Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (684 page)

1. Remember, the Chinaman generally says “1” for “r.”    

His Gift

HIS SCOUTMASTER
and his comrades, who disagreed on several points, were united in one conviction — that William Glasse Sawyer was, without exception, the most unprofitable person, not merely in the Pelican Troop: who lived in the wilderness of the 47th Postal District, London, S.E., but in the whole body of Boy Scouts throughout the world.

No one, except a ferocious uncle who was also a French-polisher, seemed responsible for his beginnings. There was a legend that he had been entered as a Wolf-Cub at the age of eight, under Miss Doughty, whom the uncle had either bribed or terrorized to accept him; and that after six months Miss Doughty confessed that she could make nothing of him and retired to teach school in the Yorkshire moors. There is also a red-headed ex-cub of that troop (he is now in a shipping-office) who asserts proudly that he used to bite William Glasse Sawyer on the leg in the hope of waking him up, and takes most of the credit for William’s present success. But when William moved into the larger life of the Pelicans, who were gay birds, he was not what you might call alert. In shape he resembled the ace of diamonds; in colour he was an oily sallow.

He could accomplish nothing that required one glimmer of reason, thought or commonsense. He cleaned himself only under bitter compulsion; he lost his bearings equally in town or country after a five-minutes’ stroll. He could track nothing smaller than a tram-car on a single line, and that only if there were no traffic. He could neither hammer a nail, carry an order, tie a knot, light a fire, notice any natural object, except food, or use any edged tool except a table-knife. To crown all, his innumerable errors and omissions were not even funny.

But it is an old law of human nature that if you hold to one known course of conduct — good or evil — you end by becoming an institution; and when he was fifteen or thereabouts William achieved that position. The Pelicans gradually took pride in the notorious fact that they possessed the only Sealed Pattern, Mark A, Ass — an unique jewel, so to speak, of Absolute, Unalterable Incapacity. The poet of a neighbouring troop used to write verses about him, and recite them from public places, such as the tops of passing trams. William made no comment, but wrapped himself up in long silences that he seldom broke till the juniors of the Troop (the elders had given it up long before) tried to do him good turns with their scout-staves.

In private life he assisted his uncle at the mystery of French-polishing, which, he said, was “boiling up things in pots and rubbing down bits of wood.” The boiling-up, he said, he did not mind so much. The rubbing down he hated. Once, too, he volunteered that his uncle and only relative had been in the Navy, and “did not like to be played with “; and the vision of William playing with any human being upset even his Scoutmaster.

Now it happened, upon a certain summer that was really a summer with heat to it, the Pelicans had been lent a dream of a summer camp in a dream of a park, which offered opportunities for every form of diversion, including bridging muddy-banked streams, and unlimited cutting into young alders and undergrowth at large. A convenient village lay just outside the Park wall, and the ferny slopes round the camp were rich in rabbits, not to mention hedgehogs and other fascinating vermin. It was reached — Mr. Hale their Scoutmaster saw to that — after two days’ hard labour, with the Troop push-cart, along sunny roads.

William’s share in the affair was — what it had always been. First he lost most of his kit; next his uncle talked to him after the fashion of the Navy of ‘96 before refitting him; thirdly he went lame behind the push-cart by reason of a stone in his shoe, and on arrival in camp dropped — not for the first, second or third time — into his unhonoured office as Camp Orderly, and was placed at the disposal of The Prawn, whose light blue eyes stuck out from his freckled face, and whose long narrow chest was covered with badges. From that point on, the procedure was as usual. Once again did The Prawn assure his Scoutmaster that he would take enormous care of William and give him work suited to his capacity and intelligence. Once again did William grunt and wriggle at the news, and once again in the silence of the deserted camp next morning, while the rest of the Pelicans were joyously mucking themselves up to their young bills at bridging brooks, did he bow his neck to The Prawn’s many orders. For The Prawn was a born organizer. He set William to unpack the push-cart and then to neatly and exactly replace all parcels, bags, tins, and boxes. He despatched him thrice in the forenoon across the hot Park to fetch water from a distant well equipped with a stiff-necked windlass and a split handle that pinched William’s fat palms. He bade him collect sticks, thorny for choice, out of the flanks of a hedge full of ripe nettles against which Scout uniforms offer small protection. He then made him lay them in the camp cooking-place, carefully rejecting the green ones, for most sticks were alike to William; and when everything else failed, he set him to pick up stray papers and rubbish the length and breadth of the camp. All that while, he not only chased him with comments but expected that William would show gratitude to him for forming his young mind.

