CHAPTER XII

THE HILLS

I

UNDER a sky of rain-washed blue they had left Bristol, and after an hour

of hard riding came to an easy upland plateau where the road lay white

and clear before them, so clean between its wide margins of rough turf,

that it seemed to have some affinity with the sky. On their way they had

met few people, but the carters with whom they had exchanged a morning

greeting were all smiling and friendly, very different from the surly

colliers that slouched about the cinder-paths at Halesby.

“Good-maarnin’,” they said, and the very dialect was friendly.

“We’re over the worst of the road,” said Mr. Ingleby. “In a minute or

two we shall see the hills.”

And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the

scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts to

turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of the

highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip: the black

bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of Callow, and a

bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it might well have

claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that swam beyond in the

grey sea. In the light of his new enthusiasm Edwin found it more

impressive than any scene that he remembered: more inspiring, though less

vast in its perspective, than the dreamy plain of the Severn’s upper

waters that he had seen so many times from Uffdown. For these hills were

very mountains, and mightier in that they rose sheer from a plain that

had been bathed in water within the memory of man. And, more than all

this . . . far more . . . they were the home of his fathers.

“Now that we are in Somerset we should drink the wine of the country.”

They pushed their bicycles on to the platform before the inn door, and

Mr. Ingleby called for cider, a pale, dry liquid with a faint acridity

very different from the sugary stuff that comes to the cities in bottles

from Devonshire.

“Yes, it’s good cider,” said Mr. Ingleby, tasting. “Where does it come

from?” he asked the landlord, who brought it.

“It do be a tidy drop o’ zidur,” said the man. “It do come from Mr.

Atwell’s varm into Burrowdown.”

“In” with the accusative, thought Edwin.

“Is old Aaron Atwell still living?” asked his father.

The landlord laughed. The gentleman must have been away a long time from

these parts. Mr. Atwell had been dead these fifteen years.

“The cider’s the same,” said Mr. Ingleby.

“’Tis a marvellous archard, sure ’nuff,” said the landlord. “And last

year was a wunnerful year for apples. ’Tis all accardin’ . . .”

They left him, and coasted gently down the hill. Descending, it seemed

to Edwin that the dome of Axdown lost some of its mountainous quality;

and by the time that they had reached the level of the plain in which

Wringford lay, he was hardly conscious of its imminence more than as a

reminder that this soft, green country was not wholly devoted to quietude

and sleep, but that a cool and lively air must always be rolling from the

hidden slopes. They came to a green, bordered by elms in heavy leaf, on

which a solitary donkey and a flock of geese were grazing. Now the road

was dead level and the hedges rich with fragile dog-rose petals and

thickets of hemp-agrimony that were not yet in flower. Superficially,

the road might have been part of Warwickshire; but there was nothing of

the Midlands in the air that moved above it.

“Take the next turn to the right,” shouted Mr. Ingleby to Edwin, riding

ahead.

In the middle of a village drenched with the perfume of roses, Edwin

turned to the right down a narrow lane. By this time his father had

reached his level. “Here we are,” he said. They dismounted.

It was a small cottage with a green-painted porch and carefully tended

garden in front of it. The place was built of the stone of the country

and washed with the pinkish lime of the hills. In the garden roses and

bright annuals were blooming, and a huge acacia, hung with ivory blossom,

shadowed the garden gate. On the gate itself Edwin read a crudely

painted name: Geranium Cottage. Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Your Uncle Will is

very fond of geraniums.” They opened the gate and pushed in their

bicycles. Everything in the garden was so meticulously orderly that to

wheel them over the mown grass seemed sacrilegious. The porch, at which

they waited, was full of choice geraniums. Their hot scent filled the

air. Mr. Ingleby knocked gently with a polished brass knocker. Slow

steps were heard within moving over a flagged floor. The door was

opened, disclosing a stone passage that smelt of coolness and

cleanliness. It was like the smell of a sweet dairy. An elderly woman,

with a plump and placid face and grey hair, received them. All her

figure except her black sateen bodice was covered with a coarse but snowy

apron.

“Why, John,” she said. “It do be a treat to see you.”

She took Mr. Ingleby in her arms and kissed him. “Poor fellow, too,” she

said. The embrace implied more than any of the condolences that Edwin

had heard in Halesby.

“And this is Edwin,” she said. “Well, what a great big man, to be sure!”

She proceeded to embrace Edwin, and he became conscious of the

extraordinary softness and coolness of her face.

“Come in and make yourselves comfortable,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “We’re

used to bicycles in this house. Our Joe has one. He goes to work on it

every day, and sometimes on a Sunday rides over to Clevedern on it. Come

in, John.” Edwin followed his father into the living-room. It was

clean, strikingly clean, and curiously homely. On the walls hung a

picture of Queen Victoria, looking like a pouter pigeon in her jubilee

robes, and another of the sardonic Disraeli. There were several padded

photograph albums with gilt clasps, and other photographs decorated the

mantelpiece and a side table. These were all accommodated in fretwork

frames.

“Joe do keep us supplied with up-to-date photograph frames,” said Aunt

Sarah Jane, following Edwin’s glances with a touch of motherly pride.

“He’s like his father. Clever with his fingers.”

Edwin found that the photographs were familiar. His father was there: an

ardent, younger father, with black whiskers and a determined mouth. A

father confident in the virtue of self-help. His mother, too, in a

tight-fitting costume of the eighties, with a row of buttons down the

front from the throat to the hem. And, wonder of wonders, there was

Edwin himself in a sailor suit. The discovery of his own portrait did

something to destroy the illusion of unreality that occupied the place.

Obviously he really belonged to it. For years, without his knowing it,

his image had been part of this unfamiliar room. Even though he had not

known of their existence he had evidently been a familiar accepted person

to these people. Even their friends must have known him by sight. It

was strange. It was pathetic. “I can see a touch of our Joe in him,

John,” said his aunt, who had been examining him closely. “An’ there do

be a look of your father as well.”

“Do you think so?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Joe’s a great boy, too,” said Aunt Sarah Jane lovingly.

It was clear enough who was the idol of this household.

“There now, your dinner will be spoiling. Take the boy upstairs, John.”

She left them, and Edwin followed his father up a crooked stair to a low

room above the garden. A cool wind was blowing down from Axdown, and the

filigree shadow of the lace window-curtains danced on the white coverlet

of the bed. The room smelt faintly of lavender. It seemed to Edwin a

wonderful room, “full of sweet”—he couldn’t remember the line—“peace and

health and quiet breathing.” There was nothing quite so placid as this

in the life that he had known.

They washed their dusty faces and came downstairs again, and Edwin,

seated by the sunny window of the front room, relapsed into a state of

perfect drowsiness, content merely to exist and drink in the sweet and

simple atmosphere of humble content. This, he supposed, was what his

father by his struggles and sacrifices had lost. Was it worth while?

The complications of this question were far too great for Edwin to

decide.

The men folk of Geranium Cottage did not return to dinner, and after that

meal, in which suet dumplings played an important part, Edwin retired to

a trellised structure at the back of the garden, bowery with honeysuckle,

that Aunt Sarah Jane described as the harbour. Here, drugged with more

cider and fresh air, he dozed away the early afternoon. He was asleep

when his father came to call him for tea. After all, it was not

surprising that he was sleepy, for they had talked into the small hours

the night before. Certainly Aunt Sarah Jane’s tea was worth waking up

for. Quince marmalade and clotted cream, and wheaten scones that she had

baked that morning. Edwin, ready now for any further revelations, would

not now have been shocked to hear that in her young days she had been a

cook. In this beatific state of refreshment he was anxious to explore.

“When are we going to Highberrow, father?”

“And this was to be a restful holiday,” Mr. Ingleby laughed. “Why, now,

if you like.”

Edwin would have run to the linhay behind the house for the bicycles, but

his father called him back. The hill was so steep, he told him, that it

would be easier for them to walk.

“Well, John, Will’ll be tarrable disappointed if you aren’t here when he

comes home from work,” said Aunt Sarah Jane. “This young man of yours do

go too fast for me.”

“Oh, we won’t be long,” said Mr. Ingleby.

And so they set off together for Highberrow, making, first of all, a

straight line for the base of the hills and then following a green lane

that skirted the foot of them but was so overshadowed with hazel that the

slopes could not be seen. In a mile or so they cut into the main road

again, by an iron milestone that said “Bridgwater 18: Bristol 14.” The

road climbed along a quarried terrace in the hill-side, and to the left

of it lay a deep valley, on the farther slope of which lay half a dozen

pink-washed cottages with gardens falling to the bed of an attenuated

stream; and behind the cottages a steep hill-side rose abruptly to a bare

height crowned with ancient earthworks.

“That,” said Mr. Ingleby, “is Silbury camp. There’s an old rhyme about

it. It is supposed to be full of buried gold. When I was a boy I often

used to lie up there in the sun, gazing out over the channel. In spring

all the meadows between the camp and Highberrow Batch are full of

daffodils. I often used to wish there were daffodils in Halesby. . . .”

In a little while they came to the church of Highberrow, placed like a

watch-tower on the edge of the Batch, surveying the immense relics of

paganism on the opposite side of the valley. It was a humble and not

very beautiful building; but Edwin entered the churchyard with awe, for

it seemed to him that so much of the past that had made him lay buried

there. And the inscriptions on the tombstones reinforced this idea; for

the churchyard was veritably crowded with the remains of dead Inglebys.

It made the past, a piece of knowledge so recent to him that it still

held an atmosphere of unreality and phantasy, so ponderable, that in

comparison with it his present condition seemed almost unreal. His

father led him through the long grass, starry with yellow ragwort, to the

corner in which his grandmother was buried.

“This is the place that I told you about,” he said.

“The place where my grandfather went out at night and blasted the rock?”

“Yes.”

It was incredible. Until that moment the story had been only a legend.

Edwin wondered how ever his father could have broken away from the

tradition of centuries and left the hills. The roots of their family had

pierced so deeply into the soil, yes, even beneath the soil and into the

veins of the solid rock. The conditions of his own life seemed to him

the tokens of an unnatural and artificial thing.

They left the churchyard by a narrow lane that always climbed. They

passed the village inn: a long, windswept building, so bare and so

exposed to weather that even the tenure of the lichen on the tiles seemed

precarious. Over the lintel a weathered board showed them the name of

Ingleby in faded letters. Edwin pointed to it.

“Yes,” said his father. “I suppose he is some remote cousin of yours.

Everybody that is left in this village must be related to us in some

degree; though I don’t suppose any of them would remember me. You see, I

went to Axcombe when I was a good deal younger than you.” He smiled. “I

am like a ghost returning to its old home. Like a ghost. . . .”

And yet, to Edwin, the whole place seemed familiar. He was not in the

least surprised when, opposite a windy farm-house, in front of which the

dry blades of a dishevelled dracæna shivered as though protesting against

its wintry exile, his father turned off to the left along a road that had

once been gay with cottage gardens and trim buildings of stone, but was

now suggestive of nothing but ruin and desolation. By one of these

pathetic ruins his father paused.

“This was your grandfather’s house, Eddie. It was here that I was born.”

Now there remained only the ground-plan of a house, and the only sign of

habitation in all the ruin was to be seen in the smoke-blackened stones

of the chimney. The garden, indeed, lay beautiful in decay, for there,

as everywhere in this deserted countryside, the golden ragwort had taken

possession; but within the walls of the house only nettles shivered.

“You’ll always find nettles in deserted human habitations. I don’t know

why,” said Mr. Ingleby. “There is a rather unusual botanical curiosity

to be found among the workings at Cold Harbour,” he went on, “the Roman

Nettle. Urtica . . . Urtica. . . . My memory isn’t what it used to be.

It has a bigger leaf than the ordinary nettle and a much more poisonous

sting. It’s only found in places where the Romans have been.”

Why, in the face of this harrowing desolation, should he be thinking of

things like that? A ghost . . . with as little passion or feeling as a

ghost: emotions so different from the passionate resentment that now

filled Edwin’s heart.

