The music-room on the top floor of Number Five was filled with the “Aladdin” company at rehearsal. Dickson Quartus, commonly known as Dick Four, was Aladdin, stage-manager, ballet-master, half the orchestra, and largely librettist, for the “book” had been rewritten and filled with local allusions. The pantomime was to be given next week, in the down-stairs study occupied by Aladdin, Abanazar, and the Emperor of China. The Slave of the Lamp, with the Princess Badroulbadour and the Widow Twankay, owned Number Five study across the same landing, so that the company could be easily assembled. The floor shook to the stamp-and-go of the ballet, while Aladdin, in pink cotton tights, a blue and tinsel jacket, and a plumed hat, banged alternately on the piano and his banjo. He was the moving spirit of the game, as befitted a senior who had passed his Army Preliminary and hoped to enter Sandhurst next spring.
Aladdin came to his own at last, Abanazar lay poisoned on the floor, the Widow Twankay danced her dance, and the company decided it would “come all right on the night.”
“What about the last song, though?” said the Emperor, a tallish, fair-headed boy with a ghost of a mustache, at which he pulled manfully. “We need a rousing old tune.”
“‘John Peel’? ‘Drink, Puppy, Drink’?” suggested Abanazar, smoothing his baggy lilac pajamas. “Pussy” Abanazar never looked more than one-half awake, but he owned a soft, slow smile which well suited the part of the Wicked Uncle.
“Stale,” said Aladdin. “Might as well have ‘Grandfather’s Clock.’ What’s that thing you were humming at prep. last night, Stalky?”
Stalky, The Slave of the Lamp, in black tights and doublet, a black silk half-mask on his forehead, whistled lazily where he lay on the top of the piano. It was a catchy music-hall tune.
Dick Four cocked his head critically, and squinted down a large red nose.
“Once more, and I can pick it up,” he said, strumming. “Sing the words.”
“Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby! Arrah, Patsy, mind the child! Wrap him in an overcoat, he’s surely going wild! Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby! just you mind the child awhile! He’ll kick and bite and cry all night! Arrah, Patsy, mind the child!”
“Rippin’! Oh, rippin’!” said Dick Four. “Only we shan’t have any piano on the night. We must work it with the banjoes—play an’ dance at the same time. You try, Tertius.”
The Emperor pushed aside his pea-green sleeves of state, and followed Dick Four on a heavy nickel-plated banjo.
“Yes, but I’m dead all this time. Bung in the middle of the stage, too,” said Abanazar.
“Oh, that’s Beetle’s biznai,” said Dick Four. “Vamp it up, Beetle. Don’t keep us waiting all night. You’ve got to get Pussy out of the light somehow, and bring us all in dancin’ at the end.”
“All right. You two play it again,” said Beetle, who, in a gray skirt and a wig of chestnut sausage-curls, set slantwise above a pair of spectacles mended with an old boot-lace, represented the Widow Twankay. He waved one leg in time to the hammered refrain, and the banjoes grew louder.
“Um! Ah! Er—‘Aladdin now has won his wife,’” he sang, and Dick Four repeated it.
“‘Your Emperor is appeased.’” Tertius flung out his chest as he delivered his line.
“Now jump up, Pussy! Say, ‘I think I’d better come to life!’ Then we all take hands and come forward: ‘We hope you’ve all been pleased.’Twiggez-vous?”
“Nous twiggons. Good enough. What’s the chorus for the final ballet? It’s four kicks and a turn,” said Dick Four.
“Oh! Er!
John Short will ring the curtain down.And ring the prompter’s bell;We hope you know before you goThat we all wish you well.”
“Rippin’! Rippin’! Now for the Widow’s scene with the Princess. Hurry up, Turkey.”
McTurk, in a violet silk skirt and a coquettish blue turban, slouched forward as one thoroughly ashamed of himself. The Slave of the Lamp climbed down from the piano, and dispassionately kicked him. “Play up, Turkey,” he said; “this is serious.” But there fell on the door the knock of authority. It happened to be King, in gown and mortar-board, enjoying a Saturday evening prowl before dinner.
