It was something almost abstract in its manifestations; it was something indecent, sinister, secret, foreign to his whole nature felt by him now for the first time, unanalysed, of course, but belonging, had he known it, to that world of which afterwards he was often to catch glimpses, that world of shining white faces in dark streets, of muffled cries from shuttered windows, of muttered exclamations, half caught, half understood. He was never again to be quite free from the neighbourhood of that half-world; he would never be quite sure of his dominance of it until he died.
He had never felt anything like this power before. With the Jampot his relations had been quite simple; he had been rebellious, naughty, disobedient, and had been punished, and there was an end. Now there was a game like tracking Red Indians in the prairie or tigers in the jungle.
He watched Miss Jones and discovered many things about her. He discovered that when she made mistakes in the things that she taught them she was afraid to confess to her mistakes, and so made them worse and worse. He discovered that she was very nervous, and that a sudden noise made her jump and turn white and put her hand to her heart. He discovered that she would punish him and then try to please him by saying he need not finish his punishment. He discovered that she would lose things, like her spectacles, her handkerchief, or her purse, and then be afraid to confess that she had lost them and endeavour to proceed without them. He discovered that she hated to hit him on the hand with a ruler (he scarcely felt the strokes). He discovered that when his mother or father was in the room she was terrified lest he should misbehave.
He discovered that she was despised by the servants, who quite openly insulted her.
All these things fed his sense of power. He did not consider her a human being at all; she was simply something upon which he could exercise his ingenuity and cleverness. Mary followed him in whatever he did; Helen pretended to be superior, but was not. Yes, Miss Jones was in the hands of her tormentors, and there was no escape for her.
Surely it must have been some outside power that drove Jeremy on. The children called it “teasing Miss Jones,” and the aboriginal savagery in their behaviour was as unconscious as their daily speech or fashion of eating their food--some instinct inherited, perhaps, from the days when the gentleman with the biggest muscles extracted for his daily amusement the teeth and nails of his less happily muscular friends.