“Ah . . . here is the school. I suppose they couldn’t pull that down. I

remember when it was newly built. It was there that I learnt my

alphabet. . . .”

In the whole of the lane the school was the only whole building.

“If you come to the edge of the Batch you will see the valley bottom

where I spent my childhood with your great-grandmother.”

They passed on, and saw, a hundred feet beneath them, the valley of the

little stream. More ruins, many of them; but one or two cottages still

inhabited. The lower cottages lay close to the water, and in four or

five places the stream was spanned by a clapper bridge. In one of the

gardens ghostly children were playing, and in another ghostly washing

flapped in a breeze that had risen with the coolness of evening. Mr.

Ingleby pointed out to Edwin his great-grandmother’s home. It was the

cottage in the garden of which the children were playing.

From the chimney a trail of smoke dwindled up against the grey hill-side.

“I should like to see inside it,” said Edwin.

“Would you? No . . . I don’t think it would be worth going down into the

hollow to see it. You’d only be disappointed. I don’t expect there’d be

anything much to see. Besides, we haven’t time. I want to take you to a

little farm—it isn’t really big enough to be called a farm—at the top of

the lane under Axdown. They call it the Holloway. Why I can’t imagine,

for it is the highest point of the whole village. Your aunt tells me

that your grandfather’s sister, your own great-aunt Lydia, is still

living there, and I think I had better go and see her.”

He turned again, and Edwin followed him. It seemed strange to him that

his father should not be anxious to look inside the house where his

childhood had been spent. A ghost . . . a ghost. . . .

They passed the windy farm once more. A man, in muddy gaiters, was

driving cows into the yard. He was the first creature—apart from the

ghostly children in the valley—that they had seen. A tall man, with a

gaunt, grey face, who did not even turn to look at them or give them

good-evening, although they must surely have been the only living people

that he had seen that day. It was impossible to believe from the sight

of its exterior that the farm was now inhabited.

“Who do you think he is?” Edwin asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t the least idea. The people at that farm used

to be named Ingleby; and he certainly has the figure of your grandfather.

. . .”

“Won’t you stop and speak to him?”

“Why should we?”

“But he would be awfully pleased to see you and know who you are. . . .”

“I don’t expect he would.”

A moment later Mr. Ingleby said,

“Now, the ruins of this cottage ought to interest you, Edwin.”

“Why? Is it one of ours?”

“No, but the old woman who lived in it in my day was always supposed to

be a witch. Mendip people were always great believers in witchcraft. I

shouldn’t wonder if your aunt believes in ‘ill-wishing’ to this day. I

suppose she was really a harmless old body. The story was that a

daughter of hers, with whom she had quarrelled, married a small dairy

farmer down by Axcombe, and no sooner had she gone to live with him than

the poor man’s cows went dry. His business failed. He had to sell his

stock. He was ruined, and took to drink; and in all the public-houses

for miles round he used to rail against his mother-in-law, and say that

she was responsible for the whole business. She was a lonely old

creature, very poor and dirty, and when we were children and going up to

the Holloway we used to cover our eyes and run for fear we should catch

sight of her. No one even knew when she died. They found her, I heard,

when she had been dead for a week or ten days.”

Edwin shivered. These hill-people, it seemed, were hard and cruel. No

doubt he must have some of their stony cruelty in his own being

somewhere.

At last they reached the farm at the top of the Holloway. It was a poor

building, only a little more hospitable than the ruins in the valley.

Mr. Ingleby knocked at the door, and a sturdy, middle-aged man with an

iron hook in place of his right hand lifted the latch and stared at them.

“You don’t know me, Isaac?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Noa. . . . I can’t say I do know ’ee.”

“I’m John Ingleby.”

“John Ingleby! . . . Well, and I’m proud to see ’ee, John. Do ’ee step

inside and see mother. I can’t shake hands with ’ee the way I was used

to. I lost en in a mowin’-machine five years back. Come in then.”

He led the way into a dark cabin. Everything in it was dark, partly,

perhaps, because the windows were full of flower-pots; partly because all

the furniture was darkened with age or smoke or grime. The only bright

colours in its brownness were a number of shining copper utensils and a

fine show of geraniums in the window. Isaac followed Mr. Ingleby’s eyes

towards these flowers.

“Purty, ban’t they?” he said with pride. “Your brother Will sent mother

they.”

In the gloom of the fireplace, where a pile of turves smouldered, mother

began to dissociate herself from the surrounding brownness. She was a

very old woman. Edwin had never seen any one so old—sitting bolt upright

in a straight-backed oaken chair. Her face seemed to Edwin very

beautiful, for extreme age had taken from it all the extraneous charm

that smoothness and colour give, leaving only the sheer chiselled beauty

of feature. It was a noble face, finely modelled, with a straight nose,

a tender mouth, and level brows beneath which burned the darkest and

clearest eyes that Edwin had ever seen. Her hair was white and scanty,

but little of it was seen beneath the white bonnet that she wore. Edwin

felt her eyes go through him in the gloom.

“Here’s cousin John come to see ’ee, mother,” said Isaac, bending over

her.

“John? What John?” said the old lady.

It struck Edwin at once that her speech was purer and more delicate than

that of her son.

“John Ingleby, Aunt Lydia,” said Edwin’s father.

“You need not raise your voice, my dear,” she said. “My sight and my

hearing are wonderful, thank God.”

“Then you remember me, Aunt Lydia?”

“Of course I remember you, John. Though it’s many and many years since

my eyes saw you. And how are you, my dear? They tell me that you have

done great things in the world. You’re a doctor, like poor Dr.

Marshall.”

“No . . . I’m not a doctor. I’m in business. I’m a chemist.”

“I knew it was something of the kind. You needn’t speak so loud. And

they told me you had married. I suppose this is your boy. A fine boy,

surely. He has a look of your grandfather.” . . .

“Yes, this is Edwin.”

“I don’t remember that name in our family. It sounds like a fanciful

name. Come here, my dear, and let me look at you.”

Edwin went to her, and she kissed him. Her face was so cold and smooth

that she might almost have been dead.

“And how is your dear wife, John?”

“I’ve had a terrible blow, Aunt Lydia. I’ve lost her.”

“Ah . . . that was bad for you, and bad for the boy, too.”

“I shall never get over it.” Mr. Ingleby’s voice trembled.

“Yes, of course, you say that. It’s natural that you should. You’re

young. But when you live to be as old as I am you’ll know better. You

will get over it. When a few years have gone by you’ll marry again.”

“Never, Aunt Lydia . . . never. . .”

“Yes. . . . That’s what you feel now. But I know the family. The

Inglebys are always very tender in marriage. I’ve seen many of them that

have lost their wives, and they always marry again. I don’t suppose that

I shall live to hear of it; but when the time comes you’ll remember what

I said.”

“No, Aunt Lydia . . . never.”

“Time is a wonderful thing, John. I’m glad to have seen you and your

boy. I hope he’ll take after you—you were always the best of them.”

She gave a little sigh. Evidently she was tired. The flame that burned

behind her black eyes was so very feeble for all its brightness. Isaac,

who had been watching her with the devotion of a practised nurse, saw

that she could not stand any more talking.

“Now, mother, that’s enough, my dear,” he said.

“Kiss me, John,” she said. And Mr. Ingleby kissed her.

“Well, now that you be here after all these years,” said Isaac cheerily,

as he rearranged the red shawl round his mother’s shoulders, “you won’t

leave us without taking something. There do be a lovely bit of bacon I

have cut. Do ’ee try a bit now, and a mug of cider.”

Edwin, who was already hungry with his walk, and was rapidly acquiring a

taste for the wine of the country, now became aware of the fact that the

dark ceiling was decked with sides of bacon and hams that hung there

slowly pickling in the turf smoke that saturated the atmosphere of the

room. He was disappointed when his father declined to take any of this

delicacy.

“Well, a mug of cider, then,” Isaac persisted. He went into an inner

chamber down three stone steps, with three china mugs hanging on his

hook. “You see, I do be pretty handy with en,” he laughed.

They drank their cider solemnly. It was even drier than that which they

had drunk for lunch at Wringford, and so free from acidity that all that

Edwin could taste was that faint astringent bitterness. It had also a

bouquet that was less like the odour of apples than that of a flour-mill.

A wonderful drink. . . . They said good-bye, and Isaac, who seemed to

Edwin the most kindly and patient creature he had ever met, showed them

to the door.

By this time the sun was setting, and the cool wind from the west had

freshened. Edwin saw, for the first time, the huge panorama on which

they had turned their backs as they climbed the hill to the Holloway.

Perhaps it was the strangeness of all his recent experience; perhaps,

partly, the exhilaration that proceeded from Isaac’s cider, but the sight

struck Edwin as one of greater magnificence than any he had ever seen

before. From their feet the whole country sloped in a series of hilly

waves to the shores of the channel, and that muddy sea now shone from

coast to coast in a blaze of tawny light: now truly, for the first time,

one of the gateways of the world. And beyond the channel stood the

heaped mountains of Wales, very wild and black in their vastness. The

sight was so impressive that on their way down the lane they did not

speak.

At last Edwin said,—

“I think Aunt Lydia has a very beautiful face. She looks like some old

grand lady.”

“She is very like your grandfather,” said his father. “She must be over

ninety. It is a great age.”

And on the way home Edwin began to imagine what his strange grandfather

the dowser must have been, with the figure of the lonely farmer, his

black beard and hair, and his great-aunt Lydia’s noble features and

piercing eyes.

II

They stayed for a week at Geranium Cottage, sinking without any effort

into its placid life. Edwin was content merely to live there, soaking up

the atmosphere of Wringford village, and only thinking of Highberrow as a

strange and ghostly adventure, possible, but too disturbing to be

indulged in. The tiredness of Mr. Ingleby, who never showed the least

inclination to revisit the place, made this abstention easier. In the

whole of his week at Wringford Edwin only made one attempt to see

Highberrow again. The impulse came to him very early one morning, just

at the hour of dawn when the birds had fallen to silence, and Joe, who

happened to be working for his master at a village some miles away, was

splashing about under the pump in the yard at the back of the linhay.

Mr. Ingleby was still asleep, and Edwin, dressing quietly, stole

downstairs and set off towards the hills, this time on his bicycle.

He followed the high road, and left the machine in a quarry opposite the

point where the first pink-washed cottages appeared. By this time he was

almost sorry that he had come there: for he was quite certain that the

village he was now going to visit would be a very different place from

the dead or hallucinated Highberrow that he and his father had penetrated

some days before. He felt this so strongly that he wouldn’t take the

risk of spoiling that marvellous impression, and instead of following the

road that they had taken before, he changed his mind, crossed the valley

of the pink cottages, and climbed the shaley slope of Silbury. In the

fosse that surrounded the encampment a hundred white tails bobbed at

once, and, laughing, he scrambled up the sides of what had once been

Silbury Camp, and now was Silbury Warren.

Here, lying full length upon the top of the vallum, as perhaps a Belgic

ancestor, or an ancestor who held the crest before the Belgæ came, had

lain before him, he could look over the combe towards the church of

Highberrow on the Batch. And the church tower was all he saw of

Highberrow again: a feature most unrepresentative of the spirit of that

pagan place. Even the church tower at this hour of the morning could

scarcely be seen for mist, and all the time cold mist was pouring down in

a dense, impalpable stream from the milky coverlet that spread upon

Axdown and Callow and all the hills beyond. In the plain nothing could

be seen at first; and from the sleeping villages no mist-muffled sound

was heard; but by degrees the pattern of the plain’s surface, with its

dappled orchards, its green pasturage and paler turf-moors, cut by the

straight bands of the rhines, the sluggish channels through which the

surface water drained into the sea, became more clear, and with this the

sounds of the country grew more distinct: indefinite noises, such as the

creaking of cart-wheels in a hidden lane, the squeak of a pump-handle at

the back of the pink cottages, the clink of a pick in the quarry. The

whole world awoke, and Edwin, too, found that he was awake and awfully

hungry. He scrambled down the slope. Smoke was now rising from the

chimneys of the cottages in the combe. He was back at Wringford in time

for breakfast.

