A Slip Under the Microscope

Outside the laboratory windows hung a watery grey fog; inside, the air was warm and close, lit by the yellow glow of green-shaded gas lamps, two to each table down the narrow length of the room. On every table stood a pair of glass jars containing the mangled remains of crayfish, mussels, frogs, and guinea-pigs on which the students had been working. Along the side of the room, facing the windows, were shelves bearing bleached dissections in spirits, topped with a row of beautifully executed anatomical drawings in white-wood frames, and below these a line of cubicle lockers. The doors of the laboratory were panelled with blackboard, and on them were the half-erased diagrams of the previous day's work. The laboratory was empty except for the demonstrator, who sat near the preparation-room door, and silent except for a low, continuous murmur and the clicking of the rocker microtome at which he worked.

But scattered about the room were traces of many students: handbags, polished instrument boxes, in one place a large drawing covered by newspaper, and in another a prettily bound copy of News from Nowhere, a book oddly at odds with its surroundings. These things had been set down hastily as the students arrived and hurried to secure places in the adjacent lecture theatre. Deadened by the closed door, the professor's measured accents sounded as a featureless muttering.

Presently, faint through the closed windows, came the sound of the Oratory clock striking eleven. The clicking of the microtome ceased, and the demonstrator looked at his watch, rose, thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked slowly down the laboratory toward the lecture-theatre door. He stood listening a moment, then his eye fell on the little volume by William Morris. He picked it up, glanced at the title, smiled, opened it, looked at the name on the flyleaf, ran the leaves through his hand, and put it down. Almost immediately the lecturer's even murmur ceased, there was a sudden burst of pencils rattling on desks, a stirring, a scraping of feet, and many voices speaking together. Then a firm footfall approached the door, which began to open and stood ajar as some indistinctly heard question arrested the newcomer.

The demonstrator turned, walked slowly back past the microtome, and left the laboratory by the preparation-room door. As he did so, first one and then several students carrying notebooks entered from the lecture theatre and spread among the little tables or stood in a group about the doorway. They were an exceptionally varied assembly, for while Oxford and Cambridge still shrank from the prospect of mixed classes, the College of Science had anticipated America years ago—mixed socially, too, for the college's reputation was high, and its scholarships, with no age limit, reached deeper even than those of the Scottish universities. The class numbered twenty-one, but some remained in the theatre questioning the professor, copying blackboard diagrams before they were washed off, or examining special specimens he had produced to illustrate the day's teaching.

Of the nine who had come into the laboratory, three were girls: one, a small fair woman wearing spectacles and dressed in greyish-green, was peering out the window at the fog; the other two, wholesome-looking, plain-faced schoolgirls, unrolled and put on brown holland aprons they wore while dissecting. Of the men, two went down to their places: one a pallid, dark-bearded man who had once been a tailor; the other a pleasant-featured, ruddy young man of twenty, dressed in a well-fitting brown suit—young Wedderburn, son of the eye specialist. The others formed a little knot near the theatre door. One, a dwarfed, spectacled figure with a hunched back, sat on a bentwood stool; two others, one a short, dark youngster and the other a flaxen-haired, reddish-complexioned young man, leaned side by side against the slate sink; and the fourth stood facing them, doing most of the talking.

This last person was named Hill.

He was a sturdily built young fellow, of the same age as Wedderburn; he had a white face, dark grey eyes, hair of an indeterminate colour, and prominent, irregular features. He talked rather louder than was necessary and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His collar was frayed and blue with starch from a careless laundress; his clothes were evidently ready-made, and there was a patch on the side of his boot near the toe. As he talked or listened, he glanced now and again toward the lecture-theatre door. They were discussing the depressing conclusion of the lecture they had just heard, the last in the introductory zoology course. “From ovum to ovum is the goal of the higher vertebrata,” the lecturer had said in his melancholy tones, neatly rounding off the sketch of comparative anatomy he had been developing.

