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.”

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 pathetic and faded quality which made Edwin wish it would stop. There was no need for him to pull back the lever, for the musical box, as though guessing his wishes, suddenly petered out with a sort of metallic growl. Edwin laughed in spite of himself, at this peculiar noise, and hearing the echo of his own laugh turned to find himself staring into the jealous eyes of a portrait of a Victorian gentleman whom he took to be the late Mr. Barrow, for whose delectation, over his glass of punch, the instrument had been purchased. Edwin began to feel a little uneasy. The feeling annoyed him. “I’m silly to be like this,” he said to himself. “I suppose it’s the uncertainty. . . . Oh, I wish I knew. . . .”

He took refuge in the bookcase, from which he extracted, to his great delight, the complete works of Shenstone in two volumes, bound in slippery calf and published by Dodsley in the year seventeen-seventy. . . . The books were in a beautiful state of preservation. Edwin doubted if they had ever been read. Mr. Barrow, no doubt, had purchased them simply for their local interest. With a final glance at Mr. Barrow’s portrait, in a faint hope that he approved of his choice, Edwin let down the blinds, so that no light penetrated the room but a single gleam reflected from the glass pane of a wool-worked fire-guard that hung from a bracket at the side of the fireplace. With a shiver he re-locked the door. . . .

When he reached the garden with his Shenstone, the light was failing.

“You were a long time, Edwin,” said Mrs. Barrow.

“Yes, wasn’t he?” echoed Miss Beecock. “I’m afraid it is time Mrs. Barrow was going in.”

Quietly, and with a leisure that seemed to presume an endless placidity of existence, the old ladies folded their work, sighed, and recrossed the lawn towards the house. In a little time came supper: biscuits and milk on which a thick cream had been rising all day. Then Mrs. Barrow kissed him good-night. He felt her face on his cheek: a little chilly, but lax and very soft. Miss Beecock lighted him to bed with a candle in a highly-polished brass candlestick. The sheets were cool and of old linen. The bedroom smelt of apples. With the air of “Mousetraps for Sale” in his head, and a sleepy consciousness of ancient creaking timbers, Edwin fell asleep.

He slept long and dreamlessly, waking in the morning to find the sun shining brilliantly through Mrs. Barrow’s lace curtains. At first he could not remember where he was, so completely had sleep, bred of long fatigue, obliterated his consciousness. Before he opened his eyes he had half expected to hear the noise of Widdup turning out of bed with a flop, or the clangour of the six-thirty bell. And then, with a rush, the whole situation came back to him: this was Halesby, and the new day might be full of tragedy.

At his bedside Miss Beecock, who had stolen into the room an hour or so before in slippered feet and found him sleeping, had placed a glass of creamy milk and biscuits. It was awfully kind of her, Edwin thought, as he sipped the yellow cream at the top of the glass. Outside in the garden it was very quiet. He had overslept the morning chorus of birdsong; but he heard the noise of a thrush cracking snail-shells on the gravel path beneath his window. He had forgotten to wind up his watch overnight; and when he found it in his waistcoat pocket where he had left it he saw that it had stopped. “I’d better get up, anyway,” he thought, and while he stood at the door wondering if Mrs. Barrow’s house ran to a bathroom, he heard a clock in the hall give a loud whirr and then strike ten. “Good Lord, I’ve overslept myself,” he thought. “I’d better buck up.”

Abandoning the uncertainty of hunting for a bath he dressed and came downstairs to the sitting-room (that was what it was called) in which the meals had been served the day before. Mrs. Barrow was sitting there in pleasant sunlight, wearing a less elaborate cap and a shetland shawl, and the canary, whose brass cage and saffron plumage now shone brilliantly in the morning sunlight, was singing like mad. When Edwin came into the room she smiled at him.

“We’re so glad that you slept well,” she said. “Miss Beecock went to have a look at you but you were sleeping so soundly that she didn’t like to disturb you. You must have been tired out. Now you’ll be ready for breakfast.”

At this point Miss Beecock entered the room, her attire modified in the same degree as that of Mrs. Barrow.

“Ah . . .” she said with a little laugh. “Here you are. I must ask Annie for your breakfast.”

“He’d like a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, and some buttered toast,” said Mrs. Barrow temptingly.

“Yes, of course he would,” said Miss Beecock.

“I think if you don’t mind,” said Edwin, “I’d like to go home. It’s so late.”“Oh, you needn’t mind us,” chimed the two old ladies.

That wasn’t exactly what Edwin had meant, but he allowed himself to be persuaded, and even enjoyed his breakfast, to the accompaniment of the twitterings of the canary and his two hostesses.

“You’ll sleep here again to-night, won’t you?” they said when he was ready to go. Edwin thanked them. “Oh, we’re only too pleased to be of any assistance to your mother,” they said, pursuing his departure with the kindest and most innocent of smiles.

This time he did not linger in the old garden: he was far too anxious to get home and learn how things were going. At the door in the wall his heart stood still. What was he going to find? It seemed to him that something terrible might be waiting for him on the other side of the wall. It was a silly apprehension, he thought, and when he stepped into it the new garden was as sunny as the old. Only, on the long walk beside the bed of stocks, a mattress, blankets, and sheets were spread out to air in the sun. The scent of some disinfectant mingled with that of the flowers. His fears supplied an awful explanation. It was the bedding from his mother’s room that was spread out there in the sun. And when he looked up to the windows of the house above him, he saw that the blinds were down. That, of course, needn’t mean anything on the sunny side of the house. In a great hurry he turned the corner to the front and saw that the blinds on that side were down as well.

III

In the darkened dining-room Aunt Laura sat at his mother’s desk writing letters with dashing fluency. When he came in she stopped her writing and rose to meet him. “Edwin, my poor dear,” she said, holding out her hands to him. He took no notice of her hands.

“She’s gone,” he said, “in the night?”

“Yes. . . . In the night. She passed away quite quietly. It’s a dreadful blow for us, Edwin, we must be brave. . . .”

He hadn’t time for sentiments of that kind. “She was alive when I came yesterday. And you wouldn’t let me see her. You, of all people. . . . She hated you. She told me so. She always hated you . . . and she’d hate you for this more than anything.”

“Edwin,” she cried, “don’t say these terrible things!’

“They’re true . . . true. I wish it were you who were dead. It was you who stopped me from seeing her . . . my little darling. . . . Damn you . . . damn you.”

“Edwin . . . you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re cruel.”

“Cruel. . . . I like that. Cruel. You talk about cruelty. . . .”

“Edwin. . . .” Aunt Laura clutched nervously at her breast. It was funny to see this big blowzy woman crumple up like that. She flopped down in a red plush chair and started crying softly in a thin voice. Edwin didn’t mind. Let her cry. She deserved it. Nothing of that kind could soften his indignant heart.

“Where’s father?” he asked at last.

“I don’t know. He’s upstairs somewhere,” she said between her sobs. “For goodness’ sake, Edwin, don’t go and say things like this to the poor man. We all have this trouble to bear. And we’ve had the strain of nursing her. Now, don’t be hasty,” she pleaded.

“All right,” said Edwin, and left her.

Upstairs on the landing he found a pale, shadowy figure in which he could scarcely recognise his father. Neither of them could speak at all. Edwin had been ready with the reproaches that had come to his lips in the presence of Aunt Laura; but he couldn’t do it. This man was too broken. He was face to face with a grief as great as his own. There were no words for either of them. The boy and the man clung together in each other’s arms, overcome with pity and with sorrow. On the landing, outside the door of the room where she lay dead, they stood together and cried quietly to each other. And now it seemed to Edwin as if pity for his father were overriding even the intensity of his own grief; for she had been everything to him, too, and for so many years. He felt that he would have done anything in the world to comfort this desolate man, whom he had always taken for granted and never really loved. But his mother had loved him. He wondered if they could do anything to assuage the bitterness of their loss by loving one another. They were two people left alone with nothing else in the world but each other. Why not . . .? That, he thought, was what his mother would have wished.

He felt his father’s tears on his forehead, the roughness of his father’s grey beard. He felt the man’s body quivering with sobs, and the arms which clutched his body as if that were the only loved thing left to him in life. They went together into the little room that had always been Edwin’s, and there they knelt together beside the bed. He didn’t exactly know why they knelt, but kneeling there at his side, with his arm still clasped about his waist, he supposed that his father was praying; and though Edwin could not understand what good prayer could do, it seemed to him a simple and a beautiful thing. It made him feel that he loved his father more than ever. He wished that he could pray himself. He tried to pray . . . for what? There was nothing left in this world for him to pray for. At last his father rose to his feet in the dim room, and Edwin rose with him. He spoke, and the tears still choked his voice and his bearded lip trembled. “Edwin,” he said, “I shall never be able to get over this. I’m broken. . . . My life . . . my life has . . .” He stopped.

“You don’t know what she was to me, Eddie. I can’t realise, Eddie, there are only two of us left. We must help each other to bear it. We must be brave.”

Strange that a phrase which had sounded like cant on the lips of Aunt Laura should now seem the truest and most natural thing imaginable.

“We . . . we were like children together,” said his father.Again they stood for a little while in silence. At last Edwin, still gripping his father’s arm, said,—“Father, may I see her?”

“Of course, dear. . . .”

They went together to the room, and his father opened the door and pulled up one of the blinds. Mrs. Bagley, the charwoman who did odd work in the house and was an expert in this melancholy office, had drawn a clean white sheet over the bed. His mother lay there in a cotton nightdress with her hands folded in front of her, and her lips gently smiling. Even her cheeks were faintly flushed, but the rest of her face and her hands were of a waxen pallor. She looked very small and childlike. She looked like a small wax doll. In this frail and strangely beautiful creature Edwin could only recognise a shadow of the mother that he knew. It was a little girl that lay there, not his mother.

Edwin spoke in a whisper,—

“Should I kiss her?”

His father nodded and turned away.

But he did not kiss her as he had thought he would. For some reason he dared not, for he could not feel certain that it was she at all. He only touched her hands, the hands that he had always worshipped, with his fingers. They were cold; and still her lips smiled. The room was full of the odour of Sanitas which some one had sprayed or sprinkled over the floor. For the rest of his life the smell was one which Edwin hated; for in his mind it became the smell of death.

IV

On the evening after the funeral Edwin sat alone in the drawing-room. He sat there because the other room was still cumbered with the remnants of a melancholy repast: several leaves of mahogany had been dragged down from the dust of the attic and had lengthened the dining-room table to such an extent that there was scarcely room to move in it, and round this table, in the sunny afternoon, had clustered a large collection of people who smelt of black crape and spoke in lowered, gentle voices, out of respect for the woman whom, it seemed to Edwin, they had never known.

Everybody who entered the house—and there were many, for Mr. Ingleby was much respected in Halesby—wore the same grave air. Even the undertaker, a brisk little man with a fiery red beard and one shoulder lower than the other from the constant carrying of coffins, treated his daily task with the same sort of mute reverence. His face, at any rate, wore an expression that matched that of the mourners; and Edwin was only disillusioned as to the sincerity of his expression when he heard him swearing violently at the driver of the first mourning carriage. This moment of relaxation caused him to forget himself so far as to whistle a pantomime song as he crossed the drive.

The black-coated people in the dining-room did not hear him: they were far too busy being serious: and behind them, from time to time, Edwin could see the grey face of his father, with curiously tired and puzzled eyes. Puzzled . . . that was the only word for them. It was just as if the man were protesting, in all simplicity, against the unreason and injustice of the blow which had fallen on him. Edwin, savagely hating the presence of all these hushed, uninterested people, found in his father’s suffering face a sudden reinforcement to his anger. It was a shame, a damned, ghastly shame, that a simple man like that should be hit in the dark; and even more pathetic that he should be simple enough to take the sympathy of his neighbours at its face value. Edwin glowed with a new and protective love for his father. It was as well that some generous emotion should be born to take the place of his numb grief.

Above all, the sight of his Aunt Laura, who was conscientiously doing the honours of the house, maddened him. He could not look at her without remembering that she had been selfish and unkind to his mother; that, on the very last day, she had robbed him of the privilege of seeing his darling alive. Even now, he believed that she was enjoying herself. Her eyes occasionally brimmed with tears, but that meant nothing. They were such easy tears . . . so different from the terrible tears that had shaken his father’s body on the day of desolation. If only she were dead, he thought, there would be no great loss.

And yet, while he thought of this, he suddenly caught sight of her husband, the little manufacturer whom he had lately begun to know as Uncle Albert, a small man with a shiny bald head and a diffident manner: and in the eyes of Uncle Albert, which were fixed upon his wife, he saw an extraordinary mixture of love and admiration for this shallow, diffuse creature whom he had found himself hating.

“If Aunt Laura were to die,” he thought, “Uncle Albert might very well be like father is to-day. That’s a queer idea. . . .” He was amazed at the complications of human relationships and the potential pain that love brings with it. He thought, “It’s no good thinking about it. . . . I give it up. I don’t really wish she were dead. I only wish . . . that there were no such thing as death. Why does God allow it?” No answer came to him: but in place of an answer another angry impulse. “Curse God,” he thought, meaning the God of Mr. Leeming, the God to whom this queer collection of people were to dedicate his mother’s soul. Another thought followed quickly: “What’s the good of cursing him? He doesn’t exist. If he existed this sort of thing couldn’t happen. . . .”

People were seriously setting themselves to the putting on of black kid gloves that the undertaker had provided. The horses on the gravel drive were getting uneasy and the cab wheels made a grating noise. Heavy steps were heard descending the stairs—awkward steps like those of men moving furniture. Edwin saw that his father had heard too. He was looking towards the closed door of the room. He wanted to go and take his father’s hand and hold it, but the space round the edge of the table was packed with people. Now they had opened the hall door. He dared not look out of the window.

The voice of Aunt Laura, most studiously kind, said to him: “Eddie, you’ll come along with your father and Uncle Albert and me.” He said, “All right.” People at the side of the table made way for him. On his way he found himself abreast of his friend, Miss Beecock. She said nothing, but smiled at him and put her arm on his sleeve. She was wearing black silk mittens, and her eyes were full of tears. That weak, tearful smile nearly did for Edwin.

The first cab was drawn up at the hall door. Edwin scrambled in last. Aunt Laura, with a rustle of black silk, made way for him. She took out her handkerchief, and Edwin was stifled with a wave of scent. He hated scent: but anyway it was better than Sanitas. He saw his father’s puzzled eyes on the other side of the cab . . . so old, so awfully old. Uncle Albert took out his handkerchief, too. Evidently, Edwin thought, it was the correct thing to do. He had misjudged him. Uncle Albert proceeded to blow his nose.

They were driving through the High Street. Aunt Laura noticed that most of the shop shutters were up, and in several cases tradesmen were standing at their shop doors bare-headed as they passed.

“It’s very kind of them . . . very nice to see so much respect, John,” she said to his father. Mr. Ingleby said “Yes,” and Aunt Laura, with a little laugh that was merely a symptom of nervousness, went on: “I expect there’ll be a crowd at the cemetery gate.” This time Mr. Ingleby said nothing and Uncle Albert once more stolidly blew his nose. “Albert, dear, I wish you wouldn’t,” said Aunt Laura. The brakes grated, and the cab stopped with a jerk. “Come along, Edwin, jump out, there’s a good boy,” said Aunt Laura. “You’ll walk with your father.”

He walked with his father. The church was full. His father went with bowed head, seeing nothing; but Edwin was conscious of many faces that he knew. In the middle of the aisle the thought suddenly came to him that these people weren’t really there to do honour to his mother: they were so many that most of them could never have known her: no, they were just curious people who had flocked there to find something sensational in the faces of the mourners. In a dull place like Halesby a funeral, and such an important funeral, was an unusual diversion. And this revelation made him determined that whatever happened he would show no emotion that might tickle the sensations of these ghouls. He only wished to goodness that he could explain the matter to his father so that he too might give them nothing to gloat over.

