Chapter I: The City of Iron

I

THE city of iron stands upon three hills and its valleys were once watered by two rivers; but since the day when its name was humbly written in Doomsday these pastoral features have disappeared, so that the hills are only known as tramway gradients that testify to the excellence of the Corporation’s power station, and the rivers, running in brick culverts, have been deprived not only of their liberty but even of their natural function of receiving a portion of the city’s gigantic sewage. The original market of North Bromwich has been not so much debauched from without, in the manner of other growing towns, as organised from within by the development of its own inherent powers for evil. It is not a place from which men have wilfully cast out beauty so much as one from which beauty has vanished in spite of man’s pitiful aspirations to preserve it. Indeed, its citizens are objects rather for pity than for reproach, and would be astonished to receive either, for many of them are wealthy, and from their childhood, knowing no better, have believed that wealth is a justification and an apology for every mortal evil from ugliness to original sin.

In the heart of the city the sense of power, impressive if malignant, is so overwhelming that one cannot see the monstrosity as a whole and can almost understand the blindness of its inhabitants. Go, rather, to the hills beyond Halesby, to Uffdown and Pen Beacon, where, with a choice of prospects, one may turn from the dreamy plain of Severn and the cloudy splendours of Silurian hills, to its pillars of cloud by day and its pillars of fire by night; and perhaps in that remoter air you may realise the city’s true significance as a phenomenon of unconquered if not inevitable disease. If you are a physician, you will realise that this evil has its counterpart in human tissues, where a single cell, that differs not at all from other cells and is a natural unit in the organism, may suddenly and, as it seems, unreasonably acquire a faculty of monstrous and malignant growth, cleaving and multiplying to the destruction of its fellows—a cell gone mad, to which the ancients gave the name of cancer.

The inhabitants of North Bromwich, who are a tolerant people, and proud of the fact, would smile at this reflection. They are not in the habit of surveying the midden in which they are bred from remote hilltops, except on Bank Holidays, at which time they have discovered a truth from which they might learn more: that with the aid of hill air and exercise, whether it be that of cocoanut shies or swing-boats, or the more hazardous pursuit of donkey-riding, it is possible to absorb a greater quantity of alcohol in a given time without unduly suffering than in the atmosphere of their own streets. But they have not time to learn, and since they have never known any other conditions of living, they exhibit the admirable human characteristic of making the best of their surroundings and persuading themselves that their hallucinated existence is typical of human life. They are even eager, pathetically eager, to find and to proclaim its virtues, and that they may do this more easily they have invented specious names for the disease and its results: Industry for the first, and, for the second, Progress.

In the vindication of a Municipal Conscience (making the best of a bad job) they periodically extend the area over which their coat of arms, a reminder of days when chivalry existed, is displayed. The coat of arms itself is an unfortunate symbol, for it is supported by the figure of a brawny slave who carries the hammer with which his chains have been forged; but the motto at least is encouraging. It is the word “Forward,” expressing the aspirations of the citizens towards the day when all England may be as the Black Country. The watcher on Uffdown may give it a more far-sighted significance: “forward, to the day when there shall be no more coal, and the evil, of its own inanition, perish.”

For the present, at any rate, the city showed no signs of perishing. During the last year or two, its tentacles had spread farther than ever before, swarming into the wet and lonely valley of the Dulas Fechan, a deep cleft in the mountains beyond Felindre where a noisy river ran through undergrowth older than man’s memory. From this valley, the council had decreed, the rain of the Savaddan watershed, which geology had destined for the Wye and later for the Atlantic, must now traverse eighty miles or more of conquered territory, and after being defouled by the domestic usages of North Bromwich, must find its way into the Trent, and so to the German Ocean, as the Romans thoughtlessly labelled the North Sea. “Water,” said the Mayor, who was also known as Sir Joseph Astill, the brewer, “water is one of the necessities of life. It is our duty to the public to see that they have it, and that they have it pure and unadulterated.”

