The Young Desire It (19 page)

He looked haggard and worried during those two weeks. Mawley thought afterwards, with that passion which pity draws into itself when it is too late to pity, that if they had only known, surely, surely…But perhaps that man knew his own destiny; perhaps it was the secret of his strength.

His talk was sparing, but there was a great sympathy in those companionable visits, and when he said, ‘I should like to be young again, sometimes, like you, lad', the boy could nod and smile, not understanding that his wish was as deep as hell, but quite ready to believe and share in the admiration for youth which lay in the face of his words.

It was impossible not to be drawn closer under the kindly shadow of his great personality; he did indeed seem young, with the essence of youth, with all its ability to feel, quick and deep, the drama of fortune's ceaseless mutation; without youth's clumsiness of thought or speech to divide Mawley from him. The boy's sympathy was not of embarrassment but of what, thought he in his pride, was genuine understanding; and perhaps it really was understanding, for his tragedy, great though it was in its stature, had ultimately the simplicity of a child's despair.

His last visit brought him to Mawley's bedside the day before that holiday ended. For the first time he was, it seemed, in great spirits. He talked fully and in a manner that raised his listener upward into a sphere of high enchantment. The boy's own mood of pleased anticipation, concerned with the return of the School and a renewal of life, may have encouraged him, as it did aid the readiness of the other's wits, and colour his imagination together with his words. He seemed not to wish to cease talking, and in the end not to be able to cease, for the torrent of phrase and exclamation bore him on and on, while Mawley dealt with an evening meal, hardly tasting the food.

He was speaking of the great goodness of life, and of its beauty. No matter that it seems cruel, he insisted; it is great and beautiful as much for its cruelty as for its gentlenesses. But it must be lived fully; every waste was beauty lost and perception delayed. And it could be as beautiful in solitude as it could in crowded places.

Men and women, he said, are all more conscious of the will to do good than of a desire to do evil. Even if they do harm it is without full understanding, and so without real intention; and understanding must be taught in schools by men, as well as afterwards by more intimate experiences…

To Mawley this seemed a strange way for that dark and silent man to talk to a boy. Had it not been for the elation he had aroused in him, Mawley must certainly have felt the embarrassment of one listening to a passionate confession by a stranger; but there was a great excitement in that broad, bare room, and the beds widely spaced in a square of barren white promontories round the four walls were as attentive as they both were to what he was saying.

‘Some people would say that I should not talk to you like this.' His speech was now carefully exact, but rapid. ‘But you are a nice lad, Mawley. I have known that. A little truth will neither alarm nor harm you. Listen to me: take great joy in all you do, however small it seems; make all things honest and let their purpose be kind. Learn to think always that there is no limit to what you can know and understand about the other fellow. What you know now—this day, this hour—can be added to by to-morrow's knowledge. Remember these words. To understand fully you must learn to love fully. See all men as people in a story whose ending you already know, and keep your eyes always on the circumstances of their lives, for it is those circumstances which make them do as they do, though there is something greater than circumstance which makes them what, in truth and honesty, they are. Originally, the human character is beautiful and innocent. Things may change it outwardly. With a hammer you can make a piece of gold into some cruel or ugly shape, but it will remain what it was—gold.'

He was leaning forward, that deep wound above his left temple beating violently. The lean folds of skin running upwards from the corners of his mouth were marked by shadow; in the depths of the eye-sockets his eyes burned, like coals in the eye-sockets of a bare skull, startling and unreal, framed by the fleshless astringency of the jaws and cheeks, and the broken curve of that brown forehead behind which the brain, like a prompter hidden, hung on the tide of his words. Mawley could see into his dark eyes. Looking through the flame of a fire you see the blackness beyond, still and untroubled like an iron intention.

