But he loved anyone who could convey enlightenment to him
through feeling. He sat betrayed with emotion when the teacher
of literature read, in a moving fashion, Tennyson's "Ulysses",
or Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind". His lips parted, his eyes
filled with a strained, almost suffering light. And the teacher
read on, fired by his power over the boy. Tom Brangwen was moved
by this experience beyond all calculation, he almost dreaded it,
it was so deep. But when, almost secretly and shamefully, he
came to take the book himself, and began the words "Oh wild west
wind, thou breath of autumn's being," the very fact of the print
caused a prickly sensation of repulsion to go over his skin, the
blood came to his face, his heart filled with a bursting passion
of rage and incompetence. He threw the book down and walked over
it and went out to the cricket field. And he hated books as if
they were his enemies. He hated them worse than ever he hated
any person.
He could not voluntarily control his attention. His mind had
no fixed habits to go by, he had nothing to get hold of, nowhere
to start from. For him there was nothing palpable, nothing known
in himself, that he could apply to learning. He did not know how
to begin. Therefore he was helpless when it came to deliberate
understanding or deliberate learning.
He had an instinct for mathematics, but if this failed him,
he was helpless as an idiot. So that he felt that the ground was
never sure under his feet, he was nowhere. His final downfall
was his complete inability to attend to a question put without
suggestion. If he had to write a formal composition on the Army,
he did at last learn to repeat the few facts he knew: "You can
join the army at eighteen. You have to be over five foot eight."
But he had all the time a living conviction that this was a
dodge and that his common-places were beneath contempt. Then he
reddened furiously, felt his bowels sink with shame, scratched
out what he had written, made an agonized effort to think of
something in the real composition style, failed, became sullen
with rage and humiliation, put the pen down and would have been
torn to pieces rather than attempt to write another word.
He soon got used to the Grammar School, and the Grammar
School got used to him, setting him down as a hopeless duffer at
learning, but respecting him for a generous, honest nature. Only
one narrow, domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him
and made the blue eyes mad with shame and rage. There was a
horrid scene, when the boy laid open the master's head with a
slate, and then things went on as before. The teacher got little
sympathy. But Brangwen winced and could not bear to think of the
deed, not even long after, when he was a grown man.