第17章

"Eh, what?"--and Woloda straightway began to expound to me Newton's Binomial, but so rapidly and unintelligibly that, suddenly reading in my eyes certain misgivings as to the soundness of his knowledge, he glanced also at Dimitri's face.

Clearly, he saw the same misgivings there, for he blushed hotly, though still continuing his involved explanations.

"No; hold on, Woloda, and let me try and do it," put in Dimitri at length, with a glance at the professors' corner as he seated himself beside me.

I could see that my friend was in the best of humours.This was always the case with him when he was satisfied with himself, and was one of the things in him which I liked best.Inasmuch as he knew mathematics well and could speak clearly, he hammered the question so thoroughly into my head that I can remember it to this day.Hardly had he finished when St.Jerome said to me in a loud whisper, "A vous, Nicolas," and I followed Ikonin out from among the desks without having had an opportunity of going through the OTHER question of which I was ignorant.At the table which we now approached were seated two professors, while before the blackboard stood a gymnasium student, who was working some formula aloud, and knocking bits off the end of the chalk with his too vigorous strokes.He even continued writing after one of the Professors had said to him "Enough!" and bidden us draw our tickets."Suppose I get the Theory of Combinations?" I thought to myself as my tremulous fingers took a ticket from among a bundle wrapped in torn paper.Ikonin, for his part, reached across the table with the same assurance, and the same sidelong movement of his whole body, as he had done at the previous examination.

Taking the topmost ticket without troubling to make further selection, he just glanced at it, and then frowned angrily.

"I always draw this kind of thing," he muttered.

I looked at mine.Horrors! It was the Theory of Combinations!

"What have you got?" whispered Ikonin at this point.

I showed him.

"Oh, I know that," he said.

"Will you make an exchange, then?"

"No.Besides, it would be all the same for me if I did," he contrived to whisper just as the professor called us up to the blackboard."I don't feel up to anything to-day."

"Then everything is lost!" I thought to myself.Instead of the brilliant result which I had anticipated I should be for ever covered with shame--more so even than Ikonin! Suddenly, under the very eyes of the professor, Ikonin turned to me, snatched my ticket out of my hands, and handed me his own.I looked at his ticket.It was Newton's Binomial!

The professor was a youngish man, with a pleasant, clever expression of face--an effect chiefly due to the prominence of the lower part of his forehead.

"What? Are you exchanging tickets, gentlemen?" he said.

"No.He only gave me his to look at, professor," answered Ikonin--

and, sure enough, the word "professor" was the last word that he uttered there.Once again, he stepped backwards towards me from the table, once again he looked at each of the professors in turn and then at myself, once again he smiled faintly, and once again he shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "It is no use, my good sirs." Then he returned to the desks.Subsequently, I learnt that this was the third year he had vainly attempted to matriculate.

I answered my question well, for I had just read it up; and the professor, kindly informing me that I had done even better than was required, placed me fifth.