Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (858 page)

The King of Coomassie shook his head gingerly. It was difficult for him to keep his cap on his matted hair.

‘Never mind. I’ll get you at the stalk.’ Then Stalky in turn placed Turkey and Dick. They fired.

“Heard something that time,’ said Dick appreciatively. Turkey had raised his left elbow, knowing that his pistol threw low.

Beetle took the field of honour without parade. His first shot was well to the left.

‘Your man is in front of ye,’ said M’Turk grimly. ‘Reload as ye stand.’

‘Now
you pay for Mandrill!’ Dick shouted. But on the ‘Fire’ Beetle blazed skyward, which, with that uncertain sort of ammunition and by the help of a passing gust, was just enough to sling the charge well forward. The King of Ashantee rubbed his cheek and swore in purest English.

‘Blood!’ Turkey paced in. “Tip of Dick’s ear bleedin’.’

‘Pimple! Pimple!’ roared the King. ‘I’ve been scratching it for weeks.’

Turkey dabbed with a handkerchief and held up the evidence.

‘Blood! Honour satisfied. ‘Let-off for you, Beetle!’

But Beetle was already treading his own conception of a reel to the chant of: Tve drilled the Mandrill—the Mandrill—the Mandrill!’

‘Bunk!’ Stalky warned him. ‘Run, you ass!’ The King of Ashantee was gnashing his teeth and reloading with intent. ‘We’ll start the stalk now. I’m on your side, Beetle.’

‘Are ye? Then I’m on Dick’s,’ said M’Turk, wheeling, and fired into the skirts of the flying overcoat.

Beetle was out of that hollow and across several others before he found a ragged bunker—the old ‘Cockscomb’— whose crest had been undercut by rabbits. Here he lay down and reloaded, resolved to sell his life dear, but not to go looking for many buyers. He knew what Stalky could be as an ally, and it worried him; but, from broken words that rode the gale, it sounded as though Stalky must have stalked Dick Four, and so committed himself to a definite policy. Beetle’s was to reach, as soon as might be, those very old red-coated men whom he had so often scorned. Deeply as they loathed his likes, they would not allow him to be peppered in their fairway. He crawled unfastidiously to the next bunker furthest from the sea, descended its face, and disturbed an old ewe. She bolted up wind, and brought down on him out of a side-ravine Dick Four, wrestling with a jammed pistol and roaring like a gorilla. Just when Beetle—as he ever afterwards explained— was about to blow his silly brains out, Dick scooped up tons of sand, and tossed them into the blast. Beetle ate of it what he could not avoid, rubbed enough of the rest out of his spectacles and eyes to see a little, and ploughed on, the skirts of his unbuttoned overcoat ever being blown forward between the legs. Renewed poppings and yells from the rear indicated either that he had been ‘decreed a rabbit’
in absentia,
or that civil war had broken out. But, like unthinking youth, he did not look back.

He arrived, well on all fours, at the lip of a big crater known in those pure days as The Pit. Directly beneath him stood an ancient in a red coat, scrabbling, like King David, with a niblick. While Beetle, on both elbows, removed his spectacles to get a little more damp sand off them, the unkind wind hove his coat-tails clean over his head, and plunged him in darkness. Almost at the same instant he felt a pain behind, which urged him to plunge out of it.... And thus it was that this innocent boy, with life’s golden promise before him, and that withered zealot, trifling blasphemously through his few remaining days, met all of a heap, on much the same selection of
mots justes
—cries of lost souls and defeated generals.

‘Blast you! Who
are
you?’ the elder began; but Beetle, his spectacles in his hand, disengaged and fled on—he felt at the moment that he could run for ever—to the protection of the fairway. Here, as he cleaned and reshipped his glasses, he realised that his personal grief was now more like the dying memory of an efficient ground-ash than any portent of fatal haemorrhage. Presently, life, as it tingled through his young system, seemed rather prosperous. At any rate, he had drilled the Mandrill; escaped further active service; the old goat in The Pit had not seen him with his spectacles on, which ought to be a perfect alibi; and a brew of brews awaited him. He returned towards Coll.

