Title: Roper's Row (1929)
Author: Warwick Deeping
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Language:  English
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Title: Roper's Row (1929)
Author: Warwick Deeping





TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER





CHAPTER I


I


The girl was tempted by the open door.  It was unusual for Hazzard
to leave his door open.  His habit was to shut it quietly and
carefully, for like many other doors in Roper's Row it had seen
better days, and was suffering from decrepitude, strained hinges
and a stammering lock.  Hazzard knew the habits of that door.
Unless you were firm with it and made sure that the catch had
caught, the door would swing slowly back into the room, uttering a
little creaking moan.  It was a faithless, treasonable door.  It
was ready to betray you and your secrets, and Hazzard had many
reasons for wishing to keep the door closed.

Ruth Avery was tempted.  She had occupied the upper floor front of
No. 7 Roper's Row for less than a month, but the occupant of the
back room was as secretive as his door.  She heard him go up and
down the stairs; he had a lame leg and a walk that, with its broken
rhythm, resembled the sounds of the human heart as heard by the
doctor's ear--"Lub-dup, lub-dup."  She had met him once on the
stairs, a little, dark, pale young man with a big head and defiant
hair, and a something in his eyes.  He had stood aside to let her
pass.  He had neither looked at her nor spoken to her.  He had that
air of unfriendliness which is a man's defence against the
unfriendliness of other people.

She thought--"I oughtn't to--but I want to," and being a woman she
tiptoed across the worn linoleum and looked in, for the room was
empty.  It had furniture of a sort, but furniture that seemed to
emphasize the room's air of emptiness.  There was an iron bedstead
covered with a pink cotton quilt, a table by the window that had
once been painted black, and a wash-hand-stand against a wall that
had once been a liverish yellow.  She saw a strip of red matting,
two sugar-boxes, one on top of the other, with their lids converted
into doors.  She saw a deal shelf hung by a cradle of string, and
lined with shabby books.  She saw two bedroom chairs, and the cane
seat of one of them suggested that a foot had been thrust through
it.  There was a hanging cupboard behind the door, but the door hid
it from her eyes.

Two objects in the room arrested her attention: a white marmalade
pot full of red roses on the black table, and a violin hanging from
a nail driven into the wall.  She was surprised to see the roses,
for roses cost money in London.  Also she had not expected to see a
violin.  She had never heard a violin being played in that back
room, and she would have preferred the sound of it to the
chattering music of her typewriter.  But the roses enchanted her;
she saw them against the blue-grey murk of a slate roof; she had
been born and bred in the country, but she had not loved flowers
then as she loved them now.  She went quickly into the room, and
taking the white jar in her two hands, put her mouth to one of the
flowers, and inhaled the perfume.

Memories rushed to her.  Surely these were cottage roses, country
flowers, not city madames?  Roses, and hay, and the smell of bean
fields, and lilac and white May, and the scent of the bluebells in
the beechwoods!  And then she nearly dropped the jar, realizing
that someone was standing behind her.

"Oh,--I'm so sorry; your door was open, and I happened to see the
roses."

She replaced the pot on the table, and with tremulous, sensitive
lips, and a flickering of her lashes, made her confession.

"It was awfully wrong of me, but I couldn't resist."

He was looking at her with those curious, still, dark eyes of his.
She noticed that he was in his socks, grey socks.  She wondered
why.

"All right.  I had gone down to get the Bunce girl to take my boots
to be mended.  You can have the flowers--if you like--"

He was abrupt, casual.  His very confession concerning his boots
was wilful and challenging.  He had only one pair of boots, and she
might just as well know it.  But she, a little frightened, and very
conscious of his dour, fixed stare, felt that life--somehow--was
piteous and deplorable.

"Really, I couldn't."

He limped round her and across the room, picked up the white pot,
and held it out with a thrust of the arm.  It was as though he
pushed the flowers at her, while saying--"Take them, get out and
go.  I'm busy."

"All right.  My mother sent them.  They'll last a day or two.  But
you might return the pot."

She took the white jar in her hands, and with a half-protesting
look at him, got herself out on to the narrow landing.  She was
still standing there when he closed his door.


II


Christopher Hazzard took off his coat.  It was a warm June evening,
but he removed his coat because clothes were precious, and because
he was about to prepare the meal that contrived to be both tea and
supper.  Opening the deal doors of the two sugar-boxes he took out
an oil-stove, a kettle, half a loaf of bread and a wedge of Dutch
cheese, a white milk-jug, two blue plates, a brown teapot, and a
spoon and a knife with a black handle.  He arranged them on the
table.  The paraffin stove was kept scrupulously clean, otherwise
the smell of those Wiltshire roses would not have lingered.  His
arranging of the meal was deft, precise, almost meticulous, as
though it was part of his self-discipline to make the most of the
little that he had.

There were footsteps on the stairs, and someone knocked.

"Hallo!"

"Ol' Bibs saith he wanth sixpunth more."

"Why?  Last time."

"A patch or suthing."

"All right."

The Bunce girl opened the door.  She was seventeen, sallow,
colourless as to hair and lips, with the open mouth and pinched
nostrils of a child whose throat had never been attended to.
Hazzard was filling the tin kettle, and the girl watched him with
pale, slate-coloured eyes that seemed to droop from under the
flaccid upper lids.  Hazzard's dark and aggressive head was
outlined against the sky.  His head and his dexterous, strong hands
were the only impressive things about him.  He was a little fellow,
narrow shouldered, fragile, and lame.

"Want sixpence, do you?"

"Yeth, Mr. Hathard."

Putting the tin kettle on the stove, and returning the ewer to its
basin, he felt in a trouser pocket and produced some coppers.

"Can't get on without boots, Phelia."

She blinked her heavy eyes at him.

"The kettle's boilin' downthstairs.  If you like--"

He was counting out pennies and halfpennies, and he did not look at
her when he answered.

"Thanks, Phelia.  I'm an independent little brute.  Got to be
somehow.  There you are.  Better get a receipt from Old Bibs.
Don't trust a soul in this world."

"Lor', Mr. Hathard--we ain't all thieves."

He gave her a quick and half-ironic stare.

"That's so.  Thank you."

He was lighting the oil-stove when the Bunce girl closed the door,
and her closing of it was gradual, the lingering effacement of a
figure that provoked her young curiosity.  For Hazzard was an
oddity in Roper's Row, though there were other oddities, clean and
unclean, obscure, shabby, secret people.  They might have been
divided into those who had not quite enough to eat, and those who
drank too much.  In Roper's Row the penny was a coin of some
significance.  Hazzard paid three and sixpence a week for that top-
floor back room, and Ophelia Bunce happened to know that he "paid
reg'lar."  The room had no fireplace, or rather the fireplace had
been boarded up, but then Hazzard never indulged in a fire.  In
winter he sat and read in his overcoat.  His feet got stone cold,
but that was to be expected when you were using your brain.

His view from the upper window of No. 7 had a circumscribed
variousness, and a bizarre beauty of its own, perhaps because there
was so much curious detail in it, and Hazzard the medical student
was learning to let no details elude him.  He looked out on the
backs of three other rows of houses all of the same soft sootiness,
and upon a collection of chimney-stacks and chimney-pots, back-
yards, and spaces that were called gardens.  In one of these
gardens a black poplar had grown and flourished; its restless,
flickering leaves gave a sense of green movement in the midst of
all that blackened brickwork, and Hazzard liked to watch the
flicker of the leaves.  It was a change from looking at crooked
chimney-stacks and comparing them to strumous children with
curvature of the spine.

When the meal was over he washed up, using an old white slop-pail
as a sink.  He dried everything and put it away, gave the stove a
wipe with a rag, and closed the doors of his sugar-box cupboards.
He did not smoke, because he could not afford tobacco, nor was he
to be pitied because there is no pain in doing without that which
you have never enjoyed.  Hazzard's joy was his work; he lived for
it and starved for it, and was despised and disliked for it by
those middle-class young men who loved their own bodies.  For, in
his own way, and at that time of his life, Hazzard had all the
climber's happiness.

Getting down a book from the shelf and taking a notebook from the
table drawer he set to work.  He could read for hours on end.  He
had an extraordinary memory, probably because he remembered with
passion.  At "Bennets" he was loathed, because he was such a scrub
and so abominably efficient, and played no games and was so
obviously a child of the people.  He knew that he was loathed.

His work was soundless.  Not so the work on the other side of the
landing.  The click-click of Ruth Avery's typewriter obtruded
itself upon his consciousness.  She was a typist somewhere in the
City, and added to her income by doing odd work in the evenings
when it happened to come her way.  Hazzard had noticed the card
hung up in the window of Mrs. Bunce's newspaper shop:  "Miss Avery.
Typing done."

He sat and listened.  The sound did not disturb him either mentally
or emotionally.  And presently the clicking of the keys and the
ping of the bell ceased.  He heard her door open.  She went down
the stairs; she was going out.

He did not trouble to wonder whether she had any object.  He went
on reading.  He could not go out on that particular evening because
his boots were being repaired.


III


Naturally, Christopher Hazzard had no sense of the romantic, but he
was very much alive to beauty.  A Wiltshire boy from one of those
green valleys where the Avon winds among the chalk hills, he had
come to know as a child the wildness and the loneliness and the
mystery of great spaces.  For he had been a lonely child, and a
persecuted child, a cripple, one of those sensitive creatures who
are designed to be hunted by little round-headed savages.

Mary Hazzard--his mother--had kept a small general shop at Melfont,
and to Christopher his mother was all that the rest of the world
was not.  She was very old now, and the shop had passed into other
hands, and Mary Hazzard had retired into a little white cottage
with a thatched roof at the southern end of Melfont village, with
the feet of its garden in the Avon, and its western windows looking
up towards the high pastures.  One of those dark, grave, silent
women, her very black hair still retained its colour, and her skin
had a fine whiteness.  The mother of a lame and a delicate child,
she had been more than a mother to him in the flesh.  She had known
him to come back to her with anguish and shame, breathing fast and
hard, afraid but fighting to conceal his fear.

She had heard the voices of other children hounding him to the very
gate of his home.

"Cowardy--cowardy custard--"

"Hobbledy--hobbledy--Look at his boot."

For Christopher was unusual, and to be unusual is to arouse the
mistrust and the dislike of the crowd, be the members of it men or
children.  Also, Mary Hazzard was unusual, and that is perhaps why
she understood her son.  Her pride--with flashing eyes--had taken
its stand behind his.  Very early she had realized him as something
unusual, partly because of his lame leg, but chiefly because of his
unlame mind.  He had not been made for the plough-lands or the
smithy or the carpenter's bench, nor had she seen him behind the
counter of a village shop.  There was more in Christopher than
that, and so she put penny to penny, and sent him to school, while
earning for herself the reputation of being a skinflint.  She was
unpopular, because she had a dark reserve, and did not gossip, and
was above herself according to her neighbours.

"Them Hazzards."

Yes, them Hazzards, mother and son, were peculiar people, but Mary
knew her world, and how few people there are in it who really
matter to you, and that the great mistake is to think that everyone
matters.  Christopher went to school; he carried off prizes; his
mother kept them on a shelf in her bedroom.  He was a dark child,
reserved and silent and watchful in the face of the world, but to
his mother he was otherwise.  He was solitary, but not with her.
On his holidays it had been his pleasure to go up to the hills with
the shepherds, or to watch birds, or to take a book and lie in the
shade of one of the old grey stones of the Melfont cromlech.
Always, those days, he had been reading or watching things.  He had
curious, deep eyes, both very still and very bright.

There had been a very frank understanding between mother and son.

"Kit, what I'm asking is that you'll never make me look a fool."

"That's a promise, mother."

Their two prides held hands.  Each inspired and rallied the other.
His mother had defied the world in defying the littleness of
Melfont.  "She thinks she's going to make a gentleman of him, does
she!"--"I do hear he's for being a doctor?"  Cluckings, and
grimaces, and rustic irony; but Christopher, who had been
persecuted in his younger days, understood his mother's pride.  She
did not wish to be made to look a fool, and to have her neighbours
kindly grinning in her shop.  And Christopher, with the teeth of
his soul well set, had promised himself and her that failure should
not come back to roost in Melfont.


IV


Mary Hazzard's effort had culminated in the paying of her son's
hospital fees, and not only had she paid these fees, but she had
managed to allow him ten shillings a week.  Ten dear, bitter, blood-
stained shillings, but she was an old woman now and could do no
more.  For it takes five years to make the very beginnings of a
doctor, and the boy had to eat and sleep, and textbooks cost money,
and the world expects a clean collar.

Christopher would think of these things as he sat at his window.
During the last year he had become aware of his mother as a woman
grown suddenly very old and white of skin; her eyes were the same
as ever, but when he looked at her face he felt strange pangs and
the stirrings of a fierce compassion.  It seemed to him that like
the mythical pelican she had fed him upon her life-blood.  He did
not know, but he may have suspected that she had gone short of food
for years, and now that the shop and its goodwill were sold she had
both less and more to give.  If it was a case of Christopher
against the world, it was also the case of a young man inspired by
a double purpose.  He could say to himself, "When I'm qualified,
when I can make money, it will be my turn."



CHAPTER II


I


At six o'clock Hazzard took down the violin and bow, and wrapping
them in a piece of black cloth such as working tailors use, put on
his hat, locked his door and descended the stairs.

Ruth Avery, idle at her window, heard him go down the stairs, and
leaning out saw him appear in Roper's Row.  Already she had come to
associate the hour of six with the emerging of that little black
limping figure into the passage below.  There were the evenings
when he carried that black affair under his arm, and the evenings
when he wore an overcoat and a white scarf.  She supposed that the
overcoat concealed something, which it did, a second-hand dress
suit bought at a second-hand clothes shop in Red Lion Street.
Challenged to imagine what the piece of black cloth might hide, she
remembered the violin that she had seen hanging on the wall, and so
allowed herself to wonder whether he gave a part of his evenings to
playing in some orchestra.

