The Young Desire It (30 page)

‘I might see you at the Oval,' she said quietly. ‘We go; all of us. I might see you there.'

He looked at her in silence.

‘It won't matter,' she said, after he had been thinking about it. ‘No one will know. We can look at each other. Only we will know.'

When they were parting, with the rusted wire of the fence already between them, neither could think of any last words to say. They held the wire in their hands, but, by the absence of expression in their faces, they might have been judged strange to one another, and unaware each that the other was there, so deep was their concern in the immortality of that moment, behind their shoulders the east and the west were pale with sunset, and the air lay coldly upon them.

When their lips met, to kiss now for the first time, it was as though that were also the last. Her lips were cold; he did not know what spell was upon them, but knew only that neither in this nor in any other parting would there be a farewell.

Charles, after the first day's distresses were over, settled himself to work with stubborn will. His apathy towards outward things arose from the thin unreality with which his mind invested them, and not even to Penworth did he become fully alive. Nevertheless, they began studying again at once, and Charles found that three weeks before the examinations he had completed his classics set books and flogged his mind through the course in Mathematics. There remained three weeks for revision. The seventh of November was a Monday, and on that day examinations would commence in the gymnasium, cleared of its movable fittings and invaded now by an orderly army of small tables and chairs marching in long lines towards the tiered gallery at the south-east end. The fact that they looked like an army was Old Mac's only consolation in such a complete defeat. During this regular yearly eviction he would prowl interminably, and his eyes ceased to twinkle, and became harassed.

With Penworth, Charles began again at the opening chapters of Latin syntax and accidence, skipped through the earlier ones, and gradually became slower and more concentrated as his memory of the work warned him. In his two modern languages he was easier. He took to rising early in the mornings so that he should have an hour before the breakfast bell in which to go over with great care the later mathematical rules and examples, trying out his memory of each one and confirming it with exercises of his own invention. Three weeks before that perilous Monday the form was given sample papers set for other examinations. When Charles found that he had done only indifferently, he felt a clutch of fear and helplessness, followed by sudden exhaustion. He went out into the sunlight of the parade ground, where boys were walking about in pairs and groups and alone, laughing, arguing, kicking their heels and running about for the joy of being alive. Many of the youngest, to whom examinations were revealed in the healthy light of careless scorn, mocked their elders for such seriousness; some of these were carrying books open in the sunlight, reading aloud or silently. Saunders, who had sat once for these examinations, was marching about by himself, audibly repeating certain set lines, giving no meaning or expression to the words. He caught sight of Charles standing still with the morning in his hair burning darkly, and called to him. They were aloofly friendly now, making no emotional move towards one another, but not uneasy together.

‘Here,' Saunders said, ‘hear me through this, will you? This bloody English paper's getting on my nerves.'

There was to be a final grammar paper following that break.

‘Go on,' Charles said. ‘I think I know it, but you say it, and I'll find out if I do or not.'

He listened gravely to Saunders's gabble, and was patient and unmoved over his muttering pauses. Never did Hamlet's most famous speech sound so like the feckless wanderings of a mind insanely decayed. Saunders was an honest fellow, without even a conception of vanity of the intellect, and his one desire was to have the thing word-perfect; time enough when the paper was under his hand to consider what the words meant.

‘Well, that's all right,' Charles said, giving him back the book. ‘But don't you think it's risky to do it right at the last like this?'

‘Oh, I don't care,' Saunders said. He began to kick the grass with the toe of his shoe, his hands deep in his pockets. When he did look up it seemed to Charles that his eyes were embarrassed.

‘You're quite a decent chap, Foxy,' he said.

Nervousness of coming examinations, in which he had once failed, broke down his abrupt, instinctive reserve for a time, as it did that of many. Friends and others sought each other out at odd moments, in the brief, intense community of fear, came closer than any laughter could have brought them, and afterwards pretended to have forgotten it all. With arms linked they would walk up and down in the afternoon sunlight or the warmer light of morning; the more sensitively shaped found private places where they could sprawl together at ease, finding a relief from fear or uneasiness in the comfort of each other's expressed affection. Charles, who had begun to regard these aloof couples enviously, was aware both of the impulse and of its transience. He turned, now, and Saunders fell into step beside him. Clearly, after such generosity of commendation, it was for Charles to speak first.

‘I don't know whether I'm decent or not,' he said with a laugh. ‘I do want to get through these exams, though.'

The situation between them, withdrawn from the peril of embarrassment, rested comfortably. Saunders began to talk at ease, and they involved themselves in argument over the comparative difficulties of French and Latin, until the distant clamour of the bell cleared the field. They had walked far, and were obliged to turn and run back together.

It was at this time that the friendship between Charles and Mawley became something sure, to which they both resorted. Mawley was an easy talker, frankly boyish and without shame, but with Charles there were always reservations. He had certain moods now of sudden, foolish gaiety irritating enough to those who did not know him, when he would laugh a lot and make bad puns in imitation of a Master whose reckless extravagances both in and out of form were well known to everyone. Mawley, careful of his ankle still, could not join in sport that year, which was very injurious to vanity; but Charles's gay moods were a compensation in their own way, as were his far more frequent inclinations to silent, curious listening. He seldom spoke seriously for long; but sometimes he did talk about Penworth, struggling even as he spoke to make plain to himself the young Englishman's strange manner. He was concerned to think that it was his own fault that a friendship between them was failing to achieve that understanding on which permanence depended; but to suggestions that there was more in it than friendship he was for a long time unwilling to listen.

‘I never know where I am with him now,' he said. ‘That's all. That other business—it's finished—it never started, anyhow. How could anyone…I mean, you can be friends with a man without that. Can't you? I don't know. It's beastly to be touched, I think.' He looked surprised. ‘At first I didn't realize. I didn't mind, I suppose; never thought. Why do you say there's more in it than just friendship?'

