The Ghost Ship | Page 9

not abate
my sufferings a jot; for it was clear that they did not find it distasteful,
and they therefore became as unsympathetic for me as the smell and
noise and rotting stones of the school itself.
The masters moved as it were in another world, and, as the classes were

large, they understood me as little as I understood them. They knew
that I was idle and untruthful, and they could not know that I was as
full of nerves as a girl, and that the mere task of getting to school every
morning made me physically sick. They punished me repeatedly and in
vain, for I found every hour I passed within the walls of the school an
overwhelming punishment in itself, and nothing I made any difference
to me. I lied to them because they expected it, and because I had no
words in which to express the truth if I knew it, which is doubtful. For
some reason I could not tell them at home why I got on so badly at
school, or no doubt they would have taken me away and sent me to a
country school, as they did afterwards. Nearly all the real sorrows of
childhood are due to this dumbness of the emotions; we teach children
to convey facts by means of words, but we do not teach them how to
make their feelings intelligible. Unfortunately, perhaps, I was very
happy at night with my story-books and my dreams, so that the real
misery of my days escaped the attention of the grown-up people. Of
course I never even thought of doing my homework, and the labour of
inventing new lies every day to account for my negligence became so
wearisome that once or twice I told the truth and simply said I had not
done it; but the masters held that this frankness aggravated the offence,
and I had to take up anew my tiresome tale of improbable calamities.
Sometimes my stories were so wild that the whole class would laugh,
and I would have to laugh myself; yet on the strength of this elaborate
politeness to authority I came to believe myself that I was untruthful by
nature.
The boys disliked me because I was not sociable, but after a time they
grew tired of bullying me and left me alone. I detested them because
they were all so much alike that their numbers filled me with horror. I
remember that the first day I went to school I walked round and round
the quadrangle in the luncheon-hour, and every boy who passed
stopped me and asked me my name and what my father was. When I
said he was an engineer every one of the boys replied, "Oh! the man
who drives the engine." The reiteration of this childish joke made me
hate them from the first, and afterwards I discovered that they were
equally unimaginative in everything they did. Sometimes I would stand
in the midst of them, and wonder what was the matter with me that I
should be so different from all the rest. When they teased me, repeating

the same questions over and over again, I cried easily, like a girl,
without quite knowing why, for their stupidities could not hurt my
reason; but when they bullied me I did not cry, because the pain made
me forget the sadness of my heart. Perhaps it was because of this that
they thought I was a little mad.
Grey day followed grey day, and I might in time have abandoned all
efforts to be faithful to my dreams, and achieved a kind of beast-like
submission that was all the authorities expected of notorious dunces. I
might have taught my senses to accept the evil conditions of life in that
unclean place; I might even have succeeded in making myself one with
the army of shadows that thronged in the quadrangle and filled the air
with meaningless noise.
But one evening when I reached home I saw by the faces of the
grown-up people that something had upset their elaborate precautions
for an ordered life, and I discovered that my brother, who had stayed at
home with a cold, was ill in bed with the measles. For a while the
significance of the news escaped me; then, with a sudden movement of
my heart, which made me feel ill, I realised that probably I would have
to stay away from school because of the infection. My feet tapped on
the floor with joy, though I tried to appear unconcerned. Then, as I
nursed my sudden hope of freedom, a little fearfully lest it should prove
an illusion, a new and enchanting idea came to me. I slipped from the
room, ran upstairs to my bedroom and, standing by