The second parcel contained a number oftechnical books dealing with the subjects of his first year’s curriculum: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Physiology, and Anatomy. The last appeared to be the most exciting. “Fearfully and wonderfully made . . .” he thought. He set to work at once preparing the little room for work, making it as comfortable as he could with a writing table in the window that looked out over Shenstone’s woods and dethroning the superannuated Henty and Fenn from the bookshelf. He could not find it in his heart to treat his poets so cavalierly, and so there they stayed. Greek and Latin and English. “I shall never drop my classics,” he thought. A resolution that has been forgotten nearly as often as it has been made. In the Blenheim orange-tree at the bottom of the garden a thrush was singing. Bullfinches were fighting shrilly in the raspberry canes. He threw open the window, and there ascended to him the heavy, faded perfume of the bed of stocks. On the mantelpiece stood a photograph of his mother. Looking at it, it seemed to him that she smiled.
Hewas happy: even Halesby became a grateful place of retirement after his long days in North Bromwich. The mornings of early autumn were very beautiful, and it was with a good deal of zest that he would scramble through his breakfast and leave the house early to catch the eight o’clock train. He usually made use of the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s garden and the cinder path beside the fish-ponds, and in this brisk walk, with the blood of youth running happily in his veins, he would catch a little of the exhilarating atmosphere of early morning in the country. When the frosts began, as they do early on that high plateau, the morning air seemed stronger and more bracing than ever.
Circumstance, in a little more than three months, had exalted him to the state of those metropolitan season-ticket holders whose majesty he had disturbed on the day when he left St. Luke’s for good. He was now in a position to appreciate their exclusiveness, and to look upon all chance people who intruded on the privacies of the eight o’clock train with the same mingled curiosity andcontempt. In every way a season ticket, in its cover of dark blue morocco, was a thing superior to the transitory and ignoble pasteboard. He could hardly resist a sigh of bored superiority on the first occasion when he produced it. He travelled second-class, thus rising to the highest level of luxury in travelling permitted to any inhabitants of Halesby, unless it were the local baronet or Mr. Willis of Mawne, whom even Sir Joseph Hingston could not outdo.
Most of the other season-ticket holders travelled second; and in this way, by making a habit of taking his place in the same carriage, for sentimental reasons one that contained a series of west-country pictures, Edwin began to be on speaking terms with many members of this select company. They included a youth articled to a solicitor in North Bromwich, the son of a Halesby postmaster, who was inclined to establish terms of familiarity; a gentleman with a bloated complexion and a fawn-coloured bowler hat, reputed to be a commercial traveller, who carried a bag in which samples may well have been hidden; a superior person with a gruff voice who was a clerk in a bank in the city, and on Saturdays carried a brown canvas bag and a hockey stick; and a withered man of fifty who travelled into North Bromwich daily on some business connected with brass, and, on damp mornings, exhibited evidences of an asthmatic complaint that aroused Edwin’s budding professional interest.
It was he who first admitted Edwin to the conversation of the compartment, by confessing to him that he had been the despair of doctors sincechildhood: that three specialists had assured his mother that she would never rear that boy: that in spite of this he had always paid four times as much in doctor’s bills as in income-tax, that in his belief they only kept him alive for what they could get out of him, and that his life had been an unending misery, as harrowing, upon his word, as that of any of the sufferers who were illustrated in the papers holding their backs with kidney complaint, until his missus had said: “Don’t throw any more money away on these doctors, John, I’ll have a talk with Mr. Ingleby,” . . . and with the aid of Ingleby’s Asthma Cure he had become relatively whole. Evidently he knew who Edwin was. “What do you think of that now?” he wheezed, and covered the embarrassment into which Edwin was immediately thrown by not waiting for his reply and continuing: “I suppose, now, you’ll be learning to be a chemist like your father?”
“No . . . I’m a medical student. I’m going to be a doctor.”
“Well . . . I’ll be damned,” said the asthmatical person. He did not say why; but the looks of the superior bank clerk, who immediately lowered his paper and stared at Edwin as though it were his duty to decide whether Edwin were a fit person to enter a learned profession or not, and then contemptuously went on with his reading, supplied the kind of commentary that might have been intended. When the asthmatical subject said that he was damned, the gentleman with the bloated complexion and the fawn-coloured bowler, who always opened his morning paper with fingers thattrembled, either with excitement or as a result of the night before, at the column headed Turf Topics, gave a snigger and spat on the floor to conceal it. And the articled clerk, at this display of ill breeding, turned up his nose.
It was a strange little company that assembled in the second-class smoker every morning; and the strangest part of it, to Edwin, was the fact that each of them, entrenched, as it were, behind his morning paper, affected a frigid disinterest, yet eagerly listened to the conversation and eagerly scrutinised the appearance of the others. All of them had their little fixed habits. In one place they put their gloves: in another their umbrellas. Every morning they began to read their papers at the same column and folded them at the same point in the journey. They seemed just as regular in their habits as the wheels of the carriage in which they travelled, revolving and stopping and shunting and being braked at an identical time and place for six days out of the seven.
When he had tumbled to this, Edwin found that the whole of the main line train that he caught every morning at the junction was occupied by perhaps a hundred grouped units of the same kind. It amused him to sample them; and when one appealed to him he would become a member of it for a time and see what he could make of it. Naturally there were more interesting people on the main line than on the Halesby branch; and in the end he himself became such a familiar figure on the eight-twenty from the junction that he could say “Good-morning” to nearly every group of seasons on thetrain. He was even taken to the heart of the superior gruff-voiced bank clerk in the Halesby carriage. Indeed, he knew every one of them, finding them human people who, in the manner of the Englishman and the hedgehog, had put out their protective spikes upon a first acquaintance.
The only Halesby traveller of whom he could make nothing was the bloated person in the fawn-coloured bowler, who began the morning with turf topics and then proceeded to suck a copying pencil till his lips were the colour of his cheeks, and, thus inspired, to underline the names of a number of horses in the day’s programme. Apart from his habit of spitting on the floor, a custom which probably saved the poor man from death by poisoning with copying ink, he was inoffensive. Edwin was even sorry for him sometimes when he saw him hung up over his forecasts. Then he would tilt the fawn-coloured bowler on to the back of his head, and scratch his head under the sandy fringe of hair. Edwin was sorry because, with a head like that, it must have been so difficult to forecast anything.
He did not see many women on the morning train. In those days female enterprise was a good deal checked by conventions that died more slowly in the Midland plain than elsewhere. From Halesby itself there were only four season-ticket holders of the opposite sex. Two of them were employed in the same large drapery establishment in Queen Street, and were excessively ladylike and careful in all their behaviour. Edwin had never spoke to either of them; but he discovered in bothan identical physical state: that peculiar greenish, waxen pallor that appears to be the inevitable result of serving in a draper’s shop. The black dresses on which their employers insisted, heightened this effect of fragility, and on mornings when tiredness had made them start too late for the train, so that they had to hurry over the last hundred yards, Edwin would notice how they panted for breath within their elegant corsets and how faint was the flush that came into their cheeks.