In the church, where a faint mustiness mingled with the exotic scent of arum lilies that diffused from the heap of wreaths on the coffin, Edwin held himself upright. They sang a hymn: “I heard the voice of Jesus say . . . Come unto me and rest”—the first quatrain in unison, and Edwin sang with them, just as he would have sung in the chapel at St. Luke’s. In the churchyard, when they walked in procession behind the bearers to the grave-side, his eyes were still dry, his lips did not tremble, though Aunt Laura’s scented handkerchief was now drenched with tears, and even Uncle Albert, a virtual outsider, was on the edge of violent emotion.The burial service was nothing to Edwin. There was no consolation in it nor, to him, the least atom of religious feeling. A mockery, a mockery, a solemn and pretentious mockery. For she was dead . . . she had vanished altogether, and the thing that they were burying with muttered formulas and tears was no more she than the empty parchment of the cocoon is the glowing butterfly. Let them cry their eyes out. That was not grief. Beyond tears. Beyond tears. . . .

With a curious air of relief that was very near to a furtive gaiety, the party drove back and reassembled in the dining-room. All except Mr. Ingleby. “He has gone to his room, poor dear,” said Aunt Laura, with her nervous laugh. “Mrs. Barrow, do have a slice of ginger-cake. Just a little?” Round the long table conversation began to flow, cautiously at first, but with an increasing confidence, when it became clear that it was unattended by any revengeful consequences.

“Didn’t you think it was awfully nice to see the people in High Street so respectful, Mrs. Willis?” said Aunt Laura. Edwin looked up. This then was the Mrs. Willis of Mawne Hall with whom his mother had planned the visit to Switzerland. He saw a middle-aged woman in black satin, with a gold watch-chain round her neck and jet in her bonnet. She caught his interested eyes and in return smiled. Aunt Laura went unanswered. “I wonder,” Edwin thought, “if she understands what a fraud the whole thing is.” At any rate she looked kind . . . and she had been kind to his mother too. A moment later she said good-bye, and when Aunt Laura had escorted her to the door, for Mrs. Willis was a person of consequence, the rest of the company began to disappear. At last Edwin was left alone in the room with his aunt and uncle. Aunt Laura’s face, that had been glowing with hospitable smiles, now took a more serious cast.

“Edwin,” she said, “I want to speak to you.”

“Do you?” said Edwin. “Well . . . go on.”

“It’s very painful . . . I’m afraid . . . I’m half afraid that it will have upset your father, poor man—as if he hadn’t enough to put up with.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“How can you ask? I mean your behaviour to-day. In the church. In the cemetery. You stood there just as if . . . just as if . . . oh, it was most irreverent. Not a sign of grief! You must have noticed it, Albert?”

Uncle Albert, most uncomfortable at his inclusion in this family scene, but fully aware of the disaster which would follow denial, said, “Yes . . . yes . . . yes, certainly.”

“Every one must have noticed it,” Aunt Laura went on. “It was a public scandal. It was unnatural. It showed such a curious lack of feeling.”

“Feeling,” said Edwin. “What do you know about feeling?”

“Steady, Edwin, steady,” from Uncle Albert.

“If mother were here,” he said, “and could hear you talking this damned piffle she’d laugh at you. That’s what she’d do.”

“Edwin!”“It’s true. . . . She couldn’t stick your sort of grief at any price.”

“On the very day of her burial. . . .”

“She’s not buried. It wasn’t she you buried. Oh, I’m sick of you. . . .”

“Edwin . . .” said Uncle Albert, who felt that something in the way of protection was demanded of him. “Really now . . .”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, uncle,” said Edwin.

“You cruel boy,” Aunt Laura sobbed.

He left them there. He carried his bitterness into the drawing-room on the other side of the passage. . . . It was very quiet there. Through the bow window floated the perfume of the bed of stocks. In the corner stood the piano. He had often listened to his mother playing at night when he was in bed. He loved her to play him to sleep. The piano was shut; and the shut piano seemed to him symbolical. All the music and all the beauty that had been there had gone out of the house. The house was an empty shell. Like a dry chrysalis. Like a coffin. There, on the hearthrug, where he had crawled as a child, he lay down and cried.

CHAPTER X
THRENODY

I

From this emotional maelstrom the current of Edwin’s life flowed into a strange peace. It seemed that the catastrophe of Mrs. Ingleby’s death had taken the Halesby household by surprise and stunned it so thoroughly that it would never recover its normal consciousness. Edwin’s father, who had now returned to the ordinary round of business, was still dazed and puzzled, and very grey. Their servant, a young woman with an exaggerated sense of the proprieties, or perhaps a dread of living alone in such a gloomy house, had given notice. Only Aunt Laura, to Edwin’s shame, showed the least capacity for dealing with the situation.

However few of the graces may have fallen to her lot, she was certainly not lacking in the domestic virtues. When the maid departed with her tin trunk and many tearful protestations of her devotion to the memory of the dear mistress, Aunt Laura turned up her sleeves and took possession of the kitchen, and Mr. Ingleby, who had gloomily anticipated a domestic wilderness, found that in spite of the maid’s defection, ambrosial food appeared before him like manna from heaven, the only difference being that Uncle Albert, who could not be permitted for one moment to remain a bachelor, took his meals with the family.

The relation between Edwin and Aunt Laura was still difficult. She could not forget—and he could not withdraw—the bitter things that had been said on that most mournful day, though her native good humour, which was profuse and blustery like the rest of her, made it difficult for her to maintain an attitude of injured benignance. Even Edwin had to admit that she was a good cook; but the excellence of her food was qualified by her incessant chatter and her nervous laugh. Edwin simply couldn’t stick them; but it amazed him to find that Uncle Albert evidently found them cheerful and reassuring. Indeed, it was possibly one of the reasons why he had fallen in love with her, being a man who resembled her in nothing and whose enthusiasms could never get him beyond a couple of words and a giggle.

Mr. Ingleby too seemed to emerge without serious irritation from this diurnal bath of small-talk, retiring, as Edwin supposed, to certain gloomy depths of his own consciousness where the froth and bubble of Aunt Laura’s conversation became imperceptible. Even when she spoke to him directly—though most of her observations were addressed to the world in general—he would not trouble to answer her: a slight which Aunt Laura took quite good-humouredly.

“Bless you,” she would have said, “the man’s so wrapped up in himself that he’s miles away from anywhere. Of course you can understand it in a man of his age, especially when you realise how devoted he was to poor Beatrice”—Mrs. Ingleby’s name might never now escape the commiserating prefix—“but when a boy like Edwin tries it on it’s another matter altogether. It’s simply conceit. Personally, I think it was a great mistake of his poor mother’s to send him to St. Luke’s. The grammar school’s good enough for the Willises. A great mistake. . . . The boy is getting ideas of himself that aren’t warranted by his position. I don’t know what we are to do with him. We certainly can’t have him running wild here.” And Uncle Albert would say: “Certainly, certainly, my love. . . .”

In spite of these pronounced opinions Aunt Laura was careful not to cross swords with Edwin himself. Indeed, she went a good deal out of her way to propitiate him with various material kindnesses, and particularly certain delicacies in the way of food, which, to the ruin of her figure in later life, represented to her the height of earthly enjoyment. Edwin didn’t quite know how to take these attentions. He couldn’t help disliking her, and the fact that she was really kind to him rather took the wind out of his sails. He would have been much happier if they had been allowed to remain in a state of armed neutrality.

A fortnight passed . . . happily for Edwin in spite of all that he felt he ought to feel. He missed his mother awfully. That was true enough. And yet . . . and yet it was also true to say that he was only beginning to live: to appreciate the joy of his growing strength: to realise the enchanted domains that were open to his eager feet and to his eager mind. Here he had freedom, leisure, health: so much of the world to see: so much of human knowledge to explore. And though the thought of death, and the particular disaster that had befallen him fell upon his spirit sometimes with a shadow that plunged the whole world into desperate darkness, he could not deny that the shadow was gradually lifting, and the character of the agony that had desolated him was becoming less spontaneous, till, in the end, it became almost a calculable emotion that might be indulged or banished at will. He found it difficult to understand this. He thought: “I’m a brute, a callous, insensitive brute. What would she think of me . . .? And yet, I can’t help it. I’m made like that. . . .” And then, after long and bitter deliberation: “I believe she would understand. I expect she was made like that too. I’m sure she was. And if there’s one thing in the world that she’d hate it would be that I should force myself to pretend anything.”

The high summer weather held. Never was there such a June. Edwin, in the joy of perfect health, would get up very early in the morning when the dew lay on the roses, and run in a sweater and flannel trousers down the lane and over the field to the mill-pond where he and his mother had walked so often in the evenings of spring. Here, where the water was deepest and great striped perch stole slowly under the camp-shedding, he would strip and bathe, lying on his back in the water so that low sunbeams came dancing over the surface into his eyes that were on the level of the flat water-lily leaves and their yellow balls now breaking into cups.

Afterwards when he would sit glowing on the bank, the sun would be rising and growing warmer every minute, and this new warmth would seem to accentuate the odour of the place that was compact of the yellow water-lily’s harsh savour, the odour of soaked wood, and another, more subtly blended: the composite smell of water that is neither fast nor stagnant, the most provocative and the coolest smell on earth.

On the way home he would sometimes get a whiff of the miller’s cowhouse, when the door was thrown open, and from within there came a sound of quiet breathing or of milk hissing in a pail. And sometimes, from the garden, the scent of a weed bonfire would drift across his path. All things smelt more poignantly at this early hour of the morning. All things smell more wonderfully early in life. . . .

With these wonders the day began; but stranger things lay in store for him. He revisited all his old haunts: the tangled woods and gardens of Shenstone on the hill-side: the ruins of the Cistercian abbey on whose fall the poet had moralised, the little chapel that marked the grave of the murdered Mercian prince. His bicycle took him farther. Westward . . . always westward.

In those days it always seemed to him as if the mountainous country that his mother had shown him that evening on Uffdown, rolling away into remote and cloudy splendours, must be the land of his heart’s desire: and though he could never reach it in a day, he managed several times to cross the Severn and even to scale the foothills upon the farther bank from which he could see the Clee Hills rising in a magnificent bareness, shaking the woods and pastures from their knees. And these distant hills would tempt him to think of the future and other desires of his heart: in the near distance Oxford, where Layton and other demigods in grey flannel trousers abode, and beyond the fine untravelled world, rivers and seas and forests, desolate wonderful names. China . . . Africa . . . “Some day,” he said to himself, “I will go to Africa. . . .”

In this way he began to think of his present adventures as a kind of prelude to others remoter and more vast. One day he had ridden farther away than usual, and having taken his lunch at the bridge town of Bewdley, he pushed his bicycle up the immense hill that overshadows the town along the road to Tenbury. For all its steepness this mountain road was strangely exhilarating, the air that moved above it grew so clean and clear. Below him, between the road and the river, lay the mighty remnants of the Forest of Wyre.

His way tumbled again to a green valley, where no mountains were to be seen; and while Edwin was deciding to turn off down the first descending lane and explore the forest, he heard a sound of spades and pickaxes and came upon a group of navvies, several of them stripped to the waist in the sun, working at a cutting of red earth that was already deep on either side of the road. For the most part they worked in silence; but one of them, a little one-eyed man, with a stiff soldierly back, encouraged them with a string of jokes. They called him “Gunner,” and the elaboration with which his chest had been tattooed with nautical symbols led Edwin to suppose that he was a sailor. When he saw Edwin leaning on his bicycle and watching the work, he called out to him, asking if he wanted a job. Edwin shook his head. “I reckon,” said the Gunner, “that a foreman’s job would be more in your line, Gaffer. It’s a fine sight to see other people working. The harder the better.”

The men laughed and stretched their backs, leaning, on their spades, and Edwin could see how a fine dew of sweat had broken out under the hair on their chests. It seemed to him a noble sight. “What are you working at?” he asked. “Is it a railway?”

“To hell with your railway,” said the Gunner. “Who would make a railway heading for the river Severn? No . . . It’s a pipe-track. This here’s the Welsh water scheme.”

“Where is it going to?”

“North Bromwich.”

“And where does it come from?”

“From Wales. . . . From the Dulas Valley, where they’re rebuilding the reservoir under a hill they call Savaddan. And a black job it is, I can tell you.”

“Is it anywhere near a place called Felindre? I think it must be.”

“Right, my son. The pipe-line goes through Felindre. Sixty or eighty mile from here.”

“My people come from Felindre . . .”“Well, God pity them. . . . That’s all I can say. I’ve been in that place on a Christmas Day, and not a pint of beer stirring. . . . Ah, that’s a black job. Well, mates, come on. . . .”

Again the men who had been listening, lifted their picks and spades, and the busy clinking sounds of digging began again. Edwin wished the Gunner good-afternoon, and began to push his bicycle up the hill again. Sixty or eighty miles. . . . That wasn’t so very far. Six or eight hours’ ride. . . . Perhaps some day he could go there. He half persuaded himself with a sentimental argument that it was only natural that he should be happy in the country from which his mother’s people had come; that even the borderland of it must be possessed by the same curiously friendly atmosphere. “I’m always most happy west of Severn,” he thought. And then he began to wonder about the sailor whom the men called Gunner. Perhaps that man had actually been in Africa. . . .

He managed to get a sixpenny tea at a little general shop on the very crown of the hills, where a small hamlet named Far Forest stood. The romantic name of the place appealed to him; and it was a curious adventure to sit down alone to tea in a back room that smelt of candles and paraffin and bacon. At the shop door a serious old man with a white beard had received him; but the tea was brought to him by a little girl in an extremely clean pinafore whom the old man addressed as Eva.

She was a curious mixture of shyness and friendliness, and her serious eyes examined Edwin minutely from under straight dark eyebrows. When she came in with the tea she found Edwin examining some books that stood in a cupboard with a glass door. Evidently she was very proud of them.

“They are my brother James’s prizes,” she said, and went on to explain how clever he was and what a scholar, until the old man called “Eva,” and she returned to him in the shop. It was all amazingly peaceful, with the westering sun flooding the doorway where the old man had been sitting out in a chair when Edwin arrived: and opposite the door was a little patch of green strewn with mossy boulders, a kind of platform in front of which the huge panorama of Clee and all the Radnor hills expanded.

“In a place like this,” Edwin thought, “people never change.” It was a ripping, placid sort of existence, in which nothing ever happened, but all things were just simple and serious and tender like the eyes of the little girl named Eva who had brought him his tea. “Good-evening, sir,” said the old man at the door. It was rather nice to be called “Sir.” Coasting down the hill into Bewdley, Edwin had all the joy of the state that he called “the after-tea feeling.” It was exhilarating and splendid: and at the end of it came the misty river town with its stone bridge and the great river of the Marches swirling proudly to the south. When he neared home, divinely tired and hungry, the black-country stretched before him in a galaxy of starry lights. As he crossed the brow of the hill above Halesby, the Willis’ Mawne furnaces suddenly lit the sky with a great flower of fire.

II

At home, Auntie Laura was in possession. Evidently she was primed with serious business; for Edwin could see that his father sat spiritually, if not physically, pinioned in the plush arm-chair. Aunt Laura wore an air of overpowering satisfaction. Evidently she had already triumphed, and she smiled so cheerfully at Edwin that he felt convinced that she had scored him off in some way. On the side of the fire opposite to his father Uncle Albert sat smoking, not as if he enjoyed it, but because it gave him the excuse of an occupation into which he might relapse in moments of tension.

“Well, here he is at last,” said Aunt Laura. “We’ve been talking about you, Edwin.”

Edwin had guessed as much.

“Well, what is it?” he said, and his tone implied that he was certain that some dark scheme had been launched against his peace of mind. Uncle Albert puffed uncomfortably at his pipe and nicotine or saliva made a gurgling noise in it. Mr. Ingleby sighed. Aunt Laura, tumbling to the hostility of the new atmosphere, hastened to propitiate.

“I expect you’re hungry, Edwin,” she said. . . .

“No. . . . I’m not hungry, thanks. What is it?”

“You needn’t be cross, Edwin. . . . We’ve decided. . . .” So it was all arranged. . . . “We’ve decided that your father must go away for a rest . . . a little holiday. . . .”

“Yes. . . . And that means, of course, that we shall have to shut up the house until he returns, and of course that will be quite easy, because it’s time you were getting back to St. Luke’s. We thought you had better go on Monday.”

“Monday?” It was now Saturday.

“Yes. . . . Monday. It is fortunate that your uncle has to go into North Bromwich on business that day. . .”

