I'll Never Be Young Again Read Online Free Page B

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