Chapter VI: Thunder Weather

I

THAT night a thrilled but incredulous dormitory discussed the exploit of Ingleby. Without pretending to have approached the dizzy achievements of Griffin, Edwin perceived that in addition to reassuring himself he had managed to atone for a little of his former reputation. He found himself treated with something that was almost respect, partly for the daring of the whole expedition, but even more for the crowning achievement of his inspired lie.

“I wish you hadn’t told them that,” he said to Widdup.

“Why not?” said Widdup. “That was the best part of it.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t mind telling a lie, but it’s rotten if the chap you tell it to believes you.”

“Get out,” said Widdup. “If you want to know the truth it’s only another example of your rotten cockiness.”

Why? Why? Why? . . . He couldn’t understand it. It seemed to him that the most natural decent things in the world were all labelled as abnormalities. Even if he had proved to his own satisfaction that he possessed the usual amount of “guts,” it seemed that he was a kind of freak. There was no getting to the bottom of the mystery. Yet, when he came to consider himself, he was certain that his attitude was infinitely humble. Perhaps that was the trouble. Other chaps didn’t think about themselves. Edwin envied them unfeignedly. He felt that he was condemned to travel a sort of vicious circle. Thus, if he were honest to himself he was bound to fail in the ordinary normal standard and to be considered, if not a prig, an oddity. If, by enormous efforts, he were to compel himself into the trodden ways of thought and conduct, he couldn’t be honest—and in the process of regaining his honesty he found himself fighting his way back to the original misfortune. There was no way out of it. Isolated he must be. He determined, above all things, that even if he were not ashamed of his isolation, he wouldn’t be proud of it. It wasn’t easy.

The whole incident of the Birches—which, after all, he had meant for a sort of private trial—was becoming a nuisance. He almost welcomed the attitude of Griffin, who scoffed at the whole business and refused to believe he had been there. Griffin, his own reputation for valour and cunning being in question, determined to prove that Edwin had not been near the race. In the dormitory that night the coalition set themselves to this business, beginning with an examination at the hands of Griffin himself.

“Widdup says you went to see the Birches run.”

“Does he?” said Edwin.

“Now, none of your fooling, Ingleby. You’re a damned little liar. You never put your nose near the races.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter to you anyway.”

“Doesn’t it? You’ll soon know that it does. We’re not going to have any liars in this house. You’d better tell the truth at once.”

“All right, then. I did go to the races.”

“The swine! . . . Get a towel, Duggie.”

“Well . . . you asked me. . .”

“Now, I’m going to prove that you’re a liar. Of course you know that already. But you ought to be shown up for your own good. Then you’ll get a tight six. What were Airs and Graces’ colours?”

“I don’t know what his colours were.”

Griffin howled. “HIS . . . listen to the swine. He doesn’t know a horse from a mare, Duggie. Ingleby, how do you tell a horse from a mare?” Edwin blushing, was overwhelmed with laughter. By this time the towel was ready, wet, and twisted into a cable. “I’ll teach you the colours of Airs and Graces,” said Griffin. “We’ve had quite enough of your airs and graces here. Next time you’ll find it pays to tell the truth in this dormitory.”

Edwin got his six, having been bent double over the end of his own bed by the other seekers after truth. It was worth it. When the lights were out and he was comfortably settled in bed he decided that that sort of thing oughtn’t to make any difference. “My mind to me a kingdom is,” he said to himself; and in his mind the great guts question had been settled for ever. As for the lamming. . . . Well, it might have been a gym shoe. . . . While he lay thinking of these things he was surprised to hear the voice of Widdup, who slept next to him, speaking in a whisper. “I say,” he said, “did you really go to the Birches, or were you pulling my leg?”

“Of course I did,” he replied. It gave him a little shock to find that so slight a thing as a display of physical violence had shaken Widdup’s faith.

“I’m glad of that,” came Widdup’s apologetic whisper. A long silence. “You’ve won the sweep, anyway,” said Widdup. “Thirty-eight and sixpence.” Edwin grunted.

“If you reckon that you’ll be here four more years, taking into account the number of men—average, you know—who go in for the house sweep every year, you could calculate the exact chances against your ever—”

He was asleep.

