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The Longest Journey

by E. M. Forster · English · Gutenberg #2604 · 541,829 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Longest Journey

Author: E. M. Forster


        
Release date: April 1, 2001 [eBook #2604]
                Most recently updated: May 11, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2604

Credits: Produced by Eve Sobol, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONGEST JOURNEY ***




THE LONGEST JOURNEY

By E. M. Forster




Part 1 — Cambridge

Part 2 — Sawston

Part 3 — Wiltshire




Part 1 — Cambridge

I


“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out
over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell
off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.”

“You have not proved it,” said a voice.

“I have proved it to myself.”

“I have proved to myself that she isn’t,” said the voice. “The cow is
_not_ there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match.

“She’s there for me,” he declared. “I don’t care whether she’s there
for you or not. Whether I’m in Cambridge or Iceland or dead, the cow
will be there.”

It was philosophy. They were discussing the existence of objects. Do
they exist only when there is some one to look at them? Or have they
a real existence of their own? It is all very interesting, but at the
same time it is difficult. Hence the cow. She seemed to make things
easier. She was so familiar, so solid, that surely the truths that she
illustrated would in time become familiar and solid also. Is the cow
there or not? This was better than deciding between objectivity and
subjectivity. So at Oxford, just at the same time, one was asking,
“What do our rooms look like in the vac.?”

“Look here, Ansell. I’m there—in the meadow—the cow’s there. You’re
there—the cow’s there. Do you agree so far?” “Well?”

“Well, if you go, the cow stops; but if I go, the cow goes. Then what
will happen if you stop and I go?”

Several voices cried out that this was quibbling.

“I know it is,” said the speaker brightly, and silence descended again,
while they tried honestly to think the matter out.

Rickie, on whose carpet the matches were being dropped, did not like
to join in the discussion. It was too difficult for him. He could
not even quibble. If he spoke, he should simply make himself a fool.
He preferred to listen, and to watch the tobacco-smoke stealing out
past the window-seat into the tranquil October air. He could see the
court too, and the college cat teasing the college tortoise, and the
kitchen-men with supper-trays upon their heads. Hot food for one—that
must be for the geographical don, who never came in for Hall; cold food
for three, apparently at half-a-crown a head, for some one he did not
know; hot food, _à  la carte _—obviously for the ladies haunting the next
staircase; cold food for two, at two shillings—going to Ansell’s rooms
for himself and Ansell, and as it passed under the lamp he saw that it
was meringues again. Then the bedmakers began to arrive, chatting to
each other pleasantly, and he could hear Ansell’s bedmaker say, “Oh
dang!” when she found she had to lay Ansell’s tablecloth; for there was
not a breath stirring. The great elms were motionless, and seemed still
in the glory of midsummer, for the darkness hid the yellow blotches on
their leaves, and their outlines were still rounded against the tender
sky. Those elms were Dryads—so Rickie believed or pretended, and the
line between the two is subtler than we admit. At all events they were
lady trees, and had for generations fooled the college statutes by
their residence in the haunts of youth.

But what about the cow? He returned to her with a start, for this would
never do. He also would try to think the matter out. Was she there or
not? The cow. There or not. He strained his eyes into the night.

Either way it was attractive. If she was there, other cows were there
too. The darkness of Europe was dotted with them, and in the far East
their flanks were shining in the rising sun. Great herds of them stood
browsing in pastures where no man came nor need ever come, or plashed
knee-deep by the brink of impassable rivers. And this, moreover, was
the view of Ansell. Yet Tilliard’s view had a good deal in it. One
might do worse than follow Tilliard, and suppose the cow not to be
there unless oneself was there to see her. A cowless world, then,
stretched round him on every side. Yet he had only to peep into a
field, and, click! it would at once become radiant with bovine life.

Suddenly he realized that this, again, would never do. As usual, he
had missed the whole point, and was overlaying philosophy with gross
and senseless details. For if the cow was not there, the world and the
fields were not there either. And what would Ansell care about sunlit
flanks or impassable streams? Rickie rebuked his own groveling soul,
and turned his eyes away from the night, which had led him to such
absurd conclusions.

The fire was dancing, and the shadow of Ansell, who stood close up to
it, seemed to dominate the little room. He was still talking, or rather
jerking, and he was still lighting matches and dropping their ends upon
the carpet. Now and then he would make a motion with his feet as if he
were running quickly backward upstairs, and would tread on the edge of
the fender, so that the fire-irons went flying and the buttered-bun
dishes crashed against each other in the hearth. The other philosophers
were crouched in odd shapes on the sofa and table and chairs, and one,
who was a little bored, had crawled to the piano and was timidly trying
the Prelude to Rhinegold with his knee upon the soft pedal. The air was
heavy with good tobacco-smoke and the pleasant warmth of tea, and as
Rickie became more sleepy the events of the day seemed to float one by
one before his acquiescent eyes. In the morning he had read Theocritus,
whom he believed to be the greatest of Greek poets; he had lunched with
a merry don and had tasted Zwieback biscuits; then he had walked with
people he liked, and had walked just long enough; and now his room was
full of other people whom he liked, and when they left he would go
and have supper with Ansell, whom he liked as well as any one. A year
ago he had known none of these joys. He had crept cold and friendless
and ignorant out of a great public school, preparing for a silent and
solitary journey, and praying as a highest favour that he might be left
alone. Cambridge had not answered his prayer. She had taken and soothed
him, and warmed him, and had laughed at him a little, saying that he
must not be so tragic yet awhile, for his boyhood had been but a dusty
corridor that led to the spacious halls of youth. In one year he had
made many friends and learnt much, and he might learn even more if he
could but concentrate his attention on that cow.

The fire had died down, and in the gloom the man by the piano ventured
to ask what would happen if an objective cow had a subjective calf.
Ansell gave an angry sigh, and at that moment there was a tap on the
door.

“Come in!” said Rickie.

The door opened. A tall young woman stood framed in the light that fell
from the passage.

“Ladies!” whispered every-one in great agitation.

“Yes?” he said nervously, limping towards the door (he was rather
lame). “Yes? Please come in. Can I be any good—”

“Wicked boy!” exclaimed the young lady, advancing a gloved finger into
the room. “Wicked, wicked boy!”

He clasped his head with his hands.

“Agnes! Oh how perfectly awful!”

“Wicked, intolerable boy!” She turned on the electric light. The
philosophers were revealed with unpleasing suddenness. “My goodness,
a tea-party! Oh really, Rickie, you are too bad! I say again: wicked,
abominable, intolerable boy! I’ll have you horsewhipped. If you
please”—she turned to the symposium, which had now risen to its
feet “If you please, he asks me and my brother for the week-end. We
accept. At the station, no Rickie. We drive to where his old lodgings
were—Trumpery Road or some such name—and he’s left them. I’m furious,
and before I can stop my brother, he’s paid off the cab and there we
are stranded. I’ve walked—walked for miles. Pray can you tell me what
is to be done with Rickie?”

“He must indeed be horsewhipped,” said Tilliard pleasantly. Then he
made a bolt for the door.

