Tony had the good sense to make no reply to this remark, but to munch instead with rather unctious enjoyment on his biscuit and jam. Carroll seemed to meditate for the moment in the dark, then knocked his ashes out on the window-sill, and leaned over, feeling for the jar. “Where the deuce is the biscuit? That jam is the real article, you know. There is a great gulf between the jam I use and what one gets in the refectory. Would that in that gulf we might souse the housekeeper, eh?”
And so they talked the shop and jargon, the boyish confidences, and experiences, and plans, that have been the theme of nocturnal talks ever since schools were invented. It was quite late before Carroll returned to his bedroom, and Tony immediately dropped to sleep, feeling that after all he had misjudged him upon first appearances. His next conscious thought was as he leaped to his feet in answer to the strident tones of the rising bell.
CHAPTER IV
MICHAELMAS TERM
This late talk with Carroll did more toward putting Tony at his ease in the school than perhaps anything that happened to him. From that time on he became very friendly with his room-mate—all the better friends doubtless because they always maintained toward each other a certain reserve, due rather to Carroll’s involuntary elaborateness of manner than to any deliberate effort on their part. All the better also was it that real as was their mutual regard for each other neither had that enthusiastic affection that school boys so frequently experience, and of which Tony was already aware in another direction. For just such a friendship quickly developed between him and Jimmie Lawrence.
He has missed one of the purest joys of life who has not known the delights of an enthusiastic boyish friendship. It has its sweetnesses, its fears and scruples, as has every other love; but there is a cloudless carelessness about its happy days as about no other period of life. For Tony, in that first Indian summer at Deal to wander off from the common fields with Jimmie Lawrence, into unfamiliar haunts, into the enchanted region of Lovel’s Woods, or along the rocky kelp-strewn shores of the Strathsey River or the tawny beaches of the Neck, was a joy pure and unalloyed.