A moment later Mr. Ingleby said,
“Now, the ruins of this cottage ought to interest you, Edwin.”
“Why? Is it one of ours?”
“No, but the old woman who lived in it in my day was always supposed to be a witch. Mendip people were always great believers in witchcraft. I shouldn’t wonder if your aunt believes in ‘ill-wishing’ to this day. I suppose she was really a harmless old body. The story was that a daughter of hers, with whom she had quarrelled, married a small dairy farmer down by Axcombe, and no sooner had she gone to live with him than the poor man’s cows went dry. His business failed. He had to sell his stock. He was ruined, and took todrink; and in all the public-houses for miles round he used to rail against his mother-in-law, and say that she was responsible for the whole business. She was a lonely old creature, very poor and dirty, and when we were children and going up to the Holloway we used to cover our eyes and run for fear we should catch sight of her. No one even knew when she died. They found her, I heard, when she had been dead for a week or ten days.”
Edwin shivered. These hill-people, it seemed, were hard and cruel. No doubt he must have some of their stony cruelty in his own being somewhere.
At last they reached the farm at the top of the Holloway. It was a poor building, only a little more hospitable than the ruins in the valley. Mr. Ingleby knocked at the door, and a sturdy, middle-aged man with an iron hook in place of his right hand lifted the latch and stared at them.
“You don’t know me, Isaac?” said Mr. Ingleby.
“Noa. . . . I can’t say I do know ’ee.”
“I’m John Ingleby.”
“John Ingleby! . . . Well, and I’m proud to see ’ee, John. Do ’ee step inside and see mother. I can’t shake hands with ’ee the way I was used to. I lost en in a mowin’-machine five years back. Come in then.”
He led the way into a dark cabin. Everything in it was dark, partly, perhaps, because the windows were full of flower-pots; partly because all the furniture was darkened with age or smoke or grime. The only bright colours in its brownness were a number of shining copper utensils and afine show of geraniums in the window. Isaac followed Mr. Ingleby’s eyes towards these flowers.
“Purty, ban’t they?” he said with pride. “Your brother Will sent mother they.”
In the gloom of the fireplace, where a pile of turves smouldered, mother began to dissociate herself from the surrounding brownness. She was a very old woman. Edwin had never seen any one so old—sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed oaken chair. Her face seemed to Edwin very beautiful, for extreme age had taken from it all the extraneous charm that smoothness and colour give, leaving only the sheer chiselled beauty of feature. It was a noble face, finely modelled, with a straight nose, a tender mouth, and level brows beneath which burned the darkest and clearest eyes that Edwin had ever seen. Her hair was white and scanty, but little of it was seen beneath the white bonnet that she wore. Edwin felt her eyes go through him in the gloom.
“Here’s cousin John come to see ’ee, mother,” said Isaac, bending over her.
“John? What John?” said the old lady.
It struck Edwin at once that her speech was purer and more delicate than that of her son.
“John Ingleby, Aunt Lydia,” said Edwin’s father.
“You need not raise your voice, my dear,” she said. “My sight and my hearing are wonderful, thank God.”
“Then you remember me, Aunt Lydia?”
“Of course I remember you, John. Though it’s many and many years since my eyes saw you. And how are you, my dear? They tell me that you havedone great things in the world. You’re a doctor, like poor Dr. Marshall.”
“No . . . I’m not a doctor. I’m in business. I’m a chemist.”
“I knew it was something of the kind. You needn’t speak so loud. And they told me you had married. I suppose this is your boy. A fine boy, surely. He has a look of your grandfather.” . . .
“Yes, this is Edwin.”
“I don’t remember that name in our family. It sounds like a fanciful name. Come here, my dear, and let me look at you.”
Edwin went to her, and she kissed him. Her face was so cold and smooth that she might almost have been dead.
“And how is your dear wife, John?”
“I’ve had a terrible blow, Aunt Lydia. I’ve lost her.”
“Ah . . . that was bad for you, and bad for the boy, too.”
“I shall never get over it.” Mr. Ingleby’s voice trembled.
“Yes, of course, you say that. It’s natural that you should. You’re young. But when you live to be as old as I am you’ll know better. You will get over it. When a few years have gone by you’ll marry again.”
“Never, Aunt Lydia . . . never. . .”
“Yes. . . . That’s what you feel now. But I know the family. The Inglebys are always very tender in marriage. I’ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they always marry again. I don’t suppose that I shall live to hear of it; butwhen the time comes you’ll remember what I said.”
“No, Aunt Lydia . . . never.”
“Time is a wonderful thing, John. I’m glad to have seen you and your boy. I hope he’ll take after you—you were always the best of them.”
She gave a little sigh. Evidently she was tired. The flame that burned behind her black eyes was so very feeble for all its brightness. Isaac, who had been watching her with the devotion of a practised nurse, saw that she could not stand any more talking.
“Now, mother, that’s enough, my dear,” he said.
“Kiss me, John,” she said. And Mr. Ingleby kissed her.
“Well, now that you be here after all these years,” said Isaac cheerily, as he rearranged the red shawl round his mother’s shoulders, “you won’t leave us without taking something. There do be a lovely bit of bacon I have cut. Do ’ee try a bit now, and a mug of cider.”
Edwin, who was already hungry with his walk, and was rapidly acquiring a taste for the wine of the country, now became aware of the fact that the dark ceiling was decked with sides of bacon and hams that hung there slowly pickling in the turf smoke that saturated the atmosphere of the room. He was disappointed when his father declined to take any of this delicacy.
“Well, a mug of cider, then,” Isaac persisted. He went into an inner chamber down three stone steps, with three china mugs hanging on his hook. “You see, I do be pretty handy with en,” he laughed.
They drank their cider solemnly. It was even drier than that which they had drunk for lunch at Wringford, and so free from acidity that all that Edwin could taste was that faint astringent bitterness. It had also a bouquet that was less like the odour of apples than that of a flour-mill. A wonderful drink. . . . They said good-bye, and Isaac, who seemed to Edwin the most kindly and patient creature he had ever met, showed them to the door.
By this time the sun was setting, and the cool wind from the west had freshened. Edwin saw, for the first time, the huge panorama on which they had turned their backs as they climbed the hill to the Holloway. Perhaps it was the strangeness of all his recent experience; perhaps, partly, the exhilaration that proceeded from Isaac’s cider, but the sight struck Edwin as one of greater magnificence than any he had ever seen before. From their feet the whole country sloped in a series of hilly waves to the shores of the channel, and that muddy sea now shone from coast to coast in a blaze of tawny light: now truly, for the first time, one of the gateways of the world. And beyond the channel stood the heaped mountains of Wales, very wild and black in their vastness. The sight was so impressive that on their way down the lane they did not speak.
At last Edwin said,—
“I think Aunt Lydia has a very beautiful face. She looks like some old grand lady.”
