AIRS AND GRACES
HE didn’t need telling that. With every step the conviction was borne in
on him, and when he came to the end of the wooden palings that marked the
school boundary he was very near to giving up his enterprise. He could
easily, so easily, slip over the hedge on the opposite side of the road
and wait there until the race was over and the bookies’ messenger-boys
came racing down the hill on their bicycles, bells tingling all the way;
and then he could meet Widdup at the appointed place and say that he had
seen the race. By that time rumour would have told him the winner’s
name. But that wouldn’t do. Not that he cared two-pence-halfpenny
whether he told the truth or a lie to Widdup, but because he would feel
such a wretched coward in his own mind. He had got to prove to himself
that he possessed the moral courage which he doubted. It was only the
existence of the very real danger—and he envisaged not only his own
expulsion, but harrowing scenes of remorse and distress at home—that made
the thing a fair test. He had to go through with it.
Beyond the line of fencing, even standing in midstream of that determined
crowd, he felt himself curiously unprotected. He did a curious thing.
He turned his college cap, with its circular stripes of green, inside
out, presenting to the world a dirty brown lining. This wasn’t enough
for him: he also turned up the collar of his Eton coat. But the crowd
was thinking of one thing only and none seemed to notice him. They
noticed nothing. Even the sellers of the race cards and the tawny
gipsies who cried for a piece of silver to cross their palms, and
promised good luck, were unheeded. Edwin concealed himself, or imagined
some measure of concealment, in an eddy of dust between a heavy
wagonette, crammed with men who looked like licensed victuallers, and a
coster’s donkey cart. He found that by holding on to the step of the
wagonette he felt safer. It was reassuring to hold something. What a
rotten coward he was!
At last one of the men in the last seat of the wagonette who had been
rolling about with his eyes closed, opened them and looked at Edwin.
They were curiously watery eyes, and his mouth was all over the shop.
When he had dreamily considered the phenomenon of Edwin for a little
while he addressed him,—
“You look ’ot, young man.”
It _was_ hot, Edwin panted.
“Bloody ’ot,” said the man in the wagonette. As an afterthought he took
a bottle of beer, about a quarter full, from his pocket. The cork came
out with a pop. “Gas,” said the fat man, and chuckled. “Gas . . . eh?”
He took a swig, and with the froth fringing his moustache, offered the
bottle to Edwin. Edwin shook his head.
“You won’t?” said the fat man. “You’re workin’ ’arder than I am. Oh,
well, if ’e won’t,” he continued dreamily, and finished the bottle. Then
he pitched it over the hedge.
The dust was terrible. On either side of the track the hedges and banks
were as white as the road. The horses pulled well, and even hanging on
the step Edwin found it difficult to keep up with them. At the crest of
the hill the driver whipped them into a trot. Edwin let go the step and
was cursed fluently by the coster for standing in the way of his
donkey-cart. His friend waved him good-bye. He found himself caught up
in a stream of other walkers, hurrying in a bee-line for the grand stand,
now distantly visible with the royal standard drooping above it. Behind
him and in front the black snake of that procession stretched, sliding,
literally, over the shiny convolutions of the Down that the feet of the
foremost had polished, and moving in a sort of vapour of its own, compact
of beer and strong tobacco and intolerable human odours. From the crown
of the Downs Edwin looked back at the playing-fields, the tiny white
figures at the nets and in the fives-court that sometimes stopped in
their play to watch the black serpent in whose belly he now moved. They
seemed very near—far too near to be comfortable; and even though he knew
that nobody down there could possibly see him, he felt happier when a
billow of the Down hid the plain from sight.
It was only when he reached the grand stand, losing himself in the thick
of the crowd that clustered about it, that he began to feel safe. He
looked at his watch and found that he had a quarter of an hour to spare.
A little old man in seedy black clothes grabbed his elbow fiercely.
“Young sir, young sir,” he said, “take my advice . . . gratis; free; for
nothing.” He laughed, and Edwin saw gray bristles stretched on his
underlip. “Take my advice. Never expose your watch at a race-meeting.
Myself . . . I’ve learnt it from long experience, my own and my friends’.
. . . Never even take a watch when I go racing. No, I leave it at home.
A beautiful half-hunter by Benson of Ludgate Hill, with enamelled face.
Yes. . . . You take my advice. A thing to always remember. Yes. . . .”
Edwin seriously thanked him. A roar went up from the crowd. “The
Prince. The Prince has entered the Royal Box,” said the old man. “God
bless him.” He raised a dusty top-hat. An extraordinary gesture for
this wrinkled, gnomish creature. “Yes,” he mumbled; “a handsome
time-piece. . . . Benson of Ludgate Hill. A very prominent firm. We
shall see nothing here. You follow me.”