II

And while he slept after that day of unusual excitement and fierce colour, he had a curious dream. In the beginning it reflected a little of the anxieties of the afternoon, for he found himself hurrying in the middle of a huge and sweaty crowd which made no way for him. He did not know why he was running so violently; but of one thing he was certain, and this was that he was going to be late. At first he had in front of him the little man in the rusty coat who had been his companion on the Downs: the same queer creature now endowed with an aspect even more grotesque and an agility more elfish, so that Edwin knew from the first that this time he was sure to lose him and never to catch him up again. All the masses of people through whom he pressed were moving even faster than himself and in the same direction, so that it seemed as if he could never gain ground at all, but must go on running for ever with no sight of his goal, nor any hope of getting nearer to it. At last his breath gave out, and he stopped. It wasn’t a bit of good; for the moving crowd wouldn’t stop with him, and he was pushed forward by this multitude of tall people, knowing that if he faltered for a moment or fell (as in the end he must), he would certainly be trampled to death by the feet of those who followed.

At last the little man outstripped him altogether, and feeling that he had lost all hope, Edwin gave a cry. When he cried out the whole hurrying crowd melted away, the noise of their padding footsteps left a clear patch of silence (it was like that) and a puff of cool, thin air blew suddenly right into his nostrils. He thought, “I’m not going to be late after all. . . . Why didn’t they tell me that I was going to Uffdown?” There was no air like that in the world. He drank it down in gulps as a horse drinks water. “Eddie, you’ll choke yourself,” his mother said. . . . “The light won’t last much longer.” “But why should it last, darling?” he replied. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said, “in the west. You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the end. Do you see?”

“Yes, darling, I can see it quite clearly. . . .” And he did see it. A long building of bluish stone with small windows set flush in the walls and no dripstones save one above the oak doorway. Not a soul to be seen. It looked as if the place had been deserted by living creatures for many years. “I can see it,” he said, “but I don’t think anybody lives there.”

“But you can see it?” she asked him eagerly. “Can you see the little bedroom window on the left—the third from the end—quite a little window?”

It was difficult to see, for, after all, it was more than a hundred miles away, and all the time that he was looking, the streamers of cloud kept rolling down from the darens on the mountain and drenching the whole scene in mist. “Eddie . . . there’s not much time,” she pleaded. “Do tell me.”

“Yes,” he said. “I can see the window you mean.”

She sighed. “I’m so glad, Eddie. I did want to show it you.”

“But why were you in such a hurry?”

“It was my last chance of showing it to you.”

“Whatever do you mean, darling?”

She turned her face away. Now it was quite dark. “I’m really dreaming,” he thought, “and this is a sort of stage on which they can do lightning tricks like that.” But there was no doubt about it being Uffdown. All round the sky the pit-fires of the black-country were flickering out. And though he couldn’t see her face, he could feel her soft hand in his. “At any rate, I’ve written . . .” she said at last.

That was the sentence which he carried in his mind when he awoke. A letter. But she didn’t usually write to him before Sunday, and it was now only Saturday. Yet, when he came into Hall for breakfast a letter was lying on his plate. There was something so strange about the whole business that he was almost afraid to open it. He had a sudden, awful intuition that she was dead. Ridiculous, of course, for dead people didn’t write letters. Smiling at himself, yet scarcely reassured, he opened the letter and read it.

“_My Darling Boy_ (she wrote),—_Did you really make fifteen_? _You
must be getting on_. _Aunt Laura has just been in to tea_, _and we
talked such a lot that I have only just time to write this before
father goes down to business and can post it_. _I have some very
interesting news for you_. _The other afternoon Mrs. Willis of Mawne
came in to see me_. _She and Lilian are going to Switzerland for a
month this summer_, _and now she suggests that I should join them
there_. _It won’t be just yet_, _and I think—no_, _I’m sure_—_that I
should be back again before your holidays_. _Father wants me to go_.
_I haven’t been very well_, _and the doctor says he’s sure it would
do me good_. _All my life I’ve wanted to see Switzerland_. _I’m
most awfully excited about it_, _Eddie_, _and father says he can
spare me_. _Won’t it be wonderful_? _They are going about the end
of June_. _I won’t forget that postal order_, _but I’m rather poor
myself just at present_. _Eddie_, _do you keep my letters_? _I
think I should like you to_. _The double stocks which father planted
in the long bed are just coming out_.

