But Nature Study is a pleasant lesson. I had got a big old tortoise, who had not yet gone to sleep, though November was darkening the early afternoon, and I knew the boys would enjoy sketching him. I put him under the radiator to warm while I went for a large empty shell that I had sawn in two to show the ribs of some ancient tortoise absorbed in his bony coat. When I came back I found Joe, the old reptile, stretching slowly his skinny neck, and looking with indifferent eyes at the two intruding boys who were kneeling beside him. I was too good-tempered to send them out again into the playground, too slack with the great relief of Friday afternoon. So I bade them put out the Nature books ready. I crouched to look at Joey, and stroked his horny, blunt head with my finger. He was quite lively. He spread out his legs and gripped the floor with his flat hand-like paws, then he slackened again as if from a yawn, dropping his head meditatively.

  I felt pleased with myself, knowing that the boys would be delighted with the lesson. ‘He will not want to walk,’ I said to myself, ‘and if he takes a sleepy stride, they’ll be just in ecstasy, and I can easily calm him down to his old position.’ So I anticipated their entry. At the end of playtime I went to bring them in. They were a small class of about thirty — my own boys. A difficult, mixed class, they were, consisting of six London Home boys, five boys from a fairly well-to-do Home for the children of actors, and a set of commoners varying from poor lads who hobbled to school, crippled by broken enormous boots, to boys who brought soft, light shoes to wear in school on snowy days. The Gordons were a difficult set; you could pick them out: crop haired, coarsely dressed lads, distrustful, always ready to assume the defensive. They would lie till it made my heart sick, if they were charged with offence, but they were willing, and would respond beautifully to an appeal. The actors were of different fibre: some gentle, a pleasure even to look at; others polite and obedient, but indifferent, covertly insolent and vulgar; all of them more or less gentlemanly.

  The boys crowded round the table noisily as soon as they discovered Joe. ‘Is he alive? — Look, his head’s coming out! He’ll bite you? — He won’t!’ — with much scorn — ‘Please Sir, do tortoises bite?’ I hurried them off to their seats in a little group in front, and pulled the table up to the desks. Joe kept fairly still. The boys nudged each other excitedly, making half audible remarks concerning the poor reptile, looking quickly from me to Joe and then to their neighbours. I set them sketching, but in their pleasure at the novelty they could not be still:

  ‘Please Sir — shall we draw the marks on the shell? Please Sir, has he only got four toes?’ — ‘Toes!’ echoes somebody, covertly delighted at the absurdity of calling the grains of claws ‘toes’. ‘Please Sir, he’s moving — Please Sir!’

  I stroked his neck and calmed him down:

  ‘Now don’t make me wish I hadn’t brought him. That’s enough. Miles — you shall go to the back and draw twigs if I hear you again! Enough now — be still, get on with the drawing, it’s hard!’

  I wanted peace for myself. They began to sketch diligently. I stood and looked across at the sunset, which I could see facing me through my window, a great gold sunset, very large and magnificent, rising up in immense gold beauty beyond the town, that was become a low dark strip of nothingness under the wonderful up-building of the western sky. The light, the thick, heavy golden sunlight which is only seen in its full dripping splendour in town, spread on the desks and the floor like gold lacquer. I lifted my hands, to take the sunlight on them, smiling faintly to myself, trying to shut my fingers over its tangible richness.

  ‘Please Sir!’ — I was interrupted — ‘Please Sir, can we have rubbers?’

  The question was rather plaintive. I had said they should have rubbers no more. I could not keep my stock, I could not detect the thief among them, and I was weary of the continual degradation of bullying them to try to recover what was lost among them. But it was Friday afternoon, very peaceful and happy. Like a bad teacher, I went back on my word:

  ‘Well — !’ I said, indulgently.

  My monitor, a pale, bright, erratic boy, went to the cupboard and took out a red box.

  ‘Please Sir!’ he cried, then he stopped and counted again in the box. ‘Eleven! There’s only eleven, Sir, and there were fifteen when I put them away on Wednesday—!’

