The Young Desire It (18 page)

‘He's a pretty child,' Waters mumbled amiably, seating himself on the bed.

‘He is,' Penworth said, his back still turned. ‘That's his misfortune. This is our good luck.'

Waters took the tumbler from his hand, and asked about news from Home.

Charles went for the May holiday feeling somehow out of key with life. The instrument of his mind would not seem to play in tune, even though it was holiday and a time to rejoice in. He took books with him, and set himself to study during the last week of the eighteen days of freedom.

This discontent would lose itself in work, he thought; but in his heart was a child's cry of bereavement at the loss of pleasure anticipated. Margaret, of whom he had thought more and more often in the last days of term, after that discomforting scene in Penworth's room, would not be at the new farm. She was nowhere, in his mind, because he could only imagine her as she had been, that morning in the grove—given to him as a gift by the earth and his own imagination, rich and silent as the land that held them in its mighty palm and gave reason to their being. On the day of the Boat Race he saw her, and she told him then that she was not able to go down. Sitting in his room at home, looking out blindly at the dancing ecstasy of a camphor laurel ravished by an evening of wind and rain, he still felt the surprise of her hand's light touch on his arm as he walked from one place to another, on the windy brim of the Mount, with the river's lake stretched in ruffled grey and blue far beneath, and the eights like insects moving on it slowly. She must have been watching him for some time, though he had not seen her among the little groups of uniformed girls mixing with the boys from the Schools, up there in the wind. She must certainly have seen him, though he had not looked for her there; for in his mind she was still most vividly present in the grove's long silence, out in the Far Field beyond the world, and it seemed that no one else in the world could know her. Yet there she was, when he turned his head as he walked against the cold wind; and when he stopped, unable to speak or even to say her name, looking slightly down into the excitement and frightened pallor of her face in the dark blue of her hat, she glanced about as she spoke, and he too was unwilling that here, of all places, they should be observed by anyone.

‘Come near the edge,' she said without smiling; and when their nearness to the scattered crowd saved them from the fear of being conspicuous, her smile came only slowly and her eyes remained wide and dark.

‘I'm not going down after all. I have to stay with my sister.'

When she looked in his face again, where there was only the warm liveliness of his joy at hearing and beholding her come in the rich reality of flesh from a backward present of imagination, she repeated what she had said.

‘Oh,' he muttered, and ground the sandy turf under his heel, still looking into her grave face. Then the edge of his disappointment showed clearly. ‘Oh,' he said again, flushing, shamed in his expectation.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘It would have been very nice. I would have loved it. But you see, I can't. But I expect next holidays I'll be down there.' She stopped, still poised to go away, like a bird that sees the approach of something strange and will take flight. ‘If I come down next holidays,' she said, raising her voice a little against the wind, ‘will you be at that place with the trees?'

‘I wish you could come,' he said. ‘I have to take exams this year. I wish you could have come.'

‘Yes. I do.'

‘It's a pity you can't.'

‘Yes, it is. But I have to stay with my sister.'

He struggled with something difficult to fit words to, and his face showed his great concern.

‘I seem to know you well.'

‘But we don't,' she said in a low voice, looking at him steadily.

‘Well—couldn't I write to you; or something?' But as he spoke he understood that he would not know what to say if he did write; and when she said no, it would be better not to, he agreed and looked away in silence.

‘Well,' she said at last, ‘I must go now.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Good-bye.'

She was gone out of his sight. When he looked again, and saw her standing near, as though she had thought of something more to say, he walked quickly along, behind a hedge of backs and trousered legs, uniformed backs above black stockings, planted square and almost shapeless together in a long jostling line.

‘Good luck to your School,' she said with a laugh. ‘Can I have a piece of your ribbon?'

He was giving her the whole rosette when she stopped him, putting out her hand.

‘Oh no—don't do that.'

‘It won't matter,' he said. ‘Do take it. Everything will be over in ten minutes, about. Take it. When shall I see you again, then?'

