MIDSUMMER
I
EDWIN had expected that the wrench of going back to school after these
holidays would be unbearable: but when he returned to St. Luke’s next day
he was almost astonished at his own acceptance of the change. It was
evening when he arrived, and boys who had come from a greater distance
than he were already unpacking their play-boxes in the long box-room.
Edwin sniffed the smell which he had once found so alien—that mingled
odour of cricket flannels, biscuits, bat-oil, and faint mustiness, with
relish. He passed through the swing-doorway into the library, dark and
echoing and groped his way towards the poetry bookshelves. He ran his
fingers over the brass netting that protected their case, he even tried
his play-box key to see if it had lost its cunning. The lock opened
easily, and he felt for the backs of the big maroon volumes of Byron with
their shiny title-plates. He thought of Mr. Leeming and of Sir
Percivale. A foolish phrase, one of a kind that he had often lately
found running through his brain—rhythmical groups of words that meant
nothing in particular—formed itself in his mind and stuck there. “_The
white lie of a blameless life_.” He laughed at himself. These words
that came from nowhere were the strangest things. He heard the echo of
his own laugh in the dark and empty room. The white lie of a blameless
life. . . . It pleased him to think that he had done with Mr. Leeming as
a form-master, even though the question of Hebrew and Holy Orders
remained unanswered.
Stepping out of the library he was hailed by Widdup; a plumper,
sunbrowned Widdup fresh from three weeks with a doctor uncle in
Devonshire. There had been long drives through the lanes at the back of
Start Bay where the primroses (so Widdup assured him) were as big as
door-handles; there had actually been sea-bathing in April, and the joy
of watching huge liners, homeward bound from India, making the Start.
“And hills . . .” said Widdup, “you never saw such hills. Talk about
these downs. . . .”
“It’s awfully hilly country at home,” said Edwin.
They were walking side by side and up and down the quadrangle, from the
gym to the swimming bath, and dozens of couples were crossing and
recrossing in the same track. From time to time they would catch a few
words of conversation, eager and excited, as they passed. Above them
stretched a deep sky powdered with dust of gold.
“What did you say?” said Widdup. “I’m awfully sorry, old chap. I didn’t
catch it. Douglas shouted to me. . . .”
“I don’t know . . .” said Edwin. “Oh, yes . . . hills. I said there are
some ripping hills at home. One called Uffdown.”
“But these hills in Devonshire . . . you’ve got to get out of the trap
for nearly every one. I used to drive my uncle. It was awful sport.
You’d think I was rotting, but it’s true.”
The chapel bell started tolling in short jerks. The couples began to
drift towards the northern end of the Quad, where the gates were being
unbolted. For five minutes exactly the gravel of the wide path sloping
to the chapel gave out a grating sound beneath the pressure of many
hundred feet. The last stragglers hurried in. The master on duty
entered the porch. All the life of that dark mass of buildings spread
upon the bare edge of the downs became concentrated within the walls of
the chapel. Its stained glass windows glowed as with some spiritual
radiance. Inside they began to sing the hymn which is used at the
beginning of the term:—
“Rank by rank again we stand
From the four winds gathered hither,
Loud the hallowed walls demand
Whence we come and how and whither . . .”
and from the open doors there issued a faintly musty smell, as though
indeed the dead air of the holiday-time were dispossessed and young life
had again invaded its ancient haunt.
II
It seemed to Edwin from the first as though the concentrated delights of
this summer term were surely enough to efface every memory of discomfort
and suffering that had clouded his early days at St. Luke’s. He was
exceptionally happy in his new form. The form-master, whose name was
Cleaver, was an idle man with a young wife and a small income of his own,
circumstances that combined to make him contented with the conditions of
servitude at St. Luke’s which weighed so heavily on the disappointed and
underpaid Selby. He was also a fine cricketer, accepting the worship
which was the prerogative of an old “blue,” and convinced in his own
mind—if ever that kingdom were possessed by anything so positive as a
conviction—that the main business of the summer term was cricket. The
atmosphere of the cricket-field, with its alternations of strenuousness
and summery lassitude, pervaded his classroom, and the traditions of that
aristocratic game, in which nobody could conceivably behave in a violent
or unsportsmanlike manner, regulated his attitude towards the work of his
form.
