Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘Well, you yourself admitted just now that a mouse was beneath the occasion,’ the Head answered.

  ‘It was.’ Mr. King did not love Mr. Lidgett. ‘It should have been a rat. But — but — I hate to plead it — it’s the lad’s first offence.’

  ‘Could you have damned him more completely, King?’

  ‘Hm. What is the penalty?’ said King, in retreat, but keeping up a rear-guard action.

  ‘Only my usual few lines of Virgil to be shown up by tea-time.’

  The Head’s eyes turned slightly to that end of the corridor where Mullins, Captain of the Games (‘Pot,’ ‘old Pot,’ or ‘Potiphar’ Mullins), was pinning up the usual Wednesday notice — ’Big, Middle, and Little Side Football — A to K, L to Z, 3 to 4.45 P.M.’

  You cannot write out the Head’s usual few (which means five hundred) Latin lines and play football for one hour and three-quarters between the hours of 1.30 and 5 P.M. Winton had evidently no intention of trying to do so, for he hung about the corridor with a set face and an uneasy foot. Yet it was law in the school, compared with which that of the Medes and Persians was no more than a non-committal resolution, that any boy, outside the First Fifteen, who missed his football for any reason whatever, and had not a written excuse, duly signed by competent authority to explain his absence, would receive not less than three strokes with a ground-ash from the Captain of the Games, generally a youth between seventeen and eighteen years, rarely under eleven stone (‘Pot’ was nearer thirteen), and always in hard condition.

  King knew without inquiry that the Head had given Winton no such excuse.

  ‘But he is practically a member of the First Fifteen. He has played for it all this term,’ said King. ‘I believe his Cap should have arrived last week.’

  ‘His Cap has not been given him. Officially, therefore, he is naught. I rely on old Pot.’

  ‘But Mullins is Winton’s study-mate,’ King persisted.

  Pot Mullins and Pater Winton were cousins and rather close friends.

  ‘That will make no difference to Mullins — or Winton, if I know ‘em,’ said the Head.

  ‘But — but,’ King played his last card desperately, ‘I was going to recommend Winton for extra sub-prefect in my House, now Carton has gone.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the Head. ‘Why not? He will be excellent by tea-time, I hope.’

  At that moment they saw Mr. Lidgett, tripping down the corridor, waylaid by Winton.

  ‘It’s about that mouse-business at mechanical drawing,’ Winton opened, swinging across his path.

  ‘Yes, yes, highly disgraceful,’ Mr. Lidgett panted.

  ‘I know it was,’ said Winton. ‘It — it was a cad’s trick because — ’

  ‘Because you knew I couldn’t give you more than fifty lines,’ said Mr. Lidgett.

  ‘Well, anyhow I’ve come to apologise for it.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Lidgett, and added, for he was a kindly man, ‘I think that shows quite right feeling. I’ll tell the Head at once I’m satisfied.’

  ‘No — no!’ The boy’s still unmended voice jumped from the growl to the squeak. ‘I didn’t mean that! I — I did it on principle. Please don’t — er — do anything of that kind.’

  Mr. Lidgett looked him up and down and, being an artist, understood.

  ‘Thank you, Winton,’ he said. ‘This shall be between ourselves.’

  ‘You heard?’ said King, indecent pride in his voice.

  ‘Of course. You thought he was going to get Lidgett to beg him off the impot.’

  King denied this with so much warmth that the Head laughed and King went away in a huff.

  ‘By the way,’ said the Head, ‘I’ve told Winton to do his lines in your form-room — not in his study.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said King over his shoulder, for the Head’s orders had saved Winton and Mullins, who was doing extra Army work in the study, from an embarrassing afternoon together.

  An hour later, King wandered into his still form-room as though by accident. Winton was hard at work.

  ‘Aha!’ said King, rubbing his hands. ‘This does not look like games, Winton. Don’t let me arrest your facile pen. Whence this sudden love for Virgil?’

  ‘Impot from the Head, sir, for that mouse-business this morning.’

  ‘Rumours thereof have reached us. That was a lapse on your part into Lower Thirdery which I don’t quite understand.’