He felt a little sorry for them; but they were not in the least sorry for themselves. In Halesby their employment at a monstrous third-rate drapery store gave them a position of unusual distinction as arbiters of feminine fashions, and they would not have exchanged their distinguished anæmia for any other calling under the sun. In their profession this toxic pallor, as of sea-kale blanched in a cellar, was regarded as an asset. It was considered French. And did not their shortness of breath, upon the least exertion or emotion, cause their bosoms to rise and fall like those of the heroines of the serial fiction that they read, when they were not too tired, in the train?
Edwin was not attracted by them any more than by the other couple: a pair of pupil teachers from an elementary school in one of the northern suburbs, who also dressed for the part that they were fulfilling in life, and wore spectacles as tokens of their studiousness. The instinct of sex had as yet scarcely asserted itself in him. He was a little curious about it, and that was all. Subconsciously, perhaps, it found expression in his anxieties abouthis personal appearance. He was beginning to take a considerable interest in what should or should not be worn, treating it more as a matter of abstract science than as one of practical politics; for he had few clothes beyond those in which he had left St. Luke’s, and was not likely to have any opportunity of extending his wardrobe until these were worn out. In those days the weekly calledTo-Dayhad reached its most vigorous phase, and a column headed Masculine Modes was a matter of earnest consideration to Edwin every Thursday, when the paper appeared. In the spring, he decided, he would buy an overcoat with Raglan sleeves. The weekly authority, who styled himself “The Major,” was dead nuts on Raglan sleeves. Beneath this fashionable covering Edwin’s interior defects would be well hidden, and, given a natty red tie (de rigueur, said the Major, with the indispensable blue serge reefer suit) and a bowler hat with a curly, but not too curly, brim, he should be able to compete with the burly bank clerk as cynosure for the eyes of the pale young ladies in the “drapery” and a spectacle of awe for the studious pupil-teachers.
Edwin soon became absorbed in the routine of the first year student’s life, and had very little time to think about anything else. He had to work hard to keep pace with it, and the realisation of this was a striking lesson to him. At St. Luke’s he had found that his advance in knowledge made the work progressively more easy. Here he was breakingnew ground from the beginning, acquiring knowledge of a kind that owed nothing to general culture and came to him none the easier for his possession of it. The only things in his new work that seemed easy and logical to him were those scientific names that were derived from Latin and Greek. Otherwise the very rudiments and nature of the subjects were new to him.
The most astonishing part of the whole business was the way in which the formidable assembly that had glared at him, as he imagined, outside the Dean’s office, simplified itself. He had been prepared to find them creatures of a different tissue from himself, and particularly such apparitions as Harrop and the immense Brown. He soon saw that as far as the career of Medicine was concerned they were identically in the same box as himself: that neither knowledge of the world nor elegance of attire could help either of them to acquire the absolute knowledge that was the one thing essential to success. It made no matter that these two approached the same problem from essentially different angles: Brown with his earnest brows knitted and a look of indomitable but baffled determination; Harrop as though the issue didn’t really matter as long as the crease in his trousers was in the right place; but in either case Edwin saw that they had to work as hard or harder than he did.
His first acquaintance, Martin, who was now becoming his friend, since the work that they shared in common bridged the social gulf of which Edwin alone was aware, seemed to possess the faculty ofdoing things and learning facts almost in spite of himself. He was not in any way brilliant, but he had a way with him and a certain shrewdness that not infrequently underlies the superficial indolence of the Celt. Above all things Edwin found him good company, for the picturesqueness of his brogue and a sense of humour, not of the verbal kind in which Edwin himself dealt, but the broader humour that arises from situations, and personal characteristics, made his society a peculiar joy. At the first lecture on Chemistry, a dull dissertation on first principles, Edwin had gravitated to the seat next to him, and for the rest of the term they kept the same places and afterwards compared notes. Edwin couldn’t help liking him, even though he was conscious of the radical social misunderstanding that underlay their friendship.
The technical sciences of Chemistry and Physics made no strong appeal to Edwin. They seemed to him matters of empirical knowledge that must be acquired according to schedule but would have very little connection with the work of his profession, and he found them too near to the desperate subject of mathematics to be congenial. He could find nothing romantic or human in them; and this fact, in itself, is a sufficient indictment of the way in which they were taught.
Anatomy was another matter altogether. He had anticipated the beginning of this study with a feeling in which awe and an instinctive distaste were mingled. From the first day he had known that somewhere up at the top of the building lay the dissecting room, a place that his fancy painted as akind of Chamber of Horrors. On his way to the theatre, in which the Dean lectured on Anatomy with a scholarly refinement of phrase that transcended the natural elegance of Martin and a fascinating collection of coloured chalks, he had passed the gloomy door and seen a blackboard on which the names of the Prosectors were recorded in white lettering. But he preferred not to look inside. Martin, to whom all adventures came more easily, settled the point for him.
“I say,” he said immediately after the lecture, “have you put yourself down for a part?”
“A part? What do you mean?”
“Anatomy. Dissecting, They’re shared between two, you know. In the first term we’re supposed to do an Upper or a Lower. Suppose we go shares in one—”
“All right,” said Edwin. “Which shall it be?”
“Well, I think an Upper will be better. There’s less fat and mess about it. We’d better go and choose one now.”
“All right.”
“Come along, then.” Martin opened the door of the dissecting room and held it while Edwin entered. It was a long, irregular chamber, with a low glass roof and an asphalt floor. Edwin’s first impression was one of light and space: the second, of a penetrating odour unlike anything that he had smelt before. He could not give a name to it, and indeed it was complex, being compact of a pungent, unknown antiseptic and another fainter smell that was, in fact, that of ancient mortality. The effect of the whole was strange but not nauseating ashe would have expected. All down the room at short intervals long zinc tables, with a tin bucket at the head of each, were ranged. Most of the tables were empty; but on four or five of them “subjects” were either displayed or lay draped in coarse, unbleached calico. One or two of them sprawled on their faces, but most of them, being as yet unappropriated, were supported under their backs by small metal platforms from which the heads rolled back and the limbs were stretched out in a posture of extreme but petrified agony. To Edwin’s eyes it was a lamentable and terrible sight. He wondered by what chain of degradations the body of a man who had lived and known the youth and pride of body that he himself possessed, who had experienced aspirations and dreams and hope and love, should descend to this final indignity. He stood still. He did not dare, for the moment, to come nearer.
“How do they get here?” he asked Martin.
“Oh, they’re paupers, you know. Old men and women, most of them, who die in the workhouses and are not claimed by their relatives. Instead of burying them they send them along here. The anatomy porters collect them. Then they’re pickled for so long in a kind of vat in the cellars of this place, and they inject them with arsenic to preserve them, and pump red paint into their arteries so that they’re easier to dissect. I shouldn’t like the job myself; but I suppose the porters are used to it. You get used to anything, you know. Besides, they aren’t a bit like they are when they’re first dead. I think that’s the chap for us. I had a lookat him the other day. It’s always better to choose an old one. The muscles are cleaner. Less work.”
