CHAPTER VI

 

November 6^th 1902

 

The guard whistled, and obediently the train began to move – past Keating, at a crawl; past Branson; past Pickwick, Owl and Waverley; past Beecham, Owbridge, Carter, Pears, in accelerated succession; past Humphrey's Iron Buildings, past Lollingdon for Choate; past Eno's at twenty miles an hour; past Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears – and suddenly the platform and palings dipped and were lost, swallowed in the green country.  Anthony leaned back in his corner and sighed thankfully.  It was escape at last; he had climbed out of that black well into which they had pushed him, and was free again.  The wheels sang cheerfully in his ears.  'To stop the train pull down the chain penálty for impróper use five póunds five póunds FIVE POUNDS FIVE POUNDS ...' But how perfectly awful luncheon at Granny's had been!

      'Work,' James Beavis was saying.  'It's the only thing at a time like this.'

      His brother nodded.  'The only thing,' he agreed.  Then, after a moment's hesitation, 'One's had a pretty bad knock,' he added self-consciously, in that queer jargon which he imagined to be colloquial English.  John Beavis's colloquialisms mostly came out of books.  'That 'bad knock' was a metaphor drawn from the boxing contests he had never witnessed.  'Luckily,' he went on, 'one's got a great deal of work on hand at the moment.'  He thought of his lectures.  He thought of his contributions to the Oxford Dictionary.  The mountains of books, the slips, his huge card index, the letters from fellow philologists.  And the exhaustive essay on Jacobean slang.  'Not that one wants to “shirk” anything,' he added, putting the colloquial word between the audible equivalents of inverted commas.  James mustn't think that he was going to drown his grief in work.  He groped for a phrase.  'It's ... it's a sacred music that one's facing!' he brought out at last.

      James kept nodding with quick little jerks of the head, as though he knew in advance everything his brother would or possibly could say.  His face twitched with sudden involuntary tics.  He was wasted by nervous impatience as though by a consumption, eaten away by it to the very bone.  'Quite,' he said, 'quite.'  And gave one last nod.  There was a long silence.

      'Tomorrow,' Anthony was thinking, 'there'll be algebra with old Jimbug.'  The prospect was disagreeable; he wasn't good at maths, and, even at the bets of times, even when he was only joking, Mr Jameson was a formidable teacher.  'If Jimbug gets baity with me, like that time last week ...' Remembering the scene, Anthony frowned; the blood came up into his cheeks. Jimbug made sarcastic remarks at him and pulled his hair.  He had begun to blub. (Who wouldn't have blubbed?) A tear had fallen on to the equation he was trying to work out and made a huge round blot.  That beast Staithes had ragged him about it afterwards.  Luckily Foxe had come to his rescue.  One laughed at Foxe because he stammered; but he was really extraordinarily decent.

      At Waterloo, Anthony and his father took a hansom.  Uncle James preferred to work.  'I can get to the Club in eleven minutes,' he told them.  His hand went to his waistcoat pocket.  He looked at his watch; then turned and without saying another word went striding away down the hill.

      'Euston!' John Beavis called up to the cabman.

      Stepping cautiously on the smooth slope, the horse moved forward; the cab heaved like a ship.  Inaudibly, Anthony hummed the 'Washington Post.'  Riding in a hansom almost made him feel extraordinarily happy.  At the bottom of the hill, the cabby whipped his horse into a trot.  They passed a smell of beer, a smell of fried fish; drove through 'Goodbye, Dolly Gray' on a cornet and swung into the Waterloo Bridge Road.  The traffic roared and rattled all about them.  If his father had not been there, Anthony would have sung out loud.

      The end of the afternoon was still smokily bright above the house tops.  And, all at once, here was the river, shining, with the black barges, and a tug, and St Paul's like a balloon in the sky, and the mysterious Shot Tower.

      On the bridge, a man was throwing bread to the seagulls.  Dim, almost invisible, they came sliding through the air; turned, with a tilt of grey wings, leaning against their speed, and suddenly flashed into brilliance, like snow against the dark fringes of the sky; then wheeled away again out of the light, towards invisibility.  Anthony looked and stopped humming.  Swerving towards you on the ice, a skater will lean like that.

      And suddenly, as though, disquietingly, he too had understood the significance of those swooping birds, 'Dear boy,' Mr Beavis began, breaking a long silence.  He pressed Anthony's arm.  'Dear boy!'

      With a sinking of the heart Anthony waited for what he would say next.

      'We must stand together now,' said Mr Beavis.

      The boy made a vague noise of acquiescence.

      'Close together.  Because we both ...' he hesitated, 'we both loved her.'

      There was another silence.  'Oh, if only he'd stop!' Anthony prayed.  Vainly.  His father went on.

