Chapter II: Golden Mediocrity

I

OF course he got his thrashing in return; but, in the end, he found himself the gainer by that unthinkable outburst. The incident had been noted, and there were those who relished the blow to Griffin’s prestige, a blow which no recriminatory lickings could efface. Edwin assured himself that he had that day lighted such a candle in England as should never be put out. It seemed, indeed, as though the affair had revealed to some of his own classmates that intellectual superiority which they had overlooked before; and, in particular, it made the basis of a friendship between himself and one of his rivals, a boy named Widdup, who combined with a head for mathematics—Edwin’s blank despair—a certain proficiency in games. Widdup disliked Griffin.

“Great beefy beast,” he said. “If they’d make him play footer and sweat some of the fat off him he’d have been a bit quicker on you. He wasn’t half waxy about it. He hates being laughed at. . . .”

And so, as the terms slipped by, St. Luke’s ceased to be a purgatory. Edwin contracted certain timid friendships—as this with Widdup—and adored a series of perfectly ordinary prefects. He shook down into his proper place in the scheme of things, and after that nobody took much notice of him. Even the Griffin-Douglas coalition, who never forgave, troubled him very little. Certain outbursts of persecution he took as a matter of course; such was the teaching of history; but the ways of these two were now widely divergent from those in which he trod. The dormitory was the only place in which they inevitably met, for he had managed to move his seat in Hall some way from that of Griffin; and in chapel, the only other place they had in common, he was safe.

The friendship with Widdup notably ripened. They were both members of the same branch of the Natural History Society, the one that was labelled astronomical. The subject was unpopular, for its pursuit was nocturnal and made no exciting appeal to the hunting instinct of boys. The section met every fortnight in the room of one of the mathematical masters. And since they met at night, they managed to escape second Prep. Their president, Mr. Heal, was a rather melancholy performer on the flute, and Edwin, generally contriving to turn up some minutes before the meeting began, would stand at the door listening to the innocent gentleman playing to himself unaccompanied folk-tunes that he had collected in the holidays. At the first sound of a door-knock Heal would unscrew his flute and pack it into a case lined with puce-coloured plush; but it seemed as though an afterglow of tenderness still lingered on his unusually dull features. As for astronomy, they never got much farther than the mere names of constellations and their figures, although Widdup often asked questions which almost tapped the mathematical master’s subject. These adventures were discouraged, for Mr. Heal had grown to hate mathematics. But they did learn to find their way about the paths of the sky, and often, on frosty winter evenings, when the clear vault above the downs was like jet, Edwin and Widdup would walk up and down the Quad and imagine that they could feel the heave of the spinning world, while they watched Capella scale the dome of sky. And once, when he had come to the master’s room a little early on the night of the section meeting, Mr. Heal cleared his throat and, taking Edwin by the ear, began to read from an olive-green book that he held in his hand. He read atrociously. “How do you like this?” he said. “H’m?” He said “H’m” with a little snarl in it.

“The Dog Star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half up the southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it swung itself forth above the rim of the landscape; Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy square of Pegasus was creeping round to the North-West; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia’s chair stood daintily poised in the uppermost boughs.”

Edwin thought it was “fine.”

“Better than the _Story of the Heavens_?” asked Mr. Heal. “Come, come, Ingleby . . . surely not?”

“Rather, sir,” said Edwin.

Mr. Heal shut the book. “The barren and gloomy square of Pegasus,” he murmured to himself. And all the rest of that evening Edwin found himself remembering the phrase. The bareness and the gloom of Pegasus had never struck him before; and now, at a sudden suggestion, the whole atmosphere of the sky had changed; the vague heavens became habitable to his fancy; new and immense territory opened before him. . . .

He told Widdup what he remembered of the passage that Heal had read.

“Poor old Tommy,” said Widdup compassionately. “It isn’t an exact square at all. It’s an irregular quadrilateral, and I don’t see anything gloomy about it. Stars aren’t gloomy anyway. Look how they sparkle. Look at Vega.”

Above the gable of the swimming bath that wonderful star throbbed white.

II

In the Lent term they both had measles and woke with swollen eyes to find each other side by side. In the same ward at the Sanatorium was Layton’s successor, Payne, a thawed, thin, almost unfamiliar Payne; and while they swam upon the first buoyant spirits of convalescence, the sheer hulk of Griffin was hove in, in the snivelling misery of the early stages. Edwin thought that Griffin had never looked so beastly, and rejoiced in the pig’s humiliation; but when, at last, Griffin recovered he found his ancient victim a handy plaything, and for want of anything better to do attempted to seduce Widdup from Edwin’s friendship. Edwin never quite forgave Widdup his defection; and when they were all better and back in school again he found that he still had to avoid Griffin on whom the habit of persecution had been regrafted. It seemed such a pity . . . he thought he had outgrown all that sort of thing.

