01 The Pothunters Read online

  ‘Why don’t you try that tip?’

  ‘Hardly. My reputation hasn’t quite the stamina for the test.’

  Vaughan left the room. At the foot of the stairs he was met by the matron.

  ‘Will you unlock the door, please, Vaughan,’ she said, handing him a bunch of keys. ‘The boys will be coming in in a minute.’

  ‘Unlock the door?’ repeated Vaughan. ‘I thought it was unlocked. All right.’

  ‘By Jove,’ he thought, ‘the plot thickens. What is our only Plunkett doing out of the House when the door is locked, I wonder.’

  Plunkett strolled in with the last batch of the returning crowd, wearing on his face the virtuous look of one who has been snatching a whiff of fresh air after a hard evening’s preparation.

  ‘Oh, I say, Plunkett,’ said Vaughan, when they met in the study after prayers, ‘I wanted to see you. Where have you been?’

  ‘I have been in the junior study. Where did you think I had been?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you doubt my word?’

  ‘I’ve the most exaggerated respect for your word, but you weren’t in the junior study at five to nine.’

  ‘No, I went up to my dormitory about that time. You seem remarkably interested in my movements.’

  ‘Only wanted to see you about the House gym. team. You might shove up the list tonight. Haynes, Jarvis, and myself.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything to him,’ said Vaughan to Dallas as they were going to their dormitories, ‘but, you know, there’s something jolly fishy about the Mutual. That door wasn’t unlocked when we saw him outside. I unlocked it myself. Seems to me the Mutual’s been having a little private bust of his own on the quiet.’

  ‘That’s rum. He might have been out by the front way to see one of the beaks, though.’

  ‘Well, even then he would be breaking rules. You aren’t allowed to go out after lock-up without House beak’s leave. No, I find him guilty.’

  ‘If only he’d go and get booked!’ said Vaughan. ‘Then he might have to leave. But he won’t. No such luck.’

  ‘No,’ said Dallas. ‘Good-night.’

  ‘Good-night.’

  Certainly there was something mysterious about the matter.

  [6]

  A LITERARY BANQUET

  Charteris and Welch were conversing in the study of which they were the joint proprietors. That is to say, Charteris was talking and playing the banjo alternately, while Welch was deep in a book and refused to be drawn out of it under any pretext. Charteris’ banjo was the joy of his fellows and the bane of his House-master. Being of a musical turn and owning a good deal of pocket-money, he had, at the end of the summer holidays, introduced the delights of a phonograph into the House. This being vetoed by the House-master, he had returned at the beginning of the following term with a penny whistle, which had suffered a similar fate. Upon this he had invested in a banjo, and the dazed Merevale, feeling that matters were getting beyond his grip, had effected a compromise with him. Having ascertained that there was no specific rule at St Austin’s against the use of musical instruments, he had informed Charteris that if he saw fit to play the banjo before prep, only, and regarded the hours between seven and eleven as a close time, all should be forgiven, and he might play, if so disposed, till the crack of doom. To this reasonable request Charteris had promptly acceded, and peace had been restored. Charteris and Welch were a curious pair. Welch spoke very little. Charteris was seldom silent. They were both in the Sixth—Welch high up, Charteris rather low down. In games, Welch was one of those fortunate individuals who are good at everything. He was captain of cricket, and not only captain, but also the best all-round man in the team, which is often a very different matter. He was the best wing three-quarter the School possessed; played fives and racquets like a professor, and only the day before had shared Tony’s glory by winning the silver medal for fencing in the Aldershot competition.

  The abilities of Charteris were more ordinary. He was a sound bat, and went in first for the Eleven, and played half for the Fifteen. As regards work, he might have been brilliant if he had chosen, but his energies were mainly devoted to the compilation of a monthly magazine (strictly unofficial) entitled The Glow Worm. This he edited, and for the most part wrote himself. It was a clever periodical, and rarely failed to bring him in at least ten shillings per number, after deducting the expenses which the College bookseller, who acted as sole agent, did his best to make as big as possible. Only a very few of the elect knew the identity of the editor, and they were bound to strict secrecy. On the day before the publication of each number, a notice was placed in the desk of the captain of each form, notifying him of what the morrow would bring forth, and asking him to pass it round the form. That was all. The School did the rest. The Glow Worm always sold well, principally because of the personal nature of its contents. If the average mortal is told that there is something about him in a paper, he will buy that paper at your own price.

