What Happened at Hazelwood? Read Online Free Page B

acknowledged to myself that I loved him from the first day we met. How these things come about I don’t know. It is said that an enduring and exclusive passion may be born of the fact that the shade or texture of a young man’s jacket unconsciously reminds one of some rug or blanket one used to suck in one’s cot. And certainly falling in love is irrational, and love itself is impersonal – impersonal even though in no other human relationship is it so certain that one particular individual is utterly indispensable and the other just as utterly out of court. This falling in love with Christopher is the chief thing that has happened to me, and the best. And yet I don’t understand it at all. As you will presently see, I oughtn’t to have done it. Instinctively, I ought to have sheered off. But there it was.
    Christopher talked anthropology mostly, and how the University had never really acknowledged it as a science, and how the old descriptive anthropologies were not a great deal of good, and how it was futile to trace cultural affiliations about the globe looking for the Ark or the Garden of Eden. Only something called configurational anthropology (which I came to understand pretty well) was really getting anywhere, and there he himself hoped one day to do this and that. Christopher’s talk was on those lines. He was twenty-three, and had some sort of junior Fellowship or research scholarship, and was living half among undergraduates and half in a common-room with a lot of old men. It was in going from one to the other, so to speak, that he caught a glimpse of me and stopped for a good stare. That stare went on for some weeks. I saw that Christopher was very shy.
    Christopher was shy and intellectual. He was also something not easy to express, but I think it might best be called the flower of courtesy – that in the most substantial sense the phrase will bear. He was all gentleness and strength. An obligation was absolute with him. For anything in which he believed in the sphere of social justice he would have dropped configurational anthropology in the waste-paper basket and stood and died in his tracks. If I had actors and actresses behind me he had a long line of aristocratic eccentrics and philosophic radicals. We got on well. It looked to me like a marriage made in heaven. I look back and it is a sort of dream: Christopher disengaging himself from mobs of young men and knots of old ones; Christopher anxiously choosing wine at the George; Christopher absently punting up stream from Magdalen Bridge and talking of the Mundugurnor and the Tchambuli and the mountain-dwelling Arapesh. The Cher became the Markham or the Sepek as he spoke. He had been living for his first substantial piece of field work. And that was what happened. One vac there was a letter. Christopher had gone to New Guinea.
    Well, that was that. Christopher was not one to let you down. He would not have let down a beggar-woman for all the Mundugumor who ever hollowed out a canoe. He had decided that he didn’t measure up to me and walked straight out.
    I walked straight out too. Within a week I was doing dramatic art. And if anyone had there and then wanted a young and rather beautiful woman to play the part of Death I just wouldn’t have needed any training at all. But of course it wore off – in a way. I had a great deal of hard work and one love affair. The love affair was bad – commonplace but bad, so that I don’t think I could so much as bear to commit a note of it to a private diary. But oblivion does in a sense take such things. I pushed along. In four years I was playing Cleopatra in a rather arty production of Shakespeare at a coterie theatre. That was quite silly, of course. But it caught the eye of what I must call an intelligent producer. There was to be a Troilus and Cressida built up round me for the West End. And I saw at once that there was nothing silly about that. It was my chance to join the family and shake hands with Kemble