“_Good-bye_, _my darling_,

“_Your loving_
“_Mother_.”

Of course nothing, in spite of the news of the Swiss excursion, could be more ordinary. That would be wonderful for her . . . of course it would. And yet, in spite of all these reasonable convictions he couldn’t get that dream out of his head. Something, he felt sure, was going wrong.

He tried to analyse the source of his disquietude. “Perhaps I’m jealous,” he thought. He was most awfully jealous of anything that other people had to do with his mother, and, anyway, he didn’t know these Willis people very well. They were new friends of hers: a family of wealthy iron-masters whose works had suddenly risen in the year of the Franco-Prussian war, and were now slowly but gigantically expanding. They lived at Mawne Hall, a sad but pretentious mansion of the departed Pomfrets, of which Edwin knew only the wrought-iron gates at the bottom of a steep drive. They had a son, Edward, of very much the same age as himself, but the Willises had no great educational ambitions (that was where Edwin’s mother came in), and had sent him to the ancient but decaying Grammar School of Halesby, an impossible concern in the eyes of any public-schoolboy. The Willises had pots of money. Here again Edwin suspected them. It rather looked as if they had “taken up” his mother; and nobody on earth had the right to do that. He hated the Willises (and particularly Edward) in advance. He always hated people he hadn’t met when he heard too much about them. He thought that the new intimacy probably had something to do with his Aunt Laura, who was diffuse and fussy and ornate, and not a patch on his mother. Nobody was a patch on his mother . . .

He couldn’t get rid of his anxiety, and so, in the heat of the moment, before morning school, he answered her letter. “Oh, darling, don’t go to Switzerland with a lot of strangers. If you do go, I feel that I shall never see you again,” he wrote. He knew it wouldn’t be any good. She couldn’t reasonably do anything but smile at his fancies. But he couldn’t help it. He even took the trouble to post the letter in the box at the Grand Entrance, so as to make certain that he couldn’t change his mind.

On the way into the classroom he met Griffin, who pushed a packet into his hand. “Here you are,” he said. “Take it.” It was thirty-eight shillings in silver, the first prize in the house sweep on the Birches. He wished he had remembered about it. He would have told his mother in the letter not to bother about the postal order. It was an awful thing to think of her being hard-up and himself rolling in this prodigious and ill-gotten fortune.

The morning class was listless, for the weather remained at a great pitch of heat, and the only thing that any one thought of was the fixture with the M.C.C. which would begin at noon. Cleaver always assisted as umpire at this match, and so the deserted Lower Fifth occupied a corner of the Big Schoolroom by themselves. In this great chamber—it was said that the roof-span was as wide as any in England—Edwin dreamed away the morning, reading, sometimes, the gilt lettering on the boards on which the names of scholars were recorded: giants who had passed before him along the same corridors, and whose names were only memorable as those of heroes in a mythology, or more ponderably evident in reports of parliamentary debates and the scores of county cricket teams.

Opposite him hung the board devoted to the winners of entrance scholarships. His own name was there. Edwin Ingleby . . . 1895. He remembered the day when it had almost embarrassed him with its fresh gold lettering. Now the leaf had toned down, and the name had sunk into obscurity beneath a dozen others. So the passage of fleet time was measured on these tables. In a few more years nobody who didn’t take the trouble would read his name. Even those of the batch before him were half-buried in obscurity. One other name arrested him: G. H. Giles. He knew nothing of Giles except that this brilliant beginning had been followed by disaster. The name of Giles appeared on no other board; for the term before Edwin came to St. Luke’s Giles had been expelled from the school. Edwin didn’t know what he had been expelled for; but the circumstance, remembered, afflicted him with a kind of awe. “It might happen so easily,” he thought. Why, if he hadn’t lied to the Head the day before he might have been expelled himself, and years afterwards some one sitting in his place would stare at the name of Ingleby with the selfsame awe. The voice of Mr. Leeming, stuck fast where Edwin had left him a year before, in the Stuart period, recalled him. “We will pass over the unpleasant . . . most unpleasant side of Charles the Second’s reign. Unfortunately, he was a thoroughly bad man, and his court . . .”

