Читать книгу The Young Physician - Francis Brett Young - Страница 6

It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin, oddly enough on the very first day of his life at St. Luke’s. Mrs. Ingleby had come down from the Midlands with him, a little anxious, for there were pitfalls in public school life (it was in ninety-five), but immensely proud of Edwin’s entrance scholarship. They had crossed London together in a hansom, and on the smoky platform at Victoria, she had bidden him a good-bye which cost her some pangs, for the poor boy was half dead with train-sickness. Edwin was her only child, and some smouldering ethic decreed that he must not be pampered, but when she raised her veil to kiss him, tears escaped beneath its rim. Those tears were very unsettling; they gave him a sudden glimpse of his mother in a new light; but he felt too ill even to watch her hurrying to the end of the platform. His head ached so violently in the sulphurous station air that he wouldn’t have minded much if some one, say his next-door neighbour in the train, a city clerk who smoked the most manly tobacco, had relieved him of the half-sovereign, the last gift of all, that he clutched mechanically in his left-hand trouser pocket—or if the porters, in the fine free way they have, had smashed all the jampots in the playbox so obstrusively white and new, with

E. INGLEBY

115

in black lettering on the lid.

The rest of that journey he had been too prostrate and lethargic to realise. Somewhere the shouting of a familiar word had bundled him out of his corner; a porter whom he had tipped fumblingly had bundled him into a cab which smelt of straw, and at last the martial-looking personage who received him at the grand entrance had conveyed him up a broad flight of stone stairs and along a corridor that echoed their two pairs of foot-steps, to the housemaster’s room, where, in an atmosphere of mellow honeydew, Mr. Selby sat at his desk, trifling with a bath-list of the big dormitory. Ingleby sat at one end of a luxurious sofa, feeling very sick. It seemed as though he could never escape from the smell of tobacco. At the other end of the sofa sat another boy, perhaps three years older than Edwin. He was tall for his age and inclined to be fat. His feet were small and shapely, and their smallness accentuated the heavy build of his shoulders, so that the whole boy seemed to taper downwards on the lines of a peg-top. He had a broad face, covered with freckles, regular but undistinguished features, and eyes, rather wide apart, of a peculiar cold and light blue. His hair was crisp and sandy; his whole get-up a little dandiacal within the limits of black and gray. He kept on fingering silver coins, that jingled together faintly in the depths of his pocket; perhaps he was counting them in the dark; perhaps he was merely fidgeting.

Mr. Selby looked up from his bath-list.

“Well, Griffin, and what is your pleasure?”

“Letter from father, sir.”

A letter from father would need an answer. Mr. Selby, although an expert in the tortuous psychology of parents, was a lazy man. He sighed as he opened it. “H’m . . . No games? You don’t look particularly ill, Griffin.”

“Doctor said I was growing too fast, sir . . . something about my heart.” Griffin’s manners were irreproachable.

Mr. Selby smiled.

“Very well, Griffin, very well. I will speak to the head-master about you. And who is this miserable weed?”

There had been no break in the drawl of Mr. Selby’s voice with this change of subject, and Edwin did not hear, or heard without understanding. Griffin shook him by the shoulder. He lurched forward like a creature coming out of a cellar into day light.

“Ingleby, sir,” he said.

“Ingleby . . . Oh, yes. Let me see. You won’t need to take the placing exam. to-morrow because of your scholarship papers. You’ll be in the lower fourth. So Griffin will look after you. Do you hear, Griffin? I think Ingleby will be in your form. You are not overwhelmingly likely to get a move, are you?”

Griffin murmured “No, sir.”

“Then you can conduct this Ingleby to D dormitory, Griffin.”

Griffin whispered “Come on,” and walked ahead down the length of the corridor and another flight of stairs to a room of immense length, with whitewashed walls, along which were ranged as many as thirty red-blanketed beds. Down the centre of the dormitory a trestled table of well-scoured wood held a double row of wash-hand basins and soap-dishes.

“There you are,” said Griffin, in a very off-hand way. “You’d better bag a bed.”

“Which one is mine, please?” Edwin asked. His head was aching so furiously that he could have lain down on the floor.

“I’ve told you, you’ve got to bag one. Don’t you hear? You’d better go and ask that man over there. Try the next one to his.”

That man over there was a stumpy boy with the face of a hyena and a shock of black hair, who scowled at Ingleby’s approach.

“Here, get away. You can’t come here. I don’t want any new kids near me. Keep him to yourself, Griffin.”

Ingleby was thrown violently into Griffin’s arms, and then buffeted backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock between them. This game proved to be such excellent fun that wherever he sought a bed on which to lay his things it was continued by his immediate neighbours. He was greenly pale and beginning to cry when a tall, dark boy, wearing glasses, arrived and made straight for the group that surrounded him.

