Oswald was very much interested in this prefect’s view of the school life. Behind his blank mask he engendered questions; his one eye watched Troop and went from Troop to Peter. This manliness in the taught surprised him tremendously. Peter was acquiring it rapidly, but Troop seemed to embody it. Oswald himself had been a man early enough and had led a hard life of mutual criticism and exasperation with his fellows, but that had been in a working reality, the navy; this, he reflected, was a case of cocks crowing inside the egg. These boys were living in a premature autonomous state, an aristocratic republic with the Head as a sort of constitutional monarch. There was one questionable consequence at least. They were acquiring political habits before they had acquired wide horizons. Were the political habits of a school where all the boys were of one race and creed and class, suitable for the problems of a world’s affairs?
Troop, under Oswald’s insidious leading, displayed his ideas modestly but frankly, and they were the ideas of a large child. Troop was a good-looking, thoroughly healthy youth, full of his grave responsibilities towards the school and inclined to claim a liberal attitude. He was very great upon his duty to “make the fellows live decently and behave decently.” He was lured into a story of how one youth with a tendency to long hair had been partly won and partly driven to a more seemly coiffure; how he had dealt with a games shirker, and how a fellow had been detected lending socialist pamphlets—“not to his friends, sir, I shouldn’t mind that so much, but pushing them upon any one”—and restrained. “Seditious sort of stuff, sir, I believe. No, I did not read it, sir.” Troop was for cold baths under all circumstances, for no smoking under sixteen and five foot six, and for a simple and unquestioning loyalty to any one who came along and professed to be in authority over him. When he mentioned the king his voice dropped worshipfully. Upon the just use of the birch Troop was conscientiously prolix. There were prefects, he said, who “savaged” the fellows. Others swished without judgment. Troop put conscience into each whack.
Troop’s liberalism interested Oswald more than anything else about him. He was proud to profess himself no mere traditionalist; he wanted Caxton to “broaden down from precedent to precedent.” Indeed he had ambitions to be remembered as a reformer. He hoped, he said, to leave the school “better than he found it”—the modern note surely. His idea of a great and memorable improvement was to let the Upper Fifth fellows into the Corso after morning service on Sunday. He did not think it would make them impertinent; rather it would increase their self-respect. He was also inclined to a reorganization of the afternoon fagging “to stop so much bawling down the corridor.” There ought to be a bell—an electric bell—in each prefect’s study. No doubt that was a bit revolutionary—Troop almost smirked. “It’s all very well for schools like Eton or Winchester to stick to the old customs, sir, but we are supposed to be an Up-to-Date school. Don’t you think, sir?” The egg was everything to this young cockerel; the world outside was naught. Oswald led him on from one solemn puerility to another, and as the big boy talked in his stout man-of-the-world voice, the red eye roved from him to Peter and from Peter back to Troop. Until presently it realized that Peter was watching it as narrowly. “What does Peter really think of this stuff?” thought Oswald. “What does Nobby really think of this stuff?” queried Peter.
“I suppose, some day, you’ll leave Caxton,” said Oswald.
“I shall be very sorry to, sir,” said Troop sincerely.
“Have you thought at all——”
“Not yet, sir. At least——”
“Troop’s people,” Peter intervened, “are Army people.”
“I see,” said Oswald.
Joan listened enviously to all this prefectorial conversation. At Highmorton that sort of bossing and influencing was done by the junior staff....