“Yes. . . . Yes. . . Business,” put in Uncle Albert, as though he were anxious to explain that his visit to that sink of iniquity was in no way connected with pleasure.

Edwin burned with sudden and quite unreasonable indignation.

“And you agreed to this, father?”

“Yes. . . . Of course I agreed. Your aunt is quite right. I am overtired. It was a terrible strain. And the doctor suggested that my native air. . . .”

“Oh . . . I don’t mean that,” said Edwin. “I mean about St. Luke’s. . . I can’t go back now . . . of course I can’t . . .”

“Don’t be ridiculous and childish, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura severely. “You don’t imagine just because”—with a hushed and melancholy inflection—“this . . . has happened, you’re never going to school again?”

“No. . . . I don’t mean that. Of course I don’t. Only . . . only the term is nearly over. In another fortnight all the chaps will be going away for the hols. It isn’t worth it. I should feel . . .”

“We weren’t considering your feelings so much as your good,” said Aunt Laura complacently.

“Father . . . father . . . you can’t mean it. You see. . . . I don’t know . . . it would all be so strange. So awfully difficult. I should have lost touch with all the work the form was doing. I shouldn’t be able to pick it up. It’s rotten . . . rotten . . .”

“Edwin, you will distress your father . . .”

“Oh, Aunt Laura, do let father speak for himself.”

Immense volumes of yellow smoke signalled Uncle Albert’s distress.

“Father . . .”

“It’s difficult, Edwin . . .”

“But it isn’t difficult, father, dear. Aunt Laura doesn’t realise. She doesn’t realise what it would be like going back like that to St. Luke’s. It would only be waste of time. Father, I’d read during the hols. . . . I would, really. It isn’t that I want to get out of going back to work. It isn’t that a bit. I’d work like blazes. Only . . . only everything now seems to have gone funny and empty . . . sort of blank. I . . . I feel awful without mother . . .”

“Edwin . . .” warningly, from Aunt Laura.

That Aunt Laura should presume to correct him in a matter of delicacy! “Of course you don’t understand,” he said bitterly. “You don’t want me to speak about mother. You’ve had your excitement out of it. You’ve had your chance of bossing round, and now you want to arrange what I shall do for the rest of my life, I suppose. You’ve no . . . no reverence.”

He was really very angry. It was always difficult for him to be anything else with Aunt Laura; for he felt that it was somehow horribly unjust for her to be alive when his mother was dead, and he could never, never forget what his darling had told him of her stupid jealousy. On this occasion Aunt Laura seemed to be less disturbed than usual by his violence. She spoke with a calculated coolness that compelled the admiration of her husband, sitting very uncomfortably on the edge of the storm, desperately anxious to show that without his taking sides his wife could rely on his support.

“It’s funny, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura, stroking her black skirt, “that you should use the word Reverence. . . . It reminds me of something that I wanted to speak to you about. You realise, don’t you, that we are all supposed to be in mourning? And yet, day after day, I see you going down the town in a pair of white canvas gym. shoes. White. . . ! Now, you mustn’t talk to me about reverence, Edwin.”

Edwin burst out laughing. It was no good arguing with the woman. He gave a despairing glance at his father. Was it possible that the man could listen seriously to superficial cant of this kind? Was it possible that he could tolerate the woman’s presence in the house? He looked, and he saw nothing but tiredness and desolation in the man’s face. He saw that in reality his father was too tired for anything but compromise. All life, all determination had been stamped out of him, and though Edwin clutched at the sympathy which he knew must be concealed in the man’s mind, he began to realise that, after all, circumstances had left the whole household curiously dependent on Aunt Laura; that without her the whole domestic machine would collapse, and that, therefore, the infliction must be suffered patiently. Edwin determined to leave the matter where it stood, but Aunt Laura, inflamed with approaching triumph, would not let it rest. “I am sure that you agree with me, John,” she threw out challengingly.

“No doubt Edwin did not understand. You know more about the people in the town than we do, Laura.”

“Compromise . . .” thought Edwin, “but I suppose it can’t be helped.” At any rate nothing that he might do should give the man a moment’s discomfort. He possessed himself in silence.

“But I think, perhaps,” Mr. Ingleby went on, “that Edwin is right. It would be hardly worth while going back to St. Luke’s for a fortnight.”

“Of course you know best, John,” Aunt Laura hurried to assure him, “but it’s really quite impossible for us to put him up while the house is closed and you are away. You know that we’ve arranged to have the painters in.”.

On a matter of fact, and one outside controversy, Uncle Albert felt that he was safe in giving his support.

“I quite understand that,” said Mr. Ingleby, “but it’s a simple matter. Edwin can come with me.”

“Oh, father, how wonderful!”

“Well, of course,” said Aunt Laura, “if he won’t be a nuisance to you. . . .” But Edwin was too pleased and excited to mind what she said. He kissed his father, and Mr. Ingleby, with a curious tenderness, clasped his arm. It seemed that catastrophe had strange uses. Already it had thrown the ordinary course of life into more than one curious byway, and now, behold, he was to embark upon another strange adventure, to become familiar with another sort of life. He determined that his duty (whatever that might be) should not suffer by it. When they returned from their holiday, all through the summer months, he would work like anything: he would make that Balliol scholarship that had seemed part of an indefinite future, as near a certainty as made no matter. He would show them—in other words Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert—what he could do.

“If we are going on Monday I had better think of packing,” he said. “Shall I need to take many things, father?”

“Oh, don’t worry your father, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura.

III

Sunday came with its usual toll of dreariness. The customary penance of the morning service was actually the least trying part of it to Edwin. To begin with, the parish church of Halesby was a structure of great beauty. Originally an offshoot of the abbey that now stood in ruins above the long string of slowly silting fishponds on the Stour, the grace and ingenuity of successive ages of priestly architects had embellished its original design with many beautiful features, and the slender beauty of its spire, crowning a steep bank above the degraded river, had imposed an atmosphere of dignity and rest upon the rather squalid surroundings of this last of the black-country towns. The music, even though it was not in any way comparable with that of St. Luke’s, was good, and the recent arrival of a young and distinguished rector from Cambridge, whose voice and person would have qualified him for success as a bishop, or an actor manager, had restored to the building some of its popularity as a place of resort or of escape from the shuttered Sunday streets.

At ten o’clock the fine peal of bells filled the air with an inspiriting music. Edwin remembered, hearing them, the melancholy with which they had often inspired him on dank evenings of autumn when the ringers were at practice. Very different they sounded on this summer morning, for a gentle wind was moving from the hills to westward, and chime eddied in a soft air that was clearer than the usual, if only because it was Sunday and the smoke of a thousand furnaces and chimney stacks no longer filled it with suffocation.

At ten-fifteen precisely Aunt Laura appeared in the dining-room, in a black silk dress smelling faintly of lavender: a minute later, Uncle Albert, in a frock coat, coaxing the last sweetness from his after-breakfast pipe. Mr. Ingleby also had exchanged the alpaca jacket in which he had been leisurely examining his roses, for the same uniform. Uncle Albert, Edwin noticed, had not yet removed the deep band of crape from his top-hat. As usual, Aunt Laura appeared a little flustered, the strain of conscious magnificence in her millinery making it difficult for her to collect her thoughts.

“Are you sure you have all the prayer-books, Albert?” she asked anxiously.Uncle Albert regretfully knocked out his pipe. “Yes, my dear,” he said.

“Don’t scatter those ashes all over the fireplace, Albert. The least you can do is to keep the room tidy on Sunday.”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Edwin, have you got your prayer-book? Why, boy, you’ve actually put on a grey striped tie. Run and change it quickly. I don’t know what people will think.”

Edwin, smarting, obeyed. When he returned the atmosphere of impatience had increased. Aunt Laura was saying: “John, dear, are you sure that the clock is right? I’m afraid the bells have stopped. No . . . thank goodness, there they are again. That’s better, Edwin. Now we really must start. You have the money for the collection, Albert? Give it to me, or you’ll be sure to leave me without any. I do hope we shan’t be late. We should look so prominent. . . .”

Why should they look so prominent? The question puzzled Edwin all the way down through the quiet streets. But even though this mystery exercised his mind he could not help appreciating the curious atmosphere of the route through which they progressed. At the corner of the street the first familiar thing smote him: it was the odour of stale spirits and beer that issued from between the closed doors of the Bull’s Head public-house, behind which it had been secreted ever since an uproarious closing time the night before. Then came the steep High Street, and from its gutters the indescribable smell of vegetable refuse left there overnight from the greengrocer’s stalls. On an ordinary morning it would not have been noticed, for the motion of wheeled traffic in the highway and the sight of open shop windows would have distracted the attention. On Sunday morning, however, it became the most important thing in the road, and seemed to emphasise the deadness of the day in contrast to the activities and dissipations of Saturday night. It called attention to the indubitable sordidness of the whole street: the poverty of its grimy brick: the faded lettering above the shop windows: the paint that cracked and peeled from the closed shutters. On this morning Halesby was a squalid and degraded town. Even Mr. Ingleby’s shop in the High Street looked curiously small and mean. Edwin disliked the sight of his own name printed over it. It reminded him of Griffin’s social prejudices.

They entered a small door in the transept when the last bell was tolling; and as they stepped into the full church Edwin realised at last the reason of Aunt Laura’s particular anxieties. They were on show. This was the first occasion, since the funeral, that the family had entered the church, and, in accordance with an immemorial custom, the congregation were now engaged in searching their faces and their clothing for evidences of the grief that was proper to their condition.

Kneeling in the conventional opening prayer, Edwin could see through his folded fingers that the whole of the gathering was engaged in a ghoulish scrutiny of their party. Now, for the first time, he realised the full meaning of the horror with which his grey tie had inspired Aunt Laura. He could even feel Aunt Laura, who remained kneeling longer than usual, wallowing in the emotion that her presence evoked. It was a rotten business. If he could have dared to do so without causing an immense scandal, Edwin would have got up and left the church. He saw Aunt Laura glance at his father with a kind of proprietary air, as if this exhibition were really her own responsibility and the degree of interest that Mr. Ingleby’s appearance aroused were to her credit.

Edwin also looked at his father. He wondered if Mr. Ingleby were in the least conscious of the spectacle to which he was contributing: decided that he wasn’t. He was thankful for that. It became apparent to him that, if the truth were known, his father was a creature of the most astonishing simplicity: a simplicity that was almost pathetic. He could see, he knew that the whole church must see, that the man had suffered. The brutes. . . . He was awfully sorry for his father. And he loved him for it. The whole affair was shameful and degrading. Never mind . . . in another twenty-four hours they would be clear of all this sort of thing. It was something to be thankful for.

“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness and doeth that which is lawful and right. . . .” The rector began to intone. He spoke the words as though his whole soul were behind them: his voice vibrated with a practiced earnestness: and all the time Edwin could see his dark eyes scrutinising the congregation in detail, congratulating himself on the presence of his supporters, speculating on the absence of certain others. In the final cadence of the sentence, a masterly modulation that would have made you swear that his whole life was in his mission, his eyes swivelled into the corner where the Ingleby party were sitting, and Edwin could have bet his life that they lighted up with a kind of satisfaction at the addition of this undoubted attraction to his morning’s entertainment. It even seemed to him that the rector’s glances almost imperceptibly indicated to his wife, a little woman of a pathetic earnestness qualified for the ultimate bishopric by a complete subjection to her husband’s personality, the fact that the Inglebys were on view.

The rector, who had views on the advantages of scamping the drier portions of the church service and stressing any sentence that held possibilities of fruity sentiment, soon got into his stride. He was in excellent voice that morning, and on two occasions in the first lesson availed himself of an opportunity of exploiting the emotional break—it was very nearly a sob—that had done so much to establish his reputation in his early days at Halesby. He was making hay while the sun shone: for in the confirmation service such opportunities are more limited.

Edwin enjoyed the psalms. There was even something familiar and pleasant in the tunes of the Cathedral Psalter after the exotic harmonies of St. Luke’s. He sang the tenor part (when last he remembered singing them it had been alto) and lost his sense of his surroundings in the beauty of the words. In the middle of them, however, he became conscious of his father singing too. He had never sat next to his father in church before. His mother had always separated them: and for this reason he had never before heard his father sing. The result filled him with horror. Mr. Ingleby had no idea of tune and was apparently unconscious of this disability. Edwin reflected how great an interest music had been in his mother’s life: realised that from this part of her his father must always have been isolated by this natural barrier. It was strange. . . . He began to wonder what they really had in common. He remembered Griffin. No . . . not that. . . .

This speculation he did his best to stifle while the rector galloped over the desert wastes of the Litany: but the kneeling posture was rendered uncomfortable by the presence in front of him of an old maiden lady who smelt of caraway seeds, a spice that Edwin detested. A hymn followed. Luckily, this time his father did not sing. Poor creature. . . . Edwin was now so ashamed of his criticism that he almost wished he would. And then they settled down to the sermon.

From the first Edwin had decided that he would not listen. The simple austerity of the service at St. Luke’s, where the liturgy was allowed to unfold its sonorous splendours for itself, had bred in him a distaste for the rector’s histrionics. So he did not hear them, contenting himself with a detailed examination of such of the congregation as were within his range. He saw them classified in their social gradations from the pompous distinction of Sir Joseph Hingston, the ironmaster, who, in spite of his baronetcy, wore a frock coat that did not differ greatly from that of Mr. Ingleby, to their late maid, dressed in black, and now conscious of the reflected glory that she had almost sacrificed by leaving. And the thing that impressed him most about this very various gathering was their shabbiness, and the fact that nearly all of those whom he knew seemed so much older than they had been when he last saw them.

Thinking of the light and elegance and cleanliness of St. Luke’s, it appeared to him that Halesby was indeed a muddy and obscure backwater and that his own people, sitting in the pew beside him, were in reality as much fitted to inhabit it as all the rest of the shabby congregation. Even the Willises, his mother’s new friends, whom a wave of commercial prosperity had carried forward into one of the front pews of the nave within calculable distance of the glory of Sir Joseph Hingston himself, would have looked very ordinary folk in the chapel at St. Luke’s.

He began to wonder if Griffin, and more latterly Aunt Laura, had been right: whether, after all, his mother had made an ambitious mistake in sending him to a public school when the ancient foundation of the Halesby Grammar School had stood waiting for the reception of him and his kind. There, in the fifth row on the left of the nave, sat Mr. Kelly, the grammar school’s head-master: a swarthy Irishman with a sinister, rather disappointed face. He wasn’t at all Edwin’s idea of a schoolmaster. Even old fat Leeming looked more distinguished than that. And yet, if he were good enough for the son of the opulent Walter Willis, he must surely be good enough for the son of an ordinary Halesby tradesman.

For the greater part of the sermon these problems of social precedence engaged Edwin’s puzzled mind. It had come as something of a shock to him to find that his mother came of a farming stock, even though the farmers had lived in a Norman castle and had once been good enough to bear a lance in company with the Lords Marchers. Examining the face of his father, who appeared to be engrossed in the rector’s rhetoric, Edwin decided that his features were really far too distinguished to belong naturally to a country chemist. Here, perhaps, in spite of present circumstance, lay the explanation of his own indubitable gentility. It was funny, he reflected, that he had never heard anything from his mother about the origins of the Inglebys: he had not even known from what part of the country their stock had sprung, and this ignorance made the expedition on which they were to start on the morrow more enthralling than ever. It was quite possible that the discovery of some illustrious ancestry might put him right with himself and justify his claim to a birthright which at present seemed rather shadowy.

Even if this failed, he decided, there remained Oxford. A fellow of Balliol (his imagination travelled fast) would have a right to hold up his head with any one in that congregation—Sir Joseph Hingston not excepted—even though the name of the fellow’s father happened to be printed on his toothbrush. It might even be for him to restore the prestige of the Ingleby name. “But in that case,” he thought, “it will be better for me to buy my toothbrushes somewhere else. . . .” Even the fact that Keats was a chemist did not modify this determination.

The sermon ended, and during the collection a hymn was sung. Half an hour before this, a gowned verger had stolen on tiptoe to the Inglebys’ pew and whispered in Mr. Ingleby’s ear, depositing a wooden plate lined with velvet under the seat as furtively as if it were something of which he was ashamed. When the collection began Edwin’s father left his pew and began to carry the plate round the transept in which they were seated.

