GOLDEN MEDIOCRITY
I
OF course he got his thrashing in return; but, in the end, he found
himself the gainer by that unthinkable outburst. The incident had been
noted, and there were those who relished the blow to Griffin’s prestige,
a blow which no recriminatory lickings could efface. Edwin assured
himself that he had that day lighted such a candle in England as should
never be put out. It seemed, indeed, as though the affair had revealed
to some of his own classmates that intellectual superiority which they
had overlooked before; and, in particular, it made the basis of a
friendship between himself and one of his rivals, a boy named Widdup, who
combined with a head for mathematics—Edwin’s blank despair—a certain
proficiency in games. Widdup disliked Griffin.
“Great beefy beast,” he said. “If they’d make him play footer and sweat
some of the fat off him he’d have been a bit quicker on you. He wasn’t
half waxy about it. He hates being laughed at. . . .”
And so, as the terms slipped by, St. Luke’s ceased to be a purgatory.
Edwin contracted certain timid friendships—as this with Widdup—and adored
a series of perfectly ordinary prefects. He shook down into his proper
place in the scheme of things, and after that nobody took much notice of
him. Even the Griffin-Douglas coalition, who never forgave, troubled him
very little. Certain outbursts of persecution he took as a matter of
course; such was the teaching of history; but the ways of these two were
now widely divergent from those in which he trod. The dormitory was the
only place in which they inevitably met, for he had managed to move his
seat in Hall some way from that of Griffin; and in chapel, the only other
place they had in common, he was safe.
The friendship with Widdup notably ripened. They were both members of
the same branch of the Natural History Society, the one that was labelled
astronomical. The subject was unpopular, for its pursuit was nocturnal
and made no exciting appeal to the hunting instinct of boys. The section
met every fortnight in the room of one of the mathematical masters. And
since they met at night, they managed to escape second Prep. Their
president, Mr. Heal, was a rather melancholy performer on the flute, and
Edwin, generally contriving to turn up some minutes before the meeting
began, would stand at the door listening to the innocent gentleman
playing to himself unaccompanied folk-tunes that he had collected in the
holidays. At the first sound of a door-knock Heal would unscrew his
flute and pack it into a case lined with puce-coloured plush; but it
seemed as though an afterglow of tenderness still lingered on his
unusually dull features. As for astronomy, they never got much farther
than the mere names of constellations and their figures, although Widdup
often asked questions which almost tapped the mathematical master’s
subject. These adventures were discouraged, for Mr. Heal had grown to
hate mathematics. But they did learn to find their way about the paths
of the sky, and often, on frosty winter evenings, when the clear vault
above the downs was like jet, Edwin and Widdup would walk up and down the
Quad and imagine that they could feel the heave of the spinning world,
while they watched Capella scale the dome of sky. And once, when he had
come to the master’s room a little early on the night of the section
meeting, Mr. Heal cleared his throat and, taking Edwin by the ear, began
to read from an olive-green book that he held in his hand. He read
atrociously. “How do you like this?” he said. “H’m?” He said “H’m”
with a little snarl in it.
“The Dog Star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half
up the southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous
constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it swung itself forth
above the rim of the landscape; Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine
were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy square of Pegasus was
creeping round to the North-West; far away through the plantation Vega
sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia’s
chair stood daintily poised in the uppermost boughs.”
Edwin thought it was “fine.”
“Better than the _Story of the Heavens_?” asked Mr. Heal. “Come, come,
Ingleby . . . surely not?”
“Rather, sir,” said Edwin.
Mr. Heal shut the book. “The barren and gloomy square of Pegasus,” he
murmured to himself. And all the rest of that evening Edwin found
himself remembering the phrase. The bareness and the gloom of Pegasus
had never struck him before; and now, at a sudden suggestion, the whole
atmosphere of the sky had changed; the vague heavens became habitable to
his fancy; new and immense territory opened before him. . . .
He told Widdup what he remembered of the passage that Heal had read.
“Poor old Tommy,” said Widdup compassionately. “It isn’t an exact square
at all. It’s an irregular quadrilateral, and I don’t see anything gloomy
about it. Stars aren’t gloomy anyway. Look how they sparkle. Look at
Vega.”
Above the gable of the swimming bath that wonderful star throbbed white.
