01 The Pothunters Read online

  ‘This sort of thing,’ said Barrett to Reade, as they walked to their form-room, ‘always makes me feel beastly. Once start a row like this, and all the beaks turn into regular detectives and go ferreting about all over the place, and it’s ten to one they knock up against something one doesn’t want them to know about.’

  Reade was feeling hurt. He had objected to the way in which Barrett had spoiled a story that might easily have been true, and really was true in parts. His dignity was offended. He said ‘Yes’ to Barrett’s observation in a tone of reserved hauteur. Barrett did not notice.

  ‘It’s an awful nuisance. For one thing it makes them so jolly strict about bounds.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wanted to go for a bike ride this afternoon. There’s nothing on at the School.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘What’s the good if you can’t break bounds? A ride of about a quarter of a mile’s no good. There’s a ripping place about ten miles down the Stapleton Road. Big wood, with a ripping little hollow in the middle, all ferns and moss. I was thinking of taking a book out there for the afternoon. Only there’s roll-call.’

  He paused. Ordinarily, this would have been the cue for Reade to say, ‘Oh, I’ll answer your name at roll-call.’ But Reade said nothing. Barrett looked surprised and disappointed.

  ‘I say, Reade,’ he said.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Would you like to answer my name at roll-call?’ It was the first time he had ever had occasion to make the request.

  ‘No,’ said Reade.

  Barrett could hardly believe his ears. Did he sleep? Did he dream? Or were visions about?

  ‘What!’ he said.

  No answer.

  ‘Do you mean to say you won’t?’

  ‘Of course I won’t. Why the deuce should I do your beastly dirty work for you?’

  Barrett did not know what to make of this. Curiosity urged him to ask for explanations. Dignity threw cold water on such a scheme. In the end dignity had the best of it.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ he said, and they went on in silence. In all the three years of their acquaintance they had never before happened upon such a crisis.

  The silence lasted until they reached the form-room. Then Barrett determined, in the interests of the common good—he and Reade shared a study, and icy coolness in a small study is unpleasant—to chain up Dignity for the moment, and give Curiosity a trial.

  ‘What’s up with you today?’ he asked.

  He could hardly have chosen a worse formula. The question has on most people precisely the same effect as that which the query, ‘Do you know where you lost it?’ has on one who is engaged in looking for mislaid property.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Reade. Probably at the same moment hundreds of other people were making the same reply, in the same tone of voice, to the same question.

  ‘Oh,’ said Barrett.

  There was another silence.

  ‘You might as well answer my name this afternoon,’ said Barrett, tentatively.

  Reade walked off without replying, and Barrett went to his place feeling that curiosity was a fraud, and resolving to confine his attentions for the future to dignity. This was by-product number one of the Pavilion burglary.

  [4]

  CERTAIN REVELATIONS

  During the last hour of morning school, Tony got a note from Jim.

  ‘Graham,’ said Mr Thompson, the master of the Sixth, sadly, just as Tony was about to open it.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Kindly tear that note up, Graham.’

  ‘Note, sir?’

  ‘Kindly tear that note up, Graham. Come, you are keeping us waiting.’

  As the hero of the novel says, further concealment was useless. Tony tore the note up unread.

  ‘Hope it didn’t want an answer,’ he said to Jim after school. ‘Constant practice has made Thompson a sort of amateur lynx.’

  ‘No. It was only to ask you to be in the study directly after lunch. There’s a most unholy row going to occur shortly, as far as I can see.’

  ‘What, about this burglary business?’

  ‘Yes. Haven’t time to tell you now. See you after lunch.’

  After lunch, having closed the study door, Jim embarked on the following statement.

  It appeared that on the previous night he had left a book of notes, which were of absolutely vital importance for the examination which the Sixth had been doing in the earlier part of the morning, in the identical room in which the prizes had been placed. Or rather, he had left it there several days before, and had not needed it till that night. At half-past six the Pavilion had been locked up, and Biffen, the ground-man, had taken the key away with him, and it was only after tea had been consumed and the evening paper read, that Jim, thinking it about time to begin work, had discovered his loss. This was about half-past seven.

