Noble in Reason by Phyllis Bentley Page A

their evening gambols, but perhaps I am mistaken here.)
    There is something—not much, but something—to be said on the side of the tormentors. The weak are always by their weakness demanding response and protection, a response which the strong feel a moral compulsion to offer. Now nothing is more maddening than a moral compulsion to give an emotional response; at once one wishes to withhold it. Weakness in a way is—I will not say a form of moral blackmail (like a woman’s carefully timed tears) but—a continual presentation of a bill for pity. Small boys, whose moral sense is undeveloped and fund of pity small, are not prepared to pay this bill. Indeed cordial and generous payment is a lesson hard enough to learn in later life.
    I perceive now, of course, that the yellow dandelions were shudderingly odious to me because the cut of their fiery golden petals reminded me of my father’s rippling hair and beard. I perceive too that there was some truth in my classmates’ assertions that they were playing a game with me in the grove.
    They genuinely disliked me less there than anywhere, because they had a feeling of daring in venturing into that forbidden territory, and respected me for my defiance of authority, of the
Trespassers
board, in entering it.
    Was there a certain masochism, a desire for punishment, in my seeking-out of Graham? When I read to-day of victims of the vile interrogations in dictator countries becoming attached to their cruel interrogators, I sometimes wonder whether something of this feeling did not colour my preference for my tormentor. Or was I simply going through the normal phases of social development—the human being needing, I am told, first his mother, then a group of friends, then a single friend of the same sex, then a beloved of the opposite sex—and reaching the third stage earlier than my contemporaries? Perhaps both; but this wretched experience of rejection made me ever afterwards intensely chary of offering my friendship; I could not believe that anybody could want it—or me.
    It was years, however—I was in my thirties—before I fathomed the motive which lay behind Graham’s hatred of me. The enlightenment came eventually from Atkinson, upon whom I had to pay a business call. We met anonymously at first—he was the works manager of a Kirkroyd Bridge dyeing plant—but as soon as I saw his round face, his round-arched eyebrows, his round eyes and short stubby body, I exclaimed his name.
    â€œAye! And you’re Jarmayne tertius. You’ve grown pretty well, considering the wreckling you were then,” said Atkinson cheerfully.
    â€œI was always grateful to you for rescuing my spectacles,” said I.
    â€œLittle devils we were then,” said Atkinson, shaking his head. We laughed together—on my part, rather falsely. “It was that Graham, you know,” continued Atkinson. “He had his knife into you, as they say.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell, you see, you knocked him out proper.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I exclaimed angrily; for my unheroic failure on that fisticuff occasion particularly vexed me. “I hit him once, but it was the merest glancing blow. The knocking out was, I assure you, all on his side.”
    â€œNay,” said Atkinson, shaking his head again. “He was jealous of you.”
    â€œJealous! Impossible! What had I that he could envy?” I asked incredulously, thinking of Graham’s good looks, his power of leadership, his prowess in games.
    â€œBrains. Graham were always top of the form before you came. Then you always beat him. Then he got tired of trying, and behaved stupid-like on purpose. That’s why he left—you remember? His father wasn’t satisfied with his progress. A very ambitious chap always, my father used to say, was parson Graham.”
    I was dumbfounded. Such an idea had, I can truly say, never entered my head. But now I