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<pre>

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Young Physician, by Francis Brett Young


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.




Title: The Young Physician


Author: Francis Brett Young



Release Date: June 29, 2015  [eBook #49331]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN***
</pre>
<p>This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: center"><i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i>.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p>THE CRESCENT MOON</p>
<p>THE IRON AGE</p>
<p>THE DARK TOWER</p>
<p>DEEP SEA</p>
<p>UNDERGROWTH<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (with E. Brett
Young)</p>
<p>MARCHING ON TANGA</p>
<p>POEMS 1916&ndash;1918.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: center">E. P. <span
class="smcap">Dutton</span> &amp; <span
class="smcap">Company</span><br />
<span class="smcap">New York</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<h1>THE<br />
YOUNG PHYSICIAN</h1>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
/>
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG<br />
<span class="GutSmall">AUTHOR OF &ldquo;MARCHING ON TANGA,&rdquo;
ETC.</span></p>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/logo.jpg">
<img alt=
"E. P. Dutton logo"
title=
"E. P. Dutton logo"
 src="images/logo.jpg" />
</a></p>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<p style="text-align: center">NEW YORK<br />
E. P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY<br />
881 FIFTH AVENUE</p>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pageiv"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. iv</span>Copyright, 1920,<br />
By E. P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY</p>

<div class="gapshortline">&nbsp;</div>
<p style="text-align: center"><i>All Rights Reserved</i></p>

<div class="gapshortline">&nbsp;</div>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p><i>First printing</i></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>March</i>, 1920</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><i>Second printing</i></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>March</i>, 1920</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><i>Third printing</i></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>September</i>, 1920</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<p style="text-align: center">Printed in the United States of
America</p>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pagev"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. v</span><span class="smcap">To</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">Thomas Brett
Young</span>, M.D.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">WITH THE LOVE AND ADMIRATION<br />
OF HIS SON</p>

<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
<h2><a name="pagevii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
vii</span>CONTENTS</h2>
<table>
<tr>
<td colspan="3"><p style="text-align: center">BOOK I</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="GutSmall">CHAPTER</span></p>
</td>
<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
</td>
<td><p>MURDERER&rsquo;S CROSS</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
</td>
<td><p>GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THE GREEN TREES</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page27">27</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
</td>
<td><p>MIDSUMMER</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page42">42</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
</td>
<td><p>AIRS AND GRACES</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page57">57</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THUNDER WEATHER</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page69">69</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p>
</td>
<td><p>IMPURITY</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page86">86</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p>
</td>
<td><p>HOMEWARDS</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page107">107</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">IX.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THE DARK HOUSE</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page124">124</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THRENODY</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page153">153</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XI.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THE THRESHOLD</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XII.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THE HILLS</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page211">211</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3"><p style="text-align: center">BOOK II.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THE CITY OF IRON</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page249">249</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
</td>
<td><p>MORTALITY BEHOLD</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page272">272</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
</td>
<td><p>CARNIVAL</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page296">296</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><a name="pageviii"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. viii</span>IV.</p>
</td>
<td><p>SCIENCE</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page324">324</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
</td>
<td><p>ROMANCE</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page346">346</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THE DRESSER</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page372">372</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p>
</td>
<td><p>THE CLERK</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page403">403</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p>
</td>
<td><p>LOWER SPARKDALE</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page435">435</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">IX.</p>
</td>
<td><p>EASY ROW</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page460">460</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p>
</td>
<td><p>WHITE ROSES</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page487">487</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2><a name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p. ix</span>BOOK
I</h2>
<blockquote><p><a name="pagex"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
x</span><i>The green trees</i>, <i>when I saw them first through
one of the gates</i>, <i>transported and ravished me</i>;
<i>their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and
almost mad with ecstasy</i>,&mdash;<i>they were such strange and
wonderful things</i>.&nbsp; <i>The skies were mine</i>, <i>and so
were the sun and moon and stars</i>,&mdash;<i>and all the world
was mine</i>,&mdash;<i>and I the only spectator and enjoyer of
it</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Thomas
Traherne</span>.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>CHAPTER
I<br />
MURDERER&rsquo;S CROSS</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Above</span> and beyond the zone of
villas, some still white with newly-mixed mortar and the latest
unadorned by more than twelve-foot tendrils of ampelopsis or
rambling roses, the downs bent their bow to the sky.&nbsp; The
horizon loomed so smooth and vast that the plantations of pine
and beech which fringed the summits were powerless to break the
nobility and purpose of its contour, etched gray-black against
the hem of a thunder-cloud that was of the colour of ink.&nbsp;
Between the banks a chalk road climbed: an aspiring road, felted
in the trodden parts with dust but cross-veined with flinty
gutters through which rain poured, like London milk, in stormy
weather.&nbsp; A smell of hot earth was in the air.&nbsp; The
turf at the wayside was parched and slippery, so that Edwin
Ingleby, plodding up the slope, was forced to keep to the white
roadway by the slipperiness of his boot-leather.&nbsp; A rather
pitiful figure he made, this small boy in an Eton jacket, his
waistcoat now unbuttoned and his school cap crumpled in his hot
hands.&nbsp; He walked and ran straight upward, as though the
devil were <a name="page2"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
2</span>at his heels; sometimes looking behind him to see if
there were any one in pursuit, sometimes wiping the sweat from
his forehead with the crumpled cap.</p>
<p>A wagonette, drawn by a pair of horses and burdened with
trippers, jolted past him, throwing up a cloud of chalk-dust that
made his eyes smart.&nbsp; Inside it swayed seven fat women in
black bodices.&nbsp; The guard, who was sufficiently sober, in
his own opinion, to ride on the step, was seen to laugh at the
dust-smothered boy in the road.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Poor lamb,&rdquo; said the most motherly of the
seven.&nbsp; &ldquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t &rsquo;e like a
lift?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Gowing the hopposite way, mem,&rdquo; said the
guard.&nbsp; &ldquo;One of them College lads.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Ot &rsquo;e looks!&rdquo; said the lady.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Going to rine kets and dorgs, too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin Ingleby rubbed the dust out of, or into, his eyes and
went plugging on to the top of the ridge where the road dipped
through a belt of beeches into the trough between two billows of
down, losing itself within high banks of turf which bordered the
plough-land, satiny now with bearded wheat and infinitely
restful.&nbsp; He sat down on the bank with his feet in the
gutter and began to mop up tears with the cap that he had lately
used for mopping up sweat.&nbsp; All the time that he was crying,
his heart was really full of almost incontinent valour, and that
was why his tears made him angry.&nbsp; He began talking to
himself:&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Damned beast . . . great beefy beast. . . .&nbsp; If
only the men could see what a damned beast he is.&nbsp; If Layton
or some one could give him what he wants.&nbsp; Only no one could
fight him. . . .&nbsp; He&rsquo;s got <a name="page3"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 3</span>a weak heart, and it might kill
him.&nbsp; I suppose that would be murder. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>The word suddenly got a new significance.&nbsp; They called
this road Murderer&rsquo;s Cross Road.&nbsp; High up in the
grassy bank some pious person had cut a St. Andrew&rsquo;s cross
to commemorate the murder of a postman who had been relieved of
his bags and his life on a dark night a century ago.&nbsp; The
college tradition said that it was haunted.&nbsp; Certainly it
had an ugly sound.&nbsp; Murderer&rsquo;s Cross Road: a name to
be whispered.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Funny . . .&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing very awful about it.&nbsp; I could
understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.&nbsp; Quite
easily.&nbsp; Only he might be sorry about it afterwards.&nbsp; I
wouldn&rsquo;t mind murdering Griffin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He took a silver watch out of his pocket and laid it on the
bank beside him.&nbsp; He could see that there was a full hour to
spare before the bell in the water tower would jangle for the
evening roll-call in the corner of the Quad; and so he lay back
easily on the bank, stretching out his legs and arms in the form
of the St. Andrew&rsquo;s cross scored in the hedge a little
farther on.&nbsp; Lying thus he could watch the shimmer on the
bearded wheat.&nbsp; He had always loved the softness of this dip
in the downs.&nbsp; He had loved it on winter mornings delicately
dusted with rime, in November when flints lay like a bloom on the
pale fallow, in March when the bloom turned green.&nbsp; Now the
thunder-clouds had rolled away, rumbling, from the south, and a
breath of cooler air was moving through the valley, throwing the
surface of that green sea into <a name="page4"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 4</span>wave-like motion; the waves shuddered
faintly and the sound came to his ears as though re-echoed from
the heavy woods which stood still in the heat, bounding the green
ripples; and lying there, with his eyes half-closed, Edwin was
already afloat, bearing westward with the set of the tide in the
track of Cortes and Columbus and Pizarro and other adventurous
voyagers.&nbsp; It was not really very difficult for him to
forget his tears.&nbsp; Although the fear of Griffin, that had
first driven him afield, was a cruel obsession to which he was
liable by night and day, he had long ago discovered that silence
and solitude could make him free of any wonder which he chose to
imagine.&nbsp; It had been like that even when he was quite
little; he had always possessed the faculty of day-dreaming; and
now that his imagination was beginning to flush at the sound of
great names, and the pomps of chivalry and legend were slowly
unfolding before him with their subtle suggestiveness unhampered
by such knowledge of detail as would be alive to incongruities,
his idleness became daily more precious.&nbsp; He suddenly
remembered that Achaean assembly stirred by Agamemnon&rsquo;s
words &ldquo;as when the West wind cometh to stir a deep
cornfield with violent blast, and the ears bow down. . .
.&rdquo;&nbsp; And now the wind-moved wheat bent like a stricken
army before knightly lances, and the roll of retreating thunder
awoke echoes of the guns of Waterloo. . . .</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin,
oddly enough on the very first day of <a name="page5"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 5</span>his life at St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
Mrs. Ingleby had come down from the Midlands with him, a little
anxious, for there were pitfalls in public school life (it was in
ninety-five), but immensely proud of Edwin&rsquo;s entrance
scholarship.&nbsp; They had crossed London together in a hansom,
and on the smoky platform at Victoria, she had bidden him a
good-bye which cost her some pangs, for the poor boy was half
dead with train-sickness.&nbsp; Edwin was her only child, and
some smouldering ethic decreed that he must not be pampered, but
when she raised her veil to kiss him, tears escaped beneath its
rim.&nbsp; Those tears were very unsettling; they gave him a
sudden glimpse of his mother in a new light; but he felt too ill
even to watch her hurrying to the end of the platform.&nbsp; His
head ached so violently in the sulphurous station air that he
wouldn&rsquo;t have minded much if some one, say his next-door
neighbour in the train, a city clerk who smoked the most manly
tobacco, had relieved him of the half-sovereign, the last gift of
all, that he clutched mechanically in his left-hand trouser
pocket&mdash;or if the porters, in the fine free way they have,
had smashed all the jampots in the playbox so obstrusively white
and new, with</p>
<p style="text-align: center">E. INGLEBY<br />
115</p>
<p>in black lettering on the lid.</p>
<p>The rest of that journey he had been too prostrate and
lethargic to realise.&nbsp; Somewhere the shouting of a familiar
word had bundled him out of his <a name="page6"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 6</span>corner; a porter whom he had tipped
fumblingly had bundled him into a cab which smelt of straw, and
at last the martial-looking personage who received him at the
grand entrance had conveyed him up a broad flight of stone stairs
and along a corridor that echoed their two pairs of foot-steps,
to the housemaster&rsquo;s room, where, in an atmosphere of
mellow honeydew, Mr. Selby sat at his desk, trifling with a
bath-list of the big dormitory.&nbsp; Ingleby sat at one end of a
luxurious sofa, feeling very sick.&nbsp; It seemed as though he
could never escape from the smell of tobacco.&nbsp; At the other
end of the sofa sat another boy, perhaps three years older than
Edwin.&nbsp; He was tall for his age and inclined to be
fat.&nbsp; His feet were small and shapely, and their smallness
accentuated the heavy build of his shoulders, so that the whole
boy seemed to taper downwards on the lines of a peg-top.&nbsp; He
had a broad face, covered with freckles, regular but
undistinguished features, and eyes, rather wide apart, of a
peculiar cold and light blue.&nbsp; His hair was crisp and sandy;
his whole get-up a little dandiacal within the limits of black
and gray.&nbsp; He kept on fingering silver coins, that jingled
together faintly in the depths of his pocket; perhaps he was
counting them in the dark; perhaps he was merely fidgeting.</p>
<p>Mr. Selby looked up from his bath-list.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, Griffin, and what is your pleasure?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Letter from father, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A letter from father would need an answer.&nbsp; Mr. Selby,
although an expert in the tortuous psychology of parents, was a
lazy man.&nbsp; He sighed as <a name="page7"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 7</span>he opened it.&nbsp; &ldquo;H&rsquo;m .
. .&nbsp; No games?&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t look particularly ill,
Griffin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Doctor said I was growing too fast, sir . . . something
about my heart.&rdquo;&nbsp; Griffin&rsquo;s manners were
irreproachable.</p>
<p>Mr. Selby smiled.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very well, Griffin, very well.&nbsp; I will speak to
the head-master about you.&nbsp; And who is this miserable
weed?&rdquo;</p>
<p>There had been no break in the drawl of Mr. Selby&rsquo;s
voice with this change of subject, and Edwin did not hear, or
heard without understanding.&nbsp; Griffin shook him by the
shoulder.&nbsp; He lurched forward like a creature coming out of
a cellar into day light.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby, sir,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby . . .&nbsp; Oh, yes.&nbsp; Let me see.&nbsp;
You won&rsquo;t need to take the placing exam. to-morrow because
of your scholarship papers.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be in the lower
fourth.&nbsp; So Griffin will look after you.&nbsp; Do you hear,
Griffin?&nbsp; I think Ingleby will be in your form.&nbsp; You
are not overwhelmingly likely to get a move, are you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Griffin murmured &ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then you can conduct this Ingleby to D dormitory,
Griffin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Griffin whispered &ldquo;Come on,&rdquo; and walked ahead down
the length of the corridor and another flight of stairs to a room
of immense length, with whitewashed walls, along which were
ranged as many as thirty red-blanketed beds.&nbsp; Down the
centre of the dormitory a trestled table of well-scoured wood <a
name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 8</span>held a double
row of wash-hand basins and soap-dishes.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There you are,&rdquo; said Griffin, in a very off-hand
way.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;d better bag a bed.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Which one is mine, please?&rdquo; Edwin asked.&nbsp;
His head was aching so furiously that he could have lain down on
the floor.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve told you, you&rsquo;ve got to bag one.&nbsp;
Don&rsquo;t you hear?&nbsp; You&rsquo;d better go and ask that
man over there.&nbsp; Try the next one to his.&rdquo;</p>
<p>That man over there was a stumpy boy with the face of a hyena
and a shock of black hair, who scowled at Ingleby&rsquo;s
approach.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Here, get away.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t come here.&nbsp;
I don&rsquo;t want any new kids near me.&nbsp; Keep him to
yourself, Griffin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Ingleby was thrown violently into Griffin&rsquo;s arms, and
then buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between
them.&nbsp; This game proved to be such excellent fun that
wherever he sought a bed on which to lay his things it was
continued by his immediate neighbours.&nbsp; He was greenly pale
and beginning to cry when a tall, dark boy, wearing glasses,
arrived and made straight for the group that surrounded him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s Layton,&rdquo; whispered some one.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s this?&rdquo; he asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;A new
boy?&mdash;What&rsquo;s your name?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;They won&rsquo;t let me find a bed.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come along down this end, then.&rdquo;&nbsp; He moved
majestically to the end of the dormitory nearest <a
name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 9</span>to the door and
pointed to a vacant bedstead, &ldquo;There you are,&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; He was kindly without the least trace of
unbending.&nbsp; Ingleby took him for a prefect; already he had
received the canonisation of heroism.&nbsp; He stood and watched
Edwin spread out his nightshirt on the bed.&nbsp; At this moment
the climax of his migraine arrived.&nbsp; Edwin was sick.</p>
<p>Layton&rsquo;s lips curled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Dirty little
skunk,&rdquo; he said as he hurried away.</p>
<p>A slipper, cleverly aimed from the other end of the room,
caught Ingleby full on his burning cheek.&nbsp; The pain seemed
to blind him.</p>
<p>And a skunk, in spite of himself, he remained, for small boys
are as persistently unintelligent as parrots in their memory for
names.&nbsp; Ingleby&rsquo;s &ldquo;skunkhood&rdquo; became a
tradition that he never wholly lived down during his first years
at St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; In them he experienced all the
inevitable qualms of homesickness, although even these were more
tolerable than the physical qualms which had complicated his
arrival, for they passed quickly in the excitement of a new life,
the adoption of new standards, the spring of new ambitions.&nbsp;
It was a thousand times unfortunate that he should have made such
a sensational d&eacute;b&ucirc;t, that chance should have
included such circumstances as Griffin and a sick-headache in his
first day; for all that was instinct in the boy rebelled against
the category in which he found himself placed, the definition of
his status that had been hastily formulated by a few small boys,
and almost tacitly accepted by the masters.</p>
<p>To begin with, he had very few of the attributes <a
name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 10</span>of the
skunk.&nbsp; He was neither dirty nor undersized: indeed he had a
nice instinct for personal cleanliness, and all the slim,
balanced beauty of a young boy&rsquo;s figure.&nbsp; He was far
from unintelligent&mdash;though this counts for little enough in
the schedules of precedence at school.&nbsp; It amounted to this:
he was not used to the company of other boys; he had never played
games; he had made himself objectionable on his first night in
the dormitory&mdash;and Layton had called him a skunk.&nbsp;
Griffin saw to the rest, seconded by the lad with the hyena face,
who bore the illustrious name of Douglas.&nbsp; Strangely enough
no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped the romance in the
hyena-faced&rsquo;s name.&nbsp; Setting out to find any tokens of
Chevy Chase beneath the black mop, he was caught staring in Hall,
and as a proper retribution for such insolence, subjected to the
pain and indignity of a &ldquo;tight six&rdquo; with a gym shoe,
his head wedged in two stocks of Mr. Griffin&rsquo;s
thighs.&nbsp; New boys of his own age, and smaller, seeing this
exhibition, formed a very low estimate of Ingleby.&nbsp; They
shuddered also at the knowledge that he had been heard to ask the
difference between a drop-kick and a punt.</p>
<p>This isolation, except for purposes of chastisement, weighed
heavily on Edwin.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t wish to be different from
others, although he felt that his mind was somehow of a painfully
foreign texture.&nbsp; He knew that things somehow struck him
differently . . . but he was so far from taking this as a mark of
superiority that he was heartily ashamed of it.&nbsp; His whole
ambition was towards the normal; he tried vigorously to suppress
<a name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
11</span>imagination, humour, all the inconvenient things with
which he had been cursed; to starve them, to destroy them.&nbsp;
He became studious of the ways of normality.&nbsp; Griffin and
the noble Douglas were handy exemplars; Layton, the head of the
house, an unattainable ideal.&nbsp; Layton, indeed, was something
of a variant; but Layton, by means of his slim skull&rsquo;s
capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating piety, had
passed beyond the pale of everyday endeavour.&nbsp; Edwin longed
to be normal, and they wouldn&rsquo;t let him.&nbsp; He
cultivated assiduously the use of the fashionable slang; and
that, of course, was easy.&nbsp; He whipped up an interest in
outdoor games; played his very hardest in the ordinary house
football, and even volunteered to take part in the Soccer games
organised on fag-days for small boys by Mr. Selby, who nursed a
lazy grudge against the Rugby Code.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Miserable
Weeds,&rdquo; they were called, enshrining his favourite
epithet.&nbsp; But though he plunged out of school every morning
to practise place-kicking in the fields before dinner, Ingleby
was not destined to shine in sport.&nbsp; His habit of dropping
off to sleep between fitful bursts of brilliance almost caused
him to be uprooted from Mr. Selby&rsquo;s plantation of
weeds.&nbsp; This didn&rsquo;t worry him much, because Soccer was
not popular; but after two trials in the house third, which the
baleful Douglas captained, he was degraded to the scratch side
known as Small Boys; and even here the scrum extinguished a
talent that might have shone in the three-quarter line.</p>
<p>And since he failed in every endeavour to attain normality,
whether by devotion to games or by <a name="page12"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 12</span>those attempts which he made to prove
that he was neither &ldquo;coxy&rdquo; nor &ldquo;pi,&rdquo; by a
retiring manner and a foul tongue, he began to crawl back into
his shell, nursing a passionate hatred, not unmixed with envy,
for all those people whom he couldn&rsquo;t hope to be
like.&nbsp; And so, in a little time, this dangerous humiliation
turned to a sort of pride.&nbsp; It pleased him to count himself
their superior even when he was most downtrodden.&nbsp; His form
master had recently been boring the class with a little
dissertation on Marcus Aurelius.&nbsp; Edwin became a Stoic,
spending his days in far corners of the box-room, munching a
slowly dwindling store of biscuits.&nbsp; Once Griffin caught him
with his locker door open and pinioned him against the benches
while Douglas made free with his Petits-Beurres to the rest of
the box-room.&nbsp; For such contingencies as this the
Emperor&rsquo;s system of philosophy seemed hardly adequate.</p>
<p>Most of all he dreaded the dormitory; for here the abandonment
of clothes laid him open to particularly painful forms of
oppression; the shock and horror of bedclothes ragged just as he
was falling off to sleep; the numbing swing of a pillow, the
lancinating flick of wet towels; Oh!&mdash;a hell of a life, only
to be terminated by the arrival of Layton, who had the privilege
of sitting up till eleven, with black rings round his spectacled
eyes.&nbsp; He was reading for a scholarship at Cambridge.&nbsp;
Then Ingleby would really get off to sleep, or sometimes, if he
were too excited, watch the moonlight, broken by the stone
mullions of the windows, whiten the long washing-table and cast
blue shadows so intense that <a name="page13"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 13</span>they heightened the bareness of the
dormitory; or else he would listen to the harsh breathing of
Douglas, who slept with his mouth open, and wonder what all those
heavy sleepers were dreaming of, or if they dreamed at all.&nbsp;
And then his own magic casements were opened.</p>
<p>At St. Luke&rsquo;s he had discovered the trick&mdash;quite a
new thing for him&mdash;of historical dreaming.&nbsp; His form
were busy with the age of the Stuarts, under the direction of a
master named Leeming, a mild-eyed cleric, rather shy of boys and
feverishly grateful whenever he sprung a response to his own
enthusiasms.</p>
<p>Ingleby drank deep of the period&rsquo;s romance, and this
heady wine coloured his dreams.&nbsp; He would dream sometimes of
the tenanted oak of Boscobel, watching with agony the movements
of the Roundhead searchers; sometimes he would stand elbowing in
the crowd about that scaffold at Whitehall, when the martyr king
stepped out.&nbsp; The man at his left hand had been eating
garlic.&nbsp; Ha!&mdash;a Frenchman.&nbsp; One of those
musketeers! . . .&nbsp; He would tremble with delight.&nbsp; He
wished that he could tell Mr. Leeming of his dreams, but they
were far too precious to risk being bruised by laughter or
unconcern.&nbsp; All night long this queer panoramic rubbish
would go seething through his brain, until, at six-fifteen, one
of the waiters swung a harsh bell outside the dormitory door and
he would turn over, trying to piece together the thin stuff that
its clangour had so suddenly broken, until the <i>ten-bell</i>
rang, and the rush for early school began.&nbsp; He <a
name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 14</span>grew to love
the winter terms because the darkness lasted longer.</p>
<p>But he did write to his mother about it.&nbsp; Always on
Sunday mornings the sergeant would come in with a letter from
her, full of the strangely remote news of home; how the garden
was looking, what Aunt Laura was doing, and how they talked of
felling the elm-trees in the lane.&nbsp; Sometimes, with the
lavishness of an angel, she would put a couple of penny stamps
inside for his reply.&nbsp; The odd stamp would buy a stick of
chocolate or a packet of nougat at the tuck shop.&nbsp; And in
these letters she rose, quite unexpectedly, to the recitation of
his dreams.&nbsp; &ldquo;How lovely it must be for you,&rdquo;
she wrote.&nbsp; &ldquo;When you come home for the holidays at
Christmas we will read some of Scott&rsquo;s novels
aloud&mdash;<i>Waverley</i> and <i>Nigel</i>, and that will give
you something more to dream about.&rdquo;&nbsp; He began to
realise what he hadn&rsquo;t seen before: that his mother was
really a wonderful playfellow&mdash;much better, when he came to
think of it, than any of the boys.&nbsp; He would have so much to
explain to her. . . .&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, you dear, you are
lovely!&rdquo; he wrote in reply.</p>
<p>And then one day, that sneak Douglas, fooling about in the
dormitory with Edwin&rsquo;s toothbrush, happened to see the
words that were faintly printed on the ivory handle:&mdash;</p>
<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">INGLEBY, CHEMIST,
HALESBY.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Oho,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>At breakfast, after a propitiatory but futile helping of jam
from Edwin&rsquo;s pot, he broke the glad news to Griffin.</p>
<p><a name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
15</span>&ldquo;Ingleby&rsquo;s father&rsquo;s a chemist,
Griff.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then that&rsquo;s why he&rsquo;s such a skunk,
Duggy.&nbsp; Is it true, Ingleby?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a chemist.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then he isn&rsquo;t a gentleman.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course he&rsquo;s a gentleman.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not if he&rsquo;s in trade.&nbsp; They oughtn&rsquo;t
to have sent you to school here.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a bally
shame.&rdquo;</p>
<p>That same afternoon Edwin was poring over a letter at his desk
in Big School.&nbsp; His mother always told him to keep her
letters.&nbsp; &ldquo;Some day you may like to look at
them,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; He was reading this letter for the
tenth time to see if he could extract some last scrapings of the
atmosphere of home which it had brought him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s that letter from?&nbsp; . . .&nbsp;
Girl?&rdquo; said Griffin rudely.</p>
<p>&ldquo;A lady.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;My mother.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Christ!&nbsp; Your mother isn&rsquo;t a lady, or she
wouldn&rsquo;t have married a chemist . . . or be your
mother.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the form on which he had
been sitting, and lashed out at Griffin&rsquo;s face.&nbsp; He
wanted to smash the freckled thing.&nbsp; He only caught the
boy&rsquo;s cheek with the flat of his hand, and then, after a
second of dazed wonder at his own achievement, he rushed out of
Big School, across the Quad, and up that white, dust-felted road
to the downs.</p>
<h3><a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
16</span>CHAPTER II<br />
GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Of</span> course he got his thrashing in
return; but, in the end, he found himself the gainer by that
unthinkable outburst.&nbsp; The incident had been noted, and
there were those who relished the blow to Griffin&rsquo;s
prestige, a blow which no recriminatory lickings could
efface.&nbsp; Edwin assured himself that he had that day lighted
such a candle in England as should never be put out.&nbsp; It
seemed, indeed, as though the affair had revealed to some of his
own classmates that intellectual superiority which they had
overlooked before; and, in particular, it made the basis of a
friendship between himself and one of his rivals, a boy named
Widdup, who combined with a head for
mathematics&mdash;Edwin&rsquo;s blank despair&mdash;a certain
proficiency in games.&nbsp; Widdup disliked Griffin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Great beefy beast,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;If
they&rsquo;d make him play footer and sweat some of the fat off
him he&rsquo;d have been a bit quicker on you.&nbsp; He
wasn&rsquo;t half waxy about it.&nbsp; He hates being laughed at.
. . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>And so, as the terms slipped by, St. Luke&rsquo;s ceased to be
a purgatory.&nbsp; Edwin contracted certain timid <a
name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
17</span>friendships&mdash;as this with Widdup&mdash;and adored a
series of perfectly ordinary prefects.&nbsp; He shook down into
his proper place in the scheme of things, and after that nobody
took much notice of him.&nbsp; Even the Griffin-Douglas
coalition, who never forgave, troubled him very little.&nbsp;
Certain outbursts of persecution he took as a matter of course;
such was the teaching of history; but the ways of these two were
now widely divergent from those in which he trod.&nbsp; The
dormitory was the only place in which they inevitably met, for he
had managed to move his seat in Hall some way from that of
Griffin; and in chapel, the only other place they had in common,
he was safe.</p>
<p>The friendship with Widdup notably ripened.&nbsp; They were
both members of the same branch of the Natural History Society,
the one that was labelled astronomical.&nbsp; The subject was
unpopular, for its pursuit was nocturnal and made no exciting
appeal to the hunting instinct of boys.&nbsp; The section met
every fortnight in the room of one of the mathematical
masters.&nbsp; And since they met at night, they managed to
escape second Prep.&nbsp; Their president, Mr. Heal, was a rather
melancholy performer on the flute, and Edwin, generally
contriving to turn up some minutes before the meeting began,
would stand at the door listening to the innocent gentleman
playing to himself unaccompanied folk-tunes that he had collected
in the holidays.&nbsp; At the first sound of a door-knock Heal
would unscrew his flute and pack it into a case lined with
puce-coloured plush; but it seemed as though an afterglow of
tenderness still lingered on his unusually dull <a
name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
18</span>features.&nbsp; As for astronomy, they never got much
farther than the mere names of constellations and their figures,
although Widdup often asked questions which almost tapped the
mathematical master&rsquo;s subject.&nbsp; These adventures were
discouraged, for Mr. Heal had grown to hate mathematics.&nbsp;
But they did learn to find their way about the paths of the sky,
and often, on frosty winter evenings, when the clear vault above
the downs was like jet, Edwin and Widdup would walk up and down
the Quad and imagine that they could feel the heave of the
spinning world, while they watched Capella scale the dome of
sky.&nbsp; And once, when he had come to the master&rsquo;s room
a little early on the night of the section meeting, Mr. Heal
cleared his throat and, taking Edwin by the ear, began to read
from an olive-green book that he held in his hand.&nbsp; He read
atrociously.&nbsp; &ldquo;How do you like this?&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;H&rsquo;m?&rdquo;&nbsp; He said
&ldquo;H&rsquo;m&rdquo; with a little snarl in it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The Dog Star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless
Pleiades, were half up the southern sky, and between them hung
Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than
now, as it swung itself forth above the rim of the landscape;
Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the
meridian: the barren and gloomy square of Pegasus was creeping
round to the North-West; far away through the plantation Vega
sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and
Cassiopeia&rsquo;s chair stood daintily poised in the uppermost
boughs.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin thought it was &ldquo;fine.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Better than the <i>Story of the Heavens</i>?&rdquo;
asked <a name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 19</span>Mr.
Heal.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come, come, Ingleby . . . surely
not?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Rather, sir,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>Mr. Heal shut the book.&nbsp; &ldquo;The barren and gloomy
square of Pegasus,&rdquo; he murmured to himself.&nbsp; And all
the rest of that evening Edwin found himself remembering the
phrase.&nbsp; The bareness and the gloom of Pegasus had never
struck him before; and now, at a sudden suggestion, the whole
atmosphere of the sky had changed; the vague heavens became
habitable to his fancy; new and immense territory opened before
him. . . .</p>
<p>He told Widdup what he remembered of the passage that Heal had
read.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Poor old Tommy,&rdquo; said Widdup
compassionately.&nbsp; &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t an exact square at
all.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s an irregular quadrilateral, and I
don&rsquo;t see anything gloomy about it.&nbsp; Stars
aren&rsquo;t gloomy anyway.&nbsp; Look how they sparkle.&nbsp;
Look at Vega.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Above the gable of the swimming bath that wonderful star
throbbed white.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>In the Lent term they both had measles and woke with swollen
eyes to find each other side by side.&nbsp; In the same ward at
the Sanatorium was Layton&rsquo;s successor, Payne, a thawed,
thin, almost unfamiliar Payne; and while they swam upon the first
buoyant spirits of convalescence, the sheer hulk of Griffin was
hove in, in the snivelling misery of the early stages.&nbsp;
Edwin thought that Griffin had never looked so beastly, and
rejoiced in the pig&rsquo;s humiliation; but when, at last,
Griffin recovered he found his ancient victim a handy plaything,
and for want <a name="page20"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
20</span>of anything better to do attempted to seduce Widdup from
Edwin&rsquo;s friendship.&nbsp; Edwin never quite forgave Widdup
his defection; and when they were all better and back in school
again he found that he still had to avoid Griffin on whom the
habit of persecution had been regrafted.&nbsp; It seemed such a
pity . . . he thought he had outgrown all that sort of thing.</p>
<p>And now he hated Griffin for a new reason.&nbsp; While they
were together in the Sanatorium, after the departure of Payne,
Griffin had spoken boastfully of his relations with one of the
&ldquo;Skivvies&rdquo; whose morning task was the making of beds
in D dormitory.&nbsp; It appeared that Griffin had met her first
by accident, and later by appointment, and he himself described
her as &ldquo;very hot pastry.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was familiar with
certain shops in the neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, which
made persuasion easy.&nbsp; To Edwin, whose life at home had kept
him in ignorance of all that a boy of fifteen ought to know,
everything sounded horrible, and he said so.&nbsp; He remembered
the look of the girl quite well: rather an&aelig;mic with black
hair and a pretty oval face.&nbsp; Griffin and Widdup howled over
his innocence, and began to instruct him in the &ldquo;origins of
life.&rdquo;&nbsp; All these things came as a great shock to
Edwin.&nbsp; He felt a passionate conviction that the other two
were fooling him.&nbsp; Unfortunately his father had never
employed a coachman.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe a bit of it,&rdquo; he said with
tears in his eyes.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You silly kid,&rdquo; said Widdup.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Everybody knows it&rsquo;s true.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
21</span>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe my father would do a thing
like that,&rdquo; cried Edwin.</p>
<p>It seemed suddenly as if the world had become a gross and
horrible planet.&nbsp; The fetters of earth were galling his
limbs.&nbsp; He felt a sudden immense yearning for the coolness
and cleanliness of stellar space.&nbsp; If only he could pass the
rest of his life in the great square of Pegasus! . . .&nbsp; And
he was consoled by the assurance that in heaven, at any rate,
there was no marrying or giving in marriage. . . .</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>Next term, to his great joy, he was moved up into the Upper
Fourth, and had for his form-master the gentle Mr. Leeming, a fat
and cheerful cleric with clean-shaven cheeks that shone like
those of a trumpet-blowing cherub.&nbsp; He was very
shortsighted, rather lazy, and intensely grateful for the least
spark of intelligence to be found in his class.&nbsp; Edwin soon
attracted him by his history and essays.&nbsp; His mother had
fulfilled her promise of reading <i>The Fortunes of Nigel</i>
aloud in the holidays, and, as luck would have it again, the
Upper Fourth were supposed to be concentrating on the early
Stuarts.&nbsp; To the bulk of the form the period was a vast and
almost empty chamber like the big schoolroom, inhabited by one or
two stiff figures, devitalised by dates&mdash;a very dreary
place.&nbsp; But to Edwin it was crowded with the swaggerers of
Alsatia, the bravoes of Whitehall, with prentices, and penniless
Scotchmen, and all the rest of Scott&rsquo;s gallant company.</p>
<p><a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
22</span>&ldquo;Have any of you read <i>Nigel</i>?&rdquo; Mr.
Leeming asked the class.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I have, sir,&rdquo; said Edwin shyly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I have already gathered so, Ingleby.&nbsp; Has anybody
else read it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Silence.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think I shall ask the head master to
set it to the Middle School as a holiday task,&rdquo; said Mr.
Leeming.</p>
<p>Thus narrowly did Edwin escape the disaster of having Scott
spoiled for him.</p>
<p>Mr. Leeming was the master in charge of the library, and Edwin
began to spend the long winter lock-ups in this room.&nbsp; Most
of the boys who frequented it came there for the bound volumes of
the <i>Illustrated London News</i>, with their pictures of the
Franco-Prussian War, Irish evictions, the launching of the
<i>Great Eastern</i>, and mild excitements of that kind.&nbsp;
Edwin found himself drawn early to the bookcase that held the
poets.&nbsp; To his great joy he discovered that the key of his
playbox fitted the case; and so he would sometimes sneak into the
room at odd moments in the day and carry away with him certain
slim green volumes from the top shelf.&nbsp; These were
Johnson&rsquo;s <i>Lives of the Poets</i>, together with their
Complete Works.&nbsp; He had been attracted to them in the first
place by the memory of a polished urn, about as graceful in
contour as a carpenter&rsquo;s baluster, that stood in a
neglected corner of the parish church at home.&nbsp; This urn was
encircled by a scroll which bore these directions</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;O smite thy breast and drop a
tear&mdash;<br />
For know thy Shenstone&rsquo;s dust lies here.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 23</span>A
palpable falsehood; for Edwin had already discovered the tomb of
the elegist in another part of the churchyard, elbowed almost
into the path by that of a Victorian ironmonger.</p>
<p>But it was something to have been born in the same parish as a
poet; and Edwin, at an age when everything is a matter of taking
sides, ranged himself boldly with Shenstone and pitted his
judgment against that of Johnson, who rather sniffed at the
poet&rsquo;s unreality, and quoted Gray&rsquo;s letters in his
despite.&nbsp; The crook and the pipe and the kid were to Edwin
very real things, as one supposes they were almost real to the
age of the pastoral ballad; and the atmosphere was the more vital
to him because he dimly remembered the sight of the poet&rsquo;s
lawns frosted on misty mornings of winter, the sighing of the
Leasowes beeches, and the damp drippings of the winter
woods.&nbsp; Thus he absorbed not only Shenstone but
Shenstone&rsquo;s contemporaries: men like Dyer and Lyttleton and
Akenside, and since he had no other standard than that of Johnson
he classed them by the same lights as their contemporaries.&nbsp;
Brooding among Augustan poetasters in the library Mr. Leeming
found him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Poetry, Ingleby?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Let me see?&nbsp; Prior?&nbsp; Ah, that was a little
age, Ingleby!&nbsp; The Augustans were not great men, and some of
them were very coarse, too.&nbsp; Have you read the Idylls of the
King?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr. Leeming introduced Ingleby to the great Victorian, for he
himself was an ardent believer in all the Galahad nonsense, and
was astonished at <a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
24</span>Ingleby&rsquo;s ignorance of the school in which those
cherubic cheeks had expanded.&nbsp; He was very fond of talking
about purity and conceived it his duty to keep his class
spotless.&nbsp; In the Lent Term, when the form were working
through the catechism, his glosses were most apparent.&nbsp; The
explanation of some passages troubled him.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>From
fornication</i> . . . that&rsquo;s a bad thing,&rdquo; he would
mutter.</p>
<p>And once having put Edwin in the way of perfection he was not
going to look back.&nbsp; A week or two later he asked him how he
was getting on with Tennyson.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who is your favourite
character in the Idylls?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
<p>Edwin glowed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, sir, Launcelot&mdash;or
Bors.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But what about Sir Percivale?&nbsp; &lsquo;Sir
Percivale whom Arthur and his knighthood called &ldquo;The
Pure,&rdquo;&rsquo;&rdquo; he quoted in the Oxford variety of
Cockney.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, sir,&rdquo; stammered Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;They seem somehow made differently from me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Arthur,&rdquo; said Mr. Leeming impressively,
&ldquo;has a great and wonderful prototype whom we should all try
to imitate no matter how distantly.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin, who had read the dedication, wondered why Mr. Leeming
lowered his voice like that in speaking of the Prince
Consort.</p>
<p>In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming for superintending
his literary diet, but he soon detected a sameness in the
fare.&nbsp; One day he had got hold of a big Maroon edition of
George Gordon, Lord Byron, with romantic engravings of the
Newstead ruins and the poet&rsquo;s own handsome head, and Mr.
Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly <a
name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
25</span>flushed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Lord Byron,&rdquo; he had said,
&ldquo;was not a good man.&nbsp; Have you read
<i>Hiawatha</i>?&rdquo;&nbsp; And he reached down Longfellow . .
. Longfellow in green boards decorated with a geometrical design
in gold, and irritating to the touch.</p>
<p>At last Edwin was almost driven from the library by Mr.
Leeming&rsquo;s attentions.&nbsp; He never read Byron because the
books were too big to be sneaked out of the room beneath a
buttoned coat; but he did read, without distinction, nearly every
volume of poetry that he could smuggle out in this way.&nbsp; He
read these books in second &ldquo;prep&rdquo; when Layton was
poring over Plato at his high desk, when Widdup was working out
the cricket averages of the second eleven, and Griffin was
looking for spicy bits in the Bible.&nbsp; And as second prep was
generally a period of great sleepiness&mdash;since the boys had
risen so early, and by that time of evening the air of the house
classroom had been breathed and rebreathed so many times as to be
almost narcotic, the poetry that he read became interwoven with
the strands of his dreams.&nbsp; Dreamy and exalted,
poppy-drenched, all poetry seemed at this time; and it was to
intensify this feeling of sensuous languor that he so often chose
the poems of Keats.</p>
<p>In an introduction to the volume he had discovered that Keats
had been an apothecary, and this filled him with a strange glow;
for since the unforgettable incident of the toothbrush he had
been (against his will) diffident about his father.&nbsp; He
determined never again to be ashamed of the shop.&nbsp; When he
read of &ldquo;rich lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,&rdquo; he
remembered a great cut-glass <a name="page26"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 26</span>bottle of some cough linctus that
glowed like a ruby in the shop window when the gas was lit at
night.&nbsp; In other ways he tapped a good deal of the romance
of his father&rsquo;s calling.&nbsp; He remembered a drawer
labelled &ldquo;Dragon&rsquo;s blood&rdquo; . . . the very next
best thing to a dragon&rsquo;s teeth with their steely
harvest.&nbsp; He recalled a whole pomander-full of provocative
scents; he shuddered at the remembered names of poisons, and
other names that suggested alchemy.&nbsp; He almost wanted to
tell Mr. Leeming when next they spoke together, of his
father&rsquo;s trade, but he wasn&rsquo;t quite sure if Mr.
Leeming approved of Keats.&nbsp; It was not likely that he would
see very much more of this master, for he was high up in his form
and certain to get a move into the Lower Fifth at the end of the
term.&nbsp; In some ways he was not sorry; for the signs of Mr.
Leeming&rsquo;s affection, the warm encircling arm, the pervading
scent of honeydew, and the na&iuml;ve glances of those watery
eyes were embarrassing.&nbsp; Before they parted Mr. Leeming
showed his intentions more clearly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Would you like to learn Hebrew, Ingleby?&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>Edwin would have liked to learn Hebrew&mdash;but not out of
school hours.&nbsp; He hesitated.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I thought you might some day wish to take Holy Orders,
and I should be glad to teach you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I will ask my father, sir,&rdquo; said Edwin
modestly.&nbsp; That was one of the penalties of having
interesting eyes.</p>
<h3><a name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
27</span>CHAPTER III<br />
THE GREEN TREES . . .</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> holidays that followed this
term were the most marvellous.&nbsp; From first to last they were
bathed in the atmosphere of mellow gold that makes beautiful some
evenings of spring, all tender and bird-haunted; and his mother,
too, was more wonderful than she had ever been before.&nbsp; On
the very first evening when she had come upstairs to tuck him in
and to kiss him good-night, she sat on the bedstead leaning over
him with both her arms round his neck and whispering secrets to
him.&nbsp; Very extraordinary they were; and as she told him, her
lips were soft on his cheek.&nbsp; She said that only a month
before she had expected to have a baby sister for him&mdash;she
had always longed so much to have a baby girl&mdash;and before
the first jealousy that had flamed up into his mind had died
away, she told him how the baby had been born dead, and how
terribly she had felt the disappointment.&nbsp; He wondered, in
the dark, if she were crying.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But now that I&rsquo;ve got my other baby again,&rdquo;
she said, &ldquo;I am going to forget all about it.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;ll be ever so happy by ourselves, Eddie, won&rsquo;t
we?&nbsp; In the evenings when father is down at business <a
name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 28</span>we will read
together.&nbsp; This time we&rsquo;ll take turns reading, for
you&rsquo;re growing such a big boy.&nbsp; And we&rsquo;ll go
wonderful walks, only not very far, because Dr. Thornhouse says
I&rsquo;m not strong enough yet.&nbsp; I want you to tell me
everything&mdash;everything you do and think about at school,
because you&rsquo;re all I&rsquo;ve got now.&nbsp; And
you&rsquo;re part of me, Eddie, really.&rdquo;&nbsp; At this she
clutched him passionately.</p>
<p>For a moment Edwin was nearly crying, and then, suddenly, he
saw another side of it: her expressed feelings were somehow
foreign to him and made him ashamed, as did Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s
watery eyes when he talked about Arthur&rsquo;s prototype.&nbsp;
In the face of this eager emotion he felt himself unresponsive
and a little consciously superior and male.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t
want to feel superior to his mother&mdash;but there it was!&nbsp;
Even at breakfast next morning he was shy, and it surprised him
when he saw her clear gray-green eyes wholly free from any
answering shame.&nbsp; So unconscious was she of his scrutiny
that he went on looking at her&mdash;really looked at her for the
first time in his life.&nbsp; And looking, he began to
differentiate this new being, so fragile and eager and girlish,
from the old traditional mother whom he had loved and accepted as
unquestionably as the miles of blue sky above him.&nbsp; He
discovered that she was a woman, remembered Griffin, and
blushed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What a colour you&rsquo;ve got, boy,&rdquo; said his
father.&nbsp; And it struck him also that she was smaller than
she used to be.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t mother rather thin?&rdquo; he asked his
father.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby smiled, and in his grave, shy way <a
name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 29</span>put out his
hand to touch hers as it lay on the table.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You silly boy,&rdquo; said his mother.</p>
<p>But her denials did not satisfy him.&nbsp; He knew, for
certain, that she was different from the mother whom he had
known.&nbsp; He noticed, too, that she was not allowed to eat the
same food as the rest of them.&nbsp; Sometimes she would forget
their rules and taste things that were forbidden, and then his
father would gravely reprove her.&nbsp; Instead of bread she was
ordered to eat a sort of biscuit which Edwin&rsquo;s curiosity
made him anxious to taste.&nbsp; He was disappointed; for they
had no taste at all.&nbsp; &ldquo;What are they made of?&rdquo;
he asked; and they told him &ldquo;Gluten. . . .&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s the sticky part of wheat without starch.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And yet, in spite of her illness, they had never been happier
together.&nbsp; The new intimacy, that had begun with her painful
confidences of the first evening, continued.&nbsp; In particular
she told him of the difficulties which she was having with his
Aunt Laura, her sister, who had lately married a small
manufacturer and come to live near Halesby.&nbsp; The story was
an old one and rather unhappy.&nbsp; It began years and years ago
in the days of his mother&rsquo;s childhood, days that she
remembered so unhappily that she never really wanted to recall
them.&nbsp; He had never before known anything about his
mother&rsquo;s childhood.&nbsp; He had just taken her for granted
in her present surroundings.&nbsp; Now, in the long firelight
evenings, she told him how her forefathers and his had once been
great people, living in a stone border castle high <a
name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 30</span>above the
Monmouth marches, and how, with the lapse of time and the decay
of the bloody age in which their violence had prospered, the
family had fallen from its estate and lost its lands; how the
tower of the castle had been broken and under its shadow a
farmhouse had arisen in which they had lived and scraped what
income they could make from a little valley-land and many acres
of mountain pasture.&nbsp; Now there were none of them left
there; but still, where the tracks grew stony and the orchards
began to thin away, the walls of the house crumbled patiently
under the shadow of overhanging mountain-ridges.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Your grandfather was the last of them, Eddie,&rdquo; she
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;He was a farmer.&rdquo;&nbsp; And for a moment
consciousness of Griffin and his social prejudices invaded the
picture.&nbsp; She told him of spring days, when the clouds would
come sweeping out of England on the back of the east wind and be
hurried like the frothy comb of a wave against the mountains, and
how they would then break asunder on the darens and fall back in
a drenching mist over the lonely house by Felindre, and for days
the farm would be islanded in fog.&nbsp; But on the summit above
them, the sheep were grazing in the sunlight and the buzzards
hunting, and in the misty lowlands beneath lay orchards full of
faint-scented apple blossom.&nbsp; &ldquo;We were not the only
decayed family there,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;There were
others, and greater&mdash;such as the Grosmonts of
Trecastel.&nbsp; But old Mr. Grosmont had two sons, and father
only had three daughters.&nbsp; I was a sort of ugly duckling,
Eddie; they never really liked me.&nbsp; And I was never happy
there.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
31</span>&ldquo;I think I must be like you, darling,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I had a rotten time at St. Luke&rsquo;s at
first.&nbsp; Even now I don&rsquo;t quite seem to be . . . I
don&rsquo;t know . . . ordinary.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She smiled and kissed him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;My father was a dear,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but
mother really hated me.&nbsp; Your Aunt Carrie was much cleverer
and better-looking than me, and so they always made a fuss of her
and left me to myself.&nbsp; She had all the advantages.&nbsp;
You see, I suppose they thought she was worth it.&nbsp; She was a
beautiful, selfish creature, with the most lovely
hair.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure it wasn&rsquo;t lovelier than yours,
darling,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then she went and threw herself away, as mother called
it, on a man she met at a hunt ball in Hereford.&nbsp; And she
died, poor thing, with her first baby.&nbsp; It was an awful blow
to mother.&nbsp; It made her more horrid to me than ever.&nbsp; I
suppose she found me such a poor substitute.&nbsp; If it had been
me it wouldn&rsquo;t have mattered.&nbsp; I went to keep house
for your great-uncle in North Bromwich; and there I met your
father.&nbsp; I have never been really happy.&nbsp; You see,
nobody had ever taken any notice of me&mdash;before that.&nbsp;
Then mother began to put all the hopes that had been disappointed
in Carrie on Aunt Laura.&nbsp; Nothing was too good for
her.&nbsp; They spoiled her, and spoiled her.&nbsp; It was worse
when father died and mother was left to do what she liked with
the money.&nbsp; And when your Aunt Laura came here and met Mr.
Fellows and married him, your grandmother blamed me.&nbsp; I
couldn&rsquo;t help it . . . and in any case Mr. Fellows <a
name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>is an awfully
nice, quiet man.&nbsp; I did all I could for her, too, getting
her house ready and that sort of thing, and now she&rsquo;s so
dreadfully difficult.&nbsp; I suppose she&rsquo;s really annoyed
to think that she hasn&rsquo;t done better for herself with all
her advantages of education, and just lets it off on me.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s dreadfully awkward, Eddie.&nbsp; I think she&rsquo;s
even jealous that their house isn&rsquo;t as big as ours.&nbsp; I
simply daren&rsquo;t tell your father the sort of things
she&rsquo;s said.&nbsp; If he knew one of them he&rsquo;d never
forgive her.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s like that about anything that
affects me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I should be, too,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Would you?&rdquo; she smiled.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve made me hate Aunt Laura
already.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You mustn&rsquo;t feel like that, Eddie.&nbsp;
She&rsquo;s young, and she&rsquo;s been spoilt.&nbsp; It
isn&rsquo;t all her fault, probably.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;If it were any one but you I wouldn&rsquo;t mind.&nbsp;
But you&rsquo;re so wonderful.&rdquo;&nbsp; He loved to look into
her eyes when she loved him.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>After this they had wonderful times together.&nbsp; In the
mornings Edwin would indulge his glorious idleness among the
books of the dining-room shelves, and after middle-day dinner,
when his father had gone back to the shop, he would set out with
his mother up the lane under the tall elms and through the
sloping field that led to the mill pond.&nbsp; They did not walk
very far because she must not be over-tired; but the field was so
crowded <a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
33</span>with wonders that they were tempted further.&nbsp;
Cowslips steeped the meadows in their vinous perfume; and between
the saplings of the hazel copse they saw the sheeted hyacinths
gleaming like pools that mirror the sky in open places.&nbsp;
Beyond the land of meadows and copses they came to a belt of the
old forest, through which they could see up a broad green lane to
the very shoulders of the hills: Pen Beacon heaving its fleece of
black firs, and the domed head of Uffdown.</p>
<p>His mother would sigh a little when she saw the hills.&nbsp;
In weather that threatened rain from the west they would seem so
near, with their contour hard against the watery sky and the
cloud shadows all prussian blue.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I should love to be there, Edwin,&rdquo; she would
say.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t we walk there some day, dearest?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s such a terrible drag up.&nbsp; We should
both be dreadfully tired.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I wish we could, mother; I do wish we
could.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The day of their last walk together, when they came to the end
of the green lane and were sitting on the gate, she jumped down
on the far side and set off walking up the track.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come along, Eddie,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
going up to Uffdown.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, mother,&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t
it too far?&nbsp; I should like to carry you!&rdquo;</p>
<p>And half-doubting, but fearfully eager for adventure, they set
off together.&nbsp; As they climbed upward it seemed that the air
grew sweeter every <a name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
34</span>moment, and when they had left the wood behind them they
came out on to a stony lane with a surface of grit veined by the
tracks of storm-water, and on either side banks of tufted grass
along which gorse was swaying in the breeze.&nbsp; And here the
clouds seemed to be racing close above their heads, all dazzling
white, and the blue in which they moved was deep and
limpid.&nbsp; Mrs. Ingleby&rsquo;s gray-green eyes were full of
laughter and her face flushed with the climb.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, mother,&rdquo; Edwin panted, &ldquo;what an awful
lick you go!&nbsp; Hadn&rsquo;t we better sit down a
bit?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And catch cold!&nbsp; You careless boy.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;ll get to the top soon now.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But you mustn&rsquo;t tire yourself.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She laughed at him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, this air is wonderful,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Just as if it had come straight out of the blue, all
washed and clean.&rdquo;</p>
<p>On the top of Uffdown where the cloak of pine droops to a
hollow between the two peaks, they sat on a dry, yielding
hedge-side, where the grass was thick as the fleece of a mountain
sheep, and four lovely counties dreamed below them.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Eddie,&rdquo; she asked, half joking, &ldquo;where does
the west wind come from?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin was willing to instruct.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know, dearest&mdash;from Wales and
the sea, I suppose.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Put your head close to mine and I&rsquo;ll show you. .
. .&nbsp; Those hills that look like mountains cut out of blue
cardboard are the Malverns, and far, ever so far beyond
them&mdash;yes, just to the left you see <a
name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 35</span>a level ridge
that drops suddenly in the west.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t know what
that is, Eddie, do you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No&mdash;I don&rsquo;t like to look at single
things.&nbsp; I like to feel it&rsquo;s all&mdash;what
d&rsquo;you call it?&mdash;all dreamy underneath one.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But you must look at that.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the
mountain, Eddie, close to where I was born.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Felindre?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I never knew that you could see it from here.&nbsp;
You never told me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You know why.&nbsp; I told you that I was never happy
there.&nbsp; And now, you see, since the old people died and the
land was sold, it really has nothing to do with us.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Still, it&rsquo;s rather wonderful to be looking
into&mdash;into another country.&nbsp; It is Wales, isn&rsquo;t
it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes&mdash;part of it&rsquo;s in Wales.&nbsp; Felindre
is in England.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin pondered for a moment.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m rather glad I&rsquo;m not half-Welsh,
anyway,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I wish I&rsquo;d been
there.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do you?&rdquo; she answered dreamily.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Yes&mdash;I wish we had been there together.&nbsp; It was
a different sort of life.&nbsp; I thought&mdash;I just thought I
should like to see it again.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He was a little alarmed at the wistfulness in her voice.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mother&mdash;what do you mean?&rdquo; he cried.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Nothing, Eddie, nothing.&nbsp; It was another
life.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She put her arms round his neck and pulled him gently to
her.&nbsp; He was content to lie there, with his head on her
breast, while she talked in a low <a name="page36"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 36</span>voice of that distant place and of
her own childhood.&nbsp; He listened in a dream and did not speak
at all until she began to tell him a long story which the
Felindre shepherd, Morgan, had told her when she was a
child.&nbsp; Then Edwin opened his eyes and stopped her.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Dearest, I know that story,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Oh, go on, it&rsquo;s wonderful. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Perhaps I&rsquo;ve told it to you before: perhaps I
told you when you were a baby&mdash;I used to talk to you a great
deal in your cradle.&nbsp; Perhaps . . . I was rather lonely when
you came, Eddie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, no, I&rsquo;m sure you haven&rsquo;t. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Look, the cloud is blotting out my mountain now,&rdquo;
she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is time we were going.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
counties were asleep already.</p>
<p>Over the brow of the hill they stepped into a different world,
for where the smoke of the black country had blotted the fading
skyline a hundred pit fires were beginning to blink out, and
nearer still a pillar of flame shot up into the sky.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, look, mother,&rdquo; Edwin cried.</p>
<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;re puddling the iron at the great Mawne
furnaces.&nbsp; Stand still a moment, we might almost hear their
roar.&rdquo;</p>
<p>But no sound came to them but the clear tinkle of a stream
plunging into its mossy cup, and this seemed to bring them back
into touch with the lands that they had left.&nbsp; They hurried
down through the dark woodland paths, and when they reached the
little town lights had bloomed in all the ugly cottage windows,
and the streets seemed deserted, for the children were
indoors.</p>
<h4><a name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
37</span>III</h4>
<p>She told him that she was rather tired, and would like to lie
down and rest for a little time before supper; and with the glow
of the hill air still on his cheeks and his limbs full of a
delicious lassitude he strolled down the lane and into the
ill-lighted street of the town.&nbsp; He passed through the
little passage at the side of the shop and through the dark
bottle-room where he had to pick his way among drug hampers and
empty acid-carboys.&nbsp; Through the upper part of the glass
door he could see his father sitting on a high stool at the desk,
his spectacles half-way down his nose, dreaming among the bad
debts in his ledger.&nbsp; Edwin stood there for several minutes,
for the picture fascinated him.</p>
<p>Mr. Ingleby had now reached the indeterminate period of middle
age: his hair was gray, rather thin about the crown, and wanted
cutting.&nbsp; In the shop he always wore a black alpaca jacket,
and this, by reason of its thinness, made his chest look mean and
skimpy.&nbsp; In this state of comparative repose he was not
impressive.&nbsp; From time to time he raised his hand to scratch
his shoulder.&nbsp; A customer came in to buy a cake of soap and
Mr. Ingleby climbed down from his stool to attend to her.&nbsp;
He opened a glass case, and, groping for this particular soap,
upset at least half a dozen others.&nbsp; Edwin noticed his
hands, which were clumsy and heavily veined on the back, and felt
sorry for him when he stooped to pick up the cakes of soap that
he had upset.&nbsp; It all seemed so inelastic, so different <a
name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 38</span>from the
eager youth of his mother.&nbsp; Examining his father from a
physical standpoint he recalled the day on which Widdup had begun
his sexual education and had laughed at his innocent
ideals.&nbsp; Now Edwin laughed at himself; and the laugh made
Mr. Ingleby look up as if a flying beetle had banged against his
ear.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hallo, boy,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;You were late
for tea, you two!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, we had a lovely walk&mdash;right on to
Uffdown.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I hope you didn&rsquo;t tire your mother.&nbsp; You
must be careful, Eddie.&nbsp; Do you want me to give you
something to do?&nbsp; You shall weigh these powders then:
Phenacetin, five grains in each.&nbsp; Only try to be quiet; I
have to get on with these Lady-day bills.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr. Ingleby yawned and Edwin started to weigh powders.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father, what is Dragon&rsquo;s Blood?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t the blood of dragons, Edwin. . .
.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby smiled under his glasses.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, father, don&rsquo;t rot.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Dragon&rsquo;s Blood is a resin.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
prepared from <i>Drac&aelig;na Draco</i>, and it&rsquo;s used for
mahogany varnishes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;O-oh.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry to disappoint you, Edwin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Silence for five minutes.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father . . . Keats was a chemist.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Keats?&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby pronounced the word in
the same tone as he would have used if he had been saying
&ldquo;Keatings, madam?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
39</span>&ldquo;The poet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh&mdash;Keats.&nbsp; Yes, of course he was.&nbsp; He
was consumptive, too.&nbsp; Died in Italy.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, father.&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin was thankful to leave
it at that; thankful that his father knew just so much, even if
he didn&rsquo;t know any more.&nbsp; It would be terrible to know
more than your father, to feel that he was a sort of intellectual
inferior to you&mdash;a boy of fifteen.&nbsp; He would not talk
of these things any more.</p>
<p>They walked home in silence.&nbsp; It seemed as if Mr. Ingleby
were still worrying about his wife&rsquo;s tiredness, for when
she tried to joke with him at the supper table he was moody and
restrained.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not really a bit overdone,&rdquo; she
protested, kissing his forehead.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re like a pair of children, the two of
you,&rdquo; he said, and indeed his gray seriousness seemed to
isolate him from all the joy of youth that was in them.</p>
<p>That night Edwin&rsquo;s mother sat for a long time on the bed
talking to him in a low voice.&nbsp; She would not tell him any
more about the mountain farmstead that had once been a castle,
even when he begged her to do so.&nbsp; She wanted to talk, she
said, about all that he was to do during the term, to make
wonderful plans for the holidays, when the days would be longer
and they would be able to sit out under the limes on the lawn in
the twilight.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I am going to plant evening stock,&rdquo; she said,
&ldquo;all along the lawn border in between the irises.&nbsp;
Besides, I shall be stronger then and we will often <a
name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 40</span>take our tea
with us to Uffdown.&rdquo;&nbsp; And at last she said,
&ldquo;Eddie, you bad boy, you must really go to sleep now,
darling.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve got such a big journey before you
to-morrow, and you&rsquo;re sure to get a headache if you
don&rsquo;t have a good night&rsquo;s sleep.&rdquo;&nbsp; She
kissed him many times.</p>
<h4>IV</h4>
<p>And when she had passed downstairs to the dining-room where
her husband sat before the fire in a plush arm-chair, lightly
dozing, she kissed him, too.&nbsp; She was feeling queerly
flushed and emotional, and somehow the atmosphere of that little
room felt stuffy to her after the air of the open spaces.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m restless to-night, dear,&rdquo; she
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I hate Eddie going back to school.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s dreadful to be parted from your baby just when
he&rsquo;s beginning to be more and more part of you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come close to me, by the fire, child,&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . I want some music, I think.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She went into the drawing-room and lit the candles on the
piano.&nbsp; Sitting there, in the pale light, with a shawl
thrown over her muslin tea-gown, she looked very frail and
pathetic, against the piano&rsquo;s ebony.&nbsp; She played the
<i>Sonata Appassionata</i> of Beethoven, and the rather tawdry
little knick-knacks on the piano danced as if they were made
uncomfortable by the rugged passion.&nbsp; The whole room seemed
a little bit artificial and threadbare, ministering to her
discontent.&nbsp; When the <i>Sonata</i> was finished she still
sat at the piano, conscious of her own reflection in its polished
panels, and wanting to cry.&nbsp; She could not bear the <a
name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 41</span>taunting of
that image, and so she snuffed the candles and sat in the
dark.</p>
<p>Edwin tossing on the verge of sleep was conscious of the music
ceasing, and, in the silence that followed, the cool cries of the
owls.</p>
<h3><a name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
42</span>CHAPTER IV<br />
MIDSUMMER</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Edwin</span> had expected that the wrench
of going back to school after these holidays would be unbearable:
but when he returned to St. Luke&rsquo;s next day he was almost
astonished at his own acceptance of the change.&nbsp; It was
evening when he arrived, and boys who had come from a greater
distance than he were already unpacking their play-boxes in the
long box-room.&nbsp; Edwin sniffed the smell which he had once
found so alien&mdash;that mingled odour of cricket flannels,
biscuits, bat-oil, and faint mustiness, with relish.&nbsp; He
passed through the swing-doorway into the library, dark and
echoing and groped his way towards the poetry bookshelves.&nbsp;
He ran his fingers over the brass netting that protected their
case, he even tried his play-box key to see if it had lost its
cunning.&nbsp; The lock opened easily, and he felt for the backs
of the big maroon volumes of Byron with their shiny
title-plates.&nbsp; He thought of Mr. Leeming and of Sir
Percivale.&nbsp; A foolish phrase, one of a kind that he had
often lately found running through his brain&mdash;rhythmical
groups of words that meant nothing in particular&mdash;formed
itself in his mind and stuck <a name="page43"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 43</span>there.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>The white lie
of a blameless life</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; He laughed at
himself.&nbsp; These words that came from nowhere were the
strangest things.&nbsp; He heard the echo of his own laugh in the
dark and empty room.&nbsp; The white lie of a blameless life. . .
.&nbsp; It pleased him to think that he had done with Mr. Leeming
as a form-master, even though the question of Hebrew and Holy
Orders remained unanswered.</p>
<p>Stepping out of the library he was hailed by Widdup; a
plumper, sunbrowned Widdup fresh from three weeks with a doctor
uncle in Devonshire.&nbsp; There had been long drives through the
lanes at the back of Start Bay where the primroses (so Widdup
assured him) were as big as door-handles; there had actually been
sea-bathing in April, and the joy of watching huge liners,
homeward bound from India, making the Start.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
hills . . .&rdquo; said Widdup, &ldquo;you never saw such
hills.&nbsp; Talk about these downs. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s awfully hilly country at home,&rdquo; said
Edwin.</p>
<p>They were walking side by side and up and down the quadrangle,
from the gym to the swimming bath, and dozens of couples were
crossing and recrossing in the same track.&nbsp; From time to
time they would catch a few words of conversation, eager and
excited, as they passed.&nbsp; Above them stretched a deep sky
powdered with dust of gold.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What did you say?&rdquo; said Widdup.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m awfully sorry, old chap.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
catch it.&nbsp; Douglas shouted to me. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know . . .&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Oh, yes . . . hills.&nbsp; I said there are some ripping
hills at home.&nbsp; One called Uffdown.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page44"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
44</span>&ldquo;But these hills in Devonshire . . . you&rsquo;ve
got to get out of the trap for nearly every one.&nbsp; I used to
drive my uncle.&nbsp; It was awful sport.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d think
I was rotting, but it&rsquo;s true.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The chapel bell started tolling in short jerks.&nbsp; The
couples began to drift towards the northern end of the Quad,
where the gates were being unbolted.&nbsp; For five minutes
exactly the gravel of the wide path sloping to the chapel gave
out a grating sound beneath the pressure of many hundred
feet.&nbsp; The last stragglers hurried in.&nbsp; The master on
duty entered the porch.&nbsp; All the life of that dark mass of
buildings spread upon the bare edge of the downs became
concentrated within the walls of the chapel.&nbsp; Its stained
glass windows glowed as with some spiritual radiance.&nbsp;
Inside they began to sing the hymn which is used at the beginning
of the term:&mdash;</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;Rank by rank again we stand<br />
From the four winds gathered hither,<br />
Loud the hallowed walls demand<br />
Whence we come and how and whither . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>and from the open doors there issued a faintly musty smell, as
though indeed the dead air of the holiday-time were dispossessed
and young life had again invaded its ancient haunt.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>It seemed to Edwin from the first as though the concentrated
delights of this summer term were surely enough to efface every
memory of discomfort and suffering that had clouded his early
days at St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He was exceptionally happy in his
<a name="page45"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 45</span>new
form.&nbsp; The form-master, whose name was Cleaver, was an idle
man with a young wife and a small income of his own,
circumstances that combined to make him contented with the
conditions of servitude at St. Luke&rsquo;s which weighed so
heavily on the disappointed and underpaid Selby.&nbsp; He was
also a fine cricketer, accepting the worship which was the
prerogative of an old &ldquo;blue,&rdquo; and convinced in his
own mind&mdash;if ever that kingdom were possessed by anything so
positive as a conviction&mdash;that the main business of the
summer term was cricket.&nbsp; The atmosphere of the
cricket-field, with its alternations of strenuousness and summery
lassitude, pervaded his classroom, and the traditions of that
aristocratic game, in which nobody could conceivably behave in a
violent or unsportsmanlike manner, regulated his attitude towards
the work of his form.</p>
<p>Edwin found it fairly easy to keep his average going at the
departments of the game in which Mr. Cleaver was concerned: Latin
and Greek and English.&nbsp; If, as occasionally happened, he
made a century, Cleaver was ready to congratulate him as a
sportsman and a brother.&nbsp; To be beaten by some yorker of
Tacitus was no crime if he had played with a straight bat and
didn&rsquo;t slog.&nbsp; Even a fool who could keep his end up
had Mr. Cleaver&rsquo;s sympathy.</p>
<p>It was not only in a spiritual atmosphere of the Lower Fifth
that Edwin found content.&nbsp; The classroom which the form
inhabited was the most pleasant in the whole school, placed high
with a bow-window overlooking a pleasant lawn that a poplar <a
name="page46"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
46</span>overshadowed.&nbsp; Beyond the lawn lay a belt of dense
thickets full of singing birds, on the edge of which laburnum and
lilac were now in flower: so that when Edwin&rsquo;s innings was
over, or Mr. Cleaver was gently tossing up classical lobs to the
weaker members of the form, he could let his eyes wander over the
warm air of the lawn to plumes of purple lilac waving in the
summer breeze, or the tops of the avenue of lime-trees leading to
the chapel spire.&nbsp; Even in the heat of the day the Lower
Fifth classroom was cool and airy, visited only by wandering bees
and scents of lime and lilac beckoning towards a golden
afternoon.</p>
<p>The term was full of lovely animal delights; the luxury of
flannels and soft felt hats; the warmth of a caressing sun; the
contrast of cool drinks and water-ices; the languors of muscular
fatigue; the reviving ecstasy of a plunge into the green depths
of the swimming bath; the joy of extended twilights, and, in the
thin air of evening, a multitude of sounds, soothing because they
were so familiar as to be no more disturbing to consciousness
than silence: boys&rsquo; voices calling in the fields, the clear
click of bat and ball, the stinging echoes of the
fives-court.&nbsp; Great days . . . great days . . .</p>
<p>Edwin found himself becoming keen on cricket&mdash;not indeed
from any ambitions towards excellence, though the mere fact of
sitting at Mr. Cleaver&rsquo;s feet was an inspiration, but for
the sheer joy of tiring himself at the nets and the peculiar
charm of the game&rsquo;s setting of sunburn and white flannels
and green fields.&nbsp; Cricket was a part of this divine summer,
and therefore to be worshipped.&nbsp; Little <a
name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 47</span>by little as
he practised he found he was beginning to improve, and before the
middle of the term he was developing into a fair bowler of medium
pace and had taken his own place in the house second
eleven.&nbsp; It did him good in other ways; for in this capacity
he found that he was at length accepted naturally and without any
exceptional effort on his part.&nbsp; So, miraculously, he seemed
to have arrived at a degree of normality.&nbsp; This, in itself,
was a triumph.</p>
<p>Spending long afternoons with his team in the lower fields, he
found that he could feel really at home with other
&ldquo;men.&rdquo;&nbsp; He discovered qualities in them that he
had never guessed before.&nbsp; In the cricket field even Douglas
became tolerable; no longer a terrible and baleful influence with
scowling brows under a mop of black hair, but just a jolly good
wicket-keeper.&nbsp; Edwin began to be feverishly interested in
the fortunes of the second eleven: kept their averages, produced
an elaborate table of league results, conceived a secondary but
violent interest in the progress of his own County,
Worcestershire, in those days, thanks to the brilliancy of the
Foster brothers&mdash;slowly rising to fame.&nbsp; Sometimes
while he lay on the grass, watching his own side bat, he would
see the figure of old, fat Leeming ambling along the path.&nbsp;
He would shrink into the concealment of his uniform flannel,
being afraid that his patron would speak to him and isolate him
from his pleasant company.&nbsp; Leeming was not fond of cricket
and his shadow would mar this particular joy.&nbsp; Only when he
had passed relief would come.&nbsp; Great days . . . great
days.</p>
<h4><a name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
48</span>III</h4>
<p>In the pursuit of these joys it is not to be supposed that
Ingleby forsook his friends the poets.&nbsp; In the flush of
early June, before the crowding of midsummer&rsquo;s high pomps,
there came to him many moments of ecstasy.&nbsp; In the spinney
at the back of the head master&rsquo;s house there was a
nightingale to which his evening dreams were dedicated.&nbsp; All
the twilights were full of delicious scents and sounds.&nbsp; Of
all other times he remembered most clearly certain evenings when
he would walk all alone up the long slope of the gravel-path from
the chapel, hearing the whizzing wings of the cockchafers that
made their home in the shrubs on either side.&nbsp; Sunday
evenings . . . Sundays were the most wonderful days of all; not,
indeed, because the chapel services made any religious appeal to
him&mdash;the advances of Mr. Leeming had scotched that long
ago&mdash;but because of the peculiar atmosphere of freedom which
the long day possessed and which, somehow, even the Head&rsquo;s
sermons failed to mar.&nbsp; He hated the Head&rsquo;s sermons;
he hated, in particular, the sight of Griffin, who was a useful
member of the choir, singing, like any golden-headed cherub, a
solo in the anthem.&nbsp; But he loved the music, and
particularly the psalms, with which the daily matins and evensong
made him so familiar that he couldn&rsquo;t help knowing many of
them by heart.</p>
<p>The chants to which the psalms were sung at St. Luke&rsquo;s
had been specially composed for the school chapel by Dr. Downton,
the organist, who had fitted <a name="page49"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 49</span>them with modulations that were, at
the least, surprising to ears which could not be happy or feel
secure far from the present help of tonic and dominant.&nbsp;
Most of the congregation at St. Luke&rsquo;s considered that
Sammy&rsquo;s tunes were rotten.&nbsp; At first they were
inflicted upon the choir in manuscript; but in Edwin&rsquo;s
second summer they appeared collected in a slim gray volume, and
Heal, who acted as choirmaster, explained that they were the
results of the most careful study of the Hebrew text, of
night-long ecstasies, and the deep brooding of Dr.
Downton&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; It gave Edwin a picture of Sammy,
with his gray, impassive face, weaving his tunes out of the
silence of the night by candlelight in the high turret-room which
that solitary master inhabited, and for this alone he began to
love the St. Luke&rsquo;s Psalter.&nbsp; It is certain, at any
rate, that his early acquaintance with strange harmonic ideas
made a great deal of the most modern music easy to him in after
years.&nbsp; Later, in North Bromwich, when he became immersed in
the flood of Wagner, he often wondered whether Sammy in his
lonely tower, had known these wonders, and cherished them up
there all by himself.&nbsp; He certainly couldn&rsquo;t associate
that sort of music with the na&iuml;vet&eacute;s of Mr.
Heal&rsquo;s flute.&nbsp; And yet, you never can tell. . .
.&nbsp; Mr. Heal knew his Hardy. . . .</p>
<p>Then there were Sunday walks with Widdup over the downs under
a grilling sun, and through the woods of York Park, where Griffin
and Douglas, poaching, had encountered keepers; but the glare and
dryness of a chalk country in summer does not invite exercise,
and the most precious <a name="page50"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 50</span>hours of all were spent on the
sloping banks between the Grand Entrance and the chapel.&nbsp;
Here, early on a Sunday morning, Edwin and Widdup would carry out
an armful of rugs and cushions: and there all day they would lie
in the shade of the limes, reading, writing letters (Ingleby
always had a letter from his mother to answer on Sundays),
watching the restless flight of little copper butterflies, seeing
the hot sky deepen to an almost southern blue behind the pointed
gables of the school.&nbsp; Against such skies the red brick of
St. Luke&rsquo;s became amazingly beautiful.&nbsp; It seemed to
Edwin that in his home, on the edge of the black country, the sky
was never so clear and deep.&nbsp; Lying there he would read the
books that he had smuggled out of the library . . . poetry . . .
a great deal of it.&nbsp; Novels . . . he read, and he always
remembered reading, Poe&rsquo;s <i>Tales of Mystery and
Imagination</i>: &ldquo;The Murder in the Rue Morgue,&rdquo;
&ldquo;The Pit and the Pendulum,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Masque of the
Red Death.&rdquo;&nbsp; Such titles!&nbsp; There seemed to be no
end to the leisure of those days.</p>
<p>With the middle of the term came the Race Meeting on the
Downs.&nbsp; During the whole of Race Week the college bounds
were tightened, so that no boy dared show his face outside the
iron gates.&nbsp; Within the short memory of the school, a
prefect&mdash;no less!&mdash;had been expelled, confronting his
own housemaster on the edge of Tattersall&rsquo;s ring.</p>
<p>On Wednesday of the week the race for the Six Thousand
Guineas, the greatest of the classics, was to be run.&nbsp; St.
Luke&rsquo;s within its closed gates buzzed like a hive.&nbsp; In
every house and every form there <a name="page51"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 51</span>were sweepstakes.&nbsp; Griffin made
a book; boasted in Hall that he meant to see the
&ldquo;Guineas&rdquo; run or die.&nbsp; Ingleby very nearly
admired him for his courage.&nbsp; The great day came.&nbsp; All
morning from the open windows of the Lower Fifth classroom he
could hear the rumble of loaded brakes climbing the Downs
road.&nbsp; In those days there were no motors, but white dust,
up-churned by many hundreds of wheels, filled the air and drifted
in clouds into the college quad.&nbsp; From a high wall at the
back of the swimming-bath they could see the road itself and the
unceasing, hot procession moving upwards; brakes full of men who
carried beer-bottles; bookies in white top-hats; costers with
buttons as big as half-crowns driving carts drawn by little
donkeys whose thick coats were matted with sweat; gipsies out to
prey upon the rest of mankind; smart gentlemen in dog-skin gloves
driving tandem; regimental drags.&nbsp; All the road was full of
dust and torn paper and the odour of beer and sweat, and every
member of the crowd looked anxiously forward, as though he feared
he would be too late for the &ldquo;Guineas,&rdquo; toward the
summit of the Downs where the grand stand, like a magnificent
paper-rack, stood up white against the sky.&nbsp; Down in the
playing-fields that afternoon nobody thought much of
cricket.&nbsp; For all the locked iron gates, the eager
consciousness of the crowd on the Downs had invaded St.
Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Ingleby was scoring for his own side&rsquo;s
innings.&nbsp; Douglas, who was sitting astride of a bat, kept
his eyes fixed on the airy summit of the grand stand, now fringed
with the black bodies of a thousand spectators.&nbsp; He pulled
out his watch.</p>
<p><a name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
52</span>&ldquo;They&rsquo;re off!&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;My God, don&rsquo;t I envy old Griff!&rdquo;</p>
<p>Ingleby forgot his scoring.&nbsp; He, too, was wondering what
had happened.&nbsp; He could imagine it easily, for several times
on the Downs he had crossed the tan gallops on which, it was
said, horses from the royal racing stables were trained, and
seen; incredibly slender creatures, lithe as greyhounds,
thundering neck and neck, over the sprinkled bark.&nbsp; He could
think of nothing swifter or more exciting on earth.&nbsp; The
game stopped.&nbsp; All the players were looking at the grand
stand, as though their eyes could tell them which horse had
won.&nbsp; Two minutes.&nbsp; Three.&nbsp; From the top of the
Downs a great roar came down to them.&nbsp; Some monstrous beast,
no congregation of men, was roaring there.&nbsp; The black fringe
on the grand stand became animated by waving arms and hats and
sticks.&nbsp; A cloud of tinier specks detached themselves.&nbsp;
These were the carrier pigeons; and in a very little time they
were flying high above the playing-fields, seeing, no doubt, the
black mass of London outstretched so many miles away.</p>
<p>&ldquo;God . . . I wish I could shoot one,&rdquo; said
Douglas.&nbsp; &ldquo;I never heard such a row as they made up
there.&nbsp; Ingleby, I&rsquo;ll lay you two to one the
Prince&rsquo;s horse has won.&rdquo;</p>
<p>That evening witnessed the canonisation of Griffin.&nbsp;
Veritably he had seen the Guineas.&nbsp; A crowd of admirers
listened to his story between preps in the house classroom.&nbsp;
His manner was indolent and boastful.&nbsp; This was to be no
more than the first of many exploits.&nbsp; On
Friday&mdash;Ladies&rsquo; Day&mdash;<a name="page53"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 53</span>the race for the Birches would be
run.&nbsp; He had put the money he had won over the Guineas on a
horse called Airs and Graces, and was going to see her bring his
money home.</p>
<p>Ingleby had never heard the name of this horse before, but
when the house sweepstakes for the Birches was drawn he found
that Airs and Graces had fallen to him.&nbsp; Griffin, who
evidently considered that this animal&rsquo;s destinies were in
his keeping, offered him a pound for his ticket.&nbsp; Ingleby
wasn&rsquo;t having any.&nbsp; Douglas, called in to give an
opinion on the damnableness of that skunk Ingleby&rsquo;s
sticking to a sweepstake ticket for which he had been given a
fair offer, agreed it was a bloody shame that a man like that
should have drawn anything but a blank.&nbsp; What did he know
about racing?&nbsp; Racing was a pastime of gentlemen in which he
couldn&rsquo;t obviously have any interest.&nbsp; Did Ingleby
understand that Griffin was going to see the race itself, a thing
that he would never have the guts to do in all his life?</p>
<p>A couple of years before Ingleby would not have known how to
meet the coalition; it is possible, even, that he would have
given up his ticket, and improbable that he would have received
the pound that Griffin offered.&nbsp; By this time he had learnt
that no answer at all was better than the softest; that when
Griffin and Douglas started that sort of game the best thing was
to keep his temper and clear out as quickly as possible.&nbsp; On
this occasion the chapel bell saved him.&nbsp; All through the
service that evening he was pondering on Griffin&rsquo;s words,
trying, rather obstinately, to convince himself that <a
name="page54"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 54</span>they
weren&rsquo;t true; that he wasn&rsquo;t the skunk they had
agreed to call him; that he was sufficiently gentle in birth to
have an interest in what the newspapers called &ldquo;the sport
of kings,&rdquo; that, at a pinch, he might summon up sufficient
&ldquo;guts&rdquo; to emulate the boldness of such a daring
customer as Griffin.&nbsp; Perhaps it was all too horribly true.
. . .</p>
<p>He couldn&rsquo;t accept it.&nbsp; It was inconceivable that
all the attributes of knightly courage should be vested in people
like Griffin; and yet he couldn&rsquo;t be certain that he
wasn&rsquo;t deceiving himself.&nbsp; It was so easy to imagine
oneself brave . . . the easiest thing in the world.&nbsp;
&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the worst of me,&rdquo; he said to himself,
&ldquo;I can imagine anything.&nbsp; I could imagine myself
hiring a coach and wearing a white top-hat and asking old fat
Leeming to come to the Birches with me on Friday.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m
all imagination and silly rot of that kind; but when it comes to
the point I&rsquo;m no damned good at all.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It wasn&rsquo;t the first time that he had realised defects of
this kind.&nbsp; Term after term he had been reproaching himself
for the lack of moral or physical courage.</p>
<p>There was only one way out of it: to prove that he was capable
of the things which he feared by doing them.&nbsp; In this way he
had driven himself to batter his hands to pulp by playing fives
without gloves; for this he had taken a dive into the deep end of
the swimming-bath for the sole reason that he found it impossible
to float in the shallow water and had determined to swim; for
this he had forced himself to spend long hours, or to waste long
hours, over Geometry, the subject that he hated most.&nbsp; <a
name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 55</span>Now, in the
same way, and wholly for his own satisfaction, he determined to
go to the Birches.</p>
<p>That night, walking up and down the Quad, he opened the
subject to Widdup.&nbsp; He said,&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do you know I drew Airs and Graces in the house
sweep?&nbsp; Griffin offered me a quid for the ticket.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I should jolly well let him have it,&rdquo; said
Widdup, explaining the mathematical side of the question.&nbsp;
&ldquo;You see, you&rsquo;ve won a twenty to one chance
already.&nbsp; The chances against the horse winning are . . .
well you can work it out easily.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll do it for you
in second prep.&nbsp; Besides, old Griff has a lot of money on
the horse and he&rsquo;s going to see the race run.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, so am I,&rdquo; said Ingleby.&nbsp; Widdup
laughed, and that annoyed him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What do you think of it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think you&rsquo;re a damned fool,&rdquo; said
Widdup.</p>
<p>Ingleby left it at that.&nbsp; Perhaps Widdup was right.&nbsp;
But why in the world should the same thing count for heroism in
the case of Griffin and folly in his own?&nbsp; He distrusted the
mathematical Widdup&rsquo;s sense of proportion.&nbsp; In any
case he had to go through with it.&nbsp; If he didn&rsquo;t, no
subsequent heroism could ever persuade him that he wasn&rsquo;t a
coward and worthy of every epithet with which Griffin had loaded
him.&nbsp; It was in the same spirit, he imagined, that knights
in the ages of chivalry had set themselves to perform extravagant
tasks, that saints had undergone monstrous privations; just to
convince themselves that they weren&rsquo;t as deficient in
&ldquo;guts&rdquo; as they feared.</p>
<p><a name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>The
business came more easily than he had expected when first he tied
himself to his resolve.&nbsp; Friday at St. Luke&rsquo;s was a
&ldquo;fag-day.&rdquo;&nbsp; On Friday afternoon, that is to say,
there were no organised games.&nbsp; The afternoon prep started
at half-past three, and afternoon school at four-fifteen.&nbsp;
The great race, he learned, was to be run at three o&rsquo;clock;
and this would give him time to miss the hour of prep which was
not supervised and to be ready for an innings of Greek with
Cleaver.&nbsp; An easy game, Greek. . . .&nbsp; For once in a way
he was prepared to slog like blazes.</p>
<p>Up to the last moment Widdup refused to think that he would go
through with it.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t believe, indeed, until he
saw Edwin climb on to the top of the wooden fence in the
nightingale&rsquo;s spinney at the back of the Head&rsquo;s house
and drop over into the road.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now, I should think you&rsquo;ve had enough of
it,&rdquo; said Widdup.&nbsp; &ldquo;If the old man came along
and saw you there, you&rsquo;d be bunked to-morrow.&nbsp; Come
along. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be back just after three,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be here to give me a hand
over?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Widdup.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are a
bloody fool, you know.&rdquo;</p>
<h3><a name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
57</span>CHAPTER V<br />
AIRS AND GRACES</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">He</span> didn&rsquo;t need telling
that.&nbsp; With every step the conviction was borne in on him,
and when he came to the end of the wooden palings that marked the
school boundary he was very near to giving up his
enterprise.&nbsp; He could easily, so easily, slip over the hedge
on the opposite side of the road and wait there until the race
was over and the bookies&rsquo; messenger-boys came racing down
the hill on their bicycles, bells tingling all the way; and then
he could meet Widdup at the appointed place and say that he had
seen the race.&nbsp; By that time rumour would have told him the
winner&rsquo;s name.&nbsp; But that wouldn&rsquo;t do.&nbsp; Not
that he cared two-pence-halfpenny whether he told the truth or a
lie to Widdup, but because he would feel such a wretched coward
in his own mind.&nbsp; He had got to prove to himself that he
possessed the moral courage which he doubted.&nbsp; It was only
the existence of the very real danger&mdash;and he envisaged not
only his own expulsion, but harrowing scenes of remorse and
distress at home&mdash;that made the thing a fair test.&nbsp; He
had to go through with it.</p>
<p>Beyond the line of fencing, even standing in midstream of that
determined crowd, he felt himself curiously unprotected.&nbsp; He
did a curious thing.&nbsp; He <a name="page58"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 58</span>turned his college cap, with its
circular stripes of green, inside out, presenting to the world a
dirty brown lining.&nbsp; This wasn&rsquo;t enough for him: he
also turned up the collar of his Eton coat.&nbsp; But the crowd
was thinking of one thing only and none seemed to notice
him.&nbsp; They noticed nothing.&nbsp; Even the sellers of the
race cards and the tawny gipsies who cried for a piece of silver
to cross their palms, and promised good luck, were
unheeded.&nbsp; Edwin concealed himself, or imagined some measure
of concealment, in an eddy of dust between a heavy wagonette,
crammed with men who looked like licensed victuallers, and a
coster&rsquo;s donkey cart.&nbsp; He found that by holding on to
the step of the wagonette he felt safer.&nbsp; It was reassuring
to hold something.&nbsp; What a rotten coward he was!</p>
<p>At last one of the men in the last seat of the wagonette who
had been rolling about with his eyes closed, opened them and
looked at Edwin.&nbsp; They were curiously watery eyes, and his
mouth was all over the shop.&nbsp; When he had dreamily
considered the phenomenon of Edwin for a little while he
addressed him,&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You look &rsquo;ot, young man.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It <i>was</i> hot, Edwin panted.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Bloody &rsquo;ot,&rdquo; said the man in the
wagonette.&nbsp; As an afterthought he took a bottle of beer,
about a quarter full, from his pocket.&nbsp; The cork came out
with a pop.&nbsp; &ldquo;Gas,&rdquo; said the fat man, and
chuckled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Gas . . . eh?&rdquo;&nbsp; He took a swig,
and with the froth fringing his moustache, offered the bottle to
Edwin.&nbsp; Edwin shook his head.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t?&rdquo; said the fat man.&nbsp;
&ldquo;You&rsquo;re <a name="page59"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
59</span>workin&rsquo; &rsquo;arder than I am.&nbsp; Oh, well, if
&rsquo;e won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he continued dreamily, and finished
the bottle.&nbsp; Then he pitched it over the hedge.</p>
<p>The dust was terrible.&nbsp; On either side of the track the
hedges and banks were as white as the road.&nbsp; The horses
pulled well, and even hanging on the step Edwin found it
difficult to keep up with them.&nbsp; At the crest of the hill
the driver whipped them into a trot.&nbsp; Edwin let go the step
and was cursed fluently by the coster for standing in the way of
his donkey-cart.&nbsp; His friend waved him good-bye.&nbsp; He
found himself caught up in a stream of other walkers, hurrying in
a bee-line for the grand stand, now distantly visible with the
royal standard drooping above it.&nbsp; Behind him and in front
the black snake of that procession stretched, sliding, literally,
over the shiny convolutions of the Down that the feet of the
foremost had polished, and moving in a sort of vapour of its own,
compact of beer and strong tobacco and intolerable human
odours.&nbsp; From the crown of the Downs Edwin looked back at
the playing-fields, the tiny white figures at the nets and in the
fives-court that sometimes stopped in their play to watch the
black serpent in whose belly he now moved.&nbsp; They seemed very
near&mdash;far too near to be comfortable; and even though he
knew that nobody down there could possibly see him, he felt
happier when a billow of the Down hid the plain from sight.</p>
<p>It was only when he reached the grand stand, losing himself in
the thick of the crowd that clustered about it, that he began to
feel safe.&nbsp; He looked at his watch and found that he had a
quarter of <a name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
60</span>an hour to spare.&nbsp; A little old man in seedy black
clothes grabbed his elbow fiercely.&nbsp; &ldquo;Young sir, young
sir,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;take my advice . . . gratis; free;
for nothing.&rdquo;&nbsp; He laughed, and Edwin saw gray bristles
stretched on his underlip.&nbsp; &ldquo;Take my advice.&nbsp;
Never expose your watch at a race-meeting.&nbsp; Myself . . .
I&rsquo;ve learnt it from long experience, my own and my
friends&rsquo;. . . .&nbsp; Never even take a watch when I go
racing.&nbsp; No, I leave it at home.&nbsp; A beautiful
half-hunter by Benson of Ludgate Hill, with enamelled face.&nbsp;
Yes. . . .&nbsp; You take my advice.&nbsp; A thing to always
remember.&nbsp; Yes. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin seriously thanked him.&nbsp; A roar went up from the
crowd.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Prince.&nbsp; The Prince has entered the
Royal Box,&rdquo; said the old man.&nbsp; &ldquo;God bless
him.&rdquo;&nbsp; He raised a dusty top-hat.&nbsp; An
extraordinary gesture for this wrinkled, gnomish creature.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he mumbled; &ldquo;a handsome time-piece. . .
.&nbsp; Benson of Ludgate Hill.&nbsp; A very prominent
firm.&nbsp; We shall see nothing here.&nbsp; You follow
me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin followed.&nbsp; More beer, more tobacco, more of the
curious composite smell, more positively vegetable than human,
that he had begun to associate with trampled pieces of paper,
probably the debris of bags that had once held fruit of some
kind.&nbsp; The little man pushed his way deftly through the
crowd.&nbsp; He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed
to notice him; and indeed the leading characteristics of this
crowd&rsquo;s vast consciousness seemed to be good humour.&nbsp;
The bookies in their white hats, the many-buttoned costers, the
sweating men in black coats, the very waiters in the refreshment
tents, staggering under leaning towers of beef <a
name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>plates,
seemed determined to enjoy themselves in spite of the heat and
the smell of their neighbours under the white-hot sky.</p>
<p>Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties.&nbsp; The vastness of the
crowd subtly shielded him.&nbsp; He felt newly secure, and his
spirit was caught up into its excitement and good humour.&nbsp;
He even turned down his collar.&nbsp; And all the time his mind
exulted in a queer sense of clarity, an intoxication due,
perhaps, to his successful daring.&nbsp; In this state he found
all his surroundings vivid and amusing; all colours and sounds
came to him with a heightened brilliancy.&nbsp; He smiled, and
suddenly found that a young gipsy woman with her head in a bright
handkerchief was smiling back at him.&nbsp; He thought it was
jolly that people should smile like that.&nbsp; He thought what
jolly good luck it was meeting his guide, the shiny shoulders of
whose frock coat he saw in front of him.&nbsp; His quick mind had
placed the little man already: a solicitor&rsquo;s clerk in some
ancient worm-eaten Inn of Court, a relic of the dark, lamp-litten
London of Dickens: a city of yellow fog and cobbled pavements
shining in the rain: of dusty, cobwebbed law-stationers&rsquo;
windows and cosy parlours behind them where kettles were singing
on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was mixed at night.</p>
<p>It seemed to him that he could have met no more suitable
person than his friend; for really all this racing crowd were
making a sort of Cockney holiday of the kind that the greatest
Victorian loved most dearly.&nbsp; He began to find words for it
all.&nbsp; He <i>must</i> find words for it, for it would be such
fun <a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
62</span>writing to his mother about it.&nbsp; If he dared. . .
