"Pip" Part 15

"Then I'll do it myself."

"Go and blab! That's right. Great Scott! you must have got religious mania, or something."

"But of course," said Pip rea.s.suringly, "I should only do that as a last resource. I should try the other way first. To begin with--but, by the bye, where do you get your whiskey?"

"What the devil has that got to do with you?" roared Linklater.

"Lots. I'm going to cut off the supply."

"Find out where it comes from first."

"I'm going to. Do you get it from the butler?"

"Find out."

"Right-o! But if I accuse him of supplying smuggled whiskey to the house, and he happens to be innocent, it's possible he may consider it his duty to mention the matter to Chilly. Won't you be rather landed if he does?"

He gazed inquiringly at Linklater, and the latter, thus suddenly cornered, lowered his eyes.

"It isn't the butler," he growled.

"Who is it?"

A pause. Then--"Atkins." (Atkins was the gate porter.)

"Thanks," said Pip. "I'll tell Atkins that if he supplies another bottle I'll report him to the Head. But all that is by the way. What I want to say is this, Link: will you promise me on your honor to drop all this monkey-business and back me up in putting the house in decent order again? This long frost is playing Old Harry with the place; but if you--if we play the man this day, the bottom will drop out of the opposition completely. Will you promise, Link?"

Pip was extremely red in the face. One cannot strain the foundations of an ancient friendship without feeling it.

Linklater looked at him for a moment, and then gazed into the fire.

"Supposing I don't," he said at length.

"But you will?"

"Yes; but supposing I _don't_?"

"Then," said Pip deliberately, "I should have to give you a thundering good licking, Link."

Linklater was no coward, but Pip's slow words dropped into his heart like ice. He felt miserably petty and mean, and he knew that he looked it. He raised the ghost of a laugh.

"Wha--what the blazes do you mean, old man?" he queried uneasily. "Rum way to treat your friends, isn't it?" It was the first time that he had admitted their friendship during that interview.

"Yes, filthy," said Pip. "But there's only one alternative--to report you to Chilly, and I don't want to do that. The less masters have to do with this job the better."

Linklater plucked up courage. Pip seemed so good-tempered and serene.

"Well, old chap," he said easily, "I absolutely refuse to fight you. The idea's absurd. So there!"

He leaned back in his chair with the air of a man who has neatly turned an awkward corner.

Pip looked at him grimly.

"I didn't say fight," he explained. "I said I should have to give you a licking,--an ordinary, low-down caning, that is,--a monitor's lamming,--in here. Of course, if you resist, I shall have to knock you down till you give in; and then I--I shall bend you over in the usual way, that's all."

He did not speak boastfully, but quietly and evenly, with his serious blue eyes fixed upon the boy in front of him. He had figured out the situation, and settled on his course of action. To him Linklater had ceased to be a friend, and was now an abstract problem, to be solved at all costs. He was prepared to knock Linklater senseless, if necessary, until he purged him of the evil spirit that possessed him. And Linklater knew it.

There was a pause, and then Linklater's weaker nature suddenly crumpled up like a wet rag before Pip's overbearing steadiness.

"All right!" he replied petulantly. "Anything you like. You've beaten me! I'll give in, curse you! And for Heaven's sake stop staring at me like that!"

His overstrained nerves could endure no more, and he rushed from the study, leaving his guest master of the situation.

Pip sighed heavily, and diverted his devastating gaze into the fire.

He had lost a friend, but he had saved the house.

IV

Thereafter there was no more trouble with the unruly element. Bereft of pseudo-monitorial support, Messrs. Hicks and Kelly found the ground slipping from under them. They were routed on several occasions, for Pip exercised a good deal of quite unconst.i.tutional authority, and wielded the rod in a manner which they regarded as excessively unfair. The half-hearted monitors took courage; presently the house began to understand the meaning of the word obedience, and its self-appointed leaders came to the reluctant conclusion that the game was not worth the candle. To crown all, the frost broke, and the long-deferred joys of football soon dissipated the last relics of discontent and insubordination for everybody.

For everybody but Linklater, that is. His pride had had a fall, and he was not the boy to recover easily from such a disaster. His interview with Pip had been absolutely private--apart from the momentary intrusion of Pip upon the torture of Master Butler, a scene which had lost none of its dramatic force from that infant martyr's description of it; but the house, though they knew nothing for certain, observed two things--(_a_) that Linklater was no longer the sworn foe of law and order, and (_b_) that he was no longer the friend of Pip; and putting two and two together and adding them up in time-honoured fashion to a total of five, they came to the unanimous and joyous conclusion that Pip had "lammed Link till he promised to dry up."

Pip, if he felt any satisfaction over the result of his labours, displayed none. He invited Linklater to take supper in his study the following Sunday evening, and though little surprised at the answer he received, all his stolid philosophy could not prevent him from feeling distinctly unhappy.

One night he lay awake, thinking. The school clock had just chimed midnight, and the dormitory was given up to a well-modulated _concerto_ for seventeen nasal organs. Pip found himself wondering if Linklater was asleep. Happy thought! he would go and see.

The night was cold, and the moon shone brightly through the uncurtained oriel windows upon Pip's bare feet as they paddled along the boarded floor. Pip's cubicle was next to the dormitory door, while Linklater's was at the extreme end, the two monitors thus dividing the dormitory between them.

Pip had something to say to Linklater.

Presently he arrived at his friend's cubicle. It possessed no door, and the moonlight illuminated the interior quite plainly, in spite of the fact that the lower half of the window was obscured by a human form--the form, in fact, of the owner of the cubicle. He was leaning far out, and was apparently endeavouring to communicate with some one in the garden below.

No; he was hauling something up! Pip could see the regular motion of his elbow as the line came in hand over hand. What had this midnight fisherman hooked? And who had put the fish on the hook for him? And what on earth--?

Suddenly the motion of Linklater's elbow ceased. Still intent on his employment, he stepped back a pace and scientifically "landed" his quarry. Simultaneously Pip realised that this performance was not intended for the public eye. He must either take official notice of it or go back to bed.

He went back to bed.

"I wonder," he said to himself, as he settled down under the clothes again, "if they ever wrap up anything _but_ bottles in those straw things? He can't have taken to drink! Atkins, of course, daren't supply him with any more, so he must be--But surely he doesn't find it as necessary as all that! Perhaps it's only cussedness. Let's hope so! Poor old Link! In the morning I'll--"

Here Pip joined the well-modulated _concerto_.

Pip's sleepy surmises had been more or less correct. It _was_ a bottle, but Linklater had not taken to drink. It was, as Pip opined, chiefly "cussedness." Pip, argued Linklater, had suddenly turned religious, and by a most unwarrantable parade of muscular Christianity had compelled him, Linklater, the idol of the school, to eat humble pie and then efface himself. But not even Pip should stop his fun. He would show his independence!