Book the Second
The Adolescence of Edward Albert Tewler

Chapter 1
The Hidden Hand

AT thirteen our young Englishman was pale and undersized. Like his mother he was a trifle exopthalmic. His features were delicate and undistinguished and his bearing circumspect. Some more vigorous element in his heredity, however, struggled against the effects of his early restriction; he grew irregularly and inelegantly to average proportions, and his profile became firmer as he got into his later teens. There was a repressed drive in him throughout his life — as we shall see. He did not actually cease growing until he was nearly thirty.

For some reason he never learnt either to whistle properly or throw hard. His mother may have checked early attempts at whistling, and so he developed a sort of hiss-whistle with his upper teeth well over the lower. And as for throwing, he was. ambidextrous, which in fact meant that he was not dexterous with either hand. He lobbed with his left hand and learnt belatedly to throw with his right. He could never throw very high or very far, and that was just as well, because an undetected astigmatism made his direction uncertain. In those days there was no examination of school children’s eyes; you had to put up with the eyes God had given you. So that he also jumped uncertainly and to the best of his ability avoided jumping.

His life had been so completely shielded from mental or physical harm that until he went to Mr Myame’s school for young gentlemen at the age of eleven and a half, he had no child associates whatever. But there he found school-fellows, and some of them were even permitted to invite him home to tea. He always had to assure his mother they were nice little boys before she allowed him to go. They had families, sisters and cousins, and his circle increased.

He became a boarder instead of a day boy in Mr Myame’s Commercial Academy when his mother died, and for a time he shared the bleak “Joseph Hart” dormitory, the larger one, with six other boys, which the ever-solicitous Mr Myame in list slippers might prowl through at any hour of the night.

And since Edward Albert had no home to go to, his first summer holidays were spent among the alarming circumstances of animal life at large and unashamed, in a Wiltshire farm belonging to Mr Myame’s brother-inlaw. There were fields in which great cows grazed and stared at you, chewing slowly as they meditated your death, and there was not the slightest protection for the passer-by. There were horses, and once at sundown three of them started galumphing round a field most terrifyingly. Edward Albert dreamt about it afterwards. There were unmuzzled dogs. There was a lot of poultry with no sense of decency whatever. Awful! And you couldn’t help looking and you sort of knew and you sort of didn’t know. And you didn’t want anyone to see you were looking, either. There were ducks, but they weren’t so bad. There were geese that would come at you very alarmingly if you went near them, but then you needn’t go near them, and otherwise they were perfectly respectable. They disapproved, it seemed, of everybody. And there was Master Horace Budd, aged ten,, very sturdy and rosy, who was coming back to London to be a boarder, too, next quarter.

“I promised Mother not to hit you,” said Master Horry, “and I won’t. But if you want a fight —”

“I don’t want a fight,” said Edward Albert. “I don’t fight,”

“Not just a punching match?”

“No. I don’t like fighting.”

“I promised Mother. Why won’t you come and ride on the old horse like I do?”

“I don’t want to.”

“I didn’t promise anything about not setting Boxer on to you.”

“If you do anything to me,” said Edward Albert, “anything I don’t like, I’ll kill you. I’ll just kill you. I know away. See?”

This gave Horry pause. “Nobody’s talking of killing people,” he said.

“I am” said Edward Albert.

“Oh, come and feed the rabbits,” said Horry, and then after a pause for reflection. “You got a knife?”

Edward Albert whistled after his fashion for a moment or so. “I don’t do it that way,” he said. “I got a way of my own.”

He had a way of his own in his imagination. For behind his unobtrusive fa9ade Edward Albert led a life of lurid reverie. He liked to be the still man who ne............