Chapter III: Carnival

I

CHRISTMAS came: an old-fashioned Christmas with hoar frost on the fields and hard roads gleaming with splintered light reflected from a frosty sky. In this raiment of frozen moisture even the black desert of Edwin’s morning pilgrimage appeared fantastically beautiful. The vacation did not suspend his work; for though no lectures were given, the dissecting room was still open; and here, on icy mornings, when the asphalt floor was as cold as the glass roof, he would freeze for an hour at a time watching Brown and Maskew at work, Martin having been whisked off to spend a baronial Christmas of scratch dances in Ireland.

A few months in North Bromwich had made a great change in Edwin. He had lost much of his old timidity, shaved twice a week, smoked the plug tobacco to which Brown had introduced him, and was no longer shy with any creature on earth of his own sex. With women it was different. . . . Ease and familiarity with this baffling sex would come, no doubt, in time; but for the present one or two desperate essays at conversation with the elegant Miss Wheeler in the absence of his friends had been failures. And Miss Wheeler was not the least approachable of her sex. There were several women medical students in his year; but in their case he had not felt the incentive to gallantry that the softer charms of Miss Wheeler suggested. Even if they had not insulated themselves with shapeless djibbehs of russet brown, and bunched back their hair in a manner ruthlessly unfeminine, the common study of a subject so grossly material as anatomy would have rubbed the bloom from any budding romance.

In the Biological laboratory, however, he found a figure that exercised a peculiar attraction on him. She was an American girl, a science student, who with the severity of the medical women’s dress contrived to combine an atmosphere of yielding femininity. She had a soft voice, for the tones of which Edwin would listen, big grey-blue eyes, soft dark hair, and very beautiful arms that her dark overalls displayed to perfection. Edwin would have found it difficult to define the way in which she attracted him: certainly he didn’t cherish any definite romantic ideas about her; but he did find her in some subtle way disturbing, so that he would be conscious of her presence when she came into the lab.; surprise himself listening for her voice when she spoke to the professor, and find that, without any definite volition, his eyes were watching her profile. And one day when she passed him and her overall brushed his sleeve, he found that he was blushing. Maskew, with his usual easy familiarity, was already on joking terms with her, and would sometimes sit on the table where she kept her microscope while they talked and laughed together; but though Edwin had every chance of sharing in this intimacy, he couldn’t bring himself to do so; and when, in the end, he was introduced to her formally, he wished that he were dead, and could not speak a word for awkwardness.

With men, on the other hand, he was now quite at his ease, even, strangely enough, with the once formidable Griffin. Since the day when he had discovered his old enemy in the Common Room they had often spoken to one another: they had even sat side by side in the deep basket chairs, one of which was now Griffin’s habitual abode, and talked of the old days at St. Luke’s, and sometimes, in the afternoon, they would share a pot of tea. There was no awkwardness in their conversation, as Edwin had feared there might be, for Griffin apparently took his expulsion as a matter of course, and, on the whole, as rather a good joke. Of course Griffin had changed. It was clear to Edwin from the first that in some way he had shrunk—not indeed physically, for he was fatter than ever; but the air of conscious and threatening physical superiority that Edwin had found so oppressive in his school days had vanished. Moreover, he was now prepared to accept Edwin as an equal, and make him the confidant of the amorous adventures that now absorbed his time, adventures to which the affair with the chambermaid at St. Luke’s had been the mildest possible prelude. Compared with Griffin’s positive achievements, the daring of Maskew’s relation with the young ladies of the Dousita seemed a trifle thin. Griffin’s father, with a shrewd appreciation of his son’s peculiar gifts, had entered him as a student at the school of brewing; and if once he could overcome his natural indolence, there was no reason why, in the future, he should not become a partner in the firm of his uncle, Sir Joseph Astill, and control the destinies of a number of barmaids beyond the dreams of concupiscence. On these prospects, Griffin, lounging in his basket chair, brooded with a heavy satisfaction.

“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” Edwin said one day, “that we should be the only St. Luke’s men in this place.”

“Oh, some are bound to turn up sooner or later,” said Griffin. “The other day, when I was up in town, I ran against Widdup—you remember Widdup—and he told me that his people thought of sending him here to take up engineering.”

“That would be rather good fun,” said Edwin. “And he’s cut out for it too. He’s got that sort of head. I should rather like to see old Widdup.”

