Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/255

 Hyde Park, and making his way home by Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue. His walking was a straight forward affair, swift and strenuous, a casual avoidance of other people, a scorn of shops and faces. His impetus swung him along, and he cultivated this impetus. Speed seemed to matter; it carried him past and over those insidious interferences.

On Saturdays he played "soccer" for the hospital. He was inoffensively popular, or rather less unpopular than some of the other 'Varsity men who had to meet the young male jealousies of men who had been at neither. He boxed, but less than of old, for he had begun to question its effect on his hands. Once a month he spent a week-end with Sorrell at Winstonbury, and on Sundays he had supper with Thomas Roland at Chelsea. Music had begun to appeal to him very subtly, and colour and pictures. He found pictures in music, and music in pictures. Occasionally he met Pentreath who was at St. Thomas's, a Pentreath who seemed to grow more sensitively serious.

Pentreath had rooms in a quiet corner of Clapham. He gave Sorrell to understand that he found Clapham less distracting, and more safe.

"I need not go north of the river, you know. Down there it is very dowdy and dull."

Kit confessed that he passed through the centre of the spider's web once each day. He spoke of Piccadilly Circus, and Shaftesbury Avenue, and Pentreath looked at him anxiously. To Kit it seemed that his friend was both fascinated and afraid.

"I wonder you dare. I promised my mater. All those beastly women!"

Pentreath's fear of his own desire, the trembling of his niceness on the edge of the elemental, were not without their effect on Kit. Pentreath's inward excitements and repressions were disturbing.

"They can't run away with you, old chap."

"It is the lights—too. The glare,—and the faces that come on you suddenly. And the eyes, looking at you from under the shadow. You must think me a silly fool, Sorrell,—but there is an unholy fascination, a beauty, a damnable beauty"

"You take it too seriously."