Chapter IV: Science

I

W.G.’s prophecy that Edwin would know all about it in the morning proved correct; but it was some consolation to him to know that he shared the experience with his friends. All the next day he went about his work with Maskew feeling a little light-headed, and a peculiar weakness in the legs made him disinclined for any exertion that could be avoided. Maskew recovered himself more easily; but W.G., who never did anything by halves, solemnly embarked on a “bust” that lasted for a whole week.

This defection disgusted Maskew, who, in his hard, capable way, believed in moderation in all things—even in vice. He considered W.G.’s conduct “a bit thick”; principally because he was deprived of his company in the dissecting room; but to Edwin the big man’s debauch seemed in some ways heroic and in keeping with his titanic physical nature: a spectacle rather for awe than for reproof. It was even impressive to see W.G. returning like a giant refreshed with vice, throwing his huge energies into the pursuits that he had abandoned as readily as he had lately squandered them in an atmosphere of patchouli. In this line Edwin would have found it constitutionally impossible to compete with W.G., but, for all that, he could not deny that he felt better, more confident, and more complete for the pantomime experience. It even flattered him to find himself regarded as something of a blood by the humbler members of his year who had witnessed his adventure on the Queen’s Theatre stage, though he could not conceal from himself the fact that Martin, more absorbed than ever in blameless but exacting relations with the eligible young ladies of Alvaston, was a little supercilious as to his attainments.

With the approach of the summer and the first examination he found little time for anything but work. The preparation for the exam. was so much of a scramble that he had no time to realise the imaginative significance of the subjects in which he was engaged. He did not guess that the little fat professor of Physics who lectured so drily on the elements of his science was actually employing his leisure in the tremendous adventure of weighing the terrestrial globe, or that certain slender aerials stretched like the web of a spider from a mast at the top of the university buildings were actually receiving the first lispings of wireless telegraphy, an achievement to which that bearded dreamer, the Principal, had devoted twenty years of his life.

To Edwin there was nothing intrinsically romantic in Chemistry or Physics. His mind could not conceive that science was a minute and infinitely laborious conquest of the properties of matter. Atoms and Molecules and the newly-dreamed Electrons, still trembling in the realms of imponderable speculation, were no more to him than abstractions unrelated to the needs of practical human life. They were only facts to be learned by rote, symbols to be memorised and grouped together on paper like the letters in an algebraic calculation; and the whole of this potentially romantic experience was clouded by his own headachy distaste for the gaseous smells of the laboratory: the choking yellow fumes of chlorine that escaped from the glass cupboards in which it was manufactured, and the less tolerable, if more human, odour of Sulphuretted Hydrogen, in an air that was desiccated by the blue flames of half a hundred Bunsen burners. These two subjects were nothing more than an arid desert of facts relating to dead matter through which he had to fight his way, and he hated them.

In comparison with them, Biology was something of an oasis. Here, at any rate, he had to deal with life, a mystery more obvious and less academic. The contemplation of its lower forms, such as the Amoeba, a tiny speck of dreamy protoplasm stretching out its languid tentacles, living its remote and curiously detached life with no aims beyond that of bare mysterious existence, filled him with a strange awe. The laboratory in which these researches were conducted, was high and airy and not associated with any unpleasant smells except at the season when the class were engaged upon the dissection of the hideous dog-fish. It had even its aspects of beauty in the person of the fair American in her dark overall; and for this reason, if for no other, Edwin found himself becoming most proficient in his knowledge of the subject.

In the middle of the summer the examination came. Maskew was an easy first, and carried off the Queen’s scholarship for the year; Edwin came second with a first-class, which, even if it didn’t satisfy himself, was enough to make his father enthusiastic; Martin ambled through with an ease that challenged Edwin’s respect, and W.G., horribly intense and determined through all the week of the exam., scraped through by virtue of sheer bulldog tenacity. The result of the examination did Edwin good if only by convincing him that Maskew, for all his suburban flashiness and his inferior general education, had a better head than his own. Like the excellent man of business that he was, Maskew did not rest upon his oars: the week after the examination, and the first of the long vacation, found him and W.G. back in the dissecting room, plugging into anatomy, the next year’s principal subject, and Edwin saw at once that if he were to keep pace with his rival he would have to forgo the months of summery leisure to which he had looked forward in the vacation. Martin was playing tennis in Ireland, and so he found himself thrown once more into the society of these two.

