THE COMPLETE DAVID BLAIZE TRILOGY (Illustrated Edition). Эдвард Бенсон
wet for anything.”
“Rot! We can’t possibly get wetter than we are.”
David, of course, had his way, and it was not till twenty minutes later that they trotted off down the Bath Road, on their way to Adams’s, David going by preference through the larger puddles. Bags’s mind, and no doubt David’s also, still ran upon Maddox.
“Does he always call you David?” he asked at length.
“Lord, yes, when we’re alone,” said David, “and I suppose he thought you didn’t count. I remember how sick I was when my father called me ‘David’ at Helmsworth. Sort of disgrace to have your Christian name known. What beastly little scugs we were, with smoking and keeping stag-beetles!”
“I never did either,” said Bags, in a rather superior manner.
David jumped with both feet in a particularly large puddle, and covered Bags with splashed water.
“I know you didn’t,” he said. “You were such a scug, you see, that you didn’t do those things when it was scuggish not to. But now, when it’s scuggish to do them, I believe you do. I bet you smoke. You and Plugs went out smoking yesterday after hall.”
“Well, what if I did?” said Bags. “And how did you know?”
“Because I stunk you when you came back, Simple. What a funny chap you are! You never smoked at Helmsworth where it was the right thing, and yet you do here where it’s the wrong thing.”
Bags plodded on for a little while in silence.
“Adams doesn’t really mind our smoking,” he said. “He chiefly wants not to have it brought to his notice.”
“Yes, but Maddox does,” said David. “I wish he’d catch you at it. You wouldn’t sit comfortable for a week or two.”
David pranced into the footpath; there was a limit to the amount of mud that it was convenient to carry on your shoes.
“Let’s walk a bit,” he said; “I’m blown.”
They moderated their pace to a walk, and David squeezed his hands into his pockets—a difficult operation as they were glued together with wet.
“Several fellows have asked me about Maddox,” he said, “and I don’t know that the deuce they’re after. Hughes has, for instance. Hughes used to be a ripper, but he’s different somehow now. He asked me the other day if Maddox had become a saint, and if I’d converted him. What the devil was he talking about? I don’t like Hughes as much as I used. He told some filthy tale in dormitory the other night, and some of the fellows laughed. I laughed too: I supposed it was polite, but I didn’t see a hang what it all meant.”
“What was it?” asked Bags.
“God knows; some awful piffle. Sounded filthy, too. He wanted to explain it to me; came and sat on my bed and wanted to explain. But just then Maddox came to bed: he’d been sitting up late working, and he hoofed Hughes out again in less than no time. It was the day after that that Hughes asked me if Maddox had become a saint. Lord, wait a minute.”
For some inconjecturable reason known only to the feline mind, Mrs. Adams’s cat had thought good to sit out in the rain this afternoon, on the top of one of the brick pilasters which stood at the entrance of the passage up to the house. There she sat unconscious of David and Bags, contemplating the scenery. With infinite craft David, having picked up a small pebble, threw it with such accuracy of aim that it passed through the fur at the top of her head between her ears. She threw up her paws and looked wildly round in startled dismay, and was there no more.
“Slap between her ears!” shrieked David. “Lord, didn’t she look funny when she threw her hands up! Blow, I’ve forgotten Maddox’s parcel. What an ass you are not to have reminded me! Hot bath, anyhow. Then I’ll go back to college and fetch it.”
This cloud-laden gale had caused the dusk of evening to close in very early, and the passage leading from the dormitories to the big room with its rows of baths was already nearly dark. On either side of the passage were the studies of the prefects, and David had to tiptoe delicately through the danger-zone, since he owed fifty lines to Cruikshank, and had not yet written them though they were overdue. But he reached the bath-room without encountering the enemy, and wallowed in a heaven of water so hot that if he moved he must almost scream. Bags was in a neighbouring bath, but finished his washing first, and left David intent, as the water cooled a little, on matters of soap and mud between his toes. Then his rain-soaked head did not seem satisfactory, and he washed the showers out, emerging eventually, towel-girt, to rub his head into a semblance of dryness. This was a tingling, exhilarating affair, and he accompanied it by bouts of piercing whistlings.
Next door to the bath-room was Maddox’s study, and about this time he perceived that David had not filled his kettle for tea. Since David—for his whistle betrayed him—was next door, it was simpler to go and fill his kettle himself, rather than go in to fetch David to do it. There, on the end of the bench below the steam-clouded windows, was David sitting, his head enveloped in a towel, violently scrubbing, and whistling whenever the towel was not in actual contact with his mouth. He had not noticed his entry, and Maddox thought it would be rather amusing to sit down without speech close beside him, holding out, in mute reproach, the empty kettle that David should have filled. This he did.
In a minute David’s head was sufficiently dry to satisfy him, and it emerged from its towel. He looked round astonished to find any one there, for Bags had gone.
“Hullo, Maddox!” he said.
“Yes: got to fill my kettle myself,” he said.
David jumped up.
“I say, I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “I bang forgot. Give it me!”
But Maddox still held it, looking at him.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just having a bath, were you?”
David paused. There was Maddox only looking at him, only smiling. But instantly he had some sense of choking discomfort. He looked back at him, frowning and puzzled, and his sense of discomfort hugely increased. He merely wanted to get away.
“Oh then, I think I’ll go and dress,” he said hurriedly, and, picking up his sponge, left the room and ran away down the dark passage to his dormitory.
David sat down on his bed for a minute, feeling as if he had escaped from some distant nightmare that had vaguely threatened to come near him. Then, very sensibly, running away from it instead of thinking about it, he began to dress in a great hurry. He washed his hands over again, went on rubbing his hair, did anything to occupy himself. In a few minutes Bags came in dressed from his dormitory next door, but David had no voluble conversation on hand, as he had half an hour ago in the fives-court, and continued dressing in silence. Bags tried a few amiable topics, but got no more response than grunts and monosyllables, which were quite unlike David’s usually rampageous loquacity. After three or four thwarted attempts it was borne in upon his lucid mind that there was something the matter.
“What’s up, Blazes?” he inquired.
“Nothing. Why?” said David savagely.
“Oh, I don’t know. You haven’t got as much to say as usual.”
“Well, who wants to talk to a chap like you?” asked David, getting his tie in a knot, and venting himself in irritation.
Bags felt slightly hurt, for he was unaware how he could have caused this, but since David did not want to talk to “a chap like him,” the most rudimentary sense of self-respect forbade the “chap like him” to make any further overtures.
David cracked his nail over his collar-stud, failed to get any sort of parting in his hair, and broke a bootlace. These material adversities somehow sobered him, and he began faintly to see that really Bags had nothing to do with his own mood.
“Sorry, Bags,” he said at length, having tied