. . . so that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of the world.

Thomas Traherne.

CHAPTER I
THE CITY OF IRON

I

The city of iron stands upon three hills and its valleys were once watered by two rivers; but since the day when its name was humbly written in Doomsday these pastoral features have disappeared, so that the hills are only known as tramway gradients that testify to the excellence of the Corporation’s power station, and the rivers, running in brick culverts, have been deprived not only of their liberty but even of their natural function of receiving a portion of the city’s gigantic sewage. The original market of North Bromwich has been not so much debauched from without, in the manner of other growing towns, as organised from within by the development of its own inherent powers for evil. It is not a place from which men have wilfully cast out beauty so much as one from which beauty has vanished in spite of man’s pitiful aspirations to preserve it. Indeed, its citizens are objects rather for pity than for reproach, and would be astonished to receive either, for many of them are wealthy, and from their childhood, knowing no better, have believed that wealth is a justification and an apology for every mortal evil from ugliness to original sin.In the heart of the city the sense of power, impressive if malignant, is so overwhelming that one cannot see the monstrosity as a whole and can almost understand the blindness of its inhabitants. Go, rather, to the hills beyond Halesby, to Uffdown and Pen Beacon, where, with a choice of prospects, one may turn from the dreamy plain of Severn and the cloudy splendours of Silurian hills, to its pillars of cloud by day and its pillars of fire by night; and perhaps in that remoter air you may realise the city’s true significance as a phenomenon of unconquered if not inevitable disease. If you are a physician, you will realise that this evil has its counterpart in human tissues, where a single cell, that differs not at all from other cells and is a natural unit in the organism, may suddenly and, as it seems, unreasonably acquire a faculty of monstrous and malignant growth, cleaving and multiplying to the destruction of its fellows—a cell gone mad, to which the ancients gave the name of cancer.

The inhabitants of North Bromwich, who are a tolerant people, and proud of the fact, would smile at this reflection. They are not in the habit of surveying the midden in which they are bred from remote hilltops, except on Bank Holidays, at which time they have discovered a truth from which they might learn more: that with the aid of hill air and exercise, whether it be that of cocoanut shies or swing-boats, or the more hazardous pursuit of donkey-riding, it is possible to absorb a greater quantity of alcohol in a given time without unduly suffering than in the atmosphere of their own streets. But they have not time to learn, and since they have never known any other conditions of living, they exhibit the admirable human characteristic of making the best of their surroundings and persuading themselves that their hallucinated existence is typical of human life. They are even eager, pathetically eager, to find and to proclaim its virtues, and that they may do this more easily they have invented specious names for the disease and its results: Industry for the first, and, for the second, Progress.

In the vindication of a Municipal Conscience (making the best of a bad job) they periodically extend the area over which their coat of arms, a reminder of days when chivalry existed, is displayed. The coat of arms itself is an unfortunate symbol, for it is supported by the figure of a brawny slave who carries the hammer with which his chains have been forged; but the motto at least is encouraging. It is the word “Forward,” expressing the aspirations of the citizens towards the day when all England may be as the Black Country. The watcher on Uffdown may give it a more far-sighted significance: “forward, to the day when there shall be no more coal, and the evil, of its own inanition, perish.”

For the present, at any rate, the city showed no signs of perishing. During the last year or two, its tentacles had spread farther than ever before, swarming into the wet and lonely valley of the Dulas Fechan, a deep cleft in the mountains beyond Felindre where a noisy river ran through undergrowth older than man’s memory. From this valley, the council had decreed, the rain of the Savaddan watershed, which geology had destined for the Wye and later for the Atlantic, must now traverse eighty miles or more of conquered territory, and after being defouled by the domestic usages of North Bromwich, must find its way into the Trent, and so to the German Ocean, as the Romans thoughtlessly labelled the North Sea. “Water,” said the Mayor, who was also known as Sir Joseph Astill, the brewer, “water is one of the necessities of life. It is our duty to the public to see that they have it, and that they have it pure and unadulterated.”

So the Welsh water came, and the altruistic baronet took the credit for it. Indeed the progressive spirit of North Bromwich found its incarnation in this fleshy gentleman. It was he who presented the municipal art gallery with their unrivalled collection of Madox-Jones cartoons, to say nothing of three portraits of himself exemplifying (he had an elegant vocabulary) the styles of the three greatest portrait painters of modern times. It was he who saved the art of music from degradation by fighting, with all the weight of his personal influence, against the performance of secular music, music, that is, divorced from “sacred” words, upon the Sabbath. It was he, again, who aroused public feeling on the question of the university: “the first Modern university,” he called it.

He accomplished its endowment, equipped it with a principal whose name was a household word in the homes of the great middle classes; and finally set the seal of modernity on his creation, less than twenty years before the total prohibition of alcohol became law in retrograde America, by instituting a learned faculty and providing a degree in the science of . . . brewing. Just as an example of the city’s liberality, there was also a faculty of Arts. The faculty of Science, of course, was important, if only as an appendage to the brewing school; those of Engineering and Mining flattered the industries of the district; that of Commerce taught its graduates to write business letters in every spoken tongue and give the Yankees what for; and lastly, that of Medicine, supplied a necessary antidote to the activities of most of the others.

Sir Joseph Astill was proud, as well he might be, of the Medical School. “In this city,” he boasted, “there are actually more hospital beds per centum of inhabitants than in any other in the whole country. The North Bromwich medical student has a greater opportunity of studying disease, in all its aspects, than the alumnus of any other school in the world. Thousands of beds lie waiting for his scrutiny; and I am glad to say that very few of them are ever empty.”

Edwin’s first serious acquaintance with North Bromwich had begun at the end of the summer holidays, through which he had worked with a good deal less than the fiery enthusiasm that he would have put into his reading for the Balliol scholarship. The syllabus of the examination for the Astill Exhibition had amazed him by its simplicity: the prescribed books were works that he had absorbed some years before at St. Luke’s, and though the mathematical side of the business worried him, as it had always done, it was clear that in North Bromwich the classics were regarded really as a polite accomplishment rather than as an integral part of a gentleman’s equipment in life: so that these drowsy summer months were really a period of comparative idleness in which he had time to brood on his regrets and become gradually reconciled to his new fate. In this spirit he approached the examination. Even the capitoline eminence on which the university buildings were placed, with the tremendous renaissance buildings of the Council House and the Corinthian Town Hall, did not greatly impress him. He saw rather the squalid slums from which these pretentious buildings rose. It was so different, he thought, from Oxford, and he passed the flagged courtyard with its cool fountain and the benevolent statue of Sir Joseph Astill in a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella on which the sculptor had lavished all the feeling of his art, without the least shadow of spiritual obeisance.

With two other long-legged candidates he had worked through his papers in a small room whose windows overlooked the quiet square and a phantom stream of noiseless traffic beyond. The first paper had been mathematical, and its intricacies kept his mind so busy that he had little time for reflection. From time to time he would see one of the long-legged competitors reducing the end of his penholder to wood-pulp in the earnestness of ruminant thought; and occasionally the deep boom of the clock in the tower of the Art Gallery would remind him that time was veritably passing; but time passed swiftly, and he was almost surprised to find himself once more in an air that for all its vitiation was less sleepy than that of the sealed examination room. By the end of the first evening all that he feared in the examination papers was over. To-morrow he would be on his own ground and the modern university could do its damnedest.

Next day the classical papers were distributed and Edwin, who found them easy, could see that his pen-chewing friend was in a bad way. All the passages set for translation were familiar: the grammatical questions consisted of old catches that had been drilled into him by Mr. Leeming in the Upper Fourth. As far as he was concerned, it was a walk over. He had time to take in more of his surroundings and to watch the silent coloured stream of traffic filtering through the narrows where the bulk of the Town Hall constricted the street. At the end of each day he found his father anxiously awaiting him. He was eager to see and handle the examination papers for himself. He seemed impressed by their difficulty, and Edwin found it hard to reassure him without appearing objectionably superior. He seemed rather surprised that Edwin, on the eve of such a formidable ordeal, should choose to take out his bicycle and ride towards the hills, so surprised that it became a matter for serious debate with Edwin whether he should do as he wanted to do and appear priggish, or affect an anxiety that didn’t exist merely to please his father. In the end he decided to be honest at all costs.

The part of the examination that he enjoyed most was the viva-voce in Classics. For this trial he was led up many flights of stone steps to a room full of books in which the Dean of the Faculty of Arts awaited him: a kindly, nervous old man with a grey beard, with whom Edwin immediately felt at home. His nervousness seemed to Edwin appropriate: it implied the indubitable fact that in North Bromwich Arts was a sideshow that counted for nothing, and that the professor’s dignity, as Dean of a learned Faculty, was a precarious and unsubstantial thing. “Your papers were excellent, . . . excellent,” he said to begin with. “Now, I should like you to read me something.” He pointed to a bookshelf. “Let us start with some Greek.”

“What would you like, sir?”

“Oh, it’s not what I should like. What would you like to read? Something that really appeals to you.”

Edwin felt that the dean was watching him, like a cat stalking a bird, as his fingers approached the bookshelf. It was a curious responsibility, for it would be an awful shame if he chose something that the old man didn’t approve of. Sophocles. . . . Why not Sophocles?

He picked out the Antigone, and chose the great chorus:—

???? ????ate ??a?,
????, ?? ?? ?t?as? p?pte??, . . .

“Let’s have it in Greek first.”

Edwin read it in the level voice which the Head of St. Luke’s had always used for the recitation of Greek poetry. When he had finished the first strophe he looked up and saw that the Dean’s weak eyes, beneath their tortoiseshell spectacles, were brimming with tears.

“That will do,” he said, “unless you’d prefer to go on . . .”

Edwin read the antistrophe.

“Yes . . . I don’t think you need translate it,” said the Dean. He paused for a moment, then, replacing the volume, went on. “In this university I am known as the Professor of Dead Languages. Dead languages. What?”

They passed a pleasant half-hour together. In Latin Edwin chose Lucretius and a passage from the Georgics, at the end of which the Dean confided to him that he kept bees. “Thank you, that will do,” he said. “I gather that you are entering the Medical School. . . . Well, it is a noble profession. I don’t know what we should do without doctors, I’m sure.”

Four days later Mr. Ingleby received him at the breakfast table with unconcealed emotion. “You’ve got your scholarship, Edwin. I’m . . . I’m as pleased as if I’d won it myself. I never had the opportunity of winning a scholarship in my life.” The hand in which he held the letter trembled. He kissed Edwin fervently. “This is a great day for me,” he said: and Edwin, glowing, felt that anything was worth while that could give such pleasure to the man that he had determined to love.

II

On a bright morning at the beginning of September Edwin found himself one of a crowd of ten or fifteen youths, waiting with a varying degree of assurance, outside the office of the Dean of the Medical Faculty in James Street, a sordid thoroughfare in which the pretentious buildings of the old College of Science hid its hinder quarters. The door was small, and only distinguished from its neighbours, a steam laundry and brassworker’s office, by a plate that bore the inscription, “University of North Bromwich. Medical School.” Inside the door stood a wooden box for a porter, usually empty, but in its moments of occupation surveying a long, dark cloakroom with a hundred or more numbered lockers and corresponding clothes-hooks, on a few of which undergraduates’ gowns and battered mortar-boards were hanging. This morning the Dean was holding audience of all the first year men, and each of the crowd in which Edwin now found himself a negligible unit, was waiting until his name should be called from the office, and, in the meantime, surveying his companions with suspicion and being surveyed with a more confident and collective suspicion by seniors who happened to drift through the corridors on business or idleness, and showed evidence of their initiation by familiarity with the porter.

Only one face in the company was in the least familiar to Edwin: that of a ponderous young man with immaculate black hair carefully parted in the middle, who had sat stolidly through the Astill Exhibition examination a few desks away from him. As he did not appear to be anxious to recognise this fact, Edwin abandoned his own intention of doing so, and, like the rest of the company, possessed his soul in silence. In the meantime he watched the others with a good deal of interest and speculation.

They were a strangely mixed company: a few of them, of whom Edwin himself was one, mere boys, to whom the air of the schoolroom still clung: some obvious men of the world, scrupulously, even doggily dressed, in an age when the fancy waistcoat had reached the zenith of its daring; others, and one other in particular, a seedy looking person with a dejected fair moustache, were clearly old enough to be the fathers of the youngest. It was to the second of these classes, the bloods, that Edwin found his attention attracted, and particularly to a paragon of elegance, whose waistcoat was the orange colour of a blackbird’s bill with light blue enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathematically bisected and shone with expensive unguents, and whose chin differed from that of Edwin in being shaved from sheer necessity instead of from motives of encouragement.

This person exuded an atmosphere of prosperity and style that took Edwin’s fancy immensely, and he wore grey flannel trousers as correctly turned up as any that Edwin had seen upon the enchanted platform of the station at Oxford. It was evident that the process of waiting bored him; for he took out of the pocket of the amazing waistcoat a gold hunter watch with a front enamelled in the same shade of light blue. The lid flicked open noiselessly when he touched a spring, and Edwin began to be exercised in his mind as to what happened when he put on a waistcoat of a different pattern, as obviously a person of this degree of magnificence must frequently do. Did he change the buttons, or did he change the watch? Edwin, surveying him, looked unconsciously at his own Waterbury; and, as he did so, the magnificent creature glanced at him with a pair of savage brown eyes, and, as Edwin decided, summed him up for good and all.

“Mr. Harrop, please,” said the porter. And Mr. Harrop pocketed his hunter and disdainfully entered the office.

Edwin, relieved from his scrutiny, turned his attention to the most impressive figure of all: a young man fully six feet four in height, but so broadly and heavily built that his tallness was scarcely noticeable. His face was good-humoured, and very plain, with the look of battered obstinacy that may sometimes be seen in that of a boxer. Perhaps this idea was reinforced by the fact that his short nose was broken, and that he carried his whole face a little forward, staring out at the world from under bushy black eyebrows. He seemed made for rough usage, and his undoubted strength was qualified by a degree of awkwardness that showed itself in his clumsy hands. These, at the present time, were clasped behind his back, beneath the folds of a brand-new undergraduate’s gown that, because of his great height, looked ridiculously small. His whole aspect was one of terrific earnestness. Evidently he was taking this business, as he would surely have taken any other, seriously. That, no doubt, was the reason why on this occasion he alone appeared in academical dress. His clasped hands, his lowered head, his bulldog neck all spoke of a determination to go through with this adventure at all costs.

“Mr. Brown,” said the porter, and nearly blundering into the returning elegance of Mr. Harrop, he slouched into the Dean’s office as though he were entering the ring for the heavy-weight championship of the world.

In the end Edwin found himself left alone with a youth of his own age, a tall, loose-limbed creature, with an indefinite humorous face, a close crop of curly fair hair and blue eyes. Edwin rather liked the look of him. He was young, and seemed approachable, and though his striped flannel suit was more elegant than Edwin’s and he wore a school tie of knitted silk, Edwin took the risk of addressing him.

“We seem to be the last.”

“Yes. I expect the Dean will keep me last of all, bad cess to him! That’s because I happen to be a sort of cousin of the old devil’s.” He spoke with a soft brogue that had come from the south of Ireland.

“Mr. Ingleby, please.”

Edwin pulled himself together and entered the Dean’s office.

A pleasant room: at one big desk a suave, clean-shaven gentleman with thin sandy hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. At another a little dark man with a bald head and a typewriter in front of him.

“Mr. Ingleby?” said the first. His voice was refined, if a little too precise.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Ingleby, what are you going to do? Ah, yes . . . you are the Astill scholar. Very good. Very good. Are you proposing to take a London degree?”

“No, sir. North Bromwich.”

“Well . . . it is possible you may change your mind later. Have you taken the London Matriculation?”

“No, sir. I was on the classical side at St. Luke’s. I was reading for a scholarship at Oxford.”

“And changed your mind . . . or” (shrewdly) “had it changed for you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is your father a doctor?”

“No.” It really doesn’t matter what my father is, thought Edwin, and the Dean, as though answering his reflection, said:—

“No. . . That doesn’t matter.” And, after a pause: “Well, Mr. . . . er . . . Ingleby, you have made a good beginning. I hope it will continue satisfactorily. That is all, thank you. Good-morning.” He held out his hand to Edwin, who was astonished into putting out a moist hand himself. “Yes,” continued the Dean in a suave, reflective voice, “you will pay your fees to my secretary, Mr. Hadley. This is . . . er . . . Mr. Hadley. Yes.”

Mr. Hadley acknowledged the introduction with a lift of the right eyebrow and Edwin left the room.

“Mr. Martin,” said the secretary, as he left, and “Mr. Martin, please,” the porter repeated.

“I say, wait a moment for me,” said the loose-limbed Irishman to Edwin in passing.

It was so friendly as to be cheering.“He seems a decent old bird,” said Martin, emerging a few minutes later.

“I thought you said he was your cousin?”

“So he is. You see I’m Irish, and so is he; and in Ireland pretty nearly everybody who is anybody is related to everybody else.” He plunged into a lengthy demonstration of the relationships of the Southern aristocracy, with warnings as to the gulfs that separated the Martins from the Martyns, and the Plunketts from the Plunkets, rambling away through a world of high-breeding and penury in which all the inhabitants called each other by their Christian names, and spent their lives in hunting, point-to-point racing, and elaborate practical jokes. A new world to Edwin.

They strolled down Sackville Row together, and cutting through the Arcades came out into the wide thoroughfare of Queen Street that had been driven through an area of slums in honour of Victoria’s first jubilee.

“By the way, what’s your school?” said Denis Martin.

“St. Luke’s.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I don’t suppose you would, in Ireland.”

“Oh, I didn’t go to school in Ireland. Nobody does. I was at Marlborough. Is St. Luke’s one of those soccer schools?”

“Good Lord, no. . . . We play rugger. We’re pretty good.”

“Who do you play?”

“Merchant Taylors and St. Paul’s, and one or two others.”“H’m. . . . They’re day schools, aren’t they? Is St. Luke’s that sort?”

Edwin, with enthusiasm, expounded the St. Luke’s legend, that nobody outside of St. Luke’s has ever been known to believe. Martin, meanwhile, looked a little supercilious and bored. He spoke as from a distant world in a tone that implied that the people of North Bromwich could never call each other by their Christian names or hunt or race or play practical jokes with an air of being born to it.

“I expect we’re a pretty mixed lot here,” he said.

And Edwin, with the guilty consciousness of being more than a little mixed himself, replied: “Yes.”

“An extraordinary collection. That great dark fellow looks an absolute tyke. Then there’s the chap with the waistcoat—”

“Yes. . . . Harrop was the name.”

“I don’t know the name,” said Martin dubiously. “Never heard of the family. He was wearing an Oriel tie.”

“Oriel. . . . Do you mean Oxford?”

“Yes, one of my cousins was there. That’s how I know it. I should think they turfed him out on account of that waistcoat. Still, Oxford isn’t what it used to be.” “In the eyes of a Southern Unionist,” he might have added. But the news was grateful to Edwin. “I shouldn’t wonder,” Martin went on, “if lots of decent people didn’t end by coming to schools like this. I expect it is the Dean’s idea, you know. I say, what about lunch? Do you know of any decent place?”

In ancient days, when he had come into North Bromwich shopping with his mother, Edwin had always been taken to Battie’s, the great confectioner’s in Queen Street, but now, passing the doors in this exalted company, he felt that the company of a crowd of shabby shopping women would hardly be suitable: besides, he might even run the risk of meeting his Aunt Laura, who also frequented the shop, so he left Battie’s prudently alone.

“I know one place,” said Martin. “I should think it’s all right. The food’s decent anyway.”

He led the way up a side street to an elegant resort frequented by the professional classes of North Bromwich, where them was a long counter set out with sandwiches like a buffet at a dance, and all the customers seemed at home. In the ordinary way Edwin would not have dared to enter it, but Martin, with the elegant confidence of Southern Unionism, showed him the way, and seated at a marble-topped table they trifled with Plover on toast. Martin, of course, did the choosing, and in his dealings with the tiny carcass showed a familiarity with the correct method of consuming small birds that Edwin was pleased to learn. “Ever shoot plover?” he said. No . . . Edwin had never shot anything: he didn’t particularly want to shoot anything; but he realised that it was a great accomplishment to be able to talk about it as though he had never done anything else.

“I’ll pay,” said Martin. “We can square up afterwards.”

They did so and, thawed by the process of feeding, began to talk more easily. “Are you digging in this place?” Martin asked. Edwin told him that he lived in the country.“In the country? I didn’t know there was any here. Have you any decent shooting?”

“Unfortunately, no.” He remembered, however, the solitary trout under the bridge below the abbey. “There’s fishing of sorts,” he said.

“What sorts?”

“Oh, trout—”

“Brown trout? There’s not much fun in that. White trout . . . sea trout you call them in England . . . are good sport. Still, we’ll have a day together next spring. I’ll get my rods over.”

The subject was dangerous, and so Edwin asked him where he was living: “With your cousin, I suppose.”

“Oh, no. . . . I don’t know the old divil, you know. I’ve rooms with an old lady up in Alvaston. She’s rather a decent sort. House full of animals.” He didn’t specify what the animals were. “I’d better go and unpack some of my things. I suppose I shall see you at the Chemistry Lecture to-morrow. So long. . . . Oh, I forgot. . . . What’s your name?”

“Ingleby.”

“Ingleby. . . Right-o.” He boarded a passing bus with the air of stepping on to a coach and four.

Edwin took the next train home. On the opposite platform of the station he caught a glimpse of the great bulk of the man named Brown walking up and down with earnestness in his eyes and under his arm a huge parcel of books. He gave Edwin the impression of wanting to throw himself into the adventure of the medical curriculum as he might have thrown himself into a Rugby scrum, expecting a repetition of the tremendous battering that he seemed already to have undergone.

Thinking of him, and of the aristocratic Martin, and of Harrop, a product which Oriel had finished to the last waistcoat button, and, more dimly, of the elderly gentleman with the dejected moustaches, it seemed to Edwin that he himself was appallingly young and callow and inexperienced. How was he going to stand up to these people with their knowledge of the world and its ways: men who had already, by virtue of their birth or experience, learned how to dress and live and move without effort in the crowded world? Yet with them, he knew, he must now take his place. It would be difficult . . . awfully difficult. He had everything, even the most elementary rules of conduct, to learn. He was a child who had never known another human being except his mother and a few school friends of his own age. He had not even the savoir-vivre of Griffin. And, in this new life, it seemed to him that the dreams on which he had depended must be useless—or even more, a positive handicap to his success.

The moments of sudden spiritual enlightenment that one reads of in the lives of saints, or of converts to Salvationism, are not a common experience in those of ordinary men; and though, in the turn of every tide, there is a critical period, measurable by the fraction of a second, in which the waters that have swayed forwards retire upon themselves, to the eyes of an observer the change of motion is so gradual as to be only slowly perceived. In Edwin’s life the death of his mother had been the real point of crisis; but this he had only dimly realised when his hopes of Oxford had been dashed for ever in a third-class compartment hurtling under Bredon Hill. Between it and the present moment there had hung a period of dead water (so to speak) in which the current of his life had seemed suspended; but now he knew that there was no doubt but that a change had overtaken him, and that he would never again be the same.

All his life, up to this point, had been curiously inorganic: a haphazard succession of novel and bewildering sensations: a kaleidoscope of sensual impressions changing almost too rapidly to be appreciated—so rapidly that it had been impossible for him to think of one in relation to another. Some of them had been painful; some enthralling in their beauty; some merely engrossing because they were full of awe: yet all had been ecstatic, and tinged in some degree with a visionary light. Now, as always, it was clear that he must be a dreamer; but, from this day onwards, it also became clear that his visions must be something more to him than a series of coloured impressions, succeeding one another without reason and accepted without explanation. In the future they must be correlated with experience and the demands of life. In that lost age of innocence the people with whom he came into contact had interested him only as figures passing through the scenes that were spread for his delectation. They had been external to him. He had lived within himself and his loneliness had been so self-sufficient that it would have made no great difference to him if they had not been there. Now he was to take his part in the drama at which, in times before, he had merely sat as a bemused spectator. It was a stirring and a terrifying prospect.

The train from North Bromwich stopped at every station, and the whole of the journey lay through the black desert that fringes the iron city, a vast basin of imprisoned smoke, bounded by hills that had once been crowned with woods, but were now dominated by the high smoke-stacks of collieries, many of them ruined and deserted. At a dirty junction, so undermined with workings that the bridge and the brick offices were distorted in a manner which suggested that the whole affair might some day go down quick into the pit, he changed into the local train. The railway company evidently did not consider the passenger traffic of Halesby worth consideration, for the carriages were old and grimy. Edwin chose a smoker because the cushions were covered with American leather and therefore more obviously clean. He found himself, in the middle of his reflections, sitting opposite a coloured photograph of the great gorge at Axcombe, a town that was served by the same line. The picture carried him suddenly to another aspect of his too complicated life. Really, the whole business was hopelessly involved. He thought, grimly, how he could have taken the wind out of Martin’s genealogical sails by blurting out the astounding intelligence that his uncle was a gardener. And what would the gentleman with the waistcoat have said? He laughed at the idea.

Through a short but sulphurous tunnel the train emerged into the valley of the Stour: the vista of the hills unfolded, and later the spire of Halesby church appeared at the valley’s head. Well, a beginning of the new life had to be made some day, and now as well as ever.

Walking home along the cinder pathway beside the silting fish-ponds it seemed to him that in the light of his new experience, Halesby was a primitive and almost pitiable place, and the same mood held him when he made his way home by the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s cloistered garden and entered his father’s house. Under the south wall the bed of double stocks was still in flower, though faded and bedraggled. Their scent reminded him of what a world of experience he had traversed in less than three months. He went straight up to his own bedroom. On the bed lay two parcels addressed to him. The larger contained his undergraduate’s cap and gown. He put them on in front of the glass and rather fancied himself. The act struck him as in a way symbolical: it was the token of an initiation. From that day forward he was a medical student. For five or six years, probably for the rest of his life, he would spend his time in the presence of the most bitter human experience; but there was something elevating in the thought that he need not be a helpless spectator: he would be able to effect positive good in a way that no scholar and no preacher of religion or abstract morality could possibly attain. “This is my life,” he thought. Well, it was good to know anything as definite as that.

The second parcel contained a number of technical books dealing with the subjects of his first year’s curriculum: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Physiology, and Anatomy. The last appeared to be the most exciting. “Fearfully and wonderfully made . . .” he thought. He set to work at once preparing the little room for work, making it as comfortable as he could with a writing table in the window that looked out over Shenstone’s woods and dethroning the superannuated Henty and Fenn from the bookshelf. He could not find it in his heart to treat his poets so cavalierly, and so there they stayed. Greek and Latin and English. “I shall never drop my classics,” he thought. A resolution that has been forgotten nearly as often as it has been made. In the Blenheim orange-tree at the bottom of the garden a thrush was singing. Bullfinches were fighting shrilly in the raspberry canes. He threw open the window, and there ascended to him the heavy, faded perfume of the bed of stocks. On the mantelpiece stood a photograph of his mother. Looking at it, it seemed to him that she smiled.

He was happy: even Halesby became a grateful place of retirement after his long days in North Bromwich. The mornings of early autumn were very beautiful, and it was with a good deal of zest that he would scramble through his breakfast and leave the house early to catch the eight o’clock train. He usually made use of the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s garden and the cinder path beside the fish-ponds, and in this brisk walk, with the blood of youth running happily in his veins, he would catch a little of the exhilarating atmosphere of early morning in the country. When the frosts began, as they do early on that high plateau, the morning air seemed stronger and more bracing than ever.

Circumstance, in a little more than three months, had exalted him to the state of those metropolitan season-ticket holders whose majesty he had disturbed on the day when he left St. Luke’s for good. He was now in a position to appreciate their exclusiveness, and to look upon all chance people who intruded on the privacies of the eight o’clock train with the same mingled curiosity and contempt. In every way a season ticket, in its cover of dark blue morocco, was a thing superior to the transitory and ignoble pasteboard. He could hardly resist a sigh of bored superiority on the first occasion when he produced it. He travelled second-class, thus rising to the highest level of luxury in travelling permitted to any inhabitants of Halesby, unless it were the local baronet or Mr. Willis of Mawne, whom even Sir Joseph Hingston could not outdo.

Most of the other season-ticket holders travelled second; and in this way, by making a habit of taking his place in the same carriage, for sentimental reasons one that contained a series of west-country pictures, Edwin began to be on speaking terms with many members of this select company. They included a youth articled to a solicitor in North Bromwich, the son of a Halesby postmaster, who was inclined to establish terms of familiarity; a gentleman with a bloated complexion and a fawn-coloured bowler hat, reputed to be a commercial traveller, who carried a bag in which samples may well have been hidden; a superior person with a gruff voice who was a clerk in a bank in the city, and on Saturdays carried a brown canvas bag and a hockey stick; and a withered man of fifty who travelled into North Bromwich daily on some business connected with brass, and, on damp mornings, exhibited evidences of an asthmatic complaint that aroused Edwin’s budding professional interest.

It was he who first admitted Edwin to the conversation of the compartment, by confessing to him that he had been the despair of doctors since childhood: that three specialists had assured his mother that she would never rear that boy: that in spite of this he had always paid four times as much in doctor’s bills as in income-tax, that in his belief they only kept him alive for what they could get out of him, and that his life had been an unending misery, as harrowing, upon his word, as that of any of the sufferers who were illustrated in the papers holding their backs with kidney complaint, until his missus had said: “Don’t throw any more money away on these doctors, John, I’ll have a talk with Mr. Ingleby,” . . . and with the aid of Ingleby’s Asthma Cure he had become relatively whole. Evidently he knew who Edwin was. “What do you think of that now?” he wheezed, and covered the embarrassment into which Edwin was immediately thrown by not waiting for his reply and continuing: “I suppose, now, you’ll be learning to be a chemist like your father?”

“No . . . I’m a medical student. I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Well . . . I’ll be damned,” said the asthmatical person. He did not say why; but the looks of the superior bank clerk, who immediately lowered his paper and stared at Edwin as though it were his duty to decide whether Edwin were a fit person to enter a learned profession or not, and then contemptuously went on with his reading, supplied the kind of commentary that might have been intended. When the asthmatical subject said that he was damned, the gentleman with the bloated complexion and the fawn-coloured bowler, who always opened his morning paper with fingers that trembled, either with excitement or as a result of the night before, at the column headed Turf Topics, gave a snigger and spat on the floor to conceal it. And the articled clerk, at this display of ill breeding, turned up his nose.

It was a strange little company that assembled in the second-class smoker every morning; and the strangest part of it, to Edwin, was the fact that each of them, entrenched, as it were, behind his morning paper, affected a frigid disinterest, yet eagerly listened to the conversation and eagerly scrutinised the appearance of the others. All of them had their little fixed habits. In one place they put their gloves: in another their umbrellas. Every morning they began to read their papers at the same column and folded them at the same point in the journey. They seemed just as regular in their habits as the wheels of the carriage in which they travelled, revolving and stopping and shunting and being braked at an identical time and place for six days out of the seven.

When he had tumbled to this, Edwin found that the whole of the main line train that he caught every morning at the junction was occupied by perhaps a hundred grouped units of the same kind. It amused him to sample them; and when one appealed to him he would become a member of it for a time and see what he could make of it. Naturally there were more interesting people on the main line than on the Halesby branch; and in the end he himself became such a familiar figure on the eight-twenty from the junction that he could say “Good-morning” to nearly every group of seasons on the train. He was even taken to the heart of the superior gruff-voiced bank clerk in the Halesby carriage. Indeed, he knew every one of them, finding them human people who, in the manner of the Englishman and the hedgehog, had put out their protective spikes upon a first acquaintance.

The only Halesby traveller of whom he could make nothing was the bloated person in the fawn-coloured bowler, who began the morning with turf topics and then proceeded to suck a copying pencil till his lips were the colour of his cheeks, and, thus inspired, to underline the names of a number of horses in the day’s programme. Apart from his habit of spitting on the floor, a custom which probably saved the poor man from death by poisoning with copying ink, he was inoffensive. Edwin was even sorry for him sometimes when he saw him hung up over his forecasts. Then he would tilt the fawn-coloured bowler on to the back of his head, and scratch his head under the sandy fringe of hair. Edwin was sorry because, with a head like that, it must have been so difficult to forecast anything.

He did not see many women on the morning train. In those days female enterprise was a good deal checked by conventions that died more slowly in the Midland plain than elsewhere. From Halesby itself there were only four season-ticket holders of the opposite sex. Two of them were employed in the same large drapery establishment in Queen Street, and were excessively ladylike and careful in all their behaviour. Edwin had never spoke to either of them; but he discovered in both an identical physical state: that peculiar greenish, waxen pallor that appears to be the inevitable result of serving in a draper’s shop. The black dresses on which their employers insisted, heightened this effect of fragility, and on mornings when tiredness had made them start too late for the train, so that they had to hurry over the last hundred yards, Edwin would notice how they panted for breath within their elegant corsets and how faint was the flush that came into their cheeks.

He felt a little sorry for them; but they were not in the least sorry for themselves. In Halesby their employment at a monstrous third-rate drapery store gave them a position of unusual distinction as arbiters of feminine fashions, and they would not have exchanged their distinguished anÆmia for any other calling under the sun. In their profession this toxic pallor, as of sea-kale blanched in a cellar, was regarded as an asset. It was considered French. And did not their shortness of breath, upon the least exertion or emotion, cause their bosoms to rise and fall like those of the heroines of the serial fiction that they read, when they were not too tired, in the train?

Edwin was not attracted by them any more than by the other couple: a pair of pupil teachers from an elementary school in one of the northern suburbs, who also dressed for the part that they were fulfilling in life, and wore spectacles as tokens of their studiousness. The instinct of sex had as yet scarcely asserted itself in him. He was a little curious about it, and that was all. Subconsciously, perhaps, it found expression in his anxieties about his personal appearance. He was beginning to take a considerable interest in what should or should not be worn, treating it more as a matter of abstract science than as one of practical politics; for he had few clothes beyond those in which he had left St. Luke’s, and was not likely to have any opportunity of extending his wardrobe until these were worn out. In those days the weekly called To-Day had reached its most vigorous phase, and a column headed Masculine Modes was a matter of earnest consideration to Edwin every Thursday, when the paper appeared. In the spring, he decided, he would buy an overcoat with Raglan sleeves. The weekly authority, who styled himself “The Major,” was dead nuts on Raglan sleeves. Beneath this fashionable covering Edwin’s interior defects would be well hidden, and, given a natty red tie (de rigueur, said the Major, with the indispensable blue serge reefer suit) and a bowler hat with a curly, but not too curly, brim, he should be able to compete with the burly bank clerk as cynosure for the eyes of the pale young ladies in the “drapery” and a spectacle of awe for the studious pupil-teachers.

II

Edwin soon became absorbed in the routine of the first year student’s life, and had very little time to think about anything else. He had to work hard to keep pace with it, and the realisation of this was a striking lesson to him. At St. Luke’s he had found that his advance in knowledge made the work progressively more easy. Here he was breaking new ground from the beginning, acquiring knowledge of a kind that owed nothing to general culture and came to him none the easier for his possession of it. The only things in his new work that seemed easy and logical to him were those scientific names that were derived from Latin and Greek. Otherwise the very rudiments and nature of the subjects were new to him.

The most astonishing part of the whole business was the way in which the formidable assembly that had glared at him, as he imagined, outside the Dean’s office, simplified itself. He had been prepared to find them creatures of a different tissue from himself, and particularly such apparitions as Harrop and the immense Brown. He soon saw that as far as the career of Medicine was concerned they were identically in the same box as himself: that neither knowledge of the world nor elegance of attire could help either of them to acquire the absolute knowledge that was the one thing essential to success. It made no matter that these two approached the same problem from essentially different angles: Brown with his earnest brows knitted and a look of indomitable but baffled determination; Harrop as though the issue didn’t really matter as long as the crease in his trousers was in the right place; but in either case Edwin saw that they had to work as hard or harder than he did.

His first acquaintance, Martin, who was now becoming his friend, since the work that they shared in common bridged the social gulf of which Edwin alone was aware, seemed to possess the faculty of doing things and learning facts almost in spite of himself. He was not in any way brilliant, but he had a way with him and a certain shrewdness that not infrequently underlies the superficial indolence of the Celt. Above all things Edwin found him good company, for the picturesqueness of his brogue and a sense of humour, not of the verbal kind in which Edwin himself dealt, but the broader humour that arises from situations, and personal characteristics, made his society a peculiar joy. At the first lecture on Chemistry, a dull dissertation on first principles, Edwin had gravitated to the seat next to him, and for the rest of the term they kept the same places and afterwards compared notes. Edwin couldn’t help liking him, even though he was conscious of the radical social misunderstanding that underlay their friendship.

The technical sciences of Chemistry and Physics made no strong appeal to Edwin. They seemed to him matters of empirical knowledge that must be acquired according to schedule but would have very little connection with the work of his profession, and he found them too near to the desperate subject of mathematics to be congenial. He could find nothing romantic or human in them; and this fact, in itself, is a sufficient indictment of the way in which they were taught.

Anatomy was another matter altogether. He had anticipated the beginning of this study with a feeling in which awe and an instinctive distaste were mingled. From the first day he had known that somewhere up at the top of the building lay the dissecting room, a place that his fancy painted as a kind of Chamber of Horrors. On his way to the theatre, in which the Dean lectured on Anatomy with a scholarly refinement of phrase that transcended the natural elegance of Martin and a fascinating collection of coloured chalks, he had passed the gloomy door and seen a blackboard on which the names of the Prosectors were recorded in white lettering. But he preferred not to look inside. Martin, to whom all adventures came more easily, settled the point for him.

“I say,” he said immediately after the lecture, “have you put yourself down for a part?”

“A part? What do you mean?”

“Anatomy. Dissecting, They’re shared between two, you know. In the first term we’re supposed to do an Upper or a Lower. Suppose we go shares in one—”

“All right,” said Edwin. “Which shall it be?”

“Well, I think an Upper will be better. There’s less fat and mess about it. We’d better go and choose one now.”

“All right.”

“Come along, then.” Martin opened the door of the dissecting room and held it while Edwin entered. It was a long, irregular chamber, with a low glass roof and an asphalt floor. Edwin’s first impression was one of light and space: the second, of a penetrating odour unlike anything that he had smelt before. He could not give a name to it, and indeed it was complex, being compact of a pungent, unknown antiseptic and another fainter smell that was, in fact, that of ancient mortality. The effect of the whole was strange but not nauseating as he would have expected. All down the room at short intervals long zinc tables, with a tin bucket at the head of each, were ranged. Most of the tables were empty; but on four or five of them “subjects” were either displayed or lay draped in coarse, unbleached calico. One or two of them sprawled on their faces, but most of them, being as yet unappropriated, were supported under their backs by small metal platforms from which the heads rolled back and the limbs were stretched out in a posture of extreme but petrified agony. To Edwin’s eyes it was a lamentable and terrible sight. He wondered by what chain of degradations the body of a man who had lived and known the youth and pride of body that he himself possessed, who had experienced aspirations and dreams and hope and love, should descend to this final indignity. He stood still. He did not dare, for the moment, to come nearer.

“How do they get here?” he asked Martin.

“Oh, they’re paupers, you know. Old men and women, most of them, who die in the workhouses and are not claimed by their relatives. Instead of burying them they send them along here. The anatomy porters collect them. Then they’re pickled for so long in a kind of vat in the cellars of this place, and they inject them with arsenic to preserve them, and pump red paint into their arteries so that they’re easier to dissect. I shouldn’t like the job myself; but I suppose the porters are used to it. You get used to anything, you know. Besides, they aren’t a bit like they are when they’re first dead. I think that’s the chap for us. I had a look at him the other day. It’s always better to choose an old one. The muscles are cleaner. Less work.”

They approached the second table. The subject was an old and withered man: his grey hair was shaven, and his mouth hung open, showing that he had lost his teeth. Martin had been quite right. He didn’t look in the least like a dead man. He did not look like a man at all: only a pathetic, tanned skeleton with tight-drawn sinews and toughened skin: a dried mummy, from which all the contours of humanity had shrunk away. It wasn’t so bad after all. The picture that Edwin’s imagination had anticipated, that of a crude and horrible human shambles, was not here. No . . . the idea of humanity was too remote to be in the least insistent. For a moment, in spite of this consolation, Edwin went pale. Martin noticed it.