It was a pleasant time, for their leisure was their own and there were no lectures to tie them to their work. They did a great deal of their reading in W.G.’s rooms, full of easy-chairs, and wreathed in tobacco smoke that escaped through a French window into a tiny garden plot green and pleasant under the white Midland sky, and this room became a haven of escape from the burning brick pavements in which Edwin and his friends would work together without strain, talking of the future and of W.G.’s romantic past, and stabilising their own ideas on the uncertainties of sex: a problem that so far had meant very little to Edwin, but which W.G. was not in a position to ignore.

“You know, it’s damned funny,” he said, “but when you get to know more about things, when you’ve done some anatomy and that, you begin to think of sex in a different light. It knocks all the mystery out of it, and I’m sure that’s a jolly sound thing. Good Lord, when I think of the ignorance with which I started on this sort of thing! Finding out everything by experiment, you know. . . . Why, if I’d had a short course of anatomy before I left school I should have been saved a lot of rotten experiments that didn’t do me or any one else any good. I’d have been a damned sight cleaner-minded than I ever was. A medical training’s a jolly good thing in that way: shows you exactly where you are instead of letting you go fumbling about in the dark.”

“Knocks all the poetry out of it though,” said Maskew.

“Poetry be damned,” said W.G. seriously, “there’s a good deal too much of your poetry about it. Poetry and mystery and a lot of bunkum like that . . . Male and female created He them. I don’t particularly admire the method. I think He made rather a better job of the amoeba. Think how much simpler it would be to split open a chunk of protoplasm instead of having to make a ridiculous fool of yourself if you want to propagate your species. Still, there it is, and the sooner you realise exactly what it means and what it’s all about, the less you worry your head about it.”

“Well, of course, if you’re going to treat it in that light you’re going to knock all the pleasure out of life—” Maskew protested.

“Oh, you’re a sensualist,” said W.G. “The main thing that I have against it is that it wastes valuable time.” He became scornful. “Think of all these rotten fellows who spend their days writing books on sexual problems, analysing their rotten little sensations in detail and gloating over mysteries of sex. It’s only their ignorance that makes them like that. What they want is a thorough course of anatomy and a whack of practical experience to cure them; and if every one else had the same sort of education there’d be no sale for their books.”

Edwin, listening to their sparring, remembered the library at St. Luke’s and a certain shelf of anatomical works that was always kept locked with a special key that Mr. Leeming carried mysteriously on his watch-chain. On the whole, he agreed with W.G. and his preferences for the methods of the Amoeba’s parthenogenesis. He wondered, however, if the kind of education that W.G. advocated would have scotched the production of such works as _Romeo and Juliet_ or the love poems of Shelley.

“It would be rather rotten if you did away with love, W.G.,” he said.

“Oh, I’m not talking about love,” said W.G. “I’m talking about a fellow’s ordinary physical needs. Being in love is not the same thing as that.”

“It is usually,” said the cynical Maskew.

“It’s all a ridiculous mix-up,” said Edwin. “Thank God it doesn’t worry us.”

II

With the beginning of the new year these delicious hours of leisure disappeared. Edwin and his friends, with the assurance of second-year men, became the real possessors of the dissecting room. Anatomy and physiology now absorbed all their time, and the leisurely interest in the first subject, which had been subsidiary in the first year, was now a matter of academical life and death. From the simple anatomical details of the upper and lower extremities that he had dissected with Martin in the year before, he passed to the more vital regions of the human body: the thorax, the abdomen, and the head and neck. He still attended the polished course of lectures on anatomy that the Dean delivered in the theatre; but this process he was forced to regard as a waste of time, since the Dean’s presentation of the subject did not differ greatly from that of any text-book of anatomy, and the Dean’s personality, which curiously resembled that of his cousin Martin, was too aristocratically remote ever to seem real.

In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he became acquainted and fascinated with the first of his medical instructors who had aroused his imagination. This was the chief demonstrator of Anatomy, Robert Moon, or, more familiarly, Bobby, a figure of romantic picturesqueness. He was tall and inclined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat, and his serious face, which was of a size and pallor that his surname suggested, was crowned by an erect crop of black and curly hair. In Edwin’s first year he had always seemed to him a strange and distant figure, walking slowly up and down the dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged from the dark chamber which he inhabited in the corner near the door, like a fat and rather sinister spider.

