The last semester was over. Paul, carrying his books under his arm, slouched out of the High School yard, his cap pulled over his face.
Hell! Those kids! What if he had flunked in several things! He had just left a group who were betting on next year's football eleven. Next year by mid-season it would be a college or a business school for him. When he talked to those boys he tried to joke as they did about life and "smut". He was only really interested in what they said when they talked "smut". Then he looked at them curiously and wanted to be like them.
Like them! Good Lord! They were donkeys. Even the ones who sailed beyond him in their classes. He wanted them to know what he was—that his views were outrageous. But there was Felix, a short brown little monkey, a Russian Jew with excited far-seeing eyes, who enjoyed debating. He said Paul's vision was warped by his personal problem. Paul tried to make Felix talk about women. Felix blushed slightly, while his eyes, bright and remote, remained fixed unwaveringly on Paul's face. Felix said he respected women as the mothers of the race. He thought the boys at school had cheap ideas about sexual laxity. That he never was so utterly strong and possessed of himself as when he put women out of his mind. Then he could give his whole soul to humanity.
Paul blushed, yet sneered. Felix! Women! That brat! "Is your father a tailor or an undertaker, Felix?" Afterward it hurt Paul to remember the wrong idea of himself which he had been at such pains to impart. It would be nice to belong somewhere!
Away from the deserted schoolhouse, Paul strolled into the park. Against the gleaming afternoon sky that was a dim milky blue, the trees were shivering. He watched whirling oak leaves that looked black on the high branches. Stretched on the grass tops, silver spider threads twitched with reflections. The bright grass, bending, seemed to rush before him like a blown cloud. Deep blots of shadow were on the lake, where, here and there, taut strands of light sparkled and broke through the shaken surface.
May's step-mother. He kept trying to push that woman away, crowding up to him with her sanctimonious face. He wanted to do violence to something. He hated himself.
When he sat down on the grass and closed his eyes he thought again of going away. Already he could feel himself inwardly small, like a speck in distance. The harshly coruscated sea made a boiling sound on the stern of the ship. Beyond the blue-black strip of water that made his eyes ache there was a long thin beach with tiny houses on it. He could hear the dry rustle of leaves and cocoanut fronds. There was rain in the air and huge masses of plum-colored cloud made a strange darkness far off over the aching earth. A man in a red shirt ran along the shore, following, waving something. Then all in a moment it had become night and there was nothing but the hiss of the sea in the quietness. The glow from a lamp made a yellow stain on the mist and showed a half-naked sailor asleep on his side with his head thrown back.
When Paul saw things like this he was never certain where the vision came from. He wondered if he had made it himself, or if it were only something he had read about. The sharpness of his dream pleased and frightened him.
He slung his books to one side and buried his face in his hands. He was miserably conscious of his big grotesque body which he wanted to forget. Saving the world. Karl Marx. Men that go down to the sea in ships. Shipped away from here. Shipped as a sailor. He shook himself without lifting his face. He did not want to hate May, so he hated Aunt Julia instead.