  Being a House-prefect, Jim did not attend preparation in the Great Hall with the common herd of the Houses, but was part-owner with Tony of a study.

  The difficulties of the situation soon presented themselves to him. It was only possible to obtain the notes in three ways—firstly, by going to the rooms of the Sixth Form master, who lived out of College; secondly, by borrowing from one of the other Sixth Form members of the House; and thirdly, by the desperate expedient of burgling the Pavilion. The objections to the first course were two. In the first place Merevale was taking prep, over in the Hall, and it was strictly forbidden for anyone to quit the House after lock-up without leave. And, besides, it was long odds that Thompson, the Sixth Form master, would not have the notes, as he had dictated them partly out of his head and partly from the works of various eminent scholars. The second course was out of the question. The only other Sixth Form boy in the House, Tony and Welch being away at Aldershot, was Charteris, and Charteris, who never worked much except the night before an exam, but worked then under forced draught, was appalled at the mere suggestion of letting his note-book out of his hands. Jim had sounded him on the subject and had met with the reply, ‘Kill my father and burn my ancestral home, and I will look on and smile. But touch these notes and you rouse the British Lion.’ After which he had given up the borrowing idea.

  There remained the third course, and there was an excitement and sporting interest about it that took him immensely. But how was he to get out to start with? He opened his study-window and calculated the risks of a drop to the ground. No, it was too far. Not worth risking a sprained ankle on the eve of the mile. Then he thought of the Matron’s sitting-room. This was on the ground-floor, and if its owner happened to be out, exit would be easy. As luck would have it she was out, and in another minute Jim had crossed the Rubicon and was standing on the gravel drive which led to the front gate.

  A sharp sprint took him to the Pavilion. Now the difficulty was not how to get out, but how to get in. Theoretically, it should have been the easiest of tasks, but in practice there were plenty of obstacles to success. He tried the lower windows, but they were firmly fixed. There had been a time when one of them would yield to a hard kick and fly bodily out of its frame, but somebody had been caught playing that game not long before, and Jim remembered with a pang that not only had the window been securely fastened up, but the culprit had had a spell of extra tuition and other punishments which had turned him for the time into a hater of his species. His own fate, he knew, would be even worse, for a prefect is supposed to have something better to do in his spare time than breaking into pavilions. It would mean expulsion perhaps, or, at the least, the loss of his prefect’s cap, and Jim did not want to lose that. Still the thing had to be done if he meant to score any marks at all in the forthcoming exam. He wavered a while between a choice of methods, and finally fixed on the crudest of all. No one was likely to be within earshot, thought he, so he picked up the largest stone he could find, took as careful aim as the dim light would allow, and hove it. There was a sickening crash, loud enough, he thought, to bring the whole School down on him, followed by a prolon
ged rattle as the broken pieces of glass fell to the ground.

  He held his breath and listened. For a moment all was still, uncannily still. He could hear the tops of the trees groaning in the slight breeze that had sprung up, and far away the distant roar of a train. Then a queer thing happened. He heard a quiet thud, as if somebody had jumped from a height on to grass, and then quick footsteps.

  He waited breathless and rigid, expecting every moment to see a form loom up beside him in the darkness. It was useless to run. His only chance was to stay perfectly quiet.

  Then it dawned upon him that the man was running away from him, not towards him. His first impulse was to give chase, but prudence restrained him. Catching burglars is an exhilarating sport, but it is best to indulge in it when one is not on a burgling expedition oneself.

  Besides he had come out to get his book, and business is business.

  There was no time to be lost now, for someone might have heard one or both of the noises and given the alarm.

