Chapter VII: The Clerk

I

WITH this chance encounter, the friendship of Edwin and Matthew Boyce really began; and during the fourth year, that now opened before him, the figure of W.G., who had dominated his stage by sheer physical magnitude, gradually receded. It was inevitable; for the atmosphere of the Boyces’ house at Alvaston, with its air of culture and refinement, was far more in keeping with Edwin’s inclinations than the obtuse, if honest, companionship of W.G. Edwin felt some misgivings for his desertion; but Maskew, who had now brilliantly taken his Primary Fellowship, began his hospital career and rejoined his old partner. So, seeing that the needs of W.G. were provided for and his responsibilities of friendship at an end, Edwin drifted into a happy intimacy with the poet’s son.

They were both so young as to be convinced that they were very old. The world was theirs; for they were full of health and contentment and, at present, so free from complication that they could enjoy to the full the treasures of the past and shape the future into splendid dreams. In the beginning they had found a field of common interest in great works of literature; but these enthusiasms did not carry them very far, for the appreciation of literary masterpieces is at its best a solitary pleasure that is not increased by the joy of sharing. It was in the enjoyment of music that their friendship found the most intense of its pleasures.

Edwin’s musical development had been slow. The first seeds had been planted in his babyhood when, without understanding, he had listened to his mother’s playing. The chapel services at St. Luke’s, made interesting by the exotic harmonies of Dr. Downton, had nursed his interest in the beauty of organised sound. The closed piano in his mother’s drawing-room had been the symbol of an instinct temporarily thwarted, and from this he had escaped by way of Aunt Laura’s late Victorian ballads which had seemed to him very beautiful in their kind. Luckily his mother’s library of music had been good if old-fashioned, and when he amused himself, more or less indiscriminately, by trying to learn the piano at home, he had been forced to do so by way of the sonatas of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart, and the Wohltemperiertes Klavier of Bach.

The emotional disturbance of his strange adventure with Dorothy Powys had thrown him into an orgy of verse-making which produced such poor results that he was forced to turn to the love-poetry of the Elizabethans and of Shelley, which he embroidered with musical settings that gave him more satisfaction. These attempts at song-writing pleased him for a time; but it was not until he became friendly with Boyce that he began to realise what music was. Not only were the Boyces the possessors of a grand-piano on which his homely tinklings became magnificently amplified, but his friend’s father, the poet, was intimately acquainted with the best of modern music.

Boyce introduced Edwin to the great German song-writers from Schubert and Schumann to Hugo Wolf, and laid the foundations of a feverish devotion to Wagner, whom the friends approached perforce by way of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, the two operas that the Moody Manners company ventured to present to provincial audiences. Edwin discovered that North Bromwich, a city that takes its music as a boa-constrictor takes food, in the triennial debauch of a festival and then goes to sleep again, supported—or rather failed to support—a society for the performance of orchestral music. The concerts were held fortnightly in the town-hall, the windows of which had now been repaired, and to these concerts Edwin and his friend went together, always sitting in the same two seats under the gallery at the back of the hall. In this way they heard a great deal of good music: the nine symphonies of Beethoven, with the Leeds Choir in the last: the usual orchestral extracts from the Ring, the Meistersingers Overture, and the Siegfried Idyll: the fourth, fifth, and sixth symphonies of Tschaikovski: the tone-poems of Strauss, and a small sprinkling of modern French music. These were ambrosial nights to which they both looked forward, and Martin, who had developed an unexpected inclination for music, sometimes went with them.

The concerts became the central incident in a kind of ritual. At seven o’clock the two, or sometimes three, would meet in the grill room behind the bar at Joey’s and consume a gross but splendid repast of tripe and onions together with a pint or more of bitter Burton. All the best music, they had decided, was German, and beer was the only drink on which it could be fully appreciated, de Quincey’s preference for laudanum notwithstanding. Pleasantly elated, they would cross the road to the town-hall and take their familiar seats, pleased to recognise the people who, like themselves, were regular attendants or subscribers to this unfashionable function; and Boyce, who, by virtue of his distinguished parentage, knew every one in North Bromwich who was interested in music, would point out to them all the distinguished people who were present: Oldham, the critic of the _Mail_, whom Arthur Boyce declared to be the soundest living writer on musical subjects, and Marsden, who did the musical criticism for the _Courier_. Matthew knew them both. Oldham, he said, was a wonderful fellow, who wrote with a pen of vitriol that made such short work of baser metals that the gold of beauty appeared brighter for his writing. Oldham became Edwin’s prophet; but, on the whole, he preferred the looks of Marsden.

“What is Marsden like?” he asked.

“Marsden? Oh, well, as a matter of fact, Marsden’s a bit of a gas bag. The governor says that he always reminds him of an old hen. Didn’t you notice him in Joey’s talking nineteen to the dozen to that queer fellow with a face like a full moon who sits in front of us?”

