“That be ’anged for a tale,” remarked the boy, doggedly.
For answer, Bobby found himself shot swiftly into the bath-room.
“You begin to argue,” said the man, not unkindly, “and you’ll get into trouble: you do what you’re told, and you’ll find yourself as right as rain.”
This was the lesson that Bobbie at first obstinately declined to learn. The cottage was the probationary cottage where all new comers stayed in quarantine for fourteen days, with every day a visit from the doctor; the restraint and the regularity and the cleanliness and the general order of the place were foes against which Bobbie warred fiercely. He would have been more antagonistic at this stage, only that the doorkeeper’s wife was a good, burly soul, with a heart as large as her hand (both were easily moved), and when one day of the fortnight she saw Bobbie comforting the small crying girl who had arrived with the detachment, by standing on his head and clapping his heels to a martial rhythm, in order that the child might be induced to change tears for laughter, and when on charging Bobbie with being a good boy to thus divert the weeping young lady, he furiously denied the imputation, then the good woman determined that there was good in Bobbie, and rewarded him with a special meat pasty that the boy could not, in justice to his appetite, refuse. Furtively, too, he made admirable dolls from young turnips which had been brought in with others from the large gardens at the back, and had been cast aside; one of these—a staring damsel, with two peas for eyes, and a broad bean for a nose—so much endeared itself to the heart of the lachrymose little girl that, one evening, in an excess of emotion, she ate it, afterwards crying her little heart out with remorse.
“And now, young Lancaster,” said the doorkeeper, looking in the bathroom at the end of a fortnight that seemed about two years, “now you’ll on with your clothes and come along o’ me to Collingwood Cottage.”
“Very near time, too,” said Bobbie, rubbing himself with the towel. “I’ve had enough of this blooming bath nonsense.”
“Oh, no, you haven’t, my lad.”
“I feel,” grumbled the boy, “as though I never want to wash again. Where’s my weskit, boss?”
“Where’s your manners?” demanded the doorkeeper sharply.
“I don’t trouble about manners,” said Bobbie; “people ’ave to take me as they find me. If they don’t like it, they can jolly well lump it.”