I'll Never Be Young Again (15 page)

I could not understand why I was not still excited, and why I did not want her any more.

It was queer that yesterday my body had mattered so much and now it did not matter at all.

When I had come aboard at midnight I had not known whom I hated most, she or myself, but now if she were to come and speak to me I should not be aware of any antagonism, she would only be a stranger, somebody out of a crowd. I could not see why desire should turn into degradation, and from degradation into nothing. One ought to go on either with the desire or the degradation. One ought always to mind terribly about things.

And here I was, whistling by the gangway, waiting for Jake, looking forward to driving in a car along a road. It was all wrong, somehow. I was glad that I did not mind any more, but it did not seem right that it should be so. It was almost callous towards myself - the self who had stood here last night with his hands burning and his body trembling. He had gone for ever, that self, like the boy who had seen ecstasy in the mountains, and the boy who had sung on a ship, and the boy who had wished to cast himself from a bridge. They were all gone, these other selves, and they would never come back again. They had vanished, like little thoughts and little dreams, poor has-beens that had lived in me and I in them, now thrown away into the dust, not even lingering as shadows to keep me company.

So, standing there on the deck of the cruising steamer it was as though I left behind me something that had been part of myself, and I wondered how it was that I left it without a regret. For here was I, calm, easy, thinking of the days ahead, and there was he whom I should not see again, troubled, tortured, exquisitely sad, the boy who had loved a woman for the first time. I had left him behind, but I was not any wiser than before.

Jake came out then, and we went down the gangway, and into the waiting launch, and so across the stretch of fjord to Vadheim.

I glanced back at the anchored steamer, and it was not even a place where I had lived, but only an incident, already half forgotten.

We found there were cars at Vadheim, and Jake was able to arrange for one of these to take us on to Olden. It was not long before we were both seated at the back of the car, and winding away from Vadheim and the fjord into deep wooded country that seemed fine to me because it was different from what we had just left. I glanced at Jake beside me, and it was good to see his dark hair falling over his eyes, and the long scar on his cheek, and the inevitable cigarette between his lips.

It was good to think that the steamer and Balholm had not really changed anything between us after all.

With each kilometre we went I knew that the distance was becoming greater between us and Vadheim, and my spirits rose because of this, so that I was aware of a sense of freedom in getting away from it as though there was something in its nearness that might have bound me to it in spite of myself. It was not the steamer, nor the fjord alone, nor even the girl, but all these things combined into an atmosphere that might have closed in upon me had I lingered there even a few hours longer. For all that was a web of my own weaving, and I, a sorry spider, to have been caught in my own mesh. Now I was clear, having made my escape, and I wondered if it would cling to me through life, this quality of desertion, of running from the thing I had created, of escaping in a sense from my own self.

I had stood in the library before my father, he with my wretched verses in his hands and his eyes turned upon me in interrogation, and I had gone from him not in rebellion at the life he had forced me to lead, but in horror at the self who had brought such a scene to pass between father and son. When I would have thrown myself into the river it was because I hated the coward who lingered on the bridge.This was I, then, twisting and turning in my tangled web, seeking an outlet when I had carefully arranged that there should be none.

It seemed to me, though, that there was madness in too great a depth of introspection, and however much I delved into my own instincts I could not change what I should find there, so it were better to shrug my shoulders and shake my head, to whistle and to laugh, and keep up a pretence that I did not care what came to me until the very believing of this pretence made it at length reality.

Still, there was no need to go into this now, for here was the car taking us along a winding road, and the mountains stood up around us and the forested hills, and the white streams ran, too, to keep us company.

Soon there would be high ground, and another fjord more beautiful than the one we had left, and Jake to turn to at a change of mood, and, anyway, I was alive and young, so why should I worry - these being the only things that really mattered.

Then I heard Jake laugh, and I saw him looking at me with an expression in his eyes that meant he knew what I had been going over in my mind.

‘So that’s that, and everything all cut and dried, eh?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I guess I know where I am now.’

‘You’re thinking that after all it’s a grand day, and this country’s pretty good, and it’s been an experience, and, anyway, you’re not such a bad fellow - and perhaps next time. . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said.

8

W
e went from Sandene to Olden, and at Olden Jake had to pay off the car because it was getting too expensive. I had got used to his paying for everything now; I did not have any shame about it. It was not as though he were merely someone I had met; he was definitely part of myself and part of my life.

Sometimes I wondered what I should be without him, for never before had there been anyone in my existence that had counted, and the years at home seemed just a stretch of time without any meaning at all.

It seemed incredible to me now that I had ever lived as I had done, a pitiful figure crouching in my father’s shadow, and the personality that had held so great a power for me had drifted away into nothing, compared to the living breathing creature that was Jake.

I thought about him sometimes, this father of mine, and how strange it was that the supreme influence of twenty-one years should have fallen away thus without my conscious knowledge of its parting. I knew that if I returned home the big park gates would close upon me and I should no longer be aware of this suggestion of captivity, but would travel along the chestnut drive feeling that the trees were smaller than before, an avenue now and not the sentinels of a shadowed cloister, and the very sweep of the gravel finally bringing to my view the grey stone of the house would hold no shudder of oppression, for these things were of the past, belonging to a dead childhood, and I would look upon the most familiar scenes of spent misery and discontent with new eyes. They could not hold me now, neither the house, nor the garden, nor the shadow of my father seated at his desk by the open window of the library; they could not hold me any more than a dream holds a child who wakes in the morning, seeing the kind brave light of day, and knows the little horrors of his dark night were of his own imagining, not lasting nor true.