“Tilliard—do stop—let me introduce Miss Pembroke—don’t all go!” For
his friends were flying from his visitor like mists before the sun.
“Oh, Agnes, I am so sorry; I’ve nothing to say. I simply forgot you
were coming, and everything about you.”

“Thank you, thank you! And how soon will you remember to ask where
Herbert is?”

“Where is he, then?”

“I shall not tell you.”

“But didn’t he walk with you?”

“I shall not tell, Rickie. It’s part of your punishment. You are not
really sorry yet. I shall punish you again later.”

She was quite right. Rickie was not as much upset as he ought to have
been. He was sorry that he had forgotten, and that he had caused his
visitors inconvenience. But he did not feel profoundly degraded, as a
young man should who has acted discourteously to a young lady. Had he
acted discourteously to his bedmaker or his gyp, he would have minded
just as much, which was not polite of him.

“First, I’ll go and get food. Do sit down and rest. Oh, let me
introduce—”

Ansell was now the sole remnant of the discussion party. He still
stood on the hearthrug with a burnt match in his hand. Miss Pembroke’s
arrival had never disturbed him.

“Let me introduce Mr. Ansell—Miss Pembroke.”

There came an awful moment—a moment when he almost regretted that he
had a clever friend. Ansell remained absolutely motionless, moving
neither hand nor head. Such behaviour is so unknown that Miss Pembroke
did not realize what had happened, and kept her own hand stretched out
longer than is maidenly.

“Coming to supper?” asked Ansell in low, grave tones.

“I don’t think so,” said Rickie helplessly.

Ansell departed without another word.

“Don’t mind us,” said Miss Pembroke pleasantly. “Why shouldn’t you keep
your engagement with your friend? Herbert’s finding lodgings,—that’s
why he’s not here,—and they’re sure to be able to give us some dinner.
What jolly rooms you’ve got!”

“Oh no—not a bit. I say, I am sorry. I am sorry. I am most awfully
sorry.”

“What about?”

“Ansell—” Then he burst forth. “Ansell isn’t a gentleman. His father’s
a draper. His uncles are farmers. He’s here because he’s so clever—just
on account of his brains. Now, sit down. He isn’t a gentleman at all.”
And he hurried off to order some dinner.

“What a snob the boy is getting!” thought Agnes, a good deal mollified.
It never struck her that those could be the words of affection—that
Rickie would never have spoken them about a person whom he disliked.
Nor did it strike her that Ansell’s humble birth scarcely explained
the quality of his rudeness. She was willing to find life full of
trivialities. Six months ago and she might have minded; but now—she
cared not what men might do unto her, for she had her own splendid
lover, who could have knocked all these unhealthy undergraduates into a
cocked-hat. She dared not tell Gerald a word of what had happened: he
might have come up from wherever he was and half killed Ansell. And she
determined not to tell her brother either, for her nature was kindly,
and it pleased her to pass things over.

She took off her gloves, and then she took off her ear-rings and began
to admire them. These ear-rings were a freak of hers—her only freak.
She had always wanted some, and the day Gerald asked her to marry him
she went to a shop and had her ears pierced. In some wonderful way
she knew that it was right. And he had given her the rings—little
gold knobs, copied, the jeweller told them, from something prehistoric
and he had kissed the spots of blood on her handkerchief. Herbert, as
usual, had been shocked.

“I can’t help it,” she cried, springing up. “I’m not like other girls.”
She began to pace about Rickie’s room, for she hated to keep quiet.
There was nothing much to see in it. The pictures were not attractive,
nor did they attract her—school groups, Watts’ “Sir Percival,” a dog
running after a rabbit, a man running after a maid, a cheap brown
Madonna in a cheap green frame—in short, a collection where one
mediocrity was generally cancelled by another. Over the door there hung
a long photograph of a city with waterways, which Agnes, who had never
been to Venice, took to be Venice, but which people who had been to
Stockholm knew to be Stockholm. Rickie’s mother, looking rather sweet,
was standing on the mantelpiece. Some more pictures had just arrived
from the framers and were leaning with their faces to the wall, but she
did not bother to turn them round. On the table were dirty teacups, a
flat chocolate cake, and Omar Khayyam, with an Oswego biscuit between
his pages. Also a vase filled with the crimson leaves of autumn. This
made her smile.

Then she saw her host’s shoes: he had left them lying on the sofa.
Rickie was slightly deformed, and so the shoes were not the same size,
and one of them had a thick heel to help him towards an even walk.
“Ugh!” she exclaimed, and removed them gingerly to the bedroom. There
she saw other shoes and boots and pumps, a whole row of them, all
deformed. “Ugh! Poor boy! It is too bad. Why shouldn’t he be like other
people? This hereditary business is too awful.” She shut the door with
a sigh. Then she recalled the perfect form of Gerald, his athletic
walk, the poise of his shoulders, his arms stretched forward to receive
her. Gradually she was comforted.

“I beg your pardon, miss, but might I ask how many to lay?” It was the
bedmaker, Mrs. Aberdeen.

“Three, I think,” said Agnes, smiling pleasantly. “Mr. Elliot’ll be
back in a minute. He has gone to order dinner.

“Thank you, miss.”

“Plenty of teacups to wash up!”

“But teacups is easy washing, particularly Mr. Elliot’s.”

“Why are his so easy?”

“Because no nasty corners in them to hold the dirt. Mr. Anderson—he’s
below—has crinkly noctagons, and one wouldn’t believe the difference.
It was I bought these for Mr. Elliot. His one thought is to save one
trouble. I never seed such a thoughtful gentleman. The world, I say,
will be the better for him.” She took the teacups into the gyp room,
and then returned with the tablecloth, and added, “if he’s spared.”

“I’m afraid he isn’t strong,” said Agnes.

“Oh, miss, his nose! I don’t know what he’d say if he knew I mentioned
his nose, but really I must speak to someone, and he has neither father
nor mother. His nose! It poured twice with blood in the Long.”

“Yes?”

“It’s a thing that ought to be known. I assure you, that little
room!... And in any case, Mr. Elliot’s a gentleman that can ill afford
to lose it. Luckily his friends were up; and I always say they’re more
like brothers than anything else.”

“Nice for him. He has no real brothers.”

“Oh, Mr. Hornblower, he is a merry gentleman, and Mr. Tilliard too!
And Mr. Elliot himself likes his romp at times. Why, it’s the merriest
staircase in the buildings! Last night the bedmaker from W said to me,
‘What are you doing to my gentlemen? Here’s Mr. Ansell come back ’ot
with his collar flopping.’ I said, ‘And a good thing.’ Some bedders
keep their gentlemen just so; but surely, miss, the world being what it
is, the longer one is able to laugh in it the better.”

Bedmakers have to be comic and dishonest. It is expected of them. In a
picture of university life it is their only function. So when we meet
one who has the face of a lady, and feelings of which a lady might be
proud, we pass her by.

“Yes?” said Miss Pembroke, and then their talk was stopped by the
arrival of her brother.

“It is too bad!” he exclaimed. “It is really too bad.”

“Now, Bertie boy, Bertie boy! I’ll have no peevishness.”