      'We'll always be true to her,' he said.  'Never ... never let her down? - will we?'

      Anthony nodded.

      'Never!' John Beavis repeated emphatically.  'Never!'  And to himself he recited yet once more those lines that had haunted him all these days:

 

                                'Till age, or grief, or sickness must

                                 Marry my body to that dust

                                 It so much loves; and fill the room

                                 My heart keeps empty in the tomb.

                                 Stay for me there!'

 

      Then aloud and in a tone almost of defiance, 'She'll never be dead for us,' he said.  'We'll keep her living in our hearts – won't we?'

      'Living for us,' his father continued, 'so that we can live for her – live finely, nobly, as she would want us to live.'  He paused on the brink of a colloquialism – the sort of colloquialism, he intended it to be, that a schoolboy would understand and appreciate.  'Live ... well, like a pair of regular “bricks”,' he brought out unnaturally.  'And bricks,' he continued, 'extermporizing an improvement on the original locution, 'bricks that are also “pals”.  Real “chums.”  We're going to be “chums” now, Anthony, aren't we?'

      Anthony nodded again.  He was in an agony of shame and embarrassment.  'Chums.'  It was a school-story word.  The Fifth Form of St Dominic's.  You laughed when you read it, you howled derisively.  Chums!  And with his father!  He felt himself blushing.  Looking out of the side window, to hide his discomfort, he saw one of the grey birds come swooping down, out of the sky, towards the bridge; nearer; nearer; then it leaned, it swerved away to the left, gleamed for a moment, transfigured, and was gone.

     

      At school everyone was frightfully decent.  Too decent, indeed.  The boys were so tactfully anxious not to intrude on his emotional privacy, not to insult him with the display of their own high spirits, that, after having made a few constrained and unnatural demonstrations of friendliness, they left him alone.  It was almost, Anthony found, like being sent to Coventry.  They could hardly have made it worse for him if he had been caught stealing or sneaking.  Never, since the first days of his first term, had he felt so hopelessly out of it all as he felt that evening.

      'Pity you missed the match this afternoon,' said Thompson as they sat down to supper; he spoke in the tone he would have used to a visiting uncle.

      'Was it a good game?' Anthony asked with the same unnatural politeness.

      'Oh, jolly good.  They won, though.  Three-two.'  The conversation languished.  Uncomfortably, Thompson wondered what he should say next.  That limerick of Butterworth's, about the young lady of Ealing? No, he couldn't possibly repeat that; not today, when Beavis's mother ... Then what?  A loud diversion at the other end of the table providentially solved his problem.  He had an excuse to turn away.  'What's that?' he shouted with unnecessary eagerness.  'What's that?'  Soon they were all talking and laughing together.  From beyond an invisible gulf Anthony listened and looked on.

      'Agnes!' someone called to his maid.  'Agnes!'

      'Aganeezer Lemon-squeezer,' said Mark Staithes – but in a low voice, so that she shouldn't hear; rudeness to the servants was a criminal offence at Bulstrode, and for that reason all the more appreciated, even soto voce.  That lemon-squeezer produced an explosion of laughter.  Staithes himself, however, preserved his gravity.  To sit unsmiling in the midst of the laughter he himself had provoked gave him an extraordinary sense of power and superiority.  Besides, it was in the family tradition.  No Staithes ever smiled at his own joke or epigram or repartee.

      Looking round the table, Mark Staithes saw that the wretched, baby-face Benger Beavis wasn't laughing with the rest, and for a second was filled with a passionate resentment against this person who had dared not to be amused by his joke.  What made the insult more intolerable with the fact that Benger was so utterly insignificant.  Bad at football, not much use at cricket.  The only thing he was good at was work.  Work!  And did such a creature dare to sit unsmiling when he ... Then, all of a sudden, he remembered that the poor chap had lost his mother, and, relaxing the hardness of his face, he gave him, across the intervening space, a little smile of recognition and sympathy.  Anthony smiled back, then looked away, blushing with an obscure discomfort as though he had been caught doing something wrong.  The consciousness of his own magnanimity and the spectacle of Benger's embarrassment restored Staithes to his good humour.

      'Agnes!' he shouted.  'Agnes!'

      Large, chronically angry, Agnes came at last.

      'More jam, please, Agnes.'

      'Jore mam,' cried Thompson.  Everybody laughed again, not because the joke was anything but putrid, but simply because everybody wanted to laugh.

      'And breadney.'

      'Yes, more breaf.'

      'More breaf, please, Agnes.'

      'Breaf, indeed! said Agnes indignantly, as she picked up the empty bread-and-butter plate.  'Why can't you say what you mean?'

      There was a redoubling of laughter.  They couldn't say what they meant – absolutely couldn't, because to say 'breaf' or 'breadney' instead of bread was a Bulstrodian tradition and the symbol of their togetherness, the seal of their superiority to all the rest of the uninitiated world.

