Chapter II: Mortality Behold

I

HE was happy: even Halesby became a grateful place of retirement after his long days in North Bromwich. The mornings of early autumn were very beautiful, and it was with a good deal of zest that he would scramble through his breakfast and leave the house early to catch the eight o’clock train. He usually made use of the short cut through Mrs. Barrow’s garden and the cinder path beside the fish-ponds, and in this brisk walk, with the blood of youth running happily in his veins, he would catch a little of the exhilarating atmosphere of early morning in the country. When the frosts began, as they do early on that high plateau, the morning air seemed stronger and more bracing than ever.

Circumstance, in a little more than three months, had exalted him to the state of those metropolitan season-ticket holders whose majesty he had disturbed on the day when he left St. Luke’s for good. He was now in a position to appreciate their exclusiveness, and to look upon all chance people who intruded on the privacies of the eight o’clock train with the same mingled curiosity and contempt. In every way a season ticket, in its cover of dark blue morocco, was a thing superior to the transitory and ignoble pasteboard. He could hardly resist a sigh of bored superiority on the first occasion when he produced it. He travelled second-class, thus rising to the highest level of luxury in travelling permitted to any inhabitants of Halesby, unless it were the local baronet or Mr. Willis of Mawne, whom even Sir Joseph Hingston could not outdo.

Most of the other season-ticket holders travelled second; and in this way, by making a habit of taking his place in the same carriage, for sentimental reasons one that contained a series of west-country pictures, Edwin began to be on speaking terms with many members of this select company. They included a youth articled to a solicitor in North Bromwich, the son of a Halesby postmaster, who was inclined to establish terms of familiarity; a gentleman with a bloated complexion and a fawn-coloured bowler hat, reputed to be a commercial traveller, who carried a bag in which samples may well have been hidden; a superior person with a gruff voice who was a clerk in a bank in the city, and on Saturdays carried a brown canvas bag and a hockey stick; and a withered man of fifty who travelled into North Bromwich daily on some business connected with brass, and, on damp mornings, exhibited evidences of an asthmatic complaint that aroused Edwin’s budding professional interest.

It was he who first admitted Edwin to the conversation of the compartment, by confessing to him that he had been the despair of doctors since childhood: that three specialists had assured his mother that she would never rear that boy: that in spite of this he had always paid four times as much in doctor’s bills as in income-tax, that in his belief they only kept him alive for what they could get out of him, and that his life had been an unending misery, as harrowing, upon his word, as that of any of the sufferers who were illustrated in the papers holding their backs with kidney complaint, until his missus had said: “Don’t throw any more money away on these doctors, John, I’ll have a talk with Mr. Ingleby,” . . . and with the aid of Ingleby’s Asthma Cure he had become relatively whole. Evidently he knew who Edwin was. “What do you think of that now?” he wheezed, and covered the embarrassment into which Edwin was immediately thrown by not waiting for his reply and continuing: “I suppose, now, you’ll be learning to be a chemist like your father?”

“No . . . I’m a medical student. I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Well . . . I’ll be damned,” said the asthmatical person. He did not say why; but the looks of the superior bank clerk, who immediately lowered his paper and stared at Edwin as though it were his duty to decide whether Edwin were a fit person to enter a learned profession or not, and then contemptuously went on with his reading, supplied the kind of commentary that might have been intended. When the asthmatical subject said that he was damned, the gentleman with the bloated complexion and the fawn-coloured bowler, who always opened his morning paper with fingers that trembled, either with excitement or as a result of the night before, at the column headed Turf Topics, gave a snigger and spat on the floor to conceal it. And the articled clerk, at this display of ill breeding, turned up his nose.

It was a strange little company that assembled in the second-class smoker every morning; and the strangest part of it, to Edwin, was the fact that each of them, entrenched, as it were, behind his morning paper, affected a frigid disinterest, yet eagerly listened to the conversation and eagerly scrutinised the appearance of the others. All of them had their little fixed habits. In one place they put their gloves: in another their umbrellas. Every morning they began to read their papers at the same column and folded them at the same point in the journey. They seemed just as regular in their habits as the wheels of the carriage in which they travelled, revolving and stopping and shunting and being braked at an identical time and place for six days out of the seven.

