Chris Character Analysis

This method proved to be one that Chris always used in any dealings with my grandfather. When the bludgeoning words came […] Chris never seemed, like myself, to be holding back with a terrible strained force for fear of letting go and speaking out […] He would not argue or defend himself […] He simply appeared to be absent, elsewhere.

He missed the horses, I thought with selfish satisfaction, more than he missed his family. I could visualize the pair, one sorrel and one black, swifting through all the meadows of summer.

You take the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, now. Terrifically high – all those thin ribs of steel, joined together to go across the very wide stretch of water. It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s there. That’s what engineers do. Imagine doing something like that, eh?

And soon, because I desperately wanted to, and because everyday mercifully made me older, quite soon I would be able to reply with such a lightning burst of knowingness that would astound him, when he spoke of the space or was it some black sky that never ended anywhere beyond this earth. Then I would not be innerly belittled for being unable to figure out what he would best like to hear. At that good and imagined time, I would not any longer be limited. I would not any longer be young.

I got this theory, see, that anybody can do anything at all, anything, if they really set their minds to it. But you have to have this total concentration. You have to focus on it with your whole mental powers, and not let it slip away by forgetting to hold it in your mind. If you hold it in your mind, like, then it’s real, see?

I need to say something really penetrating, something that would show him I knew the passionate truth of his conviction. “I bet –” I said, “I bet you’ll sell a thousand, Chris.” Two years ago, this statement would have seemed self-evident, unquestionable. Yet now, when I had spoken, I knew that I did not believe it.

No human word could be applied. The lake was not lonely or untamed. These words relate to people, and there was nothing of people here. There was no feeling about the place. It existed in some world in which man was not yet born. I looked at the grey reaches of it and felt threatened. It was like the view of God which I had held since my father’s death. Distant, indestructible, totally indifferent.

“People usually say there must be a God,” Chris went on, “because otherwise how did the universe get here? But that’s ridiculous. If the stars and planet go on to infinity, they could have existed forever, for no reason at all. Maybe they weren’t ever created. Look – what’s the alternative? To believe in a God who is brutal? What else could He be?”

He hardly ever talked about it, but this once he told me about seeing the horses in the mud, actually going under, you know? And the way their eyes looked when they realised they weren’t going to get out. Ever seen horses’ eyes when they’re afraid, I mean really berserk with fear, like in a bush-fire? Ewen said a guy tended to concentrate on the horses because he didn’t dare think what was happening to the men.

I was thinking of all the schemes he’d had, the ones that couldn’t possibly have worked, the unreal solutions to which he’d clung because there were no others, the brave and useless strokes of fantasy against a depression that was both the world’s and his own.

Well – what it said was that they could force his body to march and even to kill, but what they didn’t know was that he’d fooled them. He didn’t live inside it any more […] the letter seemed only the final heartbreaking extension of the way he’d always had of distancing himself from the absolute unbearability of battle.

Slowly, slowly, horses of the night – The night must move like this for him, slowly, all through the days and nights. I could not know whether the land he journeyed through was inhabited by terrors, the old monster-kings of the lake, or whether he had discovered at last a way for himself to make the necessary dream perpetual.