Adventure

Maurice

 

1. A great mistake—he wasn’t brave: he was afraid of the dark. But no one knew this,


2. “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He would die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other; and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.”


3. Then he would reimbibe the face and the four words, and would emerge yearning with tenderness and longing to be kind to everyone, because his friend wished it, and to be good that his friend might become more fond of him. Misery was somehow mixed up with all this happiness.


4. Maurice’s secret life can be understood now; it was part brutal, part ideal, like his dreams.


5. He wished that he had had more courage now that it was too late and he felt a man.


6. “So they say, do they? And what do you say?”

  “I don’t know,” said the hero good-temperedly.

1. Hero though he was, he longed to be a little boy again, and stroll half awake for ever by the colourless sea.


2. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be—flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design.


3. But he saw that while deceiving others he had been deceived, and mistaken them for the empty creatures he wanted them to think he was, No, they too had insides.


4. “Rubbish?” He questioned Maurice, who, when he grasped the point, was understood to reply that deeds are more important than words.


5. Words are deeds.


6. “You’er unsound about memory. You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.”


7. He was a small man—very small—with simple manners and a fair face, which had flushed when Maurice blundered in. In the college he had a reputation for brains and also for exclusiveness.


8. Durham refused. Maurice saw that he was not pliable. He said,”A movement isn’t like a separate piece—you can’t repeat it.”


9. He saw that Durham was not only clever, but had a tranquil and orderly brain.


10. But Durham listened unmoved, shook out the falsities and approved the rest. What hope for Maurice who was nothing but falsities?


11. Maurice walked to and fro on the hallowed grass, himself noiseless, his heart glowing.


12. But his heart had lit never to be quenched again, and one thing in him at last was real.


13. He spied out Durham’s weakness as well as his strength. And above all he exercised and cleaned his powers.


14. To ascend, to stretch a hand up the mountainside until a hand catches it, was the end for which he had been bom.


15. “Hall, I nearly wrote a letter to you in the vac,” said Durham.

   “But an awful screed. I’d been having a rotten time.”

1. Maurice, not well understanding, said,”So did you go?”

   “Where?”

   “To the church.”

   Durham sprang up. His face was disgusted. Then he bit his lip and began to smile.

   “No, I didn’t go to church, Hall. I thought that was plain.”

1. Wherever they met, which was everywhere.


2. When they sat it was nearly always in the same position—Maurice in a chair, and Durham at his feet, leaning against him. In the world of their friends this attracted no notice. Maurice would stroke Durham’s hair.


3. He had this overwhelming desire to impress Durham.


4. “You think I don’t think, but I can tell you I do.” Very often Durham made no reply and Maurice would be terrified lest he was losing him.


5. Durham moved about getting the coffed ready and saying,”I knew you wouldn’t like this, but you have brought it on yourself. You can’t expect me to bottle myself up indefinitely. I must let out sometimes.”


6. “Why go off on a side track?”

   “Why feel so deeply about a side track?”

1. ”If there is one won’t it be part of your own flesh and spirit? Show me that.”


2. “You’re beastly hard,” said Maurice.”I always knew I was stupid, it’s no news. The Risley set are more your sort and you had better talk to them.”

   Durham looked awkward. He was nonplussed for a reply at last, and let Maurice slouch off without pretest.

1. Maurice, although he had lost and yielded all his opinions, had a queer feeling that he was really winning and carrying on a campaign that he had begun last term.


2. “You’ve read the Symposium?”

   Maurice had not, and did not add that he had explored Martial.

1. The mist would lower again, he felt sure, and with an unhappy sign he pulled Durham’s head against his knee, as though it was a talisman for clear living. It lay there, and he had accomplished a new tenderness—stoked it steadily from temple to throat.


2. This was like him; he hated to be under an obligation to anyone.


3. “I had no right to move out of my books and music, which was what I did when I met you.”


4. “I’m thankful it’s into your hands I fell.”


5. As he alighted his name had been called out of dreams. The violence went out of his heart, and a purity that he had never imagined dwelt there instead.