When he had tumbled to this, Edwin found that the whole of the main line train that he caught every morning at the junction was occupied by perhaps a hundred grouped units of the same kind. It amused him to sample them; and when one appealed to him he would become a member of it for a time and see what he could make of it. Naturally there were more interesting people on the main line than on the Halesby branch; and in the end he himself became such a familiar figure on the eight-twenty from the junction that he could say “Good-morning” to nearly every group of seasons on the train. He was even taken to the heart of the superior gruff-voiced bank clerk in the Halesby carriage. Indeed, he knew every one of them, finding them human people who, in the manner of the Englishman and the hedgehog, had put out their protective spikes upon a first acquaintance.

The only Halesby traveller of whom he could make nothing was the bloated person in the fawn-coloured bowler, who began the morning with turf topics and then proceeded to suck a copying pencil till his lips were the colour of his cheeks, and, thus inspired, to underline the names of a number of horses in the day’s programme. Apart from his habit of spitting on the floor, a custom which probably saved the poor man from death by poisoning with copying ink, he was inoffensive. Edwin was even sorry for him sometimes when he saw him hung up over his forecasts. Then he would tilt the fawn-coloured bowler on to the back of his head, and scratch his head under the sandy fringe of hair. Edwin was sorry because, with a head like that, it must have been so difficult to forecast anything.

He did not see many women on the morning train. In those days female enterprise was a good deal checked by conventions that died more slowly in the Midland plain than elsewhere. From Halesby itself there were only four season-ticket holders of the opposite sex. Two of them were employed in the same large drapery establishment in Queen Street, and were excessively ladylike and careful in all their behaviour. Edwin had never spoke to either of them; but he discovered in both an identical physical state: that peculiar greenish, waxen pallor that appears to be the inevitable result of serving in a draper’s shop. The black dresses on which their employers insisted, heightened this effect of fragility, and on mornings when tiredness had made them start too late for the train, so that they had to hurry over the last hundred yards, Edwin would notice how they panted for breath within their elegant corsets and how faint was the flush that came into their cheeks.

He felt a little sorry for them; but they were not in the least sorry for themselves. In Halesby their employment at a monstrous third-rate drapery store gave them a position of unusual distinction as arbiters of feminine fashions, and they would not have exchanged their distinguished anæmia for any other calling under the sun. In their profession this toxic pallor, as of sea-kale blanched in a cellar, was regarded as an asset. It was considered French. And did not their shortness of breath, upon the least exertion or emotion, cause their bosoms to rise and fall like those of the heroines of the serial fiction that they read, when they were not too tired, in the train?

Edwin was not attracted by them any more than by the other couple: a pair of pupil teachers from an elementary school in one of the northern suburbs, who also dressed for the part that they were fulfilling in life, and wore spectacles as tokens of their studiousness. The instinct of sex had as yet scarcely asserted itself in him. He was a little curious about it, and that was all. Subconsciously, perhaps, it found expression in his anxieties about his personal appearance. He was beginning to take a considerable interest in what should or should not be worn, treating it more as a matter of abstract science than as one of practical politics; for he had few clothes beyond those in which he had left St. Luke’s, and was not likely to have any opportunity of extending his wardrobe until these were worn out. In those days the weekly called _To-Day_ had reached its most vigorous phase, and a column headed Masculine Modes was a matter of earnest consideration to Edwin every Thursday, when the paper appeared. In the spring, he decided, he would buy an overcoat with Raglan sleeves. The weekly authority, who styled himself “The Major,” was dead nuts on Raglan sleeves. Beneath this fashionable covering Edwin’s interior defects would be well hidden, and, given a natty red tie (_de rigueur_, said the Major, with the indispensable blue serge reefer suit) and a bowler hat with a curly, but not too curly, brim, he should be able to compete with the burly bank clerk as cynosure for the eyes of the pale young ladies in the “drapery” and a spectacle of awe for the studious pupil-teachers.

