The Revenge
If anybody has done a crime, Dr. Dunston generally speaks to them before the school, so that all may hear what the crime is. And according to the way he speaks to them, we know the sort of fate in store.
If he says he remembers what it was to be a boy himself, there is great hope, for, as Mitchell pointed out, that means the Doctor has himself committed the crime in far-off times when he was young; but if he doesn’t say he remembers what it was to be a boy himself, then the crime is probably a crime he never committed; and these are the sort he punishes worst.
Well, in the case of Tudor, he had never committed Tudor’s crime, and he himself said, when ragging Tudor before punishment, that he had never even heard of such a crime. Therefore the consequences were bad for Tudor, and he was flogged and his greatest treasure taken away from him for ever.
It was, no doubt, a very peculiar crime, and Mitchell told Tudor that it was not so much the crime itself as the destructive consequences, that had put the Doctor into such a bate. But we found out next term that the destructive consequences had been sent home in a bill for Tudor’s father to pay, and they amounted to two pounds, so Tudor caught it at home also.
Well, it was like this: Tudor came back for the spring term with a remarkably interesting tool called a glazier’s diamond. He had saved up and bought it with his own money, and it was valuable, having in it a real diamond, the beauty of which was that it could cut glass. It could also mark glass for ever; and, after a good deal of practice, on out-of-the-way panes of glass in secluded places, Tudor had thoroughly learned the difficult art of writing on glass. We were allowed to walk round the kitchen garden sometimes upon Sunday afternoons, and, occasionally, if a boy was seedy and separated from the rest for a day or two, for fear he had got something catching, such a boy was allowed in the kitchen garden under the eye of Harris, the kitchen gardener.
And Tudor often got queer and threatened to develop catching things, though he never really did; but on the days when he threatened, he generally escaped lessons and was allowed in the kitchen garden. Needless to say, that this place was full of opportunities for practising the art of writing on glass, and, as nothing was easier than to escape from the eye of Harris, he used these opportunities, and wrote his name and mine and many others on cucumber frames, and on the side of a hot-house used for growing grapes, and also on the window of a potting-shed.
I am Pratt, and Tudor and me were in the Lower Fourth. It was a class that Dr. Dunston, unfortunately, took for history, and on those occasions we went to his study for the lesson and stood in a row, which extended from the window to the front of Doctor Dunston’s desk. He sat behind the desk, and took the class from there. But there was a great difference in Tudor and me, because I was at the top of the Lower Fourth and he was at the bottom. In the case of the Doctor’s history class, however, this was a great advantage for Tudor, because the bottom of the class was by the window, and the top was in front of the Doctor.
Well, Tudor actually got the great idea of writing with his glazier’s diamond on the Doctor’s window! I advised him not, but he disdained my advice, and wrote in the left-hand top corner of the bottom sheet of glass. He wrote very small, but with great clearness, and it took him seven history lessons to finish, because it was only at rare moments he could do it. But the Doctor was now and then called out of his study by Mrs. Dunston, or somebody; and once he had to go and see the mother of a new boy who had written home to say he was being starved. It took ten minutes to calm this mother down, and during that interval Tudor finished his work. He had written the amusing words—
“BEYNON IS A LOUSE,”
and we were all rather pleased, except Beynon. But he well deserved the insult, being a fearful outsider and generally hated; and, in any case, he couldn’t hit back, for though he had been known to sneak many a time and oft, yet it wasn’t likely he would sneak about a thing that showed him in his true colours, like the writing on the Doctor’s study window.
Well, it was a triumph in a way, and everybody heard of it, and it was a regular adventure to go into the Doctor’s study and see the insult to Beynon, which, of course, would last forever, unless somebody broke the window; and, in fact, Beynon once told me, in a fit of rage, that he meant to break the window and take the consequences. But he hadn’t the pluck, even when he got an excellent chance to do so; and when, in despair, he tried to bribe other chaps to break the window, he hadn’t enough money, so he failed in every way, and the insult stood.