“I am not peevish, Agnes, but I have a full right to be. Pray, why did
he not meet us? Why did he not provide rooms? And pray, why did you
leave me to do all the settling? All the lodgings I knew are full, and
our bedrooms look into a mews. I cannot help it. And then—look here!
It really is too bad.” He held up his foot like a wounded dog. It was
dripping with water.

“Oho! This explains the peevishness. Off with it at once. It’ll be
another of your colds.”

“I really think I had better.” He sat down by the fire and daintily
unlaced his boot. “I notice a great change in university tone. I can
never remember swaggering three abreast along the pavement and charging
inoffensive visitors into a gutter when I was an undergraduate. One of
the men, too, wore an Eton tie. But the others, I should say, came from
very queer schools, if they came from any schools at all.”

Mr. Pembroke was nearly twenty years older than his sister, and had
never been as handsome. But he was not at all the person to knock
into a gutter, for though not in orders, he had the air of being
on the verge of them, and his features, as well as his clothes,
had the clerical cut. In his presence conversation became pure and
colourless and full of understatements, and—just as if he was a real
clergyman—neither men nor boys ever forgot that he was there. He had
observed this, and it pleased him very much. His conscience permitted
him to enter the Church whenever his profession, which was the
scholastic, should demand it.

“No gutter in the world’s as wet as this,” said Agnes, who had peeled
off her brother’s sock, and was now toasting it at the embers on a pair
of tongs.

“Surely you know the running water by the edge of the Trumpington road?
It’s turned on occasionally to clear away the refuse—a most primitive
idea. When I was up we had a joke about it, and called it the ‘Pem.’”

“How complimentary!”

“You foolish girl,—not after me, of course. We called it the ‘Pem’
because it is close to Pembroke College. I remember—” He smiled a
little, and twiddled his toes. Then he remembered the bedmaker, and
said, “My sock is now dry. My sock, please.”

“Your sock is sopping. No, you don’t!” She twitched the tongs away from
him. Mrs. Aberdeen, without speaking, fetched a pair of Rickie’s socks
and a pair of Rickie’s shoes.

“Thank you; ah, thank you. I am sure Mr. Elliot would allow it.”

Then he said in French to his sister, “Has there been the slightest
sign of Frederick?”

“Now, do call him Rickie, and talk English. I found him here. He had
forgotten about us, and was very sorry. Now he’s gone to get some
dinner, and I can’t think why he isn’t back.”

Mrs. Aberdeen left them.

“He wants pulling up sharply. There is nothing original in
absent-mindedness. True originality lies elsewhere. Really, the lower
classes have no _nous_. However can I wear such deformities?” For he
had been madly trying to cram a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe.

“Don’t!” said Agnes hastily. “Don’t touch the poor fellow’s things.”
The sight of the smart, stubby patent leather made her almost feel
faint. She had known Rickie for many years, but it seemed so dreadful
and so different now that he was a man. It was her first great contact
with the abnormal, and unknown fibres of her being rose in revolt
against it. She frowned when she heard his uneven tread upon the stairs.

“Agnes—before he arrives—you ought never to have left me and gone
to his rooms alone. A most elementary transgression. Imagine the
unpleasantness if you had found him with friends. If Gerald—”

Rickie by now had got into a fluster. At the kitchens he had lost his
head, and when his turn came—he had had to wait—he had yielded his
place to those behind, saying that he didn’t matter. And he had wasted
more precious time buying bananas, though he knew that the Pembrokes
were not partial to fruit. Amid much tardy and chaotic hospitality
the meal got under way. All the spoons and forks were anyhow, for
Mrs. Aberdeen’s virtues were not practical. The fish seemed never to
have been alive, the meat had no kick, and the cork of the college
claret slid forth silently, as if ashamed of the contents. Agnes was
particularly pleasant. But her brother could not recover himself. He
still remembered their desolate arrival, and he could feel the waters
of the Pem eating into his instep.

“Rickie,” cried the lady, “are you aware that you haven’t congratulated
me on my engagement?”

Rickie laughed nervously, and said, “Why no! No more I have.”

“Say something pretty, then.”

“I hope you’ll be very happy,” he mumbled. “But I don’t know anything
about marriage.”

“Oh, you awful boy! Herbert, isn’t he just the same? But you do know
something about Gerald, so don’t be so chilly and cautious. I’ve just
realized, looking at those groups, that you must have been at school
together. Did you come much across him?”

“Very little,” he answered, and sounded shy. He got up hastily, and
began to muddle with the coffee.

“But he was in the same house. Surely that’s a house group?”

“He was a prefect.” He made his coffee on the simple system. One had a
brown pot, into which the boiling stuff was poured. Just before serving
one put in a drop of cold water, and the idea was that the grounds fell
to the bottom.

“Wasn’t he a kind of athletic marvel? Couldn’t he knock any boy or
master down?”

“Yes.”

“If he had wanted to,” said Mr. Pembroke, who had not spoken for some
time.

“If he had wanted to,” echoed Rickie. “I do hope, Agnes, you’ll be most
awfully happy. I don’t know anything about the army, but I should think
it must be most awfully interesting.”

Mr. Pembroke laughed faintly.

“Yes, Rickie. The army is a most interesting profession,—the
profession of Wellington and Marlborough and Lord Roberts; a most
interesting profession, as you observe. A profession that may mean
death—death, rather than dishonour.”

“That’s nice,” said Rickie, speaking to himself. “Any profession may
mean dishonour, but one isn’t allowed to die instead. The army’s
different. If a soldier makes a mess, it’s thought rather decent of
him, isn’t it, if he blows out his brains? In the other professions it
somehow seems cowardly.”

“I am not competent to pronounce,” said Mr. Pembroke, who was not
accustomed to have his schoolroom satire commented on. “I merely know
that the army is the finest profession in the world. Which reminds me,
Rickie—have you been thinking about yours?”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“No.”

“Now, Herbert, don’t bother him. Have another meringue.”

“But, Rickie, my dear boy, you’re twenty. It’s time you thought. The
Tripos is the beginning of life, not the end. In less than two years
you will have got your B.A. What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re M.A., aren’t you?” asked Agnes; but her brother proceeded—

“I have seen so many promising, brilliant lives wrecked simply on
account of this—_not settling soon enough_. My dear boy, you must think.
Consult your tastes if possible—but think. You have not a moment to
lose. The Bar, like your father?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t like that at all.”

“I don’t mention the Church.”

“Oh, Rickie, do be a clergyman!” said Miss Pembroke. “You’d be simply
killing in a wide-awake.”

He looked at his guests hopelessly. Their kindness and competence
overwhelmed him. “I wish I could talk to them as I talk to myself,” he
thought. “I’m not such an ass when I talk to myself. I don’t believe,
for instance, that quite all I thought about the cow was rot.” Aloud he
said, “I’ve sometimes wondered about writing.”

“Writing?” said Mr. Pembroke, with the tone of one who gives everything
its trial. “Well, what about writing? What kind of writing?”

“I rather like,”—he suppressed something in his throat,—“I rather
like trying to write little stories.”

“Why, I made sure it was poetry!” said Agnes. “You’re just the boy for
poetry.”

“I had no idea you wrote. Would you let me see something? Then I could
judge.”

