Chapter IV: Midsummer

I

EDWIN had expected that the wrench of going back to school after these holidays would be unbearable: but when he returned to St. Luke’s next day he was almost astonished at his own acceptance of the change. It was evening when he arrived, and boys who had come from a greater distance than he were already unpacking their play-boxes in the long box-room. Edwin sniffed the smell which he had once found so alien—that mingled odour of cricket flannels, biscuits, bat-oil, and faint mustiness, with relish. He passed through the swing-doorway into the library, dark and echoing and groped his way towards the poetry bookshelves. He ran his fingers over the brass netting that protected their case, he even tried his play-box key to see if it had lost its cunning. The lock opened easily, and he felt for the backs of the big maroon volumes of Byron with their shiny title-plates. He thought of Mr. Leeming and of Sir Percivale. A foolish phrase, one of a kind that he had often lately found running through his brain—rhythmical groups of words that meant nothing in particular—formed itself in his mind and stuck there. “_The white lie of a blameless life_.” He laughed at himself. These words that came from nowhere were the strangest things. He heard the echo of his own laugh in the dark and empty room. The white lie of a blameless life. . . . It pleased him to think that he had done with Mr. Leeming as a form-master, even though the question of Hebrew and Holy Orders remained unanswered.

Stepping out of the library he was hailed by Widdup; a plumper, sunbrowned Widdup fresh from three weeks with a doctor uncle in Devonshire. There had been long drives through the lanes at the back of Start Bay where the primroses (so Widdup assured him) were as big as door-handles; there had actually been sea-bathing in April, and the joy of watching huge liners, homeward bound from India, making the Start. “And hills . . .” said Widdup, “you never saw such hills. Talk about these downs. . . .”

“It’s awfully hilly country at home,” said Edwin.

They were walking side by side and up and down the quadrangle, from the gym to the swimming bath, and dozens of couples were crossing and recrossing in the same track. From time to time they would catch a few words of conversation, eager and excited, as they passed. Above them stretched a deep sky powdered with dust of gold.

“What did you say?” said Widdup. “I’m awfully sorry, old chap. I didn’t catch it. Douglas shouted to me. . . .”

“I don’t know . . .” said Edwin. “Oh, yes . . . hills. I said there are some ripping hills at home. One called Uffdown.”

“But these hills in Devonshire . . . you’ve got to get out of the trap for nearly every one. I used to drive my uncle. It was awful sport. You’d think I was rotting, but it’s true.”

The chapel bell started tolling in short jerks. The couples began to drift towards the northern end of the Quad, where the gates were being unbolted. For five minutes exactly the gravel of the wide path sloping to the chapel gave out a grating sound beneath the pressure of many hundred feet. The last stragglers hurried in. The master on duty entered the porch. All the life of that dark mass of buildings spread upon the bare edge of the downs became concentrated within the walls of the chapel. Its stained glass windows glowed as with some spiritual radiance. Inside they began to sing the hymn which is used at the beginning of the term:—

“Rank by rank again we stand
From the four winds gathered hither,
Loud the hallowed walls demand
Whence we come and how and whither . . .”

and from the open doors there issued a faintly musty smell, as though indeed the dead air of the holiday-time were dispossessed and young life had again invaded its ancient haunt.

II

It seemed to Edwin from the first as though the concentrated delights of this summer term were surely enough to efface every memory of discomfort and suffering that had clouded his early days at St. Luke’s. He was exceptionally happy in his new form. The form-master, whose name was Cleaver, was an idle man with a young wife and a small income of his own, circumstances that combined to make him contented with the conditions of servitude at St. Luke’s which weighed so heavily on the disappointed and underpaid Selby. He was also a fine cricketer, accepting the worship which was the prerogative of an old “blue,” and convinced in his own mind—if ever that kingdom were possessed by anything so positive as a conviction—that the main business of the summer term was cricket. The atmosphere of the cricket-field, with its alternations of strenuousness and summery lassitude, pervaded his classroom, and the traditions of that aristocratic game, in which nobody could conceivably behave in a violent or unsportsmanlike manner, regulated his attitude towards the work of his form.

Edwin found it fairly easy to keep his average going at the departments of the game in which Mr. Cleaver was concerned: Latin and Greek and English. If, as occasionally happened, he made a century, Cleaver was ready to congratulate him as a sportsman and a brother. To be beaten by some yorker of Tacitus was no crime if he had played with a straight bat and didn’t slog. Even a fool who could keep his end up had Mr. Cleaver’s sympathy.

