The caravan hove in sight as they reached the gate. She joined Mrs. Copas inside, and he, Mr. Copas, on the footboard. He was filled with a bubbling humor and was hard put to it not to laugh aloud. He had no clear memory of the talk in the wood, but he liked the delicious absurdity of it.
“In love?” he said to himself. “Nonsense.”
All the same he could not away with the fact that he had a new zest and pleasure in contemplating the future. Thrigsby and all its works fell away behind him and he was glad of his promise to teach the girl. . . . One girl after hundreds of boys! It had been one of his stock jests for public dinners in Thrigsby that the masters of the Grammar School and the mistresses of the High School should change places. No one had ever taken him seriously until now Fate had done so. Of course it could not last, this new kind of perambulatory school with one master and one pupil; the girl was too attractive; she would be snapped up at once, settle down as a wife and mother before she knew where she was. In his thoughts he had so isolated himself with her that old prejudices leaped up in him and gave him an uncomfortable sense of indiscretion. That, however, he placated with the reminder that, after all, they were chaperoned by Mrs. Copas.
“That’s a fine girl, your niece,” he said to Mr. Copas.
“Aye. A handsome bit o’ goods. She says to me, she says, ‘I want to be a nactress, uncle,’ she says. And I says: ‘You begin at the bottom, young lady, and maybe when you’re your aunt’s age you’ll be doing the work your aunt does.’ They tell me, Mr. Mole, that in London they have leading ladies in their teens. I’ve never seen the woman who could play leads under forty. . . . Good God! Hi! Carrie! Tildy!”
Mr. Mole had fallen from the footboard, flat on his face in the road.
When he came to himself he thought with a precision and clarity that amounted almost to vision of his first arrival at Oxford, saw himself eagerly, shyly, stepping down from the train and hurrying through the crowd of other young men, eager and shy, and meeting school acquaintances. He remembered with singular acuteness the pang of shame he had felt on encountering Blazering who was going to Magdalen while he himself was a scholar of Lincoln. He pursued the stripling who had been himself out of the station and up past the gaol, feeling amazingly, blissfully youthful when he put up his hand and found a stiff beard upon his chin. Gone was the vision of Oxford, gone the sensation of youth, and he realized that he was in bed in a stranger’s room, which, without his glasses, he could not see distinctly. There was a woman by his bedside, a stout woman, with a strong light behind her, so that he could not distinguish her features. It was a very little room, low in the ceiling. The smell of it was good. It had one small window, which was open, and through it there came up the hubbub of voices and the grinding beat and blare of a mechanical organ that repeated one tune so quickly that it seemed always to be afraid it would not have time to reach the end before it began again. The woman was knitting. He tried to remember who she might be, but failing, and feeling mortified at his failure, he consoled himself with the reflection that he was ill—ill-in-bed, one of the marked degrees of sickness among schoolboys. How ill? He had never been ill in his life.
“Can I have my spectacles?” he said.
“Oh!” The knitting in the woman’s hands went clattering to the floor. “Lor’! Mr. Mole, you did give me a start. I shall have the palpitations, same as my mother. My mother had the palpitations for forty years and then she died of something else.”
“If I had my spectacles I could see who it is speaking.”