Kabanata Kabanata 1 · INTRODUCES MR. LEWISHAM.

. INTRODUCES MR. LEWISHAM.

The opening chapter does not concern itself with Love--indeed that

antagonist does not certainly appear until the third--and Mr. Lewisham

is seen at his studies. It was ten years ago, and in those days he was

assistant master in the Whortley Proprietary School, Whortley, Sussex,

and his wages were forty pounds a year, out of which he had to afford

fifteen shillings a week during term time to lodge with Mrs. Munday,

at the little shop in the West Street. He was called "Mr." to

distinguish him from the bigger boys, whose duty it was to learn, and

it was a matter of stringent regulation that he should be addressed as

"Sir."

He wore ready-made clothes, his black jacket of rigid line was dusted

about the front and sleeves with scholastic chalk, and his face was

downy and his moustache incipient. He was a passable-looking youngster

of eighteen, fair-haired, indifferently barbered, and with a quite

unnecessary pair of glasses on his fairly prominent nose--he wore

these to make himself look older, that discipline might be

maintained. At the particular moment when this story begins he was in

his bedroom. An attic it was, with lead-framed dormer windows, a

slanting ceiling and a bulging wall, covered, as a number of torn

places witnessed, with innumerable strata of florid old-fashioned

paper.

To judge by the room Mr. Lewisham thought little of Love but much on

Greatness. Over the head of the bed, for example, where good folks

hang texts, these truths asserted themselves, written in a clear,

bold, youthfully florid hand:--"Knowledge is Power," and "What man has

done man can do,"--man in the second instance referring to

Mr. Lewisham. Never for a moment were these things to be

forgotten. Mr. Lewisham could see them afresh every morning as his

head came through his shirt. And over the yellow-painted box upon

which--for lack of shelves--Mr. Lewisham's library was arranged, was a

"_Schema_." (Why he should not have headed it "Scheme," the editor of

the _Church Times_, who calls his miscellaneous notes "_Varia_," is

better able to say than I.) In this scheme, 1892 was indicated as the

year in which Mr. Lewisham proposed to take his B.A. degree at the

London University with "hons. in all subjects," and 1895 as the date

of his "gold medal." Subsequently there were to be "pamphlets in the

Liberal interest," and such like things duly dated. "Who would control

others must first control himself," remarked the wall over the

wash-hand stand, and behind the door against the Sunday trousers was a

portrait of Carlyle.

These were no mere threats against the universe; operations had

begun. Jostling Shakespeare, Emerson's Essays, and the penny Life of

Confucius, there were battered and defaced school books, a number of

the excellent manuals of the Universal Correspondence Association,

exercise books, ink (red and black) in penny bottles, and an

india-rubber stamp with Mr. Lewisham's name. A trophy of bluish green

South Kensington certificates for geometrical drawing, astronomy,

physiology, physiography, and inorganic chemistry adorned his further

wall. And against the Carlyle portrait was a manuscript list of French

irregular verbs.

Attached by a drawing-pin to the roof over the wash-hand stand,

which--the room being an attic--sloped almost dangerously, dangled a

Time-Table. Mr. Lewisham was to rise at five, and that this was no

vain boasting, a cheap American alarum clock by the books on the box

witnessed. The lumps of mellow chocolate on the papered ledge by the

bed-head indorsed that evidence. "French until eight," said the

time-table curtly. Breakfast was to be eaten in twenty minutes; then

twenty-five minutes of "literature" to be precise, learning extracts

(preferably pompous) from the plays of William Shakespeare--and then

to school and duty. The time-table further prescribed Latin

Composition for the recess and the dinner hour ("literature," however,

during the meal), and varied its injunctions for the rest of the

twenty-four hours according to the day of the week. Not a moment for

Satan and that "mischief still" of his. Only three-score and ten has

the confidence, as well as the time, to be idle.

But just think of the admirable quality of such a scheme! Up and busy

at five, with all the world about one horizontal, warm, dreamy-brained

or stupidly hullish, if roused, roused only to grunt and sigh and roll

over again into oblivion. By eight three hours' clear start, three

hours' knowledge ahead of everyone. It takes, I have been told by an

eminent scholar, about a thousand hours of sincere work to learn a

language completely--after three or four languages much less--which

gives you, even at the outset, one each a year before breakfast. The

gift of tongues--picked up like mushrooms! Then that "literature"--an

astonishing conception! In the afternoon mathematics and the

sciences. Could anything be simpler or more magnificent? In six years

Mr. Lewisham will have his five or six languages, a sound, all-round

education, a habit of tremendous industry, and be still but

four-and-twenty. He will already have honour in his university and

ampler means. One realises that those pamphlets in the Liberal

interests will be no obscure platitudes. Where Mr. Lewisham will be at

thirty stirs the imagination. There will be modifications of the

Schema, of course, as experience widens. But the spirit of it--the

spirit of it is a devouring flame!

He was sitting facing the diamond-framed window, writing, writing

fast, on a second yellow box that was turned on end and empty, and the

lid was open, and his knees were conveniently stuck into the

cavity. The bed was strewn with books and copygraphed sheets of

instructions from his remote correspondence tutors. Pursuant to the

dangling time-table he was, you would have noticed, translating Latin

into English.

