Tom Brown's Body

'What odds? Ten to one, he'll be up in the masters' Common Room when we go, and asleep by the time we get back. Now you said you'd come –'

'On condition that you get the bike, then.'

'All right, then, although I think –'

'And that the lamps and the tyres are all right. I'm not going to break my neck.'

'All right, then, but they will be all right. And who cares, anyway, about your bally neck?'

'And,' said Skene, with sudden cunning, 'that if we win anything on the Dogs, we split it fifty-fifty. You're always much luckier than I am.'

' Win anything on the – Gosh! I'd never thought of that!' said Merrys, startled. 'I say, though, that would make a stink if it came out! Do you think – ?'

'It's my last condition,' said Skene, who now saw a ray of hope that the expedition, of which he was thoroughly nervous, might, after all, be abandoned. 'Unless you bet, and we split your winnings, I'm out. I don't mind subbing up half your stake if you lose,' he added handsomely.

'You're a blasted Shylock,' said Merrys. 'All right, then, fifty-fifty.'

Hope died in Skene's loyal but cautious breast.

'All right, then,' he agreed despondently. 'I'm on, I suppose. Let's do it soon and get it over.'

*

Merrys was not the only person who was disgruntled that he had missed a visit to the Roman Bath. Mr Loveday (Albert-Edward to the members of his House) was a mild and scholarly gentleman of advanced views, particularly on what is called, erroneously, discipline, but as a rule he reserved these views for the eyes of editors of educational journals. On this occasion, however, he felt that he had been cold-shouldered to the point of insult, for Mr Conway had not seen fit to inform him that he was keeping back one of his candidates for immersion, although there was evidence that the boy had pointed this out.

'It's time we thought of some better way of managing boys than by beating them and putting them in Detention,' he observed bitterly in the Common Room, after his roll-call for the Roman Bath had failed to elicit a response from Merrys. 'I don't complain, of course. Those are the recognized ways of keeping order, especially by people whose brains and personalities are deficient in the vital qualities which go to make a schoolmaster. Nevertheless' – he glared at the back of Mr Conway's neck – 'I am suffering from –'

'Another overdose of Neill magnesia?' said Mr Conway, turning his head only slightly. He was young enough to despise Mr Loveday wholeheartedly. He thought it was quite time that the Headmaster dispossessed some of these senile Housemasters – got them to take Orders and push off into rural England – so that their legitimate successors (himself primarily) could afford to marry and settle down. 'Go and work it off somewhere else, Loveday, old dear. I can't help it if your whelps aren't given a chance to do their Prep, and so fall down on their classwork.'

'I don't believe in all this Prep,' said Mr Loveday, his fingers angrily clutching the bowl of the pipe that was in his jacket pocket. 'With competent teaching it is quite unnecessary. As for keeping boys in when they should be taking exercise' – he broke off to glare across the room again at the thick-set, aggressive, black-haired Mr Conway, who, unfortunately, again had his back to him and was earnestly discussing the respective merits of pre-war light ales with a master of his own age and tastes – 'then, I say, it is time to consider whether the principle of granting and withholding privileges is not very much to be preferred.'

'It's what they try at Borstal Institutions, isn't it?' said Mr Conway, suddenly swinging round. 'Why don't you get a job at one of them?'

Mr Loveday, who was a genuine reformer and therefore did not make quite such a mess with his theories as a less sincere man might have done, said that, in his view, the system, Borstal-based or not, was the right one. He then referred (mistakenly) to the success of his Roman-Bath privileges and their abuse by incapable form-masters, and received in reply a long and spirited denunciation of his boys from Mr Conway, who referred to their sins of omission and commission, their furtiveness, their impudence, their laziness, their slackness in form and on the games-field, their unwashedness (Roman Bath or no Roman Bath), and their general and unrelieved wrong- headedness.

'In other words,' said Mr Conway unpardonably, 'they're governed by a couple of elderly women, and they know it.'

Mr Loveday turned very white, and another master said, quietly, 'Steady on, Conway,' but, beyond his ebbing colour and a sudden intake of breath as though something had sharply hurt him, Mr Loveday made no attempt to challenge the insult. He gave Conway a straight glance, and walked out. It had been a mild Common Room joke for years that Mr Loveday's sister, who was his housekeeper, wore the trousers, but it was a joke so far made in Mr Loveday's absence.

*

Mr Kay, referred to by Skene as Spivvy and as possessing a cottage which the Dog-fanciers would have to pass on their way out from school, was the only married member of the staff who was not a Housemaster. He was too newly-joined to have been given a House, and, a cottage falling vacant upon the cricket professional's retirement to his home town in Yorkshire (and no other professional having been appointed), Mr Kay had been granted the use of this cottage for himself and his wife. He paid no rent, but had given Mr Wyck, the Headmaster, an undertaking that he would keep the cottage garden tidy without pressing the Headmaster's gardener into service, and would vacate the place if another pro were appointed.

Mr Kay was not very popular with the boys, and some of the masters despised him. He was yellow-faced, black-eyed, and claimed to be half-Portuguese – his mother had been born in Brazil – and Mr Conway, who had a sharp but accurate tongue, called him Louis the Spiv, for Mr Kay taught French to the lower forms and Economics on the Science side. Thus Mr Conway's nickname for him was sufficiently descriptive to be considered worthy of Common Room use by some of the younger masters. It had also become known to the boys, a fact of which Mr Kay had been apprised by a Fourth Form clerihew, which he had been handed, cheekily, in place of a French exercise. It ran:

Louis the Spiv

Had not the right to live.

Like every other skunk, He stunk.

It had also leaked out (again through Mr Conway, who interested himself unkindly in other people's affairs) that Mr Kay had taught for a time at a grammar school somewhere in the Midlands, and had left hurriedly in the middle of a term. He was, in consequence of Mr Conway's discoveries and verbal allusions, a solitary man, not even very happily married, and as soon as his duties for the day were over, he was in the habit of going home to his cottage for the evening and night, and shutting himself up with his work. He did not return to School until nine-thirty on the following morning.

The pious argument voiced by Merrys, therefore, that Mr Kay would be in the masters' Common Room when the truants departed for their illegal outing, was based on a fallacy. Mr Kay was not only in his cottage when the boys went by, but he even heard the sound of the bicycle wheels on the gravel drive near his windows.

The sound did not disturb him in the slightest. Marrys and Skene were far too wary to risk talking to one another while they were so near the School, and Mr Kay, hearing the bicycle's somewhat laboured progress, merely concluded that it marked the entrance or exit of the postman, who must be rather later than usual. He did not draw aside his curtain to glance out. He did not listen for the postman's knock. His wife was away from home, and he had heard from her by the morning delivery. He was not expecting any other letters.

Merrys and Skene had found it unexpectedly easy to borrow Mr Loveday's bicycle. They did not even have to take Jack the Ripper – Mr Loveday's knife-and-boot boy – into their confidence. It was Merrys who had done the actual borrowing. Skene had insisted on this.

'You got me to promise to come,' he said. 'It's up to you to do the rest.'

'Cold feet?' asked Merrys, in accents calculated to embarrass and wound the hearer.

'Yes, if you want to know, I have got cold feet,' said Skene, firmly. 'But I said I'd come with you, so I'm coming. But that's all I'm going to do.'