The Young Physician
by Francis Brett Young · English · Gutenberg #49331 · 782,709 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Young Physician
Author: Francis Brett Young
Release date: June 29, 2015 [eBook #49331]
Most recently updated: August 27, 2017
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49331
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN ***
This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_.
THE CRESCENT MOON
THE IRON AGE
THE DARK TOWER
DEEP SEA
UNDERGROWTH
(with E. Brett Young)
MARCHING ON TANGA
POEMS 1916–1918.
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK
* * * * *
THE
YOUNG PHYSICIAN
* * * * *
BY
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
AUTHOR OF “MARCHING ON TANGA,” ETC.
* * * * *
[Picture: E. P. Dutton logo]
* * * * *
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
881 FIFTH AVENUE
* * * * *
Copyright, 1920,
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
* * * * *
_All Rights Reserved_
* * * * *
_First printing_ _March_, 1920
_Second printing_ _March_, 1920
_Third printing_ _September_, 1920
* * * * *
Printed in the United States of America
* * * * *
TO
THOMAS BRETT YOUNG, M.D.
WITH THE LOVE AND ADMIRATION
OF HIS SON
* * * * *
CONTENTS
BOOK I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MURDERER’S CROSS 1
II. GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY 16
III. THE GREEN TREES 27
IV. MIDSUMMER 42
V. AIRS AND GRACES 57
VI. THUNDER WEATHER 69
VII. IMPURITY 86
VIII. HOMEWARDS 107
IX. THE DARK HOUSE 124
X. THRENODY 153
XI. THE THRESHOLD 184
XII. THE HILLS 211
BOOK II.
I. THE CITY OF IRON 249
II. MORTALITY BEHOLD 272
III. CARNIVAL 296
IV. SCIENCE 324
V. ROMANCE 346
VI. THE DRESSER 372
VII. THE CLERK 403
VIII. LOWER SPARKDALE 435
IX. EASY ROW 460
X. WHITE ROSES 487
BOOK I
_The green trees_, _when I saw them first through one of the gates_,
_transported and ravished me_; _their sweetness and unusual beauty
made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy_,—_they were such
strange and wonderful things_. _The skies were mine_, _and so were
the sun and moon and stars_,—_and all the world was mine_,—_and I the
only spectator and enjoyer of it_.
THOMAS TRAHERNE.
CHAPTER I
MURDERER’S CROSS
I
ABOVE 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. 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. 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. A smell of hot earth was in the air. 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. 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. He walked and ran straight upward, as though the devil
were 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.
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.
Inside it swayed seven fat women in black bodices. 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.
“Poor lamb,” said the most motherly of the seven. “Wouldn’t ’e like a
lift?”
“Gowing the hopposite way, mem,” said the guard. “One of them College
lads.”
“’Ot ’e looks!” said the lady. “Going to rine kets and dorgs, too.”
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. 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. 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. He began talking to himself:—
“Damned beast . . . great beefy beast. . . . If only the men could see
what a damned beast he is. If Layton or some one could give him what he
wants. Only no one could fight him. . . . He’s got a weak heart, and it
might kill him. I suppose that would be murder. . . .”
The word suddenly got a new significance. They called this road
Murderer’s Cross Road. High up in the grassy bank some pious person had
cut a St. Andrew’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.
The college tradition said that it was haunted. Certainly it had an ugly
sound. Murderer’s Cross Road: a name to be whispered.
“Funny . . .” said Edwin. “There’s nothing very awful about it. I could
understand a chap wanting to murder a chap. Quite easily. Only he might
be sorry about it afterwards. I wouldn’t mind murdering Griffin.”
He took a silver watch out of his pocket and laid it on the bank beside
him. 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’s cross scored in the hedge a
little farther on. Lying thus he could watch the shimmer on the bearded
wheat. He had always loved the softness of this dip in the downs. 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. 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 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. It was not really very difficult
for him to forget his tears. 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. 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. He suddenly remembered that Achaean
assembly stirred by Agamemnon’s words “as when the West wind cometh to
stir a deep cornfield with violent blast, and the ears bow down. . . .”
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. . . .
II
It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin, oddly
enough on the very first day of his life at St. Luke’s. 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’s entrance scholarship. 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. 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. 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. His head ached so violently in the sulphurous station air that
he wouldn’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—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
E. INGLEBY
115
in black lettering on the lid.
The rest of that journey he had been too prostrate and lethargic to
realise. Somewhere the shouting of a familiar word had bundled him out
of his 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’s room, where, in an atmosphere
of mellow honeydew, Mr. Selby sat at his desk, trifling with a bath-list
of the big dormitory. Ingleby sat at one end of a luxurious sofa,
feeling very sick. It seemed as though he could never escape from the
smell of tobacco. At the other end of the sofa sat another boy, perhaps
three years older than Edwin. He was tall for his age and inclined to be
fat. 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. He had a broad face, covered with
freckles, regular but undistinguished features, and eyes, rather wide
apart, of a peculiar cold and light blue. His hair was crisp and sandy;
his whole get-up a little dandiacal within the limits of black and gray.
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.
Mr. Selby looked up from his bath-list.
“Well, Griffin, and what is your pleasure?”
“Letter from father, sir.”
A letter from father would need an answer. Mr. Selby, although an expert
in the tortuous psychology of parents, was a lazy man. He sighed as he
opened it. “H’m . . . No games? You don’t look particularly ill,
Griffin.”
“Doctor said I was growing too fast, sir . . . something about my heart.”
Griffin’s manners were irreproachable.
Mr. Selby smiled.
“Very well, Griffin, very well. I will speak to the head-master about
you. And who is this miserable weed?”
There had been no break in the drawl of Mr. Selby’s voice with this
change of subject, and Edwin did not hear, or heard without
understanding. Griffin shook him by the shoulder. He lurched forward
like a creature coming out of a cellar into day light.
“Ingleby, sir,” he said.
“Ingleby . . . Oh, yes. Let me see. You won’t need to take the placing
exam. to-morrow because of your scholarship papers. You’ll be in the
lower fourth. So Griffin will look after you. Do you hear, Griffin? I
think Ingleby will be in your form. You are not overwhelmingly likely to
get a move, are you?”
Griffin murmured “No, sir.”
“Then you can conduct this Ingleby to D dormitory, Griffin.”
Griffin whispered “Come on,” 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. Down the centre of the dormitory a trestled table of
well-scoured wood held a double row of wash-hand basins and soap-dishes.
“There you are,” said Griffin, in a very off-hand way. “You’d better bag
a bed.”
“Which one is mine, please?” Edwin asked. His head was aching so
furiously that he could have lain down on the floor.
“I’ve told you, you’ve got to bag one. Don’t you hear? You’d better go
and ask that man over there. Try the next one to his.”
That man over there was a stumpy boy with the face of a hyena and a shock
of black hair, who scowled at Ingleby’s approach.
“Here, get away. You can’t come here. I don’t want any new kids near
me. Keep him to yourself, Griffin.”
Ingleby was thrown violently into Griffin’s arms, and then buffeted
backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between them. 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. 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.
“Here’s Layton,” whispered some one.
“What’s this?” he asked. “A new boy?—What’s your name?”
“Ingleby.”
“What’s the matter?”
“They won’t let me find a bed.”
“Come along down this end, then.” He moved majestically to the end of
the dormitory nearest to the door and pointed to a vacant bedstead,
“There you are,” he said. He was kindly without the least trace of
unbending. Ingleby took him for a prefect; already he had received the
canonisation of heroism. He stood and watched Edwin spread out his
nightshirt on the bed. At this moment the climax of his migraine
arrived. Edwin was sick.
Layton’s lips curled. “Dirty little skunk,” he said as he hurried away.
A slipper, cleverly aimed from the other end of the room, caught Ingleby
full on his burning cheek. The pain seemed to blind him.
And a skunk, in spite of himself, he remained, for small boys are as
persistently unintelligent as parrots in their memory for names.
Ingleby’s “skunkhood” became a tradition that he never wholly lived down
during his first years at St. Luke’s. 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. It was a thousand times
unfortunate that he should have made such a sensational débût, 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.
To begin with, he had very few of the attributes of the skunk. 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’s figure.
He was far from unintelligent—though this counts for little enough in the
schedules of precedence at school. 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—and Layton had
called him a skunk. Griffin saw to the rest, seconded by the lad with
the hyena face, who bore the illustrious name of Douglas. Strangely
enough no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped the romance in the
hyena-faced’s name. 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
“tight six” with a gym shoe, his head wedged in two stocks of Mr.
Griffin’s thighs. New boys of his own age, and smaller, seeing this
exhibition, formed a very low estimate of Ingleby. They shuddered also
at the knowledge that he had been heard to ask the difference between a
drop-kick and a punt.
This isolation, except for purposes of chastisement, weighed heavily on
Edwin. He didn’t wish to be different from others, although he felt that
his mind was somehow of a painfully foreign texture. 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. His whole
ambition was towards the normal; he tried vigorously to suppress
imagination, humour, all the inconvenient things with which he had been
cursed; to starve them, to destroy them. He became studious of the ways
of normality. Griffin and the noble Douglas were handy exemplars;
Layton, the head of the house, an unattainable ideal. Layton, indeed,
was something of a variant; but Layton, by means of his slim skull’s
capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating piety, had passed beyond
the pale of everyday endeavour. Edwin longed to be normal, and they
wouldn’t let him. He cultivated assiduously the use of the fashionable
slang; and that, of course, was easy. 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. “The Miserable Weeds,” they were called, enshrining his
favourite epithet. 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. His habit of dropping off to sleep between
fitful bursts of brilliance almost caused him to be uprooted from Mr.
Selby’s plantation of weeds. This didn’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.
And since he failed in every endeavour to attain normality, whether by
devotion to games or by those attempts which he made to prove that he was
neither “coxy” nor “pi,” 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’t hope to be like. And
so, in a little time, this dangerous humiliation turned to a sort of
pride. It pleased him to count himself their superior even when he was
most downtrodden. His form master had recently been boring the class
with a little dissertation on Marcus Aurelius. Edwin became a Stoic,
spending his days in far corners of the box-room, munching a slowly
dwindling store of biscuits. 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. For such
contingencies as this the Emperor’s system of philosophy seemed hardly
adequate.
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!—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. He was reading for a scholarship at Cambridge. 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 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. And then his own magic casements were opened.
At St. Luke’s he had discovered the trick—quite a new thing for him—of
historical dreaming. 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.
Ingleby drank deep of the period’s romance, and this heady wine coloured
his dreams. 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. The man at his left hand had been
eating garlic. Ha!—a Frenchman. One of those musketeers! . . . He
would tremble with delight. 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. 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 _ten-bell_ rang, and the rush for early school began.
He grew to love the winter terms because the darkness lasted longer.
But he did write to his mother about it. 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.
Sometimes, with the lavishness of an angel, she would put a couple of
penny stamps inside for his reply. The odd stamp would buy a stick of
chocolate or a packet of nougat at the tuck shop. And in these letters
she rose, quite unexpectedly, to the recitation of his dreams. “How
lovely it must be for you,” she wrote. “When you come home for the
holidays at Christmas we will read some of Scott’s novels
aloud—_Waverley_ and _Nigel_, and that will give you something more to
dream about.” He began to realise what he hadn’t seen before: that his
mother was really a wonderful playfellow—much better, when he came to
think of it, than any of the boys. He would have so much to explain to
her. . . . “Oh, you dear, you are lovely!” he wrote in reply.
And then one day, that sneak Douglas, fooling about in the dormitory with
Edwin’s toothbrush, happened to see the words that were faintly printed
on the ivory handle:—
INGLEBY, CHEMIST, HALESBY.
“Oho,” he said.
At breakfast, after a propitiatory but futile helping of jam from Edwin’s
pot, he broke the glad news to Griffin.
“Ingleby’s father’s a chemist, Griff.”
“Then that’s why he’s such a skunk, Duggy. Is it true, Ingleby?”
“Yes. He’s a chemist.”
“Then he isn’t a gentleman.”
“Of course he’s a gentleman.”
“Not if he’s in trade. They oughtn’t to have sent you to school here.
It’s a bally shame.”
That same afternoon Edwin was poring over a letter at his desk in Big
School. His mother always told him to keep her letters. “Some day you
may like to look at them,” she said. 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.
“Who’s that letter from? . . . Girl?” said Griffin rudely.
“A lady.”
“What!”
“My mother.”
“Christ! Your mother isn’t a lady, or she wouldn’t have married a
chemist . . . or be your mother.”
And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the form on which he had been
sitting, and lashed out at Griffin’s face. He wanted to smash the
freckled thing. He only caught the boy’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.
CHAPTER II
GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY
I
OF course he got his thrashing in return; but, in the end, he found
himself the gainer by that unthinkable outburst. The incident had been
noted, and there were those who relished the blow to Griffin’s prestige,
a blow which no recriminatory lickings could efface. Edwin assured
himself that he had that day lighted such a candle in England as should
never be put out. 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—Edwin’s blank despair—a certain
proficiency in games. Widdup disliked Griffin.
“Great beefy beast,” he said. “If they’d make him play footer and sweat
some of the fat off him he’d have been a bit quicker on you. He wasn’t
half waxy about it. He hates being laughed at. . . .”
And so, as the terms slipped by, St. Luke’s ceased to be a purgatory.
Edwin contracted certain timid friendships—as this with Widdup—and adored
a series of perfectly ordinary prefects. He shook down into his proper
place in the scheme of things, and after that nobody took much notice of
him. Even the Griffin-Douglas coalition, who never forgave, troubled him
very little. 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. 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.
The friendship with Widdup notably ripened. They were both members of
the same branch of the Natural History Society, the one that was labelled
astronomical. The subject was unpopular, for its pursuit was nocturnal
and made no exciting appeal to the hunting instinct of boys. The section
met every fortnight in the room of one of the mathematical masters. And
since they met at night, they managed to escape second Prep. 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. 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 features. 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’s
subject. These adventures were discouraged, for Mr. Heal had grown to
hate mathematics. 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. And once, when he had
come to the master’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. He read
atrociously. “How do you like this?” he said. “H’m?” He said “H’m”
with a little snarl in it.
“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’s
chair stood daintily poised in the uppermost boughs.”
Edwin thought it was “fine.”
“Better than the _Story of the Heavens_?” asked Mr. Heal. “Come, come,
Ingleby . . . surely not?”
“Rather, sir,” said Edwin.
Mr. Heal shut the book. “The barren and gloomy square of Pegasus,” he
murmured to himself. And all the rest of that evening Edwin found
himself remembering the phrase. 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. . . .
He told Widdup what he remembered of the passage that Heal had read.