      'More Pepin le Bref!' shouted Staithes.

      'Pepin le Breadney, le Breadney!'

      The laughter became almost hysterical.  They all remembered that occasion last term, when they had come to Pepin le Bref in their European History.  Pepin le Bref – le Bref!  First Butterworth had broken down, then Pembroke-Jones, then Thompson – and finally the whole of Division II, Staithes with the rest of them, uncontrollably.  Old Jimbug had got into the most appalling bait.  Which made it, now, even funnier.'

      'Just a lot of silly babies!' said Agnes; and, finding them still laughing when, a moment later, she came back with more bread, 'Just babies!' she repeated in a determined effort to be insulting.  But her stroke did not touch them.  They were beyond her, rapt away in the ecstasy of causeless laughter.

      Anthony would have liked to laugh with them, but somehow did not dare to do more than smile, distantly and politely, like someone in a foreign country, who does not understand the joke, but wants to show he has no objection to other people having a bit of fun.  And a moment later, feeling hungry, he found himself unexpectedly struck dumb above his empty plate.  For to have asked for more breaf, or another chunk of breadney, would have been, for the sacred paria he had now become, at once an indecency and an intrusion – an indecency, because a person who has been sanctified by his mother's death should obviously not talk slang, and an intrusion, because an outsider has no right to use the special language reserved to the elect.  Uncertainly, he hesitated.  Then at last, 'Pass me the bread, please,' he murmured; and blushed (the words sounded so horribly stupid and unnatural) to the roots of his hair.

      Leaning towards his neighbour on the other side, Thompson went on with his whispered recitation of the limerick.  '... all over the ceiling,' he concluded; and they shrieked with laughter.

      Thank goodness, Thompson hadn't heard.  Anthony felt profoundly relieved.  In spite of his hunger, he did not ask again.

      There was a stir at the high table; old Jimbug rose to his feet.  A hideous noise of chair-legs scraping across boards filled the hall, solidly, it seemed; then evaporated into the emptiness of complete silence.  'For all that we have received ...' The talk broke out again, the boys stampeded towards the door.

      In the corridor, Anthony felt a hand on his arm.  'Hullo, B-benger.'

      'Hullo, Foxe.'  He did not say 'Hullo, Horse-Face,' because of what had happened this morning.  Horse-Face would be as inappropriate to the present circumstances as Breaf.

      'I've got s-something to sh-show you,' said Brian Foxe, and his melancholy, rather ugly face seemed suddenly to shine, as he smiled at Anthony.  People laughed at Foxe because he stammered and looked like a horse.  But almost everybody liked him.  Even though he was a bit of a swot and not much good at games.  He was rather pi, too, about smut; and he never seemed to get into trouble with the masters.  But in spite of it all, you had to like him, because he was so awfully decent.  Too decent, even; for it really wasn't right to treat New Bugs the way he did – as though they were equals.  Beastly little ticks of nine the equals of boys of eleven and twelve; imagine!  No, Foxe was wrong about the New Bugs; of that there could be no doubt.  All the same, people liked old Horse-Face.

      'What have you got?' asked Anthony; and he felt so grateful to Horse-Face for behaving towards him in a normal, natural way, that he spoke quite gruffly, for fear the other might notice what he was feeling.

      'Come and see,' Brian meant to say; but he got no further than 'C-c-c-c ...' The long agony of clicks prolonged itself.  At another time, Anthony might have laughed, might have shouted, 'Listen to old Horse-Face trying to be seasick!'  But today he said nothing; only thought what awful bad luck it was on the poor chap.  In the end, Brian Foxe gave up the attempt to say 'Come and see,' and, instead, brought out, 'It's in my p-play-box.'

      They ran down the stairs to the dark lobby where the play-boxes were kept.

      'Th-there,' said Brian, lifting the lid of his box.

      Anthony looked, and at the sight of that elegant little ship, three-masted, square-rigged with paper sails, 'I say,' he exclaimed, 'that's a beauty!  Did you make her yourself?'

      Brain nodded.  He had had the carpenter's shop to himself that afternoon – all the tools he needed.  That was why she was so professional-looking.  He would have liked to explain it all, to share his pleasure in the achievement with Anthony; but he knew his stammer too well.  The pleasure would evaporate while he was laboriously trying to express it.  Besides, 'carpenter' was a terrible word.  'We'll t-try her to-n-night,' he had to be content with saying.  But the smile which accompanied the words seemed at once to apologize for their inadequacy and to make up for it.  Anthony smiled back.  They understood one another.

      Carefully, tenderly, Brian unstepped the three matchstick masts and slipped them, sails and all, into the inner pocket of his jacket; the hull went into his breeches.  A bell rang.  It was bedtime.  Obediently, Brian shut his play-box.  The started to climb the stairs once more.