Roper's Row had no roadway.  It was a broad, paved passage lined
with shabby little shops that sold fruit and groceries, and fish,
and old clocks and prints and oddments, and newspapers, stationery,
and second-hand books.  At six o'clock it was full of children
playing and shouting, and getting in the way of their elders, but
Hazzard took no notice of these youngsters.  Shouting children
roused in him unhappy memories.  He walked fast, keeping his eyes
upon a distant greenness that were the trees in Gray's Inn, for
Roper's Row was fortunate in having an open space and trees both
east and west of it.  The planes of Gray's Inn balanced the plane
trees of Red Lion Square.

Hazzard varied his route.  Sometimes he used the Clerkenwell Road;
on other evenings he followed Gray's Inn Road, and working his way
across to Myddelton Square, turned down into St. John Street.  In
St. John Street stood a public-house, "The Bunch of Grapes," and
Hazzard, entering by a side door painted in brown to imitate
grained wood, and walking along a dark passage, emerged into a big
bare room behind the bar.  Here, on a little raised platform, he
joined a red-faced man with a banjo, and a hunch-backed little
fellow who played the flute.  The three of them formed the "Bunch
of Grapes" orchestra, hired by an enterprising proprietor for the
benefit of his clients.

The banjoist was in charge.  He had a succulent, red face, and a
voice that rolled oleaginously from under a fair, drooping
moustache.  He sang music-hall songs, and sentimental songs, and
dirty ditties when the room and the audience had grown warm and
well oiled.  He always led off with three taps of the right foot, a
clearing of the throat, and a "Now then--gentlemen."  The flutist
was never seen to smile.  He sat there rather like a little wizened
monkey, blowing at his flute with an air of dark melancholy.
Hazzard, with the smell of beer and sawdust and hot humanity in his
nostrils, and his violin tucked under his chin, observed life with
a kind of ironic gravity.  The banjoist's name was Bangs; he had
glutinous movements, an eternal smile, and an exuberant good
humour.  He was very popular with the men and the women who sat at
the wooden tables covered with American cloth.  Always he was
addressed as Mr. Bangs.

"Tell us a tale, Mr. Bangs."

And Mr. Bangs would tell a tale, pulling the ends of his big and
drooping moustache, and winking one blue eye, and striking
occasional and dramatic or suggestive notes on the banjo.  He had
an arch way of plucking at the strings when producing an innuendo.

"That's where they pulled down the blind"--or "So--I ordered a
bathin' machine--for two."

The laughter in the room was like a hot breath laden with alcohol.
Hazzard would sit with his violin across his knees and watch those
gargoyle faces.  Little Lardner the flutist would close his eyes
and rock gently on his chair.  He appeared to withdraw himself into
abstracted meditation; but at the end of one of Mr. Bangs's
stories, and in the midst of the splurge of laughter, he would come
to himself with a hissing sound, a breath drawn in sharply through
closed teeth.

"Silly swine--"

Sometimes there was dancing.  A man and a woman would get up and
face each other, and looking each other in the eyes with a kind of
smeary and set smile, go through movements that were like Bangs's
voice, glutinous and strangely deliberate.  To Hazzard they
suggested people trying to move their feet in a medium that had the
consistency of treacle.

For his share in the evening's entertainment he received half a
crown and a glass of beer.  He would return to Roper's Row, wash
out his mouth, put his head in cold water, and sit down to read
till midnight.

Other evenings that were more civic and decorous took him to
Dando's Hotel in Fleet Street, and at Dando's Hazzard handed round
tomato soup, roast and vegetables, apple tart and custard, to the
middle classes instead of providing music for the masses.  Dando's
was much used by clubs and fraternities for their weekly, monthly,
or yearly dinners.  They were very hearty occasions, with much
oratory, and Hazzard, who had cultivated an ascetic stomach, used
to wonder how such well-fleshed people could manage to eat so much.
Also, having a rather fantastic fancy, he would see in the diners
so many rounds of beef or roast legs of mutton dressed up in white
collars.  But he was kept very busy on such evenings.  It was
"Waiter" here--and "Waiter" there, and the room was badly
ventilated.  He sweated.  Often he would go back to Roper's Row
with a wet shirt and an aching head, but with a few shillings in
his pocket.

A fellow "occasional" at Dando's, who was a packer of books during
the day, had put Christopher up to the happy method of extracting
tips.

"Don't be in a 'urry, my lad.  Wait till they're warm.  If they're
whiskyish, wait till the whisky's got 'em.  Then--you go and lean
over confidential like and whisper ''Ope I've looked after you to
your satisfaction, sir.'"

Hazzard had a purpose and a passion that were stronger than mere
superficial pride.  He would bend and utter those words, "I hope I
have looked after you, sir, to your satisfaction."  In nine cases
out of ten the tip was produced, and Hazzard would pocket it with a
little ironic and grave smile.  Probably no diner-out ever
suspected him of irony, or of being what he was or what he would
be.


II


It was Saturday, and Christopher had packed a bag that was black
and rather shapeless, like a mother-bag that had produced many
families.  One of the white metal clips was missing.  When lifted
by the handle it sagged at either end; placed upon a flat surface
it allowed itself to relax and to bulge.

Hazzard met Ruth Avery on the stairs.  She had been running up them
and was out of breath, and in standing aside to let her pass he was
aware of her quick breathing and her colour.  They had not spoken
to each other since the incident of the roses and the marmalade
pot.

She looked at his face and then at the black bag.  Her eyes were
shy.

"Going away?"

The question was as obvious as her smile, and yet her smile was not
as obvious as it seemed.  She was a dusky thing, far darker than he
was, suggesting a damask rose or a purple pansy, quick to change
colour, slim, sensitive.  This smile of hers came and went as
quickly as her colour, and when she was not smiling her face had a
mute, apprehensive sadness.  Always when in movement she would
appear a little out of breath, or fluttering like a bird, her face
suddenly aglow and as suddenly pale and serious.

Hazzard was as shy of her as she was of him, but it showed in him
differently.  He would just stare at a person with those still and
watchful eyes of his and say nothing, or with a lift of the head
utter a few curt, casual words.  He had learnt how to protect
himself with silence, or to use silence as a weapon, a menace that
warned people off.

"Country--till Sunday night.  Must get out of London sometimes."

She seemed to shrink against the handrail.  He puzzled her.

"I wish I could.  Regent's Park--is my limit."

"Might do worse."

He gave her a glance that was neither friendly nor hostile.  It was
steady and impartial; it offered nothing and it asked for nothing.
He went on down the stairs, while she remained leaning against the
rail, watching him descend, one hand laid along her cheek.  She had
the quick reactions of a sensitive child.  Reserve, coldness, an
unfriendly reticence hurt her.

Before leaving No. 7 Roper's Row Hazzard opened the glazed door
that gave access from the passage to Mrs. Bunce's shop.  Mrs. Bunce
in a red shawl was checking the copies of an evening paper.  She
wore spectacles; she had an amorphous roundness of face and figure;
hair and skin were so alike in their bleached deadness that they
seemed to melt into each other.  She was never without a shawl,
even in the height of summer, though the colour of the shawl might
vary.

Said Hazzard, "I shall be back to-morrow night, last train.  You
might leave the door unlocked."

Mrs. Bunce turned her spectacles upon him.  She had one of those
confidential whispering voices that go on and on like a perpetual
draught through a keyhole.

"That's all right, dearie.  Hope you'll find your mother well.  It
will do you good--it will--a whole day in the country.  Drat that
paper boy.  He's short on me again with the Globes.  I'll have to
count 'em a second time--to be sure.  Yes,--I'll leave the door
unlocked.  You'll come up quiet, won't you.  Old Rammell's so
touchy about noises--after ten o'clock.  I must count these papers
over again.  One, two, three--"

Hazzard left her counting, for in Roper's Row simple arithmetic was
of more importance than reading or writing.  Necessity sat at the
master's desk and made you figure everything out without any help
from a chalked example on the blackboard.  If you had a supreme
purpose planted like a pot of musk upon your window-sill, you
cultivated a divine miserliness in order to cherish that one plant.
You were suspicious of all other plants, especially that particular
flower that had the face of woman.

Hazzard's eyes were on the green trees in Red Lion Square.  He
carried a whole philosophy in that deplorable black bag, but on
this June day his limping walk had a little lilt of exultation.  He
did not see the London figures, those human ciphers, or the rolling
cabs and the thundering vans.  He was thinking of his mother, and
of the things he had to tell her, and of the way her eyes would
light up when she heard his news.


III


Christopher wrote to his mother once a week, but his weekends at
Melfont were far less frequent because of the cost of a third-class
railway ticket.  It had to be saved for penny by penny.  It was as
precious as the second-hand text-books that were bought in Charing
Cross Road.

To Christopher that Wiltshire country had a strangeness, a
mysterious austerity that somehow was associated with the memories
of his solitary childhood, and memories of his mother, and of
starlight nights and of blue days upon those upland fields and wild
pastures.  It was a country that was so open and yet so secret.
Its skies seemed vaster than other skies, its valleys more green
for contrast.  Always it formed a kind of background to his
consciousness, shepherd's country, open to the wind, with those
green barrows and grey stones scattered about it.  It had
landscapes that suggested ghosts, dim figures standing at gaze upon
green and lonely hill-tops, the spirits of wild men looking down
upon the shadows of cloud and of tree.  It seemed to associate
itself in Christopher's mind with the isolations of his own
asceticism, with an apple eaten under a tree, or a glass of clear
water, the clean floor of his mother's cottage, flowers in an old
brown jug, red pæonies or roses or dahlias, his mother's fresh
white skin.

Directly he saw those rolling chalk hills he was conscious of a
difference in himself and in them.  The steaming stew-pan that was
London was left to simmer under its smoky sky, while these great
rolling spaces sunned themselves as they had sunned themselves in
the days of the Barrow men.  Silbury--Avebury--Stonehenge.  And the
silvery light, and the blueness before rain, and the fields of
buttercups, and the great, glooming beechwoods.  It was all so old,
yet so new.  Ages ago men had watched the sun top the horizon, a
red or a gold sun.  In London there were no sunrises.  A window
blind grew grey and you got up.

Lying amid the grasses on those uplands as a child, and listening
to the wind making a murmuring about some old sarsen stone,
Christopher had seemed to feel those other men lying in the grass
beside him.  He had pictured them as smallish, wild, dark men,
rather like himself.  And why not?  Was it not possible that he was
of the same blood as those Barrow men who had gone free upon these
uplands when the place that was London had been a swamp?

He, too, was one of those indefatigable little men pounding away
with a stone, or pecking at the chalk with a reindeer pick, or
toiling with those others to raise the great sarsens.  He loved the
spacious sky and the wind in his face, and the flowers of that
sweet, short turf, and the river valleys with green lips dripping
with moisture.


IV


Mary Hazzard wore her black silk dress and the gold brooch with the
amethyst set in it.

She came down the path through the vegetable plot at the back of
her cottage carrying a rush basket in which were two brown eggs.  A
yew tree threw a patch of shadow on the white wall beside the green
door which when open showed the well-washed red bricks of the
kitchen floor.  On the dresser stood a yellow bowl half full of
eggs, and Kit's mother added these other two to the hoard.  For a
week before one of Christopher's visits she would collect and save
every egg that her hens laid so that he could take them back with
him to London, together with a plum-cake, and a bunch of roses or
sweet-scented stocks or purple and rose asters.

Passing through the cottage into what was both flower-garden and
orchard, a little green place dabbling its hands in the river, she
sat down in a Windsor chair under an apple tree to wait for the
great occasion.  Christopher's train reached Barrowbourne at three
minutes past five.  He had to walk the three miles from
Barrowbourne to Melfont, for the carrier's cart was as slow as a
funeral, and you saved sixpence at the expense of shoe leather.
The day of the motor was not yet.

Mary Hazzard loved these minutes of waiting, though the expectant
tumult of them was inward.  She was one of those silent,
deliberate, tall women, with an air of passive dignity She was
black and white.  Her dark eyes were steady and large.  The lesser,
fidgety, garrulous, crudely egotistical fry did not understand her
silences or her reserves.  Her heart was a dark flower, fragrant
but hidden.

Always in summer she waited for her son in that patch of garden,
with the river going by, and the light playing in the willows.  In
winter she had her chair by the window where she could watch the
gate.  A path led down from the lane over a slope of grass.  There
was a damson tree by the gate.

Suddenly she saw Christopher at the gate.  It never ceased to be a
thing of wonder to her that he should return out of that other
world which she never knew into this little world that was hers.
She rose from her chair, but remained standing under the apple
tree.  She had that dignity that is seen in some country women, but
is very rare in cities.

"Well--Kit--my dear--"

Both their faces were alight.  He came to her with something of the
air of a child, for she was taller than he was.  The man
disappeared in the boy.

"I have some news for you."

He kissed her, and not as most sons kiss their mothers.  His kiss
was meant, and in kissing her he seemed to kiss the hills and the
trees and that gently flowing water, the very mother earth of his
world.

"You've never brought me bad news yet, my dear."

She had her hands on his shoulders.  His grave face had ceased to
be a London face, watchful, and shut up behind shutters of
sensitiveness.

"It's the Angus Sandeman Prize.  I've won it.  Fifty pounds and a
medal."

"O--my dear--that's grand."

"You'll have to come and see me take it, Mother, in the autumn on
Bennet's Day."

"I'll come," said she.  "And to think, Kit, that I have been to
London only once in my life."

He looked down through the greenness towards the river.

"London and you--don't belong."

For he was thinking how old and shabby and wrinkled London looked,
and how young his mother seemed with her clear eyes and her white
skin.  He knew that she was sixty-five years old, but her black and
whiteness were like the black and whiteness of a stately house.  To
him she was unique.



