He finished as quietly as he had begun; it must have been his face that said still more, or his long and lissom body, or his cricketer’s wrists. Whatever the medium, the message was understood, and twitching hands held out in token of submission. Jan put the pen in one, the prepared receipt in the other, and Mulberry turned a back bowed with defeat. Close behind him grew a stunted old oak, forked like a catapult, with ivy winding up the twin stems. Down sat Mulberry in the fork, and with such careless precision that Jan might have seen it was a favourite seat, and the whole little open space, with its rustling carpet and its whispering roof, its acorns and its cigar ends, a tried old haunt of others besides Mulberry. But Jan kept so close an eye on his man that the receipt was being signed, on one corduroy knee, before he looked up to see the broad bust of a third party enclosed in the same oak frame.
It was Mr. Haigh, and in an instant Jan saw him redder than Mulberry himself. It was Haigh with a limp collar and a streaming face. So he had smelt a rat, set a watch, and followed the fly on foot like the old athlete that he was! But how much more like him all the rest. Jan not only came tumbling back into school life, as from that other which was to have been his, but back with a thud into the Middle Remove and all its old miseries and animosities.
“I might have known what to expect!” he cried with futile passion. “It’s about your form, doing the spy!”
Haigh took less notice of this insult than Jan had known him to take of a false quantity in school. His only comment was to transfer his attention to Mulberry, who by now had scrambled to his legs. Leaning through the forked tree, the master held out his hand for the stamped envelope, obtained possession of it without a word, and read it as he came round into the open.
“This looks like your writing, Rutter?”
“It is mine.”
Jan was still more indignant than abashed.
“May I ask what it refers to?”
“You may ask what you please, Mr. Haigh.”
“Come, Rutter! I might have put worse posers, I should have thought. Still, as it won’t be for me to deal with you for being here, instead of wherever you’re supposed to be, I won’t press inquiries into the nature of your dealings with this man.”