Stalky and Co Part 6

"Rippin'! Oh, rippin'!" said d.i.c.k Four. "Only we shan't have any piano on the night. We must work it with the banjoes--play an' dance at the same time. You try, Tertius."

The Emperor pushed aside his pea-green sleeves of state, and followed d.i.c.k Four on a heavy nickel plated banjo.

"Yes, but I'm dead all this time. Bung in the middle of the stage, too,"

said Abanazar.

"Oh, that's Beetle's biznai," said d.i.c.k Four. "Vamp it up, Beetle. Don't keep us waiting all night. You've got to get p.u.s.s.y out of the light somehow, and bring us all in dancin' at the end."

"All right. You two play it again," said Beetle, who, in a gray skirt and a wig of chestnut sausage-curls, set slantwise above a pair of spectacles mended with an old boot-lace, represented the Widow Tw.a.n.kay.

He waved one leg in time to the hammered refrain, and the banjoes grew louder.

"Um! Ah! Er--'Aladdin now has won his wife,'" he sang, and d.i.c.k Four repeated it.

"'Your Emperor is appeased.'" Tertius flung out his chest as he delivered his line.

"Now jump up, p.u.s.s.y! Say, 'I think I'd better come to life! Then we all take hands and come forward: 'We hope you've all been pleased.'

_Twiggez-vous_?"

"_Nous twiggons_. Good enough. What's the chorus for the final ballet?

It's four kicks and a turn," said d.i.c.k Four.

"Oh! Er!

John Short will ring the curtain down.

And ring the prompter's bell; We hope you know before you go That we all wish you well."

"Rippin'! Rippin'! Now for the Widow's scene with the Princess. Hurry up, Turkey."

McTurk, in a violet silk skirt and a coquettish blue turban, slouched forward as one thoroughly ashamed of himself. The Slave of the Lamp climbed down from the piano, and dispa.s.sionately kicked him. "Play up, Turkey," he said; "this is serious." But there fell on the door the knock of authority. It happened to be King, in gown and mortar-board, enjoying a Sat.u.r.day evening prowl before dinner.

"Locked doors! Locked doors!" he snapped with a scowl. "What's the meaning of this; and what, may I ask, is the intention of this--this epicene attire?"

"Pantomime, sir. The Head gave us leave," said Abanazar, as the only member of the Sixth concerned. d.i.c.k Four stood firm in the confidence born of well-fitting tights, but Beetle strove to efface himself behind the piano. A gray princess-skirt borrowed from a day-boy's mother and a spotted cotton bodice unsystematically padded with imposition-paper make one ridiculous. And in other regards Beetle had a bad conscience.

"As usual!" sneered King. "Futile foolery just when your careers, such as they may be, are hanging in the balance. I see! Ah, I see! The old gang of criminals--allied forces of disorder--Corkran"--the Slave of the Lamp smiled politely--"McTurk"--the Irishman scowled--"and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs." Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King pa.s.sed them over. "Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, as it were, a poet?"

"He's found one of 'em," thought Beetle, noting the flush on King's cheek-bone.

"I have just had the pleasure of reading an effusion of yours to my address, I believe--an effusion intended to rhyme. So--so you despise me, Master Gigadibs, do you? I am quite aware--you need not explain--that it was ostensibly not intended for my edification. I read it with laughter--yes, with laughter. These paper pellets of inky boys--still a boy we are, Master Gigadibs--do not disturb my equanimity."

"Wonder which it was," thought Beetle. He had launched many lampoons on an appreciative public ever since he discovered that it was possible to convey reproof in rhyme.

In sign of his unruffled calm, King proceeded to tear Beetle, whom he called Gigadibs, slowly asunder. From his untied shoestrings to his mended spectacles (the life of a poet at a big school is hard) he held him up to the derision of his a.s.sociates--with the usual result. His wild flowers of speech--King had an unpleasant tongue---restored him to good humor at the last. He drew a lurid picture of Beetle's latter end as a scurrilous pamphleteer dying in an attic, scattered a few compliments over McTurk and Corkran, and, reminding Beetle that he must come up for judgment when called upon, went to Common-room, where he triumphed anew over his victims.

"And the worst of it," he explained in a loud voice over his soup, "is that I waste such gems of sarcasm on their thick heads. It's miles above them, I'm certain."

"We-ell," said the school chaplain slowly, "I don't know what Corkran's appreciation of your style may be, but young McTurk reads Ruskin for his amus.e.m.e.nt."

"Nonsense! He does it to show off. I mistrust the dark Celt."

"He does nothing of the kind. I went into their study the other night, unofficially, and McTurk was gluing up the back of four odd numbers of 'Fors Clavigera.'"

"I don't know anything about their private lives," said a mathematical master hotly, "but I've learned by bitter experience that Number Five study are best left alone. They are utterly soulless young devils."

He blushed as the others laughed.

But in the music-room there were wrath and bad language. Only Stalky, Slave of the Lamp, lay on the piano unmoved.

"That little swine Manders miner must have shown him your stuff. He's always suckin' up to King. Go and kill him," he drawled. "Which one was it, Beetle?"

"Dunno," said Beetle, struggling out of the skirt. "There was one about his hunting for popularity with the small boys, and the other one was one about him in h.e.l.l, tellin' the Devil 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, rea.s.sured 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 p.a.w.ned 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 p.a.w.ned 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 p.a.w.n 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 a.s.s! 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."