Читать книгу The Happy Traveller - Mary Grant Bruce - Страница 3

Table of Contents

‟NOW’S my chance!” muttered Teddy Winter.

Far below him, somewhere in the depths of the building, a heavy door had suddenly slammed. He raised himself on his elbow, listening. No sound in the long room but the steady breathing of sleepers—save in the bed next his own, where Danny Wellcome, who always snored, had already embarked upon his nightly programme of nasal music. They were all sound asleep; all the twenty good and bad boys—chiefly bad, Mr. Pullinger said—who peopled Dormitory B. Only Teddy Winter, the twenty-first, universally admitted to be bad, was very thoroughly awake, and full of purpose.

The slamming of the door downstairs was what he had been waiting for. It always came, twenty minutes or so after Mr. Pullinger had made his final round of the dormitories, counting the heads, dark and fair, on the hard little pillows, casting his eagle eye over the neatly-folded piles of clothes at the foot of each bed, and generally satisfying himself that the Boys’ Side of the Orphanage might be considered safe for the night. Matron had passed round earlier, asking all the questions Matrons were so unpleasantly fond of asking, looking at an occasional tongue, producing an occasional dose of evil-tasting medicine. You never knew why you were singled out for Matron’s medicine, but there was no arguing about it—you gulped down the thick, bitter stuff, forbore to wipe your mouth on your sleeve while she was looking, and hated her a little more heartily than usual. At least, Teddy did. But then, as has been hinted, no one made the mistake of thinking him a good little boy.

He had escaped the dose to-night, but Joe MacEwen had been less fortunate, much to the satisfaction of the dormitory, where Joe—known as “one of Pully’s pets”—was not popular. Matron had been in a hurry, and Teddy knew why. There was a party downstairs to-night: not a very exciting party, just one of the carefree gatherings of grown-ups that generally occurred when the great man of all, the Sup’ntend’nt, went out for the evening. Dr. Mackintosh was the Superintendent, and even Mr. Pullinger had been known to quail before his eye—much as the boys were apt to quail before that of Mr. Pullinger. The boys knew well the sense of relaxing that came upon all the Orphanage attendants when the Superintendent went out. It had come early that evening, for he had taken his wife into the city for dinner and a theatre; they had heard the car grinding down the avenue while they were still at tea. Every one had hurried after that; there had been jokes between the attendants, low-voiced allusions to the party, a scamping of the time for the boys’ baths. “Bad luck it’s bath-night!” Mr. Pullinger had been heard to observe. Still, with management, it had been ten minutes earlier than usual when they were inspected for the last time. Then, lying with every muscle tense, Teddy had heard the moving to and fro, the shutting of cupboards, the turning of keys in locks, the voices dying away: all the finishing-up sounds he knew so thoroughly. And finally, the banging of the door that shut off the attendants’ quarters and the kitchens. It banged to-night with a kind of defiance, as though it shouted, “Sup’ntend’nt’s out!”

They were safe now, all the big people who ruled each hour of the day with their hard, commanding voices. Down in the big room by the kitchens they were probably becoming quite human, even merry. It was only in the boys’ waking hours that they became parts of the great machine that was the Orphanage, doing their job in their stony, efficient manner. Boys, to them, if they were orphan boys, were not really human—not flesh-and-blood boys, made for laughter and loving, but just parts of the machine. It had to be so, if Fate had dealt you the nasty trick of making you an orphan. Only for little Teddy Winter, who had not learned in three years to become a really respectable orphan, the breaking-point had come. To-night was his party as well. For he was about to run away.

I am not going to pretend that this was a proper thing to do. In the three years of his orphanhood Teddy Winter should certainly have learned to be grateful and humble; grateful to the Powers-That-Be that had fed and clothed him and provided him with a bed—complete with hard pillow—without any expense to himself; and humble because he was a bad little boy. But there you have it. Doubtless because he was bad Teddy had been quite unable to forget the first ten years of his life. They had been years containing a good many hard times, and, at the last, rather more of bewildering grief than any little boy should have; but they had also been years of much laughter and of love that had no limit. When you have such memories as these you do not take kindly to being a part of a large, cold machine. You keep remembering things when you should be trying to be grateful and humble. You remember the enormous jokes you shared with Father: at night, on the small hard pillow, comes the obstinate dream that Mother is there, tucking in the blankets, fixing the sheet at your neck so that you cuddle down into it with a little sigh of comfort, just awake enough to feel her cheek on yours. One should really have no memories at all if one is to make a satisfactory orphan. So Teddy Winter was giving up the job.