“Poor old Tommy,” said Widdup compassionately. “It isn’t an exact square
at all. It’s an irregular quadrilateral, and I don’t see anything gloomy
about it. Stars aren’t gloomy anyway. Look how they sparkle. Look at
Vega.”
Above the gable of the swimming bath that wonderful star throbbed white.
II
In the Lent term they both had measles and woke with swollen eyes to find
each other side by side. In the same ward at the Sanatorium was Layton’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. Edwin
thought that Griffin had never looked so beastly, and rejoiced in the
pig’s humiliation; but when, at last, Griffin recovered he found his
ancient victim a handy plaything, and for want of anything better to do
attempted to seduce Widdup from Edwin’s friendship. 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. It seemed such a pity . . . he
thought he had outgrown all that sort of thing.
And now he hated Griffin for a new reason. While they were together in
the Sanatorium, after the departure of Payne, Griffin had spoken
boastfully of his relations with one of the “Skivvies” whose morning task
was the making of beds in D dormitory. It appeared that Griffin had met
her first by accident, and later by appointment, and he himself described
her as “very hot pastry.” He was familiar with certain shops in the
neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, which made persuasion easy. 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. He
remembered the look of the girl quite well: rather anæmic with black hair
and a pretty oval face. Griffin and Widdup howled over his innocence,
and began to instruct him in the “origins of life.” All these things
came as a great shock to Edwin. He felt a passionate conviction that the
other two were fooling him. Unfortunately his father had never employed
a coachman.
“I don’t believe a bit of it,” he said with tears in his eyes.
“You silly kid,” said Widdup. “Everybody knows it’s true.”
“I don’t believe my father would do a thing like that,” cried Edwin.
It seemed suddenly as if the world had become a gross and horrible
planet. The fetters of earth were galling his limbs. He felt a sudden
immense yearning for the coolness and cleanliness of stellar space. If
only he could pass the rest of his life in the great square of Pegasus! . . .
And he was consoled by the assurance that in heaven, at any rate,
there was no marrying or giving in marriage. . . .
III
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. He was very shortsighted, rather lazy, and intensely grateful
for the least spark of intelligence to be found in his class. Edwin soon
attracted him by his history and essays. His mother had fulfilled her
promise of reading _The Fortunes of Nigel_ aloud in the holidays, and, as
luck would have it again, the Upper Fourth were supposed to be
concentrating on the early Stuarts. 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—a very dreary place. 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’s gallant company.
“Have any of you read _Nigel_?” Mr. Leeming asked the class.
“I have, sir,” said Edwin shyly.
“I have already gathered so, Ingleby. Has anybody else read it?”
Silence. “I think I shall ask the head master to set it to the Middle
School as a holiday task,” said Mr. Leeming.
Thus narrowly did Edwin escape the disaster of having Scott spoiled for
him.
Mr. Leeming was the master in charge of the library, and Edwin began to
spend the long winter lock-ups in this room. Most of the boys who
frequented it came there for the bound volumes of the _Illustrated London
News_, with their pictures of the Franco-Prussian War, Irish evictions,
the launching of the _Great Eastern_, and mild excitements of that kind.
Edwin found himself drawn early to the bookcase that held the poets. 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.
These were Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_, together with their Complete
Works. 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’s baluster,
that stood in a neglected corner of the parish church at home. This urn
was encircled by a scroll which bore these directions
“O smite thy breast and drop a tear—
For know thy Shenstone’s dust lies here.”
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.
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’s unreality, and quoted Gray’s
letters in his despite. 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’s lawns frosted on misty mornings
of winter, the sighing of the Leasowes beeches, and the damp drippings of
the winter woods. Thus he absorbed not only Shenstone but Shenstone’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. Brooding among Augustan poetasters in
the library Mr. Leeming found him.
“Poetry, Ingleby?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me see? Prior? Ah, that was a little age, Ingleby! The Augustans
were not great men, and some of them were very coarse, too. Have you
read the Idylls of the King?”
Mr. Leeming introduced Ingleby to the great Victorian, for he himself was
an ardent believer in all the Galahad nonsense, and was astonished at
Ingleby’s ignorance of the school in which those cherubic cheeks had
expanded. He was very fond of talking about purity and conceived it his
duty to keep his class spotless. In the Lent Term, when the form were
working through the catechism, his glosses were most apparent. The
explanation of some passages troubled him. “_From fornication_ . . .
that’s a bad thing,” he would mutter.
And once having put Edwin in the way of perfection he was not going to
look back. A week or two later he asked him how he was getting on with
Tennyson. “Who is your favourite character in the Idylls?” he asked.
Edwin glowed. “Oh, sir, Launcelot—or Bors.”
“But what about Sir Percivale? ‘Sir Percivale whom Arthur and his
knighthood called “The Pure,”’” he quoted in the Oxford variety of
Cockney.
“I don’t know, sir,” stammered Edwin. “They seem somehow made
differently from me.”
“Arthur,” said Mr. Leeming impressively, “has a great and wonderful
prototype whom we should all try to imitate no matter how distantly.”
Edwin, who had read the dedication, wondered why Mr. Leeming lowered his
voice like that in speaking of the Prince Consort.
In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming for superintending his
literary diet, but he soon detected a sameness in the fare. 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’s own handsome
head, and Mr. Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly flushed. “Lord
Byron,” he had said, “was not a good man. Have you read _Hiawatha_?”
And he reached down Longfellow . . . Longfellow in green boards decorated
with a geometrical design in gold, and irritating to the touch.
At last Edwin was almost driven from the library by Mr. Leeming’s
attentions. 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. He read these books in second “prep” 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. And as second prep was generally a period of great
sleepiness—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. 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.
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. He determined never again to be ashamed of
the shop. When he read of “rich lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,” he
remembered a great cut-glass bottle of some cough linctus that glowed
like a ruby in the shop window when the gas was lit at night. In other
ways he tapped a good deal of the romance of his father’s calling. He
remembered a drawer labelled “Dragon’s blood” . . . the very next best
thing to a dragon’s teeth with their steely harvest. He recalled a whole
pomander-full of provocative scents; he shuddered at the remembered names
of poisons, and other names that suggested alchemy. He almost wanted to
tell Mr. Leeming when next they spoke together, of his father’s trade,
but he wasn’t quite sure if Mr. Leeming approved of Keats. 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. In some ways he was not sorry; for the signs of Mr.
Leeming’s affection, the warm encircling arm, the pervading scent of
honeydew, and the naïve glances of those watery eyes were embarrassing.
Before they parted Mr. Leeming showed his intentions more clearly.
“Would you like to learn Hebrew, Ingleby?” he said.
Edwin would have liked to learn Hebrew—but not out of school hours. He
hesitated.
“I thought you might some day wish to take Holy Orders, and I should be
glad to teach you.”
“I will ask my father, sir,” said Edwin modestly. That was one of the
penalties of having interesting eyes.
CHAPTER III
THE GREEN TREES . . .
I
THE holidays that followed this term were the most marvellous. 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. 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. Very
extraordinary they were; and as she told him, her lips were soft on his
cheek. She said that only a month before she had expected to have a baby
sister for him—she had always longed so much to have a baby girl—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. He wondered, in the dark, if she were crying.
“But now that I’ve got my other baby again,” she said, “I am going to
forget all about it. We’ll be ever so happy by ourselves, Eddie, won’t
we? In the evenings when father is down at business we will read
together. This time we’ll take turns reading, for you’re growing such a
big boy. And we’ll go wonderful walks, only not very far, because Dr.
Thornhouse says I’m not strong enough yet. I want you to tell me
everything—everything you do and think about at school, because you’re
all I’ve got now. And you’re part of me, Eddie, really.” At this she
clutched him passionately.
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’s watery eyes when he talked about
Arthur’s prototype. In the face of this eager emotion he felt himself
unresponsive and a little consciously superior and male. He didn’t want
to feel superior to his mother—but there it was! 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. So unconscious was she of his
scrutiny that he went on looking at her—really looked at her for the
first time in his life. 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. He discovered that she was a woman, remembered Griffin, and
blushed.
“What a colour you’ve got, boy,” said his father. And it struck him also
that she was smaller than she used to be.
“Isn’t mother rather thin?” he asked his father. Mr. Ingleby smiled, and
in his grave, shy way put out his hand to touch hers as it lay on the
table.
“You silly boy,” said his mother.
But her denials did not satisfy him. He knew, for certain, that she was
different from the mother whom he had known. He noticed, too, that she
was not allowed to eat the same food as the rest of them. Sometimes she
would forget their rules and taste things that were forbidden, and then
his father would gravely reprove her. Instead of bread she was ordered
to eat a sort of biscuit which Edwin’s curiosity made him anxious to
taste. He was disappointed; for they had no taste at all. “What are
they made of?” he asked; and they told him “Gluten. . . . That’s the
sticky part of wheat without starch.”
And yet, in spite of her illness, they had never been happier together.
The new intimacy, that had begun with her painful confidences of the
first evening, continued. 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. The story
was an old one and rather unhappy. It began years and years ago in the
days of his mother’s childhood, days that she remembered so unhappily
that she never really wanted to recall them. He had never before known
anything about his mother’s childhood. He had just taken her for granted
in her present surroundings. 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 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.
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.
“Your grandfather was the last of them, Eddie,” she said. “He was a
farmer.” And for a moment consciousness of Griffin and his social
prejudices invaded the picture. 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. 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. “We
were not the only decayed family there,” she said. “There were others,
and greater—such as the Grosmonts of Trecastel. But old Mr. Grosmont had
two sons, and father only had three daughters. I was a sort of ugly
duckling, Eddie; they never really liked me. And I was never happy
there.”
“I think I must be like you, darling,” said Edwin. “I had a rotten time
at St. Luke’s at first. Even now I don’t quite seem to be . . . I don’t
know . . . ordinary.”
She smiled and kissed him.
“My father was a dear,” she said, “but mother really hated me. 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. She had all the advantages.
You see, I suppose they thought she was worth it. She was a beautiful,
selfish creature, with the most lovely hair.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t lovelier than yours, darling,” said Edwin.
“Then she went and threw herself away, as mother called it, on a man she
met at a hunt ball in Hereford. And she died, poor thing, with her first
baby. It was an awful blow to mother. It made her more horrid to me
than ever. I suppose she found me such a poor substitute. If it had
been me it wouldn’t have mattered. I went to keep house for your
great-uncle in North Bromwich; and there I met your father. I have never
been really happy. You see, nobody had ever taken any notice of
me—before that. Then mother began to put all the hopes that had been
disappointed in Carrie on Aunt Laura. Nothing was too good for her.
They spoiled her, and spoiled her. It was worse when father died and
mother was left to do what she liked with the money. And when your Aunt
Laura came here and met Mr. Fellows and married him, your grandmother
blamed me. I couldn’t help it . . . and in any case Mr. Fellows is an
awfully nice, quiet man. I did all I could for her, too, getting her
house ready and that sort of thing, and now she’s so dreadfully
difficult. I suppose she’s really annoyed to think that she hasn’t done
better for herself with all her advantages of education, and just lets it
off on me. It’s dreadfully awkward, Eddie. I think she’s even jealous
that their house isn’t as big as ours. I simply daren’t tell your father
the sort of things she’s said. If he knew one of them he’d never forgive
her. He’s like that about anything that affects me.”
“I should be, too,” said Edwin.
“Would you?” she smiled.
“Yes. . . . You’ve made me hate Aunt Laura already.”
“You mustn’t feel like that, Eddie. She’s young, and she’s been spoilt.
It isn’t all her fault, probably.”
“If it were any one but you I wouldn’t mind. But you’re so wonderful.”
He loved to look into her eyes when she loved him.
II
After this they had wonderful times together. 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. They did
not walk very far because she must not be over-tired; but the field was
so crowded with wonders that they were tempted further. 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. 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.
His mother would sigh a little when she saw the hills. 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.
“Oh, I should love to be there, Edwin,” she would say.
“Can’t we walk there some day, dearest?”
“It’s such a terrible drag up. We should both be dreadfully tired.”
“Oh, I wish we could, mother; I do wish we could.”
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.
“Come along, Eddie,” she said, “I’m going up to Uffdown.”
“Oh, mother,” he cried. “Isn’t it too far? I should like to carry you!”
And half-doubting, but fearfully eager for adventure, they set off
together. As they climbed upward it seemed that the air grew sweeter
every 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. 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. Mrs. Ingleby’s gray-green eyes were full of
laughter and her face flushed with the climb.
“Oh, mother,” Edwin panted, “what an awful lick you go! Hadn’t we better
sit down a bit?”
“And catch cold! You careless boy. We’ll get to the top soon now.”
“But you mustn’t tire yourself.”
She laughed at him.
“Oh, this air is wonderful,” she said. “Just as if it had come straight
out of the blue, all washed and clean.”
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.
“Eddie,” she asked, half joking, “where does the west wind come from?”
Edwin was willing to instruct.
“Oh, I don’t know, dearest—from Wales and the sea, I suppose.”
“Put your head close to mine and I’ll show you. . . . Those hills that
look like mountains cut out of blue cardboard are the Malverns, and far,
ever so far beyond them—yes, just to the left you see a level ridge that
drops suddenly in the west. You don’t know what that is, Eddie, do you?”
“No—I don’t like to look at single things. I like to feel it’s all—what
d’you call it?—all dreamy underneath one.”
“But you must look at that. It’s the mountain, Eddie, close to where I
was born.”
“Felindre?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“But I never knew that you could see it from here. You never told me.”
“You know why. I told you that I was never happy there. And now, you
see, since the old people died and the land was sold, it really has
nothing to do with us.”
“Still, it’s rather wonderful to be looking into—into another country.
It is Wales, isn’t it?”
“Yes—part of it’s in Wales. Felindre is in England.”
Edwin pondered for a moment.
“I’m rather glad I’m not half-Welsh, anyway,” he said. “But I wish I’d
been there.”
“Do you?” she answered dreamily. “Yes—I wish we had been there together.
It was a different sort of life. I thought—I just thought I should like
to see it again.”
He was a little alarmed at the wistfulness in her voice.
“Mother—what do you mean?” he cried.
“Nothing, Eddie, nothing. It was another life.”
She put her arms round his neck and pulled him gently to her. He was
content to lie there, with his head on her breast, while she talked in a
low voice of that distant place and of her own childhood. 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.
Then Edwin opened his eyes and stopped her.
“Dearest, I know that story,” he said. “Oh, go on, it’s wonderful. . . .”
“Perhaps I’ve told it to you before: perhaps I told you when you were a
baby—I used to talk to you a great deal in your cradle. Perhaps . . . I
was rather lonely when you came, Eddie.”