I must tell you the writing was very small, and could only be seen by careful scrutiny. It was absolutely safe from the Doctor, or, in fact, anybody who didn’t know it was there; and, naturally, Tudor never felt the slightest fear that it would ever be seen by the eyes of an enemy.
When, therefore, it was discovered, and shown to the Doctor, and all was lost, Tudor felt bitterly surprised. It came out that a housemaid, who disliked Beynon, found it when she was cleaning the window, and she showed it to Milly Dunston, and the hateful Milly, who loathed Tudor, because he had once given her a cough lozenge of a deadly kind, and made her suck it before she had found out the truth, promptly told her mother about the inscription, and her mother sneaked to the Doctor.
Discovery might still have been avoided, but, unfortunately, Tudor’s glazier’s diamond was well known, because he had been reported by Brown for scratching Brown’s looking-glass over the mantelpiece in Brown’s study, when he thought Brown was miles away, and Brown came in at the critical moment. So Dunston knew only too well that Tudor had a glazier’s diamond, and, owing to the laws of cause and effect, felt quite sure that Tudor had done the fatal deed.
Therefore Tudor suffered the full penalty, and Dr. Dunston told the school that Tudor’s coarseness was only exceeded by his lawless insolence and contempt for private property. That it should have been done in his own study, during intervals of respite in the history lesson, naturally had its effect on the Doctor, and made it worse for Tudor. The glazier’s diamond had to be given up, and Tudor was flogged; but being very apt to crock and often bursting out coughing without any reason, the Doctor did not flog Tudor to any great extent; and it was not the flogging, but the loss of his glazier’s diamond that made Tudor so mad and resolved him on his revenge.
Well, he had a very revengeful nature, as a matter of fact, and if anybody scored on him, he was never, as you may say, contented with life in general until he had scored back. And he always did so, and sometimes, though he might have to wait for a term or even two, he was like the elephant that a man stuck a pin into, who remembered it and instantly killed the man when he met him again twenty years later.
To be revenged in an ordinary way is, of course, easy; but to be revenged against the Doctor is far from easy, and I reminded Tudor how hard it had been even to revenge himself on Brown, when Brown scored heavily off him; and if it was hard to be revenged on a master like Brown, what would it be to strike a blow at the Doctor?
He said it might or might not come off; but he should be poor company for me, or anybody, until he had had a try, and he developed his scheme of a revenge, and thought of nothing else until the idea was ready to be put into execution.
He said:
“It’s not so much a revenge, really, as simple justice. He took my glazier’s diamond, which was the thing I valued most in the world, naturally; and what I ought to do, if I could, Pratt, would be to take from him the thing he values most in the world.”
I said:
“That’s hidden from you.”
And he said:
“No, it isn’t: the thing that he values most in the world is Mrs. Dunston.”
I said:
“Well, you can’t take her away from him.”
And he said:
“I might. Some people would remove her by death. Of course, I wouldn’t do anything like that. She’s all right, though how she can live with a grey and brutal beast like the Doctor, I don’t know—or anybody. But, of course, I can’t strike him there. I’ve merely decided to take something he can’t do without. He’ll be able to make it good in time, but not all in a minute; and in the meanwhile he’ll look a fool, besides being useless to the world at large.”
It was dangerous, but interesting.
I said:
“What could you take so important as all that, without being spotted?”
And he said:
“Swear not to tell anybody living.”
And I swore.
Then he said:
“His glasses!”
It was a great thought, worthy of Tudor, and, of course, without his glasses the Doctor would be hopelessly done. He cannot read a line without them, and when he takes a Greek class, strange to say, he wears two pairs—his ordinary double-glasses, against the naked eye, and a pair of common spectacles, of very large size, on his nose outside. In this elaborate way he reads Greek.
Well, I praised Tudor, but reminded him it was stealing.
And he said:
“I know: that’s where the justice comes in. He stole my glazier’s diamond. Now I’m going to steal his glasses.”
“Shall you ever give them back?” I asked.
And he said:
“I may, or I may not. The first thing is to get them.”
“He takes them off to stretch his eyes sometimes,” I reminded Tudor.