He rarely spoke: when he did so it was with a broad, north country accent and the most extraordinary deliberation and formality in his choice of words. With the men in the second year he possessed an enormous reputation not only for his exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side of which the Dean’s attainments seemed merely those of a dilettante, but also for his excellence as a coach. Edwin and his two friends became sedulous attendants at his tutorials, where, standing in immobile dignity behind one of the zinc dissecting-room tables in front of an appropriate background of blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second-year students, who came to sit at his feet voluntarily, like the disciples of a Greek philosopher, he would demonstrate the details of some ragged anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was of the colour and consistency of leather.

In Bobby’s demonstrations there was neither imagination nor romance: they were merely fascinating in virtue of the amazing exactitude of the detail which his brain had acquired through long familiarity with the dismembered fragments of humanity. There was nothing in the way of minute observation that could escape him, and his questions were so searching and unexpected that even Maskew, who had himself a prodigious memory for minute detail and could carry the letter of a textbook in his head, was constantly floored by them. It was a magnificent stimulus to Edwin; for it became a kind of game to master a part so thoroughly that Bobby could not stump him.

By this time he was so used to railway travelling that between the morning discussion of the progress of the war that had just broken out in South Africa, and the appearance of halfpenny papers, that multiplied like greenfly in this heated atmosphere, he could read his text-books of anatomy in a crowded carriage without disturbance apart from the natural curiosity that a vision of luridly coloured diagrams awakened in the minds of his fellow passengers, and particularly the bank clerk, who thirsted in a way that W.G. would have approved for technical instruction in the matter of certain organs. Edwin prepared himself for the demonstrator’s tutorials as rigorously as if he had been approaching a vital examination; he spent long hours in his bedroom, utterly heedless of his wide prospect of wintry fields, thinking of nothing but his collection of bleached bones, now carefully marked with coloured chalks to show the origins and insertions of muscles, and particularly those intricate fretted plates that are joined to form the fragile casket of the human skull.

So engrossed was he in absorbing the mere details of their physical form that his mind had no room for other speculations of the kind that had impressed him in the days of his first acquaintance with anatomy. It never struck him that the articulated skull which grinned at him from his mantelpiece when he woke each morning, had once contained the convolutions of a human brain: a mass of pulpy matter that had been the origin of strange complications of movement and feeling and thought, the storehouse of memories, the spring of passions and the theatre of dreams. He did not even know if the skull were that of a man or a woman. To him it was no more than an assembly of dry bones, intricate in their relations with one another, pierced by the foramina of bewildering nerves and blood-vessels, all of which must be visualised and stored and remembered within the limits of another structure of the same kind—the sutures and eminences of which he could feel with his own fingers when he rubbed his puzzled head.

He used to go back to Mr. Moon’s tutorials convinced that he knew all that was to be known of the subject in hand, and then Bobby, in his slow Lancashire voice, with broadened “a”s and “u”s, would put to him some leisurely question that showed him that he knew nothing. Very decorously and slowly these questions would be asked; and since the answers were concerned with the dryest and most exact of physical facts, guessing was of no help to him and silence the only refuge of the ignorant. No display either of knowledge or ignorance had the least effect on Bobby Moon. His wide and dreamy face showed no emotion on the discovery of either. On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind of ponderous verbal humour, slow and elephantine, like the humour of Beethoven; but even in these moments his face showed no signs of emotion, and he would pass on without waiting for any recognition of his joke to the next lethargic question. “Mr. Harrop,” he would say slowly, “what is the fotty pod of Hovers?” And Harrop, sitting on a high stool that showed his variegated socks to perfection, would reply that the fatty pad of Havers was a small cushion of fat set in the head of the femur to lubricate the hollow of the acetabulum.

The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to dominate Edwin’s impressions of the dissecting room. There was something provocative in the remoteness of this black and solitary form from all the concerns of human life. Edwin conceived him to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man, but an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously endowed with the powers of locomotion and speech but bereft of any human characteristic. It amazed him to discover, in the end, that Bobby Moon was nothing of the sort, but a creature of the most delicate human tenderness, so sensitive to the appeals of beauty and humanity that he had been forced to adopt the impassive mask that was all that his pupils knew of him from an instinct of self-protection.

