continual pleasure to me. But these things were certainly not the
living and central interests of my life.

I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the
masters even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go
freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the
Agent-General for East Australia. We two discovered in a chance
conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of
us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca
pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.
Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the
school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as
water on the way to India. But Britten had come up through the Suez
Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way. It gave
him a startling quality of living knowledge. From these pilgrims we
got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a
sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions
concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.
We became congenial intimates from that hour.

The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the
Lower Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment
between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand
and human intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher
education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the
doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my
mind. As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our
time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of
solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite
joint enterprises. I went several times to his house, he was the