Читать книгу The Young Physician - Francis Brett Young - Страница 21

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He didn’t need telling that. With every step the conviction was borne in on him, and when he came to the end of the wooden palings that marked the school boundary he was very near to giving up his enterprise. He could easily, so easily, slip over the hedge on the opposite side of the road and wait there until the race was over and the bookies’ messenger-boys came racing down the hill on their bicycles, bells tingling all the way; and then he could meet Widdup at the appointed place and say that he had seen the race. By that time rumour would have told him the winner’s name. But that wouldn’t do. Not that he cared two-pence-halfpenny whether he told the truth or a lie to Widdup, but because he would feel such a wretched coward in his own mind. He had got to prove to himself that he possessed the moral courage which he doubted. It was only the existence of the very real danger—and he envisaged not only his own expulsion, but harrowing scenes of remorse and distress at home—that made the thing a fair test. He had to go through with it.

Beyond the line of fencing, even standing in midstream of that determined crowd, he felt himself curiously unprotected. He did a curious thing. He turned his college cap, with its circular stripes of green, inside out, presenting to the world a dirty brown lining. This wasn’t enough for him: he also turned up the collar of his Eton coat. But the crowd was thinking of one thing only and none seemed to notice him. They noticed nothing. Even the sellers of the race cards and the tawny gipsies who cried for a piece of silver to cross their palms, and promised good luck, were unheeded. Edwin concealed himself, or imagined some measure of concealment, in an eddy of dust between a heavy wagonette, crammed with men who looked like licensed victuallers, and a coster’s donkey cart. He found that by holding on to the step of the wagonette he felt safer. It was reassuring to hold something. What a rotten coward he was!

At last one of the men in the last seat of the wagonette who had been rolling about with his eyes closed, opened them and looked at Edwin. They were curiously watery eyes, and his mouth was all over the shop. When he had dreamily considered the phenomenon of Edwin for a little while he addressed him,—

“You look ’ot, young man.”

It was hot, Edwin panted.

“Bloody ’ot,” said the man in the wagonette. As an afterthought he took a bottle of beer, about a quarter full, from his pocket. The cork came out with a pop. “Gas,” said the fat man, and chuckled. “Gas . . . eh?” He took a swig, and with the froth fringing his moustache, offered the bottle to Edwin. Edwin shook his head.

“You won’t?” said the fat man. “You’re workin’ ’arder than I am. Oh, well, if ’e won’t,” he continued dreamily, and finished the bottle. Then he pitched it over the hedge.

The dust was terrible. On either side of the track the hedges and banks were as white as the road. The horses pulled well, and even hanging on the step Edwin found it difficult to keep up with them. At the crest of the hill the driver whipped them into a trot. Edwin let go the step and was cursed fluently by the coster for standing in the way of his donkey-cart. His friend waved him good-bye. He found himself caught up in a stream of other walkers, hurrying in a bee-line for the grand stand, now distantly visible with the royal standard drooping above it. Behind him and in front the black snake of that procession stretched, sliding, literally, over the shiny convolutions of the Down that the feet of the foremost had polished, and moving in a sort of vapour of its own, compact of beer and strong tobacco and intolerable human odours. From the crown of the Downs Edwin looked back at the playing-fields, the tiny white figures at the nets and in the fives-court that sometimes stopped in their play to watch the black serpent in whose belly he now moved. They seemed very near—far too near to be comfortable; and even though he knew that nobody down there could possibly see him, he felt happier when a billow of the Down hid the plain from sight.

It was only when he reached the grand stand, losing himself in the thick of the crowd that clustered about it, that he began to feel safe. He looked at his watch and found that he had a quarter of an hour to spare. A little old man in seedy black clothes grabbed his elbow fiercely. “Young sir, young sir,” he said, “take my advice . . . gratis; free; for nothing.” He laughed, and Edwin saw gray bristles stretched on his underlip. “Take my advice. Never expose your watch at a race-meeting. Myself . . . I’ve learnt it from long experience, my own and my friends’. . . . Never even take a watch when I go racing. No, I leave it at home. A beautiful half-hunter by Benson of Ludgate Hill, with enamelled face. Yes. . . . You take my advice. A thing to always remember. Yes. . . .”

Edwin seriously thanked him. A roar went up from the crowd. “The Prince. The Prince has entered the Royal Box,” said the old man. “God bless him.” He raised a dusty top-hat. An extraordinary gesture for this wrinkled, gnomish creature. “Yes,” he mumbled; “a handsome time-piece. . . . Benson of Ludgate Hill. A very prominent firm. We shall see nothing here. You follow me.”

