“So I did. In that case I don’t mind for once: I think I should rather like it. It tastes beastly, but on the other hand, I drink it not for what it is, but for what it does. And I’m talking like Socrates. In other words, I drink it not for drinky but for drunky. It makes gay. Lord, what a candle! By the grace of God, or probably without it, I could light a better candle than that. I could light such a candle, as an Archbishop said just before they lit him. When do you suppose the electric light will cease being funny?”
“’Bout morning.”
Damon took the guttering candle away, in order to get Pythias the refreshment that apparently he didn’t want from his gyp-cupboard, and left him in the dark. Upon which it seemed good to Pythias to scream for his nurse and his mother in shrill falsetto. Damon couldn’t find the ice at once, for it had been put, wrapped up in a cloth, in his washing-basin, in order not to drip, and Pythias, with the exuberance of youth, continued screaming....
Damon was the elder of the two by the space of an entire year, which, when the one is twenty and the other only nineteen, is the equivalent of a decade or so later on. People of fifty and sixty, in the eyes of youth, are of about the same age, just as people of nineteen and twenty in the eyes of the more mature are contemporaries. But the view of youth is probably the more correct, for when a man has passed some fifty years in this puzzling world, he has solved any problem of interest that he is likely to solve, has seen all that he is really capable of observing, and has assimilated all that his mental and moral digestion is able to tackle. Consequently, it matters very little how much older than fifty he is....
But there are wonderful things dawning every day on those of the sunnier age; fresh horizons expand to their climbings, new stars swim into larger heavens, virgin and undiscovered slopes mount upwards for eager footsteps. Eventually the table-land is reached, and given that no national crisis or peril comes along to make everybody look upwards again to toppling precipices of ice, or menace of volcanic flame, the more elderly trot quietly thereafter, to the eyes of youth, along a mild and level road. They have married and begotten children, or they have remained single with Pekinese dogs and knitting or the club bow-window with the evening papers, to distract them gently as they move slowly on, and to the young it all seems very remote and staid and uninteresting. The exciting, the experimental age, when everything is worth trying, and almost everything worth doing, has been left behind; youth, with its causeless anticipations, and even more causeless disillusionments, its insatiable curiosity, its stainless “seeing what things are like,” has sunk gently below the horizon, and the desire even for experiment has failed.
Our happy heroes, however, one screaming in the dark, the other exploring a cupboard, had no idea what most things were like, except that, without discrimination, they found that most things were jolly. At present their best actual achievement was to have found each other, and on that point, despite the discrepancy of their ages, their discoveries were of pretty equal merit. They had been at Eton together, and the intense friendship formed there had, rather unusually, renewed itself and burned with a brighter flame when they came together again, not yet a year ago, at St. Stephen’s College, Cambridge. They shared the widening horizon, and yet kept their smaller horizon—the fresh excitements and licences of the University had not obliterated the old. To people like tutors and godfathers, Damon was known as Jim Lethbridge, Pythias as Robin Linnet. It was inevitable, therefore, that he should be more widely and intimately known as “Birds,” for how could there be an amalgamation in one set of human limbs of a Robin and Linnet without “Birds” being the natural formula for the owner?
It was a very hot night at the beginning of May, and, returning late from an idle afternoon of paddling and bathing on the upper river, they had neither of them gone into dinner in Hall, which would have implied changing from shirt and flannel trousers and nothing much besides into a more formal attire. So Birds had ordered in a loaf of bread, a cold duck and a pot of jam to his own account, and some ice and soda-water and a bottle of whisky to Jim’s, which seemed about fair. The remains of this meal, about enough for a small cat, lay on the table in the window. Then the electric light had ceased to be, and a single stolen candle had guttered over a half-hour’s Plato....
So Jim returned with preventives against thirst, and in putting down the guttering candle, spilt some hot wax over Robin’s brown hand. So he stopped screaming, and began obscenely swearing. The obscenity meant nothing whatever, nor did the amazing oaths: he talked like that just because he was a boy, and there was only a boy to listen to him. But peace returned with the long iced drink, and his mind went back to Socrates and Xantippe.
“Of course he sent her and the kids away,” he said. “Being a female, she didn’t understand him and his friends. He wanted to have a little sensible conversation before dying. I’m sure I should. Do come and see me when I’m dying, Jim. I’ll have you and my mother, because she’s frightfully decent.”
“She can’t have much in common with you then,” said Jim. “Better have the girl who sang about the oysters.”