The Young Desire It Read Free Page A

School with his mother, walking from the railway station to the gates by a private path across a burnt, untidy field, overhung with Cape lilacs that still drooped, dusty and melancholy, in the late heat of afternoon.
    It was February, with three more months of summer yet to come. The private path at each step breathed up a soft orange dust that hid the polish of his shoes. Across a road at the farther side of the burnt field the dark old wood of the School gates threatened him. He was afraid. In the lower part of his belly fear kicked and pulsed like a child in the womb, ready to be born; but it was fear of a disorderly kind, born of ignorance. He knew nothing of what life was like for a boarder at a reputable Public School with a name for sportsmanship, gentlemanliness, manliness and the classics. Nor did he know that the experience of it would be coloured by his own round head of reddish, curling hair, his red lips, his green eyes turning hazel, and an innocence which his mind reflected in his face.
    His fear, disorderly and ignorant, found an outlet simply in regret for that life which had run its course and was now, as he walked beside his mother on the dusty path, coming quietly to its end. His mother herself symbolized it. A world where he had been left alone, happily free from the understanding and the companionship of any mind or heart; free and unscrutinized, with the greater part of each day given over to his own decision, in a world peopled and filled by himself in an infinite variety of disguise. That world had been chucked to the devil by a useful and necessary maternal decision, in which he had no part.
    The preparations for his entry into the high life of the reputable School (governed by the Board of the Council of Churches, rich and very holy) interested him enough to lend him a little courage when he was not alone. Freedom had gone suddenly; he did more things at the request of other people than he had ever done, it seemed, in his life. There was a visit to the city, where he was measured for new clothes by a powerful Scot, lame and charming, who turned him round and about as if he were a piece of furniture, and made his mother smile at him as though, now for the first time, they shared some trivial secret. For a week afterwards the names and appearances of a dozen city shops remained in his mind, together with a growing uneasiness of self-concern, which invaded his body like a disease, and made nightmares of his dreams. He began to pay the penalty of his own sensitiveness, and was often miserable. He had always been of an excitable temperament, liable to sudden emotional excesses; and now, on that short, endless walk from the station to the dark, sweltering School gates, the unpleasant excitement did a final triumphant battle with his defiance, and a lot of tears gathered in his eyes. Fruits of that victory. He began to press them away quietly with his knuckles, trembling and white.
    â€˜Charles. What’s the matter, Son?’
    His mother’s voice was as calm as ever. She did not lack affection for him; but, like the rest of her emotions and the arrangement of her own busy life, it was methodical and without evidence of heat.
    â€˜Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, Mother.’
    They walked across the blazing roadway.
    â€˜That’s right,’ she murmured, kindly enough, giving his hand a quiet grip between her coolly gloved fingers. ‘This isn’t really a prison, you know.’
    He had once said he feared it would be. But now her sense of method and procedure was at ease. And the gates swallowed them, like the blind open jaws of a dead shark, sinister and smally cathedraline. They had passed through. Freedom and innocence were, for Charles, left outside.
    It happened that the name of the Headmaster at that time was Fox. Charles knew this—his mother had told him, hoping to surprise and arouse in him some positive interest—and while they waited in the