Читать книгу The Vagaries of Tod and Peter - L. Allen Harker - Страница 8

During the first part of the next, the Easter, term the twins were so closely watched that their genius for mischief had small scope. Whereupon the authorities, finding them apparently absorbed in games and the general routine, relaxed their vigilance.

At the beginning of February the weather was mild and pleasant, with just enough rain to keep the footer ground in good order. But at the end of that fickle month there came a frost, the aggravating sort of frost that makes a field too hard for football and yet leads to no skating.

The never long dormant spirit of mischief in the twins awoke.

As usual, it was Peter who began it, though Tod was the innocent first cause.

Just after first lesson, as Tod was hurrying from one classroom to another, he met the principal in the corridor, who bade him ask his form-master to come and speak to him at a quarter past ten. Further down the corridor Tod met his twin, who instantly demanded what the “Pot” wanted, and on being informed, went upon his way.

Peter might have been seen to stop more than one schoolfellow as he went—the corridor was full of boys changing classrooms—and when he reached his own he delivered a message to the effect that the Head would like to see his form-master at ten-fifteen.

Peter’s form-master, familiarly known as “Pig-Face,” from a fancied resemblance to that animal in the matter of nose, is a testy man, much given to abusing his form and to the use of opprobrious epithets seriously reflecting upon the veracity of boys in general; so, on receipt of the Head’s message, he knuckled Peter’s head, called him a “shuffling little beast,” set a complicated sum in discount for his form to wrestle with during his absence, and hurried away, fuming inwardly at the unreason of such a summons in the middle of morning school. When he arrived at the principal’s room he found six other masters also in waiting, but the principal himself was not there.

It happened that that gentleman had met Tod’s form-master three minutes after he had seen Tod, he said what he had to say there and then in the corridor, and dismissed the matter from his mind.

The seven masters waited in a grumpy group for ten good minutes, when, just as they had decided upon immediate departure, the principal himself rushed in and gazed in somewhat indignant astonishment at the assembled multitude.

It took nearly five minutes more to explain the situation, and the only boy whose conduct in delivering the various messages seemed not wholly inexplicable appeared to be Peter. For the principal good-naturedly came to the conclusion that it must have been Peter that he met, not Tod, and that Peter had misunderstood him.

Such a charitable view of Peter’s conduct, however, could not last long, seeing that six angry masters rushed back to their respective forms to inflict lines upon six perfectly innocent boys, who were not slow to protest that the message was entrusted to them by another.

During the morning three young gentlemen from the Modern and four from the Classical received a summons “to the principal at twelve,” and of course Tod and Peter were of the number, both looking so seraphically innocent that the principal was perfectly sure that it was “a put-up thing.” In this instance the innocent suffered with the guilty, for Tod got five hundred lines as well as Peter. But they both agreed that to have so scored off seven “brushers” at one time was well worth the lines.

Three days afterward Tod’s nose bled toward the end of morning school and he was dismissed to his house to clean up. As he raced along the corridor he noticed that the door of the little room into which the rope of the school bell descended was left open, and, peeping in, he discovered that Hooper, the trusty porter, was not within.

In far less time than it takes to write the words, Tod had rushed in, and the great school bell that dismisses morning school rang loud and clear over the peaceful playing-fields surrounding the school buildings, still humming with the busy life within.

Every boy and every master stopped short in what he was doing and looked at the clock. Those possessed of watches consulted them, shook them, listened to them, dubiously pressing them to unbelieving ears. And as the clocks in that school are by no means beyond reproach, being worked by a system of electricity that is, to say the least of it, capricious in its conduct, all came, not unwillingly, to the conclusion that morning work had indeed ended. Only the Head of the Modern, that man of iron endurance, whose whole scheme of creation seemed bounded by the exigencies of the Civil Service Commissioners, refused to believe that his watch was wrong, and continued to discuss the “directrix and eccentric” of a certain angle until it was really twelve o’clock; while one of the French masters, hailing from Geneva, proclaimed the unreliability of English clocks in general.

