"Are you dumb?"
He remained silent. He was too old to be beaten; besides, this form of punishment was gradually being disused. He was therefore told to sit down.
He could translate the text into Swedish, but not in the way the teacher wished. That the teacher only permitted one way of translating seemed to him silly. He had already rushed through Cornelius in a few weeks, and this deliberate, unreasonable crawling when one could run, depressed him. He saw no sense in it.
The same kind of thing happened in the history lessons. "Now, John," the teacher would say, "tell me what you know about Gustav I."
The boy stands up, and his vagrant thoughts express themselves as follows: "What I know about Gustav I. Oh! a good deal. But I knew that when I was in the lowest class (he is now in the fourth), and the master knows it too. What is the good of repeating it all again?"
"Well! is that all you know?"
He had not said a word about Gustav I., and his school-fellows laughed. Now he felt angry, and tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. How should he begin? Gustav was born at Lindholm, in the province of Roslagen. Yes, but he and the teacher knew that long ago. How stupid to oblige him to repeat it.
"Ah, well!" continues the teacher, "you don't know your lesson, you know nothing of Gustav I." Now he opens his mouth, and says curtly and decidedly: "Yes, I know his history well."
"If you do, why don't you answer?"
The master's question seems to him a very stupid one, and now he will not answer. He drives away all thoughts about Gustav I. and forces himself to think of other things, the maps on the wall, the lamp hanging from the ceiling. He pretends to be deaf.