“Pheidias, was it?” he said.
“Yes: sculptor-man,” said Frank.
David, usually a solid sleeper, could not take his usual plunge into the dim depths that night on getting into bed, but he did not make any particular effort to do so, for it was really waste of time not to lie awake when there were so many delightful things to think about. Round and round in his head they turned, like some bright wheel, and now it was the events of the last three days (house-match, in other words) now the more immediate happenings of the evening, his promotion into the twenty-two, and the much huger honour of playing for the eleven next week that sparkled on the wheel, or again this sudden illumination with regard to the Greeks fed his contemplation. Up till now it had not been real to him that the people who wrote these tedious or difficult things which he had to learn were once as alive as himself, or that beauty had inspired them to make plays and statues, even as beauty had inspired Keats and Swinburne. Until Frank had given him the gist of the Head’s discourse, he never thought of those plays as being performed in a theatre, before an audience, who had not to look up words and learn the grammar, and consider what governed an apparently isolated genitive, or account for an irregular aorist. They were not bookworms and scholars, but men and boys who ran races and crowned the victor, and had their Trafalgar just as if they were English. . . . It was all vague, but decidedly there was a new light on matters concerning Sophocles.
But, permeating all these things, was their inspiring spirit, Frank, who lay in the bed next him, whose face he could dimly see in the light from the unblinded open window just opposite. And then for the first time it was borne in upon David with a sense of reality that in a few weeks more, five and a piece, to be accurate, Frank would have left. At that thought all the pleasant and interesting things which had so delightfully entertained this waking hour was struck from his mind, and he sat up in bed giving a little despairing groan.
“Hullo!” said Frank softly. “You awake too? What’s the groaning about?”
“Oh, nothing,” said David, lying down again.
“Well, then, what isn’t it about?”
David slewed round in bed facing him, as he leaned on his elbow.
“It’s only five weeks to the end of the half,” he whispered, “and—and you don’t come back.”
“I know; it’s foul. I was thinking of it myself. It’s been keeping me awake.”