THRENODY
I
FROM this emotional maelstrom the current of Edwin’s life flowed into a
strange peace. It seemed that the catastrophe of Mrs. Ingleby’s death
had taken the Halesby household by surprise and stunned it so thoroughly
that it would never recover its normal consciousness. Edwin’s father,
who had now returned to the ordinary round of business, was still dazed
and puzzled, and very grey. Their servant, a young woman with an
exaggerated sense of the proprieties, or perhaps a dread of living alone
in such a gloomy house, had given notice. Only Aunt Laura, to Edwin’s
shame, showed the least capacity for dealing with the situation.
However few of the graces may have fallen to her lot, she was certainly
not lacking in the domestic virtues. When the maid departed with her tin
trunk and many tearful protestations of her devotion to the memory of the
dear mistress, Aunt Laura turned up her sleeves and took possession of
the kitchen, and Mr. Ingleby, who had gloomily anticipated a domestic
wilderness, found that in spite of the maid’s defection, ambrosial food
appeared before him like manna from heaven, the only difference being
that Uncle Albert, who could not be permitted for one moment to remain a
bachelor, took his meals with the family.
The relation between Edwin and Aunt Laura was still difficult. She could
not forget—and he could not withdraw—the bitter things that had been said
on that most mournful day, though her native good humour, which was
profuse and blustery like the rest of her, made it difficult for her to
maintain an attitude of injured benignance. Even Edwin had to admit that
she was a good cook; but the excellence of her food was qualified by her
incessant chatter and her nervous laugh. Edwin simply couldn’t stick
them; but it amazed him to find that Uncle Albert evidently found them
cheerful and reassuring. Indeed, it was possibly one of the reasons why
he had fallen in love with her, being a man who resembled her in nothing
and whose enthusiasms could never get him beyond a couple of words and a
giggle.
Mr. Ingleby too seemed to emerge without serious irritation from this
diurnal bath of small-talk, retiring, as Edwin supposed, to certain
gloomy depths of his own consciousness where the froth and bubble of Aunt
Laura’s conversation became imperceptible. Even when she spoke to him
directly—though most of her observations were addressed to the world in
general—he would not trouble to answer her: a slight which Aunt Laura
took quite good-humouredly.
“Bless you,” she would have said, “the man’s so wrapped up in himself
that he’s miles away from anywhere. Of course you can understand it in a
man of his age, especially when you realise how devoted he was to poor
Beatrice”—Mrs. Ingleby’s name might never now escape the commiserating
prefix—“but when a boy like Edwin tries it on it’s another matter
altogether. It’s simply conceit. Personally, I think it was a great
mistake of his poor mother’s to send him to St. Luke’s. The grammar
school’s good enough for the Willises. A great mistake. . . . The boy
is getting ideas of himself that aren’t warranted by his position. I
don’t know what we are to do with him. We certainly can’t have him
running wild here.” And Uncle Albert would say: “Certainly, certainly,
my love. . . .”
In spite of these pronounced opinions Aunt Laura was careful not to cross
swords with Edwin himself. Indeed, she went a good deal out of her way
to propitiate him with various material kindnesses, and particularly
certain delicacies in the way of food, which, to the ruin of her figure
in later life, represented to her the height of earthly enjoyment. Edwin
didn’t quite know how to take these attentions. He couldn’t help
disliking her, and the fact that she was really kind to him rather took
the wind out of his sails. He would have been much happier if they had
been allowed to remain in a state of armed neutrality.
A fortnight passed . . . happily for Edwin in spite of all that he felt
he ought to feel. He missed his mother awfully. That was true enough.
And yet . . . and yet it was also true to say that he was only beginning
to live: to appreciate the joy of his growing strength: to realise the
enchanted domains that were open to his eager feet and to his eager mind.
Here he had freedom, leisure, health: so much of the world to see: so
much of human knowledge to explore. And though the thought of death, and
the particular disaster that had befallen him fell upon his spirit
sometimes with a shadow that plunged the whole world into desperate
darkness, he could not deny that the shadow was gradually lifting, and
the character of the agony that had desolated him was becoming less
spontaneous, till, in the end, it became almost a calculable emotion that
might be indulged or banished at will. He found it difficult to
understand this. He thought: “I’m a brute, a callous, insensitive brute.
What would she think of me . . .? And yet, I can’t help it. I’m made
like that. . . .” And then, after long and bitter deliberation: “I
believe she would understand. I expect she was made like that too. I’m
sure she was. And if there’s one thing in the world that she’d hate it
would be that I should force myself to pretend anything.”
The high summer weather held. Never was there such a June. Edwin, in
the joy of perfect health, would get up very early in the morning when
the dew lay on the roses, and run in a sweater and flannel trousers down
the lane and over the field to the mill-pond where he and his mother had
walked so often in the evenings of spring. Here, where the water was
deepest and great striped perch stole slowly under the camp-shedding, he
would strip and bathe, lying on his back in the water so that low
sunbeams came dancing over the surface into his eyes that were on the
level of the flat water-lily leaves and their yellow balls now breaking
into cups.