  The ‘tump-tump’ of the puntabouts before the sides settled to games came through the open window. Winton, like his House-Master, loved fresh air. Then they heard Paddy Vernon, sub-prefect on duty, calling the roll in the field and marking defaulters. Winton wrote steadily. King curled himself up on a desk, hands round knees. One would have said that the man was gloating over the boy’s misfortune, but the boy understood.

  ‘Dis te minorem quod geris imperas,’ King quoted presently. ‘It is necessary to bear oneself as lower than the local gods — even than drawing-masters who are precluded from effective retaliation. I do wish you’d tried that mouse-game with me, Pater.’

  Winton grinned; then sobered ‘It was a cad’s trick, sir, to play on Mr. Lidgett.’ He peered forward at the page he was copying.

  ‘Well, “the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost” — ’ King stopped himself. ‘Why do you goggle like an owl? Hand me the Mantuan and I’ll dictate. No matter. Any rich Virgilian measures will serve. I may peradventure recall a few.’ He began:

  ‘Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento

  Hae tibi erunt artes pacisque imponere morem,

  Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

  There you have it all, Winton. Write that out twice and yet once again.’

  For the next forty minutes, with never a glance at the book, King paid out the glorious hexameters (and King could read Latin as though it were alive), Winton hauling them in and coiling them away behind him as trimmers in a telegraph-ship’s hold coil away deep-sea cable. King broke from the Aeneid to the Georgics and back again, pausing now and then to translate some specially loved line or to dwell on the treble-shot texture of the ancient fabric. He did not allude to the coming interview with Mullins except at the last, when he said, ‘I think at this juncture, Pater, I need not ask you for the precise significance of atqui sciebat quae sibi barbarus tortor.’

  The ungrateful Winton flushed angrily, and King loafed out to take five o’clock call-over, after which he invited little Hartopp to tea and a talk on chlorine-gas. Hartopp accepted the challenge like a bantam, and the two went up to King’s study about the same time as Winton returned to the form-room beneath it to finish his lines.

  Then half a dozen of the Second Fifteen, who should have been washing, strolled in to condole with ‘Pater’ Winton, whose misfortune and its consequences were common talk. No one was more sincere than the long, red-headed, knotty-knuckled ‘Paddy’ Vernon, but, being a careless animal, he joggled Winton’s desk.

  ‘Curse you for a silly ass!’ said Winton. ‘Don’t do that.’

  No one is expected to be polite while under punishment, so Vernon, sinking his sub-prefectship, replied peacefully enough:

  ‘Well, don’t be wrathy, Pater.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Winton. ‘Get out! This ain’t your House form-room.’

  ‘‘Form-room don’t belong to you. Why don’t you go to your own study?’ Vernon replied.

  ‘Because Mullins is there waitin’ for the victim,’ said Stalky delicately, and they all laughed. ‘You ought to have shaken that mouse out of your trouser-leg, Pater. That’s the way I did in my youth. Pater’s revertin’ to his second childhood. Never mind, Pater, we all respect you and your future caree-ah.’

  Winton, still writhing, growled. Vernon leaning on the desk somehow shook it again. Then he laughed.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ Winton asked.

  ‘I was only thinkin’ of you being sent up to take a lickin’ from Pot. I swear I don’t think it’s fair. You’ve never shirked a game in your life,
and you’re as good as in the First Fifteen already. Your Cap ought to have been delivered last week, oughtn’t it?’

  It was law in the school that no man could by any means enjoy the privileges and immunities of the First Fifteen till the black velvet cap with the gold tassel, made by dilatory Exeter outfitters, had been actually set on his head. Ages ago, a large-built and unruly Second Fifteen had attempted to change this law, but the prefects of that age were still larger, and the lively experiment had never been repeated.

  ‘Will you,’ said Winton very slowly, ‘kindly mind your own damned business, you cursed, clumsy, fat-headed fool?’

  The form-room was as silent as the empty field in the darkness outside. Vernon shifted his feet uneasily.

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t like to take a lickin’ from Pot,’ he said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Winton asked, as he paged the sheets of lines with hands that shook.

  ‘No, I shouldn’t,’ said Vernon, his freckles growing more distinct on the bridge of his white nose.

