This twenty-four hours' delay concealed a plan. It secured me the respite of a day, the blessed Thursday, which would give me time to collect my forces.
Thursday comes. The sky is gray and cold. In this horrid weather, a grate well filled with coke has its charms. Let's warm ourselves and think.
Well, my boy, you've landed yourself in a nice predicament! How will you manage tomorrow? With a book, plodding all through the night, if necessary, you might scrape up something resembling a lesson, just enough to fill the dread hour more or less. Then you could see about the next: sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. But you haven't the book. And it's no use running out to the bookshop. Algebraical treatises are not current wares. You'll have to send for one, which will take a fortnight at least. And I've promised for tomorrow, for tomorrow certain! Another argument and one that admits of no reply: funds are low; my last pecuniary resources lie in the corner of a drawer. I count the money: it amounts to twelve sous, which is not enough.
Must I cry off? Rather not! One resource suggests itself: a highly improper one, I admit, not far removed indeed from larceny. O quiet paths of algebra, you are my excuse for this venial sin! Let me confess the temporary embezzlement.
Life at my college is more or less cloistered. In return for a modest payment, most of us masters are lodged in the building; and we take our meals at the principal's table. The science master, who is the big gun of the staff and lives in the town, has nevertheless, like ourselves, his own two cells, in addition to a balcony, or leads, where the chemical preparations give forth their suffocating gases in the open air. For this reason, he finds it more convenient to hold his class here during the greater part of the year. The boys come to these rooms in winter, in front of a grate stuffed full of coke, like mine, and there find a blackboard, a pneumatic trough, a mantelpiece covered with glass receivers, panoplies of bent tubes on the walls, and, lastly, a certain cupboard in which I remember seeing a row of books, the oracles consulted by the master in the course of his lessons.
'Among those books,' said I to myself, 'there is sure to be one on algebra. To ask the owner for the loan of it does not appeal to me. My amiable colleague would receive me superciliously and laugh at my ambitious aims. I am sure he would refuse my request.'
The future was to show that my distrust was justified. Narrow mindedness and petty jealousy prevail everywhere alike.
I decide to help myself to this book, which I should never get by asking. This is the half-holiday. The science master will not put in an appearance today; and the key of my room is practically the same as his. I go, with eyes and ears on the alert. My key does not quite fit; it sticks a little, then goes in; and an extra effort makes it turn in the lock. The door opens. I inspect the cupboard and find that it does contain an algebra book, one of the big, fat books which men used to write in those days, a book nearly half a foot thick. My legs give way beneath me. You poor specimen of a housebreaker, suppose you were caught at it! However, all goes well. Quick, let's lock the door again and go back to our own quarters with the pilfered volume.
And now we are together, O mysterious tome, whose Arab name breathes a strange mustiness of occult lore and claims kindred with the sciences of almagest and alchemy. What will you show me? Let us turn the leaves at random. Before fixing one's eyes on a definite point in the landscape, it is well to take a summary view of the whole. Page follows swiftly upon page, telling me nothing. A chapter catches my attention in the middle of the volume; it is headed, Newton's Binomial Theorem.
The title allures me. What can a binomial theorem be, especially one whose author is Newton, the great English mathematician who weighed the worlds? What has the mechanism of the sky to do with this? Let us read and seek for enlightenment. With my elbows on the table and my thumbs behind my ears, I concentrate all my attention.