A sobbing voice hailed, and Stalky ranged or, rather, tottered alongside. Without turning his head, Beetle asked him what he had done
that
for.

‘Because you deserted! You left me to fight a rearguard action alone, you cad!’ Then, clinging to Beetle’s cold shoulder: ‘I didn’t mean to. I
swear
I didn’t till your coat blew up! Then I couldn’t help it. Wasn’t it a beauty? Did it sting much? Never mind! Turkey’s got it in the ankle—point-blank. He left his silly foot stickin’ out of some rushes and Dick thought it was you! Turkey’s a bit wrathy.’

Turkey limped up with Dick. They were obviously estranged. Dick was talking about ‘lousy Fenians,’ and Turkey’s nose was high in air.

‘Well?’ said Beetle, a thought comforted. Stalky continued:

‘Turkey got my cap. I stuck it up to draw his fire. Then he got me on the hand!’ A dirty rag round a palm was proof. ‘Oh, but before that, I got Dick where I got you, but
much
tighter. Turkey changed sides after Dick plugged him. That was really why I had to plug
you—
to make things fair. ‘See, you old burbler?’

‘But,’ Dick was pleading with Turkey, ‘how the devil was I to know you were wearing Beetle’s ungodly socks? I couldn’t
smell
’em in this wind, could I? It was your fault for baggin”em!’

Beetle chortled. There seemed to be some justice in things after all.

‘I hope Turkey plugged you, you murderer,’ he rounded on Dick.

‘Only once.’ Dick rubbed his neck again. He might have lightly brushed a bough of gorse.

‘That’s nothing.’ Beetle looked pointedly at his own salient work on the rim of the ear.

‘Yours was an infernal fluke,’ said Dick hotly. ‘You were in a blue funk all the time,—thou—thou noisome varlet.’

‘Thou notch-eared knave,’ was the reply.

But the crisis had passed, and Dick beamed; he, too, had a sound taste in epithets.

They were going through pockets for over-looked cartridges (one has to explain so much if any are found), and throwing them into Goosey Pool, when, out of the autumn dusk, a robin-like old man hopped, and almost pecked, at Turkey. The others delicately walked on; Beetle for once leading.

‘You were the boy who swore at me just now,’ the stranger began.

Turkey took no notice, except that his nose went up a little more.

‘I was in a bunker, and you knocked into me. Using filthy language, sir!’

‘An’ what were ye doin’ in the bunker? An’ which bunker was it?’ Turkey spoke like all the wearied and disbelieving magistracy of the Ireland of those days.

‘The Pit,’ said the Ancient, being a golfer—which is to say a monomaniac.

Turkey came to life with a jerk.

‘Bunkered? In The Pit? With this wind blowin’? Goin’ or comin’ ye could
nott!’

‘But I tell you I
did.’
The other seemed to have forgotten his original grievance.

‘Ah, then, ye’re not worth a curse—an’ never will be.’

Turkey rejoined his companions, to whom Beetle was giving a theory of cause and effect. The four linked arms and swept up the old sunken lane to Coll. Honour was satisfied; there remained but their own young appetites. When, just before last lesson, Beetle connected the rubber tube from the gas-bracket to their dear little stove—turning the jet down to that exact degree which will bring milk-cocoa to perfection in one hour and a half—and counted the potted ham-and-tongue jars, the chicken-and-ham sausage, the sardine-tins, the three jams, the condensed milk, the two pounds of Devonshire cream, and the whole pound of real butter, he would not have changed his lot with kings. Nor, as he went to the form-room, did it strike him that a spare, accurately dressed person standing in the Head’s porch had anything to do with the old goat he had heard, rather than seen, cursing in The Pit.

Ten minutes before the close of last lesson (their mouths were watering already), Foxy knocked and laid a well-known slip on King’s desk.

‘The Head to see,’ King read, and paused to let suspense soak in. ‘Ah! Only our usual three—
plus
Dickson Quartus. This I fear, portends tragedy. All four of you—
at
once—
if
you please!’