The fellow with the face like a full-moon was only one of twenty or thirty people with whom the friends experienced a sort of comradeship on these nights. Perhaps the most wonderful time was the end of the concert when they would walk out together into the spring night, parting at the corner of the town-hall; and the memory of great musical moments would accompany Edwin home through miles of darkling country, and even fill his little room at Halesby with their remembered glory or wander through his dreams.

His life at home was the least satisfactory part of these enchanted years. There were moments, indeed, when it seemed as if the ideal relationship with his father, that had been his early ambition, were being realised. Sometimes, on a Sunday morning, they would walk round the garden together in the sun, and Edwin would experience a return of the passionate good-will and anxiety to please that had overwhelmed him in the moment of their bereavement; but their two natures were radically so different that such moments were rare, and, when they came, were really more of an embarrassment than a pleasure.

He felt that, on his side at any rate, the relationship was artificial; that, however unnatural it might seem, he really had to whip himself up to a proper appreciation of his father’s virtues. A sense of veiled but radical antagonism underlay all their dealings with each other; and at times this hidden thing, that Edwin held in such dread, came so perilously near to the surface as to threaten an open rupture.

The question of Edwin’s allowance created one of these dangerous situations. Edwin knew that it was impossible for him to live the ordinary life of a medical student in North Bromwich without one; but the distaste for speaking of money matters, which arose from his delicate appreciation of his father’s finances, had made it difficult to approach the subject. At last he had screwed up his courage to the point of making a very modest demand, and his father, instead of realising the difficulty he had found in doing so, had hedged in a way that made Edwin feel himself a hard and mercenary parasite.

“All right, father, we won’t say anything more about it,” he said, comforting himself with the assurance that in a couple of years he would be qualified and in a position to earn his own living and pay his way. On the strength of this, and with his eyes wide open, he ran up a number of small tailors’ bills in North Bromwich; and all would have been well if Mr. Ingleby, in a fit of absent-mindedness, had not opened these incriminating documents and leapt to the conclusion that his son was going rapidly to the dogs. An unfortunate scene followed.

“I suppose you realise, Edwin,” he said, “that you are a minor, and that while you are under age I am responsible for these bills?”

“I’ve not the least intention of letting you pay them,” said Edwin.

“I’m afraid I have no alternative. I want you to tell me truthfully if there are any others.”

“Of course there are others. Please don’t bother about them. In a little while I shall be able to pay them.”

“This is a great blow to me,” said Mr. Ingleby solemnly, overwhelming Edwin with a picture of virtuous poverty staggering from a cowardly blow in the dark; and the obvious distrust with which his father regarded him made his position at home almost intolerable. It seemed to him that his father now looked upon all his pleasures with suspicion; and, as a natural result, he lived more than ever to himself, only returning to Halesby late at night or at times when he knew that his father would be busy in the shop. One circumstance came to bridge the gap between them, a course of pharmacology that Edwin took early in his fourth year. He was delighted to find a subject in which his father was more learned than himself, and spent a number of hours that were almost happy in the shop answering the questions that Mr. Ingleby put to him on pharmacopoeial doses and searching the little nests of drawers for rare drugs to identify in their raw state. But the pharmacology course was short, and the subject that was so important in his father’s life was small and unimportant in Edwin’s. In addition to which he could not help feeling a sort of ethical prejudice against the complacency with which his father discharged patent medicines that he knew to be worthless if not harmful.

Every circumstance tended to isolate him from the influences of Halesby. His sudden attempt to be friendly with Edward Willis had withered under the humiliating _dénouement_ of his adventure with Dorothy Powys; the new fields of music that he explored with Matthew Boyce had made him discontented with Aunt Laura’s ballads; the general air of elegance and refinement with which he had become acquainted in one or two Alvaston houses to which the Boyces had introduced him, made everything in Halesby, even his own home, seem a little shabby and unsatisfactory. North Bromwich, and his work there, claimed him more and more.

II

Even when his first enthusiasms and the inspiring generalisations that arose from them were exhausted, he found that he could not escape from the fascination of the studies which he now pursued, for the most part, in the company of Matthew Boyce. His third year had not only introduced him to the romance of surgery and the human interests of hospital life. He had spent long hours in the pathological laboratory and had made acquaintance with bacteriology, a science that was still in its infancy.

