Manton let his mouth expand into an odious smile.
“Yes, I should say you were,” he observed. “You see the Head’s view is that the authority of prefects is an institution which has his support, and he doesn’t quite see why it should be taken away by three fellows in the fifth. He asked me all sorts of questions, and so I had to give him a pretty full account. I should make a clean breast of it, I think, if I were you.”
David could stand this no longer. He felt that he must burst if he had to listen to any more of Manton’s advice.
“You say you gave him a pretty full account,” he said, “though you have not chosen to tell us what it was. Well, I shouldn’t wonder if we made it a bit fuller for you. I beg your pardon, brother Crabtree——”
Bags was leaning back, looking dreamily at Manton.
“Learned brother Gregson,” he observed, “do you remember one day how Mr. Manton wanted to whack a little boy called Babbington, and how he had to call in Mr. Crossley to help?”
“Yes, brother Crabtree,” he said, “and how soap-bubbles came out of Mr. Manton’s kettle, though he had not meant to wash.”
“And we all remember, my learned brother,” he said, “how the house was a perfect bear-garden for the first month of this term before we started our worshipful Court, and how——”
“Perhaps you didn’t tell the Head that,” he said. “We shall. We shall tell him how you couldn’t get lines done for you, till we enforced the authority you hadn’t got. We shall say how you walk round the house in slippers, and when you get back to your own fuggy studies you daren’t walk straight in for fear of finding a booby-trap come down on your mangy heads. Jolly wise precaution, too, on your part. We shall tell the Head all that.”
David licked his lips, as he warmed to his work. He took Jevons’s appeal off the table in front of him.
“I shall take this to the Head, and read it him,” he said. “Just listen: pretty dignified position for you, isn’t it? ‘To the Court of Appeal. Please Blaize, Manton got an awful soaker because somebody else put my sponge on the top of his door, which soused him; and because it was my sponge he says he’ll whack me unless I find out who did it and tell him, which isn’t fair, because it’s not my business. So I appeal. M. C. Jevons.’”