Outside the laboratory windows was a watery grey fog, and within a close
warmth and the yellow light of the green-shaded gas lamps that stood two
to each table down its narrow length. On each table stood a couple of
glass jars containing the mangled vestiges of the crayfish, mussels,
frogs, and guinea-pigs, upon which the students had been working, and
down the side of the room, facing the windows, were shelves bearing
bleached dissections in spirit, surmounted by a row of beautifully
executed anatomical drawings in white wood frames and overhanging a row
of cubical lockers. All the doors of the laboratory were panelled with
blackboard, and on these were the half-erased diagrams of the previous
day’s work. The laboratory was empty, save for the demonstrator, who sat
near the preparation-room door, and silent, save for a low, continuous
murmur, and the clicking of the rocker microtome at which he was
working. But scattered about the room were traces of numerous students:
hand-bags, polished boxes of instruments, in one place a large drawing
covered by newspaper, and in another a prettily bound copy of “News from
Nowhere,” a book oddly at variance with its surroundings. These things
had been put down hastily as the students had arrived and hurried at
once to secure their seats in the adjacent lecture-theatre. Deadened by
the closed door, the measured accents of the professor sounded as a
featureless muttering.
Presently, faint through the closed windows came the sound of the
Oratory clock striking the hour of eleven. The clicking of the microtome
ceased, and the demonstrator looked at his watch, rose, thrust his hands
into his pockets, and walked slowly down the laboratory towards the
lecture-theatre door. He stood listening for a moment, and then his eye
fell on the little volume by William Morris. He picked it up, glanced at
the title, smiled, opened it, looked at the name on the fly-leaf, ran
the leaves through with his hand, and put it down. Almost immediately
the even murmur of the lecturer ceased, there was a sudden burst of
pencils rattling on the desks in the lecture-theatre, a stirring, a
scraping of feet, and a number of voices speaking together. Then a firm
footfall approached the door, which began to open, and stood ajar, as
some indistinctly heard question arrested the new-comer.
The demonstrator turned, walked slowly back past the microtome and left
the laboratory by the preparation-room door. As he did so, first one,
and then several students carrying note-books, entered the laboratory
from the lecture-theatre, and distributed themselves among the little
tables, or stood in a group about the doorway. They were an
exceptionally heterogeneous assembly,—for while Oxford and Cambridge
still recoil from the blushing prospect of mixed classes, the College of
Science anticipated America in the matter years ago,—mixed socially,
too, for the prestige of the College is high, and its scholarships, free
of any age limit, dredge deeper even than do those of the Scotch
universities. The class numbered one and twenty, but some remained in
the theatre questioning the professor, copying the blackboard diagrams
before they were washed off, or examining the special specimens he had
produced to illustrate the day’s teaching. Of the nine who had come into
the laboratory, three were girls, one of whom, a little fair woman
wearing spectacles and dressed in greyish green, was peering out of the
window at the fog, while the other two, both wholesome-looking,
plain-faced school-girls, unrolled and put on the brown holland aprons
they wore while dissecting. Of the men, two went down the laboratory and
sat down in their places, one a pallid, dark-bearded man who had once
been a tailor, the other a pleasant-featured, ruddy young man of twenty,
dressed in a well-fitting brown suit, young Wedderburn, the son of
Wedderburn the eye-specialist. The others formed a little knot near the
theatre door. One of these, a dwarfed, spectacled figure with a hunch
back, sat on a bent wood stool, two others, one a short, dark youngster,
and the other a flaxen-haired, reddish-complexioned young man, stood
leaning side by side against the slate sink, while the fourth stood
facing them and maintained the larger share of the conversation.
This last person was named Hill. He was a sturdily built young fellow of
the same age as Wedderburn, he had a white face, dark grey eyes, hair of
an indeterminate colour, and prominent, irregular features. He talked
rather louder than was needful, and thrust his hands deeply into his
pockets. His collar was frayed and blue with the starch of a careless
laundress, his clothes were evidently ready-made, and there was a patch
on the side of his boot near the toe. And as he talked or listened to
the others, he glanced now and again towards the lecture-theatre door.
