Only the earlier part of the performance remained in Edwin’s memory. The rest of it was no more to him than a brilliant haze, from which single moments of wild picturesqueness detached themselves: as when he had a vision of a prehistoric man armed with a waving whisky bottle for a club and feebly restrained by a flushed cavalier, flown with insolence and wine, storming his way through the surging crowd in front of the stalls bar and planting his feet upon the counter; or of the same barbarian, gently armed by a tactful manager in evening dress, putting his weapon to the usages of peace and friendliness by uncorking it and offering its contents to a firm but good-humoured policeman.
“What a splendid fellow W.G. is,” Edwin thought to himself. “Splendid . . . splendid . . . magnificent.” And while he was thinking this, a sombre poet with shining eyes drew him aside and confessed to him, almost with tears, that all this brilliance and colour and life meant nothing to him compared with the memory of the Beardsley lady, whose ankles were so thin that they might be spanned with his little finger. “As light as a feather,” said the poet, “gossamer . . . swansdown . . . all soul. Of course, old fellow, I know thatyou can understand. I shouldn’t talk like this to any other person in the world.”
And Edwin understood, and realised the justice of the poet’s choice of a confidant so sympathetically that he was spurred to confidences on his own part. “You see, I happen to be a poet myself,” he said, and to prove it he felt bound to recite a sonnet that he had composed a year or two before at St. Luke’s. A magnificent sonnet it seemed to him, perhaps more magnificent for the accompaniment of a song in waltz rhythm by the theatre orchestra. It was flattering to find that Byron agreed with him as to its excellence; but while the poet was pressing his hand in congratulatory brotherhood, and Edwin was just deciding to recite it all over again, the sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and parted them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine was now singing the last verse of her song and that in two minutes it would be his duty to present her with a bouquet and a pair of silver hair-brushes. Still reciting the most telling lines of his sonnet, he was conducted by Mephistopheles through the manager’s office, where a young lady who, in her inviting softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was counting the counter-foils of tickets, and through a subterranean passage with the welcome chill of a catacomb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid bouquet was thrust into his hands.
It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was of a suffocating heaviness, until he realised that the overpowering perfume of which he was aware proceeded not from the bouquet but from the scents and powders of a bevy of creatures of unnaturalloveliness who stood waiting in the wings. They were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of their costume would have given them an excuse for shivering; but they did not appear to be conscious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin’s brain. The scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse of naked flesh excited him. At this moment all his awkwardness seemed to have vanished. He could not believe that he was the same person who had blushed at the mere contact of the American girl’s overall, or sat speechless in the presence of Miss Wheeler at the Dousita. His old modesty seemed to him to have been a ridiculous and inexcusable folly; for, at the moment, he would have welcomed the prospect of making the most shameless advances to any one of these houris in competition with any man of his acquaintance. With the air of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which of those blossoms the handkerchief should be thrown.
“Now get along with you,” said the stage-manager, pushing him forward.
He gripped the presents in his hands, and treading on air, advanced on to the stage, where Miss Marie Loraine was kissing her hands to the stalls. The stage was very big, and sloped in such a way that he felt his feet impelled towards the footlights; but, being determined that he would accomplish his mission with dignity, Edwin steered a steady, if resilient, course. In front of him he saw a creature before whose elegance and beauty the beauty of the chorus was as nothing. She stood waiting for him and smiled. For a moment Edwin faced theauditorium, a vast and dark abyss in which not a single face was to be seen. It gave him a sudden fright to think that so many thousands of unseen eyes were fixed upon the patch of limelight in which he stood. He pulled himself together. This was the moment, he thought, in which it was for him to make some speech worthy of the bewildering loveliness that stood before him.
“Go on,” said the impatient voice of Mephistopheles in the wings. “Buck up.”
“Miss Loraine,” said Edwin, with a flourish, “I have the honour of—” The middle of his sentence was broken by a crash and a tremendous peal of laughter from the unseen thousands. The younger Wade, arrayed in the panoply of a Roman legionary and balanced upon the parapet of the stage box, had fallen with a clash of armour into the big drum. Edwin thrust the bouquet and the hair-brushes into the arms of Miss Loraine, herself convulsed with laughter. With a terrific draught the curtain swept down.
“Splendid,” said the voice of Mephistopheles.
The rest of the evening was more confused than ever. He remembered a vision of this surpassing beauty standing in the wings in a long silk wrapper that her dresser had thrown over her shoulders, and thanking him for his presentation. To Edwin the moment seemed the beginning of a passionate romance. He remembered other moments in the auditorium, in which W.G. and Maskew figured. He remembered the taste of a glass of Benedictine, a liqueur that he had never tasted before, that Maskew gave him to pull him together again afterhis exertions on the stage. He remembered a flashing of lights, an uproar, a free-fight, and the singing of “God Save the Queen.” And then he found himself a member of a small but distinguished brotherhood streaming at a tremendous rate up the wide street that led towards the Prince’s Hospital. All of them were medicals, and most of them his seniors. Freddie St. Aubyn, the Wade brothers, W.G., and Maskew were among them. Out of the main road they passed singing into the meaner streets that surrounded the hospital: miserable streets with low houses and courts clustered on either side, from the upper windows of which astonished working men and women in their nightdresses put out their heads to look at the vocal procession. Opposite the portico of the hospital was a cab rank on which a solitary hansom was standing with the horse asleep in the shafts and the driver taking his rest inside. The sight appeared to arouse the fighting instincts of the elder Wade.
“Good God,” he said, with indignation, “here’s a cab. What the hell does the fellow think he’s doing here at this time of night? He must be drunk. Look at it!”
His brother, who could carry his liquor better, tried to persuade him to leave the cab alone; but before any one knew what was happening, he had thrown himself on it and turned the whole affair upside down in the road. Edwin heard a crash of splintered glass; he saw the cab on its side and the sleepy horse with its legs in the air. He thought: “Good God! What has happened?” And the next thing he saw was a red-faced cabman, buttonedup to his ears, crawling out of the wreckage and cursing fluently at Wade, who stared for a moment, dazed, at the havoc his strength had created, and then bolted for the shelter of the hospital. The cabman, now thoroughly awakened, bolted after him. Edwin glowed with admiration for Wade’s achievement. It was the deed of a Titan, a splendid Berserker. The cabby had burst through the concourse on the hospital steps, thirsting for the blood of Wade, who, by this time, was lying quietly on a hooded stretcher swatched in bandages and quite unrecognisable. A house surgeon in a white overall confronted the cabman. The hospital porters in uniform stood solemnly at his elbow. The house surgeon was assuring the cabby that he was drunk: the cabby telling the lot of them exactly what he thought of them.
“Take hold of this fellow,” said the house surgeon to the porters, “and hold him while I get a stomach pump.” The porters, specially qualified for dealing with midnight drunks, obeyed. There was a splendid struggle in which the foaming cabby was pitched out into the road, —ing their —ing eyes to Hell. The bandaged Wade was carried solemnly upstairs on his stretcher and brought round with whisky in the house surgeon’s room, a chamber full of Olympian card-players, pickled with cigar-smoke and the fumes of alcohol. Some one, it was the cavalier, began to play the piano. Edwin seized the opportunity to recite his sonnet, until W.G. laid a monstrous hand on his mouth.
