“Filthy muck,” he remarked aloud.
“Sahib calling me, sir?” said a voice that made him jump, and the Cook’s Understudy, a Goanese youth, stepped into the circle of light—or of lesser gloom.
“Very natural you should have thought so,” answered Bertram. “I said Filthy Muck.”
“Yessir,” replied the acting deputy assistant adjutant cooklet, proudly, “I am cooking breakfast for the Sahib.”
“You cooked this?” growled Bertram, and half rose, with so menacing an expression and wild an eye that the guilty fled, making a note that this was a Sahib to be properly served in future, and not, as he had foolishly thought him, a poor polite soul for whom anything was good enough. . . .
Pushing the burnt and nauseating horror from him, Bertram essayed to pour out tea, only to find that the fluid was readily procurable from anywhere but the spout. A teapot that will not “pour out” freely is an annoyance at the best of times, and to the most placid of souls. (The fact that tea through the lid is as good as tea through the spout is more than counter-balanced by the fact that tea in the cup is better than tea on the table-cloth. And it is a very difficult art, only to be acquired by patient practice, to pour tea into the cup and the cup alone, from the top of a spout-bunged teapot. Try it.)
Bertram’s had temper waxed and deepened.
“Curse the thing!” he swore, and banged the offending pot on the table, and, forgetting his nice table-manners, blew violently down the spout. This sent a wave of tea over his head and scalded him, and there the didactic virtuous, and the copy-book maxims, scored.
Sorely tempted to call to the cooklet in honeyed tones, decoy him near with fair-seeming smiles, with friendly gestures, and then to fling the thing at his head, he essayed to pour again.
A trickle, a gurgle, a spurt, a round gush of tea—and the pale wan skeletal remnants of a once lusty cockroach, sodden and soft, leapt into the cup. Swirling round and round, it seemed giddily to explore its new unresting-place, triumphant, as though chanting, with the Ancient Mariner, some such pæan as