They approached the second table. The subject was an old and withered man: his grey hair was shaven, and his mouth hung open, showing that he had lost his teeth. Martin had been quite right. He didn’t look in the least like a dead man. He did not look like a man at all: only a pathetic, tanned skeleton with tight-drawn sinews and toughened skin: a dried mummy, from which all the contours of humanity had shrunk away. It wasn’t so bad after all. The picture that Edwin’s imagination had anticipated, that of a crude and horrible human shambles, was not here. No . . . the idea of humanity was too remote to be in the least insistent. For a moment, in spite of this consolation, Edwin went pale. Martin noticed it.
“I say, this isn’t going to turn you up, is it?”
“No. . . . I’m all right. I was only . . . thinking.”
“Thinking?” said Martin, with a laugh. “I shouldn’t do too much of that if I were you. We’d better make a start to-morrow on the right Upper. I’ll put our names down.”
He turned towards the glass case in which hung notices of lectures and the printed cards on which the names of dissectors were recorded, and while he did so Edwin still stood thinking. He thought: Was this really a man who had lived and breathed and aged and suffered? Where had he been born? How long ago? Had he ever loved? Had he ever married? Had he ever wondered what the future would bring to him? surely his fancies had neverenvisaged this. Perhaps he had been born in some remote hamlet of the marches, some sweet smelling village like Far Forest, from which the iron tentacles of the city had drawn him inwards and sapped his life, leaving, in the end, this dry shell, like the sucked carcass of a fly blowing in a spider’s web. If this were the end of poverty and desolation, what a terrible thing poverty must be. Did the poor and the outcast ever dream that they might come to this? And yet, after all, what did it matter? . . .
He awoke from his dream. It was evident that he was the only dreamer in that long room. At many of the other tables second year men were sitting quietly dissecting or gossiping or thumbing manuals of practical anatomy yellow with human grease. It amazed him that men should be able to joke and smoke their pipes and appear to be contented in such an atmosphere; but the wisdom of Martin’s phrase returned to him: “You get used to anything, you know.”
Among the dissectors already at work in their white overalls, he saw the ponderous frame of the man called Brown. He, at any rate, was not letting the grass grow under his feet. Already he was engaged in reflecting the skin from the “Lower” on which he was working. His clumsy hands found the work difficult, as was shown by the anxiety of his partner, an immaculate smooth young man, whom Edwin already knew by the name of Maskew, dressed in the Major’s indispensable navy serge reefer, with the correct red tie and a big orchid inhis buttonhole. He took an elaborate meerschaum pipe out of his mouth to protest:—
“Good Lord, Brown, there’s another cutaneous nerve gone phut. Do be careful!”
And Brown, with an exaggerated earnestness:—
“I say, old man, I am sorry. I simply can’t use the damned things. Do you mean to say that’s a nerve?” He held up in his forceps a tiny white filament of tissue.
“Yes,” said Maskew, returning to his pipe. “Branch of the great gluteal. Listen to what Cunningham says: ‘The buttock is liberally supplied with cutaneous nerves: a fact much appreciated by schoolboys.’”
Brown scratched his head with the handle of his scalpel. “Well, I’m in an absolute fog. You’d better take this job on to-morrow, and I’ll do the reading. What does ‘cutaneous’ mean, anyway?”
“Cutis,” thought Edwin, “Skin.” After all, it seemed, the dead languages had their uses. By this time he had recovered from the first shock of his distaste; he was getting used to the odour of the room, and so, a moment later, he and Martin strolled over to a table at which one of the prosectors was engaged in preparing a specimen for the Dean’s lectures. It was almost pleasant to watch the deftness with which he defined the line of a pink, injected artery, wielding his scalpel as delicately and as surely as a painter at work on a canvas. They watched him working in silence. “Nice part, isn’t it?” he said with condescension.
“Yes,” said Martin, “this sort of thing must be rattling good practice for surgery.”
“Oh, surgery’s quite different,” said the prosector. “This is a lazy job. There’s no hurry about it. This fellow won’t bleed to death.”
So Edwin and Denis Martin began to work on their Upper, and the dissecting room that had been an abode of horror and an incentive to philosophy became no more than the scene of their daily labours. Edwin accepted his new callousness without regret for the sensitive perceptions that he had lost, for he saw that his heart and his imagination were not really less tender for the change; they had merely come to a working agreement with the demands of his new life, and had attained this satisfactory state not so much by a suppression of sensibility as by an insistence on the objective aspects of his work.
This fact explained to him, at the very beginning of his career, the fallacy of medical callousness in relation to pain or physical distress. He saw, on reflection, that if a doctor exaggerated the importance of subjective sensations in his patient he might well lose sight of his own object, which was nothing more nor less than removing their cause: that, for example, the fear of death, the anxiety of relatives and the patient’s own perception of intolerable pain, were of infinitely less importance to the physician than the presence of a focus of danger in the patient’s appendix. A sustained objectivity was the only attitude of mind in which a doctor could live at the same time happily and efficiently.
The only feature of the dissecting room that now seemed objectionable was the smell of the powerfulantiseptic that was used for preserving the subjects. For a week or two Edwin was conscious of its pervading every moment of his life, his train-journeys, his meal-times, even his sleep. But in a little time his olfactory nerves became so used to it that they discounted its presence, and the fact that his neighbours in railway carriages did not seem to shrink from him, convinced him that after all he did not go about the world saturated in odours of the charnel house.
The winter term went on, and to the sense of hurry and frustration that had embarrassed him at first and found its perfect expression in the knitted brows of the monstrous Brown, succeeded an atmosphere of leisure and method and ease. Edwin had time for other things than work. He began to know the men of his year, and to discover that even the most formidable of them weren’t half as formidable as they had seemed. Harrop, indeed, was still a little remote. After the spaciousness of Oriel, where he had devoted a couple of years to a liberal education in which the acquisition of knowledge was of less importance than the acquisition of style, North Bromwich, with its concentration on the virtues rather than the graces of life and the very questionable sartorial shapes that inhabited it, naturally seemed a little cheap; but in a little time even Harrop became modified and humble if a little contemptuous, and the most resplendent of his waistcoats retained no more significance than the oriflamme of a lost cause.
Brown was the more approachable of the two, and for Brown, Edwin soon conceived somethingthat was very nearly an affection. With his impressive physique and his experience of a rough world in which Edwin had never moved, was mingled a childlike enthusiasm for his new work, a rich, blundering good humour, and great generosity. He was not clever, and showed an intense admiration for better heads than his own; but for all that he was much more intelligent than he looked, and to Edwin his enthusiasm and earnestness were worth a good deal more than his intellectual attainments.
