Roll-Call — Part 1, Chapter 7, part 2
III
The written part of the examination lasted four days; and then there was an interval of one day in which the harassed and harried aspirants might restore themselves for the two days' ordeal of the viva voce.
George had continued to be well satisfied with his work up to the interval.
He considered that he had perfectly succeeded in separating the lover and the examinee, and that nothing foreign to the examination could vitiate his activity therein.
It was on the day of repose, a Wednesday, that a doubt suddenly occurred to him as to the correctness of his answer, in the "Construction" paper, to a question which began with the following formidable words: "A girder, freely supported at each end and forty feet long, carries a load of six tons at a distance of six feet from one end and another load of ten tons----" Thus it went on for ten lines.
He had always been impatient of detail, and he hated every kind of calculation.
Nevertheless he held that calculations were relatively easy, and that he could do them as well as the driest duffer in the profession when he set his mind to them.
But the doubt as to the correctness of his answer developed into a certainty.
Facing the question in private again, he obtained four different solutions in an hour; it was John Orgreave who ultimately set him right, convicting him of a most elementary misconception.
Forthwith his faith in his whole "Construction" paper vanished.
He grumbled that it was monstrous to give candidates an unbroken stretch of four hours' work at the end of a four-day effort.
Yet earlier he had been boasting that he had not felt the slightest fatigue.
He had expected to see Marguerite on the day of repose.
He did not see her.
She had offered no appointment, and he said to himself that he had not the slightest intention of running after her.
Such had become the attitude of the lover to the beloved.
On the Thursday morning, however, he felt fit enough to face a dozen oral examiners, and he performed his morning exercises in the club bedroom with a positive ferocity of vigour.
And then he was gradually overtaken by a black moodiness which he could not explain.
He had passed through similar though less acute moods as a boy; but this was the first of the inexplicable sombre humours which at moments darkened his manhood.
He had not the least suspicion that prolonged nervous tension due to two distinct causes had nearly worn him out.
He was melancholy, and his melancholy increased.
But he was proud; he was defiant.
His self-confidence, as he looked back at the years of genuine hard study behind him, was complete.
He disdained examiners.
He knew that with all their damnable ingenuity they could not floor him.
The crisis arrived in the afternoon of the first of the two days.
His brain was quite clear.
Thousands of details about drainage, ventilation, shoring, architectural practice, lighting, subsoils, specifications, iron and steel construction, under-pinning, the properties of building materials, strains, thrusts, water-supply; thousands of details about his designs--the designs in his 'testimonies of study,' the design for his Thesis, and the designs produced during the examination itself--all these peopled his brain; but they were in order; they were under control; they were his slaves.
For four and a half hours, off and on, he had admirably displayed the reality of his knowledge, and then he was sent into a fresh room to meet a fresh examiner.
There he stood in the room alone with his designs for a small provincial town hall--a key-plan, several one-eighth scale-plans, a piece of half-inch detail, and two rough perspective sketches which he knew were brilliant.
The room was hot; through the open window came the distant sound of the traffic of Regent Street.
The strange melancholy of a city in summer floated towards him from the outside and reinforced his own.
The examiner, who had been snatching tea, entered briskly and sternly.
He was a small, dapper, fair man of about fifty, with wonderfully tended finger-nails.
George despised him because Mr. Enwright despised him, but he had met him once in the way of the firm's business and found him urbane.
"Good afternoon," said George politely.
The examiner replied, trotting along the length of the desk with quick, short steps: "Now about this work of yours.
I've looked at it with some care----" His speech was like his demeanour and his finger-nails.
"Boor!"
thought George.
But he could not actively resent the slight.
He glanced round at the walls; he was in a prison.
He was at the mercy of a tyrant invested with omnipotence.
The little tyrant, however, was superficially affable.
Only now and then in his prim, courteous voice was there a hint of hostility and cruelty.
He put a number of questions, the answers to which had to be George's justification.