It was not only in a spiritual atmosphere of the Lower Fifth that Edwin found content. The classroom which the form inhabited was the most pleasant in the whole school, placed high with a bow-window overlooking a pleasant lawn that a poplar overshadowed. Beyond the lawn lay a belt of dense thickets full of singing birds, on the edge of which laburnum and lilac were now in flower: so that when Edwin’s innings was over, or Mr. Cleaver was gently tossing up classical lobs to the weaker members of the form, he could let his eyes wander over the warm air of the lawn to plumes of purple lilac waving in the summer breeze, or the tops of the avenue of lime-trees leading to the chapel spire. Even in the heat of the day the Lower Fifth classroom was cool and airy, visited only by wandering bees and scents of lime and lilac beckoning towards a golden afternoon.

The term was full of lovely animal delights; the luxury of flannels and soft felt hats; the warmth of a caressing sun; the contrast of cool drinks and water-ices; the languors of muscular fatigue; the reviving ecstasy of a plunge into the green depths of the swimming bath; the joy of extended twilights, and, in the thin air of evening, a multitude of sounds, soothing because they were so familiar as to be no more disturbing to consciousness than silence: boys’ voices calling in the fields, the clear click of bat and ball, the stinging echoes of the fives-court. Great days . . . great days . . .

Edwin found himself becoming keen on cricket—not indeed from any ambitions towards excellence, though the mere fact of sitting at Mr. Cleaver’s feet was an inspiration, but for the sheer joy of tiring himself at the nets and the peculiar charm of the game’s setting of sunburn and white flannels and green fields. Cricket was a part of this divine summer, and therefore to be worshipped. Little by little as he practised he found he was beginning to improve, and before the middle of the term he was developing into a fair bowler of medium pace and had taken his own place in the house second eleven. It did him good in other ways; for in this capacity he found that he was at length accepted naturally and without any exceptional effort on his part. So, miraculously, he seemed to have arrived at a degree of normality. This, in itself, was a triumph.

Spending long afternoons with his team in the lower fields, he found that he could feel really at home with other “men.” He discovered qualities in them that he had never guessed before. In the cricket field even Douglas became tolerable; no longer a terrible and baleful influence with scowling brows under a mop of black hair, but just a jolly good wicket-keeper. Edwin began to be feverishly interested in the fortunes of the second eleven: kept their averages, produced an elaborate table of league results, conceived a secondary but violent interest in the progress of his own County, Worcestershire, in those days, thanks to the brilliancy of the Foster brothers—slowly rising to fame. Sometimes while he lay on the grass, watching his own side bat, he would see the figure of old, fat Leeming ambling along the path. He would shrink into the concealment of his uniform flannel, being afraid that his patron would speak to him and isolate him from his pleasant company. Leeming was not fond of cricket and his shadow would mar this particular joy. Only when he had passed relief would come. Great days . . . great days.

III

In the pursuit of these joys it is not to be supposed that Ingleby forsook his friends the poets. In the flush of early June, before the crowding of midsummer’s high pomps, there came to him many moments of ecstasy. In the spinney at the back of the head master’s house there was a nightingale to which his evening dreams were dedicated. All the twilights were full of delicious scents and sounds. Of all other times he remembered most clearly certain evenings when he would walk all alone up the long slope of the gravel-path from the chapel, hearing the whizzing wings of the cockchafers that made their home in the shrubs on either side. Sunday evenings . . . Sundays were the most wonderful days of all; not, indeed, because the chapel services made any religious appeal to him—the advances of Mr. Leeming had scotched that long ago—but because of the peculiar atmosphere of freedom which the long day possessed and which, somehow, even the Head’s sermons failed to mar. He hated the Head’s sermons; he hated, in particular, the sight of Griffin, who was a useful member of the choir, singing, like any golden-headed cherub, a solo in the anthem. But he loved the music, and particularly the psalms, with which the daily matins and evensong made him so familiar that he couldn’t help knowing many of them by heart.

The chants to which the psalms were sung at St. Luke’s had been specially composed for the school chapel by Dr. Downton, the organist, who had fitted them with modulations that were, at the least, surprising to ears which could not be happy or feel secure far from the present help of tonic and dominant. Most of the congregation at St. Luke’s considered that Sammy’s tunes were rotten. At first they were inflicted upon the choir in manuscript; but in Edwin’s second summer they appeared collected in a slim gray volume, and Heal, who acted as choirmaster, explained that they were the results of the most careful study of the Hebrew text, of night-long ecstasies, and the deep brooding of Dr. Downton’s mind. It gave Edwin a picture of Sammy, with his gray, impassive face, weaving his tunes out of the silence of the night by candlelight in the high turret-room which that solitary master inhabited, and for this alone he began to love the St. Luke’s Psalter. It is certain, at any rate, that his early acquaintance with strange harmonic ideas made a great deal of the most modern music easy to him in after years. Later, in North Bromwich, when he became immersed in the flood of Wagner, he often wondered whether Sammy in his lonely tower, had known these wonders, and cherished them up there all by himself. He certainly couldn’t associate that sort of music with the naïvetés of Mr. Heal’s flute. And yet, you never can tell. . . . Mr. Heal knew his Hardy. . . .

