“You can learn a lot of useful things about general practice here,” said

Dr. Harris. “It should be extremely useful to you. You see, I’ve been

at this game for thirty years. It’s a great chance for you.” He took up

a handful of silver from the open drawer and started to jingle it. “Look

here, you’re wasting time.”

Edwin agreed.

“Well, suppose I take you on, I might be able to give you three . . .

better say two pounds a month. You can feed up at my place and sleep

here. If you sleep here, you’ll be able to take night-messages and

telephone them up to me. There’s a bedroom fitted up. One of my

assistants used to sleep here. How will that suit you?”

With a feeling of intense relief Edwin accepted.

“Very well, then, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t begin at once, just

to get into the way of things.” He paused, and added as an

after-thought: “We’ll count that you start from to-morrow.”

He led Edwin behind the green baize curtain at the back of his desk,

disclosing a set of shelves and a counter stained with the rings of

bottles and measuring glasses. At the end of the counter was a sink into

which a tap with a tapered nozzle dripped dismally. One drawer held

labels, another corks, a third a selection of eight-ounce, four-ounce,

and two-ounce bottles. At the back of the counter stood a row of

Winchester Quarts, of indefinite contents, labelled with the Roman

numerals from one to nine. Dr. Harris swabbed the swimming counter with

a rag that was already saturated with medicines.

“You can learn all you want in five minutes,” he said. “There’s no time

for refinements in this sort of practice. These big bottles are all

stock mixtures, and whatever they teach you in your universities, I can

tell you that these nine mixtures will carry you through life. There you

are . . . Number One: White Mixture. Number Two: Soda and Rhubarb.

Number Three: Bismuth. You have to go easy with Number Three: Bismuth’s

expensive. Number Four: Febrifuge . . . Liquor Ammond Acet: and that.

Number Five: Iron and Mag:Sulph. And so on. . . . Number Nine: Mercury

and Pot:Iod . . . you know what that’s for,” with a laugh, “we use a lot

of that here. Now you’ve one ounce of each stock mixture to an

eight-ounce bottle, and a two-tablespoonful dose. I used to put them up

in six-ounce bottles; but if you give them eight ounces they think

they’re getting more for the money: they don’t realise they’re getting

eight doses instead of twelve, and that’s their lookout, isn’t it? Same

proportions for children and infants, only you use the four and two-ounce

bottles instead, with dessert-spoon and teaspoonful doses. Simple, isn’t

it? But you want to simplify if you’re going to make money in these

days. Now, is that quite clear?”

“Quite clear.”

“Well, then, when a patient comes in I have a look at him—with my

experience you can tell in a moment—and I give you a slip of paper behind

the curtain. Like this. ‘Mrs. Jones. No. 5. T.D.S.’ Mrs. means an

eight-ounce bottle. One ounce of Number Five stock mixture. One

tablespoonful three times a day. Then, if I put ‘4tis horis’ instead of

‘T.D.S.,’ it means a tablespoonful every four hours; but I only do that

when I see they can afford to get through the bottle more quickly.

You’ll find powders in that drawer. Antifebrin—it’s cheaper than

phenacetin and caffein. And calomel for children. Then, as I was

saying, while I have a look at the patient and ask him one or two

questions you make up the medicine.”

“Suppose, when you’ve had a talk to him, you change your mind about the

treatment.”

“I never change my mind. There’s no time for that,” said Dr. Harris.

“And if I did we could change the medicine next time. But you needn’t

worry about the treatment: that’s my part of the business. Why”—and the

little man expanded—“I shouldn’t wonder if we got through as many as a

hundred patients in a couple of hours, the two of us together. Now, are

you ready?”

He left Edwin behind the curtain and rang his bell. A patient entered,

and as soon as the doctor had said good-evening to her the prescription

was passed behind the curtain and Edwin proceeded to fill a bottle from

one of the Winchester Quarts. This business went on monotonously for

another hour. Edwin dispensed mechanically in a kind of dream. He never

saw a single patient; but little scraps of conversation showed him that

most of them were suffering from the evils of poor housing and a

sedentary life. It consoled him to think that most of the mixtures that

he dispensed were relatively harmless. Sometimes, by an access of

solicitude and deference in the doctor’s voice, he could gather that the

patient was of a higher social degree, and he smiled to find, in these

cases, that the mixture was invariably prescribed in four-hourly doses.

All the men, it appeared, were judged to be in need of White Mixture or

Rhubarb: all the women demanded Iron and Mag:Sulph: all the children were

treated with a treacly cough mixture or calomel powders. In the space of

an hour he must have dispensed at least forty bottles of medicine, and

towards the end of the evening he noticed that Dr. Harris became even

more perfunctory in his examinations—if such a word were ever

justified—and that signs of irritation began to show themselves in his

voice. At last the waiting-room bell rang twice, and no patient

appeared.

“That’s the lot,” said Dr. Harris, appearing from behind the curtain. “I

think I’ll have a wash.” It was the first time that he had washed his

hands in the whole of the evening. “Well, you see what it’s like,” he

said, “I think I’ll have a nip of whisky.” He produced a vitriolic

bottle from a cupboard and mixed some whisky with water in a

medicine-measure.

“A good average day,” he said. “Three pounds ten.” He shovelled the

silver from the drawer into a leather bag that weighed down his coat

pocket. “That takes a lot of making at a shilling a time. Well, how do

you like it?”

“I think I shall be able to manage,” said Edwin, who was not anxious to

commit himself.

“You’d better come and see your room.”

It was a bare bedroom on the first floor with iron bedstead and a

dejected washhand-stand, but it seemed to Edwin that, at least, it would

be quiet and free from distractions. “I shall be able to read here,” he

thought, “and after all, it’s only for twelve months.”

“Not much to look at,” said Dr. Harris apologetically. “I’ll send you

down some bedding to-night. I’ll expect you for breakfast at eight

o’clock sharp. You’d better come along and have some supper now.”

“I think I’d better go and collect some of my things. I’ve been staying

with a friend in his diggings.”

“All right. As you like,” said Dr. Harris. “Nine o’clock sharp

to-morrow morning then? You have to be punctual if you’re to make money

in this business.”

Edwin said good-night, keeping the key of the surgery. When the doctor

had gone he went back into the curtained dispensary and tried to

introduce a little order into the waste. A strange life, he thought . . .

a strange and degrading life. If this were general practice, he

wondered why he had ever despised his father’s trade, for surely there

was more dignity in selling tooth-brushes than in dealing so casually

with the diseases of human beings. “I must talk it over with old W.G.,”

he thought. “He’s a sound man.” But he knew at the bottom of his heart

that he couldn’t afford to speculate on the ethics of the case. All that

mattered to him, for the present, was the necessity of finding a roof—any

roof to shelter him and food to keep him alive. He was a beggar, and

could not choose, and had every reason to be thankful for this or any

solution of his difficulties.

“It sounds bad,” said W.G., when Edwin had expanded on the refinements of

Dr. Harris’s medicine, “but, in a way, you’re lucky to have fallen on

your feet so quickly. As a matter of fact, you don’t deserve it. You’re

an old fool to have left home, you know. Now, there’s some chance of

your appreciating how comfortable you were.”

Boyce was more sympathetic, entering with great pains and seriousness

into the cause of Edwin’s spiritual nausea. The results of it pleased

him in so far as they meant that in future Edwin would be living in North

Bromwich, and promised a perpetuation of the delightful comradeship that

they had enjoyed in the summer. “I expect we shall see a lot of you, old

boy,” he said, “ambrosial evenings, you know.”

Edwin laughed. “The evenings won’t be exactly ambrosial. I shall be

earning my two pounds a month filling eight-ounce bottles with rubbish at

a shilling each. I shall feel like compounding in a felony. It’s the

devil . . .”

III

And it was pretty bad. No more concerts or operas; no week-ends at

Overton; no dinners at Joey’s; no possible diversion of any kind that

impinged upon the hours between six and nine. And yet Edwin was happy.

For the first time in his life, and at a price, he was realising what

independence meant. Even the break at Halesby had passed off without any

severe emotional disturbance. He had written to his father again,

telling him his new address and what he was doing, and his father had

replied in his formal business hand, not, indeed, with any offer of help,

but with an implied approval of what he had done, enclosing a number of

bills (opened) and a couple of second-hand book catalogues.

There was nothing unfriendly in the letter, no heroics of outraged

paternity. Reading between the lines, Edwin felt that by consulting no

interests but his own he had made an awkward situation easy for his

father. In that case, he reflected, Mr. Ingleby might very well have

made him an allowance. It gave him a sense of grim satisfaction to

remember that he was still a minor and that even if he were too proud to

use it, he still held the weapon of his father’s legal responsibility in

reserve, but the next moment he was ashamed of this reflection: when it

came to a point the element of pathos in his father’s history and person

always disarmed him.

It was enough that he should be happy, principally for the reason that

his days were so full and any moments of relaxation came to him with a

more poignant pleasure than any he had known before. He had very little

time for reading outside the subjects of his final exam., that now

overwhelmed him with an increasing weight. For pleasure he read little

but lyrical poetry, finding his chief enjoyment in the last hour before

he fell asleep in Dr. Harris’s empty lock-up, with a copy of Mackail’s

selections from the Greek Anthology that he had salved from one of the

second-hand bookstalls in Cobden Street.

In spite of himself, he was beginning to like Charles Altrincham-Harris.

He didn’t for one moment alter his opinion of the degradation to which

the man had subjected the nobilities of his calling, his meanness and his

avarice. In his dealings with the unfortunate people who came to the

shilling doctor for treatment, he still abhorred him; he knew him to be a

person whose mind was a sink of pseudo-professional prurience, and whose

body and habits were unkempt and unclean; but for all this, he could not

deny the fact that in his relations with his dispenser he displayed a

curious vein of natural kindness, and that his ideals, apart from his

loathsome business, were of a touching simplicity.

Every morning they met at breakfast. The doctor believed in good food as

a basis for work, and his housekeeper, a small, shrewish woman of fifty,

was an excellent cook. At the breakfast table he would impart to Edwin

the more salacious paragraphs of the morning paper, which he always

opened at the page that contained the records of the divorce-court. He

took no notice of politics. “They can do what they like as long as they

don’t legislate about _us_.” And though Edwin felt sincerely that the

sooner his kind were legislated for, the better, he was thankful that his

employer was not a political bore or bigot.

After breakfast Dr. Harris always smoked a clay pipe in his carpet

slippers, a present from a patient who, for some unimaginable reason, had

been grateful. Then they would walk down to 563 Lower Sparkdale together

in the fresh morning air, and the combination of gentle exercise with

deeper breathing would impel the little man to make Edwin the confidant

of his ambitions.

“Twelve thousand pounds,” he would say, “that’s all I want. Twelve

thousand pounds. Five hundred a year. Then I shall find a quiet little

place in the country and have a rest. Keep bees and poultry: that’s what

I shall do, and smoke a pipe in the garden in the evening when the poor

devil that buys my practice is going down to the surgery to rake in the

shillings.”

In these moments he would reflect on the beginning of his career. “I

took a good degree, you know. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now,

would you? No . . . I had bad luck, and a bad wife, which is the worst

sort of luck. She lost me my practice, and so I grew sick of medicine.

I couldn’t be bothered with the social side of it. Money was what I

wanted: money and quiet. And so I took a dose of medicine: fifteen years

at a shilling a bottle, with advice thrown in, and then a quiet life.

That was all I wanted. And I’ve very nearly got it. Another year or two

will make me secure. Security . . . that’s what I wanted. Well, here we

are. . . .”

