So William was left alone, bereft of his faithful friends, gloomily picturing their existence as one glorified holiday. But his troubles did not end there. Mr. Cremer, William's peaceful and long-suffering form master, became ill, and the next morning his place was taken by Mr. French.
William's attitude to his schoolmasters was, as a rule, one of pitying forbearance, but he was, on the whole, quite kindly disposed to them. He indulged their whims, he smiled at their jokes, he endured their sarcasm; but he refused to concentrate his mental powers on x's and y's and dates like 1815 in the few precious hours that were at his disposal in the evening. Instead of doing homework, he preferred to play at Red Indians or Pirates, or to hunt for rats and rabbits with Jumble, his mongrel dog.
Until the coming of Mr. French, William's relations with his schoolmasters had been fairly amicable. Mr. Cremer was a pacifist. He wanted peace at any price. He frankly avoided conflict with William. If he saw William quietly engaged in drawing beetles during his lesson, he did not expostulate. He thanked Heaven for it. He was not a proud man.
But Mr. French definitely disliked William. He kept him in till unreasonable hours in the evening. Upon William's making a quiet and unostentatious exit by way of the window when his back was turned, he followed William to his home, appeared suddenly when William was sitting down to a delayed but welcome meal, and led him ignominiously back.
When William and his special friends, according to their time-honoured custom, had bought a large pork-pie, to be passed surreptitiously round for a bite each, in order to beguile the tedium of a geometry lesson, Mr. French descended upon William as he was in the act of making the first bite, and condemned him to consume the mountainous whole before the assembled form. It was not that the pork-pie was really too much for William's digestive capacity. It was that even William felt the procedure to be lacking in dignity. Moreover, there was a stormy meeting afterwards of shareholders in the pie, who demanded their money back....
But it was when William had spent the whole of afternoon school laboriously writing the first chapter of what was to be an epoch-making story, and Mr. French had seized upon it, read it aloud to the form, and then burnt it publicly and disdainfully, that William felt it was time that something happened to Mr. French. He was proud of that story; he thought it sounded a jolly good yarn, even when read by Mr. French, who didn't seem to know how to pronounce half the words.
"The pleecemen rushed upon the outlor as he stood there so proud an' manly.
"'Ho, ho!' he cried. 'Come on, varlets, an I'll jolly well show you.'
"With one sweep of his gorry blade three pleecemen's heads roled of into a heep. He shot another through the brane, another fell strangled, an another, wot had a week hart, fell down dead at the horrible site. Only one was left.
"The outlor gave a snarling laugh through his clenshed teeth.