CHAPTER III


I


On one of the "scientific shelves" of Snape's bookshop in the
Charing Cross Road Hazzard discovered a treasure--a second-hand
copy of Schiller's Bacteriology priced at fifteen and sixpence.
When new the book cost thirty shillings, and Hazzard, holding it in
his hands, and looking faintly flushed, turned over the plates and
pages.

A little Hebrew salesman edged towards him, for the Jew had known
an enthusiast to smuggle a book out under his coat, and Hazzard's
eyes were like the eyes of a man gazing upon his beloved.

"Latest edition, twelve new plates--"

Hazzard was considering ways and means.

"Fifteen and six."

"Cheap at that."

"Will you take twelve bob?"

"We're not in business to lose money."

Hazzard put the book down on the shelf, and felt for his purse.  He
knew just how much there was in that purse--a half-sovereign, two
florins, two shillings and a threepenny bit.  He could pay for
Schiller's Bacteriology, but it would be at the expense of a week's
semi-starvation; it would mean a diet of bread and margarine and
water, but he had three of his mother's Wiltshire eggs left.

"I'll take it."

"Wrap it up for you, sir?"

"No, don't bother."

Hazzard walked out of the shop and up Charing Cross Road to Oxford
Street.  It was a hot day in July, and over that space where Oxford
Street and Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road and New
Oxford Street meet, industry had diffused a perfume of hot pickles.
There were other perfumes that associated themselves in Hazzard's
mind with London and heat and horses and flower-sellers and Italian
restaurants.  He smelt one of these appetizing perfumes in
Tottenham Court Road, a breath of hot steak and onions, and to a
young man who was almost always hungry such an aroma made a pungent
appeal.  His nostrils quivered, but under his arm he had that book,
and in his pocket a sixpence and a threepenny bit, and before him
days of asceticism, and nights when he would get up and drink water
in order to appease the wistful emptiness of his stomach.

Bennet's Hospital stood at the end of Bennet Street.  A grey
building powdered with soot, its ground plan the shape of an H, it
displayed to people walking up Bennet Street a paved forecourt with
high iron railings and double gates.  A black and white clock high
up in the pediment stared like the eye of a Cyclops.  The rows of
sash windows emphasized the Georgian symmetry of the building, and
its greyness was the greyness of an English sky.

The hospital could be entered by students either through the main
doorway where the porter's lodge projected into the forecourt, or
by way of the college entrance in Groom Street, and these two
methods of entry offered Hazzard a daily choice.  The little,
sensitive, shrinking boy in him felt tempted to sneak in by the
college door, especially after the luncheon hour when house-
surgeons and house-physicians, dressers, clinical clerks and
students would mass themselves in the main corridor just inside the
entrance, waiting for the great men to go round their wards.
Hazzard had to compel himself to face that young crowd.  It was a
hostile crowd, ironical, irresponsible, cruel without realizing its
cruelty.  He would make himself face it.  He would limp across the
bare and empty forecourt, feeling very much alone in that grey
space, and aware of all those waiting faces.  He was conscious of
being watched, and of forcing himself to advance against the
pressure of an intangible hostility.  A cold draught of
unfriendliness seemed to blow upon him out of that doorway with its
big glazed doors, persuading him to pull his rather threadbare
pride across his chest as though covering himself on a bitter day
with the collar of his coat.

For this London hospital was Melfont over again, with young men
instead of children forming the conventional crowd.  It expressed
the hatred of the many for the unusual and the peculiar, the
derisive and mocking hostility that is instant in its pillorying of
enthusiasm, especially shabby enthusiasm.  It exemplified that
English middle-class mistrust of the artist, and of anything that
does not express itself in action and in the physical language of
games.  It disliked that which puzzled it, and that which inspired
a sense of discomfort, an irrational keenness that was bad form, an
efficiency that was an offence.  To most of these young men Hazzard
was "The Squit," and Hazzard knew it.  That doorway framed faces of
derision.

With Schiller's Bacteriology under his arm he passed from the
sunlight of the forecourt to the shadow of the vestibule.  All the
familiar faces were there, familiar but unfriendly.  Young men
lounged against the red walls of the corridor or stood in groups.
As a rule they took no notice of Hazzard; no one spoke to him.
Someone might say--"Hallo, here comes the 'Squit,'" and they would
leave him to worm his way through the crowd towards the door of the
cloak-room.

The faces of his fellow-students were blurred to him, perhaps
because he did not wish to focus them clearly, but hastened to get
through the crowd and away from it.  Usually he would take refuge
beside Julian Moorhouse, who stood a little apart against the wall
beside the mahogany door of the Board Room, looking aloof and a
little bored.  Moorhouse was about the only man at Bennet's who
treated Hazzard as a human being.  Big and brown and fair, with old
country stock and Winchester and Trinity behind him, he had not
much in common with these rather raw young men who were so full of
a cocksure physical complacency and to whom nothing was sacred,
woman least of all.  It is probable that Moorhouse despised most of
them, and especially so for their despising of Hazzard.  But to
Christopher there were faces in the crowd that he both hated and
feared: Bullard's brick-red jowl with its little fiery eyes, and
its nose like the trunk of an elephant; Parker Steel's strenuous
pallor and merciless green-grey eyes; and the goatlike and ironic
head of Ardron, old Sir Dighton Fanshawe's house-physician.

Hazzard pushed through, but on this particular day someone grabbed
his arm.

"What about that sub., my lad?"

He found himself looking into Bullard's eyes.

"You're the only fellow who hasn't paid up.  What about it?"

That was Bullard's way.  A debonair and flashy animal, with the
gross vitality of him showing in his mutton-fat black hair and
glowing skin, he set a standard.  He captained the hospital
football team, and was the Bennet's Club Secretary.  He had
haunches, and a mat of swarthy hair on his chest.  A dominant young
blackguard.

Hazzard, held by the arm, refused to flinch.

"I don't play games.  You know that, Bullard."

"No reason why you shouldn't fork out half a guinea though.  We're
all Bennet's men.  What's that?"

He tweaked the book from under Hazzard's arm, and holding it as a
man holds an offensive and purulent dressing, made the occasion
public.

"A Bug Book.  If you can buy books and walk about with 'em.  I say--
you chaps--don't you agree--?"

Said Hazzard very quietly, "My book, please, Bullard."

There was a moment of tension.  They were in the arena together
with youth looking on.  And then Bullard began to laugh.
Christopher was wearing that big bowler hat that added to his
grotesqueness in the eyes of the conventional, and with one heavy
downward squelch of his footballer's hand Bullard crushed the hat
over Hazzard's eyes.

"You squit."

Schiller's Bacteriology, sent whirling over men's heads, fell
crumpled and with covers spread like a bird brought down, close to
where Moorhouse was standing.  And Moorhouse bent down and picked
it up.

"Easy, you fellows."

For quite a number of enthusiasts were refusing to allow Hazzard to
emerge from his crushed hat.  Half a dozen hands were busy,
thrusting it down over his eyebrows, and Moorhouse intervened in
his big, deliberate, rather loose-limbed way.  "Easy,--time.
Here's old Dighton coming."  Removing Christopher's hat for him he
was aware of the stark humiliations of that sensitive face.
Meanwhile Sir Dighton Fanshawe striding in, top-hatted and frock-
coated, and looking like a self-conscious and sleek old eagle,
found a suddenly decorous crowd and Ardron--the goat-like--waiting
for him and very much his house-physician.


II


That was the tragic element in Hazzard's career, the dislike that
he inspired, and the persecutions it produced.

He loved his work, and he loved his hospital--almost with that most
pathetic love which is despised and flouted by the beloved.  Life
had the eyes of a beautiful and hostile woman.  He asked for
nothing but to be let alone, and to be allowed to exercise the
passionate devotion of a little man with a big head and a genius
for taking trouble.  There was not a corner of "Bennet's" that was
not precious and singular to him.  He had loved the corner in the
physiology lab where he had sat in a patch of sunlight with his
microscope before him, and his bottles of stains and box of slides
and coverslips.  Hæmatoxylin, fuchsin, methylene blue, they were
more than mere colours.  The smell of Canada Balsam was a precious
perfume.  Even the dissecting-room had had a bizarre homeliness,
and those trussed-up or prone corpses a mystic significance.  He
had had qualms, especially over the fishing of a leg or arm out of
a locker that reeked of preserved flesh and alcohol.

He loved the wards and the out-patient departments, the smell of
humanity and of sick humanity, and all that sense of striving and
learning and disentangling, of things done and doing, the
adventures into diagnosis, and all the problems of the greatest of
the professions.  There a something in him went out to the maimed
and the halt and the blind, but especially did his heart go out to
sick and crippled children.  For he had been a crippled child; he
knew what a lame foot or a diseased spine or a tuberculous hip-
joint meant.  If there was one post that he coveted and saw himself
filling in the future, it was that of physician to the Children's
Out-patient Department.  A sick child moved him, stirred the bowels
of his compassion.

Just that!  But because of his very keenness and his genius, and
because these virtues were displayed in an ugly and rather
grotesque little body, he was disliked and actively disliked.
Youth is apt to be both crude and cruel.  These rather raw young
men, who, in some quite marvellous way, would mellow and become
general practitioners, and husbands and fathers, saw in Hazzard
nothing but a little chopping-block, a swat, a horrid little
sedulous ape.  He was shabby.  They doubted his physical cleanness,
whereas he was cleaner than any of them.  His hair grew in an
unfortunate way.  His black boots were very much boots.  He always
seemed to wear the same suit or the same sort of suit, cloth of a
dingy blackness peppered with grey.  He was not a social creature,
and he was not allowed to be sociable.  The telling of a dirty,
sexual tale left his face blank.  Life and his craft meant for him
a patient asceticism which none of these full blooded young males
understood or troubled to understand.

Also, there are forms of persecution which, though passive, are as
potent in discouraging enthusiasm as the more aggressive methods.
To ignore may mean the depression and the discouragement of the
person ignored.

When Ardron and his four clinical clerks set out to accompany and
to follow Sir Dighton Fanshawe round his wards, Christopher was at
the tail of the little procession, but on the day of the crushing
of his hat, Moorhouse, who was one of the four clerks, hung back to
keep Christopher company.  Climbing the stone stairs side by side,
with Moorhouse's long legs in sympathy with Hazzard's short ones,
they suggested the big and the little dog.  Moorhouse was all that
Hazzard was not: slow of speech, comely in a man's way, with a
sleepy, blue-eyed dignity that took life in its stride.  He came of
old stock.  He made you think of a field of wheat gold in the ear,
oak trees, dogs, horses, a chair in the sun, the brown throat and
arms of a cricketer at the wicket in the heat of a July day.

They said nothing to each other on the stairs.  Moorhouse was not a
man who said things.  With his easy, deliberate poise he put
himself in a certain position, and the picture needed no label.

Sir Dighton had paused to look at some specimens on the table
between the glazed doors of the wards and the first red coverleted
bed.  He had made his little, debonair bow to the Sister.  Two
nurses stood like mutes.  A ray of sunlight touched old Fanshawe's
white head.

"Number seventeen's?"

Ardron, jerkily polite, held up the glass.

"Yes, sir."

Sir Dighton, doing everything with that air of distinction, and
with a faint smile of profound sagacity, turned to his four clerks.

"Gentlemen, you see that urine."

He had a velvet touch.  His voice and manner transmuted even the
most indelicate substance into refined gold.  It was his custom to
address his clerks as "Gentlemen," and they too--in a sense--were
transmuted from mere conglomerations of crude young tissues and
secretions into something that many of them were not.  Often he
would address a favourite with an air of fatherly intimacy.
"Moorhouse, will you listen to that heart."  Moorhouse was
Moorhouse to him.  To Ardron he gave the Mr. because Ardron was a
Mr. and nothing of the Esquire.  When picking out one of the others
he would indicate him with his eyes, and if the youth was to his
liking, honour him by remembering his name.

"What do you see there, Moorhouse?"

Moorhouse hesitated and smiled.

"Urates, sir."

Old Dighton gave Moorhouse one of those tolerant and half-humorous
glances which said, "My dear boy, take your time; think again," but
Moorhouse remained serenely mute, though Hazzard who stood next
him, felt moved to pinch his arm and to whisper "Pus, Moorhouse,
pus."  One of the other clerks, Soames, had the beginnings of a
simper on his soapy face.  Milord Moorhouse might be the best-
dressed and the best looking fellow in the hospital, but he was a
bit slow in his reactions and in the superficial smartness of the
game of bedside ragging.  You felt that you had shot your cuffs and
scored a point when you wiped Moorhouse's stately eye.

Sir Dighton's glance travelled and fell on Hazzard.  He did not
address Hazzard, but looked at him challengingly.

"Urates, sir."

Sir Dighton glared faintly, and passed to Soames, and Soames the
soapy concluded that if that little beast Hazzard had said
"Urates," that cloud of sediment must consist of urates.

"Urates, sir."

Sir Dighton went no further

"Pus, gentlemen, pus."

His glance rested for a moment on Hazzard as though there was some
purulence in that small person.  He spoke to Ardron.

"Your clerks ought to know that, Mr. Ardron."

Ardron, too, glanced at Christopher.  Little Snob!  Backing up
Moorhouse.  No. 17 was Hazzard's case, Ardron was sure of that, and
Hazzard knew quite well what was in the test glass.

The progress continued.  Leading the way, and followed by his house-
physician and the Sister, his four clinical clerks, and sundry
students who had gathered to listen to his words of wisdom, Sir
Dighton Fanshawe went round the ward.  He would pause at the foot
of each bed, and combining the airs of the beau with the dignity of
the sage, repeat the same question, "Well, how are we to-day?"  He
did not listen to the patient's answer.  Time was precious and
clinical facts are of more importance than feelings, and the case
sheet and the temperature chart and his house-physician's report
were the realities that mattered.  If the ward happened to be a
female one Sir Dighton was more of the beau; in a male ward he was
the benign autocrat.  When a case was new to him he would sit down
on the edge of the bed, ask a few questions, and then call upon the
clerk who was responsible.

