Mike - Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (the reading strategies book TXT) 📗
- Author: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
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and have a cold bath, a voice spoke from the darkness at his side.
“Are you asleep, Jackson?”
“Who’s that?”
“Me—Jellicoe. I can’t get to sleep.”
“Nor can I. I’m stiff all over.”
“I’ll come over and sit on your bed.”
There was a creaking, and then a weight descended in the neighbourhood
of Mike’s toes.
Jellicoe was apparently not in conversational mood. He uttered no word
for quite three minutes. At the end of which time he gave a sound
midway between a snort and a sigh.
“I say, Jackson!” he said.
“Yes?”
“Have you—oh, nothing.”
Silence again.
“Jackson.”
“Hullo?”
“I say, what would your people say if you got sacked?”
“All sorts of things. Especially my pater. Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. So would mine.”
“Everybody’s would, I expect.”
“Yes.”
The bed creaked, as Jellicoe digested these great thoughts. Then he
spoke again.
“It would be a jolly beastly thing to get sacked.”
Mike was too tired to give his mind to the subject. He was not really
listening. Jellicoe droned on in a depressed sort of way.
“You’d get home in the middle of the afternoon, I suppose, and you’d
drive up to the house, and the servant would open the door, and you’d
go in. They might all be out, and then you’d have to hang about, and
wait; and presently you’d hear them come in, and you’d go out into the
passage, and they’d say ‘Hullo!’”
Jellicoe, in order to give verisimilitude, as it were, to an otherwise
bald and unconvincing narrative, flung so much agitated surprise into
the last word that it woke Mike from a troubled doze into which he had
fallen.
“Hullo?” he said. “What’s up?”
“Then you’d say. ‘Hullo!’ And then they’d say, ‘What are you doing
here? ‘And you’d say–-”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“About what would happen.”
“Happen when?”
“When you got home. After being sacked, you know.”
“Who’s been sacked?” Mike’s mind was still under a cloud.
“Nobody. But if you were, I meant. And then I suppose there’d be an
awful row and general sickness, and all that. And then you’d be sent
into a bank, or to Australia, or something.”
Mike dozed off again.
“My pater would be frightfully sick. My mater would be sick. My sister
would be jolly sick, too. Have you got any sisters, Jackson? I say,
Jackson!”
“Hullo! What’s the matter? Who’s that?”
“Me—Jellicoe.”
“What’s up?”
“I asked you if you’d got any sisters.”
“Any what?”
“Sisters.”
“Whose sisters?”
“Yours. I asked if you’d got any.”
“Any what?”
“Sisters.”
“What about them?”
The conversation was becoming too intricate for Jellicoe. He changed
the subject.
“I say, Jackson!”
“Well?”
“I say, you don’t know any one who could lend me a pound, do you?”
“What!” cried Mike, sitting up in bed and staring through the darkness
in the direction whence the numismatist’s voice was proceeding. “Do
what?”
“I say, look out. You’ll wake Smith.”
“Did you say you wanted some one to lend you a quid?”
“Yes,” said Jellicoe eagerly. “Do you know any one?”
Mike’s head throbbed. This thing was too much. The human brain could
not be expected to cope with it. Here was a youth who had borrowed a
pound from one friend the day before, and three pounds from another
friend that very afternoon, already looking about him for further
loans. Was it a hobby, or was he saving up to buy an aeroplane?
“What on earth do you want a pound for?”
“I don’t want to tell anybody. But it’s jolly serious. I shall get
sacked if I don’t get it.”
Mike pondered.
Those who have followed Mike’s career as set forth by the present
historian will have realised by this time that he was a good long way
from being perfect. As the Blue-Eyed Hero he would have been a rank
failure. Except on the cricket field, where he was a natural genius,
he was just ordinary. He resembled ninety per cent. of other members
of English public schools. He had some virtues and a good many
defects. He was as obstinate as a mule, though people whom he liked
could do as they pleased with him. He was good-natured as a general
thing, but on occasion his temper could be of the worst, and had, in
his childhood, been the subject of much adverse comment among his
aunts. He was rigidly truthful, where the issue concerned only
himself. Where it was a case of saving a friend, he was prepared to
act in a manner reminiscent of an American expert witness.
He had, in addition, one good quality without any defect to balance
it. He was always ready to help people. And when he set himself to do
this, he was never put off by discomfort or risk. He went at the thing
with a singleness of purpose that asked no questions.
Bob’s postal order, which had arrived that evening, was reposing in
the breast-pocket of his coat.
It was a wrench, but, if the situation was so serious with Jellicoe,
it had to be done.
*
Two minutes later the night was being made hideous by Jellicoe’s
almost tearful protestations of gratitude, and the postal order had
moved from one side of the dormitory to the other.
