The Gold Bat by P. G. Wodehouse (e textbook reader txt) 📕

of an hour,” said O’Hara.  “After that—­”

“Sh!” whispered Moriarty.

The door had opened.  They could see a figure dimly outlined in the semi-darkness.  Footsteps passed down into the vault, and there came a sound as if the unknown had cannoned into a chair, followed by a sharp intake of breath, expressive of pain.  A scraping sound, and a flash of light, and part of the vault was lit by a candle.  O’Hara caught a glimpse of the unknown’s face as he rose from lighting the candle, but it was not enough to enable him to recognise him.  The candle was standing on a chair, and the light it gave was too feeble to reach the face of any one not on a level with it.

The unknown began to drag chairs out into the neighbourhood of the light.  O’Hara counted six.

The sixth chair had scarcely been placed in position when the door opened again.  Six other figures appeared in the opening one after the other, and bolted into the vault like rabbits into a burrow.  The last of them closed the door after them.

O’Hara nudged Moriarty, and Moriarty nudged O’Hara; but neither made a sound.  They were not likely to be seen—­the blackness of the vault was too Egyptian for that—­but they were so near to the chairs that the least whisper must have been heard.  Not a word had proceeded from the occupants of the chairs so far.  If O’Hara’s suspicion was correct, and this was really the League holding a meeting, their methods were more secret than those of any other secret society in existence.  Even the Nihilists probably exchanged a few remarks from time to time, when they met together to plot.  But these men of mystery never opened their lips.  It puzzled O’Hara.

The light of the candle was obscured for a moment, and a sound of puffing came from the darkness.

O’Hara nudged Moriarty again.

“Smoking!” said the nudge.

Moriarty nudged O’Hara.

“Smoking it is!” was the meaning of the movement.

A strong smell of tobacco showed that the diagnosis had been a true one.  Each of the figures in turn lit his pipe at the candle, and sat back, still in silence.  It could not have been very pleasant, smoking in almost pitch darkness, but it was breaking rules, which was probably the main consideration that swayed the smokers.  They puffed away steadily, till the two Irishmen were wrapped about in invisible clouds.

Then a strange thing happened.  I know that I am infringing copyright in making that statement, but it so exactly suits the occurrence, that perhaps Mr Rider Haggard will not object.  It was a strange thing that happened.

A rasping voice shattered the silence.

“You boys down there,” said the voice, “come here immediately.  Come here, I say.”

It was the well-known voice of Mr Robert Dexter, O’Hara and Moriarty’s beloved house-master.

The two Irishmen simultaneously clutched one another, each afraid that the other would think—­from force of long habit—­that the house-master was speaking to him.  Both stood where they were.  It was the men of mystery and tobacco that Dexter was after, they thought.

But they were wrong.  What had brought Dexter to the vault was the fact that he had seen two boys, who looked uncommonly like O’Hara and Moriarty, go down the steps of the vault at a quarter to six.  He had been doing his usual after-lock-up prowl on the junior gravel, to intercept stragglers, and he had been a witness—­from a distance of fifty yards, in a very bad light—­of the descent into the vault.  He had remained on the gravel ever since, in the hope of catching them as they came up; but as they had not come up, he had determined to make the first move himself.  He had not seen the six unknowns go down, for, the evening being chilly, he had paced up and down, and they had by a lucky accident chosen a moment when his back was turned.

“Come up immediately,” he repeated.

Here a blast of tobacco-smoke rushed at him from the darkness.  The candle had been extinguished at the first alarm, and he had not realised—­though he had suspected it—­that smoking had been going on.

A hurried whispering was in progress among the unknowns.  Apparently they saw that the game was up, for they picked their way towards the door.

As each came up the steps and passed him, Mr Dexter observed “Ha!” and appeared to make a note of his name.  The last of the six was just leaving him after this process had been completed, when Mr Dexter called him back.

“That is not all,” he said, suspiciously.

“Yes, sir,” said the last of the unknowns.

Neither of the Irishmen recognised the voice.  Its owner was a stranger to them.

“I tell you it is not,” snapped Mr Dexter.  “You are concealing the truth from me.  O’Hara and Moriarty are down there—­two boys in my own house.  I saw them go down there.”

“They had nothing to do with us, sir.  We saw nothing of them.”

“I have no doubt,” said the house-master, “that you imagine that you are doing a very chivalrous thing by trying to hide them, but you will gain nothing by it.  You may go.”

He came to the top of the steps, and it seemed as if he intended to plunge into the darkness in search of the suspects.  But, probably realising the futility of such a course, he changed his mind, and delivered an ultimatum from the top step.

“O’Hara and Moriarty.”

No reply.

“O’Hara and Moriarty, I know perfectly well that you are down there.  Come up immediately.”

Dignified silence from the vault.

“Well, I shall wait here till you do choose to come up.  You would be well advised to do so immediately.  I warn you you will not tire me out.”

He turned, and the door slammed behind him.

“What’ll we do?” whispered Moriarty.  It was at last safe to whisper.

“Wait,” said O’Hara, “I’m thinking.”

O’Hara thought.  For many minutes he thought in vain.  At last there came flooding back into his mind a memory of the days of his faghood.  It was after that that he had been groping all the time.  He remembered now.  Once in those days there had been an unexpected function in the middle of term.  There were needed for that function certain chairs.  He could recall even now his furious disgust when he and a select body of fellow fags had been pounced upon by their form-master, and coerced into forming a line from the junior block to the cloisters, for the purpose of handing chairs.  True, his form-master had stood ginger-beer after the event, with princely liberality, but the labour was of the sort that gallons of ginger-beer will not make pleasant.  But he ceased to regret the episode now.  He had been at the extreme end of the chair-handling chain.  He had stood in a passage in the junior block, just by the door that led to the masters’ garden, and which—­he remembered—­was never locked till late at night.  And while he stood there, a pair of hands—­apparently without a body—­had heaved up chair after chair through a black opening in the floor.  In other words, a trap-door connected with the vault in which he now was.

