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.”
2
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.’
3
He had been alone here, in the desert, far 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 realised 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.