Читать книгу The Young Physician - Francis Brett Young - Страница 20

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.”