He imparted these reminiscences of childhood to Moriarty.  They set off to search for the missing door, and, after wanderings and barkings of shins too painful to relate, they found it.  Moriarty lit a match.  The light fell on the trap-door, and their last doubts were at an end.  The thing opened inwards.  The bolt was on their side, not in the passage above them.  To shoot the bolt took them one second, to climb into the passage one minute.  They stood at the side of the opening, and dusted their clothes.

“Bedad!” said Moriarty, suddenly.

“What?”

“Why, how are we to shut it?”

This was a problem that wanted some solving.  Eventually they managed it, O’Hara leaning over and fishing for it, while Moriarty held his legs.

As luck would have it—­and luck had stood by them well all through—­there was a bolt on top of the trap-door, as well as beneath it.

“Supposing that had been shot!” said O’Hara, as they fastened the door in its place.

Moriarty did not care to suppose anything so unpleasant.

Mr Dexter was still prowling about on the junior gravel, when the two Irishmen ran round and across the senior gravel to the gymnasium.  Here they put in a few minutes’ gentle sparring, and then marched boldly up to Mr Day (who happened to have looked in five minutes after their arrival) and got their paper.

“What time did O’Hara and Moriarty arrive at the gymnasium?” asked Mr Dexter of Mr Day next morning.

“O’Hara and Moriarty?  Really, I can’t remember.  I know they left at about a quarter to seven.”

That profound thinker, Mr Tony Weller, was never so correct as in his views respecting the value of an alibi.  There are few better things in an emergency.

XVIII O’HARA EXCELS HIMSELF

It was Renford’s turn next morning to get up and feed the ferrets.  Harvey had done it the day before.

Renford was not a youth who enjoyed early rising, but in the cause of the ferrets he would have endured anything, so at six punctually he slid out of bed, dressed quietly, so as not to disturb the rest of the dormitory, and ran over to the vault.  To his utter amazement he found it locked.  Such a thing had never been done before in the whole course of his experience.  He tugged at the handle, but not an inch or a fraction of an inch would the door yield.  The policy of the Open Door had ceased to find favour in the eyes of the authorities.

A feeling of blank despair seized upon him.  He thought of the dismay of the ferrets when they woke up and realised that there was no chance of breakfast for them.  And then they would gradually waste away, and some day somebody would go down to the vault to fetch chairs, and would come upon two mouldering skeletons, and wonder what they had once been.  He almost wept at the vision so conjured up.

There was nobody about.  Perhaps he might break in somehow.  But then there was nothing to get to work with.  He could not kick the door down.  No, he must give it up, and the ferrets’ breakfast-hour must be postponed.  Possibly Harvey might be able to think of something.

“Fed ’em?” inquired Harvey, when they met at breakfast.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Why on earth not?  You didn’t oversleep yourself?”

Renford poured his tale into his friend’s shocked ears.

“My hat!” said Harvey, when he had finished, “what on earth are we to do?  They’ll starve.”

Renford nodded mournfully.

“Whatever made them go and lock the door?” he said.

He seemed to think the authorities should have given him due notice of such an action.

“You’re sure they have locked it?  It isn’t only stuck or something?”

“I lugged at the handle for hours.  But you can go and see for yourself if you like.”

Harvey went, and, waiting till the coast was clear, attached himself to the handle with a prehensile grasp, and put his back into one strenuous tug.  It was even as Renford had said.  The door was locked beyond possibility of doubt.

Renford and he went over to school that morning with long faces and a general air of acute depression.  It was perhaps fortunate for their purpose that they did, for had their appearance been normal it might not have attracted O’Hara’s attention.  As it was, the Irishman, meeting them on the junior gravel, stopped and asked them what was wrong.  Since the adventure in the vault, he had felt an interest in Renford and Harvey.

The two told their story in alternate sentences like the Strophe and Antistrophe of a Greek chorus. ("Steichomuthics,” your Greek scholar calls it, I fancy.  Ha, yes!  Just so.)

“So ye can’t get in because they’ve locked the door, an’ ye don’t know what to do about it?” said O’Hara, at the conclusion of the narrative.

Renford and Harvey informed him in chorus that that was the state of the game up to present date.

“An’ ye want me to get them out for you?”

Neither had dared to hope that he would go so far as this.  What they had looked for had been at the most a few thoughtful words of advice.  That such a master-strategist as O’Hara should take up their cause was an unexampled piece of good luck.

“If you only would,” said Harvey.

“We should be most awfully obliged,” said Renford.

“Very well,” said O’Hara.

They thanked him profusely.

O’Hara replied that it would be a privilege.

He should be sorry, he said, to have anything happen to the ferrets.

Renford and Harvey went on into school feeling more cheerful.  If the ferrets could be extracted from their present tight corner, O’Hara was the man to do it.

O’Hara had not made his offer of assistance in any spirit of doubt.  He was certain that he could do what he had promised.  For it had not escaped his memory that this was a Tuesday—­in other words, a mathematics morning up to the quarter to eleven interval.  That meant, as has been explained previously, that, while the rest of the school were in the form-rooms, he would be out in the passage, if he cared to be.  There would be no witnesses to what he was going to do.

But, by that curious perversity of fate which is so often noticeable, Mr Banks was in a peculiarly lamb-like and