CHAPTER XTHRENODY

He passed through the door in the wall and entered another world.

Everything connected with Mrs. Barrow was in character.  She was a little old woman, the widow of a small manufacturer who had set his mark upon the countryside by the erection of a chimney stack taller than any other in the district, so tall that even from the summit of Pen Beacon it made a landmark more prominent than the slender spire of Halesby church.  In Edwin’s eyes its presence was so familiar that he had almost become fond of it.  Many and many times on windy days he had watched the immense structure swaying gently as a reed in a summer breeze.  Under the shadow of Mr. Barrow’s monument lay an old garden designed on the formal lines of a hundred years ago, full of honeysuckle arbours and narrow twisted paths: so rich, and so tangled that every year a great part of its fruitfulness ran to waste.  Long rows of lavender were there; and alleys of hoary apple-trees whose gnarled branches overreached the paths: and the whole place was so crowded with decaying vegetable matter and the mould of fallen leaves that even in high summer it had an autumnal savour and a ripe smell that was not unlike that of an apple loft.

Through this shady precinct he passed carrying his hand-bag, pausing only in a sudden patch of light where a bank of tawny scabious diffused an aromatic perfume in the sun.  He paused, not because he was impressed by their garish beauty, butbecause many of the heads were now frequented by a new hatch of Comma butterflies eagerly expanding their serrated wings, drugged already with the flowers’ harsh honey.  Edwin had never seen this uncommon butterfly before.  In the neighbourhood of St. Luke’s the species, which is notoriously capricious, had never appeared.  He wished that he had a butterfly net with him: for by catching one of them he would have scored over Widdup.

So he passed to Mrs. Barrow’s house, a dark Georgian structure as twisted and autumnal as her garden, and there, in a gloomy sitting-room, he found the old lady herself, a little demure creature with round-hunched, shawl-covered shoulders, like the dormouse inAlice in Wonderland, taking tea with her companion, a decorous lady of the same age named Miss Beecock.

They did their best to make Edwin feel at home.  They never mentioned his mother, but it was so obvious that their maidenly commonplaces were only designed to divert his mind from the tragic shadow which he carried with him, that Edwin felt inclined to scandalise them by talking of it. . . .  Their deliberate awkward kindness, the cautious glances which they exchanged, the little sniff of emotion which Mrs. Barrow concealed in her empty teacup, when the pitiful contemplation of Edwin’s youth and innocence overcame her, would have been amusing if there had been room for anything amusing on the darkened earth.

When they had finished the buttered scones and medlar jelly which Mrs. Barrow made from fruit that fell on the dark leaf-mould of her garden, Mrs.Barrow herself moved with short steps to a mahogany bureau, and calling Edwin to her side, showed him one of those secret drawers whose secret everybody knows, smelling of cedar wood and aged russia leather.  From this drawer she produced a purse made of beadwork, and from the purse her fragile fingers extracted a Georgian five-shilling piece, which, with a sigh, she then presented to Edwin.  “If I were you,” she said, “I don’t think I should spend it.  Old coins like that are valuable.  Mr. Barrow had a great interest in anything old and historical.”

Edwin was so surprised by this generosity that he almost forgot to thank her; but Miss Beecock, in a shrill, soft voice, reminded him of his duty, saying: “Now, isn’t that kind of Mrs. Barrow, Edwin?”  Edwin hastily agreed that it was, and the old ladies smiled at one another, as though they were saying, “Isn’t that clever of us, to give him a toy that will take his mind off his mother?”  In the silence that followed, a canary which had been pecking at a lump of sugar stuck in the bars of his cage, attracted by the bright hues of the ribbon on Mrs. Barrow’s cap, broke into a shrill twitter.

“Sweet . . . swee . . . t,” said Mrs. Barrow with pursed lips.

“Sweet . . . sweet,” echoed Miss Beecock, with a little laugh.

“I think I will take my crochet on to the lawn,” said Mrs. Barrow.

“If you have your shawl, and the grass is not too damp,” Miss Beecock reminded her.

“There was a heavy dew last week,” said Mrs.Barrow.  “Which day was it?  I think it must have been Tuesday.  Yes . . . it was Tuesday.  That was the day on which I spoke to Mr. Waldron about thinning the grapes.  And now, Edwin, would you like to fetch a book from the drawing-room?  You may prefer to bring it out on to the lawn.  You know the way.  The key is on the outside of the door.”

Edwin said, “Yes.”  He left them and climbed the creaking oak stairs, to the first story landing, a wide passage of polished wood lit by a shining fanlight that overlooked the street.  He knew the room well enough.  It had been one of the delights of his childhood.  It was long, and irregular in shape, and crammed with curious things that he had once found entertaining.

He unlocked the door and released immediately a concentrated odour of the same character as that which had issued from the secret drawer in Mrs. Barrow’s bureau.  Damp and cedar wood and mouldy russia leather.  All the chairs in the room were covered with white draw-sheets as though they were dead and awaiting burial.  The venetian blinds were down, and when Edwin raised them, the heavy rep curtains at the side of the three tall windows admitted no more than an ecclesiastical twilight.

There, however, stood the things which had delighted his youth.  Nothing had been moved a hair’s-breadth for many years: since the day, indeed, long before Edwin was born, when Mr. Barrow had died.  It was the best room of the house: and so reverenced by Mrs. Barrow that she would never havedreamed of living in it or using it at all except on Christmas Day, when a melancholy family party of relatives and possible heirs assembled to do their duty by the old lady.  Then, and only then, a fire was lighted, extracting from the walls a curious odour of dry rot, which resembled, curiously enough, the apple-loft odour which pervaded the garden.

Edwin was soon at home.  Here was a great glass-fronted mahogany bookcase the wonder of which he had never thoroughly explored.  Here was the flat glass showcase, shaped like a card-table in which a number of Mr. Barrow’s curiosities reposed.  Here was the great musical-box (glass-topped again) with its prickly brass cylinder and twanging teeth for notes, and a winding lever that made a sound as impressive as the winding of a grandfather’s clock.

Edwin thought he would try a tune.  He wound up the mechanism, pressed over the starting lever, and the prickly cylinder began slowly to revolve.  It made a bad start; for no one knows how many years ago it had been stopped in the middle of a tune.  Then, having finished the broken cadence, it burst gaily into the song called “Mousetraps for Sale,” a pathetic ballad which may have sounded sprightly in the ears of young people fifty years ago, but in this strange room was invested with a pathetic and faded quality which made Edwin wish it would stop.  There was no need for him to pull back the lever, for the musical box, as though guessing his wishes, suddenly petered out with a sort of metallic growl.  Edwin laughed in spite of himself,at this peculiar noise, and hearing the echo of his own laugh turned to find himself staring into the jealous eyes of a portrait of a Victorian gentleman whom he took to be the late Mr. Barrow, for whose delectation, over his glass of punch, the instrument had been purchased.  Edwin began to feel a little uneasy.  The feeling annoyed him.  “I’m silly to be like this,” he said to himself.  “I suppose it’s the uncertainty. . . .  Oh, I wish I knew. . . .”

