The sight was so dreadful that he started broad awake. Daylight shone pale between the curtains; the quilt showed pink; there was a gleam in the wardrobe mirror; outside, the milkman was calling, ‘Mu-ilk, Mui-uilk!’ as he went his rounds. Everything was reassuringly familiar, in its right place. It had been no more than a bad dream. Then, turning his head, John Beavis saw that the other half of the broad bed was empty.
The bell came nearer and nearer, ploughing through the deep warm drifts of sleep, until at last it hammered remorselessly on his naked and quivering consciousness. Anthony opened his eyes. What a filthy row it made! But he needn’t think of getting up for at least another five minutes. The warmth under the sheets was heavenly. Then – and it spoilt everything – he remembered that early school was algebra with Jimbug. His heart came into his throat. Those awful quadratics! Jimbug would start yelling at him again. It wasn’t fair. And he’d blub. But then it occurred to him that Jimbug probably wouldn’t yell at him today – because of what, he suddenly remembered, had happened yesterday. Horse-Face had been most awfully decent last night, he went on to think.
But it was time to get up. One, two, three and, ugh, how filthily cold it was! He was just diving upwards into his shirt when somebody tapped very softly at the door of his cubicle. One last wriggle brought his head through into daylight. He went and opened. Staithes was standing in the passage. Staithes – grinning, it was true, in apparent friendliness; but still . . . Anthony was disturbed. Mistrustfully, but with a hypothetical smile of welcome, ‘What’s up?’ he began; but the other put a finger to his lips.
‘Come and look,’ he whispered. ‘It’s marvellous!’
Anthony was flattered by this invitation from one who, as captain of the football eleven, had a right to be, and generally was, thoroughly offensive to him. He was afraid of Staithes and disliked him – and for that very reason felt particularly pleased that Staithes should have taken the trouble to come to him like this, of his own accord . . .
Staithes’s cubicle was already crowded. The conspiratorial silence seethed and bubbled with a suppressed excitement. Thompson had had to stuff his handkerchief into his mouth to keep himself from laughing, and Pembroke-Jones was doubling up in paroxysms of noiseless mirth. Wedged in the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the wash-stand, Partridge was standing with one cheek pressed against the partition. Staithes touched him on the shoulder. Partridge turned round and came out into the centre of the cubicle; his freckled face was distorted with glee and he twitched and fidgeted as though his bladder were bursting.
Staithes pointed to the place he had vacated and Anthony squeezed in. A knot in the wood of the partition had been prized out, and through the hole you could see all that was going on in the next cubicle. On the bed, wearing only a woollen undervest and his rupture appliance, lay Goggler Ledwidge. His eyes behind the thick glass of his spectacles were shut; his lips were parted. He looked tranquilly happy and serene, as though he were in church.
‘Is he still there?’ whispered Staithes.
Anthony turned a grinning face and nodded; then pressed his eyes more closely to the spy-hole. What made it so specially funny was the fact that it should be Goggler – Goggler, the school buffoon, the general victim, predestined by weakness and timidity to inevitable persecution. This would be something new to bait him with.
‘Let’s give him a fright,’ suggested Staithes, and climbed up on to the rail at the head of the bed.
Partridge, who played centre forward for the first eleven, made a movement to follow him. But it was to Anthony that Staithes unexpectedly turned. ‘Come on, Beavis,’ he whispered. ‘Come up here with me.’ He wanted to be specially decent to the poor chap – because of his mater. Besides, it pleased him to be able to snub that lout, Partridge.
Anthony accepted the flattering invitation with an almost abject alacrity and got up beside him. The others perched unsteadily at the foot of the bed. At a signal from Staithes all straightened themselves up and, showing their heads above the partition, hooted their derision.
Recalled thus brutally from his squalidly tender little Eden of enemas and spankings (it had, as yet, no female inhabitants), Goggler gave vent to a startled cry; his eyes opened, frantic with terror; he went very white for a moment, then blushed. With his two hands he pulled down his vest; but it was too short to cover his nakedness or even his truss. Absurdly short, like a baby’s vest. (‘We’ll try to make them last this one more term,’ his mother had said. ‘These woollen things are so frightfully expensive.’ She had made great sacrifices to send him to Bulstrode.)
