of the outside world. As he crossed the quad with this remarkable insight, as curious in its transposition of his previous beliefs as one of the negatives held up to the light in his darkroom, Mr Slymne felt a sudden relief. He was freed from the responsibilities of his career. He was no longer a schoolmaster, no longer an elderly thirty-eight, he was eighteen, no, fifteen, and entitled to a fifteen-year-old's ebullient spirits and unfeeling harshness, but with the marvellous difference that he had years of adult experience and knowledge on which to rely in his war with Glodstone. He would destroy the bully before he had finished.
With something approaching gaiety, Mr Slymne climbed the steps in the Tower to his room two at a time and added the findings that Glodstone only read adventure yarns to his dossier on the man. Downstairs, there came the sound of fighting in the dormitory. Mr Slymne rose from his desk, descended the stairs and ten minutes later had changed the whole pattern of his life by beating three boys without a qualm.
Chapter 5
'Heard about Slimey's conversion?' Major Fetherington said at breakfast the next morning. Glodstone peered over the Daily Express.
'Don't tell me he's joining the Church. God help his parishioners.'
'No such luck. The fellow's finally come round to a proper way of dealing with boys. Beat three little blighters last night for pillow-fighting in dorm.'
Mr Glodstone put down his paper and glared at the Major with his gimlet eye. 'You're joking, of course.'
'Damned if I am. Cleaves, Milshott and Bedgerson. Saw their backsides this morning when they were changing for early PT. A nicer set of welts too you couldn't wish for.'
'Extraordinary. Didn't think the runt had it in him,' said Glodstone, and turned back to his paper only slightly puzzled.
But when Mr Slymne came in five minutes later, Glodstone was genuinely startled. 'Good God,' he said loudly, 'Never thought I'd live to see the day when you'd join us for breakfast, Slymne.'
Slymne helped himself to bacon and eggs and smiled almost cordially. 'Thought it would make a change,' he said, 'One tends to get stuck in a rut. I'm thinking of taking up jogging too.'
'Just don't do yourself an injury,' said Glodstone unpleasantly. 'We wouldn't know how to get along without your conscientious objections. But then I hear you don't have any now. Beat some boys last night, eh?'
'They asked for it and they got it,' said Mr Slymne, managing to ignore the sarcasm.
'Nothing like consistency,' said Glodstone, and stalked out of the dining-room. That morning his classes suffered from his short temper and were set essays to write while Glodstone brooded. Slymne's change of behaviour was disconcerting. If the damned fellow could suddenly alter his habits and start beating and take up jogging, Glodstone felt hard done by. Slymne had always been a comforting standard of wetness against which Glodstone could measure his own forthright and manly behaviour. Damn it, the next thing the wretched Slymne would do was get married. Glodstone, staring out of the window, felt a new wave of resentment boiling up inside him at the thought. Adventure had eluded him. So had romance. And he was growing older.
'Might not be a bad thing to marry some woman after all,' he muttered to himself, but apart from a distant cousin with no money, who had once proposed to him on Valentine's Day, there were no women of his social background he could think of who would do. There were some divorced mothers, of course, whose presence at the beginning of term or on Open Day had excited him, but their visits were too brief for him to get to know them. Anyway, they were hardly his sort. Glodstone dismissed them from his thoughts until he remembered La Comtesse de Montcon. He had never met her, but Anthony Wanderby, her son by a previous marriage, was in his House and while Glodstone disliked the little blighter he was a typical American spoilt brat in the Housemaster's
