William The Conqueror (17 page)

CHAPTER 8

W
ILLIAM was going to the village Sunday-school treat. He had been attending the village Sunday school under protest for the last year, and his
enforced attendance had qualified him for an invitation to the annual treat.

The year before William had attended a superior Sunday school for the sons of gentlefolk held by one Miss Lomas at her home. Since her nervous breakdown, however (which occurred shortly after
William joined her class), he had, with the majority of her scholars, joined the village Sunday school. The smile with which the Vicar received the intimation that William was to return to the fold
had been a mirthles one.

He had enjoyed William’s short-lived removal to the more rarefied atmosphere of Miss Lomas’s Sunday school for the sons of gentlefolk. William himself, though philosophical, was
little better pleased. He endured Sunday school in the same spirit in which he endured clean collars and having his hair brushed. He knew that he went there because his father said that he might as
well go into an asylum straight off if he couldn’t get a little peace from that boy on Sunday afternoons.

William looked forward to the treat with mixed feelings. On the one hand, his friends (known as the Outlaws) would be there. That would make for mirth and freedom. On the other hand, his
grown-up sister Ethel would be there, and that would not make for mirth and freedom. Ethel always made it her duty to keep a stern eye upon her younger brother.

Ethel was to help with the tea, not because she had any official connection with the Sunday school, but because she was in the transitory state of falling back on the curate. Between her more
exciting flirtations Ethel always fell back on the curate. He was a pale, dreamy youth with a long neck who proposed to Ethel several times during each of the falling back periods, but without much
real hope. As a matter of fact, he had grave and quite justifiable doubts as to her suitability for the position of clergyman’s wife. She was too pretty for one thing. Still, he proposed
regularly and indulged in a certain half-pleasurable mournfulness each time she rejected him.

William allowed himself to be washed and brushed and put into his best suit, his mind fixed hopefully upon the treat to come. He had heard that there were to be races and coconut shies and a
roundabout. It was not so much upon these lawful pleasures that his mind was set as upon such lawless ones as were likely to offer themselves to him in the company of his beloved Outlaws.

There was Ethel, of course . . . He considered her presence at a Sunday-school treat as little short of an outrage. But he looked confidently to the curate to occupy most of her time. William
always kept a wary eye upon his pretty sister’s ‘affaires’. He had on more than one occasion found a knowledge of them useful.

He did not walk with Ethel to the field where the treat was to be held. He always avoided walking with Ethel. She objected to any interesting mode of progression such as leaping along with a
stick or crawling through the hole in the hedge or dragging one’s feet through the dead leaves.

So William, spick and span and shining with cleanliness and neatness, set off alone some time after Ethel. He walked along the top of the fence by the side of the ditch. It was a difficult
balancing feat and more than once proved too much for him. However, he picked himself up from the muddy ditch and climbed up for another attempt.

When the fence came to an end he walked along in the ditch by the side of the hedge. Neither was that an easy feat, as the bottom of the ditch was full of water and he had to walk with one foot
halfway up either bank. Occasionally he slipped. He very cleverly cut off a long corner by road, climbing through a hole in the hedge and walking across a ploughed field.

On reaching the treat field the first person he saw was Ethel talking to the curate by the gate. As her eyes fell upon him they dilated with horror. Ethel had left at home a small boy, clean and
tidy and arrayed in his best. There met her gaze now a creature whose cap nestled crookedly among spiky dishevelled locks, whose roseate face was streaked with mud, whose collar was awry and
begrimed with muddy fingermarks, whose nether limbs were encased in mud up to the knees, who slashed on all sides as he walked with a muddy stick salvaged from the ditch.

‘What on
earth
have you been doing?’ she said severely.

William’s eyes opened innocently.

‘Me?’ he said, surprised and indignant. ‘Do you mean
me
? Nothin’. Jus’ comin’ here. Same as anyone else. I’ve jus’ come straight here.
I’ve not done anythin’.’

Ethel turned angrily on her heel and walked away, followed by her enamoured curate.

