half-time. As individuals,
however, Christy's were a formidable lot, and when combined with
Buller's formed a much heavier and larger side than any Gordon had
played against before. He was not very large, and was used to Junior
Leagues. For an hour he was swept off his feet. He could not keep pace
with the game. He was flung from one position into another; he followed
after the scrum; he felt like a new boy playing for the first time. At
half-time Simonds came up thoroughly fed up with life. The score was
fifteen-nothing.

"For heaven's sake, Caruthers, get in and shove, if you can't do
anything better. You haven't done a thing the whole game."

The game was a nightmare. Mansell looked at him curiously that evening
at tea.

Gordon muttered something about a kick on the head, and being unable to
see anything.

On Sunday evening a list of those in training for the Three Cock was put
up. There were ten forwards down. Gordon was bottom on the list; both
Henry and Collins were above him. In the football world his claim to
fame for the moment faded away. If he was to remain in the public gaze,
he would have to attract attention some other way.

And so, at the most critical point in the development of his character,
Gordon began all unconsciously to seek for new ways of making himself
conspicuous. He did not know what he was doing. If someone had told him
that he was doing absurd things merely to get talked about, he would
have laughed. But all the same, it would have been true. His preparatory
schoolmaster said of him once: "There is some danger of his becoming the
school buffoon." At his prep, the boys were too closely looked after and
kept down for any one person to become pre-eminent at anything. And so a
subconscious love of notoriety drove Gordon on to play the fool for a
whole term most damnably.

It was during the end of the Easter and the whole of the summer term
that Gordon earned a reputation for reckless bravado and disregard of
all authority that stuck to him through his whole career. Up till now he
had done things merely because he had wanted to. He followed the
inclination of the moment, but now it was different. It is pleasant to
be talked of as a mixture between Don Juan and Puck; and Gordon was
sufficiently good at games to make himself an attractive and not a
repulsive figure. The Public School boy admires the Meredith type; he
despises the man who is no good at games, and who plays fast and loose
in