Stalky & Co.. Rudyard Kipling

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ swine!” said Beetle. “It was all those rats! Then I blubbed, too, and Stalky confessed that he’d been a thief in regular practice for six years, ever since he came to the school; and that I’d taught him —a la Fagin. Mason turned white with joy. He thought he had us on toast.”

      “Gorgeous! Gorgeous!” said Dick Four. “We never heard of this.”

      “‘Course not. Mason kept it jolly quiet. He wrote down all our statements on impot-paper. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t believe,” said Stalky.

      “And handed it all up to the Head, with an extempore prayer. It took about forty pages,” said Beetle. “I helped him a lot.”

      “And then, you crazy idiots?” said Abanazar.

      “Oh, we were sent for; and Stalky asked to have the ‘depositions’ read out, and the Head knocked him spinning into a waste-paper basket. Then he gave us eight cuts apiece – welters – for – for – takin’ unheard-of liberties with a new master. I saw his shoulders shaking when we went out. Do you know,” said Beetle, pensively, “that Mason can’t look at us now in second lesson without blushing? We three stare at him sometimes till he regularly trickles. He’s an awfully sensitive beast.”

      “He read ‘Eric, or Little by Little,’” said McTurk; “so we gave him ‘St. Winifred’s, or the World of School.’ They spent all their spare time stealing at St. Winifred’s, when they weren’t praying or getting drunk at pubs. Well, that was only a week ago, and the Head’s a little bit shy of us. He called it constructive deviltry. Stalky invented it all.”

      “Not the least good having a row with a master unless you can make an ass of him,” said Stalky, extended at ease on the hearth-rug. “If Mason didn’t know Number Five – well, he’s learnt, that’s all. Now, my dearly beloved ‘earers” – Stalky curled his legs under him and addressed the company – “we’ve got that strong’, perseverin’ man King on our hands. He went miles out of his way to provoke a conflict.” (Here Stalky snapped down the black silk domino and assumed the air of a judge.) “He has oppressed Beetle, McTurk, and me, privatim et seriatim, one by one, as he could catch us. But now, he has insulted Number Five up in the music-room, and in the presence of these – these ossifers of the Ninety-third, wot look like hairdressers. Binjimin, we must make him cry ‘Capivi!’”

      Stalky’s reading did not include Browning or Ruskin.

      “And, besides,” said McTurk, “he’s a Philistine, a basket-hanger. He wears a tartan tie. Ruskin says that any man who wears a tartan tie will, without doubt, be damned everlastingly.”

      “Bravo, McTurk,” said Tertius; “I thought he was only a beast.”

      “He’s that, too, of course, but he’s worse. He has a china basket with blue ribbons and a pink kitten on it, hung up in his window to grow musk in. You know when I got all that old oak carvin’ out of Bideford Church, when they were restoring it (Ruskin says that any man who’ll restore a church is an unmitigated sweep), and stuck it up here with glue? Well, King came in and wanted to know whether we’d done it with a fret-saw! Yah! He is the King of basket-hangers!”

      Down went McTurk’s inky thumb over an imaginary arena full of bleeding Kings. “Placete, child of a generous race!” he cried to Beetle.

      “Well,” began Beetle, doubtfully, “he comes from Balliol, but I’m going to give the beast a chance. You see I can always make him hop with some more poetry. He can’t report me to the Head, because it makes him ridiculous. (Stalky’s quite right.) But he shall have his chance.”

      Beetle opened the book on the table, ran his finger down a page, and began at random:

         “Or who in Moscow toward the Czar

         With the demurest of footfalls,

         Over the Kremlin’s pavement white

         With serpentine and syenite,

         Steps with five other generals – ”

      “That’s no good. Try another,” said Stalky.

      “Hold on a shake; I know what’s coming.” McTurk was reading over Beetle’s shoulder.

         “That simultaneously take snuff,

         For each to have pretext enough

         And kerchiefwise unfold his sash,

         Which – softness’ self – is yet the stuff

      (Gummy! What a sentence!)

         To hold fast where a steel chain snaps

         And leave the grand white neck no gash.

      (Full stop.)”

      “‘Don’t understand a word of it,” said Stalky.

      “More fool you! Construe,” said McTurk. “Those six bargees scragged the Czar, and left no evidence. Actum est with King.”

      “He gave me that book, too,” said Beetle, licking his lips:

         “There’s a great text in Galatians,

         Once you trip on it entails

         Twenty-nine distinct damnations,

         One sure if another fails.”

      Then irrelevantly:

         “Setebos! Setebos! and Setebos!

         Thinketh he liveth in the cold of the moon.”

      “He’s just come in from dinner,” said Dick Four, looking through the window. “Manders minor is with him.”

      “‘Safest place for Manders minor just now,” said Beetle.

      “Then you chaps had better clear out,” said Stalky politely to the visitors. “‘Tisn’t fair to mix you up in a study row. Besides, we can’t afford to have evidence.”

      “Are you going to begin at once?’ said Aladdin.

      “Immediately, if not sooner,” said Stalky, and turned out the gas. “Strong, perseverin’ man – King. Make him cry ‘Capivi.’ G’way, Binjimin.”

      The company retreated to their own neat and spacious study with expectant souls.

      “When Stalky blows out his nostrils like a horse,” said Aladdin to the Emperor of China, “he’s on the war-path. ‘Wonder what King will get.”

      “Beans,” said the Emperor. “Number Five generally pays in full.”

      “Wonder if I ought to take any notice of it officially,” said Abanazar, who had just remembered he was a prefect.

      “It’s none of your business, Pussy. Besides, if you did, we’d have them hostile to us; and we shouldn’t be able to do any work,” said Aladdin. “They’ve begun already.”

      Now that West-African war-drum had been made to signal across estuaries and deltas. Number Five was forbidden to wake the engine within earshot of the school. But a deep, devastating drone filled the passages as McTurk and Beetle scientifically rubbed its top. Anon it changed to the blare of trumpets – of savage pursuing trumpets. Then, as McTurk slapped one side, smooth with the blood of ancient sacrifice, СКАЧАТЬ