The Young Desire It (31 page)

‘You talk,' Charles said, ‘as though you were dying—no, no, not dying; but something. As though you were going away.'

Penworth looked at him in a quiet speculation, without speaking, for a minute or more, observing the question in the steady hazel-coloured eyes that regarded him, the frown between their dark brows. Then he reached forward for his pipe and tobacco, and began to fill, rolling the tobacco to a wad in the palm of his left hand with the outer edge of the right hand; and still looking at Charles. Then, as he glanced down to adjust the bowl so that it would receive the fill easily, he replied:

‘I am going away—that's right.'

They looked at each other.

‘Why?' Charles began. ‘Why—oh?'

For the first time, with a sharp and conscious emotion, he strove to imagine his next year at the School, and saw, not himself but, Penworth's absence, as though it were a positive phenomenon. Somebody else would sit in this room, behind this orderly table; some other man's books and prints would replace these. No more was he to be gladdened and amused by the arrogant fullness of Penworth's gown as the young man strode into a classroom, still with that elasticity of knee and shoulder which he salvaged from a life now past; no more to see that pleasant, condescending smile, as, having reached the dais, he swung round suddenly, smoothly, to confront a class alert with the expectancy his entry had aroused. No more would he see such small, important dramas as that measuring out the days; and no more might he look forward with pleasure to hours like this hour, secure in this small white room with its immaculate bed and its soft odour of tobacco smoke well enjoyed, of books, ink, paper, and wood, seeing opposite him the familiar beauty of the eyes that knew him so well, hearing the quiet voice, full of praise or scorn or mild laughter, to which he had so willingly paid respect.

‘Oh,' he said, ‘I am so sorry. I don't know—it won't be the same here, without you, sir. I'll feel quite different.'

Penworth, lighting his pipe, glanced up secretly under his brows and laughed with pleasure, but shook his head in half-mechanical denial.

‘Nonsense. You'll make plenty of other friends. I've told you, next year won't be like this. You'll have far more time, and you'll be able to live some sort of a life of your own, and get to know what the other fellow is thinking. That's more important than anything I can teach you.'

‘It won't be the same.' Charles put his own meaning into the words. He looked up, smiling. ‘I don't know how I shall manage to work without your help, sir, now. You've helped me very much.'

‘That's what I'm paid for. And anyhow, it's been great fun. And furthermore you can have too much of help; you must be able to stand by yourself. Don't imagine that the work is beyond you; you happen to have more intelligence than the average, that's your trouble. And in the end it's the very opposite to a cause for doubting yourself.'

Charles said nothing, rubbing his hand backwards and forwards along the edge of the table whose corner separated them.

‘Don't, of course, tell the rest of them yet,' Penworth said after a while. ‘You have a right to know. I'm going—for the sake of other people as well as for my own. I want a change, that's chiefly why. What I shall do I don't know; but at any rate I shan't be here. If I stayed too long I'd simply get—stale.'

Charles nodded.

‘Even a schoolmaster,' Penworth said, ‘leads a life of his own at odd moments, you know. You do know…'

‘Oh, I know, sir,' Charles said nervously. ‘I know—it must be pretty terrible here. I used to think how nice it must be to be a Master—free, and all that.'

‘I may be mistaken,' Penworth said slowly. ‘One never knows. I may be trying to escape from my own self, from something I never shall escape by running away. To go may be a coward's way out—leading simply to other cowardices. But I must go, before I can find that out for certain. For each one of us life's chiefly a matter of trial-and-error proof, you see.'

He talked easily on, and Charles, as he listened and watched his pale, expressive face, thought of the coming year, and of the year after it. It was not himself he saw, for he was still visualizing only Penworth's absence from the familiar scene, and feeling as one feels when a picture has been secretly taken down from a wall, leaving a characterless wide space behind which looms, a memory of the eye itself, the shadow of what was once there, affronting the gaze with the faint melancholy of so much strangeness…

Penworth had moved suddenly, and was standing beside the chair where he sat. It was a swift movement, calculated, not clumsy, and it took Charles by surprise. He looked up as the other's pale face came down above his own. Trying to move and unable, being walled by the side of the table and by Penworth, he felt almost like laughing. He was held by the shoulders, and did not know what to do.

