I found E.M.
Forster's Maurice in our garage when I
was about 14. I don't remember how I came to read it before even noticing A Passage to India or A Room with a View. They were all in the same box that my uncle
(who had been taking night classes in English) left at our house. It must have
been during the hot, idle and depressive summer holidays after my first year of
high school.
I was sure that I am
gay, but knew that I would never tell anyone. We had read Othello that year and
I cast myself as Iago - "look like the innocent flower, But be
the serpent under't". I hated myself, and knew I would one day find
my thrills without ever telling anyone. I would live in the dark, and
differently in the light. I was very dramatic (some things don’t change!).
Then I discovered
this English novel completed in 1914 but published posthumously in the 1970s.
The more I re-read it now (I do it at least once a year), the more absurd it
seems. Anyways, at my first reading, I came across this passage. My fingers
still know where it is in the musty book. Two friends find each other at
college without ever having to speak out their affliction. They find a complicated and transient love.
Love was suddenly possible for me.
Love was suddenly possible for me.
For a long while,
this passage was all the hope I had.
*****
Durham sat upon the floor beyond [Maurice's] reach.
It was late afternoon… . Maurice stretched out a hand and felt the head nestle
against it. He forgot what he was going to say. The sounds and scents
whispered, 'You are we, we are youth.' Very gently he stroked the hair and ran
his fingers down into it as if to caress the brain.
'I say, Durham, have you been all right?'
'Have you?'
'No.'
'You wrote you were.'
'I wasn't.'
The truth in his own voice made him tremble. 'A
rotten vac and I never knew it,' and wondered how long he should know it. The
mist would lower again, he felt sure, and with an unhappy sigh [Maurice] pulled
Durham's head against his knee, as though it was a talisman for clear living.
It lay there, and he had accomplished a new tenderness - stroked it steadily
from temple to throat. Then, removing both hands, he dropped them on either
side of him and sat sighing.
'Hall.'
Maurice looked.
'Is there some trouble?'
He caressed and again withdrew. It seemed as certain
that he hadn't as that he had a friend.
'Anything to do with that girl?'
'No.'
'You wrote you liked her.'
'I didn't - don't.'
Deeper sighs broke from him. They rattled in his
throat, turning to groans. His head fell back, and he forgot the pressure of
Durham on his knee, forgot that Durham was watching his turbid agony. He stared at the ceiling with wrinkled mouth
and eye, understanding nothing except that man has been created to feel pain
and loneliness without help from heaven.
Now Durham stretched up to him, stroked his hair.
They clasped one another. They were lying breast against breast soon, head was
on shoulder, but just as their cheeks met someone called 'Hall' from the court,
and [Maurice] answered: he always had answered when people called. Both started
violently, and Durham sprang to the mantelpiece where he leant his head on his
arm. Absurd people came thundering up the stairs. They wanted tea. Maurice
pointed to it, then was drawn into their conversation, and scarcely noticed his
friend's departure. It had been an
ordinary talk, he told himself, but too sentimental, and he cultivated a
breeziness at their next meeting.
This took place soon enough. With half a dozen others
he was starting for the theatre after hall when Durham called him.
'I knew you read the Symposium in the vac,' he said
in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
'Then you understand - without me saying more -'
'How do you mean?'
Durham could not wait. People were all around them,
but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, 'I love you.'
Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to
the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, 'Oh, rot!'. The words, the
manner, were out of him before he could recall them.