They were discussing the depressing peroration of the lecture they had
just heard, the last lecture it was in the introductory course in
Zoölogy. “From ovum to ovum is the goal of the higher vertebrata,” the
lecturer had said in his melancholy tones, and so had neatly rounded off
the sketch of comparative anatomy he had been developing. The spectacled
hunchback had repeated it, with noisy appreciation, had tossed it
towards the fair-haired student with an evident provocation, and had
started one of those vague, rambling discussions on generalities so
unaccountably dear to the student mind all the world over.
“That is our goal, perhaps,—I admit it,—as far as science goes,” said
the fair-haired student, rising to the challenge. “But there are things
above science.”
“Science,” said Hill, confidently, “is systematic knowledge. Ideas that
don’t come into the system must anyhow—be loose ideas.” He was not quite
sure whether that was a clever saying or a fatuity, until his hearers
took it seriously.
“The thing I cannot understand,” said the hunchback, at large, “is
whether Hill is a materialist or not.”
“There is one thing above matter,” said Hill, promptly, feeling he had a
better thing this time, aware too of some one in the doorway behind him,
and raising his voice a trifle for her benefit, “and that is—the
delusion that there is something above matter.”
“So we have your gospel at last,” said the fair-haired student. “It’s
all a delusion, is it? All our aspirations to lead something more than
dogs’ lives, all our work for anything beyond ourselves. But see how
inconsistent you are! Your socialism, for instance. Why do you trouble
about the interests of the race? Why do you concern yourself about the
beggar in the gutter? Why are you bothering yourself to lend that
book”—he indicated William Morris by a movement of the head—“to every
one in the lab?”
“Girl,” said the hunchback, indistinctly, and glanced guiltily over his
shoulder.
The girl in brown, with the brown eyes, had come into the laboratory,
and stood on the other side of the table behind him with her rolled-up
apron in one hand, looking over her shoulder, listening to the
discussion. She did not notice the hunchback, because she was glancing
from Hill to his interlocutor. Hill’s consciousness of her presence
betrayed itself to her only in his studious ignorance of the fact; but
she understood that and it pleased her. “I see no reason,” said he, “why
a man should live like a brute because he knows of nothing beyond
matter, and does not expect to exist a hundred years hence.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” said the fair-haired student.
“Why _should_ he?” said Hill.
“What inducement has he?”
“That’s the way with all you religious people. It’s all a business of
inducements. Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness’
sake?”
There was a pause. The fair man answered with a kind of vocal padding,
“But—you see—inducement—when I said inducement—” to gain time. And then
the hunchback came to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a
terrible person in the debating society with his questions, and they
invariably took one form,—a demand for a definition. “What’s your
definition of righteousness?” said the hunchback, at this stage.
Hill experienced a sudden loss of complacency at this question, but even
as it was asked, relief came in the person of Brooks, the laboratory
attendant, who entered by the preparation-room door, carrying a number
of freshly-killed guinea-pigs by their hind-legs. “This is the last
batch of material this session,” said the youngster who had not
previously spoken. Brooks advanced up the laboratory, smacking down a
couple of guinea-pigs at each table, and the discussion perished
abruptly as the students who were not already in their places hurried to
them to secure the choice of a specimen. There was a noise of keys
rattling on split rings as lockers were opened, and dissecting
instruments taken out. Hill was already standing by his table, and his
box of scalpels was sticking out of his pocket. The girl in brown came a
step towards him, and leaning over his table, said softly, “Did you see
that I returned your book, Mr. Hill?”
During the whole scene, she and the book had been vividly present in his
consciousness, but he made a clumsy pretence of looking at the book and
seeing it for the first time. “Oh, yes,” he said, taking it up. “I see.
Did you like it?”
“I want to ask you some questions about it—sometime.”
“Certainly,” said Hill. “I shall be glad.” He stopped awkwardly. “You
liked it?” he said.
“It’s a wonderful book. Only some things I don’t understand.”
Then suddenly the laboratory was hushed by a curious braying noise. It
was the demonstrator. He was at the blackboard ready to begin the day’s
instruction, and it was his custom to demand silence by a sound midway
between the “Er” of common intercourse, and the blast of a trumpet. The
girl in brown slipped back to her place, it was immediately in front of
Hill’s, and Hill, forgetting her forthwith, took a note-book out of the
drawer of his table, turned over its leaves hastily, drew a stumpy
pencil from his pocket, and prepared to make a copious note of the
coming demonstration. For demonstrations and lectures are the sacred
text of the College students. Books, saving only the professor’s own,
you may—it is even expedient to—ignore.