That vision ended, and to it succeeded one of cool, deserted streets with far too many kerb-stonesfor Edwin’s liking, and then the dishevelled sitting-room in W.G.’s digs in which they had dressed with a pale gas-jet hissing and flaring and a momentary impression of W.G. asking him where he’d put the damned corkscrew. Edwin remembered rising to a brilliant extreme of wit. “Am I your corkscrew’s keeper?” he said; and while he was explaining at length the aptness of his mot W.G. knocked the neck off the bottle with his poker, eclipsing any possible verbal brilliance.
In the middle of the night Edwin woke and staggered in the dark to the washhand-stand, where he drank a draught of water, so cool and sweet as to be astonishing, until he remembered that it had possibly come from the mountains beyond Felindre. W.G. was snoring heavily on the bed that he had just left. W.G.’s snoring got on his nerves so that he had to prod him in the ribs and wake him, a proceeding that W.G. seemed unjustly to resent.
“I say, W.G.,” he said, “do you think I was drunk?”
“Drunk?” said W.G. “Good God, you didn’t wake me to ask me that? You’ll know all right in the morning.”
Edwin only knew that his head was splitting and that he was hellishly cold.
W.G.’s prophecy that Edwin would know all about it in the morning proved correct; but it was some consolation to him to know that he shared the experience with his friends. All the next day he went about his work with Maskew feeling a little light-headed, and a peculiar weakness in the legs made him disinclined for any exertion that could be avoided. Maskew recovered himself more easily; but W.G., who never did anything by halves, solemnly embarked on a “bust” that lasted for a whole week.
This defection disgusted Maskew, who, in his hard, capable way, believed in moderation in all things—even in vice. He considered W.G.’s conduct “a bit thick”; principally because he was deprived of his company in the dissecting room; but to Edwin the big man’s debauch seemed in some ways heroic and in keeping with his titanic physical nature: a spectacle rather for awe than for reproof. It was even impressive to see W.G. returning like a giant refreshed with vice, throwing his huge energies into the pursuits that he had abandoned as readily as he had lately squandered them in anatmosphere of patchouli. In this line Edwin would have found it constitutionally impossible to compete with W.G., but, for all that, he could not deny that he felt better, more confident, and more complete for the pantomime experience. It even flattered him to find himself regarded as something of a blood by the humbler members of his year who had witnessed his adventure on the Queen’s Theatre stage, though he could not conceal from himself the fact that Martin, more absorbed than ever in blameless but exacting relations with the eligible young ladies of Alvaston, was a little supercilious as to his attainments.
With the approach of the summer and the first examination he found little time for anything but work. The preparation for the exam. was so much of a scramble that he had no time to realise the imaginative significance of the subjects in which he was engaged. He did not guess that the little fat professor of Physics who lectured so drily on the elements of his science was actually employing his leisure in the tremendous adventure of weighing the terrestrial globe, or that certain slender aerials stretched like the web of a spider from a mast at the top of the university buildings were actually receiving the first lispings of wireless telegraphy, an achievement to which that bearded dreamer, the Principal, had devoted twenty years of his life.
To Edwin there was nothing intrinsically romantic in Chemistry or Physics. His mind could not conceive that science was a minute and infinitely laborious conquest of the properties of matter. Atoms and Molecules and the newly-dreamedElectrons, still trembling in the realms of imponderable speculation, were no more to him than abstractions unrelated to the needs of practical human life. They were only facts to be learned by rote, symbols to be memorised and grouped together on paper like the letters in an algebraic calculation; and the whole of this potentially romantic experience was clouded by his own headachy distaste for the gaseous smells of the laboratory: the choking yellow fumes of chlorine that escaped from the glass cupboards in which it was manufactured, and the less tolerable, if more human, odour of Sulphuretted Hydrogen, in an air that was desiccated by the blue flames of half a hundred Bunsen burners. These two subjects were nothing more than an arid desert of facts relating to dead matter through which he had to fight his way, and he hated them.
In comparison with them, Biology was something of an oasis. Here, at any rate, he had to deal with life, a mystery more obvious and less academic. The contemplation of its lower forms, such as the Amoeba, a tiny speck of dreamy protoplasm stretching out its languid tentacles, living its remote and curiously detached life with no aims beyond that of bare mysterious existence, filled him with a strange awe. The laboratory in which these researches were conducted, was high and airy and not associated with any unpleasant smells except at the season when the class were engaged upon the dissection of the hideous dog-fish. It had even its aspects of beauty in the person of the fair American in her dark overall; and for this reason, if for noother, Edwin found himself becoming most proficient in his knowledge of the subject.
In the middle of the summer the examination came. Maskew was an easy first, and carried off the Queen’s scholarship for the year; Edwin came second with a first-class, which, even if it didn’t satisfy himself, was enough to make his father enthusiastic; Martin ambled through with an ease that challenged Edwin’s respect, and W.G., horribly intense and determined through all the week of the exam., scraped through by virtue of sheer bulldog tenacity. The result of the examination did Edwin good if only by convincing him that Maskew, for all his suburban flashiness and his inferior general education, had a better head than his own. Like the excellent man of business that he was, Maskew did not rest upon his oars: the week after the examination, and the first of the long vacation, found him and W.G. back in the dissecting room, plugging into anatomy, the next year’s principal subject, and Edwin saw at once that if he were to keep pace with his rival he would have to forgo the months of summery leisure to which he had looked forward in the vacation. Martin was playing tennis in Ireland, and so he found himself thrown once more into the society of these two.
It was a pleasant time, for their leisure was their own and there were no lectures to tie them to their work. They did a great deal of their reading in W.G.’s rooms, full of easy-chairs, and wreathed in tobacco smoke that escaped through a French window into a tiny garden plot green and pleasant under the white Midland sky, and this room becamea haven of escape from the burning brick pavements in which Edwin and his friends would work together without strain, talking of the future and of W.G.’s romantic past, and stabilising their own ideas on the uncertainties of sex: a problem that so far had meant very little to Edwin, but which W.G. was not in a position to ignore.
“You know, it’s damned funny,” he said, “but when you get to know more about things, when you’ve done some anatomy and that, you begin to think of sex in a different light. It knocks all the mystery out of it, and I’m sure that’s a jolly sound thing. Good Lord, when I think of the ignorance with which I started on this sort of thing! Finding out everything by experiment, you know. . . . Why, if I’d had a short course of anatomy before I left school I should have been saved a lot of rotten experiments that didn’t do me or any one else any good. I’d have been a damned sight cleaner-minded than I ever was. A medical training’s a jolly good thing in that way: shows you exactly where you are instead of letting you go fumbling about in the dark.”
