What Harmon couldn’t understand was why he bothered at all, why he kept making these furious attacks on the paper, only to sit back each time after a little while, frustrated and tired. Wasn’t it obvious to him that he couldn’t win? What were his thoughts as he gazed out of the windows? Where was he when his face took on that blank, almost vacant expression?
Maybe Harmon should stop this now, put an end to it. Plainly the lad wasn’t getting anywhere . . .
They were now (the headmaster glanced at his watch) thirty-five minutes into the maths section. As the boy sat back yet again, his arms dangling and his eyes half-closed behind the lenses of his spectacles, so Harmon quietly stood up and approached him from the rear. Outside, the rain was blowing in gusts against the windowpanes; in here, an old clock ticked on the wall, pacing the head’s breathing. He glanced over Keogh’s shoulder, not really knowing what he expected to see.
His glance became a fixed stare. He blinked, blinked again, and his eyes opened wide. His eyebrows drew together as he craned his neck the better to see. If Keogh heard his gasp of astonishment he made no sign, remained seated, continued to gaze blearily at the rain rivering the windows.
Harmon took a step backwards away from the boy, turned and went back to his desk. He seated himself, slid open a drawer, held his breath and took out the answers to the maths section. Keogh had not only answered the questions, he’d got them right! All of them! That last frenzied burst of work had been him working on the sixth and last. Moreover he’d accomplished it with the very minimum of rough work and hardly any use at all of the familiar and accepted formulae.
Finally the head allowed himself a deep, deep breath, gawped again at the printed answer sheets in his hand -the masses of complicated workings and neatly resolved solutions – then carefully placed them back in the drawer and slid it shut. He could hardly credit it. If he hadn’t been sitting here through the entire examination, he’d swear the boy must have cheated. But quite obviously, that was not the case. So … what did Harmon have here?
‘Intuitive,’ Howard Jamieson had called the boy, an intuitive mathematician’. Very well, Harmon would see how well (if at all) this intuition of his worked with the next paper. Meanwhile –
The headmaster rubbed his chin and stared thoughtfully at the back of Keogh’s head. He must speak to both Jamieson and young George Hannant (who’d first brought the boy to Jamieson’s attention, apparently) at greater length. These were early days, of course, but … intuition? It seemed to Harmon that there just might be another word for what Keogh was, one which the teachers it Harden simply hadn’t thought to apply. Harmon could well understand that, for he too was reluctant. > The word in Harmon’s mind was ‘genius’, and if this was so then certainly there was a place for Keogh at the Tech. Harmon would soon discover if he was right. And of course he was. It was only in his application that he was wrong. Keogh’s ‘genius’ lay in an entirely different direction.
Jack Harmon was short, fat, hirsute and generally apish. He would be quite ugly except that he exuded a friendliness and an aura of well-being that cut right through his outer guise to show the man inside for what he really was: one of Nature’s truest gentlemen. He also had a quite brilliant mind.
In Harmon’s younger days he had known George Hannant’s father. That was when J. G. Hannant had been head at Harden and Harmon had taught elementary Maths and Science at a tiny school in Morton, another colliery village. On and off over the intervening years he’d met the younger Hannant and so watched him grow up. It had come as no great surprise to him to learn that George Hannant, too, had finally come into ‘the business’ – teaching must be as much a part of him as it had been of his father.
‘Young Hannant’, Harmon had always thought of him. Ridiculous – for of course George had been a teacher now for almost twenty years!