III

They went downstairs to the cloak-room where the porter was now a

familiar of Edwin’s. It had been decided that it would not be becoming

for a really modern university, like that of North Bromwich, to impose

the sight of such an anachronism as academic dress on the streets, a rule

that had been something of a disappointment to Edwin, and so they left

their gowns behind. Joey’s was an institution of some antiquity,

opposite to the Corinthian town-hall, with which Brown had been

acquainted in his unregenerate days. It was a long and noisy bar at

which, for the sum of fourpence, one consumed a quarter of the top of a

cottage loaf, a tangle of watercress, a hunk of Cheddar cheese, and a

tankard of beer. This combination of excellences was known as a “crust

and bitter,” and it was eaten standing at the counter.

Edwin was gradually becoming a regular customer at this place; for

Martin’s delicate fancy for plovers on toast and other such refinements

had proved too expensive for him, and apart from their joint labours in

the dissecting-room, they were beginning to see less of each other—not

from any ill-will on the part of either, but simply because Martin’s

position in the house of the old lady in Alvaston, whose house was full

of animals, had introduced him to the social life of that elegant suburb

in which so perfect a carpet knight was bound to shine; and Martin’s

social engagements with encouraging matrons and innumerable eligible

daughters were becoming so pressing that his acquaintance with the black

heart of the city was gradually becoming more and more casual. For this

reason, apart from his natural inclination, Edwin was thrown into daily

contact with Brown and his partner Maskew.

Maskew was a more typical product of the Midlands. His home, and all his

upbringing, had lain in one of the great black towns that cluster, like

swollen knots, upon the North Bromwich system of railways. He had never

lived in the country; he did not even know what country was, and his

distinctive if provincial urbanity showed itself in a hundred ways—in his

dress, that was a little too smart, in his speech, that was not quite

smart enough, in a certain lack of fresh air in his mental atmosphere.

His people were wealthy, and his tastes, without emulating the style of

Harrop, were expensive. He was handsome, and if his hair had been

shorter and not so mathematically correct he would have been handsomer.

Still, he was intensely interested in women, and a great retailer of

Rabelaisian stories. He wore buttoned boots and was very nearly a

first-class billiard player.

A more unusual combination than his partnership with the abrupt and

unsubtle Brown it would have been difficult to imagine; but even in his

undoubted cleverness, his nature was complimentary, and Edwin found

himself happy in the society of both. In their company he became a

habitué of the Dousita Café; a subterranean privacy in which excellent

coffee was served in the most comfortable surroundings by young ladies

whose charms had already made something of a sensation in that decorous

city. Maskew, naturally, knew them all by their Christian names, and

treated them with a familiar badinage that impressed Edwin, mildly

ambitious but quite incapable of imitation, by the ease with which it was

performed. The cushioned seats and the mild stimulus of the coffee and

cigarettes would even rouse the massive Brown to a ponderous levity by

which the lady of their choice, a certain Miss Wheeler, whose uncle,

Maskew seriously confided to Edwin, was a bishop, was obviously

flattered. Edwin could understand any woman being attracted by Brown, or

rather, “W.G.” as the need of a distinction had by this time made his

familiar name. It also pleased him to see the way in which W.G. went red

in his bull neck on a certain occasion when Maskew had delicately

overstepped the limits of good taste in his conversation with Miss

Wheeler. But the niece of the bishop did not blush. . . .

In the intervals between lectures they would congregate in their gowns in

a dismal chamber, at the very bottom of the cramped building that was

called the Common Room, drinking tea and eating squashed-fly biscuits.

This place was frequented not only by members of the Medical School but

by students of other faculties whom Edwin regarded with some contempt.

One afternoon on entering this room Edwin found W.G. holding forth with

some indignation before a notice that had been pinned on the board asking

for a list of freshmen who were anxious to play Rugby football during the

present season. So far, only five or six names had appeared: W.G.’s,

naturally enough, came first, for his prowess in the game was well known

in the North Bromwich district.

“Isn’t it a damnable thing,” he said indignantly, “in a school of this

size to see a measly list like that?”

“You can stick mine down,” said Edwin.

“Well . . . as a matter of form, my son . . . though I don’t see what

good you’re likely to be to the club except to give it tone.”

“I play soccer,” said Maskew.

“You would,” said W.G. “Nice gentlemanly game.”

“Rugger isn’t all beef,” put in Edwin.

“No,” said W.G., “but the team wants weight. And this place is simply

thick with great, hefty, science men and brewers who’ve never known the

meaning of a healthy sweat in their lives. Upon my word, it sickens me.

Look at that chap.”

He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay huddled up in a deep

basket chair. He had shoulders that would have appeared massive by the

side of any others but W.G.’s: a fair wide face marked with freckles, a

sandy moustache and crisp, curly red hair. “That’s the kind of swine

that ought to be working in the scrum.”

Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively went pale. A curious

survival of the instinct of physical fear had shaken him. It was

ridiculous. “I know that chap,” he said in an off-hand way. “He’s no

good. I was at school with him. He’s got a weak heart. His name’s

Griffin.”

CHAPTER III

CARNIVAL

I

CHRISTMAS came: an old-fashioned Christmas with hoar frost on the fields

and hard roads gleaming with splintered light reflected from a frosty

sky. In this raiment of frozen moisture even the black desert of Edwin’s

morning pilgrimage appeared fantastically beautiful. The vacation did

not suspend his work; for though no lectures were given, the dissecting

room was still open; and here, on icy mornings, when the asphalt floor

was as cold as the glass roof, he would freeze for an hour at a time

watching Brown and Maskew at work, Martin having been whisked off to

spend a baronial Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland.

A few months in North Bromwich had made a great change in Edwin. He had

lost much of his old timidity, shaved twice a week, smoked the plug

tobacco to which Brown had introduced him, and was no longer shy with any

creature on earth of his own sex. With women it was different. . . .

Ease and familiarity with this baffling sex would come, no doubt, in

time; but for the present one or two desperate essays at conversation

with the elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friends had been

failures. And Miss Wheeler was not the least approachable of her sex.

There were several women medical students in his year; but in their case

he had not felt the incentive to gallantry that the softer charms of Miss

Wheeler suggested. Even if they had not insulated themselves with

shapeless djibbehs of russet brown, and bunched back their hair in a

manner ruthlessly unfeminine, the common study of a subject so grossly

material as anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any budding romance.

In the Biological laboratory, however, he found a figure that exercised a

peculiar attraction on him. She was an American girl, a science student,

who with the severity of the medical women’s dress contrived to combine

an atmosphere of yielding femininity. She had a soft voice, for the

tones of which Edwin would listen, big grey-blue eyes, soft dark hair,

and very beautiful arms that her dark overalls displayed to perfection.

Edwin would have found it difficult to define the way in which she

attracted him: certainly he didn’t cherish any definite romantic ideas

about her; but he did find her in some subtle way disturbing, so that he

would be conscious of her presence when she came into the lab.; surprise

himself listening for her voice when she spoke to the professor, and find

that, without any definite volition, his eyes were watching her profile.

And one day when she passed him and her overall brushed his sleeve, he

found that he was blushing. Maskew, with his usual easy familiarity, was

already on joking terms with her, and would sometimes sit on the table

where she kept her microscope while they talked and laughed together; but

though Edwin had every chance of sharing in this intimacy, he couldn’t

bring himself to do so; and when, in the end, he was introduced to her

formally, he wished that he were dead, and could not speak a word for

awkwardness.

With men, on the other hand, he was now quite at his ease, even,

strangely enough, with the once formidable Griffin. Since the day when

he had discovered his old enemy in the Common Room they had often spoken

to one another: they had even sat side by side in the deep basket chairs,

one of which was now Griffin’s habitual abode, and talked of the old days

at St. Luke’s, and sometimes, in the afternoon, they would share a pot of

tea. There was no awkwardness in their conversation, as Edwin had feared

there might be, for Griffin apparently took his expulsion as a matter of

course, and, on the whole, as rather a good joke. Of course Griffin had

changed. It was clear to Edwin from the first that in some way he had

shrunk—not indeed physically, for he was fatter than ever; but the air of

conscious and threatening physical superiority that Edwin had found so

oppressive in his school days had vanished. Moreover, he was now

prepared to accept Edwin as an equal, and make him the confidant of the

amorous adventures that now absorbed his time, adventures to which the

affair with the chambermaid at St. Luke’s had been the mildest possible

prelude. Compared with Griffin’s positive achievements, the daring of

Maskew’s relation with the young ladies of the Dousita seemed a trifle

thin. Griffin’s father, with a shrewd appreciation of his son’s peculiar

gifts, had entered him as a student at the school of brewing; and if once

he could overcome his natural indolence, there was no reason why, in the

future, he should not become a partner in the firm of his uncle, Sir

Joseph Astill, and control the destinies of a number of barmaids beyond

the dreams of concupiscence. On these prospects, Griffin, lounging in

his basket chair, brooded with a heavy satisfaction.

“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Edwin said one day, “that we should be

the only St. Luke’s men in this place.”

“Oh, some are bound to turn up sooner or later,” said Griffin. “The

other day, when I was up in town, I ran against Widdup—you remember

Widdup—and he told me that his people thought of sending him here to take

up engineering.”

“That would be rather good fun,” said Edwin. “And he’s cut out for it

too. He’s got that sort of head. I should rather like to see old

Widdup.”

“Oh, he’ll roll up one of these days. Are you doing anything in

particular this afternoon? I have to stroll down to see the

stage-manager at the Gaiety . . . an awful good sport. Suppose we go

down the town and get a drink on the way . . .”

In spite of the temptations of this adventure, Edwin declined. In the

dissecting room, half an hour later, Brown hailed him:—

“What the devil were you doing with that pig of a brewer, Ingleby?”

“He’s an old school friend of mine.”

“Well, I should keep that dark, if I were you. He’s a bad hat, that

chap. We don’t want Ingleby’s virginal innocence corrupted, do we,

Maskew?”

“Oh, he’s not a bad sort,” Edwin protested.

“He’s a nasty fellow, and he’ll come to a rotten, sticky end,” said

Brown. “Now, what do you think of this small sciatic, you old roué, for

a tricky bit of dissection?”

After all, Edwin reflected, old Brown knew something of the world. He

had to admit to himself that there was something obscene about Griffin.

It was difficult to explain, for Maskew, by his own account, was almost

equally worldly, and yet Maskew was undeniably a decent fellow while

Griffin undeniably wasn’t. He joined his friends at their work, and

could think about nothing else; for Maskew’s brains were as good as his

own, though of a different texture, and he had to be attentive to keep

pace with them. All through the vac. he worked at anatomy with these

two, sometimes in the icy dissecting room, sometimes over coffee at the

Dousita, sometimes in the cozy, diminutive diggings that Brown inhabited

in Easy Row, a street of Georgian houses at the back of the university

buildings and near the Prince’s Hospital.

They were pleasant days. Edwin, in spite of his lightness, had now found

a place in the scrum of the second fifteen, and on Saturday evenings,

when both of them were drugged with their weekly debauch of exercise, he

and W.G. would meet at the diggings in Easy Row, and after a steaming hot

bath, in the process of which Edwin never failed to be impressed by the

immensity of his friend’s physique, they would set off down the town

together and make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill: Porterhouse

steak with chipped potatoes and huge silver tankards of bitter ale. Then

they would go on together to a theatre or a music hall, too pleasantly

dulled, too mildly elated to question the humour of the most second-rate

comedian. After the show W.G. would walk down to the station with Edwin,

and see him off into the last train for Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out

of the carriage window, would see the big man turn and go clumsily along

the platform with the gait that he had noticed on the very first day of

his life as a medical student. Brown was a wonderful fellow. In half an

hour, Edwin reflected, when his train was still puffing away through the

dark, W.G. would be back in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his

mouth and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, driving facts

into that puzzled brain with the violent thoroughness of an engine that

drives piles.