Afterwards when he would sit glowing on the bank, the sun would be rising
and growing warmer every minute, and this new warmth would seem to
accentuate the odour of the place that was compact of the yellow
water-lily’s harsh savour, the odour of soaked wood, and another, more
subtly blended: the composite smell of water that is neither fast nor
stagnant, the most provocative and the coolest smell on earth.
On the way home he would sometimes get a whiff of the miller’s cowhouse,
when the door was thrown open, and from within there came a sound of
quiet breathing or of milk hissing in a pail. And sometimes, from the
garden, the scent of a weed bonfire would drift across his path. All
things smelt more poignantly at this early hour of the morning. All
things smell more wonderfully early in life. . . .
With these wonders the day began; but stranger things lay in store for
him. He revisited all his old haunts: the tangled woods and gardens of
Shenstone on the hill-side: the ruins of the Cistercian abbey on whose
fall the poet had moralised, the little chapel that marked the grave of
the murdered Mercian prince. His bicycle took him farther. Westward . . .
always westward.
In those days it always seemed to him as if the mountainous country that
his mother had shown him that evening on Uffdown, rolling away into
remote and cloudy splendours, must be the land of his heart’s desire: and
though he could never reach it in a day, he managed several times to
cross the Severn and even to scale the foothills upon the farther bank
from which he could see the Clee Hills rising in a magnificent bareness,
shaking the woods and pastures from their knees. And these distant hills
would tempt him to think of the future and other desires of his heart: in
the near distance Oxford, where Layton and other demigods in grey flannel
trousers abode, and beyond the fine untravelled world, rivers and seas
and forests, desolate wonderful names. China . . . Africa . . . “Some
day,” he said to himself, “I will go to Africa. . . .”
In this way he began to think of his present adventures as a kind of
prelude to others remoter and more vast. One day he had ridden farther
away than usual, and having taken his lunch at the bridge town of
Bewdley, he pushed his bicycle up the immense hill that overshadows the
town along the road to Tenbury. For all its steepness this mountain road
was strangely exhilarating, the air that moved above it grew so clean and
clear. Below him, between the road and the river, lay the mighty
remnants of the Forest of Wyre.
His way tumbled again to a green valley, where no mountains were to be
seen; and while Edwin was deciding to turn off down the first descending
lane and explore the forest, he heard a sound of spades and pickaxes and
came upon a group of navvies, several of them stripped to the waist in
the sun, working at a cutting of red earth that was already deep on
either side of the road. For the most part they worked in silence; but
one of them, a little one-eyed man, with a stiff soldierly back,
encouraged them with a string of jokes. They called him “Gunner,” and
the elaboration with which his chest had been tattooed with nautical
symbols led Edwin to suppose that he was a sailor. When he saw Edwin
leaning on his bicycle and watching the work, he called out to him,
asking if he wanted a job. Edwin shook his head. “I reckon,” said the
Gunner, “that a foreman’s job would be more in your line, Gaffer. It’s a
fine sight to see other people working. The harder the better.”
The men laughed and stretched their backs, leaning, on their spades, and
Edwin could see how a fine dew of sweat had broken out under the hair on
their chests. It seemed to him a noble sight. “What are you working
at?” he asked. “Is it a railway?”
“To hell with your railway,” said the Gunner. “Who would make a railway
heading for the river Severn? No . . . It’s a pipe-track. This here’s
the Welsh water scheme.”
“Where is it going to?”
“North Bromwich.”
“And where does it come from?”
“From Wales. . . . From the Dulas Valley, where they’re rebuilding the
reservoir under a hill they call Savaddan. And a black job it is, I can
tell you.”
“Is it anywhere near a place called Felindre? I think it must be.”
“Right, my son. The pipe-line goes through Felindre. Sixty or eighty
mile from here.”
“My people come from Felindre . . .”
“Well, God pity them. . . . That’s all I can say. I’ve been in that
place on a Christmas Day, and not a pint of beer stirring. . . . Ah,
that’s a black job. Well, mates, come on. . . .”
Again the men who had been listening, lifted their picks and spades, and
the busy clinking sounds of digging began again. Edwin wished the Gunner
good-afternoon, and began to push his bicycle up the hill again. Sixty
or eighty miles. . . . That wasn’t so very far. Six or eight hours’
ride. . . . Perhaps some day he could go there. He half persuaded
himself with a sentimental argument that it was only natural that he
should be happy in the country from which his mother’s people had come;
that even the borderland of it must be possessed by the same curiously
friendly atmosphere. “I’m always most happy west of Severn,” he thought.
And then he began to wonder about the sailor whom the men called Gunner.
Perhaps that man had actually been in Africa. . . .
He managed to get a sixpenny tea at a little general shop on the very
crown of the hills, where a small hamlet named Far Forest stood. The
romantic name of the place appealed to him; and it was a curious
adventure to sit down alone to tea in a back room that smelt of candles
and paraffin and bacon. At the shop door a serious old man with a white
beard had received him; but the tea was brought to him by a little girl
in an extremely clean pinafore whom the old man addressed as Eva.
