“Head master of my old school.” He gazed at me in a distraught sort of way. “Good Lord! Can’t you understand the position?”
“Not by a jugful, laddie.”
Sippy sprang from his chair and took a turn or two up and down the carpet.
“How do you feel,” he said, “when you meet the head master of your old school?”
“I never do. He’s dead.”
“Well, I’ll tell you how I feel. I feel as if I were in the Lower Fourth again, and had been sent up by my form-master for creating a disturbance in school. That happened once, Bertie, and the memory still lingers. I can recall as if it were yesterday knocking at old Waterbury’s door and hearing him say, ‘Come in!’ like a lion roaring at an early Christian, and going in and shuffling my feet on the mat and him looking at me and me explaining—and then, after what seemed a lifetime, bending over and receiving six of the juiciest on the old spot with a cane that bit like an adder. And whenever he comes into my office now the old wound begins to trouble me, and I just say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ and feel like a kid of fourteen.”
I began to grasp the posish. The whole trouble with these fellows like Sippy, who go in for writing, is that they develop the artistic temperament, and you never know when it is going to break out.
“He comes in here with his pockets full of articles on ‘The Old School Cloisters’ and ‘Some Little-Known Aspects of Tacitus,’ and muck like that, and I haven’t the nerve to refuse them. And this is supposed to be a paper devoted to the lighter interests of Society.”
“You must be firm, Sippy. Firm, old thing.”