I'll Never Be Young Again (5 page)

So he began to read aloud in his resonant voice, unaware at first of the sense, the pornographic outpourings of his son. This scene I had staged seemed to me so untrue that I was afraid, and even as I shuddered a wave of disgust came upon me for the diabolical cruelty of my action, and in something more than shame and despair I saw the papers fall from my father’s hand and his great eyes turn upon me, while my mother, understanding less than he, would have put some question, for I noticed her puzzled frown and the beginning of a sentence: ‘Why, Richard -’ she said. ‘Why, Richard . . . ?’ But my father never moved, he only kept his eyes upon my face. So then there was no more than my curse, and my stumble from the room, and running away down the drive with the memory of his eyes, and past the deer in the park, and the crying rooks hovering above the woods, and out of the iron gates for the last time, never once looking back over my shoulder. After this, three days and three nights which passed as a dream swiftly forgotten, leaving nothing but a sensation of despair, and then the sight of London friendless, and cold, and feeling hungry and feeling tired and thinking about things, and still thinking, and so standing on the bridge above the river.

Now I was tired and I leant on the table with my head pillowed on my arms, and waited for Jake to speak to me.

‘You’re blaming me, of course,’ I said; ‘I don’t care.’

I took his silence for a confirmation of my words.

‘Even now you don’t understand what I’ve been through,’ I told him; ‘you can’t know what those years have meant to me. Lost and wasted. A misery and a denial of everything that was living. Then you talk of the glory of being young.’

Jake’s voice sounded gentle coming from out of the shadows.

‘I believe you’ve felt all you’ve told me,’ he said; ‘I can understand everything and a little more. But against all this you had things you could have loved.’

‘Had things? What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘There was a garden,’ he said, ‘and woods and rooks, and the smell of flowers, and the voices of people.’

I thought he must be mad. I stared at him in amazement.

‘A garden? What was that to me? I tell you I was buried; you can’t have any conception of suffering when you say that.’

He was silent again.

‘It’s all very well for you to talk,’ I said;‘all the years I’ve wasted you must have spent loving and living, and not caring a damn. You’re crazy to talk about woods, and flowers in a garden - you haven’t understood, then, after all? Where have you been these last five years, anyway?’

I was superior to him in my knowledge of suffering. He did not know what it was to be sensitive.

Jake waited a moment, and when he spoke it was as though he were sorry for me, and the fool I had made of myself, but for himself he did not care.

‘I’ve been in prison,’ he said.

W
hen Jake told me this I got up blindly from the table and went out, through the swing doors into the street, and began to walk like a drunkard along the pavement brushing against people I did not see, never caring how I went or where I should end. I did not realize that he had followed me, but looking over my shoulder I found that he was walking by my side, and turning my head so he should not see my face, I told him roughly to go, and leave me by myself.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Jake, and he caught at my wrist before I could strike him. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said.

I wanted to knock him down, for every word of his was like a sting and a reproach to me, who in my ignorance had accused him of a lack of sympathy and an ignorance of sorrow. He had listened without speaking to my interminable rambling story of repression and introspection, with no hint or comparison of what his own life must have been, and he had let me run on, the silly boyish words pouring from my mouth, I who for all my discontent had lived in comfort and security. And in his understanding of my feelings all he had suggested for the difference between us was my possession of woods and rooks, the smell of flowers and the voices of people.

It seemed to me that I could see him in his cell watching for a glint of light through the grated window, and there would be a smile on his face for the blessed comfort this light would bring to him, whilst I, my hands and my lips buried in the scarlet and golden petals fallen from the azalea and the rhododendron bushes on the lawn at home, the sun on my back, and in my ears the song of a thrush on the sweeping branches of the chestnut tree, would groan and struggle against the impossibility of escape.

