I tapped at the door, tapped again without receiving any answer and entered. Waterfield was sitting at his table and he was crying. He indicated to me that I was to sit down, which I did. Then he blew his nose with an awful explosion of sound, and came with his rocking walk across to the chimney-piece.
“I want to ask you a question,” he said. “Do you understand why those two boys were sent away?”
“I am very glad to hear it,” he said. “I thank God for that. You may go.”
Here was a mysterious affair! I went out wondering about a million things, why Waterfield was crying, why he had sent for me, and above all why those two boys were publicly disgraced. I began to grub in my memory for any clue, and recalled trivial incidents. The elder of the two had been rather kind to a junior like myself: he had nodded good night to me one evening on the stairs, and I think the next night had given me a lump of Turkish delight. Finally, only a few days before, he had by virtue of his first-form privileges taken me for a stroll round the wooded grounds, where the first-form might go at pleasure, and I felt highly honoured at his notice. He had become rather odd: he began questions like, “I say, do you ever----,” and stopped. As I did not know what he was talking about, and only grew puzzled, he remarked rather contemptuously, “I didn’t know you were such a kid. Why, when I was your age....”
Then our privacy came to an abrupt conclusion, for we suddenly met Waterfield, with a large cigar, strolling along a path. He took us both into a greenhouse, and gave us some grapes, and walked back with us, one on each side of him.
There was nothing there at the time which had roused any strong curiosity in me. I had wondered vaguely why these sentences were left unfinished, and why he had only then discovered that I was such a kid. But now, in an intensity of wonder as to why Waterfield had been so glad to know that the reason for this expulsion was incomprehensible to me, and as to what that reason was, I began, with the groping instincts of a young thing, that has either to guess its way, or to be told it, to fit meaningless little pieces of the puzzle together, trying first one pair of fragments and then another, intensely curious and instinctively certain that there was something here which other boys understood, and which Waterfield certainly understood, but which I did not. I supposed that the completed puzzle contained something in which right and wrong were involved, since a transgression such as the two expelled boys had been guilty of was an affair that could not be atoned for by a caning or a birching.