A Javelin for Jonah Read Free Page B

here, but I shall be happy to mark anything sent in.”
    “So what is your name?” asked one of the women students.
    “The Warden has suggested that I answer to the name of James, mademoiselle,” replied Hamish.
    “Come up and see me sometime, James,” said the damsel, who appeared to be about eighteen.
    “I suggest you wash your face and comb your hair before you issue your invitations,” said Hamish. “The class is dismissed.” He stood in the doorway as they clattered out and, waylaying the large student, said to him, “And what’s your name, may I ask?”
    “Richard,” he replied. “In other words, Dirty Dick, so you’d better look out. You won’t catch me napping again.” But he grinned amiably as he spoke.
    “Fine. We meet at Philippi, then. Let me know when you can spare the time.” Hamish gave the young man a friendly clap on the shoulder and they walked out side by side to the college canteen.

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chapter 2
Long Jump with Casualties
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    T wo circumstances made life at Joynings, so far as Hamish was concerned, very much simpler and easier than he might have expected. One was the lack of brotherliness among the men students to which Henry had referred. They were prepared to sabotage, more or less effectively, lectures which did not please them, but of physical ganging-up against authority there was little sign. The second circumstance was that the promised set-to with the gloves between Hamish and his hulking challenger had resulted in a spectacular knock-out by Hamish, followed by a cheerful, unembittered relationship with the defeated Richard which Hamish found undeniably helpful.
    Richard, he learned later, had been expelled from his school for half-killing an unpopular sadistic prefect. He was now twenty-one years of age and had been at Joynings for four years, during which time his size, weight and strength had brought him to a position of leadership to which his other attributes scarcely entitled him. Hamish, bit by bit, learned the case-histories of a good many of the men-students. By no means all of them were discreditable, he thought.
    Miss Yale, the senior woman lecturer—the battle-axe to whom Hamish had referred in his letter home—was more reticent about the women students, but these, with no encouragement from him, told Hamish more about themselves than he ever learned from headquarters. They also made overtures to him which so young a man might have found embarrassing but for the fact that Hamish had a fund of common sense and a robust sense of humour inherited from his mother, a useful streak of Puritanism which came to him from his father, a trick of summing-up people and situations which Dame Beatrice, his mother’s employer had taught him, and (possibly the product of all these) a superb self-confidence which was all his own and which, by the unreflecting, was often mistaken for arrogance.
    With all his colleagues he got on reasonably well, although his preferences were for Henry and the redoubtable Miss Yale. That formidable middle-aged Amazon could beat him at golf (there was a links twenty miles from the College) and was, he discovered, an ex-county champion at throwing the javelin and, but for unfortunate family affairs which had prevented her from appearing at final trials, a near-certainty for an international vest in those Dark Ages before Hamish had been born.
    The match with the talented Squadron Club was lost by Joynings, a circumstance moodily and unfairly related by the losers to the non-appearance of their first string in the shot— the youth put out of action by Jones. To those who expressed their views to him, Hamish pointed out, logically enough, that even if Derry, the athlete injured by Jones, had taken part and had won his event, the result of the match would have been unaltered. The College still could not have won a match which was decided on an aggregate of points.
    He himself was mostly engaged in coaching swimming, but he soon found that, except