And Gideon said:
“This is the first time I’ve heard that.”
“Anyway, it’s usury, which is a crime,” said Steggles, “and I’m not going to pay anything; and, being less than twenty-one, you can’t make me; so it amounts to a bad debt, as I told you just now. You’ve done jolly well, one way and another, and you’ve got two bats, and Lord knows how many india-rubber-balls, and cricket-balls, and silver pencils, and knives out of it, including Ashby minor’s watch-chain, which is silver; and if you take my tip you’ll keep quiet, because once all these kids get to know anybody under twenty-one can borrow money without returning it, then it’s all up with your beastly financial schemes.”
Gideon was remarkably surprised to know what a lot Steggles had found out about him, and accused him of looking into his play-chest; and Steggles said he had. Then Gideon went; and about three chaps who had heard the talk told others, and they told still more chaps, until, finally, a good many fellows who owed Gideon money felt there was no hurry about paying it back till it happened to be convenient. In fact, Gideon jolly soon saw he couldn’t do any more good for himself like that, and at the beginning of the next term, when chaps were pretty flush of coin, he wrote up in the gym, “There will be a sale of bats, knives, and other various useful articles, between two and three o’clock, by auction, on Tuesday.--J. Gideon.”
Somebody tore it down, but not before most fellows had read it; and when Gideon and young Miller, who had a bat in the auction, and hoped to get it back if possible, were seen carrying Gideon’s play-chest to the gym after dinner on the appointed day, of course we went. It passed off very well for Gideon, because the things were really good, and often almost new. He seemed to know all about auctions, and hit the chest with a stump, and explained the things, and what good points they had about them. He only took money down, and I will say nobody could have done it fairer. If a knife had a broken blade, for instance, or a bat was slightly sprung, which happened with one, he always pointed it out, so that nobody could say he had been choused over it. Young Miller got back his bat for four shillings and eightpence; and Ashby minor got back his silver chain for thirteen shillings; but it wasn’t much good to him, because, in order to raise the thirteen bob, he had to raffle the chain at once, at shilling shares; and he took one, hoping to be lucky, but he wasn’t, Fowle unfortunately getting it. Gideon told me afterwards that the sale came out fairly, but not quite what he had hoped. He rather sneered at the Dunston chaps in general, and said they were a poverty-stricken crew; which got me into a bate, and I told him that I’d sooner be the son of an officer in the Royal Navy, which I am, than the biggest Jew diamond dealer in the world, his father being in that profession. He said there was no accounting for tastes, but he should have thought that a man who could deliberately go and be a sailor must be weak in the head. Then I punched him, and he instantly went down and apologized. I may mention that I am Bray, the cock of the Lower School.
Before coming to Gideon’s front tooth, just to let you know exactly the chap he was, I’ll mention another thing he did. An old woman was allowed to bring up fruit and tuck generally, and sell it to us after morning school. Steggles, who knows the reason for pretty nearly everything, said this was permitted by Doctor Dunston to take the edge off our appetites; but anyway, the old woman sold strawberries and raspberries in summer-time, and these were arranged with cabbage-leaves in little wicker baskets at about fourpence each. Well, one day Gideon, who never refused to eat fruit if offered it, but very seldom bought any, asked the old woman what she gave for the wicker baskets, and she said threepence a dozen. Then he asked her what she would give for those which had been used once, and she thought, and said they would be worth at least three halfpence a dozen to her. He didn’t say any more, but after that it was a rum thing how all the used baskets, which generally were seen kicking about the playground in shoals, disappeared. Nobody noticed it at the time, but afterwards we remembered clearly that they had disappeared. And just at the end of the term a chap, hurrying in late after the bell rang, came bang on Gideon and the old woman round a corner out of sight of the gates. And the chap saw Gideon give her a pile of baskets and get three halfpence. Of course, it was the last three halfpence he ever got that way, because when it became known the chaps rendered their baskets useless for commerce in many ways. And Barlow called Gideon “Shylock minor” when he heard that he’d made two shillings and fivepence halfpenny; which name stuck to Gideon forever. And Steggles got nine other chaps to subscribe a penny each and buy a pound of flesh from a butcher’s shop, because in Shakespeare Shylock was death on his pound of flesh. The pound was put under Gideon’s pillow by Steggles himself, and when Gideon shoved his watch under his pillow, which he always did at night, he found it; and Steggles says he turned pale, but read what was pinned on the pound of flesh, and then smiled and wrapped the meat up in a letter from home, and said: “What fools you chaps are, wasting money like that! But it looks all right, and will mean a good feed for nothing.”
Next day he got up very early and took his pound of flesh down to the kitchen and got them to cook it; and he ate about half before breakfast and had the rest cold in his desk during Monsieur Michel’s lesson, which was a safe time. And Steggles said we ought to have gone one better and put poison on it.
The great affair of the tooth came on at the beginning of next term; and first I must tell you that next door to Dunston’s lived an old man, so frightfully ancient that his skin was all shrivelled over his bones. He didn’t like boys much, but he would look over his garden-wall sometimes into our playground and scowl if anybody caught his eye. Various things, of course, went over the wall often, and it was one of the excitements of Dunston’s to go into old Grimbal’s garden and get them back. Twice only he caught a chap, and both times, despite his awful age and yellowness of skin, he thrashed the chap very fairly hard with a walking-stick; but he never reported anybody to Dunston, and it was generally thought he regarded it as a sort of sport hunting for chaps in his garden. Of course, in fair, open hunting he hadn’t a chance, and the two he did catch he got by stealth, hiding behind bushes on a rather dark evening.
Well, the facts would never have been known about this tooth but for Gideon’s mean spirit. It happened to be necessary for him to fight me, and though not caring much about it, he couldn’t help himself. Besides, though the champion of the Lower School, I was tons smaller than Gideon, and Gideon didn’t know till after the fight that I was a champion, the true facts about my greatness being hid from him.
Just before the fight Gideon said: “Oh! my tooth, by the way. It may be hurt, and it cost my father five guineas.” So, to our great interest he unscrewed one of his two top front teeth and gave it to his second. You couldn’t have told it was a sham, so remarkably was it done, and it screwed on to the foundation of the original tooth much like a spike screws into the sole of a cricket-boot. Gideon had fallen down-stairs when he was ten and knocked off half the tooth, so he told us; but Murray, who is well up in science, said that all Jews’ front teeth are rather rocky, because in feudal times they were pulled out with pincers as a form of torture, and to make the Jews give up their secret treasures. Murray said that after many generations of pulling out Nature got sick of it, and that in modern times the front teeth of Jews aren’t worth talking about. Murray is full of rum ideas like that, and he hopes to go in for engineering, having already many secret inventions waiting to be patented.