“Oh, he’ll roll up one of these days. Are you doing anything in particular this afternoon? I have to stroll down to see the stage-manager at the Gaiety . . . an awful good sport. Suppose we go down the town and get a drink on the way . . .”

In spite of the temptations of this adventure, Edwin declined. In the dissecting room, half an hour later, Brown hailed him:—

“What the devil were you doing with that pig of a brewer, Ingleby?”

“He’s an old school friend of mine.”

“Well, I should keep that dark, if I were you. He’s a bad hat, that chap. We don’t want Ingleby’s virginal innocence corrupted, do we, Maskew?”

“Oh, he’s not a bad sort,” Edwin protested.

“He’s a nasty fellow, and he’ll come to a rotten, sticky end,” said Brown. “Now, what do you think of this small sciatic, you old roué, for a tricky bit of dissection?”

After all, Edwin reflected, old Brown knew something of the world. He had to admit to himself that there was something obscene about Griffin. It was difficult to explain, for Maskew, by his own account, was almost equally worldly, and yet Maskew was undeniably a decent fellow while Griffin undeniably wasn’t. He joined his friends at their work, and could think about nothing else; for Maskew’s brains were as good as his own, though of a different texture, and he had to be attentive to keep pace with them. All through the vac. he worked at anatomy with these two, sometimes in the icy dissecting room, sometimes over coffee at the Dousita, sometimes in the cozy, diminutive diggings that Brown inhabited in Easy Row, a street of Georgian houses at the back of the university buildings and near the Prince’s Hospital.

They were pleasant days. Edwin, in spite of his lightness, had now found a place in the scrum of the second fifteen, and on Saturday evenings, when both of them were drugged with their weekly debauch of exercise, he and W.G. would meet at the diggings in Easy Row, and after a steaming hot bath, in the process of which Edwin never failed to be impressed by the immensity of his friend’s physique, they would set off down the town together and make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill: Porterhouse steak with chipped potatoes and huge silver tankards of bitter ale. Then they would go on together to a theatre or a music hall, too pleasantly dulled, too mildly elated to question the humour of the most second-rate comedian. After the show W.G. would walk down to the station with Edwin, and see him off into the last train for Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out of the carriage window, would see the big man turn and go clumsily along the platform with the gait that he had noticed on the very first day of his life as a medical student. Brown was a wonderful fellow. In half an hour, Edwin reflected, when his train was still puffing away through the dark, W.G. would be back in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, driving facts into that puzzled brain with the violent thoroughness of an engine that drives piles.

When the last train arrived at Halesby, the town would be in darkness, for, in the black country in those days the only places of amusement were the public houses and these had been shut for an hour or more. Only from the upper windows of innumerable mean dwellings lights would be seen, and sometimes the voice of a drunken husband heard grumbling. But the path beside the fish-ponds was beautiful, even on a winter night, and Edwin would feel glad as he plodded along it that he didn’t live in North Bromwich, where the night noises of the country were never heard. So he would pass quietly up the empty lane, his footsteps echoing on the hard pavement, and come at last to the little house set in the midst of shrubberies that smelt of winter. Very humble and quiet, and even pitiable it seemed after the glaring streets of the city that he had left behind.

It was an understood thing that on Saturdays, when he had been playing football, Edwin should return by the last train; and so his father did not sit up for him on these occasions. The matter had been settled at the cost of some awkwardness. On the first two or three Saturdays of the football season Edwin had come home late, to find Mr. Ingleby growing cold over the embers of a fire in the dining-room, sleepy but intensely serious, and his tired eyes had examined Edwin so closely that he felt embarrassed, being certain that his face must bear signs of a number of enormities that he had never dreamed of committing. It was the same, unreasonable feeling of guilt that he had experienced at St. Luke’s in the middle of Mr. Leeming’s pitched battle for purity, and the sensation was so strong that he felt it useless to try and hide it.

“Why do you look at me like that, father?” he said. The quietude and humility of the little room seem to him as full of accusation as his father’s face.

“What do you mean, boy?”

“I think you know what I mean. . . . There’s really no need for you to wait up for me like this.”

“I like to lock the house up,” his father replied, with a quietness that made Edwin’s voice sound rowdy and violent. “I have always done so. After all, it’s usual.”

“You are anxious about me. Why should you be more anxious about me when I come in at twelve than when I come in at six?”