It happened in this way. During the early part of his second year Edwin had become conscious of a new figure in the dissecting room, that of a man named Boyce, a student with a brilliant reputation who had managed in some inexplicable way to fail in his first examination and be left behind by the other men of his year. He was a tall, fair creature, with a long face and small, very blue eyes. The society of Alvaston had made him friendly with Martin, from whom Edwin’s new relations were gradually separating him. The only characteristic that Edwin had so far noticed in Boyce was an almost literary fluency in the use of foul language which left even Harrop gasping. Boyce was working alone on a thorax a few tables away from Edwin. He was a neat and laborious dissector, and Edwin had been tempted to admire the skill with which he had defined the network of blood-vessels, the system of coronary arteries and veins, with which the human heart is enmeshed. Boyce was evidently far less unapproachable than Edwin had imagined, and while they were examining his dissection together they had not noticed the approach of Dr. Moon, who had walked slowly to their table and stood gazing at the specimen through his moonlike pince-nez. They did not realise that he was near them until they heard his voice, slowly intoning a line of poetry. “The heart,” he said: “arras’d in purple like a house of kings. Are you acquainted with that line, Mr. Boyce?”

“No, sir. Who wrote it?”

“A man named Francis Thompson. He was a medical student at Manchester, several years senior to me.”

“Oh, I know his name,” said Boyce. “He is a friend of my father’s.”

“A great poet,” said Bobby solemnly. “A great poet. The contemplation of mortality in this place should be full of poetical reflections. You see, this is the heart of a very old or a very dissolute man. The coronary arteries are stiff with atheroma.”

“I was thinking, sir,” said Edwin, encouraged, “of the heart of Shelley that Trelawny was supposed to have picked out of the funeral pyre when the body was burned. His account says that only the heart was left. He gave it to Hunt, didn’t he? But you’d think the heart would be burned more easily—”

“Yes. . . . It’s an unlikely story. Shelley’s heart”—he looked up dreamily at the ceiling—“Shelley’s heart. . . . It’s a strange reflection.” And he moved away, his big head still in the air and his hands behind his back.

“I say,” said Edwin; “I’d no idea Bobby was like that. You wouldn’t associate him with poetry, would you? He seems such an awfully matter-of-fact chap. Dry bones, you know.”

Boyce laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Bobby. Nobody does here except my father. He’s an incurable sentimentalist. He lives an awfully lonely sort of life in some digs up in Alvaston. His mind’s crammed with poetry and old music and a lot of ethnological lumber. Do you know, he’s about the biggest authority in England on prehistoric man?”

“I hadn’t the least idea. I imagined he dreamed of nothing but bones and soft parts.”

“You would. . . . But he’s a wonderful chap really. Are you keen on poetry?”

“Of course I am.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. I don’t imagine that your friends Brown and Maskew are particularly interested in it. My guvnor’s by way of being a poet, you know. Bobby’s awfully keen on his work. Do you know it?”

Edwin was ashamed to say he did not.

“Oh, I’m not in the least surprised,” said Boyce. “He’s not appreciated, you know, except by other poets, like this fellow Thompson. I think he’s rather good, as a matter of fact, quite apart from the fact that he’s my father. If you’ll come up to our place some day I can show you a lot of interesting things in his library: first editions and things like that. I’d no idea that you were keen on them.”

The tone implied such an appreciation of Edwin’s hectic past as typified by his solitary appearance on the stage of the Queen’s Theatre that he hastened to deny the impeachment. He was tremendously pleased to have struck a man like Boyce, who went on to talk about music, of which Edwin knew nothing, and exuded an easy atmosphere of culture, of a kind that he envied, without ever losing sight of the fact that Edwin had come to him in rather a questionable shape. Edwin was thrilled to think that he had reached the threshold of a new and exciting friendship which made his association with Brown and Maskew seem commonplace and shabby; but he was far too shy to force himself on Boyce, and so the acquaintance remained for many months at the exact stage in which it had begun, and he had to be content with the sudden insight that Boyce had given him into the hidden, romantic qualities of Dr. Moon.

Sometimes, while he was scrubbing his hands with carbolic soap, the only thing that really banished the smell of the dissecting room from his fingers, he would hear Boyce discussing music, and particularly the work of Tschaikowsky, whose sixth symphony had just inflamed his imagination, with Mr. Moon in his gloomy bunk, and he would go on washing his hands until they were ridged and sodden in the hope of hearing what they were saying or even of entering into their conversation, until W.G. would come along and drag him off to Joey’s, asking him what the hell he was dawdling about. Then Edwin would be almost ashamed of W.G.’s company, and hated himself for it, since he knew in his heart of hearts that, even if he were a Philistine, W.G. was one of the best and soundest fellows on earth.

