Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (686 page)

“Yes, I could — watchin’ you,” The Prawn insisted.

“No. Mr. Marsh says it’s a Gift — same as a Talent.”

“D’you mean to tell me Rickworth’s got it, then?”

“Dunno. It’s
my
job to find that out — Mr. Marsh says. Anyway, Rickworth told me he liked cleaning out a fryin’ pan because it made him think of what it might be cookin’ next time.”

“Well, if that isn’t silliness, it’s just greediness,” said The Prawn. “What about those dampers you were talking of when I bought the fire-lighters for you this morning?”

William drew one out of the ashes, tapped it lightly with his small hazel-wand of office, and slid it over, puffed and perfect, towards The Prawn.

Once again the wave of pity — the Master’s pity for the mere consuming Public — swept over him as he watched The Prawn wolf it down.

“I’m grateful to you. I reely
am
, Prawn,” said William Glasse Sawyer.

After all, as he was used to say in later years, if it hadn’t been for The Prawn, where would he have been?

The Master-Cook

This is what might be called a parody or imitation of the verses of Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the earliest and the greatest of our English poets. It looks difficult to read, but you will find it comes quite easily if you say it aloud, remembering that where there is an accent over the end of a word, that word is pronounced as two syllables — not one. “Snailés,” for instance, would be spoken as “snai-les,” and so on.

WITH
us there rade a Maister-Cook that came
From the Rochelle which is neere Angoulême.
Littel hee was, but rounder than a topp,
And his small berd hadde dipped in manie a soppe.
His honde was smoother than beseemeth mann’s,
And his discoorse was all of marzipan,
Of tripes of Caen, or Burdeux snailés swote,
And Seinte Menhoulde wher cooken piggés-foote.
To Thoulouse and to Bress and Carcasson
For pyes and fowles and chesnottes hadde hee wonne;
Of hammés of Thuringie colde hee prate,
And well hee knew what Princes hadde on plate
At Christmas-tide, from Artois to Gascogne.

Lordinges, quod hee, manne liveth nat alone
By bred, but meatés rost and seethed, and broth,
And purchasable deinties, on mine othe.
Honey and hote gingere well liketh hee,
And whalés-flesch mortred with spicerie.
For, lat be all how man denie or carpe,
Him thries a daie his honger maketh sharpe,
And setteth him at boorde with hawkés eyne,
Snuffing what dish is set beforne to deyne,
Nor, till with meate he all-to fill to brim,
None other matter nowher mooveth him.
Lat holie Seintés sterve as bookés boast,
Most mannés soule is in his bellie most.
For, as man thinketh in his hearte is hee,
But, as hee eateth so his thought shall bee.
And Holie Fader’s self (with reveraunce)
Oweth to Cooke his port and his presaunce.
Wherbye it cometh past disputison
Cookes over alle men have dominion,
Which follow them as schippe her gouvernail
Enoff of wordes — beginneth heere my tale: —

1. A kind of sticky sweetmeat.    
2. Bordeaux snails are specially large and sweet.    
3. They grill pigs’-feet still at St. Menehoulde, not far from Verdun, better than anywhere else in all the world.    
4. Gone-to get pâtés of ducks’ liver at Toulouse; fatted poultry at Bourg in Breese, on the road to Geneva; and very large chestnuts in sugar at Carcassonne, about forty miles from Toulouse.    
5. This would probably be some sort of wild-boar ham from Germany.    
6. Expensive.    
7. Beaten up.    
8. Sneer or despise.    
9. Brings him to table.    
10. Starve.    
11. The Pope himself, who depends on his cook for being healthy and well-fed.    
12. Dispute or argument.    
13. Men are influenced by their cooks as ships are steered by their rudders.    

A Flight of Fact

H.M.S.
Gardenia
(we will take her name from the Herbaceous Border which belonged to the sloops, though she was a destroyer by profession) came quietly back to her berth some time after midnight, and disturbed half-a-dozen of her sisters as she settled down. They all talked about it next morning, especially
Phlox
and
Stephanotis
, her left- and right-hand neighbours in the big basin on the east coast of England, that was crowded with destroyers.

