Homecomings Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the warm room, all windows still closed to guard Mr Knight’s health, he turned his glance slowly upon me.
    ‘There they go,’ he said. His eyes were self-indulgent, shrewd, and sad: when I offered him a cigarette, he closed them in reproof.
    ‘I dare not. I dare not.’
    As though in slow motion, his lids raised themselves, and, not looking at me, he scrutinized the garden outside the window. His interest seemed irrelevant, so did his first remark, and yet I was waiting, as in so many of his circumlocutions, for the thrust to come. He began: ‘I suppose that, if this international situation develops as, between ourselves, I believe it must, we shall all have too much on our minds… Even those of us who are compelled to be spectators. It is a curious fate, my dear Lewis, for one to sit by in one’s retreat and watch happen a good deal that one has, without any special prescience, miserably foretold.’
    He continued, weaving his thoughts in and out, staying off the point but nevertheless leaving me in apprehension of the point to come. In his fashion, he was speaking with a kind of intimacy, an intimacy expressed in code. As he described his labyrinthine patterns he inserted some good sense about the world politics of that year, and what we had to look forward to; he always had a streak of cool detachment, startling in a selfish, timid man. With no emphasis he said: ‘I suppose that, if things come to the worst, and it’s a morbid consolation for a backwoodsman like myself to find that someone like you, right in the middle of things, agree that it is only the worst they can come to – I suppose that to some it may take their minds, though it seems a frivolous way of putting delicate matters, it may take their minds off their own distress.’
    This was the beginning.
    ‘It may,’ I said.
    ‘Will that be so with her?’ he asked, still with no emphasis.
    ‘I do not know.’
    ‘Nor do I.’ He started off circuitously again. ‘Which ever of us can claim to know a single thought of another human being? Which ever of us can claim that? Even a man like you, Lewis, who has, if I may say so, more than his share of the gift of understanding. And perhaps one might assume that one was not, in comparison with those one meets, utterly deficient oneself. And yet one would not dare to think, and I believe you wouldn’t, that one could share another’s unhappiness, even if one happened to see it under one’s eyes.’
    His glance, sly and sad, was on me, and once more he shied off.
    ‘Perhaps one feels it most,’ he said, ‘when one has the responsibility for a child. One has the illusion that one could know’ – just for a moment the modulated voice hesitated – ‘him or her as one does oneself. Flesh of one’s flesh, bone of one’s bone. Then one is faced by another human being, and what is wrong one can never know, and it is more grievous because sometimes there is the resemblance to one’s own nerves. If ever you are granted a child, Lewis, and you have any cause for anxiety, and you should have to watch a suffering for which you feel responsible, then I think you will grant the accuracy of what I have tried, of course, inadequately, to explain.’
    ‘I think I can imagine it.’
    As he heard my sarcasm, his eyelids dropped. Quietly he said: ‘Tell me, what is her life like?’
    ‘It hasn’t changed much,’ I said.
    He considered. ‘How does she spend her time in this house?’
    I said that she had recently found another occupation, she was trying to help a man who had fallen on bad days.
    ‘She was always good with the unfortunate.’
    His mouth had taken on a pursed, almost petulant smile: was he being detached enough to reflect how different she was from himself, with his passionate interest in success, his zest in finding out, each time he met one, exactly what price, on the stock exchange of reputations, one’s own reputation fetched that day?
    He began on another circuit, how it might be a