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

      Mr. Dutton took up the dart, and inked his shirt-cuff, but David did not smile.

      “Who made——” he began, and turned and saw.

      “Oh, jam!” said David under his breath.

      The Head left the window with the yellow book in his hand, took two steps to the door, and entered the class-room. He was a tall, grizzle-bearded man, lean and wiry, with cold grey eyes. To the boys he appeared of gigantic height, and was tragedy and fate personified. Terror encompassed him: he scintillated with it, as radium scintillates and is unconsumed. But he scintillated also with splendour: he was probably omniscient, and of his omnipotence there was no doubt whatever. He had rowed for Oxford against Cambridge, and the boys wondered that Cambridge had dared to put a boat on the river at all that year. He had also got a double-first, which in itself was less impressive, and he was believed to be fabulously wealthy. How any woman had ever ventured to marry him no one knew; but, after all, if he had expressed a wish that way, it was equally inconceivable that it should not be gratified. Though there was not a boy in the school who did not dread his displeasure above everything else in the world, there was none who would not have taken an infinity of trouble to be sure of winning his approbation. One of his legs was slightly shorter than the other, which gave him a swaying or rocking motion when he walked, which David could imitate admirably. But he would nearly have died of astonishment if he had known that more than once the Head had seen him do it, and had laughed in his beard with twinkling eyes.

      There was no twinkle or laughter there to-day. Still with the yellow volume in his hand, he came and stood before the skeleton of the kangaroo, and a silence fell that will perhaps be equalled for breathlessness on the day that the judgment books are opened, but probably not before. Then he spoke:

      “Silence!” he said.

      (There was not any more silence possible, so he had to be content with that.)

      He addressed his lieutenant, who stood abjectly twirling a small moustache and trying to look tall. But what was the use of trying to look tall beside that Matterhorn, or to twirl an adolescent moustache when the Head’s hand clawed his beard? It was simply silly.

      “Mr. Dutton,” said the Head, when the silence had begun to sing in the ears of the listeners. “By some strange mischance—I repeat, by some strange mischance,—I have found this disgusting and licentious book on your desk. How it got there, how it happened to be opened at—at page 56, I do not wish to inquire. It is more than enough for me to have found it there. I am willing to believe, and to tell you so publicly, Mr. Dutton, before the boys whom you are superintending on this Sunday afternoon, I am willing to believe that some obscene bird passed over the museum and dropped from its claws this stinking—yes, sir, stinking—carrion. Dropped it, sir, while your back was turned, on the very table where I see the Book of books, and also the book of Common Prayer. With your leave, with your leave, Mr. Dutton, I will do thus and thus to this unholy carrion.”

      Then ensued a slight anticlimax, for the Head, though a very strong man in hand and arm, found it impossible to do as he had designed, and tear three hundred pages across and across. But the form generally, and Mr. Dutton in particular, were too stiff with horror to notice it. So, instead, the Head tore off section after section of the lightly sewn leaves, instead of tearing the pages, laid the dismembered carrion on the floor, and stamped on it, and then, with an indescribable ejaculation of disgust, threw the mutilated remains into the fireplace.

      “You are excused, Mr. Dutton,” he said, “from the rest of this lesson, which I will take myself; but you will do me the honour to call on me immediately after evensong this afternoon.”

      His fierce eye wandered from Mr. Dutton’s stricken face to David’s desk, where lay the inky dart.

      “You are engaged now, I see, in some inquiry,” he said. “A paper dart, I perceive, on Blaize’s desk. I will conduct the inquiry myself, and wish you a good afternoon.”

      He waited in tense silence till Mr. Dutton had taken his hat and left the room. Then he turned to David.

      “Blaize, did you make that dart, or did you throw it?” he asked.

      An expression of despairing determination had come into David’s face. He was conscious also of a large ink-stain on his lips.

      “Neither, sir,” he said.

      “Then who made it?” said the Head. “And also, for I perceive the point is blunted, who threw it?”

      Dead silence on David’s part.

      “Do you know?” asked the Head.

      “Yes, sir,” said David.

      “And do you refuse to tell me? I am not here to be bullied, I may remind you.”

      David felt slightly sick, but he had swallowed a good deal of chewed pen-handle.

      “Do you refuse to tell me?” repeated the Head.

      “Yes, sir,” said David.

      Then came one of those strange calms in the middle of cyclones, which sometimes puzzled the boys. But their conjecture, a perfectly right one, was that the Head, in spite of questions like these, did not like “sneaking.” Anyhow, for a moment his fierceness faded, and he nodded at David, just as one pal might nod to another in sympathetic assent.

      “Quite right, my boy,” he said.

      Then he turned to the rest of the class, holding up the bedraggled weapon.

      “Name,” he said.

      The miserable Bags stood up, without speech.

      “Oh you, Crabtree,” said the awful voice. “And so Master Crabtree thinks that the calm and quiet of Sunday afternoon is made to give him leisure to forge these filthy weapons: that the paper you are given to write home on is designed to be desecrated to these foul usages, and the ink to supply filth to them. You will write out with the ink you have so strangely misused two hundred lines of Virgil in copper-plate hand, and eat your dinner at the pig-table, apart from your companions, for the next week.”

      The pig-table, it may be mentioned, was a separate table in the dining-room without chairs, where boys detected in swinish habits had to take their meals standing for the period of their sentence. But poor Bags’s cup was not full yet, for the Head’s eagle eye fell on David’s inky mouth.

      “I infer that the ink on Blaize’s lips was made by this weapon,” he said. “That is so? Then you will now beg Blaize’s pardon, and as soon as the Catechism and Bible-class is over, you will fetch a basin of water and bathe Blaize’s mouth with your own sponge, until it is pronounced clean by your matron. The hour for writing home is up. Sign your names, and direct your envelopes. Catechism!”

      Now the Catechism-class had already been held, and the marks for it had been put down in the mottled-covered book which lay on Mr. Dutton’s desk. But to suggest or hint this was not less inconceivable than to propose playing leap-frog. The more imaginative saw that there might be fresh trouble when Catechism marks were put down, and it was found that Mr. Dutton had already entered them in his neat small handwriting, but the idea of venturing to correct the Head when he was in this brimstone-mood was merely unthinkable. David, indeed, the boldest of them all, and, at the moment, with something of the halo of martyrdom about him, wondered what would happen if he did so, but quailed before the possible result.

      So Catechism began again, and for a little all went smoothly. The Head, of course, knew that among small boys at school Christian names are held to be effeminate and disgraceful things, and so, omitting the first question, asked Stone, the head-boy, who had given him his name, and Stone knew. Ferrers also knew what his godfathers and godmothers then did for him, and David expressed himself accurately as bound to believe and to do what they had promised for him. The Commandments went smoothly, but trouble began when the boys had to explain what they chiefly learned from those Commandments. Any meaning that they might have possessed, any effort to attach rational ideas to them, was overshadowed by the fact that, primarily, this was a lesson that should have been acquired by heart in order