.&nbsp; It would be time enough to write a letter about it when
the business was finished without disaster.&nbsp; There was
always the possibility that he would be found out and
expelled.&nbsp; Even if that should happen, he thought, he would
like to tell his mother. . . .</p>
<p>Together they passed the level of the grand stand.&nbsp; This
huge erection of white-painted wood provided the only constant
landmark, for Edwin was not tall enough to see above the
shoulders of the adult crowd in which he was moving.&nbsp; Now
they had left the grand stand behind it seemed that they must
surely be crossing the course.&nbsp; And then a bell clanged and
the crowd parted like a great wave of the Red Sea in pictures of
the Exodus.&nbsp; Edwin found himself clinging to the coat-tails
of his friend, and the little man, in turn, hanging on, as if for
his life, to a whitewashed post from which the next wave would
have sucked him back.&nbsp; The crowd swayed gently, settling
down and leaving them stranded upon the very edge of the
course.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a trick worth knowing,&rdquo;
said Edwin&rsquo;s friend.</p>
<p>Opposite them the stands, well known to him on Sunday walks as
a vast skeletal erection, stood clothed in flesh and blood: tier
upon tier of human faces packed one above the other looked down
on him.&nbsp; Edwin had never before realised how pale the faces
of men and women were.&nbsp; From the midst of them there rose a
ceaseless murmur of human speech, shrilling occasionally like the
voices of starlings when they whirl above an autumn reed bed, and
then, as suddenly, still.&nbsp; For one extraordinary <a
name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 63</span>moment they
were nearly silent.&nbsp; &ldquo;They&rsquo;re off!&rdquo; said
the little man. . . .</p>
<p>Again the murmur of the stands arose.&nbsp; A bookie just
behind them was doing his best to get in a last few bets,
entreating, proclaiming passionately the virtues of &ldquo;the
old firm.&rdquo;&nbsp; His red face lifted above the crowd, and
while he shouted saliva dribbled from his mouth.&nbsp; A curious
roaring sound came from the other side of the horse-shoe course a
mile or more away.&nbsp; He stopped with his mouth open in the
middle of a sentence.&nbsp; Something had happened over
there.&nbsp; Everybody, even those who couldn&rsquo;t see
anything, turned in the direction from which the sound
came.&nbsp; Edwin turned with them.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t
imagine why.&nbsp; And when he turned his eyes gazed straight
into those of Miss Denning, the matron of the College Sanatorium,
marvellously dressed for the occasion and leaning upon the
innocent arm of Mr. Heal.&nbsp; Thank God, Mr. Heal was
short-sighted!&nbsp; Edwin felt himself blushing.&nbsp; He knew
for certain that she had seen and recognised him; for his sick
headaches had often taken him to the Sanatorium and he had always
been rather a favourite of hers.&nbsp; She stared straight at him
and her eyes never wavered.&nbsp; Obviously the game was
up.&nbsp; He fancied that her lips smiled faintly.&nbsp; Never
was a smile more sinister.</p>
<p>Edwin had an impulse to bolt . . . simply to turn tail and run
at his hardest straight back to the college.&nbsp; He
couldn&rsquo;t do that.&nbsp; Between him and escape, an
impassable river, lay the parabola of yellow grass over which the
Birches was even now being run.&nbsp; Feeling almost physically
sick, he <a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
64</span>slipped round to the other side of his companion.&nbsp;
He wished that gnomish creature had been bigger.&nbsp;
&ldquo;They&rsquo;re at the corner . . . if you lean out you can
see . . . look, they&rsquo;re coming into the straight . . . Airs
and Graces leading.&nbsp; Down they come.&nbsp; The finest sight
in the civilised world.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin didn&rsquo;t see them.&nbsp; He saw nothing but the
phantom of Miss Denning&rsquo;s eyes, her faint and curiously
sinister smile.&nbsp; He wished to goodness the race were
over.&nbsp; Now everybody was shouting.&nbsp; The stands rose
with a growl like great beasts heaving in the air.&nbsp;
Something incredibly swift and strepitant passed him in a whirl
of wind and dust.&nbsp; The crowd about him and the heaving
stands broke into an inhuman roar.&nbsp; The little old man
beside him was jumping up and down, throwing his top-hat into the
air and catching it again.&nbsp; The whole world had gone
shouting and laughing mad.&nbsp; Edwin heard on a hundred lips
the name of Airs and Graces.&nbsp; It meant nothing to him.&nbsp;
Now he could only think of escape; and as the crowd bulged and
burst once more over the course he made a dash for the other
side.</p>
<p>Mounted police were pressing back the tide; but Edwin was
small, and quick enough to get over.&nbsp; He pushed and wriggled
his way through masses to which there seemed to be no end.&nbsp;
Only in the rear of the stands the density of the crowd
thinned.&nbsp; Then he broke into a run and though he was soaked
with sweat and his head was aching fiercely, he did not stop
running until a billow of the Down had hidden the stands from
sight.</p>
<p>In a little hollow littered with tins and other <a
name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 65</span>debris, and
choked with nettles and some other hot-smelling herb, he lay,
recovering his breath, and, for the first time, thinking, beside
a diminished dew-pond of dirty water.&nbsp; He was
miserable.&nbsp; Fate now brooded over him as heavily as the
white-hot sky, and he couldn&rsquo;t, for the life of him,
imagine why.&nbsp; It was ridiculous, in any case, that the mere
sight of a woman&rsquo;s eyes should have worked so extraordinary
a miracle.&nbsp; Yet this was no less than the truth.&nbsp;
Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all the happiness and
light and colour had gone out of his adventure.&nbsp; That which
had been, at least, magnificent, had now become childish or
nearly silly.&nbsp; Reflecting, he couldn&rsquo;t be satisfied
that anything was changed.&nbsp; Nothing had really changed
except himself; and he didn&rsquo;t want to admit that he had
changed either.&nbsp; No, he hadn&rsquo;t changed.&nbsp; Only his
mind was just like the dewpond at his feet in which the burning
sky was mirrored.&nbsp; Some days it would be blue and white and
others black with thunder.&nbsp; But the pool would be just the
same.&nbsp; &ldquo;I oughtn&rsquo;t to be more miserable now than
I was when I came up here; and then, apart from being a bit
funky, I felt ripping.&rdquo;&nbsp; None of these sober
reflections relieved him.&nbsp; All the rest of the way back he
felt hunted and miserable, and something very near to panic
seized him at the point when he reached the college palings.</p>
<p>At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was
waiting.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank goodness you&rsquo;ve come,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
Then he suddenly went white.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; cried Edwin.</p>
<p><a name="page66"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
66</span>&ldquo;Oh, Lord, it&rsquo;s the Head.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The voice of the head-master came next,&mdash;&ldquo;Hallo,
what are you doing here?&nbsp; Let me see&mdash;Widdup,
isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A mortar-board topped the palings.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Ingleby&mdash;What&rsquo;s this?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s
this?&nbsp; What are you doing there?&rdquo;</p>
<p>A moment of brilliant inspiration.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked my cap
over the fence.&nbsp; May I get it, sir?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Serious&mdash;very serious,&rdquo; muttered the
Head.&nbsp; &ldquo;The letter of the law.&nbsp; Race-week.&nbsp;
You&rsquo;re out of bounds, you know&mdash;technically out of
bounds.&nbsp; Boys have been expelled for less.&nbsp; Yes,
expelled.&nbsp; Ruin your whole career.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, in the same
flash, the too-literal Widdup, white with fear.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry, sir,&rdquo; he said . . .
&ldquo;awfully sorry.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mph. . . .&nbsp; What were you two doing
here?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss-moth
caterpillars.&rdquo;&nbsp; Silence&mdash;then, rather
lamely,&mdash;&ldquo;They&rsquo;re in the fourth stage,
sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Are they?&rdquo;&nbsp; The Head smiled, possibly
because he approved of this fervent manifestation of what the
head-masters&rsquo; conference called &ldquo;nature study,&rdquo;
possibly at Edwin&rsquo;s sudden revelation of schoolboy
psychology.&nbsp; Decidedly he approved of the puss-moths.&nbsp;
He had been reading Fabre aloud to his wife.&nbsp; Fabre, too,
was a schoolmaster, poor devil!&nbsp; He did not speak his
thoughts: schoolmasters never can.&nbsp; He said,&mdash;</p>
<p><a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
67</span>&ldquo;Let me see, Ingleby, you&rsquo;re in the Lower
Fifth?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I must speak to Mr. Cleaver. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; He
didn&rsquo;t say what he must speak about.&nbsp; &ldquo;All
right&mdash;get along with you.&rdquo;&nbsp; He left them,
walking away with his hands joined behind his back supporting an
immense flounce of black silk gown.&nbsp; Edwin scrambled over
the fence; his hands, as they clutched the top of it, were
trembling violently.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, you are a prize liar,&rdquo; said Widdup,
&ldquo;and the old man believed every word of it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
the rotten part of it. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What on earth do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; He knew
perfectly well what he meant.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who won?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Airs and Graces.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;ve won the sweep.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Ten minutes later he was back in Mr. Cleaver&rsquo;s classroom
trying to make himself so inconspicuous that he wouldn&rsquo;t be
called upon to make an exhibition of himself, and, as luck would
have it, nothing of any difficulty came his way to drag him from
his comfortable obscurity.&nbsp; Even though the intense
excitement of his adventure had now faded, the atmosphere of that
high room had changed.&nbsp; He felt that he didn&rsquo;t somehow
belong to it; or, rather, that he had left something
behind.&nbsp; All through that drowsy hour some part of him was
still being hurried over the hot downs, swept along in the
sweating crowds of the racecourse, and this <a
name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 68</span>circumstance
made his present life strangely unreal, as though he were a
changeling with whom it had nothing in common.&nbsp; Gradually,
very gradually, the old conditions reasserted themselves, but it
was not until the insistent discipline of the evening service in
chapel had dragged him back into normality that his adventure and
the influence of the strange people with whom he had rubbed
shoulders began to fade.&nbsp; Widdup, with his unblushing
admiration, helped.&nbsp; There was no shutting him up.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, you have a nerve,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
wonder what you&rsquo;ll do next. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, stow it,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
finished with that sort of thing.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not cut out for
a blood.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t think how you did it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Neither can I.&nbsp; It was damned silly of me.&nbsp; I
just wanted to satisfy myself that . . . that I had some guts,
you know.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t really care what you chaps thought
about it.&nbsp; It was sort of private. . .&rdquo;</p>
<h3><a name="page69"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
69</span>CHAPTER VI<br />
THUNDER WEATHER</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">That</span> night a thrilled but
incredulous dormitory discussed the exploit of Ingleby.&nbsp;
Without pretending to have approached the dizzy achievements of
Griffin, Edwin perceived that in addition to reassuring himself
he had managed to atone for a little of his former
reputation.&nbsp; He found himself treated with something that
was almost respect, partly for the daring of the whole
expedition, but even more for the crowning achievement of his
inspired lie.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I wish you hadn&rsquo;t told them that,&rdquo; he said
to Widdup.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; said Widdup.&nbsp; &ldquo;That was the
best part of it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think so.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mind
telling a lie, but it&rsquo;s rotten if the chap you tell it to
believes you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Get out,&rdquo; said Widdup.&nbsp; &ldquo;If you want
to know the truth it&rsquo;s only another example of your rotten
cockiness.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Why?&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Why? . . .&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t
understand it.&nbsp; It seemed to him that the most natural
decent things in the world were all labelled as
abnormalities.&nbsp; Even if he had proved to his own <a
name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>satisfaction
that he possessed the usual amount of &ldquo;guts,&rdquo; it
seemed that he was a kind of freak.&nbsp; There was no getting to
the bottom of the mystery.&nbsp; Yet, when he came to consider
himself, he was certain that his attitude was infinitely
humble.&nbsp; Perhaps that was the trouble.&nbsp; Other chaps
didn&rsquo;t think about themselves.&nbsp; Edwin envied them
unfeignedly.&nbsp; He felt that he was condemned to travel a sort
of vicious circle.&nbsp; Thus, if he were honest to himself he
was bound to fail in the ordinary normal standard and to be
considered, if not a prig, an oddity.&nbsp; If, by enormous
efforts, he were to compel himself into the trodden ways of
thought and conduct, he couldn&rsquo;t be honest&mdash;and in the
process of regaining his honesty he found himself fighting his
way back to the original misfortune.&nbsp; There was no way out
of it.&nbsp; Isolated he must be.&nbsp; He determined, above all
things, that even if he were not ashamed of his isolation, he
wouldn&rsquo;t be proud of it.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t easy.</p>
<p>The whole incident of the Birches&mdash;which, after all, he
had meant for a sort of private trial&mdash;was becoming a
nuisance.&nbsp; He almost welcomed the attitude of Griffin, who
scoffed at the whole business and refused to believe he had been
there.&nbsp; Griffin, his own reputation for valour and cunning
being in question, determined to prove that Edwin had not been
near the race.&nbsp; In the dormitory that night the coalition
set themselves to this business, beginning with an examination at
the hands of Griffin himself.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Widdup says you went to see the Birches run.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Does he?&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p><a name="page71"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
71</span>&ldquo;Now, none of your fooling, Ingleby.&nbsp;
You&rsquo;re a damned little liar.&nbsp; You never put your nose
near the races.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, it doesn&rsquo;t matter to you anyway.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll soon know that it
does.&nbsp; We&rsquo;re not going to have any liars in this
house.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d better tell the truth at
once.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;All right, then.&nbsp; I did go to the
races.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The swine!&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; Get a towel,
Duggie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well . . . you asked me. . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now, I&rsquo;m going to prove that you&rsquo;re a
liar.&nbsp; Of course you know that already.&nbsp; But you ought
to be shown up for your own good.&nbsp; Then you&rsquo;ll get a
tight six.&nbsp; What were Airs and Graces&rsquo;
colours?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what his colours were.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Griffin howled.&nbsp; &ldquo;HIS . . . listen to the
swine.&nbsp; He doesn&rsquo;t know a horse from a mare,
Duggie.&nbsp; Ingleby, how do you tell a horse from a
mare?&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin blushing, was overwhelmed with
laughter.&nbsp; By this time the towel was ready, wet, and
twisted into a cable.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll teach you the
colours of Airs and Graces,&rdquo; said Griffin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve had quite enough of your airs and graces
here.&nbsp; Next time you&rsquo;ll find it pays to tell the truth
in this dormitory.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin got his six, having been bent double over the end of his
own bed by the other seekers after truth.&nbsp; It was worth
it.&nbsp; When the lights were out and he was comfortably settled
in bed he decided that that sort of thing oughtn&rsquo;t to make
any difference.&nbsp; &ldquo;My mind to me a kingdom is,&rdquo;
he said to himself; and in his mind the great guts question had
been settled for ever.&nbsp; As for the lamming. . . .&nbsp;
Well, it might have been a gym shoe. . . .&nbsp; While <a
name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 72</span>he lay
thinking of these things he was surprised to hear the voice of
Widdup, who slept next to him, speaking in a whisper.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I say,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;did you really go to the
Birches, or were you pulling my leg?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I did,&rdquo; he replied.&nbsp; It gave him a
little shock to find that so slight a thing as a display of
physical violence had shaken Widdup&rsquo;s faith.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad of that,&rdquo; came Widdup&rsquo;s
apologetic whisper.&nbsp; A long silence.&nbsp;
&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve won the sweep, anyway,&rdquo; said
Widdup.&nbsp; &ldquo;Thirty-eight and sixpence.&rdquo;&nbsp;
Edwin grunted.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If you reckon that you&rsquo;ll be here four more
years, taking into account the number of men&mdash;average, you
know&mdash;who go in for the house sweep every year, you could
calculate the exact chances against your ever&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>He was asleep.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>And while he slept after that day of unusual excitement and
fierce colour, he had a curious dream.&nbsp; In the beginning it
reflected a little of the anxieties of the afternoon, for he
found himself hurrying in the middle of a huge and sweaty crowd
which made no way for him.&nbsp; He did not know why he was
running so violently; but of one thing he was certain, and this
was that he was going to be late.&nbsp; At first he had in front
of him the little man in the rusty coat who had been his
companion on the Downs: the same queer creature now endowed with
an aspect even more grotesque and an agility more <a
name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 73</span>elfish, so
that Edwin knew from the first that this time he was sure to lose
him and never to catch him up again.&nbsp; All the masses of
people through whom he pressed were moving even faster than
himself and in the same direction, so that it seemed as if he
could never gain ground at all, but must go on running for ever
with no sight of his goal, nor any hope of getting nearer to
it.&nbsp; At last his breath gave out, and he stopped.&nbsp; It
wasn&rsquo;t a bit of good; for the moving crowd wouldn&rsquo;t
stop with him, and he was pushed forward by this multitude of
tall people, knowing that if he faltered for a moment or fell (as
in the end he must), he would certainly be trampled to death by
the feet of those who followed.</p>
<p>At last the little man outstripped him altogether, and feeling
that he had lost all hope, Edwin gave a cry.&nbsp; When he cried
out the whole hurrying crowd melted away, the noise of their
padding footsteps left a clear patch of silence (it was like
that) and a puff of cool, thin air blew suddenly right into his
nostrils.&nbsp; He thought, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to be late
after all. . . .&nbsp; Why didn&rsquo;t they tell me that I was
going to Uffdown?&rdquo;&nbsp; There was no air like that in the
world.&nbsp; He drank it down in gulps as a horse drinks
water.&nbsp; &ldquo;Eddie, you&rsquo;ll choke yourself,&rdquo;
his mother said. . . .&nbsp; &ldquo;The light won&rsquo;t last
much longer.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;But why should it last,
darling?&rdquo; he replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to look
over there,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;in the west.&nbsp; You see
that level ridge dropping suddenly?&nbsp; Well, it&rsquo;s the
third farm from the end.&nbsp; Do you see?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, darling, I can see it quite clearly. . .
.&rdquo;&nbsp; And he did see it.&nbsp; A long building of bluish
stone with small windows set flush in the walls and no <a
name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>dripstones
save one above the oak doorway.&nbsp; Not a soul to be
seen.&nbsp; It looked as if the place had been deserted by living
creatures for many years.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can see it,&rdquo; he
said, &ldquo;but I don&rsquo;t think anybody lives
there.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But you can see it?&rdquo; she asked him eagerly.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Can you see the little bedroom window on the
left&mdash;the third from the end&mdash;quite a little
window?&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was difficult to see, for, after all, it was more than a
hundred miles away, and all the time that he was looking, the
streamers of cloud kept rolling down from the darens on the
mountain and drenching the whole scene in mist.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Eddie . . . there&rsquo;s not much time,&rdquo; she
pleaded.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do tell me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can see the window
you mean.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She sighed.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m so glad, Eddie.&nbsp; I did
want to show it you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But why were you in such a hurry?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was my last chance of showing it to you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Whatever do you mean, darling?&rdquo;</p>
<p>She turned her face away.&nbsp; Now it was quite dark.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m really dreaming,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;and
this is a sort of stage on which they can do lightning tricks
like that.&rdquo;&nbsp; But there was no doubt about it being
Uffdown.&nbsp; All round the sky the pit-fires of the
black-country were flickering out.&nbsp; And though he
couldn&rsquo;t see her face, he could feel her soft hand in
his.&nbsp; &ldquo;At any rate, I&rsquo;ve written . . .&rdquo;
she said at last.</p>
<p>That was the sentence which he carried in his mind when he
awoke.&nbsp; A letter.&nbsp; But she didn&rsquo;t usually write
to him before Sunday, and it was now only Saturday.&nbsp; Yet,
when he came into Hall <a name="page75"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 75</span>for breakfast a letter was lying on
his plate.&nbsp; There was something so strange about the whole
business that he was almost afraid to open it.&nbsp; He had a
sudden, awful intuition that she was dead.&nbsp; Ridiculous, of
course, for dead people didn&rsquo;t write letters.&nbsp; Smiling
at himself, yet scarcely reassured, he opened the letter and read
it.</p>
<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<i>My Darling Boy</i> (she
wrote),&mdash;<i>Did you really make fifteen</i>?&nbsp; <i>You
must be getting on</i>.&nbsp; <i>Aunt Laura has just been in to
tea</i>, <i>and we talked such a lot that I have only just time
to write this before father goes down to business and can post
it</i>.&nbsp; <i>I have some very interesting news for
you</i>.&nbsp; <i>The other afternoon Mrs. Willis of Mawne came
in to see me</i>.&nbsp; <i>She and Lilian are going to
Switzerland for a month this summer</i>, <i>and now she suggests
that I should join them there</i>.&nbsp; <i>It won&rsquo;t be
just yet</i>, <i>and I think&mdash;no</i>, <i>I&rsquo;m
sure</i>&mdash;<i>that I should be back again before your
holidays</i>.&nbsp; <i>Father wants me to go</i>.&nbsp; <i>I
haven&rsquo;t been very well</i>, <i>and the doctor says
he&rsquo;s sure it would do me good</i>.&nbsp; <i>All my life
I&rsquo;ve wanted to see Switzerland</i>.&nbsp; <i>I&rsquo;m most
awfully excited about it</i>, <i>Eddie</i>, <i>and father says he
can spare me</i>.&nbsp; <i>Won&rsquo;t it be wonderful</i>?&nbsp;
<i>They are going about the end of June</i>.&nbsp; <i>I
won&rsquo;t forget that postal order</i>, <i>but I&rsquo;m rather
poor myself just at present</i>.&nbsp; <i>Eddie</i>, <i>do you
keep my letters</i>?&nbsp; <i>I think I should like you
to</i>.&nbsp; <i>The double stocks which father planted in the
long bed are just coming out</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;<i>Good-bye</i>, <i>my
darling</i>,</p>
<p style="text-align: right">&ldquo;<i>Your loving</i><br />
&ldquo;<i>Mother</i>.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a name="page76"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 76</span>Of
course nothing, in spite of the news of the Swiss excursion,
could be more ordinary.&nbsp; That would be wonderful for her . .
. of course it would.&nbsp; And yet, in spite of all these
reasonable convictions he couldn&rsquo;t get that dream out of
his head.&nbsp; Something, he felt sure, was going wrong.</p>
<p>He tried to analyse the source of his disquietude.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Perhaps I&rsquo;m jealous,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; He was
most awfully jealous of anything that other people had to do with
his mother, and, anyway, he didn&rsquo;t know these Willis people
very well.&nbsp; They were new friends of hers: a family of
wealthy iron-masters whose works had suddenly risen in the year
of the Franco-Prussian war, and were now slowly but gigantically
expanding.&nbsp; They lived at Mawne Hall, a sad but pretentious
mansion of the departed Pomfrets, of which Edwin knew only the
wrought-iron gates at the bottom of a steep drive.&nbsp; They had
a son, Edward, of very much the same age as himself, but the
Willises had no great educational ambitions (that was where
Edwin&rsquo;s mother came in), and had sent him to the ancient
but decaying Grammar School of Halesby, an impossible concern in
the eyes of any public-schoolboy.&nbsp; The Willises had pots of
money.&nbsp; Here again Edwin suspected them.&nbsp; It rather
looked as if they had &ldquo;taken up&rdquo; his mother; and
nobody on earth had the right to do that.&nbsp; He hated the
Willises (and particularly Edward) in advance.&nbsp; He always
hated people he hadn&rsquo;t met when he heard too much about
them.&nbsp; He thought that the new intimacy probably had
something to do with his Aunt Laura, who was diffuse and fussy <a
name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 77</span>and ornate,
and not a patch on his mother.&nbsp; Nobody was a patch on his
mother . . .</p>
<p>He couldn&rsquo;t get rid of his anxiety, and so, in the heat
of the moment, before morning school, he answered her
letter.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, darling, don&rsquo;t go to Switzerland
with a lot of strangers.&nbsp; If you do go, I feel that I shall
never see you again,&rdquo; he wrote.&nbsp; He knew it
wouldn&rsquo;t be any good.&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t reasonably
do anything but smile at his fancies.&nbsp; But he couldn&rsquo;t
help it.&nbsp; He even took the trouble to post the letter in the
box at the Grand Entrance, so as to make certain that he
couldn&rsquo;t change his mind.</p>
<p>On the way into the classroom he met Griffin, who pushed a
packet into his hand.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here you are,&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Take it.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was thirty-eight
shillings in silver, the first prize in the house sweep on the
Birches.&nbsp; He wished he had remembered about it.&nbsp; He
would have told his mother in the letter not to bother about the
postal order.&nbsp; It was an awful thing to think of her being
hard-up and himself rolling in this prodigious and ill-gotten
fortune.</p>
<p>The morning class was listless, for the weather remained at a
great pitch of heat, and the only thing that any one thought of
was the fixture with the M.C.C. which would begin at noon.&nbsp;
Cleaver always assisted as umpire at this match, and so the
deserted Lower Fifth occupied a corner of the Big Schoolroom by
themselves.&nbsp; In this great chamber&mdash;it was said that
the roof-span was as wide as any in England&mdash;Edwin dreamed
away the morning, reading, sometimes, the gilt lettering on the
boards on which the names of scholars were <a
name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 78</span>recorded:
giants who had passed before him along the same corridors, and
whose names were only memorable as those of heroes in a
mythology, or more ponderably evident in reports of parliamentary
debates and the scores of county cricket teams.</p>
<p>Opposite him hung the board devoted to the winners of entrance
scholarships.&nbsp; His own name was there.&nbsp; Edwin Ingleby .
. . 1895.&nbsp; He remembered the day when it had almost
embarrassed him with its fresh gold lettering.&nbsp; Now the leaf
had toned down, and the name had sunk into obscurity beneath a
dozen others.&nbsp; So the passage of fleet time was measured on
these tables.&nbsp; In a few more years nobody who didn&rsquo;t
take the trouble would read his name.&nbsp; Even those of the
batch before him were half-buried in obscurity.&nbsp; One other
name arrested him: G. H. Giles.&nbsp; He knew nothing of Giles
except that this brilliant beginning had been followed by
disaster.&nbsp; The name of Giles appeared on no other board; for
the term before Edwin came to St. Luke&rsquo;s Giles had been
expelled from the school.&nbsp; Edwin didn&rsquo;t know what he
had been expelled for; but the circumstance, remembered,
afflicted him with a kind of awe.&nbsp; &ldquo;It might happen so
easily,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; Why, if he hadn&rsquo;t lied to
the Head the day before he might have been expelled himself, and
years afterwards some one sitting in his place would stare at the
name of Ingleby with the selfsame awe.&nbsp; The voice of Mr.
Leeming, stuck fast where Edwin had left him a year before, in
the Stuart period, recalled him.&nbsp; &ldquo;We will pass over
the unpleasant . . . most unpleasant side of Charles <a
name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 79</span>the
Second&rsquo;s reign.&nbsp; Unfortunately, he was a thoroughly
bad man, and his court . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin heard no more, but he heard another sound peculiar to
the Big Schoolroom on Saturday mornings: the measured steps of
the school sergeant plodding down the long stone corridor which
led to the folding doors.&nbsp; On Saturday morning the
form-masters presented their weekly reports to the Head, and boys
whose names came badly out of the ordeal were summoned to the
office to be lectured, to be put on the sort of probation known
as &ldquo;Satisfecit,&rdquo; or even to be caned.</p>
<p>The Lower Fifth knew none of these terrors.&nbsp; Cleaver was
far too easy-going to take his weekly report seriously; but the
lower ranks of Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s form trembled.&nbsp; You could
never be sure of old Leeming.&nbsp; The folding doors
opened.&nbsp; Mr. Leeming stopped speaking, and the sergeant
walked up to his desk and stood waiting at attention while
Leeming read his list.&nbsp; He looked over his glasses.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Let me see . . . Sherard . . .&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Sherard, the head-master wishes to see you at
twelve-thirty.&rdquo;&nbsp; His voice was so gently sympathetic
that nobody could possibly imagine that he had had anything to do
with this calamity.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then . . . the Lower Fifth . .
.&rdquo; he fumbled with the paper.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ingleby.&nbsp;
The head-master will see you at the same time.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
looked over at Edwin with the most pained surprise.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Very good, sergeant,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>Edwin felt himself going white.&nbsp; Yes, that was it.&nbsp;
That was the explanation of his feeling of unrest.&nbsp; He was
going to share the fate of the traditional Giles.&nbsp; Good Lord
. . . think of it!&nbsp; Miss <a name="page80"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 80</span>Denning had done this.&nbsp; And yet
he could hardly believe it&mdash;she had always been far too nice
for that.&nbsp; Now his face was burning.&nbsp; It struck him
that it wasn&rsquo;t a bit of good worrying.&nbsp; If it
weren&rsquo;t . . . if it weren&rsquo;t for his mother it really
wouldn&rsquo;t be so bad.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t bear to think
of her disappointment in his disgrace.&nbsp; She thought so much
of him.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t be quite so bad if she were not
ill.&nbsp; It might kill her.&nbsp; Good God! . . . that would be
awful!&nbsp; Suppose, after all (it was no good supposing), that
the Head wanted to see him about something else. . . .&nbsp;
There wasn&rsquo;t anything else.&nbsp; Unless . . . unless it
were something to do with his mother.&nbsp; Unless she were
seriously ill . . . even something worse.&nbsp; But he had her
letter.&nbsp; It couldn&rsquo;t be that.&nbsp; Yesterday she was
well enough to write to him.&nbsp; No . . . the story was out,
and he was going to be expelled.&nbsp; In three quarters of an
hour he would know the worst.&nbsp; He wished that the time would
pass more quickly.&nbsp; Time had never been so slow in
passing.&nbsp; The clock in the tower chimed the quarter.&nbsp;
From where he sat he could see the tower through the upper lights
of the long window.&nbsp; He could see the minute-hand give a
little lurch and move infinitesimally forward.&nbsp; He
remembered Widdup telling him exactly how many times it moved to
the minute.&nbsp; Was it twice . . . or three times?&nbsp; He had
forgotten.&nbsp; There must be something wrong with the clock
to-day.&nbsp; In the middle of this purgatory one half-humorous
fancy came to him: &ldquo;At any rate old Griff will know that I
did go to the races now.&rdquo;</p>
<h4><a name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
81</span>III</h4>
<p>They waited, ten or twelve of them, in the twilight of the
passage outside the Head&rsquo;s study.&nbsp; The atmosphere of
this place resembled that of a crypt, or more
properly&mdash;since the keynote of the St. Luke&rsquo;s
architecture was baronial rather than monastic&mdash;a
dungeon.&nbsp; The only light that came to them entered by way of
certain dusty windows of lancet shape on either side of the
gothic porch.&nbsp; Beneath these windows languished a pale array
of botanical specimens rotting in their test tubes and bearing
witness to the week-old zeal of the Head&rsquo;s particular
section of the Natural History Society.</p>
<p>They waited, a miserable company of all shapes and sizes:
some, who knew the worst, with a rather exaggerated jauntiness,
determined to make the best of it: others, such as Edwin, being
in doubt of their fate and burdened with a spiritual apprehension
far worse than any physical penalty which might overtake
them.</p>
<p>The sergeant opened the door.&nbsp; &ldquo;Sherard W.,&rdquo;
he said.&nbsp; Sherard W. crammed a sweaty cap into his pocket
and started forward, eager to get it over.&nbsp; The aperture
which admitted him showed no more than the end of a table crammed
with books, a number of highly-varnished shelves, a polished
floor covered with Turkey carpet, and a blaze of mocking
sunshine.&nbsp; The nails in the heels of Sherard W.&rsquo;s
boots rang on the stone flags.&nbsp; When he reached the Turkey
carpet his steps became silent.&nbsp; The door closed.&nbsp; The
rest of them strained to <a name="page82"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 82</span>listen.&nbsp; They heard little:
nothing but the quiet rumour of the head-master&rsquo;s voice,
and little patches of silence in which the replies of Sherard W.
were not heard at all.&nbsp; A moment later he emerged.&nbsp; A
number of whispered questions assailed him, but Sherard W.
didn&rsquo;t feel like answering questions.&nbsp; He brushed by
the rest of them as quickly as he could go, with his school-cap
pressed to his eyes.&nbsp; Another patch of sunlight was
revealed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Frazer . . .&rdquo; called the
sergeant.&nbsp; And Frazer, a tall lout of a boy with sallow
face, came forward and was swallowed up in the same way as
Sherard W.&nbsp; A minute later the sound of dull blows was
heard.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Frazer&rsquo;s got it,&rdquo; said somebody.&nbsp;
&ldquo;One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six
. . .&nbsp; Poor old Frazer!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Six from the Head isn&rsquo;t equal to three from
Cleaver.&nbsp; You should see Cleaver&rsquo;s biceps in the
gym.&rdquo;</p>
<p>One by one the members of the crowd entered and
returned.&nbsp; It seemed to Edwin that his turn would never
come.&nbsp; All the time that he waited his imagination (accursed
gift!) was playing with the hidden scene within: the long table,
that he had seen only once before, and, at the head of it, the
lean, bearded figure in the silk gown wielding an absolute power
of life and death like God in the Old Testament.&nbsp; Yes, it
was just like that.&nbsp; He remembered a minatory text that hung
cobwebbed in one of the attics at home: <span
class="smcap">Prepare To Meet Thy God</span>.&nbsp; It was not
pleasant to hear these muffled sounds of chastisement, but what
was a flogging (the Head&rsquo;s favourite word) compared with
the more devastating fate <a name="page83"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 83</span>that awaited him?&nbsp;
&ldquo;That&rsquo;s why he&rsquo;s keeping me till last,&rdquo;
he thought.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby . . .&rdquo; said the sergeant.&nbsp; Edwin had
time to fancy that his tone implied a more awful enormity than he
had put into any other name.&nbsp; He entered, and stood waiting
in the sunlight.&nbsp; It was rather less frightening than he had
imagined, this long room, relatively luxurious, and the pale man
at the head of the table with his lined, black-bearded face, and
the peculiar twitching of his left arm which had always added to
the sinister side of his equipment.&nbsp; For a moment he took no
notice of Edwin.&nbsp; Then he looked up and smiled.&nbsp; Would
the storm never break?</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ah . . . Ingleby.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I hope your entomological zeal isn&rsquo;t going to
take you up to the racecourse, Ingleby.&nbsp; How are the
puss-caterpillars getting on?&rdquo;</p>
<p>He smiled again, and showed his teeth beneath his shaggy
moustache.&nbsp; Edwin was seized with a sudden terror.&nbsp; The
worst had happened, and now the Head was playing with him.&nbsp;
He could say nothing.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Eh?&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the matter with
you?&nbsp; You aren&rsquo;t faint, are you?&nbsp; You&rsquo;d
better sit down.&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin trembled into a chair.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now, are you all right?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I sent for you, Ingleby, because I have been having a
talk with Mr. Leeming.&rdquo;</p>
<p>What in the world had old fat Leeming to do with it?&nbsp;
Edwin wished he would get it over.</p>
<p><a name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
84</span>&ldquo;Mr. Leeming has always given me good reports of
you . . . I don&rsquo;t know if you deserve them . . . and last
night I saw Mr. Cleaver, who . . . um . . . um . . . tells me
that you are one of . . .&nbsp; No, I&rsquo;ll leave that part
out . . . that you&rsquo;ve got plenty of brains when you choose
to use them, but that you are somewhat lacking in
application.&nbsp; H&rsquo;m?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Why wouldn&rsquo;t he get to the point?</p>
<p>&ldquo;He says, Ingleby, that you&rsquo;re a dreamer.&nbsp;
Well, you know, there&rsquo;s no use for dreamers in this
world.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re not wanted.&nbsp; Even dreamers with
the blessing of good brains.&nbsp; H&rsquo;m?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But Mr. Leeming is satisfied, and so am I, that if you
chose to make an effort, and take a . . . a healthy interest in
things, we might do some good with you.&nbsp; You might win
scholarships, and be a credit to the school.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
what we want.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what your parents sent you here
for.&nbsp; Now . . . now Mr. Leeming tells me that you aspire to
becoming a priest of the church. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . .?&nbsp; But Mr. Leeming told me he had talked
the matter over with you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;He mentioned it, sir . . . but I didn&rsquo;t say
anything.&nbsp; I . . . don&rsquo;t think I do want to,
sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The Head frowned.&nbsp; &ldquo;You mean that you don&rsquo;t
feel worthy of so great a vocation?&nbsp; Well, you&rsquo;re
young.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a promising boy.&nbsp; I want to do
what is best for you . . . and the school.&nbsp; At the end of
this term you are likely to get a move, and after a certain time
I don&rsquo;t think, from the scholarship <a
name="page85"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 85</span>point of
view, you can begin to specialise too early.&nbsp; You have shown
a certain . . . aptitude for English.&nbsp; You might read
History.&nbsp; You might stick to Classics.&nbsp; What do you
think about it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I should like to read History, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very well, I&rsquo;ll write to your father about
it.&nbsp; We won&rsquo;t say anything more about the Church for
the present.&nbsp; That will come later.&nbsp; I expect Mr.
Leeming will talk it over with you.&nbsp; You may go
now.&rdquo;</p>
<h3><a name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
86</span>CHAPTER VII<br />
IMPURITY</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> &ldquo;little
chat&rdquo;&mdash;as Mr. Leeming would certainly have called
it&mdash;did not take place for a long time, for the reverend
gentleman&rsquo;s mind had become exercised with a problem of
greater importance than the devotion of Edwin.&nbsp; It
wasn&rsquo;t exactly his fault.&nbsp; Mr. Leeming was a
bachelor.&nbsp; He was now in his forty-third year.&nbsp;
Naturally endowed with an intense shyness of disposition which
the forced publicity of his two professions, in the pulpit and
the Classroom, had overlaid with a veneer of suave assurance, he
was none the less a man of ardent, if timid passions.&nbsp; He
himself had always been aware of this powerful sensual element in
his nature.&nbsp; With a certain degree of courage he had
subjected it to a deliberate mortification.&nbsp; Obstinately he
had fitted his body to the Procrustean couch that his conscience
recommended: obstinately, and in a degree successfully.&nbsp; Not
quite successfully . . . for his original appetites were
unwieldy, and if they had been coerced in one direction they had
undoubtedly and demonstrably overflowed in another, as witnessed
the growing expanse of his waistcoat.</p>
<p>This waistcoat, on week-days of broadcloth and <a
name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 87</span>on Sundays of
a more sensual silk, was the symbol of Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s
possibilities.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t know it.&nbsp; Even if he
were aware, in the lacing of his boots, of its physical
existence; he hadn&rsquo;t the least idea of its spiritual
significance.&nbsp; If he had realised this, if he had been
content to see himself as he actually stood upon the brink of his
morning bath instead of as a snowy surpliced priest of God or a
knightly figure in the armour of Sir Percivale (such, indeed, was
his Christian name), Mr. Leeming might have been a healthier and
a happier man.&nbsp; As it was, the devil that he believed he had
conquered, in reality possessed his soul.</p>
<p>In his quest for the thing which he had labelled purity he had
unconsciously allowed the idea of &ldquo;Impurity&rdquo; to
become an obsession.&nbsp; In the activities of a parish, hustled
by the continual accidents of stark life and stabilised by the
actual responsibility of a wife and an increasing family, Mr.
Leeming might have become a thinner and a wiser man.&nbsp; In the
sedentary and monotonous duties of a public school, he had become
gradually more fat and introspective, and, as the years advanced,
more perpetually conscious of the unashamed presence throughout
human nature of his own suppressed desires,&mdash;more frightened
. . . and more curious . . . of their terrible existence and more
terrible power.&nbsp; Mr. Leeming, with the best intentions in
the world, was in a bad way.</p>
<p>A number of circumstances favoured the development of the
unfortunate gentleman&rsquo;s obsession.&nbsp; In the last Easter
holidays he had attended a conference of assistant masters in
London, at which the <a name="page88"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 88</span>whole question had been discussed
with the greatest solemnity, and plans had been formulated for
the stamping out of &ldquo;impurity&rdquo; in every public school
in England.&nbsp; The speeches of the delegates had convinced him
of his own blindness.&nbsp; It was impossible that St.
Luke&rsquo;s should be so very different from any other public
school, yet other people had assured the meeting that in their
own schools the disease was &ldquo;rampant,&rdquo; and Mr.
Leeming had returned to his summer duties convinced that if only
he looked with sufficient care more ills than he had ever
suspected might be found.&nbsp; He had become a man with a
mission.</p>
<p>For a crusade of this kind St. Luke&rsquo;s was not by any
means an ideal field.&nbsp; The head-master, for all his imposing
presence, was not a practical man.&nbsp; He was intolerant of
enthusiasms in his staff, not so much because they were
symptomatic of ill-breeding, but because they tended to disturb
the pleasant ordered tenor of his life.&nbsp; Croquet and botany
were sciences of more interest to him than education.&nbsp; He
believed in hard games, corporal punishment, nature study, and
the classics.&nbsp; He hated extremes.&nbsp; The golden mean was
his creed, his weakness, and his apology.&nbsp; He hadn&rsquo;t
any use for Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s intensities.&nbsp; He could even
be picturesque on occasion.&nbsp; &ldquo;If you are going to
appoint yourself inspector of our dirty linen, Leeming,&rdquo; he
said, &ldquo;you really mustn&rsquo;t expect me to do the
washing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think you understand me, sir,&rdquo; Mr.
Leeming began. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t I?&rdquo; said the Head.&nbsp; The word
Impurity formed voicelessly on Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s lips.</p>
<p><a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
89</span>&ldquo;It is a scandalous thing . . . scandalous . .
.&rdquo; he complained to the common-room, &ldquo;that a man who
knows what is right and is determined to follow it
shouldn&rsquo;t be properly backed by the headmaster.&nbsp; The
matter is vital.&nbsp; It is the most important . . . by far the
most important problem in modern education.&nbsp; Any means are
justified to purge the schools of this sort of thing. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I can see you, Leeming,&rdquo; drawled Selby, &ldquo;in
the r&ocirc;le of <i>agent provocateur</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
common-room exploded.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What is wanted in the public schoolmaster is a higher
sense of seriousness,&rdquo; Leeming spluttered.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
have no sense of suspicion.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What is more wanted in the public schools,&rdquo; said
Cleaver, &ldquo;is a suspicion of sense&mdash;common
sense.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;All you fellows talk,&rdquo; said Dr. Downton,
&ldquo;as if the whole thing were a problem for the public
schools purely and simply.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s nothing of the
kind.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not the ignorance of the average
schoolmaster as much as the ignorance of the average
parent.&nbsp; I mean ignorance of the nature of boys . . . lack
of sympathy, lack of responsibility.&nbsp; And when ugly things
happen they shove it on to us.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what they pay a hundred and fifty a year
for,&rdquo; said Cleaver.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of which we don&rsquo;t see any too much . . .&rdquo;
Selby growled.</p>
<p>&ldquo;None of you take it seriously.&nbsp; The thing is
enormous,&rdquo; said Leeming.&nbsp; &ldquo;What can you expect
in a way of improvement when a housemaster like Selby makes jokes
about it?&nbsp; I&rsquo;m convinced that <a
name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 90</span>there&rsquo;s
only one way. . . .&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t drive boys.&nbsp;
You&rsquo;ve got to understand their hearts.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to understand their bodies,&rdquo;
said Cleaver.</p>
<p>Mr. Leeming flushed.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think you are merely
disgusting, Cleaver.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s quite right,&rdquo; said Downton.&nbsp;
&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t sexual education, it isn&rsquo;t moral
instruction that&rsquo;s going to work the miracle.&nbsp; When a
boy reaches a certain age&mdash;and it isn&rsquo;t the same age
with all boys&mdash;he begins to be conscious, and quite
properly, of his physical passions.&nbsp; You needn&rsquo;t
shudder, Leeming.&nbsp; They exist.&nbsp; You know they exist as
well as anybody.&nbsp; Well, when he reaches that stage a public
school isn&rsquo;t the proper place for him.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The games would go to pot,&rdquo; said Cleaver.&nbsp;
From his point of view there was no more to be said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It depends entirely on your boy.&nbsp; Some are too old
at seventeen.&nbsp; Some are perfectly safe at nineteen.&nbsp;
The trouble is that just when you get them in sight of these
dangers you put them in supreme authority.&nbsp; A prefect can do
pretty well as he likes. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the essence of the system . . .
responsibility,&rdquo; said Selby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It gives them what Shaw said about something else: the
maximum of inclination with the maximum of
opportunity.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Shaw?&rdquo; said Cleaver.&nbsp; &ldquo;You fellows are
too deep for me.&nbsp; Anyway, I don&rsquo;t believe
there&rsquo;s much wrong here.&nbsp; So long.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
swung out of the room.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That kind of man,&rdquo; said Mr. Leeming, &ldquo;is at
the root of the whole business.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page91"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 91</span>Dr.
Downton was almost angry.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yon know, Leeming,
you&rsquo;re talking bosh.&nbsp; The thing&rsquo;s solving
itself.&nbsp; All over the world schoolboys are getting wider
interests at school.&nbsp; In their homes they&rsquo;re taking a
more equal place in family life.&nbsp; It is no longer a matter
of being seen and not heard.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re being treated
like human beings.&nbsp; The more you treat them like human
beings the less likely they are to behave like young
animals.&nbsp; And the greatest mistake of all is to keep on
talking to them about it.&nbsp; Every boy of a certain age is
curious, and quite naturally curious, about his physical
possibilities.&nbsp; So is every girl. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;My dear Downton,&rdquo; said Leeming flushing, &ldquo;I
shall be obliged if you won&rsquo;t&mdash;er&mdash;pursue the
subject.&nbsp; You make it painful. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; said Downton gathering up the skirts
of his gown.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank you.&rdquo;&nbsp; Leeming left the room.&nbsp;
Selby smiled lazily.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If only,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if only our friend
Leeming had ever enjoyed the advantage of a really bad
woman&rsquo;s society.&rdquo;</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Unconscious of the doom which was being forged for their
chastisement in the white heat of Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s troubled
brain, the school lay scattered along the perimeter of the
cricket-field waiting for the players to emerge from the
pavilion.&nbsp; They came, and the great expanse of green was
made more beautiful by their scattered figures.&nbsp; Everything
in the game seemed spacious and smooth and <a
name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
92</span>clean&mdash;the white flannels of the players; the paler
green of the rolled pitch; the new red ball; the sharp click of
the bat.&nbsp; Before lunch the school had lost three wickets,
but now it seemed as if a stand were to be made.&nbsp; The
studious Carr, the head of Edwin&rsquo;s house, was batting
steadily; while Gilson, the school&rsquo;s most showy batsman,
who would play for Surrey in the holidays, was beginning to get
set.&nbsp; Edwin and Widdup had their deck-chairs side by side,
and Douglas, for want of Griffin, absent on some deeper business,
had pitched himself near them, reclining upon a positive divan of
downy cushions.</p>
<p>The winnings of the house sweepstake, easily gained, and
therefore easily to be spent, supplied the natural accompaniment
of ices and ginger beer or that inimitable compound of both that
was known as the Strawberry Cooler.&nbsp; Under such
circumstances the mere fact of lazy existence was a
pleasure.&nbsp; Even when the cautious Carr was bowled, the long
partnership ended, and the St. Luke&rsquo;s wickets began to fall
like autumn leaves, the serene beauty of the day was scarcely
clouded.</p>
<p>In the middle of the afternoon the figure of Mr. Leeming
drifted along the edge of the field.&nbsp; He halted on the path
immediately in front of Edwin with his back to the spectators,
considerably incommoding Douglas&rsquo;s view of the play.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Old Beelzebub&rsquo;s a friend of yours, isn&rsquo;t he,
Ingleby?&rdquo; said Douglas lazily.&nbsp; &ldquo;You might tell
him that he isn&rsquo;t made of glass.&rdquo;&nbsp; But Mr.
Leeming, suddenly aware of a voice behind him, turned and came
towards them, smiling.</p>
<p><a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
93</span>&ldquo;Ah, Ingleby,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is that
you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>He sat on the grass beside them, very carefully, as befitted a
man of his figure.&nbsp; &ldquo;A beautiful day.&nbsp; Let me
see, who are we playing?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The M.C.C., sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ah, yes . . . the Marylebone Cricket Club.&nbsp; Are
you fond of cricket, Ingleby?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I am, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I very seldom see you now.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the pity
of it.&nbsp; The better a boy is the less you see of him.&nbsp;
He passes through your form quickly, and that&rsquo;s the end of
it.&nbsp; And how is Widdup?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Widdup was very well, if a little impatient</p>
<p>&ldquo;You and Ingleby are great friends, Widdup.&nbsp; Quite
inseparable.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve often seen you walking up and down
the quad at night.&nbsp; I wonder what it is you have in common,
eh?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Widdup didn&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; They&rsquo;d always been
pals.&nbsp; They&rsquo;d always slept alongside each other.&nbsp;
That was how you got to know a chap.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, Ingleby, what are you reading in these
days?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well hit, sir; oh, well hit. . . .&nbsp; Make it
five.&nbsp; I beg your pardon, sir. . .&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think
I&rsquo;m reading anything in particular.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Slowly it became evident to Mr. Leeming that the audience
which he had honoured with his company was bored.&nbsp; With
great dignity he picked himself up and left them.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a funny old swine,&rdquo; said Douglas.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I used to think he was rather decent,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;Horribly &lsquo;pi&rsquo; you
know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t trust him,&rdquo; said Douglas.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I always feel <a name="page94"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 94</span>as if he&rsquo;s up to some low-down
business or other.&nbsp; He goes mooching about in those old felt
slippers of his, and you never know where he is.&nbsp; The other
day he came into the long box-room when Griff and I were there
playing Nap.&nbsp; You couldn&rsquo;t tell he was coming.&nbsp;
He&rsquo;s like a damned old tomcat.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t think
how you stick him, Ingleby. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t, really,&rdquo; Edwin confessed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And old Griff says he follows him like a shadow.&nbsp;
Just lately he&rsquo;s taken to haunting the swimming-bath.&nbsp;
I don&rsquo;t know what he goes there for.&nbsp; He never used
to.&nbsp; He never goes in.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t suppose the fat
beast can swim.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;He could float . . .&rdquo; said the practical
Widdup.</p>
<p>The golden afternoon dragged out its lovely length.&nbsp; The
atmosphere of luxurious indolence grew so heavy that it became
too great an effort to think of carrying the rugs and deck-chairs
back to the studies; and when Douglas had left them to keep an
appointment with Griffin, Widdup and Edwin sat on till the
meadows swam with soft golden light, till the tops of the
pyramidal lime-trees became the colour of their blossoms, and the
sun cast long shadows upon the yellow fields.&nbsp; In this
delightful hour the sounds of the match from which excitement had
faded almost as the fierceness had faded from the sky, became no
more than a placid accompaniment to the dying day.&nbsp; At
six-thirty stumps were drawn.&nbsp; The wide fields began to
empty and soon no life was seen upon them but low dipping
swallows who skimmed the smooth lawn as though it were the
surface of some placid <a name="page95"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 95</span>lake.&nbsp; Upon the hillside a
straggling trail of boys could be seen taking home their rugs and
cushions as though they were returning from a day of toil instead
of one of the most exquisite idleness.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come on,&rdquo; said Widdup at last; &ldquo;we shall be
late for chapel.&rdquo;&nbsp; And indeed another twenty minutes
found them assembled in the oak pews for evensong.&nbsp; They
sang the <i>Nunc Dimittis</i>, a canticle which for all the rest
of his life Edwin associated with the placid closing of a summer
day, and the mild rays of the departing sun blazed through the
stained glass of the west window upon the pale mosaic of the
nave.&nbsp; When they emerged from the chapel the sun had set,
the skyline of the downs lay low and almost cold, and cockchafers
were whirring blindly among the sticky tops of the conifers along
the chapel path.</p>
<p>In the middle of the crowd that stuck congested in the porch
Edwin found himself wedged between Douglas and Griffin.&nbsp;
They whispered together behind his back.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, are
you going?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I&rsquo;m going, I told you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve fixed it up with her?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, she&rsquo;s up to any sport.&nbsp; Why don&rsquo;t
you come with us?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Two&rsquo;s company. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Go on with you. . . .&nbsp; You can easily pick up
another.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re not a sportsman, Duggie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t take risks of that kind.&nbsp; You bet
your boots I don&rsquo;t.&nbsp; Why don&rsquo;t you ask
Ingleby?&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a blood.&nbsp; Says he went to see the
Birches.&nbsp; And he&rsquo;s flush, too.&nbsp; Won the
sweep.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page96"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
96</span>&ldquo;Ingleby?&rdquo;&nbsp; Griffin scoffed.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I bet you he&rsquo;d funk it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Funk what?&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Going down town to-night.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s a fair
on.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m taking the skivvy from J dorm.&nbsp;
She&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; She knows a thing or two.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk so loud, you ass,&rdquo; said
Douglas.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, will you come?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, I won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You said you went to the Birches.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I did go to the Birches.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, nobody believes you.&nbsp; Now&rsquo;s your
chance to show your pluck.&nbsp; Come along, gentlemen, show your
pluck. . . .&nbsp; Three to one bar one. . . .&nbsp; &rsquo;Ere
you are, sir.&nbsp; The old and trusted firm.&nbsp; Ingleby . . .
you are a rotten little funk!&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin said nothing.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s got more sense
than you have, anyway, Griff,&rdquo; said Douglas.</p>
<p>That night in the dormitory when the lights were turned down
Griffin had not appeared.&nbsp; Douglas, who slept next to him,
had constructed, by means of his own bolster and another
confiscated from the bed of the small boy on whom the animosity
of the coalition was now chiefly lavished, a very plausible
imitation of Griffin&rsquo;s prostrate figure.&nbsp; As Griffin
habitually slept in a position which enabled him to absorb his
own fugginess, this was not difficult.&nbsp; When Edwin went to
sleep Griffin had not arrived.&nbsp; Drugged with fresh air he
slept untroubled by any dream.&nbsp; In the middle of the night
(as it seemed) he awoke, not because he had heard any sound but
rather because he had become aware in his sleep of some unusual
presence.&nbsp; He <a name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
97</span>did not move, but slowly opened his eyes, and all he saw
was the figure of Mr. Selby, gigantically tall, clad in a long
bath-gown of Turkish towelling and carrying a lighted candle that
cast a shadow even more gigantic on the whitewashed walls.&nbsp;
He moved slowly and his bedroom slippers made no sound on the
boarded floor.&nbsp; Opposite the foot of Edwin&rsquo;s and
Widdup&rsquo;s bed he paused for a moment.&nbsp; Edwin closed his
eyes.&nbsp; He felt the eyelids quiver.&nbsp; Why on earth should
Selby want to look at him?&nbsp; He passed on, and Edwin,
cautiously opening his eyes, saw him pause again opposite the gap
between Douglas and Griffin.&nbsp; At this point he waited
longer.&nbsp; He appeared to be thinking.&nbsp; He passed on and
then suddenly turned back and gently lifted the sheet from
Griffin&rsquo;s pillow.&nbsp; Gently he replaced it.&nbsp; Edwin
was almost too sleepy to realize that Griffin wasn&rsquo;t there;
but when he did, the first thought which came into his mind was
one of spontaneous and inexplicable loyalty.&nbsp; He thought,
&ldquo;Poor old Griff: He&rsquo;s in for it.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
yet, if there was one person in the world against whom he had a
reasonable excuse for hatred . . .&nbsp; Very silently Selby left
the dormitory.&nbsp; Edwin became conscious of the ghostly noises
of the night: a night-jar spinning in the wood at the back of the
Schoolhouse: the boom of a cockchafer that some enthusiast had
captured and imported into the dormitory.&nbsp; The clock in the
high turret struck twelve.&nbsp; The chime wandered clanging over
the empty quadrangle.</p>
<h4><a name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
98</span>III</h4>
<p>The next week was the most sensational that had ever shaken
the placid life of St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The fall of Griffin
was no startling matter&mdash;deliberately he had been
&ldquo;asking for it,&rdquo; and the escapade of the fair in
race-week was no more than a crowning glory.&nbsp; Still, it was
an impressive affair.&nbsp; Immediately after breakfast next
morning it was whispered that Griffin had been sent to the
infectious ward in the sanatorium, which was always devoted, by
reason of its size rather than any conscious attempt at
symbolism, to the isolation of moral leprosy.&nbsp; It became
certain&mdash;and Edwin, after his vision of Selby&rsquo;s visit
in the night had taken it for granted&mdash;that Griffin was to
be &ldquo;bunked.&rdquo;&nbsp; In the afternoon, Douglas,
faithfully prowling near his comrade&rsquo;s prison, had seen
Griffin, splendidly unrepentant, at the high window of his
condemned cell.&nbsp; Griffin had smiled.&nbsp; Griffin,
evidently, didn&rsquo;t give a damn for the whole business.&nbsp;
The house thrilled.&nbsp; Of such stuff heroes were made.&nbsp;
It remained to be seen, in the opinion of the critical, how
Griffin would shape in the supreme test of the scaffold on which
he would probably be birched before the assembled school.&nbsp;
The betting was all on Griffin&rsquo;s being a sportsman.</p>
<p>There followed a day of suspense.&nbsp; Consultations between
masters were noticed.&nbsp; Selby, for a whole hour, had been
closeted with the Head.&nbsp; Old fat Leeming had been sent for
at last to join their deliberations.&nbsp; What had Leeming to do
with it?&nbsp; Other housemasters had been summoned to the <a
name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 99</span>room beneath
the clock and emerged with unusually serious faces.&nbsp; Who was
this Griffin that his fate should shake the foundations of
Olympus?&nbsp; The Head, indeed, showed his seriousness more
clearly than all the others.&nbsp; He arrived late in chapel,
where the service had waited on his coming: he stalked up the
aisle, as full of omen as any black crow, with his pale seamed
face and his shaggy black beard, and his arms crossed behind his
back beneath the skirts of his gown.&nbsp; From his high seat at
the end of the chancel he scowled on the whole school as if he
hated it.&nbsp; At supper a message was read out.&nbsp; The
school would assemble by classes in the Big Schoolroom at
noon.&nbsp; Poor old Griff. . . .&nbsp; The sergeant, it was
said, had been seen binding a new birch in the porter&rsquo;s
lodge.</p>
<p>It was all very romantic and thrilling.&nbsp; Edwin, conscious
now for the first time of the extreme foolhardiness of his
racecourse adventure, felt himself a greater dog than ever.&nbsp;
And then, when the stage was set, and the audience attuned to an
atmosphere of tragedy by so much thunder-weather, Griffin, from
whom the glamour of the heroic had been gradually fading in the
shame of his captivity, achieved the dramatic.&nbsp; He
bolted.&nbsp; With a ladder of knotted sheets he climbed down the
waterspout and disappeared into open country.&nbsp; Griffin lived
somewhere in Kent.&nbsp; In half a day he would reach home.</p>
<p>For Selby&rsquo;s house it was a great morning.&nbsp; Edwin,
in spite of his hatred of Griffin, shared in the general
elation.&nbsp; Such private feuds were small <a
name="page100"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 100</span>concerns in
the face of the common enemy.&nbsp; Douglas was flown with
insolence.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I knew old Griff would do them,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;By God . . . that&rsquo;s a man if you like.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s the nastiest knock old Selby&rsquo;s had in his
life.&nbsp; Think of it . . . a chap with a weak heart like old
Griff shinning down a waterspout!&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin wondered if the meeting in the Big Schoolroom would be
off, or whether, perhaps, it would be postponed and Griffin
hauled back from the bosom of his family to go through with
it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You silly ass,&rdquo; said Douglas.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of
course they can&rsquo;t fetch him back.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s done
them brown.&rdquo;</p>
<p>But the morning went on without any alteration in the
programme.&nbsp; At twelve o&rsquo;clock the solemn procession
began: the whole black-coated population of St. Luke&rsquo;s
filtering through narrow corridors and the wide folding doors
into the big Schoolroom.&nbsp; The whole business was impressive;
for nobody spoke and no sound came from the crowd but the drag of
slowly-moving feet and arms that brushed one another.&nbsp; They
were like a flock of sheep driven away from market on a narrow
road between dusty hedges, for none of them knew what was
coming.&nbsp; Rumour was busy with whispers.</p>
<p>Griffin had been found in a ditch with his leg broken and had
been hauled back to fulfil his sentence.&nbsp; Like Monmouth,
Edwin thought.&nbsp; Griffin, in company with the pale skivvy
from &ldquo;D&rdquo; had been arrested by the police at
Waterloo.&nbsp; Other rumours, less credible, as, for instance,
that Cleaver, meeting a jockey friend of his in a little pub
called the Grenadier in the Downs Road, had <a
name="page101"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 101</span>walked into
a taproom full of School House bloods on Sunday morning.&nbsp;
Indeed, these were strenuous days.</p>
<p>The school settled down.&nbsp; The Head, lean, crow-like,
flapped the wings of his gown.&nbsp; He seemed to find it
difficult to make a beginning, and while he waited for a word his
left arm twitched.&nbsp; Then he began.&nbsp; It was obvious that
his pause had been nothing more than a rhetorical trick designed
to fix the attention of an audience already thrilled by
uncertainty.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t at a loss for words at
all.&nbsp; He boomed, he ranted, he bellowed, he rolled his
&ldquo;r&rsquo;s&rdquo; and his eyes.&nbsp; The masters, sitting
at their high desks, remained discreet and rather bored . . . all
except Mr. Leeming, to whom the orator appeared as an inspired
prophet of God.&nbsp; For the subject of his harangue was Mr.
Leeming&rsquo;s own: Impurity; and the whole meeting the
immediate result of Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s investigations.&nbsp; The
curtain had gone up with a most theatrical flourish upon the
Great Smut Row.</p>
<p>The essence of the Head&rsquo;s speech was a general
threat.&nbsp; Certain things had been discovered; certain further
inquiries were to be made; the fate of a large number of boys lay
in the balance; more details were known, in all probability, than
any of the victims suspected; to the youngest among them he made
a special appeal; confession, immediate confession, would be the
better part of valour; he looked to every member of the school to
aid him in the task, the sacred duty, of purging St. Luke&rsquo;s
of this abominable thing.&nbsp; Indeed it is possible that he
meant what he said.&nbsp; His port was bad, <a
name="page102"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 102</span>and he knew
better than to drink it; but the heady vintage that he brewed
from sonorous words knocked him over every time.</p>
<p>The meeting dissolved in silence.&nbsp; For the moment the
school was impressed, less by the gravity of the charge than by
its indefiniteness.&nbsp; The same evening brought tales of
segregated suspects, of tearful and terrible interviews in the
rooms of housemasters, of prefects suspended: of a veritable
reign of terror&mdash;<i>lettres de cachet</i> and the rest of
it&mdash;in Citizen Leeming&rsquo;s house.&nbsp; &ldquo;D&rdquo;
dormitory and the others in charge of the languid Selby suffered
least.&nbsp; When evening came to set a term to rumours only two
were missing&mdash;the black Douglas, and an insignificant inky
creature of the name of Hearn, whom the threats of the headmaster
had driven to some grubby confession.&nbsp; An atmosphere of
immense relief fell upon the awed dormitory and found vent in a
memorable &ldquo;rag.&rdquo;</p>
<p>But Edwin did not sleep.&nbsp; There was no reason why he
should not have slept; but he couldn&rsquo;t help feeling,
against reason, that in some way he might be dragged into the
toils of vengeance; that some peculiar combination of
circumstances might implicate him in the business, even though he
had never had anything to do with it.&nbsp; Somehow appearances
might be against him.&nbsp; In particular he became suspicious of
Mr. Leeming&rsquo;s attentions to him in the past.&nbsp; He
imagined that the wily creature had suspected him, and tried, for
that reason, to find a way into his confidence.&nbsp; What other
explanation could there be?&nbsp; His avoidance of <a
name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 103</span>Mr. Leeming
could only have increased the suspicion.&nbsp; Plainly, he was
done for.</p>
<p>He remembered, with a perilous clearness, words that had
passed between them to which he had given no thought.&nbsp; Now
they appeared terribly significant.&nbsp; &ldquo;You and Ingleby
are great friends, Widdup,&rdquo; Leeming had said only a few
days before.&nbsp; &ldquo;Quite inseparable.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve
often seen you walking up and down the quad at night.&nbsp; I
wonder what you have in common, eh?&rdquo;&nbsp; Now Edwin knew
why he wondered.&nbsp; And Widdup, like a damned fool, had said
that they slept alongside each other.&nbsp; Supposing old Leeming
imagined. . . .&nbsp; It was too bad.&nbsp; He lay there staring
at the rafters and wondering what could be done.&nbsp; He would
like to write to his mother about it.&nbsp; But a man
couldn&rsquo;t write to his mother about a thing like that.&nbsp;
And his father wouldn&rsquo;t understand.&nbsp; In the end he
determined that the only thing he could possibly do was to go and
see Leeming next day and assure him that there was nothing wrong
with their friendship.&nbsp; &ldquo;And then,&rdquo; he thought,
&ldquo;the old beast won&rsquo;t believe me.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll
think that I&rsquo;ve gone to him because I have a guilty
conscience, and he&rsquo;ll suspect me more than ever.&nbsp;
He&rsquo;ll go and make all sorts of inquiries and something will
come out that will be difficult to explain.&rdquo;&nbsp; How
could anything come out when there wasn&rsquo;t anything
wrong?&nbsp; He could not give a reasonable answer to this
question, and yet he was afraid.&nbsp; From this spiritual
purgatory of his own making he passed into an uneasy sleep.</p>
<p>Next morning, in the middle of early school, the <a
name="page104"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 104</span>sergeant
entered with a message for Mr. Cleaver, and waited while the
master read it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;Mr. Selby wants
to speak to you.&nbsp; You had better go at once.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin packed up his books with trembling hands.&nbsp; He went
very white.&nbsp; It seemed to him that the eyes of the whole
form were on him.&nbsp; They were thinking, &ldquo;Hallo,
here&rsquo;s another of them.&nbsp; Ingleby!&nbsp; Who would have
thought it?&rdquo;&nbsp; He heard the footsteps of the sergeant
go echoing down the corridor as steadily and implacably as the
fate that was overtaking him.&nbsp; He only wanted to get it
over.&nbsp; As soon as he was out of the classroom he ran, for
every moment of uncertainty was torture to him.&nbsp; He ran
across the quad and climbed the stairs, breathless, to the low
room still steeped in stale honeydew, where his life at St.
Luke&rsquo;s had begun and must now so abruptly end.&nbsp; Mr.
Selby sat at his desk waiting for him.&nbsp; When Edwin entered
the room he looked suddenly embarrassed and fingered an envelope
on his desk.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby, I sent for you urgently . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It probably came as a shock to you . . . or perhaps you
were prepared?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then you must pull yourself together.&nbsp; You
can&rsquo;t guess what it is?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; But he could.&nbsp;
It came to him suddenly, huge and annihilating, swamping in the
space of a second all the uneasiness and terror that had shadowed
him in the night.&nbsp; Those things were nothing . . .
nothing.</p>
<p><a name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
105</span>&ldquo;Oh, sir . . . my mother . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . .&nbsp; It&rsquo;s your mother, Ingleby.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.&nbsp; Very sorry. .
. .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Tell me, sir.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s dead.&nbsp; Oh . . .
she&rsquo;s dead . . . ?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr. Selby unfolded the telegram although he already knew its
contents.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. It&rsquo;s not so bad as that.&nbsp; But
she&rsquo;s ill . . . very ill . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I knew. . . .&nbsp; The minute you spoke I knew, sir. .
. .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You had better catch the eight o&rsquo;clock train at
the Downs station.&nbsp; You need only take your little
bag.&nbsp; You can get it from the matron!&rsquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Have you any money?&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Selby almost
smiled to see him so eager to go.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir. . . .&nbsp; Only about eightpence.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t go without money, you know.&nbsp;
Here&rsquo;s a sovereign.&nbsp; Now, cheer up, there&rsquo;s a
good fellow.&nbsp; Cheer up!&rdquo;&nbsp; He smiled wanly, and
Edwin burst into tears.&nbsp; Mr. Selby laid an awkward hand on
his shoulder.&nbsp; It was very decent of him, Edwin thought, as
he stood with his fists in his eyes, one of them clutching the
sovereign that Selby had given him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank you, sir . . . but it&rsquo;s awful, it&rsquo;s
awful. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course, of course. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>He shepherded Edwin out of the room.&nbsp; When the boy had
gone, Mr. Selby, an unemotional man, tore the telegram into small
pieces and placed them, with a confirmed bachelor&rsquo;s
tidiness, in the <a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
106</span>waste-paper basket.&nbsp; Then he lit a pipe of
honeydew; and the blue smoke from the bowl together with the
brown smoke that he expelled from his nostrils shone cheerily in
the morning sun that beat through the latticed window on to a
woman&rsquo;s photograph standing on the desk in front of
him.&nbsp; For a moment he gazed at the faded image.&nbsp; He had
not thought of her for years.</p>
<h3><a name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
107</span>CHAPTER VIII<br />
HOMEWARDS</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> a morning air of miraculous
freshness Edwin left the quad by the iron gates on the eastern
side.&nbsp; The square was quite empty, for all its usual
inhabitants were now in early school.&nbsp; He noticed an unusual
aspect of space and cleanliness.&nbsp; He could not remember ever
having seen it empty before.&nbsp; He noticed the tuck-shop in
the corner by the swimming-bath.&nbsp; This, too, was closed, and
the windows were heavily shuttered.&nbsp; It was a small thing,
but it suddenly occurred to him that people put up their shutters
or pulled down their blinds when some one lay dead in a
house.&nbsp; It seemed to him like a sort of omen.&nbsp; He said
to himself, &ldquo;I must think of something else . . . I must
think of something else.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t bear
it.&rdquo;&nbsp; The only other time when he had ever thought of
death had been a single moment a week or so before when his
mother had written about her plan of a visit to
Switzerland.&nbsp; And then the thought had been no more than an
indefinite shadow, too remote to be threatening.&nbsp; Now it was
different.&nbsp; The threat was ponderable and vast.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Death . . . I mustn&rsquo;t think of it.&nbsp; I must
think of something else.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He had to think of something else; for by the <a
name="page108"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 108</span>time the
gate clanged behind him the clock in the tower struck the
quarter, and he knew that he had barely time to catch his
train.&nbsp; With his bag in his hand he started running up the
road between the tufted grassy banks; past the scene of his last
adventure, the oak paling beside the nightingale&rsquo;s spinney,
past the last of the new villas, and so, on to the open
downs.&nbsp; It was a strange adventure for him to reach them so
early in the morning.&nbsp; Their turf was silvered still with a
fine dew that made it even paler than a chalk down should
be.&nbsp; Fold beyond beautiful fold they stretched before
him.&nbsp; The woody belts of beech and pine lay veiled in milky
mist, and the air which moved to meet him, as it seemed, over
that expanse of breathing grass, was of an intoxicating coolness
and sweetness which went to his head and made him want to shout
or sing.&nbsp; The spring of a summer morning in the spring of
life!&nbsp; It was all wrong.&nbsp; Surely no awful devastation
of death could overshadow such an ecstasy of physical
happiness?&nbsp; He refused to believe it.&nbsp; It was all
fantastic nonsense.&nbsp; Of course she wasn&rsquo;t dead.&nbsp;
Your mother couldn&rsquo;t die without your feeling it. . . .</p>
<p>At the station he had five minutes to spare.&nbsp; He changed
his sovereign, and was relieved to be rid of the responsibility
of one coin, and to fill his pocket with silver.&nbsp; There were
several coppers in the change, and these he placed in a
penny-in-the-slot machine, extracting several metallic ingots of
chocolate cream.&nbsp; He was ready for these at once, for his
only breakfast had been a hurried cup of tea and a slice of bread
and butter in the <a name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
109</span>matron&rsquo;s room.&nbsp; The train jolted out of the
station, and soon he was travelling eastward with the high
water-tower of St. Luke&rsquo;s dipping gradually beneath a long
horizon.</p>
<p>The morning grew more beautiful.&nbsp; In some strange way its
beauty seemed to have got into his blood; for he tingled with a
kind of mild ecstasy which he couldn&rsquo;t help feeling
unsuitable&mdash;almost irreverent, to the tragic occasion.&nbsp;
There was adventure in it and the added charm of the
unexpected.&nbsp; He was going home.&nbsp; Surely it was
reasonable enough to be excited at such a prospect as that, to
smell the fine summer scents that were so different in a midland
shire; to see the gorse ablaze on Pen Beacon and Uffdown and the
green glades of the old Mercian wood.&nbsp; Of course it was
always wonderful to be going home.</p>
<p>He remembered other homecomings from St. Luke&rsquo;s; the
first, and best of all, when, on a December morning they had
crowded into the housemaster&rsquo;s room where Mr. Selby sat in
his dressing-gown, with a gaslight flaring, handing out the
little paper packets of travelling money; how the damp platform
at the station had been crowded with human happiness and such a
holiday spirit of independence that Griffin and Douglas had
lighted cigarettes while they waited for the train.&nbsp; That
was the town station.&nbsp; He reflected that he had only once
before been to the Downs, where the train service, except on race
days, was not so good; that had been on the occasion of his first
visit to St. Luke&rsquo;s for the scholarship exam.&nbsp; He had
come down in an Eton suit, fortunately correct, and an <a
name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 110</span>unfortunate
topper that he would have given his life to hide when he found
that they were not worn.&nbsp; And his mother had come down with
him.&nbsp; At the thought of her the old numbing dread fell upon
his heart.&nbsp; Perhaps this was the very carriage in which they
had travelled.&nbsp; He remembered the journey so well: how she
had sat in the right-hand corner, with her face to the engine,
wearing a tailor-made grey coat and skirt, a velvet hat and a
veil.&nbsp; He had been looking at her rather critically, for he
was anxious that she should seem what she was&mdash;the most
beautiful creature in the world.&nbsp; And when he was looking at
her with this in his mind she had smiled at him, for no other
reason in the world probably but that she loved him; and with
that smile he had been satisfied that she really was
beautiful.&nbsp; And he had noticed how lovely her hands were
when she took her gloves off. . . .&nbsp; Now, the memory of the
moment made him want to cry, just as the beauty of the morning
made him full of exultation.&nbsp; It was a most perilous mixture
of emotions.</p>
<p>By this time the region of downs had been left far
behind.&nbsp; They were gliding, more smoothly, it seemed,
through the heavily-wooded park country of the home
counties.&nbsp; Stations became more frequent, and the train
began to fill with business people hurrying to London for their
morning&rsquo;s work.&nbsp; They settled themselves in their
carriages as though they were confident that their seats had been
reserved for them.&nbsp; They were all rather carefully, rather
shabbily dressed: the cuffs of their coats were shiny, and the
cuffs of their shirts <a name="page111"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 111</span>fringed, and one of them, a
gentleman with a top-hat half-covered by a mourning-band, wore
cuff-covers of white paper.&nbsp; They all read their morning
papers and rarely spoke; but when they did speak to each other
they used an almost formal respect in their addresses which
implied that they were all respectable, God-fearing people with
responsibilities and semi-detached houses.&nbsp; Edwin they
ignored&mdash;not so much as a wilful intrusion as an unfortunate
accident.&nbsp; He began to feel ashamed that, by starting from
the terminus, he had occupied a corner seat to which the
gentleman with the paper cuffs had an inalienable right.</p>
<p>In a little while the villas from which this population had
emerged began to creep closer to the track, and by the seventh
station their backs were crowding close to the embankment with
long, narrow gardens in which the crimson rambler rose seemed to
have established itself like a weed.&nbsp; The houses, too, or
rather the backs of them, grew more uniform, being all built with
bricks of an unhealthy yellow or putty colour.&nbsp; Soon there
were no more buildings semi-detached.&nbsp; The endless rows
seemed to be suffering some process of squeezing or constriction
that made them coalesce and edged them closer and closer to the
railway line.&nbsp; Soon the gardens grew so small that there was
no room in them for green things, only for a patch of black earth
occupied by lean cats, and posts connected by untidy pieces of
rope on which torn laundry was hung out to collect the smuts or
flap drearily in a night of drizzle.&nbsp; Then the gardens went
altogether; and the beautiful and natural love of green <a
name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 112</span>things
showed itself in sodden window-boxes full of languishing geranium
cuttings or mignonette.&nbsp; The very atmosphere seemed to have
been subjected to the increasing squeeze; for the mild air of the
downs had here a yellow tinge as though it were being
curdled.&nbsp; To complete the process the train plunged, at
last, into a sulphurous tunnel, emerging amid acrid fumes in a
sort of underground vault where the door was opened by a
ticket-collector with a red tie, tired already, who shouted
&ldquo;Tickets, please.&rdquo;</p>
<p>None of the respectable suburban gentlemen took any notice of
him, for by purchasing season tickets they had rendered
themselves immune from his attentions; but he glared at Edwin,
and Edwin passed him his ticket, which was handed on as if it
were a curiosity and a rather vulgar possession by the gentlemen
on his side of the compartment.&nbsp; The door was slammed.&nbsp;
The man with the top-hat placed it carefully on his head and
adjusted the paper cuffs.&nbsp; Others folded their morning
papers and put them in their pockets.&nbsp; One, apparently
recognizing a friend who was sitting opposite to him, for the
first time, said &ldquo;Good-morning,&rdquo; and the train passed
amid thunderous echoes under the arch and into Victoria
Station.&nbsp; All his fellow-passengers were adepts at
evacuation, and before he knew where he was Edwin was alone in
the carriage.</p>
<p>He was very lonely and yet, somehow, a little important.&nbsp;
Usually, at term end, he had crossed London with Widdup, whose
westward train also started from Paddington.&nbsp; He hailed a
hansom, <a name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
113</span>and one that was worthy of its name: a shining chariot,
all coach-builders&rsquo; varnish, with yellow wheels and
polished brass door-handles and clean straw that smelt of the
stable on its floor.&nbsp; The cabman was youngish,
mahogany-complexioned, and ready to be facetious.&nbsp; He called
Edwin &ldquo;My lord,&rdquo; and Edwin hardly knew whether to
treat him seriously or not.&nbsp; &ldquo;Geawing to the races, my
lord?&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; The Lord knew Edwin had had enough of
races for a bit.&nbsp; He said &ldquo;Paddington.&rdquo;&nbsp;
&ldquo;Ascot or Newbury?&rdquo; said the cabby, climbing to his
seat.</p>
<p>It was a great moment.&nbsp; The movement was all so swift and
luxurious, the hansom so delicately sprung that it swayed gently
with the horse&rsquo;s motion.&nbsp; The polished lamps on either
side were filled with wedding rosettes.&nbsp; Inside on either
hand were oblong mirrors in which Edwin could almost see his own
profile: a subject of endless curiosity.&nbsp; There was even a
little brass receptacle for cigar-ash.&nbsp; A Cunarder of a
cab!&nbsp; The cabby whistled &ldquo;Little Dolly
Daydreams&rdquo; with a ravishing tremolo.&nbsp; The cab, which
had jolted a trifle on the setts of the station-yard, passed
among a flight of feeding pigeons out of the iron gates into the
bowling smoothness of the Palace Road.&nbsp; My word, this was
life. . .&nbsp; .&nbsp; Life! . . .&nbsp; Perhaps she was dead
already.&nbsp; Oh, why should a day like this be marred?</p>
<p>It seemed to him, after a moment&rsquo;s thought, that it was
possible&mdash;even if it were wrong&mdash;to be possessed by two
and opposite emotions at once.&nbsp; He was miserable to feel an
alarm which wasn&rsquo;t exactly definite or real, and yet he
could not help <a name="page114"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
114</span>enjoying this astounding and unforeseen
adventure.&nbsp; &ldquo;If I <i>do</i> feel like that,&rdquo; he
thought, &ldquo;it can&rsquo;t be exactly wrong.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
that comforted him.</p>
<p>He surrendered himself to the joys of the morning.&nbsp; The
streets were so wide and clean, the green fringe of the park so
pleasant: through the railings he could see men and women on
horseback taking an early ride, enjoying, like him, the coolness
of the morning air.&nbsp; He wondered at the great white stucco
houses of Park Lane, standing back from the wide pavement with an
air of pompous reticence.&nbsp; Before one of them, remnant of a
summer dance the night before, a tented portico, striped with red
and white, overstretched the pavement.&nbsp; Edwin did not know
what kind of people lived in these houses, but in the light of
this morning it seemed to him that theirs must be an existence of
fabulous happiness, all clean and bright and shining as the
morning itself or the rubber-tired hansom, spinning along with
its yellow spokes beside the neat park railings.&nbsp; All of
them were surely exalted, splendid creatures, born to great names
and a clear-cut way of life without the least complication,
dowered with a kind of instinctive physical cleanliness.</p>
<p>At the corner, by Marble Arch, the hansom cab, silent but for
its jolly jingling bells, nearly ran over an old gentleman in a
frock coat with an exquisite white stock and a noble nose.&nbsp;
His name was probably Cohen; but Edwin thought he must be at
least an Earl.</p>
<p>Once again the resorts of elegance were left behind.&nbsp; The
hansom, heaving heavily, was checked <a name="page115"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 115</span>on the slope of the gradient
descending to the departure platform at Paddington.&nbsp;
Opposite the booking-office it stopped, and Edwin was released
from this paradisaical loosebox.&nbsp; The cabby, wishing him the
best of luck at Goodwood, patted his horse, whom he had
christened Jeddah, and climbed up again to his seat whistling
divinely.&nbsp; Edwin was disgorged upon the long platform at
Paddington that rumbled with the sound of many moving trollies
below a faint hiss of escaping steam, and smelt, as he had always
remembered it, of sulphur mingled with axle grease and the
peculiar odour that hangs about tin milk-cans.&nbsp; He was
thankful to be free of it, sitting in the corner of a third-class
carriage opposite a stout woman with eyes that looked as if she
had been crying all night, and a heavy black veil, whose hat was
surmounted by coloured photographs of the Memorial Theatre at
Stratford and Brixham Trawlers waiting for a Breeze.</p>
<p>This train ran out of London more easily than the other had
entered it.&nbsp; The area of painful constriction seemed more
narrow, and in an incredibly short time he found himself gliding
along the Thames valley with the ghostly round tower of Windsor
Castle on his left.</p>
<p>At Reading, where the sidings of the biscuit factory reminded
him of teas which he had &ldquo;brewed&rdquo; with Widdup, the
woman opposite took out a crumpled paper bag, and began to eat
sandwiches.&nbsp; She lifted her veil to do so, and the process
suddenly proclaimed her human.&nbsp; Edwin saw that she
wasn&rsquo;t, as he had imagined, a sombre, mute-like <a
name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 116</span>creature,
but a woman of middle age with a comfortable face and a
methodical appetite.</p>
<p>He began to wonder what he should say if she offered him a
sandwich, for he dreaded the idea of accepting anything from a
stranger, and at the same time could not deny that he was awfully
hungry, for the chocolate creams that he had absorbed at the
Downs station had failed to dull his normal appetite.&nbsp; This
emergency, however, never arose.&nbsp; The woman in black worked
steadily through her meal, and when she had finished her packet
of sandwiches folded the paper bag tidily and placed it in a
wicker travelling basket, from which she produced one of those
flask-shaped bottles in which spirits are sold at railways
stations.&nbsp; From this she took a prolonged and delicious
gulp; recorked and replaced it, smiled to herself, sighed, and
lowered her portcullis once more.</p>
<p>It cheered Edwin to think that she wasn&rsquo;t as inhuman and
sinister as he had imagined; and in a little while he saw beneath
her veil that she had closed her eyes and was gradually falling
asleep.&nbsp; The sun, meanwhile, was climbing towards the south,
and the railway carriage began to reflect the summery atmosphere
of the green and pleasant land through which the train was
passing.&nbsp; It made golden the dust on the window-pane at
Edwin&rsquo;s elbow and discovered warm colours in the pile of
the russet cloth with which the carriage was upholstered.</p>
<p>It was a country of green woods and fields of ripening
mowing-grass from which the sound of a machine could sometimes be
heard above the <a name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
117</span>rumble of the train.&nbsp; It all seemed
extraordinarily peaceful.&nbsp; A cuckoo passed in level flight
from one of the hedgerow elms to the dark edge of a wood.&nbsp;
In the heart of the wood itself a straight green clearing
appeared.&nbsp; It reminded Edwin of the green roads that pierced
the woods below Uffdown, and he remembered, poignantly, the walk
with his mother in the Easter holidays when they had reached the
crown of the hills at sunset.&nbsp; Some day, they had said, they
would make that journey again.&nbsp; Some day . . . perhaps
never.&nbsp; Was it quite impossible to get away from that
threatening shadow?&nbsp; But even while he was thinking how
unreasonable and how cruel the whole business was, another sight
fell upon his eyes and filled him with a new and strange
excitement: a small cluster of spires set in a city of pale
smoke, and one commanding dome.&nbsp; He held his breath.&nbsp;
He knew that it was Oxford.</p>
<p>This, then, was the city of his dreams.&nbsp; Here, in a
little while, he would find himself living the new life of
leisure and spaciousness and culture which had become his chief
ambition.&nbsp; This was his Mecca: &ldquo;That lovely city with
her dreaming spires,&rdquo; he whispered to himself.&nbsp; It was
indeed merciful that the vision of his second dream should come
to cheer him when the first became so perilously near
extinction.</p>
<p>Even when the train began to slow down among red-brick suburbs
of an appalling ugliness the mood of excitement had not
faded.&nbsp; The train ran in smoothly, and the woman in black
awoke and blew her nose.&nbsp; Edwin, looking out of the <a
name="page118"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 118</span>carriage
window, saw a congregation of demigods in grey flannel trousers,
celestial socks, and tweed Norfolk coats lounging with a grace
that was Olympian upon the platform.&nbsp; All of them, he
thought, were supremely happy.&nbsp; In this holy city happiness
had her dwelling.&nbsp; One of them&mdash;his back was turned to
Edwin&mdash;reminded him of Layton, the old head of the
house.&nbsp; He remembered with a thrill, that Layton, who had
won a scholarship at New College, was now in Oxford.&nbsp; Of
course it must be he.&nbsp; Very excited, Edwin slipped out of
the carriage and ran after him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Layton!&rdquo; he
called.&nbsp; And the young man looked round.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
do you want?&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t Layton at
all.&nbsp; Edwin apologised.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m awfully
sorry.&nbsp; I thought you were a chap I knew.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The porters were slamming the doors and he only just managed
to scramble into his seat before the train started.&nbsp; The
woman in black spoke for the first time.&nbsp; She had a soothing
voice, with a west-country burr that reminded him of his father
and Widdup.&nbsp; &ldquo;I thought you were going to be left
behind,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I saw your bag was labelled
North Bromwich.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Shouts were heard on the platform.&nbsp; &ldquo;North Bromwich
next stop. . . .&nbsp; Next stop North Bromwich . .
.&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin sat down panting, and the train moved
off.&nbsp; &ldquo;Next stop North Bromwich. . .&rdquo;&nbsp; The
words echoed in his brain, and chilled him.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t
want to look back to see the last of Oxford.&nbsp; Next stop
North Bromwich.&nbsp; At North Bromwich he would know the
worst.&nbsp; Swiftly, inevitably, the <a name="page119"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 119</span>train was carrying him towards
it.&nbsp; The tragedy had to be faced.</p>
<p>He was seized with a sudden inconsolable fear of
desolation.&nbsp; His eyes brimmed with tears so that the
coloured landscape could not be seen any longer.&nbsp; The tears
gathered and fell.&nbsp; He could feel them trickling down his
cheeks, and when he knew that he could not hold them back any
longer the strain of his emotion was too strong for him, and,
against his will, he sobbed aloud, burying his face in his
hands.</p>
<p>The woman in black, hearing the sobs, raised her veil and
looked at him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What is it, my dear?&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, nothing . . . nothing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Folks don&rsquo;t cry about nothing. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>She spoke quite kindly, and her kindness was too much for
him.&nbsp; It gave him quite an unaccountable feeling of relief
to speak about it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s . . . it&rsquo;s my mother,&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There now. . . .&nbsp; Is it really?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
bad for &rsquo;ee.&nbsp; When did she pass away?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;She isn&rsquo;t dead.&nbsp; I . . .&nbsp; I hope she
isn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; But she&rsquo;s awfully ill.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t cry now, boy.&nbsp; While there&rsquo;s
life there&rsquo;s hope.&nbsp; I always tells them
that.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who do you tell that to?&rdquo;</p>
<p>The black woman laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who do I tell that
to?&nbsp; Ha . . . that&rsquo;s a good &rsquo;un.&nbsp; Why,
dearie, my patients, of course.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand. . . .&nbsp; What sort of
patients?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
120</span>&ldquo;Well, Mr. Inquisitive, if you must know,
I&rsquo;m a monthly nurse.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Still Edwin did not understand.&nbsp; He
asked,&mdash;&ldquo;Do many of them die?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why, bless my heart, no.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s more a matter
of births than deaths.&nbsp; Not that I haven&rsquo;t a&rsquo;
seen deaths.&nbsp; And laid them out.&nbsp; But I&rsquo;ll tell
you something.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s my belief that they all die
happy.&nbsp; And though it&rsquo;s hard on a young boy like you
to lose his best friend&mdash;that&rsquo;s his
mother&mdash;it&rsquo;s my belief that death is a happy
release.&nbsp; Yes, a happy release.&nbsp; I always tell them
that.&nbsp; Especially after a long illness.&nbsp; I wonder, has
your dear mother been ill for a long time?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; said the black woman with relish,
&ldquo;Perhaps you could give me some idea of what she was
suffering from and then I could tell you near enough.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Edwin, &ldquo;it was
diabetes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Diabetes . . . think of that!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve a&rsquo;
had several with that.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a bad complaint.&nbsp;
Very.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m afraid I can&rsquo;t give you the hopes
that I&rsquo;d like to.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t they ever get better?&rdquo; Edwin
asked in agony.&nbsp; &ldquo;I expect they do sometimes,
don&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It all goes to sugar,&rdquo; said the woman
enigmatically.&nbsp; &ldquo;I ought to know for I&rsquo;ve had
them.&nbsp; Yes . . . I&rsquo;ve had them.&nbsp; But while
there&rsquo;s life there&rsquo;s hope.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what I
always say.&nbsp; And a boy&rsquo;s best friend is his
mother.&nbsp; You must never forget her.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t forget her.&nbsp; Oh, I wish
you&rsquo;d never told me,&rdquo; said Edwin, sobbing once
more.</p>
<p><a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
121</span>&ldquo;Now, dearie, don&rsquo;t take on so.&nbsp; You
mustn&rsquo;t take on so.&nbsp; You must take what God gives
you.&nbsp; I always tell them that.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t take what God gives me,&rdquo; he
cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t bear to
lose her.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ssh. . . .&nbsp; You mustn&rsquo;t say that.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s wicked to say that; I should be frightened to be
struck dead myself if I said a thing like that in God&rsquo;s
hearing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She looked nervously at the luggage rack above her head as if
she expected to find the Almighty in hiding there.&nbsp; Edwin
followed the direction of her glance and read: &ldquo;<i>This
rack is provided for light articles only it must not be used for
heavy luggage</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; He wondered inconsequently,
whether the stop, which was missing, should come before or after
the word &ldquo;only.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You must cheer up, dearie,&rdquo; said the black woman
soothingly.&nbsp; &ldquo;While there&rsquo;s life . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin wished she would shut up.&nbsp; He was sorry that she
had ever spoken, and yet he couldn&rsquo;t quite suppress a
desire to be further informed on certain technical details which
this authority had at her finger-tips.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is it a
painful death?&rdquo; he asked slowly, wiping away the last of
his tears.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Painful?&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; Well . . . not to say
painful.&nbsp; Not as painful as some.&nbsp; Most of mine passed
away in their sleep like.&nbsp; And they look so peaceful and
happy.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a great consolation to their
friends.&nbsp; Just like a doll, they look.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
better.&nbsp; You mustn&rsquo;t cry.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s a brave
boy.&nbsp; Upon my word, even though I&rsquo;m used to it,
it&rsquo;s quite upset me talking to you.&rdquo;&nbsp; She gave a
little laugh and dived once <a name="page122"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 122</span>more for the bottle of
spirits.&nbsp; &ldquo;This wouldn&rsquo;t be no use to
you,&rdquo; she said, as she took a swig.&nbsp; Edwin shook his
head.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Every woman has a mother&rsquo;s feelings.&nbsp; And I
know what they go through.&nbsp; I understand.&nbsp; I do.&nbsp;
Now, that&rsquo;s right.&nbsp; Cheer up and be a good lad.&nbsp;
Hope for the best.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what I tell them. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;This rack is intended for light articles only.&nbsp; It
must not be used for heavy luggage.&nbsp; This rack is intended
for light articles.&nbsp; Only it must not be used for heavy
luggage.&nbsp; While there&rsquo;s life there&rsquo;s hope.&nbsp;
While there&rsquo;s life there&rsquo;s hope.&nbsp; While
there&rsquo;s life there&rsquo;s hope.&rdquo;</p>
<p>So, in the pitiful whirl of Edwin&rsquo;s brain, foolish words
re-echoed, and in the end the empty phrase seemed to attach
itself to the regular beat of the train&rsquo;s rhythm as the
wheels rolled over the joints in the rails.&nbsp; Mesmerised by
the formula he only dimly realised that they were now roaring,
under a sky far paler and less blue, towards the huge pall of
yellowish atmosphere beneath which the black country
sweltered.</p>
<p>Soon the prim small gardens told that they were touching the
tentacles of a great town.&nbsp; A patch of desert country,
scarred with forgotten workings in which water reflected the pale
sky, and scattered with heaps of slag.&nbsp; A pair of conical
blast furnaces standing side by side and towering above the black
factory sheds like temples of some savage religion, as indeed
they were.&nbsp; Gloomy canal wharfs, fronting on smoke-blackened
walls where leaky steampipes, bound with asbestos, hissed.&nbsp;
The exhaust of a single small engine, puffing regular jets of <a
name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 123</span>dazzling
white steam, seen but not heard.&nbsp; A canal barge painted in
garish colours, swimming in yellow water, foul with alkali
refuse.&nbsp; A disused factory with a tall chimney on which the
words Harris and Co., Brass Founders, was painted in vertical
letters which the mesmeric eye must read.&nbsp; Another mile of
black desert, pools, and slag heaps, and ragged children flying
kites.&nbsp; Everywhere a vast debris of rusty iron, old wheels,
corroded boilers, tubes writhen and tangled as if they had been
struck by lightning.&nbsp; An asphalt school-yard on a slope,
with a tall, gothic school and children screaming their lungs
out, but silent to Edwin&rsquo;s ears.&nbsp; Endless mean streets
of dusky brick houses with roofs of purple slate and blue brick
footpaths.&nbsp; Dust and an acrid smell as of smoking pit
heaps.&nbsp; More houses, and above them, misty, and almost
beautiful, the high clock tower of the Art Gallery.&nbsp; A
thunderous tunnel. . . .&nbsp; The clamour of the wheels swelled
to an uproar.&nbsp; &ldquo;While there&rsquo;s life there&rsquo;s
hope.&nbsp; While there&rsquo;s life there&rsquo;s
hope.&rdquo;&nbsp; Under the gloom of the great glass roof the
train emerged.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good-bye, dearie,&rdquo; said the black woman,
smiling.&nbsp; &ldquo;I hope it&rsquo;s not as bad as you
think.&nbsp; You never know.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t forget your bag,
now.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He could easily have done so.</p>
<h3><a name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
124</span>CHAPTER IX<br />
THE DARK HOUSE</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Aunt Laura</span> was waiting for him on
the platform.&nbsp; It was a very strange sensation.&nbsp; Always
at other times when he had come home from St. Luke&rsquo;s his
mother had met him at North Bromwich, and even now it seemed
natural to look for her, to pick out her fragile figure from all
the others on the platform, and then to kiss her cool face
through her veil.&nbsp; On these occasions neither of them would
speak, but he would see her eyes smiling and full of love looking
him all over, drowning him in their particular kindness.&nbsp;
Aunt Laura was a poor substitute.&nbsp; To-day she was a little
more diffuse and emotional than usual, and at the same time
curiously kinder.&nbsp; She kissed him&mdash;her lips were
hot&mdash;and he felt that the kiss was really nothing more than
an attempt to conceal an entirely different emotion and to hide
her eyes.&nbsp; On his cheek her lips trembled.&nbsp; He dared
not look at her for he was afraid that in her eyes he would be
able to read the worst.&nbsp; It had to be faced.&nbsp; At last
he managed to say,</p>
<p>&ldquo;How is she?&rdquo;</p>
<p>And above the roar of the station he heard an <a
name="page125"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 125</span>uncertain
voice answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;She&rsquo;s very ill, Eddie . . . very
ill indeed.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not dead? . . . she&rsquo;s not dead?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, no.&nbsp; We must all be brave, Eddie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;We must all be brave.&rdquo;&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; He hated
to hear her talk like that.&nbsp; What had she to be brave
about?&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t her mother who was dying, only her
sister.&nbsp; A sister wasn&rsquo;t like a mother.&nbsp; It was
all very well to say these conventional things.&nbsp; He
didn&rsquo;t believe she really meant them.&nbsp; She could cry
her eyes out before he&rsquo;d believe her, however kind she
might try to be.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t any good her trying to be
kind now.&nbsp; She hadn&rsquo;t been kind to his mother.&nbsp;
He remembered the day when her callousness had made his mother
cry.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t pity her now; he couldn&rsquo;t put
up with her condolences; he believed he hated her.&nbsp; He would
hate any one in the world who had given his mother a
moment&rsquo;s pain.&nbsp; She was so little and beautiful and
perfect. . . .</p>
<p>And yet, when he sat opposite to Aunt Laura in the Halesby
train, and examined her more closely, he could see for himself
that the strain of the last few days had somehow chastened
her&mdash;she seemed to have lost some of her florid assurance,
and her eyes looked as if she had been crying.&nbsp; She even
seemed to have shrunk a little.&nbsp; And this made matters
worse, for it seemed to him that the very thing which had
obliterated what he most disliked in her had also accentuated the
family likeness.&nbsp; All the time, beneath this face, which he
distrusted, he could see a faint and tantalising resemblance to
the other face that he adored.&nbsp; If any one had <a
name="page126"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 126</span>suggested
to him that Aunt Laura was in any way like his mother, he would
have denied it indignantly; but the likeness was there, a
curious, torturing likeness of feature.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t
know then what in after years he was to realise time after time:
that grief has a way of suppressing individual characteristics
and reducing the faces of a whole suffering family to their
original type after the manner of a composite photograph.&nbsp;
It was tantalising, and so harrowing that he dared not look at
her any longer.</p>
<p>At Halesby they walked up from the station together almost
without speaking.&nbsp; The little house on the edge of the
country wore a strangely tragic air.&nbsp; Downstairs all was
quiet.&nbsp; After the big echoing rooms at St. Luke&rsquo;s it
seemed ridiculously small.&nbsp; Nobody inhabited the rooms, and
the soft carpet created a curious hushed atmosphere in which it
seemed sacrilege to speak in anything but a whisper.&nbsp; Aunt
Laura took off her hat and veil.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d better carry my bag upstairs,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; He felt somehow, that in his little old room he
could be happier.&nbsp; He could even, if he wanted to, throw
himself on the bed and give way to the tears which were bound to
come.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . you&rsquo;d better wait here,&rdquo; said Aunt
Laura.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your father is sleeping in your room.&nbsp;
You see it wouldn&rsquo;t do for him to be in hers.&nbsp;
He&rsquo;s been there for three nights.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m in
the spare room.&nbsp; I think you&rsquo;re going to sleep over at
Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin flamed with jealousy.&nbsp; What was Aunt <a
name="page127"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 127</span>Laura doing
in the house?&nbsp; She, above all people, had no right to be
there.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I could sleep on the sofa in the
drawing-room,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You mustn&rsquo;t make difficulties, Eddie.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s all arranged.&nbsp; The specialist has been out this
afternoon to see her with Dr. Moorhouse.&nbsp; He may be upstairs
now.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I can&rsquo;t, I can&rsquo;t be so far away.&nbsp;
I ought to be here.&nbsp; She would like me to be
here.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Eddie, dear . . . do be a good boy.&nbsp; Here comes
your father.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And his father came.&nbsp; Strangely, strangely old and worn
he looked in the shabby alpaca coat.&nbsp; Edwin had never
realised that he could be so pathetic.&nbsp; He smiled at Edwin,
a smile that was unutterably painful.&nbsp; &ldquo;Eddie . . . my
boy,&rdquo; he said, and kissed him, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad
you&rsquo;ve come. . . .&nbsp; She was anxious for you to come. .
