As the Studies brought back brackets and pictures for their walls, so did they bring odds and ends of speech—theatre, opera, and music-hall gags—from the great holiday world; some of which stuck for a term, and others were discarded. Number Five was unpacking, when Dick Four (King’s House) of the red nose and dramatic instincts, who with Pussy and Tertius[1] inhabited the study below, loafed up and asked them “how their symptoms seemed to segashuate.” They said nothing at the time, for they knew Dick had a giddy uncle who took him to the Pavilion and the Cri, and all would be explained later. But, before they met again, Beetle came across two fags at war in a box-room, one of whom cried to the other: “Turn me loose, or I’ll knock the natal stuffin’ out of you.” Beetle demanded why he, being offal, presumed to use this strange speech. The fag said it came out of a new book about rabbits and foxes and turtles and niggers, which was in his locker. (Uncle Remus was a popular holiday gift-book in Shotover’s year: when Cetewayo lived in the Melbury Road, Arabi Pasha in Egypt, and Spofforth on the Oval.) Beetle had it out and read for some time, standing by the window, ere he carried it off to Number Five and began at once to give a wonderful story of a Tar Baby. Stalky tore it from him because he sputtered incoherently; McTurk, for the same cause, wrenching it from Stalky. There was no prep that night. The book was amazing, and full of quotations that one could hurl like javelins. When they came down to prayers, Stalky, to show he was abreast of the latest movement, pounded on the door of Dick Four’s study shouting a couplet that pleased him:
“Ti-yi! Tungalee!
I eat um pea! I pick um pea!”
Upon which Dick Four, hornpiping and squinting, and not at all unlike a bull-frog, came out and answered from the bottom of his belly, whence he could produce incredible noises:
“Ingle-go-jang, my joy, my joy!
Ingle-go-jang, my joy!
I’m right at home, my joy, my joy!——”
The chants seemed to answer the ends of their being created for the moment. They all sang them the whole way up the corridor, and, after prayers, bore the burdens dispersedly to their several dormitories where they found many who knew the book of the words, but who, boylike, had waited for a lead ere giving tongue. In a short time the College was as severely infected with Uncle Remus as it had been with Pinafore and Patience. King realised it specially because he was running Macrea’s House in addition to his own and, Dick Four said, was telling his new charges what he thought of his “esteemed colleague’s” methods of House-control.
The Reverend John was talking to the Head in the latter’s study, perhaps a fortnight later.