The Young Desire It (39 page)

Mawley kept some of his old note-books. Their cheery words in time became unreal, and suggested faintly an enchantment of life impossible to believe in, after the passing of some years. They were enthusiastic in their assurance that the summer of that year was as hot as the devil—‘a record heat!!!' The carefully mature, consciously cultured handwriting mentioned this two or three times during passages written in December and January and February; very blithe passages telling of happy holiday affairs. Hope, which Penworth called ‘
cette original
', the smiling deceiver, must be amazed at the sad futility of making early notes on life and people; only the wish, the green thought, the unreality of a suggested enchantment evolved by time, are preserved in such apish, facile jottings, whose very abundance condemns them afterwards. Nevertheless, these coy pages held still some reminiscence of that swoon of the blood, swoon of the brain, sharp swoon and weight of the burning air, which curdle somnolently in the flesh, making all movement heavy with effort, and coaxing the lover of such summer weather to lie in the white-hot sand and listen to the thunder of waves at his feet and the ceaseless secret of gulls of wind in his ears.

He had written that in February Charles was in ‘a very interesting condition'—a happy expression that seems to have been unhappily applied this time, though it does give some hint of how changed he was from the ignorant and remote angel he had seemed when, a year before, his mother left him at the gates and walked away through the thick hazy heat of late afternoon to catch her train. There was not much dramatic interest in him then; but between then and now he had seen something of life as he was to live it, and had made his first and greatest decision affirming his own manhood. But in one way he would not alter: for he had not the fatal power of being satisfied, and his love of life therefore was conscious and intense. His mental processes, of self-analysis and objective reasoning, also altered little, and remained a sort of torture to him when he considered his own short-comings and the incomprehensibility of the rest of the world. It appeared, however (though this the optimistic note-book failed to record) that whereas before the holiday he had been often miserable and discontented for all to see, now whatever he had of discontent was the surface measure of some inward reconciliation of wish with wisdom, of a decision made and irrevocable.

Mawley afterwards insisted that at this time he knew little enough of him; but Mawley's memory was always clear enough to represent a picture of him coming in through those gates to begin another year of obedience and of work. His face was pale and thinner; he had never liked summer, though, as he said, it fascinated him, and now in his eyes a look of labour tried to conceal itself beneath that mask of defiant indifference which you could imagine him unhappily assuming during all the journey up from his home to the city, from the city eastwards to the School station, from the station along the dusty private path to the dark gates sweating in the heat.

It was like him to say no word of greeting to Mawley, letting best welcome reach out in the sudden brilliance of his smile, and to speak at once of something in the life he had now returned to from the oblivion of weeks of absence.

‘I want to get the bed next to you, Mawl. Do you think I can?'

This was the final gesture of friendship, in those days, for it made a claim of spiritual equality. They went to see. He said nothing in the oven-heat and steamy shadow of the covered way, but in the first changing room beyond it, where the brassy afternoon sunlight suddenly set his hair afire, he turned his head quickly.

‘I must say I'm glad to see you off those crutches.' And, on a sequence of thought impossible to follow, ‘It'll make a difference not having Penworth here.'

He explained, climbing the stairs, that it would be in a way easier.

‘But I'll miss him. You will, too, I know. He liked us both as much. I wonder what he'll think of our mean passes.'

There was a letter for him in the rack at the top of the stairs. Mawley mentioned it when, after putting hat and suitcase on the locker between their beds, in sign of possession, Charles was ready to sit down and talk. His face was always pale. Now it went so white that the green pigment in his skin showed. He looked as though he might have fainted, and, instead of walking down the dormitory at once, he leaned heavily on the top of the locker, with his eyes closed. Mawley said the handwriting was unmistakable.

He looked, and sighed as though he had escaped a danger.

‘Penworth? Oh—that's good. Why didn't you say? I'd better get it, hadn't I, before everyone sees it and my name's dirt again.'

But instead of going, even then, to the stair-head, he sat down on his new bed, exhaustion coming when restraint had been unlocked. His hands hung limply from the wrists over the neat bed's edge.

‘God, I'm tired. This summer's too much. As though I've been trampled on all night, when I wake in the morning.'

He said it had rained half the time while he and his mother, taking a holiday which she had needed as much as he had, were down on the southern coast, and that he had had a good time there—quiet, but good. By that, it appeared that he had been left alone, freed from the intolerable antagonism which he could not understand. What he had paid for this freedom was hard to guess.