When the last train arrived at Halesby, the town would be in darkness,

for, in the black country in those days the only places of amusement were

the public houses and these had been shut for an hour or more. Only from

the upper windows of innumerable mean dwellings lights would be seen, and

sometimes the voice of a drunken husband heard grumbling. But the path

beside the fish-ponds was beautiful, even on a winter night, and Edwin

would feel glad as he plodded along it that he didn’t live in North

Bromwich, where the night noises of the country were never heard. So he

would pass quietly up the empty lane, his footsteps echoing on the hard

pavement, and come at last to the little house set in the midst of

shrubberies that smelt of winter. Very humble and quiet, and even

pitiable it seemed after the glaring streets of the city that he had left

behind.

It was an understood thing that on Saturdays, when he had been playing

football, Edwin should return by the last train; and so his father did

not sit up for him on these occasions. The matter had been settled at

the cost of some awkwardness. On the first two or three Saturdays of the

football season Edwin had come home late, to find Mr. Ingleby growing

cold over the embers of a fire in the dining-room, sleepy but intensely

serious, and his tired eyes had examined Edwin so closely that he felt

embarrassed, being certain that his face must bear signs of a number of

enormities that he had never dreamed of committing. It was the same,

unreasonable feeling of guilt that he had experienced at St. Luke’s in

the middle of Mr. Leeming’s pitched battle for purity, and the sensation

was so strong that he felt it useless to try and hide it.

“Why do you look at me like that, father?” he said. The quietude and

humility of the little room seem to him as full of accusation as his

father’s face.

“What do you mean, boy?”

“I think you know what I mean. . . . There’s really no need for you to

wait up for me like this.”

“I like to lock the house up,” his father replied, with a quietness that

made Edwin’s voice sound rowdy and violent. “I have always done so.

After all, it’s usual.”

“You are anxious about me. Why should you be more anxious about me when

I come in at twelve than when I come in at six?”

“I know you’re passing a critical period, Eddie. . . I’m not

unsympathetic. I’ve been through it myself. And naturally I’m anxious

for you. I know that a town is full of temptations for a boy of your

age. I don’t know what your friends are like. I don’t know what sort of

influences you’re coming in contact with—”

“But I don’t see why that should make you want to sit up for me. Really,

I don’t. What good does it do?”

“I like to see you when you come in.” Edwin was uncomfortably aware of

this.

“But suppose I was drunk when I came in, father—” he said.

“I don’t suppose anything of the sort—”

“No, but supposing I was. What advantage would there be in your seeing

me? What good would it do?”

“At any rate I should know that there was a danger.”

“Well, if that’s all the trouble, we can soon get over it. I promise

you, that I’ll tell you the very first time that I am in the least drunk.

Then you needn’t worry about waiting for it. I suppose it’s bound to

happen some day.”

“I sincerely hope it isn’t, Eddie. It isn’t pleasant to me to hear you

talk like that.”

“No. . . . I suppose it would be pleasanter if we pretended that nothing

of the kind ever happened. But it wouldn’t be honest, would it? I

should think it’s the duty of every one to be drunk some time or other,

if it’s only to see what it feels like. Surely, father, _you_—”

“Edwin, Edwin. . . . Really we mustn’t be personal. You forget that I’m

your father.”

“But I don’t, father. I thought we were going to be such tremendous

pals, and honestly there isn’t much to be pals on if you aren’t ever

personal. We ought to talk about everything. We oughtn’t to hide

anything. I don’t see much fun in it if I have to do all the telling and

you don’t give anything in return. It isn’t fair.”

“But, my dear boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a nervous laugh, “you seem to

neglect the fundamental fact that I’m your father.”

“I don’t see why that should prevent us being honest. I don’t see why it

should prevent you from trusting me—”

“I do trust you, Eddie.”

“Then that’s all right; so you needn’t wait up for me again.”

Thus the matter was settled, at any rate on the surface, though Edwin was

always conscious on the morning after his late arrivals of an anxious

scrutiny on his father’s part.

“He doesn’t really trust me,” he thought, and this conviction made him

more anxious than ever to be really intimate with his father, to make him

share, as much as possible, the life that he was living in North

Bromwich. It made him talk deliberately of the men who were his friends,

and the work that he was doing, explaining with the greatest freedom the

domestic difficulties of W.G., and the worldly accomplishments of Maskew:

and this frankness gave him confidence until he discovered that such

revelations only ended by arousing his father’s suspicions. In Mr.

Ingleby’s mind it was evident that the sterling qualities of W.G., as

recited by Edwin, were of less importance than his potentialities as an

agent in Edwin’s corruption. “If I’d only given him one side of W.G.,”

thought Edwin, “he’d have been quite happy. If we’re going to be happy,

it would be much better for me to tell him nothing that his imagination

can work on.”

He found himself travelling round the old vicious circle that appeared to

be the inevitable result of being honest with himself. There must, after

all, be something in the fundamental fact that Mr. Ingleby was his

father. Ridiculous though it might seem, the ideal relation between

father and son was evidently impossible. “Well,” he said with a sigh,

“it isn’t my fault. I’ve done my best.”

The whole artificiality of their relation only dawned on him when he

mentioned to his father one evening that he had met Griffin and told him

that his old enemy turned out to be a nephew of Sir Joseph Astill. “I’m

glad to hear of it,” said Mr. Ingleby. “I hope you’ll continue to be

friends. Sir Joseph Astill is a very distinguished man.” Edwin didn’t

see what that had to do with it; but he resisted the temptation of

telling his father that Griffin was a distinctly bad egg, and that in

comparison with him W.G., with his herculean passions, was indeed a

paragon of knightly virtues. If it pleased his father to invest Griffin

with his uncle’s reflected glory, why shouldn’t he do so? And Edwin held

his tongue.

In the end the atmosphere of veiled anxiety that awaited him at home

became definitely irksome, and since the most absolute candour on his

part would not mend matters, he found himself gradually avoiding his

father’s company. It was the last thing in the world that he wanted to

do; but it seemed inevitable; and as the months passed, he gave up all

hopes of the sort of intimacy that he had desired, and relapsed into the

solitude of his own room, or even, as a last resort, the company of Aunt

Laura, who was at least unsuspicious.

Another thing attracted him to her house. All the days of his childhood

at home had been full of music, for his mother had been a capable

pianist, and he had spent long hours stretched out on the hearthrug in

the drawing-room listening to her while she played Bach and Beethoven and

occasionally Mendelssohn on the piano. At St. Luke’s, too, without any

definite musical education, he had felt a little of the inspiration that

Dr. Downton infused into the chapel services. Since he had returned to

Halesby all these pleasures had left him; for Mr. Ingleby was not in the

least musical, and the piano that had been closed a few days before his

mother’s death, had never been reopened. At this period he had not

realised the musical possibilities of North Bromwich, and in Aunt Laura’s

house he recaptured a little of this stifled interest.

She was really an accomplished musician, and though the kind of music

that she affected was becoming limited by the very character of her life

as the wife of an undistinguished manufacturer of small hardware in a

small black-country town, the taste, which had originally been formed in

Germany, existed and was easily encouraged by Edwin’s admiration of her

attainments. Here, usually on Sundays, when in addition to the

attraction of music her admirable cooking was to be appreciated, Edwin

passed many happy hours. She sang well, and could accompany herself with

something of a natural genius, and though the songs that she sang were

often enough the sugary ballads of the period that had witnessed her

musical extinction, Edwin found them satisfying to his starved sense of

music, and would even persuade her, on occasion, to play the pieces of

Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach with which his mother had made him familiar.

Nothing aroused in him an acute remembrance of those ancient happy days

more easily than music. He wished, above all things, that he might some

day be able to taste these joys for himself; and so he persuaded his aunt

to teach him the notes on the piano, and having an inherited aptitude, he

soon found that he could pick his way through simple compositions,

preferably in the open key, that he found among his mother’s music at

home. Mr. Ingleby, who had no ear, appeared to be unmoved by these

painful experiments; and to Edwin, the long winter evenings were made

magical by their indulgence. He would sit at the piano in the

drawing-room for hours at a time, and here, in a strange way, he found

himself curiously in touch with the vanishing memory of his mother. At

times this feeling was so acute that he could almost have imagined that

she was there in the room beside him, and sometimes he would sit still at

the piano in long intervals of silence, just drinking in this peculiar

and soothing atmosphere. Eventually these diversions made Mr. Ingleby

uneasy.

“You spend a good deal of time at the piano, Edwin,” he said. “I do hope

you are not letting it interfere with your work.”

Edwin said nothing; but from that time onward it seemed to him that even

this, the most harmless of his amusements, had become a matter for

grudging and suspicion. At first he only felt indignation and anger; but

later he realised that this, along with his father’s other anxieties,

probably had its origin in financial considerations. The cost of his

education in North Bromwich was a big thing for a country chemist to

face. If once he failed, the whole of his early effort might be wasted.

But then, he was not going to fail.

II

The terminal examinations at Christmas had made him sure of this. They

showed him that in his own year he and Maskew were in a class by

themselves; and though Maskew beat him easily in all the subjects of the

examination, it satisfied him a little to think that Maskew had probably

put in a good deal more work than he had, particularly in anatomy, where

he had the advantage of working in partnership with W.G., for whom the

subject of medical education was of the most deadly seriousness.

Early in the Lent term Edwin found himself introduced to a new stratum of

North Bromwich society, through the accident of his acquaintance with

Griffin. The new university had inherited from the old college of

science and the still older medical school, the tradition of a pantomime

night, a visit _en masse_ to one of the North Bromwich theatres, where

this elevating art-form flourished for three months out of the twelve.

The evening was one of fancy dress, rowdiness, and general licence, in

which the stage suffered as much as the auditorium, and the unfortunate

players were propitiated for the ruin of their performance by a series of

presentations.

Arrangements for this function were always made with a high seriousness.

The committee was composed of representatives from each year in the

school of medicine and from each of the other faculties. In this affair,

as in all matters of sport or communal life, the older foundation of the

medical school took the most prominent part; but the prestige of Griffin

as the nephew of the Vice-Chancellor and an acknowledged expert on all

matters theatrical, had induced the brewers to run him for the

secretaryship; and since the secretary was the official on whom the bulk

of the work fell, and no one was particularly anxious to take on the job,

Griffin, in his first year, had been elected to the post.

There was no denying the fact that it suited him. To begin with, he was

already on intimate terms with every theatre manager and stage-doorkeeper

in North Bromwich, and was used to dealing with the susceptibilities of

theatrical people. Again, he had plenty of money, a circumstance that

would help him in the preliminaries, which were expensively conducted in

the local Bodega and other bars and restaurants. Also, it gave Griffin

something to do; for the life of the student in brewing was of the

leisurely and somnolent character that one would naturally associate with

malt liquors, and most of his time had previously been spent sprawling in

a deep basket chair in the Common Room, playing an occasional languid

game of poker, or jingling sovereigns in his pocket while he waited for

the results of racing in the evening papers.

At the annual meeting, which Edwin had not been sufficiently interested

to attend, there had been the usual difficulty in selecting a member from

the unknown quantities of the first year, and Griffin, full of resource,

had suggested Edwin, who was straightway elected, and summoned to attend

the deliberations that followed. His election caused a good deal of

amusement to his friends, and particularly Martin, who preserved an

aristocratic contempt for this vulgar theatrical business, and W.G., who

prophesied Edwin’s conversion into a thorough-going blood; but it

introduced him to a new and bewildering society in which he met a number

of men of his own faculty who had already become impressive at a

distance.

Such were the brothers Wade, the elder unapproachable in his final year,

the younger of an elegance surpassing that of Harrop. Such was Freddie

St. Aubyn, a slight and immaculate figure with fair hair and moustache,

and the most carefully cultivated reputation for elegant dissipation in

North Bromwich. This Byronic person had already suffered the pangs of a

long intrigue with the _première danseuse_ in a musical comedy company,

on whom he was reputed to have spent money and passion lavishly but

without the least suggestion of grossness.

In addition to this he was a poet: that is to say, he had published two

volumes of verse that were so eclectic as to be out of print. At the

present time he had stuck midway in his medical career pending the issue

of his unhappy passion; and presented the unusual spectacle of a

“chronic,” not by force of incompetence, but by choice. In point of

fact, he was an unconscious survival from the nineties, and the lady of

his choice resembled a creation of Beardsley more than any type commonly

known to nature. Edwin was impressed, for the writer of the exhausted

_Poems of Passion_ was the first poet that he had met in the flesh.