By this time he had begun to feel quite at home in Geranium Cottage. He

had made the discovery of his cousin and his Uncle Will. The latter he

found wholly lovable: a creature of slow, quiet speech, as leisurely and

peaceful as his vocation, and full of small kindnesses that surprised by

reason of their unexpectedness.

The thing that most impressed Edwin in his uncle’s nature was the

extraordinary tenderness he showed towards the green things that were his

care. Perhaps the west-country custom of dispensing with the neuter

pronoun and speaking of all inanimate creatures as if they were persons,

made his solicitude for their welfare more noticeable. But he was not

only kind to them in his speech: his short and clumsy-looking fingers,

that seemed to be built for nothing but the roughest of labour, became

amazingly sensitive and delicate as soon as he began to handle the plants

in his garden, so that every touch had in it the nature of a caress.

In this life, of the devoted husbandman, he was evidently wholly

contented; and he made it seem to Edwin the most natural and human on

earth. The fascination of watching his uncle’s hands grew upon him, and

in the end he would watch the man, who had been busy at the same work in

his master’s garden all day, tending his own favourites at home until the

light began to fail, and Aunt Sarah Jane would call the two of them in to

supper. The spectacle had a sort of hypnotic effect upon the boy, it was

so slow and measured, as slow almost, Edwin thought, as the processes of

germination and growth which it was his uncle’s vocation to assist. His

fingers even handled the purple soil as if he loved it.

His cousin was a different matter altogether: a tall, dark-haired boy, a

couple of years older than Edwin. He had, much more distinctly than

Uncle Will, the Ingleby face, the features that were to be seen at their

best in the old lady at the Holloway farm. And he possessed in a high

degree the quality that had carried Edwin’s father out into the world: a

seriousness that made him anxious to “get on,” promptings of which were

now being satisfied in an accumulation of the periodical publications

that have taken the place of Mr. Samuel Smiles in these days: weeklies

devoted to all kinds of useful hobbies—electricity, wood-carving,

plumbing—the series that eventually culminated in the gigantic illusion

of the Self-Educator.

To these short cuts to power the young man devoted all his evenings, and

though he was quite natural in his anxiousness to be friendly with Edwin,

with whose subtler and more contemplative nature he had at present so

little in common, the attempts were not very successful. Between these

two there lay a far more obvious gulf than that which separated Edwin

from the older people. In a way, he could not help admiring his cousin’s

earnestness, probably because he knew that he could never imitate it, and

yet he sometimes found himself examining it in a mood of absolute

detachment that made his sympathy feel artificial.

Just before he left St. Luke’s he had been reading Darwin’s _Origin of

Species_, and in the light of this work the efforts of his father,

followed by those of his cousin Joe, seemed to him an excellent instance

of the tendency of ancient stocks to vary or sport in definite

directions. In the earnest Joe Edwin found the phenomenon a little

troublesome, for the sight of the immense energies that the youth was

putting into channels that were futile distressed him, and the more so

because to correct the waste it would have been necessary to begin again

from a point so distant that Joe would be faced with the spectacle of

more than half of his present energies wasted. So Edwin thought as

little as the consciousness of his own selfishness would allow him, of

all the labours that were typified by the fretwork mahogany frames that

surrounded the photographs of the Halesby Inglebys, listening instead to

the endless tales of his Aunt Sarah Jane, in the hour when she became

talkative, after supper.

By this time Edwin was so interested in his own romantic origins that any

story of the old Highberrow would do for him; and his aunt, with her soft

Somerset voice, her picturesque phrasing, and her unfailing memory for

social details, rebuilt, night after night, the life of the decayed

village as it had been in the old dowser’s time, evolving by degrees a

human comedy which resembled that of its great exemplar by the way in

which the protagonists of one episode became mere incidentals to another.

Edwin knew them all by name, and recognised them as if he had met them in

the flesh whenever he heard of them.

In this way, sitting in the smell of the window geraniums over a

leisurely supper of bread and cheese, in his uncle’s case literally

washed down with cider, he heard a story that he always remembered with

pride and pity and a degree of passionate resentment: the story of how

the village of his fathers had sunk into decay.

Highberrow, it appeared, had been built on what was then a common

moorland, by the men who lived in it, laboriously, stone by stone. Their

right to these fruits of their labour had never been called into

question, and the whole spirit of the village had been happy and

prosperous, as well it might, seeing that it owed nothing to the care of

any outsider and could pay its way. And during those prosperous times

its liberties seemed secure from danger. But when the decay of the

grouvier’s industry led to unemployment and poverty, and the younger men

of the Highberrow families began to look for their living overseas, the

little community became so weak that the owner of the manor-house saw his

opportunity. As Lord of the Manor he disputed the “squatters’ right” of

the Highberrow villagers, and through his agents demanded a rent that

would have made living impossible for most of them, for the cottages that

they or their forefathers had built. If they refused to pay the rent, he

said, they would be evicted, not in order that other people might be

introduced who would pay, but merely to satisfy the landlord’s

convictions of the rightness of his principle. That was the way in which

he put it. Merely out of spite would be a more accurate description of

his motives.

Highberrow was in a bad way. The villagers were either very old or very

young, and in either case their feebleness made the whole organism unfit

to resist the inroads of the parasite. What is more, they were very

poor, and the very nature of the Mendip mining industry had made them so

far individualist that the idea of combined resistance did not occur to

them. The landlord wisely started his operations with an old woman whose

cottage lay nearest to the woods in which his pheasants were bred.

Almost incredibly poor, she had lived on the products of her garden and

her poultry. To pay rent was out of the question. Sheer age and inertia

made it impossible for her to move, and in the course of time she was

evicted with her miserable belongings, and went to die at the home of a

married daughter.

Emerging from this easy contest, the landlord, or perhaps his agent,

moved on to the next. It was unfortunate for him, and fortunate for the

villagers, that he now pitched on the cottage of Thomas Ingleby, the

dowser, Edwin’s grandfather. The old man had this in his favour: that he

was a man of two trades, that even when the mining had failed him he

could make a living with the divining rod, and the consciousness of this

power no doubt stiffened his resistance. Another eviction was decreed,

but this time things did not go so easily. When the landlord’s men

arrived from the manor to empty the house, another party appeared from

the Cold Harbour mines, and as soon as the furniture was dragged out at

the front door it was seized and taken in again at the back.

“It were a proper field-day,” said Uncle Will quietly, “I do remember it

well. I can see your father now, John, standing over beyond the road

with his back to the wall, not speakin’ a word, just smokin’ of his

pipe.”

The landlord’s men saw that this sort of thing might go on for ever and

none the better for it, so they just gave it up, but old Ingleby (Edwin

had already canonised him as a “village Hampden”) had shown the rest of

the Highberrow people what could be done, and gradually stirred them into

combined action.

It was a little, pitiful attempt. He himself put into it all his

savings, a matter of a few pounds, and to this were added as many

shillings as could be scraped together in the village. He took the money

to a lawyer in Axcombe—Bayliss was his name—an honest man with a sense of

justice and, one suspects, some admiration for the sturdiness of his

client. Bayliss worked the matter up and made a case of it, and no

further attempts at eviction were made in Highberrow in the meantime.

The village even regained a little of its former confidence, and for some

time the landlord did not show his face in it. But once more luck was

against Highberrow. Bayliss, the good lawyer, died. He had been careful

to keep the matter in his own hands, and when it came to be considered by

his successor, a partner with social ambitions, the new man would not

touch it: partly because there appeared to be no more money in it (as was

probably the case), and partly because he was in the habit of meeting the

Lord of the Manor in the hunting-field, and was on card-playing terms

with the agent.

There followed an exodus of despair. The people of Highberrow, who had

no more money to fight with, packed up their pitiable belongings and left

their houses rather than face the trouble of eviction. Not so Thomas

Ingleby. The agent returned to the attack. There were threats: a stormy

interview, in which the dowser faced the landlord himself. A final

week’s notice was given, and Ingleby made sure once more of the support

of his friends from the neighbouring villages. But no further attempt at

eviction was made. At the last moment the landlord climbed down. He

arranged another interview, and at this the terms for the whole village

were settled. For the lives of the present occupants, or for a period of

sixty years, the cottages should remain rent-free. It was not

everything, but ’twas a famous victory. “That is why Aunt Lydia do be

still living up to the Holloway to this day,” said Aunt Sarah Jane.

“And I suppose grandfather lived there till he died,” said Edwin.

“No, the poor dear. When he did grow very aged your uncle and I went up

to Highberrow and persuaded en that he weren’t fit to look after himself.

You should ’a seed the dirt in that house! And he comed down to live

along of we. But he were never happy, were he, Will?”

“Noa . . . he were never happy.”

“He were a quare old man. Us seed very little of en. Arften people

would come for en from a distance that wanted water found, and he did

spend the day roving the country cutting blackthorns for his dowsing.

Right up to the day when he took to his bed, poor soul.”

“I should like to have seen him dowsing,” said Edwin. “I haven’t even

seen the twigs that they use.”

“Why, that would have been easy enough. Only the other day I throwed out

a lot that belonged to your grandfather.”

Edwin blushed at this sacrilege. “And could Uncle Will find water with a

twig?” he asked.

“Not I,” laughed his uncle. “But they do say it runs in families. Have

you ever tried, John?”

“I tried when I was a boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, “but nothing happened.”

“I expect our Joe could,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, with infinite faith in

her offspring.

“No, mother, I’ve tried it,” said Joe, from the lamplit corner where he

was wrestling with the science of sanitary inspection.

“I wonder if I could . . .” said Edwin.

“Well, you shall have a try,” laughed his uncle.

“At this time o’ night?” said Aunt Sarah Jane, scandalised.

“Let the boy have a try,” said Uncle Will, rising. “’Tis a beautivul

moonlight night, and I’ll take him over the field where the new

water-pipe runs.”

“You’m mad, the two of you,” said his aunt with a sigh.

Edwin and his uncle went out into the garden, and there the boy watched

the gardener’s clumsy, skilful hands cut a forked twig from a blackthorn

bush.

“Hazel do work as well,” he said, “but father always used the thorn.”

Then they went out together over a dewy meadow, and his uncle showed him

how to hold the rod: with his two hands turned palm upwards, the arms of

the twig between the third and fourth fingers, the thumb, and the palm of

each hand, and the fork downwards between them. Over the meadow grass

they walked slowly, then suddenly the tip of the rod began to turn

upwards by no agency of which Edwin was aware. It was very thrilling,

for his hands were quite still.

“There you are,” said his uncle, “you’ve a found our water-pipe.”

“Hold the rod down, uncle,” Edwin said.

He did so, and now the mysterious force was so strong that the arms of

the twig snapped.

“Now, you’ve gone and broke it,” said Uncle Will. “Come in or you’ll

catch cold.”

They went in together.

“Well . . .?” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Oh, he’s a proper dowser, sure enough,” said Uncle Will.

Edwin was still curiously thrilled with the whole business. He felt that

a little more excitement in his attainment was due to him; but no one,

not even his father, seemed in the least impressed. It comforted him to

think that his cousin Joe, his eyes fixed on his book in the corner, had

really less in common than himself with the strange dark people from whom

they were both descended. It was better, he thought, to be a born dowser

than a Fellow of Balliol. More wonderful still to be both.