In this work he had shared a desk with Boyce, to whom it was particularly attractive, and between them they had developed a bacteriological technique rather above the average, taking an imaginative delight in the isolation of the microscopic deadly forms of vegetable life that are responsible for nearly all the physical sufferings of mankind. When they looked together at the banded bacilli of tubercule, stained red with carbolfuchsin, they saw more than a specimen under a coverglass: they saw the chosen and bitter enemies of genius, the malignant, insensate spores of lowest life that had banished Keats to fade in Rome, Shelley to drown by Via Reggio, Stevenson to perish in Samoa: the blind instruments of destruction that were even then draining the last strength from the opium-sodden frame of the author of _The Hound of Heaven_. Here, in a single test-tube, they could see enclosed enough of the organisms of cholera to sweep all Asia with a wave of pestilence; here, stained with Indian ink, the dreamy trypanosome that had wrapped the swarming shores of the Nyanzas of dark Africa in the sleep of death.

Both of them were seized with a passionate fever for research, to rid humanity of this insidious and appalling blight. Now, more than ever, they felt the supreme responsibilities of their calling; and when, in their fourth year, they passed on to their work in the medical wards, as clerks to the senior physician at the Infirmary, and saw the effects of bacterial havoc on the bodies of men and women, their enthusiasm rose to a still higher pitch.

The canons of the new university decreed that students who had learnt their surgery at one hospital should study medicine at the other. It was something of a disappointment to Edwin to exchange the homely atmosphere of Prince’s, where everything was familiar, for the colder and more formal wards of the Infirmary. This hospital, which was nearly twice the size of the other, was situated in the lower and less healthy part of the city. At Prince’s there had been a way of escape westwards through the pleasant suburban greens of Alvaston to the country and the hills. The Infirmary, in its terra-cotta arrogance, had been set down in the heart of unreclaimed slums, in such a way that its very magnificence and efficiency were depressing by contrast. Edwin disliked the palatial splendour of its shining wards which, for all their roominess, were full of an air that suffocated; for the windows were never opened, and the atmosphere that the patients breathed had been sucked into the place by an immense system of forced ventilation, filtered until it seemed to have lost all its nature, heated, and then propelled through innumerable shafts into every corner of the building. In the basement of the hospital the machine that was responsible for this circulation of heated air made a melancholy groaning; and this sound made the whole structure seem more like an artificial assembly of matter than a real hospital with a personality and a soul.

It is possible that the teaching methods of the Infirmary were superior to those of Prince’s; and the supporters of the institution prided themselves on the fact that the nursing staff was drawn from a higher social stratum; but for a long time Edwin felt considerably less at home there than he had been at the older hospital. The ward work, however, was even more fascinating, for the reason, no doubt, that his wonder was now tempered with a higher degree of erudition.

He found his new chief an inspiring figure. In the first place, the fact that he was a gentleman and a man of culture made him an effective contrast to that dynamic but plebeian genius, L.M. He was a graduate of one of the older universities, and though this counted for little in the mind of Edwin, who now affected to despise the city of his broken dream, it did lend an air of distinction to Sir Arthur Weldon’s discourses. He had a quiet voice, an admirable manner with women patients or nurses, and beautiful hands, on one of which he wore a signet ring embellished with his crest and a motto which his presence merited: “In toto teres atque rotundus.” The rotundity, it may be added, was so mild as to do no more than accentuate the elegance of a gold and platinum watch-chain that he wore. He was a great stickler for the traditions and dignity of his profession, and no word that was not infallibly correct disturbed the urbanity of his slow and polished periods. For this reason his tutorials in the wards were models of academic dignity, and much frequented by students who knew that he was far too anxious for the form of his discourse to break its continuity by asking awkward questions. He treated his clerks, and indeed every member of his classes, as if they were gentlemen nurtured in the same fine atmosphere as himself. He inspired confidence, and demanded nothing in return but correctness of behaviour and speech.

All these things made it easy to work for him; and the fact that over and above these social qualities he was a particularly sound physician, with a reputation that was already more than provincial, made Edwin sensible of the privilege of acting as his clerk.

His speciality was disease affecting the heart or lungs, and though his wards at the infirmary were open to all sorts of general medical cases, these two types of tragedy came most frequently under his care and Edwin’s observation. Sir Arthur exacted from his clerks the preparation of accurate and voluminous notes on all his cases, and Edwin spent many hours in the wards extracting from his patients the details of family and medical history and moulding them into a balanced and intelligible report. The emotions that the study of the tubercle bacillus had aroused in him in the laboratory were reinforced a hundred times in the wards devoted to phthisical patients, too far advanced in dissolution for sanatorium treatment, that were his chief’s especial care.

They were most of them creatures of intelligence and sensitiveness above the average of the hospital patient; their eyes shone between their long lashes with a light that may have been taken for that of inspiration in those of dead poets; even in the later stages of the disease, when their strength would hardly allow them to drag up their emaciated limbs in their beds, and their bodies were wrung nightly with devastating sweats or attacks of hæmorrhage that left them transparent and exhausted—even then they were so ready to be cheerful and to let their imagination blossom in vain hope, that Edwin found them the most pitiful of all his patients. The _spes phthisica_ seemed to him the most pathetic as well as the most merciful of illusions.