Hill was the son of a Landport cobbler, and had been hooked by a chance
blue paper the authorities had thrown out to the Landport Technical
College. He kept himself in London on his allowance of a guinea a week,
and found that with proper care this also covered his clothing
allowance, an occasional waterproof collar, that is, and ink and needles
and cotton and such-like necessaries for a man about town. This was his
first year and his first session, but the brown old man in Landport had
already got himself detested in many public-houses by boasting of his
son “the professor.” Hill was a vigorous youngster, with a serene
contempt for the clergy of all denominations, and a fine ambition to
reconstruct the world. He regarded his scholarship as a brilliant
opportunity. He had begun to read at seven, and had read steadily
whatever came in his way, good or bad, since then. His worldly
experience had been limited to the Island of Portsea, and acquired
chiefly in the wholesale boot factory in which he had worked by day,
after passing the seventh standard of the Board School. He had a
considerable gift of speech, as the College Debating Society, which met
amidst the crushing machines and mine models in the Metallurgical
Theatre downstairs, already recognised, recognised by a violent
battering of desks whenever he rose. And he was just at that fine
emotional age when life opens at the end of a narrow pass, like a broad
valley at one’s feet, full of the promise of wonderful discoveries and
tremendous achievements. And his own limitations, save that he knew that
he knew neither Latin or French, were all unknown to him.
At first his interest had been divided pretty equally between his
biological work at the College and social and theological theorising, an
employment which he took in deadly earnest. Of a night, when the big
museum library was not open, he would sit on the bed of his room in
Chelsea with his coat and a muffler on, and write out the lecture notes
and revise his dissection memoranda until Thorpe called him out by a
whistle,—the landlady objected to open the door to attic visitors,—and
then the two would go prowling about the shadowy, shiny, gas-lit
streets, talking, very much in the fashion of the sample just given, of
the God Idea and Righteousness and Carlyle and the Reorganisation of
Society. And in the midst of it all, Hill, arguing not only for Thorpe
but for the casual passer-by, would lose the thread of his argument,
glancing at some pretty, painted face that looked meaningly at him as he
passed. Science and Righteousness! But once or twice lately there had
been signs that a third interest was creeping into his life, and he had
found his attention wandering from the fate of the mesoblastic somites
or the probable meaning of the blastopore, to the thought of the girl
with the brown eyes who sat at the table before him.
She was a paying student; she descended inconceivable social altitudes
to speak to him. At the thought of the education she must have had and
the accomplishments she must possess, the soul of Hill became abject
within him. She had spoken to him first over a difficulty about the
alisphenoid of a rabbit’s skull, and he had found that, in biology at
least, he had no reason for self-abasement. And from that, after the
manner of young people starting from any starting-point, they got to
generalities, and while Hill attacked her upon the question of
socialism,—some instinct told him to spare her a direct assault upon her
religion,—she was gathering resolution to undertake what she told
herself was his æsthetic education. She was a year or two older than he,
though the thought never occurred to him. The loan of “News from
Nowhere” was the beginning of a series of cross loans. Upon some absurd
first principle of his, Hill had never “wasted time” upon poetry, and it
seemed an appalling deficiency to her. One day in the lunch hour, when
she chanced upon him alone in the little museum where the skeletons were
arranged, shamefully eating the bun that constituted his midday meal,
she retreated and returned, to lend him, with a slightly furtive air, a
volume of Browning. He stood sideways towards her and took the book
rather clumsily, because he was holding the bun in the other hand. And
in the retrospect his voice lacked the cheerful clearness he could have
wished.
That occurred after the examination in comparative anatomy, on the day
before the College turned out its students and was carefully locked up
by the officials, for the Christmas holidays. The excitement of cramming
for the first trial of strength had for a little while dominated Hill to
the exclusion of his other interests. In the forecasts of the result in
which every one indulged, he was surprised to find that no one regarded
him as a possible competitor for the Harvey Commemoration Medal, of
which this and the two subsequent examinations disposed. It was about
this time that Wedderburn, who so far had lived inconspicuously on the
uttermost margin of Hill’s perceptions, began to take on the appearance
of an obstacle. By a mutual agreement the nocturnal prowlings with
Thorpe ceased for the three weeks before the examination, and his
landlady pointed out that she really could not supply so much lamp-oil
at the price. He walked to and fro from the College with little slips of
mnemonics in his hand, lists of crayfish appendages, rabbits’
skull-bones, and vertebrate nerves, for example, and became a positive
nuisance to foot-passengers in the opposite direction.