  ‘Well, I’m going to take it’ — Winton moved clear of the desk as he spoke. ‘But you’re going to take a lickin’ from me first.’ Before any one realised it, he had flung himself neighing against Vernon. No decencies were observed on either side, and the rest looked on amazed. The two met confusedly, Vernon trying to do what he could with his longer reach; Winton, insensible to blows, only concerned to drive his enemy into a corner and batter him to pulp. This he managed over against the fire-place, where Vernon dropped half-stunned. ‘Now I’m going to give you your lickin’,’ said Winton. ‘Lie there till I get a ground-ash and I’ll cut you to pieces. If you move, I’ll chuck you out of the window.’ He wound his hands into the boy’s collar and waistband, and had actually heaved him half off the ground before the others with one accord dropped on his head, shoulders, and legs. He fought them crazily in an awful hissing silence. Stalky’s sensitive nose was rubbed along the floor; Beetle received a jolt in the wind that sent him whistling and crowing against the wall; Perowne’s forehead was cut, and Malpass came out with an eye that explained itself like a dying rainbow through a whole week.

  ‘Mad! Quite mad!’ said Stalky, and for the third time wriggled back to Winton’s throat. The door opened and King came in, Hartopp’s little figure just behind him. The mound on the floor panted and heaved but did not rise, for Winton still squirmed vengefully. ‘Only a little play, sir,’ said Perowne. ‘‘Only hit my head against a form.’ This was quite true.

  ‘Oh,’ said King. ‘Dimovit obstantes propinquos. You, I presume, are the populus delaying Winton’s return to — Mullins, eh?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Stalky behind his claret-coloured handkerchief. ‘We’re the maerentes amicos.’

  ‘Not bad! You see, some of it sticks after all,’ King chuckled to Hartopp, and the two masters left without further inquiries.

  The boys sat still on the now-passive Winton.

  ‘Well,’ said Stalky at last, ‘of all the putrid he-asses, Pater, you are the — ’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m awfully sorry,’ Winton began, and they let him rise. He held out his hand to the bruised and bewildered Vernon. ‘Sorry, Paddy. I — I must have lost my temper. I — I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’

  ‘‘Fat lot of good that’ll do my face at tea,’ Vernon grunted. ‘Why couldn’t you say there was something wrong with you instead of lamming out like a lunatic? Is my lip puffy?’

  ‘Just a trifle. Look at my beak! Well, we got all these pretty marks at footer — owin’ to the zeal with which we played the game,’ said Stalky, dusting himself. ‘But d’you think you’re fit to be let loose again, Pater? ‘Sure you don’t want to kill another sub-prefect? I wish I was Pot. I’d cut your sprightly young soul out.’

  ‘I s’pose I ought to go to Pot now,’ said Winton.

  ‘And let all the other asses see you lookin’ like this! Not much. We’ll all come up to Number Five Study and wash off in hot water. Beetle, you aren’t damaged. Go along and light the gas-stove.’

  ‘There’s a tin of cocoa in my study somewhere,’ Perowne shouted after him. ‘Rootle round till you find it, and take it up.’

  Separately, by different roads, Vernon’s jersey pulled half over his head, the boys repaired to Number Five Study. Little Hartopp and King, I am sorry to say, leaned over the banisters of King’s landing and watched.

  ‘Ve-ry human,’ said little Hartopp. ‘Your virtuous Winton, having got himself into trouble, takes it out of my poor old Paddy. I wonder what precise lie Paddy will tell about his face.’

  ‘But surely you aren’t going to embarrass him by asking?’ said King.

  ‘Your boy won,’ said Hartopp.

  ‘To go back to what we were discussing,’ said King quickly, ‘do you pretend that your modern system of inculcating unrelated facts about chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies by the time the boys grow up, can have any real bearing on education — even the low type of it that examiners expect?’

  ‘I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?’

  ‘Dead, forsooth!’ King fairly danced. ‘The only living tongue on earth! Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!’

  ‘And at the end of seven years — how often have I said it?’ Hartopp went on, — ’seven years of two hundred and twenty days of six hours each, your victims go away with nothing, absolutely nothing, except, perhaps, if they’ve been very attentive, a dozen — no, I’ll grant you twenty — one score of totally unrelated Latin tags which any child of twelve could have absorbed in two terms.’