  Today he was giving his monthly tea in honour of the new number. Only contributors were invited, and the menu was always of the best. It was a Punch dinner, only more so, for these teas were celebrated with musical honours, and Charteris on the banjo was worth hearing. His rendering of extracts from the works of Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan was an intellectual treat.

  ‘When I take the chair at our harmonic club!’ he chanted, fixing the unconscious Welch with a fiery glance. ‘Welch!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If this is your idea of a harmonic club, it isn’t mine. Put down that book, and try and be sociable.’

  ‘One second,’ said Welch, burrowing still deeper.

  ‘That’s what you always say,’ said Charteris. ‘Look here—Come in.’

  There had been a knock at the door as he was speaking. Tony entered, accompanied by Jim. They were regular attendants at these banquets, for between them they wrote most of what was left of the magazine when Charteris had done with it. There was only one other contributor, Jackson, of Dawson’s House, and he came in a few minutes later. Welch was the athletics expert of the paper, and did most of the match reports.

  ‘Now we’re complete,’ said Charteris, as Jackson presented himself. ‘Gentlemen—your seats. There are only four chairs, and we, as Wordsworth might have said, but didn’t, are five. All right, I’ll sit on the table. Welch, you worm, away with melancholy. Take away his book, somebody. That’s right. Who says what? Tea already made. Coffee published shortly. If anybody wants cocoa, I’ve got some, only you’ll have to boil more water. I regret the absence of menu-cards, but as the entire feast is visible to the naked eye, our loss is immaterial. The offertory will be for the Church expenses fund. Biscuits, please.’

  ‘I wish you’d given this tea after next Saturday, Alderman,’ said Jim. Charteris was called the Alderman on account of his figure, which was inclined to stoutness, and his general capacity for consuming food.

  ‘Never put off till tomorrow—Why?’

  ‘I simply must keep fit for the mile. How’s Welch to run, too, if he eats this sort of thing?’ He pointed to the well-spread board.

  ‘Yes, there’s something in that,’ said Tony. ‘Thank goodness, my little entertainment’s over. I think I will try one of those chocolate things. Thanks.’

  ‘Welch is all right,’ said Jackson. ‘He could win the hundred and the quarter on sausage-rolls. But think of the times.’

  ‘And there,’ observed Charteris, ‘there, my young friend, you have touched upon a sore subject. Before you came in I was administering a few wholesome words of censure to that miserable object on your right. What is a fifth of a second more or less that it should make a man insult his digestion as Welch does? You’ll hardly credit it, but for the last three weeks or more I have been forced to look on a fellow-being refusing pastry and drinking beastly extracts of meat, all for the sake of winning a couple of races. It quite put me off my feed. Cake, please. Good robust slice. Thanks.’

 
‘It’s rather funny when you come to think of it,’ said Tony. ‘Welch lives on Bovril for, a month, and then, just as he thinks he’s going to score, a burglar with a sense of humour strolls into the Pav., carefully selects the only two cups he had a chance of winning, and so to bed.’

  ‘Leaving Master J. G. Welch an awful example of what comes of training,’ said Jim. ‘Welch, you’re a rotter.’

  ‘It isn’t my fault,’ observed Welch, plaintively. ‘You chaps seem to think I’ve committed some sort of crime, just because a man I didn’t know from Adam has bagged a cup or two.’

  ‘It looks to me,’ said Charteris, ‘as if Welch, thinking his chances of the quarter rather rocky, hired one of his low acquaintances to steal the cup for him.’

  ‘Shouldn’t wonder. Welch knows some jolly low characters in Stapleton.’

  ‘Welch is a jolly low character himself,’ said Tony, judicially. ‘I wonder you associate with him, Alderman.’

  ‘Stand in loco parentis. Aunt of his asked me to keep an eye on him. “Dear George is so wild,”’ she said.