Naturally, St. Aubyn’s attitude towards the first-year man was a little

patronising; but Edwin found his mixture of cynicism and melancholy

enchanting, and was particularly impressed when Freddie, languidly

supporting his sorrows in one of the Common Room easy-chairs, offered him

a fill from his pipe.

“Oh, by the way, there’s opium in it,” he said casually.

Visions of Coleridge and de Quincey invaded Edwin’s mind. He stopped

filling his pipe.

“Opium? Why on earth do you put opium in it?”

“It is an aid to the imagination,” said Freddie, “and it deadens pain.”

“Mental pain,” he added significantly, after a pause. “For that alcohol

is useless. I’ve tried it.”

“I think I’ll have some of my own, if you don’t mind,” said Edwin.

“I quite agree with you. It would be much wiser,” said St. Aubyn.

“Luckily you have no need for it. _Facilis descensus Averni_.”

From that day forward Edwin was always eagerly searching the face and the

pupils of Freddie for any symptoms of opium poisoning. He never found

any; and W.G., to whom he confided this thrilling incident, assured him

that there was nothing in it, that Freddie had probably never smoked

opium in his life, and that the whole thing was nothing more than one of

the poses that this gentleman adopted for shocking the youthful and

bourgeois. The impressive Freddie, according to W.G., was a damned

anæmic waster. If only it had not been for the exhausted _Poems of

Passion_, Edwin might have agreed with him.

The solemn meetings of the panto-night committee engaged Edwin three

afternoons a week. As a congregation of amazing bloods they were

enthralling but as business gatherings they were more remarkable still.

They were held in the saloon bar of a modern public house, all palatial

mahogany, red plush and plate-glass, called the White Horse; and the

principal business of the day was the consumption of hot whisky with

sugar and slices of lemon in it, during which Griffin, armed with a

conspicuous note-book, reported on his activities, which appeared mainly

to be social.

“On Thursday,” he would say, “I took Mary Loraine to lunch at the Grand

Midland, and she said . . .” or “I saw Tommy Fane in his dressing-room

the other night, and he said: ‘Look here, old boy. . . ’” Apparently all

Griffin’s theatrical friends called him “old boy.” The effect of these

narrations on Griffin would be so exhausting that he found it necessary

to order more whisky all round. The manager himself would bring it in; a

brilliant gentleman named Juniper with red baggy cheeks the laxness of

which was compensated by a waxed moustache that stuck out on either side

as if a skewer had transfixed them. To Griffin this magnificent creature

was most decorous; for the White Horse was one of Astill’s houses, and

Griffin had taken the trouble to inform him that the great Sir Joseph was

his uncle. In spite of, rather than as a result of these meetings, the

panto-night arranged itself. The date was fixed, the bouquets and

presents purchased, the announcements in the papers that warned any

patrons of pantomime that on this particular night they could not hope to

see a normal performance, inserted. Griffin, in the Common Room, became

a centre of feverish importance, and even Edwin, in spite of the

superciliousness of Martin, and the rough chaff of W.G., caught a little

of the reflected glamour.

Edwin now had to face the ordeal of announcing the approach of

panto-night to his father. If he were to see the thing through, as was

his duty as a member of the committee, it would be quite impossible for

him to catch the last train to Halesby, which left North Bromwich at

nine-thirty, except on Thursday and Saturday night. Mr. Ingleby,

hearing, saw the pit gaping beneath Edwin’s feet. “You didn’t mention

this to me before. . . . I suppose you have had to spend quite a lot of

time at these committee meetings? I think it was rather unwise of you to

undertake it in your first year. . . . There’s only four months before

your examination.”

“Oh, I think the exam. will be all right,” said Edwin airily.

“I don’t like to hear you speak like that, Edwin,” said his father.

“Over-confidence is a dangerous thing.”

“But it wouldn’t be any better pretending that I didn’t think it was all

right, surely?”

“Well, humility is a great virtue.”

“Not any greater than honesty.”

“It’s all very well to talk about honesty; but it would have been more

honest, wouldn’t it, if you’d told me that”—he hesitated—“this was going

on?”

“There you are. . . . That’s the whole point. If I told you everything

you wouldn’t sleep for imagining things that hadn’t happened. It’s the

thing that’s worried me ever since I was at school. If you’re absolutely

honest with other people, life simply isn’t worth living, because they

don’t understand it. It isn’t done. I’ve come to the conclusion,

father, that the only thing that really matters is to be honest with

yourself.”

“If you can trust yourself—”

“Well, I think I can. . . . And I wish you’d believe in it.”

“I do, Edwin. Only naturally I’m anxious. You’re a child. Where is

this . . . this performance held?”

“At the Queen’s Theatre this year.”

“Well, I suppose that is better than a music hall.”

His father’s prejudice against the music halls, or, as they were then

beginning to be called, Theatres of Varieties, was an old story. Edwin

could hardly resist the temptation of telling him that the performers in

the pantomime were nearly all music-hall artistes, but Mr. Ingleby saved

him, by asking him where he intended to sleep.

“Oh, I expect W.G. will give me a shake-down in his digs.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a shade of anxiety, “that Brown is

also on the committee—”.

The idea of the honest W.G. as a member of this constellation of bloods

tickled Edwin. He now wished to goodness he’d never told his father of

W.G.’s family differences and of his lucky double on the Lincoln and

National.

“Oh, no, old W.G.’s far too sober for this sort of thing.”

It was an unfortunate word.

“Sober?” repeated Mr. Ingleby. “Well, I suppose you will have to go; but

I do hope—”

He didn’t say what he hoped; but Edwin knew, and was content to leave it

at that.

III

The great day came, and Edwin found, as some compensation for the

scoffing of W.G. and the superciliousness of Martin and Maskew, that his

position was really one of some importance. All the first-year men, even

the immaculate Harrop, had decided to go to the theatre, and up to the

last minute Edwin was busy selling tickets. He had asked W.G. to put him

up, and W.G., as a matter of form, had consented. “I don’t suppose I

shall see you after midnight, my son,” he said. With his usual

thoroughness in everything that he attempted, W.G. had determined to make

a night of it. “It will do me good to make a damned fool of myself for

once in a way,” he said, “if it’s only for the sake of realising it

afterwards . . .”

They put in a hard afternoon’s work together first, and then he and Edwin

and Maskew went together to W.G.’s rooms to change. They were all rather

excited, and W.G. carried a bottle of whisky in each of his coat pockets,

the first of which was broached as an aperitif while they were changing.

In less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired as nearly as convention

would allow him, in the manner of his woaded ancestry: a splendid caveman

with lowering black brows and hairy arms like those of a gorilla, a

disguise that only called for a little accentuation of his natural

characteristics to be made effective; Maskew, again in character, as a

Restoration cavalier; and Edwin in the modest guise of Pierrot. In the

foyer of the theatre they met Martin, who had driven down in a hansom

from Alvaston clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a feeding bottle

round his neck. The stalls were already full of a carnival crowd of

students, and the rest of the house was crowded with spectators who had

come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate people who had entered in

ignorance of the festival and the fact that their form of entertainment

was to be changed for one night only.

There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, a fleshy and unsubtle

Mephistopheles, the Mephistopheles of Gounod, not of Goethe, and Freddie

St. Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of black curls that he had procured

for his presentation of Byron. Freddie, in the interests of

verisimilitude, had even shaved his moustache.

Only the earlier part of the performance remained in Edwin’s memory. The

rest of it was no more to him than a brilliant haze, from which single

moments of wild picturesqueness detached themselves: as when he had a

vision of a prehistoric man armed with a waving whisky bottle for a club

and feebly restrained by a flushed cavalier, flown with insolence and

wine, storming his way through the surging crowd in front of the stalls

bar and planting his feet upon the counter; or of the same barbarian,

gently armed by a tactful manager in evening dress, putting his weapon to

the usages of peace and friendliness by uncorking it and offering its

contents to a firm but good-humoured policeman.

“What a splendid fellow W.G. is,” Edwin thought to himself. “Splendid . . .

splendid . . . magnificent.” And while he was thinking this, a

sombre poet with shining eyes drew him aside and confessed to him, almost

with tears, that all this brilliance and colour and life meant nothing to

him compared with the memory of the Beardsley lady, whose ankles were so

thin that they might be spanned with his little finger. “As light as a

feather,” said the poet, “gossamer . . . swansdown . . . all soul. Of

course, old fellow, I know that you can understand. I shouldn’t talk

like this to any other person in the world.”

And Edwin understood, and realised the justice of the poet’s choice of a

confidant so sympathetically that he was spurred to confidences on his

own part. “You see, I happen to be a poet myself,” he said, and to prove

it he felt bound to recite a sonnet that he had composed a year or two

before at St. Luke’s. A magnificent sonnet it seemed to him, perhaps

more magnificent for the accompaniment of a song in waltz rhythm by the

theatre orchestra. It was flattering to find that Byron agreed with him

as to its excellence; but while the poet was pressing his hand in

congratulatory brotherhood, and Edwin was just deciding to recite it all

over again, the sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and parted

them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine was now singing the last verse

of her song and that in two minutes it would be his duty to present her

with a bouquet and a pair of silver hair-brushes. Still reciting the

most telling lines of his sonnet, he was conducted by Mephistopheles

through the manager’s office, where a young lady who, in her inviting

softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was counting the counter-foils of

tickets, and through a subterranean passage with the welcome chill of a

catacomb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid bouquet was thrust

into his hands.

It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was of a suffocating

heaviness, until he realised that the overpowering perfume of which he

was aware proceeded not from the bouquet but from the scents and powders

of a bevy of creatures of unnatural loveliness who stood waiting in the

wings. They were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of their

costume would have given them an excuse for shivering; but they did not

appear to be conscious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin’s brain. The

scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse of naked flesh excited

him. At this moment all his awkwardness seemed to have vanished. He

could not believe that he was the same person who had blushed at the mere

contact of the American girl’s overall, or sat speechless in the presence

of Miss Wheeler at the Dousita. His old modesty seemed to him to have

been a ridiculous and inexcusable folly; for, at the moment, he would

have welcomed the prospect of making the most shameless advances to any

one of these houris in competition with any man of his acquaintance.

With the air of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which of those

blossoms the handkerchief should be thrown.

“Now get along with you,” said the stage-manager, pushing him forward.

He gripped the presents in his hands, and treading on air, advanced on to

the stage, where Miss Marie Loraine was kissing her hands to the stalls.

The stage was very big, and sloped in such a way that he felt his feet

impelled towards the footlights; but, being determined that he would

accomplish his mission with dignity, Edwin steered a steady, if

resilient, course. In front of him he saw a creature before whose

elegance and beauty the beauty of the chorus was as nothing. She stood

waiting for him and smiled. For a moment Edwin faced the auditorium, a

vast and dark abyss in which not a single face was to be seen. It gave

him a sudden fright to think that so many thousands of unseen eyes were

fixed upon the patch of limelight in which he stood. He pulled himself

together. This was the moment, he thought, in which it was for him to

make some speech worthy of the bewildering loveliness that stood before

him.

“Go on,” said the impatient voice of Mephistopheles in the wings. “Buck

up.”

“Miss Loraine,” said Edwin, with a flourish, “I have the honour of—” The

middle of his sentence was broken by a crash and a tremendous peal of

laughter from the unseen thousands. The younger Wade, arrayed in the

panoply of a Roman legionary and balanced upon the parapet of the stage

box, had fallen with a clash of armour into the big drum. Edwin thrust

the bouquet and the hair-brushes into the arms of Miss Loraine, herself

convulsed with laughter. With a terrific draught the curtain swept down.

“Splendid,” said the voice of Mephistopheles.