“Locked doors! Locked doors!” he snapped with a scowl. “What’s the meaning of this; and what, may I ask, is the intention of this—this epicene attire?”
“Pantomime, sir. The Head gave us leave,” said Abanazar, as the only member of the Sixth concerned. Dick Four stood firm in the confidence born of well-fitting tights, but Beetle strove to efface himself behind the piano. A gray princess-skirt borrowed from a day-boy’s mother and a spotted cotton bodice unsystematically padded with imposition-paper make one ridiculous. And in other regards Beetle had a bad conscience.
“As usual!” sneered King. “Futile foolery just when your careers, such as they may be, are hanging in the balance. I see! Ah, I see! The old gang of criminals—allied forces of disorder—Corkran”—the Slave of the Lamp smiled politely—“McTurk”—the Irishman scowled—“and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs.” Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King passed them over. “Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, as it were, a poet?”
“He’s found one of ’em,” thought Beetle, noting the flush on King’s cheek-bone.
“I have just had the pleasure of reading an effusion of yours to my address, I believe—an effusion intended to rhyme. So—so you despise me, Master Gigadibs, do you? I am quite aware—you need not explain—that it was ostensibly not intended for my edification. I read it with laughter—yes, with laughter. These paper pellets of inky boys—still a boy we are, Master Gigadibs—do not disturb my equanimity.”
“Wonder which it was,” thought Beetle. He had launched many lampoons on an appreciative public ever since he discovered that it was possible to convey reproof in rhyme.
In sign of his unruffled calm, King proceeded to tear Beetle, whom he called Gigadibs, slowly asunder. From his untied shoestrings to his mended spectacles (the life of a poet at a big school is hard) he held him up to the derision of his associates—with the usual result. His wild flowers of speech—King had an unpleasant tongue—-restored him to good humor at the last. He drew a lurid picture of Beetle’s latter end as a scurrilous pamphleteer dying in an attic, scattered a few compliments over McTurk and Corkran, and, reminding Beetle that he must come up for judgment when called upon, went to Common-room, where he triumphed anew over his victims.
“And the worst of it,” he explained in a loud voice over his soup, “is that I waste such gems of sarcasm on their thick heads. It’s miles above them, I’m certain.”
“We-ell,” said the school chaplain slowly, “I don’t know what Corkran’s appreciation of your style may be, but young McTurk reads Ruskin for his amusement.”
“Nonsense! He does it to show off. I mistrust the dark Celt.”
“He does nothing of the kind. I went into their study the other night, unofficially, and McTurk was gluing up the back of four odd numbers of ‘Fors Clavigera.’”
“I don’t know anything about their private lives,” said a mathematical master hotly, “but I’ve learned by bitter experience that Number Five study are best left alone. They are utterly soulless young devils.”
He blushed as the others laughed.
But in the music-room there were wrath and bad language. Only Stalky, Slave of the Lamp, lay on the piano unmoved.
“That little swine Manders minor must have shown him your stuff. He’s always suckin’ up to King. Go and kill him,” he drawled. “Which one was it, Beetle?”
“Dunno,” said Beetle, struggling out of the skirt. “There was one about his hunting for popularity with the small boys, and the other one was one about him in hell, tellin’ the Devil he was a Balliol man. I swear both of ’em rhymed all right. By gum! P’raps Manders minor showed him both!I’llcorrect his caesuras for him.”
He disappeared down two flights of stairs, flushed a small pink and white boy in a form-room next door to King’s study, which, again, was immediately below his own, and chased him up the corridor into a form-room sacred to the revels of the Lower Third. Thence he came back, greatly disordered, to find McTurk, Stalky, and the others of the company, in his study enjoying an unlimited “brew”—coffee, cocoa, buns, new bread hot and steaming, sardine, sausage, ham-and-tongue paste, pilchards, three jams, and at least as many pounds of Devonshire cream.
“My hat!” said he, throwing himself upon the banquet. “Who stumped up for this, Stalky?” It was within a month of term end, and blank starvation had reigned in the studies for weeks.
“You,” said Stalky, serenely.
