“Well, you’d only have to fight another day, if you did,” said Heriot, with a laugh. And so the matter went no further; and not another boy or master in the school ever knew that it had gone so far.
But the being of whom Jan saw most, and the only one to whom he spoke his odd mind freely, was the other new man, Carpenter, now Chips to all the house. And Chips was another oddity in his way; but it was not Jan’s way at any single point. Chips had always been intended for a public school. But in some respects he was far less fit for one than Jan. To be at this school was to realise the dream of his life; but it was not the dream that it had been before it came true, and the dreamer took this extraordinary circumstance to heart, though he had the character to keep it to himself. Jan was the last person to whom he would have admitted it; he still stood up for the school in all their talks, and gloried in being where he was; but it was none the less obvious that he was not so happy as he tried to appear.
Chips’s troubles, to be sure, were not in form; they were almost entirely out of school, just where Jan got on best. Chips’s skin was thinner; the least taunt hurt his feelings, and he hid them less successfully than Jan could hide his. He was altogether more squeamish; lying and low talk were equally abhorrent to him; he would not smile, and had the courage to confess his repugnance under pressure, but not the force of personality to render a protest other than ineffectual. Such things ran like water from off Jan’s broader back; he was not particularly attracted or repelled.
One bad half-hour that the pair spent together almost daily was that between breakfast and second school. It was the recognised custom for fellows in the same house and form to prepare their construe together; this took Carpenter and Rutter most mornings into Shockley’s study, where Buggins and Eyre major completed the symposium. On a Virgil morning there would be interludes in which poor Chips felt himself a worm for sitting still; even when Thucydides claimed closer attention there was a lot of parenthetical swearing. But Chips—whose Greek was his weak point—endured it all as long as the work itself was fairly done.
One morning, however, as Jan was about to join the rest, Chips burst in upon him, out of breath, and stood with his back to Jan’s bare wall.
“They’ve gone and got a crib!” he gasped.
“What of?”
“Thicksides.”
“And a jolly good job!” said Jan.
Chips looked as though he distrusted his ears.