"Whose case is this?"

"Mine, sir."

The first new case happened to be Soames's.  It was that of a woman
of forty or so, with very red lips and a patch of bright colour on
either cheek, who lay propped against three pillows, and looked at
Sir Dighton with anxious, cow-like eyes.  The diagnosis was almost
obvious to the experienced eye.

"Have you examined this case, Mr. Soames?"

"Not yet, sir.  She was only admitted--"

"Very good.  Begin."

Soames, who was apt to get flustered in spite of the soapiness of
soul and skin, lugged at the stethoscope in his pocket, dropped it
on the bed, and with his eyes invited the Sister to deal with the
patient's night-dress.  Sir Dighton put up a hand.

"Mr. Soames, too much hurry.  Eyes, man, eyes.  Observe, observe."

Soames, smirking faintly, stared at the woman, whose eyes were
fixed like those of a sick animal on old Dighton.

"What do you observe, Mr. Soames?"

Soames was mute, and Sir Dighton turned to Hazzard, who happened to
be next him.

"You?"

The word had a curtness, and there was a slight tremor of Hazzard's
upper lip.  But he had no compunction about putting Soames in his
place, for Soames was not Moorhouse.

"The colour of the lips, sir; the redness of the cheeks; the
position of the patient."

Old Dighton's eyes narrowed.

"Well, what would you be led to suspect?"

"Heart, sir, mitral disease."

Fanshawe gave Hazzard a nod of the head, and a glance of cold and
curious dislike.  Probably he was not conscious of the glance's
temper.  There was too much cleverness in this little fellow; like
a monkey he was rather irrepressible.

"Never jump at conclusions, Mr. Hazzard.  Distrust your inner
consciousness."

Hazzard's lips moved as though he were about to answer, but old
Dighton's face was turned again to the patient, and the snub spread
like a smoke ring to be sensed by the other young men about the
bed.  Hazzard stood very still, with his eyes on the woman's face.
She had a something that reminded him of his mother.


III


Ruth Avery's window confronted other windows, and above them a
stucco cornice, slates and a variety of chimney-pots, but in the
window immediately opposite hers a young couple had a bright green
window-box full of scarlet geraniums, and muslin curtains with pink
bands.  That the colours were all very wrong was as obvious to Ruth
as the clashing of most things in life, but then the sounds that
came from lovers' windows could be intimate and disturbing.  Lying
in bed at night, or sitting at her open window wrapped in solitude
behind a blue serge curtain, she would seem to feel the heart of
Roper's Row surging in at her window.  She was very solitary, but
she was not made for solitude, with her quick colour and her dusky
eyes; but then she suffered from a bird's wildness and timidity.
And she was fastidious.

Roper's Row sang and shouted and gossiped.  The geraniums in the
window-box opposite fired red shots at her as she sat alone with
herself.  Sometimes she could feel the little red blurs on the dark
target of her consciousness, yearnings, restlessnesses, wounds.
There would be little scufflings and laughter between those two
lovers in the room over the way.  A merry fellow, who sometimes
played the banjo in a house along the Row, would burst into sudden
song.  She heard him now.


     "When you've been all day in the street
     There's nothing to feel but feet,
     Nothing to feel but feet.
     When you've been all day in the street
     You're standing on plates of meat."


Her eyelids flickered.  She shuddered so easily at certain things,
while understanding the inwardness of them.  She knew what it was
to have tired feet and an aching back.  The office closed at one
o'clock on Saturdays, and she--to amuse herself--had nothing to do
but walk, up streets and down streets, round squares and into and
out of parks.  She walked because she felt pursued by restlessness,
or to escape from the sense of her solitude in moving among other
people.

The voice was singing another stanza.


     "When you have got to the end of your life
     There's nothing to do but die,
     Nothing to do but die.
     When you come to the end of your life,
     There's nothing to do but die."


What a philosophy!--and she had no philosophy, but only her youth
and a feeling that she was coming to the end of life even before
she had begun to begin it.  She was an orphan; she had no relatives
left to her save an aunt in Devon, and two cousins whom she had
never seen.  She had no margin, no prospects, and no adventure in
view save the woman's adventure with a man and a child.  But she
was shy of men; she was as shy of them as Christopher Hazzard was
of women, but for different reasons.  It was as though she divined
the adventurous cad in the average man, his sex savagery, his
tendernesses and pawings that were no more than an animal hunger
that disappeared when it had gorged itself.

Men stared at her in the street.  She was a comely thing, and she
knew that a man would easily be come by, but there was that
something in her that hung back.  She was very sensitive to being
stared at; she would flinch and hurry by with flickering eyelids,
and a rush of blood to her cheeks.  Once or twice in half-lit
streets she had known panic and had fled.

Hurrying in on one of these occasions she had met Mrs. Bunce under
the gas-jet in the passage.

"My, dearie, you do look flustered."

"Someone followed me."

"A gal has to get used to that, dearie.  You learn to put a hard
face on, and they'll let you alone."

Leaning out for a moment to look at life she saw Hazzard coming
down Roper's Row from the direction of Red Lion Square.  She
watched him.  She found a touch of appeal in his limping walk; he
worked so very hard; he seemed as lonely as she was.  Withdrawing
she stood up, and then going to her door, opened it an inch or so,
and listened.  She heard the lub-dup of his footsteps on the
stairs.

She felt herself flushing.  She heard him coming up the last
flight, and opening her door wide she went out on to the landing.
His head appeared, crowned by the felt hat, which, in spite of
ironings and coaxings, showed the scars of persecution.  She
pretended to be surprised, but the pretence was very innocent.

"Oh, it's you--"

He looked at her as he looked at all women, seeing in them strange,
perilous creatures, forbidden to him by the celibacy of his
unfailing purpose.  He was the working ascetic.  It is probable
that--vaguely yet instinctively--he feared woman as he feared any
hindrance or interference.

He said "Good evening" and turned towards his door.

Her eyelids flickered.

"I'm sorry.  I expected someone about some typing.  I thought--"

He had his hand on the door handle.

"I see."

"You haven't a book you could lend me, have you?  I've nothing to
read, and to-morrow's Sunday."

He looked surprised.  He considered her a moment, and then went
into his room, and scanned his bookshelf.  He saw nothing but
medical text-books.  The only live book was the Bible his mother
had given him.

He took it from the shelf and offered it to her.

"Nothing but this.  After all--there are some good stories in it.
You see--I haven't time."

With a queer little wincing smile she accepted Mary Hazzard's
Bible, and leaving him rather like a child that has been told to go
and sit down and be good, she returned to her room and closed the
door.

She resumed her seat by the window, and let the book open on her
knees.  It opened at the Book of Ruth.  She read:

"And Ruth said--'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from
following after thee; for whither thou goest I will go; and where
thou lodgest I will lodge--'"

At another window the gay fellow was singing his song:


     "Nothing to do but die,
     Nothing to do but die.
     When you come to the end of your days
     There's nothing to do but die."



CHAPTER IV


I


To the students at "Bennet's" Hazzard had appeared as one of those
mysterious individuals who lack any of the appurtenances and the
credentials of the normal male.  He just appeared and disappeared.
He had had his own reasons for not making friends, and his reasons
had been an absurd pride and an equally absurd sensitiveness.  He
understood the laughter of fools.  No one knew where or how he
lived, and no one had cared, but with his increasing reputation as
a little swat who was carrying off medals and prizes there were
young fellow-my-lads who began to take notice.

The unusual and the abnormal may provoke dislike and ridicule, but
when the unusual shows signs of singularity in the matter of
success it may more seriously begin to offend.  Men do not confess
to such instigations, but the poison of them is there, and about
this time Bullard and one or two more who were Bullard's suckers
began to develop views upon the subject.  Youth must have its
mischief.  Hazzard was to them the little Radical among the Tories,
or the atheist in bishopdom, or the fellow who did not go to the
inter-hospital rugger matches and shout.  He was an outsider, a
kind of parasite, a red tie, an offence, and becoming more actively
so.  He was the dog whose tail asked for the tin.

Bullard, wallowing in a chair in the college common-room, and
feeling restless and full of live blood, asked a question that was
to be like a spark to tinder.

"I say, you chaps, I wonder where the 'Squit' lives?"

No one knew, no one had troubled to know, but here was a
provocation.

"Bethnal Green," said someone.

"Billingsgate.  Fishy little swine."

"I say, what a jest!  Let's do a little Sherlock Holmesing.
Soames, you'll be Watson."

"I'm damned if I will.  I'm not such an ass as all that."

"Oh, aren't you!  Well, anyway, let's play at Squit-hunting."

But to begin with they found Christopher strangely elusive.  It was
as though he had foreseen that some such game might be invented,
and just as at Melfont in the old days when he had had his secret
ways of reaching home and had varied them in order to baffle those
little persecutors who might lay in wait for him, so now he varied
his homings to Roper's Row.  Sometimes he struck into Oxford Street
and followed it and New Oxford Street as far as Holborn, and then
turned north.  At other times he traced a kind of zigzag track
through Bloomsbury.  He doubled and diverged, and on the first two
occasions when these bright lads set out to shadow him they found
themselves following nothing.

"The little beggar's fly."

After two abortive attempts the others became bored, but not so
Bullard.  He was a persistent animal, the ruthless hunter of women
and adventure, and on the third occasion he tracked Christopher to
Roper's Row.  He saw Hazzard enter No. 7.

"Got him."

Bullard went back to Bennet's and looking sly, laid a finger along
that trunk-like nose.  He was known to some of his familiars as the
"Elephant," and the name suited him.  But he kept the discovery to
himself for the time being, and later in the evening he went off
again, and finding the Bunce's shop still open, and Ophelia in
charge of it, he took off his hat to her.

"Gentleman of the name of Hazzard live here?"

He had a way with women.  He overpowered certain of them with his
male perfume.

"Yes, top floor back."

"Right'o, I'll go up, my dear."

"But 'e's out."

"Don't worry.  I'm from the hospital."

He went up, and as it happened, Christopher, who had gone to the
"Bunch of Grapes," had left his key in the door.  Bullard explored.
He opened Kit's sugar-box cupboards, and saw half a loaf of bread
and some cheese, and uncovered the nakedness of the little room and
thought it vastly funny.  But on emerging he met a girl on the
landing, and a damned pretty little bit of goods too--you fellows.
He opened the furnace doors upon her.

"Excuse me, I was looking for Hazzard."

Ruth's wide eyes held him at gaze.

"He's not in."

"So I see.--Doesn't matter.  Friend of his.  You're not Mrs.
Hazzard, are you?"

She looked shocked.

"Oh, no."

And he echoed her cry, laughing and glowing.

"Oh, no!  I didn't think so--really.  I didn't mean to be rude.
You're not quite my idea."

And then Ruth had one of her panic moments in the presence of the
male, and fled into her room and locked the door.  Bullard rubbed
his nose.  Pretty little bit of goods--the sort that cried--"Oh,
don't, please," and struggled.  He descended the stairs, and
finding Miss Bunce still in the shop, was gallant to her.

"I say, no need to tell him that anyone's called.  He's such a
nervous chap.  Let it alone, my dear."

Ophelia was not such a fool as she looked.

"Friend of his, are you?"

"Quite so.  He owes me something, but don't you worry him."

Miss Bunce nodded her tow-coloured head.  Her view of the matter
was that this red and black fellow had been up to see Miss Avery,
and that Hazzard was the excuse.  She had been listening at the
foot of the stairs and had heard voices.  So, Phelia, having a
liking for Ruth Avery, said nothing to either of them, and Ruth
herself saw no reason why she should speak to Christopher of
Bullard's visit.  As a matter of fact she did not see Christopher
for the next three days.  She heard his footsteps, and listened to
them, and was vaguely troubled by them, for they came and went on
the edge of her lonely life like the patter of a child's feet.


II


But from her window on a hot August evening, when the very walls of
Roper's Row seemed to perspire, she saw Christopher, and a certain
incident in which Christopher involved himself.  There was a little
hunch-backed child in the Row, the small son of a Cornish woman who
kept a sweet shop, one of those children with a long, large head
that looked too big for its stalk of a neck.  The children of
Roper's Row had made a victim of little Pengelly, and combined to
persecute him until he flew into one of his funny and futile rages.

"Blub, Softie, blub--"

A truculent young round-head, rapping little Pengelly's face with
his red knuckles, urged him from futile fury to tears, while the
rest of the little mob gathered round and gloated.

"'E's blubbin."

"Where's your mother, Softie?"

Into the group limped Christopher.  He did not distribute cuffings
or scoldings.  He held the small bully by the shoulder, and said
things, and the things that he said or his manner of saying them
appeared to sober the children.  In face he was as white as little
Pengelly, and when he took that small and hump-backed creature by
the hand, and brought him in and up the stairs of No. 7, Ruth crept
to her door and listened.

Said Christopher very gently to the child:

"Don't lose your temper with them.  That's just what they want.
Put a smile on, Kiddy.  Just stand and smile at them, and they'll
let you alone."

"I know I'm ugly," whimpered the child.

"No, you're not.  Besides, it's worse to be ugly inside.  I've got
a basket of plums in my room.  I'll fill your cap."

She heard Hazzard take the boy into his room, and little Pengelly's
voice asking questions.  He was feeling comforted.

"You've got a fiddle."

"I have."

"My dad used to play the fiddle.  He played beautiful, till his
cough got too bad."

"Why don't you learn to play the fiddle?  I suppose you have your
father's violin."

"Oh, we had to sell that," said the boy.  "I did hear mother say it
helped to pay for his coffin."


