The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [158]
After First Evening, when the House Room was clear of all save the four and the bell for Hall had died away and ceased, Geoghegan, the head of the house, came in carrying two canes, accompanied by Anderson.
“I am going to beat you for disobeying an order from the head of your dormitory. Have you anything to say?”
“Yes,” said Wheatley. “We had already said our prayers.”
“It is a matter of indifference to me how often you pray. You have spent most of the day on your knees in chapel, praying all the time, I hope. All I am concerned about is that you obey the orders of the head of the dormitory. Anyone else anything to say? Then get the room ready.”
They pushed back the new men’s table and laid a bench on its side across the front of the fireplace. The routine was familiar. They were beaten in the House Room twice a term, on the average.
“Who’s senior? You, I think, Wheatley.”
Wheatley bent over the bench.
“Knees straight.” Geoghegan took his hips and arranged him to his liking, slightly oblique to the line of advance. From the corner he had three steps to the point of delivery. He skipped forward, struck and slowly turned back to the corner. They were given three strokes each; none of them moved. As they walked across the Hall, Charles felt the slight nausea turn to exhilaration.
“Was he tight?”
“Yes, he was, rather. And damned accurate too.”
After Hall, in the cloisters, O’Malley approached Charles.
“I say, Ryder, I’m frightfully sorry about tonight.”
“Oh, push off.”
“I had to do my duty, you know.”
“Well, go and do it, but don’t come and bother me.”
“I’ll do anything you like to make up. Anything outside the House, that is. I’ll tell you what—I’ll kick anyone else in another house, anyone you care to choose. Spratt, if you like.”
“The best thing you can do is to kick yourself, Dirty Desmond, right round the cloisters.”
SCOTT-KING’S
MODERN EUROPE
Mariae Immaculatae Antoniae
Coniugis Prudentioris
Audaci Coniugi
I
In 1946 Scott-King had been classical master at Granchester for twenty-one years. He was himself a Granchesterian and had returned straight from the University after failing for a fellowship. There he had remained, growing slightly bald and slightly corpulent, known to generations of boys first as “Scottie,” then of late years, while barely middle-aged, as “old Scottie”; a school “institution,” whose precise and slightly nasal lamentations of modern decadence were widely parodied.
Granchester is not the most illustrious of English public schools but it is, or, as Scott-King would maintain, was, entirely respectable; it plays an annual cricket match at Lord’s; it numbers a dozen or so famous men among its old boys, who, in general, declare without apology: “I was at Granchester”—unlike the sons of lesser places who are apt to say: “As a matter of fact I was at a place called —. You see at the time my father . . .”
When Scott-King was a boy and when he first returned as a master, the school was almost equally divided into a Classical and a Modern Side, with a group of negligible and neglected specialists called “the Army Class.” Now the case was altered and out of 450 boys scarcely 50 read Greek. Scott-King had watched his classical colleagues fall away one by one, some to rural rectories, some to the British Council and the BBC, to be replaced by physicists and economists from the provincial universities, until now, instead of inhabiting solely the rare intellectual atmosphere of the Classical Sixth, he was obliged