'They'll enjoy smashing that.
'There'll be a heavy bill for to‑night; just you see! But I confess I should feel easier if the Dean or the Master were in. They can't see us from here, can they?
It was a lovely evening. They broke up Mr Austen's grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending's cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr Partridge's sheets, and threw the Matisse into his waterjug; Mr Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that. Sir Alastair Digby‑Vane‑Trumpington felt quite ill with excitement, and was supported to bed by Lumsden of Strathdrummond. It was half‑past eleven. Soon the evening would come to an end. But there was still a treat to come.
* * *
Paul Pennyfeather was reading for the Church. It was his third year of uneventful residence at Scone. He had come there after a creditable career at a small public school of ecclesiastical temper on the South Downs, where he had edited the magazine, been President of the Debating Society, and had, as his report said, 'exercised a wholesome influence for good' in the House in which he was head boy. At home he lived in Onslow Square with his guardian, a prosperous solicitor who was proud of his progress and abysmally bored by his company. Both his parents had died in India at the time when he won the essay prize at his preparatory school. For two years he had lived within his allowance, aided by two valuable scholarships. He smoked three ounces of tobacco a week — John Cotton, Medium ‑ and drank a pint and a half of beer a day, the half at luncheon and the pint at dinner, a meal he invariably ate in Hall. He had four friends, three of whom had been at school with him. None of the Bollinger Club had ever heard of Paul Pennyfeather, and he, oddly enough, had not heard of them.
Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness ‑ he had read a rather daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject ‑ but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.
Out of the night Lumsden of Strathdrummond swayed across his path like a druidical rocking‑stone. Paul tried to pass.
Now it so happened that the tie of Paul's old school bore a marked resemblance to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club. The difference of a quarter of an inch in the width of the stripes was not one that Lumsden of Strathdrummond was likely to appreciate.
'Here's an awful man wearing the Boller tie, said the Laird. It is not for nothing that since pre‑Christian times his family had exercised chieftainship over unchartered miles of barren moorland.
Mr Sniggs was looking rather apprehensively at Mr Postlethwaite.