I'll Never Be Young Again Read Online Free PDF

and then up, and a kick, and a jerk at the rein and off towards the low meadows and the rough hussocks of turf.
    I wanted to have a father who cared for the glory of these things, who gave me a gun, who rode with me calling to his dogs, who laughed loudly and long, whose breath smelt of whisky and tobacco, and then after dinner would lean back in his chair and smile at me across the candles on the dining-room table, and bid me tell him what was passing in my mind.
    I would have a mother whose beauty made me ashamed of my own clumsiness, whose voice was low, whose smile was a caress; who knew my thoughts without my telling her, who loved me to lie silent in her room when I wished to be alone thinking of nothing, whose scent would always be the same behind her ears and in the hollow of her hands, and who would come to me at night and let me be a child.
    And none of this belonged to me, but existed only in my imagination, for I had a poet for a father, and my mother was his slave, while I sat stiffly in the schoolroom with my tutor, his weak eyes blinking behind his spectacles, his scholarly voice accentuating with punctilious correction the steady metre of Greek verse. So I learnt that I must follow meekly like a humble shadow in the footsteps of my father, train my mind gradually and patiently to the polished beauty of words, fold my hands reverently on the covers of books, care for no smell save that of ancient manuscript, the faded ink, the yellow parchment.
    To be able to write then was the only object in my life; without this achievement there was no purpose in my being born at all. My tutor was like the thin echo of my father’s voice, repeating his phrases as a disciple murmurs the teachings of his master. And I grew to loathe my father, loathe his genius that made such a mockery of his son; and my spirit rebelled against all the things he stood for, it struggled to resist his power, it fought to escape from the net that bound me imprisoned in his atmosphere. I hated him, alone in his library, distant and intangible, his cold brain wandering amongst heights which I could never attain, worshipped by the world and remaining aloof, untouched and unharmed by his own fame. How could I interest him, with my boy’s body and my restlessness, and what were my dreams to him? We sat round the table in the dining-room, my mother shadowy and ineffectual, keeping up a little patter of words to the tutor, who turned his own face towards her with pretended interest; and my father silent in his oak chair chewing his food slowly, his eyes fixed on the table-cloth like a dumb idiot.
    Sometimes my mother would glance in my direction, and I would guess at the puzzled thought behind her brow.
    ‘Richard,’ she said, ‘looks pale today. I think he might take his bicycle into Lessington.’
    And my tutor would fall in with her agreement, and immediately they would make a business of this going into Lessington, the time of starting and the time of returning, and what I should do there and what I should see. So much so that instinctively I resented their idea, and scowling over my meat I would mutter that I did not care to go.
    Then my mother appealed to my father at his end of the table, with a glance of reproach in my direction for being the cause of disturbance to his great thoughts, and putting on the special voice she used for him would say: ‘My dear, we think Richard should bicycle into Lessington.’
    My father would turn his eyes upon me, as a scientist looks at an unimportant insect whose name he does not even bother to remember, and then pausing to consider the matter, for his manners were excellent, he nodded his head gravely as though he had turned the subject over in his mind.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Richard must certainly bicycle into Lessington.’
    Thus the subject was closed for ever, and early in the afternoon I would be dragging my machine from the empty stable, and pedalling along the silent drive out on to the hard high