“Confound you! You haven’t been popping my Sunday bags, then?”
“Keep your hair on. It’s only your watch.”
“Watch! I lost it—weeks ago. Out on the Burrows, when we tried to shoot the old ram—the day our pistol burst.”
“It dropped out of your pocket (you’re so beastly careless, Beetle), and McTurk and I kept it for you. I’ve been wearing it for a week, and you never noticed. Took it into Bideford after dinner to-day. Got thirteen and sevenpence. Here’s the ticket.”
“Well, that’s pretty average cool,” said Abanazar behind a slab of cream and jam, as Beetle, reassured upon the safety of his Sunday trousers, showed not even surprise, much less resentment. Indeed, it was McTurk who grew angry, saying:
“You gave him the ticket, Stalky? Youpawnedit? You unmitigated beast! Why, last month you and Beetle sold mine! ’Never got a sniff of any ticket.”
“Ah, that was because you locked your trunk, and we wasted half the afternoon hammering it open. We might have pawned it if you’d behaved like a Christian, Turkey.”
“My Aunt!” said Abanazar, “you chapsarecommunists. Vote of thanks to Beetle, though.”
“That’s beastly unfair,” said Stalky, “when I took all the trouble to pawn it. Beetle never knew he had a watch. Oh, I say, Rabbits-Eggs gave me a lift into Bideford this afternoon.”
Rabbits-Eggs was the local carrier—an outcrop of the early Devonian formation. It was Stalky who had invented his unlovely name. “He was pretty average drunk, or he wouldn’t have done it. Rabbits-Eggs is a little shy of me, somehow. But I swore it waspaxbetween us, and gave him a bob. He stopped at two pubs on the way in, so he’ll be howling drunk to-night. Oh, don’t begin reading, Beetle; there’s a council of war on. What the deuce is the matter with your collar?”
“’Chivied Manders minor into the Lower Third box-room. ’Had all his beastly little friends on top of me,” said Beetle from behind a jar of pilchards and a book.
“You ass! Any fool could have told you where Manders would bunk to,” said McTurk.
“I didn’t think,” said Beetle, meekly, scooping out pilchards with a spoon.
“Course you didn’t. You never do.” McTurk adjusted Beetle’s collar with a savage tug. “Don’t drop oil all over my ‘Fors’ or I’ll scrag you!”
“Shut up, you—you Irish Biddy! ’Tisn’t your beastly ‘Fors.’ It’s one of mine.”
The book was a fat, brown-backed volume of the later Sixties, which King had once thrown at Beetle’s head that Beetle might see whence the name Gigadibs came. Beetle had quietly annexed the book, and had seen—several things. The quarter-comprehended verses lived and ate with him, as the bedropped pages showed. He removed himself from all that world, drifting at large with wondrous Men and Women, till McTurk hammered the pilchard spoon on his head and he snarled.
“Beetle! You’re oppressed and insulted and bullied by King. Don’t you feel it?”
“Let me alone! I can write some more poetry about him if I am, I suppose.”
“Mad! Quite mad!” said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. “Beetle reads an ass called Brownin’, and McTurk reads an ass called Ruskin; and—”
“Ruskin isn’t an ass,” said McTurk. “He’s almost as good as the Opium Eater. He says ‘we’re children of noble races trained by surrounding art.’ That meansme, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading, or I’ll shove a pilchard down your neck!”
“It’s two to one,” said Stalky, warningly, and Beetle closed the book, in obedience to the law under which he and his companions had lived for six checkered years.
The visitors looked on delighted. Number Five study had a reputation for more variegated insanity than the rest of the school put together; and so far as its code allowed friendship with outsiders it was polite and open-hearted to its neighbors on the same landing.
“What rot do you want now?” said Beetle.
“King! War!” said McTurk, jerking his head toward the wall, where hung a small wooden West-African war-drum, a gift to McTurk from a naval uncle.
“Then we shall be turned out of the study again,” said Beetle, who loved his flesh-pots. “Mason turned us out for—just warbling on it.” Mason was the mathematical master who had testified in Common-room.