II

Edwin soon became absorbed in the routine of the first year student’s life, and had very little time to think about anything else. He had to work hard to keep pace with it, and the realisation of this was a striking lesson to him. At St. Luke’s he had found that his advance in knowledge made the work progressively more easy. Here he was breaking new ground from the beginning, acquiring knowledge of a kind that owed nothing to general culture and came to him none the easier for his possession of it. The only things in his new work that seemed easy and logical to him were those scientific names that were derived from Latin and Greek. Otherwise the very rudiments and nature of the subjects were new to him.

The most astonishing part of the whole business was the way in which the formidable assembly that had glared at him, as he imagined, outside the Dean’s office, simplified itself. He had been prepared to find them creatures of a different tissue from himself, and particularly such apparitions as Harrop and the immense Brown. He soon saw that as far as the career of Medicine was concerned they were identically in the same box as himself: that neither knowledge of the world nor elegance of attire could help either of them to acquire the absolute knowledge that was the one thing essential to success. It made no matter that these two approached the same problem from essentially different angles: Brown with his earnest brows knitted and a look of indomitable but baffled determination; Harrop as though the issue didn’t really matter as long as the crease in his trousers was in the right place; but in either case Edwin saw that they had to work as hard or harder than he did.

His first acquaintance, Martin, who was now becoming his friend, since the work that they shared in common bridged the social gulf of which Edwin alone was aware, seemed to possess the faculty of doing things and learning facts almost in spite of himself. He was not in any way brilliant, but he had a way with him and a certain shrewdness that not infrequently underlies the superficial indolence of the Celt. Above all things Edwin found him good company, for the picturesqueness of his brogue and a sense of humour, not of the verbal kind in which Edwin himself dealt, but the broader humour that arises from situations, and personal characteristics, made his society a peculiar joy. At the first lecture on Chemistry, a dull dissertation on first principles, Edwin had gravitated to the seat next to him, and for the rest of the term they kept the same places and afterwards compared notes. Edwin couldn’t help liking him, even though he was conscious of the radical social misunderstanding that underlay their friendship.

The technical sciences of Chemistry and Physics made no strong appeal to Edwin. They seemed to him matters of empirical knowledge that must be acquired according to schedule but would have very little connection with the work of his profession, and he found them too near to the desperate subject of mathematics to be congenial. He could find nothing romantic or human in them; and this fact, in itself, is a sufficient indictment of the way in which they were taught.

Anatomy was another matter altogether. He had anticipated the beginning of this study with a feeling in which awe and an instinctive distaste were mingled. From the first day he had known that somewhere up at the top of the building lay the dissecting room, a place that his fancy painted as a kind of Chamber of Horrors. On his way to the theatre, in which the Dean lectured on Anatomy with a scholarly refinement of phrase that transcended the natural elegance of Martin and a fascinating collection of coloured chalks, he had passed the gloomy door and seen a blackboard on which the names of the Prosectors were recorded in white lettering. But he preferred not to look inside. Martin, to whom all adventures came more easily, settled the point for him.

“I say,” he said immediately after the lecture, “have you put yourself down for a part?”

“A part? What do you mean?”

“Anatomy. Dissecting, They’re shared between two, you know. In the first term we’re supposed to do an Upper or a Lower. Suppose we go shares in one—”

“All right,” said Edwin. “Which shall it be?”

“Well, I think an Upper will be better. There’s less fat and mess about it. We’d better go and choose one now.”

“All right.”

“Come along, then.” Martin opened the door of the dissecting room and held it while Edwin entered. It was a long, irregular chamber, with a low glass roof and an asphalt floor. Edwin’s first impression was one of light and space: the second, of a penetrating odour unlike anything that he had smelt before. He could not give a name to it, and indeed it was complex, being compact of a pungent, unknown antiseptic and another fainter smell that was, in fact, that of ancient mortality. The effect of the whole was strange but not nauseating as he would have expected. All down the room at short intervals long zinc tables, with a tin bucket at the head of each, were ranged. Most of the tables were empty; but on four or five of them “subjects” were either displayed or lay draped in coarse, unbleached calico. One or two of them sprawled on their faces, but most of them, being as yet unappropriated, were supported under their backs by small metal platforms from which the heads rolled back and the limbs were stretched out in a posture of extreme but petrified agony. To Edwin’s eyes it was a lamentable and terrible sight. He wondered by what chain of degradations the body of a man who had lived and known the youth and pride of body that he himself possessed, who had experienced aspirations and dreams and hope and love, should descend to this final indignity. He stood still. He did not dare, for the moment, to come nearer.

