The Young Desire It (20 page)

The term opened like the second movement of a symphony, slow and pitched in a minor key. Work, said the Common Room notice board tersely, would proceed as usual, and after a special service in Chapel all classes would sit at once.

As though nothing had happened, Charles thought, marching down the wet path with the rest of his House. As though in a haste to forget.

He was readier than all others to begin work and thought again, for he felt he must forget this death whose obscure significance troubled him so. During the delay that preceded the entrance of the Master taking them for an hour of mathematics it was strange to hear the quiet in that long grey room, which would on any other morning have been in an uproar of raised voices and thrown books. This morning boys looked at one another with almost guilty expressions of sobriety. They were for once not drunk with their own irrepressible youth. Groups sitting and leaning by the windows talked among themselves, with self-conscious quietness; their eyes were bright but tremendously set in seriousness above the healthy colour of their cheeks and lips hanging on speech. Charles laid out his books for the hour and crossed in front of the dais to join them. He stood in silence while they talked, sometimes looking at the urgent mobility of their young faces, sometimes letting his eyes take him out through the window, past the tree's upward-soaring strength of trunk and branch into the breaking sky beyond. In his mind, going ever and ever back over events up to this moment of troubled pause, there still haunted the thread of the last long ‘
Amen
' of the choir poised up above the darkly packed bays, between floor and vault; he followed it as it floated like a breath down the white length of the chapel to the altar, held and preserved, as it faded, by one sustained pedal note from the unseen organ. As though in a dream of peace the service had ended.

He wondered what happened when a man died; whether there was indeed peace for the body whose life had rushed out like a man from an empty house, and for the brain in its weariness; whether something neither darkness nor light came quickly and finally down over all. His mind, used to small, pathetic deaths in the fields and among trees and beside the ceaseless life of streams, made no suggestion to him of a survival beyond the last passion of flesh and tissue. The act of death blocked his view now like a wall; and a fear that was no fear of death, but was the desolate fear of one who sees a symbol torn down and destroyed, made him long for some deed that would reaffirm manhood.

At last the Master came in, staring ahead darkly, conscious of expressing sorrow in the careful sternness of his impassive features; conscious also of being watched in every movement. When he had reached the dais and mounted it, he turned about, and, after allowing himself to puzzle them with a brief, keen smile, composed his face firmly.

‘Good morning. Now…Where did we stop last time?'

He could feel, as he dragged them through the fifty minutes of that first interminable period, that they were in no mood to work; but like a master of hounds he hallooed them on, wondering meanwhile what was happening in the Masters' Common Room.

Mr. Jolly was there, slumped in a chair, his head down between hunched shoulders, looking like a large sick bird. From the grey depths of his silence he watched the younger Masters; his eyes bulged slightly and his long nose pointed to the floor in the middle of the room, like the muzzle of an unhappy dog; a rakish lock of hair hung across his left eye dejectedly. He knew what they were thinking; it was what he thought himself, and what he deeply feared.

I'm damned if I do, he said loudly in his mind. I'm damned if I will. If the Board insist—then for six weeks, until they find another man. I'm too old. One House is enough for me; I'm damned if I look after a whole schoolful. They can find a younger man. I'm too tired.

An ageing man's sorrow, without the passionate quickness of leap and fall that younger hearts feel, was rising in his mind, a grey tide, steady and without rhythm or cessation. He sank more deeply into his chair, and turned his eyes to the fire prattling and whispering joyously in the hearth. This was the saddest thing he had ever known, he thought, cursing himself as he had been continually doing, without bitterness but most deeply, for not having been active to help that man while there was still time. He had not thought—that, he told himself, was a great sin, not to have thought, not to have been in his observing and his thought as solicitous as the other had been for them all. He sighed, without much emotion. At sixty, he thought, a man understands too much and feels too little, and takes all comfort for granted.