Imperceptibly the speed of his writing diminished. "_Urit me Glycerae

nitor_" lay ahead and troubled him. "Urit me," he murmured, and his

eyes travelled from his book out of window to the vicar's roof

opposite and its ivied chimneys. His brows were knit at first and then

relaxed. "_Urit me_!" He had put his pen into his mouth and glanced

about for his dictionary. _Urare_?

Suddenly his expression changed. Movement dictionary-ward ceased. He

was listening to a light tapping sound--it was a footfall--outside.

He stood up abruptly, and, stretching his neck, peered through his

unnecessary glasses and the diamond panes down into the

street. Looking acutely downward he could see a hat daintily trimmed

with pinkish white blossom, the shoulder of a jacket, and just the

tips of nose and chin. Certainly the stranger who sat under the

gallery last Sunday next the Frobishers. Then, too, he had seen her

only obliquely....

He watched her until she passed beyond the window frame. He strained

to see impossibly round the corner....

Then he started, frowned, took his pen from his mouth. "This wandering

attention!" he said. "The slightest thing! Where was I? Tcha!" He

made a noise with his teeth to express his irritation, sat down, and

replaced his knees in the upturned box. "Urit me," he said, biting the

end of his pen and looking for his dictionary.

It was a Wednesday half-holiday late in March, a spring day glorious

in amber light, dazzling white clouds and the intensest blue, casting

a powder of wonderful green hither and thither among the trees and

rousing all the birds to tumultuous rejoicings, a rousing day, a

clamatory insistent day, a veritable herald of summer. The stir of

that anticipation was in the air, the warm earth was parting above the

swelling seeds, and all the pine-woods were full of the minute

crepitation of opening bud scales. And not only was the stir of Mother

Nature's awakening in the earth and the air and the trees, but also in

Mr. Lewisham's youthful blood, bidding him rouse himself to live--live

in a sense quite other than that the Schema indicated.

He saw the dictionary peeping from under a paper, looked up "Urit me,"

appreciated the shining "nitor" of Glycera's shoulders, and so fell

idle again to rouse himself abruptly.

"I _can't_ fix my attention," said Mr. Lewisham. He took off the

needless glasses, wiped them, and blinked his eyes. This confounded

Horace and his stimulating epithets! A walk?

"I won't be beat," he said--incorrectly--replaced his glasses, brought

his elbows down on either side of his box with resonant violence, and

clutched the hair over his ears with both hands....

In five minutes' time he found himself watching the swallows curving

through the blue over the vicarage garden.

"Did ever man have such a bother with himself as me?" he asked vaguely

but vehemently. "It's self-indulgence does it--sitting down's the

beginning of laziness."

So he stood up to his work, and came into permanent view of the

village street. "If she has gone round the corner by the post office,

she will come in sight over the palings above the allotments,"

suggested the unexplored and undisciplined region of Mr. Lewisham's

mind....

She did not come into sight. Apparently she had not gone round by the

post office after all. It made one wonder where she had gone. Did she

go up through the town to the avenue on these occasions?... Then

abruptly a cloud drove across the sunlight, the glowing street went

cold and Mr. Lewisham's imagination submitted to control. So "_Mater

saeva cupidinum_," "The untamable mother of desires,"--Horace (Book

II. of the Odes) was the author appointed by the university for

Mr. Lewisham's matriculation--was, after all, translated to its

prophetic end.

Precisely as the church clock struck five Mr. Lewisham, with a

punctuality that was indeed almost too prompt for a really earnest

student, shut his Horace, took up his Shakespeare, and descended the

narrow, curved, uncarpeted staircase that led from his garret to the

living room in which he had his tea with his landlady, Mrs.

Munday. That good lady was alone, and after a few civilities

Mr. Lewisham opened his Shakespeare and read from a mark onward--that

mark, by-the-bye, was in the middle of a scene--while he consumed

mechanically a number of slices of bread and whort jam.

Mrs. Munday watched him over her spectacles and thought how bad so

much reading must be for the eyes, until the tinkling of her shop-bell

called her away to a customer. At twenty-five minutes to six he put

the book back in the window-sill, dashed a few crumbs from his jacket,

assumed a mortar-board cap that was lying on the tea-caddy, and went

forth to his evening "preparation duty."

The West Street was empty and shining golden with the sunset. Its

beauty seized upon him, and he forgot to repeat the passage from Henry

VIII. that should have occupied him down the street. Instead he was

presently thinking of that insubordinate glance from his window and of

little chins and nose-tips. His eyes became remote in their

expression....

The school door was opened by an obsequious little boy with "lines" to

be examined.

Mr. Lewisham felt a curious change of atmosphere on his entry. The

door slammed behind him. The hall with its insistent scholastic

suggestions, its yellow marbled paper, its long rows of hat-pegs, its

disreputable array of umbrellas, a broken mortar-board and a tattered

and scattered _Principia_, seemed dim and dull in contrast with the

luminous stir of the early March evening outside. An unusual sense of

the greyness of a teacher's life, of the greyness indeed of the life

of all studious souls came, and went in his mind. He took the "lines,"

written painfully over three pages of exercise book, and obliterated

them with a huge G.E.L., scrawled monstrously across each page. He

heard the familiar mingled noises of the playground drifting in to him

through the open schoolroom door.