“That’s beastly unfair,” said Stalky, “when I took all the trouble to pawn it. Beetle never knew he had a watch. Oh, I say, Rabbits-Eggs gave me a lift into Bideford this afternoon.”
Rabbits-Eggs was the local carrier—an outcrop of the early Devonian formation. It was Stalky who had invented his unlovely name. “He was pretty average drunk, or he wouldn’t have done it. Rabbits-Eggs is a little shy of me, somehow. But I swore it was pax between us, and gave him a bob. He stopped at two pubs on the way in, so he’ll be howling drunk to-night. Oh, don’t begin reading, Beetle; there’s a council of war on. What the deuce is the matter with your collar?”
“’Chivied Manders minor into the Lower Third box-room. ’Had all his beastly little friends on top of me,” said Beetle from behind a jar of pilchards and a book.
“You ass! Any fool could have told you where Manders would bunk to,” said McTurk.
“I didn’t think,” said Beetle, meekly, scooping out pilchards with a spoon.
“Course you didn’t. You never do.” McTurk adjusted Beetle’s collar with a savage tug. “Don’t drop oil all over my ‘Fors’ or I’ll scrag you!”
“Shut up, you—you Irish Biddy! ’Tisn’t your beastly ‘Fors.’ It’s one of mine.”
The book was a fat, brown-backed volume of the later Sixties, which King had once thrown at Beetle’s head that Beetle might see whence the name Gigadibs came. Beetle had quietly annexed the book, and had seen—several things. The quarter-comprehended verses lived and ate with him, as the bedropped pages showed. He removed himself from all that world, drifting at large with wondrous Men and Women, till McTurk hammered the pilchard spoon on his head and he snarled.
“Beetle! You’re oppressed and insulted and bullied by King. Don’t you feel it?”
“Let me alone! I can write some more poetry about him if I am, I suppose.”