Short Studies.
THE SOCIAL SYSTEM.
I am sixteen to-day, and I am so excited. There is such a great distance, somehow, between fifteen and sixteen. Fifteen is undeniably childish, but sixteen shows that you are on the way to being properly grown-up. Grown-up! My heart feels as though it has wings when I say that word. For when you are a child you are always waiting for things to happen, but when you are grown-up things really do happen.
I wonder what will happen to me when I am grown-up?
I had a talk with mother to-day, and there was no one else about. That happens so rarely. For, ever since I remember, there has always been a baby, like a rampart, between me and my mother, greedily taking up her attention, with small sounds and new, quaint tricks, so that many a time my heart feels as though it is bursting with unsaid things. Yet the baby is sweet, I can’t deny it. All babies are sweet, I think. Isn’t it a pity you have to be married before you can have them!
For I don’t like men. I can’t bear them. There is something so strange about them. They seem to look at you in such a penetrating way, as though in one glance their brain has taken your photograph. And they seem to be telling you, insistently and urgently, that you are a girl and they aren’t. I don’t like that. I feel I want to take all my inmost thoughts and lock them away where that penetrating look can’t possibly reach them. Then I don’t know what to say in reply to them, and it is all very awkward. I wish there were no men in the world. I told that to mother to-day. I said that the world would be a perfect place, if in it there were only mothers and daughters. I said that once before to a girl in school, and she laughed. She whispered to some other girls, and they laughed too. But mother didn’t. In fact, she agreed with me.
I told her, too, how extraordinary it was for a girl to leave her very own father and mother and go and live with a strange man.
She admitted that it was.
I couldn’t help laughing when I asked her to imagine me leaving her for a strange man. She laughed too. She thought the idea very absurd.
Next week I am going to Arnport for a fortnight to stay with Mrs. Stanley, an old friend of mother’s. She has no children, and her husband is dead. She loved him very much. Her voice goes low when she talks of him.
I hope, when I am dead, somebody’s voice will go low like that, talking of me.
I haven’t forgotten I am sixteen. I think about it often. I have real grown-up corsets, with bones in them. They feel stiff and strange as yet. But I don’t mind. They seem to press about me continually, as though reminding me I am nearing the age of grown-upness when things really do happen.
***
I am in Arnport, and I am so disappointed. Mrs. Stanley has told me that the son of her greatest friend is coming to stay with her. If only it were a girl! You simply can’t feel at home with a boy about. It’s going to be horrid. I wish I could go home.
***
He came this afternoon. He hasn’t a usual look about him. Perhaps it is his clothes. I don’t know. I am vague about boys’ clothes. His are dark and shabby looking, and his hat is queer.
He sat opposite me at tea. He looked nicer without his hat. He has thick hair, glossy black, brown eyes, dark skin, very white teeth.
He stared at me all the time. I stared at him, too, and neither of us minded. There is something marvellous about him, something wonderfully unique. The sound of his voice makes me feel as I felt when I took my first communion, breathless, radiant, afraid. Once, when he passed me the bread and butter, his hand touched mine and my heart shook. Nothing had any taste.
Afterwards we went for a walk along the shore. The sun was more golden than it usually is. In the sea were a thousand shades of green. The sand was beige. Yet the people who passed looked just as usual. They didn’t seem to notice the extraordinary beauty of everything.
I hardly talked at all. I couldn’t do anything but wonder what I would do when he went. His going, I thought, would be like the extinguishing of a very bright light, and life, ever afterwards, would be a stumbling in the darkness. I was afraid.
Friendship has never come to me so suddenly before, so fiercely and so tenderly, with such terror and such delight. I couldn’t love him more if he were a girl and I had known him for years, or if he were my mother and I had known him always. I must whisper that. It sounds terrible, I know. The sea was making queer little sounds as though it were struggling against sleep. The sky was breathing. I heard it.
We stood still and didn’t know what to do.
I couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of him. His name is Paul.
***
We spent every day together feeling utterly happy. Doesn’t “utterly” mean a lot? Utterly! Utterly!
Every evening we became troubled. The distance between bedtime and breakfast seemed so vast. It was immeasurable. It was a gap into which either of us might fall and be lost for ever. For people have died in their sleep. In the morning it would be so peaceful to see each other again, looking just as we’d looked the day before.
I have always hated pictures of flappers talking to men, and easy talk about kisses. Mother thinks flappers are the saddest things. So it wasn’t to imitate them that I kissed Paul often and let him kiss me. It was only to touch each other with our lips. To touch him with my hands wasn’t enough.
When the last day came I couldn’t believe it. I tried to talk about it, but the words stuck in my throat. They choked me. How could I talk of Life without him? He was Life. Yet it had always seemed strange to me that girls could look contented when with men. I imagined them being continually restless to get back home. Yet being without Paul, even for the few night hours, is more than homesickness to me. Isn’t it strange? Do you think it is shameful? Will it be always like this if he goes and I see him no more?
On the last night I got into bed trembling, and said my prayers very hard. Then I tried to sleep. But again the night was a gap into which either of us might fall and be lost for ever. I pictured all the things that could happen to him in his sleep. He might develop a serious illness. Lightning might blind him. He might die.
I got up and put on my bedroom slippers. I thought I would creep to his door and listen to his breathing. He might talk in his sleep and I would hear his voice.
As I was going to his room I met him, half way.
“I thought you were ill,” he said, “or dead.”
“That is what I thought about you.”
“Oh!” And he laughed a little in that funny, man’s way. He caught hold of my hands as though he never meant to let them go. I said his name, and laughed too. I was so happy and so safe, and afraid of nothing in the world.
“Let’s sit here,” he whispered. “What’s the use of going back to bed? We wouldn’t sleep.”
“No,” I said. “We wouldn’t sleep.”
So we sat on the stairs together.
I put my head on his shoulders and both my arms round his neck. His arms he put right round me, but we couldn’t get close enough.
“What shall we do?” I said, half crying. “You are going away to-morrow. What shall we do?”
“I don’t know,” he said, hopelessly.
“If we could only be together for always! If we only lived near to each other. not miles and miles apart! If only you were a girl, or I were a boy! How easy it would he! Oh, I wish I were a boy!”