‘You’d better go away,’ I said to Jake; ‘you can’t hang around with me after what I’ve said. I’m not worth a curse; I’ll clear out, I’ll go with people who don’t matter.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said again. We were standing now by a lamp-post at the corner of a street. ‘You don’t have to mind what you say to me,’ he went on, ‘and you don’t need to worry over my years in prison. That’s all gone, and locked away in myself, minding, I mean. You can talk about it whenever you like if it helps you.’

‘I feel a swine,’ I said, ‘the way I’ve been throwing about my own story like some fake martyr and you going through hell. . . .’

‘Oh! that’s all right,’ he said, and he laughed to show me I need not be shy of him over this.

‘What did you do?’ I asked stupidly, and then felt myself go scarlet, for what business was it of mine, anyway?

‘I killed a man,’ said Jake.

I did not know what to say, I wanted to show him that it did not matter to me what he had done, that he would be justified in anything.

‘Oh! well,’ I said lamely, ‘I dare say . . .’ but I did not know how to go on with my sentence.

‘I expect the other chap deserved all he got. . . .’ I ended, feeling a fool.

‘No,’ said Jake, ‘whatever anybody does it can’t give you the excuse to take their lives. I reasoned that out in prison. You get a whole lot of time for thinking there.’

His words were simple enough, but it hurt me to think of him alone with his thoughts, fighting out the reason for life and death.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, wishing to argue on his side, ‘if your chap had done something you couldn’t forgive?’

‘Oh! forgiveness,’ smiled Jake,‘that’s nothing. You soon get over that. I was your age when this thing came along, and I guess I thought very much like you then. I wanted to hurt, and only succeeded in hurting myself. The man I killed wasn’t any the wiser. In prison I soon forgot about him, and what he’d done; all I remembered were the years he might have had, and mine too, gone because I hadn’t stopped to think.’

‘What happened quite?’ I said.

He did not answer me directly.

‘When you’re young,’ he said, ‘you make the mistake of plunging too deeply into things. That’s what I did, anyway. I reckoned myself capable of judging men by standards I’d built up for myself. I resented illusions crashing about the place.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I didn’t see that my concern was with myself, and that however much I fought I couldn’t change things, and the way people went. I believed a great deal in that fellow, and I killed him because he had spoilt the life of some woman I had never even met.’

As he spoke I could see the Jake of seven years back, and the hatred in his eyes not for the man whom he had destroyed, but for the loss of an ideal. He would crucify himself for no reason. Beneath all this I saw his superiority to myself, for I would have no principles and no standards; I would accept such a thing as natural, making excuses for the conduct of a friend, laughing perhaps, wondering idly as to the attraction of the woman, and wanting to know her.

‘Oh! well, if he was like that . . .’ I began, but I was aware my voice did not ring true with sincerity.‘Anyway, what had he done?’

Now I was curious, and at the same time I despised my curiosity. Jake looked at me and the expression in his eyes made me uncomfortable, as though I were a little schoolboy grubbing over a coarse passage in the Bible.

‘Just been selfish,’ he said, ‘and thinking about his body.’

He did not say any more than this.

‘She died of consumption out in Switzerland. She went to pieces after he left her. He was the first, you see, and he hadn’t bothered to think.’

I nodded, biting my nails; I wanted to get away from the subject of the woman. I felt I wasn’t qualified to judge.

‘How did you kill him?’ I asked.

‘Fighting in the ring,’ he said, ‘just a cheap prize-fight, one of those affairs in a tent at a circus where you pay half a crown to watch. I broke his neck. Nobody but myself knew how much it was on purpose. At the trial the jury brought in a verdict of manslaughter. I knew I was guilty and I didn’t tell. That’s being a coward. Now you know why I’m here. I’ve served my little sentence.’

He laughed, and I thought how bitter I would be, how resentful of the world, how bent and broken by the punishment brought on myself. And he was laughing, standing under the lamp-post, lighting another cigarette.

‘Maybe I’ve been boring you,’ he said; ‘let’s forget about all that. I’ve told you this just to show you that you don’t have to chuck yourself over a bridge.’

