Christopher and His Kind Read Online Free PDF Page A

was actually easier to concentrate than when he was by himself. He was alone and yet not alone. He could move in and out of their world at will. He was beginning to realize how completely at home one can be as a foreigner.
    The beer, taken in tiny doses, put Christopher into a state of gradually increasing relaxation which he found he could safely prolong for about two and a half hours. All this while, his pencil moved over the paper with less and less inhibition, fewer and fewer pauses. But then, somewhere in the middle of the fourth glass, his attention lost its grip upon his theme. He wrote lines which made him grin to himself, knowing, as he did so, that they wouldn’t seem so clever—maybe not clever at all—when he reread them later. He was getting a bit silly. He must stop. He picked up his papers, left the money for the waiter, and walked slowly home, thinking to himself: This is what freedom is. This is how I ought always to have lived.
    *   *   *
    And now he must wake Francis and tell him to dress for lunch. Francis seldom actually needed waking. Usually, Christopher would find him reading and smoking, propped on pillows, on the outer side of his bed. On the inner side, snuggled against the wall, the back of the head of a boy would be visible. And sometimes another boy would be asleep on the couch, under a pile of coats and rugs.
    When Christopher entered the bedroom, Francis would give him a faintly embarrassed smile which was like a halfhearted apology for the untidiness of the room and of his life. Christopher had no wish to make Francis feel apologetic. But he had to admit to himself that this daily encounter did make him feel smug. He had been working all morning; Francis hadn’t.
    In Down There on a Visit, Francis appears as a character called Ambrose and is described as follows:
    His figure was slim and erect and there was a boyishness in his quick movements. But his dark-skinned face was quite shockingly lined, as if Life had mauled him with its claws. His hair fell picturesquely about his face in wavy black locks which were already streaked with grey. There was a gentle surprise in the expression of his dark brown eyes. He could become frantically nervous at an instant’s notice—I saw that; with his sensitive nostrils and fine-drawn cheekbones, he had the look of a horse which may bolt without warning. And yet there was a kind of inner contemplative repose in the midst of him. It made him touchingly beautiful. He could have posed for the portrait of a saint.
    This is true to life, more or less, except for the last three sentences, which relate only to the fictitious part of Ambrose. Photographs of Francis at that time show that he was beautiful, certainly, but that he had the face of a self-indulgent aristocrat, not a contemplative ascetic. I can’t detect the inner repose. He could be surprisingly patient, however; he never minded being kept waiting if he had a drink to wait with. He seemed almost unaware of discomfort. If anyone complained of it, Francis would reprove him mildly for being “fussy.” Now and then, he had to spend a day in bed; he was an invalid, though an incredibly tough one. He was perhaps suffering from side effects of the treatment for syphilis which he was then undergoing at the Institute. This was a tedious process. Francis was weary of it, all the more so now that he had been told he was no longer infectious. The doctors had warned him against giving up the treatment prematurely, but he probably would, as soon as he left Germany and started to travel in countries with fewer medical conveniences.
    It wasn’t long before Christopher realized that Francis harbored an aggression—usually well concealed but occasionally obvious—against all those who had never had syphilis. He appeared to feel that it was their self-righteousness and cowardice which had prevented them from having it, and that they therefore ought to have