II
In the Lent term they both had measles and woke with swollen eyes to find
each other side by side. In the same ward at the Sanatorium was Layton’s
successor, Payne, a thawed, thin, almost unfamiliar Payne; and while they
swam upon the first buoyant spirits of convalescence, the sheer hulk of
Griffin was hove in, in the snivelling misery of the early stages. Edwin
thought that Griffin had never looked so beastly, and rejoiced in the
pig’s humiliation; but when, at last, Griffin recovered he found his
ancient victim a handy plaything, and for want of anything better to do
attempted to seduce Widdup from Edwin’s friendship. Edwin never quite
forgave Widdup his defection; and when they were all better and back in
school again he found that he still had to avoid Griffin on whom the
habit of persecution had been regrafted. It seemed such a pity . . . he
thought he had outgrown all that sort of thing.
And now he hated Griffin for a new reason. While they were together in
the Sanatorium, after the departure of Payne, Griffin had spoken
boastfully of his relations with one of the “Skivvies” whose morning task
was the making of beds in D dormitory. It appeared that Griffin had met
her first by accident, and later by appointment, and he himself described
her as “very hot pastry.” He was familiar with certain shops in the
neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, which made persuasion easy. To
Edwin, whose life at home had kept him in ignorance of all that a boy of
fifteen ought to know, everything sounded horrible, and he said so. He
remembered the look of the girl quite well: rather anæmic with black hair
and a pretty oval face. Griffin and Widdup howled over his innocence,
and began to instruct him in the “origins of life.” All these things
came as a great shock to Edwin. He felt a passionate conviction that the
other two were fooling him. Unfortunately his father had never employed
a coachman.
“I don’t believe a bit of it,” he said with tears in his eyes.
“You silly kid,” said Widdup. “Everybody knows it’s true.”
“I don’t believe my father would do a thing like that,” cried Edwin.
It seemed suddenly as if the world had become a gross and horrible
planet. The fetters of earth were galling his limbs. He felt a sudden
immense yearning for the coolness and cleanliness of stellar space. If
only he could pass the rest of his life in the great square of Pegasus! . . .
And he was consoled by the assurance that in heaven, at any rate,
there was no marrying or giving in marriage. . . .
III
Next term, to his great joy, he was moved up into the Upper Fourth, and
had for his form-master the gentle Mr. Leeming, a fat and cheerful cleric
with clean-shaven cheeks that shone like those of a trumpet-blowing
cherub. He was very shortsighted, rather lazy, and intensely grateful
for the least spark of intelligence to be found in his class. Edwin soon
attracted him by his history and essays. His mother had fulfilled her
promise of reading _The Fortunes of Nigel_ aloud in the holidays, and, as
luck would have it again, the Upper Fourth were supposed to be
concentrating on the early Stuarts. To the bulk of the form the period
was a vast and almost empty chamber like the big schoolroom, inhabited by
one or two stiff figures, devitalised by dates—a very dreary place. But
to Edwin it was crowded with the swaggerers of Alsatia, the bravoes of
Whitehall, with prentices, and penniless Scotchmen, and all the rest of
Scott’s gallant company.
“Have any of you read _Nigel_?” Mr. Leeming asked the class.
“I have, sir,” said Edwin shyly.
“I have already gathered so, Ingleby. Has anybody else read it?”
Silence. “I think I shall ask the head master to set it to the Middle
School as a holiday task,” said Mr. Leeming.
Thus narrowly did Edwin escape the disaster of having Scott spoiled for
him.
Mr. Leeming was the master in charge of the library, and Edwin began to
spend the long winter lock-ups in this room. Most of the boys who
frequented it came there for the bound volumes of the _Illustrated London
News_, with their pictures of the Franco-Prussian War, Irish evictions,
the launching of the _Great Eastern_, and mild excitements of that kind.
Edwin found himself drawn early to the bookcase that held the poets. To
his great joy he discovered that the key of his playbox fitted the case;
and so he would sometimes sneak into the room at odd moments in the day
and carry away with him certain slim green volumes from the top shelf.
These were Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_, together with their Complete
Works. He had been attracted to them in the first place by the memory of
a polished urn, about as graceful in contour as a carpenter’s baluster,
that stood in a neglected corner of the parish church at home. This urn
was encircled by a scroll which bore these directions
“O smite thy breast and drop a tear—
For know thy Shenstone’s dust lies here.”
A palpable falsehood; for Edwin had already discovered the tomb of the
elegist in another part of the churchyard, elbowed almost into the path
by that of a Victorian ironmonger.
But it was something to have been born in the same parish as a poet; and
Edwin, at an age when everything is a matter of taking sides, ranged
himself boldly with Shenstone and pitted his judgment against that of
Johnson, who rather sniffed at the poet’s unreality, and quoted Gray’s
letters in his despite. The crook and the pipe and the kid were to Edwin
very real things, as one supposes they were almost real to the age of the
pastoral ballad; and the atmosphere was the more vital to him because he
dimly remembered the sight of the poet’s lawns frosted on misty mornings
of winter, the sighing of the Leasowes beeches, and the damp drippings of
the winter woods. Thus he absorbed not only Shenstone but Shenstone’s
contemporaries: men like Dyer and Lyttleton and Akenside, and since he
had no other standard than that of Johnson he classed them by the same
lights as their contemporaries. Brooding among Augustan poetasters in
the library Mr. Leeming found him.
