Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (842 page)

Compared with glorious, unforgot —

  ten innocent enormities

Of frontless days before the beard.

  When, instant on the casual jest.

The God Himself of Mirth appeared

  And snatched us to His heaving breast.

And we-not caring who He was

  But certain He would come again —

Accepted all He brought to pass

  As Gods accept the lives of men...

Then He withdrew from sight and speech.

  Nor left a shrine. How comes it now.

While Charon’s keel grates on the beach.

  He calls so clear: ‘Rememberest thou?’?

THE UNITED IDOLATERS

HIS name was Brownell and his reign was brief. He came from the Central Anglican Scholastic Agency, a soured, clever, reddish man picked up by the Head at the very last moment of the summer holidays in default of Macrea (of Macrea’s House) who wired from Switzerland that he had smashed a knee mountaineering, and would not be available that term.

Looking back at the affair, one sees that the Head should have warned Mr. Brownell of the College’s outstanding peculiarity, instead of leaving him to discover it for himself the first day of the term, when he went for a walk to the beach, and saw ‘Potiphar’ Mullins, Head of Games, smoking without conceal on the sands. ‘Pot,’ having the whole of the Autumn Football challenges, acceptances, and Fifteen reconstructions to work out, did not at first comprehend Mr. Brownell’s shrill cry of: ‘You’re smoking! You’re smoking, sir!’ but he removed his pipe, and answered, placably enough: ‘The Army Class is allowed to smoke, sir.’

Mr. Brownell replied: ‘Preposterous!’

Pot, seeing that this new person was uninformed, suggested that he should refer to the Head.

‘You may be sure I shall-sure I shall, sir! Then we shall see!’

Mr. Brownell and his umbrella scudded off, and Pot returned to his match-plannings. Anon, he observed, much as the Almighty might observe black-beetles, two small figures coming over the Pebble-ridge a few hundred yards to his right. They were a Major and his Minor, the latter a new boy and, as such, entitled to his brother’s countenance for exactly three days-after which he would fend for himself. Pot waited till they were well out on the great stretch of mother-o’pearl sands; then caused his ground-ash to describe a magnificent whirl of command in the air.

‘Come on,’ said the Major. ‘Run!’

‘What for?’ said the Minor, who had noticed nothing.

‘‘Cause we’re wanted. Leg it!’

‘Oh, I can do that,’ the Minor replied and, at the end of the sprint, fetched up a couple of yards ahead of his brother, and much less winded.

‘Your Minor?’ said Pot, looking over them, seawards.

‘Yes, Mullins,’ the Major replied.

‘All right. Cut along!’ They cut on the word.

‘Hi! Fludd Major! Come back!’

Back fled the elder.

‘Your wind’s bad. Too fat. You grunt like a pig. ‘Mustn’t do it! Understand? Go away!’

‘What was all that for?’ the Minor asked on the Major’s return.

‘To see if we could run, you fool!’

‘Well, I ran faster than you, anyhow,’ was the scandalous retort.

‘Look here, Har-Minor, if you go on talking like this, you’ll get yourself kicked all round Coll. An’ you mustn’t stand like you did when a Prefect’s talkin’ to you.’

The Minor’s eyes opened with awe. ‘I thought it was only one of the masters,’ said he.

‘Masters! It was Mullins-Head o’ Games. You are a putrid young ass!’

By what seemed pure chance, Mr. Brownell ran into the School Chaplain, the Reverend John Gillett, beating up against the soft September rain that no native ever troubled to wear a coat for.

‘I was trying to catch you after lunch,’ the latter began. ‘I wanted to show you our objects of local interest.’

‘Thank you! I’ve seen all I want,’ Mr. Brownell answered., Gillett, is there anything about me which suggests the Congenital Dupe?’

‘It’s early to say, yet,’ the Chaplain answered. ‘Who’ve you been meeting?’

‘A youth called Mullets, I believe.’ And, indeed, there was Potiphar, ground-ash, pipe, and all, quarter-decking serenely below the Pebbleridge.

‘Oh! I see. Old Pot-our Head of Games.’