In this ward he became acquainted with one patient in particular, a boy, the son of labouring parents whom heredity and circumstance alike had marked down from the day of his birth to be a victim of the disease. His mother and two sisters had died of it, and all his short life had been spent in a labourer’s cottage made deadly by the family’s infection, at the sunless bottom of a wet Welsh valley.

As a child he had been too delicate to enjoy the fresh air that he would have breathed on the way to the village school. He had lived, as far as Edwin could make out, in the single room in which his mother had lain dying, and had learned to read and write at her side. Then she had died; and as soon as he was old enough he had been sent out to work on the farm where his father was employed, an occupation that might well have saved him if the work and the exposure had not been too severe, or if he had not returned at night to the infected hovel. As it was, in the rainy autumn weather of the hills, he had caught a chill and sickened with pleurisy, and thus the inevitable had happened.

He was only fifteen. Education had never come his way, and he had never read any books but the Confessions of Maria Monk and the family Bible; but whenever Edwin came to go over his chest and make the necessary report of progress—fallacious word—upon his case sheets, he noticed that the boy would hide a sheet of paper on which he had been writing. His confidence was easily won, and without the least shame he showed Edwin what he had been doing. He had spent his time in writing verses composed, for the most part, in the jingling measures of Moody and Sankey’s hymns. They were sprinkled with strange dialect words that filled them with splashes of sombre colour; most of them were frankly ungrammatical; but there were things in some of them that seemed to Edwin to bear the same relation to poetry as the mountain tricklings of that far hill country bore to the full stream of Severn. Their banalities, faintly imitated from the banalities of the hymn book, were occasionally relieved by phrases of pure beauty that caught the breath with surprise.

“Why do you do this?” Edwin asked, and when he had recovered from the shyness and diffidence into which the question had cast him, the boy told him that he wrote his verses because he couldn’t help it, because the words became an obsession to him and would not let him sleep until they were written down. The thin flame of creative aspiration showed itself in other ways, in the patient’s vivid delight in colours and sounds, and in the strange pictures, having no relation to nature, that he drew with coloured chalks.

It seemed to Edwin that in this case the exhaustion of chronic disease had revealed the existence, as it sometimes will, of a faint fire of natural genius. “There, but for the spite of heaven,” he thought, “goes John Keats,” and, with the feelings of an experimenter in explosives who mixes strange reagents, he lent his patient a copy of the poet’s works.

The boy fell on them eagerly. He confessed that he did not understand them; but he would read them all day, mispronouncing the words as the classical student perhaps mispronounces those of the Greek poets, but extracting from their sonorous beauty a curious and vivid sensual satisfaction. A single line would sometimes throw him into a kind of trance, and he would lean back in his bed with the book open on his chest and his slender clubbed fingers clasped above it, repeating to himself his own version of the words without any conception of their real meaning. Sometimes a line would fill him with memories:—

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery moon, and eve’s one star . . .”

“That is like our home,” he would say.

The house-physician did not approve of these experiments. On principle he would have disapproved of poetry, and in this case he considered the reading of it unhealthy. As if there were any element of health in this misfortune! . . . A few weeks later the patient had an attack of hæmoptysis and died.

It was only in such cases of chronic illness that the question of the patient’s intellectual state arose. Such speculations might mitigate the fatigue of slow siege warfare that had only one end in view, but the acute medical wards, and particularly those devoted to acute pneumonia, were the scene of shorter and more desperate conflicts, grapplings with death, in which the issue was doubtful and medicine could at least give support, and sometimes turn the tide.

These were indeed terrible battles, in which devoted nursing counted for much. To Edwin it was a sight more awe-inspiring than the quiet of death, to watch a strong man stretched upon his back, breathing terribly through the night-long struggles of pneumonia. In it he could see the most tremendous expression of a man’s will to live, in the clenched hands, in the neck, knotted and swollen with intolerable strain, in the working of the muscles of the face and nose in their supreme thirst for air. The sound of this breathing would fill the room that was otherwise so silent that one could hear the soft hiss of the oxygen escaping from its cylinder. The train of students that followed Sir Arthur round the wards would stand waiting in the doorway, knowing that nothing was to be seen, and the physician himself would step quietly to the square of red screens and exchange a whisper with the sister who stood at the patient’s bedside, her lips compressed as though their muscles were contracting in sympathy with the other tortured muscles that she watched.

“Weill, how is he?” the physician would ask.

“I think he’s holding his own. No sleep.”

“That’ a pity. Well, persevere with the brandy and the warm oxygen.”

“Yes, sir.” Her tense lips scarcely moved.

And then Edwin’s chief, so quietly that the patient did not know what he was doing, being indeed no more than a mass of labouring muscles bent on life, would feel the temporal pulse in front of the ear with his firm white finger.