III


It was Soames who shadowed Christopher through the shabby mysteries
of the district lying between Clerkenwell and Islington, and made
the discovery that Hazzard entered the side door of the "Bunch of
Grapes."  Soames was not impartial.  Whenever he failed to answer
one of Sir Dighton's questions in the wards Hazzard was able to
answer it, and Soames was a little tired of Hazzard's infallibility.
But Soames's researches were pushed beyond the pavement of St. John
Street, and into the bar, and where, after being served with half a
pint of beer, he heard sounds of music.

"Got a concert on, Miss?"

The barmaid was too busy to be conversational, and Soames was not
an impressive young man.

"Yes.  First door on the right, and straight down the passage."

Soames finished his beer, and exploring, saw through an open door
and a haze of tobacco smoke, Mr. Bangs, Hazzard, and the flutist
making music for the many.

Soames sailed back to "Bennet's," big with the news, and found
Bullard and others playing poker in the college common-room.

"I say, you chaps."

Soames was apt to froth at the mouth when he was excited.  His
soapiness blew bubbles.

"I bet you can't guess what the Squit does in the evening."

Someone suggested that Hazzard bathed with the urchins in the
Trafalgar Square basins.

"Try again."

"Goes round with the Salvation Army?  Can't you see the little
blighter in a red jersey?"

Soames had to burst his bubble, and he burst it on Bullard.

"I s-saw him st-start out--"

"Don't spit, Samuel."

"Oh, shut up.  The Squit goes to a pub in St. John Street, and
plays the fiddle in a bally orchestra."

"No!"

"It's a fact."

"What sort of orchestra?"

"Oh, a boozer with a banjo, and a little monkey tootling on the
flute, and the Squit fiddling.  Funniest sight."

Bullard threw his cards on the table.

"By George, a straight flush!  I say--you chaps--we'll make up a
party and go and listen to the Squit fiddling."

That was what happened.  Recruits were called up, and a party of
thirty irresponsible young men started out for the "Bunch of
Grapes."  It was a rag, and the alumni of "Bennet's" had a
reputation for ragging.  Bullard was in command.  In Tottenham
Court Road they half cleared the barrow of an itinerant fruit-
vendor, and went forward armed with bags of over-ripe plums.  In
St. John Street Bullard issued instructions.

"Look here, you chaps, we'd better drift in in twos and threes.  If
we blow in in a chunk the management 'll get windy.  We'll call it
the Bag of Plums, what!"

Mr. Bangs was in the middle of one of his gags when the first
instalment from "Bennet's" strolled into the big, bare room, each
with a mug of beer in one hand and a brown-paper bag in the other.
The room happened to be rather empty.  Bullard and Soames sat down
at one of the wooden tables, and with an air of concentrated
solemnity placed their bags of plums on the board.  They kept their
hats on.  Others arrived and sat.

Said Bullard--in the pause between Mr. Bangs's gag and the next
piece of music:

"Why--surely--there's our dear little friend Squit.  By George,
what a small world it is.  Good evening, Squit."

He raised an ironical hat to Hazzard.  All of them raised their
hats.  Mr. Bangs, scenting youth and mischief, beamed round upon
them.

"Thank you, gentlemen.  Will someone call a tune?"

Said Bullard, rising to his feet, and holding his mug.

"Sir, your good health.  We are pious young men.  I propose that
the band plays 'Onward, Christian Soldiers.'"

There was a yell.

"Onward, Christian Soldiers--"

"Onward to the booze."

"With the buxom barmaid."

Christopher sat and looked at Bullard; he compelled himself to look
at him.  For he was under no illusions.  He had been caught and he
was to be pilloried.  He was conscious of a little iciness in his
spine, a dryness of the mouth, a sense of emptiness at the pit of
his stomach.  He just sat and looked at Bullard, and nursed his
violin and refused to flinch.  He knew that there was another door
in the corner of the room, and that he might be able to bolt for
it, but then the whole pack would be after him.  Besides--he was
not going to bolt.  He would face it out.

Mr. Bangs stood up.  His face looked shiny.

"Gen'lemen, this isn't a little Bethel.  I looks towards you.
We've got a little song--'Come where the Booze is cheaper.'"

Bullard led the roar of protest.

"No-no--"

"No vulgar ditties.  We're pious fellows."

"Onward, Christian Soldiers--"

Mr. Bangs began an apology.

"Sorry--gentlemen--the hymn ain't in our repetoire.  We can give
you 'Annie Laurie' or ''Er golden hair was 'anging down 'er back.'"

There was uproar.  One or two habitués began to hammer on the
tables and to protest.  Others laughed.

Said Bullard, standing, and with an air of elephantine gravity:

"Gentlemen, I put it to you that this band is a swindle.  This band
is an abandoned band.  It cannot play a good godly tune, gentlemen.
Gentlemen, I propose that this band be busted."

As Bullard had prophesied, the "Bunch of Grapes" became a Bag of
Plums.  The banjoist, raising his banjo to shield his face,
received the first purple patch upon the ass skin.  The flutist,
picking up his chair, crouched behind the seat of it, and was
moderately safe.  Thirty young men, grabbing overripe fruit out of
brown bags, and throwing it with gusts and squeals of laughter,
plastered the violinist.  It was no case for dignity.  It was one
of those occasions when an archangel would have looked foolish, and
made haste to retire behind his shield.  The thing that had been
Hazzard became a mess of juice and of pulped fruit.

The management appeared, an ex-pugilist in waistcoat and shirt-
sleeves, backed by a couple of pot-men.  Half a dozen rough
customers, always ready for a row, especially when young toffs were
the enemy, complicated the situation.  Tempers began to be lost,
and the throwing of things became impartial.  Someone struck at
Bullard, and was knocked into a welter of beer glasses and chairs.


IV


Ruth had been sitting up late, typing a short story that a shy
young man had brought into Mrs. Bunce's shop.  Her window was open,
for the night was hot and oppressive, and between the trees of Red
Lion Square and the trees of Gray's Inn, Roper's Row stretched like
a narrow, stagnant, stuffy vicolo in Venice.  Ruth was tired, and
the shy young man's notions of literature were as shy as his blond
head.  Everybody else was in bed, and in the warm stillness of the
night the clatter of the typewriter's keys and the ping of its bell
were sounds that seemed enormous, threatening to keep the whole Row
awake.  People would complain.  The Row complained easily and
forcibly, and Ruth was expecting some voice to cry out in the
stillness of the night, "Stop that damned clatter."  She stopped
it.  She covered the machine with a piece of black cloth, and
gathering up the sheets, put them away in a drawer.  Turning the
gas low, and raising the blind, she stood at the open window, for
though she was tired she was tired to the point of restlessness,
and she foresaw one of those nights when she would lie awake and
think of all the worrying things that might happen, sickness--and
the loss of her work, and starvings and ignominies.

Roper's Row was deserted.  Not a footstep trickled through it, and
in those days when life was quieter and the taxi had not ousted the
hansom, London could sleep and be silent.  The clap-clap of a
horse's hoofs came and went in Lamb's Conduit Street.  Someone
opened a window, but such sounds were no more than the fall of an
apple in the virginal stillness of the deep country.  Ruth had the
feeling that she was the only person awake in London, a little
lonely watcher of stars and roofs and chimney-pots in a world that
snored and was sunk in a terrifying indifference.  For at times
London at night did terrify her, especially in winter when rain was
falling, or the street lamps seemed to be smothering in yellow fog.

She was about to let down the blind and shut out the dim windows
opposite when she heard footsteps coming along Roper's Row.  They
associated themselves at once with the person of Christopher
Hazzard.  Lub-dup, lub-dup.  Her heart quickened its rhythm.  For,
always, her loneliness was aware of that other loneliness across
the landing, and reached out to it, and felt compassionate.

She heard his footsteps come to a pause outside No. 7, and the
turning of a key in a lock.  The door closed very gently.  And then
a sudden impulse moved her to open her own door, and to turn up the
gas-jet on the landing.  The last person to go to bed was
responsible for turning out the gas, and usually that person was
Hazzard.

She leaned over the banisters.  He was coming up, and he did not
know that she was there.  He emerged slowly into the light, and she
had her glimpse of him before he was aware of her presence.  His
hat had a gash in it; he was holding something under his arm,
something that looked broken.  His figure had a strange smeariness,
a blotched, stained appearance.

"Oh, it's you, Mr. Hazzard--"

He was startled, profoundly so.  He stopped on the stairs with a
quick, upward look of anger and impatience.  His pride was a
bruised pulp, but not too bruised to feel.

"I suppose so."

She realized that something strange had happened to him.  She
became a little breathless.

"I was awake--and I heard your steps.  I thought the gas was out--
and that you wouldn't be able to see."

He seemed to force himself up the last three steps, and she saw
that he was carrying a broken violin.  His coat suggested a
wetness, patches of some sticky substance.  His face looked so
white and hard and brittle that she could imagine it cracking like
china.

She had to say something.  She was confused into saying something.

"You've broken your violin."

He looked at her almost with hatred.

"Some of my dear friends.  What you call a rag."

"The beasts--!  Oh--I'm so sorry."

And suddenly the hardness went out of his eyes.  He stood and
looked at her with a kind of wounded smile, rather like a child
determined to be brave.

"You see--I'm an outsider.  I don't live on my mother and father.
I'm--I'm what you call an enthusiast.  You get hated.  Funny, isn't
it?  To be hated just because you are keen."

Her eyelids flickered.

"How beastly!  Did they--?"

"Oh, it's just a game to them."

He looked exhausted, a little unsteady on his feet, and suddenly
she put out a hand and touched his coat.

"What's that--?  You're all--"

He laughed, though with the appearance of laughter no sound came.

"Plum juice.  I've been pilloried.  They pelted me.  But damn them--
they shan't stop me--"

She held out both hands.  Her face was the face of Ruth.

"Do give me your coat.  I'll sponge it.  It will be dry in the
morning.  No--I'm not tired--and you are.  And I don't feel sleepy.
Yes, leave it with me."

He looked at her strangely with his still, deep eyes.

"Yes, I'm about finished--for to-night.  But you--"

Her hands remained out, and putting down his broken violin, he took
off his coat and let her have it.

"Thank you, Miss Avery.  I don't know why--"

"Oh, I'd like to.  One does sometimes.  Good night."

But she turned in her doorway and saw him still looking at her.

"I'll hang the coat on the handle of your door."

"Thank you."

She went in with a queer little feeling of exultation, and hanging
the coat on the back of a chair, poured out water into the bowl,
and used her own face-sponge upon the stains.



CHAPTER V


I


The smashing of Hazzard's violin was one of those minor tragedies
which can cause as much heartburn and contriving as do life's
greater catastrophes.  Moreover, his unfortunate felt hat, victim
of many assaults, was fit for nothing but the dustbin, and the
procuring of a new violin and of a new hat on one and the same
moment propounded a problem.

Thanks to Ruth his coat was but little the worse, and he found it
hanging on the handle of his door.

But there were other problems, and as he held the coat up to the
light and examined it, his thoughts went to his mother and to a
particular and cherished plan he had conceived.  His mother was
coming up to London for "Bennet's Day," when the hospital and its
relations and friends gathered in the lecture theatre, and some
great man delivered an oration, and prizes were presented.
"Bennet's Day" was six weeks hence, and Christopher's plan
necessitated the collecting of every possible penny.  He had
imagined it as one of life's great occasions, and on this August
morning he was viewing it across the wreckage of a fiddle and a
hat.

"Beasts!"

Yet, even in his bitterness he knew that he was not the victim of
mere venom, but of childishness, of youth's proud flesh and turgid
organs, of a young savagery that lusts to hunt and kill.  Always he
had hidden these persecutions from his mother, for he was not proud
of being hated.  The dog may be capable of despising the pursuing
urchins, but he cannot help but feel ashamed of the tin tied to his
tail.

The needs of the moment were another hat and another violin.  He
could not go hatless to the hospital, because his very hatlessness
would be a cause of joy, nor could he afford to sacrifice the half-
crowns at the "Bunch of Grapes."  Getting out his stove and
lighting it, he became the financier considering ways and means,
and comparing the respective values of capital and income.  He
would have to pawn something, and he had only one article that was
worth pawning, his particular treasure, a microscope that had cost
him months of self-denial.  It lived in a little mahogany case
under his bed.

Over a breakfast of bread and margarine and tea he faced the
situation.  He knew that when his mother came to London she could
not be kept from Roper's Row, and he did not intend her to see his
room as it was, but as the son in him wished her to see it.  In a
sense--he was a devoted snob, not for his own sake but for hers.
He had contemplated hiring some furniture and a carpet, and
dressing up his back room so that it might appear more as a mother
might wish to see it.  Not that there was anything in Mary Hazzard
that would quarrel with her son's room as it was, but Christopher,
with those memories of her many devoted years behind him, had
vanity of a sort, a sensitive child's scheming.  He wanted his
mother to have a memory to take back with her to Melfont, one of
those mementoes that women treasure, especially when they speak
with other women at their gates.

He supposed that the microscope would have to go into temporary
retirement, and that he would be able to raise three or four pounds
on it, and recover the instrument when he received a cheque for the
Angus Sandeman Prize.  He knew of a pawnbroker's shop in Holborn
that had assisted him through other crises, and when he had washed
up his breakfast things, he extracted the mahogany case from under
the bed.  He would raise his money, buy a new hat, and arrive at
the hospital as usual.  But when he thought of "Bennet's" and the
humiliations of the previous night he was conscious of qualms.  He
knew that he would have to brave the Bullard crowd, and that the
face of "Bennet's" would be large with laughter.

On that August morning the doors of Ruth and Christopher opened
simultaneously.  The microscope cabinet was matched by the cheap
little attaché-case she carried, but whereas she had no reason to
conceal her case, Hazzard had proposed to sneak forth without
publicity.

He said "You're early."

She had come out to meet him with a smile, counting upon
friendliness after those ministrations to his coat, but he hung
back and waited for her to go down the stairs.  Her smile died
away.

"Yes, I'm a little early."