The friendship with Boyce, however, was bound to come. It began with the formation of a small literary society, that had been originated by certain of the third-year men with whom Boyce was acquainted, and which held its meetings in the newly-opened smoking room that adjoined Dr. Moon’s chamber of horrors. Papers were read every fortnight, and discussions followed in which Edwin had scarcely dared to take part, but Boyce was a polished and fluent protagonist. In the end, when the first enthusiasms of the society, to which Brown and Maskew, naturally enough, did not belong, had been spent, Edwin was asked to read a paper. He chose for his subject Browne’s _Religio Medici_, a work with which this medical audience seemed strangely unacquainted. The paper was a success, and at the end of the meeting Boyce accosted him friendlily and asked him why he had never been up to see his father’s books. Edwin withheld the obvious reply that the invitation had not been pressed although he had never ceased to think of it; and Boyce at once suggested that they should go up to Alvaston together that evening. “We can put you up for the night if that will be more convenient,” he said.

They walked up together under the high, frosty sky, talking of poetry, of all the beautiful things that they had worshipped in common without knowing it. It seemed strange to Edwin that they should have worked side by side for a couple of years and scarcely spoken to each other when all the time they had so many delights that might have been shared. The unlocking of this closed and secret chamber of his heart gave him a strange feeling of elation and made the world suddenly beautiful. The hard and wintry pavement seemed curiously smooth and resilient; the roadway ran in masterly and noble curves, the black branches of plane-trees and laburnums, even the pointed gables of the smug suburban villas seemed to take on a new and piercing beauty against the starry sky, and they swung along together as triumphant in their ecstasy of youth as if indeed they were treading on the stars.

“What a topping night,” said Boyce. “God . . . look at Vega!” He waved his long arms and quoted:—

“Or search the brow of eve, to catch
In opal depths the first faint beat
Of Vega’s fiery heart. . . .”

“Whose is that?”

“My guvnor’s. He’s a tremendous chap on astronomy.”

“It’s damned good,” said Edwin, thrilling.

“Not bad, is it? He’s a very sound man, the guvnor. I think you’d like him.”

But when they reached the Boyces’ house they found that the poet was not at home. In place of him Edwin was introduced to a mild and beautiful figure with a soft voice who turned out to be Boyce’s mother. She had her son’s soft blue eyes, and spoke to him with such caressing tenderness that Edwin was seized with a sudden feeling of aching emptiness for the memory of his own mother, of whom, so potent is the anodyne of time, he had scarcely thought for more than a year.

Boyce presented Edwin with a high social recommendation. “A friend of Denis Martin’s,” he said. Mrs. Boyce smiled on him.

“Look here,” said her son, “I’m afraid we can’t very well go into the guvnor’s study. He hates any one invading it when he’s not there. Let’s go upstairs to my own room and talk.”

Edwin had a passing vision of the forbidden chamber, the flanks of a grand piano in which a reflection of firelight glowed red, and endless shelves of gilt-lettered books. The rest of the house seemed to him rather untidy, as if it were no more than a dry chrysalis protecting the central beauty of the poet’s room; but he had not time to see much following in the rear of Boyce’s long-legged progress up the stairs. He found himself, at last, in a small attic with a gable window that framed the starry sky: the kind of room that satisfied all his own ideals of comfort and seclusion.

Boyce was proud and willing to exhibit his treasures. They showed a curious mixture of the schoolboy, represented by photographic groups of cricket teams, glass cases of butterflies, and a tasseled Rugby cap, and the more mature intelligence that now possessed them. Edwin and he sat down opposite one another in a couple of easy-chairs, and talked and smoked incessantly all that evening. They spoke of Wordsworth, the idol of Boyce’s literary devotions, of Browning, whose claims to poetry he would not allow, and of Shenstone, whose name he had never met before. By this time Edwin was getting rather ashamed of his early admiration for Shenstone, and the fact that Boyce had never heard of the Pastoral Ballad confirmed him in his decision that the author was an acquaintance whom he had better drop. They went on to Francis Thompson—Dr. Moon’s quotation from the _Anthem of Earth_ had sent Edwin searching for his works in the municipal library—and he now learned that this bewildering genius, who had once, like him, been a medical student, had actually slept in the room beneath his feet.

“He never qualified,” said Boyce dreamily, “and yet medicine is a wonderful thing. I should think the fact that the medical man is always face to face with mortality”—he pointed to a suspended skeleton in the corner—“and all the other big fundamental things like birth and pain, ought to give him a sort of sense of proportion and make him sensitive to the beauties of life. Your friend, Sir Thomas Browne, is an example. Then there’s Rabelais.”

