The Young Desire It (8 page)

His mother, who had passed her thirty-fifth year when he was born, was still to his unready vision not a separate personality from himself. He could not see her except as one who had been unvaryingly kind, unvaryingly remote, concerned, he believed, as completely with her own methodical life as he was with his life of solitary dreaming. He had never felt youth's alarm before the objective regard. If he had thought of their relationship at all, he would have imagined them as two who lived in a single harmony making neither gesture nor demand.

Now, in the first intensity of loneliness and unknown self-consciousness, he felt a longing for her presence, as though he might have found great comfort in losing himself in her, not with the positive shows of affection but as passionately and negatively as if it were indeed possible that he should be drawn back, from this life, into the perfect and impregnable existence of the womb. He perceived for the first time, emotionally, her importance in his own life, and for the first time consciously desired to be with her. It was vaguely evident to him now that, after all, his way of life had been of her choosing; without seeming to decide, she had made his decisions for him; he had been first in her thoughts. That in her which to many had appeared as coldness had never been coldness to him. Lying wretchedly awake in the hot night, he thought of her face and hands, the assured movement of her strong body, her eyes calmly regarding him. Something in the face of the Junior Housemaster had reminded him of her; but he could not think what it was. That man was a stranger to him, though he had been kind; but she was no stranger. She had too often soothed him to sleep when he was a child, and now it was the annihilation in sleep that he so fervently desired, when in the incomprehensible strangeness of a life worse than bad dreams he found himself faced helplessly with his own individuality.

He wished himself away, back in his room under the eaves at home, secure from this new, uneasy necessity of decision and self-knowledge. In the light of the candle her face, delicately etched with the lines of fifty years of life, would reassure him, as it had always done, of her unfailing power to comfort and cure him. Wide-eyed in that long room full of the stir and stillness of human creatures dangerously asleep, he fancied himself looking up into her grave eyes, her composed lips pencilled now with shadow by the steady candle flame, the powder-grey fall of hair on her shoulders, while her cool right hand was stretched out to rest on his forehead with the quiet insistence of a command, though she did not speak.

She had always been kind. He saw that he had trusted her, now, when she was not there to guide and command him; and he imagined that he had consciously loved her, when with her the world he had known and loved was parted from him by such a translation into strangeness. He wondered what he would do. Unknown to himself, he desired her dominion, and, lacking it, was as though lost. The experience of unhappiness was as strange and passionate to him as would be the first experience of conscious love.

Penworth said nothing to his senior in the House, nor to anyone else, of what had happened in the bathroom, but it came often to his mind. The curious pleasure he had felt when he saw that boy's white body, and when he touched the firm skin of his shoulder, would have seemed more strange than it did had he remembered it clearly; but there remained most vividly in his mind the memory of a bewilderment, of the same bewilderment with which a young man for the first time considers the revealed body of a woman—something of fear mixed sharply with the intense admiration of desire sublimated beyond material imagery. The great business of those following days and weeks would have erased even that from his mind, if he had not seen and spoken with Charles more often than he had expected. Greek and Latin classes, as well as the innumerable brevities of House routine, brought them frequently together; and, though Penworth was ready enough now to oblige the Chief, he was careful, rather for his own sake than for the sake of the boy, to prevent himself from showing any unnatural interest in him.

Charles's defiance grew as he slowly became aware of everything about himself that was different from others. He knew, without understanding why, that there was this difference; indeed, he could not have helped knowing, when in a dozen ways each day it was made very plain to him. He heard himself called names whose meaning he did not understand, but which, from the way they were mouthed, he could recognize as the shrewdest insults. Before long, he found he could face such callings; it was physical insult that he most horribly dreaded, and this he also invited by the unabating defiance with which he bore himself. Fortune had given him strong hands, and the instinct to use them in his own defence, but against a number he was, of course, soon powerless.

The dark complexity of this sort of life became increasingly dreadful as day followed day.

