Meanwhile Mrs Berney had not forgotten his possibilities, and it was arranged that he should attend her poetry circle which met after prayers on Saturday evenings. It was composed mainly of older boys, and two of them were vast intellectuals in the Upper Sixth, so that Martin felt very awed at the prospect of reading Keats amid such company. One of them was actually the school poet and had lately worked off in The Elfreyan the emotions evoked by a summer holiday in the Lakes:
"The flaming bracken fires the breast
Of bosky Borrowdale,
Down swoops the sun in a riot of red
Behind Scawfell to a watery bed,
And the moon hath clomb o'er Skiddaw's head,
So perfect and so pale."
Martin, who had also been in the Lakes, thought this rather good and much better than Wordsworth. He was still a Tennysonian and connected poetry with the lavish use of alliteration and words like 'clomb' and 'bosky.' The thought that on the next Saturday evening he was to read in the company of such an one was as terrifying as it was inspiring. But it was not yet to be.
Leopard's one fault was, in Martin's opinion, his tendency to sulk: his career had been so uniformly successful that he was easily piqued by a reverse. Once or twice before Martin had thought it expedient to slip away quietly when he saw Spots looking black, but on this particular Saturday Fate fought against him. Leopard was dropped from the school fifteen for the match against Oxford A. It was admitted that once Leopard had the ball in his hands no one on earth could catch him, but it was rumoured that his defence was weak: it was always the way with these running-track sprinters; they couldn't tackle. So the captain had taken notice of a mere child of sixteen, called Raikes, who played "back" for his house and could tumble anybody over.
Oxford brought down a strong team, but they only won by sixteen points to eleven: and Raikes not only scored two excellent tries, but marked with unerring certainty the notable Rhodes scholar who had made history in South African Rugby. It was on the lips of all that Spots was in the soup or the apple-cart (the popularity of the rival metaphors was evenly balanced), and sporting members of Raikes' house were laying ten to one that their hero would be 'capped' within a month. Spots had watched the match dismally from the touch-line and he did not take it at all well. When he came back to Berney's his angry soul cried out for tea: and he found that all his cups were dirty. It was Pearson's duty to clean the cups, and Pearson was in 'sicker' with influenza. Martin had been told to do Pearson's work for the next few days, but he had not realised what Pearson really did and he had forgotten about the cups. Moreover, after watching the match, he had gone off to the tuck-shop to eat ham and chocolate: so Leopard shouted for him in vain, and then, spurning the proffered aid of sycophantic aliens, he furiously washed his own cups and made his own tea. An angry man does not lightly reject an excuse for wrath, and Spots thoroughly enjoyed the nursing of his grievance.
On his way back from the tuck-shop Martin borrowed a copy of Keats from the school library: then he settled down at his desk in the workroom and began to look through the Odes to see if there were any words that he could not pronounce. The meeting of the poetry circle was formidably near and the old fear of being shown up was vigorously attacking him.
Suddenly Caruth came up and said: "Spots wants you."
So he put away the book and went up to the study. He saw at once that Spots was in the blackest of moods.
"Why the blazes didn't you wash the cups?" he said. "I told you to do Pearson's work."
Martin trembled. "I forgot," he said. "I couldn't think of all the things Pearson did."