Edwin followed. More beer, more tobacco, more of the curious composite
smell, more positively vegetable than human, that he had begun to
associate with trampled pieces of paper, probably the debris of bags that
had once held fruit of some kind. The little man pushed his way deftly
through the crowd. He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed to
notice him; and indeed the leading characteristics of this crowd’s vast
consciousness seemed to be good humour. The bookies in their white hats,
the many-buttoned costers, the sweating men in black coats, the very
waiters in the refreshment tents, staggering under leaning towers of beef
plates, seemed determined to enjoy themselves in spite of the heat and
the smell of their neighbours under the white-hot sky.
Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties. The vastness of the crowd subtly
shielded him. He felt newly secure, and his spirit was caught up into
its excitement and good humour. He even turned down his collar. And all
the time his mind exulted in a queer sense of clarity, an intoxication
due, perhaps, to his successful daring. In this state he found all his
surroundings vivid and amusing; all colours and sounds came to him with a
heightened brilliancy. He smiled, and suddenly found that a young gipsy
woman with her head in a bright handkerchief was smiling back at him. He
thought it was jolly that people should smile like that. He thought what
jolly good luck it was meeting his guide, the shiny shoulders of whose
frock coat he saw in front of him. His quick mind had placed the little
man already: a solicitor’s clerk in some ancient worm-eaten Inn of Court,
a relic of the dark, lamp-litten London of Dickens: a city of yellow fog
and cobbled pavements shining in the rain: of dusty, cobwebbed
law-stationers’ windows and cosy parlours behind them where kettles were
singing on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was mixed at night.
It seemed to him that he could have met no more suitable person than his
friend; for really all this racing crowd were making a sort of Cockney
holiday of the kind that the greatest Victorian loved most dearly. He
began to find words for it all. He _must_ find words for it, for it
would be such fun writing to his mother about it. If he dared. . . . It
would be time enough to write a letter about it when the business was
finished without disaster. There was always the possibility that he
would be found out and expelled. Even if that should happen, he thought,
he would like to tell his mother. . . .
Together they passed the level of the grand stand. This huge erection of
white-painted wood provided the only constant landmark, for Edwin was not
tall enough to see above the shoulders of the adult crowd in which he was
moving. Now they had left the grand stand behind it seemed that they
must surely be crossing the course. And then a bell clanged and the
crowd parted like a great wave of the Red Sea in pictures of the Exodus.
Edwin found himself clinging to the coat-tails of his friend, and the
little man, in turn, hanging on, as if for his life, to a whitewashed
post from which the next wave would have sucked him back. The crowd
swayed gently, settling down and leaving them stranded upon the very edge
of the course. “That’s a trick worth knowing,” said Edwin’s friend.
Opposite them the stands, well known to him on Sunday walks as a vast
skeletal erection, stood clothed in flesh and blood: tier upon tier of
human faces packed one above the other looked down on him. Edwin had
never before realised how pale the faces of men and women were. From the
midst of them there rose a ceaseless murmur of human speech, shrilling
occasionally like the voices of starlings when they whirl above an autumn
reed bed, and then, as suddenly, still. For one extraordinary moment
they were nearly silent. “They’re off!” said the little man. . . .
Again the murmur of the stands arose. A bookie just behind them was
doing his best to get in a last few bets, entreating, proclaiming
passionately the virtues of “the old firm.” His red face lifted above
the crowd, and while he shouted saliva dribbled from his mouth. A
curious roaring sound came from the other side of the horse-shoe course a
mile or more away. He stopped with his mouth open in the middle of a
sentence. Something had happened over there. Everybody, even those who
couldn’t see anything, turned in the direction from which the sound came.
Edwin turned with them. He couldn’t imagine why. And when he turned his
eyes gazed straight into those of Miss Denning, the matron of the College
Sanatorium, marvellously dressed for the occasion and leaning upon the
innocent arm of Mr. Heal. Thank God, Mr. Heal was short-sighted! Edwin
felt himself blushing. He knew for certain that she had seen and
recognised him; for his sick headaches had often taken him to the
Sanatorium and he had always been rather a favourite of hers. She stared
straight at him and her eyes never wavered. Obviously the game was up.
He fancied that her lips smiled faintly. Never was a smile more
sinister.
Edwin had an impulse to bolt . . . simply to turn tail and run at his
hardest straight back to the college. He couldn’t do that. Between him
and escape, an impassable river, lay the parabola of yellow grass over
which the Birches was even now being run. Feeling almost physically
sick, he slipped round to the other side of his companion. He wished
that gnomish creature had been bigger. “They’re at the corner . . . if
you lean out you can see . . . look, they’re coming into the straight . . .
Airs and Graces leading. Down they come. The finest sight in the
civilised world.”
Edwin didn’t see them. He saw nothing but the phantom of Miss Denning’s
eyes, her faint and curiously sinister smile. He wished to goodness the
race were over. Now everybody was shouting. The stands rose with a
growl like great beasts heaving in the air. Something incredibly swift
and strepitant passed him in a whirl of wind and dust. The crowd about
him and the heaving stands broke into an inhuman roar. The little old
man beside him was jumping up and down, throwing his top-hat into the air
and catching it again. The whole world had gone shouting and laughing
mad. Edwin heard on a hundred lips the name of Airs and Graces. It
meant nothing to him. Now he could only think of escape; and as the
crowd bulged and burst once more over the course he made a dash for the
other side.