“Not so bad, sister . . . not so bad.”

Then he would sweep away with the tails of his frock-coat swinging.

“Ingleby, did you notice anything about the patient’s hands?”

“His hands, sir?’

“Yes . . . his hands.”

“No, sir. Nothing, I’m afraid. I don’t think he was plucking the bedclothes . . . carphology, do they call it?”

“You had better look the word up if you are not sure. No . . . it was a finer movement. He was rolling his thumbs over the tips of his index fingers, just like a man making pellets of bread at a dinner party. There are men who do that. Remember it. It’s a bad sign in a case of lobar pneumonia. Come along, gentlemen. The pneumococcus is a sporting antagonist. Short and sweet. I’d as soon die of pneumonia as anything and have a run for my money. That case has put up a good fight.”

That “case” . . . On the face of it the use of the word seemed to justify the accusation of gross materialism that is so usually made against the profession of medicine. The patient who lay there fighting for his life was, in the physician’s eyes, a case, and not, as Edwin, who had taken notes of his history in the earlier stages of the disease knew him to be, a bricklayer’s labourer from Wolverbury with a wife and six children, two of whom had died in infancy. He was a case: a human body, the soulless body that Edwin had learned in detail through two years of labour in the dissecting room, consisting of a heart hard-pressed, a nervous system starved of oxygen and weakened by the virus of pneumonia, and a pair of clogged lungs. This was the whole truth as far as it concerned the physician. The calamity was a material calamity to be fought with material weapons, and the state of his soul, or his relations with his wife and the rest of the community in which he lived, only mattered in so far as they affected his body and revealed him to have been a clean-living and temperate man. For the rest he was a case; and it were well for the physician to leave the _animula_, _vagula_, _blandula_ to the poets. This was one of the hard lessons of medicine.

These were sombre things; but it must not be imagined that they reflected the general tenor of hospital life. The Infirmary, indeed, was so vast as to be microcosmic, and its loves, its jealousies, and its ambitions combined to produce a broad effect of human comedy, not without tears, but leavened by the rich, and often unprintable humour that flourished in the out-patient department. Hospital politics, hospital scandals, hospital romances, combined to make life a vivid and exciting experience. In the toils of the last, spring found W.G. securely bound. Harrop, too, had launched into a desperate affair with a probationer in the children’s wards whom the matron promptly transferred to the infectious block and perpetual quarantine. Edwin and Boyce escaped this epidemic of tenderness that swept through the fourth year like measles. They were far too absorbed in their own interests and discoveries to worry their hearts about anything in a nurse’s cap and apron.

Spring passed in a swift vision of plum-blossom in the Boyce’s Alvaston garden and two weeks of musical debauchery, one Wagnerian and the other of Gilbert and Sullivan. Most of the time they were working at high pressure; but a week before the beginning of the fourth examination, Boyce proposed that they should cycle down together to the country house that his father rented in Gloucestershire, and blow away the vapours of forced ventilation with Cotswold air.

On the eve of an examination it seemed a daring but enthralling plan. Edwin put the proposal before Mr. Ingleby, and was surprised to find that he didn’t object. Indeed, it had seemed to Edwin for several months that his father was curiously distrait and less interested than usual in his work. This consent freed his conscience, and the two friends set off together on a Saturday afternoon in the spirit of abandoned holiday that is the highest privilege of youth. They had decided to take no medical books with them. As far as they were concerned, the examination might go hang; for a whole week they would live with no thought for the morrow, taking long rides over the Cotswolds, lunching at village inns on bread and cheese, returning at night to feasts of beans and bacon and libations of Overton cider.

They started from the infirmary at half-past two, and had soon left the dust and tram-lines of North Bromwich behind. The smooth, wide road that they followed stretched in magnificent undulations over the heights of the Midland plateau from which they could see the shapes of Uffdown and Pen Beacon fading into the west under a pale, black-country sky. In front of them southward the sky was blue.

“We’re in for ripping weather,” Boyce shouted as he rode ahead.

The weather didn’t really matter: they were in for a great adventure. From the plateau they glided swiftly to the vale of Redditch, and when they had left that sordid little town behind they climbed the backbone of the Ridgway, where the road follows the thin crest of a line of small hills and overlooks on either side two dreaming plains. In a blue haze of summer these green dominions lay asleep, so richly scattered with dark woodlands that no human habitation could be seen. They were as lonely as the sky. Westward of Severn the Clees and Malverns towered over Wales; but Boyce appeared to be more interested in certain lower wooded hills upon the eastern side. He made Edwin the confidant of his latest romance.

“She and I,” he said, “used to bicycle out from Alvaston in the cool of the evening . . . about an hour and a half’s easy ride. It was early last summer. Those woods are full of nightingales. We used to sit on a gate and listen to them and ride home together in the dark. I can tell you it was pretty wonderful.”