Edwin followed. More beer, more tobacco, more of the curious composite smell, more positively vegetable than human, that he had begun to associate with trampled pieces of paper, probably the debris of bags that had once held fruit of some kind. The little man pushed his way deftly through the crowd. He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed to notice him; and indeed the leading characteristics of this crowd’s vast consciousness seemed to be good humour. The bookies in their white hats, the many-buttoned costers, the sweating men in black coats, the very waiters in the refreshment tents, staggering under leaning towers of beef plates, seemed determined to enjoy themselves in spite of the heat and the smell of their neighbours under the white-hot sky.

Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties. The vastness of the crowd subtly shielded him. He felt newly secure, and his spirit was caught up into its excitement and good humour. He even turned down his collar. And all the time his mind exulted in a queer sense of clarity, an intoxication due, perhaps, to his successful daring. In this state he found all his surroundings vivid and amusing; all colours and sounds came to him with a heightened brilliancy. He smiled, and suddenly found that a young gipsy woman with her head in a bright handkerchief was smiling back at him. He thought it was jolly that people should smile like that. He thought what jolly good luck it was meeting his guide, the shiny shoulders of whose frock coat he saw in front of him. His quick mind had placed the little man already: a solicitor’s clerk in some ancient worm-eaten Inn of Court, a relic of the dark, lamp-litten London of Dickens: a city of yellow fog and cobbled pavements shining in the rain: of dusty, cobwebbed law-stationers’ windows and cosy parlours behind them where kettles were singing on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was mixed at night.

It seemed to him that he could have met no more suitable person than his friend; for really all this racing crowd were making a sort of Cockney holiday of the kind that the greatest Victorian loved most dearly. He began to find words for it all. He must find words for it, for it would be such fun writing to his mother about it. If he dared. . . . It would be time enough to write a letter about it when the business was finished without disaster. There was always the possibility that he would be found out and expelled. Even if that should happen, he thought, he would like to tell his mother. . . .

Together they passed the level of the grand stand. This huge erection of white-painted wood provided the only constant landmark, for Edwin was not tall enough to see above the shoulders of the adult crowd in which he was moving. Now they had left the grand stand behind it seemed that they must surely be crossing the course. And then a bell clanged and the crowd parted like a great wave of the Red Sea in pictures of the Exodus. Edwin found himself clinging to the coat-tails of his friend, and the little man, in turn, hanging on, as if for his life, to a whitewashed post from which the next wave would have sucked him back. The crowd swayed gently, settling down and leaving them stranded upon the very edge of the course. “That’s a trick worth knowing,” said Edwin’s friend.

Opposite them the stands, well known to him on Sunday walks as a vast skeletal erection, stood clothed in flesh and blood: tier upon tier of human faces packed one above the other looked down on him. Edwin had never before realised how pale the faces of men and women were. From the midst of them there rose a ceaseless murmur of human speech, shrilling occasionally like the voices of starlings when they whirl above an autumn reed bed, and then, as suddenly, still. For one extraordinary moment they were nearly silent. “They’re off!” said the little man. . . .

Again the murmur of the stands arose. A bookie just behind them was doing his best to get in a last few bets, entreating, proclaiming passionately the virtues of “the old firm.” His red face lifted above the crowd, and while he shouted saliva dribbled from his mouth. A curious roaring sound came from the other side of the horse-shoe course a mile or more away. He stopped with his mouth open in the middle of a sentence. Something had happened over there. Everybody, even those who couldn’t see anything, turned in the direction from which the sound came. Edwin turned with them. He couldn’t imagine why. And when he turned his eyes gazed straight into those of Miss Denning, the matron of the College Sanatorium, marvellously dressed for the occasion and leaning upon the innocent arm of Mr. Heal. Thank God, Mr. Heal was short-sighted! Edwin felt himself blushing. He knew for certain that she had seen and recognised him; for his sick headaches had often taken him to the Sanatorium and he had always been rather a favourite of hers. She stared straight at him and her eyes never wavered. Obviously the game was up. He fancied that her lips smiled faintly. Never was a smile more sinister.

Edwin had an impulse to bolt . . . simply to turn tail and run at his hardest straight back to the college. He couldn’t do that. Between him and escape, an impassable river, lay the parabola of yellow grass over which the Birches was even now being run. Feeling almost physically sick, he slipped round to the other side of his companion. He wished that gnomish creature had been bigger. “They’re at the corner . . . if you lean out you can see . . . look, they’re coming into the straight . . . Airs and Graces leading. Down they come. The finest sight in the civilised world.”

Edwin didn’t see them. He saw nothing but the phantom of Miss Denning’s eyes, her faint and curiously sinister smile. He wished to goodness the race were over. Now everybody was shouting. The stands rose with a growl like great beasts heaving in the air. Something incredibly swift and strepitant passed him in a whirl of wind and dust. The crowd about him and the heaving stands broke into an inhuman roar. The little old man beside him was jumping up and down, throwing his top-hat into the air and catching it again. The whole world had gone shouting and laughing mad. Edwin heard on a hundred lips the name of Airs and Graces. It meant nothing to him. Now he could only think of escape; and as the crowd bulged and burst once more over the course he made a dash for the other side.