. .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, father. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;We must all be brave, Eddie.&rdquo;&nbsp; Again that
terrible smile.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father, may I go and see her . . .?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The doctor says that nobody had better see her
to-night.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, Eddie, we must obey the doctor&rsquo;s orders,
dear,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ve seen her . . . you saw her this
morning, didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That was different,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I was up all night with her.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t different, is it, father?&nbsp; Aunt
Laura&rsquo;s nothing to her. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page128"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
128</span>&ldquo;Eddie, Eddie. . . .&rdquo; Aunt Laura
protested.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father, if she asked for me she ought to see me. .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s so ill, Eddie.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m afraid she
wouldn&rsquo;t know you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m sure she would. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin, you mustn&rsquo;t worry your father;
there&rsquo;s a good boy.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, Aunt Laura . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; Then fiercely,
&ldquo;She&rsquo;s any mother. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin&rsquo;s father sighed and looked away.&nbsp; Aunt Laura,
with a business-like change of tone which implied that
Edwin&rsquo;s question was disposed of, whispered to his father,
&ldquo;Is she still sleeping?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; The doctor says it isn&rsquo;t really
sleep, it&rsquo;s coma.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Coma . . . a gloomy and terrible word!&nbsp; What did it
mean?&nbsp; Edwin remembered the woman in the train.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Most of them pass away in their sleep like.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll go and lie down for an hour,&rdquo;
said his father.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, do, John,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura
encouragingly.&nbsp; &ldquo;You need it.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll go
upstairs myself to be handy if the nurse wants
anything.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This was the first that Edwin had heard of a nurse.&nbsp; The
idea inspired him with awe.&nbsp; His father sighed and turned to
go.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father . . . can&rsquo;t I go up, only for a
minute?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Aunt Laura, who had taken upon herself the role of protectress
and manager of the distressed household, intervened,</p>
<p>&ldquo;Eddie, you mustn&rsquo;t worry your father.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;re <a name="page129"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
129</span>all in trouble, and you mustn&rsquo;t be a
nuisance.&rdquo;&nbsp; His father went, without speaking.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, when can I see her?&rdquo; Edwin demanded.</p>
<p>&ldquo;To-morrow. . . .&nbsp; You must be patient like the
rest of us.&nbsp; Now I must go upstairs.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be
quiet, won&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; Mrs. Barrow has your bedroom ready,
and if you take your bag over she&rsquo;ll give you some
tea.&nbsp; She promised to look after you.&nbsp; She was most
kind.&nbsp; Or, if you like, and will keep very quiet, you can
stay here and read.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t come home to sit down here and
read.&nbsp; Why did they send for me to come if they won&rsquo;t
let me see her?&nbsp; I want her. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hush . . .&rdquo; said Aunt Laura, with an air of being
scandalised.&nbsp; She left him, closing the door with
exaggerated quietness behind her, leaving him alone in the room
that had once witnessed so much happiness.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t
know what to do.&nbsp; Read?&nbsp; The idea was ridiculous.&nbsp;
He looked at the familiar shelves, on which he knew the place and
title of every book.&nbsp; A sense of the room&rsquo;s awful
emptiness oppressed him, for everything in it recalled the memory
of his darling&rsquo;s presence; the books that they had read
together; the big chair in which he had sat cuddled in her arms;
her workbasket on the table by the window; and&mdash;terribly
pathetic&mdash;a shopping list scribbled on the back of an
envelope.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t bear to be alone in the room
with so many inanimate reminders; and while he was debating where
he should go, a sudden angry jealousy flamed up in his heart
towards the other people in the house: his father, Aunt Laura,
the doctor, and the unknown nurse who shared the <a
name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 130</span>privilege
that was denied him and didn&rsquo;t realise its value.&nbsp; He
clenched his hands and cried aloud: &ldquo;We belong to one
another. . . .&nbsp; She&rsquo;s mine. . . .&nbsp; She&rsquo;s
mine.&nbsp; I hate them.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He opened the door softly and stepped into the hall.&nbsp;
Scarcely knowing what he was doing he looked into the
drawing-room.&nbsp; There stood the piano with a sonata of
Beethoven upon the music-stand.&nbsp; The room was full of a
curious penetrating odour which came, he discovered, from a big
vase full of pinks that had faded and gone yellow.&nbsp; Some
days ago, he supposed, his mother had picked them.&nbsp; Her
hands . . . he worshipped her hands.&nbsp; A strange and
uncontrollable impulse made him bend and kiss the dead
flowers.</p>
<p>But the atmosphere of that room was if anything more cruel
than the other.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t stay there.&nbsp; Once
more he found himself in the darkness and quiet of the
hall.&nbsp; The house had never been so silent.&nbsp; Only, in
the corner an oak grandfather&rsquo;s clock with a brass face
engraved with the name of Carver, Hay, ticked steadily.&nbsp; In
the silence he heard his own heart beating far faster than the
clock.</p>
<p>Scarcely knowing what he was doing he climbed upstairs and
crept quietly to the door of the room where his mother was
lying.&nbsp; He knelt on the mat outside the door and
listened.&nbsp; Inside the room there was no sound; not even a
sound of breathing.&nbsp; If only he dared open the door. . .
.&nbsp; If only he could see her for a second she might smile at
him and he would be satisfied.&nbsp; He was thankful to find that
the mere fact of being nearer to her made <a
name="page131"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 131</span>him feel
more happy.&nbsp; For a long time he knelt there, and then,
hearing a slight noise in his own room, where his father was
supposed to be resting, he stole downstairs again, a little
comforted, opened the front door and went out into the
garden.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Mrs. Barrow, at whose house it had been arranged that Edwin
should put up for the night, was the Ingleby&rsquo;s nearest
neighbour and their landlady.&nbsp; The gardens of the two houses
stood back to back with a high wall between, and the relations of
the neighbours had always been so friendly that the little door
in the wall was never locked, even though it was so seldom used
that tendrils of ivy had attached themselves to the woodwork,
forming a kind of natural hinge.</p>
<p>On the Inglebys&rsquo; side of the wall lay a modern well-kept
garden, not more than twenty years old.&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s
mother had a passion for flowers, and his father had made the
gratification of her pleasure his favourite hobby, so that
Edwin&rsquo;s earliest memories of both of them were associated
with the gathering of fruits and blooms, with the rich odours of
summer, or, above all, the smell of newly-turned earth.&nbsp;
This summer Mr. Ingleby had planted the long bed that stretched
along the side of the house towards the door in Mrs.
Barrow&rsquo;s wall with masses of delicately-coloured
stocks.&nbsp; Though the form of these flowers was not
particularly beautiful their scent rose to meet him in a hot wave
of overpowering sweetness.&nbsp; He remembered a letter in which
<a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 132</span>his
mother had told him how wonderful they were.&nbsp; Everything
reminded him of her. . . .</p>
<p>He passed through the door in the wall and entered another
world.</p>
<p>Everything connected with Mrs. Barrow was in character.&nbsp;
She was a little old woman, the widow of a small manufacturer who
had set his mark upon the countryside by the erection of a
chimney stack taller than any other in the district, so tall that
even from the summit of Pen Beacon it made a landmark more
prominent than the slender spire of Halesby church.&nbsp; In
Edwin&rsquo;s eyes its presence was so familiar that he had
almost become fond of it.&nbsp; Many and many times on windy days
he had watched the immense structure swaying gently as a reed in
a summer breeze.&nbsp; Under the shadow of Mr. Barrow&rsquo;s
monument lay an old garden designed on the formal lines of a
hundred years ago, full of honeysuckle arbours and narrow twisted
paths: so rich, and so tangled that every year a great part of
its fruitfulness ran to waste.&nbsp; Long rows of lavender were
there; and alleys of hoary apple-trees whose gnarled branches
overreached the paths: and the whole place was so crowded with
decaying vegetable matter and the mould of fallen leaves that
even in high summer it had an autumnal savour and a ripe smell
that was not unlike that of an apple loft.</p>
<p>Through this shady precinct he passed carrying his hand-bag,
pausing only in a sudden patch of light where a bank of tawny
scabious diffused an aromatic perfume in the sun.&nbsp; He
paused, not because he was impressed by their garish beauty, but
<a name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 133</span>because
many of the heads were now frequented by a new hatch of Comma
butterflies eagerly expanding their serrated wings, drugged
already with the flowers&rsquo; harsh honey.&nbsp; Edwin had
never seen this uncommon butterfly before.&nbsp; In the
neighbourhood of St. Luke&rsquo;s the species, which is
notoriously capricious, had never appeared.&nbsp; He wished that
he had a butterfly net with him: for by catching one of them he
would have scored over Widdup.</p>
<p>So he passed to Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s house, a dark Georgian
structure as twisted and autumnal as her garden, and there, in a
gloomy sitting-room, he found the old lady herself, a little
demure creature with round-hunched, shawl-covered shoulders, like
the dormouse in <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>, taking tea with her
companion, a decorous lady of the same age named Miss
Beecock.</p>
<p>They did their best to make Edwin feel at home.&nbsp; They
never mentioned his mother, but it was so obvious that their
maidenly commonplaces were only designed to divert his mind from
the tragic shadow which he carried with him, that Edwin felt
inclined to scandalise them by talking of it. . . .&nbsp; Their
deliberate awkward kindness, the cautious glances which they
exchanged, the little sniff of emotion which Mrs. Barrow
concealed in her empty teacup, when the pitiful contemplation of
Edwin&rsquo;s youth and innocence overcame her, would have been
amusing if there had been room for anything amusing on the
darkened earth.</p>
<p>When they had finished the buttered scones and medlar jelly
which Mrs. Barrow made from fruit that fell on the dark
leaf-mould of her garden, Mrs. <a name="page134"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 134</span>Barrow herself moved with short
steps to a mahogany bureau, and calling Edwin to her side, showed
him one of those secret drawers whose secret everybody knows,
smelling of cedar wood and aged russia leather.&nbsp; From this
drawer she produced a purse made of beadwork, and from the purse
her fragile fingers extracted a Georgian five-shilling piece,
which, with a sigh, she then presented to Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;If
I were you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I should
spend it.&nbsp; Old coins like that are valuable.&nbsp; Mr.
Barrow had a great interest in anything old and
historical.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin was so surprised by this generosity that he almost
forgot to thank her; but Miss Beecock, in a shrill, soft voice,
reminded him of his duty, saying: &ldquo;Now, isn&rsquo;t that
kind of Mrs. Barrow, Edwin?&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin hastily agreed
that it was, and the old ladies smiled at one another, as though
they were saying, &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that clever of us, to give
him a toy that will take his mind off his mother?&rdquo;&nbsp; In
the silence that followed, a canary which had been pecking at a
lump of sugar stuck in the bars of his cage, attracted by the
bright hues of the ribbon on Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s cap, broke into
a shrill twitter.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Sweet . . . swee . . . t,&rdquo; said Mrs. Barrow with
pursed lips.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Sweet . . . sweet,&rdquo; echoed Miss Beecock, with a
little laugh.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think I will take my crochet on to the lawn,&rdquo;
said Mrs. Barrow.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If you have your shawl, and the grass is not too
damp,&rdquo; Miss Beecock reminded her.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There was a heavy dew last week,&rdquo; said Mrs. <a
name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
135</span>Barrow.&nbsp; &ldquo;Which day was it?&nbsp; I think it
must have been Tuesday.&nbsp; Yes . . . it was Tuesday.&nbsp;
That was the day on which I spoke to Mr. Waldron about thinning
the grapes.&nbsp; And now, Edwin, would you like to fetch a book
from the drawing-room?&nbsp; You may prefer to bring it out on to
the lawn.&nbsp; You know the way.&nbsp; The key is on the outside
of the door.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin said, &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;&nbsp; He left them and climbed
the creaking oak stairs, to the first story landing, a wide
passage of polished wood lit by a shining fanlight that
overlooked the street.&nbsp; He knew the room well enough.&nbsp;
It had been one of the delights of his childhood.&nbsp; It was
long, and irregular in shape, and crammed with curious things
that he had once found entertaining.</p>
<p>He unlocked the door and released immediately a concentrated
odour of the same character as that which had issued from the
secret drawer in Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s bureau.&nbsp; Damp and cedar
wood and mouldy russia leather.&nbsp; All the chairs in the room
were covered with white draw-sheets as though they were dead and
awaiting burial.&nbsp; The venetian blinds were down, and when
Edwin raised them, the heavy rep curtains at the side of the
three tall windows admitted no more than an ecclesiastical
twilight.</p>
<p>There, however, stood the things which had delighted his
youth.&nbsp; Nothing had been moved a hair&rsquo;s-breadth for
many years: since the day, indeed, long before Edwin was born,
when Mr. Barrow had died.&nbsp; It was the best room of the
house: and so reverenced by Mrs. Barrow that she would never have
<a name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 136</span>dreamed
of living in it or using it at all except on Christmas Day, when
a melancholy family party of relatives and possible heirs
assembled to do their duty by the old lady.&nbsp; Then, and only
then, a fire was lighted, extracting from the walls a curious
odour of dry rot, which resembled, curiously enough, the
apple-loft odour which pervaded the garden.</p>
<p>Edwin was soon at home.&nbsp; Here was a great glass-fronted
mahogany bookcase the wonder of which he had never thoroughly
explored.&nbsp; Here was the flat glass showcase, shaped like a
card-table in which a number of Mr. Barrow&rsquo;s curiosities
reposed.&nbsp; Here was the great musical-box (glass-topped
again) with its prickly brass cylinder and twanging teeth for
notes, and a winding lever that made a sound as impressive as the
winding of a grandfather&rsquo;s clock.</p>
<p>Edwin thought he would try a tune.&nbsp; He wound up the
mechanism, pressed over the starting lever, and the prickly
cylinder began slowly to revolve.&nbsp; It made a bad start; for
no one knows how many years ago it had been stopped in the middle
of a tune.&nbsp; Then, having finished the broken cadence, it
burst gaily into the song called &ldquo;Mousetraps for
Sale,&rdquo; a pathetic ballad which may have sounded sprightly
in the ears of young people fifty years ago, but in this strange
room was invested with a pathetic and faded quality which made
Edwin wish it would stop.&nbsp; There was no need for him to pull
back the lever, for the musical box, as though guessing his
wishes, suddenly petered out with a sort of metallic growl.&nbsp;
Edwin laughed in spite of himself, <a name="page137"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 137</span>at this peculiar noise, and hearing
the echo of his own laugh turned to find himself staring into the
jealous eyes of a portrait of a Victorian gentleman whom he took
to be the late Mr. Barrow, for whose delectation, over his glass
of punch, the instrument had been purchased.&nbsp; Edwin began to
feel a little uneasy.&nbsp; The feeling annoyed him.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m silly to be like this,&rdquo; he said to
himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose it&rsquo;s the uncertainty. . .
.&nbsp; Oh, I wish I knew. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>He took refuge in the bookcase, from which he extracted, to
his great delight, the complete works of Shenstone in two
volumes, bound in slippery calf and published by Dodsley in the
year seventeen-seventy. . . .&nbsp; The books were in a beautiful
state of preservation.&nbsp; Edwin doubted if they had ever been
read.&nbsp; Mr. Barrow, no doubt, had purchased them simply for
their local interest.&nbsp; With a final glance at Mr.
Barrow&rsquo;s portrait, in a faint hope that he approved of his
choice, Edwin let down the blinds, so that no light penetrated
the room but a single gleam reflected from the glass pane of a
wool-worked fire-guard that hung from a bracket at the side of
the fireplace.&nbsp; With a shiver he re-locked the door. . .
.</p>
<p>When he reached the garden with his Shenstone, the light was
failing.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You were a long time, Edwin,&rdquo; said Mrs.
Barrow.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, wasn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo; echoed Miss Beecock.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid it is time Mrs. Barrow was going
in.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Quietly, and with a leisure that seemed to presume an endless
placidity of existence, the old ladies folded their work, sighed,
and recrossed the <a name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
138</span>lawn towards the house.&nbsp; In a little time came
supper: biscuits and milk on which a thick cream had been rising
all day.&nbsp; Then Mrs. Barrow kissed him good-night.&nbsp; He
felt her face on his cheek: a little chilly, but lax and very
soft.&nbsp; Miss Beecock lighted him to bed with a candle in a
highly-polished brass candlestick.&nbsp; The sheets were cool and
of old linen.&nbsp; The bedroom smelt of apples.&nbsp; With the
air of &ldquo;Mousetraps for Sale&rdquo; in his head, and a
sleepy consciousness of ancient creaking timbers, Edwin fell
asleep.</p>
<p>He slept long and dreamlessly, waking in the morning to find
the sun shining brilliantly through Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s lace
curtains.&nbsp; At first he could not remember where he was, so
completely had sleep, bred of long fatigue, obliterated his
consciousness.&nbsp; Before he opened his eyes he had half
expected to hear the noise of Widdup turning out of bed with a
flop, or the clangour of the six-thirty bell.&nbsp; And then,
with a rush, the whole situation came back to him: this was
Halesby, and the new day might be full of tragedy.</p>
<p>At his bedside Miss Beecock, who had stolen into the room an
hour or so before in slippered feet and found him sleeping, had
placed a glass of creamy milk and biscuits.&nbsp; It was awfully
kind of her, Edwin thought, as he sipped the yellow cream at the
top of the glass.&nbsp; Outside in the garden it was very
quiet.&nbsp; He had overslept the morning chorus of birdsong; but
he heard the noise of a thrush cracking snail-shells on the
gravel path beneath his window.&nbsp; He had forgotten to wind up
his watch overnight; and when he found it in his waistcoat <a
name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 139</span>pocket
where he had left it he saw that it had stopped.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I&rsquo;d better get up, anyway,&rdquo; he thought, and
while he stood at the door wondering if Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s house
ran to a bathroom, he heard a clock in the hall give a loud whirr
and then strike ten.&nbsp; &ldquo;Good Lord, I&rsquo;ve overslept
myself,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d better buck
up.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Abandoning the uncertainty of hunting for a bath he dressed
and came downstairs to the sitting-room (that was what it was
called) in which the meals had been served the day before.&nbsp;
Mrs. Barrow was sitting there in pleasant sunlight, wearing a
less elaborate cap and a shetland shawl, and the canary, whose
brass cage and saffron plumage now shone brilliantly in the
morning sunlight, was singing like mad.&nbsp; When Edwin came
into the room she smiled at him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re so glad that you slept well,&rdquo; she
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Miss Beecock went to have a look at you but
you were sleeping so soundly that she didn&rsquo;t like to
disturb you.&nbsp; You must have been tired out.&nbsp; Now
you&rsquo;ll be ready for breakfast.&rdquo;</p>
<p>At this point Miss Beecock entered the room, her attire
modified in the same degree as that of Mrs. Barrow.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ah . . .&rdquo; she said with a little laugh.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Here you are.&nbsp; I must ask Annie for your
breakfast.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;d like a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, and
some buttered toast,&rdquo; said Mrs. Barrow temptingly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, of course he would,&rdquo; said Miss Beecock.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think if you don&rsquo;t mind,&rdquo; said Edwin,
&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to go home.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s so
late.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
140</span>&ldquo;Oh, you needn&rsquo;t mind us,&rdquo; chimed the
two old ladies.</p>
<p>That wasn&rsquo;t exactly what Edwin had meant, but he allowed
himself to be persuaded, and even enjoyed his breakfast, to the
accompaniment of the twitterings of the canary and his two
hostesses.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll sleep here again to-night, won&rsquo;t
you?&rdquo; they said when he was ready to go.&nbsp; Edwin
thanked them.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, we&rsquo;re only too pleased to be
of any assistance to your mother,&rdquo; they said, pursuing his
departure with the kindest and most innocent of smiles.</p>
<p>This time he did not linger in the old garden: he was far too
anxious to get home and learn how things were going.&nbsp; At the
door in the wall his heart stood still.&nbsp; What was he going
to find?&nbsp; It seemed to him that something terrible might be
waiting for him on the other side of the wall.&nbsp; It was a
silly apprehension, he thought, and when he stepped into it the
new garden was as sunny as the old.&nbsp; Only, on the long walk
beside the bed of stocks, a mattress, blankets, and sheets were
spread out to air in the sun.&nbsp; The scent of some
disinfectant mingled with that of the flowers.&nbsp; His fears
supplied an awful explanation.&nbsp; It was the bedding from his
mother&rsquo;s room that was spread out there in the sun.&nbsp;
And when he looked up to the windows of the house above him, he
saw that the blinds were down.&nbsp; That, of course,
needn&rsquo;t mean anything on the sunny side of the house.&nbsp;
In a great hurry he turned the corner to the front and saw that
the blinds on that side were down as well.</p>
<h4><a name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
141</span>III</h4>
<p>In the darkened dining-room Aunt Laura sat at his
mother&rsquo;s desk writing letters with dashing fluency.&nbsp;
When he came in she stopped her writing and rose to meet
him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Edwin, my poor dear,&rdquo; she said, holding
out her hands to him.&nbsp; He took no notice of her hands.</p>
<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;in the
night?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; In the night.&nbsp; She passed away
quite quietly.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a dreadful blow for us, Edwin, we
must be brave. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>He hadn&rsquo;t time for sentiments of that kind.&nbsp;
&ldquo;She was alive when I came yesterday.&nbsp; And you
wouldn&rsquo;t let me see her.&nbsp; <i>You</i>, of all people. .
. .&nbsp; She hated you.&nbsp; She told me so.&nbsp; She always
hated you . . . and she&rsquo;d hate you for this more than
anything.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin,&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;don&rsquo;t say these
terrible things!&rsquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;re true . . . true.&nbsp; I wish it were you
who were dead.&nbsp; It was you who stopped me from seeing her .
. . my little darling. . . .&nbsp; Damn you . . . damn
you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin . . . you don&rsquo;t know what you&rsquo;re
saying.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re cruel.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Cruel. . . .&nbsp; I like that.&nbsp; Cruel.&nbsp;
<i>You</i> talk about cruelty. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; Aunt Laura clutched nervously
at her breast.&nbsp; It was funny to see this big blowzy woman
crumple up like that.&nbsp; She flopped down in a red plush chair
and started crying softly in a thin voice.&nbsp; Edwin
didn&rsquo;t mind.&nbsp; Let her cry.&nbsp; <a
name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 142</span>She
deserved it.&nbsp; Nothing of that kind could soften his
indignant heart.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s father?&rdquo; he asked at last.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s upstairs
somewhere,&rdquo; she said between her sobs.&nbsp; &ldquo;For
goodness&rsquo; sake, Edwin, don&rsquo;t go and say things like
this to the poor man.&nbsp; We all have this trouble to
bear.&nbsp; And we&rsquo;ve had the strain of nursing her.&nbsp;
Now, don&rsquo;t be hasty,&rdquo; she pleaded.</p>
<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Edwin, and left her.</p>
<p>Upstairs on the landing he found a pale, shadowy figure in
which he could scarcely recognise his father.&nbsp; Neither of
them could speak at all.&nbsp; Edwin had been ready with the
reproaches that had come to his lips in the presence of Aunt
Laura; but he couldn&rsquo;t do it.&nbsp; This man was too
broken.&nbsp; He was face to face with a grief as great as his
own.&nbsp; There were no words for either of them.&nbsp; The boy
and the man clung together in each other&rsquo;s arms, overcome
with pity and with sorrow.&nbsp; On the landing, outside the door
of the room where she lay dead, they stood together and cried
quietly to each other.&nbsp; And now it seemed to Edwin as if
pity for his father were overriding even the intensity of his own
grief; for she had been everything to him, too, and for so many
years.&nbsp; He felt that he would have done anything in the
world to comfort this desolate man, whom he had always taken for
granted and never really loved.&nbsp; But his mother had loved
him.&nbsp; He wondered if they could do anything to assuage the
bitterness of their loss by loving one another.&nbsp; They were
two people left alone with nothing else in the world but each
other.&nbsp; Why not . . .?&nbsp; That, he <a
name="page143"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 143</span>thought,
was what his mother would have wished.</p>
<p>He felt his father&rsquo;s tears on his forehead, the
roughness of his father&rsquo;s grey beard.&nbsp; He felt the
man&rsquo;s body quivering with sobs, and the arms which clutched
his body as if that were the only loved thing left to him in
life.&nbsp; They went together into the little room that had
always been Edwin&rsquo;s, and there they knelt together beside
the bed.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t exactly know why they knelt, but
kneeling there at his side, with his arm still clasped about his
waist, he supposed that his father was praying; and though Edwin
could not understand what good prayer could do, it seemed to him
a simple and a beautiful thing.&nbsp; It made him feel that he
loved his father more than ever.&nbsp; He wished that he could
pray himself.&nbsp; He tried to pray . . . for what?&nbsp; There
was nothing left in this world for him to pray for.&nbsp; At last
his father rose to his feet in the dim room, and Edwin rose with
him.&nbsp; He spoke, and the tears still choked his voice and his
bearded lip trembled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Edwin,&rdquo; he said,
&ldquo;I shall never be able to get over this.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m
broken. . . .&nbsp; My life . . . my life has . . .&rdquo;&nbsp;
He stopped.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know what she was to me, Eddie.&nbsp; I
can&rsquo;t realise, Eddie, there are only two of us left.&nbsp;
We must help each other to bear it.&nbsp; We must be
brave.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Strange that a phrase which had sounded like cant on the lips
of Aunt Laura should now seem the truest and most natural thing
imaginable.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We . . . we were like children together,&rdquo; said
his father.</p>
<p><a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 144</span>Again
they stood for a little while in silence.&nbsp; At last Edwin,
still gripping his father&rsquo;s arm, said,&mdash;&ldquo;Father,
may I see her?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course, dear. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>They went together to the room, and his father opened the door
and pulled up one of the blinds.&nbsp; Mrs. Bagley, the charwoman
who did odd work in the house and was an expert in this
melancholy office, had drawn a clean white sheet over the
bed.&nbsp; His mother lay there in a cotton nightdress with her
hands folded in front of her, and her lips gently smiling.&nbsp;
Even her cheeks were faintly flushed, but the rest of her face
and her hands were of a waxen pallor.&nbsp; She looked very small
and childlike.&nbsp; She looked like a small wax doll.&nbsp; In
this frail and strangely beautiful creature Edwin could only
recognise a shadow of the mother that he knew.&nbsp; It was a
little girl that lay there, not his mother.</p>
<p>Edwin spoke in a whisper,&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Should I kiss her?&rdquo;</p>
<p>His father nodded and turned away.</p>
<p>But he did not kiss her as he had thought he would.&nbsp; For
some reason he dared not, for he could not feel certain that it
was she at all.&nbsp; He only touched her hands, the hands that
he had always worshipped, with his fingers.&nbsp; They were cold;
and still her lips smiled.&nbsp; The room was full of the odour
of Sanitas which some one had sprayed or sprinkled over the
floor.&nbsp; For the rest of his life the smell was one which
Edwin hated; for in his mind it became the smell of death.</p>
<h4><a name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
145</span>IV</h4>
<p>On the evening after the funeral Edwin sat alone in the
drawing-room.&nbsp; He sat there because the other room was still
cumbered with the remnants of a melancholy repast: several leaves
of mahogany had been dragged down from the dust of the attic and
had lengthened the dining-room table to such an extent that there
was scarcely room to move in it, and round this table, in the
sunny afternoon, had clustered a large collection of people who
smelt of black crape and spoke in lowered, gentle voices, out of
respect for the woman whom, it seemed to Edwin, they had never
known.</p>
<p>Everybody who entered the house&mdash;and there were many, for
Mr. Ingleby was much respected in Halesby&mdash;wore the same
grave air.&nbsp; Even the undertaker, a brisk little man with a
fiery red beard and one shoulder lower than the other from the
constant carrying of coffins, treated his daily task with the
same sort of mute reverence.&nbsp; His face, at any rate, wore an
expression that matched that of the mourners; and Edwin was only
disillusioned as to the sincerity of his expression when he heard
him swearing violently at the driver of the first mourning
carriage.&nbsp; This moment of relaxation caused him to forget
himself so far as to whistle a pantomime song as he crossed the
drive.</p>
<p>The black-coated people in the dining-room did not hear him:
they were far too busy being serious: and behind them, from time
to time, Edwin could see the grey face of his father, with
curiously tired and puzzled eyes.&nbsp; Puzzled . . . that was
the <a name="page146"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 146</span>only
word for them.&nbsp; It was just as if the man were protesting,
in all simplicity, against the unreason and injustice of the blow
which had fallen on him.&nbsp; Edwin, savagely hating the
presence of all these hushed, uninterested people, found in his
father&rsquo;s suffering face a sudden reinforcement to his
anger.&nbsp; It was a shame, a damned, ghastly shame, that a
simple man like that should be hit in the dark; and even more
pathetic that he should be simple enough to take the sympathy of
his neighbours at its face value.&nbsp; Edwin glowed with a new
and protective love for his father.&nbsp; It was as well that
some generous emotion should be born to take the place of his
numb grief.</p>
<p>Above all, the sight of his Aunt Laura, who was
conscientiously doing the honours of the house, maddened
him.&nbsp; He could not look at her without remembering that she
had been selfish and unkind to his mother; that, on the very last
day, she had robbed him of the privilege of seeing his darling
alive.&nbsp; Even now, he believed that she was enjoying
herself.&nbsp; Her eyes occasionally brimmed with tears, but that
meant nothing.&nbsp; They were such easy tears . . . so different
from the terrible tears that had shaken his father&rsquo;s body
on the day of desolation.&nbsp; If only she were dead, he
thought, there would be no great loss.</p>
<p>And yet, while he thought of this, he suddenly caught sight of
her husband, the little manufacturer whom he had lately begun to
know as Uncle Albert, a small man with a shiny bald head and a
diffident manner: and in the eyes of Uncle Albert, which were
fixed upon his wife, he saw an <a name="page147"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 147</span>extraordinary mixture of love and
admiration for this shallow, diffuse creature whom he had found
himself hating.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If Aunt Laura were to die,&rdquo; he thought,
&ldquo;Uncle Albert might very well be like father is
to-day.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s a queer idea. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; He
was amazed at the complications of human relationships and the
potential pain that love brings with it.&nbsp; He thought,
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no good thinking about it. . . .&nbsp; I give
it up.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t really wish she were dead.&nbsp; I
only wish . . . that there were no such thing as death.&nbsp; Why
does God allow it?&rdquo;&nbsp; No answer came to him: but in
place of an answer another angry impulse.&nbsp; &ldquo;Curse
God,&rdquo; he thought, meaning the God of Mr. Leeming, the God
to whom this queer collection of people were to dedicate his
mother&rsquo;s soul.&nbsp; Another thought followed quickly:
&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good of cursing him?&nbsp; He
doesn&rsquo;t exist.&nbsp; If he existed this sort of thing
couldn&rsquo;t happen. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>People were seriously setting themselves to the putting on of
black kid gloves that the undertaker had provided.&nbsp; The
horses on the gravel drive were getting uneasy and the cab wheels
made a grating noise.&nbsp; Heavy steps were heard descending the
stairs&mdash;awkward steps like those of men moving
furniture.&nbsp; Edwin saw that his father had heard too.&nbsp;
He was looking towards the closed door of the room.&nbsp; He
wanted to go and take his father&rsquo;s hand and hold it, but
the space round the edge of the table was packed with
people.&nbsp; Now they had opened the hall door.&nbsp; He dared
not look out of the window.</p>
<p>The voice of Aunt Laura, most studiously kind, <a
name="page148"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 148</span>said to
him: &ldquo;Eddie, you&rsquo;ll come along with your father and
Uncle Albert and me.&rdquo;&nbsp; He said, &ldquo;All
right.&rdquo;&nbsp; People at the side of the table made way for
him.&nbsp; On his way he found himself abreast of his friend,
Miss Beecock.&nbsp; She said nothing, but smiled at him and put
her arm on his sleeve.&nbsp; She was wearing black silk mittens,
and her eyes were full of tears.&nbsp; That weak, tearful smile
nearly did for Edwin.</p>
<p>The first cab was drawn up at the hall door.&nbsp; Edwin
scrambled in last.&nbsp; Aunt Laura, with a rustle of black silk,
made way for him.&nbsp; She took out her handkerchief, and Edwin
was stifled with a wave of scent.&nbsp; He hated scent: but
anyway it was better than Sanitas.&nbsp; He saw his
father&rsquo;s puzzled eyes on the other side of the cab . . . so
old, so awfully old.&nbsp; Uncle Albert took out his
handkerchief, too.&nbsp; Evidently, Edwin thought, it was the
correct thing to do.&nbsp; He had misjudged him.&nbsp; Uncle
Albert proceeded to blow his nose.</p>
<p>They were driving through the High Street.&nbsp; Aunt Laura
noticed that most of the shop shutters were up, and in several
cases tradesmen were standing at their shop doors bare-headed as
they passed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s very kind of them . . . very nice to see so
much respect, John,&rdquo; she said to his father.&nbsp; Mr.
Ingleby said &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; and Aunt Laura, with a little
laugh that was merely a symptom of nervousness, went on: &ldquo;I
expect there&rsquo;ll be a crowd at the cemetery
gate.&rdquo;&nbsp; This time Mr. Ingleby said nothing and Uncle
Albert once more stolidly blew his nose.&nbsp; &ldquo;Albert,
dear, I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura.&nbsp;
The brakes grated, and the cab stopped <a
name="page149"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 149</span>with a
jerk.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come along, Edwin, jump out, there&rsquo;s a
good boy,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll walk
with your father.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He walked with his father.&nbsp; The church was full.&nbsp;
His father went with bowed head, seeing nothing; but Edwin was
conscious of many faces that he knew.&nbsp; In the middle of the
aisle the thought suddenly came to him that these people
weren&rsquo;t really there to do honour to his mother: they were
so many that most of them could never have known her: no, they
were just curious people who had flocked there to find something
sensational in the faces of the mourners.&nbsp; In a dull place
like Halesby a funeral, and such an important funeral, was an
unusual diversion.&nbsp; And this revelation made him determined
that whatever happened he would show no emotion that might tickle
the sensations of these ghouls.&nbsp; He only wished to goodness
that he could explain the matter to his father so that he too
might give them nothing to gloat over.</p>
<p>In the church, where a faint mustiness mingled with the exotic
scent of arum lilies that diffused from the heap of wreaths on
the coffin, Edwin held himself upright.&nbsp; They sang a hymn:
&ldquo;I heard the voice of Jesus say . . . Come unto me and
rest&rdquo;&mdash;the first quatrain in unison, and Edwin sang
with them, just as he would have sung in the chapel at St.
Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; In the churchyard, when they walked in
procession behind the bearers to the grave-side, his eyes were
still dry, his lips did not tremble, though Aunt Laura&rsquo;s
scented handkerchief was now drenched with tears, and even Uncle
Albert, a virtual outsider, was on the edge of violent
emotion.</p>
<p><a name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 150</span>The
burial service was nothing to Edwin.&nbsp; There was no
consolation in it nor, to him, the least atom of religious
feeling.&nbsp; A mockery, a mockery, a solemn and pretentious
mockery.&nbsp; For she was dead . . . she had vanished
altogether, and the thing that they were burying with muttered
formulas and tears was no more she than the empty parchment of
the cocoon is the glowing butterfly.&nbsp; Let them cry their
eyes out.&nbsp; That was not grief.&nbsp; Beyond tears.&nbsp;
Beyond tears. . . .</p>
<p>With a curious air of relief that was very near to a furtive
gaiety, the party drove back and reassembled in the
dining-room.&nbsp; All except Mr. Ingleby.&nbsp; &ldquo;He has
gone to his room, poor dear,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura, with her
nervous laugh.&nbsp; &ldquo;Mrs. Barrow, do have a slice of
ginger-cake.&nbsp; Just a little?&rdquo;&nbsp; Round the long
table conversation began to flow, cautiously at first, but with
an increasing confidence, when it became clear that it was
unattended by any revengeful consequences.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you think it was awfully nice to see the
people in High Street so respectful, Mrs. Willis?&rdquo; said
Aunt Laura.&nbsp; Edwin looked up.&nbsp; This then was the Mrs.
Willis of Mawne Hall with whom his mother had planned the visit
to Switzerland.&nbsp; He saw a middle-aged woman in black satin,
with a gold watch-chain round her neck and jet in her
bonnet.&nbsp; She caught his interested eyes and in return
smiled.&nbsp; Aunt Laura went unanswered.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
wonder,&rdquo; Edwin thought, &ldquo;if she understands what a
fraud the whole thing is.&rdquo;&nbsp; At any rate she looked
kind . . . and she had been kind to his mother too.&nbsp; A
moment later she said good-bye, and <a name="page151"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 151</span>when Aunt Laura had escorted her to
the door, for Mrs. Willis was a person of consequence, the rest
of the company began to disappear.&nbsp; At last Edwin was left
alone in the room with his aunt and uncle.&nbsp; Aunt
Laura&rsquo;s face, that had been glowing with hospitable smiles,
now took a more serious cast.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I want to speak to
you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do you?&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well . . . go
on.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s very painful . . . I&rsquo;m afraid . . .
I&rsquo;m half afraid that it will have upset your father, poor
man&mdash;as if he hadn&rsquo;t enough to put up with.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What on earth do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;How can you ask?&nbsp; I mean your behaviour
to-day.&nbsp; In the church.&nbsp; In the cemetery.&nbsp; You
stood there just as if . . . just as if . . . oh, it was most
irreverent.&nbsp; Not a sign of grief!&nbsp; You must have
noticed it, Albert?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Uncle Albert, most uncomfortable at his inclusion in this
family scene, but fully aware of the disaster which would follow
denial, said, &ldquo;Yes . . . yes . . . yes,
certainly.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Every one must have noticed it,&rdquo; Aunt Laura went
on.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was a public scandal.&nbsp; It was
unnatural.&nbsp; It showed such a curious lack of
feeling.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Feeling,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;What do you
know about feeling?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Steady, Edwin, steady,&rdquo; from Uncle Albert.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If mother were here,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and could
hear you talking this damned piffle she&rsquo;d laugh at
you.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what she&rsquo;d do.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin!&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
152</span>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s true. . . .&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t
stick your sort of grief at any price.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;On the very day of her burial. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s not buried.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t she you
buried.&nbsp; Oh, I&rsquo;m sick of you. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin . . .&rdquo; said Uncle Albert, who felt that
something in the way of protection was demanded of him.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Really now . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t mean you, uncle,&rdquo; said
Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You cruel boy,&rdquo; Aunt Laura sobbed.</p>
<p>He left them there.&nbsp; He carried his bitterness into the
drawing-room on the other side of the passage. . . .&nbsp; It was
very quiet there.&nbsp; Through the bow window floated the
perfume of the bed of stocks.&nbsp; In the corner stood the
piano.&nbsp; He had often listened to his mother playing at night
when he was in bed.&nbsp; He loved her to play him to
sleep.&nbsp; The piano was shut; and the shut piano seemed to him
symbolical.&nbsp; All the music and all the beauty that had been
there had gone out of the house.&nbsp; The house was an empty
shell.&nbsp; Like a dry chrysalis.&nbsp; Like a coffin.&nbsp;
There, on the hearthrug, where he had crawled as a child, he lay
down and cried.</p>
<h3><a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
153</span>CHAPTER X<br />
THRENODY</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">From</span> this emotional maelstrom the
current of Edwin&rsquo;s life flowed into a strange peace.&nbsp;
It seemed that the catastrophe of Mrs. Ingleby&rsquo;s death had
taken the Halesby household by surprise and stunned it so
thoroughly that it would never recover its normal
consciousness.&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s father, who had now returned
to the ordinary round of business, was still dazed and puzzled,
and very grey.&nbsp; Their servant, a young woman with an
exaggerated sense of the proprieties, or perhaps a dread of
living alone in such a gloomy house, had given notice.&nbsp; Only
Aunt Laura, to Edwin&rsquo;s shame, showed the least capacity for
dealing with the situation.</p>
<p>However few of the graces may have fallen to her lot, she was
certainly not lacking in the domestic virtues.&nbsp; When the
maid departed with her tin trunk and many tearful protestations
of her devotion to the memory of the dear mistress, Aunt Laura
turned up her sleeves and took possession of the kitchen, and Mr.
Ingleby, who had gloomily anticipated a domestic wilderness,
found that in spite of the maid&rsquo;s defection, ambrosial food
<a name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 154</span>appeared
before him like manna from heaven, the only difference being that
Uncle Albert, who could not be permitted for one moment to remain
a bachelor, took his meals with the family.</p>
<p>The relation between Edwin and Aunt Laura was still
difficult.&nbsp; She could not forget&mdash;and he could not
withdraw&mdash;the bitter things that had been said on that most
mournful day, though her native good humour, which was profuse
and blustery like the rest of her, made it difficult for her to
maintain an attitude of injured benignance.&nbsp; Even Edwin had
to admit that she was a good cook; but the excellence of her food
was qualified by her incessant chatter and her nervous
laugh.&nbsp; Edwin simply couldn&rsquo;t stick them; but it
amazed him to find that Uncle Albert evidently found them
cheerful and reassuring.&nbsp; Indeed, it was possibly one of the
reasons why he had fallen in love with her, being a man who
resembled her in nothing and whose enthusiasms could never get
him beyond a couple of words and a giggle.</p>
<p>Mr. Ingleby too seemed to emerge without serious irritation
from this diurnal bath of small-talk, retiring, as Edwin
supposed, to certain gloomy depths of his own consciousness where
the froth and bubble of Aunt Laura&rsquo;s conversation became
imperceptible.&nbsp; Even when she spoke to him
directly&mdash;though most of her observations were addressed to
the world in general&mdash;he would not trouble to answer her: a
slight which Aunt Laura took quite good-humouredly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Bless you,&rdquo; she would have said, &ldquo;the
man&rsquo;s so wrapped up in himself that he&rsquo;s miles away
from <a name="page155"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
155</span>anywhere.&nbsp; Of course you can understand it in a
man of his age, especially when you realise how devoted he was to
poor Beatrice&rdquo;&mdash;Mrs. Ingleby&rsquo;s name might never
now escape the commiserating prefix&mdash;&ldquo;but when a boy
like Edwin tries it on it&rsquo;s another matter
altogether.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s simply conceit.&nbsp; Personally, I
think it was a great mistake of his poor mother&rsquo;s to send
him to St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The grammar school&rsquo;s good
enough for the Willises.&nbsp; A great mistake. . . .&nbsp; The
boy is getting ideas of himself that aren&rsquo;t warranted by
his position.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what we are to do with
him.&nbsp; We certainly can&rsquo;t have him running wild
here.&rdquo;&nbsp; And Uncle Albert would say: &ldquo;Certainly,
certainly, my love. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>In spite of these pronounced opinions Aunt Laura was careful
not to cross swords with Edwin himself.&nbsp; Indeed, she went a
good deal out of her way to propitiate him with various material
kindnesses, and particularly certain delicacies in the way of
food, which, to the ruin of her figure in later life, represented
to her the height of earthly enjoyment.&nbsp; Edwin didn&rsquo;t
quite know how to take these attentions.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t
help disliking her, and the fact that she was really kind to him
rather took the wind out of his sails.&nbsp; He would have been
much happier if they had been allowed to remain in a state of
armed neutrality.</p>
<p>A fortnight passed . . . happily for Edwin in spite of all
that he felt he ought to feel.&nbsp; He missed his mother
awfully.&nbsp; That was true enough.&nbsp; And yet . . . and yet
it was also true to say that he was only beginning to live: to
appreciate the joy <a name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
156</span>of his growing strength: to realise the enchanted
domains that were open to his eager feet and to his eager
mind.&nbsp; Here he had freedom, leisure, health: so much of the
world to see: so much of human knowledge to explore.&nbsp; And
though the thought of death, and the particular disaster that had
befallen him fell upon his spirit sometimes with a shadow that
plunged the whole world into desperate darkness, he could not
deny that the shadow was gradually lifting, and the character of
the agony that had desolated him was becoming less spontaneous,
till, in the end, it became almost a calculable emotion that
might be indulged or banished at will.&nbsp; He found it
difficult to understand this.&nbsp; He thought: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
a brute, a callous, insensitive brute.&nbsp; What would she think
of me . . .?&nbsp; And yet, I can&rsquo;t help it.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;m made like that. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; And then, after long
and bitter deliberation: &ldquo;I believe she would
understand.&nbsp; I expect she was made like that too.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;m sure she was.&nbsp; And if there&rsquo;s one thing in
the world that she&rsquo;d hate it would be that I should force
myself to pretend anything.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The high summer weather held.&nbsp; Never was there such a
June.&nbsp; Edwin, in the joy of perfect health, would get up
very early in the morning when the dew lay on the roses, and run
in a sweater and flannel trousers down the lane and over the
field to the mill-pond where he and his mother had walked so
often in the evenings of spring.&nbsp; Here, where the water was
deepest and great striped perch stole slowly under the
camp-shedding, he would strip and bathe, lying on his back in the
water so that low <a name="page157"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
157</span>sunbeams came dancing over the surface into his eyes
that were on the level of the flat water-lily leaves and their
yellow balls now breaking into cups.</p>
<p>Afterwards when he would sit glowing on the bank, the sun
would be rising and growing warmer every minute, and this new
warmth would seem to accentuate the odour of the place that was
compact of the yellow water-lily&rsquo;s harsh savour, the odour
of soaked wood, and another, more subtly blended: the composite
smell of water that is neither fast nor stagnant, the most
provocative and the coolest smell on earth.</p>
<p>On the way home he would sometimes get a whiff of the
miller&rsquo;s cowhouse, when the door was thrown open, and from
within there came a sound of quiet breathing or of milk hissing
in a pail.&nbsp; And sometimes, from the garden, the scent of a
weed bonfire would drift across his path.&nbsp; All things smelt
more poignantly at this early hour of the morning.&nbsp; All
things smell more wonderfully early in life. . . .</p>
<p>With these wonders the day began; but stranger things lay in
store for him.&nbsp; He revisited all his old haunts: the tangled
woods and gardens of Shenstone on the hill-side: the ruins of the
Cistercian abbey on whose fall the poet had moralised, the little
chapel that marked the grave of the murdered Mercian
prince.&nbsp; His bicycle took him farther.&nbsp; Westward . . .
always westward.</p>
<p>In those days it always seemed to him as if the mountainous
country that his mother had shown him that evening on Uffdown,
rolling away into remote and cloudy splendours, must be the land
of <a name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 158</span>his
heart&rsquo;s desire: and though he could never reach it in a
day, he managed several times to cross the Severn and even to
scale the foothills upon the farther bank from which he could see
the Clee Hills rising in a magnificent bareness, shaking the
woods and pastures from their knees.&nbsp; And these distant
hills would tempt him to think of the future and other desires of
his heart: in the near distance Oxford, where Layton and other
demigods in grey flannel trousers abode, and beyond the fine
untravelled world, rivers and seas and forests, desolate
wonderful names.&nbsp; China . . . Africa . . .&nbsp; &ldquo;Some
day,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;I will go to Africa. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In this way he began to think of his present adventures as a
kind of prelude to others remoter and more vast.&nbsp; One day he
had ridden farther away than usual, and having taken his lunch at
the bridge town of Bewdley, he pushed his bicycle up the immense
hill that overshadows the town along the road to Tenbury.&nbsp;
For all its steepness this mountain road was strangely
exhilarating, the air that moved above it grew so clean and
clear.&nbsp; Below him, between the road and the river, lay the
mighty remnants of the Forest of Wyre.</p>
<p>His way tumbled again to a green valley, where no mountains
were to be seen; and while Edwin was deciding to turn off down
the first descending lane and explore the forest, he heard a
sound of spades and pickaxes and came upon a group of navvies,
several of them stripped to the waist in the sun, working at a
cutting of red earth that was already deep on either side of the
road.&nbsp; For the most part they worked in silence; but one of
them, <a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 159</span>a
little one-eyed man, with a stiff soldierly back, encouraged them
with a string of jokes.&nbsp; They called him
&ldquo;Gunner,&rdquo; and the elaboration with which his chest
had been tattooed with nautical symbols led Edwin to suppose that
he was a sailor.&nbsp; When he saw Edwin leaning on his bicycle
and watching the work, he called out to him, asking if he wanted
a job.&nbsp; Edwin shook his head.&nbsp; &ldquo;I reckon,&rdquo;
said the Gunner, &ldquo;that a foreman&rsquo;s job would be more
in your line, Gaffer.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a fine sight to see other
people working.&nbsp; The harder the better.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The men laughed and stretched their backs, leaning, on their
spades, and Edwin could see how a fine dew of sweat had broken
out under the hair on their chests.&nbsp; It seemed to him a
noble sight.&nbsp; &ldquo;What are you working at?&rdquo; he
asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is it a railway?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;To hell with your railway,&rdquo; said the
Gunner.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who would make a railway heading for the
river Severn?&nbsp; No . . .&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a pipe-track.&nbsp;
This here&rsquo;s the Welsh water scheme.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Where is it going to?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;North Bromwich.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And where does it come from?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;From Wales. . . .&nbsp; From the Dulas Valley, where
they&rsquo;re rebuilding the reservoir under a hill they call
Savaddan.&nbsp; And a black job it is, I can tell you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Is it anywhere near a place called Felindre?&nbsp; I
think it must be.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Right, my son.&nbsp; The pipe-line goes through
Felindre.&nbsp; Sixty or eighty mile from here.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;My people come from Felindre . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page160"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
160</span>&ldquo;Well, God pity them. . . .&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
all I can say.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been in that place on a Christmas
Day, and not a pint of beer stirring. . . .&nbsp; Ah,
that&rsquo;s a black job.&nbsp; Well, mates, come on. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Again the men who had been listening, lifted their picks and
spades, and the busy clinking sounds of digging began
again.&nbsp; Edwin wished the Gunner good-afternoon, and began to
push his bicycle up the hill again.&nbsp; Sixty or eighty miles.
. . .&nbsp; That wasn&rsquo;t so very far.&nbsp; Six or eight
hours&rsquo; ride. . . .&nbsp; Perhaps some day he could go
there.&nbsp; He half persuaded himself with a sentimental
argument that it was only natural that he should be happy in the
country from which his mother&rsquo;s people had come; that even
the borderland of it must be possessed by the same curiously
friendly atmosphere.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m always most happy
west of Severn,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; And then he began to
wonder about the sailor whom the men called Gunner.&nbsp; Perhaps
that man had actually been in Africa. . . .</p>
<p>He managed to get a sixpenny tea at a little general shop on
the very crown of the hills, where a small hamlet named Far
Forest stood.&nbsp; The romantic name of the place appealed to
him; and it was a curious adventure to sit down alone to tea in a
back room that smelt of candles and paraffin and bacon.&nbsp; At
the shop door a serious old man with a white beard had received
him; but the tea was brought to him by a little girl in an
extremely clean pinafore whom the old man addressed as Eva.</p>
<p>She was a curious mixture of shyness and friendliness, and her
serious eyes examined Edwin <a name="page161"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 161</span>minutely from under straight dark
eyebrows.&nbsp; When she came in with the tea she found Edwin
examining some books that stood in a cupboard with a glass
door.&nbsp; Evidently she was very proud of them.</p>
<p>&ldquo;They are my brother James&rsquo;s prizes,&rdquo; she
said, and went on to explain how clever he was and what a
scholar, until the old man called &ldquo;Eva,&rdquo; and she
returned to him in the shop.&nbsp; It was all amazingly peaceful,
with the westering sun flooding the doorway where the old man had
been sitting out in a chair when Edwin arrived: and opposite the
door was a little patch of green strewn with mossy boulders, a
kind of platform in front of which the huge panorama of Clee and
all the Radnor hills expanded.</p>
<p>&ldquo;In a place like this,&rdquo; Edwin thought,
&ldquo;people never change.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was a ripping, placid
sort of existence, in which nothing ever happened, but all things
were just simple and serious and tender like the eyes of the
little girl named Eva who had brought him his tea.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Good-evening, sir,&rdquo; said the old man at the
door.&nbsp; It was rather nice to be called
&ldquo;Sir.&rdquo;&nbsp; Coasting down the hill into Bewdley,
Edwin had all the joy of the state that he called &ldquo;the
after-tea feeling.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was exhilarating and splendid:
and at the end of it came the misty river town with its stone
bridge and the great river of the Marches swirling proudly to the
south.&nbsp; When he neared home, divinely tired and hungry, the
black-country stretched before him in a galaxy of starry
lights.&nbsp; As he crossed the brow of the hill above Halesby,
the Willis&rsquo; Mawne furnaces suddenly lit the sky with a
great flower of fire.</p>
<h4><a name="page162"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
162</span>II</h4>
<p>At home, Auntie Laura was in possession.&nbsp; Evidently she
was primed with serious business; for Edwin could see that his
father sat spiritually, if not physically, pinioned in the plush
arm-chair.&nbsp; Aunt Laura wore an air of overpowering
satisfaction.&nbsp; Evidently she had already triumphed, and she
smiled so cheerfully at Edwin that he felt convinced that she had
scored him off in some way.&nbsp; On the side of the fire
opposite to his father Uncle Albert sat smoking, not as if he
enjoyed it, but because it gave him the excuse of an occupation
into which he might relapse in moments of tension.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, here he is at last,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura.&nbsp;
&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve been talking about you, Edwin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin had guessed as much.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, what is it?&rdquo; he said, and his tone implied
that he was certain that some dark scheme had been launched
against his peace of mind.&nbsp; Uncle Albert puffed
uncomfortably at his pipe and nicotine or saliva made a gurgling
noise in it.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby sighed.&nbsp; Aunt Laura, tumbling
to the hostility of the new atmosphere, hastened to
propitiate.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I expect you&rsquo;re hungry, Edwin,&rdquo; she said. .
. .</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not hungry, thanks.&nbsp;
What is it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t be cross, Edwin. . . .&nbsp;
We&rsquo;ve decided. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; So it was all arranged. .
. .&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve decided that your father must go
away for a rest . . . a little holiday. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; And that means, of course, that we
shall have to shut up the house until he returns, and of course
that will be quite easy, because it&rsquo;s <a
name="page163"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 163</span>time you
were getting back to St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; We thought you had
better go on Monday.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Monday?&rdquo;&nbsp; It was now Saturday.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; Monday.&nbsp; It is fortunate that
your uncle has to go into North Bromwich on business that day. .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; Yes. . .&nbsp; Business,&rdquo; put in
Uncle Albert, as though he were anxious to explain that his visit
to that sink of iniquity was in no way connected with
pleasure.</p>
<p>Edwin burned with sudden and quite unreasonable
indignation.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And you agreed to this, father?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; Of course I agreed.&nbsp; Your aunt is
quite right.&nbsp; I am overtired.&nbsp; It was a terrible
strain.&nbsp; And the doctor suggested that my native air. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh . . . I don&rsquo;t mean that,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I mean about St. Luke&rsquo;s. . .&nbsp; I
can&rsquo;t go back now . . . of course I can&rsquo;t . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be ridiculous and childish, Edwin,&rdquo;
said Aunt Laura severely.&nbsp; &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t imagine
just because&rdquo;&mdash;with a hushed and melancholy
inflection&mdash;&ldquo;this . . . has happened, you&rsquo;re
never going to school again?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mean that.&nbsp; Of
course I don&rsquo;t.&nbsp; Only . . . only the term is nearly
over.&nbsp; In another fortnight all the chaps will be going away
for the hols.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t worth it.&nbsp; I should feel
. . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;We weren&rsquo;t considering your feelings so much as
your good,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura complacently.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father . . . father . . . you can&rsquo;t mean
it.&nbsp; You see. . . .&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know . . . it would
all be so strange.&nbsp; So awfully difficult.&nbsp; I should
have lost <a name="page164"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
164</span>touch with all the work the form was doing.&nbsp; I
shouldn&rsquo;t be able to pick it up.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s rotten .
. . rotten . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin, you will distress your father . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, Aunt Laura, do let father speak for
himself.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Immense volumes of yellow smoke signalled Uncle Albert&rsquo;s
distress.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s difficult, Edwin . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t difficult, father, dear.&nbsp; Aunt
Laura doesn&rsquo;t realise.&nbsp; She doesn&rsquo;t realise what
it would be like going back like that to St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
It would only be waste of time.&nbsp; Father, I&rsquo;d read
during the hols. . . .&nbsp; I would, really.&nbsp; It
isn&rsquo;t that I want to get out of going back to work.&nbsp;
It isn&rsquo;t that a bit.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d work like
blazes.&nbsp; Only . . . only everything now seems to have gone
funny and empty . . . sort of blank.&nbsp; I . . . I feel awful
without mother . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin . . .&rdquo; warningly, from Aunt Laura.</p>
<p>That Aunt Laura should presume to correct him in a matter of
delicacy!&nbsp; &ldquo;Of course you don&rsquo;t
understand,&rdquo; he said bitterly.&nbsp; &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t
want me to speak about mother.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve had your
excitement out of it.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve had your chance of
bossing round, and now you want to arrange what I shall do for
the rest of my life, I suppose.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve no . . . no
reverence.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He was really very angry.&nbsp; It was always difficult for
him to be anything else with Aunt Laura; for he felt that it was
somehow horribly unjust for her to be alive when his mother was
dead, and he could <a name="page165"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
165</span>never, never forget what his darling had told him of
her stupid jealousy.&nbsp; On this occasion Aunt Laura seemed to
be less disturbed than usual by his violence.&nbsp; She spoke
with a calculated coolness that compelled the admiration of her
husband, sitting very uncomfortably on the edge of the storm,
desperately anxious to show that without his taking sides his
wife could rely on his support.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s funny, Edwin,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura,
stroking her black skirt, &ldquo;that you should use the word
Reverence. . . .&nbsp; It reminds me of something that I wanted
to speak to you about.&nbsp; You realise, don&rsquo;t you, that
we are all supposed to be in mourning?&nbsp; And yet, day after
day, I see you going down the town in a pair of white canvas gym.
shoes.&nbsp; White. . . !&nbsp; Now, you mustn&rsquo;t talk to me
about reverence, Edwin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin burst out laughing.&nbsp; It was no good arguing with
the woman.&nbsp; He gave a despairing glance at his father.&nbsp;
Was it possible that the man could listen seriously to
superficial cant of this kind?&nbsp; Was it possible that he
could tolerate the woman&rsquo;s presence in the house?&nbsp; He
looked, and he saw nothing but tiredness and desolation in the
man&rsquo;s face.&nbsp; He saw that in reality his father was too
tired for anything but compromise.&nbsp; All life, all
determination had been stamped out of him, and though Edwin
clutched at the sympathy which he knew must be concealed in the
man&rsquo;s mind, he began to realise that, after all,
circumstances had left the whole household curiously dependent on
Aunt Laura; that without her the whole domestic machine would
collapse, and that, therefore, the <a name="page166"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 166</span>infliction must be suffered
patiently.&nbsp; Edwin determined to leave the matter where it
stood, but Aunt Laura, inflamed with approaching triumph, would
not let it rest.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am sure that you agree with me,
John,&rdquo; she threw out challengingly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No doubt Edwin did not understand.&nbsp; You know more
about the people in the town than we do, Laura.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Compromise . . .&rdquo; thought Edwin, &ldquo;but I
suppose it can&rsquo;t be helped.&rdquo;&nbsp; At any rate
nothing that he might do should give the man a moment&rsquo;s
discomfort.&nbsp; He possessed himself in silence.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I think, perhaps,&rdquo; Mr. Ingleby went on,
&ldquo;that Edwin is right.&nbsp; It would be hardly worth while
going back to St. Luke&rsquo;s for a fortnight.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course you know best, John,&rdquo; Aunt Laura
hurried to assure him, &ldquo;but it&rsquo;s really quite
impossible for us to put him up while the house is closed and you
are away.&nbsp; You know that we&rsquo;ve arranged to have the
painters in.&rdquo;.</p>
<p>On a matter of fact, and one outside controversy, Uncle Albert
felt that he was safe in giving his support.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I quite understand that,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby,
&ldquo;but it&rsquo;s a simple matter.&nbsp; Edwin can come with
me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, father, how wonderful!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, of course,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura, &ldquo;if he
won&rsquo;t be a nuisance to you. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; But Edwin
was too pleased and excited to mind what she said.&nbsp; He
kissed his father, and Mr. Ingleby, with a curious tenderness,
clasped his arm.&nbsp; It seemed that catastrophe had strange
uses.&nbsp; Already it had thrown the ordinary course of life
into more than one <a name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
167</span>curious byway, and now, behold, he was to embark upon
another strange adventure, to become familiar with another sort
of life.&nbsp; He determined that his duty (whatever that might
be) should not suffer by it.&nbsp; When they returned from their
holiday, all through the summer months, he would work like
anything: he would make that Balliol scholarship that had seemed
part of an indefinite future, as near a certainty as made no
matter.&nbsp; He would show them&mdash;in other words Aunt Laura
and Uncle Albert&mdash;what he could do.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If we are going on Monday I had better think of
packing,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Shall I need to take many
things, father?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t worry your father, Edwin,&rdquo; said
Aunt Laura.</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>Sunday came with its usual toll of dreariness.&nbsp; The
customary penance of the morning service was actually the least
trying part of it to Edwin.&nbsp; To begin with, the parish
church of Halesby was a structure of great beauty.&nbsp;
Originally an offshoot of the abbey that now stood in ruins above
the long string of slowly silting fishponds on the Stour, the
grace and ingenuity of successive ages of priestly architects had
embellished its original design with many beautiful features, and
the slender beauty of its spire, crowning a steep bank above the
degraded river, had imposed an atmosphere of dignity and rest
upon the rather squalid surroundings of this last of the
black-country towns.&nbsp; The music, even though it was not in
any way comparable with <a name="page168"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 168</span>that of St. Luke&rsquo;s, was good,
and the recent arrival of a young and distinguished rector from
Cambridge, whose voice and person would have qualified him for
success as a bishop, or an actor manager, had restored to the
building some of its popularity as a place of resort or of escape
from the shuttered Sunday streets.</p>
<p>At ten o&rsquo;clock the fine peal of bells filled the air
with an inspiriting music.&nbsp; Edwin remembered, hearing them,
the melancholy with which they had often inspired him on dank
evenings of autumn when the ringers were at practice.&nbsp; Very
different they sounded on this summer morning, for a gentle wind
was moving from the hills to westward, and chime eddied in a soft
air that was clearer than the usual, if only because it was
Sunday and the smoke of a thousand furnaces and chimney stacks no
longer filled it with suffocation.</p>
<p>At ten-fifteen precisely Aunt Laura appeared in the
dining-room, in a black silk dress smelling faintly of lavender:
a minute later, Uncle Albert, in a frock coat, coaxing the last
sweetness from his after-breakfast pipe.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby also
had exchanged the alpaca jacket in which he had been leisurely
examining his roses, for the same uniform.&nbsp; Uncle Albert,
Edwin noticed, had not yet removed the deep band of crape from
his top-hat.&nbsp; As usual, Aunt Laura appeared a little
flustered, the strain of conscious magnificence in her millinery
making it difficult for her to collect her thoughts.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Are you sure you have all the prayer-books,
Albert?&rdquo; she asked anxiously.</p>
<p><a name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 169</span>Uncle
Albert regretfully knocked out his pipe.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, my
dear,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t scatter those ashes all over the fireplace,
Albert.&nbsp; The least you can do is to keep the room tidy on
Sunday.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, my dear.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin, have you got your prayer-book?&nbsp; Why, boy,
you&rsquo;ve actually put on a grey striped tie.&nbsp; Run and
change it quickly.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what people will
think.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin, smarting, obeyed.&nbsp; When he returned the atmosphere
of impatience had increased.&nbsp; Aunt Laura was saying:
&ldquo;John, dear, are you sure that the clock is right?&nbsp;
I&rsquo;m afraid the bells have stopped.&nbsp; No . . . thank
goodness, there they are again.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s better,
Edwin.&nbsp; Now we really must start.&nbsp; You have the money
for the collection, Albert?&nbsp; Give it to me, or you&rsquo;ll
be sure to leave me without any.&nbsp; I do hope we shan&rsquo;t
be late.&nbsp; We should look so prominent. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>Why should they look so prominent?&nbsp; The question puzzled
Edwin all the way down through the quiet streets.&nbsp; But even
though this mystery exercised his mind he could not help
appreciating the curious atmosphere of the route through which
they progressed.&nbsp; At the corner of the street the first
familiar thing smote him: it was the odour of stale spirits and
beer that issued from between the closed doors of the
Bull&rsquo;s Head public-house, behind which it had been secreted
ever since an uproarious closing time the night before.&nbsp;
Then came the steep High Street, and from its gutters the
indescribable smell of vegetable refuse left there overnight from
<a name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 170</span>the
greengrocer&rsquo;s stalls.&nbsp; On an ordinary morning it would
not have been noticed, for the motion of wheeled traffic in the
highway and the sight of open shop windows would have distracted
the attention.&nbsp; On Sunday morning, however, it became the
most important thing in the road, and seemed to emphasise the
deadness of the day in contrast to the activities and
dissipations of Saturday night.&nbsp; It called attention to the
indubitable sordidness of the whole street: the poverty of its
grimy brick: the faded lettering above the shop windows: the
paint that cracked and peeled from the closed shutters.&nbsp; On
this morning Halesby was a squalid and degraded town.&nbsp; Even
Mr. Ingleby&rsquo;s shop in the High Street looked curiously
small and mean.&nbsp; Edwin disliked the sight of his own name
printed over it.&nbsp; It reminded him of Griffin&rsquo;s social
prejudices.</p>
<p>They entered a small door in the transept when the last bell
was tolling; and as they stepped into the full church Edwin
realised at last the reason of Aunt Laura&rsquo;s particular
anxieties.&nbsp; They were on show.&nbsp; This was the first
occasion, since the funeral, that the family had entered the
church, and, in accordance with an immemorial custom, the
congregation were now engaged in searching their faces and their
clothing for evidences of the grief that was proper to their
condition.</p>
<p>Kneeling in the conventional opening prayer, Edwin could see
through his folded fingers that the whole of the gathering was
engaged in a ghoulish scrutiny of their party.&nbsp; Now, for the
first time, he realised the full meaning of the horror with <a
name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 171</span>which his
grey tie had inspired Aunt Laura.&nbsp; He could even feel Aunt
Laura, who remained kneeling longer than usual, wallowing in the
emotion that her presence evoked.&nbsp; It was a rotten
business.&nbsp; If he could have dared to do so without causing
an immense scandal, Edwin would have got up and left the
church.&nbsp; He saw Aunt Laura glance at his father with a kind
of proprietary air, as if this exhibition were really her own
responsibility and the degree of interest that Mr.
Ingleby&rsquo;s appearance aroused were to her credit.</p>
<p>Edwin also looked at his father.&nbsp; He wondered if Mr.
Ingleby were in the least conscious of the spectacle to which he
was contributing: decided that he wasn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; He was
thankful for that.&nbsp; It became apparent to him that, if the
truth were known, his father was a creature of the most
astonishing simplicity: a simplicity that was almost
pathetic.&nbsp; He could see, he knew that the whole church must
see, that the man had suffered.&nbsp; The brutes. . . .&nbsp; He
was awfully sorry for his father.&nbsp; And he loved him for
it.&nbsp; The whole affair was shameful and degrading.&nbsp;
Never mind . . . in another twenty-four hours they would be clear
of all this sort of thing.&nbsp; It was something to be thankful
for.</p>
<p>&ldquo;<i>When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness
and doeth that which is lawful and right</i>. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp;
The rector began to intone.&nbsp; He spoke the words as though
his whole soul were behind them: his voice vibrated with a
practiced earnestness: and all the time Edwin could see his dark
eyes scrutinising the congregation in detail, congratulating
himself on the presence of his <a name="page172"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 172</span>supporters, speculating on the
absence of certain others.&nbsp; In the final cadence of the
sentence, a masterly modulation that would have made you swear
that his whole life was in his mission, his eyes swivelled into
the corner where the Ingleby party were sitting, and Edwin could
have bet his life that they lighted up with a kind of
satisfaction at the addition of this undoubted attraction to his
morning&rsquo;s entertainment.&nbsp; It even seemed to him that
the rector&rsquo;s glances almost imperceptibly indicated to his
wife, a little woman of a pathetic earnestness qualified for the
ultimate bishopric by a complete subjection to her
husband&rsquo;s personality, the fact that the Inglebys were on
view.</p>
<p>The rector, who had views on the advantages of scamping the
drier portions of the church service and stressing any sentence
that held possibilities of fruity sentiment, soon got into his
stride.&nbsp; He was in excellent voice that morning, and on two
occasions in the first lesson availed himself of an opportunity
of exploiting the emotional break&mdash;it was very nearly a
sob&mdash;that had done so much to establish his reputation in
his early days at Halesby.&nbsp; He was making hay while the sun
shone: for in the confirmation service such opportunities are
more limited.</p>
<p>Edwin enjoyed the psalms.&nbsp; There was even something
familiar and pleasant in the tunes of the Cathedral Psalter after
the exotic harmonies of St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He sang the tenor
part (when last he remembered singing them it had been alto) and
lost his sense of his surroundings in the beauty of the
words.&nbsp; In the middle of them, however, he <a
name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 173</span>became
conscious of his father singing too.&nbsp; He had never sat next
to his father in church before.&nbsp; His mother had always
separated them: and for this reason he had never before heard his
father sing.&nbsp; The result filled him with horror.&nbsp; Mr.
Ingleby had no idea of tune and was apparently unconscious of
this disability.&nbsp; Edwin reflected how great an interest
music had been in his mother&rsquo;s life: realised that from
this part of her his father must always have been isolated by
this natural barrier.&nbsp; It was strange. . . .&nbsp; He began
to wonder what they really had in common.&nbsp; He remembered
Griffin.&nbsp; No . . . not that. . . .</p>
<p>This speculation he did his best to stifle while the rector
galloped over the desert wastes of the Litany: but the kneeling
posture was rendered uncomfortable by the presence in front of
him of an old maiden lady who smelt of caraway seeds, a spice
that Edwin detested.&nbsp; A hymn followed.&nbsp; Luckily, this
time his father did not sing.&nbsp; Poor creature. . . .&nbsp;
Edwin was now so ashamed of his criticism that he almost wished
he would.&nbsp; And then they settled down to the sermon.</p>
<p>From the first Edwin had decided that he would not
listen.&nbsp; The simple austerity of the service at St.
Luke&rsquo;s, where the liturgy was allowed to unfold its
sonorous splendours for itself, had bred in him a distaste for
the rector&rsquo;s histrionics.&nbsp; So he did not hear them,
contenting himself with a detailed examination of such of the
congregation as were within his range.&nbsp; He saw them
classified in their social gradations from the pompous
distinction of Sir Joseph Hingston, the ironmaster, who, in spite
<a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 174</span>of his
baronetcy, wore a frock coat that did not differ greatly from
that of Mr. Ingleby, to their late maid, dressed in black, and
now conscious of the reflected glory that she had almost
sacrificed by leaving.&nbsp; And the thing that impressed him
most about this very various gathering was their shabbiness, and
the fact that nearly all of those whom he knew seemed so much
older than they had been when he last saw them.</p>
<p>Thinking of the light and elegance and cleanliness of St.
Luke&rsquo;s, it appeared to him that Halesby was indeed a muddy
and obscure backwater and that his own people, sitting in the pew
beside him, were in reality as much fitted to inhabit it as all
the rest of the shabby congregation.&nbsp; Even the Willises, his
mother&rsquo;s new friends, whom a wave of commercial prosperity
had carried forward into one of the front pews of the nave within
calculable distance of the glory of Sir Joseph Hingston himself,
would have looked very ordinary folk in the chapel at St.
Luke&rsquo;s.</p>
<p>He began to wonder if Griffin, and more latterly Aunt Laura,
had been right: whether, after all, his mother had made an
ambitious mistake in sending him to a public school when the
ancient foundation of the Halesby Grammar School had stood
waiting for the reception of him and his kind.&nbsp; There, in
the fifth row on the left of the nave, sat Mr. Kelly, the grammar
school&rsquo;s head-master: a swarthy Irishman with a sinister,
rather disappointed face.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t at all
Edwin&rsquo;s idea of a schoolmaster.&nbsp; Even old fat Leeming
looked more distinguished than that.&nbsp; And yet, if he were
good <a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
175</span>enough for the son of the opulent Walter Willis, he
must surely be good enough for the son of an ordinary Halesby
tradesman.</p>
<p>For the greater part of the sermon these problems of social
precedence engaged Edwin&rsquo;s puzzled mind.&nbsp; It had come
as something of a shock to him to find that his mother came of a
farming stock, even though the farmers had lived in a Norman
castle and had once been good enough to bear a lance in company
with the Lords Marchers.&nbsp; Examining the face of his father,
who appeared to be engrossed in the rector&rsquo;s rhetoric,
Edwin decided that his features were really far too distinguished
to belong naturally to a country chemist.&nbsp; Here, perhaps, in
spite of present circumstance, lay the explanation of his own
indubitable gentility.&nbsp; It was funny, he reflected, that he
had never heard anything from his mother about the origins of the
Inglebys: he had not even known from what part of the country
their stock had sprung, and this ignorance made the expedition on
which they were to start on the morrow more enthralling than
ever.&nbsp; It was quite possible that the discovery of some
illustrious ancestry might put him right with himself and justify
his claim to a birthright which at present seemed rather
shadowy.</p>
<p>Even if this failed, he decided, there remained Oxford.&nbsp;
A fellow of Balliol (his imagination travelled fast) would have a
right to hold up his head with any one in that
congregation&mdash;Sir Joseph Hingston not excepted&mdash;even
though the name of the fellow&rsquo;s father happened to be
printed on his toothbrush.&nbsp; It might even be for him to
restore <a name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
176</span>the prestige of the Ingleby name.&nbsp; &ldquo;But in
that case,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;it will be better for me to
buy my toothbrushes somewhere else. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; Even the
fact that Keats was a chemist did not modify this
determination.</p>
<p>The sermon ended, and during the collection a hymn was
sung.&nbsp; Half an hour before this, a gowned verger had stolen
on tiptoe to the Inglebys&rsquo; pew and whispered in Mr.
Ingleby&rsquo;s ear, depositing a wooden plate lined with velvet
under the seat as furtively as if it were something of which he
was ashamed.&nbsp; When the collection began Edwin&rsquo;s father
left his pew and began to carry the plate round the transept in
which they were seated.</p>
<p>Edwin, out of the corner of his eye, saw a glow of
satisfaction spread over the features of Aunt Laura.&nbsp; Now,
more than ever, the depth of the family&rsquo;s grief was to be
demonstrated in the eyes of all men.&nbsp; Edwin thought it was a
rotten shame to make his father collect on this Sunday of all
Sundays.&nbsp; The hymn was a short one, and for several minutes
after it was finished the clink of silver and the duller sound of
copper coins was heard in every corner of the echoing
church.&nbsp; Then the sides-men formed themselves into a double
file and moved singly up the aisle.&nbsp; First came Sir Joseph
Hingston, erect and podgy, with his smooth grey waistcoat in
front of him like the breast of a pouter pigeon.&nbsp; Mr.
Willis, of Mawne, with a humbler but not unambitious abdominal
development followed him.&nbsp; Edwin conceived a fanciful theory
that when Mr. Willis, in the course of time, should have grown as
wealthy as the baronet, there would be nothing <a
name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 177</span>to choose
between their profiles.&nbsp; A miserly but erect old gentleman
named Farr, who had once given Edwin a halfpenny, followed Mr.
Willis.&nbsp; Last but one came Edwin&rsquo;s father, with the
red-bearded undertaker an eager last.</p>
<p>On the whole, Edwin was satisfied (as was obviously Aunt
Laura) with Mr. Ingleby&rsquo;s appearance.&nbsp; He certainly
looked more like the father of a fellow of Balliol than Sir
Joseph Hingston.&nbsp; The money descended with a series of
opulent splashes into the brass salver that the rector held in
front of the chancel steps: the organist (in private life he was
a carpenter) meanwhile extemporising vaguely in the key of
C.&nbsp; The rector carried the salver arm-high to the altar, as
though he were exhibiting to the Almighty the personal fruits of
his oratory.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby stole quietly to his seat bathed
in the admiring glances of Aunt Laura.&nbsp; A short prayer . . .
&ldquo;<i>And now to God the father</i>. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; The
organist launched into his latest achievement: the Gavotte from
Mignon.</p>
<p>Outside the church the summer sunlight seemed more
exhilarating than ever.&nbsp; It was worth while, Edwin thought,
to have suffered the dreariness of the morning&rsquo;s service to
experience this curious feeling of lightness and relief.&nbsp; He
supposed that he was not alone in this sensation; for the crowd
that moved slowly from the churchyard gates with a kind of
gathering resilience was a happy crowd, and its voices that at
first were hushed soon became gay and irresponsible in spite of
the slight awkwardness that its Sunday clothes imposed on
it.&nbsp; No doubt they were anticipating their Sunday <a
name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 178</span>dinner,
for, as Edwin had noticed, the liturgy of the Church of England
has some value as an <i>ap&eacute;ritif</i>.&nbsp; Even Aunt
Laura was full of a subdued playfulness.&nbsp; &ldquo;What a
shame, Albert,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that the rector
didn&rsquo;t appoint you to collect to-day.&rdquo;&nbsp; She
patted his arm.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know, my dear. . . .&nbsp; It
wasn&rsquo;t my turn, you know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I know that,&rdquo; said Aunt Laura, &ldquo;but on
a day like this it would have been rather a delicate
compliment.&nbsp; I must speak to the rector about it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I should do that,&rdquo; said Uncle
Albert, with some alarm.</p>
<p>She laughed gently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be an old
juggins,&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>All down the High Street, in the moving crowd, Edwin could
smell the savour of roast beef and baked potatoes and cabbage
water wafted from innumerable kitchen windows. . .&nbsp; .</p>
<h4>IV</h4>
<p>In the afternoon they left Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert asleep
in two arm-chairs on opposite sides of the drawing-room
fireplace, and Edwin and his father went for a walk by the old
abbey fish-ponds.&nbsp; It was the first time for many years that
Edwin had been for a walk with his father, and the experience
promised a new and exciting intimacy to which he looked forward
with eagerness.</p>
<p>Even at this hour of the day the Sabbath atmosphere imposed
itself on the countryside.&nbsp; The road that they followed was
long and straight <a name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
179</span>with an open frontage above the reedy pools, and along
the cinder path at the side of it a great number of men were
lounging: a strange and foreign population of miners from the
Mawne pits, who only emerged from their cavernous occupation on
this day of the week, and other industrial workers from the great
steel rolling mills that lay in the Stour Valley to westward.</p>
<p>None of them took any notice of Edwin and his father.&nbsp; It
was even doubtful if they knew who they were; for these men
passed a curiously separate existence, and Mr. Ingleby would only
be familiar to their wives who did the family shopping on
Saturday nights while their masters were waiting for the football
results in their favourite pubs.&nbsp; On this day the
miner&rsquo;s passion for sport of all kinds asserted itself in
the presence of a great number of slim, jacketed whippets, each
warranted to beat anything on four legs for speed, slinking
tenderly at their masters&rsquo; heels.</p>
<p>It seemed strange to Edwin that his father should know none of
these men.&nbsp; It showed him again how remote and solitary the
man&rsquo;s life must have been in this ultimate corner of the
Black Country.&nbsp; &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t really belong
here,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;re foreigners. . .
.&rdquo;&nbsp; And the reflection pleased him, though he
remembered, with a tinge of regret, that by this denial he
dissociated himself from his old idol the poet of the Pastoral
Ballad.</p>
<p>Soon they left the cinder path behind, and plunged into a
green lane descending to a water-mill, turned by the tawny Stour,
as yet unsullied <a name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
180</span>by the refuse of factories.&nbsp; At a sandstone
bridge, whose parapet was deeply carved with the initials of
lovers long since dead or disillusioned, they paused, and, for
the first time, began to talk.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a funny thing, father,&rdquo; Edwin said,
&ldquo;but I don&rsquo;t even know where we are going to-morrow.
. . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr. Ingleby smiled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you, Edwin?&nbsp;
Well, the doctor said it would be best for me to go to my native
air; and it struck me as rather a good plan.&nbsp; I never went
there with your mother.&nbsp; It belonged to another life.&nbsp;
It is quite twenty years since I have been in
Somerset.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Somerset . . .?&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t even know it was
Somerset.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; Well, as I say, it was another
world.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Somerset. . . .&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s imagination began to play
with the word.&nbsp; He could remember very little: only a huge
green county sprawling on a map with rivers . . . yes, and
hills.&nbsp; A county stretched beside the Severn Sea.&nbsp; The
Severn again!&nbsp; A western county.&nbsp; Cheddar cheese.&nbsp;
Lorna Doone.&nbsp; Cider.&nbsp; Coleridge.&nbsp; Sedgemoor.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But what part of Somerset?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The eastern end.&rdquo;</p>
<p>That was a pity.&nbsp; The farther west the better.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose it&rsquo;s rather a flat county?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A great part of it.&nbsp; Did you ever hear of
Mendip?</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;&lsquo;The rugged miners poured to
war<br />
From Mendip&rsquo;s sunless caves.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page181"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
181</span>&ldquo;Yes, of course. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I came from a little village on the top of
Mendip.&nbsp; Twenty years ago it was decaying.&nbsp; Now I
expect there&rsquo;s next to nothing left of it.&nbsp; Twenty
years makes a lot of difference.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s made a lot of
difference to me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And what was the name of the village?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose you will ever have heard
it.&nbsp; It was called Highberrow.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Highberrow . . . no.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a jolly
name.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it ever struck me in that
light.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Highberrow . . . is it right in the hills?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . quite high up.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know how
many hundreds of feet.&nbsp; I wasn&rsquo;t interested in that
sort of thing then.&nbsp; It lies right under Axdown, the highest
point of the range.&nbsp; On a clear day you can see right over
the Bristol Channel into Wales.&nbsp; All the mountains
there.&nbsp; The Brecon Beacons.&nbsp; The Sugarloaf.&nbsp; The
Black Mountain.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The Black Mountain.&nbsp; But how strange.&nbsp; Why,
when you were a little boy you must have been nearly able to see
the place where mother lived.&nbsp; With a big sea between.&nbsp;
It must have been wonderful . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . I suppose it was.&nbsp; I scarcely
remember.&nbsp; Look right down in that deep pool.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s a trout.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A trout. . . .&nbsp; Where?&nbsp; Do show me . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The vision of Mendip faded instantly, and Edwin only saw the
rufous sands of the pool beneath the bridge, and in it a shadowy
elongated figure with its head to the slow stream and faintly
quivering fins.&nbsp; In Devonshire, Widdup had told him, the <a
name="page182"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 182</span>rivers
swarmed with trout: you could catch them all day long if you
wanted to, and Edwin, loyal to his own county&rsquo;s
excellences, had only been able to produce the silvery roach of
the millpool, shoaling round the water-lilies and the mythical
legend of carnivorous pike lurking in Mr. Willis&rsquo;s ponds in
the Holloway.&nbsp; He wished he had known that there were
veritable trout in the Stour.&nbsp; Now it was too late to do
anything; but when they returned from their holiday, he
determined that he would catch this shadowy creature, even if he
had to induce it to gorge a worm.&nbsp; Still, it was quite
possible that by the time he returned he would have captured many
trout.&nbsp; For Somerset lay next to Devon on the map.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Are there many trout in Mendip?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; There is only one river of any
size.&nbsp; The Ax, that runs underground and comes out of
Axcombe gorge, and there are practically no trout in the
Ax.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a dry country.&nbsp; Limestone.&nbsp; Very
barren too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>That didn&rsquo;t really matter.&nbsp; In a day or two Edwin
would be able to see for himself.&nbsp; On their way home they
spoke very little.&nbsp; His father seemed to find it difficult
to talk to him; and in a little while Edwin became conscious of
his own unending string of questions that led nowhere.</p>
<p>But all that night he dreamed of Mendip.&nbsp; A vast, barren,
mountain-country, his dreams pictured it; waterless, and
honeycombed with the dark caves from which Macaulay&rsquo;s
miners had poured to war; a deserted countryside full of broken
villages and bounded by steep cliffs against which the <a
name="page183"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 183</span>isolating
waters of the Severn Sea broke in a soundless tumult.&nbsp; And
there Ax, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to
man.&nbsp; A fluent gentleman with a noble brow and burning grey
eyes pointed out the course of the river to him.&nbsp; He was the
only other soul beside Edwin and his father, in all that desert
country, and Edwin introduced him to Mr. Ingleby as Mr.
Coleridge&mdash;rather diffidently, for he was not sure how the
poet would take it until he remembered and explained that Keats
was a chemist.&nbsp; There, on the high crown of Axdown, his
mother joined them.&nbsp; She, it seemed, was not afraid of Mr.
Coleridge.&nbsp; She took his arm so familiarly that Edwin
trembled for her; but the poet only smiled, while she pointed out
to him a mass of huge fantastic mountains ranged beyond the
gleaming sea.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to look over
there,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;You see that level ridge
dropping suddenly?&nbsp; Well, it&rsquo;s the third farm from the
end.&nbsp; Can you see the little bedroom window on the extreme
left? . . . quite a little window?&rdquo;&nbsp; Coleridge nodded,
and Mr. Ingleby, too, shielded his eyes with his hands and
looked.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was my last chance of showing it to
you,&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But there are practically no trout in the Alph,&rdquo;
said Coleridge.</p>
<h3><a name="page184"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
184</span>CHAPTER XI<br />
THE THRESHOLD</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> next evening, when Edwin and
his father reached Bristol, a steady drizzle had set in from the
west.&nbsp; They pushed their bicycles out of the station yard at
Temple Meads and rode between slippery tramway lines towards a
small hotel, a stone&rsquo;s-throw from Bristol Bridge, where Mr.
Ingleby had decided to put up for the night.&nbsp;
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no use trying to ride on to Wringford this
evening,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;for the wind will be against us
and it&rsquo;s collar work most of the way.&nbsp; I think we can
be comfortable here to-night.&nbsp; I used to know the landlord
of this place.&nbsp; He was a Mendip man.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The Mendip landlord, of course, had been dead for many years,
having made his descent by the route that is particularly easy
for licensed victuallers; but it happened that his daughter had
married the new tenant, and this woman, a comfortable creature
who spoke with the slight burr that appeared in Mr.
Ingleby&rsquo;s speech in times of anger or any other violent
emotion, welcomed them for her father&rsquo;s sake, and gave them
a bare but cleanly room on the second story.</p>
<p>The windows of this room looked down obliquely <a
name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 185</span>on to the
tidal basin of the Avon, thronged with small coasting tramps and
sailing ships: and Edwin was content to stay there watching them;
for he had never seen the traffic of a harbour before.&nbsp; It
was still too wet to think of going out onto the quays; but even
from a distance the misty spectacle, enveloped in veils of
driving rain, was romantic.</p>
<p>Edwin watched while a pair of busy tugboats pushed and pulled
and worried the hull of a wooden schooner in to mid-stream.&nbsp;
The water was high, and she was due to catch the falling tide to
Avonmouth.&nbsp; Whither was she bound?&nbsp; He did not
know.&nbsp; Perhaps her way lay down channel to pick up a cargo
of bricks from Bridgewater.&nbsp; Perhaps she was setting out at
that moment to essay the icy passage of the Horn.&nbsp; Perhaps,
in another four months, she would have doubled the Cape and lie
wallowing in the torpid seas about Zanzibar.&nbsp; It inspired
Edwin to think that he was standing at one of the gateways of the
world.&nbsp; From the site of the stone bridge above their
lodging, just four hundred years ago, the Venetian pilot, Cabot,
had cast loose in the selfsame way, and sailed westward with his
three sons, Lewes, Sebastyan, and Sancto, to the mainland of
unknown America.&nbsp; To-day, from the same wet quays, other
adventurous prows were stretching forth to the ends of the
earth.&nbsp; To China . . .&nbsp; To Africa.&nbsp; <i>Here begins
the sea that ends not till the world&rsquo;s end</i>.</p>
<p>With his accustomed curiosity as to the origins of his own
emotions Edwin was not long in deciding that his growing
eagerness to see the beauty and <a name="page186"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 186</span>strangeness of the world must have
sprung from the fact that his ancestors had lived upon the shores
of this great waterway.&nbsp; From Highberrow, his father had
told him, you could see the whole expanse of the Bristol
Channel.&nbsp; From Highberrow, perhaps, some forbear of his own
had watched the caravels of Cabot setting down channel with the
ebb tide.&nbsp; He was bewildered with the splendour of his
heritage.&nbsp; It was impossible to imagine that Sir Joseph
Hingston&rsquo;s family had the least share in such a romantic
past.</p>
<p>In the evening, after supper, the rain ceased, and Mr. Ingleby
proposed that they should go for a walk through the city.&nbsp;
He had known it well in his youth, and it seemed to fill him with
an almost childish delight to show Edwin the things that he
remembered.&nbsp; They passed through many narrow winding streets
where the overhanging houses of the merchant venturers stood, and
ancient churches had been huddled into corners by the growing
city.&nbsp; &ldquo;I remember every inch of it,&rdquo; said Mr.
Ingleby, with a happy laugh.&nbsp; Again they crossed the river,
and skirting a line of shipping warehouses, now cavernous and
deserted, they plunged into a sordid quarter full of
sailors&rsquo; drinking dens that smelled of rum, and marine
stores that smelled of tar.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Where are we going?&rdquo; Edwin asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll see in a minute,&rdquo; said Mr.
Ingleby.&nbsp; And, in a minute, Edwin saw.</p>
<p>They had emerged from the huddled houses into a large open
space, and in the midst of it rose a miracle of beauty such as
Edwin had never seen <a name="page187"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 187</span>before: a structure too delicate in
its airy loveliness to have been built of stone; so fragile in
its strength that it seemed impossible that the slender flying
buttresses should support it.&nbsp; The shadowy spire could be
seen dimly piercing a sky that had been washed to clearness by
the rain; but inside the church, for some reason unknown, the
lamps had been lighted, and the whole building glowed as though
it had been one immense lantern.&nbsp; There could not be another
miracle of this kind in the world, Edwin thought.</p>
<p>He remembered a white model of the Taj Mahal at Agra, that
stood beneath a dome of glass in Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s
drawing-room, an intricate carving of ivory with a huge dome and
many fretted minarets.&nbsp; Edwin remembered that the Taj Mahal
was supposed to be one of the wonders of the world; but he could
not believe that it was as beautiful as this: it was too
fanciful, too complicated in its detail, while this church, for
all its delicacy, was so amazingly simple in its design.</p>
<p>&ldquo;St. Mary Redcliffe,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I always thought it was a fine church, but I don&rsquo;t
think I ever saw it lit up like this before.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
paused, and they gazed at the church for a little while in
silence.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a funny thing,&rdquo; he said at
last, &ldquo;that a great master can sign a picture and the name
of a poet be remembered by his writings, while the greatest
artists of the Middle Ages, people who planned and built
wonderful things like this . . . and I suppose it is more
beautiful to-day than when it was first finished . . . should be
quite forgotten.&nbsp; A funny thing. . . .&nbsp; I should think
the <a name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 188</span>man
who made this church must have devoted his life to it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin glowed.&nbsp; It came as a delightful surprise to him
that his father should think of a thing like this.&nbsp; He was
ashamed to confess that he hadn&rsquo;t believed him capable of
it.&nbsp; It was the sort of thing that he would only have
expected of his mother.&nbsp; &ldquo;What a rotten little snob I
am,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; And though he happened to know,
quite by accident, from the Rowley Poems of Chatterton, that the
builder of Redcliffe was William Cannynge, round whose shadowy
reputation the work of the wondrous boy had grown, he could not
for the life of him reveal this piece of learning, since it would
have spoiled the originality of his father&rsquo;s
reflection.&nbsp; He only said, &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; but the train
of thought was so strong in him that he couldn&rsquo;t resist
asking Mr. Ingleby if he knew which was the muniment room.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The muniment room.&nbsp; Why?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Because it was in the muniment room that Chatterton
pretended that he found the Rowley manuscripts.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Chatterton?&nbsp; Ah, yes. . . .&nbsp; Thomas
Chatterton, the poet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; I never read
any of his poems, but I believe he starved in London and
committed suicide with Arsenious Oxide.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This gleam of professional interest tickled Edwin.&nbsp;
Keats: Beatings.&nbsp; Chatterton: Arsenious Oxide.</p>
<p>&ldquo;They found Arsenic on his lips.&nbsp; He made no <a
name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 189</span>mistake
about it.&nbsp; The lethal dose is a very small one.&nbsp; A
grain or so would have done it.&nbsp; Why, it&rsquo;s beginning
to rain again.&nbsp; We&rsquo;d better go.&nbsp; I hope it will
clear up by to-morrow.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They walked back to their lodging in a fine drizzle.&nbsp; On
the way Edwin&rsquo;s father took his arm.&nbsp; The action gave
Edwin a curious sensation.&nbsp; It suggested to him that his
father was lonely; that the natural instinct of love in the man
was making him eager for some sort of sympathy.&nbsp; It was
pitiable; for, in reality, they were strangers . . . there was no
getting away from the fact that they were strangers.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I must make it easy for him,&rdquo; Edwin
thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;However impossible it may seem, I must make
it easy.&nbsp; I must know him.&nbsp; I must love him.&nbsp;
Whatever it costs I must love him.&nbsp; It is ridiculous that I
should have to choose my words and even at times be a little
dishonest when it ought to be the most natural and easy thing in
the world to be myself with him.&nbsp; Of course it&rsquo;s
difficult at present; but later on, when we know each other
better, it will be all right.&rdquo;</p>
<p>When they returned to their lodging their clothes were wet,
and they went together into the kitchen of the defunct
publican&rsquo;s daughter.&nbsp; She gave them two of her
husband&rsquo;s coats to wear while their own were drying, and
for a long time they sat over the fire talking to her.&nbsp; It
was evident that though Mr. Ingleby was himself unknown to her,
she knew all about his family; for she asked him many questions
about various people in Highberrow and Wringford, whom they knew
in common.&nbsp; Mr. <a name="page190"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 190</span>Ingleby could tell her very little,
but the landlady was able to supply him with a lot of gossip from
the Mendip villages.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We heard that you were married,&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Mr. Ingleby.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
I&rsquo;ve just had a great blow.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve lost my
wife.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Dear, dear . . . that&rsquo;s very sad for
&rsquo;ee.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; I shall never get over it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And this is your eldest?&nbsp; My word, how time
flies!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; He&rsquo;s the only one.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;To look at him at first you wouldn&rsquo;t say there
was much of an Ingleby in him.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. He takes after his mother&rsquo;s
family.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And yet, on second thoughts, he&rsquo;s got a look of
your brother William&rsquo;s boy, Joe, about his eyes.&nbsp; Now
that&rsquo;s a strange thing.&nbsp; Talking of your brother
William, I haven&rsquo;t seen or heard of him for
years.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t seen him for twenty years myself.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;re cycling to Wringford to-morrow.&nbsp; We shall put up
with him.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, remember me to him.&nbsp; He was always a great
favourite of dad&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Will&rsquo;s a good fellow.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose he&rsquo;s in the same place?&nbsp; Mr.
