i believe gideon was the only jew that ever came to dunston’s, and i expect, taking it all round, he might have had a better time at a school for jews in general; though in one way he wouldn’t have done as well, and wouldn’t have had the adventure with old grimbal, which turned out so splendidly for him when old grimbal died.
though easily the richest chap at merivale, and getting no less than ten shillings a week pocket-money, gideon was so awfully fond of coin that he hardly spent a penny, and the only thing he did with his money was to lend it to fellows. he didn’t lend it for nothing, having a curious system by which you paid in marbles, or bats, or knives for the money, and, in spite of that, still had to pay back the money itself after a certain time. you signed a paper, and 134gideon said that if chaps hadn’t paid back the tin on the dates named it would be very serious for them. but it got serious for him after a bit, because steggles, who knew quite as much about money as gideon (though he never had any), borrowed a whole pound once, and promised to pay five shillings for it for one term; and gideon was new to steggles then, and agreed. but when the time of payment came, steggles said that gideon had better regard it as a bad debt, because he wasn’t going to pay back even the original pound. then gideon thought a bit, and asked him why, and steggles told him. he said: “because you know jolly well the doctor doesn’t allow chaps to lend money.”
and gideon said:
“this is the first time i’ve heard that.”
“anyway, it’s usury, which is a crime,” said steggles, “and i’m not going to pay anything; and, being less than twenty-one, you can’t make me; so it amounts to a bad debt, as i told you just now. you’ve done jolly well, one way and another, and you’ve got two bats, and lord knows how 135many india-rubber-balls, and cricket-balls, and silver pencils, and knives out of it, including ashby minor’s watch-chain, which is silver; and if you take my tip you’ll keep quiet, because once all these kids get to know anybody under twenty-one can borrow money without returning it, then it’s all up with your beastly financial schemes.”
gideon was remarkably surprised to know what a lot steggles had found out about him, and accused him of looking into his play-chest; and steggles said he had. then gideon went; and about three chaps who had heard the talk told others, and they told still more chaps, until, finally, a good many fellows who owed gideon money felt there was no hurry about paying it back till it happened to be convenient. in fact, gideon jolly soon saw he couldn’t do any more good for himself like that, and at the beginning of the next term, when chaps were pretty flush of coin, he wrote up in the gym, “there will be a sale of bats, knives, and other various useful articles, between two and three o’clock, by auction, on tuesday.--j. gideon.”
136somebody tore it down, but not before most fellows had read it; and when gideon and young miller, who had a bat in the auction, and hoped to get it back if possible, were seen carrying gideon’s play-chest to the gym after dinner on the appointed day, of course we went. it passed off very well for gideon, because the things were really good, and often almost new. he seemed to know all about auctions, and hit the chest with a stump, and explained the things, and what good points they had about them. he only took money down, and i will say nobody could have done it fairer. if a knife had a broken blade, for instance, or a bat was slightly sprung, which happened with one, he always pointed it out, so that nobody could say he had been choused over it. young miller got back his bat for four shillings and eightpence; and ashby minor got back his silver chain for thirteen shillings; but it wasn’t much good to him, because, in order to raise the thirteen bob, he had to raffle the chain at once, at shilling shares; and he took one, hoping to be lucky, but he wasn’t, fowle unfortunately getting 137it. gideon told me afterwards that the sale came out fairly, but not quite what he had hoped. he rather sneered at the dunston chaps in general, and said they were a poverty-stricken crew; which got me into a bate, and i told him that i’d sooner be the son of an officer in the royal navy, which i am, than the biggest jew diamond dealer in the world, his father being in that profession. he said there was no accounting for tastes, but he should have thought that a man who could deliberately go and be a sailor must be weak in the head. then i punched him, and he instantly went down and apologized. i may mention that i am bray, the cock of the lower school.
before coming to gideon’s front tooth, just to let you know exactly the chap he was, i’ll mention another thing he did. an old woman was allowed to bring up fruit and tuck generally, and sell it to us after morning school. steggles, who knows the reason for pretty nearly everything, said this was permitted by doctor dunston to take the edge off our appetites; but anyway, the old woman sold strawberries and 138raspberries in summer-time, and these were arranged with cabbage-leaves in little wicker baskets at about fourpence each. well, one day gideon, who never refused to eat fruit if offered it, but very seldom bought any, asked the old woman what she gave for the wicker baskets, and she said threepence a dozen. then he asked her what she would give for those which had been used once, and she thought, and said they would be worth at least three halfpence a dozen to her. he didn’t say any more, but after that it was a rum thing how all the used baskets, which generally were seen kicking about the playground in shoals, disappeared. nobody noticed it at the time, but afterwards we remembered clearly that they had disappeared. and just at the end of the term a chap, hurrying in late after the bell rang, came bang on gideon and the old woman round a corner out of sight of the gates. and the chap saw gideon give her a pile of baskets and get three halfpence. of course, it was the last three halfpence he ever got that way, because when it became known the chaps rendered 139their baskets useless for commerce in many ways. and barlow called gideon “shylock minor” when he heard that he’d made two shillings and fivepence halfpenny; which name stuck to gideon forever. and steggles got nine other chaps to subscribe a penny each and buy a pound of flesh from a butcher’s shop, because in shakespeare shylock was death on his pound of flesh. the pound was put under gideon’s pillow by steggles himself, and when gideon shoved his watch under his pillow, which he always did at night, he found it; and steggles says he turned pale, but read what was pinned on the pound of flesh, and then smiled and wrapped the meat up in a letter from home, and said: “what fools you chaps are, wasting money like that! but it looks all right, and will mean a good feed for nothing.”