      'I w-won f-five more g-games today with my old c-c-c ... my ch-cheeser,' he emended, finding 'conker' too difficult.

      'Five!' cried Anthony.  'Good for the old Horse-Face!'

      Forgetting that he was an outcast, a sacred paria, he laughed aloud.  He felt warm and at home.  It was only when he was undressing in his cubicle that he remembered – because of the tooth powder.

      'Twice a day,' he heard her saying, as he dipped his wet brush into the pink carbolic-smelling dust.  'And if you possibly can, after lunch as well.  Because of the germs.'

      'But Mother, you can't expect me to go up and clean them after lunch!'

      The wound to his vanity (did she think his teeth were so dirty?) had made him rude.  He found a retrospective excuse in the reflection that it was against the school rules to go up into the dorms during the day.

      On the other side of the wooden partition that separated his cubicle from Anthony's, Brian Foxe was stepping into his pyjamas.  First the left leg, then the right.  But just as he was starting to pull them up, there came to him, suddenly, a thought so terrible that he almost cried aloud.  'Suppose my mother were to die!'  And she might die.  If Beavis's mother had died, of course she might.  And at once he saw her, lying in her bed at home.  Terribly pale.  And the death-rattle, that death-rattle one always read about in books – he heard it plainly; and it was like the noise of one of those big wooden rattles that you scare birds with.  Loud and incessant, as though it were made by a machine.  A human being couldn't possibly make such a noise.  But all the same, it came out of her mouth.  It was the death-rattle.  She was dying.

      His trousers still only half-way up his thighs, Brian stood there, quite still, staring at the brown varnished partition in front of him with eyes that had filled with tears.  It was too terrible.  The coffin; and then the empty house; and, when he went to bed, nobody to come and say goodnight.

      Suddenly shaking himself out of immobility, he pulled up his trousers and tied the string with a kind of violence.

      'But she isn't dead!' he said to himself.  'She isn't!'

      Two cubicles away, Thompson gave vent to one of those loud and extraordinarily long-drawn farts for which, at Bulstrode, he had such a reputation.  There were shouts, a chorus of laughter.  Even Brian laughed – Brian who generally refused to see that there was anything funny about that sort of noise.  But he was filled at this moment with such a sense of glad relief, that any excuse for laughter was good enough.  She was still alive!  And though she wouldn't have liked him to laugh at anything so vulgar, he simply had to allow his thankfulness to explode.  Uproariously he guffawed; then, all at once, broke off.  He had thought of Beavis.  His mother was really dead.  What must he be thinking?  Brian felt ashamed of having laughed, and for such a reason.

      Later, when the lights had been put out, he climbed on to the rail at the head of his bed and, looking over the partition into Anthony's cubicle, 'I s-say,' he whispered, 'sh-shall we see how the new b-b-b ... the new sh-ship goes?'

      Anthony jumped out of bed and, the night being cold, put on his dressing-gown and slippers; then, noiselessly, stepped on to his chair and from the chair (pushing aside the long baize curtain) to the window-ledge.  The curtain swung back behind him, shutting him into the embrasure.

      It was a high narrow window, divided by a wooden transom into two parts.  The lower and larger part consisted of a pair of sashes; the small upper pane was hinged at the top and opened outwards.  When the sashes were closed, the lower of them formed a narrow ledge, half-way up the window.  Standing on this ledge, a boy could conveniently get his head and shoulders through the small square opening above.  Each window – each pair of windows, rather – was set in a gable, so that when you leaned out, you found the slope of the tiles coming steeply down on either side, and immediately in front of you, on a level with the transom, the long gutter which carried away the water from the roof.

      The gutter!  It was Brian who had recognized its potentialities.  A sod of turn carried surreptitiously up to bed in a bulging pocket, a few stones – and there was your dam.  When it was built, you collected all the water-jugs in the dormitory, hoisted them one by one and poured their contents into the gutter.  There would be no washing the next morning; but what of that?  A long narrow sea stretched away into the night.  A whittled ship would float, and those fifty feet of watery boundlessness invited the imagination.  The danger was always rain.  If it rained hard, somebody had somehow to sneak up, at whatever risk, and break the dam.  Otherwise the gutter would overflow, and an overflow meant awkward investigations and unpleasant punishments.

      Perched high between the cold glass and the rough hairy baize of the curtains, Brian and Anthony leaned out of their twin windows into the darkness.  A brick mullion was all that separated them; they could speak in whispers.

      'Now then, Horse-Face,' commanded Anthony.  'Blow!'

      And like the allegorical Zephyr in a picture, Horse-Face blew.  Under its press of paper sail, the boat went gliding along the narrow waterway.

