Charles Langbridge Morgan

The Gunroom Charles Langbridge Morgan

Late on an afternoon in September a boy, wearing a naval mackintosh and a felt hat, came out of Torquay railway-station and hailed a cab. His figure, his voice, and his manner, which was nervous and a little self-conscious, suggested that his age was about eighteen. He took a handful of change out of his pocket, and, when he had selected from it, with momentary hesitation, a sixpence to give the porter who had brought his luggage, he cast over the few bystanders a look almost of resentment, as if he thought they had been watching and criticizing him. If an older man had intercepted this glance its character might have puzzled him. He would have asked himself how, in eighteen years, a boy, who had obviously known nothing of the poverty and hard usage that age the street urchin, could have made the discoveries about life which were reflected in the face he saw. Not that a man's experience lay in this boy's features; rather did he seem to have lost too early the swifter wisdom of a child. He had developed a faculty of suspicion before the years had taught him what he should suspect. He had faced sorrow before he had learned to distinguish clearly between sorrow and bitterness. A child's pride and the humility that springs from discipline; a love of freedom and an acquaintance with restriction; a hatred of cruelty and a knowledge of its refinements-all these had been mingled in him to the destruction of simplicity.