“I know you’re passing a critical period, Eddie. . . I’m not unsympathetic. I’ve been through it myself. And naturally I’m anxious for you. I know that a town is full of temptations for a boy of your age. I don’t know what your friends are like. I don’t know what sort of influences you’re coming in contact with—”

“But I don’t see why that should make you want to sit up for me. Really, I don’t. What good does it do?”

“I like to see you when you come in.” Edwin was uncomfortably aware of this.

“But suppose I was drunk when I came in, father—” he said.

“I don’t suppose anything of the sort—”

“No, but supposing I was. What advantage would there be in your seeing me? What good would it do?”

“At any rate I should know that there was a danger.”

“Well, if that’s all the trouble, we can soon get over it. I promise you, that I’ll tell you the very first time that I am in the least drunk. Then you needn’t worry about waiting for it. I suppose it’s bound to happen some day.”

“I sincerely hope it isn’t, Eddie. It isn’t pleasant to me to hear you talk like that.”

“No. . . . I suppose it would be pleasanter if we pretended that nothing of the kind ever happened. But it wouldn’t be honest, would it? I should think it’s the duty of every one to be drunk some time or other, if it’s only to see what it feels like. Surely, father, _you_—”

“Edwin, Edwin. . . . Really we mustn’t be personal. You forget that I’m your father.”

“But I don’t, father. I thought we were going to be such tremendous pals, and honestly there isn’t much to be pals on if you aren’t ever personal. We ought to talk about everything. We oughtn’t to hide anything. I don’t see much fun in it if I have to do all the telling and you don’t give anything in return. It isn’t fair.”

“But, my dear boy,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a nervous laugh, “you seem to neglect the fundamental fact that I’m your father.”

“I don’t see why that should prevent us being honest. I don’t see why it should prevent you from trusting me—”

“I do trust you, Eddie.”

“Then that’s all right; so you needn’t wait up for me again.”

Thus the matter was settled, at any rate on the surface, though Edwin was always conscious on the morning after his late arrivals of an anxious scrutiny on his father’s part.

“He doesn’t really trust me,” he thought, and this conviction made him more anxious than ever to be really intimate with his father, to make him share, as much as possible, the life that he was living in North Bromwich. It made him talk deliberately of the men who were his friends, and the work that he was doing, explaining with the greatest freedom the domestic difficulties of W.G., and the worldly accomplishments of Maskew: and this frankness gave him confidence until he discovered that such revelations only ended by arousing his father’s suspicions. In Mr. Ingleby’s mind it was evident that the sterling qualities of W.G., as recited by Edwin, were of less importance than his potentialities as an agent in Edwin’s corruption. “If I’d only given him one side of W.G.,” thought Edwin, “he’d have been quite happy. If we’re going to be happy, it would be much better for me to tell him nothing that his imagination can work on.”

He found himself travelling round the old vicious circle that appeared to be the inevitable result of being honest with himself. There must, after all, be something in the fundamental fact that Mr. Ingleby was his father. Ridiculous though it might seem, the ideal relation between father and son was evidently impossible. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “it isn’t my fault. I’ve done my best.”

The whole artificiality of their relation only dawned on him when he mentioned to his father one evening that he had met Griffin and told him that his old enemy turned out to be a nephew of Sir Joseph Astill. “I’m glad to hear of it,” said Mr. Ingleby. “I hope you’ll continue to be friends. Sir Joseph Astill is a very distinguished man.” Edwin didn’t see what that had to do with it; but he resisted the temptation of telling his father that Griffin was a distinctly bad egg, and that in comparison with him W.G., with his herculean passions, was indeed a paragon of knightly virtues. If it pleased his father to invest Griffin with his uncle’s reflected glory, why shouldn’t he do so? And Edwin held his tongue.

In the end the atmosphere of veiled anxiety that awaited him at home became definitely irksome, and since the most absolute candour on his part would not mend matters, he found himself gradually avoiding his father’s company. It was the last thing in the world that he wanted to do; but it seemed inevitable; and as the months passed, he gave up all hopes of the sort of intimacy that he had desired, and relapsed into the solitude of his own room, or even, as a last resort, the company of Aunt Laura, who was at least unsuspicious.

