During the continuance of the frost he had, however, to divert his imagination into other channels, as the beach was impracticable; and really, I think, the distraction did him no harm. Being confined much to the house, he turned his thoughts to an old invention of his for cleaning chimneys, with which he had competed ages ago for a prize offered by a syndicate of anti-climbing-boy philanthropists. I am sure, if simplicity and economy counted for anything, Uncle Jenico ought easily to have come out first; but it was the usual story of showiness being preferred to plain utility. The contrivance was homeliness itself; just a huge compressible ball of wool, attached through its centre to the middle of a cord of indefinite length; and the only objection to it—which was, after all, an extremely idle one—was that it required two operators, one to stand on the roof, and the other on the hearth below. But, once they were in a position, the task was a pastime rather than a labour. The top-sawyer, so to speak, lowered one end of the cord, weighted, down the flue; his companion seized it, and between them they worked the ball up and down till every particle of soot was dislodged. Could anything be more obvious? And yet the committee rejected it! Well, all I can say is that Harry and I proved its efficacy beyond a doubt; though, of course, Mrs. Puddephatt, while she benefited by it, was sarcastic about an invention which had failed to recommend itself to the particularity of London.
“It may be all right,” she would say; “and so may the himage of a piece of fat pork pulled up and down one’s throat with a string, which, I am told, is hemployed at sea to encourage ’eaving. At the same time, sir, I may venture to remark, that there are remedies known to Londoners to be worse than their diseases.”
Uncle Jenico, in the first instance, secretly inveigled Fancy-Maria into helping him in his experiment. The parlour fire was extinguished, and the worthy girl despatched to the roof through a trap-door, where she performed her share of the task with such inflexible tenacity that when my uncle tugged at his end of the cord, which she had dutifully lowered, he pulled her head into the chimney, and would have ended by drawing her bodily down, I believe, if her gasps and chokings reaching him below had not warned him in time. Then he slackened his hold, and commended her excess of loyalty and instructed her further; but in the end she descended from the roof an absolute negress, and for days afterwards shed soot from her boots and sneezed it from her hair in little clouds that flavoured everything.
Subsequently, Harry and I were taken into his confidence and made his operators, much to our gratification. Climbing-boys, indeed! It was become a luxury to be a sweep, thanks to Uncle Jenico; and the world called him a crank! Every one but himself might profit by his inventions. Certainly Harry and I did. We polished every flue in Mrs. Puddephatt’s house as clean as a whistle, and, until we tired of the sport, whatever other chimneys in the village the housewives would lay open to us. And it was only when we took to angling with the great sooty ball over parapets for unsuspecting faces pausing below, that Mr. Sant, giving ear to furious complaints, stepped in with his authority, and put an end to the game.
So, on us, black and joyous and inseparable, I will let down the act-drop of our little stage, to raise it on a later development of the drama I set out to record.
END OF PART I.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
THE BADGER.
It is with an odd sense of nervousness, and almost of oppression, that I open upon the second act of my story. In the first, the schoolboy, with his “shining morning face” and serene irresponsibility, had it all his own way. Now—an interval of five years having been supposed, as the play-bills say, to elapse—the “shining morning face” shows a little sobered, a little greyer in the dawn of manhood, like a young moon in the dawn of day. We have not eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together do we relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves and our extremely incipient moustaches.
Harry, in short, takes up the tale at sixteen, and I at a few months younger. The interval had served to shape us, I do believe, after a manly enough model. We might have been “oppidans”—to put an extreme case—at Eton, and had our characters stiffened, like cream, by whipping, and have coursed hares, and drunk small-beer at the Christopher, and enjoyed all the other social and educational advantages which, according to the evidence put before the late Commission, [Reported in 1864.] are peculiar to this seminary of the gods, and not found in its Provost such a leader, counsellor and noble confidant as little remote Dunberry was able to furnish us with in the person of Mr. Sant. And this I say in no Pharisaic spirit of self-satisfaction, but simply as a testimony to the qualities of this prince among tutors, whom we loved and respected with the best reason in the world.