The Young Desire It (29 page)

‘You've worked too hard this year, Charles,' he said. ‘I shall have to keep an eye on you when the examinations are finished. Life will be easier for you then, and for me and all of us. You can come and read poetry to me in your spare time. There'll be lots of that.'

‘Oh, I should love to, sir.' Charles's expression was dubious, yet flattered. ‘You've been so very kind to me; if it hadn't been for you I don't know what I'd have done. Honestly I don't, sir.'

‘You talk as though it were all over and done with,' Penworth said abruptly. ‘Anyhow, that remains to be seen.'

He sat down, lost in thought for a minute.

‘Now, let's get things clear. When do you have to go and run races; what afternoons?'

After Charles had gone he leaned back in a sort of exhaustion, rubbing his face slowly with his broad palms. Again a mood of discontent had gone from him: he had exorcized that devil with a little witchcraft, in his own way. But now he found himself disturbed, not by discontent but by the residue of the last half-hour's emotions. It would have suited his mood to have called the boy back into that little room, so that he could talk to him and look at him, seeing his words reflected faithfully and with a richer dramatic colour in the young face over against him, while the afternoon went coldly down into blue evening. That would have eased his heart of the ghosts of those stale longings which now troubled it, and which were made more persistent by the present languor of his mind.

Listlessly he considered his future life. At twenty-five, with a Master's degree in Arts, a choice knowledge of musical literature and of the masterpieces of his own language and two others, and an intelligence not frequently to be met with in this strenuous new country, he was still nowhere. There was in his mind a growing suspicion that a school teacher, whatever grace his qualifications might have, was a person of small importance in himself. Such a man by beginning to teach came to believe, when he observed the clumsy ignorance of his scholars, that wisdom lay in books. And as a teacher he was at the bidding of those he taught; his mind was a widow's cruse for them to suck at without being failed; but, he thought, the quality of the oil would not change.

There was another way of failure, which he himself hardly yet perceived in thought, though it was hinted in the growing disease of his moods and the unreasonable way his emotions sprang and ran. He had come from a country rich in traditional beauties of thought and practice, and calm in the knowledge of its heritage. His own mind and intelligence were nourished at that rich fountain, Oxford, the left breast of England, close to England's heart; there he had clung and sucked till he was full, his ear against the heart beating beneath, his fingers on its placid pulse. Knowledge and understanding flowed into him, and gradually he was raised, through imitations and then through voluntary exercise of choice, into a young perception of the beauty of thought and truth. He was, with the consent of his own heart, fitted out for life, and likely, by the quality of his mind and nature, to make a place for himself in worthy estimation.

Then, prompted by God knew what conceit of his young ego, he had left England for this land. It was infinitely more foreign even to his imagination than would have been a European country where men spoke a foreign tongue. It was to him the very end of the earth. The language was his own—almost his own. He found that his own ideas of culture, of behaviour and of conduct were considered right and unarguable; that good manners were the same, and that the complexities of social relationships, though relaxed a little, perhaps, as was only natural in a country with a semi-tropical climate and a cosmopolitan history, were in form unmistakably English. Here he had come, ready to open the treasure-chest of his mind and share out its endless contents, keeping for himself, above all else, the esteem he would earn and the authority in certain things with which esteem would by degrees invest him.

And already he had failed, and dreams were crumbling. For, under this surface of promise and willingness in which even a century or so had planted and germinated seeds of culture, and sometimes a being of full genius, he was being made aware of forces beyond his comprehension, powers of the earth itself that would corrupt and conquer his mind; powers that were so untamed and untamable that they would tear down the curtain of his intellectual worth and rudely lay bare the poverty of his soul's strength cosseted within. These giant subtle forces were no mystic emanations of open places, no genii lurking only in the vastness of an unknown and untroubled continent; they were the very daemons of men's minds, in cities, in homes—in schools where the childhood of the nation was nursed, and where he, come armed with gifts of rich knowledge and charm of nature, was to be shown that his own race, which like a bold adventurer he had left to cross three seas, was old, old—that its traditions and cultural beauty, faced with these crude world's-end forces, were like the encrustations of decay; popularly beautiful still, yet old with the preserved and waxen impotence of a very old man who cannot die. And he himself, the envoy of his own choosing, would in time be made a living sacrifice to the colour and the light and the human brutality of a country that had no use for him otherwise.

These things he did not see, as he sat limply in his chair, with the sour, dry odour of ink and paper in his nostrils, and a mild benison of tobacco smoke unseen in the fading light. The air on his fingers was cold without penetration; he let his hands lie still, clasped on the polished wood of the table, while he considered without emotion how little he had yet done. Yes, it seemed that if you were a school teacher you were no one and got nowhere.

Had anyone told him that as long as he remained and all his life he would be a puppet on strings in this adopted country, just as were the others of his kind who at first seemed to triumph and were pushed aside at will by the unseen hands, it would have caused him to smile. In believing he knew himself and his work as well as a young man may he was right; but he knew nothing of the power which could move untroubled, regardless of one man or of a nation, choosing its initiates and sacrificing them again to itself at the hands of the mob it swayed. He had forgotten that the most beautiful and perfect things had always been chosen by his ancients for sacrifice. He would never belong; and although those were words he said to himself often enough, he said them with complacency as well as with bitterness, and did not understand their deepest meaning.

I shall leave this place in the end, he thought. When I get away from this School, I shall grow again. It's the School that confounds me. I was not meant to be a teacher in any school.

