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jokes, the compasses
stabbing his buttocks, came only when the master’s back was turned.
    One afternoon, as snow fell thickly, Mr Gregg made us read aloud from Cymbeline . The scene was a long one and the class soon grew restless; besides, Mr Gregg had
assigned a part to Trouble. Guffaws, barely suppressed, accompanied every speech that Guiderius delivered.
    In the scene, Guiderius and Arviragus, the king’s disguised sons, conduct a burial service in the woods for Imogen, whom they falsely believe to be dead as well as a boy; that she is their
sister is also unknown to them. Neither the pathos nor the absurdity of the situation infused our reading. Trouble was dutiful, his voice clipped and passionless; Elmsley, as Arviragus, sounded
uncommonly nervous, stumbling often, as if in the mere act of playing a scene with Trouble he had compromised himself.
    Trouble intoned:
    Why, he but sleeps:
    If he be gone, he’ll make his grave a bed;
    With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,
    And worms will not come to thee.
    The snorts were loud. Mr Gregg looked up from his book.
    Elmsley replied, stumblingly:
    With fairest flowers,
    Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
    I’ll sweeten thy sad grave.
    Eight fellows had speaking parts. I was one of them, and we all had to stand. I resented this; I was the Soothsayer, who speaks only when the scene is almost over. Outside, glaring whitely under
the pale sun, snow covered the playing fields like an intimation of death.
    We had reached the part where Guiderius and Arviragus sing their famous funeral song. Trouble had the first verse. At the direction Song he paused. Someone stifled a shriek.
    ‘Just read it, Mr Pinkerton,’ said Mr Gregg.
    Suddenly I was alarmed. Trouble faced the class. In fascinated, confused longing, we all gazed back at him. From the first I had sensed his magic; now, as if all along he had been biding his
time, waiting for his moment, the magic reached out to touch us all.
    Mr Gregg looked puzzled. Then Trouble began to sing:
    Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,
    Nor the furious winter’s rages;
    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
    Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.
    Golden lads and girls all must,
    As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
    On the first lines, Trouble’s voice wavered; after that, the tone became assured. I slumped into my seat, pinned down as if by oppressive gravity, yet something in me struggled to escape,
like a bird that flurries at the bars of its cage. Trouble delivered the song slowly, giving each word its due in a clear, soaring tenor. The song, in all its melancholy beauty, might have been a
summation of all that life could hold. The setting, I realized later, was the one by Sir Hubert Parry: I would come to know it well.
    The second verse was for Arviragus; then the two had alternating lines. Elmsley looked about him. Terror flashed in his face, and he dissolved into the resignation of the damned as Trouble
pushed aside an empty desk, advanced upon him, and draped an arm across his shoulder. Elmsley could barely move his lips; it was Trouble who sang his parts, with Elmsley propped beside him like a
ventriloquist’s dummy:
    Fear no more the lightning-flash,
    Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
    Fear not slander, censure rash;
    Thou hast finish’d joy and moan.
    All lovers young, all lovers must
    Consign to thee and come to dust.
    When the song was over, there was silence, and I wondered what it meant. Time, it seemed, was stranded in its flight, as if a pendulum had swung high, hovered, and refused to sweep down. We had
been lifted out of ourselves. The fellow who had sung was no schoolboy victim, fresh from being tripped up on the stairs; the fellows who had listened were not the tormentors they had been and
would be again.
    Then came the applause. Who began it I cannot say; first one pair of hands struck softly, slowly together, then another and another, until the sound surged across the room like thunder,