“Dismiss!”
They did.
“And about time, too,” said Jimmy Silver. “I wish they would tie that man up, or something. He’s one of the worst bores I know. He may be full of bright conversation in private life, but in public he will talk about his beastly military regulations. You can’t stop him. It’s a perfect mania with him. Now, I believe—that’s to say, I have a sort of dim idea—that there’s a place round about here called a canteen. I seem to remember such a thing vaguely. We might go and look for it.”
Kennedy made no objection.
This was his first appearance at camp. Jimmy Silver, on the other hand, was a veteran. He had been there twice before, and meant to go again. He had a peculiar and extensive knowledge of the ins and outs of the place. Kennedy was quite willing to take him as his guide. He was full of information. Kennedy was surprised to see what a number of men from the other schools he seemed to know. In the canteen there were, amongst others, a Carthusian, two Tonbridge men, and a Haileyburian. They all greeted Silver with the warmth of old friends.
“You get to know a lot of fellows in camp,” explained Jimmy, as they strolled back to the Eckleton lines. “That’s the best of the place. Camp’s the best place on earth, if only you have decent weather. See that chap over there? He came here last year. He’d never been before, and one of the things he didn’t know was that Cove Reservoir’s only about three feet deep round the sides. He took a running dive, and almost buried himself in the mud. It’s about two feet deep. He told me afterwards he swallowed pounds of it. Rather bad luck. Somebody ought to have told him. You can’t do much diving here.”
“Glad you mentioned it,” said Kennedy. “I should have dived myself if you hadn’t.”
Many other curious and diverting facts did the expert drag from the bonded warehouse of his knowledge. Nothing changes at camp. Once get to know the ropes, and you know them for all time.
“The one thing I bar,” he said, “is having to get up at half-past five. And one day in the week, when there’s a divisional field-day, it’s half-past four. It’s hardly worth while going to sleep at all. Still, it isn’t so bad as it used to be. The first year I came to camp we used to have to do a three hours’ field-day before brekker. We used to have coffee before it, and nothing else till it was over. By Jove, you felt you’d had enough of it before you got back. This is Laffan’s Plain. The worst of Laffan’s Plain is that you get to know it too well. You get jolly sick of always starting on field-days from the same place, and marching across the same bit of ground. Still, I suppose they can’t alter the scenery for our benefit. See that man there? He won the sabres at Aldershot last year. That chap with him is in the Clifton footer team.”
When a school corps goes to camp, it lives in a number of tents, and, as a rule, each house collects in a tent of its own. Blackburn’s had a tent, and further down the line Kay’s had assembled. The Kay contingent were under Wayburn, a good sort, as far as he himself was concerned, but too weak to handle a mob like Kay’s. Wayburn was not coming back after the holidays, a fact which perhaps still further weakened his hold on the Kayites. They had nothing to fear from him next term.
Kay’s was represented at camp by a dozen or so of its members, of whom young Billy Silver alone had any pretensions to the esteem of his fellow man. Kay’s was the rowdiest house in the school, and the cream of its rowdy members had come to camp. There was Walton, for one, a perfect specimen of the public school man at his worst. There was Mortimer, another of Kay’s gems. Perry, again, and Callingham, and the rest. A pleasant gang, fit for anything, if it could be done in safety.
Kennedy observed them, and—the spectacle starting a train of thought—asked Jimmy Silver, as they went into their tent just before lights-out, if there was much ragging in camp.
“Not very much,” said the expert. “Chaps are generally too done up at the end of the day to want to do anything except sleep. Still, I’ve known cases. You sometimes get one tent mobbing another. They loose the ropes, you know. Low trick, I think. It isn’t often done, and it gets dropped on like bricks when it’s found out. But why? Do you feel as if you wanted to do it?”
“It only occurred to me that we’ve got a lively gang from Kay’s here. I was wondering if they’d get any chances of ragging, or if they’d have to lie low.”
“I’d forgotten Kay’s for the moment. Now you mention it, they are rather a crew. But I shouldn’t think they’d find it worth while to rot about here. It isn’t as if they were on their native heath. People have a prejudice against having their tent-ropes loosed, and they’d get beans if they did anything in that line. I remember once there was a tent which made itself objectionable, and it got raided in the night by a sort of vigilance committee from the other schools, and the chaps in it got the dickens of a time. None of them ever came to camp again. I hope Kay’s’ll try and behave decently. It’ll be an effort for them; but I hope they’ll make it. It would be an awful nuisance if young Billy made an ass of himself in any way. He loves making an ass of himself. It’s a sort of hobby of his.”
As if to support the statement, a sudden volley of subdued shouts came from the other end of the Eckleton lines.
“Go it, Wren!”
“Stick to it, Silver!”
“Wren!”
“Silver!”
“S-s-h!”
Silence, followed almost immediately by a gruff voice inquiring with simple directness what the dickens all this noise was about.
“Hullo!” said Kennedy. “Did you hear that? I wonder what’s been up? Your brother was in it, whatever it was.”
“Of course,” said Jimmy Silver, “he would be. We can’t find out about it now, though. I’ll ask him tomorrow, if I remember. I shan’t remember, of course. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Half an hour later, Kennedy, who had been ruminating over the incident in his usual painstaking way, reopened the debate.
“Who’s Wren?” he asked.
