Here Comes a Chopper (26 page)

H
ENRY
V
AUGHAN
, Silurist—
Childhood

AT THE OPENING
of the school term Mrs Bradley would have been grateful for the decision of the Reverend Ashton Clinton to make Roger a resident master for a time, but now that Claudia Denbies had been arrested and had been sent to prison by the magistrates, whilst Mrs Bradley and the police continued, along vastly different lines, to build up proof, acceptable to a jury, against the murderer, there seemed less need for caution on Roger’s behalf. At least, that was her reading of the facts.

Mrs Bradley had used the attacks upon Roger as a strong argument to show that the murderer was still at large, for the attacks, particularly the one threatened by the man with the knife, could
not have been sponsored by Claudia. The fact, too, that the chauffeur, Sim, had disappeared without trace after his attempts to injure or murder Roger, gave the police another good reason—or so Mrs Bradley pointed out to the inspector—for ceasing to suspect Claudia although she did not want her set free.

Roger did not see Mrs Bradley again until his half-term holiday, for, as he had stated, although he would have enjoyed a certain amount of freedom at week-ends in the ordinary course of events, as a resident master he had various duties which prevented his leisure from extending beyond the limit of more than a few hours at a time.

Mrs Bradley had rightly detected in Roger’s decision to take up resident duty an ambition to become a housemaster with its consequent increase of salary. She mentioned this theory to Dorothy who had been mildly but unpleasantly shocked at what she concluded (from his letters) to be Roger’s puerile regard for his own skin. Dorothy accepted the alternative theory gratefully, and wrote a congratulatory note to Roger on the subject of his wisdom and foresight.

The egregious young man thereupon proposed—off handedly and through the post—and was promptly turned down. This would have occasioned him more mental agony than it did had it not been that his attention was distracted and his safety imperilled by the extraordinary behaviour of Master Kirby and Master Healy-Lunn, who selected the fifth Sunday after Easter on which to make a
determined attempt to get themselves expelled from the school and Roger arrested for murder.

It chanced that not so very far from the school was a playhouse of amateur actors. They gave four performances during the week, and a special Sunday night show for the members of their society. The play on this particular Sunday night was by one of the members and was entitled
Blood
. It was, in point of fact, a youthfully morbid study of heredity, but to Master Siggenham, of the Upper Fourth, it represented, when he saw the advertisement in the local paper, such a tantalizing mirage of excitement and gore that he felt compelled to refer to it in class, whilst the form was apparently engaged in working out a problem in arithmetic.

His form-master imposed on him a penalty of fifty lines for talking, and, being a youth of exceptional thrift, he had most of his pocket money left from the previous week, and therefore he repaired to Master Healy-Lunn. Kirby’s silent friend’s philanthropic custom was to write up a few hundred lines which he was willing to dispose of to customers for a monetary consideration or on terms of barter. Master Siggenham, knowing this, soon purchased the necessary imposition.

‘What did you do?’ enquired Healy-Lunn, counting the halfpence carefully.

‘Nothing much, Lunn,’ replied Siggenham. ‘I merely said to Hiscock that it was a pity we couldn’t all go to see that
Blood
show at the Cockcrow Theatre instead of all that Shakespeare bilge next week.’

‘Blood
show?’

‘Yes, Lunn.’ And Siggenham explained.

‘I see. All right, cut along. And, mind, if there’s any query about the lines, you’d cut your thumb and had to do them left-handed. It’s practically true, because I did them left-handed myself, and everybody’s wrong-hand writing is the same.’

‘Oh, yes, of course, Lunn.’

Healy-Lunn sought out his friend.

‘I’d like to see this
Blood
show,’ he said.

‘We’ll go,’ said Kirby immediately.

‘We can’t, you ass. We’d get sacked. It’s late at night!’

‘How late?’

‘Well, half-past nine, I think. It won’t be over much before midnight. And, anyway, it’s the devil of a sweat from here. We’d have to go on our bikes if we went at all.’

