He read through his manuscript and then sat thinking and gnawing his knuckle. It would look queer now if he owned up. He must beat Wedderburn. He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns and Bradlaugh. Besides, he reflected, the glimpse of the rest of the slip he had had, was after all quite accidental, forced upon him by chance, a kind of providential revelation rather than an unfair advantage. It was not nearly so dishonest to avail himself of that as it was of Broome, who believed in the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for a First-Class. “Five minutes more,” said the demonstrator, folding up his paper and becoming observant. Hill watched the clock hands until two minutes remained, then he opened the book of answers, and with hot ears and an affectation of ease, gave his drawing of the lenticel its name.
When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of Wedderburn and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green who knew the demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human) said that in the result of the two examinations taken together, Hill had the advantage of a mark, 167 to 166, out of a possible 200. Every one admired Hill in a way, though the suspicion of “mugging” clung to him. But Hill was to find congratulations and Miss Haysman’s enhanced opinion of him, and even the decided decline in the crest of Wedderburn tainted by an unhappy memory. He felt a remarkable access of energy at first, and the note of a Democracy marching to Triumph returned to his Debating Society speeches; he worked at his comparative anatomy with tremendous zeal and effect, and he went on with his æsthetic education. But through it all, a vivid little picture was continually coming before his mind’s eye, of a sneakish person manipulating a slide....
No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no Higher Power existed to see it, but for all that it worried him. Memories are not dead things, but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted. Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on his memory became confused about it, until at last he was not sure, although he assured himself that he was sure, whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary. Then it is possible that Hill’s dietary was conducive to morbid conscientiousness,—a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a midday bun, and, at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient, such meat as his means determined, usually in a chophouse in a back street off the Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny and ninepenny classics, and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops. It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity. But apart from this influence on the feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to falsity, that the blasphemous Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed Atheists I am convinced: they may be, they usually are, fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves; but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal Churchmen. And, moreover, this memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman. For she now preferred him to Wedderburn so evidently that he felt sure he cared for her, and began reciprocating her attentions by timid marks of personal regard,—at one time he even bought a bunch of violets, carried it about in his pocket, and produced it with a stumbling explanation, withered and dead, in the gallery of old iron. It poisoned, too, the denunciation of capitalist dishonesty that had been one of his life’s pleasures. And, lastly, it poisoned his triumph over Wedderburn. Previously he had been Wedderburn’s superior in his own eyes, and had raged simply at a want of recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker suspicion of a positive inferiority. He fancied he found justification for his position in Browning; but they vanished on analysis. At last, moved curiously enough by exactly the same motive forces that had resulted in his dishonesty, he went to Professor Bindon and made a clean breast of the whole affair. As Hill was a paid student, Professor Bindon did not ask him to sit down, and he stood before the Professor’s desk as he made his confession.
“It’s a curious story,” said Professor Bindon, slowly realising how the thing reflected on himself, and then letting his anger rise. “A most remarkable story. I can’t understand your doing it, and I can’t understand this avowal. You’re a type of student—Cambridge men would never dream—I suppose I ought to have thought—Why did you cheat?”
“I didn’t—cheat,” said Hill.
“But you have just been telling me you did.”
“I thought I explained—”
“Either you cheated or you did not cheat.”
“I said my motion was involuntary—”
“I am not a metaphysician, I am a servant of science—of fact. You were told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If that is not cheating—”