Grisewood would be a fool to get rid of a man like that.&nbsp;
Good gardeners are scarce. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin could not understand this at all.&nbsp; It was obvious
that the woman must be making some mistake; for it was clearly
impossible that his Uncle William could be a gardener.&nbsp;
Still, his father offered no protest.</p>
<p><a name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
191</span>&ldquo;They tell me,&rdquo; she went on in her soft
West-country voice, &ldquo;that he&rsquo;ve apprenticed that boy
Joe to Hares, the shoeing-smith.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know that,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, of course, it may be all right,&rdquo; the
landlady went on, &ldquo;but there&rsquo;s always the future to
think on.&nbsp; My husband always says that the day of the horse
is over.&nbsp; What with steam and electricity, and these new
things that I see in the paper they are running from London to
Brighton!&nbsp; There&rsquo;s a gentleman near Bridgewater who
has one of these new motor-cars on the road.&nbsp; Of course, I
suppose they are fairly reliable on the flat.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin was thankful that the excitements of motor traction had
diverted her from the uncomfortable subject of his cousin&rsquo;s
profession. . . . if that were the right word to apply to the
calling of a shoeing-smith; but the matter still troubled and
bewildered him when they went upstairs to bed.&nbsp; It was one
that would not wait for explanation, and so he tackled his father
as soon as they were alone.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father, what was that woman talking about?&nbsp; What
did she mean when she said that Uncle Will was a
gardener?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What did she mean?&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby
laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why she meant what she said.&nbsp; He
<i>is</i> a gardener.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s never been anything
else.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But, father . . . it&rsquo;s impossible.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t impossible, boy.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the
truth.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t you know?&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t mother
ever tell you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think she ever spoke of
him.&nbsp; I . . . I can&rsquo;t understand it.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page192"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
192</span>&ldquo;You sound as if it had come as a shock to you,
Eddie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . yes . . . I suppose it did.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t imagine that you&rsquo;d find your
ancestry in Debrett, Eddie?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . but that&rsquo;s different.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s .
. . it&rsquo;s sort of bowled me over.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr. Ingleby laughed.&nbsp; It seemed that he was really amused
at Edwin&rsquo;s consternation.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose it&rsquo;s natural for a schoolboy to be a
bit snobbish,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . it isn&rsquo;t that.&nbsp; Honestly it
isn&rsquo;t, father.&nbsp; Only I&rsquo;d kind of taken us for
granted.&nbsp; I wish you&rsquo;d tell me all about it.&nbsp; You
see, I know absolutely nothing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a long story, Eddie.&nbsp; But of course
I&rsquo;ll tell you.&nbsp; Then you won&rsquo;t have any more of
these distressing surprises.&nbsp; Suppose you get into bed
first.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was a strange sight to Edwin to see his father kneel down
in his Jaeger nightgown and pray.&nbsp; The boy had never done
that since his second term at St. Luke&rsquo;s.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Lying in bed with his father&rsquo;s arm about him, Edwin
listened to a long and strange narration that overwhelmed him
with alternations of humiliation that made him ashamed, and of
romance that thrilled him.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby began at the
beginning.&nbsp; Their family had lived, it appeared, for years
without number, in the village of Highberrow on Mendip in a combe
beneath the great camp of Silbury, and the calling of all these
Inglebys had been that <a name="page193"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 193</span>of the other inhabitants of
Highberrow: they were miners, working for lead in the seams that
the Romans, and perhaps the Phoenicians before them, had
discovered in the mountain limestone.&nbsp; Even so early as in
the youth of Edwin&rsquo;s father the industry had been decaying,
for the traditional methods of the Mendip miner were
unscientific: he had been content to dig for himself a shallow
working from which he collected enough of the mineral that is
called calamine to keep him in pocket and in drink.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We Mendip folk,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby, &ldquo;are a
strange people, very different in our physique from the broad
Saxons of the turf-moors beneath us.&nbsp; I suppose there is a
good deal of Cornish blood in us.&nbsp; Wherever there are mines
there are Cornishmen; but I think there&rsquo;s another, older
strain: Iberian . . . Roman . . . Phoenician.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
know what it is; but I do know that we&rsquo;re somehow different
from all the rest of the Somerset people: a violent, savage sort
of folk.&nbsp; Did you ever hear of Hannah More?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin had been born too late in the
century.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, she was before my time too; but she made the
Mendip miners notorious by trying to convert them.&nbsp; I
don&rsquo;t suppose she succeeded.&nbsp; At any rate neither she
nor her influences would ever have converted your
grandfather.&nbsp; He was a wonderful man.&nbsp; Even though my
memory is mostly of the way in which I was afraid of him, I can
see what a wonderful man he was.&nbsp; And your Uncle Will would
tell you the same.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
194</span>&ldquo;He was a miner . . . ?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; A miner amongst other things.&nbsp; He
was a dowser too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A dowser?&nbsp; What is that?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know?&nbsp; The divining-rod.&nbsp; A
thing that all the scientists have been unable to explain.&nbsp;
In a dry country like Mendip the dowser is a most important
person; for neither man nor beast can live without water, and he
is the only person who can tell where a well should be
sunk.&nbsp; Your grandfather was a strange looking man with very
clear grey eyes under a black head of hair and heavy bristling
brows.&nbsp; Even when he grew very old his hair and his beard
were black.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I was the youngest of the family.&nbsp; All the others,
except your Uncle Will, have died&mdash;and for some reason or
other I was not brought up in my father&rsquo;s cottage but in
that of my grandmother, a tiny, tumbledown affair lying in the
valley under Silbury.&nbsp; We were very humble people,
Eddie.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t suppose anywhere in the world I could
have passed a quieter childhood.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a long way off
now.&nbsp; One only remembers curious, unimportant things.</p>
<p>&ldquo;When I was four years old I was sent to the village
school.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think it exists any longer.&nbsp; You
see the population of Highberrow disappeared naturally with the
abandonment of the mining.&nbsp; Even in my childhood, as I told
you, the workings were running pretty thin.&nbsp; The miners were
beginning to find that they couldn&rsquo;t pick up much of a
living on their own calamine claims; and so they drifted back
gradually&mdash;your grandfather along with them&mdash;to the
oldest workings of all: the mines <a name="page195"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 195</span>that the Romans had made two
thousand years ago.&nbsp; You may be certain that the Romans,
with their thoroughness, hadn&rsquo;t left much behind.&nbsp;
Why, in their days, Mendip must have been a great place, with a
harbour of its own on the mouth of the Ax, and great roads
radiating everywhere: to Cirencester, Exeter, and Bath.&nbsp;
Even in the Middle Ages there was a population of fifty thousand
souls on Mendip.&nbsp; Now I don&rsquo;t suppose there are a
thousand in all the mining villages put together.</p>
<p>&ldquo;So my father went to work in the Roman mines at Cold
Harbour; for a new company had been started that was reclaiming
the sublimated lead that had been left in the Romans&rsquo;
flues.&nbsp; And there, as a little boy, I used to carry him his
dinner, through the heather, over the side of Axdown.&nbsp;
You&rsquo;ll see Axdown for yourself to-morrow: a great bow of a
hill.&nbsp; There used to be a pair of ravens that built
there.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve seen them rising in great wide
circles.&nbsp; They seemed very big to me.&nbsp; I was almost
frightened of them; and when I found the skeleton of a sheep one
day on the top of Axdown under the barrows, I made sure that the
ravens had killed it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose I was a pretty intelligent boy.&nbsp; I know
that the men at the workings by Cold Harbour, where I took
father&rsquo;s dinner, used to joke with me a good deal.&nbsp;
They used to like the way in which I hit back at them with my
tongue.&nbsp; Father didn&rsquo;t take any notice of it.&nbsp; He
was always the same dark, silent man, with very few words, and no
feelings, as you&rsquo;d imagine, except the violent passions
into which he would burst out when he&rsquo;d <a
name="page196"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 196</span>been
drinking.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t often drink, though.&nbsp; He was
a good man, Eddie.&nbsp; A good man. . . .&nbsp; And so I myself
came to work in the mines.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t believe it, you know, father.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s so unlike you . . . and mother.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course it was long before I knew your mother.&nbsp;
And it does seem funny, looking back on it.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m very
glad now, mind you, that I had the experience.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a
fine thing for any man at some time of his life to have had to
face the necessity of earning his living by the use of his
hands.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll never know what that means, I
suppose.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a pity. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, while I was working at Cold Harbour, my mother
died.&nbsp; I forgot to tell you that Grannie had died some years
before, and her cottage under Silbury had been left
empty&mdash;there was no one living in Highberrow to fill
it&mdash;and was already tumbling into ruins.&nbsp; I
haven&rsquo;t told you about your grandmother&mdash;my
mother.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know that I can tell you much.&nbsp;
I think she was in some ways a little hard.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
know. . . .&nbsp; I thought the world of her, and perhaps it was
my father&rsquo;s difficult nature that made her seem harder than
she was.&nbsp; Besides, being brought up with Grannie, I was a
sort of stranger to her.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know how father came
across her.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no doubt about she was a superior
woman.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;re still feeling a little sore about
your social origin, Eddie, you can console yourself with the fact
that she had a cousin who was a solicitor&mdash;or was it a
solicitor&rsquo;s clerk?&mdash;somewhere near London.&nbsp; At
any rate, poor soul, she died.&nbsp; She was ill for several
months, and I, <a name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
197</span>being the youngest, had to stay at home and nurse
her.&nbsp; It was in that way that I met Dr. Marshall. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you about him in a moment; but thinking
of the days of my mother&rsquo;s death puts me in mind of a
strange thing that happened at the time that will show you what
sort of man your grandfather was.&nbsp; Early on in the family
there had been a girl that died to whom my mother was
particularly devoted; and a little before the end&mdash;she knew
that it couldn&rsquo;t be many weeks&mdash;mother told my father
that she would like to be buried in a particular corner of the
churchyard near to this daughter of theirs.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father never spoke of it.&nbsp; He rarely spoke of
anything.&nbsp; But I suppose he took it in all the same.&nbsp;
Anyway, when she was dead, the old sexton came up to see father
about the grave, and he told him where she had said she wanted to
lie.&nbsp; The next night the sexton came up again.&nbsp; I can
see him now&mdash;a funny, old-fashioned little man with red
whiskers&mdash;and said it couldn&rsquo;t be done, because the
soil was so shallow at that particular point.&nbsp; I can see my
father now.&nbsp; He hadn&rsquo;t been drinking; but be flew
suddenly into such a black rage that the poor little gravedigger
(Satell was his name) ran out frightened for his life.&nbsp; I
think I was pretty frightened too, for father went out after him
carrying one of the great iron bars that the miners use for
drilling.&nbsp; I thought for a moment that the loss of mother
had turned his head.&nbsp; It hadn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; He just went
there and then, in the night, to the churchyard, and worked away
with his mining tools at <a name="page198"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 198</span>the rock that poor old Satell said
he couldn&rsquo;t dig.&nbsp; He bored his holes and he blasted
the rock with the black powder they used in those days, and he
dug my mother&rsquo;s grave in the place where she wanted
it.&nbsp; You see what a strange man he was!&nbsp; You may say
what you like, Eddie&mdash;I&rsquo;ve often thought of it
since&mdash;but that was a grandfather worth having.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . he was worth having,&rdquo; Edwin agreed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I was speaking of Dr. Marshall,&rdquo; his father
continued.&nbsp; &ldquo;He was the beginning of my new
life.&nbsp; But for the accident of my mother&rsquo;s illness I
don&rsquo;t suppose I should ever have met him.&nbsp; During the
last month he came fairly often: not that he could do much good
for her, poor thing, but because she was&mdash;it&rsquo;s a
wretched phrase&mdash;a superior woman, and because no doubt she
liked to talk to him, and he knew it.&nbsp; Practice in
Highberrow can&rsquo;t have been very profitable; though
I&rsquo;m sure that my father paid him every penny that he owed
him.&nbsp; He was that kind of man.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And when she died, Dr. Marshall took a fancy to
me.&nbsp; I could tell you a good deal about him if it were worth
while.&nbsp; He was a physician of the old school, learned in
experience rather than in books.&nbsp; It is probable that he
made mistakes; but I&rsquo;m equally certain that he learned by
them.&nbsp; The week after mother died he asked your grandfather
if he could have me to wash bottles and make myself generally
useful in his surgery at Axcombe.&nbsp; And my father
didn&rsquo;t refuse.&nbsp; It would have been unlike him if he
had done so; for I think his idea in life was to let every
individual work out his own <a name="page199"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 199</span>salvation for himself.&nbsp; It was
a good plan, for it made the responsibility definite. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;So I went to Axcombe to Dr. Marshall&rsquo;s
house.&nbsp; There was plenty of hard work in it.&nbsp; I think a
country doctor earns a poor living more honestly than most
men.&nbsp; I had to share the doctor&rsquo;s work&mdash;getting
up early in the morning (that was no hardship to a miner&rsquo;s
son)&mdash;to clean up the surgery (and I can tell you it took
some cleaning), to turn out of bed in the middle of the night to
harness the pony if the message that called him took him over
roads, or to saddle the cob if the hill tracks were too rough for
wheels.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Sometimes I had long night journeys on my own; for the
doctor, in spite of his practical head for dealing with disease,
was curiously unmethodical and would often leave behind the
particular instrument that he wanted most, and in the middle of
the night a boy of my own age from one of the hill villages would
come battering at the door as though his life depended on
it.&nbsp; And they&rsquo;d go on battering, you know, as if they
thought that the sound of it would make me get up more
quickly.&nbsp; Perhaps it did: at any rate I can remember
scrambling downstairs in the dark and reading the notes that the
doctor sent by candlelight: and then I would turn out, half
asleep, and walk over the hills above Axcombe when the gorge was
swimming to the brim with fine milky mist and a single step, if
one were silly enough to go dreaming, would have sent one
spinning down, a sheer four hundred feet like the hunting king in
the legend.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m <a name="page200"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 200</span>forgetting that you don&rsquo;t know
the legend and have never seen the gorge. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;Still, I shall never forget those strange
night-journeys.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think I had begun to
appreciate Mendip until I walked the hills at night.&nbsp; I
found that I could think so clearly, and I was just beginning,
you see, to have so much to think about.&nbsp; Books. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;At Highberrow, in my father&rsquo;s cottage, there were
only two books altogether: the Bible, and a tract by Miss Hannah
More called &lsquo;The Religion of the Fashionable
World.&rsquo;&nbsp; But Dr. Marshall&rsquo;s house at Axcombe was
crammed with books: rubbish, most of them, I expect; but printed
books; and whenever I was not working I was reading.&nbsp; It was
the pure excitement of attaining knowledge of any kind that made
me read; and of course I wasted a great deal of valuable time in
ways that were unprofitable.&nbsp; The doctor did not help me
much; he was far too busy to worry much about my education; but I
know that he approved of my eagerness, and liked to see me
reading.&nbsp; I used to sleep in the loft above the stable in
those days, and I know that my candles made him rather nervous of
fire.&nbsp; But he did help me, in his own way.&nbsp; He put me
on to a little Latin, with the strictly practical idea of making
it more easy for me to dispense the prescriptions that he wrote
in the old manner without abbreviations; and he also introduced
me to another book that I don&rsquo;t suppose you&rsquo;ve ever
heard of: called <i>Religio Medici</i> by Sir Thomas
Browne.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p><a name="page201"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
201</span>&ldquo;Do you?&nbsp; I supposed it was merely a medical
curiosity.&nbsp; Latin, he thought, would be useful to me in
other ways.&nbsp; You see, like many of the old medical
practitioners that spent their lives in the lanes, he was very
interested in botany: not scientific botany&mdash;just the
identification and botanical names of the flowers that blossomed
year by year in the hedges.&nbsp; In the early summer he would
drive home with the bottom of the dogcart tangled with flowers
that he had picked while he walked the pony up some hill; and he
would pitch them over to me and tell me to learn the names of
them.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t very difficult; for in the surgery
shelves there was a fine set of Ann Pratt with excellent
illustrations.&nbsp; And sometimes he would come home with a
small insect of some kind in a pillbox and arrange it under the
microscope on the table under the dispensary window; and
he&rsquo;d say, &lsquo;Wonderful . . . wonderful!&rsquo; not
because he&rsquo;d made any biological observations, but just
because it revealed a lot of unsuspected detail.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was a favourite trick of his to show his patients a
sample of their own blood corpuscles under the microscope
too.&nbsp; &lsquo;There they are,&rsquo; he&rsquo;d say,
&lsquo;like a pile of golden guineas, and if you had a millionth
part as many guineas as you have of these in your body,
you&rsquo;d be the richest man in England.&rsquo;&nbsp; This sort
of thing used to impress his patient&rsquo;s tremendously.&nbsp;
And he knew it.&nbsp; I suppose it gave them confidence in him;
though he didn&rsquo;t need any superstitious aids of this
kind.&nbsp; The whole history of his life as a doctor should have
been enough to make them trust him.&nbsp; Still, I suppose it was
the <a name="page202"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 202</span>old
tradition of the medicine man who dealt in curious magic.&nbsp;
His common sense and the craftsmanship that he had won by
experience were his real guarantees.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He was extraordinarily practical in everything except
money matters.&nbsp; In these, even I could have taught him a
good deal.&nbsp; It was a pathetic sight to see him making out
his bills.&nbsp; He always put off the evil day, with the result
that they were only sent out about once in three years.&nbsp; I
don&rsquo;t suppose doctors can afford to be like that in these
days. . . .&nbsp; But then, what was the use of money to
him?&nbsp; All his tastes were simple and inexpensive.&nbsp; He
was unmarried.&nbsp; During all the years that I was with him he
never took a holiday, unless it were to go to Taunton and buy a
new horse.&nbsp; I do not think there are many of his kind
left.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You can see, though, what a huge difference he made to
my life.&nbsp; If I hadn&rsquo;t gone to live with him at
Axcombe, I might still have been a miner&mdash;if there
<i>are</i> any miners left on Mendip&mdash;or perhaps a gardener
like your Uncle Will.&nbsp; And where would you have been,
Eddie?&nbsp; He was careful, and I think very wisely careful, not
to turn my head.&nbsp; &lsquo;Ambition,&rsquo; he would say to
me, &lsquo;is all very well in moderation.&nbsp; But don&rsquo;t
be too ambitious, John.&nbsp; Happiness is more important in this
life than success, and very few men have a full share of
both.&nbsp; Still, you&rsquo;re a sharp lad, and there&rsquo;s no
reason why you shouldn&rsquo;t get on in the world and be happy
too if you don&rsquo;t expect too much.&rsquo;&nbsp; As time went
on we began to talk a little about my future.&nbsp;
&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t be in too much of a hurry,&rsquo; he used to
say.&nbsp; &lsquo;You&rsquo;re <a name="page203"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 203</span>young, and there&rsquo;s plenty of
time ahead of you.&rsquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course it would be ridiculous to suppose that I
hadn&rsquo;t ambitions.&nbsp; Naturally enough, I had determined
to be a doctor like my master.&nbsp; The small things that I did
for him convinced me that it would be an easy matter.&nbsp; When
he was out in the country people who had walked in from remote
villages would ask me to prescribe for them, and sometimes, with
an immense sense of importance, I would do so.&nbsp; It
wasn&rsquo;t difficult.&nbsp; He ran his practice, to all intents
and purposes, on three stock mixtures and half a dozen
pills.&nbsp; But I shall never forget one evening when one of my
father&rsquo;s fellow workmen from Highberrow came in with a
raging toothache, and I, being anxious to show off, volunteered
to take the tooth out for him.&nbsp; I remember I showed him a
microscopic sample of his own blood as a preliminary.&nbsp; But
when I came to take out the tooth I made a mess of it.&nbsp; He
was a tremendous big fellow with jaws like steel, and though I
pulled hard enough to move him in the chair, I only succeeded in
breaking the tooth and making the pain worse.&nbsp; I got my head
well smacked for my trouble, and decided that whatever else I
were to be, I wouldn&rsquo;t risk dentistry as a career.</p>
<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;There&rsquo;s no reason,&rsquo; the doctor would
say, &lsquo;why you shouldn&rsquo;t make a good chemist in
time.&rsquo;&nbsp; Of course that seemed a very small thing to
me; and yet . . . think what I might have been!&nbsp; I was
sixteen, just your own age, Eddie, when he died.&nbsp; Of course
he killed himself, as many doctors do, with work.&nbsp; People
make a great fuss when a missionary in some outlandish country
lays down his life, <a name="page204"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 204</span>as they call it, for his
flock.&nbsp; But country doctors are doing that every month in
the year all over England&mdash;I don&rsquo;t mean the social
successes in Harley Street&mdash;and from what I&rsquo;ve seen of
it their widows can&rsquo;t count on much gratitude.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was a hard winter . . . the year eighteen
sixty-seven . . . and there happened to be a great deal of
illness in the hills.&nbsp; We were worked pretty hard, both of
us, but the doctor had no chance of taking a rest: he was the
only medical man living within ten miles: and in the end he, too,
caught a heavy cold, and had to go on working through it.&nbsp;
In the end he had to give up.&nbsp; It was pneumonia; and the
last thing he did was to write a letter asking a consultant in
Bristol to come down and see him.&nbsp; He was a kindly man, but
I suppose Dr. Marshall was to him only a case.&nbsp; The old
fellow refused to have any one but me to nurse him.&nbsp;
&lsquo;John and I understand each other,&rsquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was a terrible battle: to see a great strong man
like that fighting for breath.&nbsp; They didn&rsquo;t give
oxygen in those days.&nbsp; It went on for four days and on the
fifth, or rather in the middle of the night&mdash;he called to me
faintly, and I found him lying on his back breathing more softly,
very pale and drenched with sweat.&nbsp; &lsquo;This is the
crisis . . . fifth day . . .&rsquo; he said.&nbsp; He told me to
cover him with all the blankets I could find, to give him some
brandy, and to take his temperature.&nbsp; It was a funny job for
a boy.&nbsp; I had never seen a great man suddenly go weak like
that.&nbsp; His temperature had fallen below normal.&nbsp;
&lsquo;Ah . . .&rsquo; he said.&nbsp; &lsquo;I thought so. . .
.&nbsp; Brandy. . .&rsquo;</p>
<p><a name="page205"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
205</span>&ldquo;But he couldn&rsquo;t take it himself.&nbsp;
&lsquo;You&rsquo;ve got to be the doctor now, John,&rsquo; he
said.&nbsp; There wasn&rsquo;t any more fight left in him.&nbsp;
All that day he hardly spoke at all, but at night he called me to
his side and told me to make a bonfire of all the books and the
bills we&rsquo;d been making out the week before.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
shan&rsquo;t want any more money,&rsquo; he said.&nbsp;
&lsquo;But you will . . . a little. . . .&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve seen
to that.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a good lad.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t aim too
high.&nbsp; And don&rsquo;t think too much about money.&nbsp;
Money is the root of all evil. . .&rsquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I scarcely took any notice of what he said.&nbsp; I
only knew that I was going to lose the only friend I had.&nbsp;
He died early next morning, and I was just like a dog: I
couldn&rsquo;t bring myself to leave him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I stayed in the house . . . you see, it seemed as if I
couldn&rsquo;t go anywhere else, until after the funeral.&nbsp;
Then the lawyers told me that he had left me a hundred and fifty
pounds in his will.&nbsp; It seemed to me a tremendous lot of
money.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t realise what a little way it would
go; but it seemed to make my dreams possible.&nbsp; I would be a
doctor, like him . . . as near like him as it was possible to
be.&nbsp; That was my first idea; but then I remembered what he
had told me, and decided that it would be better to become a
chemist first.&nbsp; In that way I could make sure of my
living.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I left Axcombe.&nbsp; It was necessary that I should go
to some big city to study and more or less by accident I chose
North Bromwich.&nbsp; It was a tremendous change for me who had
lived all my life in the country: I was very lonely and awkward
at first.&nbsp; But that wasn&rsquo;t the worse of it.&nbsp; I
began to <a name="page206"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
206</span>discover my own ignorance: to see that, as a matter of
fact, I knew nothing but the homely routine of the doctor&rsquo;s
surgery, the names of a few drugs and their doses, a smattering
of Latin, and the botany of the local wild flowers.&nbsp; I knew
nothing of life.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t even pull out a tooth
without breaking it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It came as an awful shock to me.&nbsp; I began to see
the reasons of the doctor&rsquo;s cautious advice.&nbsp; He
realised that I had a great deal of the dreamer in me.&nbsp; I
rather think that you have it too, Eddie.&nbsp; No doubt it comes
to both of us from those strange, dark, mining-people.&nbsp; I
saw that I should have to pull myself together and drive myself
hard if my ambitions were not to end in disaster.&nbsp; I had to
pinch and scrape.&nbsp; I had to set out and learn the most
elementary things from the beginning.&nbsp; I had thought that my
fortune was made.&nbsp; Perhaps it was a wise thing that the
doctor had left me no more money.&nbsp; It taught me that nobody
could make my fortune but myself.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was a hard fight, I can tell you: for while I was
building my schemes for the future I had to provide for the
present.&nbsp; You see I had soon realised that it wouldn&rsquo;t
do to spend any of my little capital.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t tell
you now how I lived.&nbsp; It would be too long a story.&nbsp;
But I can assure you that I had a hard time in North Bromwich,
getting all my dreams knocked out of me one by one,
thirsting&mdash;literally thirsting for clean air and country
ways.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It sounds rather like a tract, but it&rsquo;s quite
true to say that town life has a lot of temptations too for a
country boy.&nbsp; I could see everywhere the <a
name="page207"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 207</span>power of
money and the luxuries that money could purchase without
realising the work that money represents, and all this was very
disconcerting to a boy of my temperament with more than a hundred
pounds in the bank.&nbsp; Still, as it happened, nothing went
wrong.&nbsp; In the day-time I worked with my hands.&nbsp; At
night I tried to educate myself, very slowly, very
hardly&mdash;for in those days poor people had not the
opportunities of education that are open to them in these.&nbsp;
I sometimes wonder if people to-day realise the difference.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I worked on quietly for years, never wasting a penny or
an hour.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t take it for virtue in me.&nbsp; It
wasn&rsquo;t that.&nbsp; It was just that the old doctor&rsquo;s
influence on me had been sound and I couldn&rsquo;t afford to do
otherwise.&nbsp; As a matter of fact I suppose there must have
been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men in that city in
exactly the same situation.&nbsp; Only I didn&rsquo;t know one of
them.&nbsp; I was lonely . . . absolutely solitary.&nbsp; I never
heard an accent of my own country&rsquo;s speech.&nbsp; I never
saw a patch of real green or a sky that hadn&rsquo;t smoke in
it.&nbsp; I made my friends in books: not the kind of books that
you&rsquo;ve been brought up on&mdash;I hadn&rsquo;t time for
poetry or frills of that kind: books of solid facts: knowledge
for the sake of knowledge.&nbsp; You see all the things that you
would take for granted, having known them as a birthright, so to
speak, were new and unknown to me.&nbsp; One book was a sort of
gospel to me.&nbsp; It was called <i>Self Help</i>, written by a
man named Smiles.</p>
<p>&ldquo;So when you hear of a self-made man it may mot mean
much; but a self-educated man, I can <a name="page208"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 208</span>tell you, means a good deal.&nbsp;
In the end, of course, I gradually came within sight of my
ambition.&nbsp; From a van-driver to a firm of wholesale chemists
I became an assistant, an apprentice in their retail house.&nbsp;
I took my examinations.&nbsp; I qualified as a dispensing
chemist.&nbsp; Later, by a curious piece of chance, I met your
mother.&nbsp; We became friends.&nbsp; She was the first person
in whom I had confided since I left Mendip.&nbsp; She seemed to
understand.&nbsp; It was a strange thing for me, after all those
years, to be able to talk about myself.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t tell
you what a wonderful relief it was.&nbsp; And then we found that
we loved one another and married.&nbsp; We went out into the
country near North Bromwich to find a village to make a home in,
and we came across Halesby.&nbsp; The place was very different
from what it is now twenty years ago.&nbsp; We were very
happy.&nbsp; No. . . .&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t talk about it.&nbsp;
But you can see now, that behind your life there were quite a lot
of complicated things that don&rsquo;t appear on the
surface.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s really better that you should know
them.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It makes me love you, father,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Because, of course, it is all so wonderful.&nbsp; I expect
if I had been you I should still have been in Axcombe.&nbsp; I
don&rsquo;t think I could have done what you did.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You might have done a great deal more.&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s no knowing what&rsquo;s in us until we are
tried.&nbsp; That sounds like Samuel Smiles; but it&rsquo;s quite
true.&nbsp; At any rate it&rsquo;s time we were asleep,
boy.&nbsp; I think the rain has stopped.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They said good-night, and Edwin kissed his <a
name="page209"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 209</span>father; but
for several hours later he heard the clocks of Bristol
chiming.&nbsp; In a little time he knew by the quiet breathing of
his father that he was asleep, and hearing this sound and
thinking of the grey man who lay beside him, he was overwhelmed
with an emotion in which pity and passionate devotion were
curiously mingled.&nbsp; He felt strangely protective, as though
it were the man who had fought such a hard battle who was weak,
and he, who had never endured anything, were the stronger.</p>
<p>He conceived it a kind of sacred duty to see that for all the
rest of his life his father should never suffer any pain or even
discomfort from which he could protect him.&nbsp; It was a more
vivid version of the feeling that had bowled him over once
before, when they had knelt together after his mother&rsquo;s
death.&nbsp; It was a wholly illogical sentiment&mdash;and yet,
when he came to think it over, he came to the conclusion that
something of the same kind must have underlain his mother&rsquo;s
tenderness towards his father.&nbsp; He was eager to persuade
himself that there was no compassion in it: only love and
admiration.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He is the most wonderful man in the world,&rdquo; he
thought, &ldquo;and I never knew it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Remorse
overcame him when he remembered that once, at St. Luke&rsquo;s,
he had been ashamed of Mr. Ingleby&rsquo;s calling.&nbsp; There
couldn&rsquo;t be another chap in the school who had a father
that was a patch on him.&nbsp; He remembered a more recent cause
for shame: the shiver of discomfort that the landlady&rsquo;s
revelation of his Uncle Will&rsquo;s occupation had given
him.&nbsp; He had thought that a gardener uncle would be an <a
name="page210"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
210</span>uncomfortable skeleton in the cupboard of a Fellow of
Balliol.&nbsp; Instead of that he now knew that he should have
been proud of it: he should have been proud of anything in the
world that did honour to his father.&nbsp; Everything that he
was, every shred of culture that he possessed had its origin in
the devotion and the sufferings of this wonderful man, and,
whatever happened, he determined that he would be worthy of
them.</p>
<p>The cathedral clock slowly chimed two.&nbsp; Edwin turned over
and fell asleep in a mood of strange, exalted happiness.</p>
<h3><a name="page211"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
211</span>CHAPTER XII<br />
THE HILLS</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Under</span> a sky of rain-washed blue
they had left Bristol, and after an hour of hard riding came to
an easy upland plateau where the road lay white and clear before
them, so clean between its wide margins of rough turf, that it
seemed to have some affinity with the sky.&nbsp; On their way
they had met few people, but the carters with whom they had
exchanged a morning greeting were all smiling and friendly, very
different from the surly colliers that slouched about the
cinder-paths at Halesby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good-maarnin&rsquo;,&rdquo; they said, and the very
dialect was friendly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re over the worst of the road,&rdquo; said Mr.
Ingleby.&nbsp; &ldquo;In a minute or two we shall see the
hills.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply
through the scattered buildings of a hamlet.&nbsp; An inn, with a
wide space for carts to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at
the right-hand side of the highway, and in front of the
travellers lay the mass of Mendip: the black bow of Axdown with
its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of Callow, and a bold seaward
spur, so lost in watery vapours that it might well have claimed
its ancient continuity with the islands that swam beyond in the
grey sea.&nbsp; <a name="page212"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
212</span>In the light of his new enthusiasm Edwin found it more
impressive than any scene that he remembered: more inspiring,
though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy plain of the
Severn&rsquo;s upper waters that he had seen so many times from
Uffdown.&nbsp; For these hills were very mountains, and mightier
in that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in
water within the memory of man.&nbsp; And, more than all this . .
. far more . . . they were the home of his fathers.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now that we are in Somerset we should drink the wine of
the country.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They pushed their bicycles on to the platform before the inn
door, and Mr. Ingleby called for cider, a pale, dry liquid with a
faint acridity very different from the sugary stuff that comes to
the cities in bottles from Devonshire.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s good cider,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby,
tasting.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where does it come from?&rdquo; he asked
the landlord, who brought it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It do be a tidy drop o&rsquo; zidur,&rdquo; said the
man.&nbsp; &ldquo;It do come from Mr. Atwell&rsquo;s varm into
Burrowdown.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;In&rdquo; with the accusative, thought Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Is old Aaron Atwell still living?&rdquo; asked his
father.</p>
<p>The landlord laughed.&nbsp; The gentleman must have been away
a long time from these parts.&nbsp; Mr. Atwell had been dead
these fifteen years.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The cider&rsquo;s the same,&rdquo; said Mr.
Ingleby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis a marvellous archard, sure
&rsquo;nuff,&rdquo; said the landlord.&nbsp; &ldquo;And last year
was a wunnerful year for apples.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis all
accardin&rsquo; . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page213"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 213</span>They
left him, and coasted gently down the hill.&nbsp; Descending, it
seemed to Edwin that the dome of Axdown lost some of its
mountainous quality; and by the time that they had reached the
level of the plain in which Wringford lay, he was hardly
conscious of its imminence more than as a reminder that this
soft, green country was not wholly devoted to quietude and sleep,
but that a cool and lively air must always be rolling from the
hidden slopes.&nbsp; They came to a green, bordered by elms in
heavy leaf, on which a solitary donkey and a flock of geese were
grazing.&nbsp; Now the road was dead level and the hedges rich
with fragile dog-rose petals and thickets of hemp-agrimony that
were not yet in flower.&nbsp; Superficially, the road might have
been part of Warwickshire; but there was nothing of the Midlands
in the air that moved above it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Take the next turn to the right,&rdquo; shouted Mr.
Ingleby to Edwin, riding ahead.</p>
<p>In the middle of a village drenched with the perfume of roses,
Edwin turned to the right down a narrow lane.&nbsp; By this time
his father had reached his level.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here we
are,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; They dismounted.</p>
<p>It was a small cottage with a green-painted porch and
carefully tended garden in front of it.&nbsp; The place was built
of the stone of the country and washed with the pinkish lime of
the hills.&nbsp; In the garden roses and bright annuals were
blooming, and a huge acacia, hung with ivory blossom, shadowed
the garden gate.&nbsp; On the gate itself Edwin read a crudely
painted name: Geranium <a name="page214"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 214</span>Cottage.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby
smiled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your Uncle Will is very fond of
geraniums.&rdquo;&nbsp; They opened the gate and pushed in their
bicycles.&nbsp; Everything in the garden was so meticulously
orderly that to wheel them over the mown grass seemed
sacrilegious.&nbsp; The porch, at which they waited, was full of
choice geraniums.&nbsp; Their hot scent filled the air.&nbsp; Mr.
Ingleby knocked gently with a polished brass knocker.&nbsp; Slow
steps were heard within moving over a flagged floor.&nbsp; The
door was opened, disclosing a stone passage that smelt of
coolness and cleanliness.&nbsp; It was like the smell of a sweet
dairy.&nbsp; An elderly woman, with a plump and placid face and
grey hair, received them.&nbsp; All her figure except her black
sateen bodice was covered with a coarse but snowy apron.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why, John,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It do be a
treat to see you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She took Mr. Ingleby in her arms and kissed him.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Poor fellow, too,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; The embrace
implied more than any of the condolences that Edwin had heard in
Halesby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And this is Edwin,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well,
what a great big man, to be sure!&rdquo;&nbsp; She proceeded to
embrace Edwin, and he became conscious of the extraordinary
softness and coolness of her face.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come in and make yourselves comfortable,&rdquo; said
Aunt Sarah Jane.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;re used to bicycles in
this house.&nbsp; Our Joe has one.&nbsp; He goes to work on it
every day, and sometimes on a Sunday rides over to Clevedern on
it.&nbsp; Come in, John.&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin followed his father
into the living-room.&nbsp; It was clean, strikingly clean, and
curiously homely.&nbsp; On the <a name="page215"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 215</span>walls hung a picture of Queen
Victoria, looking like a pouter pigeon in her jubilee robes, and
another of the sardonic Disraeli.&nbsp; There were several padded
photograph albums with gilt clasps, and other photographs
decorated the mantelpiece and a side table.&nbsp; These were all
accommodated in fretwork frames.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Joe do keep us supplied with up-to-date photograph
frames,&rdquo; said Aunt Sarah Jane, following Edwin&rsquo;s
glances with a touch of motherly pride.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s
like his father.&nbsp; Clever with his fingers.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin found that the photographs were familiar.&nbsp; His
father was there: an ardent, younger father, with black whiskers
and a determined mouth.&nbsp; A father confident in the virtue of
self-help.&nbsp; His mother, too, in a tight-fitting costume of
the eighties, with a row of buttons down the front from the
throat to the hem.&nbsp; And, wonder of wonders, there was Edwin
himself in a sailor suit.&nbsp; The discovery of his own portrait
did something to destroy the illusion of unreality that occupied
the place.&nbsp; Obviously he really belonged to it.&nbsp; For
years, without his knowing it, his image had been part of this
unfamiliar room.&nbsp; Even though he had not known of their
existence he had evidently been a familiar accepted person to
these people.&nbsp; Even their friends must have known him by
sight.&nbsp; It was strange.&nbsp; It was pathetic.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I can see a touch of our Joe in him, John,&rdquo; said his
aunt, who had been examining him closely.&nbsp; &ldquo;An&rsquo;
there do be a look of your father as well.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do you think so?&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby.</p>
<p><a name="page216"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
216</span>&ldquo;Joe&rsquo;s a great boy, too,&rdquo; said Aunt
Sarah Jane lovingly.</p>
<p>It was clear enough who was the idol of this household.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There now, your dinner will be spoiling.&nbsp; Take the
boy upstairs, John.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She left them, and Edwin followed his father up a crooked
stair to a low room above the garden.&nbsp; A cool wind was
blowing down from Axdown, and the filigree shadow of the lace
window-curtains danced on the white coverlet of the bed.&nbsp;
The room smelt faintly of lavender.&nbsp; It seemed to Edwin a
wonderful room, &ldquo;full of sweet&rdquo;&mdash;he
couldn&rsquo;t remember the line&mdash;&ldquo;peace and health
and quiet breathing.&rdquo;&nbsp; There was nothing quite so
placid as this in the life that he had known.</p>
<p>They washed their dusty faces and came downstairs again, and
Edwin, seated by the sunny window of the front room, relapsed
into a state of perfect drowsiness, content merely to exist and
drink in the sweet and simple atmosphere of humble content.&nbsp;
This, he supposed, was what his father by his struggles and
sacrifices had lost.&nbsp; Was it worth while?&nbsp; The
complications of this question were far too great for Edwin to
decide.</p>
<p>The men folk of Geranium Cottage did not return to dinner, and
after that meal, in which suet dumplings played an important
part, Edwin retired to a trellised structure at the back of the
garden, bowery with honeysuckle, that Aunt Sarah Jane described
as the harbour.&nbsp; Here, drugged with more cider and fresh
air, he dozed away the early afternoon.&nbsp; He was asleep when
his father came to <a name="page217"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
217</span>call him for tea.&nbsp; After all, it was not
surprising that he was sleepy, for they had talked into the small
hours the night before.&nbsp; Certainly Aunt Sarah Jane&rsquo;s
tea was worth waking up for.&nbsp; Quince marmalade and clotted
cream, and wheaten scones that she had baked that morning.&nbsp;
Edwin, ready now for any further revelations, would not now have
been shocked to hear that in her young days she had been a
cook.&nbsp; In this beatific state of refreshment he was anxious
to explore.</p>
<p>&ldquo;When are we going to Highberrow, father?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And this was to be a restful holiday,&rdquo; Mr.
Ingleby laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why, now, if you like.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin would have run to the linhay behind the house for the
bicycles, but his father called him back.&nbsp; The hill was so
steep, he told him, that it would be easier for them to walk.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, John, Will&rsquo;ll be tarrable disappointed if
you aren&rsquo;t here when he comes home from work,&rdquo; said
Aunt Sarah Jane.&nbsp; &ldquo;This young man of yours do go too
fast for me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, we won&rsquo;t be long,&rdquo; said Mr.
Ingleby.</p>
<p>And so they set off together for Highberrow, making, first of
all, a straight line for the base of the hills and then following
a green lane that skirted the foot of them but was so
overshadowed with hazel that the slopes could not be seen.&nbsp;
In a mile or so they cut into the main road again, by an iron
milestone that said &ldquo;Bridgwater 18: Bristol
14.&rdquo;&nbsp; The road climbed along a quarried terrace in the
hill-side, and to the left of it lay a deep valley, on the
farther slope of which lay half a dozen pink-washed cottages with
gardens falling <a name="page218"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
218</span>to the bed of an attenuated stream; and behind the
cottages a steep hill-side rose abruptly to a bare height crowned
with ancient earthworks.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby, &ldquo;is Silbury
camp.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s an old rhyme about it.&nbsp; It is
supposed to be full of buried gold.&nbsp; When I was a boy I
often used to lie up there in the sun, gazing out over the
channel.&nbsp; In spring all the meadows between the camp and
Highberrow Batch are full of daffodils.&nbsp; I often used to
wish there were daffodils in Halesby. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>In a little while they came to the church of Highberrow,
placed like a watch-tower on the edge of the Batch, surveying the
immense relics of paganism on the opposite side of the
valley.&nbsp; It was a humble and not very beautiful building;
but Edwin entered the churchyard with awe, for it seemed to him
that so much of the past that had made him lay buried
there.&nbsp; And the inscriptions on the tombstones reinforced
this idea; for the churchyard was veritably crowded with the
remains of dead Inglebys.&nbsp; It made the past, a piece of
knowledge so recent to him that it still held an atmosphere of
unreality and phantasy, so ponderable, that in comparison with it
his present condition seemed almost unreal.&nbsp; His father led
him through the long grass, starry with yellow ragwort, to the
corner in which his grandmother was buried.</p>
<p>&ldquo;This is the place that I told you about,&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The place where my grandfather went out at night and
blasted the rock?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page219"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 219</span>It
was incredible.&nbsp; Until that moment the story had been only a
legend.&nbsp; Edwin wondered how ever his father could have
broken away from the tradition of centuries and left the
hills.&nbsp; The roots of their family had pierced so deeply into
the soil, yes, even beneath the soil and into the veins of the
solid rock.&nbsp; The conditions of his own life seemed to him
the tokens of an unnatural and artificial thing.</p>
<p>They left the churchyard by a narrow lane that always
climbed.&nbsp; They passed the village inn: a long, windswept
building, so bare and so exposed to weather that even the tenure
of the lichen on the tiles seemed precarious.&nbsp; Over the
lintel a weathered board showed them the name of Ingleby in faded
letters.&nbsp; Edwin pointed to it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said his father.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose he
is some remote cousin of yours.&nbsp; Everybody that is left in
this village must be related to us in some degree; though I
don&rsquo;t suppose any of them would remember me.&nbsp; You see,
I went to Axcombe when I was a good deal younger than
you.&rdquo;&nbsp; He smiled.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am like a ghost
returning to its old home.&nbsp; Like a ghost. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>And yet, to Edwin, the whole place seemed familiar.&nbsp; He
was not in the least surprised when, opposite a windy farm-house,
in front of which the dry blades of a dishevelled drac&aelig;na
shivered as though protesting against its wintry exile, his
father turned off to the left along a road that had once been gay
with cottage gardens and trim buildings of stone, but was now
suggestive of nothing but ruin and desolation.&nbsp; By one of
these pathetic ruins his father paused.</p>
<p><a name="page220"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
220</span>&ldquo;This was your grandfather&rsquo;s house,
Eddie.&nbsp; It was here that I was born.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Now there remained only the ground-plan of a house, and the
only sign of habitation in all the ruin was to be seen in the
smoke-blackened stones of the chimney.&nbsp; The garden, indeed,
lay beautiful in decay, for there, as everywhere in this deserted
countryside, the golden ragwort had taken possession; but within
the walls of the house only nettles shivered.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll always find nettles in deserted human
habitations.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know why,&rdquo; said Mr.
Ingleby.&nbsp; &ldquo;There is a rather unusual botanical
curiosity to be found among the workings at Cold Harbour,&rdquo;
he went on, &ldquo;the Roman Nettle.&nbsp; Urtica . . . Urtica. .
. .&nbsp; My memory isn&rsquo;t what it used to be.&nbsp; It has
a bigger leaf than the ordinary nettle and a much more poisonous
sting.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s only found in places where the Romans
have been.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Why, in the face of this harrowing desolation, should he be
thinking of things like that?&nbsp; A ghost . . . with as little
passion or feeling as a ghost: emotions so different from the
passionate resentment that now filled Edwin&rsquo;s heart.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ah . . . here is the school.&nbsp; I suppose they
couldn&rsquo;t pull that down.&nbsp; I remember when it was newly
built.&nbsp; It was there that I learnt my alphabet. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In the whole of the lane the school was the only whole
building.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If you come to the edge of the Batch you will see the
valley bottom where I spent my childhood with your
great-grandmother.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page221"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 221</span>They
passed on, and saw, a hundred feet beneath them, the valley of
the little stream.&nbsp; More ruins, many of them; but one or two
cottages still inhabited.&nbsp; The lower cottages lay close to
the water, and in four or five places the stream was spanned by a
clapper bridge.&nbsp; In one of the gardens ghostly children were
playing, and in another ghostly washing flapped in a breeze that
had risen with the coolness of evening.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby pointed
out to Edwin his great-grandmother&rsquo;s home.&nbsp; It was the
cottage in the garden of which the children were playing.</p>
<p>From the chimney a trail of smoke dwindled up against the grey
hill-side.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I should like to see inside it,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Would you?&nbsp; No . . . I don&rsquo;t think it would
be worth going down into the hollow to see it.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d
only be disappointed.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t expect there&rsquo;d be
anything much to see.&nbsp; Besides, we haven&rsquo;t time.&nbsp;
I want to take you to a little farm&mdash;it isn&rsquo;t really
big enough to be called a farm&mdash;at the top of the lane under
Axdown.&nbsp; They call it the Holloway.&nbsp; Why I can&rsquo;t
imagine, for it is the highest point of the whole village.&nbsp;
Your aunt tells me that your grandfather&rsquo;s sister, your own
great-aunt Lydia, is still living there, and I think I had better
go and see her.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He turned again, and Edwin followed him.&nbsp; It seemed
strange to him that his father should not be anxious to look
inside the house where his childhood had been spent.&nbsp; A
ghost . . . a ghost. . . .</p>
<p>They passed the windy farm once more.&nbsp; A man, in muddy
gaiters, was driving cows into the yard.&nbsp; <a
name="page222"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 222</span>He was the
first creature&mdash;apart from the ghostly children in the
valley&mdash;that they had seen.&nbsp; A tall man, with a gaunt,
grey face, who did not even turn to look at them or give them
good-evening, although they must surely have been the only living
people that he had seen that day.&nbsp; It was impossible to
believe from the sight of its exterior that the farm was now
inhabited.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who do you think he is?&rdquo; Edwin asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t the least
idea.&nbsp; The people at that farm used to be named Ingleby; and
he certainly has the figure of your grandfather. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you stop and speak to him?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why should we?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But he would be awfully pleased to see you and know who
you are. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t expect he would.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A moment later Mr. Ingleby said,</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now, the ruins of this cottage ought to interest you,
Edwin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why?&nbsp; Is it one of ours?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, but the old woman who lived in it in my day was
always supposed to be a witch.&nbsp; Mendip people were always
great believers in witchcraft.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t wonder if
your aunt believes in &lsquo;ill-wishing&rsquo; to this
day.&nbsp; I suppose she was really a harmless old body.&nbsp;
The story was that a daughter of hers, with whom she had
quarrelled, married a small dairy farmer down by Axcombe, and no
sooner had she gone to live with him than the poor man&rsquo;s
cows went dry.&nbsp; His business failed.&nbsp; He had to sell
his stock.&nbsp; He was ruined, and took to <a
name="page223"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 223</span>drink; and
in all the public-houses for miles round he used to rail against
his mother-in-law, and say that she was responsible for the whole
business.&nbsp; She was a lonely old creature, very poor and
dirty, and when we were children and going up to the Holloway we
used to cover our eyes and run for fear we should catch sight of
her.&nbsp; No one even knew when she died.&nbsp; They found her,
I heard, when she had been dead for a week or ten
days.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin shivered.&nbsp; These hill-people, it seemed, were hard
and cruel.&nbsp; No doubt he must have some of their stony
cruelty in his own being somewhere.</p>
<p>At last they reached the farm at the top of the
Holloway.&nbsp; It was a poor building, only a little more
hospitable than the ruins in the valley.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby
knocked at the door, and a sturdy, middle-aged man with an iron
hook in place of his right hand lifted the latch and stared at
them.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know me, Isaac?&rdquo; said Mr.
Ingleby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Noa. . . .&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t say I do know
&rsquo;ee.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m John Ingleby.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;John Ingleby! . . .&nbsp; Well, and I&rsquo;m proud to
see &rsquo;ee, John.&nbsp; Do &rsquo;ee step inside and see
mother.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t shake hands with &rsquo;ee the way I
was used to.&nbsp; I lost en in a mowin&rsquo;-machine five years
back.&nbsp; Come in then.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He led the way into a dark cabin.&nbsp; Everything in it was
dark, partly, perhaps, because the windows were full of
flower-pots; partly because all the furniture was darkened with
age or smoke or grime.&nbsp; The only bright colours in its
brownness were a number of shining copper utensils and a <a
name="page224"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 224</span>fine show
of geraniums in the window.&nbsp; Isaac followed Mr.
Ingleby&rsquo;s eyes towards these flowers.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Purty, ban&rsquo;t they?&rdquo; he said with
pride.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your brother Will sent mother
they.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In the gloom of the fireplace, where a pile of turves
smouldered, mother began to dissociate herself from the
surrounding brownness.&nbsp; She was a very old woman.&nbsp;
Edwin had never seen any one so old&mdash;sitting bolt upright in
a straight-backed oaken chair.&nbsp; Her face seemed to Edwin
very beautiful, for extreme age had taken from it all the
extraneous charm that smoothness and colour give, leaving only
the sheer chiselled beauty of feature.&nbsp; It was a noble face,
finely modelled, with a straight nose, a tender mouth, and level
brows beneath which burned the darkest and clearest eyes that
Edwin had ever seen.&nbsp; Her hair was white and scanty, but
little of it was seen beneath the white bonnet that she
wore.&nbsp; Edwin felt her eyes go through him in the gloom.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s cousin John come to see &rsquo;ee,
mother,&rdquo; said Isaac, bending over her.</p>
<p>&ldquo;John?&nbsp; What John?&rdquo; said the old lady.</p>
<p>It struck Edwin at once that her speech was purer and more
delicate than that of her son.</p>
<p>&ldquo;John Ingleby, Aunt Lydia,&rdquo; said Edwin&rsquo;s
father.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You need not raise your voice, my dear,&rdquo; she
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;My sight and my hearing are wonderful, thank
God.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then you remember me, Aunt Lydia?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I remember you, John.&nbsp; Though it&rsquo;s
many and many years since my eyes saw you.&nbsp; And how are you,
my dear?&nbsp; They tell me that you have <a
name="page225"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 225</span>done great
things in the world.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a doctor, like poor Dr.
Marshall.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . I&rsquo;m not a doctor.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m in
business.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m a chemist.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I knew it was something of the kind.&nbsp; You
needn&rsquo;t speak so loud.&nbsp; And they told me you had
married.&nbsp; I suppose this is your boy.&nbsp; A fine boy,
surely.&nbsp; He has a look of your grandfather.&rdquo; . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, this is Edwin.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t remember that name in our family.&nbsp;
It sounds like a fanciful name.&nbsp; Come here, my dear, and let
me look at you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin went to her, and she kissed him.&nbsp; Her face was so
cold and smooth that she might almost have been dead.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And how is your dear wife, John?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had a terrible blow, Aunt Lydia.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;ve lost her.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ah . . . that was bad for you, and bad for the boy,
too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I shall never get over it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr.
Ingleby&rsquo;s voice trembled.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, of course, you say that.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s natural
that you should.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re young.&nbsp; But when you
live to be as old as I am you&rsquo;ll know better.&nbsp; You
will get over it.&nbsp; When a few years have gone by
you&rsquo;ll marry again.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Never, Aunt Lydia . . . never. . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what you feel now.&nbsp;
But I know the family.&nbsp; The Inglebys are always very tender
in marriage.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve seen many of them that have lost
their wives, and they always marry again.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
suppose that I shall live to hear of it; but <a
name="page226"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 226</span>when the
time comes you&rsquo;ll remember what I said.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, Aunt Lydia . . . never.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Time is a wonderful thing, John.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m glad
to have seen you and your boy.&nbsp; I hope he&rsquo;ll take
after you&mdash;you were always the best of them.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She gave a little sigh.&nbsp; Evidently she was tired.&nbsp;
The flame that burned behind her black eyes was so very feeble
for all its brightness.&nbsp; Isaac, who had been watching her
with the devotion of a practised nurse, saw that she could not
stand any more talking.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now, mother, that&rsquo;s enough, my dear,&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Kiss me, John,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; And Mr. Ingleby
kissed her.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, now that you be here after all these
years,&rdquo; said Isaac cheerily, as he rearranged the red shawl
round his mother&rsquo;s shoulders, &ldquo;you won&rsquo;t leave
us without taking something.&nbsp; There do be a lovely bit of
bacon I have cut.&nbsp; Do &rsquo;ee try a bit now, and a mug of
cider.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin, who was already hungry with his walk, and was rapidly
acquiring a taste for the wine of the country, now became aware
of the fact that the dark ceiling was decked with sides of bacon
and hams that hung there slowly pickling in the turf smoke that
saturated the atmosphere of the room.&nbsp; He was disappointed
when his father declined to take any of this delicacy.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, a mug of cider, then,&rdquo; Isaac
persisted.&nbsp; He went into an inner chamber down three stone
steps, with three china mugs hanging on his hook.&nbsp;
&ldquo;You see, I do be pretty handy with en,&rdquo; he
laughed.</p>
<p><a name="page227"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 227</span>They
drank their cider solemnly.&nbsp; It was even drier than that
which they had drunk for lunch at Wringford, and so free from
acidity that all that Edwin could taste was that faint astringent
bitterness.&nbsp; It had also a bouquet that was less like the
odour of apples than that of a flour-mill.&nbsp; A wonderful
drink. . . .&nbsp; They said good-bye, and Isaac, who seemed to
Edwin the most kindly and patient creature he had ever met,
showed them to the door.</p>
<p>By this time the sun was setting, and the cool wind from the
west had freshened.&nbsp; Edwin saw, for the first time, the huge
panorama on which they had turned their backs as they climbed the
hill to the Holloway.&nbsp; Perhaps it was the strangeness of all
his recent experience; perhaps, partly, the exhilaration that
proceeded from Isaac&rsquo;s cider, but the sight struck Edwin as
one of greater magnificence than any he had ever seen
before.&nbsp; From their feet the whole country sloped in a
series of hilly waves to the shores of the channel, and that
muddy sea now shone from coast to coast in a blaze of tawny
light: now truly, for the first time, one of the gateways of the
world.&nbsp; And beyond the channel stood the heaped mountains of
Wales, very wild and black in their vastness.&nbsp; The sight was
so impressive that on their way down the lane they did not
speak.</p>
<p>At last Edwin said,&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think Aunt Lydia has a very beautiful face.&nbsp; She
looks like some old grand lady.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;She is very like your grandfather,&rdquo; said his <a
name="page228"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
228</span>father.&nbsp; &ldquo;She must be over ninety.&nbsp; It
is a great age.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And on the way home Edwin began to imagine what his strange
grandfather the dowser must have been, with the figure of the
lonely farmer, his black beard and hair, and his great-aunt
Lydia&rsquo;s noble features and piercing eyes.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>They stayed for a week at Geranium Cottage, sinking without
any effort into its placid life.&nbsp; Edwin was content merely
to live there, soaking up the atmosphere of Wringford village,
and only thinking of Highberrow as a strange and ghostly
adventure, possible, but too disturbing to be indulged in.&nbsp;
The tiredness of Mr. Ingleby, who never showed the least
inclination to revisit the place, made this abstention
easier.&nbsp; In the whole of his week at Wringford Edwin only
made one attempt to see Highberrow again.&nbsp; The impulse came
to him very early one morning, just at the hour of dawn when the
birds had fallen to silence, and Joe, who happened to be working
for his master at a village some miles away, was splashing about
under the pump in the yard at the back of the linhay.&nbsp; Mr.
Ingleby was still asleep, and Edwin, dressing quietly, stole
downstairs and set off towards the hills, this time on his
bicycle.</p>
<p>He followed the high road, and left the machine in a quarry
opposite the point where the first pink-washed cottages
appeared.&nbsp; By this time he was almost sorry that he had come
there: for he was quite certain that the village he was now going
to <a name="page229"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 229</span>visit
would be a very different place from the dead or hallucinated
Highberrow that he and his father had penetrated some days
before.&nbsp; He felt this so strongly that he wouldn&rsquo;t
take the risk of spoiling that marvellous impression, and instead
of following the road that they had taken before, he changed his
mind, crossed the valley of the pink cottages, and climbed the
shaley slope of Silbury.&nbsp; In the fosse that surrounded the
encampment a hundred white tails bobbed at once, and, laughing,
he scrambled up the sides of what had once been Silbury Camp, and
now was Silbury Warren.</p>
<p>Here, lying full length upon the top of the vallum, as perhaps
a Belgic ancestor, or an ancestor who held the crest before the
Belg&aelig; came, had lain before him, he could look over the
combe towards the church of Highberrow on the Batch.&nbsp; And
the church tower was all he saw of Highberrow again: a feature
most unrepresentative of the spirit of that pagan place.&nbsp;
Even the church tower at this hour of the morning could scarcely
be seen for mist, and all the time cold mist was pouring down in
a dense, impalpable stream from the milky coverlet that spread
upon Axdown and Callow and all the hills beyond.&nbsp; In the
plain nothing could be seen at first; and from the sleeping
villages no mist-muffled sound was heard; but by degrees the
pattern of the plain&rsquo;s surface, with its dappled orchards,
its green pasturage and paler turf-moors, cut by the straight
bands of the rhines, the sluggish channels through which the
surface water drained into the sea, became more clear, and with
this the sounds of the country grew more distinct: indefinite
noises, such <a name="page230"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
230</span>as the creaking of cart-wheels in a hidden lane, the
squeak of a pump-handle at the back of the pink cottages, the
clink of a pick in the quarry.&nbsp; The whole world awoke, and
Edwin, too, found that he was awake and awfully hungry.&nbsp; He
scrambled down the slope.&nbsp; Smoke was now rising from the
chimneys of the cottages in the combe.&nbsp; He was back at
Wringford in time for breakfast.</p>
<p>By this time he had begun to feel quite at home in Geranium
Cottage.&nbsp; He had made the discovery of his cousin and his
Uncle Will.&nbsp; The latter he found wholly lovable: a creature
of slow, quiet speech, as leisurely and peaceful as his vocation,
and full of small kindnesses that surprised by reason of their
unexpectedness.</p>
<p>The thing that most impressed Edwin in his uncle&rsquo;s
nature was the extraordinary tenderness he showed towards the
green things that were his care.&nbsp; Perhaps the west-country
custom of dispensing with the neuter pronoun and speaking of all
inanimate creatures as if they were persons, made his solicitude
for their welfare more noticeable.&nbsp; But he was not only kind
to them in his speech: his short and clumsy-looking fingers, that
seemed to be built for nothing but the roughest of labour, became
amazingly sensitive and delicate as soon as he began to handle
the plants in his garden, so that every touch had in it the
nature of a caress.</p>
<p>In this life, of the devoted husbandman, he was evidently
wholly contented; and he made it seem to Edwin the most natural
and human on earth.&nbsp; The fascination of watching his
uncle&rsquo;s hands grew upon him, and in the end he would watch
the man, <a name="page231"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
231</span>who had been busy at the same work in his
master&rsquo;s garden all day, tending his own favourites at home
until the light began to fail, and Aunt Sarah Jane would call the
two of them in to supper.&nbsp; The spectacle had a sort of
hypnotic effect upon the boy, it was so slow and measured, as
slow almost, Edwin thought, as the processes of germination and
growth which it was his uncle&rsquo;s vocation to assist.&nbsp;
His fingers even handled the purple soil as if he loved it.</p>
<p>His cousin was a different matter altogether: a tall,
dark-haired boy, a couple of years older than Edwin.&nbsp; He
had, much more distinctly than Uncle Will, the Ingleby face, the
features that were to be seen at their best in the old lady at
the Holloway farm.&nbsp; And he possessed in a high degree the
quality that had carried Edwin&rsquo;s father out into the world:
a seriousness that made him anxious to &ldquo;get on,&rdquo;
promptings of which were now being satisfied in an accumulation
of the periodical publications that have taken the place of Mr.
Samuel Smiles in these days: weeklies devoted to all kinds of
useful hobbies&mdash;electricity, wood-carving,
plumbing&mdash;the series that eventually culminated in the
gigantic illusion of the Self-Educator.</p>
<p>To these short cuts to power the young man devoted all his
evenings, and though he was quite natural in his anxiousness to
be friendly with Edwin, with whose subtler and more contemplative
nature he had at present so little in common, the attempts were
not very successful.&nbsp; Between these two there lay a far more
obvious gulf than that which separated Edwin from the older
people.&nbsp; In <a name="page232"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
232</span>a way, he could not help admiring his cousin&rsquo;s
earnestness, probably because he knew that he could never imitate
it, and yet he sometimes found himself examining it in a mood of
absolute detachment that made his sympathy feel artificial.</p>
<p>Just before he left St. Luke&rsquo;s he had been reading
Darwin&rsquo;s <i>Origin of Species</i>, and in the light of this
work the efforts of his father, followed by those of his cousin
Joe, seemed to him an excellent instance of the tendency of
ancient stocks to vary or sport in definite directions.&nbsp; In
the earnest Joe Edwin found the phenomenon a little troublesome,
for the sight of the immense energies that the youth was putting
into channels that were futile distressed him, and the more so
because to correct the waste it would have been necessary to
begin again from a point so distant that Joe would be faced with
the spectacle of more than half of his present energies
wasted.&nbsp; So Edwin thought as little as the consciousness of
his own selfishness would allow him, of all the labours that were
typified by the fretwork mahogany frames that surrounded the
photographs of the Halesby Inglebys, listening instead to the
endless tales of his Aunt Sarah Jane, in the hour when she became
talkative, after supper.</p>
<p>By this time Edwin was so interested in his own romantic
origins that any story of the old Highberrow would do for him;
and his aunt, with her soft Somerset voice, her picturesque
phrasing, and her unfailing memory for social details, rebuilt,
night after night, the life of the decayed village as it had been
in the old dowser&rsquo;s time, evolving by degrees a human
comedy which resembled that of <a name="page233"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 233</span>its great exemplar by the way in
which the protagonists of one episode became mere incidentals to
another.&nbsp; Edwin knew them all by name, and recognised them
as if he had met them in the flesh whenever he heard of them.</p>
<p>In this way, sitting in the smell of the window geraniums over
a leisurely supper of bread and cheese, in his uncle&rsquo;s case
literally washed down with cider, he heard a story that he always
remembered with pride and pity and a degree of passionate
resentment: the story of how the village of his fathers had sunk
into decay.</p>
<p>Highberrow, it appeared, had been built on what was then a
common moorland, by the men who lived in it, laboriously, stone
by stone.&nbsp; Their right to these fruits of their labour had
never been called into question, and the whole spirit of the
village had been happy and prosperous, as well it might, seeing
that it owed nothing to the care of any outsider and could pay
its way.&nbsp; And during those prosperous times its liberties
seemed secure from danger.&nbsp; But when the decay of the
grouvier&rsquo;s industry led to unemployment and poverty, and
the younger men of the Highberrow families began to look for
their living overseas, the little community became so weak that
the owner of the manor-house saw his opportunity.&nbsp; As Lord
of the Manor he disputed the &ldquo;squatters&rsquo; right&rdquo;
of the Highberrow villagers, and through his agents demanded a
rent that would have made living impossible for most of them, for
the cottages that they or their forefathers had built.&nbsp; If
they refused to pay the rent, he said, they would be evicted, not
in order that <a name="page234"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
234</span>other people might be introduced who would pay, but
merely to satisfy the landlord&rsquo;s convictions of the
rightness of his principle.&nbsp; That was the way in which he
put it.&nbsp; Merely out of spite would be a more accurate
description of his motives.</p>
<p>Highberrow was in a bad way.&nbsp; The villagers were either
very old or very young, and in either case their feebleness made
the whole organism unfit to resist the inroads of the
parasite.&nbsp; What is more, they were very poor, and the very
nature of the Mendip mining industry had made them so far
individualist that the idea of combined resistance did not occur
to them.&nbsp; The landlord wisely started his operations with an
old woman whose cottage lay nearest to the woods in which his
pheasants were bred.&nbsp; Almost incredibly poor, she had lived
on the products of her garden and her poultry.&nbsp; To pay rent
was out of the question.&nbsp; Sheer age and inertia made it
impossible for her to move, and in the course of time she was
evicted with her miserable belongings, and went to die at the
home of a married daughter.</p>
<p>Emerging from this easy contest, the landlord, or perhaps his
agent, moved on to the next.&nbsp; It was unfortunate for him,
and fortunate for the villagers, that he now pitched on the
cottage of Thomas Ingleby, the dowser, Edwin&rsquo;s
grandfather.&nbsp; The old man had this in his favour: that he
was a man of two trades, that even when the mining had failed him
he could make a living with the divining rod, and the
consciousness of this power no doubt stiffened his
resistance.&nbsp; Another eviction was decreed, but this time
things did not go so <a name="page235"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 235</span>easily.&nbsp; When the
landlord&rsquo;s men arrived from the manor to empty the house,
another party appeared from the Cold Harbour mines, and as soon
as the furniture was dragged out at the front door it was seized
and taken in again at the back.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It were a proper field-day,&rdquo; said Uncle Will
quietly, &ldquo;I do remember it well.&nbsp; I can see your
father now, John, standing over beyond the road with his back to
the wall, not speakin&rsquo; a word, just smokin&rsquo; of his
pipe.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The landlord&rsquo;s men saw that this sort of thing might go
on for ever and none the better for it, so they just gave it up,
but old Ingleby (Edwin had already canonised him as a
&ldquo;village Hampden&rdquo;) had shown the rest of the
Highberrow people what could be done, and gradually stirred them
into combined action.</p>
<p>It was a little, pitiful attempt.&nbsp; He himself put into it
all his savings, a matter of a few pounds, and to this were added
as many shillings as could be scraped together in the
village.&nbsp; He took the money to a lawyer in
Axcombe&mdash;Bayliss was his name&mdash;an honest man with a
sense of justice and, one suspects, some admiration for the
sturdiness of his client.&nbsp; Bayliss worked the matter up and
made a case of it, and no further attempts at eviction were made
in Highberrow in the meantime.&nbsp; The village even regained a
little of its former confidence, and for some time the landlord
did not show his face in it.&nbsp; But once more luck was against
Highberrow.&nbsp; Bayliss, the good lawyer, died.&nbsp; He had
been careful to keep the matter in his own hands, and when it
came to be considered by his <a name="page236"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 236</span>successor, a partner with social
ambitions, the new man would not touch it: partly because there
appeared to be no more money in it (as was probably the case),
and partly because he was in the habit of meeting the Lord of the
Manor in the hunting-field, and was on card-playing terms with
the agent.</p>
<p>There followed an exodus of despair.&nbsp; The people of
Highberrow, who had no more money to fight with, packed up their
pitiable belongings and left their houses rather than face the
trouble of eviction.&nbsp; Not so Thomas Ingleby.&nbsp; The agent
returned to the attack.&nbsp; There were threats: a stormy
interview, in which the dowser faced the landlord himself.&nbsp;
A final week&rsquo;s notice was given, and Ingleby made sure once
more of the support of his friends from the neighbouring
villages.&nbsp; But no further attempt at eviction was
made.&nbsp; At the last moment the landlord climbed down.&nbsp;
He arranged another interview, and at this the terms for the
whole village were settled.&nbsp; For the lives of the present
occupants, or for a period of sixty years, the cottages should
remain rent-free.&nbsp; It was not everything, but &rsquo;twas a
famous victory.&nbsp; &ldquo;That is why Aunt Lydia do be still
living up to the Holloway to this day,&rdquo; said Aunt Sarah
Jane.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And I suppose grandfather lived there till he
died,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, the poor dear.&nbsp; When he did grow very aged
your uncle and I went up to Highberrow and persuaded en that he
weren&rsquo;t fit to look after himself.&nbsp; You should
&rsquo;a seed the dirt in that house!&nbsp; And he comed down to
live along of we.&nbsp; But he were never happy, were he,
Will?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page237"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
237</span>&ldquo;Noa . . . he were never happy.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;He were a quare old man.&nbsp; Us seed very little of
en.&nbsp; Arften people would come for en from a distance that
wanted water found, and he did spend the day roving the country
cutting blackthorns for his dowsing.&nbsp; Right up to the day
when he took to his bed, poor soul.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I should like to have seen him dowsing,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t even seen the twigs that they
use.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why, that would have been easy enough.&nbsp; Only the
other day I throwed out a lot that belonged to your
grandfather.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin blushed at this sacrilege.&nbsp; &ldquo;And could Uncle
Will find water with a twig?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not I,&rdquo; laughed his uncle.&nbsp; &ldquo;But they
do say it runs in families.&nbsp; Have you ever tried,
John?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I tried when I was a boy,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby,
&ldquo;but nothing happened.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I expect our Joe could,&rdquo; said Aunt Sarah Jane,
with infinite faith in her offspring.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, mother, I&rsquo;ve tried it,&rdquo; said Joe, from
the lamplit corner where he was wrestling with the science of
sanitary inspection.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I wonder if I could . . .&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, you shall have a try,&rdquo; laughed his
uncle.</p>
<p>&ldquo;At this time o&rsquo; night?&rdquo; said Aunt Sarah
Jane, scandalised.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Let the boy have a try,&rdquo; said Uncle Will,
rising.&nbsp; &ldquo;&rsquo;Tis a beautivul moonlight night, and
I&rsquo;ll take him over the field where the new water-pipe
runs.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;m mad, the two of you,&rdquo; said his aunt
with a sigh.</p>
<p><a name="page238"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 238</span>Edwin
and his uncle went out into the garden, and there the boy watched
the gardener&rsquo;s clumsy, skilful hands cut a forked twig from
a blackthorn bush.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hazel do work as well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but
father always used the thorn.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Then they went out together over a dewy meadow, and his uncle
showed him how to hold the rod: with his two hands turned palm
upwards, the arms of the twig between the third and fourth
fingers, the thumb, and the palm of each hand, and the fork
downwards between them.&nbsp; Over the meadow grass they walked
slowly, then suddenly the tip of the rod began to turn upwards by
no agency of which Edwin was aware.&nbsp; It was very thrilling,
for his hands were quite still.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There you are,&rdquo; said his uncle,
&ldquo;you&rsquo;ve a found our water-pipe.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hold the rod down, uncle,&rdquo; Edwin said.</p>
<p>He did so, and now the mysterious force was so strong that the
arms of the twig snapped.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now, you&rsquo;ve gone and broke it,&rdquo; said Uncle
Will.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come in or you&rsquo;ll catch cold.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They went in together.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well . . .?&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;s a proper dowser, sure enough,&rdquo;
said Uncle Will.</p>
<p>Edwin was still curiously thrilled with the whole
business.&nbsp; He felt that a little more excitement in his
attainment was due to him; but no one, not even his father,
seemed in the least impressed.&nbsp; It comforted him to think
that his cousin Joe, his eyes fixed on his book in the corner,
had really less <a name="page239"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
239</span>in common than himself with the strange dark people
from whom they were both descended.&nbsp; It was better, he
thought, to be a born dowser than a Fellow of Balliol.&nbsp; More
wonderful still to be both.</p>
<p>All the rest of that evening he felt a queer elation in his
mysterious birthright, and when his father yawned and they both
went up to bed he lay awake for a long time listening to the
drowsy music of the corncrake and the wail of hunting owls,
trying to put himself more closely in touch with the romantic
past that had bred him: with that magnificent figure his
grandfather, and the innumerable strange and passionate ancestry
that slept under the shadow of Highberrow church on the
Batch.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yea, I have a goodly heritage,&rdquo; he
thought.&nbsp; And so he came to think of his father, through
whom these things came to him: of his hard achievements, of his
loneliness, of his difficulty of expressing&mdash;if it were not
a disinclination to express&mdash;all the powerful and stormy
things that must lie hidden in his heart.&nbsp; And a feeling of
passionate kinship carried Edwin away: an anxiety to show his
love for his father in unmistakable ways; to make clear to him
once and for all the depth of his son&rsquo;s devotion.&nbsp; He
began to think of his father as a mother might think of her
child.&nbsp; It must have been in that way, he imagined, that his
own mother had thought of her husband.&nbsp; The night was so
still that he imagined he could hear the rusty ivory of the
acacia-blossom falling at the gate.</p>
<h4><a name="page240"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
240</span>III</h4>
<p>They were in the train on their way home from Bristol, passing
smoothly under the escarpment of the lower Cotswolds.&nbsp; The
fortnight had passed with an astounding swiftness.&nbsp; After
leaving Wringford they had cycled over the back of Mendip, past
the mines at Cold Harbour, where they had paused for half an hour
to look at the workings, now deserted and overgrown with ragwort
and scabious, and the Roman amphitheatre, to the great limestone
gorge above Axcombe; and from there they had ridden to Wells,
where, beyond streets that flowed eternally with limpid water,
they had gazed on the wonder of the cathedral and seen the white
swans floating in the palace moat under a sky that was full of
peace.&nbsp; Only for a moment had they seen the masts of Bristol
and Redcliffe&rsquo;s dreamy spire; and now in a few hours they
would be back in Halesby: in another world.</p>
<p>As they travelled northwards Edwin was thinking all the time
of the work that he would do in his little room above the bed of
stocks.&nbsp; It should be a fragrant room, he thought, and a
good one for reading, for when his attention wandered he would be
able to lift his eyes to a line of gentler hills crowned by the
dark folds of Shenstone&rsquo;s hanging woods.&nbsp; And there he
would be able to dream of the coloured past and of his own
exciting future, and the enchanted life that he would soon be
leading among the noblest works of men in letters and in
stone.&nbsp; Oxford, his Mecca . . . the eternal city of his
dreams.&nbsp; He allowed his fancy to travel <a
name="page241"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 241</span>westward
over the rolling Cotswold and droop by the slow descent of river
valleys to that sacred place.&nbsp; His father&rsquo;s voice
dispelled his dream.&nbsp; They were alone in the carriage and
their privacy made speaking easy.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin . . . I&rsquo;ve been thinking a good deal about
your future.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, father?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been thinking it over in my own mind.&nbsp;
I talked it over a week or two ago with your Uncle Albert.&nbsp;
He&rsquo;s a sound man of business, you know.&nbsp; Then I felt
that I couldn&rsquo;t trust my judgment; the whole world was
upside down; but now I feel that I can think clearly, and of
course I am anxious to do my best for you.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been
thinking about this Oxford plan. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You know quite well, Edwin, that I&rsquo;m not a rich
man.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m a very poor man.&nbsp; You can understand
that, better than you could before, after this holiday.&nbsp; And
when people have very limited means and are getting on in
life&mdash;this business has made me an old man, you
know&mdash;they have to be very careful in their decisions.&nbsp;
Looking at it from every point of view, I don&rsquo;t think it
would be fair of me to let you go to Oxford.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father . . . what do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;To begin with, there&rsquo;s the expense.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I shall get a scholarship.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll work
like anything.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll make sure of it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure you would.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a good
boy.&nbsp; But that isn&rsquo;t everything by a long way.&nbsp;
When you&rsquo;ve got your scholarship, supposing you do get it,
the <a name="page242"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
242</span>expense would begin.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t like you
to feel at a hopeless disadvantage with men of your own
year.&nbsp; You would have to live quite a different life from
them.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t be able to afford any of their
pleasures.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t want their pleasures.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That is a rash thing to say.&nbsp; But I&rsquo;m
looking even farther ahead.&nbsp; What can you expect to do when
you&rsquo;ve taken a degree in Arts?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A fellowship. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ah, but that is a matter of considerable
uncertainty.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve seen so many men who have managed
to scrape through a university degree and then been thrown on the
world in a state of miserable poverty.&nbsp; Look at Mr. Kelly at
the grammar-school.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t like to live his
life; but I believe he has quite a brilliant university career
behind him.&nbsp; No . . . I don&rsquo;t think it would be fair
to you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But mother and I always said . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, I know . . . you were a pair of dreamers, both of
you.&nbsp; If you felt any very strong desire to become a parson
there might be something in it, though that, too, is a miserable
life often enough.&nbsp; But you don&rsquo;t, do you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . of course not.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;So I think that while I am living you should have the
chance of learning a useful profession.&nbsp; What about
doctoring?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But that would be expensive too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I know that . . . but I think we could do it.&nbsp; We
should have a little in common.&nbsp; I might even be able to
help you.&nbsp; And in a way . . . in a way I should feel that in
you I was realising some of <a name="page243"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 243</span>my own old ambitions.&nbsp; It is a
noble profession, Eddie: the most humane in the world.&nbsp; No
one need ever be ashamed of being a doctor.&nbsp; I think that a
parson who professes religion for the sake of a living is rather
to be despised.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Father, I&rsquo;m sure it would cost too much.&nbsp;
Six years, you know. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Five . . . only five, if you pass all your
examinations.&nbsp; And it need not be so expensive as you
think.&nbsp; During the last year they have turned the old
College in North Bromwich into a University.&nbsp; They give a
degree in medicine.&nbsp; And while you were studying there you
could still live with me at Halesby.&nbsp; I should be glad of
your company.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This appeal to Edwin&rsquo;s pity was difficult to
resist.&nbsp; It recalled to him all the resolutions that he had
made in the night at Wringford: the devotion with which he had
determined to devote himself to his father&rsquo;s welfare: the
determination that he should never do anything that could cause
the man a moment&rsquo;s pain.&nbsp; It was difficult . . .
difficult.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You could still get your scholarship,&rdquo; his father
went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;There are several endowments of that kind
at the North Bromwich medical school.&nbsp; I have a pamphlet at
home that gives all the particulars.&nbsp; I had even shown it to
your mother.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And what did she say, father?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;She didn&rsquo;t say much.&nbsp; She knew it would be a
great disappointment to you.&nbsp; But I think she realised that
it would be a good thing for you; and I know she looked forward
to having you at home.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . she must have known what a <a
name="page244"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
244</span>disappointment it would be.&nbsp; Father, I wish you
would think it over again.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I want you to think it over, too.&nbsp; At present it
naturally comes as a shock to you; but I think you&rsquo;ll see
in time. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>He couldn&rsquo;t see.&nbsp; He knew that he could never see
it in that light.&nbsp; It was going to take all the beauty that
he had conceived out of his life.&nbsp; It was going to ruin all
his happiness.&nbsp; In place of light and cleanliness and
learning it was going to give him . . . what?&nbsp; The darkness
of a smoky city; its grime; the mean ideals of the people who
lived beneath its ugliness.&nbsp; Even the memory of the
enthusiasm with which he had thought of the life of old Dr.
Marshall, his father&rsquo;s patron, couldn&rsquo;t mitigate the
dreariness of the prospect.&nbsp; The idea of living for ever in
company with dirt and misery and harrowing disease repelled
him.&nbsp; It was no good telling him that contact with these
misfortunes developed the nobler faculties of man.&nbsp; It was
not the life that he had wanted.&nbsp; His soul sent forth a cry
of exceeding bitterness.&nbsp; And while he sat there, full of
misery and resentment, the train was carrying them onward into
the gloom that always overshadowed the City of Iron.</p>
<h2><a name="page245"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 245</span>BOOK
II</h2>
<blockquote><p><a name="page247"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
247</span>. . . <i>so that with much ado I was corrupted</i>,
<i>and made to learn the dirty devices of the world</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Thomas
Traherne</span>.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3><a name="page249"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
249</span>CHAPTER I<br />
THE CITY OF IRON</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> city of iron stands upon three
hills and its valleys were once watered by two rivers; but since
the day when its name was humbly written in Doomsday these
pastoral features have disappeared, so that the hills are only
known as tramway gradients that testify to the excellence of the
Corporation&rsquo;s power station, and the rivers, running in
brick culverts, have been deprived not only of their liberty but
even of their natural function of receiving a portion of the
city&rsquo;s gigantic sewage.&nbsp; The original market of North
Bromwich has been not so much debauched from without, in the
manner of other growing towns, as organised from within by the
development of its own inherent powers for evil.&nbsp; It is not
a place from which men have wilfully cast out beauty so much as
one from which beauty has vanished in spite of man&rsquo;s
pitiful aspirations to preserve it.&nbsp; Indeed, its citizens
are objects rather for pity than for reproach, and would be
astonished to receive either, for many of them are wealthy, and
from their childhood, knowing no better, have believed that
wealth is a justification and an apology for every mortal evil
from ugliness to original sin.</p>
<p><a name="page250"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 250</span>In
the heart of the city the sense of power, impressive if
malignant, is so overwhelming that one cannot see the monstrosity
as a whole and can almost understand the blindness of its
inhabitants.&nbsp; Go, rather, to the hills beyond Halesby, to
Uffdown and Pen Beacon, where, with a choice of prospects, one
may turn from the dreamy plain of Severn and the cloudy
splendours of Silurian hills, to its pillars of cloud by day and
its pillars of fire by night; and perhaps in that remoter air you
may realise the city&rsquo;s true significance as a phenomenon of
unconquered if not inevitable disease.&nbsp; If you are a
physician, you will realise that this evil has its counterpart in
human tissues, where a single cell, that differs not at all from
other cells and is a natural unit in the organism, may suddenly
and, as it seems, unreasonably acquire a faculty of monstrous and
malignant growth, cleaving and multiplying to the destruction of
its fellows&mdash;a cell gone mad, to which the ancients gave the
name of cancer.</p>
<p>The inhabitants of North Bromwich, who are a tolerant people,
and proud of the fact, would smile at this reflection.&nbsp; They
are not in the habit of surveying the midden in which they are
bred from remote hilltops, except on Bank Holidays, at which time
they have discovered a truth from which they might learn more:
that with the aid of hill air and exercise, whether it be that of
cocoanut shies or swing-boats, or the more hazardous pursuit of
donkey-riding, it is possible to absorb a greater quantity of
alcohol in a given time without unduly suffering than in the
atmosphere of their own streets.&nbsp; But they have not time to
learn, and since <a name="page251"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
251</span>they have never known any other conditions of living,
they exhibit the admirable human characteristic of making the
best of their surroundings and persuading themselves that their
hallucinated existence is typical of human life.&nbsp; They are
even eager, pathetically eager, to find and to proclaim its
virtues, and that they may do this more easily they have invented
specious names for the disease and its results: Industry for the
first, and, for the second, Progress.</p>
<p>In the vindication of a Municipal Conscience (making the best
of a bad job) they periodically extend the area over which their
coat of arms, a reminder of days when chivalry existed, is
displayed.&nbsp; The coat of arms itself is an unfortunate
symbol, for it is supported by the figure of a brawny slave who
carries the hammer with which his chains have been forged; but
the motto at least is encouraging.&nbsp; It is the word
&ldquo;Forward,&rdquo; expressing the aspirations of the citizens
towards the day when all England may be as the Black
Country.&nbsp; The watcher on Uffdown may give it a more
far-sighted significance: &ldquo;forward, to the day when there
shall be no more coal, and the evil, of its own inanition,
perish.&rdquo;</p>
<p>For the present, at any rate, the city showed no signs of
perishing.&nbsp; During the last year or two, its tentacles had
spread farther than ever before, swarming into the wet and lonely
valley of the Dulas Fechan, a deep cleft in the mountains beyond
Felindre where a noisy river ran through undergrowth older than
man&rsquo;s memory.&nbsp; From this valley, the council had
decreed, the rain of the <a name="page252"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 252</span>Savaddan watershed, which geology
had destined for the Wye and later for the Atlantic, must now
traverse eighty miles or more of conquered territory, and after
being defouled by the domestic usages of North Bromwich, must
find its way into the Trent, and so to the German Ocean, as the
Romans thoughtlessly labelled the North Sea.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Water,&rdquo; said the Mayor, who was also known as Sir
Joseph Astill, the brewer, &ldquo;water is one of the necessities
of life.&nbsp; It is our duty to the public to see that they have
it, and that they have it pure and unadulterated.&rdquo;</p>
<p>So the Welsh water came, and the altruistic baronet took the
credit for it.&nbsp; Indeed the progressive spirit of North
Bromwich found its incarnation in this fleshy gentleman.&nbsp; It
was he who presented the municipal art gallery with their
unrivalled collection of Madox-Jones cartoons, to say nothing of
three portraits of himself exemplifying (he had an elegant
vocabulary) the styles of the three greatest portrait painters of
modern times.&nbsp; It was he who saved the art of music from
degradation by fighting, with all the weight of his personal
influence, against the performance of secular music, music, that
is, divorced from &ldquo;sacred&rdquo; words, upon the
Sabbath.&nbsp; It was he, again, who aroused public feeling on
the question of the university: &ldquo;the first Modern
university,&rdquo; he called it.</p>
<p>He accomplished its endowment, equipped it with a principal
whose name was a household word in the homes of the great middle
classes; and finally set the seal of modernity on his creation,
less than twenty years before the total prohibition of alcohol <a
name="page253"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 253</span>became law
in retrograde America, by instituting a learned faculty and
providing a degree in the science of . . . brewing.&nbsp; Just as
an example of the city&rsquo;s liberality, there was also a
faculty of Arts.&nbsp; The faculty of Science, of course, was
important, if only as an appendage to the brewing school; those
of Engineering and Mining flattered the industries of the
district; that of Commerce taught its graduates to write business
letters in every spoken tongue and give the Yankees what for; and
lastly, that of Medicine, supplied a necessary antidote to the
activities of most of the others.</p>
<p>Sir Joseph Astill was proud, as well he might be, of the
Medical School.&nbsp; &ldquo;In this city,&rdquo; he boasted,
&ldquo;there are actually more hospital beds <i>per centum</i> of
inhabitants than in any other in the whole country.&nbsp; The
North Bromwich medical student has a greater opportunity of
studying disease, in all its aspects, than the alumnus of any
other school in the world.&nbsp; Thousands of beds lie waiting
for his scrutiny; and I am glad to say that very few of them are
ever empty.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin&rsquo;s first serious acquaintance with North Bromwich
had begun at the end of the summer holidays, through which he had
worked with a good deal less than the fiery enthusiasm that he
would have put into his reading for the Balliol
scholarship.&nbsp; The syllabus of the examination for the Astill
Exhibition had amazed him by its simplicity: the prescribed books
were works that he had absorbed some years before at St.
Luke&rsquo;s, and though the mathematical side of the business
worried him, as it had always done, it was clear that in North <a
name="page254"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 254</span>Bromwich
the classics were regarded really as a polite accomplishment
rather than as an integral part of a gentleman&rsquo;s equipment
in life: so that these drowsy summer months were really a period
of comparative idleness in which he had time to brood on his
regrets and become gradually reconciled to his new fate.&nbsp; In
this spirit he approached the examination.&nbsp; Even the
capitoline eminence on which the university buildings were
placed, with the tremendous renaissance buildings of the Council
House and the Corinthian Town Hall, did not greatly impress
him.&nbsp; He saw rather the squalid slums from which these
pretentious buildings rose.&nbsp; It was so different, he
thought, from Oxford, and he passed the flagged courtyard with
its cool fountain and the benevolent statue of Sir Joseph Astill
in a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella on which the
sculptor had lavished all the feeling of his art, without the
least shadow of spiritual obeisance.</p>
<p>With two other long-legged candidates he had worked through
his papers in a small room whose windows overlooked the quiet
square and a phantom stream of noiseless traffic beyond.&nbsp;
The first paper had been mathematical, and its intricacies kept
his mind so busy that he had little time for reflection.&nbsp;
From time to time he would see one of the long-legged competitors
reducing the end of his penholder to wood-pulp in the earnestness
of ruminant thought; and occasionally the deep boom of the clock
in the tower of the Art Gallery would remind him that time was
veritably passing; but time passed swiftly, and he was almost
surprised <a name="page255"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
255</span>to find himself once more in an air that for all its
vitiation was less sleepy than that of the sealed examination
room.&nbsp; By the end of the first evening all that he feared in
the examination papers was over.&nbsp; To-morrow he would be on
his own ground and the modern university could do its
damnedest.</p>
<p>Next day the classical papers were distributed and Edwin, who
found them easy, could see that his pen-chewing friend was in a
bad way.&nbsp; All the passages set for translation were
familiar: the grammatical questions consisted of old catches that
had been drilled into him by Mr. Leeming in the Upper
Fourth.&nbsp; As far as he was concerned, it was a walk
over.&nbsp; He had time to take in more of his surroundings and
to watch the silent coloured stream of traffic filtering through
the narrows where the bulk of the Town Hall constricted the
street.&nbsp; At the end of each day he found his father
anxiously awaiting him.&nbsp; He was eager to see and handle the
examination papers for himself.&nbsp; He seemed impressed by
their difficulty, and Edwin found it hard to reassure him without
appearing objectionably superior.&nbsp; He seemed rather
surprised that Edwin, on the eve of such a formidable ordeal,
should choose to take out his bicycle and ride towards the hills,
so surprised that it became a matter for serious debate with
Edwin whether he should do as he wanted to do and appear
priggish, or affect an anxiety that didn&rsquo;t exist merely to
please his father.&nbsp; In the end he decided to be honest at
all costs.</p>
<p>The part of the examination that he enjoyed most was the
<i>viva-voce</i> in Classics.&nbsp; For this trial <a
name="page256"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 256</span>he was led
up many flights of stone steps to a room full of books in which
the Dean of the Faculty of Arts awaited him: a kindly, nervous
old man with a grey beard, with whom Edwin immediately felt at
home.&nbsp; His nervousness seemed to Edwin appropriate: it
implied the indubitable fact that in North Bromwich Arts was a
sideshow that counted for nothing, and that the professor&rsquo;s
dignity, as Dean of a learned Faculty, was a precarious and
unsubstantial thing.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your papers were excellent, . .
. excellent,&rdquo; he said to begin with.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now, I
should like you to read me something.&rdquo;&nbsp; He pointed to
a bookshelf.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let us start with some
Greek.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What would you like, sir?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s not what I should like.&nbsp; What would
you like to read?&nbsp; Something that really appeals to
you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin felt that the dean was watching him, like a cat stalking
a bird, as his fingers approached the bookshelf.&nbsp; It was a
curious responsibility, for it would be an awful shame if he
chose something that the old man didn&rsquo;t approve of.&nbsp;
Sophocles. . . .&nbsp; Why not Sophocles?</p>
<p>He picked out the Antigone, and chose the great
chorus:&mdash;</p>
<blockquote><p>&#7964;&rho;&omega;&sigmaf;
&#7936;&nu;&#8055;&kappa;&alpha;&tau;&epsilon;
&mu;&#8049;&chi;&alpha;&nu;,<br />
&#7964;&rho;&omega;&sigmaf;, &#8001;&sigmaf; &#7952;&nu;
&kappa;&tau;&#8053;&mu;&alpha;&sigma;&iota;
&pi;&#8055;&pi;&tau;&epsilon;&iota;&sigmaf;, . . .</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s have it in Greek first.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin read it in the level voice which the Head of St.
Luke&rsquo;s had always used for the recitation of Greek
poetry.&nbsp; When he had finished the first strophe he looked up
and saw that the Dean&rsquo;s weak <a name="page257"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 257</span>eyes, beneath their tortoiseshell
spectacles, were brimming with tears.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That will do,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;unless you&rsquo;d
prefer to go on . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin read the antistrophe.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . I don&rsquo;t think you need translate
it,&rdquo; said the Dean.&nbsp; He paused for a moment, then,
replacing the volume, went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;In this university I
am known as the Professor of Dead Languages.&nbsp; Dead
languages.&nbsp; What?&rdquo;</p>
<p>They passed a pleasant half-hour together.&nbsp; In Latin
Edwin chose Lucretius and a passage from the Georgics, at the end
of which the Dean confided to him that he kept bees.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Thank you, that will do,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
gather that you are entering the Medical School. . . .&nbsp;
Well, it is a noble profession.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what we
should do without doctors, I&rsquo;m sure.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Four days later Mr. Ingleby received him at the breakfast
table with unconcealed emotion.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got
your scholarship, Edwin.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m . . . I&rsquo;m as
pleased as if I&rsquo;d won it myself.&nbsp; I never had the
opportunity of winning a scholarship in my life.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
hand in which he held the letter trembled.&nbsp; He kissed Edwin
fervently.&nbsp; &ldquo;This is a great day for me,&rdquo; he
said: and Edwin, glowing, felt that anything was worth while that
could give such pleasure to the man that he had determined to
love.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>On a bright morning at the beginning of September Edwin found
himself one of a crowd of ten or fifteen youths, waiting with a
varying degree of <a name="page258"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
258</span>assurance, outside the office of the Dean of the
Medical Faculty in James Street, a sordid thoroughfare in which
the pretentious buildings of the old College of Science hid its
hinder quarters.&nbsp; The door was small, and only distinguished
from its neighbours, a steam laundry and brassworker&rsquo;s
office, by a plate that bore the inscription, &ldquo;University
of North Bromwich.&nbsp; Medical School.&rdquo;&nbsp; Inside the
door stood a wooden box for a porter, usually empty, but in its
moments of occupation surveying a long, dark cloakroom with a
hundred or more numbered lockers and corresponding clothes-hooks,
on a few of which undergraduates&rsquo; gowns and battered
mortar-boards were hanging.&nbsp; This morning the Dean was
holding audience of all the first year men, and each of the crowd
in which Edwin now found himself a negligible unit, was waiting
until his name should be called from the office, and, in the
meantime, surveying his companions with suspicion and being
surveyed with a more confident and collective suspicion by
seniors who happened to drift through the corridors on business
or idleness, and showed evidence of their initiation by
familiarity with the porter.</p>
<p>Only one face in the company was in the least familiar to
Edwin: that of a ponderous young man with immaculate black hair
carefully parted in the middle, who had sat stolidly through the
Astill Exhibition examination a few desks away from him.&nbsp; As
he did not appear to be anxious to recognise this fact, Edwin
abandoned his own intention of doing so, and, like the rest of
the company, possessed his soul in silence.&nbsp; In the meantime
he <a name="page259"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
259</span>watched the others with a good deal of interest and
speculation.</p>
<p>They were a strangely mixed company: a few of them, of whom
Edwin himself was one, mere boys, to whom the air of the
schoolroom still clung: some obvious men of the world,
scrupulously, even doggily dressed, in an age when the fancy
waistcoat had reached the zenith of its daring; others, and one
other in particular, a seedy looking person with a dejected fair
moustache, were clearly old enough to be the fathers of the
youngest.&nbsp; It was to the second of these classes, the
bloods, that Edwin found his attention attracted, and
particularly to a paragon of elegance, whose waistcoat was the
orange colour of a blackbird&rsquo;s bill with light blue
enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathematically bisected and
shone with expensive unguents, and whose chin differed from that
of Edwin in being shaved from sheer necessity instead of from
motives of encouragement.</p>
<p>This person exuded an atmosphere of prosperity and style that
took Edwin&rsquo;s fancy immensely, and he wore grey flannel
trousers as correctly turned up as any that Edwin had seen upon
the enchanted platform of the station at Oxford.&nbsp; It was
evident that the process of waiting bored him; for he took out of
the pocket of the amazing waistcoat a gold hunter watch with a
front enamelled in the same shade of light blue.&nbsp; The lid
flicked open noiselessly when he touched a spring, and Edwin
began to be exercised in his mind as to what happened when he put
on a waistcoat of a different pattern, as obviously a person of
this degree of magnificence must <a name="page260"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 260</span>frequently do.&nbsp; Did he change
the buttons, or did he change the watch?&nbsp; Edwin, surveying
him, looked unconsciously at his own Waterbury; and, as he did
so, the magnificent creature glanced at him with a pair of savage
brown eyes, and, as Edwin decided, summed him up for good and
all.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mr. Harrop, please,&rdquo; said the porter.&nbsp; And
Mr. Harrop pocketed his hunter and disdainfully entered the
office.</p>
<p>Edwin, relieved from his scrutiny, turned his attention to the
most impressive figure of all: a young man fully six feet four in
height, but so broadly and heavily built that his tallness was
scarcely noticeable.&nbsp; His face was good-humoured, and very
plain, with the look of battered obstinacy that may sometimes be
seen in that of a boxer.&nbsp; Perhaps this idea was reinforced
by the fact that his short nose was broken, and that he carried
his whole face a little forward, staring out at the world from
under bushy black eyebrows.&nbsp; He seemed made for rough usage,
and his undoubted strength was qualified by a degree of
awkwardness that showed itself in his clumsy hands.&nbsp; These,
at the present time, were clasped behind his back, beneath the
folds of a brand-new undergraduate&rsquo;s gown that, because of
his great height, looked ridiculously small.&nbsp; His whole
aspect was one of terrific earnestness.&nbsp; Evidently he was
taking this business, as he would surely have taken any other,
seriously.&nbsp; That, no doubt, was the reason why on this
occasion he alone appeared in academical dress.&nbsp; His clasped
hands, his lowered head, his bulldog neck all spoke of a <a
name="page261"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
261</span>determination to go through with this adventure at all
costs.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mr. Brown,&rdquo; said the porter, and nearly
blundering into the returning elegance of Mr. Harrop, he slouched
into the Dean&rsquo;s office as though he were entering the ring
for the heavy-weight championship of the world.</p>
<p>In the end Edwin found himself left alone with a youth of his
own age, a tall, loose-limbed creature, with an indefinite
humorous face, a close crop of curly fair hair and blue
eyes.&nbsp; Edwin rather liked the look of him.&nbsp; He was
young, and seemed approachable, and though his striped flannel
suit was more elegant than Edwin&rsquo;s and he wore a school tie
of knitted silk, Edwin took the risk of addressing him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We seem to be the last.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; I expect the Dean will keep me last of all,
bad cess to him!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s because I happen to be a sort
of cousin of the old devil&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp; He spoke with a
soft brogue that had come from the south of Ireland.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mr. Ingleby, please.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin pulled himself together and entered the Dean&rsquo;s
office.</p>
<p>A pleasant room: at one big desk a suave, clean-shaven
gentleman with thin sandy hair and gold-rimmed spectacles.&nbsp;
At another a little dark man with a bald head and a typewriter in
front of him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mr. Ingleby?&rdquo; said the first.&nbsp; His voice was
refined, if a little too precise.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, Mr. Ingleby, what are you going to do?&nbsp; <a
name="page262"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 262</span>Ah, yes . .