The spectacled hunchback repeated it with noisy appreciation, tossed it toward the fair-haired student as a provocation, and sparked one of those vague, rambling discussions of generalities so dear to the student mind all over the world.

“That is our goal, perhaps—I admit it, as far as science goes,” said the fair-haired student, rising to the challenge. “But there are things above science.”

“Science,” said Hill confidently, “is systematic knowledge. Ideas that don’t come into the system—must anyhow—be loose ideas.” He was not quite sure whether that was a clever saying or a folly until his hearers took it seriously.

“The thing I cannot understand,” said the hunchback, addressing the room, “is whether Hill is a materialist or not.”

“There is one thing above matter,” said Hill promptly, feeling he had a better line this time; aware, too, of someone in the doorway behind him, he raised his voice a trifle for her benefit, “and that is the delusion that there is something above matter.”

“So we have your gospel at last,” said the fair student. “It’s all a delusion, is it? All our aspirations to lead more than dogs’ lives, all our work for anything beyond ourselves. But see how inconsistent you are. Your socialism, for instance. Why do you trouble about the interests of the race? Why do you concern yourself about the beggar in the gutter? Why are you bothering to lend that book”—he indicated William Morris with a nod—“to everyone in the lab?”

“Girl,” said the hunchback indistinctly, and glanced guiltily over his shoulder.

The girl in brown, with the brown eyes, had come into the laboratory and stood on the other side of the table behind him, her rolled-up apron in one hand, looking over her shoulder, listening to the discussion. She did not notice the hunchback, because she was glancing from Hill to his opponent. Hill’s awareness of her presence showed itself only in his studious ignorance of the fact; but she understood, and it pleased her. “I see no reason,” said he, “why a man should live like a brute because he knows of nothing beyond matter, and does not expect to exist a hundred years hence.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” said the fair-haired student.

“Why should he?” said Hill.

“What inducement has he?”

“That’s the way with all you religious people. It’s all a business of inducements. Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness’ sake?”

There was a pause. The fair man answered with a kind of vocal padding, “But—you see—inducement—when I said inducement,” to gain time. Then the hunchback came to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a terror in the debating society with his questions, and they invariably took one form—a demand for a definition. “What’s your definition of righteousness?” said the hunchback at this stage.

Hill felt a sudden loss of composure at this question, but just as it was asked, relief appeared in the person of Brooks, the laboratory attendant, who entered by the preparation-room door carrying a number of freshly killed guinea-pigs by their hind legs. “This is the last batch of material this session,” said the youngster who had not yet spoken. Brooks advanced up the laboratory, slapping down a couple of guinea-pigs at each table. The rest of the class, scenting the prey from afar, came crowding in by the lecture-theatre door, and the discussion died abruptly as those not already in their places hurried to secure a choice specimen. There was a noise of keys rattling on split rings as lockers were opened and dissecting instruments taken out. Hill was already standing by his table, his box of scalpels sticking out of his pocket.

The girl in brown came a step toward him and, leaning over his table, said softly, “Did you see that I returned your book, Mr. Hill?”

Throughout the scene she and the book had been vividly present in his mind, but he made a clumsy pretence of noticing the book for the first time. “Oh, yes,” he said, taking it up. “I see. Did you like it?”

“I want to ask you some questions about it—some time.”

“Certainly,” said Hill. “I shall be glad.” He stopped awkwardly. “You liked it?” he said.

“It’s a wonderful book. Only some things I don’t understand.”

Then suddenly the laboratory was hushed by a curious, braying noise. It was the demonstrator, at the blackboard ready to begin the day’s instruction; it was his custom to demand silence by a sound midway between the “Er” of common speech and the blast of a trumpet. The girl in brown slipped back to her place, immediately in front of Hill’s, and Hill, forgetting her forthwith, took a notebook from his table drawer, turned over its leaves hastily, drew a stubby pencil from his pocket, and prepared to make a copious note of the coming demonstration. For demonstrations and lectures are the sacred text of the college students; books, except the professor’s own, you may—even expediently—ignore.

