‘Poor chap!’ said Beetle, with a false, feigned sympathy. ‘Let it bleed a little. That’ll prevent apoplexy,’ and he held the blind head skilfully over the table, and the papers on the table, as he guided the howling Manders to the door.
Then did Beetle, alone with the wreckage, return good for evil. How, in that office, a complete set of ‘Gibbon’* was scarred all along the back as by a flint; how so much black and copying ink chanced to mingle with Manders’s gore on the table-cloth; why the big gum-bottle, unstoppered, had rolled semicircularly across the floor; and in what manner the white china door-knob grew to be painted with yet more of Manders’s young blood, were matters which Beetle did not explain when the rabid King returned to find him standing politely over the reeking hearth-rug.
‘You never told me to go, sir,’ he said, with the air of Casablanca,* and King consigned him to the outer darkness.
But it was to a boot-cupboard under the staircase on the ground floor that he hastened, to loose the mirth that was destroying him. He had not drawn breath for a first whoop of triumph when two hands choked him dumb.
‘Go to the dormitory and get me my things. Bring ’em to Number Five lavatory.* I’m still in tights,’ hissed Stalky, sitting on his head. ‘Don’t run. Walk.’
But Beetle staggered into the form-room next door, and delegated his duty to the yet unenlightened M‘Turk, with an hysterical précis of the campaign thus far. So it was M‘Turk, of the wooden visage, who brought the clothes from the dormitory while Beetle panted on a form. Then the three buried themselves in Number Five lavatory, turned on all the taps, filled the place with steam, and dropped weeping into the baths, where they pieced out the war.
‘Moi! Je! Ich! Ego! gasped Stalky. ‘I waited till I couldn’t hear myself think, while you played the drum! Hid in the coal-locker—and tweaked Rabbits-Eggs—and Rabbits-Eggs rocked King. Wasn’t it beautiful? Did you hear the glass?’
‘Why, he—he—he,’ shrieked M‘Turk, one trembling finger pointed at Beetle.
‘Why, I—I—I was through it all,’ Beetle howled; ‘in his study, being jawed.’
‘Oh, my soul!’ said Stalky with a yell, disappearing under water.
‘The—the glass was nothing. Manders minor’s head’s cut open. La-la-lamp upset all over the rug. Blood on the books and papers. The gum! The gum! The gum! The ink! The ink! The ink! Oh, Lord!’
Then Stalky leaped out, all pink as he was, and shook Beetle into some sort of coherence; but his tale prostrated them afresh.
T bunked for the boot-cupboard the second I heard King go downstairs. Beetle tumbled in on top of me. The spare key’s hid behind the loose board. There isn’t a shadow of evidence,’ said Stalky. They were all chanting together.
‘And he turned us out himself—himself—himself!’ This from M‘Turk. ‘He can’t begin to suspect us. Oh, Stalky, it’s the loveliest thing we’ve ever done.’
‘Gum! Gum! Dollops of gum!’ shouted Beetle, his spectacles gleaming through a sea of lather. ‘Ink and blood all mixed. I held the little beast’s head all over the Latin proses for Monday. Golly, how the oil stunk! And Rabbits-Eggs told King to poultice his nose! Did you hit Rabbits-Eggs, Stalky?’
‘Did I jolly well not? Tweaked him all over. Did you hear him curse? Oh, I shall be sick in a minute if I don’t stop.’
But dressing was a slow process, because M‘Turk was obliged to dance when he heard that the musk basket was broken, and, moreover, Beetle retailed all King’s language with emendations and purple insets.
‘Shockin’!’* said Stalky, collapsing in a helpless welter of half-hitched trousers. ‘So dam’ bad, too, for innocent boys like us! ’Wonder what they’d say at “St. Winifred’s, or The World of School.” By gum! That reminds me we owe the Lower Third one for assaultin’ Beetle when he chivied Manders minor. Come on! It’s an alibi Samivel;* and besides, if we let ’em off they’ll be worse next time.’