She was a curious mixture of shyness and friendliness, and her serious
eyes examined Edwin minutely from under straight dark eyebrows. When she
came in with the tea she found Edwin examining some books that stood in a
cupboard with a glass door. Evidently she was very proud of them.
“They are my brother James’s prizes,” she said, and went on to explain
how clever he was and what a scholar, until the old man called “Eva,” and
she returned to him in the shop. It was all amazingly peaceful, with the
westering sun flooding the doorway where the old man had been sitting out
in a chair when Edwin arrived: and opposite the door was a little patch
of green strewn with mossy boulders, a kind of platform in front of which
the huge panorama of Clee and all the Radnor hills expanded.
“In a place like this,” Edwin thought, “people never change.” It was a
ripping, placid sort of existence, in which nothing ever happened, but
all things were just simple and serious and tender like the eyes of the
little girl named Eva who had brought him his tea. “Good-evening, sir,”
said the old man at the door. It was rather nice to be called “Sir.”
Coasting down the hill into Bewdley, Edwin had all the joy of the state
that he called “the after-tea feeling.” It was exhilarating and
splendid: and at the end of it came the misty river town with its stone
bridge and the great river of the Marches swirling proudly to the south.
When he neared home, divinely tired and hungry, the black-country
stretched before him in a galaxy of starry lights. As he crossed the
brow of the hill above Halesby, the Willis’ Mawne furnaces suddenly lit
the sky with a great flower of fire.
II
At home, Auntie Laura was in possession. Evidently she was primed with
serious business; for Edwin could see that his father sat spiritually, if
not physically, pinioned in the plush arm-chair. Aunt Laura wore an air
of overpowering satisfaction. Evidently she had already triumphed, and
she smiled so cheerfully at Edwin that he felt convinced that she had
scored him off in some way. On the side of the fire opposite to his
father Uncle Albert sat smoking, not as if he enjoyed it, but because it
gave him the excuse of an occupation into which he might relapse in
moments of tension.
“Well, here he is at last,” said Aunt Laura. “We’ve been talking about
you, Edwin.”
Edwin had guessed as much.
“Well, what is it?” he said, and his tone implied that he was certain
that some dark scheme had been launched against his peace of mind. Uncle
Albert puffed uncomfortably at his pipe and nicotine or saliva made a
gurgling noise in it. Mr. Ingleby sighed. Aunt Laura, tumbling to the
hostility of the new atmosphere, hastened to propitiate.
“I expect you’re hungry, Edwin,” she said. . . .
“No. . . . I’m not hungry, thanks. What is it?”
“You needn’t be cross, Edwin. . . . We’ve decided. . . .” So it was all
arranged. . . . “We’ve decided that your father must go away for a rest
. . . a little holiday. . . .”
“Yes. . . . And that means, of course, that we shall have to shut up the
house until he returns, and of course that will be quite easy, because
it’s time you were getting back to St. Luke’s. We thought you had better
go on Monday.”
“Monday?” It was now Saturday.
“Yes. . . . Monday. It is fortunate that your uncle has to go into
North Bromwich on business that day. . .”
“Yes. . . . Yes. . . Business,” put in Uncle Albert, as though he were
anxious to explain that his visit to that sink of iniquity was in no way
connected with pleasure.
Edwin burned with sudden and quite unreasonable indignation.
“And you agreed to this, father?”
“Yes. . . . Of course I agreed. Your aunt is quite right. I am
overtired. It was a terrible strain. And the doctor suggested that my
native air. . . .”
“Oh . . . I don’t mean that,” said Edwin. “I mean about St. Luke’s. . .
I can’t go back now . . . of course I can’t . . .”
“Don’t be ridiculous and childish, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura severely.
“You don’t imagine just because”—with a hushed and melancholy
inflection—“this . . . has happened, you’re never going to school again?”
“No. . . . I don’t mean that. Of course I don’t. Only . . . only the
term is nearly over. In another fortnight all the chaps will be going
away for the hols. It isn’t worth it. I should feel . . .”
“We weren’t considering your feelings so much as your good,” said Aunt
Laura complacently.
“Father . . . father . . . you can’t mean it. You see. . . . I don’t
know . . . it would all be so strange. So awfully difficult. I should
have lost touch with all the work the form was doing. I shouldn’t be
able to pick it up. It’s rotten . . . rotten . . .”
“Edwin, you will distress your father . . .”
“Oh, Aunt Laura, do let father speak for himself.”
Immense volumes of yellow smoke signalled Uncle Albert’s distress.
“Father . . .”
“It’s difficult, Edwin . . .”
“But it isn’t difficult, father, dear. Aunt Laura doesn’t realise. She
doesn’t realise what it would be like going back like that to St. Luke’s.
It would only be waste of time. Father, I’d read during the hols. . . .
I would, really. It isn’t that I want to get out of going back to work.