Hill was the son of a Landport cobbler, and had been hooked by a chance blue paper the authorities had thrown out to the Landport Technical College. He lived in London on his allowance of a guinea a week, and found that with proper care this also covered his clothing allowance—an occasional waterproof collar, that is—as well as ink, needles, cotton, and such-like necessaries for a man about town. This was his first year and his first session, but the brown old man in Landport had already made himself disliked in many public houses by boasting of his son, “the Professor.” Hill was a vigorous youngster, with a serene contempt for the clergy of all denominations and a fine ambition to reconstruct the world. He regarded his scholarship as a brilliant opportunity. He had begun to read at seven, and since then had read steadily whatever came his way, good or bad.

His worldly experience had been limited to the island of Portsea, gained chiefly in the wholesale boot factory where he had worked by day after passing the seventh standard at the board school. He had a considerable gift of speech, as the college debating society—which met amidst crushing machines and mine models in the metallurgical theatre downstairs—already recognized, with a violent battering of desks whenever he rose. And he was at that fine emotional age when life opens at the end of a narrow pass like a broad valley at one’s feet, full of the promise of wonderful discoveries and tremendous achievements.

And his own limitations—except that he knew he knew neither Latin nor French—were all unknown to him.

At first his interest was divided fairly equally between his biological work and social and theological theorizing, which he took in deadly earnest. At night, when the big museum library was not open, he would sit on the bed of his room in Chelsea, with his coat and a muffler on, writing out lecture notes and revising dissection memoranda, until Thorpe called him out by a whistle—the landlady objected to opening the door to attic visitors—and then the two would go prowling about the shadowy, shiny, gas-lit streets, talking, much as we have just seen, about the God idea, Righteousness, Carlyle, and the Reorganisation of Society. In the midst of it, Hill, arguing not only for Thorpe but for any casual passer-by, would lose the thread of his argument glancing at some pretty painted face that looked meaningly at him as he passed. Science and Righteousness!

But once or twice lately there had been signs that a third interest was creeping into his life, and he had found his attention wandering from the fate of the mesoblastic somites or the probable meaning of the blastopore, to the thought of the girl with the brown eyes who sat at the table before him.

She was a paying student; she descended inconceivable social altitudes to speak to him. At the thought of the education she must have had and the accomplishments she must possess, Hill’s soul grew abject within him. She had spoken to him first over a difficulty about the alisphenoid of a rabbit’s skull, and he had found that, in biology at least, he had no reason for self-abasement. From that, as young people will from any starting point, they got to generalities, and while Hill attacked her on socialism—some instinct told him to spare her a direct assault on her religion—she was gathering courage to undertake what she told herself was his aesthetic education. She was a year or two older than he, though the thought never occurred to him. The loan of News from Nowhere was the beginning of a series of cross-loans. On some absurd first principle, Hill had never “wasted time” on poetry, and it seemed an appalling lack to her.

One day at lunch, when she chanced upon him alone in the little museum where the skeletons were arranged, shamefully eating the bun that constituted his midday meal, she retreated and then returned to lend him, with a slightly furtive air, a volume of Browning. He stood sideways to her and took the book rather clumsily because he was holding the bun in the other hand. And in hindsight his voice lacked the cheerful clarity he could have wished.

That happened after the examination in comparative anatomy, on the day before the college closed for the Christmas holidays. The excitement of cramming for that first test of strength had for a while dominated Hill to the exclusion of other interests. In the forecasts everyone indulged in, he was surprised to find that no one regarded him as a possible contender for the Harvey Commemoration Medal, which this and the two subsequent examinations would decide. About this time Wedderburn, who had so far lived inconspicuously on the farthest margin of Hill’s perceptions, began to take on the appearance of an obstacle. By mutual agreement, the night prowls with Thorpe ceased for the three weeks before the examination, and his landlady noted that she really could not supply so much lamp oil at the price.

