Then quite suddenly all scheme of independent action was taken from Bags. Somewhere down the passage a door was opened, and David’s name was shouted. David, in any case, was not here, having gone to play squash, and, though the voice was Maddox’s, Bags saw no reason for going to tell him. If David did not answer, he would conclude that David did not hear. Probably Maddox only wanted him in a general sort of way. Then came a step along the passage from the bath-room, where the prefects’ studies were, and along the corridor and round the corner, and Maddox entered, genial and cordial as usual.
“David out?” he asked. “Why didn’t you shout ‘Not at home’? But when he comes in you might tell him——”
“I say, what a God-forsaken mess you and David keep your room in,” he said. “Piles of books and golf-balls in between. What’s this?”
Maddox suddenly took up from the table a book in a dark blue cover. It was an English translation of Thucydides, edited by the obliging Mr. Bohn.
“Well, I shall confiscate it, and I shall whack you. Better come and be whacked now, and get it over. But it’s a damned bad plan to use cribs, Bags. When you get into the fifth form, you’ll find you’re no end of a way behind fellows who’ve worked their way up, instead of cribbing their way up. Got any more of these silly things? Let’s have them all. I don’t want to search your study, you know. I would much sooner you gave me them, all of them, and told me there aren’t any more. Word of honour, you know.”
Bags got down from the table where he was sitting, feeling rather limp physically, but quite resolved to see this through. Meantime, unfortunately, Maddox had opened the volume of Bohn’s Thucydides, with the idle habit of the book-lover, and turned to the title-page.
“And you wrote David’s name in it, though it was yours?” he asked.
Here was an awful complication. And what an unspeakable ass was David, so thought Bags, to write his name in a crib. He remembered his doing it now, in Greek characters. He quite intensely wished he had not said it was his own. But that he proposed to stick to, and if Maddox chose he might think him guilty of the unutterable meanness of owning a crib and writing a pal’s name in it.