The Young Desire It (15 page)

‘You only need a bare pass. Learn all you can, but concentrate on your classics subjects, and I guarantee you'll get through all right.'

In the second half of that term, a strange, unspoken friendship grew between them almost to an intimacy. Penworth, young, lonely and bewildered by he knew not what strange forces of a strange land, took a curious, discontented pleasure in talking to the boy as though he were equal in age and understanding. In time Charles began to feel that indeed he did understand the mind and heart of the man; and when this happened and he perceived it, he put yet more distance between himself and the rest of his company. Had there been time, had the November examinations approaching not acted as an effective brake upon all inclination to spend hours with pleasant unthrift, his tendency to precocity, generated by too much sensitiveness and an unnaturally solitary childhood, might have been sadly forced by the Oxonian aesthetics and enthusiasms of the young Englishman.

Penworth himself would at that time have had great pain to explain, even to his own questing conscience, what were his objects in so cultivating the boy. He knew he wanted to touch him; he knew he felt some kind of complicated pleasure in observing the changing expressions in Charles's pale face, with its steady green-brown eyes and clear red lips; he was pleased, when one of those happy strenuous private lessons was over, to put his own white hand on the boy's touselled, ruddy crown and notice, without appearing to notice, what a fine flash of happiness and gratitude relieved the face below of its intent frown; but he would not have attempted to explain this pleasure, and he took care that the boy should not be aware of it. To this end he allowed himself moments of spoken impatience, sometimes of irritation (more genuine than he knew, and from an obscure cause), and his reward for these essays was a burning colour in Charles's face, and the hint of tears not readily to be shed.

In his own youthful self-centredness he did not at all understand the real power he was gaining over Charles. He was happy to play at an aloof intimacy expressing itself more often than not in subtly allusive quotations from one or other of the dead languages he professed, salting his conversation as young scholars down the ages, delighted at the infinite prospects of joy offered by learning, have salted it; or to enthuse tersely, by gesture and expression and with few words, over some ancient or contemporary poet; or even to discuss at length, as though to himself, in a word-imagery much above the intellectual height of Charles (but not beyond his affectionate admiration) the beauties and associations of certain musical compositions.

All this was as disturbing and as sublimely serious to Charles as the passions of religion or the pangs of love would be. Its evident danger was, in some sort, pardoned by the tremendous ardour it fired in him to learn what he desperately needed to learn—the cold, unsuggestive truths of earlier Latin syntax and accidence, and certain textbook rules of English study and composition. Penworth's sensual, smiling lips driving creases into the flat pallor of the cheeks, his bold, white brow already straightly seamed, and above all his grey eyes in their arched and beautiful setting of brow, lid and nose, all became associated for Charles with irregular Latin verbs and the obstinate eccentricities of the fourth and fifth declensions. They gave particular urgency to the understanding of the prologue to the
Canterbury
Tales
, and to the elucidation of obscure word-usages in
Hamlet
, which Penworth joyfully insisted on reading with him out of class, in addition to conducting the whole form through it soberly in the classroom. He was a young man who loved his work. Charles began to have some understanding of the joys and travails of studying Shakespeare and Chaucer with an enthusiast whose Master's degree entitled him to expound richly and with force.

Charles became suddenly happier, during those weeks. He did not notice that Penworth's hand more often touched his, or was liable to caress his head or his knee in moments when the air in the little white study was fierce and tense and attentive. He knew only that he was learning, as he had never learned before, the beauties of his own language and of that from which so much of it had grown. He had the ideal experience of being in harmony with the close brotherhood of Latin and English learned at the same time and in the same way; his heart was full and overflowing, at such times, with the passionless ecstasy of knowing.

