Just William (7 page)

The kitchenmaid put her head round the pantry door.

‘’E’s loony,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely listening to ’im talkin’.’

Further conversation was prevented by the ringing of the front doorbell and the arrival of the ‘company’.

Mr Biggs and the housemaid departed to do the honours. The kitchenmaid ran to help with the dishing up, and William was left sitting on the pantry table, idly making patterns in knife-powder
with his finger.

‘Wot was ’e doin’?’ said the cook to the kitchenmaid.

‘Nothin’ – ’cept talkin’,’ said the kitchenmaid. ‘’E’s a cure,
’e
is,’ she added.

‘If you’ve finished the knives,’ called out the cook, ‘there’s some boots and shoes on the floor to be done. Brushes an’ blacking on the shelf.’

William arose with alacrity. He thought boots would be more interesting than knives. He carefully concealed the pile of uncleaned knives behind the knife-box and began on the shoes.

The butler returned.

‘Soup ready?’ he said. ‘The company’s just goin’ into the dining-room – a pal of the master’s. Decent-lookin’ bloke,’ he added
patronisingly.

William, in his pantry, had covered a brush very thickly with blacking, and was putting it in heavy layers on the boots and shoes. A large part of it adhered to his own hands. The butler looked
in at him.

‘Wot’s ’appened to your buttons?’ he said sternly.

‘Come off,’ said William.

‘Bust off,’ corrected the butler. ‘I said so soon as I saw you. I said you’d ’ave eat your buttons bust off in a week. Well, you’ve eat ’em bust off in
ten minutes.’

‘Eatin’ an’ destroyin’ of ’is clothes,’ he said gloomily, returning to the kitchen. ‘It’s all boys ever do – eatin’ an
destroyin’ of their clothes.’

He went out with the soup and William was left with the boots. He was getting tired of boots. He’d covered them all thickly with blacking, and he didn’t know what to do next. Then
suddenly he remembered his balloon in his pocket upstairs. It might serve to vary the monotony of life. He slipped quietly upstairs for it, and then returned to his boots.

Soon Mr Biggs and the housemaid returned with the empty soup plates. Then through the kitchen resounded a high-pitched squeal, dying away slowly and shrilly.

The housemaid screamed.

‘Lawks!’ said the cook. ‘Someone’s a-torchurin’ of the poor cat to death. It’ll be that blessed boy.’

The butler advanced manfully and opened the pantry door. William stood holding in one hand an inflated balloon with the cardboard head and legs of a duck.

The butler approached him.

‘If you let off that there thing once more, you little varmint,’ he said, ‘I’ll—’

Threateningly he had advanced his large expanse of countenance very close to William’s. Acting upon a sudden uncontrollable impulse William took up the brush thickly smeared with blacking
and pushed back Mr Biggs’s face with it.

There was a moment’s silence of sheer horror, then Mr Biggs hurled himself furiously upon William . . .

In the dining-room sat the master and mistress of the house and their guest.

‘Did the new Boots arrive?’ said the master to his wife.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Any good?’ he said.

‘He doesn’t seem to have impressed Biggs very favourably,’ she said, ‘but they never do.’

‘The human boy,’ said the guest, ‘is given us as a discipline. I possess one. Though he is my own son, I find it difficult to describe the atmosphere of peace and relief that
pervades the house when he is out of it.’

‘I’d like to meet your son,’ said the host.

‘You probably will, sooner or later,’ said the guest gloomily. ‘Everyone in the neighbourhood meets him sooner or later. He does not hide his light under a bushel. Personally,
I prefer people who haven’t met him. They can’t judge me by him.’

At this moment the butler came in with a note.

‘No answer,’ he said, and departed with his slow dignity.

‘Excuse me,’ said the lady as she opened it, ‘it’s from my sister. “I hope,” she read, “that you aren’t inconvenienced much by the non-arrival of
the Boots I engaged for you. He’s got flu.” But he’s come,’ she said wonderingly.

There came the sound of an angry shout, a distant scream and the clattering of heavy running footsteps . . . growing nearer . . .

‘A revolution, I expect,’ said the guest wearily. ‘The Reds are upon us.’

At that moment the door was burst open and in rushed a boy with a blacking brush in one hand and an inflated balloon in the other. He was much dishevelled, with three buttons off the front of
his uniform, and his face streaked with knife-powder and blacking. Behind him ran the fat butler, his face purple with fury beneath a large smear of blacking. The boy rushed round the table,
slipped on the polished floor, clutched desperately at the neck of the guest, bringing both guest and chair down upon the floor beside him. In a sudden silence of utter paralysed horror, guest and
boy sat on the floor and stared at each other. Then the boy’s nerveless hand relaxed its hold upon the balloon, which had somehow or other survived the vicissitudes of the flight, and a
shrill squeak rang through the silence of the room.

The master and mistress of the house sat looking round in dazed astonishment.

As the guest looked at the boy there appeared on his countenance amazement, then incredulity, and finally frozen horror. As the boy looked at the guest there appeared on his countenance
amazement, then incredulity and finally blank dejection.

‘Good Lord!’ said the guest. ‘It’s
William
!’

‘Oh, crumbs!’ said the Boots. ‘It’s
Father
!’

CHAPTER 4

W
illiam was bored. He sat at his desk in the sunny schoolroom and gazed dispassionately at a row of figures on the blackboard.