“There are heaps of others,” said Edwin.

“Well, yes. . . . Keats.”

“Byron and Akenside,” Edwin supplied from the eighteenth century.

“I don’t know the gentleman,” said Boyce.

“Well, then, Goldsmith and Crabbe. Crabbe’s rather good, you know. And Shelley—”

“Shelley?”

“Yes, Shelley walked a hospital when he was in London with Harriet.”

“I’d no idea of that,” said Boyce, “but there’s a modern fellow that the guvnor’s rather keen on, named Bridges. Robert Bridges, who’s a physician.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“No . . . he’s not well known, but I believe he’s pretty good.”

And so they talked on, deciding that the world was ripe for great poetical achievement, awed to think that perhaps they were living, without knowing it, in the beginning of a great age of literature; convinced, to a degree of enthusiasm, of the splendour and magnanimity of the calling that they had adopted; conscious—thrillingly conscious—of the fact that the whole world lay before them full of undreamed delights as mysterious and yet as clear as the wintry sky.

Edwin had to run for his train. He didn’t mind running. On a night like this he felt that violent exercise was a mode of expressing the curious elation that his talk with Boyce, and his excitement in the new friendship that promised so many hours of happiness, had given him. At the gates of the station he paused to buy an evening paper. It contained the news of Buller’s defeat at Colenso and the result of a cup-tie between North Bromwich Albion and Notts Forest, but he had no room in his mind for football or for this African war in which W.G., to the ruin of his future finances, was itching to enlist. Edwin’s thoughts were of the great names and the great works of which he and Boyce had been talking. The newspaper lay folded on his knees; the flares of the black country swept past him in the night, unseen. He was not even aware of the other occupants of the carriage until he suddenly found himself staring straight into the eyes of his opposite, whom he recognised as Edward Willis, the son of Walter Willis of the Great Mawne Furnaces.

All Aunt Laura’s attempts, heroically made in the interests of social advancement, had so far failed to bring about a friendship between these two. Edwin, on his side, could never get out of his head an unreasonable prejudice against the Willises, the natural result of Aunt Laura’s adulation of their wealth, and even a knowledge of his own humble origins had not affected his traditional distrust of people whom he regarded as flashy and self-made. In Edward Willis he found a creature even more shy than himself, and the very fact that Mrs. Willis and Aunt Laura, putting their heads together, had decided to throw them into each other’s arms, was enough to create an atmosphere of distrust and uneasiness. The sudden recognition in the railway carriage was merely an embarrassment. Edwin was startled into saying “Hallo,” and Willis replied in exactly the same way; then both of them retired with precipitation to the cover of their evening newspapers, from which they listened to the conversation of a commercial traveller who was returning home from London and had all the latest and most authentic gossip on the South African situation.

“Mind you,” he said, “they’re wily fellows, these old Boers; we may not be up to their dirty tricks: I’m proud to say we aren’t. We shouldn’t be English if we were. But one thing, sir, you’ll see in the end, and that is that dogged British pluck will come through. You mark my words.”

Edwin felt an overpowering impulse to say that dogged British pluck pretty obviously hadn’t come through at Colenso; but Edward Willis’s presence made him far too self-conscious to commit himself, and at the next station the traveller and his friend picked up their bags and departed, breathing the word “Buller” as if it were an incantation warranted to fortify and console. Edwin and Willis were alone.

When their silence had become altogether too ridiculous, Edwin plucked up his courage and said, “Rotten thing this war.”

“I don’t know,” said Willis. “It’s all right for my old man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Iron. . . . We’re chock full of Government work for South Africa: gun-carriages and rifle barrels. You’re doing medicine, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Lucky devil. You’re learning to cure people, while I’m learning to make things to kill them.”

He stared out of the window towards a patch of sky in which the glow of his father’s furnaces pulsated as though it registered the beatings of a savage, fiery heart, and relapsed into gloomy silence. The tunnel swallowed them, and in a moment they pulled up at Mawne Hall. Willis prepared to go. “I say,” he said, “we’re giving a dance next week—” and hesitated.

“What for?” said Edwin, for want of something better.

“I don’t know . . . unless it’s to celebrate the Colenso casualties. I believe you’re invited. I hope you’ll come.”

“Thanks,” said Edwin. But Willis was gone.