I'll Never Be Young Again, Page 3

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, ‘you’ll be fine, and stronger than before. But if you listen you’ll hear the echo of a lost thing away in the air, like a bird with a song you can’t name, high up above you where you can’t reach.

  ‘“I’ll never be young again,” it says,“I’ll never be young again.”’

  Still he had not answered my question. And I did not want to be treated as a child. Nor did I understand. I spoke roughly, not choosing my words.

  ‘Oh! damn your sermons, let’s clear out of this place, it doesn’t matter where.’

  Away down the Pool I heard the siren of a ship, and the echoing siren of a tug.

  Lights winked in the darkness, and the still rotten smell of the river floated up to me, bringing a memory of the barge that had gone with the tide and the setting of the sun.

  Jake lifted his head, and he seemed to be listening to the siren and the hundred-odd sounds of the Pool. It may be there was a distant whistle and the scraping of feet on a deck, the rattle of a chain, the hoarse shout of a pilot. None of this could we see, only the flashes of light and the dim outline of moving things upon the water. I fell to wondering about the sea that lay beyond this river, and how the sight of it would meet our eyes at dawn like a strange shock of beauty after the mud reaches and the green plains. Somewhere there would be tall cliffs, white against the morning, and loose chalk and stone crumbling to a beach. I fancied there would be breakers upon the shore, a thin line of foam and a soft wind coming from the land. Little houses would stand on these cliffs, snugly asleep, the windows closed to the air. They would not matter to us as we passed, for we would have done with them. We would be away, and long after men would come from those houses and make for the fields, staring at the warm sky, calling to a dog over their shoulder, while the women bent low over their tubs, wringing their hands in the blue soapy water, harkening to the kitchen clock and aware of the good dinner smell. Staring towards the sea, shielding their eyes from the sun with their hand upraised, perhaps they would see a grey whisper of spent smoke upon the horizon to tell them we had passed. Or the square corner of a sail dipping below the line, the tip of a masthead smudged against the sky.

  Then I sighed, for these things had become real to me in a moment, and here we were only upon the bridge, and we must turn to the streets, and the noise of the traffic, and think of the necessity of eating, stand shoulder to shoulder with people on pleasure bent, mounting like beetles from the hot Underground, our eyes blinking at the glaring lights of a crowded cinema, and so to a drab lodging-house with the narrow beds and the grey cotton sheets.

  So once more I turned to Jake and repeated: ‘What shall we do?’ scarce caring for his reply, aware that despondency would come to me in any case. And his answer was one that showed me he had an intuition of my every mood, that he joined in with them as though he were part of myself, that even my thoughts were not hidden from him, that we were bound henceforth as comrades and I loved him and he understood.

  ‘We’ll get away in a ship together, you and I,’ he said.

  3

  After I had eaten I felt strong, with no shade of weariness clinging to me. We sat at a little table in a dark corner, and the shabby waiter had flicked the last crumb off the greasy cloth. We had told him to go away and not to worry us. The air about us was thick with the smoke from our cigarettes. This and the swinging light from the opposite wall worried my eyes, but Jake’s face was in shadow and he sat motionless, though I knew he was watching me. The ash fell from my cigarette on to the plate beneath me, and I kept picking at the crumbs on the cloth, and drawing imaginary figures. Jake had suggested a brandy and soda to pull me together, and perhaps this and the food had gone to my head, for I moved about in my chair excitedly, and my face was burning, and I wanted to go on talking and talking, and explaining to Jake the reason for things. With the outpouring of my words I seemed to get right clear of the atmosphere of the place, and to find myself once more standing on the lawns below the windows at home. Smooth even lawns stretching away to the sunk garden and the lily pond.

  I could hear the distant whirr of the mowing machine, and one of the gardeners snipping at the laurel bushes leading to the drive. A dog barked away by the stables. And I would look into the cool long room that was the drawing-room, with its shiny chintz covers, the air filled with the scent of flowers so fresh compared to the solidity and stale mustiness of furniture never moved, while my mother’s voice, cold and impersonal, continued in a strange monotony to my father their endless discussion of things that did not matter to me.

