The Young Desire It (9 page)

‘Just as well,' Saunders said. ‘This water's deep. Where you from?'

Charles told him, looking at him straight, wondering what was concealed in the suavity of this attention.

‘Down there? I've been there for the winter hols.'

He said nothing more, and soon went out. Charles, finishing his change slowly, struggled to understand why a boy should trouble to make him look ridiculous before everybody, and then speak naturally, almost kindly, to him. Loneliness flowed in his mind like a cold wave.

With his thin towel over his shoulder he went out into the more blinding light, and was in the water as quickly as might be. Within a minute he had been ducked under and kicked down two or three times. That was Saunders.

‘Thought you said you could swim,' he said to Charles. ‘That's not swimming, paddling round like an old tart in bed.'

He went away, hoisting himself through the water strongly. Charles made the mistake of getting up on the diving platform, and was pushed in again. He clambered up, and was pushed in a second time. One or two boys, standing to watch with water running and dripping over their bright faces, laughed delightedly. Some one shouted, ‘Oh, let the kid alone for a while, can't you?' and the scorn in that remark demanded a punitive attack on the speaker, and Charles was for a time left alone. Later Old Mac called him.

‘You, sir. You, there. Come along here.'

He turned and received a solid push in the back that sent him stumbling at a run. Old Mac looked down from his stiff height with his usual fierce kindliness.

‘You swim, sir? By gad, eh! But damned badly, sir. Damned badly. However, you seem to me a likely sort of fellow. Get into the water.'

Charles had five minutes of ceaseless criticism, delivered in a terse and level voice from above him as he swam past half a dozen times. He was shown the action of a racing crawl, and how to use his arms, racing-style. ‘Come back. Knees together, knees together. Better. Elbows in—so. Come back.' After that he was passed on, and left to himself. Not knowing what was expected of him now, he went out into the channel in mid-stream and tried to practise what Old Mac had shown him; and there he remained until he was exhausted, trying not to remember the quiet happiness of days spent in the river at home. When at last he came out, the hot sunlight on the bank was gladdening after so long in that unbuoyant cool water; it thrilled up his legs and his naked back, and he lay in a sort of dazed lassitude, watching the drops fall from his flattened hair to the short, bristling points of the grass. Only when a handful of mud was vigorously rubbed about his head and ears—and, when he turned over, into his face—did he remember where he was. It was necessary to go into the water again, loudly derided this time. While he was still in, Old Mac blew his whistle.

He waited till the last boy had clambered from the water, and followed slowly. Old Mac watched him, took him by the arm, felt the muscles of his shoulders, his thighs and calves. Charles suffered the squeezing pressure of those dry old fingers easily; they were dispassionate and purposeful. Finally Old Mac straightened his back, wiped his finger-tips on his towel, and fixed a hawk's stare upon Charles while he did so.

‘You're hard, sir,' he said. His parade-ground voice was capable of many modifications of volume, few of tone. When he spoke quietly it was an echo from a far parade-ground.

‘We may soften you. Not impossible. Properly trained you may swim well. You may be of use to the School. Keep that in mind. Make it an objective, sir. Hope to be a credit. All right—dismiss.'

From habit he broke the last word into two contrasting syllables, the first long, the second short, a breath hissing through the silver of those arrogant moustaches that scorned his kindling eyes.

Charles went to the dressing-sheds, and got into his clothes quickly. He was among the first to start walking back towards the School, across the flats. The air was less burning now and the light not so brutal; his legs and arms felt weak, tired by the unresisting fresh water, and a growing lassitude spread like drunkenness over his whole body. Before he had reached the red upward slope and the wooden ramp descending it, a wish to sleep made him pause and stumble once or twice.

At home…

At home, yes, he could have slept now, had this strong urge taken him. He could have slept, and have been up and abroad till midnight after it. Swimming at night, in the river that ran past the house, was nothing like this. It was a dark paradise of silence. The deep voices of the bitterns did not break the surface of night. But he could not go home.

He sighed, puzzled as deeply as ever by the strange difference of this new life.

‘You may be of use to the School. Keep that in mind. Make it an objective, sir. Hope to be a credit…' And Mr. Jolly had said, ‘Keep yourself clean. Cleanliness first, old chap.'

And Mr. Penworth had smiled and comforted him with the tones of his voice.

It seemed to him very unlikely, and even impossible, that he should ever understand it all.

Very quickly, and without apparent trouble, the School fell into the rhythm of the year's routine. The Headmaster interested himself in everything that was being done. Within ten days he knew every face and seemed to know each boy by name, and to be familiar with the course of his studies and with his athletic possibilities. Day after day he made a tour of House notice-boards, at the same hour each afternoon. Once a week he conferred with Housemasters, and with Formmasters on the same day. He was familiar with the entire working of the School, not only with what was happening in field and classroom, but with its domesticity also; a Matron and a nursing sister reported to his study twice a week, the one on kitchen matters and the running of the staff of servants, the other on the health of individual boys.

His own teaching staff wondered, privately and between themselves, in the Common Room, in studies, at the long table in Hall, how he was able to keep up this practice of knowing everything without ever seeming to intrude. He never appeared in a classroom, and they liked him the better for that. It was an open secret that the governing Board was opposed to many of his ideas, and gave him neither peace nor quarter at the monthly board meetings. And of his health they wondered even more. Even the boys understood its uncertainty; they sympathized, for they liked him well, though they were ready enough to make jests at his expense. Their opinion, when they thought of it, was like Mr. Jolly's, that no better Headmaster could have been entrusted with their precious fates.

