Stalky & Co.

“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. “Placete, 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 Czar   With the demurest of footfalls,   Over the Kremlin’s pavement white   With 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 enough   And kerchiefwise unfold his sash,   Which – softness’ self – is yet the stuff

(Gummy! What a sentence!)

   To hold fast where a steel chain snaps   And 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 est with King.”

“He gave me that book, too,” said Beetle, licking his lips:

   “There’s a great text in Galatians,   Once you trip on it entails   Twenty-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 to us; 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 are not required 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, via King’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’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 McTurk 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 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! 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 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!”

AN UNSAVORY INTERLUDE

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 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. 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. “One of 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.”