He walked to and from the college with little slips of mnemonics in his hand—lists of crayfish appendages, rabbit’s skull bones, vertebrate nerves, for instance—and became a positive nuisance to foot passengers going the other way.

But by a natural reaction, poetry and the girl with the brown eyes ruled the Christmas holiday. The pending exam results became such a secondary concern that Hill marvelled at his father’s excitement. Even had he wished it, there was no comparative anatomy to read in Landport, and he was too poor to buy books, but the stock of poets in the library was extensive, and Hill’s attack was magnificently sustained. He saturated himself with the fluent numbers of Longfellow and Tennyson and fortified himself with Shakespeare; found a kindred soul in Pope and a master in Shelley; and heard and fled the siren voices of Eliza Cook and Mrs. Hemans. He read no more Browning, though, because he hoped for the loan of other volumes from Miss Haysman when he returned to London.

He walked from his lodgings to the college with that volume of Browning in his shiny black bag, his mind teeming with fine general propositions about poetry. Indeed, he framed first one little speech and then another with which to grace the return. The morning was exceptionally pleasant for London; there was a clear, hard frost and an undeniable blue in the sky, a thin haze softened every outline, and warm shafts of sunlight struck between the house blocks, turning the sunny side of the street to amber and gold. In the college hall he pulled off his glove and signed his name with fingers so stiff with cold that the characteristic dash under his signature became a quivering line. He imagined Miss Haysman about him everywhere. He turned at the staircase, and there, below, he saw a crowd struggling at the foot of the notice board. This, possibly, was the biology list.

He forgot Browning and Miss Haysman for the moment and joined the scrimmage. At last, with his cheek flattened against the sleeve of the man on the step above him, he read the list—

CLASS I H. J. Somers Wedderburn William Hill and thereafter followed a second class that is outside our present sympathies. It was characteristic that he did not trouble to look for Thorpe on the physics list, but backed out of the struggle at once, and in a curious emotional state—pride over ordinary second-class humanity and acute disappointment at Wedderburn’s success—went on his way upstairs. At the top, as he hung up his coat in the passage, the zoological demonstrator, a young man from Oxford who secretly regarded him as a blatant “mugger” of the worst type, offered his heartiest congratulations.

At the laboratory door Hill paused a second to catch his breath, then entered.

He looked straight up the laboratory and saw all five girl students grouped in their places, and Wedderburn, the once retiring Wedderburn, leaning rather gracefully against the window, playing with the blind tassel, apparently talking to all five of them. Now, Hill could talk bravely enough and even overbearingly to one girl, and he could have made a speech to a roomful, but this business of standing at ease, appreciating, fencing, and returning quick remarks round a group was, he knew, altogether beyond him. Coming up the stairs, his feelings for Wedderburn had been generous—a certain admiration, perhaps, a willingness to shake his hand conspicuously and heartily as one who had fought but the first round. But before Christmas Wedderburn had never gone up to that end of the room to talk. In a flash Hill’s mist of vague excitement condensed abruptly to a vivid dislike of Wedderburn. Possibly his expression changed.

As he came up to his place, Wedderburn nodded carelessly to him, and the others glanced round. Miss Haysman looked at him and away again, the faintest touch of her eyes. “I can’t agree with you, Mr. Wedderburn,” she said.

“I must congratulate you on your first class, Mr. Hill,” said the spectacled girl in green, turning round and beaming at him.

“It’s nothing,” said Hill, staring at Wedderburn and Miss Haysman talking together, eager to hear what they were saying.

“We poor folks in the second class don’t think so,” said the girl in spectacles.