Then there were Sunday walks with Widdup over the downs under a grilling sun, and through the woods of York Park, where Griffin and Douglas, poaching, had encountered keepers; but the glare and dryness of a chalk country in summer does not invite exercise, and the most precious hours of all were spent on the sloping banks between the Grand Entrance and the chapel. Here, early on a Sunday morning, Edwin and Widdup would carry out an armful of rugs and cushions: and there all day they would lie in the shade of the limes, reading, writing letters (Ingleby always had a letter from his mother to answer on Sundays), watching the restless flight of little copper butterflies, seeing the hot sky deepen to an almost southern blue behind the pointed gables of the school. Against such skies the red brick of St. Luke’s became amazingly beautiful. It seemed to Edwin that in his home, on the edge of the black country, the sky was never so clear and deep. Lying there he would read the books that he had smuggled out of the library . . . poetry . . . a great deal of it. Novels . . . he read, and he always remembered reading, Poe’s _Tales of Mystery and Imagination_: “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death.” Such titles! There seemed to be no end to the leisure of those days.

With the middle of the term came the Race Meeting on the Downs. During the whole of Race Week the college bounds were tightened, so that no boy dared show his face outside the iron gates. Within the short memory of the school, a prefect—no less!—had been expelled, confronting his own housemaster on the edge of Tattersall’s ring.

On Wednesday of the week the race for the Six Thousand Guineas, the greatest of the classics, was to be run. St. Luke’s within its closed gates buzzed like a hive. In every house and every form there were sweepstakes. Griffin made a book; boasted in Hall that he meant to see the “Guineas” run or die. Ingleby very nearly admired him for his courage. The great day came. All morning from the open windows of the Lower Fifth classroom he could hear the rumble of loaded brakes climbing the Downs road. In those days there were no motors, but white dust, up-churned by many hundreds of wheels, filled the air and drifted in clouds into the college quad. From a high wall at the back of the swimming-bath they could see the road itself and the unceasing, hot procession moving upwards; brakes full of men who carried beer-bottles; bookies in white top-hats; costers with buttons as big as half-crowns driving carts drawn by little donkeys whose thick coats were matted with sweat; gipsies out to prey upon the rest of mankind; smart gentlemen in dog-skin gloves driving tandem; regimental drags. All the road was full of dust and torn paper and the odour of beer and sweat, and every member of the crowd looked anxiously forward, as though he feared he would be too late for the “Guineas,” toward the summit of the Downs where the grand stand, like a magnificent paper-rack, stood up white against the sky. Down in the playing-fields that afternoon nobody thought much of cricket. For all the locked iron gates, the eager consciousness of the crowd on the Downs had invaded St. Luke’s. Ingleby was scoring for his own side’s innings. Douglas, who was sitting astride of a bat, kept his eyes fixed on the airy summit of the grand stand, now fringed with the black bodies of a thousand spectators. He pulled out his watch.

“They’re off!” he said. “My God, don’t I envy old Griff!”

Ingleby forgot his scoring. He, too, was wondering what had happened. He could imagine it easily, for several times on the Downs he had crossed the tan gallops on which, it was said, horses from the royal racing stables were trained, and seen; incredibly slender creatures, lithe as greyhounds, thundering neck and neck, over the sprinkled bark. He could think of nothing swifter or more exciting on earth. The game stopped. All the players were looking at the grand stand, as though their eyes could tell them which horse had won. Two minutes. Three. From the top of the Downs a great roar came down to them. Some monstrous beast, no congregation of men, was roaring there. The black fringe on the grand stand became animated by waving arms and hats and sticks. A cloud of tinier specks detached themselves. These were the carrier pigeons; and in a very little time they were flying high above the playing-fields, seeing, no doubt, the black mass of London outstretched so many miles away.

“God . . . I wish I could shoot one,” said Douglas. “I never heard such a row as they made up there. Ingleby, I’ll lay you two to one the Prince’s horse has won.”

That evening witnessed the canonisation of Griffin. Veritably he had seen the Guineas. A crowd of admirers listened to his story between preps in the house classroom. His manner was indolent and boastful. This was to be no more than the first of many exploits. On Friday—Ladies’ Day—the race for the Birches would be run. He had put the money he had won over the Guineas on a horse called Airs and Graces, and was going to see her bring his money home.