“She is very like your grandfather,” said hisfather. “She must be over ninety. It is a great age.”
And on the way home Edwin began to imagine what his strange grandfather the dowser must have been, with the figure of the lonely farmer, his black beard and hair, and his great-aunt Lydia’s noble features and piercing eyes.
They stayed for a week at Geranium Cottage, sinking without any effort into its placid life. Edwin was content merely to live there, soaking up the atmosphere of Wringford village, and only thinking of Highberrow as a strange and ghostly adventure, possible, but too disturbing to be indulged in. The tiredness of Mr. Ingleby, who never showed the least inclination to revisit the place, made this abstention easier. In the whole of his week at Wringford Edwin only made one attempt to see Highberrow again. The impulse came to him very early one morning, just at the hour of dawn when the birds had fallen to silence, and Joe, who happened to be working for his master at a village some miles away, was splashing about under the pump in the yard at the back of the linhay. Mr. Ingleby was still asleep, and Edwin, dressing quietly, stole downstairs and set off towards the hills, this time on his bicycle.
He followed the high road, and left the machine in a quarry opposite the point where the first pink-washed cottages appeared. By this time he was almost sorry that he had come there: for he was quite certain that the village he was now going tovisit would be a very different place from the dead or hallucinated Highberrow that he and his father had penetrated some days before. He felt this so strongly that he wouldn’t take the risk of spoiling that marvellous impression, and instead of following the road that they had taken before, he changed his mind, crossed the valley of the pink cottages, and climbed the shaley slope of Silbury. In the fosse that surrounded the encampment a hundred white tails bobbed at once, and, laughing, he scrambled up the sides of what had once been Silbury Camp, and now was Silbury Warren.
Here, lying full length upon the top of the vallum, as perhaps a Belgic ancestor, or an ancestor who held the crest before the Belgæ came, had lain before him, he could look over the combe towards the church of Highberrow on the Batch. And the church tower was all he saw of Highberrow again: a feature most unrepresentative of the spirit of that pagan place. Even the church tower at this hour of the morning could scarcely be seen for mist, and all the time cold mist was pouring down in a dense, impalpable stream from the milky coverlet that spread upon Axdown and Callow and all the hills beyond. In the plain nothing could be seen at first; and from the sleeping villages no mist-muffled sound was heard; but by degrees the pattern of the plain’s surface, with its dappled orchards, its green pasturage and paler turf-moors, cut by the straight bands of the rhines, the sluggish channels through which the surface water drained into the sea, became more clear, and with this the sounds of the country grew more distinct: indefinite noises, suchas the creaking of cart-wheels in a hidden lane, the squeak of a pump-handle at the back of the pink cottages, the clink of a pick in the quarry. The whole world awoke, and Edwin, too, found that he was awake and awfully hungry. He scrambled down the slope. Smoke was now rising from the chimneys of the cottages in the combe. He was back at Wringford in time for breakfast.
By this time he had begun to feel quite at home in Geranium Cottage. He had made the discovery of his cousin and his Uncle Will. The latter he found wholly lovable: a creature of slow, quiet speech, as leisurely and peaceful as his vocation, and full of small kindnesses that surprised by reason of their unexpectedness.
The thing that most impressed Edwin in his uncle’s nature was the extraordinary tenderness he showed towards the green things that were his care. Perhaps the west-country custom of dispensing with the neuter pronoun and speaking of all inanimate creatures as if they were persons, made his solicitude for their welfare more noticeable. But he was not only kind to them in his speech: his short and clumsy-looking fingers, that seemed to be built for nothing but the roughest of labour, became amazingly sensitive and delicate as soon as he began to handle the plants in his garden, so that every touch had in it the nature of a caress.
In this life, of the devoted husbandman, he was evidently wholly contented; and he made it seem to Edwin the most natural and human on earth. The fascination of watching his uncle’s hands grew upon him, and in the end he would watch the man,who had been busy at the same work in his master’s garden all day, tending his own favourites at home until the light began to fail, and Aunt Sarah Jane would call the two of them in to supper. The spectacle had a sort of hypnotic effect upon the boy, it was so slow and measured, as slow almost, Edwin thought, as the processes of germination and growth which it was his uncle’s vocation to assist. His fingers even handled the purple soil as if he loved it.
His cousin was a different matter altogether: a tall, dark-haired boy, a couple of years older than Edwin. He had, much more distinctly than Uncle Will, the Ingleby face, the features that were to be seen at their best in the old lady at the Holloway farm. And he possessed in a high degree the quality that had carried Edwin’s father out into the world: a seriousness that made him anxious to “get on,” promptings of which were now being satisfied in an accumulation of the periodical publications that have taken the place of Mr. Samuel Smiles in these days: weeklies devoted to all kinds of useful hobbies—electricity, wood-carving, plumbing—the series that eventually culminated in the gigantic illusion of the Self-Educator.
To these short cuts to power the young man devoted all his evenings, and though he was quite natural in his anxiousness to be friendly with Edwin, with whose subtler and more contemplative nature he had at present so little in common, the attempts were not very successful. Between these two there lay a far more obvious gulf than that which separated Edwin from the older people. Ina way, he could not help admiring his cousin’s earnestness, probably because he knew that he could never imitate it, and yet he sometimes found himself examining it in a mood of absolute detachment that made his sympathy feel artificial.
Just before he left St. Luke’s he had been reading Darwin’sOrigin of Species, and in the light of this work the efforts of his father, followed by those of his cousin Joe, seemed to him an excellent instance of the tendency of ancient stocks to vary or sport in definite directions. In the earnest Joe Edwin found the phenomenon a little troublesome, for the sight of the immense energies that the youth was putting into channels that were futile distressed him, and the more so because to correct the waste it would have been necessary to begin again from a point so distant that Joe would be faced with the spectacle of more than half of his present energies wasted. So Edwin thought as little as the consciousness of his own selfishness would allow him, of all the labours that were typified by the fretwork mahogany frames that surrounded the photographs of the Halesby Inglebys, listening instead to the endless tales of his Aunt Sarah Jane, in the hour when she became talkative, after supper.
By this time Edwin was so interested in his own romantic origins that any story of the old Highberrow would do for him; and his aunt, with her soft Somerset voice, her picturesque phrasing, and her unfailing memory for social details, rebuilt, night after night, the life of the decayed village as it had been in the old dowser’s time, evolving by degrees a human comedy which resembled that ofits great exemplar by the way in which the protagonists of one episode became mere incidentals to another. Edwin knew them all by name, and recognised them as if he had met them in the flesh whenever he heard of them.
In this way, sitting in the smell of the window geraniums over a leisurely supper of bread and cheese, in his uncle’s case literally washed down with cider, he heard a story that he always remembered with pride and pity and a degree of passionate resentment: the story of how the village of his fathers had sunk into decay.