So the morning’s work began, and no morning, as far as Edwin could see,

was different from any other. He was thankful when the clock struck ten,

and Dr. Harris ruthlessly locked his surgery door. Then, fortunately, he

was obliged to take the next tram to the hospital; for if he had

lingered, as he was sometimes forced to do on Sundays, Dr. Harris would

have lit his pipe and proceeded to regale him with anecdotes of medical

experiences that always related to sex, on which he dwelt with a slow,

deliberate satisfaction, like a dog that nuzzles a piece of garbage.

The aspects of medical science that related to sex were the only ones in

which he was really interested. He possessed an expensive and eclectic

library of books on these subjects, to which he was always adding others

that he bought from the colporteurs of medical pornography who are

continually pestering the members of his profession. These he would pore

over at night, when Edwin was providentially engaged in reading for his

final. “Medicine is an extremely interesting profession from that point

of view,” he would say, and indeed the dispenser soon discovered that

this aspect of the medical profession supplied Dr. Harris with a great

number of his patients. In the squalid underways of the city he had

established a reputation for skill and discretion in the treatment of

contagious disease, and the unfortunate victims who came to Lower

Sparkdale from more reputable suburbs were ready to pay through the nose

for his advice.

One night, hearing behind his curtain the overtures of one of these cases

that he knew so well, he suddenly became aware of a tone that was

familiar in the patient’s voice. Listening more closely he could have

sworn it was the voice of Griffin. Evidently it was a person of some

consequence, for Dr. Harris devoted as much as five minutes to his

examination.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like a prescription?”

“No, you’d better make it up for me,” said the voice that resembled that

of Griffin.

“Certainly . . . delighted.”

Dr. Harris breathed heavily, as he always did when writing a

prescription, and then passed the slip of paper behind the curtain to

Edwin. Edwin, looking at once for the name at the head of the

prescription, was disappointed. The patient had preferred to remain

anonymous. He dispensed the medicine, and when Dr. Harris had said

good-bye to the patient he could not resist the temptation of looking

from behind the curtain to verify his suspicions. He could only see the

back of the departing patient, but the suspicion filled him with a queer

sensation of awe.

It showed him a new aspect of medicine that had never occurred to him in

hospital life, but would, no doubt, be present often enough in private

practice. Griffin was a person well known to Edwin and his friends, a

person about whose adventures and their consequences he would easily and

naturally have spoken. If he had retailed the incident to Maskew and

W.G. in the Dousita, it would have been the occasion of a little pity and

probably some irreverent mirth. But he saw at once that he could do

nothing of the sort. He had become, for the first time in his life, the

keeper of a professional secret. For the rest of the world, however

interested, Griffin and Griffin’s disease must not exist.

Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, reflecting that in his

future life he would in all probability become possessed of many such

secrets and that there might be occasions on which his sense of duty

would be divided between the traditional discretion of Hippocrates and

the instincts of humanity. He invented a hypothetical case for his own

confusion. Supposing he had a sister to whom Griffin was engaged:

supposing that they were going to be married in a week after this

uncomfortable knowledge had come into his possession, endangering the

whole of her future happiness and perhaps her life: what, in that case,

should be his attitude towards the question of professional secrecy?

What would he do? Would he be justified in telling her what he knew?

Hippocrates said “No”; but Hippocrates’ refusal narrowed the field of

possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own shame and threatening

him with . . . what? Not with exposure—for that Hippocrates forbade.

Obviously with death. And that would be murder. . . .

Balancing the relative heinousness of murder and perjury, Edwin began to

laugh at himself, and while he did this a curious reminiscence came into

his mind: the picture of a small boy, who resembled him in very little

but had been himself, lying in the hedge side of Murderer’s Cross Road,

on the downs above St. Luke’s, reflecting on the same problem of the

justification of homicide and saying to himself as he brooded on his

wrongs: “I can quite easily understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.”

And this picture tempting him further, he relapsed into a dream of those

strange, remote days tinged with extremes of happiness and misery, and

both of them unreal. . . .

He thought no more of Griffin.

CHAPTER IX

EASY ROW

I

FOR a whole year Edwin inhabited the room above the lock-up surgery in

Lower Sparkdale. It was a happy year, for into it was crowded a great

wealth of experience and elevating discovery to which the mechanical

drudgery of Dr. Harris’s dispensing room acted as ballast. In his

medical studies he began to feel for the first time the fruits of his

earlier labours: to realise that all medicine was little more than an

intelligent application to life of the theoretical subjects that he had

mastered without reasoning. From the very first day of his experience in

the dissecting room there was nothing in all that he had learnt that had

not its direct bearing on his present practice; and the reflection that

he possessed all this essential knowledge ready for use was exhilarating

in itself. Again, the fact that he was now standing on his feet,

actually earning his own living, gave him a greater happiness than he had

ever known in his days of dependence; it made him accept the routine of

Lower Sparkdale as a penance, cheering him with the thought that so much

sacrifice was really necessary before he should be master of himself.

He was lonely; but this seemed inevitable, for no person in his senses

could be expected to grind along in a steam-tram to Lower Sparkdale for

the sake of his company; and the final year was too full of strenuous

studies for all of them to allow of much indulgence in the joys of

friendship. Matthew Boyce made a few heroic attempts. He even spent

several evenings in Harris’s dispensary, finding the shilling doctor’s

clinical and commercial methods something of a joke. They were no joke

to Edwin: he had recognised long ago that they were no more than Harris’s

solution of the problem of living. The doctor saw nothing unworthy in

them. He did his best, within his limited knowledge, for his patients.

He was kind, and even, on occasion, generous. If there were fault to be

found it must be with the State that allowed such ignorant men to deal

with precious human bodies, and not with him. When the first humour of

the experience was exhausted Boyce came to the surgery no more. Little

by little Edwin’s insulation became more complete, and in the end he

relapsed into the degree of loneliness that he had known in his early

days at St. Luke’s.

Given the opportunity, he almost enjoyed it. There was something remote

and secret about this little room in the corner house above the grinding

trams, and when the surgery emptied at night and he went upstairs to work

he would find himself suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of thankfulness

for the fact that it was so peculiarly his: that his own books and

pictures and clothes had made it individual and different from any other

room in the whole of the city. And when the town slept, and he sat on

reading into the early hours of the morning, the lonely chamber was like

a lighthouse set in seas of night, and dreams of the misty lands beyond

Severn, of Mendip couched in darkness, or of the sleeping wolds by

Overton, would beat at his lighted window like seabirds in the night.

At first the sacrifices that his poverty demanded had seemed no more than

part of a new and exciting game. It was some months before he realised

that, literally, he could not afford the indulgence of a single pleasure

that cost money. If he were to free himself from the bondage of Dr.

Harris’s dispensary it was absolutely necessary that he should save

enough money to pay his examination fees. He began to find a new delight

in carefully hoarded shillings, and this practice threw him into a

curious sympathy with his employer. Each of them, on a different scale,

was committed to a present sacrifice for the sake of future freedom; and

this reflection reconciled him in some degree to the inconveniences that

Dr. Harris’s miserly ways inflicted on him.

It was galling, none the less, to find that he could mot afford to buy a

single new book, to hire a piano, or to hear any music except the free

recitals by which the municipal organist convinced the citizens of North

Bromwich that they were getting something for their money, in debauches

of sound that reminded them how much the organ had cost. Sometimes, to

Edwin’s joy, he played the fugues of the Well-tempered Clavier, and on

their wide streams he would be carried from springs of mountain

sweetness, by weir and cataract to solemn tidal waters and lose himself

at last in seas of absolute music. Time after time he thanked God for

Bach, and walked home to his garret like a man who has gazed upon the

splendour of a full sea and carries its tumult in his mind far inland.

Through all these experiences Edwin was so possessed by the one idea of

holding on until his final exam. was over that he scarcely missed the

society of his friends. He knew that his friendship with Boyce was

founded too deeply in common experience ever to be shaken by his own

changed circumstances: it might lapse, but it could never be broken. He

always felt that the future held more for them than the past had ever

given; but his other friends, Maskew and Martin in particular, seemed to

have been translated to another place of existence. In the wards and in

the lecture theatres he would meet them; but elsewhere they had nothing

in common with his way of existence.

Even W.G. seemed gradually to be slipping away from him—an unreasonable

state, for Edwin, after all, was now for the first time sharing something

of the big man’s early experience. For several months they had scarcely

spoken, and then, one day, nearly ran into each other’s arms in Sackville

Row, and almost mechanically wandered off to the Dousita together. In

the shades of the smoking-room nothing had changed. When they sank into

the cushions of their favourite corner Miss Wheeler approached them with

an exact replica of the smile with which, four years before, she had

engaged the heart of Maskew; and when she took their order, she stood on

one leg in exactly the same position, leaning, with a hint of tiredness

that was not surprising in a young woman who habitually breathed tobacco

smoke in place of oxygen, with her hand on the curtain at the side of

their settee.

“I never see Mr. Maskew now,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t think

whatever ’as happened to all you boys, I’m sure.”

She brought them coffee, and W.G., who had scarcely spoken, but whose

knitted brows testified to the pressure of some urgent problem, said:—

“Well, how do you like it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Being on your own.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Edwin.

“I never thought you’d stick it,” W.G. confessed. “I didn’t think you

had it in you. You see, in your case there was never the least necessity

for it.”

“There was, you know—”

“I could have understood it if you’d had a regular bust-up. I should

certainly have stayed at home if the governor hadn’t booted me out. You

never had anything of that kind.”

“No . . . not exactly. But the position was the same. I had a sort of . . .

of emotional cold-douche. I was awfully sensitive about my mother.

My father and I were all wrong. We’d really nothing in common. And it’s

turned out all right. That’s the main thing.”

“You’re a quixotic ass, my son. No . . . that’s not the word, but it’s

the same sort of thing. It was really damned foolish of you.”

“It’s jolly sound to stand on your own feet. You know where you are for

the first time. It was only uncomfortable because he was really awfully

decent. He is now: but he hasn’t the faintest glimmering of my point of

view.”

“They rarely have,” said W.G. gloomily. “Still, you haven’t made such an

ass of yourself as I have.”

“Something new?”

“Yes . . . I’m married.”

“Good God!”

“It isn’t as bad as that,” W.G. chuckled. “I thought it would come as a

bit of a shock to you.”

“But why on earth—?”

“Well, you see she was awfully unhappy at home. Brute of a father. And

we simply got tired of waiting. That’s all. You must come and see us.

She always remembered your clerking in her ward. We’re living in

furnished rooms in Alvaston. It’s an amazing experience, you know,

marriage. Quite different from anything else of the kind.” In view of

W.G.’s experience in these matters Edwin was ready to take this for

granted.

“I should think it is a damned funny thing,” he said.

They parted. There was something almost pathetic to Edwin in W.G.’s hot

handclasp. He felt that W.G. was up against something far bigger than

anything that had happened to him before: a strange, momentous adventure,

yet one that was thrilling and, in a way, enviable. Once again he found

himself admiring the big man’s desperate daring. W.G. with a wife, and

probably, in a few years, children! . . . Assuredly they were all

growing old.

II

In all that summer Edwin scarcely saw a patch of living green except the

leprous plane-trees that sickened in the hospital square. The current of

his life flowed slowly through the culverts of grimy brick that led from

Lower Sparkdale to the Infirmary. He became part of the stream of dusty

humanity that set citywards and back again with the regularity of a tide.

In December he came to the end of his penance. The final examination was

fixed for the beginning of January, and before he could sit for it, he

was compelled to take a course of practical midwifery, twenty cases in

all, which compelled his residence for a couple of weeks in the

neighbourhood of the Prince’s Hospital, the institution to which this

department was attached. Matthew Boyce and he had decided a year before

that they would do this work together, and though the unusual strain of

the fortnight in Easy Row would be a doubtful preliminary to the effort

of the final examination, the two friends had always looked forward to

the experience.