“Knocks all the poetry out of it though,” said Maskew.
“Poetry be damned,” said W.G. seriously, “there’s a good deal too much of your poetry about it. Poetry and mystery and a lot of bunkum like that . . . Male and female created He them. I don’t particularly admire the method. I think He made rather a better job of the amoeba. Think how much simpler it would be to split open a chunk of protoplasm instead of having to make a ridiculous foolof yourself if you want to propagate your species. Still, there it is, and the sooner you realise exactly what it means and what it’s all about, the less you worry your head about it.”
“Well, of course, if you’re going to treat it in that light you’re going to knock all the pleasure out of life—” Maskew protested.
“Oh, you’re a sensualist,” said W.G. “The main thing that I have against it is that it wastes valuable time.” He became scornful. “Think of all these rotten fellows who spend their days writing books on sexual problems, analysing their rotten little sensations in detail and gloating over mysteries of sex. It’s only their ignorance that makes them like that. What they want is a thorough course of anatomy and a whack of practical experience to cure them; and if every one else had the same sort of education there’d be no sale for their books.”
Edwin, listening to their sparring, remembered the library at St. Luke’s and a certain shelf of anatomical works that was always kept locked with a special key that Mr. Leeming carried mysteriously on his watch-chain. On the whole, he agreed with W.G. and his preferences for the methods of the Amoeba’s parthenogenesis. He wondered, however, if the kind of education that W.G. advocated would have scotched the production of such works asRomeo and Julietor the love poems of Shelley.
“It would be rather rotten if you did away with love, W.G.,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not talking about love,” said W.G. “I’m talking about a fellow’s ordinary physicalneeds. Being in love is not the same thing as that.”
“It is usually,” said the cynical Maskew.
“It’s all a ridiculous mix-up,” said Edwin. “Thank God it doesn’t worry us.”
With the beginning of the new year these delicious hours of leisure disappeared. Edwin and his friends, with the assurance of second-year men, became the real possessors of the dissecting room. Anatomy and physiology now absorbed all their time, and the leisurely interest in the first subject, which had been subsidiary in the first year, was now a matter of academical life and death. From the simple anatomical details of the upper and lower extremities that he had dissected with Martin in the year before, he passed to the more vital regions of the human body: the thorax, the abdomen, and the head and neck. He still attended the polished course of lectures on anatomy that the Dean delivered in the theatre; but this process he was forced to regard as a waste of time, since the Dean’s presentation of the subject did not differ greatly from that of any text-book of anatomy, and the Dean’s personality, which curiously resembled that of his cousin Martin, was too aristocratically remote ever to seem real.
In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he became acquainted and fascinated with the first of his medical instructors who had aroused his imagination. This was the chief demonstrator of Anatomy, Robert Moon, or, more familiarly, Bobby, a figure of romantic picturesqueness. He was tall andinclined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat, and his serious face, which was of a size and pallor that his surname suggested, was crowned by an erect crop of black and curly hair. In Edwin’s first year he had always seemed to him a strange and distant figure, walking slowly up and down the dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged from the dark chamber which he inhabited in the corner near the door, like a fat and rather sinister spider.
He rarely spoke: when he did so it was with a broad, north country accent and the most extraordinary deliberation and formality in his choice of words. With the men in the second year he possessed an enormous reputation not only for his exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side of which the Dean’s attainments seemed merely those of a dilettante, but also for his excellence as a coach. Edwin and his two friends became sedulous attendants at his tutorials, where, standing in immobile dignity behind one of the zinc dissecting-room tables in front of an appropriate background of blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second-year students, who came to sit at his feet voluntarily, like the disciples of a Greek philosopher, he would demonstrate the details of some ragged anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was of the colour and consistency of leather.
In Bobby’s demonstrations there was neither imagination nor romance: they were merely fascinating in virtue of the amazing exactitude of the detail which his brain had acquired through long familiarity with the dismembered fragments ofhumanity. There was nothing in the way of minute observation that could escape him, and his questions were so searching and unexpected that even Maskew, who had himself a prodigious memory for minute detail and could carry the letter of a textbook in his head, was constantly floored by them. It was a magnificent stimulus to Edwin; for it became a kind of game to master a part so thoroughly that Bobby could not stump him.
By this time he was so used to railway travelling that between the morning discussion of the progress of the war that had just broken out in South Africa, and the appearance of halfpenny papers, that multiplied like greenfly in this heated atmosphere, he could read his text-books of anatomy in a crowded carriage without disturbance apart from the natural curiosity that a vision of luridly coloured diagrams awakened in the minds of his fellow passengers, and particularly the bank clerk, who thirsted in a way that W.G. would have approved for technical instruction in the matter of certain organs. Edwin prepared himself for the demonstrator’s tutorials as rigorously as if he had been approaching a vital examination; he spent long hours in his bedroom, utterly heedless of his wide prospect of wintry fields, thinking of nothing but his collection of bleached bones, now carefully marked with coloured chalks to show the origins and insertions of muscles, and particularly those intricate fretted plates that are joined to form the fragile casket of the human skull.
So engrossed was he in absorbing the mere details of their physical form that his mind had no room for other speculations of the kind that hadimpressed him in the days of his first acquaintance with anatomy. It never struck him that the articulated skull which grinned at him from his mantelpiece when he woke each morning, had once contained the convolutions of a human brain: a mass of pulpy matter that had been the origin of strange complications of movement and feeling and thought, the storehouse of memories, the spring of passions and the theatre of dreams. He did not even know if the skull were that of a man or a woman. To him it was no more than an assembly of dry bones, intricate in their relations with one another, pierced by the foramina of bewildering nerves and blood-vessels, all of which must be visualised and stored and remembered within the limits of another structure of the same kind—the sutures and eminences of which he could feel with his own fingers when he rubbed his puzzled head.
He used to go back to Mr. Moon’s tutorials convinced that he knew all that was to be known of the subject in hand, and then Bobby, in his slow Lancashire voice, with broadened “a”s and “u”s, would put to him some leisurely question that showed him that he knew nothing. Very decorously and slowly these questions would be asked; and since the answers were concerned with the dryest and most exact of physical facts, guessing was of no help to him and silence the only refuge of the ignorant. No display either of knowledge or ignorance had the least effect on Bobby Moon. His wide and dreamy face showed no emotion on the discovery of either. On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind of ponderous verbal humour, slow and elephantine,like the humour of Beethoven; but even in these moments his face showed no signs of emotion, and he would pass on without waiting for any recognition of his joke to the next lethargic question. “Mr. Harrop,” he would say slowly, “what is the fotty pod of Hovers?” And Harrop, sitting on a high stool that showed his variegated socks to perfection, would reply that the fatty pad of Havers was a small cushion of fat set in the head of the femur to lubricate the hollow of the acetabulum.
