But he did write to his mother about it. Always on Sunday mornings the sergeant would come in with a letter from her, full of the strangely remote news of home; how the garden was looking, what Aunt Laura was doing, and how they talked of felling the elm-trees in the lane. Sometimes, with the lavishness of an angel, she would put a couple of penny stamps inside for his reply. The odd stamp would buy a stick of chocolate or a packet of nougat at the tuck shop. And in these letters she rose, quite unexpectedly, to the recitation of his dreams. “How lovely it must be for you,” she wrote. “When you come home for the holidays at Christmas we will read some of Scott’s novels aloud—_Waverley_ and _Nigel_, and that will give you something more to dream about.” He began to realise what he hadn’t seen before: that his mother was really a wonderful playfellow—much better, when he came to think of it, than any of the boys. He would have so much to explain to her. . . . “Oh, you dear, you are lovely!” he wrote in reply.
And then one day, that sneak Douglas, fooling about in the dormitory with Edwin’s toothbrush, happened to see the words that were faintly printed on the ivory handle:—
At breakfast, after a propitiatory but futile helping of jam from Edwin’s pot, he broke the glad news to Griffin.
“Then that’s why he’s such a skunk, Duggy. Is it true, Ingleby?”
“Not if he’s in trade. They oughtn’t to have sent you to school here. It’s a bally shame.”
That same afternoon Edwin was poring over a letter at his desk in Big School. His mother always told him to keep her letters. “Some day you may like to look at them,” she said. He was reading this letter for the tenth time to see if he could extract some last scrapings of the atmosphere of home which it had brought him.
“Who’s that letter from? . . . Girl?” said Griffin rudely.
“Christ! Your mother isn’t a lady, or she wouldn’t have married a chemist . . . or be your mother.”
And then Edwin jumped up, overturning the form on which he had been sitting, and lashed out at Griffin’s face. He wanted to smash the freckled thing. He only caught the boy’s cheek with the flat of his hand, and then, after a second of dazed wonder at his own achievement, he rushed out of Big School, across the Quad, and up that white, dust-felted road to the downs.