the possibilities of
our life. It was bad form to read too much, to write home except on
Sundays, to work outside the appointed hours, to talk to the day-boys,
to cultivate social relationships with the masters, to be Cambridge
in the boat-race, and in fine to hold any opinion or follow any
pursuit that was not approved by the majority. It was only by hiding
myself away in corners that I could enjoy any liberty of spirit, and
though my thoughts were often cheerless when I remembered the
relative freedom of home life, I preferred to linger with them rather
than to weary myself in breaking the little laws of a society for
which I was in no way fitted.

These were black days, rendered blacker by my morbid fear of the
physical weakness that made me liable to cry at any moment, sometimes
even without in the least knowing why. I was often on the brink of
disaster, but my fear of the boys' ridicule prevented me from
publicly disgracing myself. Once the headmaster called a boy into
his study, and he came out afterwards with red eyelids and a puffed
face. When they heard that his mother had died suddenly in India, all
the boys thought that these manifestations of sorrow were very
creditable, and in the best of taste, especially as he did not let
anybody see him crying. For my part I looked at him with a kind of
envy, this boy who could flaunt his woe where he would. I, too, had
my unassuageable sorrow for the home that was dead to me those
forlorn days; but I could only express it among the tombs in the
churchyard, or at night, muffled between the blankets, when the
silent dormitory seemed to listen with suspicious ears.

III

A consoling scrap of wisdom which unfortunately children do not find
written large in their copybooks is that sorrow is as transitory as
happiness. Although my childhood was strewn with the memorial wreaths
of dead miseries, I always had a morbid sense that my present
discomforts were immortal. So I had quite made up my mind that I
would continue to be unhappy at school, when the intervention of two
beings whom I had thought utterly remote from me, gave me a new
philosophy and reconciled me to life. The first was a master, who
found me grieving in one of my oubliettes and took me into his study
and tried to draw me out. Kindness always made me ineloquent, and
as I sat in his big basket chair and sniffed the delightful odour of
his pipe, I expressed myself chiefly in woe