‘I told you,' she said in a low voice. ‘Next holidays—August. You've never told me your name.'

‘Charles,' he said.

‘Is that all?'

‘Charles Fox.'

So, with the term at an end, the big race lost, as usual, to the School, and eighteen days ahead of him seeming to stretch towards eternity, he found himself at a loss how to order his mind. He was surprised and sad to realize what pleasure it had given him to imagine that that girl, whom now he had seen only twice, would be down there, near his home; it was surprising to think that already, after seeing her once against the quiet landscape he loved so well, he had preserved her there in the sight of his mind and had been in no doubt that he should see her there in the touchable flesh, and listen to the quality of life and silence in her voice, or watch her when she did not speak. No foolish guilt of secrecy was in him to be relieved at the knowledge that after all she would be away, and he and the solitude would lack her; he knew little enough of any kind of love for another human creature, and it had come to be most natural that he should think of her and himself happily together when he thought of his home and that country; for she was the only being who had known him there, and it seemed right that in his imagination she should share it as no one else could have shared it.

He felt that he had now lost something of it, losing her.

Going home from the station, muffled warmly in rugs under the high hood of the phaeton, with Jimmy talking beside him, he peered out into the night beyond their moving golden side-lights. The lamps ran the road through their fingers like an endless wet brown ribbon; above the opposite seat the horses' rumps were hardly to be seen in their quick rise and fall, for the night was windy and the candles in the lantern boxes shook their flames. On his right, Jimmy's face came gradually out of the darkness, the faintly-lit profile of a bronzed mask; from his pipe sparks flew away for a while, until the ash settled. Jimmy, who would have worked for Mrs. Fox if she had paid him nothing at all, had refused to let her come out on such a night; and Charles was for the first time touched with amused wonder when he realized the ease with which that brown little man guided her to her best comfort and safety.

‘Well, Mist' Charles,' Jimmy mumbled sibilantly across his pipe-stem, ‘I s'pose you're dashed glad to get back home again?'

‘Yes, Jimmy,' Charles said through the cloudy darkness. A lacework of rain was flung sharply into his face as they turned a corner into the weather.

‘You keep yourself warm now,' Jimmy said with the same mild tone of authority which Charles had heard him use to his mother—a tone no one else ever thought of using in speech with her. When he took out his pipe to chirp hoarsely at the mares, he added with sober, guarded enthusiasm, ‘Ah, there's nothing like the country for you kids, Mist' Charles. Nor for us old blokes either.'

The rhythmic smack of the hoofs and a creak and ring of harness made the windy night seem friendly when he had finished speaking. They bore on steadily; the warmth about his knees and the blustering wind hissing and hammering on the deep hood lulled Charles into a dozing half-consciousness full of the clear voices which, when sleep comes first, take bodies to them and are visible dreams. Jimmy's quiet, lively words, expressively commonplace, lay on the surface of his mind, arousing no suggestions in him but soothing him into deeper calm and the acquiescence of an accustomed confidence. He could not have remembered a time when there was no Jimmy.

They stopped at the white gate that was the first welcome of home. He was wide awake at once, but already Jimmy had jumped down, and the rattle of the gate's fastening sounded through the quieter wind as he was hearing a voice echo still—Congratulations, Fox; you are doing well.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, when the phaeton had moved slowly through and Jimmy was up beside him again. ‘I could have got down.'

‘That's all right, Mist' Charles; you was having a bit of a sleep, lad,' Jimmy said comfortably; and Charles, lying back again in his corner with the familiar smell of the worn cushioning about him, saw the rough trunks of the old pear-trees along the drive go past like dark friends in their lanterns' light, and felt the quickened pace of Julia and Jane, the two bays, as they came home. They turned to the left and stopped; the garden hedge stretched back to his right, its wet leaves shining in the light; in the lee of the house he could smell the warm, leathery sweat of the horses, and he brushed their steaming noses with his hand as he passed in front. His mother from the sudden calm light of the open door looked down to him, and asked Jimmy to bring in the suitcases when he had finished with the mares; then she held out her hands to Charles.

