CHAPTER V

CHEATING

Sec.1

Time carried us a year nearer the shadow of the Great War.  It brought us to our fourteenth year, at which period Doe’s mysterious intrigue with Freedham still awaited solution, and my Armageddon with Fillet still languished in a sort of trench-warfare.

It was now that our abominable form took to cheating once a week in Fillet’s class-room.  A Roman History lesson left invitingly open the opportunity to do so.  For Fillet’s method of examining our acquaintance with the chapter he had set to be learnt in Preparation was invariably the same.  He asked twenty questions, whose answers we had to write on paper.  He would then tell us the answers and allow us to correct our own work.  After this he would take down our marks.

Now, our form had been organised by the all-powerful statesman, Pennybet, who had lately been reading the Progressive Papers, into a Trade Union, of which the President was Mr. Archibald Pennybet.  He had decided (as it is the business of all trade unions to decide) that we were worked too hard.  We must organise to effect an improvement in the conditions of living.  To demand from the Head Master an instant reduction in the hours of labour didn’t seem feasible to our union of twenty members, but it would be quite easy by a co-operative effort to modify the extent of our Preparation.  At a mass-meeting of the workers Penny outlined his scheme—­Penny loved scheming, moving forces, and holding their reins.

It was a marvellous scheme.  We were to leave undone our Preparation for the Roman History lesson, and, when Fillet told us the answers, we were to write them down and credit ourselves with the marks.  “It’s not cheating,” explained our leader in his speech (and we were all very glad, I think, to hear that it wasn’t cheating), “because it’s not an effort to take an unfair advantage of each other.  It’s just a cordial understanding, by which we all lessen one another’s burdens.

“I and my executive,” continued Penny, “have all the details worked out to a nicety.  Here is a table for the whole term, showing how many marks each worker will give up week by week.  It is so graduated that the clever fellows will end up at the top, and those who would naturally slack will end up at the bottom.  My executive has decided that Doe is about the brainiest, so he comes out first”—­blushes from Doe—­“and I myself am willing to stand at the bottom.”

By this revelation of astonishing magnanimity Penny came out of the transaction, as he did out of most things that he put his hand to, with nothing but credit.

For half a term this comfortable scheme ran as merrily as a stream down hill.  And then a strange thing happened to me.  I was talking one afternoon to Penny on the absurdities of the Solar System, when I became conscious that my mind had closed upon seven words:  “That Rupert, the best of the lot.”