The Young Desire It (3 page)

‘Charles. What's the matter, Son?'

His mother's voice was as calm as ever. She did not lack affection for him; but, like the rest of her emotions and the arrangement of her own busy life, it was methodical and without evidence of heat.

‘Nothing,' he said. ‘It's all right, Mother.'

They walked across the blazing roadway.

‘That's right,' she murmured, kindly enough, giving his hand a quiet grip between her coolly gloved fingers. ‘This isn't really a prison, you know.'

He had once said he feared it would be. But now her sense of method and procedure was at ease. And the gates swallowed them, like the blind open jaws of a dead shark, sinister and smally cathedraline. They had passed through. Freedom and innocence were, for Charles, left outside.

It happened that the name of the Headmaster at that time was Fox. Charles knew this—his mother had told him, hoping to surprise and arouse in him some positive interest—and while they waited in the carpeted ante-room which opened into the august study he tried to take his mind away from troubles in his lower viscera (a new natural urge was threatening muscular control) by thinking of the scene which would present itself if this Fox were, unknown to them all, his own father, whom he did not remember. But in his imagination his mother would not come to life, nor soften and cry out; he could hear no passionate exclamations from her firm, straight lips, see no impulsive gesture. Such a gesture, even in his imagination, would have surprised him and seemed, to memory, foreign. Also, the face of this man hidden in the room into which a young boy had just been taken was the wooden ageless face of a young village policeman whom he had once seen mounting a bicycle outside the baker's shop, and whom he had, by some undiscoverable association, thought to resemble his father. Meanwhile, the trembling in his guts persisted, and he moved his hands and feet restlessly.

His mother was looking steadily in front of her, out beyond the open windows to where water sprinklers turned rhythmically, with faint sounds suggesting music, above clipped lawns. There was a melancholy murmur of doves across the tired afternoon spaces, and from quadrangles and corridors came the voices of boys. The voices were happy and shrill; but for Charles the whole forwardness of life had stopped upon a deep, uneasy pedal-note of suspense. In the ante-room there was a restless quiet. One or two mothers, coming late as he had done, were nervously preening and eyeing their boys, smiling at them, talking in low voices, seeming to find some sort of relief in touching their young, as frightened birds do with their broods. A big woman, badly dressed and intolerably nervous, with a heartbroken affection stiffening her plain face, looked from the pert child beside her to the other lads, and back again, and again at the others, with obvious fear. Words seemed to issue silently from the slight movement of her lips. Her own boy was a merry, ugly youngster; unselfconscious and as alert as an animal, he stared about him, and once put out his tongue at a fellow who was gazing fascinated at that large wreck of a woman from the cosseting shadow of a well-dressed, expressionless parent.

With new and anguished consciousness Charles noticed these things, and was aware in the back of his mind of the doves' moaning, the cheerful cool greenness of the lawns already in shadow, and the green sharpness of boys' voices piercing the afternoon minutely. The heat of the day was easing a little, but a new building across the road beyond the lawns burnt red, each of its bricks a scorching coal as the sun caught it full and brazen from the upper west. A faint smell of wet earth came wandering into the breathless room, and the hairy leaves of cotton palms lay like opened fans on the tired air. In spite of the heat in the room Charles felt cold, and kept wiping the moist palms of his hands down the seams of his new breeches. His mother seemed unable to move, until a Master came out with smiling, conscious impressiveness from the study, and asked her to take ‘this little man' within. That Master's face had fascinated Charles since the first time he had issued forth in his black rustling gown. There was an amazing expression of ruthless and petty self-importance in its features, which were classically exact and would have been perfect, had they not seemed too small. When he bent his head and stooped gracefully, looking sideways across his nose, away from the person to whom with exquisite friendliness a small, delicate ear was inclined, and holding the folds of the gown in against his loins, there was revealed a pinkish tonsure of mathematical perfections in the middle of his crown, and from its decisive edge the dark hair was brushed away all round. The impression of his head, and of the face with its carven eyelids and lips, suggested a subtle parody of the head of an Apollo as sculptured by an ancient master. This was not Charles's thought; he only felt dislike trying to force its strange presence in among the muddled feelings and merciless physical sensations which were threatening him with nausea.

