The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [145]
“When you have quite finished with my matches perhaps you’ll be so kind as to give them back.”
In despair the new boy threw them towards the house-captain; in despair he threw slightly wide. Apthorpe made no attempt to catch them, but watched them curiously as they fell to the floor. “How very extraordinary,” he said. The new boy looked at the matchbox; Apthorpe looked at the new boy. “Would it be troubling you too much if I asked you to give me my matches?” he said.
The new boy rose to his feet, walked the few steps, picked up the matchbox and gave it to the house-captain, with the ghastly semblance of a smile.
“Extraordinary crew of new men we have this term,” said Apthorpe. “They seem to be entirely half-witted. Has anyone been turned on to look after this man?”
“Please, I have,” said Wykham-Blake.
“A grave responsibility for one so young. Try and convey to his limited intelligence that it may prove a painful practice here to throw matchboxes about in Evening School, and laugh at house officials. By the way, is that a workbook you’re reading?”
“Oh, yes, Apthorpe.” Wykham-Blake raised a face of cherubic innocence and presented the back of the Golden Treasury.
“Who’s it for?”
“Mr. Graves. We’re to learn any poem we like.”
“And what have you chosen?”
“Milton-on-his-blindness.”
“How, may one ask, did that take your fancy?”
“I learned it once before,” said Wykham-Blake and Apthorpe laughed indulgently.
“Young blighter,” he said.
Charles wrote: Now he is snooping round seeing what books men are reading. It would be typical if he got someone beaten his first Evening School. The day before yesterday this time I was in my dinner-jacket just setting out for dinner at the d’Italie with Aunt Philippa before going to The Choice at Wyndhams. Quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore. We live in water-tight compartments. Now I am absorbed in the trivial round of House politics. Graves has played hell with the house. Apthorpe a house-captain and O’Malley on the Settle. The only consolation was seeing the woe on Wheatley’s fat face when the locker list went up. He thought he was a cert for the Settle this term. Bad luck on Tamplin though. I never expected to get on but I ought by all rights to have been above O’Malley. What a tick Graves is. It all comes of this rotten system of switching round house-tutors. We ought to have the best of Heads instead of which they try out ticks like Graves on us before giving them a house. If only we still had Frank.
Charles’s handwriting had lately begun to develop certain ornamental features—Greek E’s and flourished crossings. He wrote with conscious style. Whenever Apthorpe came past he would turn a page in the history book, hesitate and then write as though making a note from the text. The hands of the clock crept on to half past seven when the porter’s handbell began to sound in the cloisters on the far side of Lower Quad. This was the signal of release. Throughout the House Room heads were raised, pages blotted, books closed, fountain pens screwed up. “Get on with your work,” said Apthorpe; “I haven’t said anything about moving.” The porter and his bell passed up the cloisters, grew faint under the arch by the library steps, were barely audible in the Upper Quad, grew louder on the steps of Old’s House and very loud in the cloister outside Head’s. At last Apthorpe tossed the Bystander on the table and said “All right.”
The House Room rose noisily. Charles underlined the date at the head of his page—Wednesday Sept. 24th, 1919—blotted it and put the notebook in his locker. Then with his hands in his pockets he followed the crowd into the dusk.
To keep his hands in his pockets thus—with his coat back and the middle button alone fastened—was now his privilege, for he was in his third year. He could also wear coloured socks and was indeed at the moment wearing a pair of heliotrope silk with white clocks, purchased the day before in Jermyn Street. There were several things, formerly forbidden, which were now his right. He could link his arm in a friend’s and he did so now, strolling