David looked round the study again, and it made him feel rather melancholy. He hadn’t seen much of Frank this term, for Frank had been working hard, and again the sense of the distance they were apart in the world of school severed them. It was greater now that he was an independent person in the fifth than it had been when he was Frank’s fag, and in Remove A. And the intimacy which had been theirs at Naseby was no longer possible at school. At that moment, also, a tooth began suddenly to ache and gave him a series of staccato stabs with a really brilliant touch.
“Gosh, and I’ve got the toothache,” he said. “It’s suddenly begun hurting like hell.”
David leaned back in his chair, with his long arms and legs sprawling.
“It ached yesterday,” he said, “but then I didn’t mind as I was having a good time over the seal. But it’s rot having toothache when other things are beastly. Why should this blighter decay? My other teeth don’t. What a rotten show it all is!”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s a sort of conspiracy against me. Whatever I do gets found out, and I’m writing lines and being gated the whole blooming time. And the sight of your study gives me the hump. I haven’t been here for a week I should think, and now you’re sick with me, and so’s Adams.”
“Yes, it’s easy to say that,” observed David, “but it isn’t as if I set out to play the goat. It just comes: it just happens. Oh, Lord, the seal was so funny, sitting there on its sloping brim, and staring with its glass eyes at the ceiling, and all my books spread out in front of it. Soon as I’d got it fixed, I hopped out of the window, you know. There it was looking at the ceiling all moth-eaten, and the Owlers never guessed it wasn’t a boy.”
David gave a shrill laugh that began in a high treble and ended baritone, for his voice was cracking. Then he became quite grave again.
“Things are rotten,” he said. “I get amused like a kid, and suddenly in the middle of it, I remember I’m not quite such a kid. I know it really, but I can’t help skipping about and butting round. Why can’t I be your fag instead of that mucky Jevons, and, if not, why can’t I be a sensible person? I made Jevons wash while I made your kettle decent again; you should have seen his fingers. And then he sniffs and blows his beastly nose with a sort of tight sound. And I’m no better; I’ve got the toothache and I’m gated at five, and I’ve the best part of five hundred lines to write still, and you’re sick with me, and I shall get swished if I don’t take care.”