Ch. 9: Slaves of the Lamp Part II - Page 2

race-meeting here; a
dak-bungalow or railway station up country somewhere else--we had
never quite lost touch. Infant sat on the banisters, hungrily and
enviously drinking it in. He enjoyed his baronetcy, but his heart
yearned for the old days.

It was a cheerful babel of matters personal, provincial, and imperial,
pieces of old call-over lists, and new policies, cut short by the
roar of a Burmese gong, and we went down not less than a quarter of a
mile of stairs to meet Infant's mother, who had known us all in our
school-days and greeted us as if those had ended a week ago. But it
was fifteen years since, with tears of laughter, she had lent me a
gray princess-skirt for amateur theatricals.

That was a dinner from the "Arabian Nights," served in an eighty-foot
hall full of ancestors and pots of flowering roses, and, what was
more impressive, heated by steam. When it was ended and the little
mother had gone away--("You boys want to talk, so I shall say
good-night now")--we gathered about an apple-wood fire, in a gigantic
polished steel grate, under a mantelpiece ten feet high, and the
Infant compassed us about with curious liqueurs and that kind of
cigarette which serves best to introduce your own pipe.

"Oh, bliss!" grunted Dick Four from a sofa, where he had been packed
with a rug over him. "First time I've been warm since I came home."

We were all nearly on top of the fire, except Infant, who had been
long enough at home to take exercise when he felt chilled. This is a
grisly diversion, but much affected by the English of the Island.

"If you say a word about cold tubs and brisk walks," drawled McTurk,
"I'll kill you, Infant. I've got a liver, too. 'Member when we used
to think it a treat to turn out of our beds on a Sunday
morning--thermometer fifty-seven degrees if it was summer--and bathe
off the Pebbleridge? Ugh!"

"'Thing I don't understand," said Tertius, "was the way we chaps used
to go down into the lavatories, boil ourselves pink, and then come up
with all our pores open into a young snow-storm or a black frost. Yet
none of our chaps died, that I can remember."

"Talkin' of baths," said McTurk, with a chuckle, "'member our bath in
Number Five, Beetle, the night Rabbits-Eggs rocked King? What
wouldn't I give to see old Stalky now! He is the only one of the two
Studies not here."

"Stalky is the great man of his Century," said Dick Four.

"How d'you know?" I asked.

"How do I know?" said Dick Four, scornfully. "If you've ever been in a
tight place with Stalky you wouldn't ask."

"I haven't seen him since the