  The class stopped, every face upturned. Joe sunk, and lay flat on his shell, his legs limp. Another of the hateful moments had come. The sunset was smeared out, the charm of the afternoon was smashed like a fair glass that falls to the floor. My nerves seemed to tighten, and to vibrate with sudden tension.

  ‘Again!’ I cried, turning to the class in passion, to the upturned faces, and the sixty watchful eyes.

  ‘Again! I am sick of it, sick of it I am! A thieving, wretched set! — a skulking, mean lot!’ I was quivering with anger and distress.

  ‘Who is it? You must know! You are all as bad as one another, you hide it — a miserable—!’ I looked round the class in great agitation. The ‘Gordons’ with their distrustful faces, were noticeable:

  ‘Marples!’ I cried to one of them, ‘where are those rubbers?’

  ‘I don’t know where they are — I’ve never ’ad no rubbers’ — he almost shouted back, with the usual insolence of his set. I was more angry:

  ‘You must know! They’re gone — they don’t melt into air, they don’t fly — who took them then? Rawson, do you know anything of them?’

  ‘No Sir!’ he cried, with impudent indignation.

  ‘No, you intend to know nothing! Wood, have you any knowledge of these four rubbers?’

  ‘No!’ he shouted, with absolute insolence.

  ‘Come here!’ I cried, ‘come here! Fetch the cane, Burton. We’ll make an end, insolence and thieving and all.’

  The boy dragged himself to the front of the class, and stood slackly, almost crouching, glaring at me. The rest of the ‘Gordons’ sat upright in their desks, like animals of a pack ready to spring. There was tense silence for a moment. Burton handed me the cane, and I turned from the class to Wood. I liked him best among the Gordons.

  ‘Now my lad!’ I said. ‘I’ll cane you for impudence first.’

  He turned swiftly to me; tears sprang to his eyes.

  ‘Well,’ he shouted at me, ‘you always pick on the Gordons— you’re always on to us —!’ This was so manifestly untrue that my anger fell like a bird shot in a midflight.

  ‘Why!’ I exclaimed, ‘what a disgraceful untruth! I am always excusing you, letting you off—!’

  ‘But you pick on us — you start on us — you pick on Marples, an’ Rawson, an’ on me. You always begin with the Gordons.’

  ‘Well,’ I answered, justifying myself, ‘isn’t it natural? Haven’t you boys stolen — haven’t these boys stolen —several times — and been caught?’

  ‘That doesn’t say as we do now,’ he replied.

  ‘How am I to know? You don’t help me. How do I know? Isn’t it natural to suspect you—?’

  ‘Well, it’s not us. We know who it is. Everybody knows who it is — only they won’t tell.’

  ‘Who know?’ I asked.

  ‘Why Rawson, and Maddock, and Newling, and all of ‘em.’

  I asked these boys if they could tell me. Each one shook his head, and said ‘No Sir.’ I went round the class. It was the same. They lied to me every one.

  ‘You see,’ I said to Wood.

  ‘Well — they won’t own up,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t ’a done if you hadn’t ’a been goin’ to cane me.’

  This frankness was painful, but I preferred it. I made them all sit down. I asked Wood to write his knowledge on a piece of paper, and I promised not to divulge. He would not. I asked the boys he had named, all of them. They refused. I asked them again — I appealed to them.

  ‘Let them all do it then!’ said Wood. I tore up scraps of paper, and gave each boy one.

  ‘Write on it the name of the boy you suspect. He is a thief and a sneak. He gives endless pain and trouble to us all. It is your duty.’

  They wrote furtively, and quickly doubled up the papers. I collected them in the lid of the rubber box, and sat at the table to examine them. There was dead silence, they all watched me. Joe had withdrawn into his shell, forgotten.

  A few papers were blank; several had ‘I suspect nobody’ — these I threw in the paper basket; two had the name of an old thief, and these I tore up; eleven bore the name of my assistant monitor a splendid, handsome boy, one of the oldest of the actors. I remembered how deferential and polite he had been when I had asked him, how ready to make barren suggestions; I remembered his shifty, anxious look during the questioning; I remembered how eager he had been to do things for me before the monitor came in the room. I knew it was he — without remembering.

