“That would be rather good fun,” said Edwin. “And he’s cut out for it too. He’s got that sort of head. I should rather like to see old Widdup.”
“Oh, he’ll roll up one of these days. Are you doing anything in particular this afternoon? I have to stroll down to see the stage-manager at the Gaiety . . . an awful good sport. Suppose we go down the town and get a drink on the way . . .”
In spite of the temptations of this adventure, Edwin declined. In the dissecting room, half an hour later, Brown hailed him:—
“What the devil were you doing with that pig of a brewer, Ingleby?”
“He’s an old school friend of mine.”
“Well, I should keep that dark, if I were you. He’s a bad hat, that chap. We don’t want Ingleby’s virginal innocence corrupted, do we, Maskew?”
“Oh, he’s not a bad sort,” Edwin protested.
“He’s a nasty fellow, and he’ll come to a rotten, sticky end,” said Brown. “Now, what do you think of this small sciatic, you old roué, for a tricky bit of dissection?”
After all, Edwin reflected, old Brown knew something of the world. He had to admit to himself that there was something obscene about Griffin. It was difficult to explain, for Maskew, by his own account, was almost equally worldly, and yet Maskew was undeniably a decent fellow while Griffin undeniably wasn’t. He joined his friends at their work, and could think about nothing else; for Maskew’s brains were as good as his own, though of a different texture, and he had to be attentive to keep pace with them. All through the vac. he worked at anatomy with these two, sometimes in the icy dissecting room, sometimes over coffee at the Dousita, sometimes in the cozy, diminutive diggings that Brown inhabited in Easy Row, a street of Georgian houses at the back of the university buildings and near the Prince’s Hospital.
They were pleasant days. Edwin, in spite of his lightness, had now found a place in the scrum of the second fifteen, and on Saturday evenings, when both of them were drugged with their weekly debauch of exercise, he and W.G. would meet at the diggings in Easy Row, and after a steaming hot bath, in the process of which Edwin never failed to be impressed by the immensity of his friend’s physique, they would set off down the town together and make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill: Porterhouse steak with chipped potatoes and huge silver tankards of bitter ale. Then they would go on together to a theatre or a music hall, too pleasantly dulled, too mildly elated to question the humour of the most second-rate comedian. After the show W.G. would walk down to the station with Edwin, and see him off into the last train for Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out of the carriage window, would see the big man turn and go clumsily along the platform with the gait that he had noticed on the very first day of his life as a medical student. Brown was a wonderful fellow. In half an hour, Edwin reflected, when his train was still puffing away through the dark, W.G. would be back in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, driving facts into that puzzled brain with the violent thoroughness of an engine that drives piles.