Maddox found David wallowing in the tepid water, and at intervals making hazardous experiments from the high header-board. This was instructive as showing the flight of heavy bodies through space, and was occasionally followed by further interesting results as showing what happened when these heavy bodies flatly met a flat and incompressible material. Thereafter they went to school shop, and David ate his way, so to speak, from in at one door to out at the other. This was a long and sumptuous process, for the place was full, and congratulations were hurled at them. Tomlin, the diabolical, was there among the crowd, taking his defeat in a wide-minded manner.
“Thought you had me once or twice during your last over,” said Maddox to him. “Fiendish over, Tommy.”
Tommy considered this.
“’Twasn’t a very bad one,” he said. “I think I should have liked to have sent it down to Blaize instead of you. Jolly good match, though. Hullo, Blaize! You’re a rotten bad bat you know. I’ll stand you both strawberry-mess.”
It was perfectly impossible for David not to feel elated at sitting down to strawberry-mess with two members of the eleven, in the full light of day, and in sight of the school generally, or, having dreamed night and day of being “some good” in house-matches, not to feel exalted when those dreams had merged into realities that so far exceeded all his imaginings. But in a little while Maddox and Tomlin began to speak in undertones, and David rose, with the sense that private conversation was going forward.
“I think I’ll be getting back to house,” he said. “Thanks awfully for the strawberry-mess, Tomlin.”
“Wait a minute,” said Maddox. “I’m coming down in a second. Go and blow yourself out a little more.”
David thought it the part of wisdom not to do that, and strolled outside to wait for his friend. Glorious as all those things had been there was nothing so glorious as that Frank and he had been associated in them. That friendship meant more to him than cricket, or this sort of open recognition of itself. Till now their ages and places in the school had necessarily divided them in public; and so to-day it was best of all the delicious happenings when Frank joined him, and they went off together.
“The Head asked after you this afternoon, David,” said Frank. “Made inquiries. I told him you were fairly rotten.”
David did not rise at this.