THE SMOUTCHY BOYS.
General Napoleon Smith had been taken captive by the Comanche Cowboys.
Now it is fair to say in this place that they also had their side of
the question. Their fathers were, in their own opinion, striving for
the ancient rights of the town against an interloping Smith. Why
should not they against the son of that Smith and his allies? The
denunciations of the Edam Town Council were only transformed into the
blows which rained down so freely upon Hugh John's bare and curly
head, as he stood at bay that Saturday morning in the corner of the
dike.
"Surrender!" cried Nipper Donnan, whose father had moved that the town
of Edam take the case up to the House of Lords.
"'A Smith dies but does not surrender'!" replied the son of the man
who had declared his intention of fighting the matter out though it
took his last copper.
In the calm atmosphere of the law-courts this was very well, and the
combatants stood about an equal chance; but not so when translated
into terms to suit the Black Sheds of Edam and the links of the castle
island.
So the many-headed swarmed over the wall from behind; they struck down
the last brave defender of privilege, and Hugh John Picton Smith was
borne away to captivity.
Now there are many tongues and many peoples on the face of the earth,
and doubtless the one Lord made them all. But there is one variety
which appears among all nations, and commentators disagree as to what
particular Power is responsible for his creation. He is the Smoutchy
Boy.
This universal product of the race is indeed the chief evidence that
we are lineally connected with the brutes that perish; for there is no
doubt that the Smoutchy Boy is a brute among brutes. He is at once
cruel and cowardly, boastful and shy, ready to strike a weaker, and
equally ready to cry out when a stronger strikes him. He is not
peculiar to any one class of society. He frequents the best
public-schools, and is responsible for the under-current of cruelty
which ever and anon rises to the surface there and supplies a month's
free copy to enterprising journals in want of a sensation for the dull
season. He makes some regiments of the service a terror. He
understands all about "hazing" in the navy. Happily, however, among
such large collections of human beings there is generally some
clear-eyed, upstanding, able-bodied, long-armed Other Product who, by
way of counterpoise, has been specially created to be the defender of
the oppressed, and the scourge of the Smoutchy Boy.
I have seen one such scatter a dozen Smoutchies, who were employed
after their kind in stoning to death a nestful of fluffy, gaping,
yellow-billed young blackbirds. I have heard the sound of his fists
striking most compactly and satisfactorily against Smoutchy flesh.
Also I know the jar with which a foot stops suddenly in mid-air, as
the Scourge pursues and kicks the fleeing Smoutchy--kicks him "for
keeps" too.
Yet for all this Smoutchy Boy is a man and a brother. His smoutchiness
generally passes off with the callowness of hobble-de-hoyhood. The
condition is indeed rather one for the doctor than for the Police
Court. It is pathological rather than criminal; for when the Smoutchy
is thrown for some time into the society of men of the world--drilled
for instance in barrack yards, licked and clouted into shape by the
regiment or the ship's crew, he sheds his smoutchiness from him like a
garment. It is on record that Smoutchies ere now have led forlorn
hopes, pierced Africa to its centre, navigated strange seas, and
trodden trackless Polar snows. The worst Smoutchy of my time, the
bully who, till the biceps and _tendo Achilles_ muscles hardened to
their office, made life at a certain school a terror and an agony,
afterwards sprang from a steamer in order to save the life of a man
who had fallen overboard in a high-running sea.
[Illustration: "THE HEAD SMOUTCHY."]
But of all Smoutchies the worst variety is that reared in the vicinity
of the small manufacturing town. He thrives on wages too early and too
easily earned. Foul language, a tobacco pipe with the bowl turned
down, and the rotten fagends of Association football, are the signs by
which you may know him. In such a society there is always one Smoutchy
who sets the fashion, and a crowd who imitate.
In Edam the head Smoutchy of the time was Nipper Donnan. He was the
son of a fighting butcher, who in his day, and before marrying the
widow of the deceased publican of the "Black Bull," had been a yet
more riotous drover, and had almost met the running expenses of the
Sheriff Court by his promptly paid fines.
The only things Nipper Donnan feared were the small, round, deep-set
eyes of his father. The police were a sport to him. The
well-brought-up children of the Grammar School trembled at his name.
The rough lads at work in the mills on the Edam Water almost
worshipped him; for it was known that his father gave him lessons in
pugilism. He sported a meerschaum pipe; a spotted handkerchief was
always knotted knowingly round his throat, and a white bull-dog, with
red sidelong eyes and lips drawn up at the corners, followed close at
his heel.
Great in Edam and on all the banks of the Edam Water was Nipper
Donnan, the King of the Smoutchies.
And it was into his hard, rough, unclean hands that our brave General
Napoleon had fallen. Now Nipper had been reared in special hatred of
the Smiths of Windy Standard. Mr. Picton Smith it was who, long ago at
Edam Fair, as a young man, had interfered with Drover Donnan, when he
was just settling to "polish off" a soft, good-natured shepherd of the
hills, whom he had failed to cheat out of the price of his
"blackfaces." Mr. Picton Smith it was who on the same occasion had
sentenced the riotous drover to "thirty days without the option of a
fine." He it was in times more recent who had been the means of
getting the Black Bull shut up, upon the oft-repeated complaint of the
Chief Constable.
And so all this heritage of hatred was now to be worked off on the son
of the gentleman by the son of the bully. Of course it might just as
well have been the other way about, for there is no absolute heredity
in Smoutchydom. The butcher might easily have been the gentleman, and
the landlord's son the Smoutchy bully; only to Hugh John's cost, on
this occasion it happened to be the other way about.
The lads who followed Nipper Donnan were mostly humble admirers--some
more cruel, some less, but sworn Smoutchies to a man, and all afraid
to interfere with the fierce pleasures of their chief. Indeed, so
absolute was Captain Nipper Donnan, that there never was a time when
some of his band did not bear the marks of his attentions.