They walked home in silence. It seemed as if Mr. Ingleby were still worrying about his wife’s tiredness, for when she tried to joke with him at the supper table he was moody and restrained.
“I’m not really a bit overdone,” she protested, kissing his forehead.
“You’re like a pair of children, the two of you,” he said, and indeed his gray seriousness seemed to isolate him from all the joy of youth that was in them.
That night Edwin’s mother sat for a long time on the bed talking to him in a low voice. She would not tell him any more about the mountain farmstead that had once been a castle, even when he begged her to do so. She wanted to talk, she said, about all that he was to do during the term, to make wonderful plans for the holidays, when the days would be longer and they would be able to sit out under the limes on the lawn in the twilight.
“I am going to plant evening stock,” she said, “all along the lawn border in between the irises. Besides, I shall be stronger then and we will oftentake our tea with us to Uffdown.” And at last she said, “Eddie, you bad boy, you must really go to sleep now, darling. You’ve got such a big journey before you to-morrow, and you’re sure to get a headache if you don’t have a good night’s sleep.” She kissed him many times.
And when she had passed downstairs to the dining-room where her husband sat before the fire in a plush arm-chair, lightly dozing, she kissed him, too. She was feeling queerly flushed and emotional, and somehow the atmosphere of that little room felt stuffy to her after the air of the open spaces.
“I’m restless to-night, dear,” she said. “I hate Eddie going back to school. It’s dreadful to be parted from your baby just when he’s beginning to be more and more part of you.”
“Come close to me, by the fire, child,” he said.
“No . . . I want some music, I think.”
She went into the drawing-room and lit the candles on the piano. Sitting there, in the pale light, with a shawl thrown over her muslin tea-gown, she looked very frail and pathetic, against the piano’s ebony. She played theSonata Appassionataof Beethoven, and the rather tawdry little knick-knacks on the piano danced as if they were made uncomfortable by the rugged passion. The whole room seemed a little bit artificial and threadbare, ministering to her discontent. When theSonatawas finished she still sat at the piano, conscious of her own reflection in its polished panels, and wanting to cry. She could not bear thetaunting of that image, and so she snuffed the candles and sat in the dark.
Edwin tossing on the verge of sleep was conscious of the music ceasing, and, in the silence that followed, the cool cries of the owls.
Edwinhad expected that the wrench of going back to school after these holidays would be unbearable: but when he returned to St. Luke’s next day he was almost astonished at his own acceptance of the change. It was evening when he arrived, and boys who had come from a greater distance than he were already unpacking their play-boxes in the long box-room. Edwin sniffed the smell which he had once found so alien—that mingled odour of cricket flannels, biscuits, bat-oil, and faint mustiness, with relish. He passed through the swing-doorway into the library, dark and echoing and groped his way towards the poetry bookshelves. He ran his fingers over the brass netting that protected their case, he even tried his play-box key to see if it had lost its cunning. The lock opened easily, and he felt for the backs of the big maroon volumes of Byron with their shiny title-plates. He thought of Mr. Leeming and of Sir Percivale. A foolish phrase, one of a kind that he had often lately found running through his brain—rhythmical groups of words that meant nothing in particular—formed itself in his mind and stuckthere. “The white lie of a blameless life.” He laughed at himself. These words that came from nowhere were the strangest things. He heard the echo of his own laugh in the dark and empty room. The white lie of a blameless life. . . . It pleased him to think that he had done with Mr. Leeming as a form-master, even though the question of Hebrew and Holy Orders remained unanswered.
Stepping out of the library he was hailed by Widdup; a plumper, sunbrowned Widdup fresh from three weeks with a doctor uncle in Devonshire. There had been long drives through the lanes at the back of Start Bay where the primroses (so Widdup assured him) were as big as door-handles; there had actually been sea-bathing in April, and the joy of watching huge liners, homeward bound from India, making the Start. “And hills . . .” said Widdup, “you never saw such hills. Talk about these downs. . . .”
“It’s awfully hilly country at home,” said Edwin.
They were walking side by side and up and down the quadrangle, from the gym to the swimming bath, and dozens of couples were crossing and recrossing in the same track. From time to time they would catch a few words of conversation, eager and excited, as they passed. Above them stretched a deep sky powdered with dust of gold.
“What did you say?” said Widdup. “I’m awfully sorry, old chap. I didn’t catch it. Douglas shouted to me. . . .”
“I don’t know . . .” said Edwin. “Oh, yes . . . hills. I said there are some ripping hills at home. One called Uffdown.”
“But these hills in Devonshire . . . you’ve got to get out of the trap for nearly every one. I used to drive my uncle. It was awful sport. You’d think I was rotting, but it’s true.”
The chapel bell started tolling in short jerks. The couples began to drift towards the northern end of the Quad, where the gates were being unbolted. For five minutes exactly the gravel of the wide path sloping to the chapel gave out a grating sound beneath the pressure of many hundred feet. The last stragglers hurried in. The master on duty entered the porch. All the life of that dark mass of buildings spread upon the bare edge of the downs became concentrated within the walls of the chapel. Its stained glass windows glowed as with some spiritual radiance. Inside they began to sing the hymn which is used at the beginning of the term:—
“Rank by rank again we standFrom the four winds gathered hither,Loud the hallowed walls demandWhence we come and how and whither . . .”
and from the open doors there issued a faintly musty smell, as though indeed the dead air of the holiday-time were dispossessed and young life had again invaded its ancient haunt.
It seemed to Edwin from the first as though the concentrated delights of this summer term were surely enough to efface every memory of discomfort and suffering that had clouded his early days at St. Luke’s. He was exceptionally happy in hisnew form. The form-master, whose name was Cleaver, was an idle man with a young wife and a small income of his own, circumstances that combined to make him contented with the conditions of servitude at St. Luke’s which weighed so heavily on the disappointed and underpaid Selby. He was also a fine cricketer, accepting the worship which was the prerogative of an old “blue,” and convinced in his own mind—if ever that kingdom were possessed by anything so positive as a conviction—that the main business of the summer term was cricket. The atmosphere of the cricket-field, with its alternations of strenuousness and summery lassitude, pervaded his classroom, and the traditions of that aristocratic game, in which nobody could conceivably behave in a violent or unsportsmanlike manner, regulated his attitude towards the work of his form.
Edwin found it fairly easy to keep his average going at the departments of the game in which Mr. Cleaver was concerned: Latin and Greek and English. If, as occasionally happened, he made a century, Cleaver was ready to congratulate him as a sportsman and a brother. To be beaten by some yorker of Tacitus was no crime if he had played with a straight bat and didn’t slog. Even a fool who could keep his end up had Mr. Cleaver’s sympathy.