Another thing attracted him to her house. All the days of his childhood at home had been full of music, for his mother had been a capable pianist, and he had spent long hours stretched out on the hearthrug in the drawing-room listening to her while she played Bach and Beethoven and occasionally Mendelssohn on the piano. At St. Luke’s, too, without any definite musical education, he had felt a little of the inspiration that Dr. Downton infused into the chapel services. Since he had returned to Halesby all these pleasures had left him; for Mr. Ingleby was not in the least musical, and the piano that had been closed a few days before his mother’s death, had never been reopened. At this period he had not realised the musical possibilities of North Bromwich, and in Aunt Laura’s house he recaptured a little of this stifled interest.

She was really an accomplished musician, and though the kind of music that she affected was becoming limited by the very character of her life as the wife of an undistinguished manufacturer of small hardware in a small black-country town, the taste, which had originally been formed in Germany, existed and was easily encouraged by Edwin’s admiration of her attainments. Here, usually on Sundays, when in addition to the attraction of music her admirable cooking was to be appreciated, Edwin passed many happy hours. She sang well, and could accompany herself with something of a natural genius, and though the songs that she sang were often enough the sugary ballads of the period that had witnessed her musical extinction, Edwin found them satisfying to his starved sense of music, and would even persuade her, on occasion, to play the pieces of Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach with which his mother had made him familiar.

Nothing aroused in him an acute remembrance of those ancient happy days more easily than music. He wished, above all things, that he might some day be able to taste these joys for himself; and so he persuaded his aunt to teach him the notes on the piano, and having an inherited aptitude, he soon found that he could pick his way through simple compositions, preferably in the open key, that he found among his mother’s music at home. Mr. Ingleby, who had no ear, appeared to be unmoved by these painful experiments; and to Edwin, the long winter evenings were made magical by their indulgence. He would sit at the piano in the drawing-room for hours at a time, and here, in a strange way, he found himself curiously in touch with the vanishing memory of his mother. At times this feeling was so acute that he could almost have imagined that she was there in the room beside him, and sometimes he would sit still at the piano in long intervals of silence, just drinking in this peculiar and soothing atmosphere. Eventually these diversions made Mr. Ingleby uneasy.

“You spend a good deal of time at the piano, Edwin,” he said. “I do hope you are not letting it interfere with your work.”

Edwin said nothing; but from that time onward it seemed to him that even this, the most harmless of his amusements, had become a matter for grudging and suspicion. At first he only felt indignation and anger; but later he realised that this, along with his father’s other anxieties, probably had its origin in financial considerations. The cost of his education in North Bromwich was a big thing for a country chemist to face. If once he failed, the whole of his early effort might be wasted. But then, he was not going to fail.

II

The terminal examinations at Christmas had made him sure of this. They showed him that in his own year he and Maskew were in a class by themselves; and though Maskew beat him easily in all the subjects of the examination, it satisfied him a little to think that Maskew had probably put in a good deal more work than he had, particularly in anatomy, where he had the advantage of working in partnership with W.G., for whom the subject of medical education was of the most deadly seriousness.

Early in the Lent term Edwin found himself introduced to a new stratum of North Bromwich society, through the accident of his acquaintance with Griffin. The new university had inherited from the old college of science and the still older medical school, the tradition of a pantomime night, a visit _en masse_ to one of the North Bromwich theatres, where this elevating art-form flourished for three months out of the twelve. The evening was one of fancy dress, rowdiness, and general licence, in which the stage suffered as much as the auditorium, and the unfortunate players were propitiated for the ruin of their performance by a series of presentations.

Arrangements for this function were always made with a high seriousness. The committee was composed of representatives from each year in the school of medicine and from each of the other faculties. In this affair, as in all matters of sport or communal life, the older foundation of the medical school took the most prominent part; but the prestige of Griffin as the nephew of the Vice-Chancellor and an acknowledged expert on all matters theatrical, had induced the brewers to run him for the secretaryship; and since the secretary was the official on whom the bulk of the work fell, and no one was particularly anxious to take on the job, Griffin, in his first year, had been elected to the post.

There was no denying the fact that it suited him. To begin with, he was already on intimate terms with every theatre manager and stage-doorkeeper in North Bromwich, and was used to dealing with the susceptibilities of theatrical people. Again, he had plenty of money, a circumstance that would help him in the preliminaries, which were expensively conducted in the local Bodega and other bars and restaurants. Also, it gave Griffin something to do; for the life of the student in brewing was of the leisurely and somnolent character that one would naturally associate with malt liquors, and most of his time had previously been spent sprawling in a deep basket chair in the Common Room, playing an occasional languid game of poker, or jingling sovereigns in his pocket while he waited for the results of racing in the evening papers.