Mounted police were pressing back the tide; but Edwin was small, and quick enough to get over. He pushed and wriggled his way through masses to which there seemed to be no end. Only in the rear of the stands the density of the crowd thinned. Then he broke into a run and though he was soaked with sweat and his head was aching fiercely, he did not stop running until a billow of the Down had hidden the stands from sight.

In a little hollow littered with tins and other debris, and choked with nettles and some other hot-smelling herb, he lay, recovering his breath, and, for the first time, thinking, beside a diminished dew-pond of dirty water. He was miserable. Fate now brooded over him as heavily as the white-hot sky, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, imagine why. It was ridiculous, in any case, that the mere sight of a woman’s eyes should have worked so extraordinary a miracle. Yet this was no less than the truth. Suddenly, without a shadow of warning, all the happiness and light and colour had gone out of his adventure. That which had been, at least, magnificent, had now become childish or nearly silly. Reflecting, he couldn’t be satisfied that anything was changed. Nothing had really changed except himself; and he didn’t want to admit that he had changed either. No, he hadn’t changed. Only his mind was just like the dewpond at his feet in which the burning sky was mirrored. Some days it would be blue and white and others black with thunder. But the pool would be just the same. “I oughtn’t to be more miserable now than I was when I came up here; and then, apart from being a bit funky, I felt ripping.” None of these sober reflections relieved him. All the rest of the way back he felt hunted and miserable, and something very near to panic seized him at the point when he reached the college palings.

At the corner, looking horribly scared, Widdup was waiting.

“Thank goodness you’ve come,” he said. Then he suddenly went white.

“What’s the matter?” cried Edwin.

“Oh, Lord, it’s the Head.”

The voice of the head-master came next,—“Hallo, what are you doing here? Let me see—Widdup, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

A mortar-board topped the palings. “Ingleby—What’s this? What’s this? What are you doing there?”

A moment of brilliant inspiration.

“Widdup and I were fooling, sir, and he chucked my cap over the fence. May I get it, sir?”

“Serious—very serious,” muttered the Head. “The letter of the law. Race-week. You’re out of bounds, you know—technically out of bounds. Boys have been expelled for less. Yes, expelled. Ruin your whole career.”

Edwin saw that he was in a good humour; saw, in the same flash, the too-literal Widdup, white with fear.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said . . . “awfully sorry.”

“Mph. . . . What were you two doing here?”

“I wanted to get some poplar leaves for my puss-moth caterpillars.” Silence—then, rather lamely,—“They’re in the fourth stage, sir.”

“Are they?” The Head smiled, possibly because he approved of this fervent manifestation of what the head-masters’ conference called “nature study,” possibly at Edwin’s sudden revelation of schoolboy psychology. Decidedly he approved of the puss-moths. He had been reading Fabre aloud to his wife. Fabre, too, was a schoolmaster, poor devil! He did not speak his thoughts: schoolmasters never can. He said,—

“Let me see, Ingleby, you’re in the Lower Fifth?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I must speak to Mr. Cleaver. . . .” He didn’t say what he must speak about. “All right—get along with you.” He left them, walking away with his hands joined behind his back supporting an immense flounce of black silk gown. Edwin scrambled over the fence; his hands, as they clutched the top of it, were trembling violently.

“Well, you are a prize liar,” said Widdup, “and the old man believed every word of it.”

“I know,” said Edwin. “That’s the rotten part of it. . . .”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. . . .” He knew perfectly well what he meant.

“Who won?”

“Airs and Graces.”

“Then you’ve won the sweep.”

“Yes.”

Ten minutes later he was back in Mr. Cleaver’s classroom trying to make himself so inconspicuous that he wouldn’t be called upon to make an exhibition of himself, and, as luck would have it, nothing of any difficulty came his way to drag him from his comfortable obscurity. Even though the intense excitement of his adventure had now faded, the atmosphere of that high room had changed. He felt that he didn’t somehow belong to it; or, rather, that he had left something behind. All through that drowsy hour some part of him was still being hurried over the hot downs, swept along in the sweating crowds of the racecourse, and this circumstance made his present life strangely unreal, as though he were a changeling with whom it had nothing in common. Gradually, very gradually, the old conditions reasserted themselves, but it was not until the insistent discipline of the evening service in chapel had dragged him back into normality that his adventure and the influence of the strange people with whom he had rubbed shoulders began to fade. Widdup, with his unblushing admiration, helped. There was no shutting him up.

“Well, you have a nerve,” he said. “I wonder what you’ll do next. . . .”

“Oh, stow it,” said Edwin. “I’ve finished with that sort of thing. I’m not cut out for a blood.”

“I can’t think how you did it.”

“Neither can I. It was damned silly of me. I just wanted to satisfy myself that . . . that I had some guts, you know. I didn’t really care what you chaps thought about it. It was sort of private. . .”