II
Thursday, September 25th, 1919. Peacock began well by not turning up for early school so at five past we walked out and went back to our House Rooms and I read Fortitude by Walpole; it is strong meat but rather unnecessary in places. After breakfast O’Malley came greasing up to Tamplin and apologized. Everyone is against him. I maintain he was in the right until he reported him late to Anderson. No possible defence for that—sheer windiness. Peacock deigned to turn up for Double Greek. We mocked him somewhat. He is trying to make us use the new pronunciation; when he said o’ú there was a wail of “ooh” and Tamplin pronounced subjunctive soo-byoongteeway—very witty. Peacock got bored and said he’d report him to Graves but relented. Library was open 5–6 tonight. I went meaning to put in some time on Walter Crane’s Bases of Design but Mercer came up with that weird man in Brent’s called Curtis-Dunne. I envy them having Frank as house-master. He is talking of starting a literary and artistic society for men not in the Sixth. Curtis-Dunne wants to start a political group. Pretty good lift considering this is his second term although he is sixteen and has been at Dartmouth. Mercer gave me a poem to read—very sloppy. Before this there was a House Game. Everyone puffing and blowing after the holidays. Anderson said I shall probably be centre-half in the Under Sixteens—the sweatiest place in the field. I must get into training quickly.
Friday 26th. Corps day but quite slack. Reorganization. I am in A Company at last. A tick in Boucher’s called Spratt is platoon commander. We ragged him a bit. Wheatley is a section commander! Peacock sent Bankes out of the room in Greek Testament for saying “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest” when put on to translate. Jolly witty. He began to argue. Peacock said, “Must I throw you out by force?” Bankes began to go but muttered “Muscular Christianity.” Peacock: “What did you say?”; “Nothing, sir”; “Get out before I kick you.” Things got a bit duller after that. Uncle George gave Bankes three.
Saturday 27th. Things very dull in school. Luckily Peacock forgot to set any preparation. Pop. Sci. in last period. Tamplin and Mercer got some of the weights that are so precious they are kept in a glass case and picked up with tweezers, made them red hot on a Bunsen burner and dropped them in cold water. A witty thing to do. House Game—Under Sixteen team against a mixed side. They have put Wykham-Blake centre-half and me in goal; a godless place. Library again. Curtis-Dunne buttonholed me again. He drawled “My father is in parliament but he is a very unenlightened conservative. I of course am a socialist. That’s the reason I chucked the Navy.” I said, “Or did they chuck you?” “The pangs of parting were endured by both sides with mutual stoicism.” He spoke of Frank as “essentially a well-intentioned fellow.” Sunday tomorrow thank God. I may be able to get on with illuminating “The Bells of Heaven.”
III
Normally on Sundays there was a choice of service. Matins at a quarter to eight or Communion at quarter past. On the first Sunday of term there was Choral Communion for all at eight o’clock.
The chapel was huge, bare, and still unfinished, one of the great monuments of the Oxford Movement and the Gothic revival. Like an iceberg it revealed only a small part of its bulk above the surface of the terraced down; below lay a crypt and below that foundations of great depth. The Founder had chosen the site and stubbornly refused to change it so that the original estimates had been exceeded before the upper chapel was begun. Visiting preachers frequently drew a lesson from the disappointments, uncertainties and final achievement of the Founder’s “vision.” Now the whole nave rose triumphantly over the surrounding landscape, immense, clustered shafts supporting the groined roof; at the west it ended abruptly in concrete and timber and corrugated iron, while behind, in a wasteland near the kitchens, where the Corps band practised their bugles in the early morning, lay a nettle-and-bramble-grown ruin, the base of a tower, twice as high as the chapel, which one day was to rise so that on stormy nights, the Founder had decreed, prayers might be sung at its summit for sailors in peril on the sea.
From outside the windows had a deep, submarine tinge, but from inside they were clear white, and the morning sun streamed in over the altar and the assembled school. The prefect in Charles’s row was Symonds, editor of the Magazine, president of the Debating Society, the leading intellectual. Symonds was in Head’s; he pursued a course of lonely study, seldom taking Evening School, never playing any game except, late in the evenings of the summer term, an occasional single of lawn tennis, appearing rarely even in the Sixth Form, but working in private under Mr. A. A. Carmichael for the Balliol scholarship. Symonds kept a leather-bound copy of the Greek Anthology in his place in chapel and read it throughout the services with a finely negligent air.