After he had sat still there for some time, he heaved himself up out of the chair and went out into the dark corridor whose only lighting came from the School Common Room to which it led. He looked towards the Chapel, and in a while noticed that the rain had stopped. Hunching his stooped shoulders, looking like a tall grey bird ruffling its feathers, he stepped out into the stillness of the day and moved up the Chapel path, slowly, as though he were tired. At the doors, which still stood open after the morning's service, he paused, looking in without sight. Then he turned on his heel suddenly, his hands thrust down into his pockets, and made his way across the parade ground between the mirrors of its little pools. The day was grey and still, as though waiting to rain again; from the main porch the too-familiar clamour of a bell rang out upon the air. He remembered that after this break he had a class, an hour with the Sixth, and at the thought of the effort of commencing work again he groaned gently and stopped to stare at the wet grass.

Charles, coming through the outer door of the changing-room, saw his tall figure stooped against the sky on the edge of the slope. He walked up to the far end of the flat field, where trees were gathered thinly along each side of the boundary fence, overshadowing in places the black surface of a road beyond. The earth was soft under his feet; with eyes that were accustomed to observe each movement of growth he saw the bright green spears of the grass standing like the lances of a tiny army upwards from the soil's clinging darkness.

Life had been arrested by this common calamity. So it seemed to him; for the steady forward movement of his mind through time and youth had been made to pause once more by something which he did not understand. Wandering aimlessly along under the trees, letting the twigs crack and bend beneath his feet, he wondered if life were to be understood, or whether it was not till a man was old, too old to be any longer a part of the world's beauty, that understanding came to him as a compensation. This thing had made the idea of death seem for the first time fierce and positive. He had never before thought of it like that; it had been, if he considered it, calm and negatively conclusive—the lowering of a curtain when something was ended, not the terrific, violent, significant climax of the play itself. He could not understand his own feelings, that made him shiver and close and open his hands; not consciously in his mind did he associate himself nearly with the man who had died. But the shock and grief of such a positive dying was forcing him to substitute, in the vision of thought, his own mind and body for the body of the man now dead; he saw his body wandering distractedly at the bidding of its mind seeking some peace and extinction; he saw it lying dead on a cold floor, heavy and broken, looked at curiously or with horror or anguish by eyes that moved and lived, told of by tongues that still could speak.

He had lost the symbol of a necessity, but this he did not know. He felt only a dull pain in the incessant contemplation of the idea of death; and it was indeed incessant, though a more obedient part of his mind had guided his hands and taken him through that period of study not long since brought to a close by the monotonous bell.

He opened his eyes widely, and looked at the grey roof of sky above the still leaves overhead. Only a few yards away was Mr. Jolly, halted in his walking and staring at the ground with eyes that bulged slightly above the thoughtful pointing of his nose. He appeared to have forgotten something which he was trying now to remember; as Charles watched, his shoulders shrugged and his head sank low between them. Charles moved away, but Mr. Jolly called after him, calling his name. He turned and went back.

‘You were back early, weren't you, Fox?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Always report to me when you come back early, old chap. If you were to take it into your head to go and—commit suicide, now, no one would know.'

The extraordinary harshness and vibration in his voice made Charles redden and avoid his eyes. Mr. Jolly looked again on the ground, as though waiting for some more lively reply. At length he raised his head.

‘What am I saying?'

His tone was husky, as always.

‘I'm sorry, sir,' Charles said.

Mr. Jolly nodded his head soberly. ‘Always report to me. What in God's name brought you back early, Fox?'

‘I've been working at home, sir, and I wanted to—to get back so that—so that…'

Mr. Jolly gazed boldly at him now. ‘Well? “So that” what?'

‘So that I could settle down straight away, without getting put out by—coming back, sir.'

‘I see. Does change upset you, son? You oughtn't to be upset at your age—er—at your age. Well, I can tell you there are some changes coming now…' He stopped and pointed his nose at the ground, a grey dog who has lost its master. ‘Don't you young devils start thinking you'll have an easy time of it with me. And what's more…'

The lines on his forehead and cheeks deepened as he spoke; his eyes looked with melancholy slyness from their leaf-brown lids drawn fine with wrinkles, and long rayed creases from their outer corners made them seem to smile. Charles studied his face nervously, and waited, watching his eyes move from side to side as though spying out an eavesdropper among the slim rain-dark trunks.