They went in the wake of tonsure and billowing gown. He noticed numbly that the door was edged with spongy green baize, and opened and closed silently, with a delayed conclusion sighing on the action of a vacuum stop. Once inside the room, he saw only the bent head and shoulders of the Headmaster across the illimitable orderliness of a great table, and felt cooler air that smelt of books.

‘This is my son Charles.' His mother spoke without emotion or pride; the stillness heard. Startled, he saw the reduced god's-head already non-existent behind a small desk; this is my son Charles, the stillness insisted for one moment.

The Headmaster's face was cavernous. The scar of what must have been a dreadful head-wound, deep enough to receive now the ball of a man's thumb, throbbed like a ceaseless ache above the left temple. Beneath strongly-arched brows, bold and bony, shadows held the eyes that were as though drowned in them. High cheekbones dragged up the skin tautly from a square jaw, and below a nose whose shape suggested humour and kindness, the lips, of which Charles was fiercely conscious, set in a straight, shadowless tension. Later in life, thinking of the face of this man whose rule over him was so short, he realized that the whole face expressed a struggle with pain—the pain of a stretched mind as well as of the body. At this time it was a face that merely surprised him, but not with terror or awe, by its living darkness.

‘Well, Charles Fox,' the Headmaster said, standing up and leaning over the table to take his hand, ‘you and I have the same name. We should get on well.'

It was said with great simplicity. Charles tried to speak, gave it up, smiled nervously, and felt his face distorted beyond smiling. His mother was looking at him, unaware that for a moment the man's dark eyes in their sunken shadows were turned from the boy to her, and that she was summed up, roughly and with broad correctness, and dismissed for ever.

‘I'm sure he'll do what is expected of him,' she said, slowly and clearly through her smile. The words had a corrective effect on Charles, who took his hand away from his mouth. There was too much unexpected sympathy and kindliness in the Headmaster's tones.

‘I'm sure he will, too,' he said. ‘And I think we've got all we want about you. You will have to work hard—the sort of work you will have here will be to a great extent new to you. Just now I am looking for scholars as well as for all-round fellows. You might be one of them. You might make a name for the School as well as for yourself. Mightn't you?'

He spoke with quiet authority. Charles, looking up, nodded his head speechlessly, straining into the other's eyes that seemed to burn with an illusion of systole and diastole urgency in their darkness.

‘Yes, you might. Tell me—what have you thought of doing when you finish with school?'

‘I don't think he knows,' Mrs. Fox said at once. ‘He's so young, of course. And as he hasn't known a father…'

The Headmaster smiled down at her politely.

‘Well,' he said to Charles, ‘you come along and see me one day, and we'll talk about it then. Now find your way to Chatterton House, and have a talk with Mr. Jolly. He is your Housemaster; he will take care of you.'

‘He's so young,' Mrs. Fox said again, rather less certainly.

‘We'll see that he's all right, Mrs. Fox. They soon find their way about. And his examination board reports are good. We like boys who have done their previous study privately; they usually prove themselves good workers. Of course, there's more to learn in a school like this than letters only. We have ideals of conduct.'

He put one hand on Charles's shoulder, looking directly at him as he spoke.

‘They have to learn our methods, and get used to a regular full-day time-table.'

Charles felt the firm hand removed from his shoulder, and heard him say again, ‘We'll see that he's all right. You have nothing to worry about. The finest young men in the country come, many of them, from here, I'm glad to say.'

The words echoed in his mind until he found himself passing through a laughing, moving crowd of boys towards the portentous gates. His mother's gentle farewell did not embarrass him; indeed, he scarcely knew she was going even when her cool lips and hands were removed from him; he was thinking despairingly, there in the hot blue shadow of the front quadrangle, of evening on the river at home, with its perfect loneliness, the coolness, his own naked body rippling the green water, the stars coming out in a sky of dark and burning blue above the dry grassland, and the peace of his solitude. This was the hour when one went down to bathe, as the sun sank and the air lifted on a promise of night, and bitterns began their first shadowy flights. This was the hour; the very hour.