‘Pull, pull!’ Staithes shouted in sarcastic encouragement of his efforts.
‘Why wouldn’t Henry VIII allow Anne Boleyn to go into his henhouse?’ said Thompson. Everyone knew the answer, of course. There was a burst of laughter.
Staithes lifted one foot from its perch, pulled off the leathersoled slipper, took aim and threw. It hit Goggler on the side of his face. He gave a cry of pain, jumped out of bed and stood with hunched shoulders and one skinny little arm raised to cover his head, looking up at the jeering faces through eyes that had begun to overflow with tears.
‘Buzz yours too!’ shouted Staithes to the others. Then, seeing the new arrival standing in the open doorway of his cubicle, ‘Hullo, Horse-Face,’ he said, as he took off the other slipper; ‘come and have a shot.’ He raised his arm; but before he could throw, Horse-Face had jumped on to the bed and caught him by the wrist.
‘No, s-stop!’ he said. ‘Stop.’ And he caught also at Thompson’s arm. Leaning over Staithes’s shoulder, Anthony threw – as hard as he could. Goggler ducked. The slipper thumped against the wooden partition behind him.
‘B-beavis!’ cried Horse-Face – so reproachfully, that Anthony felt a sudden twinge of shame.
‘It didn’t hit him,’ he said, by way of excuse; and for some queer reason found himself thinking of that horrible deep hole in Lollingdon churchyard.
Staithes had found his tongue again. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Horse-Face,’ he said angrily, and jerked the slipper out of Brian’s hand. ‘Why can’t you mind your own business?’
‘It isn’t f-fair,’ Brian answered.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘F-five against one.’
‘But you don’t know what he was doing.’
‘I d-don’t c-c-c . . . don’t m-mind.’
‘You would care, if you knew,’ said Staithes; and proceeded to tell him what Goggler had been doing – as dirtily as he knew how.
Brian dropped his eyes and his cheeks went suddenly very red. To have to listen to smut always made him feel miserable – miserable and at the same time ashamed of himself.
‘Look at old Horse-Face blushing!’ called Partridge; and they all laughed – none more derisively than Anthony. For Anthony had had time to feel ashamed of his shame; time to refuse to think about that hole in Lollingdon churchyard; time, too, to find himself all of a sudden almost hating old Horse-Face. ‘For being so disgustingly pi,’ he would have said, if somebody had asked him to explain his hatred. But the real reason was deeper, obscurer.
If he hated Horse-Face, it was because Horse-Face had the courage of convictions which Anthony felt should also be his convictions – which, indeed, would be his convictions if only he could bring himself to have the courage of them. It was just because he liked Horse-Face so much, that he now hated him. Or, rather, because there were so many reasons why he should like him – so few reasons, on the contrary, why Horse-Face should return the liking. Horse-Face was rich with all sorts of fine qualities that he himself either lacked completely, or else, which was worse, possessed, but somehow was incapable of manifesting.
That sudden derisive burst of laughter was the expression of a kind of envious resentment against a superiority which he loved and admired. Indeed, the love and the admiration in some sort produced the resentment and the envy – produced, but ordinarily kept them below the surface in an unconscious abeyance, from which, however, some crisis like the present would suddenly call them.
‘You should have seen him,’ concluded Staithes. Now that he felt in a better humour he laughed – he could afford to laugh.
‘In his truss,’ Anthony added, in a tone of sickened contempt. Goggler’s rupture was an aggravation of the offence.
‘Yes, in his beastly old truss!’ Staithes confirmed approvingly. There was no doubt about it; combined as it was with the spectacles and the timidity, that truss made the throwing of slippers not only inevitable, but right, a moral duty.
‘He’s disgusting,’ Anthony went on, warming pleasantly to his righteous indignation.
For the first time since Staithes had started on his description of Goggler’s activities Brian looked up. ‘B-but w-why is he more disg-gusting than anyone else?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘A-after all,’ he went on, and the blood came rushing back into his cheeks as he spoke, ‘he i-isn’t the . . . the o-only one.’
There was
