Free William The Conqueror by Richmal Crompton Page B

handed back.
    They went home dejectedly through the rain. The British workman might or might not fulfil his threat of calling on their parents. The saintly career which had looked so roseate in the distance
had turned out, as William aptly described it, ‘wearin’.’ Life was full of disillusions.
    William discovered with relief that his father had not yet come home. He returned the slippers, somewhat damp, to the fender box. He put his muddy dressing-gown beneath the bed. He found his
note unopened and unread, still upon the mantelpiece. He tore it up. He tidied himself superficially. He went downstairs.
    ‘Had a nice day, dear?’ said his mother.
    He disdained to answer the question.
    ‘There’s just an hour before tea,’ she went on; ‘hadn’t you better be doing your homework, dear?’
    He considered. One might as well drink of tragedy the very dregs while one was about it. It would be a rotten ending to a rotten day. Besides, there was no doubt about it – Mr Strong was
going to make himself very disagreeable indeed, if he didn’t know those French verbs for Monday. He might as well – If he’d had any idea how rotten it was being a saint he jolly
well wouldn’t have wasted a whole Saturday over it. He took down a French grammar and sat down moodily before it without troubling to put it right way up.

CHAPTER 5
WILLIAM AND THE LOST TOURIST
    W ILLIAM, Ginger, Douglas and Henry were on their way home from school. Owing to the absence of one of the masters they had been given an extra hour
to learn their homework. William had not used it to the best advantage. He had spent the first part of it making rats out of ink-sodden blotting-paper till he was summoned to the front of the room
where his activities should be under the eye of Authority.
    There, under compulsion, he opened his Shakespeare and idly committed to memory the lines chosen for his edification by his English master:
    ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears
    I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
    The evil that men do lives after them,
    The good is oft interred with their bones,’
    he murmured monotonously to himself, rubbing his eyes with his ink-stained fingers till the ink gradually overspread his freckled countenance. There was nothing unusual in that.
As his mother plaintively remarked, William could never touch ink without ‘getting all over with it’. She would have felt almost uneasy had William ever returned home from school
without his customary coating of ink or mud.
    William wandered home with Ginger and Douglas and Henry, chanting blithely: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.’
    ‘Who was this Shakespeare, anyway?’ said William.
    ‘He was a pote,’ said Douglas unctuously, ‘an’ he – well, he just lived an’ died.’
    ‘Din’ he do anythin’?’ said William.
    ‘He wrote po’try.’
    ‘That’s not doin ’ anythin’,’ said William contemptuously. ‘I can write po’try – I mean din’ he fight or
somethin’?’
    ‘It says in the beginning of the book he acted ,’ said Henry rather vaguely.
    ‘Huh!’ said William. ‘That’s nothin’. I can act. I don’ think much of him. ’
    ‘There’s stachoos up to him in places,’ said Henry, still with his air of comprehensive knowledge.
    ‘Well, if that’s all he did,’ said William with disgust, ‘they might jus’ as well put stachoos up to me. I can write po’try an’ act if that’s all he did.’
    William’s heroes were all men of action. He was not a patron of the Arts.
    They were passing Mrs Maloney’s cottage. Mrs Maloney lived alone with a dog and a cat and a canary. She was very old and very cantankerous.
    She hated everyone, but her hatred of boys was the absorbing passion of her life. And of all boys in the world the boys she most hated were the Outlaws. It was probably that alone which kept her
alive. She visibly failed in health on the days on which she had no encounter with the Outlaws. On the days