Читать книгу Long Before Forty - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 10

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While all this was going on there was another side of me developing. It is inevitable that I should have to mention it, but it is not going to be too easy. After a very retarded physical development as a child I suddenly began to change with startling rapidity. I have already mentioned my rapid growth in physique; my sexual development was much more rapid than that. In six months (I can date it quite accurately) just before I reached fourteen everything happened to me at once. My voice broke and I began to part my hair carefully, and I grew fussy about my appearance, and I began to admit that feminine society was at any rate desirable, and my day dreams took on a new complexion. At thirteen I looked an undeveloped eleven; at fourteen people who did not know me took me for eighteen.

It is agonisingly painful to look back at that period, not because it was painful at the time (on the contrary, I was very happy) but because I realise now how very fourteenish I must have been. The girls who condescended to notice my existence were by my untamed imagination instantly regarded as paragons of beauty and perfection. I could spend hours debating with myself whether half a dozen chance words addressed to me meant this or that or the other thing. To receive a voluntary kiss from a girl would be the grandest, most superb experience any mortal could ever hope for—something wonderful happened when a girl kissed you; you were both of you filled with a new divine flame and the world was not the same place afterwards—I can remember the dull disappointment which followed the first dozen experiments or so when I gradually came to realise that my belief was unfounded; I cannot think how I ever came to form the theory.

Nowadays there was much more motive not to do homework in the evenings; evenings were much too important for anything so trifling. No sooner had I reached home from school than the most meticulous preparations had to be made. The new suit had to be brushed, and the trousers extracted from under the mattress. My hair had to be lovingly oiled, and my reflection anxiously scrutinised to see if the handsome good looks I awaited had arrived. I had to choose which of various horrible ties I would wear, and which coloured handkerchief would most fittingly protrude from my breast pocket, and which pair of socks would best complete the ensemble. Then, dressed in as outrageous a parody of prevailing fashion as a fourteen year old mind can conceive, I would sally forth flourishing my walking-stick in search of women.

But this horrifying picture must be modified a little; I was not quite the completely hateful little boy one might believe. The funny little streak of idealism which had made itself apparent can be pleaded in my favour. I did not flaunt my ties and handkerchiefs in the park to attract the notice of fast little schoolgirls or of vulgar minded little shop assistants. My geese were all swans. The girls whose acquaintance I made were all of them queens of beauty and refinement. Blotchy complexions and doubtful fingernails went quite unnoticed; so even did Cockney accents and dropped H’s. I honestly believed that the girls with whom I walked in park or street were quite as lovely and desirable as Diana of the Crossways, and it was an adorable trait in their characters that they could not understand what I was talking about when I made the comparison.

The plainest, vulgarest, most uneducated little wench who ever made eyes at a boy by the bandstand was to my mind the personification of everything beautiful and good, and, what is more, I treated her as though she was. Time and time again I have sent girls into shouts of laughter by my formal way of treating them and by my courtly manners towards them. They were nearly all of them of the type who considers it very funny when a young man offers her his arm for assistance in dismounting from a tram. I missed the point of a good many conversations, because I was most blandly ignorant of the argot of sexual relations—I did not even know there was such an argot and if anyone had told me so I would have refused to believe that people of opposite sexes could speak like that to each other. I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of what Caligula said and did to his mistresses, but I had not the least notion of what male shop assistants said and did to female shop assistants in dark alleyways. And I had such formal, courtly, stand-offish manners that it was a long time before anyone tried to show me, either. It was only rarely that I got as far as kisses, even, and they were such clumsy, unpractised, shy, botched, bungled affairs that they left unmarred the serene surface of my innocence.

I wrote poetry for them, too, high falutin bits of verse full of extravagant flights of metaphor far exceeding the worst excesses of the Caroline school, and I would quote Ovid to them, and Swinburne. Sometimes they would laugh, and sometimes they would lapse into astonished silence, but it never stimulated them into making the replies, full of lofty sentiment, in the interchange of which I firmly believed the ‘love’ I yearned for to consist. For I thought that two people ‘in love’ spent their time in telling each other in the most far-fetched language what magnificent thoughts and emotions they experienced. I knew, and had known for years, that they did other things as well, but I did not believe it when it came to a pinch. I suppose I spent a couple of years looking unsuccessfully for a love of this kind; there was a feeling of dull disappointment noticeable occasionally, but I continually resumed the quest with new hope. The mental picture which it hurts me most to recall shows me, a spectacled fourteen year old in some dark back street kissing tenderly just once the hand of some astonished shop girl (who had believed me to be eighteen at least) and quoting passionately ‘Nothing is better, I well think, than love. The hidden well-water—’ Even nowadays I feel an uncomfortable, guilty sensation when I read about the love of Don Quixote for Dulcinea del Toboso—it reflects with such excruciating exactitude my feelings of seventeen years ago.

The bloom wore off in course of time, as is only to be expected and regretted. To begin with, the tall, elegant, languid, unexpectedly efficient ideal me who grew up in my mind’s eye could not be expected to maintain such wild flights of idealism. A weary satiated cynicism was all that he could possibly rise to, and therefore, all I could allow myself to rise to, either. My experience (is it a usual one? I cannot think of any proverb which bears me out, although I feel there must be one) was that a man who adopts a cynical outlook on life soon finds plenty enough to be cynical about. It was not very long before I formulated a new theory, which my embittered restlessness drove me to try and confirm on every possible occasion, that every woman’s virtue is suspect, and that no woman can withstand indefinitely a properly conducted siege. For a time it was a new hobby, a new sort of game which one played, and in which it was only natural that one should do one’s best to succeed, but when in the end that aspect of it lost its freshness there was only bitterness and unhappiness left. But by the time that period was reached, which joined with many other circumstances to make one period of my life the most acutely unhappy I can ever remember, so many other things had happened that I must go back again and try to bring up to date all the other influences which were at work.