That February was a hot month, hotter even than an Australian February might be expected to be. Every afternoon those who were not listed for practice at the nets went down to the river which wound between its double line of trees beyond the wide scorched flats where the dairy herd was pastured. On the flats the grass was changed from gold to a bleached grey in the weeks of merciless sun. It frayed and split, seething with cicadas and insects that kept from dawn to dusk the sibilant waves of their immortal susurrus; and this sound, filling the whole world, became an unheard background to all the noises of day in the School; even at night, taken up by the crickets, the song never ceased and the air was mad with it. Sunlight was broken up like glass by the polished dry threads of stem and leaf; the grass fell flat, more than dead, and only patches of water-couch, defying the blinding heat, showed dully green about the hollow places, and spread in a scarred covering along the edges of the exhausted river.

The thick, fleshy odour of sweating mud hung in the air here. Even the river reeds, that marched like an army in the shallow water and stopped only at the sides of the platforms, and clustered by the slipways of the rowing sheds, were yellowing and breaking. When a breeze oozed warmly and fitfully down with the current, they knocked together and rattled secretly, until it seemed that the lazy ripples whispered in that swooning air. The boys came noisily down, under the care of an excellent old athletics master who sometimes made coarse army jests, and the place was shattered and outraged by their shouts and laughter. They were the blessed of the earth; they were lords of this tarnished stretch of original creation that spread flatly and wearily in the brassy light. To them, newly let out of the close afternoon heat of classrooms shuttered from the sun, it was heaven to be down here, half a mile away, with only Old Mac—lean and long like a ramrod, with silver moustaches stabbing at the pallid sky as he threw back his head to laugh—to watch them and listen delightedly, with his deafest expression, to their merry, dirty little jokes at one another's expense. On top of the distant declivity that fell down to the flats lay the School, empty now save for exhausted Masters taking some sort of ease in their shuttered studies; the red brick buildings shuddered like a long mirage in the fierce light, and through the smoke-grey tops of trees the tiled roofs pressed flat against the flat sky of the south-east. That skyline was all flatness, a poor enough backcloth against which, each afternoon, the hilarious comedy of these water-babies was played. They never looked that way. In front of them the greenish water stretched, a hundred yards to left and right of the platforms, forty yards across. Its surface was as still as a glass—something to be broken again, something to play with, to feel, to taste, something no cooler than milk cascading over shoulders and half-naked bodies as they plunged thirstily into its slow, invisible current. The soft clean odour of the water, that suggested river mud, leaves, and the secret smell of water-rotten wood, clung about their hair and bodies afterwards, reminding them of the coolness as they sat over their studies in the heavy evenings.

Charles went down. He went with the rest, running helter-skelter as madly as sheep down the ramp, down the baked clay of the slope, slowing to an eager walk in the white grass of the flats, damp with sweat already, swinging towels, singing, whistling, laughing jealously at those who, in spite of the heat, ran on before them. He had a vague idea, born of the labour of thought at night, that perhaps his one protection from further bodily shame would be to keep among them. The more people there were about him, he thought, the less likely it would be that he would seem conspicuous, a target for their eyes and their words. The first days had been busy with a confused shifting from place to place; rolls were called, scholars had given them the blank time-table forms which they filled in according to the course of their studies. Masters stood on daises, explaining, asking questions, sweeping in and out in their billowing black gowns, referring this boy and that to another classroom or another Master. The continual cry of ‘Silence, please', still echoed warmly in Charles's ears as he walked in the sun. No one had taken much notice of him; he wondered if it would last.

Evidently he must stay at the place, at least for a time. If he were to write at once to his mother, carefully explaining why he disliked it there, and asking her if he might not come away, he knew what would happen. She would explain, just as carefully, that he was only homesick, and that he would find how different that life could be, later on. He was strange to it yet; there had not been time for him even to guess at what it was really like. He must face difficulties like a man, and try to get on with the other boys. He must not think of coming home. It was the best school he could have been sent to; it would mean a great deal to him later in life to have been to that school.

