The Young Desire It (14 page)

‘I didn't mean—that way,' she said gently. ‘I mean, why do you?'

‘I don't know,' he said on a falling tone. ‘I'm not used to talking to anybody. I don't even know anybody to talk to. I like being by myself.'

The silence cowered over the fire with them. Wind and rain went by together, weeping in a key beyond passion.

‘Is it me you mind?' she asked at length, her voice sounding to his ears as though drenched with the rain.

‘No, of course not.'

‘Because I can always go. It's your own place.'

‘You'll do nothing of the kind,' he said in a loud voice, and repeated it more quietly. ‘You'll do nothing of the kind. You're wet as it is. Do you want to get a chill and die?'

‘I wouldn't mind.'

He perceived no mischief in that sober admission. It seemed a very sad thing to say, sadder than the day, sadder than the silence. He almost pleaded:

‘Don't say that. You don't want to die. How can you say it? I love being alive.'

The School and its insinuating urge to unhappiness might never have touched his mind. He forgot all that, as though within a few days he would not be back there, turned inside out with miserable sickness for this freedom, as severely as he had been at first. His eyes were bright with tears in his excitement. The girl was looking steadily at him again, and, for the sake of doing something positive, he put more sticks on the fire. They cracked cheerfully as they caught.

‘You talk very strangely,' she said. ‘I've never known a boy to talk like that.'

The thought of being compared in her mind with other boys confounded him again. She was, he thought, the sort of fair and quiet creature who would know and admire boys like Bourke, or Saunders, or Wilson junior, that sharp-voiced, blue-eyed bully; good sporting fellows, all of them, with mouths already hardening into insensitiveness towards life's better passions.

‘Do you know many, then?' he asked cautiously.

She shook her head. ‘Only friends of the other girls. Lots of them have brothers. What's your school?'

He told her. To his surprise she laughed.

‘They all say you'll never win anything; but I think it's nice, anyhow.'

‘Who cares about winning things?' he demanded.

‘I know. I don't care either,' she said. ‘But boys should. I think I saw you on the train last night.'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I was there.'

After that there was silence, while she looked low down under the branches to see if the rain were stopping. Charles watched her, disturbed at the talk of school and boys, but carefully seeing, with a sort of delight that he had never known before that moment, the happy movement that turned her face away, and threw into full view the side of her head, smooth and fair, the one long plait near him fallen and hanging on her knees, and the soft curve of breast and arm. She was very beautiful, he thought. She reminded him, with her effortless stillness, of a sunny day in the hollow valleys of those remote hills hidden now in rain. Such days were always waiting, still and golden but terribly alert, shining like a girl, but as watchful, and as full of disturbing secrecy.

He sank into a sort of dream. Above the dying rustle of the fire big drops and scatterings from the living leaves fell on the dead leaves of the floor, running about like little animals in the shadowless depths. He heard her sigh without impatience. In a while, listening beyond the slow beat of thought, he knew that the rain was going to stop. But the wind went on in the leaves.

Supporting himself valiantly with the iron staff of high and honourable intention, Charles returned to the School at the end of the holiday, and tried to forget the past few days.

Mawley was now in the same room with him, in the same class. Outside there was a red-barked tree whose amidships was framed in the brown-painted window-sashes on the left of the dais; suppurations of crusted and partly reabsorbed gum looked like great gouts of dried blood on that comely trunk, whose upper and lower ends could not be seen, where they mixed with the sky and the earth. That tree, which reminded them of those rich torsos exhumed from Mediterranean soil, deprived by time of the more meditative brutalities of earlier Christians, of all frangible extremities, was there to remind them also of what Mawley heard Penworth call ‘the life beyond'. No one who remained sane in the midst of the excesses of their century could look at such a tree and not receive some benison from the high spirit of it. This tree of theirs, which Charles referred to as the wishing tree, because it made him wish himself away at home, grew in a sort of broken courtyard, squared on the hither side by their classroom wall, and yonder by laundries with staff quarters above them and articles of apparel hanging for ever in the windows. (And what a tragic Tantalus life, Mawley thought afterwards, those maids—if maids they were—must have had, living the year long among so many delicate little morsels of itching masculinity!) At this end of that court there was a sports changing-room, belonging to one of the Houses, thoughtfully built up between the library windows and the light of day; and down there, at the far end, a line of lavatories soothed the troubled scholastic eye with their dark red and white and black paint.