It was not only in a spiritual atmosphere of the Lower Fifth that Edwin found content. The classroom which the form inhabited was the most pleasant in the whole school, placed high with a bow-window overlooking a pleasant lawn that a poplarovershadowed. Beyond the lawn lay a belt of dense thickets full of singing birds, on the edge of which laburnum and lilac were now in flower: so that when Edwin’s innings was over, or Mr. Cleaver was gently tossing up classical lobs to the weaker members of the form, he could let his eyes wander over the warm air of the lawn to plumes of purple lilac waving in the summer breeze, or the tops of the avenue of lime-trees leading to the chapel spire. Even in the heat of the day the Lower Fifth classroom was cool and airy, visited only by wandering bees and scents of lime and lilac beckoning towards a golden afternoon.
The term was full of lovely animal delights; the luxury of flannels and soft felt hats; the warmth of a caressing sun; the contrast of cool drinks and water-ices; the languors of muscular fatigue; the reviving ecstasy of a plunge into the green depths of the swimming bath; the joy of extended twilights, and, in the thin air of evening, a multitude of sounds, soothing because they were so familiar as to be no more disturbing to consciousness than silence: boys’ voices calling in the fields, the clear click of bat and ball, the stinging echoes of the fives-court. Great days . . . great days . . .
Edwin found himself becoming keen on cricket—not indeed from any ambitions towards excellence, though the mere fact of sitting at Mr. Cleaver’s feet was an inspiration, but for the sheer joy of tiring himself at the nets and the peculiar charm of the game’s setting of sunburn and white flannels and green fields. Cricket was a part of this divine summer, and therefore to be worshipped. Littleby little as he practised he found he was beginning to improve, and before the middle of the term he was developing into a fair bowler of medium pace and had taken his own place in the house second eleven. It did him good in other ways; for in this capacity he found that he was at length accepted naturally and without any exceptional effort on his part. So, miraculously, he seemed to have arrived at a degree of normality. This, in itself, was a triumph.
Spending long afternoons with his team in the lower fields, he found that he could feel really at home with other “men.” He discovered qualities in them that he had never guessed before. In the cricket field even Douglas became tolerable; no longer a terrible and baleful influence with scowling brows under a mop of black hair, but just a jolly good wicket-keeper. Edwin began to be feverishly interested in the fortunes of the second eleven: kept their averages, produced an elaborate table of league results, conceived a secondary but violent interest in the progress of his own County, Worcestershire, in those days, thanks to the brilliancy of the Foster brothers—slowly rising to fame. Sometimes while he lay on the grass, watching his own side bat, he would see the figure of old, fat Leeming ambling along the path. He would shrink into the concealment of his uniform flannel, being afraid that his patron would speak to him and isolate him from his pleasant company. Leeming was not fond of cricket and his shadow would mar this particular joy. Only when he had passed relief would come. Great days . . . great days.
In the pursuit of these joys it is not to be supposed that Ingleby forsook his friends the poets. In the flush of early June, before the crowding of midsummer’s high pomps, there came to him many moments of ecstasy. In the spinney at the back of the head master’s house there was a nightingale to which his evening dreams were dedicated. All the twilights were full of delicious scents and sounds. Of all other times he remembered most clearly certain evenings when he would walk all alone up the long slope of the gravel-path from the chapel, hearing the whizzing wings of the cockchafers that made their home in the shrubs on either side. Sunday evenings . . . Sundays were the most wonderful days of all; not, indeed, because the chapel services made any religious appeal to him—the advances of Mr. Leeming had scotched that long ago—but because of the peculiar atmosphere of freedom which the long day possessed and which, somehow, even the Head’s sermons failed to mar. He hated the Head’s sermons; he hated, in particular, the sight of Griffin, who was a useful member of the choir, singing, like any golden-headed cherub, a solo in the anthem. But he loved the music, and particularly the psalms, with which the daily matins and evensong made him so familiar that he couldn’t help knowing many of them by heart.
The chants to which the psalms were sung at St. Luke’s had been specially composed for the school chapel by Dr. Downton, the organist, who had fittedthem with modulations that were, at the least, surprising to ears which could not be happy or feel secure far from the present help of tonic and dominant. Most of the congregation at St. Luke’s considered that Sammy’s tunes were rotten. At first they were inflicted upon the choir in manuscript; but in Edwin’s second summer they appeared collected in a slim gray volume, and Heal, who acted as choirmaster, explained that they were the results of the most careful study of the Hebrew text, of night-long ecstasies, and the deep brooding of Dr. Downton’s mind. It gave Edwin a picture of Sammy, with his gray, impassive face, weaving his tunes out of the silence of the night by candlelight in the high turret-room which that solitary master inhabited, and for this alone he began to love the St. Luke’s Psalter. It is certain, at any rate, that his early acquaintance with strange harmonic ideas made a great deal of the most modern music easy to him in after years. Later, in North Bromwich, when he became immersed in the flood of Wagner, he often wondered whether Sammy in his lonely tower, had known these wonders, and cherished them up there all by himself. He certainly couldn’t associate that sort of music with the naïvetés of Mr. Heal’s flute. And yet, you never can tell. . . . Mr. Heal knew his Hardy. . . .
Then there were Sunday walks with Widdup over the downs under a grilling sun, and through the woods of York Park, where Griffin and Douglas, poaching, had encountered keepers; but the glare and dryness of a chalk country in summer does not invite exercise, and the most precioushours of all were spent on the sloping banks between the Grand Entrance and the chapel. Here, early on a Sunday morning, Edwin and Widdup would carry out an armful of rugs and cushions: and there all day they would lie in the shade of the limes, reading, writing letters (Ingleby always had a letter from his mother to answer on Sundays), watching the restless flight of little copper butterflies, seeing the hot sky deepen to an almost southern blue behind the pointed gables of the school. Against such skies the red brick of St. Luke’s became amazingly beautiful. It seemed to Edwin that in his home, on the edge of the black country, the sky was never so clear and deep. Lying there he would read the books that he had smuggled out of the library . . . poetry . . . a great deal of it. Novels . . . he read, and he always remembered reading, Poe’sTales of Mystery and Imagination: “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death.” Such titles! There seemed to be no end to the leisure of those days.
With the middle of the term came the Race Meeting on the Downs. During the whole of Race Week the college bounds were tightened, so that no boy dared show his face outside the iron gates. Within the short memory of the school, a prefect—no less!—had been expelled, confronting his own housemaster on the edge of Tattersall’s ring.
On Wednesday of the week the race for the Six Thousand Guineas, the greatest of the classics, was to be run. St. Luke’s within its closed gates buzzed like a hive. In every house and every form therewere sweepstakes. Griffin made a book; boasted in Hall that he meant to see the “Guineas” run or die. Ingleby very nearly admired him for his courage. The great day came. All morning from the open windows of the Lower Fifth classroom he could hear the rumble of loaded brakes climbing the Downs road. In those days there were no motors, but white dust, up-churned by many hundreds of wheels, filled the air and drifted in clouds into the college quad. From a high wall at the back of the swimming-bath they could see the road itself and the unceasing, hot procession moving upwards; brakes full of men who carried beer-bottles; bookies in white top-hats; costers with buttons as big as half-crowns driving carts drawn by little donkeys whose thick coats were matted with sweat; gipsies out to prey upon the rest of mankind; smart gentlemen in dog-skin gloves driving tandem; regimental drags. All the road was full of dust and torn paper and the odour of beer and sweat, and every member of the crowd looked anxiously forward, as though he feared he would be too late for the “Guineas,” toward the summit of the Downs where the grand stand, like a magnificent paper-rack, stood up white against the sky. Down in the playing-fields that afternoon nobody thought much of cricket. For all the locked iron gates, the eager consciousness of the crowd on the Downs had invaded St. Luke’s. Ingleby was scoring for his own side’s innings. Douglas, who was sitting astride of a bat, kept his eyes fixed on the airy summit of the grand stand, now fringed with the black bodies of a thousand spectators. He pulled out his watch.