So the Welsh water came, and the altruistic baronet took the credit for it. Indeed the progressive spirit of North Bromwich found its incarnation in this fleshy gentleman. It was he who presented the municipal art gallery with their unrivalled collection of Madox-Jones cartoons, to say nothing of three portraits of himself exemplifying (he had an elegant vocabulary) the styles of the three greatest portrait painters of modern times. It was he who saved the art of music from degradation by fighting, with all the weight of his personal influence, against the performance of secular music, music, that is, divorced from “sacred” words, upon the Sabbath. It was he, again, who aroused public feeling on the question of the university: “the first Modern university,” he called it.

He accomplished its endowment, equipped it with a principal whose name was a household word in the homes of the great middle classes; and finally set the seal of modernity on his creation, less than twenty years before the total prohibition of alcohol became law in retrograde America, by instituting a learned faculty and providing a degree in the science of . . . brewing. Just as an example of the city’s liberality, there was also a faculty of Arts. The faculty of Science, of course, was important, if only as an appendage to the brewing school; those of Engineering and Mining flattered the industries of the district; that of Commerce taught its graduates to write business letters in every spoken tongue and give the Yankees what for; and lastly, that of Medicine, supplied a necessary antidote to the activities of most of the others.

Sir Joseph Astill was proud, as well he might be, of the Medical School. “In this city,” he boasted, “there are actually more hospital beds _per centum_ of inhabitants than in any other in the whole country. The North Bromwich medical student has a greater opportunity of studying disease, in all its aspects, than the alumnus of any other school in the world. Thousands of beds lie waiting for his scrutiny; and I am glad to say that very few of them are ever empty.”

Edwin’s first serious acquaintance with North Bromwich had begun at the end of the summer holidays, through which he had worked with a good deal less than the fiery enthusiasm that he would have put into his reading for the Balliol scholarship. The syllabus of the examination for the Astill Exhibition had amazed him by its simplicity: the prescribed books were works that he had absorbed some years before at St. Luke’s, and though the mathematical side of the business worried him, as it had always done, it was clear that in North Bromwich the classics were regarded really as a polite accomplishment rather than as an integral part of a gentleman’s equipment in life: so that these drowsy summer months were really a period of comparative idleness in which he had time to brood on his regrets and become gradually reconciled to his new fate. In this spirit he approached the examination. Even the capitoline eminence on which the university buildings were placed, with the tremendous renaissance buildings of the Council House and the Corinthian Town Hall, did not greatly impress him. He saw rather the squalid slums from which these pretentious buildings rose. It was so different, he thought, from Oxford, and he passed the flagged courtyard with its cool fountain and the benevolent statue of Sir Joseph Astill in a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella on which the sculptor had lavished all the feeling of his art, without the least shadow of spiritual obeisance.

With two other long-legged candidates he had worked through his papers in a small room whose windows overlooked the quiet square and a phantom stream of noiseless traffic beyond. The first paper had been mathematical, and its intricacies kept his mind so busy that he had little time for reflection. From time to time he would see one of the long-legged competitors reducing the end of his penholder to wood-pulp in the earnestness of ruminant thought; and occasionally the deep boom of the clock in the tower of the Art Gallery would remind him that time was veritably passing; but time passed swiftly, and he was almost surprised to find himself once more in an air that for all its vitiation was less sleepy than that of the sealed examination room. By the end of the first evening all that he feared in the examination papers was over. To-morrow he would be on his own ground and the modern university could do its damnedest.

Next day the classical papers were distributed and Edwin, who found them easy, could see that his pen-chewing friend was in a bad way. All the passages set for translation were familiar: the grammatical questions consisted of old catches that had been drilled into him by Mr. Leeming in the Upper Fourth. As far as he was concerned, it was a walk over. He had time to take in more of his surroundings and to watch the silent coloured stream of traffic filtering through the narrows where the bulk of the Town Hall constricted the street. At the end of each day he found his father anxiously awaiting him. He was eager to see and handle the examination papers for himself. He seemed impressed by their difficulty, and Edwin found it hard to reassure him without appearing objectionably superior. He seemed rather surprised that Edwin, on the eve of such a formidable ordeal, should choose to take out his bicycle and ride towards the hills, so surprised that it became a matter for serious debate with Edwin whether he should do as he wanted to do and appear priggish, or affect an anxiety that didn’t exist merely to please his father. In the end he decided to be honest at all costs.

