Lewis Percy Read Online Free PDF Page B

remorse. Through her he had learned a kind of tentative benevolence from which he was trying to break away. And he had learned from fiction that boldness was the thing. Men had to be enterprising. How could he teach her this without wounding her?
    He was aware that he loved women in general too much to hurt them, and that his mother’s stricture – ‘I don’t think we want to be unkind, do we, Lewis?’ – would always inhibit him from the measure of decisiveness that might be conclusive. And he was also aware that to offer a woman sympathy was not always an heroic tactic. Yet what he felt for women was precisely a kind of yearning sympathy, rather than anything bolder or more straightforward. Unconsciously, he identified with his mother’s humility, although he wished that her attention could be deflected away from himself. After all, if he were to marry – and he saw marriage as the sort of alternative to heroic action that he might eventually choose – he owed it to himself to do something manly while he had the chance. A man’s education, he thought, was necessarily a rather crude affair; proving one’s manhood usually involved some act of destruction. He supposed that innocence would have to go, and even began to square up to the task. But he could not quite bear the thought that his mother’s innocence might also have to go. The eternal problem of how to maintain female innocence while accumulating male experience presented itself to him in this novel and startling form. His mother, he saw, was no different from other women, and what he felt for his mother he might eventually feel for the woman he chose as his wife. By the same token, however, he wanted freedom from the strictures that women put upon his conscience. For this reason it was absolutely necessary that he and his mother should part company for a while.
    A crucial factor was the money his father had left in trust. He knew nothing of the amount or of its disposition. From time to time his mother saw her bank manager, and betweenthem they had devised a very conservative portfolio which seemed to have seen them through. Lewis and his mother had been living on dividends for as long as he could remember, for ever, in fact. He knew that they lived modestly, although his mother was scrupulous about making him an adequate allowance. What he now required was a statement of accounts. What he wanted was his birthright.
    Giving his mother his arm as they walked to the bus stop by the Common, he attempted to extract from her the information which he thought he should now possess.
    ‘I simply think I ought to know,’ he said. ‘After all, I want to plan my future. I can’t do that without knowing how much we’ve got to live on.’
    She merely pressed his arm. ‘It will all be yours,’ she said.
    And with that he had to be content, although it was not what he wanted. At least she would be taken care of, he reasoned. While I am away, he added. The money, he gathered, was still there, and as he would soon be earning his own he would not be a charge on her. He would not ask her to make sacrifices; he would even send money home. And she would be standing at the window, a little older, perhaps, but not much changed, when he returned once more. That way, he reasoned, he could look after her at what he vaguely thought of as the end, when he was mature and experienced and had got rid of his occasional fears for her. These fears came to him unbidden when he noticed a stiffness in her movements, or when he looked up from a book to see her with her hand to her breast. Normally he was able to think these fears out of the way. Everybody got old: he himself would. That was why it was so important to make the most of the time allotted to being young. With this in mind his plan held good. He wondered if he might invite Professor Armitage to the house to meet his mother. Professor Armitage could tell her how well his work was going, might even stand as a surrogate father.