with any real certainty was to make oxygen. But he had ambitions beyond that feat, and was continually experimenting in a reckless way which made the chemistry master look wan and uneasy. He was bending over a complicated mixture of tubes, acids, and Bunsen burners when Dunstable found him. It was after school, so that the laboratory was empty, but for them.
“Don’t mind me,” said Dunstable, taking a seat on the table.
“Look out, man, don’t jog. Sit tight, and I’ll broaden your mind for you. I take this bit of litmus paper, and dip it into this bilge, and if I’ve done it right, it’ll turn blue.”
“Then I bet it doesn’t,” said Dunstable.
The paper turned red.
“Hades,” said Linton calmly. “Well, I’m not going to sweat at it any more. Let’s go down to Cook’s.”
Cook’s is the one school institution which nobody forgets who has been to Wrykyn. It is a little confectioner’s shop in the High Street. Its exterior is somewhat forbidding, and the uninitiated would probably shudder and pass on, wondering how on earth such a place could find a public daring enough to support it by eating its wares. But the school went there in flocks. Tea at Cook’s was the alternative to a study tea. There was a large room at the back of the shop, and here oceans of hot tea and tons of toast were consumed. The staff of Cook’s consisted of Mr. Cook, late sergeant in a line regiment, six foot three, disposition amiable, left leg cut off above the knee by a spirited Fuzzy in the last Soudan war; Mrs. Cook, wife of the above, disposition similar, and possessing the useful gift of being able to listen to five people at one and the same time; and an invisible menial, or menials, who made toast in some nether region at a perfectly dizzy rate of speed. Such was Cook’s.
“Talking of Cook’s,” said Dunstable, producing his pamphlet, “have you seen this? It’ll be a bit of a knock-out for them, I should think.”
Linton took the paper, and began to read. Dunstable roamed curiously about the laboratory, examining things.
“What are these little crystal sort of bits of stuff?” he asked, coming to a standstill before a large jar and opening it. “They look good to eat. Shall I try one?”
“Don’t you be an idiot,” said the expert, looking up. “What have you got hold of? Great Scott, no, don’t eat that stuff.”
“Why not? Is it poison?”
“No. But it would make you sick as a cat. It’s Sal Ammoniac.”
“Sal how much?”
“Ammoniac. You’d be awfully bad.”
“All right, then, I won’t. Well, what do you think of that thing? It’ll be rough on Cook’s, won’t it? You see they advertise a special ‘public-school’ tea, as they call it. It sounds jolly good. I don’t know what buckwheat cakes are, but they ought to be decent. I suppose now everybody’ll chuck Cook’s and go there. It’s a beastly shame, considering that Cook’s has been a sort of school shop so long. And they really depend on the school. At least, one never sees anybody else going there. Well, I shall stick to Cook’s. I don’t want any of your beastly Yankee invaders. Support home industries. Be a patriot. The band then played God Save the King, and the meeting dispersed. But, seriously, man, I am rather sick about this. The Cooks are such awfully good sorts, and this is bound to make them lose a tremendous lot. The school’s simply crawling with chaps who’d do anything to get a good tea cheaper than they’re getting now. They’ll simply scrum in to this new place.”
“Well, I don’t see what we can do,” said Linton, “except keep on going to Cook’s ourselves. Let’s be going now, by the way. We’ll get as many chaps as we can to promise to stick to them. But we can’t prevent the rest going where they like. Come on.”
The atmosphere at Cook’s that evening was heavily charged with gloom. ExSergeant Cook, usually a treasury of jest and anecdote, was silent and thoughtful. Mrs. Cook bustled about with her customary vigour, but she too was disinclined for conversation. The place was ominously empty. A quartette of school house juniors in one corner and a solitary prefect from Donaldson’s completed the sum of the customers. Nobody seemed to want to talk a great deal. There was something in the air which
and so it was. Haunted by the spectre of that hideous, new, glaring red-brick building down the street, which had opened its doors to the public on the previous afternoon.
“Look there,” said Dunstable, as they came out. He pointed along the street. The doors of the new establishment were congested. A crowd, made up of members of various houses, was pushing to get past another crowd which was trying to get out. The “public-school tea at one shilling” appeared to have proved attractive.
“Look at ‘em,” said Dunstable. “Sordid beasts! All they care about is filling themselves. There goes that man Merrett. Rand-Brown with him. Here come four more. Come on. It makes me sick.”
“I wish it would make
“Perhaps it will…. By George!”
He started.
“What’s up?” said Linton.
“Oh, nothing. I was only thinking of something.”
They walked on without further conversation. Dunstable’s brain was working fast. He had an idea, and was busy developing it.
The manager of the Wrykyn Branch of Ring’s Come-one Come-all Stores stood at the entrance to his shop on the following afternoon spitting with energy and precision on to the pavement—he was a free-born American citizen—and eyeing the High Street as a monarch might gaze at his kingdom. He had just completed a highly satisfactory report to headquarters, and was feeling contented with the universe, and the way in which it was managed. Even in the short time since the opening of the store he had managed to wake up the sluggish Britishers as if they had had an electric shock.
“We,” he observed epigrammatically to a passing cat, which had stopped on its way to look at him, “are it.”
