“And do you refuse to tell me? I am not here to be bullied, I may remind you.”
David felt slightly sick, but he had swallowed a good deal of chewed pen-handle.
“Do you refuse to tell me?” repeated the Head.
Then came one of those strange calms in the middle of cyclones, which sometimes puzzled the boys. But their conjecture, a perfectly right one, was that the Head, in spite of questions like these, did not like “sneaking.” Anyhow, for a moment his fierceness faded, and he nodded at David, just as one pal might nod to another in sympathetic assent.
Then he turned to the rest of the class, holding up the bedraggled weapon.
The miserable Bags stood up, without speech.
“Oh you, Crabtree,” said the awful voice. “And so Master Crabtree thinks that the calm and quiet of Sunday afternoon is made to give him leisure to forge these filthy weapons: that the paper you are given to write home on is designed to be desecrated to these foul usages, and the ink to supply filth to them. You will write out with the ink you have so strangely misused two hundred lines of Virgil in copper-plate hand, and eat your dinner at the pig-table, apart from your companions, for the next week.”
The pig-table, it may be mentioned, was a separate table in the dining-room without chairs, where boys detected in swinish habits had to take their meals standing for the period of their sentence. But poor Bags’s cup was not full yet, for the Head’s eagle eye fell on David’s inky mouth.
“I infer that the ink on Blaize’s lips was made by this weapon,” he said. “That is so? Then you will now beg Blaize’s pardon, and as soon as the Catechism and Bible-class is over, you will fetch a basin of water and bathe Blaize’s mouth with your own sponge, until it is pronounced clean by your matron. The hour for writing home is up. Sign your names, and direct your envelopes. Catechism!”
Now the Catechism-class had already been held, and the marks for it had been put down in the mottled-covered book which lay on Mr. Dutton’s desk. But to suggest or hint this was not less inconceivable than to propose playing leap-frog. The more imaginative saw that there might be fresh trouble when Catechism marks were put down, and it was found that Mr. Dutton had already entered them in his neat small handwriting, but the idea of venturing to correct the Head when he was in this brimstone-mood was merely unthinkable. David, indeed, the boldest of them all, and, at the moment, with something of the halo of martyrdom about him, wondered what would happen if he did so, but quailed before the possible result.