The Young Desire It (16 page)

Down the stair by the bathroom doors Penworth came lightly. His gaze discerned Charles white in the shadowy hallway there. He went closer.

‘Oh, it's you, is it?' he said with a smile. ‘I thought it might be. Won't you get cold standing there with nothing on?'

‘I'm going to have a shower, sir,' Charles said.

‘You look happy. Been playing the Game?'

‘Yes, sir—playing the Game.' Charles laughed ruefully. ‘I'm no good at it, sir, I'm afraid.'

‘Oh well,' Penworth said with a slight inflexion of impatience, ‘neither was I. It doesn't matter, perhaps, in the long run. What's made you so happy then? Are you good at something else?'

Charles was embarrassed; he always was when one asked him for an explanation of a mood or an excitement.

‘I don't know, sir,' he said in a low voice, feeling that he must answer. ‘Just—the day—and life—and everything, just suddenly.'

‘Lucky fellow; oh, lucky fellow,' Penworth said in the same low tone, but with great unrestraint; and he pulled Charles to him and held him hard against him. Charles felt for three seconds the heavy beating of that unknown heart beneath the rough, smoke-sweet jacket front, and the warmth of the hands holding his arms; then he was away, embarrassed now beyond expression, almost laughing with surprise. Penworth stepped back, saying in a calm tone through his sudden smile:

‘Go on, off you go and have your cold bath, and may it do you all the good the authorities mean it to.'

With a pleased laugh he swung on his heel, strode across the hallway and was blotted out by the closing of his door before Charles could manage a reply.

He himself went into the bathroom and joined the milling, scuffling, shouting groups round the shower cubicles. While he bathed and was teased and jostled and flicked with knife-like pangs from the corners of towels on coming out from the shower, his mind puzzled over Penworth's strangeness. He felt happy every time Penworth showed such spontaneous motions of affection, yet he could not bear to be touched or held by any man; and it was difficult to perceive in himself anything that warranted such gestures which others did not also possess; unless it was that Penworth himself, from loneliness or some other starvation, was beginning to feel for him the affection of a father or a brother. It was all strange and confusing to him, when he considered it as now, striving to make plain to himself the man's reasons and his own feelings. He had known nothing, before those weeks and months, of the precious friendliness of one man towards another; if it had been one of his fellows he would have held himself ready for a sudden change of face; but with Penworth, whom he knew to be old enough to be, without doubt, beyond such foibles and hearty treacheries, he was quite uncertain. Nothing that he had noticed could make him suppose that friendships between Masters and particular boys were natural; and if prefects and House captains and some others did often fraternize with Masters almost as though Masters were their equals, prefects and House captains were often all people of quality and privilege, inheritors of a long social tradition, and vigorous symbols of boyhood's own authority. Himself, he was no House captain, no prefect; he had no franchise, but was one of least positive importance, a first-term boy. It must be that Penworth understood how he differed in many ways from the others, and found in his own vague loneliness a kinship of difference between himself and Charles.

Charles argued this out laboriously, in terms of difficult thought, and was happy to believe it might be right. The belief gave him courage to trust in moods and intuitions of selfhood that were disturbing him more and more frequently; as though with leisure and experience grouped opposite application and learning, he must crowd all possible self-experience into the little true leisure he had. He felt the growth of self in himself; it showed in his heightened and now consciously intensified reactions to the new surprise of beauty in the world; it showed in his persisting defiance towards that unfriendly suspicion with which his occasional offers of friendship were regarded when, in the hope of peace to follow, he schooled himself to blind overture. It showed even in the lessening and final abandonment of those advances; it was hinted, to Penworth and other observers less perceived by Charles, in the deliberate way he applied his mind to work. The bodily miracle that had seen its own fulfilment was becoming a slow miracle of the mind.