6. His sincere mind, with its keen sense of right and wrong, had brought him the belief that he was damned instead.


7. He had no doubt as to what it was: his emotion, more compact than Maurice’s, was not split into brutal and the ideal, nor did he wasted years in bridging the gulf.


8. He therefore bowed his head, fasted, and kept away from anyone whom he found himself inclined to like.


9. His sixteenth year was ceaseless torture. He told no one, and finally broke down and had to be removed from school.


10. He could control the body.


11. By eighteen he was unusually mature, and so well under control that he could allow himself to be friendly with anyone who attracted him.


12. He liked being thrown about by a powerful and handsome boy. It was delightful too when Hall stoked his hair.


13. It beckoned to him across intellect.


14. Hitherto it had been dalliance, a passing pleasure for body and mind. How he despised that now. Love was harmonious, immense.


15. There was nothing humble about Clive.


16. Had he trusted the body there would have been no disaster, but by linking their love to the past he linked it to the present. 


17. Great was the pain, great the mortification, but worse followed. So deeply had Clive become one with the beloved that he began to loathe himself. His whole philosophy of life broke down.


18. He was damned. He dare never be friends with a young man again, for fear of corrupting him. Had he not lost Hall his faith in Christianity and attempted his purity besides?


19. “Oh, go to Hell, it’s all you’re fit for.” Never a truer word but hard to accept from the beloved.


20. Too silly for speech.


21. The whole day had been ordinary. Yet it had never come before to either of them, nor was it to be repeated.


22. He connected that side-car with intensities—the agony of the tennis court, the joy of yesterday. Bound in a single motion, they seemed there closer to one another than elsewhere; the machine took on a life of its own, in which they met and realized the unity preached by Plato. It had gone, and when Maurice’s train went also, actually tearing hand from hand, he broke down, and returning to his room wrote passionate sheets of despair.


23. Clive’s letter had maddened him. No doubt he is stupid—the sensible lover would apologize and get back to comfort his friend—but it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.


24. Maurice did not know that they had thus spent it perfectly—he was too young to detect the triviality of contact for contact’s sake.


25. He knew he had behaved badly to his mother, and all the snob in him had been touched to the raw. But somehow he could not retract, could not alter. Once out of the rut, he seemed out of it for ever.


26. Mrs Sheepshanks wished everyone curtsied. Clive trod on his foot when she said this, but he wasn’t sure whether accidentally. He was sure of nothing.


27. But he had scarcely reached this conclusion when Clive rushed in with the sunlight behind him.”Maurice, I shall kiss you,” he said, and did so.


28. “Where—what’s through there?”

   “Our study—”He was laughing, his expression wild and radiant.

   “Oh, so that’s why—”

   “Maurice!Maurice! You’ve actually come. You’re here. This place’ll never seem the same again, I shall love it last.”

   “It’s jolly for me coming,”said Maurice chokily: the sudden rush of joy made his head swim.

   “Go on unpacking. So I arranged it on purpose. We’re up this staircase by ourselves. It’s as like college as I could manage.”

1. It was the first time they had experienced full tranquillity together.


2. “I’m a bit of outlaw, I grant, but it serves these people right. As long as they talk of the unspeakable vice of the Greeks they can’t expect fair play. I feel to you as Pippa to her fiance, only far more nobly, far more deeply, body and soul, no starved medievalism of course, only a —a particular harmony of body and soul that I don’t think women have even guessed. But you know.”


3. “Why did you mislead me with that rotten Plato? I was still in a muddle. A lot of things hadn’t joined up in me that since have.”

   “But hadn’t you been getting hold of me for months? Since first you saw me at Risley’s, in fact.”

   “Don’t ask me.”

   “It’s a queer business, any way.”

   “It’s that.”

   Clive laughed delightedly, and wriggled in his chair.”Maurice, the more I think it over the more certain I am that it’s you who are the devil.”

   “Oh, all right.”

   “I should have gone through life half awake if you’d had the decency to leave me alone. Awake intellectually, yes, and emotionally in a way; but here—” He pointed with his pipe stem to his heart; and both smiled. “Perhaps we woke up one another. I like to think that any way.”

64.