It isn’t that a bit. I’d work like blazes. Only . . . only everything
now seems to have gone funny and empty . . . sort of blank. I . . . I
feel awful without mother . . .”
“Edwin . . .” warningly, from Aunt Laura.
That Aunt Laura should presume to correct him in a matter of delicacy!
“Of course you don’t understand,” he said bitterly. “You don’t want me
to speak about mother. You’ve had your excitement out of it. You’ve had
your chance of bossing round, and now you want to arrange what I shall do
for the rest of my life, I suppose. You’ve no . . . no reverence.”
He was really very angry. It was always difficult for him to be anything
else with Aunt Laura; for he felt that it was somehow horribly unjust for
her to be alive when his mother was dead, and he could never, never
forget what his darling had told him of her stupid jealousy. On this
occasion Aunt Laura seemed to be less disturbed than usual by his
violence. She spoke with a calculated coolness that compelled the
admiration of her husband, sitting very uncomfortably on the edge of the
storm, desperately anxious to show that without his taking sides his wife
could rely on his support.
“It’s funny, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura, stroking her black skirt, “that you
should use the word Reverence. . . . It reminds me of something that I
wanted to speak to you about. You realise, don’t you, that we are all
supposed to be in mourning? And yet, day after day, I see you going down
the town in a pair of white canvas gym. shoes. White. . . ! Now, you
mustn’t talk to me about reverence, Edwin.”
Edwin burst out laughing. It was no good arguing with the woman. He
gave a despairing glance at his father. Was it possible that the man
could listen seriously to superficial cant of this kind? Was it possible
that he could tolerate the woman’s presence in the house? He looked, and
he saw nothing but tiredness and desolation in the man’s face. He saw
that in reality his father was too tired for anything but compromise.
All life, all determination had been stamped out of him, and though Edwin
clutched at the sympathy which he knew must be concealed in the man’s
mind, he began to realise that, after all, circumstances had left the
whole household curiously dependent on Aunt Laura; that without her the
whole domestic machine would collapse, and that, therefore, the
infliction must be suffered patiently. Edwin determined to leave the
matter where it stood, but Aunt Laura, inflamed with approaching triumph,
would not let it rest. “I am sure that you agree with me, John,” she
threw out challengingly.
“No doubt Edwin did not understand. You know more about the people in
the town than we do, Laura.”
“Compromise . . .” thought Edwin, “but I suppose it can’t be helped.” At
any rate nothing that he might do should give the man a moment’s
discomfort. He possessed himself in silence.
“But I think, perhaps,” Mr. Ingleby went on, “that Edwin is right. It
would be hardly worth while going back to St. Luke’s for a fortnight.”
“Of course you know best, John,” Aunt Laura hurried to assure him, “but
it’s really quite impossible for us to put him up while the house is
closed and you are away. You know that we’ve arranged to have the
painters in.”.
On a matter of fact, and one outside controversy, Uncle Albert felt that
he was safe in giving his support.
“I quite understand that,” said Mr. Ingleby, “but it’s a simple matter.
Edwin can come with me.”
“Oh, father, how wonderful!”
“Well, of course,” said Aunt Laura, “if he won’t be a nuisance to you. . . .”
But Edwin was too pleased and excited to mind what she said. He
kissed his father, and Mr. Ingleby, with a curious tenderness, clasped
his arm. It seemed that catastrophe had strange uses. Already it had
thrown the ordinary course of life into more than one curious byway, and
now, behold, he was to embark upon another strange adventure, to become
familiar with another sort of life. He determined that his duty
(whatever that might be) should not suffer by it. When they returned
from their holiday, all through the summer months, he would work like
anything: he would make that Balliol scholarship that had seemed part of
an indefinite future, as near a certainty as made no matter. He would
show them—in other words Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert—what he could do.
“If we are going on Monday I had better think of packing,” he said.
“Shall I need to take many things, father?”
“Oh, don’t worry your father, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura.
III
Sunday came with its usual toll of dreariness. The customary penance of
the morning service was actually the least trying part of it to Edwin.
To begin with, the parish church of Halesby was a structure of great
beauty. Originally an offshoot of the abbey that now stood in ruins
above the long string of slowly silting fishponds on the Stour, the grace
and ingenuity of successive ages of priestly architects had embellished
its original design with many beautiful features, and the slender beauty
of its spire, crowning a steep bank above the degraded river, had imposed
an atmosphere of dignity and rest upon the rather squalid surroundings of
this last of the black-country towns. The music, even though it was not
in any way comparable with that of St. Luke’s, was good, and the recent
arrival of a young and distinguished rector from Cambridge, whose voice
and person would have qualified him for success as a bishop, or an actor
manager, had restored to the building some of its popularity as a place
of resort or of escape from the shuttered Sunday streets.
At ten o’clock the fine peal of bells filled the air with an inspiriting
music. Edwin remembered, hearing them, the melancholy with which they
had often inspired him on dank evenings of autumn when the ringers were
at practice. Very different they sounded on this summer morning, for a
gentle wind was moving from the hills to westward, and chime eddied in a
soft air that was clearer than the usual, if only because it was Sunday
and the smoke of a thousand furnaces and chimney stacks no longer filled
it with suffocation.