At last, hearing other people coming, he got up and went for the letter, muttering something about having forgotten. There was a look of mild surprise in his face.

The symphony in three movements was opening; the air of expectancy had broken with the familiar sound of feet and voices in the class-rooms beneath, in the bathrooms, on the stairs, and a division of life into two parts, the known for them, the unknown for those timid newcomers without background or social rights in older scholars' eyes, of whom a year before, to the day and hour, Charles had been one. Now there was an invasion of Dormitory C, where he, as a second-year scholar, had a right to live if he chose. He came back with his letter; two or three other boys, laughing at some comfortable crudity of wit, were following in a group. Their round cheeks had flushed red with the heat, and were sleek with sweat; the skin about their lips looked by contrast white, as it would do in the sudden lividness of anger. Charles took no notice of them. He sat down to read. Mawley, watching his face, saw the familiar easy tears come into his eyes and brim and tremble on the lower lids. When he looked up his smile was brilliant. It was plain that even now he was not thinking of Penworth; but all he said, as he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, was, ‘Do you remember what he said in the dormitories? “B is B, and C is C, and never the twain shall meet.” It always amused me. I don't know what made me think of that. It's some misquotation, I think.'

Mawley remembered, more readily, that anything that moved him deeply had always the power to command his tears. It was not Penworth's letter, surely, that had done this. His state now was reminiscent of early convalescence; but of the mind, not of the body.

‘Here, read it yourself. I'll unpack this case,' he said, holding out the open sheet of creamy thick paper.

Penworth's writing, as delicate and incisive as only a man's can be, was almost a self-portrait: its scholarship was warm, not dry, and it lived choicely on the page, suggesting in the individuality of each character much fluent penning of Greek running script.

‘My dear Charles
,

‘A word with you on your return
,
since we are to
be friends. My gratification at your pass may only be
equalled by the content you should now enjoy
,
and
it should
,
you know
,
be outdone by your determination
to go on as you have begun.
Te saluto—sed non moriturus!

‘Pas du tout.
I am conscious rather of being on
the eve of a new night not without its moon and
stars
,
nor lacking promise of the day to follow.
(
Aliter (Anglice)—
Life's good-oh
,
and as a musician
,
master-pupil-cum-anything else that may be
,
I am
finding myself easier with myself.)

‘One of these evenings
,
lordly in my not-always-to-
be-praised independence
,
I suppose I shall return
to haunt the precincts
,
and shall walk leisurely
up the covered way to Chatterton. Looking round
from Cicero
(In Catilinam,
I think?
)
in prep. at the
insulting
,
improper sound of voices
,
you will perceive
me with Mr. Waters in the shadows outside
,
looking
in; but I shall not gloat. Nor shall I commiserate.
Whether you understand it or not
,
I shall probably
envy. You will find one day how much you have that
I have not and have not had.

‘How is your heart? Changed at all? I dare to
ask as a friend—never as a mentor. Let things
happen as they will
,
Charles
,
and enjoy whatever
joys there are in loving. You may come to an end;
but—if you are very lucky—you may come instead
to a beginning. I hope you do. How do I know?
I don't. This is the schoolmaster's wordy peroration
,
which is let off at random
,
in the hope always of
striking a spark somewhere
,
in some darkness. Let
it be no more than that; and remember that even in
love you have my good wishes…now. Once it might
have been otherwise.

‘This note
,
ended perforce by the arrival of the
afternoon's first pupil
,
coming down the garden
path
,
is just the beginning of a beginning.

‘Tibi,
‘Christopher Penworth.'

Mawley finished reading, and folded up the letter. The air was quieter outside; February days in Australia become tired before sunset. From the Chapel path and the front courtyard and the green lawns all about, a rise and fall of voices sounded cheerfully, and the husky tones of pigeons and doves, falling from the orange-hot roofs, were by contrast fictitiously peaceful. The day was tired, and Charles, susceptible as always to changes of that sort, was aware of its exhaustion in his own limbs, and its melancholy of decline tightening his throat.

Mawley, on looking up, observed that instead of unpacking he had remained sitting on the edge of his bed, his face expressionless like that of one who thinks steadfastly of something past and irrevocable, upon which great happiness had once depended.

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