“It is a very serious offence of yours that has been reported to me, nothing less than breaking out of the house, out of my house, in the dead of night. A most enormous and unparalleled proceeding. Why, in the whole course of my experience I never knew of a boy having the audacity—at least it is extremely rare,” said the doctor, somewhat abruptly breaking the thread of his sentence. For he suddenly remembered, conscientious man, that when an Eton boy himself he had committed a similar offence for the purpose of visiting the Windsor theatre. “Suppose that in consequence of your example the custom spread, and the boys of Weston took to escaping from their rooms at night and careering about the country like—” He was going to say like rabbits, but the name of the master who had detected the offender occurred to him, and dreading the suspicion of making a joke he changed it to—“jackals, howling jackals.” “Have you been in the habit of these evasions?”
“Oh, no, sir!” cried Tom, encouraged by something in the doctor’s tones to speak out. “I never thought of such a thing till last night, just as I was going to bed. But the moon was so bright, and the bar was so loose, and the ice bears such a short time, and I take so much longer than others to learn anything, and I was so anxious to get perfect on the outside edge, that I gave way to the temptation. It was very wrong, and I am very sorry, and will take care nothing of the sort ever happens again.”
“So will I,” said the doctor drily. “These bars shall be looked to. And who went with you?”
“No one, sir, no one else knew of it. I just took my skates and went. I did not see how wrong it was, sir, then, as I do now. I am slow, sir, and can only think of one thing at a time.”
“And the outside edge engrossed all your faculties, I suppose.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dr Jolliffe would have given something to let him off, but felt that he could not; to do so would be such a severe blow to discipline. So he set his features into the sternest expression he could assume, and said, “Come into my class-room after eleven-o’clock school.”
“Yes, sir,” replied Buller, retiring with a feeling of relief; he was to get off with a flogging after all, and he did not imagine that castigation at the hands of the doctor would be particularly severe. For the head-master’s class-room contained a cupboard, rarely opened, and in that cupboard there were rods, never used at Weston for educational purposes. For if a boy did not prepare his lessons properly it was assumed that they were too difficult for him, and he was sent down into a lower form. If he still failed to meet the school requirements, his parents were requested to remove him, and he left, without a stain on his character, as the magistrates say, but he was written down an ass. Such a termination to the Weston career was dreaded infinitely more than any amount of corporal punishment or impositions, and the prospect of being degraded from his class caused the idlest boy to set to work, so that such disgraces were not common. The birch, then, was had recourse to simply for the maintenance of discipline, all forms of imprisonment being considered injurious to the health. And an invitation to the doctor’s class-room after school meant a short period, quite long enough, however, of acute physical sensation, which was not of a pleasurable character.
But everything is comparative in this world, and Tom Buller, who had feared that expulsion might be the penalty exacted for his offence, or at any rate that his friends at home would be written to, and a great fuss made, was quite in high spirits at the thought of getting the business over so quickly and easily. He found a group of friends waiting for him to come out of the doctor’s study, curious to know what he had been wanted for, Tom not being the sort of fellow, they thought, to get into a serious scrape; and when he told them that he had got out of his window the night before to go skating, that Mr Rabbits had caught him as he was getting in again by lighting up some chemical dodge which illuminated the whole place, and that he was to be flogged after eleven-o’clock school, they were filled with admiration and astonishment. What a brilliant idea! What courage and coolness in the execution! What awfully bad luck that old Rabbits had come by just at the wrong moment! They took his impending punishment even more cheerfully than he did himself, as our friends generally do, and promised to go in a body and see the operation. One, indeed, Simmonds, lamented over his sad fate, and sang by way of a dirge—
“‘Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling,
The darling of our crew,’”