“No, I took it off and forgot,” he said. “Put it on again. And there’s a cake in the parcel Bags brought. Take it out, will you?”
David tore open the bag. “Two cakes,” he said. “Which do you want now?”
“Either. You can stop and have tea with me if you like.”
“Thanks awfully, but I had tea with a chap in college.”
David considered this proposition simply on its own merits.
“Well, I think I will,” he said. “But you’ve got a rotten fire. Shan’t I take your kettle to the gas-stove?”
“Yes; good egg. Pour a little into the teapot first, though. Hi! Not over my fingers.”
“Sorry. It didn’t really touch you, did it?”
“No, of course not. I should have smacked your head if it had. Thought it was going to.”
“Just for safety,” said David. “I always swear before I’m hurt. Then they take more care.”
“Yes; stick my kettle bang in the middle of the gas-stove. Say it’s mine if any one objects.”
“Right,” said David. “It’ll be boiled in two shakes.”
David had been placed in one of the two parallel forms just below the lowest division of the fifth form when he entered Marchester at Michaelmas, but failed to get his promotion at Christmas, and now in the middle of the Lent term he was face to face with the fact that nothing in the world was more unlikely than that he should get out of it at Easter. There would be not more than half a dozen boys out of each remove promoted then, and, as his place was seventeenth in the list of the half-term results lately published, only a first-class miracle, the sort that does not occur, would do it for him.
He had just received a letter on the subject from his father, who, as usual, David thought, failed to grasp the situation altogether. But as David had not dreamed of telling his father what the situation really was, it was not much to be wondered at that the Archdeacon failed to grasp it. But there were things you couldn’t tell your people, and this was one.
At the moment David was reading extracts to Bags from this letter with comments interspersed.
“He must have been an absolute infant phenomenon,” he said, “if he really got his promotion every term, as he says. Nobody does now: it simply isn’t done. And he’s written to Adams about my work, blow him.”
“And has asked whether I hadn’t better have a private tutor in Latin in the holidays,” continued the outraged David. “It’s really too sickening, just as if one didn’t have enough of the dreary fellows in the term. And of course I had to lie about what goes on in the form. He asked me at Christmas whether there was any cribbing, and I looked as if I simply didn’t know what cribbing meant.”