“Where’s Paget?”
“Teaing with Donaldson. At least, he said he was going to.”
“Then I suppose I shall have to go alone. I hate walking alone.”
“If you hurry,” said Clowes, scanning the road from his post of vantage, “you’ll be able to go with your fascinating pal Ruthven. He’s just gone out.”
Trevor dashed downstairs in his energetic way, and overtook the youth referred to.
Clowes brooded over them from above like a sorrowful and rather disgusted Providence. Trevor’s liking for Ruthven, who was a Donaldsonite like himself, was one of the few points on which the two had any real disagreement. Clowes could not understand how any person in his senses could of his own free will make an intimate friend of Ruthven.
“Hullo, Trevor,” said Ruthven.
“Come over to the baths,” said Trevor, “I want to see O’Hara about something. Or were you going somewhere else.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. I never know what to do in term-time. It’s deadly dull.”
Trevor could never understand how any one could find term-time dull. For his own part, there always seemed too much to do in the time.
“You aren’t allowed to play games?” he said, remembering something about a doctor’s certificate in the past.
“No,” said Ruthven. “Thank goodness,” he added.
Which remark silenced Trevor. To a person who thanked goodness that he was not allowed to play games he could find nothing to say. But he ceased to wonder how it was that Ruthven was dull.
They proceeded to the baths together in silence. O’Hara, they were informed by a Dexter’s fag who met them outside the door, was not about.
“When he comes back,” said Trevor, “tell him I want him to come to tea tomorrow directly after school, and bring my bat. Don’t forget.”
The fag promised to make a point of it.
III. THE MAYOR’S STATUE
One of the rules that governed the life of Donough O’Hara, the light-hearted descendant of the O’Haras of Castle Taterfields, Co. Clare, Ireland, was “Never refuse the offer of a free tea”. So, on receipt—per the Dexter’s fag referred to—of Trevor’s invitation, he scratched one engagement (with his mathematical master—not wholly unconnected with the working-out of Examples 200 to 206 in Hall and Knight’s Algebra), postponed another (with his friend and ally Moriarty, of Dexter’s, who wished to box with him in the gymnasium), and made his way at a leisurely pace towards Donaldson’s. He was feeling particularly pleased with himself today, for several reasons. He had begun the day well by scoring brilliantly off Mr Dexter across the matutinal rasher and coffee. In morning school he had been put on to translate the one passage which he happened to have prepared—the first ten lines, in fact, of the hundred which formed the morning’s lesson. And in the final hour of afternoon school, which was devoted to French, he had discovered and exploited with great success an entirely new and original form of ragging. This, he felt, was the strenuous life; this was living one’s life as one’s life should be lived.
He met Trevor at the gate. As they were going in, a carriage and pair dashed past. Its cargo consisted of two people, the headmaster, looking bored, and a small, dapper man, with a very red face, who looked excited, and was talking volubly. Trevor and O’Hara raised their caps as the chariot swept by, but the salute passed unnoticed. The Head appeared to be wrapped in thought.
“What’s the Old Man doing in a carriage, I wonder,” said Trevor, looking after them. “Who’s that with him?”
“That,” said O’Hara, “is Sir Eustace Briggs.”
“Who’s Sir Eustace Briggs?”
O’Hara explained, in a rich brogue, that Sir Eustace was Mayor of Wrykyn, a keen politician, and a hater of the Irish nation, judging by his letters and speeches.
They went into Trevor’s study. Clowes was occupying the window in his usual manner.
“Hullo, O’Hara,” he said, “there is an air of quiet satisfaction about you that seems to show that you’ve been ragging Dexter. Have you?”
“Oh, that was only this morning at breakfast. The best rag was in French,” replied O’Hara, who then proceeded to explain in detail the methods he had employed to embitter the existence of the hapless Gallic exile with whom he had come in contact. It was that gentleman’s custom to sit on a certain desk while conducting the lesson. This desk chanced to be O’Hara’s. On the principle that a man may do what he likes with his own, he had entered the room privily in the dinner-hour, and removed the screws from his desk, with the result that for the first half-hour of the lesson the class had been occupied in excavating M. Gandinois from the ruins. That gentleman’s first act on regaining his equilibrium had been to send O’Hara out of the room, and O’Hara, who had foreseen this emergency, had spent a very pleasant half-hour in the passage with some mixed chocolates and a copy of Mr Hornung’s Amateur Cracksman. It was his notion of a cheerful and instructive French lesson.