I was ready to break down like a boy and cry. I kept my hand on his arm as though it afforded me some measure of protection. Yet somewhere inside me there was a feeling of revolt, a stupid sense of frustration. This fellow had not any right to stop me from making a fool of myself. And, anyway, I did not care a damn for his opinion. Mechanically I heard myself speaking in a small tired voice I scarcely recognized as my own.
‘You don’t understand,’ I kept saying, ‘you don’t understand - I’m not going to explain to you or to anybody. This is my affair, you don’t understand.’
He swung himself up on the bridge beside me. He pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.
I took one, and this very action of turning it in my fingers and lighting it, in the familiar drawing-in of my breath, gave me such a sense of life new-found with the blessed relief that I had so far escaped the horror of death, that I smiled and was no longer fearful or ashamed to meet his eyes.
He smiled too, and then stayed silent for some minutes, allowing me time to recover my mental balance, while his shoulder just touched my shoulder, and his knee just touched my knee, so that I was aware of the immense security of his presence.
He must have been following some train of thought in his mind, for when he spoke again it was like the continuation of things unsaid.
‘There’s always been a whole lot talked about responsibilities,’ he went on, ‘and citizenship, and duty, which is a funny word. None of these matters to you or to me, I guess. Maybe we’re built on a lower level. We’re not belonging to the crowd of real people. They exist apart, in their true, even way of living. But there’s something in me and in you that can’t be cheated for all that, it’s like a spark of light that burns in spite of ourselves, we can’t throw it away, we can’t destroy the only chance we’ve got to live for our own purpose.We wouldn’t have been born otherwise. ’
He broke off abruptly and looked at me sideways, not to watch the effect of his words, but to see how I was taking my new lease of life.
‘What were you thinking about?’ he asked. I saw that he meant by this what was I thinking before I tried to throw myself down from the bridge.
‘I don’t know,’ I said; ‘pictures came into my mind that I couldn’t stop. The smell of grass in early summer, a gull dipping its wing into the sea, a ploughman on a hill resting, his hand on his horse’s back, and the touch of earth. No, now I come to remember, these faded before things I had never known. Impossible dusty cities and men swearing and fighting; then I getting terribly drunk, getting terribly tired sleeping with women who laughed against my shoulder, not caring about me at all. Then eating and riding, and a long rest and a dream.’
Somehow we found ourselves smiling at the pictures my imagination had so swiftly conjured.
‘That’s the sort of mood you’ve got to cling to,’ he said, ‘don’t get away from it. I want you to feel like that.’
Once more I was a boy again, shy, sullen, resentful of the attitude he had adopted. I didn’t know him. It wasn’t his business.
I leant forward on the bridge, biting my nails.
‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘what all this has got to do with you. You might as well have left me to clear out. I’m no use, I don’t want to live.’
He did not bother about me, he made no attempt to ask questions, and I felt like some silly girl snubbed by a man older than herself, failing to win her impression, and sitting back confused and immature.
‘Oh! hell,’ I said, and to my shame and misery I heard my voice break off in the middle, and I felt the tears come in my eyes.
I was not even a boy, but a little sniffing child wiping his nose against the shoulder of his companion.
‘I’ve been such a fool,’ I said, ‘such a bloody fool.’
Then he laid his hand on my arm, and I knew he was not looking at my face, but that he meant to show he was with me and that my boy’s tears could not spoil anything.
‘We’ll pull along together,’ he said, and that was all.
I knew then that I did not have to worry about things again, that I could lean upon him, weak though it might seem, and that he would not leave me to the horror of being alone. I began to notice his face, his curious grey eyes and the scar that ran the length of his left cheek. His hair was black, and he wore no hat. His clothes were shabby too, as though he did not care. I did not mind who he was or where he came from, all I knew was that there was something of splendour about him that had lifted me away from myself, making the coward in me sorry and lamentable beside his grandeur. He must have been some six or seven years older than me, but I felt there was no necessity to ask these sorts of questions.
We accepted each other and that was all.
‘My name’s Jake,’ he said, throwing away his cigarette, ‘what do you call yourself ?’
I hesitated like a poor fool, and then stumbled over my words, realizing that my father’s name could not matter to such as he, fame would be one of those things that would leave him untouched, save for a smile and a shrug of his shoulder.
‘Oh! call me Dick,’ I said, ‘that’s good enough for me,’ but even as I muttered this stupidly I hated to feel he had been aware of my hesitation. It was as though some remnant of family pride still clung about me, reminding me that the shackles of relationship could never be shaken off.
At that moment I loathed the memory of my home more than ever; I could not bear that instinctively it should step between me and my freedom.
He asked me suddenly how old I was, and I told him I was twenty-one.
‘You mustn’t throw it away,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
I don’t think I really knew what he meant.
‘Life,’ he said, ‘isn’t just whining about things. There’s something tremendous in it. We don’t want to go messing up our chances. There’s so much to know, so much to do. No reason for us to crumple.’