Highberrow, it appeared, had been built on what was then a common moorland, by the men who lived in it, laboriously, stone by stone. Their right to these fruits of their labour had never been called into question, and the whole spirit of the village had been happy and prosperous, as well it might, seeing that it owed nothing to the care of any outsider and could pay its way. And during those prosperous times its liberties seemed secure from danger. But when the decay of the grouvier’s industry led to unemployment and poverty, and the younger men of the Highberrow families began to look for their living overseas, the little community became so weak that the owner of the manor-house saw his opportunity. As Lord of the Manor he disputed the “squatters’ right” of the Highberrow villagers, and through his agents demanded a rent that would have made living impossible for most of them, for the cottages that they or their forefathers had built. If they refused to pay the rent, he said, they would be evicted, not in order thatother people might be introduced who would pay, but merely to satisfy the landlord’s convictions of the rightness of his principle. That was the way in which he put it. Merely out of spite would be a more accurate description of his motives.
Highberrow was in a bad way. The villagers were either very old or very young, and in either case their feebleness made the whole organism unfit to resist the inroads of the parasite. What is more, they were very poor, and the very nature of the Mendip mining industry had made them so far individualist that the idea of combined resistance did not occur to them. The landlord wisely started his operations with an old woman whose cottage lay nearest to the woods in which his pheasants were bred. Almost incredibly poor, she had lived on the products of her garden and her poultry. To pay rent was out of the question. Sheer age and inertia made it impossible for her to move, and in the course of time she was evicted with her miserable belongings, and went to die at the home of a married daughter.
Emerging from this easy contest, the landlord, or perhaps his agent, moved on to the next. It was unfortunate for him, and fortunate for the villagers, that he now pitched on the cottage of Thomas Ingleby, the dowser, Edwin’s grandfather. The old man had this in his favour: that he was a man of two trades, that even when the mining had failed him he could make a living with the divining rod, and the consciousness of this power no doubt stiffened his resistance. Another eviction was decreed, but this time things did not go soeasily. When the landlord’s men arrived from the manor to empty the house, another party appeared from the Cold Harbour mines, and as soon as the furniture was dragged out at the front door it was seized and taken in again at the back.
“It were a proper field-day,” said Uncle Will quietly, “I do remember it well. I can see your father now, John, standing over beyond the road with his back to the wall, not speakin’ a word, just smokin’ of his pipe.”
The landlord’s men saw that this sort of thing might go on for ever and none the better for it, so they just gave it up, but old Ingleby (Edwin had already canonised him as a “village Hampden”) had shown the rest of the Highberrow people what could be done, and gradually stirred them into combined action.
It was a little, pitiful attempt. He himself put into it all his savings, a matter of a few pounds, and to this were added as many shillings as could be scraped together in the village. He took the money to a lawyer in Axcombe—Bayliss was his name—an honest man with a sense of justice and, one suspects, some admiration for the sturdiness of his client. Bayliss worked the matter up and made a case of it, and no further attempts at eviction were made in Highberrow in the meantime. The village even regained a little of its former confidence, and for some time the landlord did not show his face in it. But once more luck was against Highberrow. Bayliss, the good lawyer, died. He had been careful to keep the matter in his own hands, and when it came to be considered by hissuccessor, a partner with social ambitions, the new man would not touch it: partly because there appeared to be no more money in it (as was probably the case), and partly because he was in the habit of meeting the Lord of the Manor in the hunting-field, and was on card-playing terms with the agent.
There followed an exodus of despair. The people of Highberrow, who had no more money to fight with, packed up their pitiable belongings and left their houses rather than face the trouble of eviction. Not so Thomas Ingleby. The agent returned to the attack. There were threats: a stormy interview, in which the dowser faced the landlord himself. A final week’s notice was given, and Ingleby made sure once more of the support of his friends from the neighbouring villages. But no further attempt at eviction was made. At the last moment the landlord climbed down. He arranged another interview, and at this the terms for the whole village were settled. For the lives of the present occupants, or for a period of sixty years, the cottages should remain rent-free. It was not everything, but ’twas a famous victory. “That is why Aunt Lydia do be still living up to the Holloway to this day,” said Aunt Sarah Jane.
“And I suppose grandfather lived there till he died,” said Edwin.
“No, the poor dear. When he did grow very aged your uncle and I went up to Highberrow and persuaded en that he weren’t fit to look after himself. You should ’a seed the dirt in that house! And he comed down to live along of we. But he were never happy, were he, Will?”
“Noa . . . he were never happy.”
“He were a quare old man. Us seed very little of en. Arften people would come for en from a distance that wanted water found, and he did spend the day roving the country cutting blackthorns for his dowsing. Right up to the day when he took to his bed, poor soul.”
“I should like to have seen him dowsing,” said Edwin. “I haven’t even seen the twigs that they use.”
“Why, that would have been easy enough. Only the other day I throwed out a lot that belonged to your grandfather.”
Edwin blushed at this sacrilege. “And could Uncle Will find water with a twig?” he asked.
“Not I,” laughed his uncle. “But they do say it runs in families. Have you ever tried, John?”
“I tried when I was a boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, “but nothing happened.”
“I expect our Joe could,” said Aunt Sarah Jane, with infinite faith in her offspring.
“No, mother, I’ve tried it,” said Joe, from the lamplit corner where he was wrestling with the science of sanitary inspection.
“I wonder if I could . . .” said Edwin.
“Well, you shall have a try,” laughed his uncle.
“At this time o’ night?” said Aunt Sarah Jane, scandalised.
“Let the boy have a try,” said Uncle Will, rising. “’Tis a beautivul moonlight night, and I’ll take him over the field where the new water-pipe runs.”
“You’m mad, the two of you,” said his aunt with a sigh.
Edwin and his uncle went out into the garden, and there the boy watched the gardener’s clumsy, skilful hands cut a forked twig from a blackthorn bush.
“Hazel do work as well,” he said, “but father always used the thorn.”
Then they went out together over a dewy meadow, and his uncle showed him how to hold the rod: with his two hands turned palm upwards, the arms of the twig between the third and fourth fingers, the thumb, and the palm of each hand, and the fork downwards between them. Over the meadow grass they walked slowly, then suddenly the tip of the rod began to turn upwards by no agency of which Edwin was aware. It was very thrilling, for his hands were quite still.
“There you are,” said his uncle, “you’ve a found our water-pipe.”
“Hold the rod down, uncle,” Edwin said.
He did so, and now the mysterious force was so strong that the arms of the twig snapped.
“Now, you’ve gone and broke it,” said Uncle Will. “Come in or you’ll catch cold.”
They went in together.
“Well . . .?” said Mr. Ingleby.
“Oh, he’s a proper dowser, sure enough,” said Uncle Will.
