Examination-Day was rather a frequent periodical affair at Dr Bewley's.
One month Monsieur Brohanne would have all the fun, as Glyn called it,
an afternoon being devoted by the boys to the answering of questions,
set by the French master, neatly printed upon a sheet of foolscap paper
at the local printing-office, and carefully arranged upon a rough pad
consisting of so many sheets of perfectly new blotting-paper upon each
pupil's desk.
At another time it would be the Doctor's day, and his examination-papers
would be distributed. By the same rule, in due time in the periodicity,
Mr Rampson would revel in Latin puzzles; and Mr Morris would request
the young gentlemen to build up curious constructions with
perpendiculars, "slanting-diculars," and other varieties of the
diagonal, in company with polygons and other forms of bodies with their
many angles and curves, as set forth originally by a certain antique
brain-puzzler of the name of Euclid, for the first part of the
examination, the second portion consisting of that peculiar form of
sport in which, instead of ordinary figures, the various letters of the
alphabet were shuffled up and used for calculations, plused, minused,
squared, and cubed up to any number of degrees, under the name of
equations.
It was one afternoon prior to Morris's day, which was to begin at ten
o'clock the next morning, and when the young gentlemen were all out in
the play-field fallowing their brains for the next day's work, so that
they might begin rested and refreshed, this being the Doctor's
invariable plan, that Mr Morris was the only person in the
establishment who was busy. He had received the foolscap sheets from
the printer, carried them to his desk, upon which lay quite a pile of
new thick white blotting-paper, and taking his seat, sat quite alone,
chuckling with delight as he skimmed over his series of mathematical
questions, one and all extracted from those which had been used at
Cambridge.
"Ha, ha!" he chuckled. "This will puzzle some of them! This will make
some of them screw up their foreheads! The stiffest paper I ever set.
Eh? What's that?"
He started up, looking round, for there had been a sound like a soft
thump; but he could see nothing on account of intervening desks. But,
all the same, Wrench's tom-cat had leaped gently down to the floor, and
from there he bounded on to one of the lines of desks, along which he
stole very carefully, pausing to sniff at each keyhole as he leaned
over, fully aware as he was that several of these desks were used as
menageries, in addition to a very favourite one where he had paused more
than once on account of the delicious black-beetly odour stealing up
through the cracks, and which denoted white mice.
In one desk silkworms began as eggs upon a sheet of paper, ate, and grew
themselves into fine, fat, transparent straw-coloured larvae which
afterwards spun cocoons. In another there were a couple of beautiful
little green lizards; while one boy had his desk divided into two
portions by means of a piece of board cut to a cardboard-plan by the
Plymborough carpenter at a price. In one portion of the desk there were
books and sundry tops and balls; the other was the home of a baby
hedgehog, which lived upon bread and milk, and had a bad habit of
sitting in its saucer.
In the next row of desks there was rather an odorous creature which
puzzled Tom a good deal; so much so that when the theatre was empty he
made that desk a special spot for study in a very uncomfortable
position, crouching as he did upon the slope with his head hanging over
the edge and his nose close to the keyhole.
That desk required much thought, for he was convinced by gliding sounds
that there was a live occupant therein, and his impression was that it
was good to eat; but he had never seen inside, and was not aware that it
contained an ordinary grass-snake.
Tom was convinced too, though he had never seen it, and was not aware of
the differences in tails, that the inhabitant of another desk--
enlightened as he was by sundry scratchings and gnawings--was a rat,
though it was only Fatty Brown's young squirrel, which was destroying
the imprisoning wood in a way that was alarming to the owner of the
desk.
There were several other desks in the big theatre which gave forth
sounds and excited Tom's curiosity, for Dr Bewley's young gentlemen
affected zoology even as far as young birds, though not to any very
great extent, as, not being nightingales, they did not nourish in the
dark.
But enough has been said to account for the cat's love of study when the
theatre was vacated by the pupils, and upon this particular occasion,
taking little heed of Mr Morris, Tom went on investigating with his
nose till he had reached the end of one series of desks, and, bounding
across the intervening space, he came down with a thump upon the next,
making Mr Morris look up sharply, snatch up a pocket lexicon, and send
it flying, in company with the words, "Tsh! Cat!"
The next moment he was alone; and, in perfect satisfaction with the
stiffness of his papers, he descended from his place and proceeded to
lay neatly along the rows before him a carefully doubled set of
half-a-dozen sheets of white blotting-paper, till one stood out clear
and clean upon every pupil's desk.
This done, he proceeded to work his way back by placing a blue printed
sheet of foolscap upon each improvised blotting-pad. It was all
carefully and neatly done, for Mr Morris's mathematical brain led him
to square the paper parallelograms, as he would have termed them, with
the greatest exactitude, before going away to his own desk to gaze back
over the blue and white patchwork before him, and give utterance once
more to his thoughts regarding the puzzledom which would exist the next
morning when the boys took their places.
"A magnificent mental exercise," he said proudly, before marching slowly
down the big room like a mathematical general surveying the field where
he was to do battle next day with the enemy in the shape of sloth and
ignorance.
So wrapped up was he in self that he passed out without noticing that he
was watched by one who waited till he was out of sight, and then, though
the door was open, preferred to enter by the window, leap on to a desk,
and then slowly proceed from one to the other; not in a bold open way,
but in a slinking, snaky, crawling fashion, as if about to spring upon
some object of prey.
The peculiarity of this was that it necessitated great extension of
person; and as, after the fashion of all cats save those that belong to
the Isle of Man, Tom carried his tail behind him, he went on in
ignorance of the fact that more than once the furry end touched lightly
in a more than usually well-filled ink-well, the result being an inky
trail, which, however, dried rapidly in the warm theatre, and was not
likely to excite notice upon unpainted desk-lids which were dotted with
the blots and smudges made by hundreds of boys.
But sometimes great discoveries come from very small things, and
Wrench's Tom played his part in one of the little comedies of life,
those of Terence and Plautus not being intended here.