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He swallowed a good deal of it, but there was still plenty left; and what there was was colder than one would have believed possible. He came to the surface after what seemed to him a quarter of an hour, and struck out for the side. When he got out, Phipps and Thomas had just got in. Gorrick was standing at the end of the cocoanut matting which formed a pathway to the spring-board.
With the exception of a couple of infants splashing about in the shallow end, and a stout youth who dived in from the spring-board, scrambled out, and dived in again, each time flatter than the last, they had the place to themselves. "What's it like, Gorrick," inquired Phipps of the stout youth, who had just appeared above the surface again, blowing like a whale.
"Bit flat," added Thomas critically. Gorrick blinked severely at the speaker. A head-waiter at a fashionable restaurant is cordial in his manner compared with a boy who has been at a public school a year, when addressed familiarly by a new boy. After reflecting on the outrage for a moment, he dived in again. "Worse than ever," said Truthful Thomas. "Look here!" said Gorrick.
"Oh, come on!" exclaimed Phipps, and led Thomas away. "That kid," said Gorrick to Spencer, "wants his head smacked, badly." "That's just what I say," agreed Spencer, with the eagerness of a great mind which has found another that thinks alike with itself. Spencer was the first of the trio ready to enter the water. His movements were wary and deliberate.
When Gorrick, of the Lower Fourth, the first of the fags to put the ingenious scheme into practice, came to him, still smarting from Kennedy's castigation, Fenn promptly gave him six more cuts, worse than the first, and kicked him out into the passage.
Gorrick was blue, but determined. "I say! Did I go in all right then?" inquired Gorrick. "How the dickens do I know?" said Spencer, stung to fresh wrath by the inanity of the question. "Spencer did," said Thomas, appearing in the water below them and holding on to the rail. "Look here!" cried Spencer; "did you shove me in then?" "Me! Shove!" Thomas's voice expressed horror and pain.
His next move was to slap his chest and dance a few steps, after which he put his right foot into the water, again remarked "Oo!" and resumed Position I. "Thought you said it was warm," he shouted to Gorrick. "So it is; hot as anything. Come on in." And Spencer came on in.
Gorrick naturally did not want to spoil a good thing by giving Fenn's game away, so he lay low and said nothing, with the result that Wren and three others met with the same fate, only more so, because Fenn's wrath increased with each visit. Kennedy, of course, heard nothing of this, or he might perhaps have thought better of Fenn.
"Why, you dived in. Jolly good one, too. Reminded me of the diving elephants at the Hippodrome." And he swam off. "That kid," said Gorrick, gazing after him, "wants his head smacked." "Badly," agreed Spencer. "Look here! did he shove me in? Did you see him?" "I was doing my dive. But it must have been him. Phipps never rags in the bath."
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