The authorities of the Prince’s Hospital, lacking obstetrical wards, had

made this course the opportunity for establishing an Out-patient

Department that could deal with ten cases a week at the nominal charge of

five shillings each. The students worked in pairs, and though they could

never be sure of attending their cases together, the resident staff of

the hospital, and, if necessary, a consultant physician, were always

available in case of an emergency. Edwin and Boyce were housed in one of

the faded Georgian buildings that faced the hospital. Its lower stories,

like those of all its neighbours, were devoted to theatrical lodgings;

but a special night-bell, polished by the moist hands of forty anxious

husbands every month, communicated with the upper room in which the

resident students attempted to sleep. The house was as well known to all

the poorer people in the neighbouring warrens as were the faces pale with

sleeplessness of the students who issued from it, carrying the black bags

that were symbolical of their labours, a source of mysterious speculation

to the children of the district, and of amusement to the “professionals”

who inhabited the front rooms.

On a Monday morning in December the landlady received Edwin and Boyce and

installed them in a small room at the back of the ground-floor infested

with portraits of smiling young ladies in tights, inscribed, with the

most dashing signatures imaginable, to herself. Mrs. Meadows was

evidently very proud of these decorations and called attention to the

most blatant pair of legs by polishing the glass of their frame with her

apron.

“I hope you gentlemen will be comfortable,” she said. “Not that I doubt

it. I don’t have many complaints.” The statement was a challenge, and

implied that if there should be any complaints the lodgers might look to

themselves.

“It’s a nice fresh room,” she said, throwing open a French window that

disclosed a small patch of black earth that had once been covered with

grass but was now untenanted by any living organisms but cats and

groundsel.

“I like them to keep the window open. It takes away the smell of the

gentlemen’s disinfectant. Not but what it’s clean, I dare say.”

Edwin and Boyce would have assented in any case if it were only to

release the composite lodging-house smell that penetrated the room from

the adjoining “domestic offices,” and Mrs. Meadows’s kitchen where, it

would be imagined, turnip-tops simmered day and night upon a gas-ring.

“Then there’s a pianoforte,” she said, hesitating at the dusty portiere.

“I find that professionals like a pianoforte. It’s cheery like.”

In a little while it became apparent that the professionals liked a

pianoforte, in every one of the thirty odd houses within earshot, even if

they could not play one. From the hour of midday, when they rose, until

six o’clock, when they betook themselves to their various theatres, the

pianos of Easy Row were never silent.

“It’s no good trying to do any work in this place,” said Edwin.

“There won’t be any time, anyway,” said Boyce. “You wait till the fun

begins.”

They lunched together on steak-and-kidney pudding and turnip-tops with a

brand of bottled beer in which Mrs. Meadows showed an admirable taste,

and in the early afternoon the fun began.

From the beginning, Fate had decreed a complication by deciding that Mrs.

Hadley, back of number four, court sixteen, Granby Street, and Mrs.

Higgins over number fifty-four Rea Barn Lane, should conspire to increase

the population of North Bromwich at the same moment. Mr. Hadley and Mr.

Higgins achieved a dead heat, arriving on the doorstep together in a

dripping perspiration with messages of an equal urgency.

“This is rather rotten,” said Boyce. “Which of these ladies will you

take?”

“I’ll have Mrs. Higgins,” said Edwin. “I suppose the bag’s all right?”

The bag was right enough, though it contained very little that could do

any harm, and smelt abominably of Lysol. Mr. Higgins, still out of

breath, with beads of sweat sweeping an alluvium of metal dust into the

furrows of his cheeks, carried the bag for Edwin. For all his

exhaustion, Mr. Higgins wanted to run, and Edwin, walking with long

strides beside him, was in danger of losing his dignity by being swept

into the same degree of panic. The reflection that this would betray his

inexperience held him back.

“The nurse said very urgent, doctor,” Mr. Higgins panted.

“Yes . . . yes. You mustn’t excite yourself. It’ll be all right.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Higgins doubtfully, “you’re well up in these sort

of cases, doctor? I expect you’ve seen a lot of them?”

Edwin wished he had been able to grow a moustache for the occasion.

“Hundreds,” he said.

Mr. Higgins gave a sigh of relief. “That’s a good thing. That’s a very

good thing. You see, I’m nairvous, doctor. I lost my fairst over it,

and I don’t want to lose this one. Very young she is.”

“Is this her first?”

“Yes, doctor.”

Another bit of bad luck!

Through a maze of gritty streets they hurried, reaching, at last, a house

beside a corner “public” which a cluster of women, gossiping in their

aprons on the doorstep, proclaimed as the site of this momentous birth.

One of them snatched the black bag from Mr. Higgins. “You get away,

’Iggins, and ’ave a pint of beer quiet like. This baint no place for an

’usband. This way, doctor. Here she is, poor lamb.”

She pushed her way up the stairs, breathing heavily. Her bunchy skirts

filled the staircase, which was no wider than a loft-ladder and very

dark.

“’Ere ’e is,” she cried triumphantly, as she pushed open a matchboard

door. “’Ere ’e is. ’Ere’s the doctor. Now you won’t be long, my lover.

’E’ll ’elp you. You’ll ’elp ’er, won’t you, doctor?”

She deposited the talismanic bag triumphantly on the foot of the bed;

then she winked at Edwin: “I’ll go and keep ’Iggins out of the way,” she

said.

“I’m that glad you’ve come, doctor,” said the nurse. She was a little

shrivelled woman, with a nervous smile and her hair packed into a black

net with a wide mesh that made her whole bead sombre and forbidding. Her

lips twitched when she smiled, and Edwin, who had been counting on the

moral support of her experience, saw at once that she was even more

anxious than himself. He was soon to know that the women who acted as

professional midwives in the North Bromwich slums were usually widows

left without means, who adopted this profession with no other

qualification than a certain wealth of subjective experience, on which

they were careful to insist. The claim “I’ve had eight of them myself,

so _I_ ought to know,” did not atone for the fact that they didn’t

actually know anything at all. Mrs. Brown, the lady to whose mercies the

trustful Mr. Higgins had committed his second, was a timid specimen of

the class. Beneath her protestations of experience her soul quaked with

terror, and a hazy conviction that if anything went wrong, she, the

unregistered, would probably be committed for manslaughter, reduced her

to a state of dazed incompetence in which she heard without hearing

Edwin’s none too confident directions. She went downstairs tremulously

to bring hot water, and Edwin was left alone with his patient.

“It won’t be long, doctor, will it?” she said.

“Of course not . . . of course not,” said Edwin. He felt very much of a

fraud, for he hadn’t the least idea how long it would be. The whole

picture was moving: the patient, a girl of twenty-four or five, her

honey-coloured hair drawn back tightly from a face that was blotched

already with tears, but not ill-looking: the humility of the little

bedroom with its hired furniture and certain humble attempts at

ornamentation: pink ribbon bows upon the curtains, a ridiculous china

ornament on the mantelpiece, and brass knobs at the foot of the bedstead,

so polished that they had already become loose. No doubt Mrs. Higgins

the second had been in respectable suburban service, and these worthy

efforts were the signs of an attempt to introduce into Rea Barn Lane the

amenities of Alvaston. She lay quietly on the bed, gazing at nothing

while Edwin unpacked his bag. He did not look at her, but became

suddenly conscious that her body had given a kind of jump and that her

hands were desperately clutching a towel that Mrs. Brown had knotted to

the rail at the bottom of the bed. Then he heard the joints of the

bedstead creak. “It’s all right. Cheer up. . . . It won’t be long,” he

said.

Mrs. Brown emerged panting from the stairway with hot water. “That’s

right, my lover, that’s right. . . . That’s another one less. Now, let

the doctor have a look at you.”

A strange business. . . . It was a moment that might have been

difficult; but Edwin soon realised that the seriousness of the occasion,

the fact that this young creature’s life was veritably in his hands, made

modesty seem a thing of no account. In the eyes of this woman Edwin was

not a young man but an agency of relief from pain. In the body that pain

dominated there could be no room for blushes. Edwin, trying to summon

all his hardly learned theory to his aid in practice, was suddenly

impressed with the obligations that this confidence imposed on him. He

remembered the terms of the Hippocratic oath. Yea . . a goodly heritage!

“Is it all right, doctor?” said the anxious voice of Mrs. Brown.

“Yes, it’s all right.”

“Thank the Lord for that! You hear what the doctor says, my lover—”

“But it will be a long time yet.”

“Oh, don’t say that, doctor, don’t say that,” Mrs. Higgins wailed. “You

aren’t going to leave me?”

“It’s no good staying here now,” he said, as gently as he could. “It’s

really all right. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Can’t you help her a bit, doctor?”

Of course he couldn’t. A business of that kind would mean calling in the

house-surgeon from the Prince’s. He was determined not to be driven into

a panic, though this would have been easy enough, when he was convinced

that the case was taking a normal though inevitably lengthy course.

“I expect you’ll want me again some time this evening,” he said.

Mrs. Brown showed him downstairs. “You’re _sure_ it is all right, aren’t

you, doctor?” she said.

“Perfectly all right. You know what a first case is.”

“I’d ought to,” said Mrs. Brown proudly. “I’ve had eight myself.”

He trudged back to Easy Row, where the professionals’ pianos, tuned in

quarter-tones, were already combining to show their catholicity in

musical taste. Boyce was drowsing in an easy-chair with the Greek

Anthology open in his lap.

“Well, how’s your Mrs. Higgins?” he asked lazily.

“Oh, she’s all right. A _primip_. Is Mrs. Hadley through her little

troubles?”

“B.B.A. Born before arrival. A soft job. Saves a lot of trouble.”

“My good lady will haul us out in the middle of the night, damn her!”

said Edwin. A conventional mode of expression, for he didn’t in the

least feel like damning Mrs. Higgins. In his mind he still carried the

picture of her plain hair and blotched face: he could hear the sound of

that sudden shudder and the noise of the bedstead creaking.

The evening passed quietly. They tried to read, but found the feeling of

suspense made that impossible. No message came from Mrs. Higgins, and as

they were almost certain to be called out in the night, they went to bed

early. While they were undressing, Boyce humming softly the Liebestod

from Tristan, the bell in their bedroom rang.

“Mrs. Higgins,” said Edwin. “I’d better go and see.”

He groped his way downstairs. In the front room a party of music-hall

artistes were making a noisy supper. Before he could reach the door the

bell rang again, and when he opened it, a big man whose breath smelt of

liquor, lurched into the hall.

“Are you the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“You’re to come at once to thirty-four Greville Street. It’s the missus.

The nurse says it’s urgent.”

The nurse always said it was urgent. Boyce came downstairs grumbling.

“We’d better go together.”

“What about my friend, Mrs. Higgins?”

“Oh, damn Mrs. Higgins!” said Boyce.

It was a clear and frosty night, in which all points of light, whether of

starshine, or street-lamps, or of blue sparks crackling from the tramway

cables, shone brightly. The Greville Street husband lurched along beside

them, just sufficiently awake to show them the way through a maze of

rectangular byways to a street that lay upon the outer edge of the

district that the hospital covered. The chill clarity of the air

dispelled sleep. It was even pleasant to be walking there, for at this

time of the night the town was so empty that they might almost have been

walking over a country road.

“Here it is,” said the husband thickly.