      'Lovely!' said Anthony ecstatically; and bending down till his cheek was almost touching the water, he looked with one half-shut and deliberately unfocused eye until, miraculously, the approaching toy was transformed into a huge three-master, seen phantom-like in the distance and bearing down on him, silently, through the darkness.  A great ship – a ship of the line – one hundred and ten guns – under a cloud of canvas – the North-East Trades blowing steadily – bowling along at ten knots – eight bells just sounding from ... He stared violently as the foremast came into contact with his nose.  Reality flicked back into place again.

      'It looks just like a real ship,' he said to Brian as he turned the little boat round in the gutter.  'Put your head down and have a squint.  I'll blow.'

      Slowly the majestic three-master travelled back again.

      'It's like the Fighting T-t-t ... You know that p-picture.'

      Anthony nodded; he never liked to admit ignorance.

      'T-temeraire,' the other brought out at last.

      'Yes, yes,' said Anthony, rather impatiently, as though he had known it all the time.  Bending down again, he tried to recapture that vision of the huge hundred-and-ten-gunner bowling before the North-East Trades; but without success; the little boat refused to be transfigured.  Still, she was a lovely ship.  'A beauty,' he said out loud.

      'Only she's a b-bit l-lopsided,' said Brian, in modest depreciation of his handiwork.

      'But I rather like that,' Anthony assured him.  'It makes her look as though she were heeling over with the wind.'  Heeling over: - it gave him a peculiar pleasure to pronounce the phrase.  He had never uttered it before – only read it in books.  Lovely words!  And making an excuse to repeat them, 'Just look!' he said, 'how she heels over when it blows really hard.'

      He blew, and the little ship almost capsized.  The hurricane, he said to himself ... struck her full on the starboard beam ... carried away the fore top-gallant sails and the spinnakers ... stove in our only boat ... heeled till the gunwale touched the water ... But it was tiring to go on blowing as hard as that.  He looked up from the gutter; his eyes travelled over the sky; he listened intently to the silence.  The air was extraordinarily still; the night, almost cloudless.  And what stars!  There was Orion, with his feet tangled in the branches of the oak tree.  And Sirius.  And all the others whose names he didn't know.  Thousands and millions of them.

      'Gosh!' he whispered at last.

      'W-what on earth do you s-suppose they're f-for?' said Brian, after a long silence.

      'What – the stars?'

      Brian nodded.

      Remembering things his Uncle James had said, 'They're not for anything,' Anthony answered.

      'But they m-must be,' Brian objected.

      'Why?'

      'Because e-everything is for s-something.'

      'I don't believe that.'

      'W-well, th-think of b-b-bees,' said Brian with some difficulty.

      Anthony was shaken; they had been having some lessons in botany from old Bumface – making drawings of pistils and things.  Bees – yes; they were obviously for something.  He wished he could remember exactly what Uncle James had said.  The iron somethings of nature.  But iron whats?

      'And m-mountains,' Brian was laboriously continuing.  'It w-wouldn't r-rain properly if there w-weren't any m-mountains.'

      'Well, what do you think they're for?' Anthony asked, indicating the stars with an upward movement of the chin.

      'Perhaps there are p-people.'

      'Only on Mars.'  Anthony's certainty was dogmatic.

      There was a silence.  Then, with decision, as though he had at last made up his mind to have it out, at any cost, 'S-sometimes,' said Brian, 'I w-wonder wh-whether they aren't really al-live.'  He looked anxiously at his companion: was Benger going to laugh?  But Anthony, who was looking up at the stars, made no sound or movement of derision; only nodded gravely.  Brian's shy defenceless little secret was safe, had received no wound.  He felt profoundly grateful; and suddenly it was as though a great wave were mounting, mounting through his body.  He was almost suffocated by that violent uprush of love and ('Oh, suppose it had been my mother!') of excruciating sympathy for poor Benger.  His throat contracted; the tears came into his eyes.  He would have liked to reach out and touch Benger's hand; only, of course, that sort of thing wasn't done.

      Anthony meanwhile was still looking at Sirius.  'Alive,' he repeated to himself.  'Alive.'  It was like a heart in the sky, pulsing with light.  All at once he remembered that young bird he had found last Easter holidays.  It was on the ground and couldn't fly.  His mother had made fun of him because he didn't want to pick it up.  Big animals he liked, but for some reason it gave him the horrors to touch anything small and alive.  In the end, making an effort with himself, he had caught the bird.  And in his hand the little creature had seemed just a feathered heart, pulsing against his palm and fingers, a fistful of hot and palpitating blood.  Up there, above the fringes of the trees, Sirius was just another heart.  Alive.  But of course Uncle James would just laugh.

      Stung by this imaginary mockery and ashamed of having been betrayed into such childishness, 'But how can they be alive?' he asked resentfully, turning away from the stars.