Once or twice, wandering into the Anatomical Museum, he had come upon Brown standing rapt in front of a specimen dissection or quietly sweating up bones with a Gray’sAnatomyopen before him, and he had sung out to Edwin as if he were an old friend of his own age and they had put in an hour of work together. “You know, you’re a lot quicker than I am,” said Brown. “I suppose it comes of being decently educated. I expect that when you were learning Latin and Greek I was knocking about the world making a damn fool of myself.” Then they would light their pipes (the dissecting room had made smoking necessary to Edwin) and Brown would yarn on for half an hour about his romantic adventures, his bitter quarrels with his people, the adventures that had befallen him in Paris when he went there to play football for the Midlands, in all of which the passionate, headstrong, obstinate and withal lovable nature of the big fellow would appear.
“I expect it all sounds to you like a rotten waste of time, mucking about with my life like this,” he said. “But you know I’m not at all sorry I’ve hadit. . . . I didn’t take up this doctoring business in a hurry, without thinking about it. I thrashed the matter out; and I came to the conclusion that doctoring’s a good human sort of game: it’s a sort of chance of pulling people out of the rotten messes of one kind or another that they get themselves into—through no fault of their own, poor devils, just because they’re made like you and me and the rest of us. If you go on the bust, or knock about the country with a football team on tour, or go on the tramp and sleep in a hedge or a barn or a Rowton House, as I did when I had the last flare-up with the old man, you rub against a lot of people. They’re all just the same as yourself, you know. You can see yourself in the best of them as well as the worst; and, taking them all round, they’re all damned good at the bottom. They’ve all got to fight out their own way in life with their heads or their fists or their feet. And the only chap that can really help them in it is a doctor. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. God! . . . you’ll scarcely believe it, but once I was converted. I know it’s damn funny; but it’s a fact that when I was a youngster and had been on the periodical bust a revivalist chap got hold of me and persuaded me that I was saved. It’s a funny sort of feeling, I can tell you. I thought I was going off my nut until I went to see a doctor and he put my liver right. It’s a fine humane game, Ingleby. You can take it from me. . . . But I can tell you, with one thing and another, I’ve got my work cut out.”
He shook his head seriously, and the puzzled, dogged expression of frustrate determination thatEdwin knew so well came into his eyes. “We’re wasting time, my son,” he said. “Let’s get on with the blasted humerus. Now, what is the origin of the Supinator Longus? Come on . . .”
On one of these pleasant occasions he confided to Edwin the reason why he had his work cut out. His father, a stern Calvinistic Methodist, had finally washed his hands of him. “I’ve been a bit of a rolling stone, you see,” said Brown, “and you can’t blame the poor old fellow. So he just planked down six hundred and fifty pounds one day and told me that I could do what I liked with it, but that was the last I should get from him. It suited me down to the ground. I didn’t much care what became of me then. It was a couple of years ago. So I had a royal bust . . . a sort of glorious windup to the season . . . and then sat down to think. I had just five hundred left, and so I had to think what the devil I was going to do with it, and my prospects seemed so putridly rotten that the only thing I could do was to go on the bust again. I didn’t enjoy it much that time. Jaded palate, you know. . . . But I had a bit of luck. I met a trainer fellow in the Leicester lounge with a couple of women, and he put me on to a double for the Lincoln and National. I’ve no use for horse-racing. If it was the owners that were racing there’d be a vestige of sport in it; but it always seems to me a shame that decent, clean creatures like horses should make a living for a lot of dirty stiffs out of the ruin of working men and small shopkeepers. Still, I dreamed about this double, and as I’m a weak superstitious sort of chap, I put a tenner onit. That’s the first and the last bet I’ve ever had on a horse. But the thing happened to come off; and last spring I found myself with twelve hundred pounds instead of six-fifty. So I began to think it out. I remembered that doctor fellow who cured me of being converted, and I thought, ‘By Gad, I’ll be a doctor.’ A five year’s course. Well, I’m not particularly brilliant at the top end, and so I allowed six. Six into twelve goes twice. Two hundred a year for fees and living and clothes—outsize—and recreation. You see, it’s pretty tight. Come along and have some lunch at Joey’s.”
They went downstairs to the cloak-room where the porter was now a familiar of Edwin’s. It had been decided that it would not be becoming for a really modern university, like that of North Bromwich, to impose the sight of such an anachronism as academic dress on the streets, a rule that had been something of a disappointment to Edwin, and so they left their gowns behind. Joey’s was an institution of some antiquity, opposite to the Corinthian town-hall, with which Brown had been acquainted in his unregenerate days. It was a long and noisy bar at which, for the sum of fourpence, one consumed a quarter of the top of a cottage loaf, a tangle of watercress, a hunk of Cheddar cheese, and a tankard of beer. This combination of excellences was known as a “crust and bitter,” and it was eaten standing at the counter.
Edwin was gradually becoming a regular customer at this place; for Martin’s delicate fancy forplovers on toast and other such refinements had proved too expensive for him, and apart from their joint labours in the dissecting-room, they were beginning to see less of each other—not from any ill-will on the part of either, but simply because Martin’s position in the house of the old lady in Alvaston, whose house was full of animals, had introduced him to the social life of that elegant suburb in which so perfect a carpet knight was bound to shine; and Martin’s social engagements with encouraging matrons and innumerable eligible daughters were becoming so pressing that his acquaintance with the black heart of the city was gradually becoming more and more casual. For this reason, apart from his natural inclination, Edwin was thrown into daily contact with Brown and his partner Maskew.
Maskew was a more typical product of the Midlands. His home, and all his upbringing, had lain in one of the great black towns that cluster, like swollen knots, upon the North Bromwich system of railways. He had never lived in the country; he did not even know what country was, and his distinctive if provincial urbanity showed itself in a hundred ways—in his dress, that was a little too smart, in his speech, that was not quite smart enough, in a certain lack of fresh air in his mental atmosphere. His people were wealthy, and his tastes, without emulating the style of Harrop, were expensive. He was handsome, and if his hair had been shorter and not so mathematically correct he would have been handsomer. Still, he was intensely interested in women, and a great retailer ofRabelaisian stories. He wore buttoned boots and was very nearly a first-class billiard player.
A more unusual combination than his partnership with the abrupt and unsubtle Brown it would have been difficult to imagine; but even in his undoubted cleverness, his nature was complimentary, and Edwin found himself happy in the society of both. In their company he became a habitué of the Dousita Café; a subterranean privacy in which excellent coffee was served in the most comfortable surroundings by young ladies whose charms had already made something of a sensation in that decorous city. Maskew, naturally, knew them all by their Christian names, and treated them with a familiar badinage that impressed Edwin, mildly ambitious but quite incapable of imitation, by the ease with which it was performed. The cushioned seats and the mild stimulus of the coffee and cigarettes would even rouse the massive Brown to a ponderous levity by which the lady of their choice, a certain Miss Wheeler, whose uncle, Maskew seriously confided to Edwin, was a bishop, was obviously flattered. Edwin could understand any woman being attracted by Brown, or rather, “W.G.” as the need of a distinction had by this time made his familiar name. It also pleased him to see the way in which W.G. went red in his bull neck on a certain occasion when Maskew had delicately overstepped the limits of good taste in his conversation with Miss Wheeler. But the niece of the bishop did not blush. . . .