At ten-fifteen precisely Aunt Laura appeared in the dining-room, in a
black silk dress smelling faintly of lavender: a minute later, Uncle
Albert, in a frock coat, coaxing the last sweetness from his
after-breakfast pipe. Mr. Ingleby also had exchanged the alpaca jacket
in which he had been leisurely examining his roses, for the same uniform.
Uncle Albert, Edwin noticed, had not yet removed the deep band of crape
from his top-hat. As usual, Aunt Laura appeared a little flustered, the
strain of conscious magnificence in her millinery making it difficult for
her to collect her thoughts.
“Are you sure you have all the prayer-books, Albert?” she asked
anxiously.
Uncle Albert regretfully knocked out his pipe. “Yes, my dear,” he said.
“Don’t scatter those ashes all over the fireplace, Albert. The least you
can do is to keep the room tidy on Sunday.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Edwin, have you got your prayer-book? Why, boy, you’ve actually put on
a grey striped tie. Run and change it quickly. I don’t know what people
will think.”
Edwin, smarting, obeyed. When he returned the atmosphere of impatience
had increased. Aunt Laura was saying: “John, dear, are you sure that the
clock is right? I’m afraid the bells have stopped. No . . . thank
goodness, there they are again. That’s better, Edwin. Now we really
must start. You have the money for the collection, Albert? Give it to
me, or you’ll be sure to leave me without any. I do hope we shan’t be
late. We should look so prominent. . . .”
Why should they look so prominent? The question puzzled Edwin all the
way down through the quiet streets. But even though this mystery
exercised his mind he could not help appreciating the curious atmosphere
of the route through which they progressed. At the corner of the street
the first familiar thing smote him: it was the odour of stale spirits and
beer that issued from between the closed doors of the Bull’s Head
public-house, behind which it had been secreted ever since an uproarious
closing time the night before. Then came the steep High Street, and from
its gutters the indescribable smell of vegetable refuse left there
overnight from the greengrocer’s stalls. On an ordinary morning it would
not have been noticed, for the motion of wheeled traffic in the highway
and the sight of open shop windows would have distracted the attention.
On Sunday morning, however, it became the most important thing in the
road, and seemed to emphasise the deadness of the day in contrast to the
activities and dissipations of Saturday night. It called attention to
the indubitable sordidness of the whole street: the poverty of its grimy
brick: the faded lettering above the shop windows: the paint that cracked
and peeled from the closed shutters. On this morning Halesby was a
squalid and degraded town. Even Mr. Ingleby’s shop in the High Street
looked curiously small and mean. Edwin disliked the sight of his own
name printed over it. It reminded him of Griffin’s social prejudices.
They entered a small door in the transept when the last bell was tolling;
and as they stepped into the full church Edwin realised at last the
reason of Aunt Laura’s particular anxieties. They were on show. This
was the first occasion, since the funeral, that the family had entered
the church, and, in accordance with an immemorial custom, the
congregation were now engaged in searching their faces and their clothing
for evidences of the grief that was proper to their condition.
Kneeling in the conventional opening prayer, Edwin could see through his
folded fingers that the whole of the gathering was engaged in a ghoulish
scrutiny of their party. Now, for the first time, he realised the full
meaning of the horror with which his grey tie had inspired Aunt Laura.
He could even feel Aunt Laura, who remained kneeling longer than usual,
wallowing in the emotion that her presence evoked. It was a rotten
business. If he could have dared to do so without causing an immense
scandal, Edwin would have got up and left the church. He saw Aunt Laura
glance at his father with a kind of proprietary air, as if this
exhibition were really her own responsibility and the degree of interest
that Mr. Ingleby’s appearance aroused were to her credit.
Edwin also looked at his father. He wondered if Mr. Ingleby were in the
least conscious of the spectacle to which he was contributing: decided
that he wasn’t. He was thankful for that. It became apparent to him
that, if the truth were known, his father was a creature of the most
astonishing simplicity: a simplicity that was almost pathetic. He could
see, he knew that the whole church must see, that the man had suffered.
The brutes. . . . He was awfully sorry for his father. And he loved him
for it. The whole affair was shameful and degrading. Never mind . . .
in another twenty-four hours they would be clear of all this sort of
thing. It was something to be thankful for.
“_When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness and doeth that
which is lawful and right_. . . .” The rector began to intone. He spoke
the words as though his whole soul were behind them: his voice vibrated
with a practiced earnestness: and all the time Edwin could see his dark
eyes scrutinising the congregation in detail, congratulating himself on
the presence of his supporters, speculating on the absence of certain
others. In the final cadence of the sentence, a masterly modulation that
would have made you swear that his whole life was in his mission, his
eyes swivelled into the corner where the Ingleby party were sitting, and
Edwin could have bet his life that they lighted up with a kind of
satisfaction at the addition of this undoubted attraction to his
morning’s entertainment. It even seemed to him that the rector’s glances
almost imperceptibly indicated to his wife, a little woman of a pathetic
earnestness qualified for the ultimate bishopric by a complete subjection
to her husband’s personality, the fact that the Inglebys were on view.