Mounted police were pressing back the tide; but Edwin was small, and
quick enough to get over. He pushed and wriggled his way through masses
to which there seemed to be no end. Only in the rear of the stands the
density of the crowd thinned. Then he broke into a run and though he was
soaked with sweat and his head was aching fiercely, he did not stop
running until a billow of the Down had hidden the stands from sight.
In a little hollow littered with tins and other debris, and choked with
nettles and some other hot-smelling herb, he lay, recovering his breath,
and, for the first time, thinking, beside a diminished dew-pond of dirty
water. He was miserable. Fate now brooded over him as heavily as the
white-hot sky, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine why. It was
ridiculous, in any case, that the mere sight of a woman’s eyes should
have worked so extraordinary a miracle. Yet this was no less than the
truth. Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all the happiness and
light and colour had gone out of his adventure. That which had been, at
least, magnificent, had now become childish or nearly silly. Reflecting,
he couldn’t be satisfied that anything was changed. Nothing had really
changed except himself; and he didn’t want to admit that he had changed
either. No, he hadn’t changed. Only his mind was just like the dewpond
at his feet in which the burning sky was mirrored. Some days it would be
blue and white and others black with thunder. But the pool would be just
the same. “I oughtn’t to be more miserable now than I was when I came up
here; and then, apart from being a bit funky, I felt ripping.” None of
these sober reflections relieved him. All the rest of the way back he
felt hunted and miserable, and something very near to panic seized him at
the point when he reached the college palings.
At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was waiting.
“Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said. Then he suddenly went white.
“What’s the matter?” cried Edwin.
“Oh, Lord, it’s the Head.”
The voice of the head-master came next,—“Hallo, what are you doing here?
Let me see—Widdup, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
A mortar-board topped the palings. “Ingleby—What’s this? What’s this?
What are you doing there?”
A moment of brilliant inspiration.
“Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked my cap over the fence.
May I get it, sir?”
“Serious—very serious,” muttered the Head. “The letter of the law.
Race-week. You’re out of bounds, you know—technically out of bounds.
Boys have been expelled for less. Yes, expelled. Ruin your whole
career.”
Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, in the same flash, the
too-literal Widdup, white with fear.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said . . . “awfully sorry.”
“Mph. . . . What were you two doing here?”
“I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss-moth caterpillars.”
Silence—then, rather lamely,—“They’re in the fourth stage, sir.”
“Are they?” The Head smiled, possibly because he approved of this
fervent manifestation of what the head-masters’ conference called “nature
study,” possibly at Edwin’s sudden revelation of schoolboy psychology.
Decidedly he approved of the puss-moths. He had been reading Fabre aloud
to his wife. Fabre, too, was a schoolmaster, poor devil! He did not
speak his thoughts: schoolmasters never can. He said,—
“Let me see, Ingleby, you’re in the Lower Fifth?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I must speak to Mr. Cleaver. . . .” He didn’t say what he must speak
about. “All right—get along with you.” He left them, walking away with
his hands joined behind his back supporting an immense flounce of black
silk gown. Edwin scrambled over the fence; his hands, as they clutched
the top of it, were trembling violently.
“Well, you are a prize liar,” said Widdup, “and the old man believed
every word of it.”
“I know,” said Edwin. “That’s the rotten part of it. . . .”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. . . .” He knew perfectly well what he meant.
“Who won?”
“Airs and Graces.”
“Then you’ve won the sweep.”
“Yes.”
Ten minutes later he was back in Mr. Cleaver’s classroom trying to make
himself so inconspicuous that he wouldn’t be called upon to make an
exhibition of himself, and, as luck would have it, nothing of any
difficulty came his way to drag him from his comfortable obscurity. Even
though the intense excitement of his adventure had now faded, the
atmosphere of that high room had changed. He felt that he didn’t somehow
belong to it; or, rather, that he had left something behind. All through
that drowsy hour some part of him was still being hurried over the hot
downs, swept along in the sweating crowds of the racecourse, and this
circumstance made his present life strangely unreal, as though he were a
changeling with whom it had nothing in common. Gradually, very
gradually, the old conditions reasserted themselves, but it was not until
the insistent discipline of the evening service in chapel had dragged him
back into normality that his adventure and the influence of the strange
people with whom he had rubbed shoulders began to fade. Widdup, with his
unblushing admiration, helped. There was no shutting him up.
“Well, you have a nerve,” he said. “I wonder what you’ll do next. . . .”
“Oh, stow it,” said Edwin. “I’ve finished with that sort of thing. I’m
not cut out for a blood.”
“I can’t think how you did it.”
“Neither can I. It was damned silly of me. I just wanted to satisfy
myself that . . . that I had some guts, you know. I didn’t really care
what you chaps thought about it. It was sort of private. . .”