Mike by P. G. Wodehouse (good fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

confidence.  Probably he would have volunteered to come, too; Mike would have been glad of a companion.

It did not take him long to reach Lower Borlock.  The “White Boar” stood at the far end of the village, by the cricket field.  He rode past the church—­standing out black and mysterious against the light sky—­and the rows of silent cottages, until he came to the inn.

The place was shut, of course, and all the lights were out—­it was some time past eleven.

The advantage an inn has over a private house, from the point of view of the person who wants to get into it when it has been locked up, is that a nocturnal visit is not so unexpected in the case of the former.  Preparations have been made to meet such an emergency.  Where with a private house you would probably have to wander round heaving rocks and end by climbing up a water-spout, when you want to get into an inn you simply ring the night-bell, which, communicating with the boots’ room, has that hard-worked menial up and doing in no time.

After Mike had waited for a few minutes there was a rattling of chains and a shooting of bolts and the door opened.

“Yes, sir?” said the boots, appearing in his shirt-sleeves.  “Why, ’ullo!  Mr. Jackson, sir!”

Mike was well known to all dwellers in Lower Borlock, his scores being the chief topic of conversation when the day’s labours were over.

“I want to see Mr. Barley, Jack.”

“He’s bin in bed this half-hour back, Mr. Jackson.”

“I must see him.  Can you get him down?”

The boots looked doubtful.  “Roust the guv’nor outer bed?” he said.

Mike quite admitted the gravity of the task.  The landlord of the “White Boar” was one of those men who need a beauty sleep.

“I wish you would—­it’s a thing that can’t wait.  I’ve got some money to give to him.”

“Oh, if it’s that—­” said the boots.

Five minutes later mine host appeared in person, looking more than usually portly in a check dressing-gown and red bedroom slippers of the Dreadnought type.

“You can pop off, Jack.”

Exit boots to his slumbers once more.

“Well, Mr. Jackson, what’s it all about?”

“Jellicoe asked me to come and bring you the money.”

“The money?  What money?”

“What he owes you; the five pounds, of course.”

“The five—­” Mr. Barley stared open-mouthed at Mike for a moment; then he broke into a roar of laughter which shook the sporting prints on the wall and drew barks from dogs in some distant part of the house.  He staggered about laughing and coughing till Mike began to expect a fit of some kind.  Then he collapsed into a chair, which creaked under him, and wiped his eyes.

“Oh dear!” he said, “oh dear! the five pounds!”

Mike was not always abreast of the rustic idea of humour, and now he felt particularly fogged.  For the life of him he could not see what there was to amuse any one so much in the fact that a person who owed five pounds was ready to pay it back.  It was an occasion for rejoicing, perhaps, but rather for a solemn, thankful, eyes-raised-to-heaven kind of rejoicing.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Five pounds!”

“You might tell us the joke.”

Mr. Barley opened the letter, read it, and had another attack; when this was finished he handed the letter to Mike, who was waiting patiently by, hoping for light, and requested him to read it.

“Dear, dear!” chuckled Mr. Barley, “five pounds!  They may teach you young gentlemen to talk Latin and Greek and what not at your school, but it ’ud do a lot more good if they’d teach you how many beans make five; it ’ud do a lot more good if they’d teach you to come in when it rained, it ’ud do——­”

Mike was reading the letter.

“DEAR MR. BARLEY,” it ran.—­“I send the £5, which I could not get before.  I hope it is in time, because I don’t want you to write to the headmaster.  I am sorry Jane and John ate your wife’s hat and the chicken and broke the vase.”

There was some more to the same effect; it was signed “T.  G. Jellicoe.”

“What on earth’s it all about?” said Mike, finishing this curious document.

Mr. Barley slapped his leg.  “Why, Mr. Jellicoe keeps two dogs here; I keep ’em for him till the young gentlemen go home for their holidays.  Aberdeen terriers, they are, and as sharp as mustard.  Mischief!  I believe you, but, love us! they don’t do no harm!  Bite up an old shoe sometimes and such sort of things.  The other day, last Wednesday it were, about ’ar parse five, Jane—­she’s the worst of the two, always up to it, she is—­she got hold of my old hat and had it in bits before you could say knife.  John upset a china vase in one of the bedrooms chasing a mouse, and they got on the coffee-room table and ate half a cold chicken what had been left there.  So I says to myself, ’I’ll have a game with Mr. Jellicoe over this,’ and I sits down and writes off saying the little dogs have eaten a valuable hat and a chicken and what not, and the damage’ll be five pounds, and will he kindly remit same by Saturday night at the latest or I write to his headmaster.  Love us!” Mr. Barley slapped his thigh, “he took it all in, every word—­and here’s the five pounds in cash in this envelope here!  I haven’t had such a laugh since we got old Tom Raxley out of bed at twelve of a winter’s night by telling him his house was a-fire.”

It is not always easy to appreciate a joke of the practical order if one has been made even merely part victim of it.  Mike, as he reflected that he had been dragged out of his house in the middle of the night, in contravention of all school rules and discipline, simply in order to satisfy Mr. Barley’s sense of humour, was more inclined to be abusive than mirthful.  Running risks is all very well when they are necessary, or if one chooses to run them for one’s own amusement, but to be placed in a dangerous position, a position imperilling one’s chance of going to the ’Varsity, is another matter altogether.

But it is impossible to abuse the Barley type of man.  Barley’s enjoyment of the whole thing was so honest and child-like.  Probably it had given him the happiest quarter of an hour he had known for years, since, in fact, the affair of old Tom Raxley.  It would have been cruel to damp the man.

