The Burden (19 page)

Then she would smile, a warm, caressing smile, and say:

‘Nothing, bach. It's my own good son you are.'

And Angus Knox would turn his head sharply and look, first at his wife, and then at the boy.

It had been a happy childhood, a normal boy's childhood. Not luxurious, indeed spartan in many ways. Strict parents, a disciplined way of life. Plenty of home chores, responsibility for the four younger children, participation in the community activities. A godly but narrow way of life. And he fitted in, accepted it.

But he had wanted education, and here his father had encouraged him. He had the Scot's reverence for learning, and was ambitious for this eldest son of his to become something more than a mere tiller of the soil.

‘I'll do what I can to help you, Llewellyn, but that will not be much. You'll have to manage mostly for yourself.'

And he had done so. Encouraged by his teacher, he had gone ahead and put himself through college. He had worked in vacations, waiting in hotels and camps, he had done evening work washing dishes.

With his father he had discussed his future. Either a teacher or a doctor, he decided. He had had no particular sense of vocation, but both careers seemed to him congenial. He finally chose medicine.

Through all these years, was there no hint of dedication, of special mission? He thought back, trying to remember.

There had been
something
… yes, looking back from today's viewpoint, there had been something. Something not understood by himself at the time. A kind of fear – that was the nearest he could get to it. Behind the normal façade of daily life, a fear, a dread of something that he himself did not understand. He was more conscious of this fear when he was alone, and he had, therefore, thrown himself eagerly into community life.

It was about that time he became conscious of Carol.

He had known Carol all his life. They had gone to school together. She was two years younger than he was, a gawky, sweet-tempered child, with a brace on her teeth and a shy manner. Their parents were friends, and Carol spent a lot of time in the Knox household.

In the year of taking his finals, Llewellyn came home and saw Carol with new eyes. The brace was gone, and so was the gawkiness. Instead there was a pretty coquettish young girl, whom all the boys were anxious to date up.

Girls had so far not impinged much on Llewellyn's life. He had worked too hard, and was, moreover, emotionally undeveloped. But now the manhood in him suddenly came to life. He started taking trouble with his appearance, spent money he could ill afford on new ties, and bought boxes of candy to present to Carol. His mother smiled and sighed, as mothers do, at the signs that her son had entered on maturity! The time had come when she must lose him to another woman. Too early to think of marriage as yet, but if it had to come, Carol would be a satisfactory choice. Good stock, carefully brought up, a sweet-tempered girl, and healthy – better than some strange girl from the city whom she did not know. ‘But not good enough for my son,' said her mother's heart, and then she smiled at herself, guessing that that was what all mothers had felt since time immemorial! She spoke hesitantly to Angus of the matter.

‘Early days yet,' said Angus. ‘The lad has his way to make. But he might do worse. She's a good lass, though maybe not overloaded with brains.'

Carol was both pretty and popular, and enjoyed her popularity. She had plenty of dates, but she made it fairly clear that Llewellyn was the favourite. She talked to him sometimes in a serious way about his future. Though she did not show it, she was slightly disconcerted by his vagueness and what seemed to her his lack of ambition.

‘Why, Lew, surely you've got
some
definite plans for when you've qualified?'

‘Oh! I shall get a job all right. Plenty of openings.'

‘But don't you have to specialize nowadays?'

‘If one has any particular bent. I haven't.'

‘But, Llewellyn Knox, you want to get on, don't you?'

‘Get on – where?' His smile was slightly teasing.

‘Well – get
somewhere
.'

‘But that is life, isn't it, Carol? From here to here.' His finger traced a line on the sand. ‘Birth, growth, school, career, marriage, children, home, hard work, retirement, old age, death. From the frontier of this country to the frontier of the next.'

‘That's not what I mean at all, Lew, and you know it. I mean getting
somewhere
, making a name for yourself, making good, getting right to the top, so that everyone's proud of you.'

‘I wonder if all that makes any difference,' he said abstractedly.

‘I'll say it makes a difference!'

‘It's
how
you go through your journey that matters, I think, not where it takes you.'

‘I never heard such nonsense. Don't you
want
to be a success?'

‘I don't know. I don't think so.'

Carol was a long way away from him suddenly. He was alone, quite alone, and he was conscious of fear. A shrinking, a terrible shrinking. ‘Not me – someone else.' He almost said the words aloud.

‘Lew! Llewellyn!' Carol's voice came thinly to him from a long way away, coming towards him through the wilderness. ‘What's the matter? You look downright queer.'

He was back again, back with Carol, who was staring at him with a perplexed, frightened expression. He was conscious of a rush of tenderness towards her. She had saved him, called him back from that barren place. He took her hand.

‘You're so sweet.' He drew her towards him, kissed her gently, almost shyly. Her lips responded to his.

He thought: ‘I can tell her now … that I love her … that when I'm qualified we can get engaged. I'll ask her to wait for me. Once I've got Carol, I'll be safe.'

But the words remained unspoken. He felt something that was almost like a physical hand on his breast, pushing him back, a hand that forbade. The reality of it alarmed him. He got up.

‘Some day, Carol,' he said, ‘some day I – I've got to talk to you.'

She looked up at him and laughed, satisfied. She was not particularly anxious for him to come to the point. Things were best left as they were. She enjoyed in an innocent happy fashion her own young girl's hour of triumph, courted by the young males. Some day she and Llewellyn would marry. She had felt the emotion behind his kiss. She was quite sure of him.

As for his queer lack of ambition, that did not really worry her. Women in this country were confident of their power over men. It was women who planned and urged on their men to achieve; women, and the children that were their principal weapons. She and Llewellyn would want the best for their children, and that would be a spur to urge Llewellyn on.