The masters sat in stalls orientated between the columns, the clergy in surplices, laymen in gowns. Some of the masters who taught the Modern Side wore hoods of the newer universities; Major Stebbing, the adjutant of the O.T.C., had no gown at all; Mr. A. A. Carmichael—awfully known at Spierpoint as “A. A.,” the splendid dandy and wit, fine flower of the Oxford Union and the New College Essay Society, the reviewer of works of classical scholarship for the New Statesman, to whom Charles had never yet spoken; whom Charles had never yet heard speak directly, but only at third hand as his mots, in their idiosyncratic modulations, passed from mouth to mouth from the Sixth in sanctuary to the catechumens in the porch; whom Charles worshipped from afar—Mr. Carmichael, from a variety of academic costume, was this morning robed as a baccalaureate of Salamanca. He looked, as he stooped over his desk, like the prosecuting counsel in a cartoon by Daumier.
Nearly opposite him across the chapel stood Frank Bates; an unbridged gulf of boys separated these rival and contrasted deities, that one the ineffable dweller on cloud-capped Olympus, this the homely clay image, the intimate of hearth and household, the patron of threshing-floor and olive-press. Frank wore only an ermine hood, a B.A.’s gown, and loose, unremarkable clothes, subfusc today, with the Corinthian tie which alternated with the Carthusian, week in, week out. He was a clean, curly, spare fellow; a little wan for he was in constant pain from an injury on the football field which had left him lame and kept him at Spierpoint throughout the war. This pain of his redeemed him from heartiness. In chapel his innocent, blue eyes assumed a puzzled, rather glum expression like those of an old-fashioned child in a room full of grown-ups. Frank was a bishop’s son.
Behind the masters, out of sight in the side aisles, was a dowdy huddle of matrons and wives.
The service began with a procession of the choir: “Hail Festal Day,” with Wykham-Blake as the treble cantor. At the rear of the procession came Mr. Peacock, the Chaplain and the Headmaster. A week ago Charles had gone to church in London with Aunt Philippa. He did not as a rule go to church in the holidays, but being in London for the last week Aunt Philippa had said, “There’s nothing much we can do today. Let’s see what entertainment the Church can offer. I’m told there is a very remarkable freak named Father Wimperis.” So, together, they had gone on the top of a bus to a northern suburb where Mr. Wimperis was at the time drawing great congregations. His preaching was not theatrical by Neapolitan standards, Aunt Philippa said afterwards; “However, I enjoyed him hugely. He is irresistibly common.” For twenty minutes Mr. Wimperis alternately fluted and boomed from the pulpit, wrestled with the reading-stand and summoned the country to industrial peace. At the end he performed a little ceremony of his own invention, advancing to the church steps in cope and biretta with what proved to be a large silver salt cellar in his hands. “My people,” he said simply, scattering salt before him, “you are the salt of the earth.”
“I believe he has something new like that every week,” said Aunt Philippa. “It must be lovely to live in his neighbourhood.”
Charles’s was not a God-fearing home. Until August 1914 his father had been accustomed to read family prayers every morning; on the outbreak of war he abruptly stopped the practice, explaining, when asked, that there was now nothing left to pray for. When Charles’s mother was killed there was a memorial service for her at Boughton, his home village, but Charles’s father did not go with him and Aunt Philippa. “It was all her confounded patriotism,” he said, not to Charles but to Aunt Philippa, who did not repeat the remark until many years later. “She had no business to go off to Serbia like that. Do you think it my duty to marry again?”
“No,” said Aunt Philippa.
“Nothing would induce me to—least of all my duty.”
The service followed its course. As often happened, two small boys fainted and were carried out by house-captains; a third left bleeding at the nose. Mr. Peacock sang the Gospel over-loudly. It was his first public appearance. Symonds looked up from his Greek, frowned and continued reading. Presently it was time for Communion; most of the boys who had been confirmed went up to the chancel rails, Charles with them. Symonds sat back, twisted his long legs into the aisle to allow his row to pass, and remained in his place. Charles took Communion and returned to his row. He had been confirmed the term before, incuriously, without expectation or disappointment. When, later in life, he read accounts of the emotional disturbances caused in other boys by the ceremony he found them unintelligible; to Charles it was one of the rites of adolescence, like being made, when a new boy, to stand on the table and sing. The Chaplain had “prepared” him and had confined his conferences to theology. There had been no probing of his sexual life; he had no sexual life to probe. Instead they had talked of prayer and the sacraments.