Boyce and Edwin entered together. The front room of the house was

crowded with people who should have been in bed. They sat clustered

about a table on which stood a number of bottles from one of which the

messenger had evidently extracted his peculiar perfume. In the corner

chair, next to the window, an old woman in a lace cap had fallen asleep.

Opposite her a very dirty old man toasted his shins in front of the fire.

A strapping girl with dark, untidy hair, and an almost aggressive

physical beauty was holding forth shrilly to a group of three women who

had wandered in to drink and gossip from a neighbouring court.

“Here they are,” said the husband sullenly, “two on ’em.”

“My God! . . . Two of them? Is that all?” said the dark girl, examining

and, as it seemed, approving.

Upstairs they found a midwife of another but equally characteristic type:

a fat woman whose attention was divided between the patient in bed and

the cheerful company in the front room. On the surface she was a little

patronising, an attitude that the two students’ inexperience made it

difficult for them to resent. “I know what you doctors want,” she said,

standing with her sleeves rolled up over her red forearms. “Plenty of

hot water, that’s what you want. I’ve got some disinfectant too. I’ve

often been with the ’ospital doctors. Now we shan’t be long.”

She bustled downstairs, looking into the front room for a drink on her

way to the kitchen. Boyce, confident in the completion of his first

case, took the lead in questioning the patient, a slightly older version

of the dark sanguine girl they had seen below. Her whole attitude

towards the business, though less pathetic than that of the unforgotten

Mrs. Higgins, was equally moving. It implied such a cheerful and

courageous acceptance of life and this most uncomfortable of its

experiences. Her amazing vitality pervaded the room. It could be seen

in her masterful smile, in the grip of her red fingers on the knotted

towel, in the deep suffusion of her face. A jolly woman, built in the

mould of a fighter, who would neither take quarter nor give it. When

Boyce had examined her she smiled, disclosing a fine set of teeth, and

solemnly winked.

“Well, doctor, what about it?”

“Listen to ’er,” said the midwife, chuckling. “That’s the way to take

it!”

“Well, it’s all right, you know, but it won’t be just yet awhile.”

“My God . . . I didn’t pay the ’ospital five bob for you to tell me that.

Look ’ere, doctor, my elder sister ’ad a horrible time with her first.

’Ad to ’ave it took off ’er. Be a sport, doctor, and give us a smell of

chloroform. Come on, now! There’s two on you. . . . ’Ard-’earted

devils all you doctors are. Bain’t they, Mrs. Perkins?” She smiled at

the midwife, and then, suddenly, her face changed and she clutched at the

knotted towel. “Oh, my!” she said, and Edwin saw the veins in her neck

swell, and heard her clench her teeth.

“That’s the way, dearie. That’s the way,” said Mrs. Perkins, gritting

her own teeth in sympathy and smoothing back the hair from the patient’s

brow.

Edwin and Boyce were debating as to whether it were worth while staying

when a messenger from the hospital arrived from below to say that Mrs.

Hadley, Boyce’s patient of the afternoon, was “took worse,” and so Edwin

was left alone once more in the squalor of the patient’s room. He sat

waiting in a chair that was supposed to be easy, listening to the

conversation of the woman and her nurse. Most of it was family history

of a scandalous kind, and the manner of its expression was extremely

frank. In the course of his hospital work he had never before realised

the extraordinary contradictions of the code by which the talk of the

working-class is governed. In its mixture of delicacies and blatancies

it amazed him. Both the women were fluent gossips, and the conversation

never ceased, except in those moments of acute and sudden tension when

the patient’s hands clutched at her towel and the midwife mopped her

brow. Then, when the upstairs room was silent, a murmur of laughter and

loud voices would come up the stairs from below. In this family, at any

rate, the occasion of a birth did not lack celebration. Even the patient

was curious about what was happening downstairs. “What’s our Susan

doing?” she said from time to time.

An interminable business. As the night wore on it grew very chilly, and

Edwin shivered in his chair. The case hung fire unaccountably, and in

this, the first of many such cold vigils, he fell into a strange mood,

often to be repeated, in which the sublime influences of night and

solitude combined to purge his reflections of pettiness and showed him

what an unimaginable mystery his own life was. The patient fell into an

uneasy doze. The midwife nodded in her chair, snatching up her head with

a conscious jerk whenever it lolled over her fat bosom. The smelly

oil-lamp on the mantelpiece gave an occasional sputter when a drop of

water was sucked up into the wick. In the room below the excited talk

had petered out and only a sound of soft snoring was heard, like the

breathing of cows in a byre.

Edwin thought of many things. It seemed to him that his mind burned

clear as frosty starlight lighting forgotten memories of his childhood.

He thought of his own mother. He wondered if she had lain like the woman

on the bed on the night when he was born. He wondered if it had been in

the least like this, and whether another doctor, whose name he did not

even know, had sat by the fireplace in the little room at Halesby waiting

and seeing his own life stretched out before him in this light of

perilous clarity. He thought of St. Luke’s—of a thousand small things

that had lain submerged for years and now appeared unbidden. The

strangeness of his own experience, the elements of linked circumstance

that had combined to twist his life into its present state and make him

what he was. He thought of his father, with an unusual degree of

charity, realising that this man too was no more than a slave of the same

blind influences driven hither and thither in spite of his innate

goodwill. Edwin was ashamed to think that he had been angry with him.

In his present mood it seemed to him an unreasonable thing that one

should be angry with any human creature. Pity . . . yes, and love—but

never anger. So, like a devotee in a Tibetan lamasery, he saw his fellow

creatures, his father, himself, the midwife, and the woman on the bed,

bound helpless to the revolving wheel which is the earth. And the earth

seemed very small beneath the stars. . . .

At two o’clock in the morning the handsome girl from downstairs, who was

the patient’s sister, came softly into the room and asked the midwife if

she would like a cup of tea. The patient blinked at het with red eyes.

“How is it going, Sally?” said the sister.

“Oh, it’s all right. I suppose it’s got to be worse before it’s better,”

she said, with a laugh. “Ask the doctor if he’ll have some tea too.”

Edwin accepted gratefully. It was harsh stuff that had been standing on

the hob downstairs for some hours already. Mrs. Perkins was easily

persuaded into doctoring hers with a tablespoonful of brandy from the

bottle that is a regular constituent of the working class _layette_. The

sister sat at the foot of the bed and stared lazily at Edwin.

“You look tired, doctor,” she said.

Edwin admitted that he had had a biggish day. “You ought to get a bit of

sleep,” said the dark girl. “Sorry there bain’t no spare beds in the

house; but you can turn in with me if you like.”

She looked so daringly provocative that Edwin had a horrible suspicion

that she meant it; but it was evidently the sort of joke that Greville

Street understood, for the patient on the bed cried, “Ethel, you are a

cough-drop, you’ll make the doctor blush,” and Mrs. Perkins rocked with

laughter until she spilt her tea.

“Well, why should you have all the fun, Sally? It isn’t every day we get

a nice young man in the house.”

“_Fun_ . . .,” said the patient wryly. “You’ll know all about this sort

of fun some day.”

“Not just yet, thank you,” said Ethel. “I can look after myself better

than that.”

She went downstairs again. Edwin was beginning to feel a little unhappy

about the case. To his inexperience the long delay seemed abnormal, and

his imagination presented to him a series of textbook disasters. While

he stood doubting whether he should give himself away by sending to the

hospital for the house-surgeon, he was startled by a sudden cry. Now, at

any rate, there was no doubt about it. At this rate, he thought, it

could not be long. But it took three hours: three hours of desperate

struggle in which he could give no help, though the thing was so fierce

that he found his sympathies snatched up into it: so that he held his

breath and clenched his hands and felt his own temples bursting with

effort. There had been no experience like it. As he sat at the bedside

with the patient’s fingers clasped about his wrist, he had the feeling

that this woman, who had joked with him half an hour before with the dry,

courageous cynicism that colours the philosophy of her class, was not an

individual human soul any longer; not a woman at all, but a mass of

straining, tortured muscle animated by the first force of life. So it

had been since the first woman cried out in the night under the tangles

of Caucasus: so it would always be: the most sublime and terrible of all

physical experiences, a state of sheer physical possession, more powerful

than any spiritual ecstasy imaginable.

At five o’clock the baby was born—a boy, and Mrs. Perkins, standing by

with a skein of twisted thread in her hand, danced with nervousness.

Edwin’s hands also trembled; but his heart was lightened with a sudden

relief, as though the labour had been his and his also the

accomplishment. A palpably ridiculous state of mind . . . but it took

him like that.

The dark girl put her head in at the door. She was very pale now. Had

the whole household shared in these physical throes?

“Is it all right?” she said.

“Yes . . . it’s a boy. A beautiful boy.”

“Hallo, Eth,” said a quiet voice from the bed. “Go and tell Jim.”

It was the first word the patient had spoken.

A moment later she opened her eyes and stared in a dazed way at Edwin.

She smiled. She was a woman again—an extraordinarily chastened woman—and

somehow strangely beautiful. “Thank you, doctor,” she said. “You ’elped

me ever so. Did I be’ave very bad, Mrs. Perkins?”

“Bad? You be’aved fine,” said Mrs. Perkins, wrapping the baby in a

blanket and putting it in the fender.

The patient gave a deep sigh and seemed to relapse into her thoughts.

From time to time she would say a couple of words in a weak-contented

voice.

“’As Eth told Jim?” she asked several times, and then: “What’ll mother

think?”

“You be quiet, my lover,” said the midwife. “Don’t you disturb yourself

with talking.”

At last she said suddenly: “I’m better now,” and asked if she might see

the baby. Mrs. Perkins unwrapped the blanket from a red and frowning

forehead and showed it to her. She touched its cheek with her finger and

smiled miraculously. The action seemed to bring her submerged

personality to the surface again.

“Ugly little b—,” she said, with a happy laugh. “Looks as if ’e’d been

on the booze.”

“I shan’t forget the way you ’elped me, doctor,” she said again, when

Edwin left the house. Although it was still dark, the workmen’s trams

had begun to run, and lights appeared in the lower windows of public

houses where hot soup was on sale. When he entered the bedroom of their

lodging, Edwin found, and envied, Boyce sleeping stertorously with the

blankets pulled over his head and an overcoat on his feet. Three hours

later, when the landlady came to call them, he woke, and explained to

Edwin the excitements of his own night: how, in the middle of it, Edwin’s

own Mrs. Higgins had called him out (“decent little woman,” said Boyce),

and how, from sixteen Granby Street, he had been called to a case at the

other end of the district in a common lodging-house kept by a Pole.

“No hot water . . . no soap . . . nothing but a bucket that they’d used

for scrubbing the floors. Not even a bed! Just a straw mattress with a

couple of grey blankets on it. Two other children and a man in the room.

And crawling! I’ve stripped and had a rub down with a towel, but I feel

as if they were all over me now. You couldn’t see them on the grey

blankets, you know.”

“Sounds dismal. Had they a capable woman? My Mrs. Perkins wasn’t up to

much.”

“Midwife? My dear chap, they didn’t run to luxuries like that. It is a

bit thick, isn’t it? when a modern surgeon-accoucheur is reduced to

washing the baby with his own soap. As a matter of fact, it was an

extraordinarily interesting performance. The thing felt as if it would

break. But seriously, you know, this sort of thing teaches you a bit

about twentieth century housing.”

“Yes, it’s pretty bad,” said Edwin. “There’s one thing about it: working

all night like this gives you a terrific appetite.”

III

For a few days the extreme novelty of their adventure sustained them, but

after five nights of broken or obliterated sleep, the presence of the

night-bell at their bedside stood for a symbol of perpetual unrest.

