The Young Desire It by Kenneth Mackenzie Page B

as that, can we?’
    â€˜It’s a pity we can’t,’ Charles said, in sudden enthusiasm. ‘It’s a pity—yes, it is a pity. Did they have boarding schools, sir?’
    Penworth laughed, a barking, Alma-Mater, wit-appreciating laugh.
    â€˜Well—not of this sort. Why, don’t you like it here?’
    â€˜No. At least, not very much, sir. I do like it when you talk to me like this, though. It makes me alive again.’ He realized as he spoke that Penworth had been speaking to him as though to an equal; and, perhaps for that, he felt in some way an equal. In what way that was, he did not understand. Well, he thought, it will not last. To-morrow morning I shall have to pretend that I don’t know him any better than anyone else does.
    But he was wonderfully heartened by such kind friendship, which was not feigned, as he knew very surely, and clearly hid no intention of doing him bodily insult.
    Penworth put an arm round his shoulders and rocked him gently to and fro.
    â€˜Like it, do you?’ he said quietly.
    Charles felt tears suddenly burn his eyelids, and knew his face was flushing, as it did in any strong emotion.
    â€˜Yes, sir.’
    Penworth looked for what seemed a long time into his eyes, with a steady, searching gaze, holding him closely with one arm round his shoulders. The pupils of his eyes were dilated darkly, as they might be in the passion of rage, or fear.
    He pulled himself away miserably. A moment later Penworth had gone. There were sounds of people coming up the other stairway. He could hear the light tenor tones of the Master with the sculpted features and carven eyelids, making some small and very quaint remark. He went to the stair. Penworth was gone.
    The feeling of tears was gone also. It would be good to go out through the heat of day, to have tea with Mr. Jones, now, in a place that looked like a home.
    Charles’s knowledge of world-creation had come to him from hearing read aloud parts of the Old Testament, which taught him in untroubling words that God had made the world in six days, and in the seventh had taken his ease in the front garden of His own creating; so that Charles imagined God as a full-bearded and venerable patriarch, and had never voluntarily approached the problem of creation to resolve it for himself. His thought was still largely shaped in immature and incoherent imagery; he knew, and was learning more widely, what things were pleasant and what were not; and the pleasant and unpleasant were gradually extending the scale of their degrees into subtlety and complexity, as he learned the positive and negative of life. As yet he was perhaps only looking through the spacious doorways of that real world where thought, conscious and deliberate and urgently objective, is exercised at large. The problem of God and of the world troubled him not, though its imagery was rich and pleasing.
    If his knowledge of world-creation was mistaken but conscious, his understanding of that act of man-creation wherein lies our destiny was neither conscious nor existent at all. He supposed that man was an animal and did as they do, if he thought about it at all. His idea here was barren of all imagery and without warmth; he had watched creatures of the fields making sport in the gusty wind and sunshine of the brief spring, and understood that they did as they were supposed to do, and that it was good that they should. Once, when he was a few years younger, an older cousin, whom he seldom saw, one day watched a bull and a cow together in one of the fields near home, and, as he smacked his lips with all the appreciation of an enthusiastic connoisseur, he told Charles that so it was men and women behaved. To Charles at eleven years of age this was so obviously a fantastic fiction, and an unpleasant clumsy idea too, that he knew he was being deliberately lied to, and dismissed the whole thing from his mind with the thought that Dick, his cousin, was far from being