Meanwhile Hooper, who had gone down to the lodge to speak to his wife, could hardly believe his ears when his own sacred bell clanged, somewhat irresponsibly and gaily it is true, without his agency.

He rushed up the drive to discover the perpetrator of this extraordinary outrage, only to meet a throng of masters and boys streaming out into the playground full twenty minutes before the appointed hour.

Tod was nearly at his house by this time, and when he did arrive, hastened to the matron to descant upon the terrific hemorrhage that had occurred in his nose.

But Nemesis was never very leaden-footed where the twins were concerned.

“Other chaps,” Tod remarked mournfully, “can break all sorts of rules and do no end of mischief and never get found out, but if we do the least little thing someone’s certain to be down on us like a hundred of bricks, or else we’re obliged to own up to save somebody else.”

In this case it was the latter course that Tod had to pursue. The principal was exceedingly angry at such a wanton curtailment of the last hour of morning school, and gave it out in the afternoon that if the amateur bellringer did not disclose himself that very day, the whole school should stay in on the next half-holiday; and the frost had broken and football was in full swing once more.

Of course Tod sought the principal at the earliest opportunity and owned up.

When he appeared in the principal’s room after afternoon school he made, it is true, a valiant effort to present himself with due solemnity, but his round face was absurdly chubby and cheerful, and when the principal looked up from the letter he was writing to see who the intruder was, he sighed deeply.

“You again, Beaton!” he exclaimed wearily. “So it was you, was it, who rang that bell? What on earth did you do it for?”

“My nose bled, sir....” Tod began eagerly.

“What had your nose to do with it?”

“Everything, sir. I was sent out of class....”

“Sent out of class?” the principal repeated sternly.

“Because I made such a mess,” Tod hastened to add; “and the little door was open—and so I rang the bell.”

“Beaton, when will you cease to play these senseless and annoying tricks? Your folly caused six hundred boys, to say nothing of the masters, to lose twenty precious minutes. If I punished you as you deserve, you ought to stay in for twenty minutes each day for six hundred days....”

Tod gasped.

“But I won’t do that. Instead, you must do a thousand lines, to be given up by the end of this week. I shall not cane you, as I have no doubt you would infinitely prefer it.”

A good many boys assisted to write those lines, and the impost was given up at its appointed time.

Hockey leagues were on and Peter was playing in his house team. On the morning of the last practice before an important match, he acknowledged so barely bowing an acquaintance with certain French idioms beloved of the French master—for was he not their author?—that Peter was told to stay in after morning school and learn them.

Peter did nothing of the kind; on the contrary, he went out at the usual hour and played hockey with his accustomed vigor, with the result that the French master sent for him that afternoon to know why he had not done as he was told.

Peter pleaded “a very important engagement,” and, on being pressed to disclose the nature of that same, as usual answered quite truthfully. The French master, not unnaturally exasperated, forthwith reported him to the Head of the Modern, with the result that Peter was hauled up and bidden to stay in on the next half-holiday; the very half-holiday on which his house was to play its bitterest rival.

During the remainder of that term he got into several rows with his form-master, and Tod was equally unlucky, so that by the time the Easter holidays arrived both boys were quite ready for them and left school vowing vengeance on their persecutors.

Their parents were in India, so they went to spend the holidays with a jolly young bachelor uncle, who was an ardent fisherman and carried both the boys off with him for three weeks’ peel-fishing in a remote village in North Wales. He was also of a literary turn, that uncle, and took with him a box of books to enliven their evenings: lots of Kipling and Stevenson, and amongst the latter the “Life and Letters.” He read aloud the “Thomas Libby” incident, where Stevenson and certain kindred spirits roused a whole neighborhood to excitement by constant inquiries as to the whereabouts of one “Thomas Libby,” who existed only in his creator’s vivid imagination. That of the twins was immediately fired by an ambition to go and do likewise.

