Speed was very nervous as he took his seat on the dais at five to seven and watched the school straggling to their places. They came in quietly enough, but there was an atmosphere of subdued expectancy of which Speed was keenly conscious; the boys stared about them, grinned at each other, seemed as if they were waiting for something to happen. Nevertheless, at five past seven all was perfectly quiet and orderly, although it was obvious that little work was being done. Speed felt rather as if he were sitting on a powder-magazine, and there was a sense in which he was eager for the storm to break.
At about a quarter-past seven a banging of desk-lids began at the far end of the hall.
He stood up and said, quietly, but in a voice that carried well: "I don't want to be hard on anybody, so I'd better warn you that I shall punish any disorderliness very severely."
There was some tittering, and for a moment or so he wondered if he had made a fool of himself.
Then he saw a bright, rather pleasant-faced boy in one of the back rows deliberately raise a desk-lid and drop it with a bang. Speed consulted the map of the desks that was in front of him and by counting down the rows discovered the boy's name to be Worsley. He wondered how the name should be pronounced—whether the first syllable should rhyme with "purse" or with "horse." Instinct in him, that uncanny feeling for atmosphere, embarked him on an outrageously bold adventure, nothing less than a piece of facetiousness, the most dangerous weapon in a new Master's armoury, and the one most of all likely to recoil on himself. He stood up again and said: "Wawsley or Wurssley—however you call yourself—you have a hundred lines!"
The whole assembly roared with laughter. That frightened him a little. Supposing they did not stop laughing! He remembered an occasion at his own school when a class had ragged a certain Master very neatly and subtly by pretending to go off into hysterics of laughter at some trifling witticism of his.
When the laughter subsided, a lean, rather clever-looking boy rose up in the front row but one and said, impudently: "Please sir, I'm Worsley. I didn't do anything."
Speed replied promptly: "Oh, didn't you? Well, you've got a hundred lines, anyway."
"What for, sir"—in hot indignation.
"For sitting in your wrong desk."