Love and Mr. Lewisham | Page 2

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.