“And the worst of it,” he explained in a loud voice over his soup, “is that I waste such gems of sarcasm on their thick heads. It’s miles above them, I’m certain.”
“We-ell,” said the school chaplain slowly, “I don’t know what Corkran’s appreciation of your style may be, but young McTurk reads Ruskin for his amusement.”
“Nonsense! He does it to show off. I mistrust the dark Celt.”
“He does nothing of the kind. I went into their study the other night, unofficially, and McTurk was gluing up the back of four odd numbers of ‘Fors Clavigera.’”
“I don’t know anything about their private lives,” said a mathematical master hotly, “but I’ve learned by bitter experience that Number Five study are best left alone. They are utterly soulless young devils.”
He blushed as the others laughed.
But in the music-room there were wrath and bad language. Only Stalky, Slave of the Lamp, lay on the piano unmoved.
“That little swine Manders minor must have shown him your stuff. He’s always suckin’ up to King. Go and kill him,” he drawled. “Which one was it, Beetle?”
“Dunno,” said Beetle, struggling out of the skirt. “There was one about his hunting for popularity with the small boys, and the other one was one about him in hell, tellin’ the Devil he was a Balliol man. I swear both of ’em rhymed all right. By gum! P’raps Manders minor showed him both! I’ll correct his caesuras for him.”
He disappeared down two flights of stairs, flushed a small pink and white boy in a form-room next door to King’s study, which, again, was immediately below his own, and chased him up the corridor into a form-room sacred to the revels of the Lower Third. Thence he came back, greatly disordered, to find McTurk, Stalky, and the others of the company, in his study enjoying an unlimited “brew”—coffee, cocoa, buns, new bread hot and steaming, sardine, sausage, ham-and-tongue paste, pilchards, three jams, and at least as many pounds of Devonshire cream.