When now and again I went into one of
the master's studies and felt a carpet under my feet, and saw a
pleasant litter of pipes and novels lying on the table, it seemed to
me that I was in a holy place, and I looked at the hearthrug, the
wallpaper, and the upholstered chairs with a kind of desolate love
for things that were nice to see and touch. I suppose that if we had
been in a workhouse, a prison, or a lunatic asylum, our æesthetic
environment would have been very much the same as it was at school;
and afterwards when I went with the cricket and football teams to
other grammar schools they all gave me the same impression of clean
ugliness. It is not surprising that few boys emerge from their school
life with that feeling for colour and form which is common to nearly
all children. There was something very unpleasant to me in the fact that we all
washed with the same kind of soap, drank out of the same kind of cup,
and in general did the same things at the same time. The school
timetable robbed life of all those accidental variations that make it
interesting. Our meals, our games, even our hours of freedom seemed
only like subtle lessons. We had to eat at a certain hour whether we
were hungry or not, we had to play at a certain hour when perhaps we
wanted to sit still and be quiet. The whole school discipline tended
to the formation of habits at the expense of our reasoning faculties. Yet the astonishing thing to me was that the boys themselves set up
standards of conduct that still further narrowed 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-begone monosyllables and
hiccoughs. Nevertheless he seemed to understand me very well, and
though he did not say much, I felt by the way in which he puffed out
great, generous clouds of smoke, that he sympathised with me. He told
me to come and see him twice a week, and that I was at liberty to
read any of his books, and in general gave me a sense that I was
unfortunate rather than criminal. This did me good, because a large
part of my unhappiness was due to the fact that constant suppression
by majorities had robbed me of my self-respect. It is better for a
boy to be conceited than to be ashamed of his own nature, and to
shudder when he sees his face reflected in a glass. My second benefactor was nominally a boy, though in reality he was
nearly as old as the master, and was leaving at the end of the term
to go up to Oxford. He took me by the shoulder one evening in the
dusk, and walked me round and round the big clump of rhododendrons
that stood in the drive in front of the school. I did not understand
half he said, but to my great astonishment I heard him confessing
that he had always been unhappy at school, although at the end he
was captain in lessons, in games, in everything. I was, of course,
highly flattered that this giant should speak to me as an equal, and
admit me to his confidences. But I was even more delighted with the
encouraging light he threw on school life. "You're only here for a
little spell, you know; you'll be surprised how short it is. And
don't be miserable just because you're different. I'm different; it's
a jolly good thing to be different." I was not used, to people who
took this wide view of circumstance, and his voice in the shadows
sounded like some one speaking in a story-book. Yet although his
monologue gave me an entirely new conception of life, no more of it
lingers in my mind, save his last reflective criticism. "All the
same, I don't see why you should always have dirty nails." He never
confided in me again, and I would have died rather than have reminded
him of his kindly indiscretion; but when he passed me in the
playground he seemed to look at me with a kind of reticent interest,
and it occurred to me that after all my queerness might not be such a
bad thing, might even be something to be proud of. The value of this discovery to me can hardly be exaggerated. Hitherto
in my relationships with the boys I had fought nothing but losing
battles, for I had taken it for granted that they were right and I
was wrong. But now that I had hit on the astonishing theory that the
individual has the right to think for himself, I saw quite clearly
that most of their standards of conduct sprang from their sheep-like
stupidity. They moved in flocks because they had not the courage to
choose a line for themselves. The material result of this new theory
of life was to make me enormously conceited, and I moved among my
comrades with a mysterious confidence, and gave myself the airs of a
Byron in knickerbockers.