‘Well, son?'

He was glad that she had not changed, and that her welcome, though it was warm with conscious motherhood, was not demonstrative. He felt he could not have borne that just then. When they were inside, she turned to look at him again, while he took off his things, and spoke almost his own thought.

‘You haven't changed, son; but you've grown a lot.'

The passive calm of her voice suddenly irritated him, with a sharp irritation of which he was ashamed.

‘Did you think I would have changed?' he said quietly.

He took her arm and they walked up the dark stairs to his room. There was a lamp burning beside the bed; its ring of low blue flame threw upon the wall at the bed's head an elaborate blurred shadow of the guard inside the glass, and upon the ceiling a pale ring of yellow, but gave scant light. She turned it up, and was herself revealed in the mild, still radiance, her pale face sculptural in the dark shadows driven up from cheek and chin, until she looked down into the flame. He stood watching her, and they smiled together; but all she thought to say was, ‘Yes, you have grown. I'm glad you've done so well, Charles. You'll be able to work here when you want to, my dear, unless you'd like the governess's room. No one shall interrupt you.'

Jimmy came up the stairs with the cases, and swung them in through the open door, and nodded, and then went away.

‘Change your things,' she said, ‘and come down.'

He was looking about the room, remembering it even more clearly than he saw it, when from outside the door she said, ‘I've made you some soup; I knew you'd like it.' His ‘Thank you, Mother', followed her down the stairs.

Outside the windows he heard the passion of camphor laurels lashed and laughing in the night, and the melancholy whistle of wind through the bent cypresses; and he stared at the mighty and unreal immobility of his own shadow on the blue pallor of the wall, and realized that after all he was changed, for he had never before felt as he had a minute ago—irritated by her whom he had come to consider so kind. As he stared at that still shape of shadow, the image of the girl's face appeared in it, and in sudden, vague unhappiness he turned abruptly away.

Because Mawley's home was far to the north, he was left at the School during that holiday, and for the other reason also—being confined to bed with dull discomfort for a most constant companion. Letters, more vivid in their unimaginative brevity than any careful and colourful description would have been, made him a picture of the land's agonies in a bad season. There seemed no promise of a break in the drought that engulfed the north-west; they had already given up hope of rain. No one could leave the place.

He was moved to the emptiness of the sanatorium, across the road, where the silence inside and the passing of cars without, day and night long, drew close with the viciousness of a continual taunt. The silence in the dormitory would have been worse; here at least there were young poplar trees at the bed's head, bending and dancing beyond the stark uncurtained panes in a nakedness of spiring twigs against the blue or cloud of the windy May sky. Sometimes people came. The nursing sister brought books; a strange Scots lass, of whom much could be told, came three times a day with meals on a tray; when she looked at the bandaged thing that had once been a smooth and easy ankle she would open her eyes wide and then narrow them, as if a high wind blew into her face, exclaiming ‘Eh…! Puir wean', and at last could be made to smile at an imitation of herself: ‘Puir wean; puir wean, Mary; puir wee yen.'

Often the Headmaster came across the busy road through wind and rain or wind and sun. He was not away from the School during that holiday; when he came he would sit on the edge of the bed and listen to all sorts of stored-up chatter, seeming always to be interested. That was his charm for everyone, that he gave his whole mind to each person he engaged with—or so it seemed then. He did not say much, during those visits, after his long smile at the delight with which his frequent gifts of fruit and sweets were received; sometimes he would say, ‘Read aloud to me, will you?—from whatever you're on now'. But once Mawley made the mistake of starting to recite an Ode of Horace's that had caught his fancy because he could understand its meaning; but before he had sighed out the mock-melancholy ‘Eheu, fugaces, Postume, Postume' the Headmaster was shaking his head with a smile. ‘No, not that. Try me with Wilkie Collins; I've forgotten him.'