The Lower Third had set a guard upon their form-room for the space of a full hour, which to a boy is a lifetime. Now they were busy with their Saturday evening businesses—cooking sparrows over the gas with rusty nibs; brewing unholy drinks in gallipots;* skinning moles with pocket-knives: attending to paper trays full of silk-worms, or discussing the iniquities of their elders with a freedom, fluency, and point that would have amazed their parents. The blow fell without warning. Stalky upset a crowded form of small boys among their own cooking utensils; M‘Turk raided the untidy lockers as a terrier digs at a rabbit-hole; while Beetle poured ink upon such heads as he could not appeal to with a Smith’s Classical Dictionary. Three brisk minutes accounted for many silk-worms, pet larvae, French exercises, school caps, half-prepared bones and skulls, and a dozen pots of home-made sloe jam. It was a great wreckage, and the form-room looked as though three conflicting tempests had smitten it.
‘Phew!’ said Stalky, drawing breath outside the door (amid groans of ‘Oh, you beastly ca-ads! You think yourselves awful funny,’ and so forth). ‘ That’s all right. Never let the sun go down upon your wrath. Rummy little devils, fags. ’Got no notion o’ combinin’.’
‘Six of ’em sat on my head when I went in after Manders minor,’ said Beetle. ‘I warned ’em what they’d get, though.’
‘Everybody paid in full—beautiful feelin’,’ said M‘Turk absently, as they strolled along the corridor. ‘’Don’t think we’d better say much about King, though, do you, Stalky?’
‘Not much. Our line is injured innocence, of course—same as when old Foxibus reported us on suspicion of smoking in the Bunkers. If I hadn’t thought of buyin’ the pepper and spillin’ it all over our clothes, he’d have smelt us. King was gha-astly facetious about that. ’Called us bird-stuffers in form for a week.’
‘Ah, King hates the Natural History Society because little Hartopp is president. ’Mustn’t do anything in the Coll, without glorifyin? King,’ said M‘Turk. ‘But he must be a putrid ass, you know, to suppose at our time o’ life we’d go out and stuff birds like fags.’
‘Poor old King!’ said Beetle. ‘He’s awf’ly unpopular in Common-room, and they’ll chaff his head off about Rabbits-Eggs. Golly! How lovely! How beautiful! How holy! But you should have seen his face when the first rock came in! And the earth from the basket!’
So they were all stricken helpless for five minutes.
They repaired at last to Abanazar’s study, and were received reverently.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Stalky, quick to realise new atmospheres.
‘You know jolly well,’ said Abanazar. ‘You’ll be expelled if you get caught. King is a gibbering maniac.’
‘Who? Which? What? Expelled for how? We only played the war-drum. We’ve got turned out for that already.’
‘Do you chaps mean to say you didn’t make Rabbits-Eggs drunk and bribe him to rock King’s rooms?’
‘Bribe him? No, that I’ll swear we didn’t,’ said Stalky, with a relieved heart, for he loved not to tell lies. ‘What a low mind you’ve got, Pussy! We’ve been down having a bath. Did Rabbits-Eggs rock King? Strong, perseverin’ man King? Shockin’!’
‘Awf’ly. King’s frothing at the mouth. There’s bell for prayers. Come on.’
‘Wait a sec,’ said Stalky, continuing the conversation in a loud and cheerful voice, as they descended the stairs. ‘What did Rabbits-Eggs rock King for?’
‘I know,’ said Beetle, as they passed King’s open door. ‘I was in his study.’
‘Hush, you ass!’ hissed the Emperor of China.
‘Oh, he’s gone down to prayers,’ said Beetle, watching the shadow of the House-master on the wall. ‘Rabbits-Eggs was only a bit drunk, swear in’ at his horse, and King jawed him through the window, and then, of course, he rocked King.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ said Stalky, ‘that King began it?’
King was behind them, and every well-weighed word went up the staircase like an arrow. ‘I can only swear,’ said Beetle, ‘that King cursed like a bargee. Simply disgustin’. I
’m goin’ to write to my father about it.’
‘Better report it to Mason,’ suggested Stalky. ‘He knows our tender consciences. Hold on a shake. I’ve got to tie my bootlace.’
The other study hurried forward. They did not wish to be dragged into stage asides of this nature. So it was left to M‘Turk to sum up the situation beneath the guns of the enemy.
‘You see,’ said the Irishman, hanging on the banister, ‘he begins by bullying little chaps; then he bullies the big chaps; then he bullies some one who isn’t connected with the Coll., and then he catches it. Serves him jolly well right. … I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t see you were coming down the staircase.’
