William in Trouble (28 page)

‘Please sir, we’re trying to go, but I’ve got all caught up in the clothes-line what was out in the grass.’

‘Well, uncatch yourself.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Cut it, then, you young fool.’

‘Please, sir, I haven’t got a penknife.’

Uncle Charles cursed softly, and after a short silence a penknife struck Ginger’s head and fell on to the lawn. William seized it eagerly and examined it. It was the one! It was the
penknife he couldn’t do any harm with.

‘Cut yourself loose with that, you young scoundrels, and get off with you, disturbing people’s rest like this – if it wasn’t Christmas Eve I’d have the whole lot in
jail. I’d—’

But the waits had gone. Sucking the last of the sweets and still singing horribly, they were marching back through the village.

It was the day after Christmas Day. William and Ginger and Douglas foregathered in Ginger’s back garden. It was the first time they had met since Christmas Eve. Christmas
Day had perforce been spent in the bosoms of their families.

‘Well?’ said William eagerly to Ginger.

‘He didn’t say anything about the book,’ said Ginger. ‘He jus’ gave me five shillin’s.’

‘An’ neither did she about the tie,’ said Douglas, ‘she jus’ gave me five shillin’s.’

As a matter of fact Aunt Jane had gone to a neighbour the next morning to pour out the wolf story, but the neighbour (who was boiling with that indignation which only a disturbed night can
produce) got in first with the wait story, and after hearing it Aunt Jane had become very thoughtful and had decided to say nothing about the wolf story.

‘Uncle Charles,’ grinned William, ‘said that some fools of choir boys got tied up in the clothes-line ’n’ he’d thrown ’em the penknife he’d got
for me ’n’ they’d pinched it ’n’ he gave me five shillings.’

Each of the three produced two half-crowns upon a grimy palm.

William sighed happily.

‘Fifteen shillin’s,’ he said. ‘Jus’
think
of it!
Fifteen shillin’s!
Come on. Let’s go down to the village an’ spend it.’

CHAPTER 10

O
N the whole the Outlaws had had a very happy morning. They had been playing at ‘Cannibals,’ a new and absorbing game invented by
William. The game originated with William’s mother’s cook, who had presented William with a tin of sardines. She was ‘turning’ out the store cupboard, and finding that she
had many more sardine tins than she needed, and being in a good temper, she gave a tin to William, knowing by experience that there were few things for which William’s ingenuity could not
find a use.

William and his friends were greatly thrilled by this windfall. They bore it away to the woods and made a fire. Any excuse for making a fire was welcome to the Outlaws. The process involved much
blackening of hands and faces, much puffing and blowing and crawling about on hands and knees, and the collecting of enough firewood for a Crystal Palace demonstration. They killed several fires by
kindness before finally they got one going.

Thrown in with the tin was an opener, and first of all the Outlaws wrestled with this in turn. William wrenched his finger, Ginger cut his thumb, and Henry dislocated his wrist before they got
the tin sufficiently open to extract bits of sardine with the help of twigs. The next question was how to cook the sardines.

William was not a boy to do things in any ordinary way. William liked colour, romance, adventure. Sardines for breakfast or tea eaten with fish knives and forks and bread and butter and good
manners were so dull as to be beneath contempt. Sardines cooked like this in the open over a glorious fire made a matter for the exercise of that imagination which was one of William’s
particular gifts.

The Outlaws could be pioneers, gold-diggers, robber chieftains, anything. Yet William, never satisfied till he had attained perfection, thought that there must be yet another and more exciting
rôle to play. And suddenly it came to him.

‘
Cannibals!
’ he said.

The Outlaws thrilled to the idea.

In a few seconds the scene was laid. Ginger was the unsuspecting traveller making his way through the boundless forest, and Henry and Douglas were cannibals under William’s leadership.
They fell upon the unwary traveller and dragged him with savage whoops and cries to the fire. There they bound him to a tree and danced around him brandishing sticks. Then they cooked him.

