CHAPTER VIII

THE FREEDHAM REVELATIONS

Sec.1

The next half-holiday I was walking towards the tuck-shop and gloomily deciding that Doe’s wilful estrangement from me was fast being frozen into tacit enmity, when I felt an arm tucked most affectionately into mine.  It was done so quietly and quickly that I nearly leapt a yard at the shock.  The arm belonged to Doe.

“Ray, you old ass,” he began.

Doe, now sixteen, was not so very different from the small fawning creature of three years before.  Although the perfect curve of the cheek-line had given place to a perceptible depression beneath the cheek-bone; although the usual marks of a boy’s adolescence—­the slight pallor, the quick blush of diffidence, the slimness of limb—­were all very noticeable in Doe, there was yet much of the original Baby about his appearance.  It could be marked in his soft, indeterminate mouth, whose flower-like lips seemed always parted; in his inquiring eyes and unkempt hair; and, at the present moment, in an artless excitement that I had not seen for many a day.

I tried to drag my arm away, but he held it too tight, and proceeded to make the remarkable statement: 

“You old ass!  Surely you’ve been sulking long enough.”

“Well, I like that,” replied I, with an empty laugh.  “You drop me, sulk like a pig, and then say it’s the other way round—­”

“Rot!” he interrupted.  “Didn’t you deliberately cut me out with Radley?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, although the hint that I was Radley’s favourite always gave me a flush of pleasure.

“And haven’t you been hanging on to Penny, just to make me jealous?”

“Never entered my head,” I replied promptly, and with truth.  “I leave that sort of thing to schoolgirls like you.  But it evidently did make you jealous.”

“Yes, it did,” he admitted with an engaging smile.  This softened me; and my affection for him began at once to throb into activity.

“Yes, it did; and now that you’ve said you’re sorry, I feel frightfully lively.  Let’s go and smash a window or something.”

His spirits were infectious, and he dragged me off to the study which his intellectual eminence had recently secured for him.  When we arrived there, he tossed me a bag of sweets, which had clearly been bought as a means to sugar the reconciliation, and, dropping into his armchair, stretched his legs in front of him, and said: 

“Let’s talk as we used to.”

I was relieved from the necessity of finding some opening remark by the bursting into the room of “Moles” White.

If you look up the Latin word “Moles” in the dictionary, you will find that it means “a huge, shapeless mass”; and all of us had been very quick to see that this was an excellent description of our junior house-prefect, White.  Moles White was as enormous and ugly in his dimensions as he was genial and simple in face.  You saw at a glance that he possessed all the traditional kindliness and generosity of the giant.  As he crashed into Doe’s study, he was swinging some books on the end of a strap.