Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/168

 Yes, black, that's how it was. I went to Westminster School, and they all mocked me, my hair, my body, my difference. Yes, my difference. I was different from them all, different from my father, different from all the world. And I was glad that I was different. I hugged my difference. Different...."

He lent forward, tapped Harkness's knee with his hand, staring into his face.

"Different, Mr. Harkness, different. Different...."

And the long draughty room echoed "Different ... different ... different."

"My father beat me one night terribly, beat me so that I could not move for pain. For no reason, simply because, he said, he wished that I should understand life, and first to understand life one must learn to suffer pain, and that then, if one could suffer pain enough, one could be as God—perhaps greater than God.

"It was to that night in the Bloomsbury house that I owe everything. I was fifteen years of age. He stripped me naked and made me bleed. It was terribly cold, and I came in that bare room right into the very heart of life, into the heart of the heart, where the true meaning is at last revealed—and the true meaning"

He broke off suddenly, then whispered:

"Do you believe in God, Mr. Harkness?" and