Edwin was still curiously thrilled with the whole business. He felt that a little more excitement in his attainment was due to him; but no one, not even his father, seemed in the least impressed. It comforted him to think that his cousin Joe, his eyes fixed on his book in the corner, had really lessin common than himself with the strange dark people from whom they were both descended. It was better, he thought, to be a born dowser than a Fellow of Balliol. More wonderful still to be both.
All the rest of that evening he felt a queer elation in his mysterious birthright, and when his father yawned and they both went up to bed he lay awake for a long time listening to the drowsy music of the corncrake and the wail of hunting owls, trying to put himself more closely in touch with the romantic past that had bred him: with that magnificent figure his grandfather, and the innumerable strange and passionate ancestry that slept under the shadow of Highberrow church on the Batch. “Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” he thought. And so he came to think of his father, through whom these things came to him: of his hard achievements, of his loneliness, of his difficulty of expressing—if it were not a disinclination to express—all the powerful and stormy things that must lie hidden in his heart. And a feeling of passionate kinship carried Edwin away: an anxiety to show his love for his father in unmistakable ways; to make clear to him once and for all the depth of his son’s devotion. He began to think of his father as a mother might think of her child. It must have been in that way, he imagined, that his own mother had thought of her husband. The night was so still that he imagined he could hear the rusty ivory of the acacia-blossom falling at the gate.
They were in the train on their way home from Bristol, passing smoothly under the escarpment of the lower Cotswolds. The fortnight had passed with an astounding swiftness. After leaving Wringford they had cycled over the back of Mendip, past the mines at Cold Harbour, where they had paused for half an hour to look at the workings, now deserted and overgrown with ragwort and scabious, and the Roman amphitheatre, to the great limestone gorge above Axcombe; and from there they had ridden to Wells, where, beyond streets that flowed eternally with limpid water, they had gazed on the wonder of the cathedral and seen the white swans floating in the palace moat under a sky that was full of peace. Only for a moment had they seen the masts of Bristol and Redcliffe’s dreamy spire; and now in a few hours they would be back in Halesby: in another world.
As they travelled northwards Edwin was thinking all the time of the work that he would do in his little room above the bed of stocks. It should be a fragrant room, he thought, and a good one for reading, for when his attention wandered he would be able to lift his eyes to a line of gentler hills crowned by the dark folds of Shenstone’s hanging woods. And there he would be able to dream of the coloured past and of his own exciting future, and the enchanted life that he would soon be leading among the noblest works of men in letters and in stone. Oxford, his Mecca . . . the eternal city of his dreams. He allowed his fancy to travelwestward over the rolling Cotswold and droop by the slow descent of river valleys to that sacred place. His father’s voice dispelled his dream. They were alone in the carriage and their privacy made speaking easy.
“Edwin . . . I’ve been thinking a good deal about your future.”
“Yes, father?”
“I’ve been thinking it over in my own mind. I talked it over a week or two ago with your Uncle Albert. He’s a sound man of business, you know. Then I felt that I couldn’t trust my judgment; the whole world was upside down; but now I feel that I can think clearly, and of course I am anxious to do my best for you. I’ve been thinking about this Oxford plan. . . .”
“Yes.”
“You know quite well, Edwin, that I’m not a rich man. I’m a very poor man. You can understand that, better than you could before, after this holiday. And when people have very limited means and are getting on in life—this business has made me an old man, you know—they have to be very careful in their decisions. Looking at it from every point of view, I don’t think it would be fair of me to let you go to Oxford.”
“Father . . . what do you mean?”
“To begin with, there’s the expense.”
“But I shall get a scholarship. I’ll work like anything. I’ll make sure of it.”
“I’m sure you would. You’re a good boy. But that isn’t everything by a long way. When you’ve got your scholarship, supposing you do get it, theexpense would begin. I shouldn’t like you to feel at a hopeless disadvantage with men of your own year. You would have to live quite a different life from them. You wouldn’t be able to afford any of their pleasures.”
“I shouldn’t want their pleasures.”
“That is a rash thing to say. But I’m looking even farther ahead. What can you expect to do when you’ve taken a degree in Arts?”
“A fellowship. . . .”
“Ah, but that is a matter of considerable uncertainty. I’ve seen so many men who have managed to scrape through a university degree and then been thrown on the world in a state of miserable poverty. Look at Mr. Kelly at the grammar-school. You wouldn’t like to live his life; but I believe he has quite a brilliant university career behind him. No . . . I don’t think it would be fair to you.”
“But mother and I always said . . .”
“Yes, I know . . . you were a pair of dreamers, both of you. If you felt any very strong desire to become a parson there might be something in it, though that, too, is a miserable life often enough. But you don’t, do you?”
“No . . . of course not.”
“So I think that while I am living you should have the chance of learning a useful profession. What about doctoring?”
“But that would be expensive too.”
“I know that . . . but I think we could do it. We should have a little in common. I might even be able to help you. And in a way . . . in a way I should feel that in you I was realising some ofmy own old ambitions. It is a noble profession, Eddie: the most humane in the world. No one need ever be ashamed of being a doctor. I think that a parson who professes religion for the sake of a living is rather to be despised.”
“Father, I’m sure it would cost too much. Six years, you know. . . .”
“Five . . . only five, if you pass all your examinations. And it need not be so expensive as you think. During the last year they have turned the old College in North Bromwich into a University. They give a degree in medicine. And while you were studying there you could still live with me at Halesby. I should be glad of your company.”
This appeal to Edwin’s pity was difficult to resist. It recalled to him all the resolutions that he had made in the night at Wringford: the devotion with which he had determined to devote himself to his father’s welfare: the determination that he should never do anything that could cause the man a moment’s pain. It was difficult . . . difficult.
“You could still get your scholarship,” his father went on. “There are several endowments of that kind at the North Bromwich medical school. I have a pamphlet at home that gives all the particulars. I had even shown it to your mother.”
“And what did she say, father?”
“She didn’t say much. She knew it would be a great disappointment to you. But I think she realised that it would be a good thing for you; and I know she looked forward to having you at home.”
“Yes . . . she must have known what adisappointment it would be. Father, I wish you would think it over again.”
“I want you to think it over, too. At present it naturally comes as a shock to you; but I think you’ll see in time. . . .”
He couldn’t see. He knew that he could never see it in that light. It was going to take all the beauty that he had conceived out of his life. It was going to ruin all his happiness. In place of light and cleanliness and learning it was going to give him . . . what? The darkness of a smoky city; its grime; the mean ideals of the people who lived beneath its ugliness. Even the memory of the enthusiasm with which he had thought of the life of old Dr. Marshall, his father’s patron, couldn’t mitigate the dreariness of the prospect. The idea of living for ever in company with dirt and misery and harrowing disease repelled him. It was no good telling him that contact with these misfortunes developed the nobler faculties of man. It was not the life that he had wanted. His soul sent forth a cry of exceeding bitterness. And while he sat there, full of misery and resentment, the train was carrying them onward into the gloom that always overshadowed the City of Iron.