She took to the stairs, and Hazzard, after a moment's hesitation,
followed her.  She had seen the microscope cabinet, but there was
no need for him to assume that she knew that he was bound for the
sign of the Three Golden Balls.

"Thank you for cleaning my coat."

Her smile returned, but he was not aware of it because he was
behind her.

"Oh, that's nothing.  I hope it's dry?"

"Quite."

From the shop came sounds of activity, the thuddings of bundles of
papers, and the voices of Mrs. Bunce and her daughter checking the
morning's stock.

"Two dozen Daily G.s."

"Two dozen Daily G.s."

"Fifty Telegraphs."

"I 'aven't counted 'em yet.  Hold on a moment.  Drat it, if I
didn't forget to order those bottles of gum."

Ruth opened the street door.  The passage was very badly lit, and
the sudden change of light was like the withdrawing of a veil from
a face that resembled the face of a flower.  She glanced round at
Hazzard with a little, amused glimmer of the eyes.

"I hear that every morning.  Do you?"

"Those voices?"

"Yes.  It always makes me think of people saying their prayers."

But he did not respond.  His sense of humour--such as it was--hung
in abeyance.  Possibly he had a sense of life's grotesqueness, and
failed--because of his own concentrated gravity--to appreciate the
comic.  Also, he was wondering which way she was going, and how he
could manage to escape.  He was most absurdly conscious of being
without a hat.  His self-consciousness made the little problems of
life so much more vexatious.

He said, "I am just going down to Holborn."

Her response was instant and sanguine.

"So am I.  I walk down Holborn and Newgate and Cheapside.  Unless--
it rains--pours--"

He closed the door.  He was aware of her glancing at the mahogany
cabinet.  He romanced.

"My microscope.  Taking it to an optician's.  Something's wrong
with the condenser."

She said, "Oh," and neither caring nor knowing about condensers, or
the subtleties of oil immersion, waited with a little air of
expectancy for him to place himself at her side.  Her animation
made other men look at her.  She was wearing a red hat and a black
blouse and skirt, and the red hat seemed to give a glow to her pale
face.  She had one of those pearly skins with a soft tinge of brown
in it.  She was a pretty creature, a woman unaccountably interested
in a man who was of no interest to most women.  She moved beside
Hazzard with a face of expectancy.  Other men looked at her.

Hazzard did not look.  It was not that he was afraid to look.
Other realities absorbed him.  In a sense he was sex blind, a
little celibate with eyes that saw nothing in woman save a creature
anatomically different from man.  Almost he had the mentality of a
child where woman was concerned, that--and the attitude of the
priest.  It was part of a doctor's profession to minister to women,
and woman had her own problems which became the problems of the
accoucheur and the physician.  Woman, as a piece of human
symbolism, had remained for him the mother creature, and at that
very moment he was thinking of his mother.

For to Hazzard his mother remained the tall, dark woman standing at
the cottage gate and watching him set off down the lane for Melfont
school.  He still was supported by their mutual pride, their common
aloofness.  She was the figure to whom he returned, carrying his
persecutings and his shames into the shadow of her wise and silent
compassion, made brave by her bravery, stiffening his lip at the
thought of her.  She was his Dea Matrix, a figure of beautiful and
reassuring permanency, courageous, beneficent, serene, like some
primeval figure watching him from the shadow of one of those old
Wiltshire sarsen stones.  How deeply she inspired him he both knew
and did not know.  For to many a man such a woman is his secret
self, challenging more than the mere sex in him, animating those
sublimations of his manhood, the creative urge, the passion to
accomplish, the courage to advance in the face of prejudice.

And he was thinking, "She must never know about Bullard and those
fellows."

Meanwhile he was walking down Red Lion Street with Ruth Avery, who
was puzzling herself over the aggressive cock of his head, and his
dour, self-absorbed silence.  Her eyes threw little oblique
glances.  His face gave her the impression of combat.

She said, "I'm going for my holiday next month.  A whole week."

Hazzard came out of his combative stare.  Holidays?  He took no
holidays, save those occasional week-ends with his mother.

"Where are you going?"

"I don't quite know yet.  When's your holiday?"

He appeared to be looking intently at a yellow van that was
crawling down the street.  He avoided a stout woman with a basket,
limping down into the gutter and back again to the pavement.

"When are you going?"

She flushed faintly.

"The last week in September."

"You'll be leaving your room empty?"

"Why--yes."

He was smiling, but not at her.

"That might be useful.  Would you mind my having your room for the
week?  My mother is coming up from the country."

He was not aware of her face closing up like one of those sensitive
flowers that fold their petals when touched or when the sun ceases
to shine.

"Your mother--?  Oh, of course not.  I dare say Mrs. Bunce would
let you."

They had reached Holborn.  He paused on the edge of the pavement
and looked at her with impartial friendliness.

"It's very good of you.  I'm going this way--now."

Her smile puzzled him a little.  She had the air of an impulsive
child who has been rebuffed, and who smiles to cover up the
confusion of a little innocent and secret shame.

"I hope they will soon put your microscope right."

"Oh, easily.  Good-bye."


II


Man, being by nature a lazy creature, is provoked by the industry
of the indefatigable few, and Moorhouse, who like most English
youngsters worked hard at playing, was yet able to understand
Hazzard and Hazzard's devotion.  It was just a question of being
interested.  At a time when most young men were thinking of their
batting averages, or whether they would get a place in the Rugger
team, or of some particular petticoat that showed signs of consent,
Hazzard was thinking of his scalpel or his stethoscope.  Work was
his play.  That lame foot of his, and a particular temperament, and
the attentive dark eyes of Mary Hazzard, had conspired to make him
what he was.

Moreover, Moorhouse was a gentleman.  He did most things so very
well that he was apt to think less of the doing of them than the
louts who have to scuffle and argue.  Life came to him easily.
There was no need in his case for crude self-assertion.  The simile
of the big dog applied.  Also, being a little slow and deliberate
in his reactions, one of those infinitely good-tempered Olympians
who are never in a hurry, he saved time and tissue, and had his
very handsome head well above the crowd's pushings and flurries.
He gave the appearance of slowness, but his was a fallacious
slowness, being in reality deliberation, like the easy poise and
movements of an athlete.  He had what the players of ball games
would call the power of anticipation.

Moorhouse first heard of the "Bunch of Grapes" affair from Soames,
who was spluttering forth the epic event to certain fellows who
came from the suburbs.  Soames had a black eye.  He was leaning
against the railings of the college, and he was obviously proud of
his black eye.

Moorhouse, joining the group, understood the significance of
Soames's splutterings.  Contusions were badges of honour; they had
been liberally distributed; Bullard--it appeared--had a beauty.

"Some rag--I can tell you.  They fetched the Bobbies in.  But you
should have seen the Squit.  Someone trod on his old fiddle."

Moorhouse was in position.  Having appreciated Soames's soaring
snobbery, and gathered the facts, he commented on them with a
frankness that was both simple and casual.

"You're a lot of cads."

Soames flared up.

"Oh, are we!  Supposing you tell Bullard--"

"With pleasure--"

For Bullard, big with bacon and eggs, appeared upon the steps of
the college, his right eye a blue-black bulge.

"I say, Bully, Moorhouse has something to tell you."

Moorhouse had.  He stood there with his hands in his trouser
pockets, a slight smile on his face.

"Oh, Bullard, I was just telling Soames that you are a lot of cads.
That's my view."

Bullard laughed.

"Right'o.  You're such a damned superior person.  Supposing we
leave it at that."


III


Christopher, with three pounds ten shillings in his pocket,
hesitated before an outfitter's shop window.  The hour was twenty
minutes to nine, and he was due to attend a lecture on Pathology at
nine, and his need was a new hat.

In this Holborn window he saw top-hats and bowler hats and Trilby
hats priced at various figures, and also a cap or two.  The caps
were of a red and white or black and white check pattern and
suggested "horsiness."  But they suggested to Christopher other
considerations, possible economies and an insurance against horse-
play.

He entered the shop and inquired for caps.  A young man who had the
appearance of having slept badly, gave Christopher a moment's
sleepy consideration before pulling out a drawer and displaying a
multitude of caps of the chessboard pattern.

"Nice style, sir."

"I'd prefer something quieter."

The shopman closed the drawer and opened another in which were caps
of various shades of depressed greyness.  Each had a grey button on
the crown.  They were headgear of an inferior order.

"How do you fancy these, sir?"

Hazzard tried on one, and it sat on his big head rather like a
muffin.

"Something larger."

"What sized hat, sir?"

"Seven and a half."

The shopman rummaged among the caps, and finding one of sufficient
largeness offered it to Hazzard.

"There is a mirror behind you, sir."

Hazzard, having pulled the peak well down and felt that the thing
covered his obstreperous hair, shirked the mirror.

"This fits.  How much?"

"Two and elevenpence, sir."

"I'll take it."

But in turning to walk out of the shop he saw himself reflected in
the mirror, and that grey cap pulled down tightly over an
excrescence that was known in those days as a tuft.  He looked like
a schoolboy.  He was aware of the insignificance of his own
reflection, of its grotesqueness.  The outfitter's mirror was like
the face of "Bennet's," throwing back at him an ironical grin.

He walked out of the shop the victim of a sudden, horrible self-
consciousness.  He felt a sinking of the stomach, and all because
of an absurd cloth cap.  But the cap was symbolical.  It was the
lid of his unfortunate physical fate, or a kind of grotesque button
perched upon the pate of his destiny.  It provoked memories, and a
particular memory of a grey, soft hat that his mother had bought
him in Salisbury, and had, with a misdirected tenderness, sent him
wearing it to Melfont Sunday school.  That hat had ended the
Sabbath with contumely and tears in the waters of the Wiltshire
Avon.

Hazzard found himself walking up Holborn in the direction of New
Oxford Street.  His legs were taking him towards "Bennet's," and an
ordeal that suddenly enlarged itself, and took to itself the faces
of Bullard and of Soames.  He knew that half the hospital would be
agog.  Even the nurses would have heard of that magnificent rag, of
that adventure purpled with plums.  Sometimes he had met half a
dozen of these young women walking arm in arm along a corridor,
full of suppressed laughter and feminine whisperings, and always he
had felt that to them he was not quite a man.  His soul burned.  He
walked on, but more slowly.  Again he was the sensitive, shrinking
child, inwardly afraid, shaking at the knees, dreading loud voices
and the little savage shouts.  "There he is!  There's Dotty!"  He
burned.  The humiliations and persecutions of years seemed to
descend upon him in the London sunlight.  The morning was all
glare.  He became a creature of sudden, pitiable childishness.

Almost he was moved to utter that old, instinctive cry, "Mother,
mother!"

But only once or twice in his life had Christopher suffered that
cry to escape from his lips.  Even as a child he had divined its
cowardice, its power to hurt and to wound the one creature to whom
his little legs had carried him.  Often he had raced home, white
and breathless but silent, small hands clenched, that wailing cry
bitten through and smothered.

On the broad pavement at the end of Tottenham Court Road a flower-
seller sat behind her basket of flowers, and Hazzard's courage
carried him just as far as the basket of flowers.  Anger and
bitterness and the hatred that reacts to hate will carry a man far,
and a part of his inspiration is the confounding of his enemies.
Hazzard could hate, but on this morning the force of his hatred
failed him.  He felt so utterly alone, so weak, so obscure.



IV


Moorhouse looked for Hazzard in the lecture theatre, but the little
man did not appear.

At ten o'clock dressers and clinical clerks went to their wards for
the morning's case-taking and dressing, but Hazzard was absent, and
Moorhouse observed Soames and another student sharing some joke
together.  Ardron--Sir Dighton's house-physician--who disliked
Hazzard, and made the most of his small authority, questioned
Soames.

"Where's Hazzard?"

Soames smiled his soapy smile.  He was feeling rather a devil of a
fellow with that black eye.

"In bed, I should think.  Caught cold last night."

"There are two new cases in his beds.  You had better clerk them,
Soames."

"What, both?"

"Well, Haines can take one, and you the other.  Hazzard ought to
have reported to me."

Moorhouse, who was examining one of his case-sheets, laid it down
on the bed, and crossed over to Ardron.

"I am going off at eleven, Ardron."

"There's a new case of yours in the corner."

"I shall get it done."

"All right."

Moorhouse was not the sort of man whom Ardron could hector.

Moorhouse knew Christopher's address.  The mystery had ceased to be
a mystery, and the whole hospital was aware that Hazzard lived in a
top-floor back room in Roper's Row, and that his bedroom was also
his larder.  Bullard had uncovered all those nice little nudities.
And Moorhouse was full of scorn of the scorners, because he was
more than a mere student of medicine, and had other traditions and
other friendships.  He made for Roper's Row.  He himself had rooms
in Bernard Street in a house with a blue front door and very white
window sashes, and Bernard Street and Roper's Row were not a
quarter of a mile apart.  At No. 7, Miss Bunce, reading a novelette
behind the counter, beheld the golden man of her dreams enter her
mother's shop.  Moorhouse had beauty.  He was more than a good-
looking fellow; he had that something which women are quick to
discover.

"Does Mr. Hazzard live here?"

"Yes, top floor back."

"Is he in?"

Ophelia did not know.  She supposed that Mr. Hazzard ought to be at
the hospital, but if the gentleman cared to go up and see?  Or
should she go for him?  Moorhouse thanked her, and told her not to
trouble, and she opened the door leading into the passage.

"You can get through this way."

Moorhouse climbed the dark stairs.  He made so little noise that
Christopher, who was sitting at his table with his head in his
hands, did not hear his footsteps.  For Hazzard was very deep in
the savage misery of the moment, and in the humiliation of a
surrender.  He had allowed himself to flinch, and to be frightened
by those hostile faces, and he was hating himself and them.

Moorhouse knocked.

"Who's that?"

Hazzard's voice had a suddenness.  Almost it suggested the snarl of
a dog suspecting an attack.  He had turned sharply in his chair.

