William the Fourth Page 10

  William absented himself for the greater part of the morning, returning in time for lunch, and meekly offering himself to be cleaned and dressed afterwards like the proverbial lamb for the slaughter.

  ‘William,’ said Mrs Brown to her husband, ‘is being almost too good to be true. It’s such a comfort.’

  ‘I’m glad you can take comfort in it,’ said Mr Brown. ‘From my knowledge of William, I prefer him when you know what tricks he’s up to.’

  ‘Oh, I think you misjudge him,’ said Mrs Brown, whose trust in William was almost pathetic.

  ‘Ethel and I can’t go to the opening, darling,’ said Mrs Brown at lunch. ‘I’m rather tired. So I suppose you’ll wait and go with us later.’

  William smiled his painfully sweet smile.

  ‘I might as well go early. I might be able to help someone,’ he said shamelessly.

  Half an hour later William set off alone to the Sale of Work. He wore his super-best clothes. His hair was brushed to a chastened, sleek smoothness. He wore kid gloves. His shoes shone like stars.

  He walked briskly down to the Sale of Work. Already a gay throng had assembled there. Joan was there, looking like a piece of thistledown in fluffy white, with her mother. Ginger was there, stiff and immaculate, with his mother.

  William, Ginger, and Henry joined forces and stood talking in low, conspiratorial voices, looking rather uncomfortable in their excessive cleanness. Joan looked at them wistfully but was kept close to the maternal side.

  The real live duke arrived. He was tall and stooping, and looked very bored and aristocratic.

  Everything was ready for the opening. It was to take place on the open space of grass at the back of the tent. The chairs for the committee and the chair for the duke were close to the tent. Then a space was railed off from the crowd – from the ordinary people.

  At the other side of the tent the stalls were deserted. His Grace stood for a few minutes in the tent by one of the stalls talking to the Vicar’s wife. Then he went out to open the Sale of Work. A few minutes after his Grace had departed, William might have been seen to emerge from beneath the stall, his cap gone, his hair deranged, his knees dusty, and join Ginger and Henry in the deserted space behind the tent.

  His Grace stood and uttered the few languid words that declared the Sale of Work open. But the committee who were a few yards behind him sat in open-mouthed astonishment. For a large placard adorned his Grace’s coat behind.

  HAVE YOU TRYD

  MOSSES

  COKERNUT LUMPS?

  The committee could think of no course of action with which to meet this crisis. They could only gasp with horror, open-eyed and open-mouthed.

  The few gracious words were said. The applause rose. His Grace turned round to converse pleasantly with the Vicar’s wife, exposing his back to the view of the crowd. The applause wavered, then redoubled ecstatically

  ‘Some kind of an advertising job,’ said the organist’s wife.

  But the crowd did not mind what it was. They held their sides. They clung to each other in helpless mirth. They followed that tall, slim, elegant figure with its incongruous placard as it went with the Vicar’s wife round the tent to the stalls. The Vicar’s wife talked nervously and hysterically. ‘My dear, I couldn’t,’ she said afterwards. ‘I didn’t know how to put it. I couldn’t think of words – and I kept thinking, suppose he knows and means it to be there. It somehow seemed better bred to ignore it.’

  The committee clustered together in an anxious group.

  ‘It wasn’t there when he came. Someone must have put it on.’

  ‘My dear, someone must tell him.’

  ‘Or creep up and take it off when he isn’t looking.’

  ‘My dear – one couldn’t. Suppose he turned round when one was doing it, and thought one was putting it on!’

  ‘The Vicar must tell him – let’s find the Vicar. I think it would come better from a clergyman, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, and he might – well, he couldn’t say much before a clergyman, could he?’

  ‘And a vicar is so practised in consolation. I think you’re right— But who did it?’

  Flustered, panting, distraught, they hastened off in search of the Vicar.

  Meanwhile, his Grace talked to the Vicar’s wife. He was beginning to think that she was not quite herself. Her manner seemed more than peculiar. He glanced round. The stalls were still deserted.

  ‘They haven’t begun to buy much yet, have they?’ he said. ‘I suppose I must set the example.’

