Prout’s House was furious because Macrea’s and Hartopp’s Houses joined King’s to insult them. They called a Housemeeting after dinner—an excited and angry meeting of all save the prefects, whose dignity, though they sympathised, did not allow them to attend. They read ungrammatical resolutions, and made speeches beginning, ‘Gentlemen, we have met on this occasion,’ and ending with, ‘It’s a beastly shame,’ precisely as Houses have done since time and schools began.
Number Five study attended, with its usual air of bland patronage. At last M‘Turk, of the lanthorn jaws, delivered himself:
‘You jabber and jaw and burble, and that’s about all you can do. What’s the good of it? King’s House ’ll only gloat because they’ve drawn you, and King ’ll gloat, too. Besides, that resolution of Orrin’s is chock-full of bad grammar, and King ’ll gloat over that’
‘I thought you an’ Beetle would put it right, an’—an’ we’d post it in the corridor,’ said the composer meekly.
‘Pas si je le connai.* I’m not goin’ to meddle with the biznai,’ said Beetle. ‘It’s a gloat for King’s House. Turkey’s quite right.’
‘Well, won’t Stalky, then?’
But Stalky puffed out his cheeks and squinted down his nose in the style of Panurge,* and all he said was, ‘Oh, you abject burblers!’
‘You’re three beastly scabs!’ was the instant retort of the democracy, and they went out amid execrations.
‘This is piffling,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Let’s get our sallies, and go and shoot bunnies.’
Three saloon-pistols, with a supply of bulleted breech-caps, were stored in Stalky’s trunk, and this trunk was in their dormitory, and their dormitory was a three-bed attic one, opening out of a ten-bed establishment, which, in turn, communicated with the great range of dormitories that ran practically from one end of the College to the other. Marcrea’s House lay next to Prout’s, King’s next to Marcrea’s, and Hartopp’s beyond that again. Carefully locked doors divided House from House, but each House, in its internal arrangements—the College had originally been a terrace of twelve large houses*—was a replica of the next; one straight roof covering all.
They found Stalky’s bed drawn out from the wall to the left of the dormer window, and the latter end of Richards protruding from a two-foot-square cupboard in the wall.
‘What’s all this? I’ve never noticed it before. What are you tryin’ to do, Fatty?’
‘Fillin’ basins, Muster Corkran.’ Richards’s voice was hollow and muffled. ‘They’ve been savin’ me trouble. Yiss.’
‘’Looks like it,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Hi! You’ll stick if you don’t take care.’
Richards backed puffing.
‘I can’t rache un. Yiss, ’tess a turncock, Muster M‘Turk. They’ve took an’ runned all the watter-pipes a storey higher in the houses—runned ’em all along under the ’ang of the heaves, like. Runned ’em in last holidays. I can’t rache the turncock.’
‘Let me try,’ said Stalky, diving into the aperture.
‘Slip ’ee to the left, then, Muster Corkran. Slip ’ee to the left, an’ feel in the dark.’
To the left Stalky wriggled, and saw a long line of lead-pipe disappearing up a triangular tunnel, whose roof was the rafters and boarding of the College roof, whose floor was sharp-edged joists, and whose side was the rough studding of the lath and plaster wall under the dormer.
‘’Rummy show. How far does it go?’
‘Right along, Muster Corkran—right along from end to end. Her runs under the ’ang of the heaves. Have ’ee rached the stopcock yet? Mr. King got un put in to save us carryin’ watter from downstairs to fill the basins. No place for a lusty man like old Richards. I’m tu thickabout to go ferritin’. Thank ’ee, Muster Corkran.’
The water squirted through the tap just inside the cupboard, and, having filled the basins, the grateful Richards waddled away.
The boys sat round-eyed on their beds considering the possibilities of this trove. Two floors below them they could hear the hum of the angry House; for nothing is so still as a dormitory in mid-afternoon of a midsummer term.
‘It has been papered over till now.’ M‘Turk examined the little door. ‘If we’d only known before!’
‘I vote we go down and explore. No one will come up this time o’ day. We needn’t keep cave’*
They crawled in, Stalky leading, drew the door behind them, and on all fours embarked on a dark and dirty road full of plaster, odd shavings, and all the raffle that builders leave in the waste-room of a house. The passage was perhaps three feet wide, and, except for the straggling light round the edges of the cupboards (there was one to each dormer), almost pitchy dark.
