The Young Desire It (5 page)

‘Noisy little beggars. During the holiday this experience was never quite out of my mind.'

The Headmaster smiled with his thin shadowless lips.

‘They look quite a promising lot, Mr. Jolly.'

‘The same lot as last year's, sir. The same as the years' before last year.'

‘It may be,' the Headmaster said quietly. Under the waves of sound that cannoned against the pulp itself of his tired brain, he had little say. Like a man dangerously afloat in a sea, his concern was to swim to the safety of something as firm as silence and solitude, and into that harbour of sleep from which unhappily he put forth each morning. The hollow scar above his temple measured the beat of his heart. From habit he held his head high so that it should not be too much seen.

There was little to be said among them all at the long table. Two younger masters, side by side on the Headmaster's left hand, were laughing and pretending to make merry over their holiday experiences. Like most of the staff, they were Englishmen, graduating from Oxford to the divine Parnassus where schoolmasters seem—to their pupils at least—felicitously to dwell. These two young men, by nature alike and scholastically as opposed as the poles, had a doubly strong bond in their age and their memories of England, passionately green still in their green minds, at such an intensifying distance from Home. Even in the circumscribed world of the School, where they were encouraged and never deterred in their England-my-England cult, they sometimes felt themselves alien; but each would have scorned to admit that he was anywhere aware of a national personality in the boys he taught, and made Common-room jests about, and privately feared. The suggestion that their ‘little wretches' were wild with the raw, crude strength of a young nation beginning to feel its horns they would deftly and politely have turned aside with a laugh or an oblique, comparative reference to their own Old Schools and the fellows at Home.

So now, as they sat in state above the little wretches—who could trouble one's self-esteem even at mealtimes—they did not allow themselves to acknowledge their noisy presence, and would not acknowledge, in their own hearts, that after a summer holiday in the south this, the inviolable temple of their cult, seemed very empty, very lonely, and pervaded with that sense of personal frustration which they spent their waking hours denying. They were laughing together, Penworth rather bitterly, Waters with mild and childlike simplicity; they were talking of the sea, of the sharp sunlight, of girls and young men—secretly a little proud to think that for a time at least they had so successfully made their own involved, tradition-haunted personalities seem blithely akin to those of the simple, vigorous young people they had played and romanced with.

The boy next to Charles, a lad from the Preparatory School, dug him in the ribs.

‘That's Penworth next to the Head. You wait till you get him in class.'

He had heard a boy opposite him talking in the same way about Penworth, and could repeat it now with an appearance of authority. Familiarity with the clipped jargon of speech that became the School made him easy.

‘The Bad Penny, that's what he is. Always turning up in the wrong place. And sissy too. Had my brother shot for six, smoking down the slope.'

Charles, choking over bread against which his throat was dryly rebelling, raised his eyes from his plate. Fright and wretched foreboding (he had heard discussion about something they called Initiation, which took place in dormitories at night) had made him feel sick again. His mind had not yet returned to a proper and natural functioning; thoughts of his mother in the train on her journey home troubled him incoherently: life itself seemed to have stopped suddenly, and as suddenly to have sprung up again into a nightmarish madness. So when the sensuous, pale, mask-like face of the Junior Housemaster, whose elbow every now and then brushed apologetically against the sleeve of the Chief as he turned to Waters, floated dimly before his eyes in the rusty-red light in which the dais swam, he could not see it, and it meant nothing; but he could feel yet the impact of that boy's elbow with his body. He peered before him. Waters's face, composed it seemed of childish spectacled eyes and a loose, pouting, kindly mouth, glimmered pinkly in the ruddy light; two blank circles resolved themselves, as he turned smiling, into the thick convex of lenses.

‘After all,' Penworth said, bending his head and looking up under brows for ever arched delicately, ‘what's a holiday for? I should be sorry to have to come back here with nothing exciting to think of.'

‘Oh,' Waters mumbled, turning his lenses on him, ‘I think you exaggerate, old man. Personally,' and he peered with a myopic smile down the Hall, ‘I find all the excitement I want here. And a bit more.'

‘We played the César Franck at Batty's the other night,' Penworth said with deliberate, bland irrelevance. ‘I thought it went pretty well. But I must say I'd like to have been staying on with you.'