After a collapse during a service in the Chapel, at the beginning of the previous November when the summer was gaining vigour, no one expected Dr. Fox to continue in his duties. He appeared to understand this, too, and in his own quiet, friendly way he took pains to let it be known that there would be no change in the office. No one understood the anguish it caused him to remain in the School as its Head, nor the joy it gave him to be able to remain; he knew that though those at the bottom of a social order may show their feelings without needing to take care, any confession from the highest could shake the whole structure, and would so shake it, indeed, almost as completely as the admitted possibility that a new Headmaster might be needed to take his place.

For this reason he continued to supervise the conduct of the School, without relenting towards himself. Had he realized that now he was being watched, by boys and Masters alike, for the first signs of relaxation and physical relapse, it is probable that without haste, but without hesitation, he would have renounced his charge at once, and have retired to that quieter and less strenuous sort of life which he was beginning most seriously to need. It is probable that he would have done this if he had known that even that gesture of his, that unconscious setting of his lean jaws and passing his hand over his brown, bare cranium where the hollow scar measured the beating of his heart, was watched always, by everyone. He hardly knew he was doing it; no one ever told him, and the inward pain more often now grasped his brain like a hand.

Since he was not aware of this continual watching, he went on with his strenuous duties, and because he was so outwardly serene and so competent the School hummed as pleasantly as a hive of bees in the sun. Those who came close to him during his term of office there realized afterwards, as they looked back to consider his quiet kindness and understanding and the unchanging patience of his courtesy, how fiercely he must have struggled to hold up the mask which he was so often and so bitterly tempted to put aside for ever.

At the time, neither his friends in the School nor those who knew him outside could have guessed. He was the same as he had always been and would always be. The School was increasing in size under his care, and this gave to his thoughtful silences a naturalness which inwardly they had not.

The smoothness of this routine at first confused and then solaced Charles. He felt for once the charm of being part of a lively machine in action. Life was being arranged and explained; for the greater part of the day he knew, and each of his Masters knew also, where he should be and what he should be doing. The intervals in his time-table added the needful imagination and romance to this mechanical weekly repetition. He was not allowed to forget his first fear, though custom and the familiarity of his presence among them had permitted him to modify it somewhat. His defiance secretly sustained him. Though he pretended to be like them, he did not care. To the rest of his fellows he was an aloof, incomprehensible creature; because they did not understand anything in him, he remained what he was to them—potentially dangerous, in no active way perhaps, but as the living personification of certain forces which were strange to them. As ordinary people do, they feared strangeness; and what they feared they were prepared to hate, keenly, without knowing that this hatred had its origins in nothing more devilish than a difference of temperaments. They took refuge in that frankly expressed contempt which Charles himself could not understand. He countered it with a helpless defiance, and made rare attempts to reconcile them to himself, not yet realizing that it was his own self which he must reconcile to them.

One thing altered his life somewhat in its exterior form.

At the end of his fifth week, just before the Easter holiday, the Headmaster sent for him to come from his second morning class. Charles went quickly, feeling a pleasure that would have astonished the others, who had been taught to dread these sudden summonses to the Big Study.

Dr. Fox was sitting back in his chair, looking alertly at the door as he entered. Charles took one look at the hollow scar pulsing, and one swift glance around the room before he found himself being commanded by the man's deep shadowy eyes.

‘Sit down, Fox,' the Head said pleasantly. ‘I want to talk with you seriously about yourself.'

Charles sat on a wooden chair against the wall. From his table behind the door the Master with the minute classic features and the pink tonsure rose and walked out like an automaton, his gaze rigidly before him. The room was easier when he had gone, Charles thought.

‘I have had unusually good reports of your work,' Dr. Fox said at once. ‘You will remember what I said when I met you first—that we like scholarship and hard work as well as prowess in sport. Do you remember me saying that?'

‘Yes, sir,' Charles said.

‘Well, I want to talk with you about that again. The reports your Masters have given me are very good, as I said. I feel sure you will like to know.'

Listening to the deep quiet of his voice, looking into the dark eyes he could with difficulty see, Charles felt a rare, growing exhilaration as his contact with that calm personality, that powerfully masculine effluence that wished him well, was sustained and strengthened. He said, hesitantly, how glad he was.

‘I am sure you are. Now I want to make a suggestion. Don't make the mistake of supposing it to be a command; I should be sorry if you did that. I want to suggest that you let us put you up into the Intermediate form, the form you would normally have been in next year. You understand how your course of study is made out here. After two years, as a rule, you sit for your Intermediate examination certificate, and so go on to another two years, after which you take your examinations for Matriculation.'

Charles followed him in part only. It seemed he had just been told, but not in so many words, that he would be in the School a year less than he had expected.

‘If you agree,' the Headmaster was saying, ‘to go into IVA now, we'll be glad to trust to your own judgment, and we'll have faith in your ability until you convince us that we've been too hasty.'

A slow smile broke the shadows in his bony face. His eyes shone brilliantly in the darkness of their caverns.

‘Don't hurry to decide. You will find the work there much harder. It will mean some extra study for you; there will be a lot of catching-up to do.'

‘Yes, sir,' Charles said, smiling himself in his swift joy.

‘I find that in English and other languages you are particularly able. In Mathematics, however, there is a danger.'

‘Yes, sir,' Charles said quickly, ‘I'm not very good. But I should like to…I mean to go up to IVA, sir.'

‘Wouldn't you like to find out how far ahead they are, and think it over?'

‘No, sir. I'd like to go up.'

‘Very well. Now there's this…You seem cut out for a classics course; that is plain to me. In IVA you can dispense with your science classes, since you need only five passes for the certificate. If you dare to work without a margin, I should advise you to give up Greek for this year, and pick it up again later. That will leave you three languages, and two mathematics. Think you can manage with those? Three languages including English.'

‘Oh—yes, sir. I'll work hard.'

‘Very well, Fox. You can start in IVA after the Easter holiday. Let me see…you will be fifteen about now, sometime?'