Their days were spent in visiting patients whom they had attended. All

examination work was made impossible by the fatigue that follows want of

sleep, and the fact that they were committed to a kind of enforced

idleness made their sojourn in Easy Row almost as much a holiday as the

great summer days at Overton.

Both of them found that they could not even read for pleasure; and so the

undisturbed hours of the day were passed in talk and in music. Mrs.

Meadows’s piano had suffered under the fingers and thumbs of countless

guests; but Edwin and Boyce shared the cost of a tuner and worked

together through the Wagner scores and the subtler treasures that lay

hidden in the songs of Hugo Wolf. They had few visitors, for this

community of taste had already begun to isolate them from their student

friends; but Boyce’s father, the poet, often came to have tea with them

and to share their music, a man as versatile and sanguine as Meredith’s

Roy Richmond, and yet so versed in every variety of knowledge and so

reverent of beauty that Edwin felt there was no such company in the

world: one who took all beauty and knowledge for his province.

One afternoon a message came to the house in Easy Row from the hospital,

and as Mrs. Meadows was engaged in some obscure adjustment of her toilet,

Edwin went to the door to receive it. He took the message, and was

returning when another figure appeared on the path. It was that of a

young girl of his own age, or, perhaps, a little older, and she hurried

forward when she saw that he was closing the door. He waited.

“You weren’t going to shut me out, were you?” she said. She smiled, and

Edwin saw that her eyes were of a warm hazel such as sunshine reveals in

peaty river water. Before them Edwin found himself blushing.

“No, indeed,” he said. “Do you want Mrs. Meadows? I’ll go and tell

her.”

“Mrs. Meadows? This is thirty-seven, isn’t it?”

“Yes . . . thirty-seven.”

“I’ve come to see my friend, Miss Latham. She’s lodging here.”

“I’m so sorry. Of course. I expect she’s in the front room.”

“Thank you.” She spoke very demurely. He stood aside to let her pass

and with her a faint fragrance of white rose.

By this time Miss Latham herself had emerged, a blowsy woman who was

taking a small part in the Christmas pantomime at the theatre, and had

introduced herself to the friends through Mrs. Meadows a few days before.

“Why, Rosie, my dear, isn’t this just sweet of you? Fancy finding you on

the step flirting with Doctor . . . Dr. Ingleby! That’s right, isn’t

it?”

“Oh, what a shame, Hetty! We weren’t, were we?” Ingenuously she turned

her eyes on Edwin again. Were they hazel? Perhaps they were almost

amber. A matter of light . . .

“No . . . I’m afraid we weren’t. She didn’t give us time.”

“Two doctors in the house! Think of that!” said Miss Hetty Latham, whose

conversation habitually ran from one note of exclamation to another.

“Imagine how safe we feel, Rosie!”

And Rosie surveyed Edwin seriously.

“Aren’t you awfully young?”

“I suppose I am rather. I’m not qualified yet. But I expect to be next

week.”

“Then you must be awfully clever too—”

“What on earth are we all doing talking here in the passage? Come along

in and have a cup of tea,” said Miss Latham boisterously.

“As you two are such great friends already, I suppose it’s waste of time

introducing you.”

“Really—” Edwin protested.

“Very well, then. Dr. Ingleby: Miss Rosie Beaucaire. I never get the

order right. You can take it or leave it. May he come to tea with us,

Rosie?”

“Of course he may.”

“Come along then, both of you . . .”

CHAPTER X

WHITE ROSES

I

IT was the first of many amazing adventures, to which Matthew Boyce

supplied a calculated and cynical commentary, watching Edwin as though he

were the subject of a physiological experiment—as indeed he was. But

lack of sympathy in one quarter was scarcely likely to worry Edwin when

he had found it so overwhelmingly in another. In a few days Miss Latham,

the most tactful of duennas, had withdrawn from the scene. On the first

night of their acquaintance Edwin had taken the hazel-eyed Miss Beaucaire

back to her lodgings in Prince Albert’s Place at the back of the theatre,

where the pantomime was in rehearsal. All the way through the squalid,

lamp-lit streets they had talked of things that were entrancing, simply

because they had to do with her. Edwin thought that no companionship in

all his life had been so natural and so easy; and this was not

surprising, for the young woman, in addition to physical charms that were

armoury enough in themselves, had developed the faculty commonly acquired

by ladies of her profession, of devoting herself entirely to the

companion of the moment and giving the impression that she had never

known, and would never want to know, any other person in the world.

Rosie was only twenty-four, but had given at least the last third of her

life to studying male of the species of which Edwin was a peculiarly

ingenuous example. At the door of her lodgings she had conjured an

atmosphere of mysterious intimacy. Speaking in a voice that was low and

of a thrilling tenderness, she had said:—

“I mustn’t ask you to come in to-day. It’s a dreadful shame; but mother

has one of her headaches, and the noise might disturb her. You

understand, don’t you?”

Edwin, with a vision of an elderly and delicate version of Rosie herself

lying on a sofa with a handkerchief dipped in eau-de-cologne over her

eyes, assented. He thought it a very beautiful consideration on Rosie’s

part. A small black and tan terrier came dancing into the hall with a

friendly yelp.

“Be quiet, Imp . . . oh, _do_ be quiet! Isn’t he a duck?” she said.

“Now, I must really go.” She held out her hand. A moment before she had

taken off her glove, and Edwin, who had scarcely ever touched the hand of

a woman before, thought that her fingers were the softest and most

delicate things on earth.

“You’ll come and have tea with us, won’t you? I should like you to meet

mother.”

“Of course, I’d like to. When?”

“Oh . . . quite soon. Any day this week. Promise me you won’t forget . . .”

As if he could ever forget! Her exquisite humility quite bowled

him over. When she had closed the door behind her he walked away dazed

with an unfamiliar emotion that made the mean street, with its uniform

row of mid-Victorian houses on one side, and on the other the blank wall

of the theatre and huge, sooty warehouses, seem a holy place. The

Halesby Road, with its streaming traffic, shared the same

transfiguration. The speed and strength of the horses enthralled him;

the faces of men and women walking homeward from their work in the city

seemed triumphantly happy; the smooth wood-pavement, polished by the

rolling of innumerable wheels, shone like a street in heaven. It seemed

to Edwin as if the whole world had somehow been uplifted by a secret

knowledge of his own experience. A night of wonder. . . .

“Well, what is the young woman’s name?” asked Boyce, when he returned to

Easy Row.

“Beaucaire. She’s principal girl in the pantomime at the Queen’s.”

“H’m. . . . Attractive little piece. But she can’t be up to much if

she’s a pal of the Latham woman’s. I’ve seen her there several times.”

“Oh, that means nothing,” Edwin explained. “I don’t think she’s at all

keen on her. They acted together somewhere years ago. You can’t drop

people when they’ve been kind to you. I don’t think she’s at all keen on

her. She’s quite all right. Lives with her mother in Prince Albert’s

Place.”

“Pretty rotten sort of street. Got a bad name, you know. I believe, as

a matter of fact, it’s considered rather the thing to lug an official

mother about with you.”

“You don’t mean—” Edwin began, going very white.

“Of course I don’t. I don’t know anything about her. Only, for God’s

sake, take care of yourself. A young woman of that kind generally has a

fair share of experience, and you . . . well, you _haven’t_ exactly.

Besides, it’s just as well to remember that the final’s coming off in ten

days.”

The less said about the final the better.

“She isn’t a chorus girl, you know. If you’d met her I think you’d admit

that she’s a lady. She told me that her mother—”

Boyce chuckled.

“As a matter of fact,” said Edwin, clinching the argument, “her father

was a country parson in low circumstances.”

“I understand they usually are,” said Boyce with a yawn.

Their night was complicated by two new cases. Next morning they appeared

at breakfast with slightly ruffled tempers. They sat at opposite ends of

the table, Edwin reading, without understanding, one of Oldham’s caustic

critiques on a symphony concert the night before, his friend glued to his

beloved anthology.

“What did you say her name was?” said Boyce, apropos of nothing. “Rosie,

wasn’t it?”

Edwin grunted.

“Have you ever sampled the _Sortes Virgilianae_? I sometimes try that

trick with the anthology. There are plenty of generalisations, so it

often comes off rather well. How’s this for last night?”

“H’m—”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, fire away.”

Boyce quoted:—

Ή τὰ ῥόδα, ῥοδόεσσαν ἔχες χαῤίν, ἀλλὶ τί πωλἔς

σαντήν, ἢ τἃ ῥόδα, ἠὲ συναμφοτερα;

“Rather neat, isn’t it? While I was hanging about that case in Craven

Street, I made a translation for you. Tell me what you think of it.

‘You of the roses, rosy-fair,

Sweet maiden, tell me whether

You or the roses are your ware,

Or both of them together.’”

“Damned rotten, anyway,” said Edwin. “Maiden’s the wrong word . . .”

It comforted him, none the less, to find that Rosie did not revisit Miss

Latham, though this lady pointedly rallied him on the doorstep,

suggesting that his intimacy with Miss Beaucaire had reached a stage to

which he had not yet attained but aspired devoutly. The work at Easy

Row, that had slackened for a few days, came on with a rush; and though

the image of this delicate creature now filled his nightly vigils, being

even more precious for the squalid surroundings in which it came to him,

he found it impossible to visit the lodgings in Prince Albert’s Place, to

which his thoughts with tantalising regularity returned.

The flood of work held until their fortnight was out, leaving them both

washed-out and irritable. To speak frankly, the last few days of their

comradeship had not been a success. Although Edwin made it clear that he

didn’t wish to discuss the affair of Rosie with Boyce, the incident of

the Greek epigram rankled. He found it impossible to take the matter

lightly, feeling that it was necessary to convince himself at all costs

that he wasn’t making a fool of himself, and finding it difficult to do

so.

On the Monday next before the final examination he found himself a free

man. It was a questionable liberty, for its enjoyment really depended on

the result of this ordeal. He had definitely severed his connection with

Dr. Harris, intending to devote all his spare time at Easy Row and the

week after to preparations for the exam. A big gamble. . . . Ten pounds

and a few shillings was all he possessed in the world, except a

problematical degree in medicine which, in another seven days, might make

him certain of four guineas a week as long as he chose to work. The

margin seemed so small and the chance so desperate that he burned the

last of his boats, selling his microscope to a pawnbroker for twelve

pounds. Twenty-three pounds. . . . One could do a lot with twenty-three

pounds . . . supposing nothing went wrong.

He found a cheap bed-sitting-room in a quiet street at the back of the

University buildings. Here, and in the museums, he would be able to put

in a week of intensive cramming. He found that he couldn’t do it. He

had reckoned without the unreasonable quantity of Rosie. The first night

on which he settled down to read in his new lodging the thought of her

would not let him rest. It was ridiculous. What he wanted was a hard

walk. He would go up to Alvaston and rout Boyce out of his study for a

tramp in the moonlight towards Southfield Beeches. He would apologise to

Boyce for his bearishness during the last few days. Hadn’t they assured

each other on one of their ambrosial evenings at Overton more than a year

ago, that the friendship of two men was a more precious and lasting

experience than anything that the love of a woman could give? The whole

thing was just the result of physical staleness: a symptom of the

monotonous fatigue of the last year. He was going to get rid of it at

all costs. He turned out the gas and went downstairs.