“How do they get here?” he asked Martin.

“Oh, they’re paupers, you know. Old men and women, most of them, who die in the workhouses and are not claimed by their relatives. Instead of burying them they send them along here. The anatomy porters collect them. Then they’re pickled for so long in a kind of vat in the cellars of this place, and they inject them with arsenic to preserve them, and pump red paint into their arteries so that they’re easier to dissect. I shouldn’t like the job myself; but I suppose the porters are used to it. You get used to anything, you know. Besides, they aren’t a bit like they are when they’re first dead. I think that’s the chap for us. I had a look at him the other day. It’s always better to choose an old one. The muscles are cleaner. Less work.”

They approached the second table. The subject was an old and withered man: his grey hair was shaven, and his mouth hung open, showing that he had lost his teeth. Martin had been quite right. He didn’t look in the least like a dead man. He did not look like a man at all: only a pathetic, tanned skeleton with tight-drawn sinews and toughened skin: a dried mummy, from which all the contours of humanity had shrunk away. It wasn’t so bad after all. The picture that Edwin’s imagination had anticipated, that of a crude and horrible human shambles, was not here. No . . . the idea of humanity was too remote to be in the least insistent. For a moment, in spite of this consolation, Edwin went pale. Martin noticed it.

“I say, this isn’t going to turn you up, is it?”

“No. . . . I’m all right. I was only . . . thinking.”

“Thinking?” said Martin, with a laugh. “I shouldn’t do too much of that if I were you. We’d better make a start to-morrow on the right Upper. I’ll put our names down.”

He turned towards the glass case in which hung notices of lectures and the printed cards on which the names of dissectors were recorded, and while he did so Edwin still stood thinking. He thought: Was this really a man who had lived and breathed and aged and suffered? Where had he been born? How long ago? Had he ever loved? Had he ever married? Had he ever wondered what the future would bring to him? surely his fancies had never envisaged this. Perhaps he had been born in some remote hamlet of the marches, some sweet smelling village like Far Forest, from which the iron tentacles of the city had drawn him inwards and sapped his life, leaving, in the end, this dry shell, like the sucked carcass of a fly blowing in a spider’s web. If this were the end of poverty and desolation, what a terrible thing poverty must be. Did the poor and the outcast ever dream that they might come to this? And yet, after all, what did it matter? . . .

He awoke from his dream. It was evident that he was the only dreamer in that long room. At many of the other tables second year men were sitting quietly dissecting or gossiping or thumbing manuals of practical anatomy yellow with human grease. It amazed him that men should be able to joke and smoke their pipes and appear to be contented in such an atmosphere; but the wisdom of Martin’s phrase returned to him: “You get used to anything, you know.”

Among the dissectors already at work in their white overalls, he saw the ponderous frame of the man called Brown. He, at any rate, was not letting the grass grow under his feet. Already he was engaged in reflecting the skin from the “Lower” on which he was working. His clumsy hands found the work difficult, as was shown by the anxiety of his partner, an immaculate smooth young man, whom Edwin already knew by the name of Maskew, dressed in the Major’s indispensable navy serge reefer, with the correct red tie and a big orchid in his buttonhole. He took an elaborate meerschaum pipe out of his mouth to protest:—

“Good Lord, Brown, there’s another cutaneous nerve gone phut. Do be careful!”

And Brown, with an exaggerated earnestness:—

“I say, old man, I am sorry. I simply can’t use the damned things. Do you mean to say that’s a nerve?” He held up in his forceps a tiny white filament of tissue.

“Yes,” said Maskew, returning to his pipe. “Branch of the great gluteal. Listen to what Cunningham says: ‘The buttock is liberally supplied with cutaneous nerves: a fact much appreciated by schoolboys.’”

Brown scratched his head with the handle of his scalpel. “Well, I’m in an absolute fog. You’d better take this job on to-morrow, and I’ll do the reading. What does ‘cutaneous’ mean, anyway?”

