November was a month of the past; another week would finish off the term’s work, leaving ten clear and strenuous days for the Exams. Haigh could only set one more copy of Latin verses, and Carpenter was as sorry on his own account as he was thankful for Jan’s sake. Carpenter had acquired an undeniable knack of making hexameters and pentameters that continually construed and invariably scanned; it was the one thing he could do better than anybody in the form, and it had brought him latterly into considerable favour with a master whose ardour for the Muse betrayed a catholicity of intellect in signal contrast to his view of boys. It was not only the Greeks and Latins whose august measures appealed to Haigh; never a copy of elegiacs set he, but it was a gem already in its native English, and his voice must throb with its music even as he dictated it to his form. All this was another slight mistake in judgment: the man made a personal grievance of atrocities inevitably committed upon his favourite poets, and the boys conceived a not unreasonable prejudice against some of the noblest lyrics in the language. Carpenter was probably the only member of the form who not only revelled in the original lines, but rather enjoyed hunting up the Latin words, and found a positive satisfaction in fitting them into their proper places as dactyls and spondees.
“That’s the finest thing he’s set us yet,” said Chips, when Haigh had given them Cory’s “Heraclitus” for the last copy of the term.
“It’ll be plucky fine when I’ve done with it,” Jan rejoined grimly.
“I should start on it early, if I were you,” said Chips, “like you did last week.”
“And then get told you’ve had ’em done for you? Thanks awfully; you don’t catch me at that game again. Between tea and prayers on Saturday night’s good enough for me—if I’m not too done after the paper-chase.”
“You’re not going to the paper-chase, Tiger?”
“I am if I’m not stopped.”
“When you’re not even allowed to play football?”
“That’s exactly why.”
The paper-chase always took place on the last Saturday but one, and was quite one of the events of the winter term. All the morning, after second school, fags had been employed in tearing up scent in the library; and soon after dinner the road under Heriot’s study windows began to resound with the tramp of boys on their way in twos and threes to see the start from Burston Beeches. A spell of hard weather had broken in sunshine and clear skies; the afternoon was brilliantly fine; and by half-past two the scene in the paddock under the noble beeches, with the grey tower of Burston church rising behind the leafless branches, was worthy of the day. Practically all the school was there, and quite a quarter of it in flannels and jerseys red or white, trimmed or starred with the colour of some fifteen. Off go the two hares—gigantic gentlemen with their football colours thick upon them. Hounds and mere boys in plain clothes crowd to the gate to see the last of them and their bulging bags of scent. The twelve minutes’ law allowed them seems much more like half-an-hour; but at last time is up, the gates are opened, and the motley pack pours through with plenty of plain clothes after them for the first few fields. In about a mile comes the first check; it is the first of many, for snow is still lying under the trees and hedges, and in the distance it always looks like a handful of waste-paper. The younger hounds take a minute off, leaving their betters to pick up the scent again, and their laboured breath is so like tobacco smoke that you fancy that young master in knickerbockers is there to see that it is not. Off again to the first water-jump—which everybody fords—and so over miles of open upland, flecked with scent and snow—through hedges into ditches—a pack of mudlarks now, and but a remnant of the pack that started. Now the scent takes great zigzags, and lies in niggardly handfuls that tell their tale. Now it is thick again, and here are the two fags who met the hares with the fresh bags, and those gigantic gentlemen are actually only five minutes ahead, for here is the high road back past the Upper, and if it wasn’t for the red sun in your eyes there should be a view of them from the top of one of those hills.