The rector, who had views on the advantages of scamping the drier
portions of the church service and stressing any sentence that held
possibilities of fruity sentiment, soon got into his stride. He was in
excellent voice that morning, and on two occasions in the first lesson
availed himself of an opportunity of exploiting the emotional break—it
was very nearly a sob—that had done so much to establish his reputation
in his early days at Halesby. He was making hay while the sun shone: for
in the confirmation service such opportunities are more limited.
Edwin enjoyed the psalms. There was even something familiar and pleasant
in the tunes of the Cathedral Psalter after the exotic harmonies of St.
Luke’s. He sang the tenor part (when last he remembered singing them it
had been alto) and lost his sense of his surroundings in the beauty of
the words. In the middle of them, however, he became conscious of his
father singing too. He had never sat next to his father in church
before. His mother had always separated them: and for this reason he had
never before heard his father sing. The result filled him with horror.
Mr. Ingleby had no idea of tune and was apparently unconscious of this
disability. Edwin reflected how great an interest music had been in his
mother’s life: realised that from this part of her his father must always
have been isolated by this natural barrier. It was strange. . . . He
began to wonder what they really had in common. He remembered Griffin.
No . . . not that. . . .
This speculation he did his best to stifle while the rector galloped over
the desert wastes of the Litany: but the kneeling posture was rendered
uncomfortable by the presence in front of him of an old maiden lady who
smelt of caraway seeds, a spice that Edwin detested. A hymn followed.
Luckily, this time his father did not sing. Poor creature. . . . Edwin
was now so ashamed of his criticism that he almost wished he would. And
then they settled down to the sermon.
From the first Edwin had decided that he would not listen. The simple
austerity of the service at St. Luke’s, where the liturgy was allowed to
unfold its sonorous splendours for itself, had bred in him a distaste for
the rector’s histrionics. So he did not hear them, contenting himself
with a detailed examination of such of the congregation as were within
his range. He saw them classified in their social gradations from the
pompous distinction of Sir Joseph Hingston, the ironmaster, who, in spite
of his baronetcy, wore a frock coat that did not differ greatly from that
of Mr. Ingleby, to their late maid, dressed in black, and now conscious
of the reflected glory that she had almost sacrificed by leaving. And
the thing that impressed him most about this very various gathering was
their shabbiness, and the fact that nearly all of those whom he knew
seemed so much older than they had been when he last saw them.
Thinking of the light and elegance and cleanliness of St. Luke’s, it
appeared to him that Halesby was indeed a muddy and obscure backwater and
that his own people, sitting in the pew beside him, were in reality as
much fitted to inhabit it as all the rest of the shabby congregation.
Even the Willises, his mother’s new friends, whom a wave of commercial
prosperity had carried forward into one of the front pews of the nave
within calculable distance of the glory of Sir Joseph Hingston himself,
would have looked very ordinary folk in the chapel at St. Luke’s.
He began to wonder if Griffin, and more latterly Aunt Laura, had been
right: whether, after all, his mother had made an ambitious mistake in
sending him to a public school when the ancient foundation of the Halesby
Grammar School had stood waiting for the reception of him and his kind.
There, in the fifth row on the left of the nave, sat Mr. Kelly, the
grammar school’s head-master: a swarthy Irishman with a sinister, rather
disappointed face. He wasn’t at all Edwin’s idea of a schoolmaster.
Even old fat Leeming looked more distinguished than that. And yet, if he
were good enough for the son of the opulent Walter Willis, he must surely
be good enough for the son of an ordinary Halesby tradesman.
For the greater part of the sermon these problems of social precedence
engaged Edwin’s puzzled mind. It had come as something of a shock to him
to find that his mother came of a farming stock, even though the farmers
had lived in a Norman castle and had once been good enough to bear a
lance in company with the Lords Marchers. Examining the face of his
father, who appeared to be engrossed in the rector’s rhetoric, Edwin
decided that his features were really far too distinguished to belong
naturally to a country chemist. Here, perhaps, in spite of present
circumstance, lay the explanation of his own indubitable gentility. It
was funny, he reflected, that he had never heard anything from his mother
about the origins of the Inglebys: he had not even known from what part
of the country their stock had sprung, and this ignorance made the
expedition on which they were to start on the morrow more enthralling
than ever. It was quite possible that the discovery of some illustrious
ancestry might put him right with himself and justify his claim to a
birthright which at present seemed rather shadowy.
Even if this failed, he decided, there remained Oxford. A fellow of
Balliol (his imagination travelled fast) would have a right to hold up
his head with any one in that congregation—Sir Joseph Hingston not
excepted—even though the name of the fellow’s father happened to be
printed on his toothbrush. It might even be for him to restore the
prestige of the Ingleby name. “But in that case,” he thought, “it will
be better for me to buy my toothbrushes somewhere else. . . .” Even the
fact that Keats was a chemist did not modify this determination.
