Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/172

 Besides, who could tell where life ended? Death might be the opening of a door, especially to those who climbed to it after a life of stubborn effort. And without effort there might be no door? Or was death like a sieve, letting the finer spirits through, and throwing the baser back upon the muck-heap?

He was conscious of a sense of maturity, of a feeling of mellowness within himself. He could look at women without desiring them too fiercely. The money he made was a spiritual essence stored up for his son; opportunities, wings, arms, a buckler to ward off humiliation. His whole life orientated itself towards this other rising, younger life.

He found Kit's letters vastly interesting. They were not the letters of a boy who could think of nothing but footer and cricket. Kit observed, and asked questions.

There were some questions which Sorrell could not answer, and he said so. There were others, human appeals which he had to answer.

For when Christopher came back to Winstonbury on his first holiday it seemed to Sorrell that the boy was troubled. Roland had allowed him to live at the Pelican, and he occupied a little bedroom next to his father.

It was sex that was troubling Christopher, and all that sex implied,—his mother, other fellows' mothers.

Sorrell had dipped into Freud, and his inclination was to laugh at Freud, but he took Christopher much more seriously.

He told him everything, cleanly and frankly. He tried to make the boy feel the dignity of sex, and Christopher did feel it.

There were things at the school that had disgusted him. He appeared to be one of those boys who pass straight through the half-way house of sex, and come almost at once to a feeling of the mystery of woman.

He asked to be told about his mother.

And Sorrell told him. He tried to be utterly impartial. He gave his view of marriage as a great comradeship.

"Your mother and I were not comrades. It wasn't our fault, or rather—it was both our faults."

As for the so-called "Œdipus complex," it did not appear to exist in Kit. Nor had it existed in Sorrell. And yet it did not seem to him that either he or his son were abnormal.