Nicky-Nan, Reservist Part 21

Doctor Mant followed, to a little parlour lined with books; wherein the little man turned on him, white with rage.

"I have heard, by a side wind," he foamed, "that a meeting was held, two days ago, up at the Vicarage, when it was decided that you should hold lectures in this school--_my_ school. I wasn't asked to attend.

. . . And of course you will jump to the conclusion that I am over-sensitive, huffed for my own sake. It isn't that! . . . I _am_ huffed--maddened--if you will--for the sake of my calling.

For twenty years, Dr Mant, I have opened this school every morning with prayer, dismissed it with prayer every evening, and between times laboured to preach many things that all in the end come to one thing--the idea of a poor English schoolmaster. All over the country other poor schoolmasters have been spending their lives teaching in just the same way their notion of England--what she is, has been, ought to be. Similarly, no doubt, teachers all over France and Germany have been teaching--under the guise of grammar, arithmetic, what not--_their_ ideas of what France or Germany has been, is, ought to be. These nations are opposed and at length they come to a direct conflict, in this War. Mark you what happens! At once we patient teachers in England are brushed all aside. You call a chance Committee of amateurs, and the man who has taught the boys whom, within a fortnight, you will be clamouring to fight for you, has not even the honour to be consulted. . . . Yes, I think well enough of Great Britain to be pretty confident that she will win, letting us slip; that is, she will win though fighting with a hand tied.

But Germany is no such fool. _She_ won't, in her hour of need, despise the help of her teachers. They teach what is almost diametrically opposed to our teaching: they teach it thoroughly, and on my soul I believe it to be as nearly opposed as wrong can be to right. But they have the honour to be trusted; therefore they will succeed in making this war a long one. . . . Yes, I have a wall-map, sir, of the human body. It does not belong to the school: I bought it on my own account seven years ago, but the then Managers considered it too naked to hang on the walls of a mixed school, and disallowed the expense. You are very welcome to use it, and I am only glad that at length it will serve a purpose."

"Touchy lot, these school-teachers!" mused Dr Mant on his way back to the town. "I never can like 'em, somehow. . . . Maybe I ought to have used a little tact and told him that, as I understood it, Mrs Steele called the meeting; and it was for women-workers only.

That wouldn't quite account for Farmer Best though," he chuckled.

"And I suppose Best and the Vicar, as Managers--yes, and Mrs Pamphlett's another--just put their heads together on the spot and gave leave to use the schoolroom, without consulting the Head Teacher at all. I don't suppose it ever crossed their minds. . . . No: on the whole that poor little man is right. n.o.body in England ever _does_ take any truck in schoolmasters. They're just left out of account. And I dare say--yes: I dare say--that means we don't, as a people, take any real truck in Education. Well, and who's the worse for it?--barring the teachers themselves, poor devils! Germany has taken the other line, put herself in the hands of pedagogues, from the Professors down: and a nice result it's going to be for her, and for the rest of the world in the meantime! On the whole--"

On the whole, the Doctor decided--faithful to his habit of looking questions in the face and so pa.s.sing on--that these things worked out pretty well as they were.

His reflections carried him to the bridge-end, where, in the porch of the Old Doctor's house, he encountered Mrs Polsue.

"Ah! Good morning, ma'am! We are bound for the same door, it appears? That's to say if, as I seem to remember, a man called Nanjivell lives here?"

"He does," Mrs Polsue answered. "And if I may make bold to say so, it's high time!"

"Eh? . . . Are you looking after him? I'd no idea that he was really sick."

"No more haven't I," said Mrs Polsue. "But I'll say 'tis time _somebody_ looked after him, if I say no more. In point of fact,"

she added, "I'm not seeing Nicholas Nanjivell, but a woman called Penhaligon who lives in the other tenement here. Her husband was called up last Sat.u.r.day."

"What, are you ladies at work already?"

"Oh, _I_ don't let the gra.s.s grow under my feet," said Mrs Polsue.

"d.a.m.n the woman, I suppose that's a slap at _me_," muttered Dr Mant to himself. But he tapped on the Penhaligons' door for her very politely.

"Thank you," she said. "That's Nanjivell's door, at the end of the pa.s.sage."

He bowed and went on, came to the door, paused for a glance at the padlock hitched loose on the staple, knocked, and--as his custom was when visiting the poor--walked in briskly, scarce waiting for an answer.

"Hullo!"

Between him and the small window, almost blocking the light--on a platform constructed of three planks and a couple of chairs set face to face--stood Nicky-Nan, with a trowel in one hand and a bricklayer's board in the other, surprised in the act of plastering his parlour ceiling.

"Had an accident here?" asked Dr Mant, eyeing the job critically.

"Old house tumbling about your ears?"

