To begin with, his father was an Archdeacon, and since he wore a shovel-hat and odd, black, wrinkled gaiters even when, as during last summer holidays, he climbed the hills in the Lake District with a small edition of the poems of Wordsworth in his pocket, from which he read aloud at frequent halting-places, David had not allowed himself to hope that on the present inauspicious occasion he would be dressed like any other person, and so escape the biting criticisms that his curious garments would be sure to call forth. But there was much worse than this, for his father was going to stay with the Head over Sunday, and was to preach in school chapel in the evening. That had occurred once before, and the thought of the repetition of it made David feel cold all over, for his father, among many other infelicitous remarks in the course of an infliction which had lasted over half an hour, as timed by the indignant holders of surreptitious watches, had alluded to the chapel and the services there as the central happiness of school-life. David had barely yet lived down that fatal phrase; everything connected with chapel had been rechristened: the chapel bell had been called “the central happiness bell”; it was time for “central happiness”; one was late for “central happiness.” The school had been addressed as “lads in the springtime of hope and promise”; it was the most deplorable affair. And he might easily, in this coming trial, give birth to more of these degrading expressions, which David felt to be a personal disgrace.
But it was not even his father’s dress nor his possible behaviour in the pulpit that David dreaded most: it was the fear that he would again, as he had expressed it before, “take part in their school-life.” On that lamentable occasion he had had dinner with the boys, not sitting at the masters’ table, which would have been bad enough, but side by side with David at the table of the sixth form. As ill-luck had it, there was provided for dinner that day beefsteak pudding, otherwise known as “resurrection-bolly,” since it was firmly (though mistakenly) believed that it was composed of all the scraps left on the plates during the last week. This tradition was beyond all question of argument and conjecture; it was founded on solid proof, since Ferrers had distinctly recognised one day, in his portion of resurrection-bolly, a piece of meat which he himself had intentionally left on his plate four days previously. Consequently, however hungry you might be, it was a point of etiquette never to eat a mouthful of resurrection-bolly; and David’s misguided parent had not only eaten all his, but, like Oliver Twist, had asked for more, and unlike him had obtained it, and eaten that as well with praise and unction. Of course he could not be expected to know that he had been eating scavenged remains (so much justice was done him), but he had remarked on the excellence of it, whereas it was popularly supposed to “stink.” Clearly, then, that was the sort of food which Blaize was regaled on at home in the holidays, and witheringly sarcastic pictures were drawn of Blaize’s pater in gaiters collecting scraps from the dustbin in his shovel-hat, and gleefully taking them to the kitchen.