The Young Desire It (17 page)

‘Now,' he said, and suddenly was smiling. Charles sat up, and at once lay back again; waves of light and darkness still swept steadily into his brain, but that tide was going out.

‘Lie still,' Penworth said, and busied himself with a glass and a bottle.

‘If this makes you drunk,' he muttered, ‘it'll be the open road for me, my lad. What on earth made you go off like that?'

Charles turned his face to the wall, as though to read reason on its white page.

‘I don't know,' he began, and then, with tears in his eyes, said sharply, ‘It was so horrible, wasn't it? All torn sideways like that.' He hovered uncertainly between tears and a relaxed force of laughter. Penworth handed him the tumbler.

‘Whisky,' he said. ‘It's a waste giving it to you, but still, you'd better drink it. There's not much.'

Charles swallowed it, and as it fumed in his nose and throat his teeth began to chatter again on the thin edge of the glass. A memory of his mother's face hanging like a calm mask above the light of a candle by his bed, as she said almost those words—‘You'd better drink this, son. There's not much'—grew up vividly in his mind. There was her head's great shadow doubled in the angle of wall and ceiling like a torn piece of paper; and her hands coming out of the brown darkness to comfort him after the unwieldy horror of a nightmare. The reek of whisky was something very real, to which from the anguish of the mind it was good to turn.

He told Penworth shyly of this memory, and of others.

‘Nightmares, eh? Do you still have them?'

‘Sometimes,' Charles said, looking away to think. ‘Not often, sir.'

‘What sort of dreams now?' Penworth seated himself at the foot of the bed, and took Charles's feet in his two hands firmly, as though without seeing he did it. Charles looked at him suddenly from the pillow.

‘I dream a lot,' he explained, ‘but in a sort of muddled way. I don't often remember.'

‘Your dreams now,' Penworth said thoughtfully, his eyes upon the boy's pale face, ‘should be interesting. I wonder…'

Charles felt some relief in his confidence. He told him, in a new assurance of sympathy, of some of his dreams. His unwitting frankness shocked Penworth into looking away, and then attracted him so that he turned his face to Charles again, his deep pupils dilated, his sensual lips full of passionate seriousness.

‘I know,' he said. ‘Of course, one doesn't…'

‘What worried me,' Charles said gravely, ‘was just at first—you know, sir. There is no one to explain. I suppose everyone's the same.'

‘Yes, yes,' Penworth murmured, his eyes looking back into his own initiations and experiments. ‘All of us, sometime or other.'

‘You see, I don't know anything—about that,' Charles explained.

‘The shock of discovering your own body,' Penworth began; but he stopped himself. Looking upwards to the grey face of the window he could see the ghost of rain against the sky, as mysterious and vanishing as marks made on still water. Looking upwards, he seemed to be having some inward debate with himself; Charles could see how blind were his eyes beneath the white curve of the forehead above its deeply arched brows. His full lips were moving and trembling with every turn of his thought. He still gripped Charles's feet with his broad hands. Through the near silence of the room floated a sustained echo of tumult from the gymnasium.

At last Charles struggled to ask, ‘What are you thinking of now, Mr. Penworth?'

He turned his head sideways and down, looking into the boy's serious eyes.

‘Of myself,' he said quietly. ‘As usual. And of you. Has no one ever told you anything?—anything about physical development and your own body?'

‘No, sir.'

‘What about living here? Surely you can't live among these—these boys and not have learned a lot?'

Charles considered his own mind, frowning unconsciously.

‘I hear what they say, you know,' he said at length, after Penworth had stared into his face unwaveringly for a minute or more. ‘But I don't think I understand…I mean, I sort of know what it's about and yet I—I sort of don't know. That sounds muddled…'

‘I understand,' Penworth said shortly, as though he had come to the end of a train of thought which he had been following even while he listened to the boy's difficulties in speaking of his own mind. He was surprised to find that Charles was speaking the truth, and speaking it simply. He neither dramatized his innocence and half-knowledge, nor attempted, as others would have done, to make it seem, without actually saying, that he knew more and was willing enough to talk about it. Penworth, while he was puzzled, and confused also in certain depths of which he was only just now discovering the nature, was turned a little compassionate in his own belief and admiration.