He waited for a few moments after the slamming of the far-off door, and then crept noiselessly out of bed. Through the high, barred windows came a very faint light: the moon had not risen, but there was promise of her coming, and the stars shone brightly. Not that Teddy needed light; he had so long studied every inch of the ground he had to traverse that the blackest night would not have hindered him. He crept to the foot of the bed and dressed quickly, pausing now and then lest some sound, floating up from below, might turn to the menace of a footstep on the stairs. But none came. He was fully dressed, save for his boots, when a drowsy murmur from Danny Wellcome’s bed suddenly turned his heart cold.

“Whatcher doin’, Teddy?”

“Gettin’ a hanky, fat-head—stop makin’ a row!” said Teddy, in a swift whisper. He plunged back into bed, dressed as he was, and lay motionless; and presently Danny’s snores proclaimed that slumber had again claimed him for its own.

Very slowly Teddy crept out once more. He lingered a moment to arrange his bedclothes in a hump over the pillow, so that if any grown-ups looked into the dormitory they might imagine that he slept beneath. Then, picking up his boots, he tiptoed to the door and out into the passage.

Everything was dim and still. Most of the lights had been turned out; only a faint glimmer showed on each landing. But the main stairs were not for Teddy; not, at least, if Mr. Pullinger had done his duty and unlocked the door leading to the fire-escape, supposed to be unfastened each night after the boys were in bed. If the anticipation of the party had so infected Mr. Pullinger that he had omitted the unlocking, then Teddy knew he must face the stairs and the long corridors, with their infinitely greater chances of discovery. “He jolly well ought to be reported to Sup’ntend’nt if he has!” he muttered, gliding like a shadow along the wall.

He tried the door. It creaked hideously, but it yielded; and in a moment he was out on the slender iron staircase, and the door was shut between him and the warm silence of the building. For a moment the chill night air, the sense of utter solitude, held him motionless. Far below him, a zigzag thread of steel, the fire-escape led downwards. On one side the long line of the enormous house seemed like a crouching beast, ready to spring and swallow him up; but on the other were the friendly shadows of the trees, among which lay his path to freedom. The scent of flowers came to his nostrils—the bed of stocks he had helped to weed that very afternoon, when Joe MacEwen had pulled up three plants and had hurriedly replanted them with a wild hope that nobody would ever know. Teddy grinned at the recollection as he began to feel his way down the ladder.

It took a long time, and twice his boots, swinging in his hand, caught the iron railing with a noise that seemed appalling. But no one heard him, and presently he had reached the ground. He gave a smothered sigh of relief, sitting down on the lowest step to put on his boots.

A slow step crunched the gravel on the wide path that skirted the building, and in a flash Teddy had slipped through the staircase and was crouching beneath it. The open framework was little enough shelter, but it was better than nothing; he huddled against the wall, holding his breath, his heart thudding in his breast. Slowly the steps came, and with them the scent of tobacco; it was old Branson, the head gardener, strolling home to his cottage down by the orchard. He passed a yard from the staircase, glanced up at it, and went on, slowly—slowly, seeing nothing of the dark blot below the iron rungs. The heavy steps died away.

Teddy stood up, trembling so violently that movement was for a moment impossible. Then, deciding that it was safer to delay putting on his boots, he crept along the wall until he came to a place where the shadows lay thickest across the path; and there risked the crossing, each step on the gravel making, in his ears, noise enough to disturb a hundred Pullingers. But the party was in full swing, and the rest of the Orphanage slept; Teddy was still safe as he gained the shelter of the trees and dived among some bushes. Boots must go on now, for there was work ahead.

He knew he could not risk the gate. It might be unlocked, since the Superintendent had yet to come in; but the lodge-keeper would not be in bed, and besides, an electric light over the gateway gave a radiance that was the last thing Teddy wanted. But he had long planned his road. It lay by way of the great oak tree that grew just inside the wall and flung gnarled branches far beyond it. The drop on the outer side was longer than he liked—he had studied it whenever they were taken out for a walk—but there was nothing for it. He uttered a little prayer as he came to the tree in the darkness and scrambled into its branches: “Oh, God, please don’t go an’ let me hurt my ankle when I drop!”