What was it Wedderburn was saying? Something about William Morris! Hill did not answer the girl in spectacles, and the smile died out of his face. He could not hear and saw no way to “cut in.” Confound Wedderburn! He sat down, opened his bag, hesitated whether to return the volume of Browning forthwith in the sight of all, but instead drew out his new notebooks for the short course in elementary botany that was now beginning and would end in February. As he did so, a fat, heavy man with a white face and pale grey eyes—Bindon, the professor of botany, who came up from Kew for January and February—entered by the lecture-theatre door and passed down the laboratory, rubbing his hands together and smiling in silent affability.

In the six weeks that followed, Hill experienced some very rapid and curiously complex emotional developments. For the most part he had Wedderburn in focus, a fact Miss Haysman never suspected. She told Hill (for in the comparative privacy of the museum she talked a good deal to him of socialism, Browning, and general propositions) that she had met Wedderburn at the house of some people she knew, and “he’s inherited his cleverness; for his father, you know, is the great eye-specialist.”

“My father is a cobbler,” said Hill, quite irrelevantly, and felt the want of dignity even as he said it. But the gleam of jealousy did not offend her; she conceived herself the fundamental source of it. He suffered bitterly from a sense of Wedderburn’s unfairness and a realization of his own handicap. Here was this Wedderburn, who had picked up a prominent man for a father, and instead of losing marks on that score, it was counted to him for righteousness! And while Hill had to introduce himself and talk to Miss Haysman clumsily over mangled guinea-pigs, this Wedderburn, in some backstairs way, had access to her social altitudes and could converse in a polished argot that Hill perhaps understood but felt incapable of speaking. Not that he wanted to, of course.

Then it seemed to Hill that Wedderburn’s coming there day after day with unbrayed cuffs, neatly tailored, precisely barbered, quietly perfect, was in itself an ill-bred, sneering sort of proceeding. Moreover, it was sneaky of Wedderburn to behave insignificantly for a time, to mock modesty, to lead Hill to fancy that he himself was beyond dispute the man of the year, and then suddenly to dart in front of him and swell up in this fashion. In addition, Wedderburn showed an increasing tendency to join any conversational group that included Miss Haysman, and would venture, indeed seek occasion, to voice opinions derogatory to socialism and atheism.

He goaded Hill to incivility by neat, shallow, and exceedingly effective personal remarks about socialist leaders, until Hill hated Bernard Shaw’s graceful egotisms, William Morris’s limited editions and luxurious wallpapers, and Walter Crane’s charmingly absurd ideal working men about as much as he hated Wedderburn. The laboratory dissertations, which had been his glory the previous term, became a danger, degenerating into inglorious skirmishes with Wedderburn; Hill kept them up only out of a vague sense that his honour was involved. In the debating society Hill knew quite clearly that, to a thunderous accompaniment of banged desks, he could have pulverized Wedderburn. Only Wedderburn never attended the debating society to be pulverized, because—nauseous affectation!—he “dined late.”

You must not imagine that these things presented themselves in quite such crude form to Hill’s perception. Hill was a born generalizer. Wedderburn to him was not so much an individual obstacle as a type, the salient angle of a class. The economic theories that, after endless fermentation, had shaped themselves in Hill’s mind became abruptly concrete at the contact. The world filled with easy-mannered, graceful, gracefully dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally shallow Wedderburns: Bishops Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.s, Professors Wedderburn, Wedderburn landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and epigrammatic cities of refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or ill-dressed, from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to Hill’s imagination.

So he became, as it were, a champion of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to outward seeming only a self-assertive, ill-mannered young man, and an unsuccessful champion at that. Again and again a skirmish over the afternoon tea the girl students had inaugurated left Hill with flushed cheeks and a tattered temper, and the debating society noticed a new quality of sarcastic bitterness in his speeches.