Of course it was wonderful. Everything must be wonderful in this enchanted country. Riding along in the afternoon sunlight Edwin constructed for himself just such another passionate adventure; and the figure with which he shared these imaginary ecstasies was, for want of a better, Dorothy Powys. While the dream nightingales were singing their hardest and he was on the point of renewing that unforgettable kiss, they came to a cottage half timbered and lost in clematis and honeysuckle where a steep road fell on either side at right angles to the ridge.

“Right,” shouted Boyce, “we’ll take the road down through the Lenches.”

“What are the Lenches?” said Edwin, riding abreast.

“Villages. Five of them, I think. There’s Rous Lench and King’s Lench and Abbot’s Lench, and two others. They’re a proper subject for a poem.”

“Right-o . . . let’s collaborate,” said Edwin. “How’s this for a beginning?”

“As I was riding through the Lenches
I met three strapping country wenches.”

And laughing together, they constructed a series of frankly indecent couplets, recording the voyager’s adventures with all three. It was a matter of the most complete collaboration, for the friends supplied alternate lines, outdoing one another in Rabelaisian extravagance. Edwin, however, provided the final couplet, which, he declared, gave the composition literary form:—

“Home to my vicarage I hasted
Feeling the day had not been wasted.”

“A parson of the type of Herrick,” said Boyce.

“Yes . . . but more serious.”

“That kind of affair is awfully serious . . . at the time.”

The gables of Evesham and its one tall tower swam in a golden dust. They drank cider in the inn courtyard, purchased a couple of Bath chaps at a grocer’s and crossed the Avon. Through an orchard country they rode in that hour of evening when bird-song is most wistful. The sun went down in a blaze of splendour behind Bredon Hill. The perfume of a beanfield swept across the road.

“Good God, isn’t it good?” said Boyce. “We are nearly there.”

A village of Cotswold stone half hidden in blossoms of crimson rambler received them. The gardens were full of sweet-williams, pale phloxes, and tall hollyhocks. “Straight on,” Boyce called.

A sign-post pointed up the hill to Overton. They dismounted, and pushed their bicycles up a steep lane in the twilight. Bats were flitting everywhere, and a buff-coloured owl fluttered heavily between the overarching elms. A faint tinkle of trickling water came to their ears.

“That is the sound of Overton,” said Boyce. “Slow water trickling in the night.”

They slept together in the low-beamed room, so soundly that the sun was high before they wakened next morning.

The week that now followed was the very crown of youth. The Boyce’s summer house stood upon a patch of terraced ground, being the highest of the three farms round which the hamlet of Overton clustered, and overlooked the blossomy vale of Evesham bounded by the Cotswold escarpment, blue and dappled with the shadows of cloud. “_Parva domus_: _magna quies_,” read the motto that Matthew’s father, the poet, had placed above the lintel of the door: “small house: great quietness”—and indeed it seemed to Edwin that there could be no quieter place on earth.

He and Matthew would smoke their morning pipes together on a stone terrace that bleached in the sun along the edge of a garden that the poet had planted for perfume rather than for beauty of bloom. Here they would sit, nursing books that were unread, until the spirit tempted them to set out towards the blue escarpment, and, after a hard climb, lose themselves in the trough of some deep billow of Cotswold and fall asleep on a bank of waving grasses, or follow some runnel of the Leach or Windrush until it joined the mother stream, where they would strip and float over the shallows with the sun in their eyes, emerging covered with the tiny water leeches that gave one of the rivers its name.

On the height of Cotswold they found an inn that was half farm, possessing a barrel of cider that Edwin was almost ready to acknowledge as the equal of that which he had drunk in Somerset; and, for further attraction a huge yellow cat beneath the lazy stare of whose topaz eyes Matthew sat worshipping. In the evening the air that moved over the wolds grew cool and dry and more reviving than any juice of yellow apples, and with their lungs full of it they would spin down the winding hills into the plain, past many sweet-smelling villages and golden manor-houses, reaching Overton about sunset, when the evening stocks, that Mr. Boyce had planted along the approaches to his doorway, recovered from their lank indolence and drenched the air with a scent that matched the songs of nightingales.

There Mrs. Pratt, the wife of a neighbouring labourer, would have their dinner ready: tender young beans and boiled bacon and crisp lettuce from the garden that Matthew dressed according to the directions of his epicurean father; and with their meal, and after, they would drink the dry and bitter cider made at the middle farm from the apples of orchards that now dreamed beneath them.

