He told me a great deal about his own youth, how he too had begun foolishly and only later discovered his own inclinations—I must just have courage, he said, and he would help me as far as lay within him; I must not scruple to turn to him with any questions, ask anything I wanted to know. No one had ever before spoken to me with such sympathy, with such deep understanding; I trembled with gratitude, and was glad of the darkness that hid my wet eyes.

I could have spent hours there with him, taking no notice of the time, but there was a soft knock on the door. It opened, and a slender, shadowy figure came in. He rose and introduced the newcomer. “My wife.” The slender shadow came closer in the gloom, placed a delicate hand in mine, and then said, turning to him: “Supper’s ready.” “Yes, yes, I know,” he replied hastily and (or so at least it seemed to me) with a touch of irritation. A chilly note suddenly seemed to have entered his voice, and when the electric light came on he was once again the ageing man of that sober lecture hall, bidding me good night with a casual gesture.


I spent the next two weeks in a passionate frenzy of reading and learning. I scarcely left my room, I ate my meals standing up so as not to waste time, I studied unceasingly, without a break, almost without sleep. I was like that prince in the Oriental fairy tale who, removing seal after seal from the doors of locked chambers, finds more and more jewels and precious stones piled in each room and makes his way with increasing avidity through them all, eager to reach the last. In just the same way I left one book to plunge into another, intoxicated by each of them, never sated by any: my impetuosity had moved on to intellectual concerns. I had a first glimmering of the trackless expanses of the world of the mind, which I found as seductive as the adventure of city life had been, but at the same time I felt a boyish fear that I would not be up to it, so I economized on sleep, on pleasures, on conversation and any form of diversion merely so that I could make full use of my time, which I had never felt so valuable before. But what most inflamed my diligence was vanity, a wish to come up to my teacher’s expectations, not to disappoint his confidence, to win a smile of approval, I wanted him to be conscious of me as I was conscious of him. Every fleeting occasion was a test; I was constantly spurring my clumsy but now curiously inspired mind on to impress and surprise him; if he mentioned an author with whom I was unfamiliar during a lecture, I would go in search of the writer’s works that very afternoon, so that next day I could show off by parading my knowledge in the class discussion. A wish uttered in passing which the others scarcely noticed was transformed in my mind into an order; in this way a casual condemnation of the way students were always smoking was enough for me to throw away my lighted cigarette at once, and give up the habit he deplored immediately and for ever. His words, like an evangelist’s, bestowed grace and were binding on me too; I was always on the qui vive, attentive and intent upon greedily snapping up every chance remark he happened to drop. I seized on every word, every gesture, and when I came home I bent my mind entirely to the passionate recapitulation and memorizing of what I had heard; my impatient ardour felt that he alone was my guide, and all the other students merely enemies whom my aspiring will urged itself daily to outstrip and outperform.

Either because he sensed how much he meant to me, or because my impetuosity appealed to him, my teacher soon distinguished me by showing his favour publicly. He gave me advice on what to read, although I was a newcomer to the class he brought me to the fore in general debate in an almost unseemly manner, and I was often permitted to visit him for a confidential talk in the evening. On these occasions he would usually take a book down from the shelf and read aloud in his sonorous voice, which always rose an octave and grew more resonant when he was excited. He read from poems and tragedies, or he explained controversial cruxes; in those first two weeks of exhilaration I learned more of the nature of art than in all my previous nineteen years. We were always alone during this evening hour. Then, about eight o’clock, there would be a soft knock on the door: his wife letting him know that supper was ready. But she never again entered the room, obviously obeying instructions not to interrupt our conversation.


So fourteen days had gone by, days crammed to the full, hot days of early summer, when one morning, like a steel spring stretched too taut, my ability to work deserted me. My teacher had already warned me not to overdo my industry, advising me to set a day aside now and then to go out and about in the open air—and now his prophecy was suddenly fulfilled: I awoke from a stupefied sleep feeling dazed, and when I tried to read I found that the characters on the page flickered and blurred like pinheads. Slavishly obeying every least word my teacher uttered, I immediately decided to follow his advice and take a break from the many days avidly devoted to my education in order to amuse myself. I set out that very morning, for the first time made a thorough exploration of the town, parts of which were very old, climbed the hundreds of steps to the church tower in the cause of physical exercise, and looking out from the viewing platform at the top discovered a little lake in the green spaces just outside town. As a coast-dwelling northerner, I loved to swim, and there on the tower, from which even the dappled meadows looked like shimmering pools of green water, an irresistible longing to throw myself into that beloved element again suddenly overcame me like a gust of wind blowing from my home. No sooner had I made my way to the swimming pool after lunch and begun splashing about in the water than my body began to feel at ease again, the muscles in my arms stretched flexibly and powerfully for the first time in weeks, and within half-an-hour the sun and wind on my bare skin had turned me back into the impetuous lad of the old days who would scuffle vigorously with his friends and venture his life in daredevil exploits. Striking out strongly, exercising my body, I forgot all about books and scholarship. Returning to the passion of which I had been deprived so long, in the obsessive way characteristic of me, I had spent two hours in my rediscovered element, I had dived from the board some ten times to release my strength of feeling as I soared through the air, I had swum right across the lake twice, and my vigour was still not exhausted. Spluttering, with all my tense muscles stretched, I looked around for some new test, impatient to do something notable, bold, high-spirited.

Then I heard the creak of the diving board from the nearby ladies’ pool and felt the wood quivering as someone took off with strong impetus. Curving as it dived to form a steely crescent like a Turkish sword, the body of a slender woman rose in the air and came down again head first.