Now you will understand how it was necessary, if only in the interests of humanity, that Hill should demolish Wedderburn in the forthcoming examination and outshine him in Miss Haysman’s eyes; and you will perceive, too, how Miss Haysman fell into some common feminine misconceptions. The Hill–Wedderburn quarrel—for in his unostentatious way Wedderburn reciprocated Hill’s ill-veiled rivalry—became a tribute to her indefinable charm; she was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of scalpels and stubby pencils. To her confidential friend’s secret annoyance, it even troubled her conscience, for she was a good girl, painfully aware from Ruskin and contemporary fiction how entirely men’s activities are determined by women’s attitudes. And if Hill never by any chance mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him with finer modesty for the omission.

So the time came for the second examination, and Hill’s increasing pallor confirmed the general rumor that he was working hard. In the aerated break shop near South Kensington Station you would see him, breaking his bun and sipping his milk, his eyes intent on a paper of closely written notes. In his bedroom there were propositions about buds and stems around his looking-glass, a diagram to catch his eye, if soap should chance to spare it, above his washing basin. He missed several debating society meetings, but he found the chance encounters with Miss Haysman in the spacious ways of the adjacent art museum, or in the little museum at the top of the college, or in the college corridors, more frequent and very restful.

In particular, they used to meet in a little gallery full of wrought-iron chests and gates, near the art library, and there Hill would talk, under the gentle stimulus of her flattering attention, of Browning and his personal ambitions. A characteristic she found remarkable in him was his freedom from avarice. He contemplated quite calmly the prospect of living all his life on an income below a hundred pounds a year. But he was determined to be famous, to make recognizably, in his own proper person, the world a better place to live in. He took Bradlaugh and John Burns for his leaders and models—poor, even impecunious, great men. But Miss Haysman thought such lives were deficient on the aesthetic side, by which, though she did not know it, she meant good wallpaper and upholstery, pretty books, tasteful clothes, concerts, and meals nicely cooked and respectfully served.

At last came the day of the second examination, and the professor of botany, a fussy, conscientious man, rearranged all the tables in a long, narrow laboratory to prevent copying, put his demonstrator on a chair on a table (where, he said, he felt like a Hindoo god) to see all the cheating, and stuck a notice outside the door, “Door closed,” for no earthly reason anyone could discover. All morning from ten till one the quill of Wedderburn shrieked defiance at Hill’s, and the quills of the others chased their leaders in a tireless pack, and so again in the afternoon. Wedderburn was a little quieter than usual, and Hill’s face was hot all day, his overcoat bulging with textbooks and notebooks for last-minute revision. The next day, morning and afternoon, was the practical examination, when sections had to be cut and slides identified.

In the morning Hill was depressed because he knew he had cut a thick section, and in the afternoon came the mysterious slip.

It was just the kind of thing the botanical professor was always doing. Like the income tax, it offered a premium to the cheat. It was a preparation under the microscope, a little glass slip held in place on the stage by light steel clips, and the inscription set forth that the slip was not to be moved. Each student was to go in turn, sketch it, write in his answer book what he considered it to be, and return to his place.

Now, to move such a slip is a thing one can do by a chance movement of the finger, in a fraction of a second. The professor’s reason for forbidding the slip to be moved was that the object to be identified was characteristic of a certain tree stem. In the position it was placed it was difficult to recognize, but once the slip was moved to bring other parts of the preparation into view, its nature was obvious enough.

Hill approached, flushed from a contest with staining reagents, sat down on the little stool before the microscope, turned the mirror to get the best light, and then, out of sheer habit, shifted the slip. At once he remembered the prohibition, and, with an almost continuous motion of his hands, moved it back, sitting paralyzed with astonishment at his action.

Slowly he turned his head. The professor was out of the room; the demonstrator sat aloft on his improvised rostrum, reading the Q. Jour. Mi. Sci.; the rest of the examinees were busy with their backs to him. Should he admit the accident now? He knew quite clearly what the thing was. It was a lenticel, a characteristic preparation from the elder tree. His eyes roved over his intent fellow-students, and Wedderburn suddenly glanced over his shoulder at him with a strange expression. The mental excitement that had kept Hill at an abnormal pitch for two days gave way to a curious nervous tension. His answer book was beside him. He did not write down what the thing was, but with one eye at the microscope he began making a hasty sketch of it. His mind was full of this grotesque ethical puzzle. Should he identify it, or should he leave the question unanswered? In that case Wedderburn might well come out first.