“They’re off!” he said. “My God, don’t I envy old Griff!”
Ingleby forgot his scoring. He, too, was wondering what had happened. He could imagine it easily, for several times on the Downs he had crossed the tan gallops on which, it was said, horses from the royal racing stables were trained, and seen; incredibly slender creatures, lithe as greyhounds, thundering neck and neck, over the sprinkled bark. He could think of nothing swifter or more exciting on earth. The game stopped. All the players were looking at the grand stand, as though their eyes could tell them which horse had won. Two minutes. Three. From the top of the Downs a great roar came down to them. Some monstrous beast, no congregation of men, was roaring there. The black fringe on the grand stand became animated by waving arms and hats and sticks. A cloud of tinier specks detached themselves. These were the carrier pigeons; and in a very little time they were flying high above the playing-fields, seeing, no doubt, the black mass of London outstretched so many miles away.
“God . . . I wish I could shoot one,” said Douglas. “I never heard such a row as they made up there. Ingleby, I’ll lay you two to one the Prince’s horse has won.”
That evening witnessed the canonisation of Griffin. Veritably he had seen the Guineas. A crowd of admirers listened to his story between preps in the house classroom. His manner was indolent and boastful. This was to be no more than the first of many exploits. On Friday—Ladies’ Day—the race for the Birches would be run. He had put the money he had won over the Guineas on a horse called Airs and Graces, and was going to see her bring his money home.
Ingleby had never heard the name of this horse before, but when the house sweepstakes for the Birches was drawn he found that Airs and Graces had fallen to him. Griffin, who evidently considered that this animal’s destinies were in his keeping, offered him a pound for his ticket. Ingleby wasn’t having any. Douglas, called in to give an opinion on the damnableness of that skunk Ingleby’s sticking to a sweepstake ticket for which he had been given a fair offer, agreed it was a bloody shame that a man like that should have drawn anything but a blank. What did he know about racing? Racing was a pastime of gentlemen in which he couldn’t obviously have any interest. Did Ingleby understand that Griffin was going to see the race itself, a thing that he would never have the guts to do in all his life?
A couple of years before Ingleby would not have known how to meet the coalition; it is possible, even, that he would have given up his ticket, and improbable that he would have received the pound that Griffin offered. By this time he had learnt that no answer at all was better than the softest; that when Griffin and Douglas started that sort of game the best thing was to keep his temper and clear out as quickly as possible. On this occasion the chapel bell saved him. All through the service that evening he was pondering on Griffin’s words, trying, rather obstinately, to convince himself thatthey weren’t true; that he wasn’t the skunk they had agreed to call him; that he was sufficiently gentle in birth to have an interest in what the newspapers called “the sport of kings,” that, at a pinch, he might summon up sufficient “guts” to emulate the boldness of such a daring customer as Griffin. Perhaps it was all too horribly true. . . .
He couldn’t accept it. It was inconceivable that all the attributes of knightly courage should be vested in people like Griffin; and yet he couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t deceiving himself. It was so easy to imagine oneself brave . . . the easiest thing in the world. “That’s the worst of me,” he said to himself, “I can imagine anything. I could imagine myself hiring a coach and wearing a white top-hat and asking old fat Leeming to come to the Birches with me on Friday. I’m all imagination and silly rot of that kind; but when it comes to the point I’m no damned good at all.”
It wasn’t the first time that he had realised defects of this kind. Term after term he had been reproaching himself for the lack of moral or physical courage.
There was only one way out of it: to prove that he was capable of the things which he feared by doing them. In this way he had driven himself to batter his hands to pulp by playing fives without gloves; for this he had taken a dive into the deep end of the swimming-bath for the sole reason that he found it impossible to float in the shallow water and had determined to swim; for this he had forced himself to spend long hours, or to waste long hours, over Geometry, the subject that he hated most.Now, in the same way, and wholly for his own satisfaction, he determined to go to the Birches.
That night, walking up and down the Quad, he opened the subject to Widdup. He said,—
“Do you know I drew Airs and Graces in the house sweep? Griffin offered me a quid for the ticket.”
“I should jolly well let him have it,” said Widdup, explaining the mathematical side of the question. “You see, you’ve won a twenty to one chance already. The chances against the horse winning are . . . well you can work it out easily. I’ll do it for you in second prep. Besides, old Griff has a lot of money on the horse and he’s going to see the race run.”
“Well, so am I,” said Ingleby. Widdup laughed, and that annoyed him.
“What do you think of it?”
“I think you’re a damned fool,” said Widdup.
Ingleby left it at that. Perhaps Widdup was right. But why in the world should the same thing count for heroism in the case of Griffin and folly in his own? He distrusted the mathematical Widdup’s sense of proportion. In any case he had to go through with it. If he didn’t, no subsequent heroism could ever persuade him that he wasn’t a coward and worthy of every epithet with which Griffin had loaded him. It was in the same spirit, he imagined, that knights in the ages of chivalry had set themselves to perform extravagant tasks, that saints had undergone monstrous privations; just to convince themselves that they weren’t as deficient in “guts” as they feared.
The business came more easily than he had expected when first he tied himself to his resolve. Friday at St. Luke’s was a “fag-day.” On Friday afternoon, that is to say, there were no organised games. The afternoon prep started at half-past three, and afternoon school at four-fifteen. The great race, he learned, was to be run at three o’clock; and this would give him time to miss the hour of prep which was not supervised and to be ready for an innings of Greek with Cleaver. An easy game, Greek. . . . For once in a way he was prepared to slog like blazes.
Up to the last moment Widdup refused to think that he would go through with it. He didn’t believe, indeed, until he saw Edwin climb on to the top of the wooden fence in the nightingale’s spinney at the back of the Head’s house and drop over into the road.
“Now, I should think you’ve had enough of it,” said Widdup. “If the old man came along and saw you there, you’d be bunked to-morrow. Come along. . . .”
“I’ll be back just after three,” said Edwin. “You’ll be here to give me a hand over?”
“All right,” said Widdup. “You are a bloody fool, you know.”
