"'_Dear Sir,--The tiger's tail is worn by Smythe next his skin, under
his vest._'
"That is all," continued Dr. Dunstan. "There is no clue--either to the
sender or to his object in conveying this astounding information to me.
Concerning him I shall make researches anon, when we have proved the
truth or falsity of his statement; but for the present we are concerned
with the name of Smythe. Now, the name of Smythe may not be familiar to
many among you. I find that Smythe is a newcomer. He has been at
Merivale only since the beginning of this term. He is very young, and
unusually ignorant, but he is not too young, and not too ignorant to
know the meaning of such simple and straightforward Anglo-Saxon as I am
in the habit of employing when I address my boys. He is aware that I
have a tiger's skin, and that this interesting relic is dear to me as
the gift of one who distinguished himself within these walls, and
carried the moral lessons, and even a little of the scholastic erudition
of Merivale School into the larger life beyond, when he went down to the
sea in ships. Huxley Smythe is also aware that this integument has been
mutilated by some senseless and wicked hand. Then let him come forward
and tell us more, if, indeed, he knows more than we all know. Let him
step before me and explain the significance of these words from a
nameless source. I hope with all my heart that he may proclaim them
false, and, what is more, prove them false, for Huxley Smythe's father
is a very distinguished and learned gentleman, and a Fellow of the Royal
Society. It is impossible too highly to esteem his discoveries and
surmises respecting the customs of the Ancients. Such a man puts truth
before all things; such a man will be cut to the heart if his offspring
should prove other than honest and upright. Come hither, Huxley
Smythe!"
So Smythe went, and jolly cheap he looked. His face turned the colour
of gooseberry fool, and his hair seemed to become many shades redder
than usual as he walked up the chapel. He was naturally small, and he
seemed much smaller than he was, owing to walking up the chapel all
alone.
"Speak," said the Doctor, "and address your remarks to me. Do you, or
do you not know what has become of the caudal appendage of my
tiger-skin?"
"Yes, I do, sir," replied Smythe.
"You do, sir! Then why, when I invited information on this subject, did
you deny it to me?"
Smythe did not reply to this question. He merely said, "I cut off the
tiger's tail, sir, in a moment of great excitement, and having once got
it, I thought I'd keep it."
"Well may you have been excited, sir, at the instant of such an outrage!
And what next, sir?" asked the Doctor.
The whole of the upper part of his body began to lift in a lump, as it
always did when he got worked into a rage.
"Next, sir, I decided to wear it round my waist."
"And will you be so good as to enlighten us as to the reason for this
extraordinary decision?"
"The Boringos do it, sir, or else the Kinnatoos. My father told me that
they----"
"Boringos, sir! Kinnatoos, sir! What are the Boringos to you, wretched
youth--or the Kinnatoos, either? Because certain heathen nations, as
yet far from the light, indulge in gross superstition for their own
benighted ends, and credit inanimate objects with imaginary virtues and
grotesque qualities which we, who are civilized, know right well that
they do not possess--because these things are so, is that any reason why
a Christian boy in a Christian school should seek to emulate their
misguided credulity? The question before us is not why the Boringos do
these things, but why you cut off my tiger's tail, sir, and wore it
round your person?"
"To get fierce, sir," said Smythe.
The Doctor simply heaved in his indignation.
"To get fierce, sir!" he said, repeating Smythe's words in a tone of
helpless despair.
"Yes, please, sir. With luck the fierceness of the tiger ought to go
into me," explained Smythe.
"This is almost too much," said Dr. Dunstan.
"Because I thought that to be as fierce as a Bengal tiger would be
useful, sir," Smythe ventured to say.
"Silence, sir!" roared the Doctor in such a tremendous tone of voice
that Steggles whispered to me the Doctor himself must have been wearing
about a dozen tigers' tails all his life.
