That Mr. B. had been shut in became, however, almost instantly known, and the night-class, usually so unruly, was awed by the event into exemplary decorum. There, with no master near us, in a silence rarely broken by a giggle or a catcall, we sat diligently working, or pretending to work. Through my brain, as I hung over my book a thousand new thoughts began to surge. I was the liberator, the tyrannicide; I had freed all my fellows from the odious oppressor. Surely, when they learned that it was I, they would cluster round me; surely, now, I should be somebody in the school-life, no longer a mere trotting shadow or invisible presence. The interval seemed long; at length Mr B. was released by a servant, and he came up into the school-room to find us in that ominous condition of suspense.
At first he said nothing. He sank upon a chair in a half-fainting attitude, while he pressed his hand to his side; his distress and silence redoubled the boys' surprise, and filled me with something like remorse. For the first time, I reflected that he was human, that perhaps he suffered. He rose presently and took a slate, upon which he wrote two questions: 'Did you do it?' 'Do you know who did?' and these he propounded to each boy in rotation. The prompt, redoubled 'No' in every case seemed to pile up his despair.
One of the last to whom he held, in silence, the trembling slate was the perpetrator. As I saw the moment approach, an unspeakable timidity swept over me. I reflected that no one had seen me, that no one could accuse me. Nothing could be easier or safer than to deny, nothing more perplexing to the enemy, nothing less perilous for the culprit. A flood of plausible reasons invaded my brain; Iseemed to see this to be a case in which to tell the truth would be not merely foolish, it would be wrong. Yet when the usher stood before me, holding the slate out in his white and shaking hand, I seized the pencil, and, ignoring the first question, Iwrote 'Yes' firmly against the second. I suppose that the ambiguity of this action puzzled Mr B. He pressed me to answer:
'Did you do it?' but to that I was obstinately dumb; and away Iwas hurried to an empty bed-room, where for the whole of that night and the next day I was held a prisoner, visited at intervals by the headmaster and other inquisitorial persons, until I was gradually persuaded to make a full confession and apology.
This absurd little incident had one effect, it revealed me to my schoolfellows as an existence. From that time forth I lay no longer under the stigma of invisibility; I had produced my material shape and had thrown my shadow for a moment into a legend. But, in other respects, things went on much as before.
Curiously uninfluenced by my surroundings, I in my turn failed to exercise influence, and my practical isolation was no less than it had been before. It was thus that it came about that my social memories of my boarding-school life are monotonous and vague. It was a period during which, as it appears to me now on looking back, the stream of my spiritual nature spread out into a shallow pool which was almost stagnant. I was labouring to gain those elements of conventional knowledge, which had, in many cases, up to that time been singularly lacking. But my brain was starved, and my intellectual perceptions were veiled. Elder persons who in later years would speak to me frankly of my school-days assured me that, while I had often struck them as a smart and quaint and even interesting child, all promise seemed to fade out of me as a schoolboy, and that those who were most inclined to be indulgent gave up the hope that I should prove a man in a way remarkable.
This was particularly the case with the most indulgent of my protectors, my refined and gentle stepmother.
As this record can, however, have no value that is not based on its rigorous adhesion to the truth, I am bound to say that the dreariness and sterility of my school-life were more apparent than real. I was pursuing certain lines of moral and mental development all the time, and since my schoolmasters and my school fellows combined in thinking me so dull, I will display a tardy touch of 'proper spirit' and ask whether it may not partly have been because they were themselves so commonplace. I think that if some drops of sympathy, that magic dew of Paradise, had fallen upon my desert, it might have blossomed like the rose, or, at all events, like that chimerical flower, the Rose of Jericho.
As it was, the conventionality around me, the intellectual drought, gave me no opportunity of outward growth. They did not destroy, but they cooped up, and rendered slow and inefficient, that internal life which continued, as I have said, to live on unseen. This took the form of dreams and speculations, in the course of which I went through many tortuous processes of the mind, the actual aims of which were futile, although the movements themselves were useful. If I may more minutely define my meaning, I would say that in my schooldays, without possessing thoughts, I yet prepared my mind for thinking, and learned how to think.
The great subject of my curiosity at this time was words, as instruments of expression. I was incessant in adding to my vocabulary, and in finding accurate and individual terms for things. Here, too, the exercise preceded the employment, since Iwas busy providing myself with words before I had any ideas to express with them. When I read Shakespeare and came upon the passage in which Prospero tells Caliban that he had no thoughts until his master taught him words, I remember starting with amazement at the poet's intuition, for such a Caliban had I been:
I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other, when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like A thing most brutish; I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them know.