The rest of the evening was more confused than ever. He remembered a

vision of this surpassing beauty standing in the wings in a long silk

wrapper that her dresser had thrown over her shoulders, and thanking him

for his presentation. To Edwin the moment seemed the beginning of a

passionate romance. He remembered other moments in the auditorium, in

which W.G. and Maskew figured. He remembered the taste of a glass of

Benedictine, a liqueur that he had never tasted before, that Maskew gave

him to pull him together again after his exertions on the stage. He

remembered a flashing of lights, an uproar, a free-fight, and the singing

of “God Save the Queen.” And then he found himself a member of a small

but distinguished brotherhood streaming at a tremendous rate up the wide

street that led towards the Prince’s Hospital. All of them were

medicals, and most of them his seniors. Freddie St. Aubyn, the Wade

brothers, W.G., and Maskew were among them. Out of the main road they

passed singing into the meaner streets that surrounded the hospital:

miserable streets with low houses and courts clustered on either side,

from the upper windows of which astonished working men and women in their

nightdresses put out their heads to look at the vocal procession.

Opposite the portico of the hospital was a cab rank on which a solitary

hansom was standing with the horse asleep in the shafts and the driver

taking his rest inside. The sight appeared to arouse the fighting

instincts of the elder Wade.

“Good God,” he said, with indignation, “here’s a cab. What the hell does

the fellow think he’s doing here at this time of night? He must be

drunk. Look at it!”

His brother, who could carry his liquor better, tried to persuade him to

leave the cab alone; but before any one knew what was happening, he had

thrown himself on it and turned the whole affair upside down in the road.

Edwin heard a crash of splintered glass; he saw the cab on its side and

the sleepy horse with its legs in the air. He thought: “Good God! What

has happened?” And the next thing he saw was a red-faced cabman,

buttoned up to his ears, crawling out of the wreckage and cursing

fluently at Wade, who stared for a moment, dazed, at the havoc his

strength had created, and then bolted for the shelter of the hospital.

The cabman, now thoroughly awakened, bolted after him. Edwin glowed with

admiration for Wade’s achievement. It was the deed of a Titan, a

splendid Berserker. The cabby had burst through the concourse on the

hospital steps, thirsting for the blood of Wade, who, by this time, was

lying quietly on a hooded stretcher swatched in bandages and quite

unrecognisable. A house surgeon in a white overall confronted the

cabman. The hospital porters in uniform stood solemnly at his elbow.

The house surgeon was assuring the cabby that he was drunk: the cabby

telling the lot of them exactly what he thought of them.

“Take hold of this fellow,” said the house surgeon to the porters, “and

hold him while I get a stomach pump.” The porters, specially qualified

for dealing with midnight drunks, obeyed. There was a splendid struggle

in which the foaming cabby was pitched out into the road, —ing their —ing

eyes to Hell. The bandaged Wade was carried solemnly upstairs on his

stretcher and brought round with whisky in the house surgeon’s room, a

chamber full of Olympian card-players, pickled with cigar-smoke and the

fumes of alcohol. Some one, it was the cavalier, began to play the

piano. Edwin seized the opportunity to recite his sonnet, until W.G.

laid a monstrous hand on his mouth.

That vision ended, and to it succeeded one of cool, deserted streets with

far too many kerb-stones for Edwin’s liking, and then the dishevelled

sitting-room in W.G.’s digs in which they had dressed with a pale gas-jet

hissing and flaring and a momentary impression of W.G. asking him where

he’d put the damned corkscrew. Edwin remembered rising to a brilliant

extreme of wit. “Am I your corkscrew’s keeper?” he said; and while he

was explaining at length the aptness of his mot W.G. knocked the neck off

the bottle with his poker, eclipsing any possible verbal brilliance.

In the middle of the night Edwin woke and staggered in the dark to the

washhand-stand, where he drank a draught of water, so cool and sweet as

to be astonishing, until he remembered that it had possibly come from the

mountains beyond Felindre. W.G. was snoring heavily on the bed that he

had just left. W.G.’s snoring got on his nerves so that he had to prod

him in the ribs and wake him, a proceeding that W.G. seemed unjustly to

resent.

“I say, W.G.,” he said, “do you think I was drunk?”

“Drunk?” said W.G. “Good God, you didn’t wake me to ask me that? You’ll

know all right in the morning.”

Edwin only knew that his head was splitting and that he was hellishly

cold.

CHAPTER IV

SCIENCE

I

W.G.’s prophecy that Edwin would know all about it in the morning proved

correct; but it was some consolation to him to know that he shared the

experience with his friends. All the next day he went about his work

with Maskew feeling a little light-headed, and a peculiar weakness in the

legs made him disinclined for any exertion that could be avoided. Maskew

recovered himself more easily; but W.G., who never did anything by

halves, solemnly embarked on a “bust” that lasted for a whole week.

This defection disgusted Maskew, who, in his hard, capable way, believed

in moderation in all things—even in vice. He considered W.G.’s conduct

“a bit thick”; principally because he was deprived of his company in the

dissecting room; but to Edwin the big man’s debauch seemed in some ways

heroic and in keeping with his titanic physical nature: a spectacle

rather for awe than for reproof. It was even impressive to see W.G.

returning like a giant refreshed with vice, throwing his huge energies

into the pursuits that he had abandoned as readily as he had lately

squandered them in an atmosphere of patchouli. In this line Edwin would

have found it constitutionally impossible to compete with W.G., but, for

all that, he could not deny that he felt better, more confident, and more

complete for the pantomime experience. It even flattered him to find

himself regarded as something of a blood by the humbler members of his

year who had witnessed his adventure on the Queen’s Theatre stage, though

he could not conceal from himself the fact that Martin, more absorbed

than ever in blameless but exacting relations with the eligible young

ladies of Alvaston, was a little supercilious as to his attainments.

With the approach of the summer and the first examination he found little

time for anything but work. The preparation for the exam. was so much of

a scramble that he had no time to realise the imaginative significance of

the subjects in which he was engaged. He did not guess that the little

fat professor of Physics who lectured so drily on the elements of his

science was actually employing his leisure in the tremendous adventure of

weighing the terrestrial globe, or that certain slender aerials stretched

like the web of a spider from a mast at the top of the university

buildings were actually receiving the first lispings of wireless

telegraphy, an achievement to which that bearded dreamer, the Principal,

had devoted twenty years of his life.

To Edwin there was nothing intrinsically romantic in Chemistry or

Physics. His mind could not conceive that science was a minute and

infinitely laborious conquest of the properties of matter. Atoms and

Molecules and the newly-dreamed Electrons, still trembling in the realms

of imponderable speculation, were no more to him than abstractions

unrelated to the needs of practical human life. They were only facts to

be learned by rote, symbols to be memorised and grouped together on paper

like the letters in an algebraic calculation; and the whole of this

potentially romantic experience was clouded by his own headachy distaste

for the gaseous smells of the laboratory: the choking yellow fumes of

chlorine that escaped from the glass cupboards in which it was

manufactured, and the less tolerable, if more human, odour of

Sulphuretted Hydrogen, in an air that was desiccated by the blue flames

of half a hundred Bunsen burners. These two subjects were nothing more

than an arid desert of facts relating to dead matter through which he had

to fight his way, and he hated them.

In comparison with them, Biology was something of an oasis. Here, at any

rate, he had to deal with life, a mystery more obvious and less academic.

The contemplation of its lower forms, such as the Amoeba, a tiny speck of

dreamy protoplasm stretching out its languid tentacles, living its remote

and curiously detached life with no aims beyond that of bare mysterious

existence, filled him with a strange awe. The laboratory in which these

researches were conducted, was high and airy and not associated with any

unpleasant smells except at the season when the class were engaged upon

the dissection of the hideous dog-fish. It had even its aspects of

beauty in the person of the fair American in her dark overall; and for

this reason, if for no other, Edwin found himself becoming most

proficient in his knowledge of the subject.

In the middle of the summer the examination came. Maskew was an easy

first, and carried off the Queen’s scholarship for the year; Edwin came

second with a first-class, which, even if it didn’t satisfy himself, was

enough to make his father enthusiastic; Martin ambled through with an

ease that challenged Edwin’s respect, and W.G., horribly intense and

determined through all the week of the exam., scraped through by virtue

of sheer bulldog tenacity. The result of the examination did Edwin good

if only by convincing him that Maskew, for all his suburban flashiness

and his inferior general education, had a better head than his own. Like

the excellent man of business that he was, Maskew did not rest upon his

oars: the week after the examination, and the first of the long vacation,

found him and W.G. back in the dissecting room, plugging into anatomy,

the next year’s principal subject, and Edwin saw at once that if he were

to keep pace with his rival he would have to forgo the months of summery

leisure to which he had looked forward in the vacation. Martin was

playing tennis in Ireland, and so he found himself thrown once more into

the society of these two.

It was a pleasant time, for their leisure was their own and there were no

lectures to tie them to their work. They did a great deal of their

reading in W.G.’s rooms, full of easy-chairs, and wreathed in tobacco

smoke that escaped through a French window into a tiny garden plot green

and pleasant under the white Midland sky, and this room became a haven of

escape from the burning brick pavements in which Edwin and his friends

would work together without strain, talking of the future and of W.G.’s

romantic past, and stabilising their own ideas on the uncertainties of

sex: a problem that so far had meant very little to Edwin, but which W.G.

was not in a position to ignore.

“You know, it’s damned funny,” he said, “but when you get to know more

about things, when you’ve done some anatomy and that, you begin to think

of sex in a different light. It knocks all the mystery out of it, and

I’m sure that’s a jolly sound thing. Good Lord, when I think of the

ignorance with which I started on this sort of thing! Finding out

everything by experiment, you know. . . . Why, if I’d had a short course

of anatomy before I left school I should have been saved a lot of rotten

experiments that didn’t do me or any one else any good. I’d have been a

damned sight cleaner-minded than I ever was. A medical training’s a

jolly good thing in that way: shows you exactly where you are instead of

letting you go fumbling about in the dark.”

“Knocks all the poetry out of it though,” said Maskew.

“Poetry be damned,” said W.G. seriously, “there’s a good deal too much of

your poetry about it. Poetry and mystery and a lot of bunkum like that . . .

Male and female created He them. I don’t particularly admire the

method. I think He made rather a better job of the amoeba. Think how

much simpler it would be to split open a chunk of protoplasm instead of

having to make a ridiculous fool of yourself if you want to propagate

your species. Still, there it is, and the sooner you realise exactly

what it means and what it’s all about, the less you worry your head about

it.”

“Well, of course, if you’re going to treat it in that light you’re going

to knock all the pleasure out of life—” Maskew protested.

“Oh, you’re a sensualist,” said W.G. “The main thing that I have against

it is that it wastes valuable time.” He became scornful. “Think of all

these rotten fellows who spend their days writing books on sexual

problems, analysing their rotten little sensations in detail and gloating

over mysteries of sex. It’s only their ignorance that makes them like

that. What they want is a thorough course of anatomy and a whack of

practical experience to cure them; and if every one else had the same

sort of education there’d be no sale for their books.”

Edwin, listening to their sparring, remembered the library at St. Luke’s

and a certain shelf of anatomical works that was always kept locked with

a special key that Mr. Leeming carried mysteriously on his watch-chain.

On the whole, he agreed with W.G. and his preferences for the methods of

the Amoeba’s parthenogenesis. He wondered, however, if the kind of

education that W.G. advocated would have scotched the production of such

works as _Romeo and Juliet_ or the love poems of Shelley.

“It would be rather rotten if you did away with love, W.G.,” he said.

“Oh, I’m not talking about love,” said W.G. “I’m talking about a fellow’s

ordinary physical needs. Being in love is not the same thing as that.”

“It is usually,” said the cynical Maskew.

“It’s all a ridiculous mix-up,” said Edwin. “Thank God it doesn’t worry

us.”

II

With the beginning of the new year these delicious hours of leisure

disappeared. Edwin and his friends, with the assurance of second-year

men, became the real possessors of the dissecting room. Anatomy and

physiology now absorbed all their time, and the leisurely interest in the

first subject, which had been subsidiary in the first year, was now a

matter of academical life and death. From the simple anatomical details

of the upper and lower extremities that he had dissected with Martin in

the year before, he passed to the more vital regions of the human body:

the thorax, the abdomen, and the head and neck. He still attended the

polished course of lectures on anatomy that the Dean delivered in the

theatre; but this process he was forced to regard as a waste of time,

since the Dean’s presentation of the subject did not differ greatly from

that of any text-book of anatomy, and the Dean’s personality, which

curiously resembled that of his cousin Martin, was too aristocratically

remote ever to seem real.

