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 everyone ’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 call 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, someone generally passed it onto someone 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 only a 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.
“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 open-air
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 on fire.
“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.
“G-l-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 fire-place. 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. Moreover, 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 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 really.”
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 stomachache, 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
fire-place.
“You see, Prawn,” he explained, “cookin’ isn’t a thing one can just pick
up.”
“Yes, I could—watchin’ you,” The Prawn insisted.
“No. Mr. Marsh says it’s a Gift—same as a Talent.”
“D’you mean to tell me Rickworth’s got it, then?”
“Dunno. It’s _my_ job to find that out—Mr. Marsh says. Anyway, Rickworth
told me he liked cleaning out a fryin’ pan because it made him think of
what it might be cookin’ next time.”
“Well, if that isn’t silliness, it’s just greediness,” said The Prawn.
“What about those dampers you were talking of when I bought the
fire-lighters for you this morning?”
William drew one out of the ashes, tapped it lightly with his small
hazel-wand of office, and slid it over, puffed and perfect, towards The
Prawn.
Once again the wave of pity—the Master’s pity for the mere consuming
Public—swept over him as he watched The Prawn wolf it down.
“I’m grateful to you. I reely _am_, Prawn,” said William Glasse Sawyer.
After all, as he was used to say in later years, if it hadn’t been for
The Prawn, where would he have been?