"Oh, of course they do. There is the Chief, for instance, a brilliant scholar and the authority on Coleridge. But he is an exception; and besides, he did not stop an assistant master long; he got a headmastership pretty soon. Chief is a splendid fellow. But I am talking of the average man. Just look at our staff: a more fatuous set of fools I never struck. All in a groove, all worshipping the same rotten tin gods. I am always repeating myself, but I can't help it. Damn them all, I say, they've mucked up my life pretty well; not one of them has tried to help me. They sit round the common room fire and gas. Betteridge swears Ferrers is a wonderful man; personally, I think he is an unmitigated nuisance. But at any rate, he is the only man who ever thinks for himself. Oh, what fools they all are."
For the rest of the evening Gordon and Tester cursed and swore at everyone and everything, and on the whole felt better for having got it off their chests. At any rate, next day Gordon was plotting a rag on an enormous scale with Archie Fletcher; and in a House game assisted in the severe routing of Rogers' house by seventy-eight points to nil. It takes a good deal to upset a boy of fifteen for very long. And the long evenings were a supreme happiness.
It must be owned that during hall Lovelace was rather unsociable. It was not that he studied Greek or Latin; he had a healthy contempt for scholastic triumphs; horse-racing was the real interest of his life. "This is my work," he used to scoff, brandishing The Sportsman in Gordon's face. "I am not going to be a classic scholar, and I sha'n't discover any new element, or such stuff as that. I am going on the turf. This is my work."
For an hour every evening he laboured perseveringly at "his work" with form books, The Sportsman, and huge account books. For every single race he chose the runners, and laid imaginary bets; each night he made out how much he had lost or made; and it must be confessed that if he had really laid money on the horses, he would most certainly have done a good term's work. By Christmas he was one hundred and seventeen pounds up. This pursuit, of course, rather militated against his activities in the class-room; but, as he said, "It was only Claremont, the old Methuselah—and they had a damned good crib." Lovelace did his work from seven to eight, and during this time Caruthers, who seemed to be in the happy condition of never having any work to do at all, wandered round the studies. And during his peregrinations many who had been to him before merely units in a vast organisation detached themselves from the rest, and became to him living characters; especially was this so with Foster. He had played with Foster for two years in the Colts and in A-K sides, but there had never been anything in common between them; their interests had been far apart; neither stood for anything to the other. But now, when Gordon found himself frequently dropping into Foster's study for half-an-hour or so, he realised how many qualities Foster had. Foster was strong-willed, obstinate almost, quite regardless of tradition, in his own way slightly a rebel, and a past master in the art of deceiving masters. There are two ways of making a master look a fool: one is by introducing processions and coloured mice; the other by bowing before him, making him think you are hard-working and industrious, and all the while laughing at him behind his back. Gordon preferred the former, because he had the love of battle; but Foster held to the second method, in its way equally effective, and anyone who shook a spear against authority was sure of sympathy from Gordon.
It was a great sight to see Foster bamboozle Claremont. With the greatest regularity Foster was ploughed in his con., failed to score in Latin prose, and knew nothing of his rep. And yet he never got an imposition. He would point out how hard he worked; he often stayed behind after school for a few seconds to ask Claremont a point in the unseen. Such keenness was unusual, and Claremont could not connect it with the slovenly productions that he had learnt to associate with the name of Foster. For a long time it was a vast enigma. At half term Foster's report consisted of one word, typically Claremontian—"Inscrutable." But manners always win in the end. Foster showed so much zeal, such an honest willingness to learn, that Claremont finally classed him as a hard-working, keen, friendly, but amazingly stupid boy. The Army class, which Foster honoured with his presence, always did Latin and English with Claremont, and for over two years Foster sat at the back of Claremont's room, scoring marks by singles when others scored by tens. Yet his reports were invariably good; he never had an imposition; he never needed to prepare a line of anything.
"Well, Foster," Claremont used to say, as he returned a prose entirely besmirched with blue pencil, "I believe you really try, but the result is most disheartening."
Foster always looked profoundly distressed; and at the end of the hour he would go up, prose in hand, and ask why the subject of an active verb could not be in the ablative. Two minutes later he would emerge with a broad grin on his face, and murmur to whoever might be near that Claremont was "a most damnable ass, but none the less a pleasant creature." And in the evening hall he and Gordon would discuss how one or other of them had advanced a step further into the enemy's country, and taken one more pawn in the gigantic game of bluff. They were both in their own fashion working to the same end.
But at this point the serene calm of Gordon's life was suddenly rudely interrupted by an incursion on the part of "the Bull." About three weeks after the term had begun the Colts played their first game, and like most sides at the beginning of a season, they were terribly disorganised. Lovelace, who had been in under-sixteen teams for years, was the Senior Colts badge and was captain. Burgoyne led the scrum; he was a rough diamond, if indeed a diamond at all, and was not too popular with the side. Foster was scrum half; Collins and Gordon were in the scrum. It was really quite a decent side, but this particular afternoon it started shakily. "The Bull" raged so madly and cursed so furiously that the side became petrified with funk, and could do nothing right.
Once and only once did the Colts look like scoring, and then Lovelace knocked on the easiest pass right between the posts.