Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (685 page)

“Well! Well!” Mr. Marsh nodded friendlily. “What are
you
?”

“Camp-Guard,” said William, improvising for the first time in his life. “Can I show you anything, sir?”

“No, thank’ee. My son was a Scout once. I’ve just come to look round at things. ‘No one tryin’ any cookin’ to-day?”

“No, sir.”

“‘Bout’s well.
Pore
boys! What you goin’ to have for dinner? Tinned stuff?”

“I expect so, sir.”

“D’you like it?”

“‘Used to it.” William rather approved of this round person who wasted no time on abstract ideas.

“
Pore
boys! Well! Well! It saves trouble — for the present. Knots and splices in your stummick afterwards — in ‘ospital.” Mr. Marsh looked at the cold camp cooking-place and its three big stones, and sniffed.

“Would you like it lit?” said William, suddenly.

“What for?”

“To cook with.”

“What d’
you
know about cookin’?” Mr. Marsh’s little eyes opened wide.

“Nothing, sir.”

“What makes you think
I
’m a cook?”

“By the way you looked at our cooking-place,” the mendacious William answered. The Prawn had always urged him to cultivate habits of observation. They seemed easy — after you had observed the things.

“Well! Well! Quite a young Sherlock, you are. ‘Don’t think much o’
this
, though.” Mr. Marsh began to stoop to rearrange the openair hearth to his liking.

“Show me how and I’ll do it,” said William.

“Shove that stone a little more to the left then. Steady — So! That’ll do! Got any wood? No? You slip across to the shop and ask them to give you some small brush-stuff from the oven. Stop!
And
my apron, too. Marsh is the name.”

William left him chuckling wheezily. When he returned Mr. Marsh clad himself in a long white apron of office which showed so clearly that Carpenter from far off returned at once.

“H’sh! H’sh!” said Mr. Marsh before he could speak. “You carry on with what you’re doing. Marsh is my name. My son was a Scout once. Buffaloes — Hendon-way. It’s all right. Don’t you grudge an old man enjoying himself.”

The Walrus looked amazedly at William moving in three directions at once with his face aflame.

“It’s all right,” said William. “He’s giving us cooking-lessons.” Then — the words. came into his mouth by themselves — ”I’ll take the responsibility.”

“Yes, yes! He knew I could cook. Quite a young Sherlock he is!
You
carry on.” Mr. Marsh turned his back on the Walrus and despatched William again with some orders to his shop across the road. “And you’d better tell ‘em to put ‘em all in a basket,” he cried after him.

William returned with a fair assortment of mixed material, including eggs, two rashers of bacon, and a packet of patent flour, concerning which last Mr. Marsh said things no baker should say about his own goods. The frying-pan came out of the push-cart, with some other oddments, and it was not till after it was greased that Mr. Marsh demanded William’s name. He got it in full, and it produced strange effects on the little fat man.

“An’ ‘ow do you spell your middle name?” he asked.

“Gl-a-double-s-e,” said William.

“Might that be your mother’s?” William nodded. “Well! Well! I wonder now! I
do
wonder. It’s a great name. There was a Sawyer in the cooking line once, but ‘e was a Frenchman and spelt it different. Glasse is serious though. And you say it was your ma’s?” He fell into an abstraction, frying-pan in hand. Anon, as he cracked an egg miraculously on its edge “Whether you’re a descendant or not, it’s worth livin’ up to, a name like that.”

“Why?” said William, as the egg slid into the pan and spread as evenly as paint under an expert’s hand.

“I’ll tell you some day. She was a very great cook — but she’d have come expensive at to-day’s prices. Now, you take the pan an’ I’ll draw me own conclusions.”

The boy worked the pan over the level red fire with a motion that he had learned somehow or other while “boiling up” things for his uncle. It seemed to him natural and easy. Mr. Marsh watched in unbroken silence for at least two minutes.

“ It’s early to say — yet,” was his verdict. “But I ‘ave ‘opes. You ‘ave good ‘ands, an’ your knowin’ I was a cook shows you ‘ave the instinck.
If
you ‘ave got the Touch — mark you, I only say if — but if you ‘ave anything like the Genuine Touch, you’re provided for for life.
An’
further — don’t tilt her that way! you ‘old your neighbours, friends and employers in the ‘ollow of your ‘and.”