  Before Welch could find words to refute this hideous slander, Tony cut in once more.

  ‘The only reason he doesn’t drink gin and play billiards at the “Blue Lion” is that gin makes him ill and his best break at pills is six, including two flukes.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Welch, changing the conversation with a jerk, ‘I don’t much care if the cups are stolen. One doesn’t only run for the sake of the pot.’

  Charteris groaned. ‘Oh, well,’ said he, ‘if you’re going to take the high moral standpoint, and descend to brazen platitudes like that, I give you up.’

  ‘It’s a rum thing about those pots,’ said Welch, meditatively.

  ‘Seems to me,’ Jim rejoined, ‘the rum thing is that a man who considers the Pav. a safe place to keep a lot of valuable prizes in should be allowed at large. Why couldn’t they keep them in the Board Room as they used to?’

  ‘Thought it ‘ud save trouble, I suppose. Save them carting the things over to the Pav. on Sports Day,’ hazarded Tony.

  ‘Saved the burglar a lot of trouble, I should say,’ observed Jackson, ‘I could break into the Pav. myself in five minutes.’

  ‘Good old Jackson,’ said Charteris, ‘have a shot tonight. I’ll hold the watch. I’m doing a leader on the melancholy incident for next month’s Glow Worm. It appears that Master Reginald Robinson, a member of Mr Merevale’s celebrated boarding-establishment, was passing by the Pavilion at an early hour on the morning of the second of April—that’s today—when his eye was attracted by an excavation or incision in one of the windows of that imposing edifice. His narrative appears on another page. Interviewed by a Glow Worm representative, Master Robinson, who is a fine, healthy, bronzed young Englishman of some thirteen summers, with a delightful, boyish flow of speech, not wholly free from a suspicion of cheek, gave it as his opinion that the outrage was the work of a burglar—a remarkable display of sagacity in one so young. A portrait of Master Robinson appears on another page.’

  ‘Everything seems to appear on another page,’ said Jim. ‘Am I to do the portrait?’

  ‘I think it would be best. You can never trust a photo to caricature a person enough. Your facial H.B.’s the thing.’

  ‘Have you heard whether anything else was bagged besides the cups?’ asked Welch.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Jim.

  ‘Yes there was,’ said Jackson. ‘It further appears that that lunatic, Adamson, had left some money in the pocket of his blazer, which he had left in the Pav. overnight. On enquiry it was found that the money had also left.’

  Adamson was in the same House as Jackson, and had talked of nothing else throughout the whole of lunch. He was an abnormally wealthy individual, however, and it was generally felt, though he himself thought otherwise, that he could afford to lose some of the surplus.

  ‘How much?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Two pounds.’

  At this Jim gave vent to the exclamation which Mr Barry Pain calls the Englishman’s shortest prayer.

  ‘My dear sir,’ said Charteris. ‘My very dear sir. We blush for you. Might I ask why you take the matter to heart so?’

  Jim hesitated.

  ‘Better have it out, Jim,’ said Tony. ‘These chaps’ll keep it dark all right.’ And Jim entered once again upon the recital of his doings on the previous night.

  ‘So you see,’ he concluded, ‘this two pound business makes it all the worse.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Welch.

  ‘Well, you see, money’s a thing everybody wants, whereas cups wouldn’t be any good to a fellow at school. So that I should find it much harder to prove that I didn’t take the two pounds, than I should have done to prove that I didn’t take the cups.’

  ‘But there’s no earthly need for you to prove anything,’ said Tony. ‘There’s not the slightest chance of your being found out.’

  ‘Exactly,’ observed Charteris. ‘We will certainly respect your incog. if you wish it. Wild horses shall draw no evidence from us. It is, of course, very distressing, but what is man after all? Are we not as the beasts that perish, and is not our little life rounded by a sleep? Indeed, yes. And now—with full chorus, please.

  ‘“We-e take him from the city or the plough. We-e dress him up in uniform so ne-e-e-at.”’

  And at the third line some plaster came down from the ceiling, and Merevale came up, and the meeting dispersed without the customary cheers.