. . .so that with much ado I was corrupted,and made to learn the dirty devices of the world.Thomas Traherne.
. . .so that with much ado I was corrupted,and made to learn the dirty devices of the world.
Thomas Traherne.
Thecity of iron stands upon three hills and its valleys were once watered by two rivers; but since the day when its name was humbly written in Doomsday these pastoral features have disappeared, so that the hills are only known as tramway gradients that testify to the excellence of the Corporation’s power station, and the rivers, running in brick culverts, have been deprived not only of their liberty but even of their natural function of receiving a portion of the city’s gigantic sewage. The original market of North Bromwich has been not so much debauched from without, in the manner of other growing towns, as organised from within by the development of its own inherent powers for evil. It is not a place from which men have wilfully cast out beauty so much as one from which beauty has vanished in spite of man’s pitiful aspirations to preserve it. Indeed, its citizens are objects rather for pity than for reproach, and would be astonished to receive either, for many of them are wealthy, and from their childhood, knowing no better, have believed that wealth is a justification and an apology for every mortal evil from ugliness to original sin.
In the heart of the city the sense of power, impressive if malignant, is so overwhelming that one cannot see the monstrosity as a whole and can almost understand the blindness of its inhabitants. Go, rather, to the hills beyond Halesby, to Uffdown and Pen Beacon, where, with a choice of prospects, one may turn from the dreamy plain of Severn and the cloudy splendours of Silurian hills, to its pillars of cloud by day and its pillars of fire by night; and perhaps in that remoter air you may realise the city’s true significance as a phenomenon of unconquered if not inevitable disease. If you are a physician, you will realise that this evil has its counterpart in human tissues, where a single cell, that differs not at all from other cells and is a natural unit in the organism, may suddenly and, as it seems, unreasonably acquire a faculty of monstrous and malignant growth, cleaving and multiplying to the destruction of its fellows—a cell gone mad, to which the ancients gave the name of cancer.
The inhabitants of North Bromwich, who are a tolerant people, and proud of the fact, would smile at this reflection. They are not in the habit of surveying the midden in which they are bred from remote hilltops, except on Bank Holidays, at which time they have discovered a truth from which they might learn more: that with the aid of hill air and exercise, whether it be that of cocoanut shies or swing-boats, or the more hazardous pursuit of donkey-riding, it is possible to absorb a greater quantity of alcohol in a given time without unduly suffering than in the atmosphere of their own streets. But they have not time to learn, and sincethey have never known any other conditions of living, they exhibit the admirable human characteristic of making the best of their surroundings and persuading themselves that their hallucinated existence is typical of human life. They are even eager, pathetically eager, to find and to proclaim its virtues, and that they may do this more easily they have invented specious names for the disease and its results: Industry for the first, and, for the second, Progress.
In the vindication of a Municipal Conscience (making the best of a bad job) they periodically extend the area over which their coat of arms, a reminder of days when chivalry existed, is displayed. The coat of arms itself is an unfortunate symbol, for it is supported by the figure of a brawny slave who carries the hammer with which his chains have been forged; but the motto at least is encouraging. It is the word “Forward,” expressing the aspirations of the citizens towards the day when all England may be as the Black Country. The watcher on Uffdown may give it a more far-sighted significance: “forward, to the day when there shall be no more coal, and the evil, of its own inanition, perish.”
For the present, at any rate, the city showed no signs of perishing. During the last year or two, its tentacles had spread farther than ever before, swarming into the wet and lonely valley of the Dulas Fechan, a deep cleft in the mountains beyond Felindre where a noisy river ran through undergrowth older than man’s memory. From this valley, the council had decreed, the rain of theSavaddan watershed, which geology had destined for the Wye and later for the Atlantic, must now traverse eighty miles or more of conquered territory, and after being defouled by the domestic usages of North Bromwich, must find its way into the Trent, and so to the German Ocean, as the Romans thoughtlessly labelled the North Sea. “Water,” said the Mayor, who was also known as Sir Joseph Astill, the brewer, “water is one of the necessities of life. It is our duty to the public to see that they have it, and that they have it pure and unadulterated.”
So the Welsh water came, and the altruistic baronet took the credit for it. Indeed the progressive spirit of North Bromwich found its incarnation in this fleshy gentleman. It was he who presented the municipal art gallery with their unrivalled collection of Madox-Jones cartoons, to say nothing of three portraits of himself exemplifying (he had an elegant vocabulary) the styles of the three greatest portrait painters of modern times. It was he who saved the art of music from degradation by fighting, with all the weight of his personal influence, against the performance of secular music, music, that is, divorced from “sacred” words, upon the Sabbath. It was he, again, who aroused public feeling on the question of the university: “the first Modern university,” he called it.
He accomplished its endowment, equipped it with a principal whose name was a household word in the homes of the great middle classes; and finally set the seal of modernity on his creation, less than twenty years before the total prohibition of alcoholbecame law in retrograde America, by instituting a learned faculty and providing a degree in the science of . . . brewing. Just as an example of the city’s liberality, there was also a faculty of Arts. The faculty of Science, of course, was important, if only as an appendage to the brewing school; those of Engineering and Mining flattered the industries of the district; that of Commerce taught its graduates to write business letters in every spoken tongue and give the Yankees what for; and lastly, that of Medicine, supplied a necessary antidote to the activities of most of the others.
Sir Joseph Astill was proud, as well he might be, of the Medical School. “In this city,” he boasted, “there are actually more hospital bedsper centumof inhabitants than in any other in the whole country. The North Bromwich medical student has a greater opportunity of studying disease, in all its aspects, than the alumnus of any other school in the world. Thousands of beds lie waiting for his scrutiny; and I am glad to say that very few of them are ever empty.”
Edwin’s first serious acquaintance with North Bromwich had begun at the end of the summer holidays, through which he had worked with a good deal less than the fiery enthusiasm that he would have put into his reading for the Balliol scholarship. The syllabus of the examination for the Astill Exhibition had amazed him by its simplicity: the prescribed books were works that he had absorbed some years before at St. Luke’s, and though the mathematical side of the business worried him, as it had always done, it was clear that in NorthBromwich the classics were regarded really as a polite accomplishment rather than as an integral part of a gentleman’s equipment in life: so that these drowsy summer months were really a period of comparative idleness in which he had time to brood on his regrets and become gradually reconciled to his new fate. In this spirit he approached the examination. Even the capitoline eminence on which the university buildings were placed, with the tremendous renaissance buildings of the Council House and the Corinthian Town Hall, did not greatly impress him. He saw rather the squalid slums from which these pretentious buildings rose. It was so different, he thought, from Oxford, and he passed the flagged courtyard with its cool fountain and the benevolent statue of Sir Joseph Astill in a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella on which the sculptor had lavished all the feeling of his art, without the least shadow of spiritual obeisance.