He heard Mawley's explanation in silence.

He would listen to the talk of others less reticent than himself, with a sort of embarrassed fascination, as though he were an intruder among secrets that did not concern him but of which he must know, of which he must be sure.

‘I think it's ridiculous,' he said angrily, describing how he had come stumbling upon a couple of lads closely communing in a hidden place, one drowsy Sunday afternoon. ‘What do they do that sort of thing for? Behaving like a lot of girls.'

That was the only time he spoke of girls in a tone of contempt.

The two of them walked to and from the playing-fields together in that lovely weather, talking wisely of many important things; but of what was most frequently in his mind he said nothing then, although, unlike most of the inquisitive and inexperienced among the boys, he made no effort to let his dumb surprise seem instead the weighty silence of knowledge unspeakable. It was a wonder to observe how little he did know. Most revelations he received as a hungry man receives food, silently, from need, not greed. At times, frowning fiercely to get a true grasp of something, he would make a guarded remark, that it was strange, that he might never have known…that it ‘made a difference'. That noncommittal phrase he now used frequently. It bespoke a mind continually awakening to its own innocence.

‘Well, it makes a difference about Mr. Penworth, what you say. But it doesn't seem fair to him. You don't know for certain, anyhow. I mean, he's such a lonely sort of man, and it's probably just that.'

What he really was thinking was by no means evident. Perhaps only of his own loneliness earlier in the year, and that other loneliness which now would await him at home. His mother's manner, her seeming intention of defending him from dangers he could not perceive nor credit, troubled him, and in this slight alienation from her he intuitively found an alienation from his home itself, and felt, for all his defiance, that he must be somehow culpable. Because of this confusion, this inevitable stormy prelude to his own affirmation of self-hood, he was more and more inclined towards work, wisely recognizing the insidious anodyne distilled in a mind wearied with being forced. It was easier to lose his identity with its particular problems in the impersonality of study than to submerge it, as another would have done, in the minutely developed social life of the School. For the sake of peace in leisure hours he tried to be interested; he would willingly have convinced himself that his House mattered above all else and that he was necessary to it; but the unreality persisted, and his self-deceit was plain to him. To Mr. Jolly, who now and then let it be seen that he was aware of him by appearing before him suddenly and asking him what he was reading, with a stare of scholarly unbelief, he looked as to a father, and made great show of enthusiasm over House affairs; but Mr. Jolly was not so much in Chatterton now, having removed himself and his books to the empty, echoing house dedicated to the use of Headmasters, where no doubt he communed sceptically at times with his predecessors and imagined ‘the fools of fellows' who would live there when he was gone; and Charles, who well knew how little he himself cared, was not often put to the necessity of deceiving him.

The year was not to be thrust aside from his mind easily, nor its effects so lightly evaded and shrugged away. To one great and one lesser purpose he was sworn now by his choice, his undertakings and his experiences; and so deeply was he sworn that it was, as always in youth, impossible to look into his own future with the eye of imagination, for life as he observed it lacked all perspective, and he could not see it save as colour and imminence, light and shade. One great and one small purpose haunted his days: beyond the examinations was the summer holiday; and in the summer holiday, already there attending him, was Margaret.

Many times, in that weakness of will coming at the day's end when work was put by, and his mind had relaxed, he thought he must write to her. The desire to see even her name on paper became gradually as powerful as a passion in him, and he set it down secretly in Greek characters, and put it in his pocket, as though it were a charm of magic certain to bring the fulfilment of every unspoken promise he remembered and imagined. This silence seemed unbearable as it then concealed her from him. He dreamed ceaselessly at night, in hours of sleep without depth; but there was regret only, and no comfort, in the broken enchantments of his dreams, and with the morning light waking him he remembered of them little save that fair peace and immobility he had known in her, and the unsmiling concessions which in dreams she made to his tumult of desire and fear. Such memories, broken as they were and potent in their suggestion of all the dreaming he had forgotten, filled him with grief and determination; but there was no comfort in them.

So in those last weeks, strict against himself in keeping silence, he came to find once more a sort of consolation in his hours of work in Penworth's room. Penworth himself was beginning to show in his face and voice the strain of the year's endeavour. His eyes were tired, and more unwilling to be kind, and in his classes he talked little, sitting silently bowed over his book above the room where a feverish murmur of application echoed the sound of bees outside in the sun. But to Charles he now remained the same always and made no gesture; his friendliness did not turn sour, and whatever went on in his own mind was concealed there, beneath an aloof gravity of manner which was what the boy most needed to lubricate the hot working of his brain. He spoke of little now but the work in hand; only at times, when perhaps his day had been calmer and the signs in his forms reassuring, he would lean back in his chair, look out through the window into the paling, late sky, and discourse in the old way upon learning, or poetry, or the obscurer delights of whatever music he happened to have in his mind. Then, in the energy of a chosen enthusiasm, his voice lost its accent of tiredness, and took colour into it from what he discussed.

‘The year,' he remarked once, ‘is a parabola. We are on the downward swing now. It sometimes reminds me of the best works of art. You can feel it in the air, at this time; we speed down the curve. Perhaps if it weren't for the life here, I wouldn't notice it so much; but it fits in with what I'm used to—down, down, October, November, December—Christmas and winter and the dead end of the year. In England that's how it is.'

He thought about it, and it confused him subtly.

‘Here, after all, you're on an upward swing really, outside these walls of artificiality. Spring, with summer close behind; outside that's what it's like. But in here we move towards a close—you know, you get that in the middle of the third movement; a sudden restatement of a theme…“Remember what I said at first” sort of thing. You know what I mean?'