"And how _dare_ you want to be fierce, sir?" went on the Doctor. "You
come among us a child from a Christian home--an inexperienced and
ignorant youth. And yet at ten--for that is your age, Huxley
Smythe--you develop a disgraceful yearning to deteriorate from the state
of civilization to which you are born; you debase your intellect and
your morality by deliberate efforts to become demoralized; you seek to
take a retrograde step, and recover the ferocity of primitive--or, as we
say, pre-Adamite--humanity. You have striven to acquire the physical
brutality of palaeolithic man, sir, and--worse, far worse--you
deliberately endeavour to impress upon your nature the disgusting
attributes of one of the most pestilential animals that an inscrutable
Providence has created and let loose upon this planet. He who could
seek to secure the attributes of the tiger, Huxley Smythe, must already
possess the potentialities of the wild ass! Never in the whole course
of my scholastic experience have I met anything quite so painful as this
depravity in a child of ten. Shed no tears, sir," went on the Doctor;
"the time has not yet come for tears."
Because Smythe was blubbing a good deal at this dreadful view the Doctor
had taken of him. Of course he didn't understand a word of it, and that
made it all the worse.
"And where is my tiger's tail now, sir?" finally asked Dr. Dunstan.
"On, sir," answered Smythe humbly.
"Then it had better be taken off, sir!" said Dunstan, and he roared
again. "Divest yourself of your upper attire, wretched boy. Let this
lesson not be lost on the least among us. Take off your clothes, sir,
so that one and all of us shall be warned what evil instincts may, and
do still mar human nature in the most unexpected quarters. I mourn for
your accomplished father, Smythe; and still more for your poor mother.
It was none too soon that they sent you into my care, young though you
be. Go and stand beside the fire, sir, that the ordeal may not
physically injure you."
The kid went to the chapel fire, which always burns in winter, and took
off his coat and his waistcoat, his collar and his tie, and his shirt
and his vest. Under the vest, fastened round pretty tight, just below
his ribs, was the tiger's tail. He looked awfully rum like this, and
still cried a bit. A few chaps, including several of the sixth, laughed
out loud at the appearance of Smythe and the tail; but the Doctor soon
shut them up.
"Silence! Silence!" he shouted out. "This is no laughing matter,
Mayne; and you, Trelawny; and you, Cornwallis major. We ought to weep
rather than laugh. Here is sortilege, necromancy, black art in our
midst! Here we find a boy permeated with the--with the fetishism, the
thaumaturgy, the demonology of the savage and the cannibal. And, what
is more astounding still, we find him at Merivale! Take off that tail,
sir!"
Smythe undid the tail, and took it off. There was a bright red mark all
round his white body, and I should think the tail must have given him a
pretty good doing. A tiger's hair is undoubtedly scratchy when applied
to a tender part of the human frame, like the stomach; and perhaps
savages know this, and that is really the reason why they wear them.
Because nobody who kept a tiger's tail under his clothes for any length
of time could help getting fairly snappy, if not actually fierce.
The Doctor ordered me to bring him the tail, because I happened to be
near, and he caught my eye. This I did, and meantime Smythe got back
into his clothes. Then the Doctor told the school it could go about its
business--all but the culprit; and he marched away solemnly and slowly
with Smythe and the tail.
The tail was very skilfully sewn back into its original place, and
nobody who did not know the truth could have guessed at what had
happened to it. And Smythe told us afterwards that Dunstan talked to
him till tea-time, and then, suddenly reminded of the hour by the bell,
flogged him, but very slightly. It is always a hopeful sign if the
Doctor begins a row with talk; and the longer he talks, the less painful
is the end. But if he begins with the licking and talks afterwards, it
is bad, and adding insult to injury, as Steggles says.