Hedidn’t need telling that. With every step the conviction was borne in on him, and when he came to the end of the wooden palings that marked the school boundary he was very near to giving up his enterprise. He could easily, so easily, slip over the hedge on the opposite side of the road and wait there until the race was over and the bookies’ messenger-boys came racing down the hill on their bicycles, bells tingling all the way; and then he could meet Widdup at the appointed place and say that he had seen the race. By that time rumour would have told him the winner’s name. But that wouldn’t do. Not that he cared two-pence-halfpenny whether he told the truth or a lie to Widdup, but because he would feel such a wretched coward in his own mind. He had got to prove to himself that he possessed the moral courage which he doubted. It was only the existence of the very real danger—and he envisaged not only his own expulsion, but harrowing scenes of remorse and distress at home—that made the thing a fair test. He had to go through with it.
Beyond the line of fencing, even standing in midstream of that determined crowd, he felt himself curiously unprotected. He did a curious thing. Heturned his college cap, with its circular stripes of green, inside out, presenting to the world a dirty brown lining. This wasn’t enough for him: he also turned up the collar of his Eton coat. But the crowd was thinking of one thing only and none seemed to notice him. They noticed nothing. Even the sellers of the race cards and the tawny gipsies who cried for a piece of silver to cross their palms, and promised good luck, were unheeded. Edwin concealed himself, or imagined some measure of concealment, in an eddy of dust between a heavy wagonette, crammed with men who looked like licensed victuallers, and a coster’s donkey cart. He found that by holding on to the step of the wagonette he felt safer. It was reassuring to hold something. What a rotten coward he was!
At last one of the men in the last seat of the wagonette who had been rolling about with his eyes closed, opened them and looked at Edwin. They were curiously watery eyes, and his mouth was all over the shop. When he had dreamily considered the phenomenon of Edwin for a little while he addressed him,—
“You look ’ot, young man.”
Itwashot, Edwin panted.
“Bloody ’ot,” said the man in the wagonette. As an afterthought he took a bottle of beer, about a quarter full, from his pocket. The cork came out with a pop. “Gas,” said the fat man, and chuckled. “Gas . . . eh?” He took a swig, and with the froth fringing his moustache, offered the bottle to Edwin. Edwin shook his head.
“You won’t?” said the fat man. “You’reworkin’ ’arder than I am. Oh, well, if ’e won’t,” he continued dreamily, and finished the bottle. Then he pitched it over the hedge.
The dust was terrible. On either side of the track the hedges and banks were as white as the road. The horses pulled well, and even hanging on the step Edwin found it difficult to keep up with them. At the crest of the hill the driver whipped them into a trot. Edwin let go the step and was cursed fluently by the coster for standing in the way of his donkey-cart. His friend waved him good-bye. He found himself caught up in a stream of other walkers, hurrying in a bee-line for the grand stand, now distantly visible with the royal standard drooping above it. Behind him and in front the black snake of that procession stretched, sliding, literally, over the shiny convolutions of the Down that the feet of the foremost had polished, and moving in a sort of vapour of its own, compact of beer and strong tobacco and intolerable human odours. From the crown of the Downs Edwin looked back at the playing-fields, the tiny white figures at the nets and in the fives-court that sometimes stopped in their play to watch the black serpent in whose belly he now moved. They seemed very near—far too near to be comfortable; and even though he knew that nobody down there could possibly see him, he felt happier when a billow of the Down hid the plain from sight.
It was only when he reached the grand stand, losing himself in the thick of the crowd that clustered about it, that he began to feel safe. He looked at his watch and found that he had a quarter ofan hour to spare. A little old man in seedy black clothes grabbed his elbow fiercely. “Young sir, young sir,” he said, “take my advice . . . gratis; free; for nothing.” He laughed, and Edwin saw gray bristles stretched on his underlip. “Take my advice. Never expose your watch at a race-meeting. Myself . . . I’ve learnt it from long experience, my own and my friends’. . . . Never even take a watch when I go racing. No, I leave it at home. A beautiful half-hunter by Benson of Ludgate Hill, with enamelled face. Yes. . . . You take my advice. A thing to always remember. Yes. . . .”
Edwin seriously thanked him. A roar went up from the crowd. “The Prince. The Prince has entered the Royal Box,” said the old man. “God bless him.” He raised a dusty top-hat. An extraordinary gesture for this wrinkled, gnomish creature. “Yes,” he mumbled; “a handsome time-piece. . . . Benson of Ludgate Hill. A very prominent firm. We shall see nothing here. You follow me.”
Edwin followed. More beer, more tobacco, more of the curious composite smell, more positively vegetable than human, that he had begun to associate with trampled pieces of paper, probably the debris of bags that had once held fruit of some kind. The little man pushed his way deftly through the crowd. He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed to notice him; and indeed the leading characteristics of this crowd’s vast consciousness seemed to be good humour. The bookies in their white hats, the many-buttoned costers, the sweating men in black coats, the very waiters in the refreshment tents, staggering under leaning towers of beefplates, seemed determined to enjoy themselves in spite of the heat and the smell of their neighbours under the white-hot sky.
Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties. The vastness of the crowd subtly shielded him. He felt newly secure, and his spirit was caught up into its excitement and good humour. He even turned down his collar. And all the time his mind exulted in a queer sense of clarity, an intoxication due, perhaps, to his successful daring. In this state he found all his surroundings vivid and amusing; all colours and sounds came to him with a heightened brilliancy. He smiled, and suddenly found that a young gipsy woman with her head in a bright handkerchief was smiling back at him. He thought it was jolly that people should smile like that. He thought what jolly good luck it was meeting his guide, the shiny shoulders of whose frock coat he saw in front of him. His quick mind had placed the little man already: a solicitor’s clerk in some ancient worm-eaten Inn of Court, a relic of the dark, lamp-litten London of Dickens: a city of yellow fog and cobbled pavements shining in the rain: of dusty, cobwebbed law-stationers’ windows and cosy parlours behind them where kettles were singing on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was mixed at night.
It seemed to him that he could have met no more suitable person than his friend; for really all this racing crowd were making a sort of Cockney holiday of the kind that the greatest Victorian loved most dearly. He began to find words for it all. Hemustfind words for it, for it would be such funwriting to his mother about it. If he dared. . . . It would be time enough to write a letter about it when the business was finished without disaster. There was always the possibility that he would be found out and expelled. Even if that should happen, he thought, he would like to tell his mother. . . .
Together they passed the level of the grand stand. This huge erection of white-painted wood provided the only constant landmark, for Edwin was not tall enough to see above the shoulders of the adult crowd in which he was moving. Now they had left the grand stand behind it seemed that they must surely be crossing the course. And then a bell clanged and the crowd parted like a great wave of the Red Sea in pictures of the Exodus. Edwin found himself clinging to the coat-tails of his friend, and the little man, in turn, hanging on, as if for his life, to a whitewashed post from which the next wave would have sucked him back. The crowd swayed gently, settling down and leaving them stranded upon the very edge of the course. “That’s a trick worth knowing,” said Edwin’s friend.
