The Young Stagers/The Saxon and the Gael and Things
I.
THE SAXON AND THE GAEL AND THINGS.
The Chief in silence strode before and reached the torrent's sounding shore. The torrent was provided by the bath-room water-tap, and did very well. Too well, Ayah thought, when she returned from her meal and siesta. The Chief strode in silence and little else, as his tartan plaid was a piece of tartan ribbon and his kilt a brief petticoat—brief even for this little girl of eight. Fitz-James in silence strode behind, and then spoilt everything by breaking the silence and becoming a brass band. Association of ideas, no doubt, for when he marched behind the President he was usually a band, procession, Greek Chorus, or a general choral atmosphere.
"Shut up, Fizz-James, you 'normous ass," hissed the Chief, casting a fiery eye over her bare shoulder. "You've only got to strode, like me, till we get to Koil-and-Poggle Ford, and thou must keep thee with thy sword—until I let you do me in."
Fitz-James ceased to play an imaginary bugle and to beat a figmentary drum. He sighed at his unworthiness.
Having circumambulated the bath-room and parts adjacent, the Chief halted, well within the radius of the splashes from the torrent, shook his sword menacingly, raised his shield, scowled horribly, and suddenly thrusting his ferocious face into that of the fascinated Fitz-James, cried,
"And, Stranger, I am Brodrick Two!"
Fitz-James over-acted, being but young. He rendered "surprise and slight consternation," by collapsing upon the ground, fetching a deep groan, and murmuring "Help!"
The President remembered that the years of the Vice were not six, and was lenient.
"Pull yourself together, Fizz-James, and play the man this day," continued Roderic Dhu. "Get out of the wet, and buck up, for I have sworn this braid to stain in the best blug that warms thy vein—(where did I put that beastly braid?) D'you hear, Fizz-James? And I shall jolly well cut any vein I like."
"You be careful, Robberic," said Fitz-James, rising and attempting to draw his sword.
"Not at all," was the reply, "and this rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as I. See?"
The rock was the inverted bath, resting upon its handles. The Vice, essaying to lean upon it while he wrestled with his recalcitrant sword, found that it was not based with such firmness as to warrant its use as a simile.
Roderic Dhu looked to earth, and sky, and plain, as things he ne'er might see again.
"Would you mind helping me out with this thword, Robberic?" politely asked Fitz-James. "If I pull, this button will come right off, and my drawers will come down." As he was arrayed only in two tight garments this seemed undesirable, particularly in a Stranger.
"I will James Fizz," replied Roderic, "but some people wouldn't. Not for the person by whom they were just going to be done in—and with that very sword. . . . There you are. . . . If you are ready, it's got to ill-fare it then with Brodrick Two when on the ground his Taj he threw, whose studs of brass and tough bull-hide had death so often dashed aside. They are bone studs of Daddy's because he hadn't any studs of brass, and didn't seem to want to lend any gold ones. And the bull's hide is card-board—but it's a Taj all-right."
"I thought the Taj was a hotel," observed Fitz- James. "I wemember we went . . ."
"You're too fond of thinking, James Fizz," interrupted Roderic. "What about Blue Murder—no, Red Murdoch—I mean?"
Fitz-James's eye gleamed. He had his cue. "He's staff and stick," he said.
"He's what, you ass?" queried Roderic coldly.
"He's stark and stiff," the other corrected, and, striking the attitude shown him by the President at rehearsal, and confirmed by the picture, he declaimed:—
The wriggle is already dead
And I wemember what you said—
Er—and beneath the whiff
There lies Red Murdoch stark and stiff."
"Oh, really?" sneered Roderic, "and who stark-and-stiffed him, pray?"
"I did," replied Fitz-James. "I did him in proper." (Subaltern language, this.)
"H'm," commented Roderic. "That's awkward—because the side wins that gets first blood. . . ."
"Was there any blood?" he added, as an idea struck him, and he saw a loop-hole of escape from the operation of the baleful prophecy.
"Lots," was the depressing answer. "I stained a whole roll of braid in the best of it. All my clo'ves too—and his. Norful mess!"
"Well, anyhow, it's beneath the cliff, he lies, not 'whiff'. I daresay there is a whiff, by now—but that's not what you meant."
The bitterness of death was not past for Roderic, and he spoke bitterly.
As he prepared to fight his last fight and meet his end at the hand of the hated Southron, he protruded his tongue and made a shocking grimace.
"Yah! Fizz-Jimmy, you beastly Sack-Son," quoth he, "Come on! Beware! Thy hand must keep thy head and all the rest of thee for, as I said before, this is Koil-and-Poggle Ford, and Sack-Son, I am a perfect Gale! Lay on—and no prodding in the stummick. . . ."
Ill fared it then with Roderic Dhu, as d(h)uly laid down in the poem and shown forth in the picture.
It was a truly Homeric combat, and when Brodrick Two got a nasty crack across the knuckles, he only put his sword in his other hand the while he sucked them. But his eye flashed fire.
"I'll be Fizz-James next time," he panted, as he received, but recked not of, a wound. Apparently Fitz-James concluded that the best thing to do, in view of this threatened change of rôle, was to make hay while the sun shone, for, as, with a heart-rending groan, Roderic sank to earth and closed his eyes, he dealt him a superfluous and uncalled for coup de grâce. Worse, it partook of the nature of a prohibited "prod in the stummick". Too immersed in the enthralling business of artistic death-throes to protest, Roderic but rolled over on to the illegally assaulted part, and with his head upon his folded arms, continued to render up his spirit with the calm dignity of a Chieftain of Clan Alpine.
Here it was that the Vice displayed that lack of complete sense of the fitness of things, perfect histrionic taste, and absolute reliability which occasionally caused sorrow and chagrin to the President.
Raising his blood-stained weapon aloft in both hands, he flourished it above the prostrate body of the Chieftain, and, then (alas, that this faithful though eaves-dropping chronicler must painfully set it forth), brought it down with a resounding thwack upon the proud Gael's exiguous kilt—even as he murmured, all unsuspecting such baseness:—
"Oh, Golly! I am slain at last!"
But the while he stiffened and grew cold in rigor mortis, he opened one eye, glared at the swaggering victor, and hissed, with deadly meaning, "Yes, I'll be Fizz-James next time!"