Only the memory of the girl's comely face, and the incommunicable secret harboured in her breasts, in the sighing shadow of the grove, came from the outside world to surprise into a surrender his moments of straying thought. The harder his mind spent itself in toiling, seizing, claiming and assimilating the facts that contained fluid essences of knowledge, the more vividly, afterwards, it turned away to receive those thoughts of her. Reacting from the labour of days he made in his mind a wild but innocent life of actions and contacts, as remote from probability as a dream, in its perfect carelessness of experience. Vaguely she took her part in the fantasy of his real night dreams, when his body lay sprawled and still in that double row of sprawled, still bodies, doing its work of sober recuperation for his brain and his mind winging so gladly away in darkness that was light. He had never seen the secret bloom of a woman's breasts before; but, as though schooled by poets and others through all time, he perceived in them nourishment for the mind and foundations on which to build dreams. And the line of brow and cheek, of smooth hair and neck and shoulder, of obstinate knees and straight legs—these in memory took on a large significance of which life must certainly soon try to rob him. With such knowledge of her, the smallest yet, perhaps, the choicest he could have known, his mind in sleep or day dreaming, during a noisy morning recess or under the meaningless glory of a service in Chapel, composed ecstasies whose frailty and unworldliness were mercifully kept from him. In a rare and lonely way he was learning, as those others were learning, with surprise and happiness, to live.

The season turned suddenly that year, more suddenly even than is usual in such an empire of surprising contrasts. At Eastertide the weather had been full of autumnal blood and promise; the sun shone hot but more kindly, the earth was softer, sinking already into a misty half-shadow of palest green. Now the pause came, like a breath held. In the open simplicity of the playing fields there still sounded the crack and hiss of balls sent from the bat on their brief spin down the net; still, on the lower field with its tall pines leanly silhouetted against the western sky, beyond the boundary fence, shouts and exhortations sounded clearly as the white figures moved about leisurely in afternoon sunlight, playing the gentleman's game. But the air that caught up and echoed these sounds was motionless. For perhaps ten days the change hung poised more in mid-heaven than on earth. Mr. Jolly, behind the nets, leaned on his stick and watched a boy he was coaching. His eyes were narrowed in the light; an old felt hat, pulled down at back and front, gave to his lengthening shadow a look of humble rusticity.

‘No, no, no,' he said with tired patience. ‘Look here—er—Ford my lad. Look, boy.'

He gripped the stick as though it were a bat; his long stooped body became full of springing purpose as he demonstrated the niceties of hitting a fast ball low to a far, far boundary. When he had performed this his eyes bulged and glared unseeingly round the field shining in the sun, as though still in search of the books he spent most of his days loving.

Ford would sigh out ‘Oh—I see, sir,' with admiration and proper self-scorn; and once more, having signalled to the little group of bowlers, Mr. Jolly would narrow his cool blue eyes between their leaf-brown humorous lids, and turn on the small boys standing about him a smile mixed in brilliance and weariness, saying ‘You see?' hoarsely, without bothering whether they did see or not.

For six afternoons of the week this lazy chirrup of bats and boys sounded from the playing fields. Charles went down whenever he was listed, which happened on such days as he did not have a class after hours with Penworth. He too came under the cool whimsical eye of Mr. Jolly, who used just as much patience with him as he had with Fairfax, the School's first bat, and refrained until afterwards from telling him that he had no eye and no footwork.

‘But you have arms all right, old son, and shoulders,' he said with a slow disinterested smile. ‘Go down to the end net and let them bowl at you for a bit.'

At first Charles was filled with alarm at such a thought; but he walked down behind the line of nets to number six, where he was unkindly greeted with a few choice obscenities from one or two of the onlookers, who were becoming excited. He tried to appear at ease when he walked round and stood among them; at least, he thought, we are dressed alike.

After a time someone threw him a ball and said, ‘Now then, sweet one, go and bowl'.

He thought he must do as the others had done. Taking a run he delivered the ball furiously, but from too high; it came down hellishly short, bounded up and was taken and nipped low and far off its second fall. ‘Six, six!' they shouted, laughing at him. No one went after the ball. Finding it, he picked it up and trotted back to the three other bowlers. His turn coming again, he took a breath, ran, and again pitched short and hard, but this time the ball went wide and sank in the walls of net. The batsman, relaxing his tension with a useless swing at it, flung down his bat and stood upright.