The part of the examination that he enjoyed most was the _viva-voce_ in Classics. For this trial he was led up many flights of stone steps to a room full of books in which the Dean of the Faculty of Arts awaited him: a kindly, nervous old man with a grey beard, with whom Edwin immediately felt at home. His nervousness seemed to Edwin appropriate: it implied the indubitable fact that in North Bromwich Arts was a sideshow that counted for nothing, and that the professor’s dignity, as Dean of a learned Faculty, was a precarious and unsubstantial thing. “Your papers were excellent, . . . excellent,” he said to begin with. “Now, I should like you to read me something.” He pointed to a bookshelf. “Let us start with some Greek.”

“What would you like, sir?”

“Oh, it’s not what I should like. What would you like to read? Something that really appeals to you.”

Edwin felt that the dean was watching him, like a cat stalking a bird, as his fingers approached the bookshelf. It was a curious responsibility, for it would be an awful shame if he chose something that the old man didn’t approve of. Sophocles. . . . Why not Sophocles?

He picked out the Antigone, and chose the great chorus:—

Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν,
Ἔρως, ὁς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις, . . .

“Let’s have it in Greek first.”

Edwin read it in the level voice which the Head of St. Luke’s had always used for the recitation of Greek poetry. When he had finished the first strophe he looked up and saw that the Dean’s weak eyes, beneath their tortoiseshell spectacles, were brimming with tears.

“That will do,” he said, “unless you’d prefer to go on . . .”

Edwin read the antistrophe.

“Yes . . . I don’t think you need translate it,” said the Dean. He paused for a moment, then, replacing the volume, went on. “In this university I am known as the Professor of Dead Languages. Dead languages. What?”

They passed a pleasant half-hour together. In Latin Edwin chose Lucretius and a passage from the Georgics, at the end of which the Dean confided to him that he kept bees. “Thank you, that will do,” he said. “I gather that you are entering the Medical School. . . . Well, it is a noble profession. I don’t know what we should do without doctors, I’m sure.”

Four days later Mr. Ingleby received him at the breakfast table with unconcealed emotion. “You’ve got your scholarship, Edwin. I’m . . . I’m as pleased as if I’d won it myself. I never had the opportunity of winning a scholarship in my life.” The hand in which he held the letter trembled. He kissed Edwin fervently. “This is a great day for me,” he said: and Edwin, glowing, felt that anything was worth while that could give such pleasure to the man that he had determined to love.

II

On a bright morning at the beginning of September Edwin found himself one of a crowd of ten or fifteen youths, waiting with a varying degree of assurance, outside the office of the Dean of the Medical Faculty in James Street, a sordid thoroughfare in which the pretentious buildings of the old College of Science hid its hinder quarters. The door was small, and only distinguished from its neighbours, a steam laundry and brassworker’s office, by a plate that bore the inscription, “University of North Bromwich. Medical School.” Inside the door stood a wooden box for a porter, usually empty, but in its moments of occupation surveying a long, dark cloakroom with a hundred or more numbered lockers and corresponding clothes-hooks, on a few of which undergraduates’ gowns and battered mortar-boards were hanging. This morning the Dean was holding audience of all the first year men, and each of the crowd in which Edwin now found himself a negligible unit, was waiting until his name should be called from the office, and, in the meantime, surveying his companions with suspicion and being surveyed with a more confident and collective suspicion by seniors who happened to drift through the corridors on business or idleness, and showed evidence of their initiation by familiarity with the porter.

Only one face in the company was in the least familiar to Edwin: that of a ponderous young man with immaculate black hair carefully parted in the middle, who had sat stolidly through the Astill Exhibition examination a few desks away from him. As he did not appear to be anxious to recognise this fact, Edwin abandoned his own intention of doing so, and, like the rest of the company, possessed his soul in silence. In the meantime he watched the others with a good deal of interest and speculation.

