“And here’s Blaize come down on purpose to see it all,” said Adams, “and incidentally to get a scholarship—eh, David?”
Horrors! The Christian name again! But nobody appeared to think it the least ridiculous, any more than that Ted, who was climbing out of the window, should be known as Ted.
Adams looked rather unfavourably at one of the two boys on the sofa.
“Ozzy, go and wash your hands at once,” he said. “I won’t have fellows in here with dirty paws.”
“Sir, mayn’t I just finish——” began Ozzy.
“No: finish when you’re clean. Come out into the garden, David. How’s your father? Topknot met you at the station, didn’t he, and you’re going to have tea with him. We might find some strawberries.”
David was packed off early to bed that night in order that his brain might be in its most efficient mood for his examination next day, in a whirl of happy excitement. Never in all his day-dreams had he conceived that Adams’s could be like this. It was not like a school, it was like some new and entrancing kind of home, with the jolliest man he had ever seen as a master and father, and for family these friendly boys, and the black-haired girl, Adams’s daughter, whom everybody called by her Christian name. And yet the glamour of public school lay over it, and among this happy family there moved, like ordinary mortals, the great ones of the earth, Maddox and Cruikshank, and Westcott, captain of the school fifteen, behaving like everybody else and seemingly unconscious of their divinity. And these heroes had been seen with his mortal eyes, and he had been taken by Hughes into Maddox’s study after tea, where he had been permitted to help in washing up his tea-things. That to him was the Vatican, a room some twelve feet by ten in material dimensions, but a shrine, a centre. There were books everywhere—not school-books merely, but novels, books of poetry, books in French which Maddox read for his own amusement. Cricket-bats and a press of rackets were piled in the corner, and such space on the walls as was not filled with books was a mosaic of school photographs. And, perhaps most astounding of all, though Maddox had his school cricket colours, his racket and five colours, there was no trace of those glories anywhere; instead, on a nail behind the door, was hung a straw hat with just the house-colours on it, which David himself would be allowed to wear next September. Somehow that was tremendously grand: it was like a king who had the right to cover himself with stars and garters, preferring to go out to dinner in ordinary evening dress. . . .