the remark
of a well-meaning aunt: 'How you will enjoy the games!' Martin was not
particularly weak or unathletic: his physique and taste for games were
quite up to the normal, but he did not stand alone when he proclaimed
to his friends his weariness with the official recreation which only
doubled life's burden.

"Of course," said Caruth, after scrumming practice one night, "it's
awfully good for us. Bally influence and all that. You know what the
crushers say."

"And they ought to know," added Martin, "as they never play, at least
not compulsorily."

"Anyhow," said Caruth, "there is one comfort."

"What is that?"

"We don't have to sweat it out like Randall's. Their pre's make them
groise at it all day and all night."

"Good job. The stinkers."

Martin's sympathy with the oppressed was not yet as strong as his
hatred of Randall's, the pot hunters, the unspeakable.

Work with the Terror was not always terrible: for Martin it even had
its moments. He enjoyed turning out a good verse or a good
translation, and he enjoyed also the commendation that it won. The
Terror, whose real name was Vickers, was a young man soured by
misfortune. He had meant to go triumphantly to the Bar: he had
connections, he had brains, he would rise. But a financial crisis in
the family had left him in despair, too old to enter for the Civil
Service, too poor to attempt the Bar in spite of his connections. He
had drifted, of necessity, to the arduous, responsible, and despised
task of moulding the future generation. The future generation, as
represented by the Lower Fifth, Classical, of Elfrey, seemed to Vickers
a loathsome crew, fit only to be the victim of the sarcastic tongue on
which he prided himself. He hated the elderly bloods who remained
calmly and irremovably at the bottom of the form: he hated the
ink-stained urchins with brains who passed through his hands on their
way to higher things. The Lower Fifth he held to be an abominable form
because it was neither one thing nor the other. The teaching was not
mere routine, the soulless cramming of impenetrable skulls: on the
other hand, it wasn't like taking a Sixth. There were times,
especially in the afternoons, when the frowst of the water-warmed room,
the dingy walls and desks, the ponderous horror of mistranslated
AEschylus, and the unmannered lumpishness of the human boy (average age
sixteen) would all combine to play upon his nerves and to rend the
amorphou