All through the afternoon, and particularly when he disinterred small pieces of the lumber that he had collected in his schooldays, this sense of a ghostly childhood haunted him. It followed him down the stairs into the hall, where the grandfather clock ticked steadily as it had ticked ever since he could remember, into the dead drawing-room, soon to be made alive by the tastes of another feminine personality; on the lawn, where the limes were shedding their sticky bloom; on the way to the station, when he lugged his bag through the gnarled shadows of Mrs. Barrow’s ancient garden, and caught a glimpse of the old lady’s kindly nodding bonnet as she smiled at him from her place in the window, where she sat hermetically sealed in an atmosphere of Victorian decay.
There were the reedy pools and Shenstone’s hanging woods, ghostly waters and woodlands, never to be seen again. And there was the platform of Halesby station, reeking of hot coal dust and ashes, and, from the incoming train, a flux of shabby people, including the bank-clerk in tennis flannels and the mysterious commercial traveller with the brown leather bag, reading the Pink ’Un as he walked. From this, through the black-country’s familiar desert, the train carried him into the bitter reality of North Bromwich. With something approaching the feelings of an intruder he installed himself in W.G.’s diggings, and made a supper, undeniably pleasant, of bread and cheese with a large bottle of W.G.’s beer. The latter, which happened to be Astill’s XXXX, induced a mood of tolerant sleepiness, and luckily prepared him to receive, at midnight or thereabouts, the confidences of his friend on the subject of Sister Merrion’s intellectual charms.
“You know, old chap, she’s different from me—reads poetry by the hour when she’s in the bunk on night duty. Longfellow’s her favourite. A long way above my head and all that; but it’s a wonderful thing, when you come to think of it, to be married to an intellectual woman. . . .” So the words poured into Edwin’s drowsy ears. He was far too sleepy to smile, and, Longfellow apart, it did seem to him a comfortable and even enviable thing to be the adored centre of the universe in the Irish eyes of a tender creature with wavy brown hair and a painful domestic tragedy. W.G. was still moralising on his past wickedness and the prospect of a blameless future when Edwin fell asleep.
II
Next morning he was awakened by his friend, boisterous and ruddy from a bath, performing a strange ritual of prostrations and contortions in front of an open window discreetly veiled with fluttering butter-muslin. Edwin lazily watched the sinuous play of muscles under the shaggy limbs of W.G. through half-closed lids.
“You’d make a topping subject for dissection, W.G.,” he said.
“Hallo!” W.G. answered from between his legs. “You awake, you old slacker? There’s a letter for you that came up with the tea. Tea’s cold, by the way.”
“Thanks,” said Edwin, as W.G. skimmed the letter over to him. “Good Lord, it’s from Edmondson’s.”
It was a note hastily scribbled advising Edwin to go at once and see Dr. Altrincham-Harris at 563 Lower Sparkdale, North Bromwich, between nine and ten a.m., or six and nine p.m., and signed by the manager who screwed his eyes up.
“Five hundred and sixty-three, Lower Sparkdale,” Edwin groaned. “I say, that sounds pretty bad. Altrincham-Harris is rather hot stuff for Lower Sparkdale, isn’t it? Queer place for a double-barreler.”