He took refuge in the bookcase, from which he extracted, to his great delight, the complete works of Shenstone in two volumes, bound in slippery calf and published by Dodsley in the year seventeen-seventy. . . .  The books were in a beautiful state of preservation.  Edwin doubted if they had ever been read.  Mr. Barrow, no doubt, had purchased them simply for their local interest.  With a final glance at Mr. Barrow’s portrait, in a faint hope that he approved of his choice, Edwin let down the blinds, so that no light penetrated the room but a single gleam reflected from the glass pane of a wool-worked fire-guard that hung from a bracket at the side of the fireplace.  With a shiver he re-locked the door. . . .

When he reached the garden with his Shenstone, the light was failing.

“You were a long time, Edwin,” said Mrs. Barrow.

“Yes, wasn’t he?” echoed Miss Beecock.  “I’m afraid it is time Mrs. Barrow was going in.”

Quietly, and with a leisure that seemed to presume an endless placidity of existence, the old ladies folded their work, sighed, and recrossed thelawn towards the house.  In a little time came supper: biscuits and milk on which a thick cream had been rising all day.  Then Mrs. Barrow kissed him good-night.  He felt her face on his cheek: a little chilly, but lax and very soft.  Miss Beecock lighted him to bed with a candle in a highly-polished brass candlestick.  The sheets were cool and of old linen.  The bedroom smelt of apples.  With the air of “Mousetraps for Sale” in his head, and a sleepy consciousness of ancient creaking timbers, Edwin fell asleep.

He slept long and dreamlessly, waking in the morning to find the sun shining brilliantly through Mrs. Barrow’s lace curtains.  At first he could not remember where he was, so completely had sleep, bred of long fatigue, obliterated his consciousness.  Before he opened his eyes he had half expected to hear the noise of Widdup turning out of bed with a flop, or the clangour of the six-thirty bell.  And then, with a rush, the whole situation came back to him: this was Halesby, and the new day might be full of tragedy.

At his bedside Miss Beecock, who had stolen into the room an hour or so before in slippered feet and found him sleeping, had placed a glass of creamy milk and biscuits.  It was awfully kind of her, Edwin thought, as he sipped the yellow cream at the top of the glass.  Outside in the garden it was very quiet.  He had overslept the morning chorus of birdsong; but he heard the noise of a thrush cracking snail-shells on the gravel path beneath his window.  He had forgotten to wind up his watch overnight; and when he found it in his waistcoatpocket where he had left it he saw that it had stopped.  “I’d better get up, anyway,” he thought, and while he stood at the door wondering if Mrs. Barrow’s house ran to a bathroom, he heard a clock in the hall give a loud whirr and then strike ten.  “Good Lord, I’ve overslept myself,” he thought.  “I’d better buck up.”

Abandoning the uncertainty of hunting for a bath he dressed and came downstairs to the sitting-room (that was what it was called) in which the meals had been served the day before.  Mrs. Barrow was sitting there in pleasant sunlight, wearing a less elaborate cap and a shetland shawl, and the canary, whose brass cage and saffron plumage now shone brilliantly in the morning sunlight, was singing like mad.  When Edwin came into the room she smiled at him.

“We’re so glad that you slept well,” she said.  “Miss Beecock went to have a look at you but you were sleeping so soundly that she didn’t like to disturb you.  You must have been tired out.  Now you’ll be ready for breakfast.”

At this point Miss Beecock entered the room, her attire modified in the same degree as that of Mrs. Barrow.

“Ah . . .” she said with a little laugh.  “Here you are.  I must ask Annie for your breakfast.”

“He’d like a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, and some buttered toast,” said Mrs. Barrow temptingly.

“Yes, of course he would,” said Miss Beecock.

“I think if you don’t mind,” said Edwin, “I’d like to go home.  It’s so late.”

“Oh, you needn’t mind us,” chimed the two old ladies.

That wasn’t exactly what Edwin had meant, but he allowed himself to be persuaded, and even enjoyed his breakfast, to the accompaniment of the twitterings of the canary and his two hostesses.

“You’ll sleep here again to-night, won’t you?” they said when he was ready to go.  Edwin thanked them.  “Oh, we’re only too pleased to be of any assistance to your mother,” they said, pursuing his departure with the kindest and most innocent of smiles.

This time he did not linger in the old garden: he was far too anxious to get home and learn how things were going.  At the door in the wall his heart stood still.  What was he going to find?  It seemed to him that something terrible might be waiting for him on the other side of the wall.  It was a silly apprehension, he thought, and when he stepped into it the new garden was as sunny as the old.  Only, on the long walk beside the bed of stocks, a mattress, blankets, and sheets were spread out to air in the sun.  The scent of some disinfectant mingled with that of the flowers.  His fears supplied an awful explanation.  It was the bedding from his mother’s room that was spread out there in the sun.  And when he looked up to the windows of the house above him, he saw that the blinds were down.  That, of course, needn’t mean anything on the sunny side of the house.  In a great hurry he turned the corner to the front and saw that the blinds on that side were down as well.

In the darkened dining-room Aunt Laura sat at his mother’s desk writing letters with dashing fluency.  When he came in she stopped her writing and rose to meet him.  “Edwin, my poor dear,” she said, holding out her hands to him.  He took no notice of her hands.

“She’s gone,” he said, “in the night?”

“Yes. . . .  In the night.  She passed away quite quietly.  It’s a dreadful blow for us, Edwin, we must be brave. . . .”

He hadn’t time for sentiments of that kind.  “She was alive when I came yesterday.  And you wouldn’t let me see her.You, of all people. . . .  She hated you.  She told me so.  She always hated you . . . and she’d hate you for this more than anything.”

“Edwin,” she cried, “don’t say these terrible things!’

“They’re true . . . true.  I wish it were you who were dead.  It was you who stopped me from seeing her . . . my little darling. . . .  Damn you . . . damn you.”

“Edwin . . . you don’t know what you’re saying.  You’re cruel.”

“Cruel. . . .  I like that.  Cruel.Youtalk about cruelty. . . .”

“Edwin. . . .”  Aunt Laura clutched nervously at her breast.  It was funny to see this big blowzy woman crumple up like that.  She flopped down in a red plush chair and started crying softly in a thin voice.  Edwin didn’t mind.  Let her cry.She deserved it.  Nothing of that kind could soften his indignant heart.

“Where’s father?” he asked at last.

“I don’t know.  He’s upstairs somewhere,” she said between her sobs.  “For goodness’ sake, Edwin, don’t go and say things like this to the poor man.  We all have this trouble to bear.  And we’ve had the strain of nursing her.  Now, don’t be hasty,” she pleaded.

“All right,” said Edwin, and left her.

Upstairs on the landing he found a pale, shadowy figure in which he could scarcely recognise his father.  Neither of them could speak at all.  Edwin had been ready with the reproaches that had come to his lips in the presence of Aunt Laura; but he couldn’t do it.  This man was too broken.  He was face to face with a grief as great as his own.  There were no words for either of them.  The boy and the man clung together in each other’s arms, overcome with pity and with sorrow.  On the landing, outside the door of the room where she lay dead, they stood together and cried quietly to each other.  And now it seemed to Edwin as if pity for his father were overriding even the intensity of his own grief; for she had been everything to him, too, and for so many years.  He felt that he would have done anything in the world to comfort this desolate man, whom he had always taken for granted and never really loved.  But his mother had loved him.  He wondered if they could do anything to assuage the bitterness of their loss by loving one another.  They were two people left alone with nothing else in the world but each other.  Why not . . .?  That, hethought, was what his mother would have wished.