Opposite them the stands, well known to him on Sunday walks as a vast skeletal erection, stood clothed in flesh and blood: tier upon tier of human faces packed one above the other looked down on him. Edwin had never before realised how pale the faces of men and women were. From the midst of them there rose a ceaseless murmur of human speech, shrilling occasionally like the voices of starlings when they whirl above an autumn reed bed, and then, as suddenly, still. For one extraordinarymoment they were nearly silent. “They’re off!” said the little man. . . .
Again the murmur of the stands arose. A bookie just behind them was doing his best to get in a last few bets, entreating, proclaiming passionately the virtues of “the old firm.” His red face lifted above the crowd, and while he shouted saliva dribbled from his mouth. A curious roaring sound came from the other side of the horse-shoe course a mile or more away. He stopped with his mouth open in the middle of a sentence. Something had happened over there. Everybody, even those who couldn’t see anything, turned in the direction from which the sound came. Edwin turned with them. He couldn’t imagine why. And when he turned his eyes gazed straight into those of Miss Denning, the matron of the College Sanatorium, marvellously dressed for the occasion and leaning upon the innocent arm of Mr. Heal. Thank God, Mr. Heal was short-sighted! Edwin felt himself blushing. He knew for certain that she had seen and recognised him; for his sick headaches had often taken him to the Sanatorium and he had always been rather a favourite of hers. She stared straight at him and her eyes never wavered. Obviously the game was up. He fancied that her lips smiled faintly. Never was a smile more sinister.
Edwin had an impulse to bolt . . . simply to turn tail and run at his hardest straight back to the college. He couldn’t do that. Between him and escape, an impassable river, lay the parabola of yellow grass over which the Birches was even now being run. Feeling almost physically sick, heslipped round to the other side of his companion. He wished that gnomish creature had been bigger. “They’re at the corner . . . if you lean out you can see . . . look, they’re coming into the straight . . . Airs and Graces leading. Down they come. The finest sight in the civilised world.”
Edwin didn’t see them. He saw nothing but the phantom of Miss Denning’s eyes, her faint and curiously sinister smile. He wished to goodness the race were over. Now everybody was shouting. The stands rose with a growl like great beasts heaving in the air. Something incredibly swift and strepitant passed him in a whirl of wind and dust. The crowd about him and the heaving stands broke into an inhuman roar. The little old man beside him was jumping up and down, throwing his top-hat into the air and catching it again. The whole world had gone shouting and laughing mad. Edwin heard on a hundred lips the name of Airs and Graces. It meant nothing to him. Now he could only think of escape; and as the crowd bulged and burst once more over the course he made a dash for the other side.
Mounted police were pressing back the tide; but Edwin was small, and quick enough to get over. He pushed and wriggled his way through masses to which there seemed to be no end. Only in the rear of the stands the density of the crowd thinned. Then he broke into a run and though he was soaked with sweat and his head was aching fiercely, he did not stop running until a billow of the Down had hidden the stands from sight.
In a little hollow littered with tins and otherdebris, and choked with nettles and some other hot-smelling herb, he lay, recovering his breath, and, for the first time, thinking, beside a diminished dew-pond of dirty water. He was miserable. Fate now brooded over him as heavily as the white-hot sky, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine why. It was ridiculous, in any case, that the mere sight of a woman’s eyes should have worked so extraordinary a miracle. Yet this was no less than the truth. Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all the happiness and light and colour had gone out of his adventure. That which had been, at least, magnificent, had now become childish or nearly silly. Reflecting, he couldn’t be satisfied that anything was changed. Nothing had really changed except himself; and he didn’t want to admit that he had changed either. No, he hadn’t changed. Only his mind was just like the dewpond at his feet in which the burning sky was mirrored. Some days it would be blue and white and others black with thunder. But the pool would be just the same. “I oughtn’t to be more miserable now than I was when I came up here; and then, apart from being a bit funky, I felt ripping.” None of these sober reflections relieved him. All the rest of the way back he felt hunted and miserable, and something very near to panic seized him at the point when he reached the college palings.
At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was waiting.
“Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said. Then he suddenly went white.
“What’s the matter?” cried Edwin.
“Oh, Lord, it’s the Head.”
The voice of the head-master came next,—“Hallo, what are you doing here? Let me see—Widdup, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
A mortar-board topped the palings. “Ingleby—What’s this? What’s this? What are you doing there?”
A moment of brilliant inspiration.
“Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked my cap over the fence. May I get it, sir?”
“Serious—very serious,” muttered the Head. “The letter of the law. Race-week. You’re out of bounds, you know—technically out of bounds. Boys have been expelled for less. Yes, expelled. Ruin your whole career.”
Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, in the same flash, the too-literal Widdup, white with fear.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said . . . “awfully sorry.”
“Mph. . . . What were you two doing here?”
“I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss-moth caterpillars.” Silence—then, rather lamely,—“They’re in the fourth stage, sir.”
“Are they?” The Head smiled, possibly because he approved of this fervent manifestation of what the head-masters’ conference called “nature study,” possibly at Edwin’s sudden revelation of schoolboy psychology. Decidedly he approved of the puss-moths. He had been reading Fabre aloud to his wife. Fabre, too, was a schoolmaster, poor devil! He did not speak his thoughts: schoolmasters never can. He said,—
“Let me see, Ingleby, you’re in the Lower Fifth?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I must speak to Mr. Cleaver. . . .” He didn’t say what he must speak about. “All right—get along with you.” He left them, walking away with his hands joined behind his back supporting an immense flounce of black silk gown. Edwin scrambled over the fence; his hands, as they clutched the top of it, were trembling violently.
“Well, you are a prize liar,” said Widdup, “and the old man believed every word of it.”
“I know,” said Edwin. “That’s the rotten part of it. . . .”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. . . .” He knew perfectly well what he meant.
“Who won?”
“Airs and Graces.”
“Then you’ve won the sweep.”
“Yes.”
Ten minutes later he was back in Mr. Cleaver’s classroom trying to make himself so inconspicuous that he wouldn’t be called upon to make an exhibition of himself, and, as luck would have it, nothing of any difficulty came his way to drag him from his comfortable obscurity. Even though the intense excitement of his adventure had now faded, the atmosphere of that high room had changed. He felt that he didn’t somehow belong to it; or, rather, that he had left something behind. All through that drowsy hour some part of him was still being hurried over the hot downs, swept along in the sweating crowds of the racecourse, and thiscircumstance made his present life strangely unreal, as though he were a changeling with whom it had nothing in common. Gradually, very gradually, the old conditions reasserted themselves, but it was not until the insistent discipline of the evening service in chapel had dragged him back into normality that his adventure and the influence of the strange people with whom he had rubbed shoulders began to fade. Widdup, with his unblushing admiration, helped. There was no shutting him up.
“Well, you have a nerve,” he said. “I wonder what you’ll do next. . . .”
“Oh, stow it,” said Edwin. “I’ve finished with that sort of thing. I’m not cut out for a blood.”
“I can’t think how you did it.”
“Neither can I. It was damned silly of me. I just wanted to satisfy myself that . . . that I had some guts, you know. I didn’t really care what you chaps thought about it. It was sort of private. . .”
