The Head finished the Ode, and invited questions. Stone wanted to know what Hippocrene was, thinking this an intelligent question, but Ferrers’s inquiry as to what the “magic casements” were earned stronger approbation from the Head, who mysteriously told him that no one could tell till they looked out on to the “perilous seas.” It was not like the “Commentaries” of Julius Cæsar, this which he had read them, because it could mean different things to different people. Each sentence of the “Commentaries” meant one thing and it was the business of boys to find out, with the aid of a dictionary, what it was. But music and poetry were altogether different: they meant to you what you were capable of finding in them. Then he turned to David, who alone of the class had not asked any questions, intelligent or otherwise.
“Nothing you want to know, Blaize?” he asked.
“No, thank you, sir,” said David. “But would you read it us again, sir, as you do sometimes?”
The Head sat up, clasping his knees with his arms, and without answering David began the Ode again in that extraordinary voice of his, this time not looking at his book. He began in tones so low that it needed an effort to hear him; it boomed out over “charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; it sounded like a breeze at night in the stanza “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet”; again it shook with emotion over the “sad heart of Ruth,” and David felt a lump rise in his throat, a mysteriously blissful misery took possession of him. And when the Head finished he found himself smiling at him with mouth that trembled a little.
There was silence a moment.
“That will do for to-day,” said the Head. “You can go.”
The group rose from the grass with alacrity, for though Keats was all very well, an extra half-hour at the bathing-place, for the lesson had been very short, was even better. But in spite of the permission David lingered.
“Did he write much else, sir?” he said.
The Head handed him the volume.
“You may see for yourself,” he said. “Give it me back when you’ve finished with it.”
David deposited this in his desk in the museum, and then ran after the others to the bathing-place, with lines still ringing in his head, but untying and unbuttoning as he went so as to lose as few seconds as possible before the first heavenly plunge out of the heat and baking sunlight into the cool arms of the water. That, too, on this morning of vivid life was more consciously delicious than ever before, when with a long run he sprang, an arrow of gleaming limbs, off the header-board which he left vibrating with his leap, and burrowed into the cool embrace of the water. Some flower must have opened in his brain to-day, quickening his sense of living, and though no whit less boyish than before, he was far more conscious of the water and the sun, and above all of himself.
He swam and floated and dived, came swiftly up behind Stone, who swam in rather a water-logged manner, and with a firm hand placed suddenly on the top of his head sent him down to the bottom of the bath, and before he came up again, spluttering and more water-logged than ever, was floating with arms and legs spread star-fish fashion, gazing serenely and unconsciously into the sky. Stone concluded mistakenly that it was Ferrers who had done this thing, and raised a storm of splashing in his indignant face, and got ducked again for that, and so precisely flicked with a wet towel when he came out that he cried on the name of his Maker and danced with the shrewdness of the touch. Upon which David, forgetting that his mouth was submerged, laughed, and thereon swallowed so much water that he had to come out and lie face downwards on the grass in order to disgorge it. That was pleasant also, and he lay there on the grass with his forehead on his arms till his back was dry and baked. Then, making a compact parcel of himself with his hands clasped round his ankles, two friends lifted him and swung him into the water again.
Bags the unbathed had brought down some strawberries and newly baked buns, and David, having filled himself up with those things, took to the water again in spite of Ferrers’s warning that if you bathed directly after a heavy meal you got cramp in your stomach and sank like a stone to rise no more. It was necessary to test the truth of this remarkable legend, and it was found to be wholly untrustworthy. . . . And all the time the magic casements and the alien corn wandered fragmentarily in his head.
The first eleven played the next sixteen that afternoon, and still that happy tide of the consciousness of life and the beautiful jolly things of life bore David along. He made a catch of an unparalleled order off his own bowling from a hit so smart that he had only meant to put up his hands to protect his face, and the ball stuck in them to his great surprise and hurt more than anything had ever hurt. Subsequently he made thirty runs after being missed three times, which added zest to the performance, and took the Head’s volume of Keats up to bed with him. But, Glanders being ill, and the dormitory unpatrolled, he had a wonderful pillow-fight with Bags instead of reading, and did not, as his custom was, go instantly to sleep when at length he got into bed. Instead he lay in a lump with his hands round his knees saying “Jolly happy, jolly, jolly happy! By Gad, ‘fairy lands forlorn! Fairy lands forlorn.’ Gosh, how that catch hurt! but what frightful sport! Marchester next week too . . . five bob. . . .”
And these images lost their outline, and became blurred with the approach of sleep.
One of the house-masters at Marchester was an old friend of the Archdeacon, and it had been arranged that David should stay with Mr. Adams when he went up for his scholarship examination. Hughes, David’s great chum of a year ago, was in Adams’s house, and by permission met him at the station, and, after the first greetings, looked David over with an eye made critical by the adamantine traditions that bind junior boys at public schools. Hughes was extremely glad to see him, but he had certainly been very anxious to get an early and private view of him to see if he came up to the standards and ordinances then prevailing, and make such corrections in his bearing and attire as were necessary. It would be an awful thing, for instance, if David turned up in a straw hat with his school eleven colours, as those were identical with the Rugby fifteen colours at Marchester, and to be seen walking about with a small alien boy in fifteen colours was a nightmare possibility. But there was a lot, as he saw at once, to be said in David’s favour: his clothes were neat, he looked exceedingly clean (not grubby, a thing which Hughes, from his faded reminiscences of Helmsworth, was dismally afraid of), his hair was short behind and well inside his collar, and he stood straight. On the other hand, there were certain details that must be altered.
“I say, have you been travelling in a smoker?” he asked. “Second, too.”
David wished he had spent his last shilling in going first.
“Yes, first was so frightfully expensive,” said David.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that: all the fellows go third. Yes, the bus will take your luggage up, and we’ll walk, shall we? It’ll take the fug of the smoking-carriage out of your clothes.”
David marvelled at this: he had thought a smoking-carriage must be the manly thing. He had a packet of cigarettes also in his coat-pocket.
“Don’t fellows smoke here?” he asked, looking up in timid admiration at Hughes, who had grown enormously.
“Oh yes, in some scuggy houses,” he said, “but not in Adams’s. It’s thought frightfully bad form in Adams’s!”
David fingered his packet of cigarettes nervously, conscious suddenly of the enormous gulf that yawned between a private and a public school, and yearning to bridge it over by every means in his power.
“I’ve got some cigarettes in my pocket,” he said.
“Oh,