“I say, this isn’t going to turn you up, is it?”

“No. . . . I’m all right. I was only . . . thinking.”

“Thinking?” said Martin, with a laugh. “I shouldn’t do too much of that if I were you. We’d better make a start to-morrow on the right Upper. I’ll put our names down.”

He turned towards the glass case in which hung notices of lectures and the printed cards on which the names of dissectors were recorded, and while he did so Edwin still stood thinking. He thought: Was this really a man who had lived and breathed and aged and suffered? Where had he been born? How long ago? Had he ever loved? Had he ever married? Had he ever wondered what the future would bring to him? surely his fancies had never envisaged this. Perhaps he had been born in some remote hamlet of the marches, some sweet smelling village like Far Forest, from which the iron tentacles of the city had drawn him inwards and sapped his life, leaving, in the end, this dry shell, like the sucked carcass of a fly blowing in a spider’s web. If this were the end of poverty and desolation, what a terrible thing poverty must be. Did the poor and the outcast ever dream that they might come to this? And yet, after all, what did it matter? . . .

He awoke from his dream. It was evident that he was the only dreamer in that long room. At many of the other tables second year men were sitting quietly dissecting or gossiping or thumbing manuals of practical anatomy yellow with human grease. It amazed him that men should be able to joke and smoke their pipes and appear to be contented in such an atmosphere; but the wisdom of Martin’s phrase returned to him: “You get used to anything, you know.”

Among the dissectors already at work in their white overalls, he saw the ponderous frame of the man called Brown. He, at any rate, was not letting the grass grow under his feet. Already he was engaged in reflecting the skin from the “Lower” on which he was working. His clumsy hands found the work difficult, as was shown by the anxiety of his partner, an immaculate smooth young man, whom Edwin already knew by the name of Maskew, dressed in the Major’s indispensable navy serge reefer, with the correct red tie and a big orchid in his buttonhole. He took an elaborate meerschaum pipe out of his mouth to protest:—

“Good Lord, Brown, there’s another cutaneous nerve gone phut. Do be careful!”

And Brown, with an exaggerated earnestness:—

“I say, old man, I am sorry. I simply can’t use the damned things. Do you mean to say that’s a nerve?” He held up in his forceps a tiny white filament of tissue.

“Yes,” said Maskew, returning to his pipe. “Branch of the great gluteal. Listen to what Cunningham says: ‘The buttock is liberally supplied with cutaneous nerves: a fact much appreciated by schoolboys.’”

Brown scratched his head with the handle of his scalpel. “Well, I’m in an absolute fog. You’d better take this job on to-morrow, and I’ll do the reading. What does ‘cutaneous’ mean, anyway?”

“Cutis,” thought Edwin, “Skin.” After all, it seemed, the dead languages had their uses. By this time he had recovered from the first shock of his distaste; he was getting used to the odour of the room, and so, a moment later, he and Martin strolled over to a table at which one of the prosectors was engaged in preparing a specimen for the Dean’s lectures. It was almost pleasant to watch the deftness with which he defined the line of a pink, injected artery, wielding his scalpel as delicately and as surely as a painter at work on a canvas. They watched him working in silence. “Nice part, isn’t it?” he said with condescension.

“Yes,” said Martin, “this sort of thing must be rattling good practice for surgery.”“Oh, surgery’s quite different,” said the prosector. “This is a lazy job. There’s no hurry about it. This fellow won’t bleed to death.”

So Edwin and Denis Martin began to work on their Upper, and the dissecting room that had been an abode of horror and an incentive to philosophy became no more than the scene of their daily labours. Edwin accepted his new callousness without regret for the sensitive perceptions that he had lost, for he saw that his heart and his imagination were not really less tender for the change; they had merely come to a working agreement with the demands of his new life, and had attained this satisfactory state not so much by a suppression of sensibility as by an insistence on the objective aspects of his work.

This fact explained to him, at the very beginning of his career, the fallacy of medical callousness in relation to pain or physical distress. He saw, on reflection, that if a doctor exaggerated the importance of subjective sensations in his patient he might well lose sight of his own object, which was nothing more nor less than removing their cause: that, for example, the fear of death, the anxiety of relatives and the patient’s own perception of intolerable pain, were of infinitely less importance to the physician than the presence of a focus of danger in the patient’s appendix. A sustained objectivity was the only attitude of mind in which a doctor could live at the same time happily and efficiently.

The only feature of the dissecting room that now seemed objectionable was the smell of the powerful antiseptic that was used for preserving the subjects. For a week or two Edwin was conscious of its pervading every moment of his life, his train-journeys, his meal-times, even his sleep. But in a little time his olfactory nerves became so used to it that they discounted its presence, and the fact that his neighbours in railway carriages did not seem to shrink from him, convinced him that after all he did not go about the world saturated in odours of the charnel house.

The winter term went on, and to the sense of hurry and frustration that had embarrassed him at first and found its perfect expression in the knitted brows of the monstrous Brown, succeeded an atmosphere of leisure and method and ease. Edwin had time for other things than work. He began to know the men of his year, and to discover that even the most formidable of them weren’t half as formidable as they had seemed. Harrop, indeed, was still a little remote. After the spaciousness of Oriel, where he had devoted a couple of years to a liberal education in which the acquisition of knowledge was of less importance than the acquisition of style, North Bromwich, with its concentration on the virtues rather than the graces of life and the very questionable sartorial shapes that inhabited it, naturally seemed a little cheap; but in a little time even Harrop became modified and humble if a little contemptuous, and the most resplendent of his waistcoats retained no more significance than the oriflamme of a lost cause.

Brown was the more approachable of the two, and for Brown, Edwin soon conceived something that was very nearly an affection. With his impressive physique and his experience of a rough world in which Edwin had never moved, was mingled a childlike enthusiasm for his new work, a rich, blundering good humour, and great generosity. He was not clever, and showed an intense admiration for better heads than his own; but for all that he was much more intelligent than he looked, and to Edwin his enthusiasm and earnestness were worth a good deal more than his intellectual attainments.

Once or twice, wandering into the Anatomical Museum, he had come upon Brown standing rapt in front of a specimen dissection or quietly sweating up bones with a Gray’s Anatomy open before him, and he had sung out to Edwin as if he were an old friend of his own age and they had put in an hour of work together. “You know, you’re a lot quicker than I am,” said Brown. “I suppose it comes of being decently educated. I expect that when you were learning Latin and Greek I was knocking about the world making a damn fool of myself.” Then they would light their pipes (the dissecting room had made smoking necessary to Edwin) and Brown would yarn on for half an hour about his romantic adventures, his bitter quarrels with his people, the adventures that had befallen him in Paris when he went there to play football for the Midlands, in all of which the passionate, headstrong, obstinate and withal lovable nature of the big fellow would appear.

“I expect it all sounds to you like a rotten waste of time, mucking about with my life like this,” he said. “But you know I’m not at all sorry I’ve had it. . . . I didn’t take up this doctoring business in a hurry, without thinking about it. I thrashed the matter out; and I came to the conclusion that doctoring’s a good human sort of game: it’s a sort of chance of pulling people out of the rotten messes of one kind or another that they get themselves into—through no fault of their own, poor devils, just because they’re made like you and me and the rest of us. If you go on the bust, or knock about the country with a football team on tour, or go on the tramp and sleep in a hedge or a barn or a Rowton House, as I did when I had the last flare-up with the old man, you rub against a lot of people. They’re all just the same as yourself, you know. You can see yourself in the best of them as well as the worst; and, taking them all round, they’re all damned good at the bottom. They’ve all got to fight out their own way in life with their heads or their fists or their feet. And the only chap that can really help them in it is a doctor. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. God! . . . you’ll scarcely believe it, but once I was converted. I know it’s damn funny; but it’s a fact that when I was a youngster and had been on the periodical bust a revivalist chap got hold of me and persuaded me that I was saved. It’s a funny sort of feeling, I can tell you. I thought I was going off my nut until I went to see a doctor and he put my liver right. It’s a fine humane game, Ingleby. You can take it from me. . . . But I can tell you, with one thing and another, I’ve got my work cut out.”

He shook his head seriously, and the puzzled, dogged expression of frustrate determination that Edwin knew so well came into his eyes. “We’re wasting time, my son,” he said. “Let’s get on with the blasted humerus. Now, what is the origin of the Supinator Longus? Come on . . .”

On one of these pleasant occasions he confided to Edwin the reason why he had his work cut out. His father, a stern Calvinistic Methodist, had finally washed his hands of him. “I’ve been a bit of a rolling stone, you see,” said Brown, “and you can’t blame the poor old fellow. So he just planked down six hundred and fifty pounds one day and told me that I could do what I liked with it, but that was the last I should get from him. It suited me down to the ground. I didn’t much care what became of me then. It was a couple of years ago. So I had a royal bust . . . a sort of glorious windup to the season . . . and then sat down to think. I had just five hundred left, and so I had to think what the devil I was going to do with it, and my prospects seemed so putridly rotten that the only thing I could do was to go on the bust again. I didn’t enjoy it much that time. Jaded palate, you know. . . . But I had a bit of luck. I met a trainer fellow in the Leicester lounge with a couple of women, and he put me on to a double for the Lincoln and National. I’ve no use for horse-racing. If it was the owners that were racing there’d be a vestige of sport in it; but it always seems to me a shame that decent, clean creatures like horses should make a living for a lot of dirty stiffs out of the ruin of working men and small shopkeepers. Still, I dreamed about this double, and as I’m a weak superstitious sort of chap, I put a tenner on it. That’s the first and the last bet I’ve ever had on a horse. But the thing happened to come off; and last spring I found myself with twelve hundred pounds instead of six-fifty. So I began to think it out. I remembered that doctor fellow who cured me of being converted, and I thought, ‘By Gad, I’ll be a doctor.’ A five year’s course. Well, I’m not particularly brilliant at the top end, and so I allowed six. Six into twelve goes twice. Two hundred a year for fees and living and clothes—outsize—and recreation. You see, it’s pretty tight. Come along and have some lunch at Joey’s.”

III

They went downstairs to the cloak-room where the porter was now a familiar of Edwin’s. It had been decided that it would not be becoming for a really modern university, like that of North Bromwich, to impose the sight of such an anachronism as academic dress on the streets, a rule that had been something of a disappointment to Edwin, and so they left their gowns behind. Joey’s was an institution of some antiquity, opposite to the Corinthian town-hall, with which Brown had been acquainted in his unregenerate days. It was a long and noisy bar at which, for the sum of fourpence, one consumed a quarter of the top of a cottage loaf, a tangle of watercress, a hunk of Cheddar cheese, and a tankard of beer. This combination of excellences was known as a “crust and bitter,” and it was eaten standing at the counter.

Edwin was gradually becoming a regular customer at this place; for Martin’s delicate fancy for plovers on toast and other such refinements had proved too expensive for him, and apart from their joint labours in the dissecting-room, they were beginning to see less of each other—not from any ill-will on the part of either, but simply because Martin’s position in the house of the old lady in Alvaston, whose house was full of animals, had introduced him to the social life of that elegant suburb in which so perfect a carpet knight was bound to shine; and Martin’s social engagements with encouraging matrons and innumerable eligible daughters were becoming so pressing that his acquaintance with the black heart of the city was gradually becoming more and more casual. For this reason, apart from his natural inclination, Edwin was thrown into daily contact with Brown and his partner Maskew.

Maskew was a more typical product of the Midlands. His home, and all his upbringing, had lain in one of the great black towns that cluster, like swollen knots, upon the North Bromwich system of railways. He had never lived in the country; he did not even know what country was, and his distinctive if provincial urbanity showed itself in a hundred ways—in his dress, that was a little too smart, in his speech, that was not quite smart enough, in a certain lack of fresh air in his mental atmosphere. His people were wealthy, and his tastes, without emulating the style of Harrop, were expensive. He was handsome, and if his hair had been shorter and not so mathematically correct he would have been handsomer. Still, he was intensely interested in women, and a great retailer of Rabelaisian stories. He wore buttoned boots and was very nearly a first-class billiard player.

A more unusual combination than his partnership with the abrupt and unsubtle Brown it would have been difficult to imagine; but even in his undoubted cleverness, his nature was complimentary, and Edwin found himself happy in the society of both. In their company he became a habituÉ of the Dousita CafÉ; a subterranean privacy in which excellent coffee was served in the most comfortable surroundings by young ladies whose charms had already made something of a sensation in that decorous city. Maskew, naturally, knew them all by their Christian names, and treated them with a familiar badinage that impressed Edwin, mildly ambitious but quite incapable of imitation, by the ease with which it was performed. The cushioned seats and the mild stimulus of the coffee and cigarettes would even rouse the massive Brown to a ponderous levity by which the lady of their choice, a certain Miss Wheeler, whose uncle, Maskew seriously confided to Edwin, was a bishop, was obviously flattered. Edwin could understand any woman being attracted by Brown, or rather, “W.G.” as the need of a distinction had by this time made his familiar name. It also pleased him to see the way in which W.G. went red in his bull neck on a certain occasion when Maskew had delicately overstepped the limits of good taste in his conversation with Miss Wheeler. But the niece of the bishop did not blush. . . .

In the intervals between lectures they would congregate in their gowns in a dismal chamber, at the very bottom of the cramped building that was called the Common Room, drinking tea and eating squashed-fly biscuits. This place was frequented not only by members of the Medical School but by students of other faculties whom Edwin regarded with some contempt. One afternoon on entering this room Edwin found W.G. holding forth with some indignation before a notice that had been pinned on the board asking for a list of freshmen who were anxious to play Rugby football during the present season. So far, only five or six names had appeared: W.G.’s, naturally enough, came first, for his prowess in the game was well known in the North Bromwich district.

“Isn’t it a damnable thing,” he said indignantly, “in a school of this size to see a measly list like that?”

“You can stick mine down,” said Edwin.

“Well . . . as a matter of form, my son . . . though I don’t see what good you’re likely to be to the club except to give it tone.”

“I play soccer,” said Maskew.

“You would,” said W.G. “Nice gentlemanly game.”

“Rugger isn’t all beef,” put in Edwin.

“No,” said W.G., “but the team wants weight. And this place is simply thick with great, hefty, science men and brewers who’ve never known the meaning of a healthy sweat in their lives. Upon my word, it sickens me. Look at that chap.”

He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay huddled up in a deep basket chair. He had shoulders that would have appeared massive by the side of any others but W.G.’s: a fair wide face marked with freckles, a sandy moustache and crisp, curly red hair. “That’s the kind of swine that ought to be working in the scrum.”

Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively went pale. A curious survival of the instinct of physical fear had shaken him. It was ridiculous. “I know that chap,” he said in an off-hand way. “He’s no good. I was at school with him. He’s got a weak heart. His name’s Griffin.”

CHAPTER III
CARNIVAL

I

Christmas came: an old-fashioned Christmas with hoar frost on the fields and hard roads gleaming with splintered light reflected from a frosty sky. In this raiment of frozen moisture even the black desert of Edwin’s morning pilgrimage appeared fantastically beautiful. The vacation did not suspend his work; for though no lectures were given, the dissecting room was still open; and here, on icy mornings, when the asphalt floor was as cold as the glass roof, he would freeze for an hour at a time watching Brown and Maskew at work, Martin having been whisked off to spend a baronial Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland.

A few months in North Bromwich had made a great change in Edwin. He had lost much of his old timidity, shaved twice a week, smoked the plug tobacco to which Brown had introduced him, and was no longer shy with any creature on earth of his own sex. With women it was different. . . . Ease and familiarity with this baffling sex would come, no doubt, in time; but for the present one or two desperate essays at conversation with the elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friends had been failures. And Miss Wheeler was not the least approachable of her sex. There were several women medical students in his year; but in their case he had not felt the incentive to gallantry that the softer charms of Miss Wheeler suggested. Even if they had not insulated themselves with shapeless djibbehs of russet brown, and bunched back their hair in a manner ruthlessly unfeminine, the common study of a subject so grossly material as anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any budding romance.

In the Biological laboratory, however, he found a figure that exercised a peculiar attraction on him. She was an American girl, a science student, who with the severity of the medical women’s dress contrived to combine an atmosphere of yielding femininity. She had a soft voice, for the tones of which Edwin would listen, big grey-blue eyes, soft dark hair, and very beautiful arms that her dark overalls displayed to perfection. Edwin would have found it difficult to define the way in which she attracted him: certainly he didn’t cherish any definite romantic ideas about her; but he did find her in some subtle way disturbing, so that he would be conscious of her presence when she came into the lab.; surprise himself listening for her voice when she spoke to the professor, and find that, without any definite volition, his eyes were watching her profile. And one day when she passed him and her overall brushed his sleeve, he found that he was blushing. Maskew, with his usual easy familiarity, was already on joking terms with her, and would sometimes sit on the table where she kept her microscope while they talked and laughed together; but though Edwin had every chance of sharing in this intimacy, he couldn’t bring himself to do so; and when, in the end, he was introduced to her formally, he wished that he were dead, and could not speak a word for awkwardness.

With men, on the other hand, he was now quite at his ease, even, strangely enough, with the once formidable Griffin. Since the day when he had discovered his old enemy in the Common Room they had often spoken to one another: they had even sat side by side in the deep basket chairs, one of which was now Griffin’s habitual abode, and talked of the old days at St. Luke’s, and sometimes, in the afternoon, they would share a pot of tea. There was no awkwardness in their conversation, as Edwin had feared there might be, for Griffin apparently took his expulsion as a matter of course, and, on the whole, as rather a good joke. Of course Griffin had changed. It was clear to Edwin from the first that in some way he had shrunk—not indeed physically, for he was fatter than ever; but the air of conscious and threatening physical superiority that Edwin had found so oppressive in his school days had vanished. Moreover, he was now prepared to accept Edwin as an equal, and make him the confidant of the amorous adventures that now absorbed his time, adventures to which the affair with the chambermaid at St. Luke’s had been the mildest possible prelude. Compared with Griffin’s positive achievements, the daring of Maskew’s relation with the young ladies of the Dousita seemed a trifle thin. Griffin’s father, with a shrewd appreciation of his son’s peculiar gifts, had entered him as a student at the school of brewing; and if once he could overcome his natural indolence, there was no reason why, in the future, he should not become a partner in the firm of his uncle, Sir Joseph Astill, and control the destinies of a number of barmaids beyond the dreams of concupiscence. On these prospects, Griffin, lounging in his basket chair, brooded with a heavy satisfaction.

“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Edwin said one day, “that we should be the only St. Luke’s men in this place.”

“Oh, some are bound to turn up sooner or later,” said Griffin. “The other day, when I was up in town, I ran against Widdup—you remember Widdup—and he told me that his people thought of sending him here to take up engineering.”

“That would be rather good fun,” said Edwin. “And he’s cut out for it too. He’s got that sort of head. I should rather like to see old Widdup.”

“Oh, he’ll roll up one of these days. Are you doing anything in particular this afternoon? I have to stroll down to see the stage-manager at the Gaiety . . . an awful good sport. Suppose we go down the town and get a drink on the way . . .”

In spite of the temptations of this adventure, Edwin declined. In the dissecting room, half an hour later, Brown hailed him:—

“What the devil were you doing with that pig of a brewer, Ingleby?”

“He’s an old school friend of mine.”

“Well, I should keep that dark, if I were you. He’s a bad hat, that chap. We don’t want Ingleby’s virginal innocence corrupted, do we, Maskew?”

“Oh, he’s not a bad sort,” Edwin protested.

“He’s a nasty fellow, and he’ll come to a rotten, sticky end,” said Brown. “Now, what do you think of this small sciatic, you old rouÉ, for a tricky bit of dissection?”

After all, Edwin reflected, old Brown knew something of the world. He had to admit to himself that there was something obscene about Griffin. It was difficult to explain, for Maskew, by his own account, was almost equally worldly, and yet Maskew was undeniably a decent fellow while Griffin undeniably wasn’t. He joined his friends at their work, and could think about nothing else; for Maskew’s brains were as good as his own, though of a different texture, and he had to be attentive to keep pace with them. All through the vac. he worked at anatomy with these two, sometimes in the icy dissecting room, sometimes over coffee at the Dousita, sometimes in the cozy, diminutive diggings that Brown inhabited in Easy Row, a street of Georgian houses at the back of the university buildings and near the Prince’s Hospital.

They were pleasant days. Edwin, in spite of his lightness, had now found a place in the scrum of the second fifteen, and on Saturday evenings, when both of them were drugged with their weekly debauch of exercise, he and W.G. would meet at the diggings in Easy Row, and after a steaming hot bath, in the process of which Edwin never failed to be impressed by the immensity of his friend’s physique, they would set off down the town together and make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill: Porterhouse steak with chipped potatoes and huge silver tankards of bitter ale. Then they would go on together to a theatre or a music hall, too pleasantly dulled, too mildly elated to question the humour of the most second-rate comedian. After the show W.G. would walk down to the station with Edwin, and see him off into the last train for Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out of the carriage window, would see the big man turn and go clumsily along the platform with the gait that he had noticed on the very first day of his life as a medical student. Brown was a wonderful fellow. In half an hour, Edwin reflected, when his train was still puffing away through the dark, W.G. would be back in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, driving facts into that puzzled brain with the violent thoroughness of an engine that drives piles.

When the last train arrived at Halesby, the town would be in darkness, for, in the black country in those days the only places of amusement were the public houses and these had been shut for an hour or more. Only from the upper windows of innumerable mean dwellings lights would be seen, and sometimes the voice of a drunken husband heard grumbling. But the path beside the fish-ponds was beautiful, even on a winter night, and Edwin would feel glad as he plodded along it that he didn’t live in North Bromwich, where the night noises of the country were never heard. So he would pass quietly up the empty lane, his footsteps echoing on the hard pavement, and come at last to the little house set in the midst of shrubberies that smelt of winter. Very humble and quiet, and even pitiable it seemed after the glaring streets of the city that he had left behind.

It was an understood thing that on Saturdays, when he had been playing football, Edwin should return by the last train; and so his father did not sit up for him on these occasions. The matter had been settled at the cost of some awkwardness. On the first two or three Saturdays of the football season Edwin had come home late, to find Mr. Ingleby growing cold over the embers of a fire in the dining-room, sleepy but intensely serious, and his tired eyes had examined Edwin so closely that he felt embarrassed, being certain that his face must bear signs of a number of enormities that he had never dreamed of committing. It was the same, unreasonable feeling of guilt that he had experienced at St. Luke’s in the middle of Mr. Leeming’s pitched battle for purity, and the sensation was so strong that he felt it useless to try and hide it.

“Why do you look at me like that, father?” he said. The quietude and humility of the little room seem to him as full of accusation as his father’s face.

“What do you mean, boy?”

“I think you know what I mean. . . . There’s really no need for you to wait up for me like this.”

“I like to lock the house up,” his father replied, with a quietness that made Edwin’s voice sound rowdy and violent. “I have always done so. After all, it’s usual.”

“You are anxious about me. Why should you be more anxious about me when I come in at twelve than when I come in at six?”

“I know you’re passing a critical period, Eddie. . . I’m not unsympathetic. I’ve been through it myself. And naturally I’m anxious for you. I know that a town is full of temptations for a boy of your age. I don’t know what your friends are like. I don’t know what sort of influences you’re coming in contact with—”

“But I don’t see why that should make you want to sit up for me. Really, I don’t. What good does it do?”

“I like to see you when you come in.” Edwin was uncomfortably aware of this.

“But suppose I was drunk when I came in, father—” he said.

“I don’t suppose anything of the sort—”

“No, but supposing I was. What advantage would there be in your seeing me? What good would it do?”

“At any rate I should know that there was a danger.”

“Well, if that’s all the trouble, we can soon get over it. I promise you, that I’ll tell you the very first time that I am in the least drunk. Then you needn’t worry about waiting for it. I suppose it’s bound to happen some day.”

“I sincerely hope it isn’t, Eddie. It isn’t pleasant to me to hear you talk like that.”

“No. . . . I suppose it would be pleasanter if we pretended that nothing of the kind ever happened. But it wouldn’t be honest, would it? I should think it’s the duty of every one to be drunk some time or other, if it’s only to see what it feels like. Surely, father, you—”

“Edwin, Edwin. . . . Really we mustn’t be personal. You forget that I’m your father.”

“But I don’t, father. I thought we were going to be such tremendous pals, and honestly there isn’t much to be pals on if you aren’t ever personal. We ought to talk about everything. We oughtn’t to hide anything. I don’t see much fun in it if I have to do all the telling and you don’t give anything in return. It isn’t fair.”

“But, my dear boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a nervous laugh, “you seem to neglect the fundamental fact that I’m your father.”

“I don’t see why that should prevent us being honest. I don’t see why it should prevent you from trusting me—”

“I do trust you, Eddie.”

“Then that’s all right; so you needn’t wait up for me again.”

Thus the matter was settled, at any rate on the surface, though Edwin was always conscious on the morning after his late arrivals of an anxious scrutiny on his father’s part.

“He doesn’t really trust me,” he thought, and this conviction made him more anxious than ever to be really intimate with his father, to make him share, as much as possible, the life that he was living in North Bromwich. It made him talk deliberately of the men who were his friends, and the work that he was doing, explaining with the greatest freedom the domestic difficulties of W.G., and the worldly accomplishments of Maskew: and this frankness gave him confidence until he discovered that such revelations only ended by arousing his father’s suspicions. In Mr. Ingleby’s mind it was evident that the sterling qualities of W.G., as recited by Edwin, were of less importance than his potentialities as an agent in Edwin’s corruption. “If I’d only given him one side of W.G.,” thought Edwin, “he’d have been quite happy. If we’re going to be happy, it would be much better for me to tell him nothing that his imagination can work on.”

He found himself travelling round the old vicious circle that appeared to be the inevitable result of being honest with himself. There must, after all, be something in the fundamental fact that Mr. Ingleby was his father. Ridiculous though it might seem, the ideal relation between father and son was evidently impossible. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “it isn’t my fault. I’ve done my best.”

The whole artificiality of their relation only dawned on him when he mentioned to his father one evening that he had met Griffin and told him that his old enemy turned out to be a nephew of Sir Joseph Astill. “I’m glad to hear of it,” said Mr. Ingleby. “I hope you’ll continue to be friends. Sir Joseph Astill is a very distinguished man.” Edwin didn’t see what that had to do with it; but he resisted the temptation of telling his father that Griffin was a distinctly bad egg, and that in comparison with him W.G., with his herculean passions, was indeed a paragon of knightly virtues. If it pleased his father to invest Griffin with his uncle’s reflected glory, why shouldn’t he do so? And Edwin held his tongue.In the end the atmosphere of veiled anxiety that awaited him at home became definitely irksome, and since the most absolute candour on his part would not mend matters, he found himself gradually avoiding his father’s company. It was the last thing in the world that he wanted to do; but it seemed inevitable; and as the months passed, he gave up all hopes of the sort of intimacy that he had desired, and relapsed into the solitude of his own room, or even, as a last resort, the company of Aunt Laura, who was at least unsuspicious.

Another thing attracted him to her house. All the days of his childhood at home had been full of music, for his mother had been a capable pianist, and he had spent long hours stretched out on the hearthrug in the drawing-room listening to her while she played Bach and Beethoven and occasionally Mendelssohn on the piano. At St. Luke’s, too, without any definite musical education, he had felt a little of the inspiration that Dr. Downton infused into the chapel services. Since he had returned to Halesby all these pleasures had left him; for Mr. Ingleby was not in the least musical, and the piano that had been closed a few days before his mother’s death, had never been reopened. At this period he had not realised the musical possibilities of North Bromwich, and in Aunt Laura’s house he recaptured a little of this stifled interest.

She was really an accomplished musician, and though the kind of music that she affected was becoming limited by the very character of her life as the wife of an undistinguished manufacturer of small hardware in a small black-country town, the taste, which had originally been formed in Germany, existed and was easily encouraged by Edwin’s admiration of her attainments. Here, usually on Sundays, when in addition to the attraction of music her admirable cooking was to be appreciated, Edwin passed many happy hours. She sang well, and could accompany herself with something of a natural genius, and though the songs that she sang were often enough the sugary ballads of the period that had witnessed her musical extinction, Edwin found them satisfying to his starved sense of music, and would even persuade her, on occasion, to play the pieces of Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach with which his mother had made him familiar.

Nothing aroused in him an acute remembrance of those ancient happy days more easily than music. He wished, above all things, that he might some day be able to taste these joys for himself; and so he persuaded his aunt to teach him the notes on the piano, and having an inherited aptitude, he soon found that he could pick his way through simple compositions, preferably in the open key, that he found among his mother’s music at home. Mr. Ingleby, who had no ear, appeared to be unmoved by these painful experiments; and to Edwin, the long winter evenings were made magical by their indulgence. He would sit at the piano in the drawing-room for hours at a time, and here, in a strange way, he found himself curiously in touch with the vanishing memory of his mother. At times this feeling was so acute that he could almost have imagined that she was there in the room beside him, and sometimes he would sit still at the piano in long intervals of silence, just drinking in this peculiar and soothing atmosphere. Eventually these diversions made Mr. Ingleby uneasy.

“You spend a good deal of time at the piano, Edwin,” he said. “I do hope you are not letting it interfere with your work.”

Edwin said nothing; but from that time onward it seemed to him that even this, the most harmless of his amusements, had become a matter for grudging and suspicion. At first he only felt indignation and anger; but later he realised that this, along with his father’s other anxieties, probably had its origin in financial considerations. The cost of his education in North Bromwich was a big thing for a country chemist to face. If once he failed, the whole of his early effort might be wasted. But then, he was not going to fail.

II

The terminal examinations at Christmas had made him sure of this. They showed him that in his own year he and Maskew were in a class by themselves; and though Maskew beat him easily in all the subjects of the examination, it satisfied him a little to think that Maskew had probably put in a good deal more work than he had, particularly in anatomy, where he had the advantage of working in partnership with W.G., for whom the subject of medical education was of the most deadly seriousness.

Early in the Lent term Edwin found himself introduced to a new stratum of North Bromwich society, through the accident of his acquaintance with Griffin. The new university had inherited from the old college of science and the still older medical school, the tradition of a pantomime night, a visit en masse to one of the North Bromwich theatres, where this elevating art-form flourished for three months out of the twelve. The evening was one of fancy dress, rowdiness, and general licence, in which the stage suffered as much as the auditorium, and the unfortunate players were propitiated for the ruin of their performance by a series of presentations.

Arrangements for this function were always made with a high seriousness. The committee was composed of representatives from each year in the school of medicine and from each of the other faculties. In this affair, as in all matters of sport or communal life, the older foundation of the medical school took the most prominent part; but the prestige of Griffin as the nephew of the Vice-Chancellor and an acknowledged expert on all matters theatrical, had induced the brewers to run him for the secretaryship; and since the secretary was the official on whom the bulk of the work fell, and no one was particularly anxious to take on the job, Griffin, in his first year, had been elected to the post.

There was no denying the fact that it suited him. To begin with, he was already on intimate terms with every theatre manager and stage-doorkeeper in North Bromwich, and was used to dealing with the susceptibilities of theatrical people. Again, he had plenty of money, a circumstance that would help him in the preliminaries, which were expensively conducted in the local Bodega and other bars and restaurants. Also, it gave Griffin something to do; for the life of the student in brewing was of the leisurely and somnolent character that one would naturally associate with malt liquors, and most of his time had previously been spent sprawling in a deep basket chair in the Common Room, playing an occasional languid game of poker, or jingling sovereigns in his pocket while he waited for the results of racing in the evening papers.

At the annual meeting, which Edwin had not been sufficiently interested to attend, there had been the usual difficulty in selecting a member from the unknown quantities of the first year, and Griffin, full of resource, had suggested Edwin, who was straightway elected, and summoned to attend the deliberations that followed. His election caused a good deal of amusement to his friends, and particularly Martin, who preserved an aristocratic contempt for this vulgar theatrical business, and W.G., who prophesied Edwin’s conversion into a thorough-going blood; but it introduced him to a new and bewildering society in which he met a number of men of his own faculty who had already become impressive at a distance.

Such were the brothers Wade, the elder unapproachable in his final year, the younger of an elegance surpassing that of Harrop. Such was Freddie St. Aubyn, a slight and immaculate figure with fair hair and moustache, and the most carefully cultivated reputation for elegant dissipation in North Bromwich. This Byronic person had already suffered the pangs of a long intrigue with the premiÈre danseuse in a musical comedy company, on whom he was reputed to have spent money and passion lavishly but without the least suggestion of grossness.

In addition to this he was a poet: that is to say, he had published two volumes of verse that were so eclectic as to be out of print. At the present time he had stuck midway in his medical career pending the issue of his unhappy passion; and presented the unusual spectacle of a “chronic,” not by force of incompetence, but by choice. In point of fact, he was an unconscious survival from the nineties, and the lady of his choice resembled a creation of Beardsley more than any type commonly known to nature. Edwin was impressed, for the writer of the exhausted Poems of Passion was the first poet that he had met in the flesh. Naturally, St. Aubyn’s attitude towards the first-year man was a little patronising; but Edwin found his mixture of cynicism and melancholy enchanting, and was particularly impressed when Freddie, languidly supporting his sorrows in one of the Common Room easy-chairs, offered him a fill from his pipe.

“Oh, by the way, there’s opium in it,” he said casually.

Visions of Coleridge and de Quincey invaded Edwin’s mind. He stopped filling his pipe.

“Opium? Why on earth do you put opium in it?”

“It is an aid to the imagination,” said Freddie, “and it deadens pain.”

“Mental pain,” he added significantly, after a pause. “For that alcohol is useless. I’ve tried it.”“I think I’ll have some of my own, if you don’t mind,” said Edwin.

“I quite agree with you. It would be much wiser,” said St. Aubyn. “Luckily you have no need for it. Facilis descensus Averni.”

From that day forward Edwin was always eagerly searching the face and the pupils of Freddie for any symptoms of opium poisoning. He never found any; and W.G., to whom he confided this thrilling incident, assured him that there was nothing in it, that Freddie had probably never smoked opium in his life, and that the whole thing was nothing more than one of the poses that this gentleman adopted for shocking the youthful and bourgeois. The impressive Freddie, according to W.G., was a damned anÆmic waster. If only it had not been for the exhausted Poems of Passion, Edwin might have agreed with him.

The solemn meetings of the panto-night committee engaged Edwin three afternoons a week. As a congregation of amazing bloods they were enthralling but as business gatherings they were more remarkable still. They were held in the saloon bar of a modern public house, all palatial mahogany, red plush and plate-glass, called the White Horse; and the principal business of the day was the consumption of hot whisky with sugar and slices of lemon in it, during which Griffin, armed with a conspicuous note-book, reported on his activities, which appeared mainly to be social.

“On Thursday,” he would say, “I took Mary Loraine to lunch at the Grand Midland, and she said . . .” or “I saw Tommy Fane in his dressing-room the other night, and he said: ‘Look here, old boy. . . ’” Apparently all Griffin’s theatrical friends called him “old boy.” The effect of these narrations on Griffin would be so exhausting that he found it necessary to order more whisky all round. The manager himself would bring it in; a brilliant gentleman named Juniper with red baggy cheeks the laxness of which was compensated by a waxed moustache that stuck out on either side as if a skewer had transfixed them. To Griffin this magnificent creature was most decorous; for the White Horse was one of Astill’s houses, and Griffin had taken the trouble to inform him that the great Sir Joseph was his uncle. In spite of, rather than as a result of these meetings, the panto-night arranged itself. The date was fixed, the bouquets and presents purchased, the announcements in the papers that warned any patrons of pantomime that on this particular night they could not hope to see a normal performance, inserted. Griffin, in the Common Room, became a centre of feverish importance, and even Edwin, in spite of the superciliousness of Martin, and the rough chaff of W.G., caught a little of the reflected glamour.

Edwin now had to face the ordeal of announcing the approach of panto-night to his father. If he were to see the thing through, as was his duty as a member of the committee, it would be quite impossible for him to catch the last train to Halesby, which left North Bromwich at nine-thirty, except on Thursday and Saturday night. Mr. Ingleby, hearing, saw the pit gaping beneath Edwin’s feet. “You didn’t mention this to me before. . . . I suppose you have had to spend quite a lot of time at these committee meetings? I think it was rather unwise of you to undertake it in your first year. . . . There’s only four months before your examination.”

“Oh, I think the exam. will be all right,” said Edwin airily.

“I don’t like to hear you speak like that, Edwin,” said his father. “Over-confidence is a dangerous thing.”

“But it wouldn’t be any better pretending that I didn’t think it was all right, surely?”

“Well, humility is a great virtue.”

“Not any greater than honesty.”

“It’s all very well to talk about honesty; but it would have been more honest, wouldn’t it, if you’d told me that”—he hesitated—“this was going on?”

“There you are. . . . That’s the whole point. If I told you everything you wouldn’t sleep for imagining things that hadn’t happened. It’s the thing that’s worried me ever since I was at school. If you’re absolutely honest with other people, life simply isn’t worth living, because they don’t understand it. It isn’t done. I’ve come to the conclusion, father, that the only thing that really matters is to be honest with yourself.”

“If you can trust yourself—”

“Well, I think I can. . . . And I wish you’d believe in it.”

“I do, Edwin. Only naturally I’m anxious. You’re a child. Where is this . . . this performance held?”

“At the Queen’s Theatre this year.”“Well, I suppose that is better than a music hall.”

His father’s prejudice against the music halls, or, as they were then beginning to be called, Theatres of Varieties, was an old story. Edwin could hardly resist the temptation of telling him that the performers in the pantomime were nearly all music-hall artistes, but Mr. Ingleby saved him, by asking him where he intended to sleep.

“Oh, I expect W.G. will give me a shake-down in his digs.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a shade of anxiety, “that Brown is also on the committee—”.

The idea of the honest W.G. as a member of this constellation of bloods tickled Edwin. He now wished to goodness he’d never told his father of W.G.’s family differences and of his lucky double on the Lincoln and National.

“Oh, no, old W.G.’s far too sober for this sort of thing.”

It was an unfortunate word.

“Sober?” repeated Mr. Ingleby. “Well, I suppose you will have to go; but I do hope—”

He didn’t say what he hoped; but Edwin knew, and was content to leave it at that.

III

The great day came, and Edwin found, as some compensation for the scoffing of W.G. and the superciliousness of Martin and Maskew, that his position was really one of some importance. All the first-year men, even the immaculate Harrop, had decided to go to the theatre, and up to the last minute Edwin was busy selling tickets. He had asked W.G. to put him up, and W.G., as a matter of form, had consented. “I don’t suppose I shall see you after midnight, my son,” he said. With his usual thoroughness in everything that he attempted, W.G. had determined to make a night of it. “It will do me good to make a damned fool of myself for once in a way,” he said, “if it’s only for the sake of realising it afterwards . . .”

They put in a hard afternoon’s work together first, and then he and Edwin and Maskew went together to W.G.’s rooms to change. They were all rather excited, and W.G. carried a bottle of whisky in each of his coat pockets, the first of which was broached as an aperitif while they were changing. In less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired as nearly as convention would allow him, in the manner of his woaded ancestry: a splendid caveman with lowering black brows and hairy arms like those of a gorilla, a disguise that only called for a little accentuation of his natural characteristics to be made effective; Maskew, again in character, as a Restoration cavalier; and Edwin in the modest guise of Pierrot. In the foyer of the theatre they met Martin, who had driven down in a hansom from Alvaston clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a feeding bottle round his neck. The stalls were already full of a carnival crowd of students, and the rest of the house was crowded with spectators who had come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate people who had entered in ignorance of the festival and the fact that their form of entertainment was to be changed for one night only.

There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, a fleshy and unsubtle Mephistopheles, the Mephistopheles of Gounod, not of Goethe, and Freddie St. Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of black curls that he had procured for his presentation of Byron. Freddie, in the interests of verisimilitude, had even shaved his moustache.

Only the earlier part of the performance remained in Edwin’s memory. The rest of it was no more to him than a brilliant haze, from which single moments of wild picturesqueness detached themselves: as when he had a vision of a prehistoric man armed with a waving whisky bottle for a club and feebly restrained by a flushed cavalier, flown with insolence and wine, storming his way through the surging crowd in front of the stalls bar and planting his feet upon the counter; or of the same barbarian, gently armed by a tactful manager in evening dress, putting his weapon to the usages of peace and friendliness by uncorking it and offering its contents to a firm but good-humoured policeman.