  ‘But — but can’t you realise that if our system brings later — at any rate — at a pinch — a simple understanding — grammar and Latinity apart — a mere glimpse of the significance (foul word!) of, we’ll say, one Ode of Horace, one twenty lines of Virgil, we’ve got what we poor devils of ushers are striving after?’

  ‘And what might that be?’ said Hartopp.

  ‘Balance, proportion, perspective — life. Your scientific man is the unrelated animal — the beast without background. Haven’t you ever realised that in your atmosphere of stinks?’

  ‘Meantime you make them lose life for the sake of living, eh?’

  ‘Blind again, Hartopp! I told you about Paddy’s quotation this morning. (But he made probrosis a verb, he did!) You yourself heard young Corkran’s reference to maerentes amicos. It sticks — a little of it sticks among the barbarians.’

  ‘Absolutely and essentially Chinese,’ said little Hartopp, who, alone of the common-room, refused to be outfaced by King. ‘But I don’t yet understand how Paddy came to be licked by Winton. Paddy’s supposed to be something of a boxer.’

  ‘Beware of vinegar made from honey,’ King replied. ‘Pater, like some other people, is patient and long-suffering, but he has his limits. The Head is oppressing him damnably, too. As I pointed out, the boy has practically been in the First Fifteen since term began.’

  ‘But, my dear fellow, I’ve known you give a boy an impot and refuse him leave off games, again and again.’

  ‘Ah, but that was when there was real need to get at some oaf who couldn’t be sensitised in any other way. Now, in our esteemed Head’s action I see nothing but — ’

  The conversation from this point does not concern us.

  Meantime Winton, very penitent and especially polite towards Vernon, was being cheered with cocoa in Number Five Study. They had some difficulty in stemming the flood of his apologies. He himself pointed out to Vernon that he had attacked a sub-prefect for no reason whatever, and, therefore, deserved official punishment.

  ‘I can’t think what was the matter with me to-day,’ he mourned. ‘Ever since that blasted mouse-business — ’

  ‘Well, then, don’t think,’ said Stalky. ‘Or do you want Paddy to make a row about it before all the school?’

  Here Vernon was understood to say that he would see Winton and all the school somewhere else.r />
  ‘And if you imagine Perowne and Malpass and me are goin’ to give evidence at a prefects’ meeting just to soothe your beastly conscience, you jolly well err,’ said Beetle. ‘I know what you did.’

  ‘What?’ croaked Pater, out of the valley of his humiliation.

  ‘You went Berserk. I’ve read all about it in Hypatia.’

  ‘What’s “going Berserk”?’ Winton asked.

  ‘Never you mind,’ was the reply. ‘Now, don’t you feel awfully weak and seedy?’

  ‘I am rather tired,’ said Winton, sighing.

  ‘That’s what you ought to be. You’ve gone Berserk and pretty soon you’ll go to sleep. But you’ll probably be liable to fits of it all your life,’ Beetle concluded. ‘‘Shouldn’t wonder if you murdered some one some day.’

  ‘Shut up — you and your Berserks!’ said Stalky. ‘Go to Mullins now and get it over, Pater.’

  ‘I call it filthy unjust of the Head,’ said Vernon. ‘Anyhow, you’ve given me my lickin’, old man. I hope Pot’ll give you yours.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry — awfully sorry,’ was Winton’s last word.

  It was the custom in that consulship to deal with games’ defaulters between five o’clock call-over and tea. Mullins, who was old enough to pity, did not believe in letting boys wait through the night till the chill of the next morning for their punishments. He was finishing off the last of the small fry and their excuses when Winton arrived.

  ‘But, please, Mullins’ — this was Babcock tertius, a dear little twelve-year-old mother’s darling — ’I had an awful hack on the knee. I’ve been to the Matron about it and she gave me some iodine. I’ve been rubbing it in all day. I thought that would be an excuse off.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at it,’ said the impassive Mullins. ‘That’s a shin-bruise — about a week old. Touch your toes. I’ll give you the iodine.’