“Oh, no, I’m sure you haven’t. . . .”
“Look, the cloud is blotting out my mountain now,” she said. “It is time
we were going.” The counties were asleep already.
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.
“Oh, look, mother,” Edwin cried.
“They’re puddling the iron at the great Mawne furnaces. Stand still a
moment, we might almost hear their roar.”
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. 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.
III
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. 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. 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.
Edwin stood there for several minutes, for the picture fascinated him.
Mr. Ingleby had now reached the indeterminate period of middle age: his
hair was gray, rather thin about the crown, and wanted cutting. In the
shop he always wore a black alpaca jacket, and this, by reason of its
thinness, made his chest look mean and skimpy. In this state of
comparative repose he was not impressive. From time to time he raised
his hand to scratch his shoulder. A customer came in to buy a cake of
soap and Mr. Ingleby climbed down from his stool to attend to her. He
opened a glass case, and, groping for this particular soap, upset at
least half a dozen others. 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. It all seemed so inelastic,
so different from the eager youth of his mother. 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. Now Edwin
laughed at himself; and the laugh made Mr. Ingleby look up as if a flying
beetle had banged against his ear.
“Hallo, boy,” he said. “You were late for tea, you two!”
“Oh, we had a lovely walk—right on to Uffdown.”
“I hope you didn’t tire your mother. You must be careful, Eddie. Do you
want me to give you something to do? You shall weigh these powders then:
Phenacetin, five grains in each. Only try to be quiet; I have to get on
with these Lady-day bills.”
Mr. Ingleby yawned and Edwin started to weigh powders.
“Father, what is Dragon’s Blood?”
“It isn’t the blood of dragons, Edwin. . . .” Mr. Ingleby smiled under
his glasses.
“Oh, father, don’t rot.”
“Dragon’s Blood is a resin. It’s prepared from _Dracæna Draco_, and it’s
used for mahogany varnishes.”
“O-oh.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Edwin.”
Silence for five minutes.
“Father . . . Keats was a chemist.”
“Keats?” Mr. Ingleby pronounced the word in the same tone as he would
have used if he had been saying “Keatings, madam?”
“The poet.”
“Oh—Keats. Yes, of course he was. He was consumptive, too. Died in
Italy.”
“Yes, father.” Edwin was thankful to leave it at that; thankful that his
father knew just so much, even if he didn’t know any more. It would be
terrible to know more than your father, to feel that he was a sort of
intellectual inferior to you—a boy of fifteen. He would not talk of
these things any more.
They walked home in silence. It seemed as if Mr. Ingleby were still
worrying about his wife’s tiredness, for when she tried to joke with him
at the supper table he was moody and restrained.
“I’m not really a bit overdone,” she protested, kissing his forehead.
“You’re like a pair of children, the two of you,” he said, and indeed his
gray seriousness seemed to isolate him from all the joy of youth that was
in them.
That night Edwin’s mother sat for a long time on the bed talking to him
in a low voice. 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.
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.
“I am going to plant evening stock,” she said, “all along the lawn border
in between the irises. Besides, I shall be stronger then and we will
often take our tea with us to Uffdown.” And at last she said, “Eddie,
you bad boy, you must really go to sleep now, darling. You’ve got such a
big journey before you to-morrow, and you’re sure to get a headache if
you don’t have a good night’s sleep.” She kissed him many times.
IV
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. 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.
“I’m restless to-night, dear,” she said. “I hate Eddie going back to
school. It’s dreadful to be parted from your baby just when he’s
beginning to be more and more part of you.”
“Come close to me, by the fire, child,” he said.
“No . . . I want some music, I think.”
She went into the drawing-room and lit the candles on the piano. Sitting
there, in the pale light, with a shawl thrown over her muslin tea-gown,
she looked very frail and pathetic, against the piano’s ebony. She
played the _Sonata Appassionata_ of Beethoven, and the rather tawdry
little knick-knacks on the piano danced as if they were made
uncomfortable by the rugged passion. The whole room seemed a little bit
artificial and threadbare, ministering to her discontent. When the
_Sonata_ was finished she still sat at the piano, conscious of her own
reflection in its polished panels, and wanting to cry. She could not
bear the taunting of that image, and so she snuffed the candles and sat
in the dark.
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.
CHAPTER IV
MIDSUMMER
I
EDWIN had expected that the wrench of going back to school after these
holidays would be unbearable: but when he returned to St. Luke’s next day
he was almost astonished at his own acceptance of the change. 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.
Edwin sniffed the smell which he had once found so alien—that mingled
odour of cricket flannels, biscuits, bat-oil, and faint mustiness, with
relish. He passed through the swing-doorway into the library, dark and
echoing and groped his way towards the poetry bookshelves. 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. The lock opened
easily, and he felt for the backs of the big maroon volumes of Byron with
their shiny title-plates. He thought of Mr. Leeming and of Sir
Percivale. A foolish phrase, one of a kind that he had often lately
found running through his brain—rhythmical groups of words that meant
nothing in particular—formed itself in his mind and stuck there. “_The
white lie of a blameless life_.” He laughed at himself. These words
that came from nowhere were the strangest things. He heard the echo of
his own laugh in the dark and empty room. The white lie of a blameless
life. . . . 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.
Stepping out of the library he was hailed by Widdup; a plumper,
sunbrowned Widdup fresh from three weeks with a doctor uncle in
Devonshire. 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.
“And hills . . .” said Widdup, “you never saw such hills. Talk about
these downs. . . .”
“It’s awfully hilly country at home,” said Edwin.
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. From time to time they would catch a few
words of conversation, eager and excited, as they passed. Above them
stretched a deep sky powdered with dust of gold.
“What did you say?” said Widdup. “I’m awfully sorry, old chap. I didn’t
catch it. Douglas shouted to me. . . .”
“I don’t know . . .” said Edwin. “Oh, yes . . . hills. I said there are
some ripping hills at home. One called Uffdown.”
“But these hills in Devonshire . . . you’ve got to get out of the trap
for nearly every one. I used to drive my uncle. It was awful sport.
You’d think I was rotting, but it’s true.”
The chapel bell started tolling in short jerks. The couples began to
drift towards the northern end of the Quad, where the gates were being
unbolted. 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. The last stragglers hurried in. The master on duty
entered the porch. 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. Its stained glass windows glowed as with some spiritual
radiance. Inside they began to sing the hymn which is used at the
beginning of the term:—
“Rank by rank again we stand
From the four winds gathered hither,
Loud the hallowed walls demand
Whence we come and how and whither . . .”
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.
II
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’s. He was
exceptionally happy in his new form. 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’s which weighed so heavily on the disappointed and
underpaid Selby. He was also a fine cricketer, accepting the worship
which was the prerogative of an old “blue,” and convinced in his own
mind—if ever that kingdom were possessed by anything so positive as a
conviction—that the main business of the summer term was cricket. 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.
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. If, as occasionally happened, he made a century, Cleaver was
ready to congratulate him as a sportsman and a brother. To be beaten by
some yorker of Tacitus was no crime if he had played with a straight bat
and didn’t slog. Even a fool who could keep his end up had Mr. Cleaver’s
sympathy.
It was not only in a spiritual atmosphere of the Lower Fifth that Edwin
found content. 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 overshadowed. 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’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. 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.
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’ voices calling in the
fields, the clear click of bat and ball, the stinging echoes of the
fives-court. Great days . . . great days . . .
Edwin found himself becoming keen on cricket—not indeed from any
ambitions towards excellence, though the mere fact of sitting at Mr.
Cleaver’s feet was an inspiration, but for the sheer joy of tiring
himself at the nets and the peculiar charm of the game’s setting of
sunburn and white flannels and green fields. Cricket was a part of this
divine summer, and therefore to be worshipped. Little 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. 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. So,
miraculously, he seemed to have arrived at a degree of normality. This,
in itself, was a triumph.
Spending long afternoons with his team in the lower fields, he found that
he could feel really at home with other “men.” He discovered qualities
in them that he had never guessed before. 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. 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—slowly rising to fame. 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. 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. Leeming was not
fond of cricket and his shadow would mar this particular joy. Only when
he had passed relief would come. Great days . . . great days.
III
In the pursuit of these joys it is not to be supposed that Ingleby
forsook his friends the poets. In the flush of early June, before the
crowding of midsummer’s high pomps, there came to him many moments of
ecstasy. In the spinney at the back of the head master’s house there was
a nightingale to which his evening dreams were dedicated. All the
twilights were full of delicious scents and sounds. 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. Sunday evenings . . . Sundays were the most wonderful days
of all; not, indeed, because the chapel services made any religious
appeal to him—the advances of Mr. Leeming had scotched that long ago—but
because of the peculiar atmosphere of freedom which the long day
possessed and which, somehow, even the Head’s sermons failed to mar. He
hated the Head’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. But he loved the music, and particularly
the psalms, with which the daily matins and evensong made him so familiar
that he couldn’t help knowing many of them by heart.
The chants to which the psalms were sung at St. Luke’s had been specially
composed for the school chapel by Dr. Downton, the organist, who had
fitted 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. Most of the congregation at St. Luke’s considered
that Sammy’s tunes were rotten. At first they were inflicted upon the
choir in manuscript; but in Edwin’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’s mind. 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’s Psalter. 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. 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. He certainly couldn’t associate
that sort of music with the naïvetés of Mr. Heal’s flute. And yet, you
never can tell. . . . Mr. Heal knew his Hardy. . . .
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 hours
of all were spent on the sloping banks between the Grand Entrance and the
chapel. 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. Against
such skies the red brick of St. Luke’s became amazingly beautiful. It
seemed to Edwin that in his home, on the edge of the black country, the
sky was never so clear and deep. Lying there he would read the books
that he had smuggled out of the library . . . poetry . . . a great deal
of it. Novels . . . he read, and he always remembered reading, Poe’s
_Tales of Mystery and Imagination_: “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The
Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death.” Such titles!
There seemed to be no end to the leisure of those days.
With the middle of the term came the Race Meeting on the Downs. During
the whole of Race Week the college bounds were tightened, so that no boy
dared show his face outside the iron gates. Within the short memory of
the school, a prefect—no less!—had been expelled, confronting his own
housemaster on the edge of Tattersall’s ring.
On Wednesday of the week the race for the Six Thousand Guineas, the
greatest of the classics, was to be run. St. Luke’s within its closed
gates buzzed like a hive. In every house and every form there were
sweepstakes. Griffin made a book; boasted in Hall that he meant to see
the “Guineas” run or die. Ingleby very nearly admired him for his
courage. The great day came. All morning from the open windows of the
Lower Fifth classroom he could hear the rumble of loaded brakes climbing
the Downs road. 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. 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. 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 “Guineas,” toward the summit of the Downs where the
grand stand, like a magnificent paper-rack, stood up white against the
sky. Down in the playing-fields that afternoon nobody thought much of
cricket. For all the locked iron gates, the eager consciousness of the
crowd on the Downs had invaded St. Luke’s. Ingleby was scoring for his
own side’s innings. 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. He pulled out his watch.
“They’re off!” he said. “My God, don’t I envy old Griff!”
Ingleby forgot his scoring. He, too, was wondering what had happened.
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. He could
think of nothing swifter or more exciting on earth. The game stopped.
All the players were looking at the grand stand, as though their eyes
could tell them which horse had won. Two minutes. Three. From the top
of the Downs a great roar came down to them. Some monstrous beast, no
congregation of men, was roaring there. The black fringe on the grand
stand became animated by waving arms and hats and sticks. A cloud of
tinier specks detached themselves. 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.
“God . . . I wish I could shoot one,” said Douglas. “I never heard such
a row as they made up there. Ingleby, I’ll lay you two to one the
Prince’s horse has won.”
That evening witnessed the canonisation of Griffin. Veritably he had
seen the Guineas. A crowd of admirers listened to his story between
preps in the house classroom. His manner was indolent and boastful.
This was to be no more than the first of many exploits. On
Friday—Ladies’ Day—the race for the Birches would be run. 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.
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. Griffin, who evidently considered that this animal’s
destinies were in his keeping, offered him a pound for his ticket.
Ingleby wasn’t having any. Douglas, called in to give an opinion on the
damnableness of that skunk Ingleby’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. What did he know
about racing? Racing was a pastime of gentlemen in which he couldn’t
obviously have any interest. 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?
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. 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. On this occasion the chapel bell saved him. All through the
service that evening he was pondering on Griffin’s words, trying, rather
obstinately, to convince himself that they weren’t true; that he wasn’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 “the sport of
kings,” that, at a pinch, he might summon up sufficient “guts” to emulate
the boldness of such a daring customer as Griffin. Perhaps it was all
too horribly true. . . .
He couldn’t accept it. It was inconceivable that all the attributes of
knightly courage should be vested in people like Griffin; and yet he
couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t deceiving himself. It was so easy to
imagine oneself brave . . . the easiest thing in the world. “That’s the
worst of me,” he said to himself, “I can imagine anything. 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. I’m all
imagination and silly rot of that kind; but when it comes to the point
I’m no damned good at all.”
It wasn’t the first time that he had realised defects of this kind. Term
after term he had been reproaching himself for the lack of moral or
physical courage.
There was only one way out of it: to prove that he was capable of the
things which he feared by doing them. 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.
Now, in the same way, and wholly for his own satisfaction, he determined
to go to the Birches.
That night, walking up and down the Quad, he opened the subject to
Widdup. He said,—
“Do you know I drew Airs and Graces in the house sweep? Griffin offered
me a quid for the ticket.”
“I should jolly well let him have it,” said Widdup, explaining the
mathematical side of the question. “You see, you’ve won a twenty to one
chance already. The chances against the horse winning are . . . well you
can work it out easily. I’ll do it for you in second prep. Besides, old
Griff has a lot of money on the horse and he’s going to see the race
run.”
“Well, so am I,” said Ingleby. Widdup laughed, and that annoyed him.
“What do you think of it?”
“I think you’re a damned fool,” said Widdup.
Ingleby left it at that. Perhaps Widdup was right. But why in the world
should the same thing count for heroism in the case of Griffin and folly
in his own? He distrusted the mathematical Widdup’s sense of proportion.
In any case he had to go through with it. If he didn’t, no subsequent
heroism could ever persuade him that he wasn’t a coward and worthy of
every epithet with which Griffin had loaded him. 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’t as
deficient in “guts” as they feared.
The business came more easily than he had expected when first he tied
himself to his resolve. Friday at St. Luke’s was a “fag-day.” On Friday
afternoon, that is to say, there were no organised games. The afternoon
prep started at half-past three, and afternoon school at four-fifteen.
The great race, he learned, was to be run at three o’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. An easy game, Greek. . . .