“How do you mean?” said William, intent on his egg.

“Everything which a man
is
depends on what ‘e puts inside ‘im,” was the reply. “A good cook’s a King of men — besides being thunderin’ well off if ‘e don’t drink. It’s the only sure business in the whole round world; and
I
’ve been round it eight times, in the Mercantile Marine, before I married the second Mrs. M.”

William, more interested in the pan than Mr. Marsh’s marriages, made no reply. “Yes, a good cook,” Mr. Marsh went on reminiscently, “even on Board o’ Trade allowance, ‘as brought many a ship to port that ‘ud otherwise ‘ave mut’nied on the ‘igh seas.”

The eggs and bacon mellowed together. Mr. Marsh supplied some wonderful last touches and the result was eaten, with the Walrus’s help, sizzling out of the pan and washed down with some stone ginger-beer from the convenient establishment of Mr. E. M. Marsh outside the Park wall.

“I’ve ruined me dinner,” Mr. Marsh confided to the boys, “but I ‘aven’t enjoyed myself like this, not since Noah was an able seaman. You wash up, young Sherlock, an’ I’ll tell you something.”

He filled an ancient pipe with eloquent tobacco, and while William scoured the pan, he held forth on the art and science and mystery of cooking as inspiredly as Mr. Jorrocks, Master of Foxhounds, had lectured upon the Chase. The burden of his song was Power — power which, striking directly at the stomach of man, makes the rudest polite, not to say sycophantic, towards a good cook, whether at sea, in camp, in the face of war, or (here he embellished his text with personal experiences) the crowded competitive cities where a good meal was as rare, he declared, as silk pyjamas in a pig-sty. “An’ mark you,” he concluded, “three times a day the ‘aughtiest and most overbearin’ of ‘em all ‘ave to come crawling to you for a round belly-full. Put
that
in your pipe and smoke it out, young Sherlock!”

He unloosed his sacrificial apron and rolled away.

The Boy Scout is used to strangers who give him good advice on the smallest provocation; but strangers who fill you up with bacon and eggs and ginger-beer are few.

“What started it all?” the Walrus demanded.

“Well, I can’t exactly say,” William answered, and as he had never been known to give a coherent account of anything, the Walrus returned to his wires, and William lay out and dreamed in the fern among the cattle-flies. He had dismissed The Prawn altogether from his miraculously enlarging mind. Very soon he was on the High Seas, a locality which till that instant had never appealed to him, in a gale, issuing bacon and eggs to crews on the edge of mutiny. Next, he was at war, turning the tides of it to victory for his own land by meals of bacon and eggs that brought bemedalled Generals in troops like Pelicans, to his fireplace. Then he was sustaining his uncle, at the door of an enormous restaurant, with plates of bacon and eggs sent out by gilded commissionaires such as guard the cinemas, while his uncle wept with gratitude and remorse, and The Prawn, badges and all, begged for scraps.

His chin struck his chest and half waked him to fresh flights of glory. He might have the Genuine Touch, Mr. Marsh had said it. More over, he, the Mug, had a middle name which filled that great man with respect. All the 47th Postal District should ring with that name, even to the exclusion of the racing-news, in its evening papers. And on his return from camp, or perhaps a day or two later, he would defy his very uncle and escape for ever from the foul business of French-polishing.

Here he slept generously and dreamlessly till evening, when the Pelicans returned, their pouches full of samples of uncookable vegetables and insects, and the Walrus made his report of the day’s Camp doings to the Scoutmaster.

“Wait a minute, Walrus. You say the Mug actually
did
the cooking?”

“Mr. Marsh had him under instruction, sir. But the Mug did a lot of it — he held the pan over the fire. I saw him, sir. And he washed up afterwards.”

“Did he?” said the Scoutmaster lightly. “Well, that’s something.” But when the Walrus had gone Mr. Hale smote thrice upon his bare knees and laughed, as a Scout should, without noise.

