The Gold Bat Part 15

"I don't see the good. Would you?"

"No. He can't do anything, and it would only give him a bad time. There are pleasanter things, I should think, than going on from day to day not knowing whether you're going to be sacked or not within the next twelve hours. Don't tell him."

"I won't. And Barry plays against Ripton."

"Certainly. He's the best man."

"I'm going over to Seymour's now," said Trevor, after a pause, "to see Milton. We've drawn Seymour's in the next round of the house-matches. I suppose you knew. I want to get it over before the Ripton match, for several reasons. About half the fifteen are playing on one side or the other, and it'll give them a good chance of getting fit. Running and pa.s.sing is all right, but a good, hard game's the thing for putting you into form. And then I was thinking that, as the side that loses, whichever it is--"

"Seymour's, of course."

"Hope so. Well, they're bound to be a bit sick at losing, so they'll play up all the harder on Sat.u.r.day to console themselves for losing the cup."

"My word, what strategy!" said Clowes. "You think of everything. When do you think of playing it, then?"

"Wednesday struck me as a good day. Don't you think so?"

"It would do splendidly. It'll be a good match. For all practical purposes, of course, it's the final. If we beat Seymour's, I don't think the others will trouble us much."

There was just time to see Milton before lock-up. Trevor ran across to Seymour's, and went up to his study.

"Come in," said Milton, in answer to his knock.

Trevor went in, and stood surprised at the difference in the look of the place since the last time he had visited it. The walls, once covered with photographs, were bare. Milton, seated before the fire, was ruefully contemplating what looked like a heap of waste cardboard.

Trevor recognised the symptoms. He had had experience.

"You don't mean to say they've been at you, too!" he cried.

Milton's normally cheerful face was thunderous and gloomy.

"Yes. I was thinking what I'd like to do to the man who ragged it."

"It's the League again, I suppose?"

Milton looked surprised.

"_Again?_" he said, "where did _you_ hear of the League?

This is the first time I've heard of its existence, whatever it is.

What is the confounded thing, and why on earth have they played the fool here? What's the meaning of this bally rot?"

He exhibited one of the variety of cards of which Trevor had already seen two specimens. Trevor explained briefly the style and nature of the League, and mentioned that his study also had been wrecked.

"Your study? Why, what have they got against you?"

"I don't know," said Trevor. Nothing was to be gained by speaking of the letters he had received.

"Did they cut up your photographs?"

"Every one."

"I tell you what it is, Trevor, old chap," said Milton, with great solemnity, "there's a lunatic in the school. That's what I make of it.

A lunatic whose form of madness is wrecking studies."

"But the same chap couldn't have done yours and mine. It must have been a Donaldson's fellow who did mine, and one of your chaps who did yours and Mill's."

"Mill's? By Jove, of course. I never thought of that. That was the League, too, I suppose?"

"Yes. One of those cards was tied to a chair, but Clowes took it away before anybody saw it."

Milton returned to the details of the disaster.

"Was there any ink spilt in your room?"

"Pints," said Trevor, shortly. The subject was painful.

"So there was here," said Milton, mournfully. "Gallons."

There was silence for a while, each pondering over his wrongs.

"Gallons," said Milton again. "I was a.s.s enough to keep a large pot full of it here, and they used it all, every drop. You never saw such a sight."

Trevor said he had seen one similar spectacle.

"And my photographs! You remember those photographs I showed you? All ruined. Slit across with a knife. Some torn in half. I wish I knew who did that."

Trevor said he wished so, too.

"There was one of Mrs Patrick Campbell," Milton continued in heartrending tones, "which was torn into sixteen pieces. I counted them. There they are on the mantelpiece. And there was one of Little Tich" (here he almost broke down), "which was so covered with ink that for half an hour I couldn't recognise it. Fact."

Trevor nodded sympathetically.

"Yes," said Milton. "Soaked."

There was another silence. Trevor felt it would be almost an outrage to discuss so prosaic a topic as the date of a house-match with one so broken up. Yet time was flying, and lock-up was drawing near.

"Are you willing to play--" he began.

"I feel as if I could never play again," interrupted Milton. "You'd hardly believe the amount of blotting-paper I've used today. It must have been a lunatic, d.i.c.k, old man."

When Milton called Trevor "d.i.c.k", it was a sign that he was moved. When he called him "d.i.c.k, old man", it gave evidence of an internal upheaval without parallel.

"Why, who else but a lunatic would get up in the night to wreck another chap's study? All this was done between eleven last night and seven this morning. I turned in at eleven, and when I came down here again at seven the place was a wreck. It must have been a lunatic."

"How do you account for the printed card from the League?"

Milton murmured something about madmen's cunning and diverting suspicion, and relapsed into silence. Trevor seized the opportunity to make the proposal he had come to make, that Donaldson's _v._ Seymour's should be played on the following Wednesday.

Milton agreed listlessly.