Edwin heard no more, but he heard another sound peculiar to the Big Schoolroom on Saturday mornings: the measured steps of the school sergeant plodding down the long stone corridor which led to the folding doors. On Saturday morning the form-masters presented their weekly reports to the Head, and boys whose names came badly out of the ordeal were summoned to the office to be lectured, to be put on the sort of probation known as “Satisfecit,” or even to be caned.

The Lower Fifth knew none of these terrors. Cleaver was far too easy-going to take his weekly report seriously; but the lower ranks of Mr. Leeming’s form trembled. You could never be sure of old Leeming. The folding doors opened. Mr. Leeming stopped speaking, and the sergeant walked up to his desk and stood waiting at attention while Leeming read his list. He looked over his glasses. “Let me see . . . Sherard . . .” he said. “Sherard, the head-master wishes to see you at twelve-thirty.” His voice was so gently sympathetic that nobody could possibly imagine that he had had anything to do with this calamity. “Then . . . the Lower Fifth . . .” he fumbled with the paper. “Ingleby. The head-master will see you at the same time.” He looked over at Edwin with the most pained surprise. “Very good, sergeant,” he said.

Edwin felt himself going white. Yes, that was it. That was the explanation of his feeling of unrest. He was going to share the fate of the traditional Giles. Good Lord . . . think of it! Miss Denning had done this. And yet he could hardly believe it—she had always been far too nice for that. Now his face was burning. It struck him that it wasn’t a bit of good worrying. If it weren’t . . . if it weren’t for his mother it really wouldn’t be so bad. He couldn’t bear to think of her disappointment in his disgrace. She thought so much of him. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if she were not ill. It might kill her. Good God! . . . that would be awful! Suppose, after all (it was no good supposing), that the Head wanted to see him about something else. . . . There wasn’t anything else. Unless . . . unless it were something to do with his mother. Unless she were seriously ill . . . even something worse. But he had her letter. It couldn’t be that. Yesterday she was well enough to write to him. No . . . the story was out, and he was going to be expelled. In three quarters of an hour he would know the worst. He wished that the time would pass more quickly. Time had never been so slow in passing. The clock in the tower chimed the quarter. From where he sat he could see the tower through the upper lights of the long window. He could see the minute-hand give a little lurch and move infinitesimally forward. He remembered Widdup telling him exactly how many times it moved to the minute. Was it twice . . . or three times? He had forgotten. There must be something wrong with the clock to-day. In the middle of this purgatory one half-humorous fancy came to him: “At any rate old Griff will know that I did go to the races now.”

III

They waited, ten or twelve of them, in the twilight of the passage outside the Head’s study. The atmosphere of this place resembled that of a crypt, or more properly—since the keynote of the St. Luke’s architecture was baronial rather than monastic—a dungeon. The only light that came to them entered by way of certain dusty windows of lancet shape on either side of the gothic porch. Beneath these windows languished a pale array of botanical specimens rotting in their test tubes and bearing witness to the week-old zeal of the Head’s particular section of the Natural History Society.

They waited, a miserable company of all shapes and sizes: some, who knew the worst, with a rather exaggerated jauntiness, determined to make the best of it: others, such as Edwin, being in doubt of their fate and burdened with a spiritual apprehension far worse than any physical penalty which might overtake them.

