The Young Desire It (28 page)

He began his final series of classes by delivering, at Charles in particular, a clipped and sharply-worded string of remarks on the necessity for decent interest and quiet, attentive behaviour in form. The boy, still sore and distressed from his trouncing, and by nature not inclined to see in this sudden jeremiad from the dais a good reason for the others ceasing their unkind treatment of him, tried to make a reply, in the last flush of that rage he had earlier given way to; and Penworth, who had now arranged things as he wished them to be, interrupted him promptly to begin a real diatribe against those who deliberately dissociate themselves from their fellows—‘because Nature has by mistake given them pretty faces and pretty ways, and has further erred in making them aware of her unfortunate gifts'.

By the time he had finished this speech he was exhausted and in great relief. The Latin class could now continue. Seeing, when he looked up gravely from his book, the expression of miserable bewilderment in Charles's face, he was further eased of his own discontent; he gave him no particular attention during that hour, but before he left the dais, when the echoes of the noon bell were still shaking on the air, he spoke to him again.

‘Fox, I want to see you this afternoon, when classes end.'

‘Yes, sir,' Charles said.

When the door had swung closed after his flying gown, some laughed and some commiserated with Charles a little. He did not answer them, but took up his books and went out. The day was brilliant now under the high sun, and as he walked across the courtyard and up the covered way, to put the books back in his House locker, he began to wonder why he had ever come back. Before, it had not entered his mind to wonder; now, as he understood with every beat of his heart the gulf and distance that seemed to separate him from all others in this place, he considered why he had returned—why he had not locked himself in his quiet room at home, or run out into the fields and beyond the fields to the lonely hills smoky with blue mist, in those last two days when Margaret was gone and he, as he saw, was alone in the world, without even the comfort of a belief in his mother's expressed affection and understanding.

He looked about. There was the brick, the glass, the wooden floor; there were the open doors of this prison, with streaming sunlight across and beyond them. Voices sounded sharp and clear, voices he now knew well, coming from the stairs, the changing rooms, the bathrooms above; he heard the slither of feet on the floor of his own dormitory, over his head, and words and laughter were in the whole building, so familiar and inevitable that it became unreal to him, and his own mind and body became unreal. He stared at his hand holding up the locker door. If he let it go that door would fall back with a clear smack of wood on wood; if he pushed the books they would hit the back wall of the locker with a bump, a hollow noise, and the inkstained cloth, polished higher by much handling, lie smooth and slippery against his fingers.

‘What made me come back?' he asked; and that second voice which was now the eternal tenant of his mind, that voice which was learning to reply to every question he asked of himself, and would never be silent until death put a quiet over all, answered, Reason. You knew you did not have it in your nature to do anything else. Even this is a part of life, though you are unwilling to think that. And, the mute voice added, even this will end.

He shook his head, hearing without understanding, knowing without knowing why he knew. These voices would go on for ever, arguing their ceaseless drama from the proscenium of his brain to the narrow auditorium where his consciousness sat listening. Arguments about his mother's sudden emergence from her former placid silence had been rehearsed and rehearsed there; arguments about Margaret had begun to absorb him passionately; and now once more Penworth, who had been his friend, worthy of admiration and love, was matter for unhappy debate.

The clamour of the bell made him drop the locker lid, and it came down sharply with a smack of wood on wood, and a rattle of the catch. The sudden pause upstairs was invaded by a sense of purpose that brought feet scampering down in a crowd. He went out of the classroom where the lockers stood, and was caught in the jostling throng that already reached to the covered way and was streaming down with a thunder of running.

At the brief knock on the panel, Penworth, who had been staring darkly through the open window and feeling at odds with the cheer of sunlight slanting into the pooled lawn outside, called to come in without turning round. Charles saw his head and shoulders cut out against the trees and the sky; the shoulders sloping dispiritedly, pulled down by the deep thrust of hands into trousers pockets.

‘Sir, it's me,' he said.

Penworth brought himself slowly round; his frown remained dark, and the full melancholy of his lips reflected in his eyes.