The first sardine (selected at random from the heap turned out upon Douglas’s handkerchief) now represented Ginger, and the sardine tin, insecurely fastened to a stick and held over the
blaze, represented the cauldron, and Ginger himself, to increase the verisimilitude, hid behind a bush. Then they ate Ginger, chanting wild songs.

The sardine gone, Ginger emerged from the bush and joined them in the capacity of cannibal, and Henry in his turn was the unwary traveller proceeding through the boundless forest. He was
captured, danced round, and eaten like Ginger. Douglas and William followed as unwary travellers in their turn, and the performance each time grew more realistic and bloodcurdling by the addition
of such things as tomahawks and daggers and swords, and a horrible show of torturing and scalping the victims invented by William.

But when each one of the Outlaws had impersonated the unwary traveller (and William’s dying groans had aroused real admiration and envy in the breasts of his companions), no one felt any
desire to repeat the performance. For one thing the taste of burnt sardine is an acquired taste, and the Outlaws had not been wholly successful in acquiring it. Yet they were loth to relinquish
their rôles, which were gaining in realism each minute. In fact, Douglas, dispensing altogether with the sardine substitute, was at that minute sitting on Henry and making a most effective
pretence of gnawing off his ear, while Henry’s screams of agony would have done credit to a hyena.

It was William who thought of varying the proceedings by introducing the fresh character of a rescue party. Ginger was to be a fair damsel captured by Henry and Douglas, the cannibals, and
William, a passing traveller, was to hear her cries for help and come to her rescue.

Beyond Ginger’s inability to resemble a fair damsel (except for a rather good falsetto ‘Help! Help!’) it was a great success, and the battle between William and Ginger (who
proved quite a creditable Amazon) against Henry and Douglas was an enthralling one.

Henry had entered into the spirit of the thing so much that he retired behind a tree with a little clump of moss which he pretended to eat with much show of enjoyment, persisting (to
William’s indignation) that it was William’s scalp. This new version of the game might have gone on indefinitely had not one of the keepers heard their voices, and, recognising his
inveterate enemies, charged them on sight.

Cannibals, traveller, and distressed damsel fled to the road like four streaks of lightning, leaving only a smoking fire, a sardine tin, a few bits of dismembered sardine and a perspiring keeper
to mark the scene.

On reaching the road the Outlaws discovered that it was lunch time, and wended their way back to the village, carrying on a cannibal v. traveller guerrilla warfare all the time, while Ginger
(who fancied himself very much as the distressed damsel) practised his ‘Help! Help!’, making it higher and higher and shriller and shriller till it almost wandered off the scale
altogether.

At the cross-roads they separated to go to their respective homes. Their rôles were by this time slightly mixed. Douglas was making a great play of eating a large stone, which he said was
William’s head, and William was licking his lips and evincing every sign of satisfaction over a stick which he said was Douglas’s leg.

Ginger was still chirping his ‘Help! Help!’, trying to solve the difficult problem of reconciling highness in the scale (which he associated with the female voice) with that
resonance and loudness that he felt to be an essential part of any cry for help. Henry was leaping and brandishing a stick and practising his war-whoop.

William threw away Douglas’s leg in his garden and entered the house. The spell of his morning’s game was still upon him. He had enjoyed being a cannibal, and he
had enjoyed rescuing distressed damsels from cannibals. He entered the hall. He could hear his sister Ethel’s voice from the morning-room.

‘I don’t love him at all. I’m being
forced
to marry him against my will. I have no one to turn to for help. My heart fails me. He presses his suit every day. He is
coming this afternoon and my parents will
force
me to accede to his proposals. Alas, what shall I do?’

William, open-mouthed with amazement, eyes nearly starting out of his head, went upstairs to his room.
Poor
Ethel! What a rotten shame – his father and mother
forcing
poor
Ethel to marry a man she didn’t love. Of all the
cheek.
Why
should
poor Ethel marry a man she didn’t love?