He felt his father’s tears on his forehead, the roughness of his father’s grey beard.  He felt the man’s body quivering with sobs, and the arms which clutched his body as if that were the only loved thing left to him in life.  They went together into the little room that had always been Edwin’s, and there they knelt together beside the bed.  He didn’t exactly know why they knelt, but kneeling there at his side, with his arm still clasped about his waist, he supposed that his father was praying; and though Edwin could not understand what good prayer could do, it seemed to him a simple and a beautiful thing.  It made him feel that he loved his father more than ever.  He wished that he could pray himself.  He tried to pray . . . for what?  There was nothing left in this world for him to pray for.  At last his father rose to his feet in the dim room, and Edwin rose with him.  He spoke, and the tears still choked his voice and his bearded lip trembled.  “Edwin,” he said, “I shall never be able to get over this.  I’m broken. . . .  My life . . . my life has . . .”  He stopped.

“You don’t know what she was to me, Eddie.  I can’t realise, Eddie, there are only two of us left.  We must help each other to bear it.  We must be brave.”

Strange that a phrase which had sounded like cant on the lips of Aunt Laura should now seem the truest and most natural thing imaginable.

“We . . . we were like children together,” said his father.

Again they stood for a little while in silence.  At last Edwin, still gripping his father’s arm, said,—“Father, may I see her?”

“Of course, dear. . . .”

They went together to the room, and his father opened the door and pulled up one of the blinds.  Mrs. Bagley, the charwoman who did odd work in the house and was an expert in this melancholy office, had drawn a clean white sheet over the bed.  His mother lay there in a cotton nightdress with her hands folded in front of her, and her lips gently smiling.  Even her cheeks were faintly flushed, but the rest of her face and her hands were of a waxen pallor.  She looked very small and childlike.  She looked like a small wax doll.  In this frail and strangely beautiful creature Edwin could only recognise a shadow of the mother that he knew.  It was a little girl that lay there, not his mother.

Edwin spoke in a whisper,—

“Should I kiss her?”

His father nodded and turned away.

But he did not kiss her as he had thought he would.  For some reason he dared not, for he could not feel certain that it was she at all.  He only touched her hands, the hands that he had always worshipped, with his fingers.  They were cold; and still her lips smiled.  The room was full of the odour of Sanitas which some one had sprayed or sprinkled over the floor.  For the rest of his life the smell was one which Edwin hated; for in his mind it became the smell of death.

On the evening after the funeral Edwin sat alone in the drawing-room.  He sat there because the other room was still cumbered with the remnants of a melancholy repast: several leaves of mahogany had been dragged down from the dust of the attic and had lengthened the dining-room table to such an extent that there was scarcely room to move in it, and round this table, in the sunny afternoon, had clustered a large collection of people who smelt of black crape and spoke in lowered, gentle voices, out of respect for the woman whom, it seemed to Edwin, they had never known.

Everybody who entered the house—and there were many, for Mr. Ingleby was much respected in Halesby—wore the same grave air.  Even the undertaker, a brisk little man with a fiery red beard and one shoulder lower than the other from the constant carrying of coffins, treated his daily task with the same sort of mute reverence.  His face, at any rate, wore an expression that matched that of the mourners; and Edwin was only disillusioned as to the sincerity of his expression when he heard him swearing violently at the driver of the first mourning carriage.  This moment of relaxation caused him to forget himself so far as to whistle a pantomime song as he crossed the drive.

The black-coated people in the dining-room did not hear him: they were far too busy being serious: and behind them, from time to time, Edwin could see the grey face of his father, with curiously tired and puzzled eyes.  Puzzled . . . that was theonly word for them.  It was just as if the man were protesting, in all simplicity, against the unreason and injustice of the blow which had fallen on him.  Edwin, savagely hating the presence of all these hushed, uninterested people, found in his father’s suffering face a sudden reinforcement to his anger.  It was a shame, a damned, ghastly shame, that a simple man like that should be hit in the dark; and even more pathetic that he should be simple enough to take the sympathy of his neighbours at its face value.  Edwin glowed with a new and protective love for his father.  It was as well that some generous emotion should be born to take the place of his numb grief.

Above all, the sight of his Aunt Laura, who was conscientiously doing the honours of the house, maddened him.  He could not look at her without remembering that she had been selfish and unkind to his mother; that, on the very last day, she had robbed him of the privilege of seeing his darling alive.  Even now, he believed that she was enjoying herself.  Her eyes occasionally brimmed with tears, but that meant nothing.  They were such easy tears . . . so different from the terrible tears that had shaken his father’s body on the day of desolation.  If only she were dead, he thought, there would be no great loss.

And yet, while he thought of this, he suddenly caught sight of her husband, the little manufacturer whom he had lately begun to know as Uncle Albert, a small man with a shiny bald head and a diffident manner: and in the eyes of Uncle Albert, which were fixed upon his wife, he saw anextraordinary mixture of love and admiration for this shallow, diffuse creature whom he had found himself hating.

“If Aunt Laura were to die,” he thought, “Uncle Albert might very well be like father is to-day.  That’s a queer idea. . . .”  He was amazed at the complications of human relationships and the potential pain that love brings with it.  He thought, “It’s no good thinking about it. . . .  I give it up.  I don’t really wish she were dead.  I only wish . . . that there were no such thing as death.  Why does God allow it?”  No answer came to him: but in place of an answer another angry impulse.  “Curse God,” he thought, meaning the God of Mr. Leeming, the God to whom this queer collection of people were to dedicate his mother’s soul.  Another thought followed quickly: “What’s the good of cursing him?  He doesn’t exist.  If he existed this sort of thing couldn’t happen. . . .”

People were seriously setting themselves to the putting on of black kid gloves that the undertaker had provided.  The horses on the gravel drive were getting uneasy and the cab wheels made a grating noise.  Heavy steps were heard descending the stairs—awkward steps like those of men moving furniture.  Edwin saw that his father had heard too.  He was looking towards the closed door of the room.  He wanted to go and take his father’s hand and hold it, but the space round the edge of the table was packed with people.  Now they had opened the hall door.  He dared not look out of the window.

The voice of Aunt Laura, most studiously kind,said to him: “Eddie, you’ll come along with your father and Uncle Albert and me.”  He said, “All right.”  People at the side of the table made way for him.  On his way he found himself abreast of his friend, Miss Beecock.  She said nothing, but smiled at him and put her arm on his sleeve.  She was wearing black silk mittens, and her eyes were full of tears.  That weak, tearful smile nearly did for Edwin.

The first cab was drawn up at the hall door.  Edwin scrambled in last.  Aunt Laura, with a rustle of black silk, made way for him.  She took out her handkerchief, and Edwin was stifled with a wave of scent.  He hated scent: but anyway it was better than Sanitas.  He saw his father’s puzzled eyes on the other side of the cab . . . so old, so awfully old.  Uncle Albert took out his handkerchief, too.  Evidently, Edwin thought, it was the correct thing to do.  He had misjudged him.  Uncle Albert proceeded to blow his nose.

They were driving through the High Street.  Aunt Laura noticed that most of the shop shutters were up, and in several cases tradesmen were standing at their shop doors bare-headed as they passed.