All the rest of that evening he felt a queer elation in his mysterious

birthright, and when his father yawned and they both went up to bed he

lay awake for a long time listening to the drowsy music of the corncrake

and the wail of hunting owls, trying to put himself more closely in touch

with the romantic past that had bred him: with that magnificent figure

his grandfather, and the innumerable strange and passionate ancestry that

slept under the shadow of Highberrow church on the Batch. “Yea, I have a

goodly heritage,” he thought. And so he came to think of his father,

through whom these things came to him: of his hard achievements, of his

loneliness, of his difficulty of expressing—if it were not a

disinclination to express—all the powerful and stormy things that must

lie hidden in his heart. And a feeling of passionate kinship carried

Edwin away: an anxiety to show his love for his father in unmistakable

ways; to make clear to him once and for all the depth of his son’s

devotion. He began to think of his father as a mother might think of her

child. It must have been in that way, he imagined, that his own mother

had thought of her husband. The night was so still that he imagined he

could hear the rusty ivory of the acacia-blossom falling at the gate.

III

They were in the train on their way home from Bristol, passing smoothly

under the escarpment of the lower Cotswolds. The fortnight had passed

with an astounding swiftness. After leaving Wringford they had cycled

over the back of Mendip, past the mines at Cold Harbour, where they had

paused for half an hour to look at the workings, now deserted and

overgrown with ragwort and scabious, and the Roman amphitheatre, to the

great limestone gorge above Axcombe; and from there they had ridden to

Wells, where, beyond streets that flowed eternally with limpid water,

they had gazed on the wonder of the cathedral and seen the white swans

floating in the palace moat under a sky that was full of peace. Only for

a moment had they seen the masts of Bristol and Redcliffe’s dreamy spire;

and now in a few hours they would be back in Halesby: in another world.

As they travelled northwards Edwin was thinking all the time of the work

that he would do in his little room above the bed of stocks. It should

be a fragrant room, he thought, and a good one for reading, for when his

attention wandered he would be able to lift his eyes to a line of gentler

hills crowned by the dark folds of Shenstone’s hanging woods. And there

he would be able to dream of the coloured past and of his own exciting

future, and the enchanted life that he would soon be leading among the

noblest works of men in letters and in stone. Oxford, his Mecca . . .

the eternal city of his dreams. He allowed his fancy to travel westward

over the rolling Cotswold and droop by the slow descent of river valleys

to that sacred place. His father’s voice dispelled his dream. They were

alone in the carriage and their privacy made speaking easy.

“Edwin . . . I’ve been thinking a good deal about your future.”

“Yes, father?”

“I’ve been thinking it over in my own mind. I talked it over a week or

two ago with your Uncle Albert. He’s a sound man of business, you know.

Then I felt that I couldn’t trust my judgment; the whole world was upside

down; but now I feel that I can think clearly, and of course I am anxious

to do my best for you. I’ve been thinking about this Oxford plan. . . .”

“Yes.”

“You know quite well, Edwin, that I’m not a rich man. I’m a very poor

man. You can understand that, better than you could before, after this

holiday. And when people have very limited means and are getting on in

life—this business has made me an old man, you know—they have to be very

careful in their decisions. Looking at it from every point of view, I

don’t think it would be fair of me to let you go to Oxford.”

“Father . . . what do you mean?”

“To begin with, there’s the expense.”

“But I shall get a scholarship. I’ll work like anything. I’ll make sure

of it.”

“I’m sure you would. You’re a good boy. But that isn’t everything by a

long way. When you’ve got your scholarship, supposing you do get it, the

expense would begin. I shouldn’t like you to feel at a hopeless

disadvantage with men of your own year. You would have to live quite a

different life from them. You wouldn’t be able to afford any of their

pleasures.”

“I shouldn’t want their pleasures.”

“That is a rash thing to say. But I’m looking even farther ahead. What

can you expect to do when you’ve taken a degree in Arts?”

“A fellowship. . . .”

“Ah, but that is a matter of considerable uncertainty. I’ve seen so many

men who have managed to scrape through a university degree and then been

thrown on the world in a state of miserable poverty. Look at Mr. Kelly

at the grammar-school. You wouldn’t like to live his life; but I believe

he has quite a brilliant university career behind him. No . . . I don’t

think it would be fair to you.”

“But mother and I always said . . .”

“Yes, I know . . . you were a pair of dreamers, both of you. If you felt

any very strong desire to become a parson there might be something in it,

though that, too, is a miserable life often enough. But you don’t, do

you?”

“No . . . of course not.”

“So I think that while I am living you should have the chance of learning

a useful profession. What about doctoring?”

“But that would be expensive too.”

“I know that . . . but I think we could do it. We should have a little

in common. I might even be able to help you. And in a way . . . in a

way I should feel that in you I was realising some of my own old

ambitions. It is a noble profession, Eddie: the most humane in the

world. No one need ever be ashamed of being a doctor. I think that a

parson who professes religion for the sake of a living is rather to be

despised.”

“Father, I’m sure it would cost too much. Six years, you know. . . .”

“Five . . . only five, if you pass all your examinations. And it need

not be so expensive as you think. During the last year they have turned

the old College in North Bromwich into a University. They give a degree

in medicine. And while you were studying there you could still live with

me at Halesby. I should be glad of your company.”

This appeal to Edwin’s pity was difficult to resist. It recalled to him

all the resolutions that he had made in the night at Wringford: the

devotion with which he had determined to devote himself to his father’s

welfare: the determination that he should never do anything that could

cause the man a moment’s pain. It was difficult . . . difficult.

“You could still get your scholarship,” his father went on. “There are

several endowments of that kind at the North Bromwich medical school. I

have a pamphlet at home that gives all the particulars. I had even shown

it to your mother.”

“And what did she say, father?”

“She didn’t say much. She knew it would be a great disappointment to

you. But I think she realised that it would be a good thing for you; and

I know she looked forward to having you at home.”

“Yes . . . she must have known what a disappointment it would be.

Father, I wish you would think it over again.”

“I want you to think it over, too. At present it naturally comes as a

shock to you; but I think you’ll see in time. . . .”

He couldn’t see. He knew that he could never see it in that light. It

was going to take all the beauty that he had conceived out of his life.

It was going to ruin all his happiness. In place of light and

cleanliness and learning it was going to give him . . . what? The

darkness of a smoky city; its grime; the mean ideals of the people who

lived beneath its ugliness. Even the memory of the enthusiasm with which

he had thought of the life of old Dr. Marshall, his father’s patron,

couldn’t mitigate the dreariness of the prospect. The idea of living for

ever in company with dirt and misery and harrowing disease repelled him.

It was no good telling him that contact with these misfortunes developed

the nobler faculties of man. It was not the life that he had wanted.

His soul sent forth a cry of exceeding bitterness. And while he sat

there, full of misery and resentment, the train was carrying them onward

into the gloom that always overshadowed the City of Iron.

BOOK II

. . . _so that with much ado I was corrupted_, _and made to learn the

dirty devices of the world_.

THOMAS TRAHERNE.

CHAPTER I

THE CITY OF IRON

I

THE city of iron stands upon three hills and its valleys were once

watered by two rivers; but since the day when its name was humbly written

in Doomsday these pastoral features have disappeared, so that the hills

are only known as tramway gradients that testify to the excellence of the

Corporation’s power station, and the rivers, running in brick culverts,

have been deprived not only of their liberty but even of their natural

function of receiving a portion of the city’s gigantic sewage. The

original market of North Bromwich has been not so much debauched from

without, in the manner of other growing towns, as organised from within

by the development of its own inherent powers for evil. It is not a

place from which men have wilfully cast out beauty so much as one from

which beauty has vanished in spite of man’s pitiful aspirations to

preserve it. Indeed, its citizens are objects rather for pity than for

reproach, and would be astonished to receive either, for many of them are

wealthy, and from their childhood, knowing no better, have believed that

wealth is a justification and an apology for every mortal evil from

ugliness to original sin.

In the heart of the city the sense of power, impressive if malignant, is

so overwhelming that one cannot see the monstrosity as a whole and can

almost understand the blindness of its inhabitants. Go, rather, to the

hills beyond Halesby, to Uffdown and Pen Beacon, where, with a choice of

prospects, one may turn from the dreamy plain of Severn and the cloudy

splendours of Silurian hills, to its pillars of cloud by day and its

pillars of fire by night; and perhaps in that remoter air you may realise

the city’s true significance as a phenomenon of unconquered if not

inevitable disease. If you are a physician, you will realise that this

evil has its counterpart in human tissues, where a single cell, that

differs not at all from other cells and is a natural unit in the

organism, may suddenly and, as it seems, unreasonably acquire a faculty

of monstrous and malignant growth, cleaving and multiplying to the

destruction of its fellows—a cell gone mad, to which the ancients gave

the name of cancer.

The inhabitants of North Bromwich, who are a tolerant people, and proud

of the fact, would smile at this reflection. They are not in the habit

of surveying the midden in which they are bred from remote hilltops,

except on Bank Holidays, at which time they have discovered a truth from

which they might learn more: that with the aid of hill air and exercise,

whether it be that of cocoanut shies or swing-boats, or the more

hazardous pursuit of donkey-riding, it is possible to absorb a greater

quantity of alcohol in a given time without unduly suffering than in the

atmosphere of their own streets. But they have not time to learn, and

since they have never known any other conditions of living, they exhibit

the admirable human characteristic of making the best of their

surroundings and persuading themselves that their hallucinated existence

is typical of human life. They are even eager, pathetically eager, to

find and to proclaim its virtues, and that they may do this more easily

they have invented specious names for the disease and its results:

Industry for the first, and, for the second, Progress.

In the vindication of a Municipal Conscience (making the best of a bad

job) they periodically extend the area over which their coat of arms, a

reminder of days when chivalry existed, is displayed. The coat of arms

itself is an unfortunate symbol, for it is supported by the figure of a

brawny slave who carries the hammer with which his chains have been

forged; but the motto at least is encouraging. It is the word “Forward,”

expressing the aspirations of the citizens towards the day when all

England may be as the Black Country. The watcher on Uffdown may give it

a more far-sighted significance: “forward, to the day when there shall be

no more coal, and the evil, of its own inanition, perish.”

For the present, at any rate, the city showed no signs of perishing.

During the last year or two, its tentacles had spread farther than ever

before, swarming into the wet and lonely valley of the Dulas Fechan, a

deep cleft in the mountains beyond Felindre where a noisy river ran

through undergrowth older than man’s memory. From this valley, the

council had decreed, the rain of the Savaddan watershed, which geology

had destined for the Wye and later for the Atlantic, must now traverse

eighty miles or more of conquered territory, and after being defouled by

the domestic usages of North Bromwich, must find its way into the Trent,

and so to the German Ocean, as the Romans thoughtlessly labelled the

North Sea. “Water,” said the Mayor, who was also known as Sir Joseph

Astill, the brewer, “water is one of the necessities of life. It is our

duty to the public to see that they have it, and that they have it pure

and unadulterated.”

So the Welsh water came, and the altruistic baronet took the credit for

it. Indeed the progressive spirit of North Bromwich found its

incarnation in this fleshy gentleman. It was he who presented the

municipal art gallery with their unrivalled collection of Madox-Jones

cartoons, to say nothing of three portraits of himself exemplifying (he

had an elegant vocabulary) the styles of the three greatest portrait

painters of modern times. It was he who saved the art of music from

degradation by fighting, with all the weight of his personal influence,

against the performance of secular music, music, that is, divorced from

“sacred” words, upon the Sabbath. It was he, again, who aroused public

feeling on the question of the university: “the first Modern university,”

he called it.

He accomplished its endowment, equipped it with a principal whose name

was a household word in the homes of the great middle classes; and

finally set the seal of modernity on his creation, less than twenty years

before the total prohibition of alcohol became law in retrograde America,

by instituting a learned faculty and providing a degree in the science of

. . . brewing. Just as an example of the city’s liberality, there was

also a faculty of Arts. The faculty of Science, of course, was

important, if only as an appendage to the brewing school; those of

Engineering and Mining flattered the industries of the district; that of

Commerce taught its graduates to write business letters in every spoken

tongue and give the Yankees what for; and lastly, that of Medicine,

supplied a necessary antidote to the activities of most of the others.

Sir Joseph Astill was proud, as well he might be, of the Medical School.