“Yes, and for tea,” said Tudor. “If he goes in to Mrs. Dunston’s room for a hasty cup of tea, he generally leaves the glasses in the study on his desk till he comes back to work.”
Well, Tudor got them. In a week from the day he decided to take them, he had an opportunity. Every day that week he had contrived to be around when tea-time came on, and once Dr. Dunston found him hanging about the passage, and told him to be gone. But he was crowned with success, and that same night in the playground, by the light of my electric torch, Tudor showed me the solemn sight of the double-eyeglasses of the Doctor actually in his hand!
Well, he was fearfully excited about it, and concealed the glasses for a few hours in his playbox. Then, fearing there might be a hue and cry, and everything stirred to its foundations, he took the glasses out just before supper, and concealed them in a crevice on the top of the playground wall, only known to me and him.
That night he did not sleep for hours, and more did I. I pictured the Doctor’s terrible anger at having to stop reading the news of the War, and Tudor told me next morning that he had put the Doctor out of action for all school purposes, as well as private reading, and we might hope for at least three days without him, as it would take fully that time to manufacture such glasses as he wore.
But a bitter disappointment was in store for Tudor, and when the usual moment came for prayers in the chapel before breakfast, lo and behold, Dr. Dunston sailed in with a pair of glasses perched on his nose in the customary place! We could hardly believe our eyes; then we quickly perceived that Dunston evidently kept a reserve pair of glasses for fear of accidents. And the accident had happened, and he had fallen back upon the reserve pair, no doubt in triumph.
Well, Tudor said it was gall and wormwood to be done like that, and even thought of stealing the second pair of glasses; but then a strange and sudden thing overtook Tudor, and the very next Sunday a man came to preach at the chapel service for a good cause; and the good cause was a Medical Drug Fund for natives in the wilds of Africa. These natives become Christians under steady pressure, and after that always seem to be in need of drugs, especially quinine; and Tudor, who, owing to his lungs and one thing and another, had a good experience of drugs, was deeply interested, and gave sixpence to the Medical Drug Fund, and showed a strong inclination to become a collector for the Medical Drug Missionary. I had often read of sermons altering a person’s ideas, and making him or her inclined to be different from that moment onwards, but I never saw it actually happen in real life before. Yet, in the case of Tudor, that Medical Drug sermon, and the stirring anecdotes of the savage tribes, tamed into well-behaved invalids by the Missionary, had a wonderful effect upon him, and it took the strange form of making him rather down-hearted about Dr. Dunston’s glasses. Nothing had been said when they disappeared, and no fuss was made at all; and I advised him just to take them back quietly, when a chance presented itself, and slip them under some papers on the Doctor’s desk, and leave the rest to time.
I said:
“You’d better do it now, while this feeling about being a collector for the Missionary is on you. It will soon pass off, and then you won’t want to give them back.”
He said:
“To show you how I did feel before hearing the Drug Missionary, Pratt, I may tell you I had an idea of taking the glasses home next holidays, and buying a new glazier’s diamond and writing on the glasses the bitter words, ‘THOU SHALT NOT STEAL,’ and then returning them to his desk next term. But there are two very good reasons why I shall not do that. One is this strong pro-missionary feeling in me, and the other is that, if I did, Dunston would guess to a dead certainty who had done it, knowing only too well what I can do in the matter of writing on glass.”
“He would,” I told Tudor. “So the sooner you put them back unharmed, the better.”
“I shall,” said Tudor, “and I’m going to return them in a very peculiar way. I am going to hide them in a certain place, and then I am going to write an anonymous letter to Dunston, telling him they are in that place.”
Well, I thought nothing of this idea.
I said:
“Why make it so beastly complicated? Besides, anonymous letters are often traced by skilled detectives, and if it was found you wrote it, where are you then?”
And he said:
“I have no fear about that, because the letter will all be carefully printed; and my reason for writing a letter at all is to explain to him that the Unknown, who took his glasses away, is sorry.”
“What on earth does that matter to him?” I said.