With two other long-legged candidates he had worked through his papers in a small room whose windows overlooked the quiet square and a phantom stream of noiseless traffic beyond. The first paper had been mathematical, and its intricacies kept his mind so busy that he had little time for reflection. From time to time he would see one of the long-legged competitors reducing the end of his penholder to wood-pulp in the earnestness of ruminant thought; and occasionally the deep boom of the clock in the tower of the Art Gallery would remind him that time was veritably passing; but time passed swiftly, and he was almost surprisedto find himself once more in an air that for all its vitiation was less sleepy than that of the sealed examination room. By the end of the first evening all that he feared in the examination papers was over. To-morrow he would be on his own ground and the modern university could do its damnedest.
Next day the classical papers were distributed and Edwin, who found them easy, could see that his pen-chewing friend was in a bad way. All the passages set for translation were familiar: the grammatical questions consisted of old catches that had been drilled into him by Mr. Leeming in the Upper Fourth. As far as he was concerned, it was a walk over. He had time to take in more of his surroundings and to watch the silent coloured stream of traffic filtering through the narrows where the bulk of the Town Hall constricted the street. At the end of each day he found his father anxiously awaiting him. He was eager to see and handle the examination papers for himself. He seemed impressed by their difficulty, and Edwin found it hard to reassure him without appearing objectionably superior. He seemed rather surprised that Edwin, on the eve of such a formidable ordeal, should choose to take out his bicycle and ride towards the hills, so surprised that it became a matter for serious debate with Edwin whether he should do as he wanted to do and appear priggish, or affect an anxiety that didn’t exist merely to please his father. In the end he decided to be honest at all costs.
The part of the examination that he enjoyed most was theviva-vocein Classics. For this trialhe was led up many flights of stone steps to a room full of books in which the Dean of the Faculty of Arts awaited him: a kindly, nervous old man with a grey beard, with whom Edwin immediately felt at home. His nervousness seemed to Edwin appropriate: it implied the indubitable fact that in North Bromwich Arts was a sideshow that counted for nothing, and that the professor’s dignity, as Dean of a learned Faculty, was a precarious and unsubstantial thing. “Your papers were excellent, . . . excellent,” he said to begin with. “Now, I should like you to read me something.” He pointed to a bookshelf. “Let us start with some Greek.”
“What would you like, sir?”
“Oh, it’s not what I should like. What would you like to read? Something that really appeals to you.”
Edwin felt that the dean was watching him, like a cat stalking a bird, as his fingers approached the bookshelf. It was a curious responsibility, for it would be an awful shame if he chose something that the old man didn’t approve of. Sophocles. . . . Why not Sophocles?
He picked out the Antigone, and chose the great chorus:—
Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν,Ἔρως, ὁς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις, . . .
Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν,Ἔρως, ὁς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις, . . .
“Let’s have it in Greek first.”
Edwin read it in the level voice which the Head of St. Luke’s had always used for the recitation of Greek poetry. When he had finished the first strophe he looked up and saw that the Dean’s weakeyes, beneath their tortoiseshell spectacles, were brimming with tears.
“That will do,” he said, “unless you’d prefer to go on . . .”
Edwin read the antistrophe.
“Yes . . . I don’t think you need translate it,” said the Dean. He paused for a moment, then, replacing the volume, went on. “In this university I am known as the Professor of Dead Languages. Dead languages. What?”
They passed a pleasant half-hour together. In Latin Edwin chose Lucretius and a passage from the Georgics, at the end of which the Dean confided to him that he kept bees. “Thank you, that will do,” he said. “I gather that you are entering the Medical School. . . . Well, it is a noble profession. I don’t know what we should do without doctors, I’m sure.”
Four days later Mr. Ingleby received him at the breakfast table with unconcealed emotion. “You’ve got your scholarship, Edwin. I’m . . . I’m as pleased as if I’d won it myself. I never had the opportunity of winning a scholarship in my life.” The hand in which he held the letter trembled. He kissed Edwin fervently. “This is a great day for me,” he said: and Edwin, glowing, felt that anything was worth while that could give such pleasure to the man that he had determined to love.
On a bright morning at the beginning of September Edwin found himself one of a crowd of ten or fifteen youths, waiting with a varying degree ofassurance, outside the office of the Dean of the Medical Faculty in James Street, a sordid thoroughfare in which the pretentious buildings of the old College of Science hid its hinder quarters. The door was small, and only distinguished from its neighbours, a steam laundry and brassworker’s office, by a plate that bore the inscription, “University of North Bromwich. Medical School.” Inside the door stood a wooden box for a porter, usually empty, but in its moments of occupation surveying a long, dark cloakroom with a hundred or more numbered lockers and corresponding clothes-hooks, on a few of which undergraduates’ gowns and battered mortar-boards were hanging. This morning the Dean was holding audience of all the first year men, and each of the crowd in which Edwin now found himself a negligible unit, was waiting until his name should be called from the office, and, in the meantime, surveying his companions with suspicion and being surveyed with a more confident and collective suspicion by seniors who happened to drift through the corridors on business or idleness, and showed evidence of their initiation by familiarity with the porter.
Only one face in the company was in the least familiar to Edwin: that of a ponderous young man with immaculate black hair carefully parted in the middle, who had sat stolidly through the Astill Exhibition examination a few desks away from him. As he did not appear to be anxious to recognise this fact, Edwin abandoned his own intention of doing so, and, like the rest of the company, possessed his soul in silence. In the meantime hewatched the others with a good deal of interest and speculation.
They were a strangely mixed company: a few of them, of whom Edwin himself was one, mere boys, to whom the air of the schoolroom still clung: some obvious men of the world, scrupulously, even doggily dressed, in an age when the fancy waistcoat had reached the zenith of its daring; others, and one other in particular, a seedy looking person with a dejected fair moustache, were clearly old enough to be the fathers of the youngest. It was to the second of these classes, the bloods, that Edwin found his attention attracted, and particularly to a paragon of elegance, whose waistcoat was the orange colour of a blackbird’s bill with light blue enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathematically bisected and shone with expensive unguents, and whose chin differed from that of Edwin in being shaved from sheer necessity instead of from motives of encouragement.
This person exuded an atmosphere of prosperity and style that took Edwin’s fancy immensely, and he wore grey flannel trousers as correctly turned up as any that Edwin had seen upon the enchanted platform of the station at Oxford. It was evident that the process of waiting bored him; for he took out of the pocket of the amazing waistcoat a gold hunter watch with a front enamelled in the same shade of light blue. The lid flicked open noiselessly when he touched a spring, and Edwin began to be exercised in his mind as to what happened when he put on a waistcoat of a different pattern, as obviously a person of this degree of magnificence mustfrequently do. Did he change the buttons, or did he change the watch? Edwin, surveying him, looked unconsciously at his own Waterbury; and, as he did so, the magnificent creature glanced at him with a pair of savage brown eyes, and, as Edwin decided, summed him up for good and all.
