The Young Desire It (10 page)

‘Last week, sir.'

‘Good. That's all, Fox. And good luck.'

As Charles was going out, he called him back.

‘To show you that you have done well—and can keep on doing well—let me tell you that you are only the fourth boy in five years whom we've put up like this. That should help you to keep going.'

‘Yes—thank you, sir.'

‘How do you like it here?'

Charles started to speak, stopped, changed his mind again, and said, ‘I'm getting used to it now, sir. At first I hated it, I'm afraid.'

Once more the Headmaster smiled.

‘That often happens. But remember that, as the saying is, life isn't all beer and skittles, even for the worthy. Often the more you try to do right, the harder life seems to hit back. Anyhow…you may find that out later. Well, that's all, Fox. Go along now.' And he said again, ‘Good luck'.

A minute later, leaning back in his chair, he set his jaws till the muscles knotted at the base, and passed one palm heavily over the brown bare dome of his cranium. The hair growing at the back and the sides of his high skull had once been black, but was now very grey. He sighed and shut his eyes for a while, trying to turn from admiring the boy's youth and wakening life; it was becoming increasingly hard for his mind to change from one matter to another, such was the flogged intensity of its concentration; and to deal with every human being as he wished to deal was, each week now, more deliberate and conscious an effort.

The letter Charles had that day from his mother told him that there had been more rain. It was the third lot of rain since January, she said; and she remarked, too, ‘when you come home next week there may be mushrooms. It has happened once or twice before, mushrooms at Easter. I know how you like picking them.'

That brief mention of mushrooms, put there, he knew, because it lengthened out a paragraph a little, brought from his memory a most vivid image of the Far Field in autumn, when the grass was always cropped bare round great worn patches of dark clay, and the earth itself in those bare places had begun to shine and live again, after the first rains. It was a beautiful soil to peer into: the smooth surface, baked in months of summer sun and trodden almost to a polish by the hard little hoofs of sheep, would crack and soften with the moisture, and dry again on the surface in the humid heat that followed the earliest showers. The grass was greener after rain had washed it; it began, within two weeks perhaps, to renew the buds the sheep had nipped when everything was dry; it lay flat where they had trodden and pressed it down, and stooled out, clinging as closely to the earth as a cloth. In the wide treeless spaces there the wind came past, in the autumn, as fresh as spring. He imagined the shapes of birds, far off, flung into the sky above a grove closely planted for shade, crying loudly with a remote sound like a triumphant ‘
Ah!
' full of sad finality, as though for months they had foretold the breaking of a bad summer and the renewal of the earth's life.

Here the first mushrooms appeared, breaking through inches of half-softened crust from the moister warmth beneath, just as if for their pulpy round heads it was no feat at all. They came up in a night; they seemed to come even as he walked about stooping with his knife to take them up into the basket; against the darkness of the earth they shone like moons, and the pink flesh of their secret under-sides was wonderful to see…

He was enraptured, remembering the spaciousness and freedom there, among the rolling fields that rose against the sky in uplands from which he could see the hills five miles away, covered with a mist like the bloom on plums, and as purple and dusky as plums in the soft distance of evening. Without his knowledge, the agelessness of those lonely places made him understand in some degree how brief and immaterial his own life was. He looked upon a world that had not changed and was without knowledge of time, and was himself the product of change and of unreckoned thousand years. As he grew more at one with it, there were moments when its timelessness became his own.

He was enraptured, remembering it. All through the following days it haunted his mind almost beyond the doors of sleep. The urge to express something of it which he could not grasp, something darkly reflected in the mirror of his passion for it, became so great that it seemed to him like a physical sensation, a trembling of his very heart. In the School he went about as though he were walking in a dream, and his uneasy fears and uncertainties did not rise up in him as he became aware of the others of his kind there. There was excitement among them; they were going home, too. He thought that must mean to them the delight of freedom from the ceaseless yes and no of that life they were leading.