‘Here’s Macrea’s House,’ said Stalky, his eye at the crack of the third cupboard. ‘I can see Barnes’s name on his trunk. Don’t make such a row, Beetle! We can get right to the end of the Coll. Come on! … We’re in King’s House now—I can see a bit of Rattray’s trunk. How these beastly boards hurt one’s knees!’ They heard his nails scraping on plaster.
‘That’s the ceiling below. Look out! If we smashed that the plaster ’ud fall down in the lower dormitory,’ said Beetle.
‘Let’s,’ whispered M‘Turk.
‘An’ be collared first thing? Not much. Why, I can shove my hand ever so far up between these boards.’
Stalky thrust an arm to the elbow between the joists.
‘No good stayin’ here. I vote we go back and talk it over. It’s a crummy place. ’Must say I’m grateful to King for his waterworks.’
They crawled out, brushed one another clean, slid the saloon-pistols down a trouser-leg, and hurried forth to a deep and solitary Devonshire lane in whose flanks a boy might sometimes slay a young rabbit. They threw themselves down under the rank elder bushes, and began to think aloud.
‘You know,’ said Stalky at last, sighting at a distant sparrow, ‘we could hide our sallies in there like anything.’
‘Huh!’ Beetle snorted, choked, and gurgled. He had been silent since they left the dormitory.
‘Did you ever read a book called The History of a House or something? I got it out of the library the other day. A Frenchwoman wrote it—Violet somebody.* But it’s translated, you know; and it’s very interestin’. Tells you how a house is built.’
‘Well, if you’re in a sweat to find that out, you can go down to the new cottages they’re building for the coastguard.’
‘My Hat! I will.’ He felt in his pockets. ‘Give me tuppence, some one.’
‘Rot! Stay here, and don’t mess about in the sun.’
‘Gi’ me tuppence.’
‘I say, Beetle, you aren’t stuffy about anything, are you?’ said M‘Turk, handing over the coppers. His tone was serious, for though Stalky often, and M‘Turk occasionally, manœuvred on his own account, Beetle had never been known to do so in all the history of the confederacy.
‘No, I’m not. I’m thinking.’
‘Well, we’ll come, too,’ said Stalky, with a general’s suspicion of his aides.
‘’Don’t want you.’
‘Oh, leave him alone. He’s been taken worse with a poem,’ said M‘Turk. ‘He’ll go burbling down to the Pebble Ridge and spit it all up in the study when he comes back.’
‘Then why did he want the tuppence, Turkey? He’s gettin’ too beastly independent. Hi! There’s a bunny. No, it ain’t. It’s a cat, by Jove! You plug first.’
Twenty minutes later a boy with a straw hat at the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets, was staring at workmen as they moved about a half-finished cottage. He produced some ferocious tobacco, and was passed from the forecourt into the interior, where he asked many questions.
‘Well, let’s have your beastly epic,’ said Turkey, as they burst into the study, to find Beetle deep in Viollet-le-Duc and some drawings. ‘We’ve had no end of a lark.’
‘Epic? What epic? I’ve been down to the coastguard.’
‘No epic? Then we will slay you, O Beadle,’* sa
id Stalky, moving to the attack. ‘You’ve got something up your sleeve. I know, when you talk in that tone!’
‘Your Uncle Beetle’—with an attempt to imitate Stalky’s war-voice—‘is a Great Man.’
‘Oh no; he jolly well isn’t anything of the kind. You deceive yourself, Beetle. Scrag him, Turkey!’
‘A Great Man,’ Beetle gurgled from the floor. ‘You are futile—look out for my tie!—futile burblers. I am the Great Man. I gloat. Ouch! Hear me!’
‘Beetle, de-ah’—Stalky dropped unreservedly on Beetle’s chest—‘we love you, an’ you’re a poet. If I ever said you were a doggaroo,* I apologise; but you know as well as we do that you can’t do anything by yourself without mucking it.’
‘I’ve got a notion.’
‘And you’ll spoil the whole show if you don’t tell your Uncle Stalky. Cough it up, ducky, and we’ll see what we can do. Notion, you fat impostor—I knew you had a notion when you went away! Turkey said it was a poem.’
‘I’ve found out how houses are built. Le’ me get up. The floor-joists of one room are the ceiling-joists of the room below.’
