Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
General
Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896
Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)
Benson family
book dropped from under his arm, and you picked it up for him, and he
said, “Oh thanks! Hullo, is that you?” knowing perfectly well that it
was, and you would say, “Hullo!”... So after each had said, “Hullo,”
one said, “There’s about three minutes yet before stroke, isn’t there?”
and the other replied, “About that,” and then taking the plunge said:
“I say, I’ve got a squash court to-morrow at twelve. Will you have a
game?” and the answer, if things were going well would be, “O ripping;
thanks awfully!”
Then a precious minute would go by in silence and it was time to get up
and go into chapel, with a new joy of life swimming into your ken. Never
did Cortez stare at the Pacific with a wilder surmise than that with
which he and you looked at each other as together you passed out of the
dusk into the brightly lit ante-chapel, thinking of that game of squash
to-morrow, which perhaps was to lay the foundation-stone of the temple
of a new friendship. There would be time enough after that for a dip at
the bathing-place, and a breathless race not to be late for hall....
The ardent affair, if the squash and the bath had been satisfactory,
blazed after that like a prairie fire, and the two became inseparable
for a term, or if not that for a few weeks. But to suppose that this
ardency was sensual is to miss the point of it and lose the value of it
altogether. That the base of the attraction was largely physical is no
doubt true, for it was founded primarily on appearance, but there is a
vast difference between the breezy open-air quality of these friendships
and the dingy sensualism which sometimes is wrongly attributed to them.
A grown-up man cannot conceivably recapture their quality, so as to
experience it emotionally, but to confuse it with moral perversion, as
the adult understand that, is merely to misunderstand it.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account