  ‘Well!’ I said, feeling very wretched when I was convinced that the papers were right. ‘Go on with the drawing.’

  They were very uneasy and restless, but quiet. From time to time they watched me. Very shortly, the bell rang. I told the two monitors to collect up the things, and I sent the class home. We did not go into prayers. I, and they, were in no mood for hymns and the evening prayer of gratitude.

  When the monitors had finished, and I had turned out all the lights but one, I sent home Curwen, and kept my assistant-monitor a moment.

  ‘Ségar, do you know anything of my rubbers?’

  ‘No Sir’ — he had a deep, manly voice, and he spoke with earnest protestation — flushing.

  ‘No? Nor my pencils — nor my two books?’

  ‘No Sir! I know nothing about the books.’

  ‘No? The pencils then —?’

  ‘No Sir! Nothing! I don’t know anything about them.’

  ‘Nothing, Ségar?’

  ‘No Sir.’

  He hung his head, and looked so humiliated, a fine, handsome lad, that I gave it up. Yet I knew he would be dishonest again, when the opportunity arrived.

  ‘Very well! You will not help as monitor any more. You will not come into the classroom until the class comes in — any more. You understand?’

  ‘Yes Sir’ — he was very quiet.

  ‘Go along then.’

  He went out, and silently closed the door. I turned out the last light, tried the cupboards, and went home.

  I felt very tired, and very sick. The night had come up, the clouds were moving darkly, and the sordid streets near the school felt like disease in the lamplight.

  A MODERN LOVER

  (Please also see the introduction to the novel ‘Mr. Noon’)

  I

  The road was heavy with mud. It was labour to move along it. The old, wide way, forsaken and grown over with grass, used not to be so bad. The farm traffic from Coney Grey must have cut it up. The young man crossed carefully again to the strip of grass on the other side.

  It was a dreary, out-of-doors track, saved only by low fragments of fence and occasional bushes from the desolation of the large spaces of arable and of grassland on either side, where only the unopposed wind and the great clouds mattered, where even the little grasses bent to one another indifferent of any traveller. The abandoned road used to seem clean and firm. Cyril Mersham stopped to look round and to bring back old winters to the scene, over the ribbed red land and the purple wood. The surface of the field seemed suddenly to lift and break. Something had startled the peewits, and the fallow flickered over with pink gleams of birds white-breasting the sunset. Then the plovers turned, and were gone in the dusk behind.

  Darkness was issuing out of the earth, and clinging to the trunks of the elms which rose like weird statues, lessening down the wayside. Mersham laboured forwards, the earth sucking and smacking at his feet. In front the Coney Grey farm was piled in shadow on the road. He came near to it, and saw the turnips heaped in a fabulous heap up the side of the barn, a buttress that rose almost to the eaves, and stretched out towards the cart-ruts in the road. Also, the pale breasts of the turnips got the sunset, and they were innumerable orange glimmers piled in the dusk. The two labourers who were pulping at the foot of the mound stood shadow-like to watch as he passed, breathing the sharp scent of turnips.

  It was all very wonderful and glamorous here, in the old places that had seemed so ordinary. Three-quarters of the scarlet sun was settling among the branches of the elm in front, right ahead where he would come soon. But when he arrived at the brow where the hill swooped downwards, where the broad road ended suddenly, the sun had vanished from the space before him, and the evening star was white where the night urged up against the retreating, rose-coloured billow of day. Mersham passed through the stile and sat upon the remnant of the thorn tree on the brink of the valley. All the wide space before him was full of a mist of rose, nearly to his feet. The large ponds were hidden, the farms, the fields, the far-off coal-mine, under the rosy outpouring of twilight. Between him and the spaces of Leicestershire and the hills of Derbyshire, between him and all the South Country which he had fled, was the splendid rose-red strand of sunset, and the white star keeping guard.

