“Boys always give way to girls,” generalized Miss Carthew.
“I don’t believe they do nowadays,” said Michael.
“I see it’s hopeless to argue any more. I’m sorry you won’t see you’re in the wrong. It makes me feel disappointed.”
Michael again shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t see how I can possibly ask your mother to let Nancy stay here next Christmas. I suppose you’ll be trying to kiss her.”
Michael really had to laugh at this.
“Why, I like Nancy awfully,” he said. “And we both think kissing is fearful rot—I mean frightfully stupid. But I won’t do it again, Miss Carthew. I’m sorry. I am really.”
There was one great advantage in dealing with Miss Carthew. She was always ready to forgive at once, and, as Michael respected her enough to dislike annoying her, he found it perfectly easy to apologize and be friends—particularly as he had set his heart on Nancy’s Christmas visit.
Carlington Road and the Confederate Roads were now under the control of Michael and his friends. Rodber had gone away to a public school: the elder Macalister and Garrod had both got bicycles which occupied all their time: Michael, the twin Macalisters and a boy called Norton were in a very strong position of authority. Norton had two young brothers and the Macalisters had one, so that there were three slaves in perpetual attendance. It became the fashion to forsake the school field for the more adventurous wasteland of the neighbourhood. At the end of Carlington Road itself still existed what was practically open country as far as it lasted. There were elm-trees and declivities and broken hedges and the excavated hollows of deserted gravel-pits. There was an attractive zigzag boundary fence which was sufficiently ruinous at certain intervals to let a boy through to wander in the allotments of railway workers. Bands of predatory “cads” prowled about this wasteland, and many were the fierce fights at sundown between the cads and the Randellites. Caps were taken for scalps, and Miss Carthew was horrified to observe nailed to Michael’s bedroom wall the filthiest cap she had ever seen.
Apart from the battles there were the luxurious camps, where cigarettes at five a penny were smoked to the last puff and were succeeded by the consumption of highly scented sweets to remove the traces of tobacco. These camps were mostly pitched in the gravelly hollows, where Michael and the Macalisters and Norton used to sit round a campfire on the warm evenings of summer, while silhouetted against the blue sky above stood the minor Macalister and the junior Nortons in ceaseless vigilance. The bait held out to these sentries, who sometimes mutinied, was their equipment with swords, guns, pistols, shields, bows, arrows and breastplates. So heavily and decoratively armed and sustained by the prospect of peppermint bull’s-eyes, Dicky Macalister and the two Nortons were content for an hour to scan the horizon for marauding cads, while down below the older boys discussed life in all its ambiguity and complication. These symposiums in the gravel-pit tried to solve certain problems in a very speculative manner.
“There must be some secret about being married,” said Michael one Saturday afternoon, when the sun blazed down upon the sentries and the last cigarette had been smoked.
“There is,” Norton agreed,
“I can’t make out about twins,” Michael continued, looking critically at the Macalisters.
Siegfried Macalister, generally known as “Smack” in distinction to his brother Hugh always called “Mac,” felt bound to offer a suggestion.
“There’s twenty minutes’ difference between us. I heard my mater tell a visitor, and besides I’m the eldest.”
Speculation was temporarily interrupted by a bout between Smack and Mac, because neither was allowed to claim priority. At the end of an indecisive round Michael struck in:
“But why are there twins? People don’t like twins coming, because in Ally Sloper there’s always a joke about twins.”
“I know married people who haven’t got any children at all,” said Norton in order still more elaborately to complicate the point at issue.
“Yes, there you are,” said Michael. “There’s some secret about marriage.”
“There’s a book in my mater’s room which I believe would tell us,” hinted Smack.
“There’s a good deal in the Bible,” Norton observed. “Only it’s difficult to find the places and then you can’t tell for certain what they mean.”
Then came a long whispering at the end of which the four boys shook their heads very wisely and said that they were sure that was it.
“Hullo!” Michael shouted, forgetting the debate. “Young Dicky’s signalling.”
“Indians,” said Mac.
“Sioux or Apaches?” asked Smack anxiously.
“Neither. It’s Arabs. Charge,” shouted Norton.
All problems went to the winds in the glories of action, in the clash of stick on stick, in the rending of cad’s collar and cad’s belt, and in the final defeat of the Arabs with the loss of their caravan—a sugar-box on a pair of elliptical wheels.
In addition to the arduous military life led by Michael at this period, he was also in common with Smack and Mac and Norton a multiplex collector. At first the two principal collections were silkworms and silver-paper. Afterwards came postage stamps and coins and medals and autographs and birds’ eggs and shells and fossils and bones and skins and butterflies and moths and portraits of famous cricketers. From the moment the first silkworm was brought home in a perforated cardboard-box to the moment when by some arrangement of vendible material the first bicycle was secured, the greater part of Michael’s leisure was mysteriously occupied in swapping. This swapping would continue until the mere theory of swapping for swapping’s sake as exemplified in a paper called The Exchange and Mart was enough. When this journal became the rage, the most delightful occupation of Michael and his friends was that of poring over the columns of this medium of barter in order to read of X. Y. Z. in Northumberland who was willing to exchange five Buff Orpingtons, a suit, a tennis racket and Cowper’s Poems for a mechanical organ or a 5 ft. by 4 ft. greenhouse. All the romance