But the soul of the
Gardenia
— Lieutenant-in-Command H.R. Duckett — was lifted far above insults. What he had done during his last trip had been well done. Vastly more important —
Gardenia
was in for a boiler-clean, which meant four days’ leave for her commanding officer.

“Where did you get that fender from, you dockyard burglar?”
Stephanotis
clamoured over his rail, for
Gardenia
was wearing a large coir-matting fender, evidently fresh from store, over her rail. It creaked with newness. “You common thief of the beach, where did you find that new fender?”

The only craft that a destroyer will, sometimes, not steal equipment from is a destroyer; which accounts for the purity of her morals and the loftiness of her conversation, and her curiosity in respect to stolen fillings.

Duckett, unmoved, went below, to return with a valise which he carried on to His Majesty’s quarter-deck, and, atop of a suit of rat-catcher clothes, crammed into it a pair of ancient pigskin gaiters.

Here
Phlox
, assisted by her Dandy Dinmont, Dinah, who had been trained to howl at certain notes in her master’s voice, gave a spirited and imaginary account of
Gardenia’s
return the night before, which was compared to that of an ambulance with a lady-driver. Duckett retaliated by slipping on to his head for one coquettish instant a gravy-coloured soft cloth cap. It was the last straw.
Phlox
and
Stephanotis
, who had no hope of any leave for the present, pronounced it an offence, only to be wiped out by drinks.

“All things considered,” said Duckett, “I don’t care if I
do
. Come along!” and, the hour being what it was, he gave the necessary orders through the wardroom’s tiny skylight. The captains came.
Phlox
— Lieutenant-Commander Jerry Marlett, a large and weather-beaten person, docked himself in the arm-chair by the ward-room stove with his cherished Dinah in his arms. Great possessions and much land, inherited from an uncle, had removed him from the Navy on the eve of war. Three days after the declaration of it he was back again, and had been very busy ever since.
Stephanotis
— Lieutenant-in-Command Augustus Holwell Rayne,
alias
“The Damper,” because of his pessimism, spread himself out on the settee. He was small and agile, but of gloomy outlook, which a D.S.O. earned, he said, quite by mistake could not lighten. “Horse” Duckett, Gardenia’s skipper, was a reversion to the primitive Marryat type — a predatory, astute, resourceful pirate, too well known to all His Majesty’s dockyards, a man of easily injured innocence who could always prove an alibi, and in whose ship, if his torpedo-coxswain had ever allowed any one to look there, several sorts of missing Government property might have been found. His ambition was to raise pigs (animals he only knew as bacon) in Shropshire (a county he had never seen) after the war, so he waged his war with zeal to bring that happy day nearer. He sat in the arm-chair by the door, whence he controlled the operations of “Crippen,” the wardroom steward, late of Bolitho’s Travelling Circus and Swings, who had taken to the high seas to avoid the attentions of the Police ashore.

As usual, Duckett’s character had been blackened by My Lords of the Admiralty, and he was in the midst of a hot campaign against them. An able-seaman’s widowed mother had sent a ham to her son, whose name was E. R. Davids. Unfortunately, Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies, who swore that he had both a mother and expectations of hams from her, came across the ham first, and, misreading its address, had had it boiled for, and at once eaten by, the Engineers’ mess. E. R. Davids, a vindictive soul, wrote to his mother, who, it seems, wrote to the Admiralty, who, according to Duckett, wrote to him daily every day for a month to know what had become of E. R. Davids’ ham. In the meantime the guilty Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies had been transferred to a sloop off the Irish coast.

“An’ what the dooce
am
I to do?” Duckett asked his guests plaintively.

“Apply for leave to go to Ireland with a stomach-pump and heave the ham out of Davies,” Jerry suggested promptly.

“That’s rather a wheeze,” said Duckett. “I
had
thought of marrying Davids’ mother to settle the case. Anyhow, it was all Crippen’s fault for not steering the ham into the wardroom when it came aboard. Don’t let it occur again, Crippen. Hams are going to be very scarce.”

“Well, now you’ve got all that off your chest” — Jerry Marlett lowered his voice — ”suppose you tell us about what happened — the night before last.”