Edwin found it fairly easy to keep his average going at the departments
of the game in which Mr. Cleaver was concerned: Latin and Greek and
English. If, as occasionally happened, he made a century, Cleaver was
ready to congratulate him as a sportsman and a brother. To be beaten by
some yorker of Tacitus was no crime if he had played with a straight bat
and didn’t slog. Even a fool who could keep his end up had Mr. Cleaver’s
sympathy.
It was not only in a spiritual atmosphere of the Lower Fifth that Edwin
found content. The classroom which the form inhabited was the most
pleasant in the whole school, placed high with a bow-window overlooking a
pleasant lawn that a poplar overshadowed. Beyond the lawn lay a belt of
dense thickets full of singing birds, on the edge of which laburnum and
lilac were now in flower: so that when Edwin’s innings was over, or Mr.
Cleaver was gently tossing up classical lobs to the weaker members of the
form, he could let his eyes wander over the warm air of the lawn to
plumes of purple lilac waving in the summer breeze, or the tops of the
avenue of lime-trees leading to the chapel spire. Even in the heat of
the day the Lower Fifth classroom was cool and airy, visited only by
wandering bees and scents of lime and lilac beckoning towards a golden
afternoon.
The term was full of lovely animal delights; the luxury of flannels and
soft felt hats; the warmth of a caressing sun; the contrast of cool
drinks and water-ices; the languors of muscular fatigue; the reviving
ecstasy of a plunge into the green depths of the swimming bath; the joy
of extended twilights, and, in the thin air of evening, a multitude of
sounds, soothing because they were so familiar as to be no more
disturbing to consciousness than silence: boys’ voices calling in the
fields, the clear click of bat and ball, the stinging echoes of the
fives-court. Great days . . . great days . . .
Edwin found himself becoming keen on cricket—not indeed from any
ambitions towards excellence, though the mere fact of sitting at Mr.
Cleaver’s feet was an inspiration, but for the sheer joy of tiring
himself at the nets and the peculiar charm of the game’s setting of
sunburn and white flannels and green fields. Cricket was a part of this
divine summer, and therefore to be worshipped. Little by little as he
practised he found he was beginning to improve, and before the middle of
the term he was developing into a fair bowler of medium pace and had
taken his own place in the house second eleven. It did him good in other
ways; for in this capacity he found that he was at length accepted
naturally and without any exceptional effort on his part. So,
miraculously, he seemed to have arrived at a degree of normality. This,
in itself, was a triumph.
Spending long afternoons with his team in the lower fields, he found that
he could feel really at home with other “men.” He discovered qualities
in them that he had never guessed before. In the cricket field even
Douglas became tolerable; no longer a terrible and baleful influence with
scowling brows under a mop of black hair, but just a jolly good
wicket-keeper. Edwin began to be feverishly interested in the fortunes
of the second eleven: kept their averages, produced an elaborate table of
league results, conceived a secondary but violent interest in the
progress of his own County, Worcestershire, in those days, thanks to the
brilliancy of the Foster brothers—slowly rising to fame. Sometimes while
he lay on the grass, watching his own side bat, he would see the figure
of old, fat Leeming ambling along the path. He would shrink into the
concealment of his uniform flannel, being afraid that his patron would
speak to him and isolate him from his pleasant company. Leeming was not
fond of cricket and his shadow would mar this particular joy. Only when
he had passed relief would come. Great days . . . great days.
