Noble in Reason by Phyllis Bentley Page B

remembered the significant word
rivals
which Graham had used to me. My sympathy rushed out to Graham. He was dead by that time, too, which made it worse.
    â€œI wish he would have been friends with me,” I said uneasily.
    â€œAye. You might have been as thick as thieves together,” agreed Atkinson. “I told him so. But you never seemed to notice what you were doing to him, you see. He was vexed to be outdone by a little squit like you. Now about this piece,” said Atkinson in a more serious tone, turning to the cloth inquestion, which lay on the long table beside us: “Your people say the dye’s uneven. But we say the fault’s in the weave. . . .”
    So I too was to blame for the wretchedness of our schooltime together, and perhaps the results were worse for Graham than for me. My troubles then started in me, or confirmed in me perhaps, a hatred of persecution which has never left me all my life. Even to-day, forty years after Graham first snatched my cap, I cannot endure to see a child surrounded by a jeering circle of its contemporaries. A sharp pain twangs through my whole body at the sight; I have stopped the car, rushed across the road, interrogated children hotly, in a word made a public ass of myself, to effect a rescue. Political persecutions affect me in the same way; I cannot easily sit quiet while a concerted attack is made on any person, in the press, at a meeting or even in committee.
    On the other hand, this experience at school turned me for ever away from pacifism. I discovered then, though of course without formulating it to myself, that peaceful intentions are no protection, no barrier against evil. Nobody in the world was more peaceful than I at school, more full of goodwill and eager friendliness. But it was not enough; it did not save me from suffering harm, or the others from the harm of inflicting harm on me. The law of life is self-defence; to abrogate that right leads logically to self-destruction. I love peace with all my heart, and seek to ensue it, but never since my schooldays with Graham have I believed that pacifism was the road to peace.
    I see now too how, in relating everything that happens to one’s own feelings, one falsifies and loses one’s way. I have never forgotten the pain of rejection which I felt that night when John and Henry went out on their bicycles and left me. Yet in reality their actions had nothing whatever to do with me. They were related to a deep experience which mybrothers were then beginning to share: namely a jealous rivalry over Beatrice Darrell. Henry already loved Beatrice— he had always loved her—with all the force of his strong, narrow, fastidious, upright nature; he gave her an adoring and utterly faithful homage and treated her, I am sure, with every possible delicacy and respect. John, a despiser of girls in his rough early teens, had just reached the stage when they suddenly blossomed into his chief preoccupation. A healthy, lusty, aggressive male, as soon as he became aware of Beatrice’s charms he set out to enjoy them. The tedium of Beatrice’s aimless life, and the natural daring of her disposition, no doubt assisted his advances; at any rate John and Beatrice met in the grove for kisses, as the events of that and the previous day sufficiently indicated if I had had eyes to see it. Both my brothers hoped to meet Beatrice that night; neither wished to be hampered in their courtship by a naïve and observant small brother.
5
    My third and last school provided me, oddly enough, with what in spite of the modern dread of cliché and the recent amusing guying of this cliché in play and film, I can only call the happiest days of my life.
    A short time after Graham’s departure I won a partial scholarship to a famous northern grammar school. As always when confronted with some ordeal—then as now—I kept my hopes in firm check before the test, reminding myself continually of the