The culprit bowed airily.
"You will lose much more by my silence than I by yours," he said—and it takes considerable courage to make such a statement to a tribunal of schoolboys.
If Norman suffered from our aloofness, he took it with the same nonchalance as he had taken our plaudits. Oddly enough, he had no intimate friends, and all of us, partly out of resentment against his pose of onlooker, and more from the love of torture which links the schoolboy to the savage, performed our duty of silent punishment with a zeal which deserved a better inspiration. We forgot how he had made friends with the misfits whose square personalities were being drawn through the round hole of public-school life. Little chaps he had taken in hand on arrival when they wanted to weep for loneliness turned from him as if he held contagion. All the sensitive, shrinking ones about whom he had thrown his cloak of vivacity, and who were now grown bold and self-reliant, let him pass from the Little Dean's Yard to his house and through the ancient passages, a lonely debonair figure that always smiled…. And no one spoke to him. I, whom he had named "The Pest," thus turning my naturally perverse sulkiness into a subject of jest and good-humor, took a special delight in watching the man who had been sentenced by his peers to solitude in the midst of a crowd.
His peers?… Was it Smith tertius (or quartus) who used the word "swine"?
Two weeks had passed, and we were to play Winchester a decisive match on our grounds, which, as land near the cathedral is rather difficult to obtain, are almost a mile from the school.
The stage was set. Youthful scholars of ten and twelve walked in their gowns, their brows knit with thought, their eyes blinking from over-study. Little chaps struggled under the responsibility of silk toppers, and conversed solemnly on the deterioration of the tuck-shop; and the Olympian creature who was the head-boy of the school lounged outside the scoring-booth as if he were "fed up" with nectar, and would like some brown October ale for a change—a pose much favored by the best people in England. There was an excellent audience of the secondary sex, composed of proud mothers and apologetic sisters, whose presence was necessitating a sort of Jekyll and Hyde attitude on the part of their schoolboy relatives, who were endeavoring to be polite to their "people" and at the same time give the impression to their confrères that the women were mere acquaintances—accidental dinner partners, as it were.
No schoolboy of twelve likes to admit to a mother.
Surrounding the field there is a high iron fence, through the railings of which, or on top, a motley collection of gamins cheer on their wealthier brethren of the silk hats. Naturally no notice is taken of these uninvited guests. It is quite all right for them to shout for Westminster if it gives them any pleasure, but what has a silk hat in common with a red kerchief and a slouch-cap?
On the day of the match they seemed in larger numbers than usual, and the top of the fence was covered with urchins, who retained their position of vantage as though the law of gravitation were no concern of theirs, keeping up a shrill chorus as Winchester went out for a moderate score.
With the odds all in our favor we went in to bat, Grubbs, the captain, and I leading off. The first ball was wide, but to feel the play of my muscles I took a perfunctory swing at it with my bat. The effect was extraordinary…. The crowd of Cockney youngsters raised a volume of sound as if my bat had been a baton and they a chorus.