The Young Desire It (27 page)

‘Up at the north part,' he said, speaking quickly to carry them on from what must seem a forward suggestion, ‘it's much more interesting. It's only half cleared, and a lot of it isn't at all. When my cousins stay with us we always go there…'

The girl's eyes met his as Mrs. McLeod took him up, once more with what seemed a flash of mockery in her shrewd eyes.

‘Och, she does as she pleases. Don't you, my bairn? Well then, it might be guid of you t'ask her; and perhaps she'll say “Ay” t'it. Puir soul—she hasna much t'enjoy hersel' at wi' us folks a' the day doing and a' the night asleep.'

He said he would come over when it was fine.

‘She's been awfu' silent and mousie these last few days,' Mrs. McLeod said, speaking still as though of a third person absent, in a manner Charles found safe and imitable. ‘Now maybe,' she said, ‘it's young company she needs. That'll be fine noo.' She looked at the girl as she spoke, and though she laughed with that same curious mockery he could see the pain of love in her eyes, the shadow of tender concern over so much silence in someone so young, standing there with such clearness that he was surprised and discomforted, for no one had ever looked at him like that.

When he was leaving she told the girl to walk with him as far as the end gate.

‘Go along, Meg, it'll do you guid. Here you've been stuck in the house near a week, and your holiday too. Put on your jacket then, for it's raining. Though when I was a young bit of a thing like you ones we didna much care aboot rain.'

She watched them go out, and stood at the door, her strong arms still for a moment, folded under the genial depth of her bosom; with great kindness she begged Charles to thank his mother, and then looked after them while they walked round past the house, beyond her view. The rain was light and grey; when she turned away the kitchen's warmth and worn cheer welcomed her.

Charles looked at Margaret, but her face was mostly hidden by the curve of the hat brim, on which a dew of rain already stood, and he could see only her straight nose and her lips, full and pale, seeming to tremble as though she would speak, or smile, but could not. He too tried to find words, but now, with the peril of their meeting past, the safety of speech was forbidden him, while the memory of his mother came close and weighed heavily. From the half-revealed shape of her face he looked up to the black branches of the plum trees past which their path was leading them. There was already a scattered white of blossom on them, and he could see the tight promise of other buds and the brown buds of leaves that in September and October would have burst in a dew of green. Beyond them the flanks of the hills rose upwards into the sky. As he looked over this hazy distance, her voice fell on the cold stillness of the rain.

‘Have you been working hard?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘What have you done? Have you thought—enough?'

It was difficult, after that, to keep silence, in an eternity of seconds waiting for her answer. She turned to him, and again her face sprang into life and full being as he saw her eyes.

‘I've been missing you,' she said. ‘I didn't think I—not like that. Perhaps I shouldn't tell you. But I have. I've missed you. I didn't know what to do, and I thought…I thought I'd go away, go home; but I couldn't, I couldn't.'

Her eyes besought him to understand the passionate suddenness of her outcry. He had not expected this; it was as though she knew what had happened that morning, and it wakened him to such a white fury of joy that he was frightened.

‘Didn't you miss me too? Did you dream too? I dreamed of you.'

‘I wish I could tell you,' he stammered, frowning. The words stumbled on his lips, and lay on the air between them as they walked, slowing their steps in the new darkness of their necessity. He had not been prepared for such words, spoken by her voice, given meaning and weight by that direct, clear look in her eyes which he remembered too well. He had not expected, either, that her last few days would be thrown open for him so desperately, by such words; laid bare of all concealment, with their loneliness admitted in the eager, troubled tone of her voice, and his own presence in her mind and heart confessed. Her calm silence, in the house, had suggested nothing of this; while he looked at her there he had imagined that such a calm was also within her, and that so she had passed the days; and even when her aunt had laughed at her affectionately for having been so silent—she who, he thought, was always silent—his imagination had persisted in describing her as at peace with herself and ready to be at peace with him too. From the surface contentment of his own mind, and from his refusal to look deeply into that future which might hold unthinkable disappointment, he had built this image of her; and now she had shattered it down, so certainly that his very heart, after its leap of joy, was dumb in the completeness of her confusion.

