No More Learning

Let the hind that tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing. "

"Yes, it's the early harrowing, past a doubt," I said, with a dread at
my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.

"Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad; I am victor.
Greet me O Sun, Dominant master and absolute lord
Over the soul of one! "

"Well? " said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.

I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid
a photograph on the paper--the photograph of a girl with a curly head,
and a foolish slack mouth.

"Isn't it--isn't it wonderful? " he whispered, pink to the tips of his
ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. "I didn't know; I
didn't think--it came like a thunderclap. "

"Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie? "

"My God--she--she loves me!
" He sat down repeating the last words to
himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already
bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and bow he had loved in
his past lives.

"What will your mother say? " I asked, cheerfully.

"I don't care a damn what she says. "

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should,
properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told
him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described
to the newly named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve.
Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist's assistant with a
weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already
that She had never been kissed by a man before.

Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by
thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I
understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully
behind us. It is that we may not remember our first wooings. Were it not
so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.

"Now, about that galley-story," I said, still more cheerfully, in a
pause in the rush of the speech.

Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. "The galley--what galley?
Good heavens, don't joke, man!