  He wandered over to a stall and bought a pink cushion. Then he looked around again, his cushion under his arm, his placard still adorning the back of his coat. The crowd were engaged only in staring at him; they were fighting to get a glimpse of him; they were following him about like dogs—

  ‘I suppose some of these people must know my name,’ he said. ‘I thought that speech of mine in the House last week would wake people up—’

  ‘Er – oh, yes,’ said the Vicar’s wife. She blinked and swallowed. ‘Er – oh, yes – indeed, yes – indeed, yes – I quite agree – er – quite!’

  Here the Vicar rescued her.

  The Vicar had not quite made up his mind whether to be jocular or condoling.

  ‘A splendid attendance, isn’t it, your Grace? There’s a little thing I want to—’ The Vicar’s wife tactfully glided away. ‘Of course we all understand – you’re not responsible – and, on our honour, we aren’t – quite an accident – the guilty party, however, shall be found. I assure you he shall – er – shall be found.’

  ‘Would you mind,’ said his Grace patiently, ‘telling me of what you are talking?’

  The Vicar drew a deep breath, then took the plunge.

  ‘There’s a small placard on your back,’ he said. ‘Well, not small – that is – allow me—’

  His Grace hastily felt behind, secured the placard, tore it off, put on his tortoise-shell spectacles, and examined it at arm’s length. Then he turned to the Vicar, who was mopping his brow. The committee were trembling in the background. One of them – Miss Spence by name – had already succumbed to a nervous breakdown and had had to go home. Another was having hysterics in the tent.

  ‘How long exactly’ asked his Grace slowly, ‘have I been wearing this?’

  The Vicar smiled mirthlessly, and put up a hand nervously as if to loosen his collar.

  ‘Er – quite a matter of minutes – ahem – of minutes one might say, your Grace, since – ah – ahem – since the opening, one might almost put it—’

  ‘Then,’ said his Grace, ‘why the devil didn’t you tell me before?’

  The Vicar put up his hand and coughed reproachfully

  At this moment William, Ginger and Henry emerged from beneath one of the stalls, in whose butter-muslined shelter they had been preparing themselves, and awaiting the most dramatic moment to appear.

  HIS GRACE EXAMINED THE PLACARD, THEN TURNED TO THE VICAR. ‘HOW LONG EXACTLY,’ HE SAID SLOWLY, ‘HAVE I BEEN WEARING THIS?’

  They all wore ‘sandwiches’ made from sheets of cardboard and joined over their shoulders by string.

  William bore before him –

  MOSSES

  TREEKLE

  TOFFY

  IS THE

  BEST

  – and behind him

  GET

  YOUR BULLS

  EYES

  AT

  MOSSES

  Ginger bore before him –

  YOU WILL

  LIKE

  MOSSES

  MUNKY

  NUTS

  – and behind him

  MOSSES

  TAKES

  AN

  INTEREST

  Henry bore before him –

  GO THO MOSSES

  FOR

  FRUTY

  BITS

  – and behind him

  MOSSES

  MAKES

  HAPOTHS

  AT THAT MOMENT, WILLIAM, GINGER AND HEN
RY EMERGED FROM BENEATH ONE OF THE STALLS.

  Solemnly, with expressionless faces and eyes fixed in front of them, they paraded through the crowd. His Grace, who had taken off his spectacles, put them on again. His Grace was a good judge of faces.

  ‘Secure that first boy,’ he said.

  The Vicar, nothing loth, secured William by the collar and brought him before his Grace. His Grace held out his placard.

  ‘Did you – er – attach this to my coat?’ he asked sternly

  William shook off the Vicar’s hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as sternly as his Grace. ‘You see, we wanted people to go to Mr Moss’s shop – ’cause, you see, Mallards’ is a big company, an’ he’s not, an’ they’ve got – er – capitols behind them and he’s not – see? And we wanted to make people go to Moss’s, and we thought we’d fix up notices wot’d make people go to Moss’s like big shops do – an’ we knew no one’d take any notice of our notices if we jus’ put ’em up anywhere, but we thought if we fixed one on to someone important wot everyone’d be lookin’ at all the time – an’ he’s awful kind an’ he takes an’ int’rest an’ he cares wot you get an’ his cokernut lumps is better’n anyone’s, an’ he makes ha’p’oths without makin’ a fuss – an’ he’s awful worried, an’ we wanted to help him—’

  ‘An’ she’s a murderer,’ piped Ginger.

