II.
Back to his room again, muttering, “Jealous, that's what they are—beasts! Jealous! My God, they 're beasts!”
He lit his lamp with trembling fingers and then on the table he saw a note. It was from the school-sergeant and ran thus:
'.ir:
Mr. Moy-Thompson would be greatly obliged if you could find it possible to step round and see him for a few minutes directly after chapel....
So it had come. He flung off his gown and stared at the dark frame of the window. The chapel bell was clanging its last notes—the boys from the Lower School passed under his window in a stream and their noisy chatter came up to him. It was a wonderful night—the dark-swelling trees rose in dim clouds against the silver field of stars. The bells stopped and very faintly he could hear the organ. He was conscious that his head was aching and he flung the window wide open and drank in the evening scents. He had passed with all the incoherent swiftness of his feverish brain from the insults that he had received in the Senior common room to his approaching interview with the headmaster. Let them rot! He might have known that that would be the way that they would take it—he was a fool to have expected anything else. His mind sped on to the future. He would force them all to see the kind of man that he was. He must brace himself up for this interview with Moy-Thompson, because this was to be the decisive crisis of the battle. When he had shown him how determined he was, when he had made it evident that he would withdraw no jot or tittle of his accusation, then indeed he would have the place at his feet. To-morrow, when they had all heard of this interview, they would sound a very different note.
He leaned out of his window, drinking in the air. He wished that he were cooler and that he could think more connectedly. He did not know why it was, but as soon as he had caught a thought and fixed it there securely, and had hastened after another, the first one was gone again.
His thoughts were like fish in a pool. And then suddenly he thought of Traill—-Traill I Why was it that for weeks Traill had been his one thought and that now he did not count at all? There was a connection somewhere between all that personal quarrel and now this sudden public outburst. It had its link, but as he pressed his hand to his head he confessed that he was bewildered, that that scene in the common room had been a check and that he scarcely knew, in this bewilderment, what it was that he was going to do.
He sat down in his armchair with the open window behind him, although it was midwinter. He could hear them singing the End of Term Hymn—“Lord, dismiss us with Thy Blessing”—and singing it too with vigor that, exultantly, proclaimed the first happy glimpse of approaching freedom. He shook his shoulders with irritation and got up and closed the window. Then he sat down again and considered the matter.
Moy-Thompson's reception of him offered two possible alternatives. He could be humble or he could he arrogant—he could plead for mercy or he might try to bully Perrin into submission. Those were the only two possibilities. In the first case one would of course be as lenient as possible. Perrin smiled a very bitter smile as he thought of this. There would be things of course on which he would insist, demands that he must make, but he would treat Moy-Thompson gently and if certain concessions were made he would promise to say no more to the governors.