It was a discouraging night. A soft winter drizzle had set in from the

West, and in the jaded Halesby Road nebulous street lamps were reflected

in a layer of black slime that covered the wood-pavement. The shop

windows were misted with rain, and the few people who had ventured out

into the street trod carefully as though they were afraid of slipping. A

brutal night if ever there was one. Plodding up the street with the rain

in his face he found that he was passing the end of Prince Albert’s

Place. He passed it by twenty paces, and then, almost against his will,

turned round again. It was no good. There she was, for certain, within

forty yards of him. If he were to walk along the road on the opposite

side under the blank walls of the warehouses, he would be able to see the

very room that held her exquisiteness. He did so. There was a light in

the front room of the lower story, but the blinds were down, and he could

not see any one inside. He crossed the road boldly and stood for a

moment on the doorstep. It gave him a peculiar stab of happiness to feel

so near her. He railed against the combination of shyness and convention

that held him; for if he were to do the thing that was reasonable and

downright, he would have walked straight into the house and told her the

thousand things that choked his heart—he would have kissed her soft hands

and gazed into her shy, adorable eyes. Yes, he would have kissed her

eyes too. No doubt it would rather have taken the mother’s breath away.

Probably Rosie had never given him another thought since he left her on

the doorstep. That was the funny part of it. He laughed at himself, and

the sound of his laugh must somehow have penetrated the hall, for the

black and tan terrier barked shrilly. “Really, I’m off my head, you

know,” he said to himself, and wandered off again into the wet streets,

walking, until the small hours, those unimaginable slums in which his

labours of the last fortnight had lain. “God . . . it’s ridiculous!” he

thought, “but a man can’t help falling in love.” It seemed to him that

the phantom of Dorothy Powys regarded him seriously.

II

Next afternoon he presented himself at Prince Albert’s Place. A landlady

who might well have been Mrs. Meadows’s sister took in his card, and

after a little buzz of conversation that might have been explained in a

dozen sinister ways, he was admitted to the little room, whose lighted

windows he had surveyed the night before. Rosie came forward to meet

him. Once again, trembling, he took her hand. He even fancied—divine

flattery!—that she blushed.

“This is my friend Dr. Ingleby, mother,” she said.

“Very pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Beaucaire. “Won’t you

come and sit over here?”

In the shadow of Mrs. Beaucaire Edwin took his seat. She was a large

woman with a husky voice and a big, dissipated face that had once been

handsome. If she had any place in the scheme of things it was surely as

a foil to the fragile grace of her daughter. Rosie, with an occasional

sideways glance, was busy talking to a little man with a blue shaven chin

and an immense mobile mouth, who looked like a bookie.

“I suppose you know Mr. Flood?” said Mrs. Beaucaire.

Edwin confessed that he did not.

“_The_ Mr. Flood, you know. Bertie, this is Mr. Ingleby. . . . I beg

your pardon, _Dr._ Ingleby,” and the great comedian shook hands with

Edwin and hoped he was well.

The atmosphere of the lodgings was very easy and familiar. Bertie Flood,

the Mirth-maker of Three Continents, as the newspapers described him,

devoted himself in an easy paternal manner to Rosie. It became apparent

to Edwin, overshadowed by the bulk and impressiveness of Mrs. Beaucaire,

that whenever Mr. Flood could make an opportunity of handling Rosie, he

did so, and also that Rosie did not in any way resent the process. It

even seemed to him that she invited Mr. Flood’s attentions.

“We’re very unconventional people, you know, Dr. Ingleby—quite Bohemian,”

said Mrs. Beaucaire in a thick voice.

Edwin agreed that the relation was delightful. It was only by an effort

of concentration that he could hear what the mother was saying. All the

time his eyes were on Rosie, so divinely fragile in her white muslin

blouse. He shuddered when Bertie Flood touched her. Nothing but the

delightful innocence of the girl could have induced her to suffer the

presence of this satyr. And yet it seemed to him that she was doing all

that she could to please him. . . .

“Yes, my poor husband: the vicar I always call him—habit, you know—had a

small parish in the North of England. I have a son in the church too.

Both he and Rosie really take after the father.”

“Yes. . . . Exactly,” said Edwin. In that moment Rosie had smiled at

him, and the smile was enough. God, what a woman!

“The vicar came from a very old family. In the North it is recognised,

but in a place like North Bromwich it is very difficult for us to meet

the right sort of people. I have to be very careful for Rosie’s sake.

The child is so trusting. I was so glad, you know, when she told me that

she had met you at Miss Latham’s. One feels so safe with a doctor.

You’ll be able to look after her a bit . . . see that she don’t get too

tired. Pantomime is very tiring, you know. I myself suffer agonies from

indigestion. What with that and my headaches, I’m afraid I’m a poor

companion for her. As I say, both the children take after the dear

vicar. Rosie isn’t a bit like me.”

“No,” said Edwin, still dazed by the memory of her smile; but, as he

spoke, his eyes met those of Mrs. Beaucaire, and he saw to his amazement

that they were really the eyes of Rosie, that her discoloured nose had

once been of the same shape as her daughter’s, that the sagging, sensual

mouth was in fact a degraded version of Rosie’s too. It was a

revelation, blasphemous but prophetic. He would not consider it. He

dared not look at her.

A moment later Bertie Flood left them. Tea wasn’t much in his line, he

said, and his complexion confirmed the assertion. Mrs. Beaucaire saw him

to the door. Edwin and Rosie were alone.

It was a wonderful minute. He felt that she could never seem more

beautiful, more delicate, more exquisite than at this moment standing in

her pale loveliness against the grimy lodging-house wallpaper, with her

hands clasped before her.

“I had to come,” he said.

“I had been expecting you. I’m awfully glad you found time.”

Found time! . . . He wanted to tell her of his strange adventure of the

night before: how he had stood in the dripping rain beneath her window,

hungry for the sight of her, unsatisfied. She stood as though she would

be glad to listen; but there was no time. Mrs. Beaucaire, after a noisy

and pointed demonstration in the hall, re-entered. It seemed that there

was nothing left for him but to take his departure.

“Surely you’re not going so soon?” she said.

And he stayed. It was all delightfully intimate and domestic. These

people seemed to possess the rare faculty of putting a visitor as shy as

Edwin at his ease. Mrs. Beaucaire did most of the talking, enlarging on

Rosie’s devotion to the parson brother, regretting that circumstance, and

possibly the unreasonable prejudice of country people against theatrical

connections, had deprived him of the family living: and Rosie listened

quietly, more compelling in her demure silences than Mrs. Beaucaire at

her most impressive.

Once or twice in the afternoon that lady tactfully left them, returning,

each time with a renewed vigour and a scent that suggested the

combination of eau-de-cologne and brandy. These solitary moments were

very precious to Edwin. Neither of them spoke more than a few words, but

the air between them seemed charged with emotion. It was six o’clock

when he left Prince Albert’s Place.

“You won’t forget us, will you?” said Mrs. Beaucaire with enthusiasm.

“It will be so nice for Rosie to have some one to take her to rehearsal.

I don’t like her mixing with the boys in the company. It isn’t the

thing. And we don’t happen to have any really nice friends in the

Midlands. In the North it would have been quite different.”

A delirious week slipped by. In spite of every resolution Edwin had

found it impossible to work. His new lodging was not inspiring; but this

was only one of the excuses that he invented to salve his conscience. He

knew the real reason for this divine, unreasonable restlessness. Even if

it were to wreck his chances in the final examination it could not be

avoided, and there was no reason why it should be excused. He knew that

he was in love, and before this unquestionable miracle he abased himself.

Mrs. Beaucaire, now satisfied that she could indulge a “headache” and

take to her bed as often as she chose, did not question his presence at

Prince Albert’s Place: she was even ready on occasion to treat it with a

mild facetiousness. Rosie, who lapped up adoration as naturally as a

kitten takes to milk, treated it as a matter of course. Edwin rather

wished that she wouldn’t take as a matter of course the most wonderful

thing in the world. There was a passivity in her acquiescence that

filled him with a fear that she was used to this sort of thing or even a

little bored by it. She mopped up his devotions with an ease that would

have been disconcerting if he had not always been bemused by her beauty.

Surely it was enough that she should be beautiful!

In the morning—Mrs. Beaucaire always had a headache of another kind next

day—Edwin would escort Rosie to her rehearsal at the theatre. He became

familiar with the frowsty box in which the lame stage-doorkeeper sat like

an obscene spider guarding the baize-covered board on which the company’s

letters were kept. The man came to know him and would pass him in

through the swinging doors with a peculiarly evil leer. Sometimes, at

the stage door they would become involved in a mass of patchouli-scented

chorus, and Edwin would thrill at the dignity and refinement with which

Rosie, in her white fox furs, would slip through this vulgar tumult.

So to the stage with its vast cobwebbed walls, its huge echoes and the

mysterious darkness of the flies, where looped ropes and grimy festoons

of forgotten scenery hung still as seaweed in a deep sea. There, in the

sour and characteristic odour of an empty stage, Edwin would wait for her

in a little alcove of the whitewashed wall in which iron cleats were

piled, and the unmeaning murmur of the rehearsal would come to him

mingled with the shrill voice of the producer, who ended every sentence

with the words “my dear,” or “old boy,” and the noise of the carpenter

hammering wood in the flies. His original acquaintance, Miss Latham,

discreetly avoided him, but the comedian, Bertie Flood, seemed inclined

to be familiar. One morning he dragged Edwin off to his dressing room

for a smoke. He sat with his legs on either side of a chair, his

fawn-coloured bowler on the back of his head, looking more than ever like

a bookie.

“Well, old boy,” he said, “how goes it? How’s the little Beaucaire?”

“She’s all right, as far as I know,” said Edwin, who was inclined to

resent the description.

“Ma had any headaches lately? I know what ma’s headaches will end in.

Cirrhosis of the liver. You’re a doctor, aren’t you? Well, I know all

about that. Had it myself. Just realised in time that it didn’t pay.

Now I never touch anything but gin. Do you want a word of advice?”

Edwin thanked him.

“May seem funny from a chap that gets two hundred a week for making a

damn fool of himself.”

“Not at all,” said Edwin politely.

“Well, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go easy in that direction. Treat

it as a business proposition. Ma’s a bad old woman . . . only don’t tell

her I said so. You see I’m a friend of the family. Dear little girl,

Rosie, too. _Verbus Satienti_—I always let ’em think I was at

Oxford—Good for business.”

It was rather disturbing; for though it was no news to Edwin that Mrs.

Beaucaire’s headaches were euphemistic, the fact had done no more than

contribute to the ideal qualities with which he had invested her

daughter. There was something romantic as well as pitiful in the idea of

Rosie’s contrasting innocence: the rose that has its roots in foulness is

not less a rose. It had even seemed to him that the complete collapse of

Mrs. Beaucaire might throw Rosie into his arms: a situation that would be

full of romantic and tender possibilities; and the girl’s inimitably

virginal air was enough to convince him that Bertie Flood’s other

suggestions were no more than the natural products of a mind degraded by

the atmosphere of the music-hall. He was convinced too that he had no

cause for jealousy. Ever since he had first visited her, Rosie had never

spent more than a few hours of daylight out of his sight.

On the last day of the week before the examination his confidence

suffered something of a shock. It was a raw winter morning, but he had

set his heart on taking her into his own hill-country, and she, with her

usual sweet submission, but without a hint of enthusiasm, had consented.

He had planned to avoid the Halesby side of the range and to approach it

from the southern escarpment. Early in the morning he paid a visit to

Parkinson’s, the florist’s, in the Arcade, where he bought a bunch of

pale, exotic roses: white roses, that should match her own sweetness and

fragility. Once she had expressed a general liking for flowers, and

since then it had been his delight to give them to her. She mopped up

his flowers and his passion with the same dreamy passivity.

From the corner of the Place he saw a weedy, black-coated figure in front

of Number Ten; and as he approached, the figure entered and the door

closed behind him. Edwin wondered vaguely if it might be the parson

brother. The landlady opened the door in a flurry. It almost seemed as

if she wanted to conceal something.