He thanked Mr. Marsh next morning for the interest he had shown in the camp, and suggested (this was while he was buying many very solid buns for a route-march) that nothing would delight the Pelicans more than a few words from Mr. Marsh on the subject of cookery, if he could see his way to it. .

“Quite so,” said Mr. Marsh. “
I
’m worth listenin’ to. Well! Well! I’ll be along this evening, and, maybe, I’ll bring some odds and ends with me. Send over young Sherlock-Glasse to ‘elp me fetch ‘em.
That’s
a boy with ‘is stummick in the proper place. ‘Know anything about ‘im?”

Mr. Hale knew a good deal, but he did not tell it all. He suggested that William himself should be approached, and would excuse him from the route-march for that purpose.

“Route-march!” said Mr. Marsh in horror. “Lor! The very worst use you can make of your feet is walkin’ on ‘em. ‘Gives you bunions. Besides, ‘e ain’t got the figure for marches. ‘E’s a cook by build as well as instinck. ‘Eavy in the run, oily in the skin, broad in the beam, short in the arm,
but
, mark you, light on the feet. That’s the way cooks ought to be issued. You never ‘eard of a really good
thin
cook yet, did you? No. Nor me. An’ I’ve known millions that called ‘emselves cooks.”

Mr. Hare regretted that he had not studied the natural history of cooks, and sent William over early in the day.

Mr. Marsh spoke to the Pelicans for an hour that evening beside an open wood fire, from the ashes of which he drew forth (talking all the while) wonderful hot cakes called “dampers”; while from its top he drew off pans full of “lobscouse,” which he said was not to be confounded with “salmagundi,” and a hair-raising compound of bacon, cheese and onions all melted together. And while the Pelicans ate, he convulsed them with mirth or held them breathless with anecdotes of the High Seas and the World, so that the vote of thanks they passed him at the end waked all the cows in the Park. But William sat wrapped in visions, his hands twitching sympathetically to Mr. Marsh’s wizardry among the pots and pans. He knew now what the name of Glasse signified; for he had spent an hour at the back of the baker’s shop reading, in a brown-leather book dated 1767 A.D. and called
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by a Lady
, and that lady’s name, as it appeared in facsimile at the head of Chap. I., was “H. Glasse.” Torture would not have persuaded him (or Mr. Marsh), by that time, that she was not his direct ancestress; but, as a matter of form, he intended to ask his uncle.

When The Prawn, very grateful that Mr. Marsh had made no reference to his notions of cookery, asked William what he thought of the lecture and exhibition, William came out of his dreams with a start, and “Oh, all right, I suppose, but I wasn’t listening much.” Then The Prawn, who always improved an occasion, lectured him on lack of attention; and William missed all that too. The question in his mind was whether his uncle would let him stay with Mr. Marsh for a couple of days after Camp broke up, or whether he would use the reply-paid telegram, which Mr. Marsh had sent him, for his own French-polishing concerns. When The Prawn’s voice ceased, he not only promised to do better next time, but added, out of a vast and inexplicable pity that suddenly rose up inside him, “And I’m grateful to you, Prawn. I am reelly.”

On his return to town from that wonder-revealing visit, he found the Pelicans treating him with a new respect. For one thing, the Walrus had talked about the bacon and eggs; for another, The Prawn, who when he let himself go could be really funny, had given some artistic imitations of Mr. Marsh’s comments on his cookery. Lastly, Mr. Hale had laid down that William’s future employ would be to cook for the Pelicans when they camped abroad. “And look out that you don’t poison us too much,” he added.

There were occasional mistakes and some very flat failures, but the Pelicans swallowed them all loyally; no one had even a stomach-ache, and the office of Cook’s mate to William was in great demand. The Prawn himself sought it next Spring when the Troop stole a couple of fair May days on the outskirts of a brick-field, and were very happy. But William set him aside in favour of a new and specially hopeless recruit; oily-skinned, fat, short-armed, but light on his feet, and with some notion of lifting pot-lids without wrecking or flooding the whole fireplace.

“You see, Prawn,” he explained, “cookin’ isn’t a thing one can just pick up.”