It could not be described as a beautiful courtyard. Too many walls and windows reminded it that truth is not always beauty. But a carter's lane debouched gaily into it on the left, coming round the laundries in a rutted, undisciplined curve during its few moments of unobserved freedom; and beyond its edge, down the wild tangle of a stretch of slope, young Cape lilacs traced the sky and pointed out the whitest clouds, and in the spring, while their leaves were opening, themselves hung out cloudy sprays of those tiny purple and white stars that so enchant the air of warm spring afternoons. They could not see the lilacs from their seats in the classroom, nor the lavatories, nor the lusty carter's lane embracing the stout laundries like an arm. Their view, in secret moments of inattention or during the permissible pauses for meditation in English or Latin composition, was that sturdy section of red, blood-stained tree's body, and a miraculous depth of sky behind it. From this sky, all the year round, the light came into the room, and, like some wise friend from a class higher than their own, helped while it seemed to hinder their work. Even in dark afternoons of winter, there it was beyond the streaming window-panes, wrapped coldly in cloud through which it seemed still to thrust its blue shoulder.

After that first holiday, when he experienced the novelty of an honest scholar's return to his desk, there seemed to be a change in Charles. Any of them who noticed him at all were aware of it, and interpreted it in their own ways. He sat in the seat in front of Mawley, in that class, and for the rest of the year Mawley's most familiar sight was of his reddish, curly head bent low between his shoulders over the desk, and his right hand, white and bony about the knuckles, raised in mid-air without urgency whenever a question was asked. A graph of his progress in a stern-driven, difficult class might have been made from the increasing number of times his hand went up during the second half of his earliest term, and the first half of the winter term. At first his slim back and broad shoulders expressed all sorts of embarrassments and uncertainties; he had a way of turning his face to the grey wall and staring blankly at it, as though the wall itself had voiced the solemn questions he could not yet answer; or he would run his fingers through his hair, and, as though some spring in the brain had been released, up would go his hand, always without urgency. Others of them strained up, waving hands like flails, or floundered back; he moved slowly and with decision. This was some sign of the self-control which, in a few pathetic weeks of bullying and unkindness, he had been taught. Whatever might move bubbling beneath, his appearance remained defiantly calm. Penworth, himself frankly enthusiastic in certain scholastic pursuits, such as the sleuth-like tracking-down of an irregular verb's movements from infinitive to gerundive, was often thrown into an enchanting fury by the calm of Charles's pale face and hands.

‘For heaven's sake, Fox,' he would snap, ‘at least try to
look
as though you cared.'

Penworth's passions always seemed very innocent. Once, Charles having laughed loudly in sincere enjoyment of some sharp irrelevance, he offered to skin him alive and looked as though he meant it. Such scenes, however, came later, when both Masters and classes were wrought to a sad pitch of nerves by the looming examinations of November, and when the friendship between Penworth and Charles had reached a sad state too. During the first term humours and enthusiasms might be expressed freely, provided the expression were seemly and proper to the manners of the School.