Thatnight a thrilled but incredulous dormitory discussed the exploit of Ingleby. Without pretending to have approached the dizzy achievements of Griffin, Edwin perceived that in addition to reassuring himself he had managed to atone for a little of his former reputation. He found himself treated with something that was almost respect, partly for the daring of the whole expedition, but even more for the crowning achievement of his inspired lie.
“I wish you hadn’t told them that,” he said to Widdup.
“Why not?” said Widdup. “That was the best part of it.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t mind telling a lie, but it’s rotten if the chap you tell it to believes you.”
“Get out,” said Widdup. “If you want to know the truth it’s only another example of your rotten cockiness.”
Why? Why? Why? . . . He couldn’t understand it. It seemed to him that the most natural decent things in the world were all labelled as abnormalities. Even if he had proved to his ownsatisfaction that he possessed the usual amount of “guts,” it seemed that he was a kind of freak. There was no getting to the bottom of the mystery. Yet, when he came to consider himself, he was certain that his attitude was infinitely humble. Perhaps that was the trouble. Other chaps didn’t think about themselves. Edwin envied them unfeignedly. He felt that he was condemned to travel a sort of vicious circle. Thus, if he were honest to himself he was bound to fail in the ordinary normal standard and to be considered, if not a prig, an oddity. If, by enormous efforts, he were to compel himself into the trodden ways of thought and conduct, he couldn’t be honest—and in the process of regaining his honesty he found himself fighting his way back to the original misfortune. There was no way out of it. Isolated he must be. He determined, above all things, that even if he were not ashamed of his isolation, he wouldn’t be proud of it. It wasn’t easy.
The whole incident of the Birches—which, after all, he had meant for a sort of private trial—was becoming a nuisance. He almost welcomed the attitude of Griffin, who scoffed at the whole business and refused to believe he had been there. Griffin, his own reputation for valour and cunning being in question, determined to prove that Edwin had not been near the race. In the dormitory that night the coalition set themselves to this business, beginning with an examination at the hands of Griffin himself.
“Widdup says you went to see the Birches run.”
“Does he?” said Edwin.
“Now, none of your fooling, Ingleby. You’re a damned little liar. You never put your nose near the races.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter to you anyway.”
“Doesn’t it? You’ll soon know that it does. We’re not going to have any liars in this house. You’d better tell the truth at once.”
“All right, then. I did go to the races.”
“The swine! . . . Get a towel, Duggie.”
“Well . . . you asked me. . .”
“Now, I’m going to prove that you’re a liar. Of course you know that already. But you ought to be shown up for your own good. Then you’ll get a tight six. What were Airs and Graces’ colours?”
“I don’t know what his colours were.”
Griffin howled. “HIS . . . listen to the swine. He doesn’t know a horse from a mare, Duggie. Ingleby, how do you tell a horse from a mare?” Edwin blushing, was overwhelmed with laughter. By this time the towel was ready, wet, and twisted into a cable. “I’ll teach you the colours of Airs and Graces,” said Griffin. “We’ve had quite enough of your airs and graces here. Next time you’ll find it pays to tell the truth in this dormitory.”
Edwin got his six, having been bent double over the end of his own bed by the other seekers after truth. It was worth it. When the lights were out and he was comfortably settled in bed he decided that that sort of thing oughtn’t to make any difference. “My mind to me a kingdom is,” he said to himself; and in his mind the great guts question had been settled for ever. As for the lamming. . . . Well, it might have been a gym shoe. . . . Whilehe lay thinking of these things he was surprised to hear the voice of Widdup, who slept next to him, speaking in a whisper. “I say,” he said, “did you really go to the Birches, or were you pulling my leg?”
“Of course I did,” he replied. It gave him a little shock to find that so slight a thing as a display of physical violence had shaken Widdup’s faith.
“I’m glad of that,” came Widdup’s apologetic whisper. A long silence. “You’ve won the sweep, anyway,” said Widdup. “Thirty-eight and sixpence.” Edwin grunted.
“If you reckon that you’ll be here four more years, taking into account the number of men—average, you know—who go in for the house sweep every year, you could calculate the exact chances against your ever—”
He was asleep.
And while he slept after that day of unusual excitement and fierce colour, he had a curious dream. In the beginning it reflected a little of the anxieties of the afternoon, for he found himself hurrying in the middle of a huge and sweaty crowd which made no way for him. He did not know why he was running so violently; but of one thing he was certain, and this was that he was going to be late. At first he had in front of him the little man in the rusty coat who had been his companion on the Downs: the same queer creature now endowed with an aspect even more grotesque and an agility moreelfish, so that Edwin knew from the first that this time he was sure to lose him and never to catch him up again. All the masses of people through whom he pressed were moving even faster than himself and in the same direction, so that it seemed as if he could never gain ground at all, but must go on running for ever with no sight of his goal, nor any hope of getting nearer to it. At last his breath gave out, and he stopped. It wasn’t a bit of good; for the moving crowd wouldn’t stop with him, and he was pushed forward by this multitude of tall people, knowing that if he faltered for a moment or fell (as in the end he must), he would certainly be trampled to death by the feet of those who followed.
At last the little man outstripped him altogether, and feeling that he had lost all hope, Edwin gave a cry. When he cried out the whole hurrying crowd melted away, the noise of their padding footsteps left a clear patch of silence (it was like that) and a puff of cool, thin air blew suddenly right into his nostrils. He thought, “I’m not going to be late after all. . . . Why didn’t they tell me that I was going to Uffdown?” There was no air like that in the world. He drank it down in gulps as a horse drinks water. “Eddie, you’ll choke yourself,” his mother said. . . . “The light won’t last much longer.” “But why should it last, darling?” he replied. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said, “in the west. You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the end. Do you see?”
“Yes, darling, I can see it quite clearly. . . .” And he did see it. A long building of bluish stone with small windows set flush in the walls and nodripstones save one above the oak doorway. Not a soul to be seen. It looked as if the place had been deserted by living creatures for many years. “I can see it,” he said, “but I don’t think anybody lives there.”
“But you can see it?” she asked him eagerly. “Can you see the little bedroom window on the left—the third from the end—quite a little window?”
It was difficult to see, for, after all, it was more than a hundred miles away, and all the time that he was looking, the streamers of cloud kept rolling down from the darens on the mountain and drenching the whole scene in mist. “Eddie . . . there’s not much time,” she pleaded. “Do tell me.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can see the window you mean.”
She sighed. “I’m so glad, Eddie. I did want to show it you.”
“But why were you in such a hurry?”
“It was my last chance of showing it to you.”
“Whatever do you mean, darling?”
She turned her face away. Now it was quite dark. “I’m really dreaming,” he thought, “and this is a sort of stage on which they can do lightning tricks like that.” But there was no doubt about it being Uffdown. All round the sky the pit-fires of the black-country were flickering out. And though he couldn’t see her face, he could feel her soft hand in his. “At any rate, I’ve written . . .” she said at last.
