“Oh, I don’t know. There’s a sort of conspiracy against me. Whatever I do gets found out, and I’m writing lines and being gated the whole blooming time. And the sight of your study gives me the hump. I haven’t been here for a week I should think, and now you’re sick with me, and so’s Adams.”
“Well, don’t play the goat,” said Frank.
“Yes, it’s easy to say that,” observed David, “but it isn’t as if I set out to play the goat. It just comes: it just happens. Oh, Lord, the seal was so funny, sitting there on its sloping brim, and staring with its glass eyes at the ceiling, and all my books spread out in front of it. Soon as I’d got it fixed, I hopped out of the window, you know. There it was looking at the ceiling all moth-eaten, and the Owlers never guessed it wasn’t a boy.”
David gave a shrill laugh that began in a high treble and ended baritone, for his voice was cracking. Then he became quite grave again.
“Things are rotten,” he said. “I get amused like a kid, and suddenly in the middle of it, I remember I’m not quite such a kid. I know it really, but I can’t help skipping about and butting round. Why can’t I be your fag instead of that mucky Jevons, and, if not, why can’t I be a sensible person? I made Jevons wash while I made your kettle decent again; you should have seen his fingers. And then he sniffs and blows his beastly nose with a sort of tight sound. And I’m no better; I’ve got the toothache and I’m gated at five, and I’ve the best part of five hundred lines to write still, and you’re sick with me, and I shall get swished if I don’t take care.”
Frank had been through this: he knew the transitional disquiet of being fifteen, which has just got to be lived through. He poured out a cup of tea and handed it to David.
“I think I won’t,” he said. “I’ve just had tea. Isn’t it rum how you can be no end cheerful, as I was when I jabbed the electric light, and then suddenly go rotten? I dare say it’s only toothache.”
Frank got up.
“There’s some chloroform somewhere,” he said, “which I used for killing butterflies. If you stick some on cotton wool, and jam it in your tooth, it’ll be all right.”
He rummaged in his cupboard, and with the aid of a pin put the soaked wool into David’s tooth.