Edwin, out of the corner of his eye, saw a glow of satisfaction spread over the features of Aunt Laura. Now, more than ever, the depth of the family’s grief was to be demonstrated in the eyes of all men. Edwin thought it was a rotten shame to make his father collect on this Sunday of all Sundays. The hymn was a short one, and for several minutes after it was finished the clink of silver and the duller sound of copper coins was heard in every corner of the echoing church. Then the sides-men formed themselves into a double file and moved singly up the aisle. First came Sir Joseph Hingston, erect and podgy, with his smooth grey waistcoat in front of him like the breast of a pouter pigeon. Mr. Willis, of Mawne, with a humbler but not unambitious abdominal development followed him. Edwin conceived a fanciful theory that when Mr. Willis, in the course of time, should have grown as wealthy as the baronet, there would be nothing to choose between their profiles. A miserly but erect old gentleman named Farr, who had once given Edwin a halfpenny, followed Mr. Willis. Last but one came Edwin’s father, with the red-bearded undertaker an eager last.

On the whole, Edwin was satisfied (as was obviously Aunt Laura) with Mr. Ingleby’s appearance. He certainly looked more like the father of a fellow of Balliol than Sir Joseph Hingston. The money descended with a series of opulent splashes into the brass salver that the rector held in front of the chancel steps: the organist (in private life he was a carpenter) meanwhile extemporising vaguely in the key of C. The rector carried the salver arm-high to the altar, as though he were exhibiting to the Almighty the personal fruits of his oratory. Mr. Ingleby stole quietly to his seat bathed in the admiring glances of Aunt Laura. A short prayer . . . “And now to God the father. . . .” The organist launched into his latest achievement: the Gavotte from Mignon.

Outside the church the summer sunlight seemed more exhilarating than ever. It was worth while, Edwin thought, to have suffered the dreariness of the morning’s service to experience this curious feeling of lightness and relief. He supposed that he was not alone in this sensation; for the crowd that moved slowly from the churchyard gates with a kind of gathering resilience was a happy crowd, and its voices that at first were hushed soon became gay and irresponsible in spite of the slight awkwardness that its Sunday clothes imposed on it. No doubt they were anticipating their Sunday dinner, for, as Edwin had noticed, the liturgy of the Church of England has some value as an apÉritif. Even Aunt Laura was full of a subdued playfulness. “What a shame, Albert,” she said, “that the rector didn’t appoint you to collect to-day.” She patted his arm.

“Oh, I don’t know, my dear. . . . It wasn’t my turn, you know.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Aunt Laura, “but on a day like this it would have been rather a delicate compliment. I must speak to the rector about it.”

“I don’t think I should do that,” said Uncle Albert, with some alarm.

She laughed gently. “Don’t be an old juggins,” she said.

All down the High Street, in the moving crowd, Edwin could smell the savour of roast beef and baked potatoes and cabbage water wafted from innumerable kitchen windows. . . .

IV

In the afternoon they left Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert asleep in two arm-chairs on opposite sides of the drawing-room fireplace, and Edwin and his father went for a walk by the old abbey fish-ponds. It was the first time for many years that Edwin had been for a walk with his father, and the experience promised a new and exciting intimacy to which he looked forward with eagerness.

Even at this hour of the day the Sabbath atmosphere imposed itself on the countryside. The road that they followed was long and straight with an open frontage above the reedy pools, and along the cinder path at the side of it a great number of men were lounging: a strange and foreign population of miners from the Mawne pits, who only emerged from their cavernous occupation on this day of the week, and other industrial workers from the great steel rolling mills that lay in the Stour Valley to westward.

None of them took any notice of Edwin and his father. It was even doubtful if they knew who they were; for these men passed a curiously separate existence, and Mr. Ingleby would only be familiar to their wives who did the family shopping on Saturday nights while their masters were waiting for the football results in their favourite pubs. On this day the miner’s passion for sport of all kinds asserted itself in the presence of a great number of slim, jacketed whippets, each warranted to beat anything on four legs for speed, slinking tenderly at their masters’ heels.

It seemed strange to Edwin that his father should know none of these men. It showed him again how remote and solitary the man’s life must have been in this ultimate corner of the Black Country. “We don’t really belong here,” he thought. “We’re foreigners. . . .” And the reflection pleased him, though he remembered, with a tinge of regret, that by this denial he dissociated himself from his old idol the poet of the Pastoral Ballad.

Soon they left the cinder path behind, and plunged into a green lane descending to a water-mill, turned by the tawny Stour, as yet unsullied by the refuse of factories. At a sandstone bridge, whose parapet was deeply carved with the initials of lovers long since dead or disillusioned, they paused, and, for the first time, began to talk.

“It’s a funny thing, father,” Edwin said, “but I don’t even know where we are going to-morrow. . . .”

Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Don’t you, Edwin? Well, the doctor said it would be best for me to go to my native air; and it struck me as rather a good plan. I never went there with your mother. It belonged to another life. It is quite twenty years since I have been in Somerset.”

“Somerset . . .? I didn’t even know it was Somerset.”

“No. . . . Well, as I say, it was another world.”

Somerset. . . . Edwin’s imagination began to play with the word. He could remember very little: only a huge green county sprawling on a map with rivers . . . yes, and hills. A county stretched beside the Severn Sea. The Severn again! A western county. Cheddar cheese. Lorna Doone. Cider. Coleridge. Sedgemoor.

“But what part of Somerset?”

“The eastern end.”

That was a pity. The farther west the better.

“I suppose it’s rather a flat county?”

“A great part of it. Did you ever hear of Mendip?

“‘The rugged miners poured to war
From Mendip’s sunless caves.’”“Yes, of course. . . .”

“I came from a little village on the top of Mendip. Twenty years ago it was decaying. Now I expect there’s next to nothing left of it. Twenty years makes a lot of difference. It’s made a lot of difference to me.”

“And what was the name of the village?”

“I don’t suppose you will ever have heard it. It was called Highberrow.”

“Highberrow . . . no. It’s a jolly name.”

“I don’t think it ever struck me in that light.”

“Highberrow . . . is it right in the hills?”

“Yes . . . quite high up. I don’t know how many hundreds of feet. I wasn’t interested in that sort of thing then. It lies right under Axdown, the highest point of the range. On a clear day you can see right over the Bristol Channel into Wales. All the mountains there. The Brecon Beacons. The Sugarloaf. The Black Mountain.”

“The Black Mountain. But how strange. Why, when you were a little boy you must have been nearly able to see the place where mother lived. With a big sea between. It must have been wonderful . . .”

“Yes . . . I suppose it was. I scarcely remember. Look right down in that deep pool. That’s a trout.”

“A trout. . . . Where? Do show me . . .”

The vision of Mendip faded instantly, and Edwin only saw the rufous sands of the pool beneath the bridge, and in it a shadowy elongated figure with its head to the slow stream and faintly quivering fins. In Devonshire, Widdup had told him, the rivers swarmed with trout: you could catch them all day long if you wanted to, and Edwin, loyal to his own county’s excellences, had only been able to produce the silvery roach of the millpool, shoaling round the water-lilies and the mythical legend of carnivorous pike lurking in Mr. Willis’s ponds in the Holloway. He wished he had known that there were veritable trout in the Stour. Now it was too late to do anything; but when they returned from their holiday, he determined that he would catch this shadowy creature, even if he had to induce it to gorge a worm. Still, it was quite possible that by the time he returned he would have captured many trout. For Somerset lay next to Devon on the map.

“Are there many trout in Mendip?” he asked.

“No. . . . There is only one river of any size. The Ax, that runs underground and comes out of Axcombe gorge, and there are practically no trout in the Ax. It’s a dry country. Limestone. Very barren too.”

That didn’t really matter. In a day or two Edwin would be able to see for himself. On their way home they spoke very little. His father seemed to find it difficult to talk to him; and in a little while Edwin became conscious of his own unending string of questions that led nowhere.

But all that night he dreamed of Mendip. A vast, barren, mountain-country, his dreams pictured it; waterless, and honeycombed with the dark caves from which Macaulay’s miners had poured to war; a deserted countryside full of broken villages and bounded by steep cliffs against which the isolating waters of the Severn Sea broke in a soundless tumult. And there Ax, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man. A fluent gentleman with a noble brow and burning grey eyes pointed out the course of the river to him. He was the only other soul beside Edwin and his father, in all that desert country, and Edwin introduced him to Mr. Ingleby as Mr. Coleridge—rather diffidently, for he was not sure how the poet would take it until he remembered and explained that Keats was a chemist. There, on the high crown of Axdown, his mother joined them. She, it seemed, was not afraid of Mr. Coleridge. She took his arm so familiarly that Edwin trembled for her; but the poet only smiled, while she pointed out to him a mass of huge fantastic mountains ranged beyond the gleaming sea. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said. “You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the end. Can you see the little bedroom window on the extreme left? . . . quite a little window?” Coleridge nodded, and Mr. Ingleby, too, shielded his eyes with his hands and looked. “It was my last chance of showing it to you,” she said.

“But there are practically no trout in the Alph,” said Coleridge.

CHAPTER XI
THE THRESHOLD

I

The next evening, when Edwin and his father reached Bristol, a steady drizzle had set in from the west. They pushed their bicycles out of the station yard at Temple Meads and rode between slippery tramway lines towards a small hotel, a stone’s-throw from Bristol Bridge, where Mr. Ingleby had decided to put up for the night. “It’s no use trying to ride on to Wringford this evening,” he said, “for the wind will be against us and it’s collar work most of the way. I think we can be comfortable here to-night. I used to know the landlord of this place. He was a Mendip man.”

The Mendip landlord, of course, had been dead for many years, having made his descent by the route that is particularly easy for licensed victuallers; but it happened that his daughter had married the new tenant, and this woman, a comfortable creature who spoke with the slight burr that appeared in Mr. Ingleby’s speech in times of anger or any other violent emotion, welcomed them for her father’s sake, and gave them a bare but cleanly room on the second story.

The windows of this room looked down obliquely on to the tidal basin of the Avon, thronged with small coasting tramps and sailing ships: and Edwin was content to stay there watching them; for he had never seen the traffic of a harbour before. It was still too wet to think of going out onto the quays; but even from a distance the misty spectacle, enveloped in veils of driving rain, was romantic.

Edwin watched while a pair of busy tugboats pushed and pulled and worried the hull of a wooden schooner in to mid-stream. The water was high, and she was due to catch the falling tide to Avonmouth. Whither was she bound? He did not know. Perhaps her way lay down channel to pick up a cargo of bricks from Bridgewater. Perhaps she was setting out at that moment to essay the icy passage of the Horn. Perhaps, in another four months, she would have doubled the Cape and lie wallowing in the torpid seas about Zanzibar. It inspired Edwin to think that he was standing at one of the gateways of the world. From the site of the stone bridge above their lodging, just four hundred years ago, the Venetian pilot, Cabot, had cast loose in the selfsame way, and sailed westward with his three sons, Lewes, Sebastyan, and Sancto, to the mainland of unknown America. To-day, from the same wet quays, other adventurous prows were stretching forth to the ends of the earth. To China . . . To Africa. Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end.

With his accustomed curiosity as to the origins of his own emotions Edwin was not long in deciding that his growing eagerness to see the beauty and strangeness of the world must have sprung from the fact that his ancestors had lived upon the shores of this great waterway. From Highberrow, his father had told him, you could see the whole expanse of the Bristol Channel. From Highberrow, perhaps, some forbear of his own had watched the caravels of Cabot setting down channel with the ebb tide. He was bewildered with the splendour of his heritage. It was impossible to imagine that Sir Joseph Hingston’s family had the least share in such a romantic past.

In the evening, after supper, the rain ceased, and Mr. Ingleby proposed that they should go for a walk through the city. He had known it well in his youth, and it seemed to fill him with an almost childish delight to show Edwin the things that he remembered. They passed through many narrow winding streets where the overhanging houses of the merchant venturers stood, and ancient churches had been huddled into corners by the growing city. “I remember every inch of it,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a happy laugh. Again they crossed the river, and skirting a line of shipping warehouses, now cavernous and deserted, they plunged into a sordid quarter full of sailors’ drinking dens that smelled of rum, and marine stores that smelled of tar.

“Where are we going?” Edwin asked.

“You’ll see in a minute,” said Mr. Ingleby. And, in a minute, Edwin saw.

They had emerged from the huddled houses into a large open space, and in the midst of it rose a miracle of beauty such as Edwin had never seen before: a structure too delicate in its airy loveliness to have been built of stone; so fragile in its strength that it seemed impossible that the slender flying buttresses should support it. The shadowy spire could be seen dimly piercing a sky that had been washed to clearness by the rain; but inside the church, for some reason unknown, the lamps had been lighted, and the whole building glowed as though it had been one immense lantern. There could not be another miracle of this kind in the world, Edwin thought.

He remembered a white model of the Taj Mahal at Agra, that stood beneath a dome of glass in Mrs. Barrow’s drawing-room, an intricate carving of ivory with a huge dome and many fretted minarets. Edwin remembered that the Taj Mahal was supposed to be one of the wonders of the world; but he could not believe that it was as beautiful as this: it was too fanciful, too complicated in its detail, while this church, for all its delicacy, was so amazingly simple in its design.

“St. Mary Redcliffe,” said Mr. Ingleby. “I always thought it was a fine church, but I don’t think I ever saw it lit up like this before.” He paused, and they gazed at the church for a little while in silence. “It’s a funny thing,” he said at last, “that a great master can sign a picture and the name of a poet be remembered by his writings, while the greatest artists of the Middle Ages, people who planned and built wonderful things like this . . . and I suppose it is more beautiful to-day than when it was first finished . . . should be quite forgotten. A funny thing. . . . I should think the man who made this church must have devoted his life to it.”

Edwin glowed. It came as a delightful surprise to him that his father should think of a thing like this. He was ashamed to confess that he hadn’t believed him capable of it. It was the sort of thing that he would only have expected of his mother. “What a rotten little snob I am,” he thought. And though he happened to know, quite by accident, from the Rowley Poems of Chatterton, that the builder of Redcliffe was William Cannynge, round whose shadowy reputation the work of the wondrous boy had grown, he could not for the life of him reveal this piece of learning, since it would have spoiled the originality of his father’s reflection. He only said, “Yes,” but the train of thought was so strong in him that he couldn’t resist asking Mr. Ingleby if he knew which was the muniment room.

“The muniment room. Why?”

“Because it was in the muniment room that Chatterton pretended that he found the Rowley manuscripts.”

“Chatterton? Ah, yes. . . . Thomas Chatterton, the poet.”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. I never read any of his poems, but I believe he starved in London and committed suicide with Arsenious Oxide.”

This gleam of professional interest tickled Edwin. Keats: Beatings. Chatterton: Arsenious Oxide.

“They found Arsenic on his lips. He made no mistake about it. The lethal dose is a very small one. A grain or so would have done it. Why, it’s beginning to rain again. We’d better go. I hope it will clear up by to-morrow.”

They walked back to their lodging in a fine drizzle. On the way Edwin’s father took his arm. The action gave Edwin a curious sensation. It suggested to him that his father was lonely; that the natural instinct of love in the man was making him eager for some sort of sympathy. It was pitiable; for, in reality, they were strangers . . . there was no getting away from the fact that they were strangers.

“I must make it easy for him,” Edwin thought. “However impossible it may seem, I must make it easy. I must know him. I must love him. Whatever it costs I must love him. It is ridiculous that I should have to choose my words and even at times be a little dishonest when it ought to be the most natural and easy thing in the world to be myself with him. Of course it’s difficult at present; but later on, when we know each other better, it will be all right.”

When they returned to their lodging their clothes were wet, and they went together into the kitchen of the defunct publican’s daughter. She gave them two of her husband’s coats to wear while their own were drying, and for a long time they sat over the fire talking to her. It was evident that though Mr. Ingleby was himself unknown to her, she knew all about his family; for she asked him many questions about various people in Highberrow and Wringford, whom they knew in common. Mr. Ingleby could tell her very little, but the landlady was able to supply him with a lot of gossip from the Mendip villages.

“We heard that you were married,” she said.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Ingleby. “But I’ve just had a great blow. I’ve lost my wife.”

