“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’ ‘O, 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 trod 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.”
After dinner King took his house to bathe in the sea off the Pebbleridge. It was an old promise; but he wished he could have evaded it, for all Prout’s lined up by the Fives Court and cheered with intention. In his absence not less than half the school invaded the infected dormitory to draw their own conclusions. The cat had gained in the last twelve hours, but a battlefield of the fifth day could not have been so flamboyant as the spies reported.
“My word, she is doin’ herself proud,” said Stalky. “Did you ever smell anything like it? Ah, an’ she isn’t under White’s dormitory at all yet.”
“But she will be. Give her time,” said Beetle. “She’ll twine like a giddy honeysuckle. What howlin’ Lazarites they are! No house is justified in makin’ itself a stench in the nostrils of decent — ”
“High-minded, pure-souled boys. Do you burn with remorse and regret?” said McTurk, as they hastened to meet the house coming up from the sea. King had deserted it, so speech was unfettered. Round its front played a crowd of skirmishers — all houses mixed — flying, reforming, shrieking insults. On its tortured flanks marched the Hoplites, seniors hurling jests one after another — simple and primitive jests of the Stone Age. To these the three added themselves, dispassionately, with an air of aloofness, almost sadly.
“And they look all right, too,” said Stalky. “It can’t be Rattray, can it? Rattray?”
No answer.
“Rattray, dear? He seems stuffy about something or other. Look here, old man, we don’t bear any malice about your sending that soap to us last week, do we? Be cheerful, Rat. You can live this down all right. I dare say it’s only a few fags. Your house is so beastly slack, though.”
“You aren’t going back to the house, are you?” said McTurk. The victims desired nothing better. “You’ve simply no conception of the reek up there. Of course, frowzin’ as you do, you wouldn’t notice it; but, after this nice wash and the clean, fresh air, even you’d be upset. ‘Much better camp on the Burrows. We’ll get you some straw. Shall we’?” The house hurried in to the tune of “John Brown’s body,” sung by loving schoolmates, and barricaded themselves in their form-room. Straightway Stalky chalked a large cross, with “Lord, have mercy upon us,” on the door, and left King to find it.
The wind shifted that night and wafted a carrion-reek into Macrea’s dormitories; so that boys in nightgowns pounded on the locked door between the houses, entreating King’s to wash. Number Five study went to second lesson with not more than half a pound of camphor apiece in their clothing; and King, too wary to ask for explanations, gibbered a while and hurled them forth. So Beetle finished yet another poem at peace in the study.
“They’re usin’ carbolic now. Malpas told me,” said Stalky. “King thinks it’s the drains.”
“She’ll need a lot o’ carbolic,” said McTurk. “No harm tryin’, I suppose. It keeps King out of mischief.”
“I swear I thought he was goin’ to kill me when I sniffed just now. He didn’t mind Burton major sniffin’ at me the other day, though. He never stopped Alexander howlin’ ‘Stinker!’ into our form-room before — before we doctored ‘em. He just grinned,” said Stalky. “What was he frothing over you for, Beetle?”
“Aha! That, was my subtle jape. I had him on toast. You know he always jaws about the learned Lipsius.”
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 340