Stalky & Co.

“My Hat! You’ve been here six years, and you expect fairness. Well, you are a dithering idiot.”

A knot of King’s boys, also bound for the baths, hailed them, beseeching them to wash – for the honor of their house.

“That’s what comes of King’s jawin’ and messin’. Those young animals wouldn’t have thought of it unless he’d put it into their heads. Now they’ll be funny about it for weeks,” said Stalky. “Don’t take any notice.”

The boys came nearer, shouting an opprobrious word. At last they moved to windward, ostentatiously holding their noses.

“That’s pretty,” said Beetle. “They’ll be sayin’ our house stinks next.”

When they returned from the baths, damp-headed, languid, at peace with the world, Beetle’s forecast came only too true. They were met in the corridor by a fag – a common, Lower-Second fag – who at arm’s length handed them a carefully wrapped piece of soap “with the compliments of King’s House.”

“Hold on,” said Stalky, checking immediate attack. “Who put you up to this, Nixon? Rattray and White? (Those were two leaders in King’s house.) Thank you. There’s no answer.”

“Oh, it’s too sickening to have this kind o’ rot shoved on to a chap. What’s the sense of it? What’s the fun of it?” said McTurk.

“It will go on to the end of the term, though,” Beetle wagged his head sorrowfully. He had worn many jests threadbare on his own account.

In a few days it became an established legend of the school that Prout’s house did not wash and were therefore noisome. Mr. King was pleased to smile succulently in form when one of his boys drew aside from Beetle with certain gestures.

“There seems to be some disability attaching to you, my Beetle, or else why should Burton major withdraw, so to speak, the hem of his garments? I confess I am still in the dark. Will some one be good enough to enlighten me?”

Naturally, he was enlightened by half the form.

“Extraordinary! Most extraordinary! However, each house has its traditions, with which I would not for the world interfere. We have a prejudice in favor of washing. Go on, Beetle – from ‘jugurtha tamen’ – and, if you can, avoid the more flagrant forms of guessing.”

Prout’s house was furious because Macrea’s and Hartopp’s houses joined King’s to insult them. They called a house-meeting after dinner – an excited and angry meeting of all save the prefects, whose dignity, though they sympathized, did not allow them to attend. They read ungrammatical resolutions, and made speeches beginning, “Gentlemen, we have met on this occasion,” and ending with, “It’s a beastly shame,” precisely as houses have done since time and schools began.

Number Five study attended, with its usual air of bland patronage. At last McTurk, of the lanthorn jaws, delivered himself:

“You jabber and jaw and burble, and that’s about all you can do. What’s the good of it? King’s house’ll only gloat because they’ve drawn you, and King will gloat, too. Besides, that resolution of Orrin’s is chock-full of bad grammar, and King’ll gloat over that.”

“I thought you an’ Beetle would put it right, an’ – an’ we’d post it in the corridor,” said the composer meekly.

“Par si je le connai. I’m not goin’ to meddle with the biznai,” said Beetle. “It’s a gloat for King’s house. Turkey’s quite right.”

“Well, won’t Stalky, then?”

But Stalky puffed out his cheeks and squinted down his nose in the style of Panurge, and all he said was, “Oh, you abject burblers!”

“You’re three beastly scabs!” was the instant retort of the democracy, and they went out amid execrations.

“This is piffling,” said McTurk. “Let’s get our sallies, and go and shoot bunnies.”

Three saloon-pistols, with a supply of bulleted breech-caps, were stored in Stalky’s trunk, and this trunk was in their dormitory, and their dormitory was a three-bed attic one, opening out of a ten-bed establishment, which, in turn, communicated with the great range of dormitories that ran practically from one end of the College to the other. Macrea’s house lay next to Prout’s, King’s next to Macrea’s, and Hartopp’s beyond that again. Carefully locked doors divided house from house, but each house, in its internal arrangements – the College had originally been a terrace of twelve large houses – was a replica of the next; one straight roof covering all.

