Myself When Young: Confessions

by Alec Waugh

I can recall now not a single feature of her; whether she was dark or fair or tall: but I seem to recollect vaguely that she was plump and that the light in her eyes was roguish. I used to think how pleasantly a love affair would enliven the tedium of military routine. I had not, let it be clearly understood, the slightest intention of embarking on such an enterprise. On the lowest grounds, it would have been unsoldierlike behaviour. The preliminaries, at any rate, would have been staged in full view of my platoon. And an officer should not encourage in the private soldier a suspicion that he is a creature of the same clay and of the same instincts. There is much to be said for the Ouida convention of beer in the canteen and champagne in the mess.

But dreams are agreeable things, and my fancy created a number of romantic situations in which that girl and myself might at some later day find ourselves. I never came out of my billet without a slight quickening of the pulses. “Will she be there?” I asked myself. “Will she be as pretty as she was yesterday?” Once she smiled at me, and my vanity began to wonder whether she too was not regretting that there lay between us the barrier of military rank. Perhaps she, too, was musing wistfully in the twilight on the inequalities of time and place. Perhaps she, too, was dreaming of some romantic encounter in a lane in spring-time on the Cornish cliffs.

“You!” I should gasp. And we should stand still, gazing at one another. And then we should both begin to talk eagerly at once. “I so wanted to speak to you,” I should say.

“I, too,” she would reply. And we should walk together arm-in-arm along the lane by the tall cliffs, standing perhaps silent for a while saddened by the permanence of these high cliffs. So were they yesterday, so would they be to-morrow; their silence might well seem a criticism of our enchantment.

But it would pass quickly enough, that fleeting sorrow, in the bright sunlight of an April day. And she would tell me that she was not really the daughter of a Tyneside miner, but of an impoverished country Squire, married to a rich cad, in part settlement of an overdue account. “I could not stand it,” she would say, “I ran away. But he found me, he dragged me back. He is with me now in the hotel at Boscastle.”

But she should never go back to him. We should rush to Padstow and catch the next train to town. I should hurry round to Grant Richards. “Trouble,” I should say, “I’m going to Austria to-morrow. I must have a hundred pounds at once. My address to no one.” A terrific story, I felt, ending perhaps with a duel on the steps of a Viennese hotel. I had indeed already begun to wonder what editor I should approach with its scenario when the dream was broken.

I detected her, shortly before lights out, leaning in the dark corner of a wall against the beating breast of a junior lance-sergeant.

If I had been sixty instead of twenty-two, I should have been doubtless highly thrilled by the discovery. I should not, indeed, have even included myself in my romantic reverie. I should have selected an attractive member of my platoon and ordaining that he should fall in love with her, I should have watched their love-making with that mixture of subjective and objective interest with which we watch the love-making of the cinema and the stage, I should have identified myself, through my imagination, with their rapture. It would have been a focussing of myself, like the writing of a love-story is when, for a while, one ceases to be oneself, or perhaps becomes oneself more truly in the persons of one’s hero and one’s heroine.

There must be rough sea, though, before the calm waters of harbourage are reached. Many stories of first love have been written, but I cannot at the moment remember a single story about last love. I do not mean the “Père Goriot,” or “Poor Folk”; the “gaga” love affairs. I mean a story of purposeful, commanding love; a love that is at its dawn fine and fresh and vigorous; but that comes too late in life, that pilfers the last years of manhood, that wastes and exhausts itself; but to which its object clings desperately, knowing it is for the last time, knowing that he will not have the faith, the strength, the confidence to begin again. And it must come very often, such a love; must be, as often as not, an inevitable stage in the natural development of man; must mark the passage of the borderland between middle-age and age.

Take, as an example, a prosperous man in the middle fifties, a politician shall we say, grey-haired, grey-bearded, with a strong, massive, heavily-lined face. His second daughter has been married for two years. He is emotionally unattached. His wife has been to him for many years little more than a companion. He can no longer live as he had lived for the ten or twelve years previously, in his daughters. He has begun to weary somewhat of the evasion, the deceit, the insincerity of party politics. He meets at a friend’s house a young girl who has ideas of going on the stage. It is not difficult to understand their attraction for one another. She is small, dainty, with light flaxen hair bobbed low at the neck, and drawn back tightly from her forehead, so that it may bunch widely like clustering flowers about her ears. Her eyes are blue, a pale, cornflower blue; she is not pretty, perhaps; she is the sort of girl who would look very ordinary in a photograph, for the charm of her features lies in their mobility. She is never still. She is listening eagerly, or talking eagerly, and her laughs are quick and short, like commas in her conversation. There is a gulf of over thirty years between them. But her innocence responds to his experience. He can teach her so much. And for him the greed of life, the curiosity, the freshness, the enthusiasm of those dancing eyes and laughing lips speak of a country in which he will never again travel.