Spierpoint was a product of the Oxford Movement, founded with definite religious aims; in eighty years it had grown more and more to resemble the older Public Schools, but there was still a strong ecclesiastical flavour in the place. Some boys were genuinely devout and their peculiarity was respected; in general profanity was rare and ill-looked-on. Most of the Sixth professed themselves agnostic or atheist.
The school had been chosen for Charles because, at the age of eleven, he had had a “religious phase” and told his father that he wished to become a priest.
“Good heavens,” his father said; “or do you mean a parson?”
“A priest of the Anglican Church,” said Charles precisely.
“That’s better. I thought you meant a Roman Catholic. Well, a parson’s is not at all a bad life for a man with a little money of his own. They can’t remove you except for flagrant immorality. Your uncle has been trying to get rid of his fellow at Boughton for ten years—a most offensive fellow but perfectly chaste. He won’t budge. It’s a great thing in life to have a place you can’t be removed from—too few of them.”
But the “phase” had passed and lingered now only in Charles’s love of Gothic architecture and breviaries.
After Communion Charles sat back in his chair thinking about the secular, indeed slightly anti-clerical, lyric which, already inscribed, he was about to illuminate, while the masters and, after them, the women from the side aisles, went up to the rails.
The food on Sundays was always appreciably worse than on other days; breakfast invariably consisted of boiled eggs, over-boiled and lukewarm.
Wheatley said, “How many ties do you suppose A. A.’s got?”
“I began counting last term,” said Tamplin, “and got to thirty.”
“Including bows?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, he’s jolly rich.”
“Why doesn’t he keep a car, then?” asked Jorkins.
The hour after breakfast was normally devoted to letter-writing, but today a railway strike had been called and there were no posts. Moreover, since it was the start of term, there was no Sunday Lesson. The whole morning was therefore free and Charles had extracted permission to spend it in the Drawing School. He collected his materials and was soon happily at work.
The poem—Ralph Hodgson’s “Twould ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs ...”—was one of Frank’s favourites. In the happy days when he had been House Tutor of Head’s, Frank had read poetry aloud on Sunday evenings to any in Head’s who cared to come, which was mostly the lower half of the House. He read “There swimmeth One Who swam e’er rivers were begun, And under that Almighty Fin the littlest fish may enter in” and “Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase” and “Under the wide and starry sky” and “What have I done for you, England, my England.....?” and many others of the same comfortable kind; but always before the end of the evening someone would say “Please, sir, can we have ‘The Bells of Heaven’?” Now he read only to his own house but the poems, Frank’s pleasant voices, his nightingales, were awake still, warm and bright with remembered firelight.
Charles did not question whether the poem was not perfectly suited to the compressed thirteenth-century script in which he had written it. His method of writing was first to draw the letters faintly, freehand in pencil; then with a ruler and ruling pen to ink in the uprights firmly in Indian ink until the page consisted of lines of short and long black perpendiculars; then with a mapping pen he joined them with hair strokes and completed their lozenge-shaped terminals. It was a method he had evolved for himself by trial and error. The initial letters of each line were left blank and these, during the last week of the holidays, he had filled with vermilion, carefully drawn, “Old English” capitals. The T alone remained to do and for this he had selected a model from Shaw’s Alphabets, now open before him on the table. It was a florid fifteenth-century letter which needed considerable ingenuity of adaption, for he had decided to attach to it the decorative tail of the J. He worked happily, entirely absorbed, drawing in pencil, then tensely, with breath held, inking the outline with a mapping pen; then, when it was dry—how often, in his impatience, he had ruined his work by attempting this too soon—rubbing away the pencil lines. Finally he got out his watercolours and his red sable brushes. At heart he knew he was going too fast—a monk would take a week over a single letter—but he worked with intensity and in less than two hours the initial with its pendant, convoluted border was finished. Then, as he put away his brushes, the exhilaration left him. It was no good; it was botched; the ink outline varied in thickness, the curves seemed to feel their way cautiously where they should have been bold; in places the colour overran the line and everywhere in contrast to the opaque lithographic ink it was watery and transparent. It was no good.
Despondently Charles shut his drawing book and put his things together. Outside the Drawing School, steps led down to the Upper Quad past the doors of Brent’s House—Frank’s. Here he met Mercer.
“Hullo, been painting?”
“Yes, if you can call it that.”
“Let me see.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“It’s absolutely beastly. I hate it, I tell you. I’d have torn it up if I wasn’t going to keep it as a humiliation to look at in case I ever begin to feel I know anything about art.”
