"I didn't, you know I didn't," he protested on the spur of the moment.
But both knew that it was more than half the truth.
Chance and John Berrisford had been powerful allies.
On a still October afternoon Martin lay where the first slopes of Grey Knotts go sweeping up to the great mountain mass of The Gables and the Scawfells. He looked down upon Seatoller, diminutive below him, and on the curving beauty of Borrowdale, burnished with late bracken, aflame with autumnal trees. Behind him he knew, he felt, were the mountains that he loved, stretching crag upon crag to the desolate screes of Wast Water and the glimpse of the shimmering sea. Borrowdale ... there flashed suddenly upon his mind the verse of the Elfreyan poet and he quoted it now to the winds and rocks and a curious stone-finch:
"'The flaming bracken fires the breast Of bosky Borrowdale, Down swoops the sun in a riot of red Behind Scawfell to a watery bed, And the moon hath clomb o'er Skiddaw's head, So perfect and so pale."
With that pathetic verse came other memories, flowing torrentially through the opened flood-gates of his mind. For five years he had forgotten Elfrey and Berney's and all his schoolday toils and triumphs. Only one week-end had he spent there and that in his 'fresher' year. He had forgotten because Oxford had been so generous and had given him so much to think and feel and say. But now his recollections seemed strangely vivid despite their long storage in the lumber-room of his mind. Foskett had made another step on the pathway of prosperity, but Berney was still at work: Vickers had moved to higher things, but Barmy Walters lingered on, for he had reached the dotage in which years add nothing to decay. The same old jokes would be played, the crashing of the instrument-boxes, the passing of fruit-bags and biscuit tins, and the pollution of his water with ink. And somehow, against the promptings of conscience, Martin felt that it was right for these things to go on. Poor Barmy! But with his uncle he believed in Institutions.
Then the amazing disappearance of people broke in upon his mind. Spots, for instance. His career had flickered out at Cambridge, where they had despised his athletics. Drink, perhaps. Cullen and Neave, surely they must be in the motor trade. Gregson had vanished utterly. Everything demanded that he should be writing for the Rationalist Press, but where was he? Anstey was at the Bar, Rayner a subaltern in India. 'Granny' had recently been head of Berney's, Granny whom Martin had loathed and swiped. It seemed unreal and impossible. But now, as he looked back over that gap of five years, he realised that Elfrey with all its troubles and its narrowness had been kind. The avenging of Gideon and the night of pitchers, the bowling of "googlies," the friendship of Finney ... astonishing that things so good should have slipped away. Lazily chewing the long sweet stems of grass, he refought a hundred skirmishes.