"It's Moorhouse."

"Moorhouse--!"

"Yes, I came along to see if you were seedy."

There was silence.  Hazzard, sitting twisted, and clutching the
back of the chair with both hands, stared at the door.

"I'm all right, thanks."

"That's good.  I wondered.  Can I come in?"

Hazzard stood up.  His face had a strange ravaged look.  He seemed
to hesitate.  Then, with a jerky stiffness he crossed the room and
unlocked the door.

"Come in, Moorhouse."

He met Moorhouse's eyes for a moment, and then avoided them, not
because there was anything in Moorhouse's eyes that could humiliate
him, but because of their quiet, lazy kindness.

He closed the door.  He was voiceless.  He was acutely conscious of
the poverty of his room, and of Moorhouse's well-cut clothes and of
their many contrasts.  One of his chairs was occupied by the broken
violin.  And the bed was unmade, and he had been in too great a
hurry to wash up and clear away his breakfast things.  Also, he had
had neither the heart nor the will power to tackle the day's
trifles.

"Afraid I'm in rather a mess.  There's a chair."

Moorhouse sat down on the chair that Christopher had been using.
He saw things without appearing to see them, the broken violin, the
unmade bed, the teapot and cup and plate.  He was moved to a young
man's pity, but he concealed it with the tact of an older man.  He
brought out a pipe.

"Mind if I smoke?"

Hazzard's eyelids flickered.

"Do.  Afraid I haven't any tobacco."

"I carry my own tobacco."

Moorhouse, who like Hazzard had a mother whom he loved very dearly,
and sisters, and a country home where dogs and horses and trees and
the very grasses were part of life, had that delicacy that is born
of a happy childhood.  He carried with him the indelible stigmata
left by the touches of a woman.  To him the atmosphere of home
meant a place full of flowers and pictures, and green vistas, and
old furniture, and the making of music.  He was entering upon life--
man's life--with that most blessed of heritages, happy memories,
and faith in people.

He lit his pipe.

"Nothing much doing in the wards this morning.  That case of
myxoedema I have in the corner is behaving like a miracle."

He talked "shop" to Christopher and he talked it easily because in
his way he was almost as interested in his work as Hazzard was.
His keenness had not Christopher's sharp edge, but it was tempered
with a young humanity.  Moorhouse had very definite urges.  And his
easiness communicated itself to Hazzard, who, sitting on the edge
of his unmade bed, and feeling raw, and ready to be hurt, became
strangely soothed by Moorhouse's voice and manner.  He admired
Moorhouse, and he admired him ungrudgingly.  He quite understood
why Sir Dighton Fanshawe looked and spoke to Moorhouse as he did.
There was something very big and lovable and wholesome about the
man.

Meanwhile the broken violin lay there, and Hazzard knew that
Moorhouse knew of the affair of the "Bunch of Grapes."  He had
known it instantly; he had divined in Moorhouse a quiet
magnanimity.  Nothing was mentioned.  The very silence became a
nexus of sympathy.

Said Moorhouse:  "I say, come round and have some lunch with me.
My people in Bernard Street can always raise a meal."

And Hazzard blushed.

"I'd like to."

"Good business."


V


To Christopher there came a sudden righting of his dignity.  It
seemed to him quite natural he should say certain things to
Moorhouse, and do certain things in his presence, quietly and
without shame.

"Do you mind if I tidy up?"

"Go ahead."

Moorhouse sat at the open window and smoked and observed this
London vista, while Christopher made his bed, and emptied his
basin, and washed and put away the breakfast crockery.  Mostly
there was silence between them, but here and there a few words were
dropped with a tentative yet significant curtness.

"That poplar tree over there is rather unexpected."

"Yes, there's a tree just like it close to where my mother lives in
Wiltshire."

"Which part?"

"Melfont.  On the Avon."

"Great country.  We are Gloucestershire.  This ought to be a good
window to read at."

Hazzard was poking the broken violin away under the chest of
drawers.

"My mother used to keep a shop.  She's a wonderful woman.  I have
to rough it a bit, but then--a man doesn't mind--when someone--"

"Of course not.  My mater's a great woman.  I say, Hazzard, why
don't you take up coaching?"

"Coaching?"

"Yes, with your brains.  It ought to be easy for you to get half a
dozen duffers to cram.  You might even begin on me."

"You're not a duffer," said Christopher sharply.

"No, but I'm damned lazy.  Think it over--"

When Hazzard's household activities were over he took down the new
cloth cap from the peg behind the door, and glanced at Moorhouse's
bowler that sleeked itself in the sunlight on the table by the
window.

"I'm ready now."

"Come along."


VI


Moorhouse's rooms in Bernard Street offered Kit many contrasts, but
he was neither offended nor disconcerted by them.  These natural
objects were for the use of Moorhouse, and to Moorhouse Hazzard was
ready to allow all the good things that he himself lacked.  For in
Moorhouse's room there was furniture of another sort, courtesy, a
sensitive consideration.

And then arrived the hour when it was time to stroll to "Bennet's"
for the afternoon's work.

"Excuse me a moment, Hazzard."

Moorhouse disappeared into his bedroom, to return wearing a cap, a
cap that was much more distinguished than Christopher's, but still--
it was a cap.

Bullard's crowd, very much on the alert behind the hospital doors,
and offering and accepting bets on the chances of the Squit funking
a public occasion, saw Moorhouse and Hazzard crossing the
forecourt.  Hazzard was wearing a cap.  But so was Moorhouse.  A
conspiracy of comradeship, wearing the same headgear, challenged
and confounded that petty situation.



CHAPTER VI


I


There were evenings when Mary Hazzard locked her cottage door, and
following the path or sheep-track that left the lane where a spring
emptied itself into a stone trough, she would climb Sisbury Hill.
Time was when she had mounted the turf slope like a girl, without a
pause, and almost without the hurrying of her breath, but those
days were long ago.  Now she would pause three or four times during
the ascent, and stand and gaze above the valley where all her life
had been passed--day in--day out--like the river itself flowing
past the poplars, the willows and the orchards.  The scene had a
beautiful sameness.  She could look at things that were near and at
things that were far.  She could tell where there had been the
yellowness of buttercups, or the young gold of the Lombardy poplars
in the spring, or the lushing up of the grasses, and the fleckings
of colour--the flowers in the cottage gardens.  She did not hasten,
for life was growing short.  Reaching the green crown of Sisbury
where the wind came swiftly out of the west, and the sky had a
clouded spaciousness, she would take her stand by the solitary
stone set upright in the turf.

She called it Kit's stone.  For it had been a favourite haunt of
Christopher's where he could lie in the grass with a book, solitary
and secure, like a hill-man able to look down upon possible
enemies.  Often and often from the western window of her cottage
she had watched that little lone figure ascending or descending the
great green hill.  It was a heritage still sacred to the solitary
and the few, and to those uncommon people who do not mix with the
crowd, and who escape instinctively to a wood or a hill-top.

Usually it was about the hour of sunset when Mary Hazzard climbed
Sisbury.  With the setting sun behind her, if the evening happened
to be clear, and with the menhir throwing a long shadow, she would
lean against the stone and look towards the east.  That is to say,
she looked towards London and her son.  Standing on that high hill
she had a feeling that distance was obliterated, and that she was
with Christopher and he with her.

For she was a woman of one love and no illusions.  In her long and
rather solitary life she had become rather like a mirror in which
life and its affairs were reflected just as they were.  She
reflected both mystery and make-believe, for the things as they are
are only the things as we see them, and most of man's struttings
are against a surface that is cracked and joggled.  Ever as a tall,
dark, grave-eyed girl Mary Hazzard had accepted solitude, finding
that which seemed to be herself reflected in it.

But on Sisbury Hill she pondered other matters while feeling
conscious of the yonderness of her son.  To begin with there was
the strangeness of growing old, while Sisbury Hill and Kit's Stone
and the Avon and the beechwoods across the valley remained
strangely the same.  And you yourself were the same, yet different.
You were girl and mother, child and old woman.  Finding nature so
changeless and eternally renewed, you were surprised at your own
wrinkles and your faltering heart, for your window of the senses
seemed the same window.  Also there were days when you felt like a
child of seven or a girl of seventeen, and your years were sixty.
Or you warmed your hands at the fire and wondered at death.

Yet there comes that season of acceptance, and it had come to Kit's
mother.  She had her secret, even as he had his.  She knew that she
had not very long to live, and yet she would climb slowly to the
top of Sisbury because Sisbury was her hill of acceptance, a high
place from which she could look upon what had been and what was and
what might be.  She had been spared that phase of old age in which
life is nothing but a stream of irritations, of frettings against
the failings of the flesh, of anger against all change--because
change is youth.  She had never been an irritable woman.

So, the last phase was to her like Sisbury.  She liked it sun-
steeped, with a soft breeze blowing, but when two days out of three
were grey and green and sad she accepted them, for life is like
that, especially in northern lands.  Little bursts of sunlight
breaking through the wet, green, clouded sadness, and playing for a
moment, and disappearing.  She had done what she could, and now she
was an old woman on a hill-top watching youth in the valley.

Yet, she knew her son as she knew the valley.

Almost she could follow his path in its past and in its future.

He had had so many obstacles to surmount, and with that lame leg of
his.

She had watched him climbing.

She knew that she wanted to go on living until it was known in this
Wiltshire valley that her son had done that which he had set out to
do.

Dr. Christopher Hazzard.

But after that--?  There was always an afterwards, even perhaps
when you died.  She had Christopher's afterwards very much before
her, for on Sisbury she was like a woman who was fey, and the
afterwards--as she saw it for her son--filled her with peculiar
compassion.  Always he would be very much alone, for he was flesh
of her flesh, and spirit of her spirit.  He would have the world
more against him than with him, for the world was but Melfont
village enlarged.  His passion was work, and the world is
prejudiced against the aloof and passionate worker.

He would have such struggles, and no longer would she be a live
presence in his life, and yet in a strange way she was glad.

She was one of those women who foresaw old age and decrepitude as a
burden to others, a burden that might tenderly be borne, but which
remained a burden.  She would leave her son a hundred odd pounds
and that little old cottage, and a memory.

Moreover she saw in Kit more than a mere country practitioner, a
little, kindly, pottering, conventional creature going a daily
round.  She saw him as the searcher and the creator, and a searcher
is not made for the bearing of burdens.  She saw him very much
alone, absorbed, gazing intently at the infinite significance of
the very little, using those clever hands of his.  She believed--
somehow--that her son would be a great man, but she doubted whether
he would be a very happy one.

But what was happiness, especially to a man?  Surely it lay in
striving, searching, and accomplishing?


II


A quarter of a mile up the lane lay Prosser's Farm.  It was marked
on the estate maps as "Beech Farm," but it had come to be known as
Prosser's Farm because it was so full of Prosser; and the Prossers
were pushing people.  Mrs. Prosser had had a family of eleven, and
all doing well--thank you, and Prosser-ish, as was to be expected.
Their ages ranged from four-and-twenty to eight, and the first
three Prossers, red, blue-eyed and truculent, had been the most
merciless of Christopher's persecutors.

Mrs. Prosser, large and pink and fat, with a snout, and a general
air of infallibility and good-humoured insolence, would waddle past
Mary Hazzard's cottage most days of the week, and as a rule with a
few small Prossers grunting and galloping near her like young
porkers following the sow.  She was a woman who sagged and bulged
and quaked.  She perspired, and seemed to enjoy it.  She had a loud
voice and used it generously, on her husband and her children and
her neighbours.  An open gate tempted her just as it tempted her
animal prototype.

If the young Prossers had persecuted the son, Mrs. Prosser had been
equally molestive to the mother.

"Well, Mary, how's that boy of yours?  I must say I'm sorry for a
woman that has a child that's sickly."

Mrs. Prosser, leaning over a gate or filling a doorway, showed
neighbourliness.  She disliked Mary Hazzard, and the dislike was
mutual, for it was common knowledge that Sam Prosser at the age of
five-and-twenty had very much wanted Mary.

Sarah Prosser had not forgotten the romance, and all through the
years she had--as it were--thrown a dish-clout at that tall, dark,
silent woman.  Also, she had thrown her children at Mary Hazzard,
and her children's healthiness, and their looks, and their vigour,
and the oozing, prodigal and happy fecundity of her own fat person.
What Prosser thought of it was another matter.

During these later years Mrs. Sarah had changed her chant.

"Well, Mary, is that boy of yours a doctor yet?  It does seem a
long business, don't it?  But--I do suppose it will be all right in
the end--if his health holds out.  London be such a--terrible--
place, and he always was sickly."

If Mary Hazzard had any original sin left in her, it was provoked
by the Prosser woman.  She wanted to see her life's purpose planted
securely and triumphantly above the wallowings of her neighbour.
She asked to be spared the ordeal of being made to appear a fool
before fools.

And Christopher had won the Angus Sandeman prize, and she was going
up to London to see him take it, and Mrs. Prosser knew.  Sisbury
Hill had the light of a smile on its green, still face.


III


Ruth was packing a portmanteau, a diminutive and very old brown
leather contraption with two new straps and four of its corners
patched.  She had it open on the floor.  She sat or knelt upon the
floor like a child playing a game, for packing for your one yearly
holiday was part of the adventure.  Ruth was a little flushed.  She
was a creature of quick and graceful gestures, and of pretty poses
that were unconscious, and of moments of still, dark thought.  She
could sprawl like a child, and be as natural and as graceful as a
child when no one was watching her.  Translated into the nude, and
with the portmanteau transformed into a little brown forest pool,
she could have given to an artist the study of a naiad looking at
her dusky self in the brown water.

She patted and smoothed a dress, or tucked a roll of stockings into
a corner, or rose and turned on her knees to reach for some article
from the bed.  At eight o'clock next morning a good fellow who sold
evening papers in Bloomsbury was to call at No. 7 Roper's Row and
shoulder Ruth's portmanteau to Charing Cross Station.

