“You are disposed to be impertinent, Rendall; I have no desire to staunch the flowings of your brain, but I would remind you that God equipped mankind with legs and arms, and it was clearly not the intention that we should allow them to stagnate from disuse. That is a piece of wisdom you would do well in taking to heart. A brain that is overworked will conduct its owner unworthily, therefore I should tonic yours with a little exercise.”
Wynne had never held a very high opinion of the Head since the day he had been informed of the mysteries of perpetuating the species. On that occasion the Head had fallen very considerably in his esteem.
He had floundered sorrowfully in his logic, had shown embarrassment, and made a muddle of what he had to say.
For some reason the good man had confused the subject with the commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and as his exposition was by no means clear on either count Wynne had been greatly perplexed. He was informed of certain consequences of sex and at the same time warned that indulgence was forbidden. When it was over he felt he had been told of something which by holy law was impossible of achievement. He left the study far more uncertain as to how the race was perpetuated than he had been on entering. Incidentally he felt rather sick, and in the privacy of his little den he had thrown his books about and stared at himself in the glass with a new and half-fledged understanding.
He was, however, a singularly sexless boy, and the effect produced was of no very enduring character. Sex curiosity had no abiding place in his disposition, and he entirely failed to understand the impulse which compelled some of the older boys to bring opera glasses to bear on the windows of the servants’ quarters in the hope that some disrobing act might be espied and magnified. He would take no part in the whispered conversation that forms part of a nightly program in practically every school, and found no reason to reverence those scions of adventure who, with a wealth of imagination, drew pictures of their conquests over undefended citadels.
For this reserve he was almost unanimously dubbed a prig, but with little enough justice. Wynne possessed no great distaste for wrong as being wrong; indeed, in many cases, wrong appealed to him more generously than the accepted view of right.
It was the schoolboy form of especial backstairs carnalism that provoked in him the greatest distaste. There was, he thought, something sordid and paltry about an enterprise that could only be referred to in half-tones. If one sinned one should sin openly as Nero had done, and play upon a lyre while the smoke of one’s sinning columned to the sky.
There is in the make-up of most growing boys a substratum of nastiness, and it may well prove to be an act of divine providence that this should be so. By the great Law of Contrast our judgments are made. They are made in contrast to the error of our earlier ways. From the lowest stage we step to higher planes and look back with timid disgust on thoughts and actions we have left behind. It is seldom enough, thank God, we consider our vulgar embryonic excesses in any other light than that of a degrading folly which, by the grace of better understanding, we have filtered from our systems. It is seldom enough that the most perverted boy carries out into the world the brand of his unmoral beginnings. There should be comfort in this for the parent whose son returns from school before the holidays begin.
Wynne was coldly unmoved by the most lurid imaginings of sex. He would merely shrug his shoulder and go elsewhere. Yet mentally he was every kind of sensualist. The music of words stirred him illimitably—it would quicken his pulses and shorten his breath as no bold appeal from the eyes could have done. He could recognize love in the grand periods of the poets, and gasp with emotion at the splendour and passion it bespoke; but to associate love with the individual, or to consider himself in the light of a possible lover, never entered his mind.
And so he passed over his period of first knowledge and learnt nothing from the lesson.