“It’s very kind of them . . . very nice to see so much respect, John,” she said to his father.  Mr. Ingleby said “Yes,” and Aunt Laura, with a little laugh that was merely a symptom of nervousness, went on: “I expect there’ll be a crowd at the cemetery gate.”  This time Mr. Ingleby said nothing and Uncle Albert once more stolidly blew his nose.  “Albert, dear, I wish you wouldn’t,” said Aunt Laura.  The brakes grated, and the cab stoppedwith a jerk.  “Come along, Edwin, jump out, there’s a good boy,” said Aunt Laura.  “You’ll walk with your father.”

He walked with his father.  The church was full.  His father went with bowed head, seeing nothing; but Edwin was conscious of many faces that he knew.  In the middle of the aisle the thought suddenly came to him that these people weren’t really there to do honour to his mother: they were so many that most of them could never have known her: no, they were just curious people who had flocked there to find something sensational in the faces of the mourners.  In a dull place like Halesby a funeral, and such an important funeral, was an unusual diversion.  And this revelation made him determined that whatever happened he would show no emotion that might tickle the sensations of these ghouls.  He only wished to goodness that he could explain the matter to his father so that he too might give them nothing to gloat over.

In the church, where a faint mustiness mingled with the exotic scent of arum lilies that diffused from the heap of wreaths on the coffin, Edwin held himself upright.  They sang a hymn: “I heard the voice of Jesus say . . . Come unto me and rest”—the first quatrain in unison, and Edwin sang with them, just as he would have sung in the chapel at St. Luke’s.  In the churchyard, when they walked in procession behind the bearers to the grave-side, his eyes were still dry, his lips did not tremble, though Aunt Laura’s scented handkerchief was now drenched with tears, and even Uncle Albert, a virtual outsider, was on the edge of violent emotion.

The burial service was nothing to Edwin.  There was no consolation in it nor, to him, the least atom of religious feeling.  A mockery, a mockery, a solemn and pretentious mockery.  For she was dead . . . she had vanished altogether, and the thing that they were burying with muttered formulas and tears was no more she than the empty parchment of the cocoon is the glowing butterfly.  Let them cry their eyes out.  That was not grief.  Beyond tears.  Beyond tears. . . .

With a curious air of relief that was very near to a furtive gaiety, the party drove back and reassembled in the dining-room.  All except Mr. Ingleby.  “He has gone to his room, poor dear,” said Aunt Laura, with her nervous laugh.  “Mrs. Barrow, do have a slice of ginger-cake.  Just a little?”  Round the long table conversation began to flow, cautiously at first, but with an increasing confidence, when it became clear that it was unattended by any revengeful consequences.

“Didn’t you think it was awfully nice to see the people in High Street so respectful, Mrs. Willis?” said Aunt Laura.  Edwin looked up.  This then was the Mrs. Willis of Mawne Hall with whom his mother had planned the visit to Switzerland.  He saw a middle-aged woman in black satin, with a gold watch-chain round her neck and jet in her bonnet.  She caught his interested eyes and in return smiled.  Aunt Laura went unanswered.  “I wonder,” Edwin thought, “if she understands what a fraud the whole thing is.”  At any rate she looked kind . . . and she had been kind to his mother too.  A moment later she said good-bye, andwhen Aunt Laura had escorted her to the door, for Mrs. Willis was a person of consequence, the rest of the company began to disappear.  At last Edwin was left alone in the room with his aunt and uncle.  Aunt Laura’s face, that had been glowing with hospitable smiles, now took a more serious cast.

“Edwin,” she said, “I want to speak to you.”

“Do you?” said Edwin.  “Well . . . go on.”

“It’s very painful . . . I’m afraid . . . I’m half afraid that it will have upset your father, poor man—as if he hadn’t enough to put up with.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“How can you ask?  I mean your behaviour to-day.  In the church.  In the cemetery.  You stood there just as if . . . just as if . . . oh, it was most irreverent.  Not a sign of grief!  You must have noticed it, Albert?”

Uncle Albert, most uncomfortable at his inclusion in this family scene, but fully aware of the disaster which would follow denial, said, “Yes . . . yes . . . yes, certainly.”

“Every one must have noticed it,” Aunt Laura went on.  “It was a public scandal.  It was unnatural.  It showed such a curious lack of feeling.”

“Feeling,” said Edwin.  “What do you know about feeling?”

“Steady, Edwin, steady,” from Uncle Albert.

“If mother were here,” he said, “and could hear you talking this damned piffle she’d laugh at you.  That’s what she’d do.”

“Edwin!”

“It’s true. . . .  She couldn’t stick your sort of grief at any price.”

“On the very day of her burial. . . .”

“She’s not buried.  It wasn’t she you buried.  Oh, I’m sick of you. . . .”

“Edwin . . .” said Uncle Albert, who felt that something in the way of protection was demanded of him.  “Really now . . .”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, uncle,” said Edwin.

“You cruel boy,” Aunt Laura sobbed.

He left them there.  He carried his bitterness into the drawing-room on the other side of the passage. . . .  It was very quiet there.  Through the bow window floated the perfume of the bed of stocks.  In the corner stood the piano.  He had often listened to his mother playing at night when he was in bed.  He loved her to play him to sleep.  The piano was shut; and the shut piano seemed to him symbolical.  All the music and all the beauty that had been there had gone out of the house.  The house was an empty shell.  Like a dry chrysalis.  Like a coffin.  There, on the hearthrug, where he had crawled as a child, he lay down and cried.

Fromthis emotional maelstrom the current of Edwin’s life flowed into a strange peace.  It seemed that the catastrophe of Mrs. Ingleby’s death had taken the Halesby household by surprise and stunned it so thoroughly that it would never recover its normal consciousness.  Edwin’s father, who had now returned to the ordinary round of business, was still dazed and puzzled, and very grey.  Their servant, a young woman with an exaggerated sense of the proprieties, or perhaps a dread of living alone in such a gloomy house, had given notice.  Only Aunt Laura, to Edwin’s shame, showed the least capacity for dealing with the situation.

However few of the graces may have fallen to her lot, she was certainly not lacking in the domestic virtues.  When the maid departed with her tin trunk and many tearful protestations of her devotion to the memory of the dear mistress, Aunt Laura turned up her sleeves and took possession of the kitchen, and Mr. Ingleby, who had gloomily anticipated a domestic wilderness, found that in spite of the maid’s defection, ambrosial foodappeared before him like manna from heaven, the only difference being that Uncle Albert, who could not be permitted for one moment to remain a bachelor, took his meals with the family.

The relation between Edwin and Aunt Laura was still difficult.  She could not forget—and he could not withdraw—the bitter things that had been said on that most mournful day, though her native good humour, which was profuse and blustery like the rest of her, made it difficult for her to maintain an attitude of injured benignance.  Even Edwin had to admit that she was a good cook; but the excellence of her food was qualified by her incessant chatter and her nervous laugh.  Edwin simply couldn’t stick them; but it amazed him to find that Uncle Albert evidently found them cheerful and reassuring.  Indeed, it was possibly one of the reasons why he had fallen in love with her, being a man who resembled her in nothing and whose enthusiasms could never get him beyond a couple of words and a giggle.