During those weeks some enchantment held the season in mid-turn. By the change of shadows in the classroom they knew how the sun moved down earlier in the west; but there was to be seen only the torso of the wounded tree soaring upward in a hard fountain of hope, and beyond it that darkening and incredible depth of blue, navigated more often now by the skyey galleons that fought silent, leisurely battles up there, conquering and overcoming one another while the idle gaze divined them not as ships but as cloud. Then at last, as if weary of such lazy mockery, they joined all together and turned upon the sun great dangerous sides of grey.

The rain began on some Friday afternoon, after a day of revived heat. The sky set firm, and a shower that whispered with deceptive innocence during dinner at noon had so increased and established itself by three o'clock that only the curious melancholy voices of iron drain-pipes, silent since so many long months, made one aware that it was still raining. They played harsh liquid music from every corner and angle of the walls; after a time even their plaintiveness fell upon the ear unregarded, and life in the sprawling buildings went on as it had always done. Notices on all House boards, cancelling whatever arrangements for play had been made, were by most read gladly enough. There was a rush for the library, and a more sober advance by some to the dusty and echoing gymnasium, where Old Mac, straight and iron-faced, waited in his office, cocking a martial eye every so often at the lawns beyond his window, where a small flood was rising and overflowing into the neat paths.

Charles went to see Penworth, who ordered him with moody abruptness to go away and close the door quietly. This surprised Charles, and for a moment caused him a rich pang of self-pity; but from habit he took a firm hold of that softening, smiled to himself, went to the bathroom mirror to see himself smiling, and (such is the virtue of the reflected image) went down the changing-room to undress feeling happy enough. While he was changing he whistled merrily.

Of all the playing places in a school, its gymnasium is perhaps most attractive to the future individualists in that community. There, in the muffled drumming of feet and bodies on matting and mattress and floor, the individualist may step forth valiantly from his wise retreat and exercise himself freely and as he chooses. It is a sort of collection of one-man shows, like a fair, where each young merchant, having once learned something of the trade, sells his own goods for admiration. It is an aloof but lively place; and this might always be remarked of Old Mac, its deity. He lived in magnificent solitude there, issuing forth in close formation at the mid-morning break to command his own armies on the School parade ground, where the Chapel with Christian severity flung back his steely kettle-drum voice in a piercing echo that served to italicize each crisply-shouted command. After that, when all ranks were dismissed from parade, he marched back to his inner realm, a study of perfect control and grace as he walked at a stand-easy pace over the worn grass, training his moustaches ever upward to deny the kindling kindness of his eye.

When it rained he lurked, like a spider anxious to teach a fly the intricacies of the web. He welcomed the rain as something that did its duty in emphasizing his individuality by keeping him indoors in the easy and vigorous atmosphere of the gymnasium. This day he had not long to wait; under the narrow shelter of eaves they ran to the doors at the side, which he had left open at dinner-time after one fierce glance at the sky. Charles, coming after the others, slipped in unnoticed and joined an energetic group playing with a medicine ball under the gallery at the south-east end.

Later he tired of that, and went to watch the crew at work on the wall bars and parallels. Their great hour was only some ten days off; the papers were already noting form, and beginning their comments; during the coming week excitement would rise to a fine pitch in all Schools, and there would be much argument this way and that. To-day, with the aid of benches, they were at arm-work and leg-work together, naked to the waist and sweating already in spite of the afternoon coolness. Charles stood watching with dreamy admiration the smooth flux and ebb of those flat masses of muscle beneath the sweat-polished skin, noticing how pectoral and dorsal tension rose and fell, with an echo in the wooden squareness of the steadying thighs. He felt proud of having a man's body, lean, smooth and beautiful in action, and proud in being a brother of such isolated, pulsing realms of purposeful energy. A hunger for the rhythm of movement troubled his limbs. In that busy place of honestly selfish concentration he was not noticed much; eyes whose direction he interrupted and shared were kinder, with that blood-conscious kindness of the athlete, the individual, secure in his own body. Charles turned to the horizontal bars, where the shining lights of muscular artistry were gathered. He lost himself in close contemplation of Milltree's grand circles, hearing, instead of the thunder of feet and the slap and drum of the medicine ball, a creaking protest of resinous palms against wood as Milltree sent his arched body flying round, extended full length from the hands as it came head-downwards to the upper vertical, swinging out and down with brutal acceleration, and drawing together from that essential abandon for the retard of the final upswing. The repetition of this rhythm became mesmeric.

