The Young Desire It (4 page)

There were tears ready to fall from his screwed-down eyelids. ‘I don't want to…I told you, I told you…'

He was cut short by a flame of pain that ran up his arm. The blood came pelting back to his face, from neck to brow. He yelled, and bit at the coarse, salty palm that was pressed in haste over his open, twisting mouth. They hit him with the backs of their hands; some one took off his shoes while he struggled there on his back, tasting the salt of skin on his flattened lips. A new and crueller devastation of pain gripped him from the loins upwards. He did not know what was being done to him. They spoke no word, breathing heavily while he fought and strangled cries in his throat.

‘Go on, that'll do for him for the time being', one lad, who had leaned against the white wall, watching, said at last.

‘Yes, better let him go now, you chaps. He might faint.'

They took their hands off him at length, and he lay choking and sobbing with laughter, snorting through his nose with a fury of breath, laughing brokenly. His body sank back from the dizzy heights of pain to which it had soared; his hands fell open. He got down from the slippery table-top, white in the face and trembling convulsedly. They stood round watching while he tried to fasten the buttons of his clothes, putting his hand up often to his neck and collar, brushing his dishevelled hair with hot fingers, in great shame. Their eyes shone, as though with divine inspiration, above the brilliance of their smiles.

‘Next time come quietly,' said Monty, a tall, heavy youth, fair-haired and with clear, small eyes. The cruelty in their relaxing faces made Charles speechless. He had never before seen human beings so closely.

‘Let him go for the time being,' the boy leaning to the wall said again.

Charles tried to hold his head up. He kept putting his hand spasmodically to his hair.

‘He's sissy all right.'

‘Now go and see old Jolly and tell him all about mother and father.'

In time he found himself alone again, at the foot of a flight of dark wooden stairs leading up to a half-landing and twisting back and up again. On his right hand, double doors opened into a bathroom. Even in there it was hot. He went through. Save for a terrible memory of living faces, there was nothing in his mind. He leaned on one hand over the urinal, pressing his palm on the cool white porcelain before him. There he waited a long time, until the burning tension of muscle relaxed. In the lavatories he washed his hands and face, trembling still and putting into his movements unnecessary, half-controlled energy. Then he went out and up the stairs.

On the landing it was possible to hear clearly the shouting and laughter that rocketed about the quadrangles. The door in front of him was closed. He looked about, and realized that a few boys of his own age were standing in the half-shadow of the dark red and white walls. He would have to wait.

On his right hand a door stood open upon a long dormitory. White beds side by side in a double row were divided by a stretch of bare wooden floor; he had never seen so many beds; his own present insignificance began to dawn on his consciousness. With the walls, the bare polished floor, the white ceiling, they swept away in an exact perspective to a large window at the far end. Windows lined one wall, high up; the kindly green of virginia creeper broke their sharp glassy lines, reminding him of the kitchen windows at home. There on his left another dormitory stretched away, another exaggerated perspective of intense whiteness; and a door opened on a wide balcony where one line of white beds immaculately faced the red sun sinking beyond the wide grey river flats with their fringe of trees. His eyes ached for colour; but on that floor there were only the dark surfaces of woodwork to relieve so much whiteness.

While he looked dazedly from his right to his left, the others watched him, and spoke in low voices among themselves. Through his heat and confusion he heard one whisper, ‘That's my brother's dorm. He says I can go in there. That's his bed at the end.'

‘Your brother a prefect?'

‘Aw—what do you think! 'Course he is.'

Charles could see their faces clearly now. To his returning awareness they were the same faces he had seen gathering round him downstairs—good-natured, excited, expectant, fair and dark alike; their eyes and teeth shone dully in the reflected light from the west. He began to believe, without understanding why, that he was like them—one of them. Of course. But he had no prefect brother; the reputable name of the School had scarcely a meaning for him, until that afternoon. Its honour, the understood code of behaviour that its scholars as young citizens carried with them carefully into the world, were not yet his honour, or his code; but they were there, perceptibly filling the place; they were in the attitudes of boys to Masters, of Masters to boys—‘This holy place is ours; this is the hatching-house of all that is decent in the country's men. Betray it if you dare.' His mother had said, when she told him of her intention to send him, and he had protested from the darkness of his incoherent intuition: ‘But Charles, it makes all the difference to your success in the world, if you've been to a good Public School.'