So Mike laughed perfunctorily, took back the envelope with the five pounds, accepted a stone ginger beer and a plateful of biscuits, and rode off on his return journey.

Mention has been made above of the difference which exists between getting into an inn after lock-up and into a private house.  Mike was to find this out for himself.

His first act on arriving at Sedleigh was to replace his bicycle in the shed.  This he accomplished with success.  It was pitch-dark in the shed, and as he wheeled his machine in, his foot touched something on the floor.  Without waiting to discover what this might be, he leaned his bicycle against the wall, went out, and locked the door, after which he ran across to Outwood’s.

Fortune had favoured his undertaking by decreeing that a stout drain-pipe should pass up the wall within a few inches of his and Psmith’s study.  On the first day of term, it may be remembered he had wrenched away the wooden bar which bisected the window-frame, thus rendering exit and entrance almost as simple as they had been for Wyatt during Mike’s first term at Wrykyn.

He proceeded to scale this water-pipe.

He had got about half-way up when a voice from somewhere below cried, “Who’s that?”

CHAPTER XLV

PURSUIT

These things are Life’s Little Difficulties.  One can never tell precisely how one will act in a sudden emergency.  The right thing for Mike to have done at this crisis was to have ignored the voice, carried on up the water-pipe, and through the study window, and gone to bed.  It was extremely unlikely that anybody could have recognised him at night against the dark background of the house.  The position then would have been that somebody in Mr. Outwood’s house had been seen breaking in after lights-out; but it would have been very difficult for the authorities to have narrowed the search down any further than that.  There were thirty-four boys in Outwood’s, of whom about fourteen were much the same size and build as Mike.

The suddenness, however, of the call caused Mike to lose his head.  He made the strategic error of sliding rapidly down the pipe, and running.

There were two gates to Mr. Outwood’s front garden.  The carriage drive ran in a semicircle, of which the house was the centre.  It was from the right-hand gate, nearest to Mr. Downing’s house, that the voice had come, and, as Mike came to the ground, he saw a stout figure galloping towards him from that direction.  He bolted like a rabbit for the other gate.  As he did so, his pursuer again gave tongue.

“Oo-oo-oo yer!” was the exact remark.

Whereby Mike recognised him as the school sergeant.

“Oo-oo-oo yer!” was that militant gentleman’s habitual way of beginning a conversation.

With this knowledge, Mike felt easier in his mind.  Sergeant Collard was a man of many fine qualities, (notably a talent for what he was wont to call “spott’n,” a mysterious gift which he exercised on the rifle range), but he could not run.  There had been a time in his hot youth when he had sprinted like an untamed mustang in pursuit of volatile Pathans in Indian hill wars, but Time, increasing his girth, had taken from him the taste for such exercise.  When he moved now it was at a stately walk.  The fact that he ran to-night showed how the excitement of the chase had entered into his blood.

“Oo-oo-oo yer!” he shouted again, as Mike, passing through the gate, turned into the road that led to the school.  Mike’s attentive ear noted that the bright speech was a shade more puffily delivered this time.  He began to feel that this was not such bad fun after all.  He would have liked to be in bed, but, if that was out of the question, this was certainly the next best thing.

He ran on, taking things easily, with the sergeant panting in his wake, till he reached the entrance to the school grounds.  He dashed in and took cover behind a tree.

Presently the sergeant turned the corner, going badly and evidently cured of a good deal of the fever of the chase.  Mike heard him toil on for a few yards and then stop.  A sound of panting was borne to him.

Then the sound of footsteps returning, this time at a walk.  They passed the gate and went on down the road.

The pursuer had given the thing up.

Mike waited for several minutes behind his tree.  His programme now was simple.  He would give Sergeant Collard about half an hour, in case the latter took it into his head to “guard home” by waiting at the gate.  Then he would trot softly back, shoot up the water-pipe once more, and so to bed.  It had just struck a quarter to something—­twelve, he supposed—­on the school clock.  He would wait till a quarter past.

Meanwhile, there was nothing to be gained from lurking behind a tree.  He left his cover, and started to stroll in the direction of the pavilion.  Having arrived there, he sat on the steps, looking out on to the cricket field.

His thoughts were miles away, at Wrykyn, when he was recalled to Sedleigh by the sound of somebody running.  Focussing his gaze, he saw a dim figure moving rapidly across the cricket field straight for him.

His first impression, that he had been seen and followed, disappeared as the runner, instead of making for the pavilion, turned aside, and stopped at the door of the bicycle shed.  Like Mike, he was evidently possessed of a key, for Mike heard it grate in the lock.  At this point he left the pavilion and hailed his fellow rambler by night in a cautious undertone.

The other appeared startled.

“Who the dickens is that?” he asked.  “Is that you, Jackson?”

Mike recognised Adair’s voice.  The last person he would have expected to meet at midnight obviously on the point of going for a bicycle ride.

“What are you doing out here, Jackson?”

“What are you, if it comes to that?”

Adair was lighting his lamp.

“I’m going for the doctor.  One of the chaps in our house is bad.”

“Oh!”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Just been for a stroll.”

“Hadn’t you better be getting back?”

“Plenty of time.”

“I suppose you think you’re doing something tremendously brave and dashing?”

“Hadn’t you better be going to the doctor?”

“If you want to know what I think——­”

“I don’t.  So long.”

Mike turned away, whistling between his teeth.  After a moment’s pause, Adair rode off.  Mike saw his light pass across the field and through the gate.  The school clock struck the quarter.

It seemed to Mike that Sergeant Collard, even if he had started to wait for him at the house, would not keep up the vigil for more than