  Before his Grace could reply Joan wrenched herself free from her mother’s restraining hand and flew up to the group.

  ‘Oh, please don’t do anything to William,’ she pleaded. ‘It was my fault, too – I’m not a real one, but I’m an ally – till death do us part, you know.’

  His Grace looked from one to the other. He had been bored almost to tears by the Vicar’s wife and the committee. With a lightening of the heart he recognised more entertaining company.

  ‘Well,’ he said judicially, ‘come to the refreshment tent and we’ll talk it over, over an ice.’

  The news that his Grace had spent almost the entire afternoon eating ices with William Brown and those other children, discussing pirates and Red Indians, and telling them stories of big-game hunting, made the village gasp.

  The further knowledge that he had asked them to walk down to the station with him, had called at Moss’s, tasted cokernut lumps, pronounced them delicious, bought a pound for each of them, and ordered a monthly supply, left the village almost paralysed. But everyone went to Mr Moss’s to ask for details. Mr Moss was known as the confectioner who supplied the Duke of Ashbridge with cokernut lumps. Mallards’ shop was let to a baker’s the next month, and the red-haired girl said that she wasn’t sorry – of all the dead-and-alive holes to work in this place was the deadest.

  It was Miss Spence who voiced the prevailing sentiment about William. She did not say it out of affection for William. She had no affection for William.

  William chased her cat and her hens, disturbed her rest with his unearthly songs and whistles, broke her windows with his cricket ball, and threw stones over the hedge into her garden pond.

  But one day, as she watched William progress along the ditch – William never walked on the road if he could walk in the ditch – dragging his toes in the mud, his hands in his pockets, his head poking forward, his brows frowning, his freckled face stern and determined, his mouth puckered up to make his devastating whistle, his train of boy followers behind him, she said slowly: ‘There’s something about that boy—’

  CHAPTER 9

  WILLIAM AND THE BLACK CAT

  Bunker, the old black cat, had been an inhabitant of William’s home ever since he could remember. Bunker officially belonged to Ethel, William’s sister, but he bestowed his presence impartially on every family in the neighbourhood. He frequently haunted the next door garden, where lived another black cat, a petted darling named Luke, belonging to Miss Amelia Blake.

  William treated all cats with supreme contempt. Towards his own family’s cat he unbent occasionally so far as to throw twigs at it or experiment upon it with pots of coloured paints, but he prided himself upon despising cats, and considered that their only use in the world was to give exercise and pleasure to his beloved mongrel, Jumble.

  When William lay in bed and Miss Amelia Blake’s tender accents rose nightly to his ears from the next garden, ‘Luky Luky Luky Luky Luk-ee-ee-ee!’ he would frown scornfully.

  ‘Huh! All for an ole cat! Fancy knowin’ ’em.’

  His boast was that he did not know one cat from another.

  Bunker was very old and very mangy. He employed habitually an ear-splitting and horrible yell, long drawn out and increasing in volume as it neared its nightmare climax – a yell which William loved to imitate.

  ‘Yah-ah-ah-ah-ah-Ah-AH!’

  Mr Brown remarked many times that that cat and that boy would drive him to drink between them, but at least that boy slept at night. It was decided one morning, when Bunker had spent a whole night in the garden without once relaxing the efforts of his vocal chords, that Bunker should leave this unsympathetic world for some sphere where, one hoped, his voice could be better appreciated, or, at any rate, submitted to some tuning process.

  ‘Well, he goes, or I go,’ said Mr Brown. ‘One or other of us must be destroyed. The world can’t hold us both. You can take your choice.’

  Thus Bunker’s fate was sealed.

  Ethel, who had hardly looked at Bunker for months without disgust, began, now that his dissolution was imminent, to dwell upon his engaging kittenhood, to see him in her mind’s eye as a black ball with a blue ribbon around his neck, and to experience all the feelings that one ought to experience when one’s beloved pet is torn from one by Death. She would even have fondled him if he hadn’t been so mangy. When his hideous voice upraised itself she would murmur, ‘My darling Bunker.’ And only a week ago she had murmured, ‘Why we keep that cat, I can’t think.’