‘But I don't want to succeed.'

‘Oh, son, don't say that. You don't understand. And you don't know what it's like, after all.'

He was already learning.

A sudden mild roar of laughter sounded strangely lunatic out of the silence behind the closed door; as though an officiating priest were to laugh before an altar. The small boys outside became silent, too; Charles could feel the pounding beat of his heart. The door opened, and a lad backed out hastily, red-faced and smiling. The others pushed one another forward, each one determined not to be the next to walk into that unknown room. They crowded round the fellow who had just come out.

‘What's he like, Wilson?'

‘Pretty decent.'

‘Sounds a bit cracked, to me. What's he laughing at?'

Charles, helpless before the expectancy in their looks, found himself facing the afternoon's third ordeal. They watched him go through the door, nudging one another, hooting softly after him. ‘Who's that stupid cow? Looks a bit sissy to me. D'you reckon?'

They judged him, but without much feeling one way or the other; while he himself stood by the table, resting his hand upon its cool edge, hardly daring to look the Master in the eyes, yet not daring to look away.

Mr. Jolly appeared to have been suitably named. When he took from his lips a tumbler of weak whisky-and-water, his eyes, blue, piercing, droll as a sly clown's, were revealed beneath leaf-brown lids. He was a tall man, with the eager, inquisitive stoop of an avid scholar; his nose was very long, and was fairly set off by a lock of flat, grey hair that curved inward above his left eye, giving him a mildly distracted appearance; and below that long, inquisitive nose, that looked to have smelt out every secret contained in life and books, his wide, well-made mouth curved sardonically back into flat, grey cheeks. But for his eyes he would have seemed old; but they had such a knowing droop in their upper lids, and were yet so bright and open, that his face had an essential youth still untroubled, and you would think that his greatest concern was to locate and pin down with a long ironic forefinger everything that savoured even faintly of a jest on which he could exercise his mind.

‘Well, well,' he said as he put the tumbler down, ‘so here's another. I no sooner rid myself of one than here's another.' His voice was husky and sly, but not unkind. ‘Could you by any chance tell me how many more of your kind are beyond that door?'

‘I don't know. The Headmaster…' Charles began.

‘Yes, I know. And let me tell you, young fellow,' he extended a forefinger that matched his nose in length and shrewdness, ‘a finer man is not governing a school at this time. Not here nor anywhere else in the country. Not in the whole world.' He growled in his throat, and his bold glance strayed to the book-shelves beside him. ‘And yet the Board, the damned confounded Board…' As his eye met Charles's accidentally, he growled again and cleared his throat.

‘Well,' he said abruptly, ‘what's
your
name? Smith? We've too many Smiths. Jones? Same with Jones. Now come on, old chap, what's your name?' He pleaded huskily.

‘Charles Fox,' said Charles, whose mouth had been open to speak while he was talked over.

‘Charles Fox what?'

‘Charles Fox—that's all.'

‘Now listen to me, old man. In this school your name is “Charles Fox, sir”. D'you see what I mean? “Charles Fox,
sir
”.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Charles, his face twitching nervously. Mr. Jolly looked at him with great care, his stare blue, humorous and unfaltering.

‘Old chap,' he said huskily as though with deep emotion, while his eyelids drooped a little more heavily, ‘you've got a lot to learn.'

He let this ride home upon that bold gaze, while Charles repeated his ‘Yes, sir.'

‘Yes,' he said. He became animated again, turned over papers with his long, inquisitive grey fingers, and finally took a sip from the half-empty tumbler.