“What a splendid fellow W.G. is,” Edwin thought to himself. “Splendid . . . splendid . . . magnificent.” And while he was thinking this, a sombre poet with shining eyes drew him aside and confessed to him, almost with tears, that all this brilliance and colour and life meant nothing to him compared with the memory of the Beardsley lady, whose ankles were so thin that they might be spanned with his little finger. “As light as a feather,” said the poet, “gossamer . . . swansdown . . . all soul. Of course, old fellow, I know that you can understand. I shouldn’t talk like this to any other person in the world.”

And Edwin understood, and realised the justice of the poet’s choice of a confidant so sympathetically that he was spurred to confidences on his own part. “You see, I happen to be a poet myself,” he said, and to prove it he felt bound to recite a sonnet that he had composed a year or two before at St. Luke’s. A magnificent sonnet it seemed to him, perhaps more magnificent for the accompaniment of a song in waltz rhythm by the theatre orchestra. It was flattering to find that Byron agreed with him as to its excellence; but while the poet was pressing his hand in congratulatory brotherhood, and Edwin was just deciding to recite it all over again, the sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and parted them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine was now singing the last verse of her song and that in two minutes it would be his duty to present her with a bouquet and a pair of silver hair-brushes. Still reciting the most telling lines of his sonnet, he was conducted by Mephistopheles through the manager’s office, where a young lady who, in her inviting softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was counting the counter-foils of tickets, and through a subterranean passage with the welcome chill of a catacomb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid bouquet was thrust into his hands.

It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was of a suffocating heaviness, until he realised that the overpowering perfume of which he was aware proceeded not from the bouquet but from the scents and powders of a bevy of creatures of unnatural loveliness who stood waiting in the wings. They were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of their costume would have given them an excuse for shivering; but they did not appear to be conscious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin’s brain. The scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse of naked flesh excited him. At this moment all his awkwardness seemed to have vanished. He could not believe that he was the same person who had blushed at the mere contact of the American girl’s overall, or sat speechless in the presence of Miss Wheeler at the Dousita. His old modesty seemed to him to have been a ridiculous and inexcusable folly; for, at the moment, he would have welcomed the prospect of making the most shameless advances to any one of these houris in competition with any man of his acquaintance. With the air of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which of those blossoms the handkerchief should be thrown.

“Now get along with you,” said the stage-manager, pushing him forward.

He gripped the presents in his hands, and treading on air, advanced on to the stage, where Miss Marie Loraine was kissing her hands to the stalls. The stage was very big, and sloped in such a way that he felt his feet impelled towards the footlights; but, being determined that he would accomplish his mission with dignity, Edwin steered a steady, if resilient, course. In front of him he saw a creature before whose elegance and beauty the beauty of the chorus was as nothing. She stood waiting for him and smiled. For a moment Edwin faced the auditorium, a vast and dark abyss in which not a single face was to be seen. It gave him a sudden fright to think that so many thousands of unseen eyes were fixed upon the patch of limelight in which he stood. He pulled himself together. This was the moment, he thought, in which it was for him to make some speech worthy of the bewildering loveliness that stood before him.

“Go on,” said the impatient voice of Mephistopheles in the wings. “Buck up.”

“Miss Loraine,” said Edwin, with a flourish, “I have the honour of—” The middle of his sentence was broken by a crash and a tremendous peal of laughter from the unseen thousands. The younger Wade, arrayed in the panoply of a Roman legionary and balanced upon the parapet of the stage box, had fallen with a clash of armour into the big drum. Edwin thrust the bouquet and the hair-brushes into the arms of Miss Loraine, herself convulsed with laughter. With a terrific draught the curtain swept down.

“Splendid,” said the voice of Mephistopheles.

The rest of the evening was more confused than ever. He remembered a vision of this surpassing beauty standing in the wings in a long silk wrapper that her dresser had thrown over her shoulders, and thanking him for his presentation. To Edwin the moment seemed the beginning of a passionate romance. He remembered other moments in the auditorium, in which W.G. and Maskew figured. He remembered the taste of a glass of Benedictine, a liqueur that he had never tasted before, that Maskew gave him to pull him together again after his exertions on the stage. He remembered a flashing of lights, an uproar, a free-fight, and the singing of “God Save the Queen.” And then he found himself a member of a small but distinguished brotherhood streaming at a tremendous rate up the wide street that led towards the Prince’s Hospital. All of them were medicals, and most of them his seniors. Freddie St. Aubyn, the Wade brothers, W.G., and Maskew were among them. Out of the main road they passed singing into the meaner streets that surrounded the hospital: miserable streets with low houses and courts clustered on either side, from the upper windows of which astonished working men and women in their nightdresses put out their heads to look at the vocal procession. Opposite the portico of the hospital was a cab rank on which a solitary hansom was standing with the horse asleep in the shafts and the driver taking his rest inside. The sight appeared to arouse the fighting instincts of the elder Wade.

“Good God,” he said, with indignation, “here’s a cab. What the hell does the fellow think he’s doing here at this time of night? He must be drunk. Look at it!”

His brother, who could carry his liquor better, tried to persuade him to leave the cab alone; but before any one knew what was happening, he had thrown himself on it and turned the whole affair upside down in the road. Edwin heard a crash of splintered glass; he saw the cab on its side and the sleepy horse with its legs in the air. He thought: “Good God! What has happened?” And the next thing he saw was a red-faced cabman, buttoned up to his ears, crawling out of the wreckage and cursing fluently at Wade, who stared for a moment, dazed, at the havoc his strength had created, and then bolted for the shelter of the hospital. The cabman, now thoroughly awakened, bolted after him. Edwin glowed with admiration for Wade’s achievement. It was the deed of a Titan, a splendid Berserker. The cabby had burst through the concourse on the hospital steps, thirsting for the blood of Wade, who, by this time, was lying quietly on a hooded stretcher swatched in bandages and quite unrecognisable. A house surgeon in a white overall confronted the cabman. The hospital porters in uniform stood solemnly at his elbow. The house surgeon was assuring the cabby that he was drunk: the cabby telling the lot of them exactly what he thought of them.

“Take hold of this fellow,” said the house surgeon to the porters, “and hold him while I get a stomach pump.” The porters, specially qualified for dealing with midnight drunks, obeyed. There was a splendid struggle in which the foaming cabby was pitched out into the road, —ing their —ing eyes to Hell. The bandaged Wade was carried solemnly upstairs on his stretcher and brought round with whisky in the house surgeon’s room, a chamber full of Olympian card-players, pickled with cigar-smoke and the fumes of alcohol. Some one, it was the cavalier, began to play the piano. Edwin seized the opportunity to recite his sonnet, until W.G. laid a monstrous hand on his mouth.

That vision ended, and to it succeeded one of cool, deserted streets with far too many kerb-stones for Edwin’s liking, and then the dishevelled sitting-room in W.G.’s digs in which they had dressed with a pale gas-jet hissing and flaring and a momentary impression of W.G. asking him where he’d put the damned corkscrew. Edwin remembered rising to a brilliant extreme of wit. “Am I your corkscrew’s keeper?” he said; and while he was explaining at length the aptness of his mot W.G. knocked the neck off the bottle with his poker, eclipsing any possible verbal brilliance.

In the middle of the night Edwin woke and staggered in the dark to the washhand-stand, where he drank a draught of water, so cool and sweet as to be astonishing, until he remembered that it had possibly come from the mountains beyond Felindre. W.G. was snoring heavily on the bed that he had just left. W.G.’s snoring got on his nerves so that he had to prod him in the ribs and wake him, a proceeding that W.G. seemed unjustly to resent.

“I say, W.G.,” he said, “do you think I was drunk?”

“Drunk?” said W.G. “Good God, you didn’t wake me to ask me that? You’ll know all right in the morning.”

Edwin only knew that his head was splitting and that he was hellishly cold.

CHAPTER IV
SCIENCE

I

W.G.’s prophecy that Edwin would know all about it in the morning proved correct; but it was some consolation to him to know that he shared the experience with his friends. All the next day he went about his work with Maskew feeling a little light-headed, and a peculiar weakness in the legs made him disinclined for any exertion that could be avoided. Maskew recovered himself more easily; but W.G., who never did anything by halves, solemnly embarked on a “bust” that lasted for a whole week.

This defection disgusted Maskew, who, in his hard, capable way, believed in moderation in all things—even in vice. He considered W.G.’s conduct “a bit thick”; principally because he was deprived of his company in the dissecting room; but to Edwin the big man’s debauch seemed in some ways heroic and in keeping with his titanic physical nature: a spectacle rather for awe than for reproof. It was even impressive to see W.G. returning like a giant refreshed with vice, throwing his huge energies into the pursuits that he had abandoned as readily as he had lately squandered them in an atmosphere of patchouli. In this line Edwin would have found it constitutionally impossible to compete with W.G., but, for all that, he could not deny that he felt better, more confident, and more complete for the pantomime experience. It even flattered him to find himself regarded as something of a blood by the humbler members of his year who had witnessed his adventure on the Queen’s Theatre stage, though he could not conceal from himself the fact that Martin, more absorbed than ever in blameless but exacting relations with the eligible young ladies of Alvaston, was a little supercilious as to his attainments.

With the approach of the summer and the first examination he found little time for anything but work. The preparation for the exam. was so much of a scramble that he had no time to realise the imaginative significance of the subjects in which he was engaged. He did not guess that the little fat professor of Physics who lectured so drily on the elements of his science was actually employing his leisure in the tremendous adventure of weighing the terrestrial globe, or that certain slender aerials stretched like the web of a spider from a mast at the top of the university buildings were actually receiving the first lispings of wireless telegraphy, an achievement to which that bearded dreamer, the Principal, had devoted twenty years of his life.

To Edwin there was nothing intrinsically romantic in Chemistry or Physics. His mind could not conceive that science was a minute and infinitely laborious conquest of the properties of matter. Atoms and Molecules and the newly-dreamed Electrons, still trembling in the realms of imponderable speculation, were no more to him than abstractions unrelated to the needs of practical human life. They were only facts to be learned by rote, symbols to be memorised and grouped together on paper like the letters in an algebraic calculation; and the whole of this potentially romantic experience was clouded by his own headachy distaste for the gaseous smells of the laboratory: the choking yellow fumes of chlorine that escaped from the glass cupboards in which it was manufactured, and the less tolerable, if more human, odour of Sulphuretted Hydrogen, in an air that was desiccated by the blue flames of half a hundred Bunsen burners. These two subjects were nothing more than an arid desert of facts relating to dead matter through which he had to fight his way, and he hated them.

In comparison with them, Biology was something of an oasis. Here, at any rate, he had to deal with life, a mystery more obvious and less academic. The contemplation of its lower forms, such as the Amoeba, a tiny speck of dreamy protoplasm stretching out its languid tentacles, living its remote and curiously detached life with no aims beyond that of bare mysterious existence, filled him with a strange awe. The laboratory in which these researches were conducted, was high and airy and not associated with any unpleasant smells except at the season when the class were engaged upon the dissection of the hideous dog-fish. It had even its aspects of beauty in the person of the fair American in her dark overall; and for this reason, if for no other, Edwin found himself becoming most proficient in his knowledge of the subject.

In the middle of the summer the examination came. Maskew was an easy first, and carried off the Queen’s scholarship for the year; Edwin came second with a first-class, which, even if it didn’t satisfy himself, was enough to make his father enthusiastic; Martin ambled through with an ease that challenged Edwin’s respect, and W.G., horribly intense and determined through all the week of the exam., scraped through by virtue of sheer bulldog tenacity. The result of the examination did Edwin good if only by convincing him that Maskew, for all his suburban flashiness and his inferior general education, had a better head than his own. Like the excellent man of business that he was, Maskew did not rest upon his oars: the week after the examination, and the first of the long vacation, found him and W.G. back in the dissecting room, plugging into anatomy, the next year’s principal subject, and Edwin saw at once that if he were to keep pace with his rival he would have to forgo the months of summery leisure to which he had looked forward in the vacation. Martin was playing tennis in Ireland, and so he found himself thrown once more into the society of these two.

It was a pleasant time, for their leisure was their own and there were no lectures to tie them to their work. They did a great deal of their reading in W.G.’s rooms, full of easy-chairs, and wreathed in tobacco smoke that escaped through a French window into a tiny garden plot green and pleasant under the white Midland sky, and this room became a haven of escape from the burning brick pavements in which Edwin and his friends would work together without strain, talking of the future and of W.G.’s romantic past, and stabilising their own ideas on the uncertainties of sex: a problem that so far had meant very little to Edwin, but which W.G. was not in a position to ignore.

“You know, it’s damned funny,” he said, “but when you get to know more about things, when you’ve done some anatomy and that, you begin to think of sex in a different light. It knocks all the mystery out of it, and I’m sure that’s a jolly sound thing. Good Lord, when I think of the ignorance with which I started on this sort of thing! Finding out everything by experiment, you know. . . . Why, if I’d had a short course of anatomy before I left school I should have been saved a lot of rotten experiments that didn’t do me or any one else any good. I’d have been a damned sight cleaner-minded than I ever was. A medical training’s a jolly good thing in that way: shows you exactly where you are instead of letting you go fumbling about in the dark.”

“Knocks all the poetry out of it though,” said Maskew.

“Poetry be damned,” said W.G. seriously, “there’s a good deal too much of your poetry about it. Poetry and mystery and a lot of bunkum like that . . . Male and female created He them. I don’t particularly admire the method. I think He made rather a better job of the amoeba. Think how much simpler it would be to split open a chunk of protoplasm instead of having to make a ridiculous fool of yourself if you want to propagate your species. Still, there it is, and the sooner you realise exactly what it means and what it’s all about, the less you worry your head about it.”

“Well, of course, if you’re going to treat it in that light you’re going to knock all the pleasure out of life—” Maskew protested.

“Oh, you’re a sensualist,” said W.G. “The main thing that I have against it is that it wastes valuable time.” He became scornful. “Think of all these rotten fellows who spend their days writing books on sexual problems, analysing their rotten little sensations in detail and gloating over mysteries of sex. It’s only their ignorance that makes them like that. What they want is a thorough course of anatomy and a whack of practical experience to cure them; and if every one else had the same sort of education there’d be no sale for their books.”

Edwin, listening to their sparring, remembered the library at St. Luke’s and a certain shelf of anatomical works that was always kept locked with a special key that Mr. Leeming carried mysteriously on his watch-chain. On the whole, he agreed with W.G. and his preferences for the methods of the Amoeba’s parthenogenesis. He wondered, however, if the kind of education that W.G. advocated would have scotched the production of such works as Romeo and Juliet or the love poems of Shelley.

“It would be rather rotten if you did away with love, W.G.,” he said.

“Oh, I’m not talking about love,” said W.G. “I’m talking about a fellow’s ordinary physical needs. Being in love is not the same thing as that.”

“It is usually,” said the cynical Maskew.

“It’s all a ridiculous mix-up,” said Edwin. “Thank God it doesn’t worry us.”

II

With the beginning of the new year these delicious hours of leisure disappeared. Edwin and his friends, with the assurance of second-year men, became the real possessors of the dissecting room. Anatomy and physiology now absorbed all their time, and the leisurely interest in the first subject, which had been subsidiary in the first year, was now a matter of academical life and death. From the simple anatomical details of the upper and lower extremities that he had dissected with Martin in the year before, he passed to the more vital regions of the human body: the thorax, the abdomen, and the head and neck. He still attended the polished course of lectures on anatomy that the Dean delivered in the theatre; but this process he was forced to regard as a waste of time, since the Dean’s presentation of the subject did not differ greatly from that of any text-book of anatomy, and the Dean’s personality, which curiously resembled that of his cousin Martin, was too aristocratically remote ever to seem real.

In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he became acquainted and fascinated with the first of his medical instructors who had aroused his imagination. This was the chief demonstrator of Anatomy, Robert Moon, or, more familiarly, Bobby, a figure of romantic picturesqueness. He was tall and inclined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat, and his serious face, which was of a size and pallor that his surname suggested, was crowned by an erect crop of black and curly hair. In Edwin’s first year he had always seemed to him a strange and distant figure, walking slowly up and down the dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged from the dark chamber which he inhabited in the corner near the door, like a fat and rather sinister spider.

He rarely spoke: when he did so it was with a broad, north country accent and the most extraordinary deliberation and formality in his choice of words. With the men in the second year he possessed an enormous reputation not only for his exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side of which the Dean’s attainments seemed merely those of a dilettante, but also for his excellence as a coach. Edwin and his two friends became sedulous attendants at his tutorials, where, standing in immobile dignity behind one of the zinc dissecting-room tables in front of an appropriate background of blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second-year students, who came to sit at his feet voluntarily, like the disciples of a Greek philosopher, he would demonstrate the details of some ragged anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was of the colour and consistency of leather.

In Bobby’s demonstrations there was neither imagination nor romance: they were merely fascinating in virtue of the amazing exactitude of the detail which his brain had acquired through long familiarity with the dismembered fragments of humanity. There was nothing in the way of minute observation that could escape him, and his questions were so searching and unexpected that even Maskew, who had himself a prodigious memory for minute detail and could carry the letter of a textbook in his head, was constantly floored by them. It was a magnificent stimulus to Edwin; for it became a kind of game to master a part so thoroughly that Bobby could not stump him.

By this time he was so used to railway travelling that between the morning discussion of the progress of the war that had just broken out in South Africa, and the appearance of halfpenny papers, that multiplied like greenfly in this heated atmosphere, he could read his text-books of anatomy in a crowded carriage without disturbance apart from the natural curiosity that a vision of luridly coloured diagrams awakened in the minds of his fellow passengers, and particularly the bank clerk, who thirsted in a way that W.G. would have approved for technical instruction in the matter of certain organs. Edwin prepared himself for the demonstrator’s tutorials as rigorously as if he had been approaching a vital examination; he spent long hours in his bedroom, utterly heedless of his wide prospect of wintry fields, thinking of nothing but his collection of bleached bones, now carefully marked with coloured chalks to show the origins and insertions of muscles, and particularly those intricate fretted plates that are joined to form the fragile casket of the human skull.

So engrossed was he in absorbing the mere details of their physical form that his mind had no room for other speculations of the kind that had impressed him in the days of his first acquaintance with anatomy. It never struck him that the articulated skull which grinned at him from his mantelpiece when he woke each morning, had once contained the convolutions of a human brain: a mass of pulpy matter that had been the origin of strange complications of movement and feeling and thought, the storehouse of memories, the spring of passions and the theatre of dreams. He did not even know if the skull were that of a man or a woman. To him it was no more than an assembly of dry bones, intricate in their relations with one another, pierced by the foramina of bewildering nerves and blood-vessels, all of which must be visualised and stored and remembered within the limits of another structure of the same kind—the sutures and eminences of which he could feel with his own fingers when he rubbed his puzzled head.

He used to go back to Mr. Moon’s tutorials convinced that he knew all that was to be known of the subject in hand, and then Bobby, in his slow Lancashire voice, with broadened “a”s and “u”s, would put to him some leisurely question that showed him that he knew nothing. Very decorously and slowly these questions would be asked; and since the answers were concerned with the dryest and most exact of physical facts, guessing was of no help to him and silence the only refuge of the ignorant. No display either of knowledge or ignorance had the least effect on Bobby Moon. His wide and dreamy face showed no emotion on the discovery of either. On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind of ponderous verbal humour, slow and elephantine, like the humour of Beethoven; but even in these moments his face showed no signs of emotion, and he would pass on without waiting for any recognition of his joke to the next lethargic question. “Mr. Harrop,” he would say slowly, “what is the fotty pod of Hovers?” And Harrop, sitting on a high stool that showed his variegated socks to perfection, would reply that the fatty pad of Havers was a small cushion of fat set in the head of the femur to lubricate the hollow of the acetabulum.

The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to dominate Edwin’s impressions of the dissecting room. There was something provocative in the remoteness of this black and solitary form from all the concerns of human life. Edwin conceived him to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man, but an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously endowed with the powers of locomotion and speech but bereft of any human characteristic. It amazed him to discover, in the end, that Bobby Moon was nothing of the sort, but a creature of the most delicate human tenderness, so sensitive to the appeals of beauty and humanity that he had been forced to adopt the impassive mask that was all that his pupils knew of him from an instinct of self-protection.

It happened in this way. During the early part of his second year Edwin had become conscious of a new figure in the dissecting room, that of a man named Boyce, a student with a brilliant reputation who had managed in some inexplicable way to fail in his first examination and be left behind by the other men of his year. He was a tall, fair creature, with a long face and small, very blue eyes. The society of Alvaston had made him friendly with Martin, from whom Edwin’s new relations were gradually separating him. The only characteristic that Edwin had so far noticed in Boyce was an almost literary fluency in the use of foul language which left even Harrop gasping. Boyce was working alone on a thorax a few tables away from Edwin. He was a neat and laborious dissector, and Edwin had been tempted to admire the skill with which he had defined the network of blood-vessels, the system of coronary arteries and veins, with which the human heart is enmeshed. Boyce was evidently far less unapproachable than Edwin had imagined, and while they were examining his dissection together they had not noticed the approach of Dr. Moon, who had walked slowly to their table and stood gazing at the specimen through his moonlike pince-nez. They did not realise that he was near them until they heard his voice, slowly intoning a line of poetry. “The heart,” he said: “arras’d in purple like a house of kings. Are you acquainted with that line, Mr. Boyce?”

“No, sir. Who wrote it?”

“A man named Francis Thompson. He was a medical student at Manchester, several years senior to me.”

“Oh, I know his name,” said Boyce. “He is a friend of my father’s.”

“A great poet,” said Bobby solemnly. “A great poet. The contemplation of mortality in this place should be full of poetical reflections. You see, this is the heart of a very old or a very dissolute man. The coronary arteries are stiff with atheroma.”

“I was thinking, sir,” said Edwin, encouraged, “of the heart of Shelley that Trelawny was supposed to have picked out of the funeral pyre when the body was burned. His account says that only the heart was left. He gave it to Hunt, didn’t he? But you’d think the heart would be burned more easily—”

“Yes. . . . It’s an unlikely story. Shelley’s heart”—he looked up dreamily at the ceiling—“Shelley’s heart. . . . It’s a strange reflection.” And he moved away, his big head still in the air and his hands behind his back.

“I say,” said Edwin; “I’d no idea Bobby was like that. You wouldn’t associate him with poetry, would you? He seems such an awfully matter-of-fact chap. Dry bones, you know.”

Boyce laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Bobby. Nobody does here except my father. He’s an incurable sentimentalist. He lives an awfully lonely sort of life in some digs up in Alvaston. His mind’s crammed with poetry and old music and a lot of ethnological lumber. Do you know, he’s about the biggest authority in England on prehistoric man?”

“I hadn’t the least idea. I imagined he dreamed of nothing but bones and soft parts.”

“You would. . . . But he’s a wonderful chap really. Are you keen on poetry?”

“Of course I am.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. I don’t imagine that your friends Brown and Maskew are particularly interested in it. My guvnor’s by way of being a poet, you know. Bobby’s awfully keen on his work. Do you know it?”

Edwin was ashamed to say he did not.

“Oh, I’m not in the least surprised,” said Boyce. “He’s not appreciated, you know, except by other poets, like this fellow Thompson. I think he’s rather good, as a matter of fact, quite apart from the fact that he’s my father. If you’ll come up to our place some day I can show you a lot of interesting things in his library: first editions and things like that. I’d no idea that you were keen on them.”

The tone implied such an appreciation of Edwin’s hectic past as typified by his solitary appearance on the stage of the Queen’s Theatre that he hastened to deny the impeachment. He was tremendously pleased to have struck a man like Boyce, who went on to talk about music, of which Edwin knew nothing, and exuded an easy atmosphere of culture, of a kind that he envied, without ever losing sight of the fact that Edwin had come to him in rather a questionable shape. Edwin was thrilled to think that he had reached the threshold of a new and exciting friendship which made his association with Brown and Maskew seem commonplace and shabby; but he was far too shy to force himself on Boyce, and so the acquaintance remained for many months at the exact stage in which it had begun, and he had to be content with the sudden insight that Boyce had given him into the hidden, romantic qualities of Dr. Moon.

Sometimes, while he was scrubbing his hands with carbolic soap, the only thing that really banished the smell of the dissecting room from his fingers, he would hear Boyce discussing music, and particularly the work of Tschaikowsky, whose sixth symphony had just inflamed his imagination, with Mr. Moon in his gloomy bunk, and he would go on washing his hands until they were ridged and sodden in the hope of hearing what they were saying or even of entering into their conversation, until W.G. would come along and drag him off to Joey’s, asking him what the hell he was dawdling about. Then Edwin would be almost ashamed of W.G.’s company, and hated himself for it, since he knew in his heart of hearts that, even if he were a Philistine, W.G. was one of the best and soundest fellows on earth.

The friendship with Boyce, however, was bound to come. It began with the formation of a small literary society, that had been originated by certain of the third-year men with whom Boyce was acquainted, and which held its meetings in the newly-opened smoking room that adjoined Dr. Moon’s chamber of horrors. Papers were read every fortnight, and discussions followed in which Edwin had scarcely dared to take part, but Boyce was a polished and fluent protagonist. In the end, when the first enthusiasms of the society, to which Brown and Maskew, naturally enough, did not belong, had been spent, Edwin was asked to read a paper. He chose for his subject Browne’s Religio Medici, a work with which this medical audience seemed strangely unacquainted. The paper was a success, and at the end of the meeting Boyce accosted him friendlily and asked him why he had never been up to see his father’s books. Edwin withheld the obvious reply that the invitation had not been pressed although he had never ceased to think of it; and Boyce at once suggested that they should go up to Alvaston together that evening. “We can put you up for the night if that will be more convenient,” he said.

They walked up together under the high, frosty sky, talking of poetry, of all the beautiful things that they had worshipped in common without knowing it. It seemed strange to Edwin that they should have worked side by side for a couple of years and scarcely spoken to each other when all the time they had so many delights that might have been shared. The unlocking of this closed and secret chamber of his heart gave him a strange feeling of elation and made the world suddenly beautiful. The hard and wintry pavement seemed curiously smooth and resilient; the roadway ran in masterly and noble curves, the black branches of plane-trees and laburnums, even the pointed gables of the smug suburban villas seemed to take on a new and piercing beauty against the starry sky, and they swung along together as triumphant in their ecstasy of youth as if indeed they were treading on the stars.

“What a topping night,” said Boyce. “God . . . look at Vega!” He waved his long arms and quoted:—

“Or search the brow of eve, to catch
In opal depths the first faint beat
Of Vega’s fiery heart. . . .”“Whose is that?”

“My guvnor’s. He’s a tremendous chap on astronomy.”

“It’s damned good,” said Edwin, thrilling.

“Not bad, is it? He’s a very sound man, the guvnor. I think you’d like him.”

But when they reached the Boyces’ house they found that the poet was not at home. In place of him Edwin was introduced to a mild and beautiful figure with a soft voice who turned out to be Boyce’s mother. She had her son’s soft blue eyes, and spoke to him with such caressing tenderness that Edwin was seized with a sudden feeling of aching emptiness for the memory of his own mother, of whom, so potent is the anodyne of time, he had scarcely thought for more than a year.

Boyce presented Edwin with a high social recommendation. “A friend of Denis Martin’s,” he said. Mrs. Boyce smiled on him.

“Look here,” said her son, “I’m afraid we can’t very well go into the guvnor’s study. He hates any one invading it when he’s not there. Let’s go upstairs to my own room and talk.”

Edwin had a passing vision of the forbidden chamber, the flanks of a grand piano in which a reflection of firelight glowed red, and endless shelves of gilt-lettered books. The rest of the house seemed to him rather untidy, as if it were no more than a dry chrysalis protecting the central beauty of the poet’s room; but he had not time to see much following in the rear of Boyce’s long-legged progress up the stairs. He found himself, at last, in a small attic with a gable window that framed the starry sky: the kind of room that satisfied all his own ideals of comfort and seclusion.

Boyce was proud and willing to exhibit his treasures. They showed a curious mixture of the schoolboy, represented by photographic groups of cricket teams, glass cases of butterflies, and a tasseled Rugby cap, and the more mature intelligence that now possessed them. Edwin and he sat down opposite one another in a couple of easy-chairs, and talked and smoked incessantly all that evening. They spoke of Wordsworth, the idol of Boyce’s literary devotions, of Browning, whose claims to poetry he would not allow, and of Shenstone, whose name he had never met before. By this time Edwin was getting rather ashamed of his early admiration for Shenstone, and the fact that Boyce had never heard of the Pastoral Ballad confirmed him in his decision that the author was an acquaintance whom he had better drop. They went on to Francis Thompson—Dr. Moon’s quotation from the Anthem of Earth had sent Edwin searching for his works in the municipal library—and he now learned that this bewildering genius, who had once, like him, been a medical student, had actually slept in the room beneath his feet.

“He never qualified,” said Boyce dreamily, “and yet medicine is a wonderful thing. I should think the fact that the medical man is always face to face with mortality”—he pointed to a suspended skeleton in the corner—“and all the other big fundamental things like birth and pain, ought to give him a sort of sense of proportion and make him sensitive to the beauties of life. Your friend, Sir Thomas Browne, is an example. Then there’s Rabelais.”

“There are heaps of others,” said Edwin.

“Well, yes. . . . Keats.”

“Byron and Akenside,” Edwin supplied from the eighteenth century.

“I don’t know the gentleman,” said Boyce.

“Well, then, Goldsmith and Crabbe. Crabbe’s rather good, you know. And Shelley—”

“Shelley?”

“Yes, Shelley walked a hospital when he was in London with Harriet.”

“I’d no idea of that,” said Boyce, “but there’s a modern fellow that the guvnor’s rather keen on, named Bridges. Robert Bridges, who’s a physician.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“No . . . he’s not well known, but I believe he’s pretty good.”

And so they talked on, deciding that the world was ripe for great poetical achievement, awed to think that perhaps they were living, without knowing it, in the beginning of a great age of literature; convinced, to a degree of enthusiasm, of the splendour and magnanimity of the calling that they had adopted; conscious—thrillingly conscious—of the fact that the whole world lay before them full of undreamed delights as mysterious and yet as clear as the wintry sky.

Edwin had to run for his train. He didn’t mind running. On a night like this he felt that violent exercise was a mode of expressing the curious elation that his talk with Boyce, and his excitement in the new friendship that promised so many hours of happiness, had given him. At the gates of the station he paused to buy an evening paper. It contained the news of Buller’s defeat at Colenso and the result of a cup-tie between North Bromwich Albion and Notts Forest, but he had no room in his mind for football or for this African war in which W.G., to the ruin of his future finances, was itching to enlist. Edwin’s thoughts were of the great names and the great works of which he and Boyce had been talking. The newspaper lay folded on his knees; the flares of the black country swept past him in the night, unseen. He was not even aware of the other occupants of the carriage until he suddenly found himself staring straight into the eyes of his opposite, whom he recognised as Edward Willis, the son of Walter Willis of the Great Mawne Furnaces.

All Aunt Laura’s attempts, heroically made in the interests of social advancement, had so far failed to bring about a friendship between these two. Edwin, on his side, could never get out of his head an unreasonable prejudice against the Willises, the natural result of Aunt Laura’s adulation of their wealth, and even a knowledge of his own humble origins had not affected his traditional distrust of people whom he regarded as flashy and self-made. In Edward Willis he found a creature even more shy than himself, and the very fact that Mrs. Willis and Aunt Laura, putting their heads together, had decided to throw them into each other’s arms, was enough to create an atmosphere of distrust and uneasiness. The sudden recognition in the railway carriage was merely an embarrassment. Edwin was startled into saying “Hallo,” and Willis replied in exactly the same way; then both of them retired with precipitation to the cover of their evening newspapers, from which they listened to the conversation of a commercial traveller who was returning home from London and had all the latest and most authentic gossip on the South African situation.

“Mind you,” he said, “they’re wily fellows, these old Boers; we may not be up to their dirty tricks: I’m proud to say we aren’t. We shouldn’t be English if we were. But one thing, sir, you’ll see in the end, and that is that dogged British pluck will come through. You mark my words.”

Edwin felt an overpowering impulse to say that dogged British pluck pretty obviously hadn’t come through at Colenso; but Edward Willis’s presence made him far too self-conscious to commit himself, and at the next station the traveller and his friend picked up their bags and departed, breathing the word “Buller” as if it were an incantation warranted to fortify and console. Edwin and Willis were alone.

When their silence had become altogether too ridiculous, Edwin plucked up his courage and said, “Rotten thing this war.”

“I don’t know,” said Willis. “It’s all right for my old man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Iron. . . . We’re chock full of Government work for South Africa: gun-carriages and rifle barrels. You’re doing medicine, aren’t you?”“Yes.”

“Lucky devil. You’re learning to cure people, while I’m learning to make things to kill them.”

He stared out of the window towards a patch of sky in which the glow of his father’s furnaces pulsated as though it registered the beatings of a savage, fiery heart, and relapsed into gloomy silence. The tunnel swallowed them, and in a moment they pulled up at Mawne Hall. Willis prepared to go. “I say,” he said, “we’re giving a dance next week—” and hesitated.

“What for?” said Edwin, for want of something better.

“I don’t know . . . unless it’s to celebrate the Colenso casualties. I believe you’re invited. I hope you’ll come.”

“Thanks,” said Edwin. But Willis was gone.

CHAPTER V
ROMANCE

I

Mr. Ingleby wanted to know why he was so late. “I read a paper at the Literary Society,” he said, “and then went back to Alvaston with a man named Boyce. He’s a son of Arthur Boyce.”

“The auctioneer?” asked Mr. Ingleby.

“No . . . the poet.”

Mr. Ingleby’s features showed a faint anxiety, as though he doubted if such an influence were healthy. “Well, I hope your paper was a success,” he said.

“Oh, I think it went all right. Any letters?”

“Yes . . . two. Here they are.” He handed them to Edwin.

One of them was the invitation from Mawne. He showed it to his father.

“A dance—” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Yes. . . . I suppose I’d better go.”

“Your Aunt Laura told me about it. If it won’t interfere with your work, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“I haven’t any proper clothes. Evening dress, you know”“I suppose that is quite necessary,” said Mr. Ingleby regretfully.

Edwin could see that the question of expense was troubling his father’s mind. He wished to goodness he would say so outright, instead of looking vaguely distressed. It would be so much more satisfactory. As it was, he could only feel indefinitely in the wrong, as if the dance were a piece of reckless and inexcusable levity in which he had no right to take a part. The dress suit, the acquisition of which had been anticipated with some satisfaction, now appeared to him in the terms of an accumulation of small change hardly earned in his father’s dusty shop: as the outcome of pennyworths of Epsom Salts, sticks of liquorice, or teething powders. It was humiliating, and even distressing to realise that every single comfort or luxury that he enjoyed—even the prime necessities of life, had to be accumulated, literally scraped together from this incredibly humble source and by the personal exertions of this simple and pathetic person. With these conditions in his mind he could not bear accepting money from his father, the weight of his obligation was so overwhelming. Now he found it difficult to face the idea of a tailor’s bill that might represent the profit on at least three days of small trading in the shop.

“I don’t think I’d better go, father,” he said.

“It would be rather ungracious if you didn’t, Edwin,” his father replied. “It was extremely kind of the Willises to ask you. I think you’d better go and be measured to-morrow by Mr. Jones.”

The idea of a Halesby tailor’s cut was not inspiring and made Edwin inclined to press his refusal; but Mr. Ingleby went on to explain that Mr. Jones owed him a bill that he had begun to look upon as a bad debt, and that Edwin’s dress suit would be a way of working it off. This circumstance made the order less shameful, except in so far as it applied to the hateful penury of Mr. Jones, whom Edwin remembered as a man with a beard, as shabbily unlike a tailor’s dummy as it was possible for a man to be. The occurrence was unfortunate in another way; for such an addition to his wardrobe would almost certainly scotch the idea of asking for a dress allowance, a plan which had been maturing in his brain for some months and only needed a callous frame of mind for its performance.

Next evening, however, he went to see Mr. Jones, who measured him obsequiously, and assured him that in the happy days before he was his own master, he had actually cut morning-coats for Sir Joseph Astill, a gentleman who was very difficult to fit on account of a slight . . . er . . . fullness in the figure. Edwin, primed by the observations of The Major in To-Day, was able to tell Mr. Jones exactly what he wanted, and Mr. Jones’s manner, when he rubbed his hands over Edwin’s instructions, did not suggest for a moment the fact of which Edwin was all the time aware: that this was not a bona-fide order, but a rather shabby way of making him pay a bill that he had scamped for a couple of years.

Stepping out of Mr. Jones’s melancholy shop, Edwin thanked heaven that his father had not wanted him to follow in his footsteps; for it seemed to him that the life of a struggling tradesman in a small town must be the most humiliating on earth. He was awfully sorry for all of them as he walked down the street and read their names on the boards above their windows. He had never quite realised their condition before he smelt the particular odour of lower middle-class poverty, vaguely suggestive of perambulators, aspidistras, and boiled mutton, that moved down the linoleum floored passage at the back of Mr. Jones’s shop.

In due course the clothes arrived. On the whole, Mr. Jones had not done badly; but even so, Edwin was still scarcely qualified for the business in hand. He had never learned to dance, and it was necessary to acquire this accomplishment in a little more than a week. At first he had decided to pull his courage together and approach Martin, whose eligibility compelled him to be an expert dancing man; but, at the last moment, he funked a confession that would expose such depths of social ignorance, and went instead to a certain Professor Beagle, who advertised classes in dancing and deportment at the hour of five on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in the Queen’s Assembly Rooms, next door to the theatre of the same name.

On the next Tuesday afternoon Edwin presented himself to Mr. Beagle at the advertised hour. He found him alone sitting on a platform at the end of a long room that smelt of dust and moth-eaten rep curtains. When Edwin appeared at the other end of the room the professor dismounted, cleared his throat, clasped his hands in front of him, and made a formal bow. He was a little man, and very fat. He wore a navy blue coat that was cut very short at the back, so that it ruckled up over his round haunches, and his collar rose so high and stiff above a white Ascot tie, that he was forced to carry his head tilted backwards in the direction of his waxed moustache. His face was purple and his watery eyes stared, whether as the result of the collar’s asphyxiation or his past manner of life it was difficult to say. His feet were excessively small, and his striped grey trousers tapered to the ankles in such a way that every step he made seemed a nice feat of balancing. He bowed to Edwin, and Edwin explained the urgent circumstances of his mission.

“I see,” said Professor Beagle. “I quite understand. You must not, ’owever, expect me to be able to turn you out as I should wish to in the time at our disposal. Perhaps you will be good enough not to mention my name in this connection, and keep my instructions, as it were, dark?”

Edwin assured him of secrecy, and the professor proceeded to ask him where the dance was to be held. “I do not wish to teach you anything that will not be useful,” he said. “In some circles the Quadrille, which I myself consider the most dignified of dances, is still in favour. In others the Valeta is coming into vogue. In different planes of society different conditions prevail.”

In the end the professor decided that Edwin’s case called for the Waltz, the Lancers, and the Polka, with the possible addition of the Pas de Quatre. He demonstrated to Edwin the position in which his feet should be placed, and then invited him to have a try at the waltz.

“You will take my harm, please, in the following way . . . so. . . . Now, neither grarsping nor clarsping, let the lady’s ’and lie gently in yours, with the fingers ’alf bent, and under no circumstances squeeze the figger. So . . . ”

Edwin placed his right arm above the ruckles in Professor Beagle’s broad back: into his left hand a podgy fist descended like a lump of moist dough, and from the little man’s back-tilted, strangled head a faint sound of whistling proceeded that raked Edwin’s own nostrils with a cross-fire of whisky and cachous. Then the professor began to revolve like a peg top, and Edwin felt himself swept round by the arm that lay upon his shoulder, to the rhythm of the whistled tune, which was sometimes suspended and replaced by: “Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three. Gently now. Keep-on-the. Tips-of-your. WONN-two-three. Toes.”

In this manner they circled the room several times. Edwin was getting out of breath; but the professor, to whom this form of exercise was so usual as to be negligible, showed no signs of fatigue, except that his eyes became a little more glassy and his cheeks more purple. Indeed, the power by which he swung Edwin round the room was a thing of mystery; for his little feet did not seem to move, and the upper part of his body was rigid. He moved like a cyclone or a dust-storm, Edwin thought, revolving terrifically on its own axis.