She looked away from his face, and repeated what she had said.

‘I dreamed of you.'

‘I did too,' he said. ‘You have been with me all the time.'

‘Yes.'

She nodded; he felt her looking at him again, but could not turn to her.

‘You know how people like my aunt say “Good night and sweet dreams”? I know now; sweet dreams. I didn't know how much there was in—in dreams; what they could be like. Now I know.'

‘Tell me, Margaret.'

‘I can't. Not in words, I couldn't.'

They had come to the gate; and, as people do who have walked side by side and are at a parting, they turned to face one another. Her eyes, shadowed by the arch of the hat's brim on which lay a hoar of rain, were shining with tears, that trembled on the lower lids.

‘You think I'm being silly, don't you?'

‘I should put my arms round you, Margaret.'

At that, and at his vehemence, she closed her eyes, standing there limply and still, and the tears pressed out from under the lids and went heavily down her cheeks. She shook her head.

‘Don't, not here. No one must see. No one must know that—that…'

Her mouth twisted with misery and happiness so that she could not end it; but he thought he knew what she would have said. Never had the violent fusion of grief and joy torn a face into such a hot mask of beauty. He dared not look at her deep eyes regarding him; his hand was on the wooden latch of the gate, and he saw how the light rain was dewing the back of it, and how through the paint the whorled grain of wood was showing bare. His hand was now a stranger to him; he could see the minute drops of water gathering on it, but could not feel them there; they lay on the faint hair and on the peaks of the knuckles where the skin was stretched white. He looked at them for what seemed a long time.

‘You must go,' she said. ‘Your hair is getting wet.'

The determination following a decision was coming into him as something he could feel and trust. The words of her surrender had given him leadership and the right to speak and command. It was she, he felt now without shame, she alone who greatly mattered to him. He looked up at her frankly.

‘When it's fine I'll come,' he said. ‘The first fine day. We can go out—out that way. Somewhere. I know it all.' He waved towards the north, confident and alive within himself, alive to her and to his own stronger manhood.

‘How long will it be?' she said.

‘It ought to clear in a few days. I know this weather.' He talked on, quickly and eagerly, until her face became calm and she smiled. Tears had come easily; so much thought, and the experience of unknown passion, must have wearied her mind to that helpless surrender which with tears and passion she had admitted. Now she wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.

‘I can't come here, you see,' he explained. ‘I mean, I wouldn't like to come often. You know. But Margaret, don't be miserable. Look here…'

He made her look up.

‘Don't be miserable. Think how good life is, and how soon—think about me, and I will about you. Don't cry.'

‘I'm not miserable,' she said, shaking her head.

‘No. Think of me, and I will of you.'

‘And dream. I can't help that.' She tried to laugh.

‘Yes, and dream too.'

‘I wish I could sleep all the time,' she said. ‘Sometimes I feel frightened. It can't be true—we're too young. What can we do? We're so young. But oh, Charles…'

She spoke his name softly, as though he were not there.

‘Don't,' he said; and his hand, that had seemed foreign to him, was his own, filled with his whole body's consciousness as its fingers rested upon hers.

‘We're not too young. Look, I tell you, we're the happiest people in the world. Don't be frightened; and don't be unhappy any more. I hate to see you cry. It makes me feel torn to pieces.'

‘I won't cry any more,' she said. ‘But just then, seeing you again and not being able to tell anyone, not anyone—until you came—I couldn't bear it any more; and oh, Charles, I did want to be sure, I wanted to see you, to see if you were—like I dreamed you were. And now I've told you, and I don't care what you do, it makes no difference. It all hurts me inside, too, like…'

‘But now you must be happy,' he said slowly, in wonder at the passion in her face.

