William watched him, smoothing back his unsmoothable hair.
“Oh, Glor!” he ejaculated softly.
CHAPTER XII
THE CAT AND THE MOUSE
William’s signal failure as a student of science was not due to any lack of interest. It was due to excess of zeal rather than to lack of zeal. William liked to experiment. He liked to experiment with his experiments. He liked to put in one or two extra things and see what happened. He liked to heat things when he was not told to heat them just to see what happened. And strange things happened. On several occasions William was deprived of his eyebrows and front hair. William in this condition felt proud of himself. He felt that everyone who saw him must imagine him to be the hero of some desperate adventure. He cultivated a stern frown with his hairless eyebrows. Old Stinks the Science Master rather liked William. He kept him in for hours in the lab. after school washing up innumerable test tubes and cleaning the benches as atonement for his unauthorised experiments; but he would generally stay there himself, as well, smoking by the fire and drawing from William his views on life in general. On more than one occasion he gravely accepted from William the peace offering of a liquorice stick. In spite of William’s really well-meant efforts, Old Stinks generally had to re-wash all the test tubes and other implements when William had gone. Occasionally he invited William to tea and sat fascinated at the sight of the vast amount of nourishment that William’s frame seemed able to assimilate. In return William lent him his original stories and plays to read (for William rather fancied himself as an author and had burnt much midnight candle over “The Hand of Deth” and “The Tru Story of an Indian Brave”). It is not too much to say that “Stinks” enjoyed these far more than he did many works of better known authors.
But this term, Old Stinks, having foolishly contracted Scarlet Fever on the last day of the holidays, was absent and his place was taken by Mr. Evelyn Courtnay, an elegant young man with spats, very sleek hair and a microscopic moustache. From the moment he first saw him William felt that Mr. Evelyn Courtnay was the sort of man who would dislike him intensely. His fears were not ill-founded. Mr. Courtnay disliked William’s voice and William’s clothes and William’s appearance. He disliked everything about William. It is only fair to add that this dislike was heartily reciprocated by William. William, however, was quite willing to lie low. It was Mr. Courtnay who opened the campaign. He set William a hundred lines for overbalancing on his stool in an attempt to regain a piece of his litmus paper that had been taken with felonious intent by his vis-à-vis. When William expostulated he increased it to three hundred. When William, turning back to his desk and encountering a whiff of hydrochloric acid gas of his neighbour’s manufacture, sneezed, he increased it to four hundred. Then came a strange time for William. William had previously escaped scot free for most of his crimes. Now to his amazement and indignation he found himself in the unfamiliar position of a scapegoat. Any disturbance in William’s part of the room was visited on William and quite occasionally William was not guilty of it. Mr. Evelyn Courtnay, having taken a dislike to William, gratified his dislike to the full. Most people considered that this was very good for William, but it was a view that was not shared by William himself. He wrote lines in most of his spare time and made a thorough and systematic study of Mr. Courtnay. Silently he studied his habits and his mode of life and his character. He did this because he had a vague idea that Fate might some day deliver his enemy into his hand.
William rarely trusted Fate in vain.... He gleaned much of his knowledge of the ways of Mr. Courtnay from Eliza, Mr. Courtnay’s maid who occasionally spent the evening with Ellen, the Brown’s housemaid.
“’Is aunt’s comin’ to dine wif ’im to-morrer night,” said Eliza one evening.
William, who was whittling sticks in the back garden near the open kitchen door, put his penknife in his pocket, scowled and began to listen.
“Yes, it’s goin’ to be a set out an’ no mistake,” went on Eliza. “From what I makes out ’e’s expectin’ of money from ’er an’—oh my! the fuss—such a set out of a dinner an’ all! I can’t abide a young man what fusses to the hextent ’e does. An’ ’e sez the larst time she ’ad dinner wif ’im she seed a mouse an’ screamed the place down an’ went orf in an ’uff so there’s got to be mousetraps down in the dining room all night before she comes as well as all the hother fuss.”