CHAPTER VII
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 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 apathy, 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 remember 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 arrangements 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 quire 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 set 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 justification 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 my rehearsal, Katherine Dale appeared as heroine. I had braved my Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/65