The lady said, “Awfully sorry I’m late, old cork.”
Sam said, “Oh, Bates.”
He was standing some little space removed from the main body when he spoke, and the words did not register. The lady passed on into the building. Bates was preparing to follow her, when Sam spoke again. And this time nobody within any reasonable radius could have failed to hear him.
“Hey!” said the field-marshal, massaging his ear with a look of reproach and dislike.
Bates turned, and as he saw Sam, there spread itself over his face the startled look of one who, wandering gayly along some primrose path, sees gaping before him a frightful chasm or a fearful serpent or some menacing lion in the undergrowth. In this crisis, Claude Bates did not hesitate. With a single backward spring—which, if he could have remembered it and reproduced it later on the dancing floor, would have made him the admired of all—he disappeared, leaving Sam staring blankly after him.
A large fat hand, placed in no cordial spirit on his shoulder, awoke Sam from his reverie. The field-marshal was gazing at him with a loathing which he now made no attempt to conceal.
“You ’op it,” said the field-marshal. “We don’t want none of your sort ’ere.”
“But I was at school with him,” stammered Sam. The thing had been so sudden that even now he could not completely realise that what practically amounted to his own flesh and blood had thrown him down cold.
“At school with ’im too, was you?” said the field-marshal. “The only school you was ever at was Borstal. You ’op it, and quick. That’s what you do, before I call a policeman.”