Stalky & Co.

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. We have 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 over that.”

“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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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’s the 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 about that when 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, 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 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’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 book-shelf; 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 McTurk, “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 dormitory; 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 the 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 resolutions to-morrow 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 favor of his smile, made that afternoon a long penance to the misled Prouts. 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 by, “now what have you got to say for yourselves? Foster, Carton, Finch, Longbridge, Marlin, Brett! I heard you chaps catchin’ it from King – he 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!”

“Oh, shut up, Stalky.”

“Not a bit of it. You’re a gaudy lot of resolutionists, you are! You’ve made a sweet mess of it. Perhaps you’ll have the decency to leave us alone next time.”

Here the house grew angry, and in many voices pointed out how this blunder would never have come to pass if Number Five study had helped them from the first.

“But you chaps are so beastly conceited, an’ – an’ you swaggered into the meetin’ as if we were a lot of idiots,” growled Orrin of the resolution.

“That’s precisely what you are! That’s what we’ve been tryin’ to hammer into your thick heads all this time,” said Stalky. “Never mind, we’ll forgive you. Cheer up. You can’t help bein’ asses, you know,” and, the enemy’s flank deftly turned, Stalky hopped into bed.

That night was the first of sorrow among the jubilant King’s. By some accident of under-floor drafts the cat did not vex the dormitory beneath which she lay, but the next one to the right; stealing on the air rather as a pale-blue sensation than as any poignant offense. But the mere adumbration of an odor is enough for the sensitive nose and clean tongue of youth. Decency demands that we draw several carbolized sheets over what the dormitory said to Mr. King and what Mr. King replied. He was genuinely proud of his house and fastidious in all that concerned their well-being. He came; he sniffed; he said things. Next morning a boy in that dormitory confided to his bosom friend, a fag of Macrea’s, that there was trouble in their midst which King would fain keep secret.

But Macrea’s boy had also a bosom friend in Prout’s, a shock-headed fag of malignant disposition, who, when he had wormed out the secret, told – told it in a high-pitched treble that rang along the corridor like a bat’s squeak.

“An’ – an’ they’ve been calling us ‘stinkers’ all this week. Why, Harland minor says they simply can’t sleep in his dormitory for the stink. Come on!”

“With one shout and with one cry” Prout’s juniors hurled themselves into the war, and through the interval between first and second lesson some fifty twelve-year-olds were embroiled on the gravel outside King’s windows to a tune whose leit-motif was the word “stinker.”

“Hark to the minute-gun at sea!” said Stalky. They were in their study collecting books for second lesson – Latin, with King. “I thought his azure brow was a bit cloudy at prayers. ‘She is comin’, sister Mary. She is – ‘”

“If they make such a row now, what will they do when she really begins to look up an’ take notice?”

“Well, no vulgar repartee, Beetle. All we want is to keep out of this row like gentlemen.”

“‘Tis but a little faded flower.’ Where’s my Horace? Look here, I don’t understand what she means by stinkin’ out Rattray’s dormitory first. We holed in under White’s, didn’t we?” asked McTurk, with a wrinkled brow.

“Skittish little thing. She’s rompin’ about all over the place, I suppose.”

“My Aunt! King’ll be a cheerful customer at second lesson. I haven’t prepared my Horace one little bit, either,” said Beetle. “Come on!”

They were outside the form-room door now. It was within five minutes of the bell, and King might arrive at any moment.

Turkey elbowed into a cohort of scuffling fags, cut out Thornton tertius (he that had been Harland’s bosom friend), and bade him tell his tale.

It was a simple one, interrupted by tears. Many of King’s house had already battered him for libel.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” McTurk cried. “He says that King’s house stinks. That’s all.”

“Stale!” Stalky shouted. “We knew that years ago, only we didn’t choose to run about shoutin’ ‘stinker.’ We’ve got some manners, ir they haven’t. Catch a fag, Turkey, and make sure of it.”

Turkey’s long arm closed on a hurried and anxious ornament of the Lower Second.

“Oh, McTurk, please let me go. I don’t stink – I swear I don’t!”

“Guilty conscience!” cried Beetle. “Who said you did?”

“What d’you make of it?” Stalky punted the small boy into Beetle’s arms.

“Snf! Snf! He does, though. I think it’s leprosy – or thrush. P’raps it’s both. Take it away.”

“Indeed, Master Beetle” – King generally came to the house-door for a minute or two as the bell rang – “we are vastly indebted to you for your diagnosis, which seems to reflect almost as much credit on the natural unwholesomeness of your mind as it does upon your pitiful ignorance of the diseases of which you discourse so glibly. We will, however, test your knowledge in other directions.”

That was a merry lesson, but, in his haste to scarify Beetle, King clean neglected to give him an imposition, and since at the same time he supplied him with many priceless adjectives for later use, Beetle was well content, and applied himself most seriously throughout third lesson (algebra with little Hartopp) to composing a poem entitled “The Lazar-house.”