“The lowest six boys of the form will bring those silly volumes across to my house,” he said. “The head boy will count them here, and then come across when they are all removed and count them again to see that the numbers tally. You understand, Blaize?”
“Yes, sir,” said David.
“And I am ashamed of you all,” said the Head.
CHAPTER X
David’s soft grey hat with house-colours on it was tilted over his eyes to screen them from the sun, and he lay full length on the hot dry sand above high-water mark on the beach at Naseby, stupefied and simmering with content. His arms, bare to the elbow in rolled-up shirt sleeves, were extended, and he kept filling his hands with sand and letting it ooze out again through the interstices of his fingers in a pleasant, tickling manner, hourglass fashion, though the action evoked in him neither edifying nor melancholy reflection on the subject of the passing of time. Beside him lay two coats and two bags of golf-clubs, for he and Maddox, with whom he was staying, had just come back from a morning round of golf, and had gone down to the shore to bathe before lunch. They had tossed up as to which of them should go to fetch towels, and, Maddox having lost, had just disappeared up the steep, crumbling path that led to the top of the sand-cliffs, where was perched the house his mother usually took for the summer holidays. A few hundred yards farther north these cliffs broke into tumbled sand-dunes and stretches of short, velvety turf, where greens nestled in Elysian valleys surrounded by saharas.
Maddox would be absent some ten minutes, and David let his lazy thoughts float down the stream of the very pleasant thinkings which made up his extreme contentment. He did not direct them, but let them drift, going swiftly here, eddying round there, while the memory-shores of the last few months glided by. In the first place, and perhaps most important of all, he was staying here with his friend—this was an eddy; he went round and round in it. Though he had been here three days already, passing them entirely with Maddox, playing golf with him, playing tennis with him, bathing with him, and quite continuously talking to him, David could not get used to this amazing situation. He called him “Frank” too, just as if he was nobody in particular, and at the thought of it David rolled over on to his side, wriggling, and said “Lord!”
It was but a little more than a year ago that he had been, in his own phrase, “a scruggy little devil with stag-beetles,” capable, it is true, of hero-worship, and able to recognise a hero when he saw him, for had not his heart burned within him when, going up for his scholarship examination, the demigod had thrown a careless word to him? It was quite sufficient then that Maddox, the handsomest fellow in the world, the best bat probably that Marchester had ever produced, and altogether the most glorious of created beings, should have noticed him at all: indeed, that was more than sufficient; it was sufficient that Maddox should exist. And since then only a year had passed, and here he was calling him Frank, and leaning on his arm when so disposed, and tossing him who should get towels, and staying with his mother. Often she would say something to him in French, unconscious which language she talked, and Frank would answer in French, which seemed wonderfully romantic. Though their ages were so diverse (for Frank was eighteen and David fifteen, and three years, when the combined total is so small, make a vast difference) here, staying with him, David hardly felt the gap. At school it was otherwise, a hundred seasons sundered them, but here they were equal. All difference was swallowed up in friendship, friendship even swallowed up hero-worship sometimes.
David dwelled gluttonously on the steps that had led up to this. There was that meeting at Baxminster, with the splendid adventure of the second edition of Keats, and here he made an agitated excursion into the fate of that. He and Margery had decided to sell it, and had got the enormous sum of twelve (not ten) pounds for it. But the glory of that had been abruptly extinguished, for their father had insisted that their equal shares should be invested in the savings bank, to roll up at some beggarly rate of interest, and do no good to anybody. Really, grown-up people were beyond words. . . .
He dismissed this distressing topic and hitched on to Maddox again. Public-school life began with his installation as fag, and there hero-worship had soared like a flame day by day, until that afternoon when, after playing squash with Bags in the rain, he had gone back to the house for a bath. David had always avoided the thought of that; it remained a moment quite sundered from the rest of his intercourse with Frank, embarrassing, and to be forgotten, like the momentary opening of a cupboard where nightmare dwelt. Anyhow, it had been locked again instantly, and the key thrown away. Never a sound had again issued therefrom.