They agreed that, for the first time in their knowledge of him, the Head must have been drunk. Nothing else explained his performance.

‘The way he
talked
was enough,’ said Dick Four. ‘All the studies brew, and he knows it. But he went on as if he’d heard of it for the first time.’

‘At the top of his voice, too. When Bates is wrathy, he whispers. But he shouted like Rabbits-Eggs. That proves it,’ said Stalky.

‘Then, all that putrid rot about “the criminality” of havin’ a tube.
All
the studies have ‘em. He said it was theft—of gas!
There
you are!’ Dick continued.

‘An’ his rot about ‘gorgin’.’ He
knows
we can’t live on the muck they give us. He—he said brewin’ was “an insult to the bountiful provision made for us by the authorities.” Mad! Ravin’ mad!’ This was Beetle’s kinder judgment.

Turkey scratched an ankle and spoke—

‘Authority! He’s never said a word about any authority except himself since I’ve been here.’

‘Then you think he’s tight, too?’

‘I do not. If he’d drunk enough to make him talk like that, he’d have been lyin’ on the floor to say it.’

‘Anyhow, he licked like hell,’ Beetle went on.

‘He did
nott,
either. His arm was never shoulder-high once.’

‘But if he wasn’t tight, what made him count the cuts aloud? No one does that, except Justus Prout,’ said Stalky.

Dick Four pointed at the untouched table.

‘He hasn’t confiscated the grub. Better eat it and have Pussy and Tertius in for cover.’

‘Better make sure first,’ said Beetle. 7 don’t want the Head japin’ with me again just now. I’ll ask Foxy.’

He found him in the gym as usual.

‘No orders about it at all,’ said the Sergeant, and there was an unfathomable twinkle in his little red eye.

But Turkey sat on the window-seat asking of nobody:

‘For what would he be roarin’ like that? The man was out of his nature, I tell ye.’

Years—some years—later, Captain ‘Pussy’ Abanazar, R.E., seconded for duty in the Indian Political, at home on leave, was invited by the Head to spend a few days of the Easters at Coll., in a mild, early, Devon spring. Half a dozen of the Army Class stayed up to read for near exams, and perhaps as many juniors whose people were abroad. When the last shouting brake-load had left, and emptiness filled the universe, the Head turned into a most delightful and comprehending uncle, so that that forlorn band remembered those Easters through the rest of their lives. And when Captain Abanazar rolled in, and was to each of them equally a demi-god and an elder brother of the right sort (he tipped like Croesus), their caps overflowed.

One soft evening in the Head’s private study, with the sea churning up old memories all along the Ridge, Pussy asked:

‘Bates Sahib, do you remember lickin’ Number Five and Dick Four for brewin’ in—’ He gave the year and added: ‘My first term as a sub, you know.’

The Head smiled and nodded.

‘And giving ‘em a pi-jaw?’

‘Pi-jaws aren’t my line. There
was
a jaw, though. Why? What did they think about it?’

‘They didn’t understand it at all. I believe they thought you were tight.’

‘Would I had been! But it was worse. It was cowardice, Pussy—it was bowing down in the House of Rimmon. And they noticed what I said?’

‘I should say they did!’

‘No wonder! We had a Board of Directors in those days— retired Colonels—martial men with the habit of command. I’m glad I never had that.’

‘Yes, we all deplored your lack of it, Sir.’

‘Don’t misunderstand me. They were excellent men. I’m sure we were all deeply indebted to them. One of the very best was a Colonel—Coll—Con—wait a minute—Curthwen. But he’s in Abraham’s bosom now. (Awkward bedfellow!) He knew about education and the prices of things.
So
useful at Board meetings. I always moved the vote of thanks to him. He was exceptionally nice to me. Advice—the soundest advice. You see, he knew about—er—everything except, yes, golf. He had to come down here to learn that. I only dared go round with him once. I enjoyed it too much. Little runny-nosed Northam caddies told him where to put his horrible feet. Ah! When he came down here, you see, his evenings were quite free, and he could drop in on me at any time, and—er—offer a few suggestions.’

Pussy shuddered all over; and he was not of the smaller makes.