Youth Without God Read Free Page A

opinion of niggers? Where was it? Yes—it came out of the loud-speaker in a restaurant where I was having dinner—and quite took my appetite away.
    So I let N’s sentence stand. For it is not for a schoolmaster to question the opinions stated on the radio.
    And while I read on, there was the radio still droning and cackling and vibrating through my mind: the newspapers re-echoed it and the children wrote it down like a dictation.
    Soon I’d got as far as T: beneath his book lay Z’s. Where was W? Had I mislaid his work? No, he was poorly yesterday—caught a bad cold at the Stadium on Sunday—inflammation of the lungs. I remember now, his father wrote me a note. All in order. Poor W! What were you doing at the Stadium, with that icy rain storming down?
    Well, you might as well ask yourself what you were doing there! You were at the Stadium too on Sunday, you stuck it out till the whistle went, although neither of the teams was at all in the first class. Why?—play was slow, tedious even—why did you stay? You, along with thirty thousand other spectators?
    Why?
    When the outside right outplays the left half and centres, when the centre-forward breaks away and shoots, when the goalkeeper throws himself on the ball, when the back’s attempt to clear brings a free kick and a spectacular save, whether the play’s fair or foul, the referee good or weak-willed, impartial or the reverse—then for all thoseonlookers nothing exists in the world outside the game. The sun may shine or it may be pouring or snowing. It makes no difference to them. They’ve forgotten everything.
    What is “everything” for them?…
    I had to smile: the niggers, perhaps—

2. RAIN
    NEXT MORNING, AS I WENT INTO THE HIGH school, on going upstairs to the masters’ common-room I heard quite an uproar coming from above me. I raced up and saw five of my youngsters—E, G, R, H, and T—laying into one opponent, F.
    “What’s going on here?” I shouted. “If you really want to brawl like board-school boys, then have it out one with another and not five against one—that’s a rotten thing to do.”
    They all looked up dumbly at me—even F, the victim of the attack. His collar was torn.
    “What’s he done to you?” I inquired; my heroes weren’t very ready with an explanation. Nor was the bullied one. At last, I learned that F had done nothing to the other five. Quite the reverse—they had taken his bread roll—not to eat it themselves, but just to see him without one. They’d thrown it through the window into the yard.
    I looked down. There it lay, bright on the dark asphalt in the falling rain.
    Perhaps the other five had no rolls, I thought, and they were mad when they saw F’s. But no, they all had them. G had two. Once more I asked:
    “Why did you do it?”
    They didn’t know themselves. There they stood, in frontof me, grinning awkwardly. Man must be evil: so we read in the Bible. When the rain ceased, and the waters of the flood began to recede, God said: “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
    Has God kept His promise? I cannot tell.
    But I did not ask them again why they threw the bread out into the yard. I only asked them if they had never heard of that unwritten law, which for measureless thousands of years has grown stronger and stronger, to become a beautiful human precept: “If you must fight, then fight one against one. Be just.” I turned to the five again.
    “Aren’t you rather ashamed of yourselves?” I asked.
    They weren’t. I seemed to be talking another language to them. They stared at me, and even the victim, F, smiled. There was derision in his smile.
    “Shut the window,” I said. “Or the rain will come in.”
    They obeyed me.
    What sort of a generation will theirs be?
    Hard? Or only brutal?
    I said no more, and went on to the common-room. On the stairs I stopped. Had they begun again? No, all was quiet. Perhaps