He said "H'm!"
and "Ah!"
and "Really?"
He came to the matter of spouting.
"Now, I object to hopper-heads," he said.
"I regard them as unhygienic."
And he looked coldly at George with eyebrows lifted.
George returned the gaze.
"I know you do, sir," George replied.
Indeed it was notorious that hopper-heads to vertical spouting were a special antipathy of the examiner's; he was a famous faddist.
But the reply was a mistake.
The examiner, secure in his attributes, ignored the sally.
A little later, taking up the general plan of the town hall, he said: "The fact is, I do--not--care for this kind of thing.
The whole tendency----" "Excuse me, sir," George interrupted, with conscious and elaborate respectfulness.
"But surely the question isn't one of personal preferences.
Is the design good or is it bad?"
"Well, I call it bad," said the examiner, showing testiness.
The examiner too could be impulsive, was indeed apt to be short-tempered.
The next instant he seized one of the brilliant perspective sketches, and by his mere manner of holding it between his thumb and finger he sneered at it and condemned it.
He snapped out, not angrily--rather pityingly: "And what the devil's this?"
George, furious, retorted: "What the hell do you think it is?"
He had not foreseen that he was going to say such a thing.
The traffic in Regent Street, which had been inaudible to both of them, was loud in their ears.
The examiner had committed a peccadillo, George a terrible crime.
The next morning the episode, in various forms, was somehow common knowledge and a source of immense diversion.
George went through the second day, but lifelessly.
He was sure he had failed.
Apart from the significance of the fact that the viva voce counted for 550 marks out of a total of 1200, he felt that the Royal Institute of British Architects would know how to defend its dignity.
On the Saturday morning John Orgreave had positive secret information that George would be plucked.
IV
On that same Saturday afternoon George and Marguerite went out together.
She had given him a rendezvous in Brompton Cemetery, choosing this spot partly because it was conveniently near and partly in unconscious obedience to the traditional instinct of lovers for the society of the undisturbing dead.
Each of them had a roofed habitation, but neither could employ it for the ends of love.
No. 8 was barred to George as much by his own dignity as by the invisible sword of the old man; and of course he could not break the immemorial savage taboo of a club by introducing a girl into it.
The Duke of Wellington himself, though Candle Court was his purdah, could never have broken the taboo of even so modest a club as Pickering's. Owing to the absence of Agg, who had gone to Wales with part of her family, the studio in Manresa Road was equally closed to the pair.
Marguerite was first at the rendezvous.
George saw her walking sedately near the entrance.
Despite her sedateness she had unmistakably the air of waiting at a tryst.
Anybody at a glance would have said that she was expecting a man.
She had the classical demure innocency of her situation.
George did not care for that.
Why?
She in fact was expecting a man, and in expecting him she had nothing to be ashamed of.
Well, he did not care for it.
He did not care for her being like other girls of her class.
In his pocket he had an invitation from Miss Wheeler for the next evening.
Would Miss Wheeler wait for a man in a public place, especially a cemetery?
Would Lois Ingram?
Would Laurencine?
He could not picture them so waiting.
Oh, simpleton, unlearned in the world!
A snob too, no doubt!
(He actually thought that Hyde Park would have been 'better' than the cemetery for their rendezvous.
) And illogical!
If No. 8 had been open to them, and the studio, and the club, he would have accepted with gusto the idea of an open-air rendezvous.
But since there was no alternative to an open-air rendezvous the idea of it humiliated and repelled him.
Further, in addition to her culpable demure innocency, Marguerite was wearing black.
Of course she was.
She had no choice.
Still, he hated her mourning.
Moreover, she was too modest; she did not impose herself.
Some girls wore mourning with splendid defiance.
Marguerite seemed to apologize; seemed to turn the other cheek to death....
He arrived critical, and naturally he found matter to criticize.
Her greeting showed quite candidly the pleasure she had in the sight of him.
Her heart was in the hand she gave him; he felt its mystic throbbings there.
