“Oh, I say, how ripping!” he said. “But I wish Maddox liked cricket and footer.”
“Well, footer he detests; but he only means that thinking of nothing but cricket is a waste of time. By the way, you’re in luck: there’s a two-days’ match begins to-morrow against Barnard’s team. Friday’s a whole holiday; some frowsy saint. They say Jessop’s coming. Wouldn’t it be sport to see him hit a dozen sixes, and then be clean-bowled by Cruikshank?”
“Oh, and who’s Cruikshank?” asked David.
“Well, that’s damned funny not to have heard of Cruikshank. Fastest bowler we’ve ever had, and he’s in Adams’s too. He and Maddox don’t get on a bit, though of course they’re awfully polite to each other. Cruikshank’s awfully pi: fit to burst. Here we are.”
Hughes again cast an anxious eye over David, for the moment was momentous, as the whole school would be about. But he really felt that David would do him credit. They paused a moment in the gateway.
“If you like we’ll stroll round the court,” he said, “before we go down to house. There’s chapel, you see, and hall next beyond it; foul place, stinks of mutton. Then two more college boarding-houses—what?”
“But which is Adams’s?” asked David.
“Oh, that’s not here. These are all college houses, in-boarders, and rather scuggy compared to out-boarders. Then there’s fifth form class-room and sixth form class-room, and school library up on top. I dare say Maddox is there now. Big school behind, more class-rooms and then the fives-court. Like to walk through?”
No devout Catholic ever went to Rome in more heart-felt pilgrimage than was this to David. It was the temple of his religion that he saw, the public school which was to be his home. His horizon and aspirations stretched no farther than this red-brick arena, for, to the eyes of the thirteen-year-old, those who have finished with their public school and have gone out from it to the middle-aged Universities, are already past their prime. They are old; they are done with, unless the fact that they play cricket for Oxford or Cambridge gives them a little longer lease of immortality. But to be a great man, a Maddox or a Cruikshank in this theatre of life which already his feet trod, was the utmost dream of David’s ambitions, and if at the hoary age of eighteen he could only have played a real part in the life of the scenes that were now unrolling to him he felt that an honoured grave would be the natural conclusion. Everything that might happen after public school was over seemed a posthumous sort of affair. You were old after that, and at this moment even the Head, for all his terror and glamour, appeared a tomb-like creature.
Hughes exchanged “Hullo” with a friend or two, and said “Right: half-past four” to one of them, which made David long to know what heroic thing was to happen then, and took him past the east end of chapel without further comment. David, quickly and quite mistakenly, drew a conclusion based on his private school experience.