The words seemed to pull Edwin back into sanity. Together they forced their way into a street that was empty but for a stream of people hurrying to the square with stones. They stood panting in the quiet.
“God . . . what animals men are!” said Boyce. “I suppose it was something like this a hundred years ago, when they burned Priestley’s house.”
“Yes, it’s pretty rotten,” said Edwin, “but didn’t you feel you wanted to join in it?”
“Yes, that’s the amazing part of it,” said Boyce. “What’s happening to you in these days? We seem to have lost sight of one another.”
They walked down to the station together. “It’s an extraordinary thing, isn’t it?” said Edwin, “that ordinary peaceable men should go mad like that?”
“They aren’t men,” said Boyce. “They’re a crowd.”
WITH this chance encounter, the friendship of Edwin and Matthew Boyce really began; and during the fourth year, that now opened before him, the figure of W.G., who had dominated his stage by sheer physical magnitude, gradually receded. It was inevitable; for the atmosphere of the Boyces’ house at Alvaston, with its air of culture and refinement, was far more in keeping with Edwin’s inclinations than the obtuse, if honest, companionship of W.G. Edwin felt some misgivings for his desertion; but Maskew, who had now brilliantly taken his Primary Fellowship, began his hospital career and rejoined his old partner. So, seeing that the needs of W.G. were provided for and his responsibilities of friendship at an end, Edwin drifted into a happy intimacy with the poet’s son.
They were both so young as to be convinced that they were very old. The world was theirs; for they were full of health and contentment and, at present, so free from complication that they could enjoy to the full the treasures of the past and shape the future into splendid dreams. In the beginning they had found a field of common interest in great works of literature; but these enthusiasms did not carry them very far, for the appreciation of literary masterpieces is at its best a solitary pleasure that is not increased by the joy of sharing. It was in the enjoyment of music that their friendship found the most intense of its pleasures.
Edwin’s musical development had been slow. The first seeds had been planted in his babyhood when, without understanding, he had listened to his mother’s playing. The chapel services at St. Luke’s, made interesting by the exotic harmonies of Dr. Downton, had nursed his interest in the beauty of organised sound. The closed piano in his mother’s drawing-room had been the symbol of an instinct temporarily thwarted, and from this he had escaped by way of Aunt Laura’s late Victorian ballads which had seemed to him very beautiful in their kind. Luckily his mother’s library of music had been good if old-fashioned, and when he amused himself, more or less indiscriminately, by trying to learn the piano at home, he had been forced to do so by way of the sonatas of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart, and the Wohltemperiertes Klavier of Bach.