“Warbling?—O Lord!” said Abanazar. “We couldn’t hear ourselves speak in our study when you played the infernal thing. What’s the good of getting turned out of your study, anyhow?”
“We lived in the form-rooms for a week, too,” said Beetle, tragically. “And it was beastly cold.”
“Ye-es, but Mason’s rooms were filled with rats every day we were out. It took him a week to draw the inference,” said McTurk. “He loathes rats. ’Minute he let us go back the rats stopped. Mason’s a little shy of us now, but there was no evidence.”
“Jolly well there wasn’t,” said Stalky, “when I got out on the roof and dropped the beastly things down his chimney. But, look here—question is, are our characters good enough just now to stand a study row?”
“Never mind mine,” said Beetle. “King swears I haven’t any.”
“I’m not thinking of you,” Stalky returned scornfully. “You aren’t going up for the Army, you old bat. I don’t want to be expelled—and the Head’s getting rather shy of us, too.”
“Rot!” said McTurk. “The Head never expels except for beastliness or stealing. But I forgot; you and Stalkyarethieves—regular burglars.”
The visitors gasped, but Stalky interpreted the parable with large grins.
“Well, you know, that little beast Manders minor saw Beetle and me hammerin’ McTurk’s trunk open in the dormitory when we took his watch last month. Of course Manders sneaked to Mason, and Mason solemnly took it up as a case of theft, to get even with us about the rats.”
“That just put Mason into our giddy hands,” said McTurk, blandly. “We were nice to him, because he was a new master and wanted to win the confidence of the boys. ’Pity he draws inferences, though. Stalky went to his study and pretended to blub, and told Mason he’d lead a new life if Mason would let him off this time, but Mason wouldn’t. ’Said it was his duty to report him to the Head.”
“Vindictive swine!” said Beetle. “It was all those rats! ThenIblubbed, too, and Stalky confessed that he’d been a thief in regular practice for six years, ever since he came to the school; and that I’d taught him—à laFagin. Mason turned white with joy. He thought he had us on toast.”
“Gorgeous! Gorgeous!” said Dick Four. “We never heard of this.”
“’Course not. Mason kept it jolly quiet. He wrote down all our statements on impot-paper. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t believe,” said Stalky.
“And handed it all up to the Head,withan extempore prayer. It took about forty pages,” said Beetle. “I helped him a lot.”
“And then, you crazy idiots?” said Abanazar.
“Oh, we were sent for; and Stalky asked to have the ‘depositions’ read out, and the Head knocked him spinning into a waste-paper basket. Then he gave us eight cuts apiece—welters—for—for—takin’ unheard-of liberties with a new master. I saw his shoulders shaking when we went out. Do you know,” said Beetle, pensively, “that Mason can’t look at us now in second lesson without blushing? We three stare at him sometimes till he regularly trickles. He’s an awfully sensitive beast.”
“He read ‘Eric, or Little by Little,’” said McTurk; “so we gave him ‘St. Winifred’s,orthe World of School.’ They spent all their spare time stealing at St. Winifred’s, when they weren’t praying or getting drunk at pubs. Well, that was only a week ago, and the Head’s a little bit shy of us. He called it constructive deviltry. Stalky invented it all.”
“Not the least good having a row with a master unless you can make an ass of him,” said Stalky, extended at ease on the hearth-rug. “If Mason didn’t know Number Five—well, he’s learnt, that’s all. Now, my dearly beloved ’earers”—Stalky curled his legs under him and addressed the company—“we’ve got that strong’, perseverin’ man King on our hands. He went miles out of his way to provoke a conflict.” (Here Stalky snapped down the black silk domino and assumed the air of a judge.) “He has oppressed Beetle, McTurk, and me,privatim et seriatim, one by one, as he could catch us. Butnow, he has insulted Number Five up in the music-room, and in the presence of these—these ossifers of the Ninety-third, wot look like hairdressers. Binjimin, we must make him cry ‘Capivi!’”
Stalky’s reading didnotinclude Browning or Ruskin.