  Then he would push back his chair and wander towards the door, returning to the library, where he would continue his work, and on his way pausing, his hand on the handle of the door: ‘Have you spoken to Richard?’

  My mother answered something I could not hear, but I could see him shrug his shoulders as though to dismiss such a trivial thing as me from his mind, and then he would add contemptuously with a half-laugh: ‘He’ll never make anything of himself.’

  She probably nodded her head as she always did, in complete agreement to any of his words, and when he was gone she would forget me as he had done and give herself up to that self-effacing work which was her life’s pleasure, the copying of his spidery manuscripts in her own neat handwriting.

  And I, standing without on the smooth lawn, would glance towards the large bay window of the library, and would see the figure of this man that was my father standing an instant, his hands clasped behind his back, gazing at the son of whom he had so piteous an opinion; then turning to the heavy desk, the curtain blowing and fanning the litter of his papers, he would seat himself, his head lower than his hunched shoulders, and in the room there would be no sound but the steady scratching of his pen and the tassel of the blind tap-tapping against the window-pane.

  Every word he wrote would be strong with that sweet purity and simplicity that was his gift alone, placing him higher than any living poet, secure on his pedestal apart from the world, like a great silent god above the little dwarfs of men tossed hither and thither in the stream of life. From the crystal clearness of his brain the images became words, and the words became magic, and the whole was transcendent of beauty, one thread touching another, alike in their perfection and their certitude of immortality.

  Thus it seemed to me he was not a living figure of flesh and blood, but a monument to the national pride of his country, his England, and now and then he would bow gravely from his pedestal and scatter to the people a small quantity of his thought, which they would grub for on their poor rough ground, then clasp to their hungry hearts as treasure.

  My father was a legend, and he had created his legend, his life, his atmosphere, he continued as something changeless and immortal like some saga whispered from generation to generation. His home was no more than a reflection of himself where his wife and his servants moved like dumb things, stray patterns on a screen of his own weaving, and he a giant in the huge musty library, his sombre eyes set deep in his carven face, untouched by the world, as the frozen snow of a far mountain, splendid on his pinnacle, alone with his thoughts.

  Like a medieval king he accepted the homage due to him, and I could remember the line of people waiting in the stone hall until he should come to them, my mother moving amongst them as graciously as the queen she felt herself to be.

  The little crowd of worshippers would fade away when the audience was finished, and, dazzled and awestruck, find themselves out on the great paved terrace with the magnificent image of their god printed for ever on their minds.

  This was as it should be; this was what they had imagined, the poet secure in a background of tradition, while England and themselves bowed low in recognition of his supremacy.

  And so away down the long chestnut drive and through the park where the deer grazed, and the deep woods beyond, and out past the lodge and the high iron gates on to the main road that led to Lessington.

  They would sigh, shaking their heads at the loveli
ness of what they had seen, the peace of the house, the marvel of my father’s presence, but even as they envied him, deep in their hearts they would smile at the memory of the homes awaiting them, and their own little joys and their own little worries.

  These were some of the things I told Jake that night in the corner of the dirty smoke-filled eating-house. Nor did he interrupt me to put some question, for I spoke as though talking to myself and he a silent witness.

  Even as the words came from my mouth my eyes fell upon the torn half of a newspaper left on another table, and this was the same edition I had read myself that evening on the bridge. And here was a column of a speech, and here was my father’s face staring up at me from the print to torture me once more. I struck at it with my fist and threw it over to Jake in his shadowed corner.

  ‘There,’ I said to him, ‘there is my father,’ with triumph and defiance in my voice as though I expected his surprise and disapproval, and I didn’t care at all, not I.