“In this city,” he boasted, “there are actually more hospital beds _per

centum_ of inhabitants than in any other in the whole country. The North

Bromwich medical student has a greater opportunity of studying disease,

in all its aspects, than the alumnus of any other school in the world.

Thousands of beds lie waiting for his scrutiny; and I am glad to say that

very few of them are ever empty.”

Edwin’s first serious acquaintance with North Bromwich had begun at the

end of the summer holidays, through which he had worked with a good deal

less than the fiery enthusiasm that he would have put into his reading

for the Balliol scholarship. The syllabus of the examination for the

Astill Exhibition had amazed him by its simplicity: the prescribed books

were works that he had absorbed some years before at St. Luke’s, and

though the mathematical side of the business worried him, as it had

always done, it was clear that in North Bromwich the classics were

regarded really as a polite accomplishment rather than as an integral

part of a gentleman’s equipment in life: so that these drowsy summer

months were really a period of comparative idleness in which he had time

to brood on his regrets and become gradually reconciled to his new fate.

In this spirit he approached the examination. Even the capitoline

eminence on which the university buildings were placed, with the

tremendous renaissance buildings of the Council House and the Corinthian

Town Hall, did not greatly impress him. He saw rather the squalid slums

from which these pretentious buildings rose. It was so different, he

thought, from Oxford, and he passed the flagged courtyard with its cool

fountain and the benevolent statue of Sir Joseph Astill in a frock coat

and carrying a rolled umbrella on which the sculptor had lavished all the

feeling of his art, without the least shadow of spiritual obeisance.

With two other long-legged candidates he had worked through his papers in

a small room whose windows overlooked the quiet square and a phantom

stream of noiseless traffic beyond. The first paper had been

mathematical, and its intricacies kept his mind so busy that he had

little time for reflection. From time to time he would see one of the

long-legged competitors reducing the end of his penholder to wood-pulp in

the earnestness of ruminant thought; and occasionally the deep boom of

the clock in the tower of the Art Gallery would remind him that time was

veritably passing; but time passed swiftly, and he was almost surprised

to find himself once more in an air that for all its vitiation was less

sleepy than that of the sealed examination room. By the end of the first

evening all that he feared in the examination papers was over. To-morrow

he would be on his own ground and the modern university could do its

damnedest.

Next day the classical papers were distributed and Edwin, who found them

easy, could see that his pen-chewing friend was in a bad way. All the

passages set for translation were familiar: the grammatical questions

consisted of old catches that had been drilled into him by Mr. Leeming in

the Upper Fourth. As far as he was concerned, it was a walk over. He

had time to take in more of his surroundings and to watch the silent

coloured stream of traffic filtering through the narrows where the bulk

of the Town Hall constricted the street. At the end of each day he found

his father anxiously awaiting him. He was eager to see and handle the

examination papers for himself. He seemed impressed by their difficulty,

and Edwin found it hard to reassure him without appearing objectionably

superior. He seemed rather surprised that Edwin, on the eve of such a

formidable ordeal, should choose to take out his bicycle and ride towards

the hills, so surprised that it became a matter for serious debate with

Edwin whether he should do as he wanted to do and appear priggish, or

affect an anxiety that didn’t exist merely to please his father. In the

end he decided to be honest at all costs.

The part of the examination that he enjoyed most was the _viva-voce_ in

Classics. For this trial he was led up many flights of stone steps to a

room full of books in which the Dean of the Faculty of Arts awaited him:

a kindly, nervous old man with a grey beard, with whom Edwin immediately

felt at home. His nervousness seemed to Edwin appropriate: it implied

the indubitable fact that in North Bromwich Arts was a sideshow that

counted for nothing, and that the professor’s dignity, as Dean of a

learned Faculty, was a precarious and unsubstantial thing. “Your papers

were excellent, . . . excellent,” he said to begin with. “Now, I should

like you to read me something.” He pointed to a bookshelf. “Let us

start with some Greek.”

“What would you like, sir?”

“Oh, it’s not what I should like. What would you like to read?

Something that really appeals to you.”

Edwin felt that the dean was watching him, like a cat stalking a bird, as

his fingers approached the bookshelf. It was a curious responsibility,

for it would be an awful shame if he chose something that the old man

didn’t approve of. Sophocles. . . . Why not Sophocles?

He picked out the Antigone, and chose the great chorus:—

Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν,

Ἔρως, ὁς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις, . . .

“Let’s have it in Greek first.”

Edwin read it in the level voice which the Head of St. Luke’s had always

used for the recitation of Greek poetry. When he had finished the first

strophe he looked up and saw that the Dean’s weak eyes, beneath their

tortoiseshell spectacles, were brimming with tears.

“That will do,” he said, “unless you’d prefer to go on . . .”

Edwin read the antistrophe.

“Yes . . . I don’t think you need translate it,” said the Dean. He

paused for a moment, then, replacing the volume, went on. “In this

university I am known as the Professor of Dead Languages. Dead

languages. What?”

They passed a pleasant half-hour together. In Latin Edwin chose

Lucretius and a passage from the Georgics, at the end of which the Dean

confided to him that he kept bees. “Thank you, that will do,” he said.

“I gather that you are entering the Medical School. . . . Well, it is a

noble profession. I don’t know what we should do without doctors, I’m

sure.”

Four days later Mr. Ingleby received him at the breakfast table with

unconcealed emotion. “You’ve got your scholarship, Edwin. I’m . . . I’m

as pleased as if I’d won it myself. I never had the opportunity of

winning a scholarship in my life.” The hand in which he held the letter

trembled. He kissed Edwin fervently. “This is a great day for me,” he

said: and Edwin, glowing, felt that anything was worth while that could

give such pleasure to the man that he had determined to love.

II

On a bright morning at the beginning of September Edwin found himself one

of a crowd of ten or fifteen youths, waiting with a varying degree of

assurance, outside the office of the Dean of the Medical Faculty in James

Street, a sordid thoroughfare in which the pretentious buildings of the

old College of Science hid its hinder quarters. The door was small, and

only distinguished from its neighbours, a steam laundry and brassworker’s

office, by a plate that bore the inscription, “University of North

Bromwich. Medical School.” Inside the door stood a wooden box for a

porter, usually empty, but in its moments of occupation surveying a long,

dark cloakroom with a hundred or more numbered lockers and corresponding

clothes-hooks, on a few of which undergraduates’ gowns and battered

mortar-boards were hanging. This morning the Dean was holding audience

of all the first year men, and each of the crowd in which Edwin now found

himself a negligible unit, was waiting until his name should be called

from the office, and, in the meantime, surveying his companions with

suspicion and being surveyed with a more confident and collective

suspicion by seniors who happened to drift through the corridors on

business or idleness, and showed evidence of their initiation by

familiarity with the porter.

Only one face in the company was in the least familiar to Edwin: that of

a ponderous young man with immaculate black hair carefully parted in the

middle, who had sat stolidly through the Astill Exhibition examination a

few desks away from him. As he did not appear to be anxious to recognise

this fact, Edwin abandoned his own intention of doing so, and, like the

rest of the company, possessed his soul in silence. In the meantime he

watched the others with a good deal of interest and speculation.

They were a strangely mixed company: a few of them, of whom Edwin himself

was one, mere boys, to whom the air of the schoolroom still clung: some

obvious men of the world, scrupulously, even doggily dressed, in an age

when the fancy waistcoat had reached the zenith of its daring; others,

and one other in particular, a seedy looking person with a dejected fair

moustache, were clearly old enough to be the fathers of the youngest. It

was to the second of these classes, the bloods, that Edwin found his

attention attracted, and particularly to a paragon of elegance, whose

waistcoat was the orange colour of a blackbird’s bill with light blue

enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathematically bisected and shone with

expensive unguents, and whose chin differed from that of Edwin in being

shaved from sheer necessity instead of from motives of encouragement.

This person exuded an atmosphere of prosperity and style that took

Edwin’s fancy immensely, and he wore grey flannel trousers as correctly

turned up as any that Edwin had seen upon the enchanted platform of the

station at Oxford. It was evident that the process of waiting bored him;

for he took out of the pocket of the amazing waistcoat a gold hunter

watch with a front enamelled in the same shade of light blue. The lid

flicked open noiselessly when he touched a spring, and Edwin began to be

exercised in his mind as to what happened when he put on a waistcoat of a

different pattern, as obviously a person of this degree of magnificence

must frequently do. Did he change the buttons, or did he change the

watch? Edwin, surveying him, looked unconsciously at his own Waterbury;

and, as he did so, the magnificent creature glanced at him with a pair of

savage brown eyes, and, as Edwin decided, summed him up for good and all.

“Mr. Harrop, please,” said the porter. And Mr. Harrop pocketed his

hunter and disdainfully entered the office.

Edwin, relieved from his scrutiny, turned his attention to the most

impressive figure of all: a young man fully six feet four in height, but

so broadly and heavily built that his tallness was scarcely noticeable.

His face was good-humoured, and very plain, with the look of battered

obstinacy that may sometimes be seen in that of a boxer. Perhaps this

idea was reinforced by the fact that his short nose was broken, and that

he carried his whole face a little forward, staring out at the world from

under bushy black eyebrows. He seemed made for rough usage, and his

undoubted strength was qualified by a degree of awkwardness that showed

itself in his clumsy hands. These, at the present time, were clasped

behind his back, beneath the folds of a brand-new undergraduate’s gown

that, because of his great height, looked ridiculously small. His whole

aspect was one of terrific earnestness. Evidently he was taking this

business, as he would surely have taken any other, seriously. That, no

doubt, was the reason why on this occasion he alone appeared in

academical dress. His clasped hands, his lowered head, his bulldog neck

all spoke of a determination to go through with this adventure at all

costs.

“Mr. Brown,” said the porter, and nearly blundering into the returning

elegance of Mr. Harrop, he slouched into the Dean’s office as though he

were entering the ring for the heavy-weight championship of the world.

In the end Edwin found himself left alone with a youth of his own age, a

tall, loose-limbed creature, with an indefinite humorous face, a close

crop of curly fair hair and blue eyes. Edwin rather liked the look of

him. He was young, and seemed approachable, and though his striped

flannel suit was more elegant than Edwin’s and he wore a school tie of

knitted silk, Edwin took the risk of addressing him.

“We seem to be the last.”

“Yes. I expect the Dean will keep me last of all, bad cess to him!

That’s because I happen to be a sort of cousin of the old devil’s.” He

spoke with a soft brogue that had come from the south of Ireland.

“Mr. Ingleby, please.”

Edwin pulled himself together and entered the Dean’s office.

A pleasant room: at one big desk a suave, clean-shaven gentleman with

thin sandy hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. At another a little dark man

with a bald head and a typewriter in front of him.

“Mr. Ingleby?” said the first. His voice was refined, if a little too

precise.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Ingleby, what are you going to do? Ah, yes . . . you are the

Astill scholar. Very good. Very good. Are you proposing to take a

London degree?”

“No, sir. North Bromwich.”

“Well . . . it is possible you may change your mind later. Have you

taken the London Matriculation?”

“No, sir. I was on the classical side at St. Luke’s. I was reading for

a scholarship at Oxford.”

“And changed your mind . . . or” (shrewdly) “had it changed for you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is your father a doctor?”

“No.” It really doesn’t matter what my father is, thought Edwin, and the

Dean, as though answering his reflection, said:—

“No. . . That doesn’t matter.” And, after a pause: “Well, Mr. . . . er

. . . Ingleby, you have made a good beginning. I hope it will continue

satisfactorily. That is all, thank you. Good-morning.” He held out his

hand to Edwin, who was astonished into putting out a moist hand himself.

“Yes,” continued the Dean in a suave, reflective voice, “you will pay

your fees to my secretary, Mr. Hadley. This is . . . er . . . Mr.

Hadley. Yes.”

Mr. Hadley acknowledged the introduction with a lift of the right eyebrow

and Edwin left the room.

“Mr. Martin,” said the secretary, as he left, and “Mr. Martin, please,”

the porter repeated.

