Chapter X: Threnody

I

FROM this 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 food appeared 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 from anywhere. 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 joy of 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 low sunbeams 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 of his 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 Edwin minutely 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.

II

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’s time 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 lost touch 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 could never, 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, the infliction 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 one curious 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.

III

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 with that 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 from the 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 with which 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 his supporters, 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, he became 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 spite of 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 good enough 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 restore the 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 nothing to 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.

On the whole, Edwin was satisfied (as was obviously Aunt Laura) with Mr. Ingleby’s appearance. He certainly looked more like the father of a fellow of Balliol than Sir Joseph Hingston. The money descended with a series of opulent splashes into the brass salver that the rector held in front of the chancel steps: the organist (in private life he was a carpenter) meanwhile extemporising vaguely in the key of C. The rector carried the salver arm-high to the altar, as though he were exhibiting to the Almighty the personal fruits of his oratory. Mr. Ingleby stole quietly to his seat bathed in the admiring glances of Aunt Laura. A short prayer . . . “_And now to God the father_. . . .” The organist launched into his latest achievement: the Gavotte from Mignon.

Outside the church the summer sunlight seemed more exhilarating than ever. It was worth while, Edwin thought, to have suffered the dreariness of the morning’s service to experience this curious feeling of lightness and relief. He supposed that he was not alone in this sensation; for the crowd that moved slowly from the churchyard gates with a kind of gathering resilience was a happy crowd, and its voices that at first were hushed soon became gay and irresponsible in spite of the slight awkwardness that its Sunday clothes imposed on it. No doubt they were anticipating their Sunday dinner, for, as Edwin had noticed, the liturgy of the Church of England has some value as an _apéritif_. Even Aunt Laura was full of a subdued playfulness. “What a shame, Albert,” she said, “that the rector didn’t appoint you to collect to-day.” She patted his arm.

“Oh, I don’t know, my dear. . . . It wasn’t my turn, you know.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Aunt Laura, “but on a day like this it would have been rather a delicate compliment. I must speak to the rector about it.”

“I don’t think I should do that,” said Uncle Albert, with some alarm.

She laughed gently. “Don’t be an old juggins,” she said.

All down the High Street, in the moving crowd, Edwin could smell the savour of roast beef and baked potatoes and cabbage water wafted from innumerable kitchen windows. . . .

IV

In the afternoon they left Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert asleep in two arm-chairs on opposite sides of the drawing-room fireplace, and Edwin and his father went for a walk by the old abbey fish-ponds. It was the first time for many years that Edwin had been for a walk with his father, and the experience promised a new and exciting intimacy to which he looked forward with eagerness.

Even at this hour of the day the Sabbath atmosphere imposed itself on the countryside. The road that they followed was long and straight with an open frontage above the reedy pools, and along the cinder path at the side of it a great number of men were lounging: a strange and foreign population of miners from the Mawne pits, who only emerged from their cavernous occupation on this day of the week, and other industrial workers from the great steel rolling mills that lay in the Stour Valley to westward.

None of them took any notice of Edwin and his father. It was even doubtful if they knew who they were; for these men passed a curiously separate existence, and Mr. Ingleby would only be familiar to their wives who did the family shopping on Saturday nights while their masters were waiting for the football results in their favourite pubs. On this day the miner’s passion for sport of all kinds asserted itself in the presence of a great number of slim, jacketed whippets, each warranted to beat anything on four legs for speed, slinking tenderly at their masters’ heels.

It seemed strange to Edwin that his father should know none of these men. It showed him again how remote and solitary the man’s life must have been in this ultimate corner of the Black Country. “We don’t really belong here,” he thought. “We’re foreigners. . . .” And the reflection pleased him, though he remembered, with a tinge of regret, that by this denial he dissociated himself from his old idol the poet of the Pastoral Ballad.

Soon they left the cinder path behind, and plunged into a green lane descending to a water-mill, turned by the tawny Stour, as yet unsullied by the refuse of factories. At a sandstone bridge, whose parapet was deeply carved with the initials of lovers long since dead or disillusioned, they paused, and, for the first time, began to talk.

“It’s a funny thing, father,” Edwin said, “but I don’t even know where we are going to-morrow. . . .”

Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Don’t you, Edwin? Well, the doctor said it would be best for me to go to my native air; and it struck me as rather a good plan. I never went there with your mother. It belonged to another life. It is quite twenty years since I have been in Somerset.”

