The Young Desire It (6 page)

A sudden roaring scrape of seats became an audible silence, with one voice saying certain indistinguishable words. He mimicked them furiously: ‘For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful.' Out of the fullness of my belly do I cry to Thee.

The noise of talking broke out more vigorously than before, full-bodied now with the tramp of feet, as though that pause for grace after meat had acted as a dam before a lusty river. One minute later he heard the thunder of feet racing up the covered way. He cursed, without ceasing to unpack. Sharp-toned voices began to bring down a rattle of echoes through the House; they seemed to stick in his flesh, like inflexible arrows. It was a relief to hear Waters pummel on the door softly with his fist, and to hear him say mildly, ‘I've some whisky here; thought we might celebrate our return to felicity.'

Beyond the dark blankness of the door, steps and voices tore the evening to shreds.

The first week of his new life was to Charles a nightmare of endless days. It had a nightmare's excitement and a nightmare's horror expressed in longing for safety and for sleep. He thought, at the end of twenty-four hours, that his only times of peace would be the hours he spent behind his desk in the classroom, and the hours lost in sleep. Only by exercising or evacuating his mind could he hope to reduce its unease and misery to some condition approaching normality; and exercise it he did, upon such foreign studies as languages and the sciences which he was told he would need to study if he wished to make his school course properly progressive.

Within forty-eight hours, with very little sleep to assuage the intolerable thirst of his heart salted by memory, he had begun to show that defiance which grew in him until it finally characterized him among his fellows, as they in their own ways were characterized by other excesses. Such defiance usually arises from perfect unhappiness. With Charles it was so. The pain within his breast at length seemed to him to have become a physical suffering, such was its intensity. After the first seconds of half-consciousness as he woke each morning, it leapt up with the pain of a wound touched unexpectedly. He turned himself away from it, urging his mind to sleep again; it would be another hour yet before the dormitories were roused to their first full noise of life and increasing haste. He looked at the lines of huddled bodies covered only by sheets, stretching to his right and left, and opposite. The air was still cool, eased by the fading night; in the unreal light of summer dawn those sleeping bodies were real enough, to him, and expressive, it seemed, of a dozen different kinds of thoughtlessness, selfishness and passion, even in sleep. He did not wonder whether he should ever cease to be afraid of them. They were there, tangible, potent, liable at a word, at the clamour of a distant bell, to become mobile and cruelly dangerous. They were there. He had no eminence from which to regard them as part of the young manhood of a nation, none of age's aloof idealism nor of philanthropy's deliberate blindness; he was one of them, and already it seemed to him that he was like them. He thought of the first occasion on which he was treated not as a vulnerable curiosity but as a boy; the few moments of secret relief made him almost hysterical; it was like a dream, and ended as abruptly as a dream, and he awoke sharply to the old awareness of his isolation.

Charles was built slim and not tall, but his arms and shoulders were as strong as those of a colt. Riding in the hilly country of home had strengthened his back and given his chest depth. This was belied by the round smallness of his head and face, which his curling dark red hair—the ungentle gift of early puberty—softened and made yet more delicate. For this he was marked down at once, and had his names among the other boys; but fear and defiance, coming to the aid of inexperience, taught him how to use his clenched hands when, on his first night in the dormitory, he was driven to fight. That condescension of Fortune faced him abruptly in the direction in which he was apparently destined to go, as long as he lived in the School: it taught the others that, though without doubt he was fair game for their baiting and might always be shouted at from a distance, derisively, he was not safe to tackle single-handed, since obviously he did not know what he was doing. Two or three might beset him at once, with right and morality on their side; otherwise, since he seemed not to care how bitterly he fought, it was most comfortable to leave him to himself, and to be content with miscalling him and making him as frequent a jest as was possible.

This unspoken compromise in his relationship with the majority of the boys remained to him unknown. His first fight was indeed the first fight of his life; the shock was so great that when it was ended, with the honour technically on his side, he had to retire to a private place, for his instinct warned him urgently how fatal to him would be the revelation of such incredible and bitter passion. There he remained, schooling himself to silence; and when he had washed his face and was back at his bed-side they looked at him more attentively than they had done, and the captain of Dormitory B came and spoke abruptly to him:

‘You can't fight in the dormitories, you know. I'll punish you next time, so don't do it again.'

He had the tone and expression of a man speaking to a slave; as he turned away he winked at the others, and they began to talk again, breaking their interested, expectant silence with ready laughter. The Junior Housemaster passing down the aisle between the beds caused them to still their jeering.

‘Oh—Mr. Penworth, sir! Sir.'

‘Hallo, sir. Have a good holiday?'

‘I bet you're as glad as we are to be back again…'

They turned their attention to him; Charles, left alone, was not aware of anything curious in the attitude of the young Englishman towards them, of them towards him. He was too shaken still with the shock of physical combat. It was something so unknown to him, so far beyond his present imagination, that he could only regard it with a horror of which he was scarcely master. His body still burned from forehead to knee; on his face the marks of fighting showed red, where the struck flesh was still angry, and his hands felt as though they had been scorched by their brutal contact with something so unknown and awful as another human body. Desperately he tried to seem at ease in the control of himself; he took a book from the top of his locker, and lying on his bed used it as a screen between his eyes and theirs, pretending to read.

They for their part were engaged in a new conflict of a kind they did not understand. This was no simple, primitive battle of muscle and bone with muscle and bone; it was not concluded in minutes of time, for it was that sort of sublime struggle which death ends only because to most the dead have no arousing power. Even its sublimity was not apparent. There was merely a young Englishman being pleasant to a group of laughing boys. The new-comers in the dormitory took no part in this; they retired as much as possible from notice, looking side-ways sometimes at Charles with secret suspicion because he had probably set in motion some mildly lethal mechanism which would not be likely to discriminate. So he had no sympathy—unless from the boy in the next bed, a lad named Forrester, plump, bewildered and clearly fair game for any tormentor, with his shining brown cow-eyes inviting more disgraces.

