Even my correspondence with Margot gave me no pleasure. I could not write to her about my doubts, but I wanted very much to talk them over with her. While I could not put down on paper what was uppermost in my heart, I found it very hard to fill letters with less important things. Whenever I have been less than frank, I have always found it dolefully unsatisfactory.
I imagine that most thoughtful boys of my generation were horribly alone. It is getting more the custom nowadays for adults to be friends with children. The Doctor at school was the only man in whom I had ever confided. And in my loneliness I looked forward eagerly to long talks with Margot. I supposed that love meant understanding.
The serious sickness of the Mother took us home before the summer was ended. I had not been especially unhappy there during my childhood, but now that I had seen other pleasanter homes, my own seemed cruelly cheerless. Its gloom was intensified because the Mother was dying. I had had no special love for her but the thing was made harder for me by my lack of sympathy with their religious conventions. It was imperative that they should not question God’s will. The Mother did not want to die. The Father was, I am sure, broken-hearted at the thought of losing her. They kept up a brave attitude—to me it seemed a hollow pretense—that God was being very good to them, that he was releasing her from the bondage of life, calling her to joy unspeakable. However much she was attached to things known—the Father, her absent son, the graves of her other children, the homely things of the parsonage, the few pieces of inherited silver, the familiar chairs—it was incumbent on her to appear glad to go out into the unknown.
It was my first encounter with death. How strange it is that the greatest of all commonplaces should always surprise us! What twist in our brains is it, that makes us try so desperately to ignore death? The doctors of philosophy juggle words over their _Erkenntnis Theorie_—trying to discover the confines of human knowledge, trying to decide for us what things are knowable and what we may not know—but above all their prattle, the fact of death stands out as one thing we all do know. Whether our temperaments incline us to reverence pure reason or to accept empirical knowledge, we know, beyond cavil, that we must surely die. Yet what an amazing amount of mental energy we expend in trying to forget it. The result? We are all surprised and unnerved when this commonplace occurs.