“Oh! I see. Old Pot—our Head of Games.”
“He was smoking. He’s smoking now! Before those two little boys, too!” Mr. Brownell panted. “He had the audacity to tell me that——”
“Yes,” the Reverend John cut in. “The Army Class is allowed to smoke—not in their studies, of course, but within limits, out of doors. You see we have to compete against the Crammers’ establishments, where smoking’s usual.”
This was true! Of the only school in England was this the cold truth, and for the reason given, in that unprogressive age.
“Good Heavens!” said Mr. Brownell to the gulls and the gray sea. “And I was never warned!”
“The Head is a little forgetful. I ought to have——But it’s all right,” the Chaplain added soothingly. “Pot won’t—er—give you away.”
Mr. Brownell, who knew what smoking led to, testified out of his twelve years’ experience of what he called the Animal Boy. He left little unexplored or unexplained.
“There may be something in what you say,” the Reverend John assented. “But as a matter of fact, their actual smoking doesn’t amount to much. They talk a great deal about their brands of tobacco. Practically, it makes them rather keen on putting down smoking among the juniors—as an encroachment on their privilege, you see. They lick ’em twice as hard for it as we’d dare to.”
“Lick!” Mr. Brownell cried. “One expels! One expels! I know the end of these practices.” He told his companion, in detail, with anecdotes and inferences, a great deal more about the Animal Boy.
“Ah!” said the Reverend John to himself. “You’ll leave at the end of the term; but you’ll have a deuce of a time first.” Aloud: “We-ell, I suppose no one can be sure of any school’s tendency at any given moment, but, personally, I should incline to believe that we’re reasonably free from the—er—monastic microbes of—er—older institutions.”