"How are things?"
he began.
"I rather thought I should have been hearing from you."
He softened his voice to match the tenderness of her smile, but he did it consciously.
She replied: "I thought you'd have enough to worry about with the exam.
without me."
It was not a wise speech, because it implied that he was capable of being worried, of being disturbed in the effort of absorption necessary for the examination.
He laughed a little harshly.
"Well, you see the result!"
He had written to tell her of the disastrous incident and that failure was a certainty; a sort of shame had made him recoil from telling her to her face; it was easier to be casual in writing than in talking; the letter had at any rate tempered for both of them the shock of communication.
Now, he was out of humour with her because he had played the ass with an ass of an examiner--not because she was directly or indirectly responsible for his doing so; simply because he had done so.
She was the woman.
It was true that she in part was indirectly responsible for the calamity, but he did not believe it, and anyhow would never have admitted it.
"Oh!
George!
What a shame it was!"
As usual, not a trace of reproach from her: an absolute conviction that he was entirely blameless.
"What shall you do?
You'll have to sit again."
"Sit again?
Me?"
he exclaimed haughtily.
"I never shall!
I've done with exams."
He meant it.
"But--shall you give up architecture, then?"
"Certainly not!
My dear girl, what are you thinking of?
Of course I shan't give up architecture.
But you needn't pass any exams, to be an architect.
Anybody can call himself an architect, and be an architect, without passing exams.
Exams.
are optional.
That's what makes old Enwright so cross with our beautiful profession."
He laughed again harshly.
All the time, beneath his quite genuine defiance, he was thinking what an idiot he had been to cheek the examiner, and how staggeringly simple it was to ruin years of industry by one impulsive moment's folly, and how iniquitous was a world in which such injustice could be.
Marguerite was puzzled.
In her ignorance she had imagined that professions were inseparably connected with examinations.
However, she had to find faith to accept his dictum, and she found it.
"Now about this afternoon," he said.
"I vote we take a steamboat down the river.
I've made up my mind I must have a look at Greenwich again from the water.
And we both need a blow."
"But won't it take a long time?"
she mildly objected.
He turned on her violently, and spoke as he had never spoken: "What if it does?"
He knew that she was thinking of her infernal father, and he would not have it.
He remembered all that Agg had said.
Assuredly Agg had shown nerve, too much nerve, to tackle him in the way she did, and the more he reflected upon Agg's interference the more he resented it as impertinent.
Still, Agg had happened to talk sense.
"Oh, nothing!"
Marguerite agreed quickly, fearfully.
"I should like to go.
I've never been.
Do we go to Chelsea Pier?
Down Fernshaw Road will be the nearest."
"We'll go down Beaufort Street," he decided.
He divined that she had suggested Fernshaw Road in order to avoid passing the end of the Grove, where her father might conceivably see them.
Well, he was not going out of his way to avoid her father.
Nay, he was going slightly out of his way in order to give her father every chance of beholding them together.
Although the day was Saturday there was no stir on Chelsea Pier.
The pier-keeper, indeed, was alone on the pier, which rose high on the urgent flood-tide, so that the gangway to it sloped unusually upwards.
No steamer was in sight, and it seemed impossible that any steamer should ever call at that forlorn and decrepit platform that trembled under the straining of the water.
Nevertheless, a steamer did after a little while appear round the bend, in Battersea Reach; she dropped her funnel, aimed her sharp nose at an arch of Battersea Bridge, and finally, poising herself against the strong stream, bumped very gently and neatly into contact with the pier.
The pier-keeper went through all the classic motions of mooring, unbarring, barring, and casting off, and in a few seconds the throbbing steamer, which was named with the name of a great Londoner, left the pier again with George and Marguerite on board.
Nobody had disembarked.
The shallow and handsome craft, flying its gay flags, crossed and recrossed the river, calling at three piers in the space of a few minutes; but all the piers were like Chelsea Pier;
all the pier-keepers had the air of castaways upon shaking islets.