‘Who the hell did that?' he asked loudly, looking at Charles with injury and anger in his eyes.

‘I did,' Charles said defiantly.

‘Well, for Chrissake don't do it again,' the boy snapped, and the others laughed.

‘I've got to learn,' Charles replied loudly, his face reddening.

‘Not on me you haven't,' that boy shouted. ‘Go on—clear out of the way, you red-headed maniac.'

Charles stepped aside, seeing that it was useless to argue—useless and, it seemed, somehow indelicate. The others drew away, smiling and looking.

‘Let yourself go loose,' one lad told him later on, when they had forgotten him again. ‘Don't try and kill anybody. Let your shoulders go loose, and let the ball go when it wants to, and don't throw it hard like that. Watch.'

He took the ball that fell on the turf near him, and withdrew for a run, tossing it with practised nonchalance in the air, as he walked. Charles watched, saw the smooth continuity of run, delivery and the ball's flight, and thought it impossible to imitate. He could not learn that unity of three motions. He did not want to. However, he caught the ball thrown with a careless flick at him, and tried again. Another batsman was at the stumps. This time he did better. The same boy, whose name he thought was Walton, encouraged him by telling him he was improving.

Later Mr. Jolly stood behind the net; Charles happened at that time to have a ball again.

‘You'll never bowl,' Mr. Jolly roared mildly, after his second ball. ‘Drop that, Fox. You'll never bowl. I'm quite sure you won't. Come along, take the bat and let me see again.' He hooked a wide yawn with the top of his stick; the fresh afternoon air, free of the classroom's melancholy odour of ink and books, was making him sleepy.

Charles went back to the School with one or two others, joining in their talk as they walked or ran under the trees. The dry leaves and twigs of summer's reaping cracked against the soft soles of their shoes; their voices in the open spaces were high and merry. He noticed how the days were growing shorter, and felt the coolness of the evening air on his warm skin. Away in the west, keeping pace with them in magnificent creative silence, the sunset clouds were afloat like galleons in the sky; the sun was gone, but they glowed still, rumouring him in colour and splendour, in lavender and silver, crimson and gold that ached like the fever of love before it faded all to ashes. When Charles looked out from the changing-room windows, while he silently stripped naked for a shower, it had gone; but the mood of release and happiness that had brought him home persisted, and his body's weariness seemed good. Once more, as in that grey morning in the sheltering grove with the unknown girl, life's great beauty was whispered and murmured to his mind from the full tide of his heart, in wordless images of gladness, purpose and content.

He was thinking of the shape of things: the remaining four weeks of term, with a stern trial examination waiting at the end like a not unmatchable wrestler challenging him; four Sunday afternoons when there would be nothing to do but read, and perhaps have tea and talk with Mr. Jones, small, kindly and whimsical, whose conversation effortlessly took him in among its surmises and calm surprises at the inexhaustible beauties of chamber music and organ works, with an occasional revelation about the difficulties of training a choir of boys, and some dreamlike remembrance of working in London or in Leipzig. And then, finally, the May holiday.

Strange tremblings in the pit of his stomach disturbed him pleasantly as he walked to the bathroom, where a high-spirited uproar and the sound of water pelting and splashing was too big for that place of brick and concrete, and forced its way out into the echoing dimness of nearby classrooms. He was going to see Margaret again in these holidays; and he was going to work. May, late May, with the fields full of green and tender grass already, and the channels of winter streams beginning to run with a sound that rejoiced the vast night silences like a lullaby; books that necessity was making familiar and dear to him; and the girl made somehow dear by strangeness. He could not remember her face, save as it was colourful and fair; a page of type came more readily to his mind; but that was a face in which the delicate fire of youth glowed with commanding innocence, surrounded by the mystery of the first climacteric's superb accomplishment as a candle flame is surrounded and glorified by its aureole of transparent gold. His heart beat when he thought he could have seen such magic and have looked upon it with open eyes.