Mike at Wrykyn (8 page)

Following
the chain of events, we find Mr. Butt, having prudently changed his clothes,
calling upon the headmaster.

The
headmaster was grave and sympathetic; Mr. Butt fierce and revengeful.

The
imagination of the Force is proverbial. Nurtured on motor-cars and fed with
stop-watches, it has become world-famous. Mr. Butt gave free rein to it.

“Threw
me in, they did, sir. Yes, sir.”

“Threw
you in!”

“Yes,
sir.
Plop!”
said Mr. Butt, with a certain sad relish.

“Really,
really!” said the headmaster. “Indeed! This is—dear me! I shall certainly—They
threw you in !—Yes, I shall—certainly—”

Encouraged
by this appreciative reception of his story, Mr. Butt started it again, right
from the beginning.

“I was
on my beat, sir, and I thought I heard a disturbance. I says to myself, “Allo,’
I says, ‘a frakkus. Lots of them all gathered together, and fighting.’ I says,
beginning to suspect something, ‘Wot’s this all about, I wonder?’ I says. ‘Blow
me if I don’t think it’s a frakkus.’ And,” concluded Mr. Butt, with the air of
one confiding a secret, “and it
was
a frakkus!”

“And
these boys actually threw you into the pond?”

“Plop,
sir! Mrs. Butt is drying my uniform at home at this
very moment as we sit talking here, sir. She says to me, ‘Why, whatever
‘ave
you been a-doing? You’re all wet.’ And,” he added, again with the
confidential air, “I
was,
too. Wringin’ wet.”

The
headmaster’s frown deepened.

“And
you are certain that your assailants were boys from the school?”

“Sure
as I am that I’m sitting here, sir. They all ‘ad their caps on their heads,
sir.”

“I have
never heard of such a thing. I can hardly believe that it is possible. They
actually seized you, and threw you into the water—”

“Splish,
sir!” said the policeman, with a vividness of
imagery both surprising and gratifying.

The
headmaster tapped restlessly on the floor with his foot.

“How
many boys were there?” he asked.

“Couple
of ‘undred, sir,” said Mr. Butt promptly.

“Two
hundred!”

“It was
dark, sir, and I couldn’t see not to say properly; but if you ask me my frank
and private opinion I should say couple of ‘undred.”

“H’m—
Well, I will look into the matter at once. They shall be punished.”

“Yes,
sir.”

“Ye-e-s—H’m—Yes—Most
severely.”

“Yes,
sir.”

“Yes—Thank
you, constable. Good night.”

“Good
night, sir.”

The
headmaster of Wrykyn was not a motorist. Owing to this disadvantage he made a
mistake. Had he been a motorist, he would have known that statements by the
police in the matter of figures must be divided by any number from two to ten,
according to discretion. As it was, he accepted Constable Butt’s report almost
as it stood. He thought that he might possibly have been mistaken as to the
exact numbers of those concerned in his immersion; but he accepted the
statement in so far as it indicated that the thing had been the work of a
considerable section of the school, and not of only one or two individuals. And
this made all the difference to his method of dealing with the affair. Had he
known how few were the numbers of those responsible for the cold in the head
which subsequently attacked Constable Butt, he would have asked for their
names, and an extra lesson would have settled the entire matter.

As it
was, however, he got the impression that the school, as a whole, was culpable,
and he proceeded to punish the school as a whole.

It
happened that, about a week before the pond episode, a certain member of the
Royal Family had recovered from a dangerous illness. No official holiday had
been given to the schools in honour of the recovery, but Eton and Harrow had
set the example, which was followed throughout the kingdom, and Wrykyn had
come into line with the rest. Only two days before the O.W.s matches the headmaster
had given out a notice in the hall that the following Friday would be a whole
holiday; and the school, always ready to stop work, had approved of the announcement
exceedingly.

The
step which the headmaster decided to take by way of avenging Mr. Butt’s wrongs
was to stop this holiday.

He gave
out a notice to that effect on the Monday.

The
school was thunderstruck. It could not understand it. The pond affair had, of
course, become public property; and those who had had nothing to do with it had
been much amused. “There’ll be a frightful row about it,” they had said,
thrilled with the pleasant excitement of those who see trouble approaching and
themselves looking on from a comfortable distance without risk or uneasiness.
They were not malicious. They did not want to see their friends in
difficulties. But there is no denying that a row does break the monotony of a
school term. The thrilling feeling that something is going to happen is the
salt of life….

And
here they were, right in it after all. The blow had fallen, and crushed guilty
and innocent alike.

The school’s attitude can
be summed up in three words. It was one vast, blank, astounded “Here, I
say!”

Everybody
was saying it, though not always in those words. When condensed, everybody’s
comment on the situation came to that.

There is something rather
pathetic in the indignation of a school. It must always, or nearly always,
expend itself in words, and in private at that. Even the consolation of getting
on to platforms and shouting at itself is denied to it. A public school has no
Hyde Park.

There
is every probability—in fact, it is certain—that, but for one malcontent, the
school’s indignation would have been allowed to simmer down in the usual way,
and finally become a mere vague memory.

The
malcontent was Wyatt. He had been responsible for the starting of the matter,
and he proceeded now to carry it on till it blazed up into the biggest thing of
its kind ever known at Wrykyn—the Great Picnic.

Anyone who knows the
public schools, their iron-bound conservatism, and, as a whole, intense respect
for order and authority, will appreciate the magnitude of his feat, even though
he may not approve of it. Leaders of men are rare. Leaders of boys are almost
unknown. It requires genius to sway a school.

