The Young Desire It (34 page)

As though he were still waiting to hear a known sentence of death pronounced upon himself, he remained inwardly frozen save for the interminable quick beat of his heart against his ribs. Day after day, from the time of that brilliant sports meeting, he had seemed to wait. In his mind, keyed even now to a defiant, unreasoning optimism, a constant, mechanical thought insisted that life was lovely and good, and so would remain; but though he might nod his head as he heard it, and make himself smile and talk and move about between the lines of each day's relaxed routine, his consciousness bent its whole scrutiny now upon the shape of bereavement. If he could have done so, he would have cried out against whatever trick of life had put into his hands something which, before he had discovered what it was, was irrevocably withdrawn; but it was not yet in him to cry out against life, for his childhood had been a happy one, and now his unhappiness was only eased because it became too great and swollen, and his mind again and again slid away from it, too tired to hold it longer even though it was the only reality now in a sea of incomprehension.

Of this incomprehension Penworth partook in his mind. After some hesitation he sought him out in his room, before leaving the House and the School with his bags. There was doubt in him as to whether he should do this, for, as he now felt, any passage of emotional stress would very likely break his carefully devised resistance to all outward demonstration.

Penworth, however, received him calmly enough, as though they had been slightly acquainted for some time.

‘Hallo. You off already?' he said. He had taken off coat and waistcoat, collar and tie, and his short sleeves were rolled above the elbows. Charles, embarrassed because they had had no informal meeting since that day just before the examinations, noticed how white and solid was his neck above the gaping edge of the shirt top. In that room there was already an air of adventure and departure foreign to his memories of it. Their eyes met.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I'm going.'

‘Don't look so miserable about it,' Penworth said. ‘You've played your first game with life—and won it. Haven't you?'

‘I don't know, sir,' Charles said. ‘There's more than…'

‘Oh yes.' He was lightly ironic. ‘There are other games. For a young man in love I should say you don't look as pleased with yourself as you might.'

The sense of strain between them, and the feeling that he was being derided now by one whose derision he had never known, gave Charles the hardness he needed; but he could not go yet. They stood still. Penworth had been packing books; the hollow lid of a wooden chest flung itself back expectantly against the edge of the bed, and a litter of volumes lay on the cleared table. It was hot, and there was much busy dust.

‘Great things, books,' Penworth said suddenly, following his look. ‘You always know where you are with them.'

‘Yes,' Charles said. There was some importance in the words, but he could not resolve them. He turned to Penworth again, ready to hold out his hand and say farewell. There was a bitter taste about this; they were clearly separated already, and he wished it had come about in some way less difficult, so that he could have spoken easily, and in the certainty of being fairly heard. As it was…

‘Look here,' Penworth said, ‘what are we standing here for, like this? There's nothing left, I believe, but to say goodbye. I am right, am I not?'

‘I suppose so,' Charles said. ‘Only—it's a pity it happens like this, after all the…'

‘Your choice, my friend. There can be no other way; and I don't think I myself am exactly to blame for it. Do you?'

‘No, sir. It's all my fault. But—oh, I ought to be able to explain…'

‘Does it matter?'

The words were spoken calmly. For the first time Charles saw clearly where life was leading him, and in a brief illumination of understanding perceived what part Margaret played in this miserable conclusion in which she seemed not to be concerned. As a friendship this had failed; but now it had made him as hard as a man—harder than Penworth, who was looking at him as though he divined his thoughts, looking with something like his old quizzical understanding. He began to go to the door, wishing to stay no longer.

‘Don't go, Charles.'

Penworth's voice was friendly now. He was holding out both hands, as though welcoming someone long absent from him.

‘Don't go like that. I know what you feel. I know what it's been like for you, this year. I ought to; I had a lot to do with it. You had to choose, didn't you? Well, you've chosen, and I admit your choice—from your point of view—is right.'

Listening to the dispassionate humility in his words, Charles felt something like triumph, a strange feeling, surely irrelevant to this certain parting.

‘Well,' he was saying, ‘that's all there is to it now. But'—he came forward and took Charles's hands and held them loosely—‘I would not have you go like this. There's no reason why we shouldn't part as friends. Is there?'

They stood looking at one another steadily, until Penworth's regard wavered and shifted.

‘No,' Charles said, choking over the words. ‘No, there's no reason. That is, if you feel there's not. I don't think it's been your fault, though; honestly I don't. But you see—she—it's as though it's her fault. Hers, and of course mine, I suppose. And now I don't care—whether it's her fault or not. I don't care. If I could tell you, you'd understand.'

His eyes were full of tears. Penworth drew back and leaned against the table, grasping its edge firmly with both hands. His voice was calm enough.

‘I understand that,' he said easily. ‘You've made your choice. It was in you to make it. And now you must stick to it, and stick it out. But, listen to me.'

He held his look with his own.

‘Try and see things in some sort of perspective. That's been your trouble all along—you can't do it. Don't be more unhappy than next year, say, will advise you if you look into it. I know it's difficult…even though I don't know, and certainly don't want to know, what's going on between you. From now on your life's your own concern. I can't help you. Nobody can. But we can still be friends if you choose. It seems, by the way, that most choices are yours.'

He laughed.

‘Doesn't it? It does. So if you choose we can be friends, Charles. I won't be here any more, so it will be easier than it might have been. Life altogether will be easier for you this coming year—in so far as work is concerned, and in other ways, of course. Even if I'm not here it doesn't mean we can't be quite good friends, does it?'

‘No, sir,' Charles said.

‘Well, cheer up, then.'

He moved to the bed, kicked away the wooden chest, and sat down.

‘Come and sit here for a minute, till you feel ready to face the world. Use a handkerchief freely; I don't mind.'