“I am afraid,” said Professor Beagle formally at the end of the first lesson. “I am afraid you have no great natural gift. It is better that I should be candid with you. You will need half a dozen lessons at least before you can take your place with the young ladies in one of my advanced classes.”

Edwin stuck to it. On six more occasions he visited the Assembly Rooms, where, with exactly the same formalities, Mr. Beagle received him. With Mr. Beagle in his arms, prevented by sheer physical bulk from, in any circumstances, squeezing the figger, he revolved in the vortex of the waltz. In the Lancers he set to imaginary partners, or went “visiting” with Mr. Beagle’s hand lying gently in his, with the fingers ’alf bent. In the Pas de Quatre, where the draught of whisky and cachous was happily directed forwards, he pointed an awkward toe alongside Mr. Beagle’s tapered and elegant extremity. In the end the professor pronounced himself satisfied with him.

“If I were you,” he said, “I think I should come along to my advanced class this evening and familiarise yourself with the proximity of young ladies. The fee is a purely nominal ’alf-crown.”

Edwin decided to do so, and walked up in the evening with his patent leather pumps in his pocket. He felt very shy. The place was lighted with flaring gas jets, and in a room marked Gentlemen, that he had always taken for a lavatory, a number of young men, who looked like shop assistants, were putting on white kid gloves. They all seemed to know one another and to look upon Edwin as an intruder. No one spoke to him, and he waited in the cloak room until the last had disappeared before he dared to emerge. From the room on the opposite side of the passage there issued a breeze of concentrated perfumes, and a round of subdued titters. This room was labelled “Ladies.”

While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he dare risk an encounter, the door opposite opened and a bevy of bloused figures appeared. The sight of the first took him by surprise: it was the elder of the two anÆmic young ladies in the drapery who travelled in the morning train with him from Halesby. She gave him a smile of recognition that revealed her defective teeth. This prospect was altogether too much for him. An acute shyness drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon as he had taken off his pumps and put on his shoes again, he left the Queen’s Assembly Rooms and bolted down Sackville Row to his train.

II

The Willis’s dance, to which Edwin had looked forward with such mingled pleasure and anxiety, was destined to bring forth a violent emotional experience. Mr. Jones had not undergone the experience of cutting for the undulant figure of Sir Joseph Hingston for nothing. Apart from the fact that the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, Edwin’s dress coat was a success, and, as Aunt Laura benignantly pointed out, it was just as well that some allowance should be made for future growth. Mr. Jones had been extremely anxious that Edwin should be supplied with a magenta silk handkerchief, an ornament which, he was assured, all the best people wore stuffed in the corner of their waistcoats.

On this problem the Major had never delivered judgment, so Edwin mustered sufficient courage to approach Denis Martin for advice. Martin scornfully told him that the idea was preposterous. “It’s the kind of get-up that your friend Maskew would adopt,” he said. He also impressed upon Edwin the fact that the infallible index of a bounder in evening-dress was a ready-made tie. No doubt the advice was excellent; but it let Edwin in for an hour of agony on the evening of the dance, when the tie refused to answer to the Major’s printed instructions, and finished up by making him look as if he had gone to bed in his boots and slept on it.

He had never been to Mawne Hall before. That pretentious mansion with its castellated faÇade set on a steep bank above the valley of the Stour, in which the works that maintained it lay, was so brightly lit upon this evening that it glowed like a lantern through the bare boughs of the hanging wood beneath. In the gun-room at the side of the hall in which the hats and coats of the guests were being received by Bassett, the Willises’ coachman, he recognised a number of incredibly elegant creatures of his own sex with shining white waistcoats, pearl studs, and immaculate ties. He knew scarcely any of them, for they were mostly neighbouring ironmasters or professional people to whose society the Willises’ money had proved a sufficient introduction. Among them he recognised Sir Joseph Hingston, playing ducks and drakes with his aitches, and wearing, to Edwin’s encouragement, a flagrantly ready-made tie. In this particular, at any rate, he was one up on the baronet. He hoped that some one else would realise this fact. In the middle of these reflections he thought he heard a voice that he recognised, and turned to find himself rubbing shoulders with Griffin. Edwin said, “Good-evening.”

“Good Lord, Ingleby, are you here? I haven’t seen you since the pantomime night. What are you doing here? Do you know these people?”

It struck Edwin that he spoke rather contemptuously of his hosts.

“Yes. . . . I live near here, you know,” he replied. “I didn’t know the Willises were friends of yours.” As a matter of fact he knew nothing about the Willises’ friends; but it sounded rather well.

“No . . . I don’t know them,” said Griffin, “but the old man is a business friend of my uncle’s, and apparently they were rather hard up for men.” The sound of waltz music was heard, and Griffin left him hurriedly. “See you later,” he said.

Edwin, anxious not to be left behind, pulled on his gloves and split the thumb of one of them. He passed through the hall, where his name was announced, rather contemptuously, as he thought, by Hannah, the Willises’ tall and starchy servant, and was received in a manner that was reassuring and homely by Mrs. Willis. She spoke for a moment of his mother, and tears gathered in her rather watery eyes; then she introduced him to her small daughter Lilian, very self-conscious in a white party frock with a pale blue waistband, and another dark girl with beautiful grey eyes and a creamy rather than pale complexion, who was standing beside her. Miss Dorothy Powys, she said. Edwin, hedging for safety, booked a dance with Lilian, who took the matter as seriously as himself. Next, no doubt, he must have a shot at Miss Dorothy Powys, in spite of the disturbing beauty of her eyes; but when he came to ask her for a dance, he saw that Griffin was talking to her.

“May I have another—number sixteen?” Edwin heard him ask easily. She smiled and nodded. Her smile seemed to Edwin very beautiful: so beautiful, indeed, that he couldn’t possibly bring himself to approach her when Griffin turned away. It was awfully silly of him, he thought.

The evening was not exactly a success. He polkaed with Lilian, and took his place in the Lancers with several mature ladies to whom Mrs. Willis introduced him. Luckily none of these belonged to Halesby, a circumstance that must be attributed to Mrs. Willis’s tact, so that the question of his origin never arose. He danced according to the letter of Professor Beagle’s instructions. Neither grasping nor clasping, he let the ladies’ hands lie gently in his with the fingers half bent, and in no circumstances did he squeeze the figger. What he missed was the terrific motive power that the unladylike Professor Beagle had applied to his revolutions. It now appeared to him that to supply this was the part of the male; and as most of the matrons with whom Mrs. Willis supplied him were bulky, he had his work cut out. Once, returning thoroughly blown from one of these adventures he caught the eye of Dorothy Powys; and he thought she smiled. Could this be true? He wondered. . . . During the greater part of the evening when he had not been dancing he had found himself following her movements with his eyes. He had decided that she must be at least a year or two older than himself; but that didn’t really matter, for she seemed to him a creature of such very perfect grace, and her eyes, in the moment when he caught them, had been so wonderful. After the next dance, which was the one that she had booked with Griffin, he watched them disappear into the library.

It made him feel sick with himself that he hadn’t taken the opportunity of his introduction. What a damned fool he was! And afterwards, when he watched her, she did not smile at all, either for him or for any one else. Indeed, she seemed pale, and anxious, as if something had happened to upset her. In despair Edwin wandered off into the card-room, where he saw Lady Hingston, who was partnering Mr. Willis at bridge, revoke three times in two games, to the intense annoyance of her husband. From the card-room he strolled on to the buffet, where he found Griffin absorbing quantities of whisky and soda. He begged Edwin to join him; but Edwin, who was particularly anxious to behave himself, struck to claret-cup.

“Well, have you struck any cuddle?” said Griffin brutally, with his mouth full.

“Any what?”

“Cuddle. . . . Girls. . . . What the devil do you think one comes to a dance for?”

“No. . . . I haven’t,” said Edwin.“Well, they are a pretty scratch lot,” Griffin confessed. “That Powys girl’s all right though.”

Edwin blushed furiously. He suddenly wanted to throw his glass of claret-cup at Griffin’s head. Why? . . . He calmed himself.

“Do you know her?” he asked.

“Never met her before to-night. She’s got a topping figure. She must be pretty well connected. Lord Alfred Powys is one of their directors here.”

“But you don’t mean to say—” Edwin began.

“The night is yet young,” said Griffin, gulping another whisky. “God, there’s number twelve! I must hook it.”

Edwin wandered back to the ballroom. He couldn’t keep away from it, but, at the same time, he was anxious not to appear disengaged, for fear that Mrs. Willis should induce some other heavy partner to abandon her arm-chair for his amusement. He hung about the pillars of the folding doors that led into the supper room, just out of range of Mrs. Willis’s maternal gaze. From this point he could watch the beautiful Miss Powys, and wonder, with a sort of bitter excitement, exactly what Griffin had meant by his suggestions. Watching her, he could not believe that she could be anything but graceful and beautiful in everything she did. The band started to play the music for waltz: number sixteen. He remembered it was the second dance that Griffin had booked with her. For some reason that he couldn’t imagine, he felt that he wanted to be near when Griffin came for her: perhaps he could tell her attitude towards him by something that she might say. He went over to the place where she was sitting next to Mrs. Willis. He tried not to look at her.

In a moment he heard Griffin’s voice. “Ours, I think.” The tone was a little blurred by Griffin’s potations.

“I think you’ve made a mistake,” she said.

Edwin turned round, and at the same moment she looked towards him. “Surely I am dancing this with you, Mr. Ingleby.”

“But look here, I’m sure these are your initials on my programme, Miss Powys. Let me look at yours.”

He tried to take the programme from her fingers, but she moved it away.

“Really, we mustn’t contradict each other, Mr. Griffin. The dance is Mr. Ingleby’s. Will you take me, please?” she said to Edwin.

In an ecstatic dream Edwin found himself walking away with her on his arm. It was a miracle, an astounding, beautiful miracle. She picked up her skirt by the loop of ribbon with which it was suspended and looked him full in the eyes, smiling. “Shall we start?” she said.

They started. In one fatal moment Edwin, who hadn’t been doing badly at the beginning of the evening, forgot every single precept that Professor Beagle had taught him.

“I say, what a shocking dancer you are,” she said with a laugh.

“I’m most awfully sorry, I only learnt this week.” Now that his mind was diverted by speaking to her the steps came more naturally.“That’s better,” she said. “Who on earth taught you?”

He confessed to Professor Beagle, and she appeared to be amused.

“You see you’re dancing away from me all the time. Just as if you were afraid of me. You ought to hold me closer. It upsets the what d’you call it . . . centre of gravity.”

“I was told never under any circumstances to—” He couldn’t very well repeat Professor Beagle’s formula.

“Now you’re getting on beautifully. Don’t think about it. That’s the idea. Just dance.”

The music ended. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

“Out into the hall, if you don’t mind . . . on the stairs. I want to explain to you. It was really awfully good of you to take me on.”

“It was a wonderful piece of luck for me.”

They sat together on the shallow oak staircase and she proceeded to tell him that Griffin had upset her in the dance before by trying to kiss her shoulder. “I really couldn’t stick a repetition of that,” she said. “Besides, I think the man had been drinking. So I just pitched upon your poor innocence and lied for all I was worth. Who are you, by the way? I only just remembered your name when Mrs. Willis introduced us. She’s rather a dear, isn’t she?”

The music of the next dance struck up. “Are you dancing?” Edwin asked eagerly.

“I don’t know, I expect so. Just look at my programme. It’s too dark for me to see.”Edwin took the programme from her fingers. It was a thrilling moment. In the dusk he deciphered two initials, “E.W.,” he said.

“Oh, that’s only Edward Willis. He’s very shy of me. If you’ve nothing better to do I think we’ll stay here.”

It was so easy to talk to her. To Edwin, indeed, it seemed as if he had now become articulate for the first time in his life. She did not speak very much of herself; but she asked him many questions about his life at school, where, he confided to her, he had first known Griffin, and then again about his new work in North Bromwich. And when she did speak her voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of an amazing limpid purity, more beautiful than any human speech he had ever heard. Edwin would have liked to listen to it for ever. He felt that he wanted words to describe its peculiar music, but no words came to him. He could only remember a line in Browning’s Pauline:—

“Her voice was as the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought. . . .”

That was the nearest he could get to it; but the words, although they expressed a little of his absorption, did not convey the musical qualities that he wanted to describe. He tried to compare it with the tones of some instrument that he knew, but neither wood-wind nor strings suggested what he wanted. No . . . it was a sound nearer to nature than any man-made instrument. It was the voice of a Naiad: the sound of running water in a clear brookland. And all the time that he listened to her he was thrillingly conscious of her physical presence. She was sitting on the stair beneath him, and fortunately she could not see that he was gazing at her in the gloom, thinking how beautifully shaped was the nape of the neck from which her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome by the loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoulder.

“I’m talking all the time,” he said, “and you’re saying nothing. It’s rather a shame . . . because you speak so beautifully.”

“Whatever do you mean?” For a moment her eyes were on his. He dared not look at them. He could not answer her, for the moment seemed full of such an overpowering sweetness.

“Do tell me.”

“Oh, I only mean that when you say a thing like that, it . . . it suggests that everything about you is marvellously clean and clear and musical—” He paused, for he felt that she might laugh at him.

“Yes . . . go on,” she said.

“Like water in a hill country. It makes me feel as if I weren’t within a hundred miles of North Bromwich.”

She laughed softly, but not unkindly.

“No, I’m not a bit like that. I’m really awfully hard and worldly—I wish I were the least bit what you imagine. You’re most awfully young, aren’t you?”

Perhaps she did not mean the word cruelly, but it seemed very cruel to Edwin. It was quite possible that she was a few years older than himself, if age were to be counted by years; but in reality he knew that she was beautifully young, certainly young enough to love and to be loved.

“Don’t let’s talk about me,” she said.

“But I want to talk about you.”

He wanted to talk about nothing else. His head was full of words that he wanted to throw before her like jewels, but he did not know how much he dared to say. He knew it was impossible for him to express a hundredth part of his delight in her. It would be nearly as bad as kissing her neck in the manner of Griffin, to say that the curve of it sent him delirious with joy. It would be indecency rather than candour to say that the faint scent of her intoxicated him. He was silent with tremulous emotion. He wondered if she could be conscious of it; and he could not guess, for she, too, did not speak. From the ballroom they heard the music of another dance begin. Two shadowy couples emerged from the passage beneath them. A curtain of Indian beading made a sound like dead leaves driven over a dry pavement by the wind. The intruders’ voices died away.

“I suppose we must go too,” she said with a sigh.

“Why must you go? Are you dancing?” Edwin asked, with a catch in his throat.

“No, I don’t think I shall dance any more. I was rather upset. It was silly of me. But I think we’d better go.”

Edwin offered her his arm in the best manner of Professor Beagle.

“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. For a moment she hesitated. She was smiling, and her eyes were wonderful in the gloom. Their faces were level with each other. And, suddenly, amazingly, she kissed him.

“I’m going,” she said. Edwin tried to take her hand as she moved away from him. For a second it lay in his, soft and small and warm. Then, before his arms had time to follow the impulse of his flaming brain, she had slipped away from him and passed into the shadow of the passage. He stood there at the foot of the stairs alone, his heart thudding like a steam-hammer in a bewildered, intoxicating elation. Why had she left him? Why? . . . unless it were only a part of her adorable modesty. That must be the reason: and yet it was hardly consistent with an exalted ideal of modesty to kiss a young man, whom she had only known for fifteen minutes, on the lips. A new aspect of the miracle presented itself to him. Was it possible, after all, that Griffin had been right, that she was really exactly what he had insinuated, a fast little baggage who had determined, in a sudden caprice, to throw Griffin over and try a new experiment?

He could not believe it. Everything that he had noticed and adored in her, her grey eyes, the delicious quality of her speech, her fragrance, the indescribable fineness—there was no other word for it—of her, denied the possibility. He found it difficult to realise that she had gone in the moment of such an astounding revelation. Such was the way of a Naiad, melting away out of her sweet mortality in the moment of possession. Standing alone at the foot of the gloomy staircase, listening in a dream to the luscious music of the Choristers’ waltz, he tried to recreate his dream out of memory. Nothing of her was left but her delicate perfume. On the stairs he saw a small crumpled muslin handkerchief from which the perfume came. He picked it up with the reverence of a pilgrim touching a relic, eagerly triumphant that he had managed to rescue a fragment of his dream. It did not strike him that this tiny square of scented muslin was presumably the instrument with which divinity blew its nose: and indeed its dimensions scarcely fitted it for this material function. He placed it in the satin-lined pocket of Mr. Jones’s creation. It pleased him to think that it lay near his heart.

This, of course, was only the beginning of a romance. No doubt, in the course of the evening, he would see her again. Somehow he must persuade her to see him alone, and then he would be able to do all the magnificently passionate things of which her flight had cheated him. He would kiss her; he would hold her exquisiteness in his arms; he would tell her all the glorious things that he had been fool enough to withhold.

He went back into the ballroom. Nobody seemed to notice him there. It pleased him to think that these ordinary people were too dull in their perceptions to guess at the wonder in his heart. It was a secret that he shared with only one other person in the world, and that secret had altered his whole outlook on life. He was no longer the timid boy, conscious of his social disadvantages and of his new dress clothes, who had entered the Willises’ house a couple of hours before, but a man, a lover, to whose passion the whole beauty of the world ministered, a creature miraculously placed beyond the reach of envy or of scorn. He was happy to wait patiently for the supreme moment when he should see her again. And so he waited, mildly tolerant of Griffin, over whom he had scored so easily, of Edward Willis, who performed with a set face his penitentiary programme of duty-dances, of Mrs. Willis, who watched the joy of her small daughter Lilian with the proud but anxious eyes of a mother hen, of Mr. Willis circulating among his guests with an expansive smile, of poor Lady Hingston, still revoking automatically in the card-room.

But Dorothy Powys never returned to the seat that she had occupied under the shadow of Mrs. Willis’s wings. She had told him that she didn’t mean to dance any more, but surely that didn’t mean that he was not to see her again. He grew uneasy. Of course she could easily escape if she wanted to do so, for she was staying in the house. He wondered if he dared ask Mrs. Willis what had become of her, but decided that this would certainly give him away.

Instead of doing this he posted himself in a corner from which he could hear everything that was said in Mrs. Willis’s circle. This was not a very profitable pursuit, for Mrs. Willis was not an interesting talker, and the only excitement that penetrated the broody calm that surrounded her was the arrival of her husband, very excited over a telephone message, that had no foundation in fact, announcing the relief of Ladysmith by General Buller. Edwin was beginning to give the business up as a bad job when he saw a tall, languid man, whom he considered to be rather shabbily dressed, approach Mrs. Willis and ask her what had happened to his niece.

“Oh, she was here half an hour ago,” said Mrs. Willis. “The poor child told me that she had a headache and was going to bed. I told Hannah to take her a hot water bottle. . . . I do hope you’re quite comfortable, Lord Alfred,” she went on. “It is nice, isn’t it? to see all these young people enjoying themselves. At least it would be, if one didn’t have to think of all the poor creatures in South Africa being fired at by these treacherous Boers.”

And the tall, shabby man mumbled, “Yes . . . yes, certainly. . . . Very,” in his beard.

It was enough for Edwin. He said good-bye to Mrs. Willis, who seemed only mildly surprised at his departure, and left the house. There was no reason now why he should stay. On the stone terrace he paused, listening for a moment to the muted music from within the house. In the upper stories only one window was lighted. He could see the glowing yellow pane beyond a bough of one of the cedars with which the lawn was shaded. He wondered if that window were hers. He would like, he thought, to stay there all night in the black shadow of the cedar, gazing at that window and feeling that he was near her. Later on, no doubt, the light would be extinguished, and then he would imagine her lying there asleep. How beautiful she must be when she lay there sleeping!

He sighed, and went on his way, under the wonderful night. He climbed the steep slope of Mawne Bank, under the smouldering pit-fires, in a dream, and found himself, surprised, beneath the walls of the cherry orchard at the back of Old Mawne Hall. Inside the walls the cherry-trees lay locked in a wintry sleep. He stopped, for the steepness of the hill had stolen his breath. He remembered a day when he walked there with his mother. “How mother would have loved her!” he thought. Yes . . . she was more wonderful than his mother. On the day that he remembered, so many years ago, it had been spring. The branches had been full of billowy bloom. Now, in the wintry night, he felt that spring was near: spring was in his blood, stirring it to new and passionate aspirations as in a few months time it would stir the dreamy sap of the cherry-trees. A strange, unseasonable miracle. Glorious, indefinite words formed themselves in his mind. Spring, with its warm, perfumed breath, triumphing beautifully over the powers of winter and death. Death at Colenso under those tawny kopjes. Love in his heart. A sublime, ecstatic muddle. . . . The Mawne furnaces leapt into a sudden flower of fire that made the sky above them tawny. Love was like fire . . . an exultant leaping flame.

He did not know where he was going until he found himself at home in his little shabby room taking off his dress-suit and staring at himself as a stranger in the dusty mirror. “Who am I?” he thought, “that this should have happened to me? I do not know myself. I am greater and more wonderful than the image that I see in the glass.”He placed his precious talisman of muslin under his pillow, and wondered if he might be blessed with a dream of her. “She kissed me,” he thought. “She kissed my lips—”

III

It was evident that if he were to see her again he must make friends with Edward Willis. He was sorry that he had not done so before. For once in a way the recommendations of Aunt Laura had been prophetically right. His self-consciousness made it difficult for him to do so, for he felt certain that this cold, calculating young man would see through him. For two days he debated with himself on the various ways in which Mawne might be approached without coming to any satisfactory conclusion. On the third he was so lucky as to meet his victim on the Halesby train. Willis did not seem in the least anxious to renew their acquaintance; and it was at the expense of some awkwardness that Edwin managed to drag him into conversation.

They talked a little about the war, which Willis seemed to view from a remote and pessimistic angle. From that, by way of Mr. Willis’s Ladysmith rumour, they passed on to a discussion of the dance. Edwin was enthusiastic.

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” said Willis. “I hate dancing.”

“I rather admired that Miss Powys,” said Edwin.

“Dorothy Powys? Yes, she’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”

“Who is she?”“Oh, she’s a niece of Lord Alfred Powys, one of our directors. Lives with him, I believe. I don’t really know her.”

“Isn’t she staying with you?”

“Oh, no. . . . She only stayed at Mawne for the night of the dance. Her uncle happened to be coming over for a directors’ meeting, and the governor asked him to bring her along with him as there was a dance on.”

This was all very discouraging.

“Where do they live?” Edwin asked.

“Somewhere over in the Teme valley, I think. Lord Alfred’s a great fisherman. He’s a nice chap.”

“And she lives with him?”

“Yes. . . . I think he’s sort of adopted her. But I understand she’s going to India sometime next month.”

“India? What on earth is she going to India for?”

“Going to be married to some fellow in the Indian army. A major, I think he is.”

“To be married—” said Edwin.

And the train pulled up at Mawne Hall.

IV

He took it very hardly. On the face of it, it seemed that her kiss had been no more than a piece of mad, cynical trifling; but his respect for himself—which was considerable, as became his years—would not allow him to believe this. He decided, instead, that Dorothy Powys’s kiss had been the symbol of a great and noble passion, fated, in the melancholy manner of nearly every legendary lore, to frustration. He was convinced that the unknown major in the Indian army would never be loved; that the memory of that intense moment on Mr. Willis’s back stairs would haunt his wife for ever, and temper with romance the vistas of an unhappy marriage. The main result of the incident in Edwin’s case was a spate of passionate but imitative verses, a new devotion to such music as repressed his particular portion of weltschmerz, and an anxiety to confide the story, with elaborations, to some sympathetic friend. He turned it on to W.G.

“Well, W.G., what do you think of it?” he asked, when he had finished.

W.G. sucked at his pipe and smiled good-humouredly.

“Better luck next time, old chap,” he said.

CHAPTER VI
THE DRESSER

I

In the following June the second professional examination was held. On a stifling morning, when the blue brick pavements of North Bromwich reflected a torrid heat, and a warm wind, blowing like a sirocco from the black desert outside, swept the streets with clouds of dust, Edwin, Maskew, and W.G. waited in the cloakroom outside the Dean’s office to see the results of the examination posted. Maskew was the only one of the three who showed no signs of nervousness; for W.G. could never overcome the difficulty of expressing his thoughts on paper, and Edwin had passed ten minutes of purgatory with an outside examiner in the anatomy viva. He knew, on the other hand, that his Physiology had been extraordinarily good, and put his faith in the general impression of intelligence that he hoped he had created.

The porter came out with the lists, and W.G., striding to meet his fate like some Homeric hero, snatched the paper from his hands. He went very white as he read it.

“Good God—” he said. “Well, I’m damned—”

“Rotten luck if you’re down, W.G.,” said Maskew sympathetically.“Down? . . . I’m not down. I’m through.”

He still looked bewildered. Edwin took the paper from his trembling hands. As he had expected Maskew was first, but he saw that he himself was second on the list. Martin had ambled through respectively somewhere about the middle. W.G. and Harrop were last and last but one. He pinned the list on the notice-board. It was an exhilarating moment in which he was conscious of the herculean, sweaty handgrip of W.G. who was muttering: “Well, I’m damned if we don’t all deserve it.”

Talking and laughing together, they went out to lunch at Joey’s and caught the next train down to Evesham, where the coolness of the glassy Avon made the June heat more tolerable, and in the evening, blistered with rowing and sunshine, they came back to North Bromwich, dined together, and afterwards went to a music-hall. It was wonderful to Edwin to see the physical elation of W.G. The big man wanted to dance like a child, and it was with difficulty that Maskew restrained him from smashing a plate-glass window in Sackville Row. “You’re a cold-blooded swine, Maskew,” he said indignantly. “God, man, don’t you feel you want to do something? You must let off steam in some way, and it’s just as well to do it decently.”

Next morning the Dean sent a message to Edwin and Maskew, asking them to call at his office during the morning. They went together, and were received with his usual urbane politeness.

“Good-morning, Mr. Maskew . . . Mr. Ingleby. . . . You had better sit down. I am very pleased to see your names at the top of the list. Yes . . . very pleased. I’ve consulted Dr. Moon, and he approves your appointment as prosectors. It is an office that you will be very wise to undertake if you have any surgical ambitions, and I am very pleased to offer it to you. Perhaps you will let me know to-morrow? Thank you, gentlemen. . . . Good-morning.”

“Shall you take it?” said Edwin, as soon as they were outside.

“Of course I shall. I’m rather keen on Anatomy. It only means putting one back a year, and it’s worth it a hundred times over, if one gets the primary Fellowship. You’ll be a fool if you don’t do it. We should have a topping time together. No lectures . . . just a year of research work.”

“I shall have to think about it,” said Edwin.

It was the financial side of the question that had to be considered. To add another year to a course that was already expensive in pursuit of an elusive Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons: was it worth while? To begin with, he might easily fail. The primary examination was notoriously fluky, the results depending on the individual caprices and preferences of examiners. Edwin knew very well that better men than himself had failed in it. If, after draining his father’s pockets for another year, he should be ploughed, the situation would be altogether too pathetic.

Anything that affected his father’s purse seemed to Edwin, in those days, a matter for delicacy and shame. He hated to receive money from him. It was an acute embarrassment to see him write a cheque. He wrote slowly, with a regular, formal hand, and all the time Edwin, watching him, would think how many small, degrading sales of tooth paste and castor oil and pennyworths of camphor had gone to the making of that tenuous bank-account, and how easily and carelessly the painful accumulations would be spent. He hated asking his father for money, and for this reason had compelled himself to refrain from asking for the perfectly reasonable and necessary allowance that he had been wanting to settle for the last year.

And so he did not dare to tell his father that he had been offered the prosectorship and the opportunity of taking the Fellowship. If he had done so he was almost certain that Mr. Ingleby would have consented, and his father’s sacrifice would have thrown such a weight of obligation on him that life would not have been worth living. Indeed, if, in the end, he should have failed, his shame would have been intolerable. These reflections on the humility and penury of his father always plunged Edwin into a debauch of sentiment in which he would return with the zeal of a prodigal to the resolutions that he had made at the time of his mother’s death. They filled him with a kind of protective fervour that might easily have been mistaken for love, but was, in reality, an excuse for its absence. Still, even if the sentiment harrowed, it consoled, and Edwin was heroically elated by the performance of a sacrifice that he had not been brave enough to refuse.

It pleased him also to find that W.G. was thankful for his decision. “You see, it would have been rotten for me,” he said, “if you and Maskew had both been left behind. When you’ve got into the habit of working with a fellow in your first two years, it’s a bit of a break to have to go on by yourself. Of course, I should never have the least earthly chance of getting the Fellowship, and even if I had, I couldn’t afford to waste a year over it. I’m damned glad you’re coming on with me, Ingleby.”

The tribute was flattering. Edwin, always rather pathetically anxious for friendship, was particularly pleased to have it offered so frankly by a creature as unlike him in every way as W.G. There was something stable and reliable about the big man’s simplicity. He felt that he would be as loath to give offence to W.G. as to his father; and though he still felt some indefinite hankerings after the atmosphere of culture that he would have enjoyed in the society of Boyce, he couldn’t deny the fact that W.G. was a sound and splendid fellow, and a good man to have by his side in an emergency. Together they plunged into the new world of hospital life.

II

Two general hospitals supplied the clinical needs of the North Bromwich Medical School. The older, from which the school had originated, was a small institution, the Prince’s, with which Edwin had become acquainted on the occasion of his first panto-night. It stood in the upper and healthier part of the city, in the middle of the slums that lie upon the fringe of the fashionable suburb of Alvaston: a solid building of early Victorian red brick, with a stone portico facing upon a thoroughfare of rather older houses that had once been reputable but had now degenerated into theatrical lodging-houses.

The hospital itself was small enough to be homely, and W.G. and Edwin soon became accustomed to its narrow entrance hall, and the lodge in which porters, who already knew all that was to be known about the reception of casualties, were housed.

Edwin would arrive at the hospital early in the morning, when no sign of life was to be seen in the “professional” lodgings sleeping with drawn blinds upon the other side of the road. At this time of the day the hospital porch smelt clean and antiseptic, for the stream of stinking humanity had not yet begun to trickle through. He would hang his coat in the narrow passage that served for cloakroom and lounge with a cigarette in his mouth before the glass-fronted notice-boards on which the lists of operations for the day were exhibited, and exchange greetings with the night porter departing in a state of drowsy ill-temper, or the day-porter coming on duty with a military swagger and his grey hair plastered down with vaseline, from the casualty department, and cold water.

Here, too, the members of the consulting staff would arrive in their frock-coats and top-hats: great men, such as Lloyd Moore, the outstanding surgical genius of the Midlands; old Beaton, the professor of surgery, with his long, grey beard, and Hartley, the ophthalmologist, whose reputation was European. These giants would pass on through the swinging doors to their wards or consulting rooms, and on the very stroke of nine, W.G., who was a bad riser, and always cut things fine, would plunge in, carrying with him the strenuous atmosphere of a cold sponge and breezy enthusiasm. Then the clock would strike nine, and they would pass on together arm in arm, into the huge, airy waiting-hall with innumerable benches set crosswise like the pews in a church; and, at the same moment, the military porter, who had been marshalling the queue of out-patients, would release them, and a bewildering crowd of poorly-clad human wreckage would drift in behind them, settling patiently into the benches opposite the door of the department from which they were seeking relief.

The work of Edwin and W.G. lay in the Casualty Department, a small room full of pleasant morning light. On one side of it ran a long counter with shelves for bottles, and drawers in which plasters, dressings, and ointments were kept. On the other, half a dozen chairs were ranged for the reception of patients. The medical staff consisted of four persons only: two professionals, a young and enthusiastic surgeon named Mather who held the post of Assistant Surgeon to Out-patients, and an elderly sister who had been on the job for years, and two amateurs in the shape of Edwin and W.G.

All of them were clothed in white overalls; for the work of the casualty department was of a dirty nature, and these long garments also served as some protection from the swarming parasites that lived upon the bodies of their patients. Edwin, who suffered agonies of irritation from their attacks, also armed himself with a glass-stoppered bottle of ether with which he would drench the seat of irritation in the hopes of inflicting death or at least unconsciousness upon his tormentors.

Then, one by one, the patients would file in, and plant themselves upon the wooden chairs: old men whose skins were foul with the ravages of eczema and dirt combined; women, exhausted in middle age by child-bearing, and the accepted slavery of housework; sturdy mechanics who had been the victims of some unavoidable accident; pale young women, made anxious for their livelihood by illness that its conditions had caused, and, more terrible than all, the steady stream of wan, transparent children, the idols of maternal care, the victims of maternal ignorance.

In the human wreckage of the casualty department there was no great variety; but all of it was new to Edwin and W.G., and they threw themselves into the labour with enthusiasm, working so hard from nine o’clock till one, that their backs ached and they lost all sense of the passage of time. Mather himself seemed to them a prodigy of skilfulness, so swift in his decisions, so certain and adroit in the work of his hands. Even the sister, whom Edwin had originally regarded as a mere woman, aroused their admiration by the ease with which she worked and her invincible good humour. Edwin found that she could teach him more than his male superiority would ever have dreamed.

Little by little the astounding confusion of their work began to seem more simple. Bandages, that had seemed condemned to unsightly ruckles, or liable to fall unrolled upon the dirty floor, began to fold themselves in symmetrical designs. Edwin and W.G. vied with one another in the neatness of their dressings. The smell of the place, that had seemed at first to fester beneath an unconvincing veil of carbolic and iodoform, now seemed natural to their nostrils, even pleasant in its familiarity.

Edwin began to have time to look about him, to form individual attachments to the patients who came there every day, to take a particular interest in cases that he regarded as his own. Gradually, from the mass of evil-smelling humanity, personalities began to emerge and even intimacies that were flattering because they implied a trust in his own imperfect skill.

He did not know the names of his patients any more than they knew his. To him they were grouped under conventional generics: Daddy, Granny, Tommy, Polly, and the like. To them he was always “Doctor”; but the thing that made them human and lovable to him was the sense of their dependence on him; and the preference for his attentions that was sometimes timidly expressed, gave him a flush of gratification deeper than any he had ever known. It pleased him to think that it was true when his patients told him that he dressed them more gently than the other workers in the casualty department. Such confidences almost convinced him that he had found a vocation.

After lunch Edwin and W.G. would talk over their cases together in the lounge of the Dousita. Maskew, who still met them every day at this resort, found their conversation boring, and fell back more and more upon the charms of Miss Wheeler, who did not seem to have varied by a single hairpin since the day of their first acquaintance. And from the discussion of their individual cases, W.G. would sometimes pass on to the more general questions that their work aroused.

“This life’s worth living,” he would say. “When you first take up medicine and spend a couple of years over learning the atomic weights of heavy metals or dissecting the stomach of an earthworm, you begin to wonder what the devil you’re getting at; by Gad, this hospital work opens your eyes. You’re doing something practical. What’s more, you’re doing a job that no professor of classics or stinks could touch, and you see the actual results of your treatment on your patients.”

“Thank God, I’m not one of them, W.G.,” said Maskew morosely. “As a matter of fact, it’s no more than when an electrical engineer finds a short circuit and makes a new connection, or when a carpenter makes a job of a rickety staircase.”

“That’s all you know about it, my friend,” said W.G. “In our job you’re dealing with human life; you’re relieving physical pain—and sometimes you get thanked for it, which is damned pleasant. And you’ve a responsibility too. If you make a slip the poor devil you’re experimenting on is going to suffer. You may even kill him. And the extraordinary thing is that he trusts you . . .”

To Edwin also that was the most extraordinary thing, and, indeed, the most pathetic. It showed him that the practice of medicine imposed an actual moral discipline on those who followed it: an obligation of the most meticulous honour and devotion. But if the discipline of practice demanded much, it repaid a thousandfold. He had his reward not only in the thanks of the scabrous old men whose varicose ulcers, or “bad legs,” as they called them, he dressed, but in the rarer consciousness of actual achievement which came to him more frequently as the scope of his work extended.

One case in particular he always remembered, principally because it was the first of the kind. She was a little Jewish tailoress who laboured at piecework in some sweater’s den in the rookeries on the southern side of the hospital. She was not beautiful. Her face had the peculiar ivory pallor, and her whole body the unhealthy brittleness, of plants that have sprouted in a cellar. But her voice was soft, and her hands, the fingertips of which were made callous by the plucking of threads and rough with innumerable needle pricks, were beautifully shaped. A week or so before she had stabbed her left forefinger with an infected needle, and lit a focus of suppuration in the tendon sheath. She had to live, poor thing! and so, for a week she had worked in a state of agony, while the tissues grew tense and shiny with compression, and the pain would not let her sleep. At last, when she could work no longer, she had come to the casualty department, nursing her poisoned hand in a bandana handkerchief. She had not slept for four nights, and was very near to tears.

Edwin, who saw that surgery was needed, showed the case to Mather. The surgeon stripped the sleeve from her thin, transparent arm and showed him the red lines by which the poison was tracking up the lymphatics towards the glands of the axilla that stood like blockhouses in the way of bacterial invasion.

“Why didn’t you come before?” he said, with a roughness that was not unkind. How many times was Edwin to hear those very words!

“I couldn’t, doctor. There was my work—”

“There’d be no more work for you, my dear, if you went on much longer,” said Mather: and then, to Edwin, “Yes . . . you’d better incise it at once, I’m busy putting up a fracture. Straight down in the middle line. Don’t be afraid of it.”

“Oh, you’re not going to cut me, doctor?” she said. “Not till to-morrow. . . . Oh, please . . . when I’ve had a night’s sleep.”

He was very nervous. He assured her that he would give her no pain; but while he left her to fetch the scalpel and the dressings he heard a queer drumming noise and turned to see that it was made by the heels of his patient trembling on the floor. He was nearly as tremulous himself.

“I promise you I won’t hurt you,” he said, and she returned him a painful smile. It was a look he knew. “Just like the eyes of a dog,” W.G. had said.

He sprayed the finger with ethyl chloride, that froze into a crust like hoarfrost on the fingertip and blanched the skin that was already pale with the pressure inside it. All the time the girl was making little nervous movements, and sometimes her heels began to drum again until she tucked them under the bar of her chair.“I’m sorry, doctor, I can’t help it,” she said.

Then, with his scalpel, he made a clean longitudinal cut through the tense skin down to the bone of the phalanx. She gave a start and clutched his hand so that he nearly gave it up. “I’ve got to do it,” he thought. “I must do it.” It was the first time that he had ever cut with a knife into living flesh. A strange sensation. . . . But the bead of matter that escaped showed him that he had got to the root of the trouble, and the sight of it filled him with a new and curious exultation.

It was a long business, for the neglected pressure had impaired the vitality of the bone and the wound would not heal until the dead spicules had been separated from the living tissue. Edwin dressed the finger every morning. The patient would have been a poor subject at the best of times, and he knew that the fact that she was now out of work probably meant that she was starving. It would have been easy for him to tell her that she must have plenty of nourishing food; but he knew well enough that the words would have been no more than a mockery. In the hospital wards, he reflected, she might have been well fed; but the wards at the Prince’s were full of more serious cases who could not walk to the hospital to receive their treatment. On occasions of this kind he wished that he were a millionaire: an extravagant idea—for doctors are never millionaires. He could only ram iron into her and dress her and try to get her well so that she might travel back around the vicious circle to the conditions that had been responsible for her illness. It seemed to him that people who were not doctors could never really know anything about life.

In a little while there were others, many of them, in whose cases he knew that he had been privileged to effect some positive good: notably an old woman, always dressed in black and loaded with crepe as though she were attending her own funeral, who had fractured her wrist by slipping on an icy pavement one evening when she was fetching her husband’s supper beer, an office that she appeared far too ladylike ever to have performed. She had put out her hand to save herself, and a Colles fracture of the ulna and radius had been the result.

She called Edwin “My dear,” and the first thing that he noticed about her was the amazing cleanliness of her withered skin. He remembered the fortitude that she had shown when first he reduced the fracture; how her bony fingers, on one of which was a wedding ring worn very thin, had clasped his. For some curious reason he felt very tenderly towards her, and when the bones were set and he had passed her on to the massage department, he felt quite lost without her early “Good-morning!” That was another strange thing about medical practice: the way in which people with whom he was thrown into an intimate sympathy for a few days passed completely and irrevocably out of his life.