‘He was smoking. He’s smoking now! Before those two little boys, too!’ Mr. Brownell panted. ‘He had the audacity to tell me that — ’

‘Yes,’ the Reverend John cut in. ‘The Army Class is allowed to smoke- not in their studies, of course, but within limits, out of doors. You see, we have to compete against the Crammers’ establishments, where smoking’s usual.’

This was true! Of the only school in England was this the cold truth, and for the reason given, in that unprogressive age.

‘Good Heavens!’ said Mr. Brownell to the gulls and the gray sea. ‘And I was never warned!’

‘The Head is a little forgetful. I ought to have — But it’s all right,’ the Chaplain added soothingly. ‘Pot won’t-er-give you away.’

Mr. Brownell, who knew what smoking led to, testified out of his twelve years’ experience of what he called the Animal Boy. He left little unexplored or unexplained.

‘There may be something in what you say,’ the Reverend John assented. ‘But as a matter of fact, their actual smoking doesn’t amount to much. They talk a great deal about their brands of tobacco. Practically, it makes them rather keen on putting down smoking among the juniors-as an encroachment on their privilege, you see. They lick ‘em twice as hard for it as we’d dare to.’

‘Lick!’ Mr. Brownell cried. ‘One expels! One expels! I know the end of these practices.’ He told his companion, in detail, with anecdotes and inferences, a great deal more about the Animal Boy.

‘Ah!’ said the Reverend John to himself. ‘You’ll leave at the end of the term; but you’ll have a deuce of a time first.’ Aloud: ‘We-ell, I suppose no one can be sure of any school’s tendency at any given moment, but, personally, I should incline to believe that we’re reasonably free from the-er-monastic microbes of-er-older institutions.’

‘But a school’s a school. You can’t get out of that! It’s preposterous! You must admit that,’ Mr. Brownell insisted.

They were within hail of Pot by now, and the Reverend John asked him how Affairs of State stood.

‘All right, thank you, sir. How are you, sir?’

‘Loungin’ round and sufferin’, my son. What about the dates of the Exeter and Tiverton matches?’

‘As late in the term as we can get ‘em, don’t you think, sir?’

‘Quite! Specially Blundell’s. They’re our dearest foe,’ he explained to the frozen Mr. Brownell. ‘Aren’t we rather light in the scrum just now, Mullins?’

‘‘Fraid so, sir: but Packman’s playin’ forward this term.’

‘At last!’ cried the Reverend John. (Packman was Pot’s second-in- command, who considered himself a heaven-born half-back, but Pot had been working on him diplomatically. ‘He’ll be a pillar, at any rate. Lend me one of your fuzees, please. I’ve only got matches.’

Mr. Brownell was unused to this sort of talk. ‘A bad beginning to a bad business,’ he muttered as they returned to College.

Pot finished out his meditations; from time to time rubbing up the gloss on his new seven-and-sixpenny silver-mounted, rather hot, myall- wood pipe, with its very thin crust in the bowl.

As the Studies brought back brackets and pictures for their walls, so did they bring odds and ends of speech-theatre, opera, and music-hall gags-from the great holiday world; some of which stuck for a term, and others were discarded. Number Five was unpacking, when Dick Four (King’s House) of the red nose and dramatic instincts, who with Pussy and Tertius inhabited the study below, loafed up and asked them ‘how their symptoms seemed to segashuate.’ They said nothing at the time, for they knew Dick had a giddy uncle who took him to the Pavilion and the Cri, and all would be explained later. But, before they met again, Beetle came across two fags at war in a box-room, one of whom cried to the other ‘Turn me loose, or I’ll knock the natal stuffin’ out of you.’ Beetle demanded why he, being offal, presumed to use this strange speech. The fag said it came out of a new book about rabbits and foxes and turtles and niggers, which was in his locker. (Uncle Remus was a popular holiday gift-book in Shotover’s year: when Cetewayo lived in the Melbury Road, Arabi Pasha in Egypt, and Spofforth on the Oval.) Beetle had it out and read for some time, standing by the window, ere he carried it off to Number Five and began at once to give a wonderful story of a Tar Baby. Stalky tore it from him because he sputtered incoherently; McTurk, for the same cause, wrenching it from Stalky. There was no prep that night. The book was amazing, and full of quotations that one could hurl like javelins. When they came down to prayers, Stalky, to show he was abreast of the latest movement, pounded on the door of Dick Four’s study shouting a couplet that pleased him:

‘Ti-yi! Tungalee!