“And, besides,” said McTurk, “he’s a Philistine, a basket-hanger. He wears a tartan tie. Ruskin says that any man who wears a tartan tie will, without doubt, be damned everlastingly.”
“Bravo, McTurk,” said Tertius; “I thought he was only a beast.”
“He’s that, too, of course, but he’s worse. He has a china basket with blue ribbons and a pink kitten on it, hung up in his window to grow musk in. You know when I got all that old oak carvin’ out of Bideford Church, when they were restoring it (Ruskin says that any man who’ll restore a church is an unmitigated sweep), and stuck it up here with glue? Well, King came in and wanted to know whether we’d done it with a fret-saw! Yah! He is the King of basket-hangers!”
Down went McTurk’s inky thumb over an imaginary arena full of bleeding Kings. “Placetne, child of a generous race!” he cried to Beetle.
“Well,” began Beetle, doubtfully, “he comes from Balliol, but I’m going to give the beast a chance. You see I can always make him hop with some more poetry. He can’t report me to the Head, because it makes him ridiculous. (Stalky’s quite right.) But he shall have his chance.”
Beetle opened the book on the table, ran his finger down a page, and began at random:
“Or who in Moscow toward the CzarWith the demurest of footfalls,Over the Kremlin’s pavement whiteWith serpentine and syenite,Steps with five other generals—”
“That’s no good. Try another,” said Stalky.
“Hold on a shake; I know what’s coming.” McTurk was reading over Beetle’s shoulder.
“That simultaneously take snuff,For each to have pretext enoughAnd kerchiefwise unfold his sash,Which—softness’ self—is yet the stuff
(Gummy! What a sentence!)
To hold fast where a steel chain snapsAnd leave the grand white neck no gash.
(Full stop.)”
“’Don’t understand a word of it,” said Stalky.
“More fool you! Construe,” said McTurk. “Those six bargees scragged the Czar, and left no evidence.Actum estwith King.”
“He gave me that book, too,” said Beetle, licking his lips:
“There’s a great text in Galatians,Once you trip on it entailsTwenty-nine distinct damnations,One sure if another fails.”
Then irrelevantly:
“Setebos! Setebos! and Setebos!Thinketh he liveth in the cold of the moon.”
“He’s just come in from dinner,” said Dick Four, looking through the window. “Manders minor is with him.”
“’Safest place for Manders minor just now,” said Beetle.
“Then you chaps had better clear out,” said Stalky politely to the visitors. “’Tisn’t fair to mix you up in a study row. Besides, we can’t afford to have evidence.”
“Are you going to begin at once?’ said Aladdin.
“Immediately, if not sooner,” said Stalky, and turned out the gas. “Strong, perseverin’ man—King. Make him cry ‘Capivi.’ G’way, Binjimin.”
The company retreated to their own neat and spacious study with expectant souls.
“When Stalky blows out his nostrils like a horse,” said Aladdin to the Emperor of China, “he’s on the war-path. ’Wonder what King will get.”
“Beans,” said the Emperor. “Number Five generally pays in full.”
“Wonder if I ought to take any notice of it officially,” said Abanazar, who had just remembered he was a prefect.
“It’s none of your business, Pussy. Besides, if you did, we’d have them hostile tous; and we shouldn’t be able to do any work,” said Aladdin. “They’ve begun already.”
Now that West-African war-drum had been made to signal across estuaries and deltas. Number Five was forbidden to wake the engine within earshot of the school. But a deep, devastating drone filled the passages as McTurk and Beetle scientifically rubbed its top. Anon it changed to the blare of trumpets—of savage pursuing trumpets. Then, as McTurk slapped one side, smooth with the blood of ancient sacrifice, the roar broke into short coughing howls such as the wounded gorilla throws in his native forest. These were followed by the wrath of King—three steps at a time, up the staircase, with a dry whir of the gown. Aladdin and company, listening, squeaked with excitement as the door crashed open. King stumbled into the darkness, and cursed those performers by the gods of Balliol and quiet repose.
“Turned out for a week,” said Aladdin, holding the study door on the crack. “Key to be brought down to his study in five minutes. ‘Brutes! Barbarians! Savages! Children!’ He’s rather agitated. ‘Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby,’” he sang in a whisper as he clung to the door-knob, dancing a noiseless war-dance.
