Devilry and stoicism bound them together. Their secrets were blacker, deeper, more terrible or more hilarious through mutual knowledge of the throat-contracting thrill of a lightning skid across a mellow schoolroom: through mutual knowledge of the long leaf-shrouded flights through space: of their knowledge of the sound as the stinging bullet spins past the head or the pain as it strikes.
But what of all this? This rhythm of stung boys? Or boys as filled with life as fish or birds. Only that it was taking place that morning.
What of the ghastly black huddle on the Professor’s desk? The sunlight streaming through the leaves of the plane tree had begun to dapple it with shimmering lozenges of light. It snored – a disgraceful sound to hear during the first lesson of a summer morning.
But the moments of its indulgence were numbered, for there was, all of a sudden, a cry from near the ceiling and above the schoolroom door. It was the voice of an urchin, a freckled wisp of a thing, who was perched on a high cupboard. The glass of the fanlight above the door was at his shoulder. It was dark with grime, but a small circle the size of a coin was kept transparent and through this spy-hole he could command a view of the corridor outside. He could thus give warning not only to the whole class but to the Professor, at the first sign of danger.
It was rarely that either Barquentine or Deadyawn made a tour of the schoolroom, but it was as well to have the freckled urchin stationed on the cupboard from first thing in the morning onwards, for there was nothing more irritating than for the class to be disturbed.
That morning, lying there like a toy on the cupboard top, he had become so intrigued by the changing fortunes of the ‘game’ below him that it had been over a minute since he had last put his eye to the spy-hole. When he did so it was to see, not twenty feet from the door, a solid phalanx of Professors, like a black tide, with Deadyawn himself at the fore, out-topping the others, in his high chair on wheels.
Deadyawn, who headed the phalanx, was head and shoulders above the rest of the staff, although he was by no means sitting up straight in his high, narrow chair. With its small wheels squeaking at the feet of the four legs, it rocked to and fro as it was propelled rapidly forwards by the usher, who was as yet invisible to the wisp at the spy-hole, being hidden by the high, ugly piece of furniture – ugly beyond belief – with its disproportionate feeding-tray at the height of Deadyawn’s heart and the raw little shelf for his feet.
What was visible of Deadyawn’s face above the tray appeared to be awake – a sure sign that something of particular urgency was in the air.
Behind him the rustling darkness was solid with the professors. What had happened to their various classes, and what on earth they could want on this lazy floor of the castle at any time, let alone at the beginning of the day, was unguessable. But here, nevertheless, they were, their gowns whisking and whispering along the walls on either side. There was an intentness in their gait, a kind of mass seriousness, quite frightening.
The midget boy on the cupboard-top cried his warning with a shriller note in his voice than his schoolfellows had ever heard before.
‘The “Yawner”!’ he screamed. ‘Quick! quick! quick! The Yawner’n all of ’em! Let me down! let me down!’
The rhythm of the hazardous game was broken. Not a single pellet whizzed past the head of the last boy to burst out of the sunlight and crash into the leather wall. In a moment the room was suspiciously quiet. Four rows of boys sat half turned at their desks, their heads cocked on one side, as they listened to the squeaking of Deadyawn’s chair on its small wheels as it rolled towards them through the silence.
The wisp had been caught, having dropped from what must have seemed to him a great height into the arms of a big straw-headed youth.
The two floorboards had been grabbed and shot back into their long, narrow cavities immediately below the professor’s desk. But a mistake had been made, and when it was noticed it was too late for anything to be done about it. One of the boards in the whirl of the moment had been put back
On the desk itself the heavy black dog-like weight was still snoring. Even the shrill cry of the ‘look-out’ had done no more than send a twitch through the jointed huddle.
Any boy in the first row, had he thought it possible to reach the professor’s desk and get back to his own place before the entry of Deadyawn and the staff, would have thrown the folds of Bellgrove’s gown off Bellgrove’s sleeping head, where it lay sunk between his arms on the desk top, and would have shaken Bellgrove into some sort of awareness; for the black and shapeless thing was indeed the old master himself, lost beneath the awning of his gown. For his pupils had draped it over his reverend head, as they always did when he fell asleep.
