I'll Never Be Young Again (4 page)

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 loveliness 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.’

Even the first sentence: ‘Have you spoken to Richard?’ proved in a few words his contempt for his son, so much that it was not worth the trouble of taking him to task, but such a matter was best left to the handling of my mother. For why should he worry, and why should he care?

Then in a blind frenzy of rage I must run upstairs to the poor forsaken schoolroom and rummage in a dusty drawer, and from beneath the scarce-started manuscript of my Greek play, which rapidly I tore across, flinging it in pieces about the floor, I drew page after page of my own poetry hidden in a thin black exercise-book, poetry that I had not dared read over even to myself, for here were lines of hatred and revolt, bitterness and despair; here were my dreams of women, lust-ridden and obscene, images conjured by the loathing of my father’s simplicity and purity. Pitiful and stark, they expressed no more than a defiance of his beauty. And seizing these I went down to the library, and flung open the door, looking upon him where he sat before his desk, his heavy brown face resting in his hands, and I went to him and threw my poems in front of him, stammering over my words as I spoke.‘Read them, read them, I wrote them because of you,’ and then called out of the window to my mother bending over her flowers: ‘You come too, and listen to my poems.’ Then the horror grew upon me as she came through the long windows, a dawn of a smile on her face, and leant over my father’s shoulder, who, slowly drawing his spectacles from his case, fumbled with my litter of paper.