Penworth walked slowly down the aisle between the immaculate beds, hands in pockets, knees loose, lips wide in a quizzical smile, eyes sardonically watchful beneath the delicate stressed arches of their brows. The wave of unformulated antagonism spread out behind him; he felt it, and was angered, yet satisfied. His tolerant good-humour (after three whiskies with Waters downstairs) when he spoke was reflected back to him from them drunk with their own numerous youth; each party looked down a little upon the person and the character and the mind of the other. It was a very public gathering. They smiled with the sincerity of cats.

This, thought Penworth, is a great Public School, run according to the English tradition; and it's no more English than the country itself is England. When I am about, their voices are polite and their manners are good—or if they're not I have to tell them so, and can punish them for their mistakes. When there's no one like me to make them self-conscious, what must happen? What must it be like among them?

And he realized that he had no more idea of their emotions and passions than they had of his. To him they were, and would always remain, crude, unchangeable young animals, who had never seen an English spring or an Oxford dusk; they were looking forward, but he looked back, for ever.

To them, he was a foreigner whose speech they happened to understand. They watched him as the men on their fathers' farms and stations watched any young English novice, hiding their smiles or not, as whatever courtesy they knew prompted them. The pure, cultured accent of his voice was always strange, even though they learnt to imitate it. They paid a high price in money for that accent, and for his knowledge of dead languages and their living tongue; he belonged to them, and to their successors—a necessary appurtenance; when they left the School to become, by passing through those dark gates, men, he would remain, and remain a teacher of young minds with a little brief and nominal authority over young bodies also. But he would remain as a stranger who talked of Home and meant that shape on their maps which they recognized as England, a place in which they believed, without imagery or emotion, and which few of them would ever see.

With the oldest boys, prefects and classical scholars of the Sixth, he had a rather better standing. He once confessed, when he was older and the School was not much more than a memory, that he felt, when among them, as if he had suddenly found himself back in his Oxford Common Room, among young graduates of his own age.

‘My own age,' he repeated carefully. ‘Not my own tastes, of course. But according to our standards at Home their general intelligence, and their worldly intelligence especially, were well above their years. Of course there were crudities. Of course. But they knew what they wanted from life, and you felt they were going to have their way. I thought at first it might be some contemporary characteristic, something to do with their generation, you know. But I realized—it's a sort of shock, even now—that after all their generation and mine were really the same. The difference was hemispheric: climate and culture and tradition. And then, of course, I smoked a pipe and drank whisky, which made me feel very much their senior. It was quite deceptive, all that. I don't even quite get it now. If I had read more Latin and Greek than they would ever hear of, that didn't concern them. But it did concern me. It was part of my manhood; they were young ruffians of boys. Yet—somehow—I never quite believed that. Couldn't.'

That was the kind of confession a man makes when his emotions are no longer involved with what he is considering. At the time, and in spite of himself, his emotions very surely were involved, in a way he could not understand. Regret for the past combined with fear of the present and uncertainty as to the future, prevented him from observing himself objectively, even for a moment. Perhaps to have said he feared the present would have been to put it too definitely. Yet there was certainly fear of some sort at the root of his dislike for the boys, the School, and the country which had borne them all. Even the stomachic geniality brought about by a few whiskies in his room downstairs, conversing amiably with Waters, could not dissipate it.

However, he paraded in great style, feeling the indefinite, angry satisfaction that always stimulated him when he walked among them and felt them move out of his way. At the end of the dormitory the new Captain of School, a choice cricketer and a good classical scholar (one of his own creations, he thought pleasantly) sat on the House captain's bed quietly conversing. Penworth went to shake hands with him. He was, among the boys, a hero; and as a hero he was a fellow to be reckoned with, even by an aloof and scholarly Junior Housemaster.

‘Well, Fairfax?' Penworth said kindly; and asked him another question in Greek, which made him frown and laugh.

‘I'm afraid the holidays have made me forget all that, sir.'

‘Oh well. Soon pick it up again, you know,' Penworth said confidentially; and there was an echo in his mind of his own voice querulously suggesting to Waters at the high table, ‘Need we talk shop so soon? After all, there's always to-morrow.' And here he was—the habitual pedagogue already, eyes, voice and smile hinting yet deprecating the intellectual intimacy implied in his words. This sort of intimacy was inevitable with Fairfax and uncompromising after all.

He discussed holidays with him, thinking secretly as he watched his lively, good-looking face that he was probably as mature as any of his own younger companions of the south coast summer; and as himself—almost. They talked of cricket prospects, and of the new year's eight. Fairfax would row stroke again…

‘Stroke bene factum,' said Penworth suddenly; and having with such coy suavity put himself once more in the secure, austerely amiable position of a classics Master conversing with a very promising scholar, he stood up, nodded, and walked away.

‘Oh, he's really not bad,' Fairfax said, replying to some warm criticism of the House captain's. ‘It's our own fault if he seems like a stranger.'

Penworth went downstairs. Waters was sprawling back in the big study chair, with his feet up on the table, holding a full tumbler in one hand, reading with myopic concentration.

‘How are the little ones?' he asked. ‘Why aren't you drinking?'

‘You forget,' Penworth said severely. ‘I'm on duty. As for the little ones—you'd better come up and see for yourself.'

His own room seemed to him wretchedly apathetic and empty. Light glared boldly from the porcelain-shaded globe, picked out sharp highlights on inkwells, pens, glasses and the polished table top, and fell with a blind angularity upon the floor and the white walls. Shadow was as sharp as the light. He stood for a moment staring at the childish top of Waters's lowered head.