I wondered why he included himself in my inferiority, and I thought that this was his way of showing sympathy. He was pulling himself down to my level. I didn’t want him to do that, it was a humiliation to both of us, but especially to him. I knew that however desperate his life might have been, however lonely and bitter and distressed, he would not have done what I had tried to do.
He would have been sufficient to himself and never lonely.
‘Oh! you,’ I said, ‘you’re different -’
I felt hot and ashamed, but he did not notice this, unless he kept his thoughts to himself.
The darkness had come while we had been talking, and there were no wide streaks left in the sky and no dark patches.
There was a star above the black smudge of St Paul’s.
I was grateful to the darkness and grateful to the vast sound of London in the distance. I loved the warm air and the spent dust, the lights of the world that still accepted me, the listless scent of a summer evening, the movement of people, and the blessed certitude of the small star. And above all the voice and nearness of my companion.
The river beneath the bridge was remote now and beyond me, the very water running so swift and silently held no suggestion of horror. It had even lost its power of fascination. I was superior on my firm bridge and it could not reach me. I would not be afraid of it again.
Perhaps in a way I was dazzled at the thrill of escape, I was oddly excited at the possibility of adventure, I wanted to show off. I swung my legs carelessly over the parapet, whistling to myself, knowing I should not fall.
Jake laughed, and steadied my arm as though I were a child.
‘You’re safe now, aren’t you?’ he said.
I felt small and ridiculous, and was not sure how much of a fool he thought me. I wished I was different, I wished I were stronger than he.
It would be good to win his approval over anything.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked, and I wondered whether he realized how I hung upon his words. He did not answer me directly, his face was in shadow and I could not learn the expression in his eyes. Once more he continued in a channel of his own thoughts.
‘Being young,’ he said, ‘is something you won’t understand until it’s gone from you, and then it will come in a flash, leaving you a little wiser than before.You won’t be lonely, you won’t be unhappy, possibly there will be a great peace and security. You’ll go on, you see, as others have gone on, just that and no more. You’ll love and live, and the rest of it. But because of stupidity, or carelessness, or a belief in the lasting glamour of things, you’ll throw away what you wanted to throw away tonight. I guess you won’t notice any difference.You won’t know what you’re losing, and you won’t care.’
He laughed softly, and laying his hand on my shoulder I knew that he understood me better than I did myself. And there was a shadow across his eyes which made me feel as if he were sorry about something.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, ‘you’ll be fine, and stronger than before. But if you listen you’ll hear the echo of a lost thing away in the air, like a bird with a song you can’t name, high up above you where you can’t reach.
‘“I’ll never be young again,” it says,“I’ll never be young again.”’
Still he had not answered my question. And I did not want to be treated as a child. Nor did I understand. I spoke roughly, not choosing my words.
‘Oh! damn your sermons, let’s clear out of this place, it doesn’t matter where.’
Away down the Pool I heard the siren of a ship, and the echoing siren of a tug.
Lights winked in the darkness, and the still rotten smell of the river floated up to me, bringing a memory of the barge that had gone with the tide and the setting of the sun.
Jake lifted his head, and he seemed to be listening to the siren and the hundred-odd sounds of the Pool. It may be there was a distant whistle and the scraping of feet on a deck, the rattle of a chain, the hoarse shout of a pilot. None of this could we see, only the flashes of light and the dim outline of moving things upon the water. I fell to wondering about the sea that lay beyond this river, and how the sight of it would meet our eyes at dawn like a strange shock of beauty after the mud reaches and the green plains. Somewhere there would be tall cliffs, white against the morning, and loose chalk and stone crumbling to a beach. I fancied there would be breakers upon the shore, a thin line of foam and a soft wind coming from the land. Little houses would stand on these cliffs, snugly asleep, the windows closed to the air. They would not matter to us as we passed, for we would have done with them. We would be away, and long after men would come from those houses and make for the fields, staring at the warm sky, calling to a dog over their shoulder, while the women bent low over their tubs, wringing their hands in the blue soapy water, harkening to the kitchen clock and aware of the good dinner smell. Staring towards the sea, shielding their eyes from the sun with their hand upraised, perhaps they would see a grey whisper of spent smoke upon the horizon to tell them we had passed. Or the square corner of a sail dipping below the line, the tip of a masthead smudged against the sky.
Then I sighed, for these things had become real to me in a moment, and here we were only upon the bridge, and we must turn to the streets, and the noise of the traffic, and think of the necessity of eating, stand shoulder to shoulder with people on pleasure bent, mounting like beetles from the hot Underground, our eyes blinking at the glaring lights of a crowded cinema, and so to a drab lodging-house with the narrow beds and the grey cotton sheets.
So once more I turned to Jake and repeated: ‘What shall we do?’ scarce caring for his reply, aware that despondency would come to me in any case. And his answer was one that showed me he had an intuition of my every mood, that he joined in with them as though he were part of myself, that even my thoughts were not hidden from him, that we were bound henceforth as comrades and I loved him and he understood.
‘We’ll get away in a ship together, you and I,’ he said.
3
A
fter I had eaten I felt strong, with no shade of weariness clinging to me. We sat at a little table in a dark corner, and the shabby waiter had flicked the last crumb off the 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.’