I went home in a state of profound depression. I had made a hopeless
fool of myself; probably they were talking about it now. These thoughts
were rendered no brighter by being mingled with anticipations of what
I was returning to. Above all else in the world, perhaps, I hated,
and almost feared, that atmosphere of dullness and joylessness, which
hung like a mist over our house. It exasperated me, it seemed to sap
my vitality, and with all the strength of my nature I tried to resist
it. It was as if the narrowness and dinginess, the gray, colourless,
melancholy monotony of my father’s existence, had a hateful power of
penetrating into my brain, like the fumes of a drug, clouding my mind,
subduing it to a kind of cold lethargy: there were times when I had a
feeling that I was struggling for life.
My father was in the parlour when I came in. He glanced up at the
clock, which meant that he was surprised at my returning so much
earlier than usual, but he made no remark. I sat down to take off my
boots; then I took up the book I was reading. My father all this time
had not spoken a word, and I had returned him silence for silence.
Sometimes, after a whole evening of this kind of thing, my feeling of
constraint would become so acute that the effort required to say even
good-night would appear almost insurmountable, and I would invent all
sorts of excuses for slipping out of the room without doing so. My
father was correcting exercises. The books were arranged in two piles
in front of him――those he had already finished with, and those he
had not yet touched. Behind him was the wall, with its cheap, ugly,
flowered paper, and illuminated texts. I glanced at him from time to
time over the top of my book. There was a perpetual dinginess in his
appearance; his linen was not often scrupulously clean, and his nails
never were. Just now I wanted to ask him to stop snuffing. How could I
read while he kept on making such disgusting noises! He had a peculiar
way of breathing through his nose so as to produce a sort of whistling
sound, which I could never get accustomed to. Often I had gone upstairs
and sat in an ice-cold bedroom merely to be rid of it.
Suddenly he looked up over his spectacles and addressed me across the
table. “I intended to ask you about that book you have brought home.
Who gave it to you?”
I at once assumed an air of elaborate nonchalance. “Nobody gave it to
me. I found it in the book-case.”
“What are you reading in it?”
“‘Venus and Adonis.’”
“I don’t like the books you have been reading lately.”
“But this is Shakespeare!” I exclaimed, feigning tremendous
astonishment.
“I don’t care who it is. Why can’t you read what other boys read?”
“I thought he was supposed to be the greatest poet in the world!”
“You know very well what I mean. If you _do_ read him, why don’t you
read the plays――‘Julius Cæsar?’”
“I’d rather have poems than plays. What is the harm in this?”
“The harm is that it is not suited to your age. It is full of all kinds
of voluptuous images and thoughts. You have been too much at Derryaghy
lately.”
The train of reasoning which connected voluptuous thoughts with
Derryaghy was difficult to follow, yet I was not surprised that my
father had come out there. With him all roads led to Derryaghy,
and I could never understand what he really felt about my position
in relation to Mrs. Carroll. When he spoke face to face with her
his manner always expressed something like a carefully repressed
disapproval, and at the same time he allowed me to remain under
countless obligations to her. For example, she looked after, that is
to say, she paid for, my clothing. Also it had been settled recently
that she was to pay my school, and later my university, expenses. I
believe a struggle was perpetually going on within him between his
consciousness of my interests and a desire to tell her to mind her own
business and to leave him to look after his son himself. This peculiar
combination of natural antipathy, a fear to give offence, and a sense
that it was his duty to be thankful, was singularly ill adapted to
produce a graceful attitude in his personal dealings with her, and I do
not think she cared for him.
“Now that Mrs. Carroll has her nephew and niece, there is no need for
you to go there so often,” he went on. “I was glad to see that you did
not stay late to-night.” He added the last words in a conciliatory
tone, even with approval.
“Why don’t you like her?” I asked simply.
He fixed his eyes sternly upon me. “Why don’t I like whom?”
“Mrs. Carroll.”
“Mrs. Carroll! I don’t think I understand you!”
As I gave no further explanation he returned to his exercises, but I
could see an irrepressible desire to justify himself working in his
mind. It broke out in another minute. “You don’t appear to realise
that your question accuses me of both ingratitude and hypocrisy! Or,
possibly, that is what you intended to do?”
Oh, how well I knew this mood, and how we would go round and round
the same little circle, and how he would outwardly be so calm and
reasonable and not in the least annoyed, yet inwardly be perfectly
furious. “I think I’ll go to bed,” I murmured, getting up, and
pretending to yawn.
My yawn was only meant to convey sleepiness, but my father saw in it
impertinence. “Why do you try to vex me?” he asked.
“I don’t try to vex you. Why should I?”
“Mrs. Carroll is different from us. Her position in life is different;
it alters her view of everything; it is only natural that she should be
more worldly.”
“Is she very worldly?” I asked, without enthusiasm. Anybody less so, I
could hardly imagine, but there was no use arguing.
My father branched off in another direction. “To-night, at dinner, were
you offered wine?”
“I had some claret.”
“You remembered I had told you I would rather you didn’t take anything?”
“No.”
“Are you speaking the truth, Peter?”
“I don’t know whether I remembered or not,” I answered petulantly. “I
didn’t think it important enough to make a fuss about. You always want
me to do everything differently from other people. If I can’t do as
other people do, I’d rather not go at all.”