They were a strangely mixed company: a few of them, of whom Edwin himself was one, mere boys, to whom the air of the schoolroom still clung: some obvious men of the world, scrupulously, even doggily dressed, in an age when the fancy waistcoat had reached the zenith of its daring; others, and one other in particular, a seedy looking person with a dejected fair moustache, were clearly old enough to be the fathers of the youngest. It was to the second of these classes, the bloods, that Edwin found his attention attracted, and particularly to a paragon of elegance, whose waistcoat was the orange colour of a blackbird’s bill with light blue enamelled buttons, whose hair was mathematically bisected and shone with expensive unguents, and whose chin differed from that of Edwin in being shaved from sheer necessity instead of from motives of encouragement.

This person exuded an atmosphere of prosperity and style that took Edwin’s fancy immensely, and he wore grey flannel trousers as correctly turned up as any that Edwin had seen upon the enchanted platform of the station at Oxford. It was evident that the process of waiting bored him; for he took out of the pocket of the amazing waistcoat a gold hunter watch with a front enamelled in the same shade of light blue. The lid flicked open noiselessly when he touched a spring, and Edwin began to be exercised in his mind as to what happened when he put on a waistcoat of a different pattern, as obviously a person of this degree of magnificence must frequently do. Did he change the buttons, or did he change the watch? Edwin, surveying him, looked unconsciously at his own Waterbury; and, as he did so, the magnificent creature glanced at him with a pair of savage brown eyes, and, as Edwin decided, summed him up for good and all.

“Mr. Harrop, please,” said the porter. And Mr. Harrop pocketed his hunter and disdainfully entered the office.

Edwin, relieved from his scrutiny, turned his attention to the most impressive figure of all: a young man fully six feet four in height, but so broadly and heavily built that his tallness was scarcely noticeable. His face was good-humoured, and very plain, with the look of battered obstinacy that may sometimes be seen in that of a boxer. Perhaps this idea was reinforced by the fact that his short nose was broken, and that he carried his whole face a little forward, staring out at the world from under bushy black eyebrows. He seemed made for rough usage, and his undoubted strength was qualified by a degree of awkwardness that showed itself in his clumsy hands. These, at the present time, were clasped behind his back, beneath the folds of a brand-new undergraduate’s gown that, because of his great height, looked ridiculously small. His whole aspect was one of terrific earnestness. Evidently he was taking this business, as he would surely have taken any other, seriously. That, no doubt, was the reason why on this occasion he alone appeared in academical dress. His clasped hands, his lowered head, his bulldog neck all spoke of a determination to go through with this adventure at all costs.

“Mr. Brown,” said the porter, and nearly blundering into the returning elegance of Mr. Harrop, he slouched into the Dean’s office as though he were entering the ring for the heavy-weight championship of the world.

In the end Edwin found himself left alone with a youth of his own age, a tall, loose-limbed creature, with an indefinite humorous face, a close crop of curly fair hair and blue eyes. Edwin rather liked the look of him. He was young, and seemed approachable, and though his striped flannel suit was more elegant than Edwin’s and he wore a school tie of knitted silk, Edwin took the risk of addressing him.

“We seem to be the last.”

“Yes. I expect the Dean will keep me last of all, bad cess to him! That’s because I happen to be a sort of cousin of the old devil’s.” He spoke with a soft brogue that had come from the south of Ireland.

“Mr. Ingleby, please.”

Edwin pulled himself together and entered the Dean’s office.

A pleasant room: at one big desk a suave, clean-shaven gentleman with thin sandy hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. At another a little dark man with a bald head and a typewriter in front of him.

“Mr. Ingleby?” said the first. His voice was refined, if a little too precise.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Ingleby, what are you going to do? Ah, yes . . . you are the Astill scholar. Very good. Very good. Are you proposing to take a London degree?”

