XII

The presiding genius of the examinations was Lector Booklund, teacher of Latin in Lower and Upper Sixth.  He was short and stocky and gnarled by gout.  Instead of speaking, he emitted a series of verbal explosives, and the boy whose answers didn’t come quick enough became the object of withering scorn.  Most of his life seemed concentrated in his eyes where twinkling merriment and blazing anger alternated with bewildering rapidity.  He posed as a tyrant, but the boys who knew him well said that at heart he was as kind as he was just, and that his nervous impatience and bursts of rage were merely the results of severe physical sufferings.

The moment he caught sight of Keith among the boys up for examination, most of whom hailed from other schools, he became interested and began to draw him out.  And Keith was able to respond with some of his old-time quickwittedness.  His ambition had been stirred into a semblance of life through the shock of his failure, while the summer’s rest and peace had brought back some of his natural vivacity.  The inner conflict was still a source of trouble, but it did not seem quite so much a matter of life and death.  He had not yet passed the crisis, but he had reached a point where a little tactful nursing might put him on the right path again for good.  What he needed above all was encouragement, and that was what he got for a while from the new class principal.

He passed the examinations with ease.  Then the sense of being a favoured pupil once more made him throw himself into the studies with considerable zest.  Little by little, however, his zest slacked off.  More and more frequently he became the object of blame or ridicule instead of praise.  By and by Lector Booklund found it hard to ask him a question or give him a direction without open display of irritation.  It was evident that he felt disappointed in Keith, and he did not hesitate to show it.

Many causes combined to produce the slump in Keith’s aspirations that in its turn produced the changed attitude of the teacher.  The latter’s impatience had probably as much to do with it as anything else, while his splenetic manners and speech intimidated the boy’s already overwrought sensitiveness.  The subjects taught and the form of the teachings did their share, too.  Grammar and rules and dry data seemed to play a greater part than ever.  In Latin, for instance, they were reading Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the colourful old legends might easily have been used to arouse the boy’s interest, if attention had merely been concentrated on the stories told and the life revealed by them.  But the teacher was first and last a grammarian, and he would wax frantically enthusiastic over some subtle syntactic distinction which left Keith peevishly indifferent.  And Lector Booklund was positively jealous on behalf of his own subject, so that once he flung a bitingly sarcastic remark at the boy because his attention had flared up at the quoting of a phrase in English.