‘It isn’t
sense
,’ he murmured scornfully.

Miss Drew was also bored, but, unlike William, she tried to hide the fact.

‘If the interest on a hundred pounds for one year is five pounds,’ she said wearily, then, ‘William Brown, do sit up and don’t look so stupid!’

William changed his position from that of lolling over one side of his desk to that of lolling over the other, and began to justify himself.

‘Well, I can’t unner
stand
any of it. It’s enough to make anyone look stupid when he can’t unner
stand
any of it. I can’t think why people go on
givin’ people bits of money for givin’ ’em lots of money and go on an’ on doin’ it. It dun’t seem sense. Anyone’s a mug for givin’ anyone a hundred
pounds just ’cause he says he’ll go on givin’ him five pounds and go on stickin’ to his hundred pounds. How’s he to
know
he will? Well,’ he warmed to his
subject, ‘what’s to stop him not givin’ any five pounds once he’s got hold of the hundred pounds an’ goin’ on stickin’ to the hundred
pounds—’

Miss Drew checked him by a slim, upraised hand.

‘William,’ she said patiently, ‘just listen to me. Now suppose,’ her eyes roved round the room and settled on a small red-haired boy, ‘suppose that Eric wanted a
hundred pounds for something and you lent it to him—’

‘I wun’t lend Eric a hundred pounds,’ he said firmly, ‘’cause I ha’n’t got it. I’ve only got 3½d, an’ I wun’t lend that to
Eric, ’cause I’m not such a mug, ’cause I lent him my mouth organ once an’ he bit a bit off an’—’

Miss Drew interrupted sharply. Teaching on a hot afternoon is rather trying.

‘You’d better stay in after school, William, and I’ll explain.’

William scowled, emitted his monosyllable of scornful disdain ‘Huh!’ and relapsed into gloom.

He brightened, however, on remembering a lizard he had caught on the way to school, and drew it from its hiding place in his pocket. But the lizard had abandoned the unequal struggle for
existence among the stones, top, penknife, bits of putty, and other small objects that inhabited William’s pocket. The housing problem had been too much for it.

William in disgust shrouded the remains in blotting paper, and disposed of it in his neighbour’s inkpot. The neighbour protested and an enlivening scrimmage ensued.

Finally the lizard was dropped down the neck of an inveterate enemy of William’s in the next row, and was extracted only with the help of obliging friends. Threats of vengeance followed,
couched in blood-curdling terms, and written on blotting paper.

Meanwhile Miss Drew explained Simple Practice to a small but earnest coterie of admirers in the front row. And William, in the back row, whiled away the hours for which his father paid the
education authorities a substantial sum.

But his turn was to come.

At the end of afternoon school one by one the class departed, leaving William only nonchalantly chewing an India rubber and glaring at Miss Drew.

‘Now, William.’

Miss Drew was severely patient.

William went up to the platform and stood by her desk.

‘You see, if someone borrows a hundred pounds from someone else—’

She wrote down the figures on a piece of paper, bending low over her desk. The sun poured in through the window, showing the little golden curls in the nape of her neck. She lifted to William
eyes that were stern and frowning, but blue as blue above flushed cheeks.

‘Don’t you see, William?’ she said.

There was a faint perfume about her, and William the devil-may-care pirate and robber-chief, the stern despiser of all things effeminate, felt the first dart of the malicious blind god. He
blushed and simpered.

‘Yes, I see all about it now,’ he assured her. ‘You’ve explained it all plain now. I cudn’t unner
stand
it before. It’s a bit soft – in’t it
– anyway, to go lending hundred pounds about just ’cause someone says they’ll give you five pounds next year. Some folks is mugs. But I do unner
stand
now. I cudn’t
unnerstand it before.’

‘You’d have found it simpler if you hadn’t played with dead lizards all the time,’ she said wearily, closing her books.

William gasped.

He went home her devoted slave. Certain members of the class always deposited dainty bouquets on her desk in the morning. William was determined to outshine the rest. He went into the garden
with a large basket and a pair of scissors the next morning before he set out for school.

It happened that no one was about. He went first to the hothouse. It was a riot of colour. He worked there with a thoroughness and concentration worthy of a nobler cause. He came out staggering
beneath a piled-up basket of hothouse blooms. The hothouse itself was bare and desolate.

Hearing a sound in the back garden he hastily decided to delay no longer, but to set out to school at once. He set out as unostentatiously as possible.

Miss Drew, entering her classroom, was aghast to see instead of the usual small array of buttonholes on her desk, a mass of already withering hothouse flowers completely covering her desk and
chair.

William was a boy who never did things by halves.

‘Good Heavens!’ she cried in consternation.

William blushed with pleasure.

He changed his seat to one in the front row. All that morning he sat, his eyes fixed on her earnestly, dreaming of moments in which he rescued her from robbers and pirates (here he was somewhat
inconsistent with his own favourite role of robber-chief and pirate), and bore her fainting in his strong arms to safety. Then she clung to him in love and gratitude, and they were married at once
by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

William would have no half measures. They were to be married by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, or else the Pope. He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t rather have the Pope. He
would wear his black pirate suit with the skull and crossbones. No, that would not do—

‘What have I just been saying, William?’ said Miss Drew.

William coughed and gazed at her soulfully.

‘’Bout lendin’ money?’ he said, hopefully.