The sermon ended, and during the collection a hymn was sung. Half an
hour before this, a gowned verger had stolen on tiptoe to the Inglebys’
pew and whispered in Mr. Ingleby’s ear, depositing a wooden plate lined
with velvet under the seat as furtively as if it were something of which
he was ashamed. When the collection began Edwin’s father left his pew
and began to carry the plate round the transept in which they were
seated.
Edwin, out of the corner of his eye, saw a glow of satisfaction spread
over the features of Aunt Laura. Now, more than ever, the depth of the
family’s grief was to be demonstrated in the eyes of all men. Edwin
thought it was a rotten shame to make his father collect on this Sunday
of all Sundays. The hymn was a short one, and for several minutes after
it was finished the clink of silver and the duller sound of copper coins
was heard in every corner of the echoing church. Then the sides-men
formed themselves into a double file and moved singly up the aisle.
First came Sir Joseph Hingston, erect and podgy, with his smooth grey
waistcoat in front of him like the breast of a pouter pigeon. Mr.
Willis, of Mawne, with a humbler but not unambitious abdominal
development followed him. Edwin conceived a fanciful theory that when
Mr. Willis, in the course of time, should have grown as wealthy as the
baronet, there would be nothing to choose between their profiles. A
miserly but erect old gentleman named Farr, who had once given Edwin a
halfpenny, followed Mr. Willis. Last but one came Edwin’s father, with
the red-bearded undertaker an eager last.
On the whole, Edwin was satisfied (as was obviously Aunt Laura) with Mr.
Ingleby’s appearance. He certainly looked more like the father of a
fellow of Balliol than Sir Joseph Hingston. The money descended with a
series of opulent splashes into the brass salver that the rector held in
front of the chancel steps: the organist (in private life he was a
carpenter) meanwhile extemporising vaguely in the key of C. The rector
carried the salver arm-high to the altar, as though he were exhibiting to
the Almighty the personal fruits of his oratory. Mr. Ingleby stole
quietly to his seat bathed in the admiring glances of Aunt Laura. A
short prayer . . . “_And now to God the father_. . . .” The organist
launched into his latest achievement: the Gavotte from Mignon.
Outside the church the summer sunlight seemed more exhilarating than
ever. It was worth while, Edwin thought, to have suffered the dreariness
of the morning’s service to experience this curious feeling of lightness
and relief. He supposed that he was not alone in this sensation; for the
crowd that moved slowly from the churchyard gates with a kind of
gathering resilience was a happy crowd, and its voices that at first were
hushed soon became gay and irresponsible in spite of the slight
awkwardness that its Sunday clothes imposed on it. No doubt they were
anticipating their Sunday dinner, for, as Edwin had noticed, the liturgy
of the Church of England has some value as an _apéritif_. Even Aunt
Laura was full of a subdued playfulness. “What a shame, Albert,” she
said, “that the rector didn’t appoint you to collect to-day.” She patted
his arm.
“Oh, I don’t know, my dear. . . . It wasn’t my turn, you know.”
“Oh, I know that,” said Aunt Laura, “but on a day like this it would have
been rather a delicate compliment. I must speak to the rector about it.”
“I don’t think I should do that,” said Uncle Albert, with some alarm.
She laughed gently. “Don’t be an old juggins,” she said.
All down the High Street, in the moving crowd, Edwin could smell the
savour of roast beef and baked potatoes and cabbage water wafted from
innumerable kitchen windows. . . .
IV
In the afternoon they left Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert asleep in two
arm-chairs on opposite sides of the drawing-room fireplace, and Edwin and
his father went for a walk by the old abbey fish-ponds. It was the first
time for many years that Edwin had been for a walk with his father, and
the experience promised a new and exciting intimacy to which he looked
forward with eagerness.
Even at this hour of the day the Sabbath atmosphere imposed itself on the
countryside. The road that they followed was long and straight with an
open frontage above the reedy pools, and along the cinder path at the
side of it a great number of men were lounging: a strange and foreign
population of miners from the Mawne pits, who only emerged from their
cavernous occupation on this day of the week, and other industrial
workers from the great steel rolling mills that lay in the Stour Valley
to westward.
None of them took any notice of Edwin and his father. It was even
doubtful if they knew who they were; for these men passed a curiously
separate existence, and Mr. Ingleby would only be familiar to their wives
who did the family shopping on Saturday nights while their masters were
waiting for the football results in their favourite pubs. On this day
the miner’s passion for sport of all kinds asserted itself in the
presence of a great number of slim, jacketed whippets, each warranted to
beat anything on four legs for speed, slinking tenderly at their masters’
heels.
It seemed strange to Edwin that his father should know none of these men.
It showed him again how remote and solitary the man’s life must have been
in this ultimate corner of the Black Country. “We don’t really belong
here,” he thought. “We’re foreigners. . . .” And the reflection pleased
him, though he remembered, with a tinge of regret, that by this denial he
dissociated himself from his old idol the poet of the Pastoral Ballad.
