Read Online Mike at Wrykyn by P.G. Wodehouse - Free Book Online Page B

mean?”
    “Why
don’t you take the holiday?”
    “What?
Not turn up on Friday!”
    “Yes.
I’m not going to.”
    Neville-Smith
stopped and stared. Wyatt was unmoved.
    “You’re
what?”
    “I
simply shan’t go to school.”
    “You’re
rotting.”
    “All
right.”
    “No,
but, I say, ragging barred. Are you just going to go off, though the holiday’s
been stopped?”
    “That’s
the idea.”
    “You’ll
get sacked.”
    “I
suppose so. But only because I shall be the only one to do it. If the whole
school took Friday off, they couldn’t do much. They couldn’t sack the whole
school.”
    “By
Jove, nor could they! I say!”
    They
walked on, Neville-Smith’s mind in a whirl, Wyatt whistling.
    “I
say,” said Neville-Smith after a pause. “It would be a bit of a rag.”
    “Not
bad.”
    “Do you
think the chaps would do it?”
    “If
they understood they wouldn’t be alone.” Another pause.
    “Shall
I ask some of them?” said Neville-Smith. ,,Do.”
    “I
could get quite a lot, I believe.”
    “That
would be a start, wouldn’t it? I could get a couple of dozen from Wain’s. We
should be forty or fifty strong to start with.”
    “I say,
what a score, wouldn’t it be?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll
speak to the chaps tonight, and let you know.”
    “All
right,” said Wyatt. “Tell them that I shall be going anyhow. I should be glad
of a little company.”
     
    The school turned in on
the Thursday night in a restless, excited way. There were mysterious whisperings
and gigglings. Groups kept forming in corners apart, to disperse casually and
innocently on the approach of some person in authority.
    An air
of expectancy permeated each of the houses.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER
X
     
    THE GREAT PICNIC
     
    MORNING school at Wrykyn
started at nine o’clock.
    At that hour there was a
call-over in each of the form-rooms. After call-over the forms proceeded to the
Great Hall for prayers.
    A
strangely desolate feeling was in the air at nine o’clock on the Friday
morning. Sit in the grounds of a public school any afternoon in the summer
holidays, and you will get exactly the same sensation of being alone in the
world as came to the dozen or so day-boys who bicycled through the gates that
morning. Wrykyn was a boarding-school for the most part, but it had its leaven
of day-boys. The majority of these lived in the town, and walked to school. A
few, however, whose homes were farther away, came on bicycles. One plutocrat
did the journey in a motor-car, rather to the scandal of the authorities, who,
though unable to interfere, looked askance when compelled by the warning toot
of the horn to skip from road to pavement. A form-master has the strongest
objection to being made to skip like a young ram by a boy to whom he has only
the day before given a hundred lines for shuffling his feet in form.
    It
seemed curious to these cyclists that there should be nobody about. Punctuality
is the politeness of princes, but it was not a leading characteristic of the
school; and at three minutes to nine, as a general rule, you might see the
gravel in front of the buildings freely dotted with sprinters, trying to get in
in time to answer their names.
    It was
curious that there should be nobody about today. A wave of reform could
scarcely have swept through the houses during the night.
    And
yet—where was everybody?
    Time
only deepened the mystery. The form-rooms, like the gravel, were empty.
    The
cyclists looked at one another in astonishment. What could it mean?
    It was
an occasion on which sane people wonder if their brains are not playing them
some unaccountable trick.
    “I
say,” said Willoughby, of the Lower Fifth, to Brown, the only other occupant of
the form-room, “the old man did stop the holiday today, didn’t he?”
    “Just
what I was going to ask you,” said Brown. “It’s jolly rum. I distinctly
remember him giving it out in the Hall that it was going to be stopped because
of the O.W.s day row.”
    “So do I.
I