At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was waiting.
“Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said. Then he suddenly went white.
The voice of the head-master came next,—“Hallo, what are you doing here? Let me see—Widdup, isn’t it?”
A mortar-board topped the palings. “Ingleby—What’s this? What’s this? What are you doing there?”
“Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked my cap over the fence. May I get it, sir?”
“Serious—very serious,” muttered the Head. “The letter of the law. Race-week. You’re out of bounds, you know—technically out of bounds. Boys have been expelled for less. Yes, expelled. Ruin your whole career.”
Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, in the same flash, the too-literal Widdup, white with fear.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said . . . “awfully sorry.”
“Mph. . . . What were you two doing here?”
“I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss-moth caterpillars.” Silence—then, rather lamely,—“They’re in the fourth stage, sir.”
“Are they?” The Head smiled, possibly because he approved of this fervent manifestation of what the head-masters’ conference called “nature study,” possibly at Edwin’s sudden revelation of schoolboy psychology. Decidedly he approved of the puss-moths. He had been reading Fabre aloud to his wife. Fabre, too, was a schoolmaster, poor devil! He did not speak his thoughts: schoolmasters never can. He said,—
“Let me see, Ingleby, you’re in the Lower Fifth?”
“I must speak to Mr. Cleaver. . . .” He didn’t say what he must speak about. “All right—get along with you.” He left them, walking away with his hands joined behind his back supporting an immense flounce of black silk gown. Edwin scrambled over the fence; his hands, as they clutched the top of it, were trembling violently.
“Well, you are a prize liar,” said Widdup, “and the old man believed every word of it.”
“I know,” said Edwin. “That’s the rotten part of it. . . .”
“Oh, I don’t know. . . .” He knew perfectly well what he meant.
Ten minutes later he was back in Mr. Cleaver’s classroom trying to make himself so inconspicuous that he wouldn’t be called upon to make an exhibition of himself, and, as luck would have it, nothing of any difficulty came his way to drag him from his comfortable obscurity. Even though the intense excitement of his adventure had now faded, the atmosphere of that high room had changed. He felt that he didn’t somehow belong to it; or, rather, that he had left something behind. All through that drowsy hour some part of him was still being hurried over the hot downs, swept along in the sweating crowds of the racecourse, and this circumstance made his present life strangely unreal, as though he were a changeling with whom it had nothing in common. Gradually, very gradually, the old conditions reasserted themselves, but it was not until the insistent discipline of the evening service in chapel had dragged him back into normality that his adventure and the influence of the strange people with whom he had rubbed shoulders began to fade. Widdup, with his unblushing admiration, helped. There was no shutting him up.