"Won't do, Tom," I said. "It's all sham. We can't fight. I daresay
old Lom's right, though."
"What do you mean?"
"That we shall be able to knock Eely and Dicksee into the middle of next
week."
"But it seems to me as if they must feel that we have been learning, or
else they would have been sure to have done something before now."
"Never mind," I said, "let's wait. We don't want to fight, as Lom says,
but if we're obliged to, we've got to do it well."
The occasion for trying our ability did not come off, though it was very
near it several times; but as I grew more confident, the less I felt
disposed to try, and Mercer always confessed it was the same with him,
though the cock of the school and his miserable toady, Dicksee often led
us a sad life.
One morning, soon after the last visit of Uncle Seaborough, Lomax came
to the schoolroom door, just as Mr Hasnip was giving me a terrible
bullying about the results of a problem in algebra, on to which he had
hurried me before I had more than the faintest idea of the meaning of
the rules I had been struggling through.
I suppose I was very stupid, but it was terribly confusing to me for the
most part. I grasped very well the fact that a plus quantity killed a
minus quantity if they were of equal value, and that a little figure two
by the side of a letter meant its square, and I somehow blundered
through some simple equations, but when Mr Hasnip lit a scholastic fire
under me, and began to force on bigger mathematical flowers from my
unhappy soil in the Doctor's scholastic hothouse, I began to feel as if
I were blighted, and as if quadratic equations were instruments of
torture to destroy boys' brains.
On that particular morning, I was, what fat Dicksee called, "catching
it," and I was listening gloomily to my teacher's attempts at being
witty at my expense.
"How a boy can be so stupid," he said, "is more than I can grasp. It is
perfect child's play, and yet you have gone on getting the problem into
a hopeless tangle--a ridiculous tangle. You have made a surd perfectly
absurd, and--"
"Mr Hasnip!" came from the other end of the great room. Mr Hasnip
looked up.
"The drill-master is here. The horse has arrived for Burr junior's
riding lesson. Can you excuse him?"
"Certainly, sir," and Mr Hasnip looked at me, showing his teeth in a
hungry kind of smile, as if a nice morsel were being snatched from him,
and I stood with my heart beating, and the warm blood tingling in my
cheeks, conscious that all the boys were looking at me.
"Here, take your book, Burr junior," said my tutor. "Very glad to go, I
daresay. Now aren't you?"