"Look, sir, here they are!"
"But, my dear Ferguson, I'm sure we must have looked there."
"Yes, sir. I thought we had."
"Er, 't any rate there are your shoes, Ferguson, and I hope you'll have a good game!" The Chief went out, rather annoyed at having wasted so much time. At tea that evening there was mirth at the V. B table.
On this occasion trouble was avoided. But one day Willing, a new boy, lost his corps hat. He was certain it had been there before lunch. The Corps Parade was already falling in. Seeing no other hat to fit him, he very idiotically went on without a hat at all. It would have been far better to have cut parade altogether. Clarke asked him where his hat was, but his ideas on the subject were very nebulous. The whole corps was kept waiting while School House hats were examined. Ten people had got hats other than their own.
They each got a Georgic....
The pent-up fury of the House now broke loose. Everyone swore he would murder Clarke on the last day, bag his clothes, and hold him in a cold bath for half-an-hour. If half of the things that were going to be done on the last day ever happened, how very few heads of houses would live to tell the tale! It is so easy to talk, so very hard to do anything; a head of the House is absolutely supreme. If he is at all sensitive, it is possible to make his life utterly wretched by a silent demonstration of hatred, but if he is at all a man, threats can never mature, and Clarke was a man. During his last days at Fernhurst he was supremely miserable. The House was split up into factions: he himself had no one to talk to except Ferguson and Sandham. But he carried on the grim joke to its completion. In the last week he beat four boys for being low in form, and gave a whole dormitory a hundred lines daily till the end of the term for talking after lights out. The Chief was sorry to lose him; Ferguson would make a very weak head. The future was not too bright.
"I say, you know, I think I had better get a 'budge' this term." Gordon announced this fact as the Lower Fifth were pretending to prepare for the exam. Mansell protested:
"Now don't be a damned ass, my good man; you don't know when you are well off. You stop with old Methuselah a bit longer. He is a most damnable ass, but his form is a glorious slack."