III
In the pursuit of these joys it is not to be supposed that Ingleby
forsook his friends the poets. In the flush of early June, before the
crowding of midsummer’s high pomps, there came to him many moments of
ecstasy. In the spinney at the back of the head master’s house there was
a nightingale to which his evening dreams were dedicated. All the
twilights were full of delicious scents and sounds. Of all other times
he remembered most clearly certain evenings when he would walk all alone
up the long slope of the gravel-path from the chapel, hearing the
whizzing wings of the cockchafers that made their home in the shrubs on
either side. Sunday evenings . . . Sundays were the most wonderful days
of all; not, indeed, because the chapel services made any religious
appeal to him—the advances of Mr. Leeming had scotched that long ago—but
because of the peculiar atmosphere of freedom which the long day
possessed and which, somehow, even the Head’s sermons failed to mar. He
hated the Head’s sermons; he hated, in particular, the sight of Griffin,
who was a useful member of the choir, singing, like any golden-headed
cherub, a solo in the anthem. But he loved the music, and particularly
the psalms, with which the daily matins and evensong made him so familiar
that he couldn’t help knowing many of them by heart.
The chants to which the psalms were sung at St. Luke’s had been specially
composed for the school chapel by Dr. Downton, the organist, who had
fitted them with modulations that were, at the least, surprising to ears
which could not be happy or feel secure far from the present help of
tonic and dominant. Most of the congregation at St. Luke’s considered
that Sammy’s tunes were rotten. At first they were inflicted upon the
choir in manuscript; but in Edwin’s second summer they appeared collected
in a slim gray volume, and Heal, who acted as choirmaster, explained that
they were the results of the most careful study of the Hebrew text, of
night-long ecstasies, and the deep brooding of Dr. Downton’s mind. It
gave Edwin a picture of Sammy, with his gray, impassive face, weaving his
tunes out of the silence of the night by candlelight in the high
turret-room which that solitary master inhabited, and for this alone he
began to love the St. Luke’s Psalter. It is certain, at any rate, that
his early acquaintance with strange harmonic ideas made a great deal of
the most modern music easy to him in after years. Later, in North
Bromwich, when he became immersed in the flood of Wagner, he often
wondered whether Sammy in his lonely tower, had known these wonders, and
cherished them up there all by himself. He certainly couldn’t associate
that sort of music with the naïvetés of Mr. Heal’s flute. And yet, you
never can tell. . . . Mr. Heal knew his Hardy. . . .
Then there were Sunday walks with Widdup over the downs under a grilling
sun, and through the woods of York Park, where Griffin and Douglas,
poaching, had encountered keepers; but the glare and dryness of a chalk
country in summer does not invite exercise, and the most precious hours
of all were spent on the sloping banks between the Grand Entrance and the
chapel. Here, early on a Sunday morning, Edwin and Widdup would carry
out an armful of rugs and cushions: and there all day they would lie in
the shade of the limes, reading, writing letters (Ingleby always had a
letter from his mother to answer on Sundays), watching the restless
flight of little copper butterflies, seeing the hot sky deepen to an
almost southern blue behind the pointed gables of the school. Against
such skies the red brick of St. Luke’s became amazingly beautiful. It
seemed to Edwin that in his home, on the edge of the black country, the
sky was never so clear and deep. Lying there he would read the books
that he had smuggled out of the library . . . poetry . . . a great deal
of it. Novels . . . he read, and he always remembered reading, Poe’s
_Tales of Mystery and Imagination_: “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The
Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death.” Such titles!
There seemed to be no end to the leisure of those days.
With the middle of the term came the Race Meeting on the Downs. During
the whole of Race Week the college bounds were tightened, so that no boy
dared show his face outside the iron gates. Within the short memory of
the school, a prefect—no less!—had been expelled, confronting his own
housemaster on the edge of Tattersall’s ring.