At the annual meeting, which Edwin had not been sufficiently interested to attend, there had been the usual difficulty in selecting a member from the unknown quantities of the first year, and Griffin, full of resource, had suggested Edwin, who was straightway elected, and summoned to attend the deliberations that followed. His election caused a good deal of amusement to his friends, and particularly Martin, who preserved an aristocratic contempt for this vulgar theatrical business, and W.G., who prophesied Edwin’s conversion into a thorough-going blood; but it introduced him to a new and bewildering society in which he met a number of men of his own faculty who had already become impressive at a distance.

Such were the brothers Wade, the elder unapproachable in his final year, the younger of an elegance surpassing that of Harrop. Such was Freddie St. Aubyn, a slight and immaculate figure with fair hair and moustache, and the most carefully cultivated reputation for elegant dissipation in North Bromwich. This Byronic person had already suffered the pangs of a long intrigue with the _première danseuse_ in a musical comedy company, on whom he was reputed to have spent money and passion lavishly but without the least suggestion of grossness.

In addition to this he was a poet: that is to say, he had published two volumes of verse that were so eclectic as to be out of print. At the present time he had stuck midway in his medical career pending the issue of his unhappy passion; and presented the unusual spectacle of a “chronic,” not by force of incompetence, but by choice. In point of fact, he was an unconscious survival from the nineties, and the lady of his choice resembled a creation of Beardsley more than any type commonly known to nature. Edwin was impressed, for the writer of the exhausted _Poems of Passion_ was the first poet that he had met in the flesh. Naturally, St. Aubyn’s attitude towards the first-year man was a little patronising; but Edwin found his mixture of cynicism and melancholy enchanting, and was particularly impressed when Freddie, languidly supporting his sorrows in one of the Common Room easy-chairs, offered him a fill from his pipe.

“Oh, by the way, there’s opium in it,” he said casually.

Visions of Coleridge and de Quincey invaded Edwin’s mind. He stopped filling his pipe.

“Opium? Why on earth do you put opium in it?”

“It is an aid to the imagination,” said Freddie, “and it deadens pain.”

“Mental pain,” he added significantly, after a pause. “For that alcohol is useless. I’ve tried it.”

“I think I’ll have some of my own, if you don’t mind,” said Edwin.

“I quite agree with you. It would be much wiser,” said St. Aubyn. “Luckily you have no need for it. _Facilis descensus Averni_.”

From that day forward Edwin was always eagerly searching the face and the pupils of Freddie for any symptoms of opium poisoning. He never found any; and W.G., to whom he confided this thrilling incident, assured him that there was nothing in it, that Freddie had probably never smoked opium in his life, and that the whole thing was nothing more than one of the poses that this gentleman adopted for shocking the youthful and bourgeois. The impressive Freddie, according to W.G., was a damned anæmic waster. If only it had not been for the exhausted _Poems of Passion_, Edwin might have agreed with him.

The solemn meetings of the panto-night committee engaged Edwin three afternoons a week. As a congregation of amazing bloods they were enthralling but as business gatherings they were more remarkable still. They were held in the saloon bar of a modern public house, all palatial mahogany, red plush and plate-glass, called the White Horse; and the principal business of the day was the consumption of hot whisky with sugar and slices of lemon in it, during which Griffin, armed with a conspicuous note-book, reported on his activities, which appeared mainly to be social.

“On Thursday,” he would say, “I took Mary Loraine to lunch at the Grand Midland, and she said . . .” or “I saw Tommy Fane in his dressing-room the other night, and he said: ‘Look here, old boy. . . ’” Apparently all Griffin’s theatrical friends called him “old boy.” The effect of these narrations on Griffin would be so exhausting that he found it necessary to order more whisky all round. The manager himself would bring it in; a brilliant gentleman named Juniper with red baggy cheeks the laxness of which was compensated by a waxed moustache that stuck out on either side as if a skewer had transfixed them. To Griffin this magnificent creature was most decorous; for the White Horse was one of Astill’s houses, and Griffin had taken the trouble to inform him that the great Sir Joseph was his uncle. In spite of, rather than as a result of these meetings, the panto-night arranged itself. The date was fixed, the bouquets and presents purchased, the announcements in the papers that warned any patrons of pantomime that on this particular night they could not hope to see a normal performance, inserted. Griffin, in the Common Room, became a centre of feverish importance, and even Edwin, in spite of the superciliousness of Martin, and the rough chaff of W.G., caught a little of the reflected glamour.

