"Of course, it's all right," said Lovelace; "there's only one thing to do. You talk of nothing else but this rotten affair; talk about it in the Toe, in the changing-room, in form, in chapel, if you like. Ask people you meet if they've owned up. Treat the whole thing as a glorious rag."
"Yes," shouted Gordon, "let's go down to Rudd and tell him if he doesn't own up we'll give him hell."
And in truth the next half-hour was for Rudd very hell of very hell. His existence just now was not very pleasant. If he had been good at footer all his domestic failings would have been forgiven him. But he was not; he loathed the game, though at times he would have given anything to be of some use. Strangely enough, at Oxford he found people respected his brains, and no one hated him because he could not drop goals from the twenty-five. Life is full of compensations.
Lovelace and Tester were both supreme actors. That night in the dormitory they were full of the subject. After lights out, they kept the whole place in a roar of laughter. Bradford joined in a bit, but he was still nervous; visions rose up before him of an officer passing down the ranks, suddenly seizing him, and saying: "This is the man." It was hardly a ravishing thought; but it was useless to go back on a lie. Tester realised this. As Ferguson came through he called out:
"I say, Ferguson, you know you'd better go up to the Chief and tell him you did it."
Ferguson was, like the Boy Scout, always prepared.
"My good man, you don't surely imagine I am so devoid of good feeling and have such a hazy conception of the higher life as not to inform the Headmaster. I have just returned from breaking the news to him. He took it quite well on the whole. It was a touching scene. I nearly wept."
Betteridge then arose, and gave an imitation of a Rogers' sermon.
"Well, Ferguson, I must own that I am sorry to lose you. I would give much to retain you here. But dis aliter visum: you must go. You are expelled. Between the Scylla of over-elation and the Charybdis of despair you have a long time steered the bark of the School House. But one failing wipes away many virtues. And we must not discriminate between the doer and the deed, the actor and the action, the sinner and the sin. The same punishment for all. But in that paradisal state where suns sink not nor flowers fade, there will be a sweet reunion."
It was pure Rogers. The dormitory rocked with laughter. Tester began to give his impressions of what the officer must have looked like. There was a heated argument as to whether he was a parson. Mansell thought not.