      'Brian winced.  'Why is he angry?' he wondered.  Then, aloud, 'Well,' he started, 'if G-god's alive ...'

      'But my pater doesn't go to church,' Anthony objected.

      'N-no, b-b-but ...' How little he wanted to argue now!

      Anthony couldn't wait.  'He doesn't believe in that sort of thing.'

      'But it's G-god that c-counts; n-not ch-church.'  Oh, if only he hadn't got this terrible stammer!  He could explain it all so well; he could say all those things his mother had said.  But somehow, at the moment, even the things that she had said were beside the point.  The point was saying; the point was caring for people, caring until it hurt.

      'My uncle,' said Anthony, 'he doesn't even believe in God.  I don't either,' he added provocatively

      But Brian did not take up the challenge.  'I s-say,' he broke out impulsively, 'I s-say, B-b-b ...' The very intensity of his eagerness made him stammer all the worse.  'B-benger,' he brought out at last.  It was an agony to feel the current of his love thus checked and diverted.  Held up behind the grotesquely irrelevant impediment to its progress, the stream mounted, seemed to gather force and was at last so strong within him that, forgetting altogether that it wasn't done, Brian suddenly laid his hand on Anthony's arm.  The fingers travelled down the sleeve, then closed round the bare wrist; and thereafter, every time his stammer interposed itself between his feeling and its object, his grasp tightened in a spasm almost of desperation.

      'I'm so t-terribly s-sorry about your m-mother,' he went on.  'I d-didn't w-want to s-say it be-before.  N-not in f-front of the o-others.  You know, I was th-th-th ...' He gripped on Anthony's wrist more tightly; it was as though he were trying to supplement his strangled words by the direct eloquence of touch, were trying to persuade the other of the continued existence of the stream within him, of its force, unabated in spite of the temporary checking of the current.  He began the sentence again and acquired sufficient momentum to take him past the barrier.  'I was th-thinking just n-now,' he said, 'it m-might have been my mother.  Oh, B-b-beavis, it m-must be too awful!'

      Anthony had looked at him, in the first moment of surprise, with an expression of suspicion, almost of fear on his face.  But as the other stammered on, this first hardening of resistance melted away, and now, without feeling ashamed of what he was doing, he began to cry.

      Balanced precariously in the tall embrasure of the windows, the two children stood there for a long time in silence.  The cheeks of both of them were cold with tears; but on Anthony's wrist the grip of that consoling hand was obstinately violent, like a drowning man's.

      Suddenly, with a thin rattling of withered leaves, a gust of wind came swelling up out of the darkness.  The little three-master started, as though it had been woken out of sleep, and noiselessly, with an air of purposeful haste, began to glide, stern-foremost, along the gutter.

      The servants had gone to bed; all the house was still.  Slowly, in the dark, John Beavis left his study and climbed past the mezzanine landing, past the drawing-room, stair after stair, towards the second floor.  Outside, in the empty street, the sound of hoofs approached and again receded.  The silence closed in once more – the silence of his solitude, the silence (he shuddered) of her grave.

      He stood still, listening for long seconds to the beating of his heart; then, with decision, mounted the last two stairs, crossed the dark landing and, opening the door, turned on the light.  His image confronted him, staring palely from the dressing-table mirror.  The silver brushes were in their usual place, the little trays and pincushions, the row of cut-glass bottles.  He looked away.  One corner of the broad pink quilt was turned back; he saw the two pillows lying cheek by cheek, and above them, on the wall, that photogravure of the Sistine Madonna they had bought together, in the shop near the British Museum.  Turning, he saw himself again, at full length, funereally black, in the glass of the wardrobe.  The wardrobe ... He stepped across the room and turned the key in the lock.  The heavy glass door swung open of its own accord, and suddenly he was breathing the very air of her presence, that faint scent of orris-root, quickened secretly, as it were, by some sharper, warmer perfume.  Grey, white, green, shell-pink, black – dress after dress.  It was as though she had died ten times and ten times been hung there, limp, gruesomely headless, but haloed still, ironically, with the sweet, breathing symbol of her life.  He stretched out his hand and touched the smooth silk, the cloth, the muslin, the velvet; all those various textures.  Stirred, the hanging folds gave out their perfume more strongly; he shut his eyes and inhaled her real presence.  But what was left of her had been burnt, and the ashes were at the bottom of that pit in Lollingdon churchyard.

      'Stay for me there,' John Beavis whispered articulately in the silence.

      His throat contracted painfully; the tears welled out between his closed eyelids.  Shutting the wardrobe door, he turned away and began to undress.

      He was conscious, suddenly, of an overwhelming fatigue.  It cost him an immense effort to wash.  When he got into bed, he fell asleep almost at once.

