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

swung under my guard and landed on my ribs with his right. I shook him off, and then followed him up closely with a short right and left on the mark. He tried a left hook to my jaw, but I dodged, and got in a stab from my right above his heart. This shook him a little, and he came at me with a rush. He was smiling, as he had often smiled when we had sparred together on the ranch, and I heard him say - “Come on - Jake.” I knew then that I should kill him. Something inside me was bleeding because of him, and I was young, and I’d never been hurt before. I thought more of my own lost faith than of the girl, dying out in Switzerland. Then I remembered the leper colony, and the way he had talked on the ranch with his face uplifted like a priest who dies for his belief. I remembered his hands, and a sick animal in pain, watching him with wounded eyes, trusting him. I felt as though I possessed all the strength of the world at that moment. He rushed at me then, shaken by the blow above his heart as I have said, and his guard was careless, for he was swinging to attack. I saw his smile and the point of his jaw, and then I smiled too, and I struck him - just below his jaw - I saw his head fall back horribly, and his hands spreading - clutching at the air, and then he crashed down on to the floor to lie limp and helpless, with his neck broken, and the veins standing out strangely in his throat.
    ‘He died there at my feet.
    ‘Then I remember somebody shouting and people climbing up through the ropes on to the ring, and the thin hysterical voice of someone screaming in my ear, pulling at my shoulder with their hands . . .’
    Jake broke off, and I saw his eyes staring at me over the light of the fire, and they were black and burning against the pallor of his face.
    ‘Why - what’s wrong, Dick?’ he said.
    When he spoke to me the picture of the ringside vanished, and the hot air was gone, and his eyes were no longer the eyes of the murderer bearing down upon me, his friend, but the grave gentle eyes of the Jake I knew, and there was not any hatred after all, and there was no death from which I could not escape, but only the firelight and the pale branches of the trees, and he and I talking together of something that had happened long ago.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s all right - it doesn’t matter any more.’
    ‘Why,’ he said, ‘you look like a pale ghost, scared in the dim light. You’re white and drawn, and your eyes are black like two hollows in your face.’
    I shivered for no reason.
    ‘You’re drawing a picture of yourself,’ I said. He shook his head at me. ‘You don’t have to be scared,’ he said.
    ‘I’m not scared,’ I told him, ‘I’m only glad that all this here is real, and that your story is over and done with. It can’t happen again.’
    ‘No, never again.’
    ‘Being in prison hasn’t made you hard, Jake. I can imagine what you were before, but you’re bigger now in every way.’
    ‘No - I only see straight.’
    ‘I shan’t ever be able to do that.’
    ‘Yes, you will.’
    ‘I don’t see how.’
    ‘After you’ve suffered a while.’
    ‘I did, as a boy, in my own way.’
    ‘That’s different.’
    ‘It would take me wrong, Jake. I’d crumple up over anything.’
    ‘No, you wouldn’t. At first, perhaps, not afterwards.’
    ‘It would be all right if you were around.’
    ‘You can’t depend on that.’
    ‘You said I could always depend on you,’ I said.
    ‘I meant, you mustn’t give way to the idea of your own weakness, ’ he answered.
    ‘I’m a rotter, aren’t I?’
    ‘I’ve told you - you’re young.’
    ‘Jake, I don’t want ever to be old. I want always to get up in the morning and feel there’s something grand lying just ahead of me, round the corner, over a hill. I want always to feel that if I stand still, only for a minute, I’m missing something a few yards away. I don’t want ever to find myself thinking: “What’s the use of going across that