  One afternoon when Ethel was at the tennis club, Mrs Brown approached William mysteriously.

  ‘William, dear, I think it would be so kind of you to take Bunker to Gorton’s now while Ethel is out. I’ve told Mr Gorton and he’s expecting him, and it would be much nicer for Ethel just to hear that it was all over.’

  Nothing loth to help in Bunker’s destruction, William took the covered basket from the pantry and went into the garden, caught a glimpse of black fur beyond the summer-house, crept up behind it, grabbed it with a triumphant ‘Would you?’ and clapped it into the basket.

  Gorton’s was a wonderland to William – dogs in cages, cats in cages, guinea-pigs in cages, rabbits in cages, white rats in cages, tortoises in cages, goldfish in bowls.

  Once William had been thrilled to see a monkey there. William had stood outside the shop for a whole morning watching it and making encouraging conciliatory noises to it which it answered by an occasional jabber that delighted William’s very soul. William was glad of an errand that gave him an excuse for wandering round the fascinations of the shop. He handed his basket to Mr Gorton, and began his tour of inspection. He spent half an hour in front of the cage of a parrot, who screamed repeatedly, ‘Go – away, you ass, go away!’

  William would never have tired of the joy of listening to this, but, discovering that it was almost tea-time, he reluctantly took up his empty basket and returned.

  When he entered the dining-room, Mrs Brown was speaking to Ethel.

  ‘Ethel, darling, William very kindly took dear Bunker to Mr Gorton’s this afternoon. We wanted you to be spared the pain of knowing till it was over, but now it’s over and Bunker didn’t suffer at all, you know, darling, and—’

  At that moment there arose from the garden the familiar hair-raising, ear-splitting sound. ‘Yah-ah-ah-ah-AH!’

  Ethel burst into tears.

  ‘It’s Bunker’s ghost,’ she said. ‘Oh, it’s his ghost.’

  But it wasn’t Bunker’s ghost, for Bunker’s solid, earthly, mangy form appeared at that very moment upon the window-sill.

  William’s heart stood still. In the sudden silence that
greeted the apparition of the earthly body of Bunker, his mind grasped the important fact that he must have taken the wrong cat, and that the less he said about it the better.

  ‘William,’ said Mrs Brown reproachfully, ‘you might have done a little thing like that for your sister.’

  ‘I thought—’ said William feebly, ‘I mean, I meant—’

  ‘Well, you must do it after tea,’ said Mrs Brown firmly; ‘it isn’t kind of you to cause your sister all this unnecessary suffering just because you’re too lazy to walk down to Gorton’s.’

  His sister, who was finding it difficult to whip up a loving sorrow for Bunker, while Bunker, mangy and alive, stared at her through the window, said nothing and William muttered: ‘All right – after tea – I’ll go after tea.’

  He went after tea. He handed the basket to Mr Gorton with an unblushing: ‘There was two really to be done – here’s the other.’

  He stood oppressed by the thought of his crime, and waited the return of his basket. He had even lost interest in Mr Gorton’s wonderland. When the parrot screamed, ‘Go away, you ass, go away,’ he replied huffily, ‘Go away yourself.’

  As he lay in bed that night, he wondered vaguely whose cat he had consigned to an untimely death.

  He soon knew.

  ‘Luky Luky Luky Luky Luk-ee-ee-ee. Where are you, darling? Luky? – Luky? Luky, Luky, Luky Luky Luky Lukee-ee-ee-ee? What’s happened to you, Luky? Where are you, darling? Luky, Luky, Luky, Luky, Luk-ee-ee-ee-ee.’

  It seemed to William to go on all night.

  William’s excursions in the character of robber chief, outlaw, or Red Indian, took him many miles outside the radius of his own village. Three days after the day of his ill-omened mistake he was passing a wayside cottage (in the character of a famous detective on the track of crime), when he noticed a large black cat sitting upon the doorstep washing its face. There was something familiar about that cat. William stopped. It wasn’t Bunker, but was it—