Roger usually did visiting rounds on Sunday nights. The boys were sent to bed half an hour earlier than usual on Sundays, this to their disgust. The masters, however, were grateful for the respite, and no amount of pleading or cajoling would gain for any boy so little as ten minutes of extra time. On this occasion Healy-Lunn and Kirby tried the experiment of pretending to catch lice in one another’s hair when the visiting master came round, but unfortunately they had miscalculated, for instead of the greenhorn Roger, whom they were expecting, a senior master appeared, and, confiscating the clothes brush (unfortunately long-handled) which they had provided with the laudable idea of adding local colour to the scene of carnage
by smacking it down on the imaginary bugs they were collecting, he put them, one after the other, across their respective cots and used the back of the brush to enforce his view that lights out meant lights out, and that little boys who were not under the bedclothes at the proper time must expect some untoward occurrences, of which this was the first and, he hoped, for their sakes, the last. He made the point quite clear.

He then tossed them lightly into their beds, pulled their hair, tucked them up and went out laughing.

‘We ought to have had a basin of water, and not that beastly brush,’ said Kirby, accepting reverses, as a good general should, merely as the text-book of the future. ‘He could hardly have drowned us, could he?’

The smacking had had a soporific effect, and the boys, when the time to break out drew near, would have given a good deal to be out of the business and to have lapsed into comforting slumber. Like older and supposedly wiser persons, however, having committed themselves to the expedition they felt in honour bound to go through with it.

Roger might have known nothing about it at all had it not been for the entirely fortuitous circumstance that a little boy named Thomason was sick in the night, and had to receive attention from the matron.

Kirby and Healy-Lunn, as members of the Sixth, were permitted a room for two. Thomason slept next door to them in a dormitory. He was nine
years old, and so were the other three children in the room. Roger, having been brought into the affair by a tousle-headed boy in pyjamas who came to the masters’ room at just after half-past nine, went into the two-room to request Kirby or Healy-Lunn to run for the matron who resided in the school sanatorium, distant a stone’s throw from the main buildings.

He found the two-room empty and the boys’ outdoor clothes gone from their pegs behind the door. Quickly he sent two other thirteen-year-olds for the matron, and then set to work to discover what madness had this time possessed his two blithe spirits.

He had to be circumspect if the headmaster were not to know what had happened, and he was still too near his undergraduate days to want boys to be expelled for what he felt quite sure was a silly prank. He owed this particular pair a debt of gratitude, moreover, for having saved him from injury, possibly from death, at Gravesend—from his point of view aptly named. He resolved to go after the truants and get them back to their room and say nothing to anyone about it.

Leaving the capable matron in charge of the sick child, he went out to the shed where the masters kept cycles and motor cycles, and borrowed Parkinson’s machine. The minimum of enquiry had given him a clue. Roger was not a bad psychologist except where girls were concerned.

The boys, Roger concluded, would have ridden to the theatre on bicycles. A key to the cycle shed hung in the boys’ lobby, and was under the guard of a lobby prefect. It was a simple matter, however, for a boy to abstract it when he came to bed, carry it up to his dormitory, and use it after lights-out: simple, that is to say, in theory. The practical difficulty was that as bicycle lamps were forbidden, cycling at night was a breach of the law as well as of the rules of the school.

Roger wondered, as he kicked Parkinson’s machine into motion, whether the boys had managed to acquire bicycle lamps, or whether they were running the risk of cycling without lights. Time alone would show.

It was a dark night, and Parkinson’s head-lamp made the hedges of the school drive look black, strange and solid. It seemed as though the boys would be already at the theatre unless some accident had prevented this or had delayed them, so he felt little need to keep more than a cursory lookout for them on his way. He turned out of the school gate, which the boys had left wide open, and, once upon the road, he opened up the throttle and made speed.

The trip by day would have been both pleasant and pretty, particularly at that time of the early summer, but in the darkness there was nothing much to look at except the brilliance of the headlight on the road. He roared over a bridge and past a roadhouse, took the straight road into the village, slowed for a town, and then accelerated briskly
and was soon touching fifty miles an hour across a common.

