“There is a fellow here,” wrote Cards to his mother, “whom I like very
much. He's got a most awful lot of stuff in him although he doesn't say
much and he looks like nothing on earth sometimes. He's very good
at football, although he's only been here a year. His name is
Westcott--Peter Westcott. I expect I'll bring him back one holiday.”
But, of course, he never did. Peter, when it came to actuality, wouldn't
look right at home. It was during Peter's second year that these things
were happening, and, all this time, Peter was climbing slowly to a very
real popularity. Cards was leaving at the end of this second year--had
he stayed until the end of the third his superficialities would have
been most severely tested.
To him Peter gave all that whole-hearted love and devotion that only
Stephen had known before. He gave it with a very considerable sense
of humour and with no sentiment at all. He saw Cards quite clearly, he
watched his poses and his elaborate pretences, and he laughed at him
sometimes and called him names.
Cards' pride was, on several occasions, distinctly hurt by this
laughter, but his certain conviction of his own superiority always
comforted him. Nor was Peter ever sentimental in his attitude. He never
told Cards that he cared for him, and he even hung back a little when
Cards was in a demonstrative mood and wanted to be told that he was
“wonderful.” Cards sometimes wondered whether Peter cared for him at
all and whether he wasn't really fonder of that “stupid ass Galleon” who
never had a word to say for himself. Peter's grey eyes would have told
Cards a great deal if he had cared to examine them, but he did not know
anything about eyes. Peter noticed, a little against his will, that
as he advanced up the school so Cards cared increasingly about him.
He grasped this discovery philosophically; after all, there were many
fellows who took their colour from the world's opinion, and it was
natural enough that they should. He himself regarded his growing
popularity as a thing of no importance whatever; it did not touch him
anywhere at all because he despised and hated the place. “When the time
does come,” he said once to Cards, “and one is allowed to do things,
I'll stop a lot of this filth.”
“You'll have your work cut out,” Cards told him. “What does it all
matter to us? Let 'em wallow--and they'll only hate you.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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