As for Llewellyn, he walked home in a serious state of perturbation. What a very odd experience that had been. Full of recent lectures on psychology, he analysed himself with misgiving. A resistance to sex perhaps? Why had he set up this resistance? He ate his supper staring at his mother, and wondering uneasily if he had an Oedipus Complex.

Nevertheless, it was to her he came for reassurance before he went back to college.

He said abruptly:

‘You like Carol, don't you?'

Here it comes, she thought with a pang, but she said steadfastly:

‘She's a sweet girl. Both your father and I like her well.'

‘I wanted to tell her – the other day –'

‘That you loved her?'

‘Yes. I wanted to ask her to wait for me.'

‘No need of that, if she loves you, bach.'

‘But I couldn't say it, the words wouldn't come.'

She smiled. ‘Don't let that worry you. Men are mostly tongue-tied at these times. There was your father sitting and glowering at me, day after day, more as though he hated me than loved me, and not able to get a word out but “How are you?” and “It's a fine day.” '

Llewellyn said sombrely: ‘It was more than that. It was like a hand shoving me back. It was as though I was –
forbidden
.'

She felt then the urgency and force of his trouble. She said slowly:

‘It may be that she's not the real girl for you. Oh –' she stifled his protest. ‘It's hard to tell when you're young and the blood rises. But there's something in you – the true self, maybe – that knows what should and shouldn't be, and that saves you from yourself, and the impulse that isn't the true one.'

‘Something in oneself …' He dwelt on that.

He looked at her with sudden desperate eyes.

‘I don't know really – anything about myself.'

Back at college, he filled up every moment, either with work or in the company of friends. Fear faded away from him. He felt self-assured once more. He read abstruse dissertations on adolescent sex manifestations, and explained himself to himself satisfactorily.

He graduated with distinction, and that, too, encouraged him to have confidence in himself. He returned home with his mind made up, and his future clear ahead. He would ask Carol to marry him, and discuss with her the various possibilities open to him now that he was qualified. He felt an enormous relief now that his life unfolded before him in so clear a sequence. Work that was congenial and which he felt himself competent to do well, and a girl he loved with whom to make a home and have children.

Arrived at home, he threw himself into all the local festivities. He went about in a crowd, but within that crowd he and Carol paired off and were accepted as a pair. He was seldom, if ever, alone, and when he went to bed at night he slept and dreamed of Carol. They were erotic dreams and he welcomed them as such. Everything was normal, everything was fine, everything was as it should be.

Confident in this belief, he was startled when his father said to him one day:

‘What's wrong, lad?'

‘Wrong?' He stared.

‘You're not yourself.'

‘But I am! I've never felt so fit!'

‘You're well enough physically, maybe.'

Llewellyn stared at his father. The gaunt, aloof, old man, with his deep-set burning eyes, nodded his head slowly.

‘There are times,' he said, ‘when a man needs to be alone.'

He said no more, turning away, as Llewellyn felt once more that swift illogical fear spring up. He
didn't
want to be alone – it was the last thing he wanted. He couldn't, he
mustn't
be alone.

Three days later he came to his father and said:

‘I'm going camping in the mountains. By myself.'

Angus nodded. ‘Ay.'

His eyes, the eyes of a mystic, looked at his son with comprehension.

Llewellyn thought: ‘I've inherited something from him – something that
he
knows about, and I don't know about yet.'

He had been alone here, in the desert, for nearly three weeks. Curious things had been happening to him. From the very first, however, he had found solitude quite acceptable. He wondered why he had fought against the idea of it so long.

To begin with, he had thought a great deal about himself and his future and Carol. It had all unrolled itself quite clearly and logically, and it was not for some time that he realized that he was looking at his life from
outside
, as a spectator and not a participator. That was because none of that mapped-out planned existence was real. It was logical and coherent, but in fact it did not exist. He loved Carol, he desired her, but he would not marry her. He had something else to do. As yet he did not know what. After he had acknowledged that fact, there came another phase – a phase he could only describe as one of emptiness, great echoing emptiness. He was nothing, and contained nothing. There was no longer any fear. By accepting emptiness, he had cast out fear.

During this phase, he ate and drank hardly anything.

Sometimes he was, he thought, slightly light-headed.

Like a mirage in front of him, scenes and people appeared.

Once or twice he saw a face very clearly. It was a woman's face, and it roused in him an extraordinary excitement. It had fragile, very beautiful bones, with hollowed temples, and dark hair springing back from the temples, and deep, almost tragic eyes. Behind her he saw, once, a background of flames, and another time the shadowy outline of what looked like a church. This time, he saw suddenly that she was only a child. Each time he was conscious of suffering. He thought: ‘If I could only help …' But at the same time he knew that there was no help possible, and that the very idea was wrong and false.

Another vision was of a gigantic office desk in pale shining wood, and behind it a man with a heavy jowl and small, alert, blue eyes. The man leant forward as though about to speak, and to do so emphasized what he was about to say by picking up a small ruler and gesticulating with it.

Then again he saw the corner of a room at a curious angle. Near it was a window, and through the window the outlines of a pine tree with snow on it. Between him and the window, a face obtruded, looking down on him – a round, pink-faced man with glasses, but before Llewellyn could see him really clearly, he, too, faded away.

All these visions must, Llewellyn thought, be the figments of his own imagination. There seemed so little sense or meaning to them, and they were all faces and surroundings that he had never known.

But soon there were no more pictorial images. The emptiness of which he was so conscious was no longer vast and all-encompassing. The emptiness drew together, it acquired meaning and purpose. He was no longer adrift in it. Instead, he held it within himself.

Then he knew something more. He was waiting.

The dust-storm came suddenly – one of those unheralded storms that arose in this mountainous desert region. It came whirling and shrieking in clouds of red dust. It was like a live thing. It ended as suddenly as it had begun.