That was the sentence which he carried in his mind when he awoke. A letter. But she didn’t usually write to him before Sunday, and it was now only Saturday. Yet, when he came into Hallfor breakfast a letter was lying on his plate. There was something so strange about the whole business that he was almost afraid to open it. He had a sudden, awful intuition that she was dead. Ridiculous, of course, for dead people didn’t write letters. Smiling at himself, yet scarcely reassured, he opened the letter and read it.
“My Darling Boy(she wrote),—Did you really make fifteen?You must be getting on.Aunt Laura has just been in to tea,and we talked such a lot that I have only just time to write this before father goes down to business and can post it.I have some very interesting news for you.The other afternoon Mrs. Willis of Mawne came in to see me.She and Lilian are going to Switzerland for a month this summer,and now she suggests that I should join them there.It won’t be just yet,and I think—no,I’m sure—that I should be back again before your holidays.Father wants me to go.I haven’t been very well,and the doctor says he’s sure it would do me good.All my life I’ve wanted to see Switzerland.I’m most awfully excited about it,Eddie,and father says he can spare me.Won’t it be wonderful?They are going about the end of June.I won’t forget that postal order,but I’m rather poor myself just at present.Eddie,do you keep my letters?I think I should like you to.The double stocks which father planted in the long bed are just coming out.“Good-bye,my darling,“Your loving“Mother.”
“My Darling Boy(she wrote),—Did you really make fifteen?You must be getting on.Aunt Laura has just been in to tea,and we talked such a lot that I have only just time to write this before father goes down to business and can post it.I have some very interesting news for you.The other afternoon Mrs. Willis of Mawne came in to see me.She and Lilian are going to Switzerland for a month this summer,and now she suggests that I should join them there.It won’t be just yet,and I think—no,I’m sure—that I should be back again before your holidays.Father wants me to go.I haven’t been very well,and the doctor says he’s sure it would do me good.All my life I’ve wanted to see Switzerland.I’m most awfully excited about it,Eddie,and father says he can spare me.Won’t it be wonderful?They are going about the end of June.I won’t forget that postal order,but I’m rather poor myself just at present.Eddie,do you keep my letters?I think I should like you to.The double stocks which father planted in the long bed are just coming out.
“Good-bye,my darling,
“Your loving“Mother.”
Of course nothing, in spite of the news of the Swiss excursion, could be more ordinary. That would be wonderful for her . . . of course it would. And yet, in spite of all these reasonable convictions he couldn’t get that dream out of his head. Something, he felt sure, was going wrong.
He tried to analyse the source of his disquietude. “Perhaps I’m jealous,” he thought. He was most awfully jealous of anything that other people had to do with his mother, and, anyway, he didn’t know these Willis people very well. They were new friends of hers: a family of wealthy iron-masters whose works had suddenly risen in the year of the Franco-Prussian war, and were now slowly but gigantically expanding. They lived at Mawne Hall, a sad but pretentious mansion of the departed Pomfrets, of which Edwin knew only the wrought-iron gates at the bottom of a steep drive. They had a son, Edward, of very much the same age as himself, but the Willises had no great educational ambitions (that was where Edwin’s mother came in), and had sent him to the ancient but decaying Grammar School of Halesby, an impossible concern in the eyes of any public-schoolboy. The Willises had pots of money. Here again Edwin suspected them. It rather looked as if they had “taken up” his mother; and nobody on earth had the right to do that. He hated the Willises (and particularly Edward) in advance. He always hated people he hadn’t met when he heard too much about them. He thought that the new intimacy probably had something to do with his Aunt Laura, who was diffuse and fussyand ornate, and not a patch on his mother. Nobody was a patch on his mother . . .
He couldn’t get rid of his anxiety, and so, in the heat of the moment, before morning school, he answered her letter. “Oh, darling, don’t go to Switzerland with a lot of strangers. If you do go, I feel that I shall never see you again,” he wrote. He knew it wouldn’t be any good. She couldn’t reasonably do anything but smile at his fancies. But he couldn’t help it. He even took the trouble to post the letter in the box at the Grand Entrance, so as to make certain that he couldn’t change his mind.
On the way into the classroom he met Griffin, who pushed a packet into his hand. “Here you are,” he said. “Take it.” It was thirty-eight shillings in silver, the first prize in the house sweep on the Birches. He wished he had remembered about it. He would have told his mother in the letter not to bother about the postal order. It was an awful thing to think of her being hard-up and himself rolling in this prodigious and ill-gotten fortune.
The morning class was listless, for the weather remained at a great pitch of heat, and the only thing that any one thought of was the fixture with the M.C.C. which would begin at noon. Cleaver always assisted as umpire at this match, and so the deserted Lower Fifth occupied a corner of the Big Schoolroom by themselves. In this great chamber—it was said that the roof-span was as wide as any in England—Edwin dreamed away the morning, reading, sometimes, the gilt lettering on the boards on which the names of scholars wererecorded: giants who had passed before him along the same corridors, and whose names were only memorable as those of heroes in a mythology, or more ponderably evident in reports of parliamentary debates and the scores of county cricket teams.
Opposite him hung the board devoted to the winners of entrance scholarships. His own name was there. Edwin Ingleby . . . 1895. He remembered the day when it had almost embarrassed him with its fresh gold lettering. Now the leaf had toned down, and the name had sunk into obscurity beneath a dozen others. So the passage of fleet time was measured on these tables. In a few more years nobody who didn’t take the trouble would read his name. Even those of the batch before him were half-buried in obscurity. One other name arrested him: G. H. Giles. He knew nothing of Giles except that this brilliant beginning had been followed by disaster. The name of Giles appeared on no other board; for the term before Edwin came to St. Luke’s Giles had been expelled from the school. Edwin didn’t know what he had been expelled for; but the circumstance, remembered, afflicted him with a kind of awe. “It might happen so easily,” he thought. Why, if he hadn’t lied to the Head the day before he might have been expelled himself, and years afterwards some one sitting in his place would stare at the name of Ingleby with the selfsame awe. The voice of Mr. Leeming, stuck fast where Edwin had left him a year before, in the Stuart period, recalled him. “We will pass over the unpleasant . . . most unpleasant side of Charlesthe Second’s reign. Unfortunately, he was a thoroughly bad man, and his court . . .”
Edwin heard no more, but he heard another sound peculiar to the Big Schoolroom on Saturday mornings: the measured steps of the school sergeant plodding down the long stone corridor which led to the folding doors. On Saturday morning the form-masters presented their weekly reports to the Head, and boys whose names came badly out of the ordeal were summoned to the office to be lectured, to be put on the sort of probation known as “Satisfecit,” or even to be caned.
The Lower Fifth knew none of these terrors. Cleaver was far too easy-going to take his weekly report seriously; but the lower ranks of Mr. Leeming’s form trembled. You could never be sure of old Leeming. The folding doors opened. Mr. Leeming stopped speaking, and the sergeant walked up to his desk and stood waiting at attention while Leeming read his list. He looked over his glasses. “Let me see . . . Sherard . . .” he said. “Sherard, the head-master wishes to see you at twelve-thirty.” His voice was so gently sympathetic that nobody could possibly imagine that he had had anything to do with this calamity. “Then . . . the Lower Fifth . . .” he fumbled with the paper. “Ingleby. The head-master will see you at the same time.” He looked over at Edwin with the most pained surprise. “Very good, sergeant,” he said.