Behind him, as he looked after his mother walking away, the boys shouted and milled in and out, laughing with one another, full of the cheerful energy of apes. The finest young men in the country. Charles thought he would be one of them, and envied them what they did not have.

He turned about and began to walk, looking under his eyebrows sideways to see if anyone were noticing him. The boys thronged and chattered, shouting out across the quadrangle to one another. There was in the air a noisy gaiety that felt unreal; they laughed and tumbled, yet all of them seemed to be waiting for something, for a command or the startling authority of a bell. High above them the milk-pale sky fainted with summer; sunlight on the roofs was thick and red. Under the covered porch that went between a low brick building and the older part of the School, a Master stood bracing his shoulders back against a wood-and-brick pillar, and a half-circle of boys about him yapped and fidgeted like terriers teasing a young bull. This Master's face was a smiling, leathern mask, brown and dark beneath a soft lick of black hair on his narrow forehead, lean but not ascetic; the flat cheeks were creased from the genial depth of his ready and scornful smile, and a mature irony sat easily in his twinkling eyes. Charles heard only the sparrow-like ‘Sir' of the boys round him, until he suddenly raised his eyes and his voice from them to shout at a group engaged in jumping the heavy chains that bound the soft evening green of a long lawn. ‘Get away from those chains, you donkeys. You'll break your worthless necks', and his warning died into a dispassionate grumbling. He had not ceased to smile. Charles felt a sad admiration and envy for so much good-fellowship; he thought, it must be like living in your own home, to be a Master here.

He went on more quickly, but was not quite swift enough in his search for a lavatory, for he had not wished to seem to hurry. A group of youths, older and less noisy than the terriers, debouched from a sloping covered way that had echoed the sound of their feet and the tones of their voices.

‘Here's one, here's one,' said the youth in front.

‘What's your name, kid?'

‘Oh, oh, where is my dear mother?'

They had gathered round him before he realized it. They stood silent while he looked from one heavy face to another, into blue eyes, into brown eyes, at lips curled with a certain gleaming expectancy, at hands slowly withdrawn from pockets. He blushed and would have smiled as he answered them, ‘Charles Fox'.

‘Fox, eh? First-year, aren't you?'

‘What—I—yes, I only just came.'

‘Well, well,' they said.

‘Can you tell me…'

‘He's sissy,' one said softly, and they laughed with satisfaction. ‘Come on,' they said, ‘we'll see if you're a girl too.'

‘We're the girl-catchers, boy.'

They took hold of him roughly by arms and neck, and he began to struggle.

‘No, no. I don't want to. Please.'

They growled, cheerfully. ‘Monty, you old bastard, get hold of his ear. Get his ear, go on.' He felt a hot red pain flame into his head, into the very bone, and down his neck. He meant to free his hand to strike down that other hand.

‘Wait,' he said. ‘Let me go. I'll come. Let go. I will come.'

‘You'll come all right,' Monty said, still twisting his ear, and the others laughed loudly at that. ‘Go on, he couldn't, he couldn't. Let's see, here, give us a try.'

‘Don't be rude,' one said primly. ‘Lots of time, don't fiddle with him.' They issued from the hot dimness of the covered way into blood-red sunlight streaming through glass. Their heels clattered on concrete; Charles was blinded by the direct red glare.

‘In here,' said one. ‘Old Jolly's busy with a few upstairs. He won't come down for another year.'

‘Please,' Charles said, ‘it's Mr. Jolly I want to see.'

‘You'll see him all right,' he was told. They panted and still laughed among themselves as they hoisted him up on to a table-top in what seemed to be a large classroom. ‘Pull those doors across,' Monty commanded, his face red and excited. ‘Don't want everyone to come in, do you?'

The folding doors were closed; the classroom was half its previous size. Charles, with the irrelevance of excessive fear, was irritated and puzzled by their laughter. They stretched him out on the table-top, held him there, and began to unbutton his breeches.