“Cutis,” thought Edwin, “Skin.” After all, it seemed, the dead languages had their uses. By this time he had recovered from the first shock of his distaste; he was getting used to the odour of the room, and so, a moment later, he and Martin strolled over to a table at which one of the prosectors was engaged in preparing a specimen for the Dean’s lectures. It was almost pleasant to watch the deftness with which he defined the line of a pink, injected artery, wielding his scalpel as delicately and as surely as a painter at work on a canvas. They watched him working in silence. “Nice part, isn’t it?” he said with condescension.

“Yes,” said Martin, “this sort of thing must be rattling good practice for surgery.”

“Oh, surgery’s quite different,” said the prosector. “This is a lazy job. There’s no hurry about it. This fellow won’t bleed to death.”

So Edwin and Denis Martin began to work on their Upper, and the dissecting room that had been an abode of horror and an incentive to philosophy became no more than the scene of their daily labours. Edwin accepted his new callousness without regret for the sensitive perceptions that he had lost, for he saw that his heart and his imagination were not really less tender for the change; they had merely come to a working agreement with the demands of his new life, and had attained this satisfactory state not so much by a suppression of sensibility as by an insistence on the objective aspects of his work.

This fact explained to him, at the very beginning of his career, the fallacy of medical callousness in relation to pain or physical distress. He saw, on reflection, that if a doctor exaggerated the importance of subjective sensations in his patient he might well lose sight of his own object, which was nothing more nor less than removing their cause: that, for example, the fear of death, the anxiety of relatives and the patient’s own perception of intolerable pain, were of infinitely less importance to the physician than the presence of a focus of danger in the patient’s appendix. A sustained objectivity was the only attitude of mind in which a doctor could live at the same time happily and efficiently.

The only feature of the dissecting room that now seemed objectionable was the smell of the powerful antiseptic that was used for preserving the subjects. For a week or two Edwin was conscious of its pervading every moment of his life, his train-journeys, his meal-times, even his sleep. But in a little time his olfactory nerves became so used to it that they discounted its presence, and the fact that his neighbours in railway carriages did not seem to shrink from him, convinced him that after all he did not go about the world saturated in odours of the charnel house.

The winter term went on, and to the sense of hurry and frustration that had embarrassed him at first and found its perfect expression in the knitted brows of the monstrous Brown, succeeded an atmosphere of leisure and method and ease. Edwin had time for other things than work. He began to know the men of his year, and to discover that even the most formidable of them weren’t half as formidable as they had seemed. Harrop, indeed, was still a little remote. After the spaciousness of Oriel, where he had devoted a couple of years to a liberal education in which the acquisition of knowledge was of less importance than the acquisition of style, North Bromwich, with its concentration on the virtues rather than the graces of life and the very questionable sartorial shapes that inhabited it, naturally seemed a little cheap; but in a little time even Harrop became modified and humble if a little contemptuous, and the most resplendent of his waistcoats retained no more significance than the oriflamme of a lost cause.

Brown was the more approachable of the two, and for Brown, Edwin soon conceived something that was very nearly an affection. With his impressive physique and his experience of a rough world in which Edwin had never moved, was mingled a childlike enthusiasm for his new work, a rich, blundering good humour, and great generosity. He was not clever, and showed an intense admiration for better heads than his own; but for all that he was much more intelligent than he looked, and to Edwin his enthusiasm and earnestness were worth a good deal more than his intellectual attainments.

Once or twice, wandering into the Anatomical Museum, he had come upon Brown standing rapt in front of a specimen dissection or quietly sweating up bones with a Gray’s _Anatomy_ open before him, and he had sung out to Edwin as if he were an old friend of his own age and they had put in an hour of work together. “You know, you’re a lot quicker than I am,” said Brown. “I suppose it comes of being decently educated. I expect that when you were learning Latin and Greek I was knocking about the world making a damn fool of myself.” Then they would light their pipes (the dissecting room had made smoking necessary to Edwin) and Brown would yarn on for half an hour about his romantic adventures, his bitter quarrels with his people, the adventures that had befallen him in Paris when he went there to play football for the Midlands, in all of which the passionate, headstrong, obstinate and withal lovable nature of the big fellow would appear.