“Mr. Harrop, please,” said the porter. And Mr. Harrop pocketed his hunter and disdainfully entered the office.
Edwin, relieved from his scrutiny, turned his attention to the most impressive figure of all: a young man fully six feet four in height, but so broadly and heavily built that his tallness was scarcely noticeable. His face was good-humoured, and very plain, with the look of battered obstinacy that may sometimes be seen in that of a boxer. Perhaps this idea was reinforced by the fact that his short nose was broken, and that he carried his whole face a little forward, staring out at the world from under bushy black eyebrows. He seemed made for rough usage, and his undoubted strength was qualified by a degree of awkwardness that showed itself in his clumsy hands. These, at the present time, were clasped behind his back, beneath the folds of a brand-new undergraduate’s gown that, because of his great height, looked ridiculously small. His whole aspect was one of terrific earnestness. Evidently he was taking this business, as he would surely have taken any other, seriously. That, no doubt, was the reason why on this occasion he alone appeared in academical dress. His clasped hands, his lowered head, his bulldog neck all spoke of adetermination to go through with this adventure at all costs.
“Mr. Brown,” said the porter, and nearly blundering into the returning elegance of Mr. Harrop, he slouched into the Dean’s office as though he were entering the ring for the heavy-weight championship of the world.
In the end Edwin found himself left alone with a youth of his own age, a tall, loose-limbed creature, with an indefinite humorous face, a close crop of curly fair hair and blue eyes. Edwin rather liked the look of him. He was young, and seemed approachable, and though his striped flannel suit was more elegant than Edwin’s and he wore a school tie of knitted silk, Edwin took the risk of addressing him.
“We seem to be the last.”
“Yes. I expect the Dean will keep me last of all, bad cess to him! That’s because I happen to be a sort of cousin of the old devil’s.” He spoke with a soft brogue that had come from the south of Ireland.
“Mr. Ingleby, please.”
Edwin pulled himself together and entered the Dean’s office.
A pleasant room: at one big desk a suave, clean-shaven gentleman with thin sandy hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. At another a little dark man with a bald head and a typewriter in front of him.
“Mr. Ingleby?” said the first. His voice was refined, if a little too precise.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Mr. Ingleby, what are you going to do?Ah, yes . . . you are the Astill scholar. Very good. Very good. Are you proposing to take a London degree?”
“No, sir. North Bromwich.”
“Well . . . it is possible you may change your mind later. Have you taken the London Matriculation?”
“No, sir. I was on the classical side at St. Luke’s. I was reading for a scholarship at Oxford.”
“And changed your mind . . . or” (shrewdly) “had it changed for you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is your father a doctor?”
“No.” It really doesn’t matter what my father is, thought Edwin, and the Dean, as though answering his reflection, said:—
“No. . . That doesn’t matter.” And, after a pause: “Well, Mr. . . . er . . . Ingleby, you have made a good beginning. I hope it will continue satisfactorily. That is all, thank you. Good-morning.” He held out his hand to Edwin, who was astonished into putting out a moist hand himself. “Yes,” continued the Dean in a suave, reflective voice, “you will pay your fees to my secretary, Mr. Hadley. This is . . . er . . . Mr. Hadley. Yes.”
Mr. Hadley acknowledged the introduction with a lift of the right eyebrow and Edwin left the room.
“Mr. Martin,” said the secretary, as he left, and “Mr. Martin, please,” the porter repeated.
“I say, wait a moment for me,” said the loose-limbed Irishman to Edwin in passing.
It was so friendly as to be cheering.
“He seems a decent old bird,” said Martin, emerging a few minutes later.
“I thought you said he was your cousin?”
“So he is. You see I’m Irish, and so is he; and in Ireland pretty nearly everybody who is anybody is related to everybody else.” He plunged into a lengthy demonstration of the relationships of the Southern aristocracy, with warnings as to the gulfs that separated the Martins from the Martyns, and the Plunketts from the Plunkets, rambling away through a world of high-breeding and penury in which all the inhabitants called each other by their Christian names, and spent their lives in hunting, point-to-point racing, and elaborate practical jokes. A new world to Edwin.
They strolled down Sackville Row together, and cutting through the Arcades came out into the wide thoroughfare of Queen Street that had been driven through an area of slums in honour of Victoria’s first jubilee.
“By the way, what’s your school?” said Denis Martin.
“St. Luke’s.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I don’t suppose you would, in Ireland.”
“Oh, I didn’t go to school in Ireland. Nobody does. I was at Marlborough. Is St. Luke’s one of those soccer schools?”
“Good Lord, no. . . . We play rugger. We’re pretty good.”
“Who do you play?”
“Merchant Taylors and St. Paul’s, and one or two others.”
“H’m. . . . They’re day schools, aren’t they? Is St. Luke’s that sort?”
Edwin, with enthusiasm, expounded the St. Luke’s legend, that nobody outside of St. Luke’s has ever been known to believe. Martin, meanwhile, looked a little supercilious and bored. He spoke as from a distant world in a tone that implied that the people of North Bromwich could never call each other by their Christian names or hunt or race or play practical jokes with an air of being born to it.
“I expect we’re a pretty mixed lot here,” he said.
And Edwin, with the guilty consciousness of being more than a little mixed himself, replied: “Yes.”
“An extraordinary collection. That great dark fellow looks an absolute tyke. Then there’s the chap with the waistcoat—”
“Yes. . . . Harrop was the name.”
“I don’t know the name,” said Martin dubiously. “Never heard of the family. He was wearing an Oriel tie.”
“Oriel. . . . Do you mean Oxford?”
“Yes, one of my cousins was there. That’s how I know it. I should think they turfed him out on account of that waistcoat. Still, Oxford isn’t what it used to be.” “In the eyes of a Southern Unionist,” he might have added. But the news was grateful to Edwin. “I shouldn’t wonder,” Martin went on, “if lots of decent people didn’t end by coming to schools like this. I expect it is the Dean’s idea, you know. I say, what about lunch? Do you know of any decent place?”
In ancient days, when he had come into North Bromwich shopping with his mother, Edwin hadalways been taken to Battie’s, the great confectioner’s in Queen Street, but now, passing the doors in this exalted company, he felt that the company of a crowd of shabby shopping women would hardly be suitable: besides, he might even run the risk of meeting his Aunt Laura, who also frequented the shop, so he left Battie’s prudently alone.
“I know one place,” said Martin. “I should think it’s all right. The food’s decent anyway.”