Ingleby had never heard the name of this horse before, but when the house sweepstakes for the Birches was drawn he found that Airs and Graces had fallen to him. Griffin, who evidently considered that this animal’s destinies were in his keeping, offered him a pound for his ticket. Ingleby wasn’t having any. Douglas, called in to give an opinion on the damnableness of that skunk Ingleby’s sticking to a sweepstake ticket for which he had been given a fair offer, agreed it was a bloody shame that a man like that should have drawn anything but a blank. What did he know about racing? Racing was a pastime of gentlemen in which he couldn’t obviously have any interest. Did Ingleby understand that Griffin was going to see the race itself, a thing that he would never have the guts to do in all his life?

A couple of years before Ingleby would not have known how to meet the coalition; it is possible, even, that he would have given up his ticket, and improbable that he would have received the pound that Griffin offered. By this time he had learnt that no answer at all was better than the softest; that when Griffin and Douglas started that sort of game the best thing was to keep his temper and clear out as quickly as possible. On this occasion the chapel bell saved him. All through the service that evening he was pondering on Griffin’s words, trying, rather obstinately, to convince himself that they weren’t true; that he wasn’t the skunk they had agreed to call him; that he was sufficiently gentle in birth to have an interest in what the newspapers called “the sport of kings,” that, at a pinch, he might summon up sufficient “guts” to emulate the boldness of such a daring customer as Griffin. Perhaps it was all too horribly true. . . .

He couldn’t accept it. It was inconceivable that all the attributes of knightly courage should be vested in people like Griffin; and yet he couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t deceiving himself. It was so easy to imagine oneself brave . . . the easiest thing in the world. “That’s the worst of me,” he said to himself, “I can imagine anything. I could imagine myself hiring a coach and wearing a white top-hat and asking old fat Leeming to come to the Birches with me on Friday. I’m all imagination and silly rot of that kind; but when it comes to the point I’m no damned good at all.”

It wasn’t the first time that he had realised defects of this kind. Term after term he had been reproaching himself for the lack of moral or physical courage.

There was only one way out of it: to prove that he was capable of the things which he feared by doing them. In this way he had driven himself to batter his hands to pulp by playing fives without gloves; for this he had taken a dive into the deep end of the swimming-bath for the sole reason that he found it impossible to float in the shallow water and had determined to swim; for this he had forced himself to spend long hours, or to waste long hours, over Geometry, the subject that he hated most. Now, in the same way, and wholly for his own satisfaction, he determined to go to the Birches.

That night, walking up and down the Quad, he opened the subject to Widdup. He said,—

“Do you know I drew Airs and Graces in the house sweep? Griffin offered me a quid for the ticket.”

“I should jolly well let him have it,” said Widdup, explaining the mathematical side of the question. “You see, you’ve won a twenty to one chance already. The chances against the horse winning are . . . well you can work it out easily. I’ll do it for you in second prep. Besides, old Griff has a lot of money on the horse and he’s going to see the race run.”

“Well, so am I,” said Ingleby. Widdup laughed, and that annoyed him.

“What do you think of it?”

“I think you’re a damned fool,” said Widdup.

Ingleby left it at that. Perhaps Widdup was right. But why in the world should the same thing count for heroism in the case of Griffin and folly in his own? He distrusted the mathematical Widdup’s sense of proportion. In any case he had to go through with it. If he didn’t, no subsequent heroism could ever persuade him that he wasn’t a coward and worthy of every epithet with which Griffin had loaded him. It was in the same spirit, he imagined, that knights in the ages of chivalry had set themselves to perform extravagant tasks, that saints had undergone monstrous privations; just to convince themselves that they weren’t as deficient in “guts” as they feared.

The business came more easily than he had expected when first he tied himself to his resolve. Friday at St. Luke’s was a “fag-day.” On Friday afternoon, that is to say, there were no organised games. The afternoon prep started at half-past three, and afternoon school at four-fifteen. The great race, he learned, was to be run at three o’clock; and this would give him time to miss the hour of prep which was not supervised and to be ready for an innings of Greek with Cleaver. An easy game, Greek. . . . For once in a way he was prepared to slog like blazes.

Up to the last moment Widdup refused to think that he would go through with it. He didn’t believe, indeed, until he saw Edwin climb on to the top of the wooden fence in the nightingale’s spinney at the back of the Head’s house and drop over into the road.

“Now, I should think you’ve had enough of it,” said Widdup. “If the old man came along and saw you there, you’d be bunked to-morrow. Come along. . . .”

“I’ll be back just after three,” said Edwin. “You’ll be here to give me a hand over?”

“All right,” said Widdup. “You are a bloody fool, you know.”