“I expect it all sounds to you like a rotten waste of time, mucking about with my life like this,” he said. “But you know I’m not at all sorry I’ve had it. . . . I didn’t take up this doctoring business in a hurry, without thinking about it. I thrashed the matter out; and I came to the conclusion that doctoring’s a good human sort of game: it’s a sort of chance of pulling people out of the rotten messes of one kind or another that they get themselves into—through no fault of their own, poor devils, just because they’re made like you and me and the rest of us. If you go on the bust, or knock about the country with a football team on tour, or go on the tramp and sleep in a hedge or a barn or a Rowton House, as I did when I had the last flare-up with the old man, you rub against a lot of people. They’re all just the same as yourself, you know. You can see yourself in the best of them as well as the worst; and, taking them all round, they’re all damned good at the bottom. They’ve all got to fight out their own way in life with their heads or their fists or their feet. And the only chap that can really help them in it is a doctor. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. God! . . . you’ll scarcely believe it, but once I was converted. I know it’s damn funny; but it’s a fact that when I was a youngster and had been on the periodical bust a revivalist chap got hold of me and persuaded me that I was saved. It’s a funny sort of feeling, I can tell you. I thought I was going off my nut until I went to see a doctor and he put my liver right. It’s a fine humane game, Ingleby. You can take it from me. . . . But I can tell you, with one thing and another, I’ve got my work cut out.”

He shook his head seriously, and the puzzled, dogged expression of frustrate determination that Edwin knew so well came into his eyes. “We’re wasting time, my son,” he said. “Let’s get on with the blasted humerus. Now, what is the origin of the Supinator Longus? Come on . . .”

On one of these pleasant occasions he confided to Edwin the reason why he had his work cut out. His father, a stern Calvinistic Methodist, had finally washed his hands of him. “I’ve been a bit of a rolling stone, you see,” said Brown, “and you can’t blame the poor old fellow. So he just planked down six hundred and fifty pounds one day and told me that I could do what I liked with it, but that was the last I should get from him. It suited me down to the ground. I didn’t much care what became of me then. It was a couple of years ago. So I had a royal bust . . . a sort of glorious windup to the season . . . and then sat down to think. I had just five hundred left, and so I had to think what the devil I was going to do with it, and my prospects seemed so putridly rotten that the only thing I could do was to go on the bust again. I didn’t enjoy it much that time. Jaded palate, you know. . . . But I had a bit of luck. I met a trainer fellow in the Leicester lounge with a couple of women, and he put me on to a double for the Lincoln and National. I’ve no use for horse-racing. If it was the owners that were racing there’d be a vestige of sport in it; but it always seems to me a shame that decent, clean creatures like horses should make a living for a lot of dirty stiffs out of the ruin of working men and small shopkeepers. Still, I dreamed about this double, and as I’m a weak superstitious sort of chap, I put a tenner on it. That’s the first and the last bet I’ve ever had on a horse. But the thing happened to come off; and last spring I found myself with twelve hundred pounds instead of six-fifty. So I began to think it out. I remembered that doctor fellow who cured me of being converted, and I thought, ‘By Gad, I’ll be a doctor.’ A five year’s course. Well, I’m not particularly brilliant at the top end, and so I allowed six. Six into twelve goes twice. Two hundred a year for fees and living and clothes—outsize—and recreation. You see, it’s pretty tight. Come along and have some lunch at Joey’s.”

III

They went downstairs to the cloak-room where the porter was now a familiar of Edwin’s. It had been decided that it would not be becoming for a really modern university, like that of North Bromwich, to impose the sight of such an anachronism as academic dress on the streets, a rule that had been something of a disappointment to Edwin, and so they left their gowns behind. Joey’s was an institution of some antiquity, opposite to the Corinthian town-hall, with which Brown had been acquainted in his unregenerate days. It was a long and noisy bar at which, for the sum of fourpence, one consumed a quarter of the top of a cottage loaf, a tangle of watercress, a hunk of Cheddar cheese, and a tankard of beer. This combination of excellences was known as a “crust and bitter,” and it was eaten standing at the counter.