The author shook his head. “I don’t show it to any one. It isn’t
anything. I just try because it amuses me.”

“What is it about?”

“Silly nonsense.”

“Are you ever going to show it to any one?”

“I don’t think so.”

Mr. Pembroke did not reply, firstly, because the meringue he was eating
was, after all, Rickie’s; secondly, because it was gluey and stuck his
jaws together. Agnes observed that the writing was really a very good
idea: there was Rickie’s aunt,—she could push him.

“Aunt Emily never pushes any one; she says they always rebound and
crush her.”

“I only had the pleasure of seeing your aunt once. I should have
thought her a quite uncrushable person. But she would be sure to help
you.”

“I couldn’t show her anything. She’d think them even sillier than they
are.”

“Always running yourself down! There speaks the artist!”

“I’m not modest,” he said anxiously. “I just know they’re bad.”

Mr. Pembroke’s teeth were clear of meringue, and he could refrain no
longer. “My dear Rickie, your father and mother are dead, and you often
say your aunt takes no interest in you. Therefore your life depends on
yourself. Think it over carefully, but settle, and having once settled,
stick. If you think that this writing is practicable, and that you
could make your living by it—that you could, if needs be, support a
wife—then by all means write. But you must work. Work and drudge.
Begin at the bottom of the ladder and work upwards.”

Rickie’s head drooped. Any metaphor silenced him. He never thought of
replying that art is not a ladder—with a curate, as it were, on the
first rung, a rector on the second, and a bishop, still nearer heaven,
at the top. He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at
all, but a horseman, whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not
to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot, and
generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not
art, and cannot lead to it.

“Of course I don’t really think about writing,” he said, as he poured
the cold water into the coffee. “Even if my things ever were decent, I
don’t think the magazines would take them, and the magazines are one’s
only chance. I read somewhere, too, that Marie Corelli’s about the only
person who makes a thing out of literature. I’m certain it wouldn’t pay
me.”

“I never mentioned the word ‘pay,’” said Mr. Pembroke uneasily.

“You must not consider money. There are ideals too.”

“I have no ideals.”

“Rickie!” she exclaimed. “Horrible boy!”

“No, Agnes, I have no ideals.” Then he got very red, for it was a
phrase he had caught from Ansell, and he could not remember what came
next.

“The person who has no ideals,” she exclaimed, “is to be pitied.”

“I think so too,” said Mr. Pembroke, sipping his coffee. “Life without
an ideal would be like the sky without the sun.”

Rickie looked towards the night, wherein there now twinkled innumerable
stars—gods and heroes, virgins and brides, to whom the Greeks have
given their names.

“Life without an ideal—” repeated Mr. Pembroke, and then stopped, for
his mouth was full of coffee grounds. The same affliction had overtaken
Agnes. After a little jocose laughter they departed to their lodgings,
and Rickie, having seen them as far as the porter’s lodge, hurried,
singing as he went, to Ansell’s room, burst open the door, and said,
“Look here! Whatever do you mean by it?”

“By what?” Ansell was sitting alone with a piece of paper in front of
him. On it was a diagram—a circle inside a square, inside which was
again a square.

“By being so rude. You’re no gentleman, and I told her so.” He slammed
him on the head with a sofa cushion. “I’m certain one ought to be
polite, even to people who aren’t saved.” (“Not saved” was a phrase
they applied just then to those whom they did not like or intimately
know.) “And I believe she is saved. I never knew any one so always
good-tempered and kind. She’s been kind to me ever since I knew her. I
wish you’d heard her trying to stop her brother: you’d have certainly
come round. Not but what he was only being nice as well. But she is
really nice. And I thought she came into the room so beautifully. Do
you know—oh, of course, you despise music—but Anderson was playing
Wagner, and he’d just got to the part where they sing

    ‘Rheingold!
     Rheingold!’

and the sun strikes into the waters, and the music, which up to then
has so often been in E flat—”

“Goes into D sharp. I have not understood a single word, partly because
you talk as if your mouth was full of plums, partly because I don’t
know whom you’re talking about.” “Miss Pembroke—whom you saw.”

“I saw no one.”

“Who came in?”

“No one came in.”

“You’re an ass!” shrieked Rickie. “She came in. You saw her come in.
She and her brother have been to dinner.”

“You only think so. They were not really there.”

“But they stop till Monday.”

“You only think that they are stopping.”

“But—oh, look here, shut up! The girl like an empress—”

“I saw no empress, nor any girl, nor have you seen them.”

“Ansell, don’t rag.”

“Elliot, I never rag, and you know it. She was not really there.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Rickie exclaimed, “I’ve got you. You
say—or was it Tilliard?—no, _you_ say that the cow’s there. Well—there
these people are, then. Got you. Yah!”

“Did it never strike you that phenomena may be of two kinds: _one_,
those which have a real existence, such as the cow; _two_, those which
are the subjective product of a diseased imagination, and which, to our
destruction, we invest with the semblance of reality? If this never
struck you, let it strike you now.”

Rickie spoke again, but received no answer. He paced a little up
and down the sombre room. Then he sat on the edge of the table and
watched his clever friend draw within the square a circle, and within
the circle a square, and inside that another circle, and inside that
another square.

“Why will you do that?”

No answer.

“Are they real?”

“The inside one is—the one in the middle of everything, that there’s
never room enough to draw.”




II


A little this side of Madingley, to the left of the road, there is a
secluded dell, paved with grass and planted with fir-trees. It could
not have been worth a visit twenty years ago, for then it was only a
scar of chalk, and it is not worth a visit at the present day, for the
trees have grown too thick and choked it. But when Rickie was up, it
chanced to be the brief season of its romance, a season as brief for a
chalk-pit as a man—its divine interval between the bareness of boyhood
and the stuffiness of age. Rickie had discovered it in his second
term, when the January snows had melted and left fiords and lagoons of
clearest water between the inequalities of the floor. The place looked
as big as Switzerland or Norway—as indeed for the moment it was—and
he came upon it at a time when his life too was beginning to expand.
Accordingly the dell became for him a kind of church—a church where
indeed you could do anything you liked, but where anything you did
would be transfigured. Like the ancient Greeks, he could even laugh at
his holy place and leave it no less holy. He chatted gaily about it,
and about the pleasant thoughts with which it inspired him; he took
his friends there; he even took people whom he did not like. “_Procul
este, profani!_” exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to
it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love
the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if
he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would
attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed
with the aesthete, he would possibly not have introduced him. If the
dell was to bear any inscription, he would have liked it to be “This
way to Heaven,” painted on a sign-post by the high-road, and he did not
realize till later years that the number of visitors would not thereby
have sensibly increased.

On the blessed Monday that the Pembrokes left, he walked out here with
three friends. It was a day when the sky seemed enormous. One cloud, as
large as a continent, was voyaging near the sun, whilst other clouds
seemed anchored to the horizon, too lazy or too happy to move. The sky
itself was of the palest blue, paling to white where it approached the
earth; and the earth, brown, wet, and odorous, was engaged beneath it
on its yearly duty of decay. Rickie was open to the complexities of
autumn; he felt extremely tiny—extremely tiny and extremely important;
and perhaps the combination is as fair as any that exists. He hoped
that all his life he would never be peevish or unkind.

