Jack Ward managed to appease his father, and having done it he set out on a campaign which for thoroughness beat anything I have ever discovered. He went off at the end of July to stay with a tutor who coached him in history and rowing, and he stayed with him until the Oxford term began. The tutor was a rowing blue who did not, from Jack's account of him, mind how little work his pupils did as long as they were ready to go on the river, but Jack assured me that he had read for four or five hours every day. To start with a history coach two years before his schools struck me as being magnificent, but Jack would not hear a word against his way of spending the vac.
"He may not know much history," he said to me when we got back to Oxford, "but he's a rare good sort, and he says I'm a natural oar. Besides, he's a sportsman."
"What's that?" I asked, for I used the word "sportsman" to mean so many things.
"He doesn't bother people; you can play cards if you like, and he has a billiard table. He is a nailer at cork pool."
"Is he?" I said, and asked no more about him, for I have a horror of nailers at any sort of pool, having once been hopelessly fleeced by some of them.
"I won a pot," Jack went on gaily, "in the scratch fours at Wallhead regatta—I rowed in two regattas. Not so bad; and now I've got to go down to the river every day and be coached by men who don't know the difference between an oar and a barge pole. Well, it's all part of the game."
"What's the game?" I asked.
"Look here, Godfrey, something's happened to you. You've gone stupid; it's your game. To buck St. Cuthbert's up, get rid of these confounded slackers, squash them flat, and we are going to do it, you see if we don't. Dennison was drunk last night or pretended to be, and he and his gang invaded a lot of freshers and then asked them all to breakfast. That crowd are no more use to a college than a headache. Fancy coming to Oxford to be ragged by Dennison!"
"It does seem rather futile."
"Futile!" Jack exclaimed scornfully, and then proceeded to say what he called it; "but if you have given up caring what happens I shall chuck up the whole thing," he concluded.