In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he became acquainted and

fascinated with the first of his medical instructors who had aroused his

imagination. This was the chief demonstrator of Anatomy, Robert Moon,

or, more familiarly, Bobby, a figure of romantic picturesqueness. He was

tall and inclined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat, and his

serious face, which was of a size and pallor that his surname suggested,

was crowned by an erect crop of black and curly hair. In Edwin’s first

year he had always seemed to him a strange and distant figure, walking

slowly up and down the dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged

from the dark chamber which he inhabited in the corner near the door,

like a fat and rather sinister spider.

He rarely spoke: when he did so it was with a broad, north country accent

and the most extraordinary deliberation and formality in his choice of

words. With the men in the second year he possessed an enormous

reputation not only for his exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side

of which the Dean’s attainments seemed merely those of a dilettante, but

also for his excellence as a coach. Edwin and his two friends became

sedulous attendants at his tutorials, where, standing in immobile dignity

behind one of the zinc dissecting-room tables in front of an appropriate

background of blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second-year

students, who came to sit at his feet voluntarily, like the disciples of

a Greek philosopher, he would demonstrate the details of some ragged

anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was of the colour and

consistency of leather.

In Bobby’s demonstrations there was neither imagination nor romance: they

were merely fascinating in virtue of the amazing exactitude of the detail

which his brain had acquired through long familiarity with the

dismembered fragments of humanity. There was nothing in the way of

minute observation that could escape him, and his questions were so

searching and unexpected that even Maskew, who had himself a prodigious

memory for minute detail and could carry the letter of a textbook in his

head, was constantly floored by them. It was a magnificent stimulus to

Edwin; for it became a kind of game to master a part so thoroughly that

Bobby could not stump him.

By this time he was so used to railway travelling that between the

morning discussion of the progress of the war that had just broken out in

South Africa, and the appearance of halfpenny papers, that multiplied

like greenfly in this heated atmosphere, he could read his text-books of

anatomy in a crowded carriage without disturbance apart from the natural

curiosity that a vision of luridly coloured diagrams awakened in the

minds of his fellow passengers, and particularly the bank clerk, who

thirsted in a way that W.G. would have approved for technical instruction

in the matter of certain organs. Edwin prepared himself for the

demonstrator’s tutorials as rigorously as if he had been approaching a

vital examination; he spent long hours in his bedroom, utterly heedless

of his wide prospect of wintry fields, thinking of nothing but his

collection of bleached bones, now carefully marked with coloured chalks

to show the origins and insertions of muscles, and particularly those

intricate fretted plates that are joined to form the fragile casket of

the human skull.

So engrossed was he in absorbing the mere details of their physical form

that his mind had no room for other speculations of the kind that had

impressed him in the days of his first acquaintance with anatomy. It

never struck him that the articulated skull which grinned at him from his

mantelpiece when he woke each morning, had once contained the

convolutions of a human brain: a mass of pulpy matter that had been the

origin of strange complications of movement and feeling and thought, the

storehouse of memories, the spring of passions and the theatre of dreams.

He did not even know if the skull were that of a man or a woman. To him

it was no more than an assembly of dry bones, intricate in their

relations with one another, pierced by the foramina of bewildering nerves

and blood-vessels, all of which must be visualised and stored and

remembered within the limits of another structure of the same kind—the

sutures and eminences of which he could feel with his own fingers when he

rubbed his puzzled head.

He used to go back to Mr. Moon’s tutorials convinced that he knew all

that was to be known of the subject in hand, and then Bobby, in his slow

Lancashire voice, with broadened “a”s and “u”s, would put to him some

leisurely question that showed him that he knew nothing. Very decorously

and slowly these questions would be asked; and since the answers were

concerned with the dryest and most exact of physical facts, guessing was

of no help to him and silence the only refuge of the ignorant. No

display either of knowledge or ignorance had the least effect on Bobby

Moon. His wide and dreamy face showed no emotion on the discovery of

either. On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind of ponderous

verbal humour, slow and elephantine, like the humour of Beethoven; but

even in these moments his face showed no signs of emotion, and he would

pass on without waiting for any recognition of his joke to the next

lethargic question. “Mr. Harrop,” he would say slowly, “what is the

fotty pod of Hovers?” And Harrop, sitting on a high stool that showed

his variegated socks to perfection, would reply that the fatty pad of

Havers was a small cushion of fat set in the head of the femur to

lubricate the hollow of the acetabulum.

The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to dominate Edwin’s impressions

of the dissecting room. There was something provocative in the

remoteness of this black and solitary form from all the concerns of human

life. Edwin conceived him to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man,

but an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously endowed with the powers

of locomotion and speech but bereft of any human characteristic. It

amazed him to discover, in the end, that Bobby Moon was nothing of the

sort, but a creature of the most delicate human tenderness, so sensitive

to the appeals of beauty and humanity that he had been forced to adopt

the impassive mask that was all that his pupils knew of him from an

instinct of self-protection.

It happened in this way. During the early part of his second year Edwin

had become conscious of a new figure in the dissecting room, that of a

man named Boyce, a student with a brilliant reputation who had managed in

some inexplicable way to fail in his first examination and be left behind

by the other men of his year. He was a tall, fair creature, with a long

face and small, very blue eyes. The society of Alvaston had made him

friendly with Martin, from whom Edwin’s new relations were gradually

separating him. The only characteristic that Edwin had so far noticed in

Boyce was an almost literary fluency in the use of foul language which

left even Harrop gasping. Boyce was working alone on a thorax a few

tables away from Edwin. He was a neat and laborious dissector, and Edwin

had been tempted to admire the skill with which he had defined the

network of blood-vessels, the system of coronary arteries and veins, with

which the human heart is enmeshed. Boyce was evidently far less

unapproachable than Edwin had imagined, and while they were examining his

dissection together they had not noticed the approach of Dr. Moon, who

had walked slowly to their table and stood gazing at the specimen through

his moonlike pince-nez. They did not realise that he was near them until

they heard his voice, slowly intoning a line of poetry. “The heart,” he

said: “arras’d in purple like a house of kings. Are you acquainted with

that line, Mr. Boyce?”

“No, sir. Who wrote it?”

“A man named Francis Thompson. He was a medical student at Manchester,

several years senior to me.”

“Oh, I know his name,” said Boyce. “He is a friend of my father’s.”

“A great poet,” said Bobby solemnly. “A great poet. The contemplation

of mortality in this place should be full of poetical reflections. You

see, this is the heart of a very old or a very dissolute man. The

coronary arteries are stiff with atheroma.”

“I was thinking, sir,” said Edwin, encouraged, “of the heart of Shelley

that Trelawny was supposed to have picked out of the funeral pyre when

the body was burned. His account says that only the heart was left. He

gave it to Hunt, didn’t he? But you’d think the heart would be burned

more easily—”

“Yes. . . . It’s an unlikely story. Shelley’s heart”—he looked up

dreamily at the ceiling—“Shelley’s heart. . . . It’s a strange

reflection.” And he moved away, his big head still in the air and his

hands behind his back.

“I say,” said Edwin; “I’d no idea Bobby was like that. You wouldn’t

associate him with poetry, would you? He seems such an awfully

matter-of-fact chap. Dry bones, you know.”

Boyce laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Bobby. Nobody does here except my

father. He’s an incurable sentimentalist. He lives an awfully lonely

sort of life in some digs up in Alvaston. His mind’s crammed with poetry

and old music and a lot of ethnological lumber. Do you know, he’s about

the biggest authority in England on prehistoric man?”

“I hadn’t the least idea. I imagined he dreamed of nothing but bones and

soft parts.”

“You would. . . . But he’s a wonderful chap really. Are you keen on

poetry?”

“Of course I am.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. I don’t imagine that your friends

Brown and Maskew are particularly interested in it. My guvnor’s by way

of being a poet, you know. Bobby’s awfully keen on his work. Do you

know it?”

Edwin was ashamed to say he did not.

“Oh, I’m not in the least surprised,” said Boyce. “He’s not appreciated,

you know, except by other poets, like this fellow Thompson. I think he’s

rather good, as a matter of fact, quite apart from the fact that he’s my

father. If you’ll come up to our place some day I can show you a lot of

interesting things in his library: first editions and things like that.

I’d no idea that you were keen on them.”

The tone implied such an appreciation of Edwin’s hectic past as typified

by his solitary appearance on the stage of the Queen’s Theatre that he

hastened to deny the impeachment. He was tremendously pleased to have

struck a man like Boyce, who went on to talk about music, of which Edwin

knew nothing, and exuded an easy atmosphere of culture, of a kind that he

envied, without ever losing sight of the fact that Edwin had come to him

in rather a questionable shape. Edwin was thrilled to think that he had

reached the threshold of a new and exciting friendship which made his

association with Brown and Maskew seem commonplace and shabby; but he was

far too shy to force himself on Boyce, and so the acquaintance remained

for many months at the exact stage in which it had begun, and he had to

be content with the sudden insight that Boyce had given him into the

hidden, romantic qualities of Dr. Moon.

Sometimes, while he was scrubbing his hands with carbolic soap, the only

thing that really banished the smell of the dissecting room from his

fingers, he would hear Boyce discussing music, and particularly the work

of Tschaikowsky, whose sixth symphony had just inflamed his imagination,

with Mr. Moon in his gloomy bunk, and he would go on washing his hands

until they were ridged and sodden in the hope of hearing what they were

saying or even of entering into their conversation, until W.G. would come

along and drag him off to Joey’s, asking him what the hell he was

dawdling about. Then Edwin would be almost ashamed of W.G.’s company,

and hated himself for it, since he knew in his heart of hearts that, even

if he were a Philistine, W.G. was one of the best and soundest fellows on

earth.

The friendship with Boyce, however, was bound to come. It began with the

formation of a small literary society, that had been originated by

certain of the third-year men with whom Boyce was acquainted, and which

held its meetings in the newly-opened smoking room that adjoined Dr.

Moon’s chamber of horrors. Papers were read every fortnight, and

discussions followed in which Edwin had scarcely dared to take part, but

Boyce was a polished and fluent protagonist. In the end, when the first

enthusiasms of the society, to which Brown and Maskew, naturally enough,

did not belong, had been spent, Edwin was asked to read a paper. He

chose for his subject Browne’s _Religio Medici_, a work with which this

medical audience seemed strangely unacquainted. The paper was a success,

and at the end of the meeting Boyce accosted him friendlily and asked him

why he had never been up to see his father’s books. Edwin withheld the

obvious reply that the invitation had not been pressed although he had

never ceased to think of it; and Boyce at once suggested that they should

go up to Alvaston together that evening. “We can put you up for the

night if that will be more convenient,” he said.

They walked up together under the high, frosty sky, talking of poetry, of

all the beautiful things that they had worshipped in common without

knowing it. It seemed strange to Edwin that they should have worked side

by side for a couple of years and scarcely spoken to each other when all

the time they had so many delights that might have been shared. The

unlocking of this closed and secret chamber of his heart gave him a

strange feeling of elation and made the world suddenly beautiful. The

hard and wintry pavement seemed curiously smooth and resilient; the

roadway ran in masterly and noble curves, the black branches of

plane-trees and laburnums, even the pointed gables of the smug suburban

villas seemed to take on a new and piercing beauty against the starry

sky, and they swung along together as triumphant in their ecstasy of

youth as if indeed they were treading on the stars.

“What a topping night,” said Boyce. “God . . . look at Vega!” He waved

his long arms and quoted:—

“Or search the brow of eve, to catch

In opal depths the first faint beat

Of Vega’s fiery heart. . . .”

“Whose is that?”

“My guvnor’s. He’s a tremendous chap on astronomy.”

“It’s damned good,” said Edwin, thrilling.

“Not bad, is it? He’s a very sound man, the guvnor. I think you’d like

him.”

But when they reached the Boyces’ house they found that the poet was not

at home. In place of him Edwin was introduced to a mild and beautiful

figure with a soft voice who turned out to be Boyce’s mother. She had

her son’s soft blue eyes, and spoke to him with such caressing tenderness

that Edwin was seized with a sudden feeling of aching emptiness for the

memory of his own mother, of whom, so potent is the anodyne of time, he

had scarcely thought for more than a year.

