from a hit so smart that he had only meant to put up his hands to protect his face, and the ball stuck in them to his great surprise and hurt more than anything had ever hurt. Subsequently he made thirty runs after being missed three times, which added zest to the performance, and took the Head’s volume of Keats up to bed with him. But, Glanders being ill, and the dormitory unpatrolled, he had a wonderful pillow-fight with Bags instead of reading, and did not, as his custom was, go instantly to sleep when at length he got into bed. Instead he lay in a lump with his hands round his knees saying “Jolly happy, jolly, jolly happy! By Gad, ‘fairy lands forlorn! Fairy lands forlorn.’ Gosh, how that catch hurt! but what frightful sport! Marchester next week too . . . five bob. . . .”
And these images lost their outline, and became blurred with the approach of sleep.
One of the house-masters at Marchester was an old friend of the Archdeacon, and it had been arranged that David should stay with Mr. Adams when he went up for his scholarship examination. Hughes, David’s great chum of a year ago, was in Adams’s house, and by permission met him at the station, and, after the first greetings, looked David over with an eye made critical by the adamantine traditions that bind junior boys at public schools. Hughes was extremely glad to see him, but he had certainly been very anxious to get an early and private view of him to see if he came up to the standards and ordinances then prevailing, and make such corrections in his bearing and attire as were necessary. It would be an awful thing, for instance, if David turned up in a straw hat with his school eleven colours, as those were identical with the Rugby fifteen colours at Marchester, and to be seen walking about with a small alien boy in fifteen colours was a nightmare possibility. But there was a lot, as he saw at once, to be said in David’s favour: his clothes were neat, he looked exceedingly clean (not grubby, a thing which Hughes, from his faded reminiscences of Helmsworth, was dismally afraid of), his hair was short behind and well inside his collar, and he stood straight. On the other hand, there were certain details that must be altered.
“I say, have you been travelling in a smoker?” he asked. “Second, too.”
David wished he had spent his last shilling in going first.
“Yes, first was so frightfully expensive,” said David.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that: all the fellows go third. Yes, the bus will take your luggage up, and we’ll walk, shall we? It’ll take the fug of the smoking-carriage out of your clothes.”
David marvelled at this: he had thought a smoking-carriage must be the manly thing. He had a packet of cigarettes also in his coat-pocket.
“Don’t fellows smoke here?” he asked, looking up in timid admiration at Hughes, who had grown enormously.
“Oh yes, in some scuggy houses,” he said, “but not in Adams’s. It’s thought frightfully bad form in Adams’s!”
David fingered his packet of cigarettes nervously, conscious suddenly of the enormous gulf that yawned between a private and a public school, and yearning to bridge it over by every means in his power.
“I’ve got some cigarettes in my pocket,” he said.
“Oh, chuck them away,” said his friend, “or give them to a porter. It would be a rotten affair if any of the fellows in the house knew. You’d come here with a bad name.”
David’s face fell for a moment, for those were gold-tipped cigarettes, which he had thought would probably be so exceedingly the right thing. Hughes noticed this, and gave consolation, for really Blaize was extremely presentable.
“I say, Blazes,” he said, “I’m awfully glad to see you, and we’ll have a ripping time. But it’s best to tell you what’s the right thing and what isn’t, don’t you think?”
David responded cordially to this.
“Rather,” he said, “and it’s jolly good of you. Thanks, awfully. Do tell me if there’s anything else.”
Hughes gave him another critical glance, as solemn as a tailor’s when looking at the fit of a coat that he wants to be a credit to him.
“Oh well, that buttonhole,” he said. “I think I should take that out. Only tremendous swells wear them, and even then it’s rather ‘side.’ ”
David instantly plucked out the offending vegetable. He probably would have torn out a handful of his hair, if crisp yellow locks showed “side.” Hughes nodded at him approvingly.
“Now you’re first-rate,” he said. “Oh, just send your stick up with your luggage. Now come on. You look just as if you were at Marchester already. You see I got leave for you to come and brew—have tea, you know—in my study this afternoon, and it would have been beastly for both of us, if you weren’t up to Adams’s form, and it turned out that you smoked or kept white mice, or something hopeless.”
The two handsome boys went on their way up to the Mecca of David’s aspirations, and he thought with the deepest relief of his decision not to bring the Monarch and his wife with him. It had been a wrench to part with them even for a few days, and an anxiety to leave them even in the care of the assiduous Bags, to whom he had given a paper of directions about diet and fresh air. But if it was hopeless to keep white mice, how much more dire would have been his position if he had been found possessed of stag-beetles, or if, as might easily have happened without this oblique warning, he had incidentally mentioned to some of Hughes’s friends that his tastes lay in those verminous directions! And Hughes proceeded, inspired by that authoritative conventionality which public schools so teach, that every well-bred junior boy of fifteen or sixteen in any house is in characteristics of behaviour exactly like every other. At one time buttonholes and smoking are de rigueur, at another they are quite impossible; at one time it is the fashion to be industrious, and every one works, at another to be as idle as is possible. Morals are subject to the same strict but changeable etiquette; for years perhaps the most admirable tone characterises a house, then another code obtains, and Satan himself might be staggered at the result.
“Jove, it was a good thing I came to the station,” he said, “and I wanted to, too. Else you might have appeared with a stick and a buttonhole and a cigarette, and a slow-worm for all I knew. Do you remember we had a slow-worm, you and I, at Helmsworth? Of course some fellows go in for natural history, and Maddox, who’s the head of our house, collects butterflies. But then, he’s such a swell, he can do just what he likes. I’m his fag, you know, and he’s awfully jolly to me. Damned hot it is; let’s walk slower.”
David was extremely quick at picking up an atmosphere and he made the perfectly correct conclusion that, though smoking was bad form, swearing was not. But the mention of Maddox roused the thrill and glamour of hero-worship—a hero-worship more complete and entire than is ever accorded by the world of grown-up men and women to their most august idols.
“Oh go on, tell me about Maddox,” he said.
“I dare say you’ll see him. Sure to, in fact. He’s not very tall, but he’s damned good-looking. He’s far the finest bat in the eleven, and the funny thing is he says cricket’s rather a waste of time, and hardly ever goes up to a net. He’s editor of the school-paper, and played racquets for us at Queen’s last year. But what he likes best of all is reading.”
“That’s queer,” said David.
“ ’Tis rather. He makes all our juniors work too, I can tell you. But he’ll help anybody, and he’ll always give you a construe of a bit you don’t understand, if you’ve looked out all the words first. And he’s only just seventeen, think of that, so that
