Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (54 page)

‘What was it, then? What was it, then? There's nothing to frighten him, Georgie dear.'

‘It was – it was a policeman! He was on the Down – I saw him! He came in. Jane
said
he would.'

‘Policemen don't come into houses, dearie. Turn over, and take my hand.'

‘I saw him – on the Down. He came here. Where is your hand, Harper?'

The housekeeper waited till the sobs changed to the regular breathing of sleep before she stole out.

‘Jane, what nonsense have you been telling Master Georgie about policemen?'

‘I haven't told him anything.'

‘You have. He's been dreaming about them.'

‘We met Tisdall on Dowhead when we were in the donkey-cart this morning. P'r'aps that's what put it into his head.'

‘Oh! Now you aren't going to frighten the child into fits with your silly tales, and the master know nothing about it. If ever I catch you again,' etc.

A child of six was telling himself stories as he lay in bed. It was a new power, and he kept it a secret. A month before it had occurred to him to carry on a nursery tale left unfinished by his mother, and he was delighted to find that the tale as it came out of his own head was just as new and surprising as though he were listening to it ‘all new from the beginning.' There was a prince in that tale, and he killed dragons, but only for one night. Ever afterward Georgie dubbed himself prince, pasha, giant-killer, and all the rest (you see, he could not tell any one, for fear of being laughed at), and his tales faded gradually into dreamland, where adventures were so many that he could not recall the half of them. They all began in the same way, or, as Georgie explained to the shadows of the night-light, there was ‘the same starting-off place' – a pile of brushwood stacked somewhere near a beach; and round this pile Georgie found himself running races with little boys and girls. These ended, things began to happen, such as ships that ran high up the dry land and turned into cardboard boxes; or gilt-and-green iron railings that surrounded beautiful gardens, but were all soft and could be walked through and overthrown so long as he remembered it was only a dream. He could never hold that knowledge more than a few seconds before things became real, and instead of pushing down houses full of grown-up people (a just revenge), he sat miserably upon gigantic door-steps trying to sing the multiplication-table up to four times six. It was most amusing at the very beginning, before the races round the pile, when he could shout to the others, ‘It's only make-believe, and I'll smack you!'

The princess of his tales was a person of wonderful beauty (she came from the old illustrated edition of Grimm, now out of print), and as she invariably looked on at Georgie's valor among the dragons and buffaloes and so forth, he gave her the two finest names he had ever heard in his life – Annie and Louise, pronounced ‘Annie
an
louise.' When the dreams swamped the stories, she would change into one of the little girls round the brushwood pile, still keeping her title and crown. She saw Georgie drown once in a dream-sea by the beach (it was the day after he had been taken to bathe in a realsea by his nurse); and he said as he sank: ‘Poor Annie
an
louise! She'll be sorry for me now!' But ‘Annie
an
louise,' walking slowly on the beach, called, ‘ “Ha! ha!” said the duck, laughing,' which to a waking mind might not seem to bear on the situation. It consoled Georgie at once, and must have been some kind of spell, for it raised the bottom of the deep, and he waded out with a twelve-inch flower-pot on each foot. As he was strictly forbidden to meddle with flower-pots in real life, he felt triumphantly wicked.

The movements of the grown-ups, whom Georgie tolerated, but did not pretend to understand, removed his world, when he was seven years old, to a place called ‘Oxford-on-a-visit.' Here were huge buildings surrounded by vast prairies, with streets of infinite length, and, above all, something called the ‘buttery,' which Georgie was dying to see, because he knew it must be greasy, and therefore delightful. He perceived how correct were his judgments when his nurse led him through a stone arch into the presence of an enormously fat man, who asked him if he would like some bread and cheese. Georgie was used to eat all round the clock, so he took what ‘buttery'gave him, and would have taken some brown liquid called ‘auditale' but that his nurse led him away to an afternoon performance of a thing called ‘Pepper's Ghost,' This was intensely thrilling. People's heads came off and flew all over the stage, and skeletons danced bone by bone, while Mr Pepper himself, beyond question a man of the worst, waved his arms and flapped a long gown, and in a deep bass voice (Georgie had never heard a man sing before) told of his sorrows unspeakable. Some grown-up or other tried to explain that the illusion was made with mirrors, and that there was no need to be frightened. Georgie did not know what illusions were, but he did know that a mirror was the looking-glass with the ivory handle on his mother's dressing-table. Therefore the ‘grown-up' was ‘just saying things' after the distressing custom of ‘grown-ups,' and Georgie cast about for amusement between scenes. Next to him sat a little girl dressed all in black, her hair combed off her forehead exactly like the girl in the book called ‘Alice in Wonderland,' which had been given himon his last birthday. The little girl looked at Georgie, and Georgie looked at her. There seemed to be no need of any further introduction.