“Somerset . . .? I didn’t even know it was Somerset.”

“No. . . . Well, as I say, it was another world.”

Somerset. . . . Edwin’s imagination began to play with the word. He could remember very little: only a huge green county sprawling on a map with rivers . . . yes, and hills. A county stretched beside the Severn Sea. The Severn again! A western county. Cheddar cheese. Lorna Doone. Cider. Coleridge. Sedgemoor.

“But what part of Somerset?”

“The eastern end.”

That was a pity. The farther west the better.

“I suppose it’s rather a flat county?”

“A great part of it. Did you ever hear of Mendip?

“‘The rugged miners poured to war
From Mendip’s sunless caves.’”

“Yes, of course. . . .”

“I came from a little village on the top of Mendip. Twenty years ago it was decaying. Now I expect there’s next to nothing left of it. Twenty years makes a lot of difference. It’s made a lot of difference to me.”

“And what was the name of the village?”

“I don’t suppose you will ever have heard it. It was called Highberrow.”

“Highberrow . . . no. It’s a jolly name.”

“I don’t think it ever struck me in that light.”

“Highberrow . . . is it right in the hills?”

“Yes . . . quite high up. I don’t know how many hundreds of feet. I wasn’t interested in that sort of thing then. It lies right under Axdown, the highest point of the range. On a clear day you can see right over the Bristol Channel into Wales. All the mountains there. The Brecon Beacons. The Sugarloaf. The Black Mountain.”

“The Black Mountain. But how strange. Why, when you were a little boy you must have been nearly able to see the place where mother lived. With a big sea between. It must have been wonderful . . .”

“Yes . . . I suppose it was. I scarcely remember. Look right down in that deep pool. That’s a trout.”

“A trout. . . . Where? Do show me . . .”

The vision of Mendip faded instantly, and Edwin only saw the rufous sands of the pool beneath the bridge, and in it a shadowy elongated figure with its head to the slow stream and faintly quivering fins. In Devonshire, Widdup had told him, the rivers swarmed with trout: you could catch them all day long if you wanted to, and Edwin, loyal to his own county’s excellences, had only been able to produce the silvery roach of the millpool, shoaling round the water-lilies and the mythical legend of carnivorous pike lurking in Mr. Willis’s ponds in the Holloway. He wished he had known that there were veritable trout in the Stour. Now it was too late to do anything; but when they returned from their holiday, he determined that he would catch this shadowy creature, even if he had to induce it to gorge a worm. Still, it was quite possible that by the time he returned he would have captured many trout. For Somerset lay next to Devon on the map.

“Are there many trout in Mendip?” he asked.

“No. . . . There is only one river of any size. The Ax, that runs underground and comes out of Axcombe gorge, and there are practically no trout in the Ax. It’s a dry country. Limestone. Very barren too.”

That didn’t really matter. In a day or two Edwin would be able to see for himself. On their way home they spoke very little. His father seemed to find it difficult to talk to him; and in a little while Edwin became conscious of his own unending string of questions that led nowhere.

But all that night he dreamed of Mendip. A vast, barren, mountain-country, his dreams pictured it; waterless, and honeycombed with the dark caves from which Macaulay’s miners had poured to war; a deserted countryside full of broken villages and bounded by steep cliffs against which the isolating waters of the Severn Sea broke in a soundless tumult. And there Ax, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man. A fluent gentleman with a noble brow and burning grey eyes pointed out the course of the river to him. He was the only other soul beside Edwin and his father, in all that desert country, and Edwin introduced him to Mr. Ingleby as Mr. Coleridge—rather diffidently, for he was not sure how the poet would take it until he remembered and explained that Keats was a chemist. There, on the high crown of Axdown, his mother joined them. She, it seemed, was not afraid of Mr. Coleridge. She took his arm so familiarly that Edwin trembled for her; but the poet only smiled, while she pointed out to him a mass of huge fantastic mountains ranged beyond the gleaming sea. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said. “You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the end. Can you see the little bedroom window on the extreme left? . . . quite a little window?” Coleridge nodded, and Mr. Ingleby, too, shielded his eyes with his hands and looked. “It was my last chance of showing it to you,” she said.

“But there are practically no trout in the Alph,” said Coleridge.