“You’re always dissatisfied, Ryder. It’s the mark of a true artist, I suppose.”
“If I was an artist I shouldn’t do things I’d be dissatisfied with. Here, look at it, if you must.”
Mercer gazed at the open page. “What don’t you like about it?”
“The whole thing’s nauseating.”
“I suppose it is a bit ornate.”
“There, my dear Mercer, with your usual unerring discernment you have hit upon the one quality that is at all tolerable.”
“Oh, sorry. Anyway, I think the whole thing absolutely first-class.”
“Do you, Mercer. I’m greatly encouraged.”
“You know you’re a frightfully difficult man. I don’t know why I like you.”
“I know why I like you. Because you are so extremely easy.”
“Coming to the library?”
“I suppose so.”
When the library was open a prefect sat there entering in a ledger the books which boys took out. Charles as usual made his way to the case where the Art books were kept but before he had time to settle down, as he liked to do, he was accosted by Curtis-Dunne, the old new boy of last term in Brent’s. “Don’t you think it scandalous,” he said, “that on one of the few days of the week when we have the chance to use the library, we should have to kick our heels waiting until some semi-literate prefect chooses to turn up and take us in? I’ve taken the matter up with the good Frank.”
“Oh, and what did he say to that?”
“We’re trying to work out a scheme by which library privileges can be extended to those who seriously want them, people like you and me and I suppose the good Mercer.”
“I forget for the moment what form you are in.”
“Modern Upper. Please don’t think from that I am a scientist. It’s simply that in the Navy we had to drop Classics. My interests are entirely literary and political. And of course hedonistic.”
“Oh.”
“Hedonistic above all. By the way, I’ve been looking through the political and economic section. It’s very quaintly chosen, with glaring lacunae. I’ve just filled three pages in the Suggestions Book. I thought perhaps you’d care to append your signature.”
“No thanks. It’s not usual for people without library privileges to write in the Suggestions Book. Besides, I’ve no interest in economics.”
“I’ve also written a suggestion about extending the library privileges. Frank needs something to work on, that he can put before the committee.”
He brought the book to the Art bay; Charles read “That since seniority is no indication of literary taste the system of library privileges be revised to provide facilities for those genuinely desirous of using them to advantage.”
“Neatly put, I think,” said Curtis-Dunne.
“You’ll be thought frightfully above yourself, writing this.”
“It is already generally recognized that I am above myself, but I want other signatures.”
Charles hesitated. To gain time he said, “I say, what on earth have you got on your feet? Aren’t those house shoes?”
Curtis-Dunne pointed a toe shod in shabby, soft black leather; a laced shoe without a toecap, in surface like the cover of a well-worn Bible. “Ah, you have observed my labour-saving device. I wear them night and morning. They are a constant perplexity to those in authority. When questioned, as happened two or three times a week during my first term, I say they are a naval pattern which my father, on account of extreme poverty, has asked me to wear out. That embarrasses them. But I am sure you do not share these middle-class prejudices. Dear boy, your name, please, to this subversive manifesto.”
Still Charles hesitated. The suggestion outraged Spierpoint taste in all particulars. Whatever intrigues, blandishments and self-advertisements were employed by the ambitious at Spierpoint were always elaborately disguised. Self-effacement and depreciation were the rule. To put oneself explicitly forward for preferment was literally not done. Moreover, the lead came from a boy who was not only in another house and immeasurably Charles’s inferior, but also a notorious eccentric. A term back Charles would have rejected the proposal with horror, but today and all this term he was aware of a new voice in his inner counsels, a detached, critical Hyde who intruded his presence more and more often on the conventional, intolerant, subhuman, wholly respectable Dr. Jekyll; a voice, as it were, from a more civilized age, as from the chimney corner in mid-Victorian times there used to break sometimes the sardonic laughter of grandmama, relic of Regency, a clear, outrageous, entirely self-assured disturber among the high and muddled thoughts of her whiskered descendants.
“Frank’s all for the suggestion, you know,” said Curtis-Dunne. “He says the initiative must come from us. He can’t go pushing reforms which he’ll be told nobody really wants. He wants a concrete proposal to put before the library committee.”
That silenced Jekyll. Charles signed.
“Now,” said Curtis-Dunne, “there should be little difficulty with the lad Mercer. He said he’d sign if you would.”
By lunchtime there were twenty-three signatories, including the prefect-in-charge.
“We have this day lit a candle,” said Curtis-Dunne.