“‘Tisn’t every one ‘ud take this amount o’ trouble with you, Mug,” said The Prawn virtuously, when even his energetic soul could make no further work for his vassal. “Now you open that bully-beef tin and we’ll have something to eat, and then you’re off duty — for a bit. I shall try my hand at a little camp-cooking.”

William found the tin — at the very bottom, of course, of the push-cart; cut himself generously over the knuckles in opening it (till The Prawn showed him how this should be done), and in due course, being full of bread and bully, withdrew towards a grateful clump of high fern that he had had his eye on for some time, wriggled deep into it, and on a little rabbit-browsed clearing of turf, stretched out and slept the sleep of the weary who have been up and under strict orders since six A.M. Till that hour of that day, be it remembered, William had given no proof either of intelligence or initiative in any direction.

He waked, slowly as was his habit, and noticed that the shadows were stretching a little, even as he stretched himself. Then he heard The Prawn clanking pot-lids, between soft bursts of song. William sniffed. The Prawn was cooking — was probably qualifying for something or other; The Prawn did nothing but qualify for badges. On reflection William discovered that he loved The Prawn even less this camp than the last, or the one before that. Then he heard the voice of a stranger.

“Yes,” was The Prawn’s reply. “I’m in charge of the camp. Would you like to look at it, sir?”

“‘Seen ‘em — seen heaps of ‘em,” said the unknown. “My son was in ‘em once — Buffaloes, out Hendon-way. What are you?”

“Well, just now I’m a sort of temporary Cook,” said The Prawn, whose manners were far better than William’s.

“Temp’ry! Temp’ry!” the stranger puffed. “Can’t be a temp’ry cook any more’n you can be a temp’ry Parson. Not so much. Cookin’s cookin’! Let’s see your notions of cookin’.”

William had never heard any one address The Prawn in these tones, and somehow it cheered him. In the silence that followed he turned on his face and wriggled unostentatiously through the fern, as a Scout should, till he could see that bold man without attracting The Prawn’s notice. And this, too, was the first time that William had ever profited by the instruction of his Scoutmaster or the example of his comrades.

Heavenly sights rewarded him. The Prawn, visibly ill at ease, was shifting from one sinewy leg to the other, while an enormously fat little man with a pointed grey beard and arms like the fins of a fish investigated a couple of pots that hung on properly crutched sticks over the small fire that William had lighted in the cooking-place. He did not seem to approve of what he saw or smelt. And yet it was the impeccable Prawn’s own cookery!

“Lor!” said he at last after more sniffs of contempt, as he replaced the lid. “If you hot up things in tins,
that
ain’t cookery. That’s vittles — mere vittles! And the way you’ve set that pot on, you’re drawing all the nesty wood-smoke into the water. The spuds won’t take much harm of it, but you’ve ruined the meat. That
is
meat, ain’t it? Get me a fork.”

William hugged himself. The Prawn, looking exactly, like his namesake well-boiled, fetched a big fork. The little man prodded into the pot.

“It’s stew!” The Prawn explained, but his voice shook.

“Lor!” said the man again. “It’s boilin’! It’s boilin’! You don’t boil when you stew, my son; an’ as for
this
” — up came a grey slab of mutton — ”there’s no odds between this and motor-tyres. Well! Well! As I was sayin’ —  — ” He joined his hands behind his globular back and shook his head in silence. After a while, The Prawn tried to assert himself.

“Cookin’ isn’t my strong point,” began The Prawn, “but —  — ”

“Pore boys! Pore boys!” the stranger soliloquized, looking straight in front of him. “Pore little boys! Wicked, I call it. They don’t ever let you make bread, do they, my son?”

The Prawn said they generally bought their bread at a shop.

