I'll Never Be Young Again(3)

There seemed no reason for staying any longer. I would not even be dramatic and make a gesture of farewell. There should be no sentimentality where I was concerned. It was not worth the trouble of tears, not my life, anyway. I would make a ripple upon the water for a moment, not much more than a stone thrown by a child from a bank. Nothing mattered very much. I wondered why my heart felt so heavy and afraid, why the sweat clung to my hands and could not be wiped away.

I swung my legs over, holding on to the bridge with desperate fingers. An odd snatch of breeze blew across my hair. I supposed that this was the very last thing of the world to come to me.

I breathed deeply, and I felt as though the waiting water rose up in front of me and would not let me go.

This was my final impression of horror, when fear and fascination took hold upon me, and I knew that I should have no other moment but this before the river itself closed in upon me. My fingers slackened, and I lowered myself for the fall.

It was then that someone laid his hands upon my shoulder, and turning to clutch him instinctively as a means of safety, I saw Jake for the first time, his head thrown back, a smile on his lips.





2

‘You don’t want to do that,’ he said; ‘it doesn’t do any good really, you know. Because nobody has ever proved that there isn’t something beyond. The chances are you might find yourself up against something terrific, something too big for you, and you wouldn’t know how to get out of it. Besides - wait until you’re sixty-five if you must finish that way.’

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.