There was some comment around Charles in Hall about his conduct in the library.
“I know he’s awful,” said Charles, “but he happens to amuse me.”
“They all think he’s barmy in Brent’s.”
“Frank doesn’t. And anyway I call that a recommendation. As a matter of fact, he’s one of the most intelligent men I ever met. If he’d come at the proper time he’d probably be senior to all of us.”
Support came unexpectedly from Wheatley. “I happen to know the Head took him in as a special favour to his father. He’s Sir Samson Curtis-Dunne’s son, the Member for this division. They’ve got a big place near Steyning. I wouldn’t at all mind having a day’s shooting there next Veniam day.”
On Sunday afternoons, for two hours, the House Room was out of bounds to all except the Settle; in their black coats and with straw hats under their arms the school scattered over the countryside in groups, pairs and occasional disconsolate single figures, for “walks.” All human habitations were barred; the choice lay between the open down behind Spierpoint Ring and the single country road to the isolated Norman church of St. Botolph. Tamplin and Charles usually walked together.
“How I hate Sunday afternoons,” said Charles.
“We might get some blackberries.”
But at the door of the house they were stopped by Mr. Graves.
“Hullo, you two,” he said, “would you like to make yourselves useful? My press has arrived. I thought you might help put it together.” He led them into his room, where half-opened crates filled most of the floor. “It was all in one piece when I bought it. All I’ve got to go on is this.” He showed them a woodcut in an old book. “They didn’t change much from Caxton’s day until the steam presses came in. This one is about a hundred years old.”
“Damned sweat,” muttered Tamplin.
“And here, young Ryder, is the ‘movable type’ you deplore so much.”
“What sort of type is it, sir?”
“We’ll have to find out. I bought the whole thing in one lot from a village stationer.”
They took out letters at random, set them, and took an impression by pressing them, inked, on a sheet of writing paper. Mr. Graves had an album of typefaces.
“They all look the same to me,” said Tamplin.
In spite of his prejudice, Charles was interested. “I’ve got it, I think, sir; Baskerville.”
“No. Look at the serifs. How about Caslon Old Style?”
At last it was identified. Then Charles found a box full of ornamental initials, menu headings of decanters and dessert, foxes’ heads and running hounds for sporting announcements, ecclesiastical devices and monograms, crowns, Odd Fellows’ arms, the wood-cut of a prize bull, decorative bands, the splendid jumble of a century of English job-printing.
“I say, sir, what fun. You could do all sorts of things with these.”
“We will, Charles.”
Tamplin looked at the amateurs with disgust. “I say, sir, I’ve just remembered something I must do. Do you mind awfully if I don’t stay?”
“Run along, old Tamplin.” When he had gone, Mr. Graves said, “I’m sorry Tamplin doesn’t like me.”
“Why can he not let things pass?” thought Charles. “Why does he always have to comment on everything?”
“You don’t like me either, Charles. But you like the press.”
“Yes,” said Charles, “I like the press.”
The type was tied up in little bags. They poured it out, each bagful into the tray provided for it in the worn oak tray.
“Now for the press. This looks like the base.”
It took them two hours to rebuild. When at last it was assembled, it looked small, far too small for the number and size of the cases in which it had travelled. The main cast-iron supports terminated in brass Corinthian capitals and the summit was embellished with a brass urn bearing the engraved date 1824. The common labour, the problems and discoveries, of erection had drawn the two together; now they surveyed its completion in common pride. Tamplin was forgotten.
“It’s a lovely thing, sir. Could you print a book on it?”
“It would take time. Thank you very much for your help. And now,” Mr. Graves looked at his watch, “as, through some grave miscarriage of justice, you are not on the Settle, I expect you have no engagement for tea. See what you can find in the locker.”
The mention of the Settle disturbed their intimacy. Mr. Graves repeated the mistake a few minutes later when they had boiled the kettle and were making toast on the gas-ring. “So at this moment Desmond O’Malley is sitting down to his first Settle tea. I hope he’s enjoying it. I don’t think somehow he is enjoying this term very much so far.” Charles said nothing. “Do you know, he came to me two days ago and asked to resign from it? He said that if I didn’t let him he would do something that would make me degrade him. He’s an odd boy, Desmond. It was an odd request.”
“I don’t suppose he’d want me to know about it.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. Do you know why I’m telling you? Do you?”
“No, sir.”
“I think you could make all the difference to him, whether his life is tolerable or not. I gather all you little beasts in the Upper Dormitory have been giving him hell.”
