THE OTHER MARGARET
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not want to spoil things for Jennings by undermining the confidence
of the customer. Elwin looked from the king to the lieutenant and
back to the king. It was perfectly polite, only as if he had looked at
the young man to hear his opinion more clearly and then had ex–
amined again the thing they were talking about.
·
But Jennings understood the movement of Elwin's glance, for
when the lieutenant had shaken hands and left the shop, Jennings
said stoutly, "He's a good kid."
"Yes he is," Elwin said serenely.
"It's funny seeing him an officer. He used to be against any–
thing like that. But he was glad to go-he said he did not want to
miss
sharing the experience of his generation."
"A lot of them say that." Elwin had heard it often from the
young men, the clever ones. Someone had started it and all the young
men with the semi-political views said it. Their reasons for saying
it were various. Elwin liked some of the reasons and disliked others,
but whether he liked the reasons C!r not, he never heard the phrase
without a twinge of envy. Now it comforted him to think that this
man with the black beard and the flower had done his fighting with–
out any remarks about experience and generations.
The idea of age and death did not present itself to Elwin in any
horrifying way. It had first come to him in the form of a sentence
from one of Hazlitt's essays. The sentence was, "No young man be–
lieves he shall ever die," and the words had come to him suddenly
from the past, part of an elaborate recollection of a scene at high–
school. When he looked up the quotation, he found that he had
remembered it with perfect accuracy, down to that very
shall
which
struck his modern ear as odd and even ungrammatical. The mem–
ory had begun with the winter sunlight coming through the dirty
windows of the classroom. Then there was the color, texture and
smell of varnished wood. But these details were only pointing to the
teacher himself and what he was saying. He
was
a Mr. Baxter, a
heron-like man, esteemed as brilliant and eccentric, what some stu–
dents called "a real person." Suddenly Mr. Baxter in a loud voice
had uttered that sentence of Hazlitt's. He held the book in his hand
but did not read from it. "No young man believes he shall ever die,"
he said, just as if he had thought of it himself.
It had been very startling to hear him say that, and this effect
was of course just what the teacher wanted. It was the opening sen–
tence of an essay called "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,"
and to Baxter it was important that the class should see what a bold
and captivating way it was to begin an essay, how it was exactly as
