He preferred study, involving solitude, to games which hurled him among companions of his own age. The chaplain took an interest in the queerly brilliant little mind, and gave the boy constant private coaching, with the result that he won a Grammar School scholarship, carrying advantages which he could not have enjoyed at the Foundlings’ Institution.
Two passions at this time began to possess him, giving him his only thrills of pleasure. The first was his love of the water. He swam like a fish. The first time he went with the other boys to the swimming baths he stood on the edge watching the swimmers; gazing, with brooding eyes, at the water, as if striving to capture an evasive memory.
“Jump in, Sparrow!” shouted the young master in charge. “There must always be a beginning. Don’t funk it!”
The lithe body quivered all over, a ripple of muscles under the smooth skin. He walked down the steps with the sudden alertness of one awaking from a long dream, slipped into the water, and, as it lapped around him, glided forward and swam from one end of the bath to the other, with the ease and grace of a little water animal.
They called him the Frog. They called him the Minnow. Later on, they called him the Sea-lion. It mattered nothing to him what they called him. He swam for the sheer joy of it. He felt more alive in the water than on land. He seemed to come nearer to finding something he had been seeking all his short life.
His first swim in the sea brought the swift resolve to eschew heaven. “Why?” asked another boy, to whom in an unusual moment of expansiveness he confided, as they shared a towel, this momentous decision. “Because,” said Luke, “once we get there, the Bible says there shall be no more sea.”
His other passion was for gazing in at windows, from the outside, after dark, when firelight gleamed fitfully on shining furniture; when unknown people sat talking, and smiling, and handing each other cups of tea; when they lighted lamps and candles, forgetting to draw the curtains and leaving the windows unshuttered.
When he left school and was launched on life, a lonely youth, to fend for himself, earning enough by his pen for his own modest needs, rousing himself to a few hours of brilliant work if he wanted new books, new clothes, or a complete holiday—this strange fascination grew. A hunger possessed him to look in at other people’s windows. He would walk miles to satisfy this craving. Out into the country, where farm kitchens sent a ruddy glow across the fields; where cottage windows gleamed like friendly stars. He would draw near, avoiding kennels and gravel paths, and feast his eyes on cosy rooms; husbands and wives, seated in easy chairs at the end of the day’s work; fathers and mothers, among their children; comfortable cats, purring before the fire; faithful dogs, suddenly alert, ears pricking, eyes on the window pane.
He had no wish to be within. His pleasure was to look in from outside, as a being from another world, with no personal share in this life’s loves and joys, with an insatiable desire to witness them.
Sometimes the inmates of these lighted rooms chanced to look up and see the strained face and sombre eyes gazing through the window. Then they would make a movement of fear or of anger; or a kindly move, as if to ask him in. In either case he would turn away quickly and disappear in the darkness. He had no wish to enter, he had no desire to share their joys. He only asked to view them from without.