“I say, wait a moment for me,” said the loose-limbed Irishman to Edwin in

passing.

It was so friendly as to be cheering.

“He seems a decent old bird,” said Martin, emerging a few minutes later.

“I thought you said he was your cousin?”

“So he is. You see I’m Irish, and so is he; and in Ireland pretty nearly

everybody who is anybody is related to everybody else.” He plunged into

a lengthy demonstration of the relationships of the Southern aristocracy,

with warnings as to the gulfs that separated the Martins from the

Martyns, and the Plunketts from the Plunkets, rambling away through a

world of high-breeding and penury in which all the inhabitants called

each other by their Christian names, and spent their lives in hunting,

point-to-point racing, and elaborate practical jokes. A new world to

Edwin.

They strolled down Sackville Row together, and cutting through the

Arcades came out into the wide thoroughfare of Queen Street that had been

driven through an area of slums in honour of Victoria’s first jubilee.

“By the way, what’s your school?” said Denis Martin.

“St. Luke’s.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I don’t suppose you would, in Ireland.”

“Oh, I didn’t go to school in Ireland. Nobody does. I was at

Marlborough. Is St. Luke’s one of those soccer schools?”

“Good Lord, no. . . . We play rugger. We’re pretty good.”

“Who do you play?”

“Merchant Taylors and St. Paul’s, and one or two others.”

“H’m. . . . They’re day schools, aren’t they? Is St. Luke’s that sort?”

Edwin, with enthusiasm, expounded the St. Luke’s legend, that nobody

outside of St. Luke’s has ever been known to believe. Martin, meanwhile,

looked a little supercilious and bored. He spoke as from a distant world

in a tone that implied that the people of North Bromwich could never call

each other by their Christian names or hunt or race or play practical

jokes with an air of being born to it.

“I expect we’re a pretty mixed lot here,” he said.

And Edwin, with the guilty consciousness of being more than a little

mixed himself, replied: “Yes.”

“An extraordinary collection. That great dark fellow looks an absolute

tyke. Then there’s the chap with the waistcoat—”

“Yes. . . . Harrop was the name.”

“I don’t know the name,” said Martin dubiously. “Never heard of the

family. He was wearing an Oriel tie.”

“Oriel. . . . Do you mean Oxford?”

“Yes, one of my cousins was there. That’s how I know it. I should think

they turfed him out on account of that waistcoat. Still, Oxford isn’t

what it used to be.” “In the eyes of a Southern Unionist,” he might have

added. But the news was grateful to Edwin. “I shouldn’t wonder,” Martin

went on, “if lots of decent people didn’t end by coming to schools like

this. I expect it is the Dean’s idea, you know. I say, what about

lunch? Do you know of any decent place?”

In ancient days, when he had come into North Bromwich shopping with his

mother, Edwin had always been taken to Battie’s, the great confectioner’s

in Queen Street, but now, passing the doors in this exalted company, he

felt that the company of a crowd of shabby shopping women would hardly be

suitable: besides, he might even run the risk of meeting his Aunt Laura,

who also frequented the shop, so he left Battie’s prudently alone.

“I know one place,” said Martin. “I should think it’s all right. The

food’s decent anyway.”

He led the way up a side street to an elegant resort frequented by the

professional classes of North Bromwich, where them was a long counter set

out with sandwiches like a buffet at a dance, and all the customers

seemed at home. In the ordinary way Edwin would not have dared to enter

it, but Martin, with the elegant confidence of Southern Unionism, showed

him the way, and seated at a marble-topped table they trifled with Plover

on toast. Martin, of course, did the choosing, and in his dealings with

the tiny carcass showed a familiarity with the correct method of

consuming small birds that Edwin was pleased to learn. “Ever shoot

plover?” he said. No . . . Edwin had never shot anything: he didn’t

particularly want to shoot anything; but he realised that it was a great

accomplishment to be able to talk about it as though he had never done

anything else.

“I’ll pay,” said Martin. “We can square up afterwards.”

They did so and, thawed by the process of feeding, began to talk more

easily. “Are you digging in this place?” Martin asked. Edwin told him

that he lived in the country.

“In the country? I didn’t know there was any here. Have you any decent

shooting?”

“Unfortunately, no.” He remembered, however, the solitary trout under

the bridge below the abbey. “There’s fishing of sorts,” he said.

“What sorts?”

“Oh, trout—”

“Brown trout? There’s not much fun in that. White trout . . . sea trout

you call them in England . . . are good sport. Still, we’ll have a day

together next spring. I’ll get my rods over.”

The subject was dangerous, and so Edwin asked him where he was living:

“With your cousin, I suppose.”

“Oh, no. . . . I don’t know the old divil, you know. I’ve rooms with an

old lady up in Alvaston. She’s rather a decent sort. House full of

animals.” He didn’t specify what the animals were. “I’d better go and

unpack some of my things. I suppose I shall see you at the Chemistry

Lecture to-morrow. So long. . . . Oh, I forgot. . . . What’s your

name?”

“Ingleby.”

“Ingleby. . . Right-o.” He boarded a passing bus with the air of

stepping on to a coach and four.

Edwin took the next train home. On the opposite platform of the station

he caught a glimpse of the great bulk of the man named Brown walking up

and down with earnestness in his eyes and under his arm a huge parcel of

books. He gave Edwin the impression of wanting to throw himself into the

adventure of the medical curriculum as he might have thrown himself into

a Rugby scrum, expecting a repetition of the tremendous battering that he

seemed already to have undergone.

Thinking of him, and of the aristocratic Martin, and of Harrop, a product

which Oriel had finished to the last waistcoat button, and, more dimly,

of the elderly gentleman with the dejected moustaches, it seemed to Edwin

that he himself was appallingly young and callow and inexperienced. How

was he going to stand up to these people with their knowledge of the

world and its ways: men who had already, by virtue of their birth or

experience, learned how to dress and live and move without effort in the

crowded world? Yet with them, he knew, he must now take his place. It

would be difficult . . . awfully difficult. He had everything, even the

most elementary rules of conduct, to learn. He was a child who had never

known another human being except his mother and a few school friends of

his own age. He had not even the _savoir-vivre_ of Griffin. And, in

this new life, it seemed to him that the dreams on which he had depended

must be useless—or even more, a positive handicap to his success.

The moments of sudden spiritual enlightenment that one reads of in the

lives of saints, or of converts to Salvationism, are not a common

experience in those of ordinary men; and though, in the turn of every

tide, there is a critical period, measurable by the fraction of a second,

in which the waters that have swayed forwards retire upon themselves, to

the eyes of an observer the change of motion is so gradual as to be only

slowly perceived. In Edwin’s life the death of his mother had been the

real point of crisis; but this he had only dimly realised when his hopes

of Oxford had been dashed for ever in a third-class compartment hurtling

under Bredon Hill. Between it and the present moment there had hung a

period of dead water (so to speak) in which the current of his life had

seemed suspended; but now he knew that there was no doubt but that a

change had overtaken him, and that he would never again be the same.

All his life, up to this point, had been curiously inorganic: a haphazard

succession of novel and bewildering sensations: a kaleidoscope of sensual

impressions changing almost too rapidly to be appreciated—so rapidly that

it had been impossible for him to think of one in relation to another.

Some of them had been painful; some enthralling in their beauty; some

merely engrossing because they were full of awe: yet all had been

ecstatic, and tinged in some degree with a visionary light. Now, as

always, it was clear that he must be a dreamer; but, from this day

onwards, it also became clear that his visions must be something more to

him than a series of coloured impressions, succeeding one another without

reason and accepted without explanation. In the future they must be

correlated with experience and the demands of life. In that lost age of

innocence the people with whom he came into contact had interested him

only as figures passing through the scenes that were spread for his

delectation. They had been external to him. He had lived within himself

and his loneliness had been so self-sufficient that it would have made no

great difference to him if they had not been there. Now he was to take

his part in the drama at which, in times before, he had merely sat as a

bemused spectator. It was a stirring and a terrifying prospect.

The train from North Bromwich stopped at every station, and the whole of

the journey lay through the black desert that fringes the iron city, a

vast basin of imprisoned smoke, bounded by hills that had once been

crowned with woods, but were now dominated by the high smoke-stacks of

collieries, many of them ruined and deserted. At a dirty junction, so

undermined with workings that the bridge and the brick offices were

distorted in a manner which suggested that the whole affair might some

day go down quick into the pit, he changed into the local train. The

railway company evidently did not consider the passenger traffic of

Halesby worth consideration, for the carriages were old and grimy. Edwin

chose a smoker because the cushions were covered with American leather

and therefore more obviously clean. He found himself, in the middle of

his reflections, sitting opposite a coloured photograph of the great

gorge at Axcombe, a town that was served by the same line. The picture

carried him suddenly to another aspect of his too complicated life.

Really, the whole business was hopelessly involved. He thought, grimly,

how he could have taken the wind out of Martin’s genealogical sails by

blurting out the astounding intelligence that his uncle was a gardener.

And what would the gentleman with the waistcoat have said? He laughed at

the idea.

Through a short but sulphurous tunnel the train emerged into the valley

of the Stour: the vista of the hills unfolded, and later the spire of

Halesby church appeared at the valley’s head. Well, a beginning of the

new life had to be made some day, and now as well as ever.

Walking home along the cinder pathway beside the silting fish-ponds it

seemed to him that in the light of his new experience, Halesby was a

primitive and almost pitiable place, and the same mood held him when he

made his way home by the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s cloistered

garden and entered his father’s house. Under the south wall the bed of

double stocks was still in flower, though faded and bedraggled. Their

scent reminded him of what a world of experience he had traversed in less

than three months. He went straight up to his own bedroom. On the bed

lay two parcels addressed to him. The larger contained his

undergraduate’s cap and gown. He put them on in front of the glass and

rather fancied himself. The act struck him as in a way symbolical: it

was the token of an initiation. From that day forward he was a medical

student. For five or six years, probably for the rest of his life, he

would spend his time in the presence of the most bitter human experience;

but there was something elevating in the thought that he need not be a

helpless spectator: he would be able to effect positive good in a way

that no scholar and no preacher of religion or abstract morality could

possibly attain. “This is my life,” he thought. Well, it was good to

know anything as definite as that.

The second parcel contained a number of technical books dealing with the

subjects of his first year’s curriculum: Chemistry, Physics, Biology,

Physiology, and Anatomy. The last appeared to be the most exciting.

“Fearfully and wonderfully made . . .” he thought. He set to work at

once preparing the little room for work, making it as comfortable as he

could with a writing table in the window that looked out over Shenstone’s

woods and dethroning the superannuated Henty and Fenn from the bookshelf.

He could not find it in his heart to treat his poets so cavalierly, and

so there they stayed. Greek and Latin and English. “I shall never drop

my classics,” he thought. A resolution that has been forgotten nearly as

often as it has been made. In the Blenheim orange-tree at the bottom of

the garden a thrush was singing. Bullfinches were fighting shrilly in

the raspberry canes. He threw open the window, and there ascended to him

the heavy, faded perfume of the bed of stocks. On the mantelpiece stood

a photograph of his mother. Looking at it, it seemed to him that she

smiled.

CHAPTER II

MORTALITY BEHOLD . . .

I

HE was happy: even Halesby became a grateful place of retirement after

his long days in North Bromwich. The mornings of early autumn were very

beautiful, and it was with a good deal of zest that he would scramble

through his breakfast and leave the house early to catch the eight

o’clock train. He usually made use of the short cut through Mrs.

Barrow’s garden and the cinder path beside the fish-ponds, and in this

brisk walk, with the blood of youth running happily in his veins, he

would catch a little of the exhilarating atmosphere of early morning in

the country. When the frosts began, as they do early on that high

plateau, the morning air seemed stronger and more bracing than ever.