King went down-stairs again, and Beetle and McTurk lit the gas to confer with Stalky. But Stalky had vanished.
“Looks like no end of a mess,” said Beetle, collecting his books and mathematical instrument case. “A week in the form-rooms isn’t any advantage to us.”
“Yes, but don’t you see that Stalky isn’t here, you owl!” said McTurk. “Take down the key, and look sorrowful. King’ll only jaw you for half an hour. I’m going to read in the lower form-room.”
“But it’s always me,” mourned Beetle.
“Wait till we see,” said McTurk, hopefully. “I don’t know any more than you do what Stalky means, but it’s something. Go down and draw King’s fire. You’re used to it.”
No sooner had the key turned in the door than the lid of the coal-box, which was also the window-seat, lifted cautiously. It had been a tight fit, even for the lithe Stalky, his head between his knees, and his stomach under his right ear. From a drawer in the table he took a well-worn catapult, a handful of buckshot, and a duplicate key of the study; noiselessly he raised the window and kneeled by it, his face turned to the road, the wind-sloped trees, the dark levels of the Burrows, and the white line of breakers falling nine-deep along the Pebbleridge. Far down the steep-banked Devonshire lane he heard the husky hoot of the carrier’s horn. There was a ghost of melody in it, as it might have been the wind in a gin-bottle essaying to sing, “It’s a way we have in the Army.”
Stalky smiled a tight-lipped smile, and at extreme range opened fire: the old horse half wheeled in the shafts.
“Where he gwaine tu?” hiccoughed Rabbits-Eggs. Another buckshot tore through the rotten canvas tilt with a vicious zipp.
“Habet!” murmured Stalky, as Rabbits-Eggs swore into the patient night, protesting that he saw the “dommed colleger” who was assaulting him.
“And so,” King was saying in a high head voice to Beetle, whom he had kept to play with before Manders minor, well knowing that it hurts a Fifth-form boy to be held up to a fag’s derision, “and so, Master Beetle, in spite of all our verses, which we are so proud of, when we presume to come into direct conflict with even so humble a representative of authority as myself, for instance, we are turned out of our studies, are we not?”
“Yes, sir,” said Beetle, with a sheepish grin on his lips and murder in his heart. Hope had nearly left him, but he clung to a well-established faith that never was Stalky so dangerous as when he was invisible.
“You arenotrequired to criticise, thank you. Turned out of our studies, we are, just as if we were no better than little Manders minor. Only inky schoolboys we are, and must be treated as such.”
Beetle pricked up his ears, for Rabbits-Eggs was swearing savagely on the road, and some of the language entered at the upper sash. King believed in ventilation. He strode to the window gowned and majestic, very visible in the gaslight.
“I zee ’un! I zee ’un!” roared Rabbits-Eggs, now that he had found a visible foe—another shot from the darkness above. “Yiss, yeou, yeou long-nosed, fower-eyed, gingy-whiskered beggar! Yeu’m tu old for such goin’s on. Aie! Poultice yeour nose, I tall ’ee! Poultice yeour long nose!”
Beetle’s heart leaped up within him. Somewhere, somehow, he knew, Stalky moved behind these manifestations. There were hope and the prospect of revenge. He would embody the suggestion about the nose in deathless verse. King threw up the window, and sternly rebuked Rabbits-Eggs. But the carrier was beyond fear or fawning. He had descended from the cart, and was stooping by the roadside.
It all fell swiftly as a dream. Manders minor raised his hand to his head with a cry, as a jagged flint cannoned on to some rich tree-calf bindings in the book-shelf. Another quoited along the writing-table. Beetle made zealous feint to stop it, and in that endeavor overturned a student’s lamp, which dripped,viaKing’s papers and some choice books, greasily on to a Persian rug. There was much broken glass on the window-seat; the china basket—McTurk’s aversion—cracked to flinders, had dropped her musk plant and its earth over the red rep cushions; Manders minor was bleeding profusely from a cut on the cheek-bone; and King, using strange words, every one of which Beetle treasured, ran forth to find the school-sergeant, that Rabbits-Eggs might be instantly cast into jail.