The passengers on the steamer would not have filled a motor-bus, and they carried themselves like melancholy adventurers who have begun to doubt the authenticity of the inspiration which sent them on a mysterious quest.
Such was travel on the Thames in the years immediately before Londoners came to a final decision that the Thames was meet to be ignored by the genteel town which it had begotten.
George and Marguerite sat close together near the prow, saying little, the one waiting to spring, the other to suffer onslaught.
It was in Lambeth Reach that the broad, brimming river challenged and seized George's imagination.
A gusty, warm, south-west wind met the rushing tide and blew it up into foamy waves.
The wind was powerful, but the tide was irresistible.
Far away, Land's End having divided the Atlantic surge, that same wind was furiously driving vast waters up the English Channel and round the Forelands, and also vast waters up the west coast of Britain.
The twin surges had met again in the outer estuary of the Thames and joined their terrific impulses to defy the very wind which had given them strength, and the mighty flux swept with unregarding power through the mushroom city whose existence on its banks was a transient episode in the everlasting life of the river.
The river seemed to threaten the city that had confined it in stone.
And George, in the background of his mind, which was obsessed by the tormenting enigma of the girl by his side, also threatened the city.
With the uncompromising arrogance of the student who has newly acquired critical ideas, he estimated and judged it.
He cursed the Tate Gallery and utterly damned Doulton's works.
He sternly approved Lambeth Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Somerset House, Waterloo Bridge, and St. Paul's. He cursed St. Thomas's Hospital and the hotels.
He patronized New Scotland Yard.
The "Isambard Brunel" penetrated more and more into the heart of the city, fighting for every yard of her progress.
Flags stood out straight in the blue sky traversed by swift white clouds.
Huge rudder-less barges, each with a dwarf in the stern struggling at a giant's oar, were borne westwards broadside on like straws upon the surface of a hurrying brook.
A launch with an orchestra on board flew gaily past.
Tugs with a serpentine tail of craft threaded perilously through the increasing traffic.
Railway trains, cabs, coloured omnibuses, cyclists, and footfarers mingled in and complicated the scene.
Then the first ocean-going steamer appeared, belittling all else.
And then the calm, pale beauty of the custom-house at last humbled George, and for an instant made him think that he could never do anything worth doing.
His pride leapt up, unconquerable.
The ocean-going steamers, as they multiplied on the river, roused in him wild and painful longings to rush to the ends of the earth and gorge himself on the immense feast which the great romantic earth had to offer.
"By Jove!"
he exclaimed passionately.
"I'd give something to go to Japan."
"Would you?"
Marguerite answered with mildness.
She had not the least notion of what he was feeling.
Her voice responded to him, but her imagination did not respond.
True, as he had always known, she had no ambition!
The critical quality of his mood developed.
The imperious impulse came to take her to task.
"What's the latest about your father?"
he asked, with a touch of impatient, aggrieved disdain.
Both were aware that the words had opened a crucial interview between them.
She moved nervously on the seat.
The benches that ran along the deck-rails met in an acute angle at the stem of the steamer, so that the pair sat opposite each other with their knees almost touching.
He went on: "I hear he hasn't gone back to the office yet."
"No," said Marguerite.
"But he'll start again on Monday, I think."
"But is he fit to go back?
I thought he looked awful."
She flushed slightly--at the indirect reference to the episode in the basement on the night of the death.
"It will do him good to go back," said Marguerite.
"I'm sure he misses the office dreadfully."
George gazed at her person.
Under the thin glove he suddenly detected the form of her ring.
She was wearing it again, then.
(He could not remember whether she had worn it at their last meeting, in Agg's studio.
The very curious fact was that at their last meeting he had forgotten to look for the ring.
) Not only was she wearing the ring, but she carried a stylish little handbag which he had given her.
When he bought that bag, in the Burlington Arcade, it had been a bag like any other bag.
But now it had become part of her, individualized by her personality, a mysterious and provocative bag.
