CHAPTER XXI

I had formed no definite conception of what my new school would be like, but there was a flatness about the reality for which I was unprepared. I seemed to slip into my place at once, without attracting the slightest attention either of boys or masters, and at a week’s end any strangeness there might have been had completely worn off. I did not play football, which was the only game played this term. I got to know a good many boys, but I formed no friendships. I found my new companions to be, on the whole, little, if at all, more congenial than the boys at Newcastle, in spite of there being so many more to choose from. I liked them well enough, and they were, with one exception, perfectly decent to me, but it all ended there: that is to say, in my relation with them I had invariably to approach them on their own ground, I had to enter into _their_ world, they were incapable of entering into mine, or even of meeting me halfway. There was a boy I had felt attracted to, purely on account of his good-looks, and as our ways home lay in the same direction I joined him one afternoon just as he was going out at the gate. But the first words he uttered shattered my illusions. He had a harsh, loud voice and spoke through his nose. Almost at once he began to tell me what he imagined to be a funny story, and before I had been with him five minutes I said good-bye abruptly, and left him standing on the pavement, staring after me, nor did I ever speak to him again.

Day by day I went to school, neither liking it nor disliking it. Yet it was all rather dismal, for life without any kind of human sympathy, either given or received, is a dreadful, almost an impossible, thing. I thought a good deal of Katherine, and wrote to her, but got only an occasional scrappy note in reply. I did not see much of George, for he was kept in his business till nearly seven o’clock, and in the evenings I had to prepare my work for the next day. George, moreover, had his own circle of friends, none of whom, as I have said, were particularly eager for my company, while George himself, when he was among them, was the least eager of all. Sometimes when I was with him alone I would remember this and resent it, but he could always make me forgive him when he wanted to: he could be extraordinarily pleasant when he wanted to, and it was impossible to be bored in his company.

We still shared the same bedroom, and at night he liked to talk before going to sleep. He had obtained a considerable influence over me, more than anybody else ever did or was to do, yet it is difficult to describe what it consisted in, or why it should have come about. I had an extremely poor opinion of him: I knew he had not even a rudimentary conscience: frequently he repelled, and even disgusted, me: but always, by some instinct, he seemed to know when he had done so, and he had a special gift for recovering lost ground. His influence was bad――absolutely――and yet what was so harmful to me did not, so far as I know, have any particularly disastrous effect upon George himself. He had an amazingly licentious imagination, and, in this direction, a power of vivid suggestion. As I became more accustomed to him, things that had at first jarred upon me ceased to do so; but it was doubly unfortunate that I should have been thrown so intimately into his society just at this particular time. Had I been either older or younger, or had I had any other friends, the effect would not have been so injurious. It was not that I had not heard my share of Rabelaisian talk before. This was, somehow, different. At all events, the other had passed off me easily, awakening no after-thoughts, leaving my senses untroubled. It was not so now. My mind became disturbed, and, above all, my dreams were coloured by certain obsessions which George took a delight in evoking. In my dreams his suggestions became realities, and his imagination seemed to brood over them like an evil angel. I do not think he was himself conscious of it, conscious, that is, that what for him appeared to be no more than a sort of intellectual pastime, which he could shake from him as easily as one might turn off a tap, assumed with me a darker form. His words appeared to touch me physically, and with an appalling directness and persistency. He had a trick of re-telling stories he had read, twisting them and altering them with an astonishing ingenuity, so as to introduce the element he revelled in, and he never became crude or brutal till he had carefully prepared his ground. And it was all transformed by a curious gift of humour, which was in itself something quite inimitable, consisting, as it did, largely in his personality and manner, in an unquenchable liveliness, and a faculty of mimicry.