‘Don’t be so filthy technical.’
‘Well, the man told me. The floor is laid on top of those joists—those boards on edge that we crawled over—but the floor stops at a partition. Well, if you get behind a partition, same as you did in the attic, don’t you see that you can shove anything you please under the floor between the floor-boards and the lath and plaster of the ceiling below? Look here. I’ve drawn it.’
He produced a rude sketch, sufficient to enlighten the allies. There is no part of the modern school curriculum that deals with architecture, and none of them had yet reflected whether floors and ceilings were hollow or solid. Outside his own immediate interests the boy is as ignorant as the savage he so admires; but he has also the savage’s resource.
‘I see,’ said Stalky. ‘I shoved my hand there. An’ then?’
‘An’ then… They’ve been calling us stinkers, you know. We might shove somethin’ under—sulphur, or something that stunk pretty bad—an’ stink ’em out. I know it can be done somehow.’ Beetle’s eyes turned to Stalky handling the diagrams.
‘Stinks?’ said Stalky interrogatively. Then his face grew luminous with delight. ‘By gum! I’ve got it. Horrid Stinks! Turkey!’ He leaped at the Irishman. ‘This afternoon—just after Beetle went away! She’s the very thing!’
‘Come to my arms, my beamish boy,’ carolled M‘Turk, and they fell into each other’s arms dancing. ‘Oh, frabjous day! Calloo, callay!* She will! She will!’
‘Hold on,’ said Beetle. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Dearr man! It shall, though. Oh, Artie, my pure-souled youth, let us tell our darling Reggie about Pestiferous Stink-adores.’
‘Not until after call-over. Come on!’
‘I say,’ said Orrin stiffly, as they fell into their places along the walls of the gymnasium. ‘The House are goin’ to hold another meeting.’
‘Hold away, then.’ Stalky’s mind was elsewhere.
‘It’s about you three this time.’
‘All right, give ’em my love…. Here, sir,’ and he tore down the corridor.
Gambolling like kids at play, with bounds and side—starts, with caperings and curvettings, they led the almost bursting Beetle to the rabbit-lane, and from under a pile of stones drew forth the new-slain corpse of a cat. Then did Beetle see the inner meaning of what had gone before, and lifted up his voice in thanksgiving for that the world held warriors so wise as Stalky and M‘Turk.
‘Well-nourished old lady, ain’t she?’ said Stalky. ‘How long d’you suppose it’ll take her to get a bit whiff in a confined space?’
‘Bit whiff! What a coarse brute you are!’ said M‘Turk. ‘Can’t a poor pussy-cat get under King’s dormitory floor to die without your pursuin’ her with your foul innuendoes?’
‘What did she die under the floor for?’ said Beetle, looking to the future.
‘Oh, they won’t worry about that when they find her,’ said Stalky.
‘A cat may look at a king.’ M‘Turk rolled down the bank at his own jest. ‘Pussy, you don’t know how useful you’re goin’ to be to three pure-souled, high-minded boys.’
‘They’ll have to take up the floor for her, same as they did in Number Nine when the rat croaked. Big medicine—heap big medicine!* Phew! Oh, Lord, I wish I could stop laughin’,’ said Beetle.
‘Stinks! Hi, stinks! Clammy ones!’ M‘Turk gasped as he regained his place. ‘And’—the exquisite humour of it brought them sliding down together in a tangle—‘it’s all for the honour of the House, too!’
‘An’ they’re holdin’ another meetin’—on us,’ Stalky panted, his knees in the ditch and his face in the long grass. ‘Well, let’s get the bullet out of her and hurry up. The sooner she’s bedded out the better.’
Between them they did some grisly work with a penknife; between them (ask not who buttoned her to his bosom) they took up the corpse and hastened back, Stalky arranging their plan of action at the full trot.
The afternoon sun, lying in broad patches on the bed-rugs, saw three boys and an umbrella disappear into a dormitory wall. In five minutes they returned, brushed themselves all over, washed their hands, combed their hair, and descended.
‘Are you sure you shoved her far enough under?’ said M‘Turk suddenly.
‘Hang it, man, I shoved her the full length of my arm and Beetle’s brolly. That must be about six feet. She’s bung in the middle of King’s big upper ten-bedder. Eligible central situation, I call it. She’ll stink out his chaps, and Hartopp’s and Macrea’s, when she really begins to fume. I swear your Uncle Stalky is a great man. Do you realise what a great man he is, Beetle?’