“Here’s Layton,” whispered some one.

“What’s this?” he asked. “A new boy?—What’s your name?”

“Ingleby.”

“What’s the matter?”

“They won’t let me find a bed.”

“Come along down this end, then.” He moved majestically to the end of the dormitory nearest to the door and pointed to a vacant bedstead, “There you are,” he said. He was kindly without the least trace of unbending. Ingleby took him for a prefect; already he had received the canonisation of heroism. He stood and watched Edwin spread out his nightshirt on the bed. At this moment the climax of his migraine arrived. Edwin was sick.

Layton’s lips curled. “Dirty little skunk,” he said as he hurried away.

A slipper, cleverly aimed from the other end of the room, caught Ingleby full on his burning cheek. The pain seemed to blind him.

And a skunk, in spite of himself, he remained, for small boys are as persistently unintelligent as parrots in their memory for names. Ingleby’s “skunkhood” became a tradition that he never wholly lived down during his first years at St. Luke’s. In them he experienced all the inevitable qualms of homesickness, although even these were more tolerable than the physical qualms which had complicated his arrival, for they passed quickly in the excitement of a new life, the adoption of new standards, the spring of new ambitions. It was a thousand times unfortunate that he should have made such a sensational débût, that chance should have included such circumstances as Griffin and a sick-headache in his first day; for all that was instinct in the boy rebelled against the category in which he found himself placed, the definition of his status that had been hastily formulated by a few small boys, and almost tacitly accepted by the masters.

To begin with, he had very few of the attributes of the skunk. He was neither dirty nor undersized: indeed he had a nice instinct for personal cleanliness, and all the slim, balanced beauty of a young boy’s figure. He was far from unintelligent—though this counts for little enough in the schedules of precedence at school. It amounted to this: he was not used to the company of other boys; he had never played games; he had made himself objectionable on his first night in the dormitory—and Layton had called him a skunk. Griffin saw to the rest, seconded by the lad with the hyena face, who bore the illustrious name of Douglas. Strangely enough no one but Ingleby seemed to have tapped the romance in the hyena-faced’s name. Setting out to find any tokens of Chevy Chase beneath the black mop, he was caught staring in Hall, and as a proper retribution for such insolence, subjected to the pain and indignity of a “tight six” with a gym shoe, his head wedged in two stocks of Mr. Griffin’s thighs. New boys of his own age, and smaller, seeing this exhibition, formed a very low estimate of Ingleby. They shuddered also at the knowledge that he had been heard to ask the difference between a drop-kick and a punt.

This isolation, except for purposes of chastisement, weighed heavily on Edwin. He didn’t wish to be different from others, although he felt that his mind was somehow of a painfully foreign texture. He knew that things somehow struck him differently . . . but he was so far from taking this as a mark of superiority that he was heartily ashamed of it. His whole ambition was towards the normal; he tried vigorously to suppress imagination, humour, all the inconvenient things with which he had been cursed; to starve them, to destroy them. He became studious of the ways of normality. Griffin and the noble Douglas were handy exemplars; Layton, the head of the house, an unattainable ideal. Layton, indeed, was something of a variant; but Layton, by means of his slim skull’s capacity for retaining facts and an ingratiating piety, had passed beyond the pale of everyday endeavour. Edwin longed to be normal, and they wouldn’t let him. He cultivated assiduously the use of the fashionable slang; and that, of course, was easy. He whipped up an interest in outdoor games; played his very hardest in the ordinary house football, and even volunteered to take part in the Soccer games organised on fag-days for small boys by Mr. Selby, who nursed a lazy grudge against the Rugby Code. “The Miserable Weeds,” they were called, enshrining his favourite epithet. But though he plunged out of school every morning to practise place-kicking in the fields before dinner, Ingleby was not destined to shine in sport. His habit of dropping off to sleep between fitful bursts of brilliance almost caused him to be uprooted from Mr. Selby’s plantation of weeds. This didn’t worry him much, because Soccer was not popular; but after two trials in the house third, which the baleful Douglas captained, he was degraded to the scratch side known as Small Boys; and even here the scrum extinguished a talent that might have shone in the three-quarter line.

And since he failed in every endeavour to attain normality, whether by devotion to games or by those attempts which he made to prove that he was neither “coxy” nor “pi,” by a retiring manner and a foul tongue, he began to crawl back into his shell, nursing a passionate hatred, not unmixed with envy, for all those people whom he couldn’t hope to be like. And so, in a little time, this dangerous humiliation turned to a sort of pride. It pleased him to count himself their superior even when he was most downtrodden. His form master had recently been boring the class with a little dissertation on Marcus Aurelius. Edwin became a Stoic, spending his days in far corners of the box-room, munching a slowly dwindling store of biscuits. Once Griffin caught him with his locker door open and pinioned him against the benches while Douglas made free with his Petits-Beurres to the rest of the box-room. For such contingencies as this the Emperor’s system of philosophy seemed hardly adequate.

