"Ah, my young friend, you hit the nail on its head. As everybody knows, to get on to Randall's gym is as easy as falling downstairs. From there you can get to the fire ladders and up to Randall's dormies. To-morrow night it is proposed to invade the dormies while the whole house gorges below and listens to slush about their pestilential pots. Meanwhile we snitch their water jugs and empty the water on their little beds. Then we bring the jugs back here and wait. The windows on this side of the dormy look out on the zinc roof of Randall's gym: beyond is the dining-room, where the swine will be guzzling. With windows open we can easily hear what's going on. When old Toffee Randall gets up to propose his blighted house" (Neave had in his excitement sunk from the level of the lay sermon) "I move that we chuck all the empty jugs on that zinc roof and shout: 'For Gideon and the Lord.' There ought to be row enough to raise hell. You know what those roofs are ... and there will be forty pitchers. They won't have the least notion what the row is till they get upstairs and see their beds. They'll think it's a private rag of our own, but they'll learn in due time. Now don't anyone say a word. We've got to keep this to our dormy or the pre's are bound to find out." The hurried arrival of Spots, followed by the extinction of the lights, put an end to further devising of conspiracy. For a long time Martin lay awake, gazing at the ceiling and turning restlessly from side to side. Excitement, that terrible mingling of sheer joy and sheer terror, gripped him, almost physically: as he thought of the splendours and the perils of to-morrow night he felt as he had felt before when he was walking down the study passage to the prefects' common-room and listening to Spots's following tread. What, he wondered, would be the end of it all? There would be a row, inevitably. They might even be kept back a day: that would be wretched. But swiping? He could endure that for the glory of sharing in a rag, a colossal rag with Neave and Cullen as leaders. Besides he hated Randall's, hated them so bitterly that the prospect of soaking their beds and smashing their pitchers was heavenly even at the cost of swipings innumerable. Nowhere is group feeling more obvious and more powerful than in the world of youth. In a single term Martin had become so passionately one of Berney's that his hatred of Randall's and their smudgy type of success made him quiver with anger. He didn't care a straw for Gideon's nose: nobody really cared for Gideon's sufferings. They were all linked by the single bond of hatred. It was Randall's that mattered ... the swine.