Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/39



E came to us from Naogong, somewhere in central India; and as soon as we saw him we all voted him a Beast. That was in the Mess of the 45th Bengal Cavalry, stationed at Pindi; and everything I'm going to write about happened this season. I've told you he was an awful Beast—old even for a subaltern; but then he'd joined the Army late, and had knocked about the world a good deal. We didn't know that at first. I wish we had. It would have saved the honour of the Mess. He was called "Tick" in Naogong, because he was never out of debt; but that didn't make us think him a Beast. Quite the other way, for most of us were pretty well dipped ourselves. No; what we hated about the fellow was his "dark horsiness." I can't express it any better than that; and, besides, it's an awful nuisance having to write at all. But all the other fellows in the Mess say I'm the only man who can handle a pen decently; and that I must, for their credit, tell the world exactly how it came about. Everyone is chaffing us so beastily now.

Well, I was saying that we didn't like Tick Boileau's "dark horsiness." I mean by that, you never knew what the fellow could do and what he could not; and he was always coming out, with that beastly conceited grin on his face, in a new line—'specially before women,—and making the other man, who had tried to do the same thing, feel awfully small and humble. That was his strong point-simpering and cutting a fellow out when he was doing his hardest at something or other. Same with billiards; same with riding; same with the banjo: he could really make the banjo talk—better even than Banjo Browne at Kasauli you know; same with tennis. And to make everything more beastly, he used to pretend at first that he couldn't do anything. We found him out in the end; but we'd have found him out sooner if we'd listened to what old Harkness the Riding-Master said the day after Tick had been handed over to him to make into a decent "Hornet." That's what the bye-name of our regiment is. Harkness told me when I came into Riding School, and laughed at Tick clinging on to the neck of his old crock as if he had never seen a horse before. Harkness was cursing—like a riding master. He said:—"You mark my words, Mister Mactavish; he's been kidding me,