‘Do not think I know all there is to know,' he said. ‘You, because you are to me only a child, might be dazzled or confounded by my words, and I would not have that. It is man's most difficult task to impart both knowledge and understanding. Remember this: some day you too will learn that there are times in your life when it is not in your power to avoid hurting others. Then do what you have to do, quickly—whatever it is. If it is very difficult, your own courage will pardon much in your deed. But you must know that those who love you will be the better for it; and then, when your mind is made up and you can act, you will have no more fear and no impatience. Once, when I was young, someone said to me in reproof for some thoughtlessness, “You must learn how easy it is to hurt those you love…” Then, I believed that; afterwards I found that it was not true, for it is easiest to hurt those who love you—those you yourself love may not be open to harm from you, according to the measure of their regard for you. But if they in turn love you, then beware. Everything you do will have tremendous meaning for them.'

He sighed, and silence fell. The dark had already come; but there was light and warmth about the bed from the tall orange cylinders of a radiator on the floor. It seemed as though he, and not the boy, were sick of some great pain; but Mawley could not easily understand what he had been saying.

His voice had been changed by his thought when next he spoke.

‘I have been looking at you. You are young and clean. You have a long time to live. Now, in another day, the new term will begin. I hope it will be a happy one—for all of you.'

Mawley said, surely it would be happy.

‘Well,' he said, apparently with some difficulty. ‘You must all make it happy for yourselves. If many work together to that end, the faults or weaknesses of one, or a few, will not spoil their happiness.'

‘But, sir,' Mawley argued, reasonably, ‘you will be here too. Or are you going away?'

He smiled and reassured him.

‘Yes, I shall be here. I shall always be here. But more depends on you now than on me.'

Drawn back from the dull orange light, his face was dark in the darkness. He stood up and walked to the door.

‘Would you like me to put the light on for you now? Or would you rather lie in the darkness and sleep?'

Mawley said he would have it on. The man smiled, wished him a good night, and was gone.

Charles came up the stairs, clattering and stumbling in his haste. When he was by Mawley's bed in the dormitory, the other could see the rain shining on his white face like tears.

‘You know, I suppose,' he said dully, and seated himself on the bed's edge. ‘What will happen now? I can't believe it. It doesn't seem possible.'

‘What did I know?'

‘Don't you know?' he said, slowly. ‘The Head. He's dead. Last night, in the storm in town, he—killed himself. Good God! When I say it it seems to mean nothing. I can't understand it. I can't. To shoot yourself…'

There was nothing to say that could yet be said between them; they were too young. The whole of the previous evening's scene came back into Mawley's mind quickly and savagely, bitter with sudden self-scorn. They looked at one another, and something stayed Mawley from telling him about it—the inevitable glamour of all secrets, or perhaps merely the wish not to seem to peer too deeply beneath a surface. He was already exhausted. To increase the boy's own distress, he noticed tears on Charles's cheeks, heavy tears bigger than the rain-drops, moving slowly down. Suddenly the great bell of the chapel began to ring, as it rang only on Sundays and on the first day of a new term. It crashed among its own echoes, each stroke hanging crowded on the air and spreading out as relentlessly as a ripple spreads on the face of still water, impossible of arrest. There came, after the first stroke, the frantic beating of pigeons' wings; they were always sent flinging across the day from their refuge in the towers, as though so great a sound had muscular force to hurl them out like a giant. They wheeled through the rain under the grey sky, past the windows against which Charles's ruddy head, wet and ruffled, was outlined darkly.

Trying to divert both their minds from struggling with something they could not understand, Mawley told him of holiday experiences—of Mary, in particular, whose impulsive, speechless love-making in the empty sanatorium (its greatest colour her flushed, embarrassed face framed in a brilliant handkerchief tied over her head) had, until this morning, appeared as the only drama of those dull days. At what was no doubt a frank enough account of actions and words quite unreal to him, he looked startled.

‘Did she really do that?' he said. ‘It seems horrible, somehow.' But he asked other questions, his face flushing slightly but his gaze steadily refusing to be ashamed. To the whole recital of masculine braggadocio he listened closely, and neither of them could smile at it, after all; for its element of tragedy, a woman's sterility, embarrassed him deeply when he understood it.

‘Don't tell anybody else,' he said. ‘They'd only laugh.'