“It matters to me,” explained Tudor. “As you know, that Drug Missionary made a great impression upon me, and I have come to be very sick with myself that I did this thing. Of course, I am not nearly sick enough to give the show away and tell Dunston I did it, but I am sick enough to say I am sorry, and I want him to know it—anonymously.”
Well, this was beyond me, and I told Tudor so. He then said:
“Sometimes, Pratt, people don’t pay quite enough income tax; but presently there comes a feeling over them that they have defrauded the innocent and trustful Government, and their hearts are softened—I dare say often by a missionary, like mine was—and then they send five-pound notes by great stealth to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and feel better. And their consciences are quickly cured. But they take jolly good care not to send their names, because they know that, if they did, the Chancellor of the Exchequer would go much further, and, far from rewarding them for their conduct, would very likely want more still, and never trust them again about their incomes, and persecute them to their dying day. And it’s like that with me.”
Then I saw what he meant; and I also saw that there may be a great danger in listening to missionaries, and was exceedingly sorry that Tudor had done so. I still advised him not to write to the Doctor, and felt sure his conscience would be just as comfortable if he didn’t; but when Tudor decides to carry out a project, he carries it out, and he is generally very unpleasant till he has. Accordingly, he dropped the Doctor’s glasses into a deep Indian jar which stood on the mantelpiece in the study, and then, in great secret with me, he wrote his letter. It happened he had just got a new Latin Delectus, and at the end of this book was a sheet of clean paper without a mark upon it. We cut it out with a penknife, and took a school envelope and two halfpenny stamps, and wrote the letter and posted it to the Doctor on the following day.
Well, the letter ran in these words, all printed, so that there was no handwriting in it; and the envelope, needless to say, was also printed in a very dexterous and utterly misleading manner.
“DEAR SIR,
“I regret to have to confess that I stole your eyeglasses in a bad moment. There was a very good reason, but, all the same, I am sorry, and also clearly know now that it was a very wrong thing to do. It was a revenge, but it came to nothing, because you had a pair in reserve. I am glad you had. I prefer to be Unknown.
“Your glasses are in a beautiful and rare Indian jar at the left-hand corner of your mantel-piece, and I hope you will forgive, because my eyes have been opened by the visit of the Drug Missionary to Merivale, and I am sorry.
“I am, dear Sir, your well-wisher,
“THE UNKNOWN.”
Well, this good and mysterious letter Tudor posted, and the very next morning, curiously enough, he entirely ceased to want to collect for the Drug Missionary. In fact, from that moment he fell back quite into his usual way of looking at things, and, by the next evening, actually said he was sorry he had given Dr. Dunston back his glasses. But he was sorrier still three days later, for then a very shattering event indeed happened to Tudor. The Doctor sent for him, and he went without the least fear, to find his anonymous letter lying on the Doctor’s desk.
I heard the whole amazing story afterwards. The Doctor asked him first if he had written the letter, and, being taken utterly unawares and frightfully fluttered at the shock, almost before he knew what he was doing, you may say, Tudor confessed that he had.
Then the Doctor told him how vain it was for any boy to seek to deceive him. He said: “You see how swiftly your sin has found you out, Tudor.”
And Tudor admitted it had. He was now, of course, prepared for the worst, yet, as he told me, his chief feeling at that moment was not so much terror as a frightful longing to know how the Doctor had spotted him. Of course, he couldn’t dare to ask, so he merely admitted that his sin certainly had found him out quicker than he expected; and then, rather craftily, he said he was glad it had.
Well, the Doctor didn’t believe this; but he was not in a particularly severe mood that evening, strange to say, and he told Tudor exactly what had happened. He said:
“It may interest you to know, misguided boy, that mentioning your anonymous letter to Mr. Brown, and informing him that I had found my lost glasses in the spot indicated, he evinced a kindly concern, and even assured me that he would probably have no great difficulty in discovering the culprit. In the brief space of four-and-twenty hours he did so. Perceiving that the paper on which you wrote was obviously from a book of a certain folio, his first care was to ascertain, by comparisons of size, from what work it had come. Perceiving also that the paper was extraordinarily clean, he had no difficulty in concluding it was extracted from a new book. He then discovered that the page came from a Latin Delectus, and, on further inquiry, was able to learn that three copies of the work had recently been issued to members of the Lower Fourth. Pursuing his investigations, when the boys had retired to rest, he speedily marked down the mutilated volume in your desk, Tudor; and while I have already thanked him for his zeal and penetration, I feel little doubt that a time will come when, looking back on this dark page in your history, you will thank him also.”