Not the easiest matter, climbing a tree in the faint starlight. He had not imagined how puzzling it would be. But he managed it, with a few rents in his jacket, and found himself perched on the branch he wanted—and he had passed the wall, the hideous twelve-feet wall that shut in all the dreary Orphanage world from the world of space and freedom and happy boys. He could have shouted aloud when he climbed beyond it and made his slow way down the drooping bough. But it was too soon to shout. He crept on until the bending of the branch beneath him warned him not to trust it further. Then he gripped it with both hands, said his little prayer again, and dropped.

It was a long drop, and an unlucky one, for one foot came down heavily on a bent dry stick, which promptly flew up and dealt him a cruel blow from hip to ankle. He went down in a heap on the hard ground and lay for a moment, wondering if any bones were broken. Finding himself whole, though sorely battered, he struggled to his feet—and immediately forgot bruises and pain. For he was free! The great wall towered above him, the wall of which he hated every stone; but he was on the right side of it now, and the whole world lay before him.

So long he had planned the great adventure that he knew exactly what he meant to do. For two years the resolve to escape had never left him, though his native shrewdness had warned him that it was useless to try too soon—that he must wait until he was big enough to make sure of getting the job on a farm that he knew waited somewhere for a handy boy. Even Mr. Pullinger said he was handy—when he liked. Until he was thirteen he had waited: it had seemed like a message from Fate that on the very day after his birthday wonderful luck had come his way in the shape of the visiting lady. He did not know who she was—a tall, pale lady, on her way to see Mrs. Mackintosh when she met him wheeling a load of pea-stakes. She had stopped and chatted with him for a few moments, just as she might have talked to a real boy—not to an orphan. And then, as she bade him good-bye, she had hesitated, glanced round cautiously, and had slipped into his hand a shining new half-crown! He trembled yet with the wonder of it.

It was absolutely against rules, of course, and highly dangerous as well for Teddy; for orphans were not supposed to possess anything at all beyond the meeker virtues. Sooner or later it was bound to be discovered, and then there would be trouble, and the marvellous gift would be taken from him—to be kept for him, probably, but what good would that be to him now? He must escape while he was still a capitalist, with a whole two-and-sixpence between him and the needs of the world. Just a few days to make up his mind, while the precious coin lay hidden in a convenient hole in his mattress, companioned by what crusts of bread he could smuggle away from tea: and then had come the happy chance of the Superintendent’s absence and the party below stairs. All the stars in their courses had fought for him; and here he was, at ten o’clock at night, free, independent, rich, and the open road calling to him! “If only the chaps could see me now!” he thought, with a half-contemptuous memory of the sleeping cherubs in Dormitory B.

Not that he had any illusions about the difficulty of running away. To escape from the Orphanage had been easy enough, but permanent escape was quite another matter. Other boys had tried it, but they had always been brought back; Mr. Pullinger often told them about it, laughing in the way they all knew and hated—every boy dreaded “Pully’s laugh” more than any other attendant’s anger. According to Mr. Pullinger, no runaway had the slightest chance. There were so many policemen about wherever one went; so many officious people, quick to note a boy in unusual clothes. The clothes made it so hopeless. Teddy felt a new spasm of hatred for the little round jacket and the trousers he wore, a queer shade of muddy blue; no boys he ever saw outside wore anything like them in colour and cut. They would mark him out half a mile away. Therefore it was only possible to move about at night until a chance came of finding other garments. “Finding” meant stealing, of course. He did not like the idea, but there seemed no other way.

Meanwhile, the first thing to do was to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the storm that would certainly break over the Orphanage in the morning—if, indeed, luck delayed it so long. To the right lay the city, miles away, its myriad lights sending a pale glow into the sky—no place for a runaway orphan. To the left, fewer lights, but still far too many for safety. But ahead were dim roads, and dark expanses of paddocks, beyond which lay the country of his dreams, where overworked farmers waited anxiously for a handy boy. Teddy set his teeth, felt the half-crown in his pocket for the thousand-and-first time, and jogged off into the darkness.