“No, sir. North Bromwich.”

“Well . . . it is possible you may change your mind later. Have you taken the London Matriculation?”

“No, sir. I was on the classical side at St. Luke’s. I was reading for a scholarship at Oxford.”

“And changed your mind . . . or” (shrewdly) “had it changed for you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is your father a doctor?”

“No.” It really doesn’t matter what my father is, thought Edwin, and the Dean, as though answering his reflection, said:—

“No. . . That doesn’t matter.” And, after a pause: “Well, Mr. . . . er . . . Ingleby, you have made a good beginning. I hope it will continue satisfactorily. That is all, thank you. Good-morning.” He held out his hand to Edwin, who was astonished into putting out a moist hand himself. “Yes,” continued the Dean in a suave, reflective voice, “you will pay your fees to my secretary, Mr. Hadley. This is . . . er . . . Mr. Hadley. Yes.”

Mr. Hadley acknowledged the introduction with a lift of the right eyebrow and Edwin left the room.

“Mr. Martin,” said the secretary, as he left, and “Mr. Martin, please,” the porter repeated.

“I say, wait a moment for me,” said the loose-limbed Irishman to Edwin in passing.

It was so friendly as to be cheering.

“He seems a decent old bird,” said Martin, emerging a few minutes later.

“I thought you said he was your cousin?”

“So he is. You see I’m Irish, and so is he; and in Ireland pretty nearly everybody who is anybody is related to everybody else.” He plunged into a lengthy demonstration of the relationships of the Southern aristocracy, with warnings as to the gulfs that separated the Martins from the Martyns, and the Plunketts from the Plunkets, rambling away through a world of high-breeding and penury in which all the inhabitants called each other by their Christian names, and spent their lives in hunting, point-to-point racing, and elaborate practical jokes. A new world to Edwin.

They strolled down Sackville Row together, and cutting through the Arcades came out into the wide thoroughfare of Queen Street that had been driven through an area of slums in honour of Victoria’s first jubilee.

“By the way, what’s your school?” said Denis Martin.

“St. Luke’s.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I don’t suppose you would, in Ireland.”

“Oh, I didn’t go to school in Ireland. Nobody does. I was at Marlborough. Is St. Luke’s one of those soccer schools?”

“Good Lord, no. . . . We play rugger. We’re pretty good.”

“Who do you play?”

“Merchant Taylors and St. Paul’s, and one or two others.”

“H’m. . . . They’re day schools, aren’t they? Is St. Luke’s that sort?”

Edwin, with enthusiasm, expounded the St. Luke’s legend, that nobody outside of St. Luke’s has ever been known to believe. Martin, meanwhile, looked a little supercilious and bored. He spoke as from a distant world in a tone that implied that the people of North Bromwich could never call each other by their Christian names or hunt or race or play practical jokes with an air of being born to it.

“I expect we’re a pretty mixed lot here,” he said.

And Edwin, with the guilty consciousness of being more than a little mixed himself, replied: “Yes.”

“An extraordinary collection. That great dark fellow looks an absolute tyke. Then there’s the chap with the waistcoat—”

“Yes. . . . Harrop was the name.”

“I don’t know the name,” said Martin dubiously. “Never heard of the family. He was wearing an Oriel tie.”

“Oriel. . . . Do you mean Oxford?”

“Yes, one of my cousins was there. That’s how I know it. I should think they turfed him out on account of that waistcoat. Still, Oxford isn’t what it used to be.” “In the eyes of a Southern Unionist,” he might have added. But the news was grateful to Edwin. “I shouldn’t wonder,” Martin went on, “if lots of decent people didn’t end by coming to schools like this. I expect it is the Dean’s idea, you know. I say, what about lunch? Do you know of any decent place?”

In ancient days, when he had come into North Bromwich shopping with his mother, Edwin had always been taken to Battie’s, the great confectioner’s in Queen Street, but now, passing the doors in this exalted company, he felt that the company of a crowd of shabby shopping women would hardly be suitable: besides, he might even run the risk of meeting his Aunt Laura, who also frequented the shop, so he left Battie’s prudently alone.