‘Well, I had the notion first, hadn’t I, only——’
‘You couldn’t do it without your Uncle Stalky, could you?’
‘They’ve been calling us stinkers for a week now,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Oh, won’t they catch it!’
‘Stinker! Yah! Stink-ah!’ rang down the corridor.
‘And she’s there,’ said Stalky, a hand on either boy’s shoulder. ‘She—is—there, gettin’ ready to surprise ’em. Presently she’ll begin to whisper to ’em in their dreams. Then she’ll whiff. Golly, how she’ll whiff! Oblige me by thinkin’ of it for two minutes.’
They went to their study in more or less of silence. There they began to laugh—laugh as only boys can. They laughed with their foreheads on the tables, or on the floor; laughed at length, curled over the backs of chairs or clinging to a bookshelf; laughed themselves limp.
And in the middle of it Orrin entered on behalf of the House.
‘Don’t mind us, Orrin; sit down. You don’t know how we respect and admire you. There’s something about your pure, high, young forehead, full of the dreams of innocent boyhood,* that’s no end fetchin’. It is, indeed.’
‘The House sent me to give you this.’ He laid a folded sheet of paper on the table and retired with an awful front.
‘It’s the resolution! Oh, read it, some one. I’m too silly-sick with laughin’ to see,’ said Beetle.
Stalky jerked it open with a precautionary sniff.
‘Phew! Phew! Listen. “The House notices with pain and contempt the attitude of indiference”—how many f’s in indifference, Beetle?’
‘Two for choice.’
‘Only one here—“adopted by the occupants of Number Five Study in relation to the insults offered to Mr. Prout’s House at the recent meeting in Number Twelve form-room, and the House hereby pass a vote of censure on the said study.” That’s all.’
‘And she bled all down my shirt, too!’ said Beetle.
‘An’ I’m catty all over,’ said M‘Turk, ‘though I washed twice.’
‘An’ I nearly broke Beetle’s brolly plantin’ her where she would blossom!’
The situation was beyond speech, but not laughter. There was some attempt that night to demonstrate against the three in their dor
mitory; so they came forth.
‘You see,’ Beetle began suavely as he loosened his braces, ‘the trouble with you is that you’re a set of unthinkin’ asses. You’ve no more brains than spidgers.* We’ve told you that heaps of times, haven’t we?’
‘We’ll give all three of you a dormitory lickin’. You always jaw at us as if you were prefects,’ cried one.
‘Oh no, you won’t,’ said Stalky, ‘because you know that if you did you’d get the worst of it sooner or later. We aren’t in any hurry. We can afford to wait for our little revenges. You’ve made howlin’ asses of yourselves, and just as soon as King gets hold of your precious resolution tomorrow you’ll find that out. If you aren’t sick an’ sorry by to-morrow night, I’ll—I’ll eat my hat.’
But or ever the dinner-bell rang the next day Prout’s were sadly aware of their error. King received stray members of that House with an exaggerated attitude of fear. Did they purpose to cause him to be dismissed from the College by unanimous resolution? What were their views concerning the government of the school, that he might hasten to give effect to them? He would not offend them for worlds; but he feared—he sadly feared—that his own House, who did not pass resolutions (but washed), might somewhat deride.
King was a happy man, and his House, basking in the favour of his smile, made that afternoon a long penance to the misled Prout’s. And Prout himself, with a dull and lowering visage, tried to think out the rights and wrongs of it all, only plunging deeper into bewilderment. Why should his House be called ‘stinkers’? Truly, it was a small thing, but he had been trained to believe that straws show which way the wind blows, and that there is no smoke without fire. He approached King in Common-room with a sense of injustice, but King was pleased to be full of airy persiflage that tide, and brilliantly danced dialectical rings round Prout.
‘Now,’ said Stalky at bedtime, making pilgrimage through the dormitories before the prefects came up, ‘now what have you got to say for yourselves? Foster, Carton, Finch, Longbridge, Marlin, Brett! I heard you chaps cat chin’ it from King—he made made hay of you—an’ all you could do was to wriggle an’ grin an’ say, “Yes, sir,” an’ “No, sir,” an’ “Oh, sir,” an’ “Please, sir”! You an’ your resolution! Urh!’
The Complete Stalky & Co Page 12
