“Eddie . . . for God’s sake, go . . . now! . . . quickly!”
“I can’t go.”
“Go quickly, I tell you. Don’t be a damned little fool. You don’t want to be mixed up in this. Eddie, for God’s sake. . . . It’s ‘natural causes,’ Eddie.”
He blundered down the dark stairs and out into the street. He could not walk. He cowered under the warehouse wall opposite, gazing, as though fascinated, at the yellow square of window. The discreet Victorian houses surveyed him as if the horror that the yellow blind concealed were an ordinary occurrence in their dingy lives. They were used to death. And death did not change them. A rubber-tyred hansom rolled smoothly up the Halesby Road, past the mouth of the Place. At the corner, under the gas-lamp, Edwin saw the figure of a policeman with rain shining on his cape. The sight recalled him to a sense of awful possibilities. For the moment he dared not move. He flattened himself against the warehouse walls and did not realise that he was standing directly under the dripping waterspout. In the western sky rose the baleful glare of an uncowled furnace. The policeman strolled away, and Edwin, cautiously emerging, set off through the rain up the Halesby Road towards the hills. He felt that he needed their solitude and darkness.
IV
Next day, a haggard and desolate figure, he appeared in the cloak-room of the University where the examination results were displayed. In a dream he realised that he was now a Bachelor of Medicine, but in the realisation there was none of the joy that he had anticipated. He stood before the board bewildered, until W.G. came up behind him and wrung his hand.
“You look as if you’d been making a night of it, my boy,” he said. “Come and have some coffee at the Dousita.”
W.G. was on the top of himself. “It was a pretty near thing. The external examiner in Medicine gave me hell; but it’s all right. God! . . . it’s difficult to believe, isn’t it? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. A voyage, I should think.”
He hadn’t thought of it before.