The Passionate Year Read Online Free PDF Page B

try to remember all of it, but I guess when I’m in there
I shall just do whatever occurs to me at the moment.” To which Clanwell
replied, putting a hand on Speed’s shoulder: “You couldn’t do better, my
lad.”
    Speed was very nervous as he took his seat on the dais at five to seven
and watched the school straggling to their places. They came in quietly
enough, but there was an atmosphere of subdued expectancy of which Speed was
keenly conscious; the boys stared about them, grinned at each other, seemed
as if they were waiting for something to happen. Nevertheless, at five past
seven all was perfectly quiet and orderly, although it was obvious that
little work was being done. Speed felt rather as if he were sitting on a
powder-magazine, and there was a sense in which he was eager for the storm to
break.
    At about a quarter-past seven a banging of desk-lids began at the far end
of the hall.
    He stood up and said, quietly, but in a voice that carried well: “I don’t
want to be hard on anybody, so I’d better warn you that I shall punish any
disorderliness very severely.”
    There was some tittering, and for a moment or so he wondered if he had
made a fool of himself.
    Then he saw a bright, rather pleasant-faced boy in one of the back rows
deliberately raise a desk-lid and drop it with a bang. Speed consulted the
map of the desks that was in front of him and by counting down the rows
discovered the boy’s name to be Worsley. He wondered how the name should be
pronounced—whether the first syllable should rhyme with “purse” or with
“horse.” Instinct in him, that uncanny feeling for atmosphere, embarked him
on an outrageously bold adventure, nothing less than a piece of
facetiousness, the most dangerous weapon in a new Master’s armoury, and the
one most of all likely to recoil on himself. He stood up again and said:
“Wawsley or Wurssley—however you call yourself—you have a hundred
lines!”
    The whole assembly roared with laughter. That frightened him a little.
Supposing they did not stop laughing! He remembered an occasion at his own
school when a class had ragged a certain Master very neatly and subtly by
pretending to go off into hysterics of laughter at some trifling witticism of
his.
    When the laughter subsided, a lean, rather clever-looking boy rose up in
the front row but one and said, impudently: “Please, sir, I’m Worsley. I
didn’t do anything.”
    Speed replied promptly: “Oh, didn’t you? Well, you’ve got a hundred lines,
anyway.”
    “What for, sir?”—in hot indignation.
    “For sitting in your wrong desk.”
    Again the assembly laughed, but there was no mistaking the respectfulness
that underlay the merriment. And, as a matter of fact, the rest of the
evening passed entirely without incident. After the others had gone, and when
the school-bell had rung for evening chapel, Worsley came up to the dais
accompanied by the pleasant-faced boy who dropped the desk-lid. Worsley
pleaded for the remission of his hundred lines, and the other boy supported
him, urging that it was he and not Worsley who had dropped the lid.
    “And what is your name?” asked Speed.
    “Naylor, sir.”
    “Very well, Naylor, you and Worsley can share the hundred lines between
you.” He added smiling “I’ve no doubt you’re neither of you worse than
anybody else but you must pay the penalty of being, pioneers.”
    They went away laughing.
    That night Speed went into Clanwell’s room for a chat before bedtime, and
Clanwell congratulated him fulsomely on his successful passage of the ordeal.
“As, a matter of fact,” Clanwell said, “I happen to know that they’d prepared
a star benefit performance for you but that you put them off, somehow, from
the beginning. The prefects get to hear of these things and they tell me.. Of
course, I don’t take any official notice of them. It doesn’t matter to me
what plans people make—it’s when any are put into