‘Well,' he said, ‘I'd find it rather hard to tell you everything face to face like this…'

‘I'd probably find it hard, too,' Charles said with a smile.

‘Anyhow,' Penworth went on unheeding, ‘there are things you'll learn; and it's probably just as fair to you to let you find them out for yourself. As the gods see fit. But,' he said, ‘don't get into the habit of talking as the other boys talk until you know what you're speaking of and what it all means. You'll only do yourself harm—in your own opinion, later.'

His charity just then surprised and flattered him. He felt driven to it, at first, because he had finally discovered and admitted to himself why he liked the boy as he did. He was, despite his youngness, honest enough and lonely enough to admit that this was a physical attraction, of exactly the same sort as he would have felt in the untutored presence of a girl of the same age. Had he been rather older, separated from his own deeply impressionable boyhood by darker, longer years, he might have regarded with jealous hatred the idea of himself desiring the unknowable body of this boy ten years his junior and a lifetime apart in ignorance; but he was at that time still subjectively familiar with the rules of philosophy and domesticity of the ancients he studied, and, because also desire can reason against itself without for one instant quitting its intention or questioning its present emotion, he considered himself calmly, and, had he been alone, would have shrugged his shoulders, as though to say, ‘Well, let it be so, then'.

‘Action can wait,' he heard himself murmur; and to the urgent question in Charles's eyes he could not reply for a moment. At last, when the silence between them had calmed to a quietened current of thought, he spoke again.

‘You don't need to worry about yourself, nor about those dreams. You are made to grow like that so that one day you can have a wife and children. One day…'

Deserted as suddenly as he had been possessed by that charitable restraint, he took his hands from the boy's feet, reached forward impulsively and took his cold fingers into his own, pulling him up to a sitting position, feeling with a heart-beat of fear the weight of the body communicated to his own back and shoulders, and imagining with rage its warmth and deathly whiteness. When their faces were close together he looked desperately into Charles's eyes, striving with the stubbornness of despair to find in their far depths some response to his own will.

Charles went stiff with the alarm of this. When he turned his eyes sideways, startled beyond thought by what was happening to him, seeing only the stillness and finality of the closed door, Penworth kissed him clumsily and hard on the lips.

The silence of the room roared like a surf in their ears. It was as big as the dreadful silence of his own nightmares to Charles. He could not move; he could not even turn his head more to avoid further contact with the dry eager lips of another man. Slowly his eyes came round. At the uncomprehending alarm in them Penworth laughed shortly, and let his hands slide free; that clipped, low laugh exploded like a long-awaited thunderclap in the still room.

‘It's all right, dear lad,' he said. ‘Don't be frightened—I shan't hurt you.'

Charles stood up; and he too rose; so they faced each other.

‘Were you frightened of—something that might have happened?' Penworth asked, lightness lifting his voice out of the mire of emotional extravagance. ‘There's nothing to be frightened of now. Is there?'

Charles shook his head several times, without being able to speak. He did not clearly know what he felt. It seemed somehow like happiness, but there was a black colour of doubt and regret hanging undefined about it. The goodness of having such a friend, so quickly in sympathy, so spontaneous in showing sympathy, was a warm glow in his heart; but he knew without being told that men do not kiss one another so. It was such an impossible thing that he had never even imagined it; and now…He shook his head. That was the origin of the enormous doubt and the shamed regret he felt; he understood that something had been done which should not have been done, though he did not understand why there was argument against it. Instinct warned him uncertainly that from this moment he would never talk of it, and his own shyness made it impossible that he should turn to Penworth there by the window and ask, Why? For he had been made most conscious, in the last fifteen minutes, of the vastness and danger of his ignorance. The coil of life was about him, and as yet he could not follow it with his eyes, nor sink back in the empowered calm of understanding; he must remain poised, keeping balance deliberately and with effort.