For once in a way he was prepared to slog like blazes.
Up to the last moment Widdup refused to think that he would go through
with it. He didn’t believe, indeed, until he saw Edwin climb on to the
top of the wooden fence in the nightingale’s spinney at the back of the
Head’s house and drop over into the road.
“Now, I should think you’ve had enough of it,” said Widdup. “If the old
man came along and saw you there, you’d be bunked to-morrow. Come along.
. . .”
“I’ll be back just after three,” said Edwin. “You’ll be here to give me
a hand over?”
“All right,” said Widdup. “You are a bloody fool, you know.”
CHAPTER V
AIRS AND GRACES
HE didn’t need telling that. 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. 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’ 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. By that time rumour would have told him the winner’s
name. But that wouldn’t do. 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. He had got to prove to himself
that he possessed the moral courage which he doubted. It was only the
existence of the very real danger—and he envisaged not only his own
expulsion, but harrowing scenes of remorse and distress at home—that made
the thing a fair test. He had to go through with it.
Beyond the line of fencing, even standing in midstream of that determined
crowd, he felt himself curiously unprotected. He did a curious thing.
He turned his college cap, with its circular stripes of green, inside
out, presenting to the world a dirty brown lining. This wasn’t enough
for him: he also turned up the collar of his Eton coat. But the crowd
was thinking of one thing only and none seemed to notice him. They
noticed nothing. 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. 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’s donkey cart. He found that by holding on to the step of the
wagonette he felt safer. It was reassuring to hold something. What a
rotten coward he was!
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.
They were curiously watery eyes, and his mouth was all over the shop.
When he had dreamily considered the phenomenon of Edwin for a little
while he addressed him,—
“You look ’ot, young man.”
It _was_ hot, Edwin panted.
“Bloody ’ot,” said the man in the wagonette. As an afterthought he took
a bottle of beer, about a quarter full, from his pocket. The cork came
out with a pop. “Gas,” said the fat man, and chuckled. “Gas . . . eh?”
He took a swig, and with the froth fringing his moustache, offered the
bottle to Edwin. Edwin shook his head.
“You won’t?” said the fat man. “You’re workin’ ’arder than I am. Oh,
well, if ’e won’t,” he continued dreamily, and finished the bottle. Then
he pitched it over the hedge.
The dust was terrible. On either side of the track the hedges and banks
were as white as the road. The horses pulled well, and even hanging on
the step Edwin found it difficult to keep up with them. At the crest of
the hill the driver whipped them into a trot. Edwin let go the step and
was cursed fluently by the coster for standing in the way of his
donkey-cart. His friend waved him good-bye. 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. 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. 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. They
seemed very near—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.
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. He
looked at his watch and found that he had a quarter of an hour to spare.
A little old man in seedy black clothes grabbed his elbow fiercely.
“Young sir, young sir,” he said, “take my advice . . . gratis; free; for
nothing.” He laughed, and Edwin saw gray bristles stretched on his
underlip. “Take my advice. Never expose your watch at a race-meeting.
Myself . . . I’ve learnt it from long experience, my own and my friends’.
. . . Never even take a watch when I go racing. No, I leave it at home.
A beautiful half-hunter by Benson of Ludgate Hill, with enamelled face.
Yes. . . . You take my advice. A thing to always remember. Yes. . . .”
Edwin seriously thanked him. A roar went up from the crowd. “The
Prince. The Prince has entered the Royal Box,” said the old man. “God
bless him.” He raised a dusty top-hat. An extraordinary gesture for
this wrinkled, gnomish creature. “Yes,” he mumbled; “a handsome
time-piece. . . . Benson of Ludgate Hill. A very prominent firm. We
shall see nothing here. You follow me.”
Edwin followed. 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. The little man pushed his way deftly
through the crowd. He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed to
notice him; and indeed the leading characteristics of this crowd’s vast
consciousness seemed to be good humour. 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
plates, seemed determined to enjoy themselves in spite of the heat and
the smell of their neighbours under the white-hot sky.
Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties. The vastness of the crowd subtly
shielded him. He felt newly secure, and his spirit was caught up into
its excitement and good humour. He even turned down his collar. And all
the time his mind exulted in a queer sense of clarity, an intoxication
due, perhaps, to his successful daring. In this state he found all his
surroundings vivid and amusing; all colours and sounds came to him with a
heightened brilliancy. He smiled, and suddenly found that a young gipsy
woman with her head in a bright handkerchief was smiling back at him. He
thought it was jolly that people should smile like that. He thought what
jolly good luck it was meeting his guide, the shiny shoulders of whose
frock coat he saw in front of him. His quick mind had placed the little
man already: a solicitor’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’ windows and cosy parlours behind them where kettles were
singing on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was mixed at night.
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. He
began to find words for it all. He _must_ find words for it, for it
would be such fun writing to his mother about it. If he dared. . . . It
would be time enough to write a letter about it when the business was
finished without disaster. There was always the possibility that he
would be found out and expelled. Even if that should happen, he thought,
he would like to tell his mother. . . .
Together they passed the level of the grand stand. 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. Now they had left the grand stand behind it seemed that they
must surely be crossing the course. And then a bell clanged and the
crowd parted like a great wave of the Red Sea in pictures of the Exodus.
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. The crowd
swayed gently, settling down and leaving them stranded upon the very edge
of the course. “That’s a trick worth knowing,” said Edwin’s friend.
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. Edwin had
never before realised how pale the faces of men and women were. 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. For one extraordinary moment
they were nearly silent. “They’re off!” said the little man. . . .
Again the murmur of the stands arose. A bookie just behind them was
doing his best to get in a last few bets, entreating, proclaiming
passionately the virtues of “the old firm.” His red face lifted above
the crowd, and while he shouted saliva dribbled from his mouth. A
curious roaring sound came from the other side of the horse-shoe course a
mile or more away. He stopped with his mouth open in the middle of a
sentence. Something had happened over there. Everybody, even those who
couldn’t see anything, turned in the direction from which the sound came.
Edwin turned with them. He couldn’t imagine why. 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. Thank God, Mr. Heal was short-sighted! Edwin
felt himself blushing. 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. She stared
straight at him and her eyes never wavered. Obviously the game was up.
He fancied that her lips smiled faintly. Never was a smile more
sinister.
Edwin had an impulse to bolt . . . simply to turn tail and run at his
hardest straight back to the college. He couldn’t do that. Between him
and escape, an impassable river, lay the parabola of yellow grass over
which the Birches was even now being run. Feeling almost physically
sick, he slipped round to the other side of his companion. He wished
that gnomish creature had been bigger. “They’re at the corner . . . if
you lean out you can see . . . look, they’re coming into the straight . . .
Airs and Graces leading. Down they come. The finest sight in the
civilised world.”
Edwin didn’t see them. He saw nothing but the phantom of Miss Denning’s
eyes, her faint and curiously sinister smile. He wished to goodness the
race were over. Now everybody was shouting. The stands rose with a
growl like great beasts heaving in the air. Something incredibly swift
and strepitant passed him in a whirl of wind and dust. The crowd about
him and the heaving stands broke into an inhuman roar. The little old
man beside him was jumping up and down, throwing his top-hat into the air
and catching it again. The whole world had gone shouting and laughing
mad. Edwin heard on a hundred lips the name of Airs and Graces. It
meant nothing to him. 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.
Mounted police were pressing back the tide; but Edwin was small, and
quick enough to get over. He pushed and wriggled his way through masses
to which there seemed to be no end. Only in the rear of the stands the
density of the crowd thinned. 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.
In a little hollow littered with tins and other 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. He was miserable. Fate now brooded over him as heavily as the
white-hot sky, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine why. It was
ridiculous, in any case, that the mere sight of a woman’s eyes should
have worked so extraordinary a miracle. Yet this was no less than the
truth. Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all the happiness and
light and colour had gone out of his adventure. That which had been, at
least, magnificent, had now become childish or nearly silly. Reflecting,
he couldn’t be satisfied that anything was changed. Nothing had really
changed except himself; and he didn’t want to admit that he had changed
either. No, he hadn’t changed. Only his mind was just like the dewpond
at his feet in which the burning sky was mirrored. Some days it would be
blue and white and others black with thunder. But the pool would be just
the same. “I oughtn’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.” None of
these sober reflections relieved him. 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.
At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was waiting.
“Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said. Then he suddenly went white.
“What’s the matter?” cried Edwin.
“Oh, Lord, it’s the Head.”
The voice of the head-master came next,—“Hallo, what are you doing here?
Let me see—Widdup, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
A mortar-board topped the palings. “Ingleby—What’s this? What’s this?
What are you doing there?”
A moment of brilliant inspiration.
“Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked my cap over the fence.
May I get it, sir?”
“Serious—very serious,” muttered the Head. “The letter of the law.
Race-week. You’re out of bounds, you know—technically out of bounds.
Boys have been expelled for less. Yes, expelled. Ruin your whole
career.”
Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, in the same flash, the
too-literal Widdup, white with fear.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said . . . “awfully sorry.”
“Mph. . . . What were you two doing here?”
“I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss-moth caterpillars.”
Silence—then, rather lamely,—“They’re in the fourth stage, sir.”
“Are they?” The Head smiled, possibly because he approved of this
fervent manifestation of what the head-masters’ conference called “nature
study,” possibly at Edwin’s sudden revelation of schoolboy psychology.
Decidedly he approved of the puss-moths. He had been reading Fabre aloud
to his wife. Fabre, too, was a schoolmaster, poor devil! He did not
speak his thoughts: schoolmasters never can. He said,—
“Let me see, Ingleby, you’re in the Lower Fifth?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I must speak to Mr. Cleaver. . . .” He didn’t say what he must speak
about. “All right—get along with you.” He left them, walking away with
his hands joined behind his back supporting an immense flounce of black
silk gown. Edwin scrambled over the fence; his hands, as they clutched
the top of it, were trembling violently.
“Well, you are a prize liar,” said Widdup, “and the old man believed
every word of it.”
“I know,” said Edwin. “That’s the rotten part of it. . . .”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. . . .” He knew perfectly well what he meant.
“Who won?”
“Airs and Graces.”
“Then you’ve won the sweep.”
“Yes.”
Ten minutes later he was back in Mr. Cleaver’s classroom trying to make
himself so inconspicuous that he wouldn’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. Even
though the intense excitement of his adventure had now faded, the
atmosphere of that high room had changed. He felt that he didn’t somehow
belong to it; or, rather, that he had left something behind. 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
circumstance made his present life strangely unreal, as though he were a
changeling with whom it had nothing in common. 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. Widdup, with his
unblushing admiration, helped. There was no shutting him up.
“Well, you have a nerve,” he said. “I wonder what you’ll do next. . . .”
“Oh, stow it,” said Edwin. “I’ve finished with that sort of thing. I’m
not cut out for a blood.”
“I can’t think how you did it.”
“Neither can I. It was damned silly of me. I just wanted to satisfy
myself that . . . that I had some guts, you know. I didn’t really care
what you chaps thought about it. It was sort of private. . .”
CHAPTER VI
THUNDER WEATHER
I
THAT night a thrilled but incredulous dormitory discussed the exploit of
Ingleby. 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. 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.
“I wish you hadn’t told them that,” he said to Widdup.
“Why not?” said Widdup. “That was the best part of it.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t mind telling a lie, but it’s rotten if the
chap you tell it to believes you.”
“Get out,” said Widdup. “If you want to know the truth it’s only another
example of your rotten cockiness.”
Why? Why? Why? . . . He couldn’t understand it. It seemed to him that
the most natural decent things in the world were all labelled as
abnormalities. Even if he had proved to his own satisfaction that he
possessed the usual amount of “guts,” it seemed that he was a kind of
freak. There was no getting to the bottom of the mystery. Yet, when he
came to consider himself, he was certain that his attitude was infinitely
humble. Perhaps that was the trouble. Other chaps didn’t think about
themselves. Edwin envied them unfeignedly. He felt that he was
condemned to travel a sort of vicious circle. 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. If, by enormous efforts, he were
to compel himself into the trodden ways of thought and conduct, he
couldn’t be honest—and in the process of regaining his honesty he found
himself fighting his way back to the original misfortune. There was no
way out of it. Isolated he must be. He determined, above all things,
that even if he were not ashamed of his isolation, he wouldn’t be proud
of it. It wasn’t easy.
The whole incident of the Birches—which, after all, he had meant for a
sort of private trial—was becoming a nuisance. He almost welcomed the
attitude of Griffin, who scoffed at the whole business and refused to
believe he had been there. Griffin, his own reputation for valour and
cunning being in question, determined to prove that Edwin had not been
near the race. In the dormitory that night the coalition set themselves
to this business, beginning with an examination at the hands of Griffin
himself.
“Widdup says you went to see the Birches run.”
“Does he?” said Edwin.
“Now, none of your fooling, Ingleby. You’re a damned little liar. You
never put your nose near the races.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter to you anyway.”
“Doesn’t it? You’ll soon know that it does. We’re not going to have any
liars in this house. You’d better tell the truth at once.”
“All right, then. I did go to the races.”
“The swine! . . . Get a towel, Duggie.”
“Well . . . you asked me. . .”
“Now, I’m going to prove that you’re a liar. Of course you know that
already. But you ought to be shown up for your own good. Then you’ll
get a tight six. What were Airs and Graces’ colours?”
“I don’t know what his colours were.”
Griffin howled. “HIS . . . listen to the swine. He doesn’t know a horse
from a mare, Duggie. Ingleby, how do you tell a horse from a mare?”
Edwin blushing, was overwhelmed with laughter. By this time the towel
was ready, wet, and twisted into a cable. “I’ll teach you the colours of
Airs and Graces,” said Griffin. “We’ve had quite enough of your airs and
graces here. Next time you’ll find it pays to tell the truth in this
dormitory.”
Edwin got his six, having been bent double over the end of his own bed by
the other seekers after truth. It was worth it. When the lights were
out and he was comfortably settled in bed he decided that that sort of
thing oughtn’t to make any difference. “My mind to me a kingdom is,” he
said to himself; and in his mind the great guts question had been settled
for ever. As for the lamming. . . . Well, it might have been a gym
shoe. . . . While he lay thinking of these things he was surprised to
hear the voice of Widdup, who slept next to him, speaking in a whisper.
“I say,” he said, “did you really go to the Birches, or were you pulling
my leg?”
“Of course I did,” he replied. It gave him a little shock to find that
so slight a thing as a display of physical violence had shaken Widdup’s
faith.
“I’m glad of that,” came Widdup’s apologetic whisper. A long silence.
“You’ve won the sweep, anyway,” said Widdup. “Thirty-eight and
sixpence.” Edwin grunted.