Mr. Ingleby too seemed to emerge without serious irritation from this diurnal bath of small-talk, retiring, as Edwin supposed, to certain gloomy depths of his own consciousness where the froth and bubble of Aunt Laura’s conversation became imperceptible.  Even when she spoke to him directly—though most of her observations were addressed to the world in general—he would not trouble to answer her: a slight which Aunt Laura took quite good-humouredly.

“Bless you,” she would have said, “the man’s so wrapped up in himself that he’s miles away fromanywhere.  Of course you can understand it in a man of his age, especially when you realise how devoted he was to poor Beatrice”—Mrs. Ingleby’s name might never now escape the commiserating prefix—“but when a boy like Edwin tries it on it’s another matter altogether.  It’s simply conceit.  Personally, I think it was a great mistake of his poor mother’s to send him to St. Luke’s.  The grammar school’s good enough for the Willises.  A great mistake. . . .  The boy is getting ideas of himself that aren’t warranted by his position.  I don’t know what we are to do with him.  We certainly can’t have him running wild here.”  And Uncle Albert would say: “Certainly, certainly, my love. . . .”

In spite of these pronounced opinions Aunt Laura was careful not to cross swords with Edwin himself.  Indeed, she went a good deal out of her way to propitiate him with various material kindnesses, and particularly certain delicacies in the way of food, which, to the ruin of her figure in later life, represented to her the height of earthly enjoyment.  Edwin didn’t quite know how to take these attentions.  He couldn’t help disliking her, and the fact that she was really kind to him rather took the wind out of his sails.  He would have been much happier if they had been allowed to remain in a state of armed neutrality.

A fortnight passed . . . happily for Edwin in spite of all that he felt he ought to feel.  He missed his mother awfully.  That was true enough.  And yet . . . and yet it was also true to say that he was only beginning to live: to appreciate the joyof his growing strength: to realise the enchanted domains that were open to his eager feet and to his eager mind.  Here he had freedom, leisure, health: so much of the world to see: so much of human knowledge to explore.  And though the thought of death, and the particular disaster that had befallen him fell upon his spirit sometimes with a shadow that plunged the whole world into desperate darkness, he could not deny that the shadow was gradually lifting, and the character of the agony that had desolated him was becoming less spontaneous, till, in the end, it became almost a calculable emotion that might be indulged or banished at will.  He found it difficult to understand this.  He thought: “I’m a brute, a callous, insensitive brute.  What would she think of me . . .?  And yet, I can’t help it.  I’m made like that. . . .”  And then, after long and bitter deliberation: “I believe she would understand.  I expect she was made like that too.  I’m sure she was.  And if there’s one thing in the world that she’d hate it would be that I should force myself to pretend anything.”

The high summer weather held.  Never was there such a June.  Edwin, in the joy of perfect health, would get up very early in the morning when the dew lay on the roses, and run in a sweater and flannel trousers down the lane and over the field to the mill-pond where he and his mother had walked so often in the evenings of spring.  Here, where the water was deepest and great striped perch stole slowly under the camp-shedding, he would strip and bathe, lying on his back in the water so that lowsunbeams came dancing over the surface into his eyes that were on the level of the flat water-lily leaves and their yellow balls now breaking into cups.

Afterwards when he would sit glowing on the bank, the sun would be rising and growing warmer every minute, and this new warmth would seem to accentuate the odour of the place that was compact of the yellow water-lily’s harsh savour, the odour of soaked wood, and another, more subtly blended: the composite smell of water that is neither fast nor stagnant, the most provocative and the coolest smell on earth.

On the way home he would sometimes get a whiff of the miller’s cowhouse, when the door was thrown open, and from within there came a sound of quiet breathing or of milk hissing in a pail.  And sometimes, from the garden, the scent of a weed bonfire would drift across his path.  All things smelt more poignantly at this early hour of the morning.  All things smell more wonderfully early in life. . . .

With these wonders the day began; but stranger things lay in store for him.  He revisited all his old haunts: the tangled woods and gardens of Shenstone on the hill-side: the ruins of the Cistercian abbey on whose fall the poet had moralised, the little chapel that marked the grave of the murdered Mercian prince.  His bicycle took him farther.  Westward . . . always westward.

In those days it always seemed to him as if the mountainous country that his mother had shown him that evening on Uffdown, rolling away into remote and cloudy splendours, must be the land ofhis heart’s desire: and though he could never reach it in a day, he managed several times to cross the Severn and even to scale the foothills upon the farther bank from which he could see the Clee Hills rising in a magnificent bareness, shaking the woods and pastures from their knees.  And these distant hills would tempt him to think of the future and other desires of his heart: in the near distance Oxford, where Layton and other demigods in grey flannel trousers abode, and beyond the fine untravelled world, rivers and seas and forests, desolate wonderful names.  China . . . Africa . . .  “Some day,” he said to himself, “I will go to Africa. . . .”

In this way he began to think of his present adventures as a kind of prelude to others remoter and more vast.  One day he had ridden farther away than usual, and having taken his lunch at the bridge town of Bewdley, he pushed his bicycle up the immense hill that overshadows the town along the road to Tenbury.  For all its steepness this mountain road was strangely exhilarating, the air that moved above it grew so clean and clear.  Below him, between the road and the river, lay the mighty remnants of the Forest of Wyre.

His way tumbled again to a green valley, where no mountains were to be seen; and while Edwin was deciding to turn off down the first descending lane and explore the forest, he heard a sound of spades and pickaxes and came upon a group of navvies, several of them stripped to the waist in the sun, working at a cutting of red earth that was already deep on either side of the road.  For the most part they worked in silence; but one of them,a little one-eyed man, with a stiff soldierly back, encouraged them with a string of jokes.  They called him “Gunner,” and the elaboration with which his chest had been tattooed with nautical symbols led Edwin to suppose that he was a sailor.  When he saw Edwin leaning on his bicycle and watching the work, he called out to him, asking if he wanted a job.  Edwin shook his head.  “I reckon,” said the Gunner, “that a foreman’s job would be more in your line, Gaffer.  It’s a fine sight to see other people working.  The harder the better.”

The men laughed and stretched their backs, leaning, on their spades, and Edwin could see how a fine dew of sweat had broken out under the hair on their chests.  It seemed to him a noble sight.  “What are you working at?” he asked.  “Is it a railway?”

“To hell with your railway,” said the Gunner.  “Who would make a railway heading for the river Severn?  No . . .  It’s a pipe-track.  This here’s the Welsh water scheme.”

“Where is it going to?”

“North Bromwich.”

“And where does it come from?”

“From Wales. . . .  From the Dulas Valley, where they’re rebuilding the reservoir under a hill they call Savaddan.  And a black job it is, I can tell you.”

“Is it anywhere near a place called Felindre?  I think it must be.”

“Right, my son.  The pipe-line goes through Felindre.  Sixty or eighty mile from here.”

“My people come from Felindre . . .”

“Well, God pity them. . . .  That’s all I can say.  I’ve been in that place on a Christmas Day, and not a pint of beer stirring. . . .  Ah, that’s a black job.  Well, mates, come on. . . .”