“I don’t think Miss Beaucaire can see you for a bit,” she said. “Won’t

you call later in the morning?”

He told her that he would wait, as they had an appointment, and a train

to catch.

“Then will you kindly wait in my room. You mustn’t take any notice of

the state it’s in,” she said, still on the defensive.

The state of the landlady’s room was not inspiriting. On a dirty table

cloth lay the remains of last night’s supper. On the window sill stood a

chevaux de frise of empty brandy bottles that Edwin couldn’t help

associating with Mrs. Beaucaire. The arm-chairs, covered with dirty

chintz overalls that suggested a layer of more ancient dirt beneath, were

not inviting. He preferred to stand. The house was as quiet and

secretive as usual; but from the next room he heard an irritating rumour

of voices. One of the voices, he could have sworn, was Rosie’s. A

little later he heard a laugh, and the suspicion became a disquieting

certainty, for the laugh was one that he knew well—with a difference. It

was as if Mrs. Beaucaire had laughed with Rosie’s voice. He found it

difficult to restrain himself from bursting into the room and settling

the matter once and for all. Again the laugh—and then a long silence.

He heard steps in the passage, a whispered conversation with the

landlady, and then Rosie came in to him, flushed, and with her fair hair

disordered. He could not speak. He only gave her the roses.

“Thank you, Eddie,” she said, scarcely noticing them. Her lips were

parted and her eyes shone with excitement. She had never seemed to him

more beautiful, but there was something frightening in her beauty.

“Whatever is the matter with you?” she said. “Why do you look so

serious?”

“Who was your visitor?”

“Oh, that’s it, is it? You silly boy! You surely don’t mean to say

you’re jealous?”

“Please tell me—”

“It was only a priest. I had to make my confession.”

“A priest? I thought your people belonged to the Church of England.”

“That doesn’t prevent me from being a Catholic. It’s much better for

professional girls to be Catholics. They look after you when you’re on

the road.”

He could not say any more about it. It seemed to him that her eyes were

anxious as though she were not quite sure how much he had heard.

“You believe me, don’t you?” She spoke in a frightened whisper.

“Of course I do. We’ve just time for our train. You are coming, aren’t

you?”

She said: “Of course I am,” and ran upstairs singing to put her hat on.

The roses lay neglected on the sideboard where she had placed them. In

five minutes she returned, thoroughly dressed for her new role of country

girl with brogued shoes and a short skirt of Harris tweed.

“I’m ready,” she said gaily.

It was a wonderful day. They walked together under dull skies that made

the berries in the hedgerows and the waning fires of autumn glow more

brightly, and even ministered to the girl’s own beauty. The cool air and

the walking made her cheeks glow with a colour that was natural and

therefore unusual. Edwin was so entranced with her companionship that he

forgot his anxiousness of the morning; so lost in the amazing beauty of

her hazel eyes and her cheek’s soft contour that he did not notice that

she was limping. Halfway to the summit of the hills she stopped, gave a

little sigh, and sat down on the bank of a hedge.

“I’m awfully sorry, Eddie. My foot hurts. I think this shoe’s too

tight.”

“They look simply splendid.”

“I know. I only bought them yesterday—just specially for to-day.”

“But it’s ridiculous to go for a long walk in new shoes!”

“Do you mind if I take them off for a minute?”

“Of course not. Let me undo the laces.”

He knelt at her feet. It was a wonderful and thrilling experience to

loosen the laces, to feel her small feet in their smooth silk stockings.

His hands trembled.

“I wish you wouldn’t touch my feet. I’m awfully sorry: it’s one of the

things I can’t bear. You don’t mind, do you?”

“You mustn’t blame me. They’re so beautiful.”

She smiled. Her modesty delighted him.

Sitting there together, so miraculously alone, he began to talk about his

future. “I shan’t see you for a whole week. It will be unbearable. But

when the exam. is over and I’m qualified it will be such a relief. I

shall feel able to say the things that I want to say to you.”

For a long time she was silent. Then she said: “What are you expecting

to do?”

“I think I shall go in for one of the services. What do you think of the

Indian Medical? It would be wonderful to see India. I’ve always thought

that I should like to know something of the world. I think it’s a good

life. Women generally love it. What do you think about it?”

“I should think it would be rather nice. But wouldn’t it be awfully hot?

I’ve known one or two boys in the Indian Army. There’s lots of dancing

and that sort of thing, isn’t there?”

He laughed. Dancing wasn’t his strong point, as Professor Beagle could

have told her, and in any case India didn’t mean dancing to him. She did

not seem at all anxious to pursue the subject.

“I think we could walk back to the hotel now,” she said. “I’m simply

starving.” They walked down the hill together, almost in silence. When

they reached the hotel, she disappeared in the company of the barmaid,

leaving Edwin to wait for her in the coffee-room. He almost resented her

absence. He felt that he couldn’t spare her for a moment. Waiting at

the table he picked up a week-old copy of the _North Bromwich Courier_.

Gazing idly at the front page, he caught sight of his own name. It was

the announcement of a wedding.

INGLEBY: FELLOWS. On the tenth of December, at the Parish Church,

Halesby, John Ingleby to Julia, elder daughter of the late Joseph

Fellows, of Mawne, Staffs.

He was overwhelmed with a sudden indescribable emotion that was neither

jealousy, anger, nor shame, but curiously near to all three. He sat

bewildered, with the paper in front of him. Rosie returned to find him

blankly staring.

“Why, what’s the matter with you? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

“Yes. . . . I think I have. It’s nothing, really. Nothing at all.”

He drank more than he need have done of a villainous wine that was

labelled _Château Margaux_, but had probably been pressed on the hot

hill-sides of Oran. In the train, on the way home, he felt flushed and

sleepy, but, all the time, divinely conscious of the warmth and softness

of Rosie sitting beside him. They were alone in the first-class

carriage. “I’m sleepy too,” she said. He drew her gently to his side,

and she rested, content, with her head on his shoulder. In the wonder of

this he forgot the newspaper and its staggering contents. As they neared

North Bromwich she stood up in front of the mirror to arrange her hair,

and Edwin, pulling himself together, saw that his blue coat was floured

with a fine bloom of powder.

She still found it difficult to walk, and so they drove in a hansom to

Prince Albert’s Place, very grimy and sinister in the dusk.

“You needn’t ring,” she said, taking out a latchkey and showing him into

the narrow hall. “Let’s be very quiet, so as not to disturb mother.”

“I don’t think I’ll come in,” he said. He knew that he must make an end

somewhere.

“Not even to be thanked? I’ve enjoyed myself most awfully.”

She stood before him in the gloom of the hall as though she were waiting

for something. It felt as if the dark space between them must break into

flame. Their lips met.

“Good God! . . . how wonderful you are!” he said.

“Next week,” she whispered.

III

Edwin had arranged to spend the following day with the Boyces at their

house in Alvaston. He found it difficult to contain himself, for the

delicious memory of their parting the night before swamped his efforts at

conversation with the persistency of waves that follow one another in a

rising tide. It seemed to him impossible that his state should not be

evident to the whole household, and particularly to Matthew, who knew him

so well.

In the afternoon, when they sat smoking together in Boyce’s study at the

top of the house, he felt that he was on the brink of a confession. The

only thing that restrained him from it was the memory of the epigram and

of his friend’s translation. He felt in his bones that Boyce would not

be sympathetic and though his infatuation suggested that he wouldn’t much

care whether Boyce were sympathetic, or suspicious, an intuitive dread of

suspicion and its possible effects on his own reason made him hold his

tongue. It was in the nature of Boyce, who didn’t happen, for the

moment, to be in love, to be critical, to sweep away Rosie’s perfections

in a generalisation: and the appeal of a generalisation to the mind of

youth is so strong that Edwin was afraid to hear it. Somewhere in his

submerged reason he admitted that Boyce’s judgment on the matter would

probably be sound, and reason was the last tribunal in the world before

which he wished this exceptional case to be presented. An unsatisfactory

day. For the first time in their lives, the relations of the two friends

were indefinitely strained.

He left Alvaston early in the evening. On his way to his lodging he

passed the gloomy entrance to Prince Albert’s Place. It would have been

easy, so easy, to call at Number Ten, but he had determined, once and for

all, that the examination week should be free from distractions, and

pride in his own strength of mind held him to his course, though he

realised, almost gladly, that even if he were master of his feet he could

not control his thoughts. He wondered if he would dream of her . . .

Next day the rigours of the final examination overtook him. This was the

supreme ordeal in which every moment of his professional life from the

day when he first entered the dissecting room to the night of the last

midwifery case, would stand the test of scrutiny. He was not exactly

afraid of it. He knew that his knowledge and technical skill were at

least above the average of his year, and felt that with ordinary luck he

would be among the first four of a field of twelve. The year was not one

of exceptional brilliance, and comparisons were therefore in his favour.

On the first day, in the _viva-voce_ examination on surgery, he did, for

one moment, lose his head, but when once he had pulled himself together

and accustomed himself to the conditions of the test, he settled down

into a state of fatalistic equanimity, taking the rough with the smooth

and deciding that, on the whole, he was not likely to make a hopeless

fool of himself.

On the first night he went to bed early, but on the second, feeling that

his mind would be clearer for some diversion, he went to a music-hall

with W.G. and his wife. Drinking beer in the bar with his friend, he

suddenly heard his name called, and felt a tap on his shoulder. He

turned to find himself in front of a face that was curiously familiar,

and in a moment found that he was shaking hands with Widdup, a small and

rather chastened Widdup, who spoke to him with the slow, precise voice

that he had known at St. Luke’s.

“I thought it was you, Ingleby,” he said. “I wondered if I should run

across you.”

Avoiding a hair-raising display on the slack wire, they stood talking.

Widdup, it appeared, had been destined for an engineering career in North

Bromwich, when his mathematical genius had won him a scholarship at

Cambridge.

“A pity, in a way, for I should have seen more of you. I suppose that

sort of thing always happens to school friendships.” At present he was

visiting a firm of iron-founders on business. They talked together of

old times: of the day when Edwin, greatly daring, had seen the Birches

run: of the languid Selby, now head-master of a small public-school in

Norfolk, and of old fat Leeming. Between the conscious effort of

remembering St. Luke’s and the unbidden image of Rosie, Edwin’s head was

in a whirl.

“And old Griffin,” said Widdup. “That’s another funny thing. I ran slap

into him in the lounge of the Grand Midland to-night. Up to the same old

games, you know. Yes . . . he had a girl with him. Rather an attractive

little piece: something to do with the pantomime, he told me. What was

her name? The old brute introduced me, too! Yes . . . I think I’ve got

it. Beaucaire . . . Rosie Beaucaire. Rather a rosy prospect for old

Griff, I should imagine. Why, what the devil’s the matter with you?”

“I’m all right, thanks,” said Edwin. “It’s this exam., you know. Let’s

have another drink.” He called for whisky and soda.

“Chin-chin,” said Widdup.

Edwin polished off a couple of drinks and then told Widdup that he must

rejoin his friend, leaving him staggered at his abrupt departure. He

didn’t rejoin W.G. He walked straight out of the theatre and off up the

Halesby Road. He had determined to go straight to Rosie’s lodgings and

thrash the matter out; but by the time he reached Prince Albert’s Place

he had thought better of it.

