Читать книгу The Young Physician - Francis Brett Young - Страница 24

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.”