Boyce presented Edwin with a high social recommendation. “A friend of

Denis Martin’s,” he said. Mrs. Boyce smiled on him.

“Look here,” said her son, “I’m afraid we can’t very well go into the

guvnor’s study. He hates any one invading it when he’s not there. Let’s

go upstairs to my own room and talk.”

Edwin had a passing vision of the forbidden chamber, the flanks of a

grand piano in which a reflection of firelight glowed red, and endless

shelves of gilt-lettered books. The rest of the house seemed to him

rather untidy, as if it were no more than a dry chrysalis protecting the

central beauty of the poet’s room; but he had not time to see much

following in the rear of Boyce’s long-legged progress up the stairs. He

found himself, at last, in a small attic with a gable window that framed

the starry sky: the kind of room that satisfied all his own ideals of

comfort and seclusion.

Boyce was proud and willing to exhibit his treasures. They showed a

curious mixture of the schoolboy, represented by photographic groups of

cricket teams, glass cases of butterflies, and a tasseled Rugby cap, and

the more mature intelligence that now possessed them. Edwin and he sat

down opposite one another in a couple of easy-chairs, and talked and

smoked incessantly all that evening. They spoke of Wordsworth, the idol

of Boyce’s literary devotions, of Browning, whose claims to poetry he

would not allow, and of Shenstone, whose name he had never met before.

By this time Edwin was getting rather ashamed of his early admiration for

Shenstone, and the fact that Boyce had never heard of the Pastoral Ballad

confirmed him in his decision that the author was an acquaintance whom he

had better drop. They went on to Francis Thompson—Dr. Moon’s quotation

from the _Anthem of Earth_ had sent Edwin searching for his works in the

municipal library—and he now learned that this bewildering genius, who

had once, like him, been a medical student, had actually slept in the

room beneath his feet.

“He never qualified,” said Boyce dreamily, “and yet medicine is a

wonderful thing. I should think the fact that the medical man is always

face to face with mortality”—he pointed to a suspended skeleton in the

corner—“and all the other big fundamental things like birth and pain,

ought to give him a sort of sense of proportion and make him sensitive to

the beauties of life. Your friend, Sir Thomas Browne, is an example.

Then there’s Rabelais.”

“There are heaps of others,” said Edwin.

“Well, yes. . . . Keats.”

“Byron and Akenside,” Edwin supplied from the eighteenth century.

“I don’t know the gentleman,” said Boyce.

“Well, then, Goldsmith and Crabbe. Crabbe’s rather good, you know. And

Shelley—”

“Shelley?”

“Yes, Shelley walked a hospital when he was in London with Harriet.”

“I’d no idea of that,” said Boyce, “but there’s a modern fellow that the

guvnor’s rather keen on, named Bridges. Robert Bridges, who’s a

physician.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“No . . . he’s not well known, but I believe he’s pretty good.”

And so they talked on, deciding that the world was ripe for great

poetical achievement, awed to think that perhaps they were living,

without knowing it, in the beginning of a great age of literature;

convinced, to a degree of enthusiasm, of the splendour and magnanimity of

the calling that they had adopted; conscious—thrillingly conscious—of the

fact that the whole world lay before them full of undreamed delights as

mysterious and yet as clear as the wintry sky.

Edwin had to run for his train. He didn’t mind running. On a night like

this he felt that violent exercise was a mode of expressing the curious

elation that his talk with Boyce, and his excitement in the new

friendship that promised so many hours of happiness, had given him. At

the gates of the station he paused to buy an evening paper. It contained

the news of Buller’s defeat at Colenso and the result of a cup-tie

between North Bromwich Albion and Notts Forest, but he had no room in his

mind for football or for this African war in which W.G., to the ruin of

his future finances, was itching to enlist. Edwin’s thoughts were of the

great names and the great works of which he and Boyce had been talking.

The newspaper lay folded on his knees; the flares of the black country

swept past him in the night, unseen. He was not even aware of the other

occupants of the carriage until he suddenly found himself staring

straight into the eyes of his opposite, whom he recognised as Edward

Willis, the son of Walter Willis of the Great Mawne Furnaces.

All Aunt Laura’s attempts, heroically made in the interests of social

advancement, had so far failed to bring about a friendship between these

two. Edwin, on his side, could never get out of his head an unreasonable

prejudice against the Willises, the natural result of Aunt Laura’s

adulation of their wealth, and even a knowledge of his own humble origins

had not affected his traditional distrust of people whom he regarded as

flashy and self-made. In Edward Willis he found a creature even more shy

than himself, and the very fact that Mrs. Willis and Aunt Laura, putting

their heads together, had decided to throw them into each other’s arms,

was enough to create an atmosphere of distrust and uneasiness. The

sudden recognition in the railway carriage was merely an embarrassment.

Edwin was startled into saying “Hallo,” and Willis replied in exactly the

same way; then both of them retired with precipitation to the cover of

their evening newspapers, from which they listened to the conversation of

a commercial traveller who was returning home from London and had all the

latest and most authentic gossip on the South African situation.

“Mind you,” he said, “they’re wily fellows, these old Boers; we may not

be up to their dirty tricks: I’m proud to say we aren’t. We shouldn’t be

English if we were. But one thing, sir, you’ll see in the end, and that

is that dogged British pluck will come through. You mark my words.”

Edwin felt an overpowering impulse to say that dogged British pluck

pretty obviously hadn’t come through at Colenso; but Edward Willis’s

presence made him far too self-conscious to commit himself, and at the

next station the traveller and his friend picked up their bags and

departed, breathing the word “Buller” as if it were an incantation

warranted to fortify and console. Edwin and Willis were alone.

When their silence had become altogether too ridiculous, Edwin plucked up

his courage and said, “Rotten thing this war.”

“I don’t know,” said Willis. “It’s all right for my old man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Iron. . . . We’re chock full of Government work for South Africa:

gun-carriages and rifle barrels. You’re doing medicine, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Lucky devil. You’re learning to cure people, while I’m learning to make

things to kill them.”

He stared out of the window towards a patch of sky in which the glow of

his father’s furnaces pulsated as though it registered the beatings of a

savage, fiery heart, and relapsed into gloomy silence. The tunnel

swallowed them, and in a moment they pulled up at Mawne Hall. Willis

prepared to go. “I say,” he said, “we’re giving a dance next week—” and

hesitated.

“What for?” said Edwin, for want of something better.

“I don’t know . . . unless it’s to celebrate the Colenso casualties. I

believe you’re invited. I hope you’ll come.”

“Thanks,” said Edwin. But Willis was gone.

CHAPTER V

ROMANCE

I

MR. INGLEBY wanted to know why he was so late. “I read a paper at the

Literary Society,” he said, “and then went back to Alvaston with a man

named Boyce. He’s a son of Arthur Boyce.”

“The auctioneer?” asked Mr. Ingleby.

“No . . . the poet.”

Mr. Ingleby’s features showed a faint anxiety, as though he doubted if

such an influence were healthy. “Well, I hope your paper was a success,”

he said.

“Oh, I think it went all right. Any letters?”

“Yes . . . two. Here they are.” He handed them to Edwin.

One of them was the invitation from Mawne. He showed it to his father.

“A dance—” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Yes. . . . I suppose I’d better go.”

“Your Aunt Laura told me about it. If it won’t interfere with your work,

I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“I haven’t any proper clothes. Evening dress, you know”

“I suppose that is quite necessary,” said Mr. Ingleby regretfully.

Edwin could see that the question of expense was troubling his father’s

mind. He wished to goodness he would say so outright, instead of looking

vaguely distressed. It would be so much more satisfactory. As it was,

he could only feel indefinitely in the wrong, as if the dance were a

piece of reckless and inexcusable levity in which he had no right to take

a part. The dress suit, the acquisition of which had been anticipated

with some satisfaction, now appeared to him in the terms of an

accumulation of small change hardly earned in his father’s dusty shop: as

the outcome of pennyworths of Epsom Salts, sticks of liquorice, or

teething powders. It was humiliating, and even distressing to realise

that every single comfort or luxury that he enjoyed—even the prime

necessities of life, had to be accumulated, literally scraped together

from this incredibly humble source and by the personal exertions of this

simple and pathetic person. With these conditions in his mind he could

not bear accepting money from his father, the weight of his obligation

was so overwhelming. Now he found it difficult to face the idea of a

tailor’s bill that might represent the profit on at least three days of

small trading in the shop.

“I don’t think I’d better go, father,” he said.

“It would be rather ungracious if you didn’t, Edwin,” his father replied.

“It was extremely kind of the Willises to ask you. I think you’d better

go and be measured to-morrow by Mr. Jones.”

The idea of a Halesby tailor’s cut was not inspiring and made Edwin

inclined to press his refusal; but Mr. Ingleby went on to explain that

Mr. Jones owed him a bill that he had begun to look upon as a bad debt,

and that Edwin’s dress suit would be a way of working it off. This

circumstance made the order less shameful, except in so far as it applied

to the hateful penury of Mr. Jones, whom Edwin remembered as a man with a

beard, as shabbily unlike a tailor’s dummy as it was possible for a man

to be. The occurrence was unfortunate in another way; for such an

addition to his wardrobe would almost certainly scotch the idea of asking

for a dress allowance, a plan which had been maturing in his brain for

some months and only needed a callous frame of mind for its performance.

Next evening, however, he went to see Mr. Jones, who measured him

obsequiously, and assured him that in the happy days before he was his

own master, he had actually cut morning-coats for Sir Joseph Astill, a

gentleman who was very difficult to fit on account of a slight . . . er . . .

fullness in the figure. Edwin, primed by the observations of The

Major in _To-Day_, was able to tell Mr. Jones exactly what he wanted, and

Mr. Jones’s manner, when he rubbed his hands over Edwin’s instructions,

did not suggest for a moment the fact of which Edwin was all the time

aware: that this was not a _bona-fide_ order, but a rather shabby way of

making him pay a bill that he had scamped for a couple of years.

Stepping out of Mr. Jones’s melancholy shop, Edwin thanked heaven that

his father had not wanted him to follow in his footsteps; for it seemed

to him that the life of a struggling tradesman in a small town must be

the most humiliating on earth. He was awfully sorry for all of them as

he walked down the street and read their names on the boards above their

windows. He had never quite realised their condition before he smelt the

particular odour of lower middle-class poverty, vaguely suggestive of

perambulators, aspidistras, and boiled mutton, that moved down the

linoleum floored passage at the back of Mr. Jones’s shop.

In due course the clothes arrived. On the whole, Mr. Jones had not done

badly; but even so, Edwin was still scarcely qualified for the business

in hand. He had never learned to dance, and it was necessary to acquire

this accomplishment in a little more than a week. At first he had

decided to pull his courage together and approach Martin, whose

eligibility compelled him to be an expert dancing man; but, at the last

moment, he funked a confession that would expose such depths of social

ignorance, and went instead to a certain Professor Beagle, who advertised

classes in dancing and deportment at the hour of five on Tuesdays,

Thursdays, and Saturdays, in the Queen’s Assembly Rooms, next door to the

theatre of the same name.

On the next Tuesday afternoon Edwin presented himself to Mr. Beagle at

the advertised hour. He found him alone sitting on a platform at the end

of a long room that smelt of dust and moth-eaten rep curtains. When

Edwin appeared at the other end of the room the professor dismounted,

cleared his throat, clasped his hands in front of him, and made a formal

bow. He was a little man, and very fat. He wore a navy blue coat that

was cut very short at the back, so that it ruckled up over his round

haunches, and his collar rose so high and stiff above a white Ascot tie,

that he was forced to carry his head tilted backwards in the direction of

his waxed moustache. His face was purple and his watery eyes stared,

whether as the result of the collar’s asphyxiation or his past manner of

life it was difficult to say. His feet were excessively small, and his

striped grey trousers tapered to the ankles in such a way that every step

he made seemed a nice feat of balancing. He bowed to Edwin, and Edwin

explained the urgent circumstances of his mission.