By a sympathetic coincidence, just at this time he chanced to look into a Shakespearian play, during the apathetic quiet of Sunday afternoon in the Library. The work of that poet was almost unknown to him, except for two or three set plays.
Julius Caesar
he was reading with desultory interest in class. Now for the first time the curious fluency of the style, uninterrupted by a Master's comments, caught his attention like a clear voice suddenly breaking silence in the big, badly-lit room where he stood; and he read on, and came to a sentence that turned his lips in a smile of delight.

'A babbled of green fields…

He read it over again. Who babbled of green fields? he wondered. The type was small and worn; he took the volume over to a window that opened into a well where the light was better, and stood there, turning back to find out who it was that babbled so. Some person called Falstaff. It was not a name he knew. An index at the end said, referring to the name—‘Sir John F., v.
Henry IV
and
The
Merry Wives Of Windsor.
F. was one of Shakespeare's most famous creations, and probably the most popular during the Bard's own life…'

Charles was ready to imagine himself, that hot silent afternoon, babbling of green fields in the rapt incoherence of death.

The librarian gave him the volume, and he took it outside. The mid-afternoon sunlight was still and scalding, blinding like a fire too closely peered into, yet as dull in colour as brass. He went quickly up the concrete path to the Chapel; under the shadow of the south side boys were lying about on the grass, too lax to make their usual happy noise, or to play. They sprawled on their bellies in the shade, or lay looking upwards with narrowed eyes at the white heat of the sky, chewing pieces of grass while they talked and argued as incessantly as ever. Some of them called out after him; Saunders, who lay on his back with his knees drawn up, turned his head lazily.

‘There's a swim this afternoon, Foxy. Coming?'

‘I might,' Charles said shortly. He was in haste to get out of the sun.

One of the half-doors was swung back, and he went in quickly, without troubling to listen to what they had to say further. Inside, in the vestry, there was a coolness; the creamy stone and the oak looked fresh in the sudden shadow. Sunlight fell in long broken blades across the dimness in the spiral stone stair that turned up from the right-hand tower base towards the organ loft. Here, to his embarrassment, he came upon his music master, sitting on the lowest choir bench with his elbows on the rail and his face smothered in his fingers.

‘Oh—I'm sorry, sir,' he said.

‘It's all right,' Mr. Jones said, looking up and feeling for his spectacles. When he had put them on he looked again at Charles, who remained at the entrance to the loft, in hot uncertainty as to whether he should withdraw from what he knew was an intrusion.

‘Oh, it's you, Fox,' Mr. Jones said. ‘What are you going to do here?'

‘I was going to read, sir.'

‘All right. What are you reading?'

Charles showed him. As he came close he saw with great confusion that the organist's hectic thin cheeks were wet in places, under the eyes.

‘Ah,' Jones said. ‘Well, you couldn't do better than read Shakespeare in a lovely place like this. Away from—away from interruption.'

‘I'm sorry if I interrupted you, sir,' Charles said in a hurry. ‘The light in the library is so bad; I thought I'd—I'd come up here.'

‘Stay, stay,' Jones urged him, kindly. ‘I was going, in any case. It's too hot to practise…'

Charles believed he heard him add ‘in this damnable country' under his breath; but he was smiling, although the smile was rather rueful. He had a charming quick smile with a whimsical sharpness and twist in it, suggesting a happy wit, which he had. From the low opening into the stair he said, turning back, ‘I'm going home. If you care to come over to my cottage in an hour, when you'll have finished that, we could have tea together and talk about it. Mr. Penworth is on duty; I'll see him on my way.' He went on down the stair without waiting for an answer; and when he had disappeared Charles heard him call out in a voice that strained at light-heartedness, ‘My wife went back to England yesterday, so there'll be no one there'.

And yet again, above the clatter of his own descending heels, he said loudly from below, ‘She couldn't stand the climate…' and in a moment there came up the fading sound of his feet going quickly away down the Chapel path.