‘It's not “me”,' he remarked coldly. ‘It's “I”.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Charles, on guard before this mood.

‘Well,' he said. ‘What do you want? Did I send for you? Oh, I know—this morning, yes.'

He seated himself in his chair, so that the light from the windows behind him fell thinly on his brown, wide head. Charles once more measured with his eyes the width and height of that forehead, and its deep downward arc of whiteness from temple to temple. His admiration for the sensual beauty of the face would not change, no matter how darkly he was considered. The bold nose with fine nostrils, the wonderful setting of the eyes that could look so cold, and the sensitive, full mouth reminded him of kind words and friendship. Only the chin was small, round and womanish; but he did not see that, for the man's eyes drew his look always.

‘So you're going to run races, eh?' Penworth said, after regarding him for some time as though he were a stranger. ‘Will that leave you enough time for working with me, or can you dispense with me now?'

Charles stared, and his lips trembled when he spoke.

‘No, sir—please don't think that. I only gave my name because—I only gave my name so as not to seem to want to dis—dissociate myself too much—so as not to seem out of it too much, sir.'

Penworth raised his eyebrows, without smiling.

‘I see you remember my words,' he said. ‘Come here. No, right round the table, this side. There. Now look at me.'

He took Charles's face between his cool palms, and stared into his eyes.

‘What's the matter with you? You're trembling.'

Charles said nothing, concentrating his mind on returning that deep look.

‘Well,' said Penworth quietly, ‘what have you got to say for yourself?'

Charles said: ‘Nothing, sir. I just came. You told me to.'

Again Penworth raised his eyebrows.

‘I see. You came because I told you to. I see. If I hadn't sent for you, told you to come, you wouldn't have come. Am I right to assume that?'

‘Oh, sir! Of course I'd have come, anyway. Of course I would.'

Penworth looked from his eyes to his lips, and back again to his eyes. The glance was bold and quick, as sudden as the fall of a hawk from its hover. Charles instinctively moved his head, and the blood flung across his cheeks.

‘Come here,' Penworth said deliberately. ‘You silly young ninny.' His regard was big with anger. ‘I sometimes think,' he said, ‘that you're a danger to this School, Fox.'

He let Charles go out of his hands, and laughed.

‘You have the vanity, too, to talk about love—and girls—you do, you! With a face…'

He stopped himself. Charles stood helplessly, while tears of rage filled his eyes, and became tears of misery; they fell and he was unable to move to conceal them. His breath choked in his throat.

‘I don't talk about it,' he cried, with shame and misery and ebbing anger tearing at him.

‘Oh, yes you do,' Penworth remarked lightly. ‘Kindly don't contradict me like that.' A voice was asking clearly and curiously in his mind why he was doing what he did. He shook it aside as he would at that moment have shaken aside the hand of any mendicant. It came again; it was Charles's voice.

‘Why do you say this to me? Is this why I was to come and see you? You were my great friend, and now you say this to me, and you don't even know what it means. I wish I had never come here. I wish I had never been born.'

Penworth swallowed, determined to look unconcerned before such childish hysterics; but he could not see the anguish he had brought into the boy's face without seeing also that it was as true as his own pretended coldness was false and cruel. Yet the pain he watched gave him a great surge of—was that pleasure, then, that overpowering sense of elation, and self-pity? Was that pleasure?

He regarded Charles for some minutes, saying nothing, noticing the curve from his averted head to his neck and shoulders, and the way those shoulders shook, almost as though he were being whipped. Then he stood up and turned once more to the window, enjoying the curious sensations of his secret shame and elation, and above all enjoying now that supreme and most godly power, the power to comfort when his dramatic sense admitted comfort.

It was some time before the silence in the white room was broken. When Charles spoke, his voice came steadily.

‘Mr. Penworth, I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I've made you angry. I didn't mean to, sir. It was just that I felt so unhappy coming back here, and looked forward to seeing you; that was all I did look forward to. I didn't know you'd be feeling wretched. Even in form this morning—I thought it was just—just you, and I thought it was just a sort of pretence and that you didn't really mean what you said, sir.'