I wished he did not have this power of making me feel aware of my shame, leaving me stripped before my own eyes without the shadow of an excuse.

Perhaps for the first time that night I realized what he had saved me from, and but for him I would now be drifting swollen and horrible at the mercy of the river tides.

He must have seen what was passing in my mind.

‘I’m glad I came along,’ he said. Now I knew that because of him there was some meaning left to my existence, and that where-soever I should go in the future, and whatever the days might have in store for me, I should not be alone.

My knowledge of what he had done, and those years of suffering in prison, had in the little space of time he had taken to tell me so succeeded in making me forget myself that now the thought of my father and the home I had left were become shadowy, ineffectual memories in my mind, and I believed myself free of their clinging atmosphere at last.

For Jake was more real to me in the few hours I had known him than the shrouded intangibility of my father, and Jake’s personality had carried me away from my dusty dreams to the reality of hardship and suffering.

To me this was the meaning of being alive, this very sensation of the pavement beneath our feet, and the lamp shining upon a square, the smell of the warm air, the careless knowledge that it mattered little where we went, with no one to care but our two selves.

Jake and I wandered wherever the streets should lead us, and it was good to know that there was not the necessity of talking, but a word thrown now and again, and a whistle of a song, and a glance at the sky and a smile.

I could know his thoughts if I wanted, and it was the same for him.

I knew then that this night was a thing which could never be forgotten, nor the hard ring of our feet as we walked, nor the scattered groups of people in the slum streets, nor the wind rising from odd corners to blow upon our hair, nor the thrill of adventure, nor the mud-tang of the river smell from the docks and the lights of ships at anchor.

And never forgotten the sight that met our eyes before morning when we looked over a great bank of coal and black dust and saw the grey outline of a sleeping barque, her yards scarce discernible through the mist, the shrouds as shadowy as a cobweb, and the white letters on her stern: ‘
Hedwig
- Oslo.’

Jake and I stared at her without a word, and then turning smiled at one another, for the same thought belonged to us both, and we knew we were looking upon the ship that would carry us away.

Then we lay down on a piece of sacking on the wharf, and pillowed our faces in our hands, and slept.

A
s she went down the river the ship seemed like a phantom on the surface of black water, and the lights of London burned and flared in the darkness, sending a tongue of yellow flame to the sky. These lights and the dim buildings, this sound and clamour of London belonged to the world which we were leaving, and we passed them by, careless, unheeding, our eyes turned to new vistas ahead and to new sounds. There were the lights of other ships, there was the wash from a swift tug-boat, and faintly - coming from beyond, borne on the air - the siren of a homebound cargo vessel. London was gone, and vanished soon the flat marshes of Essex, and nothing awaited us but the great turn and span of the river, and a cold fresh wind; new lights winking from a headland, a spatter of rain, and the smell of the sea.

I leant against the bulwark of the ship and the first spray licked my face, and I felt the deck rise and fall beneath my feet as the barque met the sea. The coast of England slipped away from us, strange and unfamiliar in the grey light of morning, while ahead lay a hard unbroken line of sea, and another day and another sky.

It came to me that this was the beginning of adventure, and the starting of a dream, and as I felt the sea on my lips and heard the voices of men around me, I knew that I was no longer a boy who yearned to break the shackles of home and be free, but I was sailing before the mast of a Norwegian barque, and I was a man with other men.

So I should know what it would be to sail in a ship, to be weary and worn, to be hungry and happy.

I should learn the feel of ropes, the pressure of wind in canvas, I should know sickness and torture, but beyond these things there would be a fierce wild pleasure that I could not explain, a tumult of my body and a madness of my brain, laughter, and shouting in the air.

At first there was confusion and distress, and a lost sensation of my own helplessness, and then I conquered the misery of sickness, clinging to Jake like a weeping child, and I came out of the fo’c’sle upon the deck with my belly empty and my tongue afire, and there was the barque straining to be free as I had striven, a high sea running and a high wind blowing.