“I know one place,” said Martin. “I should think it’s all right. The food’s decent anyway.”

He led the way up a side street to an elegant resort frequented by the professional classes of North Bromwich, where them was a long counter set out with sandwiches like a buffet at a dance, and all the customers seemed at home. In the ordinary way Edwin would not have dared to enter it, but Martin, with the elegant confidence of Southern Unionism, showed him the way, and seated at a marble-topped table they trifled with Plover on toast. Martin, of course, did the choosing, and in his dealings with the tiny carcass showed a familiarity with the correct method of consuming small birds that Edwin was pleased to learn. “Ever shoot plover?” he said. No . . . Edwin had never shot anything: he didn’t particularly want to shoot anything; but he realised that it was a great accomplishment to be able to talk about it as though he had never done anything else.

“I’ll pay,” said Martin. “We can square up afterwards.”

They did so and, thawed by the process of feeding, began to talk more easily. “Are you digging in this place?” Martin asked. Edwin told him that he lived in the country.

“In the country? I didn’t know there was any here. Have you any decent shooting?”

“Unfortunately, no.” He remembered, however, the solitary trout under the bridge below the abbey. “There’s fishing of sorts,” he said.

“What sorts?”

“Oh, trout—”

“Brown trout? There’s not much fun in that. White trout . . . sea trout you call them in England . . . are good sport. Still, we’ll have a day together next spring. I’ll get my rods over.”

The subject was dangerous, and so Edwin asked him where he was living: “With your cousin, I suppose.”

“Oh, no. . . . I don’t know the old divil, you know. I’ve rooms with an old lady up in Alvaston. She’s rather a decent sort. House full of animals.” He didn’t specify what the animals were. “I’d better go and unpack some of my things. I suppose I shall see you at the Chemistry Lecture to-morrow. So long. . . . Oh, I forgot. . . . What’s your name?”

“Ingleby.”

“Ingleby. . . Right-o.” He boarded a passing bus with the air of stepping on to a coach and four.

Edwin took the next train home. On the opposite platform of the station he caught a glimpse of the great bulk of the man named Brown walking up and down with earnestness in his eyes and under his arm a huge parcel of books. He gave Edwin the impression of wanting to throw himself into the adventure of the medical curriculum as he might have thrown himself into a Rugby scrum, expecting a repetition of the tremendous battering that he seemed already to have undergone.

Thinking of him, and of the aristocratic Martin, and of Harrop, a product which Oriel had finished to the last waistcoat button, and, more dimly, of the elderly gentleman with the dejected moustaches, it seemed to Edwin that he himself was appallingly young and callow and inexperienced. How was he going to stand up to these people with their knowledge of the world and its ways: men who had already, by virtue of their birth or experience, learned how to dress and live and move without effort in the crowded world? Yet with them, he knew, he must now take his place. It would be difficult . . . awfully difficult. He had everything, even the most elementary rules of conduct, to learn. He was a child who had never known another human being except his mother and a few school friends of his own age. He had not even the _savoir-vivre_ of Griffin. And, in this new life, it seemed to him that the dreams on which he had depended must be useless—or even more, a positive handicap to his success.

The moments of sudden spiritual enlightenment that one reads of in the lives of saints, or of converts to Salvationism, are not a common experience in those of ordinary men; and though, in the turn of every tide, there is a critical period, measurable by the fraction of a second, in which the waters that have swayed forwards retire upon themselves, to the eyes of an observer the change of motion is so gradual as to be only slowly perceived. In Edwin’s life the death of his mother had been the real point of crisis; but this he had only dimly realised when his hopes of Oxford had been dashed for ever in a third-class compartment hurtling under Bredon Hill. Between it and the present moment there had hung a period of dead water (so to speak) in which the current of his life had seemed suspended; but now he knew that there was no doubt but that a change had overtaken him, and that he would never again be the same.