Between William and his sister there existed, as a rule, a state of armed warfare, but William’s heart was now full of indignation and pity. He had spent the morning rescuing one
distressed damsel in the shape of Ginger, and he was quite prepared to spend the afternoon rescuing another in the shape of Ethel.

‘Gosh!’ he muttered to his reflection as he brushed his hair savagely. ‘Fancy them
forcin
’ her to marry someone she doesn’t love!
Rotten!
’

Downstairs in the morning-room Ethel closed the book and yawned. ‘It
is
piffle, isn’t it?’ she said.

Mrs Brown looked up from her mending.

‘Yes, dear, it is. I don’t think we’ll read any more. But they hadn’t any of my list in, and I just took it at random from the shelves. It’s nearly lunch time,
isn’t it?’

Ethel rose, yawned again, and went out into the hall. She met William coming downstairs. He threw her a mysterious look of sympathy and indignation.

‘’S all right, Ethel,’ he whispered huskily. ‘Don’ you worry.
I’ll
see you through.’

She gaped at him, but he had disappeared into the dining-room.

‘Now we mustn’t forget,’ said Mrs Brown at lunch, when she had made suitable comments on the state of William’s hair and hands and face and nails, ‘that Mr
Polluck’s coming today, and I told your father that one of us would meet him.’

Again Ethel met William’s eye and again he threw her that mysterious glance.

Mrs Brown intercepted and misinterpreted it. ‘Don’t you feel well, dear?’ she said solicitously.

‘Yes thanks,’ muttered William.

‘I thought he was looking queer when I saw him in the hall,’ admitted Ethel. ‘I believe he’s been eating green apples again. You know what happened last time.’

‘Oh, no,’ said William, nobly forgiving her for her unfeeling tone, and for her callous misunderstanding of his signals of sympathy, and added meaningly, ‘It’s not
that.
Oh, no, it’s not
that –
it’s somethin’ very different to
green apples.
’

‘’S ALL RIGHT, ETHEL,’ HE WHISPERED HUSKILY. ‘DON’ YOU WORRY. I’LL SEE YOU THROUGH!’

And again he gazed fixedly at Ethel, who returned his look blankly. The Brown family were quite accustomed to mysterious remarks and tones from William, and attached no meaning to them
whatever.

After lunch he followed his mother into the drawing-room.

‘What time is this Mr Polluck comin’?’ he said to her coldly. He felt that he had declared war now on both his parents in defence of the deeply-wronged Ethel.

‘His train gets in at four o’clock. Oh dear, that reminds me, somebody must meet him. Robert dear,’ as her elder son entered, ‘are you doing anything this
afternoon?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert, very quickly, ‘I’m going to tennis at the Maylands’, and I’ve promised to be there by four.’

‘Well, you could easily go round by the station and meet Mr Polluck and bring him here before you go, couldn’t you, dear? It would be
so
kind of you.’

Then, lest Robert should discover some irrefutable reason why he could not possibly meet Mr Polluck’s train, she went quickly upstairs for her afternoon’s rest.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Robert bitterly, as the door closed behind her. ‘Oh, yes, go and meet him and the train’s sure to be late, and get to the Maylands’ when
everybody’s made up fours for tennis and me have to talk to old Mrs Mayland. Oh, yes, very nice that, very nice indeed.’

He was speaking to himself more than to William but William (whose fertile brain had already formed a plan), with his most innocent expression and in his meekest voice said: ‘What about me
goin’ for you, Robert? I’d
like
to do jus’ that little thing for you, Robert. What about me meetin’ him an’ bringin’ him home? I could easy do
that.’

Robert looked at him suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’ he said brusquely, ‘because you jolly well aren’t going to get a
penny
out of me.’

William looked shocked and hurt at this interpretation of his offer.

‘I don’t want anythin’, Robert,’ he said more meekly than ever, ‘’cept jus’ to
help
you. I’d jus’
like
to do that little thing
to
help
you.’