On Wednesday of the week the race for the Six Thousand Guineas, the
greatest of the classics, was to be run. St. Luke’s within its closed
gates buzzed like a hive. In every house and every form there were
sweepstakes. Griffin made a book; boasted in Hall that he meant to see
the “Guineas” run or die. Ingleby very nearly admired him for his
courage. The great day came. All morning from the open windows of the
Lower Fifth classroom he could hear the rumble of loaded brakes climbing
the Downs road. In those days there were no motors, but white dust,
up-churned by many hundreds of wheels, filled the air and drifted in
clouds into the college quad. From a high wall at the back of the
swimming-bath they could see the road itself and the unceasing, hot
procession moving upwards; brakes full of men who carried beer-bottles;
bookies in white top-hats; costers with buttons as big as half-crowns
driving carts drawn by little donkeys whose thick coats were matted with
sweat; gipsies out to prey upon the rest of mankind; smart gentlemen in
dog-skin gloves driving tandem; regimental drags. All the road was full
of dust and torn paper and the odour of beer and sweat, and every member
of the crowd looked anxiously forward, as though he feared he would be
too late for the “Guineas,” toward the summit of the Downs where the
grand stand, like a magnificent paper-rack, stood up white against the
sky. Down in the playing-fields that afternoon nobody thought much of
cricket. For all the locked iron gates, the eager consciousness of the
crowd on the Downs had invaded St. Luke’s. Ingleby was scoring for his
own side’s innings. Douglas, who was sitting astride of a bat, kept his
eyes fixed on the airy summit of the grand stand, now fringed with the
black bodies of a thousand spectators. He pulled out his watch.
“They’re off!” he said. “My God, don’t I envy old Griff!”
Ingleby forgot his scoring. He, too, was wondering what had happened.
He could imagine it easily, for several times on the Downs he had crossed
the tan gallops on which, it was said, horses from the royal racing
stables were trained, and seen; incredibly slender creatures, lithe as
greyhounds, thundering neck and neck, over the sprinkled bark. He could
think of nothing swifter or more exciting on earth. The game stopped.
All the players were looking at the grand stand, as though their eyes
could tell them which horse had won. Two minutes. Three. From the top
of the Downs a great roar came down to them. Some monstrous beast, no
congregation of men, was roaring there. The black fringe on the grand
stand became animated by waving arms and hats and sticks. A cloud of
tinier specks detached themselves. These were the carrier pigeons; and
in a very little time they were flying high above the playing-fields,
seeing, no doubt, the black mass of London outstretched so many miles
away.
“God . . . I wish I could shoot one,” said Douglas. “I never heard such
a row as they made up there. Ingleby, I’ll lay you two to one the
Prince’s horse has won.”
That evening witnessed the canonisation of Griffin. Veritably he had
seen the Guineas. A crowd of admirers listened to his story between
preps in the house classroom. His manner was indolent and boastful.
This was to be no more than the first of many exploits. On
Friday—Ladies’ Day—the race for the Birches would be run. He had put the
money he had won over the Guineas on a horse called Airs and Graces, and
was going to see her bring his money home.
Ingleby had never heard the name of this horse before, but when the house
sweepstakes for the Birches was drawn he found that Airs and Graces had
fallen to him. Griffin, who evidently considered that this animal’s
destinies were in his keeping, offered him a pound for his ticket.
Ingleby wasn’t having any. Douglas, called in to give an opinion on the
damnableness of that skunk Ingleby’s sticking to a sweepstake ticket for
which he had been given a fair offer, agreed it was a bloody shame that a
man like that should have drawn anything but a blank. What did he know
about racing? Racing was a pastime of gentlemen in which he couldn’t
obviously have any interest. Did Ingleby understand that Griffin was
going to see the race itself, a thing that he would never have the guts
to do in all his life?
