The Young Desire It (33 page)

He sighed. I shall be glad to get away, he thought. Boys are such wretched little animals. It's the School that confounds me.

Outside, the night was cool and windless. He excused himself to Mr. Jolly, and left the table.

At the end of the flagged path where he stopped to light his pipe, cupping his hand round the bowl and the matchlight as though there were wind, the Chapel towered into the sky, pale and monumental in the night. The great west window glowed faintly round the screen behind it, a colour of pale honey, and other light shone through the arrow windows set in the right tower. There was a muffled humming sound from the organ, like bees underground. He walked that way slowly, loitering outside the doorway to smoke his pipe for a few minutes while he stared at the darkness of the lawns and listened. There was a half-moon that shed no light. Within the Chapel the organ murmured and chanted; the stone of the porch moulding under his hand was warm still, and he let himself believe it vibrated in an accustomed sympathy with the diapason. In spite of the brightly-lit uproar he had just left, which still came to his ears without intruding, the night seemed peaceful to him. There was a great air of calm, now that the sun had gone, as though the earth were waking from its swoon and listening with him to this buried music that vibrated elusively under his hand on the stone. Beneath all sounds, the night was peaceful, and still; cool air lay against his forehead and cheeks.

Inside the Chapel, however, the air was warm, dusty and slightly stale. But that stream of music pouring down the narrow stairway, spilling out on the dim black and white marble squares of the vestry floor like the yellow light itself, was cool, sublimely without passion. Jones had a habit of going through the organ preludes and fugues for an hour at a time. He thought he would wait.

He crept up the stone spiral way and sat down on a step near the top, holding on to the hot bowl of the pipe in his pocket. The fugue went on, insisting and insisting with different voices in its argument; it grew up, mathematical, perfect, black and white in its lordly simplicity; it built up an architecture of sound like peace in his mind, an edifice into which his consciousness could enter as he had entered the Chapel, listening to the inspired dictations of the music.

Ah, he thought, if only this were all of life, to listen and to believe. But a moment afterwards he was smiling at the youthfulness of such a wish, and reminding himself that this calm elation, free of all desire to do, was one of the resting-places, where a man stopped and sat down, and from which he must rise and go on, refreshed but never contented, consoled but not fully at peace.

When the fugue was ended with a triumphant shout from pedals and keybanks, he stood up. The organist was sighing after the energy of his playing; there followed the felted rustle of pedals and a faint clicking of stops pushed in. He went up the last few stairs.

‘Oh, hallo,' said Jones, his thin face shining in a smile, glistening with sweat, glittering as the organ light flashed across his spectacles.

‘Hot work,' Penworth remarked.

‘Hot but good. I shall never get tired of these—whatever else…' He stroked the pages with his hand. ‘Never.'

‘I suppose you know I'm off as soon as term's ended?' Penworth said.

‘No! Your own idea?' Little Jones looked at him eagerly. ‘You're not going Home?'

‘No, unfortunately. I wish I were, in some ways.'

‘So do I. In fact, you know, I think I will.' He spoke as though his own decision surprised him. ‘Impossible to work properly in this country, Penworth. And then, my wife…'

He took his glasses off and began polishing them with a piece of silk. Penworth was leaning glumly against the organ, glancing round over his right shoulder to speak without unfolding his arms; his eyes searched the gloom towards the altar. Jones looked up from his polishing, and then looked down again.

‘I can't work here,' he repeated mildly. ‘I think I'll have to give notice, and go back at the end of next term. Trust to luck, you know. After all, even an organ billet in a village…'

‘Yes, I know,' Penworth said bitterly. He took his lower lip between his teeth. England in summer. Oh God—the beauty of it all, and the peace. ‘Go while you can,' he said. ‘If you stay as long as I have you'll never get away.'

Their quiet voices woke no echo in the vault or the nave. Jones looked down dispassionately at the cloth he was twisting and rubbing; his eyes were strangely naked and helpless without their glass screens.

‘Go while you can,' Penworth said again, ‘or you'll find it's too late, like I have. The only escape I can make is to get away from this confounded School.'

