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IX.

EASY ROW

460

X.

WHITE ROSES

487

BOOK I

The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy,—they were such strange and wonderful things.  The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars,—and all the world was mine,—and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.

Thomas Traherne.

CHAPTER I
MURDERER’S CROSS

I

Above and beyond the zone of villas, some still white with newly-mixed mortar and the latest unadorned by more than twelve-foot tendrils of ampelopsis or rambling roses, the downs bent their bow to the sky.  The horizon loomed so smooth and vast that the plantations of pine and beech which fringed the summits were powerless to break the nobility and purpose of its contour, etched gray-black against the hem of a thunder-cloud that was of the colour of ink.  Between the banks a chalk road climbed: an aspiring road, felted in the trodden parts with dust but cross-veined with flinty gutters through which rain poured, like London milk, in stormy weather.  A smell of hot earth was in the air.  The turf at the wayside was parched and slippery, so that Edwin Ingleby, plodding up the slope, was forced to keep to the white roadway by the slipperiness of his boot-leather.  A rather pitiful figure he made, this small boy in an Eton jacket, his waistcoat now unbuttoned and his school cap crumpled in his hot hands.  He walked and ran straight upward, as though the devil were at his heels; sometimes looking behind him to see if there were any one in pursuit, sometimes wiping the sweat from his forehead with the crumpled cap.

A wagonette, drawn by a pair of horses and burdened with trippers, jolted past him, throwing up a cloud of chalk-dust that made his eyes smart.  Inside it swayed seven fat women in black bodices.  The guard, who was sufficiently sober, in his own opinion, to ride on the step, was seen to laugh at the dust-smothered boy in the road.

“Poor lamb,” said the most motherly of the seven.  “Wouldn’t ’e like a lift?”

“Gowing the hopposite way, mem,” said the guard.  “One of them College lads.”

“’Ot ’e looks!” said the lady.  “Going to rine kets and dorgs, too.”

Edwin Ingleby rubbed the dust out of, or into, his eyes and went plugging on to the top of the ridge where the road dipped through a belt of beeches into the trough between two billows of down, losing itself within high banks of turf which bordered the plough-land, satiny now with bearded wheat and infinitely restful.  He sat down on the bank with his feet in the gutter and began to mop up tears with the cap that he had lately used for mopping up sweat.  All the time that he was crying, his heart was really full of almost incontinent valour, and that was why his tears made him angry.  He began talking to himself:—

“Damned beast . . . great beefy beast. . . .  If only the men could see what a damned beast he is.  If Layton or some one could give him what he wants.  Only no one could fight him. . . .  He’s got a weak heart, and it might kill him.  I suppose that would be murder. . . .”

The word suddenly got a new significance.  They called this road Murderer’s Cross Road.  High up in the grassy bank some pious person had cut a St. Andrew’s cross to commemorate the murder of a postman who had been relieved of his bags and his life on a dark night a century ago.  The college tradition said that it was haunted.  Certainly it had an ugly sound.  Murderer’s Cross Road: a name to be whispered.

“Funny . . .” said Edwin.  “There’s nothing very awful about it.  I could understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.  Quite easily.  Only he might be sorry about it afterwards.  I wouldn’t mind murdering Griffin.”

He took a silver watch out of his pocket and laid it on the bank beside him.  He could see that there was a full hour to spare before the bell in the water tower would jangle for the evening roll-call in the corner of the Quad; and so he lay back easily on the bank, stretching out his legs and arms in the form of the St. Andrew’s cross scored in the hedge a little farther on.  Lying thus he could watch the shimmer on the bearded wheat.  He had always loved the softness of this dip in the downs.  He had loved it on winter mornings delicately dusted with rime, in November when flints lay like a bloom on the pale fallow, in March when the bloom turned green.  Now the thunder-clouds had rolled away, rumbling, from the south, and a breath of cooler air was moving through the valley, throwing the surface of that green sea into wave-like motion; the waves shuddered faintly and the sound came to his ears as though re-echoed from the heavy woods which stood still in the heat, bounding the green ripples; and lying there, with his eyes half-closed, Edwin was already afloat, bearing westward with the set of the tide in the track of Cortes and Columbus and Pizarro and other adventurous voyagers.  It was not really very difficult for him to forget his tears.  Although the fear of Griffin, that had first driven him afield, was a cruel obsession to which he was liable by night and day, he had long ago discovered that silence and solitude could make him free of any wonder which he chose to imagine.  It had been like that even when he was quite little; he had always possessed the faculty of day-dreaming; and now that his imagination was beginning to flush at the sound of great names, and the pomps of chivalry and legend were slowly unfolding before him with their subtle suggestiveness unhampered by such knowledge of detail as would be alive to incongruities, his idleness became daily more precious.  He suddenly remembered that Achaean assembly stirred by Agamemnon’s words “as when the West wind cometh to stir a deep cornfield with violent blast, and the ears bow down. . . .”  And now the wind-moved wheat bent like a stricken army before knightly lances, and the roll of retreating thunder awoke echoes of the guns of Waterloo. . . .

II

It was nearly three years since Edwin had first seen Griffin, oddly enough on the very first day of his life at St. Luke’s.  Mrs. Ingleby had come down from the Midlands with him, a little anxious, for there were pitfalls in public school life (it was in ninety-five), but immensely proud of Edwin’s entrance scholarship.  They had crossed London together in a