“Elliot is in a dangerous state,” said Ansell. They had reached the
dell, and had stood for some time in silence, each leaning against a
tree. It was too wet to sit down.

“How’s that?” asked Rickie, who had not known he was in any state at
all. He shut up Keats, whom he thought he had been reading, and slipped
him back into his coat-pocket. Scarcely ever was he without a book.

“He’s trying to like people.”

“Then he’s done for,” said Widdrington. “He’s dead.”

“He’s trying to like Hornblower.”

The others gave shrill agonized cries.

“He wants to bind the college together. He wants to link us to the
beefy set.”

“I do like Hornblower,” he protested. “I don’t try.”

“And Hornblower tries to like you.”

“That part doesn’t matter.”

“But he does try to like you. He tries not to despise you. It is
altogether a most public-spirited affair.”

“Tilliard started them,” said Widdrington. “Tilliard thinks it such a
pity the college should be split into sets.”

“Oh, Tilliard!” said Ansell, with much irritation. “But what can you
expect from a person who’s eternally beautiful? The other night we had
been discussing a long time, and suddenly the light was turned on.
Every one else looked a sight, as they ought. But there was Tilliard,
sitting neatly on a little chair, like an undersized god, with not a
curl crooked. I should say he will get into the Foreign Office.”

“Why are most of us so ugly?” laughed Rickie.

“It’s merely a sign of our salvation—merely another sign that the
college is split.”

“The college isn’t split,” cried Rickie, who got excited on this
subject with unfailing regularity. “The college is, and has been, and
always will be, one. What you call the beefy set aren’t a set at all.
They’re just the rowing people, and naturally they chiefly see each
other; but they’re always nice to me or to any one. Of course, they
think us rather asses, but it’s quite in a pleasant way.”

“That’s my whole objection,” said Ansell. “What right have they to
think us asses in a pleasant way? Why don’t they hate us? What right
has Hornblower to smack me on the back when I’ve been rude to him?”

“Well, what right have you to be rude to him?”

“Because I hate him. You think it is so splendid to hate no one. I
tell you it is a crime. You want to love every one equally, and that’s
worse than impossible—it’s wrong. When you denounce sets, you’re really
trying to destroy friendship.”

“I maintain,” said Rickie—it was a verb he clung to, in the hope that
it would lend stability to what followed—“I maintain that one can like
many more people than one supposes.”

“And I maintain that you hate many more people than you pretend.”

“I hate no one,” he exclaimed with extraordinary vehemence, and the
dell re-echoed that it hated no one.

“We are obliged to believe you,” said Widdrington, smiling a little;
“but we are sorry about it.”

“Not even your father?” asked Ansell.

Rickie was silent.

“Not even your father?”

The cloud above extended a great promontory across the sun. It only lay
there for a moment, yet that was enough to summon the lurking coldness
from the earth.

“Does he hate his father?” said Widdrington, who had not known. “Oh,
good!”

“But his father’s dead. He will say it doesn’t count.”

“Still, it’s something. Do you hate yours?”

Ansell did not reply. Rickie said: “I say, I wonder whether one ought
to talk like this?”

“About hating dead people?”

“Yes—”

“Did you hate your mother?” asked Widdrington.

Rickie turned crimson.

“I don’t see Hornblower’s such a rotter,” remarked the other man, whose
name was James.

“James, you are diplomatic,” said Ansell. “You are trying to tide over
an awkward moment. You can go.”

Widdrington was crimson too. In his wish to be sprightly he had used
words without thinking of their meanings. Suddenly he realized that
“father” and “mother” really meant father and mother—people whom he
had himself at home. He was very uncomfortable, and thought Rickie had
been rather queer. He too tried to revert to Hornblower, but Ansell
would not let him. The sun came out, and struck on the white ramparts
of the dell. Rickie looked straight at it. Then he said abruptly—

“I think I want to talk.”

“I think you do,” replied Ansell.

“Shouldn’t I be rather a fool if I went through Cambridge without
talking? It’s said never to come so easy again. All the people are dead
too. I can’t see why I shouldn’t tell you most things about my birth
and parentage and education.”

“Talk away. If you bore us, we have books.”

With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who
has no book will be obliged to listen to it.

                   •       •       •       •       •

Some people spend their lives in a suburb, and not for any urgent
reason. This had been the fate of Rickie. He had opened his eyes
to filmy heavens, and taken his first walk on asphalt. He had seen
civilization as a row of semi-detached villas, and society as a state
in which men do not know the men who live next door. He had himself
become part of the grey monotony that surrounds all cities. There was
no necessity for this—it was only rather convenient to his father.

Mr. Elliot was a barrister. In appearance he resembled his son, being
weakly and lame, with hollow little cheeks, a broad white band of
forehead, and stiff impoverished hair. His voice, which he did not
transmit, was very suave, with a fine command of cynical intonation. By
altering it ever so little he could make people wince, especially if
they were simple or poor. Nor did he transmit his eyes. Their peculiar
flatness, as if the soul looked through dirty window-panes, the
unkindness of them, the cowardice, the fear in them, were to trouble
the world no longer.

He married a girl whose voice was beautiful. There was no caress
in it yet all who heard it were soothed, as though the world held
some unexpected blessing. She called to her dogs one night over
invisible waters, and he, a tourist up on the bridge, thought “that
is extraordinarily adequate.” In time he discovered that her figure,
face, and thoughts were adequate also, and as she was not impossible
socially, he married her. “I have taken a plunge,” he told his family.
The family, hostile at first, had not a word to say when the woman was
introduced to them; and his sister declared that the plunge had been
taken from the opposite bank.

Things only went right for a little time. Though beautiful without and
within, Mrs. Elliot had not the gift of making her home beautiful; and
one day, when she bought a carpet for the dining-room that clashed,
he laughed gently, said he “really couldn’t,” and departed. Departure
is perhaps too strong a word. In Mrs. Elliot’s mouth it became, “My
husband has to sleep more in town.” He often came down to see them,
nearly always unexpectedly, and occasionally they went to see him.
“Father’s house,” as Rickie called it, only had three rooms, but these
were full of books and pictures and flowers; and the flowers, instead
of being squashed down into the vases as they were in mummy’s house,
rose gracefully from frames of lead which lay coiled at the bottom,
as doubtless the sea serpent has to lie, coiled at the bottom of the
sea. Once he was let to lift a frame out—only once, for he dropped
some water on a creton. “I think he’s going to have taste,” said Mr.
Elliot languidly. “It is quite possible,” his wife replied. She had not
taken off her hat and gloves, nor even pulled up her veil. Mr. Elliot
laughed, and soon afterwards another lady came in, and they—went away.

“Why does father always laugh?” asked Rickie in the evening when he and
his mother were sitting in the nursery.

“It is a way of your father’s.”

“Why does he always laugh at me? Am I so funny?” Then after a pause,
“You have no sense of humour, have you, mummy?”

Mrs. Elliot, who was raising a thread of cotton to her lips, held it
suspended in amazement.

