“’Tisn’t rot,” shrieked David, snatching up a towel to shield himself. “I swear it isn’t. While you brutes have been having an innocent happy sweat along the road this nice weather, I’ve been jawed by Adams. It’s a solid fact. We’re all going to be hauled up before the Head, and he was disposed to be uncommonly sick about it, so Adams said. Do shut up being funny with sponges.”
“Right oh,” said Plugs, “if you swear you’re not lying.”
“Swear!” said David. “Hurry up and dress, and come to my study, because you and I and Bags have to talk. It’s—it’s a welter of politics.”
The Court accordingly met in about ten minutes’ time in David’s study, where he had made tea for them, and where, on the table, lay Jevons’s appeal. He laid before the other two all his talk with Adams, reproducing it with laudable accuracy.
“And as it’s a dead cert that we shall appear before the Head,” he finished up, “we’ve got to agree exactly what we say. We mustn’t give different accounts of it.”
Bags caressed what he hoped was going to be a moustache.
“Of course not,” he said. “We’ve just got to say what’s happened. Truth, whole truth, and nothing but.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean we were to make things up,” said David, “but the only question is, how much we tell the Head. I vote for a conference—Adams suggested it—with Manton and Crossley, and see if we can’t let each other down easily.”
“Compromise out of Court?” suggested Plugs.
“Yes: something of the kind. We can give them away hopelessly by saying how inefficient they were, and they can give us away, by saying that we have undermined the prefects’ authority. Don’t you see? It might all be toned down a bit.”