Free I'll Never Be Young Again by Daphne du Maurier Page A

like existing indefinitely in a land of dreams, clearer than reality where the spirit wandered of its own free will, untrammelled by desire and discontent. Jake and I had entered into a strange intimacy, when silence meant more to us than words. We knew that we were happy without going into an explanation of what we felt.We rode side by side like two pilgrims to no shrine. We had no prayers, but every moment was something to be worshipped, and our gods were the things we looked upon, the mountains, and the cold air.
    Somewhere there was a little withered boy with a dusty mind who, stifling in the atmosphere of his father, wrote shabby pornographic poems crouched in a lonely room full of shadows, but he was not here in the silent hills amongst the singing falls and the untrodden snow.
    Maybe, Jake too looked down from his heights on the face of a prisoner, barred from the light of the sun, who sat tortured by the thought of a life lain waste that might have been as splendid as the one that followed on.
    I did not want ever to go down into the world again. I wished I were a writer, I wished I knew how to write down on paper the beauty of things. My father, having seen nothing of all this, would sit alone in the library before his open desk, and from his pen little thoughts would run forming themselves into words, becoming in one stroke, in one flash, living images of strange loveliness grouped like a string of pictures without names.
    Whilst I, groping in the darkness, could only wonder and worship, with the mountains rising up before me, their shoulders stretched above a bank of cloud, their frozen faces lifted in dumb expectation to a white intangible sky.
    And below the green forests clustered, the spreading branches turning away from the hard rock surface like reluctant fingers.
    I would describe the silence of a frozen lake, and the sudden sound of a foaming cataract of water splashing its way down into a forest stream. I would make some melody of music, linking the echoes of falls in a valley with the song of the stream, and mingling with this a gold pattern of lost sunlight on a trembling leaf.
    I would paint the still air, and the other mountains that I could not reach, and the white light at midnight, and the shiver before dawn.
    I would draw with a shadowed pencil the figures of two men, their horses motionless, standing on the sloping ground of a rough track watching the sun go down behind a blue mountain, and when it was gone there were patches of pink and silver like fingerprints in the untouched snow.
    And the first man had a face that might have been carven out of stone, with the scar that ran down his left cheek as a crevice in a rock. He belonged here, to the colours of the setting sun, to the ridge of the mountains never climbed, and to the frozen air.
    I wished I had some gift of explanation, but in my mind there is this picture burnt with strokes of fire, treasured and unforgettable, of Jake astride his horse, the reins hanging loose on the horse’s neck, while he sat with his arms folded and his head turned to that suggestion of pale light upon a mountain where the sun had been. And below us the soft snow crinkled and melted, and the white rushing streams fell into the valleys.
    We had climbed the highest point of our journey, and we stayed here transfigured, saying never a word, Jake happier than he had ever been and out of my reach for ever.
    If we could have stayed there perhaps a breath of ice could have been blown upon us, and we would have stood crystallized into eternity, the smiles frozen on our lips, the moment never changing and the beauty of a thought remaining with us everlasting.
    It would have been good to die in such a way, with Jake by my side, and no fear in my heart. It seemed strange that life must go on without our need for it. I wanted to cry out to Jake to stay, to linger here only a little longer, away from the world, so that we could carry a greater memory of it which would not