Edwin now had to face the ordeal of announcing the approach of panto-night to his father. If he were to see the thing through, as was his duty as a member of the committee, it would be quite impossible for him to catch the last train to Halesby, which left North Bromwich at nine-thirty, except on Thursday and Saturday night. Mr. Ingleby, hearing, saw the pit gaping beneath Edwin’s feet. “You didn’t mention this to me before. . . . I suppose you have had to spend quite a lot of time at these committee meetings? I think it was rather unwise of you to undertake it in your first year. . . . There’s only four months before your examination.”

“Oh, I think the exam. will be all right,” said Edwin airily.

“I don’t like to hear you speak like that, Edwin,” said his father. “Over-confidence is a dangerous thing.”

“But it wouldn’t be any better pretending that I didn’t think it was all right, surely?”

“Well, humility is a great virtue.”

“Not any greater than honesty.”

“It’s all very well to talk about honesty; but it would have been more honest, wouldn’t it, if you’d told me that”—he hesitated—“this was going on?”

“There you are. . . . That’s the whole point. If I told you everything you wouldn’t sleep for imagining things that hadn’t happened. It’s the thing that’s worried me ever since I was at school. If you’re absolutely honest with other people, life simply isn’t worth living, because they don’t understand it. It isn’t done. I’ve come to the conclusion, father, that the only thing that really matters is to be honest with yourself.”

“If you can trust yourself—”

“Well, I think I can. . . . And I wish you’d believe in it.”

“I do, Edwin. Only naturally I’m anxious. You’re a child. Where is this . . . this performance held?”

“At the Queen’s Theatre this year.”

“Well, I suppose that is better than a music hall.”

His father’s prejudice against the music halls, or, as they were then beginning to be called, Theatres of Varieties, was an old story. Edwin could hardly resist the temptation of telling him that the performers in the pantomime were nearly all music-hall artistes, but Mr. Ingleby saved him, by asking him where he intended to sleep.

“Oh, I expect W.G. will give me a shake-down in his digs.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Ingleby, with a shade of anxiety, “that Brown is also on the committee—”.

The idea of the honest W.G. as a member of this constellation of bloods tickled Edwin. He now wished to goodness he’d never told his father of W.G.’s family differences and of his lucky double on the Lincoln and National.

“Oh, no, old W.G.’s far too sober for this sort of thing.”

It was an unfortunate word.

“Sober?” repeated Mr. Ingleby. “Well, I suppose you will have to go; but I do hope—”

He didn’t say what he hoped; but Edwin knew, and was content to leave it at that.

III

The great day came, and Edwin found, as some compensation for the scoffing of W.G. and the superciliousness of Martin and Maskew, that his position was really one of some importance. All the first-year men, even the immaculate Harrop, had decided to go to the theatre, and up to the last minute Edwin was busy selling tickets. He had asked W.G. to put him up, and W.G., as a matter of form, had consented. “I don’t suppose I shall see you after midnight, my son,” he said. With his usual thoroughness in everything that he attempted, W.G. had determined to make a night of it. “It will do me good to make a damned fool of myself for once in a way,” he said, “if it’s only for the sake of realising it afterwards . . .”

They put in a hard afternoon’s work together first, and then he and Edwin and Maskew went together to W.G.’s rooms to change. They were all rather excited, and W.G. carried a bottle of whisky in each of his coat pockets, the first of which was broached as an aperitif while they were changing. In less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired as nearly as convention would allow him, in the manner of his woaded ancestry: a splendid caveman with lowering black brows and hairy arms like those of a gorilla, a disguise that only called for a little accentuation of his natural characteristics to be made effective; Maskew, again in character, as a Restoration cavalier; and Edwin in the modest guise of Pierrot. In the foyer of the theatre they met Martin, who had driven down in a hansom from Alvaston clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a feeding bottle round his neck. The stalls were already full of a carnival crowd of students, and the rest of the house was crowded with spectators who had come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate people who had entered in ignorance of the festival and the fact that their form of entertainment was to be changed for one night only.

There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, a fleshy and unsubtle Mephistopheles, the Mephistopheles of Gounod, not of Goethe, and Freddie St. Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of black curls that he had procured for his presentation of Byron. Freddie, in the interests of verisimilitude, had even shaved his moustache.