I eat um pea! I pick um pea!’

Upon which Dick Four, hornpiping and squinting, and not at all unlike a bull-frog, came out and answered from the bottom of his belly, whence he could produce incredible noises

‘Ingle-go-jang, my joy, my joy!

Ingle-go-jang, my joy!

I’m right at home, my joy, my joy! — ’

The chants seemed to answer the ends of their being created for the moment. They all sang them the whole way up the corridor, and, after prayers, bore the burdens dispersedly to their several dormitories, where they found many who knew the book of the words, but who, boylike, had waited for a lead ere giving tongue. In a short time the College was as severely infected with Uncle Remus as it had been with Pinafore and Patience. King realised it specially because he was running Macrea’s House in addition to his own and, Dick Four said, was telling his new charges what he thought of his ‘esteemed colleague’s’ methods of House-control.

The Reverend John was talking to the Head in the tatter’s study, perhaps a fortnight later.

‘If you’d only wired me,’ he said. ‘I could have dug up something that might have tided us over. This man’s dangerous.’

‘Mea culpa!’ the Head replied. ‘I had so much on hand. Our Governing Council alone — But what do We make of him?’

‘Trust Youth! We call him “Mister.”

‘“Mister Brownell”?’

‘Just “Mister.” It took Us three days to plumb his soul.’

‘And he doesn’t approve of Our institutions? You say he is On the Track-eh? He suspects the worst?’

The School Chaplain nodded.

‘We-ell. I should say that that was the one tendency we had not developed. Setting aside we haven’t even a curtain in a dormitory, let alone a lock to any form-room door-there has to be tradition in these things.’

‘So I believe. So, indeed, one knows. And-’tisn’t as if I ever preached on personal purity either.’

The Head laughed. ‘No, or you’d join Brownell at term-end. By the way, what’s this new line of Patristic discourse you’re giving us in church? I found myself listening to some of it last Sunday.’

‘Oh! My early Christianity sermons? I bought a dozen ready made in Town just before I came down. Some one who knows his Gibbon must have done ‘em. Aren’t they good?’ The Reverend John, who was no hand at written work, beamed self-approvingly. There was a knock and Pot entered.

The weather had defeated him, at last. All footer-grounds, he reported, were unplayable, and must be rested. His idea, to keep things going, was Big and Little Side Paper-chases thrice a week. For the juniors, a shortish course on the Burrows, which he intended to oversee personally the first few times, while Packman lunged Big Side across the inland and upland ploughs, for proper sweats. There was some question of bounds that he asked authority to vary; and, would the Head please say which afternoons would interfere least with the Army Class, Extra Tuition.

As to bounds, the Head left those, as usual, entirely to Pot. The Reverend John volunteered to shift one of his extra-Tu classes from four to five p.m. till after prayers-nine to ten. The whole question was settled in five minutes.

‘We hate paper-chases, don’t we, Pot?’ the Headmaster asked as the Head of Games rose.

‘Yes, sir, but it keeps ‘em in training. Good night, sir.’

‘To go back — ’ drawled the Head when the door was well shut. ‘No-o. I do not think so!...Ye-es! He’ll leave at the end of the term... A-aah! How does it go? “Don’t ‘spute wid de squinch-owl. Jam de shovel in de fier.” Have you come across that extraordinary book, by the way?’

‘Oh, yes. We’ve got it badly too. It has some sort of elemental appeal, I suppose.’

Here Mr. King came in with a neat little scheme for the reorganisation of certain details in Macrea’s House, where he had detected reprehensible laxities. The Head sighed. The Reverend John only heard the beginnings of it. Then he slid out softly. He remembered he had not written to Macrea for quite a long time.