The black gown tore past like a thunder-storm, and in its wake, three abreast, arms linked, the Aladdin Company rolled up the big corridor to prayers, singing with most innocent intention:
‘Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby! Arrah, Patsy, mind the child!
Wrap him up in an overcoat, he’s surely goin’ wild!
Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby; just ye mind the child awhile!
He’ll kick an’ bite an’ cry all night! Arrah, Patsy, mind the child!’
An Unsavoury Interlude
Rudyard Kipling
It was a maiden aunt of Stalky who sent him both books, with the inscription, ‘To dearest Artie, on his sixteenth birthday’; it was M‘Turk who ordered their hypothecation;* and it was Beetle, returned from Bideford, who flung them on the window-sill of Number Five study with news that Bastable would advance but ninepence on the two; Eric; or, Little by Little, being almost as great a drug as St. Winifred’s. ‘An’ I don’t think much of your aunt. We’re nearly out of cartridges, too—Artie, dear.’
Whereupon Stalky rose up to grapple with him, but M‘Turk sat on Stalky’s head, calling him a ‘pure-minded boy’ till peace was declared. As they were grievously in arrears with a Latin prose, as it was a blazing July afternoon, and as they ought to have been at a House cricket-match, they began to renew their acquaintance, intimate and unholy, with the volumes.
‘Here we are!’ said M‘Turk. ‘ “Corporal punishment produced on Eric the worst effects. He burned not with remorse or regret”—make a note o’ that, Beetle—“but with shame and violent indignation. He glared”—oh, naughty Eric! Let’s get to where he goes in for drink.’
‘Hold on half a shake. Here’s another sample. “The Sixth,” he says, “is the palladium of all public schools.” But this lot’—Stalky rapped the gilded book—‘can’t prevent fellows drinkin’ and stealin’, an’ lettin’ fags out of window at night, an’—an’ doin’ what they please. Golly, what we’ve missed—not goin’ to St. Winifred’s! …’
‘I’m sorry to see any boys of my House taking so little interest in their matches.’
Mr. Prout could move very silently if he pleased, though that is no merit in a boy’s eyes. He had flung open the study—door without knocking—another sin—and looked at them suspiciously. ‘Very sorry, indeed, I am to see you frowsting in your studies.’
‘We’ve been out ever since dinner, sir,’ said M‘Turk wearily. One House-match is just like another, and their ‘ploy’ of that week happened to be rabbit-shooting with saloonpistols.*
‘I can’t see a ball when it’s coming, sir,’ said Beetle. ‘I’ve had my gig-lamps* smashed at the Nets till I got excused. I wasn’t any good even as a fag, then, sir.’
‘Tuck is probably your form. Tuck and brewing. Why can’t you three take any interest in the honour of your House?’
They had heard that phrase till they were wearied. The ‘honour of the House’ was Prout’s weak point, and they knew well how to flick him on the raw.
‘If you order us to go down, sir, of course we’ll go,’ said Stalky, with maddening politeness. But Prout knew better than that. He had tried the experiment once at a big match, when the three, self-isolated, stood to attention for half an hour in full view of all the visitors, to whom fags, subsidised for that end, pointed them out as victims of Prout’s tyranny. And Prout was a sensitive man.
In the infinitely petty confederacies of the Common-room, King and Macrea, fellow House-masters, had borne it in upon him that by games, and games alone, was salvation wrought. Boys neglected were boys lost. They must be disciplined. Left to himself, Prout would have made a sympathetic Housemaster; but he was never so left, and, with the devilish insight of youth, the boys knew to whom they were indebted for his zeal.
‘Must we go down, sir?’ said M‘Turk.
‘I don’t want to order you to do what a right-thinking boy should do gladly. I’m sorry.’ And he lurched out with some hazy impression that he had sown good seed on poor ground.
‘Now what does he suppose is the use of that?’ said Beetle.
‘Oh, he’s cracked. King jaws him in Common-room about not keepin’ us up to the mark, and Macrea burbles about “dithcipline,” an’ old Heffy sits between ’em sweatin’ big drops. I heard Oke [the Common-room butler] talking to Richards [Prout’s House-servant] about it down in the basement the other day when I went down to bag some bread,’ said Stalky.
‘What did Oke say?’ demanded M‘Turk, throwing Eric into a corner.