next day he got up very early and took his pound of flesh down to the kitchen and got them to cook it; and he ate about half before breakfast and had the rest cold in his desk during monsieur michel’s lesson, which was a safe time. and steggles said we 140ought to have gone one better and put poison on it.
the great affair of the tooth came on at the beginning of next term; and first i must tell you that next door to dunston’s lived an old man, so frightfully ancient that his skin was all shrivelled over his bones. he didn’t like boys much, but he would look over his garden-wall sometimes into our playground and scowl if anybody caught his eye. various things, of course, went over the wall often, and it was one of the excitements of dunston’s to go into old grimbal’s garden and get them back. twice only he caught a chap, and both times, despite his awful age and yellowness of skin, he thrashed the chap very fairly hard with a walking-stick; but he never reported anybody to dunston, and it was generally thought he regarded it as a sort of sport hunting for chaps in his garden. of course, in fair, open hunting he hadn’t a chance, and the two he did catch he got by stealth, hiding behind bushes on a rather dark evening.
well, the facts would never have been known about this tooth but for gideon’s 141mean spirit. it happened to be necessary for him to fight me, and though not caring much about it, he couldn’t help himself. besides, though the champion of the lower school, i was tons smaller than gideon, and gideon didn’t know till after the fight that i was a champion, the true facts about my greatness being hid from him.
just before the fight gideon said: “oh! my tooth, by the way. it may be hurt, and it cost my father five guineas.” so, to our great interest he unscrewed one of his two top front teeth and gave it to his second. you couldn’t have told it was a sham, so remarkably was it done, and it screwed on to the foundation of the original tooth much like a spike screws into the sole of a cricket-boot. gideon had fallen down-stairs when he was ten and knocked off half the tooth, so he told us; but murray, who is well up in science, said that all jews’ front teeth are rather rocky, because in feudal times they were pulled out with pincers as a form of torture, and to make the jews give up their secret treasures. murray said that after many generations of pulling out nature 142got sick of it, and that in modern times the front teeth of jews aren’t worth talking about. murray is full of rum ideas like that, and he hopes to go in for engineering, having already many secret inventions waiting to be patented.
as to gideon, i licked him rather badly in two rounds and a half. then he was mopped up and dressed, and screwed in his front tooth again with the greatest ease.
once it got known about this tooth, and fellows were naturally excited. steggles said it was on the principle of a tobacco-pipe mouthpiece; and, finding the chaps were keen to see it, gideon let it be generally known he would freely show it to anybody for threepence a time, and to friends for twopence. but this was a safe reduction to make, because, properly speaking, he hadn’t any friends. seeing there were nearly 200 boys at dunston’s, and that certainly half, including several fellows from the sixth, took a pleasure in seeing the tooth, and didn’t mind the rather high charge, gideon did jolly well; and in the 143case of nubby tomkins, he made actually one shilling and threepence; because the tooth had a most peculiar fascination for nubby, and he saw it no less than five times. after that gideon made a reduction to him, as well he might. but somehow slade, the head of the school, was very averse to gideon’s front tooth when he heard about it, and he decided that there must be no more exhibitions of it for money. he told gideon so himself.
however, a new boy came a week afterwards and heard about the strangeness of the tooth, and offered a shilling, in three instalments, to see it; which was too much temptation for gideon, and he showed it, contrary to what slade had said.
slade, of course, heard, for the new boy happened to be his own cousin, though called saunders; and then there was a curious scene in the playground, which i fortunately saw. slade came up to gideon in the very quiet way he has, and asked him in a perfectly gentlemanly voice for his front tooth. at first gideon seemed inclined not to give it up, but he saw what an awfully 144serious thing that would be, and finally unscrewed it, though not willingly.
“now,” said slade, “i’ll have no more of this penny peep-show business at merivale. i told you once, and you have disobeyed me. so there’s an end of your beastly tooth. what’s this?”
he took something out of his pocket.
