It was the Reverend John who stopped himself, just in time, from breaking forth. He recalled that, some days ago, he had heard Stalky on the stairs of Number Five, hurling the boots of many fags at Howell’s door and bidding the “impassioned Diderot” within “break forth” at his peril.
“Odd,” said he, gravely, when his pipe drew again. “Where did Diderot say that?”
“I’ve forgotten for the moment. Taffy told me he’d picked it up in the course of holiday reading.”
“Possibly. One never knows what heifers the young are ploughing with. Oh! How did Beetle do?”
“The necessary dates and his handwriting defeated him, I’m glad to say. I cannot accuse myself of having missed any opportunity to castigate that boy’s inordinate and intolerable conceit. But I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I think I touched him somewhat, though, when I read Macaulay’s stock piece on Johnson. The others saw it at once.”
“Yes, you told me about that at the time,” said the Reverend John, hurriedly.
“And our esteemed Head having taken him off maths for this précis-writing—whatever that means!—has turned him into a most objectionable free-lance. He was without any sense of reverence before, and promiscuous cheap fiction—which is all that his type of reading means—aggravates his worst points. When it came to a trial he was simply nowhere.”
“Ah, well! Ours is a hard calling—specially if one’s sensitive. Luckily, I’m too fat.” The Reverend John went out to bathe off the Pebble Ridge, girt with a fair linen towel whose red fringe signalled from half a mile away.
There lurked on summer afternoons, round the fives-court or the gym, certain watchful outcasts who had exhausted their weekly ration of three baths, and who were too well known to Cory the bathman to outface him by swearing that they hadn’t. These came in like sycophantic pups at walk, and when the Reverend John climbed the Pebble Ridge, more than a dozen of them were at his heels, with never a towel among them. One could only bathe off the Ridge with a House Master, but by custom, a dozen details above a certain age, no matter whence recruited, made a “House” for bathing, if any kindly Master chose so to regard them. Beetle led the low, growing reminder: “House! House, sir? We’ve got a House now, Padre.”