But by a natural reaction Poetry and the girl with the brown eyes ruled
the Christmas holiday. The pending results of the examination became
such a secondary consideration that Hill marvelled at his father’s
excitement. Even had he wished it, there was no comparative anatomy to
read in Landport, and he was too poor to buy books, but the stock of
poets in the library was extensive and Hill’s attack was magnificently
sustained. He saturated himself with the fluent numbers of Longfellow
and Tennyson, and fortified himself with Shakespeare, found a kindred
soul in Pope and a master in Shelley, and heard and fled the siren
voices of Eliza Cook and Mrs. Hemans. But he read no more Browning,
because he hoped for the loan of other volumes from Miss Haysman when he
returned to London.
He walked from his lodgings to the College with that volume of Browning
in his shiny black bag, and his mind teeming with the finest general
propositions about poetry. Indeed he framed first this little speech and
then that with which to grace the return. The morning was an
exceptionally pleasant one for London, there was a clear, hard frost and
undeniable blue in the sky, a thin haze softened every outline, and warm
shafts of sunlight struck between the houseblocks and turned the sunny
side of the street to amber and gold. In the hall of the College he
pulled off his glove and signed his name with fingers so stiff with cold
that the characteristic dash under the signature he cultivated became a
quivering line. He imagined Miss Haysman about him everywhere. He turned
at the staircase, and there, below, he saw a crowd struggling at the
foot of the notice board. This, possibly, was the biology list. He
forgot Browning and Miss Haysman for the moment, and joined the
scrimmage. And at last with his cheek flattened against the sleeve of
the man on the step above him, he read the list:
“_Class I._
H. J. SOMERS WEDDERBURN.
WILLIAM HILL.”
And thereafter followed a second class that is outside our present
sympathies. It was characteristic that he did not trouble to look for
Thorpe on the Physics list, but backed out of the struggle at once, and
in a curious emotional state between pride over common second-class
humanity and acute disappointment at Wedderburn’s success, went on his
way upstairs. At the top, as he was hanging up his coat in the passage,
the zoölogical demonstrator, a young man from Oxford, who secretly
regarded him as a blatant “mugger” of the very worst type, offered his
heartiest congratulations.
At the laboratory door Hill stopped for a second to get his breath, and
then entered. He looked straight up the laboratory and saw all five girl
students grouped in their places, and Wedderburn, the once retiring
Wedderburn, leaning rather gracefully against the window, playing with
the blind tassel and talking, apparently, to the five of them. Now Hill
could talk bravely enough and even overbearingly to one girl, and he
could have made a speech to a roomful of girls, but this business of
standing at ease and appreciating, fencing, and returning quick remarks
round a group, was, he knew, altogether beyond him. Coming up the
staircase his feelings for Wedderburn had been generous, a certain
admiration perhaps, a willingness to shake his hand conspicuously and
heartily as one who had fought but the first round. But before Christmas
Wedderburn had never gone up to that end of the room to talk. In a flash
Hill’s mist of vague excitement condensed abruptly to a vivid dislike of
Wedderburn. Possibly his expression changed. As he came up to his place
Wedderburn nodded carelessly to him, and the others glanced round. Miss
Haysman looked at him and away again, the faintest touch of her eyes. “I
can’t agree with you, Mr. Wedderburn,” she said.
“I must congratulate you on your first class, Mr. Hill,” said the
spectacled girl in green, turning round and beaming at him.
“It’s nothing,” said Hill, staring at Wedderburn and Miss Haysman
talking together, and eager to hear what they talked about.
“We poor folks in the second class don’t think so,” said the girl in
spectacles.
What was it Wedderburn was saying? Something about William Morris! Hill
did not answer the girl in spectacles, and the smile died out of his
face. He could not hear and failed to see how he could “cut in.”