      Towards the morning, when the light of the new day and the noises from the street had begun to break through the enveloping layers of his inner darkness, John Beavis dreamed that he was walking along the corridor that led to his lecture-room at King's College.  No, not walking: running.  For the corridor had become immensely long and there was some terribly urgent reason for getting to the end of it quickly, for being there in time.  In time for what?  He did not know; but as he ran, he felt a sickening apprehension mounting, as it were, and expanding and growing every moment more intense within him.  And when at last he opened the door of the lecture-room, it wasn't the lecture-room at all, but their bedroom at home, with Maisie lying there, panting for breath, her face flushed with the fever, dark with the horrible approach of asphyxiation, and across it, like two weals, bluish and livid, the parted lips.  The sight was so dreadful that he started broad awake.  Daylight shone pale between the curtains; the quilt showed pink; there was a gleam in the wardrobe mirror; outside, the milkman was calling, 'Mu-ilk, Mui-uilk!' as he went his rounds.  Everything was reassuringly familiar, in its right place.  It had been no more than a bad dream.  Then, turning his head, John Beavis saw that the other half of the broad bed was empty.

 

      The bell came nearer and nearer, ploughing through the deep warm drifts of sleep, until at last it hammered remorselessly on his naked and quivering consciousness.  Anthony opened his eyes.  With a filthy row it made!  But he needn't think of getting up for at least another five minutes.  The warmth under the sheets was heavenly.  Then – and it spoilt everything – he remembered that early school was algebra and Jimbug.  His heart came into his throat.  Those awful quadratics!  Jimbug would start yelling at him again.  It wasn't fair.  And he'd blub.  But then it occurred to him that Jimbug probably wouldn't yell at him today – because of what, he suddenly remembered, had happened yesterday.  Horse-Face had been most awfully decent last night, he went on to think.

      But it was time to get up.  One, two, three and, ugh, how filthily cold it was!  He was just diving upwards into his shirt when somebody tapped very softly at the door of his cubicle.  One last wriggle brought his head through into daylight.  He went and opened.  Staithes was standing in the passage.  Staithes – grinning, it was true, in apparent friendliness; but still ... Anthony was disturbed.  Mistrustfully, but with a hypothetical smile of welcome, 'What's up?' he began; but the other put a finger to his lips.

      'Come and look,' he whispered.  'It's marvellous!'

      Anthony was flattered by this invitation from one who, as captain of the football eleven, had a right to be, and generally was, thoroughly offensive to him.  He was afraid of Staithes and disliked him – and for that very reason felt particularly pleased that Staithes should have taken the trouble to come to him like this, of his own accord ...

      Staithes's cubicle was already crowded.  The conspiratorial silence seethed and bubbled with a suppressed excitement.  Thompson had had to stuff his handkerchief into his mouth to keep himself from laughing, and Pembroke-Jones was doubling up in paroxysms of noiseless mirth.  Wedged in the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the washstand, Partridge was standing with one cheek pressed against the partition.  Staithes touched him on the shoulder.  Partridge turned round and came into the centre of the cubicle; his freckled face was distorted with glee and he twitched and fidgeted as though his bladder were bursting.  Staithes pointed to the place he had vacated and Anthony squeezed in.  A knot in the wood of the partition had been prized out, and through the hole you could see all that was going on in the next cubicle.  On the bed, wearing only a woollen undervest and his rupture appliance, lay Goggler Ledwidge.  His eyes behind the thick glass of his spectacles were shut; his lips were parted.  He looked tranquilly happy and serene, as though he were in church.

      'Is he still there?' whispered Staithes.

      Anthony turned a grinning face and nodded; then pressed his eyes more closely to the spy-hole.  What made it so specially funny was the fact that it should be Goggler – Goggler, the school buffoon, the general victim, predestined by weakness and timidity to inevitable persecution.  This would be something new to bait him with.

      'Let's give him a fright,' suggested Staithes, and climbed up on to the rail at the head of the bed.

      Partridge, who played centre forward for the first eleven, made a movement to follow him.  But it was to Anthony that Staithes unexpected turned.  'Come on, Beavis,' he whispered.  'Come up here with me.'  He wanted to be specially decent to the poor chap – because of his mater.  Besides, it pleased him to be able to snub that lout, Partridge.

      Anthony accepted the flattering invitation with an almost abject alacrity and got up beside him.  The others perched unsteadily at the foot of the bed.  At a signal from Staithes all straightened themselves up and, showing their heads above the partition, hooted their derision.

      Recalled thus brutally from his squalidly tender little Eden of enemas and spankings (it had, as yet, no female inhabitants), Goggler gave vent to a startled cry; his eyes opened, frantic with terror; he went very white for a moment, then blushed.  With his two hands he pulled down his vest; but it was too short to cover his nakedness or even his truss.  Absurdly short, like a baby's vest. ('We'll try to make them last this one more term,' his mother had said.  'These woollen things are so frightfully expensive.'  She had made great sacrifices to send him to Bulstrode.)