  Once the window was broken the rest was fairly easy, the only danger being the pieces of glass. He took off his coat and flung it on to the sill of the upper window. In a few seconds he was up himself without injury. He found it a trifle hard to keep his balance, as there was nothing to hold on to, but he managed it long enough to enable him to thrust an arm through the gap and turn the handle. After this there was a bolt to draw, which he managed without difficulty.

  The window swung open. Jim jumped in, and groped his way round the room till he found his book. The other window of the room was wide open. He shut it for no definite reason, and noticed that a pane had been cut out entire. The professional cracksman had done his work more neatly than the amateur.

  ‘Poor chap,’ thought Jim, with a chuckle, as he effected a retreat, ‘I must have given him a bit of a start with my half-brick.’ After bolting the window behind him, he climbed down.

  As he reached earth again the clock struck a quarter to nine. In another quarter of an hour prep, would be over and the House door unlocked, and he would be able to get in again. Nor would the fact of his being out excite remark, for it was the custom of the House-Prefects to take the air for the few minutes which elapsed between the opening of the door and the final locking-up for the night.

  The rest of his adventures ran too smoothly to require a detailed description. Everything succeeded excellently. The only reminiscences of his escapade were a few cuts in his coat, which went unnoticed, and the precious book of notes, to which he applied himself with such vigour in the watches of the night, with a surreptitious candle and a hamper of apples as aids to study, that, though tired next day, he managed to do quite well enough in the exam, to pass muster. And, as he had never had the least prospect of coming out top, or even in the first five, this satisfied him completely.

  Tony listened with breathless interest to Jim’s recital of his adventures, and at the conclusion laughed.

  ‘What a mad thing to go and do,’ he said. ‘Jolly sporting, though.’

  Jim did not join in his laughter.

  ‘Yes, but don’t you see,’ he said, ruefully, ‘what a mess I’m in? If they find out that I was in the Pav. at the time when the cups were bagged, how on earth am I to prove I didn’t take them myself?’

  ‘By Jove, I never thought of that. But, hang it all, they’d never dream of accusing a Coll. chap of stealing Sports prizes. This isn’t a reformatory for juvenile hooligans.’

  ‘No, perhaps not.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, even if they didn’t, the Old Man would be frightfully sick if he got to know about it. I’d lose my prefect’s cap for a cert.’

  ‘You might, certainly.’

  ‘I should. There wouldn’t be any question about it. Why, don’t you remember that business last summer about Cairns? He used to stay out after lock-up. That was absolutely all he did. Well, the Old ‘Un dropped on him like a hundredweight of bricks. Multiply that by about ten and you get what he’ll do to me if he books me over this job.’

  Tony looked thoughtful. The case of Cairns versus The Powers that were, was too recent to have escaped his memory. Even now Cairns was to be seen on the grounds with a common School House cap at the back of his head in place of the prefect’s cap which had once adorned it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’d lose your cap all right, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Rather. And the sickening part of the business is that this real, copper-bottomed burglary’ll make them hunt about all over the shop for clues and things, and the odds are they’ll find me out, even if they don’t book the real man. Shouldn’t wonder if they had a detective down for a big thing of this sort.’

  ‘They are having one, I heard.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Jim, dejectedly. ‘I’m done, you see.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t believe detectives are much class.’

  ‘Anyhow, he’ll probably have gumption enough to spot me.’

  Jim’s respect for the abilities of our national sleuth-hounds was greater than Tony’s, and a good deal greater than that of most people.

  [5]

  CONCERNING THE MUTUAL FRIEND

  ‘I wonder where the dear Mutual gets to these afternoons,’ said Dallas.

  ‘The who?’ asked MacArthur. MacArthur, commonly known as the Babe, was a day boy. Dallas and Vaughan had invited him to tea in their study.

  ‘Plunkett, you know.’

  ‘Why the Mutual?’

  ‘Mutual Friend, Vaughan’s and mine. Shares this study with us. I call him dear partly because he’s head of the House, and therefore, of course, we respect and admire him.’

  ‘And partly,’ put in Vaughan, beaming at the Babe over a frying-pan full of sausages, ‘partly because we love him so. Oh, he’s a beauty.’