The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to dominate Edwin’s impressions of the dissecting room. There was something provocative in the remoteness of this black and solitary form from all the concerns of human life. Edwin conceived him to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man, but an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously endowed with the powers of locomotion and speech but bereft of any human characteristic. It amazed him to discover, in the end, that Bobby Moon was nothing of the sort, but a creature of the most delicate human tenderness, so sensitive to the appeals of beauty and humanity that he had been forced to adopt the impassive mask that was all that his pupils knew of him from an instinct of self-protection.
It happened in this way. During the early part of his second year Edwin had become conscious of a new figure in the dissecting room, that of a man named Boyce, a student with a brilliant reputation who had managed in some inexplicable way to fail in his first examination and be left behind by the other men of his year. He was a tall, fair creature,with a long face and small, very blue eyes. The society of Alvaston had made him friendly with Martin, from whom Edwin’s new relations were gradually separating him. The only characteristic that Edwin had so far noticed in Boyce was an almost literary fluency in the use of foul language which left even Harrop gasping. Boyce was working alone on a thorax a few tables away from Edwin. He was a neat and laborious dissector, and Edwin had been tempted to admire the skill with which he had defined the network of blood-vessels, the system of coronary arteries and veins, with which the human heart is enmeshed. Boyce was evidently far less unapproachable than Edwin had imagined, and while they were examining his dissection together they had not noticed the approach of Dr. Moon, who had walked slowly to their table and stood gazing at the specimen through his moonlike pince-nez. They did not realise that he was near them until they heard his voice, slowly intoning a line of poetry. “The heart,” he said: “arras’d in purple like a house of kings. Are you acquainted with that line, Mr. Boyce?”
“No, sir. Who wrote it?”
“A man named Francis Thompson. He was a medical student at Manchester, several years senior to me.”
“Oh, I know his name,” said Boyce. “He is a friend of my father’s.”
“A great poet,” said Bobby solemnly. “A great poet. The contemplation of mortality in this place should be full of poetical reflections. You see, thisis the heart of a very old or a very dissolute man. The coronary arteries are stiff with atheroma.”
“I was thinking, sir,” said Edwin, encouraged, “of the heart of Shelley that Trelawny was supposed to have picked out of the funeral pyre when the body was burned. His account says that only the heart was left. He gave it to Hunt, didn’t he? But you’d think the heart would be burned more easily—”
“Yes. . . . It’s an unlikely story. Shelley’s heart”—he looked up dreamily at the ceiling—“Shelley’s heart. . . . It’s a strange reflection.” And he moved away, his big head still in the air and his hands behind his back.
“I say,” said Edwin; “I’d no idea Bobby was like that. You wouldn’t associate him with poetry, would you? He seems such an awfully matter-of-fact chap. Dry bones, you know.”
Boyce laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Bobby. Nobody does here except my father. He’s an incurable sentimentalist. He lives an awfully lonely sort of life in some digs up in Alvaston. His mind’s crammed with poetry and old music and a lot of ethnological lumber. Do you know, he’s about the biggest authority in England on prehistoric man?”
“I hadn’t the least idea. I imagined he dreamed of nothing but bones and soft parts.”
“You would. . . . But he’s a wonderful chap really. Are you keen on poetry?”
“Of course I am.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. I don’t imagine that your friends Brown and Maskew are particularly interested in it. My guvnor’s by way of beinga poet, you know. Bobby’s awfully keen on his work. Do you know it?”
Edwin was ashamed to say he did not.
“Oh, I’m not in the least surprised,” said Boyce. “He’s not appreciated, you know, except by other poets, like this fellow Thompson. I think he’s rather good, as a matter of fact, quite apart from the fact that he’s my father. If you’ll come up to our place some day I can show you a lot of interesting things in his library: first editions and things like that. I’d no idea that you were keen on them.”
The tone implied such an appreciation of Edwin’s hectic past as typified by his solitary appearance on the stage of the Queen’s Theatre that he hastened to deny the impeachment. He was tremendously pleased to have struck a man like Boyce, who went on to talk about music, of which Edwin knew nothing, and exuded an easy atmosphere of culture, of a kind that he envied, without ever losing sight of the fact that Edwin had come to him in rather a questionable shape. Edwin was thrilled to think that he had reached the threshold of a new and exciting friendship which made his association with Brown and Maskew seem commonplace and shabby; but he was far too shy to force himself on Boyce, and so the acquaintance remained for many months at the exact stage in which it had begun, and he had to be content with the sudden insight that Boyce had given him into the hidden, romantic qualities of Dr. Moon.
Sometimes, while he was scrubbing his hands with carbolic soap, the only thing that really banishedthe smell of the dissecting room from his fingers, he would hear Boyce discussing music, and particularly the work of Tschaikowsky, whose sixth symphony had just inflamed his imagination, with Mr. Moon in his gloomy bunk, and he would go on washing his hands until they were ridged and sodden in the hope of hearing what they were saying or even of entering into their conversation, until W.G. would come along and drag him off to Joey’s, asking him what the hell he was dawdling about. Then Edwin would be almost ashamed of W.G.’s company, and hated himself for it, since he knew in his heart of hearts that, even if he were a Philistine, W.G. was one of the best and soundest fellows on earth.
The friendship with Boyce, however, was bound to come. It began with the formation of a small literary society, that had been originated by certain of the third-year men with whom Boyce was acquainted, and which held its meetings in the newly-opened smoking room that adjoined Dr. Moon’s chamber of horrors. Papers were read every fortnight, and discussions followed in which Edwin had scarcely dared to take part, but Boyce was a polished and fluent protagonist. In the end, when the first enthusiasms of the society, to which Brown and Maskew, naturally enough, did not belong, had been spent, Edwin was asked to read a paper. He chose for his subject Browne’sReligio Medici, a work with which this medical audience seemed strangely unacquainted. The paper was a success, and at the end of the meeting Boyce accosted him friendlily and asked him why he had never been up to seehis father’s books. Edwin withheld the obvious reply that the invitation had not been pressed although he had never ceased to think of it; and Boyce at once suggested that they should go up to Alvaston together that evening. “We can put you up for the night if that will be more convenient,” he said.
They walked up together under the high, frosty sky, talking of poetry, of all the beautiful things that they had worshipped in common without knowing it. It seemed strange to Edwin that they should have worked side by side for a couple of years and scarcely spoken to each other when all the time they had so many delights that might have been shared. The unlocking of this closed and secret chamber of his heart gave him a strange feeling of elation and made the world suddenly beautiful. The hard and wintry pavement seemed curiously smooth and resilient; the roadway ran in masterly and noble curves, the black branches of plane-trees and laburnums, even the pointed gables of the smug suburban villas seemed to take on a new and piercing beauty against the starry sky, and they swung along together as triumphant in their ecstasy of youth as if indeed they were treading on the stars.
“What a topping night,” said Boyce. “God . . . look at Vega!” He waved his long arms and quoted:—
“Or search the brow of eve, to catchIn opal depths the first faint beatOf Vega’s fiery heart. . . .”
“Whose is that?”
“My guvnor’s. He’s a tremendous chap on astronomy.”
“It’s damned good,” said Edwin, thrilling.
