Maurice, closing thoughts

Say goodbye to Clive and Cambridge, once so glamorous defying the whole world and blinding the unimportance.

But 'that's finished', said Scudder in the boathouse.

Their reunion doesn't touch me as much as the general idea of an ideal. Clive nipped it. Maurice died for it. The rebirth is only paying due justification to the hurt. How should it end otherwise when Forster's standing on the rebel's side?

***
Maurice blew out his cheeks, and began picking flowerets off a tall stalk. They vanished one after another, like candles that the night has extinguished.

*

Maurice opened his hand. Luminous petals appeared in it. 'You care for me a little bit, I do think,' he admitted, 'but I can't hang all my life on a little bit. You don't. You hang yours on Anne. You don't worry whether your relation with her is platonic or not, you only know it's big enough to hang a life on. I can't hang mine on to the five minutes you spare me from her and politics.'

*

To the end of his life Clive was not sure of the exact moment of departure, and with the approach of old age he grew uncertain whether the moment had yet occurred. The Blue Room would glimmer, ferns undulate. Out of some eternal Cambridge his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May Team.