In the intervals between lectures they would congregate in their gowns in a dismal chamber,at the very bottom of the cramped building that was called the Common Room, drinking tea and eating squashed-fly biscuits. This place was frequented not only by members of the Medical School but by students of other faculties whom Edwin regarded with some contempt. One afternoon on entering this room Edwin found W.G. holding forth with some indignation before a notice that had been pinned on the board asking for a list of freshmen who were anxious to play Rugby football during the present season. So far, only five or six names had appeared: W.G.’s, naturally enough, came first, for his prowess in the game was well known in the North Bromwich district.
“Isn’t it a damnable thing,” he said indignantly, “in a school of this size to see a measly list like that?”
“You can stick mine down,” said Edwin.
“Well . . . as a matter of form, my son . . . though I don’t see what good you’re likely to be to the club except to give it tone.”
“I play soccer,” said Maskew.
“You would,” said W.G. “Nice gentlemanly game.”
“Rugger isn’t all beef,” put in Edwin.
“No,” said W.G., “but the team wants weight. And this place is simply thick with great, hefty, science men and brewers who’ve never known the meaning of a healthy sweat in their lives. Upon my word, it sickens me. Look at that chap.”
He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay huddled up in a deep basket chair. He had shoulders that would have appeared massive bythe side of any others but W.G.’s: a fair wide face marked with freckles, a sandy moustache and crisp, curly red hair. “That’s the kind of swine that ought to be working in the scrum.”
Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively went pale. A curious survival of the instinct of physical fear had shaken him. It was ridiculous. “I know that chap,” he said in an off-hand way. “He’s no good. I was at school with him. He’s got a weak heart. His name’s Griffin.”
Christmascame: an old-fashioned Christmas with hoar frost on the fields and hard roads gleaming with splintered light reflected from a frosty sky. In this raiment of frozen moisture even the black desert of Edwin’s morning pilgrimage appeared fantastically beautiful. The vacation did not suspend his work; for though no lectures were given, the dissecting room was still open; and here, on icy mornings, when the asphalt floor was as cold as the glass roof, he would freeze for an hour at a time watching Brown and Maskew at work, Martin having been whisked off to spend a baronial Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland.
A few months in North Bromwich had made a great change in Edwin. He had lost much of his old timidity, shaved twice a week, smoked the plug tobacco to which Brown had introduced him, and was no longer shy with any creature on earth of his own sex. With women it was different. . . . Ease and familiarity with this baffling sex would come, no doubt, in time; but for the present one or two desperate essays at conversation with the elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friendshad been failures. And Miss Wheeler was not the least approachable of her sex. There were several women medical students in his year; but in their case he had not felt the incentive to gallantry that the softer charms of Miss Wheeler suggested. Even if they had not insulated themselves with shapeless djibbehs of russet brown, and bunched back their hair in a manner ruthlessly unfeminine, the common study of a subject so grossly material as anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any budding romance.
In the Biological laboratory, however, he found a figure that exercised a peculiar attraction on him. She was an American girl, a science student, who with the severity of the medical women’s dress contrived to combine an atmosphere of yielding femininity. She had a soft voice, for the tones of which Edwin would listen, big grey-blue eyes, soft dark hair, and very beautiful arms that her dark overalls displayed to perfection. Edwin would have found it difficult to define the way in which she attracted him: certainly he didn’t cherish any definite romantic ideas about her; but he did find her in some subtle way disturbing, so that he would be conscious of her presence when she came into the lab.; surprise himself listening for her voice when she spoke to the professor, and find that, without any definite volition, his eyes were watching her profile. And one day when she passed him and her overall brushed his sleeve, he found that he was blushing. Maskew, with his usual easy familiarity, was already on joking terms with her, and would sometimes sit on the table where she kepther microscope while they talked and laughed together; but though Edwin had every chance of sharing in this intimacy, he couldn’t bring himself to do so; and when, in the end, he was introduced to her formally, he wished that he were dead, and could not speak a word for awkwardness.
With men, on the other hand, he was now quite at his ease, even, strangely enough, with the once formidable Griffin. Since the day when he had discovered his old enemy in the Common Room they had often spoken to one another: they had even sat side by side in the deep basket chairs, one of which was now Griffin’s habitual abode, and talked of the old days at St. Luke’s, and sometimes, in the afternoon, they would share a pot of tea. There was no awkwardness in their conversation, as Edwin had feared there might be, for Griffin apparently took his expulsion as a matter of course, and, on the whole, as rather a good joke. Of course Griffin had changed. It was clear to Edwin from the first that in some way he had shrunk—not indeed physically, for he was fatter than ever; but the air of conscious and threatening physical superiority that Edwin had found so oppressive in his school days had vanished. Moreover, he was now prepared to accept Edwin as an equal, and make him the confidant of the amorous adventures that now absorbed his time, adventures to which the affair with the chambermaid at St. Luke’s had been the mildest possible prelude. Compared with Griffin’s positive achievements, the daring of Maskew’s relation with the young ladies of the Dousita seemed a trifle thin. Griffin’s father, witha shrewd appreciation of his son’s peculiar gifts, had entered him as a student at the school of brewing; and if once he could overcome his natural indolence, there was no reason why, in the future, he should not become a partner in the firm of his uncle, Sir Joseph Astill, and control the destinies of a number of barmaids beyond the dreams of concupiscence. On these prospects, Griffin, lounging in his basket chair, brooded with a heavy satisfaction.
“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Edwin said one day, “that we should be the only St. Luke’s men in this place.”
“Oh, some are bound to turn up sooner or later,” said Griffin. “The other day, when I was up in town, I ran against Widdup—you remember Widdup—and he told me that his people thought of sending him here to take up engineering.”
“That would be rather good fun,” said Edwin. “And he’s cut out for it too. He’s got that sort of head. I should rather like to see old Widdup.”
“Oh, he’ll roll up one of these days. Are you doing anything in particular this afternoon? I have to stroll down to see the stage-manager at the Gaiety . . . an awful good sport. Suppose we go down the town and get a drink on the way . . .”
In spite of the temptations of this adventure, Edwin declined. In the dissecting room, half an hour later, Brown hailed him:—
“What the devil were you doing with that pig of a brewer, Ingleby?”
“He’s an old school friend of mine.”
“Well, I should keep that dark, if I were you.He’s a bad hat, that chap. We don’t want Ingleby’s virginal innocence corrupted, do we, Maskew?”
“Oh, he’s not a bad sort,” Edwin protested.
“He’s a nasty fellow, and he’ll come to a rotten, sticky end,” said Brown. “Now, what do you think of this small sciatic, you old roué, for a tricky bit of dissection?”