“Not bad, is it? He’s a very sound man, the guvnor. I think you’d like him.”
But when they reached the Boyces’ house they found that the poet was not at home. In place of him Edwin was introduced to a mild and beautiful figure with a soft voice who turned out to be Boyce’s mother. She had her son’s soft blue eyes, and spoke to him with such caressing tenderness that Edwin was seized with a sudden feeling of aching emptiness for the memory of his own mother, of whom, so potent is the anodyne of time, he had scarcely thought for more than a year.
Boyce presented Edwin with a high social recommendation. “A friend of Denis Martin’s,” he said. Mrs. Boyce smiled on him.
“Look here,” said her son, “I’m afraid we can’t very well go into the guvnor’s study. He hates any one invading it when he’s not there. Let’s go upstairs to my own room and talk.”
Edwin had a passing vision of the forbidden chamber, the flanks of a grand piano in which a reflection of firelight glowed red, and endless shelves of gilt-lettered books. The rest of the house seemed to him rather untidy, as if it were no more than a dry chrysalis protecting the central beauty of the poet’s room; but he had not time to see much following in the rear of Boyce’s long-legged progress up the stairs. He found himself, at last, in a small attic with a gable window that framed the starrysky: the kind of room that satisfied all his own ideals of comfort and seclusion.
Boyce was proud and willing to exhibit his treasures. They showed a curious mixture of the schoolboy, represented by photographic groups of cricket teams, glass cases of butterflies, and a tasseled Rugby cap, and the more mature intelligence that now possessed them. Edwin and he sat down opposite one another in a couple of easy-chairs, and talked and smoked incessantly all that evening. They spoke of Wordsworth, the idol of Boyce’s literary devotions, of Browning, whose claims to poetry he would not allow, and of Shenstone, whose name he had never met before. By this time Edwin was getting rather ashamed of his early admiration for Shenstone, and the fact that Boyce had never heard of the Pastoral Ballad confirmed him in his decision that the author was an acquaintance whom he had better drop. They went on to Francis Thompson—Dr. Moon’s quotation from theAnthem of Earthhad sent Edwin searching for his works in the municipal library—and he now learned that this bewildering genius, who had once, like him, been a medical student, had actually slept in the room beneath his feet.
“He never qualified,” said Boyce dreamily, “and yet medicine is a wonderful thing. I should think the fact that the medical man is always face to face with mortality”—he pointed to a suspended skeleton in the corner—“and all the other big fundamental things like birth and pain, ought to give him a sort of sense of proportion and make him sensitive to the beauties of life. Your friend, SirThomas Browne, is an example. Then there’s Rabelais.”
“There are heaps of others,” said Edwin.
“Well, yes. . . . Keats.”
“Byron and Akenside,” Edwin supplied from the eighteenth century.
“I don’t know the gentleman,” said Boyce.
“Well, then, Goldsmith and Crabbe. Crabbe’s rather good, you know. And Shelley—”
“Shelley?”
“Yes, Shelley walked a hospital when he was in London with Harriet.”
“I’d no idea of that,” said Boyce, “but there’s a modern fellow that the guvnor’s rather keen on, named Bridges. Robert Bridges, who’s a physician.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“No . . . he’s not well known, but I believe he’s pretty good.”
And so they talked on, deciding that the world was ripe for great poetical achievement, awed to think that perhaps they were living, without knowing it, in the beginning of a great age of literature; convinced, to a degree of enthusiasm, of the splendour and magnanimity of the calling that they had adopted; conscious—thrillingly conscious—of the fact that the whole world lay before them full of undreamed delights as mysterious and yet as clear as the wintry sky.
Edwin had to run for his train. He didn’t mind running. On a night like this he felt that violent exercise was a mode of expressing the curious elation that his talk with Boyce, and his excitementin the new friendship that promised so many hours of happiness, had given him. At the gates of the station he paused to buy an evening paper. It contained the news of Buller’s defeat at Colenso and the result of a cup-tie between North Bromwich Albion and Notts Forest, but he had no room in his mind for football or for this African war in which W.G., to the ruin of his future finances, was itching to enlist. Edwin’s thoughts were of the great names and the great works of which he and Boyce had been talking. The newspaper lay folded on his knees; the flares of the black country swept past him in the night, unseen. He was not even aware of the other occupants of the carriage until he suddenly found himself staring straight into the eyes of his opposite, whom he recognised as Edward Willis, the son of Walter Willis of the Great Mawne Furnaces.
All Aunt Laura’s attempts, heroically made in the interests of social advancement, had so far failed to bring about a friendship between these two. Edwin, on his side, could never get out of his head an unreasonable prejudice against the Willises, the natural result of Aunt Laura’s adulation of their wealth, and even a knowledge of his own humble origins had not affected his traditional distrust of people whom he regarded as flashy and self-made. In Edward Willis he found a creature even more shy than himself, and the very fact that Mrs. Willis and Aunt Laura, putting their heads together, had decided to throw them into each other’s arms, was enough to create an atmosphere of distrust and uneasiness. The sudden recognition in the railwaycarriage was merely an embarrassment. Edwin was startled into saying “Hallo,” and Willis replied in exactly the same way; then both of them retired with precipitation to the cover of their evening newspapers, from which they listened to the conversation of a commercial traveller who was returning home from London and had all the latest and most authentic gossip on the South African situation.
“Mind you,” he said, “they’re wily fellows, these old Boers; we may not be up to their dirty tricks: I’m proud to say we aren’t. We shouldn’t be English if we were. But one thing, sir, you’ll see in the end, and that is that dogged British pluck will come through. You mark my words.”
Edwin felt an overpowering impulse to say that dogged British pluck pretty obviously hadn’t come through at Colenso; but Edward Willis’s presence made him far too self-conscious to commit himself, and at the next station the traveller and his friend picked up their bags and departed, breathing the word “Buller” as if it were an incantation warranted to fortify and console. Edwin and Willis were alone.
When their silence had become altogether too ridiculous, Edwin plucked up his courage and said, “Rotten thing this war.”
“I don’t know,” said Willis. “It’s all right for my old man.”
“What do you mean?”
“Iron. . . . We’re chock full of Government work for South Africa: gun-carriages and rifle barrels. You’re doing medicine, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky devil. You’re learning to cure people, while I’m learning to make things to kill them.”
He stared out of the window towards a patch of sky in which the glow of his father’s furnaces pulsated as though it registered the beatings of a savage, fiery heart, and relapsed into gloomy silence. The tunnel swallowed them, and in a moment they pulled up at Mawne Hall. Willis prepared to go. “I say,” he said, “we’re giving a dance next week—” and hesitated.
“What for?” said Edwin, for want of something better.
“I don’t know . . . unless it’s to celebrate the Colenso casualties. I believe you’re invited. I hope you’ll come.”
“Thanks,” said Edwin. But Willis was gone.
Mr. Inglebywanted to know why he was so late. “I read a paper at the Literary Society,” he said, “and then went back to Alvaston with a man named Boyce. He’s a son of Arthur Boyce.”