How could he tell now whether he might not have identified it without shifting? It was possible Wedderburn had failed to recognize it, of course. Suppose Wedderburn had also moved the slide? He looked at the clock. There were fifteen minutes to make up his mind. He gathered up his answer book and the colored pencils he used for illustrating replies and walked back to his seat.

He read through his manuscript, then sat thinking, gnawing his knuckle. It would look queer now if he owned up. He must beat Wedderburn. He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns and Bradlaugh. Besides, he reflected, the glimpse he had had of the rest of the slip was, after all, quite accidental, forced upon him by chance—a kind of providential revelation rather than an unfair advantage. It was not nearly so dishonest to avail himself of that as it was for Broome, who believed in the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for a first class. “Five minutes more,” said the demonstrator, folding up his paper and becoming observant. Hill watched the clock hands until two minutes remained; then he opened the answer book and, with hot ears and an affectation of ease, gave his drawing of the lenticel its name.

When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of Wedderburn and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green, who knew the demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human), said that in the results of the two examinations taken together Hill had the advantage by one mark—167 to 166 out of a possible 200. Everyone admired Hill in a way, though the suspicion of “mugging” clung to him. But Hill was to find congratulations and Miss Haysman’s enhanced opinion of him, and even the decided decline in Wedderburn’s crest, tainted by an unhappy memory. He felt a remarkable access of energy at first, and the note of a democracy marching to triumph returned to his debating-society speeches; he worked at comparative anatomy with tremendous zeal and effect, and continued his aesthetic education. But through it all a vivid little picture kept coming before his mind’s eye—of a sneaky person manipulating a slide.

No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure no higher power existed to see it, but still it worried him. Memories are not dead things but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if continually fretted. Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on his memory became confused, until at last he was not sure—though he assured himself he was sure—whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary. Then it is possible Hill’s diet contributed to morbid conscientiousness: breakfast often eaten in a hurry, a midday bun, and, at such hours after five as happened to be convenient, such meat as his means allowed, usually in a cheap eating-house in a back street off the Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny classics, and those treats usually meant suppressing potatoes or chops.

It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity. But apart from this influence on his feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to falsity, which the blasphemous Landport cobbler had beaten into him with strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed atheists I am convinced: they may be—they usually are—fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves, but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen. Moreover, this memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman.

For she now so evidently preferred him to Wedderburn that he felt sure he cared for her, and began to return her attentions by timid marks of personal regard; at one time he even bought a bunch of violets, carried it about in his pocket, and produced it, with a stumbling explanation, withered and dead, in the gallery of old iron. It poisoned, too, the denunciation of capitalist dishonesty that had been one of his life’s pleasures. And, lastly, it poisoned his triumph over Wedderburn. Previously he had been Wedderburn’s superior in his own eyes and had raged only at a want of recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker suspicion of positive inferiority. He fancied he found justifications in Browning, but they vanished on analysis. At last—moved, curiously enough, by exactly the same motive forces that had led to his dishonesty—he went to Professor Bindon and made a clean breast of the whole affair.

Because Hill was a paid student, Bindon did not ask him to sit down, and Hill stood before the professor’s desk as he confessed.

“It’s a curious story,” said Bindon, slowly realizing how the thing reflected on himself, and then letting his anger rise—“a most remarkable story. I can’t understand your doing it, and I can’t understand this avowal. You’re a type of student—Cambridge men would never dream—I suppose I ought to have thought—why did you cheat?”

“I didn’t cheat,” said Hill.

“But you have just told me you did.”

“I thought I explained—”

“Either you cheated or you did not cheat.”

“I said my motion was involuntary.”

