"Oh, well, I suppose we must wait, but it is a great nuisance. I wanted to finish the book to-day, it's our last lesson, you know."
The next day was Good Friday.
For ten minutes they sat in silence. It takes a long time to prepare a big rag; the curtain very seldom goes up punctually on the first night; and there had been no dress rehearsal. There was a sound of scuffling from the door in the cloister which led into the School House studies. Then came the tread of measured feet. The door opened, and the great procession entered.
At the head was Gordon in Ferguson's dressing-gown (a great white confection with pale pink frogs) with a white Colts' cap on his head; he beat time with a small swagger cane. Then came the trumpeters, Crosbie and Forbes, who were producing strange harmonies on two pipes that they had bagged from the armoury. Behind them Mansell walked in corps clothes and a Second Fifteen cap. He was chanting a low dirge. On each side of him marched the choristers, Lovelace and Hunter, in white sheets and enormous psalters that they had borrowed from the chapel. They also sang in a strange outlandish tongue. But the pièce de resistance was the banner. It consisted of a long piece of white calico on which was inscribed in red ink: "Up, Up, Oxford. Down with the Cantabs." (Trundle hailed from Emmanuel.) It was fastened at each end to a hockey stick, and Fletcher and Collins bore it in solemnly. In the rear, Briault gave his impressions of a cow being ill. Dyke was the showman.
"I will now present, gentlemen," he began, "my circus of touring artistes, who are raising a fund for the endowment of the Oxford boating club. I must beg you all——"
But Trundle cut short the oration. Seizing a cane, he rushed into the cavalcade of Isis, and smote out full lustily. Pandemonium broke forth. No battle-field was more rich in groans; no revue chorus produced so much noise. It took a quarter of an hour to obtain quiet. But at last a motley crowd sat down to study François Coppée.
And then came the dénouement. It was entirely unexpected and entirely unrehearsed. There was a knock outside. The door opened and an amazing apparition appeared on the threshold. Betteridge was in the Sixth. Very enviously the night before he had listened to the preparations and plans of the extra French set; cursing inwardly, he had sat down at ten o'clock to do prose with the Chief. Faintly across the court were borne the sounds of strife. He groaned within him. Suddenly the Chief stood up.
"I find I shall have to leave you for a little. Some parents are coming to interview me. I want you all to return quietly to your studies, and continue the prose there."
Joyfully the Sixth trooped out. Betteridge rushed across the courts to Trundle's class-room. For a second he listened outside, then a great idea struck him. There was still half-an-hour left. Madly he tore up to the dormitories. Luckily they were not locked. Five minutes later he appeared before Mr Henry Trundle entirely changed. He had on a very light brown suit, a pair of check spats, a rainbow-coloured waistcoat, a heliotrope bow tie; a bowler was balanced on his head at an angle of forty-five degrees, a camera was slung round his neck, in his hand he had a notebook and pencil.
"Mr Trundle, I believe," he said. "I am the reporter of The Fernhurst Gazette. We have received a wire that there has been a great pro-Oxford demonstration in here, and we want to get an account of it in the stop press news before our sister journal, The Western Evening Transcript. Can you give me some notes?"