It
would be an absorbing task for a psychologist to trace the various stages by
which an impossibility was changed into a reality. Wyatt’s coolness and
matter-of-fact determination were his chief weapons. His popularity and
reputation for lawlessness helped him. A conversation which he had with
Neville-Smith, a day-boy, is typical of the way in which he forced his point of
view on the school.

Neville-Smith
was thoroughly representative of the average Wrykynian. He could play his part
in any minor “rag” which interested him, and probably considered himself, on
the whole, a daring sort of person. But at heart he had an enormous respect for
authority. Before he came to Wyatt, he would not have dreamed of proceeding
beyond words in his revolt. Wyatt acted on him like some drug.

Neville-Smith
came upon Wyatt on his way to the nets. The notice concerning the holiday had
only been given out that morning, and he was full of it. He expressed his
opinion of the headmaster freely and in well-chosen words. He said it was a
swindle, that it was all rot, and that it was a beastly shame. He added that
something ought to be done about it.

“What
are you going to do?” asked Wyatt.

“Well,”
said Neville-Smith a little awkwardly, guiltily conscious that he had been
frothing, and scenting sarcasm, “I don’t suppose one can actually
do
anything.”

“Why
not?” said Wyatt. “What do you mean?”

“Why
don’t you take the holiday?”

“What?
Not turn up on Friday!”

“Yes.
I’m not going to.”

Neville-Smith
stopped and stared. Wyatt was unmoved.

“You’re
what?”

“I
simply shan’t go to school.”

“You’re
rotting.”

“All
right.”

“No,
but, I say, ragging barred. Are you just going to go off, though the holiday’s
been stopped?”

“That’s
the idea.”

“You’ll
get sacked.”

“I
suppose so. But only because I shall be the only one to do it. If the whole
school took Friday off, they couldn’t do much. They couldn’t sack the whole
school.”

“By
Jove, nor could they! I say!”

They
walked on, Neville-Smith’s mind in a whirl, Wyatt whistling.

“I
say,” said Neville-Smith after a pause. “It would be a bit of a rag.”

“Not
bad.”

“Do you
think the chaps would do it?”

“If
they understood they wouldn’t be alone.” Another pause.

“Shall
I ask some of them?” said Neville-Smith. ,,Do.”

“I
could get quite a lot, I believe.”

“That
would be a start, wouldn’t it? I could get a couple of dozen from Wain’s. We
should be forty or fifty strong to start with.”

“I say,
what a score, wouldn’t it be?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll
speak to the chaps tonight, and let you know.”

“All
right,” said Wyatt. “Tell them that I shall be going anyhow. I should be glad
of a little company.”

The school turned in on
the Thursday night in a restless, excited way. There were mysterious whisperings
and gigglings. Groups kept forming in corners apart, to disperse casually and
innocently on the approach of some person in authority.

An air
of expectancy permeated each of the houses.

CHAPTER
X

THE GREAT PICNIC

MORNING school at Wrykyn
started at nine o’clock.

At that hour there was a
call-over in each of the form-rooms. After call-over the forms proceeded to the
Great Hall for prayers.

A
strangely desolate feeling was in the air at nine o’clock on the Friday
morning. Sit in the grounds of a public school any afternoon in the summer
holidays, and you will get exactly the same sensation of being alone in the
world as came to the dozen or so day-boys who bicycled through the gates that
morning. Wrykyn was a boarding-school for the most part, but it had its leaven
of day-boys. The majority of these lived in the town, and walked to school. A
few, however, whose homes were farther away, came on bicycles. One plutocrat
did the journey in a motor-car, rather to the scandal of the authorities, who,
though unable to interfere, looked askance when compelled by the warning toot
of the horn to skip from road to pavement. A form-master has the strongest
objection to being made to skip like a young ram by a boy to whom he has only
the day before given a hundred lines for shuffling his feet in form.

It
seemed curious to these cyclists that there should be nobody about. Punctuality
is the politeness of princes, but it was not a leading characteristic of the
school; and at three minutes to nine, as a general rule, you might see the
gravel in front of the buildings freely dotted with sprinters, trying to get in
in time to answer their names.

It was
curious that there should be nobody about today. A wave of reform could
scarcely have swept through the houses during the night.

And
yet—where was everybody?

Time
only deepened the mystery. The form-rooms, like the gravel, were empty.

The
cyclists looked at one another in astonishment. What could it mean?

It was
an occasion on which sane people wonder if their brains are not playing them
some unaccountable trick.

“I
say,” said Willoughby, of the Lower Fifth, to Brown, the only other occupant of
the form-room, “the old man
did
stop the holiday today, didn’t he?”

“Just
what I was going to ask you,” said Brown. “It’s jolly rum. I distinctly
remember him giving it out in the Hall that it was going to be stopped because
of the O.W.s day row.”

“So do I.
I can’t make it out. Where
is
everybody?”

“They
can’t
all
be late.”

“Somebody
would have turned up by now. Why, it’s just striking.”

“Perhaps
he sent another notice round the houses late last night, saying it was on again
all right. I say, what a swindle if he did. Someone might have let us know. I should
have got up an hour later.”

“So
should I.”

“Hullo,
here
is
somebody.”

It was
the master of the Lower Fifth, Mr. Spence. He walked briskly into the room, as
was his habit. Seeing the obvious void, he stopped in his stride, and hooked
puzzled.