It was the most natural thing in the world, he reflected, that Griffin

should know the Beaucaires, for Griffin was constantly in touch with

theatrical people. It was even natural that Griffin, knowing her, should

take Rosie to the Grand Midland. It was the obvious thing to do if you

had money to spend, as Griffin had. It would be just like the irony of

fate, he reflected, if Griffin should afflict him with unhappiness in

this case as he had done in so many others. He remembered the bitter

sufferings of those early days at St. Luke’s that Widdup had so clearly

recalled. He remembered Dorothy Powys and the dance at Mawne: his

suspicions, his agonised resentment. Even more darkly there came to him

the memory of a voice in Dr. Harris’s surgery, a conviction, never yet

established, that Griffin had no right to know any woman. This

reflection, he knew, implied a doubt of Rosie’s innocence: an imputation

that he could not possibly admit. And yet . . . and yet . . . He

remembered the warning that Bertie Flood had given him in his dressing

room. He remembered the visitor in the black coat four days before. His

mind was in hell.

In this purgatory of doubt and horror, he lived for the rest of the week.

In the daytime the progress of the examination engrossed him, but at

night he always found himself hanging about the darkness of Prince

Albert’s Place, hoping against hope, that his suspicions were unfounded,

not daring to put them to the test, lest they should be confirmed.

On Friday night, when the last of his medical ordeals was over, he went

straight to Number Ten. It was a wonderful moment. Now, with a clear

conscience he might see her again; now, once more, he could know the

ecstasy of her kisses and forget the ungenerous nightmare in which he had

lived through the later stages of the exam. He approached the dirty

doorway with his heart beating wildly. At first his ring was unanswered,

but a little later the landlady came to the door with a red, suspicious

face, opening it jealously, as though she feared to let him in.

He inquired for Miss Beaucaire. Miss Beaucaire was out. Did the woman

know when she was expected to return? She hadn’t the least idea. Was

Mrs. Beaucaire in, then? Mrs. Beaucaire was in, but invisible. Mrs.

Beaucaire had one of her headaches. Edwin suggested that he should wait

in their room. Impossible. Mrs. Beaucaire was lying down there. He

hung upon the doorstep as if he were waiting at the gates of paradise.

At last the landlady took it upon herself to close the door.

She must have thought he was mad. Perhaps he was mad. . . .

For an hour or more he waited in the rain. It occurred to him that at

least the woman was speaking the truth, for there was no light in either

of the front rooms. The Grand Midland. . . . It was there that Widdup

had seen them. He walked to Sackville Row at a great pace and straight

into the hotel, where waiters and elderly commercial gentlemen stared at

his wet clothes and his haggard face. He went into each of the

dining-rooms and down the stairs to the Turkish lounge. Nowhere was

Rosie or Griffin to be seen. A search of this kind was ridiculous, but

every moment that the agony was extended made him more desperately

anxious.

He walked back in the drizzle to Prince Albert’s Place and paced the

pavement under the black walls of the warehouses. The road was deserted.

There was no sound in it at all but the dripping of water from some

neglected spout. He walked up and down in the shadow, and as he walked

he became conscious of something like a personality in the faces of the

long row of lodging-houses, something sinister, as though their shuttered

windows concealed a wealth of obscene experience like the eyes of ancient

street-walkers. The souls of those squat Victorian houses were languidly

interested in him. Another victim. . . . That was what he must seem to

them. And still the windows of Number Ten were unlighted.

He heard the clock in the Art Gallery chime eleven: a leisurely, placid

chime muffled by gusty rain. Perhaps the woman had lied to him.

Perhaps, at that very moment Rosie was sleeping peacefully in the

unlighted upper story. He was overwrought with the strain of the

examination on the top of this devastating passion. He had better go

home.

He turned to go, and at that very moment he saw two figures approaching

from the Halesby Road. The street lamp, at the corner, threw their

shadows on the shining pavement. One of them was Rosie—he would have

known her anywhere—and the other, beyond doubt, was Griffin. He was

seized with the same blind passion that had swept over him in the big

schoolroom at St. Luke’s ten years before, an impulse to murder that he

could only control by digging his finger nails into his hands.

He stood there trembling in the shadow of the blank wall, huddling close

to it for support and for protection. They passed him, and he heard

Rosie’s quiet laugh. Her laugh was one of the things about her that he

had loved most. They stopped at the door, and Rosie took out her

latchkey. It was almost a repetition of the scene in which he had shared

a week before. Now, perhaps, she would kiss him. He felt that if he saw

her kissing Griffin he could have killed them both. Murderer’s Cross

Road. . . . A hundred thoughts came swirling through his brain. They

entered, and closed the door behind them. Griffin: the old Griffin: the

human beast of St. Luke’s. The new Griffin: the gross North Bromwich

womaniser: the Griffin of Dr. Harris’s surgery. . . . Edwin saw himself

upon the edge of a ghastly, unthinkable tragedy. He must prevent it. At

all costs. At the cost of life if needs be.

He crept quickly across the road. The houses watched him. The window of

the lower room bloomed suddenly with a yellow light. He stood with his

hands clutching the window-sill, listening. Once again he heard Rosie’s

laugh, and a rumour of deeper speech that he knew to be the voice of

Griffin. The shadow of Griffin’s shoulders swept the window, swelling

gigantically as it passed. The light was turned down, but not

extinguished. Rosie’s laugh again. He could have killed her for that

laugh, for it mocked him. The faint shadow of the man’s shoulders

retreated. He guessed that they were standing at the door. The door of

the room closed softly. Now there was no sound except the heavy

breathing that one hears in the neighbourhood of a pigsty at night. Was

Griffin still there?

Another beam of light fell on the shining street. Some one had lighted

the gas in the room upstairs. Was Griffin still below? Panic seized

him. He must know. At all costs he must know. Dr. Harris’s surgery. . . .

If he had to break in the front door he must know. As he reached it

he tripped over an iron boot-scraper. The step barked his shin. Of

course the door was locked, but—wonder of wonders—Rosie had left the

latchkey outside. He opened the door softly and went on tip-toe into the

hall. In the room on the right he still heard the grunting noise. Thank

God, Griffin was still there! At least he could tell him that he knew!

He opened the door. In the half-light he could see that the room was

empty except for Mrs. Beaucaire, who lay stretched on the sofa, snoring

heavily with her vile mouth open. On the table stood an empty brandy

bottle. The place stank of brandy.

Now he knew the worst. He stumbled upstairs in the dark and knocked

frantically at the door of the front bedroom. Rosie answered: “Who is

it?”

“It’s I. For God’s sake, let me in.”

“Who the devil is it?” said the voice of Dr. Harris’s consulting-room.

Rosie answered him in excited whispers.

“You can’t come in, Eddie,” she said. “How on earth did you get into the

house? Please go away. I can’t see you. I can’t, really.”

“I’m coming in, I tell you. If you don’t open the door, I’ll smash it.

I mean what I say.”

“Ingleby—?” the voice muttered. “What the devil has Ingleby to do with

you? All right. I’ll go. I’ll chuck the fellow downstairs.”

“Oh, don’t . . . please don’t. . . . Let him go quietly.”

Griffin unlocked the door. He stood facing Edwin in his shirt-sleeves.

Rosie, still dressed, clutched at the mantelpiece. The vein in the

middle of Griffin’s forehead bulged with anger. His short neck was

flushed.

“What the hell—” he began—and then they closed. Edwin’s heel ripped up

the corner of the carpet as they swayed together. Suddenly Griffin’s

grip slackened. His face blanched, and in a moment Edwin was letting

down a sheer weight upon the bed.

“What’s the matter?” Rosie screamed, and flung herself beside him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Good God! . . . He’s gone.”

“No . . . No—” she cried.

Edwin tore open Griffin’s shirt, listening for an impulse that was not

there.

“He’s gone,” he said, panting. “He’s dead. . . . Heart. . . . He

always had a rocky heart. He’s dead.”

The awful word seemed to pull Rosie together. They stared at each other

blankly with wide eyes. “Are you sure?” she whispered.

“Yes. . . . Of course—”

She rose to her feet, speaking in a voice that was quite new to him.

“Eddie . . . for God’s sake, go . . . now! . . . quickly!”

“I can’t go.”

“Go quickly, I tell you. Don’t be a damned little fool. You don’t want

to be mixed up in this. Eddie, for God’s sake. . . . It’s ‘natural

causes,’ Eddie.”

He blundered down the dark stairs and out into the street. He could not

walk. He cowered under the warehouse wall opposite, gazing, as though

fascinated, at the yellow square of window. The discreet Victorian

houses surveyed him as if the horror that the yellow blind concealed were

an ordinary occurrence in their dingy lives. They were used to death.

And death did not change them. A rubber-tyred hansom rolled smoothly up

the Halesby Road, past the mouth of the Place. At the corner, under the

gas-lamp, Edwin saw the figure of a policeman with rain shining on his

cape. The sight recalled him to a sense of awful possibilities. For the

moment he dared not move. He flattened himself against the warehouse

walls and did not realise that he was standing directly under the

dripping waterspout. In the western sky rose the baleful glare of an

uncowled furnace. The policeman strolled away, and Edwin, cautiously

emerging, set off through the rain up the Halesby Road towards the hills.

He felt that he needed their solitude and darkness.

IV

Next day, a haggard and desolate figure, he appeared in the cloak-room of

the University where the examination results were displayed. In a dream

he realised that he was now a Bachelor of Medicine, but in the

realisation there was none of the joy that he had anticipated. He stood

before the board bewildered, until W.G. came up behind him and wrung his

hand.

“You look as if you’d been making a night of it, my boy,” he said. “Come

and have some coffee at the Dousita.”

W.G. was on the top of himself. “It was a pretty near thing. The

external examiner in Medicine gave me hell; but it’s all right. God! . . .

it’s difficult to believe, isn’t it? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. A voyage, I should think.”

He hadn’t thought of it before.

“That’s not a bad idea. Bit of a rest cure, eh? That’s the only

disadvantage, I don’t mind telling you, of being married. I couldn’t

leave the missus.”

W.G. babbled on happily. “Did you see the evening paper?” he said. “I

see that fellow Griffin’s done for. I always said he’d come to a nasty,

sticky end. Some woman or other. . . . I remember your saying that he

couldn’t play footer because of his heart. Ah, well . . . that’s one

swine the less, poor devil!”

When W.G. left him, Edwin called for a timetable and looked out the

trains to Liverpool. There was one that started in half an hour. He

caught it, and next morning presented himself at a shipping office in

Water Street.

The medical superintendent received him.

“You want a ship? Well, you know, you look very young. When were you

qualified?”

“Yesterday,” Edwin confessed.

“Very young. Still, you won’t be stale. You don’t _drink_, by any

chance?”

“I’m practically a total abstainer.” The man scrutinised Edwin’s haggard

eyes.

“H’m. . . . Well, as it happens, one of our men has failed us. I’ll

give you a ship, the _Macao_, if you can sail to-morrow. Rather short

notice, eh?”

“I think I can do it. What about equipment?”

“Oh, we don’t go in for brass-bound uniforms on our ships. Ten pounds a

month and bonus. What?”

“Where is she going to?”

“China. You may call at Japan for coal with luck. See the world, you

know. That’s what most of you fellows are after. You’ll have to go

aboard to-night. Birkenhead Docks.”

“I’ll he there.”

And with trembling hands he signed his contract.

In a wintry evening he crossed the Mersey ferry. A salt wind from the

west boomed up the channel. Edwin, in the bows, felt his face drenched

with spray. “It’s clean,” he thought. “It will make me cleaner. That’s

what I need. I don’t believe I shall ever feel anything again, until I’m

washed clean. I’m old . . . old and numb. I’ve lost my sense of

enjoyment. I wonder if it will ever come back to me!”

As he stood there in the salt breeze, some words of Traherne, his

mother’s countryman, came into his mind:

“You shall never enjoy this world aright till the sea itself floweth

in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with

the stars.”

Perhaps they were true. He wondered.