William walked on whistling to himself and slashing gaily with his stick. Every boy knows that there are few sensations more delightful than the sensation of slashing with a stick. But
occasionally a slash goes further than you mean it to. A stout gentleman, who had come to help with the races, gave a yell and seized William by the shoulders.

‘Look here, my little man,’ he said, trying without success to sound more pleasant than he felt. ‘Look here, my little chap, don’t go about hitting people’s ankles
like that. Let me have your stick, my little man. It’s dangerous, you know, in these crowds.’

William, seeing that resistance would be useless, surrendered his stick and walked on, his hands in his pockets, whistling.

Miss Lomas, who had risen from the bed of her nervous breakdown for the first time in order to ‘watch the dear little children enjoying themselves,’ heard the sound of
William’s whistling and hastily retired again. Mere words cannot do justice to William’s whistle. It suggested the violent squeaking of a slate pencil drawn forcibly across a slate.

He made his way across the field, his whistle opening a way for him through the crowds as by magic, and at the farther end of we field met the other Outlaws, Henry, Douglas and Ginger, with a
whoop of joy. All had set out from home in a condition of spotless cleanliness, and all had in a remarkably short time managed to return to their normal and dishevelled condition.

An impromptu wrestling match (which was merely an expression of joy at reunion) was completing the transformation when the ringing of a bell summoned them to the middle of the field. There stood
the fat gentleman surrounded by a crowd of boys. He saw William and gave him an apprehensive and sickly smile. He didn’t like the look of William at all. There was a certain absence of
meekness and conformity about William’s expression that he felt boded no good.

Besides, there was the memory of that stick. He was already half regretting that he’d offered to help at all.

‘Fall in for the first race, little boys,’ he said. ‘We’ll have ten in the first heat.’

He put William among the first ten. He thought he’d like to get William over. He was the sort of man who goes to the dentist at once if he feels a twinge of toothache. He arranged the ten
in a nice straight row. William crouched in correct position, hands on the ground, and looked about him.

‘Ready!’ said the stout gentleman. William suddenly noticed his next-door neighbour. It was Hubert Lane – a school-fellow and a mortal enemy. Between William and his friends
and Hubert Lane and
his
friends raged a deadly feud.

‘Steady!’ said the fat gentleman.

Slowly and deliberately Hubert Lane put out his tongue at William.

‘Go!’ said the fat gentleman.

To his surprise the line did not move forward as he had expected. Instead the boy – that boy, the boy he disliked, the boy who looked so untidy and possessed that fiendish whistle and had
hit him on the ankle – hurled himself suddenly upon his next-door neighbour and a general scrimmage ensued. All the other competitors joined the fray. Apparently half were on that boy’s
side and half on the other.

More and more boys joined in from among the bystanders till every boy present was engaged in the combat on one side or the other, and the racecourse was a bedlam of fighting, shouting,
scrimmaging boys. The fat gentleman rang his bell frienziedly, and finally ran almost in tears to find someone in authority to quell the riot. He found the curate first.

The curate was standing with Ethel near the entrance gate. He was flattering himself that he was getting on with her better than he had ever got on before when the fat man came up.

‘Please come at once,’ panted the fat man. ‘The boys are all fighting and I can’t do anything with them!’

The curate looked at him coldly for a minute, then said, ‘I’ll come in a minute,’ and turned back to Ethel.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘What were you saying just now when he interrupted?’

The fat man wrung his hands hopelessly and ran off to try and find someone else.

The fight was brought to an end by the victory of William’s side, and the consequent flight of Hubert Lane’s. William’s side pursued the other through the gate and some way
down the road, then returned black-eyed and dishevelled, arm-in-arm, chanting discordant pæons of victory.

Some of them demanded races, but the fat man had gone home, and after ringing his bell in turn for some time for the sheer love of the noise it made, they scattered among the other parts of the
‘treat’, combining again with a rush to blockade the entrance gate at any attempt on the part of the routed army to return to the festal ground.

