No. XII
TOMKINS ON 'TINNED COW'
Tin Lin Chow was his proper name, but we called him 'Tinned Cow,' though he never much liked it, and said that his father would have made it hot for us if we had been in China. But we were at Merivale School in England, so we reckoned that Tinned Cow was near enough, that being good English anyway.
The chap was exactly the same colour as the stomach of the guinea-pig of Vincent Peters; and his father was allowed to wear a gold button in his hat, so he said, that being a sign of a man who wrote books in China. He wrote Chinese books for a living, and when we asked Tinned Cow if his father could turn out stuff a patch on Henty or Mayne Reid, he said much better. But he had to confess afterwards that his father was only doing a history of China in a hundred volumes, or some such muck; so evidently he was no real good, for all his gold button.
When the kid first came to learn English and get English ideas—owing to his father having convinced himself that Chinese ideas were rotten—he rather gave himself airs, and seemed to think because he was somebody at Pekin he must be at Merivale; but the only person who made anything of him was the Doctor. He used to bring everything round to China—even arithmetic, and he evidently thought it was rather fine to have a mandarin's son in the school. Especially as Tinned Cow had brothers coming on, who might follow. What a mandarin is exactly, Tinned Cow didn't know himself; but he seemed to think they were about equal to dukes, which, of course, must be nonsense, because dukes can become kings in time, whereas mandarins can't be emperors. In fact, the only mandarins I ever heard of till then were oranges.
He was a frightful liar, but good as a maker of kites. And Browne, the master in the lower fourth, said that both things were common to the Chinese character. For mere lies we had Fowle and Steggles, and others, even better than Tinned Cow, because his knowledge of English wasn't up to lying without being found out for some terms; but at kites he could smash anybody. His kites, in fact, were corkers, and he taught us to kite-fight, which is not bad sport when there's nothing better on. Chinese kites are very light, and all made of tissue-paper and cane, or bamboo, split up fine. For a cane, Tinned Cow had the beautiful cheek to go into Dr. Dunstan's study, when he was reading prayers in the chapel, and rout about in the cane corner and steal a good specimen, and hide it in the gym. That was the first thing that made me like the kid. But he said it was nothing, and seemed surprised that I thought much of it. He also said that over the pictures in a huge volume of Shakespeare the Doctor had, was tissue-paper of such a choice kind that it must undoubtedly be Chinese, and that, if so, it was the best in the world for kites. He said that if I would allow him to be my chum, he would get several sheets of this paper in a quiet moment, and make me the best kite he had yet made. Well, I never guessed then what a Chinese kid really is in the way of being a worm; so I agreed, provided he made two kites and put my initials on them in silver paper from a packet of chocolate—the initials, of course, being N.T. They stand for Norman Tomkins—merely Tomkins now, but Tomkins major next term, when my young brother comes to Merivale.
The chap was so frightfully keen to become my chum (my being captain of the second footer eleven) that he agreed to the two kites without a murmur, and stole the tissue paper and used the cane for the framework. So, rather curiously, the tissue paper from a swagger Shakespeare and a bit of one of old Dunstan's canes soared up to a frightful height over the school; and it happened that the Doctor saw it, and, little dreaming of what was soaring, patted Tinned Cow on the head, and greatly praised him, and said that the art of kite-flying in China was tremendously ancient, and that in the matter of kites, as well as many other more important things, China had instructed the world. Yet, when Fuller tried to sneak a quill pen for a private purpose, believing the Doctor was not in the study at the time, whereas he had merely gone behind a screen to find a book, Fuller got five hundred lines and the eighth Commandment to translate into Latin and Greek, and French and German. Which shows that to be found out is its own punishment, as Steggles told Fuller afterwards.
Well, I let Tinned Cow be my chum, and found him fairly decent, considering he was a Chinaman, for two terms. Then he began to settle down and learn English and football, and say that Merivale was better by long chalks than China. In fact, he rather hated China really, and said, except for toys and sweets and fireworks, that England was really far better. I may mention that his feet were small, but not like pictures, and he said that only wretched girls had their feet squashed in his country. He had a sister whose feet were squashed, and he said that she was pretty, which must have been another lie, because pictures show all Chinese women to be exactly and hideously all alike. But he had to admit that English girls were prettier, because Trelawny made him, and also said that he'd tattoo a lion and unicorn on the middle of his chest if he didn't. So he yielded; in fact, he always yielded very readily to force, though Fowle often tried, unknown to me, to arrange a fight for him. He had no idea even of doubling a decent fist, and said that only wild beasts fight without proper weapons. But once he took on Bray with single-sticks, and they chose a half-holiday and went into the wood by the cricket ground and fought well for two hours and a half; and a bruise on a Chinese skin is very interesting to see. Bray turned yellow, then blue, that deepened to black on the fourth day; but Tinned Cow, from the usual putty-like tint of his body, went lead-colour where Bray whacked his arm and leg. And Tinned Cow's bravery surprised me; but it was a draw, and he assured me that he didn't care a bit about being alive, and would have gone on hammering and being hammered until Bray had killed him if necessary. He said that in his country, when two chaps are going to fight, they begin by cutting frightful attitudes, and standing in rum and awful positions, and sticking out their muscles and making faces, like Ajax defying the lightning in the Dictionary of Antiquities. This the idiots do, each hoping to terrify the other chap, and funk him, and so defeat him without striking a blow. Tinned Cow said that most battles were settled in this way; and once, when Martin minimus called him a yellow weasel, he puffed out his cheeks and frowned, as well as you can without eyebrows, and crooked his hands like a bird's claws and tried to horrify Martin minimus, which he did; but it was young Martin's first term, and the kid was barely eight years old.
Now I come to that little brute Milly Dunstan, the Doctor's youngest daughter. She didn't care much about Tinned Cow at first, for she always takes about three terms to see what a new chap's like; but after the mandarin in China had sent Dr. Dunstan a gift of some rusty armour and screens and old religious books—more like window-blinds than decent books—and a live Chinese dog with a tongue like as if it had been licking ink, then Milly, who's the greediest little hateful wretch, even for a girl, I ever saw, suddenly dropped Blount, whose father was merely a lawyer, and began to encourage Tinned Cow like anything. He didn't understand her character as I and a few other chaps did. Bruce and Mathers and Fordyce knew her real nature, because she had pretty well absorbed all their pocket-money for term after term; and so I told Tinned Cow that her blue eyes and curls and little silly ways generally were simply a whitewashed sepulchre, and certainly wouldn't last longer than a hamper from Pekin; which, I told him, he'd jolly soon find out. But there's nothing so obstinate as the Chinese nation; and if she'd asked him for his pigtail, I believe Tinned Cow would have chopped it off for her, though he would not have dared to go home to his father after that till he'd grown a new one.
It seemed rather a horrid thing, Mathers said, a Christian girl to encourage a chap the colour of parsnips, not to mention his eyes, which were like buttonholes; but that was only because Milly had chucked Mathers; and we all knew what she really was; and, as Steggles said, she'd have sacrificed her whole family for a new sort of lemon drop; and of course when Tinned Cow found out how mad she was after sweets, he wrote to China, to his mother, for the best sweets in Pekin; which she sent. But while he was waiting for them, the Chinese dog got homesick, or something, and bit the boot-boy and was poisoned painlessly. Still Milly stuck to Tinned Cow, and walked openly about the playing-fields on match-days with him. And silly grown-up women, little knowing the bitter truth, said it was just like Dr. Dunstan's dear little girl to encourage a poor lonely foreign kid; but we knew what she was encouraging him for well enough.