Again the men who had been listening, lifted their picks and spades, and the busy clinking sounds of digging began again.  Edwin wished the Gunner good-afternoon, and began to push his bicycle up the hill again.  Sixty or eighty miles. . . .  That wasn’t so very far.  Six or eight hours’ ride. . . .  Perhaps some day he could go there.  He half persuaded himself with a sentimental argument that it was only natural that he should be happy in the country from which his mother’s people had come; that even the borderland of it must be possessed by the same curiously friendly atmosphere.  “I’m always most happy west of Severn,” he thought.  And then he began to wonder about the sailor whom the men called Gunner.  Perhaps that man had actually been in Africa. . . .

He managed to get a sixpenny tea at a little general shop on the very crown of the hills, where a small hamlet named Far Forest stood.  The romantic name of the place appealed to him; and it was a curious adventure to sit down alone to tea in a back room that smelt of candles and paraffin and bacon.  At the shop door a serious old man with a white beard had received him; but the tea was brought to him by a little girl in an extremely clean pinafore whom the old man addressed as Eva.

She was a curious mixture of shyness and friendliness, and her serious eyes examined Edwinminutely from under straight dark eyebrows.  When she came in with the tea she found Edwin examining some books that stood in a cupboard with a glass door.  Evidently she was very proud of them.

“They are my brother James’s prizes,” she said, and went on to explain how clever he was and what a scholar, until the old man called “Eva,” and she returned to him in the shop.  It was all amazingly peaceful, with the westering sun flooding the doorway where the old man had been sitting out in a chair when Edwin arrived: and opposite the door was a little patch of green strewn with mossy boulders, a kind of platform in front of which the huge panorama of Clee and all the Radnor hills expanded.

“In a place like this,” Edwin thought, “people never change.”  It was a ripping, placid sort of existence, in which nothing ever happened, but all things were just simple and serious and tender like the eyes of the little girl named Eva who had brought him his tea.  “Good-evening, sir,” said the old man at the door.  It was rather nice to be called “Sir.”  Coasting down the hill into Bewdley, Edwin had all the joy of the state that he called “the after-tea feeling.”  It was exhilarating and splendid: and at the end of it came the misty river town with its stone bridge and the great river of the Marches swirling proudly to the south.  When he neared home, divinely tired and hungry, the black-country stretched before him in a galaxy of starry lights.  As he crossed the brow of the hill above Halesby, the Willis’ Mawne furnaces suddenly lit the sky with a great flower of fire.

At home, Auntie Laura was in possession.  Evidently she was primed with serious business; for Edwin could see that his father sat spiritually, if not physically, pinioned in the plush arm-chair.  Aunt Laura wore an air of overpowering satisfaction.  Evidently she had already triumphed, and she smiled so cheerfully at Edwin that he felt convinced that she had scored him off in some way.  On the side of the fire opposite to his father Uncle Albert sat smoking, not as if he enjoyed it, but because it gave him the excuse of an occupation into which he might relapse in moments of tension.

“Well, here he is at last,” said Aunt Laura.  “We’ve been talking about you, Edwin.”

Edwin had guessed as much.

“Well, what is it?” he said, and his tone implied that he was certain that some dark scheme had been launched against his peace of mind.  Uncle Albert puffed uncomfortably at his pipe and nicotine or saliva made a gurgling noise in it.  Mr. Ingleby sighed.  Aunt Laura, tumbling to the hostility of the new atmosphere, hastened to propitiate.

“I expect you’re hungry, Edwin,” she said. . . .

“No. . . .  I’m not hungry, thanks.  What is it?”

“You needn’t be cross, Edwin. . . .  We’ve decided. . . .”  So it was all arranged. . . .  “We’ve decided that your father must go away for a rest . . . a little holiday. . . .”

“Yes. . . .  And that means, of course, that we shall have to shut up the house until he returns, and of course that will be quite easy, because it’stime you were getting back to St. Luke’s.  We thought you had better go on Monday.”

“Monday?”  It was now Saturday.

“Yes. . . .  Monday.  It is fortunate that your uncle has to go into North Bromwich on business that day. . .”

“Yes. . . .  Yes. . .  Business,” put in Uncle Albert, as though he were anxious to explain that his visit to that sink of iniquity was in no way connected with pleasure.

Edwin burned with sudden and quite unreasonable indignation.

“And you agreed to this, father?”

“Yes. . . .  Of course I agreed.  Your aunt is quite right.  I am overtired.  It was a terrible strain.  And the doctor suggested that my native air. . . .”

“Oh . . . I don’t mean that,” said Edwin.  “I mean about St. Luke’s. . .  I can’t go back now . . . of course I can’t . . .”

“Don’t be ridiculous and childish, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura severely.  “You don’t imagine just because”—with a hushed and melancholy inflection—“this . . . has happened, you’re never going to school again?”

“No. . . .  I don’t mean that.  Of course I don’t.  Only . . . only the term is nearly over.  In another fortnight all the chaps will be going away for the hols.  It isn’t worth it.  I should feel . . .”

“We weren’t considering your feelings so much as your good,” said Aunt Laura complacently.

“Father . . . father . . . you can’t mean it.  You see. . . .  I don’t know . . . it would all be so strange.  So awfully difficult.  I should have losttouch with all the work the form was doing.  I shouldn’t be able to pick it up.  It’s rotten . . . rotten . . .”

“Edwin, you will distress your father . . .”

“Oh, Aunt Laura, do let father speak for himself.”

Immense volumes of yellow smoke signalled Uncle Albert’s distress.

“Father . . .”

“It’s difficult, Edwin . . .”

“But it isn’t difficult, father, dear.  Aunt Laura doesn’t realise.  She doesn’t realise what it would be like going back like that to St. Luke’s.  It would only be waste of time.  Father, I’d read during the hols. . . .  I would, really.  It isn’t that I want to get out of going back to work.  It isn’t that a bit.  I’d work like blazes.  Only . . . only everything now seems to have gone funny and empty . . . sort of blank.  I . . . I feel awful without mother . . .”

“Edwin . . .” warningly, from Aunt Laura.

That Aunt Laura should presume to correct him in a matter of delicacy!  “Of course you don’t understand,” he said bitterly.  “You don’t want me to speak about mother.  You’ve had your excitement out of it.  You’ve had your chance of bossing round, and now you want to arrange what I shall do for the rest of my life, I suppose.  You’ve no . . . no reverence.”

He was really very angry.  It was always difficult for him to be anything else with Aunt Laura; for he felt that it was somehow horribly unjust for her to be alive when his mother was dead, and he couldnever, never forget what his darling had told him of her stupid jealousy.  On this occasion Aunt Laura seemed to be less disturbed than usual by his violence.  She spoke with a calculated coolness that compelled the admiration of her husband, sitting very uncomfortably on the edge of the storm, desperately anxious to show that without his taking sides his wife could rely on his support.

“It’s funny, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura, stroking her black skirt, “that you should use the word Reverence. . . .  It reminds me of something that I wanted to speak to you about.  You realise, don’t you, that we are all supposed to be in mourning?  And yet, day after day, I see you going down the town in a pair of white canvas gym. shoes.  White. . . !  Now, you mustn’t talk to me about reverence, Edwin.”

