Title: Roper's Row (1929)
Author: Warwick Deeping
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Language:  English
Date first posted: November 2006
Date most recently updated: November 2006

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ROPER'S ROW

by

Warwick Deeping

1929

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

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 myxœdema 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