“What’s this?” he asked. “A new boy?—What’s your name?”
“Come along down this end, then.” He moved majestically to the end of the dormitory nearest to the door and pointed to a vacant bedstead, “There you are,” he said. He was kindly without the least trace of unbending. Ingleby took him for a prefect; already he had received the canonisation of heroism. He stood and watched Edwin spread out his nightshirt on the bed. At this moment the climax of his migraine arrived. Edwin was sick.
Layton’s lips curled. “Dirty little skunk,” he said as he hurried away.
A slipper, cleverly aimed from the other end of the room, caught Ingleby full on his burning cheek. The pain seemed to blind him.
And a skunk, in spite of himself, he remained, for small boys are as persistently unintelligent as parrots in their memory for names. Ingleby’s “skunkhood” became a tradition that he never wholly lived down during his first years at St. Luke’s. In them he experienced all the inevitable qualms of homesickness, although even these were more tolerable than the physical qualms which had complicated his arrival, for they passed quickly in the excitement of a new life, the adoption of new standards, the spring of new ambitions. It was a thousand times unfortunate that he should have made such a sensational débût, that chance should have included such circumstances as Griffin and a sick-headache in his first day; for all that was instinct in the boy rebelled against the category in which he found himself placed, the definition of his status that had been hastily formulated by a few small boys, and almost tacitly accepted by the masters.
To begin with, he had very few of the attributes of the skunk. He was neither dirty nor undersized: indeed he had a nice instinct for personal cleanliness, and all the slim, balanced beauty of a young boy’s figure. He was far from unintelligent—though this counts for little enough in the schedules of precedence at school. It amounted to this: he was not used to the company of other boys; he had never played games; he had made himself objectionable on his first night in the dormitory—and Layton had called him a skunk. Griffin saw to the rest, seconded by the lad with the hyena face, who bore the illustrious name of Douglas. Strangely enough no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped the romance in the hyena-faced’s name. Setting out to find any tokens of Chevy Chase beneath the black mop, he was caught staring in Hall, and as a proper retribution for such insolence, subjected to the pain and indignity of a “tight six” with a gym shoe, his head wedged in two stocks of Mr. Griffin’s thighs. New boys of his own age, and smaller, seeing this exhibition, formed a very low estimate of Ingleby. They shuddered also at the knowledge that he had been heard to ask the difference between a drop-kick and a punt.