“I see,” said Professor Beagle. “I quite understand. You must not,

’owever, expect me to be able to turn you out as I should wish to in the

time at our disposal. Perhaps you will be good enough not to mention my

name in this connection, and keep my instructions, as it were, dark?”

Edwin assured him of secrecy, and the professor proceeded to ask him

where the dance was to be held. “I do not wish to teach you anything

that will not be useful,” he said. “In some circles the Quadrille, which

I myself consider the most dignified of dances, is still in favour. In

others the Valeta is coming into vogue. In different planes of society

different conditions prevail.”

In the end the professor decided that Edwin’s case called for the Waltz,

the Lancers, and the Polka, with the possible addition of the Pas de

Quatre. He demonstrated to Edwin the position in which his feet should

be placed, and then invited him to have a try at the waltz.

“You will take my harm, please, in the following way . . . so. . . .

Now, neither grarsping nor clarsping, let the lady’s ’and lie gently in

yours, with the fingers ’alf bent, and under no circumstances squeeze the

figger. So . . . ”

Edwin placed his right arm above the ruckles in Professor Beagle’s broad

back: into his left hand a podgy fist descended like a lump of moist

dough, and from the little man’s back-tilted, strangled head a faint

sound of whistling proceeded that raked Edwin’s own nostrils with a

cross-fire of whisky and cachous. Then the professor began to revolve

like a peg top, and Edwin felt himself swept round by the arm that lay

upon his shoulder, to the rhythm of the whistled tune, which was

sometimes suspended and replaced by: “Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three.

Wonn-two-three. Gently now. Keep-on-the. Tips-of-your.

WONN-two-three. Toes.”

In this manner they circled the room several times. Edwin was getting

out of breath; but the professor, to whom this form of exercise was so

usual as to be negligible, showed no signs of fatigue, except that his

eyes became a little more glassy and his cheeks more purple. Indeed, the

power by which he swung Edwin round the room was a thing of mystery; for

his little feet did not seem to move, and the upper part of his body was

rigid. He moved like a cyclone or a dust-storm, Edwin thought, revolving

terrifically on its own axis.

“I am afraid,” said Professor Beagle formally at the end of the first

lesson. “I am afraid you have no great natural gift. It is better that

I should be candid with you. You will need half a dozen lessons at least

before you can take your place with the young ladies in one of my

advanced classes.”

Edwin stuck to it. On six more occasions he visited the Assembly Rooms,

where, with exactly the same formalities, Mr. Beagle received him. With

Mr. Beagle in his arms, prevented by sheer physical bulk from, in any

circumstances, squeezing the figger, he revolved in the vortex of the

waltz. In the Lancers he set to imaginary partners, or went “visiting”

with Mr. Beagle’s hand lying gently in his, with the fingers ’alf bent.

In the Pas de Quatre, where the draught of whisky and cachous was happily

directed forwards, he pointed an awkward toe alongside Mr. Beagle’s

tapered and elegant extremity. In the end the professor pronounced

himself satisfied with him.

“If I were you,” he said, “I think I should come along to my advanced

class this evening and familiarise yourself with the proximity of young

ladies. The fee is a purely nominal ’alf-crown.”

Edwin decided to do so, and walked up in the evening with his patent

leather pumps in his pocket. He felt very shy. The place was lighted

with flaring gas jets, and in a room marked Gentlemen, that he had always

taken for a lavatory, a number of young men, who looked like shop

assistants, were putting on white kid gloves. They all seemed to know

one another and to look upon Edwin as an intruder. No one spoke to him,

and he waited in the cloak room until the last had disappeared before he

dared to emerge. From the room on the opposite side of the passage there

issued a breeze of concentrated perfumes, and a round of subdued titters.

This room was labelled “Ladies.”

While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he dare risk an encounter, the

door opposite opened and a bevy of bloused figures appeared. The sight

of the first took him by surprise: it was the elder of the two anæmic

young ladies in the drapery who travelled in the morning train with him

from Halesby. She gave him a smile of recognition that revealed her

defective teeth. This prospect was altogether too much for him. An

acute shyness drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon as he had

taken off his pumps and put on his shoes again, he left the Queen’s

Assembly Rooms and bolted down Sackville Row to his train.

II

The Willis’s dance, to which Edwin had looked forward with such mingled

pleasure and anxiety, was destined to bring forth a violent emotional

experience. Mr. Jones had not undergone the experience of cutting for

the undulant figure of Sir Joseph Hingston for nothing. Apart from the

fact that the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, Edwin’s dress

coat was a success, and, as Aunt Laura benignantly pointed out, it was

just as well that some allowance should be made for future growth. Mr.

Jones had been extremely anxious that Edwin should be supplied with a

magenta silk handkerchief, an ornament which, he was assured, all the

best people wore stuffed in the corner of their waistcoats.

On this problem the Major had never delivered judgment, so Edwin mustered

sufficient courage to approach Denis Martin for advice. Martin

scornfully told him that the idea was preposterous. “It’s the kind of

get-up that your friend Maskew would adopt,” he said. He also impressed

upon Edwin the fact that the infallible index of a bounder in

evening-dress was a ready-made tie. No doubt the advice was excellent;

but it let Edwin in for an hour of agony on the evening of the dance,

when the tie refused to answer to the Major’s printed instructions, and

finished up by making him look as if he had gone to bed in his boots and

slept on it.

He had never been to Mawne Hall before. That pretentious mansion with

its castellated façade set on a steep bank above the valley of the Stour,

in which the works that maintained it lay, was so brightly lit upon this

evening that it glowed like a lantern through the bare boughs of the

hanging wood beneath. In the gun-room at the side of the hall in which

the hats and coats of the guests were being received by Bassett, the

Willises’ coachman, he recognised a number of incredibly elegant

creatures of his own sex with shining white waistcoats, pearl studs, and

immaculate ties. He knew scarcely any of them, for they were mostly

neighbouring ironmasters or professional people to whose society the

Willises’ money had proved a sufficient introduction. Among them he

recognised Sir Joseph Hingston, playing ducks and drakes with his

aitches, and wearing, to Edwin’s encouragement, a flagrantly ready-made

tie. In this particular, at any rate, he was one up on the baronet. He

hoped that some one else would realise this fact. In the middle of these

reflections he thought he heard a voice that he recognised, and turned to

find himself rubbing shoulders with Griffin. Edwin said, “Good-evening.”

“Good Lord, Ingleby, are you here? I haven’t seen you since the

pantomime night. What are you doing here? Do you know these people?”

It struck Edwin that he spoke rather contemptuously of his hosts.

“Yes. . . . I live near here, you know,” he replied. “I didn’t know the

Willises were friends of yours.” As a matter of fact he knew nothing

about the Willises’ friends; but it sounded rather well.

“No . . . I don’t know them,” said Griffin, “but the old man is a

business friend of my uncle’s, and apparently they were rather hard up

for men.” The sound of waltz music was heard, and Griffin left him

hurriedly. “See you later,” he said.

Edwin, anxious not to be left behind, pulled on his gloves and split the

thumb of one of them. He passed through the hall, where his name was

announced, rather contemptuously, as he thought, by Hannah, the Willises’

tall and starchy servant, and was received in a manner that was

reassuring and homely by Mrs. Willis. She spoke for a moment of his

mother, and tears gathered in her rather watery eyes; then she introduced

him to her small daughter Lilian, very self-conscious in a white party

frock with a pale blue waistband, and another dark girl with beautiful

grey eyes and a creamy rather than pale complexion, who was standing

beside her. Miss Dorothy Powys, she said. Edwin, hedging for safety,

booked a dance with Lilian, who took the matter as seriously as himself.

Next, no doubt, he must have a shot at Miss Dorothy Powys, in spite of

the disturbing beauty of her eyes; but when he came to ask her for a

dance, he saw that Griffin was talking to her.

“May I have another—number sixteen?” Edwin heard him ask easily. She

smiled and nodded. Her smile seemed to Edwin very beautiful: so

beautiful, indeed, that he couldn’t possibly bring himself to approach

her when Griffin turned away. It was awfully silly of him, he thought.

The evening was not exactly a success. He polkaed with Lilian, and took

his place in the Lancers with several mature ladies to whom Mrs. Willis

introduced him. Luckily none of these belonged to Halesby, a

circumstance that must be attributed to Mrs. Willis’s tact, so that the

question of his origin never arose. He danced according to the letter of

Professor Beagle’s instructions. Neither grasping nor clasping, he let

the ladies’ hands lie gently in his with the fingers half bent, and in no

circumstances did he squeeze the figger. What he missed was the terrific

motive power that the unladylike Professor Beagle had applied to his

revolutions. It now appeared to him that to supply this was the part of

the male; and as most of the matrons with whom Mrs. Willis supplied him

were bulky, he had his work cut out. Once, returning thoroughly blown

from one of these adventures he caught the eye of Dorothy Powys; and he

thought she smiled. Could this be true? He wondered. . . . During the

greater part of the evening when he had not been dancing he had found

himself following her movements with his eyes. He had decided that she

must be at least a year or two older than himself; but that didn’t really

matter, for she seemed to him a creature of such very perfect grace, and

her eyes, in the moment when he caught them, had been so wonderful.

After the next dance, which was the one that she had booked with Griffin,

he watched them disappear into the library.

It made him feel sick with himself that he hadn’t taken the opportunity

of his introduction. What a damned fool he was! And afterwards, when he

watched her, she did not smile at all, either for him or for any one

else. Indeed, she seemed pale, and anxious, as if something had happened

to upset her. In despair Edwin wandered off into the card-room, where he

saw Lady Hingston, who was partnering Mr. Willis at bridge, revoke three

times in two games, to the intense annoyance of her husband. From the

card-room he strolled on to the buffet, where he found Griffin absorbing

quantities of whisky and soda. He begged Edwin to join him; but Edwin,

who was particularly anxious to behave himself, struck to claret-cup.

“Well, have you struck any cuddle?” said Griffin brutally, with his mouth

full.

“Any what?”

“Cuddle. . . . Girls. . . . What the devil do you think one comes to a

dance for?”

“No. . . . I haven’t,” said Edwin.

“Well, they are a pretty scratch lot,” Griffin confessed. “That Powys

girl’s all right though.”

Edwin blushed furiously. He suddenly wanted to throw his glass of

claret-cup at Griffin’s head. Why? . . . He calmed himself.

“Do you know her?” he asked.

“Never met her before to-night. She’s got a topping figure. She must be

pretty well connected. Lord Alfred Powys is one of their directors

here.”

“But you don’t mean to say—” Edwin began.

“The night is yet young,” said Griffin, gulping another whisky. “God,

there’s number twelve! I must hook it.”

Edwin wandered back to the ballroom. He couldn’t keep away from it, but,

at the same time, he was anxious not to appear disengaged, for fear that

Mrs. Willis should induce some other heavy partner to abandon her

arm-chair for his amusement. He hung about the pillars of the folding

doors that led into the supper room, just out of range of Mrs. Willis’s

maternal gaze. From this point he could watch the beautiful Miss Powys,

and wonder, with a sort of bitter excitement, exactly what Griffin had

meant by his suggestions. Watching her, he could not believe that she

could be anything but graceful and beautiful in everything she did. The

band started to play the music for waltz: number sixteen. He remembered

it was the second dance that Griffin had booked with her. For some

reason that he couldn’t imagine, he felt that he wanted to be near when

Griffin came for her: perhaps he could tell her attitude towards him by

something that she might say. He went over to the place where she was

sitting next to Mrs. Willis. He tried not to look at her.

In a moment he heard Griffin’s voice. “Ours, I think.” The tone was a

little blurred by Griffin’s potations.

“I think you’ve made a mistake,” she said.

Edwin turned round, and at the same moment she looked towards him.

“Surely I am dancing this with you, Mr. Ingleby.”

“But look here, I’m sure these are your initials on my programme, Miss

Powys. Let me look at yours.”

He tried to take the programme from her fingers, but she moved it away.

“Really, we mustn’t contradict each other, Mr. Griffin. The dance is Mr.

Ingleby’s. Will you take me, please?” she said to Edwin.

