Meanwhile, in the Senior common room, during that interval between chapel and dinner, things had occurred. The news of the morning struggle had been brought, of course, by the eager witnesses, Comber and Birkland, much earlier in the day; but the school day was a very busy one—one hour followed another with terrible swiftness, and then there were boys to see and games to play and all the accumulated details to fill in any odd moments that there might be,—so that, with the exception of short sentences and exclamations and a general air of pleasurable surprise pervading everything, no real movement was possible until this evening hour. The room, lighted by gas, was more ugly and naked than ever—although it was close and stuffy, the spirit of it was cold and chill.
Comber was in the chair of honor, the only arm-chair in the room; Birkland and Pons, White and Dormer, and the little science master, West, were also there. Little West was so obvious and striking an example of his type that it seemed as though he had been especially created to stand to the end of time as an example of what a Board School education and a pushing disposition can do for a man. He was short and square, with a shaggy, unkempt mustache and that sallow, unhealthy complexion that two generations of ill-fed progenitors tend to produce. He was a little bald on the top of his head, wore ready-made clothes, and spoke slowly and with great care. He had worked exceedingly hard all his youth and was the only master at Moffatt's whose ambitions were unimpaired and his optimism (concerning his own future) unchecked. His most striking feature were his hard, burning, little eyes, and it was with these that he kept order in class.
He disliked all the other members of the staff, but he hated Birkland. Birkland had, from the first, laughed at him; he had laughed at his clothes, at his accent, at his pretensions to being a gentleman (to do Birkland justice, if West had never pretended to be a gentleman at all, he would have admired and liked him). In fact he made him his chief and principal butt; and West, being slow of speech and (outside his own subject) slow of brain, could never reply anything at all to Birkland's sallies, and was left helpless and fuming.
Comber was reciting for the hundredth time what it was that he had seen. The whole affair gave him very particular pleasure; he thought Traill a conceited, insufferable young man, who had come in and taken the football out of his hands and supplanted him completely—whenever he thought of it he boiled over with rage; but he had never been able to do anything, because Traill had never given himself away. He played football a great deal better than Comber even in his palmiest days had ever played it. Traill had given him no opportunity until now; but now at last Comber glowed with the thought of the things that he would be able to do. He intended it in no way maliciously—it was simply that the younger generation should be taught its place; let Traill once submit to Comber's rule in the football world and Comber would be pleasant enough. Then Comber did not like Birkland's sharp tongue any more than the rest of the staff did, and Birkland was a friend of Traill's. Of course, on the other side, Comber did not like Perrin either. Perrin was a pompous, pretentious fool, but in this case it was clearly Comber's duty to uphold the senior staff.
He was leaning back in his arm-chair, with his chest out and one finger impressively in the air. “There they were, you know, rolling—positively rolling—on the floor. And all the breakfast things broken to bits and the coffee streaming all over the floor—you never saw anything like it. And then up they both got and looked at each other, and went out of the room without a word, brushing past Birkland and me as though we weren't there; didn't they, Birkland?”
Birkland was sitting in his chair with a sad, rather cynical, smile on his face, as though he were saying, “This is their kind of life. Look at Comber there, now—how pleased he is with things! Will be happy for a month at least, and all their little private hates and jealousies are being fed just as you feed the snakes at the Zoo. And am I not just as bad as the rest? Am I not pleased, because it will give me a chance of having a hit at the rest of them?... What a set we are!”
But he didn't say anything—he just sat there listening, with his contemptuous smile, to Comber.
“An awful noise, you know, they made,” Comber went on. “And anything funnier than Perrin when he got up you never saw, with his hair all tousled and pulled about, and dust all over his back, and his cheek bleeding where the coffee-pot had hit him. My word, it was funny!”
“At all events,” said Birkland dryly, “we ought all to be glad that you got such amusement out of it, Comber. That's something to be thankful for, at any rate.”
“Oh, it's all very well, Birkland,” Comber answered angrily; “you were amused enough yourself, really—you know you were. In any case,” he went on importantly, “the thing can't go on, you know. We can't have junior masters flinging themselves at the throats of senior ones. That sort of thing must be stopped.”