JELLICOE GOES ON THE SICK-LIST
Mike woke next morning with a confused memory of having listened to a
great deal of incoherent conversation from Jellicoe, and a painfully
vivid recollection of handing over the bulk of his worldly wealth to
him. The thought depressed him, though it seemed to please Jellicoe,
for the latter carolled in a gay undertone as he dressed, till Psmith,
who had a sensitive ear, asked as a favour that these farm-yard
imitations might cease until he was out of the room.
There were other things to make Mike low-spirited that morning. To
begin with, he was in detention, which in itself is enough to spoil a
day. It was a particularly fine day, which made the matter worse. In
addition to this, he had never felt stiffer in his life. It seemed to
him that the creaking of his joints as he walked must be audible to
every one within a radius of several yards. Finally, there was the
interview with Mr. Downing to come. That would probably be unpleasant.
As Psmith had said, Mr. Downing was the sort of master who would be
likely to make trouble. The great match had not been an ordinary
match. Mr. Downing was a curious man in many ways, but he did not make
a fuss on ordinary occasions when his bowling proved expensive.
Yesterday’s performance, however, stood in a class by itself. It stood
forth without disguise as a deliberate rag. One side does not keep
another in the field the whole day in a one-day match except as a
grisly kind of practical joke. And Mr. Downing and his house realised
this. The house’s way of signifying its comprehension of the fact was
to be cold and distant as far as the seniors were concerned, and
abusive and pugnacious as regards the juniors. Young blood had been
shed overnight, and more flowed during the eleven o’clock interval
that morning to avenge the insult.
Mr. Downing’s methods of retaliation would have to be, of necessity,
more elusive; but Mike did not doubt that in some way or other his
form-master would endeavour to get a bit of his own back.
As events turned out, he was perfectly right. When a master has got
his knife into a boy, especially a master who allows himself to be
influenced by his likes and dislikes, he is inclined to single him out
in times of stress, and savage him as if he were the official
representative of the evildoers. Just as, at sea, the skipper, when he
has trouble with the crew, works it off on the boy.
Mr. Downing was in a sarcastic mood when he met Mike. That is to say,
he began in a sarcastic strain. But this sort of thing is difficult to
keep up. By the time he had reached his peroration, the rapier had
given place to the bludgeon. For sarcasm to be effective, the user of
it must be met half-way. His hearer must appear to be conscious of the
sarcasm and moved by it. Mike, when masters waxed sarcastic towards
him, always assumed an air of stolid stupidity, which was as a suit of
mail against satire.
So Mr. Downing came down from the heights with a run, and began to
express himself with a simple strength which it did his form good to
listen to. Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterwards
that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the
orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers,
who had left at Christmas to go to a crammer’s, had introduced three
lively grass-snakes into the room during a Latin lesson.
“You are surrounded,” concluded Mr. Downing, snapping his pencil in
two in his emotion, “by an impenetrable mass of conceit and vanity and
selfishness. It does not occur to you to admit your capabilities as a
cricketer in an open, straightforward way and place them at the
disposal of the school. No, that would not be dramatic enough for you.
It would be too commonplace altogether. Far too commonplace!” Mr.
Downing laughed bitterly. “No, you must conceal your capabilities. You
must act a lie. You must—who is that shuffling his feet? I will not
have it, I will have silence—you must hang back in order to
make a more effective entrance, like some wretched actor who—I will
not have this shuffling. I have spoken of this before. Macpherson,
are you shuffling your feet?”
“Sir, no, sir.”
“Please, sir.”
“Well, Parsons?”
“I think it’s the noise of the draught under the door, sir.”
Instant departure of Parsons for the outer regions. And, in the
excitement of this side-issue, the speaker lost his inspiration, and
abruptly concluded his remarks by putting Mike on to translate in
Cicero. Which Mike, who happened to have prepared the first half-page,
did with much success.
*
The Old Boys’ match was timed to begin shortly after eleven o’clock.
During the interval most of the school walked across the field to look
at the pitch. One or two of the Old Boys had already changed and were
practising in front of the pavilion.
It was through one of these batsmen that an accident occurred which
had a good deal of influence on Mike’s affairs.
Mike had strolled out by himself. Half-way across the field Jellicoe
joined him. Jellicoe was cheerful, and rather embarrassingly grateful.
He was just in the middle of his harangue when the accident happened.
To their left, as they crossed the field, a long youth, with the faint
beginnings of a moustache and a blazer that lit up the surrounding
landscape like a glowing beacon, was lashing out recklessly at a
friend’s bowling. Already he had gone within an ace of slaying a small
boy. As Mike and Jellicoe proceeded on their way, there was a shout of
“Heads!”
The almost universal habit of batsmen of shouting “Heads!” at whatever
height from the ground the ball may be, is not a
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