The talk became professional. Duckett produced certain evidence — still damp — in support of the claims that he had sent in concerning the fate of a German submarine, and gave a chain of facts and figures and bearings that the others duly noted.

“And how did your Acting Sub do?” asked Jerry at last.

“Oh, very fair, but I didn’t tell him so, of course. They’re hard enough to hold at the best of times, these makee-do officers. Have you noticed that they are always above their job — always thinkin’ round the corner when they’re thinkin’ at al!? On our way back, this young merchant o’ mine — when I’d almost made up my mind to tell him he wasn’t as big tripes as he looked — told me his one dream in life was to fly. Fly! He flew alright by the time I’d done with him, but — imagine one’s Sub
tellin’
one a thing like that! ‘It must be
so
interestin’ to fly,’ he said. The whole North Sea one blooming burgoo of what-come-nexts, an’ this pup complainin’ of lack of interest in it! Fly! Fly! When I was a Sub-Lootenant —  — ”

He turned pathetically towards The Damper, who had known him in that rank in the Mediterranean.

“There wasn’t much flyin’ in our day,” said The Damper mournfully. “But I can’t remember anything else we didn’t do.”

“Quite so; but we had some decency knocked into us. The new breed wouldn’t know decency if they met it on a dungfork.
That’s
what I mean.”

“When
I
was Actin’ Sub,” Jerry opened thoughtfully, “in the
Polycarp
— the pious
Polycarp
— Nineteen-O-Seven, I got nine cuts of the best from the Senior Sub for occupyin’ the bathroom ten seconds too long. Twenty minutes later, just when the welts were beginnin’ to come up, y’ know, I was sent off in the gig with a Corporal o’ Marines an’ a private to fetch the Headman of All the Pelungas aboard. He was wanted for slavery, or barratry, or bigamy or something.”

“All the Pelungas?” Duckett repeated with interest. “‘Odd you should mention that part of the world. What are the Pelungas like?”

“Very nice. Hundreds of islands and millions of coral reefs with atolls an’ lagoons an’ palm-trees, an’ all the population scullin’ round in outrigger canoes between ‘em like a permanent regatta. Filthy navigation, though.
Polycarp
had to lie five miles out on account of the reefs (even then our navigator was tearin’ his hair), an’ I had an hour’s steerin’ on hot, hard thwarts. Talk o’ tortures!
You
know. We landed in a white lather at the boat-steps of the Headman’s island. The Headman wasn’t takin’ any at first. He’d drawn up his whole army — three hundred strong, with old Martini rifles an’ a couple of ancestral seven-pounders — in front of his fort.
We
didn’t know anything about his domestic arrangements. We just dropped in among ‘em, so to say. Then my Corporal of Marines — the fattest man in the Service bar one — fell down the landin’ steps. The Headman had a Prime Minister — about as fat as my Corporal — and he helped him up. Well,
that
broke the ice a bit. The Prime Minister was a statesman. He poured oil on the crisis, while the Headman cursed me and the Navy and the British Government, and I kept wrigglin’ in my white ducks to keep ‘em from drawin’ tight on me.
You
know how it feels! I remember I told the Headman the
Polycarp
‘ud blow him an’ his island out of the water if he didn’t come along quick. She could have done it in a week or two; but we were scrubbin’ hammocks at the time. I forgot that little fact for the minute. I was a bit hot — all over. The Prime Minister soothed us down again, an’ by and by the Headman said he’d pay us a state call — as a favour. I didn’t care what he called it s’long as he came. So I lay about a quarter of a mile off-shore in the gig, in case the seven-pounders pooped off — I knew the Martinis couldn’t hit us at that range — and I waited for him till he shoved off in his State barge — forty rowers a side. Would you believe it, he wanted to take precedence of the White Ensign on the way to the ship? I had to fall him in behind the gig and bring him alongside properly. I was so sore I could hardly get aboard at the finish.”

“What happened to the Headman? “said The Damper.

“Nothing. He was acquitted or condemned — I forget which — but he was a perfect gentleman. We used to go sailing with him and his people — dancing with ‘em on the beach and all that sort of thing.
I
don’t want to meet a nicer community than the Pelungaloos. They aren’t used to white men — but they’re first-class learners.”