. you are the Astill scholar.&nbsp; Very good.&nbsp; Very
good.&nbsp; Are you proposing to take a London degree?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&nbsp; North Bromwich.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well . . . it is possible you may change your mind
later.&nbsp; Have you taken the London Matriculation?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&nbsp; I was on the classical side at St.
Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; I was reading for a scholarship at
Oxford.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And changed your mind . . . or&rdquo; (shrewdly)
&ldquo;had it changed for you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Is your father a doctor?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;&nbsp; It really doesn&rsquo;t matter what my
father is, thought Edwin, and the Dean, as though answering his
reflection, said:&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . .&nbsp; That doesn&rsquo;t matter.&rdquo;&nbsp;
And, after a pause: &ldquo;Well, Mr. . . . er . . . Ingleby, you
have made a good beginning.&nbsp; I hope it will continue
satisfactorily.&nbsp; That is all, thank you.&nbsp;
Good-morning.&rdquo;&nbsp; He held out his hand to Edwin, who was
astonished into putting out a moist hand himself.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; continued the Dean in a suave, reflective
voice, &ldquo;you will pay your fees to my secretary, Mr.
Hadley.&nbsp; This is . . . er . . . Mr. Hadley.&nbsp;
Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr. Hadley acknowledged the introduction with a lift of the
right eyebrow and Edwin left the room.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mr. Martin,&rdquo; said the secretary, as he left, and
&ldquo;Mr. Martin, please,&rdquo; the porter repeated.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I say, wait a moment for me,&rdquo; said the
loose-limbed Irishman to Edwin in passing.</p>
<p>It was so friendly as to be cheering.</p>
<p><a name="page263"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
263</span>&ldquo;He seems a decent old bird,&rdquo; said Martin,
emerging a few minutes later.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I thought you said he was your cousin?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;So he is.&nbsp; You see I&rsquo;m Irish, and so is he;
and in Ireland pretty nearly everybody who is anybody is related
to everybody else.&rdquo;&nbsp; He plunged into a lengthy
demonstration of the relationships of the Southern aristocracy,
with warnings as to the gulfs that separated the Martins from the
Martyns, and the Plunketts from the Plunkets, rambling away
through a world of high-breeding and penury in which all the
inhabitants called each other by their Christian names, and spent
their lives in hunting, point-to-point racing, and elaborate
practical jokes.&nbsp; A new world to Edwin.</p>
<p>They strolled down Sackville Row together, and cutting through
the Arcades came out into the wide thoroughfare of Queen Street
that had been driven through an area of slums in honour of
Victoria&rsquo;s first jubilee.</p>
<p>&ldquo;By the way, what&rsquo;s your school?&rdquo; said Denis
Martin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;St. Luke&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Never heard of it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose you would, in Ireland.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I didn&rsquo;t go to school in Ireland.&nbsp;
Nobody does.&nbsp; I was at Marlborough.&nbsp; Is St.
Luke&rsquo;s one of those soccer schools?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good Lord, no. . . .&nbsp; We play rugger.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;re pretty good.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who do you play?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Merchant Taylors and St. Paul&rsquo;s, and one or two
others.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page264"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
264</span>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m. . . .&nbsp; They&rsquo;re day
schools, aren&rsquo;t they?&nbsp; Is St. Luke&rsquo;s that
sort?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin, with enthusiasm, expounded the St. Luke&rsquo;s legend,
that nobody outside of St. Luke&rsquo;s has ever been known to
believe.&nbsp; Martin, meanwhile, looked a little supercilious
and bored.&nbsp; He spoke as from a distant world in a tone that
implied that the people of North Bromwich could never call each
other by their Christian names or hunt or race or play practical
jokes with an air of being born to it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I expect we&rsquo;re a pretty mixed lot here,&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>And Edwin, with the guilty consciousness of being more than a
little mixed himself, replied: &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;An extraordinary collection.&nbsp; That great dark
fellow looks an absolute tyke.&nbsp; Then there&rsquo;s the chap
with the waistcoat&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; Harrop was the name.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know the name,&rdquo; said Martin
dubiously.&nbsp; &ldquo;Never heard of the family.&nbsp; He was
wearing an Oriel tie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oriel. . . .&nbsp; Do you mean Oxford?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, one of my cousins was there.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
how I know it.&nbsp; I should think they turfed him out on
account of that waistcoat.&nbsp; Still, Oxford isn&rsquo;t what
it used to be.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;In the eyes of a Southern
Unionist,&rdquo; he might have added.&nbsp; But the news was
grateful to Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t wonder,&rdquo;
Martin went on, &ldquo;if lots of decent people didn&rsquo;t end
by coming to schools like this.&nbsp; I expect it is the
Dean&rsquo;s idea, you know.&nbsp; I say, what about lunch?&nbsp;
Do you know of any decent place?&rdquo;</p>
<p>In ancient days, when he had come into North Bromwich shopping
with his mother, Edwin had <a name="page265"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 265</span>always been taken to Battie&rsquo;s,
the great confectioner&rsquo;s in Queen Street, but now, passing
the doors in this exalted company, he felt that the company of a
crowd of shabby shopping women would hardly be suitable: besides,
he might even run the risk of meeting his Aunt Laura, who also
frequented the shop, so he left Battie&rsquo;s prudently
alone.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I know one place,&rdquo; said Martin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
should think it&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; The food&rsquo;s decent
anyway.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He led the way up a side street to an elegant resort
frequented by the professional classes of North Bromwich, where
them was a long counter set out with sandwiches like a buffet at
a dance, and all the customers seemed at home.&nbsp; In the
ordinary way Edwin would not have dared to enter it, but Martin,
with the elegant confidence of Southern Unionism, showed him the
way, and seated at a marble-topped table they trifled with Plover
on toast.&nbsp; Martin, of course, did the choosing, and in his
dealings with the tiny carcass showed a familiarity with the
correct method of consuming small birds that Edwin was pleased to
learn.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ever shoot plover?&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; No .
. . Edwin had never shot anything: he didn&rsquo;t particularly
want to shoot anything; but he realised that it was a great
accomplishment to be able to talk about it as though he had never
done anything else.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll pay,&rdquo; said Martin.&nbsp; &ldquo;We can
square up afterwards.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They did so and, thawed by the process of feeding, began to
talk more easily.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you digging in this
place?&rdquo; Martin asked.&nbsp; Edwin told him that he lived in
the country.</p>
<p><a name="page266"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
266</span>&ldquo;In the country?&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t know there
was any here.&nbsp; Have you any decent shooting?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Unfortunately, no.&rdquo;&nbsp; He remembered, however,
the solitary trout under the bridge below the abbey.&nbsp;
&ldquo;There&rsquo;s fishing of sorts,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What sorts?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, trout&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Brown trout?&nbsp; There&rsquo;s not much fun in
that.&nbsp; White trout . . . sea trout you call them in England
. . . are good sport.&nbsp; Still, we&rsquo;ll have a day
together next spring.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll get my rods
over.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The subject was dangerous, and so Edwin asked him where he was
living: &ldquo;With your cousin, I suppose.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, no. . . .&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know the old divil,
you know.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve rooms with an old lady up in
Alvaston.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s rather a decent sort.&nbsp; House
full of animals.&rdquo;&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t specify what the
animals were.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d better go and unpack some of
my things.&nbsp; I suppose I shall see you at the Chemistry
Lecture to-morrow.&nbsp; So long. . . .&nbsp; Oh, I forgot. . .
.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s your name?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby. . .&nbsp; Right-o.&rdquo;&nbsp; He boarded a
passing bus with the air of stepping on to a coach and four.</p>
<p>Edwin took the next train home.&nbsp; On the opposite platform
of the station he caught a glimpse of the great bulk of the man
named Brown walking up and down with earnestness in his eyes and
under his arm a huge parcel of books.&nbsp; He gave Edwin the
impression of wanting to throw himself into the adventure of the
medical curriculum as he might have thrown himself into a Rugby
scrum, expecting <a name="page267"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
267</span>a repetition of the tremendous battering that he seemed
already to have undergone.</p>
<p>Thinking of him, and of the aristocratic Martin, and of
Harrop, a product which Oriel had finished to the last waistcoat
button, and, more dimly, of the elderly gentleman with the
dejected moustaches, it seemed to Edwin that he himself was
appallingly young and callow and inexperienced.&nbsp; How was he
going to stand up to these people with their knowledge of the
world and its ways: men who had already, by virtue of their birth
or experience, learned how to dress and live and move without
effort in the crowded world?&nbsp; Yet with them, he knew, he
must now take his place.&nbsp; It would be difficult . . .
awfully difficult.&nbsp; He had everything, even the most
elementary rules of conduct, to learn.&nbsp; He was a child who
had never known another human being except his mother and a few
school friends of his own age.&nbsp; He had not even the
<i>savoir-vivre</i> of Griffin.&nbsp; And, in this new life, it
seemed to him that the dreams on which he had depended must be
useless&mdash;or even more, a positive handicap to his
success.</p>
<p>The moments of sudden spiritual enlightenment that one reads
of in the lives of saints, or of converts to Salvationism, are
not a common experience in those of ordinary men; and though, in
the turn of every tide, there is a critical period, measurable by
the fraction of a second, in which the waters that have swayed
forwards retire upon themselves, to the eyes of an observer the
change of motion is so gradual as to be only slowly
perceived.&nbsp; In Edwin&rsquo;s life the death of his mother
had been the <a name="page268"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
268</span>real point of crisis; but this he had only dimly
realised when his hopes of Oxford had been dashed for ever in a
third-class compartment hurtling under Bredon Hill.&nbsp; Between
it and the present moment there had hung a period of dead water
(so to speak) in which the current of his life had seemed
suspended; but now he knew that there was no doubt but that a
change had overtaken him, and that he would never again be the
same.</p>
<p>All his life, up to this point, had been curiously inorganic:
a haphazard succession of novel and bewildering sensations: a
kaleidoscope of sensual impressions changing almost too rapidly
to be appreciated&mdash;so rapidly that it had been impossible
for him to think of one in relation to another.&nbsp; Some of
them had been painful; some enthralling in their beauty; some
merely engrossing because they were full of awe: yet all had been
ecstatic, and tinged in some degree with a visionary light.&nbsp;
Now, as always, it was clear that he must be a dreamer; but, from
this day onwards, it also became clear that his visions must be
something more to him than a series of coloured impressions,
succeeding one another without reason and accepted without
explanation.&nbsp; In the future they must be correlated with
experience and the demands of life.&nbsp; In that lost age of
innocence the people with whom he came into contact had
interested him only as figures passing through the scenes that
were spread for his delectation.&nbsp; They had been external to
him.&nbsp; He had lived within himself and his loneliness had
been so self-sufficient that it would have made no great
difference to him if they had not been there.&nbsp; <a
name="page269"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 269</span>Now he was
to take his part in the drama at which, in times before, he had
merely sat as a bemused spectator.&nbsp; It was a stirring and a
terrifying prospect.</p>
<p>The train from North Bromwich stopped at every station, and
the whole of the journey lay through the black desert that
fringes the iron city, a vast basin of imprisoned smoke, bounded
by hills that had once been crowned with woods, but were now
dominated by the high smoke-stacks of collieries, many of them
ruined and deserted.&nbsp; At a dirty junction, so undermined
with workings that the bridge and the brick offices were
distorted in a manner which suggested that the whole affair might
some day go down quick into the pit, he changed into the local
train.&nbsp; The railway company evidently did not consider the
passenger traffic of Halesby worth consideration, for the
carriages were old and grimy.&nbsp; Edwin chose a smoker because
the cushions were covered with American leather and therefore
more obviously clean.&nbsp; He found himself, in the middle of
his reflections, sitting opposite a coloured photograph of the
great gorge at Axcombe, a town that was served by the same
line.&nbsp; The picture carried him suddenly to another aspect of
his too complicated life.&nbsp; Really, the whole business was
hopelessly involved.&nbsp; He thought, grimly, how he could have
taken the wind out of Martin&rsquo;s genealogical sails by
blurting out the astounding intelligence that his uncle was a
gardener.&nbsp; And what would the gentleman with the waistcoat
have said?&nbsp; He laughed at the idea.</p>
<p>Through a short but sulphurous tunnel the train <a
name="page270"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 270</span>emerged
into the valley of the Stour: the vista of the hills unfolded,
and later the spire of Halesby church appeared at the
valley&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; Well, a beginning of the new life had
to be made some day, and now as well as ever.</p>
<p>Walking home along the cinder pathway beside the silting
fish-ponds it seemed to him that in the light of his new
experience, Halesby was a primitive and almost pitiable place,
and the same mood held him when he made his way home by the short
cut through Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s cloistered garden and entered his
father&rsquo;s house.&nbsp; Under the south wall the bed of
double stocks was still in flower, though faded and
bedraggled.&nbsp; Their scent reminded him of what a world of
experience he had traversed in less than three months.&nbsp; He
went straight up to his own bedroom.&nbsp; On the bed lay two
parcels addressed to him.&nbsp; The larger contained his
undergraduate&rsquo;s cap and gown.&nbsp; He put them on in front
of the glass and rather fancied himself.&nbsp; The act struck him
as in a way symbolical: it was the token of an initiation.&nbsp;
From that day forward he was a medical student.&nbsp; For five or
six years, probably for the rest of his life, he would spend his
time in the presence of the most bitter human experience; but
there was something elevating in the thought that he need not be
a helpless spectator: he would be able to effect positive good in
a way that no scholar and no preacher of religion or abstract
morality could possibly attain.&nbsp; &ldquo;This is my
life,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; Well, it was good to know anything
as definite as that.</p>
<p>The second parcel contained a number of <a
name="page271"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 271</span>technical
books dealing with the subjects of his first year&rsquo;s
curriculum: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Physiology, and
Anatomy.&nbsp; The last appeared to be the most exciting.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Fearfully and wonderfully made . . .&rdquo; he
thought.&nbsp; He set to work at once preparing the little room
for work, making it as comfortable as he could with a writing
table in the window that looked out over Shenstone&rsquo;s woods
and dethroning the superannuated Henty and Fenn from the
bookshelf.&nbsp; He could not find it in his heart to treat his
poets so cavalierly, and so there they stayed.&nbsp; Greek and
Latin and English.&nbsp; &ldquo;I shall never drop my
classics,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; A resolution that has been
forgotten nearly as often as it has been made.&nbsp; In the
Blenheim orange-tree at the bottom of the garden a thrush was
singing.&nbsp; Bullfinches were fighting shrilly in the raspberry
canes.&nbsp; He threw open the window, and there ascended to him
the heavy, faded perfume of the bed of stocks.&nbsp; On the
mantelpiece stood a photograph of his mother.&nbsp; Looking at
it, it seemed to him that she smiled.</p>
<h3><a name="page272"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
272</span>CHAPTER II<br />
MORTALITY BEHOLD . . .</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">He</span> was happy: even Halesby became a
grateful place of retirement after his long days in North
Bromwich.&nbsp; The mornings of early autumn were very beautiful,
and it was with a good deal of zest that he would scramble
through his breakfast and leave the house early to catch the
eight o&rsquo;clock train.&nbsp; He usually made use of the short
cut through Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s garden and the cinder path beside
the fish-ponds, and in this brisk walk, with the blood of youth
running happily in his veins, he would catch a little of the
exhilarating atmosphere of early morning in the country.&nbsp;
When the frosts began, as they do early on that high plateau, the
morning air seemed stronger and more bracing than ever.</p>
<p>Circumstance, in a little more than three months, had exalted
him to the state of those metropolitan season-ticket holders
whose majesty he had disturbed on the day when he left St.
Luke&rsquo;s for good.&nbsp; He was now in a position to
appreciate their exclusiveness, and to look upon all chance
people who intruded on the privacies of the eight o&rsquo;clock
train with the same mingled curiosity and <a
name="page273"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
273</span>contempt.&nbsp; In every way a season ticket, in its
cover of dark blue morocco, was a thing superior to the
transitory and ignoble pasteboard.&nbsp; He could hardly resist a
sigh of bored superiority on the first occasion when he produced
it.&nbsp; He travelled second-class, thus rising to the highest
level of luxury in travelling permitted to any inhabitants of
Halesby, unless it were the local baronet or Mr. Willis of Mawne,
whom even Sir Joseph Hingston could not outdo.</p>
<p>Most of the other season-ticket holders travelled second; and
in this way, by making a habit of taking his place in the same
carriage, for sentimental reasons one that contained a series of
west-country pictures, Edwin began to be on speaking terms with
many members of this select company.&nbsp; They included a youth
articled to a solicitor in North Bromwich, the son of a Halesby
postmaster, who was inclined to establish terms of familiarity; a
gentleman with a bloated complexion and a fawn-coloured bowler
hat, reputed to be a commercial traveller, who carried a bag in
which samples may well have been hidden; a superior person with a
gruff voice who was a clerk in a bank in the city, and on
Saturdays carried a brown canvas bag and a hockey stick; and a
withered man of fifty who travelled into North Bromwich daily on
some business connected with brass, and, on damp mornings,
exhibited evidences of an asthmatic complaint that aroused
Edwin&rsquo;s budding professional interest.</p>
<p>It was he who first admitted Edwin to the conversation of the
compartment, by confessing to him that he had been the despair of
doctors since <a name="page274"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
274</span>childhood: that three specialists had assured his
mother that she would never rear that boy: that in spite of this
he had always paid four times as much in doctor&rsquo;s bills as
in income-tax, that in his belief they only kept him alive for
what they could get out of him, and that his life had been an
unending misery, as harrowing, upon his word, as that of any of
the sufferers who were illustrated in the papers holding their
backs with kidney complaint, until his missus had said:
&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t throw any more money away on these doctors,
John, I&rsquo;ll have a talk with Mr. Ingleby,&rdquo; . . . and
with the aid of Ingleby&rsquo;s Asthma Cure he had become
relatively whole.&nbsp; Evidently he knew who Edwin was.&nbsp;
&ldquo;What do you think of that now?&rdquo; he wheezed, and
covered the embarrassment into which Edwin was immediately thrown
by not waiting for his reply and continuing: &ldquo;I suppose,
now, you&rsquo;ll be learning to be a chemist like your
father?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . I&rsquo;m a medical student.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m
going to be a doctor.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well . . . I&rsquo;ll be damned,&rdquo; said the
asthmatical person.&nbsp; He did not say why; but the looks of
the superior bank clerk, who immediately lowered his paper and
stared at Edwin as though it were his duty to decide whether
Edwin were a fit person to enter a learned profession or not, and
then contemptuously went on with his reading, supplied the kind
of commentary that might have been intended.&nbsp; When the
asthmatical subject said that he was damned, the gentleman with
the bloated complexion and the fawn-coloured bowler, who always
opened his morning paper with fingers that <a
name="page275"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 275</span>trembled,
either with excitement or as a result of the night before, at the
column headed Turf Topics, gave a snigger and spat on the floor
to conceal it.&nbsp; And the articled clerk, at this display of
ill breeding, turned up his nose.</p>
<p>It was a strange little company that assembled in the
second-class smoker every morning; and the strangest part of it,
to Edwin, was the fact that each of them, entrenched, as it were,
behind his morning paper, affected a frigid disinterest, yet
eagerly listened to the conversation and eagerly scrutinised the
appearance of the others.&nbsp; All of them had their little
fixed habits.&nbsp; In one place they put their gloves: in
another their umbrellas.&nbsp; Every morning they began to read
their papers at the same column and folded them at the same point
in the journey.&nbsp; They seemed just as regular in their habits
as the wheels of the carriage in which they travelled, revolving
and stopping and shunting and being braked at an identical time
and place for six days out of the seven.</p>
<p>When he had tumbled to this, Edwin found that the whole of the
main line train that he caught every morning at the junction was
occupied by perhaps a hundred grouped units of the same
kind.&nbsp; It amused him to sample them; and when one appealed
to him he would become a member of it for a time and see what he
could make of it.&nbsp; Naturally there were more interesting
people on the main line than on the Halesby branch; and in the
end he himself became such a familiar figure on the eight-twenty
from the junction that he could say &ldquo;Good-morning&rdquo; to
nearly every group of seasons on the <a name="page276"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 276</span>train.&nbsp; He was even taken to
the heart of the superior gruff-voiced bank clerk in the Halesby
carriage.&nbsp; Indeed, he knew every one of them, finding them
human people who, in the manner of the Englishman and the
hedgehog, had put out their protective spikes upon a first
acquaintance.</p>
<p>The only Halesby traveller of whom he could make nothing was
the bloated person in the fawn-coloured bowler, who began the
morning with turf topics and then proceeded to suck a copying
pencil till his lips were the colour of his cheeks, and, thus
inspired, to underline the names of a number of horses in the
day&rsquo;s programme.&nbsp; Apart from his habit of spitting on
the floor, a custom which probably saved the poor man from death
by poisoning with copying ink, he was inoffensive.&nbsp; Edwin
was even sorry for him sometimes when he saw him hung up over his
forecasts.&nbsp; Then he would tilt the fawn-coloured bowler on
to the back of his head, and scratch his head under the sandy
fringe of hair.&nbsp; Edwin was sorry because, with a head like
that, it must have been so difficult to forecast anything.</p>
<p>He did not see many women on the morning train.&nbsp; In those
days female enterprise was a good deal checked by conventions
that died more slowly in the Midland plain than elsewhere.&nbsp;
From Halesby itself there were only four season-ticket holders of
the opposite sex.&nbsp; Two of them were employed in the same
large drapery establishment in Queen Street, and were excessively
ladylike and careful in all their behaviour.&nbsp; Edwin had
never spoke to either of them; but he discovered in both <a
name="page277"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 277</span>an
identical physical state: that peculiar greenish, waxen pallor
that appears to be the inevitable result of serving in a
draper&rsquo;s shop.&nbsp; The black dresses on which their
employers insisted, heightened this effect of fragility, and on
mornings when tiredness had made them start too late for the
train, so that they had to hurry over the last hundred yards,
Edwin would notice how they panted for breath within their
elegant corsets and how faint was the flush that came into their
cheeks.</p>
<p>He felt a little sorry for them; but they were not in the
least sorry for themselves.&nbsp; In Halesby their employment at
a monstrous third-rate drapery store gave them a position of
unusual distinction as arbiters of feminine fashions, and they
would not have exchanged their distinguished an&aelig;mia for any
other calling under the sun.&nbsp; In their profession this toxic
pallor, as of sea-kale blanched in a cellar, was regarded as an
asset.&nbsp; It was considered French.&nbsp; And did not their
shortness of breath, upon the least exertion or emotion, cause
their bosoms to rise and fall like those of the heroines of the
serial fiction that they read, when they were not too tired, in
the train?</p>
<p>Edwin was not attracted by them any more than by the other
couple: a pair of pupil teachers from an elementary school in one
of the northern suburbs, who also dressed for the part that they
were fulfilling in life, and wore spectacles as tokens of their
studiousness.&nbsp; The instinct of sex had as yet scarcely
asserted itself in him.&nbsp; He was a little curious about it,
and that was all.&nbsp; Subconsciously, perhaps, it found
expression in his anxieties about <a name="page278"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 278</span>his personal appearance.&nbsp; He
was beginning to take a considerable interest in what should or
should not be worn, treating it more as a matter of abstract
science than as one of practical politics; for he had few clothes
beyond those in which he had left St. Luke&rsquo;s, and was not
likely to have any opportunity of extending his wardrobe until
these were worn out.&nbsp; In those days the weekly called
<i>To-Day</i> had reached its most vigorous phase, and a column
headed Masculine Modes was a matter of earnest consideration to
Edwin every Thursday, when the paper appeared.&nbsp; In the
spring, he decided, he would buy an overcoat with Raglan
sleeves.&nbsp; The weekly authority, who styled himself
&ldquo;The Major,&rdquo; was dead nuts on Raglan sleeves.&nbsp;
Beneath this fashionable covering Edwin&rsquo;s interior defects
would be well hidden, and, given a natty red tie (<i>de
rigueur</i>, said the Major, with the indispensable blue serge
reefer suit) and a bowler hat with a curly, but not too curly,
brim, he should be able to compete with the burly bank clerk as
cynosure for the eyes of the pale young ladies in the
&ldquo;drapery&rdquo; and a spectacle of awe for the studious
pupil-teachers.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Edwin soon became absorbed in the routine of the first year
student&rsquo;s life, and had very little time to think about
anything else.&nbsp; He had to work hard to keep pace with it,
and the realisation of this was a striking lesson to him.&nbsp;
At St. Luke&rsquo;s he had found that his advance in knowledge
made the work progressively more easy.&nbsp; Here he was breaking
<a name="page279"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 279</span>new
ground from the beginning, acquiring knowledge of a kind that
owed nothing to general culture and came to him none the easier
for his possession of it.&nbsp; The only things in his new work
that seemed easy and logical to him were those scientific names
that were derived from Latin and Greek.&nbsp; Otherwise the very
rudiments and nature of the subjects were new to him.</p>
<p>The most astonishing part of the whole business was the way in
which the formidable assembly that had glared at him, as he
imagined, outside the Dean&rsquo;s office, simplified
itself.&nbsp; He had been prepared to find them creatures of a
different tissue from himself, and particularly such apparitions
as Harrop and the immense Brown.&nbsp; He soon saw that as far as
the career of Medicine was concerned they were identically in the
same box as himself: that neither knowledge of the world nor
elegance of attire could help either of them to acquire the
absolute knowledge that was the one thing essential to
success.&nbsp; It made no matter that these two approached the
same problem from essentially different angles: Brown with his
earnest brows knitted and a look of indomitable but baffled
determination; Harrop as though the issue didn&rsquo;t really
matter as long as the crease in his trousers was in the right
place; but in either case Edwin saw that they had to work as hard
or harder than he did.</p>
<p>His first acquaintance, Martin, who was now becoming his
friend, since the work that they shared in common bridged the
social gulf of which Edwin alone was aware, seemed to possess the
faculty of <a name="page280"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
280</span>doing things and learning facts almost in spite of
himself.&nbsp; He was not in any way brilliant, but he had a way
with him and a certain shrewdness that not infrequently underlies
the superficial indolence of the Celt.&nbsp; Above all things
Edwin found him good company, for the picturesqueness of his
brogue and a sense of humour, not of the verbal kind in which
Edwin himself dealt, but the broader humour that arises from
situations, and personal characteristics, made his society a
peculiar joy.&nbsp; At the first lecture on Chemistry, a dull
dissertation on first principles, Edwin had gravitated to the
seat next to him, and for the rest of the term they kept the same
places and afterwards compared notes.&nbsp; Edwin couldn&rsquo;t
help liking him, even though he was conscious of the radical
social misunderstanding that underlay their friendship.</p>
<p>The technical sciences of Chemistry and Physics made no strong
appeal to Edwin.&nbsp; They seemed to him matters of empirical
knowledge that must be acquired according to schedule but would
have very little connection with the work of his profession, and
he found them too near to the desperate subject of mathematics to
be congenial.&nbsp; He could find nothing romantic or human in
them; and this fact, in itself, is a sufficient indictment of the
way in which they were taught.</p>
<p>Anatomy was another matter altogether.&nbsp; He had
anticipated the beginning of this study with a feeling in which
awe and an instinctive distaste were mingled.&nbsp; From the
first day he had known that somewhere up at the top of the
building lay the dissecting room, a place that his fancy painted
as a <a name="page281"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
281</span>kind of Chamber of Horrors.&nbsp; On his way to the
theatre, in which the Dean lectured on Anatomy with a scholarly
refinement of phrase that transcended the natural elegance of
Martin and a fascinating collection of coloured chalks, he had
passed the gloomy door and seen a blackboard on which the names
of the Prosectors were recorded in white lettering.&nbsp; But he
preferred not to look inside.&nbsp; Martin, to whom all
adventures came more easily, settled the point for him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I say,&rdquo; he said immediately after the lecture,
&ldquo;have you put yourself down for a part?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A part?&nbsp; What do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Anatomy.&nbsp; Dissecting, They&rsquo;re shared between
two, you know.&nbsp; In the first term we&rsquo;re supposed to do
an Upper or a Lower.&nbsp; Suppose we go shares in
one&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;Which shall
it be?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, I think an Upper will be better.&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s less fat and mess about it.&nbsp; We&rsquo;d better
go and choose one now.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;All right.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come along, then.&rdquo;&nbsp; Martin opened the door
of the dissecting room and held it while Edwin entered.&nbsp; It
was a long, irregular chamber, with a low glass roof and an
asphalt floor.&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s first impression was one of
light and space: the second, of a penetrating odour unlike
anything that he had smelt before.&nbsp; He could not give a name
to it, and indeed it was complex, being compact of a pungent,
unknown antiseptic and another fainter smell that was, in fact,
that of ancient mortality.&nbsp; The effect of the whole was
strange but not nauseating as <a name="page282"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 282</span>he would have expected.&nbsp; All
down the room at short intervals long zinc tables, with a tin
bucket at the head of each, were ranged.&nbsp; Most of the tables
were empty; but on four or five of them &ldquo;subjects&rdquo;
were either displayed or lay draped in coarse, unbleached
calico.&nbsp; One or two of them sprawled on their faces, but
most of them, being as yet unappropriated, were supported under
their backs by small metal platforms from which the heads rolled
back and the limbs were stretched out in a posture of extreme but
petrified agony.&nbsp; To Edwin&rsquo;s eyes it was a lamentable
and terrible sight.&nbsp; He wondered by what chain of
degradations the body of a man who had lived and known the youth
and pride of body that he himself possessed, who had experienced
aspirations and dreams and hope and love, should descend to this
final indignity.&nbsp; He stood still.&nbsp; He did not dare, for
the moment, to come nearer.</p>
<p>&ldquo;How do they get here?&rdquo; he asked Martin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, they&rsquo;re paupers, you know.&nbsp; Old men and
women, most of them, who die in the workhouses and are not
claimed by their relatives.&nbsp; Instead of burying them they
send them along here.&nbsp; The anatomy porters collect
them.&nbsp; Then they&rsquo;re pickled for so long in a kind of
vat in the cellars of this place, and they inject them with
arsenic to preserve them, and pump red paint into their arteries
so that they&rsquo;re easier to dissect.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t
like the job myself; but I suppose the porters are used to
it.&nbsp; You get used to anything, you know.&nbsp; Besides, they
aren&rsquo;t a bit like they are when they&rsquo;re first
dead.&nbsp; I think that&rsquo;s the chap for us.&nbsp; I had a
look <a name="page283"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 283</span>at
him the other day.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s always better to choose an
old one.&nbsp; The muscles are cleaner.&nbsp; Less
work.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They approached the second table.&nbsp; The subject was an old
and withered man: his grey hair was shaven, and his mouth hung
open, showing that he had lost his teeth.&nbsp; Martin had been
quite right.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t look in the least like a dead
man.&nbsp; He did not look like a man at all: only a pathetic,
tanned skeleton with tight-drawn sinews and toughened skin: a
dried mummy, from which all the contours of humanity had shrunk
away.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t so bad after all.&nbsp; The picture
that Edwin&rsquo;s imagination had anticipated, that of a crude
and horrible human shambles, was not here.&nbsp; No . . . the
idea of humanity was too remote to be in the least
insistent.&nbsp; For a moment, in spite of this consolation,
Edwin went pale.&nbsp; Martin noticed it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I say, this isn&rsquo;t going to turn you up, is
it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; I&rsquo;m all right.&nbsp; I was only .
. . thinking.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thinking?&rdquo; said Martin, with a laugh.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t do too much of that if I were you.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;d better make a start to-morrow on the right
Upper.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll put our names down.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He turned towards the glass case in which hung notices of
lectures and the printed cards on which the names of dissectors
were recorded, and while he did so Edwin still stood
thinking.&nbsp; He thought: Was this really a man who had lived
and breathed and aged and suffered?&nbsp; Where had he been
born?&nbsp; How long ago?&nbsp; Had he ever loved?&nbsp; Had he
ever married?&nbsp; Had he ever wondered what the future would
bring to him? surely his fancies had never <a
name="page284"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 284</span>envisaged
this.&nbsp; Perhaps he had been born in some remote hamlet of the
marches, some sweet smelling village like Far Forest, from which
the iron tentacles of the city had drawn him inwards and sapped
his life, leaving, in the end, this dry shell, like the sucked
carcass of a fly blowing in a spider&rsquo;s web.&nbsp; If this
were the end of poverty and desolation, what a terrible thing
poverty must be.&nbsp; Did the poor and the outcast ever dream
that they might come to this?&nbsp; And yet, after all, what did
it matter? . . .</p>
<p>He awoke from his dream.&nbsp; It was evident that he was the
only dreamer in that long room.&nbsp; At many of the other tables
second year men were sitting quietly dissecting or gossiping or
thumbing manuals of practical anatomy yellow with human
grease.&nbsp; It amazed him that men should be able to joke and
smoke their pipes and appear to be contented in such an
atmosphere; but the wisdom of Martin&rsquo;s phrase returned to
him: &ldquo;You get used to anything, you know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Among the dissectors already at work in their white overalls,
he saw the ponderous frame of the man called Brown.&nbsp; He, at
any rate, was not letting the grass grow under his feet.&nbsp;
Already he was engaged in reflecting the skin from the
&ldquo;Lower&rdquo; on which he was working.&nbsp; His clumsy
hands found the work difficult, as was shown by the anxiety of
his partner, an immaculate smooth young man, whom Edwin already
knew by the name of Maskew, dressed in the Major&rsquo;s
indispensable navy serge reefer, with the correct red tie and a
big orchid in <a name="page285"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
285</span>his buttonhole.&nbsp; He took an elaborate meerschaum
pipe out of his mouth to protest:&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good Lord, Brown, there&rsquo;s another cutaneous nerve
gone phut.&nbsp; Do be careful!&rdquo;</p>
<p>And Brown, with an exaggerated earnestness:&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I say, old man, I am sorry.&nbsp; I simply can&rsquo;t
use the damned things.&nbsp; Do you mean to say that&rsquo;s a
nerve?&rdquo;&nbsp; He held up in his forceps a tiny white
filament of tissue.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Maskew, returning to his pipe.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Branch of the great gluteal.&nbsp; Listen to what
Cunningham says: &lsquo;The buttock is liberally supplied with
cutaneous nerves: a fact much appreciated by
schoolboys.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
<p>Brown scratched his head with the handle of his scalpel.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m in an absolute fog.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d
better take this job on to-morrow, and I&rsquo;ll do the
reading.&nbsp; What does &lsquo;cutaneous&rsquo; mean,
anyway?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Cutis,&rdquo; thought Edwin, &ldquo;Skin.&rdquo;&nbsp;
After all, it seemed, the dead languages had their uses.&nbsp; By
this time he had recovered from the first shock of his distaste;
he was getting used to the odour of the room, and so, a moment
later, he and Martin strolled over to a table at which one of the
prosectors was engaged in preparing a specimen for the
Dean&rsquo;s lectures.&nbsp; It was almost pleasant to watch the
deftness with which he defined the line of a pink, injected
artery, wielding his scalpel as delicately and as surely as a
painter at work on a canvas.&nbsp; They watched him working in
silence.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nice part, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; he said
with condescension.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Martin, &ldquo;this sort of thing must
be rattling good practice for surgery.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page286"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
286</span>&ldquo;Oh, surgery&rsquo;s quite different,&rdquo; said
the prosector.&nbsp; &ldquo;This is a lazy job.&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s no hurry about it.&nbsp; This fellow won&rsquo;t
bleed to death.&rdquo;</p>
<p>So Edwin and Denis Martin began to work on their Upper, and
the dissecting room that had been an abode of horror and an
incentive to philosophy became no more than the scene of their
daily labours.&nbsp; Edwin accepted his new callousness without
regret for the sensitive perceptions that he had lost, for he saw
that his heart and his imagination were not really less tender
for the change; they had merely come to a working agreement with
the demands of his new life, and had attained this satisfactory
state not so much by a suppression of sensibility as by an
insistence on the objective aspects of his work.</p>
<p>This fact explained to him, at the very beginning of his
career, the fallacy of medical callousness in relation to pain or
physical distress.&nbsp; He saw, on reflection, that if a doctor
exaggerated the importance of subjective sensations in his
patient he might well lose sight of his own object, which was
nothing more nor less than removing their cause: that, for
example, the fear of death, the anxiety of relatives and the
patient&rsquo;s own perception of intolerable pain, were of
infinitely less importance to the physician than the presence of
a focus of danger in the patient&rsquo;s appendix.&nbsp; A
sustained objectivity was the only attitude of mind in which a
doctor could live at the same time happily and efficiently.</p>
<p>The only feature of the dissecting room that now seemed
objectionable was the smell of the powerful <a
name="page287"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 287</span>antiseptic
that was used for preserving the subjects.&nbsp; For a week or
two Edwin was conscious of its pervading every moment of his
life, his train-journeys, his meal-times, even his sleep.&nbsp;
But in a little time his olfactory nerves became so used to it
that they discounted its presence, and the fact that his
neighbours in railway carriages did not seem to shrink from him,
convinced him that after all he did not go about the world
saturated in odours of the charnel house.</p>
<p>The winter term went on, and to the sense of hurry and
frustration that had embarrassed him at first and found its
perfect expression in the knitted brows of the monstrous Brown,
succeeded an atmosphere of leisure and method and ease.&nbsp;
Edwin had time for other things than work.&nbsp; He began to know
the men of his year, and to discover that even the most
formidable of them weren&rsquo;t half as formidable as they had
seemed.&nbsp; Harrop, indeed, was still a little remote.&nbsp;
After the spaciousness of Oriel, where he had devoted a couple of
years to a liberal education in which the acquisition of
knowledge was of less importance than the acquisition of style,
North Bromwich, with its concentration on the virtues rather than
the graces of life and the very questionable sartorial shapes
that inhabited it, naturally seemed a little cheap; but in a
little time even Harrop became modified and humble if a little
contemptuous, and the most resplendent of his waistcoats retained
no more significance than the oriflamme of a lost cause.</p>
<p>Brown was the more approachable of the two, and for Brown,
Edwin soon conceived something <a name="page288"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 288</span>that was very nearly an
affection.&nbsp; With his impressive physique and his experience
of a rough world in which Edwin had never moved, was mingled a
childlike enthusiasm for his new work, a rich, blundering good
humour, and great generosity.&nbsp; He was not clever, and showed
an intense admiration for better heads than his own; but for all
that he was much more intelligent than he looked, and to Edwin
his enthusiasm and earnestness were worth a good deal more than
his intellectual attainments.</p>
<p>Once or twice, wandering into the Anatomical Museum, he had
come upon Brown standing rapt in front of a specimen dissection
or quietly sweating up bones with a Gray&rsquo;s <i>Anatomy</i>
open before him, and he had sung out to Edwin as if he were an
old friend of his own age and they had put in an hour of work
together.&nbsp; &ldquo;You know, you&rsquo;re a lot quicker than
I am,&rdquo; said Brown.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose it comes of being
decently educated.&nbsp; I expect that when you were learning
Latin and Greek I was knocking about the world making a damn fool
of myself.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then they would light their pipes (the
dissecting room had made smoking necessary to Edwin) and Brown
would yarn on for half an hour about his romantic adventures, his
bitter quarrels with his people, the adventures that had befallen
him in Paris when he went there to play football for the
Midlands, in all of which the passionate, headstrong, obstinate
and withal lovable nature of the big fellow would appear.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I expect it all sounds to you like a rotten waste of
time, mucking about with my life like this,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;But you know I&rsquo;m not at all sorry I&rsquo;ve had <a
name="page289"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 289</span>it. . .
.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t take up this doctoring business in a
hurry, without thinking about it.&nbsp; I thrashed the matter
out; and I came to the conclusion that doctoring&rsquo;s a good
human sort of game: it&rsquo;s a sort of chance of pulling people
out of the rotten messes of one kind or another that they get
themselves into&mdash;through no fault of their own, poor devils,
just because they&rsquo;re made like you and me and the rest of
us.&nbsp; If you go on the bust, or knock about the country with
a football team on tour, or go on the tramp and sleep in a hedge
or a barn or a Rowton House, as I did when I had the last
flare-up with the old man, you rub against a lot of people.&nbsp;
They&rsquo;re all just the same as yourself, you know.&nbsp; You
can see yourself in the best of them as well as the worst; and,
taking them all round, they&rsquo;re all damned good at the
bottom.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve all got to fight out their own way in
life with their heads or their fists or their feet.&nbsp; And the
only chap that can really help them in it is a doctor.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s the conclusion I&rsquo;ve come to.&nbsp; God! . . .
you&rsquo;ll scarcely believe it, but once I was converted.&nbsp;
I know it&rsquo;s damn funny; but it&rsquo;s a fact that when I
was a youngster and had been on the periodical bust a revivalist
chap got hold of me and persuaded me that I was saved.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s a funny sort of feeling, I can tell you.&nbsp; I
thought I was going off my nut until I went to see a doctor and
he put my liver right.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a fine humane game,
Ingleby.&nbsp; You can take it from me. . . .&nbsp; But I can
tell you, with one thing and another, I&rsquo;ve got my work cut
out.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He shook his head seriously, and the puzzled, dogged
expression of frustrate determination that <a
name="page290"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 290</span>Edwin knew
so well came into his eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;re wasting
time, my son,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s get on
with the blasted humerus.&nbsp; Now, what is the origin of the
Supinator Longus?&nbsp; Come on . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>On one of these pleasant occasions he confided to Edwin the
reason why he had his work cut out.&nbsp; His father, a stern
Calvinistic Methodist, had finally washed his hands of him.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been a bit of a rolling stone, you see,&rdquo;
said Brown, &ldquo;and you can&rsquo;t blame the poor old
fellow.&nbsp; So he just planked down six hundred and fifty
pounds one day and told me that I could do what I liked with it,
but that was the last I should get from him.&nbsp; It suited me
down to the ground.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t much care what became of
me then.&nbsp; It was a couple of years ago.&nbsp; So I had a
royal bust . . . a sort of glorious windup to the season . . .
and then sat down to think.&nbsp; I had just five hundred left,
and so I had to think what the devil I was going to do with it,
and my prospects seemed so putridly rotten that the only thing I
could do was to go on the bust again.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t enjoy
it much that time.&nbsp; Jaded palate, you know. . . .&nbsp; But
I had a bit of luck.&nbsp; I met a trainer fellow in the
Leicester lounge with a couple of women, and he put me on to a
double for the Lincoln and National.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve no use for
horse-racing.&nbsp; If it was the owners that were racing
there&rsquo;d be a vestige of sport in it; but it always seems to
me a shame that decent, clean creatures like horses should make a
living for a lot of dirty stiffs out of the ruin of working men
and small shopkeepers.&nbsp; Still, I dreamed about this double,
and as I&rsquo;m a weak superstitious sort of chap, I put a
tenner on <a name="page291"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
291</span>it.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the first and the last bet
I&rsquo;ve ever had on a horse.&nbsp; But the thing happened to
come off; and last spring I found myself with twelve hundred
pounds instead of six-fifty.&nbsp; So I began to think it
out.&nbsp; I remembered that doctor fellow who cured me of being
converted, and I thought, &lsquo;By Gad, I&rsquo;ll be a
doctor.&rsquo;&nbsp; A five year&rsquo;s course.&nbsp; Well,
I&rsquo;m not particularly brilliant at the top end, and so I
allowed six.&nbsp; Six into twelve goes twice.&nbsp; Two hundred
a year for fees and living and clothes&mdash;outsize&mdash;and
recreation.&nbsp; You see, it&rsquo;s pretty tight.&nbsp; Come
along and have some lunch at Joey&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>They went downstairs to the cloak-room where the porter was
now a familiar of Edwin&rsquo;s.&nbsp; It had been decided that
it would not be becoming for a really modern university, like
that of North Bromwich, to impose the sight of such an
anachronism as academic dress on the streets, a rule that had
been something of a disappointment to Edwin, and so they left
their gowns behind.&nbsp; Joey&rsquo;s was an institution of some
antiquity, opposite to the Corinthian town-hall, with which Brown
had been acquainted in his unregenerate days.&nbsp; It was a long
and noisy bar at which, for the sum of fourpence, one consumed a
quarter of the top of a cottage loaf, a tangle of watercress, a
hunk of Cheddar cheese, and a tankard of beer.&nbsp; This
combination of excellences was known as a &ldquo;crust and
bitter,&rdquo; and it was eaten standing at the counter.</p>
<p>Edwin was gradually becoming a regular customer at this place;
for Martin&rsquo;s delicate fancy for <a name="page292"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 292</span>plovers on toast and other such
refinements had proved too expensive for him, and apart from
their joint labours in the dissecting-room, they were beginning
to see less of each other&mdash;not from any ill-will on the part
of either, but simply because Martin&rsquo;s position in the
house of the old lady in Alvaston, whose house was full of
animals, had introduced him to the social life of that elegant
suburb in which so perfect a carpet knight was bound to shine;
and Martin&rsquo;s social engagements with encouraging matrons
and innumerable eligible daughters were becoming so pressing that
his acquaintance with the black heart of the city was gradually
becoming more and more casual.&nbsp; For this reason, apart from
his natural inclination, Edwin was thrown into daily contact with
Brown and his partner Maskew.</p>
<p>Maskew was a more typical product of the Midlands.&nbsp; His
home, and all his upbringing, had lain in one of the great black
towns that cluster, like swollen knots, upon the North Bromwich
system of railways.&nbsp; He had never lived in the country; he
did not even know what country was, and his distinctive if
provincial urbanity showed itself in a hundred ways&mdash;in his
dress, that was a little too smart, in his speech, that was not
quite smart enough, in a certain lack of fresh air in his mental
atmosphere.&nbsp; His people were wealthy, and his tastes,
without emulating the style of Harrop, were expensive.&nbsp; He
was handsome, and if his hair had been shorter and not so
mathematically correct he would have been handsomer.&nbsp; Still,
he was intensely interested in women, and a great retailer of <a
name="page293"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 293</span>Rabelaisian
stories.&nbsp; He wore buttoned boots and was very nearly a
first-class billiard player.</p>
<p>A more unusual combination than his partnership with the
abrupt and unsubtle Brown it would have been difficult to
imagine; but even in his undoubted cleverness, his nature was
complimentary, and Edwin found himself happy in the society of
both.&nbsp; In their company he became a habitu&eacute; of the
Dousita Caf&eacute;; a subterranean privacy in which excellent
coffee was served in the most comfortable surroundings by young
ladies whose charms had already made something of a sensation in
that decorous city.&nbsp; Maskew, naturally, knew them all by
their Christian names, and treated them with a familiar badinage
that impressed Edwin, mildly ambitious but quite incapable of
imitation, by the ease with which it was performed.&nbsp; The
cushioned seats and the mild stimulus of the coffee and
cigarettes would even rouse the massive Brown to a ponderous
levity by which the lady of their choice, a certain Miss Wheeler,
whose uncle, Maskew seriously confided to Edwin, was a bishop,
was obviously flattered.&nbsp; Edwin could understand any woman
being attracted by Brown, or rather, &ldquo;W.G.&rdquo; as the
need of a distinction had by this time made his familiar
name.&nbsp; It also pleased him to see the way in which W.G. went
red in his bull neck on a certain occasion when Maskew had
delicately overstepped the limits of good taste in his
conversation with Miss Wheeler.&nbsp; But the niece of the bishop
did not blush. . . .</p>
<p>In the intervals between lectures they would congregate in
their gowns in a dismal chamber, <a name="page294"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 294</span>at the very bottom of the cramped
building that was called the Common Room, drinking tea and eating
squashed-fly biscuits.&nbsp; This place was frequented not only
by members of the Medical School but by students of other
faculties whom Edwin regarded with some contempt.&nbsp; One
afternoon on entering this room Edwin found W.G. holding forth
with some indignation before a notice that had been pinned on the
board asking for a list of freshmen who were anxious to play
Rugby football during the present season.&nbsp; So far, only five
or six names had appeared: W.G.&rsquo;s, naturally enough, came
first, for his prowess in the game was well known in the North
Bromwich district.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it a damnable thing,&rdquo; he said
indignantly, &ldquo;in a school of this size to see a measly list
like that?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You can stick mine down,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well . . . as a matter of form, my son . . . though I
don&rsquo;t see what good you&rsquo;re likely to be to the club
except to give it tone.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I play soccer,&rdquo; said Maskew.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You would,&rdquo; said W.G.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nice
gentlemanly game.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Rugger isn&rsquo;t all beef,&rdquo; put in Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said W.G., &ldquo;but the team wants
weight.&nbsp; And this place is simply thick with great, hefty,
science men and brewers who&rsquo;ve never known the meaning of a
healthy sweat in their lives.&nbsp; Upon my word, it sickens
me.&nbsp; Look at that chap.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay huddled up in
a deep basket chair.&nbsp; He had shoulders that would have
appeared massive by <a name="page295"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 295</span>the side of any others but
W.G.&rsquo;s: a fair wide face marked with freckles, a sandy
moustache and crisp, curly red hair.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
the kind of swine that ought to be working in the
scrum.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively went pale.&nbsp;
A curious survival of the instinct of physical fear had shaken
him.&nbsp; It was ridiculous.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know that
chap,&rdquo; he said in an off-hand way.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s
no good.&nbsp; I was at school with him.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s got a
weak heart.&nbsp; His name&rsquo;s Griffin.&rdquo;</p>
<h3><a name="page296"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
296</span>CHAPTER III<br />
CARNIVAL</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Christmas</span> came: an old-fashioned
Christmas with hoar frost on the fields and hard roads gleaming
with splintered light reflected from a frosty sky.&nbsp; In this
raiment of frozen moisture even the black desert of Edwin&rsquo;s
morning pilgrimage appeared fantastically beautiful.&nbsp; The
vacation did not suspend his work; for though no lectures were
given, the dissecting room was still open; and here, on icy
mornings, when the asphalt floor was as cold as the glass roof,
he would freeze for an hour at a time watching Brown and Maskew
at work, Martin having been whisked off to spend a baronial
Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland.</p>
<p>A few months in North Bromwich had made a great change in
Edwin.&nbsp; He had lost much of his old timidity, shaved twice a
week, smoked the plug tobacco to which Brown had introduced him,
and was no longer shy with any creature on earth of his own
sex.&nbsp; With women it was different. . . .&nbsp; Ease and
familiarity with this baffling sex would come, no doubt, in time;
but for the present one or two desperate essays at conversation
with the elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friends <a
name="page297"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 297</span>had been
failures.&nbsp; And Miss Wheeler was not the least approachable
of her sex.&nbsp; There were several women medical students in
his year; but in their case he had not felt the incentive to
gallantry that the softer charms of Miss Wheeler suggested.&nbsp;
Even if they had not insulated themselves with shapeless djibbehs
of russet brown, and bunched back their hair in a manner
ruthlessly unfeminine, the common study of a subject so grossly
material as anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any budding
romance.</p>
<p>In the Biological laboratory, however, he found a figure that
exercised a peculiar attraction on him.&nbsp; She was an American
girl, a science student, who with the severity of the medical
women&rsquo;s dress contrived to combine an atmosphere of
yielding femininity.&nbsp; She had a soft voice, for the tones of
which Edwin would listen, big grey-blue eyes, soft dark hair, and
very beautiful arms that her dark overalls displayed to
perfection.&nbsp; Edwin would have found it difficult to define
the way in which she attracted him: certainly he didn&rsquo;t
cherish any definite romantic ideas about her; but he did find
her in some subtle way disturbing, so that he would be conscious
of her presence when she came into the lab.; surprise himself
listening for her voice when she spoke to the professor, and find
that, without any definite volition, his eyes were watching her
profile.&nbsp; And one day when she passed him and her overall
brushed his sleeve, he found that he was blushing.&nbsp; Maskew,
with his usual easy familiarity, was already on joking terms with
her, and would sometimes sit on the table where she kept <a
name="page298"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 298</span>her
microscope while they talked and laughed together; but though
Edwin had every chance of sharing in this intimacy, he
couldn&rsquo;t bring himself to do so; and when, in the end, he
was introduced to her formally, he wished that he were dead, and
could not speak a word for awkwardness.</p>
<p>With men, on the other hand, he was now quite at his ease,
even, strangely enough, with the once formidable Griffin.&nbsp;
Since the day when he had discovered his old enemy in the Common
Room they had often spoken to one another: they had even sat side
by side in the deep basket chairs, one of which was now
Griffin&rsquo;s habitual abode, and talked of the old days at St.
Luke&rsquo;s, and sometimes, in the afternoon, they would share a
pot of tea.&nbsp; There was no awkwardness in their conversation,
as Edwin had feared there might be, for Griffin apparently took
his expulsion as a matter of course, and, on the whole, as rather
a good joke.&nbsp; Of course Griffin had changed.&nbsp; It was
clear to Edwin from the first that in some way he had
shrunk&mdash;not indeed physically, for he was fatter than ever;
but the air of conscious and threatening physical superiority
that Edwin had found so oppressive in his school days had
vanished.&nbsp; Moreover, he was now prepared to accept Edwin as
an equal, and make him the confidant of the amorous adventures
that now absorbed his time, adventures to which the affair with
the chambermaid at St. Luke&rsquo;s had been the mildest possible
prelude.&nbsp; Compared with Griffin&rsquo;s positive
achievements, the daring of Maskew&rsquo;s relation with the
young ladies of the Dousita seemed a trifle thin.&nbsp;
Griffin&rsquo;s father, with <a name="page299"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 299</span>a shrewd appreciation of his
son&rsquo;s peculiar gifts, had entered him as a student at the
school of brewing; and if once he could overcome his natural
indolence, there was no reason why, in the future, he should not
become a partner in the firm of his uncle, Sir Joseph Astill, and
control the destinies of a number of barmaids beyond the dreams
of concupiscence.&nbsp; On these prospects, Griffin, lounging in
his basket chair, brooded with a heavy satisfaction.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a funny thing, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; Edwin
said one day, &ldquo;that we should be the only St. Luke&rsquo;s
men in this place.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, some are bound to turn up sooner or later,&rdquo;
said Griffin.&nbsp; &ldquo;The other day, when I was up in town,
I ran against Widdup&mdash;you remember Widdup&mdash;and he told
me that his people thought of sending him here to take up
engineering.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That would be rather good fun,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;And he&rsquo;s cut out for it too.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s got
that sort of head.&nbsp; I should rather like to see old
Widdup.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;ll roll up one of these days.&nbsp; Are
you doing anything in particular this afternoon?&nbsp; I have to
stroll down to see the stage-manager at the Gaiety . . . an awful
good sport.&nbsp; Suppose we go down the town and get a drink on
the way . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>In spite of the temptations of this adventure, Edwin
declined.&nbsp; In the dissecting room, half an hour later, Brown
hailed him:&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What the devil were you doing with that pig of a
brewer, Ingleby?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s an old school friend of mine.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, I should keep that dark, if I were you.&nbsp; <a
name="page300"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 300</span>He&rsquo;s
a bad hat, that chap.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t want Ingleby&rsquo;s
virginal innocence corrupted, do we, Maskew?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;s not a bad sort,&rdquo; Edwin
protested.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a nasty fellow, and he&rsquo;ll come to a
rotten, sticky end,&rdquo; said Brown.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now, what do
you think of this small sciatic, you old rou&eacute;, for a
tricky bit of dissection?&rdquo;</p>
<p>After all, Edwin reflected, old Brown knew something of the
world.&nbsp; He had to admit to himself that there was something
obscene about Griffin.&nbsp; It was difficult to explain, for
Maskew, by his own account, was almost equally worldly, and yet
Maskew was undeniably a decent fellow while Griffin undeniably
wasn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; He joined his friends at their work, and
could think about nothing else; for Maskew&rsquo;s brains were as
good as his own, though of a different texture, and he had to be
attentive to keep pace with them.&nbsp; All through the vac. he
worked at anatomy with these two, sometimes in the icy dissecting
room, sometimes over coffee at the Dousita, sometimes in the
cozy, diminutive diggings that Brown inhabited in Easy Row, a
street of Georgian houses at the back of the university buildings
and near the Prince&rsquo;s Hospital.</p>
<p>They were pleasant days.&nbsp; Edwin, in spite of his
lightness, had now found a place in the scrum of the second
fifteen, and on Saturday evenings, when both of them were drugged
with their weekly debauch of exercise, he and W.G. would meet at
the diggings in Easy Row, and after a steaming hot bath, in the
process of which Edwin never failed to be impressed by the
immensity of his friend&rsquo;s physique, they would set off down
the town together <a name="page301"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
301</span>and make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill:
Porterhouse steak with chipped potatoes and huge silver tankards
of bitter ale.&nbsp; Then they would go on together to a theatre
or a music hall, too pleasantly dulled, too mildly elated to
question the humour of the most second-rate comedian.&nbsp; After
the show W.G. would walk down to the station with Edwin, and see
him off into the last train for Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out
of the carriage window, would see the big man turn and go
clumsily along the platform with the gait that he had noticed on
the very first day of his life as a medical student.&nbsp; Brown
was a wonderful fellow.&nbsp; In half an hour, Edwin reflected,
when his train was still puffing away through the dark, W.G.
would be back in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth
and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, driving facts
into that puzzled brain with the violent thoroughness of an
engine that drives piles.</p>
<p>When the last train arrived at Halesby, the town would be in
darkness, for, in the black country in those days the only places
of amusement were the public houses and these had been shut for
an hour or more.&nbsp; Only from the upper windows of innumerable
mean dwellings lights would be seen, and sometimes the voice of a
drunken husband heard grumbling.&nbsp; But the path beside the
fish-ponds was beautiful, even on a winter night, and Edwin would
feel glad as he plodded along it that he didn&rsquo;t live in
North Bromwich, where the night noises of the country were never
heard.&nbsp; So he would pass quietly up the empty lane, his
footsteps echoing on the hard pavement, and come at last to the
little house <a name="page302"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
302</span>set in the midst of shrubberies that smelt of
winter.&nbsp; Very humble and quiet, and even pitiable it seemed
after the glaring streets of the city that he had left
behind.</p>
<p>It was an understood thing that on Saturdays, when he had been
playing football, Edwin should return by the last train; and so
his father did not sit up for him on these occasions.&nbsp; The
matter had been settled at the cost of some awkwardness.&nbsp; On
the first two or three Saturdays of the football season Edwin had
come home late, to find Mr. Ingleby growing cold over the embers
of a fire in the dining-room, sleepy but intensely serious, and
his tired eyes had examined Edwin so closely that he felt
embarrassed, being certain that his face must bear signs of a
number of enormities that he had never dreamed of
committing.&nbsp; It was the same, unreasonable feeling of guilt
that he had experienced at St. Luke&rsquo;s in the middle of Mr.
Leeming&rsquo;s pitched battle for purity, and the sensation was
so strong that he felt it useless to try and hide it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why do you look at me like that, father?&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; The quietude and humility of the little room seem to
him as full of accusation as his father&rsquo;s face.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What do you mean, boy?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think you know what I mean. . . .&nbsp; There&rsquo;s
really no need for you to wait up for me like this.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I like to lock the house up,&rdquo; his father replied,
with a quietness that made Edwin&rsquo;s voice sound rowdy and
violent.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have always done so.&nbsp; After all,
it&rsquo;s usual.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You are anxious about me.&nbsp; Why should you <a
name="page303"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 303</span>be more
anxious about me when I come in at twelve than when I come in at
six?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I know you&rsquo;re passing a critical period, Eddie. .
.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not unsympathetic.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been
through it myself.&nbsp; And naturally I&rsquo;m anxious for
you.&nbsp; I know that a town is full of temptations for a boy of
your age.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what your friends are
like.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what sort of influences
you&rsquo;re coming in contact with&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t see why that should make you want to
sit up for me.&nbsp; Really, I don&rsquo;t.&nbsp; What good does
it do?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I like to see you when you come in.&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin
was uncomfortably aware of this.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But suppose I was drunk when I came in,
father&mdash;&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose anything of the
sort&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, but supposing I was.&nbsp; What advantage would
there be in your seeing me?&nbsp; What good would it
do?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;At any rate I should know that there was a
danger.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, if that&rsquo;s all the trouble, we can soon get
over it.&nbsp; I promise you, that I&rsquo;ll tell you the very
first time that I am in the least drunk.&nbsp; Then you
needn&rsquo;t worry about waiting for it.&nbsp; I suppose
it&rsquo;s bound to happen some day.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I sincerely hope it isn&rsquo;t, Eddie.&nbsp; It
isn&rsquo;t pleasant to me to hear you talk like that.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; I suppose it would be pleasanter if we
pretended that nothing of the kind ever happened.&nbsp; But it
wouldn&rsquo;t be honest, would it?&nbsp; I should think
it&rsquo;s the duty of every one to be drunk some time or <a
name="page304"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 304</span>other, if
it&rsquo;s only to see what it feels like.&nbsp; Surely, father,
<i>you</i>&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Edwin, Edwin. . . .&nbsp; Really we mustn&rsquo;t be
personal.&nbsp; You forget that I&rsquo;m your father.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t, father.&nbsp; I thought we were
going to be such tremendous pals, and honestly there isn&rsquo;t
much to be pals on if you aren&rsquo;t ever personal.&nbsp; We
ought to talk about everything.&nbsp; We oughtn&rsquo;t to hide
anything.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t see much fun in it if I have to do
all the telling and you don&rsquo;t give anything in
return.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t fair.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But, my dear boy,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby, with a
nervous laugh, &ldquo;you seem to neglect the fundamental fact
that I&rsquo;m your father.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see why that should prevent us being
honest.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t see why it should prevent you from
trusting me&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I do trust you, Eddie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then that&rsquo;s all right; so you needn&rsquo;t wait
up for me again.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Thus the matter was settled, at any rate on the surface,
though Edwin was always conscious on the morning after his late
arrivals of an anxious scrutiny on his father&rsquo;s part.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t really trust me,&rdquo; he thought,
and this conviction made him more anxious than ever to be really
intimate with his father, to make him share, as much as possible,
the life that he was living in North Bromwich.&nbsp; It made him
talk deliberately of the men who were his friends, and the work
that he was doing, explaining with the greatest freedom the
domestic difficulties of W.G., and the worldly accomplishments of
Maskew: and <a name="page305"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
305</span>this frankness gave him confidence until he discovered
that such revelations only ended by arousing his father&rsquo;s
suspicions.&nbsp; In Mr. Ingleby&rsquo;s mind it was evident that
the sterling qualities of W.G., as recited by Edwin, were of less
importance than his potentialities as an agent in Edwin&rsquo;s
corruption.&nbsp; &ldquo;If I&rsquo;d only given him one side of
W.G.,&rdquo; thought Edwin, &ldquo;he&rsquo;d have been quite
happy.&nbsp; If we&rsquo;re going to be happy, it would be much
better for me to tell him nothing that his imagination can work
on.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He found himself travelling round the old vicious circle that
appeared to be the inevitable result of being honest with
himself.&nbsp; There must, after all, be something in the
fundamental fact that Mr. Ingleby was his father.&nbsp;
Ridiculous though it might seem, the ideal relation between
father and son was evidently impossible.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said with a sigh, &ldquo;it isn&rsquo;t my
fault.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve done my best.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The whole artificiality of their relation only dawned on him
when he mentioned to his father one evening that he had met
Griffin and told him that his old enemy turned out to be a nephew
of Sir Joseph Astill.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad to hear of
it,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby.&nbsp; &ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ll
continue to be friends.&nbsp; Sir Joseph Astill is a very
distinguished man.&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin didn&rsquo;t see what that
had to do with it; but he resisted the temptation of telling his
father that Griffin was a distinctly bad egg, and that in
comparison with him W.G., with his herculean passions, was indeed
a paragon of knightly virtues.&nbsp; If it pleased his father to
invest Griffin with his uncle&rsquo;s reflected glory, why
shouldn&rsquo;t he do so?&nbsp; And Edwin held his tongue.</p>
<p><a name="page306"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 306</span>In
the end the atmosphere of veiled anxiety that awaited him at home
became definitely irksome, and since the most absolute candour on
his part would not mend matters, he found himself gradually
avoiding his father&rsquo;s company.&nbsp; It was the last thing
in the world that he wanted to do; but it seemed inevitable; and
as the months passed, he gave up all hopes of the sort of
intimacy that he had desired, and relapsed into the solitude of
his own room, or even, as a last resort, the company of Aunt
Laura, who was at least unsuspicious.</p>
<p>Another thing attracted him to her house.&nbsp; All the days
of his childhood at home had been full of music, for his mother
had been a capable pianist, and he had spent long hours stretched
out on the hearthrug in the drawing-room listening to her while
she played Bach and Beethoven and occasionally Mendelssohn on the
piano.&nbsp; At St. Luke&rsquo;s, too, without any definite
musical education, he had felt a little of the inspiration that
Dr. Downton infused into the chapel services.&nbsp; Since he had
returned to Halesby all these pleasures had left him; for Mr.
Ingleby was not in the least musical, and the piano that had been
closed a few days before his mother&rsquo;s death, had never been
reopened.&nbsp; At this period he had not realised the musical
possibilities of North Bromwich, and in Aunt Laura&rsquo;s house
he recaptured a little of this stifled interest.</p>
<p>She was really an accomplished musician, and though the kind
of music that she affected was becoming limited by the very
character of her life as the wife of an undistinguished
manufacturer of small hardware in a small black-country town, the
<a name="page307"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 307</span>taste,
which had originally been formed in Germany, existed and was
easily encouraged by Edwin&rsquo;s admiration of her
attainments.&nbsp; Here, usually on Sundays, when in addition to
the attraction of music her admirable cooking was to be
appreciated, Edwin passed many happy hours.&nbsp; She sang well,
and could accompany herself with something of a natural genius,
and though the songs that she sang were often enough the sugary
ballads of the period that had witnessed her musical extinction,
Edwin found them satisfying to his starved sense of music, and
would even persuade her, on occasion, to play the pieces of
Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach with which his mother had made him
familiar.</p>
<p>Nothing aroused in him an acute remembrance of those ancient
happy days more easily than music.&nbsp; He wished, above all
things, that he might some day be able to taste these joys for
himself; and so he persuaded his aunt to teach him the notes on
the piano, and having an inherited aptitude, he soon found that
he could pick his way through simple compositions, preferably in
the open key, that he found among his mother&rsquo;s music at
home.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby, who had no ear, appeared to be unmoved
by these painful experiments; and to Edwin, the long winter
evenings were made magical by their indulgence.&nbsp; He would
sit at the piano in the drawing-room for hours at a time, and
here, in a strange way, he found himself curiously in touch with
the vanishing memory of his mother.&nbsp; At times this feeling
was so acute that he could almost have imagined that she was
there in the room beside him, and sometimes he would sit still at
the piano in long <a name="page308"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
308</span>intervals of silence, just drinking in this peculiar
and soothing atmosphere.&nbsp; Eventually these diversions made
Mr. Ingleby uneasy.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You spend a good deal of time at the piano,
Edwin,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I do hope you are not letting
it interfere with your work.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin said nothing; but from that time onward it seemed to him
that even this, the most harmless of his amusements, had become a
matter for grudging and suspicion.&nbsp; At first he only felt
indignation and anger; but later he realised that this, along
with his father&rsquo;s other anxieties, probably had its origin
in financial considerations.&nbsp; The cost of his education in
North Bromwich was a big thing for a country chemist to
face.&nbsp; If once he failed, the whole of his early effort
might be wasted.&nbsp; But then, he was not going to fail.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>The terminal examinations at Christmas had made him sure of
this.&nbsp; They showed him that in his own year he and Maskew
were in a class by themselves; and though Maskew beat him easily
in all the subjects of the examination, it satisfied him a little
to think that Maskew had probably put in a good deal more work
than he had, particularly in anatomy, where he had the advantage
of working in partnership with W.G., for whom the subject of
medical education was of the most deadly seriousness.</p>
<p>Early in the Lent term Edwin found himself introduced to a new
stratum of North Bromwich society, through the accident of his
acquaintance <a name="page309"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
309</span>with Griffin.&nbsp; The new university had inherited
from the old college of science and the still older medical
school, the tradition of a pantomime night, a visit <i>en
masse</i> to one of the North Bromwich theatres, where this
elevating art-form flourished for three months out of the
twelve.&nbsp; The evening was one of fancy dress, rowdiness, and
general licence, in which the stage suffered as much as the
auditorium, and the unfortunate players were propitiated for the
ruin of their performance by a series of presentations.</p>
<p>Arrangements for this function were always made with a high
seriousness.&nbsp; The committee was composed of representatives
from each year in the school of medicine and from each of the
other faculties.&nbsp; In this affair, as in all matters of sport
or communal life, the older foundation of the medical school took
the most prominent part; but the prestige of Griffin as the
nephew of the Vice-Chancellor and an acknowledged expert on all
matters theatrical, had induced the brewers to run him for the
secretaryship; and since the secretary was the official on whom
the bulk of the work fell, and no one was particularly anxious to
take on the job, Griffin, in his first year, had been elected to
the post.</p>
<p>There was no denying the fact that it suited him.&nbsp; To
begin with, he was already on intimate terms with every theatre
manager and stage-doorkeeper in North Bromwich, and was used to
dealing with the susceptibilities of theatrical people.&nbsp;
Again, he had plenty of money, a circumstance that would help him
in the preliminaries, which were <a name="page310"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 310</span>expensively conducted in the local
Bodega and other bars and restaurants.&nbsp; Also, it gave
Griffin something to do; for the life of the student in brewing
was of the leisurely and somnolent character that one would
naturally associate with malt liquors, and most of his time had
previously been spent sprawling in a deep basket chair in the
Common Room, playing an occasional languid game of poker, or
jingling sovereigns in his pocket while he waited for the results
of racing in the evening papers.</p>
<p>At the annual meeting, which Edwin had not been sufficiently
interested to attend, there had been the usual difficulty in
selecting a member from the unknown quantities of the first year,
and Griffin, full of resource, had suggested Edwin, who was
straightway elected, and summoned to attend the deliberations
that followed.&nbsp; His election caused a good deal of amusement
to his friends, and particularly Martin, who preserved an
aristocratic contempt for this vulgar theatrical business, and
W.G., who prophesied Edwin&rsquo;s conversion into a
thorough-going blood; but it introduced him to a new and
bewildering society in which he met a number of men of his own
faculty who had already become impressive at a distance.</p>
<p>Such were the brothers Wade, the elder unapproachable in his
final year, the younger of an elegance surpassing that of
Harrop.&nbsp; Such was Freddie St. Aubyn, a slight and immaculate
figure with fair hair and moustache, and the most carefully
cultivated reputation for elegant dissipation in North
Bromwich.&nbsp; This Byronic person had already suffered the
pangs of a long intrigue with the <a name="page311"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 311</span><i>premi&egrave;re danseuse</i> in a
musical comedy company, on whom he was reputed to have spent
money and passion lavishly but without the least suggestion of
grossness.</p>
<p>In addition to this he was a poet: that is to say, he had
published two volumes of verse that were so eclectic as to be out
of print.&nbsp; At the present time he had stuck midway in his
medical career pending the issue of his unhappy passion; and
presented the unusual spectacle of a &ldquo;chronic,&rdquo; not
by force of incompetence, but by choice.&nbsp; In point of fact,
he was an unconscious survival from the nineties, and the lady of
his choice resembled a creation of Beardsley more than any type
commonly known to nature.&nbsp; Edwin was impressed, for the
writer of the exhausted <i>Poems of Passion</i> was the first
poet that he had met in the flesh.&nbsp; Naturally, St.
Aubyn&rsquo;s attitude towards the first-year man was a little
patronising; but Edwin found his mixture of cynicism and
melancholy enchanting, and was particularly impressed when
Freddie, languidly supporting his sorrows in one of the Common
Room easy-chairs, offered him a fill from his pipe.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, by the way, there&rsquo;s opium in it,&rdquo; he
said casually.</p>
<p>Visions of Coleridge and de Quincey invaded Edwin&rsquo;s
mind.&nbsp; He stopped filling his pipe.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Opium?&nbsp; Why on earth do you put opium in
it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It is an aid to the imagination,&rdquo; said Freddie,
&ldquo;and it deadens pain.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mental pain,&rdquo; he added significantly, after a
pause.&nbsp; &ldquo;For that alcohol is useless.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve
tried it.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page312"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
312</span>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll have some of my own, if you
don&rsquo;t mind,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I quite agree with you.&nbsp; It would be much
wiser,&rdquo; said St. Aubyn.&nbsp; &ldquo;Luckily you have no
need for it.&nbsp; <i>Facilis descensus Averni</i>.&rdquo;</p>
<p>From that day forward Edwin was always eagerly searching the
face and the pupils of Freddie for any symptoms of opium
poisoning.&nbsp; He never found any; and W.G., to whom he
confided this thrilling incident, assured him that there was
nothing in it, that Freddie had probably never smoked opium in
his life, and that the whole thing was nothing more than one of
the poses that this gentleman adopted for shocking the youthful
and bourgeois.&nbsp; The impressive Freddie, according to W.G.,
was a damned an&aelig;mic waster.&nbsp; If only it had not been
for the exhausted <i>Poems of Passion</i>, Edwin might have
agreed with him.</p>
<p>The solemn meetings of the panto-night committee engaged Edwin
three afternoons a week.&nbsp; As a congregation of amazing
bloods they were enthralling but as business gatherings they were
more remarkable still.&nbsp; They were held in the saloon bar of
a modern public house, all palatial mahogany, red plush and
plate-glass, called the White Horse; and the principal business
of the day was the consumption of hot whisky with sugar and
slices of lemon in it, during which Griffin, armed with a
conspicuous note-book, reported on his activities, which appeared
mainly to be social.</p>
<p>&ldquo;On Thursday,&rdquo; he would say, &ldquo;I took Mary
Loraine to lunch at the Grand Midland, and she said . . .&rdquo;
or &ldquo;I saw Tommy Fane in his <a name="page313"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 313</span>dressing-room the other night, and
he said: &lsquo;Look here, old boy. . . &rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp;
Apparently all Griffin&rsquo;s theatrical friends called him
&ldquo;old boy.&rdquo;&nbsp; The effect of these narrations on
Griffin would be so exhausting that he found it necessary to
order more whisky all round.&nbsp; The manager himself would
bring it in; a brilliant gentleman named Juniper with red baggy
cheeks the laxness of which was compensated by a waxed moustache
that stuck out on either side as if a skewer had transfixed
them.&nbsp; To Griffin this magnificent creature was most
decorous; for the White Horse was one of Astill&rsquo;s houses,
and Griffin had taken the trouble to inform him that the great
Sir Joseph was his uncle.&nbsp; In spite of, rather than as a
result of these meetings, the panto-night arranged itself.&nbsp;
The date was fixed, the bouquets and presents purchased, the
announcements in the papers that warned any patrons of pantomime
that on this particular night they could not hope to see a normal
performance, inserted.&nbsp; Griffin, in the Common Room, became
a centre of feverish importance, and even Edwin, in spite of the
superciliousness of Martin, and the rough chaff of W.G., caught a
little of the reflected glamour.</p>
<p>Edwin now had to face the ordeal of announcing the approach of
panto-night to his father.&nbsp; If he were to see the thing
through, as was his duty as a member of the committee, it would
be quite impossible for him to catch the last train to Halesby,
which left North Bromwich at nine-thirty, except on Thursday and
Saturday night.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby, hearing, saw the pit gaping
beneath Edwin&rsquo;s feet.&nbsp; &ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t mention
this to me before. . . .&nbsp; I <a name="page314"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 314</span>suppose you have had to spend quite
a lot of time at these committee meetings?&nbsp; I think it was
rather unwise of you to undertake it in your first year. . .
.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s only four months before your
examination.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I think the exam. will be all right,&rdquo; said
Edwin airily.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like to hear you speak like that,
Edwin,&rdquo; said his father.&nbsp; &ldquo;Over-confidence is a
dangerous thing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But it wouldn&rsquo;t be any better pretending that I
didn&rsquo;t think it was all right, surely?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, humility is a great virtue.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not any greater than honesty.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all very well to talk about honesty; but it
would have been more honest, wouldn&rsquo;t it, if you&rsquo;d
told me that&rdquo;&mdash;he hesitated&mdash;&ldquo;this was
going on?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;There you are. . . .&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the whole
point.&nbsp; If I told you everything you wouldn&rsquo;t sleep
for imagining things that hadn&rsquo;t happened.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
the thing that&rsquo;s worried me ever since I was at
school.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;re absolutely honest with other
people, life simply isn&rsquo;t worth living, because they
don&rsquo;t understand it.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t done.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;ve come to the conclusion, father, that the only thing
that really matters is to be honest with yourself.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;If you can trust yourself&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, I think I can. . . .&nbsp; And I wish you&rsquo;d
believe in it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I do, Edwin.&nbsp; Only naturally I&rsquo;m
anxious.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a child.&nbsp; Where is this . . .
this performance held?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;At the Queen&rsquo;s Theatre this year.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page315"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
315</span>&ldquo;Well, I suppose that is better than a music
hall.&rdquo;</p>
<p>His father&rsquo;s prejudice against the music halls, or, as
they were then beginning to be called, Theatres of Varieties, was
an old story.&nbsp; Edwin could hardly resist the temptation of
telling him that the performers in the pantomime were nearly all
music-hall artistes, but Mr. Ingleby saved him, by asking him
where he intended to sleep.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I expect W.G. will give me a shake-down in his
digs.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby, with a shade of
anxiety, &ldquo;that Brown is also on the
committee&mdash;&rdquo;.</p>
<p>The idea of the honest W.G. as a member of this constellation
of bloods tickled Edwin.&nbsp; He now wished to goodness
he&rsquo;d never told his father of W.G.&rsquo;s family
differences and of his lucky double on the Lincoln and
National.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, no, old W.G.&rsquo;s far too sober for this sort of
thing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was an unfortunate word.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Sober?&rdquo; repeated Mr. Ingleby.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well,
I suppose you will have to go; but I do hope&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>He didn&rsquo;t say what he hoped; but Edwin knew, and was
content to leave it at that.</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>The great day came, and Edwin found, as some compensation for
the scoffing of W.G. and the superciliousness of Martin and
Maskew, that his position was really one of some
importance.&nbsp; All the first-year men, even the immaculate
Harrop, had decided to go to the theatre, and up to the last
minute Edwin was busy selling tickets.&nbsp; He had asked <a
name="page316"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 316</span>W.G. to put
him up, and W.G., as a matter of form, had consented.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t suppose I shall see you after midnight, my
son,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; With his usual thoroughness in
everything that he attempted, W.G. had determined to make a night
of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;It will do me good to make a damned fool of
myself for once in a way,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if it&rsquo;s
only for the sake of realising it afterwards . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>They put in a hard afternoon&rsquo;s work together first, and
then he and Edwin and Maskew went together to W.G.&rsquo;s rooms
to change.&nbsp; They were all rather excited, and W.G. carried a
bottle of whisky in each of his coat pockets, the first of which
was broached as an aperitif while they were changing.&nbsp; In
less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired as nearly as
convention would allow him, in the manner of his woaded ancestry:
a splendid caveman with lowering black brows and hairy arms like
those of a gorilla, a disguise that only called for a little
accentuation of his natural characteristics to be made effective;
Maskew, again in character, as a Restoration cavalier; and Edwin
in the modest guise of Pierrot.&nbsp; In the foyer of the theatre
they met Martin, who had driven down in a hansom from Alvaston
clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a feeding bottle round
his neck.&nbsp; The stalls were already full of a carnival crowd
of students, and the rest of the house was crowded with
spectators who had come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate
people who had entered in ignorance of the festival and the fact
that their form of entertainment was to be changed for one night
only.</p>
<p>There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, a <a
name="page317"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 317</span>fleshy and
unsubtle Mephistopheles, the Mephistopheles of Gounod, not of
Goethe, and Freddie St. Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of
black curls that he had procured for his presentation of
Byron.&nbsp; Freddie, in the interests of verisimilitude, had
even shaved his moustache.</p>
<p>Only the earlier part of the performance remained in
Edwin&rsquo;s memory.&nbsp; The rest of it was no more to him
than a brilliant haze, from which single moments of wild
picturesqueness detached themselves: as when he had a vision of a
prehistoric man armed with a waving whisky bottle for a club and
feebly restrained by a flushed cavalier, flown with insolence and
wine, storming his way through the surging crowd in front of the
stalls bar and planting his feet upon the counter; or of the same
barbarian, gently armed by a tactful manager in evening dress,
putting his weapon to the usages of peace and friendliness by
uncorking it and offering its contents to a firm but
good-humoured policeman.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What a splendid fellow W.G. is,&rdquo; Edwin thought to
himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;Splendid . . . splendid . . .
magnificent.&rdquo;&nbsp; And while he was thinking this, a
sombre poet with shining eyes drew him aside and confessed to
him, almost with tears, that all this brilliance and colour and
life meant nothing to him compared with the memory of the
Beardsley lady, whose ankles were so thin that they might be
spanned with his little finger.&nbsp; &ldquo;As light as a
feather,&rdquo; said the poet, &ldquo;gossamer . . . swansdown .
. . all soul.&nbsp; Of course, old fellow, I know that <a
name="page318"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 318</span>you can
understand.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t talk like this to any other
person in the world.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And Edwin understood, and realised the justice of the
poet&rsquo;s choice of a confidant so sympathetically that he was
spurred to confidences on his own part.&nbsp; &ldquo;You see, I
happen to be a poet myself,&rdquo; he said, and to prove it he
felt bound to recite a sonnet that he had composed a year or two
before at St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; A magnificent sonnet it seemed
to him, perhaps more magnificent for the accompaniment of a song
in waltz rhythm by the theatre orchestra.&nbsp; It was flattering
to find that Byron agreed with him as to its excellence; but
while the poet was pressing his hand in congratulatory
brotherhood, and Edwin was just deciding to recite it all over
again, the sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and parted
them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine was now singing the
last verse of her song and that in two minutes it would be his
duty to present her with a bouquet and a pair of silver
hair-brushes.&nbsp; Still reciting the most telling lines of his
sonnet, he was conducted by Mephistopheles through the
manager&rsquo;s office, where a young lady who, in her inviting
softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was counting the counter-foils
of tickets, and through a subterranean passage with the welcome
chill of a catacomb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid
bouquet was thrust into his hands.</p>
<p>It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was of a
suffocating heaviness, until he realised that the overpowering
perfume of which he was aware proceeded not from the bouquet but
from the scents and powders of a bevy of creatures of unnatural
<a name="page319"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
319</span>loveliness who stood waiting in the wings.&nbsp; They
were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of their costume
would have given them an excuse for shivering; but they did not
appear to be conscious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin&rsquo;s
brain.&nbsp; The scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse
of naked flesh excited him.&nbsp; At this moment all his
awkwardness seemed to have vanished.&nbsp; He could not believe
that he was the same person who had blushed at the mere contact
of the American girl&rsquo;s overall, or sat speechless in the
presence of Miss Wheeler at the Dousita.&nbsp; His old modesty
seemed to him to have been a ridiculous and inexcusable folly;
for, at the moment, he would have welcomed the prospect of making
the most shameless advances to any one of these houris in
competition with any man of his acquaintance.&nbsp; With the air
of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which of those blossoms
the handkerchief should be thrown.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now get along with you,&rdquo; said the stage-manager,
pushing him forward.</p>
<p>He gripped the presents in his hands, and treading on air,
advanced on to the stage, where Miss Marie Loraine was kissing
her hands to the stalls.&nbsp; The stage was very big, and sloped
in such a way that he felt his feet impelled towards the
footlights; but, being determined that he would accomplish his
mission with dignity, Edwin steered a steady, if resilient,
course.&nbsp; In front of him he saw a creature before whose
elegance and beauty the beauty of the chorus was as
nothing.&nbsp; She stood waiting for him and smiled.&nbsp; For a
moment Edwin faced the <a name="page320"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 320</span>auditorium, a vast and dark abyss in
which not a single face was to be seen.&nbsp; It gave him a
sudden fright to think that so many thousands of unseen eyes were
fixed upon the patch of limelight in which he stood.&nbsp; He
pulled himself together.&nbsp; This was the moment, he thought,
in which it was for him to make some speech worthy of the
bewildering loveliness that stood before him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; said the impatient voice of
Mephistopheles in the wings.&nbsp; &ldquo;Buck up.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Miss Loraine,&rdquo; said Edwin, with a flourish,
&ldquo;I have the honour of&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; The middle of his
sentence was broken by a crash and a tremendous peal of laughter
from the unseen thousands.&nbsp; The younger Wade, arrayed in the
panoply of a Roman legionary and balanced upon the parapet of the
stage box, had fallen with a clash of armour into the big
drum.&nbsp; Edwin thrust the bouquet and the hair-brushes into
the arms of Miss Loraine, herself convulsed with laughter.&nbsp;
With a terrific draught the curtain swept down.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Splendid,&rdquo; said the voice of Mephistopheles.</p>
<p>The rest of the evening was more confused than ever.&nbsp; He
remembered a vision of this surpassing beauty standing in the
wings in a long silk wrapper that her dresser had thrown over her
shoulders, and thanking him for his presentation.&nbsp; To Edwin
the moment seemed the beginning of a passionate romance.&nbsp; He
remembered other moments in the auditorium, in which W.G. and
Maskew figured.&nbsp; He remembered the taste of a glass of
Benedictine, a liqueur that he had never tasted before, that
Maskew gave him to pull him together again after <a
name="page321"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 321</span>his
exertions on the stage.&nbsp; He remembered a flashing of lights,
an uproar, a free-fight, and the singing of &ldquo;God Save the
Queen.&rdquo;&nbsp; And then he found himself a member of a small
but distinguished brotherhood streaming at a tremendous rate up
the wide street that led towards the Prince&rsquo;s
Hospital.&nbsp; All of them were medicals, and most of them his
seniors.&nbsp; Freddie St. Aubyn, the Wade brothers, W.G., and
Maskew were among them.&nbsp; Out of the main road they passed
singing into the meaner streets that surrounded the hospital:
miserable streets with low houses and courts clustered on either
side, from the upper windows of which astonished working men and
women in their nightdresses put out their heads to look at the
vocal procession.&nbsp; Opposite the portico of the hospital was
a cab rank on which a solitary hansom was standing with the horse
asleep in the shafts and the driver taking his rest inside.&nbsp;
The sight appeared to arouse the fighting instincts of the elder
Wade.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God,&rdquo; he said, with indignation,
&ldquo;here&rsquo;s a cab.&nbsp; What the hell does the fellow
think he&rsquo;s doing here at this time of night?&nbsp; He must
be drunk.&nbsp; Look at it!&rdquo;</p>
<p>His brother, who could carry his liquor better, tried to
persuade him to leave the cab alone; but before any one knew what
was happening, he had thrown himself on it and turned the whole
affair upside down in the road.&nbsp; Edwin heard a crash of
splintered glass; he saw the cab on its side and the sleepy horse
with its legs in the air.&nbsp; He thought: &ldquo;Good
God!&nbsp; What has happened?&rdquo;&nbsp; And the next thing he
saw was a red-faced cabman, buttoned <a name="page322"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 322</span>up to his ears, crawling out of the
wreckage and cursing fluently at Wade, who stared for a moment,
dazed, at the havoc his strength had created, and then bolted for
the shelter of the hospital.&nbsp; The cabman, now thoroughly
awakened, bolted after him.&nbsp; Edwin glowed with admiration
for Wade&rsquo;s achievement.&nbsp; It was the deed of a Titan, a
splendid Berserker.&nbsp; The cabby had burst through the
concourse on the hospital steps, thirsting for the blood of Wade,
who, by this time, was lying quietly on a hooded stretcher
swatched in bandages and quite unrecognisable.&nbsp; A house
surgeon in a white overall confronted the cabman.&nbsp; The
hospital porters in uniform stood solemnly at his elbow.&nbsp;
The house surgeon was assuring the cabby that he was drunk: the
cabby telling the lot of them exactly what he thought of
them.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Take hold of this fellow,&rdquo; said the house surgeon
to the porters, &ldquo;and hold him while I get a stomach
pump.&rdquo;&nbsp; The porters, specially qualified for dealing
with midnight drunks, obeyed.&nbsp; There was a splendid struggle
in which the foaming cabby was pitched out into the road,
&mdash;ing their &mdash;ing eyes to Hell.&nbsp; The bandaged Wade
was carried solemnly upstairs on his stretcher and brought round
with whisky in the house surgeon&rsquo;s room, a chamber full of
Olympian card-players, pickled with cigar-smoke and the fumes of
alcohol.&nbsp; Some one, it was the cavalier, began to play the
piano.&nbsp; Edwin seized the opportunity to recite his sonnet,
until W.G. laid a monstrous hand on his mouth.</p>
<p>That vision ended, and to it succeeded one of cool, deserted
streets with far too many kerb-stones <a name="page323"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 323</span>for Edwin&rsquo;s liking, and then
the dishevelled sitting-room in W.G.&rsquo;s digs in which they
had dressed with a pale gas-jet hissing and flaring and a
momentary impression of W.G. asking him where he&rsquo;d put the
damned corkscrew.&nbsp; Edwin remembered rising to a brilliant
extreme of wit.&nbsp; &ldquo;Am I your corkscrew&rsquo;s
keeper?&rdquo; he said; and while he was explaining at length the
aptness of his mot W.G. knocked the neck off the bottle with his
poker, eclipsing any possible verbal brilliance.</p>
<p>In the middle of the night Edwin woke and staggered in the
dark to the washhand-stand, where he drank a draught of water, so
cool and sweet as to be astonishing, until he remembered that it
had possibly come from the mountains beyond Felindre.&nbsp; W.G.
was snoring heavily on the bed that he had just left.&nbsp;
W.G.&rsquo;s snoring got on his nerves so that he had to prod him
in the ribs and wake him, a proceeding that W.G. seemed unjustly
to resent.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I say, W.G.,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;do you think I was
drunk?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Drunk?&rdquo; said W.G. &ldquo;Good God, you
didn&rsquo;t wake me to ask me that?&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll know all
right in the morning.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin only knew that his head was splitting and that he was
hellishly cold.</p>
<h3><a name="page324"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
324</span>CHAPTER IV<br />
SCIENCE</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p>W.G.&rsquo;s prophecy that Edwin would know all about it in
the morning proved correct; but it was some consolation to him to
know that he shared the experience with his friends.&nbsp; All
the next day he went about his work with Maskew feeling a little
light-headed, and a peculiar weakness in the legs made him
disinclined for any exertion that could be avoided.&nbsp; Maskew
recovered himself more easily; but W.G., who never did anything
by halves, solemnly embarked on a &ldquo;bust&rdquo; that lasted
for a whole week.</p>
<p>This defection disgusted Maskew, who, in his hard, capable
way, believed in moderation in all things&mdash;even in
vice.&nbsp; He considered W.G.&rsquo;s conduct &ldquo;a bit
thick&rdquo;; principally because he was deprived of his company
in the dissecting room; but to Edwin the big man&rsquo;s debauch
seemed in some ways heroic and in keeping with his titanic
physical nature: a spectacle rather for awe than for
reproof.&nbsp; It was even impressive to see W.G. returning like
a giant refreshed with vice, throwing his huge energies into the
pursuits that he had abandoned as readily as he had lately
squandered them in an <a name="page325"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 325</span>atmosphere of patchouli.&nbsp; In
this line Edwin would have found it constitutionally impossible
to compete with W.G., but, for all that, he could not deny that
he felt better, more confident, and more complete for the
pantomime experience.&nbsp; It even flattered him to find himself
regarded as something of a blood by the humbler members of his
year who had witnessed his adventure on the Queen&rsquo;s Theatre
stage, though he could not conceal from himself the fact that
Martin, more absorbed than ever in blameless but exacting
relations with the eligible young ladies of Alvaston, was a
little supercilious as to his attainments.</p>
<p>With the approach of the summer and the first examination he
found little time for anything but work.&nbsp; The preparation
for the exam. was so much of a scramble that he had no time to
realise the imaginative significance of the subjects in which he
was engaged.&nbsp; He did not guess that the little fat professor
of Physics who lectured so drily on the elements of his science
was actually employing his leisure in the tremendous adventure of
weighing the terrestrial globe, or that certain slender aerials
stretched like the web of a spider from a mast at the top of the
university buildings were actually receiving the first lispings
of wireless telegraphy, an achievement to which that bearded
dreamer, the Principal, had devoted twenty years of his life.</p>
<p>To Edwin there was nothing intrinsically romantic in Chemistry
or Physics.&nbsp; His mind could not conceive that science was a
minute and infinitely laborious conquest of the properties of
matter.&nbsp; Atoms and Molecules and the newly-dreamed <a
name="page326"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 326</span>Electrons,
still trembling in the realms of imponderable speculation, were
no more to him than abstractions unrelated to the needs of
practical human life.&nbsp; They were only facts to be learned by
rote, symbols to be memorised and grouped together on paper like
the letters in an algebraic calculation; and the whole of this
potentially romantic experience was clouded by his own headachy
distaste for the gaseous smells of the laboratory: the choking
yellow fumes of chlorine that escaped from the glass cupboards in
which it was manufactured, and the less tolerable, if more human,
odour of Sulphuretted Hydrogen, in an air that was desiccated by
the blue flames of half a hundred Bunsen burners.&nbsp; These two
subjects were nothing more than an arid desert of facts relating
to dead matter through which he had to fight his way, and he
hated them.</p>
<p>In comparison with them, Biology was something of an
oasis.&nbsp; Here, at any rate, he had to deal with life, a
mystery more obvious and less academic.&nbsp; The contemplation
of its lower forms, such as the Amoeba, a tiny speck of dreamy
protoplasm stretching out its languid tentacles, living its
remote and curiously detached life with no aims beyond that of
bare mysterious existence, filled him with a strange awe.&nbsp;
The laboratory in which these researches were conducted, was high
and airy and not associated with any unpleasant smells except at
the season when the class were engaged upon the dissection of the
hideous dog-fish.&nbsp; It had even its aspects of beauty in the
person of the fair American in her dark overall; and for this
reason, if for no <a name="page327"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
327</span>other, Edwin found himself becoming most proficient in
his knowledge of the subject.</p>
<p>In the middle of the summer the examination came.&nbsp; Maskew
was an easy first, and carried off the Queen&rsquo;s scholarship
for the year; Edwin came second with a first-class, which, even
if it didn&rsquo;t satisfy himself, was enough to make his father
enthusiastic; Martin ambled through with an ease that challenged
Edwin&rsquo;s respect, and W.G., horribly intense and determined
through all the week of the exam., scraped through by virtue of
sheer bulldog tenacity.&nbsp; The result of the examination did
Edwin good if only by convincing him that Maskew, for all his
suburban flashiness and his inferior general education, had a
better head than his own.&nbsp; Like the excellent man of
business that he was, Maskew did not rest upon his oars: the week
after the examination, and the first of the long vacation, found
him and W.G. back in the dissecting room, plugging into anatomy,
the next year&rsquo;s principal subject, and Edwin saw at once
that if he were to keep pace with his rival he would have to
forgo the months of summery leisure to which he had looked
forward in the vacation.&nbsp; Martin was playing tennis in
Ireland, and so he found himself thrown once more into the
society of these two.</p>
<p>It was a pleasant time, for their leisure was their own and
there were no lectures to tie them to their work.&nbsp; They did
a great deal of their reading in W.G.&rsquo;s rooms, full of
easy-chairs, and wreathed in tobacco smoke that escaped through a
French window into a tiny garden plot green and pleasant under
the white Midland sky, and this room became <a
name="page328"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 328</span>a haven of
escape from the burning brick pavements in which Edwin and his
friends would work together without strain, talking of the future
and of W.G.&rsquo;s romantic past, and stabilising their own
ideas on the uncertainties of sex: a problem that so far had
meant very little to Edwin, but which W.G. was not in a position
to ignore.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You know, it&rsquo;s damned funny,&rdquo; he said,
&ldquo;but when you get to know more about things, when
you&rsquo;ve done some anatomy and that, you begin to think of
sex in a different light.&nbsp; It knocks all the mystery out of
it, and I&rsquo;m sure that&rsquo;s a jolly sound thing.&nbsp;
Good Lord, when I think of the ignorance with which I started on
this sort of thing!&nbsp; Finding out everything by experiment,
you know. . . .&nbsp; Why, if I&rsquo;d had a short course of
anatomy before I left school I should have been saved a lot of
rotten experiments that didn&rsquo;t do me or any one else any
good.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d have been a damned sight cleaner-minded
than I ever was.&nbsp; A medical training&rsquo;s a jolly good
thing in that way: shows you exactly where you are instead of
letting you go fumbling about in the dark.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Knocks all the poetry out of it though,&rdquo; said
Maskew.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Poetry be damned,&rdquo; said W.G. seriously,
&ldquo;there&rsquo;s a good deal too much of your poetry about
it.&nbsp; Poetry and mystery and a lot of bunkum like that . .
