Love and Mr. Lewisham | Page 3

"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.

CHAPTER II
.
"AS THE WIND BLOWS."
A flaw in that pentagram of a time-table, that pentagram by which the
demons of distraction were to be excluded from Mr. Lewisham's career
to Greatness, was the absence of a clause forbidding study out of doors.
It was the day after the trivial window peeping of the last chapter that
this gap in the time-table became apparent, a day if possible more
gracious and alluring than its predecessor, and at half-past twelve,
instead of returning from the school directly to his lodging, Mr.
Lewisham escaped through the omission and made his way--Horace in
pocket--to the park gates and so to the avenue of ancient trees that
encircles the broad Whortley domain. He dismissed a suspicion of his
motive with perfect success. In the avenue--for the path is but little
frequented--one might expect to read undisturbed. The open air, the
erect attitude, are surely better than sitting in a stuffy, enervating
bedroom. The open air is distinctly healthy, hardy, simple....
The day was breezy, and there was a perpetual rustling, a going and
coming in the budding trees.
The