“it’s a catapult,” said gideon.
“it is,” said slade, “and i’m going to use your tooth instead of a bullet, and fire it into space.”
“it cost five guineas,” said gideon.
“don’t care if it cost a hundred,” answered slade, still in a very gentlemanly sort of way. “we can’t have this sort of thing here, you know.”
slade was just going to fire into space, as he had said, when a robin suddenly settled within thirty yards of us, on the wall between the playground and old grimbal’s. slade being a wonderful shot with a catapult (having once shot a wood-pigeon), suddenly fired at the robin, and only missed it by about four inches. he said the shape of a front tooth was very unfavorable for shooting. 145but, anyway, the tooth went over into grimbal’s, and we distinctly heard it hit against the side of his house.
then slade went away, and we rotted gideon rather, because not having the tooth looked rum, and made a difference in his voice. he took it very quietly, and said he rather thought his father would be able to summon slade; and before evening school, having marked down the spot where he fancied his tooth had hit grimbal’s house, he went to look with a box of matches. what happened afterwards he told us frankly; and it was certainly true, because, with all his faults, gideon never lied to anybody.
“i went quietly over, and began carefully looking along the bottom of the wall, using a match to every foot or so,” he said, "and i had done about half when i heard a door open. i then hooked it, and ran almost on to old grimbal. he had not opened the door at all, but was coming up the garden path at the critical moment. of course, he caught me. he was going to rub it into me with his stick, when i said i should think 146it very kind if he would hear me first, as i had a perfectly good excuse for being there.
"he said:
"‘what excuse can you have for trespassing in my garden, you little oily wretch?’
"‘oily wretch’ was what he called me; and i said that my tooth had been fired into his garden that very day, about half-past one, by a chap with a catapult; and i lighted a match and showed him it was missing.
"he said:
"‘how the deuce are you going to find a tooth in a garden this size?’ and i told him i had marked it down very carefully, and that it had cost five guineas, and that i rather believed my father would be able to summon the chap who had shot it away. he seemed a good deal interested, and said he thought very likely he might, if it was robbery with violence. then he asked me if i was the boy he had seen beating down the price of a purse at wilkinson’s in merivale, and i said i was. then he said, ‘come in and have a bit of cake, boy’; and i went in and had a bit of cake, and saw on a shelf in his room about fifty or sixty 147cricket-balls, and various things which he has collared when they went over. he asked me a lot of questions about different things, and i answered them. all he said was about money. he also asked me to be good enough to value the things he had, which came over the wall from time to time; and i did, and he thanked me. they were worth fifteen shillings and tenpence; and wright’s ball, which everybody thought was stolen by the milkman, wasn’t, for old grimbal’s got it; and the milkman should be told and apologized to.
"well, he knew a lot about money, and told me he had thousands of golden sovereigns, which he makes breed into thousands more.
"he said:
"‘you’re the only boy i ever met with a grain of sense in his head. now, if i gave you a check on my bankers in merivale for five pounds to-day, and wrote to you to-morrow morning to say i had changed my mind, what would you do?’
“i said, ‘it would be too late, sir, because your check would have been sent off to my 148father that very night, to put out at interest for me.’ he said, ‘that’s right. never give back money, or anything.’ then he asked me my name, and told me i might come back to-morrow and look for my tooth by daylight.”
that was gideon’s most peculiar adventure, and, though he never found the tooth or saw old grimbal again, yet about seven or eight months afterwards, when old grimbal was discovered all curiously twisted up and dead in bed by the man who took him his breakfast, the result of gideon’s visit to him came out. old grimbal had specially put him into his will by some legal method, and doctor dunston had gideon into his study three days after old grimbal kicked. it then was proved that old grimbal had left gideon all the things that came over the wall, and also a legacy of fifty pounds in money, because, according to the bit of the will which the doctor read to gideon out of a lawyer’s letter, he was the only boy old grimbal had ever met with who showed any intelligence above that of the anthropoid ape.
gideon returned all the balls and things 149to their owners free of charge, but not until the rightful owners proved they were so. and the money he sent to his father; and his father, he told me afterwards, was so jolly pleased about the whole affair that he added nine hundred and fifty pounds to old grimbal’s fifty. therefore, by shooting gideon’s front tooth at a robin, slade was actually putting the enormous sum of one thousand pounds into gideon’s pocket, which i should think was about the rummest thing that ever happened in the world.
gideon stopped at dunston’s one term after that. then he went away, and, i believe, began to help his father to sell diamonds. he was fairly good at french, and very at german; but of other things he knew rather little, except arithmetic, and his was the most beautiful arithmetic which had ever been done at merivale; for i heard stokes, who was a seventeenth wrangler in his time, tell the doctor so.