Most of all he dreaded the dormitory; for here the abandonment of clothes laid him open to particularly painful forms of oppression; the shock and horror of bedclothes ragged just as he was falling off to sleep; the numbing swing of a pillow, the lancinating flick of wet towels; Oh!—a hell of a life, only to be terminated by the arrival of Layton, who had the privilege of sitting up till eleven, with black rings round his spectacled eyes. He was reading for a scholarship at Cambridge. Then Ingleby would really get off to sleep, or sometimes, if he were too excited, watch the moonlight, broken by the stone mullions of the windows, whiten the long washing-table and cast blue shadows so intense that they heightened the bareness of the dormitory; or else he would listen to the harsh breathing of Douglas, who slept with his mouth open, and wonder what all those heavy sleepers were dreaming of, or if they dreamed at all. And then his own magic casements were opened.

At St. Luke’s he had discovered the trick—quite a new thing for him—of historical dreaming. His form were busy with the age of the Stuarts, under the direction of a master named Leeming, a mild-eyed cleric, rather shy of boys and feverishly grateful whenever he sprung a response to his own enthusiasms.

Ingleby drank deep of the period’s romance, and this heady wine coloured his dreams. He would dream sometimes of the tenanted oak of Boscobel, watching with agony the movements of the Roundhead searchers; sometimes he would stand elbowing in the crowd about that scaffold at Whitehall, when the martyr king stepped out. The man at his left hand had been eating garlic. Ha!—a Frenchman. One of those musketeers! . . . He would tremble with delight. He wished that he could tell Mr. Leeming of his dreams, but they were far too precious to risk being bruised by laughter or unconcern. All night long this queer panoramic rubbish would go seething through his brain, until, at six-fifteen, one of the waiters swung a harsh bell outside the dormitory door and he would turn over, trying to piece together the thin stuff that its clangour had so suddenly broken, until the ten-bell rang, and the rush for early school began. He grew to love the winter terms because the darkness lasted longer.

But he did write to his mother about it. Always on Sunday mornings the sergeant would come in with a letter from her, full of the strangely remote news of home; how the garden was looking, what Aunt Laura was doing, and how they talked of felling the elm-trees in the lane. Sometimes, with the lavishness of an angel, she would put a couple of penny stamps inside for his reply. The odd stamp would buy a stick of chocolate or a packet of nougat at the tuck shop. And in these letters she rose, quite unexpectedly, to the recitation of his dreams. “How lovely it must be for you,” she wrote. “When you come home for the holidays at Christmas we will read some of Scott’s novels aloud—Waverley and Nigel, and that will give you something more to dream about.” He began to realise what he hadn’t seen before: that his mother was really a wonderful playfellow—much better, when he came to think of it, than any of the boys. He would have so much to explain to her. . . . “Oh, you dear, you are lovely!” he wrote in reply.

And then one day, that sneak Douglas, fooling about in the dormitory with Edwin’s toothbrush, happened to see the words that were faintly printed on the ivory handle:—

INGLEBY, CHEMIST, HALESBY.

“Oho,” he said.

At breakfast, after a propitiatory but futile helping of jam from Edwin’s pot, he broke the glad news to Griffin.

“Ingleby’s father’s a chemist, Griff.”

“Then that’s why he’s such a skunk, Duggy. Is it true, Ingleby?”

“Yes. He’s a chemist.”

“Then he isn’t a gentleman.”

“Of course he’s a gentleman.”

“Not if he’s in trade. They oughtn’t to have sent you to school here. It’s a bally shame.”

That same afternoon Edwin was poring over a letter at his desk in Big School. His mother always told him to keep her letters. “Some day you may like to look at them,” she said. He was reading this letter for the tenth time to see if he could extract some last scrapings of the atmosphere of home which it had brought him.

“Who’s that letter from? . . . Girl?” said Griffin rudely.

“A lady.”

“What!”

“My mother.”

“Christ! Your mother isn’t a lady, or she wouldn’t have married a chemist . . . or be your mother.”

And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the form on which he had been sitting, and lashed out at Griffin’s face. He wanted to smash the freckled thing. He only caught the boy’s cheek with the flat of his hand, and then, after a second of dazed wonder at his own achievement, he rushed out of Big School, across the Quad, and up that white, dust-felted road to the downs.