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.