Edwin was gradually becoming a regular customer at this place; for Martin’s delicate fancy for plovers on toast and other such refinements had proved too expensive for him, and apart from their joint labours in the dissecting-room, they were beginning to see less of each other—not from any ill-will on the part of either, but simply because Martin’s position in the house of the old lady in Alvaston, whose house was full of animals, had introduced him to the social life of that elegant suburb in which so perfect a carpet knight was bound to shine; and Martin’s social engagements with encouraging matrons and innumerable eligible daughters were becoming so pressing that his acquaintance with the black heart of the city was gradually becoming more and more casual. For this reason, apart from his natural inclination, Edwin was thrown into daily contact with Brown and his partner Maskew.

Maskew was a more typical product of the Midlands. His home, and all his upbringing, had lain in one of the great black towns that cluster, like swollen knots, upon the North Bromwich system of railways. He had never lived in the country; he did not even know what country was, and his distinctive if provincial urbanity showed itself in a hundred ways—in his dress, that was a little too smart, in his speech, that was not quite smart enough, in a certain lack of fresh air in his mental atmosphere. His people were wealthy, and his tastes, without emulating the style of Harrop, were expensive. He was handsome, and if his hair had been shorter and not so mathematically correct he would have been handsomer. Still, he was intensely interested in women, and a great retailer of Rabelaisian stories. He wore buttoned boots and was very nearly a first-class billiard player.

A more unusual combination than his partnership with the abrupt and unsubtle Brown it would have been difficult to imagine; but even in his undoubted cleverness, his nature was complimentary, and Edwin found himself happy in the society of both. In their company he became a habitué of the Dousita Café; a subterranean privacy in which excellent coffee was served in the most comfortable surroundings by young ladies whose charms had already made something of a sensation in that decorous city. Maskew, naturally, knew them all by their Christian names, and treated them with a familiar badinage that impressed Edwin, mildly ambitious but quite incapable of imitation, by the ease with which it was performed. The cushioned seats and the mild stimulus of the coffee and cigarettes would even rouse the massive Brown to a ponderous levity by which the lady of their choice, a certain Miss Wheeler, whose uncle, Maskew seriously confided to Edwin, was a bishop, was obviously flattered. Edwin could understand any woman being attracted by Brown, or rather, “W.G.” as the need of a distinction had by this time made his familiar name. It also pleased him to see the way in which W.G. went red in his bull neck on a certain occasion when Maskew had delicately overstepped the limits of good taste in his conversation with Miss Wheeler. But the niece of the bishop did not blush. . . .

In the intervals between lectures they would congregate in their gowns in a dismal chamber, at the very bottom of the cramped building that was called the Common Room, drinking tea and eating squashed-fly biscuits. This place was frequented not only by members of the Medical School but by students of other faculties whom Edwin regarded with some contempt. One afternoon on entering this room Edwin found W.G. holding forth with some indignation before a notice that had been pinned on the board asking for a list of freshmen who were anxious to play Rugby football during the present season. So far, only five or six names had appeared: W.G.’s, naturally enough, came first, for his prowess in the game was well known in the North Bromwich district.

“Isn’t it a damnable thing,” he said indignantly, “in a school of this size to see a measly list like that?”

“You can stick mine down,” said Edwin.

“Well . . . as a matter of form, my son . . . though I don’t see what good you’re likely to be to the club except to give it tone.”

“I play soccer,” said Maskew.

“You would,” said W.G. “Nice gentlemanly game.”

“Rugger isn’t all beef,” put in Edwin.

“No,” said W.G., “but the team wants weight. And this place is simply thick with great, hefty, science men and brewers who’ve never known the meaning of a healthy sweat in their lives. Upon my word, it sickens me. Look at that chap.”

He pointed to a corner in which a big fellow lay huddled up in a deep basket chair. He had shoulders that would have appeared massive by the side of any others but W.G.’s: a fair wide face marked with freckles, a sandy moustache and crisp, curly red hair. “That’s the kind of swine that ought to be working in the scrum.”

Edwin looked, and as he did so, instinctively went pale. A curious survival of the instinct of physical fear had shaken him. It was ridiculous. “I know that chap,” he said in an off-hand way. “He’s no good. I was at school with him. He’s got a weak heart. His name’s Griffin.”