But he took the note: Well, a few days later he had an excellent opportunity of using it, and he did use it. In my somnolent, doltish phase, I couldn't remember a thing about the earlier, awake phase. When he showed me the note I had written and signed, I was confident it was a forgery. Of course I was furious. And of course I regarded his behaviour as insufferable cheek. With great gusto I whacked him. Naturally this incident was soon known to the whole school. I used to be frightfully popular, being good at games and correct about school etiquette. But this affair broke my popularity completely. Everyone despised and distrusted me. And as popularity was my ruling passion (though I didn't know it), I went through agonies trying to restore my position. Sometimes I half succeeded. But always, just when everything seemed going well, I would wake up for a few minutes and do something outrageous, so that the fat was in the fire all over again."

Victor fell silent, gazing down into the stream, with folded arms on the rail of the bridge. Suddenly he stood upright, with a laugh that was also a sigh, stretching himself as though in relief after some kind of bondage. We moved along the path. "Tell me," I said, "when you say you saw the kid as a live human person, what do you really mean? Telepathy?"

"No, no I Perhaps telepathy may have something to do with it sometimes, but mainly it's just a heightening of imaginative insight. The other person's tone of voice and facial expression, the whole smell of him, so to speak, suddenly flash a meaning at me. Johnson minor suddenly became a vivid picture of a desperately perplexed and frightened little person. And also I saw myself with the same imaginative penetration. I saw myself as he saw me, and indeed very much more clearly than he could possibly have seen me."

"You see," he said, looking round at me with an open smile which was impossible to the normal Victor, "it's not only other people that come clear, and not only my own mind, but everything. To pursue the metaphor, not only the stream turns limpid, but the banks, the fields, the people in them, the sky, the whole universe become--yes, limpid. I see into everything, in a sense. Not, of course, spatially, like X- rays. Not mystically either, seeing God in them, or what not. Rather, instead of being just coloured shapes, they become bewilderingly pregnant symbols; pregnant with whatever was relevant to them in my past experience. That's it! The wretched Johnson minor's puckered brows and quivering lip suddenly flooded me with all my forgotten experience of such things, and with anew, shattering insight into their meaning in terms of the mental suffering of Johnson himself, there and then."

I think it was at this point that Victor bent down to watch a violent drama that had staged itself in a cobweb strung between the tall grasses beside our path. But he did not stop talking. "Sometimes," he said, "I seem able to trace the waking to some event outside myself. It's the impact of experience that shakes me into life--Johnson minor's struggle not to blub, or the conjunction of you and Edith and the marriage service. The sight of this spider preparing its dinner might do the trick, if ever my sleep-walking self could stoop to notice such things.