After all, Edwin reflected, old Brown knew something of the world. He had to admit to himself that there was something obscene about Griffin. It was difficult to explain, for Maskew, by his own account, was almost equally worldly, and yet Maskew was undeniably a decent fellow while Griffin undeniably wasn’t. He joined his friends at their work, and could think about nothing else; for Maskew’s brains were as good as his own, though of a different texture, and he had to be attentive to keep pace with them. All through the vac. he worked at anatomy with these two, sometimes in the icy dissecting room, sometimes over coffee at the Dousita, sometimes in the cozy, diminutive diggings that Brown inhabited in Easy Row, a street of Georgian houses at the back of the university buildings and near the Prince’s Hospital.
They were pleasant days. Edwin, in spite of his lightness, had now found a place in the scrum of the second fifteen, and on Saturday evenings, when both of them were drugged with their weekly debauch of exercise, he and W.G. would meet at the diggings in Easy Row, and after a steaming hot bath, in the process of which Edwin never failed to be impressed by the immensity of his friend’s physique, they would set off down the town togetherand make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill: Porterhouse steak with chipped potatoes and huge silver tankards of bitter ale. Then they would go on together to a theatre or a music hall, too pleasantly dulled, too mildly elated to question the humour of the most second-rate comedian. After the show W.G. would walk down to the station with Edwin, and see him off into the last train for Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out of the carriage window, would see the big man turn and go clumsily along the platform with the gait that he had noticed on the very first day of his life as a medical student. Brown was a wonderful fellow. In half an hour, Edwin reflected, when his train was still puffing away through the dark, W.G. would be back in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, driving facts into that puzzled brain with the violent thoroughness of an engine that drives piles.
When the last train arrived at Halesby, the town would be in darkness, for, in the black country in those days the only places of amusement were the public houses and these had been shut for an hour or more. Only from the upper windows of innumerable mean dwellings lights would be seen, and sometimes the voice of a drunken husband heard grumbling. But the path beside the fish-ponds was beautiful, even on a winter night, and Edwin would feel glad as he plodded along it that he didn’t live in North Bromwich, where the night noises of the country were never heard. So he would pass quietly up the empty lane, his footsteps echoing on the hard pavement, and come at last to the little houseset in the midst of shrubberies that smelt of winter. Very humble and quiet, and even pitiable it seemed after the glaring streets of the city that he had left behind.
It was an understood thing that on Saturdays, when he had been playing football, Edwin should return by the last train; and so his father did not sit up for him on these occasions. The matter had been settled at the cost of some awkwardness. On the first two or three Saturdays of the football season Edwin had come home late, to find Mr. Ingleby growing cold over the embers of a fire in the dining-room, sleepy but intensely serious, and his tired eyes had examined Edwin so closely that he felt embarrassed, being certain that his face must bear signs of a number of enormities that he had never dreamed of committing. It was the same, unreasonable feeling of guilt that he had experienced at St. Luke’s in the middle of Mr. Leeming’s pitched battle for purity, and the sensation was so strong that he felt it useless to try and hide it.
“Why do you look at me like that, father?” he said. The quietude and humility of the little room seem to him as full of accusation as his father’s face.
“What do you mean, boy?”
“I think you know what I mean. . . . There’s really no need for you to wait up for me like this.”
“I like to lock the house up,” his father replied, with a quietness that made Edwin’s voice sound rowdy and violent. “I have always done so. After all, it’s usual.”
“You are anxious about me. Why should yoube more anxious about me when I come in at twelve than when I come in at six?”
“I know you’re passing a critical period, Eddie. . . I’m not unsympathetic. I’ve been through it myself. And naturally I’m anxious for you. I know that a town is full of temptations for a boy of your age. I don’t know what your friends are like. I don’t know what sort of influences you’re coming in contact with—”
“But I don’t see why that should make you want to sit up for me. Really, I don’t. What good does it do?”
“I like to see you when you come in.” Edwin was uncomfortably aware of this.
“But suppose I was drunk when I came in, father—” he said.
“I don’t suppose anything of the sort—”
“No, but supposing I was. What advantage would there be in your seeing me? What good would it do?”
“At any rate I should know that there was a danger.”
“Well, if that’s all the trouble, we can soon get over it. I promise you, that I’ll tell you the very first time that I am in the least drunk. Then you needn’t worry about waiting for it. I suppose it’s bound to happen some day.”
“I sincerely hope it isn’t, Eddie. It isn’t pleasant to me to hear you talk like that.”
“No. . . . I suppose it would be pleasanter if we pretended that nothing of the kind ever happened. But it wouldn’t be honest, would it? I should think it’s the duty of every one to be drunk some time orother, if it’s only to see what it feels like. Surely, father,you—”
“Edwin, Edwin. . . . Really we mustn’t be personal. You forget that I’m your father.”
“But I don’t, father. I thought we were going to be such tremendous pals, and honestly there isn’t much to be pals on if you aren’t ever personal. We ought to talk about everything. We oughtn’t to hide anything. I don’t see much fun in it if I have to do all the telling and you don’t give anything in return. It isn’t fair.”
“But, my dear boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a nervous laugh, “you seem to neglect the fundamental fact that I’m your father.”
“I don’t see why that should prevent us being honest. I don’t see why it should prevent you from trusting me—”
“I do trust you, Eddie.”
“Then that’s all right; so you needn’t wait up for me again.”
Thus the matter was settled, at any rate on the surface, though Edwin was always conscious on the morning after his late arrivals of an anxious scrutiny on his father’s part.
“He doesn’t really trust me,” he thought, and this conviction made him more anxious than ever to be really intimate with his father, to make him share, as much as possible, the life that he was living in North Bromwich. It made him talk deliberately of the men who were his friends, and the work that he was doing, explaining with the greatest freedom the domestic difficulties of W.G., and the worldly accomplishments of Maskew: andthis frankness gave him confidence until he discovered that such revelations only ended by arousing his father’s suspicions. In Mr. Ingleby’s mind it was evident that the sterling qualities of W.G., as recited by Edwin, were of less importance than his potentialities as an agent in Edwin’s corruption. “If I’d only given him one side of W.G.,” thought Edwin, “he’d have been quite happy. If we’re going to be happy, it would be much better for me to tell him nothing that his imagination can work on.”
He found himself travelling round the old vicious circle that appeared to be the inevitable result of being honest with himself. There must, after all, be something in the fundamental fact that Mr. Ingleby was his father. Ridiculous though it might seem, the ideal relation between father and son was evidently impossible. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “it isn’t my fault. I’ve done my best.”
The whole artificiality of their relation only dawned on him when he mentioned to his father one evening that he had met Griffin and told him that his old enemy turned out to be a nephew of Sir Joseph Astill. “I’m glad to hear of it,” said Mr. Ingleby. “I hope you’ll continue to be friends. Sir Joseph Astill is a very distinguished man.” Edwin didn’t see what that had to do with it; but he resisted the temptation of telling his father that Griffin was a distinctly bad egg, and that in comparison with him W.G., with his herculean passions, was indeed a paragon of knightly virtues. If it pleased his father to invest Griffin with his uncle’s reflected glory, why shouldn’t he do so? And Edwin held his tongue.