Circumstance, in a little more than three months, had exalted him to the

state of those metropolitan season-ticket holders whose majesty he had

disturbed on the day when he left St. Luke’s for good. He was now in a

position to appreciate their exclusiveness, and to look upon all chance

people who intruded on the privacies of the eight o’clock train with the

same mingled curiosity and contempt. In every way a season ticket, in

its cover of dark blue morocco, was a thing superior to the transitory

and ignoble pasteboard. He could hardly resist a sigh of bored

superiority on the first occasion when he produced it. He travelled

second-class, thus rising to the highest level of luxury in travelling

permitted to any inhabitants of Halesby, unless it were the local baronet

or Mr. Willis of Mawne, whom even Sir Joseph Hingston could not outdo.

Most of the other season-ticket holders travelled second; and in this

way, by making a habit of taking his place in the same carriage, for

sentimental reasons one that contained a series of west-country pictures,

Edwin began to be on speaking terms with many members of this select

company. They included a youth articled to a solicitor in North

Bromwich, the son of a Halesby postmaster, who was inclined to establish

terms of familiarity; a gentleman with a bloated complexion and a

fawn-coloured bowler hat, reputed to be a commercial traveller, who

carried a bag in which samples may well have been hidden; a superior

person with a gruff voice who was a clerk in a bank in the city, and on

Saturdays carried a brown canvas bag and a hockey stick; and a withered

man of fifty who travelled into North Bromwich daily on some business

connected with brass, and, on damp mornings, exhibited evidences of an

asthmatic complaint that aroused Edwin’s budding professional interest.

It was he who first admitted Edwin to the conversation of the

compartment, by confessing to him that he had been the despair of doctors

since childhood: that three specialists had assured his mother that she

would never rear that boy: that in spite of this he had always paid four

times as much in doctor’s bills as in income-tax, that in his belief they

only kept him alive for what they could get out of him, and that his life

had been an unending misery, as harrowing, upon his word, as that of any

of the sufferers who were illustrated in the papers holding their backs

with kidney complaint, until his missus had said: “Don’t throw any more

money away on these doctors, John, I’ll have a talk with Mr. Ingleby,” . . .

and with the aid of Ingleby’s Asthma Cure he had become relatively

whole. Evidently he knew who Edwin was. “What do you think of that

now?” he wheezed, and covered the embarrassment into which Edwin was

immediately thrown by not waiting for his reply and continuing: “I

suppose, now, you’ll be learning to be a chemist like your father?”

“No . . . I’m a medical student. I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Well . . . I’ll be damned,” said the asthmatical person. He did not say

why; but the looks of the superior bank clerk, who immediately lowered

his paper and stared at Edwin as though it were his duty to decide

whether Edwin were a fit person to enter a learned profession or not, and

then contemptuously went on with his reading, supplied the kind of

commentary that might have been intended. When the asthmatical subject

said that he was damned, the gentleman with the bloated complexion and

the fawn-coloured bowler, who always opened his morning paper with

fingers that trembled, either with excitement or as a result of the night

before, at the column headed Turf Topics, gave a snigger and spat on the

floor to conceal it. And the articled clerk, at this display of ill

breeding, turned up his nose.

It was a strange little company that assembled in the second-class smoker

every morning; and the strangest part of it, to Edwin, was the fact that

each of them, entrenched, as it were, behind his morning paper, affected

a frigid disinterest, yet eagerly listened to the conversation and

eagerly scrutinised the appearance of the others. All of them had their

little fixed habits. In one place they put their gloves: in another

their umbrellas. Every morning they began to read their papers at the

same column and folded them at the same point in the journey. They

seemed just as regular in their habits as the wheels of the carriage in

which they travelled, revolving and stopping and shunting and being

braked at an identical time and place for six days out of the seven.

When he had tumbled to this, Edwin found that the whole of the main line

train that he caught every morning at the junction was occupied by

perhaps a hundred grouped units of the same kind. It amused him to

sample them; and when one appealed to him he would become a member of it

for a time and see what he could make of it. Naturally there were more

interesting people on the main line than on the Halesby branch; and in

the end he himself became such a familiar figure on the eight-twenty from

the junction that he could say “Good-morning” to nearly every group of

seasons on the train. He was even taken to the heart of the superior

gruff-voiced bank clerk in the Halesby carriage. Indeed, he knew every

one of them, finding them human people who, in the manner of the

Englishman and the hedgehog, had put out their protective spikes upon a

first acquaintance.

The only Halesby traveller of whom he could make nothing was the bloated

person in the fawn-coloured bowler, who began the morning with turf

topics and then proceeded to suck a copying pencil till his lips were the

colour of his cheeks, and, thus inspired, to underline the names of a

number of horses in the day’s programme. Apart from his habit of

spitting on the floor, a custom which probably saved the poor man from

death by poisoning with copying ink, he was inoffensive. Edwin was even

sorry for him sometimes when he saw him hung up over his forecasts. Then

he would tilt the fawn-coloured bowler on to the back of his head, and

scratch his head under the sandy fringe of hair. Edwin was sorry

because, with a head like that, it must have been so difficult to

forecast anything.

He did not see many women on the morning train. In those days female

enterprise was a good deal checked by conventions that died more slowly

in the Midland plain than elsewhere. From Halesby itself there were only

four season-ticket holders of the opposite sex. Two of them were

employed in the same large drapery establishment in Queen Street, and

were excessively ladylike and careful in all their behaviour. Edwin had

never spoke to either of them; but he discovered in both an identical

physical state: that peculiar greenish, waxen pallor that appears to be

the inevitable result of serving in a draper’s shop. The black dresses

on which their employers insisted, heightened this effect of fragility,

and on mornings when tiredness had made them start too late for the

train, so that they had to hurry over the last hundred yards, Edwin would

notice how they panted for breath within their elegant corsets and how

faint was the flush that came into their cheeks.

He felt a little sorry for them; but they were not in the least sorry for

themselves. In Halesby their employment at a monstrous third-rate

drapery store gave them a position of unusual distinction as arbiters of

feminine fashions, and they would not have exchanged their distinguished

anæmia for any other calling under the sun. In their profession this

toxic pallor, as of sea-kale blanched in a cellar, was regarded as an

asset. It was considered French. And did not their shortness of breath,

upon the least exertion or emotion, cause their bosoms to rise and fall

like those of the heroines of the serial fiction that they read, when

they were not too tired, in the train?

Edwin was not attracted by them any more than by the other couple: a pair

of pupil teachers from an elementary school in one of the northern

suburbs, who also dressed for the part that they were fulfilling in life,

and wore spectacles as tokens of their studiousness. The instinct of sex

had as yet scarcely asserted itself in him. He was a little curious

about it, and that was all. Subconsciously, perhaps, it found expression

in his anxieties about his personal appearance. He was beginning to take

a considerable interest in what should or should not be worn, treating it

more as a matter of abstract science than as one of practical politics;

for he had few clothes beyond those in which he had left St. Luke’s, and

was not likely to have any opportunity of extending his wardrobe until

these were worn out. In those days the weekly called _To-Day_ had

reached its most vigorous phase, and a column headed Masculine Modes was

a matter of earnest consideration to Edwin every Thursday, when the paper

appeared. In the spring, he decided, he would buy an overcoat with

Raglan sleeves. The weekly authority, who styled himself “The Major,”

was dead nuts on Raglan sleeves. Beneath this fashionable covering

Edwin’s interior defects would be well hidden, and, given a natty red tie

(_de rigueur_, said the Major, with the indispensable blue serge reefer

suit) and a bowler hat with a curly, but not too curly, brim, he should

be able to compete with the burly bank clerk as cynosure for the eyes of

the pale young ladies in the “drapery” and a spectacle of awe for the

studious pupil-teachers.

II

Edwin soon became absorbed in the routine of the first year student’s

life, and had very little time to think about anything else. He had to

work hard to keep pace with it, and the realisation of this was a

striking lesson to him. At St. Luke’s he had found that his advance in

knowledge made the work progressively more easy. Here he was breaking

new ground from the beginning, acquiring knowledge of a kind that owed

nothing to general culture and came to him none the easier for his

possession of it. The only things in his new work that seemed easy and

logical to him were those scientific names that were derived from Latin

and Greek. Otherwise the very rudiments and nature of the subjects were

new to him.

The most astonishing part of the whole business was the way in which the

formidable assembly that had glared at him, as he imagined, outside the

Dean’s office, simplified itself. He had been prepared to find them

creatures of a different tissue from himself, and particularly such

apparitions as Harrop and the immense Brown. He soon saw that as far as

the career of Medicine was concerned they were identically in the same

box as himself: that neither knowledge of the world nor elegance of

attire could help either of them to acquire the absolute knowledge that

was the one thing essential to success. It made no matter that these two

approached the same problem from essentially different angles: Brown with

his earnest brows knitted and a look of indomitable but baffled

determination; Harrop as though the issue didn’t really matter as long as

the crease in his trousers was in the right place; but in either case

Edwin saw that they had to work as hard or harder than he did.

His first acquaintance, Martin, who was now becoming his friend, since

the work that they shared in common bridged the social gulf of which

Edwin alone was aware, seemed to possess the faculty of doing things and

learning facts almost in spite of himself. He was not in any way

brilliant, but he had a way with him and a certain shrewdness that not

infrequently underlies the superficial indolence of the Celt. Above all

things Edwin found him good company, for the picturesqueness of his

brogue and a sense of humour, not of the verbal kind in which Edwin

himself dealt, but the broader humour that arises from situations, and

personal characteristics, made his society a peculiar joy. At the first

lecture on Chemistry, a dull dissertation on first principles, Edwin had

gravitated to the seat next to him, and for the rest of the term they

kept the same places and afterwards compared notes. Edwin couldn’t help

liking him, even though he was conscious of the radical social

misunderstanding that underlay their friendship.

The technical sciences of Chemistry and Physics made no strong appeal to

Edwin. They seemed to him matters of empirical knowledge that must be

acquired according to schedule but would have very little connection with

the work of his profession, and he found them too near to the desperate

subject of mathematics to be congenial. He could find nothing romantic

or human in them; and this fact, in itself, is a sufficient indictment of

the way in which they were taught.

Anatomy was another matter altogether. He had anticipated the beginning

of this study with a feeling in which awe and an instinctive distaste

were mingled. From the first day he had known that somewhere up at the

top of the building lay the dissecting room, a place that his fancy

painted as a kind of Chamber of Horrors. On his way to the theatre, in

which the Dean lectured on Anatomy with a scholarly refinement of phrase

that transcended the natural elegance of Martin and a fascinating

collection of coloured chalks, he had passed the gloomy door and seen a

blackboard on which the names of the Prosectors were recorded in white

lettering. But he preferred not to look inside. Martin, to whom all

adventures came more easily, settled the point for him.

“I say,” he said immediately after the lecture, “have you put yourself

down for a part?”

“A part? What do you mean?”

“Anatomy. Dissecting, They’re shared between two, you know. In the

first term we’re supposed to do an Upper or a Lower. Suppose we go

shares in one—”

“All right,” said Edwin. “Which shall it be?”

“Well, I think an Upper will be better. There’s less fat and mess about

it. We’d better go and choose one now.”

“All right.”

“Come along, then.” Martin opened the door of the dissecting room and

held it while Edwin entered. It was a long, irregular chamber, with a

low glass roof and an asphalt floor. Edwin’s first impression was one of

light and space: the second, of a penetrating odour unlike anything that

he had smelt before. He could not give a name to it, and indeed it was

complex, being compact of a pungent, unknown antiseptic and another

fainter smell that was, in fact, that of ancient mortality. The effect

of the whole was strange but not nauseating as he would have expected.

All down the room at short intervals long zinc tables, with a tin bucket

at the head of each, were ranged. Most of the tables were empty; but on

four or five of them “subjects” were either displayed or lay draped in

coarse, unbleached calico. One or two of them sprawled on their faces,

but most of them, being as yet unappropriated, were supported under their

backs by small metal platforms from which the heads rolled back and the

limbs were stretched out in a posture of extreme but petrified agony. To

Edwin’s eyes it was a lamentable and terrible sight. He wondered by what

chain of degradations the body of a man who had lived and known the youth

and pride of body that he himself possessed, who had experienced

aspirations and dreams and hope and love, should descend to this final

indignity. He stood still. He did not dare, for the moment, to come

nearer.