“The auctioneer?” asked Mr. Ingleby.
“No . . . the poet.”
Mr. Ingleby’s features showed a faint anxiety, as though he doubted if such an influence were healthy. “Well, I hope your paper was a success,” he said.
“Oh, I think it went all right. Any letters?”
“Yes . . . two. Here they are.” He handed them to Edwin.
One of them was the invitation from Mawne. He showed it to his father.
“A dance—” said Mr. Ingleby.
“Yes. . . . I suppose I’d better go.”
“Your Aunt Laura told me about it. If it won’t interfere with your work, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”
“I haven’t any proper clothes. Evening dress, you know”
“I suppose that is quite necessary,” said Mr. Ingleby regretfully.
Edwin could see that the question of expense was troubling his father’s mind. He wished to goodness he would say so outright, instead of looking vaguely distressed. It would be so much more satisfactory. As it was, he could only feel indefinitely in the wrong, as if the dance were a piece of reckless and inexcusable levity in which he had no right to take a part. The dress suit, the acquisition of which had been anticipated with some satisfaction, now appeared to him in the terms of an accumulation of small change hardly earned in his father’s dusty shop: as the outcome of pennyworths of Epsom Salts, sticks of liquorice, or teething powders. It was humiliating, and even distressing to realise that every single comfort or luxury that he enjoyed—even the prime necessities of life, had to be accumulated, literally scraped together from this incredibly humble source and by the personal exertions of this simple and pathetic person. With these conditions in his mind he could not bear accepting money from his father, the weight of his obligation was so overwhelming. Now he found it difficult to face the idea of a tailor’s bill that might represent the profit on at least three days of small trading in the shop.
“I don’t think I’d better go, father,” he said.
“It would be rather ungracious if you didn’t, Edwin,” his father replied. “It was extremely kind of the Willises to ask you. I think you’d better go and be measured to-morrow by Mr. Jones.”
The idea of a Halesby tailor’s cut was notinspiring and made Edwin inclined to press his refusal; but Mr. Ingleby went on to explain that Mr. Jones owed him a bill that he had begun to look upon as a bad debt, and that Edwin’s dress suit would be a way of working it off. This circumstance made the order less shameful, except in so far as it applied to the hateful penury of Mr. Jones, whom Edwin remembered as a man with a beard, as shabbily unlike a tailor’s dummy as it was possible for a man to be. The occurrence was unfortunate in another way; for such an addition to his wardrobe would almost certainly scotch the idea of asking for a dress allowance, a plan which had been maturing in his brain for some months and only needed a callous frame of mind for its performance.
Next evening, however, he went to see Mr. Jones, who measured him obsequiously, and assured him that in the happy days before he was his own master, he had actually cut morning-coats for Sir Joseph Astill, a gentleman who was very difficult to fit on account of a slight . . . er . . . fullness in the figure. Edwin, primed by the observations of The Major inTo-Day, was able to tell Mr. Jones exactly what he wanted, and Mr. Jones’s manner, when he rubbed his hands over Edwin’s instructions, did not suggest for a moment the fact of which Edwin was all the time aware: that this was not abona-fideorder, but a rather shabby way of making him pay a bill that he had scamped for a couple of years.
Stepping out of Mr. Jones’s melancholy shop, Edwin thanked heaven that his father had not wanted him to follow in his footsteps; for it seemedto him that the life of a struggling tradesman in a small town must be the most humiliating on earth. He was awfully sorry for all of them as he walked down the street and read their names on the boards above their windows. He had never quite realised their condition before he smelt the particular odour of lower middle-class poverty, vaguely suggestive of perambulators, aspidistras, and boiled mutton, that moved down the linoleum floored passage at the back of Mr. Jones’s shop.
In due course the clothes arrived. On the whole, Mr. Jones had not done badly; but even so, Edwin was still scarcely qualified for the business in hand. He had never learned to dance, and it was necessary to acquire this accomplishment in a little more than a week. At first he had decided to pull his courage together and approach Martin, whose eligibility compelled him to be an expert dancing man; but, at the last moment, he funked a confession that would expose such depths of social ignorance, and went instead to a certain Professor Beagle, who advertised classes in dancing and deportment at the hour of five on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in the Queen’s Assembly Rooms, next door to the theatre of the same name.
On the next Tuesday afternoon Edwin presented himself to Mr. Beagle at the advertised hour. He found him alone sitting on a platform at the end of a long room that smelt of dust and moth-eaten rep curtains. When Edwin appeared at the other end of the room the professor dismounted, cleared his throat, clasped his hands in front of him, and made a formal bow. He was a little man, and veryfat. He wore a navy blue coat that was cut very short at the back, so that it ruckled up over his round haunches, and his collar rose so high and stiff above a white Ascot tie, that he was forced to carry his head tilted backwards in the direction of his waxed moustache. His face was purple and his watery eyes stared, whether as the result of the collar’s asphyxiation or his past manner of life it was difficult to say. His feet were excessively small, and his striped grey trousers tapered to the ankles in such a way that every step he made seemed a nice feat of balancing. He bowed to Edwin, and Edwin explained the urgent circumstances of his mission.
“I see,” said Professor Beagle. “I quite understand. You must not, ’owever, expect me to be able to turn you out as I should wish to in the time at our disposal. Perhaps you will be good enough not to mention my name in this connection, and keep my instructions, as it were, dark?”
Edwin assured him of secrecy, and the professor proceeded to ask him where the dance was to be held. “I do not wish to teach you anything that will not be useful,” he said. “In some circles the Quadrille, which I myself consider the most dignified of dances, is still in favour. In others the Valeta is coming into vogue. In different planes of society different conditions prevail.”
In the end the professor decided that Edwin’s case called for the Waltz, the Lancers, and the Polka, with the possible addition of the Pas de Quatre. He demonstrated to Edwin the positionin which his feet should be placed, and then invited him to have a try at the waltz.
“You will take my harm, please, in the following way . . . so. . . . Now, neither grarsping nor clarsping, let the lady’s ’and lie gently in yours, with the fingers ’alf bent, and under no circumstances squeeze the figger. So . . . ”
Edwin placed his right arm above the ruckles in Professor Beagle’s broad back: into his left hand a podgy fist descended like a lump of moist dough, and from the little man’s back-tilted, strangled head a faint sound of whistling proceeded that raked Edwin’s own nostrils with a cross-fire of whisky and cachous. Then the professor began to revolve like a peg top, and Edwin felt himself swept round by the arm that lay upon his shoulder, to the rhythm of the whistled tune, which was sometimes suspended and replaced by: “Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three. Gently now. Keep-on-the. Tips-of-your. WONN-two-three. Toes.”
In this manner they circled the room several times. Edwin was getting out of breath; but the professor, to whom this form of exercise was so usual as to be negligible, showed no signs of fatigue, except that his eyes became a little more glassy and his cheeks more purple. Indeed, the power by which he swung Edwin round the room was a thing of mystery; for his little feet did not seem to move, and the upper part of his body was rigid. He moved like a cyclone or a dust-storm, Edwin thought, revolving terrifically on its own axis.