In the end the atmosphere of veiled anxiety that awaited him at home became definitely irksome, and since the most absolute candour on his part would not mend matters, he found himself gradually avoiding his father’s company. It was the last thing in the world that he wanted to do; but it seemed inevitable; and as the months passed, he gave up all hopes of the sort of intimacy that he had desired, and relapsed into the solitude of his own room, or even, as a last resort, the company of Aunt Laura, who was at least unsuspicious.
Another thing attracted him to her house. All the days of his childhood at home had been full of music, for his mother had been a capable pianist, and he had spent long hours stretched out on the hearthrug in the drawing-room listening to her while she played Bach and Beethoven and occasionally Mendelssohn on the piano. At St. Luke’s, too, without any definite musical education, he had felt a little of the inspiration that Dr. Downton infused into the chapel services. Since he had returned to Halesby all these pleasures had left him; for Mr. Ingleby was not in the least musical, and the piano that had been closed a few days before his mother’s death, had never been reopened. At this period he had not realised the musical possibilities of North Bromwich, and in Aunt Laura’s house he recaptured a little of this stifled interest.
She was really an accomplished musician, and though the kind of music that she affected was becoming limited by the very character of her life as the wife of an undistinguished manufacturer of small hardware in a small black-country town, thetaste, which had originally been formed in Germany, existed and was easily encouraged by Edwin’s admiration of her attainments. Here, usually on Sundays, when in addition to the attraction of music her admirable cooking was to be appreciated, Edwin passed many happy hours. She sang well, and could accompany herself with something of a natural genius, and though the songs that she sang were often enough the sugary ballads of the period that had witnessed her musical extinction, Edwin found them satisfying to his starved sense of music, and would even persuade her, on occasion, to play the pieces of Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach with which his mother had made him familiar.
Nothing aroused in him an acute remembrance of those ancient happy days more easily than music. He wished, above all things, that he might some day be able to taste these joys for himself; and so he persuaded his aunt to teach him the notes on the piano, and having an inherited aptitude, he soon found that he could pick his way through simple compositions, preferably in the open key, that he found among his mother’s music at home. Mr. Ingleby, who had no ear, appeared to be unmoved by these painful experiments; and to Edwin, the long winter evenings were made magical by their indulgence. He would sit at the piano in the drawing-room for hours at a time, and here, in a strange way, he found himself curiously in touch with the vanishing memory of his mother. At times this feeling was so acute that he could almost have imagined that she was there in the room beside him, and sometimes he would sit still at the piano in longintervals of silence, just drinking in this peculiar and soothing atmosphere. Eventually these diversions made Mr. Ingleby uneasy.
“You spend a good deal of time at the piano, Edwin,” he said. “I do hope you are not letting it interfere with your work.”
Edwin said nothing; but from that time onward it seemed to him that even this, the most harmless of his amusements, had become a matter for grudging and suspicion. At first he only felt indignation and anger; but later he realised that this, along with his father’s other anxieties, probably had its origin in financial considerations. The cost of his education in North Bromwich was a big thing for a country chemist to face. If once he failed, the whole of his early effort might be wasted. But then, he was not going to fail.
The terminal examinations at Christmas had made him sure of this. They showed him that in his own year he and Maskew were in a class by themselves; and though Maskew beat him easily in all the subjects of the examination, it satisfied him a little to think that Maskew had probably put in a good deal more work than he had, particularly in anatomy, where he had the advantage of working in partnership with W.G., for whom the subject of medical education was of the most deadly seriousness.
Early in the Lent term Edwin found himself introduced to a new stratum of North Bromwich society, through the accident of his acquaintancewith Griffin. The new university had inherited from the old college of science and the still older medical school, the tradition of a pantomime night, a visiten masseto one of the North Bromwich theatres, where this elevating art-form flourished for three months out of the twelve. The evening was one of fancy dress, rowdiness, and general licence, in which the stage suffered as much as the auditorium, and the unfortunate players were propitiated for the ruin of their performance by a series of presentations.
Arrangements for this function were always made with a high seriousness. The committee was composed of representatives from each year in the school of medicine and from each of the other faculties. In this affair, as in all matters of sport or communal life, the older foundation of the medical school took the most prominent part; but the prestige of Griffin as the nephew of the Vice-Chancellor and an acknowledged expert on all matters theatrical, had induced the brewers to run him for the secretaryship; and since the secretary was the official on whom the bulk of the work fell, and no one was particularly anxious to take on the job, Griffin, in his first year, had been elected to the post.
There was no denying the fact that it suited him. To begin with, he was already on intimate terms with every theatre manager and stage-doorkeeper in North Bromwich, and was used to dealing with the susceptibilities of theatrical people. Again, he had plenty of money, a circumstance that would help him in the preliminaries, which wereexpensively conducted in the local Bodega and other bars and restaurants. Also, it gave Griffin something to do; for the life of the student in brewing was of the leisurely and somnolent character that one would naturally associate with malt liquors, and most of his time had previously been spent sprawling in a deep basket chair in the Common Room, playing an occasional languid game of poker, or jingling sovereigns in his pocket while he waited for the results of racing in the evening papers.
At the annual meeting, which Edwin had not been sufficiently interested to attend, there had been the usual difficulty in selecting a member from the unknown quantities of the first year, and Griffin, full of resource, had suggested Edwin, who was straightway elected, and summoned to attend the deliberations that followed. His election caused a good deal of amusement to his friends, and particularly Martin, who preserved an aristocratic contempt for this vulgar theatrical business, and W.G., who prophesied Edwin’s conversion into a thorough-going blood; but it introduced him to a new and bewildering society in which he met a number of men of his own faculty who had already become impressive at a distance.
Such were the brothers Wade, the elder unapproachable in his final year, the younger of an elegance surpassing that of Harrop. Such was Freddie St. Aubyn, a slight and immaculate figure with fair hair and moustache, and the most carefully cultivated reputation for elegant dissipation in North Bromwich. This Byronic person had already suffered the pangs of a long intrigue with thepremière danseusein a musical comedy company, on whom he was reputed to have spent money and passion lavishly but without the least suggestion of grossness.
In addition to this he was a poet: that is to say, he had published two volumes of verse that were so eclectic as to be out of print. At the present time he had stuck midway in his medical career pending the issue of his unhappy passion; and presented the unusual spectacle of a “chronic,” not by force of incompetence, but by choice. In point of fact, he was an unconscious survival from the nineties, and the lady of his choice resembled a creation of Beardsley more than any type commonly known to nature. Edwin was impressed, for the writer of the exhaustedPoems of Passionwas the first poet that he had met in the flesh. Naturally, St. Aubyn’s attitude towards the first-year man was a little patronising; but Edwin found his mixture of cynicism and melancholy enchanting, and was particularly impressed when Freddie, languidly supporting his sorrows in one of the Common Room easy-chairs, offered him a fill from his pipe.
