Pip said nothing about the matter at all. It was a way he had. He methodically made up his fixture card for the cricket season, and remarked to Ellis that if the present extraordinarily mild winter ended as it had begun, they ought to be able with any luck to get up a little net practice during the fag-end of the spring term after the Sports.
But all thoughts of cricket, and indeed of every other suggestion of summer, were speedily brought to an end by the coming of the great and historic frost—subsequently known as the Hot-Water Frost—which is talked about in Grandwich to this day. It arrived rather late,—the first week in February,—and it held continuously and unrelentingly until the last week in March.
Morning after morning the mercury in the thermometer outside Big School was found to have retreated unostentatiously into its bulb; day after day a watery and apologetic sun shone forth upon a curiously resonant and rigid world; and night after night the black frost came down like a cast-iron pall, repairing in a moment the feeble and ineffective ravages of the winter day.
Not very far away enthusiastic persons were endeavouring to roast an ox whole in the middle of the Thames, and at Grandwich many an equally unusual and delightful pastime was improvised. There was much sliding: there was no other way of getting about; and boys and masters slid or glid, with more or less agility and immunity from disaster, to and fro between house and school for several weeks. There was a magnificent slide, slightly downhill, all the way from Big School door to the Gymnasium, which offered an exhilarating rush through the air of nearly seventy yards—an offer of which Mr. Bradshaw, accidentally discovering the existence of the slide when walking home from dinner one dark night, involuntarily availed himself.
There was skating galore, for the Head, taking it for granted that each day's frost must be the last, gave extra half-holidays with a liberality which continued, perforce, for seven weeks. There was tobogganing, too, down a smooth hillside ending in a plantation of young trees, against which the adamantine heads of the youth of Grandwich crashed unceasingly from dinnertime till tea. Every night, between "prep" and prayers, a picked band from the Hivites house, which stood adjacent to the slope, sallied out, often headed by their house-master in person, carrying pots and kettles filled with hot water to pour upon the worn parts of the toboggan-slide; rags and sacking, too, wherewith to bandage the trunks of such of the young trees as were beginning to suffer from unceasing collision with the heads of youthful Grandwich. Under this scientific treatment the toboggan-slide increased rather than decreased in excellence. The long slope, though slightly abraded towards the end of a day, always emerged glossy and speckless with the morning's light, and fearsome was the speed with which the toboggans rushed down to arboreal destruction at the foot. "Monkey" Merton, the most agile boy in the school, used to shoot down on skates, saving his life with incredible regularity at the end of each descent by hooking on to a tree as a street arab hooks on to a lamp-post.
And if there were joys outside there were others within. The classrooms were so cold that the benches were deserted, and boys and master sat round the great open fireplace in a sociable semicircle. In the houses too, there were unlimited fires; and unlimited fires meant unlimited other things. There was a fireplace at the end of each of the big dormitories, and fires now blazed in these from seven o'clock every evening. Theoretically these dormitory fires, not being stoked after 9 P.M., died a natural death shortly after the boys had retired to bed. In practice, however, they glowed like the altars of Vesta all night long, for every boy made it his business to convey a regular contribution of coal to his dormitory. (Handkerchiefs were an appalling item in the laundry-bill that term.) Their united efforts were thus sufficient to keep the fire going all night, and the élite of the dormitory used to bivouac round it, in baths filled with bedclothes. This practice, of course, varied in its extent, and depended entirely on the house-master's capacity for keeping his house in order. Among the Hivites it is sufficient to say that the nocturnal fire-worshippers were never once disturbed during the whole seven weeks of frost.
Besides fuel, it was only natural that light refreshments should find their way up to the dormitories, and many and festive were the supper-parties which were held, with the senior monitor in the chair—or rather the bath-chair—supported by the nobility and gentry sitting well into the fire, while the fags sat and munched upon their hat-boxes in the outer circle.
A change of routine always tugs at the bonds of discipline; for a boy, like his noble and infinitely more useful fellow-creature, the horse, though you may drive him daily with ease and comfort so long as you do so under monotonously normal conditions, kicks over the traces at once if you change his oats or take his blinkers off. Pip's house, the Hivites, had recently changed hands. "Uncle Bill" had been promoted to the largest house in Grandwich, and had left his flock lamenting, taking Hanbury with him; and the house, under the benevolent sway of his successor, Mr. Chilford, a fine scholar but no master of men, was in that state of discipline usually described as "lax." Mr. Chilford, who disliked boys, and saw as little of them as possible, left a good deal of the management of his house to monitors—a sound plan, provided, firstly, that it is adopted by the house-master to give his monitors experience and reliability, and not to save himself trouble; and secondly, that the monitors have the right stuff in them. But when the monitors' excessive authority is entirely due to the house-master's lack of the same, things are bound to happen.
Now, Mr. Chilford's monitors that term were not a very strong lot. They were chiefly of the clever and rather undersized type, with an unwholesome respect for the burly malefactors of the Fifth and Modern Side. Their ranks had recently been stiffened by the inclusion of Pip,—non-membership of the Sixth was no bar to a house-monitorship,—and he and Linklater were the only representatives of authority for whom the house could be said to have any respect whatsoever. Pip, as junior monitor, did not participate largely in the direction of affairs, but he backed the house's nominal head, one Maxwell, with a good deal of unostentatious energy whenever that incompetent official could be cajoled or reviled into doing his duty; and he kept a quiet but effective hand upon the house-bullies.
But, as has been the case ever since history grew old enough to repeat itself, the chief danger came not from without but within. Linklater, second only to Pip in popularity and influence, once deposed from the captaincy of the Eleven, became, as Ham had predicted, the prey of the parasite and the flatterer. Such, little though they cared for their much vaunted hero-martyr, were delighted with any policy which presented them with an opportunity of pursuing a career of misdemeanour under monitorial authority. Did Pip go to quell a riot in a study, Linklater was in the midst of it; was a boy of the baser sort detected in any particularly unlawful offence, he said that "Linklater had given him leave."