‘I've got a cut on my thumb,' said he. It was the first work of his first real knife, a savage triangular hack, and he esteemed it a most valuable possession.

‘I'm tho thorry!' she lisped. ‘Let me look – pleathe.'

‘There's a di-ack-lum plaster on, but it's all raw under.' Georgie answered, complying.

‘Dothent it hurt?' – her gray eyes were full of pity and interest.

‘Awf'ly. Perhaps it will give me lockjaw.'

‘It lookth very horrid. I'm
tho
thorry!' She put a forefinger to his hand, and held her head sidewise for a better view.

Here the nurse turned, and shook him severely. ‘You mustn't talk to strange little girls, Master Georgie.'

‘She isn't strange. She's very nice. I like her, an' I've showed her my new cut.'

‘The idea! You change places with me.'

She moved him over, and shut out the little girl from his view, while the grown-up behind renewed the futile explanations.

‘I am
not
afraid, truly,' said the boy, wriggling in despair; ‘But why don't you go to sleep in the afternoons, same as the Provost of Oriel?'

Georgie had been introduced to a grown-up of that name, who slept in his presence without apology. Georgie understood that he was the most important grown-up in Oxford; hence he strove to gild his rebuke with flatteries. This grownup did not seem to like it, but he collapsed, and Georgie lay back in his seat, silent and enraptured. Mr Pepper was singing again, and the deep, ringing voice, the red fire, and the misty, waving gown all seemed to be mixed up with the little girl Who had been so kind about his cut. When the performance was ended she nodded to Georgie, and Georgie nodded in return. He spoke no more than was necessary till bedtime, but meditated on new colours and sounds and lights and music and things as far as he understood them, the deep-mouthedagony of Mr Pepper mingling with the little girl's lisp. That night he made a new tale, from which he shamelessly removed the Rapunzel-Rapunzel-let-down-your-hair princess, gold crown, Grimm edition, and all, and put a new Annie
an
louise in her place. So it was perfectly right and natural that when he came to the brushwood pile he should find her waiting for him, her hair combed off her forehead more like Alice in Wonderland than ever, and the races and adventures began.

Ten years at an English public school do not encourage dreaming. Georgie got his growth and chest measurement, and a few other things which did not appear in the bills, under a system of compulsory cricket, football, and paper-chases, from four to five days a week, which provided for three lawful cuts of a ground-ash if any boy absented himself from these entertainments without medical certificate or master's written excuse. From the child of eight, timid and shrinking, consoled by the sick-house matron as he wept for his mother, Georgie shot up into a hard-muscled, pugnacious little ten-year-old bully of the preparatory school, and was transplanted to the world of three hundred boys in the big dormitories below the hill, where the cheek so brazen and effective among juniors had to be turned to the smiter many times a day. There he became a rumple-collared, dusty-hatted fag of the Lower Third, and a little half-back at Little Side foot-ball; was pushed and prodded through the slack back-waters of the Lower Fourth, where all the raffle of a school generally accumulates; won his ‘second-fifteen' cap at football, enjoyed the dignity of a study with two companions in it, and began to look forward to office as a sub-prefect. At this crisis he was exhorted to work by the head-master, who saw in him the makings of a good man. So he worked slowly and systematically, and in due course sat at the prefects' table with the right to carry a cane, and, under restrictions, to use it. At last he blossomed into full glory as head of the school, ex-officio captain of the games; head of his house, where he and his lieutenants preserved discipline and decency among seventy boys from twelve to seventeen; general arbiter in thequarrels that spring up among the touchy Sixth – quarrels which on no account the vulgar must hear discussed; and intimate friend and ally of the head himself. He had a study of his own, where the black-and-gold ‘first-fifteen' cap hung on a bracket above the line of hurdle, long-jump, and half-mile cups that he had picked up year after year at the yearly sports; he used real razors, which the fags stropped with reverence; and outside his door were laid the black-and-yellow match goal-posts carried down in state to the field when the school tried conclusions with other teams. When he stepped forth in the black jersey, white knickers, and black stockings of the first fifteen, the new match-ball under his arm, and his old and frayed cap at the back of his head, the small fry of the lower forms stood apart and worshipped, and the ‘new caps' of the team talked to him ostentatiously, that the world might see. And so, in summer, when he came back to the pavilion after a slow but eminently safe game, it mattered not whether he had made nothing in, as once happened, a hundred and three, the school shouted just the same, and women-folk who had come to look at the match looked at Cottar – Cottar
major
;‘that's Cottar!' – and the day-boys felt that though home and mother were pleasant, it were better to live life joyously and whole, a full-blooded boarder in Cottar's house. Above all, he was responsible for that thing called the tone of the school, and few realise with what passionate devotion a certain type of boy throws himself into this work. Home was a far-away country, full of ponies and fishing and shooting, and men-visitors who interfered with one's plans; but school was the real world, where things of vital importance happened, and crises arose that must be dealt with promptly and quietly. Not for nothing was it written, ‘Let the consuls look to it that the republic takes no harm,' and Georgie was glad to be back in authority when the holidays ended. Behind him, but not too near, was the wise and temperate head, now suggesting the wisdom of the serpent, now counseling the mildness of the dove; leading him on to see, more by half-hints than by any direct word, how boys and men are all of a piece, and how he who can handle the one will assuredly in time control the other. On the other side – Georgie did not realise this till later – was the wiry drill-sergeant, contemptuously aware of all the tricks of ten generations of boys, who ruled the gymnasium through the long winter evenings when the squads were at work. There, among the rattle of the single-sticks, the click of the foils, the jar of the spring-bayonet sent home on the plastron, and the incessant ‘bat-bat' of the gloves, little Schofield would cool off on the vaulting-horse, and explain to the head of the school by what mysterious ways the worth of a boy could be gauged between half-shut eyelids.