“Dear, dear . . . that’s very sad for ’ee.”

“Yes. . . . I shall never get over it.”

“And this is your eldest? My word, how time flies!”

“Yes. . . . He’s the only one.”

“To look at him at first you wouldn’t say there was much of an Ingleby in him.”

“No. He takes after his mother’s family.”

“And yet, on second thoughts, he’s got a look of your brother William’s boy, Joe, about his eyes. Now that’s a strange thing. Talking of your brother William, I haven’t seen or heard of him for years.”

“I haven’t seen him for twenty years myself. We’re cycling to Wringford to-morrow. We shall put up with him.”

“Well, remember me to him. He was always a great favourite of dad’s.”

“Will’s a good fellow.”

“I suppose he’s in the same place? Mr. Grisewood would be a fool to get rid of a man like that. Good gardeners are scarce. . . .”

Edwin could not understand this at all. It was obvious that the woman must be making some mistake; for it was clearly impossible that his Uncle William could be a gardener. Still, his father offered no protest.“They tell me,” she went on in her soft West-country voice, “that he’ve apprenticed that boy Joe to Hares, the shoeing-smith.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Well, of course, it may be all right,” the landlady went on, “but there’s always the future to think on. My husband always says that the day of the horse is over. What with steam and electricity, and these new things that I see in the paper they are running from London to Brighton! There’s a gentleman near Bridgewater who has one of these new motor-cars on the road. Of course, I suppose they are fairly reliable on the flat.”

Edwin was thankful that the excitements of motor traction had diverted her from the uncomfortable subject of his cousin’s profession. . . . if that were the right word to apply to the calling of a shoeing-smith; but the matter still troubled and bewildered him when they went upstairs to bed. It was one that would not wait for explanation, and so he tackled his father as soon as they were alone.

“Father, what was that woman talking about? What did she mean when she said that Uncle Will was a gardener?”

“What did she mean?” Mr. Ingleby laughed. “Why she meant what she said. He is a gardener. He’s never been anything else.”

“But, father . . . it’s impossible.”

“It isn’t impossible, boy. It’s the truth. Didn’t you know? Didn’t mother ever tell you?”

“No. . . . I don’t think she ever spoke of him. I . . . I can’t understand it.”“You sound as if it had come as a shock to you, Eddie.”

“No . . . yes . . . I suppose it did.”

“You didn’t imagine that you’d find your ancestry in Debrett, Eddie?”

“No . . . but that’s different. It’s . . . it’s sort of bowled me over.”

Mr. Ingleby laughed. It seemed that he was really amused at Edwin’s consternation.

“I suppose it’s natural for a schoolboy to be a bit snobbish,” he said.

“No . . . it isn’t that. Honestly it isn’t, father. Only I’d kind of taken us for granted. I wish you’d tell me all about it. You see, I know absolutely nothing.”

“It’s a long story, Eddie. But of course I’ll tell you. Then you won’t have any more of these distressing surprises. Suppose you get into bed first.”

It was a strange sight to Edwin to see his father kneel down in his Jaeger nightgown and pray. The boy had never done that since his second term at St. Luke’s.

II

Lying in bed with his father’s arm about him, Edwin listened to a long and strange narration that overwhelmed him with alternations of humiliation that made him ashamed, and of romance that thrilled him. Mr. Ingleby began at the beginning. Their family had lived, it appeared, for years without number, in the village of Highberrow on Mendip in a combe beneath the great camp of Silbury, and the calling of all these Inglebys had been that of the other inhabitants of Highberrow: they were miners, working for lead in the seams that the Romans, and perhaps the Phoenicians before them, had discovered in the mountain limestone. Even so early as in the youth of Edwin’s father the industry had been decaying, for the traditional methods of the Mendip miner were unscientific: he had been content to dig for himself a shallow working from which he collected enough of the mineral that is called calamine to keep him in pocket and in drink.

“We Mendip folk,” said Mr. Ingleby, “are a strange people, very different in our physique from the broad Saxons of the turf-moors beneath us. I suppose there is a good deal of Cornish blood in us. Wherever there are mines there are Cornishmen; but I think there’s another, older strain: Iberian . . . Roman . . . Phoenician. I don’t know what it is; but I do know that we’re somehow different from all the rest of the Somerset people: a violent, savage sort of folk. Did you ever hear of Hannah More?”

“No.” Edwin had been born too late in the century.

“Well, she was before my time too; but she made the Mendip miners notorious by trying to convert them. I don’t suppose she succeeded. At any rate neither she nor her influences would ever have converted your grandfather. He was a wonderful man. Even though my memory is mostly of the way in which I was afraid of him, I can see what a wonderful man he was. And your Uncle Will would tell you the same.”“He was a miner . . . ?”

“Yes. . . . A miner amongst other things. He was a dowser too.”

“A dowser? What is that?”

“Don’t you know? The divining-rod. A thing that all the scientists have been unable to explain. In a dry country like Mendip the dowser is a most important person; for neither man nor beast can live without water, and he is the only person who can tell where a well should be sunk. Your grandfather was a strange looking man with very clear grey eyes under a black head of hair and heavy bristling brows. Even when he grew very old his hair and his beard were black.

“I was the youngest of the family. All the others, except your Uncle Will, have died—and for some reason or other I was not brought up in my father’s cottage but in that of my grandmother, a tiny, tumbledown affair lying in the valley under Silbury. We were very humble people, Eddie. I don’t suppose anywhere in the world I could have passed a quieter childhood. It’s a long way off now. One only remembers curious, unimportant things.

“When I was four years old I was sent to the village school. I don’t think it exists any longer. You see the population of Highberrow disappeared naturally with the abandonment of the mining. Even in my childhood, as I told you, the workings were running pretty thin. The miners were beginning to find that they couldn’t pick up much of a living on their own calamine claims; and so they drifted back gradually—your grandfather along with them—to the oldest workings of all: the mines that the Romans had made two thousand years ago. You may be certain that the Romans, with their thoroughness, hadn’t left much behind. Why, in their days, Mendip must have been a great place, with a harbour of its own on the mouth of the Ax, and great roads radiating everywhere: to Cirencester, Exeter, and Bath. Even in the Middle Ages there was a population of fifty thousand souls on Mendip. Now I don’t suppose there are a thousand in all the mining villages put together.

“So my father went to work in the Roman mines at Cold Harbour; for a new company had been started that was reclaiming the sublimated lead that had been left in the Romans’ flues. And there, as a little boy, I used to carry him his dinner, through the heather, over the side of Axdown. You’ll see Axdown for yourself to-morrow: a great bow of a hill. There used to be a pair of ravens that built there. I’ve seen them rising in great wide circles. They seemed very big to me. I was almost frightened of them; and when I found the skeleton of a sheep one day on the top of Axdown under the barrows, I made sure that the ravens had killed it.

“I suppose I was a pretty intelligent boy. I know that the men at the workings by Cold Harbour, where I took father’s dinner, used to joke with me a good deal. They used to like the way in which I hit back at them with my tongue. Father didn’t take any notice of it. He was always the same dark, silent man, with very few words, and no feelings, as you’d imagine, except the violent passions into which he would burst out when he’d been drinking. He didn’t often drink, though. He was a good man, Eddie. A good man. . . . And so I myself came to work in the mines.”

“I can’t believe it, you know, father. It’s so unlike you . . . and mother.”

“Of course it was long before I knew your mother. And it does seem funny, looking back on it. I’m very glad now, mind you, that I had the experience. It’s a fine thing for any man at some time of his life to have had to face the necessity of earning his living by the use of his hands. You’ll never know what that means, I suppose. It’s a pity. . . .

“Well, while I was working at Cold Harbour, my mother died. I forgot to tell you that Grannie had died some years before, and her cottage under Silbury had been left empty—there was no one living in Highberrow to fill it—and was already tumbling into ruins. I haven’t told you about your grandmother—my mother. I don’t know that I can tell you much. I think she was in some ways a little hard. I don’t know. . . . I thought the world of her, and perhaps it was my father’s difficult nature that made her seem harder than she was. Besides, being brought up with Grannie, I was a sort of stranger to her. I don’t know how father came across her. There’s no doubt about she was a superior woman. If you’re still feeling a little sore about your social origin, Eddie, you can console yourself with the fact that she had a cousin who was a solicitor—or was it a solicitor’s clerk?—somewhere near London. At any rate, poor soul, she died. She was ill for several months, and I, being the youngest, had to stay at home and nurse her. It was in that way that I met Dr. Marshall. . . .

“I’ll tell you about him in a moment; but thinking of the days of my mother’s death puts me in mind of a strange thing that happened at the time that will show you what sort of man your grandfather was. Early on in the family there had been a girl that died to whom my mother was particularly devoted; and a little before the end—she knew that it couldn’t be many weeks—mother told my father that she would like to be buried in a particular corner of the churchyard near to this daughter of theirs.

“Father never spoke of it. He rarely spoke of anything. But I suppose he took it in all the same. Anyway, when she was dead, the old sexton came up to see father about the grave, and he told him where she had said she wanted to lie. The next night the sexton came up again. I can see him now—a funny, old-fashioned little man with red whiskers—and said it couldn’t be done, because the soil was so shallow at that particular point. I can see my father now. He hadn’t been drinking; but be flew suddenly into such a black rage that the poor little gravedigger (Satell was his name) ran out frightened for his life. I think I was pretty frightened too, for father went out after him carrying one of the great iron bars that the miners use for drilling. I thought for a moment that the loss of mother had turned his head. It hadn’t. He just went there and then, in the night, to the churchyard, and worked away with his mining tools at the rock that poor old Satell said he couldn’t dig. He bored his holes and he blasted the rock with the black powder they used in those days, and he dug my mother’s grave in the place where she wanted it. You see what a strange man he was! You may say what you like, Eddie—I’ve often thought of it since—but that was a grandfather worth having.”

“Yes . . . he was worth having,” Edwin agreed.

“But I was speaking of Dr. Marshall,” his father continued. “He was the beginning of my new life. But for the accident of my mother’s illness I don’t suppose I should ever have met him. During the last month he came fairly often: not that he could do much good for her, poor thing, but because she was—it’s a wretched phrase—a superior woman, and because no doubt she liked to talk to him, and he knew it. Practice in Highberrow can’t have been very profitable; though I’m sure that my father paid him every penny that he owed him. He was that kind of man.

“And when she died, Dr. Marshall took a fancy to me. I could tell you a good deal about him if it were worth while. He was a physician of the old school, learned in experience rather than in books. It is probable that he made mistakes; but I’m equally certain that he learned by them. The week after mother died he asked your grandfather if he could have me to wash bottles and make myself generally useful in his surgery at Axcombe. And my father didn’t refuse. It would have been unlike him if he had done so; for I think his idea in life was to let every individual work out his own salvation for himself. It was a good plan, for it made the responsibility definite. . . .

“So I went to Axcombe to Dr. Marshall’s house. There was plenty of hard work in it. I think a country doctor earns a poor living more honestly than most men. I had to share the doctor’s work—getting up early in the morning (that was no hardship to a miner’s son)—to clean up the surgery (and I can tell you it took some cleaning), to turn out of bed in the middle of the night to harness the pony if the message that called him took him over roads, or to saddle the cob if the hill tracks were too rough for wheels.

“Sometimes I had long night journeys on my own; for the doctor, in spite of his practical head for dealing with disease, was curiously unmethodical and would often leave behind the particular instrument that he wanted most, and in the middle of the night a boy of my own age from one of the hill villages would come battering at the door as though his life depended on it. And they’d go on battering, you know, as if they thought that the sound of it would make me get up more quickly. Perhaps it did: at any rate I can remember scrambling downstairs in the dark and reading the notes that the doctor sent by candlelight: and then I would turn out, half asleep, and walk over the hills above Axcombe when the gorge was swimming to the brim with fine milky mist and a single step, if one were silly enough to go dreaming, would have sent one spinning down, a sheer four hundred feet like the hunting king in the legend. I’m forgetting that you don’t know the legend and have never seen the gorge. . . .

“Still, I shall never forget those strange night-journeys. I don’t think I had begun to appreciate Mendip until I walked the hills at night. I found that I could think so clearly, and I was just beginning, you see, to have so much to think about. Books. . . .

“At Highberrow, in my father’s cottage, there were only two books altogether: the Bible, and a tract by Miss Hannah More called ‘The Religion of the Fashionable World.’ But Dr. Marshall’s house at Axcombe was crammed with books: rubbish, most of them, I expect; but printed books; and whenever I was not working I was reading. It was the pure excitement of attaining knowledge of any kind that made me read; and of course I wasted a great deal of valuable time in ways that were unprofitable. The doctor did not help me much; he was far too busy to worry much about my education; but I know that he approved of my eagerness, and liked to see me reading. I used to sleep in the loft above the stable in those days, and I know that my candles made him rather nervous of fire. But he did help me, in his own way. He put me on to a little Latin, with the strictly practical idea of making it more easy for me to dispense the prescriptions that he wrote in the old manner without abbreviations; and he also introduced me to another book that I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of: called Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne.”

“I know it,” said Edwin.“Do you? I supposed it was merely a medical curiosity. Latin, he thought, would be useful to me in other ways. You see, like many of the old medical practitioners that spent their lives in the lanes, he was very interested in botany: not scientific botany—just the identification and botanical names of the flowers that blossomed year by year in the hedges. In the early summer he would drive home with the bottom of the dogcart tangled with flowers that he had picked while he walked the pony up some hill; and he would pitch them over to me and tell me to learn the names of them. It wasn’t very difficult; for in the surgery shelves there was a fine set of Ann Pratt with excellent illustrations. And sometimes he would come home with a small insect of some kind in a pillbox and arrange it under the microscope on the table under the dispensary window; and he’d say, ‘Wonderful . . . wonderful!’ not because he’d made any biological observations, but just because it revealed a lot of unsuspected detail.

“It was a favourite trick of his to show his patients a sample of their own blood corpuscles under the microscope too. ‘There they are,’ he’d say, ‘like a pile of golden guineas, and if you had a millionth part as many guineas as you have of these in your body, you’d be the richest man in England.’ This sort of thing used to impress his patient’s tremendously. And he knew it. I suppose it gave them confidence in him; though he didn’t need any superstitious aids of this kind. The whole history of his life as a doctor should have been enough to make them trust him. Still, I suppose it was the old tradition of the medicine man who dealt in curious magic. His common sense and the craftsmanship that he had won by experience were his real guarantees.

“He was extraordinarily practical in everything except money matters. In these, even I could have taught him a good deal. It was a pathetic sight to see him making out his bills. He always put off the evil day, with the result that they were only sent out about once in three years. I don’t suppose doctors can afford to be like that in these days. . . . But then, what was the use of money to him? All his tastes were simple and inexpensive. He was unmarried. During all the years that I was with him he never took a holiday, unless it were to go to Taunton and buy a new horse. I do not think there are many of his kind left.

“You can see, though, what a huge difference he made to my life. If I hadn’t gone to live with him at Axcombe, I might still have been a miner—if there are any miners left on Mendip—or perhaps a gardener like your Uncle Will. And where would you have been, Eddie? He was careful, and I think very wisely careful, not to turn my head. ‘Ambition,’ he would say to me, ‘is all very well in moderation. But don’t be too ambitious, John. Happiness is more important in this life than success, and very few men have a full share of both. Still, you’re a sharp lad, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get on in the world and be happy too if you don’t expect too much.’ As time went on we began to talk a little about my future. ‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry,’ he used to say. ‘You’re young, and there’s plenty of time ahead of you.’

“Of course it would be ridiculous to suppose that I hadn’t ambitions. Naturally enough, I had determined to be a doctor like my master. The small things that I did for him convinced me that it would be an easy matter. When he was out in the country people who had walked in from remote villages would ask me to prescribe for them, and sometimes, with an immense sense of importance, I would do so. It wasn’t difficult. He ran his practice, to all intents and purposes, on three stock mixtures and half a dozen pills. But I shall never forget one evening when one of my father’s fellow workmen from Highberrow came in with a raging toothache, and I, being anxious to show off, volunteered to take the tooth out for him. I remember I showed him a microscopic sample of his own blood as a preliminary. But when I came to take out the tooth I made a mess of it. He was a tremendous big fellow with jaws like steel, and though I pulled hard enough to move him in the chair, I only succeeded in breaking the tooth and making the pain worse. I got my head well smacked for my trouble, and decided that whatever else I were to be, I wouldn’t risk dentistry as a career.

