Mike - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (the reading strategies book TXT) 📗
- Author: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
- Performer: -
Book online «Mike - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (the reading strategies book TXT) 📗». Author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
Even at that crisis, Mike could not help feeling that if a row of this
calibre did not draw Mr. Outwood from his bed, he must be an unusual
kind of housemaster.
He plunged forward again with outstretched arms, and stumbled and fell
over one of the on-the-floor section of the opposing force. They
seized each other earnestly and rolled across the room till Mike,
contriving to secure his adversary’s head, bumped it on the floor with
such abandon that, with a muffled yell, the other let go, and for the
second time he rose. As he did so he was conscious of a curious
thudding sound that made itself heard through the other assorted
noises of the battle.
All this time the fight had gone on in the blackest darkness, but now
a light shone on the proceedings. Interested occupants of other
dormitories, roused from their slumbers, had come to observe the
sport. They were crowding in the doorway with a candle.
By the light of this Mike got a swift view of the theatre of war. The
enemy appeared to number five. The warrior whose head Mike had bumped
on the floor was Robinson, who was sitting up feeling his skull in a
gingerly fashion. To Mike’s right, almost touching him, was Stone. In
the direction of the door, Psmith, wielding in his right hand the cord
of a dressing-gown, was engaging the remaining three with a patient
smile. They were clad in pyjamas, and appeared to be feeling the
dressing-gown cord acutely.
The sudden light dazed both sides momentarily. The defence was the
first to recover, Mike, with a swing, upsetting Stone, and Psmith,
having seized and emptied Jellicoe’s jug over Spiller, getting to work
again with the cord in a manner that roused the utmost enthusiasm of
the spectators.
[Illustration: PSMITH SEIZED AND EMPTIED JELLICOE’S JUG OVER SPILLER]
Agility seemed to be the leading feature of Psmith’s tactics. He was
everywhere—on Mike’s bed, on his own, on Jellicoe’s (drawing a
passionate complaint from that non-combatant, on whose face he
inadvertently trod), on the floor—he ranged the room, sowing
destruction.
The enemy were disheartened; they had started with the idea that this
was to be a surprise attack, and it was disconcerting to find the
garrison armed at all points. Gradually they edged to the door, and a
final rush sent them through.
“Hold the door for a second,” cried Psmith, and vanished. Mike was
alone in the doorway.
It was a situation which exactly suited his frame of mind; he stood
alone in direct opposition to the community into which Fate had
pitchforked him so abruptly. He liked the feeling; for the first time
since his father had given him his views upon school reports that
morning in the Easter holidays, he felt satisfied with life. He hoped,
outnumbered as he was, that the enemy would come on again and not give
the thing up in disgust; he wanted more.
On an occasion like this there is rarely anything approaching
concerted action on the part of the aggressors. When the attack came,
it was not a combined attack; Stone, who was nearest to the door, made
a sudden dash forward, and Mike hit him under the chin.
Stone drew back, and there was another interval for rest and
reflection.
It was interrupted by the reappearance of Psmith, who strolled back
along the passage swinging his dressing-gown cord as if it were some
clouded cane.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Comrade Jackson,” he said politely. “Duty
called me elsewhere. With the kindly aid of a guide who knows the lie
of the land, I have been making a short tour of the dormitories. I
have poured divers jugfuls of water over Comrade Spiller’s bed,
Comrade Robinson’s bed, Comrade Stone’s—Spiller, Spiller, these are
harsh words; where you pick them up I can’t think—not from me. Well,
well, I suppose there must be an end to the pleasantest of functions.
Good-night, good-night.”
The door closed behind Mike and himself. For ten minutes shufflings
and whisperings went on in the corridor, but nobody touched the
handle.
Then there was a sound of retreating footsteps, and silence reigned.
On the following morning there was a notice on the house-board. It
ran:
INDOOR GAMES
Dormitory-raiders are informed that in future neither
Mr. Psmith nor Mr. Jackson will be at home to visitors.
This nuisance must now cease.
R. PSMITH.
M. JACKSON.
ADAIR
On the same morning Mike met Adair for the first time.
He was going across to school with Psmith and Jellicoe, when a group
of three came out of the gate of the house next door.
“That’s Adair,” said Jellicoe, “in the middle.”
His voice had assumed a tone almost of awe.
“Who’s Adair?” asked Mike.
“Captain of cricket, and lots of other things.”
Mike could only see the celebrity’s back. He had broad shoulders and
wiry, light hair, almost white. He walked well, as if he were used to
running. Altogether a fit-looking sort of man. Even Mike’s jaundiced
eye saw that.