  ‘No, but rotting apart,’ said the Babe, ‘what sort of a chap is he? I hardly know him by sight, even.’

  ‘Should describe him roughly,’ said Dallas, ‘as a hopeless, forsaken unspeakable worm.’

  ‘Understates it considerably,’ remarked Vaughan. ‘His manners are patronizing, and his customs beastly.’

  ‘He wears spectacles, and reads Herodotus in the original Greek for pleasure.’

  ‘He sneers at footer, and jeers at cricket. Croquet is his form, I should say. Should doubt, though, if he even plays that.’

  ‘But why on earth,’ said the Babe, ‘do you have him in your study?’

  Vaughan looked wildly and speechlessly at Dallas, who looked helplessly back at Vaughan.

  ‘Don’t, Babe, please!’ said Dallas. ‘You’ve no idea how a remark of that sort infuriates us. You surely don’t suppose we’d have the man in the study if we could help it?’

  ‘It’s another instance of Ward at his worst,’ said Vaughan. ‘Have you never heard the story of the Mutual Friend’s arrival?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was like this. At the beginning of this term I came back expecting to be head of this show. You see, Richards left at Christmas and I was next man in. Dallas and I had made all sorts of arrangements for having a good time. Well, I got back on the last evening of the holidays. When I got into this study, there was the man Plunkett sitting in the best chair, reading.’

  ‘Probably reading Herodotus in the original Greek,’ snorted Dallas.

  ‘He didn’t take the slightest notice of me. I stood in the doorway like Patience on a monument for about a quarter of an hour. Then I coughed. He took absolutely no notice. I coughed again, loud enough to crack the windows. Then I got tired of it, and said “Hullo”. He did look up at that. “Hullo,” he said, “you’ve got rather a nasty cough.” I said “Yes”, and waited for him to throw himself on my bosom and explain everything, you know.’

  ‘Did he?’ asked the Babe, deeply interested.

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Dallas, ‘he—sorry, Vaughan, fire ahead.’

  ‘He went on reading. After a bit I said I hoped he was fairly comfortable. He said he was. Conversation languished a
gain. I made another shot. “Looking for anybody?” I said. “No,” he said, “are you?” “No.” “Then why the dickens should I be?” he said. I didn’t quite follow his argument. In fact, I don’t even now. “Look here,” I said, “tell me one thing. Have you or have you not bought this place? If you have, all right. If you haven’t, I’m going to sling you out, and jolly soon, too.” He looked at me in his superior sort of way, and observed without blenching that he was head of the House.’

  ‘Just another of Ward’s jars,’ said Dallas. ‘Knowing that Vaughan was keen on being head of the House he actually went to the Old Man and persuaded him that it would be better to bring in some day boy who was a School-prefect than let Vaughan boss the show. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Pretty low,’ said the Babe.

  ‘Said I was thoughtless and headstrong,’ cut in Vaughan, spearing a sausage as if it were Mr Ward’s body. ‘Muffins up, Dallas, old man. When the sausages are done to a turn. “Thoughtless and headstrong.” Those were his very words.’

  ‘Can’t you imagine the old beast?’ said Dallas, pathetically, ‘Can’t you see him getting round the Old Man? A capital lad at heart, I am sure, distinctly a capital lad, but thoughtless and headstrong, far too thoughtless for a position so important as that of head of my House. The abandoned old wreck!’

  Tea put an end for the moment to conversation, but when the last sausage had gone the way of all flesh, Vaughan returned to the sore subject like a moth to a candle.

  ‘It isn’t only the not being head of the House that I bar. It’s the man himself. You say you haven’t studied Plunkett much. When you get to know him better, you’ll appreciate his finer qualities more. There are so few of them.’

  ‘The only fine quality I’ve ever seen in him,’ said Dallas, ‘is his habit of slinking off in the afternoons when he ought to be playing games, and not coming back till lock-up.’