And as this thought occurred to him, he also recalled Crossfield’s famous speech at the last Parliament and the laughter which had greeted it. Could he translate “Balbus hopped over a wall” without the dictionary? Ah! He thought sometimes he would try, just to prove how slanderous Crossfield’s insinuation had been. The result of all these cogitations was that Bloomfield began to discover he was not quite such an “all-round” man as his friends had told him. And that being so, had not he better qualify himself like an honest man for his post?
He did not like to confide the idea to his friends for fear of their laughter, but for a week or two at least he actually read rather hard on the sly. The worst of it was, that till the examinations next term there could be nothing to show for it. For the Sixth did not change their places every day as the lower forms did. There was no chance of leaping to the top at a bound by some lucky answer, or even of advancing a single desk. And therefore, however hard he worked this term, he would never rise above eighteenth classic in the eyes of the school, and that was not—well, he would have liked to be a little higher for the sake of Willoughby!
The outlook was not encouraging. Even Wibberly, the toady, and Silk, the Welcher, were better men than he was at classics.
Suppose, instead of spending his energy over classics, he were to get up one or two rousing speeches for the Parliament, which should take the shine out of every one else and carry the school by storm? It was not a bad idea. But the chance would not come. No one could get up a fine speech on such a hackneyed subject as “That Rowing is a finer Sport than Cricket,” or that “The Study of Science in Public Schools should be Abolished!” And when he did attempt to prepare an oration on the subject of Compulsory Football, the first friend he showed it to pointed out so many faults in the composition of the first sentence that prudence prompted him to put the effusion in the fire.
Meanwhile his friends and admirers kept him busy. Their delight seemed to be to seize on all the youngsters they could by any pretext lay hands on and hale them to appear before him. By this means they imagined they were making his authority known and dealing a serious blow at the less obtrusive captain in the schoolhouse.
Poor Bloomfield had to administer justice right and left for every imaginable offence, and was so watched and prompted by officious admirers that he was constantly losing his head and making himself ridiculous.
He gave one boy a thrashing for being found with a paper dart in his hand, because Game had reported him; and to another, who had stolen a book, he gave only twenty lines, because he was in the second-eleven. Cusack and Welcher, who was caught climbing the schoolhouse elms one Monday, he sentenced to an hour’s detention; and Pilbury, whom he caught in the same act on Tuesday, he deprived of play for a week—that is, he said he was not to leave his house for a week. But Pilbury turned up the very next day in the “Big,” under the very nose of the Parrett captain, who did not even observe his presence.
It was this sort of thing which, as the term dragged on, made Bloomfield more and more uncomfortable with his position. It was all very well for Game, and Ashley, and Wibberly to declare that but for him Willoughby would have gone to the dogs—it was all very well of them to make game of and caricature Riddell and his failures. Seeing is believing; and Bloomfield, whose heart was honest, and whose common sense, when left to itself, was not altogether feeble, could not help making the unpleasant discovery that he was not doing very much after all for Willoughby.
But the boat-race was now coming on. There, at any rate, was a sphere in which he need fear no rival. With Parrett’s boat at the head of the river, and he its stroke, he would at any rate have one claim on the obedience of Willoughby which nobody could gainsay.