Stalky & Co.. Rudyard Kipling

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СКАЧАТЬ he was a Balliol man. I swear both of ‘em rhymed all right. By gum! P’raps Manders minor showed him both! I’ll correct his caesuras for him.”

      He disappeared down two flights of stairs, flushed a small pink and white boy in a form-room next door to King’s study, which, again, was immediately below his own, and chased him up the corridor into a form-room sacred to the revels of the Lower Third. Thence he came back, greatly disordered, to find McTurk, Stalky, and the others of the company, in his study enjoying an unlimited “brew” – coffee, cocoa, buns, new bread hot and steaming, sardine, sausage, ham-and-tongue paste, pilchards, three jams, and at least as many pounds of Devonshire cream.

      “My hat!” said he, throwing himself upon the banquet. “Who stumped up for this, Stalky?” It was within a month of term end, and blank starvation had reigned in the studies for weeks.

      “You,” said Stalky, serenely.

      “Confound you! You haven’t been popping my Sunday bags, then?”

      “Keep your hair on. It’s only your watch.”

      “Watch! I lost it – weeks ago. Out on the Burrows, when we tried to shoot the old ram – the day our pistol burst.”

      “It dropped out of your pocket (you’re so beastly careless, Beetle), and McTurk and I kept it for you. I’ve been wearing it for a week, and you never noticed. Took it into Bideford after dinner to-day. Got thirteen and sevenpence. Here’s the ticket.”

      “Well, that’s pretty average cool,” said Abanazar behind a slab of cream and jam, as Beetle, reassured upon the safety of his Sunday trousers, showed not even surprise, much less resentment. Indeed, it was McTurk who grew angry, saying:

      “You gave him the ticket, Stalky? You pawned it? You unmitigated beast! Why, last month you and Beetle sold mine! ‘Never got a sniff of any ticket.”

      “Ah, that was because you locked your trunk, and we wasted half the afternoon hammering it open. We might have pawned it if you’d behaved like a Christian, Turkey.”

      “My Aunt!” said Abanazar, “you chaps are communists. Vote of thanks to Beetle, though.”

      “That’s beastly unfair,” said Stalky, “when I took all the trouble to pawn it. Beetle never knew he had a watch. Oh, I say, Rabbits-Eggs gave me a lift into Bideford this afternoon.”

      Rabbits-Eggs was the local carrier – an outcrop of the early Devonian formation. It was Stalky who had invented his unlovely name. “He was pretty average drunk, or he wouldn’t have done it. Rabbits-Eggs is a little shy of me, somehow. But I swore it was pax between us, and gave him a bob. He stopped at two pubs on the way in, so he’ll be howling drunk to-night. Oh, don’t begin reading, Beetle; there’s a council of war on. What the deuce is the matter with your collar?”

      “‘Chivied Manders minor into the Lower Third box-room. ‘Had all his beastly little friends on top of me,” said Beetle from behind a jar of pilchards and a book.

      “You ass! Any fool could have told you where Manders would bunk to,” said McTurk.

      “I didn’t think,” said Beetle, meekly, scooping out pilchards with a spoon.

      “Course you didn’t. You never do.” McTurk adjusted Beetle’s collar with a savage tug. “Don’t drop oil all over my ‘Fors’ or I’ll scrag you!”

      “Shut up, you – you Irish Biddy! ‘Tisn’t your beastly ‘Fors.’ It’s one of mine.”

      The book was a fat, brown-backed volume of the later Sixties, which King had once thrown at Beetle’s head that Beetle might see whence the name Gigadibs came. Beetle had quietly annexed the book, and had seen – several things. The quarter-comprehended verses lived and ate with him, as the bedropped pages showed. He removed himself from all that world, drifting at large with wondrous Men and Women, till McTurk hammered the pilchard spoon on his head and he snarled.

      “Beetle! You’re oppressed and insulted and bullied by King. Don’t you feel it?”

      “Let me alone! I can write some more poetry about him if I am, I suppose.”

      “Mad! Quite mad!” said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. “Beetle reads an ass called Brownin’, and McTurk reads an ass called Ruskin; and – ”

      “Ruskin isn’t an ass,” said McTurk. “He’s almost as good as the Opium Eater. He says ‘we’re children of noble races trained by surrounding art.’ That means me, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading, or I’ll shove a pilchard down your neck!”

      “It’s two to one,” said Stalky, warningly, and Beetle closed the book, in obedience to the law under which he and his companions had lived for six checkered years.

      The visitors looked on delighted. Number Five study had a reputation for more variegated insanity than the rest of the school put together; and so far as its code allowed friendship with outsiders it was polite and open-hearted to its neighbors on the same landing.

      “What rot do you want now?” said Beetle.

      “King! War!” said McTurk, jerking his head toward the wall, where hung a small wooden West-African war-drum, a gift to McTurk from a naval uncle.

      “Then we shall be turned out of the study again,” said Beetle, who loved his flesh-pots. “Mason turned us out for – just warbling on it.” Mason was the mathematical master who had testified in Common-room.

      “Warbling? – O Lord!” said Abanazar. “We couldn’t hear ourselves speak in our study when you played the infernal thing. What’s the good of getting turned out of your study, anyhow?”

      “We lived in the form-rooms for a week, too,” said Beetle, tragically. “And it was beastly cold.”

      “Ye-es, but Mason’s rooms were filled with rats every day we were out. It took him a week to draw the inference,” said McTurk. “He loathes rats. ‘Minute he let us go back the rats stopped. Mason’s a little shy of us now, but there was no evidence.”

      “Jolly well there wasn’t,” said Stalky, “when I got out on the roof and dropped the beastly things down his chimney. But, look here – question is, are our characters good enough just now to stand a study row?”

      “Never mind mine,” said Beetle. “King swears I haven’t any.”

      “I’m not thinking of you,” Stalky returned scornfully. “You aren’t going up for the Army, you old bat. I don’t want to be expelled – and the Head’s getting rather shy of us, too.”

      “Rot!” said McTurk. “The Head never expels except for beastliness or stealing. But I forgot; you and Stalky are thieves – regular burglars.”

      The visitors gasped, but Stalky interpreted the parable with large grins.

      “Well, you know, that little beast Manders minor saw Beetle and me hammerin’ McTurk’s trunk open in the dormitory when we took his watch last month. Of course Manders sneaked to Mason, and Mason solemnly took it up as a case of theft, to get even with us about the rats.”

      “That just put Mason into our giddy hands,” said McTurk, blandly. “We СКАЧАТЬ