“‘There’s no reason,’ the doctor would say, ‘why you shouldn’t make a good chemist in time.’ Of course that seemed a very small thing to me; and yet . . . think what I might have been! I was sixteen, just your own age, Eddie, when he died. Of course he killed himself, as many doctors do, with work. People make a great fuss when a missionary in some outlandish country lays down his life, as they call it, for his flock. But country doctors are doing that every month in the year all over England—I don’t mean the social successes in Harley Street—and from what I’ve seen of it their widows can’t count on much gratitude.

“It was a hard winter . . . the year eighteen sixty-seven . . . and there happened to be a great deal of illness in the hills. We were worked pretty hard, both of us, but the doctor had no chance of taking a rest: he was the only medical man living within ten miles: and in the end he, too, caught a heavy cold, and had to go on working through it. In the end he had to give up. It was pneumonia; and the last thing he did was to write a letter asking a consultant in Bristol to come down and see him. He was a kindly man, but I suppose Dr. Marshall was to him only a case. The old fellow refused to have any one but me to nurse him. ‘John and I understand each other,’ he said.

“It was a terrible battle: to see a great strong man like that fighting for breath. They didn’t give oxygen in those days. It went on for four days and on the fifth, or rather in the middle of the night—he called to me faintly, and I found him lying on his back breathing more softly, very pale and drenched with sweat. ‘This is the crisis . . . fifth day . . .’ he said. He told me to cover him with all the blankets I could find, to give him some brandy, and to take his temperature. It was a funny job for a boy. I had never seen a great man suddenly go weak like that. His temperature had fallen below normal. ‘Ah . . .’ he said. ‘I thought so. . . . Brandy. . .’“But he couldn’t take it himself. ‘You’ve got to be the doctor now, John,’ he said. There wasn’t any more fight left in him. All that day he hardly spoke at all, but at night he called me to his side and told me to make a bonfire of all the books and the bills we’d been making out the week before. ‘I shan’t want any more money,’ he said. ‘But you will . . . a little. . . . I’ve seen to that. You’re a good lad. Don’t aim too high. And don’t think too much about money. Money is the root of all evil. . .’

“I scarcely took any notice of what he said. I only knew that I was going to lose the only friend I had. He died early next morning, and I was just like a dog: I couldn’t bring myself to leave him.

“I stayed in the house . . . you see, it seemed as if I couldn’t go anywhere else, until after the funeral. Then the lawyers told me that he had left me a hundred and fifty pounds in his will. It seemed to me a tremendous lot of money. I didn’t realise what a little way it would go; but it seemed to make my dreams possible. I would be a doctor, like him . . . as near like him as it was possible to be. That was my first idea; but then I remembered what he had told me, and decided that it would be better to become a chemist first. In that way I could make sure of my living.

“I left Axcombe. It was necessary that I should go to some big city to study and more or less by accident I chose North Bromwich. It was a tremendous change for me who had lived all my life in the country: I was very lonely and awkward at first. But that wasn’t the worse of it. I began to discover my own ignorance: to see that, as a matter of fact, I knew nothing but the homely routine of the doctor’s surgery, the names of a few drugs and their doses, a smattering of Latin, and the botany of the local wild flowers. I knew nothing of life. I couldn’t even pull out a tooth without breaking it.

“It came as an awful shock to me. I began to see the reasons of the doctor’s cautious advice. He realised that I had a great deal of the dreamer in me. I rather think that you have it too, Eddie. No doubt it comes to both of us from those strange, dark, mining-people. I saw that I should have to pull myself together and drive myself hard if my ambitions were not to end in disaster. I had to pinch and scrape. I had to set out and learn the most elementary things from the beginning. I had thought that my fortune was made. Perhaps it was a wise thing that the doctor had left me no more money. It taught me that nobody could make my fortune but myself.

“It was a hard fight, I can tell you: for while I was building my schemes for the future I had to provide for the present. You see I had soon realised that it wouldn’t do to spend any of my little capital. I won’t tell you now how I lived. It would be too long a story. But I can assure you that I had a hard time in North Bromwich, getting all my dreams knocked out of me one by one, thirsting—literally thirsting for clean air and country ways.

“It sounds rather like a tract, but it’s quite true to say that town life has a lot of temptations too for a country boy. I could see everywhere the power of money and the luxuries that money could purchase without realising the work that money represents, and all this was very disconcerting to a boy of my temperament with more than a hundred pounds in the bank. Still, as it happened, nothing went wrong. In the day-time I worked with my hands. At night I tried to educate myself, very slowly, very hardly—for in those days poor people had not the opportunities of education that are open to them in these. I sometimes wonder if people to-day realise the difference.

“I worked on quietly for years, never wasting a penny or an hour. Don’t take it for virtue in me. It wasn’t that. It was just that the old doctor’s influence on me had been sound and I couldn’t afford to do otherwise. As a matter of fact I suppose there must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men in that city in exactly the same situation. Only I didn’t know one of them. I was lonely . . . absolutely solitary. I never heard an accent of my own country’s speech. I never saw a patch of real green or a sky that hadn’t smoke in it. I made my friends in books: not the kind of books that you’ve been brought up on—I hadn’t time for poetry or frills of that kind: books of solid facts: knowledge for the sake of knowledge. You see all the things that you would take for granted, having known them as a birthright, so to speak, were new and unknown to me. One book was a sort of gospel to me. It was called Self Help, written by a man named Smiles.

“So when you hear of a self-made man it may mot mean much; but a self-educated man, I can tell you, means a good deal. In the end, of course, I gradually came within sight of my ambition. From a van-driver to a firm of wholesale chemists I became an assistant, an apprentice in their retail house. I took my examinations. I qualified as a dispensing chemist. Later, by a curious piece of chance, I met your mother. We became friends. She was the first person in whom I had confided since I left Mendip. She seemed to understand. It was a strange thing for me, after all those years, to be able to talk about myself. I can’t tell you what a wonderful relief it was. And then we found that we loved one another and married. We went out into the country near North Bromwich to find a village to make a home in, and we came across Halesby. The place was very different from what it is now twenty years ago. We were very happy. No. . . . I won’t talk about it. But you can see now, that behind your life there were quite a lot of complicated things that don’t appear on the surface. It’s really better that you should know them.”

“It makes me love you, father,” said Edwin. “Because, of course, it is all so wonderful. I expect if I had been you I should still have been in Axcombe. I don’t think I could have done what you did.”

“You might have done a great deal more. There’s no knowing what’s in us until we are tried. That sounds like Samuel Smiles; but it’s quite true. At any rate it’s time we were asleep, boy. I think the rain has stopped.”

They said good-night, and Edwin kissed his father; but for several hours later he heard the clocks of Bristol chiming. In a little time he knew by the quiet breathing of his father that he was asleep, and hearing this sound and thinking of the grey man who lay beside him, he was overwhelmed with an emotion in which pity and passionate devotion were curiously mingled. He felt strangely protective, as though it were the man who had fought such a hard battle who was weak, and he, who had never endured anything, were the stronger.

He conceived it a kind of sacred duty to see that for all the rest of his life his father should never suffer any pain or even discomfort from which he could protect him. It was a more vivid version of the feeling that had bowled him over once before, when they had knelt together after his mother’s death. It was a wholly illogical sentiment—and yet, when he came to think it over, he came to the conclusion that something of the same kind must have underlain his mother’s tenderness towards his father. He was eager to persuade himself that there was no compassion in it: only love and admiration.

“He is the most wonderful man in the world,” he thought, “and I never knew it.” Remorse overcame him when he remembered that once, at St. Luke’s, he had been ashamed of Mr. Ingleby’s calling. There couldn’t be another chap in the school who had a father that was a patch on him. He remembered a more recent cause for shame: the shiver of discomfort that the landlady’s revelation of his Uncle Will’s occupation had given him. He had thought that a gardener uncle would be an uncomfortable skeleton in the cupboard of a Fellow of Balliol. Instead of that he now knew that he should have been proud of it: he should have been proud of anything in the world that did honour to his father. Everything that he was, every shred of culture that he possessed had its origin in the devotion and the sufferings of this wonderful man, and, whatever happened, he determined that he would be worthy of them.

The cathedral clock slowly chimed two. Edwin turned over and fell asleep in a mood of strange, exalted happiness.

CHAPTER XII
THE HILLS

I

Under a sky of rain-washed blue they had left Bristol, and after an hour of hard riding came to an easy upland plateau where the road lay white and clear before them, so clean between its wide margins of rough turf, that it seemed to have some affinity with the sky. On their way they had met few people, but the carters with whom they had exchanged a morning greeting were all smiling and friendly, very different from the surly colliers that slouched about the cinder-paths at Halesby.

“Good-maarnin’,” they said, and the very dialect was friendly.

“We’re over the worst of the road,” said Mr. Ingleby. “In a minute or two we shall see the hills.”

And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of the highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip: the black bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of Callow, and a bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it might well have claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that swam beyond in the grey sea. In the light of his new enthusiasm Edwin found it more impressive than any scene that he remembered: more inspiring, though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy plain of the Severn’s upper waters that he had seen so many times from Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and mightier in that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in water within the memory of man. And, more than all this . . . far more . . . they were the home of his fathers.

“Now that we are in Somerset we should drink the wine of the country.”

They pushed their bicycles on to the platform before the inn door, and Mr. Ingleby called for cider, a pale, dry liquid with a faint acridity very different from the sugary stuff that comes to the cities in bottles from Devonshire.

“Yes, it’s good cider,” said Mr. Ingleby, tasting. “Where does it come from?” he asked the landlord, who brought it.

“It do be a tidy drop o’ zidur,” said the man. “It do come from Mr. Atwell’s varm into Burrowdown.”

“In” with the accusative, thought Edwin.

“Is old Aaron Atwell still living?” asked his father.

The landlord laughed. The gentleman must have been away a long time from these parts. Mr. Atwell had been dead these fifteen years.

“The cider’s the same,” said Mr. Ingleby.

“’Tis a marvellous archard, sure ’nuff,” said the landlord. “And last year was a wunnerful year for apples. ’Tis all accardin’ . . .”They left him, and coasted gently down the hill. Descending, it seemed to Edwin that the dome of Axdown lost some of its mountainous quality; and by the time that they had reached the level of the plain in which Wringford lay, he was hardly conscious of its imminence more than as a reminder that this soft, green country was not wholly devoted to quietude and sleep, but that a cool and lively air must always be rolling from the hidden slopes. They came to a green, bordered by elms in heavy leaf, on which a solitary donkey and a flock of geese were grazing. Now the road was dead level and the hedges rich with fragile dog-rose petals and thickets of hemp-agrimony that were not yet in flower. Superficially, the road might have been part of Warwickshire; but there was nothing of the Midlands in the air that moved above it.

“Take the next turn to the right,” shouted Mr. Ingleby to Edwin, riding ahead.

In the middle of a village drenched with the perfume of roses, Edwin turned to the right down a narrow lane. By this time his father had reached his level. “Here we are,” he said. They dismounted.

It was a small cottage with a green-painted porch and carefully tended garden in front of it. The place was built of the stone of the country and washed with the pinkish lime of the hills. In the garden roses and bright annuals were blooming, and a huge acacia, hung with ivory blossom, shadowed the garden gate. On the gate itself Edwin read a crudely painted name: Geranium Cottage. Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Your Uncle Will is very fond of geraniums.” They opened the gate and pushed in their bicycles. Everything in the garden was so meticulously orderly that to wheel them over the mown grass seemed sacrilegious. The porch, at which they waited, was full of choice geraniums. Their hot scent filled the air. Mr. Ingleby knocked gently with a polished brass knocker. Slow steps were heard within moving over a flagged floor. The door was opened, disclosing a stone passage that smelt of coolness and cleanliness. It was like the smell of a sweet dairy. An elderly woman, with a plump and placid face and grey hair, received them. All her figure except her black sateen bodice was covered with a coarse but snowy apron.

“Why, John,” she said. “It do be a treat to see you.”

She took Mr. Ingleby in her arms and kissed him. “Poor fellow, too,” she said. The embrace implied more than any of the condolences that Edwin had heard in Halesby.

“And this is Edwin,” she said. “Well, what a great big man, to be sure!” She proceeded to embrace Edwin, and he became conscious of the extraordinary softness and coolness of her face.

“Come in and make yourselves comfortable,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “We’re used to bicycles in this house. Our Joe has one. He goes to work on it every day, and sometimes on a Sunday rides over to Clevedern on it. Come in, John.” Edwin followed his father into the living-room. It was clean, strikingly clean, and curiously homely. On the walls hung a picture of Queen Victoria, looking like a pouter pigeon in her jubilee robes, and another of the sardonic Disraeli. There were several padded photograph albums with gilt clasps, and other photographs decorated the mantelpiece and a side table. These were all accommodated in fretwork frames.

“Joe do keep us supplied with up-to-date photograph frames,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, following Edwin’s glances with a touch of motherly pride. “He’s like his father. Clever with his fingers.”

Edwin found that the photographs were familiar. His father was there: an ardent, younger father, with black whiskers and a determined mouth. A father confident in the virtue of self-help. His mother, too, in a tight-fitting costume of the eighties, with a row of buttons down the front from the throat to the hem. And, wonder of wonders, there was Edwin himself in a sailor suit. The discovery of his own portrait did something to destroy the illusion of unreality that occupied the place. Obviously he really belonged to it. For years, without his knowing it, his image had been part of this unfamiliar room. Even though he had not known of their existence he had evidently been a familiar accepted person to these people. Even their friends must have known him by sight. It was strange. It was pathetic. “I can see a touch of our Joe in him, John,” said his aunt, who had been examining him closely. “An’ there do be a look of your father as well.”

“Do you think so?” said Mr. Ingleby.“Joe’s a great boy, too,” said Aunt Sarah Jane lovingly.

It was clear enough who was the idol of this household.

“There now, your dinner will be spoiling. Take the boy upstairs, John.”

She left them, and Edwin followed his father up a crooked stair to a low room above the garden. A cool wind was blowing down from Axdown, and the filigree shadow of the lace window-curtains danced on the white coverlet of the bed. The room smelt faintly of lavender. It seemed to Edwin a wonderful room, “full of sweet”—he couldn’t remember the line—“peace and health and quiet breathing.” There was nothing quite so placid as this in the life that he had known.

They washed their dusty faces and came downstairs again, and Edwin, seated by the sunny window of the front room, relapsed into a state of perfect drowsiness, content merely to exist and drink in the sweet and simple atmosphere of humble content. This, he supposed, was what his father by his struggles and sacrifices had lost. Was it worth while? The complications of this question were far too great for Edwin to decide.

The men folk of Geranium Cottage did not return to dinner, and after that meal, in which suet dumplings played an important part, Edwin retired to a trellised structure at the back of the garden, bowery with honeysuckle, that Aunt Sarah Jane described as the harbour. Here, drugged with more cider and fresh air, he dozed away the early afternoon. He was asleep when his father came to call him for tea. After all, it was not surprising that he was sleepy, for they had talked into the small hours the night before. Certainly Aunt Sarah Jane’s tea was worth waking up for. Quince marmalade and clotted cream, and wheaten scones that she had baked that morning. Edwin, ready now for any further revelations, would not now have been shocked to hear that in her young days she had been a cook. In this beatific state of refreshment he was anxious to explore.

“When are we going to Highberrow, father?”

“And this was to be a restful holiday,” Mr. Ingleby laughed. “Why, now, if you like.”

Edwin would have run to the linhay behind the house for the bicycles, but his father called him back. The hill was so steep, he told him, that it would be easier for them to walk.

“Well, John, Will’ll be tarrable disappointed if you aren’t here when he comes home from work,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “This young man of yours do go too fast for me.”

“Oh, we won’t be long,” said Mr. Ingleby.