Edwin felt himself going white. Yes, that was it. That was the explanation of his feeling of unrest. He was going to share the fate of the traditional Giles. Good Lord . . . think of it! MissDenning had done this. And yet he could hardly believe it—she had always been far too nice for that. Now his face was burning. It struck him that it wasn’t a bit of good worrying. If it weren’t . . . if it weren’t for his mother it really wouldn’t be so bad. He couldn’t bear to think of her disappointment in his disgrace. She thought so much of him. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if she were not ill. It might kill her. Good God! . . . that would be awful! Suppose, after all (it was no good supposing), that the Head wanted to see him about something else. . . . There wasn’t anything else. Unless . . . unless it were something to do with his mother. Unless she were seriously ill . . . even something worse. But he had her letter. It couldn’t be that. Yesterday she was well enough to write to him. No . . . the story was out, and he was going to be expelled. In three quarters of an hour he would know the worst. He wished that the time would pass more quickly. Time had never been so slow in passing. The clock in the tower chimed the quarter. From where he sat he could see the tower through the upper lights of the long window. He could see the minute-hand give a little lurch and move infinitesimally forward. He remembered Widdup telling him exactly how many times it moved to the minute. Was it twice . . . or three times? He had forgotten. There must be something wrong with the clock to-day. In the middle of this purgatory one half-humorous fancy came to him: “At any rate old Griff will know that I did go to the races now.”
They waited, ten or twelve of them, in the twilight of the passage outside the Head’s study. The atmosphere of this place resembled that of a crypt, or more properly—since the keynote of the St. Luke’s architecture was baronial rather than monastic—a dungeon. The only light that came to them entered by way of certain dusty windows of lancet shape on either side of the gothic porch. Beneath these windows languished a pale array of botanical specimens rotting in their test tubes and bearing witness to the week-old zeal of the Head’s particular section of the Natural History Society.
They waited, a miserable company of all shapes and sizes: some, who knew the worst, with a rather exaggerated jauntiness, determined to make the best of it: others, such as Edwin, being in doubt of their fate and burdened with a spiritual apprehension far worse than any physical penalty which might overtake them.
The sergeant opened the door. “Sherard W.,” he said. Sherard W. crammed a sweaty cap into his pocket and started forward, eager to get it over. The aperture which admitted him showed no more than the end of a table crammed with books, a number of highly-varnished shelves, a polished floor covered with Turkey carpet, and a blaze of mocking sunshine. The nails in the heels of Sherard W.’s boots rang on the stone flags. When he reached the Turkey carpet his steps became silent. The door closed. The rest of them strained tolisten. They heard little: nothing but the quiet rumour of the head-master’s voice, and little patches of silence in which the replies of Sherard W. were not heard at all. A moment later he emerged. A number of whispered questions assailed him, but Sherard W. didn’t feel like answering questions. He brushed by the rest of them as quickly as he could go, with his school-cap pressed to his eyes. Another patch of sunlight was revealed. “Frazer . . .” called the sergeant. And Frazer, a tall lout of a boy with sallow face, came forward and was swallowed up in the same way as Sherard W. A minute later the sound of dull blows was heard.
“Frazer’s got it,” said somebody. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . Poor old Frazer!”
“Six from the Head isn’t equal to three from Cleaver. You should see Cleaver’s biceps in the gym.”
One by one the members of the crowd entered and returned. It seemed to Edwin that his turn would never come. All the time that he waited his imagination (accursed gift!) was playing with the hidden scene within: the long table, that he had seen only once before, and, at the head of it, the lean, bearded figure in the silk gown wielding an absolute power of life and death like God in the Old Testament. Yes, it was just like that. He remembered a minatory text that hung cobwebbed in one of the attics at home:Prepare To Meet Thy God. It was not pleasant to hear these muffled sounds of chastisement, but what was a flogging (the Head’s favourite word) compared with the more devastating fatethat awaited him? “That’s why he’s keeping me till last,” he thought.
“Ingleby . . .” said the sergeant. Edwin had time to fancy that his tone implied a more awful enormity than he had put into any other name. He entered, and stood waiting in the sunlight. It was rather less frightening than he had imagined, this long room, relatively luxurious, and the pale man at the head of the table with his lined, black-bearded face, and the peculiar twitching of his left arm which had always added to the sinister side of his equipment. For a moment he took no notice of Edwin. Then he looked up and smiled. Would the storm never break?
“Ah . . . Ingleby.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I hope your entomological zeal isn’t going to take you up to the racecourse, Ingleby. How are the puss-caterpillars getting on?”
He smiled again, and showed his teeth beneath his shaggy moustache. Edwin was seized with a sudden terror. The worst had happened, and now the Head was playing with him. He could say nothing.
“Eh? . . . What’s the matter with you? You aren’t faint, are you? You’d better sit down.” Edwin trembled into a chair.
“Now, are you all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I sent for you, Ingleby, because I have been having a talk with Mr. Leeming.”
What in the world had old fat Leeming to do with it? Edwin wished he would get it over.
“Mr. Leeming has always given me good reports of you . . . I don’t know if you deserve them . . . and last night I saw Mr. Cleaver, who . . . um . . . um . . . tells me that you are one of . . . No, I’ll leave that part out . . . that you’ve got plenty of brains when you choose to use them, but that you are somewhat lacking in application. H’m?”
“Yes, sir.”
Why wouldn’t he get to the point?
“He says, Ingleby, that you’re a dreamer. Well, you know, there’s no use for dreamers in this world. They’re not wanted. Even dreamers with the blessing of good brains. H’m?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But Mr. Leeming is satisfied, and so am I, that if you chose to make an effort, and take a . . . a healthy interest in things, we might do some good with you. You might win scholarships, and be a credit to the school. That’s what we want. That’s what your parents sent you here for. Now . . . now Mr. Leeming tells me that you aspire to becoming a priest of the church. . . .”
“No, sir.”
“No . . .? But Mr. Leeming told me he had talked the matter over with you?”
“He mentioned it, sir . . . but I didn’t say anything. I . . . don’t think I do want to, sir.”
The Head frowned. “You mean that you don’t feel worthy of so great a vocation? Well, you’re young. You’re a promising boy. I want to do what is best for you . . . and the school. At the end of this term you are likely to get a move, and after a certain time I don’t think, from the scholarshippoint of view, you can begin to specialise too early. You have shown a certain . . . aptitude for English. You might read History. You might stick to Classics. What do you think about it?”
“I should like to read History, sir.”
“Very well, I’ll write to your father about it. We won’t say anything more about the Church for the present. That will come later. I expect Mr. Leeming will talk it over with you. You may go now.”