And now he hated Griffin for a new reason. While they were together in the Sanatorium, after the departure of Payne, Griffin had spoken boastfully of his relations with one of the “Skivvies” whose morning task was the making of beds in D dormitory. It appeared that Griffin had met her first by accident, and later by appointment, and he himself described her as “very hot pastry.” He was familiar with certain shops in the neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, which made persuasion easy. To Edwin, whose life at home had kept him in ignorance of all that a boy of fifteen ought to know, everything sounded horrible, and he said so. He remembered the look of the girl quite well: rather anæmic with black hair and a pretty oval face. Griffin and Widdup howled over his innocence, and began to instruct him in the “origins of life.” All these things came as a great shock to Edwin. He felt a passionate conviction that the other two were fooling him. Unfortunately his father had never employed a coachman.

“I don’t believe a bit of it,” he said with tears in his eyes.

“You silly kid,” said Widdup. “Everybody knows it’s true.”

“I don’t believe my father would do a thing like that,” cried Edwin.

It seemed suddenly as if the world had become a gross and horrible planet. The fetters of earth were galling his limbs. He felt a sudden immense yearning for the coolness and cleanliness of stellar space. If only he could pass the rest of his life in the great square of Pegasus! . . . And he was consoled by the assurance that in heaven, at any rate, there was no marrying or giving in marriage. . . .

III

Next term, to his great joy, he was moved up into the Upper Fourth, and had for his form-master the gentle Mr. Leeming, a fat and cheerful cleric with clean-shaven cheeks that shone like those of a trumpet-blowing cherub. He was very shortsighted, rather lazy, and intensely grateful for the least spark of intelligence to be found in his class. Edwin soon attracted him by his history and essays. His mother had fulfilled her promise of reading _The Fortunes of Nigel_ aloud in the holidays, and, as luck would have it again, the Upper Fourth were supposed to be concentrating on the early Stuarts. To the bulk of the form the period was a vast and almost empty chamber like the big schoolroom, inhabited by one or two stiff figures, devitalised by dates—a very dreary place. But to Edwin it was crowded with the swaggerers of Alsatia, the bravoes of Whitehall, with prentices, and penniless Scotchmen, and all the rest of Scott’s gallant company.

“Have any of you read _Nigel_?” Mr. Leeming asked the class.

“I have, sir,” said Edwin shyly.

“I have already gathered so, Ingleby. Has anybody else read it?”

Silence. “I think I shall ask the head master to set it to the Middle School as a holiday task,” said Mr. Leeming.

Thus narrowly did Edwin escape the disaster of having Scott spoiled for him.

Mr. Leeming was the master in charge of the library, and Edwin began to spend the long winter lock-ups in this room. Most of the boys who frequented it came there for the bound volumes of the _Illustrated London News_, with their pictures of the Franco-Prussian War, Irish evictions, the launching of the _Great Eastern_, and mild excitements of that kind. Edwin found himself drawn early to the bookcase that held the poets. To his great joy he discovered that the key of his playbox fitted the case; and so he would sometimes sneak into the room at odd moments in the day and carry away with him certain slim green volumes from the top shelf. These were Johnson’s _Lives of the Poets_, together with their Complete Works. He had been attracted to them in the first place by the memory of a polished urn, about as graceful in contour as a carpenter’s baluster, that stood in a neglected corner of the parish church at home. This urn was encircled by a scroll which bore these directions

“O smite thy breast and drop a tear—
For know thy Shenstone’s dust lies here.”

A palpable falsehood; for Edwin had already discovered the tomb of the elegist in another part of the churchyard, elbowed almost into the path by that of a Victorian ironmonger.

But it was something to have been born in the same parish as a poet; and Edwin, at an age when everything is a matter of taking sides, ranged himself boldly with Shenstone and pitted his judgment against that of Johnson, who rather sniffed at the poet’s unreality, and quoted Gray’s letters in his despite. The crook and the pipe and the kid were to Edwin very real things, as one supposes they were almost real to the age of the pastoral ballad; and the atmosphere was the more vital to him because he dimly remembered the sight of the poet’s lawns frosted on misty mornings of winter, the sighing of the Leasowes beeches, and the damp drippings of the winter woods. Thus he absorbed not only Shenstone but Shenstone’s contemporaries: men like Dyer and Lyttleton and Akenside, and since he had no other standard than that of Johnson he classed them by the same lights as their contemporaries. Brooding among Augustan poetasters in the library Mr. Leeming found him.