“If we have, it’s because he asked for it.”
“I dare say, but don’t you think it rather sad that in life there are so many different things different people are asking for, and the only people who get what they ask for are the Desmond O’Malleys?”
At that moment, beyond the box-room, the Settle tea had reached its second stage; surfeited with crumpets, five or six each, they were starting on the éclairs and cream-slices. There was still a warm, soggy pile of crumpets left uneaten and according to custom O’Malley, as junior man, was deputed to hand them round the House Room.
Wheatley was supercilious. “What is that, O’Malley? Crumpets? How very kind of you, but I am afraid I never eat them. My digestion, you know.”
Tamplin was comic. “My figure, you know,” he said.
Jorkins was rude. “No, thanks. They look stale.”
There was loud laughter among the third-year men and some of their more precocious juniors. In strict order of seniority, O’Malley travelled from boy to boy, rebuffed, crimson. All the Upper Dormitory refused. Only the fags watched, first in wonder that anyone should refuse crumpets on a cold afternoon, later with brightening expectancy as the full plate came nearer to them.
“I say, thanks awfully, O’Malley.” They soon went at the under-school table and O’Malley returned to his chair before the empty grate, where he sat until chapel silently eating confectionery.
“You see,” said Mr. Graves, “the beastlier you are to O’Malley, the beastlier he’ll become. People are like that.”
IV
Sunday, Sept. 28th. Choral. Two or three faints otherwise uneventful. Tried to do the initial and border for “The Bells of Heaven” but made a mess of it. Afterwards talked to Curtis-Dunne in the library. He intrigues me. With Frank’s approval we are agitating for library privileges. I don’t suppose anything will come of it except that everyone will say we are above ourselves. After luncheon Tamplin and I were going for a walk when Graves called us in and made us help put up his printing press. Tamplin escaped. Graves tried to get things out of me about ragging Dirty Desmond but without success. In the evening we had another rag. Tamplin, Wheatley, Jorkins and I hurried up to the dormitory as soon as the bell went and said our prayers before Dirty D. arrived. Then when he said, “Say your dibs” we just sat on our beds. He looked frightfully bored and said “Must I repeat my instructions?” As the other men were praying we said nothing. Then he said, “I give you one more chance to say your dibs. If you don’t I’ll report you.” We said nothing so off Dirty D. went in his dressing gown to Anderson who was with the other house-captains at hot-air with Graves. Up came Anderson. “What’s all this about your prayers?” “We’ve said them already.” “Why?” “Because Tamplin got a late for taking too long so we thought we’d better start early.” “I see. Well we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” So far nothing has been said. Everyone thinks we shall get beaten but I don’t see how we can be. We are entirely in our rights. Geoghegan has just been round to all four of us to say we are to stay behind after First Evening so I suppose we are going to be beaten.
After First Evening, when the House Room was clear of all save the four and the bell for Hall had died away and ceased, Geoghegan, the head of the house, came in carrying two canes, accompanied by Anderson.
“I am going to beat you for disobeying an order from the head of your dormitory. Have you anything to say?”
“Yes,” said Wheatley. “We had already said our prayers.”
“It is a matter of indifference to me how often you pray. You have spent most of the day on your knees in chapel, praying all the time, I hope. All I am concerned about is that you obey the orders of the head of the dormitory. Anyone else anything to say? Then get the room ready.”
They pushed back the new men’s table and laid a bench on its side across the front of the fireplace. The routine was familiar. They were beaten in the House Room twice a term, on the average.
“Who’s senior? You, I think, Wheatley.”
Wheatley bent over the bench.
“Knees straight.” Geoghegan took his hips and arranged him to his liking, slightly oblique to the line of advance. From the corner he had three steps to the point of delivery. He skipped forward, struck and slowly turned back to the corner. They were given three strokes each; none of them moved. As they walked across the Hall, Charles felt the slight nausea turn to exhilaration.
“Was he tight?”
“Yes, he was, rather. And damned accurate too.”
After Hall, in the cloisters, O’Malley approached Charles.
“I say, Ryder, I’m frightfully sorry about tonight.”
“Oh, push off.”
“I had to do my duty, you know.”
“Well, go and do it, but don’t come and bother me.”
“I’ll do anything you like to make up. Anything outside the House, that is. I’ll tell you what—I’ll kick anyone else in another house, anyone you care to choose. Spratt, if you like.”
“The best thing you can do is to kick yourself, Dirty Desmond, right round the cloisters.”