Only the earlier part of the performance remained in Edwin’s memory. The rest of it was no more to him than a brilliant haze, from which single moments of wild picturesqueness detached themselves: as when he had a vision of a prehistoric man armed with a waving whisky bottle for a club and feebly restrained by a flushed cavalier, flown with insolence and wine, storming his way through the surging crowd in front of the stalls bar and planting his feet upon the counter; or of the same barbarian, gently armed by a tactful manager in evening dress, putting his weapon to the usages of peace and friendliness by uncorking it and offering its contents to a firm but good-humoured policeman.

“What a splendid fellow W.G. is,” Edwin thought to himself. “Splendid . . . splendid . . . magnificent.” And while he was thinking this, a sombre poet with shining eyes drew him aside and confessed to him, almost with tears, that all this brilliance and colour and life meant nothing to him compared with the memory of the Beardsley lady, whose ankles were so thin that they might be spanned with his little finger. “As light as a feather,” said the poet, “gossamer . . . swansdown . . . all soul. Of course, old fellow, I know that you can understand. I shouldn’t talk like this to any other person in the world.”

And Edwin understood, and realised the justice of the poet’s choice of a confidant so sympathetically that he was spurred to confidences on his own part. “You see, I happen to be a poet myself,” he said, and to prove it he felt bound to recite a sonnet that he had composed a year or two before at St. Luke’s. A magnificent sonnet it seemed to him, perhaps more magnificent for the accompaniment of a song in waltz rhythm by the theatre orchestra. It was flattering to find that Byron agreed with him as to its excellence; but while the poet was pressing his hand in congratulatory brotherhood, and Edwin was just deciding to recite it all over again, the sinister figure of Mephistopheles appeared and parted them, telling him that Miss Marie Loraine was now singing the last verse of her song and that in two minutes it would be his duty to present her with a bouquet and a pair of silver hair-brushes. Still reciting the most telling lines of his sonnet, he was conducted by Mephistopheles through the manager’s office, where a young lady who, in her inviting softness, resembled Miss Wheeler, was counting the counter-foils of tickets, and through a subterranean passage with the welcome chill of a catacomb, to the wings of the theatre, where a florid bouquet was thrust into his hands.

It struck Edwin that the scent of the flowers was of a suffocating heaviness, until he realised that the overpowering perfume of which he was aware proceeded not from the bouquet but from the scents and powders of a bevy of creatures of unnatural loveliness who stood waiting in the wings. They were the ladies of the chorus, and the nature of their costume would have given them an excuse for shivering; but they did not appear to be conscious of the heat that throbbed in Edwin’s brain. The scent and the proximity of such a huge expanse of naked flesh excited him. At this moment all his awkwardness seemed to have vanished. He could not believe that he was the same person who had blushed at the mere contact of the American girl’s overall, or sat speechless in the presence of Miss Wheeler at the Dousita. His old modesty seemed to him to have been a ridiculous and inexcusable folly; for, at the moment, he would have welcomed the prospect of making the most shameless advances to any one of these houris in competition with any man of his acquaintance. With the air of a Sultan he surveyed them, deciding to which of those blossoms the handkerchief should be thrown.

“Now get along with you,” said the stage-manager, pushing him forward.

He gripped the presents in his hands, and treading on air, advanced on to the stage, where Miss Marie Loraine was kissing her hands to the stalls. The stage was very big, and sloped in such a way that he felt his feet impelled towards the footlights; but, being determined that he would accomplish his mission with dignity, Edwin steered a steady, if resilient, course. In front of him he saw a creature before whose elegance and beauty the beauty of the chorus was as nothing. She stood waiting for him and smiled. For a moment Edwin faced the auditorium, a vast and dark abyss in which not a single face was to be seen. It gave him a sudden fright to think that so many thousands of unseen eyes were fixed upon the patch of limelight in which he stood. He pulled himself together. This was the moment, he thought, in which it was for him to make some speech worthy of the bewildering loveliness that stood before him.

“Go on,” said the impatient voice of Mephistopheles in the wings. “Buck up.”

“Miss Loraine,” said Edwin, with a flourish, “I have the honour of—” The middle of his sentence was broken by a crash and a tremendous peal of laughter from the unseen thousands. The younger Wade, arrayed in the panoply of a Roman legionary and balanced upon the parapet of the stage box, had fallen with a clash of armour into the big drum. Edwin thrust the bouquet and the hair-brushes into the arms of Miss Loraine, herself convulsed with laughter. With a terrific draught the curtain swept down.

