Читать книгу The School Ghost and Boycotted with Other Stories - Talbot Baines Reed - Страница 4

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Ferriby had broken up. The rats and mice were having their innings in the schoolrooms, and the big bell was getting rusty for want of exercise. The door of the Lower Third had not had a panel kicked out of it for a whole week, and Dr. Allsuch’s pictures and sofas and piano were all stacked up in the Detention Room while their proper quarters underwent a “doing-up.”

There was no mistake about the school having broken up. And yet, if it was so, how came we all to be there this Christmas week, instead of sitting at our own firesides in the bosoms of our own families, anywhere but at Ferriby?

When I say all, I mean all in Jolliffe’s House; the others had cleared out. Bull’s was empty, and Wragg’s, across the quadrangle, had not a ghost of a fellow left. Nor had the doctor’s. Every other house was shut up, but Jolliffe’s was as full up as the night before a county match, and no sign of an exodus.

Of course the reader guesses the reason at once!

“I know,” says one virtuous youth; “they’d all been detained for bad conduct, and stopped their holidays!”

Wrong, my exemplary one! Jolliffe’s was the best behaved house in Ferriby, though I say so who should not. But any one could tell you so. For every thousand lines of imposition the other houses had to turn out Jolliffe’s only had a hundred, and for every half-dozen canes worn out on the horny palms of Bull’s and Wragg’s, one was quite enough for us.

No; the fact was, one of our fellows had had scarlet fever a fortnight before the holidays, and as he was in and out with us for some days before it was discovered, sleeping in our dormitory, and sitting next to us in class, it was a settled thing we were all in for it.

So the school was suddenly broken up, the other houses all packed off, the sickly ones among us—there were only one or two—removed to the infirmary, and the rest of us, under the charge of Jolliffe himself, invited to make the best of a bad job, and enjoy ourselves as well as we could, with the promise that if in three weeks no one else showed signs of knocking up, we should be allowed to go home.

Of course, we were awfully sold at first, and by no means in an amiable frame of mind. It is no joke to be done out of Christmas at home. What a dolt that Gilks was to get scarlet fever! Why could he not have waited till he got home?

But after a day or two we shook down, as British boys will, to our lot. After all, it was only a case of putting off our holiday, and meanwhile we were allowed to do anything we liked, short of setting the place on fire, or kicking up a row near the infirmary.

There were enough of us to turn out two good teams at football, or to run a big paper-chase across country, or get up a grand concert of an evening; and not too many of us to crowd into the long dormitory, where, for all we were interfered with, we might have prolonged our bolster matches “from eve to dewy morn.”

In time we came to look upon our confinement as rather a spree than otherwise, and this feeling was considerably heightened by the arrival of several hampers at the beginning of Christmas week, including a magnificent one from Dr. Allsuch himself, along with a message bidding us be sure and have a merry Christmas. We voted the doctor a brick, and drank his health in ginger beer, with great enthusiasm, to the toast of “Dr. Allsuch, and all such bricks!”

It was on Christmas Eve, after a specially grand banquet off the contents of one of these hampers, that we crowded round the big common-hall fire in a very complacent frame of mind, uncommonly well satisfied and comfortable within and without.

“I don’t know,” said Lamb meditatively, cracking a walnut between his finger and thumb, and slowly skinning it—“I don’t know; Gilks might have done us a worse turn after all.”

“I rather wish he’d make a yearly thing of it,” said Ellis. “They say he’s pulled through all right.”

“Oh yes, he’s all right! and so are the other three. In fact, French and Addley never had scarlet fever at all. It was a false alarm.”

“Well,” said Lamb, “I’m jolly glad of it! I wouldn’t have cared for any of them to die, you know.”

Lamb said this in a tone as if we should all be rather surprised to hear him say so.

“Nobody ever did die at Ferriby, did they?” said Jim Sparrow, the youngest and tenderest specimen we had at Jolliffe’s.

It was rather cheek of a kid like Jim to interpose at all in a conversation of his seniors, and it seemed as if he was going to get snubbed by receiving no reply, when Fergus suddenly took the thing up.

“Eh, young Jim Sparrow, what’s that you’re saying?”

Fergus was the wag of our house—indeed, he was the only Irishman we could boast of, and the fact of his being an Irishman always made us inclined to laugh whenever he spoke. We could see now by the twinkle in his eye that he was going to let off the steam at Jim Sparrow’s expense.

“I said,” replied Jim, blushing rather to find everybody listening to him, “nobody’s ever died at Ferriby, have they?”

Fergus gazed at him in astonishment.

“What!” exclaimed he, “you mean to say you never heard of poor Bubbles?”

“Bubbles? No,” replied Jim, looking rather scared.

“Just fancy that!” said Fergus, turning round to us; “never heard of Bubbles!”

Of course we, who saw what the wag was driving at, looked rather surprised and a little mysterious.

“What was it?” inquired Jim Sparrow, looking half ashamed of himself.

“Eh? Well, if you never heard it, I’d better not tell you. It’s not a nice story, is it, you fellows?”

“Horrible!” said Lamb, starting at another walnut.

“Oh, do tell me!” cried Jim eagerly, “I’m so fond of stories;” and he settled himself back in his chair rather uneasily, and tried to look as if it was all good fun.