“If you reckon that you’ll be here four more years, taking into account
the number of men—average, you know—who go in for the house sweep every
year, you could calculate the exact chances against your ever—”
He was asleep.
II
And while he slept after that day of unusual excitement and fierce
colour, he had a curious dream. 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. 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. 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 elfish, so that Edwin knew from the first
that this time he was sure to lose him and never to catch him up again.
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. At last his breath
gave out, and he stopped. It wasn’t a bit of good; for the moving crowd
wouldn’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.
At last the little man outstripped him altogether, and feeling that he
had lost all hope, Edwin gave a cry. 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. He thought, “I’m not going to be
late after all. . . . Why didn’t they tell me that I was going to
Uffdown?” There was no air like that in the world. He drank it down in
gulps as a horse drinks water. “Eddie, you’ll choke yourself,” his
mother said. . . . “The light won’t last much longer.” “But why should
it last, darling?” he replied. “You’ve got to look over there,” she
said, “in the west. You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well,
it’s the third farm from the end. Do you see?”
“Yes, darling, I can see it quite clearly. . . .” And he did see it. A
long building of bluish stone with small windows set flush in the walls
and no dripstones save one above the oak doorway. Not a soul to be seen.
It looked as if the place had been deserted by living creatures for many
years. “I can see it,” he said, “but I don’t think anybody lives there.”
“But you can see it?” she asked him eagerly. “Can you see the little
bedroom window on the left—the third from the end—quite a little window?”
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. “Eddie . . . there’s not much time,” she pleaded. “Do
tell me.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can see the window you mean.”
She sighed. “I’m so glad, Eddie. I did want to show it you.”
“But why were you in such a hurry?”
“It was my last chance of showing it to you.”
“Whatever do you mean, darling?”
She turned her face away. Now it was quite dark. “I’m really dreaming,”
he thought, “and this is a sort of stage on which they can do lightning
tricks like that.” But there was no doubt about it being Uffdown. All
round the sky the pit-fires of the black-country were flickering out.
And though he couldn’t see her face, he could feel her soft hand in his.
“At any rate, I’ve written . . .” she said at last.
That was the sentence which he carried in his mind when he awoke. A
letter. But she didn’t usually write to him before Sunday, and it was
now only Saturday. Yet, when he came into Hall for breakfast a letter
was lying on his plate. There was something so strange about the whole
business that he was almost afraid to open it. He had a sudden, awful
intuition that she was dead. Ridiculous, of course, for dead people
didn’t write letters. Smiling at himself, yet scarcely reassured, he
opened the letter and read it.
“_My Darling Boy_ (she wrote),—_Did you really make fifteen_? _You
must be getting on_. _Aunt Laura has just been in to tea_, _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 have some very
interesting news for you_. _The other afternoon Mrs. Willis of Mawne
came in to see me_. _She and Lilian are going to Switzerland for a
month this summer_, _and now she suggests that I should join them
there_. _It won’t be just yet_, _and I think—no_, _I’m sure_—_that I
should be back again before your holidays_. _Father wants me to go_.
_I haven’t been very well_, _and the doctor says he’s sure it would
do me good_. _All my life I’ve wanted to see Switzerland_. _I’m
most awfully excited about it_, _Eddie_, _and father says he can
spare me_. _Won’t it be wonderful_? _They are going about the end
of June_. _I won’t forget that postal order_, _but I’m rather poor
myself just at present_. _Eddie_, _do you keep my letters_? _I
think I should like you to_. _The double stocks which father planted
in the long bed are just coming out_.
“_Good-bye_, _my darling_,
“_Your loving_
“_Mother_.”
Of course nothing, in spite of the news of the Swiss excursion, could be
more ordinary. That would be wonderful for her . . . of course it would.
And yet, in spite of all these reasonable convictions he couldn’t get
that dream out of his head. Something, he felt sure, was going wrong.
He tried to analyse the source of his disquietude. “Perhaps I’m
jealous,” he thought. He was most awfully jealous of anything that other
people had to do with his mother, and, anyway, he didn’t know these
Willis people very well. 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.
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. 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’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. The Willises had pots of money. Here again Edwin
suspected them. It rather looked as if they had “taken up” his mother;
and nobody on earth had the right to do that. He hated the Willises (and
particularly Edward) in advance. He always hated people he hadn’t met
when he heard too much about them. He thought that the new intimacy
probably had something to do with his Aunt Laura, who was diffuse and
fussy and ornate, and not a patch on his mother. Nobody was a patch on
his mother . . .
He couldn’t get rid of his anxiety, and so, in the heat of the moment,
before morning school, he answered her letter. “Oh, darling, don’t go to
Switzerland with a lot of strangers. If you do go, I feel that I shall
never see you again,” he wrote. He knew it wouldn’t be any good. She
couldn’t reasonably do anything but smile at his fancies. But he
couldn’t help it. He even took the trouble to post the letter in the box
at the Grand Entrance, so as to make certain that he couldn’t change his
mind.
On the way into the classroom he met Griffin, who pushed a packet into
his hand. “Here you are,” he said. “Take it.” It was thirty-eight
shillings in silver, the first prize in the house sweep on the Birches.
He wished he had remembered about it. He would have told his mother in
the letter not to bother about the postal order. It was an awful thing
to think of her being hard-up and himself rolling in this prodigious and
ill-gotten fortune.
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. Cleaver always assisted as umpire
at this match, and so the deserted Lower Fifth occupied a corner of the
Big Schoolroom by themselves. In this great chamber—it was said that the
roof-span was as wide as any in England—Edwin dreamed away the morning,
reading, sometimes, the gilt lettering on the boards on which the names
of scholars were 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.
Opposite him hung the board devoted to the winners of entrance
scholarships. His own name was there. Edwin Ingleby . . . 1895. He
remembered the day when it had almost embarrassed him with its fresh gold
lettering. Now the leaf had toned down, and the name had sunk into
obscurity beneath a dozen others. So the passage of fleet time was
measured on these tables. In a few more years nobody who didn’t take the
trouble would read his name. Even those of the batch before him were
half-buried in obscurity. One other name arrested him: G. H. Giles. He
knew nothing of Giles except that this brilliant beginning had been
followed by disaster. The name of Giles appeared on no other board; for
the term before Edwin came to St. Luke’s Giles had been expelled from the
school. Edwin didn’t know what he had been expelled for; but the
circumstance, remembered, afflicted him with a kind of awe. “It might
happen so easily,” he thought. Why, if he hadn’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. The voice of Mr. Leeming, stuck fast where Edwin had left
him a year before, in the Stuart period, recalled him. “We will pass
over the unpleasant . . . most unpleasant side of Charles the Second’s
reign. Unfortunately, he was a thoroughly bad man, and his court . . .”
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. 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 “Satisfecit,” or even to be caned.
The Lower Fifth knew none of these terrors. Cleaver was far too
easy-going to take his weekly report seriously; but the lower ranks of
Mr. Leeming’s form trembled. You could never be sure of old Leeming.
The folding doors opened. Mr. Leeming stopped speaking, and the sergeant
walked up to his desk and stood waiting at attention while Leeming read
his list. He looked over his glasses. “Let me see . . . Sherard . . .”
he said. “Sherard, the head-master wishes to see you at twelve-thirty.”
His voice was so gently sympathetic that nobody could possibly imagine
that he had had anything to do with this calamity. “Then . . . the Lower
Fifth . . .” he fumbled with the paper. “Ingleby. The head-master will
see you at the same time.” He looked over at Edwin with the most pained
surprise. “Very good, sergeant,” he said.
Edwin felt himself going white. Yes, that was it. That was the
explanation of his feeling of unrest. He was going to share the fate of
the traditional Giles. Good Lord . . . think of it! Miss Denning had
done this. And yet he could hardly believe it—she had always been far
too nice for that. Now his face was burning. It struck him that it
wasn’t a bit of good worrying. If it weren’t . . . if it weren’t for his
mother it really wouldn’t be so bad. He couldn’t bear to think of her
disappointment in his disgrace. She thought so much of him. It wouldn’t
be quite so bad if she were not ill. It might kill her. Good God! . . .
that would be awful! Suppose, after all (it was no good supposing), that
the Head wanted to see him about something else. . . . There wasn’t
anything else. Unless . . . unless it were something to do with his
mother. Unless she were seriously ill . . . even something worse. But
he had her letter. It couldn’t be that. Yesterday she was well enough
to write to him. No . . . the story was out, and he was going to be
expelled. In three quarters of an hour he would know the worst. He
wished that the time would pass more quickly. Time had never been so
slow in passing. The clock in the tower chimed the quarter. From where
he sat he could see the tower through the upper lights of the long
window. He could see the minute-hand give a little lurch and move
infinitesimally forward. He remembered Widdup telling him exactly how
many times it moved to the minute. Was it twice . . . or three times?
He had forgotten. There must be something wrong with the clock to-day.
In the middle of this purgatory one half-humorous fancy came to him: “At
any rate old Griff will know that I did go to the races now.”
III
They waited, ten or twelve of them, in the twilight of the passage
outside the Head’s study. The atmosphere of this place resembled that of
a crypt, or more properly—since the keynote of the St. Luke’s
architecture was baronial rather than monastic—a dungeon. The only light
that came to them entered by way of certain dusty windows of lancet shape
on either side of the gothic porch. 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’s particular section of the
Natural History Society.
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.
The sergeant opened the door. “Sherard W.,” he said. Sherard W. crammed
a sweaty cap into his pocket and started forward, eager to get it over.
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. The
nails in the heels of Sherard W.’s boots rang on the stone flags. When
he reached the Turkey carpet his steps became silent. The door closed.
The rest of them strained to listen. They heard little: nothing but the
quiet rumour of the head-master’s voice, and little patches of silence in
which the replies of Sherard W. were not heard at all. A moment later he
emerged. A number of whispered questions assailed him, but Sherard W.
didn’t feel like answering questions. He brushed by the rest of them as
quickly as he could go, with his school-cap pressed to his eyes. Another
patch of sunlight was revealed. “Frazer . . .” called the sergeant. And
Frazer, a tall lout of a boy with sallow face, came forward and was
swallowed up in the same way as Sherard W. A minute later the sound of
dull blows was heard.
“Frazer’s got it,” said somebody. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four
. . . five . . . six . . . Poor old Frazer!”
“Six from the Head isn’t equal to three from Cleaver. You should see
Cleaver’s biceps in the gym.”
One by one the members of the crowd entered and returned. It seemed to
Edwin that his turn would never come. 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. Yes, it was just like
that. He remembered a minatory text that hung cobwebbed in one of the
attics at home: PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD. It was not pleasant to hear
these muffled sounds of chastisement, but what was a flogging (the Head’s
favourite word) compared with the more devastating fate that awaited him?
“That’s why he’s keeping me till last,” he thought.
“Ingleby . . .” said the sergeant. Edwin had time to fancy that his tone
implied a more awful enormity than he had put into any other name. He
entered, and stood waiting in the sunlight. 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. For a moment he took no notice of
Edwin. Then he looked up and smiled. Would the storm never break?
“Ah . . . Ingleby.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hope your entomological zeal isn’t going to take you up to the
racecourse, Ingleby. How are the puss-caterpillars getting on?”
He smiled again, and showed his teeth beneath his shaggy moustache.
Edwin was seized with a sudden terror. The worst had happened, and now
the Head was playing with him. He could say nothing.
“Eh? . . . What’s the matter with you? You aren’t faint, are you?
You’d better sit down.” Edwin trembled into a chair.
“Now, are you all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I sent for you, Ingleby, because I have been having a talk with Mr.
Leeming.”
What in the world had old fat Leeming to do with it? Edwin wished he
would get it over.
“Mr. Leeming has always given me good reports of you . . . I don’t know
if you deserve them . . . and last night I saw Mr. Cleaver, who . . . um
. . . um . . . tells me that you are one of . . . No, I’ll leave that
part out . . . that you’ve got plenty of brains when you choose to use
them, but that you are somewhat lacking in application. H’m?”
“Yes, sir.”
Why wouldn’t he get to the point?
“He says, Ingleby, that you’re a dreamer. Well, you know, there’s no use
for dreamers in this world. They’re not wanted. Even dreamers with the
blessing of good brains. H’m?”
“Yes, sir.”
“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. You might win scholarships, and be a credit to the
school. That’s what we want. That’s what your parents sent you here
for. Now . . . now Mr. Leeming tells me that you aspire to becoming a
priest of the church. . . .”
“No, sir.”
“No . . .? But Mr. Leeming told me he had talked the matter over with
you?”
“He mentioned it, sir . . . but I didn’t say anything. I . . . don’t
think I do want to, sir.”
The Head frowned. “You mean that you don’t feel worthy of so great a
vocation? Well, you’re young. You’re a promising boy. I want to do
what is best for you . . . and the school. At the end of this term you
are likely to get a move, and after a certain time I don’t think, from
the scholarship point of view, you can begin to specialise too early.
You have shown a certain . . . aptitude for English. You might read
History. You might stick to Classics. What do you think about it?”
“I should like to read History, sir.”
“Very well, I’ll write to your father about it. We won’t say anything
more about the Church for the present. That will come later. I expect
Mr. Leeming will talk it over with you. You may go now.”
CHAPTER VII
IMPURITY
I
THE “little chat”—as Mr. Leeming would certainly have called it—did not
take place for a long time, for the reverend gentleman’s mind had become
exercised with a problem of greater importance than the devotion of
Edwin. It wasn’t exactly his fault. Mr. Leeming was a bachelor. He was
now in his forty-third year. 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. He himself had
always been aware of this powerful sensual element in his nature. With a
certain degree of courage he had subjected it to a deliberate
mortification. Obstinately he had fitted his body to the Procrustean
couch that his conscience recommended: obstinately, and in a degree
successfully. 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.
This waistcoat, on week-days of broadcloth and on Sundays of a more
sensual silk, was the symbol of Mr. Leeming’s possibilities. He didn’t
know it. Even if he were aware, in the lacing of his boots, of its
physical existence; he hadn’t the least idea of its spiritual
significance. 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. As it was, the devil that
he believed he had conquered, in reality possessed his soul.
In his quest for the thing which he had labelled purity he had
unconsciously allowed the idea of “Impurity” to become an obsession. 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. 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,—more frightened . . . and more
curious . . . of their terrible existence and more terrible power. Mr.
Leeming, with the best intentions in the world, was in a bad way.
A number of circumstances favoured the development of the unfortunate
gentleman’s obsession. In the last Easter holidays he had attended a
conference of assistant masters in London, at which the whole question
had been discussed with the greatest solemnity, and plans had been
formulated for the stamping out of “impurity” in every public school in
England. The speeches of the delegates had convinced him of his own
blindness. It was impossible that St. Luke’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 “rampant,” 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. He
had become a man with a mission.