It was that rainy Friday that began for Mawley a conscious friendship with Charles. There were several—individualists all, no doubt—who had gathered together to monopolize the springboard and vaulting horse; they had the horse broad-on, and were, with that sober self-examination and approval so good to indulge in in youth, going from short-arm bend to long-arm. The responsive thrust and clatter of the board gave great animation to these serious proceedings, and it was the general excitement, as well as an habitual excess of confidence and blind zeal, that made Mawley forget his feet in the first long-arm, and left him laid out on the mattress with a tendon torn out of the right ankle, in such overwhelming perfection of pain as few are allowed to know while remaining conscious. Lying there, hidden from the others by the varnished broadside of the horse, it was possible to observe with one of those receptive abettors of consciousness, how the great hall had suddenly deserted him, its merry activity unabated but his own place in it closed up and gone. Its white walls became intensely more white; faces and all vanished, but the shouting and the laughter went on, the clatter of the springboard sent invisible bodies thudding over on to that mattress, and suddenly there were Charles's eyes, horrified. Speech at that moment was not in Mawley's power; it was for Charles. Suddenly again, as though consciousness were being released in abrupt jerks, there was his body dancing frantically and his mouth open, shouting, and his hands waving. Something seemed to have frightened him properly, for his face was greenish with pallor; it must have been Mawley's foot doubled unnaturally outwards, lying flat and out of line with leg and body, looking, as he said a long time later, ‘worse than murder'. He said, ‘I'd rather see a chap dead than lying like that and being alive enough to laugh'. His antics must have been worth laughter.

The next gift of consciousness to Mawley was a dawning sight of the lower bathroom in Chatterton materializing swiftly out of a white blankness, and a foreshortened vista of his own leg and foot extended into a flooding washbasin. If only there had been blood, Charles thought, it would not have looked so horrible. You could not mistake Old Mac's dry, flat fingers, with the small one on the left hand gripped by a heavy signet ring. Charles's white face, drawn down in a ghastly tension of colour from the slowly turning eyes, was peering; Penworth, terse before animal suffering, let out monosyllables abruptly. Pain, so immediate in its need for exclamation, does not aid coherent speech when it grasps body and heart like a great hand, and stirs the guts with an icy, inquisitive forefinger. But hearing seems to have become minutely acute. Every tremble in Charles's breath, as his heart stamped the action of his lungs, throbbed on the air. Something had greatly shocked him. It must have been that gold and purple royalty which was, ten minutes ago, a happy and obedient joint. Penworth observed its effect on Charles, also.

‘Better have a drink of water, Fox,' he snapped. ‘Glass in my…Oh, the young idiot. Damn.'

Charles slid comfortably down the wall, moving his hands in blind groping as he went over sideways. Penworth cupped a double handful of water from the flooded basin and flung it into the shrunken whiteness of his face.

‘Leave it,' said Old Mac impatiently. ‘Upstairs with this one.'

From the bed in Dormitory C it was a surprise to Mawley to hear the turmoil in the gymnasium going on as before, with a crash and clatter still from the springboard and a chinking rattle of rings. Old Mac's hands were neat and orderly, resting on his chest to hold him still, while his voice said, ‘Hold still, sir. A nasty fall, by gad', calmly, as though to himself. The pain located itself at last, withdrawing its false rumour downwards. Steps and words rose on the stairs; the School's nursing sister smiled and murmured like a brown dove over his shivering:

‘What have
you
done with yourself? Let's have a look.'

Penworth, with drops of water still falling from fingers and wrists, lifted Charles half-conscious from that foolish tumble between wall and floor, and bore him off to his room.

Charles was struggling, saying: ‘It's all right, sir, really it is,' but Penworth as abruptly as before bade him shut up. He closed the door by kicking it with his heel, and laid Charles on the bed.