“Splendid,” said the voice of Mephistopheles.

The rest of the evening was more confused than ever. He remembered a vision of this surpassing beauty standing in the wings in a long silk wrapper that her dresser had thrown over her shoulders, and thanking him for his presentation. To Edwin the moment seemed the beginning of a passionate romance. He remembered other moments in the auditorium, in which W.G. and Maskew figured. He remembered the taste of a glass of Benedictine, a liqueur that he had never tasted before, that Maskew gave him to pull him together again after his exertions on the stage. He remembered a flashing of lights, an uproar, a free-fight, and the singing of “God Save the Queen.” And then he found himself a member of a small but distinguished brotherhood streaming at a tremendous rate up the wide street that led towards the Prince’s Hospital. All of them were medicals, and most of them his seniors. Freddie St. Aubyn, the Wade brothers, W.G., and Maskew were among them. Out of the main road they passed singing into the meaner streets that surrounded the hospital: miserable streets with low houses and courts clustered on either side, from the upper windows of which astonished working men and women in their nightdresses put out their heads to look at the vocal procession. Opposite the portico of the hospital was a cab rank on which a solitary hansom was standing with the horse asleep in the shafts and the driver taking his rest inside. The sight appeared to arouse the fighting instincts of the elder Wade.

“Good God,” he said, with indignation, “here’s a cab. What the hell does the fellow think he’s doing here at this time of night? He must be drunk. Look at it!”

His brother, who could carry his liquor better, tried to persuade him to leave the cab alone; but before any one knew what was happening, he had thrown himself on it and turned the whole affair upside down in the road. Edwin heard a crash of splintered glass; he saw the cab on its side and the sleepy horse with its legs in the air. He thought: “Good God! What has happened?” And the next thing he saw was a red-faced cabman, buttoned up to his ears, crawling out of the wreckage and cursing fluently at Wade, who stared for a moment, dazed, at the havoc his strength had created, and then bolted for the shelter of the hospital. The cabman, now thoroughly awakened, bolted after him. Edwin glowed with admiration for Wade’s achievement. It was the deed of a Titan, a splendid Berserker. The cabby had burst through the concourse on the hospital steps, thirsting for the blood of Wade, who, by this time, was lying quietly on a hooded stretcher swatched in bandages and quite unrecognisable. A house surgeon in a white overall confronted the cabman. The hospital porters in uniform stood solemnly at his elbow. The house surgeon was assuring the cabby that he was drunk: the cabby telling the lot of them exactly what he thought of them.

“Take hold of this fellow,” said the house surgeon to the porters, “and hold him while I get a stomach pump.” The porters, specially qualified for dealing with midnight drunks, obeyed. There was a splendid struggle in which the foaming cabby was pitched out into the road, —ing their —ing eyes to Hell. The bandaged Wade was carried solemnly upstairs on his stretcher and brought round with whisky in the house surgeon’s room, a chamber full of Olympian card-players, pickled with cigar-smoke and the fumes of alcohol. Some one, it was the cavalier, began to play the piano. Edwin seized the opportunity to recite his sonnet, until W.G. laid a monstrous hand on his mouth.

That vision ended, and to it succeeded one of cool, deserted streets with far too many kerb-stones for Edwin’s liking, and then the dishevelled sitting-room in W.G.’s digs in which they had dressed with a pale gas-jet hissing and flaring and a momentary impression of W.G. asking him where he’d put the damned corkscrew. Edwin remembered rising to a brilliant extreme of wit. “Am I your corkscrew’s keeper?” he said; and while he was explaining at length the aptness of his mot W.G. knocked the neck off the bottle with his poker, eclipsing any possible verbal brilliance.

In the middle of the night Edwin woke and staggered in the dark to the washhand-stand, where he drank a draught of water, so cool and sweet as to be astonishing, until he remembered that it had possibly come from the mountains beyond Felindre. W.G. was snoring heavily on the bed that he had just left. W.G.’s snoring got on his nerves so that he had to prod him in the ribs and wake him, a proceeding that W.G. seemed unjustly to resent.

“I say, W.G.,” he said, “do you think I was drunk?”

“Drunk?” said W.G. “Good God, you didn’t wake me to ask me that? You’ll know all right in the morning.”

Edwin only knew that his head was splitting and that he was hellishly cold.