SUCH, SUCH WERE THE
JOYS
539
satisfaction. Now all was nullified. There had been a sort of courage
in the first act, but my subsequent cowardice had wiped it out.
The fact I hardly noticed was that although Hall formally
challenged me to fight, he did not actually attack me. Indeed, after
receiving that one blow he never oppressed me again.
It
was perhaps
twenty years before I saw the significance of this. At the time I
could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the
weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish. I
did not see that in that case the weak have the right to make a dif–
ferent set of rules for themselves; because, even if such an idea had
occurred to me, there was no one in my environment who could
have confirmed me in it. I lived in a world of boys, gregarious
animals, questioning nothing, accepting the law of the stronger and
avenging their own humiliations by passing them down to someone
smaller. My situation was that of countless other boys, and if
potentially I was more of a rebel than most, it was only because, by
boyish standards, I was a poorer specimen. But I never did rebel in–
tellectually, only emotionally. I had nothing to help me except my
dumb selfishness, my inability- not, indeed, to despise myself, but
to
dislike
myself-my instinct to survive.
It was about a year after I hit John Hall in the face that I
left Crossgates forever. It was the end of a winter term. With a
sense of coming out from darkness into sunlight I put on my Old
Boy's tie as we dressed for the journey. I well remember the feeling
of that brand-new silk tie round my neck, a feeling of emancipation,
as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an
amulet against Bingo's voice and Sim's cane. I was escaping from
bondage. It was not that I expected, or even intended, to be any
more successful at a public school than I had been at Crossgates.
But still, I was escaping. I knew that at a public school there
would be more privacy, more neglect, more chance to be idle and
self-indulgent and degenerate. For years past I had been resolved–
unconsciously at first, but consciously later on-that when once my
scholarship was won I would "slack off" and cram no longer. This
resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages
of thirteen and twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of
avoidable work.
Bingo shook hands to say good-by. She even gave me my