Everything she wore, down to her boots and even her bootlaces so neatly threaded and knotted, was mysterious and provocative.
He examined her face.
It was marvellously beautiful; it was ordinary; it was marvellously beautiful.
He knew her to the depths;
he did not know her at all; she was a chance acquaintance; she was a complete stranger.
"How are you getting on with him?
You know you really ought to tell me."
"Oh, George!"
she said, earnestly vivacious.
"You're wrong in thinking he's not nice to me.
He is.
He's quite forgiven me."
"Forgiven you!"
George took her up.
"I should like to know what he had to forgive."
"Well," she murmured timorously.
"You understand what I mean."
He drummed his elegant feet on the striated deck.
Out of the corner of his left eye he saw the mediaeval shape of the Tower rapidly disappearing.
In front were the variegated funnels and masts of fleets gathered together in St. Katherine's Dock and London Dock.
The steamer gained speed as she headed from Cherry Gardens Pier towards the middle of the river.
She was a frail trifle compared with the big boats that lined the wharves; but in herself she had size and irresistible force, travelling quite smoothly over the short, riotous, sparkling waves which her cut-water divided and spurned away on either side.
Only a tremor faintly vibrated throughout her being.
"Has he forgiven you for being engaged?"
George demanded, with rough sarcasm.
She showed no resentment of his tone, but replied gently: "I did try to mention it once, but it was no use--he wasn't in a condition.
He made me quite afraid--not for me of course, but for him."
"Well, I give it up!"
said George.
"I simply give it up!
It's past me.
How soon's he going to _be_ in condition?
He can't keep us walking about the streets for ever."
"No, of course not!"
She smiled to placate him.
There was a pause, and then George, his eyes fixed on her hand, remarked: "I see you've got your ring on."
She too looked at her hand.
"My ring?
Naturally.
What do you mean?"
He proceeded cruelly: "I suppose you don't wear it in the house, so that the sight of it shan't annoy him."
She flushed once more.
"Oh, George, dear!"
Her glance asked for mercy, for magnanimity.
"Do you wear it when you're in the house, or don't you?"
Her eyes fell.
"I daren't excite him.
Truly, I daren't. It wouldn't do.
It wouldn't be right."
She was admitting George's haphazard charge against her.
He was astounded.
But he merely flung back his head and raised his eyebrows.
He thought: "And yet she sticks to it he's nice to her!
My God!"
He said nothing aloud.
The Royal Hospital, Greenwich, showed itself in the distance like a domed island rising fabulously out of the blue-green water.
Even far off, before he could decipher the main contours of the gigantic quadruple pile, the vision excited him.
His mind, darkened by the most dreadful apprehensions concerning Marguerite, dwelt on it darkly, sardonically, and yet with pleasure.
And he proudly compared his own disillusions with those of his greatest forerunners.
His studies, and the example of Mr. Enwright, had inspired him with an extremely enthusiastic worship of Inigo Jones, whom he classed, not without reason, among the great creative artists of Europe.
He snorted when he heard the Royal Hospital referred to as the largest and finest charitable institution in the world.
For him it was the supreme English architectural work.
He snorted at the thought of that pompous and absurd monarch James I ordering Inigo Jones to design him a palace surpassing all palaces and choosing a sublime site therefor, and then doing nothing.
He snorted at the thought of that deluded monarch Charles I ordering Inigo Jones to design him a palace surpassing all palaces, and receiving from Inigo Jones the plans of a structure which would have equalled in beauty and eclipsed in grandeur any European structure of the Christian era--even Chambord, even the Escurial, even Versailles--and then accomplishing nothing beyond a tiny fragment of the sublime dream.
He snorted at the thought that Inigo Jones had died at the age of nearly eighty ere the foundations of the Greenwich palace had begun to be dug, and without having seen more than the fragment of his unique Whitehall--after a youth spent in arranging masques for a stupid court, and an old age spent in disappointment.
