Sentence.
The big room was full. Every form room, always occupied at morning preparation, was emptied of its contents, for all had been convened, by special proclamation, to the large schoolroom, now to become, for the time being, a species of hall of justice. So, even as at prayer time, arranged in the rows of lockers according to dormitories, the whole three hundred and fifty or so of boys chattered in a continuous and undertoned buzz—restrained, but not silenced, by the prefectorial calls:
“Quiet there!”
“You, Jones. I’ve spoken to you before already.”
“Brown, come to me afterwards in the fourth form room.”
“Now, then, that bottom row. Stop that shoving about! D’you hear?”
And so on.
Yes, the excitement was intense. There had not been such a row on, said some one, since that in which Thurston’s gang had been caught smoking. They had set up a kind of divan in a dry ditch, which, being unexpectedly raided, they, and their pipes and tobacco, had been seized in close conjunction the one with the other—and Thurston and five other big fellows had been flogged. Or, said others, since a far worse case of another kind, wherein some fifteen fellows of all ages had been swished. And now all sorts of wild rumours began to go round. All the fellows in the small room at the end of Williams’s dormitory were going to be swished—so extensive was the order sent to the gardener for the manufacture of birch rods, declared some, who affected to be in the know. But the centre light of all the excitement and conjecture was Haviland. He was not a prefect now, and therefore could, constitutionally, be swished. But—would he take it? That was the point—would he take it? Some opined that he would not—others that he would have to.
“Silence! Ss-silence there!” roared the prefects, with a force and unanimity that hushed the room in a minute. For it meant that the Doctor was coming in.
You might have heard a pin drop in that hitherto buzzing assemblage as the Headmaster ascended to the big desk in the middle and signed for the door to be shut. Then it was seen that there stood before him of culprits exactly one dozen, of whom all but two were in varying stages of funk.