W.G. and Edwin found their experience so intriguing that they took turns to visit the casualty department in the afternoons when the work was light, and the absence of Mather gave them a free hand in the performance of minor surgery. At this time of the day the work of the department was more suggestive of its name; for the people who came there were nearly all the victims of sudden illness or accident that needed diagnosis and immediate treatment. It pleased Edwin to deal with these off his own bat, and he spent the long afternoons that were free from lectures in suturing wounds, removing brass filings or specks of cinders from eyes, extracting teeth, gaining confidence every day and suffering the mingled emotions of pain, pity, and violent indignation. Not infrequently the last . . . for he saw so much suffering that might easily have been prevented but for the ignorance or callousness of humanity. These things aroused his anger; but he soon realised that anger was the one emotion that a doctor is most wise to suppress.

Sometimes a woman from one of the neighbouring slums would enter in a state of hollow-eyed terror, carrying in her shawl a child that was obviously dying from broncho-pneumonia.

“Why, in the name of Heaven, didn’t you come up before?” he would ask indignantly.

“The neighbours said it was only the teething, doctor,” she would reply.

Edwin would try to suppress an inclination to damn the neighbours upside down. “Surely you could see the child was ill?” he would say.

“Yes, doctor, but how could I get away? There’s seven of them, bless their hearts, and me going with another, and the house looking like a pigsty, and the master’s dinner to cook. I haven’t got no time to spare for hospitals.”

And he knew that she spoke the truth, contenting himself, as he filled in the form for admission to the children’s ward, with telling her that the diet of bread-crusts soaked in beer, which she had been giving it, was not ideal for a baby eight months old.

“Take the baby along to ward fourteen,” he would say, “they’ll do what they can for it,” and be met, as likely as not, with a volume of tigerish abuse from a wild-eyed woman who swore that if her baby was going to die it wasn’t going to do so in any bloody hospital, was it, my pretty?—the last words sinking to a maternal coo and being accompanied by a paroxysm of kisses on the baby’s lips that were already blue for want of breath. And then Edwin would control his indignation and resort to wheedling and coaxing, feeling that if the baby were left to the mercies of maternal instinct, he himself would be little better than a murderer.

Indeed, the responsibilities of his calling and its immense obligations impressed themselves on him more deeply every day. He saw that this profession of medicine was not to be taken lightly; that his work in it would be useless, almost impious, if it were not religiously performed. Even from the earliest ages this had been so. One day, idly reading a back number of the Lancet, he came upon a historical article that contained a translation of the Hippocratic oath, which had been administered to all those who were initiated in the mysteries of medicine two thousand years ago. It seemed to him that it might have been written on the day that he read it. Thus it ran:—

“I swear by Apollo the Healer, and Æsculapius, and Hygieia, and Panacea; and I call all Gods and Goddesses to witness, that I will, according to my power and judgment, make good this oath and covenant that I sign. I will use all ways of medical treatment that shall be for the advantage of the sufferers, according to my power and judgment, and will protect them from injury and injustice. Nor will I give to any man, though I be asked to give it, any deadly drug, nor will I consent that it should be given. But purely and holily I will keep guard over my life and my art.

“And into whatever houses I enter, I will enter into them for the benefit of the sufferers, departing from all wilful injustice and destructiveness, and all lustful works, on bodies, male and female, free and slaves. And whatever in practice I see or hear, or even outside practice, which it is not right should be told abroad, I will be silent, counting as unsaid what was said.

“Therefore to me, accomplishing this oath and not confounding it, may there be enjoyment of life and art, being in good repute among all men for ever and ever: but to me, transgressing and perjured, the contrary.”

Fine reading, Edwin thought. . . . The only deity of whom he was not quite certain was Panacea. Obviously the classical representative of Mother Siegel. It seemed to him a pity that the modern student was not bound by the formulÆ of the Physician of Cos.

His three months in the casualty department passed away quickly, and in the spring of the year he found himself attached as dresser to that startling surgeon, Lloyd Moore. The appointment, as he soon realised, was a privilege; for Lloyd Moore was the one man of unquestionable genius in the North Bromwich Medical School. At first the experience was rather alarming, for the vagaries of his chief, and, not least, his genial vulgarity, seemed at first as though they were going to destroy the pretty edifice of ideals that Edwin had constructed on the basis of the Hippocratic oath and his experience in the casualty department. Lloyd Moore, to begin with, was no respecter of persons, ancient or modern; his wit was ruthless and occasionally bitter, as Edwin had reason to know; his language, particularly in moments of stress, was unvarnished and foul, even in the presence of women.

On the surface, indeed, he seemed a person whom Hippocrates would have regarded as undignified and improper. Sometimes in the out-patient department Edwin would blush for his chief’s violence and cruelty, but, in the end, all these things were forgotten in the realisation that the little man was a great surgical genius, to whom diagnosis was a matter of inspired, unerring instinct, and practice a gift of the gods. Nor were his virtues merely professional. L.M. (as he was always called) was a man of the people, one who had fought his way inch by inch into the honourable position that he held as the greatest of surgeons and the wealthiest practitioner in the Midlands. The unpaid work of the hospital absorbed him even to the neglect of private practice, and every doctor in the district knew that he could count on the very best of the great man’s skill for a nominal fee in any case of emergency. Far more than any consultant in the Midlands, he was regarded as the general practitioner’s friend, and, as a result of this confidence, all the most interesting surgical material of the district found its way into his clinic.

In a little time Edwin became wholly subject to the spell of this amazing personality, until it seemed strange to him that he could ever have doubted the propriety of anything that L.M. said or did. He wondered more and more at the man’s titanic energy, for Lloyd Moore was a little fellow, so pale that he always looked as if he were fainting with exhaustion. His patients also adored him, and more than once Edwin was told in the wards by elderly female admirers that Mr. Lloyd Moore was the very image of Jesus Christ.

In the days of the casualty department Edwin’s main concern had been with the alleviation of immediate pain. The problem of the wards was graver, being no less than the balance of life and death. In the achievements of L.M.’s scalpel, he saw the highest attainment of which surgery was capable. In a hundred cases offhand he could say to himself that but for Lloyd Moore’s skill the patient would have died, and when he saw the fragile figure of the surgeon with his pale face and burning eyes enter the theatre, Edwin would think of him as a man worn thin by wrestling with death . . . death in its most cruel and invincible moods.

But in the theatre, at the time of one of L.M.’s emergency operations, there was no time for dreaming or for romantic speculation. An atmosphere of materialism, of pure, sublimated action, filled the room as surely as the sweet fumes of chloroform and ether. Everything about the place was clean and bright and hard, from the frosted-glass of the roof and the porcelain walls to the shining instruments that lay newly sterilised in trays on the glass-topped tables. Even the theatre sister in her white overall gave an impression of clean, bright hardness. Indeed, in this white temple of sterility, everything was clean except those parts of the patient’s body that the nurses in the wards had not scrubbed with nail-brushes and shaved and painted with iodine, and the language of L.M., whose physical lustrations had no effect whatever on his vocabulary.

Even L.M.’s language was at times a relief, for it seemed to be the only human thing that ever gained admission to the theatre, and the sister was so inhuman as never to take the least notice of it. Not a smile, nor even the least compression of the lips marked her appreciation or disapproval of the surgeon’s sallies. Physically she was an extremely attractive woman, with very beautiful eyes that were not without their effect upon Edwin; but the influence of the place robbed her of any sexual attributes; so that she became no more than a monosyllabic automaton, intent, devoted, faultlessly prepared for any of the desperate emergencies of surgery. From the first Edwin had noticed that the more embarrassing physical details of the patients had no disturbing effect upon her modesty. He soon saw that if she had permitted herself for one moment to be a woman she could not have remained the wholly admirable theatre-sister that she was. “But I can’t imagine,” he thought, “how any man could marry a nurse—”

From such reflections he would be roused by the anÆsthetist’s laconic “Ready.” On one side of the operating table he would stand, and on the other L.M. with the theatre-sister ready at his elbow. The surgeon would pick up a scalpel carelessly, as a man picks up a pencil to write, and then, apparently with as little thought, he would make a long, clean incision through the skin and superficial fatty tissues of the abdomen, putting his head on one side to look at it like an artist whose pencil has described a beautiful curve. Then, sharply: “Swabs . . . Ingleby, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” And Edwin would press a swab of gauze to the incision to absorb the blood that escaped from the subcutaneous veins.

“Right.”

Layer by layer the various planes of fascia, muscle, and peritoneum would be opened and neatly laid aside, every one of them slipped in its own pair of artery forceps. Then, from the gaping wound, that L.M. probed with his thin finger, a sickening odour would rise . . . one that Edwin never remembered apart from the other sickening smell of ether.

“Pus. . . I thought so,” L.M. would say. “The brute’s perforated, damn him.” And Edwin knew that yet another creature had been snatched out of the jaws of death.

In the hands of L.M. surgery seemed so simple. His scalpel—for he used fewer instruments than any surgeon Edwin ever knew—was a part of him in the same way as a perfect rider is part of his horse. There was never any hesitation in his surgery, never any room for doubt; everything was straightforward and self-evident from the first incision to the last suture; and he was at his best when he threw into it a touch of bravura, rejoicing in the amazing virtuosity of his own technique and playing, a little, to the gallery.

“There you are,” he would say, “you see there’s nothing in it. Nothing at all but a working knowledge of anatomy and a dollop of common-sense. That’s all surgery. Why on earth should they pay me a hundred guineas for doing a simple thing like that? There’s nothing in it, is there?”

Edwin knew that there was a great deal in it: genius, and more than genius: a life of devotion to one end only; infinite physical strains; cruel disappointments; harrowing mistakes. For even L.M. had made mistakes in his time; and a doctor pays for his mistakes more heavily than any other man.

Apart from the performance of emergency operations, that might take place at any hour of the day or night, the surgeon only occupied his theatre on three mornings in the week; and the greater part of Edwin’s time was devoted to the work of the wards. Here he performed his proper function as dresser, being, under the house-surgeon, responsible for the after-treatment of the patients on whom L.M. had operated This business kept his hands full. Nearly all the acute surgical cases needed dressing daily, and some more than once a day. It was usual for the dresser to leave the second dressing to be done by the house-surgeon on his evening round, or by the sister of the ward, who would doubtless have performed it, as well as either of them; but nothing could induce Edwin, in his newest enthusiasm, to drop a case into which his teeth were fixed.

The morning visits were ceremonial. The great floors of the wards shone like the faces of such patients as were fit to be scrubbed, with a soapy flannel; the rows of beds were set with a mathematical correctness, the sheets turned down at exactly the same level; the water in the jugs stood hot, awaiting the dresser’s hands, his towel lay folded in the jug’s mouth; a probationer, pink-faced and red-armed, stood waiting to do his professional pleasure; morning sunlight flickered over the leaves of aspidistras that flourished in pots on the central tables, and on the trays of dressing instruments that were ready for his hand.

At ten o’clock precisely, Edwin, an older and more experienced Edwin whose shaves were no longer a luxury, whose clothes no longer looked as if he were in the act of growing out of them, and whose collars were adorned by the very latest thing in ties, would enter the ward, roll up his shirtsleeves, and be helped on with a white overall by the obedient probationer—whose main function in life this office seemed to be—or sometimes by the sister herself. The new Edwin, product of six months in hospital, was no longer afraid of these attentions because they happened to be performed by women. In a mild way he was even an amateur of the physical points exhibited by the genus probationer, and had arrived at a touching intimacy with the sisters, who found in him a clean and pleasant mannered youth, and on occasion hauled him out of the difficulties into which his inexperience landed him. Thus attired, he would begin his progress of the ward, followed, wherever he went, by the females who had robed him, the junior pushing before her the wheeled glass table on which the dressings and instruments were kept. For the time being he was, or imagined himself to be, the most important person in the ward, until, perhaps, the house-surgeon entered, and his attendants forsook their allegiance and hastened to put themselves at the service of this superior person.

In the duties of the wards Edwin became far more familiar with his cases than in the casualty department. The work was less hurried, and the patients themselves were less fully armed with the conventional social gestures by which men and women protect and hide themselves. They lay in bed helpless, dependent on the hospital staff for every necessity and amusement; and the stress of physical pain, or the catastrophe of a major operation had generally shaken from them the little superficialities that they had gathered to themselves in the course of everyday life. Edwin noticed that, even at their worst, the women were hardly ever too ill to be a little concerned for their personal appearance, and, as they grew better, the patients of both sexes would make an heroic attempt to appear as they wished themselves to seem rather than as they were; but he realised, none the less, that the doctor gets nearer to the bed-rock of human personality than any other man who ministers to humanity. With him, the person into whose hands their suffering bodies were committed in an almost pitiful confidence, they were concerned to hide themselves far less than with any other; and in this triumphant discovery Edwin flattered himself that he was becoming richly learned in human nature. He did not realise how little he had learned.

One thing, however, that these days taught him, he never lost in after life: an intense appreciation of the inherent patience and nobility of human beings, the precious ore that the fire of suffering revealed. Even the worst of his patients—in North Bromwich as elsewhere disease is an impartial enemy, falling on the virtuous and abandoned alike—revealed such amazing possibilities of good. In these hospital wards the fundamental gregarious instinct of mankind, with the unselfishness and sympathy that go along with it, asserted itself. The common life of the ward was happy, extraordinarily happy. Removed from the ordinary responsibilities of wage-earning and competition, fed and housed and tended without question, the patients lived together as happily as a community of African savages, supported by the female labour of the nursing staff, obedient to the unquestioned authority of the sister in charge.

And in Edwin’s eyes these, too, were wonderful people. At first he had taken them more or less for granted; but gradually he realised the tremendous sacrifices that their life implied: the long hours: the unceasing strain of keeping their temper: the clean, efficient materialism for which they must have sacrificed so much of the obvious beauty of life, committing themselves—for most of them were middle-aged—to an abnegation of the privileges of marriage and motherhood in a cloistral seclusion as complete as that imposed on the useless devotee of some mystical religion. He took it for granted that the life of a nun was useless to any one except herself. . . . Well, this was a religion worth some sacrifice: the religion of humanity. They themselves would only have called it a profession. At first it had seemed to him that their interests were narrow and their lives, of necessity, mean. He had been astonished at the small things that gave them pleasure: a bunch of primroses from a grateful patient; a ride on the top of a bus; a word of commendation from one of the consulting staff; a house-surgeon’s or even a student’s compliment; and, above all, the passionate attachments and enmities that made up the life of the nunnery in which they lived: but in the end he began to sympathise with them in the humility of their pleasures, to feel that anything might be forgiven to creatures who had made so great a sacrifice. In a mild way he idealised them; and for this reason they decided that he was “quite a nice boy.”

III

In the winter of his third year Edwin’s newly formulated enthusiasm for humanity in the bulk suffered something of a check. The hospital absorbed him so completely that in those days he saw very little of the city, going to and from his lectures and his work in the Pathological Laboratory at the University without taking any real share in the life of North Bromwich, or being aware of the passions and interests that swayed the city’s heart. Coming down from the hospital, one evening in December, he suddenly became conscious of a constriction in the traffic which grew more acute as it reached the narrows that debouch upon the open space in front of the town hall; and while he was wondering what could be the cause of this, a huge rumour of voices, not unlike that which proceeds from a Midland football crowd when it disapproves of a referee, but deeper and more malignant, reached his ears.

He wondered what was the matter, and since it looked as if the traffic were now completely blocked on the main road, he cut down the quiet street that faces the university buildings and overlooks the paved court in which the statue of Sir Joseph Astill inappropriately dispenses water to a big stone basin. Almost immediately he found himself upon the fringes of an immense crowd over which the waves of threatening sound that he had heard at a distance were moving like catspaws on a sullen sea. The windows of the town-hall itself blazed with light, making the outlines of the Corinthian pillars that surrounded it almost beautiful. He edged his way into the black crowd. It was composed for the most part of workers in iron and brass, and exhaled an odour of stale oil. In a moment of relative silence he asked the man who stood in front of him, a little mechanic who had not troubled to change the oily dungarees in which he worked, what was the matter.

“It’s Lloyd George . . . the b—,” he said, and spat fiercely. Edwin was not sure where he had heard the name before. He seemed to remember it as that of a Welsh member of Parliament who had come into notoriety during the debates on the South African War. He inquired what Lloyd George was doing.

“Come to speak agen’ Joe,” said the mechanic savagely; and, as a wave of sound that had started somewhere in the middle of the crowd came sweeping towards them, he suddenly began to squeal hoarsely like a carnivorous beast in a cage: a ridiculous noise, that seemed, nevertheless, to express the feelings of the multitude. From scraps of conversation that he heard beneath the crowd’s rumour, Edwin began to understand that this beggarly Welshman, who had spent the last few years in vilifying the workmen of North Bromwich generally, and their political idol in particular, had actually dared to bring his dirty accusations to the political heart of the city: the town-hall in which their favourite had delivered his most important speeches; that, at this very moment, the meeting which popular feeling had proscribed, was beginning behind the Corinthian pillars, and that the just indignation of North Bromwich had determined that he should not escape with his life.

It struck Edwin that whatever else the Welshman might be, he was certainly not lacking in courage; but, for all that, he found it difficult to prevent his own feelings in the matter from being swamped and absorbed and swept away by the crowd’s vast, angry consciousness. Almost in spite of himself, his heart palpitated with vehement malice against the intruder. He felt that he would have experienced a brutal satisfaction in seeing him torn limb from limb.

A yell of extraordinary savagery, in which he found it difficult not to join, rose from the square.

The meeting, it seemed, had begun. Edwin saw members of the crowd scattering in all directions. A cry of “stones!” was raised, and he saw that men, women, and children were streaming towards an area of slum that was being dismantled to make room for some monument of municipal grandeur, returning with caps and hands and aprons full of stones and broken brick. Soon the air was full of flying missiles, and though the crash of glass could not be heard, ragged holes were torn in the frosted glass of the town-hall windows.

A body of police, tremendous strapping fellows, marched by, followed by impotent jeers and hooting, and planted themselves in front of all the doors with truncheons drawn. Their presence seemed to enrage the crowd, inflaming that suppressed hate of the forces of order that slumbers in most men’s hearts. The volleys of stones increased as the supplies of ammunition grew more plentiful. A little dark man with a red tie monotonously shouting the words: “Free speech!” was caught up, and, as it seemed to Edwin, trampled to death. Somewhere in the middle of the struggling masses people began to sing the revivalist hymn: “Shall we gather at the river?” It reached Edwin in an immense and gathering volume, with words adapted for the occasion:—

“Shall we gather at the fountain,
The beautiful, the beautiful, the fountain?
We’ll drown Lloyd George in the fountain.
And he won’t come here any more.”

The very volume of sound was impressive and inspiring.

Suddenly the crowd was parted by the arrival of a new body. It was a phalanx of university students who had dragged an immense beam of oak from the debris of the dismantled slum and were hurling it forward as a battering ram against one of the principal doors. Edwin could see amongst them the towering shoulders of W.G., and the mouth of the elder Wade, the hero of the hansom cab, wide open and yelling. It seemed as though the savagery of the crowd had reached its height: they tore a way through it, trampling the fallen as they went. And then the police, who had been held in reserve, charged at right angles to them, hitting out right and left with their loaded batons. The less courageous part of the crowd tried to scatter. The wave of a stampede spread outwards till it reached the edge on which Edwin was standing. He was thrown violently from his feet into the chest of a stranger, who shouted, “Hallo, Ingleby—” It was Matthew Boyce. “I think we’d better get out of this,” he said.

The words seemed to pull Edwin back into sanity. Together they forced their way into a street that was empty but for a stream of people hurrying to the square with stones. They stood panting in the quiet.

“God . . . what animals men are!” said Boyce. “I suppose it was something like this a hundred years ago, when they burned Priestley’s house.”

“Yes, it’s pretty rotten,” said Edwin, “but didn’t you feel you wanted to join in it?”

“Yes, that’s the amazing part of it,” said Boyce. “What’s happening to you in these days? We seem to have lost sight of one another.”

They walked down to the station together. “It’s an extraordinary thing, isn’t it?” said Edwin, “that ordinary peaceable men should go mad like that?”

“They aren’t men,” said Boyce. “They’re a crowd.”

CHAPTER VII
THE CLERK

I

With this chance encounter, the friendship of Edwin and Matthew Boyce really began; and during the fourth year, that now opened before him, the figure of W.G., who had dominated his stage by sheer physical magnitude, gradually receded. It was inevitable; for the atmosphere of the Boyces’ house at Alvaston, with its air of culture and refinement, was far more in keeping with Edwin’s inclinations than the obtuse, if honest, companionship of W.G. Edwin felt some misgivings for his desertion; but Maskew, who had now brilliantly taken his Primary Fellowship, began his hospital career and rejoined his old partner. So, seeing that the needs of W.G. were provided for and his responsibilities of friendship at an end, Edwin drifted into a happy intimacy with the poet’s son.

They were both so young as to be convinced that they were very old. The world was theirs; for they were full of health and contentment and, at present, so free from complication that they could enjoy to the full the treasures of the past and shape the future into splendid dreams. In the beginning they had found a field of common interest in great works of literature; but these enthusiasms did not carry them very far, for the appreciation of literary masterpieces is at its best a solitary pleasure that is not increased by the joy of sharing. It was in the enjoyment of music that their friendship found the most intense of its pleasures.

Edwin’s musical development had been slow. The first seeds had been planted in his babyhood when, without understanding, he had listened to his mother’s playing. The chapel services at St. Luke’s, made interesting by the exotic harmonies of Dr. Downton, had nursed his interest in the beauty of organised sound. The closed piano in his mother’s drawing-room had been the symbol of an instinct temporarily thwarted, and from this he had escaped by way of Aunt Laura’s late Victorian ballads which had seemed to him very beautiful in their kind. Luckily his mother’s library of music had been good if old-fashioned, and when he amused himself, more or less indiscriminately, by trying to learn the piano at home, he had been forced to do so by way of the sonatas of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart, and the Wohltemperiertes Klavier of Bach.

The emotional disturbance of his strange adventure with Dorothy Powys had thrown him into an orgy of verse-making which produced such poor results that he was forced to turn to the love-poetry of the Elizabethans and of Shelley, which he embroidered with musical settings that gave him more satisfaction. These attempts at song-writing pleased him for a time; but it was not until he became friendly with Boyce that he began to realise what music was. Not only were the Boyces the possessors of a grand-piano on which his homely tinklings became magnificently amplified, but his friend’s father, the poet, was intimately acquainted with the best of modern music.

Boyce introduced Edwin to the great German song-writers from Schubert and Schumann to Hugo Wolf, and laid the foundations of a feverish devotion to Wagner, whom the friends approached perforce by way of TannhÄuser and Lohengrin, the two operas that the Moody Manners company ventured to present to provincial audiences. Edwin discovered that North Bromwich, a city that takes its music as a boa-constrictor takes food, in the triennial debauch of a festival and then goes to sleep again, supported—or rather failed to support—a society for the performance of orchestral music. The concerts were held fortnightly in the town-hall, the windows of which had now been repaired, and to these concerts Edwin and his friend went together, always sitting in the same two seats under the gallery at the back of the hall. In this way they heard a great deal of good music: the nine symphonies of Beethoven, with the Leeds Choir in the last: the usual orchestral extracts from the Ring, the Meistersingers Overture, and the Siegfried Idyll: the fourth, fifth, and sixth symphonies of Tschaikovski: the tone-poems of Strauss, and a small sprinkling of modern French music. These were ambrosial nights to which they both looked forward, and Martin, who had developed an unexpected inclination for music, sometimes went with them.The concerts became the central incident in a kind of ritual. At seven o’clock the two, or sometimes three, would meet in the grill room behind the bar at Joey’s and consume a gross but splendid repast of tripe and onions together with a pint or more of bitter Burton. All the best music, they had decided, was German, and beer was the only drink on which it could be fully appreciated, de Quincey’s preference for laudanum notwithstanding. Pleasantly elated, they would cross the road to the town-hall and take their familiar seats, pleased to recognise the people who, like themselves, were regular attendants or subscribers to this unfashionable function; and Boyce, who, by virtue of his distinguished parentage, knew every one in North Bromwich who was interested in music, would point out to them all the distinguished people who were present: Oldham, the critic of the Mail, whom Arthur Boyce declared to be the soundest living writer on musical subjects, and Marsden, who did the musical criticism for the Courier. Matthew knew them both. Oldham, he said, was a wonderful fellow, who wrote with a pen of vitriol that made such short work of baser metals that the gold of beauty appeared brighter for his writing. Oldham became Edwin’s prophet; but, on the whole, he preferred the looks of Marsden.

“What is Marsden like?” he asked.

“Marsden? Oh, well, as a matter of fact, Marsden’s a bit of a gas bag. The governor says that he always reminds him of an old hen. Didn’t you notice him in Joey’s talking nineteen to the dozen to that queer fellow with a face like a full moon who sits in front of us?”

The fellow with the face like a full-moon was only one of twenty or thirty people with whom the friends experienced a sort of comradeship on these nights. Perhaps the most wonderful time was the end of the concert when they would walk out together into the spring night, parting at the corner of the town-hall; and the memory of great musical moments would accompany Edwin home through miles of darkling country, and even fill his little room at Halesby with their remembered glory or wander through his dreams.

His life at home was the least satisfactory part of these enchanted years. There were moments, indeed, when it seemed as if the ideal relationship with his father, that had been his early ambition, were being realised. Sometimes, on a Sunday morning, they would walk round the garden together in the sun, and Edwin would experience a return of the passionate good-will and anxiety to please that had overwhelmed him in the moment of their bereavement; but their two natures were radically so different that such moments were rare, and, when they came, were really more of an embarrassment than a pleasure.

He felt that, on his side at any rate, the relationship was artificial; that, however unnatural it might seem, he really had to whip himself up to a proper appreciation of his father’s virtues. A sense of veiled but radical antagonism underlay all their dealings with each other; and at times this hidden thing, that Edwin held in such dread, came so perilously near to the surface as to threaten an open rupture.

The question of Edwin’s allowance created one of these dangerous situations. Edwin knew that it was impossible for him to live the ordinary life of a medical student in North Bromwich without one; but the distaste for speaking of money matters, which arose from his delicate appreciation of his father’s finances, had made it difficult to approach the subject. At last he had screwed up his courage to the point of making a very modest demand, and his father, instead of realising the difficulty he had found in doing so, had hedged in a way that made Edwin feel himself a hard and mercenary parasite.

“All right, father, we won’t say anything more about it,” he said, comforting himself with the assurance that in a couple of years he would be qualified and in a position to earn his own living and pay his way. On the strength of this, and with his eyes wide open, he ran up a number of small tailors’ bills in North Bromwich; and all would have been well if Mr. Ingleby, in a fit of absent-mindedness, had not opened these incriminating documents and leapt to the conclusion that his son was going rapidly to the dogs. An unfortunate scene followed.

“I suppose you realise, Edwin,” he said, “that you are a minor, and that while you are under age I am responsible for these bills?”

“I’ve not the least intention of letting you pay them,” said Edwin.

“I’m afraid I have no alternative. I want you to tell me truthfully if there are any others.”“Of course there are others. Please don’t bother about them. In a little while I shall be able to pay them.”

“This is a great blow to me,” said Mr. Ingleby solemnly, overwhelming Edwin with a picture of virtuous poverty staggering from a cowardly blow in the dark; and the obvious distrust with which his father regarded him made his position at home almost intolerable. It seemed to him that his father now looked upon all his pleasures with suspicion; and, as a natural result, he lived more than ever to himself, only returning to Halesby late at night or at times when he knew that his father would be busy in the shop. One circumstance came to bridge the gap between them, a course of pharmacology that Edwin took early in his fourth year. He was delighted to find a subject in which his father was more learned than himself, and spent a number of hours that were almost happy in the shop answering the questions that Mr. Ingleby put to him on pharmacopoeial doses and searching the little nests of drawers for rare drugs to identify in their raw state. But the pharmacology course was short, and the subject that was so important in his father’s life was small and unimportant in Edwin’s. In addition to which he could not help feeling a sort of ethical prejudice against the complacency with which his father discharged patent medicines that he knew to be worthless if not harmful.

Every circumstance tended to isolate him from the influences of Halesby. His sudden attempt to be friendly with Edward Willis had withered under the humiliating dÉnouement of his adventure with Dorothy Powys; the new fields of music that he explored with Matthew Boyce had made him discontented with Aunt Laura’s ballads; the general air of elegance and refinement with which he had become acquainted in one or two Alvaston houses to which the Boyces had introduced him, made everything in Halesby, even his own home, seem a little shabby and unsatisfactory. North Bromwich, and his work there, claimed him more and more.

II

Even when his first enthusiasms and the inspiring generalisations that arose from them were exhausted, he found that he could not escape from the fascination of the studies which he now pursued, for the most part, in the company of Matthew Boyce. His third year had not only introduced him to the romance of surgery and the human interests of hospital life. He had spent long hours in the pathological laboratory and had made acquaintance with bacteriology, a science that was still in its infancy.

In this work he had shared a desk with Boyce, to whom it was particularly attractive, and between them they had developed a bacteriological technique rather above the average, taking an imaginative delight in the isolation of the microscopic deadly forms of vegetable life that are responsible for nearly all the physical sufferings of mankind. When they looked together at the banded bacilli of tubercule, stained red with carbolfuchsin, they saw more than a specimen under a coverglass: they saw the chosen and bitter enemies of genius, the malignant, insensate spores of lowest life that had banished Keats to fade in Rome, Shelley to drown by Via Reggio, Stevenson to perish in Samoa: the blind instruments of destruction that were even then draining the last strength from the opium-sodden frame of the author of The Hound of Heaven. Here, in a single test-tube, they could see enclosed enough of the organisms of cholera to sweep all Asia with a wave of pestilence; here, stained with Indian ink, the dreamy trypanosome that had wrapped the swarming shores of the Nyanzas of dark Africa in the sleep of death.

Both of them were seized with a passionate fever for research, to rid humanity of this insidious and appalling blight. Now, more than ever, they felt the supreme responsibilities of their calling; and when, in their fourth year, they passed on to their work in the medical wards, as clerks to the senior physician at the Infirmary, and saw the effects of bacterial havoc on the bodies of men and women, their enthusiasm rose to a still higher pitch.

The canons of the new university decreed that students who had learnt their surgery at one hospital should study medicine at the other. It was something of a disappointment to Edwin to exchange the homely atmosphere of Prince’s, where everything was familiar, for the colder and more formal wards of the Infirmary. This hospital, which was nearly twice the size of the other, was situated in the lower and less healthy part of the city. At Prince’s there had been a way of escape westwards through the pleasant suburban greens of Alvaston to the country and the hills. The Infirmary, in its terra-cotta arrogance, had been set down in the heart of unreclaimed slums, in such a way that its very magnificence and efficiency were depressing by contrast. Edwin disliked the palatial splendour of its shining wards which, for all their roominess, were full of an air that suffocated; for the windows were never opened, and the atmosphere that the patients breathed had been sucked into the place by an immense system of forced ventilation, filtered until it seemed to have lost all its nature, heated, and then propelled through innumerable shafts into every corner of the building. In the basement of the hospital the machine that was responsible for this circulation of heated air made a melancholy groaning; and this sound made the whole structure seem more like an artificial assembly of matter than a real hospital with a personality and a soul.

It is possible that the teaching methods of the Infirmary were superior to those of Prince’s; and the supporters of the institution prided themselves on the fact that the nursing staff was drawn from a higher social stratum; but for a long time Edwin felt considerably less at home there than he had been at the older hospital. The ward work, however, was even more fascinating, for the reason, no doubt, that his wonder was now tempered with a higher degree of erudition.

He found his new chief an inspiring figure. In the first place, the fact that he was a gentleman and a man of culture made him an effective contrast to that dynamic but plebeian genius, L.M. He was a graduate of one of the older universities, and though this counted for little in the mind of Edwin, who now affected to despise the city of his broken dream, it did lend an air of distinction to Sir Arthur Weldon’s discourses. He had a quiet voice, an admirable manner with women patients or nurses, and beautiful hands, on one of which he wore a signet ring embellished with his crest and a motto which his presence merited: “In toto teres atque rotundus.” The rotundity, it may be added, was so mild as to do no more than accentuate the elegance of a gold and platinum watch-chain that he wore. He was a great stickler for the traditions and dignity of his profession, and no word that was not infallibly correct disturbed the urbanity of his slow and polished periods. For this reason his tutorials in the wards were models of academic dignity, and much frequented by students who knew that he was far too anxious for the form of his discourse to break its continuity by asking awkward questions. He treated his clerks, and indeed every member of his classes, as if they were gentlemen nurtured in the same fine atmosphere as himself. He inspired confidence, and demanded nothing in return but correctness of behaviour and speech.

All these things made it easy to work for him; and the fact that over and above these social qualities he was a particularly sound physician, with a reputation that was already more than provincial, made Edwin sensible of the privilege of acting as his clerk.His speciality was disease affecting the heart or lungs, and though his wards at the infirmary were open to all sorts of general medical cases, these two types of tragedy came most frequently under his care and Edwin’s observation. Sir Arthur exacted from his clerks the preparation of accurate and voluminous notes on all his cases, and Edwin spent many hours in the wards extracting from his patients the details of family and medical history and moulding them into a balanced and intelligible report. The emotions that the study of the tubercle bacillus had aroused in him in the laboratory were reinforced a hundred times in the wards devoted to phthisical patients, too far advanced in dissolution for sanatorium treatment, that were his chief’s especial care.

They were most of them creatures of intelligence and sensitiveness above the average of the hospital patient; their eyes shone between their long lashes with a light that may have been taken for that of inspiration in those of dead poets; even in the later stages of the disease, when their strength would hardly allow them to drag up their emaciated limbs in their beds, and their bodies were wrung nightly with devastating sweats or attacks of hÆmorrhage that left them transparent and exhausted—even then they were so ready to be cheerful and to let their imagination blossom in vain hope, that Edwin found them the most pitiful of all his patients. The spes phthisica seemed to him the most pathetic as well as the most merciful of illusions.

In this ward he became acquainted with one patient in particular, a boy, the son of labouring parents whom heredity and circumstance alike had marked down from the day of his birth to be a victim of the disease. His mother and two sisters had died of it, and all his short life had been spent in a labourer’s cottage made deadly by the family’s infection, at the sunless bottom of a wet Welsh valley.

As a child he had been too delicate to enjoy the fresh air that he would have breathed on the way to the village school. He had lived, as far as Edwin could make out, in the single room in which his mother had lain dying, and had learned to read and write at her side. Then she had died; and as soon as he was old enough he had been sent out to work on the farm where his father was employed, an occupation that might well have saved him if the work and the exposure had not been too severe, or if he had not returned at night to the infected hovel. As it was, in the rainy autumn weather of the hills, he had caught a chill and sickened with pleurisy, and thus the inevitable had happened.

He was only fifteen. Education had never come his way, and he had never read any books but the Confessions of Maria Monk and the family Bible; but whenever Edwin came to go over his chest and make the necessary report of progress—fallacious word—upon his case sheets, he noticed that the boy would hide a sheet of paper on which he had been writing. His confidence was easily won, and without the least shame he showed Edwin what he had been doing. He had spent his time in writing verses composed, for the most part, in the jingling measures of Moody and Sankey’s hymns. They were sprinkled with strange dialect words that filled them with splashes of sombre colour; most of them were frankly ungrammatical; but there were things in some of them that seemed to Edwin to bear the same relation to poetry as the mountain tricklings of that far hill country bore to the full stream of Severn. Their banalities, faintly imitated from the banalities of the hymn book, were occasionally relieved by phrases of pure beauty that caught the breath with surprise.

“Why do you do this?” Edwin asked, and when he had recovered from the shyness and diffidence into which the question had cast him, the boy told him that he wrote his verses because he couldn’t help it, because the words became an obsession to him and would not let him sleep until they were written down. The thin flame of creative aspiration showed itself in other ways, in the patient’s vivid delight in colours and sounds, and in the strange pictures, having no relation to nature, that he drew with coloured chalks.

It seemed to Edwin that in this case the exhaustion of chronic disease had revealed the existence, as it sometimes will, of a faint fire of natural genius. “There, but for the spite of heaven,” he thought, “goes John Keats,” and, with the feelings of an experimenter in explosives who mixes strange reagents, he lent his patient a copy of the poet’s works.

The boy fell on them eagerly. He confessed that he did not understand them; but he would read them all day, mispronouncing the words as the classical student perhaps mispronounces those of the Greek poets, but extracting from their sonorous beauty a curious and vivid sensual satisfaction. A single line would sometimes throw him into a kind of trance, and he would lean back in his bed with the book open on his chest and his slender clubbed fingers clasped above it, repeating to himself his own version of the words without any conception of their real meaning. Sometimes a line would fill him with memories:—

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery moon, and eve’s one star . . .”

“That is like our home,” he would say.

The house-physician did not approve of these experiments. On principle he would have disapproved of poetry, and in this case he considered the reading of it unhealthy. As if there were any element of health in this misfortune! . . . A few weeks later the patient had an attack of hÆmoptysis and died.

It was only in such cases of chronic illness that the question of the patient’s intellectual state arose. Such speculations might mitigate the fatigue of slow siege warfare that had only one end in view, but the acute medical wards, and particularly those devoted to acute pneumonia, were the scene of shorter and more desperate conflicts, grapplings with death, in which the issue was doubtful and medicine could at least give support, and sometimes turn the tide.

These were indeed terrible battles, in which devoted nursing counted for much. To Edwin it was a sight more awe-inspiring than the quiet of death, to watch a strong man stretched upon his back, breathing terribly through the night-long struggles of pneumonia. In it he could see the most tremendous expression of a man’s will to live, in the clenched hands, in the neck, knotted and swollen with intolerable strain, in the working of the muscles of the face and nose in their supreme thirst for air. The sound of this breathing would fill the room that was otherwise so silent that one could hear the soft hiss of the oxygen escaping from its cylinder. The train of students that followed Sir Arthur round the wards would stand waiting in the doorway, knowing that nothing was to be seen, and the physician himself would step quietly to the square of red screens and exchange a whisper with the sister who stood at the patient’s bedside, her lips compressed as though their muscles were contracting in sympathy with the other tortured muscles that she watched.

“Weill, how is he?” the physician would ask.

“I think he’s holding his own. No sleep.”

“That’ a pity. Well, persevere with the brandy and the warm oxygen.”

“Yes, sir.” Her tense lips scarcely moved.

And then Edwin’s chief, so quietly that the patient did not know what he was doing, being indeed no more than a mass of labouring muscles bent on life, would feel the temporal pulse in front of the ear with his firm white finger.

“Not so bad, sister . . . not so bad.”

Then he would sweep away with the tails of his frock-coat swinging.“Ingleby, did you notice anything about the patient’s hands?”

“His hands, sir?’

“Yes . . . his hands.”

“No, sir. Nothing, I’m afraid. I don’t think he was plucking the bedclothes . . . carphology, do they call it?”

“You had better look the word up if you are not sure. No . . . it was a finer movement. He was rolling his thumbs over the tips of his index fingers, just like a man making pellets of bread at a dinner party. There are men who do that. Remember it. It’s a bad sign in a case of lobar pneumonia. Come along, gentlemen. The pneumococcus is a sporting antagonist. Short and sweet. I’d as soon die of pneumonia as anything and have a run for my money. That case has put up a good fight.”

That “case” . . . On the face of it the use of the word seemed to justify the accusation of gross materialism that is so usually made against the profession of medicine. The patient who lay there fighting for his life was, in the physician’s eyes, a case, and not, as Edwin, who had taken notes of his history in the earlier stages of the disease knew him to be, a bricklayer’s labourer from Wolverbury with a wife and six children, two of whom had died in infancy. He was a case: a human body, the soulless body that Edwin had learned in detail through two years of labour in the dissecting room, consisting of a heart hard-pressed, a nervous system starved of oxygen and weakened by the virus of pneumonia, and a pair of clogged lungs. This was the whole truth as far as it concerned the physician. The calamity was a material calamity to be fought with material weapons, and the state of his soul, or his relations with his wife and the rest of the community in which he lived, only mattered in so far as they affected his body and revealed him to have been a clean-living and temperate man. For the rest he was a case; and it were well for the physician to leave the animula, vagula, blandula to the poets. This was one of the hard lessons of medicine.