All his life, up to this point, had been curiously inorganic: a haphazard succession of novel and bewildering sensations: a kaleidoscope of sensual impressions changing almost too rapidly to be appreciated—so rapidly that it had been impossible for him to think of one in relation to another. Some of them had been painful; some enthralling in their beauty; some merely engrossing because they were full of awe: yet all had been ecstatic, and tinged in some degree with a visionary light. Now, as always, it was clear that he must be a dreamer; but, from this day onwards, it also became clear that his visions must be something more to him than a series of coloured impressions, succeeding one another without reason and accepted without explanation. In the future they must be correlated with experience and the demands of life. In that lost age of innocence the people with whom he came into contact had interested him only as figures passing through the scenes that were spread for his delectation. They had been external to him. He had lived within himself and his loneliness had been so self-sufficient that it would have made no great difference to him if they had not been there. Now he was to take his part in the drama at which, in times before, he had merely sat as a bemused spectator. It was a stirring and a terrifying prospect.

The train from North Bromwich stopped at every station, and the whole of the journey lay through the black desert that fringes the iron city, a vast basin of imprisoned smoke, bounded by hills that had once been crowned with woods, but were now dominated by the high smoke-stacks of collieries, many of them ruined and deserted. At a dirty junction, so undermined with workings that the bridge and the brick offices were distorted in a manner which suggested that the whole affair might some day go down quick into the pit, he changed into the local train. The railway company evidently did not consider the passenger traffic of Halesby worth consideration, for the carriages were old and grimy. Edwin chose a smoker because the cushions were covered with American leather and therefore more obviously clean. He found himself, in the middle of his reflections, sitting opposite a coloured photograph of the great gorge at Axcombe, a town that was served by the same line. The picture carried him suddenly to another aspect of his too complicated life. Really, the whole business was hopelessly involved. He thought, grimly, how he could have taken the wind out of Martin’s genealogical sails by blurting out the astounding intelligence that his uncle was a gardener. And what would the gentleman with the waistcoat have said? He laughed at the idea.

Through a short but sulphurous tunnel the train emerged into the valley of the Stour: the vista of the hills unfolded, and later the spire of Halesby church appeared at the valley’s head. Well, a beginning of the new life had to be made some day, and now as well as ever.

Walking home along the cinder pathway beside the silting fish-ponds it seemed to him that in the light of his new experience, Halesby was a primitive and almost pitiable place, and the same mood held him when he made his way home by the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s cloistered garden and entered his father’s house. Under the south wall the bed of double stocks was still in flower, though faded and bedraggled. Their scent reminded him of what a world of experience he had traversed in less than three months. He went straight up to his own bedroom. On the bed lay two parcels addressed to him. The larger contained his undergraduate’s cap and gown. He put them on in front of the glass and rather fancied himself. The act struck him as in a way symbolical: it was the token of an initiation. From that day forward he was a medical student. For five or six years, probably for the rest of his life, he would spend his time in the presence of the most bitter human experience; but there was something elevating in the thought that he need not be a helpless spectator: he would be able to effect positive good in a way that no scholar and no preacher of religion or abstract morality could possibly attain. “This is my life,” he thought. Well, it was good to know anything as definite as that.

The second parcel contained a number of technical books dealing with the subjects of his first year’s curriculum: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Physiology, and Anatomy. The last appeared to be the most exciting. “Fearfully and wonderfully made . . .” he thought. He set to work at once preparing the little room for work, making it as comfortable as he could with a writing table in the window that looked out over Shenstone’s woods and dethroning the superannuated Henty and Fenn from the bookshelf. He could not find it in his heart to treat his poets so cavalierly, and so there they stayed. Greek and Latin and English. “I shall never drop my classics,” he thought. A resolution that has been forgotten nearly as often as it has been made. In the Blenheim orange-tree at the bottom of the garden a thrush was singing. Bullfinches were fighting shrilly in the raspberry canes. He threw open the window, and there ascended to him the heavy, faded perfume of the bed of stocks. On the mantelpiece stood a photograph of his mother. Looking at it, it seemed to him that she smiled.