.&nbsp; Male and female created He them.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
particularly admire the method.&nbsp; I think He made rather a
better job of the amoeba.&nbsp; Think how much simpler it would
be to split open a chunk of protoplasm instead of having to make
a ridiculous fool <a name="page329"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
329</span>of yourself if you want to propagate your
species.&nbsp; Still, there it is, and the sooner you realise
exactly what it means and what it&rsquo;s all about, the less you
worry your head about it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, of course, if you&rsquo;re going to treat it in
that light you&rsquo;re going to knock all the pleasure out of
life&mdash;&rdquo; Maskew protested.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;re a sensualist,&rdquo; said W.G.&nbsp;
&ldquo;The main thing that I have against it is that it wastes
valuable time.&rdquo;&nbsp; He became scornful.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Think of all these rotten fellows who spend their days
writing books on sexual problems, analysing their rotten little
sensations in detail and gloating over mysteries of sex.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s only their ignorance that makes them like that.&nbsp;
What they want is a thorough course of anatomy and a whack of
practical experience to cure them; and if every one else had the
same sort of education there&rsquo;d be no sale for their
books.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin, listening to their sparring, remembered the library at
St. Luke&rsquo;s and a certain shelf of anatomical works that was
always kept locked with a special key that Mr. Leeming carried
mysteriously on his watch-chain.&nbsp; On the whole, he agreed
with W.G. and his preferences for the methods of the
Amoeba&rsquo;s parthenogenesis.&nbsp; He wondered, however, if
the kind of education that W.G. advocated would have scotched the
production of such works as <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> or the love
poems of Shelley.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It would be rather rotten if you did away with love,
W.G.,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m not talking about love,&rdquo; said W.G.
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m talking about a fellow&rsquo;s ordinary physical
<a name="page330"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
330</span>needs.&nbsp; Being in love is not the same thing as
that.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It is usually,&rdquo; said the cynical Maskew.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all a ridiculous mix-up,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;Thank God it doesn&rsquo;t worry
us.&rdquo;</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>With the beginning of the new year these delicious hours of
leisure disappeared.&nbsp; Edwin and his friends, with the
assurance of second-year men, became the real possessors of the
dissecting room.&nbsp; Anatomy and physiology now absorbed all
their time, and the leisurely interest in the first subject,
which had been subsidiary in the first year, was now a matter of
academical life and death.&nbsp; From the simple anatomical
details of the upper and lower extremities that he had dissected
with Martin in the year before, he passed to the more vital
regions of the human body: the thorax, the abdomen, and the head
and neck.&nbsp; He still attended the polished course of lectures
on anatomy that the Dean delivered in the theatre; but this
process he was forced to regard as a waste of time, since the
Dean&rsquo;s presentation of the subject did not differ greatly
from that of any text-book of anatomy, and the Dean&rsquo;s
personality, which curiously resembled that of his cousin Martin,
was too aristocratically remote ever to seem real.</p>
<p>In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he became
acquainted and fascinated with the first of his medical
instructors who had aroused his imagination.&nbsp; This was the
chief demonstrator of Anatomy, Robert Moon, or, more familiarly,
Bobby, a figure of romantic picturesqueness.&nbsp; He was tall
and <a name="page331"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
331</span>inclined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat,
and his serious face, which was of a size and pallor that his
surname suggested, was crowned by an erect crop of black and
curly hair.&nbsp; In Edwin&rsquo;s first year he had always
seemed to him a strange and distant figure, walking slowly up and
down the dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged from
the dark chamber which he inhabited in the corner near the door,
like a fat and rather sinister spider.</p>
<p>He rarely spoke: when he did so it was with a broad, north
country accent and the most extraordinary deliberation and
formality in his choice of words.&nbsp; With the men in the
second year he possessed an enormous reputation not only for his
exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side of which the
Dean&rsquo;s attainments seemed merely those of a dilettante, but
also for his excellence as a coach.&nbsp; Edwin and his two
friends became sedulous attendants at his tutorials, where,
standing in immobile dignity behind one of the zinc
dissecting-room tables in front of an appropriate background of
blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second-year students, who
came to sit at his feet voluntarily, like the disciples of a
Greek philosopher, he would demonstrate the details of some
ragged anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was of
the colour and consistency of leather.</p>
<p>In Bobby&rsquo;s demonstrations there was neither imagination
nor romance: they were merely fascinating in virtue of the
amazing exactitude of the detail which his brain had acquired
through long familiarity with the dismembered fragments of <a
name="page332"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
332</span>humanity.&nbsp; There was nothing in the way of minute
observation that could escape him, and his questions were so
searching and unexpected that even Maskew, who had himself a
prodigious memory for minute detail and could carry the letter of
a textbook in his head, was constantly floored by them.&nbsp; It
was a magnificent stimulus to Edwin; for it became a kind of game
to master a part so thoroughly that Bobby could not stump
him.</p>
<p>By this time he was so used to railway travelling that between
the morning discussion of the progress of the war that had just
broken out in South Africa, and the appearance of halfpenny
papers, that multiplied like greenfly in this heated atmosphere,
he could read his text-books of anatomy in a crowded carriage
without disturbance apart from the natural curiosity that a
vision of luridly coloured diagrams awakened in the minds of his
fellow passengers, and particularly the bank clerk, who thirsted
in a way that W.G. would have approved for technical instruction
in the matter of certain organs.&nbsp; Edwin prepared himself for
the demonstrator&rsquo;s tutorials as rigorously as if he had
been approaching a vital examination; he spent long hours in his
bedroom, utterly heedless of his wide prospect of wintry fields,
thinking of nothing but his collection of bleached bones, now
carefully marked with coloured chalks to show the origins and
insertions of muscles, and particularly those intricate fretted
plates that are joined to form the fragile casket of the human
skull.</p>
<p>So engrossed was he in absorbing the mere details of their
physical form that his mind had no room for other speculations of
the kind that had <a name="page333"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
333</span>impressed him in the days of his first acquaintance
with anatomy.&nbsp; It never struck him that the articulated
skull which grinned at him from his mantelpiece when he woke each
morning, had once contained the convolutions of a human brain: a
mass of pulpy matter that had been the origin of strange
complications of movement and feeling and thought, the storehouse
of memories, the spring of passions and the theatre of
dreams.&nbsp; He did not even know if the skull were that of a
man or a woman.&nbsp; To him it was no more than an assembly of
dry bones, intricate in their relations with one another, pierced
by the foramina of bewildering nerves and blood-vessels, all of
which must be visualised and stored and remembered within the
limits of another structure of the same kind&mdash;the sutures
and eminences of which he could feel with his own fingers when he
rubbed his puzzled head.</p>
<p>He used to go back to Mr. Moon&rsquo;s tutorials convinced
that he knew all that was to be known of the subject in hand, and
then Bobby, in his slow Lancashire voice, with broadened
&ldquo;a&rdquo;s and &ldquo;u&rdquo;s, would put to him some
leisurely question that showed him that he knew nothing.&nbsp;
Very decorously and slowly these questions would be asked; and
since the answers were concerned with the dryest and most exact
of physical facts, guessing was of no help to him and silence the
only refuge of the ignorant.&nbsp; No display either of knowledge
or ignorance had the least effect on Bobby Moon.&nbsp; His wide
and dreamy face showed no emotion on the discovery of
either.&nbsp; On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind
of ponderous verbal humour, slow and elephantine, <a
name="page334"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 334</span>like the
humour of Beethoven; but even in these moments his face showed no
signs of emotion, and he would pass on without waiting for any
recognition of his joke to the next lethargic question.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Mr. Harrop,&rdquo; he would say slowly, &ldquo;what is the
fotty pod of Hovers?&rdquo;&nbsp; And Harrop, sitting on a high
stool that showed his variegated socks to perfection, would reply
that the fatty pad of Havers was a small cushion of fat set in
the head of the femur to lubricate the hollow of the
acetabulum.</p>
<p>The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to dominate
Edwin&rsquo;s impressions of the dissecting room.&nbsp; There was
something provocative in the remoteness of this black and
solitary form from all the concerns of human life.&nbsp; Edwin
conceived him to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man, but
an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously endowed with the
powers of locomotion and speech but bereft of any human
characteristic.&nbsp; It amazed him to discover, in the end, that
Bobby Moon was nothing of the sort, but a creature of the most
delicate human tenderness, so sensitive to the appeals of beauty
and humanity that he had been forced to adopt the impassive mask
that was all that his pupils knew of him from an instinct of
self-protection.</p>
<p>It happened in this way.&nbsp; During the early part of his
second year Edwin had become conscious of a new figure in the
dissecting room, that of a man named Boyce, a student with a
brilliant reputation who had managed in some inexplicable way to
fail in his first examination and be left behind by the other men
of his year.&nbsp; He was a tall, fair creature, <a
name="page335"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 335</span>with a long
face and small, very blue eyes.&nbsp; The society of Alvaston had
made him friendly with Martin, from whom Edwin&rsquo;s new
relations were gradually separating him.&nbsp; The only
characteristic that Edwin had so far noticed in Boyce was an
almost literary fluency in the use of foul language which left
even Harrop gasping.&nbsp; Boyce was working alone on a thorax a
few tables away from Edwin.&nbsp; He was a neat and laborious
dissector, and Edwin had been tempted to admire the skill with
which he had defined the network of blood-vessels, the system of
coronary arteries and veins, with which the human heart is
enmeshed.&nbsp; Boyce was evidently far less unapproachable than
Edwin had imagined, and while they were examining his dissection
together they had not noticed the approach of Dr. Moon, who had
walked slowly to their table and stood gazing at the specimen
through his moonlike pince-nez.&nbsp; They did not realise that
he was near them until they heard his voice, slowly intoning a
line of poetry.&nbsp; &ldquo;The heart,&rdquo; he said:
&ldquo;arras&rsquo;d in purple like a house of kings.&nbsp; Are
you acquainted with that line, Mr. Boyce?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&nbsp; Who wrote it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A man named Francis Thompson.&nbsp; He was a medical
student at Manchester, several years senior to me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I know his name,&rdquo; said Boyce.&nbsp; &ldquo;He
is a friend of my father&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A great poet,&rdquo; said Bobby solemnly.&nbsp;
&ldquo;A great poet.&nbsp; The contemplation of mortality in this
place should be full of poetical reflections.&nbsp; You see, this
<a name="page336"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 336</span>is the
heart of a very old or a very dissolute man.&nbsp; The coronary
arteries are stiff with atheroma.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I was thinking, sir,&rdquo; said Edwin, encouraged,
&ldquo;of the heart of Shelley that Trelawny was supposed to have
picked out of the funeral pyre when the body was burned.&nbsp;
His account says that only the heart was left.&nbsp; He gave it
to Hunt, didn&rsquo;t he?&nbsp; But you&rsquo;d think the heart
would be burned more easily&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; It&rsquo;s an unlikely story.&nbsp;
Shelley&rsquo;s heart&rdquo;&mdash;he looked up dreamily at the
ceiling&mdash;&ldquo;Shelley&rsquo;s heart. . . .&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s a strange reflection.&rdquo;&nbsp; And he moved away,
his big head still in the air and his hands behind his back.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I say,&rdquo; said Edwin; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d no idea
Bobby was like that.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t associate him with
poetry, would you?&nbsp; He seems such an awfully matter-of-fact
chap.&nbsp; Dry bones, you know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Boyce laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, you don&rsquo;t know
Bobby.&nbsp; Nobody does here except my father.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
an incurable sentimentalist.&nbsp; He lives an awfully lonely
sort of life in some digs up in Alvaston.&nbsp; His mind&rsquo;s
crammed with poetry and old music and a lot of ethnological
lumber.&nbsp; Do you know, he&rsquo;s about the biggest authority
in England on prehistoric man?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I hadn&rsquo;t the least idea.&nbsp; I imagined he
dreamed of nothing but bones and soft parts.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You would. . . .&nbsp; But he&rsquo;s a wonderful chap
really.&nbsp; Are you keen on poetry?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I am.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no &lsquo;of course&rsquo; about
it.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t imagine that your friends Brown and
Maskew are particularly interested in it.&nbsp; My guvnor&rsquo;s
by way of being <a name="page337"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
337</span>a poet, you know.&nbsp; Bobby&rsquo;s awfully keen on
his work.&nbsp; Do you know it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin was ashamed to say he did not.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m not in the least surprised,&rdquo; said
Boyce.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s not appreciated, you know, except
by other poets, like this fellow Thompson.&nbsp; I think
he&rsquo;s rather good, as a matter of fact, quite apart from the
fact that he&rsquo;s my father.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;ll come up to
our place some day I can show you a lot of interesting things in
his library: first editions and things like that.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d
no idea that you were keen on them.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The tone implied such an appreciation of Edwin&rsquo;s hectic
past as typified by his solitary appearance on the stage of the
Queen&rsquo;s Theatre that he hastened to deny the
impeachment.&nbsp; He was tremendously pleased to have struck a
man like Boyce, who went on to talk about music, of which Edwin
knew nothing, and exuded an easy atmosphere of culture, of a kind
that he envied, without ever losing sight of the fact that Edwin
had come to him in rather a questionable shape.&nbsp; Edwin was
thrilled to think that he had reached the threshold of a new and
exciting friendship which made his association with Brown and
Maskew seem commonplace and shabby; but he was far too shy to
force himself on Boyce, and so the acquaintance remained for many
months at the exact stage in which it had begun, and he had to be
content with the sudden insight that Boyce had given him into the
hidden, romantic qualities of Dr. Moon.</p>
<p>Sometimes, while he was scrubbing his hands with carbolic
soap, the only thing that really banished <a
name="page338"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 338</span>the smell
of the dissecting room from his fingers, he would hear Boyce
discussing music, and particularly the work of Tschaikowsky,
whose sixth symphony had just inflamed his imagination, with Mr.
Moon in his gloomy bunk, and he would go on washing his hands
until they were ridged and sodden in the hope of hearing what
they were saying or even of entering into their conversation,
until W.G. would come along and drag him off to Joey&rsquo;s,
asking him what the hell he was dawdling about.&nbsp; Then Edwin
would be almost ashamed of W.G.&rsquo;s company, and hated
himself for it, since he knew in his heart of hearts that, even
if he were a Philistine, W.G. was one of the best and soundest
fellows on earth.</p>
<p>The friendship with Boyce, however, was bound to come.&nbsp;
It began with the formation of a small literary society, that had
been originated by certain of the third-year men with whom Boyce
was acquainted, and which held its meetings in the newly-opened
smoking room that adjoined Dr. Moon&rsquo;s chamber of
horrors.&nbsp; Papers were read every fortnight, and discussions
followed in which Edwin had scarcely dared to take part, but
Boyce was a polished and fluent protagonist.&nbsp; In the end,
when the first enthusiasms of the society, to which Brown and
Maskew, naturally enough, did not belong, had been spent, Edwin
was asked to read a paper.&nbsp; He chose for his subject
Browne&rsquo;s <i>Religio Medici</i>, a work with which this
medical audience seemed strangely unacquainted.&nbsp; The paper
was a success, and at the end of the meeting Boyce accosted him
friendlily and asked him why he had never been up to see <a
name="page339"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 339</span>his
father&rsquo;s books.&nbsp; Edwin withheld the obvious reply that
the invitation had not been pressed although he had never ceased
to think of it; and Boyce at once suggested that they should go
up to Alvaston together that evening.&nbsp; &ldquo;We can put you
up for the night if that will be more convenient,&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>They walked up together under the high, frosty sky, talking of
poetry, of all the beautiful things that they had worshipped in
common without knowing it.&nbsp; It seemed strange to Edwin that
they should have worked side by side for a couple of years and
scarcely spoken to each other when all the time they had so many
delights that might have been shared.&nbsp; The unlocking of this
closed and secret chamber of his heart gave him a strange feeling
of elation and made the world suddenly beautiful.&nbsp; The hard
and wintry pavement seemed curiously smooth and resilient; the
roadway ran in masterly and noble curves, the black branches of
plane-trees and laburnums, even the pointed gables of the smug
suburban villas seemed to take on a new and piercing beauty
against the starry sky, and they swung along together as
triumphant in their ecstasy of youth as if indeed they were
treading on the stars.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What a topping night,&rdquo; said Boyce.&nbsp;
&ldquo;God . . . look at Vega!&rdquo;&nbsp; He waved his long
arms and quoted:&mdash;</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;Or search the brow of eve, to catch<br
/>
&nbsp;&nbsp; In opal depths the first faint beat<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Of Vega&rsquo;s fiery heart. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page340"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
340</span>&ldquo;Whose is that?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;My guvnor&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a tremendous chap
on astronomy.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s damned good,&rdquo; said Edwin,
thrilling.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not bad, is it?&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a very sound man, the
guvnor.&nbsp; I think you&rsquo;d like him.&rdquo;</p>
<p>But when they reached the Boyces&rsquo; house they found that
the poet was not at home.&nbsp; In place of him Edwin was
introduced to a mild and beautiful figure with a soft voice who
turned out to be Boyce&rsquo;s mother.&nbsp; She had her
son&rsquo;s soft blue eyes, and spoke to him with such caressing
tenderness that Edwin was seized with a sudden feeling of aching
emptiness for the memory of his own mother, of whom, so potent is
the anodyne of time, he had scarcely thought for more than a
year.</p>
<p>Boyce presented Edwin with a high social recommendation.&nbsp;
&ldquo;A friend of Denis Martin&rsquo;s,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
Mrs. Boyce smiled on him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; said her son, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid
we can&rsquo;t very well go into the guvnor&rsquo;s study.&nbsp;
He hates any one invading it when he&rsquo;s not there.&nbsp;
Let&rsquo;s go upstairs to my own room and talk.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin had a passing vision of the forbidden chamber, the
flanks of a grand piano in which a reflection of firelight glowed
red, and endless shelves of gilt-lettered books.&nbsp; The rest
of the house seemed to him rather untidy, as if it were no more
than a dry chrysalis protecting the central beauty of the
poet&rsquo;s room; but he had not time to see much following in
the rear of Boyce&rsquo;s long-legged progress up the
stairs.&nbsp; He found himself, at last, in a small attic with a
gable window that framed the starry <a name="page341"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 341</span>sky: the kind of room that satisfied
all his own ideals of comfort and seclusion.</p>
<p>Boyce was proud and willing to exhibit his treasures.&nbsp;
They showed a curious mixture of the schoolboy, represented by
photographic groups of cricket teams, glass cases of butterflies,
and a tasseled Rugby cap, and the more mature intelligence that
now possessed them.&nbsp; Edwin and he sat down opposite one
another in a couple of easy-chairs, and talked and smoked
incessantly all that evening.&nbsp; They spoke of Wordsworth, the
idol of Boyce&rsquo;s literary devotions, of Browning, whose
claims to poetry he would not allow, and of Shenstone, whose name
he had never met before.&nbsp; By this time Edwin was getting
rather ashamed of his early admiration for Shenstone, and the
fact that Boyce had never heard of the Pastoral Ballad confirmed
him in his decision that the author was an acquaintance whom he
had better drop.&nbsp; They went on to Francis Thompson&mdash;Dr.
Moon&rsquo;s quotation from the <i>Anthem of Earth</i> had sent
Edwin searching for his works in the municipal library&mdash;and
he now learned that this bewildering genius, who had once, like
him, been a medical student, had actually slept in the room
beneath his feet.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He never qualified,&rdquo; said Boyce dreamily,
&ldquo;and yet medicine is a wonderful thing.&nbsp; I should
think the fact that the medical man is always face to face with
mortality&rdquo;&mdash;he pointed to a suspended skeleton in the
corner&mdash;&ldquo;and all the other big fundamental things like
birth and pain, ought to give him a sort of sense of proportion
and make him sensitive to the beauties of life.&nbsp; Your
friend, Sir <a name="page342"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
342</span>Thomas Browne, is an example.&nbsp; Then there&rsquo;s
Rabelais.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;There are heaps of others,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, yes. . . .&nbsp; Keats.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Byron and Akenside,&rdquo; Edwin supplied from the
eighteenth century.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know the gentleman,&rdquo; said
Boyce.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, then, Goldsmith and Crabbe.&nbsp; Crabbe&rsquo;s
rather good, you know.&nbsp; And Shelley&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Shelley?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, Shelley walked a hospital when he was in London
with Harriet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d no idea of that,&rdquo; said Boyce,
&ldquo;but there&rsquo;s a modern fellow that the guvnor&rsquo;s
rather keen on, named Bridges.&nbsp; Robert Bridges, who&rsquo;s
a physician.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never heard of him.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . he&rsquo;s not well known, but I believe
he&rsquo;s pretty good.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And so they talked on, deciding that the world was ripe for
great poetical achievement, awed to think that perhaps they were
living, without knowing it, in the beginning of a great age of
literature; convinced, to a degree of enthusiasm, of the
splendour and magnanimity of the calling that they had adopted;
conscious&mdash;thrillingly conscious&mdash;of the fact that the
whole world lay before them full of undreamed delights as
mysterious and yet as clear as the wintry sky.</p>
<p>Edwin had to run for his train.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t mind
running.&nbsp; On a night like this he felt that violent exercise
was a mode of expressing the curious elation that his talk with
Boyce, and his excitement <a name="page343"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 343</span>in the new friendship that promised
so many hours of happiness, had given him.&nbsp; At the gates of
the station he paused to buy an evening paper.&nbsp; It contained
the news of Buller&rsquo;s defeat at Colenso and the result of a
cup-tie between North Bromwich Albion and Notts Forest, but he
had no room in his mind for football or for this African war in
which W.G., to the ruin of his future finances, was itching to
enlist.&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s thoughts were of the great names and
the great works of which he and Boyce had been talking.&nbsp; The
newspaper lay folded on his knees; the flares of the black
country swept past him in the night, unseen.&nbsp; He was not
even aware of the other occupants of the carriage until he
suddenly found himself staring straight into the eyes of his
opposite, whom he recognised as Edward Willis, the son of Walter
Willis of the Great Mawne Furnaces.</p>
<p>All Aunt Laura&rsquo;s attempts, heroically made in the
interests of social advancement, had so far failed to bring about
a friendship between these two.&nbsp; Edwin, on his side, could
never get out of his head an unreasonable prejudice against the
Willises, the natural result of Aunt Laura&rsquo;s adulation of
their wealth, and even a knowledge of his own humble origins had
not affected his traditional distrust of people whom he regarded
as flashy and self-made.&nbsp; In Edward Willis he found a
creature even more shy than himself, and the very fact that Mrs.
Willis and Aunt Laura, putting their heads together, had decided
to throw them into each other&rsquo;s arms, was enough to create
an atmosphere of distrust and uneasiness.&nbsp; The sudden
recognition in the railway <a name="page344"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 344</span>carriage was merely an
embarrassment.&nbsp; Edwin was startled into saying
&ldquo;Hallo,&rdquo; and Willis replied in exactly the same way;
then both of them retired with precipitation to the cover of
their evening newspapers, from which they listened to the
conversation of a commercial traveller who was returning home
from London and had all the latest and most authentic gossip on
the South African situation.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mind you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;they&rsquo;re wily
fellows, these old Boers; we may not be up to their dirty tricks:
I&rsquo;m proud to say we aren&rsquo;t.&nbsp; We shouldn&rsquo;t
be English if we were.&nbsp; But one thing, sir, you&rsquo;ll see
in the end, and that is that dogged British pluck will come
through.&nbsp; You mark my words.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin felt an overpowering impulse to say that dogged British
pluck pretty obviously hadn&rsquo;t come through at Colenso; but
Edward Willis&rsquo;s presence made him far too self-conscious to
commit himself, and at the next station the traveller and his
friend picked up their bags and departed, breathing the word
&ldquo;Buller&rdquo; as if it were an incantation warranted to
fortify and console.&nbsp; Edwin and Willis were alone.</p>
<p>When their silence had become altogether too ridiculous, Edwin
plucked up his courage and said, &ldquo;Rotten thing this
war.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Willis.&nbsp;
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right for my old man.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Iron. . . .&nbsp; We&rsquo;re chock full of Government
work for South Africa: gun-carriages and rifle barrels.&nbsp;
You&rsquo;re doing medicine, aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page345"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
345</span>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Lucky devil.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re learning to cure
people, while I&rsquo;m learning to make things to kill
them.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He stared out of the window towards a patch of sky in which
the glow of his father&rsquo;s furnaces pulsated as though it
registered the beatings of a savage, fiery heart, and relapsed
into gloomy silence.&nbsp; The tunnel swallowed them, and in a
moment they pulled up at Mawne Hall.&nbsp; Willis prepared to
go.&nbsp; &ldquo;I say,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we&rsquo;re giving
a dance next week&mdash;&rdquo; and hesitated.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What for?&rdquo; said Edwin, for want of something
better.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know . . . unless it&rsquo;s to celebrate
the Colenso casualties.&nbsp; I believe you&rsquo;re
invited.&nbsp; I hope you&rsquo;ll come.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; But Willis was
gone.</p>
<h3><a name="page346"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
346</span>CHAPTER V<br />
ROMANCE</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Ingleby</span> wanted to know why he
was so late.&nbsp; &ldquo;I read a paper at the Literary
Society,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and then went back to Alvaston
with a man named Boyce.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a son of Arthur
Boyce.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The auctioneer?&rdquo; asked Mr. Ingleby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . the poet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Mr. Ingleby&rsquo;s features showed a faint anxiety, as though
he doubted if such an influence were healthy.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well,
I hope your paper was a success,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I think it went all right.&nbsp; Any
letters?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . two.&nbsp; Here they are.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
handed them to Edwin.</p>
<p>One of them was the invitation from Mawne.&nbsp; He showed it
to his father.</p>
<p>&ldquo;A dance&mdash;&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; I suppose I&rsquo;d better
go.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Your Aunt Laura told me about it.&nbsp; If it
won&rsquo;t interfere with your work, I don&rsquo;t see why you
shouldn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t any proper clothes.&nbsp; Evening
dress, you know&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page347"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
347</span>&ldquo;I suppose that is quite necessary,&rdquo; said
Mr. Ingleby regretfully.</p>
<p>Edwin could see that the question of expense was troubling his
father&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; He wished to goodness he would say so
outright, instead of looking vaguely distressed.&nbsp; It would
be so much more satisfactory.&nbsp; As it was, he could only feel
indefinitely in the wrong, as if the dance were a piece of
reckless and inexcusable levity in which he had no right to take
a part.&nbsp; The dress suit, the acquisition of which had been
anticipated with some satisfaction, now appeared to him in the
terms of an accumulation of small change hardly earned in his
father&rsquo;s dusty shop: as the outcome of pennyworths of Epsom
Salts, sticks of liquorice, or teething powders.&nbsp; It was
humiliating, and even distressing to realise that every single
comfort or luxury that he enjoyed&mdash;even the prime
necessities of life, had to be accumulated, literally scraped
together from this incredibly humble source and by the personal
exertions of this simple and pathetic person.&nbsp; With these
conditions in his mind he could not bear accepting money from his
father, the weight of his obligation was so overwhelming.&nbsp;
Now he found it difficult to face the idea of a tailor&rsquo;s
bill that might represent the profit on at least three days of
small trading in the shop.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;d better go, father,&rdquo;
he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It would be rather ungracious if you didn&rsquo;t,
Edwin,&rdquo; his father replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was extremely
kind of the Willises to ask you.&nbsp; I think you&rsquo;d better
go and be measured to-morrow by Mr. Jones.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The idea of a Halesby tailor&rsquo;s cut was not <a
name="page348"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 348</span>inspiring
and made Edwin inclined to press his refusal; but Mr. Ingleby
went on to explain that Mr. Jones owed him a bill that he had
begun to look upon as a bad debt, and that Edwin&rsquo;s dress
suit would be a way of working it off.&nbsp; This circumstance
made the order less shameful, except in so far as it applied to
the hateful penury of Mr. Jones, whom Edwin remembered as a man
with a beard, as shabbily unlike a tailor&rsquo;s dummy as it was
possible for a man to be.&nbsp; The occurrence was unfortunate in
another way; for such an addition to his wardrobe would almost
certainly scotch the idea of asking for a dress allowance, a plan
which had been maturing in his brain for some months and only
needed a callous frame of mind for its performance.</p>
<p>Next evening, however, he went to see Mr. Jones, who measured
him obsequiously, and assured him that in the happy days before
he was his own master, he had actually cut morning-coats for Sir
Joseph Astill, a gentleman who was very difficult to fit on
account of a slight . . . er . . . fullness in the figure.&nbsp;
Edwin, primed by the observations of The Major in <i>To-Day</i>,
was able to tell Mr. Jones exactly what he wanted, and Mr.
Jones&rsquo;s manner, when he rubbed his hands over Edwin&rsquo;s
instructions, did not suggest for a moment the fact of which
Edwin was all the time aware: that this was not a
<i>bona-fide</i> order, but a rather shabby way of making him pay
a bill that he had scamped for a couple of years.</p>
<p>Stepping out of Mr. Jones&rsquo;s melancholy shop, Edwin
thanked heaven that his father had not wanted him to follow in
his footsteps; for it seemed <a name="page349"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 349</span>to him that the life of a struggling
tradesman in a small town must be the most humiliating on
earth.&nbsp; He was awfully sorry for all of them as he walked
down the street and read their names on the boards above their
windows.&nbsp; He had never quite realised their condition before
he smelt the particular odour of lower middle-class poverty,
vaguely suggestive of perambulators, aspidistras, and boiled
mutton, that moved down the linoleum floored passage at the back
of Mr. Jones&rsquo;s shop.</p>
<p>In due course the clothes arrived.&nbsp; On the whole, Mr.
Jones had not done badly; but even so, Edwin was still scarcely
qualified for the business in hand.&nbsp; He had never learned to
dance, and it was necessary to acquire this accomplishment in a
little more than a week.&nbsp; At first he had decided to pull
his courage together and approach Martin, whose eligibility
compelled him to be an expert dancing man; but, at the last
moment, he funked a confession that would expose such depths of
social ignorance, and went instead to a certain Professor Beagle,
who advertised classes in dancing and deportment at the hour of
five on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in the Queen&rsquo;s
Assembly Rooms, next door to the theatre of the same name.</p>
<p>On the next Tuesday afternoon Edwin presented himself to Mr.
Beagle at the advertised hour.&nbsp; He found him alone sitting
on a platform at the end of a long room that smelt of dust and
moth-eaten rep curtains.&nbsp; When Edwin appeared at the other
end of the room the professor dismounted, cleared his throat,
clasped his hands in front of him, and made a formal bow.&nbsp;
He was a little man, and very <a name="page350"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 350</span>fat.&nbsp; He wore a navy blue coat
that was cut very short at the back, so that it ruckled up over
his round haunches, and his collar rose so high and stiff above a
white Ascot tie, that he was forced to carry his head tilted
backwards in the direction of his waxed moustache.&nbsp; His face
was purple and his watery eyes stared, whether as the result of
the collar&rsquo;s asphyxiation or his past manner of life it was
difficult to say.&nbsp; His feet were excessively small, and his
striped grey trousers tapered to the ankles in such a way that
every step he made seemed a nice feat of balancing.&nbsp; He
bowed to Edwin, and Edwin explained the urgent circumstances of
his mission.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said Professor Beagle.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
quite understand.&nbsp; You must not, &rsquo;owever, expect me to
be able to turn you out as I should wish to in the time at our
disposal.&nbsp; Perhaps you will be good enough not to mention my
name in this connection, and keep my instructions, as it were,
dark?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin assured him of secrecy, and the professor proceeded to
ask him where the dance was to be held.&nbsp; &ldquo;I do not
wish to teach you anything that will not be useful,&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;In some circles the Quadrille, which I myself
consider the most dignified of dances, is still in favour.&nbsp;
In others the Valeta is coming into vogue.&nbsp; In different
planes of society different conditions prevail.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In the end the professor decided that Edwin&rsquo;s case
called for the Waltz, the Lancers, and the Polka, with the
possible addition of the Pas de Quatre.&nbsp; He demonstrated to
Edwin the position <a name="page351"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
351</span>in which his feet should be placed, and then invited
him to have a try at the waltz.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You will take my harm, please, in the following way . .
. so. . . .&nbsp; Now, neither grarsping nor clarsping, let the
lady&rsquo;s &rsquo;and lie gently in yours, with the fingers
&rsquo;alf bent, and under no circumstances squeeze the
figger.&nbsp; So . . . &rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin placed his right arm above the ruckles in Professor
Beagle&rsquo;s broad back: into his left hand a podgy fist
descended like a lump of moist dough, and from the little
man&rsquo;s back-tilted, strangled head a faint sound of
whistling proceeded that raked Edwin&rsquo;s own nostrils with a
cross-fire of whisky and cachous.&nbsp; Then the professor began
to revolve like a peg top, and Edwin felt himself swept round by
the arm that lay upon his shoulder, to the rhythm of the whistled
tune, which was sometimes suspended and replaced by:
&ldquo;Wonn-two-three.&nbsp; Wonn-two-three.&nbsp;
Wonn-two-three.&nbsp; Gently now.&nbsp; Keep-on-the.&nbsp;
Tips-of-your.&nbsp; WONN-two-three.&nbsp; Toes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In this manner they circled the room several times.&nbsp;
Edwin was getting out of breath; but the professor, to whom this
form of exercise was so usual as to be negligible, showed no
signs of fatigue, except that his eyes became a little more
glassy and his cheeks more purple.&nbsp; Indeed, the power by
which he swung Edwin round the room was a thing of mystery; for
his little feet did not seem to move, and the upper part of his
body was rigid.&nbsp; He moved like a cyclone or a dust-storm,
Edwin thought, revolving terrifically on its own axis.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I am afraid,&rdquo; said Professor Beagle formally at
the end of the first lesson.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am afraid you have <a
name="page352"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 352</span>no great
natural gift.&nbsp; It is better that I should be candid with
you.&nbsp; You will need half a dozen lessons at least before you
can take your place with the young ladies in one of my advanced
classes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin stuck to it.&nbsp; On six more occasions he visited the
Assembly Rooms, where, with exactly the same formalities, Mr.
Beagle received him.&nbsp; With Mr. Beagle in his arms, prevented
by sheer physical bulk from, in any circumstances, squeezing the
figger, he revolved in the vortex of the waltz.&nbsp; In the
Lancers he set to imaginary partners, or went
&ldquo;visiting&rdquo; with Mr. Beagle&rsquo;s hand lying gently
in his, with the fingers &rsquo;alf bent.&nbsp; In the Pas de
Quatre, where the draught of whisky and cachous was happily
directed forwards, he pointed an awkward toe alongside Mr.
Beagle&rsquo;s tapered and elegant extremity.&nbsp; In the end
the professor pronounced himself satisfied with him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If I were you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I think I should
come along to my advanced class this evening and familiarise
yourself with the proximity of young ladies.&nbsp; The fee is a
purely nominal &rsquo;alf-crown.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin decided to do so, and walked up in the evening with his
patent leather pumps in his pocket.&nbsp; He felt very shy.&nbsp;
The place was lighted with flaring gas jets, and in a room marked
Gentlemen, that he had always taken for a lavatory, a number of
young men, who looked like shop assistants, were putting on white
kid gloves.&nbsp; They all seemed to know one another and to look
upon Edwin as an intruder.&nbsp; No one spoke to him, and he
waited in the cloak room until the last had <a
name="page353"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 353</span>disappeared
before he dared to emerge.&nbsp; From the room on the opposite
side of the passage there issued a breeze of concentrated
perfumes, and a round of subdued titters.&nbsp; This room was
labelled &ldquo;Ladies.&rdquo;</p>
<p>While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he dare risk an
encounter, the door opposite opened and a bevy of bloused figures
appeared.&nbsp; The sight of the first took him by surprise: it
was the elder of the two an&aelig;mic young ladies in the drapery
who travelled in the morning train with him from Halesby.&nbsp;
She gave him a smile of recognition that revealed her defective
teeth.&nbsp; This prospect was altogether too much for him.&nbsp;
An acute shyness drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon
as he had taken off his pumps and put on his shoes again, he left
the Queen&rsquo;s Assembly Rooms and bolted down Sackville Row to
his train.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>The Willis&rsquo;s dance, to which Edwin had looked forward
with such mingled pleasure and anxiety, was destined to bring
forth a violent emotional experience.&nbsp; Mr. Jones had not
undergone the experience of cutting for the undulant figure of
Sir Joseph Hingston for nothing.&nbsp; Apart from the fact that
the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, Edwin&rsquo;s
dress coat was a success, and, as Aunt Laura benignantly pointed
out, it was just as well that some allowance should be made for
future growth.&nbsp; Mr. Jones had been extremely anxious that
Edwin should be supplied with a magenta silk handkerchief, an
ornament which, he was assured, <a name="page354"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 354</span>all the best people wore stuffed in
the corner of their waistcoats.</p>
<p>On this problem the Major had never delivered judgment, so
Edwin mustered sufficient courage to approach Denis Martin for
advice.&nbsp; Martin scornfully told him that the idea was
preposterous.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the kind of get-up that
your friend Maskew would adopt,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; He also
impressed upon Edwin the fact that the infallible index of a
bounder in evening-dress was a ready-made tie.&nbsp; No doubt the
advice was excellent; but it let Edwin in for an hour of agony on
the evening of the dance, when the tie refused to answer to the
Major&rsquo;s printed instructions, and finished up by making him
look as if he had gone to bed in his boots and slept on it.</p>
<p>He had never been to Mawne Hall before.&nbsp; That pretentious
mansion with its castellated fa&ccedil;ade set on a steep bank
above the valley of the Stour, in which the works that maintained
it lay, was so brightly lit upon this evening that it glowed like
a lantern through the bare boughs of the hanging wood
beneath.&nbsp; In the gun-room at the side of the hall in which
the hats and coats of the guests were being received by Bassett,
the Willises&rsquo; coachman, he recognised a number of
incredibly elegant creatures of his own sex with shining white
waistcoats, pearl studs, and immaculate ties.&nbsp; He knew
scarcely any of them, for they were mostly neighbouring
ironmasters or professional people to whose society the
Willises&rsquo; money had proved a sufficient introduction.&nbsp;
Among them he recognised Sir Joseph Hingston, playing ducks and
drakes with his aitches, and wearing, to Edwin&rsquo;s
encouragement, a flagrantly <a name="page355"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 355</span>ready-made tie.&nbsp; In this
particular, at any rate, he was one up on the baronet.&nbsp; He
hoped that some one else would realise this fact.&nbsp; In the
middle of these reflections he thought he heard a voice that he
recognised, and turned to find himself rubbing shoulders with
Griffin.&nbsp; Edwin said, &ldquo;Good-evening.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good Lord, Ingleby, are you here?&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t
seen you since the pantomime night.&nbsp; What are you doing
here?&nbsp; Do you know these people?&rdquo;</p>
<p>It struck Edwin that he spoke rather contemptuously of his
hosts.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; I live near here, you know,&rdquo; he
replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know the Willises were
friends of yours.&rdquo;&nbsp; As a matter of fact he knew
nothing about the Willises&rsquo; friends; but it sounded rather
well.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . I don&rsquo;t know them,&rdquo; said Griffin,
&ldquo;but the old man is a business friend of my uncle&rsquo;s,
and apparently they were rather hard up for men.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
sound of waltz music was heard, and Griffin left him
hurriedly.&nbsp; &ldquo;See you later,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>Edwin, anxious not to be left behind, pulled on his gloves and
split the thumb of one of them.&nbsp; He passed through the hall,
where his name was announced, rather contemptuously, as he
thought, by Hannah, the Willises&rsquo; tall and starchy servant,
and was received in a manner that was reassuring and homely by
Mrs. Willis.&nbsp; She spoke for a moment of his mother, and
tears gathered in her rather watery eyes; then she introduced him
to her small daughter Lilian, very self-conscious in a white
party frock with a pale blue waistband, and <a
name="page356"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 356</span>another
dark girl with beautiful grey eyes and a creamy rather than pale
complexion, who was standing beside her.&nbsp; Miss Dorothy
Powys, she said.&nbsp; Edwin, hedging for safety, booked a dance
with Lilian, who took the matter as seriously as himself.&nbsp;
Next, no doubt, he must have a shot at Miss Dorothy Powys, in
spite of the disturbing beauty of her eyes; but when he came to
ask her for a dance, he saw that Griffin was talking to her.</p>
<p>&ldquo;May I have another&mdash;number sixteen?&rdquo; Edwin
heard him ask easily.&nbsp; She smiled and nodded.&nbsp; Her
smile seemed to Edwin very beautiful: so beautiful, indeed, that
he couldn&rsquo;t possibly bring himself to approach her when
Griffin turned away.&nbsp; It was awfully silly of him, he
thought.</p>
<p>The evening was not exactly a success.&nbsp; He polkaed with
Lilian, and took his place in the Lancers with several mature
ladies to whom Mrs. Willis introduced him.&nbsp; Luckily none of
these belonged to Halesby, a circumstance that must be attributed
to Mrs. Willis&rsquo;s tact, so that the question of his origin
never arose.&nbsp; He danced according to the letter of Professor
Beagle&rsquo;s instructions.&nbsp; Neither grasping nor clasping,
he let the ladies&rsquo; hands lie gently in his with the fingers
half bent, and in no circumstances did he squeeze the
figger.&nbsp; What he missed was the terrific motive power that
the unladylike Professor Beagle had applied to his
revolutions.&nbsp; It now appeared to him that to supply this was
the part of the male; and as most of the matrons with whom Mrs.
Willis supplied him were bulky, he had his work cut out.&nbsp;
Once, returning thoroughly blown from one of these adventures he
<a name="page357"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 357</span>caught
the eye of Dorothy Powys; and he thought she smiled.&nbsp; Could
this be true?&nbsp; He wondered. . . .&nbsp; During the greater
part of the evening when he had not been dancing he had found
himself following her movements with his eyes.&nbsp; He had
decided that she must be at least a year or two older than
himself; but that didn&rsquo;t really matter, for she seemed to
him a creature of such very perfect grace, and her eyes, in the
moment when he caught them, had been so wonderful.&nbsp; After
the next dance, which was the one that she had booked with
Griffin, he watched them disappear into the library.</p>
<p>It made him feel sick with himself that he hadn&rsquo;t taken
the opportunity of his introduction.&nbsp; What a damned fool he
was!&nbsp; And afterwards, when he watched her, she did not smile
at all, either for him or for any one else.&nbsp; Indeed, she
seemed pale, and anxious, as if something had happened to upset
her.&nbsp; In despair Edwin wandered off into the card-room,
where he saw Lady Hingston, who was partnering Mr. Willis at
bridge, revoke three times in two games, to the intense annoyance
of her husband.&nbsp; From the card-room he strolled on to the
buffet, where he found Griffin absorbing quantities of whisky and
soda.&nbsp; He begged Edwin to join him; but Edwin, who was
particularly anxious to behave himself, struck to claret-cup.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, have you struck any cuddle?&rdquo; said Griffin
brutally, with his mouth full.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Any what?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Cuddle. . . .&nbsp; Girls. . . .&nbsp; What the devil
do you think one comes to a dance for?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p><a name="page358"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
358</span>&ldquo;Well, they are a pretty scratch lot,&rdquo;
Griffin confessed.&nbsp; &ldquo;That Powys girl&rsquo;s all right
though.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin blushed furiously.&nbsp; He suddenly wanted to throw his
glass of claret-cup at Griffin&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; Why? . .
.&nbsp; He calmed himself.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do you know her?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Never met her before to-night.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s got a
topping figure.&nbsp; She must be pretty well connected.&nbsp;
Lord Alfred Powys is one of their directors here.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But you don&rsquo;t mean to say&mdash;&rdquo; Edwin
began.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The night is yet young,&rdquo; said Griffin, gulping
another whisky.&nbsp; &ldquo;God, there&rsquo;s number
twelve!&nbsp; I must hook it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin wandered back to the ballroom.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t
keep away from it, but, at the same time, he was anxious not to
appear disengaged, for fear that Mrs. Willis should induce some
other heavy partner to abandon her arm-chair for his
amusement.&nbsp; He hung about the pillars of the folding doors
that led into the supper room, just out of range of Mrs.
Willis&rsquo;s maternal gaze.&nbsp; From this point he could
watch the beautiful Miss Powys, and wonder, with a sort of bitter
excitement, exactly what Griffin had meant by his
suggestions.&nbsp; Watching her, he could not believe that she
could be anything but graceful and beautiful in everything she
did.&nbsp; The band started to play the music for waltz: number
sixteen.&nbsp; He remembered it was the second dance that Griffin
had booked with her.&nbsp; For some reason that he couldn&rsquo;t
imagine, he felt that he wanted to be near when Griffin came for
her: perhaps he could tell her attitude towards him by something
that she might say.&nbsp; He went over to <a
name="page359"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 359</span>the place
where she was sitting next to Mrs. Willis.&nbsp; He tried not to
look at her.</p>
<p>In a moment he heard Griffin&rsquo;s voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ours,
I think.&rdquo;&nbsp; The tone was a little blurred by
Griffin&rsquo;s potations.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think you&rsquo;ve made a mistake,&rdquo; she
said.</p>
<p>Edwin turned round, and at the same moment she looked towards
him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Surely I am dancing this with you, Mr.
Ingleby.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But look here, I&rsquo;m sure these are your initials
on my programme, Miss Powys.&nbsp; Let me look at
yours.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He tried to take the programme from her fingers, but she moved
it away.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Really, we mustn&rsquo;t contradict each other, Mr.
Griffin.&nbsp; The dance is Mr. Ingleby&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Will you
take me, please?&rdquo; she said to Edwin.</p>
<p>In an ecstatic dream Edwin found himself walking away with her
on his arm.&nbsp; It was a miracle, an astounding, beautiful
miracle.&nbsp; She picked up her skirt by the loop of ribbon with
which it was suspended and looked him full in the eyes,
smiling.&nbsp; &ldquo;Shall we start?&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>They started.&nbsp; In one fatal moment Edwin, who
hadn&rsquo;t been doing badly at the beginning of the evening,
forgot every single precept that Professor Beagle had taught
him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I say, what a shocking dancer you are,&rdquo; she said
with a laugh.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m most awfully sorry, I only learnt this
week.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now that his mind was diverted by speaking to
her the steps came more naturally.</p>
<p><a name="page360"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
360</span>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s better,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Who on earth taught you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>He confessed to Professor Beagle, and she appeared to be
amused.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You see you&rsquo;re dancing away from me all the
time.&nbsp; Just as if you were afraid of me.&nbsp; You ought to
hold me closer.&nbsp; It upsets the what d&rsquo;you call it . .
. centre of gravity.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I was told never under any circumstances
to&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t very well repeat
Professor Beagle&rsquo;s formula.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now you&rsquo;re getting on beautifully.&nbsp;
Don&rsquo;t think about it.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the idea.&nbsp;
Just dance.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The music ended.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where would you like to
go?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Out into the hall, if you don&rsquo;t mind . . . on the
stairs.&nbsp; I want to explain to you.&nbsp; It was really
awfully good of you to take me on.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was a wonderful piece of luck for me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They sat together on the shallow oak staircase and she
proceeded to tell him that Griffin had upset her in the dance
before by trying to kiss her shoulder.&nbsp; &ldquo;I really
couldn&rsquo;t stick a repetition of that,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Besides, I think the man had been drinking.&nbsp; So I
just pitched upon your poor innocence and lied for all I was
worth.&nbsp; Who are you, by the way?&nbsp; I only just
remembered your name when Mrs. Willis introduced us.&nbsp;
She&rsquo;s rather a dear, isn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;</p>
<p>The music of the next dance struck up.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you
dancing?&rdquo; Edwin asked eagerly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, I expect so.&nbsp; Just look at my
programme.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s too dark for me to see.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page361"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 361</span>Edwin
took the programme from her fingers.&nbsp; It was a thrilling
moment.&nbsp; In the dusk he deciphered two initials,
&ldquo;E.W.,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s only Edward Willis.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
very shy of me.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;ve nothing better to do I
think we&rsquo;ll stay here.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was so easy to talk to her.&nbsp; To Edwin, indeed, it
seemed as if he had now become articulate for the first time in
his life.&nbsp; She did not speak very much of herself; but she
asked him many questions about his life at school, where, he
confided to her, he had first known Griffin, and then again about
his new work in North Bromwich.&nbsp; And when she did speak her
voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of an amazing limpid
purity, more beautiful than any human speech he had ever
heard.&nbsp; Edwin would have liked to listen to it for
ever.&nbsp; He felt that he wanted words to describe its peculiar
music, but no words came to him.&nbsp; He could only remember a
line in Browning&rsquo;s <i>Pauline</i>:&mdash;</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;Her voice was as the voice of his own
soul<br />
Heard in the calm of thought. . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>That was the nearest he could get to it; but the words,
although they expressed a little of his absorption, did not
convey the musical qualities that he wanted to describe.&nbsp; He
tried to compare it with the tones of some instrument that he
knew, but neither wood-wind nor strings suggested what he
wanted.&nbsp; No . . . it was a sound nearer to nature than any
man-made instrument.&nbsp; It was the voice of a Naiad: the sound
of running water in a clear brookland.&nbsp; And all the time
that he listened to <a name="page362"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 362</span>her he was thrillingly conscious of
her physical presence.&nbsp; She was sitting on the stair beneath
him, and fortunately she could not see that he was gazing at her
in the gloom, thinking how beautifully shaped was the nape of the
neck from which her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome by the
loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoulder.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m talking all the time,&rdquo; he said,
&ldquo;and you&rsquo;re saying nothing.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s rather a
shame . . . because you speak so beautifully.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Whatever do you mean?&rdquo;&nbsp; For a moment her
eyes were on his.&nbsp; He dared not look at them.&nbsp; He could
not answer her, for the moment seemed full of such an
overpowering sweetness.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do tell me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, I only mean that when you say a thing like that, it
. . . it suggests that everything about you is marvellously clean
and clear and musical&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; He paused, for he felt
that she might laugh at him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . go on,&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Like water in a hill country.&nbsp; It makes me feel as
if I weren&rsquo;t within a hundred miles of North
Bromwich.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She laughed softly, but not unkindly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m not a bit like that.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m
really awfully hard and worldly&mdash;I wish I were the least bit
what you imagine.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re most awfully young,
aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Perhaps she did not mean the word cruelly, but it seemed very
cruel to Edwin.&nbsp; It was quite possible that she was a few
years older than himself, if age were to be counted by years; but
in reality <a name="page363"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
363</span>he knew that she was beautifully young, certainly young
enough to love and to be loved.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let&rsquo;s talk about me,&rdquo; she
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;But I want to talk about you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He wanted to talk about nothing else.&nbsp; His head was full
of words that he wanted to throw before her like jewels, but he
did not know how much he dared to say.&nbsp; He knew it was
impossible for him to express a hundredth part of his delight in
her.&nbsp; It would be nearly as bad as kissing her neck in the
manner of Griffin, to say that the curve of it sent him delirious
with joy.&nbsp; It would be indecency rather than candour to say
that the faint scent of her intoxicated him.&nbsp; He was silent
with tremulous emotion.&nbsp; He wondered if she could be
conscious of it; and he could not guess, for she, too, did not
speak.&nbsp; From the ballroom they heard the music of another
dance begin.&nbsp; Two shadowy couples emerged from the passage
beneath them.&nbsp; A curtain of Indian beading made a sound like
dead leaves driven over a dry pavement by the wind.&nbsp; The
intruders&rsquo; voices died away.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose we must go too,&rdquo; she said with a
sigh.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why must you go?&nbsp; Are you dancing?&rdquo; Edwin
asked, with a catch in his throat.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, I don&rsquo;t think I shall dance any more.&nbsp; I
was rather upset.&nbsp; It was silly of me.&nbsp; But I think
we&rsquo;d better go.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin offered her his arm in the best manner of Professor
Beagle.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; she said in a low voice.&nbsp; For a
moment she hesitated.&nbsp; She was smiling, and her eyes were
wonderful in the gloom.&nbsp; Their faces <a
name="page364"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 364</span>were level
with each other.&nbsp; And, suddenly, amazingly, she kissed
him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; Edwin tried to
take her hand as she moved away from him.&nbsp; For a second it
lay in his, soft and small and warm.&nbsp; Then, before his arms
had time to follow the impulse of his flaming brain, she had
slipped away from him and passed into the shadow of the
passage.&nbsp; He stood there at the foot of the stairs alone,
his heart thudding like a steam-hammer in a bewildered,
intoxicating elation.&nbsp; Why had she left him?&nbsp; Why? . .
. unless it were only a part of her adorable modesty.&nbsp; That
must be the reason: and yet it was hardly consistent with an
exalted ideal of modesty to kiss a young man, whom she had only
known for fifteen minutes, on the lips.&nbsp; A new aspect of the
miracle presented itself to him.&nbsp; Was it possible, after
all, that Griffin had been right, that she was really exactly
what he had insinuated, a fast little baggage who had determined,
in a sudden caprice, to throw Griffin over and try a new
experiment?</p>
<p>He could not believe it.&nbsp; Everything that he had noticed
and adored in her, her grey eyes, the delicious quality of her
speech, her fragrance, the indescribable fineness&mdash;there was
no other word for it&mdash;of her, denied the possibility.&nbsp;
He found it difficult to realise that she had gone in the moment
of such an astounding revelation.&nbsp; Such was the way of a
Naiad, melting away out of her sweet mortality in the moment of
possession.&nbsp; Standing alone at the foot of the gloomy
staircase, listening in a dream to the luscious music of the
Choristers&rsquo; waltz, <a name="page365"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 365</span>he tried to recreate his dream out
of memory.&nbsp; Nothing of her was left but her delicate
perfume.&nbsp; On the stairs he saw a small crumpled muslin
handkerchief from which the perfume came.&nbsp; He picked it up
with the reverence of a pilgrim touching a relic, eagerly
triumphant that he had managed to rescue a fragment of his
dream.&nbsp; It did not strike him that this tiny square of
scented muslin was presumably the instrument with which divinity
blew its nose: and indeed its dimensions scarcely fitted it for
this material function.&nbsp; He placed it in the satin-lined
pocket of Mr. Jones&rsquo;s creation.&nbsp; It pleased him to
think that it lay near his heart.</p>
<p>This, of course, was only the beginning of a romance.&nbsp; No
doubt, in the course of the evening, he would see her
again.&nbsp; Somehow he must persuade her to see him alone, and
then he would be able to do all the magnificently passionate
things of which her flight had cheated him.&nbsp; He would kiss
her; he would hold her exquisiteness in his arms; he would tell
her all the glorious things that he had been fool enough to
withhold.</p>
<p>He went back into the ballroom.&nbsp; Nobody seemed to notice
him there.&nbsp; It pleased him to think that these ordinary
people were too dull in their perceptions to guess at the wonder
in his heart.&nbsp; It was a secret that he shared with only one
other person in the world, and that secret had altered his whole
outlook on life.&nbsp; He was no longer the timid boy, conscious
of his social disadvantages and of his new dress clothes, who had
entered the Willises&rsquo; house a couple of hours before, but a
man, a lover, to whose passion the whole beauty of the <a
name="page366"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 366</span>world
ministered, a creature miraculously placed beyond the reach of
envy or of scorn.&nbsp; He was happy to wait patiently for the
supreme moment when he should see her again.&nbsp; And so he
waited, mildly tolerant of Griffin, over whom he had scored so
easily, of Edward Willis, who performed with a set face his
penitentiary programme of duty-dances, of Mrs. Willis, who
watched the joy of her small daughter Lilian with the proud but
anxious eyes of a mother hen, of Mr. Willis circulating among his
guests with an expansive smile, of poor Lady Hingston, still
revoking automatically in the card-room.</p>
<p>But Dorothy Powys never returned to the seat that she had
occupied under the shadow of Mrs. Willis&rsquo;s wings.&nbsp; She
had told him that she didn&rsquo;t mean to dance any more, but
surely that didn&rsquo;t mean that he was not to see her
again.&nbsp; He grew uneasy.&nbsp; Of course she could easily
escape if she wanted to do so, for she was staying in the
house.&nbsp; He wondered if he dared ask Mrs. Willis what had
become of her, but decided that this would certainly give him
away.</p>
<p>Instead of doing this he posted himself in a corner from which
he could hear everything that was said in Mrs. Willis&rsquo;s
circle.&nbsp; This was not a very profitable pursuit, for Mrs.
Willis was not an interesting talker, and the only excitement
that penetrated the broody calm that surrounded her was the
arrival of her husband, very excited over a telephone message,
that had no foundation in fact, announcing the relief of
Ladysmith by General Buller.&nbsp; Edwin was beginning to give
the business up as <a name="page367"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
367</span>a bad job when he saw a tall, languid man, whom he
considered to be rather shabbily dressed, approach Mrs. Willis
and ask her what had happened to his niece.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, she was here half an hour ago,&rdquo; said Mrs.
Willis.&nbsp; &ldquo;The poor child told me that she had a
headache and was going to bed.&nbsp; I told Hannah to take her a
hot water bottle. . . .&nbsp; I do hope you&rsquo;re quite
comfortable, Lord Alfred,&rdquo; she went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is
nice, isn&rsquo;t it? to see all these young people enjoying
themselves.&nbsp; At least it would be, if one didn&rsquo;t have
to think of all the poor creatures in South Africa being fired at
by these treacherous Boers.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And the tall, shabby man mumbled, &ldquo;Yes . . . yes,
certainly. . . .&nbsp; Very,&rdquo; in his beard.</p>
<p>It was enough for Edwin.&nbsp; He said good-bye to Mrs.
Willis, who seemed only mildly surprised at his departure, and
left the house.&nbsp; There was no reason now why he should
stay.&nbsp; On the stone terrace he paused, listening for a
moment to the muted music from within the house.&nbsp; In the
upper stories only one window was lighted.&nbsp; He could see the
glowing yellow pane beyond a bough of one of the cedars with
which the lawn was shaded.&nbsp; He wondered if that window were
hers.&nbsp; He would like, he thought, to stay there all night in
the black shadow of the cedar, gazing at that window and feeling
that he was near her.&nbsp; Later on, no doubt, the light would
be extinguished, and then he would imagine her lying there
asleep.&nbsp; How beautiful she must be when she lay there
sleeping!</p>
<p>He sighed, and went on his way, under the <a
name="page368"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 368</span>wonderful
night.&nbsp; He climbed the steep slope of Mawne Bank, under the
smouldering pit-fires, in a dream, and found himself, surprised,
beneath the walls of the cherry orchard at the back of Old Mawne
Hall.&nbsp; Inside the walls the cherry-trees lay locked in a
wintry sleep.&nbsp; He stopped, for the steepness of the hill had
stolen his breath.&nbsp; He remembered a day when he walked there
with his mother.&nbsp; &ldquo;How mother would have loved
her!&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; Yes . . . she was more wonderful
than his mother.&nbsp; On the day that he remembered, so many
years ago, it had been spring.&nbsp; The branches had been full
of billowy bloom.&nbsp; Now, in the wintry night, he felt that
spring was near: spring was in his blood, stirring it to new and
passionate aspirations as in a few months time it would stir the
dreamy sap of the cherry-trees.&nbsp; A strange, unseasonable
miracle.&nbsp; Glorious, indefinite words formed themselves in
his mind.&nbsp; Spring, with its warm, perfumed breath,
triumphing beautifully over the powers of winter and death.&nbsp;
Death at Colenso under those tawny kopjes.&nbsp; Love in his
heart.&nbsp; A sublime, ecstatic muddle. . . .&nbsp; The Mawne
furnaces leapt into a sudden flower of fire that made the sky
above them tawny.&nbsp; Love was like fire . . . an exultant
leaping flame.</p>
<p>He did not know where he was going until he found himself at
home in his little shabby room taking off his dress-suit and
staring at himself as a stranger in the dusty mirror.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Who am I?&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;that this should have
happened to me?&nbsp; I do not know myself.&nbsp; I am greater
and more wonderful than the image that I see in the
glass.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page369"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 369</span>He
placed his precious talisman of muslin under his pillow, and
wondered if he might be blessed with a dream of her.&nbsp;
&ldquo;She kissed me,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;She kissed
my lips&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>It was evident that if he were to see her again he must make
friends with Edward Willis.&nbsp; He was sorry that he had not
done so before.&nbsp; For once in a way the recommendations of
Aunt Laura had been prophetically right.&nbsp; His
self-consciousness made it difficult for him to do so, for he
felt certain that this cold, calculating young man would see
through him.&nbsp; For two days he debated with himself on the
various ways in which Mawne might be approached without coming to
any satisfactory conclusion.&nbsp; On the third he was so lucky
as to meet his victim on the Halesby train.&nbsp; Willis did not
seem in the least anxious to renew their acquaintance; and it was
at the expense of some awkwardness that Edwin managed to drag him
into conversation.</p>
<p>They talked a little about the war, which Willis seemed to
view from a remote and pessimistic angle.&nbsp; From that, by way
of Mr. Willis&rsquo;s Ladysmith rumour, they passed on to a
discussion of the dance.&nbsp; Edwin was enthusiastic.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad you enjoyed yourself,&rdquo; said
Willis.&nbsp; &ldquo;I hate dancing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I rather admired that Miss Powys,&rdquo; said
Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Dorothy Powys?&nbsp; Yes, she&rsquo;s a pretty girl,
isn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who is she?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page370"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
370</span>&ldquo;Oh, she&rsquo;s a niece of Lord Alfred Powys,
one of our directors.&nbsp; Lives with him, I believe.&nbsp; I
don&rsquo;t really know her.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t she staying with you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, no. . . .&nbsp; She only stayed at Mawne for the
night of the dance.&nbsp; Her uncle happened to be coming over
for a directors&rsquo; meeting, and the governor asked him to
bring her along with him as there was a dance on.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This was all very discouraging.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Where do they live?&rdquo; Edwin asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Somewhere over in the Teme valley, I think.&nbsp; Lord
Alfred&rsquo;s a great fisherman.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a nice
chap.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;And she lives with him?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; I think he&rsquo;s sort of adopted
her.&nbsp; But I understand she&rsquo;s going to India sometime
next month.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;India?&nbsp; What on earth is she going to India
for?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Going to be married to some fellow in the Indian
army.&nbsp; A major, I think he is.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;To be married&mdash;&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>And the train pulled up at Mawne Hall.</p>
<h4>IV</h4>
<p>He took it very hardly.&nbsp; On the face of it, it seemed
that her kiss had been no more than a piece of mad, cynical
trifling; but his respect for himself&mdash;which was
considerable, as became his years&mdash;would not allow him to
believe this.&nbsp; He decided, instead, that Dorothy
Powys&rsquo;s kiss had been the symbol of a great and noble
passion, fated, in the melancholy manner of nearly every
legendary lore, <a name="page371"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
371</span>to frustration.&nbsp; He was convinced that the unknown
major in the Indian army would never be loved; that the memory of
that intense moment on Mr. Willis&rsquo;s back stairs would haunt
his wife for ever, and temper with romance the vistas of an
unhappy marriage.&nbsp; The main result of the incident in
Edwin&rsquo;s case was a spate of passionate but imitative
verses, a new devotion to such music as repressed his particular
portion of <i>weltschmerz</i>, and an anxiety to confide the
story, with elaborations, to some sympathetic friend.&nbsp; He
turned it on to W.G.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, W.G., what do you think of it?&rdquo; he asked,
when he had finished.</p>
<p>W.G. sucked at his pipe and smiled good-humouredly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Better luck next time, old chap,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<h3><a name="page372"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
372</span>CHAPTER VI<br />
THE DRESSER</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the following June the second
professional examination was held.&nbsp; On a stifling morning,
when the blue brick pavements of North Bromwich reflected a
torrid heat, and a warm wind, blowing like a sirocco from the
black desert outside, swept the streets with clouds of dust,
Edwin, Maskew, and W.G. waited in the cloakroom outside the
Dean&rsquo;s office to see the results of the examination
posted.&nbsp; Maskew was the only one of the three who showed no
signs of nervousness; for W.G. could never overcome the
difficulty of expressing his thoughts on paper, and Edwin had
passed ten minutes of purgatory with an outside examiner in the
anatomy <i>viva</i>.&nbsp; He knew, on the other hand, that his
Physiology had been extraordinarily good, and put his faith in
the general impression of intelligence that he hoped he had
created.</p>
<p>The porter came out with the lists, and W.G., striding to meet
his fate like some Homeric hero, snatched the paper from his
hands.&nbsp; He went very white as he read it.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God&mdash;&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well,
I&rsquo;m damned&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Rotten luck if you&rsquo;re down, W.G.,&rdquo; said
Maskew sympathetically.</p>
<p><a name="page373"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
373</span>&ldquo;Down? . . .&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not down.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;m through.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He still looked bewildered.&nbsp; Edwin took the paper from
his trembling hands.&nbsp; As he had expected Maskew was first,
but he saw that he himself was second on the list.&nbsp; Martin
had ambled through respectively somewhere about the middle.&nbsp;
W.G. and Harrop were last and last but one.&nbsp; He pinned the
list on the notice-board.&nbsp; It was an exhilarating moment in
which he was conscious of the herculean, sweaty handgrip of W.G.
who was muttering: &ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m damned if we
don&rsquo;t all deserve it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Talking and laughing together, they went out to lunch at
Joey&rsquo;s and caught the next train down to Evesham, where the
coolness of the glassy Avon made the June heat more tolerable,
and in the evening, blistered with rowing and sunshine, they came
back to North Bromwich, dined together, and afterwards went to a
music-hall.&nbsp; It was wonderful to Edwin to see the physical
elation of W.G.&nbsp; The big man wanted to dance like a child,
and it was with difficulty that Maskew restrained him from
smashing a plate-glass window in Sackville Row.&nbsp;
&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a cold-blooded swine, Maskew,&rdquo; he said
indignantly.&nbsp; &ldquo;God, man, don&rsquo;t you feel you want
to do something?&nbsp; You must let off steam in some way, and
it&rsquo;s just as well to do it decently.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Next morning the Dean sent a message to Edwin and Maskew,
asking them to call at his office during the morning.&nbsp; They
went together, and were received with his usual urbane
politeness.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good-morning, Mr. Maskew . . . Mr. Ingleby. . . .&nbsp;
You had better sit down.&nbsp; I am very pleased <a
name="page374"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 374</span>to see your
names at the top of the list.&nbsp; Yes . . . very pleased.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;ve consulted Dr. Moon, and he approves your appointment
as prosectors.&nbsp; It is an office that you will be very wise
to undertake if you have any surgical ambitions, and I am very
pleased to offer it to you.&nbsp; Perhaps you will let me know
to-morrow?&nbsp; Thank you, gentlemen. . . .&nbsp;
Good-morning.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Shall you take it?&rdquo; said Edwin, as soon as they
were outside.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I shall.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m rather keen on
Anatomy.&nbsp; It only means putting one back a year, and
it&rsquo;s worth it a hundred times over, if one gets the primary
Fellowship.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be a fool if you don&rsquo;t do
it.&nbsp; We should have a topping time together.&nbsp; No
lectures . . . just a year of research work.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I shall have to think about it,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>It was the financial side of the question that had to be
considered.&nbsp; To add another year to a course that was
already expensive in pursuit of an elusive Fellowship of the
Royal College of Surgeons: was it worth while?&nbsp; To begin
with, he might easily fail.&nbsp; The primary examination was
notoriously fluky, the results depending on the individual
caprices and preferences of examiners.&nbsp; Edwin knew very well
that better men than himself had failed in it.&nbsp; If, after
draining his father&rsquo;s pockets for another year, he should
be ploughed, the situation would be altogether too pathetic.</p>
<p>Anything that affected his father&rsquo;s purse seemed to
Edwin, in those days, a matter for delicacy and shame.&nbsp; He
hated to receive money from him.&nbsp; It was an acute
embarrassment to see him write a <a name="page375"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 375</span>cheque.&nbsp; He wrote slowly, with
a regular, formal hand, and all the time Edwin, watching him,
would think how many small, degrading sales of tooth paste and
castor oil and pennyworths of camphor had gone to the making of
that tenuous bank-account, and how easily and carelessly the
painful accumulations would be spent.&nbsp; He hated asking his
father for money, and for this reason had compelled himself to
refrain from asking for the perfectly reasonable and necessary
allowance that he had been wanting to settle for the last
year.</p>
<p>And so he did not dare to tell his father that he had been
offered the prosectorship and the opportunity of taking the
Fellowship.&nbsp; If he had done so he was almost certain that
Mr. Ingleby would have consented, and his father&rsquo;s
sacrifice would have thrown such a weight of obligation on him
that life would not have been worth living.&nbsp; Indeed, if, in
the end, he should have failed, his shame would have been
intolerable.&nbsp; These reflections on the humility and penury
of his father always plunged Edwin into a debauch of sentiment in
which he would return with the zeal of a prodigal to the
resolutions that he had made at the time of his mother&rsquo;s
death.&nbsp; They filled him with a kind of protective fervour
that might easily have been mistaken for love, but was, in
reality, an excuse for its absence.&nbsp; Still, even if the
sentiment harrowed, it consoled, and Edwin was heroically elated
by the performance of a sacrifice that he had not been brave
enough to refuse.</p>
<p>It pleased him also to find that W.G. was thankful for his
decision.&nbsp; &ldquo;You see, it would have been <a
name="page376"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 376</span>rotten for
me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if you and Maskew had both been left
behind.&nbsp; When you&rsquo;ve got into the habit of working
with a fellow in your first two years, it&rsquo;s a bit of a
break to have to go on by yourself.&nbsp; Of course, I should
never have the least earthly chance of getting the Fellowship,
and even if I had, I couldn&rsquo;t afford to waste a year over
it.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m damned glad you&rsquo;re coming on with me,
Ingleby.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The tribute was flattering.&nbsp; Edwin, always rather
pathetically anxious for friendship, was particularly pleased to
have it offered so frankly by a creature as unlike him in every
way as W.G.&nbsp; There was something stable and reliable about
the big man&rsquo;s simplicity.&nbsp; He felt that he would be as
loath to give offence to W.G. as to his father; and though he
still felt some indefinite hankerings after the atmosphere of
culture that he would have enjoyed in the society of Boyce, he
couldn&rsquo;t deny the fact that W.G. was a sound and splendid
fellow, and a good man to have by his side in an emergency.&nbsp;
Together they plunged into the new world of hospital life.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Two general hospitals supplied the clinical needs of the North
Bromwich Medical School.&nbsp; The older, from which the school
had originated, was a small institution, the Prince&rsquo;s, with
which Edwin had become acquainted on the occasion of his first
panto-night.&nbsp; It stood in the upper and healthier part of
the city, in the middle of the slums that lie upon the fringe of
the fashionable suburb of Alvaston: <a name="page377"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 377</span>a solid building of early Victorian
red brick, with a stone portico facing upon a thoroughfare of
rather older houses that had once been reputable but had now
degenerated into theatrical lodging-houses.</p>
<p>The hospital itself was small enough to be homely, and W.G.
and Edwin soon became accustomed to its narrow entrance hall, and
the lodge in which porters, who already knew all that was to be
known about the reception of casualties, were housed.</p>
<p>Edwin would arrive at the hospital early in the morning, when
no sign of life was to be seen in the &ldquo;professional&rdquo;
lodgings sleeping with drawn blinds upon the other side of the
road.&nbsp; At this time of the day the hospital porch smelt
clean and antiseptic, for the stream of stinking humanity had not
yet begun to trickle through.&nbsp; He would hang his coat in the
narrow passage that served for cloakroom and lounge with a
cigarette in his mouth before the glass-fronted notice-boards on
which the lists of operations for the day were exhibited, and
exchange greetings with the night porter departing in a state of
drowsy ill-temper, or the day-porter coming on duty with a
military swagger and his grey hair plastered down with vaseline,
from the casualty department, and cold water.</p>
<p>Here, too, the members of the consulting staff would arrive in
their frock-coats and top-hats: great men, such as Lloyd Moore,
the outstanding surgical genius of the Midlands; old Beaton, the
professor of surgery, with his long, grey beard, and Hartley, the
ophthalmologist, whose reputation was European.&nbsp; These
giants would pass on through the swinging doors to their wards or
consulting rooms, <a name="page378"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
378</span>and on the very stroke of nine, W.G., who was a bad
riser, and always cut things fine, would plunge in, carrying with
him the strenuous atmosphere of a cold sponge and breezy
enthusiasm.&nbsp; Then the clock would strike nine, and they
would pass on together arm in arm, into the huge, airy
waiting-hall with innumerable benches set crosswise like the pews
in a church; and, at the same moment, the military porter, who
had been marshalling the queue of out-patients, would release
them, and a bewildering crowd of poorly-clad human wreckage would
drift in behind them, settling patiently into the benches
opposite the door of the department from which they were seeking
relief.</p>
<p>The work of Edwin and W.G. lay in the Casualty Department, a
small room full of pleasant morning light.&nbsp; On one side of
it ran a long counter with shelves for bottles, and drawers in
which plasters, dressings, and ointments were kept.&nbsp; On the
other, half a dozen chairs were ranged for the reception of
patients.&nbsp; The medical staff consisted of four persons only:
two professionals, a young and enthusiastic surgeon named Mather
who held the post of Assistant Surgeon to Out-patients, and an
elderly sister who had been on the job for years, and two
amateurs in the shape of Edwin and W.G.</p>
<p>All of them were clothed in white overalls; for the work of
the casualty department was of a dirty nature, and these long
garments also served as some protection from the swarming
parasites that lived upon the bodies of their patients.&nbsp;
Edwin, who suffered agonies of irritation from their attacks,
also armed himself with a glass-stoppered bottle of ether <a
name="page379"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 379</span>with which
he would drench the seat of irritation in the hopes of inflicting
death or at least unconsciousness upon his tormentors.</p>
<p>Then, one by one, the patients would file in, and plant
themselves upon the wooden chairs: old men whose skins were foul
with the ravages of eczema and dirt combined; women, exhausted in
middle age by child-bearing, and the accepted slavery of
housework; sturdy mechanics who had been the victims of some
unavoidable accident; pale young women, made anxious for their
livelihood by illness that its conditions had caused, and, more
terrible than all, the steady stream of wan, transparent
children, the idols of maternal care, the victims of maternal
ignorance.</p>
<p>In the human wreckage of the casualty department there was no
great variety; but all of it was new to Edwin and W.G., and they
threw themselves into the labour with enthusiasm, working so hard
from nine o&rsquo;clock till one, that their backs ached and they
lost all sense of the passage of time.&nbsp; Mather himself
seemed to them a prodigy of skilfulness, so swift in his
decisions, so certain and adroit in the work of his hands.&nbsp;
Even the sister, whom Edwin had originally regarded as a mere
woman, aroused their admiration by the ease with which she worked
and her invincible good humour.&nbsp; Edwin found that she could
teach him more than his male superiority would ever have
dreamed.</p>
<p>Little by little the astounding confusion of their work began
to seem more simple.&nbsp; Bandages, that had seemed condemned to
unsightly ruckles, or liable to fall unrolled upon the dirty
floor, began to <a name="page380"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
380</span>fold themselves in symmetrical designs.&nbsp; Edwin and
W.G. vied with one another in the neatness of their
dressings.&nbsp; The smell of the place, that had seemed at first
to fester beneath an unconvincing veil of carbolic and iodoform,
now seemed natural to their nostrils, even pleasant in its
familiarity.</p>
<p>Edwin began to have time to look about him, to form individual
attachments to the patients who came there every day, to take a
particular interest in cases that he regarded as his own.&nbsp;
Gradually, from the mass of evil-smelling humanity, personalities
began to emerge and even intimacies that were flattering because
they implied a trust in his own imperfect skill.</p>
<p>He did not know the names of his patients any more than they
knew his.&nbsp; To him they were grouped under conventional
generics: Daddy, Granny, Tommy, Polly, and the like.&nbsp; To
them he was always &ldquo;Doctor&rdquo;; but the thing that made
them human and lovable to him was the sense of their dependence
on him; and the preference for his attentions that was sometimes
timidly expressed, gave him a flush of gratification deeper than
any he had ever known.&nbsp; It pleased him to think that it was
true when his patients told him that he dressed them more gently
than the other workers in the casualty department.&nbsp; Such
confidences almost convinced him that he had found a
vocation.</p>
<p>After lunch Edwin and W.G. would talk over their cases
together in the lounge of the Dousita.&nbsp; Maskew, who still
met them every day at this resort, found their conversation
boring, and fell <a name="page381"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
381</span>back more and more upon the charms of Miss Wheeler, who
did not seem to have varied by a single hairpin since the day of
their first acquaintance.&nbsp; And from the discussion of their
individual cases, W.G. would sometimes pass on to the more
general questions that their work aroused.</p>
<p>&ldquo;This life&rsquo;s worth living,&rdquo; he would
say.&nbsp; &ldquo;When you first take up medicine and spend a
couple of years over learning the atomic weights of heavy metals
or dissecting the stomach of an earthworm, you begin to wonder
what the devil you&rsquo;re getting at; by Gad, this hospital
work opens your eyes.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re doing something
practical.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s more, you&rsquo;re doing a job that
no professor of classics or stinks could touch, and you see the
actual results of your treatment on your patients.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank God, I&rsquo;m not one of them, W.G.,&rdquo; said
Maskew morosely.&nbsp; &ldquo;As a matter of fact, it&rsquo;s no
more than when an electrical engineer finds a short circuit and
makes a new connection, or when a carpenter makes a job of a
rickety staircase.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all you know about it, my friend,&rdquo;
said W.G.&nbsp; &ldquo;In our job you&rsquo;re dealing with human
life; you&rsquo;re relieving physical pain&mdash;and sometimes
you get thanked for it, which is damned pleasant.&nbsp; And
you&rsquo;ve a responsibility too.&nbsp; If you make a slip the
poor devil you&rsquo;re experimenting on is going to
suffer.&nbsp; You may even kill him.&nbsp; And the extraordinary
thing is that he trusts you . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>To Edwin also that was the most extraordinary thing, and,
indeed, the most pathetic.&nbsp; It showed him that the practice
of medicine imposed an actual moral discipline on those who
followed it: <a name="page382"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
382</span>an obligation of the most meticulous honour and
devotion.&nbsp; But if the discipline of practice demanded much,
it repaid a thousandfold.&nbsp; He had his reward not only in the
thanks of the scabrous old men whose varicose ulcers, or
&ldquo;bad legs,&rdquo; as they called them, he dressed, but in
the rarer consciousness of actual achievement which came to him
more frequently as the scope of his work extended.</p>
<p>One case in particular he always remembered, principally
because it was the first of the kind.&nbsp; She was a little
Jewish tailoress who laboured at piecework in some
sweater&rsquo;s den in the rookeries on the southern side of the
hospital.&nbsp; She was not beautiful.&nbsp; Her face had the
peculiar ivory pallor, and her whole body the unhealthy
brittleness, of plants that have sprouted in a cellar.&nbsp; But
her voice was soft, and her hands, the fingertips of which were
made callous by the plucking of threads and rough with
innumerable needle pricks, were beautifully shaped.&nbsp; A week
or so before she had stabbed her left forefinger with an infected
needle, and lit a focus of suppuration in the tendon
sheath.&nbsp; She had to live, poor thing! and so, for a week she
had worked in a state of agony, while the tissues grew tense and
shiny with compression, and the pain would not let her
sleep.&nbsp; At last, when she could work no longer, she had come
to the casualty department, nursing her poisoned hand in a
bandana handkerchief.&nbsp; She had not slept for four nights,
and was very near to tears.</p>
<p>Edwin, who saw that surgery was needed, showed the case to
Mather.&nbsp; The surgeon stripped the sleeve from her thin,
transparent arm and showed him <a name="page383"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 383</span>the red lines by which the poison
was tracking up the lymphatics towards the glands of the axilla
that stood like blockhouses in the way of bacterial invasion.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you come before?&rdquo; he said, with
a roughness that was not unkind.&nbsp; How many times was Edwin
to hear those very words!</p>
<p>&ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t, doctor.&nbsp; There was my
work&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;d be no more work for you, my dear, if you
went on much longer,&rdquo; said Mather: and then, to Edwin,
&ldquo;Yes . . . you&rsquo;d better incise it at once, I&rsquo;m
busy putting up a fracture.&nbsp; Straight down in the middle
line.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t be afraid of it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;re not going to cut me, doctor?&rdquo;
she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not till to-morrow. . . .&nbsp; Oh, please
. . . when I&rsquo;ve had a night&rsquo;s sleep.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He was very nervous.&nbsp; He assured her that he would give
her no pain; but while he left her to fetch the scalpel and the
dressings he heard a queer drumming noise and turned to see that
it was made by the heels of his patient trembling on the
floor.&nbsp; He was nearly as tremulous himself.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I promise you I won&rsquo;t hurt you,&rdquo; he said,
and she returned him a painful smile.&nbsp; It was a look he
knew.&nbsp; &ldquo;Just like the eyes of a dog,&rdquo; W.G. had
said.</p>
<p>He sprayed the finger with ethyl chloride, that froze into a
crust like hoarfrost on the fingertip and blanched the skin that
was already pale with the pressure inside it.&nbsp; All the time
the girl was making little nervous movements, and sometimes her
heels began to drum again until she tucked them under the bar of
her chair.</p>
<p><a name="page384"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
384</span>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry, doctor, I can&rsquo;t help
it,&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>Then, with his scalpel, he made a clean longitudinal cut
through the tense skin down to the bone of the phalanx.&nbsp; She
gave a start and clutched his hand so that he nearly gave it
up.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got to do it,&rdquo; he
thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;I must do it.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was the first
time that he had ever cut with a knife into living flesh.&nbsp; A
strange sensation. . . .&nbsp; But the bead of matter that
escaped showed him that he had got to the root of the trouble,
and the sight of it filled him with a new and curious
exultation.</p>
<p>It was a long business, for the neglected pressure had
impaired the vitality of the bone and the wound would not heal
until the dead spicules had been separated from the living
tissue.&nbsp; Edwin dressed the finger every morning.&nbsp; The
patient would have been a poor subject at the best of times, and
he knew that the fact that she was now out of work probably meant
that she was starving.&nbsp; It would have been easy for him to
tell her that she must have plenty of nourishing food; but he
knew well enough that the words would have been no more than a
mockery.&nbsp; In the hospital wards, he reflected, she might
have been well fed; but the wards at the Prince&rsquo;s were full
of more serious cases who could not walk to the hospital to
receive their treatment.&nbsp; On occasions of this kind he
wished that he were a millionaire: an extravagant idea&mdash;for
doctors are never millionaires.&nbsp; He could only ram iron into
her and dress her and try to get her well so that she might
travel back around the vicious circle to the conditions that had
been responsible for her illness.&nbsp; It seemed to him that
people who <a name="page385"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
385</span>were not doctors could never really know anything about
life.</p>
<p>In a little while there were others, many of them, in whose
cases he knew that he had been privileged to effect some positive
good: notably an old woman, always dressed in black and loaded
with crepe as though she were attending her own funeral, who had
fractured her wrist by slipping on an icy pavement one evening
when she was fetching her husband&rsquo;s supper beer, an office
that she appeared far too ladylike ever to have performed.&nbsp;
She had put out her hand to save herself, and a Colles fracture
of the ulna and radius had been the result.</p>
<p>She called Edwin &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; and the first thing
that he noticed about her was the amazing cleanliness of her
withered skin.&nbsp; He remembered the fortitude that she had
shown when first he reduced the fracture; how her bony fingers,
on one of which was a wedding ring worn very thin, had clasped
his.&nbsp; For some curious reason he felt very tenderly towards
her, and when the bones were set and he had passed her on to the
massage department, he felt quite lost without her early
&ldquo;Good-morning!&rdquo;&nbsp; That was another strange thing
about medical practice: the way in which people with whom he was
thrown into an intimate sympathy for a few days passed completely
and irrevocably out of his life.</p>
<p>W.G. and Edwin found their experience so intriguing that they
took turns to visit the casualty department in the afternoons
when the work was light, and the absence of Mather gave them a
free hand in the performance of minor surgery.&nbsp; At this time
of the day the work of the department <a name="page386"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 386</span>was more suggestive of its name; for
the people who came there were nearly all the victims of sudden
illness or accident that needed diagnosis and immediate
treatment.&nbsp; It pleased Edwin to deal with these off his own
bat, and he spent the long afternoons that were free from
lectures in suturing wounds, removing brass filings or specks of
cinders from eyes, extracting teeth, gaining confidence every day
and suffering the mingled emotions of pain, pity, and violent
indignation.&nbsp; Not infrequently the last . . . for he saw so
much suffering that might easily have been prevented but for the
ignorance or callousness of humanity.&nbsp; These things aroused
his anger; but he soon realised that anger was the one emotion
that a doctor is most wise to suppress.</p>
<p>Sometimes a woman from one of the neighbouring slums would
enter in a state of hollow-eyed terror, carrying in her shawl a
child that was obviously dying from broncho-pneumonia.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why, in the name of Heaven, didn&rsquo;t you come up
before?&rdquo; he would ask indignantly.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The neighbours said it was only the teething,
doctor,&rdquo; she would reply.</p>
<p>Edwin would try to suppress an inclination to damn the
neighbours upside down.&nbsp; &ldquo;Surely you could see the
child was ill?&rdquo; he would say.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, doctor, but how could I get away?&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s seven of them, bless their hearts, and me going
with another, and the house looking like a pigsty, and the
master&rsquo;s dinner to cook.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t got no time
to spare for hospitals.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And he knew that she spoke the truth, contenting <a
name="page387"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 387</span>himself, as
he filled in the form for admission to the children&rsquo;s ward,
with telling her that the diet of bread-crusts soaked in beer,
which she had been giving it, was not ideal for a baby eight
months old.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Take the baby along to ward fourteen,&rdquo; he would
say, &ldquo;they&rsquo;ll do what they can for it,&rdquo; and be
met, as likely as not, with a volume of tigerish abuse from a
wild-eyed woman who swore that if her baby was going to die it
wasn&rsquo;t going to do so in any bloody hospital, was it, my
pretty?&mdash;the last words sinking to a maternal coo and being
accompanied by a paroxysm of kisses on the baby&rsquo;s lips that
were already blue for want of breath.&nbsp; And then Edwin would
control his indignation and resort to wheedling and coaxing,
feeling that if the baby were left to the mercies of maternal
instinct, he himself would be little better than a murderer.</p>
<p>Indeed, the responsibilities of his calling and its immense
obligations impressed themselves on him more deeply every
day.&nbsp; He saw that this profession of medicine was not to be
taken lightly; that his work in it would be useless, almost
impious, if it were not religiously performed.&nbsp; Even from
the earliest ages this had been so.&nbsp; One day, idly reading a
back number of the <i>Lancet</i>, he came upon a historical
article that contained a translation of the Hippocratic oath,
which had been administered to all those who were initiated in
the mysteries of medicine two thousand years ago.&nbsp; It seemed
to him that it might have been written on the day that he read
it.&nbsp; Thus it ran:&mdash;</p>
<blockquote><p><a name="page388"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
388</span>&ldquo;I swear by Apollo the Healer, and
&AElig;sculapius, and Hygieia, and Panacea; and I call all Gods
and Goddesses to witness, that I will, according to my power and
judgment, make good this oath and covenant that I sign.&nbsp; I
will use all ways of medical treatment that shall be for the
advantage of the sufferers, according to my power and judgment,
and will protect them from injury and injustice.&nbsp; Nor will I
give to any man, though I be asked to give it, any deadly drug,
nor will I consent that it should be given.&nbsp; But purely and
holily I will keep guard over my life and my art.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And into whatever houses I enter, I will enter into
them for the benefit of the sufferers, departing from all wilful
injustice and destructiveness, and all lustful works, on bodies,
male and female, free and slaves.&nbsp; And whatever in practice
I see or hear, or even outside practice, which it is not right
should be told abroad, I will be silent, counting as unsaid what
was said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Therefore to me, accomplishing this oath and not
confounding it, may there be enjoyment of life and art, being in
good repute among all men for ever and ever: but to me,
transgressing and perjured, the contrary.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fine reading, Edwin thought. . . .&nbsp; The only deity of
whom he was not quite certain was Panacea.&nbsp; Obviously the
classical representative of Mother Siegel.&nbsp; It seemed to him
a pity that the modern student was not bound by the formul&aelig;
of the Physician of Cos.</p>
<p>His three months in the casualty department <a
name="page389"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 389</span>passed away
quickly, and in the spring of the year he found himself attached
as dresser to that startling surgeon, Lloyd Moore.&nbsp; The
appointment, as he soon realised, was a privilege; for Lloyd
Moore was the one man of unquestionable genius in the North
Bromwich Medical School.&nbsp; At first the experience was rather
alarming, for the vagaries of his chief, and, not least, his
genial vulgarity, seemed at first as though they were going to
destroy the pretty edifice of ideals that Edwin had constructed
on the basis of the Hippocratic oath and his experience in the
casualty department.&nbsp; Lloyd Moore, to begin with, was no
respecter of persons, ancient or modern; his wit was ruthless and
occasionally bitter, as Edwin had reason to know; his language,
particularly in moments of stress, was unvarnished and foul, even
in the presence of women.</p>
<p>On the surface, indeed, he seemed a person whom Hippocrates
would have regarded as undignified and improper.&nbsp; Sometimes
in the out-patient department Edwin would blush for his
chief&rsquo;s violence and cruelty, but, in the end, all these
things were forgotten in the realisation that the little man was
a great surgical genius, to whom diagnosis was a matter of
inspired, unerring instinct, and practice a gift of the
gods.&nbsp; Nor were his virtues merely professional.&nbsp; L.M.