And so they set off together for Highberrow, making, first of all, a straight line for the base of the hills and then following a green lane that skirted the foot of them but was so overshadowed with hazel that the slopes could not be seen. In a mile or so they cut into the main road again, by an iron milestone that said “Bridgwater 18: Bristol 14.” The road climbed along a quarried terrace in the hill-side, and to the left of it lay a deep valley, on the farther slope of which lay half a dozen pink-washed cottages with gardens falling to the bed of an attenuated stream; and behind the cottages a steep hill-side rose abruptly to a bare height crowned with ancient earthworks.

“That,” said Mr. Ingleby, “is Silbury camp. There’s an old rhyme about it. It is supposed to be full of buried gold. When I was a boy I often used to lie up there in the sun, gazing out over the channel. In spring all the meadows between the camp and Highberrow Batch are full of daffodils. I often used to wish there were daffodils in Halesby. . . .”

In a little while they came to the church of Highberrow, placed like a watch-tower on the edge of the Batch, surveying the immense relics of paganism on the opposite side of the valley. It was a humble and not very beautiful building; but Edwin entered the churchyard with awe, for it seemed to him that so much of the past that had made him lay buried there. And the inscriptions on the tombstones reinforced this idea; for the churchyard was veritably crowded with the remains of dead Inglebys. It made the past, a piece of knowledge so recent to him that it still held an atmosphere of unreality and phantasy, so ponderable, that in comparison with it his present condition seemed almost unreal. His father led him through the long grass, starry with yellow ragwort, to the corner in which his grandmother was buried.

“This is the place that I told you about,” he said.

“The place where my grandfather went out at night and blasted the rock?”

“Yes.”It was incredible. Until that moment the story had been only a legend. Edwin wondered how ever his father could have broken away from the tradition of centuries and left the hills. The roots of their family had pierced so deeply into the soil, yes, even beneath the soil and into the veins of the solid rock. The conditions of his own life seemed to him the tokens of an unnatural and artificial thing.

They left the churchyard by a narrow lane that always climbed. They passed the village inn: a long, windswept building, so bare and so exposed to weather that even the tenure of the lichen on the tiles seemed precarious. Over the lintel a weathered board showed them the name of Ingleby in faded letters. Edwin pointed to it.

“Yes,” said his father. “I suppose he is some remote cousin of yours. Everybody that is left in this village must be related to us in some degree; though I don’t suppose any of them would remember me. You see, I went to Axcombe when I was a good deal younger than you.” He smiled. “I am like a ghost returning to its old home. Like a ghost. . . .”

And yet, to Edwin, the whole place seemed familiar. He was not in the least surprised when, opposite a windy farm-house, in front of which the dry blades of a dishevelled dracÆna shivered as though protesting against its wintry exile, his father turned off to the left along a road that had once been gay with cottage gardens and trim buildings of stone, but was now suggestive of nothing but ruin and desolation. By one of these pathetic ruins his father paused.“This was your grandfather’s house, Eddie. It was here that I was born.”

Now there remained only the ground-plan of a house, and the only sign of habitation in all the ruin was to be seen in the smoke-blackened stones of the chimney. The garden, indeed, lay beautiful in decay, for there, as everywhere in this deserted countryside, the golden ragwort had taken possession; but within the walls of the house only nettles shivered.

“You’ll always find nettles in deserted human habitations. I don’t know why,” said Mr. Ingleby. “There is a rather unusual botanical curiosity to be found among the workings at Cold Harbour,” he went on, “the Roman Nettle. Urtica . . . Urtica. . . . My memory isn’t what it used to be. It has a bigger leaf than the ordinary nettle and a much more poisonous sting. It’s only found in places where the Romans have been.”

Why, in the face of this harrowing desolation, should he be thinking of things like that? A ghost . . . with as little passion or feeling as a ghost: emotions so different from the passionate resentment that now filled Edwin’s heart.

“Ah . . . here is the school. I suppose they couldn’t pull that down. I remember when it was newly built. It was there that I learnt my alphabet. . . .”

In the whole of the lane the school was the only whole building.

“If you come to the edge of the Batch you will see the valley bottom where I spent my childhood with your great-grandmother.”They passed on, and saw, a hundred feet beneath them, the valley of the little stream. More ruins, many of them; but one or two cottages still inhabited. The lower cottages lay close to the water, and in four or five places the stream was spanned by a clapper bridge. In one of the gardens ghostly children were playing, and in another ghostly washing flapped in a breeze that had risen with the coolness of evening. Mr. Ingleby pointed out to Edwin his great-grandmother’s home. It was the cottage in the garden of which the children were playing.

From the chimney a trail of smoke dwindled up against the grey hill-side.

“I should like to see inside it,” said Edwin.

“Would you? No . . . I don’t think it would be worth going down into the hollow to see it. You’d only be disappointed. I don’t expect there’d be anything much to see. Besides, we haven’t time. I want to take you to a little farm—it isn’t really big enough to be called a farm—at the top of the lane under Axdown. They call it the Holloway. Why I can’t imagine, for it is the highest point of the whole village. Your aunt tells me that your grandfather’s sister, your own great-aunt Lydia, is still living there, and I think I had better go and see her.”

He turned again, and Edwin followed him. It seemed strange to him that his father should not be anxious to look inside the house where his childhood had been spent. A ghost . . . a ghost. . . .

They passed the windy farm once more. A man, in muddy gaiters, was driving cows into the yard. He was the first creature—apart from the ghostly children in the valley—that they had seen. A tall man, with a gaunt, grey face, who did not even turn to look at them or give them good-evening, although they must surely have been the only living people that he had seen that day. It was impossible to believe from the sight of its exterior that the farm was now inhabited.

“Who do you think he is?” Edwin asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t the least idea. The people at that farm used to be named Ingleby; and he certainly has the figure of your grandfather. . . .”

“Won’t you stop and speak to him?”

“Why should we?”

“But he would be awfully pleased to see you and know who you are. . . .”

“I don’t expect he would.”

A moment later Mr. Ingleby said,

“Now, the ruins of this cottage ought to interest you, Edwin.”

“Why? Is it one of ours?”

“No, but the old woman who lived in it in my day was always supposed to be a witch. Mendip people were always great believers in witchcraft. I shouldn’t wonder if your aunt believes in ‘ill-wishing’ to this day. I suppose she was really a harmless old body. The story was that a daughter of hers, with whom she had quarrelled, married a small dairy farmer down by Axcombe, and no sooner had she gone to live with him than the poor man’s cows went dry. His business failed. He had to sell his stock. He was ruined, and took to drink; and in all the public-houses for miles round he used to rail against his mother-in-law, and say that she was responsible for the whole business. She was a lonely old creature, very poor and dirty, and when we were children and going up to the Holloway we used to cover our eyes and run for fear we should catch sight of her. No one even knew when she died. They found her, I heard, when she had been dead for a week or ten days.”

Edwin shivered. These hill-people, it seemed, were hard and cruel. No doubt he must have some of their stony cruelty in his own being somewhere.

At last they reached the farm at the top of the Holloway. It was a poor building, only a little more hospitable than the ruins in the valley. Mr. Ingleby knocked at the door, and a sturdy, middle-aged man with an iron hook in place of his right hand lifted the latch and stared at them.

“You don’t know me, Isaac?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Noa. . . . I can’t say I do know ’ee.”

“I’m John Ingleby.”

“John Ingleby! . . . Well, and I’m proud to see ’ee, John. Do ’ee step inside and see mother. I can’t shake hands with ’ee the way I was used to. I lost en in a mowin’-machine five years back. Come in then.”

He led the way into a dark cabin. Everything in it was dark, partly, perhaps, because the windows were full of flower-pots; partly because all the furniture was darkened with age or smoke or grime. The only bright colours in its brownness were a number of shining copper utensils and a fine show of geraniums in the window. Isaac followed Mr. Ingleby’s eyes towards these flowers.

“Purty, ban’t they?” he said with pride. “Your brother Will sent mother they.”

In the gloom of the fireplace, where a pile of turves smouldered, mother began to dissociate herself from the surrounding brownness. She was a very old woman. Edwin had never seen any one so old—sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed oaken chair. Her face seemed to Edwin very beautiful, for extreme age had taken from it all the extraneous charm that smoothness and colour give, leaving only the sheer chiselled beauty of feature. It was a noble face, finely modelled, with a straight nose, a tender mouth, and level brows beneath which burned the darkest and clearest eyes that Edwin had ever seen. Her hair was white and scanty, but little of it was seen beneath the white bonnet that she wore. Edwin felt her eyes go through him in the gloom.

“Here’s cousin John come to see ’ee, mother,” said Isaac, bending over her.

“John? What John?” said the old lady.

It struck Edwin at once that her speech was purer and more delicate than that of her son.

“John Ingleby, Aunt Lydia,” said Edwin’s father.

“You need not raise your voice, my dear,” she said. “My sight and my hearing are wonderful, thank God.”

“Then you remember me, Aunt Lydia?”

“Of course I remember you, John. Though it’s many and many years since my eyes saw you. And how are you, my dear? They tell me that you have done great things in the world. You’re a doctor, like poor Dr. Marshall.”

“No . . . I’m not a doctor. I’m in business. I’m a chemist.”

“I knew it was something of the kind. You needn’t speak so loud. And they told me you had married. I suppose this is your boy. A fine boy, surely. He has a look of your grandfather.” . . .

“Yes, this is Edwin.”

“I don’t remember that name in our family. It sounds like a fanciful name. Come here, my dear, and let me look at you.”

Edwin went to her, and she kissed him. Her face was so cold and smooth that she might almost have been dead.

“And how is your dear wife, John?”

“I’ve had a terrible blow, Aunt Lydia. I’ve lost her.”

“Ah . . . that was bad for you, and bad for the boy, too.”

“I shall never get over it.” Mr. Ingleby’s voice trembled.

“Yes, of course, you say that. It’s natural that you should. You’re young. But when you live to be as old as I am you’ll know better. You will get over it. When a few years have gone by you’ll marry again.”

“Never, Aunt Lydia . . . never. . .”

“Yes. . . . That’s what you feel now. But I know the family. The Inglebys are always very tender in marriage. I’ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they always marry again. I don’t suppose that I shall live to hear of it; but when the time comes you’ll remember what I said.”

“No, Aunt Lydia . . . never.”

“Time is a wonderful thing, John. I’m glad to have seen you and your boy. I hope he’ll take after you—you were always the best of them.”

She gave a little sigh. Evidently she was tired. The flame that burned behind her black eyes was so very feeble for all its brightness. Isaac, who had been watching her with the devotion of a practised nurse, saw that she could not stand any more talking.

“Now, mother, that’s enough, my dear,” he said.

“Kiss me, John,” she said. And Mr. Ingleby kissed her.

“Well, now that you be here after all these years,” said Isaac cheerily, as he rearranged the red shawl round his mother’s shoulders, “you won’t leave us without taking something. There do be a lovely bit of bacon I have cut. Do ’ee try a bit now, and a mug of cider.”

Edwin, who was already hungry with his walk, and was rapidly acquiring a taste for the wine of the country, now became aware of the fact that the dark ceiling was decked with sides of bacon and hams that hung there slowly pickling in the turf smoke that saturated the atmosphere of the room. He was disappointed when his father declined to take any of this delicacy.

“Well, a mug of cider, then,” Isaac persisted. He went into an inner chamber down three stone steps, with three china mugs hanging on his hook. “You see, I do be pretty handy with en,” he laughed.They drank their cider solemnly. It was even drier than that which they had drunk for lunch at Wringford, and so free from acidity that all that Edwin could taste was that faint astringent bitterness. It had also a bouquet that was less like the odour of apples than that of a flour-mill. A wonderful drink. . . . They said good-bye, and Isaac, who seemed to Edwin the most kindly and patient creature he had ever met, showed them to the door.

By this time the sun was setting, and the cool wind from the west had freshened. Edwin saw, for the first time, the huge panorama on which they had turned their backs as they climbed the hill to the Holloway. Perhaps it was the strangeness of all his recent experience; perhaps, partly, the exhilaration that proceeded from Isaac’s cider, but the sight struck Edwin as one of greater magnificence than any he had ever seen before. From their feet the whole country sloped in a series of hilly waves to the shores of the channel, and that muddy sea now shone from coast to coast in a blaze of tawny light: now truly, for the first time, one of the gateways of the world. And beyond the channel stood the heaped mountains of Wales, very wild and black in their vastness. The sight was so impressive that on their way down the lane they did not speak.

At last Edwin said,—

“I think Aunt Lydia has a very beautiful face. She looks like some old grand lady.”

“She is very like your grandfather,” said his father. “She must be over ninety. It is a great age.”

And on the way home Edwin began to imagine what his strange grandfather the dowser must have been, with the figure of the lonely farmer, his black beard and hair, and his great-aunt Lydia’s noble features and piercing eyes.

II

They stayed for a week at Geranium Cottage, sinking without any effort into its placid life. Edwin was content merely to live there, soaking up the atmosphere of Wringford village, and only thinking of Highberrow as a strange and ghostly adventure, possible, but too disturbing to be indulged in. The tiredness of Mr. Ingleby, who never showed the least inclination to revisit the place, made this abstention easier. In the whole of his week at Wringford Edwin only made one attempt to see Highberrow again. The impulse came to him very early one morning, just at the hour of dawn when the birds had fallen to silence, and Joe, who happened to be working for his master at a village some miles away, was splashing about under the pump in the yard at the back of the linhay. Mr. Ingleby was still asleep, and Edwin, dressing quietly, stole downstairs and set off towards the hills, this time on his bicycle.

He followed the high road, and left the machine in a quarry opposite the point where the first pink-washed cottages appeared. By this time he was almost sorry that he had come there: for he was quite certain that the village he was now going to visit would be a very different place from the dead or hallucinated Highberrow that he and his father had penetrated some days before. He felt this so strongly that he wouldn’t take the risk of spoiling that marvellous impression, and instead of following the road that they had taken before, he changed his mind, crossed the valley of the pink cottages, and climbed the shaley slope of Silbury. In the fosse that surrounded the encampment a hundred white tails bobbed at once, and, laughing, he scrambled up the sides of what had once been Silbury Camp, and now was Silbury Warren.

Here, lying full length upon the top of the vallum, as perhaps a Belgic ancestor, or an ancestor who held the crest before the BelgÆ came, had lain before him, he could look over the combe towards the church of Highberrow on the Batch. And the church tower was all he saw of Highberrow again: a feature most unrepresentative of the spirit of that pagan place. Even the church tower at this hour of the morning could scarcely be seen for mist, and all the time cold mist was pouring down in a dense, impalpable stream from the milky coverlet that spread upon Axdown and Callow and all the hills beyond. In the plain nothing could be seen at first; and from the sleeping villages no mist-muffled sound was heard; but by degrees the pattern of the plain’s surface, with its dappled orchards, its green pasturage and paler turf-moors, cut by the straight bands of the rhines, the sluggish channels through which the surface water drained into the sea, became more clear, and with this the sounds of the country grew more distinct: indefinite noises, such as the creaking of cart-wheels in a hidden lane, the squeak of a pump-handle at the back of the pink cottages, the clink of a pick in the quarry. The whole world awoke, and Edwin, too, found that he was awake and awfully hungry. He scrambled down the slope. Smoke was now rising from the chimneys of the cottages in the combe. He was back at Wringford in time for breakfast.

By this time he had begun to feel quite at home in Geranium Cottage. He had made the discovery of his cousin and his Uncle Will. The latter he found wholly lovable: a creature of slow, quiet speech, as leisurely and peaceful as his vocation, and full of small kindnesses that surprised by reason of their unexpectedness.

The thing that most impressed Edwin in his uncle’s nature was the extraordinary tenderness he showed towards the green things that were his care. Perhaps the west-country custom of dispensing with the neuter pronoun and speaking of all inanimate creatures as if they were persons, made his solicitude for their welfare more noticeable. But he was not only kind to them in his speech: his short and clumsy-looking fingers, that seemed to be built for nothing but the roughest of labour, became amazingly sensitive and delicate as soon as he began to handle the plants in his garden, so that every touch had in it the nature of a caress.

In this life, of the devoted husbandman, he was evidently wholly contented; and he made it seem to Edwin the most natural and human on earth. The fascination of watching his uncle’s hands grew upon him, and in the end he would watch the man, who had been busy at the same work in his master’s garden all day, tending his own favourites at home until the light began to fail, and Aunt Sarah Jane would call the two of them in to supper. The spectacle had a sort of hypnotic effect upon the boy, it was so slow and measured, as slow almost, Edwin thought, as the processes of germination and growth which it was his uncle’s vocation to assist. His fingers even handled the purple soil as if he loved it.