These were sombre things; but it must not be imagined that they reflected the general tenor of hospital life. The Infirmary, indeed, was so vast as to be microcosmic, and its loves, its jealousies, and its ambitions combined to produce a broad effect of human comedy, not without tears, but leavened by the rich, and often unprintable humour that flourished in the out-patient department. Hospital politics, hospital scandals, hospital romances, combined to make life a vivid and exciting experience. In the toils of the last, spring found W.G. securely bound. Harrop, too, had launched into a desperate affair with a probationer in the children’s wards whom the matron promptly transferred to the infectious block and perpetual quarantine. Edwin and Boyce escaped this epidemic of tenderness that swept through the fourth year like measles. They were far too absorbed in their own interests and discoveries to worry their hearts about anything in a nurse’s cap and apron.

Spring passed in a swift vision of plum-blossom in the Boyce’s Alvaston garden and two weeks of musical debauchery, one Wagnerian and the other of Gilbert and Sullivan. Most of the time they were working at high pressure; but a week before the beginning of the fourth examination, Boyce proposed that they should cycle down together to the country house that his father rented in Gloucestershire, and blow away the vapours of forced ventilation with Cotswold air.

On the eve of an examination it seemed a daring but enthralling plan. Edwin put the proposal before Mr. Ingleby, and was surprised to find that he didn’t object. Indeed, it had seemed to Edwin for several months that his father was curiously distrait and less interested than usual in his work. This consent freed his conscience, and the two friends set off together on a Saturday afternoon in the spirit of abandoned holiday that is the highest privilege of youth. They had decided to take no medical books with them. As far as they were concerned, the examination might go hang; for a whole week they would live with no thought for the morrow, taking long rides over the Cotswolds, lunching at village inns on bread and cheese, returning at night to feasts of beans and bacon and libations of Overton cider.

They started from the infirmary at half-past two, and had soon left the dust and tram-lines of North Bromwich behind. The smooth, wide road that they followed stretched in magnificent undulations over the heights of the Midland plateau from which they could see the shapes of Uffdown and Pen Beacon fading into the west under a pale, black-country sky. In front of them southward the sky was blue.“We’re in for ripping weather,” Boyce shouted as he rode ahead.

The weather didn’t really matter: they were in for a great adventure. From the plateau they glided swiftly to the vale of Redditch, and when they had left that sordid little town behind they climbed the backbone of the Ridgway, where the road follows the thin crest of a line of small hills and overlooks on either side two dreaming plains. In a blue haze of summer these green dominions lay asleep, so richly scattered with dark woodlands that no human habitation could be seen. They were as lonely as the sky. Westward of Severn the Clees and Malverns towered over Wales; but Boyce appeared to be more interested in certain lower wooded hills upon the eastern side. He made Edwin the confidant of his latest romance.

“She and I,” he said, “used to bicycle out from Alvaston in the cool of the evening . . . about an hour and a half’s easy ride. It was early last summer. Those woods are full of nightingales. We used to sit on a gate and listen to them and ride home together in the dark. I can tell you it was pretty wonderful.”

Of course it was wonderful. Everything must be wonderful in this enchanted country. Riding along in the afternoon sunlight Edwin constructed for himself just such another passionate adventure; and the figure with which he shared these imaginary ecstasies was, for want of a better, Dorothy Powys. While the dream nightingales were singing their hardest and he was on the point of renewing that unforgettable kiss, they came to a cottage half timbered and lost in clematis and honeysuckle where a steep road fell on either side at right angles to the ridge.

“Right,” shouted Boyce, “we’ll take the road down through the Lenches.”

“What are the Lenches?” said Edwin, riding abreast.

“Villages. Five of them, I think. There’s Rous Lench and King’s Lench and Abbot’s Lench, and two others. They’re a proper subject for a poem.”

“Right-o . . . let’s collaborate,” said Edwin. “How’s this for a beginning?”

“As I was riding through the Lenches
I met three strapping country wenches.”

And laughing together, they constructed a series of frankly indecent couplets, recording the voyager’s adventures with all three. It was a matter of the most complete collaboration, for the friends supplied alternate lines, outdoing one another in Rabelaisian extravagance. Edwin, however, provided the final couplet, which, he declared, gave the composition literary form:—

“Home to my vicarage I hasted
Feeling the day had not been wasted.”

“A parson of the type of Herrick,” said Boyce.

“Yes . . . but more serious.”

“That kind of affair is awfully serious . . . at the time.”

The gables of Evesham and its one tall tower swam in a golden dust. They drank cider in the inn courtyard, purchased a couple of Bath chaps at a grocer’s and crossed the Avon. Through an orchard country they rode in that hour of evening when bird-song is most wistful. The sun went down in a blaze of splendour behind Bredon Hill. The perfume of a beanfield swept across the road.

“Good God, isn’t it good?” said Boyce. “We are nearly there.”

A village of Cotswold stone half hidden in blossoms of crimson rambler received them. The gardens were full of sweet-williams, pale phloxes, and tall hollyhocks. “Straight on,” Boyce called.

A sign-post pointed up the hill to Overton. They dismounted, and pushed their bicycles up a steep lane in the twilight. Bats were flitting everywhere, and a buff-coloured owl fluttered heavily between the overarching elms. A faint tinkle of trickling water came to their ears.

“That is the sound of Overton,” said Boyce. “Slow water trickling in the night.”

They slept together in the low-beamed room, so soundly that the sun was high before they wakened next morning.

The week that now followed was the very crown of youth. The Boyce’s summer house stood upon a patch of terraced ground, being the highest of the three farms round which the hamlet of Overton clustered, and overlooked the blossomy vale of Evesham bounded by the Cotswold escarpment, blue and dappled with the shadows of cloud. “Parva domus: magna quies,” read the motto that Matthew’s father, the poet, had placed above the lintel of the door: “small house: great quietness”—and indeed it seemed to Edwin that there could be no quieter place on earth.

He and Matthew would smoke their morning pipes together on a stone terrace that bleached in the sun along the edge of a garden that the poet had planted for perfume rather than for beauty of bloom. Here they would sit, nursing books that were unread, until the spirit tempted them to set out towards the blue escarpment, and, after a hard climb, lose themselves in the trough of some deep billow of Cotswold and fall asleep on a bank of waving grasses, or follow some runnel of the Leach or Windrush until it joined the mother stream, where they would strip and float over the shallows with the sun in their eyes, emerging covered with the tiny water leeches that gave one of the rivers its name.

On the height of Cotswold they found an inn that was half farm, possessing a barrel of cider that Edwin was almost ready to acknowledge as the equal of that which he had drunk in Somerset; and, for further attraction a huge yellow cat beneath the lazy stare of whose topaz eyes Matthew sat worshipping. In the evening the air that moved over the wolds grew cool and dry and more reviving than any juice of yellow apples, and with their lungs full of it they would spin down the winding hills into the plain, past many sweet-smelling villages and golden manor-houses, reaching Overton about sunset, when the evening stocks, that Mr. Boyce had planted along the approaches to his doorway, recovered from their lank indolence and drenched the air with a scent that matched the songs of nightingales.

There Mrs. Pratt, the wife of a neighbouring labourer, would have their dinner ready: tender young beans and boiled bacon and crisp lettuce from the garden that Matthew dressed according to the directions of his epicurean father; and with their meal, and after, they would drink the dry and bitter cider made at the middle farm from the apples of orchards that now dreamed beneath them.

Then came music. The drawing-room piano stood by the open window, and a soft movement of air disturbed the flames of the candles in silver candlesticks that lighted the music stand. No other light was there; and in the gloom beyond, Edwin, playing the tender songs of Grieg and Schumann, and the prelude to Tristan, would see the long legs of Matthew stretched dreaming on a sofa. The nights were so silent that it seemed a pity to mar them with music; and for a long time Edwin would sit in silence at the piano, while strong winged moths fluttered in out of the darkness and circled round the candle’s flame. Last of all, before they turned in, they would go for a slow walk over meadows cool in the moonlight, listening to the silence—“Solemn midnight’s tingling silentness,” Matthew quoted—or to the gentle creaking of the branches of elms, now heavy with foliage, that embosomed their small house.

The last day of their holiday was wet; but that made no great difference to them, for a succession of showers drew from the drenched garden a perfume more intense. They spent the day in musical exploration, and when the darkness came they sat together talking far into the night. They talked of North Bromwich, for the ponderable influence of the morrow had already invaded their quietude, and of their future work.

“In a year’s time,” said Edwin, “we shall be qualified.”

“What shall you do?”

“Oh, general practice, I suppose. That’s the easiest way to make a living. It’s what most men do.”

“I don’t like the idea of it,” said Matthew. “It’s sordid, unsatisfactory work. A hard living in which science stands no chance. Selling bottles of medicine—quite harmless, of course, but unnecessary—to people who don’t really need them. You have to do it to make a living. If you don’t the other people cut you out.”

“I don’t think it’s as bad as that. There must be something fundamentally good about medical practice. You are actually helping the people who are genuinely ill.”

“That’s the ideal side of it. But there’s another. I don’t think I shall risk it. If the governor can’t let me have enough money to wait for consulting practice, I shall have a shot at one of the services. I think the Indian Medical Service is the thing. Fairly good pay, a chance of seeing the world, and a good sporting life.”

“India—?” Edwin had never thought of it. Sitting there in an English dusk the idea appealed to him. Great rivers: burning plains under the icy rampart of Himalaya: strange, dark religions. India. . . . Yes, it sounded good. His imagination went a little farther ahead. A hill-station according to Kipling, or perhaps a more solitary cantonment in the plains where the commandant was a major in the Indian army and the wife of the commandant, a girl whose name had once been Dorothy Powys. And the major, of course, would succumb to some pernicious tropical disease through which Edwin would nurse him devotedly; and when he was dead and buried his beautiful wife would come to Edwin—the only other Englishman in the station, and say: “I never really loved him. I never really loved any one but you.” Altogether an extremely romantic prospect. . . . Yes, the Indian Medical Service would do very well. . . .

The last night was more beautiful in its silence than any other. It had been a wonderful week. There would never be another like it. The crown of youth. And, as it came to pass, the end of youth as well.

III

It was late that night when Edwin reached home. After the huge openness of the Cotswold expanses, the air of Halesby, lying deep in its valley, seemed to him confined and oppressive, and to add to this impression there was a sense of thunder in it. After supper his father went to his writing desk and pulled out a sheaf of bluish, translucent papers which he spread out on the table, and began to study intently. Edwin, sprawling, tired and contented, in the corner, watched him lazily.

“Whatever have you got there, father?” he said.“Plans . . . architect’s plans,” Mr. Ingleby replied nervously.

“Plans? What for? Surely you aren’t thinking of building a new house.”

“Well, not exactly. No . . . I am thinking of adding to this one.”

“But that would be an expensive job. Isn’t it big enough for us?”

“Yes. It’s big enough at present; but it may not be shortly.”

“What do you mean?”

Edwin laughed uneasily, for he could not understand this air of mystery. Mr. Ingleby rose from his plans and cleared his throat. The little lamp-lit room immediately became full of an atmosphere of suppressed intensity, in which the tick of the clock could be heard as if it were consciously calling attention to the importance of the moment.

“I mean. . . . As a matter of fact, I had intended telling you this evening; but I found it difficult to do so, because . . . because I could not be quite sure how you’d take it. It . . . it may come as a shock to you. I am thinking of enlarging the house because I am proposing to be married again.”

“Married? Good God!”

A feeling of inexplicable passion choked Edwin so that his voice did not sound as if it were his own.

“Yes, I knew it would come as a surprise to you. Probably you’ll find it difficult to understand my feelings. You mustn’t be hasty.’

“Good God!” Edwin’s amazement could find no other words.“You are the first person I have told, Edwin. I’ve thought a good deal about it . . . about you particularly, and I’ve quite satisfied myself that I am not doing you any injustice. In another year I suppose you will be going out into the world and leaving me. Don’t decide what you think too hastily.”

He paused, but Edwin could not speak.

“If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you all about it. I think you will approve of my choice. I’ll tell you—”

“For God’s sake, don’t. Not now—”

“Very well. As you wish.” Mr. Ingleby’s hands that held the architect’s papers trembled. He smiled, kindly, but with a sort of bewilderment. “As you wish,” he repeated.

And Edwin, feeling as if he would do something ridiculous and violent in the stress of the curiously mingled emotions that possessed him, went quickly to the door and ran upstairs to his room, where he flung himself on his bed in the dark.

In a little while he found himself, ridiculously, sobbing. He could not define the passionate mixture of resentment, jealousy, shame, and even hatred, that overwhelmed him. He could not understand himself. A psycho-analyst, no doubt would have found a name for his state of mind, describing it as an “Œdipus complex”; but Edwin had never heard of psycho-analysis, and only knew that his mind was ruthlessly torn by passions beyond the control of reason. He made a valiant attempt to think rationally. Primarily, he admitted, it wasn’t his business to decide whether his father should marry again or remain a widower. His father was a free agent with responsibilities towards Edwin that were rapidly vanishing and would soon be ended. He couldn’t even suggest that this new marriage would be the ruin of any vital comradeship between them, for the hopes of this ideal state that he had once cherished, had not been realised during the last few years. There was no reason why his father’s marriage should affect him personally, or even financially, for he had never reckoned on the least paternal support when once he should be qualified. There was not even the least suggestion that his father was physically unsuitable for the married state, for there was no reason why he should not live for many years to come. There were actually valid arguments, that Edwin could not dispute, in favour of the plan—such as Mr. Ingleby’s loneliness, soon to be increased, and the discomfort that he had suffered as an elderly widower at the hands of a series of inefficient house-keepers. From every point of view the world would be justified in concluding that he was doing the correct and obvious thing. Why, then, should Edwin lie on his bed in the dark wetting his pillow with tears, and sick with shame?

No reason could assuage his suffering. However calmly he tried to consider the matter, the thought of his mother rose up in his mind; a vision of her, beautiful and pathetic, and indefinitely wronged, came to reinforce his indignation. He lit a candle and gazed for a long time at her photograph, the one that he had always kept in his desk at St. Luke’s and scarcely noticed for the last three years; and though he knew that she was dead and presumably beyond the reach of any human passion, the sight of her features filled him more than ever with this unconscionable resentment so devastating in its intensity. The portrait took him back to the tenderness that he remembered at the time of her death, and particularly that strange moment when he and his father had knelt together in the little room across the landing. The smell of Sanitas. . . .

And then he remembered another incident in the gloom of that brown room at the Holloway on the windy crown of Mendip, whence he had seen all the kingdoms of the earth. Thinking of this, he seemed to hear the voice of a very old woman, who said, “The Inglebys are always very tender in marriage. I’ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they always marry again.” How could she have known? And then the thought of a strange woman in the house, treading in the places where his mother’s steps had once moved, swept him off his feet again.

“I could never stay here,” he thought. “I could never stay here. . . . I should do something desperate and cruel and unreasonable. I couldn’t help myself. I must go. It’s a pity . . . but I must go. I couldn’t stay here. I simply couldn’t.”

With this determination in his mind, but without the least idea of the way in which it might be realised, he arrived at a state of comparative serenity, in which he could contemplate his mother’s photograph without so much passionate resentment at the slur that was being laid on her memory. Now he saw everything in terms of his new resolution. He saw, pathetically, the little bed in which he had slept for so many years, the shelves on which his favourite books were ranged, the piano and the sheaves of his mother’s music that he had managed to install in his room: all the small details that went together to create its atmosphere of homeliness.

“How the devil shall I manage to leave them?” he thought. He went to the window and saw, beyond the garden trees, the low line of those familiar hills: the landscape that he had always delighted in as his own, and that now was to be his no longer. He sighed, for to leave them seemed to him impossible; they were so familiar, so much a definite part of his life. A curious impulse seized him to creep downstairs and out of the house, and visit the grave in the cemetery where his mother was laid; but he restrained himself from this debauch of sentiment. “It will do no good,” he thought. “It’s all over.” He even wondered if he might feel happier if he went down to Aunt Laura’s house and confided in her: perhaps she would understand. At least she was his mother’s sister and might be conscious of the indignity; but when he had almost determined to do this, he reflected that she and his uncle were probably in bed, and a ludicrous picture of her putting her head out of the window to ask what was the matter, with her hair in curling pins, restrained him. Besides, it would be rather ridiculous to fall back upon the sympathies of a person whom he had neglected for several years.

“No. . . . I must go on my own way,” he thought. “It’s a sort of break in my life, just like the big break before. It’s got to be faced, and it’s no good worrying about it.”

He suddenly remembered that in twelve hours’ time he would be sitting for his fourth examination, and that it would be wise for him to get some sleep; so he undressed and went to bed, wondering how many more times he would undress in that little room and caring less than he would have expected. He fell asleep soon, for he was thoroughly tired out, and slept so soundly that he did not see his father enter the room a few hours later. He came in softly, in his dressing-gown, carrying a candle, and stooped above Edwin’s sleeping figure with troubled eyes.

CHAPTER VIII
LOWER SPARKDALE

I

Next day, in a fever of restlessness, Edwin essayed and passed his fourth professional examination. He had expected to get a first-class in it, but when he found himself near the bottom of the list in the neighbourhood of W.G., he was not seriously disturbed. The subjects of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology were unimportant, and now that his life had taken this sudden change of direction, it did not much matter what sort of a degree he took. His one concern was to get qualified and licensed to earn his living on the bodies of his fellow-men as quickly as possible.

Since his interview with his father, the determination to leave Halesby had not faltered, although he had not then calculated the difficulties that now faced him. To begin with, he had no money beyond a few pounds that his mother had placed to his credit in the Post Office Savings Bank in his childhood. Luckily his college and hospital fees had been paid in advance, and he was only concerned with the actual cost of living and the fees for the final examination. In some way or other he would have to live for twelve months, and he smiled to himself to think that he was in very much the same position as his father had occupied thirty years before.

On the whole, he thought, his father must have had less cause for anxiety, with Dr. Marshall’s two hundred pounds behind him and the humble standards of a village boy in place of Edwin’s more elaborate traditions of life. He felt that he needed the advice of a sound man with some knowledge of the world. In an emergency of this kind Matthew Boyce could offer him very little but sympathy, and so he turned naturally to the counsels of that battered warrior, W.G., feeling, at the same time, rather shabby in making use of a friend whom he had practically neglected in the last two years.

W.G. providentially didn’t look at it in that light. He had always regarded Edwin from a fatherly standpoint, and the mere fact that this was a case of rebellion against domestic authority of the kind in which he had been engaged since his childhood made him sympathetic, though he didn’t, as Edwin saw to his despair, appreciate the delicacies of the situation.

“I can quite see why you want to cut adrift,” he said. “It’s a feeling that any one’s who’s dependent gets, if he has any guts in him; but I’m damned if I see any cause or just impediment why these two persons shouldn’t enter into holy matrimony.”

“I suppose it’s just rotten sentimentality. Still . . . I can’t help it. There it is. It’s the idea of seeing another woman in my mother’s place. I simply couldn’t stick it, W.G.”

“Well, old chap, I’m quite prepared to believe you know best. The thing is, what are you going to do? You can’t live on nothing in this hard world. You can share my bed for a week or two if you like. I’m sorry it won’t be for longer; but marriage appears to be in the air. To tell you the truth, I’m going to get married myself.”

“You married? . . . Good Lord! What on earth are you doing that for?”

“I don’t know. Force of circumstance, I suppose. It’s one of the things that happens when you least expect it.”

“Do I know her, W.G.?”

“Oh, yes . . . you know her. It’s Sister Merrion in Number Twelve.”

There came to Edwin a vision of a tall, dark girl, with wavy brown hair and Irish eyes, whom he couldn’t help remembering at the infirmary.

“I didn’t even know that you were friendly.”

“We weren’t until about three weeks ago. I happened to notice that she was looking rather down in the mouth, and took her out to tea; and then the poor girl broke down at the Dousita and told me all about her home affairs. It’s the devil and all to see a pretty girl like that crying. She’d been having a thin time of it at home with her father: a pretty rotten sort of fellow, I gathered, and that seemed the only way out of it. So we’re going to be married next month. A sort of fellow-feeling, you know.”

“But . . . Good Lord . . . are you in love with her?”

“Of course I am, you old ass. I shouldn’t marry her if I wasn’t. It’ll be a bit of a pinch till I’m qualified, though.”“I say, I hope you’ll be happy.”

A sudden pang of something like envy overwhelmed Edwin. The picture of settled peace, romantic love in a cottage, that W.G. was about to share with the undeniably beautiful Sister Merrion struck him as an ideal state.

“You’re a lucky devil, W.G.,” he said.

It seemed unreasonable that W.G. should devote himself to the smaller problem of Edwin’s ways and means on the eve of such a momentous adventure. It hardly seemed fair to bother him.

“We’re going into rooms in Alvaston at first,” he said. “It’ll be less expensive than furnishing, and we don’t intend to indulge in a family for the present. Meanwhile, if I were you, I should go and talk to the manager at Edmondson’s. He may be able to put you on to something. Yes . . . have a shot at him first, and mention my name, he’s a very decent sort.”

Edwin laughed to himself. It seemed to him that he was in the grip of a curiously ironical fate, for Edmondson’s was the identical firm of wholesale druggists with whom his father had been employed on his first arrival at North Bromwich. History was repeating itself in a way that was proper to romance.

In the afternoon he went down to Edmondson’s and asked for the manager, a vigorous person with shrewd eyes that he screwed up habitually whenever he made a point in his conversation. He called Edwin “Doctor”: a form of address that was flattering, until Edwin realised that it was no more than a habit with him. “Ingleby,” he said; “let me see, I know the name.”

“Probably you know my father. He’s in business at Halesby.”

“Ah, yes, of course . . . your father. Come along to my room, doctor, and have a cigar.”

In this varnished chamber, decorated with a collection of barbarous surgical instruments, survivals of the Middle Ages, Edwin unbosomed himself. The manager listened in silence, screwing up his eyes from time to time, to show that he was taking in Edwin’s story.

“Well,” he said at the end of it. “Do you want me to tell you what I think of it, doctor? Candidly, you know.”

Edwin was only too anxious for another opinion.

“Well, I think you don’t know when you’re well off. To tell you the truth, doctor, I think you’re a damned fool. That’s straight. See?”

“I’m not surprised,” said Edwin. “Still, I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to stay at home. I can’t do it, that’s all. I’m only wondering if you can put me in the way of a job of some kind.”

“Well, doctor, that’s easier said than done. When you’re qualified, it’ll be a different matter altogether. I think I can promise to keep you in ‘locums’ at four or five guineas a week, as long as you like to take them; but I can’t honestly say there’s anything for you at present. It’s not like the old days when doctors were allowed to keep unqualified assistants.”

“I’m through my fourth exam., you know. I could do dispensing.”“Dispensing. . . . Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, doctor, I’ll see what I can do for you. You know what I think of it, don’t you? In the meantime you’d better leave your address. No good writing to Halesby, I suppose?”

Edwin gave him the address of W.G.’s diggings, and went off, hopelessly discouraged, to find his friend. W.G., however, was at present far too engrossed in the charms of Sister Merrion to be available. So Edwin went on to the Boyce’s house in Alvaston, only to find that Matthew had cycled down to Overton again with his father. It was impossible for him to settle to any work; so he took an afternoon train to Halesby, at a time when he knew his father would be busy at the shop, and collected the few belongings that he felt he must take with him.

The atmosphere of the house was inexpressibly poignant. Within its walls, he reflected, dwelt the ghost of all his childhood, and memories of his mother, that had lain submerged in his consciousness for many years, rose to meet him wherever he went. Well, he would never see the place again. This exile, it pleased him to think, was his final sacrifice to her memory. That was the best way in which he could express it. At the worst, another voice whispered, it was an excess of mawkish sentiment.

All through the afternoon, and particularly when he disinterred small pieces of the lumber that he had collected in his schooldays, this sense of a ghostly childhood haunted him. It followed him down the stairs into the hall, where the grandfather clock ticked steadily as it had ticked ever since he could remember, into the dead drawing-room, soon to be made alive by the tastes of another feminine personality; on the lawn, where the limes were shedding their sticky bloom; on the way to the station, when he lugged his bag through the gnarled shadows of Mrs. Barrow’s ancient garden, and caught a glimpse of the old lady’s kindly nodding bonnet as she smiled at him from her place in the window, where she sat hermetically sealed in an atmosphere of Victorian decay.

There were the reedy pools and Shenstone’s hanging woods, ghostly waters and woodlands, never to be seen again. And there was the platform of Halesby station, reeking of hot coal dust and ashes, and, from the incoming train, a flux of shabby people, including the bank-clerk in tennis flannels and the mysterious commercial traveller with the brown leather bag, reading the Pink ’Un as he walked. From this, through the black-country’s familiar desert, the train carried him into the bitter reality of North Bromwich. With something approaching the feelings of an intruder he installed himself in W.G.’s diggings, and made a supper, undeniably pleasant, of bread and cheese with a large bottle of W.G.’s beer. The latter, which happened to be Astill’s XXXX, induced a mood of tolerant sleepiness, and luckily prepared him to receive, at midnight or thereabouts, the confidences of his friend on the subject of Sister Merrion’s intellectual charms.

“You know, old chap, she’s different from me—reads poetry by the hour when she’s in the bunk on night duty. Longfellow’s her favourite. A long way above my head and all that; but it’s a wonderful thing, when you come to think of it, to be married to an intellectual woman. . . .” So the words poured into Edwin’s drowsy ears. He was far too sleepy to smile, and, Longfellow apart, it did seem to him a comfortable and even enviable thing to be the adored centre of the universe in the Irish eyes of a tender creature with wavy brown hair and a painful domestic tragedy. W.G. was still moralising on his past wickedness and the prospect of a blameless future when Edwin fell asleep.

II

Next morning he was awakened by his friend, boisterous and ruddy from a bath, performing a strange ritual of prostrations and contortions in front of an open window discreetly veiled with fluttering butter-muslin. Edwin lazily watched the sinuous play of muscles under the shaggy limbs of W.G. through half-closed lids.

“You’d make a topping subject for dissection, W.G.,” he said.

“Hallo!” W.G. answered from between his legs. “You awake, you old slacker? There’s a letter for you that came up with the tea. Tea’s cold, by the way.”

“Thanks,” said Edwin, as W.G. skimmed the letter over to him. “Good Lord, it’s from Edmondson’s.”

It was a note hastily scribbled advising Edwin to go at once and see Dr. Altrincham-Harris at 563 Lower Sparkdale, North Bromwich, between nine and ten a.m., or six and nine p.m., and signed by the manager who screwed his eyes up.

“Five hundred and sixty-three, Lower Sparkdale,” Edwin groaned. “I say, that sounds pretty bad. Altrincham-Harris is rather hot stuff for Lower Sparkdale, isn’t it? Queer place for a double-barreler.”

“General practitioner,” said W.G., rubbing himself down with a pair of flesh-gloves. “They all go in for hyphens. It impresses the lower-middle classes. When I go into practice, my son, I shall be known as Dr. William George-Brown, if I can afford the extra letters on a plate.”

“Lower Sparkdale’s a pretty awful slum, isn’t it?”

“Never been there. It’s time you cleared off to the bathroom. You’ll feel better when you’re awake.”

Edwin spent the morning in writing, and four times rewriting, a letter to his father. It was a difficult job, for he felt that the reasons for his departure could not be explained in words, and he was particularly anxious to make it clear that it was purely a matter of temperament and that he didn’t wish it to imply any criticism of Mr. Ingleby’s plans. When he had finished it he found that it was far too late to visit the surgery of Dr. Altrincham-Harris. He therefore waited till the evening, and then took a steam-tram through a succession of sordid streets, past the public abattoirs and the newly-opened Rowton House, to the level of 563 Lower Sparkdale.

The extreme end of that street was not as bad as he had imagined it might be, for at this point the slum ended, resolving itself into the edge of a growing suburb of red-brick. Number 563 was a corner house secretively curtained with dirty muslin on flat brass rods. A shining plate revealed the qualifications, such as they were, of C. Altrincham-Harris, Physician and Surgeon, and as the front door seemed to have sunk into a state of disuse, Edwin entered at another, marked “Surgery,” round which a number of poorly-clad women, some of them carrying babies, were clustered.

Inside the door was a narrow waiting-room that concentrated into an incredibly small number of cubic feet the characteristic odour of an out-patient department. Every seat was occupied, and Edwin, deciding to wait for his turn, stood listening to a varied recitation of medical history that every patient seemed compelled by the surroundings to relate to her neighbour. At the moment when he entered a very stout woman, who had been drinking, had the ear of the company, talking loudly over the shoulder of a pasty child whose neck was covered with the pin-points that fleas make on an insensitive skin, and occasionally, in accessions of tenderness, hugging it to her bosom.

“So I says to the inspector . . . yes, inspector, ’e ’ad the nerve to call ’isself . . . says I, you can take your summonses to ’ell, I says. I love my children, I says. There’s more love for the little ’armless things in my finger than there’ll ever be in your bloody body, I says. And I caught ’er up and carried ’er straight along ’ere to the doctor. Doctor ’Arris knows me, I says, and what’s more ’e shall ’ave a look at Margaret’s ’ead with ’is own eyes. Shan’t ’e, my pretty?” The child wriggled as she was clasped in another beery embrace.

A bell tingled inside. “Now we shall see,” said the lady determinedly rising. “And ’ave a stifficate if it costs me two shillin’s.”

The room murmured low applause and sympathy, and she entered the surgery, emerging, two minutes later, with the testimonial in her mouth.

“What did I tell yo’?” she said. “The doctor says there ain’t one. Not one. It’s time these inspectors was done away with. I only ’ope ’e will summons me. Good-night, all.”

She went out, hugging the child in both arms, and a pale woman, respectably dressed, who had sat through her tirades in silence, took her place in the doctor’s consulting room. Dr. Altrincham-Harris didn’t keep her long. She came out, like the rest of them, after an interview that lasted perhaps two minutes, carrying a bottle of medicine wrapped up in one of the papers that are called comic. Again the bell rang.

“Good God,” Edwin thought, “and this is general practice!” It was evident that he had entered a world in which the academic methods of diagnosis and prescription with which he had been educated were not followed. On the surface it was quite clear that the physician could not have given an eighth part of the usual time or care to the consideration of any single case. He remembered instances of hospital patients who had affected to despise the perfunctoriness of the methods of the Prince’s out-patient department, and had boasted that they would receive better attention from the hands of a “private doctor.” He hoped to goodness that none of these unfortunate people would drift into the hands of Dr. Altrincham-Harris.

His own turn came, and relieved to be rid of the stink of the waiting-room, he entered the surgery. Dr. Harris was sitting in an attitude of impatience behind a desk littered with papers. He was a little man, with grey, untidy hair and a drooping moustache. He held a pencil in his hand, as if he were itching to dash off another prescription, and an open drawer in the desk at his right hand was full of small silver. When he saw that Edwin was better dressed than the majority of his patients, his manner changed at once. “Please sit down,” he said. “Now, what can I do for you?”

Edwin hesitated, for he found it difficult to begin. Dr. Harris encouraged him with a wink, and a grip of his left arm.

“Now, my boy, you needn’t be frightened of me. You’ll find the doctor’s your best friend. Had a bit of bad luck, eh? Well, you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”

The wink was the most disgusting part of this performance, but Edwin, quickly recovering his sense of humour, pulled out Edmondson’s letter and handed it to the doctor.

“Well, now, why didn’t you say so at first,” said Dr. Harris, scratching a bristly grey chin. “Yes . . . I did mention to their manager that I was in want of some one to do a bit of rough dispensing and keep this place tidy. You see I don’t live here. It’s what we call a lock-up, and the work’s so pressing that I’ve really no time to do my own dispensing. I suppose you hold the Apothecaries’ Hall Diploma—passed your exams and that?”

“No . . . I’m a medical student. I took pharmacology in my last exam. I’m in my final year.”

“Hm . . . I shouldn’t have thought it. You look very young. Final year . . .” Then his eyes brightened. “Have you done your midwifery yet?”

“No, I shall do that later in the year.”

“That’s a pity . . . a pity. You could have been very useful to me in that way, keeping cases going, you know, so that I could be in at the finish. I could do twice the amount of midwifery that I do now if I had some one to keep an eye on them. Before the General Medical Council did away with unqualified assistants, I used to keep three of them: paid me well, too. Now I’ve got to do everything myself. It’s a dog’s life, but there’s money in it, I don’t mind telling you. Well, there’s no time to waste. What do you want?”

“I want a place to live in and my keep, and just enough money to keep me going till I’m qualified. That’s all. You’ll understand . . . I’m on my own, and I’ve just about ten pounds to carry me over a year. I hope you can give me a job.”

“I suppose you could take a hand with dressings and things like that?”

Edwin saw that the little man was out for bargaining, but as long as he could feel that something was being settled he didn’t really mind.

“Yes . . . I can do anything you like to use me for in your surgery hours. I can’t promise more. You see, I have to pass my final.”“You can learn a lot of useful things about general practice here,” said Dr. Harris. “It should be extremely useful to you. You see, I’ve been at this game for thirty years. It’s a great chance for you.” He took up a handful of silver from the open drawer and started to jingle it. “Look here, you’re wasting time.”

Edwin agreed.

“Well, suppose I take you on, I might be able to give you three . . . better say two pounds a month. You can feed up at my place and sleep here. If you sleep here, you’ll be able to take night-messages and telephone them up to me. There’s a bedroom fitted up. One of my assistants used to sleep here. How will that suit you?”

With a feeling of intense relief Edwin accepted.

“Very well, then, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t begin at once, just to get into the way of things.” He paused, and added as an after-thought: “We’ll count that you start from to-morrow.”

He led Edwin behind the green baize curtain at the back of his desk, disclosing a set of shelves and a counter stained with the rings of bottles and measuring glasses. At the end of the counter was a sink into which a tap with a tapered nozzle dripped dismally. One drawer held labels, another corks, a third a selection of eight-ounce, four-ounce, and two-ounce bottles. At the back of the counter stood a row of Winchester Quarts, of indefinite contents, labelled with the Roman numerals from one to nine. Dr. Harris swabbed the swimming counter with a rag that was already saturated with medicines.

“You can learn all you want in five minutes,” he said. “There’s no time for refinements in this sort of practice. These big bottles are all stock mixtures, and whatever they teach you in your universities, I can tell you that these nine mixtures will carry you through life. There you are . . . Number One: White Mixture. Number Two: Soda and Rhubarb. Number Three: Bismuth. You have to go easy with Number Three: Bismuth’s expensive. Number Four: Febrifuge . . . Liquor Ammond Acet: and that. Number Five: Iron and Mag:Sulph. And so on. . . . Number Nine: Mercury and Pot:Iod . . . you know what that’s for,” with a laugh, “we use a lot of that here. Now you’ve one ounce of each stock mixture to an eight-ounce bottle, and a two-tablespoonful dose. I used to put them up in six-ounce bottles; but if you give them eight ounces they think they’re getting more for the money: they don’t realise they’re getting eight doses instead of twelve, and that’s their lookout, isn’t it? Same proportions for children and infants, only you use the four and two-ounce bottles instead, with dessert-spoon and teaspoonful doses. Simple, isn’t it? But you want to simplify if you’re going to make money in these days. Now, is that quite clear?”

“Quite clear.”

“Well, then, when a patient comes in I have a look at him—with my experience you can tell in a moment—and I give you a slip of paper behind the curtain. Like this. ‘Mrs. Jones. No. 5. T.D.S.’ Mrs. means an eight-ounce bottle. One ounce of Number Five stock mixture. One tablespoonful three times a day. Then, if I put ‘4tis horis’ instead of ‘T.D.S.,’ it means a tablespoonful every four hours; but I only do that when I see they can afford to get through the bottle more quickly. You’ll find powders in that drawer. Antifebrin—it’s cheaper than phenacetin and caffein. And calomel for children. Then, as I was saying, while I have a look at the patient and ask him one or two questions you make up the medicine.”

“Suppose, when you’ve had a talk to him, you change your mind about the treatment.”

“I never change my mind. There’s no time for that,” said Dr. Harris. “And if I did we could change the medicine next time. But you needn’t worry about the treatment: that’s my part of the business. Why”—and the little man expanded—“I shouldn’t wonder if we got through as many as a hundred patients in a couple of hours, the two of us together. Now, are you ready?”

He left Edwin behind the curtain and rang his bell. A patient entered, and as soon as the doctor had said good-evening to her the prescription was passed behind the curtain and Edwin proceeded to fill a bottle from one of the Winchester Quarts. This business went on monotonously for another hour. Edwin dispensed mechanically in a kind of dream. He never saw a single patient; but little scraps of conversation showed him that most of them were suffering from the evils of poor housing and a sedentary life. It consoled him to think that most of the mixtures that he dispensed were relatively harmless. Sometimes, by an access of solicitude and deference in the doctor’s voice, he could gather that the patient was of a higher social degree, and he smiled to find, in these cases, that the mixture was invariably prescribed in four-hourly doses.

All the men, it appeared, were judged to be in need of White Mixture or Rhubarb: all the women demanded Iron and Mag:Sulph: all the children were treated with a treacly cough mixture or calomel powders. In the space of an hour he must have dispensed at least forty bottles of medicine, and towards the end of the evening he noticed that Dr. Harris became even more perfunctory in his examinations—if such a word were ever justified—and that signs of irritation began to show themselves in his voice. At last the waiting-room bell rang twice, and no patient appeared.

“That’s the lot,” said Dr. Harris, appearing from behind the curtain. “I think I’ll have a wash.” It was the first time that he had washed his hands in the whole of the evening. “Well, you see what it’s like,” he said, “I think I’ll have a nip of whisky.” He produced a vitriolic bottle from a cupboard and mixed some whisky with water in a medicine-measure.

“A good average day,” he said. “Three pounds ten.” He shovelled the silver from the drawer into a leather bag that weighed down his coat pocket. “That takes a lot of making at a shilling a time. Well, how do you like it?”

“I think I shall be able to manage,” said Edwin, who was not anxious to commit himself.

“You’d better come and see your room.”It was a bare bedroom on the first floor with iron bedstead and a dejected washhand-stand, but it seemed to Edwin that, at least, it would be quiet and free from distractions. “I shall be able to read here,” he thought, “and after all, it’s only for twelve months.”

“Not much to look at,” said Dr. Harris apologetically. “I’ll send you down some bedding to-night. I’ll expect you for breakfast at eight o’clock sharp. You’d better come along and have some supper now.”

“I think I’d better go and collect some of my things. I’ve been staying with a friend in his diggings.”

“All right. As you like,” said Dr. Harris. “Nine o’clock sharp to-morrow morning then? You have to be punctual if you’re to make money in this business.”

Edwin said good-night, keeping the key of the surgery. When the doctor had gone he went back into the curtained dispensary and tried to introduce a little order into the waste. A strange life, he thought . . . a strange and degrading life. If this were general practice, he wondered why he had ever despised his father’s trade, for surely there was more dignity in selling tooth-brushes than in dealing so casually with the diseases of human beings. “I must talk it over with old W.G.,” he thought. “He’s a sound man.” But he knew at the bottom of his heart that he couldn’t afford to speculate on the ethics of the case. All that mattered to him, for the present, was the necessity of finding a roof—any roof to shelter him and food to keep him alive. He was a beggar, and could not choose, and had every reason to be thankful for this or any solution of his difficulties.

“It sounds bad,” said W.G., when Edwin had expanded on the refinements of Dr. Harris’s medicine, “but, in a way, you’re lucky to have fallen on your feet so quickly. As a matter of fact, you don’t deserve it. You’re an old fool to have left home, you know. Now, there’s some chance of your appreciating how comfortable you were.”

Boyce was more sympathetic, entering with great pains and seriousness into the cause of Edwin’s spiritual nausea. The results of it pleased him in so far as they meant that in future Edwin would be living in North Bromwich, and promised a perpetuation of the delightful comradeship that they had enjoyed in the summer. “I expect we shall see a lot of you, old boy,” he said, “ambrosial evenings, you know.”

Edwin laughed. “The evenings won’t be exactly ambrosial. I shall be earning my two pounds a month filling eight-ounce bottles with rubbish at a shilling each. I shall feel like compounding in a felony. It’s the devil . . .”

