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The professor looked me compassionately in the face, and said in a quiet, but determined, voice: "You will not pass into the second course, Monsieur Irtenieff. You had better not complete the examinations. The faculty must be weeded out. The same with you, Monsieur Ikonin." Ikonin renewed his humble, piteous appeals, but the professor was inexorable.
"That will do," he added, and I saw him put down four marks to Ikonin in his register. "Come!" I thought to myself. "He cannot be so strict after all."
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.
"Well?" said the professor in the spectacles. Once more Ikonin opened his mouth, and once more remained silent. "Come! You are not the only one to be examined. Do you mean to answer or do you not?" said the youngish professor, but Ikonin did not even look at him. He was gazing fixedly at his ticket and uttered not a single word. Still not a word from Ikonin.
The terrible professor turned out to be a little thin, bilious-looking man with hair long and greasy and a face expressive of extraordinary sullenness. Handing Ikonin a copy of Cicero's Orations, he bid him translate. To my great astonishment Ikonin not only read off some of the Latin, but even managed to construe a few lines to the professor's prompting.
Ikonin, though taking a ticket with the same plunge of his whole body as he had done at the previous examinations, did at least return some sort of an answer this time, though a poor one. I, on the contrary, did just as he had done on the two previous occasions, or even worse, since I took a second ticket, yet for a second time returned no answer.
Then he gave his long hair a shake, and rapidly conned over what was written on his ticket. I think he had just opened his mouth to answer when the professor with the star dismissed the gymnasium student with a word of commendation, and then turned and looked at Ikonin. At once the latter seemed taken back, and stopped short. For about two minutes there was a dead silence.
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.
I lost no time in answering the question in syntax which had been put to Ikonin, but the professor only pulled a long face and turned away from me. "Well, your turn will come presently, and then we shall see how much you know," he remarked, without looking at me, but proceeding to explain to Ikonin the point on which he had questioned him.
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.
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