“Oh, thanks awfully!” he said. “You’re Topknot’s pal, I suppose, come up for the scholarship-racket. Good luck!”
He nodded to David, flicked the end of Hughes’s nose, and went off down the passage to the sixth-form room, whistling louder than even David thought possible.
“Gosh!” said David. There was really nothing more to be said.
“Oh, he’s always like that,” remarked Hughes, feeling that the meeting could not have been more impressive.
“And he wished me good luck,” said David, still feeling dazzled. “Wasn’t that awfully jolly of him? And he flicked your nose, same as you might flick mine.”
“Oh, Lord, yes,” said Hughes.
After this all that immediately followed seemed but the setting and stage from which the chief actor had departed, for that glimpse of Maddox had been to David like some appearance of the spirit itself of public school. Soon they left the college buildings and walked down some quarter of a mile to where the red roofs of Adams’s rose between full-foliaged elms. They had to cross a broad, swift-flowing chalk-stream where rushes twitched in the current, and cushions of star-flowered water-weed waved, and Hughes pointed out the wagging tail of a great fat trout who was supposed to have baffled the wiles of all fishermen from time immemorial. Arrived at the house, they had to part, for David, as a guest, must present himself formally at the front door while Hughes went round through the yard, where stump-cricket was going on, to the boys’ quarters. There were cheerful cries of “Hullo, Topknot” and David, waiting for the bell to be answered, thrilled again at the thought of being part of all this. The idea of Mr. Adams was no longer formidable, though he had pictured him as being rather taller than the Head.
He was shown through a big oak-panelled hall, into Mr. Adams’s study, and even if he had entered in trepidation, his fears would have been at once set at rest. In a long chair by the open window, with a pipe in his mouth, while two boys were leaning over the back of his chair, sat his master, clerical as to collar, but with a blazer on instead of a black coat. Just as David entered, one of the two boys, scarcely older than himself to all appearance, and with a shrill voice yet unbroken, was expostulating with him.
“Oh, I say, do go back and construe that again, sir,” he said. “I wasn’t attending. Sorry.”
Adams held out a hand to David.