“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 came to be mingled 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 Casabianca, 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 McTurk, with an hysterical precis of the campaign thus far. So it was McTurk, 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 McTurk, 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.
“I bunked for the boot-cupboard the second I heard King go down-stairs. 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 McTurk. “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 McTurk 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 silkworms, 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 form crowded with small boys among their own cooking utensils, McTurk 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 silkworms, 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’sall 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 McTurk absently, as they strolled along the corridor. “Don’t think we’d better say much about King, though, do you, Stalky?”
“Notmuch. Our line is injured innocence, of course—same as when the Sergeant 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 McTurk. “But he must be a putrid ass, know, to suppose at our time o’ life we’d go and stuff birds like fags.”
“Poor old King!” said Beetle. “He’s 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!Andthe 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 realize 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, swearin’ 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 boot-lace.”
The other study hurried forward. They did not wish to be dragged into stage asides of this nature. So it was left to McTurk 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 College, and then 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!”
It was a maiden aunt of Stalky who sent him both books, with the inscription, “To dearest Artie, on his sixteenth birthday;” it was McTurk 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 McTurk 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 McTurk. “‘Corporal punishment produced on Eric the worst effects. He burnednotwith 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. McTurk wearily. One house-match is just like another, and their “ploy” of that week happened to be rabbit-shooting with saloon-pistols.
“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 honor of your house?”
They had heard that phrase till they were wearied. The “honor 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, subsidized 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 house-master; 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 McTurk.
“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, an’ 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 McTurk, 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 awf’ly 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,” McTurk 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 Pebbleridge 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 crowd, flannelled, 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. “Oneof you was that thing called a water-funk. 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 McTurk 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 honor 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 McTurk.
“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.Wehave a prejudice in favor of washing. Go on, Beetle—from ‘jugurtha tamen’—and, if you can, avoid the more flagrant forms of guessing.”
Prout’s house was furious because Macrea’s and Hartopp’s houses joined King’s to insult them. They called a house-meeting after dinner—an excited and angry meeting of all save the prefects, whose dignity, though they sympathized, 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 McTurk, 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 will gloat, too. Besides, that resolution of Orrin’s is chock-full of bad grammar, and King’ll gloat overthat.”
“I thought you an’ Beetle would put it right, an’—an’ we’d post it in the corridor,” said the composer meekly.
“Par 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 McTurk. “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. Macrea’s house lay next to Prout’s, King’s next to Macrea’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 McTurk. “Hi! You’ll stick if you don’t take care.”
Richards backed puffing.
“I can’t rache un. Yiss, ’tess a turncock, Muster McTurk. 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.Ican’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 down-stairs 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.” McTurk 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 keepcavé.”
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 struggling 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 McTurk.
“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 water-works.”
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 French woman 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 out that, 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 McTurk, handing over the coppers. His tone was serious, for though Stalky often, and McTurk occasionally, manoeuvred 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 McTurk. “He’ll go burbling down to the Pebbleridge 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 Beetle,” said Stalky, moving to the attack. “You’ve got something up your sleeve.Iknow, 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. “Youare 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 apologize; 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’sthe very thing!”
“Come to my arms, my beamish boy,” caroled McTurk, 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 Stinkadores.”
“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.
Gamboling like kids at play, with bounds and sidestarts, with caperings and curvetings, 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 McTurk.
“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 McTurk. “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 aboutthatwhen they find her,” said Stalky.
“A cat may look at a king.” McTurk 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!” McTurk gasped as he regained his place. “And”—the exquisite humor of it brought them sliding down together in a tangle—“it’s all for the honor of the house, too!”
“An’ they’re holdin’ another meeting—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 emerged, brushed themselves all over, washed their hands, combed their hair, and descended.
“Are you sure you shoved her far enough under?” said McTurk 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,Icall 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 realize 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 McTurk. “Oh,won’tthey 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 book-shelf; laughed themselves limp.