“I am afraid,” said Professor Beagle formally at the end of the first lesson. “I am afraid you haveno great natural gift. It is better that I should be candid with you. You will need half a dozen lessons at least before you can take your place with the young ladies in one of my advanced classes.”
Edwin stuck to it. On six more occasions he visited the Assembly Rooms, where, with exactly the same formalities, Mr. Beagle received him. With Mr. Beagle in his arms, prevented by sheer physical bulk from, in any circumstances, squeezing the figger, he revolved in the vortex of the waltz. In the Lancers he set to imaginary partners, or went “visiting” with Mr. Beagle’s hand lying gently in his, with the fingers ’alf bent. In the Pas de Quatre, where the draught of whisky and cachous was happily directed forwards, he pointed an awkward toe alongside Mr. Beagle’s tapered and elegant extremity. In the end the professor pronounced himself satisfied with him.
“If I were you,” he said, “I think I should come along to my advanced class this evening and familiarise yourself with the proximity of young ladies. The fee is a purely nominal ’alf-crown.”
Edwin decided to do so, and walked up in the evening with his patent leather pumps in his pocket. He felt very shy. The place was lighted with flaring gas jets, and in a room marked Gentlemen, that he had always taken for a lavatory, a number of young men, who looked like shop assistants, were putting on white kid gloves. They all seemed to know one another and to look upon Edwin as an intruder. No one spoke to him, and he waited in the cloak room until the last haddisappeared before he dared to emerge. From the room on the opposite side of the passage there issued a breeze of concentrated perfumes, and a round of subdued titters. This room was labelled “Ladies.”
While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he dare risk an encounter, the door opposite opened and a bevy of bloused figures appeared. The sight of the first took him by surprise: it was the elder of the two anæmic young ladies in the drapery who travelled in the morning train with him from Halesby. She gave him a smile of recognition that revealed her defective teeth. This prospect was altogether too much for him. An acute shyness drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon as he had taken off his pumps and put on his shoes again, he left the Queen’s Assembly Rooms and bolted down Sackville Row to his train.
The Willis’s dance, to which Edwin had looked forward with such mingled pleasure and anxiety, was destined to bring forth a violent emotional experience. Mr. Jones had not undergone the experience of cutting for the undulant figure of Sir Joseph Hingston for nothing. Apart from the fact that the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, Edwin’s dress coat was a success, and, as Aunt Laura benignantly pointed out, it was just as well that some allowance should be made for future growth. Mr. Jones had been extremely anxious that Edwin should be supplied with a magenta silk handkerchief, an ornament which, he was assured,all the best people wore stuffed in the corner of their waistcoats.
On this problem the Major had never delivered judgment, so Edwin mustered sufficient courage to approach Denis Martin for advice. Martin scornfully told him that the idea was preposterous. “It’s the kind of get-up that your friend Maskew would adopt,” he said. He also impressed upon Edwin the fact that the infallible index of a bounder in evening-dress was a ready-made tie. No doubt the advice was excellent; but it let Edwin in for an hour of agony on the evening of the dance, when the tie refused to answer to the Major’s printed instructions, and finished up by making him look as if he had gone to bed in his boots and slept on it.
He had never been to Mawne Hall before. That pretentious mansion with its castellated façade set on a steep bank above the valley of the Stour, in which the works that maintained it lay, was so brightly lit upon this evening that it glowed like a lantern through the bare boughs of the hanging wood beneath. In the gun-room at the side of the hall in which the hats and coats of the guests were being received by Bassett, the Willises’ coachman, he recognised a number of incredibly elegant creatures of his own sex with shining white waistcoats, pearl studs, and immaculate ties. He knew scarcely any of them, for they were mostly neighbouring ironmasters or professional people to whose society the Willises’ money had proved a sufficient introduction. Among them he recognised Sir Joseph Hingston, playing ducks and drakes with his aitches, and wearing, to Edwin’s encouragement, a flagrantlyready-made tie. In this particular, at any rate, he was one up on the baronet. He hoped that some one else would realise this fact. In the middle of these reflections he thought he heard a voice that he recognised, and turned to find himself rubbing shoulders with Griffin. Edwin said, “Good-evening.”
“Good Lord, Ingleby, are you here? I haven’t seen you since the pantomime night. What are you doing here? Do you know these people?”
It struck Edwin that he spoke rather contemptuously of his hosts.
“Yes. . . . I live near here, you know,” he replied. “I didn’t know the Willises were friends of yours.” As a matter of fact he knew nothing about the Willises’ friends; but it sounded rather well.
“No . . . I don’t know them,” said Griffin, “but the old man is a business friend of my uncle’s, and apparently they were rather hard up for men.” The sound of waltz music was heard, and Griffin left him hurriedly. “See you later,” he said.
Edwin, anxious not to be left behind, pulled on his gloves and split the thumb of one of them. He passed through the hall, where his name was announced, rather contemptuously, as he thought, by Hannah, the Willises’ tall and starchy servant, and was received in a manner that was reassuring and homely by Mrs. Willis. She spoke for a moment of his mother, and tears gathered in her rather watery eyes; then she introduced him to her small daughter Lilian, very self-conscious in a white party frock with a pale blue waistband, andanother dark girl with beautiful grey eyes and a creamy rather than pale complexion, who was standing beside her. Miss Dorothy Powys, she said. Edwin, hedging for safety, booked a dance with Lilian, who took the matter as seriously as himself. Next, no doubt, he must have a shot at Miss Dorothy Powys, in spite of the disturbing beauty of her eyes; but when he came to ask her for a dance, he saw that Griffin was talking to her.
“May I have another—number sixteen?” Edwin heard him ask easily. She smiled and nodded. Her smile seemed to Edwin very beautiful: so beautiful, indeed, that he couldn’t possibly bring himself to approach her when Griffin turned away. It was awfully silly of him, he thought.
The evening was not exactly a success. He polkaed with Lilian, and took his place in the Lancers with several mature ladies to whom Mrs. Willis introduced him. Luckily none of these belonged to Halesby, a circumstance that must be attributed to Mrs. Willis’s tact, so that the question of his origin never arose. He danced according to the letter of Professor Beagle’s instructions. Neither grasping nor clasping, he let the ladies’ hands lie gently in his with the fingers half bent, and in no circumstances did he squeeze the figger. What he missed was the terrific motive power that the unladylike Professor Beagle had applied to his revolutions. It now appeared to him that to supply this was the part of the male; and as most of the matrons with whom Mrs. Willis supplied him were bulky, he had his work cut out. Once, returning thoroughly blown from one of these adventures hecaught the eye of Dorothy Powys; and he thought she smiled. Could this be true? He wondered. . . . During the greater part of the evening when he had not been dancing he had found himself following her movements with his eyes. He had decided that she must be at least a year or two older than himself; but that didn’t really matter, for she seemed to him a creature of such very perfect grace, and her eyes, in the moment when he caught them, had been so wonderful. After the next dance, which was the one that she had booked with Griffin, he watched them disappear into the library.
