PARTISAN REVIEW
Bingo had heard everything. Instantly her voice came scream-
ing after me:
"Come here! Come here
this
instant! What was that you said?"
"I said it didn't hurt," I faltered out.
"How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a
proper thing to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!"
This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He contmued for a
length of time that frightened and astonished me-about five
min–
utes, it seemed-ending up by breaking the riding crop. The bone
handle went flying across the room.
"Look what you've made me do!" he said furiously, holding up
the broken crop.
I had fallen into a chair, weakly sniveling. I remember that this
was the only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually
reduced me to tears, and curiously enough I was not even now cry–
ing because of the pain. The second beating had not hurt very
much either. Fright and shame seemed to have anesthetized me. I
was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly
from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief
which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of
-desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in
a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were
such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.
I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked .and (b) outside my
control. The second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I
did not question. It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without
knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and
without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something
that you did: it might be something that happened to you. I do not
want to claim that this idea flashed into my mind as a complete
novelty at this very moment, under the blows of Sim's cane: I must
have had glimpses of it even before I left home, for my early child–
hood had not been altogether happy. But at any rate this was the
great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where
it was
not possible
for me to be good. And the double beating was a
turning point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harsh–
ness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more
terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate,
