“Oh, no, rather not.”
Going downstairs from his mother’s room, Michael had half an impulse to turn back and confide in her the real account of his holidays. But on reflection he protested to himself that his mother looked upon him as immaculate, and he felt unwilling to disturb by such a revolutionary step the approved tranquillities of maternal ignorance.
Mr. Cray, his new form-master, was a man of distinct personality, and possessed a considerable amount of educative ability; but unfortunately for Michael the zest of classics had withered in his heart after his disappointment over the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate. Therefore Mr. Cray with his bright archæology and chatty scholarship bored Michael more profoundly than any of his masters so far had bored him. Mr. Cray resented this attitude very bitterly, being used to keenness in his form, and Michael’s dreary indolence, which often came nearer to insolence, irritated him. As for the plodding, inky sycophants who fawned upon Mr. Cray’s informativeness, Michael regarded them with horror and contempt. He sat surrounded by the butts and bugbears of his school-life. All the boys whose existence he had deplored seemed to have clambered arduously into the Upper Fifth just to enrage him with the sight of their industrious propinquity. There they sat with their scraggy wrists protruding from shrinking coat-sleeves, with ambitious noses glued to their books, with pens and pencils neatly disposed for demonstrative annotation, and nearly all of them conscious of having figured in the school-list with the printed bubble of the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate beside their names. Contemplating them in the mass, Michael scarcely knew how he would endure another dusty year of school.
“And now we come to the question of the Homeric gate—the Homeric gate, Fane, when you can condescend to our level,” said Mr. Cray severely.
“I’m listening, sir,” said Michael wearily.
“Of course the earliest type of gate was without hinges—without hinges, Fane! Very much like your attention, Fane!”
Several sycophants giggled at this, and Michael, gazing very earnestly at Mr. Cray’s benign but somewhat dirty bald head, took a bloody revenge upon those in reach of his javelin of quadruple penholders.
“For Monday,” said Mr. Cray, when he had done with listening to the intelligent advice of his favourite pupils on the subject of gates ancient and modern, “for Monday the essay will be on Patriotism.”
Michael groaned audibly.
“Isn’t there an alternative subject, sir?” he gloomily enquired.