      'Pull, pull!' Staithes shouted in sarcastic encouragement of his efforts.

      'Why wouldn't Henry VIII allow Anne Boleyn to go into his henhouse?' said Thompson.  Everyone knew the answer, of course.  There was a burst of laughter.

      Staithes lifted one foot from its perch, pulled off the leather-soled slipper, took aim and threw.  It hit Goggler on the side of the face.  He gave a cry of pain, jumped out of bed and stood with hunched shoulders and one skinny little arm raised to cover his head, looking up at the jeering faces through eyes that had begun to overflow with tears.

      'Buzz yours too!' shouted Staithes to the others.  Then, seeing the new arrival standing in the open doorway of his cubicle, 'Hello, Horse-Face,' he said, as he took off the other slipper; 'come and have a shot.'  He raised his arm; but before he could throw, Horse-Face had jumped on to the bed and caught him by the wrist.

      'No, s-stop!' he said.  'Stop.'  And he caught also at Thompson's arm.  Leaning over Staithes's shoulder, Anthony threw – as hard as he could.  Goggler ducked.  The slipper thumped against the wooden partition behind him.

      'B-beavis!' cried Horse-Face – so reproachfully, that Anthony felt a sudden twinge of shame.

      'It didn't hit him,' he said, by way of excuse; and for some queer reason found himself thinking of that horrible deep hole in Lollingdon churchyard.

      Staithes had found his tongue again.  'I don't know what you think you're doing, Horse-Face,' he said angrily, and jerked the slipper out of Brian's hand.  'Why can't you mind your own business.'

      'It isn't f-fair,' Brian answered.

      'Yes, it is.'

      'F-five against one.'

      'But you don't know what he was doing.'

      'I d-don't c-c-c ... don't m-mind.'

      'You would care, if you knew,' said Staithes; and proceeded to tell him what Goggler had been doing – as dirtily as he knew how.

      Brian dropped his eyes and his cheeks went suddenly very red.  To have to listen to smut always made him feel miserable – miserable and at the same time ashamed of himself.

      'Look at old Horse-Face blushing!' called Partridge; and they all laughed – none more derisively than Anthony.  For Anthony had had time to feel ashamed of his shame; time to refuse to think about that hole in Lollingdon churchyard; time, too, to find himself all of a sudden almost hating old Horse-Face.  'For being so disgustingly pi,' he would have said, if somebody had asked him to explain his hatred.  Horse-Face, it was because Horse-Face was so extraordinarily decent; because Horse-Face had the courage of his convictions which Anthony felt should be his convictions – which, indeed, would be his convictions if only he could bring himself to have the courage of them.  It was just because he liked Horse-Face so much, that he now hated him.  Or, rather, because there were so many reasons why he should like him – so few reasons, on the contrary, why Horse-Face should return the liking.  Horse-Face was rich with all sorts of fine qualities that he himself either lacked completely or else, which was worse, possessed, but somehow was incapable of manifesting.  That sudden derisive burst of laughter was the expression of a kind of envious resentment against a superiority which he loved and admired.  Indeed, the love and the admiration in some sort produced the resentment and the envy – produced, but ordinarily kept them below the surface in an unconscious abeyance, from which, however, some crisis like the present would suddenly call them.

      'You should have seen him,' concluded Staithes.  Now that he felt in a better humour he laughed – he could afford to laugh.

      'In his truss,' Anthony added, in a tone of sickened contempt.  Goggler's rupture was an aggravation of the offence.

      'Yes, in his beastly old truss!' Staithes confirmed approvingly.  There was no doubt about it; combined as it was with the spectacles and the timidity, that truss made the throwing of slippers not only inevitable, but right, a moral duty.

      'He's disgusting,' Anthony went on, warming pleasantly to his righteous indignation.

      For the first time since Staithes had started on his description of Goggler's activities Brian looked up.  'B-but w-why is he more disg-gusting than anyone else?' he asked in a low voice.  'A-after all,' he went on, and the blood came rushing back into his cheeks as he spoke, 'he i-isn't the ... the o-only one.'

      There was a moment's uncomfortable silence.  Of course he wasn't the only one.  But he was the only one, they were all thinking, who had a truss, and goggles, and a vest that was too short for him; the only one who did it in broad daylight and let himself be caught at it.  There was a difference.

      Staithes counter-attacked on another front.  'Sermon by the Reverend Horse-Face!' he said jerkingly, and at once recovered the initiative, the position of superiority.  'Gosh!' he added in another tone, 'it's late.  We must buck up.'