Then came music. The drawing-room piano stood by the open window, and a soft movement of air disturbed the flames of the candles in silver candlesticks that lighted the music stand. No other light was there; and in the gloom beyond, Edwin, playing the tender songs of Grieg and Schumann, and the prelude to Tristan, would see the long legs of Matthew stretched dreaming on a sofa. The nights were so silent that it seemed a pity to mar them with music; and for a long time Edwin would sit in silence at the piano, while strong winged moths fluttered in out of the darkness and circled round the candle’s flame. Last of all, before they turned in, they would go for a slow walk over meadows cool in the moonlight, listening to the silence—“Solemn midnight’s tingling silentness,” Matthew quoted—or to the gentle creaking of the branches of elms, now heavy with foliage, that embosomed their small house.

The last day of their holiday was wet; but that made no great difference to them, for a succession of showers drew from the drenched garden a perfume more intense. They spent the day in musical exploration, and when the darkness came they sat together talking far into the night. They talked of North Bromwich, for the ponderable influence of the morrow had already invaded their quietude, and of their future work.

“In a year’s time,” said Edwin, “we shall be qualified.”

“What shall you do?”

“Oh, general practice, I suppose. That’s the easiest way to make a living. It’s what most men do.”

“I don’t like the idea of it,” said Matthew. “It’s sordid, unsatisfactory work. A hard living in which science stands no chance. Selling bottles of medicine—quite harmless, of course, but unnecessary—to people who don’t really need them. You have to do it to make a living. If you don’t the other people cut you out.”

“I don’t think it’s as bad as that. There must be something fundamentally good about medical practice. You are actually helping the people who are genuinely ill.”

“That’s the ideal side of it. But there’s another. I don’t think I shall risk it. If the governor can’t let me have enough money to wait for consulting practice, I shall have a shot at one of the services. I think the Indian Medical Service is the thing. Fairly good pay, a chance of seeing the world, and a good sporting life.”

“India—?” Edwin had never thought of it. Sitting there in an English dusk the idea appealed to him. Great rivers: burning plains under the icy rampart of Himalaya: strange, dark religions. India. . . . Yes, it sounded good. His imagination went a little farther ahead. A hill-station according to Kipling, or perhaps a more solitary cantonment in the plains where the commandant was a major in the Indian army and the wife of the commandant, a girl whose name had once been Dorothy Powys. And the major, of course, would succumb to some pernicious tropical disease through which Edwin would nurse him devotedly; and when he was dead and buried his beautiful wife would come to Edwin—the only other Englishman in the station, and say: “I never really loved him. I never really loved any one but you.” Altogether an extremely romantic prospect. . . . Yes, the Indian Medical Service would do very well. . . .

The last night was more beautiful in its silence than any other. It had been a wonderful week. There would never be another like it. The crown of youth. And, as it came to pass, the end of youth as well.

III

It was late that night when Edwin reached home. After the huge openness of the Cotswold expanses, the air of Halesby, lying deep in its valley, seemed to him confined and oppressive, and to add to this impression there was a sense of thunder in it. After supper his father went to his writing desk and pulled out a sheaf of bluish, translucent papers which he spread out on the table, and began to study intently. Edwin, sprawling, tired and contented, in the corner, watched him lazily.

“Whatever have you got there, father?” he said.

“Plans . . . architect’s plans,” Mr. Ingleby replied nervously.

“Plans? What for? Surely you aren’t thinking of building a new house.”

“Well, not exactly. No . . . I am thinking of adding to this one.”

“But that would be an expensive job. Isn’t it big enough for us?”

“Yes. It’s big enough at present; but it may not be shortly.”

“What do you mean?”

Edwin laughed uneasily, for he could not understand this air of mystery. Mr. Ingleby rose from his plans and cleared his throat. The little lamp-lit room immediately became full of an atmosphere of suppressed intensity, in which the tick of the clock could be heard as if it were consciously calling attention to the importance of the moment.

“I mean. . . . As a matter of fact, I had intended telling you this evening; but I found it difficult to do so, because . . . because I could not be quite sure how you’d take it. It . . . it may come as a shock to you. I am thinking of enlarging the house because I am proposing to be married again.”

“Married? Good God!”

A feeling of inexplicable passion choked Edwin so that his voice did not sound as if it were his own.

“Yes, I knew it would come as a surprise to you. Probably you’ll find it difficult to understand my feelings. You mustn’t be hasty.’

“Good God!” Edwin’s amazement could find no other words.

“You are the first person I have told, Edwin. I’ve thought a good deal about it . . . about you particularly, and I’ve quite satisfied myself that I am not doing you any injustice. In another year I suppose you will be going out into the world and leaving me. Don’t decide what you think too hastily.”

He paused, but Edwin could not speak.

“If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you all about it. I think you will approve of my choice. I’ll tell you—”

“For God’s sake, don’t. Not now—”

“Very well. As you wish.” Mr. Ingleby’s hands that held the architect’s papers trembled. He smiled, kindly, but with a sort of bewilderment. “As you wish,” he repeated.

And Edwin, feeling as if he would do something ridiculous and violent in the stress of the curiously mingled emotions that possessed him, went quickly to the door and ran upstairs to his room, where he flung himself on his bed in the dark.

