"_Ach! Gott in Himmel_!" he cried as he ran, "my beautiful caravan!
Who has this to it done?"
He joined the frenzied altercation that was going on between the donkey man and the fat woman. The air was rent by their angry shouts.
A group of highly appreciative villagers collected round them. Then one of them pointed to William, who sat, feeling still slightly shaken, upon the bank.
"It was 'im wot done it," he said, "it was 'im that was a-drivin' of it down the 'ill."
With one wild glance at the scene of devastation and anger, William turned and fled through the wood.
"_Ach! Gott in Himmel!_" screamed the fat man, beginning to pursue him. The fat woman and the donkey man joined the pursuit. To William it was like some ghastly nightmare after an evening's entertainment at the cinematograph.
Meanwhile the donkey and the mule fraternised over the _debris_ and the villagers helped themselves to all they could find. But the fat man was very fat, and the fat woman was very fat, and the donkey man was very old, and William was young and very fleet, so in less than ten minutes they gave up the pursuit and returned panting and quarrelling to the road. William sat on the further outskirts of the wood and panted. He felt on the whole exhilarated by the adventure. It was quite a suitable adventure for his last day of unregeneration. But he felt also in need of bodily sustenance, so he purchased a bun and a bottle of lemonade at a neighbouring shop and sat by the roadside to recover. There were no signs of his pursuers.
He felt reluctant to return home. It is always well to follow a morning's absence from school by an afternoon's absence from school. A return in the afternoon is ignominious and humiliating. William wandered round the neighbourhood experiencing all the thrill of the outlaw. Certainly by this time the gardener would have complained to his father, probably the schoolmistress would have sent a note.
Also--someone had been scratched by the cat.
William decided that all things considered it was best to make a day of it.
[Illustration: WILLIAM'S SPIRITS SANK A LITTLE AS HE APPROACHED THE GATE. HE COULD SEE THROUGH THE TREES THE FAT CARAVAN-OWNER GESTICULATING AT THE DOOR.]
He spent part of the afternoon in throwing stones at a scarecrow. His aim was fairly good, and he succeeded in knocking off the hat and finally prostrating the wooden framework. Followed--an exciting chase by an angry farmer.
It was after tea-time when he returned home, walking with careless bravado as of a criminal who has drunk of crime to its very depth and flaunts it before the world. His spirits sank a little as he approached the gate. He could see through the trees the fat caravan-owner gesticulating at the door. Helped by the villagers, he had tracked William. Phrases floated to him through the summer air.
"Mine beautiful caravan.... _Ach.... Gott in Himmel_!"
He could see the gardener smiling in the distance. There was a small blue bruise on his shining head. William judged from the smile that he had laid his formal complaint before authority. William noticed that his father looked pale and harassed. He noticed, also, with a thrill of horror, that his hand was bound up, and that there was a long scratch down his cheek. He knew the cat had scratched _somebody_, but ... Crumbs!
A small boy came down the road and saw William hesitating at the open gateway.
"_You'll_ catch it!" he said cheerfully. "They've wrote to say you wasn't in school."
William crept round to the back of the house beneath the bushes. He felt that the time had come to give himself up to justice, but he wanted, as the popular saying is, to be sure of "getting his money's worth." There was the tin half full of green paint in the tool shed.
He'd had his eye on it for some time. He went quietly round to the tool shed. Soon he was contemplating with a satisfied smile a green and enraged cat and a green and enraged hen. Then, bracing himself for the effort, he delivered himself up to justice. When all was said and done no punishment could be really adequate to a day like that.
Dusk was falling. William gazed pensively from his bedroom window. He was reviewing his day. He had almost forgotten the stormy and decidedly unpleasant scene with his father. Mr. Brown's rhetoric had been rather lost on William, because its pearls of sarcasm had been so far above his head. And William had not been really loth to retire at once to bed. After all, it had been a very tiring day.
Now his thoughts were going over some of its most exquisite moments--the moments when the pea and the gardener's head met and rebounded with such satisfactory force; the moment when he swung along the high road, monarch of a caravan and a mule and the whole wide world; the moment when the scarecrow hunched up and collapsed so realistically; the cat covered with green paint.... After all it was his last day. He saw himself from to-morrow onward leading a quiet and blameless life, walking sedately to school, working at high pressure in school, doing his homework conscientiously in the evening, being exquisitely polite to his family and instructors--and the vision failed utterly to attract. Moreover, he hadn't yet tried turning off the water at the main, or locking the cook into the larder, or--or hundreds of things.
There came a gentle voice from the garden.
"William, where are you?"
William looked down and met the earnest gaze of Deborah.
"Hello," he said.
"William," she said. "You won't forget that you're going to start to-morrow, will you?"
William looked at her firmly.
"I can't jus' to-morrow," he said. "I'm puttin' it off. I'm puttin' it off for a year or two."
CHAPTER XIII
WILLIAM AND THE ANCIENT SOULS
The house next William's had been unoccupied for several months, and William made full use of its garden. Its garden was in turns a jungle, a desert, an ocean, and an enchanted island. William invited select parties of his friends to it. He had come to look upon it as his own property. He hunted wild animals in it with Jumble, his trusty hound; he tracked Red Indians in it, again with Jumble, his trusty hound; and he attacked and sank ships in it, making his victims walk the plank, again with the help and assistance of Jumble, his trusty hound.