“I’m not aware that I told you anything except what would please me,”
he answered coldly. “I left you perfectly free.”
“How can you call it ‘leaving me free’ when you’re for ever asking me
whether I’ve done it? You say you don’t forbid me to do things, but you
always talk about them afterwards.”
There was a pause. It was broken by my father who seemed now deeply
offended. “Did you make any arrangement about going back?”
“I promised to go to-morrow, after breakfast.”
“What for?”
“I was asked to take the Dales somewhere.”
“Can’t they find their own way? It isn’t very difficult.”
“Does that mean I’m not to go?”
“You can’t be always going there. You seem to me to live there.”
“It’s easier than living at home,” I muttered.
“It is pleasanter, I daresay; but I don’t want you to make yourself a
nuisance to strangers.”
“Aren’t they the best judges of whether I’m a nuisance or not?”
“Well, I don’t wish you to go to-morrow.”
“You might have said so sooner,” I burst out. “What reason have you?”
“I hope you don’t intend to be as disrespectful as you are,” my father
said slowly. “If I had no other reason for not wanting you to go, I
should have a very good one in the way it seems to make you behave when
you come back. I _have_ another reason, however: I don’t desire you to
grow up with an idea that you have nothing to think of in life but your
own pleasures. You are quite sufficiently inclined that way as it is.”
He spoke quietly, but there was a concentrated feeling behind his
words. “What have I been doing?” I asked, trying to be equally calm,
though I knew my eyes were bright, my cheeks flushed, and my lips
pouting.
“I wasn’t alluding to anything particular so much as to your whole way
of looking at things. You appear to wish to be absolutely independent,
to go out and in just as you please. You appear to think you have no
duty to me or to anybody else. You are becoming utterly selfish.”
“Selfish!” I was too indignant to protest more than by simply repeating
the word. People always called you selfish, I thought, bitterly, when
you only wanted to prevent _them_ from being so. I was convinced I was
capable of making the most sublime sacrifices, if there were any need
for them. Indeed I had often imagined myself making such sacrifices,
making them secretly, but to be discovered in the end, when all my
unsuspected nobility would suddenly be revealed, in some rather public
way, perhaps, but too late to save those who had wilfully misunderstood
me from agonies of remorse. It was my father who was selfish, with his
idea of making everybody think and act exactly as he did. He was not
only selfish, but he was jealous. That was at the back of all these
objections to my going to Derryaghy. Only, he never realized his own
faults; he found moral justifications for them. One thing was certain,
I was going there to-morrow, whether he allowed me to or not. I was
so full of these thoughts that I missed a great deal of what he was
saying, but the gist of it I gathered――and I had heard it frequently
before――that I should have my living to earn, my way to make in the
world, that I shouldn’t have Mrs. Carroll always, and that the fewer
luxurious tastes I acquired, the more chance I should have of being
happy in the very obscure and humble path that was apparently all my
father saw before me.
If he really wanted to inspire me with feelings of humility, however,
he could hardly have wasted his breath on a more thankless task. It
was not that I saw myself becoming remarkably successful, but simply
that I seemed to have had a glimpse of what an extraordinary youth
I was. My interview with my father had made me forget all about my
unhappy behaviour at Derryaghy, and as soon as I was in bed I began to
compose a passionate drama, of which I was, naturally, the hero, but
in which, without any rehearsal, Katherine Dale appeared as heroine. I
had braved my father’s anger in order to be with her, and now I was
no longer shy, the right words rushed from me in a torrent. Sometimes
our love story was happy, more often it was a perfect bath of tears.
Indeed, I think I must have had some inborn feeling for the stage, so
frequently did I lead up to the most telling and lime-lit situations,
on the very weakest of which a curtain could only go down to a thunder
of applause. In this present drama there was a fathomless well of
sentiment, of “love interest” of the most uncompromising type. I had
read lately, in bound volumes of _Temple Bar_, one or two novels by
Miss Rhoda Broughton, and as I lay there in my small room, with a text
above my head, I was far from anxious to “keep innocency.” On the
contrary, I was one of those bold, dark, rugged, cynical creatures, one
of those splendid ugly men, who carry in their breasts a smouldering
fire of passion for some girl “with eyes like a shot partridge”; one
of those men who gnaw the ends of their moustaches, and have behind
them the remembrance of a fearful life. My name was Dare Stamer, or
Paul Le Mesurier, and my heart was sombre and volcanic. The plot of our
romance did not vary a great deal. We met; we loved; we quarrelled. I
married somebody else――a cold, soulless, blonde beauty with magnificent
shoulders――and Katherine sometimes went into a consumption, and
sometimes did not, but in either case there was a last meeting between
us, when the veils of falsehoods were torn aside, and for one wild,
mad, delirious moment I held her in my arms, my lips pressed on hers.
It was these wild, mad, delirious moments that so appealed to me. They
followed one another thick and fast as rain-drops in a thunder-shower.
I was ever at a climax. The room was brimmed up with lovers’ tears
and lovers’ kisses, meetings and partings, yet never perhaps had the
text above my head, though I was far from thinking so, been obeyed so
literally and so successfully.