“Better tell the cook to boil the bird at once, hadn’t we?” suggested Captain Macke.
“Yes,” agreed Vereker. “I fancy I’ve heard our housekeeper at home talk about boiling ’em for hours. Hours and hours. . . . Sure of it.”
“But s’pose the beastly thing’s bin boiled already—what then?” asked Augustus. “Bally thing’d dissolve, I tell you. . . . Have to drink it. . . .”
“Very nice, too,” declared Halke.
“I’d sooner eat pudding and drink brandy, than drink pudding and burn brandy,” stated Augustus firmly. “What would we boil it in, anyhow?” he added. “It wouldn’t go in a kettle, an’ if you let it loose in a dam’ great dekchi or something, it’d all go to bits. . . .”
“Tie it up in a shirt or something,” said Forbes. . . . “What’s your idea, Greene—as a man of intellect and education?”
“I’d say boil it,” replied Bertram. “I don’t believe they can be boiled too much. . . . I fancy it ought to be tied up, though, as Clarence suggests, or it might disintegrate, I suppose.”
“Who’s got a clean shirt or vest or pants or something?” asked the Major. “Or could we ram it into a helmet and tie it down?”
It appeared that no one had a very clean shirt, and it happened that nobody spoke up with military promptitude and smart alacrity when Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji offered to lend his pillow-case.
“I know,” said the Major, in a tone of decision and finality. “I’ll send for the cook, tell him there’s a plum-pudding, an’ he can dam’ well serve it hot for dinner as a plum-pudding ought to be served—or God have mercy on him, for we will have none. . . .”