The incident, or rather series of incidents, to which the non-appearance of Mr. Libby led up, enchanted them. They chuckled over the mysterious Thomas for a whole day, but it was not till evening, at bedtime, that Tod whispered to Peter how, like “Sentimental Tommy,” he had “found a way.”

Sitting on the side of his bed, he announced gleefully: “Tell you what it is, Peter, we’ll be a parent! A parent with a delicate kid! And we’ll write long-winded letters in scratchy, small handwriting, you know, like the masters write....”

“But,” Peter interrupted excitedly, “how are we to get the answers? It wouldn’t be any fun if we didn’t.”

“The answers,” Tod replied calmly, “will come to the post office here, where we’re living, you juggins! You bet there’ll be answers. They’re awfully keen after the oof at the good old school. Why, they scent a new boy a mile off. He shall go into old Pig-Face’s house, just to pay him out for all his beastliness to you, and I’ll pester the Head about him and his delicate chest, and all that sort of rot that parents do write, don’t you know.”

Peter gasped. “But how can he ‘go’ into anybody’s house if there isn’t a him to go?”

“What an ass you are, Peter! Was there a Thomas Libby? And how many people’s houses was he going to, pray?”

“Go on,” said Peter humbly, “go on.”

“The parent’s name,” Tod announced proudly, “is Theopompus Buggins.”

“Theopompus!” Peter echoed dubiously. “It doesn’t sound very real somehow—and is the kid to be young Theopompus?”

“No,” said Tod firmly, “his name is Archibald, and Mr. Buggins is his uncle.”

“I thought he was to be a parent,” Peter objected in a dissatisfied voice.

“Well, an uncle is a sort of parent; probably the kid’s an orphan.”

There was silence for a minute while Peter digested this view of the matter. But still he was not quite satisfied, for presently he said: “Tod, would you believe in anyone called ‘Theopompus Buggins’?”

“Well, no, I’m not sure that I would,” Tod admitted. “Why?”

“D’you believe the Head will?”

“I never thought of that.”

“I think,” Peter suggested beguilingly, “that we had better have a commoner name, don’t you?”

“P’r’aps we had,” Tod sighed. “Let’s have Jones—Theopompus Jones, now.”

“Jones is all right,” Peter allowed graciously, “but I don’t fancy Theopompus much, it’s such a peculiar name.”

“It’s a splendid name,” Tod exclaimed huffily, “but of course if you think it’s too uncommon he can be ‘T. Jones, Esq.,’ or ‘John Jones’ if you insist upon it. How would you like ‘Peter Jones’?”

“T. Jones will do spiffingly,” Peter answered with some haste. “We’ll know his name is Theopompus right enough, and it don’t matter a hang to them whether he’s Theobald or Theophilus or anything; but I say, Tod, must he be an uncle?”

“Yes,” Tod replied firmly, “he jolly well must, and, what’s more, he’s got to be going to Injia just as term begins. We’ll look out the sailings in uncle’s paper and choose his ship. He’ll just get there in the hot weather, but that can’t be helped.”

The twins were well acquainted with the whereabouts of “sailings” in the papers, as most Anglo-Indian children are.

“Why, you’ve planned it all, Tod,” Peter said admiringly. “How’ll you do about the writing?”

“I shall write as like old Stinks as possible, that niggly, scrabbly sort of writing, you know.”

“By Jove! So you can—that’ll be all right. Parents and people call that sort of writing ‘scholarly,’ but if we did it they’d say we were beastly illiterate or something.”

“What I like about a scholarly handwriting,” said Tod thoughtfully, “is that no mortal can tell whether the spelling’s right or not. When I’m once through the Shop I shall always write a scholarly hand and not bother about spelling and that any more.”

“Boys,” a voice called from the next room, “you get to bed and don’t keep jawing all night.”

It would not be fair to disclose the exact spot in Wales from which that anxious relative, Mr. T. Jones, indited his first letter to the headmaster of the Public School which reckoned Tod and Peter among its pupils.