He went, with his rustling gown gathered up in his arm, straight to the desk that Mr. Tovey was wont to occupy, and for five awful minutes, without the slightest allusion to Thucydides, continued reading from the sheaf of papers he carried with him. He did not look at all pleasant, as occasionally he made a note, or occasionally drew his thick blue pencil across a page. And all the time the hapless Remove A sat in a state of confirmed pessimism.
It was noticed that he had divided his sheaf into two packets. He came to the end of it, and tore up, across and across, the larger packet of the two. The rest numbered perhaps half a dozen sheets. Then he spoke.
“I have never seen a worse set of unseen translations than those which the form showed up to Maddox this morning,” he said. “Some half-dozen are passable, and one, that of Blaize, is good, or nearly so. Blaize!”
“What is your place in the form by the half-term marks?”
“Seventeenth, sir,” said David, from his lowly abode.
The Head glared at him and spoke very advisedly.
“That is a disgraceful place for a boy who can make such a decent unseen translation,” he observed.
This had precisely the effect that that diabolical Head had intended. Rather bad luck on Blaize, reflected the form generally, to be whacked for cribbing, and then to be slated by the Head for being so low.
“You may close your books for the present,” he said, “and listen to what I have to say to you. It is an extremely serious matter. Before doing your unseen you construed a piece of prepared work, and out of the twenty-four boys in the form, sixteen got practically full marks for it. You may remember that at last lesson I took away from Maddox the crib he had brought in with him, and I also took the transcription of the shorthand notes he had made. I see, by referring to the crib, that all, or, I think, nearly all of the boys who got full marks, had used that crib. They had not even the sense to alter their translations so that their indebtedness to it should not have been so glaringly obvious. They are fools, in fact, as well as knaves, and I have no use in Remove A or in any other part of the school for either. Now I have not the slightest intention of asking any of you if you used a crib or not, because, without your telling me, I know that you did. I will just take one instance, the first that comes to hand. Gregson translated his prepared lesson perfectly, and in it used three expressions which were identical with expressions in Bohn’s translation. His unseen, on the other hand, was simply beneath contempt. I use his name only as the first that occurs to me, and I do not single him out as being a worse offender than many others. Nor do I wish him or any of you to confess, still less to deny that he used a crib. He and you alike are a very rotten set of fellows.”