On the way into the classroom he met Griffin, who pushed a packet into his hand. “Here you are,” he said. “Take it.” It was thirty-eight shillings in silver, the first prize in the house sweep on the Birches. He wished he had remembered about it. He would have told his mother in the letter not to bother about the postal order. It was an awful thing to think of her being hard-up and himself rolling in this prodigious and ill-gotten fortune.
The morning class was listless, for the weather remained at a great pitch of heat, and the only thing that any one thought of was the fixture with the M.C.C. which would begin at noon. Cleaver always assisted as umpire at this match, and so the deserted Lower Fifth occupied a corner of the Big Schoolroom by themselves. In this great chamber—it was said that the roof-span was as wide as any in England—Edwin dreamed away the morning, reading, sometimes, the gilt lettering on the boards on which the names of scholars were recorded: giants who had passed before him along the same corridors, and whose names were only memorable as those of heroes in a mythology, or more ponderably evident in reports of parliamentary debates and the scores of county cricket teams.
Opposite him hung the board devoted to the winners of entrance scholarships. His own name was there. Edwin Ingleby . . . 1895. He remembered the day when it had almost embarrassed him with its fresh gold lettering. Now the leaf had toned down, and the name had sunk into obscurity beneath a dozen others. So the passage of fleet time was measured on these tables. In a few more years nobody who didn’t take the trouble would read his name. Even those of the batch before him were half-buried in obscurity. One other name arrested him: G. H. Giles. He knew nothing of Giles except that this brilliant beginning had been followed by disaster. The name of Giles appeared on no other board; for the term before Edwin came to St. Luke’s Giles had been expelled from the school. Edwin didn’t know what he had been expelled for; but the circumstance, remembered, afflicted him with a kind of awe. “It might happen so easily,” he thought. Why, if he hadn’t lied to the Head the day before he might have been expelled himself, and years afterwards some one sitting in his place would stare at the name of Ingleby with the selfsame awe. The voice of Mr. Leeming, stuck fast where Edwin had left him a year before, in the Stuart period, recalled him. “We will pass over the unpleasant . . . most unpleasant side of Charles the Second’s reign. Unfortunately, he was a thoroughly bad man, and his court . . .”
Edwin heard no more, but he heard another sound peculiar to the Big Schoolroom on Saturday mornings: the measured steps of the school sergeant plodding down the long stone corridor which led to the folding doors. On Saturday morning the form-masters presented their weekly reports to the Head, and boys whose names came badly out of the ordeal were summoned to the office to be lectured, to be put on the sort of probation known as “Satisfecit,” or even to be caned.
The Lower Fifth knew none of these terrors. Cleaver was far too easy-going to take his weekly report seriously; but the lower ranks of Mr. Leeming’s form trembled. You could never be sure of old Leeming. The folding doors opened. Mr. Leeming stopped speaking, and the sergeant walked up to his desk and stood waiting at attention while Leeming read his list. He looked over his glasses. “Let me see . . . Sherard . . .” he said. “Sherard, the head-master wishes to see you at twelve-thirty.” His voice was so gently sympathetic that nobody could possibly imagine that he had had anything to do with this calamity. “Then . . . the Lower Fifth . . .” he fumbled with the paper. “Ingleby. The head-master will see you at the same time.” He looked over at Edwin with the most pained surprise. “Very good, sergeant,” he said.
Edwin felt himself going white. Yes, that was it. That was the explanation of his feeling of unrest. He was going to share the fate of the traditional Giles. Good Lord . . . think of it! Miss Denning had done this. And yet he could hardly believe it—she had always been far too nice for that. Now his face was burning. It struck him that it wasn’t a bit of good worrying. If it weren’t . . . if it weren’t for his mother it really wouldn’t be so bad. He couldn’t bear to think of her disappointment in his disgrace. She thought so much of him. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if she were not ill. It might kill her. Good God! . . . that would be awful! Suppose, after all (it was no good supposing), that the Head wanted to see him about something else. . . . There wasn’t anything else. Unless . . . unless it were something to do with his mother. Unless she were seriously ill . . . even something worse. But he had her letter. It couldn’t be that. Yesterday she was well enough to write to him. No . . . the story was out, and he was going to be expelled. In three quarters of an hour he would know the worst. He wished that the time would pass more quickly. Time had never been so slow in passing. The clock in the tower chimed the quarter. From where he sat he could see the tower through the upper lights of the long window. He could see the minute-hand give a little lurch and move infinitesimally forward. He remembered Widdup telling him exactly how many times it moved to the minute. Was it twice . . . or three times? He had forgotten. There must be something wrong with the clock to-day. In the middle of this purgatory one half-humorous fancy came to him: “At any rate old Griff will know that I did go to the races now.”
III
They waited, ten or twelve of them, in the twilight of the passage outside the Head’s study. The atmosphere of this place resembled that of a crypt, or more properly—since the keynote of the St. Luke’s architecture was baronial rather than monastic—a dungeon. The only light that came to them entered by way of certain dusty windows of lancet shape on either side of the gothic porch. Beneath these windows languished a pale array of botanical specimens rotting in their test tubes and bearing witness to the week-old zeal of the Head’s particular section of the Natural History Society.
They waited, a miserable company of all shapes and sizes: some, who knew the worst, with a rather exaggerated jauntiness, determined to make the best of it: others, such as Edwin, being in doubt of their fate and burdened with a spiritual apprehension far worse than any physical penalty which might overtake them.
The sergeant opened the door. “Sherard W.,” he said. Sherard W. crammed a sweaty cap into his pocket and started forward, eager to get it over. The aperture which admitted him showed no more than the end of a table crammed with books, a number of highly-varnished shelves, a polished floor covered with Turkey carpet, and a blaze of mocking sunshine. The nails in the heels of Sherard W.’s boots rang on the stone flags. When he reached the Turkey carpet his steps became silent. The door closed. The rest of them strained to listen. They heard little: nothing but the quiet rumour of the head-master’s voice, and little patches of silence in which the replies of Sherard W. were not heard at all. A moment later he emerged. A number of whispered questions assailed him, but Sherard W. didn’t feel like answering questions. He brushed by the rest of them as quickly as he could go, with his school-cap pressed to his eyes. Another patch of sunlight was revealed. “Frazer . . .” called the sergeant. And Frazer, a tall lout of a boy with sallow face, came forward and was swallowed up in the same way as Sherard W. A minute later the sound of dull blows was heard.