518
PARTISAN REVIEW
there would be other spies posted here and there about the town.
All that day and the next I waited for the summons to the study,
and was surprised when it did not come. It did not seem to me
strange that the headmaster of a private school should dispose of an
army of informers, and I did not even imagine that he would have
to pay them. I assumed that any adult, inside the school or outside,
would collaborate voluntarily in preventing us from breaking thr
rules. Sim was all-powerful, and it was natural that his agents should
be everywhere. When this episode happened I do not think I can have
been less than twelve years old.
I hated Bingo and Sim, with a sort of shamefaced, remorseful
hatred, but it did not occur to me to doubt their judgment. When
they told me that I must either win a public school scholarship or
become an office boy at fourteen, I believed that those were the
unavoidable alternatives before me. And above all, I believed Bingo
and Sim when they told me they were my benefactors. I see now, of
course, that from Sim's point of view I was a good speculation.
He sank money in me, and he looked to get it back in the form
of prestige.
If
I had "gone off," as promising boys sometimes do, I
imagine that he would have got rid of me swiftly.
As
it was I won
him two scholarships when the time came, and no doubt he made
full use of them in his prospectuses. But it is difficult for a child to
realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child be–
lieves that the school exists to educate and that the schoolmaster
disciplines him either for his own good, or from a love of bullying.
Sim and Bingo had chosen to befriend me, and their friendship in–
cluded canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me
and saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I
believed in it. It was therefore clear that lowed them a vast debt
of gratitude. But I was
not
grateful, as I very well knew. On the
contrary, I hated both of them. I could not control my subjective
feelings, and I could not conceal them from myself. But it is wicked,
is it not, to hate your benefactors? So I was taught, and so I be–
lieved. A child accepts the codes of behavior that are presented to
it, even when it breaks them. From the age of eight, or even earlie"
the consciousness of sin was never far away from me.
If
I contrived
to seem callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of
shame and dismay. All through my boyhood I had a profound con-
