_ CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT. MR. MORRIS PREPARES
Examination-Day was rather a frequent periodical affair at Dr Bewley's. One month Monsieur Brohanne would have all the fun, as Glyn called it, an afternoon being devoted by the boys to the answering of questions, set by the French master, neatly printed upon a sheet of foolscap paper at the local printing-office, and carefully arranged upon a rough pad consisting of so many sheets of perfectly new blotting-paper upon each pupil's desk.
At another time it would be the Doctor's day, and his examination-papers would be distributed. By the same rule, in due time in the periodicity, Mr Rampson would revel in Latin puzzles; and Mr Morris would request the young gentlemen to build up curious constructions with perpendiculars, "slanting-diculars," and other varieties of the diagonal, in company with polygons and other forms of bodies with their many angles and curves, as set forth originally by a certain antique brain-puzzler of the name of Euclid, for the first part of the examination, the second portion consisting of that peculiar form of sport in which, instead of ordinary figures, the various letters of the alphabet were shuffled up and used for calculations, plused, minused, squared, and cubed up to any number of degrees, under the name of equations.
It was one afternoon prior to Morris's day, which was to begin at ten o'clock the next morning, and when the young gentlemen were all out in the play-field fallowing their brains for the next day's work, so that they might begin rested and refreshed, this being the Doctor's invariable plan, that Mr Morris was the only person in the establishment who was busy. He had received the foolscap sheets from the printer, carried them to his desk, upon which lay quite a pile of new thick white blotting-paper, and taking his seat, sat quite alone, chuckling with delight as he skimmed over his series of mathematical questions, one and all extracted from those which had been used at Cambridge.
"Ha, ha!" he chuckled. "This will puzzle some of them! This will make some of them screw up their foreheads! The stiffest paper I ever set. Eh? What's that?"
He started up, looking round, for there had been a sound like a soft thump; but he could see nothing on account of intervening desks. But, all the same, Wrench's tom-cat had leaped gently down to the floor, and from there he bounded on to one of the lines of desks, along which he stole very carefully, pausing to sniff at each keyhole as he leaned over, fully aware as he was that several of these desks were used as menageries, in addition to a very favourite one where he had paused more than once on account of the delicious black-beetly odour stealing up through the cracks, and which denoted white mice.
In one desk silkworms began as eggs upon a sheet of paper, ate, and grew themselves into fine, fat, transparent straw-coloured larvae which afterwards spun cocoons. In another there were a couple of beautiful little green lizards; while one boy had his desk divided into two portions by means of a piece of board cut to a cardboard-plan by the Plymborough carpenter at a price. In one portion of the desk there were books and sundry tops and balls; the other was the home of a baby hedgehog, which lived upon bread and milk, and had a bad habit of sitting in its saucer.
In the next row of desks there was rather an odorous creature which puzzled Tom a good deal; so much so that when the theatre was empty he made that desk a special spot for study in a very uncomfortable position, crouching as he did upon the slope with his head hanging over the edge and his nose close to the keyhole.
That desk required much thought, for he was convinced by gliding sounds that there was a live occupant therein, and his impression was that it was good to eat; but he had never seen inside, and was not aware that it contained an ordinary grass-snake.
Tom was convinced too, though he had never seen it, and was not aware of the differences in tails, that the inhabitant of another desk-- enlightened as he was by sundry scratchings and gnawings--was a rat, though it was only Fatty Brown's young squirrel, which was destroying the imprisoning wood in a way that was alarming to the owner of the desk.
There were several other desks in the big theatre which gave forth sounds and excited Tom's curiosity, for Dr Bewley's young gentlemen affected zoology even as far as young birds, though not to any very great extent, as, not being nightingales, they did not nourish in the dark.
But enough has been said to account for the cat's love of study when the theatre was vacated by the pupils, and upon this particular occasion, taking little heed of Mr Morris, Tom went on investigating with his nose till he had reached the end of one series of desks, and, bounding across the intervening space, he came down with a thump upon the next, making Mr Morris look up sharply, snatch up a pocket lexicon, and send it flying, in company with the words, "Tsh! Cat!"
The next moment he was alone; and, in perfect satisfaction with the stiffness of his papers, he descended from his place and proceeded to lay neatly along the rows before him a carefully doubled set of half-a-dozen sheets of white blotting-paper, till one stood out clear and clean upon every pupil's desk.
This done, he proceeded to work his way back by placing a blue printed sheet of foolscap upon each improvised blotting-pad. It was all carefully and neatly done, for Mr Morris's mathematical brain led him to square the paper parallelograms, as he would have termed them, with the greatest exactitude, before going away to his own desk to gaze back over the blue and white patchwork before him, and give utterance once more to his thoughts regarding the puzzledom which would exist the next morning when the boys took their places.
"A magnificent mental exercise," he said proudly, before marching slowly down the big room like a mathematical general surveying the field where he was to do battle next day with the enemy in the shape of sloth and ignorance.
So wrapped up was he in self that he passed out without noticing that he was watched by one who waited till he was out of sight, and then, though the door was open, preferred to enter by the window, leap on to a desk, and then slowly proceed from one to the other; not in a bold open way, but in a slinking, snaky, crawling fashion, as if about to spring upon some object of prey.
The peculiarity of this was that it necessitated great extension of person; and as, after the fashion of all cats save those that belong to the Isle of Man, Tom carried his tail behind him, he went on in ignorance of the fact that more than once the furry end touched lightly in a more than usually well-filled ink-well, the result being an inky trail, which, however, dried rapidly in the warm theatre, and was not likely to excite notice upon unpainted desk-lids which were dotted with the blots and smudges made by hundreds of boys.
But sometimes great discoveries come from very small things, and Wrench's Tom played his part in one of the little comedies of life, those of Terence and Plautus not being intended here. _