‘Why do you play the fiddle?' Waters said vaguely. ‘You know it's bad for you…I say, I believe I can see a promising lad down there, Penworth. Have a look: fourth table from us, facing this way, third from the end. See him?'

He always tried to see more than he could, and had a happy faith in his ability to read in a boy's face obscure promises of future scholarship. His heart was too kind.

‘Yes. I see,' Penworth said briefly. ‘That's Wilson senior. You struggled with him all last year, if I remember. And the year before.'

‘Oh,' Waters mumbled. ‘I thought it was a new face.'

Penworth laughed. ‘Need we talk shop so soon? After all, there's always to-morrow. And you surely know by now that there's no such thing as a new face in this place.'

As though apologizing for an inflexion of bitterness that characterized much of his conversation in the School, he turned to the Headmaster with a polite question as to his health.

‘All right, really,' Dr. Fox said. ‘I had hoped to have more time in the vacation; but you know what it's like—there's a lot to do. I resume here feeling tired, still.'

Penworth heard more than a little weariness in the careful precision of his speech.

‘I understand, sir.'

‘We should have a good year this year. And by the way, you have quite an interesting-looking lot in your House.'

‘Is that so, sir? I only got in in time for tea.'

His words spurned the cold meats lying untouched on his plate, eloquent witness to the state of his mind.

‘Yes. You're a sensitive fellow, Penworth…'

He interrupted. ‘Thank you, sir.' His smile tried to express humility, but was twisted still.

‘…Well, there are one or two of the new lads who will need some looking after. You could give them that. Unobtrusive, you know. There's one chap who looked quite sickened with fright to-day. A fellow with the same name as my own. Fox. He is in your House. It might be as well to keep an eye on him for a week or two.'

‘I will,' Penworth said cordially, his mind already away.

‘Glad if you would. One or two others, too, perhaps; you will not find it hard to recognize them.'

He set his teeth suddenly together, so that the muscles at the back of his jaw bulged, hollowing cavities in his long cheeks. His hand passed briefly over the brown, hairless dome of his skull.

‘There's the Head—see—he's doing it now. Watch. No—wait on, you'll see him do it again in a minute. Once he starts he can't stop. Dobson reckons he's going off his nut; his father says.'

‘Yah—Dobson's old man!'

‘No, but—you look.'

Charles felt another indigestible dig in his side. He looked up towards the fading red haze of light, and saw the gesture that so delighted the boys.

‘He's waiting for the hair to grow.'

‘Hair nothing.'

‘Oh, he is! He had it treated with electricity in the holidays.'

‘Electricity nothing.'

‘Oh—you shut up, Carrol, or I'll give you a smack in the mouth.'

‘Me fat arse.'

‘So it is.'

‘Right-oh. You wait till after.'

They yelled at one another over the length and breadth of the long trestle tables, whose rough white cloths were already made homely and comfortably stale by marks of spilt tea and jam. Charles, having at last for very despair overcome his fear of meeting their eyes, looked about and realized that no one was watching him. Opposite his seat on the hard, polished form sat another lad whose plight seemed similar. He was a plain-faced, freckled chap, the same whose mother's face had twisted with such heartbreak and bewilderment, in the Headmaster's ante-room that afternoon. Charles, out of the quietening confusion of his mind, brought up a memory of him there, pert and alert. There was some comfort in seeing him so near, and in the thought that someone else who was not merely a name was in a like condition to his own; for in his ignorance he supposed that everyone entering the School for the first time would be searched for signs of girlhood, would be put on a desk-top and taught new degrees of pain and shame.

‘What's your name?' someone said, with a sort of threatening reserve; and at this reminder that they were not one big happy family, the others nearby became silent and watchful, and only the voices of the prefects, seated at top and bottom between their favourites, went murmuring and laughing on.

‘Bush,' said the freckled one promptly, looking boldly about from one to another.

‘This chap's name's Fox,' Charles's neighbour said. ‘Isn't it?'

Charles nodded, his eyes wide opened. A wit spoke up from the scrutinizing silence:

‘Ever see the fox go into the bush?'