Confound Wedderburn! He sat down, opened his bag, hesitated whether to
return the volume of Browning forthwith, in the sight of all, and
instead drew out his new note-books for the short course in elementary
botany that was now beginning, and which would terminate in February. As
he did so a fat heavy man with a white face and pale grey eyes, Bindon,
the professor of Botany who came up from Kew for January and February,
came in by the lecture-theatre door and passed, rubbing his hands
together and smiling in silent affability, down the laboratory.
In the subsequent six weeks Hill experienced some very rapid and
curiously complex emotional developments. For the most part he had
Wedderburn in focus—a fact that Miss Haysman never suspected. She told
Hill (for in the comparative privacy of the museum she talked a good
deal to him of socialism and Browning and general propositions) that she
had met Wedderburn at the house of some people she knew, and “He’s
inherited his cleverness; for his father, you know, is the great
eye-specialist.”
“_My_ father is a cobbler,” said Hill, quite irrelevantly, and perceived
the want of dignity even as he said it. But the gleam of jealousy did
not offend her. She conceived herself the fundamental source of it. He
suffered bitterly from a sense of Wedderburn’s unfairness and a
realisation of his own handicap. Here was this Wedderburn had picked up
a prominent man for a father, and instead of his losing so many marks on
the score of that advantage, it was counted to him for righteousness!
And while Hill had to introduce himself and talk to Miss Haysman
clumsily over mangled guinea-pigs in the laboratory, this Wedderburn, in
some backstairs way, had access to her social altitudes, and could
converse in a polished argot that Hill understood perhaps, but felt
incapable of speaking. Not of course that he wanted to. Then it seemed
to Hill that for Wedderburn to come there day after day with cuffs
unfrayed, neatly tailored, precisely barbered, quietly perfect, was in
itself an ill-bred, sneering sort of proceeding. Moreover, it was a
stealthy thing for Wedderburn to behave insignificantly for a space, to
mock modesty, to lead Hill to fancy that he himself was beyond dispute
the man of the year, and then suddenly to dart in front of him, and
incontinently to swell up in this fashion. In addition to these things
Wedderburn displayed an increasing disposition to join in any
conversational grouping that included Miss Haysman, and would venture,
and indeed seek occasion to pass opinions derogatory to Socialism and
Atheism. He goaded Hill to incivilities by neat, shallow, and
exceedingly effective personalities about the socialist leaders, until
Hill hated Bernard Shaw’s graceful egotisms, William Morris’s limited
editions and luxurious wall-papers, and Walter Crane’s charmingly absurd
ideal working-men, about as much as he hated Wedderburn. The
dissertations in the laboratory that had been his glory in the previous
term, became a danger, degenerated into inglorious tussles with
Wedderburn, and Hill kept to them only out of an obscure perception that
his honour was involved. In the Debating Society Hill knew quite clearly
that, to a thunderous accompaniment of banged desks, he could have
pulverised Wedderburn. Only Wedderburn never attended the Debating
Society to be pulverised, because—nauseous affectation!—he “dined late.”
You must not imagine that these things presented themselves in quite
such a crude form to Hill’s perception. Hill was a born generaliser.
Wedderburn to him was not so much an individual obstacle as a type, the
salient angle of a class. The economic theories that, after infinite
ferment, had shaped themselves in Hill’s mind, became abruptly concrete
at the contact. The world became full of easy-mannered, graceful,
gracefully dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally shallow
Wedderburns, Bishops Wedderburn, Wedderburns, M.P., Professors
Wedderburn, Wedderburn landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and
epigrammatic cities of refuge from a sturdy debater. And every one ill
clothed or ill dressed, from the cobbler to the cab runner, was a man
and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to Hill’s imagination. So that he
became, as it were, a champion of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to
outward seeming only a self-assertive, ill-mannered young man, and an
unsuccessful champion at that. Again and again, a skirmish over the
afternoon tea that the girl-students had inaugurated, left Hill with
flushed cheeks and a tattered temper, and the Debating Society noticed a
new quality of sarcastic bitterness in his speeches.