III

And it was pretty bad. No more concerts or operas; no week-ends at Overton; no dinners at Joey’s; no possible diversion of any kind that impinged upon the hours between six and nine. And yet Edwin was happy. For the first time in his life, and at a price, he was realising what independence meant. Even the break at Halesby had passed off without any severe emotional disturbance. He had written to his father again, telling him his new address and what he was doing, and his father had replied in his formal business hand, not, indeed, with any offer of help, but with an implied approval of what he had done, enclosing a number of bills (opened) and a couple of second-hand book catalogues.

There was nothing unfriendly in the letter, no heroics of outraged paternity. Reading between the lines, Edwin felt that by consulting no interests but his own he had made an awkward situation easy for his father. In that case, he reflected, Mr. Ingleby might very well have made him an allowance. It gave him a sense of grim satisfaction to remember that he was still a minor and that even if he were too proud to use it, he still held the weapon of his father’s legal responsibility in reserve, but the next moment he was ashamed of this reflection: when it came to a point the element of pathos in his father’s history and person always disarmed him.

It was enough that he should be happy, principally for the reason that his days were so full and any moments of relaxation came to him with a more poignant pleasure than any he had known before. He had very little time for reading outside the subjects of his final exam., that now overwhelmed him with an increasing weight. For pleasure he read little but lyrical poetry, finding his chief enjoyment in the last hour before he fell asleep in Dr. Harris’s empty lock-up, with a copy of Mackail’s selections from the Greek Anthology that he had salved from one of the second-hand bookstalls in Cobden Street.

In spite of himself, he was beginning to like Charles Altrincham-Harris. He didn’t for one moment alter his opinion of the degradation to which the man had subjected the nobilities of his calling, his meanness and his avarice. In his dealings with the unfortunate people who came to the shilling doctor for treatment, he still abhorred him; he knew him to be a person whose mind was a sink of pseudo-professional prurience, and whose body and habits were unkempt and unclean; but for all this, he could not deny the fact that in his relations with his dispenser he displayed a curious vein of natural kindness, and that his ideals, apart from his loathsome business, were of a touching simplicity.

Every morning they met at breakfast. The doctor believed in good food as a basis for work, and his housekeeper, a small, shrewish woman of fifty, was an excellent cook. At the breakfast table he would impart to Edwin the more salacious paragraphs of the morning paper, which he always opened at the page that contained the records of the divorce-court. He took no notice of politics. “They can do what they like as long as they don’t legislate about us.” And though Edwin felt sincerely that the sooner his kind were legislated for, the better, he was thankful that his employer was not a political bore or bigot.

After breakfast Dr. Harris always smoked a clay pipe in his carpet slippers, a present from a patient who, for some unimaginable reason, had been grateful. Then they would walk down to 563 Lower Sparkdale together in the fresh morning air, and the combination of gentle exercise with deeper breathing would impel the little man to make Edwin the confidant of his ambitions.

“Twelve thousand pounds,” he would say, “that’s all I want. Twelve thousand pounds. Five hundred a year. Then I shall find a quiet little place in the country and have a rest. Keep bees and poultry: that’s what I shall do, and smoke a pipe in the garden in the evening when the poor devil that buys my practice is going down to the surgery to rake in the shillings.”

In these moments he would reflect on the beginning of his career. “I took a good degree, you know. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, would you? No . . . I had bad luck, and a bad wife, which is the worst sort of luck. She lost me my practice, and so I grew sick of medicine. I couldn’t be bothered with the social side of it. Money was what I wanted: money and quiet. And so I took a dose of medicine: fifteen years at a shilling a bottle, with advice thrown in, and then a quiet life. That was all I wanted. And I’ve very nearly got it. Another year or two will make me secure. Security . . . that’s what I wanted. Well, here we are. . . .”

So the morning’s work began, and no morning, as far as Edwin could see, was different from any other. He was thankful when the clock struck ten, and Dr. Harris ruthlessly locked his surgery door. Then, fortunately, he was obliged to take the next tram to the hospital; for if he had lingered, as he was sometimes forced to do on Sundays, Dr. Harris would have lit his pipe and proceeded to regale him with anecdotes of medical experiences that always related to sex, on which he dwelt with a slow, deliberate satisfaction, like a dog that nuzzles a piece of garbage.

The aspects of medical science that related to sex were the only ones in which he was really interested. He possessed an expensive and eclectic library of books on these subjects, to which he was always adding others that he bought from the colporteurs of medical pornography who are continually pestering the members of his profession. These he would pore over at night, when Edwin was providentially engaged in reading for his final. “Medicine is an extremely interesting profession from that point of view,” he would say, and indeed the dispenser soon discovered that this aspect of the medical profession supplied Dr. Harris with a great number of his patients. In the squalid underways of the city he had established a reputation for skill and discretion in the treatment of contagious disease, and the unfortunate victims who came to Lower Sparkdale from more reputable suburbs were ready to pay through the nose for his advice.

One night, hearing behind his curtain the overtures of one of these cases that he knew so well, he suddenly became aware of a tone that was familiar in the patient’s voice. Listening more closely he could have sworn it was the voice of Griffin. Evidently it was a person of some consequence, for Dr. Harris devoted as much as five minutes to his examination.“I suppose you wouldn’t like a prescription?”

“No, you’d better make it up for me,” said the voice that resembled that of Griffin.

“Certainly . . . delighted.”

Dr. Harris breathed heavily, as he always did when writing a prescription, and then passed the slip of paper behind the curtain to Edwin. Edwin, looking at once for the name at the head of the prescription, was disappointed. The patient had preferred to remain anonymous. He dispensed the medicine, and when Dr. Harris had said good-bye to the patient he could not resist the temptation of looking from behind the curtain to verify his suspicions. He could only see the back of the departing patient, but the suspicion filled him with a queer sensation of awe.

It showed him a new aspect of medicine that had never occurred to him in hospital life, but would, no doubt, be present often enough in private practice. Griffin was a person well known to Edwin and his friends, a person about whose adventures and their consequences he would easily and naturally have spoken. If he had retailed the incident to Maskew and W.G. in the Dousita, it would have been the occasion of a little pity and probably some irreverent mirth. But he saw at once that he could do nothing of the sort. He had become, for the first time in his life, the keeper of a professional secret. For the rest of the world, however interested, Griffin and Griffin’s disease must not exist.

Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, reflecting that in his future life he would in all probability become possessed of many such secrets and that there might be occasions on which his sense of duty would be divided between the traditional discretion of Hippocrates and the instincts of humanity. He invented a hypothetical case for his own confusion. Supposing he had a sister to whom Griffin was engaged: supposing that they were going to be married in a week after this uncomfortable knowledge had come into his possession, endangering the whole of her future happiness and perhaps her life: what, in that case, should be his attitude towards the question of professional secrecy? What would he do? Would he be justified in telling her what he knew? Hippocrates said “No”; but Hippocrates’ refusal narrowed the field of possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own shame and threatening him with . . . what? Not with exposure—for that Hippocrates forbade. Obviously with death. And that would be murder. . . .

Balancing the relative heinousness of murder and perjury, Edwin began to laugh at himself, and while he did this a curious reminiscence came into his mind: the picture of a small boy, who resembled him in very little but had been himself, lying in the hedge side of Murderer’s Cross Road, on the downs above St. Luke’s, reflecting on the same problem of the justification of homicide and saying to himself as he brooded on his wrongs: “I can quite easily understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.” And this picture tempting him further, he relapsed into a dream of those strange, remote days tinged with extremes of happiness and misery, and both of them unreal. . . .

He thought no more of Griffin.

CHAPTER IX
EASY ROW

I

For a whole year Edwin inhabited the room above the lock-up surgery in Lower Sparkdale. It was a happy year, for into it was crowded a great wealth of experience and elevating discovery to which the mechanical drudgery of Dr. Harris’s dispensing room acted as ballast. In his medical studies he began to feel for the first time the fruits of his earlier labours: to realise that all medicine was little more than an intelligent application to life of the theoretical subjects that he had mastered without reasoning. From the very first day of his experience in the dissecting room there was nothing in all that he had learnt that had not its direct bearing on his present practice; and the reflection that he possessed all this essential knowledge ready for use was exhilarating in itself. Again, the fact that he was now standing on his feet, actually earning his own living, gave him a greater happiness than he had ever known in his days of dependence; it made him accept the routine of Lower Sparkdale as a penance, cheering him with the thought that so much sacrifice was really necessary before he should be master of himself.

He was lonely; but this seemed inevitable, for no person in his senses could be expected to grind along in a steam-tram to Lower Sparkdale for the sake of his company; and the final year was too full of strenuous studies for all of them to allow of much indulgence in the joys of friendship. Matthew Boyce made a few heroic attempts. He even spent several evenings in Harris’s dispensary, finding the shilling doctor’s clinical and commercial methods something of a joke. They were no joke to Edwin: he had recognised long ago that they were no more than Harris’s solution of the problem of living. The doctor saw nothing unworthy in them. He did his best, within his limited knowledge, for his patients. He was kind, and even, on occasion, generous. If there were fault to be found it must be with the State that allowed such ignorant men to deal with precious human bodies, and not with him. When the first humour of the experience was exhausted Boyce came to the surgery no more. Little by little Edwin’s insulation became more complete, and in the end he relapsed into the degree of loneliness that he had known in his early days at St. Luke’s.

Given the opportunity, he almost enjoyed it. There was something remote and secret about this little room in the corner house above the grinding trams, and when the surgery emptied at night and he went upstairs to work he would find himself suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of thankfulness for the fact that it was so peculiarly his: that his own books and pictures and clothes had made it individual and different from any other room in the whole of the city. And when the town slept, and he sat on reading into the early hours of the morning, the lonely chamber was like a lighthouse set in seas of night, and dreams of the misty lands beyond Severn, of Mendip couched in darkness, or of the sleeping wolds by Overton, would beat at his lighted window like seabirds in the night.

At first the sacrifices that his poverty demanded had seemed no more than part of a new and exciting game. It was some months before he realised that, literally, he could not afford the indulgence of a single pleasure that cost money. If he were to free himself from the bondage of Dr. Harris’s dispensary it was absolutely necessary that he should save enough money to pay his examination fees. He began to find a new delight in carefully hoarded shillings, and this practice threw him into a curious sympathy with his employer. Each of them, on a different scale, was committed to a present sacrifice for the sake of future freedom; and this reflection reconciled him in some degree to the inconveniences that Dr. Harris’s miserly ways inflicted on him.

It was galling, none the less, to find that he could mot afford to buy a single new book, to hire a piano, or to hear any music except the free recitals by which the municipal organist convinced the citizens of North Bromwich that they were getting something for their money, in debauches of sound that reminded them how much the organ had cost. Sometimes, to Edwin’s joy, he played the fugues of the Well-tempered Clavier, and on their wide streams he would be carried from springs of mountain sweetness, by weir and cataract to solemn tidal waters and lose himself at last in seas of absolute music. Time after time he thanked God for Bach, and walked home to his garret like a man who has gazed upon the splendour of a full sea and carries its tumult in his mind far inland.

Through all these experiences Edwin was so possessed by the one idea of holding on until his final exam. was over that he scarcely missed the society of his friends. He knew that his friendship with Boyce was founded too deeply in common experience ever to be shaken by his own changed circumstances: it might lapse, but it could never be broken. He always felt that the future held more for them than the past had ever given; but his other friends, Maskew and Martin in particular, seemed to have been translated to another place of existence. In the wards and in the lecture theatres he would meet them; but elsewhere they had nothing in common with his way of existence.

Even W.G. seemed gradually to be slipping away from him—an unreasonable state, for Edwin, after all, was now for the first time sharing something of the big man’s early experience. For several months they had scarcely spoken, and then, one day, nearly ran into each other’s arms in Sackville Row, and almost mechanically wandered off to the Dousita together. In the shades of the smoking-room nothing had changed. When they sank into the cushions of their favourite corner Miss Wheeler approached them with an exact replica of the smile with which, four years before, she had engaged the heart of Maskew; and when she took their order, she stood on one leg in exactly the same position, leaning, with a hint of tiredness that was not surprising in a young woman who habitually breathed tobacco smoke in place of oxygen, with her hand on the curtain at the side of their settee.

“I never see Mr. Maskew now,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t think whatever ’as happened to all you boys, I’m sure.”

She brought them coffee, and W.G., who had scarcely spoken, but whose knitted brows testified to the pressure of some urgent problem, said:—

“Well, how do you like it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Being on your own.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Edwin.

“I never thought you’d stick it,” W.G. confessed. “I didn’t think you had it in you. You see, in your case there was never the least necessity for it.”

“There was, you know—”

“I could have understood it if you’d had a regular bust-up. I should certainly have stayed at home if the governor hadn’t booted me out. You never had anything of that kind.”

“No . . . not exactly. But the position was the same. I had a sort of . . . of emotional cold-douche. I was awfully sensitive about my mother. My father and I were all wrong. We’d really nothing in common. And it’s turned out all right. That’s the main thing.”

“You’re a quixotic ass, my son. No . . . that’s not the word, but it’s the same sort of thing. It was really damned foolish of you.”

“It’s jolly sound to stand on your own feet. You know where you are for the first time. It was only uncomfortable because he was really awfully decent. He is now: but he hasn’t the faintest glimmering of my point of view.”

“They rarely have,” said W.G. gloomily. “Still, you haven’t made such an ass of yourself as I have.”

“Something new?”

“Yes . . . I’m married.”

“Good God!”

“It isn’t as bad as that,” W.G. chuckled. “I thought it would come as a bit of a shock to you.”

“But why on earth—?”

“Well, you see she was awfully unhappy at home. Brute of a father. And we simply got tired of waiting. That’s all. You must come and see us. She always remembered your clerking in her ward. We’re living in furnished rooms in Alvaston. It’s an amazing experience, you know, marriage. Quite different from anything else of the kind.” In view of W.G.’s experience in these matters Edwin was ready to take this for granted.

“I should think it is a damned funny thing,” he said.

They parted. There was something almost pathetic to Edwin in W.G.’s hot handclasp. He felt that W.G. was up against something far bigger than anything that had happened to him before: a strange, momentous adventure, yet one that was thrilling and, in a way, enviable. Once again he found himself admiring the big man’s desperate daring. W.G. with a wife, and probably, in a few years, children! . . . Assuredly they were all growing old.

II

In all that summer Edwin scarcely saw a patch of living green except the leprous plane-trees that sickened in the hospital square. The current of his life flowed slowly through the culverts of grimy brick that led from Lower Sparkdale to the Infirmary. He became part of the stream of dusty humanity that set citywards and back again with the regularity of a tide. In December he came to the end of his penance. The final examination was fixed for the beginning of January, and before he could sit for it, he was compelled to take a course of practical midwifery, twenty cases in all, which compelled his residence for a couple of weeks in the neighbourhood of the Prince’s Hospital, the institution to which this department was attached. Matthew Boyce and he had decided a year before that they would do this work together, and though the unusual strain of the fortnight in Easy Row would be a doubtful preliminary to the effort of the final examination, the two friends had always looked forward to the experience.

The authorities of the Prince’s Hospital, lacking obstetrical wards, had made this course the opportunity for establishing an Out-patient Department that could deal with ten cases a week at the nominal charge of five shillings each. The students worked in pairs, and though they could never be sure of attending their cases together, the resident staff of the hospital, and, if necessary, a consultant physician, were always available in case of an emergency. Edwin and Boyce were housed in one of the faded Georgian buildings that faced the hospital. Its lower stories, like those of all its neighbours, were devoted to theatrical lodgings; but a special night-bell, polished by the moist hands of forty anxious husbands every month, communicated with the upper room in which the resident students attempted to sleep. The house was as well known to all the poorer people in the neighbouring warrens as were the faces pale with sleeplessness of the students who issued from it, carrying the black bags that were symbolical of their labours, a source of mysterious speculation to the children of the district, and of amusement to the “professionals” who inhabited the front rooms.

On a Monday morning in December the landlady received Edwin and Boyce and installed them in a small room at the back of the ground-floor infested with portraits of smiling young ladies in tights, inscribed, with the most dashing signatures imaginable, to herself. Mrs. Meadows was evidently very proud of these decorations and called attention to the most blatant pair of legs by polishing the glass of their frame with her apron.

“I hope you gentlemen will be comfortable,” she said. “Not that I doubt it. I don’t have many complaints.” The statement was a challenge, and implied that if there should be any complaints the lodgers might look to themselves.

“It’s a nice fresh room,” she said, throwing open a French window that disclosed a small patch of black earth that had once been covered with grass but was now untenanted by any living organisms but cats and groundsel.“I like them to keep the window open. It takes away the smell of the gentlemen’s disinfectant. Not but what it’s clean, I dare say.”

Edwin and Boyce would have assented in any case if it were only to release the composite lodging-house smell that penetrated the room from the adjoining “domestic offices,” and Mrs. Meadows’s kitchen where, it would be imagined, turnip-tops simmered day and night upon a gas-ring.

“Then there’s a pianoforte,” she said, hesitating at the dusty portiere. “I find that professionals like a pianoforte. It’s cheery like.”

In a little while it became apparent that the professionals liked a pianoforte, in every one of the thirty odd houses within earshot, even if they could not play one. From the hour of midday, when they rose, until six o’clock, when they betook themselves to their various theatres, the pianos of Easy Row were never silent.

“It’s no good trying to do any work in this place,” said Edwin.

“There won’t be any time, anyway,” said Boyce. “You wait till the fun begins.”

They lunched together on steak-and-kidney pudding and turnip-tops with a brand of bottled beer in which Mrs. Meadows showed an admirable taste, and in the early afternoon the fun began.

From the beginning, Fate had decreed a complication by deciding that Mrs. Hadley, back of number four, court sixteen, Granby Street, and Mrs. Higgins over number fifty-four Rea Barn Lane, should conspire to increase the population of North Bromwich at the same moment. Mr. Hadley and Mr. Higgins achieved a dead heat, arriving on the doorstep together in a dripping perspiration with messages of an equal urgency.

“This is rather rotten,” said Boyce. “Which of these ladies will you take?”

“I’ll have Mrs. Higgins,” said Edwin. “I suppose the bag’s all right?”

The bag was right enough, though it contained very little that could do any harm, and smelt abominably of Lysol. Mr. Higgins, still out of breath, with beads of sweat sweeping an alluvium of metal dust into the furrows of his cheeks, carried the bag for Edwin. For all his exhaustion, Mr. Higgins wanted to run, and Edwin, walking with long strides beside him, was in danger of losing his dignity by being swept into the same degree of panic. The reflection that this would betray his inexperience held him back.

“The nurse said very urgent, doctor,” Mr. Higgins panted.

“Yes . . . yes. You mustn’t excite yourself. It’ll be all right.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Higgins doubtfully, “you’re well up in these sort of cases, doctor? I expect you’ve seen a lot of them?”

Edwin wished he had been able to grow a moustache for the occasion.

“Hundreds,” he said.

Mr. Higgins gave a sigh of relief. “That’s a good thing. That’s a very good thing. You see, I’m nairvous, doctor. I lost my fairst over it, and I don’t want to lose this one. Very young she is.”

“Is this her first?”“Yes, doctor.”

Another bit of bad luck!

Through a maze of gritty streets they hurried, reaching, at last, a house beside a corner “public” which a cluster of women, gossiping in their aprons on the doorstep, proclaimed as the site of this momentous birth. One of them snatched the black bag from Mr. Higgins. “You get away, ’Iggins, and ’ave a pint of beer quiet like. This baint no place for an ’usband. This way, doctor. Here she is, poor lamb.”

She pushed her way up the stairs, breathing heavily. Her bunchy skirts filled the staircase, which was no wider than a loft-ladder and very dark.

“’Ere ’e is,” she cried triumphantly, as she pushed open a matchboard door. “’Ere ’e is. ’Ere’s the doctor. Now you won’t be long, my lover. ’E’ll ’elp you. You’ll ’elp ’er, won’t you, doctor?”

She deposited the talismanic bag triumphantly on the foot of the bed; then she winked at Edwin: “I’ll go and keep ’Iggins out of the way,” she said.

“I’m that glad you’ve come, doctor,” said the nurse. She was a little shrivelled woman, with a nervous smile and her hair packed into a black net with a wide mesh that made her whole bead sombre and forbidding. Her lips twitched when she smiled, and Edwin, who had been counting on the moral support of her experience, saw at once that she was even more anxious than himself. He was soon to know that the women who acted as professional midwives in the North Bromwich slums were usually widows left without means, who adopted this profession with no other qualification than a certain wealth of subjective experience, on which they were careful to insist. The claim “I’ve had eight of them myself, so I ought to know,” did not atone for the fact that they didn’t actually know anything at all. Mrs. Brown, the lady to whose mercies the trustful Mr. Higgins had committed his second, was a timid specimen of the class. Beneath her protestations of experience her soul quaked with terror, and a hazy conviction that if anything went wrong, she, the unregistered, would probably be committed for manslaughter, reduced her to a state of dazed incompetence in which she heard without hearing Edwin’s none too confident directions. She went downstairs tremulously to bring hot water, and Edwin was left alone with his patient.

“It won’t be long, doctor, will it?” she said.

“Of course not . . . of course not,” said Edwin. He felt very much of a fraud, for he hadn’t the least idea how long it would be. The whole picture was moving: the patient, a girl of twenty-four or five, her honey-coloured hair drawn back tightly from a face that was blotched already with tears, but not ill-looking: the humility of the little bedroom with its hired furniture and certain humble attempts at ornamentation: pink ribbon bows upon the curtains, a ridiculous china ornament on the mantelpiece, and brass knobs at the foot of the bedstead, so polished that they had already become loose. No doubt Mrs. Higgins the second had been in respectable suburban service, and these worthy efforts were the signs of an attempt to introduce into Rea Barn Lane the amenities of Alvaston. She lay quietly on the bed, gazing at nothing while Edwin unpacked his bag. He did not look at her, but became suddenly conscious that her body had given a kind of jump and that her hands were desperately clutching a towel that Mrs. Brown had knotted to the rail at the bottom of the bed. Then he heard the joints of the bedstead creak. “It’s all right. Cheer up. . . . It won’t be long,” he said.

Mrs. Brown emerged panting from the stairway with hot water. “That’s right, my lover, that’s right. . . . That’s another one less. Now, let the doctor have a look at you.”

A strange business. . . . It was a moment that might have been difficult; but Edwin soon realised that the seriousness of the occasion, the fact that this young creature’s life was veritably in his hands, made modesty seem a thing of no account. In the eyes of this woman Edwin was not a young man but an agency of relief from pain. In the body that pain dominated there could be no room for blushes. Edwin, trying to summon all his hardly learned theory to his aid in practice, was suddenly impressed with the obligations that this confidence imposed on him. He remembered the terms of the Hippocratic oath. Yea . . a goodly heritage!

“Is it all right, doctor?” said the anxious voice of Mrs. Brown.

“Yes, it’s all right.”

“Thank the Lord for that! You hear what the doctor says, my lover—”

“But it will be a long time yet.”

“Oh, don’t say that, doctor, don’t say that,” Mrs. Higgins wailed. “You aren’t going to leave me?”

“It’s no good staying here now,” he said, as gently as he could. “It’s really all right. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Can’t you help her a bit, doctor?”

Of course he couldn’t. A business of that kind would mean calling in the house-surgeon from the Prince’s. He was determined not to be driven into a panic, though this would have been easy enough, when he was convinced that the case was taking a normal though inevitably lengthy course.

“I expect you’ll want me again some time this evening,” he said.

Mrs. Brown showed him downstairs. “You’re sure it is all right, aren’t you, doctor?” she said.

“Perfectly all right. You know what a first case is.”

“I’d ought to,” said Mrs. Brown proudly. “I’ve had eight myself.”

He trudged back to Easy Row, where the professionals’ pianos, tuned in quarter-tones, were already combining to show their catholicity in musical taste. Boyce was drowsing in an easy-chair with the Greek Anthology open in his lap.

“Well, how’s your Mrs. Higgins?” he asked lazily.

“Oh, she’s all right. A primip. Is Mrs. Hadley through her little troubles?”

“B.B.A. Born before arrival. A soft job. Saves a lot of trouble.”

“My good lady will haul us out in the middle of the night, damn her!” said Edwin. A conventional mode of expression, for he didn’t in the least feel like damning Mrs. Higgins. In his mind he still carried the picture of her plain hair and blotched face: he could hear the sound of that sudden shudder and the noise of the bedstead creaking.

The evening passed quietly. They tried to read, but found the feeling of suspense made that impossible. No message came from Mrs. Higgins, and as they were almost certain to be called out in the night, they went to bed early. While they were undressing, Boyce humming softly the Liebestod from Tristan, the bell in their bedroom rang.

“Mrs. Higgins,” said Edwin. “I’d better go and see.”

He groped his way downstairs. In the front room a party of music-hall artistes were making a noisy supper. Before he could reach the door the bell rang again, and when he opened it, a big man whose breath smelt of liquor, lurched into the hall.

“Are you the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“You’re to come at once to thirty-four Greville Street. It’s the missus. The nurse says it’s urgent.”

The nurse always said it was urgent. Boyce came downstairs grumbling.

“We’d better go together.”

“What about my friend, Mrs. Higgins?”

“Oh, damn Mrs. Higgins!” said Boyce.

It was a clear and frosty night, in which all points of light, whether of starshine, or street-lamps, or of blue sparks crackling from the tramway cables, shone brightly. The Greville Street husband lurched along beside them, just sufficiently awake to show them the way through a maze of rectangular byways to a street that lay upon the outer edge of the district that the hospital covered. The chill clarity of the air dispelled sleep. It was even pleasant to be walking there, for at this time of the night the town was so empty that they might almost have been walking over a country road.

“Here it is,” said the husband thickly.

Boyce and Edwin entered together. The front room of the house was crowded with people who should have been in bed. They sat clustered about a table on which stood a number of bottles from one of which the messenger had evidently extracted his peculiar perfume. In the corner chair, next to the window, an old woman in a lace cap had fallen asleep. Opposite her a very dirty old man toasted his shins in front of the fire. A strapping girl with dark, untidy hair, and an almost aggressive physical beauty was holding forth shrilly to a group of three women who had wandered in to drink and gossip from a neighbouring court.

“Here they are,” said the husband sullenly, “two on ’em.”

“My God! . . . Two of them? Is that all?” said the dark girl, examining and, as it seemed, approving.

Upstairs they found a midwife of another but equally characteristic type: a fat woman whose attention was divided between the patient in bed and the cheerful company in the front room. On the surface she was a little patronising, an attitude that the two students’ inexperience made it difficult for them to resent. “I know what you doctors want,” she said, standing with her sleeves rolled up over her red forearms. “Plenty of hot water, that’s what you want. I’ve got some disinfectant too. I’ve often been with the ’ospital doctors. Now we shan’t be long.”

She bustled downstairs, looking into the front room for a drink on her way to the kitchen. Boyce, confident in the completion of his first case, took the lead in questioning the patient, a slightly older version of the dark sanguine girl they had seen below. Her whole attitude towards the business, though less pathetic than that of the unforgotten Mrs. Higgins, was equally moving. It implied such a cheerful and courageous acceptance of life and this most uncomfortable of its experiences. Her amazing vitality pervaded the room. It could be seen in her masterful smile, in the grip of her red fingers on the knotted towel, in the deep suffusion of her face. A jolly woman, built in the mould of a fighter, who would neither take quarter nor give it. When Boyce had examined her she smiled, disclosing a fine set of teeth, and solemnly winked.

“Well, doctor, what about it?”

“Listen to ’er,” said the midwife, chuckling. “That’s the way to take it!”

“Well, it’s all right, you know, but it won’t be just yet awhile.”

“My God . . . I didn’t pay the ’ospital five bob for you to tell me that. Look ’ere, doctor, my elder sister ’ad a horrible time with her first. ’Ad to ’ave it took off ’er. Be a sport, doctor, and give us a smell of chloroform. Come on, now! There’s two on you. . . . ’Ard-’earted devils all you doctors are. Bain’t they, Mrs. Perkins?” She smiled at the midwife, and then, suddenly, her face changed and she clutched at the knotted towel. “Oh, my!” she said, and Edwin saw the veins in her neck swell, and heard her clench her teeth.

“That’s the way, dearie. That’s the way,” said Mrs. Perkins, gritting her own teeth in sympathy and smoothing back the hair from the patient’s brow.

Edwin and Boyce were debating as to whether it were worth while staying when a messenger from the hospital arrived from below to say that Mrs. Hadley, Boyce’s patient of the afternoon, was “took worse,” and so Edwin was left alone once more in the squalor of the patient’s room. He sat waiting in a chair that was supposed to be easy, listening to the conversation of the woman and her nurse. Most of it was family history of a scandalous kind, and the manner of its expression was extremely frank. In the course of his hospital work he had never before realised the extraordinary contradictions of the code by which the talk of the working-class is governed. In its mixture of delicacies and blatancies it amazed him. Both the women were fluent gossips, and the conversation never ceased, except in those moments of acute and sudden tension when the patient’s hands clutched at her towel and the midwife mopped her brow. Then, when the upstairs room was silent, a murmur of laughter and loud voices would come up the stairs from below. In this family, at any rate, the occasion of a birth did not lack celebration. Even the patient was curious about what was happening downstairs. “What’s our Susan doing?” she said from time to time.An interminable business. As the night wore on it grew very chilly, and Edwin shivered in his chair. The case hung fire unaccountably, and in this, the first of many such cold vigils, he fell into a strange mood, often to be repeated, in which the sublime influences of night and solitude combined to purge his reflections of pettiness and showed him what an unimaginable mystery his own life was. The patient fell into an uneasy doze. The midwife nodded in her chair, snatching up her head with a conscious jerk whenever it lolled over her fat bosom. The smelly oil-lamp on the mantelpiece gave an occasional sputter when a drop of water was sucked up into the wick. In the room below the excited talk had petered out and only a sound of soft snoring was heard, like the breathing of cows in a byre.

Edwin thought of many things. It seemed to him that his mind burned clear as frosty starlight lighting forgotten memories of his childhood. He thought of his own mother. He wondered if she had lain like the woman on the bed on the night when he was born. He wondered if it had been in the least like this, and whether another doctor, whose name he did not even know, had sat by the fireplace in the little room at Halesby waiting and seeing his own life stretched out before him in this light of perilous clarity. He thought of St. Luke’s—of a thousand small things that had lain submerged for years and now appeared unbidden. The strangeness of his own experience, the elements of linked circumstance that had combined to twist his life into its present state and make him what he was. He thought of his father, with an unusual degree of charity, realising that this man too was no more than a slave of the same blind influences driven hither and thither in spite of his innate goodwill. Edwin was ashamed to think that he had been angry with him. In his present mood it seemed to him an unreasonable thing that one should be angry with any human creature. Pity . . . yes, and love—but never anger. So, like a devotee in a Tibetan lamasery, he saw his fellow creatures, his father, himself, the midwife, and the woman on the bed, bound helpless to the revolving wheel which is the earth. And the earth seemed very small beneath the stars. . . .

At two o’clock in the morning the handsome girl from downstairs, who was the patient’s sister, came softly into the room and asked the midwife if she would like a cup of tea. The patient blinked at het with red eyes.

“How is it going, Sally?” said the sister.

“Oh, it’s all right. I suppose it’s got to be worse before it’s better,” she said, with a laugh. “Ask the doctor if he’ll have some tea too.”

Edwin accepted gratefully. It was harsh stuff that had been standing on the hob downstairs for some hours already. Mrs. Perkins was easily persuaded into doctoring hers with a tablespoonful of brandy from the bottle that is a regular constituent of the working class layette. The sister sat at the foot of the bed and stared lazily at Edwin.

“You look tired, doctor,” she said.

Edwin admitted that he had had a biggish day. “You ought to get a bit of sleep,” said the dark girl. “Sorry there bain’t no spare beds in the house; but you can turn in with me if you like.”

She looked so daringly provocative that Edwin had a horrible suspicion that she meant it; but it was evidently the sort of joke that Greville Street understood, for the patient on the bed cried, “Ethel, you are a cough-drop, you’ll make the doctor blush,” and Mrs. Perkins rocked with laughter until she spilt her tea.

“Well, why should you have all the fun, Sally? It isn’t every day we get a nice young man in the house.”

“Fun . . .,” said the patient wryly. “You’ll know all about this sort of fun some day.”

“Not just yet, thank you,” said Ethel. “I can look after myself better than that.”

She went downstairs again. Edwin was beginning to feel a little unhappy about the case. To his inexperience the long delay seemed abnormal, and his imagination presented to him a series of textbook disasters. While he stood doubting whether he should give himself away by sending to the hospital for the house-surgeon, he was startled by a sudden cry. Now, at any rate, there was no doubt about it. At this rate, he thought, it could not be long. But it took three hours: three hours of desperate struggle in which he could give no help, though the thing was so fierce that he found his sympathies snatched up into it: so that he held his breath and clenched his hands and felt his own temples bursting with effort. There had been no experience like it. As he sat at the bedside with the patient’s fingers clasped about his wrist, he had the feeling that this woman, who had joked with him half an hour before with the dry, courageous cynicism that colours the philosophy of her class, was not an individual human soul any longer; not a woman at all, but a mass of straining, tortured muscle animated by the first force of life. So it had been since the first woman cried out in the night under the tangles of Caucasus: so it would always be: the most sublime and terrible of all physical experiences, a state of sheer physical possession, more powerful than any spiritual ecstasy imaginable.

At five o’clock the baby was born—a boy, and Mrs. Perkins, standing by with a skein of twisted thread in her hand, danced with nervousness. Edwin’s hands also trembled; but his heart was lightened with a sudden relief, as though the labour had been his and his also the accomplishment. A palpably ridiculous state of mind . . . but it took him like that.

The dark girl put her head in at the door. She was very pale now. Had the whole household shared in these physical throes?

“Is it all right?” she said.

“Yes . . . it’s a boy. A beautiful boy.”

“Hallo, Eth,” said a quiet voice from the bed. “Go and tell Jim.”

It was the first word the patient had spoken.

A moment later she opened her eyes and stared in a dazed way at Edwin. She smiled. She was a woman again—an extraordinarily chastened woman—and somehow strangely beautiful. “Thank you, doctor,” she said. “You ’elped me ever so. Did I be’ave very bad, Mrs. Perkins?”

“Bad? You be’aved fine,” said Mrs. Perkins, wrapping the baby in a blanket and putting it in the fender.

The patient gave a deep sigh and seemed to relapse into her thoughts. From time to time she would say a couple of words in a weak-contented voice.

“’As Eth told Jim?” she asked several times, and then: “What’ll mother think?”

“You be quiet, my lover,” said the midwife. “Don’t you disturb yourself with talking.”

At last she said suddenly: “I’m better now,” and asked if she might see the baby. Mrs. Perkins unwrapped the blanket from a red and frowning forehead and showed it to her. She touched its cheek with her finger and smiled miraculously. The action seemed to bring her submerged personality to the surface again.

“Ugly little b—,” she said, with a happy laugh. “Looks as if ’e’d been on the booze.”

“I shan’t forget the way you ’elped me, doctor,” she said again, when Edwin left the house. Although it was still dark, the workmen’s trams had begun to run, and lights appeared in the lower windows of public houses where hot soup was on sale. When he entered the bedroom of their lodging, Edwin found, and envied, Boyce sleeping stertorously with the blankets pulled over his head and an overcoat on his feet. Three hours later, when the landlady came to call them, he woke, and explained to Edwin the excitements of his own night: how, in the middle of it, Edwin’s own Mrs. Higgins had called him out (“decent little woman,” said Boyce), and how, from sixteen Granby Street, he had been called to a case at the other end of the district in a common lodging-house kept by a Pole.

“No hot water . . . no soap . . . nothing but a bucket that they’d used for scrubbing the floors. Not even a bed! Just a straw mattress with a couple of grey blankets on it. Two other children and a man in the room. And crawling! I’ve stripped and had a rub down with a towel, but I feel as if they were all over me now. You couldn’t see them on the grey blankets, you know.”

“Sounds dismal. Had they a capable woman? My Mrs. Perkins wasn’t up to much.”

“Midwife? My dear chap, they didn’t run to luxuries like that. It is a bit thick, isn’t it? when a modern surgeon-accoucheur is reduced to washing the baby with his own soap. As a matter of fact, it was an extraordinarily interesting performance. The thing felt as if it would break. But seriously, you know, this sort of thing teaches you a bit about twentieth century housing.”

“Yes, it’s pretty bad,” said Edwin. “There’s one thing about it: working all night like this gives you a terrific appetite.”

III

For a few days the extreme novelty of their adventure sustained them, but after five nights of broken or obliterated sleep, the presence of the night-bell at their bedside stood for a symbol of perpetual unrest. Their days were spent in visiting patients whom they had attended. All examination work was made impossible by the fatigue that follows want of sleep, and the fact that they were committed to a kind of enforced idleness made their sojourn in Easy Row almost as much a holiday as the great summer days at Overton.

Both of them found that they could not even read for pleasure; and so the undisturbed hours of the day were passed in talk and in music. Mrs. Meadows’s piano had suffered under the fingers and thumbs of countless guests; but Edwin and Boyce shared the cost of a tuner and worked together through the Wagner scores and the subtler treasures that lay hidden in the songs of Hugo Wolf. They had few visitors, for this community of taste had already begun to isolate them from their student friends; but Boyce’s father, the poet, often came to have tea with them and to share their music, a man as versatile and sanguine as Meredith’s Roy Richmond, and yet so versed in every variety of knowledge and so reverent of beauty that Edwin felt there was no such company in the world: one who took all beauty and knowledge for his province.

One afternoon a message came to the house in Easy Row from the hospital, and as Mrs. Meadows was engaged in some obscure adjustment of her toilet, Edwin went to the door to receive it. He took the message, and was returning when another figure appeared on the path. It was that of a young girl of his own age, or, perhaps, a little older, and she hurried forward when she saw that he was closing the door. He waited.“You weren’t going to shut me out, were you?” she said. She smiled, and Edwin saw that her eyes were of a warm hazel such as sunshine reveals in peaty river water. Before them Edwin found himself blushing.

“No, indeed,” he said. “Do you want Mrs. Meadows? I’ll go and tell her.”

“Mrs. Meadows? This is thirty-seven, isn’t it?”

“Yes . . . thirty-seven.”

“I’ve come to see my friend, Miss Latham. She’s lodging here.”

“I’m so sorry. Of course. I expect she’s in the front room.”

“Thank you.” She spoke very demurely. He stood aside to let her pass and with her a faint fragrance of white rose.

By this time Miss Latham herself had emerged, a blowsy woman who was taking a small part in the Christmas pantomime at the theatre, and had introduced herself to the friends through Mrs. Meadows a few days before.

“Why, Rosie, my dear, isn’t this just sweet of you? Fancy finding you on the step flirting with Doctor . . . Dr. Ingleby! That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Oh, what a shame, Hetty! We weren’t, were we?” Ingenuously she turned her eyes on Edwin again. Were they hazel? Perhaps they were almost amber. A matter of light . . .

“No . . . I’m afraid we weren’t. She didn’t give us time.”

“Two doctors in the house! Think of that!” said Miss Hetty Latham, whose conversation habitually ran from one note of exclamation to another. “Imagine how safe we feel, Rosie!”

And Rosie surveyed Edwin seriously.

“Aren’t you awfully young?”

“I suppose I am rather. I’m not qualified yet. But I expect to be next week.”

“Then you must be awfully clever too—”

“What on earth are we all doing talking here in the passage? Come along in and have a cup of tea,” said Miss Latham boisterously.

“As you two are such great friends already, I suppose it’s waste of time introducing you.”

“Really—” Edwin protested.

“Very well, then. Dr. Ingleby: Miss Rosie Beaucaire. I never get the order right. You can take it or leave it. May he come to tea with us, Rosie?”

“Of course he may.”

“Come along then, both of you . . .”