Soon they left the cinder path behind, and plunged into a green lane
descending to a water-mill, turned by the tawny Stour, as yet unsullied
by the refuse of factories. At a sandstone bridge, whose parapet was
deeply carved with the initials of lovers long since dead or
disillusioned, they paused, and, for the first time, began to talk.
“It’s a funny thing, father,” Edwin said, “but I don’t even know where we
are going to-morrow. . . .”
Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Don’t you, Edwin? Well, the doctor said it would
be best for me to go to my native air; and it struck me as rather a good
plan. I never went there with your mother. It belonged to another life.
It is quite twenty years since I have been in Somerset.”
“Somerset . . .? I didn’t even know it was Somerset.”
“No. . . . Well, as I say, it was another world.”
Somerset. . . . Edwin’s imagination began to play with the word. He
could remember very little: only a huge green county sprawling on a map
with rivers . . . yes, and hills. A county stretched beside the Severn
Sea. The Severn again! A western county. Cheddar cheese. Lorna Doone.
Cider. Coleridge. Sedgemoor.
“But what part of Somerset?”
“The eastern end.”
That was a pity. The farther west the better.
“I suppose it’s rather a flat county?”
“A great part of it. Did you ever hear of Mendip?
“‘The rugged miners poured to war
From Mendip’s sunless caves.’”
“Yes, of course. . . .”
“I came from a little village on the top of Mendip. Twenty years ago it
was decaying. Now I expect there’s next to nothing left of it. Twenty
years makes a lot of difference. It’s made a lot of difference to me.”
“And what was the name of the village?”
“I don’t suppose you will ever have heard it. It was called Highberrow.”
“Highberrow . . . no. It’s a jolly name.”
“I don’t think it ever struck me in that light.”
“Highberrow . . . is it right in the hills?”
“Yes . . . quite high up. I don’t know how many hundreds of feet. I
wasn’t interested in that sort of thing then. It lies right under
Axdown, the highest point of the range. On a clear day you can see right
over the Bristol Channel into Wales. All the mountains there. The
Brecon Beacons. The Sugarloaf. The Black Mountain.”
“The Black Mountain. But how strange. Why, when you were a little boy
you must have been nearly able to see the place where mother lived. With
a big sea between. It must have been wonderful . . .”
“Yes . . . I suppose it was. I scarcely remember. Look right down in
that deep pool. That’s a trout.”
“A trout. . . . Where? Do show me . . .”
The vision of Mendip faded instantly, and Edwin only saw the rufous sands
of the pool beneath the bridge, and in it a shadowy elongated figure with
its head to the slow stream and faintly quivering fins. In Devonshire,
Widdup had told him, the rivers swarmed with trout: you could catch them
all day long if you wanted to, and Edwin, loyal to his own county’s
excellences, had only been able to produce the silvery roach of the
millpool, shoaling round the water-lilies and the mythical legend of
carnivorous pike lurking in Mr. Willis’s ponds in the Holloway. He
wished he had known that there were veritable trout in the Stour. Now it
was too late to do anything; but when they returned from their holiday,
he determined that he would catch this shadowy creature, even if he had
to induce it to gorge a worm. Still, it was quite possible that by the
time he returned he would have captured many trout. For Somerset lay
next to Devon on the map.
“Are there many trout in Mendip?” he asked.
“No. . . . There is only one river of any size. The Ax, that runs
underground and comes out of Axcombe gorge, and there are practically no
trout in the Ax. It’s a dry country. Limestone. Very barren too.”
That didn’t really matter. In a day or two Edwin would be able to see
for himself. On their way home they spoke very little. His father
seemed to find it difficult to talk to him; and in a little while Edwin
became conscious of his own unending string of questions that led
nowhere.
But all that night he dreamed of Mendip. A vast, barren,
mountain-country, his dreams pictured it; waterless, and honeycombed with
the dark caves from which Macaulay’s miners had poured to war; a deserted
countryside full of broken villages and bounded by steep cliffs against
which the isolating waters of the Severn Sea broke in a soundless tumult.
And there Ax, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man.
A fluent gentleman with a noble brow and burning grey eyes pointed out
the course of the river to him. He was the only other soul beside Edwin
and his father, in all that desert country, and Edwin introduced him to
Mr. Ingleby as Mr. Coleridge—rather diffidently, for he was not sure how
the poet would take it until he remembered and explained that Keats was a
chemist. There, on the high crown of Axdown, his mother joined them.
She, it seemed, was not afraid of Mr. Coleridge. She took his arm so
familiarly that Edwin trembled for her; but the poet only smiled, while
she pointed out to him a mass of huge fantastic mountains ranged beyond
the gleaming sea. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said. “You see
that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the
end. Can you see the little bedroom window on the extreme left? . . .
quite a little window?” Coleridge nodded, and Mr. Ingleby, too, shielded
his eyes with his hands and looked. “It was my last chance of showing it
to you,” she said.
“But there are practically no trout in the Alph,” said Coleridge.