That was well received, with howls and jeers and approval, and the storm of chatter broke again. Charles, who had looked bewildered at their delight in the quip, yet felt pleased with it if it had made them all start talking again like this. Bush was looking across at him, grinning nervously but boldly enough, and he smiled back and turned his eyes away.

‘Listen to them,' Waters said, peering and sweating above his empty cup. ‘The very devil of a row.' His plump pink face creased in a cheerful smile. Despite bouts of homesickness and mild despair of being able to do his work, he always looked cheerful, frown and gloom though he might. The beaming moons of his massive lenses betrayed him everlastingly, in secret treachery with the pouting geniality of his mouth.

‘Let's go out, shall we,' Penworth said; and after making their excuses to the Headmaster they rose and self-consciously walked out one after the other, giving slightly at the knees in a walk they had salvaged from the wreck of a life that had had Oxford and rich green lanes and the open downs and a mellow, ageless confidence for its setting.

‘I want to get this confounded collar and tie off,' Penworth said when they were outside in the shadowless evening light. ‘This damned country—a man can't even eat in comfort.'

Silently, they let that general protest cover all their melancholy and rebellious feelings at being back at work once more. Penworth said he would go to his room.

‘Get my pipe,' Waters mumbled, and shouted after him: ‘I won't be a minute, Penworth—come along as soon as I have my pipe.'

A sudden angry ray, that seemed to have lingered after the sun was gone, struck Penworth violently in the eyes as he turned into the hot darkness of the covered way, going towards his room. He cursed it, and went back to a light-switch which controlled the lights in that passage. It was hot, and in the stillness beneath the everlasting seethe of crickets in dry grass a shrill whine of mosquitoes irritated his ears. He damned everything because there was nothing definite to damn. Along the edges of the river flats the trees drooped their grey leaves; the bark on their trunks looked to have been cracked and warped by the summer's heat. A bad beginning, he thought, for February, which was certainly the worst of the summer months. The sound of a far surf was still in his ears, and he forgot the whine of the midges, imagining instead the salt taste of the water still bitter and clean upon his white, thick skin. And now—this! Barren, he thought; chaotic under its cheap veneer of system and public-spiritedness; and with a Chief who did not look as though he would hold out much longer. Any change there would upset the whole of that routine which was so difficult to achieve, and so comfortable to follow, freeing the mind at set times as a good dog is freed from the chain to caper here and there and lift a scornful leg at the statelier and more ancient facts of existence. Such as the morale of the School, and sport, and keeping up appearances, he thought, swirling into his hot little room as though he already had a gown gracing his shoulders and billowing urgently behind him.

There on his bed was the smaller suitcase, with its raised top exhibiting an almost feminine neatness of packed clothes inside. The larger one was on the floor. Leaning back against the solidity of his working table, he kicked the big case with one foot, and it slithered heavily under the bed. Across the grassy square outside his window the noise from the dining-hall came monotonously, in a high-pitched drone; he listened, and stared at his chaste and narrow bed, with a case on it, and a case under it, and the mosquito net at its head cascading down on the pillow. A smell of stale smoke and ink and old books lay still in the room. His table had been dusted; red ink and blue were in their proper wells, and his pens and pencils, many more than he needed because each had the key to some part or other of his little history, lay before the inkstand—as stale as last year.

The shrill singing note, varying no more than a quarter tone, thinly pierced his listening. A few mosquitoes had gathered round his head and hands, coming in from the damp lawns outside because he had blood in his veins, just beneath the surface of that thick, fine-textured skin. He cursed and started up from his leaning position, crossed to the light-switch, and then took up a spray that stood on the dressing-table at the bed's foot. His savage pumping spread a vapour of kerosene and chemicals on the hot air; a most sterile smell, dispassionate and unreal, overcame the odour of his old pipes and old books. When he put the spray down again, he stood looking at the still, speaking face of a girl half-smiling through a silver window. Then he stood the photograph up as it would stand for the next thirteen weeks, turned his back to it, and in the utter wretchedness of his heart began to set the whole room to rights and to put away everything he had brought back with him, methodically, carefully, with a kind of blind, meticulous hatred restraining all his movements.