Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/45

 cold, as if draughts were blowing through it. I don't mind owning to that. Tick went ahead:—

"The woman—she was an utter stranger—came up to speak to me, and she told me that my little girl had gone into the cloakroom at the end of the last dance before the extras came on, complaining of a pain in her side. She had sat down and died of heart disease as she sat! This was at the end of the last pukka waltz. Do you hear me? I tell you it was at the end of the last pukka waltz!"

[I don't know much about printing presses; but if you printer fellows have got any type big enough and awful enough to give any idea of the way in which Tick said that you are seven pounds better than I thought.]

I felt as if all the winds in the Hills were crawling round my hair. You know that cold, creepy feeling at the top of the scalp, just when the first dropping shots begin, and before the real shindy starts. Well, that was how I felt—how we all felt, in fact—when Tick had finished and brought down his hand again on the table.

We shifted about as if our chairs were all red-hot, trying to think of something pleasant to say. Tick kept on repeating: "It was at the end of the last pukka waltz!" Then he'd stop for a bit, and rock to and fro; and ask us what he was to do. Whether "a betrothal to a dead woman was binding in law," and so on—sometimes laughing and sometimes chucking his head about like my second charger when the curb-chain's tighter than it should be.

It may sound awfully funny to read now; but I assure you sitting round the Mess table with Tick's white and blue face in front of one and Tick's awful way of laughing and talking in one's ears, the fun did not dawn on us till a long time after. And even then we weren't grateful.

Our Colonel was the first to move. The old man got up and put his hand on Tick's shoulder, and begged him, for his own sake, not to take it to heart so much. Said that he was unwell, and had better go to his own quarters. Tick chucked up his head again and regularly yelled:—"I tell you I have seen it with my own eyes. I wish to Heaven it had been a delusion." All this time the Colonel was soothing him down, just as you or I would gentle a horse; and the other Johnnies stood round and mumbled something about being awfully sorry for his trouble, and that, if they'd known, they would have dropped pulling his leg like a shot.