‘You see,' Jones said absently, as though he had not been listening, ‘as long as Helen's there I could go. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some sort of idea of that kind—subconscious, you know—that made me let her go back alone. By the way,' he added with mild irrelevance, ‘there's one chap in this place, that lad Fox, who may do quite well. He's got a weird and wonderful sort of understanding of music although he doesn't know much about it yet. I wonder if you could tell me what he's like in class? He's a nice chap—very serious yet, you know, but he'll get over that. I wonder what his other work's like.'

‘Oh—he's all right,' Penworth said. ‘The same in class as he is with you: understands more than he knows. Got a good brain. It's strange you should mention him. I think he's the only one of them all I shall be sorry not to go on with. He's a bright spark. The others smoulder, and if you don't keep blowing on 'em they go out.'

‘He's the best of my lot,' Jones said darkly, ‘but he doesn't practise enough. I've been at him. I'd like to have the teaching of that lad. He looks as though with the proper sort of handling he might do something good. Most of them think music's a confounded nuisance.'

‘He might,' Penworth said, ‘but I sometimes doubt it. He's too soft; he wants a bit of good hard badness in him. The good stuff's there—if he doesn't get it knocked out of him. I'm glad he's interested you too. Music may help him a bit, later on.' He spoke with gloomy detachment, remembering something now ended. ‘It's done me a lot of good, I know that. And a lot of harm, I sometimes think.'

‘Look here'—Jones was suddenly earnest, eager, like a child—‘do go and get your fiddle, Penworth, and let's go through some of this stuff together. How about it?'

He stood up in his eagerness to persuade. Penworth turned about from his leaning position, shaking his head.

‘I've got about four dozen papers to mark between now and to-morrow afternoon. I'm afraid I can't do it. Sorry. Music would knock me out for the night. Otherwise…'

The little organist looked sad.

‘It's a pity,' he said. ‘It would have done us both good. Like a purge, if you know what I mean. Nothing like Bach.' He sighed again.

‘Nothing,' Penworth agreed.

‘Are you sure you won't?'

‘I can't manage it, old man, really.'

On the path boys passed him. They were still arguing across the cool darkness; their voices rang out clear and sharp. Somebody called out from the distant porch, and an answer came floating back. They were all about him in the darkness, not knowing he was there. In the black night they were not so excited; arm in arm they walked about, talking always. There was no evening study, and until prayers they would be free to go where they chose. Happy, sudden laughter, disturbing in its night mystery, bereft of the image of a distorted face, lingered behind him, out on the wide unlit parade ground, as he walked towards the main building to get the papers from his cupboard in the Common Room. A sense of his own loneliness, a passionate envy of them, hurried him on through the darkness towards the light; taking advantage of his body's fatigue, it weighed heavily on him.

In the white solitude of his own room, he sat down in the chair, took his face between his hands, and cursed the country and his own weariness. Before him, the tidy pile of papers mocked him; the uncultivated, gross handwritings were like boys' faces scorning him with twist and flourish, muttering in secret illegibility things whose meaning he could not grasp, as though they alone knew and were germane to the deep cause of his discontent.

I came here, he thought bitterly, with a certain knowledge of myself. I was confident. I had what few men of my age have in this damned place. And now, where is it? Is it my own growth, or an intellectual cancer, or what? What is happening to me, here, now, to-night and every night and every day?

Trying to get hold of the problem sanely, he groaned aloud, and buried his face in his crossed arms so that no light should beat redly behind his closed eyelids. That helped not at all. Thoughts crowded confusedly into his mind, and a sea of faces, as many as the hosts of insects making the night tense with their sibilance, rose like a tide before that inward vision from which no grateful darkness this side of sleep could ever free him. Was that insects? It might be, he thought, the sound of my own blood in my head. And all the faces were hot and untidy, and had their mouths open to shout, to argue, to laugh in the darkness with a mysterious, challenging laughter, dangerous, secret.

‘Sleep after sunset,' he muttered suddenly, staring at his clenched hands white over the knuckles. The imperfection of the spoken phrase charmed him faintly, like poetry, with all that was not said; he imagined sleep coming into the mind as night came to the earth, after the setting of the sun consciousness. When he had thought of this for a while, he grew happier, and smiled, and at length took up a pen stained with the bronze green of dried red ink. When it came out of the ink-well it was as darkly red as though it had been dipped in blood. He looked at it, turning it this way and that in the light as he would have turned something precious, dipped it again as his thought went forward, and after a moment put it to the paper to draw a line through a word, and wrote his comment, thinking with relief that this was the last time he would be faced with this sort of task.

