‘I can always be comfortable with you, Puddle,’ Stephen would say in a tone of satisfaction, ‘you’re like a nice chair; though you are so tiny yet one’s got room to stretch, I don’t know how you do it.’
Then Puddle would smile, and that smile would warm Stephen while it mocked her a little; but it also mocked Puddle—they would share that warm smile with its fun and its kindness, so that neither of them could feel hurt or embarrassed. And their friendship took root, growing strong and verdant, and it flourished like a green bay-tree in the schoolroom.
Came the time when Stephen began to realize that Puddle had genius—the genius of teaching; the genius of compelling her pupil to share in her own enthusiastic love of the Classics.
‘Oh, Stephen, if only you could read this in Greek!’ she would say, and her voice would sound full of excitement; ‘the beauty, the splendid dignity of it—it’s like the sea, Stephen, rather terrible but splendid; that’s the language, it’s far more virile than Latin.’ And Stephen would catch that sudden excitement, and determine to work even harder at Greek.
But Puddle did not live by the ancients alone, she taught Stephen to appreciate all literary beauty, observing in her pupil a really fine judgment, a great feeling for balance in sentences and words. A vast tract of new interest was thus opened up, and Stephen began to excel in composition; to her own deep amazement she found herself able to write many things that had long lain dormant in her heart—all the beauty of nature, for instance, she could write it. Impressions of childhood—gold light on the hills; the first cuckoo, mysterious, strangely alluring; those rides home from hunting together with her father—bare furrows, the meaning of those bare furrows. And later, how many queer hopes and queer longings, queer joys and even more curious frustrations. Joy of strength, splendid physical strength and courage; joy of health and sound sleep and refreshed awakening; joy of Raftery leaping under the saddle, joy of wind racing backward as Raftery leapt forward. And then, what? A sudden impenetrable darkness, a sudden vast void all nothingness and darkness; a sudden sense of acute apprehension: ‘I’m lost, where am I? Where am I? I’m nothing—yes I am, I’m Stephen—but that’s being nothing—’ then that horrible sense of apprehension.
Writing, it was like a heavenly balm, it was like the flowing out of deep waters, it was like the lifting of a load from the spirit; it brought with it a sense of relief, of assuagement. One could say things in writing without feeling self-conscious, without feeling shy and ashamed and foolish—one could even write of the days of young Nelson, smiling a very little as one did so.
Sometimes Puddle would sit alone in her bedroom reading and re-reading Stephen’s strange compositions; frowning, or smiling a little in her turn, at those turbulent, youthful outpourings.
She would think: ‘Here’s real talent, real red-hot talent—interesting to find it in that great, athletic creature; but what is she likely to make of her talent? She’s up agin the world, if she only knew it!’ Then Puddle would shake her head and look doubtful, feeling sorry for Stephen and the world in general.
3
This then was how Stephen conquered yet another kingdom, and at seventeen was not only athlete but student. Three years under Puddle’s ingenious tuition, and the girl was as proud of her brains as of her muscles—a trifle too proud, she was growing conceited, she was growing self-satisfied, arrogant even, and Sir Philip must tease her: ‘Ask Stephen, she’ll tell us. Stephen, what’s that reference to Adeimantus, something about a mind fixed on true being—doesn’t it come in Euripides, somewhere? Oh, no, I’m forgetting, of course it’s Plato; really my Greek is disgracefully rusty!’ Then Stephen would know that Sir Philip was laughing at her, but very kindly.