For a crusade of this kind St. Luke’s was not by any means an ideal
field. The head-master, for all his imposing presence, was not a
practical man. 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. Croquet and
botany were sciences of more interest to him than education. He believed
in hard games, corporal punishment, nature study, and the classics. He
hated extremes. The golden mean was his creed, his weakness, and his
apology. He hadn’t any use for Mr. Leeming’s intensities. He could even
be picturesque on occasion. “If you are going to appoint yourself
inspector of our dirty linen, Leeming,” he said, “you really mustn’t
expect me to do the washing.”
“I don’t think you understand me, sir,” Mr. Leeming began. . . .
“Oh, don’t I?” said the Head. The word Impurity formed voicelessly on
Mr. Leeming’s lips.
“It is a scandalous thing . . . scandalous . . .” he complained to the
common-room, “that a man who knows what is right and is determined to
follow it shouldn’t be properly backed by the headmaster. The matter is
vital. It is the most important . . . by far the most important problem
in modern education. Any means are justified to purge the schools of
this sort of thing. . . .”
“I can see you, Leeming,” drawled Selby, “in the rôle of _agent
provocateur_.” The common-room exploded.
“What is wanted in the public schoolmaster is a higher sense of
seriousness,” Leeming spluttered. “You have no sense of suspicion.”
“What is more wanted in the public schools,” said Cleaver, “is a
suspicion of sense—common sense.”
“All you fellows talk,” said Dr. Downton, “as if the whole thing were a
problem for the public schools purely and simply. It’s nothing of the
kind. It’s not the ignorance of the average schoolmaster as much as the
ignorance of the average parent. I mean ignorance of the nature of boys
. . . lack of sympathy, lack of responsibility. And when ugly things
happen they shove it on to us.”
“That’s what they pay a hundred and fifty a year for,” said Cleaver.
“Of which we don’t see any too much . . .” Selby growled.
“None of you take it seriously. The thing is enormous,” said Leeming.
“What can you expect in a way of improvement when a housemaster like
Selby makes jokes about it? I’m convinced that there’s only one way. . . .
You can’t drive boys. You’ve got to understand their hearts.”
“You’ve got to understand their bodies,” said Cleaver.
Mr. Leeming flushed. “I think you are merely disgusting, Cleaver.”
“He’s quite right,” said Downton. “It isn’t sexual education, it isn’t
moral instruction that’s going to work the miracle. When a boy reaches a
certain age—and it isn’t the same age with all boys—he begins to be
conscious, and quite properly, of his physical passions. You needn’t
shudder, Leeming. They exist. You know they exist as well as anybody.
Well, when he reaches that stage a public school isn’t the proper place
for him.”
“The games would go to pot,” said Cleaver. From his point of view there
was no more to be said.
“It depends entirely on your boy. Some are too old at seventeen. Some
are perfectly safe at nineteen. The trouble is that just when you get
them in sight of these dangers you put them in supreme authority. A
prefect can do pretty well as he likes. . . .”
“It’s the essence of the system . . . responsibility,” said Selby.
“It gives them what Shaw said about something else: the maximum of
inclination with the maximum of opportunity.”
“Shaw?” said Cleaver. “You fellows are too deep for me. Anyway, I don’t
believe there’s much wrong here. So long.” He swung out of the room.
“That kind of man,” said Mr. Leeming, “is at the root of the whole
business.”
Dr. Downton was almost angry. “Yon know, Leeming, you’re talking bosh.
The thing’s solving itself. All over the world schoolboys are getting
wider interests at school. In their homes they’re taking a more equal
place in family life. It is no longer a matter of being seen and not
heard. They’re being treated like human beings. The more you treat them
like human beings the less likely they are to behave like young animals.
And the greatest mistake of all is to keep on talking to them about it.
Every boy of a certain age is curious, and quite naturally curious, about
his physical possibilities. So is every girl. . . .”
“My dear Downton,” said Leeming flushing, “I shall be obliged if you
won’t—er—pursue the subject. You make it painful. . . .”
“Very well,” said Downton gathering up the skirts of his gown.
“Thank you.” Leeming left the room. Selby smiled lazily.
“If only,” he said, “if only our friend Leeming had ever enjoyed the
advantage of a really bad woman’s society.”
II
Unconscious of the doom which was being forged for their chastisement in
the white heat of Mr. Leeming’s troubled brain, the school lay scattered
along the perimeter of the cricket-field waiting for the players to
emerge from the pavilion. They came, and the great expanse of green was
made more beautiful by their scattered figures. Everything in the game
seemed spacious and smooth and clean—the white flannels of the players;
the paler green of the rolled pitch; the new red ball; the sharp click of
the bat. Before lunch the school had lost three wickets, but now it
seemed as if a stand were to be made. The studious Carr, the head of
Edwin’s house, was batting steadily; while Gilson, the school’s most
showy batsman, who would play for Surrey in the holidays, was beginning
to get set. 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.
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. Under such circumstances the mere fact of lazy existence was a
pleasure. Even when the cautious Carr was bowled, the long partnership
ended, and the St. Luke’s wickets began to fall like autumn leaves, the
serene beauty of the day was scarcely clouded.
In the middle of the afternoon the figure of Mr. Leeming drifted along
the edge of the field. He halted on the path immediately in front of
Edwin with his back to the spectators, considerably incommoding Douglas’s
view of the play. “Old Beelzebub’s a friend of yours, isn’t he,
Ingleby?” said Douglas lazily. “You might tell him that he isn’t made of
glass.” But Mr. Leeming, suddenly aware of a voice behind him, turned
and came towards them, smiling.
“Ah, Ingleby,” he said. “Is that you?”
He sat on the grass beside them, very carefully, as befitted a man of his
figure. “A beautiful day. Let me see, who are we playing?”
“The M.C.C., sir.”
“Ah, yes . . . the Marylebone Cricket Club. Are you fond of cricket,
Ingleby?”
“Of course I am, sir.”
“I very seldom see you now. That’s the pity of it. The better a boy is
the less you see of him. He passes through your form quickly, and that’s
the end of it. And how is Widdup?”
Widdup was very well, if a little impatient
“You and Ingleby are great friends, Widdup. Quite inseparable. I’ve
often seen you walking up and down the quad at night. I wonder what it
is you have in common, eh?”
Widdup didn’t know. They’d always been pals. They’d always slept
alongside each other. That was how you got to know a chap.
“Well, Ingleby, what are you reading in these days?”
“Well hit, sir; oh, well hit. . . . Make it five. I beg your pardon,
sir. . . I don’t think I’m reading anything in particular.”
Slowly it became evident to Mr. Leeming that the audience which he had
honoured with his company was bored. With great dignity he picked
himself up and left them.
“He’s a funny old swine,” said Douglas.
“I used to think he was rather decent,” said Edwin. “Horribly ‘pi’ you
know.”
“I don’t trust him,” said Douglas. “I always feel as if he’s up to some
low-down business or other. He goes mooching about in those old felt
slippers of his, and you never know where he is. The other day he came
into the long box-room when Griff and I were there playing Nap. You
couldn’t tell he was coming. He’s like a damned old tomcat. I can’t
think how you stick him, Ingleby. . . .”
“I don’t, really,” Edwin confessed.
“And old Griff says he follows him like a shadow. Just lately he’s taken
to haunting the swimming-bath. I don’t know what he goes there for. He
never used to. He never goes in. I don’t suppose the fat beast can
swim.”
“He could float . . .” said the practical Widdup.
The golden afternoon dragged out its lovely length. 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. 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. At six-thirty stumps were drawn. 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 lake. 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.
“Come on,” said Widdup at last; “we shall be late for chapel.” And
indeed another twenty minutes found them assembled in the oak pews for
evensong. They sang the _Nunc Dimittis_, 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. 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.
In the middle of the crowd that stuck congested in the porch Edwin found
himself wedged between Douglas and Griffin. They whispered together
behind his back. “Well, are you going?”
“Of course I’m going, I told you.”
“You’ve fixed it up with her?”
“Yes, she’s up to any sport. Why don’t you come with us?”
“Two’s company. . . .”
“Go on with you. . . . You can easily pick up another. You’re not a
sportsman, Duggie.”
“I don’t take risks of that kind. You bet your boots I don’t. Why don’t
you ask Ingleby? He’s a blood. Says he went to see the Birches. And
he’s flush, too. Won the sweep.”
“Ingleby?” Griffin scoffed. “I bet you he’d funk it.”
“Funk what?” said Edwin.
“Going down town to-night. There’s a fair on. I’m taking the skivvy
from J dorm. She’s all right. She knows a thing or two.”
“Don’t talk so loud, you ass,” said Douglas. “Well, will you come?”
“No, I won’t,” said Edwin.
“You said you went to the Birches.”
“I did go to the Birches.”
“Well, nobody believes you. Now’s your chance to show your pluck. Come
along, gentlemen, show your pluck. . . . Three to one bar one. . . .
’Ere you are, sir. The old and trusted firm. Ingleby . . . you are a
rotten little funk!”
Edwin said nothing. “He’s got more sense than you have, anyway, Griff,”
said Douglas.
That night in the dormitory when the lights were turned down Griffin had
not appeared. 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’s prostrate figure. As Griffin habitually
slept in a position which enabled him to absorb his own fugginess, this
was not difficult. When Edwin went to sleep Griffin had not arrived.
Drugged with fresh air he slept untroubled by any dream. 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. He 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. He moved slowly and his
bedroom slippers made no sound on the boarded floor. Opposite the foot
of Edwin’s and Widdup’s bed he paused for a moment. Edwin closed his
eyes. He felt the eyelids quiver. Why on earth should Selby want to
look at him? He passed on, and Edwin, cautiously opening his eyes, saw
him pause again opposite the gap between Douglas and Griffin. At this
point he waited longer. He appeared to be thinking. He passed on and
then suddenly turned back and gently lifted the sheet from Griffin’s
pillow. Gently he replaced it. Edwin was almost too sleepy to realize
that Griffin wasn’t there; but when he did, the first thought which came
into his mind was one of spontaneous and inexplicable loyalty. He
thought, “Poor old Griff: He’s in for it.” And yet, if there was one
person in the world against whom he had a reasonable excuse for hatred . . .
Very silently Selby left the dormitory. 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. The clock in the high
turret struck twelve. The chime wandered clanging over the empty
quadrangle.
III
The next week was the most sensational that had ever shaken the placid
life of St. Luke’s. The fall of Griffin was no startling
matter—deliberately he had been “asking for it,” and the escapade of the
fair in race-week was no more than a crowning glory. Still, it was an
impressive affair. 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.
It became certain—and Edwin, after his vision of Selby’s visit in the
night had taken it for granted—that Griffin was to be “bunked.” In the
afternoon, Douglas, faithfully prowling near his comrade’s prison, had
seen Griffin, splendidly unrepentant, at the high window of his condemned
cell. Griffin had smiled. Griffin, evidently, didn’t give a damn for
the whole business. The house thrilled. Of such stuff heroes were made.
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. The betting was all on Griffin’s
being a sportsman.
There followed a day of suspense. Consultations between masters were
noticed. Selby, for a whole hour, had been closeted with the Head. Old
fat Leeming had been sent for at last to join their deliberations. What
had Leeming to do with it? Other housemasters had been summoned to the
room beneath the clock and emerged with unusually serious faces. Who was
this Griffin that his fate should shake the foundations of Olympus? The
Head, indeed, showed his seriousness more clearly than all the others.
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. From his high seat at the end of
the chancel he scowled on the whole school as if he hated it. At supper
a message was read out. The school would assemble by classes in the Big
Schoolroom at noon. Poor old Griff. . . . The sergeant, it was said,
had been seen binding a new birch in the porter’s lodge.
It was all very romantic and thrilling. Edwin, conscious now for the
first time of the extreme foolhardiness of his racecourse adventure, felt
himself a greater dog than ever. 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.
He bolted. With a ladder of knotted sheets he climbed down the
waterspout and disappeared into open country. Griffin lived somewhere in
Kent. In half a day he would reach home.
For Selby’s house it was a great morning. Edwin, in spite of his hatred
of Griffin, shared in the general elation. Such private feuds were small
concerns in the face of the common enemy. Douglas was flown with
insolence.
“I knew old Griff would do them,” he said. “By God . . . that’s a man if
you like. It’s the nastiest knock old Selby’s had in his life. Think of
it . . . a chap with a weak heart like old Griff shinning down a
waterspout!”
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.
“You silly ass,” said Douglas. “Of course they can’t fetch him back.
He’s done them brown.”
But the morning went on without any alteration in the programme. At
twelve o’clock the solemn procession began: the whole black-coated
population of St. Luke’s filtering through narrow corridors and the wide
folding doors into the big Schoolroom. 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. 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. Rumour was busy
with whispers.
Griffin had been found in a ditch with his leg broken and had been hauled
back to fulfil his sentence. Like Monmouth, Edwin thought. Griffin, in
company with the pale skivvy from “D” had been arrested by the police at
Waterloo. 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 walked into a taproom full of School House bloods on
Sunday morning. Indeed, these were strenuous days.
The school settled down. The Head, lean, crow-like, flapped the wings of
his gown. He seemed to find it difficult to make a beginning, and while
he waited for a word his left arm twitched. Then he began. 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. He wasn’t at a loss for words at all. He boomed, he
ranted, he bellowed, he rolled his “r’s” and his eyes. 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. For the subject of his harangue was Mr. Leeming’s own: Impurity;
and the whole meeting the immediate result of Mr. Leeming’s
investigations. The curtain had gone up with a most theatrical flourish
upon the Great Smut Row.
The essence of the Head’s speech was a general threat. 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’s of this
abominable thing. Indeed it is possible that he meant what he said. His
port was bad, and he knew better than to drink it; but the heady vintage
that he brewed from sonorous words knocked him over every time.
The meeting dissolved in silence. For the moment the school was
impressed, less by the gravity of the charge than by its indefiniteness.
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—_lettres de cachet_ and the rest of it—in
Citizen Leeming’s house. “D” dormitory and the others in charge of the
languid Selby suffered least. When evening came to set a term to rumours
only two were missing—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. An atmosphere of immense relief fell
upon the awed dormitory and found vent in a memorable “rag.”
But Edwin did not sleep. There was no reason why he should not have
slept; but he couldn’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. Somehow appearances
might be against him. In particular he became suspicious of Mr.
Leeming’s attentions to him in the past. He imagined that the wily
creature had suspected him, and tried, for that reason, to find a way
into his confidence. What other explanation could there be? His
avoidance of Mr. Leeming could only have increased the suspicion.
