“No, sir. . . . Only about eightpence.”

“You can’t go without money, you know. Here’s a sovereign. Now, cheer up, there’s a good fellow. Cheer up!” He smiled wanly, and Edwin burst into tears. Mr. Selby laid an awkward hand on his shoulder. It was very decent of him, Edwin thought, as he stood with his fists in his eyes, one of them clutching the sovereign that Selby had given him.

“Thank you, sir . . . but it’s awful, it’s awful. . . .”

“Of course, of course. . . .”

He shepherded Edwin out of the room. When the boy had gone, Mr. Selby, an unemotional man, tore the telegram into small pieces and placed them, with a confirmed bachelor’s tidiness, in the waste-paper basket. Then he lit a pipe of honeydew; and the blue smoke from the bowl together with the brown smoke that he expelled from his nostrils shone cheerily in the morning sun that beat through the latticed window on to a woman’s photograph standing on the desk in front of him. For a moment he gazed at the faded image. He had not thought of her for years.

CHAPTER VIII
HOMEWARDS

In a morning air of miraculous freshness Edwin left the quad by the iron gates on the eastern side. The square was quite empty, for all its usual inhabitants were now in early school. He noticed an unusual aspect of space and cleanliness. He could not remember ever having seen it empty before. He noticed the tuck-shop in the corner by the swimming-bath. This, too, was closed, and the windows were heavily shuttered. It was a small thing, but it suddenly occurred to him that people put up their shutters or pulled down their blinds when some one lay dead in a house. It seemed to him like a sort of omen. He said to himself, “I must think of something else . . . I must think of something else. I can’t bear it.” The only other time when he had ever thought of death had been a single moment a week or so before when his mother had written about her plan of a visit to Switzerland. And then the thought had been no more than an indefinite shadow, too remote to be threatening. Now it was different. The threat was ponderable and vast. “Death . . . I mustn’t think of it. I must think of something else.”

He had to think of something else; for by the time the gate clanged behind him the clock in the tower struck the quarter, and he knew that he had barely time to catch his train. With his bag in his hand he started running up the road between the tufted grassy banks; past the scene of his last adventure, the oak paling beside the nightingale’s spinney, past the last of the new villas, and so, on to the open downs. It was a strange adventure for him to reach them so early in the morning. Their turf was silvered still with a fine dew that made it even paler than a chalk down should be. Fold beyond beautiful fold they stretched before him. The woody belts of beech and pine lay veiled in milky mist, and the air which moved to meet him, as it seemed, over that expanse of breathing grass, was of an intoxicating coolness and sweetness which went to his head and made him want to shout or sing. The spring of a summer morning in the spring of life! It was all wrong. Surely no awful devastation of death could overshadow such an ecstasy of physical happiness? He refused to believe it. It was all fantastic nonsense. Of course she wasn’t dead. Your mother couldn’t die without your feeling it. . . .

At the station he had five minutes to spare. He changed his sovereign, and was relieved to be rid of the responsibility of one coin, and to fill his pocket with silver. There were several coppers in the change, and these he placed in a penny-in-the-slot machine, extracting several metallic ingots of chocolate cream. He was ready for these at once, for his only breakfast had been a hurried cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter in the matron’s room. The train jolted out of the station, and soon he was travelling eastward with the high water-tower of St. Luke’s dipping gradually beneath a long horizon.

The morning grew more beautiful. In some strange way its beauty seemed to have got into his blood; for he tingled with a kind of mild ecstasy which he couldn’t help feeling unsuitable—almost irreverent, to the tragic occasion. There was adventure in it and the added charm of the unexpected. He was going home. Surely it was reasonable enough to be excited at such a prospect as that, to smell the fine summer scents that were so different in a midland shire; to see the gorse ablaze on Pen Beacon and Uffdown and the green glades of the old Mercian wood. Of course it was always wonderful to be going home.