‘Say, if you think you’re going to get -me- to run–‘
‘When I grab your little hand, and start running, you’ll find you’ll soon be running too. And, years hence, when you win the Marathon at the Olympic Games, you’ll come to me with tears in your eyes, and you’ll say–‘
‘Oh, slush!’
‘I shouldn’t wonder.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Meanwhile, you had better go to bed. It’s past your proper time.’
He stared at me in open-eyed amazement.
‘Bed!’
‘Bed.’
He seemed more amused than annoyed.
‘Say, what time do you think I usually go to bed?’
‘I know what time you go here. Nine o’clock.’
As if to support my words, the door opened, and Mrs Attwell, the matron, entered.
‘I think it’s time he came to bed, Mr Burns.’
‘Just what I was saying, Mrs Attwell.’
‘You’re crazy,’ observed the Little Nugget. ‘Bed nothing!’
Mrs Attwell looked at me despairingly.
‘I never saw such a boy!’
The whole machinery of the school was being held up by this legal infant. Any vacillation now, and Authority would suffer a set-back from which it would be hard put to it to recover. It seemed to me a situation that called for action.
I bent down, scooped the Little Nugget out of his chair like an oyster, and made for the door. Outside he screamed incessantly. He kicked me in the stomach and then on the knee. He continued to scream. He screamed all the way upstairs. He was screaming when we reached his room.
. . . . .
Half an hour later I sat in the study, smoking thoughtfully. Reports from the seat of war told of a sullen and probably only temporary acquiescence with Fate on the part of the enemy. He was in bed, and seemed to have made up his mind to submit to the position. An air of restrained jubilation prevailed among the elder members of the establishment. Mr Abney was friendly and Mrs Attwell openly congratulatory. I was something like the hero of the hour.
But was I jubilant? No, I was inclined to moodiness. Unforeseen difficulties had arisen in my path. Till now, I had regarded this kidnapping as something abstract. Personality had not entered into the matter. If I had had any picture in my mind’s eye, it was of myself stealing away softly into the night with a docile child, his little hand laid trustfully in mine. From what I had seen and heard of Ogden Ford in moments of emotion, it seemed to me that whoever wanted to kidnap him with any approach to stealth would need to use chloroform.
Things were getting very complex.
CHAPTER 3
I have never kept a diary, and I have found it, in consequence, somewhat difficult, in telling this narrative, to arrange the minor incidents of my story in their proper sequence. I am writing by the light of an imperfect memory; and the work is complicated by the fact that the early days of my sojourn at Sanstead House are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which emerge haphazard the figures of boys–boys working, boys eating, boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs and along passages, the whole picture faintly scented with a composite aroma consisting of roast beef, ink, chalk, and that curious classroom smell which is like nothing else on earth.
I cannot arrange the incidents. I can see Mr Abney, furrowed as to the brow and drooping at the jaw, trying to separate Ogden Ford from a half-smoked cigar-stump. I can hear Glossop, feverishly angry, bellowing at an amused class. A dozen other pictures come back to me, but I cannot place them in their order; and perhaps, after all, their sequence is unimportant. This story deals with affairs which were outside the ordinary school life.
With the war between the Little Nugget and Authority, for instance, the narrative has little to do. It is a subject for an epic, but it lies apart from the main channel of the story, and must be avoided. To tell of his gradual taming, of the chaos his advent caused until we became able to cope with him, would be to turn this story into a treatise on education. It is enough to say that the process of moulding his character and exorcising the devil which seemed to possess him was slow.