  Here, on the lee-shore of day, was the only purple showing of the woods and the great hedge below him; and the roof of the farm below him, with a film of smoke rising up. Unreal, like a dream which wastes a sleep with unrest, was the South and its hurrying to and fro. Here, on the farther shore of the sunset, with the flushed tide at his feet, and the large star flashing with strange laughter, did he himself naked walk with lifted arms into the quiet flood of life.

  What was it he wanted, sought in the slowly-lapsing tide of days? Two years he had been in the large city in the south. There always his soul had moved among the faces that swayed on the thousand currents in that node of tides, hovering and wheeling and flying low over the faces of the multitude like a sea-gull over the waters, stopping now and again, and taking a fragment of life — a look, a contour, a movement — to feed upon. Of many people, his friends, he had asked that they would kindle again the smouldering embers of their experience; he had blown the low fires gently with his breath, and had leaned his face towards their glow, and had breathed in the words that rose like fumes from the revived embers, till he was sick with the strong drug of sufferings and ecstasies and sensations, and the dreams that ensued. But most folk had choked out the fires of their fiercer experience with rubble of sentimentality and stupid fear, and rarely could he feel the hot destruction of Life fighting out its way.

  Surely, surely somebody could give him enough of the philtre of life to stop the craving which tortured him hither and thither, enough to satisfy for a while, to intoxicate him till he could laugh the crystalline laughter of the star, and bathe in the retreating flood of twilight like a naked boy in the surf, clasping the waves and beating them and answering their wild clawings with laughter sometimes, and sometimes gasps of pain.

  He rose and stretched himself. The mist was lying in the valley like a flock of folded sheep; Orion had strode into the sky, and the Twins were playing towards the West. He shivered, stumbled down the path, and crossed the orchard, passing among the dark trees as if among people he knew.

  II

  He came into the yard. It was exceedingly, painfully muddy. He felt a disgust of his own feet, which were cold, and numbed, and heavy.

  The window of the house was uncurtained, and shone like a yellow moon, with only a large leaf or two of ivy, and a cord of honeysuckle hanging across it. There seemed a throng of figures moving about the fire. Another light gleamed mysteriously among the out-buildings. He heard a voice in the cow-shed, and the impatient movement of a cow, and the rhythm of milk in the bucket.

  He hesitated in the darkness of the porch; then he entered without knocking. A girl was opposite him, coming out of the dairy doorway with a loaf of bread. She started, and they stood a moment looking at each other across the room. They advanced to each other; he took her hand, plunged overhead, as it were, for a moment in her great brown eyes. Then he let her go, and looked aside, saying some words of greeting. He had not kissed her; he realised that when he heard her voice:

  “When did you come?”

  She was bent over the table, cutting bread-and-butter. What was it in her bowed, submissive pose, in the dark, small head with its black hair twining and hiding her face, that made him wince and shrink and close over his soul that had been open like a foolhardy flower to the night? Perhaps it was her very submission, which trammelled him, throwing the responsibility of her wholly on him, making him shrink from the burden of her.

  Her brothers were home from the pit. They were two well-built lads of twenty and twenty-one. The coal-dust over their faces was like a mask, making them inscrutable, hiding any glow of greeting, making them strangers. He could only see their eyes wake with a sudden smile, which sank almost immediately, and they turned aside. The mother was kneeling at a big brown stew-jar in front of the open oven. She did not rise, but gave him her hand, saying: “Cyril! How are you?” Her large dark eyes wavered and left him. She continued with the spoon in the jar.

  His disappointment rose as water suddenly heaves up the side of a ship. A sense of dreariness revived, a feeling, too, of the cold wet mud that he had struggled through.

  These were the people who, a few months before, would look up in one fine broad glow of welcome whenever he entered the door, even if he came daily. Three years before, their lives would draw together into one flame, and whole evenings long would flare with magnificent mirth, and with play. They had known each other’s lightest and deepest feelings. Now, when he came back to them after a long absence, they withdrew, turned aside. He sat down on the sofa under the window, deeply chagrined. His heart closed tight like a fir-cone, which had been open and full of naked seeds when he came to them.

  They asked him questions of the South. They were starved for news, they said, in that God-forsaken hole.

  “It is such a treat to hear a bit of news from outside,” said the mother.