18
doctor addicted to this form of swindling being locally available, The Grange was given up and a 
house called Glenburnie taken at Southampton. 
On March 5th, 1887, Edward Crowley died. The course of the disease had been practically painless. 
Only one point is of interest to our present purpose. On the night of March 5th, the boy --- away at 
school --- dreamed that his father was dead. There was no reason for this in the ordinary way, as 
the reports had been highly optimistic. The boy remembers that the quality of the dream was 
entirely different from anything that he had known. The news of the death did not arrive in 
Cambridge till the following morning. The interest of this fact depends on a subsequent parallel. 
During the years that followed, the boy --- and the man --- dreamed repeatedly that his mother was 
dead; but on the day of her death he --- then three thousand miles away --- had the same dream, 
save that it differed from the others by possessing this peculiar indescribable but unmistakable 
quality that he remembered in connection with the death of his father. 
From the moment of the funeral the boy's life entered on an entirely new phase. The change was 
radical. Within three weeks of his return to school he got into trouble for the first time. He does not 
remember for what offence5, but only that his punishment was diminished on account of his 
bereavement. This was the first symptom of a complete reversal of his attitude to life in every 
respect. It seems obvious that his father's death must have been causally connected with it. But 
even so, the events remain inexplicable. The conditions of his school life, for instance, can hardly 
have altered, yet his reaction to them makes it almost incredible that it was the same boy. 
Previous to the death of Edward Crowley, the recollections of his son, however vivid or detailed, 
appear to him strangely impersonal. In throwing back his mind to that period, he feels, although 
attention constantly elicits new facts, that he is investigating the behavior of somebody else. It is 
only from this point that he begins to think of himself in the first person. From this point, however, 
he does so; and is able to continue this autohagiography in a more conventional style by speaking of 
himself as "I". 
{53} 
 
1. At Amsterdam. It was a failure at first, the natives objecting to a liquid 
which lacked taste, smell and colour.  
2. i.e. Of the "playground".  
3. Query? "Oiler", of course, but what was that doing?  
4. It is purely a question of virility: compare the noble races, Arabs, 
Pathans, Ghurkas, Japanese, etc. with the "moral" races. Of course, 
absence of caste determines loss of virility and vice versa.  
5. On revision, he thinks it was "talking on the march", a whispered word to 
the other half of his scale of the "crocodile".  
 
 
4 
I had naturally no idea at the time that the death of my father would make any practical difference 
to my environment. In most similar cases it probably would not have done so. Most widows naturally 
remain in the groove. 
As things were, I found myself in a totally new environment. My father's religious opinions had 
tended to alienate him from his family; and the friends whom he had made in his own circle had no 
interest in visiting my mother. I was thrown into the atmosphere of her family. She moved to 
London in order to be near her brother, whom till then I had hardly met.