Charles sat down by him, and in spite of his misery, triumph was still lively within him. After a while he could smile and they could talk, not indeed with that former feeling of intimacy now lost to them, but freely and in increasing unconcern.

‘I'm sorry to be such a fool,' he said at last. ‘I suppose it's the excitement and all that.'

‘Glad it's all over now?'

Charles hesitated, looking up through the open window at the sky, hearing the innumerable, excited sounds of reunion and departure.

‘I'm glad about the School,' he said at last. ‘But home's different now. I don't know: my mother's different. We don't seem to understand each other as we used to.'

Penworth's fine eyes regarded him steadily, in silence. Aware of the look, fearful of once more venturing into that realm of personal conflict now closed to them in speech, he said nothing, and Penworth, after the short silence, turned to other things in a way that seemed strange but was now to be a rule.

When at last Charles could restrain himself no longer, and must go, they stood up together, and at the door their hands met and clasped.

‘Well,' Penworth said, ‘I'm like you—not sorry to leave here. But don't forget, we write to one another sometimes. A bargain?'

‘A bargain.'

‘And don't forget, either, that this mustn't be an end, but a new beginning.'

The look in his eyes, of one still grappling with the awareness of defeat in all defeat's isolation, made Charles turn quickly and walk away without looking back.

Those words remained in his mind, when he left the School that afternoon, and during his first long week at home. He too was now isolated, until she came. The words had more deep and immediate significance than Penworth could have supposed when he said them, with that keen smile driving creases into his cheeks and making his grey eyes more beautiful; they applied so clearly to the conviction of his own heart that he came to think he had uttered them himself with the defiance of despair. This mustn't be an end, but a beginning. Not an end…

He communed with himself day after day, doggedly and desperately. There was no one he could speak to, now, when he most needed to set his mind moving forward, out of this coil, towards some purpose. The brilliant days reflecting in water and air, the flowers that Jimmy—shrewd Jimmy, who knew the ways of all flowers—had caused to bloom everywhere, mocked him, as his own body, his pale, dulled face mocked him from the water he stared into before he broke it. To be unhappy among all things that had taught him happiness was like seeing a sneer on the lips of someone dearly loved. It lay contrary to the fury of reason in all desire. The fear of losing what he did not have dragged at body and mind. He knew his mother was watching him, but would not meet her eyes, and could not care what else she saw, knowing that what she saw her own alienated will would interpret in the interests of alien feelings.

In a helplessness such as he had never known nor imagined, he went through those few days, waiting for a final pronouncement in action of what her words had already told him.

A note came for him from her, at the end of the week. He felt frightened and sick when he saw it, though he had never looked on her handwriting before. Studying with fascinated distress the characters of his own name on the envelope's whiteness, he tried to think what was inside, trying to imagine something that existed in her mind but still, even in that moment, had no existence for him. He knew what was written, and was trying to remember. No, no—he did not know. The handwriting was uneven and without marked character, like that of women whose hearts are generous and deeply swayed, to the confusion of their minds. He looked most carefully at it. No trace of scholasticism had shaped that
C
or that clumsy
F. Charles Fox.
He looked at it, surprised to think that that brief and definite description meant himself, meant his body and the tumult that was his mind; and as he thought of this he saw her hand resting on the paper under the pen, making these marks.

A note inside the envelope said with the rapidity of thought:

Elsa and John are going away for Christmas for
a week
,
but that's all. After that I have to come
back to start getting ready. There is nothing else
,
I must go
,
but I will be down there for a week with
you anyhow.

And then, like a futile crying aloud:

Oh Charles if we had never known one another that
day you would be happy now and it would be so
easy and for you too. Do you wish we never had?

He laid it flat on his table. A green light, like sunshine refracted by sea-water, came softly into the room beneath the faded canvas awning pitched outside above the window. In this light the stumbling handwriting looked illusory and kept escaping him. After he had been staring at it for some time, watching it vanish and reappear, he heard his mother calling him from the foot of the stairs. Folding the sheet, he put it carefully into the torn envelope and went down.

‘Come and help me, son,' she said. ‘There's that new bed to be laid out; I can't decide. Jimmy says it should go between the coach-house and the wall. You have a look.'

She went out into the blind brilliance of the morning with him, pulling on an old shapeless hat of straw to keep the fury of the sunlight from her face, and perhaps to make it not unnatural that he should not see her eyes. She was glancing about as she talked, but not at him. The white look in his face half an hour ago, when he came in with the mail that one of the O'Neills had left at the outer gate, had alarmed her, and she knew that her alarm must not be revealed to him—not yet. After months of absence from him during which she had found it hard to write as she had written at first, when all was well between them, in the new knowledge that her quiet command of his affection in obedience was now put in peril by what she could not yet control, she was determined to say nothing to him of that girl until he spoke; and even then she had not thought what to say. All her life it had been clear to her that the emotion of every moment dictated its own happiest expressions.

Meanwhile, walking with him out into the sun, she was satisfied that for the present he should be unhappy and alone with her; and she spoke easily of small things. They had considered the placing of the bed for new roses, and to please him she was agreeing with his own suggestion, when Jimmy joined them, wiping sweat from his brown, creased forehead with the back of one wrist. His blue eyes under sandy brows were bright and interested.

‘No, Mist' Charles. Not there, lad,' he said mildly, having in his turn surveyed the position Charles had liked.

‘Why not?' Charles, ready now to be at once defiant of all opposition, of whatever importance, spoke almost angrily. For no reason at all he was determined to hold to what he had suggested.

‘Why, because of the weather, ye see. It comes that way.' Jimmy waved his pipe at the hard, flawless sky in the north-west. ‘Put 'em as you want, and they'll get the worst of it, lad.'