The more I realized how different I was from the members of my new set, how isolated I was in their midst, the less easy was it for that very reason to break with them. I do not really know whether the toping and bragging ever caused me much pleasure, and I could never so accustom myself to hard drinking that I did not feel the painful consequences after each bout. I was as if coerced into doing this. I did it because I had to, because I was otherwise absolutely ignorant of a course to follow, I knew not where to begin. I was afraid of being long alone. I was frightened of the many tender, chaste, intimate moods to which I constantly felt myself inclined, I was afraid of the tender notions of love which so often came to me.
One thing I lacked most of all—a friend. There were two or three schoolfellows whom I liked very much. But they belonged to the good set and my vices had for a long time been a secret to no one. They avoided me. With all I passed for a hopeless gamester under whose feet the very earth quaked. The masters knew much about me, severe punishments were several times inflicted on me, my final expulsion from the school was waited for with more or less certainty. I knew that myself; for a long time I had ceased to be a good pupil; I got through my work by hook or by crook, with the feeling that the state of affairs could not last much longer.
There are many ways by which God can make us feel lonely and lead us to a consciousness of ourselves. With me it was in this way: it was like a bad dream, in which I saw myself ostracized, foul and clammy, creeping restlessly and painfully over broken beer glasses, down an abominably unclean road. There are such dreams, when you imagine you have set out to find a beautiful princess, but you stick in stinking back streets full of rubbish and dirty puddles. So it was with me. In this scarcely refined way I was destined to become lonely and to put between myself and my childhood a locked door of Eden over against which stood merciless sentinels on guard in beaming rays of light. It was a beginning, an awakening of that homesickness, that longing to return to my true self.
I was terribly frightened when my father, alarmed by a letter from my house master, appeared for the first time in St. ⸻ and faced me unexpectedly. When he came for the second time, towards the end of that winter, I was hard and indifferent, I let him heap blame on me, I let him beg me to think of my mother, I was unmoved. Finally he grew very angry and said that if I did not turn over a new leaf he would have me disgraced and chased out of the school, and would have me placed in a reformatory. Little I cared! When he went away I felt sorry for him, but he had accomplished nothing; he had found no approach to me, and for a few moments I felt that it served him right.
I was indifferent as to what might become of me. In my peculiar and unlovely manner, with my carrying on and my frequenting of public houses, I was at odds with the world—this was my way of protesting. I was ruining myself thereby, but what of it? Sometimes the case presented itself to me in this wise: If the world had no use for such as me, if there was no better place for us, if there were no higher duties, then people like myself simply went to the devil. So much the worse for the world.
The Christmas holidays of that year were exceedingly unpleasant. My mother was terrified when she saw me again. I had grown taller, and my thin face looked gray and ravaged by dissipation, with flabby features and inflamed rings round the eyes. The first indications of a moustache, and the spectacles which I had but lately taken to wearing, made me look stranger still. My sisters started back and giggled when they saw me. It was all very pleasant. Unpleasant was the conversation with my father in his study, unpleasant the greeting of a couple of relations, unpleasant above all things was Christmas night. That has been since my birth the great day of our house, the evening of festivity and love, of gratitude, of the renewal of the bond between my parents and myself. This time everything was depressing and embarrassing. As usual my father read the portion of the gospel about the shepherds in the field “keeping watch over their flock by night”; as usual my sisters stood radiantly before the table on which the presents were laid out. But my father’s voice was sad, and he looked old and
