When he arose and handed in his empty book there was a stir of surprise in the room. A few serious pairs of eyes turned on him in awed surmise followed by faint contempt at the swift surrender and by impatience at the interruption,—mere schoolboys still, he was thinking, shocked at his casual acceptance of his fate. They were, however, less shocked than he had hoped; moreover his acceptance of his fate was less casual than it seemed, for his knees were trembley when he found himself irrevocably outside the building, sagging down the steps towards the deserted yard, a gentleman at large, or whatever you were when you left off being a schoolboy. He sighed, and the sigh came out of him bumpily, like a sob. Why did he die? Why did he die?
That phrase, half intelligible, half abracadabra, often came into his head in moments of stress; he had no clue to its origin, but he could not remember a time when he hadn't been saying it to himself. As a child, when performing tragedies before the mirror shrouded in a brocaded table-cloth, he had declaimed it in mournful cadences. And one day at St. Basil's, when he had fallen from a nightmarish trapeze and stunned himself, he had come to murmuring it cryptically,—why did he die? Why did he die? Whereupon a shout of relief had gone up from his scared mates, the unexpected and unconscious friendliness of which had turned his bump into a blessing, for it had been the sign of his belated acceptance as one of them.