The change in Charles appeared to have come about during the brief Easter holiday. On that cool and clouded Monday he drove with his mother into the village, and they heard a service in the small church planted dimly among great pines, with a scattering of headstones as grey as the sheep feeding among them. He looked with concealed eagerness at everyone in the church, at first, but later devoted himself as sincerely as might be to following the vagaries of the service. He and she left the church with the Canon, to whom she must speak of coming social affairs; they talked of some kind of fête, and he stood by, not listening much. When they drove away in the old phaeton (she would not part with it), there was no one in sight. As they went, the sun came out warmly among great steep masses of dazzling, icy cloud, and shone on the road, and touched off small explosions of light among the drenched leaves of the trees. It was very still, a clear autumn day after the sharp, repeated rain of the weekend. Distances across the shining fields were as clean as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope; the light wind of their passage brought tingling blood to his cheeks; he felt deeply at peace with the world, and put one hand on his mother's arm in a friendly way that surprised and pleased her, though she did not let it be seen. On the way they talked a little about the School, and she told him, for the first time, that the Headmaster had written very well of him and had explained the change in his form.

‘Why didn't you tell me when I told you?' Charles asked; but he knew his mother, and when she said nothing he was not surprised. The even thud of hoofbeats on the soft surface, a faint creaking murmur of springs and harness, bore them along, escorting them in their own silence, which neither of them found further occasion to break.

So the holiday ended. On Wednesday he was back again, and life, spreading from that central point of refuge, the white bed in Dormitory B, like a spider web over the School, took on in certain ways a new purpose. But his secret fear, of bodily insult and physical pain, remained as it was in the beginning. His clear, watching eyes, now becoming almost hazel in colour as they darkened with young manhood, kept him aware of all rude intention. Boys are not reticent about their feelings towards one another. Their hatred is as thorough as is their admiration, and they show both with the complete and uncompromising frankness of pagan amorality. Only in the higher strata of the School's society, after boys were invested with prefecture, or otherwise made responsible and partly free in action, did a conscious sense of duty begin to grow like an invisible cataract over the feelings in their eyes. Among the younger ones, who made up the greater number, there was only a keen sense of being alive, of having some ineluctable way to a destination, towards which they must surge as ruthlessly as a mob of sheep, and with very little more deliberate intention.

In himself Charles was hardly aware of a change. His mind was now occupied in considering the tremendous distance that seemed to loom bottomless between a matter-of-fact first-year application to the execution of a schedule of work, and the hard driving toil of the higher class, made continually conscious of itself at work, and with its eyes repeatedly directed towards those ominous examinations. For to Charles, whose greatest schooling had hitherto occupied him never more than three or perhaps four hours in each day, in the governess's room at home, this leaping, urgent butterfly-hunt, for seven and eight hours daily, in pursuit of fluttering facts so many of which looked alike, was at first liable to have driven him to despair.

The Headmaster sent for him once, after two weeks in the Junior form. Charles, made bold by the fear of appearing unable, told him he was already feeling more confident, and would certainly go on with it.

‘Never feel it's an impossibility,' the Headmaster said, ‘to do a lot of work in a short time. I have an idea that in your own case it will suit your temperament, Fox.'

Charles thanked him, without properly understanding what that meant, and was told that he must consider himself free still to withdraw from his undertaking, and so was dismissed.

Walking away from the soft closure of that heavy door, Charles knew that he would not withdraw. Having tasted both the exhilarations and the despairs of driving his mind harder than it had ever been driven, he could not enjoy the thought of returning to a class of boys of whom many were younger than himself, where all that would be asked of him would be perhaps fifteen minutes of serious thought in every thirty passed in the classroom.

Also, in addition to the set hours of work by day and evening, with their new, unrelenting application, Penworth had offered to give him extra classes during the week, of Latin, and to assist him with the textbook part of English whenever he chose. When Charles told him that Greek was to be discontinued, because of so much essential work, he looked grave and said he was disappointed, and muttered about forcing young minds so that they missed half of what was good in life.

‘Anyhow,' he said, ‘if you get through all right—and there's no earthly reason why you shouldn't—you can always pick it up again next year. Next year, of course, won't be so hard on you…' And when Charles mentioned the fear he felt about the two mathematics, he consoled him there also.