SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
529
many questions unanswered. Thus, I knew in principle how the
baby gets into the woman, but I did not know how it gets out
again, because I had never followed the subject up. I knew all the
dirty words, and in my bad moments I would repeat them to my–
self, but I did not know what the worst of them meant, nor want
to know. They were abstractly wicked, a sort of verbal charm.
While I remained in this state, it was easy for me to remain ignorant
of any sexual misdeeds that went on about me, and to be hardly
wiser even when the row broke. At most, through the veiled and
terrible warnings of Bingo, Sim and all the rest of them, I grasped
that the crime of which we were all guilty was somehow connected
with the sexual organs. I had noticed, without feeling much in–
terest, that one's penis sometimes stands up of its own accord (this
starts happening to a boy long before he has any conscious sexual
desires), and I was inclined to believe, or half-believe, that
that
must be the crime. At any rate, it was something to do with the
penis-so much I understood. Many other boys, I have no doubt,
were equally in the dark.
Mter the talk on the Temple of the Body (days later, it seems
in
retrospect: the row seemed to continue for days), a dozen of
us were seated at the long shiny table which Sim used for the
scholarship, under Bingo's lowering eye. A long, desolate wail rang
out from a room somewhere above. A very small boy named
Ronald, aged no more than about ten, who was implicated in some
way, was being flogged, or was recovering from a flogging. At the
sound, Bingo's eyes searched our faces, and settled on me.
«You see,"
she said.
I will not swear that she said, "You see what you have done,"
but that was the sense of it. We were all bowed down with shame.
It was
our
fault. Somehow or other we had led poor Ronald astray:
we
were responsible for his agony and his ruin. Then Bingo turned
upon another boy named Heath. It is thirty years ago, and I can–
not remember for certain whether she merely quoted a verse from
the Bible, or whether she actually brought out a Bible and made
Heath read it; but at any rate the text indicated was:
"Who shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me,
it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