‘ “Oh,” he said, “they make more nise nor a nest full o’ jackdaws, an’ half of it like we’d no ears to our heads that waited on ’em. They talks over old Prout—what he’ve done an’ left undone about his boys. An’ how their boys be fine boys, an’ his’n be dom bad.” Well, Oke talked like that, you know, and Richards got awfly wrathy. He has a down on King for something or other. ’Wonder why?’
‘Why, King talks about Prout in form-room—makes allusions, an’ all that—only half the chaps are such asses they can’t see what he’s drivin’ at. And d’you remember what he said about the “Casual House” last Tuesday? He meant us. They say he says perfectly beastly things to his own House, making fun of Prout’s,’ said Beetle.
‘Well, we didn’t come here to mix up in their rows,’ M‘Turk said wrathfully. ‘Who’ll bathe after call-over? King’s takin’ it in the cricket-field. Come on.’ Turkey seized his straw* and led the way.
They reached the sun-blistered pavilion over against the gray Pebble Ridge just before roll-call, and, asking no questions, gathered from King’s voice and manner that his House was on the road to victory.
‘Ah, ha!’ said he, turning to show the light of his countenance. ‘Here we have the ornaments of the Casual House at last. You consider cricket beneath you, I believe’—the flannelled crowd sniggered—‘and from what I have seen this afternoon, I fancy many others of your House hold the same view. And may I ask what you purpose to do with your noble selves till tea-time?’
‘Going down to bathe, sir,’ said Stalky.
‘And whence this sudden zeal for cleanliness? There is nothing about you that particularly suggests it. Indeed, so far as I remember—I may be at fault—but a short time ago——’
‘Five years, sir,’ said Beetle hotly.
King scowled. ‘One of you was that thing called a waterfunk. Yes, a water-funk. So now you wish to wash? It is well. Cleanliness never injured a boy or—a House. We will proceed to business,’ and he addressed himself to the call-over board.
‘What the deuce did you say anything to him for, Beetle?’ said M‘Turk angrily, as they strolled towards the big, open sea-baths.
‘’Twasn’t fair—remindin’ one of bein’ a water-funk. My first term, too. Heaps of chaps are—when they can’t swim.’
‘Yes, you ass; but he saw he’d fetched you. You ought never to answer King.’
‘But it wasn’t fair, Stalky.’
‘My Hat! You’ve been here six years, and you expect fairness. Well, you are a dithering idiot.’
A knot of King’s boys, also bound for the baths, hailed them, beseeching them to wash—for the honour of their House.
‘That’s what comes of King’s jawin’ and messin’. Those young animals wouldn’t have thought of it unless he’d put it into their heads. Now they’ll
be funny about it for weeks,’ said Stalky. ‘Don’t take any notice.’
The boys came nearer, shouting an opprobrious word. At last they moved to windward, ostentatiously holding their noses.
‘That’s pretty,’ said Beetle. ‘They’ll be sayin’ our House stinks next.’
When they returned from the baths, damp-headed, languid, at peace with the world, Beetle’s forecast came only too true. They were met in the corridor by a fag—a common, Lower-Second fag—who at arm’s length handed them a carefully wrapped piece of soap ‘with the compliments of King’s House.’
‘Hold on,’ said Stalky, checking immediate attack. ‘Who put you up to this, Nixon? Rattray and White? [Those were two leaders in King’s House.] Thank you. There’s no answer.’
‘Oh, it’s too sickening to have this kind o’ rot shoved on to a chap. What’s the sense of it? What’s the fun of it?’ said M‘Turk.
‘It will go on to the end of the term, though.’ Beetle wagged his head sorrowfully. He had worn many jests threadbare on his own account.
In a few days it became an established legend of the school that Prout’s House did not wash and were therefore noisome. Mr. King was pleased to smile succulently in form when one of his boys drew aside from Beetle with certain gestures.
‘There seems to be some disability attaching to you, my Beetle, or else why should Burton major withdraw, so to speak, the hem of his garments? I confess I am still in the dark. Will some one be good enough to enlighten me?’
Naturally, he was enlightened by half the Form.
‘Extraordinary! Most extraordinary! However, each House has its traditions, with which I would not for the world interfere. We have a prejudice in favour of washing. Go on, Beetle—from ‘Jugurtha tamen’*—and, if you can, avoid the more flagrant forms of guessing.’
The Complete Stalky & Co Page 11