Sometimes, to vary the monotony, he made Jumble, his trusty hound, walk the plank into the rain tub. This was one of the many unpleasant things that William brought into Jumble's life. It was only his intense love for William that reconciled him to his existence. Jumble was one of the very few beings who appreciated William.
The house on the other side was a much smaller one, and was occupied by Mr. Gregorius Lambkin. Mr. Gregorius Lambkin was a very shy and rather elderly bachelor. He issued from his front door every morning at half-past eight holding a neat little attache case in a neatly-gloved hand. He spent the day in an insurance office and returned, still unruffled and immaculate, at about half past six. Most people considered him quite dull and negligible, but he possessed the supreme virtue in William's eyes of not objecting to William. William had suffered much from unsympathetic neighbours who had taken upon themselves to object to such innocent and artistic objects as catapults and pea-shooters, and cricket balls. William had a very soft spot in his heart for Mr. Gregorius Lambkin. William spent a good deal of his time in Mr. Lambkin's garden during his absence, and Mr.
Lambkin seemed to have no objection. Other people's gardens always seemed to William to be more attractive than his own--especially when he had no right of entry into them.
There was quite an excitement in the neighbourhood when the empty house was let. It was rumoured that the newcomer was a Personage. She was the President of the Society of Ancient Souls. The Society of Ancient Souls was a society of people who remembered their previous existence. The memory usually came in a flash. For instance, you might remember in a flash when you were looking at a box of matches that you had been Guy Fawkes. Or you might look at a cow and remember in a flash that you had been Nebuchadnezzar. Then you joined the Society of Ancient Souls, and paid a large subscription, and attended meetings at the house of its President in costume. And the President was coming to live next door to William. By a curious coincidence her name was Gregoria--Miss Gregoria Mush. William awaited her coming with anxiety.
He had discovered that one's next-door neighbours make a great difference to one's life. They may be agreeable and not object to mouth organs and whistling and occasional stone-throwing, or they may not. They sometimes--the worst kind--go to the length of writing notes to one's father about one, and then, of course, the only course left to one is one of Revenge. But William hoped great things from Miss Gregoria Mush. There was a friendly sound about the name. On the evening of her arrival he climbed up on the roller and gazed wistfully over the fence at the territory that had once been his, but from which he was now debarred. He felt like Moses surveying the Promised Land.
Miss Gregoria Mush was walking in the garden. William watched her with bated breath. She was very long, and very thin, and very angular, and she was reading poetry out loud to herself as she trailed about in her long draperies.
"'Oh, moon of my delight....'" she declaimed, then her eye met William's. The eyes beneath her pince-nez were like little gimlets.
"How dare you stare at me, you rude boy?" she said.
William gasped.
[Illustration: "HOW DARE YOU STARE AT ME, YOU RUDE BOY?" SHE SAID.]
"I shall write to your father," she said fiercely, and then proceeded still ferociously, "'... that knows no wane.'"
"Crumbs!" murmured William, descending slowly from his perch.
She did write to his father, and that note was the first of many. She objected to his singing, she objected to his shouting, she objected to his watching her over the wall, and she objected to his throwing sticks at her cat. She objected both verbally and in writing. This persecution was only partly compensated for by occasional glimpses of meetings of the Ancient Souls. For the Ancient Souls met in costume, and sometimes William could squeeze through the hole in the fence and watch the Ancient Souls meeting in the dining-room. Miss Gregoria Mush arrayed as Mary, Queen of Scots (one of her many previous existences) was worth watching. And always there was the garden on the other side.
Mr. Gregorius Lambkin made no objections and wrote no notes. But clouds of Fate were gathering round Mr. Gregorius Lambkin. William first heard of it one day at lunch.
"I saw the old luny talking to poor little Lambkin to-day," said Robert, William's elder brother.
In these terms did Robert refer to the august President of the Society of Ancient Souls.
And the next news Robert brought home was that "poor little Lambkin"
had joined the Society of Ancient Souls, but didn't seem to want to talk about it. He seemed very vague as to his previous existence, but he said that Miss Gregoria Mush was sure that he had been Julius Caesar. The knowledge had come to her in a flash when he raised his hat and she saw his bald head.
There was a meeting of the Ancient Souls that evening, and William crept through the hole and up to the dining-room window to watch. A gorgeous scene met his eye. Noah conversed agreeably with Cleopatra in the window seat, and by the piano Napoleon discussed the Irish question with Lobengula. As William watched, his small nose flattened against a corner of the window, Nero and Dante arrived, having shared a taxi from the station. Miss Gregoria Mush, tall and gaunt and angular, presided in the robes of Mary, Queen of Scots, which was her favourite previous existence. Then Mr. Gregorius Lambkin arrived. He looked as unhappy as it is possible for man to look. He was dressed in a toga and a laurel wreath. Heat and nervousness had caused his small waxed moustache to droop. His toga was too long and his laurel wreath was crooked. Miss Gregoria Mush received him effusively. She carried him off to a corner seat near the window, and there they conversed, or, to be more accurate, she talked and he listened. The window was open and William could hear some of the things she said.
"Now you are a member you must come here often ... you and I, the only Ancient Souls in this vicinity ... we will work together and live only in the Past.... Have you remembered any other previous existence?...