A Javelin for Jonah Read Free Page A

youth in the front row.
    “Well, not that,” Hamish replied. “I will tell you what it is at the end of the session. My subject this morning is Jean-Paul Sartre. I shall speak entirely in French and when I have finished you will write in your notebooks, in either French or English, the gist of what I have said.” He glanced over his notes and began to utter. So did the students. They kept up a continual low murmuring all the time he was speaking. When he paused, so did they. When he resumed, they did the same. Hamish carried on his discourse without raising his voice. At the end of a quarter of an hour he stopped, smiled and said, “That’s it, then. Ten minutes to get down what you can remember.” He seated himself. The students began to write. He wondered what was going down in their notebooks. At any rate they had ceased to mutter. All appeared to be extremely busy, although he had no illusions about the sort of thing which was probably being written, for now and again there was a smothered guffaw as one student showed another what he had put into his notebook.
    The first climax came fairly soon. The youth who had asked him his name came out to the desk and said, “Please, sir, what’s the French for… ” (an unprintable word even in these days). He spoke loudly and clearly. The group looked up interestedly. One of the women students tittered. Hamish rose to his feet and picked up a piece of chalk as though he was going to write on the blackboard. Instead, he dropped the chalk, seized the student by the collar, swung him round and kicked him half across the room.
    “That’s the French you are asking for,” he said pleasantly, “and, if you can’t spell it, perhaps I can be of further assistance.” He looked at the class. “Does any other gentleman require help?” he asked quietly.
    “Yes, I do,” said a hulking young man at the back of the room. “You’ve hurt that poor boy. I demand satisfaction. I don’t like to see you hurt that poor boy.”
    “Oh, are you the champion of the oppressed?” asked Hamish, measuring him with his eye. The young man, who appeared to be among the oldest and was certainly the biggest of those present, stepped out from the ranks and came towards him. Without further speech he swung a heavy fist at Hamish’s head. Hamish avoided it easily, put his left fist with a sharp jab into the man’s brightly-coloured shirt-front and then clipped him under the jaw with his right. It was not, and was not intended to be, a knock-out blow.
    “Hey!” said the man, blinking. “How did that happen?”
    “Come again, and I’ll show you.”
    “Right,” said the fellow. He grinned good-naturedly. “In the gym, though, and, I think, with the gloves on.” He returned to his place. The youth whom Hamish had kicked limped out of the room, no doubt (thought Hamish) to confide his troubles to the Warden. Hamish seated himself again. He felt certain that his own troubles were by no means over, but he felt also that the preliminary skirmish had gone his way. He had no intention of allowing anybody to read out the scurrilous stuff which he was quite sure some, if not all, had put into their notebooks. Instead he said, “I shall now translate my lecture for you, so perhaps you will correct your own work and form your own opinion as to how much of the lecture you understood.”
    There were no more interruptions. When he had finished, amid what he thought he recognized as the brooding silence which precedes a thunderstorm, he wrote a short vocabulary on the blackboard and braced his shoulders against the missiles which he more or less expected would be thrown at him once his back was turned. These, singularly enough, did not materialize. Turning again to the students, he remarked in a quiet tone, “Some of you may care to use some of those words in your essay. The subject is Mémorial d’un Gladiateur Romain . Needless to say, the work is entirely optional, as I understand is customary