It's the School, he thought; that's what's the matter with me.

After a week of days which time seemed almost to drag backward, the end of the term and of the school year did come. Speech Day, with its ceremony, its giving of shiny prizes to nervous, self-consciously victorious students, and all the flutter of light dresses on the lawns and in the Chapel, the women's soft, pleased voices and exciting unfamiliar laughter, the faint unease of fathers and elder brothers, went by like a dream. The Headmaster, making his speech from the dais in the Hall, touched on the year's tragedy which was also, he said—clearing his throat and roving his eyes with sober slyness from side to side—the greatest tragedy that could ever happen to a Public School as a School, and to every individual boy belonging to it. People were particularly still while he mentioned, with an expression of emotion which many perceived to have been feigned, the name and attributes of his predecessor, going over each good quality in a low, audible voice whose hoarseness was too familiar to the boys to seem remarkable. Most there had already forgotten, and this passage had a little of the drama of surprise for them, and made the day more happy in their memories.

‘You will understand,' he said, ‘the grave and difficult task that faces any man who finds himself called upon to conduct a great School such as this. If, like him who was the friend of me and my colleagues and the chief trustee of your children's early lives, such a man is in bodily pain, suffering yet compelled by his own faith-keeping to go forward, longing for rest and unable to rest, the strain may become greater than any of us here can understand. But if that is so, and if such a man in the end gives beneath it, we can feel only a deep compassion—when it is too late—and wish that we might have given every help and every thought, before it became too late. Remember in your prayers that man, who made the School to a great degree what it is to-day—an institution of which we, its governors, must always be proud, and of which you, as members of its society or as parents who chose it for its high and honourable reputation, must be proud also, as long as it remains to gladden your memory and welcome your every return…'

Charles, listening dully, felt again that sense of personal loss which had so long ago shaken him. He watched Mr. Jolly's distant face against the brown of the panelling. Standing up alone, tall and grey in front of the averted faces of gowned and hooded Masters at his back, he continued his year's report; and as he stood there, speaking with proper weight and pause, not worrying about his notes but roving his eyes slyly from side to side, there was in his mind the vision of himself standing and speaking, just so, at the end of the next year, and the next; until he too should be made absent from that assembly, by age or death or some such release, while some other man, unwilling perhaps like himself but at the bidding of such as his own discomforting will and wisdom, would take his place, another actor playing this part, another leader wanting only leisure, rest and a final freedom from the perilous loneliness of authority.

When that part of the afternoon's ceremony was completed, and the year's prizes given, tea was served to visitors. The School had come to the end of its year. This hour was one of release, into the greater bondage of free responsibility for some, but for most into that much-dreamed-of time, the seven weeks of summer holiday leading them from December swiftly over Christmas into a new year. The spirit of friendship smiled among them all; sentimentally they took leave of Masters and of one another, and the excitement of their voices was now without unkindness, for in that hot, cloudless, long-declining afternoon they were given what they fiercely desired, freedom and individuality, the liberty to go. With that desire appeased, they could afford to be kind.

Charles walked up the covered way alone, for the last time that year. In the spontaneous happiness of all those with whom he had lived there was an overtone of triumph now that drew responsive echoes from the unhappy bewilderment within him. The air of parting had no weight in his mind; he felt satisfied to know that for some time after this day he would walk these floors no more, and see nothing of the glass and wood of this genial prison; but he faced the holiday, as something stark and positive, with uncontrollable tremors of foreboding. The black promise, that had rung like far thunder in his mind ever since that day when the examinations ended, was now to be fulfilled by life with a wave of the hand; and so—farewell. He was in no mental state to do deliberate battle with his own misery; by no careful and constructive architecture of thought could he sort and build up the material of the future into any credible structure. In the landscape of things certain to happen, one empty fact gaped like a chasm into which with a rush of cold wind and a bursting heart he was being hurried by the days.