He mistook the way after that, having taken a left-hand fork instead of keeping straight on, and he had come to a railway bridge before he realized what he had done. He knew where he was, however, and decided that to keep straight on would be quicker than turning in his tracks.

The road he was following was narrower than the one he had intended to take, but the surface was good, and he did not need to slow down except on a very rough couple of miles across a gorse-covered heath where the road became no more than a track and the surface was very uneven.

He struck a good road after that, and came into another town to find it all very quiet. He stopped to ask a policeman the way to take for the theatre, for he was now some miles out of his way. He was directed, and drove on out of the town towards the village in which the theatre had been made from an ancient tithe-barn.

Roger had no particular plan of action in his head beyond arriving at the theatre and getting the two boys unostentatiously out of it. That this would be no easy task had not occurred to him. The theatre was up a short lane. He saw the lanterns swinging on either side of the entrance, propped up his motor cycle in the only space he could find which was not already occupied by pedal cycles, other motor cycles and cars, and went up to the entrance of the barn.

‘Ticket?’ said a handsome youth in a pink shirt, orange trousers and a black tie.

Roger said brusquely:

‘I’ve got two boys inside. I want to get them home.’

‘Oh, yes? Their seat numbers?’ said a blonde girl, joining the youth and talking through her cigarette.

‘I don’t know them,’ Roger confessed. ‘Do you mind if I go in?’

‘Well, you might go in at the interval,’ said the youth obligingly, ‘but you can’t interrupt just now. We’ve just begun the second act, you know.’

‘How long does the second act take?’

‘Over in three-quarters of an hour—another forty minutes from now. Not long to wait. Have a gasper, won’t you?’

‘But, good Lord!’ said Roger. ‘I can’t wait forty minutes! I’ve got to get back with these kids! They’ve broken out of school!’

‘Sorry,’ said the blonde, ‘but there it is.’

She retired with the pink-shirted youth and they conversed learnedly of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, the Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich, the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill, and the Citizen Theatre, Bath, until Roger, in desperation, pushed his way in through a badly-hung door and stood in the auditorium.

He had a self-congratulatory moment in which he believed he had crossed his last fence, but he found that this was not so. The barn seemed pitch-dark except for the light from the stage, for the
box-office from which he had come, although lighted only by the lanterns, had made his eyes already unaccustomed to darkness.

It was not going to be possible, as he realized almost at once, to locate his two truants without going along all the rows until he found them. He went back to the box-office. Neither the pink shirt nor the blonde hair took the slightest notice of him. They were discussing the Little Theatre, Bournemouth.

He felt he could not hang about for nearly forty minutes, so he went back to Parkinson’s motor cycle, started it up, and went for a thirty-minute ride.

At first he went towards Guildford, but suddenly, before he had covered half a mile, he had another and a crazier scheme. He would go back, he thought, to Whiteledge, and have another look at the house in which so many extraordinary incidents had their root.

He took the road by Merrow Down and Clandon Park through the village of East Glandon and out by way of the two Horsleys as far as Effingham. He turned off, but, realizing very soon that, in the darkness, he was not likely to find the house at all easily, he went past the golf course and as far as White Hill, and then thought it better to return.

He was in good time, but the interval came at last, and he went in, collared his truants (who were very sleepy, rather bored, and looked extremely frightened when they saw him), gave them a good start on the homeward road, and then went after them.

All went well; he let them into school with his own latch-key, saw them to their dormitory, and told them to come and see him in the morning. He interviewed them grimly when they appeared.

‘Oh, but sir!’ said Master Kirby, at sight of the cane. ‘You can’t mean to
beat
us, sir!’

‘Bend over,’ said Roger briefly.

‘But you can’t
do
this to us, sir,’ urged Kirby. ‘Mr Simmonds smacked us only last night, sir. With a whacking great clothes-brush, sir, too.’