It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin, oddly enough on the very first day of his life at St. Luke’s. Mrs. Ingleby had come down from the Midlands with him, a little anxious, for there were pitfalls in public school life (it was in ninety-five), but immensely proud of Edwin’s entrance scholarship. They had crossed London together in a hansom, and on the smoky platform at Victoria, she had bidden him a good-bye which cost her some pangs, for the poor boy was half dead with train-sickness. Edwin was her only child, and some smouldering ethic decreed that he must not be pampered, but when she raised her veil to kiss him, tears escaped beneath its rim. Those tears were very unsettling; they gave him a sudden glimpse of his mother in a new light; but he felt too ill even to watch her hurrying to the end of the platform. His head ached so violently in the sulphurous station air that he wouldn’t have minded much if some one, say his next-door neighbour in the train, a city clerk who smoked the most manly tobacco, had relieved him of the half-sovereign, the last gift of all, that he clutched mechanically in his left-hand trouser pocket—or if the porters, in the fine free way they have, had smashed all the jampots in the playbox so obstrusively white and new, with
E. INGLEBY
115
in black lettering on the lid.
The rest of that journey he had been too prostrate and lethargic to realise. Somewhere the shouting of a familiar word had bundled him out of his corner; a porter whom he had tipped fumblingly had bundled him into a cab which smelt of straw, and at last the martial-looking personage who received him at the grand entrance had conveyed him up a broad flight of stone stairs and along a corridor that echoed their two pairs of foot-steps, to the housemaster’s room, where, in an atmosphere of mellow honeydew, Mr. Selby sat at his desk, trifling with a bath-list of the big dormitory. Ingleby sat at one end of a luxurious sofa, feeling very sick. It seemed as though he could never escape from the smell of tobacco. At the other end of the sofa sat another boy, perhaps three years older than Edwin. He was tall for his age and inclined to be fat. His feet were small and shapely, and their smallness accentuated the heavy build of his shoulders, so that the whole boy seemed to taper downwards on the lines of a peg-top. He had a broad face, covered with freckles, regular but undistinguished features, and eyes, rather wide apart, of a peculiar cold and light blue. His hair was crisp and sandy; his whole get-up a little dandiacal within the limits of black and gray. He kept on fingering silver coins, that jingled together faintly in the depths of his pocket; perhaps he was counting them in the dark; perhaps he was merely fidgeting.
Mr. Selby looked up from his bath-list.
“Well, Griffin, and what is your pleasure?”
“Letter from father, sir.”
A letter from father would need an answer. Mr. Selby, although an expert in the tortuous psychology of parents, was a lazy man. He sighed as he opened it. “H’m . . . No games? You don’t look particularly ill, Griffin.”
“Doctor said I was growing too fast, sir . . . something about my heart.” Griffin’s manners were irreproachable.
Mr. Selby smiled.