He saw her firm handwriting on the face of the grass; he foresaw all that she would say, and within his mind argued, passionately, incoherently, and pleaded with her, but perceived that she was stronger than himself. Turning away from her, he wondered what else there was to do.

There was death, a word he knew. The image of her face expressing unhappiness came into his mind. It was not to be thought of that he would die, and escape that way. He did not want to die; it meant an end, it meant a nothingness, and now, since he had been at the School, his instinct to live had received such encouragement that it had crystallized into clear imagery. He passionately wanted to go on living: but it would be necessary, for happiness, to live in a different place…

But there was no different place. Home was closed to him by his departure. If he ran away from the School and went to live in the hills near home, either he would starve, or someone would certainly find him, and then, as he knew, it would all begin again.

He considered these ideas clearly, with great seriousness and feeling. No experience in his life had yet suggested to him how little he had learned of living. With animals and the land, and with trees and birds, morning, noon and night as his constant companions, life was easy. There were dangers. He might fall out of a tree, as Johnny O'Neill had done two years ago, and be injured. A snake, hiding coldly in the dry grass, could kill him at a stroke. If he were lost for long in the hills in summer, he might starve and die. But life was easy to live; no natural danger could approach the awful horror of the danger of human beings. That was so dire that he could not understand it. He was entirely without understanding of deliberate evil; his mind could not grapple with it—not yet.

It was evident that, until he had found some resources of his own, he must stay in the School. He cast about in his mind, but could see no other thing to do. And he wanted, too, the fine satisfaction of learning. In his life he had read little; a few works of natural history in other countries, descriptions of the lives of foreign peoples, and merry stories of English Public Schools had, after the earlier tales of adventure, made up his occasional reading. He knew a little of the writing of a few poets, and understood the emotion but not the meaning of their works. The desire to know was coming to life like a fire in his heart. He wanted to learn. Now in his innocence he perceived that to live lost in the country he knew, with learning to nourish his mind and the earth to gladden him, was the finest of all living. Desire and fear were only now beginning to wake within him and take over their predestined rule of his whole life. Their germination and first conquests were confusing him at present with a chaotic unhappiness.

His first attempt at protective subterfuge began. He decided to go swimming. He knew how to swim.

There were other new boys going down. They walked mostly alone, while the second-year lads and the rest, whose speech and manner made them seem to belong for ever to the School, went in their own groups, ragging one another happily, laughing like girls. They were already at home again. There was talk of the crew to be selected, and of the two cricket teams.

‘And the swimming,' one said happily.

‘Yes. What about the new kids? Who will be picked?'

‘Yes. Little Miss Fox will be picked, for sure.'

They laughed joyously. Charles walked on, looking at the white grass.

‘Yes. What about that big chap that came a day late?'

‘The white-headed chap?'

‘Yes. Thomas. What about him?'

‘Go on. His name's not Thomas.'

‘It is Thomas, I tell you.'

‘You lying bitch, Saunders. It's not. Thomas is that thin bloke with the ugly mug like yours.'

‘All right, Peterson.'

There was a scuffle in the grass, and the two boys who had been arguing jumped to their feet again when they observed how far they were left behind. Grass seeds clung to their clothes and in their hair.

‘Watch this,' said Saunders, and he set off at a run.

Charles felt a sudden weight, like a house, strike him and take him heavily to the ground. They laughed as they watched his surprise; their laughter was not unkind. He got up, smiling, and walked on with the straggling last few, smiling still from nervousness, smiling defiantly though no one noticed him. Anger, fear and a growing relief made his heart beat madly. When they were at the dressing-sheds he undressed himself as though nothing had happened. The boy next to him was he who had sent him sprawling. He asked Charles if he could swim. In a low voice Charles said he could.