The Vicar, who hated boys, had taken refuge in the tea tent and was pretending not to see or hear anything of what was going on.

The Outlaws went to the coconut shies. Fate was favouring William. Not only had he routed his enemy, but by a lucky shot he knocked down a coconut. He swaggered off whistling shrilly, his
coconut under his arm, his admiring Outlaws around him.

They sat down in a secluded part of the ground, then after a few minutes rose and swaggered on again, leaving only the empty shell behind them. Near the toffee-stall they met the curate and
Ethel.

Ethel was smiling sweetly upon the curate, and the curate, delirious with happiness, and seeing her little brother through a roseate haze of sentiment, slipped a shilling into William’s
hand as he passed.

He regretted it instantly, because he did not like William, and he knew that generosity to William was no magic pass into Ethel’s good graces, and a shilling is a shilling; but William
took no chances and had hastily converted the shilling into a large and sticky-looking mixture of treacle toffee plentifully mingled with desiccated coconut at the nearest stall, before the curate
had time to explain that he’d given him a shilling by mistake for a threepenny piece, and would he please give it back?

The Outlaws retired to the hedge with their booty, and again in a few minutes walked on, their faces freely ornamented with coconut and toffee, leaving a large empty paper bag behind them.

The roundabout was next to the coffee-stall, and the Outlaws, still sucking, climbed upon the horses and held on to the poles. The man in charge looked at them rather suspiciously as he started
the machine.

His suspicions were justified. He had no sooner started it than, challenged by William, the Outlaws all began to climb their poles in an attempt to gain the roof. The man in charge, however, was
equal to the occasion. He had boys of his own. He stopped the machine, ordered them down, boxed their ears, and sent them off. Still sucking, they wandered on. The grown-ups who were to help with
the tea were now coming on to the ground.

Suddenly three of these bore down upon the Outlaws with cries of horror. They were Ginger’s mother, Henry’s mother, and Douglas’s mother. Ginger, Henry and Douglas turned to
flee, but too late. Each mother had her offspring firmly by the arm and was gazing down with honor into countenances upon which the battle and the coconut toffee had left their copious traces.

‘Go home at once and wash,’ they said.

William slunk away hastily in the opposite direction, feeling grateful that his mother had been prevented by a previous engagement from helping with the tea.

Once clear of danger (for he had been afraid that Ginger’s mother or Henry’s mother or Douglas’s mother, with the grown-up’s usual gift of officious interference in other
people’s business, might order him home to wash, too!), and seeing that Ethel was still at the other end of the field concerned only with the curate, he thrust his hands into his pockets,
and, uttering again his nerve-racking whistle, strolled on through the grounds. He met no friends or enemies and nothing happened.

William began to feel rather dull. He was conscious, too, of a heavy sensation of sleepiness, caused probably by the combined effects of the battle, the roundabout, the heat, and a surfeit of
coconut toffee.

In the hedge, at the end of the ground, was an inviting hole, and William, who never could resist inviting holes, crawled through into the next field and lay down on the grass by the roadside,
and, surrendering himself to his sensation of drowsiness, went to sleep.

He awoke to hear people talking just near him. He looked around cautiously. Two men sat on the seat by the river.

‘I’ve decided to kill Ethel,’ one of them was saying.

William sat up with a start of horror and indignation. He had often imagined himself wreaking terrible and dramatic vengeances on his sister after some more than usually unwarranted piece of
interference on her part, but he’d never gone so far as to kill her – even in his imagination.

Besides, he decided, it would be one thing for him to think of killing her, but quite another thing for a perfect stranger to think of it. William’s indignation increased. It was little
short of impertinence for a complete stranger to contemplate killing his sister. Cautiously he peered over the long grass that evidently concealed his recumbent form from the speakers.

The man who had just spoken was a good-looking young man, with brown, curly hair. His companion was middle-aged and bald.

‘How are you going to do it?’ said the older man.

‘Push her into the river, I think,’ said the young man.