  He looked at the photograph and the name beneath, then handed it back to me without a word. Then I continued speaking my thoughts aloud. Once again I was back at home, and wandering lost along the narrow dusty corridors of the silent house, passing the doors of the bedrooms never used, peering into the great empty wing that was shut away from the part in which we lived.

  The furniture, draped in white sheets, stared strangely through the gloom. If I opened a window the hinges creaked, the pane shook, and the stream of day filtering through into the room seemed like a sacrilege and the intrusion of shame. A blind moth fluttered its way to the light. Then I shut the window again and drew close the shutters and crept from this atmosphere of decay and silent antagonism, and away down the murky passages and down the stone stairway of the servants’ quarters, out into the bright sunlight of the gardens even as the moth with its fluttering wings had done. Yet the moth was free and I was still in prison.

  And I wanted to shout and I wanted to sing, and I wanted to throw a ball into the air.

  For I wished to be a boy with other boys, wandering in early morning in wet fields, astir with the lark, the dew soaking my shoes and the mud from the valley stream clinging to my clothes.

  I wanted to rob a nest, careless of the disconsolate bird; I wanted to dive into the stagnant lake from the low branches of a crouching willow. I wanted to feel a cricket bat in my hands, bending the spring handle, and hear the sharp crack of the leather against the wood.

  I wanted to use my fists against the faces of boys, to fight with them, laughing, sprawling on the ground, and then run with them, catching at my breath, flinging a stone to the top of a tree.

  I wanted to smell the hot, damp flesh of horses, they snuggling their warm noses in my hand, and then up, and a kick, and a jerk at the rein and off towards the low meadows and the rough hussocks of turf.

  I wanted to have a father who cared for the glory of these things, who gave me a gun, who rode with me calling to his dogs, who laughed loudly and long, whose breath smelt of whisky and tobacco, and then after dinner would lean back in his chair and smile at me across the candles on the dining-room table, and bid me tell him what was passing in my mind.

  I would have a mother whose beauty made me ashamed of my own clumsiness, whose voice was low, whose smile was a caress; who knew my thoughts without my telling her, who loved me to lie silent in her room when I wished to be alone thinking of nothing, whose scent would always be the same behind her ears and in the hollow of her hands, and who would come to me at night and let me be a child.

  And none of this belonged to me, but existed only in my imagination, for I had a poet for a father, and my mother was his slave, while I sat stiffly in the schoolroom with my tutor, his weak eyes blinking behind his spectacles, his scholarly voice accentuating with punctilious correction the steady metre of Greek verse. So I learnt that I must follow meekly like a humble shadow in the footsteps of my father, train my mind gradually and patiently to the polished beauty of words, fold my hands reverently on the covers of books, care for no smell save that of ancient manuscript, the faded ink, the yellow parchment.

  To be able to write then was the only object in my life; without this achievement there was no purpose in my being born at all. My tutor was like the thin echo of my father’s voice, repeating his phrases as a disciple murmurs the teachings of his master. And I grew to loathe my father, loathe his genius that made such a mockery of his son; and my spirit rebelled against all the things he stood for, it struggled to resist his power, it fought to escape from the net that bound me imprisoned in his atmosphere. I hated him, alone in his library, distant and intangible, his cold brain wandering amongst heights which I could never attain, worshipped by the world and remaining aloof, untouched and unharmed by his own fame. How could I interest him, with my boy’s body and my restlessness, and what were my dreams to him? We sat round the table in the dining-room, my mother shadowy and ineffectual, keeping up a little patter of words to the tutor, who turned his own face towards her with pretended interest; and my father silent in his oak chair chewing his food slowly, his eyes fixed on the table-cloth like a dumb idiot.

  Sometimes my mother would glance in my direction, and I would guess at the puzzled thought behind her brow.

  ‘Richard,’ she said, ‘looks pale today. I think he might take his bicycle into Lessington.’

  And my tutor would fall in with her agreement, and immediately they would make a business of this going into Lessington, the time of starting and the time of returning, and what I should do there and what I should see. So much so that instinctively I resented their idea, and scowling over my meat I would mutter that I did not care to go.