It made him feel sick with himself that he hadn’t taken the opportunity of his introduction. What a damned fool he was! And afterwards, when he watched her, she did not smile at all, either for him or for any one else. Indeed, she seemed pale, and anxious, as if something had happened to upset her. In despair Edwin wandered off into the card-room, where he saw Lady Hingston, who was partnering Mr. Willis at bridge, revoke three times in two games, to the intense annoyance of her husband. From the card-room he strolled on to the buffet, where he found Griffin absorbing quantities of whisky and soda. He begged Edwin to join him; but Edwin, who was particularly anxious to behave himself, struck to claret-cup.
“Well, have you struck any cuddle?” said Griffin brutally, with his mouth full.
“Any what?”
“Cuddle. . . . Girls. . . . What the devil do you think one comes to a dance for?”
“No. . . . I haven’t,” said Edwin.
“Well, they are a pretty scratch lot,” Griffin confessed. “That Powys girl’s all right though.”
Edwin blushed furiously. He suddenly wanted to throw his glass of claret-cup at Griffin’s head. Why? . . . He calmed himself.
“Do you know her?” he asked.
“Never met her before to-night. She’s got a topping figure. She must be pretty well connected. Lord Alfred Powys is one of their directors here.”
“But you don’t mean to say—” Edwin began.
“The night is yet young,” said Griffin, gulping another whisky. “God, there’s number twelve! I must hook it.”
Edwin wandered back to the ballroom. He couldn’t keep away from it, but, at the same time, he was anxious not to appear disengaged, for fear that Mrs. Willis should induce some other heavy partner to abandon her arm-chair for his amusement. He hung about the pillars of the folding doors that led into the supper room, just out of range of Mrs. Willis’s maternal gaze. From this point he could watch the beautiful Miss Powys, and wonder, with a sort of bitter excitement, exactly what Griffin had meant by his suggestions. Watching her, he could not believe that she could be anything but graceful and beautiful in everything she did. The band started to play the music for waltz: number sixteen. He remembered it was the second dance that Griffin had booked with her. For some reason that he couldn’t imagine, he felt that he wanted to be near when Griffin came for her: perhaps he could tell her attitude towards him by something that she might say. He went over tothe place where she was sitting next to Mrs. Willis. He tried not to look at her.
In a moment he heard Griffin’s voice. “Ours, I think.” The tone was a little blurred by Griffin’s potations.
“I think you’ve made a mistake,” she said.
Edwin turned round, and at the same moment she looked towards him. “Surely I am dancing this with you, Mr. Ingleby.”
“But look here, I’m sure these are your initials on my programme, Miss Powys. Let me look at yours.”
He tried to take the programme from her fingers, but she moved it away.
“Really, we mustn’t contradict each other, Mr. Griffin. The dance is Mr. Ingleby’s. Will you take me, please?” she said to Edwin.
In an ecstatic dream Edwin found himself walking away with her on his arm. It was a miracle, an astounding, beautiful miracle. She picked up her skirt by the loop of ribbon with which it was suspended and looked him full in the eyes, smiling. “Shall we start?” she said.
They started. In one fatal moment Edwin, who hadn’t been doing badly at the beginning of the evening, forgot every single precept that Professor Beagle had taught him.
“I say, what a shocking dancer you are,” she said with a laugh.
“I’m most awfully sorry, I only learnt this week.” Now that his mind was diverted by speaking to her the steps came more naturally.
“That’s better,” she said. “Who on earth taught you?”
He confessed to Professor Beagle, and she appeared to be amused.
“You see you’re dancing away from me all the time. Just as if you were afraid of me. You ought to hold me closer. It upsets the what d’you call it . . . centre of gravity.”
“I was told never under any circumstances to—” He couldn’t very well repeat Professor Beagle’s formula.
“Now you’re getting on beautifully. Don’t think about it. That’s the idea. Just dance.”
The music ended. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.
“Out into the hall, if you don’t mind . . . on the stairs. I want to explain to you. It was really awfully good of you to take me on.”
“It was a wonderful piece of luck for me.”
They sat together on the shallow oak staircase and she proceeded to tell him that Griffin had upset her in the dance before by trying to kiss her shoulder. “I really couldn’t stick a repetition of that,” she said. “Besides, I think the man had been drinking. So I just pitched upon your poor innocence and lied for all I was worth. Who are you, by the way? I only just remembered your name when Mrs. Willis introduced us. She’s rather a dear, isn’t she?”
The music of the next dance struck up. “Are you dancing?” Edwin asked eagerly.
“I don’t know, I expect so. Just look at my programme. It’s too dark for me to see.”
Edwin took the programme from her fingers. It was a thrilling moment. In the dusk he deciphered two initials, “E.W.,” he said.
“Oh, that’s only Edward Willis. He’s very shy of me. If you’ve nothing better to do I think we’ll stay here.”
It was so easy to talk to her. To Edwin, indeed, it seemed as if he had now become articulate for the first time in his life. She did not speak very much of herself; but she asked him many questions about his life at school, where, he confided to her, he had first known Griffin, and then again about his new work in North Bromwich. And when she did speak her voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of an amazing limpid purity, more beautiful than any human speech he had ever heard. Edwin would have liked to listen to it for ever. He felt that he wanted words to describe its peculiar music, but no words came to him. He could only remember a line in Browning’sPauline:—
“Her voice was as the voice of his own soulHeard in the calm of thought. . . .”
That was the nearest he could get to it; but the words, although they expressed a little of his absorption, did not convey the musical qualities that he wanted to describe. He tried to compare it with the tones of some instrument that he knew, but neither wood-wind nor strings suggested what he wanted. No . . . it was a sound nearer to nature than any man-made instrument. It was the voice of a Naiad: the sound of running water in a clear brookland. And all the time that he listened toher he was thrillingly conscious of her physical presence. She was sitting on the stair beneath him, and fortunately she could not see that he was gazing at her in the gloom, thinking how beautifully shaped was the nape of the neck from which her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome by the loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoulder.
“I’m talking all the time,” he said, “and you’re saying nothing. It’s rather a shame . . . because you speak so beautifully.”
“Whatever do you mean?” For a moment her eyes were on his. He dared not look at them. He could not answer her, for the moment seemed full of such an overpowering sweetness.
“Do tell me.”
“Oh, I only mean that when you say a thing like that, it . . . it suggests that everything about you is marvellously clean and clear and musical—” He paused, for he felt that she might laugh at him.
“Yes . . . go on,” she said.
“Like water in a hill country. It makes me feel as if I weren’t within a hundred miles of North Bromwich.”
She laughed softly, but not unkindly.
“No, I’m not a bit like that. I’m really awfully hard and worldly—I wish I were the least bit what you imagine. You’re most awfully young, aren’t you?”