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 were nice to him, because he was a new master and wanted to win the confidence of the boys. ‘Pity he draws inferences, though. Stalky went to his study and pretended to blub, and told Mason he’d lead a new life if Mason would let him off this time, but Mason wouldn’t. ‘Said it was his duty to report him to the Head.”
“Vindictive 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