He led the way up a side street to an elegant resort frequented by the professional classes of North Bromwich, where them was a long counter set out with sandwiches like a buffet at a dance, and all the customers seemed at home. In the ordinary way Edwin would not have dared to enter it, but Martin, with the elegant confidence of Southern Unionism, showed him the way, and seated at a marble-topped table they trifled with Plover on toast. Martin, of course, did the choosing, and in his dealings with the tiny carcass showed a familiarity with the correct method of consuming small birds that Edwin was pleased to learn. “Ever shoot plover?” he said. No . . . Edwin had never shot anything: he didn’t particularly want to shoot anything; but he realised that it was a great accomplishment to be able to talk about it as though he had never done anything else.
“I’ll pay,” said Martin. “We can square up afterwards.”
They did so and, thawed by the process of feeding, began to talk more easily. “Are you digging in this place?” Martin asked. Edwin told him that he lived in the country.
“In the country? I didn’t know there was any here. Have you any decent shooting?”
“Unfortunately, no.” He remembered, however, the solitary trout under the bridge below the abbey. “There’s fishing of sorts,” he said.
“What sorts?”
“Oh, trout—”
“Brown trout? There’s not much fun in that. White trout . . . sea trout you call them in England . . . are good sport. Still, we’ll have a day together next spring. I’ll get my rods over.”
The subject was dangerous, and so Edwin asked him where he was living: “With your cousin, I suppose.”
“Oh, no. . . . I don’t know the old divil, you know. I’ve rooms with an old lady up in Alvaston. She’s rather a decent sort. House full of animals.” He didn’t specify what the animals were. “I’d better go and unpack some of my things. I suppose I shall see you at the Chemistry Lecture to-morrow. So long. . . . Oh, I forgot. . . . What’s your name?”
“Ingleby.”
“Ingleby. . . Right-o.” He boarded a passing bus with the air of stepping on to a coach and four.
Edwin took the next train home. On the opposite platform of the station he caught a glimpse of the great bulk of the man named Brown walking up and down with earnestness in his eyes and under his arm a huge parcel of books. He gave Edwin the impression of wanting to throw himself into the adventure of the medical curriculum as he might have thrown himself into a Rugby scrum, expectinga repetition of the tremendous battering that he seemed already to have undergone.
Thinking of him, and of the aristocratic Martin, and of Harrop, a product which Oriel had finished to the last waistcoat button, and, more dimly, of the elderly gentleman with the dejected moustaches, it seemed to Edwin that he himself was appallingly young and callow and inexperienced. How was he going to stand up to these people with their knowledge of the world and its ways: men who had already, by virtue of their birth or experience, learned how to dress and live and move without effort in the crowded world? Yet with them, he knew, he must now take his place. It would be difficult . . . awfully difficult. He had everything, even the most elementary rules of conduct, to learn. He was a child who had never known another human being except his mother and a few school friends of his own age. He had not even thesavoir-vivreof Griffin. And, in this new life, it seemed to him that the dreams on which he had depended must be useless—or even more, a positive handicap to his success.
The moments of sudden spiritual enlightenment that one reads of in the lives of saints, or of converts to Salvationism, are not a common experience in those of ordinary men; and though, in the turn of every tide, there is a critical period, measurable by the fraction of a second, in which the waters that have swayed forwards retire upon themselves, to the eyes of an observer the change of motion is so gradual as to be only slowly perceived. In Edwin’s life the death of his mother had been thereal point of crisis; but this he had only dimly realised when his hopes of Oxford had been dashed for ever in a third-class compartment hurtling under Bredon Hill. Between it and the present moment there had hung a period of dead water (so to speak) in which the current of his life had seemed suspended; but now he knew that there was no doubt but that a change had overtaken him, and that he would never again be the same.
All his life, up to this point, had been curiously inorganic: a haphazard succession of novel and bewildering sensations: a kaleidoscope of sensual impressions changing almost too rapidly to be appreciated—so rapidly that it had been impossible for him to think of one in relation to another. Some of them had been painful; some enthralling in their beauty; some merely engrossing because they were full of awe: yet all had been ecstatic, and tinged in some degree with a visionary light. Now, as always, it was clear that he must be a dreamer; but, from this day onwards, it also became clear that his visions must be something more to him than a series of coloured impressions, succeeding one another without reason and accepted without explanation. In the future they must be correlated with experience and the demands of life. In that lost age of innocence the people with whom he came into contact had interested him only as figures passing through the scenes that were spread for his delectation. They had been external to him. He had lived within himself and his loneliness had been so self-sufficient that it would have made no great difference to him if they had not been there.Now he was to take his part in the drama at which, in times before, he had merely sat as a bemused spectator. It was a stirring and a terrifying prospect.
The train from North Bromwich stopped at every station, and the whole of the journey lay through the black desert that fringes the iron city, a vast basin of imprisoned smoke, bounded by hills that had once been crowned with woods, but were now dominated by the high smoke-stacks of collieries, many of them ruined and deserted. At a dirty junction, so undermined with workings that the bridge and the brick offices were distorted in a manner which suggested that the whole affair might some day go down quick into the pit, he changed into the local train. The railway company evidently did not consider the passenger traffic of Halesby worth consideration, for the carriages were old and grimy. Edwin chose a smoker because the cushions were covered with American leather and therefore more obviously clean. He found himself, in the middle of his reflections, sitting opposite a coloured photograph of the great gorge at Axcombe, a town that was served by the same line. The picture carried him suddenly to another aspect of his too complicated life. Really, the whole business was hopelessly involved. He thought, grimly, how he could have taken the wind out of Martin’s genealogical sails by blurting out the astounding intelligence that his uncle was a gardener. And what would the gentleman with the waistcoat have said? He laughed at the idea.
Through a short but sulphurous tunnel the trainemerged into the valley of the Stour: the vista of the hills unfolded, and later the spire of Halesby church appeared at the valley’s head. Well, a beginning of the new life had to be made some day, and now as well as ever.
Walking home along the cinder pathway beside the silting fish-ponds it seemed to him that in the light of his new experience, Halesby was a primitive and almost pitiable place, and the same mood held him when he made his way home by the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s cloistered garden and entered his father’s house. Under the south wall the bed of double stocks was still in flower, though faded and bedraggled. Their scent reminded him of what a world of experience he had traversed in less than three months. He went straight up to his own bedroom. On the bed lay two parcels addressed to him. The larger contained his undergraduate’s cap and gown. He put them on in front of the glass and rather fancied himself. The act struck him as in a way symbolical: it was the token of an initiation. From that day forward he was a medical student. For five or six years, probably for the rest of his life, he would spend his time in the presence of the most bitter human experience; but there was something elevating in the thought that he need not be a helpless spectator: he would be able to effect positive good in a way that no scholar and no preacher of religion or abstract morality could possibly attain. “This is my life,” he thought. Well, it was good to know anything as definite as that.