Edwin burst out laughing.  It was no good arguing with the woman.  He gave a despairing glance at his father.  Was it possible that the man could listen seriously to superficial cant of this kind?  Was it possible that he could tolerate the woman’s presence in the house?  He looked, and he saw nothing but tiredness and desolation in the man’s face.  He saw that in reality his father was too tired for anything but compromise.  All life, all determination had been stamped out of him, and though Edwin clutched at the sympathy which he knew must be concealed in the man’s mind, he began to realise that, after all, circumstances had left the whole household curiously dependent on Aunt Laura; that without her the whole domestic machine would collapse, and that, therefore, theinfliction must be suffered patiently.  Edwin determined to leave the matter where it stood, but Aunt Laura, inflamed with approaching triumph, would not let it rest.  “I am sure that you agree with me, John,” she threw out challengingly.

“No doubt Edwin did not understand.  You know more about the people in the town than we do, Laura.”

“Compromise . . .” thought Edwin, “but I suppose it can’t be helped.”  At any rate nothing that he might do should give the man a moment’s discomfort.  He possessed himself in silence.

“But I think, perhaps,” Mr. Ingleby went on, “that Edwin is right.  It would be hardly worth while going back to St. Luke’s for a fortnight.”

“Of course you know best, John,” Aunt Laura hurried to assure him, “but it’s really quite impossible for us to put him up while the house is closed and you are away.  You know that we’ve arranged to have the painters in.”.

On a matter of fact, and one outside controversy, Uncle Albert felt that he was safe in giving his support.

“I quite understand that,” said Mr. Ingleby, “but it’s a simple matter.  Edwin can come with me.”

“Oh, father, how wonderful!”

“Well, of course,” said Aunt Laura, “if he won’t be a nuisance to you. . . .”  But Edwin was too pleased and excited to mind what she said.  He kissed his father, and Mr. Ingleby, with a curious tenderness, clasped his arm.  It seemed that catastrophe had strange uses.  Already it had thrown the ordinary course of life into more than onecurious byway, and now, behold, he was to embark upon another strange adventure, to become familiar with another sort of life.  He determined that his duty (whatever that might be) should not suffer by it.  When they returned from their holiday, all through the summer months, he would work like anything: he would make that Balliol scholarship that had seemed part of an indefinite future, as near a certainty as made no matter.  He would show them—in other words Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert—what he could do.

“If we are going on Monday I had better think of packing,” he said.  “Shall I need to take many things, father?”

“Oh, don’t worry your father, Edwin,” said Aunt Laura.

Sunday came with its usual toll of dreariness.  The customary penance of the morning service was actually the least trying part of it to Edwin.  To begin with, the parish church of Halesby was a structure of great beauty.  Originally an offshoot of the abbey that now stood in ruins above the long string of slowly silting fishponds on the Stour, the grace and ingenuity of successive ages of priestly architects had embellished its original design with many beautiful features, and the slender beauty of its spire, crowning a steep bank above the degraded river, had imposed an atmosphere of dignity and rest upon the rather squalid surroundings of this last of the black-country towns.  The music, even though it was not in any way comparable withthat of St. Luke’s, was good, and the recent arrival of a young and distinguished rector from Cambridge, whose voice and person would have qualified him for success as a bishop, or an actor manager, had restored to the building some of its popularity as a place of resort or of escape from the shuttered Sunday streets.

At ten o’clock the fine peal of bells filled the air with an inspiriting music.  Edwin remembered, hearing them, the melancholy with which they had often inspired him on dank evenings of autumn when the ringers were at practice.  Very different they sounded on this summer morning, for a gentle wind was moving from the hills to westward, and chime eddied in a soft air that was clearer than the usual, if only because it was Sunday and the smoke of a thousand furnaces and chimney stacks no longer filled it with suffocation.

At ten-fifteen precisely Aunt Laura appeared in the dining-room, in a black silk dress smelling faintly of lavender: a minute later, Uncle Albert, in a frock coat, coaxing the last sweetness from his after-breakfast pipe.  Mr. Ingleby also had exchanged the alpaca jacket in which he had been leisurely examining his roses, for the same uniform.  Uncle Albert, Edwin noticed, had not yet removed the deep band of crape from his top-hat.  As usual, Aunt Laura appeared a little flustered, the strain of conscious magnificence in her millinery making it difficult for her to collect her thoughts.

“Are you sure you have all the prayer-books, Albert?” she asked anxiously.

Uncle Albert regretfully knocked out his pipe.  “Yes, my dear,” he said.

“Don’t scatter those ashes all over the fireplace, Albert.  The least you can do is to keep the room tidy on Sunday.”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Edwin, have you got your prayer-book?  Why, boy, you’ve actually put on a grey striped tie.  Run and change it quickly.  I don’t know what people will think.”

Edwin, smarting, obeyed.  When he returned the atmosphere of impatience had increased.  Aunt Laura was saying: “John, dear, are you sure that the clock is right?  I’m afraid the bells have stopped.  No . . . thank goodness, there they are again.  That’s better, Edwin.  Now we really must start.  You have the money for the collection, Albert?  Give it to me, or you’ll be sure to leave me without any.  I do hope we shan’t be late.  We should look so prominent. . . .”

Why should they look so prominent?  The question puzzled Edwin all the way down through the quiet streets.  But even though this mystery exercised his mind he could not help appreciating the curious atmosphere of the route through which they progressed.  At the corner of the street the first familiar thing smote him: it was the odour of stale spirits and beer that issued from between the closed doors of the Bull’s Head public-house, behind which it had been secreted ever since an uproarious closing time the night before.  Then came the steep High Street, and from its gutters the indescribable smell of vegetable refuse left there overnight fromthe greengrocer’s stalls.  On an ordinary morning it would not have been noticed, for the motion of wheeled traffic in the highway and the sight of open shop windows would have distracted the attention.  On Sunday morning, however, it became the most important thing in the road, and seemed to emphasise the deadness of the day in contrast to the activities and dissipations of Saturday night.  It called attention to the indubitable sordidness of the whole street: the poverty of its grimy brick: the faded lettering above the shop windows: the paint that cracked and peeled from the closed shutters.  On this morning Halesby was a squalid and degraded town.  Even Mr. Ingleby’s shop in the High Street looked curiously small and mean.  Edwin disliked the sight of his own name printed over it.  It reminded him of Griffin’s social prejudices.

They entered a small door in the transept when the last bell was tolling; and as they stepped into the full church Edwin realised at last the reason of Aunt Laura’s particular anxieties.  They were on show.  This was the first occasion, since the funeral, that the family had entered the church, and, in accordance with an immemorial custom, the congregation were now engaged in searching their faces and their clothing for evidences of the grief that was proper to their condition.

Kneeling in the conventional opening prayer, Edwin could see through his folded fingers that the whole of the gathering was engaged in a ghoulish scrutiny of their party.  Now, for the first time, he realised the full meaning of the horror withwhich his grey tie had inspired Aunt Laura.  He could even feel Aunt Laura, who remained kneeling longer than usual, wallowing in the emotion that her presence evoked.  It was a rotten business.  If he could have dared to do so without causing an immense scandal, Edwin would have got up and left the church.  He saw Aunt Laura glance at his father with a kind of proprietary air, as if this exhibition were really her own responsibility and the degree of interest that Mr. Ingleby’s appearance aroused were to her credit.

