David instantly plucked out the offending vegetable. He probably would have torn out a handful of his hair, if crisp yellow locks showed “side.” Hughes nodded at him approvingly.
“Now you’re first-rate,” he said. “Oh, just send your stick up with your luggage. Now come on. You look just as if you were at Marchester already. You see I got leave for you to come and brew—have tea, you know—in my study this afternoon, and it would have been beastly for both of us, if you weren’t up to Adams’s form, and it turned out that you smoked or kept white mice, or something hopeless.”
The two handsome boys went on their way up to the Mecca of David’s aspirations, and he thought with the deepest relief of his decision not to bring the Monarch and his wife with him. It had been a wrench to part with them even for a few days, and an anxiety to leave them even in the care of the assiduous Bags, to whom he had given a paper of directions about diet and fresh air. But if it was hopeless to keep white mice, how much more dire would have been his position if he had been found possessed of stag-beetles, or if, as might easily have happened without this oblique warning, he had incidentally mentioned to some of Hughes’s friends that his tastes lay in those verminous directions! And Hughes proceeded, inspired by that authoritative conventionality which public schools so teach, that every well-bred junior boy of fifteen or sixteen in any house is in characteristics of behaviour exactly like every other. At one time buttonholes and smoking are de rigueur, at another they are quite impossible; at one time it is the fashion to be industrious, and every one works, at another to be as idle as is possible. Morals are subject to the same strict but changeable etiquette; for years perhaps the most admirable tone characterises a house, then another code obtains, and Satan himself might be staggered at the result.
“Jove, it was a good thing I came to the station,” he said, “and I wanted to, too. Else you might have appeared with a stick and a buttonhole and a cigarette, and a slow-worm for all I knew. Do you remember we had a slow-worm, you and I, at Helmsworth? Of course some fellows go in for natural history, and Maddox, who’s the head of our house, collects butterflies. But then, he’s such a swell, he can do just what he likes. I’m his fag, you know, and he’s awfully jolly to me. Damned hot it is; let’s walk slower.”
David was extremely quick at picking up an atmosphere and he made the perfectly correct conclusion that, though smoking was bad form, swearing was not. But the mention of Maddox roused the thrill and glamour of hero-worship—a hero-worship more complete and entire than is ever accorded by the world of grown-up men and women to their most august idols.
“Oh go on, tell me about Maddox,” he said.
“I dare say you’ll see him. Sure to, in fact. He’s not very tall, but he’s damned good-looking. He’s far the finest bat in the eleven, and the funny thing is he says cricket’s rather a waste of time, and hardly ever goes up to a net. He’s editor of the school-paper, and played racquets for us at Queen’s last year. But what he likes best of all is reading.”
“That’s queer,” said David.
“ ’Tis rather. He makes all our juniors work too, I can tell you. But he’ll help anybody, and he’ll always give you a construe of a bit you don’t understand, if you’ve looked out all the words first. And he’s only just seventeen, think of that, so that he’ll have two more years here. He never plays footer, though he can run like hell, and says Rugby is a barbarous sport; and in the winter, when he’s not playing racquets, he just reads and reads. His mother was French, too; rum thing that, and the point is that H. T. (that’s Hairy Toe, an awful ass) who teaches French, is English, and Maddox knows about twice as much as he. He makes awful howlers, Maddox says, and pronounces just as if he was a cad. But that’s all right, because he is.”
David skipped with uncontrollable emotion.