“Oh, funny asses,” he said witheringly, which was about the best thing that could be done under the circumstances.
David walked down the path that led to the Head’s study with a suspended heart, feeling certain that this was scholarship news, and not one of his private misdeeds that was to be set before him, but yet hurriedly attempting to recollect the omissions and trespasses of which he had lately been guilty. But he credited himself with so stainless a record that he was really open to the damning imputation of having become a saint. For the effect of that glimpse of public school life had been magical on his conduct: he had literally not cared to do the sort of things any more that spelt trouble at Helmsworth. At Marchester, for example, only scugs smoked, and therefore the temptation of so doing (especially since he did not like it) had ceased to beckon him. The only reason for indulging in it had really been the notion that it was grand, and if by a higher standard it was not grand at all, the point of it was gone. Again, the fact that at Adams’s house it was the thing to work, had made industry a perfectly palatable mode of passing the time. Or where, when he had once seen a master like Adams, was the use of cheeking that dreary ass Dubs? You couldn’t cheek Dubs any more: it was beneath you to do any such thing. Dubs was pure piffle.
There had been a paralysing row in the school a few days before, at which the Head had appeared in his most terrific light; but David had had nothing to do with that. A series of small thefts had been going on, and the culprit had eventually been caught red-handed in a dormitory deserted for cricket, had been held up to public execration, and expelled. That scene had made David feel sick with terror: personally he did not in the least desire to steal other fellows’ things, but he quaked at the thought of being made the scorn of the assembled school as had happened to Anstruther. He supposed that his whole subsequent life would be cursed and blasted, as indeed the Head had assured Anstruther that his was.
David tapped at the door, and entered in obedience to a stern, gruff permission. The Head looked up, frowning.
“Blaize; yes, wait a moment.”
He finished a letter, reread it and directed it, and threw it on the floor. That was one of his great ways: he just threw letters on the floor, if he wanted them to be posted, and they were picked up and stamped.
“I have just heard from Marchester,” he said. “You have done well, but you have not got a scholarship. There were six given, and you were eighth on the list. Don’t be discouraged; you have done well. But I am recommending your father to send you to Mr. Adams’s house, anyhow. It is more expensive than an in-boarder’s, and I wish you had got a scholarship, so as to begin helping in your own education. But I think you may consider that you will go to Mr. Adams’s next September.”
The Head suddenly took his keys from his pocket, and rattled them in the lock of the drawer that held the canes. But he was doing it, so it seemed to David, in a sort of absence of mind and not to be thinking of what lay within. Then, leaving them there, he got up and rocked across to the fireplace, where he stood on the hearthrug, looking gigantic. He began a portentous, terror-breathing discourse.
“David,” he said, “a few days ago you saw a schoolfellow publicly expelled. I saw you turn white; I saw your horror at the task that was forced on me. Now you are on the point of going out into the bigger life of a public school, and when you have been a week at Marchester you will look back on the time you have passed here as a sort of babyhood, and wonder whether it was you who smoked half a cigarette now and then, and cheeked Mr. Dutton, and put—er—put resurrection pie into envelopes and burned it.”
(“Good Lord,” thought David. “Is it going to be a caning for sundries?”)