‘Here's the damned winter,' Penworth said at length, without turning round; and immediately he asked, ‘Do you by any chance know what it is to be as lonely as hell?'

Charles nodded; and then, remembering with confusion that he was not being observed, he said, ‘I do now, sir,' struggling to reach the high and windy level of the other's thought. ‘Since I've been here, at school,' he said slowly.

‘Exactly.' Penworth swung round upon him as sharply as though he had been angered by the words. ‘Here,' he said, ‘in a place like this—to be lonely; to want some sort of peace; to want love. To be lonely among so many. A microcosm that mirrors the worldly macrocosm—this place. An analogy with life in all the world—so many, and each one alone. If we try to touch each other's heart, it's misunderstood. And, worst of all, we don't understand it ourselves. We're lost; in a crowd it's as though we're… I can't tell you.'

‘I do know; I feel it,' Charles said as calmly as he might.

‘Well, don't say it so smugly,' Penworth said bitterly; but his stare softened and became warmer, and he said, ‘I forgot that you're so young. Why do I talk to you like this? Why should I? I haven't the right; I haven't the right to do it. There it is again: every action and inclination blasted by life's discreet irony. We're always at the mercy of that.'

He came close and took Charles's face between his palms, looking down not now with desire but with something clearer and more assured.

‘I can't expect you to understand,' he murmured coldly. ‘You're a child. What can you know? For all your pretty looks you're as masculine as any of us—and more than some. What can you know?'

He stared unwaveringly into his eyes.

‘And yet—perhaps you're not. If you're not, it's not for me to know—not now.' And he muttered to himself between his clenched teeth, ‘I haven't the courage.'

With a gesture as of one dropping something into space he let Charles's face slip from between his hot palms, and stood back from him. To Charles there was nothing deliberately dramatic in this; but to Penworth there was, and he watched its effect reflected in the boy's face, in the unhappy striving to understand and to keep pace with the thought spoken.

Charles made an effort and answered him.

‘I may not know it all, but even if I am so young I do know you're unhappy; and if I could help I would. If I can.'

Penworth smiled, but his eyes were steadily watchful.

‘Nobly spoken. Nobly said. However'—and once again he changed in that sudden way that so bemused Charles—‘I believe you mean it.'

‘I do, sir,' Charles said, and felt once more uncertain of his ground. ‘But I don't know what I can do—except talk to you. I do like that. I like it awfully. No one else talks like you.'

He hesitated, and found he could say no more.

‘I should not have upset you like this,' Penworth said. ‘I should have remembered that you are working hard, and that you can't be normal when you're doing that. I try to solve a physical problem with intellectual co-equivalents and get an answer in spiritual terms; and it can't be done. Anyone could tell you that. It can't be done.'

His smile shone at last in his eyes. He put one arm round Charles's shoulders, rocking him from side to side, gently, as he had done once before, in the heat of afternoon up there in the choir loft. He looked down affectionately into his face.

‘You're doing well, too. Now—let's forget about this afternoon altogether. Is that a bargain?'

‘Oh, yes, sir,' Charles said earnestly, not thinking whom the bargain might profit because of the full return of happiness and assurance that leapt up within him.

‘Right. Now go upstairs and see how Mawley is getting on.'

Steps paused at the door and a fist pounded softly on the panels.

‘Come in,' Penworth snapped; and, when Waters put his mild pink face round the dark edge of the door, he turned to Charles from the other side of the room, and said coldly, ‘All right, Fox, you can go now. And don't be a fool and faint next time you see a sprained ankle.'

When he had gone Waters came into the room and shut the door with care.

‘What happened? Faint?'

Penworth flung away an impatient gesture.

‘Young Mawley hurt himself in the gym—pretty badly, I think—and that young idiot fainted in the bathroom. I gave him some perfectly good whisky; wasted it, in fact. You'd better sample it yourself.'