His cousin was a different matter altogether: a tall, dark-haired boy, a couple of years older than Edwin. He had, much more distinctly than Uncle Will, the Ingleby face, the features that were to be seen at their best in the old lady at the Holloway farm. And he possessed in a high degree the quality that had carried Edwin’s father out into the world: a seriousness that made him anxious to “get on,” promptings of which were now being satisfied in an accumulation of the periodical publications that have taken the place of Mr. Samuel Smiles in these days: weeklies devoted to all kinds of useful hobbies—electricity, wood-carving, plumbing—the series that eventually culminated in the gigantic illusion of the Self-Educator.

To these short cuts to power the young man devoted all his evenings, and though he was quite natural in his anxiousness to be friendly with Edwin, with whose subtler and more contemplative nature he had at present so little in common, the attempts were not very successful. Between these two there lay a far more obvious gulf than that which separated Edwin from the older people. In a way, he could not help admiring his cousin’s earnestness, probably because he knew that he could never imitate it, and yet he sometimes found himself examining it in a mood of absolute detachment that made his sympathy feel artificial.

Just before he left St. Luke’s he had been reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, and in the light of this work the efforts of his father, followed by those of his cousin Joe, seemed to him an excellent instance of the tendency of ancient stocks to vary or sport in definite directions. In the earnest Joe Edwin found the phenomenon a little troublesome, for the sight of the immense energies that the youth was putting into channels that were futile distressed him, and the more so because to correct the waste it would have been necessary to begin again from a point so distant that Joe would be faced with the spectacle of more than half of his present energies wasted. So Edwin thought as little as the consciousness of his own selfishness would allow him, of all the labours that were typified by the fretwork mahogany frames that surrounded the photographs of the Halesby Inglebys, listening instead to the endless tales of his Aunt Sarah Jane, in the hour when she became talkative, after supper.

By this time Edwin was so interested in his own romantic origins that any story of the old Highberrow would do for him; and his aunt, with her soft Somerset voice, her picturesque phrasing, and her unfailing memory for social details, rebuilt, night after night, the life of the decayed village as it had been in the old dowser’s time, evolving by degrees a human comedy which resembled that of its great exemplar by the way in which the protagonists of one episode became mere incidentals to another. Edwin knew them all by name, and recognised them as if he had met them in the flesh whenever he heard of them.

In this way, sitting in the smell of the window geraniums over a leisurely supper of bread and cheese, in his uncle’s case literally washed down with cider, he heard a story that he always remembered with pride and pity and a degree of passionate resentment: the story of how the village of his fathers had sunk into decay.

Highberrow, it appeared, had been built on what was then a common moorland, by the men who lived in it, laboriously, stone by stone. Their right to these fruits of their labour had never been called into question, and the whole spirit of the village had been happy and prosperous, as well it might, seeing that it owed nothing to the care of any outsider and could pay its way. And during those prosperous times its liberties seemed secure from danger. But when the decay of the grouvier’s industry led to unemployment and poverty, and the younger men of the Highberrow families began to look for their living overseas, the little community became so weak that the owner of the manor-house saw his opportunity. As Lord of the Manor he disputed the “squatters’ right” of the Highberrow villagers, and through his agents demanded a rent that would have made living impossible for most of them, for the cottages that they or their forefathers had built. If they refused to pay the rent, he said, they would be evicted, not in order that other people might be introduced who would pay, but merely to satisfy the landlord’s convictions of the rightness of his principle. That was the way in which he put it. Merely out of spite would be a more accurate description of his motives.

Highberrow was in a bad way. The villagers were either very old or very young, and in either case their feebleness made the whole organism unfit to resist the inroads of the parasite. What is more, they were very poor, and the very nature of the Mendip mining industry had made them so far individualist that the idea of combined resistance did not occur to them. The landlord wisely started his operations with an old woman whose cottage lay nearest to the woods in which his pheasants were bred. Almost incredibly poor, she had lived on the products of her garden and her poultry. To pay rent was out of the question. Sheer age and inertia made it impossible for her to move, and in the course of time she was evicted with her miserable belongings, and went to die at the home of a married daughter.

Emerging from this easy contest, the landlord, or perhaps his agent, moved on to the next. It was unfortunate for him, and fortunate for the villagers, that he now pitched on the cottage of Thomas Ingleby, the dowser, Edwin’s grandfather. The old man had this in his favour: that he was a man of two trades, that even when the mining had failed him he could make a living with the divining rod, and the consciousness of this power no doubt stiffened his resistance. Another eviction was decreed, but this time things did not go so easily. When the landlord’s men arrived from the manor to empty the house, another party appeared from the Cold Harbour mines, and as soon as the furniture was dragged out at the front door it was seized and taken in again at the back.

“It were a proper field-day,” said Uncle Will quietly, “I do remember it well. I can see your father now, John, standing over beyond the road with his back to the wall, not speakin’ a word, just smokin’ of his pipe.”

The landlord’s men saw that this sort of thing might go on for ever and none the better for it, so they just gave it up, but old Ingleby (Edwin had already canonised him as a “village Hampden”) had shown the rest of the Highberrow people what could be done, and gradually stirred them into combined action.

It was a little, pitiful attempt. He himself put into it all his savings, a matter of a few pounds, and to this were added as many shillings as could be scraped together in the village. He took the money to a lawyer in Axcombe—Bayliss was his name—an honest man with a sense of justice and, one suspects, some admiration for the sturdiness of his client. Bayliss worked the matter up and made a case of it, and no further attempts at eviction were made in Highberrow in the meantime. The village even regained a little of its former confidence, and for some time the landlord did not show his face in it. But once more luck was against Highberrow. Bayliss, the good lawyer, died. He had been careful to keep the matter in his own hands, and when it came to be considered by his successor, a partner with social ambitions, the new man would not touch it: partly because there appeared to be no more money in it (as was probably the case), and partly because he was in the habit of meeting the Lord of the Manor in the hunting-field, and was on card-playing terms with the agent.

There followed an exodus of despair. The people of Highberrow, who had no more money to fight with, packed up their pitiable belongings and left their houses rather than face the trouble of eviction. Not so Thomas Ingleby. The agent returned to the attack. There were threats: a stormy interview, in which the dowser faced the landlord himself. A final week’s notice was given, and Ingleby made sure once more of the support of his friends from the neighbouring villages. But no further attempt at eviction was made. At the last moment the landlord climbed down. He arranged another interview, and at this the terms for the whole village were settled. For the lives of the present occupants, or for a period of sixty years, the cottages should remain rent-free. It was not everything, but ’twas a famous victory. “That is why Aunt Lydia do be still living up to the Holloway to this day,” said Aunt Sarah Jane.

“And I suppose grandfather lived there till he died,” said Edwin.

“No, the poor dear. When he did grow very aged your uncle and I went up to Highberrow and persuaded en that he weren’t fit to look after himself. You should ’a seed the dirt in that house! And he comed down to live along of we. But he were never happy, were he, Will?”“Noa . . . he were never happy.”

“He were a quare old man. Us seed very little of en. Arften people would come for en from a distance that wanted water found, and he did spend the day roving the country cutting blackthorns for his dowsing. Right up to the day when he took to his bed, poor soul.”

“I should like to have seen him dowsing,” said Edwin. “I haven’t even seen the twigs that they use.”

“Why, that would have been easy enough. Only the other day I throwed out a lot that belonged to your grandfather.”

Edwin blushed at this sacrilege. “And could Uncle Will find water with a twig?” he asked.

“Not I,” laughed his uncle. “But they do say it runs in families. Have you ever tried, John?”

“I tried when I was a boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, “but nothing happened.”

“I expect our Joe could,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, with infinite faith in her offspring.

“No, mother, I’ve tried it,” said Joe, from the lamplit corner where he was wrestling with the science of sanitary inspection.

“I wonder if I could . . .” said Edwin.

“Well, you shall have a try,” laughed his uncle.

“At this time o’ night?” said Aunt Sarah Jane, scandalised.

“Let the boy have a try,” said Uncle Will, rising. “’Tis a beautivul moonlight night, and I’ll take him over the field where the new water-pipe runs.”

“You’m mad, the two of you,” said his aunt with a sigh.Edwin and his uncle went out into the garden, and there the boy watched the gardener’s clumsy, skilful hands cut a forked twig from a blackthorn bush.

“Hazel do work as well,” he said, “but father always used the thorn.”

Then they went out together over a dewy meadow, and his uncle showed him how to hold the rod: with his two hands turned palm upwards, the arms of the twig between the third and fourth fingers, the thumb, and the palm of each hand, and the fork downwards between them. Over the meadow grass they walked slowly, then suddenly the tip of the rod began to turn upwards by no agency of which Edwin was aware. It was very thrilling, for his hands were quite still.

“There you are,” said his uncle, “you’ve a found our water-pipe.”

“Hold the rod down, uncle,” Edwin said.

He did so, and now the mysterious force was so strong that the arms of the twig snapped.

“Now, you’ve gone and broke it,” said Uncle Will. “Come in or you’ll catch cold.”

They went in together.

“Well . . .?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Oh, he’s a proper dowser, sure enough,” said Uncle Will.

Edwin was still curiously thrilled with the whole business. He felt that a little more excitement in his attainment was due to him; but no one, not even his father, seemed in the least impressed. It comforted him to think that his cousin Joe, his eyes fixed on his book in the corner, had really less in common than himself with the strange dark people from whom they were both descended. It was better, he thought, to be a born dowser than a Fellow of Balliol. More wonderful still to be both.

All the rest of that evening he felt a queer elation in his mysterious birthright, and when his father yawned and they both went up to bed he lay awake for a long time listening to the drowsy music of the corncrake and the wail of hunting owls, trying to put himself more closely in touch with the romantic past that had bred him: with that magnificent figure his grandfather, and the innumerable strange and passionate ancestry that slept under the shadow of Highberrow church on the Batch. “Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” he thought. And so he came to think of his father, through whom these things came to him: of his hard achievements, of his loneliness, of his difficulty of expressing—if it were not a disinclination to express—all the powerful and stormy things that must lie hidden in his heart. And a feeling of passionate kinship carried Edwin away: an anxiety to show his love for his father in unmistakable ways; to make clear to him once and for all the depth of his son’s devotion. He began to think of his father as a mother might think of her child. It must have been in that way, he imagined, that his own mother had thought of her husband. The night was so still that he imagined he could hear the rusty ivory of the acacia-blossom falling at the gate.

III

They were in the train on their way home from Bristol, passing smoothly under the escarpment of the lower Cotswolds. The fortnight had passed with an astounding swiftness. After leaving Wringford they had cycled over the back of Mendip, past the mines at Cold Harbour, where they had paused for half an hour to look at the workings, now deserted and overgrown with ragwort and scabious, and the Roman amphitheatre, to the great limestone gorge above Axcombe; and from there they had ridden to Wells, where, beyond streets that flowed eternally with limpid water, they had gazed on the wonder of the cathedral and seen the white swans floating in the palace moat under a sky that was full of peace. Only for a moment had they seen the masts of Bristol and Redcliffe’s dreamy spire; and now in a few hours they would be back in Halesby: in another world.

As they travelled northwards Edwin was thinking all the time of the work that he would do in his little room above the bed of stocks. It should be a fragrant room, he thought, and a good one for reading, for when his attention wandered he would be able to lift his eyes to a line of gentler hills crowned by the dark folds of Shenstone’s hanging woods. And there he would be able to dream of the coloured past and of his own exciting future, and the enchanted life that he would soon be leading among the noblest works of men in letters and in stone. Oxford, his Mecca . . . the eternal city of his dreams. He allowed his fancy to travel westward over the rolling Cotswold and droop by the slow descent of river valleys to that sacred place. His father’s voice dispelled his dream. They were alone in the carriage and their privacy made speaking easy.

“Edwin . . . I’ve been thinking a good deal about your future.”

“Yes, father?”

“I’ve been thinking it over in my own mind. I talked it over a week or two ago with your Uncle Albert. He’s a sound man of business, you know. Then I felt that I couldn’t trust my judgment; the whole world was upside down; but now I feel that I can think clearly, and of course I am anxious to do my best for you. I’ve been thinking about this Oxford plan. . . .”

“Yes.”

“You know quite well, Edwin, that I’m not a rich man. I’m a very poor man. You can understand that, better than you could before, after this holiday. And when people have very limited means and are getting on in life—this business has made me an old man, you know—they have to be very careful in their decisions. Looking at it from every point of view, I don’t think it would be fair of me to let you go to Oxford.”

“Father . . . what do you mean?”

“To begin with, there’s the expense.”

“But I shall get a scholarship. I’ll work like anything. I’ll make sure of it.”

“I’m sure you would. You’re a good boy. But that isn’t everything by a long way. When you’ve got your scholarship, supposing you do get it, the expense would begin. I shouldn’t like you to feel at a hopeless disadvantage with men of your own year. You would have to live quite a different life from them. You wouldn’t be able to afford any of their pleasures.”

“I shouldn’t want their pleasures.”

“That is a rash thing to say. But I’m looking even farther ahead. What can you expect to do when you’ve taken a degree in Arts?”

“A fellowship. . . .”

“Ah, but that is a matter of considerable uncertainty. I’ve seen so many men who have managed to scrape through a university degree and then been thrown on the world in a state of miserable poverty. Look at Mr. Kelly at the grammar-school. You wouldn’t like to live his life; but I believe he has quite a brilliant university career behind him. No . . . I don’t think it would be fair to you.”

“But mother and I always said . . .”

“Yes, I know . . . you were a pair of dreamers, both of you. If you felt any very strong desire to become a parson there might be something in it, though that, too, is a miserable life often enough. But you don’t, do you?”

“No . . . of course not.”

“So I think that while I am living you should have the chance of learning a useful profession. What about doctoring?”

“But that would be expensive too.”

“I know that . . . but I think we could do it. We should have a little in common. I might even be able to help you. And in a way . . . in a way I should feel that in you I was realising some of my own old ambitions. It is a noble profession, Eddie: the most humane in the world. No one need ever be ashamed of being a doctor. I think that a parson who professes religion for the sake of a living is rather to be despised.”

“Father, I’m sure it would cost too much. Six years, you know. . . .”

“Five . . . only five, if you pass all your examinations. And it need not be so expensive as you think. During the last year they have turned the old College in North Bromwich into a University. They give a degree in medicine. And while you were studying there you could still live with me at Halesby. I should be glad of your company.”

This appeal to Edwin’s pity was difficult to resist. It recalled to him all the resolutions that he had made in the night at Wringford: the devotion with which he had determined to devote himself to his father’s welfare: the determination that he should never do anything that could cause the man a moment’s pain. It was difficult . . . difficult.

“You could still get your scholarship,” his father went on. “There are several endowments of that kind at the North Bromwich medical school. I have a pamphlet at home that gives all the particulars. I had even shown it to your mother.”

“And what did she say, father?”

“She didn’t say much. She knew it would be a great disappointment to you. But I think she realised that it would be a good thing for you; and I know she looked forward to having you at home.”

“Yes . . . she must have known what a disappointment it would be. Father, I wish you would think it over again.”

“I want you to think it over, too. At present it naturally comes as a shock to you; but I think you’ll see in time. . . .”

He couldn’t see. He knew that he could never see it in that light. It was going to take all the beauty that he had conceived out of his life. It was going to ruin all his happiness. In place of light and cleanliness and learning it was going to give him . . . what? The darkness of a smoky city; its grime; the mean ideals of the people who lived beneath its ugliness. Even the memory of the enthusiasm with which he had thought of the life of old Dr. Marshall, his father’s patron, couldn’t mitigate the dreariness of the prospect. The idea of living for ever in company with dirt and misery and harrowing disease repelled him. It was no good telling him that contact with these misfortunes developed the nobler faculties of man. It was not the life that he had wanted. His soul sent forth a cry of exceeding bitterness. And while he sat there, full of misery and resentment, the train was carrying them onward into the gloom that always overshadowed the City of Iron.