(as he was always called) was a man of the people, one who had
fought his way inch by inch into the honourable position that he
held as the greatest of surgeons and the wealthiest practitioner
in the Midlands.&nbsp; The unpaid work of the hospital absorbed
him even to the neglect of private practice, and every doctor in
the district <a name="page390"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
390</span>knew that he could count on the very best of the great
man&rsquo;s skill for a nominal fee in any case of
emergency.&nbsp; Far more than any consultant in the Midlands, he
was regarded as the general practitioner&rsquo;s friend, and, as
a result of this confidence, all the most interesting surgical
material of the district found its way into his clinic.</p>
<p>In a little time Edwin became wholly subject to the spell of
this amazing personality, until it seemed strange to him that he
could ever have doubted the propriety of anything that L.M. said
or did.&nbsp; He wondered more and more at the man&rsquo;s
titanic energy, for Lloyd Moore was a little fellow, so pale that
he always looked as if he were fainting with exhaustion.&nbsp;
His patients also adored him, and more than once Edwin was told
in the wards by elderly female admirers that Mr. Lloyd Moore was
the very image of Jesus Christ.</p>
<p>In the days of the casualty department Edwin&rsquo;s main
concern had been with the alleviation of immediate pain.&nbsp;
The problem of the wards was graver, being no less than the
balance of life and death.&nbsp; In the achievements of
L.M.&rsquo;s scalpel, he saw the highest attainment of which
surgery was capable.&nbsp; In a hundred cases offhand he could
say to himself that but for Lloyd Moore&rsquo;s skill the patient
would have died, and when he saw the fragile figure of the
surgeon with his pale face and burning eyes enter the theatre,
Edwin would think of him as a man worn thin by wrestling with
death . . . death in its most cruel and invincible moods.</p>
<p>But in the theatre, at the time of one of L.M.&rsquo;s
emergency operations, there was no time for <a
name="page391"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 391</span>dreaming or
for romantic speculation.&nbsp; An atmosphere of materialism, of
pure, sublimated action, filled the room as surely as the sweet
fumes of chloroform and ether.&nbsp; Everything about the place
was clean and bright and hard, from the frosted-glass of the roof
and the porcelain walls to the shining instruments that lay newly
sterilised in trays on the glass-topped tables.&nbsp; Even the
theatre sister in her white overall gave an impression of clean,
bright hardness.&nbsp; Indeed, in this white temple of sterility,
everything was clean except those parts of the patient&rsquo;s
body that the nurses in the wards had not scrubbed with
nail-brushes and shaved and painted with iodine, and the language
of L.M., whose physical lustrations had no effect whatever on his
vocabulary.</p>
<p>Even L.M.&rsquo;s language was at times a relief, for it
seemed to be the only human thing that ever gained admission to
the theatre, and the sister was so inhuman as never to take the
least notice of it.&nbsp; Not a smile, nor even the least
compression of the lips marked her appreciation or disapproval of
the surgeon&rsquo;s sallies.&nbsp; Physically she was an
extremely attractive woman, with very beautiful eyes that were
not without their effect upon Edwin; but the influence of the
place robbed her of any sexual attributes; so that she became no
more than a monosyllabic automaton, intent, devoted, faultlessly
prepared for any of the desperate emergencies of surgery.&nbsp;
From the first Edwin had noticed that the more embarrassing
physical details of the patients had no disturbing effect upon
her modesty.&nbsp; He soon saw that if she had permitted herself
for <a name="page392"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 392</span>one
moment to be a woman she could not have remained the wholly
admirable theatre-sister that she was.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I
can&rsquo;t imagine,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;how any man could
marry a nurse&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>From such reflections he would be roused by the
an&aelig;sthetist&rsquo;s laconic &ldquo;Ready.&rdquo;&nbsp; On
one side of the operating table he would stand, and on the other
L.M. with the theatre-sister ready at his elbow.&nbsp; The
surgeon would pick up a scalpel carelessly, as a man picks up a
pencil to write, and then, apparently with as little thought, he
would make a long, clean incision through the skin and
superficial fatty tissues of the abdomen, putting his head on one
side to look at it like an artist whose pencil has described a
beautiful curve.&nbsp; Then, sharply: &ldquo;Swabs . . . Ingleby,
what the hell do you think you&rsquo;re doing?&rdquo;&nbsp; And
Edwin would press a swab of gauze to the incision to absorb the
blood that escaped from the subcutaneous veins.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Right.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Layer by layer the various planes of fascia, muscle, and
peritoneum would be opened and neatly laid aside, every one of
them slipped in its own pair of artery forceps.&nbsp; Then, from
the gaping wound, that L.M. probed with his thin finger, a
sickening odour would rise . . . one that Edwin never remembered
apart from the other sickening smell of ether.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Pus. . . I thought so,&rdquo; L.M. would say.&nbsp;
&ldquo;The brute&rsquo;s perforated, damn him.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
Edwin knew that yet another creature had been snatched out of the
jaws of death.</p>
<p>In the hands of L.M. surgery seemed so simple.&nbsp; <a
name="page393"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 393</span>His
scalpel&mdash;for he used fewer instruments than any surgeon
Edwin ever knew&mdash;was a part of him in the same way as a
perfect rider is part of his horse.&nbsp; There was never any
hesitation in his surgery, never any room for doubt; everything
was straightforward and self-evident from the first incision to
the last suture; and he was at his best when he threw into it a
touch of bravura, rejoicing in the amazing virtuosity of his own
technique and playing, a little, to the gallery.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There you are,&rdquo; he would say, &ldquo;you see
there&rsquo;s nothing in it.&nbsp; Nothing at all but a working
knowledge of anatomy and a dollop of common-sense.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s all surgery.&nbsp; Why on earth should they pay me a
hundred guineas for doing a simple thing like that?&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s nothing in it, is there?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin knew that there was a great deal in it: genius, and more
than genius: a life of devotion to one end only; infinite
physical strains; cruel disappointments; harrowing
mistakes.&nbsp; For even L.M. had made mistakes in his time; and
a doctor pays for his mistakes more heavily than any other
man.</p>
<p>Apart from the performance of emergency operations, that might
take place at any hour of the day or night, the surgeon only
occupied his theatre on three mornings in the week; and the
greater part of Edwin&rsquo;s time was devoted to the work of the
wards.&nbsp; Here he performed his proper function as dresser,
being, under the house-surgeon, responsible for the
after-treatment of the patients on whom L.M. had operated This
business kept his hands full.&nbsp; Nearly all the acute surgical
cases needed <a name="page394"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
394</span>dressing daily, and some more than once a day.&nbsp; It
was usual for the dresser to leave the second dressing to be done
by the house-surgeon on his evening round, or by the sister of
the ward, who would doubtless have performed it, as well as
either of them; but nothing could induce Edwin, in his newest
enthusiasm, to drop a case into which his teeth were fixed.</p>
<p>The morning visits were ceremonial.&nbsp; The great floors of
the wards shone like the faces of such patients as were fit to be
scrubbed, with a soapy flannel; the rows of beds were set with a
mathematical correctness, the sheets turned down at exactly the
same level; the water in the jugs stood hot, awaiting the
dresser&rsquo;s hands, his towel lay folded in the jug&rsquo;s
mouth; a probationer, pink-faced and red-armed, stood waiting to
do his professional pleasure; morning sunlight flickered over the
leaves of aspidistras that flourished in pots on the central
tables, and on the trays of dressing instruments that were ready
for his hand.</p>
<p>At ten o&rsquo;clock precisely, Edwin, an older and more
experienced Edwin whose shaves were no longer a luxury, whose
clothes no longer looked as if he were in the act of growing out
of them, and whose collars were adorned by the very latest thing
in ties, would enter the ward, roll up his shirtsleeves, and be
helped on with a white overall by the obedient
probationer&mdash;whose main function in life this office seemed
to be&mdash;or sometimes by the sister herself.&nbsp; The new
Edwin, product of six months in hospital, was no longer afraid of
these attentions because they happened to be performed <a
name="page395"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 395</span>by
women.&nbsp; In a mild way he was even an amateur of the physical
points exhibited by the <i>genus</i> probationer, and had arrived
at a touching intimacy with the sisters, who found in him a clean
and pleasant mannered youth, and on occasion hauled him out of
the difficulties into which his inexperience landed him.&nbsp;
Thus attired, he would begin his progress of the ward, followed,
wherever he went, by the females who had robed him, the junior
pushing before her the wheeled glass table on which the dressings
and instruments were kept.&nbsp; For the time being he was, or
imagined himself to be, the most important person in the ward,
until, perhaps, the house-surgeon entered, and his attendants
forsook their allegiance and hastened to put themselves at the
service of this superior person.</p>
<p>In the duties of the wards Edwin became far more familiar with
his cases than in the casualty department.&nbsp; The work was
less hurried, and the patients themselves were less fully armed
with the conventional social gestures by which men and women
protect and hide themselves.&nbsp; They lay in bed helpless,
dependent on the hospital staff for every necessity and
amusement; and the stress of physical pain, or the catastrophe of
a major operation had generally shaken from them the little
superficialities that they had gathered to themselves in the
course of everyday life.&nbsp; Edwin noticed that, even at their
worst, the women were hardly ever too ill to be a little
concerned for their personal appearance, and, as they grew
better, the patients of both sexes would make an heroic attempt
to appear as they wished themselves to seem rather <a
name="page396"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 396</span>than as
they were; but he realised, none the less, that the doctor gets
nearer to the bed-rock of human personality than any other man
who ministers to humanity.&nbsp; With him, the person into whose
hands their suffering bodies were committed in an almost pitiful
confidence, they were concerned to hide themselves far less than
with any other; and in this triumphant discovery Edwin flattered
himself that he was becoming richly learned in human
nature.&nbsp; He did not realise how little he had learned.</p>
<p>One thing, however, that these days taught him, he never lost
in after life: an intense appreciation of the inherent patience
and nobility of human beings, the precious ore that the fire of
suffering revealed.&nbsp; Even the worst of his patients&mdash;in
North Bromwich as elsewhere disease is an impartial enemy,
falling on the virtuous and abandoned alike&mdash;revealed such
amazing possibilities of good.&nbsp; In these hospital wards the
fundamental gregarious instinct of mankind, with the
unselfishness and sympathy that go along with it, asserted
itself.&nbsp; The common life of the ward was happy,
extraordinarily happy.&nbsp; Removed from the ordinary
responsibilities of wage-earning and competition, fed and housed
and tended without question, the patients lived together as
happily as a community of African savages, supported by the
female labour of the nursing staff, obedient to the unquestioned
authority of the sister in charge.</p>
<p>And in Edwin&rsquo;s eyes these, too, were wonderful
people.&nbsp; At first he had taken them more or less for
granted; but gradually he realised the <a
name="page397"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 397</span>tremendous
sacrifices that their life implied: the long hours: the unceasing
strain of keeping their temper: the clean, efficient materialism
for which they must have sacrificed so much of the obvious beauty
of life, committing themselves&mdash;for most of them were
middle-aged&mdash;to an abnegation of the privileges of marriage
and motherhood in a cloistral seclusion as complete as that
imposed on the useless devotee of some mystical religion.&nbsp;
He took it for granted that the life of a nun was useless to any
one except herself. . . .&nbsp; Well, this was a religion worth
some sacrifice: the religion of humanity.&nbsp; They themselves
would only have called it a profession.&nbsp; At first it had
seemed to him that their interests were narrow and their lives,
of necessity, mean.&nbsp; He had been astonished at the small
things that gave them pleasure: a bunch of primroses from a
grateful patient; a ride on the top of a bus; a word of
commendation from one of the consulting staff; a
house-surgeon&rsquo;s or even a student&rsquo;s compliment; and,
above all, the passionate attachments and enmities that made up
the life of the nunnery in which they lived: but in the end he
began to sympathise with them in the humility of their pleasures,
to feel that anything might be forgiven to creatures who had made
so great a sacrifice.&nbsp; In a mild way he idealised them; and
for this reason they decided that he was &ldquo;quite a nice
boy.&rdquo;</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>In the winter of his third year Edwin&rsquo;s newly formulated
enthusiasm for humanity in the bulk suffered something of a
check.&nbsp; The hospital <a name="page398"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 398</span>absorbed him so completely that in
those days he saw very little of the city, going to and from his
lectures and his work in the Pathological Laboratory at the
University without taking any real share in the life of North
Bromwich, or being aware of the passions and interests that
swayed the city&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; Coming down from the
hospital, one evening in December, he suddenly became conscious
of a constriction in the traffic which grew more acute as it
reached the narrows that debouch upon the open space in front of
the town hall; and while he was wondering what could be the cause
of this, a huge rumour of voices, not unlike that which proceeds
from a Midland football crowd when it disapproves of a referee,
but deeper and more malignant, reached his ears.</p>
<p>He wondered what was the matter, and since it looked as if the
traffic were now completely blocked on the main road, he cut down
the quiet street that faces the university buildings and
overlooks the paved court in which the statue of Sir Joseph
Astill inappropriately dispenses water to a big stone basin.
Almost immediately he found himself upon the fringes of an
immense crowd over which the waves of threatening sound that he
had heard at a distance were moving like catspaws on a sullen
sea. The windows of the town-hall itself blazed with light,
making the outlines of the Corinthian pillars that surrounded it
almost beautiful.&nbsp; He edged his way into the black
crowd.&nbsp; It was composed for the most part of workers in iron
and brass, and exhaled an odour of stale oil.&nbsp; In a moment
of relative silence he asked the man who stood in front of him, a
little mechanic who had not <a name="page399"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 399</span>troubled to change the oily
dungarees in which he worked, what was the matter.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s Lloyd George . . . the b&mdash;,&rdquo; he
said, and spat fiercely.&nbsp; Edwin was not sure where he had
heard the name before.&nbsp; He seemed to remember it as that of
a Welsh member of Parliament who had come into notoriety during
the debates on the South African War.&nbsp; He inquired what
Lloyd George was doing.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come to speak agen&rsquo; Joe,&rdquo; said the mechanic
savagely; and, as a wave of sound that had started somewhere in
the middle of the crowd came sweeping towards them, he suddenly
began to squeal hoarsely like a carnivorous beast in a cage: a
ridiculous noise, that seemed, nevertheless, to express the
feelings of the multitude. From scraps of conversation that he
heard beneath the crowd&rsquo;s rumour, Edwin began to understand
that this beggarly Welshman, who had spent the last few years in
vilifying the workmen of North Bromwich generally, and their
political idol in particular, had actually dared to bring his
dirty accusations to the political heart of the city: the
town-hall in which their favourite had delivered his most
important speeches; that, at this very moment, the meeting which
popular feeling had proscribed, was beginning behind the
Corinthian pillars, and that the just indignation of North
Bromwich had determined that he should not escape with his
life.</p>
<p>It struck Edwin that whatever else the Welshman might be, he
was certainly not lacking in courage; but, for all that, he found
it difficult to prevent his own feelings in the matter from being
<a name="page400"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 400</span>swamped
and absorbed and swept away by the crowd&rsquo;s vast, angry
consciousness.&nbsp; Almost in spite of himself, his heart
palpitated with vehement malice against the intruder.&nbsp; He
felt that he would have experienced a brutal satisfaction in
seeing him torn limb from limb.</p>
<p>A yell of extraordinary savagery, in which he found it
difficult not to join, rose from the square.</p>
<p>The meeting, it seemed, had begun.&nbsp; Edwin saw members of
the crowd scattering in all directions.&nbsp; A cry of
&ldquo;stones!&rdquo; was raised, and he saw that men, women, and
children were streaming towards an area of slum that was being
dismantled to make room for some monument of municipal grandeur,
returning with caps and hands and aprons full of stones and
broken brick.&nbsp; Soon the air was full of flying missiles, and
though the crash of glass could not be heard, ragged holes were
torn in the frosted glass of the town-hall windows.</p>
<p>A body of police, tremendous strapping fellows, marched by,
followed by impotent jeers and hooting, and planted themselves in
front of all the doors with truncheons drawn.&nbsp; Their
presence seemed to enrage the crowd, inflaming that suppressed
hate of the forces of order that slumbers in most men&rsquo;s
hearts.&nbsp; The volleys of stones increased as the supplies of
ammunition grew more plentiful.&nbsp; A little dark man with a
red tie monotonously shouting the words: &ldquo;Free
speech!&rdquo; was caught up, and, as it seemed to Edwin,
trampled to death.&nbsp; Somewhere in the middle of the
struggling masses people began to sing the revivalist hymn:
&ldquo;Shall we gather at the river?&rdquo;&nbsp; It reached
Edwin in an <a name="page401"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
401</span>immense and gathering volume, with words adapted for
the occasion:&mdash;</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;Shall we gather at the fountain,<br />
The beautiful, the beautiful, the fountain?<br />
We&rsquo;ll drown Lloyd George in the fountain.<br />
And he won&rsquo;t come here any more.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The very volume of sound was impressive and inspiring.</p>
<p>Suddenly the crowd was parted by the arrival of a new
body.&nbsp; It was a phalanx of university students who had
dragged an immense beam of oak from the debris of the dismantled
slum and were hurling it forward as a battering ram against one
of the principal doors.&nbsp; Edwin could see amongst them the
towering shoulders of W.G., and the mouth of the elder Wade, the
hero of the hansom cab, wide open and yelling.&nbsp; It seemed as
though the savagery of the crowd had reached its height: they
tore a way through it, trampling the fallen as they went.&nbsp;
And then the police, who had been held in reserve, charged at
right angles to them, hitting out right and left with their
loaded batons.&nbsp; The less courageous part of the crowd tried
to scatter.&nbsp; The wave of a stampede spread outwards till it
reached the edge on which Edwin was standing.&nbsp; He was thrown
violently from his feet into the chest of a stranger, who
shouted, &ldquo;Hallo, Ingleby&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; It was Matthew
Boyce.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think we&rsquo;d better get out of
this,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>The words seemed to pull Edwin back into sanity.&nbsp;
Together they forced their way into a street that was empty but
for a stream of people hurrying to <a name="page402"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 402</span>the square with stones.&nbsp; They
stood panting in the quiet.</p>
<p>&ldquo;God . . . what animals men are!&rdquo; said
Boyce.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose it was something like this a
hundred years ago, when they burned Priestley&rsquo;s
house.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s pretty rotten,&rdquo; said Edwin,
&ldquo;but didn&rsquo;t you feel you wanted to join in
it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s the amazing part of it,&rdquo; said
Boyce.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s happening to you in these
days?&nbsp; We seem to have lost sight of one another.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They walked down to the station together.&nbsp;
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s an extraordinary thing, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
said Edwin, &ldquo;that ordinary peaceable men should go mad like
that?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;They aren&rsquo;t men,&rdquo; said Boyce.&nbsp;
&ldquo;They&rsquo;re a crowd.&rdquo;</p>
<h3><a name="page403"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
403</span>CHAPTER VII<br />
THE CLERK</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">With</span> this chance encounter, the
friendship of Edwin and Matthew Boyce really began; and during
the fourth year, that now opened before him, the figure of W.G.,
who had dominated his stage by sheer physical magnitude,
gradually receded.&nbsp; It was inevitable; for the atmosphere of
the Boyces&rsquo; house at Alvaston, with its air of culture and
refinement, was far more in keeping with Edwin&rsquo;s
inclinations than the obtuse, if honest, companionship of
W.G.&nbsp; Edwin felt some misgivings for his desertion; but
Maskew, who had now brilliantly taken his Primary Fellowship,
began his hospital career and rejoined his old partner.&nbsp; So,
seeing that the needs of W.G. were provided for and his
responsibilities of friendship at an end, Edwin drifted into a
happy intimacy with the poet&rsquo;s son.</p>
<p>They were both so young as to be convinced that they were very
old.&nbsp; The world was theirs; for they were full of health and
contentment and, at present, so free from complication that they
could enjoy to the full the treasures of the past and shape the
future into splendid dreams.&nbsp; In the beginning they had
found a field of common interest in great <a
name="page404"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 404</span>works of
literature; but these enthusiasms did not carry them very far,
for the appreciation of literary masterpieces is at its best a
solitary pleasure that is not increased by the joy of
sharing.&nbsp; It was in the enjoyment of music that their
friendship found the most intense of its pleasures.</p>
<p>Edwin&rsquo;s musical development had been slow.&nbsp; The
first seeds had been planted in his babyhood when, without
understanding, he had listened to his mother&rsquo;s
playing.&nbsp; The chapel services at St. Luke&rsquo;s, made
interesting by the exotic harmonies of Dr. Downton, had nursed
his interest in the beauty of organised sound.&nbsp; The closed
piano in his mother&rsquo;s drawing-room had been the symbol of
an instinct temporarily thwarted, and from this he had escaped by
way of Aunt Laura&rsquo;s late Victorian ballads which had seemed
to him very beautiful in their kind.&nbsp; Luckily his
mother&rsquo;s library of music had been good if old-fashioned,
and when he amused himself, more or less indiscriminately, by
trying to learn the piano at home, he had been forced to do so by
way of the sonatas of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart, and the
Wohltemperiertes Klavier of Bach.</p>
<p>The emotional disturbance of his strange adventure with
Dorothy Powys had thrown him into an orgy of verse-making which
produced such poor results that he was forced to turn to the
love-poetry of the Elizabethans and of Shelley, which he
embroidered with musical settings that gave him more
satisfaction.&nbsp; These attempts at song-writing pleased him
for a time; but it was not until he became friendly with Boyce
that he began to realise <a name="page405"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 405</span>what music was.&nbsp; Not only were
the Boyces the possessors of a grand-piano on which his homely
tinklings became magnificently amplified, but his friend&rsquo;s
father, the poet, was intimately acquainted with the best of
modern music.</p>
<p>Boyce introduced Edwin to the great German song-writers from
Schubert and Schumann to Hugo Wolf, and laid the foundations of a
feverish devotion to Wagner, whom the friends approached perforce
by way of Tannh&auml;user and Lohengrin, the two operas that the
Moody Manners company ventured to present to provincial
audiences.&nbsp; Edwin discovered that North Bromwich, a city
that takes its music as a boa-constrictor takes food, in the
triennial debauch of a festival and then goes to sleep again,
supported&mdash;or rather failed to support&mdash;a society for
the performance of orchestral music.&nbsp; The concerts were held
fortnightly in the town-hall, the windows of which had now been
repaired, and to these concerts Edwin and his friend went
together, always sitting in the same two seats under the gallery
at the back of the hall.&nbsp; In this way they heard a great
deal of good music: the nine symphonies of Beethoven, with the
Leeds Choir in the last: the usual orchestral extracts from the
Ring, the Meistersingers Overture, and the Siegfried Idyll: the
fourth, fifth, and sixth symphonies of Tschaikovski: the
tone-poems of Strauss, and a small sprinkling of modern French
music.&nbsp; These were ambrosial nights to which they both
looked forward, and Martin, who had developed an unexpected
inclination for music, sometimes went with them.</p>
<p><a name="page406"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 406</span>The
concerts became the central incident in a kind of ritual.&nbsp;
At seven o&rsquo;clock the two, or sometimes three, would meet in
the grill room behind the bar at Joey&rsquo;s and consume a gross
but splendid repast of tripe and onions together with a pint or
more of bitter Burton.&nbsp; All the best music, they had
decided, was German, and beer was the only drink on which it
could be fully appreciated, de Quincey&rsquo;s preference for
laudanum notwithstanding.&nbsp; Pleasantly elated, they would
cross the road to the town-hall and take their familiar seats,
pleased to recognise the people who, like themselves, were
regular attendants or subscribers to this unfashionable function;
and Boyce, who, by virtue of his distinguished parentage, knew
every one in North Bromwich who was interested in music, would
point out to them all the distinguished people who were present:
Oldham, the critic of the <i>Mail</i>, whom Arthur Boyce declared
to be the soundest living writer on musical subjects, and
Marsden, who did the musical criticism for the
<i>Courier</i>.&nbsp; Matthew knew them both.&nbsp; Oldham, he
said, was a wonderful fellow, who wrote with a pen of vitriol
that made such short work of baser metals that the gold of beauty
appeared brighter for his writing.&nbsp; Oldham became
Edwin&rsquo;s prophet; but, on the whole, he preferred the looks
of Marsden.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What is Marsden like?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Marsden?&nbsp; Oh, well, as a matter of fact,
Marsden&rsquo;s a bit of a gas bag.&nbsp; The governor says that
he always reminds him of an old hen.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t you
notice him in Joey&rsquo;s talking nineteen to the dozen <a
name="page407"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 407</span>to that
queer fellow with a face like a full moon who sits in front of
us?&rdquo;</p>
<p>The fellow with the face like a full-moon was only one of
twenty or thirty people with whom the friends experienced a sort
of comradeship on these nights.&nbsp; Perhaps the most wonderful
time was the end of the concert when they would walk out together
into the spring night, parting at the corner of the town-hall;
and the memory of great musical moments would accompany Edwin
home through miles of darkling country, and even fill his little
room at Halesby with their remembered glory or wander through his
dreams.</p>
<p>His life at home was the least satisfactory part of these
enchanted years.&nbsp; There were moments, indeed, when it seemed
as if the ideal relationship with his father, that had been his
early ambition, were being realised.&nbsp; Sometimes, on a Sunday
morning, they would walk round the garden together in the sun,
and Edwin would experience a return of the passionate good-will
and anxiety to please that had overwhelmed him in the moment of
their bereavement; but their two natures were radically so
different that such moments were rare, and, when they came, were
really more of an embarrassment than a pleasure.</p>
<p>He felt that, on his side at any rate, the relationship was
artificial; that, however unnatural it might seem, he really had
to whip himself up to a proper appreciation of his father&rsquo;s
virtues.&nbsp; A sense of veiled but radical antagonism underlay
all their dealings with each other; and at times this hidden
thing, that Edwin held in such dread, came so <a
name="page408"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 408</span>perilously
near to the surface as to threaten an open rupture.</p>
<p>The question of Edwin&rsquo;s allowance created one of these
dangerous situations.&nbsp; Edwin knew that it was impossible for
him to live the ordinary life of a medical student in North
Bromwich without one; but the distaste for speaking of money
matters, which arose from his delicate appreciation of his
father&rsquo;s finances, had made it difficult to approach the
subject.&nbsp; At last he had screwed up his courage to the point
of making a very modest demand, and his father, instead of
realising the difficulty he had found in doing so, had hedged in
a way that made Edwin feel himself a hard and mercenary
parasite.</p>
<p>&ldquo;All right, father, we won&rsquo;t say anything more
about it,&rdquo; he said, comforting himself with the assurance
that in a couple of years he would be qualified and in a position
to earn his own living and pay his way.&nbsp; On the strength of
this, and with his eyes wide open, he ran up a number of small
tailors&rsquo; bills in North Bromwich; and all would have been
well if Mr. Ingleby, in a fit of absent-mindedness, had not
opened these incriminating documents and leapt to the conclusion
that his son was going rapidly to the dogs.&nbsp; An unfortunate
scene followed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose you realise, Edwin,&rdquo; he said,
&ldquo;that you are a minor, and that while you are under age I
am responsible for these bills?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve not the least intention of letting you pay
them,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I have no alternative.&nbsp; I want
you to tell me truthfully if there are any others.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page409"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
409</span>&ldquo;Of course there are others.&nbsp; Please
don&rsquo;t bother about them.&nbsp; In a little while I shall be
able to pay them.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;This is a great blow to me,&rdquo; said Mr. Ingleby
solemnly, overwhelming Edwin with a picture of virtuous poverty
staggering from a cowardly blow in the dark; and the obvious
distrust with which his father regarded him made his position at
home almost intolerable.&nbsp; It seemed to him that his father
now looked upon all his pleasures with suspicion; and, as a
natural result, he lived more than ever to himself, only
returning to Halesby late at night or at times when he knew that
his father would be busy in the shop.&nbsp; One circumstance came
to bridge the gap between them, a course of pharmacology that
Edwin took early in his fourth year.&nbsp; He was delighted to
find a subject in which his father was more learned than himself,
and spent a number of hours that were almost happy in the shop
answering the questions that Mr. Ingleby put to him on
pharmacopoeial doses and searching the little nests of drawers
for rare drugs to identify in their raw state.&nbsp; But the
pharmacology course was short, and the subject that was so
important in his father&rsquo;s life was small and unimportant in
Edwin&rsquo;s.&nbsp; In addition to which he could not help
feeling a sort of ethical prejudice against the complacency with
which his father discharged patent medicines that he knew to be
worthless if not harmful.</p>
<p>Every circumstance tended to isolate him from the influences
of Halesby.&nbsp; His sudden attempt to be friendly with Edward
Willis had withered <a name="page410"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 410</span>under the humiliating
<i>d&eacute;nouement</i> of his adventure with Dorothy Powys; the
new fields of music that he explored with Matthew Boyce had made
him discontented with Aunt Laura&rsquo;s ballads; the general air
of elegance and refinement with which he had become acquainted in
one or two Alvaston houses to which the Boyces had introduced
him, made everything in Halesby, even his own home, seem a little
shabby and unsatisfactory.&nbsp; North Bromwich, and his work
there, claimed him more and more.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Even when his first enthusiasms and the inspiring
generalisations that arose from them were exhausted, he found
that he could not escape from the fascination of the studies
which he now pursued, for the most part, in the company of
Matthew Boyce.&nbsp; His third year had not only introduced him
to the romance of surgery and the human interests of hospital
life.&nbsp; He had spent long hours in the pathological
laboratory and had made acquaintance with bacteriology, a science
that was still in its infancy.</p>
<p>In this work he had shared a desk with Boyce, to whom it was
particularly attractive, and between them they had developed a
bacteriological technique rather above the average, taking an
imaginative delight in the isolation of the microscopic deadly
forms of vegetable life that are responsible for nearly all the
physical sufferings of mankind.&nbsp; When they looked together
at the banded bacilli of tubercule, stained red with
carbolfuchsin, they saw <a name="page411"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 411</span>more than a specimen under a
coverglass: they saw the chosen and bitter enemies of genius, the
malignant, insensate spores of lowest life that had banished
Keats to fade in Rome, Shelley to drown by Via Reggio, Stevenson
to perish in Samoa: the blind instruments of destruction that
were even then draining the last strength from the opium-sodden
frame of the author of <i>The Hound of Heaven</i>.&nbsp; Here, in
a single test-tube, they could see enclosed enough of the
organisms of cholera to sweep all Asia with a wave of pestilence;
here, stained with Indian ink, the dreamy trypanosome that had
wrapped the swarming shores of the Nyanzas of dark Africa in the
sleep of death.</p>
<p>Both of them were seized with a passionate fever for research,
to rid humanity of this insidious and appalling blight.&nbsp;
Now, more than ever, they felt the supreme responsibilities of
their calling; and when, in their fourth year, they passed on to
their work in the medical wards, as clerks to the senior
physician at the Infirmary, and saw the effects of bacterial
havoc on the bodies of men and women, their enthusiasm rose to a
still higher pitch.</p>
<p>The canons of the new university decreed that students who had
learnt their surgery at one hospital should study medicine at the
other.&nbsp; It was something of a disappointment to Edwin to
exchange the homely atmosphere of Prince&rsquo;s, where
everything was familiar, for the colder and more formal wards of
the Infirmary.&nbsp; This hospital, which was nearly twice the
size of the other, was situated in the lower and less healthy
part of the city.&nbsp; At Prince&rsquo;s there had been a way of
escape <a name="page412"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
412</span>westwards through the pleasant suburban greens of
Alvaston to the country and the hills.&nbsp; The Infirmary, in
its terra-cotta arrogance, had been set down in the heart of
unreclaimed slums, in such a way that its very magnificence and
efficiency were depressing by contrast.&nbsp; Edwin disliked the
palatial splendour of its shining wards which, for all their
roominess, were full of an air that suffocated; for the windows
were never opened, and the atmosphere that the patients breathed
had been sucked into the place by an immense system of forced
ventilation, filtered until it seemed to have lost all its
nature, heated, and then propelled through innumerable shafts
into every corner of the building.&nbsp; In the basement of the
hospital the machine that was responsible for this circulation of
heated air made a melancholy groaning; and this sound made the
whole structure seem more like an artificial assembly of matter
than a real hospital with a personality and a soul.</p>
<p>It is possible that the teaching methods of the Infirmary were
superior to those of Prince&rsquo;s; and the supporters of the
institution prided themselves on the fact that the nursing staff
was drawn from a higher social stratum; but for a long time Edwin
felt considerably less at home there than he had been at the
older hospital.&nbsp; The ward work, however, was even more
fascinating, for the reason, no doubt, that his wonder was now
tempered with a higher degree of erudition.</p>
<p>He found his new chief an inspiring figure.&nbsp; In the first
place, the fact that he was a gentleman and a man of culture made
him an effective <a name="page413"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
413</span>contrast to that dynamic but plebeian genius,
L.M.&nbsp; He was a graduate of one of the older universities,
and though this counted for little in the mind of Edwin, who now
affected to despise the city of his broken dream, it did lend an
air of distinction to Sir Arthur Weldon&rsquo;s discourses.&nbsp;
He had a quiet voice, an admirable manner with women patients or
nurses, and beautiful hands, on one of which he wore a signet
ring embellished with his crest and a motto which his presence
merited: &ldquo;In toto teres atque rotundus.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
rotundity, it may be added, was so mild as to do no more than
accentuate the elegance of a gold and platinum watch-chain that
he wore.&nbsp; He was a great stickler for the traditions and
dignity of his profession, and no word that was not infallibly
correct disturbed the urbanity of his slow and polished
periods.&nbsp; For this reason his tutorials in the wards were
models of academic dignity, and much frequented by students who
knew that he was far too anxious for the form of his discourse to
break its continuity by asking awkward questions.&nbsp; He
treated his clerks, and indeed every member of his classes, as if
they were gentlemen nurtured in the same fine atmosphere as
himself.&nbsp; He inspired confidence, and demanded nothing in
return but correctness of behaviour and speech.</p>
<p>All these things made it easy to work for him; and the fact
that over and above these social qualities he was a particularly
sound physician, with a reputation that was already more than
provincial, made Edwin sensible of the privilege of acting as his
clerk.</p>
<p><a name="page414"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 414</span>His
speciality was disease affecting the heart or lungs, and though
his wards at the infirmary were open to all sorts of general
medical cases, these two types of tragedy came most frequently
under his care and Edwin&rsquo;s observation.&nbsp; Sir Arthur
exacted from his clerks the preparation of accurate and
voluminous notes on all his cases, and Edwin spent many hours in
the wards extracting from his patients the details of family and
medical history and moulding them into a balanced and
intelligible report.&nbsp; The emotions that the study of the
tubercle bacillus had aroused in him in the laboratory were
reinforced a hundred times in the wards devoted to phthisical
patients, too far advanced in dissolution for sanatorium
treatment, that were his chief&rsquo;s especial care.</p>
<p>They were most of them creatures of intelligence and
sensitiveness above the average of the hospital patient; their
eyes shone between their long lashes with a light that may have
been taken for that of inspiration in those of dead poets; even
in the later stages of the disease, when their strength would
hardly allow them to drag up their emaciated limbs in their beds,
and their bodies were wrung nightly with devastating sweats or
attacks of h&aelig;morrhage that left them transparent and
exhausted&mdash;even then they were so ready to be cheerful and
to let their imagination blossom in vain hope, that Edwin found
them the most pitiful of all his patients.&nbsp; The <i>spes
phthisica</i> seemed to him the most pathetic as well as the most
merciful of illusions.</p>
<p>In this ward he became acquainted with one patient in
particular, a boy, the son of labouring parents whom heredity and
circumstance alike had <a name="page415"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 415</span>marked down from the day of his
birth to be a victim of the disease.&nbsp; His mother and two
sisters had died of it, and all his short life had been spent in
a labourer&rsquo;s cottage made deadly by the family&rsquo;s
infection, at the sunless bottom of a wet Welsh valley.</p>
<p>As a child he had been too delicate to enjoy the fresh air
that he would have breathed on the way to the village
school.&nbsp; He had lived, as far as Edwin could make out, in
the single room in which his mother had lain dying, and had
learned to read and write at her side.&nbsp; Then she had died;
and as soon as he was old enough he had been sent out to work on
the farm where his father was employed, an occupation that might
well have saved him if the work and the exposure had not been too
severe, or if he had not returned at night to the infected
hovel.&nbsp; As it was, in the rainy autumn weather of the hills,
he had caught a chill and sickened with pleurisy, and thus the
inevitable had happened.</p>
<p>He was only fifteen.&nbsp; Education had never come his way,
and he had never read any books but the Confessions of Maria Monk
and the family Bible; but whenever Edwin came to go over his
chest and make the necessary report of progress&mdash;fallacious
word&mdash;upon his case sheets, he noticed that the boy would
hide a sheet of paper on which he had been writing.&nbsp; His
confidence was easily won, and without the least shame he showed
Edwin what he had been doing.&nbsp; He had spent his time in
writing verses composed, for the most part, in the jingling
measures of Moody and Sankey&rsquo;s hymns.&nbsp; They were
sprinkled with strange dialect words that filled <a
name="page416"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 416</span>them with
splashes of sombre colour; most of them were frankly
ungrammatical; but there were things in some of them that seemed
to Edwin to bear the same relation to poetry as the mountain
tricklings of that far hill country bore to the full stream of
Severn.&nbsp; Their banalities, faintly imitated from the
banalities of the hymn book, were occasionally relieved by
phrases of pure beauty that caught the breath with surprise.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why do you do this?&rdquo; Edwin asked, and when he had
recovered from the shyness and diffidence into which the question
had cast him, the boy told him that he wrote his verses because
he couldn&rsquo;t help it, because the words became an obsession
to him and would not let him sleep until they were written
down.&nbsp; The thin flame of creative aspiration showed itself
in other ways, in the patient&rsquo;s vivid delight in colours
and sounds, and in the strange pictures, having no relation to
nature, that he drew with coloured chalks.</p>
<p>It seemed to Edwin that in this case the exhaustion of chronic
disease had revealed the existence, as it sometimes will, of a
faint fire of natural genius.&nbsp; &ldquo;There, but for the
spite of heaven,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;goes John
Keats,&rdquo; and, with the feelings of an experimenter in
explosives who mixes strange reagents, he lent his patient a copy
of the poet&rsquo;s works.</p>
<p>The boy fell on them eagerly.&nbsp; He confessed that he did
not understand them; but he would read them all day,
mispronouncing the words as the classical student perhaps
mispronounces those of the Greek poets, but extracting from their
<a name="page417"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 417</span>sonorous
beauty a curious and vivid sensual satisfaction.&nbsp; A single
line would sometimes throw him into a kind of trance, and he
would lean back in his bed with the book open on his chest and
his slender clubbed fingers clasped above it, repeating to
himself his own version of the words without any conception of
their real meaning.&nbsp; Sometimes a line would fill him with
memories:&mdash;</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;Deep in the shady sadness of a vale<br
/>
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,<br />
Far from the fiery moon, and eve&rsquo;s one star . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That is like our home,&rdquo; he would say.</p>
<p>The house-physician did not approve of these
experiments.&nbsp; On principle he would have disapproved of
poetry, and in this case he considered the reading of it
unhealthy.&nbsp; As if there were any element of health in this
misfortune! . . .&nbsp; A few weeks later the patient had an
attack of h&aelig;moptysis and died.</p>
<p>It was only in such cases of chronic illness that the question
of the patient&rsquo;s intellectual state arose.&nbsp; Such
speculations might mitigate the fatigue of slow siege warfare
that had only one end in view, but the acute medical wards, and
particularly those devoted to acute pneumonia, were the scene of
shorter and more desperate conflicts, grapplings with death, in
which the issue was doubtful and medicine could at least give
support, and sometimes turn the tide.</p>
<p>These were indeed terrible battles, in which devoted nursing
counted for much.&nbsp; To Edwin it <a name="page418"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 418</span>was a sight more awe-inspiring than
the quiet of death, to watch a strong man stretched upon his
back, breathing terribly through the night-long struggles of
pneumonia.&nbsp; In it he could see the most tremendous
expression of a man&rsquo;s will to live, in the clenched hands,
in the neck, knotted and swollen with intolerable strain, in the
working of the muscles of the face and nose in their supreme
thirst for air.&nbsp; The sound of this breathing would fill the
room that was otherwise so silent that one could hear the soft
hiss of the oxygen escaping from its cylinder.&nbsp; The train of
students that followed Sir Arthur round the wards would stand
waiting in the doorway, knowing that nothing was to be seen, and
the physician himself would step quietly to the square of red
screens and exchange a whisper with the sister who stood at the
patient&rsquo;s bedside, her lips compressed as though their
muscles were contracting in sympathy with the other tortured
muscles that she watched.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Weill, how is he?&rdquo; the physician would ask.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think he&rsquo;s holding his own.&nbsp; No
sleep.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo; a pity.&nbsp; Well, persevere with the
brandy and the warm oxygen.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her tense lips scarcely
moved.</p>
<p>And then Edwin&rsquo;s chief, so quietly that the patient did
not know what he was doing, being indeed no more than a mass of
labouring muscles bent on life, would feel the temporal pulse in
front of the ear with his firm white finger.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not so bad, sister . . . not so bad.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Then he would sweep away with the tails of his frock-coat
swinging.</p>
<p><a name="page419"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
419</span>&ldquo;Ingleby, did you notice anything about the
patient&rsquo;s hands?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;His hands, sir?&rsquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . his hands.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&nbsp; Nothing, I&rsquo;m afraid.&nbsp; I
don&rsquo;t think he was plucking the bedclothes . . .
carphology, do they call it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You had better look the word up if you are not
sure.&nbsp; No . . . it was a finer movement.&nbsp; He was
rolling his thumbs over the tips of his index fingers, just like
a man making pellets of bread at a dinner party.&nbsp; There are
men who do that.&nbsp; Remember it.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a bad sign
in a case of lobar pneumonia.&nbsp; Come along, gentlemen.&nbsp;
The pneumococcus is a sporting antagonist.&nbsp; Short and
sweet.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d as soon die of pneumonia as anything and
have a run for my money.&nbsp; That case has put up a good
fight.&rdquo;</p>
<p>That &ldquo;case&rdquo; . . .&nbsp; On the face of it the use
of the word seemed to justify the accusation of gross materialism
that is so usually made against the profession of medicine.&nbsp;
The patient who lay there fighting for his life was, in the
physician&rsquo;s eyes, a case, and not, as Edwin, who had taken
notes of his history in the earlier stages of the disease knew
him to be, a bricklayer&rsquo;s labourer from Wolverbury with a
wife and six children, two of whom had died in infancy.&nbsp; He
was a case: a human body, the soulless body that Edwin had
learned in detail through two years of labour in the dissecting
room, consisting of a heart hard-pressed, a nervous system
starved of oxygen and weakened by the virus of pneumonia, and a
pair of clogged lungs.&nbsp; This was the whole truth as far as
it concerned the physician.&nbsp; <a name="page420"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 420</span>The calamity was a material calamity
to be fought with material weapons, and the state of his soul, or
his relations with his wife and the rest of the community in
which he lived, only mattered in so far as they affected his body
and revealed him to have been a clean-living and temperate
man.&nbsp; For the rest he was a case; and it were well for the
physician to leave the <i>animula</i>, <i>vagula</i>,
<i>blandula</i> to the poets.&nbsp; This was one of the hard
lessons of medicine.</p>
<p>These were sombre things; but it must not be imagined that
they reflected the general tenor of hospital life.&nbsp; The
Infirmary, indeed, was so vast as to be microcosmic, and its
loves, its jealousies, and its ambitions combined to produce a
broad effect of human comedy, not without tears, but leavened by
the rich, and often unprintable humour that flourished in the
out-patient department.&nbsp; Hospital politics, hospital
scandals, hospital romances, combined to make life a vivid and
exciting experience.&nbsp; In the toils of the last, spring found
W.G. securely bound.&nbsp; Harrop, too, had launched into a
desperate affair with a probationer in the children&rsquo;s wards
whom the matron promptly transferred to the infectious block and
perpetual quarantine.&nbsp; Edwin and Boyce escaped this epidemic
of tenderness that swept through the fourth year like
measles.&nbsp; They were far too absorbed in their own interests
and discoveries to worry their hearts about anything in a
nurse&rsquo;s cap and apron.</p>
<p>Spring passed in a swift vision of plum-blossom in the
Boyce&rsquo;s Alvaston garden and two weeks of musical
debauchery, one Wagnerian and the other of Gilbert and
Sullivan.&nbsp; Most of the time they <a name="page421"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 421</span>were working at high pressure; but a
week before the beginning of the fourth examination, Boyce
proposed that they should cycle down together to the country
house that his father rented in Gloucestershire, and blow away
the vapours of forced ventilation with Cotswold air.</p>
<p>On the eve of an examination it seemed a daring but
enthralling plan.&nbsp; Edwin put the proposal before Mr.
Ingleby, and was surprised to find that he didn&rsquo;t
object.&nbsp; Indeed, it had seemed to Edwin for several months
that his father was curiously distrait and less interested than
usual in his work.&nbsp; This consent freed his conscience, and
the two friends set off together on a Saturday afternoon in the
spirit of abandoned holiday that is the highest privilege of
youth.&nbsp; They had decided to take no medical books with
them.&nbsp; As far as they were concerned, the examination might
go hang; for a whole week they would live with no thought for the
morrow, taking long rides over the Cotswolds, lunching at village
inns on bread and cheese, returning at night to feasts of beans
and bacon and libations of Overton cider.</p>
<p>They started from the infirmary at half-past two, and had soon
left the dust and tram-lines of North Bromwich behind.&nbsp; The
smooth, wide road that they followed stretched in magnificent
undulations over the heights of the Midland plateau from which
they could see the shapes of Uffdown and Pen Beacon fading into
the west under a pale, black-country sky.&nbsp; In front of them
southward the sky was blue.</p>
<p><a name="page422"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
422</span>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re in for ripping weather,&rdquo; Boyce
shouted as he rode ahead.</p>
<p>The weather didn&rsquo;t really matter: they were in for a
great adventure.&nbsp; From the plateau they glided swiftly to
the vale of Redditch, and when they had left that sordid little
town behind they climbed the backbone of the Ridgway, where the
road follows the thin crest of a line of small hills and
overlooks on either side two dreaming plains.&nbsp; In a blue
haze of summer these green dominions lay asleep, so richly
scattered with dark woodlands that no human habitation could be
seen.&nbsp; They were as lonely as the sky.&nbsp; Westward of
Severn the Clees and Malverns towered over Wales; but Boyce
appeared to be more interested in certain lower wooded hills upon
the eastern side.&nbsp; He made Edwin the confidant of his latest
romance.</p>
<p>&ldquo;She and I,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;used to bicycle out
from Alvaston in the cool of the evening . . . about an hour and
a half&rsquo;s easy ride.&nbsp; It was early last summer.&nbsp;
Those woods are full of nightingales.&nbsp; We used to sit on a
gate and listen to them and ride home together in the dark.&nbsp;
I can tell you it was pretty wonderful.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Of course it was wonderful.&nbsp; Everything must be wonderful
in this enchanted country.&nbsp; Riding along in the afternoon
sunlight Edwin constructed for himself just such another
passionate adventure; and the figure with which he shared these
imaginary ecstasies was, for want of a better, Dorothy
Powys.&nbsp; While the dream nightingales were singing their
hardest and he was on the point of renewing that unforgettable
kiss, they came to a cottage half <a name="page423"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 423</span>timbered and lost in clematis and
honeysuckle where a steep road fell on either side at right
angles to the ridge.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Right,&rdquo; shouted Boyce, &ldquo;we&rsquo;ll take
the road down through the Lenches.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What are the Lenches?&rdquo; said Edwin, riding
abreast.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Villages.&nbsp; Five of them, I think.&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s Rous Lench and King&rsquo;s Lench and Abbot&rsquo;s
Lench, and two others.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re a proper subject for a
poem.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Right-o . . . let&rsquo;s collaborate,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;How&rsquo;s this for a beginning?&rdquo;</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;As I was riding through the Lenches<br
/>
I met three strapping country wenches.&rdquo;</p>
<p>And laughing together, they constructed a series of frankly
indecent couplets, recording the voyager&rsquo;s adventures with
all three.&nbsp; It was a matter of the most complete
collaboration, for the friends supplied alternate lines, outdoing
one another in Rabelaisian extravagance.&nbsp; Edwin, however,
provided the final couplet, which, he declared, gave the
composition literary form:&mdash;</p>
<p class="poetry">&ldquo;Home to my vicarage I hasted<br />
Feeling the day had not been wasted.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A parson of the type of Herrick,&rdquo; said Boyce.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . but more serious.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That kind of affair is awfully serious . . . at the
time.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The gables of Evesham and its one tall tower swam in a golden
dust.&nbsp; They drank cider in the <a name="page424"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 424</span>inn courtyard, purchased a couple of
Bath chaps at a grocer&rsquo;s and crossed the Avon.&nbsp;
Through an orchard country they rode in that hour of evening when
bird-song is most wistful.&nbsp; The sun went down in a blaze of
splendour behind Bredon Hill.&nbsp; The perfume of a beanfield
swept across the road.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God, isn&rsquo;t it good?&rdquo; said Boyce.&nbsp;
&ldquo;We are nearly there.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A village of Cotswold stone half hidden in blossoms of crimson
rambler received them.&nbsp; The gardens were full of
sweet-williams, pale phloxes, and tall hollyhocks.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Straight on,&rdquo; Boyce called.</p>
<p>A sign-post pointed up the hill to Overton.&nbsp; They
dismounted, and pushed their bicycles up a steep lane in the
twilight.&nbsp; Bats were flitting everywhere, and a
buff-coloured owl fluttered heavily between the overarching
elms.&nbsp; A faint tinkle of trickling water came to their
ears.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That is the sound of Overton,&rdquo; said Boyce.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Slow water trickling in the night.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They slept together in the low-beamed room, so soundly that
the sun was high before they wakened next morning.</p>
<p>The week that now followed was the very crown of youth.&nbsp;
The Boyce&rsquo;s summer house stood upon a patch of terraced
ground, being the highest of the three farms round which the
hamlet of Overton clustered, and overlooked the blossomy vale of
Evesham bounded by the Cotswold escarpment, blue and dappled with
the shadows of cloud.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>Parva domus</i>: <i>magna
quies</i>,&rdquo; read the motto that Matthew&rsquo;s father, the
poet, had placed above the lintel of the door: &ldquo;small
house: great quietness&rdquo;&mdash;<a name="page425"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 425</span>and indeed it seemed to Edwin that
there could be no quieter place on earth.</p>
<p>He and Matthew would smoke their morning pipes together on a
stone terrace that bleached in the sun along the edge of a garden
that the poet had planted for perfume rather than for beauty of
bloom.&nbsp; Here they would sit, nursing books that were unread,
until the spirit tempted them to set out towards the blue
escarpment, and, after a hard climb, lose themselves in the
trough of some deep billow of Cotswold and fall asleep on a bank
of waving grasses, or follow some runnel of the Leach or Windrush
until it joined the mother stream, where they would strip and
float over the shallows with the sun in their eyes, emerging
covered with the tiny water leeches that gave one of the rivers
its name.</p>
<p>On the height of Cotswold they found an inn that was half
farm, possessing a barrel of cider that Edwin was almost ready to
acknowledge as the equal of that which he had drunk in Somerset;
and, for further attraction a huge yellow cat beneath the lazy
stare of whose topaz eyes Matthew sat worshipping.&nbsp; In the
evening the air that moved over the wolds grew cool and dry and
more reviving than any juice of yellow apples, and with their
lungs full of it they would spin down the winding hills into the
plain, past many sweet-smelling villages and golden manor-houses,
reaching Overton about sunset, when the evening stocks, that Mr.
Boyce had planted along the approaches to his doorway, recovered
from their lank indolence and drenched <a
name="page426"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 426</span>the air
with a scent that matched the songs of nightingales.</p>
<p>There Mrs. Pratt, the wife of a neighbouring labourer, would
have their dinner ready: tender young beans and boiled bacon and
crisp lettuce from the garden that Matthew dressed according to
the directions of his epicurean father; and with their meal, and
after, they would drink the dry and bitter cider made at the
middle farm from the apples of orchards that now dreamed beneath
them.</p>
<p>Then came music.&nbsp; The drawing-room piano stood by the
open window, and a soft movement of air disturbed the flames of
the candles in silver candlesticks that lighted the music
stand.&nbsp; No other light was there; and in the gloom beyond,
Edwin, playing the tender songs of Grieg and Schumann, and the
prelude to Tristan, would see the long legs of Matthew stretched
dreaming on a sofa.&nbsp; The nights were so silent that it
seemed a pity to mar them with music; and for a long time Edwin
would sit in silence at the piano, while strong winged moths
fluttered in out of the darkness and circled round the
candle&rsquo;s flame.&nbsp; Last of all, before they turned in,
they would go for a slow walk over meadows cool in the moonlight,
listening to the silence&mdash;&ldquo;Solemn midnight&rsquo;s
tingling silentness,&rdquo; Matthew quoted&mdash;or to the gentle
creaking of the branches of elms, now heavy with foliage, that
embosomed their small house.</p>
<p>The last day of their holiday was wet; but that made no great
difference to them, for a succession of showers drew from the
drenched garden a perfume more intense.&nbsp; They spent the day
in musical <a name="page427"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
427</span>exploration, and when the darkness came they sat
together talking far into the night.&nbsp; They talked of North
Bromwich, for the ponderable influence of the morrow had already
invaded their quietude, and of their future work.</p>
<p>&ldquo;In a year&rsquo;s time,&rdquo; said Edwin, &ldquo;we
shall be qualified.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What shall you do?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, general practice, I suppose.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the
easiest way to make a living.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s what most men
do.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t like the idea of it,&rdquo; said
Matthew.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s sordid, unsatisfactory
work.&nbsp; A hard living in which science stands no
chance.&nbsp; Selling bottles of medicine&mdash;quite harmless,
of course, but unnecessary&mdash;to people who don&rsquo;t really
need them.&nbsp; You have to do it to make a living.&nbsp; If you
don&rsquo;t the other people cut you out.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s as bad as that.&nbsp;
There must be something fundamentally good about medical
practice.&nbsp; You are actually helping the people who are
genuinely ill.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the ideal side of it.&nbsp; But
there&rsquo;s another.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think I shall risk
it.&nbsp; If the governor can&rsquo;t let me have enough money to
wait for consulting practice, I shall have a shot at one of the
services.&nbsp; I think the Indian Medical Service is the
thing.&nbsp; Fairly good pay, a chance of seeing the world, and a
good sporting life.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;India&mdash;?&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin had never thought of
it.&nbsp; Sitting there in an English dusk the idea appealed to
him.&nbsp; Great rivers: burning plains under the icy rampart of
Himalaya: strange, dark religions.&nbsp; <a
name="page428"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 428</span>India. . .
.&nbsp; Yes, it sounded good.&nbsp; His imagination went a little
farther ahead.&nbsp; A hill-station according to Kipling, or
perhaps a more solitary cantonment in the plains where the
commandant was a major in the Indian army and the wife of the
commandant, a girl whose name had once been Dorothy Powys.&nbsp;
And the major, of course, would succumb to some pernicious
tropical disease through which Edwin would nurse him devotedly;
and when he was dead and buried his beautiful wife would come to
Edwin&mdash;the only other Englishman in the station, and say:
&ldquo;I never really loved him.&nbsp; I never really loved any
one but you.&rdquo;&nbsp; Altogether an extremely romantic
prospect. . . .&nbsp; Yes, the Indian Medical Service would do
very well. . . .</p>
<p>The last night was more beautiful in its silence than any
other.&nbsp; It had been a wonderful week.&nbsp; There would
never be another like it.&nbsp; The crown of youth.&nbsp; And, as
it came to pass, the end of youth as well.</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>It was late that night when Edwin reached home.&nbsp; After
the huge openness of the Cotswold expanses, the air of Halesby,
lying deep in its valley, seemed to him confined and oppressive,
and to add to this impression there was a sense of thunder in
it.&nbsp; After supper his father went to his writing desk and
pulled out a sheaf of bluish, translucent papers which he spread
out on the table, and began to study intently.&nbsp; Edwin,
sprawling, tired and contented, in the corner, watched him
lazily.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Whatever have you got there, father?&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p><a name="page429"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
429</span>&ldquo;Plans . . . architect&rsquo;s plans,&rdquo; Mr.
Ingleby replied nervously.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Plans?&nbsp; What for?&nbsp; Surely you aren&rsquo;t
thinking of building a new house.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, not exactly.&nbsp; No . . .&nbsp; I am thinking
of adding to this one.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But that would be an expensive job.&nbsp; Isn&rsquo;t
it big enough for us?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s big enough at present; but it may
not be shortly.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin laughed uneasily, for he could not understand this air
of mystery.&nbsp; Mr. Ingleby rose from his plans and cleared his
throat.&nbsp; The little lamp-lit room immediately became full of
an atmosphere of suppressed intensity, in which the tick of the
clock could be heard as if it were consciously calling attention
to the importance of the moment.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I mean. . . .&nbsp; As a matter of fact, I had intended
telling you this evening; but I found it difficult to do so,
because . . . because I could not be quite sure how you&rsquo;d
take it.&nbsp; It . . . it may come as a shock to you.&nbsp; I am
thinking of enlarging the house because I am proposing to be
married again.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Married?&nbsp; Good God!&rdquo;</p>
<p>A feeling of inexplicable passion choked Edwin so that his
voice did not sound as if it were his own.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, I knew it would come as a surprise to you.&nbsp;
Probably you&rsquo;ll find it difficult to understand my
feelings.&nbsp; You mustn&rsquo;t be hasty.&rsquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God!&rdquo;&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s amazement could
find no other words.</p>
<p><a name="page430"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
430</span>&ldquo;You are the first person I have told,
Edwin.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve thought a good deal about it . . . about
you particularly, and I&rsquo;ve quite satisfied myself that I am
not doing you any injustice.&nbsp; In another year I suppose you
will be going out into the world and leaving me.&nbsp;
Don&rsquo;t decide what you think too hastily.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He paused, but Edwin could not speak.</p>
<p>&ldquo;If you&rsquo;ll listen, I&rsquo;ll tell you all about
it.&nbsp; I think you will approve of my choice.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll
tell you&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;For God&rsquo;s sake, don&rsquo;t.&nbsp; Not
now&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very well.&nbsp; As you wish.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr.
Ingleby&rsquo;s hands that held the architect&rsquo;s papers
trembled.&nbsp; He smiled, kindly, but with a sort of
bewilderment.&nbsp; &ldquo;As you wish,&rdquo; he repeated.</p>
<p>And Edwin, feeling as if he would do something ridiculous and
violent in the stress of the curiously mingled emotions that
possessed him, went quickly to the door and ran upstairs to his
room, where he flung himself on his bed in the dark.</p>
<p>In a little while he found himself, ridiculously,
sobbing.&nbsp; He could not define the passionate mixture of
resentment, jealousy, shame, and even hatred, that overwhelmed
him.&nbsp; He could not understand himself.&nbsp; A
psycho-analyst, no doubt would have found a name for his state of
mind, describing it as an &ldquo;&OElig;dipus complex&rdquo;; but
Edwin had never heard of psycho-analysis, and only knew that his
mind was ruthlessly torn by passions beyond the control of
reason.&nbsp; He made a valiant attempt to think
rationally.&nbsp; Primarily, he admitted, it wasn&rsquo;t his
business to decide whether his father should <a
name="page431"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 431</span>marry again
or remain a widower.&nbsp; His father was a free agent with
responsibilities towards Edwin that were rapidly vanishing and
would soon be ended.&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t even suggest that
this new marriage would be the ruin of any vital comradeship
between them, for the hopes of this ideal state that he had once
cherished, had not been realised during the last few years.&nbsp;
There was no reason why his father&rsquo;s marriage should affect
him personally, or even financially, for he had never reckoned on
the least paternal support when once he should be
qualified.&nbsp; There was not even the least suggestion that his
father was physically unsuitable for the married state, for there
was no reason why he should not live for many years to
come.&nbsp; There were actually valid arguments, that Edwin could
not dispute, in favour of the plan&mdash;such as Mr.
Ingleby&rsquo;s loneliness, soon to be increased, and the
discomfort that he had suffered as an elderly widower at the
hands of a series of inefficient house-keepers.&nbsp; From every
point of view the world would be justified in concluding that he
was doing the correct and obvious thing.&nbsp; Why, then, should
Edwin lie on his bed in the dark wetting his pillow with tears,
and sick with shame?</p>
<p>No reason could assuage his suffering.&nbsp; However calmly he
tried to consider the matter, the thought of his mother rose up
in his mind; a vision of her, beautiful and pathetic, and
indefinitely wronged, came to reinforce his indignation.&nbsp; He
lit a candle and gazed for a long time at her photograph, the one
that he had always kept in his desk at St. Luke&rsquo;s and
scarcely noticed for the last three years; <a
name="page432"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 432</span>and though
he knew that she was dead and presumably beyond the reach of any
human passion, the sight of her features filled him more than
ever with this unconscionable resentment so devastating in its
intensity.&nbsp; The portrait took him back to the tenderness
that he remembered at the time of her death, and particularly
that strange moment when he and his father had knelt together in
the little room across the landing.&nbsp; The smell of Sanitas. .
. .</p>
<p>And then he remembered another incident in the gloom of that
brown room at the Holloway on the windy crown of Mendip, whence
he had seen all the kingdoms of the earth.&nbsp; Thinking of
this, he seemed to hear the voice of a very old woman, who said,
&ldquo;The Inglebys are always very tender in marriage.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they
always marry again.&rdquo;&nbsp; How could she have known?&nbsp;
And then the thought of a strange woman in the house, treading in
the places where his mother&rsquo;s steps had once moved, swept
him off his feet again.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I could never stay here,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I could never stay here. . . .&nbsp; I should do something
desperate and cruel and unreasonable.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t help
myself.&nbsp; I must go.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a pity . . . but I must
go.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t stay here.&nbsp; I simply
couldn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
<p>With this determination in his mind, but without the least
idea of the way in which it might be realised, he arrived at a
state of comparative serenity, in which he could contemplate his
mother&rsquo;s photograph without so much passionate resentment
at the slur that was being laid on her memory.&nbsp; Now he saw
everything in terms of his new resolution.&nbsp; <a
name="page433"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 433</span>He saw,
pathetically, the little bed in which he had slept for so many
years, the shelves on which his favourite books were ranged, the
piano and the sheaves of his mother&rsquo;s music that he had
managed to install in his room: all the small details that went
together to create its atmosphere of homeliness.</p>
<p>&ldquo;How the devil shall I manage to leave them?&rdquo; he
thought.&nbsp; He went to the window and saw, beyond the garden
trees, the low line of those familiar hills: the landscape that
he had always delighted in as his own, and that now was to be his
no longer.&nbsp; He sighed, for to leave them seemed to him
impossible; they were so familiar, so much a definite part of his
life.&nbsp; A curious impulse seized him to creep downstairs and
out of the house, and visit the grave in the cemetery where his
mother was laid; but he restrained himself from this debauch of
sentiment.&nbsp; &ldquo;It will do no good,&rdquo; he
thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all over.&rdquo;&nbsp; He even
wondered if he might feel happier if he went down to Aunt
Laura&rsquo;s house and confided in her: perhaps she would
understand.&nbsp; At least she was his mother&rsquo;s sister and
might be conscious of the indignity; but when he had almost
determined to do this, he reflected that she and his uncle were
probably in bed, and a ludicrous picture of her putting her head
out of the window to ask what was the matter, with her hair in
curling pins, restrained him.&nbsp; Besides, it would be rather
ridiculous to fall back upon the sympathies of a person whom he
had neglected for several years.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No. . . .&nbsp; I must go on my own way,&rdquo; he
thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a sort of break in my life, just
like the big <a name="page434"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
434</span>break before.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s got to be faced, and
it&rsquo;s no good worrying about it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He suddenly remembered that in twelve hours&rsquo; time he
would be sitting for his fourth examination, and that it would be
wise for him to get some sleep; so he undressed and went to bed,
wondering how many more times he would undress in that little
room and caring less than he would have expected.&nbsp; He fell
asleep soon, for he was thoroughly tired out, and slept so
soundly that he did not see his father enter the room a few hours
later.&nbsp; He came in softly, in his dressing-gown, carrying a
candle, and stooped above Edwin&rsquo;s sleeping figure with
troubled eyes.</p>
<h3><a name="page435"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
435</span>CHAPTER VIII<br />
LOWER SPARKDALE</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">Next</span> day, in a fever of
restlessness, Edwin essayed and passed his fourth professional
examination.&nbsp; He had expected to get a first-class in it,
but when he found himself near the bottom of the list in the
neighbourhood of W.G., he was not seriously disturbed.&nbsp; The
subjects of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology were unimportant,
and now that his life had taken this sudden change of direction,
it did not much matter what sort of a degree he took.&nbsp; His
one concern was to get qualified and licensed to earn his living
on the bodies of his fellow-men as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>Since his interview with his father, the determination to
leave Halesby had not faltered, although he had not then
calculated the difficulties that now faced him.&nbsp; To begin
with, he had no money beyond a few pounds that his mother had
placed to his credit in the Post Office Savings Bank in his
childhood.&nbsp; Luckily his college and hospital fees had been
paid in advance, and he was only concerned with the actual cost
of living and the fees for the final examination.&nbsp; In some
way or other he would have to live for twelve months, and he
smiled to himself to think that he was in very <a
name="page436"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 436</span>much the
same position as his father had occupied thirty years before.</p>
<p>On the whole, he thought, his father must have had less cause
for anxiety, with Dr. Marshall&rsquo;s two hundred pounds behind
him and the humble standards of a village boy in place of
Edwin&rsquo;s more elaborate traditions of life.&nbsp; He felt
that he needed the advice of a sound man with some knowledge of
the world.&nbsp; In an emergency of this kind Matthew Boyce could
offer him very little but sympathy, and so he turned naturally to
the counsels of that battered warrior, W.G., feeling, at the same
time, rather shabby in making use of a friend whom he had
practically neglected in the last two years.</p>
<p>W.G. providentially didn&rsquo;t look at it in that
light.&nbsp; He had always regarded Edwin from a fatherly
standpoint, and the mere fact that this was a case of rebellion
against domestic authority of the kind in which he had been
engaged since his childhood made him sympathetic, though he
didn&rsquo;t, as Edwin saw to his despair, appreciate the
delicacies of the situation.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I can quite see why you want to cut adrift,&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a feeling that any one&rsquo;s
who&rsquo;s dependent gets, if he has any guts in him; but
I&rsquo;m damned if I see any cause or just impediment why these
two persons shouldn&rsquo;t enter into holy matrimony.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose it&rsquo;s just rotten sentimentality.&nbsp;
Still . . . I can&rsquo;t help it.&nbsp; There it is.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s the idea of seeing another woman in my mother&rsquo;s
place.&nbsp; I simply couldn&rsquo;t stick it, W.G.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, old chap, I&rsquo;m quite prepared to believe you
know best.&nbsp; The thing is, what are you going <a
name="page437"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 437</span>to
do?&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t live on nothing in this hard
world.&nbsp; You can share my bed for a week or two if you
like.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m sorry it won&rsquo;t be for longer; but
marriage appears to be in the air.&nbsp; To tell you the truth,
I&rsquo;m going to get married myself.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You married?&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; Good Lord!&nbsp; What on
earth are you doing that for?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; Force of circumstance, I
suppose.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s one of the things that happens when you
least expect it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do I know her, W.G.?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes . . . you know her.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s Sister
Merrion in Number Twelve.&rdquo;</p>
<p>There came to Edwin a vision of a tall, dark girl, with wavy
brown hair and Irish eyes, whom he couldn&rsquo;t help
remembering at the infirmary.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t even know that you were
friendly.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;We weren&rsquo;t until about three weeks ago.&nbsp; I
happened to notice that she was looking rather down in the mouth,
and took her out to tea; and then the poor girl broke down at the
Dousita and told me all about her home affairs.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
the devil and all to see a pretty girl like that crying.&nbsp;
She&rsquo;d been having a thin time of it at home with her
father: a pretty rotten sort of fellow, I gathered, and that
seemed the only way out of it.&nbsp; So we&rsquo;re going to be
married next month.&nbsp; A sort of fellow-feeling, you
know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But . . . Good Lord . . . are you in love with
her?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I am, you old ass.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t
marry her if I wasn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; It&rsquo;ll be a bit of a
pinch till I&rsquo;m qualified, though.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page438"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
438</span>&ldquo;I say, I hope you&rsquo;ll be happy.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A sudden pang of something like envy overwhelmed Edwin.&nbsp;
The picture of settled peace, romantic love in a cottage, that
W.G. was about to share with the undeniably beautiful Sister
Merrion struck him as an ideal state.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a lucky devil, W.G.,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>It seemed unreasonable that W.G. should devote himself to the
smaller problem of Edwin&rsquo;s ways and means on the eve of
such a momentous adventure.&nbsp; It hardly seemed fair to bother
him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re going into rooms in Alvaston at
first,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;ll be less expensive
than furnishing, and we don&rsquo;t intend to indulge in a family
for the present.&nbsp; Meanwhile, if I were you, I should go and
talk to the manager at Edmondson&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He may be able to
put you on to something.&nbsp; Yes . . . have a shot at him
first, and mention my name, he&rsquo;s a very decent
sort.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin laughed to himself.&nbsp; It seemed to him that he was
in the grip of a curiously ironical fate, for Edmondson&rsquo;s
was the identical firm of wholesale druggists with whom his
father had been employed on his first arrival at North
Bromwich.&nbsp; History was repeating itself in a way that was
proper to romance.</p>
<p>In the afternoon he went down to Edmondson&rsquo;s and asked
for the manager, a vigorous person with shrewd eyes that he
screwed up habitually whenever he made a point in his
conversation.&nbsp; He called Edwin &ldquo;Doctor&rdquo;: a form
of address that was flattering, until Edwin realised that it was
no more than <a name="page439"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
439</span>a habit with him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ingleby,&rdquo; he said;
&ldquo;let me see, I know the name.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Probably you know my father.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s in
business at Halesby.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ah, yes, of course . . . your father.&nbsp; Come along
to my room, doctor, and have a cigar.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In this varnished chamber, decorated with a collection of
barbarous surgical instruments, survivals of the Middle Ages,
Edwin unbosomed himself.&nbsp; The manager listened in silence,
screwing up his eyes from time to time, to show that he was
taking in Edwin&rsquo;s story.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said at the end of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do
you want me to tell you what I think of it, doctor?&nbsp;
Candidly, you know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin was only too anxious for another opinion.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, I think you don&rsquo;t know when you&rsquo;re
well off.&nbsp; To tell you the truth, doctor, I think
you&rsquo;re a damned fool.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s straight.&nbsp;
See?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not surprised,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Still, I&rsquo;ve made up my mind.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not
going to stay at home.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t do it, that&rsquo;s
all.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m only wondering if you can put me in the way
of a job of some kind.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, doctor, that&rsquo;s easier said than done.&nbsp;
When you&rsquo;re qualified, it&rsquo;ll be a different matter
altogether.&nbsp; I think I can promise to keep you in
&lsquo;locums&rsquo; at four or five guineas a week, as long as
you like to take them; but I can&rsquo;t honestly say
there&rsquo;s anything for you at present.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not
like the old days when doctors were allowed to keep unqualified
assistants.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m through my fourth exam., you know.&nbsp; I
could do dispensing.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page440"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
440</span>&ldquo;Dispensing. . . .&nbsp; Yes, I hadn&rsquo;t
thought of that.&nbsp; Well, doctor, I&rsquo;ll see what I can do
for you.&nbsp; You know what I think of it, don&rsquo;t
you?&nbsp; In the meantime you&rsquo;d better leave your
address.&nbsp; No good writing to Halesby, I suppose?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin gave him the address of W.G.&rsquo;s diggings, and went
off, hopelessly discouraged, to find his friend.&nbsp; W.G.,
however, was at present far too engrossed in the charms of Sister
Merrion to be available.&nbsp; So Edwin went on to the
Boyce&rsquo;s house in Alvaston, only to find that Matthew had
cycled down to Overton again with his father.&nbsp; It was
impossible for him to settle to any work; so he took an afternoon
train to Halesby, at a time when he knew his father would be busy
at the shop, and collected the few belongings that he felt he
must take with him.</p>
<p>The atmosphere of the house was inexpressibly poignant.&nbsp;
Within its walls, he reflected, dwelt the ghost of all his
childhood, and memories of his mother, that had lain submerged in
his consciousness for many years, rose to meet him wherever he
went.&nbsp; Well, he would never see the place again.&nbsp; This
exile, it pleased him to think, was his final sacrifice to her
memory.&nbsp; That was the best way in which he could express
it.&nbsp; At the worst, another voice whispered, it was an excess
of mawkish sentiment.</p>
<p>All through the afternoon, and particularly when he
disinterred small pieces of the lumber that he had collected in
his schooldays, this sense of a ghostly childhood haunted
him.&nbsp; It followed him down the stairs into the hall, where
the grandfather <a name="page441"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
441</span>clock ticked steadily as it had ticked ever since he
could remember, into the dead drawing-room, soon to be made alive
by the tastes of another feminine personality; on the lawn, where
the limes were shedding their sticky bloom; on the way to the
station, when he lugged his bag through the gnarled shadows of
Mrs. Barrow&rsquo;s ancient garden, and caught a glimpse of the
old lady&rsquo;s kindly nodding bonnet as she smiled at him from
her place in the window, where she sat hermetically sealed in an
atmosphere of Victorian decay.</p>
<p>There were the reedy pools and Shenstone&rsquo;s hanging
woods, ghostly waters and woodlands, never to be seen
again.&nbsp; And there was the platform of Halesby station,
reeking of hot coal dust and ashes, and, from the incoming train,
a flux of shabby people, including the bank-clerk in tennis
flannels and the mysterious commercial traveller with the brown
leather bag, reading the <i>Pink &rsquo;Un</i> as he
walked.&nbsp; From this, through the black-country&rsquo;s
familiar desert, the train carried him into the bitter reality of
North Bromwich.&nbsp; With something approaching the feelings of
an intruder he installed himself in W.G.&rsquo;s diggings, and
made a supper, undeniably pleasant, of bread and cheese with a
large bottle of W.G.&rsquo;s beer.&nbsp; The latter, which
happened to be Astill&rsquo;s XXXX, induced a mood of tolerant
sleepiness, and luckily prepared him to receive, at midnight or
thereabouts, the confidences of his friend on the subject of
Sister Merrion&rsquo;s intellectual charms.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You know, old chap, she&rsquo;s different from
me&mdash;reads poetry by the hour when she&rsquo;s in the bunk on
night duty.&nbsp; Longfellow&rsquo;s her favourite.&nbsp; A long
<a name="page442"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 442</span>way
above my head and all that; but it&rsquo;s a wonderful thing,
when you come to think of it, to be married to an intellectual
woman. . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; So the words poured into Edwin&rsquo;s
drowsy ears.&nbsp; He was far too sleepy to smile, and,
Longfellow apart, it did seem to him a comfortable and even
enviable thing to be the adored centre of the universe in the
Irish eyes of a tender creature with wavy brown hair and a
painful domestic tragedy.&nbsp; W.G. was still moralising on his
past wickedness and the prospect of a blameless future when Edwin
fell asleep.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Next morning he was awakened by his friend, boisterous and
ruddy from a bath, performing a strange ritual of prostrations
and contortions in front of an open window discreetly veiled with
fluttering butter-muslin.&nbsp; Edwin lazily watched the sinuous
play of muscles under the shaggy limbs of W.G. through
half-closed lids.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d make a topping subject for dissection,
W.G.,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hallo!&rdquo; W.G. answered from between his
legs.&nbsp; &ldquo;You awake, you old slacker?&nbsp;
There&rsquo;s a letter for you that came up with the tea.&nbsp;
Tea&rsquo;s cold, by the way.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; said Edwin, as W.G. skimmed the letter
over to him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Good Lord, it&rsquo;s from
Edmondson&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was a note hastily scribbled advising Edwin to go at once
and see Dr. Altrincham-Harris at 563 Lower Sparkdale, North
Bromwich, between nine <a name="page443"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 443</span>and ten a.m., or six and nine p.m.,
and signed by the manager who screwed his eyes up.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Five hundred and sixty-three, Lower Sparkdale,&rdquo;
Edwin groaned.&nbsp; &ldquo;I say, that sounds pretty bad.&nbsp;
Altrincham-Harris is rather hot stuff for Lower Sparkdale,
isn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; Queer place for a
double-barreler.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;General practitioner,&rdquo; said W.G., rubbing himself
down with a pair of flesh-gloves.&nbsp; &ldquo;They all go in for
hyphens.&nbsp; It impresses the lower-middle classes.&nbsp; When
I go into practice, my son, I shall be known as Dr. William
George-Brown, if I can afford the extra letters on a
plate.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Lower Sparkdale&rsquo;s a pretty awful slum,
isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Never been there.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s time you cleared off
to the bathroom.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll feel better when you&rsquo;re
awake.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin spent the morning in writing, and four times rewriting,
a letter to his father.&nbsp; It was a difficult job, for he felt
that the reasons for his departure could not be explained in
words, and he was particularly anxious to make it clear that it
was purely a matter of temperament and that he didn&rsquo;t wish
it to imply any criticism of Mr. Ingleby&rsquo;s plans.&nbsp;
When he had finished it he found that it was far too late to
visit the surgery of Dr. Altrincham-Harris.&nbsp; He therefore
waited till the evening, and then took a steam-tram through a
succession of sordid streets, past the public abattoirs and the
newly-opened Rowton House, to the level of 563 Lower
Sparkdale.</p>
<p>The extreme end of that street was not as bad <a
name="page444"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 444</span>as he had
imagined it might be, for at this point the slum ended, resolving
itself into the edge of a growing suburb of red-brick.&nbsp;
Number 563 was a corner house secretively curtained with dirty
muslin on flat brass rods.&nbsp; A shining plate revealed the
qualifications, such as they were, of C. Altrincham-Harris,
Physician and Surgeon, and as the front door seemed to have sunk
into a state of disuse, Edwin entered at another, marked
&ldquo;Surgery,&rdquo; round which a number of poorly-clad women,
some of them carrying babies, were clustered.</p>
<p>Inside the door was a narrow waiting-room that concentrated
into an incredibly small number of cubic feet the characteristic
odour of an out-patient department.&nbsp; Every seat was
occupied, and Edwin, deciding to wait for his turn, stood
listening to a varied recitation of medical history that every
patient seemed compelled by the surroundings to relate to her
neighbour.&nbsp; At the moment when he entered a very stout
woman, who had been drinking, had the ear of the company, talking
loudly over the shoulder of a pasty child whose neck was covered
with the pin-points that fleas make on an insensitive skin, and
occasionally, in accessions of tenderness, hugging it to her
bosom.</p>
<p>&ldquo;So I says to the inspector . . . yes, inspector,
&rsquo;e &rsquo;ad the nerve to call &rsquo;isself . . . says I,
you can take your summonses to &rsquo;ell, I says.&nbsp; I
<i>love</i> my children, I says.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s more love
for the little &rsquo;armless things in my finger than
there&rsquo;ll ever be in your bloody body, I says.&nbsp; And I
caught &rsquo;er up and carried &rsquo;er straight along
&rsquo;ere to the doctor.&nbsp; Doctor &rsquo;Arris knows me, I
says, and what&rsquo;s more <a name="page445"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 445</span>&rsquo;e shall &rsquo;ave a look at
Margaret&rsquo;s &rsquo;ead with &rsquo;is own eyes.&nbsp;
Shan&rsquo;t &rsquo;e, my pretty?&rdquo;&nbsp; The child wriggled
as she was clasped in another beery embrace.</p>
<p>A bell tingled inside.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now we shall see,&rdquo;
said the lady determinedly rising.&nbsp; &ldquo;And &rsquo;ave a
stifficate if it costs me two shillin&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The room murmured low applause and sympathy, and she entered
the surgery, emerging, two minutes later, with the testimonial in
her mouth.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What did I tell yo&rsquo;?&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;The doctor says there ain&rsquo;t one.&nbsp; Not
<i>one</i>.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s time these inspectors was done away
with.&nbsp; I only &rsquo;ope &rsquo;e will summons me.&nbsp;
Good-night, all.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She went out, hugging the child in both arms, and a pale
woman, respectably dressed, who had sat through her tirades in
silence, took her place in the doctor&rsquo;s consulting
room.&nbsp; Dr. Altrincham-Harris didn&rsquo;t keep her
long.&nbsp; She came out, like the rest of them, after an
interview that lasted perhaps two minutes, carrying a bottle of
medicine wrapped up in one of the papers that are called
comic.&nbsp; Again the bell rang.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God,&rdquo; Edwin thought, &ldquo;and this is
general practice!&rdquo;&nbsp; It was evident that he had entered
a world in which the academic methods of diagnosis and
prescription with which he had been educated were not
followed.&nbsp; On the surface it was quite clear that the
physician could not have given an eighth part of the usual time
or care to the consideration of any single case.&nbsp; He
remembered instances of hospital patients who had affected to
despise the perfunctoriness of the methods of the Prince&rsquo;s
out-patient department, and had boasted <a
name="page446"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 446</span>that they
would receive better attention from the hands of a &ldquo;private
doctor.&rdquo;&nbsp; He hoped to goodness that none of these
unfortunate people would drift into the hands of Dr.
Altrincham-Harris.</p>
<p>His own turn came, and relieved to be rid of the stink of the
waiting-room, he entered the surgery.&nbsp; Dr. Harris was
sitting in an attitude of impatience behind a desk littered with
papers.&nbsp; He was a little man, with grey, untidy hair and a
drooping moustache.&nbsp; He held a pencil in his hand, as if he
were itching to dash off another prescription, and an open drawer
in the desk at his right hand was full of small silver.&nbsp;
When he saw that Edwin was better dressed than the majority of
his patients, his manner changed at once.&nbsp; &ldquo;Please sit
down,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now, what can I do for
you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin hesitated, for he found it difficult to begin.&nbsp; Dr.
Harris encouraged him with a wink, and a grip of his left
arm.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Now, my boy, you needn&rsquo;t be frightened of
me.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll find the doctor&rsquo;s your best
friend.&nbsp; Had a bit of bad luck, eh?&nbsp; Well, you&rsquo;re
not the first, and you won&rsquo;t be the last.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The wink was the most disgusting part of this performance, but
Edwin, quickly recovering his sense of humour, pulled out
Edmondson&rsquo;s letter and handed it to the doctor.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, now, why didn&rsquo;t you say so at first,&rdquo;
said Dr. Harris, scratching a bristly grey chin.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes
. . . I did mention to their manager that I was in want of some
one to do a bit of rough dispensing and keep this place
tidy.&nbsp; You see I don&rsquo;t live here.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
what we call a lock-up, and the work&rsquo;s so pressing <a
name="page447"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 447</span>that
I&rsquo;ve really no time to do my own dispensing.&nbsp; I
suppose you hold the Apothecaries&rsquo; Hall
Diploma&mdash;passed your exams and that?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . I&rsquo;m a medical student.&nbsp; I took
pharmacology in my last exam.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m in my final
year.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hm . . . I shouldn&rsquo;t have thought it.&nbsp; You
look very young.&nbsp; Final year . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; Then his
eyes brightened.&nbsp; &ldquo;Have you done your midwifery
yet?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, I shall do that later in the year.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a pity . . . a pity.&nbsp; You could have
been very useful to me in that way, keeping cases going, you
know, so that I could be in at the finish.&nbsp; I could do twice
the amount of midwifery that I do now if I had some one to keep
an eye on them.&nbsp; Before the General Medical Council did away
with unqualified assistants, I used to keep three of them: paid
me well, too.&nbsp; Now I&rsquo;ve got to do everything
myself.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a dog&rsquo;s life, but there&rsquo;s
money in it, I don&rsquo;t mind telling you.&nbsp; Well,
there&rsquo;s no time to waste.&nbsp; What do you
want?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I want a place to live in and my keep, and just enough
money to keep me going till I&rsquo;m qualified.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s all.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll understand . . . I&rsquo;m
on my own, and I&rsquo;ve just about ten pounds to carry me over
a year.&nbsp; I hope you can give me a job.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose you could take a hand with dressings and
things like that?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin saw that the little man was out for bargaining, but as
long as he could feel that something was being settled he
didn&rsquo;t really mind.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . I can do anything you like to use me for in
your surgery hours.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t promise more.&nbsp; You
see, I have to pass my final.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page448"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
448</span>&ldquo;You can learn a lot of useful things about
general practice here,&rdquo; said Dr. Harris.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
should be extremely useful to you.&nbsp; You see, I&rsquo;ve been
at this game for thirty years.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a great chance
for you.&rdquo;&nbsp; He took up a handful of silver from the
open drawer and started to jingle it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Look here,
you&rsquo;re wasting time.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin agreed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, suppose I take you on, I might be able to give
you three . . . better say two pounds a month.&nbsp; You can feed
up at my place and sleep here.&nbsp; If you sleep here,
you&rsquo;ll be able to take night-messages and telephone them up
to me.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s a bedroom fitted up.&nbsp; One of my
assistants used to sleep here.&nbsp; How will that suit
you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>With a feeling of intense relief Edwin accepted.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very well, then, there&rsquo;s no reason why you
shouldn&rsquo;t begin at once, just to get into the way of
things.&rdquo;&nbsp; He paused, and added as an after-thought:
&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll count that you start from
to-morrow.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He led Edwin behind the green baize curtain at the back of his
desk, disclosing a set of shelves and a counter stained with the
rings of bottles and measuring glasses.&nbsp; At the end of the
counter was a sink into which a tap with a tapered nozzle dripped
dismally.&nbsp; One drawer held labels, another corks, a third a
selection of eight-ounce, four-ounce, and two-ounce
bottles.&nbsp; At the back of the counter stood a row of
Winchester Quarts, of indefinite contents, labelled with the
Roman numerals from one to nine.&nbsp; Dr. Harris swabbed the
swimming <a name="page449"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
449</span>counter with a rag that was already saturated with
medicines.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You can learn all you want in five minutes,&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no time for refinements in this
sort of practice.&nbsp; These big bottles are all stock mixtures,
and whatever they teach you in your universities, I can tell you
that these nine mixtures will carry you through life.&nbsp; There
you are . . . Number One: White Mixture.&nbsp; Number Two: Soda
and Rhubarb.&nbsp; Number Three: Bismuth.&nbsp; You have to go
easy with Number Three: Bismuth&rsquo;s expensive.&nbsp; Number
Four: Febrifuge . . . Liquor Ammond Acet: and that.&nbsp; Number
Five: Iron and Mag:Sulph.&nbsp; And so on. . . .&nbsp; Number
Nine: Mercury and Pot:Iod . . . you know what that&rsquo;s
for,&rdquo; with a laugh, &ldquo;we use a lot of that here.&nbsp;
Now you&rsquo;ve one ounce of each stock mixture to an
eight-ounce bottle, and a two-tablespoonful dose.&nbsp; I used to
put them up in six-ounce bottles; but if you give them eight
ounces they think they&rsquo;re getting more for the money: they
don&rsquo;t realise they&rsquo;re getting eight doses instead of
twelve, and that&rsquo;s their lookout, isn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp;
Same proportions for children and infants, only you use the four
and two-ounce bottles instead, with dessert-spoon and teaspoonful
doses.&nbsp; Simple, isn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; But you want to
simplify if you&rsquo;re going to make money in these days.&nbsp;
Now, is that quite clear?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Quite clear.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, then, when a patient comes in I have a look at
him&mdash;with my experience you can tell in a moment&mdash;and I
give you a slip of paper behind the curtain.&nbsp; Like
this.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mrs. Jones.&nbsp; No. 5.&nbsp;
T.D.S.&rsquo;&nbsp; <a name="page450"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 450</span>Mrs. means an eight-ounce
bottle.&nbsp; One ounce of Number Five stock mixture.&nbsp; One
tablespoonful three times a day.&nbsp; Then, if I put &lsquo;4tis
horis&rsquo; instead of &lsquo;T.D.S.,&rsquo; it means a
tablespoonful every four hours; but I only do that when I see
they can afford to get through the bottle more quickly.&nbsp;
You&rsquo;ll find powders in that drawer.&nbsp;
Antifebrin&mdash;it&rsquo;s cheaper than phenacetin and
caffein.&nbsp; And calomel for children.&nbsp; Then, as I was
saying, while I have a look at the patient and ask him one or two
questions you make up the medicine.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Suppose, when you&rsquo;ve had a talk to him, you
change your mind about the treatment.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I never change my mind.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no time for
that,&rdquo; said Dr. Harris.&nbsp; &ldquo;And if I did we could
change the medicine next time.&nbsp; But you needn&rsquo;t worry
about the treatment: that&rsquo;s my part of the business.&nbsp;
Why&rdquo;&mdash;and the little man expanded&mdash;&ldquo;I
shouldn&rsquo;t wonder if we got through as many as a hundred
patients in a couple of hours, the two of us together.&nbsp; Now,
are you ready?&rdquo;</p>
<p>He left Edwin behind the curtain and rang his bell.&nbsp; A
patient entered, and as soon as the doctor had said good-evening
to her the prescription was passed behind the curtain and Edwin
proceeded to fill a bottle from one of the Winchester
Quarts.&nbsp; This business went on monotonously for another
hour.&nbsp; Edwin dispensed mechanically in a kind of
dream.&nbsp; He never saw a single patient; but little scraps of
conversation showed him that most of them were suffering from the
evils of poor housing and a sedentary life.&nbsp; It consoled him
to think that most of the mixtures that he dispensed were
relatively <a name="page451"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
451</span>harmless.&nbsp; Sometimes, by an access of solicitude
and deference in the doctor&rsquo;s voice, he could gather that
the patient was of a higher social degree, and he smiled to find,
in these cases, that the mixture was invariably prescribed in
four-hourly doses.</p>
<p>All the men, it appeared, were judged to be in need of White
Mixture or Rhubarb: all the women demanded Iron and Mag:Sulph:
all the children were treated with a treacly cough mixture or
calomel powders.&nbsp; In the space of an hour he must have
dispensed at least forty bottles of medicine, and towards the end
of the evening he noticed that Dr. Harris became even more
perfunctory in his examinations&mdash;if such a word were ever
justified&mdash;and that signs of irritation began to show
themselves in his voice.&nbsp; At last the waiting-room bell rang
twice, and no patient appeared.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the lot,&rdquo; said Dr. Harris, appearing
from behind the curtain.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll have a
wash.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was the first time that he had washed his
hands in the whole of the evening.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, you see
what it&rsquo;s like,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll
have a nip of whisky.&rdquo;&nbsp; He produced a vitriolic bottle
from a cupboard and mixed some whisky with water in a
medicine-measure.</p>
<p>&ldquo;A good average day,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Three
pounds ten.&rdquo;&nbsp; He shovelled the silver from the drawer
into a leather bag that weighed down his coat pocket.&nbsp;
&ldquo;That takes a lot of making at a shilling a time.&nbsp;
Well, how do you like it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think I shall be able to manage,&rdquo; said Edwin,
who was not anxious to commit himself.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better come and see your room.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page452"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 452</span>It
was a bare bedroom on the first floor with iron bedstead and a
dejected washhand-stand, but it seemed to Edwin that, at least,
it would be quiet and free from distractions.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
shall be able to read here,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;and after
all, it&rsquo;s only for twelve months.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not much to look at,&rdquo; said Dr. Harris
apologetically.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll send you down some
bedding to-night.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll expect you for breakfast at
eight o&rsquo;clock sharp.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d better come along
and have some supper now.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;d better go and collect some of my
things.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been staying with a friend in his
diggings.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;All right.&nbsp; As you like,&rdquo; said Dr.
Harris.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nine o&rsquo;clock sharp to-morrow morning
then?&nbsp; You have to be punctual if you&rsquo;re to make money
in this business.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin said good-night, keeping the key of the surgery.&nbsp;
When the doctor had gone he went back into the curtained
dispensary and tried to introduce a little order into the
waste.&nbsp; A strange life, he thought . . . a strange and
degrading life.&nbsp; If this were general practice, he wondered
why he had ever despised his father&rsquo;s trade, for surely
there was more dignity in selling tooth-brushes than in dealing
so casually with the diseases of human beings.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
must talk it over with old W.G.,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp;
&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a sound man.&rdquo;&nbsp; But he knew at the
bottom of his heart that he couldn&rsquo;t afford to speculate on
the ethics of the case.&nbsp; All that mattered to him, for the
present, was the necessity of finding a roof&mdash;any roof to
shelter him and food to <a name="page453"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 453</span>keep him alive.&nbsp; He was a
beggar, and could not choose, and had every reason to be thankful
for this or any solution of his difficulties.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It sounds bad,&rdquo; said W.G., when Edwin had
expanded on the refinements of Dr. Harris&rsquo;s medicine,
&ldquo;but, in a way, you&rsquo;re lucky to have fallen on your
feet so quickly.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, you don&rsquo;t
deserve it.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re an old fool to have left home, you
know.&nbsp; Now, there&rsquo;s some chance of your appreciating
how comfortable you were.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Boyce was more sympathetic, entering with great pains and
seriousness into the cause of Edwin&rsquo;s spiritual
nausea.&nbsp; The results of it pleased him in so far as they
meant that in future Edwin would be living in North Bromwich, and
promised a perpetuation of the delightful comradeship that they
had enjoyed in the summer.&nbsp; &ldquo;I expect we shall see a
lot of you, old boy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;ambrosial evenings,
you know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin laughed.&nbsp; &ldquo;The evenings won&rsquo;t be
exactly ambrosial.&nbsp; I shall be earning my two pounds a month
filling eight-ounce bottles with rubbish at a shilling
each.&nbsp; I shall feel like compounding in a felony.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s the devil . . .&rdquo;</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>And it was pretty bad.&nbsp; No more concerts or operas; no
week-ends at Overton; no dinners at Joey&rsquo;s; no possible
diversion of any kind that impinged upon the hours between six
and nine.&nbsp; And yet Edwin was happy.&nbsp; For the first time
in his life, and at a price, he was realising what independence
meant.&nbsp; Even the break at Halesby had passed off <a
name="page454"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 454</span>without any
severe emotional disturbance.&nbsp; He had written to his father
again, telling him his new address and what he was doing, and his
father had replied in his formal business hand, not, indeed, with
any offer of help, but with an implied approval of what he had
done, enclosing a number of bills (opened) and a couple of
second-hand book catalogues.</p>
<p>There was nothing unfriendly in the letter, no heroics of
outraged paternity.&nbsp; Reading between the lines, Edwin felt
that by consulting no interests but his own he had made an
awkward situation easy for his father.&nbsp; In that case, he
reflected, Mr. Ingleby might very well have made him an
allowance.&nbsp; It gave him a sense of grim satisfaction to
remember that he was still a minor and that even if he were too
proud to use it, he still held the weapon of his father&rsquo;s
legal responsibility in reserve, but the next moment he was
ashamed of this reflection: when it came to a point the element
of pathos in his father&rsquo;s history and person always
disarmed him.</p>
<p>It was enough that he should be happy, principally for the
reason that his days were so full and any moments of relaxation
came to him with a more poignant pleasure than any he had known
before.&nbsp; He had very little time for reading outside the
subjects of his final exam., that now overwhelmed him with an
increasing weight.&nbsp; For pleasure he read little but lyrical
poetry, finding his chief enjoyment in the last hour before he
fell asleep in Dr. Harris&rsquo;s empty lock-up, with a copy of
Mackail&rsquo;s selections from the Greek Anthology <a
name="page455"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 455</span>that he had
salved from one of the second-hand bookstalls in Cobden
Street.</p>
<p>In spite of himself, he was beginning to like Charles
Altrincham-Harris.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t for one moment alter his
opinion of the degradation to which the man had subjected the
nobilities of his calling, his meanness and his avarice.&nbsp; In
his dealings with the unfortunate people who came to the shilling
doctor for treatment, he still abhorred him; he knew him to be a
person whose mind was a sink of pseudo-professional prurience,
and whose body and habits were unkempt and unclean; but for all
this, he could not deny the fact that in his relations with his
dispenser he displayed a curious vein of natural kindness, and
that his ideals, apart from his loathsome business, were of a
touching simplicity.</p>
<p>Every morning they met at breakfast.&nbsp; The doctor believed
in good food as a basis for work, and his housekeeper, a small,
shrewish woman of fifty, was an excellent cook.&nbsp; At the
breakfast table he would impart to Edwin the more salacious
paragraphs of the morning paper, which he always opened at the
page that contained the records of the divorce-court.&nbsp; He
took no notice of politics.&nbsp; &ldquo;They can do what they
like as long as they don&rsquo;t legislate about
<i>us</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; And though Edwin felt sincerely that the
sooner his kind were legislated for, the better, he was thankful
that his employer was not a political bore or bigot.</p>
<p>After breakfast Dr. Harris always smoked a clay pipe in his
carpet slippers, a present from a patient who, for some
unimaginable reason, had been <a name="page456"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 456</span>grateful.&nbsp; Then they would walk
down to 563 Lower Sparkdale together in the fresh morning air,
and the combination of gentle exercise with deeper breathing
would impel the little man to make Edwin the confidant of his
ambitions.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Twelve thousand pounds,&rdquo; he would say,
&ldquo;that&rsquo;s all I want.&nbsp; Twelve thousand
pounds.&nbsp; Five hundred a year.&nbsp; Then I shall find a
quiet little place in the country and have a rest.&nbsp; Keep
bees and poultry: that&rsquo;s what I shall do, and smoke a pipe
in the garden in the evening when the poor devil that buys my
practice is going down to the surgery to rake in the
shillings.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In these moments he would reflect on the beginning of his
career.&nbsp; &ldquo;I took a good degree, you know.&nbsp; You
wouldn&rsquo;t think it to look at me now, would you?&nbsp; No .
. . I had bad luck, and a bad wife, which is the worst sort of
luck.&nbsp; She lost me my practice, and so I grew sick of
medicine.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t be bothered with the social side
of it.&nbsp; Money was what I wanted: money and quiet.&nbsp; And
so I took a dose of medicine: fifteen years at a shilling a
bottle, with advice thrown in, and then a quiet life.&nbsp; That
was all I wanted.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;ve very nearly got it.&nbsp;
Another year or two will make me secure.&nbsp; Security . . .
that&rsquo;s what I wanted.&nbsp; Well, here we are. . .
.&rdquo;</p>
<p>So the morning&rsquo;s work began, and no morning, as far as
Edwin could see, was different from any other.&nbsp; He was
thankful when the clock struck ten, and Dr. Harris ruthlessly
locked his surgery door.&nbsp; Then, fortunately, he was obliged
to take the next tram to the hospital; for if he had lingered, as
he <a name="page457"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 457</span>was
sometimes forced to do on Sundays, Dr. Harris would have lit his
pipe and proceeded to regale him with anecdotes of medical
experiences that always related to sex, on which he dwelt with a
slow, deliberate satisfaction, like a dog that nuzzles a piece of
garbage.</p>
<p>The aspects of medical science that related to sex were the
only ones in which he was really interested.&nbsp; He possessed
an expensive and eclectic library of books on these subjects, to
which he was always adding others that he bought from the
colporteurs of medical pornography who are continually pestering
the members of his profession.&nbsp; These he would pore over at
night, when Edwin was providentially engaged in reading for his
final.&nbsp; &ldquo;Medicine is an extremely interesting
profession from that point of view,&rdquo; he would say, and
indeed the dispenser soon discovered that this aspect of the
medical profession supplied Dr. Harris with a great number of his
patients.&nbsp; In the squalid underways of the city he had
established a reputation for skill and discretion in the
treatment of contagious disease, and the unfortunate victims who
came to Lower Sparkdale from more reputable suburbs were ready to
pay through the nose for his advice.</p>
<p>One night, hearing behind his curtain the overtures of one of
these cases that he knew so well, he suddenly became aware of a
tone that was familiar in the patient&rsquo;s voice.&nbsp;
Listening more closely he could have sworn it was the voice of
Griffin.&nbsp; Evidently it was a person of some consequence, for
Dr. Harris devoted as much as five minutes to his
examination.</p>
<p><a name="page458"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
458</span>&ldquo;I suppose you wouldn&rsquo;t like a
prescription?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, you&rsquo;d better make it up for me,&rdquo; said
the voice that resembled that of Griffin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Certainly . . . delighted.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Dr. Harris breathed heavily, as he always did when writing a
prescription, and then passed the slip of paper behind the
curtain to Edwin.&nbsp; Edwin, looking at once for the name at
the head of the prescription, was disappointed.&nbsp; The patient
had preferred to remain anonymous.&nbsp; He dispensed the
medicine, and when Dr. Harris had said good-bye to the patient he
could not resist the temptation of looking from behind the
curtain to verify his suspicions.&nbsp; He could only see the
back of the departing patient, but the suspicion filled him with
a queer sensation of awe.</p>
<p>It showed him a new aspect of medicine that had never occurred
to him in hospital life, but would, no doubt, be present often
enough in private practice.&nbsp; Griffin was a person well known
to Edwin and his friends, a person about whose adventures and
their consequences he would easily and naturally have
spoken.&nbsp; If he had retailed the incident to Maskew and W.G.
in the Dousita, it would have been the occasion of a little pity
and probably some irreverent mirth.&nbsp; But he saw at once that
he could do nothing of the sort.&nbsp; He had become, for the
first time in his life, the keeper of a professional
secret.&nbsp; For the rest of the world, however interested,
Griffin and Griffin&rsquo;s disease must not exist.</p>
<p>Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, reflecting that
in his future life he would in all probability become possessed
of many such secrets <a name="page459"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 459</span>and that there might be occasions on
which his sense of duty would be divided between the traditional
discretion of Hippocrates and the instincts of humanity.&nbsp; He
invented a hypothetical case for his own confusion.&nbsp;
Supposing he had a sister to whom Griffin was engaged: supposing
that they were going to be married in a week after this
uncomfortable knowledge had come into his possession, endangering
the whole of her future happiness and perhaps her life: what, in
that case, should be his attitude towards the question of
professional secrecy?&nbsp; What would he do?&nbsp; Would he be
justified in telling her what he knew?&nbsp; Hippocrates said
&ldquo;No&rdquo;; but Hippocrates&rsquo; refusal narrowed the
field of possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own shame
and threatening him with . . . what?&nbsp; Not with
exposure&mdash;for that Hippocrates forbade.&nbsp; Obviously with
death.&nbsp; And that would be murder. . . .</p>
<p>Balancing the relative heinousness of murder and perjury,
Edwin began to laugh at himself, and while he did this a curious
reminiscence came into his mind: the picture of a small boy, who
resembled him in very little but had been himself, lying in the
hedge side of Murderer&rsquo;s Cross Road, on the downs above St.
