He went down to his bath feeling utterly wretched and dispirited, with that completeness of emotion that only children know, who are unable to look beyond the present and immediate future, the happiness or misery of which possesses them entirely. Other boys were splashing about and throwing sponges at each other, and he was hailed with the derisive taunts indicating general good spirits and friendliness.
“Hullo, here’s Blazes. ‘What, reported again, Blaize!’ ‘Don’t bully me, sir! The other hand, sir.’ Whack, whack!”
“I say, Blazes, how’s the Monarch? Flown away, Bags says. Dirty vermin anyhow, so what’s the odds? Come and practise at No. 1 net at half-past twelve with me and Ferrers.”
David chucked his sponge into his bath and kicked off his slippers.
“Can’t. Catechism to learn, thanks to Stone.”
“Oh, yes, so you have. I expect you wouldn’t be able to hold a bat either. Never mind, buck up. All the same in a hundred years. Besides, Hughes was caned two mornings running last year, and he didn’t blub even at the second helping.”
The goat-like Bags entered at this moment.
“I say, rough luck,” he said to David. “I warned you as soon as I saw Glanders. Found the Monarch yet?”
This was rather too much. David felt suddenly sure that Bags was at the bottom of all his misfortunes, and, already goaded by high-spirited sympathy, turned on him.
“No, I haven’t,” he shouted; “and I’m jolly well going to search your cubicle. I believe you stole him. Look here, you chaps, I believe Bags took the Monarch, and I believe he saw Glanders coming when I was talking to him, and didn’t warn me.”
Stone took his brown head out of the towel in which he had been rubbing it.
“Why? What evidence?” he asked.
“Unless you’re too blooming omniscient to want evidence,” said Bags.
“Because you’re a sneak. Because I jolly well hurt you last night, and you said I hadn’t to put me off the scent,” said David with a sudden inspiration. “Why, you’ve got a bruise as big as a football,” he cried, pointing to the injured part of Bags’s anatomy, “and yet you said it didn’t hurt. It must have hurt: it’s all rot to say it didn’t. And you said it was pax in order to put me off the look-out.”
“Bosh: that’s not evidence,” said Ferrers, whose father was a K.C., and was much looked up to on points of school-law. “That’s only your blooming guess.”
“Well, it would be evidence if I found the Monarch in his beastly cubicle,” said David. “Or perhaps you’d say that stags can fly, and that the Monarch had only flown there.”
This was sarcasm of the deepest dye, and produced its due effect on all the boys who, in various stages of undress, surrounded the two, except Stone, who never could understand what sarcasm meant.
“Oh rot, Blazes,” said he. “At that rate the Monarch may have flown to my cubicle, but I’m not going to have you search it and turn everything upside down for the sake of a sickly stag-beetle.”
The man of law considered the points.
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t make a challenge out of it, Blazes,” he said, disregarding the obtuse Stone. “If you’re so certain of it, you can challenge Bags to allow you to search his cubicle, an’ if you don’t find the Monarch there, he gives you three cuts of the hardest with a racquet-handle and pax immediately afterwards.”
David was standing in his bath, and, slipping, plumped down into it heaving out solid water.
“Sorry, you fellows,” he said to those who were wettest. “Right then, I challenge.”
Bags had moved away, in the general stampede caused by David’s plunge, and on the instant, with fresh suspicions teeming in his head, David jumped out, and got between him and the door of the big bath-room.
“I say, Bags, you haven’t had your bath,” he said; “and were you going back without it? Aren’t you going to have a bath? Not feeling dirty? Anyhow, I challenge. Do you accept it?”
Bags took off his dressing-gown.
“Oh, you thought I was going back to dormitory to put them in your cubicle again, did you?” he said. “It just happens to be my bath there by the door.”
“Well, but do you accept?” cried David, executing a sort of Indian war-dance round him.
“No,” said Bags. “I don’t want to give you three with a racquet-handle, as we made it up last night. And I don’t want you turning everything upside down in my cubicle.”
Ferrers put on his dressing-gown with the solemnity of a judge assuming the black-cap.
“Then it simply proves the plaintiff’s case, if you won’t have your cubicle searched,” he said. “It’s all rot about your not wanting to whack Blazes because it was pax last night. He’s challenged you: it isn’t pax any longer. State of war!”
Ferrers was in his element, and it seemed to the court generally even as to him, that never at the Old Bailey had the net been woven in such impenetrable fashion round the most palpable criminal. Bags, too, felt that, but the net that really enmeshed him was of very different sort from what it appeared to be. Certainly he was in a hole, but not the hole that every one thought he was in.
The majesty of the law proceeded.
“If you don’t accept the challenge,” said Ferrers, “it proves you are guilty.”
The plaintiff continued to dance.
“I’ll let you give me six cuts, if I don’t find the Monarch in your cubicle,” he shouted. “You must be guilty, if you refuse six. Mustn’t he, Ferrers?”
Ferrers tore his sock in trying to put it on to a wet foot.
“Not for a cert,” he said. “Bags is beastly cunning. He may be running you up to a higher figure.”
“Then I’ll let him have twelve cuts,” said David, feeling absolutely sure about it, “if I may search his cubicle and not find the Monarch. Oh, and search his dressing-gown, too,” he added quickly, conjecturing a perfectly demoniacal piece of cunning on the part of Bags.
Bags stepped out of his bath with dignity, feeling there was no escape.
“Then I accept Blazes’ challenge of three cuts,” he said, “just to show I didn’t want to run him up. If I did, I should take twelve.”
“Done,” said David. “I’ll go and search at once; there’s another quarter of an hour before school. I may as well search his dressing-gown first. No, not there. Oh, blow! what shall I say if Glanders finds me in his cubicle again? I know: Bags is in the bath-room, and wants his liniment. If Glanders doesn’t think that likely, she can come and look at him.”
Now Bags’s dilemma, the net in which he was really involved, was this. He had lain awake for two hours last night in savage anger with David, whom, in secret boyish fashion, he adored, and who had been so beastly to him. Open vengeance was out of the question, because, if it came to a fight, David was more than his match, and thus his revenge for that infernal kick must be done stealthily. Plan after plan suggested itself to him, but none were suitable until he thought of the very simple one of taking the Monarch and his wife, which, as he knew quite well, lived in David’s washing-basin at night. That was accomplished