"No; I was not here that term," Davenport would reply; "but I sha'n't forget when the Chief found Betteridge's bed pitched on the floor, with Betteridge underneath and Lovelace sitting on top."
Was it possible, thought some small fry, that the great Mansell, who played for the Fifteen, had once actually slept in the same bed as he occupied now? Had Betteridge, who had only that night given half the day-room a hundred lines, once had his bed shipped on that very floor! It all seemed like a gigantic fairy story. And to think that Caruthers had seen these things!
But they were not long, these moments of the assumption of the godhead. Darkness soon fell on the long passage, and only whispered talking sounded faint and far away. Gordon and Davenport then went back to their room, and on evenings after a hard game they had a small supper. They had managed to discover a loose board, and the floor space caused by its removal served as a cupboard, a cupboard so damp and unhealthy that the most lenient sanitary inspector must infallibly have condemned it. Here, just before afternoon school, they secreted ginger beer bottles, a loaf of bread, butter, some tomatoes and a chunk of Gorgonzola cheese. In the morning they carried away the bottles in their pockets. It would have been much easier and much more comfortable to have had a meal in their study, but then it would have lacked the savour of romance. The rule forbidding the importation of food into the dormitories was very strict. At the end of the term, when both were going to leave that particular room, they nailed down the board, so that no other marauder should imitate them. They wished to be unique. But before they did so, they put in the mouldy cupboard a lemonade bottle and one of the blue Fernhurst roll-books for the Michaelmas Term, 1913. They underlined their names in it, and left it as a memento of a few happy evenings.
"I wonder," said Caruthers, "if years hence someone will pull up that board and find the book, and seeing our names will wonder who we were."
"Perhaps," said Davenport. "And, you know, they may try and find out something about us in back numbers of The Fernhurstian, or in the photographs of house sides. Do you think they will be able to find out anything about us?"
"I hope so; but how little we know even of the bloods of 1905, and as likely as not we sha'n't ever be bloods. It will be rather funny if some day of all the things we have done nothing remains but the blue roll-book."
"Funny?" said Davenport. "Rather pathetic, I should say."
At fifteen one is apt to be sentimental.
Perhaps some rude fingers have already torn up that board; perhaps even now some new generation of Fernhurstians is using it as a receptacle for tobacco, or cheese, or any other commodity contraband to the dormitories. But perhaps underneath a board in No. 1 double dormitory there still repose that identical lemonade bottle and the roll-book with its blue cover, now sadly faded and its leaves turned up with age, to serve as Gordon's epitaph, when all his other deeds have perished in oblivion.