“You told him so this afternoon. But I have seen you laugh.” He nodded
wisely. “I have seen you laugh ever so often. One day you were laughing
alone all down in the sweet peas.”

“Was I?”

“Yes. Were you laughing at me?”

“I was not thinking about you. Cotton, please—a reel of No. 50 white
from my chest of drawers. Left hand drawer. Now which is your left
hand?”

“The side my pocket is.”

“And if you had no pocket?”

“The side my bad foot is.”

“I meant you to say, ‘the side my heart is,’” said Mrs. Elliot, holding
up the duster between them. “Most of us—I mean all of us—can feel
on one side a little watch, that never stops ticking. So even if you
had no bad foot you would still know which is the left. No. 50 white,
please. No; I’ll get it myself.” For she had remembered that the dark
passage frightened him.

These were the outlines. Rickie filled them in with the slowness and
the accuracy of a child. He was never told anything, but he discovered
for himself that his father and mother did not love each other, and
that his mother was lovable. He discovered that Mr. Elliot had dubbed
him Rickie because he was rickety, that he took pleasure in alluding
to his son’s deformity, and was sorry that it was not more serious
than his own. Mr. Elliot had not one scrap of genius. He gathered the
pictures and the books and the flower-supports mechanically, not in
any impulse of love. He passed for a cultured man because he knew how
to select, and he passed for an unconventional man because he did not
select quite like other people. In reality he never did or said or
thought one single thing that had the slightest beauty or value. And in
time Rickie discovered this as well.

The boy grew up in great loneliness. He worshipped his mother, and
she was fond of him. But she was dignified and reticent, and pathos,
like tattle, was disgusting to her. She was afraid of intimacy, in
case it led to confidences and tears, and so all her life she held
her son at a little distance. Her kindness and unselfishness knew
no limits, but if he tried to be dramatic and thank her, she told
him not to be a little goose. And so the only person he came to know
at all was himself. He would play Halma against himself. He would
conduct solitary conversations, in which one part of him asked and
another part answered. It was an exciting game, and concluded with
the formula: “Good-bye. Thank you. I am glad to have met you. I hope
before long we shall enjoy another chat.” And then perhaps he would
sob for loneliness, for he would see real people—real brothers, real
friends—doing in warm life the things he had pretended. “Shall I ever
have a friend?” he demanded at the age of twelve. “I don’t see how.
They walk too fast. And a brother I shall never have.”

(“No loss,” interrupted Widdrington.

“But I shall never have one, and so I quite want one, even now.”)

When he was thirteen Mr. Elliot entered on his illness. The pretty
rooms in town would not do for an invalid, and so he came back to
his home. One of the first consequences was that Rickie was sent to
a public school. Mrs. Elliot did what she could, but she had no hold
whatever over her husband.

“He worries me,” he declared. “He’s a joke of which I have got tired.”

“Would it be possible to send him to a private tutor’s?”

“No,” said Mr. Elliot, who had all the money. “Coddling.”

“I agree that boys ought to rough it; but when a boy is lame and very
delicate, he roughs it sufficiently if he leaves home. Rickie can’t
play games. He doesn’t make friends. He isn’t brilliant. Thinking it
over, I feel that as it’s like this, we can’t ever hope to give him the
ordinary education. Perhaps you could think it over too.”

“No.”

“I am sure that things are best for him as they are. The day-school
knocks quite as many corners off him as he can stand. He hates it, but
it is good for him. A public school will not be good for him. It is too
rough. Instead of getting manly and hard, he will—”

“My head, please.”

Rickie departed in a state of bewildered misery, which was scarcely
ever to grow clearer.

Each holiday he found his father more irritable, and a little weaker.
Mrs. Elliot was quickly growing old. She had to manage the servants, to
hush the neighbouring children, to answer the correspondence, to paper
and re-paper the rooms—and all for the sake of a man whom she did not
like, and who did not conceal his dislike for her. One day she found
Rickie tearful, and said rather crossly, “Well, what is it this time?”

He replied, “Oh, mummy, I’ve seen your wrinkles—your grey hair—I’m
unhappy.”

Sudden tenderness overcame her, and she cried, “My darling, what does
it matter? Whatever does it matter now?”

He had never known her so emotional. Yet even better did he remember
another incident. Hearing high voices from his father’s room, he went
upstairs in the hope that the sound of his tread might stop them. Mrs.
Elliot burst open the door, and seeing him, exclaimed, “My dear! If you
please, he’s hit me.” She tried to laugh it off, but a few hours later
he saw the bruise which the stick of the invalid had raised upon his
mother’s hand.

God alone knows how far we are in the grip of our bodies. He alone can
judge how far the cruelty of Mr. Elliot was the outcome of extenuating
circumstances. But Mrs. Elliot could accurately judge of its extent.

At last he died. Rickie was now fifteen, and got off a whole week’s
school for the funeral. His mother was rather strange. She was much
happier, she looked younger, and her mourning was as unobtrusive as
convention permitted. All this he had expected. But she seemed to
be watching him, and to be extremely anxious for his opinion on any
subject—more especially on his father. Why? At last he saw that she
was trying to establish confidence between them. But confidence cannot
be established in a moment. They were both shy. The habit of years
was upon them, and they alluded to the death of Mr. Elliot as an
irreparable loss.

“Now that your father has gone, things will be very different.”

“Shall we be poorer, mother?”

“No.”

“Oh!”

“But naturally things will be very different.”

“Yes, naturally.”

“For instance, your poor father liked being near London, but I almost
think we might move. Would you like that?”

“Of course, mummy.” He looked down at the ground. He was not accustomed
to being consulted, and it bewildered him.

“Perhaps you might like quite a different life better?”

He giggled.

“It’s a little difficult for me,” said Mrs. Elliot, pacing vigorously
up and down the room, and more and more did her black dress seem a
mockery. “In some ways you ought to be consulted: nearly all the money
is left to you, as you must hear some time or other. But in other ways
you’re only a boy. What am I to do?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, appearing more helpless and unhelpful than
he really was.

“For instance, would you like me to arrange things exactly as I like?”

“Oh do!” he exclaimed, thinking this a most brilliant suggestion.

“The very nicest thing of all.” And he added, in his half-pedantic,
half-pleasing way, “I shall be as wax in your hands, mamma.”

She smiled. “Very well, darling. You shall be.” And she pressed him
lovingly, as though she would mould him into something beautiful.

For the next few days great preparations were in the air. She went to
see his father’s sister, the gifted and vivacious Aunt Emily. They were
to live in the country—somewhere right in the country, with grass and
trees up to the door, and birds singing everywhere, and a tutor. For he
was not to go back to school. Unbelievable! He was never to go back to
school, and the head-master had written saying that he regretted the
step, but that possibly it was a wise one.

It was raw weather, and Mrs. Elliot watched over him with ceaseless
tenderness. It seemed as if she could not do too much to shield him and
to draw him nearer to her.

“Put on your greatcoat, dearest,” she said to him.

“I don’t think I want it,” answered Rickie, remembering that he was now
fifteen.

“The wind is bitter. You ought to put it on.”

“But it’s so heavy.”