“How do they get here?” he asked Martin.

“Oh, they’re paupers, you know. Old men and women, most of them, who die

in the workhouses and are not claimed by their relatives. Instead of

burying them they send them along here. The anatomy porters collect

them. Then they’re pickled for so long in a kind of vat in the cellars

of this place, and they inject them with arsenic to preserve them, and

pump red paint into their arteries so that they’re easier to dissect. I

shouldn’t like the job myself; but I suppose the porters are used to it.

You get used to anything, you know. Besides, they aren’t a bit like they

are when they’re first dead. I think that’s the chap for us. I had a

look at him the other day. It’s always better to choose an old one. The

muscles are cleaner. Less work.”

They approached the second table. The subject was an old and withered

man: his grey hair was shaven, and his mouth hung open, showing that he

had lost his teeth. Martin had been quite right. He didn’t look in the

least like a dead man. He did not look like a man at all: only a

pathetic, tanned skeleton with tight-drawn sinews and toughened skin: a

dried mummy, from which all the contours of humanity had shrunk away. It

wasn’t so bad after all. The picture that Edwin’s imagination had

anticipated, that of a crude and horrible human shambles, was not here.

No . . . the idea of humanity was too remote to be in the least

insistent. For a moment, in spite of this consolation, Edwin went pale.

Martin noticed it.

“I say, this isn’t going to turn you up, is it?”

“No. . . . I’m all right. I was only . . . thinking.”

“Thinking?” said Martin, with a laugh. “I shouldn’t do too much of that

if I were you. We’d better make a start to-morrow on the right Upper.

I’ll put our names down.”

He turned towards the glass case in which hung notices of lectures and

the printed cards on which the names of dissectors were recorded, and

while he did so Edwin still stood thinking. He thought: Was this really

a man who had lived and breathed and aged and suffered? Where had he

been born? How long ago? Had he ever loved? Had he ever married? Had

he ever wondered what the future would bring to him? surely his fancies

had never envisaged this. Perhaps he had been born in some remote hamlet

of the marches, some sweet smelling village like Far Forest, from which

the iron tentacles of the city had drawn him inwards and sapped his life,

leaving, in the end, this dry shell, like the sucked carcass of a fly

blowing in a spider’s web. If this were the end of poverty and

desolation, what a terrible thing poverty must be. Did the poor and the

outcast ever dream that they might come to this? And yet, after all,

what did it matter? . . .

He awoke from his dream. It was evident that he was the only dreamer in

that long room. At many of the other tables second year men were sitting

quietly dissecting or gossiping or thumbing manuals of practical anatomy

yellow with human grease. It amazed him that men should be able to joke

and smoke their pipes and appear to be contented in such an atmosphere;

but the wisdom of Martin’s phrase returned to him: “You get used to

anything, you know.”

Among the dissectors already at work in their white overalls, he saw the

ponderous frame of the man called Brown. He, at any rate, was not

letting the grass grow under his feet. Already he was engaged in

reflecting the skin from the “Lower” on which he was working. His clumsy

hands found the work difficult, as was shown by the anxiety of his

partner, an immaculate smooth young man, whom Edwin already knew by the

name of Maskew, dressed in the Major’s indispensable navy serge reefer,

with the correct red tie and a big orchid in his buttonhole. He took an

elaborate meerschaum pipe out of his mouth to protest:—

“Good Lord, Brown, there’s another cutaneous nerve gone phut. Do be

careful!”

And Brown, with an exaggerated earnestness:—

“I say, old man, I am sorry. I simply can’t use the damned things. Do

you mean to say that’s a nerve?” He held up in his forceps a tiny white

filament of tissue.

“Yes,” said Maskew, returning to his pipe. “Branch of the great gluteal.

Listen to what Cunningham says: ‘The buttock is liberally supplied with

cutaneous nerves: a fact much appreciated by schoolboys.’”

Brown scratched his head with the handle of his scalpel. “Well, I’m in

an absolute fog. You’d better take this job on to-morrow, and I’ll do

the reading. What does ‘cutaneous’ mean, anyway?”

“Cutis,” thought Edwin, “Skin.” After all, it seemed, the dead languages

had their uses. By this time he had recovered from the first shock of

his distaste; he was getting used to the odour of the room, and so, a

moment later, he and Martin strolled over to a table at which one of the

prosectors was engaged in preparing a specimen for the Dean’s lectures.

It was almost pleasant to watch the deftness with which he defined the

line of a pink, injected artery, wielding his scalpel as delicately and

as surely as a painter at work on a canvas. They watched him working in

silence. “Nice part, isn’t it?” he said with condescension.

“Yes,” said Martin, “this sort of thing must be rattling good practice

for surgery.”

“Oh, surgery’s quite different,” said the prosector. “This is a lazy

job. There’s no hurry about it. This fellow won’t bleed to death.”

So Edwin and Denis Martin began to work on their Upper, and the

dissecting room that had been an abode of horror and an incentive to

philosophy became no more than the scene of their daily labours. Edwin

accepted his new callousness without regret for the sensitive perceptions

that he had lost, for he saw that his heart and his imagination were not

really less tender for the change; they had merely come to a working

agreement with the demands of his new life, and had attained this

satisfactory state not so much by a suppression of sensibility as by an

insistence on the objective aspects of his work.

This fact explained to him, at the very beginning of his career, the

fallacy of medical callousness in relation to pain or physical distress.

He saw, on reflection, that if a doctor exaggerated the importance of

subjective sensations in his patient he might well lose sight of his own

object, which was nothing more nor less than removing their cause: that,

for example, the fear of death, the anxiety of relatives and the

patient’s own perception of intolerable pain, were of infinitely less

importance to the physician than the presence of a focus of danger in the

patient’s appendix. A sustained objectivity was the only attitude of

mind in which a doctor could live at the same time happily and

efficiently.

The only feature of the dissecting room that now seemed objectionable was

the smell of the powerful antiseptic that was used for preserving the

subjects. For a week or two Edwin was conscious of its pervading every

moment of his life, his train-journeys, his meal-times, even his sleep.

But in a little time his olfactory nerves became so used to it that they

discounted its presence, and the fact that his neighbours in railway

carriages did not seem to shrink from him, convinced him that after all

he did not go about the world saturated in odours of the charnel house.

The winter term went on, and to the sense of hurry and frustration that

had embarrassed him at first and found its perfect expression in the

knitted brows of the monstrous Brown, succeeded an atmosphere of leisure

and method and ease. Edwin had time for other things than work. He

began to know the men of his year, and to discover that even the most

formidable of them weren’t half as formidable as they had seemed.

Harrop, indeed, was still a little remote. After the spaciousness of

Oriel, where he had devoted a couple of years to a liberal education in

which the acquisition of knowledge was of less importance than the

acquisition of style, North Bromwich, with its concentration on the

virtues rather than the graces of life and the very questionable

sartorial shapes that inhabited it, naturally seemed a little cheap; but

in a little time even Harrop became modified and humble if a little

contemptuous, and the most resplendent of his waistcoats retained no more

significance than the oriflamme of a lost cause.

Brown was the more approachable of the two, and for Brown, Edwin soon

conceived something that was very nearly an affection. With his

impressive physique and his experience of a rough world in which Edwin

had never moved, was mingled a childlike enthusiasm for his new work, a

rich, blundering good humour, and great generosity. He was not clever,

and showed an intense admiration for better heads than his own; but for

all that he was much more intelligent than he looked, and to Edwin his

enthusiasm and earnestness were worth a good deal more than his

intellectual attainments.

Once or twice, wandering into the Anatomical Museum, he had come upon

Brown standing rapt in front of a specimen dissection or quietly sweating

up bones with a Gray’s _Anatomy_ open before him, and he had sung out to

Edwin as if he were an old friend of his own age and they had put in an

hour of work together. “You know, you’re a lot quicker than I am,” said

Brown. “I suppose it comes of being decently educated. I expect that

when you were learning Latin and Greek I was knocking about the world

making a damn fool of myself.” Then they would light their pipes (the

dissecting room had made smoking necessary to Edwin) and Brown would yarn

on for half an hour about his romantic adventures, his bitter quarrels

with his people, the adventures that had befallen him in Paris when he

went there to play football for the Midlands, in all of which the

passionate, headstrong, obstinate and withal lovable nature of the big

fellow would appear.

“I expect it all sounds to you like a rotten waste of time, mucking about

with my life like this,” he said. “But you know I’m not at all sorry

I’ve had it. . . . I didn’t take up this doctoring business in a hurry,

without thinking about it. I thrashed the matter out; and I came to the

conclusion that doctoring’s a good human sort of game: it’s a sort of

chance of pulling people out of the rotten messes of one kind or another

that they get themselves into—through no fault of their own, poor devils,

just because they’re made like you and me and the rest of us. If you go

on the bust, or knock about the country with a football team on tour, or

go on the tramp and sleep in a hedge or a barn or a Rowton House, as I

did when I had the last flare-up with the old man, you rub against a lot

of people. They’re all just the same as yourself, you know. You can see

yourself in the best of them as well as the worst; and, taking them all

round, they’re all damned good at the bottom. They’ve all got to fight

out their own way in life with their heads or their fists or their feet.

And the only chap that can really help them in it is a doctor. That’s

the conclusion I’ve come to. God! . . . you’ll scarcely believe it, but

once I was converted. I know it’s damn funny; but it’s a fact that when

I was a youngster and had been on the periodical bust a revivalist chap

got hold of me and persuaded me that I was saved. It’s a funny sort of

feeling, I can tell you. I thought I was going off my nut until I went

to see a doctor and he put my liver right. It’s a fine humane game,

Ingleby. You can take it from me. . . . But I can tell you, with one

thing and another, I’ve got my work cut out.”

He shook his head seriously, and the puzzled, dogged expression of

frustrate determination that Edwin knew so well came into his eyes.

“We’re wasting time, my son,” he said. “Let’s get on with the blasted

humerus. Now, what is the origin of the Supinator Longus? Come on . . .”

On one of these pleasant occasions he confided to Edwin the reason why he

had his work cut out. His father, a stern Calvinistic Methodist, had

finally washed his hands of him. “I’ve been a bit of a rolling stone,

you see,” said Brown, “and you can’t blame the poor old fellow. So he

just planked down six hundred and fifty pounds one day and told me that I

could do what I liked with it, but that was the last I should get from

him. It suited me down to the ground. I didn’t much care what became of

me then. It was a couple of years ago. So I had a royal bust . . . a

sort of glorious windup to the season . . . and then sat down to think.

I had just five hundred left, and so I had to think what the devil I was

going to do with it, and my prospects seemed so putridly rotten that the

only thing I could do was to go on the bust again. I didn’t enjoy it

much that time. Jaded palate, you know. . . . But I had a bit of luck.

I met a trainer fellow in the Leicester lounge with a couple of women,

and he put me on to a double for the Lincoln and National. I’ve no use

for horse-racing. If it was the owners that were racing there’d be a

vestige of sport in it; but it always seems to me a shame that decent,

clean creatures like horses should make a living for a lot of dirty

stiffs out of the ruin of working men and small shopkeepers. Still, I

dreamed about this double, and as I’m a weak superstitious sort of chap,

I put a tenner on it. That’s the first and the last bet I’ve ever had on

a horse. But the thing happened to come off; and last spring I found

myself with twelve hundred pounds instead of six-fifty. So I began to

think it out. I remembered that doctor fellow who cured me of being

converted, and I thought, ‘By Gad, I’ll be a doctor.’ A five year’s

course. Well, I’m not particularly brilliant at the top end, and so I

allowed six. Six into twelve goes twice. Two hundred a year for fees

and living and clothes—outsize—and recreation. You see, it’s pretty

tight. Come along and have some lunch at Joey’s.”