The Artfulness of Steggles
I
I remember the very evening he came to Merivale. “Nubby” Tomkins had a cold on his chest, so Mathers and I stopped in from the half-hour “kick-about” in the playground before tea, being chums of Nubby’s. Whenever he gets a cold on the chest he thinks he is going to die, and this evening, sitting by the fire in the Fifth’s class-room, he roasted chestnuts for Mathers and me, and took a very gloomy view of his future life.
“As you know,” he said, “I hate being out of doors excepting when I can lie about in hay. And to make me go out walking in all weathers, as they do here, is simply murder. I know what’ll be the end of it. I shall get bacilluses or microbes into some important part of me, and die. It’s like those books the Doctor reads to the kids on Sundays, with choir-boys in them. The little brutes sing like angels, and their voices go echoing to the top of cathedrals, and make people blub about in the pews. Then they get microbes on the chest, and kick. You know the only thing I can do is to sing; and I shall die as sure as mud.”
Nubby was a corker at singing. He had all the solos in the chapel to himself, and people came miles to hear him.
“You won’t die,” said Mathers. “You don’t give your money away to the poor, or help blind people across roads, and all that. Your voice’ll crack, and you’ll live.”
“I wish it would,” said Nubby; “I should feel a lot safer.”
“Mine,” continued Mathers, “cracked when my mustache came.”
We looked at him as he patted it. Mathers was going next term. He had more mustache than, at least, two of the under-masters, and once he let Nubby stroke it, and Nubby said he could feel it distinctly under the hand.
“That’s what’s done it with M.,” said Nubby, looking at Mathers and opening another gloomy subject.