"No . . . yes--that's to say--" stammered Nicky-Nan; then he seemed to swallow down something, and so to make way for a pent-up fury.

"Who sent for 'ee? Who told 'ee to walk in like that without knockin'? . . . _That's_ what I ask--Who sent for 'ee here?

_I_ didn!"

"What in thunder's wrong with ye?" asked the Doctor, very coolly taking a third chair, seating himself astraddle on it, and crossing his arms over the top. "No harm to be taken patching up a bit of plaster, is there?" Again he eyed the ceiling.

"I--I beg your pardon, Doctor," answered Nicky-Nan, recollecting himself. "But I live pretty lonely here, and the children--"

"So _that's_ why you put a padlock on the door? . . . Well, I'm not a child. And though you didn't send for me, somebody else did.

Mr Johns, the Custom House Officer at Troy. He wants to know why you didn't go with the rest of the Reserve last Sunday."

Nicky-Nan blazed up again. "Then you can tell 'en I can't nor I won't--not if he cuts me in little pieces, I won't! Curse this War, an' Johns 'pon the top of it! Can't you _see_--"

"No," put in the Doctor, "that's just what I can't, while you stand up there spitting like a cat on the tiles between me and the light.

What fly has stung ye I can't think; unless you want to get off by pa.s.sing yourself on me for a lunatic; and I can't certify to that without calling in a magistrate. . . . Here, man, don't be a fool, but get down!"

Nicky-Nan laid aside trowel and board on the platform, and lowered himself to the floor, very painfully.

"Sit ye down here!" Doctor Mant jumped up and turned his chair about.

"Wait a moment, though, and let me have a look at you. No! not that way, man--with your back to the light!" He caught Nicky-Nan by the two shoulders, faced him about to the window, and took stock of him.

"H'm . . . you look pretty bad."

Nicky-Nan, in fact, had spent half the previous night in crawling upstairs and downstairs, between parlour and bedroom, or in kneeling by the bedroom cupboard, hiding his wealth. He had thrown himself at last on his bed, to sleep for a couple of hours, but at daybreak had turned out again to start upon the plastering and work at it doggedly, with no more sustenance than a dry biscuit. It had all been one long-drawn physical torture; and the grey plaster smeared on his face showed it ghastly even beyond nature.

"Here, sit down; strip your leg, and let me have a look at it."

The examination took some fifteen minutes, perhaps; the Doctor kneeling and inspecting the growth with the aid of a pocket magnifying-gla.s.s.

"Well," said he, rising and dusting his knees, "it's a daisy, and I'll bet it hurts. But I don't believe it's malignant, for all that.

If you were a rich man, now--but you're not; so we won't discuss it.

What you'll have to do is to lie up, until I get you a ticket for the South Devon and East Cornwall Hospital."

"No hospital for me," said Nicky-Nan, setting his jaw.

"Don't be a fool. I let slip in my haste that I don't reckon the thing malignant; and I don't--as yet. But it easily may be; and anyhow you're going to have trouble with it."

"I've had trouble enough with it already. But, mortal or not, I ben't goin' to stir out o' Polpier nor out o' this house. . . .

Doctor, don't you ask it!" he wound up, as with a cry extorted by pain.

"Why, man, what are you afraid of? An operation for _that_, what is it? A whiff of chloroform--and in a week or so--"

"But--," interrupted Nicky-Nan sharply, and again recollected himself. "To tell 'ee the truth, Doctor--that's to say, if what pa.s.ses between patient an' doctor goes no farther--"

"That's all right. I'm secret as houses."

"To tell 'ee the truth, then, there's a particular reason why I don't want to leave Polpier--not just for the present."

Dr Mant stared at him. "You are going to tell me that reason?"

But Nicky-Nan shook his head. "I'd rather not say," he confessed lamely.

Still Dr Mant stared. "Look here, Nanjivell. You've a beast of a lump on your leg, and I can certify at once that it unfits you for service. You couldn't even crawl up a ladder aboard s.h.i.+p, let alone work a gun. But the people over at Troy have asked the question; and, what is more, it sticks in my head that, two days ago, I got a letter about you--an anonymous letter, suggesting that you were just a malingerer, who nursed an ailment rather than go to the War and take your chance with the others. As a rule I put that kind of letter in the fire, and so I did with this one. As a rule, also, I put it right out of my head. . . . But I've a conscience, in these times; and if I thought you to be nursing a trouble which I pretty well know to be curable, just to avoid your honest share in this War--" Dr Mant paused.

"Cuss the War!" said Nicky-Nan wearily. "It looks to me as if everybody was possessed with it."

Dr Mant still gazed at him curiously, then whipped about with a sudden "Hey! What's _that?_"