Penworth followed his dramatic sense, and turned round. Charles was confused to see him smiling. He had expected further reprimand, spoken to make his difficult apology seem only right and apposite, spoken rather stiffly as though to any boy, and to be followed by a brief dismissal. To see, instead, the old smile of friendship and interest made him wonder what would happen next. His attention was so concentrated that he could not smile himself.

‘They call me the Bad Penny, don't they? Well—It's all right, you needn't give them away—perhaps I am. Always turning up. He that turneth up—a stone…He that turneth up the stone of my heavy humour finds a worm beneath.'

He laughed pleasantly at his thought.

‘It's all right,' he said again. ‘You needn't frown like that over what I mean. Or do you see it? Perhaps you do—you of all people, Charles Fox. The long and the short of it is, Charles, that nothing in the School's prospectus, or curriculum, gives me the right to treat you as I like to, and do. Mr. Jolly will tell you that it's a bad policy for a Master to make a boy an especial friend, just as it's bad policy to be everlastingly hard on a particular boy in class. Mr. Jolly will tell you, if you care to ask him, that especial friendships are bad for the Master's disciplinary powers, and not fair to the boy; they hamper him in his efforts to assume his rightful social status as an ordinary member of our happy community. So, Charles, I do wrong to you, and I do wrong to make you the slave of my humours—or to be willing to make you. Now you shall choose: whether do I continue for the next eight or nine weeks to coach you in here, or whether do I inform Mr. Jolly that my time is too much occupied, and ask him to free me from the arrangement. Now choose.'

He leaned against the window-frame, put into a gentle humour again by the pleasing sound of his own words, and by his certainty of how the boy's choice would fall. Self-confidence had returned to him with the affirmation, during these last minutes, of his own singular personality; and when he was assured in self-confidence his desire was always to be kind. He watched Charles.

‘Well, sir,' Charles said hesitantly. ‘If you would—would you mind, just until the exams are over, going on as we were?'

‘I should be glad,' Penworth replied with amiable frankness. ‘You are doing particularly well. Come here, old thing.'

He put his arm round his shoulders in the old way of friendship, and rocked him gently from side to side.

‘You look tired,' he said, and he closed his fingers in the ruddy curls and tilted his face far back. ‘Yes, you do look tired. You've worked too hard. And,' he said slowly, as though piecing together the thought as he spoke it, ‘I believe you feel too hard, too. I believe you do. Your hair, now, is said to be the colour that indicates an excitable nature. Let me have a good look at you. There.'

He held him away, gripping his shoulders with his broad, strong hands.

‘An excitable nature. A good nose, though; a nose suggesting will-power, or determination. Same thing. Same thing? I wonder. Anyhow…Eyebrows rather thick—concentration. But eyes too dreamy even for a youth, and a mouth too soft, altogether too soft and generous, not sharp-cut. Eyes and lips like yours are a nice combination in a boy, I must say! You might have been an artist; but I don't think you will: you're not hard enough. So, if you feel too deeply, I don't know what you'll do. And God help you, anyhow.'

He let him go, watching him.

‘Now—am I not nice to you? What do you think of my summing-up? The temperament of an excitable girl combined with a very masculine strength of will and a masculine mind…It's no good, Charles; you'll get into awful messes. But I expect you'll get out of them too. What do you think?'

‘I suppose you're right, sir,' Charles said. ‘I don't know; is it—is it always possible to tell from a person's face what he's like?'

‘Ah, now that depends upon the teller. Just as if you were a small depositor. And you needn't laugh at me like that. You see—an excitable nature, as I said. You're laughing from nervousness.'

He taunted him affably; and as he did so he was startled by a thought that irritated him suddenly in spite of himself and made him wonder whether something in their relationship had not been resolved that afternoon, so that now certain desires of his, stale desires once warm, begotten of a loneliness of which he must make himself master, were assuredly hopeless. He cursed himself for having shown his feelings as he had done earlier, and made a determination.