‘Now,' Penworth said in a low voice, urgently. ‘Now, Charles. Before we say good-bye for good.'

The pupils of his eyes were dilated, as though by anger, or fear. Charles stared into them, afraid, and unable to rise under the hands resting on his shoulders. The way those words were spoken had frightened him; the beseeching tone of a voice used always in command, in careful, interested but dispassionate explanation, alarmed him more than any anger would have done. He felt the blood drain from his head and face, and with an effort restrained himself from crying out. Penworth made another sudden movement, and had him strongly, gently by the wrists. Automatically he stood up and drew back.

‘Let go,' he said, and the surprising steadiness of his voice gave him courage. He heard the other's breath, coming and going quickly. Outside that room the afternoon was placid and still.

‘Let go, please,' he said again firmly. ‘Please don't do this. It spoils everything.'

What he meant by that he did not afterwards know; but it caused Penworth to laugh shakily.

‘You talk like a damned schoolgirl being seduced.'

‘I'm not a girl,' Charles said slowly, ‘even if I do look like one.'

That was difficult to say, but it had the effect of making Penworth release his wrists. He stepped suddenly back as his weight came free, and the chair fell noisily. They heard the sound of steps approaching through the changing room.

‘Don't make such a row, you little fool,' Penworth said.

He spoke with a bitter scorn; but he said nothing more, sitting down on the bed and putting his white face into his hands, breathing unevenly. He looked like one who had escaped a vicious, uncontrollable danger, without knowing by what means he had escaped it.

The whole thing had taken no more than two minutes. The steps crossed the hall outside, faded, vanished, while they listened. Charles, trembling now with the release of tension, stooped blindly down and set the chair upright, by the table where it had been before, where he himself had sat, listening to that cultured voice talk easily to him of life and beauty. He stood staring at the chair, not knowing what to do or how to break the spell of what was a perfect conclusion for them both.

‘Better go,' Penworth said at last with difficulty, still pressing his hands to his face, his elbows on his knees. That position was so strange, so dramatically out of character, that Charles felt tears come into his eyes. He went to the door, and did not hesitate to open it and go out. On the way up the stairs he thought he was going to be sick, and hastened his steps; but in the upper bathroom, a place of sure solitude at that hour of the afternoon, nausea gave way to the misery of reaction, and tears blinded him. He leaned against the wall at the end of a row of basins, and, as Penworth had done, hid his face in his hands.

But even in the sharpness of that misery he felt, surprisingly, a great coolness of relief, as though a decision had been made for him, and as though at last he were in an open place here, with a free wind blowing in his face, and his vision clear before him.

During those days of examination the first heat of summer came westward like the waves of a tide rising over the hills. Passing a long morning alone at the far end of the parade ground, waiting for dinner and an afternoon sitting, Charles was surprised to see the grass already dry where it stood up golden from the hardened earth. October had worked with sweet secret poison, and a week of heat would reveal the final dryness at the heart of all free, untended growth. In the misty gold of the tall grass, wild oats drooping ripe against the sky, sorrel turning purple and brown and hard on the red earth, cicadas had, as it were in one day, reached their swooning full chorus, and rushed the trembling light with a sound like blood heard in the ears. The whole earth and all nature sank into a still swoon beneath the eternal ravishment of the sun, and the ceaseless, passionate susurrus of the insects gave sound to the heat, as already mirage was giving it a shaking visibility, clear and refractory like water. Charles felt once more the bite of it on his skin, the dull strain in his eyes; dry and brilliant, as brittle as glass, light lay on all things, and now, scarcely at the middle of November, October's mysterious spring, with all its gentleness and drowsiness in the mean of beauty, seemed never to have been; the earth lay swooning, the day marched like an army, and in the illusion of the windless grass sang the myriad cicadas.

