He was obsessed; he spent the entire day now in the composition of poetry—all bawdy variations of a theme. And he could not bring himself to destroy them. His desk was stuffed with tiny crumpled balls of writing: one day, during the geography lesson, the woman caught him. His bones turned to rubber as she bore down on him glaring, and took from the concealing pages of his book the paper on which he had been writing. At recess she cleared his desk, read the sequence, and, with boding quietness, bade him to see the principal after school.
“What does it mean? What do you reckon it means?” he whispered dryly to Otto Krause.
“Oh, you’ll ketch it now!” said Otto Krause, laughing hoarsely.
And the class tormented him slily, rubbing their bottoms when they caught his eye, and making grimaces of agony.
He was sick through to his guts. He had a loathing of physical humiliation which was not based on fear, from which he never recovered. The brazen insensitive spirit of the boys he envied but could not imitate: they would howl loudly under punishment, in order to mitigate it, and they were vaingloriously unconcerned ten minutes later. He did not think he could endure being whipped by the fat young man with the flower: at three o’clock, white-faced, he went to the man’s office.
Armstrong, slit-eyed and thin lipped, began to swish the cane he held in his hand through the air as Eugene entered. Behind him, smoothed and flatted on his desk, was stacked the damning pile of rhymed insult.
“Did you write these?” he demanded, narrowing his eyes to little points in order to frighten his victim.
“Yes,” said Eugene.
The principal cut the air again with his cane. He had visited Daisy several times, had eaten at Gant’s plenteous board. He remembered very well.
“What have I ever done to you, son, that you should feel this way?” he said, with a sudden change of whining magnanimity.
“N-n-nothing,” said Eugene.
“Do you think you’ll ever do it again?” said he, becoming ominous again.
“N-no, sir,” Eugene answered, in the ghost of a voice.