“Ah! I’m a shopkeeper meself. Marsh, the Baker here, is me.
Pore
boys! Well! Well! . . . Though it’s against me own interest to say so, I think shops are wicked. They sell people things out o’ tins which save ‘em trouble, an’ fill the ‘ospitals with stummick-cases afterwards. An’ the muck that’s sold for flour. . . .” His voice faded away and he meditated again. “Well — well!
As
I was sayin’ —  — Pore boys!
Pore
boys! I’m glad you ain’t askin’ me to dinner. Good-bye.”

He rolled away across the fern, leaving The Prawn dumb behind him.

It seemed to William best to wriggle back in his cover as far as he could, ere The Prawn should cal! him to work again. He was not a Scout by instinct, but his uncle had shown him that when things went wrong in the world, some one generally passed it on to some one else. Very soon he heard his name called, acidly, several times. He crawled out from the far, end of the fern-patch, rubbing his eyes, and The Prawn re-enslaved him on the spot. For once in his life William was alert and intelligent, but The Prawn paid him no compliments, nor when the very muddy Pelicans came back from the bridging did The Prawn refer in any way to the visit of Mr. E. M. Marsh & Son, Bakers and Confectioners in the village street just outside the Park wall. Nor, for that matter, did he serve the Pelicans much besides tinned meats for their evening meal.

To say that William did not sleep a wink that night would be what has been called “nature-faking’.’; which is a sin. His system demanded at least nine hours’ rest, but he lay awake for quite twenty minutes, during which he thought intensely, rapidly and joyously. Had he been asked he would have said that his thoughts dealt solely with The Prawn and the judgment that had fallen upon him; but William was no psychologist. He did not know that hate — raging hate against a too-badged, too virtuous senior — had shot him into a new world, exactly as the large blunt shell is heaved through space and dropped into a factory, a garden or a barracks by the charge behind it. And, as the shell, which is but metal and mixed chemicals, needs the mere graze on the fuse to spread itself all over the landscape, so did his mind need but the touch of that hate to flare up and illuminate not only all his world, but his own way through it.

Next morning something sang in his ear that it was long since he had done good turns to any one except his uncle, who was slow to appreciate them. He would amend that error; and the more safely since The Prawn would be off all that day with the Troop on a tramp in the natural history line, and his place as Camp Warden and Provost Marshal would be filled by the placid and easy-going Walrus, whose proper name was Carpenter, who never tried for badges, but who could not see a rabbit without going after him. And the owner of the Park had given full leave to the Pelicans to slay by any means, except a gun, any rabbits they could. So William ingratiated himself with his Superior Officer as soon as the Pelicans had left. . . .

No, the excellent Carpenter did not see that he needed William by his side all day. He might take himself and his bruised foot pretty much where he chose. He went, and this new and active mind of his that he did not realize, accompanied him — straight up the path of duty which, poetry tells us, is so often the road to glory.

He began by cleaning himself and his kit at seven o’clock in the morning, long before the village shops were open. This he did near a postern gate with a crack in it, in the Park wall, commanding a limited but quite sufficient view of the establishment of E. M. Marsh & Son across the street. It was perfect weather, and about eight o’clock Mr. Marsh himself in his shirt-sleeves rolled out to enjoy it before he took down the shutters. Hardly had he shifted the first of them when a fattish Boy Scout with a flat face and a slight limp laid hold of the second and began to slide it towards him.

“Well, well!” said Mr. Marsh. “Ah! Your good turn, eh?”

“ Yes,” said William briefly.

“That’s right! Handsomely now, handsomely,” for the shutter was jamming in its groove. William knew from his uncle that “handsomely “meant slowly and with care. The shutter responded to the coaxing. The others followed.

“Belay!” said Mr. Marsh, wiping his forehead, for, like William, he perspired easily. When he turned round William had gone. The Movies had taught him, though he knew it not, the value of dramatic effect. He continued to watch Mr. Marsh through the crack in the postern — it was the little wooden door at the end of the right of way through the Park — and when, an hour or so later, Mr. Marsh came out of his shop and headed towards it, William retired backwards into the high fern and brambles. The manœuvre would have rejoiced Mr. Hale’s heart, for generally William moved like an elephant with its young. He turned up, quite casually, when Mr. Marsh had puffed his way again into the empty camp. Carpenter was off in pursuit of rabbits, with a pocket full of fine picture-wire. It was the first time William had ever done the honours of any establishment. He came to attention and smiled.