IN QUEST OF HIS YOUTH
AN EXTRAVAGANCE OF TEMPERAMENT
BY
LEONARD MERRICK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXI
COPYRIGHT, 1911
BY MITCHELL KENNERLY
"How we laughed as we laboured together!
How well I remember, to-day,
Our 'outings' in midsummer weather,
Our winter delights at the play!
We were not over-nice in our dinners;
Our 'rooms' were up rickety stairs;
But if hope be the wealth of beginners,
By Jove, we were all millionaires!
Our incomes were very uncertain,
Our prospects were equally vague;
Yet the persons I pity who know not the city,
The beautiful city of Prague!"
If you can imagine the lonely shade of the manwho wrote that verse returning to LiteraryLondon—where there is no longer a young man whocould write it, and merely a few greybeards areleft still to understand what it means—I say, ifyou can imagine this, you may appreciate thecondition of Conrad when he went back to theQuartier Latin.
Conrad was no less sad, his disappointment wasno less bitter, the society that he had sought soeagerly was no less alien to him. But while hecommanded bocks for all, and mourned the changethat left him desolate, the melancholy of his moodwas a subtler thing—for he realised that theprofoundest change was in himself.
Something should be said of the longings thathad brought him back to the Quarter—longingsin one hour tender, and in the nexttempestuous—something hinted of the regretful years duringwhich his limbs reposed in an official chair whilehis mind flew out of the official window to placesacross the sea where he had been young, andsanguine, and infinitely glad. To a score of places itflew, but to none perhaps so often as Paris, wherehe had studied art in the days when he meant tomove the world.
Of course the trouble with the man was thathe wanted to be nineteen again, and didn'trecognise it. We do not immediately recognise thatour youth is going from us; it recedes stealthily,like our hair. For a long time he had missed thezest, the sparkle, the buoyancy from life, but forthe flatness that distressed him he blamed theColony instead of his age. He confused the emotionsof his youth with the scenes where he had feltthem, and yearned to make sentimental journeys,fancying that to revisit the scenes would be torecover the emotions.
Because the office rewarded his mental flightsungenerously he was restrained by one of thoselittle realities which vulgar novelists observe andwhich are so out of place in novels—"sordid"considerations, like ways and means. Give us lotsof Blood, and the dummy over the dashing highwayman'sshoulder! If you call him a "cavalier"it's Breezy Romance.
And then his Aunt Tryphena died, and left himeverything.
At once he was lord of himself. Liberated by"everything," he sailed for Home, and savouringthe knowledge that he was free to rove where helisted, lingered in London. Some monthsafterwards—when the crocuses were perking behindthe Park rails, and Piccadilly was abloom with thefirst millinery of spring—he travelled to Dover,en route for the Past.
And lilac was everywhere—Paris was all lilacand sunshine. He drove to an hotel on the leftbank. To behold it again! The grotesque clockunder the glass shade, and the clothes p