For the rest, the school was not encouraged to dwell on its emotions, but rather to keep in hard condition, to avoid false quantities, and to enter the army direct, without the help of the expensive London crammer, under whose roof young blood learns too much. Cottar
major
went the way of hundreds before him. The head gave him six months' final polish, taught him what kind of answers best please a certain kind of examiners and win marks, and handed him over to the properly constituted authorities, who passed him into Sandhurst fairly high up the list. Here he had sense enough to see that he was in the Lower Third once more, and behaved with respect toward his seniors, till they in turn respected him, and he was promoted to the rank of corporal, and sat in authority over mixed peoples with all the vices of men and boys combined. For the first of many occasions school experience served him well. His reward was another string of athletic cups, a good-conduct sword, and, at last, Her Majesty's commission as a subaltern in a first-class line regiment. He did not know that he bore with him from school and college a character worth much fine gold, but was pleased to find his mess so kindly and companionable. He had plenty of money of his own; his training had set the public-school mask upon his face, and had taught him how many were the ‘things no fellow can do.' By virtue of the same training he kept his pores open and his mouth shut; and he looked very well with his company on parade.

The regular working of the empire shifted his world to India, where he tasted utter loneliness in subaltern's quarters, – one room and one bullock-trunk, – and, with his mess, learned the new life from the beginning. But there were horses in the land – ponies at reasonable price; there was polo for such as could afford it; there were the disreputable remnants of a pack of hounds; and there were cricket, and musketry instruction, and the fitting up of the new gymnasium; and Cottar worried his way along without too much despair. It dawned on him that a regiment in India was nearer the chance of active service than he had conceived, and that a man might as well study his profession. A major of the new school backed this idea with enthusiasm (he was a black little man, full of notions), and he and Cottar accumulated a good library of military works, and read and argued and disputed far into the nights. But the adjutant said the old thing: ‘Get to know your men, young un, and they'll follow you anywhere. That's all you want – know your men.' Cottar thought he knew them fairly well at cricket and the regimental sports, but he never realised the true inwardness of them till he was sent off with a detachment of twenty to sit down in a mud fort near a rushing river which was spanned by a bridge of boats. When the floods came they went out and hunted stray pontoons down the banks. Otherwise there was nothing to do, and the men got drunk, gambled, and quarrelled. They were a sickly crew, for a junior subaltern is by custom saddled with the worst men. Cottar endured their rioting as long as he could, and then sent down-country for a dozen pairs of boxing-gloves. (Nothing in the regulations forbids an officer taking part in healthy sports.)