Luke&rsquo;s, reflecting on the same problem of the justification
of homicide and saying to himself as he brooded on his wrongs:
&ldquo;I can quite easily understand a chap wanting to murder a
chap.&rdquo;&nbsp; And this picture tempting him further, he
relapsed into a dream of those strange, remote days tinged with
extremes of happiness and misery, and both of them unreal. . .
.</p>
<p>He thought no more of Griffin.</p>
<h3><a name="page460"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
460</span>CHAPTER IX<br />
EASY ROW</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">For</span> a whole year Edwin inhabited
the room above the lock-up surgery in Lower Sparkdale.&nbsp; It
was a happy year, for into it was crowded a great wealth of
experience and elevating discovery to which the mechanical
drudgery of Dr. Harris&rsquo;s dispensing room acted as
ballast.&nbsp; In his medical studies he began to feel for the
first time the fruits of his earlier labours: to realise that all
medicine was little more than an intelligent application to life
of the theoretical subjects that he had mastered without
reasoning.&nbsp; From the very first day of his experience in the
dissecting room there was nothing in all that he had learnt that
had not its direct bearing on his present practice; and the
reflection that he possessed all this essential knowledge ready
for use was exhilarating in itself.&nbsp; Again, the fact that he
was now standing on his feet, actually earning his own living,
gave him a greater happiness than he had ever known in his days
of dependence; it made him accept the routine of Lower Sparkdale
as a penance, cheering him with the thought that so much
sacrifice was really necessary before he should be master of
himself.</p>
<p>He was lonely; but this seemed inevitable, for <a
name="page461"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 461</span>no person
in his senses could be expected to grind along in a steam-tram to
Lower Sparkdale for the sake of his company; and the final year
was too full of strenuous studies for all of them to allow of
much indulgence in the joys of friendship.&nbsp; Matthew Boyce
made a few heroic attempts.&nbsp; He even spent several evenings
in Harris&rsquo;s dispensary, finding the shilling doctor&rsquo;s
clinical and commercial methods something of a joke.&nbsp; They
were no joke to Edwin: he had recognised long ago that they were
no more than Harris&rsquo;s solution of the problem of
living.&nbsp; The doctor saw nothing unworthy in them.&nbsp; He
did his best, within his limited knowledge, for his
patients.&nbsp; He was kind, and even, on occasion,
generous.&nbsp; If there were fault to be found it must be with
the State that allowed such ignorant men to deal with precious
human bodies, and not with him.&nbsp; When the first humour of
the experience was exhausted Boyce came to the surgery no
more.&nbsp; Little by little Edwin&rsquo;s insulation became more
complete, and in the end he relapsed into the degree of
loneliness that he had known in his early days at St.
Luke&rsquo;s.</p>
<p>Given the opportunity, he almost enjoyed it.&nbsp; There was
something remote and secret about this little room in the corner
house above the grinding trams, and when the surgery emptied at
night and he went upstairs to work he would find himself suddenly
overwhelmed with a feeling of thankfulness for the fact that it
was so peculiarly his: that his own books and pictures and
clothes had made it individual and different from any other room
in the whole of the city.&nbsp; And when the town slept, <a
name="page462"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 462</span>and he sat
on reading into the early hours of the morning, the lonely
chamber was like a lighthouse set in seas of night, and dreams of
the misty lands beyond Severn, of Mendip couched in darkness, or
of the sleeping wolds by Overton, would beat at his lighted
window like seabirds in the night.</p>
<p>At first the sacrifices that his poverty demanded had seemed
no more than part of a new and exciting game.&nbsp; It was some
months before he realised that, literally, he could not afford
the indulgence of a single pleasure that cost money.&nbsp; If he
were to free himself from the bondage of Dr. Harris&rsquo;s
dispensary it was absolutely necessary that he should save enough
money to pay his examination fees.&nbsp; He began to find a new
delight in carefully hoarded shillings, and this practice threw
him into a curious sympathy with his employer.&nbsp; Each of
them, on a different scale, was committed to a present sacrifice
for the sake of future freedom; and this reflection reconciled
him in some degree to the inconveniences that Dr. Harris&rsquo;s
miserly ways inflicted on him.</p>
<p>It was galling, none the less, to find that he could mot
afford to buy a single new book, to hire a piano, or to hear any
music except the free recitals by which the municipal organist
convinced the citizens of North Bromwich that they were getting
something for their money, in debauches of sound that reminded
them how much the organ had cost.&nbsp; Sometimes, to
Edwin&rsquo;s joy, he played the fugues of the Well-tempered
Clavier, and on their wide streams he would be carried from
springs of mountain sweetness, by weir and cataract to solemn
tidal <a name="page463"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
463</span>waters and lose himself at last in seas of absolute
music.&nbsp; Time after time he thanked God for Bach, and walked
home to his garret like a man who has gazed upon the splendour of
a full sea and carries its tumult in his mind far inland.</p>
<p>Through all these experiences Edwin was so possessed by the
one idea of holding on until his final exam. was over that he
scarcely missed the society of his friends.&nbsp; He knew that
his friendship with Boyce was founded too deeply in common
experience ever to be shaken by his own changed circumstances: it
might lapse, but it could never be broken.&nbsp; He always felt
that the future held more for them than the past had ever given;
but his other friends, Maskew and Martin in particular, seemed to
have been translated to another place of existence.&nbsp; In the
wards and in the lecture theatres he would meet them; but
elsewhere they had nothing in common with his way of
existence.</p>
<p>Even W.G. seemed gradually to be slipping away from
him&mdash;an unreasonable state, for Edwin, after all, was now
for the first time sharing something of the big man&rsquo;s early
experience.&nbsp; For several months they had scarcely spoken,
and then, one day, nearly ran into each other&rsquo;s arms in
Sackville Row, and almost mechanically wandered off to the
Dousita together.&nbsp; In the shades of the smoking-room nothing
had changed.&nbsp; When they sank into the cushions of their
favourite corner Miss Wheeler approached them with an exact
replica of the smile with which, four years before, she had
engaged the heart of Maskew; and when she took their order, she
stood on one leg in exactly the same position, <a
name="page464"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 464</span>leaning,
with a hint of tiredness that was not surprising in a young woman
who habitually breathed tobacco smoke in place of oxygen, with
her hand on the curtain at the side of their settee.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I never see Mr. Maskew now,&rdquo; she said with a
sigh.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t think whatever &rsquo;as
happened to all you boys, I&rsquo;m sure.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She brought them coffee, and W.G., who had scarcely spoken,
but whose knitted brows testified to the pressure of some urgent
problem, said:&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, how do you like it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Being on your own.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I never thought you&rsquo;d stick it,&rdquo; W.G.
confessed.&nbsp; &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t think you had it in
you.&nbsp; You see, in your case there was never the least
necessity for it.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;There was, you know&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I could have understood it if you&rsquo;d had a regular
bust-up.&nbsp; I should certainly have stayed at home if the
governor hadn&rsquo;t booted me out.&nbsp; You never had anything
of that kind.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . not exactly.&nbsp; But the position was the
same.&nbsp; I had a sort of . . . of emotional cold-douche.&nbsp;
I was awfully sensitive about my mother.&nbsp; My father and I
were all wrong.&nbsp; We&rsquo;d really nothing in common.&nbsp;
And it&rsquo;s turned out all right.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the main
thing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a quixotic ass, my son.&nbsp; No . . .
that&rsquo;s not the word, but it&rsquo;s the same sort of
thing.&nbsp; It was really damned foolish of you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s jolly sound to stand on your own feet.&nbsp;
You know where you are for the first time.&nbsp; It was only <a
name="page465"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
465</span>uncomfortable because he was really awfully
decent.&nbsp; He is now: but he hasn&rsquo;t the faintest
glimmering of my point of view.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;They rarely have,&rdquo; said W.G. gloomily.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Still, you haven&rsquo;t made such an ass of yourself as I
have.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Something new?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . I&rsquo;m married.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t as bad as that,&rdquo; W.G.
chuckled.&nbsp; &ldquo;I thought it would come as a bit of a
shock to you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But why on earth&mdash;?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, you see she was awfully unhappy at home.&nbsp;
Brute of a father.&nbsp; And we simply got tired of
waiting.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s all.&nbsp; You must come and see
us.&nbsp; She always remembered your clerking in her ward.&nbsp;
We&rsquo;re living in furnished rooms in Alvaston.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s an amazing experience, you know, marriage.&nbsp; Quite
different from anything else of the kind.&rdquo;&nbsp; In view of
W.G.&rsquo;s experience in these matters Edwin was ready to take
this for granted.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I should think it is a damned funny thing,&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>They parted.&nbsp; There was something almost pathetic to
Edwin in W.G.&rsquo;s hot handclasp.&nbsp; He felt that W.G. was
up against something far bigger than anything that had happened
to him before: a strange, momentous adventure, yet one that was
thrilling and, in a way, enviable.&nbsp; Once again he found
himself admiring the big man&rsquo;s desperate daring.&nbsp; W.G.
with a wife, and probably, in a few years, children! . . .&nbsp;
Assuredly they were all growing old.</p>
<h4><a name="page466"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
466</span>II</h4>
<p>In all that summer Edwin scarcely saw a patch of living green
except the leprous plane-trees that sickened in the hospital
square.&nbsp; The current of his life flowed slowly through the
culverts of grimy brick that led from Lower Sparkdale to the
Infirmary.&nbsp; He became part of the stream of dusty humanity
that set citywards and back again with the regularity of a
tide.&nbsp; In December he came to the end of his penance.&nbsp;
The final examination was fixed for the beginning of January, and
before he could sit for it, he was compelled to take a course of
practical midwifery, twenty cases in all, which compelled his
residence for a couple of weeks in the neighbourhood of the
Prince&rsquo;s Hospital, the institution to which this department
was attached.&nbsp; Matthew Boyce and he had decided a year
before that they would do this work together, and though the
unusual strain of the fortnight in Easy Row would be a doubtful
preliminary to the effort of the final examination, the two
friends had always looked forward to the experience.</p>
<p>The authorities of the Prince&rsquo;s Hospital, lacking
obstetrical wards, had made this course the opportunity for
establishing an Out-patient Department that could deal with ten
cases a week at the nominal charge of five shillings each.&nbsp;
The students worked in pairs, and though they could never be sure
of attending their cases together, the resident staff of the
hospital, and, if necessary, a consultant physician, were always
available in case of an emergency.&nbsp; Edwin and Boyce were
housed in one of <a name="page467"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
467</span>the faded Georgian buildings that faced the
hospital.&nbsp; Its lower stories, like those of all its
neighbours, were devoted to theatrical lodgings; but a special
night-bell, polished by the moist hands of forty anxious husbands
every month, communicated with the upper room in which the
resident students attempted to sleep.&nbsp; The house was as well
known to all the poorer people in the neighbouring warrens as
were the faces pale with sleeplessness of the students who issued
from it, carrying the black bags that were symbolical of their
labours, a source of mysterious speculation to the children of
the district, and of amusement to the &ldquo;professionals&rdquo;
who inhabited the front rooms.</p>
<p>On a Monday morning in December the landlady received Edwin
and Boyce and installed them in a small room at the back of the
ground-floor infested with portraits of smiling young ladies in
tights, inscribed, with the most dashing signatures imaginable,
to herself.&nbsp; Mrs. Meadows was evidently very proud of these
decorations and called attention to the most blatant pair of legs
by polishing the glass of their frame with her apron.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I hope you gentlemen will be comfortable,&rdquo; she
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not that I doubt it.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t have
many complaints.&rdquo;&nbsp; The statement was a challenge, and
implied that if there should be any complaints the lodgers might
look to themselves.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a nice fresh room,&rdquo; she said, throwing
open a French window that disclosed a small patch of black earth
that had once been covered with grass but was now untenanted by
any living organisms but cats and groundsel.</p>
<p><a name="page468"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
468</span>&ldquo;I like them to keep the window open.&nbsp; It
takes away the smell of the gentlemen&rsquo;s disinfectant.&nbsp;
Not but what it&rsquo;s clean, I dare say.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin and Boyce would have assented in any case if it were
only to release the composite lodging-house smell that penetrated
the room from the adjoining &ldquo;domestic offices,&rdquo; and
Mrs. Meadows&rsquo;s kitchen where, it would be imagined,
turnip-tops simmered day and night upon a gas-ring.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then there&rsquo;s a pianoforte,&rdquo; she said,
hesitating at the dusty portiere.&nbsp; &ldquo;I find that
professionals like a pianoforte.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s cheery
like.&rdquo;</p>
<p>In a little while it became apparent that the professionals
liked a pianoforte, in every one of the thirty odd houses within
earshot, even if they could not play one.&nbsp; From the hour of
midday, when they rose, until six o&rsquo;clock, when they betook
themselves to their various theatres, the pianos of Easy Row were
never silent.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no good trying to do any work in this
place,&rdquo; said Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;There won&rsquo;t be any time, anyway,&rdquo; said
Boyce.&nbsp; &ldquo;You wait till the fun begins.&rdquo;</p>
<p>They lunched together on steak-and-kidney pudding and
turnip-tops with a brand of bottled beer in which Mrs. Meadows
showed an admirable taste, and in the early afternoon the fun
began.</p>
<p>From the beginning, Fate had decreed a complication by
deciding that Mrs. Hadley, back of number four, court sixteen,
Granby Street, and Mrs. Higgins over number fifty-four Rea Barn
Lane, should conspire to increase the population of North
Bromwich at the same moment.&nbsp; Mr. Hadley and <a
name="page469"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 469</span>Mr. Higgins
achieved a dead heat, arriving on the doorstep together in a
dripping perspiration with messages of an equal urgency.</p>
<p>&ldquo;This is rather rotten,&rdquo; said Boyce.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Which of these ladies will you take?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have Mrs. Higgins,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I suppose the bag&rsquo;s all right?&rdquo;</p>
<p>The bag was right enough, though it contained very little that
could do any harm, and smelt abominably of Lysol.&nbsp; Mr.
Higgins, still out of breath, with beads of sweat sweeping an
alluvium of metal dust into the furrows of his cheeks, carried
the bag for Edwin.&nbsp; For all his exhaustion, Mr. Higgins
wanted to run, and Edwin, walking with long strides beside him,
was in danger of losing his dignity by being swept into the same
degree of panic.&nbsp; The reflection that this would betray his
inexperience held him back.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The nurse said very urgent, doctor,&rdquo; Mr. Higgins
panted.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . yes.&nbsp; You mustn&rsquo;t excite
yourself.&nbsp; It&rsquo;ll be all right.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; said Mr. Higgins doubtfully,
&ldquo;you&rsquo;re well up in these sort of cases, doctor?&nbsp;
I expect you&rsquo;ve seen a lot of them?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin wished he had been able to grow a moustache for the
occasion.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hundreds,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>Mr. Higgins gave a sigh of relief.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a
good thing.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s a very good thing.&nbsp; You see,
I&rsquo;m nairvous, doctor.&nbsp; I lost my fairst over it, and I
don&rsquo;t want to lose this one.&nbsp; Very young she
is.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Is this her first?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page470"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
470</span>&ldquo;Yes, doctor.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Another bit of bad luck!</p>
<p>Through a maze of gritty streets they hurried, reaching, at
last, a house beside a corner &ldquo;public&rdquo; which a
cluster of women, gossiping in their aprons on the doorstep,
proclaimed as the site of this momentous birth.&nbsp; One of them
snatched the black bag from Mr. Higgins.&nbsp; &ldquo;You get
away, &rsquo;Iggins, and &rsquo;ave a pint of beer quiet
like.&nbsp; This baint no place for an &rsquo;usband.&nbsp; This
way, doctor.&nbsp; Here she is, poor lamb.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She pushed her way up the stairs, breathing heavily.&nbsp; Her
bunchy skirts filled the staircase, which was no wider than a
loft-ladder and very dark.</p>
<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;Ere &rsquo;e is,&rdquo; she cried triumphantly,
as she pushed open a matchboard door.&nbsp; &ldquo;&rsquo;Ere
&rsquo;e is.&nbsp; &rsquo;Ere&rsquo;s the doctor.&nbsp; Now you
won&rsquo;t be long, my lover.&nbsp; &rsquo;E&rsquo;ll &rsquo;elp
you.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll &rsquo;elp &rsquo;er, won&rsquo;t you,
doctor?&rdquo;</p>
<p>She deposited the talismanic bag triumphantly on the foot of
the bed; then she winked at Edwin: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go and keep
&rsquo;Iggins out of the way,&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m that glad you&rsquo;ve come, doctor,&rdquo;
said the nurse.&nbsp; She was a little shrivelled woman, with a
nervous smile and her hair packed into a black net with a wide
mesh that made her whole bead sombre and forbidding.&nbsp; Her
lips twitched when she smiled, and Edwin, who had been counting
on the moral support of her experience, saw at once that she was
even more anxious than himself.&nbsp; He was soon to know that
the women who acted as professional midwives in the North
Bromwich slums were usually widows left without means, who
adopted <a name="page471"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
471</span>this profession with no other qualification than a
certain wealth of subjective experience, on which they were
careful to insist.&nbsp; The claim &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had eight of
them myself, so <i>I</i> ought to know,&rdquo; did not atone for
the fact that they didn&rsquo;t actually know anything at
all.&nbsp; Mrs. Brown, the lady to whose mercies the trustful Mr.
Higgins had committed his second, was a timid specimen of the
class.&nbsp; Beneath her protestations of experience her soul
quaked with terror, and a hazy conviction that if anything went
wrong, she, the unregistered, would probably be committed for
manslaughter, reduced her to a state of dazed incompetence in
which she heard without hearing Edwin&rsquo;s none too confident
directions.&nbsp; She went downstairs tremulously to bring hot
water, and Edwin was left alone with his patient.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It won&rsquo;t be long, doctor, will it?&rdquo; she
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course not . . . of course not,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; He felt very much of a fraud, for he hadn&rsquo;t
the least idea how long it would be.&nbsp; The whole picture was
moving: the patient, a girl of twenty-four or five, her
honey-coloured hair drawn back tightly from a face that was
blotched already with tears, but not ill-looking: the humility of
the little bedroom with its hired furniture and certain humble
attempts at ornamentation: pink ribbon bows upon the curtains, a
ridiculous china ornament on the mantelpiece, and brass knobs at
the foot of the bedstead, so polished that they had already
become loose.&nbsp; No doubt Mrs. Higgins the second had been in
respectable suburban service, and these worthy efforts were the
signs of an attempt to introduce <a name="page472"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 472</span>into Rea Barn Lane the amenities of
Alvaston.&nbsp; She lay quietly on the bed, gazing at nothing
while Edwin unpacked his bag.&nbsp; He did not look at her, but
became suddenly conscious that her body had given a kind of jump
and that her hands were desperately clutching a towel that Mrs.
Brown had knotted to the rail at the bottom of the bed.&nbsp;
Then he heard the joints of the bedstead creak.&nbsp;
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; Cheer up. . . .&nbsp; It
won&rsquo;t be long,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>Mrs. Brown emerged panting from the stairway with hot
water.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right, my lover, that&rsquo;s
right. . . .&nbsp; That&rsquo;s another one less.&nbsp; Now, let
the doctor have a look at you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A strange business. . . .&nbsp; It was a moment that might
have been difficult; but Edwin soon realised that the seriousness
of the occasion, the fact that this young creature&rsquo;s life
was veritably in his hands, made modesty seem a thing of no
account.&nbsp; In the eyes of this woman Edwin was not a young
man but an agency of relief from pain.&nbsp; In the body that
pain dominated there could be no room for blushes.&nbsp; Edwin,
trying to summon all his hardly learned theory to his aid in
practice, was suddenly impressed with the obligations that this
confidence imposed on him.&nbsp; He remembered the terms of the
Hippocratic oath.&nbsp; Yea . . a goodly heritage!</p>
<p>&ldquo;Is it all right, doctor?&rdquo; said the anxious voice
of Mrs. Brown.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s all right.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank the Lord for that!&nbsp; You hear what the doctor
says, my lover&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But it will be a long time yet.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t say that, doctor, don&rsquo;t say
that,&rdquo; Mrs. <a name="page473"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
473</span>Higgins wailed.&nbsp; &ldquo;You aren&rsquo;t going to
leave me?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no good staying here now,&rdquo; he said, as
gently as he could.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really all
right.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s only a matter of time.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you help her a bit, doctor?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Of course he couldn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; A business of that kind
would mean calling in the house-surgeon from the
Prince&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He was determined not to be driven into a
panic, though this would have been easy enough, when he was
convinced that the case was taking a normal though inevitably
lengthy course.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I expect you&rsquo;ll want me again some time this
evening,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>Mrs. Brown showed him downstairs.&nbsp; &ldquo;You&rsquo;re
<i>sure</i> it is all right, aren&rsquo;t you, doctor?&rdquo; she
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Perfectly all right.&nbsp; You know what a first case
is.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d ought to,&rdquo; said Mrs. Brown
proudly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had eight myself.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He trudged back to Easy Row, where the professionals&rsquo;
pianos, tuned in quarter-tones, were already combining to show
their catholicity in musical taste.&nbsp; Boyce was drowsing in
an easy-chair with the Greek Anthology open in his lap.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, how&rsquo;s your Mrs. Higgins?&rdquo; he asked
lazily.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, she&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; A <i>primip</i>.&nbsp;
Is Mrs. Hadley through her little troubles?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;B.B.A.&nbsp; Born before arrival.&nbsp; A soft
job.&nbsp; Saves a lot of trouble.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;My good lady will haul us out in the middle of the
night, damn her!&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; A conventional mode of
expression, for he didn&rsquo;t in the least feel like damning
Mrs. Higgins.&nbsp; In his mind he still <a
name="page474"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 474</span>carried the
picture of her plain hair and blotched face: he could hear the
sound of that sudden shudder and the noise of the bedstead
creaking.</p>
<p>The evening passed quietly.&nbsp; They tried to read, but
found the feeling of suspense made that impossible.&nbsp; No
message came from Mrs. Higgins, and as they were almost certain
to be called out in the night, they went to bed early.&nbsp;
While they were undressing, Boyce humming softly the Liebestod
from Tristan, the bell in their bedroom rang.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mrs. Higgins,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d
better go and see.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He groped his way downstairs.&nbsp; In the front room a party
of music-hall artistes were making a noisy supper.&nbsp; Before
he could reach the door the bell rang again, and when he opened
it, a big man whose breath smelt of liquor, lurched into the
hall.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Are you the doctor?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re to come at once to thirty-four Greville
Street.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the missus.&nbsp; The nurse says
it&rsquo;s urgent.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The nurse always said it was urgent.&nbsp; Boyce came
downstairs grumbling.</p>
<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;d better go together.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What about my friend, Mrs. Higgins?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, damn Mrs. Higgins!&rdquo; said Boyce.</p>
<p>It was a clear and frosty night, in which all points of light,
whether of starshine, or street-lamps, or of blue sparks
crackling from the tramway cables, shone brightly.&nbsp; The
Greville Street husband lurched along beside them, just
sufficiently awake to show them the way through a maze of
rectangular byways to a street that lay upon the <a
name="page475"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 475</span>outer edge
of the district that the hospital covered.&nbsp; The chill
clarity of the air dispelled sleep.&nbsp; It was even pleasant to
be walking there, for at this time of the night the town was so
empty that they might almost have been walking over a country
road.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Here it is,&rdquo; said the husband thickly.</p>
<p>Boyce and Edwin entered together.&nbsp; The front room of the
house was crowded with people who should have been in bed.&nbsp;
They sat clustered about a table on which stood a number of
bottles from one of which the messenger had evidently extracted
his peculiar perfume.&nbsp; In the corner chair, next to the
window, an old woman in a lace cap had fallen asleep.&nbsp;
Opposite her a very dirty old man toasted his shins in front of
the fire.&nbsp; A strapping girl with dark, untidy hair, and an
almost aggressive physical beauty was holding forth shrilly to a
group of three women who had wandered in to drink and gossip from
a neighbouring court.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Here they are,&rdquo; said the husband sullenly,
&ldquo;two on &rsquo;em.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;My God! . . .&nbsp; Two of them?&nbsp; Is that
all?&rdquo; said the dark girl, examining and, as it seemed,
approving.</p>
<p>Upstairs they found a midwife of another but equally
characteristic type: a fat woman whose attention was divided
between the patient in bed and the cheerful company in the front
room.&nbsp; On the surface she was a little patronising, an
attitude that the two students&rsquo; inexperience made it
difficult for them to resent.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know what you
doctors want,&rdquo; she said, standing with her sleeves rolled
up over her red forearms.&nbsp; &ldquo;Plenty of hot water, <a
name="page476"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
476</span>that&rsquo;s what you want.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve got some
disinfectant too.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve often been with the
&rsquo;ospital doctors.&nbsp; Now we shan&rsquo;t be
long.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She bustled downstairs, looking into the front room for a
drink on her way to the kitchen.&nbsp; Boyce, confident in the
completion of his first case, took the lead in questioning the
patient, a slightly older version of the dark sanguine girl they
had seen below.&nbsp; Her whole attitude towards the business,
though less pathetic than that of the unforgotten Mrs. Higgins,
was equally moving.&nbsp; It implied such a cheerful and
courageous acceptance of life and this most uncomfortable of its
experiences.&nbsp; Her amazing vitality pervaded the room.&nbsp;
It could be seen in her masterful smile, in the grip of her red
fingers on the knotted towel, in the deep suffusion of her
face.&nbsp; A jolly woman, built in the mould of a fighter, who
would neither take quarter nor give it.&nbsp; When Boyce had
examined her she smiled, disclosing a fine set of teeth, and
solemnly winked.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, doctor, what about it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Listen to &rsquo;er,&rdquo; said the midwife,
chuckling.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way to take
it!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s all right, you know, but it
won&rsquo;t be just yet awhile.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;My God . . . I didn&rsquo;t pay the &rsquo;ospital five
bob for you to tell me that.&nbsp; Look &rsquo;ere, doctor, my
elder sister &rsquo;ad a horrible time with her first.&nbsp;
&rsquo;Ad to &rsquo;ave it took off &rsquo;er.&nbsp; Be a sport,
doctor, and give us a smell of chloroform.&nbsp; Come on,
now!&nbsp; There&rsquo;s two on you. . . .&nbsp;
&rsquo;Ard-&rsquo;earted devils all you doctors are.&nbsp;
Bain&rsquo;t they, Mrs. Perkins?&rdquo;&nbsp; She smiled at the
midwife, and then, suddenly, her face changed and <a
name="page477"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 477</span>she
clutched at the knotted towel.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, my!&rdquo; she
said, and Edwin saw the veins in her neck swell, and heard her
clench her teeth.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the way, dearie.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the
way,&rdquo; said Mrs. Perkins, gritting her own teeth in sympathy
and smoothing back the hair from the patient&rsquo;s brow.</p>
<p>Edwin and Boyce were debating as to whether it were worth
while staying when a messenger from the hospital arrived from
below to say that Mrs. Hadley, Boyce&rsquo;s patient of the
afternoon, was &ldquo;took worse,&rdquo; and so Edwin was left
alone once more in the squalor of the patient&rsquo;s room.&nbsp;
He sat waiting in a chair that was supposed to be easy, listening
to the conversation of the woman and her nurse.&nbsp; Most of it
was family history of a scandalous kind, and the manner of its
expression was extremely frank.&nbsp; In the course of his
hospital work he had never before realised the extraordinary
contradictions of the code by which the talk of the working-class
is governed.&nbsp; In its mixture of delicacies and blatancies it
amazed him.&nbsp; Both the women were fluent gossips, and the
conversation never ceased, except in those moments of acute and
sudden tension when the patient&rsquo;s hands clutched at her
towel and the midwife mopped her brow.&nbsp; Then, when the
upstairs room was silent, a murmur of laughter and loud voices
would come up the stairs from below.&nbsp; In this family, at any
rate, the occasion of a birth did not lack celebration.&nbsp;
Even the patient was curious about what was happening
downstairs.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s our Susan doing?&rdquo; she
said from time to time.</p>
<p><a name="page478"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 478</span>An
interminable business.&nbsp; As the night wore on it grew very
chilly, and Edwin shivered in his chair.&nbsp; The case hung fire
unaccountably, and in this, the first of many such cold vigils,
he fell into a strange mood, often to be repeated, in which the
sublime influences of night and solitude combined to purge his
reflections of pettiness and showed him what an unimaginable
mystery his own life was.&nbsp; The patient fell into an uneasy
doze.&nbsp; The midwife nodded in her chair, snatching up her
head with a conscious jerk whenever it lolled over her fat
bosom.&nbsp; The smelly oil-lamp on the mantelpiece gave an
occasional sputter when a drop of water was sucked up into the
wick.&nbsp; In the room below the excited talk had petered out
and only a sound of soft snoring was heard, like the breathing of
cows in a byre.</p>
<p>Edwin thought of many things.&nbsp; It seemed to him that his
mind burned clear as frosty starlight lighting forgotten memories
of his childhood.&nbsp; He thought of his own mother.&nbsp; He
wondered if she had lain like the woman on the bed on the night
when he was born.&nbsp; He wondered if it had been in the least
like this, and whether another doctor, whose name he did not even
know, had sat by the fireplace in the little room at Halesby
waiting and seeing his own life stretched out before him in this
light of perilous clarity.&nbsp; He thought of St.
Luke&rsquo;s&mdash;of a thousand small things that had lain
submerged for years and now appeared unbidden.&nbsp; The
strangeness of his own experience, the elements of linked
circumstance that had combined to twist his life into its present
state and make him what he was.&nbsp; He thought of his father,
with an unusual <a name="page479"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
479</span>degree of charity, realising that this man too was no
more than a slave of the same blind influences driven hither and
thither in spite of his innate goodwill.&nbsp; Edwin was ashamed
to think that he had been angry with him.&nbsp; In his present
mood it seemed to him an unreasonable thing that one should be
angry with any human creature.&nbsp; Pity . . . yes, and
love&mdash;but never anger.&nbsp; So, like a devotee in a Tibetan
lamasery, he saw his fellow creatures, his father, himself, the
midwife, and the woman on the bed, bound helpless to the
revolving wheel which is the earth.&nbsp; And the earth seemed
very small beneath the stars. . . .</p>
<p>At two o&rsquo;clock in the morning the handsome girl from
downstairs, who was the patient&rsquo;s sister, came softly into
the room and asked the midwife if she would like a cup of
tea.&nbsp; The patient blinked at het with red eyes.</p>
<p>&ldquo;How is it going, Sally?&rdquo; said the sister.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; I suppose it&rsquo;s
got to be worse before it&rsquo;s better,&rdquo; she said, with a
laugh.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ask the doctor if he&rsquo;ll have some tea
too.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin accepted gratefully.&nbsp; It was harsh stuff that had
been standing on the hob downstairs for some hours already.&nbsp;
Mrs. Perkins was easily persuaded into doctoring hers with a
tablespoonful of brandy from the bottle that is a regular
constituent of the working class <i>layette</i>.&nbsp; The sister
sat at the foot of the bed and stared lazily at Edwin.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You look tired, doctor,&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>Edwin admitted that he had had a biggish day.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
ought to get a bit of sleep,&rdquo; said the dark <a
name="page480"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 480</span>girl.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Sorry there bain&rsquo;t no spare beds in the house; but
you can turn in with me if you like.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She looked so daringly provocative that Edwin had a horrible
suspicion that she meant it; but it was evidently the sort of
joke that Greville Street understood, for the patient on the bed
cried, &ldquo;Ethel, you are a cough-drop, you&rsquo;ll make the
doctor blush,&rdquo; and Mrs. Perkins rocked with laughter until
she spilt her tea.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, why should you have all the fun, Sally?&nbsp; It
isn&rsquo;t every day we get a nice young man in the
house.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;<i>Fun</i> . . .,&rdquo; said the patient wryly.&nbsp;
&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll know all about this sort of fun some
day.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not just yet, thank you,&rdquo; said Ethel.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I can look after myself better than that.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She went downstairs again.&nbsp; Edwin was beginning to feel a
little unhappy about the case.&nbsp; To his inexperience the long
delay seemed abnormal, and his imagination presented to him a
series of textbook disasters.&nbsp; While he stood doubting
whether he should give himself away by sending to the hospital
for the house-surgeon, he was startled by a sudden cry.&nbsp;
Now, at any rate, there was no doubt about it.&nbsp; At this
rate, he thought, it could not be long.&nbsp; But it took three
hours: three hours of desperate struggle in which he could give
no help, though the thing was so fierce that he found his
sympathies snatched up into it: so that he held his breath and
clenched his hands and felt his own temples bursting with
effort.&nbsp; There had been no experience like it.&nbsp; As he
sat at the bedside with the patient&rsquo;s fingers clasped about
his wrist, he <a name="page481"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
481</span>had the feeling that this woman, who had joked with him
half an hour before with the dry, courageous cynicism that
colours the philosophy of her class, was not an individual human
soul any longer; not a woman at all, but a mass of straining,
tortured muscle animated by the first force of life.&nbsp; So it
had been since the first woman cried out in the night under the
tangles of Caucasus: so it would always be: the most sublime and
terrible of all physical experiences, a state of sheer physical
possession, more powerful than any spiritual ecstasy
imaginable.</p>
<p>At five o&rsquo;clock the baby was born&mdash;a boy, and Mrs.
Perkins, standing by with a skein of twisted thread in her hand,
danced with nervousness.&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s hands also trembled;
but his heart was lightened with a sudden relief, as though the
labour had been his and his also the accomplishment.&nbsp; A
palpably ridiculous state of mind . . . but it took him like
that.</p>
<p>The dark girl put her head in at the door.&nbsp; She was very
pale now.&nbsp; Had the whole household shared in these physical
throes?</p>
<p>&ldquo;Is it all right?&rdquo; she said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . it&rsquo;s a boy.&nbsp; A beautiful
boy.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Hallo, Eth,&rdquo; said a quiet voice from the
bed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Go and tell Jim.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was the first word the patient had spoken.</p>
<p>A moment later she opened her eyes and stared in a dazed way
at Edwin.&nbsp; She smiled.&nbsp; She was a woman again&mdash;an
extraordinarily chastened woman&mdash;and somehow strangely
beautiful.&nbsp; &ldquo;Thank you, <a name="page482"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 482</span>doctor,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;You &rsquo;elped me ever so.&nbsp; Did I be&rsquo;ave very
bad, Mrs. Perkins?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Bad?&nbsp; You be&rsquo;aved fine,&rdquo; said Mrs.
Perkins, wrapping the baby in a blanket and putting it in the
fender.</p>
<p>The patient gave a deep sigh and seemed to relapse into her
thoughts.&nbsp; From time to time she would say a couple of words
in a weak-contented voice.</p>
<p>&ldquo;&rsquo;As Eth told Jim?&rdquo; she asked several times,
and then: &ldquo;What&rsquo;ll mother think?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You be quiet, my lover,&rdquo; said the midwife.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you disturb yourself with talking.&rdquo;</p>
<p>At last she said suddenly: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m better now,&rdquo;
and asked if she might see the baby.&nbsp; Mrs. Perkins unwrapped
the blanket from a red and frowning forehead and showed it to
her.&nbsp; She touched its cheek with her finger and smiled
miraculously.&nbsp; The action seemed to bring her submerged
personality to the surface again.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ugly little b&mdash;,&rdquo; she said, with a happy
laugh.&nbsp; &ldquo;Looks as if &rsquo;e&rsquo;d been on the
booze.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I shan&rsquo;t forget the way you &rsquo;elped me,
doctor,&rdquo; she said again, when Edwin left the house.&nbsp;
Although it was still dark, the workmen&rsquo;s trams had begun
to run, and lights appeared in the lower windows of public houses
where hot soup was on sale.&nbsp; When he entered the bedroom of
their lodging, Edwin found, and envied, Boyce sleeping
stertorously with the blankets pulled over his head and an
overcoat on his feet.&nbsp; Three hours later, when the landlady
came to call them, he woke, and explained to Edwin the
excitements of his own night: how, in <a name="page483"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 483</span>the middle of it, Edwin&rsquo;s own
Mrs. Higgins had called him out (&ldquo;decent little
woman,&rdquo; said Boyce), and how, from sixteen Granby Street,
he had been called to a case at the other end of the district in
a common lodging-house kept by a Pole.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No hot water . . . no soap . . . nothing but a bucket
that they&rsquo;d used for scrubbing the floors.&nbsp; Not even a
bed!&nbsp; Just a straw mattress with a couple of grey blankets
on it.&nbsp; Two other children and a man in the room.&nbsp; And
crawling!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve stripped and had a rub down with a
towel, but I feel as if they were all over me now.&nbsp; You
couldn&rsquo;t see them on the grey blankets, you
know.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Sounds dismal.&nbsp; Had they a capable woman?&nbsp; My
Mrs. Perkins wasn&rsquo;t up to much.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Midwife?&nbsp; My dear chap, they didn&rsquo;t run to
luxuries like that.&nbsp; It is a bit thick, isn&rsquo;t it? when
a modern surgeon-accoucheur is reduced to washing the baby with
his own soap.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, it was an
extraordinarily interesting performance.&nbsp; The thing felt as
if it would break.&nbsp; But seriously, you know, this sort of
thing teaches you a bit about twentieth century
housing.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s pretty bad,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;There&rsquo;s one thing about it: working all night like
this gives you a terrific appetite.&rdquo;</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>For a few days the extreme novelty of their adventure
sustained them, but after five nights of broken or obliterated
sleep, the presence of the night-bell at their bedside stood for
a symbol of perpetual unrest.&nbsp; Their days were spent in <a
name="page484"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 484</span>visiting
patients whom they had attended.&nbsp; All examination work was
made impossible by the fatigue that follows want of sleep, and
the fact that they were committed to a kind of enforced idleness
made their sojourn in Easy Row almost as much a holiday as the
great summer days at Overton.</p>
<p>Both of them found that they could not even read for pleasure;
and so the undisturbed hours of the day were passed in talk and
in music.&nbsp; Mrs. Meadows&rsquo;s piano had suffered under the
fingers and thumbs of countless guests; but Edwin and Boyce
shared the cost of a tuner and worked together through the Wagner
scores and the subtler treasures that lay hidden in the songs of
Hugo Wolf.&nbsp; They had few visitors, for this community of
taste had already begun to isolate them from their student
friends; but Boyce&rsquo;s father, the poet, often came to have
tea with them and to share their music, a man as versatile and
sanguine as Meredith&rsquo;s Roy Richmond, and yet so versed in
every variety of knowledge and so reverent of beauty that Edwin
felt there was no such company in the world: one who took all
beauty and knowledge for his province.</p>
<p>One afternoon a message came to the house in Easy Row from the
hospital, and as Mrs. Meadows was engaged in some obscure
adjustment of her toilet, Edwin went to the door to receive
it.&nbsp; He took the message, and was returning when another
figure appeared on the path.&nbsp; It was that of a young girl of
his own age, or, perhaps, a little older, and she hurried forward
when she saw that he was closing the door.&nbsp; He waited.</p>
<p><a name="page485"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
485</span>&ldquo;You weren&rsquo;t going to shut me out, were
you?&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; She smiled, and Edwin saw that her
eyes were of a warm hazel such as sunshine reveals in peaty river
water.&nbsp; Before them Edwin found himself blushing.</p>
<p>&ldquo;No, indeed,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do you want
Mrs. Meadows?&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll go and tell her.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Mrs. Meadows?&nbsp; This is thirty-seven, isn&rsquo;t
it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes . . . thirty-seven.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve come to see my friend, Miss Latham.&nbsp;
She&rsquo;s lodging here.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m so sorry.&nbsp; Of course.&nbsp; I expect
she&rsquo;s in the front room.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank you.&rdquo;&nbsp; She spoke very demurely.&nbsp;
He stood aside to let her pass and with her a faint fragrance of
white rose.</p>
<p>By this time Miss Latham herself had emerged, a blowsy woman
who was taking a small part in the Christmas pantomime at the
theatre, and had introduced herself to the friends through Mrs.
Meadows a few days before.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why, Rosie, my dear, isn&rsquo;t this just sweet of
you?&nbsp; Fancy finding you on the step flirting with Doctor . .
. Dr. Ingleby!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s right, isn&rsquo;t
it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, what a shame, Hetty!&nbsp; We weren&rsquo;t, were
we?&rdquo;&nbsp; Ingenuously she turned her eyes on Edwin
again.&nbsp; Were they hazel?&nbsp; Perhaps they were almost
amber.&nbsp; A matter of light . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . . I&rsquo;m afraid we weren&rsquo;t.&nbsp; She
didn&rsquo;t give us time.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Two doctors in the house!&nbsp; Think of that!&rdquo;
said Miss Hetty Latham, whose conversation habitually <a
name="page486"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 486</span>ran from
one note of exclamation to another.&nbsp; &ldquo;Imagine how safe
we feel, Rosie!&rdquo;</p>
<p>And Rosie surveyed Edwin seriously.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you awfully young?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose I am rather.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not qualified
yet.&nbsp; But I expect to be next week.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then you must be awfully clever too&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;What on earth are we all doing talking here in the
passage?&nbsp; Come along in and have a cup of tea,&rdquo; said
Miss Latham boisterously.</p>
<p>&ldquo;As you two are such great friends already, I suppose
it&rsquo;s waste of time introducing you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Really&mdash;&rdquo; Edwin protested.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very well, then.&nbsp; Dr. Ingleby: Miss Rosie
Beaucaire.&nbsp; I never get the order right.&nbsp; You can take
it or leave it.&nbsp; May he come to tea with us,
Rosie?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course he may.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Come along then, both of you . . .&rdquo;</p>
<h3><a name="page487"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
487</span>CHAPTER X<br />
WHITE ROSES</h3>
<h4>I</h4>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was the first of many amazing
adventures, to which Matthew Boyce supplied a calculated and
cynical commentary, watching Edwin as though he were the subject
of a physiological experiment&mdash;as indeed he was.&nbsp; But
lack of sympathy in one quarter was scarcely likely to worry
Edwin when he had found it so overwhelmingly in another.&nbsp; In
a few days Miss Latham, the most tactful of duennas, had
withdrawn from the scene.&nbsp; On the first night of their
acquaintance Edwin had taken the hazel-eyed Miss Beaucaire back
to her lodgings in Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place at the back of the
theatre, where the pantomime was in rehearsal.&nbsp; All the way
through the squalid, lamp-lit streets they had talked of things
that were entrancing, simply because they had to do with
her.&nbsp; Edwin thought that no companionship in all his life
had been so natural and so easy; and this was not surprising, for
the young woman, in addition to physical charms that were armoury
enough in themselves, had developed the faculty commonly acquired
by ladies of her profession, of devoting herself entirely to the
companion of the moment and giving the <a
name="page488"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 488</span>impression
that she had never known, and would never want to know, any other
person in the world.&nbsp; Rosie was only twenty-four, but had
given at least the last third of her life to studying male of the
species of which Edwin was a peculiarly ingenuous example.&nbsp;
At the door of her lodgings she had conjured an atmosphere of
mysterious intimacy.&nbsp; Speaking in a voice that was low and
of a thrilling tenderness, she had said:&mdash;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I mustn&rsquo;t ask you to come in to-day.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s a dreadful shame; but mother has one of her headaches,
and the noise might disturb her.&nbsp; You understand,
don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin, with a vision of an elderly and delicate version of
Rosie herself lying on a sofa with a handkerchief dipped in
eau-de-cologne over her eyes, assented.&nbsp; He thought it a
very beautiful consideration on Rosie&rsquo;s part.&nbsp; A small
black and tan terrier came dancing into the hall with a friendly
yelp.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Be quiet, Imp . . . oh, <i>do</i> be quiet!&nbsp;
Isn&rsquo;t he a duck?&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now, I must
really go.&rdquo;&nbsp; She held out her hand.&nbsp; A moment
before she had taken off her glove, and Edwin, who had scarcely
ever touched the hand of a woman before, thought that her fingers
were the softest and most delicate things on earth.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll come and have tea with us, won&rsquo;t
you?&nbsp; I should like you to meet mother.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course, I&rsquo;d like to.&nbsp; When?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh . . . quite soon.&nbsp; Any day this week.&nbsp;
Promise me you won&rsquo;t forget . . .&rdquo;&nbsp; As if he
could ever forget!&nbsp; Her exquisite humility quite bowled him
over.&nbsp; When she had closed the door behind <a
name="page489"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 489</span>her he
walked away dazed with an unfamiliar emotion that made the mean
street, with its uniform row of mid-Victorian houses on one side,
and on the other the blank wall of the theatre and huge, sooty
warehouses, seem a holy place.&nbsp; The Halesby Road, with its
streaming traffic, shared the same transfiguration.&nbsp; The
speed and strength of the horses enthralled him; the faces of men
and women walking homeward from their work in the city seemed
triumphantly happy; the smooth wood-pavement, polished by the
rolling of innumerable wheels, shone like a street in
heaven.&nbsp; It seemed to Edwin as if the whole world had
somehow been uplifted by a secret knowledge of his own
experience.&nbsp; A night of wonder. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, what is the young woman&rsquo;s name?&rdquo;
asked Boyce, when he returned to Easy Row.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Beaucaire.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s principal girl in the
pantomime at the Queen&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m. . . .&nbsp; Attractive little piece.&nbsp;
But she can&rsquo;t be up to much if she&rsquo;s a pal of the
Latham woman&rsquo;s.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve seen her there several
times.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, that means nothing,&rdquo; Edwin explained.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think she&rsquo;s at all keen on her.&nbsp;
They acted together somewhere years ago.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t
drop people when they&rsquo;ve been kind to you.&nbsp; I
don&rsquo;t think she&rsquo;s at all keen on her.&nbsp;
She&rsquo;s quite all right.&nbsp; Lives with her mother in
Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Pretty rotten sort of street.&nbsp; Got a bad name, you
know.&nbsp; I believe, as a matter of fact, it&rsquo;s considered
rather the thing to lug an official mother about with
you.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page490"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
490</span>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean&mdash;&rdquo; Edwin began,
going very white.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know
anything about her.&nbsp; Only, for God&rsquo;s sake, take care
of yourself.&nbsp; A young woman of that kind generally has a
fair share of experience, and you . . . well, you
<i>haven&rsquo;t</i> exactly.&nbsp; Besides, it&rsquo;s just as
well to remember that the final&rsquo;s coming off in ten
days.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The less said about the final the better.</p>
<p>&ldquo;She isn&rsquo;t a chorus girl, you know.&nbsp; If
you&rsquo;d met her I think you&rsquo;d admit that she&rsquo;s a
lady.&nbsp; She told me that her mother&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>Boyce chuckled.</p>
<p>&ldquo;As a matter of fact,&rdquo; said Edwin, clinching the
argument, &ldquo;her father was a country parson in low
circumstances.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I understand they usually are,&rdquo; said Boyce with a
yawn.</p>
<p>Their night was complicated by two new cases.&nbsp; Next
morning they appeared at breakfast with slightly ruffled
tempers.&nbsp; They sat at opposite ends of the table, Edwin
reading, without understanding, one of Oldham&rsquo;s caustic
critiques on a symphony concert the night before, his friend
glued to his beloved anthology.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What did you say her name was?&rdquo; said Boyce,
apropos of nothing.&nbsp; &ldquo;Rosie, wasn&rsquo;t
it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin grunted.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Have you ever sampled the <i>Sortes
Virgilianae</i>?&nbsp; I sometimes try that trick with the
anthology.&nbsp; There are plenty of generalisations, so it often
comes off rather well.&nbsp; How&rsquo;s this for last
night?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page491"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
491</span>&ldquo;Are you listening?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, fire away.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Boyce quoted:&mdash;</p>
<blockquote><p>&#905; &tau;&#8048; &#8165;&#972;&delta;&alpha;,
&#8165;&omicron;&delta;&#972;&epsilon;&sigma;&sigma;&alpha;&nu;
&#7956;&chi;&epsilon;&sigmaf; &chi;&alpha;&#8164;&#943;&nu;,
&#7936;&lambda;&lambda;&#8054; &tau;&#943;
&pi;&omega;&lambda;&#7956;&sigmaf;<br />
&sigma;&alpha;&nu;&tau;&#942;&nu;, &#7970; &tau;&#7939;
&#8165;&#972;&delta;&alpha;, &#7968;&#8050;
&sigma;&upsilon;&nu;&alpha;&mu;&phi;&omicron;&tau;&epsilon;&rho;&alpha;;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Rather neat, isn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; While I was hanging
about that case in Craven Street, I made a translation for
you.&nbsp; Tell me what you think of it.</p>
<p class="poetry">&lsquo;You of the roses, rosy-fair,<br />
Sweet maiden, tell me whether<br />
You or the roses are your ware,<br />
Or both of them together.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Damned rotten, anyway,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Maiden&rsquo;s the wrong word . . .&rdquo;</p>
<p>It comforted him, none the less, to find that Rosie did not
revisit Miss Latham, though this lady pointedly rallied him on
the doorstep, suggesting that his intimacy with Miss Beaucaire
had reached a stage to which he had not yet attained but aspired
devoutly.&nbsp; The work at Easy Row, that had slackened for a
few days, came on with a rush; and though the image of this
delicate creature now filled his nightly vigils, being even more
precious for the squalid surroundings in which it came to him, he
found it impossible to visit the lodgings in Prince
Albert&rsquo;s Place, to which his thoughts with tantalising
regularity returned.</p>
<p>The flood of work held until their fortnight was out, leaving
them both washed-out and irritable.&nbsp; To speak frankly, the
last few days of their comradeship had not been a success.&nbsp;
Although Edwin <a name="page492"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
492</span>made it clear that he didn&rsquo;t wish to discuss the
affair of Rosie with Boyce, the incident of the Greek epigram
rankled.&nbsp; He found it impossible to take the matter lightly,
feeling that it was necessary to convince himself at all costs
that he wasn&rsquo;t making a fool of himself, and finding it
difficult to do so.</p>
<p>On the Monday next before the final examination he found
himself a free man.&nbsp; It was a questionable liberty, for its
enjoyment really depended on the result of this ordeal.&nbsp; He
had definitely severed his connection with Dr. Harris, intending
to devote all his spare time at Easy Row and the week after to
preparations for the exam.&nbsp; A big gamble. . . .&nbsp; Ten
pounds and a few shillings was all he possessed in the world,
except a problematical degree in medicine which, in another seven
days, might make him certain of four guineas a week as long as he
chose to work.&nbsp; The margin seemed so small and the chance so
desperate that he burned the last of his boats, selling his
microscope to a pawnbroker for twelve pounds.&nbsp; Twenty-three
pounds. . . .&nbsp; One could do a lot with twenty-three pounds .
. . supposing nothing went wrong.</p>
<p>He found a cheap bed-sitting-room in a quiet street at the
back of the University buildings.&nbsp; Here, and in the museums,
he would be able to put in a week of intensive cramming.&nbsp; He
found that he couldn&rsquo;t do it.&nbsp; He had reckoned without
the unreasonable quantity of Rosie.&nbsp; The first night on
which he settled down to read in his new lodging the thought of
her would not let him rest.&nbsp; It was ridiculous.&nbsp; What
he wanted was a hard walk.&nbsp; He would go up to Alvaston and
rout Boyce out of his <a name="page493"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 493</span>study for a tramp in the moonlight
towards Southfield Beeches.&nbsp; He would apologise to Boyce for
his bearishness during the last few days.&nbsp; Hadn&rsquo;t they
assured each other on one of their ambrosial evenings at Overton
more than a year ago, that the friendship of two men was a more
precious and lasting experience than anything that the love of a
woman could give?&nbsp; The whole thing was just the result of
physical staleness: a symptom of the monotonous fatigue of the
last year.&nbsp; He was going to get rid of it at all
costs.&nbsp; He turned out the gas and went downstairs.</p>
<p>It was a discouraging night.&nbsp; A soft winter drizzle had
set in from the West, and in the jaded Halesby Road nebulous
street lamps were reflected in a layer of black slime that
covered the wood-pavement.&nbsp; The shop windows were misted
with rain, and the few people who had ventured out into the
street trod carefully as though they were afraid of
slipping.&nbsp; A brutal night if ever there was one.&nbsp;
Plodding up the street with the rain in his face he found that he
was passing the end of Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place.&nbsp; He
passed it by twenty paces, and then, almost against his will,
turned round again.&nbsp; It was no good.&nbsp; There she was,
for certain, within forty yards of him.&nbsp; If he were to walk
along the road on the opposite side under the blank walls of the
warehouses, he would be able to see the very room that held her
exquisiteness.&nbsp; He did so.&nbsp; There was a light in the
front room of the lower story, but the blinds were down, and he
could not see any one inside.&nbsp; He crossed the road boldly
and stood for a moment on the doorstep.&nbsp; It gave him a
peculiar <a name="page494"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
494</span>stab of happiness to feel so near her.&nbsp; He railed
against the combination of shyness and convention that held him;
for if he were to do the thing that was reasonable and downright,
he would have walked straight into the house and told her the
thousand things that choked his heart&mdash;he would have kissed
her soft hands and gazed into her shy, adorable eyes.&nbsp; Yes,
he would have kissed her eyes too.&nbsp; No doubt it would rather
have taken the mother&rsquo;s breath away.&nbsp; Probably Rosie
had never given him another thought since he left her on the
doorstep.&nbsp; That was the funny part of it.&nbsp; He laughed
at himself, and the sound of his laugh must somehow have
penetrated the hall, for the black and tan terrier barked
shrilly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Really, I&rsquo;m off my head, you
know,&rdquo; he said to himself, and wandered off again into the
wet streets, walking, until the small hours, those unimaginable
slums in which his labours of the last fortnight had lain.&nbsp;
&ldquo;God . . . it&rsquo;s ridiculous!&rdquo; he thought,
&ldquo;but a man can&rsquo;t help falling in love.&rdquo;&nbsp;
It seemed to him that the phantom of Dorothy Powys regarded him
seriously.</p>
<h4>II</h4>
<p>Next afternoon he presented himself at Prince Albert&rsquo;s
Place.&nbsp; A landlady who might well have been Mrs.
Meadows&rsquo;s sister took in his card, and after a little buzz
of conversation that might have been explained in a dozen
sinister ways, he was admitted to the little room, whose lighted
windows he had surveyed the night before.&nbsp; Rosie came
forward to meet him.&nbsp; Once again, trembling, he took her <a
name="page495"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 495</span>hand.&nbsp;
He even fancied&mdash;divine flattery!&mdash;that she
blushed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;This is my friend Dr. Ingleby, mother,&rdquo; she
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very pleased to meet you, I&rsquo;m sure,&rdquo; said
Mrs. Beaucaire.&nbsp; &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you come and sit over
here?&rdquo;</p>
<p>In the shadow of Mrs. Beaucaire Edwin took his seat.&nbsp; She
was a large woman with a husky voice and a big, dissipated face
that had once been handsome.&nbsp; If she had any place in the
scheme of things it was surely as a foil to the fragile grace of
her daughter.&nbsp; Rosie, with an occasional sideways glance,
was busy talking to a little man with a blue shaven chin and an
immense mobile mouth, who looked like a bookie.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I suppose you know Mr. Flood?&rdquo; said Mrs.
Beaucaire.</p>
<p>Edwin confessed that he did not.</p>
<p>&ldquo;<i>The</i> Mr. Flood, you know.&nbsp; Bertie, this is
Mr. Ingleby. . . . I beg your pardon, <i>Dr.</i> Ingleby,&rdquo;
and the great comedian shook hands with Edwin and hoped he was
well.</p>
<p>The atmosphere of the lodgings was very easy and
familiar.&nbsp; Bertie Flood, the Mirth-maker of Three
Continents, as the newspapers described him, devoted himself in
an easy paternal manner to Rosie.&nbsp; It became apparent to
Edwin, overshadowed by the bulk and impressiveness of Mrs.
Beaucaire, that whenever Mr. Flood could make an opportunity of
handling Rosie, he did so, and also that Rosie did not in any way
resent the process.&nbsp; It even seemed to him that she invited
Mr. Flood&rsquo;s attentions.</p>
<p><a name="page496"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
496</span>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re very unconventional people, you
know, Dr. Ingleby&mdash;quite Bohemian,&rdquo; said Mrs.
Beaucaire in a thick voice.</p>
<p>Edwin agreed that the relation was delightful.&nbsp; It was
only by an effort of concentration that he could hear what the
mother was saying.&nbsp; All the time his eyes were on Rosie, so
divinely fragile in her white muslin blouse.&nbsp; He shuddered
when Bertie Flood touched her.&nbsp; Nothing but the delightful
innocence of the girl could have induced her to suffer the
presence of this satyr.&nbsp; And yet it seemed to him that she
was doing all that she could to please him. . . .</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes, my poor husband: the vicar I always call
him&mdash;habit, you know&mdash;had a small parish in the North
of England.&nbsp; I have a son in the church too.&nbsp; Both he
and Rosie really take after the father.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; Exactly,&rdquo; said Edwin.&nbsp; In
that moment Rosie had smiled at him, and the smile was
enough.&nbsp; God, what a woman!</p>
<p>&ldquo;The vicar came from a very old family.&nbsp; In the
North it is recognised, but in a place like North Bromwich it is
very difficult for us to meet the right sort of people.&nbsp; I
have to be very careful for Rosie&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; The child
is so trusting.&nbsp; I was so glad, you know, when she told me
that she had met you at Miss Latham&rsquo;s.&nbsp; One feels so
safe with a doctor.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be able to look after her
a bit . . . see that she don&rsquo;t get too tired.&nbsp;
Pantomime is very tiring, you know.&nbsp; I myself suffer agonies
from indigestion.&nbsp; What with that and my headaches,
I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;m a poor companion for her.&nbsp; As I
say, <a name="page497"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
497</span>both the children take after the dear vicar.&nbsp;
Rosie isn&rsquo;t a bit like me.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Edwin, still dazed by the memory of her
smile; but, as he spoke, his eyes met those of Mrs. Beaucaire,
and he saw to his amazement that they were really the eyes of
Rosie, that her discoloured nose had once been of the same shape
as her daughter&rsquo;s, that the sagging, sensual mouth was in
fact a degraded version of Rosie&rsquo;s too.&nbsp; It was a
revelation, blasphemous but prophetic.&nbsp; He would not
consider it.&nbsp; He dared not look at her.</p>
<p>A moment later Bertie Flood left them.&nbsp; Tea wasn&rsquo;t
much in his line, he said, and his complexion confirmed the
assertion.&nbsp; Mrs. Beaucaire saw him to the door.&nbsp; Edwin
and Rosie were alone.</p>
<p>It was a wonderful minute.&nbsp; He felt that she could never
seem more beautiful, more delicate, more exquisite than at this
moment standing in her pale loveliness against the grimy
lodging-house wallpaper, with her hands clasped before her.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I had to come,&rdquo; he said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I had been expecting you.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m awfully glad
you found time.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Found time!&nbsp; . . .&nbsp; He wanted to tell her of his
strange adventure of the night before: how he had stood in the
dripping rain beneath her window, hungry for the sight of her,
unsatisfied.&nbsp; She stood as though she would be glad to
listen; but there was no time.&nbsp; Mrs. Beaucaire, after a
noisy and pointed demonstration in the hall, re-entered.&nbsp; It
seemed that there was nothing left for him but to take his
departure.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Surely you&rsquo;re not going so soon?&rdquo; she
said.</p>
<p><a name="page498"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 498</span>And
he stayed.&nbsp; It was all delightfully intimate and
domestic.&nbsp; These people seemed to possess the rare faculty
of putting a visitor as shy as Edwin at his ease.&nbsp; Mrs.
Beaucaire did most of the talking, enlarging on Rosie&rsquo;s
devotion to the parson brother, regretting that circumstance, and
possibly the unreasonable prejudice of country people against
theatrical connections, had deprived him of the family living:
and Rosie listened quietly, more compelling in her demure
silences than Mrs. Beaucaire at her most impressive.</p>
<p>Once or twice in the afternoon that lady tactfully left them,
returning, each time with a renewed vigour and a scent that
suggested the combination of eau-de-cologne and brandy.&nbsp;
These solitary moments were very precious to Edwin.&nbsp; Neither
of them spoke more than a few words, but the air between them
seemed charged with emotion.&nbsp; It was six o&rsquo;clock when
he left Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t forget us, will you?&rdquo; said Mrs.
Beaucaire with enthusiasm.&nbsp; &ldquo;It will be so nice for
Rosie to have some one to take her to rehearsal.&nbsp; I
don&rsquo;t like her mixing with the boys in the company.&nbsp;
It isn&rsquo;t the thing.&nbsp; And we don&rsquo;t happen to have
any really nice friends in the Midlands.&nbsp; In the North it
would have been quite different.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A delirious week slipped by.&nbsp; In spite of every
resolution Edwin had found it impossible to work.&nbsp; His new
lodging was not inspiring; but this was only one of the excuses
that he invented to salve his conscience.&nbsp; He knew the real
reason for this divine, unreasonable restlessness.&nbsp; Even if
it were to wreck his chances in the final examination it <a
name="page499"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 499</span>could not
be avoided, and there was no reason why it should be
excused.&nbsp; He knew that he was in love, and before this
unquestionable miracle he abased himself.</p>
<p>Mrs. Beaucaire, now satisfied that she could indulge a
&ldquo;headache&rdquo; and take to her bed as often as she chose,
did not question his presence at Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place: she
was even ready on occasion to treat it with a mild
facetiousness.&nbsp; Rosie, who lapped up adoration as naturally
as a kitten takes to milk, treated it as a matter of
course.&nbsp; Edwin rather wished that she wouldn&rsquo;t take as
a matter of course the most wonderful thing in the world.&nbsp;
There was a passivity in her acquiescence that filled him with a
fear that she was used to this sort of thing or even a little
bored by it.&nbsp; She mopped up his devotions with an ease that
would have been disconcerting if he had not always been bemused
by her beauty.&nbsp; Surely it was enough that she should be
beautiful!</p>
<p>In the morning&mdash;Mrs. Beaucaire always had a headache of
another kind next day&mdash;Edwin would escort Rosie to her
rehearsal at the theatre.&nbsp; He became familiar with the
frowsty box in which the lame stage-doorkeeper sat like an
obscene spider guarding the baize-covered board on which the
company&rsquo;s letters were kept.&nbsp; The man came to know him
and would pass him in through the swinging doors with a
peculiarly evil leer.&nbsp; Sometimes, at the stage door they
would become involved in a mass of patchouli-scented chorus, and
Edwin would thrill at the dignity and refinement with which <a
name="page500"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 500</span>Rosie, in
her white fox furs, would slip through this vulgar tumult.</p>
<p>So to the stage with its vast cobwebbed walls, its huge echoes
and the mysterious darkness of the flies, where looped ropes and
grimy festoons of forgotten scenery hung still as seaweed in a
deep sea.&nbsp; There, in the sour and characteristic odour of an
empty stage, Edwin would wait for her in a little alcove of the
whitewashed wall in which iron cleats were piled, and the
unmeaning murmur of the rehearsal would come to him mingled with
the shrill voice of the producer, who ended every sentence with
the words &ldquo;my dear,&rdquo; or &ldquo;old boy,&rdquo; and
the noise of the carpenter hammering wood in the flies.&nbsp; His
original acquaintance, Miss Latham, discreetly avoided him, but
the comedian, Bertie Flood, seemed inclined to be familiar.&nbsp;
One morning he dragged Edwin off to his dressing room for a
smoke.&nbsp; He sat with his legs on either side of a chair, his
fawn-coloured bowler on the back of his head, looking more than
ever like a bookie.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, old boy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;how goes
it?&nbsp; How&rsquo;s the little Beaucaire?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s all right, as far as I know,&rdquo; said
Edwin, who was inclined to resent the description.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ma had any headaches lately?&nbsp; I know what
ma&rsquo;s headaches will end in.&nbsp; Cirrhosis of the
liver.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a doctor, aren&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; Well,
I know all about that.&nbsp; Had it myself.&nbsp; Just realised
in time that it didn&rsquo;t pay.&nbsp; Now I never touch
anything but gin.&nbsp; Do you want a word of advice?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Edwin thanked him.</p>
<p><a name="page501"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
501</span>&ldquo;May seem funny from a chap that gets two hundred
a week for making a damn fool of himself.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Edwin politely.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, if you&rsquo;ll take my advice, you&rsquo;ll go
easy in that direction.&nbsp; Treat it as a business
proposition.&nbsp; Ma&rsquo;s a bad old woman . . . only
don&rsquo;t tell her I said so.&nbsp; You see I&rsquo;m a friend
of the family.&nbsp; Dear little girl, Rosie, too.&nbsp;
<i>Verbus Satienti</i>&mdash;I always let &rsquo;em think I was
at Oxford&mdash;Good for business.&rdquo;</p>
<p>It was rather disturbing; for though it was no news to Edwin
that Mrs. Beaucaire&rsquo;s headaches were euphemistic, the fact
had done no more than contribute to the ideal qualities with
which he had invested her daughter.&nbsp; There was something
romantic as well as pitiful in the idea of Rosie&rsquo;s
contrasting innocence: the rose that has its roots in foulness is
not less a rose.&nbsp; It had even seemed to him that the
complete collapse of Mrs. Beaucaire might throw Rosie into his
arms: a situation that would be full of romantic and tender
possibilities; and the girl&rsquo;s inimitably virginal air was
enough to convince him that Bertie Flood&rsquo;s other
suggestions were no more than the natural products of a mind
degraded by the atmosphere of the music-hall.&nbsp; He was
convinced too that he had no cause for jealousy.&nbsp; Ever since
he had first visited her, Rosie had never spent more than a few
hours of daylight out of his sight.</p>
<p>On the last day of the week before the examination his
confidence suffered something of a shock.&nbsp; It was a raw
winter morning, but he had set his heart on taking her into his
own hill-country, and she, with her usual sweet submission, but
without <a name="page502"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
502</span>a hint of enthusiasm, had consented.&nbsp; He had
planned to avoid the Halesby side of the range and to approach it
from the southern escarpment.&nbsp; Early in the morning he paid
a visit to Parkinson&rsquo;s, the florist&rsquo;s, in the Arcade,
where he bought a bunch of pale, exotic roses: white roses, that
should match her own sweetness and fragility.&nbsp; Once she had
expressed a general liking for flowers, and since then it had
been his delight to give them to her.&nbsp; She mopped up his
flowers and his passion with the same dreamy passivity.</p>
<p>From the corner of the Place he saw a weedy, black-coated
figure in front of Number Ten; and as he approached, the figure
entered and the door closed behind him.&nbsp; Edwin wondered
vaguely if it might be the parson brother.&nbsp; The landlady
opened the door in a flurry.&nbsp; It almost seemed as if she
wanted to conceal something.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think Miss Beaucaire can see you for a
bit,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you call later in
the morning?&rdquo;</p>
<p>He told her that he would wait, as they had an appointment,
and a train to catch.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Then will you kindly wait in my room.&nbsp; You
mustn&rsquo;t take any notice of the state it&rsquo;s in,&rdquo;
she said, still on the defensive.</p>
<p>The state of the landlady&rsquo;s room was not
inspiriting.&nbsp; On a dirty table cloth lay the remains of last
night&rsquo;s supper.&nbsp; On the window sill stood a chevaux de
frise of empty brandy bottles that Edwin couldn&rsquo;t help
associating with Mrs. Beaucaire.&nbsp; The arm-chairs, covered
with dirty chintz overalls that suggested a layer of more ancient
dirt beneath, <a name="page503"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
503</span>were not inviting.&nbsp; He preferred to stand.&nbsp;
The house was as quiet and secretive as usual; but from the next
room he heard an irritating rumour of voices.&nbsp; One of the
voices, he could have sworn, was Rosie&rsquo;s.&nbsp; A little
later he heard a laugh, and the suspicion became a disquieting
certainty, for the laugh was one that he knew well&mdash;with a
difference.&nbsp; It was as if Mrs. Beaucaire had laughed with
Rosie&rsquo;s voice.&nbsp; He found it difficult to restrain
himself from bursting into the room and settling the matter once
and for all.&nbsp; Again the laugh&mdash;and then a long
silence.&nbsp; He heard steps in the passage, a whispered
conversation with the landlady, and then Rosie came in to him,
flushed, and with her fair hair disordered.&nbsp; He could not
speak.&nbsp; He only gave her the roses.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Thank you, Eddie,&rdquo; she said, scarcely noticing
them.&nbsp; Her lips were parted and her eyes shone with
excitement.&nbsp; She had never seemed to him more beautiful, but
there was something frightening in her beauty.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Whatever is the matter with you?&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Why do you look so serious?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who was your visitor?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s it, is it?&nbsp; You silly boy!&nbsp;
You surely don&rsquo;t mean to say you&rsquo;re
jealous?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Please tell me&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was only a priest.&nbsp; I had to make my
confession.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;A priest?&nbsp; I thought your people belonged to the
Church of England.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t prevent me from being a
Catholic.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s much better for professional girls to
be <a name="page504"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
504</span>Catholics.&nbsp; They look after you when you&rsquo;re
on the road.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He could not say any more about it.&nbsp; It seemed to him
that her eyes were anxious as though she were not quite sure how
much he had heard.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You believe me, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;&nbsp; She spoke
in a frightened whisper.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course I do.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve just time for our
train.&nbsp; You are coming, aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>She said: &ldquo;Of course I am,&rdquo; and ran upstairs
singing to put her hat on.</p>
<p>The roses lay neglected on the sideboard where she had placed
them.&nbsp; In five minutes she returned, thoroughly dressed for
her new role of country girl with brogued shoes and a short skirt
of Harris tweed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m ready,&rdquo; she said gaily.</p>
<p>It was a wonderful day.&nbsp; They walked together under dull
skies that made the berries in the hedgerows and the waning fires
of autumn glow more brightly, and even ministered to the
girl&rsquo;s own beauty.&nbsp; The cool air and the walking made
her cheeks glow with a colour that was natural and therefore
unusual.&nbsp; Edwin was so entranced with her companionship that
he forgot his anxiousness of the morning; so lost in the amazing
beauty of her hazel eyes and her cheek&rsquo;s soft contour that
he did not notice that she was limping.&nbsp; Halfway to the
summit of the hills she stopped, gave a little sigh, and sat down
on the bank of a hedge.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m awfully sorry, Eddie.&nbsp; My foot
hurts.&nbsp; I think this shoe&rsquo;s too tight.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;They look simply splendid.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page505"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
505</span>&ldquo;I know.&nbsp; I only bought them
yesterday&mdash;just specially for to-day.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;But it&rsquo;s ridiculous to go for a long walk in new
shoes!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Do you mind if I take them off for a minute?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Of course not.&nbsp; Let me undo the laces.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He knelt at her feet.&nbsp; It was a wonderful and thrilling
experience to loosen the laces, to feel her small feet in their
smooth silk stockings.&nbsp; His hands trembled.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t touch my feet.&nbsp;
I&rsquo;m awfully sorry: it&rsquo;s one of the things I
can&rsquo;t bear.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t mind, do you?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;You mustn&rsquo;t blame me.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re so
beautiful.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She smiled.&nbsp; Her modesty delighted him.</p>
<p>Sitting there together, so miraculously alone, he began to
talk about his future.&nbsp; &ldquo;I shan&rsquo;t see you for a
whole week.&nbsp; It will be unbearable.&nbsp; But when the exam.
is over and I&rsquo;m qualified it will be such a relief.&nbsp; I
shall feel able to say the things that I want to say to
you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>For a long time she was silent.&nbsp; Then she said:
&ldquo;What are you expecting to do?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think I shall go in for one of the services.&nbsp;
What do you think of the Indian Medical?&nbsp; It would be
wonderful to see India.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve always thought that I
should like to know something of the world.&nbsp; I think
it&rsquo;s a good life.&nbsp; Women generally love it.&nbsp; What
do you think about it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I should think it would be rather nice.&nbsp; But
wouldn&rsquo;t it be awfully hot?&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve known one or
two boys in the Indian Army.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s lots of dancing
and that sort of thing, isn&rsquo;t there?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page506"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 506</span>He
laughed.&nbsp; Dancing wasn&rsquo;t his strong point, as
Professor Beagle could have told her, and in any case India
didn&rsquo;t mean dancing to him.&nbsp; She did not seem at all
anxious to pursue the subject.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think we could walk back to the hotel now,&rdquo; she
said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m simply starving.&rdquo;&nbsp; They
walked down the hill together, almost in silence.&nbsp; When they
reached the hotel, she disappeared in the company of the barmaid,
leaving Edwin to wait for her in the coffee-room.&nbsp; He almost
resented her absence.&nbsp; He felt that he couldn&rsquo;t spare
her for a moment.&nbsp; Waiting at the table he picked up a
week-old copy of the <i>North Bromwich Courier</i>.&nbsp; Gazing
idly at the front page, he caught sight of his own name.&nbsp; It
was the announcement of a wedding.</p>
<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">Ingleby</span>: <span
class="smcap">Fellows</span>. On the tenth of December, at the
Parish Church, Halesby, John Ingleby to Julia, elder daughter of
the late Joseph Fellows, of Mawne, Staffs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He was overwhelmed with a sudden indescribable emotion that
was neither jealousy, anger, nor shame, but curiously near to all
three.&nbsp; He sat bewildered, with the paper in front of
him.&nbsp; Rosie returned to find him blankly staring.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Why, what&rsquo;s the matter with you?&nbsp; You look
as if you&rsquo;d seen a ghost.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; I think I have.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
nothing, really.&nbsp; Nothing at all.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He drank more than he need have done of a villainous wine that
was labelled <i>Ch&acirc;teau Margaux</i>, but had probably been
pressed on the hot hill-sides of Oran.&nbsp; In the train, on the
way home, he felt <a name="page507"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
507</span>flushed and sleepy, but, all the time, divinely
conscious of the warmth and softness of Rosie sitting beside
him.&nbsp; They were alone in the first-class carriage.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sleepy too,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; He drew her
gently to his side, and she rested, content, with her head on his
shoulder.&nbsp; In the wonder of this he forgot the newspaper and
its staggering contents.&nbsp; As they neared North Bromwich she
stood up in front of the mirror to arrange her hair, and Edwin,
pulling himself together, saw that his blue coat was floured with
a fine bloom of powder.</p>
<p>She still found it difficult to walk, and so they drove in a
hansom to Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place, very grimy and sinister in
the dusk.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t ring,&rdquo; she said, taking out a
latchkey and showing him into the narrow hall.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s be very quiet, so as not to disturb
mother.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ll come in,&rdquo; he
said.&nbsp; He knew that he must make an end somewhere.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Not even to be thanked?&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve enjoyed myself
most awfully.&rdquo;</p>
<p>She stood before him in the gloom of the hall as though she
were waiting for something.&nbsp; It felt as if the dark space
between them must break into flame.&nbsp; Their lips met.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God! . . . how wonderful you are!&rdquo; he
said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Next week,&rdquo; she whispered.</p>
<h4>III</h4>
<p>Edwin had arranged to spend the following day with the Boyces
at their house in Alvaston.&nbsp; He found it difficult to
contain himself, for the delicious <a name="page508"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 508</span>memory of their parting the night
before swamped his efforts at conversation with the persistency
of waves that follow one another in a rising tide.&nbsp; It
seemed to him impossible that his state should not be evident to
the whole household, and particularly to Matthew, who knew him so
well.</p>
<p>In the afternoon, when they sat smoking together in
Boyce&rsquo;s study at the top of the house, he felt that he was
on the brink of a confession.&nbsp; The only thing that
restrained him from it was the memory of the epigram and of his
friend&rsquo;s translation.&nbsp; He felt in his bones that Boyce
would not be sympathetic and though his infatuation suggested
that he wouldn&rsquo;t much care whether Boyce were sympathetic,
or suspicious, an intuitive dread of suspicion and its possible
effects on his own reason made him hold his tongue.&nbsp; It was
in the nature of Boyce, who didn&rsquo;t happen, for the moment,
to be in love, to be critical, to sweep away Rosie&rsquo;s
perfections in a generalisation: and the appeal of a
generalisation to the mind of youth is so strong that Edwin was
afraid to hear it.&nbsp; Somewhere in his submerged reason he
admitted that Boyce&rsquo;s judgment on the matter would probably
be sound, and reason was the last tribunal in the world before
which he wished this exceptional case to be presented.&nbsp; An
unsatisfactory day.&nbsp; For the first time in their lives, the
relations of the two friends were indefinitely strained.</p>
<p>He left Alvaston early in the evening.&nbsp; On his way to his
lodging he passed the gloomy entrance to Prince Albert&rsquo;s
Place.&nbsp; It would have been easy, so easy, to call at Number
Ten, but he had <a name="page509"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
509</span>determined, once and for all, that the examination week
should be free from distractions, and pride in his own strength
of mind held him to his course, though he realised, almost
gladly, that even if he were master of his feet he could not
control his thoughts.&nbsp; He wondered if he would dream of her
. . .</p>
<p>Next day the rigours of the final examination overtook
him.&nbsp; This was the supreme ordeal in which every moment of
his professional life from the day when he first entered the
dissecting room to the night of the last midwifery case, would
stand the test of scrutiny.&nbsp; He was not exactly afraid of
it.&nbsp; He knew that his knowledge and technical skill were at
least above the average of his year, and felt that with ordinary
luck he would be among the first four of a field of twelve.&nbsp;
The year was not one of exceptional brilliance, and comparisons
were therefore in his favour.</p>
<p>On the first day, in the <i>viva-voce</i> examination on
surgery, he did, for one moment, lose his head, but when once he
had pulled himself together and accustomed himself to the
conditions of the test, he settled down into a state of
fatalistic equanimity, taking the rough with the smooth and
deciding that, on the whole, he was not likely to make a hopeless
fool of himself.</p>
<p>On the first night he went to bed early, but on the second,
feeling that his mind would be clearer for some diversion, he
went to a music-hall with W.G. and his wife.&nbsp; Drinking beer
in the bar with his friend, he suddenly heard his name called,
and felt a tap on his shoulder.&nbsp; He turned to find himself
in front of a face that was curiously familiar, <a
name="page510"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 510</span>and in a
moment found that he was shaking hands with Widdup, a small and
rather chastened Widdup, who spoke to him with the slow, precise
voice that he had known at St. Luke&rsquo;s.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I thought it was you, Ingleby,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;I wondered if I should run across you.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Avoiding a hair-raising display on the slack wire, they stood
talking.&nbsp; Widdup, it appeared, had been destined for an
engineering career in North Bromwich, when his mathematical
genius had won him a scholarship at Cambridge.</p>
<p>&ldquo;A pity, in a way, for I should have seen more of
you.&nbsp; I suppose that sort of thing always happens to school
friendships.&rdquo;&nbsp; At present he was visiting a firm of
iron-founders on business.&nbsp; They talked together of old
times: of the day when Edwin, greatly daring, had seen the
Birches run: of the languid Selby, now head-master of a small
public-school in Norfolk, and of old fat Leeming.&nbsp; Between
the conscious effort of remembering St. Luke&rsquo;s and the
unbidden image of Rosie, Edwin&rsquo;s head was in a whirl.</p>
<p>&ldquo;And old Griffin,&rdquo; said Widdup.&nbsp;
&ldquo;That&rsquo;s another funny thing.&nbsp; I ran slap into
him in the lounge of the Grand Midland to-night.&nbsp; Up to the
same old games, you know.&nbsp; Yes . . . he had a girl with
him.&nbsp; Rather an attractive little piece: something to do
with the pantomime, he told me.&nbsp; What was her name?&nbsp;
The old brute introduced me, too!&nbsp; Yes . . . I think
I&rsquo;ve got it.&nbsp; Beaucaire . . . Rosie Beaucaire.&nbsp;
Rather a rosy prospect for old Griff, I should imagine.&nbsp;
Why, what the devil&rsquo;s the matter with you?&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page511"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
511</span>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m all right, thanks,&rdquo; said
Edwin.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s this exam., you know.&nbsp;
Let&rsquo;s have another drink.&rdquo;&nbsp; He called for whisky
and soda.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Chin-chin,&rdquo; said Widdup.</p>
<p>Edwin polished off a couple of drinks and then told Widdup
that he must rejoin his friend, leaving him staggered at his
abrupt departure.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t rejoin W.G.&nbsp; He
walked straight out of the theatre and off up the Halesby
Road.&nbsp; He had determined to go straight to Rosie&rsquo;s
lodgings and thrash the matter out; but by the time he reached
Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place he had thought better of it.</p>
<p>It was the most natural thing in the world, he reflected, that
Griffin should know the Beaucaires, for Griffin was constantly in
touch with theatrical people.&nbsp; It was even natural that
Griffin, knowing her, should take Rosie to the Grand
Midland.&nbsp; It was the obvious thing to do if you had money to
spend, as Griffin had.&nbsp; It would be just like the irony of
fate, he reflected, if Griffin should afflict him with
unhappiness in this case as he had done in so many others.&nbsp;
He remembered the bitter sufferings of those early days at St.
Luke&rsquo;s that Widdup had so clearly recalled.&nbsp; He
remembered Dorothy Powys and the dance at Mawne: his suspicions,
his agonised resentment.&nbsp; Even more darkly there came to him
the memory of a voice in Dr. Harris&rsquo;s surgery, a
conviction, never yet established, that Griffin had no right to
know any woman.&nbsp; This reflection, he knew, implied a doubt
of Rosie&rsquo;s innocence: an imputation that he could not
possibly admit.&nbsp; And yet . . . and yet . . .&nbsp; He
remembered the warning that Bertie Flood had given him in his
dressing <a name="page512"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
512</span>room.&nbsp; He remembered the visitor in the black coat
four days before.&nbsp; His mind was in hell.</p>
<p>In this purgatory of doubt and horror, he lived for the rest
of the week.&nbsp; In the daytime the progress of the examination
engrossed him, but at night he always found himself hanging about
the darkness of Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place, hoping against hope,
that his suspicions were unfounded, not daring to put them to the
test, lest they should be confirmed.</p>
<p>On Friday night, when the last of his medical ordeals was
over, he went straight to Number Ten.&nbsp; It was a wonderful
moment.&nbsp; Now, with a clear conscience he might see her
again; now, once more, he could know the ecstasy of her kisses
and forget the ungenerous nightmare in which he had lived through
the later stages of the exam.&nbsp; He approached the dirty
doorway with his heart beating wildly.&nbsp; At first his ring
was unanswered, but a little later the landlady came to the door
with a red, suspicious face, opening it jealously, as though she
feared to let him in.</p>
<p>He inquired for Miss Beaucaire.&nbsp; Miss Beaucaire was
out.&nbsp; Did the woman know when she was expected to
return?&nbsp; She hadn&rsquo;t the least idea.&nbsp; Was Mrs.
Beaucaire in, then?&nbsp; Mrs. Beaucaire was in, but
invisible.&nbsp; Mrs. Beaucaire had one of her headaches.&nbsp;
Edwin suggested that he should wait in their room.&nbsp;
Impossible.&nbsp; Mrs. Beaucaire was lying down there.&nbsp; He
hung upon the doorstep as if he were waiting at the gates of
paradise.&nbsp; At last the landlady took it upon herself to
close the door.</p>
<p><a name="page513"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 513</span>She
must have thought he was mad.&nbsp; Perhaps he was mad. . . .</p>
<p>For an hour or more he waited in the rain.&nbsp; It occurred
to him that at least the woman was speaking the truth, for there
was no light in either of the front rooms.&nbsp; The Grand
Midland. . . .&nbsp; It was there that Widdup had seen
them.&nbsp; He walked to Sackville Row at a great pace and
straight into the hotel, where waiters and elderly commercial
gentlemen stared at his wet clothes and his haggard face.&nbsp;
He went into each of the dining-rooms and down the stairs to the
Turkish lounge.&nbsp; Nowhere was Rosie or Griffin to be
seen.&nbsp; A search of this kind was ridiculous, but every
moment that the agony was extended made him more desperately
anxious.</p>
<p>He walked back in the drizzle to Prince Albert&rsquo;s Place
and paced the pavement under the black walls of the
warehouses.&nbsp; The road was deserted.&nbsp; There was no sound
in it at all but the dripping of water from some neglected
spout.&nbsp; He walked up and down in the shadow, and as he
walked he became conscious of something like a personality in the
faces of the long row of lodging-houses, something sinister, as
though their shuttered windows concealed a wealth of obscene
experience like the eyes of ancient street-walkers.&nbsp; The
souls of those squat Victorian houses were languidly interested
in him.&nbsp; Another victim. . . .&nbsp; That was what he must
seem to them.&nbsp; And still the windows of Number Ten were
unlighted.</p>
<p>He heard the clock in the Art Gallery chime eleven: a
leisurely, placid chime muffled by gusty rain.&nbsp; Perhaps the
woman had lied to him.&nbsp; <a name="page514"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 514</span>Perhaps, at that very moment Rosie
was sleeping peacefully in the unlighted upper story.&nbsp; He
was overwrought with the strain of the examination on the top of
this devastating passion.&nbsp; He had better go home.</p>
<p>He turned to go, and at that very moment he saw two figures
approaching from the Halesby Road.&nbsp; The street lamp, at the
corner, threw their shadows on the shining pavement.&nbsp; One of
them was Rosie&mdash;he would have known her anywhere&mdash;and
the other, beyond doubt, was Griffin.&nbsp; He was seized with
the same blind passion that had swept over him in the big
schoolroom at St. Luke&rsquo;s ten years before, an impulse to
murder that he could only control by digging his finger nails
into his hands.</p>
<p>He stood there trembling in the shadow of the blank wall,
huddling close to it for support and for protection.&nbsp; They
passed him, and he heard Rosie&rsquo;s quiet laugh.&nbsp; Her
laugh was one of the things about her that he had loved
most.&nbsp; They stopped at the door, and Rosie took out her
latchkey.&nbsp; It was almost a repetition of the scene in which
he had shared a week before.&nbsp; Now, perhaps, she would kiss
him.&nbsp; He felt that if he saw her kissing Griffin he could
have killed them both.&nbsp; Murderer&rsquo;s Cross Road. . .
.&nbsp; A hundred thoughts came swirling through his brain.&nbsp;
They entered, and closed the door behind them.&nbsp; Griffin: the
old Griffin: the human beast of St. Luke&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The new
Griffin: the gross North Bromwich womaniser: the Griffin of Dr.
Harris&rsquo;s surgery. . . .&nbsp; Edwin saw himself upon the
edge of a ghastly, unthinkable <a name="page515"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 515</span>tragedy.&nbsp; He must prevent
it.&nbsp; At all costs.&nbsp; At the cost of life if needs
be.</p>
<p>He crept quickly across the road.&nbsp; The houses watched
him.&nbsp; The window of the lower room bloomed suddenly with a
yellow light.&nbsp; He stood with his hands clutching the
window-sill, listening.&nbsp; Once again he heard Rosie&rsquo;s
laugh, and a rumour of deeper speech that he knew to be the voice
of Griffin.&nbsp; The shadow of Griffin&rsquo;s shoulders swept
the window, swelling gigantically as it passed.&nbsp; The light
was turned down, but not extinguished.&nbsp; Rosie&rsquo;s laugh
again.&nbsp; He could have killed her for that laugh, for it
mocked him.&nbsp; The faint shadow of the man&rsquo;s shoulders
retreated.&nbsp; He guessed that they were standing at the
door.&nbsp; The door of the room closed softly.&nbsp; Now there
was no sound except the heavy breathing that one hears in the
neighbourhood of a pigsty at night.&nbsp; Was Griffin still
there?</p>
<p>Another beam of light fell on the shining street.&nbsp; Some
one had lighted the gas in the room upstairs.&nbsp; Was Griffin
still below?&nbsp; Panic seized him.&nbsp; He must know.&nbsp; At
all costs he must know.&nbsp; Dr. Harris&rsquo;s surgery. . .
.&nbsp; If he had to break in the front door he must know.&nbsp;
As he reached it he tripped over an iron boot-scraper.&nbsp; The
step barked his shin.&nbsp; Of course the door was locked,
but&mdash;wonder of wonders&mdash;Rosie had left the latchkey
outside.&nbsp; He opened the door softly and went on tip-toe into
the hall.&nbsp; In the room on the right he still heard the
grunting noise.&nbsp; Thank God, Griffin was still there!&nbsp;
At least he could tell him that he knew!</p>
<p>He opened the door.&nbsp; In the half-light he could <a
name="page516"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 516</span>see that
the room was empty except for Mrs. Beaucaire, who lay stretched
on the sofa, snoring heavily with her vile mouth open.&nbsp; On
the table stood an empty brandy bottle.&nbsp; The place stank of
brandy.</p>
<p>Now he knew the worst.&nbsp; He stumbled upstairs in the dark
and knocked frantically at the door of the front bedroom.&nbsp;
Rosie answered: &ldquo;Who is it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s I.&nbsp; For God&rsquo;s sake, let me
in.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Who the devil is it?&rdquo; said the voice of Dr.
Harris&rsquo;s consulting-room.</p>
<p>Rosie answered him in excited whispers.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t come in, Eddie,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;How on earth did you get into the house?&nbsp; Please go
away.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t see you.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t,
really.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m coming in, I tell you.&nbsp; If you
don&rsquo;t open the door, I&rsquo;ll smash it.&nbsp; I mean what
I say.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Ingleby&mdash;?&rdquo; the voice muttered.&nbsp;
&ldquo;What the devil has Ingleby to do with you?&nbsp; All
right.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll go.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll chuck the fellow
downstairs.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t . . . please don&rsquo;t. . . .&nbsp;
Let him go quietly.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Griffin unlocked the door.&nbsp; He stood facing Edwin in his
shirt-sleeves.&nbsp; Rosie, still dressed, clutched at the
mantelpiece.&nbsp; The vein in the middle of Griffin&rsquo;s
forehead bulged with anger.&nbsp; His short neck was flushed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;What the hell&mdash;&rdquo; he began&mdash;and then
they closed.&nbsp; Edwin&rsquo;s heel ripped up the corner of the
carpet as they swayed together.&nbsp; Suddenly Griffin&rsquo;s
grip slackened.&nbsp; His face blanched, and in a moment Edwin
was letting down a sheer weight upon the bed.</p>
<p><a name="page517"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
517</span>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; Rosie screamed,
and flung herself beside him.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the
matter?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Good God! . . .&nbsp; He&rsquo;s gone.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;No . . .&nbsp; No&mdash;&rdquo; she cried.</p>
<p>Edwin tore open Griffin&rsquo;s shirt, listening for an
impulse that was not there.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s gone,&rdquo; he said, panting.&nbsp;
&ldquo;He&rsquo;s dead. . . .&nbsp; Heart. . . .&nbsp; He always
had a rocky heart.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s dead.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The awful word seemed to pull Rosie together.&nbsp; They
stared at each other blankly with wide eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you
sure?&rdquo; she whispered.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yes. . . .&nbsp; Of course&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
<p>She rose to her feet, speaking in a voice that was quite new
to him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Eddie . . . for God&rsquo;s sake, go . . . now! . . .
quickly!&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t go.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Go quickly, I tell you.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t be a damned
little fool.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t want to be mixed up in
this.&nbsp; Eddie, for God&rsquo;s sake. . . .&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
&lsquo;natural causes,&rsquo; Eddie.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He blundered down the dark stairs and out into the
street.&nbsp; He could not walk.&nbsp; He cowered under the
warehouse wall opposite, gazing, as though fascinated, at the
yellow square of window.&nbsp; The discreet Victorian houses
surveyed him as if the horror that the yellow blind concealed
were an ordinary occurrence in their dingy lives.&nbsp; They were
used to death.&nbsp; And death did not change them.&nbsp; A
rubber-tyred hansom rolled smoothly up the Halesby Road, past the
mouth of the Place.&nbsp; At the corner, under the gas-lamp,
Edwin saw the <a name="page518"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
518</span>figure of a policeman with rain shining on his
cape.&nbsp; The sight recalled him to a sense of awful
possibilities.&nbsp; For the moment he dared not move.&nbsp; He
flattened himself against the warehouse walls and did not realise
that he was standing directly under the dripping
waterspout.&nbsp; In the western sky rose the baleful glare of an
uncowled furnace.&nbsp; The policeman strolled away, and Edwin,
cautiously emerging, set off through the rain up the Halesby Road
towards the hills.&nbsp; He felt that he needed their solitude
and darkness.</p>
<h4>IV</h4>
<p>Next day, a haggard and desolate figure, he appeared in the
cloak-room of the University where the examination results were
displayed.&nbsp; In a dream he realised that he was now a
Bachelor of Medicine, but in the realisation there was none of
the joy that he had anticipated.&nbsp; He stood before the board
bewildered, until W.G. came up behind him and wrung his hand.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You look as if you&rsquo;d been making a night of it,
my boy,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come and have some coffee at
the Dousita.&rdquo;</p>
<p>W.G. was on the top of himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was a pretty
near thing.&nbsp; The external examiner in Medicine gave me hell;
but it&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; God! . . . it&rsquo;s difficult
to believe, isn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; What are you going to
do?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; A voyage, I should
think.&rdquo;</p>
<p>He hadn&rsquo;t thought of it before.</p>
<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s not a bad idea.&nbsp; Bit of a rest cure,
eh?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the only disadvantage, I don&rsquo;t mind
telling <a name="page519"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
519</span>you, of being married.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t leave the
missus.&rdquo;</p>
<p>W.G. babbled on happily.&nbsp; &ldquo;Did you see the evening
paper?&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I see that fellow
Griffin&rsquo;s done for.&nbsp; I always said he&rsquo;d come to
a nasty, sticky end.&nbsp; Some woman or other. . . .&nbsp; I
remember your saying that he couldn&rsquo;t play footer because
of his heart.&nbsp; Ah, well . . . that&rsquo;s one swine the
less, poor devil!&rdquo;</p>
<p>When W.G. left him, Edwin called for a timetable and looked
out the trains to Liverpool.&nbsp; There was one that started in
half an hour.&nbsp; He caught it, and next morning presented
himself at a shipping office in Water Street.</p>
<p>The medical superintendent received him.</p>
<p>&ldquo;You want a ship?&nbsp; Well, you know, you look very
young.&nbsp; When were you qualified?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yesterday,&rdquo; Edwin confessed.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Very young.&nbsp; Still, you won&rsquo;t be
stale.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t <i>drink</i>, by any
chance?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m practically a total abstainer.&rdquo;&nbsp;
The man scrutinised Edwin&rsquo;s haggard eyes.</p>
<p>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m. . . .&nbsp; Well, as it happens, one of our
men has failed us.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll give you a ship, the
<i>Macao</i>, if you can sail to-morrow.&nbsp; Rather short
notice, eh?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I think I can do it.&nbsp; What about
equipment?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Oh, we don&rsquo;t go in for brass-bound uniforms on
our ships.&nbsp; Ten pounds a month and bonus.&nbsp;
What?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Where is she going to?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;China.&nbsp; You may call at Japan for coal with
luck.&nbsp; See the world, you know.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what most
of you fellows are after.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll have to go aboard
to-night.&nbsp; Birkenhead Docks.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll he there.&rdquo;</p>
<p><a name="page520"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 520</span>And
with trembling hands he signed his contract.</p>
<p>In a wintry evening he crossed the Mersey ferry.&nbsp; A salt
wind from the west boomed up the channel.&nbsp; Edwin, in the
bows, felt his face drenched with spray.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
clean,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp; &ldquo;It will make me
cleaner.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what I need.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
believe I shall ever feel anything again, until I&rsquo;m washed
clean.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m old . . . old and numb.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve
lost my sense of enjoyment.&nbsp; I wonder if it will ever come
back to me!&rdquo;</p>
<p>As he stood there in the salt breeze, some words of Traherne,
his mother&rsquo;s countryman, came into his mind:</p>
<blockquote><p>&ldquo;You shall never enjoy this world aright
till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed
with the heavens and crowned with the stars.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Perhaps they were true.&nbsp; He wondered.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN***</p>
<pre>


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