The Golden Sovereign by Richard Church

Author:Richard Church
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

More of the Tree of Knowledge

If I have suggested that my infatuation for that clear, girlish voice, and for the robust figure which generated it, was no more than a background to my emotional life, then I have been false to facts.

The kindness of this girl, combined with her reticent shyness, and even with her turns of frightened hostility, had fastened upon my hungry imagination and drawn me to the verge of mania. What is so odd is that this vivid direction of my vitality did not lead me away from my other premature bias. Indeed it fed my preoccupation with words, illuminating the pages of my dictionary and grammar-books, as religious joy and misery drove the hands of medieval monks to the fiery intricacies of initial letters during the scribing of their love-story of Christ’s passion.

Ceaselessly, at the edge of my consciousness, I heard the whispering of shingle on the beach below the Leas at Folkestone; the obbligato to that deep-throated voice which I could see vibrating behind the little necklace and the cross which I had dared once to kiss, pressing it back into the warm flesh, to the terror of us both.

Her letters were no appeasement. They fed the fever, which raged in my veins like the initial symptoms of a consuming disease. Mind and body ached with it. The heightened sensibility, after weeks of torpor following my mother’s death, made me realise how intricately the feminine half of life had woven itself into my nature; emotional, mental, physical. I was lost, hungry, crippled in a world of men, because I could find no contact there, to use my experience, my tender, manipulative responsibility, the quick intuitions and almost hypnotic craft, developed during the nursing of my mother.

This force was different from calf-love, which would have been more normal, and perhaps more healthy, in a boy of eighteen. I was physiologically experienced, a precocious young doctor, in the articulations, the troubles of womankind. It was a dangerous knowledge, beginning so soon to affect my freedom, as a foretaste of further enslavement as the craving toward this morbid ministry took deeper root in my nature.

It was inevitable that my brother’s influence should wane. Though we lived together in our four little rooms, nested in an atmosphere of friendship under the roof of our Anglo-Catholic landlord and lady, we went our separate ways, increasingly reluctant to encroach on each other’s privacy of mind.

Jack too was in the bondage of passion, sombrely translating it into terms of his melancholy spirit, and expressing the result through an ever greater musical authority and definition. But this took most of his time and will, and fed upon his vitality. His features grew more pronounced: the powerful nose, the cheek-bones, the delicate chin and nervous lips. The light of day, shining upon his ears and those filbert-tipped hands, touched them to shell-like transparency. He began to be looked upon by friends and colleagues with an increasing awe, because of this wrapped-away quality of person and character.

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