He returned to thinking of Charles, and considered with sober disquiet his warm desires, complex, multiplied, and ceaselessly relevant to his awareness of the boy. Passages of the
Phaedrus
haunted his mind also, and after wondering over them, he leaned across to his bookshelves to draw out a thin volume, beautifully printed in the most perfect Greek type he had ever seen, almost beautiful enough to rob the words of their fullest worth of meaning, encouraging the eye to break them up and taste the characters like pomegranate seeds clustering in them.

Reading slowly aloud, he heard also the voice of his mind translating.

To pass on from these obvious thoughts—let us next
consider what good or what harmful effects upon
your fortunes it will be natural to expect as a result
of the companionship and tutelage of a lover. To all
,
and to the lover himself most of all
,
it must be clear
that he would hope for nothing more deeply than for
the beloved to be deprived of those treasures most
dear
,
most precious and most holy to him. Gladly
would he see him bereft of father and of mother
,
of
relations and of friends
,
in all of whom he observes
that censorious and obstinate opposition to his
enjoyment of the traffic with his beloved which he
desires above all things.

He stared through the page, frowning faintly. At last, with an effort, the focus of his regard brought back to his waiting mind the words.

Furthermore
,
if a youth possess property in gold or
other such substance
,
he will seem the less easy of
conquest
,
and less easy of control
,
that conquest
having been made. So it cannot be otherwise but
that a lover will grudge his chosen one the possession
of fortune
,
and rejoice greatly in its loss…

Over the remaining sentence he lingered gravely.

Nay
,
he would even have him remain as long as may
be without wife
,
or children
,
or home
,
such is the
sort of his desire to gather for ever the fruits of his
own enjoyments.

Coldly he remembered that girl the boy had told him of; and this memory brought back the faint aversion he had felt as he listened to what he assured himself was a sentimental account of meaningless calf-love. His eyes strayed to the opposite page, stepping down from line to line until they were held by a phrase, and he read again.

…the object of this passion has
,
furthermore
,
at all
times and among all men to beware of censorious
observation…to listen either to difficult and excessive
praises
,
or
,
as is equally probable
,
to unbearable
condemnation
,
from his lover's dark caprice…
as surely
,
when his desire is grown stale
,
will the
lover be until death a traitor to him upon whom
with promises innumerable
,
yes
,
and with oath and
prayer…

He let the volume sink and close between his fingers, and stared at the fading white of the wall, while the light from the windows behind him grew faint, and into the House beyond his door sounds of life returned. Sport was ended for the day. They were changing, plunging under the shivering chill of the showers; he could hear them shouting, and follow the ring and echo of their hilarious laughter, the slaps of hands on chest and flank under the water, the sharp whip-crack of flicking towels. Somewhere out there was that lad whose face and voice had troubled him many times in many months.

Yes, he thought, I must leave this place. It's the School that confounds me. But before I go…

Leaving that thought uncompleted, he put the slim book carefully back into its own slit of shadow in his shelves.

September had eluded them like a dream; before they knew it, the gales and madness of the equinox were gone, and October enveloped life in its brief balm and calm before the rigour of summer began. Suddenly the earth was revealed to them in all its delight and newness. In the darker grass pink flowers and white flowers came out, threepenny stars with six points that shone for a time in the warming sunlight. The days were lengthening, mysterious now with spring's virginity and promise; the cold nights were shorter, brilliant in moonlight green or the dark silver of starlight, cloudless, windless, frosty and serenely still. That stillness was of the whole earth, that lay quiet like a woman woken from sleep into a dream of new consummation.

Charles was for some days at the mercy of that halcyon languor. The air swam with bees and light, beyond the windows; he could breathe the breath of flowers, Cape lilacs clouding purple and white against the high sky, roses from the Masters' garden trailing their ripe sweetness through the cold corridors among motley odours of books and dust and cedar flakes on the floors; and a perfume of grass warmed by the sun lying on the lawns. He was suddenly aware of his own weariness. It would not last. Masters were patient with their classes; they too felt the season's serenity sucking at the marrow of their bones, though they did not feel it with such swooning keenness as did those young adolescent creatures on whom they smiled. Charles felt the heavy, sleepy warmth in his knees and back, and struggled in vain against its drugged dominion of his mind; but little by little its weight was eased from smothering him, and with a renewed and happier energy he went to attack the last weeks of the year's study.

November was perilously near, he thought. The first despair of his return had gone, leaving him apathetic to everyone about him, as though he had wakened from a sleep, from the reality of a dream. And indeed, looking back always upon that last holiday, it did seem dreamlike to him, with all a dream's reality and irrevocability. Like a dream the girl's face haunted him, making the daylight less bright, as though through a veil he saw it, and lighting the darkness of night and sleep with something warmer than moonlight.

They had said, informed by some wisdom beyond their years, that they would not write to each other. In all their encounters they had been made aware of the tyrannous impotence of words; to have addressed himself to her in words written would have satisfied his necessity as little as the hunger of a child is satisfied by a voice that would comfort it. He recalled her voice, and her eyes as she said it; he looked into her warm, quiet face, and thought that to-morrow she would be gone, and in two days he too would be back within the confines of a place where love was as incommunicable as any dream. For a while, in unhappy silence, they were afraid; they dared not look at one another, and the cool brilliance of the waning afternoon came between them like a parting. But, when he said that this was the saddest part of every day, looking out over the illimitable, pale afternoon spaces, they were together again, though their hands had not yet touched; and then they said that they would not write, but would wait till the summer holiday brought them into each other's sight, and see what life should give them.