In an ecstatic dream Edwin found himself walking away with her on his

arm. It was a miracle, an astounding, beautiful miracle. She picked up

her skirt by the loop of ribbon with which it was suspended and looked

him full in the eyes, smiling. “Shall we start?” she said.

They started. In one fatal moment Edwin, who hadn’t been doing badly at

the beginning of the evening, forgot every single precept that Professor

Beagle had taught him.

“I say, what a shocking dancer you are,” she said with a laugh.

“I’m most awfully sorry, I only learnt this week.” Now that his mind was

diverted by speaking to her the steps came more naturally.

“That’s better,” she said. “Who on earth taught you?”

He confessed to Professor Beagle, and she appeared to be amused.

“You see you’re dancing away from me all the time. Just as if you were

afraid of me. You ought to hold me closer. It upsets the what d’you

call it . . . centre of gravity.”

“I was told never under any circumstances to—” He couldn’t very well

repeat Professor Beagle’s formula.

“Now you’re getting on beautifully. Don’t think about it. That’s the

idea. Just dance.”

The music ended. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

“Out into the hall, if you don’t mind . . . on the stairs. I want to

explain to you. It was really awfully good of you to take me on.”

“It was a wonderful piece of luck for me.”

They sat together on the shallow oak staircase and she proceeded to tell

him that Griffin had upset her in the dance before by trying to kiss her

shoulder. “I really couldn’t stick a repetition of that,” she said.

“Besides, I think the man had been drinking. So I just pitched upon your

poor innocence and lied for all I was worth. Who are you, by the way? I

only just remembered your name when Mrs. Willis introduced us. She’s

rather a dear, isn’t she?”

The music of the next dance struck up. “Are you dancing?” Edwin asked

eagerly.

“I don’t know, I expect so. Just look at my programme. It’s too dark

for me to see.”

Edwin took the programme from her fingers. It was a thrilling moment.

In the dusk he deciphered two initials, “E.W.,” he said.

“Oh, that’s only Edward Willis. He’s very shy of me. If you’ve nothing

better to do I think we’ll stay here.”

It was so easy to talk to her. To Edwin, indeed, it seemed as if he had

now become articulate for the first time in his life. She did not speak

very much of herself; but she asked him many questions about his life at

school, where, he confided to her, he had first known Griffin, and then

again about his new work in North Bromwich. And when she did speak her

voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of an amazing limpid purity,

more beautiful than any human speech he had ever heard. Edwin would have

liked to listen to it for ever. He felt that he wanted words to describe

its peculiar music, but no words came to him. He could only remember a

line in Browning’s _Pauline_:—

“Her voice was as the voice of his own soul

Heard in the calm of thought. . . .”

That was the nearest he could get to it; but the words, although they

expressed a little of his absorption, did not convey the musical

qualities that he wanted to describe. He tried to compare it with the

tones of some instrument that he knew, but neither wood-wind nor strings

suggested what he wanted. No . . . it was a sound nearer to nature than

any man-made instrument. It was the voice of a Naiad: the sound of

running water in a clear brookland. And all the time that he listened to

her he was thrillingly conscious of her physical presence. She was

sitting on the stair beneath him, and fortunately she could not see that

he was gazing at her in the gloom, thinking how beautifully shaped was

the nape of the neck from which her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome

by the loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoulder.

“I’m talking all the time,” he said, “and you’re saying nothing. It’s

rather a shame . . . because you speak so beautifully.”

“Whatever do you mean?” For a moment her eyes were on his. He dared not

look at them. He could not answer her, for the moment seemed full of

such an overpowering sweetness.

“Do tell me.”

“Oh, I only mean that when you say a thing like that, it . . . it

suggests that everything about you is marvellously clean and clear and

musical—” He paused, for he felt that she might laugh at him.

“Yes . . . go on,” she said.

“Like water in a hill country. It makes me feel as if I weren’t within a

hundred miles of North Bromwich.”

She laughed softly, but not unkindly.

“No, I’m not a bit like that. I’m really awfully hard and worldly—I wish

I were the least bit what you imagine. You’re most awfully young, aren’t

you?”

Perhaps she did not mean the word cruelly, but it seemed very cruel to

Edwin. It was quite possible that she was a few years older than

himself, if age were to be counted by years; but in reality he knew that

she was beautifully young, certainly young enough to love and to be

loved.

“Don’t let’s talk about me,” she said.

“But I want to talk about you.”

He wanted to talk about nothing else. His head was full of words that he

wanted to throw before her like jewels, but he did not know how much he

dared to say. He knew it was impossible for him to express a hundredth

part of his delight in her. It would be nearly as bad as kissing her

neck in the manner of Griffin, to say that the curve of it sent him

delirious with joy. It would be indecency rather than candour to say

that the faint scent of her intoxicated him. He was silent with

tremulous emotion. He wondered if she could be conscious of it; and he

could not guess, for she, too, did not speak. From the ballroom they

heard the music of another dance begin. Two shadowy couples emerged from

the passage beneath them. A curtain of Indian beading made a sound like

dead leaves driven over a dry pavement by the wind. The intruders’

voices died away.

“I suppose we must go too,” she said with a sigh.

“Why must you go? Are you dancing?” Edwin asked, with a catch in his

throat.

“No, I don’t think I shall dance any more. I was rather upset. It was

silly of me. But I think we’d better go.”

Edwin offered her his arm in the best manner of Professor Beagle.

“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. For a moment she hesitated. She

was smiling, and her eyes were wonderful in the gloom. Their faces were

level with each other. And, suddenly, amazingly, she kissed him.

“I’m going,” she said. Edwin tried to take her hand as she moved away

from him. For a second it lay in his, soft and small and warm. Then,

before his arms had time to follow the impulse of his flaming brain, she

had slipped away from him and passed into the shadow of the passage. He

stood there at the foot of the stairs alone, his heart thudding like a

steam-hammer in a bewildered, intoxicating elation. Why had she left

him? Why? . . . unless it were only a part of her adorable modesty.

That must be the reason: and yet it was hardly consistent with an exalted

ideal of modesty to kiss a young man, whom she had only known for fifteen

minutes, on the lips. A new aspect of the miracle presented itself to

him. Was it possible, after all, that Griffin had been right, that she

was really exactly what he had insinuated, a fast little baggage who had

determined, in a sudden caprice, to throw Griffin over and try a new

experiment?

He could not believe it. Everything that he had noticed and adored in

her, her grey eyes, the delicious quality of her speech, her fragrance,

the indescribable fineness—there was no other word for it—of her, denied

the possibility. He found it difficult to realise that she had gone in

the moment of such an astounding revelation. Such was the way of a

Naiad, melting away out of her sweet mortality in the moment of

possession. Standing alone at the foot of the gloomy staircase,

listening in a dream to the luscious music of the Choristers’ waltz, he

tried to recreate his dream out of memory. Nothing of her was left but

her delicate perfume. On the stairs he saw a small crumpled muslin

handkerchief from which the perfume came. He picked it up with the

reverence of a pilgrim touching a relic, eagerly triumphant that he had

managed to rescue a fragment of his dream. It did not strike him that

this tiny square of scented muslin was presumably the instrument with

which divinity blew its nose: and indeed its dimensions scarcely fitted

it for this material function. He placed it in the satin-lined pocket of

Mr. Jones’s creation. It pleased him to think that it lay near his

heart.

This, of course, was only the beginning of a romance. No doubt, in the

course of the evening, he would see her again. Somehow he must persuade

her to see him alone, and then he would be able to do all the

magnificently passionate things of which her flight had cheated him. He

would kiss her; he would hold her exquisiteness in his arms; he would

tell her all the glorious things that he had been fool enough to

withhold.

He went back into the ballroom. Nobody seemed to notice him there. It

pleased him to think that these ordinary people were too dull in their

perceptions to guess at the wonder in his heart. It was a secret that he

shared with only one other person in the world, and that secret had

altered his whole outlook on life. He was no longer the timid boy,

conscious of his social disadvantages and of his new dress clothes, who

had entered the Willises’ house a couple of hours before, but a man, a

lover, to whose passion the whole beauty of the world ministered, a

creature miraculously placed beyond the reach of envy or of scorn. He

was happy to wait patiently for the supreme moment when he should see her

again. And so he waited, mildly tolerant of Griffin, over whom he had

scored so easily, of Edward Willis, who performed with a set face his

penitentiary programme of duty-dances, of Mrs. Willis, who watched the

joy of her small daughter Lilian with the proud but anxious eyes of a

mother hen, of Mr. Willis circulating among his guests with an expansive

smile, of poor Lady Hingston, still revoking automatically in the

card-room.

But Dorothy Powys never returned to the seat that she had occupied under

the shadow of Mrs. Willis’s wings. She had told him that she didn’t mean

to dance any more, but surely that didn’t mean that he was not to see her

again. He grew uneasy. Of course she could easily escape if she wanted

to do so, for she was staying in the house. He wondered if he dared ask

Mrs. Willis what had become of her, but decided that this would certainly

give him away.

Instead of doing this he posted himself in a corner from which he could

hear everything that was said in Mrs. Willis’s circle. This was not a

very profitable pursuit, for Mrs. Willis was not an interesting talker,

and the only excitement that penetrated the broody calm that surrounded

her was the arrival of her husband, very excited over a telephone

message, that had no foundation in fact, announcing the relief of

Ladysmith by General Buller. Edwin was beginning to give the business up

as a bad job when he saw a tall, languid man, whom he considered to be

rather shabbily dressed, approach Mrs. Willis and ask her what had

happened to his niece.

“Oh, she was here half an hour ago,” said Mrs. Willis. “The poor child

told me that she had a headache and was going to bed. I told Hannah to

take her a hot water bottle. . . . I do hope you’re quite comfortable,

Lord Alfred,” she went on. “It is nice, isn’t it? to see all these young

people enjoying themselves. At least it would be, if one didn’t have to

think of all the poor creatures in South Africa being fired at by these

treacherous Boers.”

And the tall, shabby man mumbled, “Yes . . . yes, certainly. . . .

Very,” in his beard.

It was enough for Edwin. He said good-bye to Mrs. Willis, who seemed

only mildly surprised at his departure, and left the house. There was no

reason now why he should stay. On the stone terrace he paused, listening

for a moment to the muted music from within the house. In the upper

stories only one window was lighted. He could see the glowing yellow

pane beyond a bough of one of the cedars with which the lawn was shaded.

He wondered if that window were hers. He would like, he thought, to stay

there all night in the black shadow of the cedar, gazing at that window

and feeling that he was near her. Later on, no doubt, the light would be

extinguished, and then he would imagine her lying there asleep. How

beautiful she must be when she lay there sleeping!

He sighed, and went on his way, under the wonderful night. He climbed

the steep slope of Mawne Bank, under the smouldering pit-fires, in a

dream, and found himself, surprised, beneath the walls of the cherry

orchard at the back of Old Mawne Hall. Inside the walls the cherry-trees

lay locked in a wintry sleep. He stopped, for the steepness of the hill

had stolen his breath. He remembered a day when he walked there with his

mother. “How mother would have loved her!” he thought. Yes . . . she

was more wonderful than his mother. On the day that he remembered, so

many years ago, it had been spring. The branches had been full of

billowy bloom. Now, in the wintry night, he felt that spring was near:

spring was in his blood, stirring it to new and passionate aspirations as

in a few months time it would stir the dreamy sap of the cherry-trees. A

strange, unseasonable miracle. Glorious, indefinite words formed

themselves in his mind. Spring, with its warm, perfumed breath,

triumphing beautifully over the powers of winter and death. Death at

Colenso under those tawny kopjes. Love in his heart. A sublime,

ecstatic muddle. . . . The Mawne furnaces leapt into a sudden flower of

fire that made the sky above them tawny. Love was like fire . . . an

exultant leaping flame.

He did not know where he was going until he found himself at home in his

little shabby room taking off his dress-suit and staring at himself as a

stranger in the dusty mirror. “Who am I?” he thought, “that this should

have happened to me? I do not know myself. I am greater and more

wonderful than the image that I see in the glass.”

He placed his precious talisman of muslin under his pillow, and wondered

if he might be blessed with a dream of her. “She kissed me,” he thought.

“She kissed my lips—”

III