“Beastly,” said Raikes.
The room was silent. So that was the end of the adventure. Jeremy, slipping off to sleep, suddenly loved the school, didn’t want to leave it—no, never. Saw the rooms, one by one, the class-room, the dining-room, Big Hall—Thompson, the matron, Crockett. All warm and safe and cosy.
And London. Swimming in rain, chasing you, hating you, catching you up at the last with a birch.
Good old school—the end of that adventure. . . .
CHAPTER XII
A FINE DAY
I
It was a fine day. Jeremy, waking and turning over in his bed, could see beyond and above Stokesley’s slumbering form a thin strip of pale blue sky gleaming like a sudden revelation of water behind folds of amber mist. It would be a real thumping autumn day and he was to play half for the first fifteen against The Rest that afternoon. He also had three hundred lines to do for the French master that he had not even begun, and it must be handed up completed at exactly 11.30 that same morning. He had also every chance of swapping a silver frame containing a photograph of his Aunt Amy with Phipps minor for a silver pencil, and he was to have half Raseley’s sausage for breakfast that morning in return for mathematical favours done for him on the preceding day. As he thought of all these various things he rolled round like a kitten in his bed, curling up as it was his pleasantest habit into a ball so that his toes nearly met his forehead and he was one exquisite lump of warmth. Rending through this came the harsh sound of the first bell, murmurs from other rooms, patterings down the passage, and then suddenly both Stokesley and Raikes sitting up in bed simultaneously, yawning and looking like bewildered owls. In precisely five minutes the three boys were washed, dressed and down, herding with the rest in the long cold class-room waiting for call-over. When they had answered their names they slipped across the misty playground into chapel and sat there like all their companions in a confused state of half sleep, half wakefulness, responding as it were in a dream, screaming out the hymn and then all shuffling off to breakfast again like shadows in a Japanese pageant.
It was not, in fact, until the first five minutes at breakfast, when Raseley strongly resisted the appeal for half his sausage, that Jeremy woke to the full labours of the day. Raseley was sitting almost opposite to him and he had a very nice sausage, large and fat and properly cracked in the middle. Jeremy’s sausage was a very small one, so that, whereas on other days he might have passed over the whole episode, being of a very generous nature, to-day he was compelled to insist on his rights. “I didn’t,” protested Raseley. “I said you could have half a sausage if you did the sums, and you only did two and a half.”
“I did them all,” said Jeremy stoutly. “It wasn’t my fault that that beastly fraction one was wrong. I only said I’d do them. I never said I’d do them right.”
“Well, you can jolly well come and fetch it,” said Raseley, pursuing in the circumstances the wisest plan, which was to eat his sausage as fast as he could.