“Poetry, Ingleby?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me see? Prior? Ah, that was a little age, Ingleby! The Augustans were not great men, and some of them were very coarse, too. Have you read the Idylls of the King?”

Mr. Leeming introduced Ingleby to the great Victorian, for he himself was an ardent believer in all the Galahad nonsense, and was astonished at Ingleby’s ignorance of the school in which those cherubic cheeks had expanded. He was very fond of talking about purity and conceived it his duty to keep his class spotless. In the Lent Term, when the form were working through the catechism, his glosses were most apparent. The explanation of some passages troubled him. “_From fornication_ . . . that’s a bad thing,” he would mutter.

And once having put Edwin in the way of perfection he was not going to look back. A week or two later he asked him how he was getting on with Tennyson. “Who is your favourite character in the Idylls?” he asked.

Edwin glowed. “Oh, sir, Launcelot—or Bors.”

“But what about Sir Percivale? ‘Sir Percivale whom Arthur and his knighthood called “The Pure,”’” he quoted in the Oxford variety of Cockney.

“I don’t know, sir,” stammered Edwin. “They seem somehow made differently from me.”

“Arthur,” said Mr. Leeming impressively, “has a great and wonderful prototype whom we should all try to imitate no matter how distantly.”

Edwin, who had read the dedication, wondered why Mr. Leeming lowered his voice like that in speaking of the Prince Consort.

In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming for superintending his literary diet, but he soon detected a sameness in the fare. One day he had got hold of a big Maroon edition of George Gordon, Lord Byron, with romantic engravings of the Newstead ruins and the poet’s own handsome head, and Mr. Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly flushed. “Lord Byron,” he had said, “was not a good man. Have you read _Hiawatha_?” And he reached down Longfellow . . . Longfellow in green boards decorated with a geometrical design in gold, and irritating to the touch.

At last Edwin was almost driven from the library by Mr. Leeming’s attentions. He never read Byron because the books were too big to be sneaked out of the room beneath a buttoned coat; but he did read, without distinction, nearly every volume of poetry that he could smuggle out in this way. He read these books in second “prep” when Layton was poring over Plato at his high desk, when Widdup was working out the cricket averages of the second eleven, and Griffin was looking for spicy bits in the Bible. And as second prep was generally a period of great sleepiness—since the boys had risen so early, and by that time of evening the air of the house classroom had been breathed and rebreathed so many times as to be almost narcotic, the poetry that he read became interwoven with the strands of his dreams. Dreamy and exalted, poppy-drenched, all poetry seemed at this time; and it was to intensify this feeling of sensuous languor that he so often chose the poems of Keats.

In an introduction to the volume he had discovered that Keats had been an apothecary, and this filled him with a strange glow; for since the unforgettable incident of the toothbrush he had been (against his will) diffident about his father. He determined never again to be ashamed of the shop. When he read of “rich lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon,” he remembered a great cut-glass bottle of some cough linctus that glowed like a ruby in the shop window when the gas was lit at night. In other ways he tapped a good deal of the romance of his father’s calling. He remembered a drawer labelled “Dragon’s blood” . . . the very next best thing to a dragon’s teeth with their steely harvest. He recalled a whole pomander-full of provocative scents; he shuddered at the remembered names of poisons, and other names that suggested alchemy. He almost wanted to tell Mr. Leeming when next they spoke together, of his father’s trade, but he wasn’t quite sure if Mr. Leeming approved of Keats. It was not likely that he would see very much more of this master, for he was high up in his form and certain to get a move into the Lower Fifth at the end of the term. In some ways he was not sorry; for the signs of Mr. Leeming’s affection, the warm encircling arm, the pervading scent of honeydew, and the naïve glances of those watery eyes were embarrassing. Before they parted Mr. Leeming showed his intentions more clearly.

“Would you like to learn Hebrew, Ingleby?” he said.

Edwin would have liked to learn Hebrew—but not out of school hours. He hesitated.

“I thought you might some day wish to take Holy Orders, and I should be glad to teach you.”

“I will ask my father, sir,” said Edwin modestly. That was one of the penalties of having interesting eyes.