You will understand now how it was necessary, if only in the interests
of humanity, that Hill should demolish Wedderburn in the forthcoming
examination and outshine him in the eyes of Miss Haysman, and you will
perceive, too, how Miss Haysman fell into some common feminine
misconceptions. The Hill-Wedderburn quarrel, for in his unostentatious
way Wedderburn reciprocated Hill’s ill-veiled rivalry, became a tribute
to her indefinable charm. She was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of
scalpels and stumpy pencils. To her confidential friend’s secret
annoyance, it even troubled her conscience, for she was a good girl, and
painfully aware, from Ruskin and contemporary fiction, how entirely
men’s activities are determined by women’s attitudes. And if Hill never
by any chance mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him
with the finer modesty for that omission.
So the time came on for the second examination, and Hill’s increasing
pallor confirmed the general rumour that he was working hard. In the
Aërated Bread Shop near South Kensington Station you would see him,
breaking his bun and sipping his milk, with his eyes intent upon a paper
of closely written notes. In his bedroom there were propositions about
buds and stems round his looking-glass, a diagram to catch his eye, if
soap should chance to spare it, above his washing-basin. He missed
several meetings of the Debating Society, but he found the chance
encounters with Miss Haysman in the spacious ways of the adjacent Art
Museum, or in the little Museum at the top of the College, or in the
College corridors, more frequent and very restful. In particular they
used to meet in a little gallery full of wrought-iron chests and gates,
near the Art Library, and there Hill used to talk, under the gentle
stimulus of her flattering attention, of Browning and his personal
ambitions. A characteristic she found remarkable in him was his freedom
from avarice. He contemplated quite calmly the prospect of living all
his life on an income below a hundred pounds a year. But he was
determined to be famous, to make, recognisably in his own proper person,
the world a better place to live in. He took Bradlaugh and John Burns
for his leaders and models, poor, even impecunious, Great Men. But Miss
Haysman thought that such lives were deficient on the æsthetic side, by
which, though she did not know it, she meant good wall-paper and
upholstery, pretty books, tasteful clothes, concerts, and meals nicely
cooked and respectfully served.
At last came the day of the second examination, and the professor of
botany, a fussy conscientious man, rearranged all the tables in the long
narrow laboratory to prevent copying, and put his demonstrator on a
chair on a table (where he felt, he said, like a Hindoo god) to see all
the cheating, and stuck a notice outside the door, “Door Closed,” for no
earthly reason that any human being could discover. And all the morning
from ten to one the quill of Wedderburn shrieked defiance at Hill’s, and
the quills of the others chased their leaders in a tireless pack. So
also it was in the afternoon. Wedderburn was a little quieter than
usual, and Hill’s face was hot all day, and his overcoat bulged with
text-books and note-books against the last moment’s revision. And the
next day, in the morning and in the afternoon, was the practical
examination, when sections had to be cut and slides identified. In the
morning Hill was depressed because he knew he had cut a thick section,
and in the afternoon came the Mysterious Slip.
It was just the kind of thing that the botanical professor was always
doing. Like the income tax, it offered a premium to the cheat. It was a
preparation under the microscope, a little glass slip, held in its place
on the stage of the instrument by light steel clips, and the inscription
set forth that the slip was not to be moved. Each student was to go in
turn to it, sketch it, write in his book of answers what he considered
it to be, and return to his place. Now to move such a slip is a thing
one can do by a chance movement of the finger, and in a fraction of a
second. The professor’s reason for decreeing that the slip should not be
moved depended on the fact that the object he wanted identified was
characteristic of a certain tree stem. In the position in which it was
placed it was a difficult thing to recognise, but once the slip was
moved so as to bring other parts of the preparation into view, its
nature was obvious enough.
Hill came to this, flushed from a contest with staining reagents, sat
down on the little stool before the microscope, turned the mirror to get
the best light, and then out of sheer habit shifted the slip. At once he
remembered the prohibition, and with an almost continuous motion of his
hands, moved it back, and sat paralysed with astonishment at his action.
Then slowly he turned his head. The professor was out of the room, the
demonstrator sat aloft on his impromptu rostrum, reading the “Q. Jour.