‘Well, Charles Fox sir, you're in my House. Your dormitory is Dormitory B—the fifth bed from this end.' He gestured to his left. ‘One two three four five. H'm. Now make yourself familiar with the rules. Rise at seven; bath; breakfast at seven-forty-five. Etcetera, etcetera. Yes. Dinner at twelve-thirty; tea at six. Line up for meals with the other members of your House—the best House in the School; a statement which you will be careful to refrain from questioning, from this moment until you leave it. H'm. Your evening preparation begins at seven-thirty and ends at eight-thirty, when like the other young puppies you will come rowdily upstairs for evening prayers in Dormitory B. Evening devotion. We take it for granted that your Church is the Church of England. That is, we do not question such things. All dissension must be kept to yourself. Yes. After prayers, make your toilet and get into bed. No fooling in bathrooms—no noise—quiet conversation you will find to be an excellent recreation while in the dormitories. Get to know your fellows; but no dog-fighting, or I shall make it my business to find out all culprits and chastise them personally. My canes are in that corner by the door. Let us hope you make no closer acquaintance with them.'

He stopped abruptly, and his eyes left their staring to wander once more over the book-shelves, as though if they might they would drag him after them, hands outstretched to select.

‘Yes, sir,' Charles said.

‘Yes,' said Mr. Jolly, gathering himself back into his chair. ‘Now you just listen to me, old chap. We know nothing about you here. Your job is to teach us, just as ours is to teach you. You teach us to like and respect you; we'll teach you something above all price. I mean knowledge. We may even teach you a little wisdom, though your associates will teach you more. Keep yourself clean. We all know what healthy young growing boys are, and we try to help you as far as that is possible. There are some things gentlemen do not do.'

He gazed blandly at the wall beyond Charles's head.

‘There are some things we punish with expulsion, just as we punish other things with caning on the behind, others with cancellation of exeats, others with lines, and others perhaps with a mere reprimand.'

As he intoned this huskily, his expression became impersonal and lofty, and he pointed his long nose at Charles, looking down its each side, his eyes bulging a little beneath the shells of their lids.

‘Cleanliness first, old chap…That's all.'

Charles backed awkwardly towards the door. He wondered what Mr. Jolly would say now if he could have known what happened downstairs, twenty minutes earlier. He had no wish to tell him of it. It was not Mr. Jolly's business to know what happened to new boys, nor what went on in their minds and hearts during their first days at the School.

His hand was upon the brass knob when Mr. Jolly looked up with difficulty from his book-shelves. Recollection wiped the amorous glaze from his blue eyes as he observed Charles.

‘What did you say your name is?' he asked huskily. Charles did not see the mild twinkle in his regard.

‘Charles Fox, sir.'

Mr. Jolly laughed, and to the sound of the laugh Charles backed out, flushed but smiling twistedly, as the boy whom he followed had done. A need for action sent him rapidly through the little group of sneering, interested lads by the door, and got him down the stairs. In a pile of luggage at their foot he saw his own trunks, draped with the new travelling rug his mother had given him. As he stared, and struggled with a fresh impulse to fall down and give himself up to despair, the sharp, arrogant nagging of a bell fell swollen on the hot evening, and some one yelled, in an excited voice, ‘Tea!'

At the long refectory table on the dais sat the Headmaster and some of his colleagues. He was almost exhausted from the strained excitement of the first afternoon of term; the restraint put upon him by continually meeting, considering, summing up and remembering nervous new-comers had laid a weight upon his head and dragged down his lips and his shoulders. But he made it his business to smile as he looked blindly down the long, uproarious dining-hall, where twenty new boys were having their first experience of a meal in Hall, and as many others, transferred this year from the Preparatory School a mile away, were assuming a loud equality with older boys, brothers, cousins and their friends. Social adjustments were in progress. To-morrow, when term officially commenced, there would be more of it; with the return of those eminent ones who allowed themselves to arrive as late as midday of the first day, the growling tolerance of this evening's atmosphere would be keyed up sharply with something sterner, something (for any who would have dared to say it of the School) more brutal.

On his right Mr. Jolly sat pointing his nose attentively at his plate. The exhausted lock of hair hanging over his left eye gave to the downbent penitence suggested by his attitude an air of sly and solemn rakishness. When he raised his head to speak to the Chief his nose swung across the vista of the Hall like an accusing finger—phallic and hortative had it not been for the dispassionate flatness of the nostrils. He glared round the weary lock of hair, growling.