One thing may be worth mentioning. The Doctor never asked for details,
so Smythe never gave him any; and, as old Dunstan never heard about what
Freckles did, or I did, we escaped intact. This made what Smythe had
done seem far worse than it was. Of course we richly rewarded the kid
for being such a jolly good plucked one, and gave him many a thing worth
having; and we also made it up pretty thoroughly to Fowle for writing
the anonymous letter to the Doctor. It proved to be him, because nobody
else in the dormitory ever kept awake after everybody else was asleep,
which was in itself a beastly mean thing to do; and we made him finally
confess that he had spotted the tail. With the help of a Chinese
torture that Tin Lin Chow had shown us, we made him confess. It is
beautifully simple, and a kid can do it. And when Fowle confessed at
the first twinge, and said he did it for revenge because young Smythe
had cheeked him in front of about twenty chaps, we felt that he was
beneath a fine thing like a Chinese torture, and just kicked the calves
of his legs for a little while, and then arranged, as a punishment, for
the whole school to send him to Coventry for a week. Which was done.
*RICHMOND MINIMUS, PREACHER*
*No. V*
*RICHMOND MINIMUS, PREACHER*
*I*
Properly speaking he wasn't 'minimus' in his preaching days; but once
there were three Richmonds in the field, as Dr. Dunstan used to say, and
after Richmond major went to Sandhurst, young Richmond ought to have
become 'minor,' and very much wanted to, but nobody could get into the
way of changing it. Even when he was left all alone and Richmond minor
left to go into a tea merchant's office, chaps still called him
'minimus.'
His father was a clergyman who had risen into a rural dean; but
Morrison, who lived at Exeter and understood a frightful deal about
religious people, said that, while a very good thing in its way, a rural
dean was mere dust beside a cathedral dean. He seemed to think really,
though I don't know whether it is true, that a minor canon is almost as
classy as a rural dean, if not quite. Anyway, the father of Richmond
minimus was one, and, until Morrison explained that it was nothing to
make a fuss about, we were all rather interested. No doubt it was
through his father that Richmond got his preaching power. He was going
into the Church himself some day, and looked forward to being something
out of the common in course of time. He said that he always felt a
great liking for church--even from his earliest years--and had never
been known to object to going, though his brothers--especially the one
now training to become a tea merchant--had not in the least cared for
it.
He was a frightfully good kid, and Mathers always said he would die
young, or else get consumption, if there was any truth in the stories we
were allowed to read on Sunday afternoons. In these, which were
different to week-day stories, there were many deaths. And sometimes
the bad boys died and sometimes the good ones; but they died in a very
different way. The good ones died in the lap of luxury, with their
friends crying round the bed, and grapes and clergymen, and pretty well
everything to make it all right; but the bad ones were smashed like
flies, owing to setting machinery in motion; or fell over cliffs
birds'-nesting; or got taken up by policemen. The difference was that
the good ones died from sheer bad health. They had hectic coughs or
something of that kind, and nobody could cure them--in fact, nobody ever
seemed to try to; but the bad boys were always as hard as nuts and never
had hectic coughs or anything. In fact, they would all be alive now if
they had only gone to church on Sundays and not always chosen that day
for adventures. In these adventures they invariably got mucked up,
excepting when occasionally they were saved by good boys coming home
from church, or sometimes even by good girls; which Stopford said must
have been worse than death, owing to his hatred of girls.
This Stopford ought to have died a hundred times a Sunday really. He
was not merely bad. That was nothing, because we all were. At any rate,
none of us were good enough to get consumption. But he was a beast as
well--an utter beast--and nobody liked him but Fowle; and nobody ever
liked Fowle, so in self-defence Fowle had to like Stopford.
This Stopford was a bully, among other things, and a great hater of
Richmond minimus. I think really it was the frightful sufferings of
Richmond that made him take to preaching in a way, because, though
Richmond minor was as old as Stopford, he had no muscles, being merely a
piece of string for strength; so, though Richmond major could tackle
Stopford, and did so till he left, after he had gone, there was nobody
much to care whether Stopford bullied the kid or didn't bully him.
The first time I saw any of the instinct to preaching in Richmond
minimus was after a footer match. It was the time when Buckland Grammar
School licked us rather badly, owing to Mathers and Bray having smoked
in secret before the match and being in far too footling a condition to
play; and Richmond said to me afterwards, when we went back to
Dunstan's, smothered by four goals to none, that often what we did in
secret was rewarded openly.