In a little while he found himself, ridiculously, sobbing. He could not define the passionate mixture of resentment, jealousy, shame, and even hatred, that overwhelmed him. He could not understand himself. A psycho-analyst, no doubt would have found a name for his state of mind, describing it as an “Œdipus complex”; but Edwin had never heard of psycho-analysis, and only knew that his mind was ruthlessly torn by passions beyond the control of reason. He made a valiant attempt to think rationally. Primarily, he admitted, it wasn’t his business to decide whether his father should marry again or remain a widower. His father was a free agent with responsibilities towards Edwin that were rapidly vanishing and would soon be ended. He couldn’t even suggest that this new marriage would be the ruin of any vital comradeship between them, for the hopes of this ideal state that he had once cherished, had not been realised during the last few years. There was no reason why his father’s marriage should affect him personally, or even financially, for he had never reckoned on the least paternal support when once he should be qualified. There was not even the least suggestion that his father was physically unsuitable for the married state, for there was no reason why he should not live for many years to come. There were actually valid arguments, that Edwin could not dispute, in favour of the plan—such as Mr. Ingleby’s loneliness, soon to be increased, and the discomfort that he had suffered as an elderly widower at the hands of a series of inefficient house-keepers. From every point of view the world would be justified in concluding that he was doing the correct and obvious thing. Why, then, should Edwin lie on his bed in the dark wetting his pillow with tears, and sick with shame?

No reason could assuage his suffering. However calmly he tried to consider the matter, the thought of his mother rose up in his mind; a vision of her, beautiful and pathetic, and indefinitely wronged, came to reinforce his indignation. He lit a candle and gazed for a long time at her photograph, the one that he had always kept in his desk at St. Luke’s and scarcely noticed for the last three years; and though he knew that she was dead and presumably beyond the reach of any human passion, the sight of her features filled him more than ever with this unconscionable resentment so devastating in its intensity. The portrait took him back to the tenderness that he remembered at the time of her death, and particularly that strange moment when he and his father had knelt together in the little room across the landing. The smell of Sanitas. . . .

And then he remembered another incident in the gloom of that brown room at the Holloway on the windy crown of Mendip, whence he had seen all the kingdoms of the earth. Thinking of this, he seemed to hear the voice of a very old woman, who said, “The Inglebys are always very tender in marriage. I’ve seen many of them that have lost their wives, and they always marry again.” How could she have known? And then the thought of a strange woman in the house, treading in the places where his mother’s steps had once moved, swept him off his feet again.

“I could never stay here,” he thought. “I could never stay here. . . . I should do something desperate and cruel and unreasonable. I couldn’t help myself. I must go. It’s a pity . . . but I must go. I couldn’t stay here. I simply couldn’t.”

With this determination in his mind, but without the least idea of the way in which it might be realised, he arrived at a state of comparative serenity, in which he could contemplate his mother’s photograph without so much passionate resentment at the slur that was being laid on her memory. Now he saw everything in terms of his new resolution. He saw, pathetically, the little bed in which he had slept for so many years, the shelves on which his favourite books were ranged, the piano and the sheaves of his mother’s music that he had managed to install in his room: all the small details that went together to create its atmosphere of homeliness.

“How the devil shall I manage to leave them?” he thought. He went to the window and saw, beyond the garden trees, the low line of those familiar hills: the landscape that he had always delighted in as his own, and that now was to be his no longer. He sighed, for to leave them seemed to him impossible; they were so familiar, so much a definite part of his life. A curious impulse seized him to creep downstairs and out of the house, and visit the grave in the cemetery where his mother was laid; but he restrained himself from this debauch of sentiment. “It will do no good,” he thought. “It’s all over.” He even wondered if he might feel happier if he went down to Aunt Laura’s house and confided in her: perhaps she would understand. At least she was his mother’s sister and might be conscious of the indignity; but when he had almost determined to do this, he reflected that she and his uncle were probably in bed, and a ludicrous picture of her putting her head out of the window to ask what was the matter, with her hair in curling pins, restrained him. Besides, it would be rather ridiculous to fall back upon the sympathies of a person whom he had neglected for several years.

“No. . . . I must go on my own way,” he thought. “It’s a sort of break in my life, just like the big break before. It’s got to be faced, and it’s no good worrying about it.”

He suddenly remembered that in twelve hours’ time he would be sitting for his fourth examination, and that it would be wise for him to get some sleep; so he undressed and went to bed, wondering how many more times he would undress in that little room and caring less than he would have expected. He fell asleep soon, for he was thoroughly tired out, and slept so soundly that he did not see his father enter the room a few hours later. He came in softly, in his dressing-gown, carrying a candle, and stooped above Edwin’s sleeping figure with troubled eyes.