I'll Never Be Young Again Read Free Page B

anybody. This is my affair, you don’t understand.’
    He swung himself up on the bridge beside me. He pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.
    I took one, and this very action of turning it in my fingers and lighting it, in the familiar drawing-in of my breath, gave me such a sense of life new-found with the blessed relief that I had so far escaped the horror of death, that I smiled and was no longer fearful or ashamed to meet his eyes.
    He smiled too, and then stayed silent for some minutes, allowing me time to recover my mental balance, while his shoulder just touched my shoulder, and his knee just touched my knee, so that I was aware of the immense security of his presence.
    He must have been following some train of thought in his mind, for when he spoke again it was like the continuation of things unsaid.
    ‘There’s always been a whole lot talked about responsibilities,’ he went on, ‘and citizenship, and duty, which is a funny word. None of these matters to you or to me, I guess. Maybe we’re built on a lower level. We’re not belonging to the crowd of real people. They exist apart, in their true, even way of living. But there’s something in me and in you that can’t be cheated for all that, it’s like a spark of light that burns in spite of ourselves, we can’t throw it away, we can’t destroy the only chance we’ve got to live for our own purpose.We wouldn’t have been born otherwise. ’
    He broke off abruptly and looked at me sideways, not to watch the effect of his words, but to see how I was taking my new lease of life.
    ‘What were you thinking about?’ he asked. I saw that he meant by this what was I thinking before I tried to throw myself down from the bridge.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said; ‘pictures came into my mind that I couldn’t stop. The smell of grass in early summer, a gull dipping its wing into the sea, a ploughman on a hill resting, his hand on his horse’s back, and the touch of earth. No, now I come to remember, these faded before things I had never known. Impossible dusty cities and men swearing and fighting; then I getting terribly drunk, getting terribly tired sleeping with women who laughed against my shoulder, not caring about me at all. Then eating and riding, and a long rest and a dream.’
    Somehow we found ourselves smiling at the pictures my imagination had so swiftly conjured.
    ‘That’s the sort of mood you’ve got to cling to,’ he said, ‘don’t get away from it. I want you to feel like that.’
    Once more I was a boy again, shy, sullen, resentful of the attitude he had adopted. I didn’t know him. It wasn’t his business.
    I leant forward on the bridge, biting my nails.
    ‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘what all this has got to do with you. You might as well have left me to clear out. I’m no use, I don’t want to live.’
    He did not bother about me, he made no attempt to ask questions, and I felt like some silly girl snubbed by a man older than herself, failing to win her impression, and sitting back confused and immature.
    ‘Oh! hell,’ I said, and to my shame and misery I heard my voice break off in the middle, and I felt the tears come in my eyes.
    I was not even a boy, but a little sniffing child wiping his nose against the shoulder of his companion.
    ‘I’ve been such a fool,’ I said, ‘such a bloody fool.’
    Then he laid his hand on my arm, and I knew he was not looking at my face, but that he meant to show he was with me and that my boy’s tears could not spoil anything.
    ‘We’ll pull along together,’ he said, and that was all.
    I knew then that I did not have to worry about things again, that I could lean upon him, weak though it might seem, and that he would not leave me to the horror of being alone. I began to notice his face, his curious grey eyes and the scar that ran the length of his left cheek. His hair was black, and he wore no hat. His clothes were shabby too, as though he did not care. I did not mind who he was