  Then my mother appealed to my father at his end of the table, with a glance of reproach in my direction for being the cause of disturbance to his great thoughts, and putting on the special voice she used for him would say: ‘My dear, we think Richard should bicycle into Lessington.’

  My father would turn his eyes upon me, as a scientist looks at an unimportant insect whose name he does not even bother to remember, and then pausing to consider the matter, for his manners were excellent, he nodded his head gravely as though he had turned the subject over in his mind.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Richard must certainly bicycle into Lessington.’

  Thus the subject was closed for ever, and early in the afternoon I would be dragging my machine from the empty stable, and pedalling along the silent drive out on to the hard high road bounded on either side by the ugly telegraph-poles.

  In the evening my father would still be working in the library, and we would sit in the drawing-room, the tutor with his spectacles balanced on his nose reading aloud to my mother, who lay back in her chair, her eyes shut, sleeping, her work on her knee.

  And I would run upstairs to the empty schoolroom, my mind afire with a poem I should write, but once I took the pencil in my hand the ideas floated away from me, mocking me, and the words would not come. I would scribble something in a last desperate effort to be unbeaten, but the lines stared up at me pathetic in their immaturity, and in a wave of misery I tore the paper, aware of my failure. There was silence in the house and the garden was hushed. There was no movement even in the branches of the trees.

  ‘You talked to me of being young,’ I said to Jake, ‘you talked this evening on the bridge of losing something I would never understand. Don’t you see what all that has meant to me? I was a boy without the life of a boy. Being young means bondage to me, it means a gaping sepulchre of a house smelling of dust and decay, it means people I have never loved living apart from me in a world of their own where there’s no time, it means the stifling personality of my father crushing the spirit of his son, it means the agony of restlessness, the torture of longings which nobody would explain, and always with me the certainty I was a failure, unable to write, unable to live - don’t you see, don’t you see?’

  I did not really care whether Jake followed my words or not, I was speaking to persuade myself.


  I went on to tell him of this business of growing up in my father’s shadow, of no longer being a boy and my tutor leaving, my supposed education being finished, while my mother still looked upon me as a child of ten and my father never looked on me at all, unless it was to ask me courteously if I had finished the play I had begun.

  For I had started a drama in blank verse, one scene of which had been written and re-written, and because of this I shut myself up in a room all day pretending to be working, while most of the time I bit the end of my penholder and gazed out of the window over the trees in the park to the hills beyond.

  I hated blank verse, and I hated the Greek form which was nothing but a wretched, slavish imitation of my father’s metre, and forgetting the pompous mouthings of my hero I dreamt idly as the long hours passed.

  I would be a man with other men, I would lose myself in a conversation of trivial things where poetry was scorned; I would go where there were no trees and no placid grazing deer but the hot dust of a city and the scream of moving things, where life was a jest and a laugh, where life was an oath and a tear, where people hated and people loved, and beauty meant no empty word in the cool impersonality of a poem but the body of a woman. And so on, and so on, I dreamt with the pen still clutched between my fingers and the poor hidden life in me yearning to be free.

  As I explained these things to Jake it seemed as though the old hatred of my home rose strong in me as ever, and I was still passionately bound to it for all my breaking away, for all my thankful realization of the hot drab restaurant and my hands on the greasy cloth and Jake’s face secure in the dark corner before me. My father still wrote unmoved in the library, and whatever I did could not change him, for he would always know me as unworthy, a wretched abortion of himself, and therefore something to be cast aside from his thoughts lest I should disturb their crystal clarity.

  So all I had been saying was no more than an attempt to show this man my father and the atmosphere grown up about him, and once more Jake must bring his mind back to the picture I had drawn for him, of the open windows of the drawing-room and I standing on the lawn with the echo of my father’s voice ringing in my ears: ‘He’ll never make anything of himself.’