The Young Desire It by Kenneth Mackenzie

muscle and bone; it was not concluded in minutes of time, for it was that sort of sublime struggle which death ends only because to most the dead have no arousing power. Even its sublimity was not apparent. There was merely a young Englishman being pleasant to a group of laughing boys. The new-comers in the dormitory took no part in this; they retired as much as possible from notice, looking side-ways sometimes at Charles with secret suspicion because he had probably set in motion some mildly lethal mechanism which would not be likely to discriminate. So he had no sympathy—unless from the boy in the next bed, a lad named Forrester, plump, bewildered and clearly fair game for any tormentor, with his shining brown cow-eyes inviting more disgraces.
    Penworth walked slowly down the aisle between the immaculate beds, hands in pockets, knees loose, lips wide in a quizzical smile, eyes sardonically watchful beneath the delicate stressed arches of their brows. The wave of unformulated antagonism spread out behind him; he felt it, and was angered, yet satisfied. His tolerant good-humour (after three whiskies with Waters downstairs) when he spoke was reflected back to him from them drunk with their own numerous youth; each party looked down a little upon the person and the character and the mind of the other. It was a very public gathering. They smiled with the sincerity of cats.
    This, thought Penworth, is a great Public School, run according to the English tradition; and it’s no more English than the country itself is England. When I am about, their voices are polite and their manners are good—or if they’re not I have to tell them so, and can punish them for their mistakes. When there’s no one like me to make them self-conscious, what must happen? What must it be like among them?
    And he realized that he had no more idea of their emotions and passions than they had of his. To him they were, and would always remain, crude, unchangeable young animals, who had never seen an English spring or an Oxford dusk; they were looking forward, but he looked back, for ever.
    To them, he was a foreigner whose speech they happened to understand. They watched him as the men on their fathers’ farms and stations watched any young English novice, hiding their smiles or not, as whatever courtesy they knew prompted them. The pure, cultured accent of his voice was always strange, even though they learnt to imitate it. They paid a high price in money for that accent, and for his knowledge of dead languages and their living tongue; he belonged to them, and to their successors—a necessary appurtenance; when they left the School to become, by passing through those dark gates, men, he would remain, and remain a teacher of young minds with a little brief and nominal authority over young bodies also. But he would remain as a stranger who talked of Home and meant that shape on their maps which they recognized as England, a place in which they believed, without imagery or emotion, and which few of them would ever see.
    With the oldest boys, prefects and classical scholars of the Sixth, he had a rather better standing. He once confessed, when he was older and the School was not much more than a memory, that he felt, when among them, as if he had suddenly found himself back in his Oxford Common Room, among young graduates of his own age.
    â€˜My own age,’ he repeated carefully. ‘Not my own tastes, of course. But according to our standards at Home their general intelligence, and their worldly intelligence especially, were well above their years. Of course there were crudities. Of course. But they knew what they wanted from life, and you felt they were going to have their way. I thought at first it might be some contemporary characteristic, something to do with their generation, you know. But I realized—it’s a sort of shock, even now—that after all their generation and mine were really the same. The