‘Well—go along,' he said mildly. ‘I don't want to have anything to do with any of you—you toads.'

His face creased in a smile round the jutting sombreness of his long nose. Charles knew his habit of using strong epithets with that brilliant smile; it was as characteristic as the lock of hair over his eye suggesting past revelry, and just now it was very reassuring. He withdrew from there.

Mr. Jolly, left alone, ceased to smile, and with sadness making the day more grey for him pondered on the intractable divergence of inclination from knowledge of duty. When he turned, raising his eyes from the leafy earth and seeing the School buildings across the wet field, with Chatterton, his own House, jutting out from the main buildings towards him, he scowled, and his blue full eyes looked fierce but without cruelty. By the time he had sauntered gloomily back, and was once more walking down the chapel path towards the porch where the bell hung, he knew what he would eventually do, for the School and for himself. He growled in his throat.

With Mr. Jolly as Headmaster they felt at ease, particularly those of them who were becoming panicky already at the nearer approach of the examinations. He was familiar, even when his new authority caused them to look more closely at him as he passed, even when he was no longer ‘Old Jolly' and ‘Jolly Roger', but ‘the Head'—masculinity personified. He was not changed; his hoarse voice still drawled in the Sixth, and murmured behind the closed door of his room in Chatterton in the evenings; if he looked more tired and growled more often, it was not the School who noticed it. A change of Headmasters is acutely felt in a School where many of the boys are old for their years and many of the Masters seem young for theirs. Had a strange man come among them just then, the tension between Masters and boys might have been so heightened that useful work would have become impossible—just as impossible to the insensitive, who would not have noticed the tension in the air, as to the sensitive, whom laziness made the others imitate. Innumerable small changes would have set their small fishpond seething; the withdrawal or substitution of habitual understandings between the Masters' Common Room and the Big Study would have been irksome to the conservative-minded Englishmen who frankly disliked changes even in their least interesting classes; even the different and suspicious personality of a strange man would have sent the School into a slight hysteria of nerves and self-consciousness.

As it was, nothing like this happened. Mr. Jolly, new to them as the supreme arbiter of their destinies there, was familiar and well liked as a man. Such a calm settled once more over the life within and about those tall walls of ruddy brick that Charles, whose lost symbol was thus replaced, was hardly aware of the growing pains in his own mind, and worked steadily through the winter term. He did not go home for the usual mid-term week-end because he was unwilling to be sheered off even for a day from the straight course of his purpose, or estranged even for a day from the atmosphere of overseen study. Instead, he spent much time in the library, reading and making casual references which might somehow concern his work; and, as Mawley was now going about nimbly on crutches, they walked together in the afternoons, moving up and down the parade ground near the edge of the slope, slowly because he had a regard for crippled movement over the uneven ground there. Those days, from Thursday until Tuesday, were cold and fine; coming like that in the middle of a stormy season, in the middle of a term trumpeted in by the passion of a great man's despair, they were halcyon in their brilliance and calm. Charles, deeply sensitive to all weathers, felt this, and as he walked through the pallor of afternoon sunlight looking out over country stretching for ever westward below him, he rejoiced in the elemental peace that lay in earth and air and drew a veil of misty blue over those green distances. The hard and brittle outlines of summer were gone from all things, and in his mind a like sharpness of definition was being softened by experiences of which he had had no thought in the solitude of his life before. The coming change of this in him was perceptible; the very virginity of his mind was a reason why every new impress made upon it by circumstance and thought should stand out so clearly; he was so lacking in the armament of pretence and habit, so open to surprise, that not to show his feelings or the struggle of his thought would have been unnatural, and impossible except in the presence of his own fear. In his suspicion the body could die innumerable small deaths of insult and outrage; and that was the only thing he feared. Before such a suspicion, every unkind intention is a deadly one, every physical insult a mental agony of shame. He was not a physical coward, and would at that time have undertaken many things which to others might have seemed fearsome; but in such action he was the master of his own body, not the victim of foreign impulses which, because he was so far from understanding them, seemed full of evil power. At no time could he imagine himself laying hands on any creature to do hurt.