CHAPTER X
WHITE ROSES

I

It was the first of many amazing adventures, to which Matthew Boyce supplied a calculated and cynical commentary, watching Edwin as though he were the subject of a physiological experiment—as indeed he was. But lack of sympathy in one quarter was scarcely likely to worry Edwin when he had found it so overwhelmingly in another. In a few days Miss Latham, the most tactful of duennas, had withdrawn from the scene. On the first night of their acquaintance Edwin had taken the hazel-eyed Miss Beaucaire back to her lodgings in Prince Albert’s Place at the back of the theatre, where the pantomime was in rehearsal. All the way through the squalid, lamp-lit streets they had talked of things that were entrancing, simply because they had to do with her. Edwin thought that no companionship in all his life had been so natural and so easy; and this was not surprising, for the young woman, in addition to physical charms that were armoury enough in themselves, had developed the faculty commonly acquired by ladies of her profession, of devoting herself entirely to the companion of the moment and giving the impression that she had never known, and would never want to know, any other person in the world. Rosie was only twenty-four, but had given at least the last third of her life to studying male of the species of which Edwin was a peculiarly ingenuous example. At the door of her lodgings she had conjured an atmosphere of mysterious intimacy. Speaking in a voice that was low and of a thrilling tenderness, she had said:—

“I mustn’t ask you to come in to-day. It’s a dreadful shame; but mother has one of her headaches, and the noise might disturb her. You understand, don’t you?”

Edwin, with a vision of an elderly and delicate version of Rosie herself lying on a sofa with a handkerchief dipped in eau-de-cologne over her eyes, assented. He thought it a very beautiful consideration on Rosie’s part. A small black and tan terrier came dancing into the hall with a friendly yelp.

“Be quiet, Imp . . . oh, do be quiet! Isn’t he a duck?” she said. “Now, I must really go.” She held out her hand. A moment before she had taken off her glove, and Edwin, who had scarcely ever touched the hand of a woman before, thought that her fingers were the softest and most delicate things on earth.

“You’ll come and have tea with us, won’t you? I should like you to meet mother.”

“Of course, I’d like to. When?”

“Oh . . . quite soon. Any day this week. Promise me you won’t forget . . .” As if he could ever forget! Her exquisite humility quite bowled him over. When she had closed the door behind her he walked away dazed with an unfamiliar emotion that made the mean street, with its uniform row of mid-Victorian houses on one side, and on the other the blank wall of the theatre and huge, sooty warehouses, seem a holy place. The Halesby Road, with its streaming traffic, shared the same transfiguration. The speed and strength of the horses enthralled him; the faces of men and women walking homeward from their work in the city seemed triumphantly happy; the smooth wood-pavement, polished by the rolling of innumerable wheels, shone like a street in heaven. It seemed to Edwin as if the whole world had somehow been uplifted by a secret knowledge of his own experience. A night of wonder. . . .

“Well, what is the young woman’s name?” asked Boyce, when he returned to Easy Row.

“Beaucaire. She’s principal girl in the pantomime at the Queen’s.”

“H’m. . . . Attractive little piece. But she can’t be up to much if she’s a pal of the Latham woman’s. I’ve seen her there several times.”

“Oh, that means nothing,” Edwin explained. “I don’t think she’s at all keen on her. They acted together somewhere years ago. You can’t drop people when they’ve been kind to you. I don’t think she’s at all keen on her. She’s quite all right. Lives with her mother in Prince Albert’s Place.”

“Pretty rotten sort of street. Got a bad name, you know. I believe, as a matter of fact, it’s considered rather the thing to lug an official mother about with you.”“You don’t mean—” Edwin began, going very white.

“Of course I don’t. I don’t know anything about her. Only, for God’s sake, take care of yourself. A young woman of that kind generally has a fair share of experience, and you . . . well, you haven’t exactly. Besides, it’s just as well to remember that the final’s coming off in ten days.”

The less said about the final the better.

“She isn’t a chorus girl, you know. If you’d met her I think you’d admit that she’s a lady. She told me that her mother—”

Boyce chuckled.

“As a matter of fact,” said Edwin, clinching the argument, “her father was a country parson in low circumstances.”

“I understand they usually are,” said Boyce with a yawn.

Their night was complicated by two new cases. Next morning they appeared at breakfast with slightly ruffled tempers. They sat at opposite ends of the table, Edwin reading, without understanding, one of Oldham’s caustic critiques on a symphony concert the night before, his friend glued to his beloved anthology.

“What did you say her name was?” said Boyce, apropos of nothing. “Rosie, wasn’t it?”

Edwin grunted.

“Have you ever sampled the Sortes Virgilianae? I sometimes try that trick with the anthology. There are plenty of generalisations, so it often comes off rather well. How’s this for last night?”

“H’m—”“Are you listening?”

“Yes, fire away.”

Boyce quoted:—

? t? ??da, ??d?essa? ??e? ?a???, ???? t? p????
sa?t??, ? t? ??da, ?? s??af?te?a;

“Rather neat, isn’t it? While I was hanging about that case in Craven Street, I made a translation for you. Tell me what you think of it.

‘You of the roses, rosy-fair,
Sweet maiden, tell me whether
You or the roses are your ware,
Or both of them together.’”

“Damned rotten, anyway,” said Edwin. “Maiden’s the wrong word . . .”

It comforted him, none the less, to find that Rosie did not revisit Miss Latham, though this lady pointedly rallied him on the doorstep, suggesting that his intimacy with Miss Beaucaire had reached a stage to which he had not yet attained but aspired devoutly. The work at Easy Row, that had slackened for a few days, came on with a rush; and though the image of this delicate creature now filled his nightly vigils, being even more precious for the squalid surroundings in which it came to him, he found it impossible to visit the lodgings in Prince Albert’s Place, to which his thoughts with tantalising regularity returned.

The flood of work held until their fortnight was out, leaving them both washed-out and irritable. To speak frankly, the last few days of their comradeship had not been a success. Although Edwin made it clear that he didn’t wish to discuss the affair of Rosie with Boyce, the incident of the Greek epigram rankled. He found it impossible to take the matter lightly, feeling that it was necessary to convince himself at all costs that he wasn’t making a fool of himself, and finding it difficult to do so.

On the Monday next before the final examination he found himself a free man. It was a questionable liberty, for its enjoyment really depended on the result of this ordeal. He had definitely severed his connection with Dr. Harris, intending to devote all his spare time at Easy Row and the week after to preparations for the exam. A big gamble. . . . Ten pounds and a few shillings was all he possessed in the world, except a problematical degree in medicine which, in another seven days, might make him certain of four guineas a week as long as he chose to work. The margin seemed so small and the chance so desperate that he burned the last of his boats, selling his microscope to a pawnbroker for twelve pounds. Twenty-three pounds. . . . One could do a lot with twenty-three pounds . . . supposing nothing went wrong.

He found a cheap bed-sitting-room in a quiet street at the back of the University buildings. Here, and in the museums, he would be able to put in a week of intensive cramming. He found that he couldn’t do it. He had reckoned without the unreasonable quantity of Rosie. The first night on which he settled down to read in his new lodging the thought of her would not let him rest. It was ridiculous. What he wanted was a hard walk. He would go up to Alvaston and rout Boyce out of his study for a tramp in the moonlight towards Southfield Beeches. He would apologise to Boyce for his bearishness during the last few days. Hadn’t they assured each other on one of their ambrosial evenings at Overton more than a year ago, that the friendship of two men was a more precious and lasting experience than anything that the love of a woman could give? The whole thing was just the result of physical staleness: a symptom of the monotonous fatigue of the last year. He was going to get rid of it at all costs. He turned out the gas and went downstairs.

It was a discouraging night. A soft winter drizzle had set in from the West, and in the jaded Halesby Road nebulous street lamps were reflected in a layer of black slime that covered the wood-pavement. The shop windows were misted with rain, and the few people who had ventured out into the street trod carefully as though they were afraid of slipping. A brutal night if ever there was one. Plodding up the street with the rain in his face he found that he was passing the end of Prince Albert’s Place. He passed it by twenty paces, and then, almost against his will, turned round again. It was no good. There she was, for certain, within forty yards of him. If he were to walk along the road on the opposite side under the blank walls of the warehouses, he would be able to see the very room that held her exquisiteness. He did so. There was a light in the front room of the lower story, but the blinds were down, and he could not see any one inside. He crossed the road boldly and stood for a moment on the doorstep. It gave him a peculiar stab of happiness to feel so near her. He railed against the combination of shyness and convention that held him; for if he were to do the thing that was reasonable and downright, he would have walked straight into the house and told her the thousand things that choked his heart—he would have kissed her soft hands and gazed into her shy, adorable eyes. Yes, he would have kissed her eyes too. No doubt it would rather have taken the mother’s breath away. Probably Rosie had never given him another thought since he left her on the doorstep. That was the funny part of it. He laughed at himself, and the sound of his laugh must somehow have penetrated the hall, for the black and tan terrier barked shrilly. “Really, I’m off my head, you know,” he said to himself, and wandered off again into the wet streets, walking, until the small hours, those unimaginable slums in which his labours of the last fortnight had lain. “God . . . it’s ridiculous!” he thought, “but a man can’t help falling in love.” It seemed to him that the phantom of Dorothy Powys regarded him seriously.

II

Next afternoon he presented himself at Prince Albert’s Place. A landlady who might well have been Mrs. Meadows’s sister took in his card, and after a little buzz of conversation that might have been explained in a dozen sinister ways, he was admitted to the little room, whose lighted windows he had surveyed the night before. Rosie came forward to meet him. Once again, trembling, he took her hand. He even fancied—divine flattery!—that she blushed.

“This is my friend Dr. Ingleby, mother,” she said.

“Very pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Beaucaire. “Won’t you come and sit over here?”

In the shadow of Mrs. Beaucaire Edwin took his seat. She was a large woman with a husky voice and a big, dissipated face that had once been handsome. If she had any place in the scheme of things it was surely as a foil to the fragile grace of her daughter. Rosie, with an occasional sideways glance, was busy talking to a little man with a blue shaven chin and an immense mobile mouth, who looked like a bookie.

“I suppose you know Mr. Flood?” said Mrs. Beaucaire.

Edwin confessed that he did not.

“The Mr. Flood, you know. Bertie, this is Mr. Ingleby. . . . I beg your pardon, Dr. Ingleby,” and the great comedian shook hands with Edwin and hoped he was well.

The atmosphere of the lodgings was very easy and familiar. Bertie Flood, the Mirth-maker of Three Continents, as the newspapers described him, devoted himself in an easy paternal manner to Rosie. It became apparent to Edwin, overshadowed by the bulk and impressiveness of Mrs. Beaucaire, that whenever Mr. Flood could make an opportunity of handling Rosie, he did so, and also that Rosie did not in any way resent the process. It even seemed to him that she invited Mr. Flood’s attentions.“We’re very unconventional people, you know, Dr. Ingleby—quite Bohemian,” said Mrs. Beaucaire in a thick voice.

Edwin agreed that the relation was delightful. It was only by an effort of concentration that he could hear what the mother was saying. All the time his eyes were on Rosie, so divinely fragile in her white muslin blouse. He shuddered when Bertie Flood touched her. Nothing but the delightful innocence of the girl could have induced her to suffer the presence of this satyr. And yet it seemed to him that she was doing all that she could to please him. . . .

“Yes, my poor husband: the vicar I always call him—habit, you know—had a small parish in the North of England. I have a son in the church too. Both he and Rosie really take after the father.”

“Yes. . . . Exactly,” said Edwin. In that moment Rosie had smiled at him, and the smile was enough. God, what a woman!

“The vicar came from a very old family. In the North it is recognised, but in a place like North Bromwich it is very difficult for us to meet the right sort of people. I have to be very careful for Rosie’s sake. The child is so trusting. I was so glad, you know, when she told me that she had met you at Miss Latham’s. One feels so safe with a doctor. You’ll be able to look after her a bit . . . see that she don’t get too tired. Pantomime is very tiring, you know. I myself suffer agonies from indigestion. What with that and my headaches, I’m afraid I’m a poor companion for her. As I say, both the children take after the dear vicar. Rosie isn’t a bit like me.”

“No,” said Edwin, still dazed by the memory of her smile; but, as he spoke, his eyes met those of Mrs. Beaucaire, and he saw to his amazement that they were really the eyes of Rosie, that her discoloured nose had once been of the same shape as her daughter’s, that the sagging, sensual mouth was in fact a degraded version of Rosie’s too. It was a revelation, blasphemous but prophetic. He would not consider it. He dared not look at her.

A moment later Bertie Flood left them. Tea wasn’t much in his line, he said, and his complexion confirmed the assertion. Mrs. Beaucaire saw him to the door. Edwin and Rosie were alone.

It was a wonderful minute. He felt that she could never seem more beautiful, more delicate, more exquisite than at this moment standing in her pale loveliness against the grimy lodging-house wallpaper, with her hands clasped before her.

“I had to come,” he said.

“I had been expecting you. I’m awfully glad you found time.”

Found time! . . . He wanted to tell her of his strange adventure of the night before: how he had stood in the dripping rain beneath her window, hungry for the sight of her, unsatisfied. She stood as though she would be glad to listen; but there was no time. Mrs. Beaucaire, after a noisy and pointed demonstration in the hall, re-entered. It seemed that there was nothing left for him but to take his departure.

“Surely you’re not going so soon?” she said.And he stayed. It was all delightfully intimate and domestic. These people seemed to possess the rare faculty of putting a visitor as shy as Edwin at his ease. Mrs. Beaucaire did most of the talking, enlarging on Rosie’s devotion to the parson brother, regretting that circumstance, and possibly the unreasonable prejudice of country people against theatrical connections, had deprived him of the family living: and Rosie listened quietly, more compelling in her demure silences than Mrs. Beaucaire at her most impressive.

Once or twice in the afternoon that lady tactfully left them, returning, each time with a renewed vigour and a scent that suggested the combination of eau-de-cologne and brandy. These solitary moments were very precious to Edwin. Neither of them spoke more than a few words, but the air between them seemed charged with emotion. It was six o’clock when he left Prince Albert’s Place.

“You won’t forget us, will you?” said Mrs. Beaucaire with enthusiasm. “It will be so nice for Rosie to have some one to take her to rehearsal. I don’t like her mixing with the boys in the company. It isn’t the thing. And we don’t happen to have any really nice friends in the Midlands. In the North it would have been quite different.”

A delirious week slipped by. In spite of every resolution Edwin had found it impossible to work. His new lodging was not inspiring; but this was only one of the excuses that he invented to salve his conscience. He knew the real reason for this divine, unreasonable restlessness. Even if it were to wreck his chances in the final examination it could not be avoided, and there was no reason why it should be excused. He knew that he was in love, and before this unquestionable miracle he abased himself.

Mrs. Beaucaire, now satisfied that she could indulge a “headache” and take to her bed as often as she chose, did not question his presence at Prince Albert’s Place: she was even ready on occasion to treat it with a mild facetiousness. Rosie, who lapped up adoration as naturally as a kitten takes to milk, treated it as a matter of course. Edwin rather wished that she wouldn’t take as a matter of course the most wonderful thing in the world. There was a passivity in her acquiescence that filled him with a fear that she was used to this sort of thing or even a little bored by it. She mopped up his devotions with an ease that would have been disconcerting if he had not always been bemused by her beauty. Surely it was enough that she should be beautiful!

In the morning—Mrs. Beaucaire always had a headache of another kind next day—Edwin would escort Rosie to her rehearsal at the theatre. He became familiar with the frowsty box in which the lame stage-doorkeeper sat like an obscene spider guarding the baize-covered board on which the company’s letters were kept. The man came to know him and would pass him in through the swinging doors with a peculiarly evil leer. Sometimes, at the stage door they would become involved in a mass of patchouli-scented chorus, and Edwin would thrill at the dignity and refinement with which Rosie, in her white fox furs, would slip through this vulgar tumult.

So to the stage with its vast cobwebbed walls, its huge echoes and the mysterious darkness of the flies, where looped ropes and grimy festoons of forgotten scenery hung still as seaweed in a deep sea. There, in the sour and characteristic odour of an empty stage, Edwin would wait for her in a little alcove of the whitewashed wall in which iron cleats were piled, and the unmeaning murmur of the rehearsal would come to him mingled with the shrill voice of the producer, who ended every sentence with the words “my dear,” or “old boy,” and the noise of the carpenter hammering wood in the flies. His original acquaintance, Miss Latham, discreetly avoided him, but the comedian, Bertie Flood, seemed inclined to be familiar. One morning he dragged Edwin off to his dressing room for a smoke. He sat with his legs on either side of a chair, his fawn-coloured bowler on the back of his head, looking more than ever like a bookie.

“Well, old boy,” he said, “how goes it? How’s the little Beaucaire?”

“She’s all right, as far as I know,” said Edwin, who was inclined to resent the description.

“Ma had any headaches lately? I know what ma’s headaches will end in. Cirrhosis of the liver. You’re a doctor, aren’t you? Well, I know all about that. Had it myself. Just realised in time that it didn’t pay. Now I never touch anything but gin. Do you want a word of advice?”

Edwin thanked him.“May seem funny from a chap that gets two hundred a week for making a damn fool of himself.”

“Not at all,” said Edwin politely.

“Well, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go easy in that direction. Treat it as a business proposition. Ma’s a bad old woman . . . only don’t tell her I said so. You see I’m a friend of the family. Dear little girl, Rosie, too. Verbus Satienti—I always let ’em think I was at Oxford—Good for business.”

It was rather disturbing; for though it was no news to Edwin that Mrs. Beaucaire’s headaches were euphemistic, the fact had done no more than contribute to the ideal qualities with which he had invested her daughter. There was something romantic as well as pitiful in the idea of Rosie’s contrasting innocence: the rose that has its roots in foulness is not less a rose. It had even seemed to him that the complete collapse of Mrs. Beaucaire might throw Rosie into his arms: a situation that would be full of romantic and tender possibilities; and the girl’s inimitably virginal air was enough to convince him that Bertie Flood’s other suggestions were no more than the natural products of a mind degraded by the atmosphere of the music-hall. He was convinced too that he had no cause for jealousy. Ever since he had first visited her, Rosie had never spent more than a few hours of daylight out of his sight.

On the last day of the week before the examination his confidence suffered something of a shock. It was a raw winter morning, but he had set his heart on taking her into his own hill-country, and she, with her usual sweet submission, but without a hint of enthusiasm, had consented. He had planned to avoid the Halesby side of the range and to approach it from the southern escarpment. Early in the morning he paid a visit to Parkinson’s, the florist’s, in the Arcade, where he bought a bunch of pale, exotic roses: white roses, that should match her own sweetness and fragility. Once she had expressed a general liking for flowers, and since then it had been his delight to give them to her. She mopped up his flowers and his passion with the same dreamy passivity.

From the corner of the Place he saw a weedy, black-coated figure in front of Number Ten; and as he approached, the figure entered and the door closed behind him. Edwin wondered vaguely if it might be the parson brother. The landlady opened the door in a flurry. It almost seemed as if she wanted to conceal something.

“I don’t think Miss Beaucaire can see you for a bit,” she said. “Won’t you call later in the morning?”

He told her that he would wait, as they had an appointment, and a train to catch.

“Then will you kindly wait in my room. You mustn’t take any notice of the state it’s in,” she said, still on the defensive.

The state of the landlady’s room was not inspiriting. On a dirty table cloth lay the remains of last night’s supper. On the window sill stood a chevaux de frise of empty brandy bottles that Edwin couldn’t help associating with Mrs. Beaucaire. The arm-chairs, covered with dirty chintz overalls that suggested a layer of more ancient dirt beneath, were not inviting. He preferred to stand. The house was as quiet and secretive as usual; but from the next room he heard an irritating rumour of voices. One of the voices, he could have sworn, was Rosie’s. A little later he heard a laugh, and the suspicion became a disquieting certainty, for the laugh was one that he knew well—with a difference. It was as if Mrs. Beaucaire had laughed with Rosie’s voice. He found it difficult to restrain himself from bursting into the room and settling the matter once and for all. Again the laugh—and then a long silence. He heard steps in the passage, a whispered conversation with the landlady, and then Rosie came in to him, flushed, and with her fair hair disordered. He could not speak. He only gave her the roses.

“Thank you, Eddie,” she said, scarcely noticing them. Her lips were parted and her eyes shone with excitement. She had never seemed to him more beautiful, but there was something frightening in her beauty.

“Whatever is the matter with you?” she said. “Why do you look so serious?”

“Who was your visitor?”

“Oh, that’s it, is it? You silly boy! You surely don’t mean to say you’re jealous?”

“Please tell me—”

“It was only a priest. I had to make my confession.”

“A priest? I thought your people belonged to the Church of England.”

“That doesn’t prevent me from being a Catholic. It’s much better for professional girls to be Catholics. They look after you when you’re on the road.”

He could not say any more about it. It seemed to him that her eyes were anxious as though she were not quite sure how much he had heard.

“You believe me, don’t you?” She spoke in a frightened whisper.

“Of course I do. We’ve just time for our train. You are coming, aren’t you?”

She said: “Of course I am,” and ran upstairs singing to put her hat on.

The roses lay neglected on the sideboard where she had placed them. In five minutes she returned, thoroughly dressed for her new role of country girl with brogued shoes and a short skirt of Harris tweed.

“I’m ready,” she said gaily.

It was a wonderful day. They walked together under dull skies that made the berries in the hedgerows and the waning fires of autumn glow more brightly, and even ministered to the girl’s own beauty. The cool air and the walking made her cheeks glow with a colour that was natural and therefore unusual. Edwin was so entranced with her companionship that he forgot his anxiousness of the morning; so lost in the amazing beauty of her hazel eyes and her cheek’s soft contour that he did not notice that she was limping. Halfway to the summit of the hills she stopped, gave a little sigh, and sat down on the bank of a hedge.

“I’m awfully sorry, Eddie. My foot hurts. I think this shoe’s too tight.”

“They look simply splendid.”“I know. I only bought them yesterday—just specially for to-day.”

“But it’s ridiculous to go for a long walk in new shoes!”

“Do you mind if I take them off for a minute?”

“Of course not. Let me undo the laces.”

He knelt at her feet. It was a wonderful and thrilling experience to loosen the laces, to feel her small feet in their smooth silk stockings. His hands trembled.

“I wish you wouldn’t touch my feet. I’m awfully sorry: it’s one of the things I can’t bear. You don’t mind, do you?”

“You mustn’t blame me. They’re so beautiful.”

She smiled. Her modesty delighted him.

Sitting there together, so miraculously alone, he began to talk about his future. “I shan’t see you for a whole week. It will be unbearable. But when the exam. is over and I’m qualified it will be such a relief. I shall feel able to say the things that I want to say to you.”

For a long time she was silent. Then she said: “What are you expecting to do?”

“I think I shall go in for one of the services. What do you think of the Indian Medical? It would be wonderful to see India. I’ve always thought that I should like to know something of the world. I think it’s a good life. Women generally love it. What do you think about it?”

“I should think it would be rather nice. But wouldn’t it be awfully hot? I’ve known one or two boys in the Indian Army. There’s lots of dancing and that sort of thing, isn’t there?”He laughed. Dancing wasn’t his strong point, as Professor Beagle could have told her, and in any case India didn’t mean dancing to him. She did not seem at all anxious to pursue the subject.

“I think we could walk back to the hotel now,” she said. “I’m simply starving.” They walked down the hill together, almost in silence. When they reached the hotel, she disappeared in the company of the barmaid, leaving Edwin to wait for her in the coffee-room. He almost resented her absence. He felt that he couldn’t spare her for a moment. Waiting at the table he picked up a week-old copy of the North Bromwich Courier. Gazing idly at the front page, he caught sight of his own name. It was the announcement of a wedding.

Ingleby: Fellows. On the tenth of December, at the Parish Church, Halesby, John Ingleby to Julia, elder daughter of the late Joseph Fellows, of Mawne, Staffs.

He was overwhelmed with a sudden indescribable emotion that was neither jealousy, anger, nor shame, but curiously near to all three. He sat bewildered, with the paper in front of him. Rosie returned to find him blankly staring.

“Why, what’s the matter with you? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

“Yes. . . . I think I have. It’s nothing, really. Nothing at all.”

He drank more than he need have done of a villainous wine that was labelled ChÂteau Margaux, but had probably been pressed on the hot hill-sides of Oran. In the train, on the way home, he felt flushed and sleepy, but, all the time, divinely conscious of the warmth and softness of Rosie sitting beside him. They were alone in the first-class carriage. “I’m sleepy too,” she said. He drew her gently to his side, and she rested, content, with her head on his shoulder. In the wonder of this he forgot the newspaper and its staggering contents. As they neared North Bromwich she stood up in front of the mirror to arrange her hair, and Edwin, pulling himself together, saw that his blue coat was floured with a fine bloom of powder.

She still found it difficult to walk, and so they drove in a hansom to Prince Albert’s Place, very grimy and sinister in the dusk.

“You needn’t ring,” she said, taking out a latchkey and showing him into the narrow hall. “Let’s be very quiet, so as not to disturb mother.”

“I don’t think I’ll come in,” he said. He knew that he must make an end somewhere.

“Not even to be thanked? I’ve enjoyed myself most awfully.”

She stood before him in the gloom of the hall as though she were waiting for something. It felt as if the dark space between them must break into flame. Their lips met.

“Good God! . . . how wonderful you are!” he said.

“Next week,” she whispered.

III

Edwin had arranged to spend the following day with the Boyces at their house in Alvaston. He found it difficult to contain himself, for the delicious memory of their parting the night before swamped his efforts at conversation with the persistency of waves that follow one another in a rising tide. It seemed to him impossible that his state should not be evident to the whole household, and particularly to Matthew, who knew him so well.

In the afternoon, when they sat smoking together in Boyce’s study at the top of the house, he felt that he was on the brink of a confession. The only thing that restrained him from it was the memory of the epigram and of his friend’s translation. He felt in his bones that Boyce would not be sympathetic and though his infatuation suggested that he wouldn’t much care whether Boyce were sympathetic, or suspicious, an intuitive dread of suspicion and its possible effects on his own reason made him hold his tongue. It was in the nature of Boyce, who didn’t happen, for the moment, to be in love, to be critical, to sweep away Rosie’s perfections in a generalisation: and the appeal of a generalisation to the mind of youth is so strong that Edwin was afraid to hear it. Somewhere in his submerged reason he admitted that Boyce’s judgment on the matter would probably be sound, and reason was the last tribunal in the world before which he wished this exceptional case to be presented. An unsatisfactory day. For the first time in their lives, the relations of the two friends were indefinitely strained.

He left Alvaston early in the evening. On his way to his lodging he passed the gloomy entrance to Prince Albert’s Place. It would have been easy, so easy, to call at Number Ten, but he had determined, once and for all, that the examination week should be free from distractions, and pride in his own strength of mind held him to his course, though he realised, almost gladly, that even if he were master of his feet he could not control his thoughts. He wondered if he would dream of her . . .

Next day the rigours of the final examination overtook him. This was the supreme ordeal in which every moment of his professional life from the day when he first entered the dissecting room to the night of the last midwifery case, would stand the test of scrutiny. He was not exactly afraid of it. He knew that his knowledge and technical skill were at least above the average of his year, and felt that with ordinary luck he would be among the first four of a field of twelve. The year was not one of exceptional brilliance, and comparisons were therefore in his favour.

On the first day, in the viva-voce examination on surgery, he did, for one moment, lose his head, but when once he had pulled himself together and accustomed himself to the conditions of the test, he settled down into a state of fatalistic equanimity, taking the rough with the smooth and deciding that, on the whole, he was not likely to make a hopeless fool of himself.

On the first night he went to bed early, but on the second, feeling that his mind would be clearer for some diversion, he went to a music-hall with W.G. and his wife. Drinking beer in the bar with his friend, he suddenly heard his name called, and felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to find himself in front of a face that was curiously familiar, and in a moment found that he was shaking hands with Widdup, a small and rather chastened Widdup, who spoke to him with the slow, precise voice that he had known at St. Luke’s.

“I thought it was you, Ingleby,” he said. “I wondered if I should run across you.”

Avoiding a hair-raising display on the slack wire, they stood talking. Widdup, it appeared, had been destined for an engineering career in North Bromwich, when his mathematical genius had won him a scholarship at Cambridge.

“A pity, in a way, for I should have seen more of you. I suppose that sort of thing always happens to school friendships.” At present he was visiting a firm of iron-founders on business. They talked together of old times: of the day when Edwin, greatly daring, had seen the Birches run: of the languid Selby, now head-master of a small public-school in Norfolk, and of old fat Leeming. Between the conscious effort of remembering St. Luke’s and the unbidden image of Rosie, Edwin’s head was in a whirl.

“And old Griffin,” said Widdup. “That’s another funny thing. I ran slap into him in the lounge of the Grand Midland to-night. Up to the same old games, you know. Yes . . . he had a girl with him. Rather an attractive little piece: something to do with the pantomime, he told me. What was her name? The old brute introduced me, too! Yes . . . I think I’ve got it. Beaucaire . . . Rosie Beaucaire. Rather a rosy prospect for old Griff, I should imagine. Why, what the devil’s the matter with you?”“I’m all right, thanks,” said Edwin. “It’s this exam., you know. Let’s have another drink.” He called for whisky and soda.

“Chin-chin,” said Widdup.

Edwin polished off a couple of drinks and then told Widdup that he must rejoin his friend, leaving him staggered at his abrupt departure. He didn’t rejoin W.G. He walked straight out of the theatre and off up the Halesby Road. He had determined to go straight to Rosie’s lodgings and thrash the matter out; but by the time he reached Prince Albert’s Place he had thought better of it.

It was the most natural thing in the world, he reflected, that Griffin should know the Beaucaires, for Griffin was constantly in touch with theatrical people. It was even natural that Griffin, knowing her, should take Rosie to the Grand Midland. It was the obvious thing to do if you had money to spend, as Griffin had. It would be just like the irony of fate, he reflected, if Griffin should afflict him with unhappiness in this case as he had done in so many others. He remembered the bitter sufferings of those early days at St. Luke’s that Widdup had so clearly recalled. He remembered Dorothy Powys and the dance at Mawne: his suspicions, his agonised resentment. Even more darkly there came to him the memory of a voice in Dr. Harris’s surgery, a conviction, never yet established, that Griffin had no right to know any woman. This reflection, he knew, implied a doubt of Rosie’s innocence: an imputation that he could not possibly admit. And yet . . . and yet . . . He remembered the warning that Bertie Flood had given him in his dressing room. He remembered the visitor in the black coat four days before. His mind was in hell.

In this purgatory of doubt and horror, he lived for the rest of the week. In the daytime the progress of the examination engrossed him, but at night he always found himself hanging about the darkness of Prince Albert’s Place, hoping against hope, that his suspicions were unfounded, not daring to put them to the test, lest they should be confirmed.

On Friday night, when the last of his medical ordeals was over, he went straight to Number Ten. It was a wonderful moment. Now, with a clear conscience he might see her again; now, once more, he could know the ecstasy of her kisses and forget the ungenerous nightmare in which he had lived through the later stages of the exam. He approached the dirty doorway with his heart beating wildly. At first his ring was unanswered, but a little later the landlady came to the door with a red, suspicious face, opening it jealously, as though she feared to let him in.

He inquired for Miss Beaucaire. Miss Beaucaire was out. Did the woman know when she was expected to return? She hadn’t the least idea. Was Mrs. Beaucaire in, then? Mrs. Beaucaire was in, but invisible. Mrs. Beaucaire had one of her headaches. Edwin suggested that he should wait in their room. Impossible. Mrs. Beaucaire was lying down there. He hung upon the doorstep as if he were waiting at the gates of paradise. At last the landlady took it upon herself to close the door.She must have thought he was mad. Perhaps he was mad. . . .

For an hour or more he waited in the rain. It occurred to him that at least the woman was speaking the truth, for there was no light in either of the front rooms. The Grand Midland. . . . It was there that Widdup had seen them. He walked to Sackville Row at a great pace and straight into the hotel, where waiters and elderly commercial gentlemen stared at his wet clothes and his haggard face. He went into each of the dining-rooms and down the stairs to the Turkish lounge. Nowhere was Rosie or Griffin to be seen. A search of this kind was ridiculous, but every moment that the agony was extended made him more desperately anxious.

He walked back in the drizzle to Prince Albert’s Place and paced the pavement under the black walls of the warehouses. The road was deserted. There was no sound in it at all but the dripping of water from some neglected spout. He walked up and down in the shadow, and as he walked he became conscious of something like a personality in the faces of the long row of lodging-houses, something sinister, as though their shuttered windows concealed a wealth of obscene experience like the eyes of ancient street-walkers. The souls of those squat Victorian houses were languidly interested in him. Another victim. . . . That was what he must seem to them. And still the windows of Number Ten were unlighted.

He heard the clock in the Art Gallery chime eleven: a leisurely, placid chime muffled by gusty rain. Perhaps the woman had lied to him. Perhaps, at that very moment Rosie was sleeping peacefully in the unlighted upper story. He was overwrought with the strain of the examination on the top of this devastating passion. He had better go home.

He turned to go, and at that very moment he saw two figures approaching from the Halesby Road. The street lamp, at the corner, threw their shadows on the shining pavement. One of them was Rosie—he would have known her anywhere—and the other, beyond doubt, was Griffin. He was seized with the same blind passion that had swept over him in the big schoolroom at St. Luke’s ten years before, an impulse to murder that he could only control by digging his finger nails into his hands.

He stood there trembling in the shadow of the blank wall, huddling close to it for support and for protection. They passed him, and he heard Rosie’s quiet laugh. Her laugh was one of the things about her that he had loved most. They stopped at the door, and Rosie took out her latchkey. It was almost a repetition of the scene in which he had shared a week before. Now, perhaps, she would kiss him. He felt that if he saw her kissing Griffin he could have killed them both. Murderer’s Cross Road. . . . A hundred thoughts came swirling through his brain. They entered, and closed the door behind them. Griffin: the old Griffin: the human beast of St. Luke’s. The new Griffin: the gross North Bromwich womaniser: the Griffin of Dr. Harris’s surgery. . . . Edwin saw himself upon the edge of a ghastly, unthinkable tragedy. He must prevent it. At all costs. At the cost of life if needs be.

He crept quickly across the road. The houses watched him. The window of the lower room bloomed suddenly with a yellow light. He stood with his hands clutching the window-sill, listening. Once again he heard Rosie’s laugh, and a rumour of deeper speech that he knew to be the voice of Griffin. The shadow of Griffin’s shoulders swept the window, swelling gigantically as it passed. The light was turned down, but not extinguished. Rosie’s laugh again. He could have killed her for that laugh, for it mocked him. The faint shadow of the man’s shoulders retreated. He guessed that they were standing at the door. The door of the room closed softly. Now there was no sound except the heavy breathing that one hears in the neighbourhood of a pigsty at night. Was Griffin still there?

Another beam of light fell on the shining street. Some one had lighted the gas in the room upstairs. Was Griffin still below? Panic seized him. He must know. At all costs he must know. Dr. Harris’s surgery. . . . If he had to break in the front door he must know. As he reached it he tripped over an iron boot-scraper. The step barked his shin. Of course the door was locked, but—wonder of wonders—Rosie had left the latchkey outside. He opened the door softly and went on tip-toe into the hall. In the room on the right he still heard the grunting noise. Thank God, Griffin was still there! At least he could tell him that he knew!

He opened the door. In the half-light he could see that the room was empty except for Mrs. Beaucaire, who lay stretched on the sofa, snoring heavily with her vile mouth open. On the table stood an empty brandy bottle. The place stank of brandy.

Now he knew the worst. He stumbled upstairs in the dark and knocked frantically at the door of the front bedroom. Rosie answered: “Who is it?”

“It’s I. For God’s sake, let me in.”

“Who the devil is it?” said the voice of Dr. Harris’s consulting-room.

Rosie answered him in excited whispers.

“You can’t come in, Eddie,” she said. “How on earth did you get into the house? Please go away. I can’t see you. I can’t, really.”

“I’m coming in, I tell you. If you don’t open the door, I’ll smash it. I mean what I say.”

“Ingleby—?” the voice muttered. “What the devil has Ingleby to do with you? All right. I’ll go. I’ll chuck the fellow downstairs.”

“Oh, don’t . . . please don’t. . . . Let him go quietly.”

Griffin unlocked the door. He stood facing Edwin in his shirt-sleeves. Rosie, still dressed, clutched at the mantelpiece. The vein in the middle of Griffin’s forehead bulged with anger. His short neck was flushed.

“What the hell—” he began—and then they closed. Edwin’s heel ripped up the corner of the carpet as they swayed together. Suddenly Griffin’s grip slackened. His face blanched, and in a moment Edwin was letting down a sheer weight upon the bed.“What’s the matter?” Rosie screamed, and flung herself beside him. “What’s the matter?”

“Good God! . . . He’s gone.”

“No . . . No—” she cried.

Edwin tore open Griffin’s shirt, listening for an impulse that was not there.

“He’s gone,” he said, panting. “He’s dead. . . . Heart. . . . He always had a rocky heart. He’s dead.”

The awful word seemed to pull Rosie together. They stared at each other blankly with wide eyes. “Are you sure?” she whispered.

“Yes. . . . Of course—”

She rose to her feet, speaking in a voice that was quite new to him.

“Eddie . . . for God’s sake, go . . . now! . . . quickly!”

“I can’t go.”

“Go quickly, I tell you. Don’t be a damned little fool. You don’t want to be mixed up in this. Eddie, for God’s sake. . . . It’s ‘natural causes,’ Eddie.”

He blundered down the dark stairs and out into the street. He could not walk. He cowered under the warehouse wall opposite, gazing, as though fascinated, at the yellow square of window. The discreet Victorian houses surveyed him as if the horror that the yellow blind concealed were an ordinary occurrence in their dingy lives. They were used to death. And death did not change them. A rubber-tyred hansom rolled smoothly up the Halesby Road, past the mouth of the Place. At the corner, under the gas-lamp, Edwin saw the figure of a policeman with rain shining on his cape. The sight recalled him to a sense of awful possibilities. For the moment he dared not move. He flattened himself against the warehouse walls and did not realise that he was standing directly under the dripping waterspout. In the western sky rose the baleful glare of an uncowled furnace. The policeman strolled away, and Edwin, cautiously emerging, set off through the rain up the Halesby Road towards the hills. He felt that he needed their solitude and darkness.

IV

Next day, a haggard and desolate figure, he appeared in the cloak-room of the University where the examination results were displayed. In a dream he realised that he was now a Bachelor of Medicine, but in the realisation there was none of the joy that he had anticipated. He stood before the board bewildered, until W.G. came up behind him and wrung his hand.

“You look as if you’d been making a night of it, my boy,” he said. “Come and have some coffee at the Dousita.”

W.G. was on the top of himself. “It was a pretty near thing. The external examiner in Medicine gave me hell; but it’s all right. God! . . . it’s difficult to believe, isn’t it? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. A voyage, I should think.”

He hadn’t thought of it before.

“That’s not a bad idea. Bit of a rest cure, eh? That’s the only disadvantage, I don’t mind telling you, of being married. I couldn’t leave the missus.”

W.G. babbled on happily. “Did you see the evening paper?” he said. “I see that fellow Griffin’s done for. I always said he’d come to a nasty, sticky end. Some woman or other. . . . I remember your saying that he couldn’t play footer because of his heart. Ah, well . . . that’s one swine the less, poor devil!”

When W.G. left him, Edwin called for a timetable and looked out the trains to Liverpool. There was one that started in half an hour. He caught it, and next morning presented himself at a shipping office in Water Street.

The medical superintendent received him.

“You want a ship? Well, you know, you look very young. When were you qualified?”

“Yesterday,” Edwin confessed.

“Very young. Still, you won’t be stale. You don’t drink, by any chance?”

“I’m practically a total abstainer.” The man scrutinised Edwin’s haggard eyes.

“H’m. . . . Well, as it happens, one of our men has failed us. I’ll give you a ship, the Macao, if you can sail to-morrow. Rather short notice, eh?”

“I think I can do it. What about equipment?”

“Oh, we don’t go in for brass-bound uniforms on our ships. Ten pounds a month and bonus. What?”

“Where is she going to?”

“China. You may call at Japan for coal with luck. See the world, you know. That’s what most of you fellows are after. You’ll have to go aboard to-night. Birkenhead Docks.”

“I’ll he there.”And with trembling hands he signed his contract.

In a wintry evening he crossed the Mersey ferry. A salt wind from the west boomed up the channel. Edwin, in the bows, felt his face drenched with spray. “It’s clean,” he thought. “It will make me cleaner. That’s what I need. I don’t believe I shall ever feel anything again, until I’m washed clean. I’m old . . . old and numb. I’ve lost my sense of enjoyment. I wonder if it will ever come back to me!”

As he stood there in the salt breeze, some words of Traherne, his mother’s countryman, came into his mind:

“You shall never enjoy this world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.”

Perhaps they were true. He wondered.