But her absorption in the business of packing was not complete, nor
was the prospect of ten days at Hastings so satisfying as it might
have been.  She was going alone to a bed-sitting room in Prospect
Place, a girl friend in the office of Hilton & Stagg in Fenchurch
Street having failed her.  Also, it was the end of September and
cloudy and rather cold, and romantic possibilities seemed absent.

She was about to close the lid of the portmanteau when she heard
the opening of Hazzard's door, and his footsteps crossing the
landing.  She remained motionless, the feminine creature crouching
and expectant, for since the incident of her washing of Hazzard's
coat there had been a friendliness between them.  Not that a girl
of Ruth's eyes and colouring was content with friendliness; she
wasn't; in her shy and secret way she had watched and wondered and
listened, and looked for sweet significances in life's little
nothings.

Moreover, during the last day or two Christopher's room had been
full of activities.  Men in dirty white aprons had carried things
up the stairs, and she had heard Hazzard hammering and pulling
furniture about.  His mother was coming up from Wiltshire for
Bennet's Day, and Ruth, too gentle and too unpossessive to be
jealous, had caught herself wishing that the occasion could have
arranged itself otherwise.

Hazzard's footsteps approached her door and paused there.  He
knocked.

"Miss Avery."

She rose on her slim legs, and went swiftly to look in her mirror.

"Yes."

She patted her hair and wished that he would be less formal, and
call her Ruth.

"Can I speak to you a moment?"

She crossed the room and opened the door, and stood there with a
smile of dark expectancy.

"Sorry to disturb you."

"Oh, I was packing.  I've just finished."

She noticed that his face had a rapt look, also that there was a
little blob of white paint on his right temple.  Also there were
paint stains on his fingers.  He had been refreshing the dressing-
table and the chest of drawers.

"My mother comes up on the Wednesday.  I'm wondering if you would
mind--"

His glance examined her room, but not because it was her room and
had any perfume and mystery for him, but because it was to be his
mother's room for one notable night.

"I shan't be back till the Saturday."

"Would you mind if I altered--things--a little?  I'll put
everything back."

She was a little puzzled, and beginning to be a little piqued.

"In what way?"

"Oh, I daresay it will not be necessary."

"Will she have much luggage?"

"No."

"I've cleared two of the drawers, and there's room in the
cupboard."

"Thank you.  It's very good of you to let me.  I'll take care."

He glanced at her open trunk, and saw something white and neatly
folded, a clean nightdress, but he did not see it as a nightdress,
nor as a man like Bullard would have seen it.  But he had arrived
at the end of his mission, and became suddenly shy and diffident,
and perhaps he was conscious of a response that was lacking.  He
felt vaguely dissatisfied with the occasion, not realizing that the
impression emanated from her.

"I won't bother you any more."

He retreated.  He appeared to dwindle away, and she closed the door
on him with a sense of happenings unfulfilled.  He had not spoken
about her holiday, or wished her fair weather and a good time.  He
had just assumed her absence and shown himself glad and ready to
make use of it.  And she felt hurt and a little aggrieved, and
convinced that he was not at all interested in her or her little
affairs, and being a very warm and simple creature, quite
exquisitely simple in her way, she reacted like a disregarded
child, and sat down on her bed and looked pensive.

Hazzard had not been to the hospital for three days.  He had been
busy preparing for the great occasion, staging a piece of devoted
make-believe for the beguiling of his mother; he had bought a four-
pound tin of cream paint and a brush; he had arranged to hire for
three nights a carpet, a small sideboard, two leather-seated
chairs, four pictures in oils.  The hiring of these articles had
not been an easy matter, for he had had to remove the scepticism of
the owner of the second-hand furniture shop.

"What--three nights!  What's the game, my lad?"

Christopher found that the truth had powers of persuasion.

"My mother is coming up from the country."

"Mother!  Now--you don't tell me--"

"That is just what I am telling you.  You can go and make
inquiries.  Mrs. Bunce--my landlady knows--"

"Mrs. Bunce of No. 7.  Yes, I've done business with her."

"I'll pay in advance--if you prefer it."

"That's my motto; money down."

With the arrival of the stage properties, displacements and
concealments became necessary.  Christopher's two sugar-boxes were
hidden away under the bed.  Two decrepit chairs were given
temporary standing room on the landing.  There was the catering to
be considered, and Mrs. Bunce agreed to board mother and son during
Mrs. Mary's visit.  Ophelia would wait on them.

"I don't want my mother to know, Mrs. Bunce."

"Bless your heart," said the lady, "I--can--keep a secret--
sometimes."

When Ruth Avery's portmanteau had been carried downstairs, and she
herself had followed it, Hazzard remained master of the whole top
floor of No. 7.  Ruth's door was shut, and he crossed the landing,
and opening her door, went in.  She had turned down the bed for the
sheets to be changed, and in her basin was the water she had used,
and the towels were neatly folded on the white rails.  The room had
a clean simplicity, and he stood there thinking that it would be
just the room for his mother.

It may be that he did not hear footsteps on the stairs, or if he
heard them he assumed them to be the footsteps of the Bunce girl
coming up to do the room.  He was bending over the bed, pressing a
hand into the mattress to test the springs, for Mary Hazzard was
not a good sleeper, and being the child of his mother he was a
creature of quaint thoroughness and forethought.

"Oh--!"

He turned as sharply as the exclamation.  He saw Ruth in the
doorway, a Ruth with wide dark eyes and a vivid face, a figure of
haste, breathlessness, and confusion.

He reddened.

"I'm sorry.  I thought--"

She seemed to waver.  There was something in her eyes that
perplexed him.  She seemed to glow with a sudden self-conscious
radiance.

"I forgot my purse.  So silly.  I had to run all the way back from
Conduit Street."

She was all colour and breathlessness.  She crossed quickly to the
chest of drawers, and opened a top drawer.

"There!  Fancy my forgetting!"

He had betaken himself to the door, and he drew aside to let her
pass.

"You won't miss your train?"

"I shall just manage it."

"I hope you'll have a good time."

Her eyes, confusedly, bright, met his.

"Of course.  I'm so glad your mother is sleeping here.  Good-bye."

She held out a hand and he took it, and was aware of the warmth and
the faint pressure of her fingers.

"Good-bye."

She turned at the top of the stairs and smiled and nodded, and he
saw the whiteness of her neck under the brim of her black hat as
she went down the stairs.  He remained for a moment staring at the
dingy wallpaper.  He had thought the white V of her neck rather
pretty, but in two minutes he had forgotten all about it.  He had
so many other things to do.

On the morning of the great day Christopher Hazzard rose at five.
He was in a hurry, and not a little excited; he cut himself while
shaving, and spoilt a clean collar and solved the problem by
appearing in Roper's Row without a collar, and with a wad of blood-
stained cotton-wool adhering to his cheek.  But Roper's Row was
supremely his, empty and silent, with the rising sun shining down
it, and the green of the plane trees closing each end of it like a
curtain.  He felt adventurous and exultant, like a small boy
setting forth in the freshness of the dawn to rob an orchard or
climb some distant and mysterious hill.

He was bound for Covent Garden market.  Inevitably his mother would
arrive with a bunch of flowers, but he wanted her to find flowers
in her room.  He bought bronze-red and white chrysanthemums; he
spent two and sixpence on the flowers, and was back in Roper's Row
about the time that blinds were going up, and an occasional door
opening like a sleepy, yawning mouth.  In the passage of No. 7 he
met Ophelia with her hair in curlpapers, and bearing the white milk-
jug that was to be left on the doorstep ready for the milkman.

"Lor', Mr. Hazzard, ain't you early."

Christopher felt absurdly happy, and in love with everything and
everybody.  The sun was shining; even Ophelia's fringe of curl-
papers suggested a halo.

"Don't forget, I shall need milk for two."

"I've got it ready, see."

She had a piece of paper with "Four pints" scrawled on it, to be
tucked under the jug.

"That's forethought, Mr. Hazzard."

He extracted a red chrysanthemum and presented it to her.

"A red-letter day, Ophelia.  You wear that for good luck."

Miss Bunce tucked the flower into her blue-and-white striped
flannel blouse, and placed the milk-jug outside the door.

Hazzard had gone on to climb the stairs.

"Lawks!" was her reflection, "you'd think 'e 'ad a gal comin' up
from the country, and not 'is ma.  'E's a queer un, and no
mistake."


IV


Hazzard brought his mother from Paddington Station in a cab.

Always he had known his mother to be a very wonderful woman, but
her uniqueness had belonged to Wiltshire and the greenness and
solitudes of downland, woods and meadows, and in London she was a
stranger, a tall, dark-eyed barbarian from the west.  Christopher
may have wondered how she and London would meet, but from the
moment of her getting into the four-wheeler he felt her to be what
she was, a notable and natural gentlewoman who took to the
"growler" as to a state coach, and to whom London was nothing more
than a conglomeration of houses and people.  She wore black, and a
black low-crowned hat instead of a bonnet, and in her lap lay a
sheaf of purple autumn asters and white and yellow dahlias.  She
sat erect, but without any suggestion of stiffness, and looked at
her leisure out of the cab's windows.

There was nothing in her dark, still eyes that exclaimed "So--this
is London."  She was as much herself as on the crown of Sisbury
Hill, gravely regarding life, and thinking it over, well poised
within herself, and not hurrying to pay homage to circumstance.  So
might Boadicea have driven through Camulodunum in her chariot.

She said, "Did it not strike you, Kit, at first--as being very
strange?"

"What, mother?"

"All these houses.  And people choosing to be like a swarm of
bees."

He admitted that in the beginning he had found London rather
amazing, marvellous, and not a little terrifying.  He was aware of
her gazing at the shops and the people and the traffic with an
impartial interest, as though she had arrived from Mars.  Her
handsome face, with its fine white skin, seemed--somehow--to make
London look dim and smeary.

"The marvel to me, Kit, is that people should choose all this."

He let his hand rest on one of her knees as he had done when he was
a very small boy being read to.

"You spoke of swarming bees, Mother.  There's the queen bee."

She smiled.

"The Golden Bee, my dear.  Oh yes, I understand.  Most insects and
men love crowds.  But to me--"

He divined her meaning, that to her London was a vast foolishness,
though she grasped the blind urges of its necessity.  It was a huge
and urbanized Mrs. Prosser.  And he sat and absorbed this new
impression of his mother as a woman who had stepped down off
Sisbury Hill, but who, retaining the attitude of Sisbury, could
find London no higher than her knees.  She overlooked St. Paul's.
She remained as notable a woman to Christopher the man as she had
been to Christopher the child.

He said, "You'll find Roper's Row rather small and narrow, Mother."

She turned to him suddenly with her particular smile.

"It's the inside of things, my dear.  It's what you've done there--
for both of us."

Vehicles could not traverse Roper's Row, and the cab stopped in
Lamb's Conduit Street, and Christopher got out and paid and tipped
the cabman, and laid hold of his mother's black bag.

She smiled at him.

"Eggs, my dear."

"I'll be careful."

She descended, carrying her flowers, and together they walked up
Roper's Row, and to Christopher the Row became both narrower and
yet more spacious.  His mother was half a head taller than most
London women; she held herself very straight; she moved with an air
of quiet and gentle loftiness.  She did not stare, but was stared
at and was not troubled by it.  And in walking up Roper's Row he
realized his mother as his mother, a woman of many memories, a
notable and beloved figure.  He was as proud of her as a child.

Some instinct made Mary Hazzard enter No. 7 by way of the shop.
She had a peculiar flair for the rightness of things.  She found
Mrs. Bunce behind the counter.

"Good morning.  You are Mrs. Bunce.  I am Mrs. Hazzard."

With the flowers against the bosom of her black dress she held out
a hand, and Mrs. Bunce's spectacles glimmered.  Unconsciously she
wiped her hand on her apron.

"Glad to see you, ma'am.  I'm sure I hope you'll be comfortable.
Anythink we can do--we will do."

As Mrs. Bunce said later to Phelia, "Bless me--if she didn't give
me a kind of shock.  If the Queen had walked in I couldn't 'ave
felt more so-so.  You wouldn't 'ave expected a little chap to 'ave
a mother like that.  Now, would you?  I ask you?"



CHAPTER VII


I


Christopher preceded his mother up the stairs like a chamberlain
conducting a great lady to her lodging.  He took the last flight
quickly, with a swifter beat of heart, for Ophelia had closed both
doors, and the landing was very dark when the doors were shut.
Hazzard threw open both doors, and met his mother as she reached
the last few steps.

She paused there, one hand on the rail.  She was unused to such
stairs, and her heart was not what it had been, and these London
stairs were more severe than Sisbury Hill.  She was feeling
distressed, but she managed to hide her distress, and her pallor
was a smiling mask.

"I'm not quite so young as I was, Kit."

She completed the climbing of her calvary, and crossing to the open
doorway of her son's room, stood there gazing.  She had not missed
his look of expectancy, and she understood it, though she did not
know that Christopher had dressed his stage to satisfy a mutual
pride.  She saw the room, neat and well furnished, and the wide and
open window and, framed by it, a pleasant space enclosed by walls
of brown-black brick, and the various and quaint chimneys, and a
stretch of blue sky.  The big and solitary poplar was fluttering
its leaves and making a cool grey green flickering.

She said, "Why--how good, my dear.  That window.  And the air."

His sensitive face was flushed.

"Yes, it's a fine window.  I sit there and work.  The light is just
right."

She seemed to touch and stroke the room and its objects with her
calm gentleness of her glances.

"You've got such nice furniture.  I've often sat and dreamed, my
dear."

He was happy.

"Now, I'll show you your room.  Perhaps you would like to rest a
little."

In Ruth's room Mary Hazzard found the flowers that Christopher had
bought that morning in Covent Garden, arranged in a china vase
borrowed from the Bunces.  He had place