Lying on the hard ground, he smelt the earth and the warped dead leaves. Tough, hardy grasses, slippery and matted like hair now, had ripened their transparent pods of seeds hurriedly; they were the fruit of those pink and white threepenny stars, the only reminder and proof that they had ever shone in the balmy October sunlight. Looking carefully into the tiny maze of shadows beneath the silken strands, he could still find seeds not yet baked by the sun. They were sweet and bulging with juice, so full that between his teeth they cracked and burst like minute grapes in March. Above him the sky arched, enamelled dry and bright. No cloud troubled its mighty concentration. It had not yet the bleached pallor of full summer, but winter's depth and the hazy velvet of spring were already gone from it, and its cerulean sweep was glossy and hard.

There was a great vigour in life, a kind of muscular tension and the urge to do. The sun thrust like a sword into all things, but to men's bodies it gave an electric and galvanic impulse. Charles found it difficult to keep still, as he lay with the lacy shadows of blue leaves falling on his head and shoulders. He was restless, with a deeper restlessness than the melancholy compulsions and regrets of spring. As vividly as though he might turn his head and see it, the vision of his home stood by him, dazzling white between shining camphor laurels and the black green of the tapering cypresses. The sunlight flung back from the walls, and in doorways and under clipped eaves black shadow stood like unpolished stone, impenetrable and cool to the eye. Jimmy had been watering the lawns and gardens at dawn; now the heat of late morning drew up an invisible vapour from earth and water, and filled the vibrating air with perfume from the hot, wet grass. Beneath its banks the river seemed to lie still in its bed, a green glass holding images of the trees that hung in great motionless green cumulus, sunk heavy upon their white trunks. There the air was warm and sweet with the rotting water-levels of winter floods. Snags thrust up above their brown reflections, snakes staring into the sun's eye out of their mirror, drying and crusted with their own watery decay, but hard as iron beneath, and slippery to the swimmer's naked foot…

The imperative ringing of a bell, struck quickly at first and dying out in slow repetitive monotony, flicked open his eyes and made him sit up. Before him stretched this landscape which his own homesickness had made unsympathetic and more than strange; it swept flat from the foot of the red, burnt slope, lying out towards the river and the shimmering trees. It was not his own; he knew it, but it held no secrets and no dreams of his, no memories and no power to console. It was alien, as there against the hard bright sky the burning brick of wall and tile, brilliant, dazzling in the sun, was alien to him.

He got up and walked towards it.

After dinner, when another bell called a summons to the examination room, he took a clean handkerchief and went with others to an outside tap to soak it. The stream of water was cool, but the earth, as though already thirsty, drank it glittering as quickly as it fell and spread. They took turns at the tap, or went into the downstairs lavatories from nervousness or caution. A big grass-fly with huge eyes and glassy wings settled on the hot metal of the tap, and began its steely mechanical chirr and tick. Several made an attempt to get it, but Charles had been quicker; he took it away struggling powerfully within the cage of his closed fingers, and threw it with force into the sky. The sun sucked it up, and it was gone.

For most this was the last day. The English paper rounded off all, and even the clannish, clumsy modern science students, whose bugbear it was supposed to be, faced it happily.

The big room was full, and reasonably cool. Outside, easily to be seen and admired through the wide-flung side doors, light swam with the sound of bees, and troublesome odours of drying grass and the earth by dripping taps came slyly in. Life was unreal, but beautiful and full of promise; the day itself, not yet seeming to move in afternoon's decline, could be felt in every movement of hand and arm and knee, and when the eyelids were closed a heaviness like sleep weighed dangerously upon them. Up at the front of the room a boy slipped down fainting in his seat before the papers were distributed, and two of the supervisors, serious-faced undergraduates from the University earning a little money to help them through the coming year, laid him out on the dusty floor and put a borrowed wet handkerchief over his face. Heads craned to see who that was; some dared to whisper, after cautious glances towards the supervisors' tables, where sealed packages, awful with difficulties unrevealed, were being opened. When the folded blue slips were given out, a minute before the hands of the clock-face pointed dramatically to two hours after noon, the boy who had fainted rose unsteadily, gripping the edge of his small table, and sat down in his chair. The serious, silent undergraduates walked back along their aisles to the end of the room, where a tension of silence made the movement of eyes and hands and faces seem as sharp as sounds. Work began. Heads were bowed, and pens whispered their secret, trivial confidence to the white paper.