I'll Never Be Young Again Read Online Free PDF Page B

road bounded on either side by the ugly telegraph-poles.
    In the evening my father would still be working in the library, and we would sit in the drawing-room, the tutor with his spectacles balanced on his nose reading aloud to my mother, who lay back in her chair, her eyes shut, sleeping, her work on her knee.
    And I would run upstairs to the empty schoolroom, my mind afire with a poem I should write, but once I took the pencil in my hand the ideas floated away from me, mocking me, and the words would not come. I would scribble something in a last desperate effort to be unbeaten, but the lines stared up at me pathetic in their immaturity, and in a wave of misery I tore the paper, aware of my failure. There was silence in the house and the garden was hushed. There was no movement even in the branches of the trees.
    ‘You talked to me of being young,’ I said to Jake, ‘you talked this evening on the bridge of losing something I would never understand. Don’t you see what all that has meant to me? I was a boy without the life of a boy. Being young means bondage to me, it means a gaping sepulchre of a house smelling of dust and decay, it means people I have never loved living apart from me in a world of their own where there’s no time, it means the stifling personality of my father crushing the spirit of his son, it means the agony of restlessness, the torture of longings which nobody would explain, and always with me the certainty I was a failure, unable to write, unable to live - don’t you see, don’t you see?’
    I did not really care whether Jake followed my words or not, I was speaking to persuade myself.
    I went on to tell him of this business of growing up in my father’s shadow, of no longer being a boy and my tutor leaving, my supposed education being finished, while my mother still looked upon me as a child of ten and my father never looked on me at all, unless it was to ask me courteously if I had finished the play I had begun.
    For I had started a drama in blank verse, one scene of which had been written and re-written, and because of this I shut myself up in a room all day pretending to be working, while most of the time I bit the end of my penholder and gazed out of the window over the trees in the park to the hills beyond.
    I hated blank verse, and I hated the Greek form which was nothing but a wretched, slavish imitation of my father’s metre, and forgetting the pompous mouthings of my hero I dreamt idly as the long hours passed.
    I would be a man with other men, I would lose myself in a conversation of trivial things where poetry was scorned; I would go where there were no trees and no placid grazing deer but the hot dust of a city and the scream of moving things, where life was a jest and a laugh, where life was an oath and a tear, where people hated and people loved, and beauty meant no empty word in the cool impersonality of a poem but the body of a woman. And so on, and so on, I dreamt with the pen still clutched between my fingers and the poor hidden life in me yearning to be free.
    As I explained these things to Jake it seemed as though the old hatred of my home rose strong in me as ever, and I was still passionately bound to it for all my breaking away, for all my thankful realization of the hot drab restaurant and my hands on the greasy cloth and Jake’s face secure in the dark corner before me. My father still wrote unmoved in the library, and whatever I did could not change him, for he would always know me as unworthy, a wretched abortion of himself, and therefore something to be cast aside from his thoughts lest I should disturb their crystal clarity.
    So all I had been saying was no more than an attempt to show this man my father and the atmosphere grown up about him, and once more Jake must bring his mind back to the picture I had drawn for him, of the open windows of the drawing-room and I standing on the lawn with the echo of my father’s voice ringing in my ears: ‘He’ll never