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?”
I looked up at him, but made no reply.
“Do you hear me, sir?”