Well, Tudor didn’t give his views about Brown, but he said the glasses had been very much on his mind, only he had not liked to return them without saying he was bitterly sorry. He told me afterwards that he was very nearly saying to Dr. Dunston that some boys would have returned the glasses without even an anonymous letter of regret; but fortunately he did not.
The Doctor then took him through the letter, and invited him to throw light upon it. He was chiefly interested in the part about revenge, and he forced Tudor to explain that the revenge was because Dr. Dunston had taken away his glazier’s diamond. Dr. Dunston then said that incident was long ago closed, and that, in fact, after the pane of glass in his study had been taken out and a new one put in, he had dismissed the matter from his mind. He seemed much surprised that Tudor had not dismissed the matter from his mind also, and he told him that the revengeful spirit always came to grief in the long run. He then wound up by saying:
“You sign yourself ‘The Unknown,’ wretched boy, but let this be a lesson to you that henceforth you are neither unknown to your head master or your God. For the rest, since you have the grace, in this penitential though patronizing communication, to express sincere regret at your conduct, and also to record the fact that you are my ‘Well-wisher,’ though that is not at all the sort of expression suitable from a Fourth Form scholar to his head master—since, I say, I find these signs of grace, I shall not inflict the extreme penalty on this occasion. For the moment I have not determined on my next step, and will thank you to wait upon me this time to-morrow. Now you may go.”
And Tudor said:
“Thank you very much, sir,” and went.
He was a great deal cast down, and admitted, for once, I was right. But though his feeling for the Doctor was now, on the whole, one of patience and thankfulness, his feeling for Brown was very different, and when the wretched Brown grinned at Tudor, and rotted him in class, and told the whole story of how he had played the beastly sleuth-hound on Tudor, and started calling him “The Unknown,” Tudor took it with dignified silence, and from that instant started to plan the greatest revenge of his life. He told me that it might not be at Merivale he would be revenged, but in the world at large, and if it was not until Brown had grown old and bald-headed, the end was bound to be just the same, and the rest of Brown’s life, however long it might last, would undoubtedly be ruined by Tudor. And he also said that he was jolly glad the missionary feeling had left him, so that not a shadow of remorse might come between him and Brown when “The Day” arrived.
Well, there was only one thing more rather interesting about Tudor’s revenge on the Doctor, and that was Dr. Dunston’s revenge on Tudor. Tudor went to him again at the appointed time, and, after a lot of jaw, the Doctor told Tudor that he must now write out the complete article on “Optics,” in the Encyclopædia Britannica, including all the algebra and everything. There were exactly ten huge pages of this deadly stuff, and Tudor was fairly frantic at first; but curious to relate, after he had done one page, he found it quite interesting in its way. Then it got more and more interesting, as it went on, and Tudor finally decided that there was no doubt, with his strong feeling for the science of optics, that he ought to take it up as a profession.
I asked him if he should take up microscopes or telescopes, and he said telescopes certainly, because that meant astronomy, and in time you might rise to be Astronomer Royal of Greenwich, which was something.
I said:
“It is a great thing to know the stars and comets by their names.”
And he said:
“Yes, Pratt, and another great advantage of astronomy is that you may be out all night whenever you choose, and nobody can say a word against you.”
So the extraordinary event came about that what Dr. Dunston intended as a stiff imposition and sharp punishment on Tudor, really worked in a very different manner, and instead of crushing Tudor and grinding him under the heel of Dr. Dunston, so to speak, only put into Tudor the splendid idea of mastering the heavens, and then, some day, getting the perfect freedom by night of an Astronomer Royal of Greenwich.