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

weaving, and he a giant in the huge musty library, his sombre eyes set deep in his carven face, untouched by the world, as the frozen snow of a far mountain, splendid on his pinnacle, alone with his thoughts.
    Like a medieval king he accepted the homage due to him, and I could remember the line of people waiting in the stone hall until he should come to them, my mother moving amongst them as graciously as the queen she felt herself to be.
    The little crowd of worshippers would fade away when the audience was finished, and, dazzled and awestruck, find themselves out on the great paved terrace with the magnificent image of their god printed for ever on their minds.
    This was as it should be; this was what they had imagined, the poet secure in a background of tradition, while England and themselves bowed low in recognition of his supremacy.
    And so away down the long chestnut drive and through the park where the deer grazed, and the deep woods beyond, and out past the lodge and the high iron gates on to the main road that led to Lessington.
    They would sigh, shaking their heads at the loveliness of what they had seen, the peace of the house, the marvel of my father’s presence, but even as they envied him, deep in their hearts they would smile at the memory of the homes awaiting them, and their own little joys and their own little worries.
    These were some of the things I told Jake that night in the corner of the dirty smoke-filled eating-house. Nor did he interrupt me to put some question, for I spoke as though talking to myself and he a silent witness.
    Even as the words came from my mouth my eyes fell upon the torn half of a newspaper left on another table, and this was the same edition I had read myself that evening on the bridge. And here was a column of a speech, and here was my father’s face staring up at me from the print to torture me once more. I struck at it with my fist and threw it over to Jake in his shadowed corner.
    ‘There,’ I said to him, ‘there is my father,’ with triumph and defiance in my voice as though I expected his surprise and disapproval, and I didn’t care at all, not I.
    He looked at the photograph and the name beneath, then handed it back to me without a word. Then I continued speaking my thoughts aloud. Once again I was back at home, and wandering lost along the narrow dusty corridors of the silent house, passing the doors of the bedrooms never used, peering into the great empty wing that was shut away from the part in which we lived.
    The furniture, draped in white sheets, stared strangely through the gloom. If I opened a window the hinges creaked, the pane shook, and the stream of day filtering through into the room seemed like a sacrilege and the intrusion of shame. A blind moth fluttered its way to the light. Then I shut the window again and drew close the shutters and crept from this atmosphere of decay and silent antagonism, and away down the murky passages and down the stone stairway of the servants’ quarters, out into the bright sunlight of the gardens even as the moth with its fluttering wings had done. Yet the moth was free and I was still in prison.
    And I wanted to shout and I wanted to sing, and I wanted to throw a ball into the air.
    For I wished to be a boy with other boys, wandering in early morning in wet fields, astir with the lark, the dew soaking my shoes and the mud from the valley stream clinging to my clothes.
    I wanted to rob a nest, careless of the disconsolate bird; I wanted to dive into the stagnant lake from the low branches of a crouching willow. I wanted to feel a cricket bat in my hands, bending the spring handle, and hear the sharp crack of the leather against the wood.
    I wanted to use my fists against the faces of boys, to fight with them, laughing, sprawling on the ground, and then run with them, catching at my breath, flinging a stone to the top of a tree.
    I wanted to smell the hot, damp flesh of horses, they snuggling their warm noses in my hand,