As a matter of fact, Adair deserved more than a casual glance. He was
that rare type, the natural leader. Many boys and men, if accident, or
the passage of time, places them in a position where they are expected
to lead, can handle the job without disaster; but that is a very
different thing from being a born leader. Adair was of the sort that
comes to the top by sheer force of character and determination. He
was not naturally clever at work, but he had gone at it with a dogged
resolution which had carried him up the school, and landed him high in
the Sixth. As a cricketer he was almost entirely self-taught. Nature
had given him a good eye, and left the thing at that. Adair’s
doggedness had triumphed over her failure to do her work thoroughly.
At the cost of more trouble than most people give to their life-work
he had made himself into a bowler. He read the authorities, and
watched first-class players, and thought the thing out on his own
account, and he divided the art of bowling into three sections. First,
and most important—pitch. Second on the list—break. Third—pace. He
set himself to acquire pitch. He acquired it. Bowling at his own pace
and without any attempt at break, he could now drop the ball on an
envelope seven times out of ten.
Break was a more uncertain quantity. Sometimes he could get it at the
expense of pitch, sometimes at the expense of pace. Some days he could
get all three, and then he was an uncommonly bad man to face on
anything but a plumb wicket.
Running he had acquired in a similar manner. He had nothing
approaching style, but he had twice won the mile and half-mile at the
Sports off elegant runners, who knew all about stride and the correct
timing of the sprints and all the rest of it.
Briefly, he was a worker. He had heart.
A boy of Adair’s type is always a force in a school. In a big public
school of six or seven hundred, his influence is felt less; but in a
small school like Sedleigh he is like a tidal wave, sweeping all
before him. There were two hundred boys at Sedleigh, and there was not
one of them in all probability who had not, directly or indirectly,
been influenced by Adair. As a small boy his sphere was not large, but
the effects of his work began to be apparent even then. It is human
nature to want to get something which somebody else obviously values
very much; and when it was observed by members of his form that Adair
was going to great trouble and inconvenience to secure a place in the
form eleven or fifteen, they naturally began to think, too, that it
was worth being in those teams. The consequence was that his form
always played hard. This made other forms play hard. And the net
result was that, when Adair succeeded to the captaincy of football
and cricket in the same year, Sedleigh, as Mr. Downing, Adair’s
housemaster and the nearest approach to a cricket-master that
Sedleigh possessed, had a fondness for saying, was a keen school.
As a whole, it both worked and played with energy.
All it wanted now was opportunity.
This Adair was determined to give it. He had that passionate fondness
for his school which every boy is popularly supposed to have, but
which really is implanted in about one in every thousand. The average
public-school boy likes his school. He hopes it will lick
Bedford at footer and Malvern at cricket, but he rather bets it won’t.
He is sorry to leave, and he likes going back at the end of the
holidays, but as for any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he
would think it rather bad form than otherwise. If anybody came up to
him, slapped him on the back, and cried, “Come along, Jenkins, my boy!
Play up for the old school, Jenkins! The dear old school! The old
place you love so!” he would feel seriously ill.
Adair was the exception.
To Adair, Sedleigh was almost a religion. Both his parents were dead;
his guardian, with whom he spent the holidays, was a man with
neuralgia at one end of him and gout at the other; and the only really
pleasant times Adair had had, as far back as he could remember, he
owed to Sedleigh. The place had grown on him, absorbed him. Where
Mike, violently transplanted from Wrykyn, saw only a wretched little
hole not to be mentioned in the same breath with Wrykyn, Adair,
dreaming of the future, saw a colossal establishment, a public school
among public schools, a lump of human radium, shooting out Blues and
Balliol Scholars year after year without ceasing.
It would not be so till long after he was gone and forgotten, but he
did not mind that. His devotion to Sedleigh was purely unselfish. He
did not want fame. All he worked for was that the school should grow
and grow, keener and better at games and more prosperous year by year,
till it should take its rank among the schools, and to be an
Old Sedleighan should be a badge passing its owner everywhere.
“He’s captain of cricket and footer,” said Jellicoe impressively.
“He’s in the shooting eight. He’s won the mile and half two years
running. He would have boxed at Aldershot last term, only he sprained
his wrist. And he plays fives jolly well!”
“Sort of little tin god,” said Mike, taking a violent dislike to Adair
from that moment.
Mike’s actual acquaintance with this all-round man dated from the
dinner-hour that day. Mike was walking to the house with Psmith.
Psmith was a little ruffled on account of a slight passage-of-arms he
had had with his form-master during morning school.
“‘There’s a P before the Smith,’ I said to him. ‘Ah, P. Smith, I see,’
replied the goat. ‘Not Peasmith,’ I replied, exercising wonderful
self-restraint, ‘just Psmith.’ It took me ten minutes to drive the
thing into the man’s head; and when I had driven it in, he sent
me out of the room for looking at him through my eyeglass. Comrade
Jackson, I fear me we have fallen among bad men. I suspect that we are
going to be much persecuted by scoundrels.”
“Both you chaps play cricket, I suppose?”
They turned. It was Adair. Seeing him face to face, Mike was aware of
a pair of very bright blue eyes and a square jaw. In
Comments (0)