that statue?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“You?” said the bishop.
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“You? You? You?” said the general.
“Sir, yes, sir.”
There was a quivering pause. The bishop looked at the headmaster. The headmaster looked at the bishop. The general looked at the boy. The boy looked at the floor.
The general was the first to speak.
“Monstrous!” he exclaimed. “Monstrous. Monstrous. Never heard of such a thing. This boy must be expelled, Headmaster. Expelled. Ex—”
“No!” said the headmaster in a ringing voice.
“Then flogged within an inch of his life. Within an inch. An inch.”
“No!” A strange, new dignity seemed to have descended upon the Rev. Trevor Entwhistle. He was breathing a little quickly through his nose, and his eyes had assumed a somewhat prawn-like aspect. “In matters of school discipline, general, I must with all deference claim to be paramount. I will deal with this case as I think best. In my opinion this is not an occasion for severity. You agree with me, bishop?”
The bishop came to himself with a start. He had been thinking of an article which he had just completed for a leading review on the subject of Miracles, and was regretting that the tone he had taken, though in keeping with the trend of Modern Thought, had been tinged with something approaching scepticism.
“Oh, entirely,” he said.
“Then all I can say,” fumed the general, “is that I wash my hands of the whole business, the whole business, the whole business. And if this is the way our boys are being brought up nowadays, no wonder the country is going to the dogs, the dogs, going to the dogs.”
The door slammed behind him. The headmaster turned to the boy, a kindly, winning smile upon his face.
“No doubt,” he said, “you now regret this rash act?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“And you would not do it again?”
“Sir, no, sir.”
“Then I think,” said the headmaster cheerily, “that we may deal leniently with what, after all, was but a boyish prank, eh, bishop?”
“Oh, decidedly, Headmaster.”
“Quite the sort of thing—ha, ha!—that you or I might have done—er—at his age?”
“Oh, quite.”
“Then you shall write me twenty lines of Virgil, Mulliner, and we will say no more about it.”
The bishop sprang from his chair.
“Mulliner! Did you say Mulliner?”
“Yes.”
“I have a secretary of that name. Are you, by any chance, a relation of his, my lad?”
“Sir, yes, sir. Brother.”
“Oh!” said the bishop.
The bishop found Augustine in the garden, squirting whale-oil solution on the rosebushes, for he was an enthusiastic horticulturist. He placed an affectionate hand on his shoulder.
“Mulliner,” he said, “do not think that I have not detected your hidden hand behind this astonishing occurrence.”
“Eh?” said Augustine. “What astonishing occurrence?”
“As you are aware, Mulliner, last night, from motives which I can assure you were honourable and in accord with the truest spirit of sound Churchmanship, the Rev. Trevor Entwhistle and I were compelled to go out and paint old Fatty Hemel’s statue pink. Just now, in the headmaster’s study, a boy confessed that he had done it. That boy, Mulliner, was your brother.
“Oh yes?”
“It was you who, in order to save me, inspired him to that confession. Do not deny it, Mulliner.”
Augustine smiled an embarrassed smile.
“It was nothing, Bish, nothing at all.”
“I trust the matter did not involve you in any too great expense. From what I know of brothers, the lad was scarcely likely to have carried through this benevolent ruse for nothing.”
“Oh, just a couple of quid. He wanted three, but I beat him down. Preposterous, I mean to say,” said Augustine warmly. “Three quid for a perfectly simple, easy job like that? And so I told him.”
“It shall be returned to you, Mulliner.”
“No, no, Bish.”
“Yes, Mulliner, it shall be returned to you. I have not the sum on my person, but I will forward you a cheque to your new address, The Vicarage, Steeple Mummery, Hants.”
Augustine’s eyes filled with sudden tears. He grasped the other’s hand.
“Bish,” he said in a choking voice, “I don’t know how to thank you. But—have you considered?”
“Considered?”
“The wife of thy bosom. Deuteronomy 13:6. What will she say when you tell her?”
The bishop’s eyes gleamed with a resolute light.
“Mulliner,” he said, “the point you raise had not escaped me. But I have the situation well in hand. A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter. Ecclesiastes 10:20. I shall inform her of my decision on the long-distance telephone.”
Came the Dawn
The man in the corner took a sip of stout-and-mild, and proceeded to point the moral of the story which he had just told us.
“Yes, gentlemen,” he said, “Shakespeare was right. There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”
We nodded. He had been speaking of a favourite dog of his which, entered recently by some error in a local cat show, had taken first prize in the class for short-haired tortoiseshells; and we all thought the quotation well-chosen and apposite.
“There is, indeed,” said Mr. Mulliner. “A rather similar thing happened to my nephew Lancelot.”
In the nightly reunions in the bar-parlour of the Anglers’ Rest we have been trained to believe almost anything of Mr. Mulliner’s relatives, but this, we felt, was a little too much.
“You mean to say your nephew Lancelot took a prize at a cat show?”
“No, no,” said Mr. Mulliner hastily. “Certainly not. I have never deviated from the truth in my life, and I hope I never shall. No Mulliner has ever taken a prize at a cat show. No Mulliner, indeed, to the best of my knowledge, has even been entered for such a competition. What I meant was that the fact that we never know what the future holds in store for us was well exemplified in the case of my nephew Lancelot, just as it was in the case of this gentleman’s dog which suddenly found itself transformed for all practical purposes into a short-haired tortoiseshell cat. It is rather a curious story, and provides a good illustration of the adage