They found Stalky’s bed drawn out from the wall to the left of the dormer window, and the latter end of Richards protruding from a two-foot-square cupboard in the wall.

“What’s all this? I’ve never noticed it before. What are you tryin’ to do, Fatty?”

“Fillin’ basins, Muster Corkran.” Richards’s voice was hollow and muffled. “They’ve been savin’ me trouble. Yiss.”

“‘Looks like it,” said McTurk. “Hi! You’ll stick if you don’t take care.”

Richards backed puffing.

“I can’t rache un. Yiss, ‘tess a turncock, Muster McTurk. They’ve took an’ runned all the watter-pipes a storey higher in the houses – runned ‘em all along under the ‘ang of the heaves, like. Runned ‘em in last holidays. I can’t rache the turncock.”

“Let me try,” said Stalky, diving into the aperture.

“Slip ‘ee to the left, then, Muster Corkran. Slip ‘ee to the left, an’ feel in the dark.”

To the left Stalky wriggled, and saw a long line of lead pipe disappearing up a triangular tunnel, whose roof was the rafters and boarding of the college roof, whose floor was sharp-edged joists, and whose side was the rough studding of the lath and plaster wall under the dormer.

“Rummy show. How far does it go?”

“Right along, Muster Corkran – right along from end to end. Her runs under the ‘ang of the heaves. Have ‘ee rached the stopcock yet? Mr. King got un put in to save us carryin’ watter from down-stairs to fill the basins. No place for a lusty man like old Richards. I’m tu thickabout to go ferritin’. Thank ‘ee, Muster Corkran.”

The water squirted through the tap just inside the cupboard, and, having filled the basins, the grateful Richards waddled away.

The boys sat round-eyed on their beds considering the possibilities of this trove. Two floors below them they could hear the hum of the angry house; for nothing is so still as a dormitory in mid-afternoon of a midsummer term.

“It has been papered over till now.” McTurk examined the little door. “If we’d only known before!”

“I vote we go down and explore. No one will come up this time o’ day. We needn’t keep cave’’.”

They crawled in, Stalky leading, drew the door behind them, and on all fours embarked on a dark and dirty road full of plaster, odd shavings, and all the raffle that builders leave in the waste room of a house. The passage was perhaps three feet wide, and, except for the struggling light round the edges of the cupboards (there was one to each dormer), almost pitchy dark.

“Here’s Macrea’s house,” said Stalky, his eye at the crack of the third cupboard. “I can see Barnes’s name on his trunk. Don’t make such a row, Beetle! We can get right to the end of the Coll. Come on!.. We’re in King’s house now – I can see a bit of Rattray’s trunk. How these beastly boards hurt one’s knees!” They heard his nails scraping, on plaster.

“That’s the ceiling below. Look out! If we smashed that the plaster ‘ud fall down in the lower dormitory,” said Beetle.

“Let’s,” whispered McTurk.

“An’ be collared first thing? Not much. Why, I can shove my hand ever so far up between these boards.”

Stalky thrust an arm to the elbow between the joists.

“No good stayin’ here. I vote we go back and talk it over. It’s a crummy place. ‘Must say I’m grateful to King for his water-works.”

They crawled out, brushed one another clean, slid the saloon-pistols down a trouser-leg, and hurried forth to a deep and solitary Devonshire lane in whose flanks a boy might sometimes slay a young rabbit. They threw themselves down under the rank elder bushes, and began to think aloud.

“You know,” said Stalky at last, sighting at a distant sparrow, “we could hide our sallies in there like anything.”

“Huh!” Beetle snorted, choked, and gurgled. He had been silent since they left the dormitory. “Did you ever read a book called ‘The History of a House’ or something? I got it out of the library the other day. A French woman wrote it – Violet somebody. But it’s translated, you know; and it’s very interestin’. Tells you how a house is built.”

“Well, if you’re in a sweat to find out that, you can go down to the new cottages they’re building for the coastguard.”

“My Hat! I will.” He felt in his pockets. “Give me tuppence, some one.”