Mi. Sci.,” the rest of the examinees were busy and with their backs to
him. Should he own up to the accident now? He knew quite clearly what
the thing was. It was a lenticel, a characteristic preparation from the
elder-tree. His eye roved over his intent fellow-students and Wedderburn
suddenly glanced over his shoulder at him with a queer expression in his
eyes. The mental excitement that had kept Hill at an abnormal pitch of
vigour these two days gave way to a curious nervous tension. His book of
answers was beside him. He did not write down what the thing was, but
with one eye at the microscope he began making a hasty sketch of it. His
mind was full of this grotesque puzzle in ethics that had suddenly been
sprung upon him. Should he identify it? Or should he leave this question
unanswered? In that case Wedderburn would probably come out first in the
botanical list. How could he tell now whether he might not have
identified the thing without shifting it? It was possible that
Wedderburn had failed to recognise it, of course. Suppose Wedderburn,
too, had shifted the slide? He looked up at the clock. There were
fifteen minutes in which to make up his mind. He gathered up his book of
answers and the coloured pencils he used in illustrating his replies,
and walked back to his seat.
He read through his manuscript and then sat thinking and gnawing his
knuckle. It would look queer now if he owned up. He _must_ beat
Wedderburn. He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns
and Bradlaugh. Besides, he reflected, the glimpse of the rest of the
slip he had had, was after all quite accidental, forced upon him by
chance, a kind of providential revelation rather than an unfair
advantage. It was not nearly so dishonest to avail himself of that as it
was of Broome, who believed in the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for
a First-Class. “Five minutes more,” said the demonstrator, folding up
his paper and becoming observant. Hill watched the clock hands until two
minutes remained, then he opened the book of answers, and with hot ears
and an affectation of ease, gave his drawing of the lenticel its name.
When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of Wedderburn
and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green who knew the
demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human) said that
in the result of the two examinations taken together, Hill had the
advantage of a mark, 167 to 166, out of a possible 200. Every one
admired Hill in a way, though the suspicion of “mugging” clung to him.
But Hill was to find congratulations and Miss Haysman’s enhanced opinion
of him, and even the decided decline in the crest of Wedderburn tainted
by an unhappy memory. He felt a remarkable access of energy at first,
and the note of a Democracy marching to Triumph returned to his Debating
Society speeches; he worked at his comparative anatomy with tremendous
zeal and effect, and he went on with his æsthetic education. But through
it all, a vivid little picture was continually coming before his mind’s
eye, of a sneakish person manipulating a slide....
No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no Higher
Power existed to see it, but for all that it worried him. Memories are
not dead things, but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and
develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually
fretted. Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that
the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on his memory became
confused about it, until at last he was not sure, although he assured
himself that he _was_ sure, whether the movement had been absolutely
involuntary. Then it is possible that Hill’s dietary was conducive to
morbid conscientiousness,—a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a
midday bun, and, at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient,
such meat as his means determined, usually in a chophouse in a back
street off the Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to
threepenny and ninepenny classics, and they usually represented a
suppression of potatoes or chops. It is indisputable that outbreaks of
self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods
of scarcity. But apart from this influence on the feelings, there was in
Hill a distinct aversion to falsity, that the blasphemous Landport
cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of
one fact about professed Atheists I am convinced: they may be, they
usually are, fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions,
brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves; but they lie with difficulty.
If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of
compromise, they would simply be liberal Churchmen. And, moreover, this
memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman. For she now preferred him
to Wedderburn so evidently that he felt sure he cared for her, and began
reciprocating her attentions by timid marks of personal regard,—at one
time he even bought a bunch of violets, carried it about in his pocket,
and produced it with a stumbling explanation, withered and dead, in the
gallery of old iron. It poisoned, too, the denunciation of capitalist
dishonesty that had been one of his life’s pleasures. And, lastly, it
poisoned his triumph over Wedderburn. Previously he had been
Wedderburn’s superior in his own eyes, and had raged simply at a want of
recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker suspicion of a positive
inferiority. He fancied he found justification for his position in
Browning; but they vanished on analysis. At last, moved curiously enough
by exactly the same motive forces that had resulted in his dishonesty,
he went to Professor Bindon and made a clean breast of the whole affair.
As Hill was a paid student, Professor Bindon did not ask him to sit
down, and he stood before the Professor’s desk as he made his
confession.
“It’s a curious story,” said Professor Bindon, slowly realising how the
thing reflected on himself, and then letting his anger rise. “A most
remarkable story. I can’t understand your doing it, and I can’t
understand this avowal. You’re a type of student—Cambridge men would
never dream—I suppose I ought to have thought—Why _did_ you cheat?”
