Читать книгу Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North - Fullerton Leonard Waldo - Страница 6

This Robin Hood kind of life in the open went on till Wilf was fourteen. Then he was sent away to Marlborough College—a boy's school which had 600 pupils. Marlborough is in the Chalk Hills of the Marlborough Downs, seventy-five miles west of London. The building, dating from 1843, is on the site of a castle of Henry I.

The first day Wilf landed there he looked about him and felt pretty forlorn.

"I wonder if I'll ever get to know all those boys?" he asked himself.

When he was at home, he had a room all his own or shared one with his brother. Here it was so different.

He counted the beds in his dormitory. There were twenty-five of them. "How can a fellow ever get to sleep in such a crowd?" he wondered. "Perhaps they'll toss me in a blanket, the way they did in 'Tom Brown at Rugby.' Well, if they try anything like that, they'll find I'm ready for them!"

He felt the mattress. "Pretty hard compared with the beds at home, but no matter. Let's see what the schoolroom is like."

So he went into the "Big School" as it was called. Three hundred boys were supposed to study there.

"Gracious!" exclaimed Wilf. "Don't see how a fellow ever gets his lessons in a place like this."

It was as busy and as noisy as a bear-garden. Here and there a boy with his hands over his ears was really looking at a book. But most of the boys were talking, laughing, singing as if there were no such thing as lessons.

Sometimes a master might look in, or a monitor would wander down the aisle. But most of the time there was nothing to keep a boy from following his own sweet will.

"I say, Smith!" one called out, "lend me a shilling, will you? I want to buy Grisby's white rat, and I haven't got enough." A fat boy who looked as if he thought mostly of meal-times was telling everybody in his neighborhood: "I've just got a box from home. Jam and fruitcake and gooseberry tarts. Come and see me to-night in the dormitory, you fellows."

Somebody else called out: "My knife's so dull I'll never get my name carved on this desk. Give me your knife, Willoughby: it's sharper."

There were boys having fencing-matches with rulers across the aisle. There were others who took no end of pains to make paper arrows, or spitballs that would stick to the ceiling. In the corners of their desks might be bird's eggs in need of fresh air. Some of the boys were reading adventure stories, covered up to look like school-books.

In the midst of this Babel, you were expected to get your lessons as well as you could.

When it came to meal-times, you went into what was called "Big Hall," where four hundred boys ate together.

The beef was tough enough to make a suitcase: the milk was like chalk and water: the potatoes would have done to plaster a ceiling or cement a wall. How different it all was from the good though simple fare at home!

"Want to join a brewing company?" asked the boy across the table.

"What's a brewing company?" inquired Wilf.

"We buy sausages and cook 'em in saucepans over the fire—when we can find a fire."

"Yes, you can count me in," said Wilf. So it didn't make so much difference after that, if he couldn't eat what was set before him at the table.

But usually the boys brought robust appetites to their meals, for they went in heavily for all forms of athletics. The boys who didn't make the teams had to drill in the gymnasium or run round and round an open air track a mile and a half long. If you shirked, the boys themselves saw to it that you got punished.

When Wilf came home to Cheshire for the long vacations he found some poor little ragamuffins who had no fun in their lives, and started a club for them in his own house. There were no boy scouts in those days, when Sir Robert Baden-Powell and Ernest Thompson Seton were little boys themselves. It was just taken for granted that boys would be boys, and it was hoped that they would grow up to be good men, if after school hours they were allowed to run loose in the streets. But Grenfell had a different idea.

He turned the dining-room on Saturday evenings into a gymnasium.

He pushed aside the table and chucked the chairs out of the window.

"Now any of you fellows who want to can get busy on the parallel bars," he told them, "or if you like you can go out into the back yard and pitch quoits. I'll take on anybody who wants to box with me."

The boys thought it was heaps of fun. They could hardly wait for Saturday night to come, because it meant the rare sport of banging another boy in the nose, which was much more satisfactory than throwing stones at a policeman.

After he was big enough, he used to go to lodging-houses where men slept who were down and out. He knew that drink had brought them low, and he wanted to show them better things to do.

The saloon-keepers were against him from the start. He was depriving them of some of their best customers.

"You're spoiling our business," they grumbled.

At last they made up their minds they would "get" him.

They collected a "gang" and one night they locked the door, backed up against it, and shouted:

"Come on, young feller! We're goin' to fix you!"

They rolled up their sleeves, clenched their fists, and sailed into him full-tilt like a big, angry crowd of human bees.

Grenfell was ready for them. It was like a fight in the movies.

He had kept himself in fine condition, for he was in training to play football and he was known to be a first-rate boxer.

They flew at him, roaring to encourage one another. There were six or eight of them, but they were afraid of his fists.

"Come on, boys!"

"Hit 'im a good 'un, Bill! 'E's spoilin' our business, that's what 'e's doin'."

"Push in his face. 'Ammer 'im good 'n' proper!"

"We'll show 'im what's what!"

"'E's a noosance. Le's get rid of 'im. Lemme get at 'im once. I'll show 'im!"

So they came on, clumsy with drink, but their maudlin outcries didn't scare Grenfell a bit.

He was waiting for them—cool, quiet, determined.

Their diet was mostly bad ale and beer, or whiskey: Grenfell was all muscle, from constant exercise and wholesome diet—the roast beef of old England, whole wheat bread, plenty of rich milk.