The sergeant opened the door. “Sherard W.,” he said. Sherard W. crammed a sweaty cap into his pocket and started forward, eager to get it over. The aperture which admitted him showed no more than the end of a table crammed with books, a number of highly-varnished shelves, a polished floor covered with Turkey carpet, and a blaze of mocking sunshine. The nails in the heels of Sherard W.’s boots rang on the stone flags. When he reached the Turkey carpet his steps became silent. The door closed. The rest of them strained to listen. They heard little: nothing but the quiet rumour of the head-master’s voice, and little patches of silence in which the replies of Sherard W. were not heard at all. A moment later he emerged. A number of whispered questions assailed him, but Sherard W. didn’t feel like answering questions. He brushed by the rest of them as quickly as he could go, with his school-cap pressed to his eyes. Another patch of sunlight was revealed. “Frazer . . .” called the sergeant. And Frazer, a tall lout of a boy with sallow face, came forward and was swallowed up in the same way as Sherard W. A minute later the sound of dull blows was heard.

“Frazer’s got it,” said somebody. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . Poor old Frazer!”

“Six from the Head isn’t equal to three from Cleaver. You should see Cleaver’s biceps in the gym.”

One by one the members of the crowd entered and returned. It seemed to Edwin that his turn would never come. All the time that he waited his imagination (accursed gift!) was playing with the hidden scene within: the long table, that he had seen only once before, and, at the head of it, the lean, bearded figure in the silk gown wielding an absolute power of life and death like God in the Old Testament. Yes, it was just like that. He remembered a minatory text that hung cobwebbed in one of the attics at home: PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD. It was not pleasant to hear these muffled sounds of chastisement, but what was a flogging (the Head’s favourite word) compared with the more devastating fate that awaited him? “That’s why he’s keeping me till last,” he thought.

“Ingleby . . .” said the sergeant. Edwin had time to fancy that his tone implied a more awful enormity than he had put into any other name. He entered, and stood waiting in the sunlight. It was rather less frightening than he had imagined, this long room, relatively luxurious, and the pale man at the head of the table with his lined, black-bearded face, and the peculiar twitching of his left arm which had always added to the sinister side of his equipment. For a moment he took no notice of Edwin. Then he looked up and smiled. Would the storm never break?

“Ah . . . Ingleby.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hope your entomological zeal isn’t going to take you up to the racecourse, Ingleby. How are the puss-caterpillars getting on?”

He smiled again, and showed his teeth beneath his shaggy moustache. Edwin was seized with a sudden terror. The worst had happened, and now the Head was playing with him. He could say nothing.

“Eh? . . . What’s the matter with you? You aren’t faint, are you? You’d better sit down.” Edwin trembled into a chair.

“Now, are you all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I sent for you, Ingleby, because I have been having a talk with Mr. Leeming.”

What in the world had old fat Leeming to do with it? Edwin wished he would get it over.

“Mr. Leeming has always given me good reports of you . . . I don’t know if you deserve them . . . and last night I saw Mr. Cleaver, who . . . um . . . um . . . tells me that you are one of . . . No, I’ll leave that part out . . . that you’ve got plenty of brains when you choose to use them, but that you are somewhat lacking in application. H’m?”

“Yes, sir.”

Why wouldn’t he get to the point?

“He says, Ingleby, that you’re a dreamer. Well, you know, there’s no use for dreamers in this world. They’re not wanted. Even dreamers with the blessing of good brains. H’m?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But Mr. Leeming is satisfied, and so am I, that if you chose to make an effort, and take a . . . a healthy interest in things, we might do some good with you. You might win scholarships, and be a credit to the school. That’s what we want. That’s what your parents sent you here for. Now . . . now Mr. Leeming tells me that you aspire to becoming a priest of the church. . . .”

“No, sir.”

“No . . .? But Mr. Leeming told me he had talked the matter over with you?”

“He mentioned it, sir . . . but I didn’t say anything. I . . . don’t think I do want to, sir.”

The Head frowned. “You mean that you don’t feel worthy of so great a vocation? Well, you’re young. You’re a promising boy. I want to do what is best for you . . . and the school. At the end of this term you are likely to get a move, and after a certain time I don’t think, from the scholarship point of view, you can begin to specialise too early. You have shown a certain . . . aptitude for English. You might read History. You might stick to Classics. What do you think about it?”

“I should like to read History, sir.”

“Very well, I’ll write to your father about it. We won’t say anything more about the Church for the present. That will come later. I expect Mr. Leeming will talk it over with you. You may go now.”