The boys sat gazing at each other. Nobody spoke.
‘What the devil is the matter with the young fool?’ said Tracy at last.
‘Don’t you see?’ suggested another fifth form boy, Coleridge by name, next in seniority to Tracy, and of higher character, ‘he didn’t like the little word—d, a, m, n. That’s the fence which he refused.’
Immediately there was an outburst of discordant voices expressing astonishment, doubt, indignation, anger, and some few compassion, the boys all talking at once, and eagerly discussing the procedure to be adopted. Some boys (among whom Tracy was conspicuous) urged that Gerald ought to be brought back at once perforce, and made to sing, being subjected to corporal chastisement if he refused; others that his behaviour, as being an unprecedented violation of the rules and customs of the house, should be referred to the Sixth Form; others, again, that he should be sent to Coventry for a month; others, that he should incur a double measure of fagging. But there were not a few boys—and some of these the most influential—who felt in their hearts, and after a time began to express the feeling, that Tracy had made a mistake alike of taste and of judgment in choosing a song which contained any word of a questionable nature, even though it was one that boys used habitually without much thinking of it; it was a shame (they said) to compel ‘a kid like that’ to use the word at all, and the incident, if it got abroad in the school, would reflect no great credit on the house. The one point, therefore, upon which the whole house agreed was that the incident must not be allowed to get abroad. For the rest, as generally happens when a multitude of counsellors deliberate upon a plan of action, it was resolved to take no action at all. But the ‘trying of voices’ was at an end for that night. The meeting broke up, and the boys stood in knots in the passages or outside the rooms, discussing what had taken place. It was universally felt that Gerald was ‘not up to snuff,’ and that the sooner he was initiated into that mystery, the better; but opinion was in favour of letting the initiation be effected by the gradual and subtle awakening process of school life, rather than by the searching test of the ‘trying of voices.’ This opinion was confirmed when it became known that the Sixth Form, who were the supreme arbiters of all moral or social questions in the house, had decided against inflicting any pains and penalties upon Gerald Eversley, and that the particular member of the Sixth Form who had chosen him, or had been reduced to taking him as a fag, had pronounced the treatment which he had experienced to be a shame.
When Harry Venniker returned to his room, he found Gerald Eversley weeping by the fireside.
‘Well, you young fool,’ he said, ‘you’ve made a pretty shindy. The whole house is talking about what’s to be done to you.’
Gerald was silent.
‘You don’t mean to say,’ continued Harry, ‘that you object to saying damn. Why, it’s what everybody says.’
‘But I promised I wouldn’t say it,’ replied Gerald amidst his tears.
‘Why not?’