THE COMPLETE DAVID BLAIZE TRILOGY (Illustrated Edition). Эдвард Бенсон

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 he’ll have two more years here. He never plays footer, though he can run like hell, and says Rugby is a barbarous sport; and in the winter, when he’s not playing racquets, he just reads and reads. His mother was French, too; rum thing that, and the point is that H. T. (that’s Hairy Toe, an awful ass) who teaches French, is English, and Maddox knows about twice as much as he. He makes awful howlers, Maddox says, and pronounces just as if he was a cad. But that’s all right, because he is.”

      David skipped with uncontrollable emotion.

      “Oh, I say, how ripping!” he said. “But I wish Maddox liked cricket and footer.”

      “Well, footer he detests; but he only means that thinking of nothing but cricket is a waste of time. By the way, you’re in luck: there’s a two-days’ match begins to-morrow against Barnard’s team. Friday’s a whole holiday; some frowsy saint. They say Jessop’s coming. Wouldn’t it be sport to see him hit a dozen sixes, and then be clean-bowled by Cruikshank?”

      “Oh, and who’s Cruikshank?” asked David.

      “Well, that’s damned funny not to have heard of Cruikshank. Fastest bowler we’ve ever had, and he’s in Adams’s too. He and Maddox don’t get on a bit, though of course they’re awfully polite to each other. Cruikshank’s awfully pi: fit to burst. Here we are.”

      Hughes again cast an anxious eye over David, for the moment was momentous, as the whole school would be about. But he really felt that David would do him credit. They paused a moment in the gateway.

      “If you like we’ll stroll round the court,” he said, “before we go down to house. There’s chapel, you see, and hall next beyond it; foul place, stinks of mutton. Then two more college boarding-houses—what?”

      “But which is Adams’s?” asked David.

      “Oh, that’s not here. These are all college houses, in-boarders, and rather scuggy compared to out-boarders. Then there’s fifth form class-room and sixth form class-room, and school library up on top. I dare say Maddox is there now. Big school behind, more class-rooms and then the fives-court. Like to walk through?”

      No devout Catholic ever went to Rome in more heart-felt pilgrimage than was this to David. It was the temple of his religion that he saw, the public school which was to be his home. His horizon and aspirations stretched no farther than this red-brick arena, for, to the eyes of the thirteen-year-old, those who have finished with their public school and have gone out from it to the middle-aged Universities, are already past their prime. They are old; they are done with, unless the fact that they play cricket for Oxford or Cambridge gives them a little longer lease of immortality. But to be a great man, a Maddox or a Cruikshank in this theatre of life which already his feet trod, was the utmost dream of David’s ambitions, and if at the hoary age of eighteen he could only have played a real part in the life of the scenes that were now unrolling to him he felt that an honoured grave would be the natural conclusion. Everything that might happen after public school was over seemed a posthumous sort of affair. You were old after that, and at this moment even the Head, for all his terror and glamour, appeared a tomb-like creature.

      Hughes exchanged “Hullo” with a friend or two, and said “Right: half-past four” to one of them, which made David long to know what heroic thing was to happen then, and took him past the east end of chapel without further comment. David, quickly and quite mistakenly, drew a conclusion based on his private school experience.

      “I suppose chapel’s pretty good rot,” he said.

      This was worse than buttonholes.

      “Chapel rot?” said Hughes. “Why, it’s perfectly ripping. Maddox’s uncle was the architect. It’s the finest school-chapel in England, bar Eton perhaps. You’ll see it to-night. You never saw anything so ripping.”

      “Oh, sorry,” said David, flushing; “but