“Do put it on, dear.”

He was not very often irritable or rude, but he answered, “Oh, I shan’t
catch cold. I do wish you wouldn’t keep on bothering.” He did not
catch cold, but while he was out his mother died. She only survived
her husband eleven days, a coincidence which was recorded on their
tombstone.

                   •       •       •       •       •

Such, in substance, was the story which Rickie told his friends as
they stood together in the shelter of the dell. The green bank at the
entrance hid the road and the world, and now, as in spring, they could
see nothing but snow-white ramparts and the evergreen foliage of the
firs. Only from time to time would a beech leaf flutter in from the
woods above, to comment on the waning year, and the warmth and radiance
of the sun would vanish behind a passing cloud.

About the greatcoat he did not tell them, for he could not have spoken
of it without tears.




III


Mr. Ansell, a provincial draper of moderate prosperity, ought by
rights to have been classed not with the cow, but with those phenomena
that are not really there. But his son, with pardonable illogicality,
excepted him. He never suspected that his father might be the
subjective product of a diseased imagination. From his earliest years
he had taken him for granted, as a most undeniable and lovable fact.
To be born one thing and grow up another—Ansell had accomplished
this without weakening one of the ties that bound him to his home.
The rooms above the shop still seemed as comfortable, the garden
behind it as gracious, as they had seemed fifteen years before, when
he would sit behind Miss Appleblossom’s central throne, and she, like
some allegorical figure, would send the change and receipted bills
spinning away from her in little boxwood balls. At first the young man
had attributed these happy relations to his own tact. But in time he
perceived that the tact was all on the side of his father. Mr. Ansell
was not merely a man of some education; he had what no education can
bring—the power of detecting what is important. Like many fathers, he
had spared no expense over his boy,—he had borrowed money to start
him at a rapacious and fashionable private school; he had sent him to
tutors; he had sent him to Cambridge. But he knew that all this was
not the important thing. The important thing was freedom. The boy must
use his education as he chose, and if he paid his father back it would
certainly not be in his own coin. So when Stewart said, “At Cambridge,
can I read for the Moral Science Tripos?” Mr. Ansell had only replied,
“This philosophy—do you say that it lies behind everything?”

“Yes, I think so. It tries to discover what is good and true.”

“Then, my boy, you had better read as much of it as you can.”

And a year later: “I’d like to take up this philosophy seriously, but I
don’t feel justified.”

“Why not?”

“Because it brings in no return. I think I’m a great philosopher, but
then all philosophers think that, though they don’t dare to say so.
But, however great I am, I shan’t earn money. Perhaps I shan’t ever be
able to keep myself. I shan’t even get a good social position. You’ve
only to say one word, and I’ll work for the Civil Service. I’m good
enough to get in high.”

Mr. Ansell liked money and social position. But he knew that there is
a more important thing, and replied, “You must take up this philosophy
seriously, I think.”

“Another thing—there are the girls.”

“There is enough money now to get Mary and Maud as good husbands as
they deserve.” And Mary and Maud took the same view. It was in this
plebeian household that Rickie spent part of the Christmas vacation.
His own home, such as it was, was with the Silts, needy cousins of
his father’s, and combined to a peculiar degree the restrictions of
hospitality with the discomforts of a boarding-house. Such pleasure as
he had outside Cambridge was in the homes of his friends, and it was
a particular joy and honour to visit Ansell, who, though as free from
social snobbishness as most of us will ever manage to be, was rather
careful when he drove up to the facade of his shop.

“I like our new lettering,” he said thoughtfully. The words “Stewart
Ansell” were repeated again and again along the High Street—curly gold
letters that seemed to float in tanks of glazed chocolate.

“Rather!” said Rickie. But he wondered whether one of the bonds that
kept the Ansell family united might not be their complete absence of
taste—a surer bond by far than the identity of it. And he wondered
this again when he sat at tea opposite a long row of crayons—Stewart
as a baby, Stewart as a small boy with large feet, Stewart as a larger
boy with smaller feet, Mary reading a book whose leaves were as thick
as eiderdowns. And yet again did he wonder it when he woke with a
gasp in the night to find a harp in luminous paint throbbing and
glowering at him from the adjacent wall. “Watch and pray” was written
on the harp, and until Rickie hung a towel over it the exhortation was
partially successful.

It was a very happy visit. Miss Appleblosssom—who now acted as
housekeeper—had met him before, during her never-forgotten expedition
to Cambridge, and her admiration of University life was as shrill and
as genuine now as it had been then. The girls at first were a little
aggressive, for on his arrival he had been tired, and Maud had taken it
for haughtiness, and said he was looking down on them. But this passed.
They did not fall in love with him, nor he with them, but a morning was
spent very pleasantly in snow-balling in the back garden. Ansell was
rather different to what he was in Cambridge, but to Rickie not less
attractive. And there was a curious charm in the hum of the shop, which
swelled into a roar if one opened the partition door on a market-day.

“Listen to your money!” said Rickie. “I wish I could hear mine. I wish
my money was alive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Mine’s dead money. It’s come to me through about six dead
people—silently.”

“Getting a little smaller and a little more respectable each time, on
account of the death-duties.”

“It needed to get respectable.”

“Why? Did your people, too, once keep a shop?”

“Oh, not as bad as that! They only swindled. About a hundred years ago
an Elliot did something shady and founded the fortunes of our house.”

“I never knew any one so relentless to his ancestors. You make up for
your soapiness towards the living.”

“You’d be relentless if you’d heard the Silts, as I have, talk about ‘a
fortune, small perhaps, but unsoiled by trade!’ Of course Aunt Emily is
rather different. Oh, goodness me! I’ve forgotten my aunt. She lives
not so far. I shall have to call on her.”

Accordingly he wrote to Mrs. Failing, and said he should like to pay
his respects. He told her about the Ansells, and so worded the letter
that she might reasonably have sent an invitation to his friend.

She replied that she was looking forward to their _tête-à-tête_.

“You mustn’t go round by the trains,” said Mr. Ansell. “It means
changing at Salisbury. By the road it’s no great way. Stewart shall
drive you over Salisbury Plain, and fetch you too.”

“There’s too much snow,” said Ansell.

“Then the girls shall take you in their sledge.”

“That I will,” said Maud, who was not unwilling to see the inside of
Cadover. But Rickie went round by the trains.

“We have all missed you,” said Ansell, when he returned. “There is a
general feeling that you are no nuisance, and had better stop till the
end of the vac.”

This he could not do. He was bound for Christmas to the Silts—“as a
_real_ guest,” Mrs. Silt had written, underlining the word “real”
twice. And after Christmas he must go to the Pembrokes.

“These are no reasons. The only real reason for doing a thing is
because you want to do it. I think the talk about ‘engagements’ is
cant.”

“I think perhaps it is,” said Rickie. But he went. Never had the turkey
been so athletic, or the plum-pudding tied into its cloth so tightly.
Yet he knew that both these symbols of hilarity had cost money, and
it went to his heart when Mr. Silt said in a hungry voice, “Have you
thought at all of what you want to be? No? Well, why should you? You
have no need to be anything.” And at dessert: “I wonder who Cadover
goes to? I expect money will follow money. It always does.” It was with
a guilty feeling of relief that he left for the Pembrokes’.