“Well, if you do want it I’ll tell you; but don’t blame me if it upsets you, that’s all!” replied the irrepressible Fergus.

Jim looked as heroic as he could, and wished he had never asked to be enlightened on the subject of Bubbles.

Fergus refreshed himself with an orange, stuck his feet into the fender, and began in a solemn voice.

“I suppose, Jim Sparrow, if you have never heard about Bubbles, you really don’t know the history of the school at all. You don’t even know how it came to be called Ferriby?”

“No,” responded Jim, keeping his eyes on the fire.

“Ferriby is derived from two Anglo-Saxon words,” proceeded Fergus, “which you may have heard—‘fire’ and ‘boy.’ Now I’ll tell you about Bubbles!”

There was something very mysterious about the manner in which Fergus uttered these words, and we listened for what was to come almost as breathlessly as Jim Sparrow.

“It was early in this century,” he said, “that a boy came to this school called Bubbles. No one knew where he came from. He had no parents, and never went home for the holidays. He was about your age, Sparrow, and just your build, and he was in the Lower Fourth.”

“I’m going to be moved up this Christmas,” interposed Jim hurriedly.

“Are you? So was Bubbles going to be moved up when what I’m going to tell you happened!”

It was getting dark, and for the last few minutes all the light in the room had been caused by a jet of gas in the coals. That jet now went out suddenly, leaving us in nearly total darkness.

“It was a Christmas Eve. Everybody else had gone home for the holidays, and Bubbles was the only boy left in the school—Bubbles and a master whose name I won’t mention.”

“He was the Detention Master, wasn’t he?” inquired Lamb’s voice.

“Ah, yes. There’s no harm in telling you that. Bubbles and the Detention Master were left all alone at Ferriby, Sparrow.”

“Ye—es,” said Sparrow softly, and making two syllables of the word.

“They’d had no hampers sent them, and as they sat round the fire that evening they knew both of them there was no Christmas dinner in the house. They had neither of them tasted food for some days, and had no money to buy any, and if they had had, the snow was too deep to get anywhere. They had tried making soup out of copy-book covers, but it wasn’t nourishing, and the soles of their boots which they tried to eat didn’t sit well on their stomachs.”

Some one choked at this point, greatly to the speaker’s wrath.

“All right; some one seems to think it a laughing matter, so I’ll stop.”

“Oh no,” cried one or two voices eagerly, “do go on. He only got a piece of apple the wrong way.”

“Was it you laughed, Jim Sparrow?” demanded Fergus.

“Oh no,” replied Jim, who was holding on rather tight to the sides of his chair.

“I don’t like any one making fun of a serious thing like this,” said Fergus. “I was saying the soles of their boots didn’t sit well on their stomachs. They sat round the fire the whole evening, brooding and ravenous, and saying nothing. For a long time they both stared into the fire; then presently the master took his eyes off the fire and stared at Bubbles. Bubbles used to be fat, like you, Sparrow, but the last day or two he had got rather reduced. Still he was fairly plump; at least, so thought the master, as he looked first at him, then at the fire, and then thought of the empty larder downstairs.”

It was too dark to see Jim Sparrow, but I could almost hear him turn pale, so profound was the silence.

“The fire was a big one, a roaring one, and howled up the chimney as if it was hungry too. Bubbles where he sat was close to it, in fact, his feet almost touched the bars. The master sat a little behind Bubbles, and his arm rested on the back of Bubbles’s chair. ‘To-morrow,’ thought the master, ‘he will be thinner, and next day only skin and bone.’ Then he thought of the saying in the copy-books, ‘Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.’ He sprang to his feet, seized Bubbles by the head and feet—there was a shriek and a yell—and next moment the master was alone in the room, and the chimney was on fire!”

At this last sentence the speaker, suiting the action to the word, had risen from his seat and suddenly pounced upon the unhappy Sparrow, who, already paralysed with terror, now fairly yelled and howled for mercy. Fergus dropped him back gently into his chair, and resuming his own seat, continued—

“There is very little to add. Under the ruins were found the remains of the master grasping in each hand a large-sized drumstick. Bubbles was never seen more. It was supposed he escaped without his legs on to the roof, and they do say that every Christmas Eve he revisits Ferriby, and tries to get down the chimney in search of his lost legs.”

At the conclusion of this tragic story every one drew a long breath. Jim Sparrow, it was clear, had swallowed it from beginning to end, and one or two others of the juniors looked as if they would have been more pleased had the event not been made to happen on Christmas Eve, of all nights. But with these exceptions the whole thing seemed a very good joke, and greatly to the credit of Fergus’s imagination.

“Oh, and I should say,” added that doughty historian, as he poked up the fire into a blaze, “though it’s not of much consequence, that this took place in this very house, they say in this very room. Funny story, isn’t it, Sparrow?”

Sparrow had not yet sufficiently recovered from his fright to reply, but it was evident by his looks he considered it anything but funny. However, the talk soon veered round to other and more ordinary topics, in the midst of which, aided by the remnants of our feast, the spirits even of Jim Sparrow revived, so much so that by bedtime he was as cheerful as if he had never even heard the name of Bubbles.