“’Tisn’t a satisfactory state of things though,” he said. “If everybody cribbed everything, it would be all right, because then everybody would get full marks——”
“But old Tovey is a suspicious dog,” he said, “and in that case he might suspect something. He’s as blind as a bat, and you can have your crib spread out on the desk bang in front of his nose, and he won’t see it. He didn’t ought to be a beak at all. I put out my tongue at him the other day, right out like that and held it there, and he never saw. I think beaks ought to have their eyesight tested every year or two, like they do for the army to see if they’re competent. He makes up for his eyes by his ears though. If you try to prompt a fellow right at back of the room, he hears like—like a megaphone.”
Bags continued to suck his orange till David had finished and then went on.
“I repeat, if everybody cribbed everything it would be all right,” he said. “And the only proper alternative is that nobody should crib nothing.”
“Oh, ah,” said David. “Case of ‘Jerusalem the Golden,’ as applied to Tovey’s. When we’re all saints we’ll wear nightshirts, ’stead of pyjamas, and golden crowns and bare hoofs——”
“Don’t be profane,” said Bags. “You’re going to be confirmed.”
“Right oh,” said David. “Lord, do you remember the catechism classes at Helmsworth?”
David finished his father’s letter and tore it up.
“Grown-up people seem to think that we think the same way as they do,” he said. “That’s such rot. We might just as well expect them to think the same way as us. They’ve forgotten about being fourteen, and we never knew about being forty or fifty. Do you remember my pater’s sermon, too, about the chapel being the centre of school life, just because the cathedral is the centre of his? I think he’s forgotten a lot about being a boy.”
Bags had a certain persistency about him.
“Cribbing,” he remarked, “I don’t see why it’s any worse to get full marks for a thing by cribbing than to avoid an impot by cribbing. Either you crib or you don’t. If you crib, why not crib it all? I don’t see that Plugs is a bit worse than you. Blazes, why don’t you tell Maddox all about it? You’re such pals with him, though you are his fag.”
“My word, you do have rum notions,” he said. “It would be sneaking; Maddox always whacks fellows if he finds they crib!”