‘Yes.'

‘Promise?'

‘And you promise to come? Don't leave me here, with no one to talk to.'

‘I will come.'

He was going away; she looked at him.

‘And Charles…'

He waited for her to speak. At length she said:

‘You know the other day? It was wonderful, only I couldn't tell you then. It was like a dream. I shall never forget.'

When he opened the gate the warmth of her hand still lingered in his palm. After he had pushed the latch to, not letting himself look round lest he should lose the last image of her in his mind, he heard the soft sound of her steps when she went on past the budding fruit trees to the house. As he walked towards home, the rain awoke and became heavier. He put back his head so that it might fall cold and sweet against his hot face.

At the beginning of the summer term the tension in examination forms was pitched high. Charles's deep moodiness became familiar to any who noticed him, and even Penworth, though he fell into minor furies over it, began at length to leave him alone.

He had come back to the School looking rather tired, and much thinner; and this seemed to accentuate the green light in his eyes and the boldness of his nose and mouth, so that his face, though it kept its softness of expression and its pale reserve, seemed yet to have cast off superfluous delicacy and to have gained something of young manhood's sharpened maturity. At first Mawley did not notice much change in him, because of his own concern with time lost and examinations looming darkly nearer. But the pose of that head in front of him in the classroom, and the fierce frequency of his fingers ploughing through his auburn hair, at length made Mawley curious enough to look more closely at him; and he saw, or imagined he saw, that once more the events of his holiday must have impressed themselves deeply on his mind; but neither Mawley nor anyone else knew then what had happened. He proved that he must have worked fairly continuously by scoring a sound pass in the short test papers in Mathematics with which the term commenced; and as this was the first time he had come well through any such mathematical ordeal, the Master in charge thought it worth mentioning, and Charles, who had always evaded with fear and suspicion any public commendation of himself, had to submit to the unpleasantness and danger of being exhibited to his form as an example of what sincere purpose and conscientiousness could do. ‘Sincere purpose and conscientiousness' were the Master's own words; Charles was subsequently laughed at and ridiculed in a fitting manner, and his reaction to this proved Mawley's own half-interested suspicions about him; for he fell into a white rage, and battered two boys soundly with his fists before a sufficient number could bring him down and prove further, by the force of numbers, how wretched it was for any fellow calling himself decent to do work out of class and try by queanish means to find favour in the eyes of the common enemy, the Masters. This attack, it appeared to Mawley now, must have been in ferment for some time, for Penworth, in spite of his intentions, had fatally shown his regard for Charles, and even in his loudest and most snapping temper was unable to hold his eyes from kindling with a secret and not quite tutorial warmth of interest.

So for Charles the term opened; and, had it not been for the concentration of one admitted purpose, on which he could not now go back, he would have felt the brief force of that antagonism more keenly. But in the uneasy excitement of that September, at the beginning of the most broken and uneasy term in the year, he was allowed to keep to himself as he seemed to wish. Training would commence at once, for the big sporting day of the year, when the Public Schools made a serious match of general athletic ability. Before this day, which was usually fixed early in December, the School culled its best athletes, after a morning and afternoon of private competition between the Houses. On the first night of term, before all had returned, lists were made up by House-prefects; and some instinct of self-protection, or bravado, prompted Charles to enter his name for three events, when the first call was made in Chatterton.

Penworth was surprised and disappointed by this; but, after a very pleasant holiday in town, with Waters living not far away to meet him for various social enjoyments which they shared, he had come back to the School in no mood of friendliness towards any person there, since it was necessary to transfer his self-contempt out of the subjective. Even Waters, against the too-familiar setting of classroom and Common Room, seemed far less interesting, and Penworth, now as always greatly at the mercy of his own swift moods, was driven by discontent to write long letters off to England, and to stare at the photograph of the woman's face on his neat dressing-table, and think of marriage as a possible freedom from the persecution of solitude.