“Oh, by the way, there’s opium in it,” he said casually.
Visions of Coleridge and de Quincey invaded Edwin’s mind. He stopped filling his pipe.
“Opium? Why on earth do you put opium in it?”
“It is an aid to the imagination,” said Freddie, “and it deadens pain.”
“Mental pain,” he added significantly, after a pause. “For that alcohol is useless. I’ve tried it.”
“I think I’ll have some of my own, if you don’t mind,” said Edwin.
“I quite agree with you. It would be much wiser,” said St. Aubyn. “Luckily you have no need for it.Facilis descensus Averni.”
From that day forward Edwin was always eagerly searching the face and the pupils of Freddie for any symptoms of opium poisoning. He never found any; and W.G., to whom he confided this thrilling incident, assured him that there was nothing in it, that Freddie had probably never smoked opium in his life, and that the whole thing was nothing more than one of the poses that this gentleman adopted for shocking the youthful and bourgeois. The impressive Freddie, according to W.G., was a damned anæmic waster. If only it had not been for the exhaustedPoems of Passion, Edwin might have agreed with him.
The solemn meetings of the panto-night committee engaged Edwin three afternoons a week. As a congregation of amazing bloods they were enthralling but as business gatherings they were more remarkable still. They were held in the saloon bar of a modern public house, all palatial mahogany, red plush and plate-glass, called the White Horse; and the principal business of the day was the consumption of hot whisky with sugar and slices of lemon in it, during which Griffin, armed with a conspicuous note-book, reported on his activities, which appeared mainly to be social.
“On Thursday,” he would say, “I took Mary Loraine to lunch at the Grand Midland, and she said . . .” or “I saw Tommy Fane in hisdressing-room the other night, and he said: ‘Look here, old boy. . . ’” Apparently all Griffin’s theatrical friends called him “old boy.” The effect of these narrations on Griffin would be so exhausting that he found it necessary to order more whisky all round. The manager himself would bring it in; a brilliant gentleman named Juniper with red baggy cheeks the laxness of which was compensated by a waxed moustache that stuck out on either side as if a skewer had transfixed them. To Griffin this magnificent creature was most decorous; for the White Horse was one of Astill’s houses, and Griffin had taken the trouble to inform him that the great Sir Joseph was his uncle. In spite of, rather than as a result of these meetings, the panto-night arranged itself. The date was fixed, the bouquets and presents purchased, the announcements in the papers that warned any patrons of pantomime that on this particular night they could not hope to see a normal performance, inserted. Griffin, in the Common Room, became a centre of feverish importance, and even Edwin, in spite of the superciliousness of Martin, and the rough chaff of W.G., caught a little of the reflected glamour.
Edwin now had to face the ordeal of announcing the approach of panto-night to his father. If he were to see the thing through, as was his duty as a member of the committee, it would be quite impossible for him to catch the last train to Halesby, which left North Bromwich at nine-thirty, except on Thursday and Saturday night. Mr. Ingleby, hearing, saw the pit gaping beneath Edwin’s feet. “You didn’t mention this to me before. . . . Isuppose you have had to spend quite a lot of time at these committee meetings? I think it was rather unwise of you to undertake it in your first year. . . . There’s only four months before your examination.”
“Oh, I think the exam. will be all right,” said Edwin airily.
“I don’t like to hear you speak like that, Edwin,” said his father. “Over-confidence is a dangerous thing.”
“But it wouldn’t be any better pretending that I didn’t think it was all right, surely?”
“Well, humility is a great virtue.”
“Not any greater than honesty.”
“It’s all very well to talk about honesty; but it would have been more honest, wouldn’t it, if you’d told me that”—he hesitated—“this was going on?”
“There you are. . . . That’s the whole point. If I told you everything you wouldn’t sleep for imagining things that hadn’t happened. It’s the thing that’s worried me ever since I was at school. If you’re absolutely honest with other people, life simply isn’t worth living, because they don’t understand it. It isn’t done. I’ve come to the conclusion, father, that the only thing that really matters is to be honest with yourself.”
“If you can trust yourself—”
“Well, I think I can. . . . And I wish you’d believe in it.”
“I do, Edwin. Only naturally I’m anxious. You’re a child. Where is this . . . this performance held?”
“At the Queen’s Theatre this year.”
“Well, I suppose that is better than a music hall.”
His father’s prejudice against the music halls, or, as they were then beginning to be called, Theatres of Varieties, was an old story. Edwin could hardly resist the temptation of telling him that the performers in the pantomime were nearly all music-hall artistes, but Mr. Ingleby saved him, by asking him where he intended to sleep.
“Oh, I expect W.G. will give me a shake-down in his digs.”
“I suppose,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a shade of anxiety, “that Brown is also on the committee—”.
The idea of the honest W.G. as a member of this constellation of bloods tickled Edwin. He now wished to goodness he’d never told his father of W.G.’s family differences and of his lucky double on the Lincoln and National.
“Oh, no, old W.G.’s far too sober for this sort of thing.”
It was an unfortunate word.
“Sober?” repeated Mr. Ingleby. “Well, I suppose you will have to go; but I do hope—”
He didn’t say what he hoped; but Edwin knew, and was content to leave it at that.
The great day came, and Edwin found, as some compensation for the scoffing of W.G. and the superciliousness of Martin and Maskew, that his position was really one of some importance. All the first-year men, even the immaculate Harrop, had decided to go to the theatre, and up to the last minute Edwin was busy selling tickets. He had askedW.G. to put him up, and W.G., as a matter of form, had consented. “I don’t suppose I shall see you after midnight, my son,” he said. With his usual thoroughness in everything that he attempted, W.G. had determined to make a night of it. “It will do me good to make a damned fool of myself for once in a way,” he said, “if it’s only for the sake of realising it afterwards . . .”
They put in a hard afternoon’s work together first, and then he and Edwin and Maskew went together to W.G.’s rooms to change. They were all rather excited, and W.G. carried a bottle of whisky in each of his coat pockets, the first of which was broached as an aperitif while they were changing. In less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired as nearly as convention would allow him, in the manner of his woaded ancestry: a splendid caveman with lowering black brows and hairy arms like those of a gorilla, a disguise that only called for a little accentuation of his natural characteristics to be made effective; Maskew, again in character, as a Restoration cavalier; and Edwin in the modest guise of Pierrot. In the foyer of the theatre they met Martin, who had driven down in a hansom from Alvaston clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a feeding bottle round his neck. The stalls were already full of a carnival crowd of students, and the rest of the house was crowded with spectators who had come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate people who had entered in ignorance of the festival and the fact that their form of entertainment was to be changed for one night only.
There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, afleshy and unsubtle Mephistopheles, the Mephistopheles of Gounod, not of Goethe, and Freddie St. Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of black curls that he had procured for his presentation of Byron. Freddie, in the interests of verisimilitude, had even shaved his moustache.