Edwin also looked at his father.  He wondered if Mr. Ingleby were in the least conscious of the spectacle to which he was contributing: decided that he wasn’t.  He was thankful for that.  It became apparent to him that, if the truth were known, his father was a creature of the most astonishing simplicity: a simplicity that was almost pathetic.  He could see, he knew that the whole church must see, that the man had suffered.  The brutes. . . .  He was awfully sorry for his father.  And he loved him for it.  The whole affair was shameful and degrading.  Never mind . . . in another twenty-four hours they would be clear of all this sort of thing.  It was something to be thankful for.

“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness and doeth that which is lawful and right. . . .”  The rector began to intone.  He spoke the words as though his whole soul were behind them: his voice vibrated with a practiced earnestness: and all the time Edwin could see his dark eyes scrutinising the congregation in detail, congratulating himself on the presence of hissupporters, speculating on the absence of certain others.  In the final cadence of the sentence, a masterly modulation that would have made you swear that his whole life was in his mission, his eyes swivelled into the corner where the Ingleby party were sitting, and Edwin could have bet his life that they lighted up with a kind of satisfaction at the addition of this undoubted attraction to his morning’s entertainment.  It even seemed to him that the rector’s glances almost imperceptibly indicated to his wife, a little woman of a pathetic earnestness qualified for the ultimate bishopric by a complete subjection to her husband’s personality, the fact that the Inglebys were on view.

The rector, who had views on the advantages of scamping the drier portions of the church service and stressing any sentence that held possibilities of fruity sentiment, soon got into his stride.  He was in excellent voice that morning, and on two occasions in the first lesson availed himself of an opportunity of exploiting the emotional break—it was very nearly a sob—that had done so much to establish his reputation in his early days at Halesby.  He was making hay while the sun shone: for in the confirmation service such opportunities are more limited.

Edwin enjoyed the psalms.  There was even something familiar and pleasant in the tunes of the Cathedral Psalter after the exotic harmonies of St. Luke’s.  He sang the tenor part (when last he remembered singing them it had been alto) and lost his sense of his surroundings in the beauty of the words.  In the middle of them, however, hebecame conscious of his father singing too.  He had never sat next to his father in church before.  His mother had always separated them: and for this reason he had never before heard his father sing.  The result filled him with horror.  Mr. Ingleby had no idea of tune and was apparently unconscious of this disability.  Edwin reflected how great an interest music had been in his mother’s life: realised that from this part of her his father must always have been isolated by this natural barrier.  It was strange. . . .  He began to wonder what they really had in common.  He remembered Griffin.  No . . . not that. . . .

This speculation he did his best to stifle while the rector galloped over the desert wastes of the Litany: but the kneeling posture was rendered uncomfortable by the presence in front of him of an old maiden lady who smelt of caraway seeds, a spice that Edwin detested.  A hymn followed.  Luckily, this time his father did not sing.  Poor creature. . . .  Edwin was now so ashamed of his criticism that he almost wished he would.  And then they settled down to the sermon.

From the first Edwin had decided that he would not listen.  The simple austerity of the service at St. Luke’s, where the liturgy was allowed to unfold its sonorous splendours for itself, had bred in him a distaste for the rector’s histrionics.  So he did not hear them, contenting himself with a detailed examination of such of the congregation as were within his range.  He saw them classified in their social gradations from the pompous distinction of Sir Joseph Hingston, the ironmaster, who, in spiteof his baronetcy, wore a frock coat that did not differ greatly from that of Mr. Ingleby, to their late maid, dressed in black, and now conscious of the reflected glory that she had almost sacrificed by leaving.  And the thing that impressed him most about this very various gathering was their shabbiness, and the fact that nearly all of those whom he knew seemed so much older than they had been when he last saw them.

Thinking of the light and elegance and cleanliness of St. Luke’s, it appeared to him that Halesby was indeed a muddy and obscure backwater and that his own people, sitting in the pew beside him, were in reality as much fitted to inhabit it as all the rest of the shabby congregation.  Even the Willises, his mother’s new friends, whom a wave of commercial prosperity had carried forward into one of the front pews of the nave within calculable distance of the glory of Sir Joseph Hingston himself, would have looked very ordinary folk in the chapel at St. Luke’s.

He began to wonder if Griffin, and more latterly Aunt Laura, had been right: whether, after all, his mother had made an ambitious mistake in sending him to a public school when the ancient foundation of the Halesby Grammar School had stood waiting for the reception of him and his kind.  There, in the fifth row on the left of the nave, sat Mr. Kelly, the grammar school’s head-master: a swarthy Irishman with a sinister, rather disappointed face.  He wasn’t at all Edwin’s idea of a schoolmaster.  Even old fat Leeming looked more distinguished than that.  And yet, if he were goodenough for the son of the opulent Walter Willis, he must surely be good enough for the son of an ordinary Halesby tradesman.

For the greater part of the sermon these problems of social precedence engaged Edwin’s puzzled mind.  It had come as something of a shock to him to find that his mother came of a farming stock, even though the farmers had lived in a Norman castle and had once been good enough to bear a lance in company with the Lords Marchers.  Examining the face of his father, who appeared to be engrossed in the rector’s rhetoric, Edwin decided that his features were really far too distinguished to belong naturally to a country chemist.  Here, perhaps, in spite of present circumstance, lay the explanation of his own indubitable gentility.  It was funny, he reflected, that he had never heard anything from his mother about the origins of the Inglebys: he had not even known from what part of the country their stock had sprung, and this ignorance made the expedition on which they were to start on the morrow more enthralling than ever.  It was quite possible that the discovery of some illustrious ancestry might put him right with himself and justify his claim to a birthright which at present seemed rather shadowy.

Even if this failed, he decided, there remained Oxford.  A fellow of Balliol (his imagination travelled fast) would have a right to hold up his head with any one in that congregation—Sir Joseph Hingston not excepted—even though the name of the fellow’s father happened to be printed on his toothbrush.  It might even be for him to restorethe prestige of the Ingleby name.  “But in that case,” he thought, “it will be better for me to buy my toothbrushes somewhere else. . . .”  Even the fact that Keats was a chemist did not modify this determination.

The sermon ended, and during the collection a hymn was sung.  Half an hour before this, a gowned verger had stolen on tiptoe to the Inglebys’ pew and whispered in Mr. Ingleby’s ear, depositing a wooden plate lined with velvet under the seat as furtively as if it were something of which he was ashamed.  When the collection began Edwin’s father left his pew and began to carry the plate round the transept in which they were seated.

Edwin, out of the corner of his eye, saw a glow of satisfaction spread over the features of Aunt Laura.  Now, more than ever, the depth of the family’s grief was to be demonstrated in the eyes of all men.  Edwin thought it was a rotten shame to make his father collect on this Sunday of all Sundays.  The hymn was a short one, and for several minutes after it was finished the clink of silver and the duller sound of copper coins was heard in every corner of the echoing church.  Then the sides-men formed themselves into a double file and moved singly up the aisle.  First came Sir Joseph Hingston, erect and podgy, with his smooth grey waistcoat in front of him like the breast of a pouter pigeon.  Mr. Willis, of Mawne, with a humbler but not unambitious abdominal development followed him.  Edwin conceived a fanciful theory that when Mr. Willis, in the course of time, should have grown as wealthy as the baronet, there would be nothingto choose between their profiles.  A miserly but erect old gentleman named Farr, who had once given Edwin a halfpenny, followed Mr. Willis.  Last but one came Edwin’s father, with the red-bearded undertaker an eager last.

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