Plainly, he was done for.
He remembered, with a perilous clearness, words that had passed between
them to which he had given no thought. Now they appeared terribly
significant. “You and Ingleby are great friends, Widdup,” Leeming had
said only a few days before. “Quite inseparable. I’ve often seen you
walking up and down the quad at night. I wonder what you have in common,
eh?” Now Edwin knew why he wondered. And Widdup, like a damned fool,
had said that they slept alongside each other. Supposing old Leeming
imagined. . . . It was too bad. He lay there staring at the rafters and
wondering what could be done. He would like to write to his mother about
it. But a man couldn’t write to his mother about a thing like that. And
his father wouldn’t understand. 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. “And then,” he
thought, “the old beast won’t believe me. He’ll think that I’ve gone to
him because I have a guilty conscience, and he’ll suspect me more than
ever. He’ll go and make all sorts of inquiries and something will come
out that will be difficult to explain.” How could anything come out when
there wasn’t anything wrong? He could not give a reasonable answer to
this question, and yet he was afraid. From this spiritual purgatory of
his own making he passed into an uneasy sleep.
Next morning, in the middle of early school, the sergeant entered with a
message for Mr. Cleaver, and waited while the master read it.
“Ingleby,” he said at last, “Mr. Selby wants to speak to you. You had
better go at once.”
Edwin packed up his books with trembling hands. He went very white. It
seemed to him that the eyes of the whole form were on him. They were
thinking, “Hallo, here’s another of them. Ingleby! Who would have
thought it?” He heard the footsteps of the sergeant go echoing down the
corridor as steadily and implacably as the fate that was overtaking him.
He only wanted to get it over. As soon as he was out of the classroom he
ran, for every moment of uncertainty was torture to him. 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’s had begun and
must now so abruptly end. Mr. Selby sat at his desk waiting for him.
When Edwin entered the room he looked suddenly embarrassed and fingered
an envelope on his desk.
“Ingleby, I sent for you urgently . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“It probably came as a shock to you . . . or perhaps you were prepared?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you must pull yourself together. You can’t guess what it is?”
“No, sir.” . . . But he could. 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. Those things were nothing . . .
nothing.
“Oh, sir . . . my mother . . .”
“Yes. . . It’s your mother, Ingleby. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad
news. Very sorry. . . .”
“Tell me, sir. She’s dead. Oh . . . she’s dead . . . ?”
Mr. Selby unfolded the telegram although he already knew its contents.
“No. It’s not so bad as that. But she’s ill . . . very ill . . .”
“I knew. . . . The minute you spoke I knew, sir. . . .”
“You had better catch the eight o’clock train at the Downs station. You
need only take your little bag. You can get it from the matron!’
“Yes, sir. . . .”
“Have you any money?” Mr. Selby almost smiled to see him so eager to go.
“No, sir. . . . Only about eightpence.”
“You can’t go without money, you know. Here’s a sovereign. Now, cheer
up, there’s a good fellow. Cheer up!” He smiled wanly, and Edwin burst
into tears. Mr. Selby laid an awkward hand on his shoulder. 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.
“Thank you, sir . . . but it’s awful, it’s awful. . . .”
“Of course, of course. . . .”
He shepherded Edwin out of the room. When the boy had gone, Mr. Selby,
an unemotional man, tore the telegram into small pieces and placed them,
with a confirmed bachelor’s tidiness, in the waste-paper basket. 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’s
photograph standing on the desk in front of him. For a moment he gazed
at the faded image. He had not thought of her for years.
CHAPTER VIII
HOMEWARDS
IN a morning air of miraculous freshness Edwin left the quad by the iron
gates on the eastern side. The square was quite empty, for all its usual
inhabitants were now in early school. He noticed an unusual aspect of
space and cleanliness. He could not remember ever having seen it empty
before. He noticed the tuck-shop in the corner by the swimming-bath.
This, too, was closed, and the windows were heavily shuttered. 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.
It seemed to him like a sort of omen. He said to himself, “I must think
of something else . . . I must think of something else. I can’t bear
it.” 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. And then the thought had been no more
than an indefinite shadow, too remote to be threatening. Now it was
different. The threat was ponderable and vast. “Death . . . I mustn’t
think of it. I must think of something else.”
He had to think of something else; for by the 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. 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’s spinney, past
the last of the new villas, and so, on to the open downs. It was a
strange adventure for him to reach them so early in the morning. Their
turf was silvered still with a fine dew that made it even paler than a
chalk down should be. Fold beyond beautiful fold they stretched before
him. 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. The spring of a summer morning
in the spring of life! It was all wrong. Surely no awful devastation of
death could overshadow such an ecstasy of physical happiness? He refused
to believe it. It was all fantastic nonsense. Of course she wasn’t
dead. Your mother couldn’t die without your feeling it. . . .
At the station he had five minutes to spare. He changed his sovereign,
and was relieved to be rid of the responsibility of one coin, and to fill
his pocket with silver. 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. 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 matron’s room. The train jolted out of the station, and
soon he was travelling eastward with the high water-tower of St. Luke’s
dipping gradually beneath a long horizon.
The morning grew more beautiful. 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’t help feeling unsuitable—almost irreverent, to the
tragic occasion. There was adventure in it and the added charm of the
unexpected. He was going home. 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. Of
course it was always wonderful to be going home.
He remembered other homecomings from St. Luke’s; the first, and best of
all, when, on a December morning they had crowded into the housemaster’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. That was the town station.
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’s for the scholarship exam. He
had come down in an Eton suit, fortunately correct, and an unfortunate
topper that he would have given his life to hide when he found that they
were not worn. And his mother had come down with him. At the thought of
her the old numbing dread fell upon his heart. Perhaps this was the very
carriage in which they had travelled. 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. He
had been looking at her rather critically, for he was anxious that she
should seem what she was—the most beautiful creature in the world. 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. And
he had noticed how lovely her hands were when she took her gloves off. . . .
Now, the memory of the moment made him want to cry, just as the
beauty of the morning made him full of exultation. It was a most
perilous mixture of emotions.
By this time the region of downs had been left far behind. They were
gliding, more smoothly, it seemed, through the heavily-wooded park
country of the home counties. Stations became more frequent, and the
train began to fill with business people hurrying to London for their
morning’s work. They settled themselves in their carriages as though
they were confident that their seats had been reserved for them. They
were all rather carefully, rather shabbily dressed: the cuffs of their
coats were shiny, and the cuffs of their shirts fringed, and one of them,
a gentleman with a top-hat half-covered by a mourning-band, wore
cuff-covers of white paper. 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. Edwin they ignored—not so much as a wilful intrusion as an
unfortunate accident. 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.
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. The
houses, too, or rather the backs of them, grew more uniform, being all
built with bricks of an unhealthy yellow or putty colour. Soon there
were no more buildings semi-detached. 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. 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. Then the
gardens went altogether; and the beautiful and natural love of green
things showed itself in sodden window-boxes full of languishing geranium
cuttings or mignonette. 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. 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
“Tickets, please.”
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. The door was
slammed. The man with the top-hat placed it carefully on his head and
adjusted the paper cuffs. Others folded their morning papers and put
them in their pockets. One, apparently recognizing a friend who was
sitting opposite to him, for the first time, said “Good-morning,” and the
train passed amid thunderous echoes under the arch and into Victoria
Station. All his fellow-passengers were adepts at evacuation, and before
he knew where he was Edwin was alone in the carriage.
He was very lonely and yet, somehow, a little important. Usually, at
term end, he had crossed London with Widdup, whose westward train also
started from Paddington. He hailed a hansom, and one that was worthy of
its name: a shining chariot, all coach-builders’ varnish, with yellow
wheels and polished brass door-handles and clean straw that smelt of the
stable on its floor. The cabman was youngish, mahogany-complexioned, and
ready to be facetious. He called Edwin “My lord,” and Edwin hardly knew
whether to treat him seriously or not. “Geawing to the races, my lord?”
he said. The Lord knew Edwin had had enough of races for a bit. He said
“Paddington.” “Ascot or Newbury?” said the cabby, climbing to his seat.
It was a great moment. The movement was all so swift and luxurious, the
hansom so delicately sprung that it swayed gently with the horse’s
motion. The polished lamps on either side were filled with wedding
rosettes. Inside on either hand were oblong mirrors in which Edwin could
almost see his own profile: a subject of endless curiosity. There was
even a little brass receptacle for cigar-ash. A Cunarder of a cab! The
cabby whistled “Little Dolly Daydreams” with a ravishing tremolo. 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. My word, this was life. . . . Life! . . .
Perhaps she was dead already. Oh, why should a day like this be
marred?
It seemed to him, after a moment’s thought, that it was possible—even if
it were wrong—to be possessed by two and opposite emotions at once. He
was miserable to feel an alarm which wasn’t exactly definite or real, and
yet he could not help enjoying this astounding and unforeseen adventure.
“If I _do_ feel like that,” he thought, “it can’t be exactly wrong.” And
that comforted him.
He surrendered himself to the joys of the morning. 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. He wondered at the
great white stucco houses of Park Lane, standing back from the wide
pavement with an air of pompous reticence. Before one of them, remnant
of a summer dance the night before, a tented portico, striped with red
and white, overstretched the pavement. 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. 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.
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. His name was probably Cohen; but
Edwin thought he must be at least an Earl.
Once again the resorts of elegance were left behind. The hansom, heaving
heavily, was checked on the slope of the gradient descending to the
departure platform at Paddington. Opposite the booking-office it
stopped, and Edwin was released from this paradisaical loosebox. 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. 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. 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.
This train ran out of London more easily than the other had entered it.
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.
At Reading, where the sidings of the biscuit factory reminded him of teas
which he had “brewed” with Widdup, the woman opposite took out a crumpled
paper bag, and began to eat sandwiches. She lifted her veil to do so,
and the process suddenly proclaimed her human. Edwin saw that she
wasn’t, as he had imagined, a sombre, mute-like creature, but a woman of
middle age with a comfortable face and a methodical appetite.
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. This emergency, however, never arose. 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.
From this she took a prolonged and delicious gulp; recorked and replaced
it, smiled to herself, sighed, and lowered her portcullis once more.
It cheered Edwin to think that she wasn’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. 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. It made golden the dust on the window-pane at Edwin’s
elbow and discovered warm colours in the pile of the russet cloth with
which the carriage was upholstered.
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 rumble of
the train. It all seemed extraordinarily peaceful. A cuckoo passed in
level flight from one of the hedgerow elms to the dark edge of a wood.
In the heart of the wood itself a straight green clearing appeared. 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. Some
day, they had said, they would make that journey again. Some day . . .
perhaps never. Was it quite impossible to get away from that threatening
shadow? 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. He held his breath. He
knew that it was Oxford.
This, then, was the city of his dreams. 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. This was his Mecca: “That
lovely city with her dreaming spires,” he whispered to himself. It was
indeed merciful that the vision of his second dream should come to cheer
him when the first became so perilously near extinction.
Even when the train began to slow down among red-brick suburbs of an
appalling ugliness the mood of excitement had not faded. The train ran
in smoothly, and the woman in black awoke and blew her nose. Edwin,
looking out of the 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. All of them, he
thought, were supremely happy. In this holy city happiness had her
dwelling. One of them—his back was turned to Edwin—reminded him of
Layton, the old head of the house. He remembered with a thrill, that
Layton, who had won a scholarship at New College, was now in Oxford. Of
course it must be he. Very excited, Edwin slipped out of the carriage
and ran after him. “Layton!” he called. And the young man looked round.
“What do you want?” he said. It wasn’t Layton at all. Edwin apologised.
“I’m awfully sorry. I thought you were a chap I knew.”
The porters were slamming the doors and he only just managed to scramble
into his seat before the train started. The woman in black spoke for the
first time. She had a soothing voice, with a west-country burr that
reminded him of his father and Widdup. “I thought you were going to be
left behind,” she said. “I saw your bag was labelled North Bromwich.”
Shouts were heard on the platform. “North Bromwich next stop. . . .
Next stop North Bromwich . . .” Edwin sat down panting, and the train
moved off. “Next stop North Bromwich. . .” The words echoed in his
brain, and chilled him. He didn’t want to look back to see the last of
Oxford. Next stop North Bromwich. At North Bromwich he would know the
worst. Swiftly, inevitably, the train was carrying him towards it. The
tragedy had to be faced.
He was seized with a sudden inconsolable fear of desolation. His eyes
brimmed with tears so that the coloured landscape could not be seen any
longer. The tears gathered and fell. 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.
The woman in black, hearing the sobs, raised her veil and looked at him.
“What is it, my dear?” she said.
“Oh, nothing . . . nothing.”
“Folks don’t cry about nothing. . . .”
She spoke quite kindly, and her kindness was too much for him. It gave
him quite an unaccountable feeling of relief to speak about it.
“It’s . . . it’s my mother,” he said.
“There now. . . . Is it really? That’s bad for ’ee. When did she pass
away?”
“She isn’t dead. I . . . I hope she isn’t. But she’s awfully ill.”
“Don’t cry now, boy. While there’s life there’s hope. I always tells
them that.”
“Who do you tell that to?”
The black woman laughed. “Who do I tell that to? Ha . . . that’s a good
’un. Why, dearie, my patients, of course.”
“I don’t understand. . . . What sort of patients?”
“Well, Mr. Inquisitive, if you must know, I’m a monthly nurse.”
Still Edwin did not understand. He asked,—“Do many of them die?”
“Why, bless my heart, no. It’s more a matter of births than deaths. Not
that I haven’t a’ seen deaths. And laid them out. But I’ll tell you
something. It’s my belief that they all die happy. And though it’s hard
on a young boy like you to lose his best friend—that’s his mother—it’s my
belief that death is a happy release. Yes, a happy release. I always
tell them that. Especially after a long illness. I wonder, has your
dear mother been ill for a long time?”
Edwin thought. “Yes.”
“Perhaps,” said the black woman with relish, “Perhaps you could give me
some idea of what she was suffering from and then I could tell you near
enough.”
“I think,” said Edwin, “it was diabetes.”
“Diabetes . . . think of that! I’ve a’ had several with that. It’s a
bad complaint. Very. I’m afraid I can’t give you the hopes that I’d
like to.”
“But don’t they ever get better?” Edwin asked in agony. “I expect they
do sometimes, don’t they?”
“It all goes to sugar,” said the woman enigmatically. “I ought to know
for I’ve had them. Yes . . . I’ve had them. But while there’s life
there’s hope. That’s what I always say. And a boy’s best friend is his
mother. You must never forget her.”
“I couldn’t forget her. Oh, I wish you’d never told me,” said Edwin,
sobbing once more.