A couple of years before Ingleby would not have known how to meet the
coalition; it is possible, even, that he would have given up his ticket,
and improbable that he would have received the pound that Griffin
offered. By this time he had learnt that no answer at all was better
than the softest; that when Griffin and Douglas started that sort of game
the best thing was to keep his temper and clear out as quickly as
possible. On this occasion the chapel bell saved him. All through the
service that evening he was pondering on Griffin’s words, trying, rather
obstinately, to convince himself that they weren’t true; that he wasn’t
the skunk they had agreed to call him; that he was sufficiently gentle in
birth to have an interest in what the newspapers called “the sport of
kings,” that, at a pinch, he might summon up sufficient “guts” to emulate
the boldness of such a daring customer as Griffin. Perhaps it was all
too horribly true. . . .
He couldn’t accept it. It was inconceivable that all the attributes of
knightly courage should be vested in people like Griffin; and yet he
couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t deceiving himself. It was so easy to
imagine oneself brave . . . the easiest thing in the world. “That’s the
worst of me,” he said to himself, “I can imagine anything. I could
imagine myself hiring a coach and wearing a white top-hat and asking old
fat Leeming to come to the Birches with me on Friday. I’m all
imagination and silly rot of that kind; but when it comes to the point
I’m no damned good at all.”
It wasn’t the first time that he had realised defects of this kind. Term
after term he had been reproaching himself for the lack of moral or
physical courage.
There was only one way out of it: to prove that he was capable of the
things which he feared by doing them. In this way he had driven himself
to batter his hands to pulp by playing fives without gloves; for this he
had taken a dive into the deep end of the swimming-bath for the sole
reason that he found it impossible to float in the shallow water and had
determined to swim; for this he had forced himself to spend long hours,
or to waste long hours, over Geometry, the subject that he hated most.
Now, in the same way, and wholly for his own satisfaction, he determined
to go to the Birches.
That night, walking up and down the Quad, he opened the subject to
Widdup. He said,—
“Do you know I drew Airs and Graces in the house sweep? Griffin offered
me a quid for the ticket.”
“I should jolly well let him have it,” said Widdup, explaining the
mathematical side of the question. “You see, you’ve won a twenty to one
chance already. The chances against the horse winning are . . . well you
can work it out easily. I’ll do it for you in second prep. Besides, old
Griff has a lot of money on the horse and he’s going to see the race
run.”
“Well, so am I,” said Ingleby. Widdup laughed, and that annoyed him.
“What do you think of it?”
“I think you’re a damned fool,” said Widdup.
Ingleby left it at that. Perhaps Widdup was right. But why in the world
should the same thing count for heroism in the case of Griffin and folly
in his own? He distrusted the mathematical Widdup’s sense of proportion.
In any case he had to go through with it. If he didn’t, no subsequent
heroism could ever persuade him that he wasn’t a coward and worthy of
every epithet with which Griffin had loaded him. It was in the same
spirit, he imagined, that knights in the ages of chivalry had set
themselves to perform extravagant tasks, that saints had undergone
monstrous privations; just to convince themselves that they weren’t as
deficient in “guts” as they feared.
The business came more easily than he had expected when first he tied
himself to his resolve. Friday at St. Luke’s was a “fag-day.” On Friday
afternoon, that is to say, there were no organised games. The afternoon
prep started at half-past three, and afternoon school at four-fifteen.
The great race, he learned, was to be run at three o’clock; and this
would give him time to miss the hour of prep which was not supervised and
to be ready for an innings of Greek with Cleaver. An easy game, Greek. . . .
For once in a way he was prepared to slog like blazes.
Up to the last moment Widdup refused to think that he would go through
with it. He didn’t believe, indeed, until he saw Edwin climb on to the
top of the wooden fence in the nightingale’s spinney at the back of the
Head’s house and drop over into the road.
“Now, I should think you’ve had enough of it,” said Widdup. “If the old
man came along and saw you there, you’d be bunked to-morrow. Come along.
. . .”
“I’ll be back just after three,” said Edwin. “You’ll be here to give me
a hand over?”
“All right,” said Widdup. “You are a bloody fool, you know.”