They were no match for him.

On they came, one after another. The first lunged out heavily; Grenfell parried the blow with his right hand and landed his left on the jaw. The ruffian fell to the floor like a log of wood and lay there. As he fell, he clutched at the corner of the table and overturned it with a mighty crash on top of him.

The second man got a blow on the nose that sent him over to the corner to wipe away the blood. The rest Grenfell laid out flat on the floor in one, two, three order.

They came at him again, those who were able to go on. They got their arms around him but he threw them off. They kicked him and he knocked them down again. They bit and clawed and scratched and used all the foul tactics that they knew.

They tried to get him from both sides—they rushed at him from the front and the rear at the same time.

Agile as a cat he turned and faced them whichever way they came, and those quick, hard fists of his shot out and hit them on the chin or on the nose till they bled like stuck pigs and bawled for mercy.

Grenfell stood there amid the wrecked furniture, his clothes torn, bleeding and triumphant. "Want any more?" he smiled.

When they saw that all combined they were no match for this wildcat they had roused to action, they said:

"Well, le's call it quits. Le's have peace."

They never tackled him again. They didn't know much, to be sure, but they knew when they had had enough of "a first-class fighting man."

Then Grenfell started camping-parties with poor boys who hadn't any money to spend for holidays. The first summer he had thirteen at the seashore.

A boy had to take a sea-bath before he got his breakfast. No one could go in a boat unless he could swim. The beds were hay-stuffed burlap bags. A lifeboat retired from service was more fun than Noah's Ark to keep the happy company afloat for a fishing-party or a picnic.

Next year there were thirty boys: then the number grew to a hundred, and more. Not one life was lost. How they loved it all! Especially when the boat, twelve boys at the oars, came plunging in, on the returning tide, with the boys all singing at the top of their voices:

"Here we come rejoicing,

Pulling at the sweeps"

to the rhythmic tune of "Bringing in the Sheaves." Then, when the boat's keel slid into the sand, it was a mad rush for the best supper boys ever ate.

His school days over, instead of going to Oxford University, Grenfell chose to enter the London Hospital, so as to take his examinations at London University later, and become a doctor.

While Grenfell was in the hospital, murder was quite the fashion in London. Many a time his patients had a policeman sitting behind a screen at the foot of the bed, ready to nab them if they got up and tried to climb out of a window.

One day, Sir Frederick Treves said to him: "Go to the North Sea, where the deep-sea fishermen need a man like you. If you go in January, you will see some fine seascapes, anyway. Don't go in summer when all of the old ladies go for a rest."

Grenfell turned the idea over and over in his mind. He had always loved the sea and been the friend of sailors and fishermen. He liked the thought of the help he could be as a doctor among them. So he decided to cast in his lot with the fishermen who go from England's East Coast into the brawling North Sea.

Yarmouth, about 120 miles northeast of London, is the headquarters of the herring fisheries, which engage about 300 vessels and 3,000 men. A short distance off the shore are sandbanks, and between these and the mainland Yarmouth Roads provides a safe harbor and a good anchorage for ships drawing eighteen or nineteen feet of water.

So one pitch-black and rainy night Grenfell packed his bag and went to Yarmouth. At the railway-station he found a retired fisherman with a cab that threatened to fall apart if you looked at it too hard. They drove a couple of miles alongshore in the darkness, and found what looked like two posts sticking out of the sand.

"Where's the ship?" asked Grenfell.

"Those are her topmasts," answered the sea-dog. "Tide's low. The rest of her is hidden by the wharf."

Grenfell scrambled over a hillock and a dim anchor-lantern showed him the tiny craft that for many days and nights was to be his tossing home in the great waters.

In answer to his hail, a voice called back cheerily: "Mind the rigging; it's just tarred and greased."

But Grenfell was already sliding down it, nimble as a cat, though it was so sticky he had to wrench his hands and feet from it now and then.

The boat was engaged in peddling tobacco among the ships of the North Sea fishing-fleet, and for the next two months no land was seen, except two distant islands: and the decks were never free from ice and snow.

Aboard many of the boats to which they came the entire crew, skipper and all, were 'prentices not more than twenty years old. These lads got no pay, except a little pocket-money. Many of the crew were hard characters, and the young skippers were harder still. Often they had been sent to sea from industrial schools and reformatories.

One awkward boy had cooked the "duff" for dinner and burned it. So the skipper made him take the ashes from the cook's galley to the fore-rigging, climb to the cross-tree with the cinders one by one, and throw them over the cross-tree into the sea, repeating the act till he had disposed of the contents of the scuttle.

A boy who had not cleaned the cabin as he should was given a bucketful of sea water, and was made to spend the whole night emptying it with a teaspoon into another bucket, and then putting it back the same way.

Most of the boys were lively and merry, and always ready for a lark.

Grenfell, who has never been able to forget that he was once a boy, got along famously with them, and was hail-fellow-well-met wherever he went.

Once, when he was aboard a little sailing-vessel, he was playing cricket on the deck, and the last ball went over the side.

He dived after it at once, telling the helmsman to "tack back." When the helmsman saw Grenfell struggling in the water, he got so rattled that it was a long time before he could bring the boat near him.

At last Grenfell managed to catch hold of the end of a rope that was thrown to him and climb aboard.

But the cricket ball was in his hand!