“Poetry, Ingleby?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me see? Prior? Ah, that was a little age, Ingleby! The Augustans
were not great men, and some of them were very coarse, too. Have you
read the Idylls of the King?”
Mr. Leeming introduced Ingleby to the great Victorian, for he himself was
an ardent believer in all the Galahad nonsense, and was astonished at
Ingleby’s ignorance of the school in which those cherubic cheeks had
expanded. He was very fond of talking about purity and conceived it his
duty to keep his class spotless. In the Lent Term, when the form were
working through the catechism, his glosses were most apparent. The
explanation of some passages troubled him. “_From fornication_ . . .
that’s a bad thing,” he would mutter.
And once having put Edwin in the way of perfection he was not going to
look back. A week or two later he asked him how he was getting on with
Tennyson. “Who is your favourite character in the Idylls?” he asked.
Edwin glowed. “Oh, sir, Launcelot—or Bors.”
“But what about Sir Percivale? ‘Sir Percivale whom Arthur and his
knighthood called “The Pure,”’” he quoted in the Oxford variety of
Cockney.
“I don’t know, sir,” stammered Edwin. “They seem somehow made
differently from me.”
“Arthur,” said Mr. Leeming impressively, “has a great and wonderful
prototype whom we should all try to imitate no matter how distantly.”
Edwin, who had read the dedication, wondered why Mr. Leeming lowered his
voice like that in speaking of the Prince Consort.
In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming for superintending his
literary diet, but he soon detected a sameness in the fare. One day he
had got hold of a big Maroon edition of George Gordon, Lord Byron, with
romantic engravings of the Newstead ruins and the poet’s own handsome
head, and Mr. Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly flushed. “Lord
Byron,” he had said, “was not a good man. Have you read _Hiawatha_?”
And he reached down Longfellow . . . Longfellow in green boards decorated
with a geometrical design in gold, and irritating to the touch.
At last Edwin was almost driven from the library by Mr. Leeming’s
attentions. He never read Byron because the books were too big to be
sneaked out of the room beneath a buttoned coat; but he did read, without
distinction, nearly every volume of poetry that he could smuggle out in
this way. He read these books in second “prep” when Layton was poring
over Plato at his high desk, when Widdup was working out the cricket
averages of the second eleven, and Griffin was looking for spicy bits in
the Bible. And as second prep was generally a period of great
sleepiness—since the boys had risen so early, and by that time of evening
the air of the house classroom had been breathed and rebreathed so many
times as to be almost narcotic, the poetry that he read became interwoven
with the strands of his dreams. Dreamy and exalted, poppy-drenched, all
poetry seemed at this time; and it was to intensify this feeling of
sensuous languor that he so often chose the poems of Keats.
In an introduction to the volume he had discovered that Keats had been an
apothecary, and this filled him with a strange glow; for since the
unforgettable incident of the toothbrush he had been (against his will)
diffident about his father. He determined never again to be ashamed of
the shop. When he read of “rich lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,” he
remembered a great cut-glass bottle of some cough linctus that glowed
like a ruby in the shop window when the gas was lit at night. In other
ways he tapped a good deal of the romance of his father’s calling. He
remembered a drawer labelled “Dragon’s blood” . . . the very next best
thing to a dragon’s teeth with their steely harvest. He recalled a whole
pomander-full of provocative scents; he shuddered at the remembered names
of poisons, and other names that suggested alchemy. He almost wanted to
tell Mr. Leeming when next they spoke together, of his father’s trade,
but he wasn’t quite sure if Mr. Leeming approved of Keats. It was not
likely that he would see very much more of this master, for he was high
up in his form and certain to get a move into the Lower Fifth at the end
of the term. In some ways he was not sorry; for the signs of Mr.
Leeming’s affection, the warm encircling arm, the pervading scent of
honeydew, and the naïve glances of those watery eyes were embarrassing.
Before they parted Mr. Leeming showed his intentions more clearly.
“Would you like to learn Hebrew, Ingleby?” he said.
Edwin would have liked to learn Hebrew—but not out of school hours. He
hesitated.
“I thought you might some day wish to take Holy Orders, and I should be
glad to teach you.”
“I will ask my father, sir,” said Edwin modestly. That was one of the
penalties of having interesting eyes.