“I am not a metaphysician; I am a servant of science—of fact. You were told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If that is not cheating—”

“If I was a cheat,” said Hill, with a note of hysteria in his voice, “should I come here and tell you?”

“Your repentance, of course, does you credit,” said Bindon, “but it does not alter the original facts.”

“No, sir,” said Hill, giving in in utter self-abasement.

“Even now you cause an enormous amount of trouble. The examination list will have to be revised.”

“I suppose so, sir.”

“Suppose so? Of course it must be revised. And I don’t see how I can conscientiously pass you.”

“Not pass me?” said Hill. “Fail me?”

“It’s the rule in all examinations. Or where should we be? What else did you expect? You don’t want to shirk the consequences of your own acts?”

“I thought, perhaps——” said Hill. And then, “Fail me? I thought, as I told you, you would simply deduct the marks given for that slip.”

“Impossible!” said Bindon. “Besides, it would still leave you above Wedderburn. Deduct only the marks! Preposterous! The Departmental Regulations distinctly say——”

“But it’s my own admission, sir.”

“The Regulations say nothing whatever of the manner in which the matter comes to light. They simply provide——”

“It will ruin me. If I fail this examination, they won’t renew my scholarship.”

“You should have thought of that before.”

“But, sir, consider all my circumstances——”

“I cannot consider anything. Professors in this College are machines. The Regulations will not even let us recommend our students for appointments. I am a machine, and you have worked me. I have to do——”

“It’s very hard, sir.”

“Possibly it is.”

“If I am to be failed this examination, I might as well go home at once.”

“That is as you think proper.” Bindon’s voice softened a little; he perceived he had been unjust, and, provided he did not contradict himself, he was disposed to be lenient. “As a private person,” he said, “I think this confession of yours goes far to mitigate your offence. But you have set the machinery in motion, and now it must take its course. I—I am really sorry you gave way.”

A wave of emotion prevented Hill from answering. Suddenly, very vividly, he saw the heavily lined face of the old Landport cobbler, his father. “Good God! What a fool I have been!” he said hotly and abruptly.

“I hope,” said Bindon, “that it will be a lesson to you.”

But oddly enough, they were not thinking of quite the same indiscretion.

There was a pause.

“I would like a day to think, sir, and then I will let you know—about going home, I mean,” said Hill, moving toward the door.

The next day Hill’s place was vacant. The spectacled girl in green was, as usual, first with the news. Wedderburn and Miss Haysman were talking of a performance of The Meistersingers when she came up to them.

“Have you heard?” she said.

“Heard what?”

“There was cheating in the examination.”

“Cheating!” said Wedderburn, his face suddenly hot. “How?”

“That slide——”

“Moved? Never!”

“It was. That slide that we weren’t to move——”

“Nonsense!” said Wedderburn. “Why! How could they find out? Who do they say——”

“It was Mr. Hill.”

“Hill?”

“Mr. Hill!”

“Not—surely not the immaculate Hill?” said Wedderburn, recovering.

“I don’t believe it,” said Miss Haysman. “How do you know?”

“I didn’t,” said the girl in spectacles. “But I know it now for a fact. Mr. Hill went and confessed to Professor Bindon himself.”

“By Jove!” said Wedderburn. “Hill, of all people. But I am always inclined to distrust these philanthropists-on-principle——”

“Are you quite sure?” said Miss Haysman, with a catch in her breath.

“Quite. It’s dreadful, isn’t it? But, you know, what can you expect? His father is a cobbler.”

Then Miss Haysman astonished the girl in spectacles.

“I don’t care. I will not believe it,” she said, flushing darkly under her warm-tinted skin. “I will not believe it until he has told me so himself—face to face. I would scarcely believe it then,” and abruptly she turned her back on the girl in spectacles and walked to her own place.

“It’s true, all the same,” said the girl in spectacles, peering and smiling at Wedderburn.

But Wedderburn did not answer her. She was indeed one of those people who seemed destined to make unanswered remarks.