“I didn’t—cheat,” said Hill.
“But you have just been telling me you did.”
“I thought I explained—”
“Either you cheated or you did not cheat.”
“I said my motion was involuntary—”
“I am not a metaphysician, I am a servant of science—of fact. You were
told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If that is not
cheating—”
“If I was a cheat,” said Hill, with the note of hysterics in his voice,
“should I come here and tell you?”
“Your repentance, of course, does you credit,” said Professor Bindon;
“but it does not alter the original facts.”
“No, sir,” said Hill, giving in, in utter self-abasement.
“Even now you cause an enormous amount of trouble. The examination list
will have to be revised.”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“Suppose so! Of course it must be revised. And I don’t see how I can
conscientiously pass you.”
“Not pass me!” said Hill. “Fail me!”
“It’s the rule in all examinations. Or where should we be? What else did
you expect? You don’t want to shirk the consequences of your own acts?”
“I thought perhaps,” said Hill. And then, “Fail me! I thought, as I told
you, you would simply deduct the marks given for that slip—”
“Impossible!” said Bindon. “Besides, it would still leave you above
Wedderburn. Deduct only the marks! Preposterous! The Departmental
Regulations distinctly say—”
“But it’s my own admission, sir.”
“The Regulations say nothing whatever of the manner in which the matter
comes to light. They simply provide—”
“It will ruin me. If I fail this examination, they won’t renew my
scholarship.”
“You should have thought of that before.”
“But, sir, consider all my circumstances—”
“I cannot consider anything. Professors in this College are machines.
The Regulations will not even let us recommend our students for
appointments. I am a machine, and you have worked me. I have to do—”
“It’s very hard, sir.”
“Possibly it is.”
“If I am to be failed this examination I might as well go home at once.”
“That is as you think proper.” Bindon’s voice softened a little, he
perceived he had been unjust, and, provided he did not contradict
himself, he was disposed to amelioration. “As a private person,” he
said, “I think this confession of yours goes far to mitigate your
offence. But you have set the machinery in motion, you know, and now it
must take its course. I—I am really sorry you gave way.”
A wave of emotion prevented Hill from answering. Suddenly very vividly
he saw the heavily-lined face of the old Landport cobbler, his father.
“Good God!—What a fool I have been!” he said hotly and abruptly.
“I hope,” said Bindon, “that it will be a lesson to you.”
But curiously enough they were not thinking of quite the same
indiscretion.
There was a pause.
“I would like a day to think, sir, and then I will let you know—about
going home, I mean,” said Hill, moving towards the door.
The next day Hill’s place was vacant. The spectacled girl in green was,
as usual, first with the news. Wedderburn and Miss Haysman were talking
of the Meistersingers, when she came up to them.
“Have you heard?” she said.
“Heard what?”
“There was cheating in the examination.”
“Cheating!” said Wedderburn, with his face suddenly hot. “How?”
“That slide—”
“Moved? Never!”
“It was. That slide that we weren’t to move—”
“Nonsense!” said Wedderburn. “Why! How could they find out? Who do they
say—”
“It was Mr. Hill.”
“_Hill_!”
“Mr. Hill!”
“Not—surely not the immaculate Hill?” said Wedderburn, recovering.
“I don’t believe it,” said Miss Haysman. “How do you know?”
“I _didn’t_,” said the girl in spectacles. “But I know it now for a
fact. Mr. Hill went and confessed to Professor Bindon himself.”
“By Jove!” said Wedderburn. “Hill of all people—But I am always inclined
to distrust these philanthropists-on-principle—”
“Are you quite sure?” said Miss Haysman, with a catch in her breath.
“Quite. It’s dreadful, isn’t it? But you know, what can you expect? His
father is a cobbler—”
Then Miss Haysman astonished the girl in spectacles.
“I don’t care. I will not believe it,” she said, flushing darkly under
her warm-tinted skin. “I will not believe it until he has told me so
himself—face to face. I would scarcely believe it then,” and abruptly
she turned her back on the girl in spectacles, and walked to her own
place.
“It’s true, all the same,” said the girl in spectacles, peering and
smiling at Wedderburn.
But Wedderburn did not answer her. She was, indeed, one of those people
who are destined to make unanswered remarks.