The Young Desire It Read Free Page B

carpeted ante-room which opened into the august study he tried to take his mind away from troubles in his lower viscera (a new natural urge was threatening muscular control) by thinking of the scene which would present itself if this Fox were, unknown to them all, his own father, whom he did not remember. But in his imagination his mother would not come to life, nor soften and cry out; he could hear no passionate exclamations from her firm, straight lips, see no impulsive gesture. Such a gesture, even in his imagination, would have surprised him and seemed, to memory, foreign. Also, the face of this man hidden in the room into which a young boy had just been taken was the wooden ageless face of a young village policeman whom he had once seen mounting a bicycle outside the baker’s shop, and whom he had, by some undiscoverable association, thought to resemble his father. Meanwhile, the trembling in his guts persisted, and he moved his hands and feet restlessly.
    His mother was looking steadily in front of her, out beyond the open windows to where water sprinklers turned rhythmically, with faint sounds suggesting music, above clipped lawns. There was a melancholy murmur of doves across the tired afternoon spaces, and from quadrangles and corridors came the voices of boys. The voices were happy and shrill; but for Charles the whole forwardness of life had stopped upon a deep, uneasy pedal-note of suspense. In the ante-room there was a restless quiet. One or two mothers, coming late as he had done, were nervously preening and eyeing their boys, smiling at them, talking in low voices, seeming to find some sort of relief in touching their young, as frightened birds do with their broods. A big woman, badly dressed and intolerably nervous, with a heartbroken affection stiffening her plain face, looked from the pert child beside her to the other lads, and back again, and again at the others, with obvious fear. Words seemed to issue silently from the slight movement of her lips. Her own boy was a merry, ugly youngster; unselfconscious and as alert as an animal, he stared about him, and once put out his tongue at a fellow who was gazing fascinated at that large wreck of a woman from the cosseting shadow of a well-dressed, expressionless parent.
    With new and anguished consciousness Charles noticed these things, and was aware in the back of his mind of the doves’ moaning, the cheerful cool greenness of the lawns already in shadow, and the green sharpness of boys’ voices piercing the afternoon minutely. The heat of the day was easing a little, but a new building across the road beyond the lawns burnt red, each of its bricks a scorching coal as the sun caught it full and brazen from the upper west. A faint smell of wet earth came wandering into the breathless room, and the hairy leaves of cotton palms lay like opened fans on the tired air. In spite of the heat in the room Charles felt cold, and kept wiping the moist palms of his hands down the seams of his new breeches. His mother seemed unable to move, until a Master came out with smiling, conscious impressiveness from the study, and asked her to take ‘this little man’ within. That Master’s face had fascinated Charles since the first time he had issued forth in his black rustling gown. There was an amazing expression of ruthless and petty self-importance in its features, which were classically exact and would have been perfect, had they not seemed too small. When he bent his head and stooped gracefully, looking sideways across his nose, away from the person to whom with exquisite friendliness a small, delicate ear was inclined, and holding the folds of the gown in against his loins, there was revealed a pinkish tonsure of mathematical perfections in the middle of his crown, and from its decisive edge the dark hair was brushed away all round. The impression of his head, and of the face with its carven eyelids and lips, suggested a subtle parody of the head of an