Tom Brown's Body Read Free

Economics on the Science side. Thus Mr Conway's nickname for him was sufficiently descriptive to be considered worthy of Common Room use by some of the younger masters. It had also become known to the boys, a fact of which Mr Kay had been apprised by a Fourth Form clerihew, which he had been handed, cheekily, in place of a French exercise. It ran:
    Louis the Spiv
Had not the right to live.
Like every other skunk, He stunk.
    It had also leaked out (again through Mr Conway, who interested himself unkindly in other people's affairs) that Mr Kay had taught for a time at a grammar school somewhere in the Midlands, and had left hurriedly in the middle of a term. He was, in consequence of Mr Conway's discoveries and verbal allusions, a solitary man, not even very happily married, and as soon as his duties for the day were over, he was in the habit of going home to his cottage for the evening and night, and shutting himself up with his work. He did not return to School until nine-thirty on the following morning.
    The pious argument voiced by Merrys, therefore, that Mr Kay would be in the masters' Common Room when the truants departed for their illegal outing, was based on a fallacy. Mr Kay was not only in his cottage when the boys went by, but he even heard the sound of the bicycle wheels on the gravel drive near his windows.
    The sound did not disturb him in the slightest. Marrys and Skene were far too wary to risk talking to one another while they were so near the School, and Mr Kay, hearing the bicycle's somewhat laboured progress, merely concluded that it marked the entrance or exit of the postman, who must be rather later than usual. He did not draw aside his curtain to glance out. He did not listen for the postman's knock. His wife was away from home, and he had heard from her by the morning delivery. He was not expecting any other letters.
    Merrys and Skene had found it unexpectedly easy to borrow Mr Loveday's bicycle. They did not even have to take Jack the Ripper – Mr Loveday's knife-and-boot boy – into their confidence. It was Merrys who had done the actual borrowing. Skene had insisted on this.
    'You got me to promise to come,' he said. 'It's up to you to do the rest.'
    'Cold feet?' asked Merrys, in accents calculated to embarrass and wound the hearer.
    'Yes, if you want to know, I have got cold feet,' said Skene, firmly. 'But I said I'd come with you, so I'm coming. But that's all I'm going to do.'
    'All right, then,' said Merrys. 'I only wish it was Conway's bike, though,' he added, in a different tone. 'The silly, sickening, unfair beast! I'd jolly well smash it up for him as well as borrow it, if I had it.'
    'No, you wouldn't, chump. There'd be a row, and everything would come out.'
    Merrys did not contest this, but went off to spy out the lie of the land with a view to sneaking the bicycle. Mr Loveday's potting-sheds, garage, and kitchen premises were out of bounds to his boys, but there were ways and means of circumventing this law.
    'I say, Stallard,' said Merrys, presenting himself before his House captain as that august man was dismembering a bloater which he had just cooked for himself over his study fire, 'I'm awfully sorry, but I've dropped a gym shoe out of the dorm window, and I think it's got caught in a bush. May I go round and pick it up?'
    'How the devil could it drop out of the dorm window?' demanded Stallard, irritated, for a bloater must be eaten. hot, in his opinion, or not at all. Fagging was not part of the official system at Spey, and he did not want the trouble of cooking another bloater if this one grew cold and, in his view, inedible.
    'Please, Stallard, I had cleaned it, and shoved – put it on the window-ledge to dry, and, as I went to move away, I suppose I must have caught it with the edge of my hand, sort of, and –'
    'Oh, go to hell and get it!' said Stallard, hitching his chair nearer the table and picking up a fork and a bit of bread. 'And no messing about, do you hear!'
    'Oh, yes,