All I had done to rid me of my ghosts was to fall in with Jake as my strength and my conscience, my leader and my companion, and he had washed away every memory of my bitterness and repression with a look, and a smile, and a word here and there; so that my home was a sleeping house in a still garden, my father a dreaming poet with no shadow of scorn in his eyes. I did not hate them any more; they were just a pattern in a finished screen, now folded and put away for ever.

I had sailed in a ship and felt the wind in my face, I had wandered in strange cities, I had ridden over the mountains, I had slept under a white sky, I had loved a girl with my body: all these little moments had been lived through and forgotten, nothing in themselves, making other patterns on that screen.

Only Jake remained, and I asked no more than this, his continual presence at my side, and long days and nights ahead of us, and laughter and talk, and an open road, and the sun.

We stayed a couple of nights at Olden, because Jake wanted to see the Briksdal Glacier and I to explore the fjord in a boat, and then we pored over the map and saw a road that would take us on to Marak at the head of another fjord, or if we turned east at Griotli we should strike inland for over a hundred kilometres perhaps until we came to Otta on the railway from Trondhjem to Oslo.

It was some fifty kilometres from Olden to Griotli, and we were lucky in this, getting seats in an open tourist car bound for Marak, thus taking us a good way on our journey.

I was tired of the fjords now; I wanted to get away to something different.

We struck east then at Griotli, where we found neither cars nor horses, so there was nothing for it but to start walking, and we reckoned that if we did twenty miles a day we should make Otta and the railway in five days or thereabouts.

We made packs of whatever kit we had, and slung it over our backs, and set off from Griotli knowing that time did not matter to us at all, and we could sleep in the hills or in the shelter of a peasant’s hut, and food could be found at odd places.

We could rest when we chose, and walk when we chose, and the weather was grand, and we were together and we did not care.

Once more it was like being in the mountains from Fagerness to Laardel, and the fjords, and the steamer, and the girl might not have happened for the little I thought of them. I don’t believe I thought of anything much during that six days’ tramp from Griotli to Otta. Nothing mattered but the sun shining and the wind from the hills blowing upon my face, the feel of the hard road beneath my feet - ever and again striking off from this road on to the rough tracks and the hill paths - then throwing off my pack and lying beneath the forest trees with my head in my hands, and the sound of a rushing stream in my ears.

Back in the mountains there had been something of peace and exultation; an understanding of beauty beyond my grasp and a dumb longing to stand a little higher than myself, but here there was the glory of tangible things, the touch of earth, the feeling of water running over my hands, the smell of trees clustered together - the very knowledge of being alive with this world to live in.

Back in the mountains Jake had been the leader, I sitting carelessly astride my horse letting him follow slowly in the footprints of the other, with my spirit shaken by what I saw and timid of the thoughts that came to me, wrapped in a silent ecstasy; while here I climbed a grass track calling to Jake over my shoulder, he ploughing away steadily behind me, or I found myself alone on the road ahead of him, obeying some instinct within me that made me run like a boy and swing by the branch of a tree, throw a stone in a stream, shouting a song into the air. Then I would stand on a ledge of high ground, and wave my hand to him, a dark figure in the road below; and while I waited I kicked my heels on the ground, watching a blue shadow pass across the distant hills; smoking a cigarette with my face lifted to the sun, and I whistled a tune without words and smiled for no reason.

Presently Jake would join me, and we would sit there together plucking at a stem of grass, sifting the sand with our hands, chucking stones down into the valley.

I did not want anything to be changed; it could have gone on like this for ever for all I cared.

‘This is all right, isn’t it, Jake?’ I would say.

‘Good enough for me,’ he would answer.

‘God! I’m happy. I don’t see how anything could be better than this.’

Jake laughed, and I knew why he was laughing.

‘You don’t believe a word I say, ever, do you, Jake?’

‘Always, Dick.You’re an enthusiast though, that’s why I smiled. I wondered what would happen if it came on to rain and the wind changed.’

‘I shouldn’t care. I like a stinging wind and the rain in my face. Those aren’t the sort of things that change me.’

‘What price London now, Dick?’

‘Any price you like. I feel fit. I feel grand - I’m ready for anything. Think of standing in Piccadilly and looking up at the electric signs - just before dark when the light is grey and the theatres are opening - and the traffic all jammed up anyhow in a block, and the smell of dust and food from a restaurant, and a news-boy shouting in your ear. . . . It isn’t so bad, Jake, what d’you think?’

‘You’ve never lived there, you make everything as a picture in your mind.You go through life doing that, don’t you?’ he said.

‘I can’t help it. I’ve always done it, even when I’ve hated things. No, this suits me, Jake, out here on this road with the hills behind us, and a stream at our feet. I feel like living every minute and holding on to it. That’s what I want to do - to hold on to it.’

‘You can’t do that. When you live too fiercely it slips away from you, and you find you’ve missed the whole thing.’

‘Yes - I’ve felt that.’

‘Keep calm if you can - don’t get blown about the place. You’ll enjoy everything so much more, especially afterwards.’

‘How d’you mean, afterwards?’ I asked.

‘When all this, and all you do later, is behind you.’

‘Don’t be a ghoul, Jake. I don’t have to think of that. Now is the time that matters. I don’t want to sit back and call up dead dreams. Memories - what hell.’

‘No, it’s the best time,’ he said.

‘How do you know?’

‘I know, that’s all,’ he answered.

‘What, being old, with a bald head and a pain in my back?’

‘No - that’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘I don’t get you at all. You have a whole lot of theories that don’t fit in with mine.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he smiled.

‘Now you’re laughing again. You’re a terrible fellow, Jake.’

‘I can’t stop myself when I look at you, with your eyes glaring, and your hair standing up on end - just letting yourself burn to a cinder with your terrific ideas.’

‘How d’you expect me to live?’ I scowled.