“Now, dearie, don’t take on so. You mustn’t take on so. You must take
what God gives you. I always tell them that.”
“I won’t take what God gives me,” he cried. “I won’t. I can’t bear to
lose her.”
“Ssh. . . . You mustn’t say that. It’s wicked to say that; I should be
frightened to be struck dead myself if I said a thing like that in God’s
hearing.”
She looked nervously at the luggage rack above her head as if she
expected to find the Almighty in hiding there. Edwin followed the
direction of her glance and read: “_This rack is provided for light
articles only it must not be used for heavy luggage_.” He wondered
inconsequently, whether the stop, which was missing, should come before
or after the word “only.”
“You must cheer up, dearie,” said the black woman soothingly. “While
there’s life . . .”
Edwin wished she would shut up. He was sorry that she had ever spoken,
and yet he couldn’t quite suppress a desire to be further informed on
certain technical details which this authority had at her finger-tips.
“Is it a painful death?” he asked slowly, wiping away the last of his
tears.
“Painful? . . . Well . . . not to say painful. Not as painful as some.
Most of mine passed away in their sleep like. And they look so peaceful
and happy. It’s a great consolation to their friends. Just like a doll,
they look. That’s better. You mustn’t cry. That’s a brave boy. Upon
my word, even though I’m used to it, it’s quite upset me talking to you.”
She gave a little laugh and dived once more for the bottle of spirits.
“This wouldn’t be no use to you,” she said, as she took a swig. Edwin
shook his head.
“Every woman has a mother’s feelings. And I know what they go through.
I understand. I do. Now, that’s right. Cheer up and be a good lad.
Hope for the best. That’s what I tell them. . . .”
“This rack is intended for light articles only. It must not be used for
heavy luggage. This rack is intended for light articles. Only it must
not be used for heavy luggage. While there’s life there’s hope. While
there’s life there’s hope. While there’s life there’s hope.”
So, in the pitiful whirl of Edwin’s brain, foolish words re-echoed, and
in the end the empty phrase seemed to attach itself to the regular beat
of the train’s rhythm as the wheels rolled over the joints in the rails.
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.
Soon the prim small gardens told that they were touching the tentacles of
a great town. A patch of desert country, scarred with forgotten workings
in which water reflected the pale sky, and scattered with heaps of slag.
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. Gloomy canal wharfs, fronting on smoke-blackened walls where
leaky steampipes, bound with asbestos, hissed. The exhaust of a single
small engine, puffing regular jets of dazzling white steam, seen but not
heard. A canal barge painted in garish colours, swimming in yellow
water, foul with alkali refuse. 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. Another mile of black desert,
pools, and slag heaps, and ragged children flying kites. Everywhere a
vast debris of rusty iron, old wheels, corroded boilers, tubes writhen
and tangled as if they had been struck by lightning. An asphalt
school-yard on a slope, with a tall, gothic school and children screaming
their lungs out, but silent to Edwin’s ears. Endless mean streets of
dusky brick houses with roofs of purple slate and blue brick footpaths.
Dust and an acrid smell as of smoking pit heaps. More houses, and above
them, misty, and almost beautiful, the high clock tower of the Art
Gallery. A thunderous tunnel. . . . The clamour of the wheels swelled
to an uproar. “While there’s life there’s hope. While there’s life
there’s hope.” Under the gloom of the great glass roof the train
emerged.
“Good-bye, dearie,” said the black woman, smiling. “I hope it’s not as
bad as you think. You never know. Don’t forget your bag, now.”
He could easily have done so.
CHAPTER IX
THE DARK HOUSE
I
AUNT LAURA was waiting for him on the platform. It was a very strange
sensation. Always at other times when he had come home from St. Luke’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. 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. Aunt Laura was a poor substitute. To-day she was a little
more diffuse and emotional than usual, and at the same time curiously
kinder. She kissed him—her lips were hot—and he felt that the kiss was
really nothing more than an attempt to conceal an entirely different
emotion and to hide her eyes. On his cheek her lips trembled. He dared
not look at her for he was afraid that in her eyes he would be able to
read the worst. It had to be faced. At last he managed to say,
“How is she?”
And above the roar of the station he heard an uncertain voice answer.
“She’s very ill, Eddie . . . very ill indeed.”
“Not dead? . . . she’s not dead?”
“No, no. We must all be brave, Eddie.”
“We must all be brave.” . . . He hated to hear her talk like that.
What had she to be brave about? It wasn’t her mother who was dying, only
her sister. A sister wasn’t like a mother. It was all very well to say
these conventional things. He didn’t believe she really meant them. She
could cry her eyes out before he’d believe her, however kind she might
try to be. It wasn’t any good her trying to be kind now. She hadn’t
been kind to his mother. He remembered the day when her callousness had
made his mother cry. He couldn’t pity her now; he couldn’t put up with
her condolences; he believed he hated her. He would hate any one in the
world who had given his mother a moment’s pain. She was so little and
beautiful and perfect. . . .
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—she seemed to have lost some
of her florid assurance, and her eyes looked as if she had been crying.
She even seemed to have shrunk a little. 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. All the
time, beneath this face, which he distrusted, he could see a faint and
tantalising resemblance to the other face that he adored. If any one had
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. He didn’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.
It was tantalising, and so harrowing that he dared not look at her any
longer.
At Halesby they walked up from the station together almost without
speaking. The little house on the edge of the country wore a strangely
tragic air. Downstairs all was quiet. After the big echoing rooms at
St. Luke’s it seemed ridiculously small. 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. Aunt Laura took off her
hat and veil.
“I’d better carry my bag upstairs,” said Edwin. He felt somehow, that in
his little old room he could be happier. He could even, if he wanted to,
throw himself on the bed and give way to the tears which were bound to
come.
“No . . . you’d better wait here,” said Aunt Laura. “Your father is
sleeping in your room. You see it wouldn’t do for him to be in hers.
He’s been there for three nights. And I’m in the spare room. I think
you’re going to sleep over at Mrs. Barrow’s.”
Edwin flamed with jealousy. What was Aunt Laura doing in the house?
She, above all people, had no right to be there.
“But I could sleep on the sofa in the drawing-room,” he said.
“You mustn’t make difficulties, Eddie. It’s all arranged. The
specialist has been out this afternoon to see her with Dr. Moorhouse. He
may be upstairs now.”
“But I can’t, I can’t be so far away. I ought to be here. She would
like me to be here.”
“Eddie, dear . . . do be a good boy. Here comes your father.”
And his father came. Strangely, strangely old and worn he looked in the
shabby alpaca coat. Edwin had never realised that he could be so
pathetic. He smiled at Edwin, a smile that was unutterably painful.
“Eddie . . . my boy,” he said, and kissed him, “I’m glad you’ve come. . . .
She was anxious for you to come. . . .”
“Oh, father. . . .”
“We must all be brave, Eddie.” Again that terrible smile.
“Father, may I go and see her . . .?”
“The doctor says that nobody had better see her to-night.”
“Yes, Eddie, we must obey the doctor’s orders, dear,” said Aunt Laura.
“But you’ve seen her . . . you saw her this morning, didn’t you?”
“That was different,” said Aunt Laura. “I was up all night with her.”
“It isn’t different, is it, father? Aunt Laura’s nothing to her. . . .”
“Eddie, Eddie. . . .” Aunt Laura protested.
“Father, if she asked for me she ought to see me. . .”
“She’s so ill, Eddie. I’m afraid she wouldn’t know you.”
“Oh, I’m sure she would. . . .”
“Edwin, you mustn’t worry your father; there’s a good boy.”
“Oh, Aunt Laura . . .” Then fiercely, “She’s any mother. . . .”
Edwin’s father sighed and looked away. Aunt Laura, with a business-like
change of tone which implied that Edwin’s question was disposed of,
whispered to his father, “Is she still sleeping?”
“Yes. . . . The doctor says it isn’t really sleep, it’s coma.”
Coma . . . a gloomy and terrible word! What did it mean? Edwin
remembered the woman in the train. “Most of them pass away in their
sleep like.”
“I think I’ll go and lie down for an hour,” said his father.
“Yes, do, John,” said Aunt Laura encouragingly. “You need it. I’ll go
upstairs myself to be handy if the nurse wants anything.”
This was the first that Edwin had heard of a nurse. The idea inspired
him with awe. His father sighed and turned to go.
“Father . . . can’t I go up, only for a minute?”
Aunt Laura, who had taken upon herself the role of protectress and
manager of the distressed household, intervened,
“Eddie, you mustn’t worry your father. We’re all in trouble, and you
mustn’t be a nuisance.” His father went, without speaking.
“Well, when can I see her?” Edwin demanded.
“To-morrow. . . . You must be patient like the rest of us. Now I must
go upstairs. You’ll be quiet, won’t you? Mrs. Barrow has your bedroom
ready, and if you take your bag over she’ll give you some tea. She
promised to look after you. She was most kind. Or, if you like, and
will keep very quiet, you can stay here and read.”
“I didn’t come home to sit down here and read. Why did they send for me
to come if they won’t let me see her? I want her. . . .”
“Hush . . .” said Aunt Laura, with an air of being scandalised. She left
him, closing the door with exaggerated quietness behind her, leaving him
alone in the room that had once witnessed so much happiness. He didn’t
know what to do. Read? The idea was ridiculous. He looked at the
familiar shelves, on which he knew the place and title of every book. A
sense of the room’s awful emptiness oppressed him, for everything in it
recalled the memory of his darling’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—terribly pathetic—a shopping
list scribbled on the back of an envelope. He couldn’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 privilege that was denied
him and didn’t realise its value. He clenched his hands and cried aloud:
“We belong to one another. . . . She’s mine. . . . She’s mine. I hate
them.”
He opened the door softly and stepped into the hall. Scarcely knowing
what he was doing he looked into the drawing-room. There stood the piano
with a sonata of Beethoven upon the music-stand. 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. Some days ago, he supposed, his
mother had picked them. Her hands . . . he worshipped her hands. A
strange and uncontrollable impulse made him bend and kiss the dead
flowers.
But the atmosphere of that room was if anything more cruel than the
other. He couldn’t stay there. Once more he found himself in the
darkness and quiet of the hall. The house had never been so silent.
Only, in the corner an oak grandfather’s clock with a brass face engraved
with the name of Carver, Hay, ticked steadily. In the silence he heard
his own heart beating far faster than the clock.
Scarcely knowing what he was doing he climbed upstairs and crept quietly
to the door of the room where his mother was lying. He knelt on the mat
outside the door and listened. Inside the room there was no sound; not
even a sound of breathing. If only he dared open the door. . . . If
only he could see her for a second she might smile at him and he would be
satisfied. He was thankful to find that the mere fact of being nearer to
her made him feel more happy. 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.
II
Mrs. Barrow, at whose house it had been arranged that Edwin should put up
for the night, was the Ingleby’s nearest neighbour and their landlady.
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.
On the Inglebys’ side of the wall lay a modern well-kept garden, not more
than twenty years old. Edwin’s mother had a passion for flowers, and his
father had made the gratification of her pleasure his favourite hobby, so
that Edwin’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. This summer Mr. Ingleby had
planted the long bed that stretched along the side of the house towards
the door in Mrs. Barrow’s wall with masses of delicately-coloured stocks.
Though the form of these flowers was not particularly beautiful their
scent rose to meet him in a hot wave of overpowering sweetness. He
remembered a letter in which his mother had told him how wonderful they
were. Everything reminded him of her. . . .
He passed through the door in the wall and entered another world.
Everything connected with Mrs. Barrow was in character. 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. In
Edwin’s eyes its presence was so familiar that he had almost become fond
of it. Many and many times on windy days he had watched the immense
structure swaying gently as a reed in a summer breeze. Under the shadow
of Mr. Barrow’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. 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.
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. He paused, not because he was impressed by
their garish beauty, but 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’ harsh honey. Edwin had never seen this
uncommon butterfly before. In the neighbourhood of St. Luke’s the
species, which is notoriously capricious, had never appeared. He wished
that he had a butterfly net with him: for by catching one of them he
would have scored over Widdup.
So he passed to Mrs. Barrow’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 _Alice in Wonderland_,
taking tea with her companion, a decorous lady of the same age named Miss
Beecock.
They did their best to make Edwin feel at home. 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. . . .
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’s youth and
innocence overcame her, would have been amusing if there had been room
for anything amusing on the darkened earth.
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. 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.
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. “If I were you,” she
said, “I don’t think I should spend it. Old coins like that are
valuable. Mr. Barrow had a great interest in anything old and
historical.”
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: “Now, isn’t that kind of Mrs. Barrow, Edwin?” Edwin hastily
agreed that it was, and the old ladies smiled at one another, as though
they were saying, “Isn’t that clever of us, to give him a toy that will
take his mind off his mother?” 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’s cap, broke
into a shrill twitter.
“Sweet . . . swee . . . t,” said Mrs. Barrow with pursed lips.
“Sweet . . . sweet,” echoed Miss Beecock, with a little laugh.
“I think I will take my crochet on to the lawn,” said Mrs. Barrow.
“If you have your shawl, and the grass is not too damp,” Miss Beecock
reminded her.
“There was a heavy dew last week,” said Mrs. Barrow. “Which day was it?
I think it must have been Tuesday. Yes . . . it was Tuesday. That was
the day on which I spoke to Mr. Waldron about thinning the grapes. And
now, Edwin, would you like to fetch a book from the drawing-room? You
may prefer to bring it out on to the lawn. You know the way. The key is
on the outside of the door.”
Edwin said, “Yes.” 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. He knew the room well enough. It
had been one of the delights of his childhood. It was long, and
irregular in shape, and crammed with curious things that he had once
found entertaining.
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’s bureau. Damp and cedar wood and mouldy russia leather. All the
chairs in the room were covered with white draw-sheets as though they
were dead and awaiting burial. 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.
There, however, stood the things which had delighted his youth. Nothing
had been moved a hair’s-breadth for many years: since the day, indeed,
long before Edwin was born, when Mr. Barrow had died. It was the best
room of the house: and so reverenced by Mrs. Barrow that she would never
have 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. 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.
Edwin was soon at home. Here was a great glass-fronted mahogany bookcase
the wonder of which he had never thoroughly explored. Here was the flat
glass showcase, shaped like a card-table in which a number of Mr.
Barrow’s curiosities reposed. 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’s clock.
Edwin thought he would try a tune. He wound up the mechanism, pressed
over the starting lever, and the prickly cylinder began slowly to
revolve. It made a bad start; for no one knows how many years ago it had
been stopped in the middle of a tune. Then, having finished the broken
cadence, it burst gaily into the song called “Mousetraps for Sale,” 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
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