  [7]

  BARRETT EXPLORES

  Barrett stood at the window of his study with his hands in his pockets, looking thoughtfully at the football field. Now and then he whistled. That was to show that he was very much at his ease. He whistled a popular melody of the day three times as slowly as its talented composer had originally intended it to be whistled, and in a strange minor key. Some people, when offended, invariably whistle in this manner, and these are just the people with whom, if you happen to share a study with them, it is rash to have differences of opinion. Reade, who was deep in a book—though not so deep as he would have liked the casual observer to fancy him to be—would have given much to stop Barrett’s musical experiments. To ask him to stop in so many words was, of course, impossible. Offended dignity must draw the line somewhere. That is one of the curious results of a polite education. When two gentlemen of Hoxton or the Borough have a misunderstanding, they address one another with even more freedom than is their usual custom. When one member of a public school falls out with another member, his politeness in dealing with him becomes so Chesterfieldian, that one cannot help being afraid that he will sustain a strain from which he will never recover.

  After a time the tension became too much for Barrett. He picked up his cap and left the room. Reade continued to be absorbed in his book.

  It was a splendid day outside, warm for April, and with just that freshness in the air which gets into the blood and makes Spring the best time of the whole year. Barrett had not the aesthetic soul to any appreciable extent, but he did know a fine day when he saw one, and even he realized that a day like this was not to be wasted in pottering about the School grounds watching the ‘under thirteen’ hundred yards (trial heats) and the ‘under fourteen’ broad jump, or doing occasional exercises in the gymnasium. It was a day for going far afield and not returning till lock-up. He had an object, too. Everything seemed to shout ‘eggs’ at him, to remind him that he was an enthusiast on the subject and had a collection to which he ought to seize this excellent opportunity of adding. The only question was, where to go. The surrounding country was a Paradise for the naturalist who had no absurd scruples on the subject of trespassing. To the west, in the direction of Stapleton, the woods and hedges were thick with nests. But then, so they were to the east along the Badgwick road. He wavered, but a recollection that there was water in the Badgwick direction, and that he might with luck beard a water-wagtail in its lair, decided him. What is life without a water-wagtail’s egg? A m
ere mockery. He turned east.

  ‘Hullo, Barrett, where are you off to?’ Grey, of Prater’s House, intercepted him as he was passing.

  ‘Going to see if I can get some eggs. Are you coming?’

  Grey hesitated. He was a keen naturalist, too.

  ‘No, I don’t think I will, thanks. Got an uncle coming down to see me.’

  ‘Well, cut off before he comes.’

  ‘No, he’d be too sick. Besides,’ he added, ingenuously, ‘there’s a possible tip. Don’t want to miss that. I’m simply stony. Always am at end of term.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Barrett, realizing that further argument would be thrown away. ‘Well, so long, then.’

  ‘So long. Hope you have luck.’

  ‘Thanks. I say.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Roll-call, you know. If you don’t see me anywhere about, you might answer my name.’

  ‘All right. And if you find anything decent, you might remember me. You know pretty well what I’ve got already.’

  ‘Right, I will.’

  ‘Magpie’s what I want particularly. Where are you going, by the way?’

  ‘Thought of having a shot at old Venner’s woods. I’m after a water-wagtail myself. Ought to be one or two in the Dingle.’

  ‘Heaps, probably. But I should advise you to look out, you know. Venner’s awfully down on trespassing.’

  ‘Yes, the bounder. But I don’t think he’ll get me. One gets the knack of keeping fairly quiet with practice.’

  ‘He’s got thousands of keepers.’

  ‘Millions.’

  ‘Dogs, too.’

  ‘Dash his beastly dogs. I like dogs. Why are you such a croaker today, Grey?’

  ‘Well, you know he’s had two chaps sacked for going in his woods to my certain knowledge, Morton-Smith and Ainsworth. That’s only since I’ve been at the Coll., too. Probably lots more before that.’

  ‘Ainsworth was booked smoking there. That’s why he was sacked. And Venner caught Morton-Smith himself simply staggering under dead rabbits. They sack any chap for poaching.’