The echo of these words died in Charles's mind when he began to read. It was hot in the loft, though the long blinds had been drawn down over the tall, narrow windows whose leaded panes, farther up the Chapel, broke into fragments of sullen gold the sunlight slanting in. Charles unbuttoned his coat and his waistcoat, and stood leaning against the northern wall. In the silence of the great vaulted roof his heart beat heavy and slow; the seductive, strangling murmur of pigeons floated down from the belfries above him. After some minutes these sounds too became the silence.

Perhaps half an hour after he had started to read
King
Henry the Fifth
there was a noise of feet coming lightly but slowly up the narrow stair. Charles, however, was so concentrated upon the page that not till Penworth had spoken twice did he look up. Then, when he realized that he had heard him speak once already, the blood came quickly into his face, and he began to stammer out an apology.

‘Well, and what are you doing here?' Penworth said in a friendly way, coming to stand by him. Charles let his strong broad fingers take the book out of his hands.

‘H'm; you're not doing any harm reading that, anyhow.' Penworth was pleasantly decided, and Charles felt again how well he liked this cultured, easy man, who could make even Greek syntax seem a matter for smiles and small excitements.

‘What do you think of it?' Penworth asked. Then he laughed and said, ‘No—don't bother; schoolmasters spoil things when they start asking questions. And this is Sunday, anyhow. Read it and enjoy it alone. Nothing is nicer.'

He sat down, and Charles remained where he was standing, feeling happy that he had been surprised in such a way by such a man. Penworth was looking up at him, cocking an eye under the fine arches of his brows. From the bays of his wide temples Charles could see how the hair was already receding, as though into the bays of a coastline a tide were being sent.

His smile was weary and pleasing at first. Then, as he talked and looked at Charles, it became deeper and more lively. He confounded the heat…Charles listened to the colourful cadences of his voice with half-unheeding content; he was still wrapped in unfinished thoughts about the play he had been reading, and parts of it came into his mind surprisingly, and were confused with Penworth's idle words.

‘…just between twelve and one, e'en at turning o' the tide: for after I saw him fumble at the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of green fields…So 'a bade me lay more clothes on his feet…just between twelve and one, e'en at turning o' the tide…'a babbled of green fields…'

Penworth ceased talking abruptly.

‘You weren't listening,' he said; but his smile smoothed the abruptness of the words.

‘Yes, sir—oh, yes, I was listening,' Charles said, feeling his face become hot. ‘But that play too…it…'

‘…kinda gets yer, eh? As your friends outside would say.'

As he said this Penworth quite carelessly put out his hand and gripped Charles's leg firmly above the knee. His palm was warm but dry; Charles hardly noticed it in his relief at not being thought rude. The gentle fingers slid slowly upwards under the short trouser leg; they touched Charles like moths, in sensitive places, for hardly a second, and then as slowly slid down again. Penworth had not spoken; he was looking into Charles's eyes, and smiling. His smile was in his eyes, too, as though turned inward to deride himself. He withdrew his hand and let it fall upon his knee.

For a moment the silence was hot and intense. Then Penworth stretched his arms up, and pulled his head back, yawning so that the skin creased down his flat, healthy cheeks. He still looked at Charles, sideways, and raised one eyebrow as though he would have said, ‘Well, what fools all of us are'. Charles laughed. He had already forgotten the caressive touch, which had seemed almost as dispassionate as the touch of his own hand upon a sheet of paper.

‘It makes one wish to live like some rich Greek of centuries ago,' Penworth said, when his yawn was ended in a gasp of breath. ‘This climate of yours, I mean. To bathe and hunt and go to the games, and in the evening walk about in public places, and converse like men. That was the life. But different ages, different conventions. Different moralities.' And he added darkly, ‘Intelligent men must work like any slaves, with starved souls'.

He stood up, sighing. ‘I suppose you don't trouble about what I mean. Why should you? Anyhow, we can't put the clock back as far as that, can we?'

‘It's a pity we can't,' Charles said, in sudden enthusiasm. ‘It's a pity—yes, it is a pity. Did they have boarding schools, sir?'