Psychology and Other Stories Read Free

time to admire his throw—its speed, its precision, the geometrical perfection of its arc, like the illustration in a physics textbook—before a twinge of disquiet tugged at his guts.
    Luckily, his arm had not taken into account the fact that its target was moving. The ball missed the oblivious batsman’s head by several inches, but came close enough that the infielder who had been running to catch it felt obliged to shout at the batsman to duck. The ball swooped to earth and rolled gracefully out of bounds. The opposing First Eleven had time to capture four more bases and break seven more wickets before it was retrieved.
    Archie trudged back to his corner of the field, muttering and kicking at the turf as he went. This display of remorse did not express his disappointment, but concealed it: he was playing the part of the passionately engaged and ordinarily competent athlete cursing himself, unfairly, for the sort of mistake that anyone might make.But this pantomime could no more evoke the true depth and complexity of his anguish than a tin whistle could perform a symphony of Rubbra’s. To truly give vent to his feelings, he would have had, at the very least, to die.
    No one chided him; no one even tried to cheer him. It was as if he did not exist.
    He hated Parcliffe at first. Then he met Clayton Fishpool.
    Fishpool was, in Archie’s scheme of classification, perhaps the most stuck-up boy at the school. He wore an ascot and socks with sandals—either of which in isolation would have qualified him as the most eccentric character Archie had ever laid eyes on. He was idiotically handsome, with just the kind of soft lank hair that Archie believed, on his own head, would have made him look rakish, carefree, and sensitive, yet with a capacity for beautiful cruelty—but which, on Clayton Fishpool, only looked foppish. Aside from his physical appearance, Fishpool had about him an aura of self-sufficiency and complacent grandeur. He was sixteen, and he carried himself as though he had arrived at this sublimely remote age through his own foresight and diligence. For The Lyre , the school’s snobbish literary newspaper, he wrote poems and editorials which he signed “C.S. Fishpool.”
    (He was known, in the gold and green groves of Yllisee, as Dartagnan the Disreputable, Dartagnan the Demi-Mage.)
    â€œWhat’s that you’re reading?”
    Archie held the book at arm’s length and eyed it indifferently.
    Fishpool emitted a high-pitched squeak. “Oh, Strachey’s all right, but if you go in for that whole Bloomsbury thing you should really read Firbank.”
    Archie told his face to take on the expression of a man who had long ago resolved to look into Firbank and was now grateful for thisreminder. In fact, he was appalled: He had chosen this book, as he chose all his books for public consumption, for its obscurity. He would not read “classics”: to do so was, first, to admit unfamiliarity with them, and, second, to reveal a prosaic and unoriginal soul. In the dining hall he therefore read Two Noble Kinsmen instead of Hamlet, The Holy Sinner instead of The Magic Mountain, The Eternal Moment instead of Howards End , George Meredith instead of George Eliot, Edward FitzGerald instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William James instead of Henry James, and someone like Lytton Strachey instead of someone whose work he actually enjoyed, like John Buchan or Aldous Huxley. He believed, or anyway sometimes imagined himself saying he believed, that the duty of the serious student of literature was not to tread the same old well-worn paths, but to blaze new trails, to seek out the unknown and unsung masterpieces. (Or was he simply afraid to read any book that someone might know better than he did?) He had thought Strachey safe; but now here was C.S. Fishpool, not only wearily familiar with Strachey, but able to name an even more obscure author whom Archie should have been reading