After that, it was almost a relief for them to speak of the Headmaster again. Charles evidently felt this death passionately, for some reason not connected with death at all. In retrospect, it seems probable that he had unconsciously idealized the person of the dead man as the manifestation of something symbolized by no other person in the School, instinctively realizing the power, the ‘goodness' he would have called it, of that positive masculinity which in Penworth, his closest friend until now, he could not find.

‘I don't know why,' he said, ‘but it makes me feel lost. If I'd known him well, or…You knew him better than I did. He was such a good man, and so kind to everybody. So strong. Now I can't see what will happen.'

The suggestion that Mr. Jolly might succeed to the office surprised and pleased him.

‘I never thought of that,' he said. ‘Perhaps he will; do you think? He's a good man, too. But Dr. Fox was so young.' He smiled slightly frowning over a thought. ‘Perhaps I liked him because his name was the same as mine. I don't know. That was the first thing he said, the day I came. And now—he's gone.'

He stared at his clasped hands in silence for a while. His eyes were shining when he looked up.

‘I never had a father,' he said. ‘I mean, I never knew mine. That makes another reason why I liked
him
so much, I suppose. But of course I didn't know him well. But you couldn't help feeling…Could you?'

He was searching his own mind to find why he should incline so to take this as a loss personal to himself. The Headmaster, familiar enough in sight, had been actually a personality cloistered, remote from us, hidden away in a sound-proof room with a green baize door that closed slowly on the delaying action of a vacuum stop; he had used his canes on boys, but there was that in his manner that made such intimate approaches to him causes for pride and a general increase of esteem and self-esteem in the boys punished. Yet that was all. Charles was trying to reconcile with this apparent remoteness his own sudden impression of intimate knowledge of the man himself, and the confusion of his mind added to his feeling of grief.

At last he got up and went out to his own dormitory across the empty landing, putting his cases on the bed and opening the top of the locker. That bell went on booming, every thirty seconds, strange, startling and out of place in his mind, but at one with the day. He was the first who had returned; there was this day of holiday still to end, before classes began in the morning. He looked down the white, empty dormitory, dim with winter.

Oh, he thought; and the tears flowed easily. Lying on the cold whiteness of the coverlet he held his eyes open, staring, and the pillowcase, fresh and smooth, smelling still of soap and steam, became wet under his cheek.

We should have known, he thought. To die like that…

Presently his thought grew calm again. It was the first time death had in any way come near to him, and, with his heart already troubled at another return to the School and shadowed with regret for what had been denied to him in the holiday, such a piece of news, hinted at in the shouts of paper-boys on the smoke-dark station, briefly told in the cable pages of the morning late editions, had so burdened his mind with grief that his thought became confused, and all he could ask of himself was, What will happen now? again and again, as the train plunged through mist and rain and its own smoke, bringing him nearer the School from town. The windows of the compartment were clouded over on the outside and thinly slashed with slanting rain; this and his own unhappy preoccupation caused him to be carried a station too far. There he got out, and with the suitcases weighing more and more heavily on his arms walked back along the main road to the School gates.

The Matron told him he could have dinner at noon in the Hall. Her eyes were red and ugly with crying, and she peered at him between swollen lids, trying to see what he was feeling; but his face showed her only what he knew, and she smiled and nodded and let him go. When the door was closed after him she sank back heavily into her creaking basket-chair, and began to sob again, with the ease and freedom observable in some women, to whom the drama of grief is a rich comfort.

It's the books that make them so heavy, Charles thought, as he took the cases upstairs in Chatterton.

When at length he had unpacked them, he changed his clothes and had dinner. His mother's calm and quiet would have comforted him; he had long since forgotten his momentary irritations, and ached to be home again, and considered with foreboding the long line of weeks stretched forward from that day, before he would be there again, and before he would see the girl. While a staring, red-eyed maid served him with his meal, as he sat solitary in the far end of the great Hall, gazing now at the black beams and struts overhead, now at his plate, he determined to work very hard in the winter term, so that the time should seem to pass more easily; and once more he said to himself that a sense of loss would lose itself in work. But when he thought of Sundays in the Chapel, with no familiar face looking east to the altar from the golden shadow of that pew reserved for the Headmaster and his family, grief came back to him keenly, and he could not clearly see his food for tears.