The Pembrokes lived in an adjacent suburb, or rather “sububurb,”—the
tract called Sawston, celebrated for its public school. Their style of
life, however, was not particularly suburban. Their house was small and
its name was Shelthorpe, but it had an air about it which suggested
a certain amount of money and a certain amount of taste. There were
decent water-colours in the drawing-room. Madonnas of acknowledged
merit hung upon the stairs. A replica of the Hermes of Praxiteles—of
course only the bust—stood in the hall with a real palm behind it.
Agnes, in her slap-dash way, was a good housekeeper, and kept the
pretty things well dusted. It was she who insisted on the strip of
brown holland that led diagonally from the front door to the door of
Herbert’s study: boys’ grubby feet should not go treading on her Indian
square. It was she who always cleaned the picture-frames and washed the
bust and the leaves of the palm. In short, if a house could speak—and
sometimes it does speak more clearly than the people who live in
it—the house of the Pembrokes would have said, “I am not quite like
other houses, yet I am perfectly comfortable. I contain works of art
and a microscope and books. But I do not live for any of these things
or suffer them to disarrange me. I live for myself and for the greater
houses that shall come after me. Yet in me neither the cry of money nor
the cry for money shall ever be heard.”

Mr. Pembroke was at the station. He did better as a host than as a
guest, and welcomed the young man with real friendliness.

“We were all coming, but Gerald has strained his ankle slightly, and
wants to keep quiet, as he is playing next week in a match. And,
needless to say, that explains the absence of my sister.”

“Gerald Dawes?”

“Yes; he’s with us. I’m so glad you’ll meet again.”

“So am I,” said Rickie with extreme awkwardness. “Does he remember me?”

“Vividly.”

Vivid also was Rickie’s remembrance of him.

“A splendid fellow,” asserted Mr. Pembroke.

“I hope that Agnes is well.”

“Thank you, yes; she is well. And I think you’re looking more like
other people yourself.”

“I’ve been having a very good time with a friend.”

“Indeed. That’s right. Who was that?”

Rickie had a young man’s reticence. He generally spoke of “a friend,”
“a person I know,” “a place I was at.” When the book of life is
opening, our readings are secret, and we are unwilling to give chapter
and verse. Mr. Pembroke, who was half way through the volume, and had
skipped or forgotten the earlier pages, could not understand Rickie’s
hesitation, nor why with such awkwardness he should pronounce the
harmless dissyllable “Ansell.”

“Ansell? Wasn’t that the pleasant fellow who asked us to lunch?”

“No. That was Anderson, who keeps below. You didn’t see Ansell. The
ones who came to breakfast were Tilliard and Hornblower.”

“Of course. And since then you have been with the Silts. How are they?”

“Very well, thank you. They want to be remembered to you.”

The Pembrokes had formerly lived near the Elliots, and had shown great
kindness to Rickie when his parents died. They were thus rather in the
position of family friends.

“Please remember us when you write.” He added, almost roguishly,
“The Silts are kindness itself. All the same, it must be just a
little—dull, we thought, and we thought that you might like a change.
And of course we are delighted to have you besides. That goes without
saying.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Rickie, who had accepted the invitation
because he felt he ought to.

“Not a bit. And you mustn’t expect us to be otherwise than quiet on the
holidays. There is a library of a sort, as you know, and you will find
Gerald a splendid fellow.”

“Will they be married soon?”

“Oh no!” whispered Mr. Pembroke, shutting his eyes, as if Rickie had
made some terrible _faux pas_. “It will be a very long engagement. He
must make his way first. I have seen such endless misery result from
people marrying before they have made their way.”

“Yes. That is so,” said Rickie despondently, thinking of the Silts.

“It’s a sad unpalatable truth,” said Mr. Pembroke, thinking that the
despondency might be personal, “but one must accept it. My sister and
Gerald, I am thankful to say, have accepted it, though naturally it has
been a little pill.”

Their cab lurched round the corner as he spoke, and the two patients
came in sight. Agnes was leaning over the creosoted garden-gate, and
behind her there stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek
athlete and the face of an English one. He was fair and cleanshaven,
and his colourless hair was cut rather short. The sun was in his eyes,
and they, like his mouth, seemed scarcely more than slits in his
healthy skin. Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.
Round his neck went an up-and-down collar and a mauve-and-gold tie,
and the rest of his limbs were hidden by a grey lounge suit, carefully
creased in the right places.

“Lovely! Lovely!” cried Agnes, banging on the gate, “Your train must
have been to the minute.”

“Hullo!” said the athlete, and vomited with the greeting a cloud of
tobacco-smoke. It must have been imprisoned in his mouth some time, for
no pipe was visible.

“Hullo!” returned Rickie, laughing violently. They shook hands.

“Where are you going, Rickie?” asked Agnes. “You aren’t grubby. Why
don’t you stop? Gerald, get the large wicker-chair. Herbert has
letters, but we can sit here till lunch. It’s like spring.”

The garden of Shelthorpe was nearly all in front an unusual and
pleasant arrangement. The front gate and the servants’ entrance were
both at the side, and in the remaining space the gardener had contrived
a little lawn where one could sit concealed from the road by a fence,
from the neighbour by a fence, from the house by a tree, and from the
path by a bush.

“This is the lovers’ bower,” observed Agnes, sitting down on the bench.
Rickie stood by her till the chair arrived.

“Are you smoking before lunch?” asked Mr. Dawes.

“No, thank you. I hardly ever smoke.”

“No vices. Aren’t you at Cambridge now?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your college?”

Rickie told him.

“Do you know Carruthers?”

“Rather!”

“I mean A. P. Carruthers, who got his socker blue.”

“Rather! He’s secretary to the college musical society.”

“A. P. Carruthers?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Dawes seemed offended. He tapped on his teeth, and remarked that
the weather had no business to be so warm in winter. “But it was
fiendish before Christmas,” said Agnes.

He frowned, and asked, “Do you know a man called Gerrish?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

“Do you know James?”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s my year too. He got a blue for hockey his second term.”

“I know nothing about the ’Varsity.”

Rickie winced at the abbreviation “’Varsity.” It was at that time the
proper thing to speak of “the University.”

“I haven’t the time,” pursued Mr. Dawes.

“No, no,” said Rickie politely.

“I had the chance of being an Undergrad, myself, and, by Jove, I’m
thankful I didn’t!”

“Why?” asked Agnes, for there was a pause.

“Puts you back in your profession. Men who go there first, before the
Army, start hopelessly behind. The same with the Stock Exchange or
Painting. I know men in both, and they’ve never caught up the time they
lost in the ’Varsity—unless, of course, you turn parson.”

“I love Cambridge,” said she. “All those glorious buildings, and every
one so happy and running in and out of each other’s rooms all day long.”

“That might make an Undergrad happy, but I beg leave to state it
wouldn’t me. I haven’t four years to throw away for the sake of being
called a ’Varsity man and hobnobbing with Lords.”

Rickie was prepared to find his old schoolfellow ungrammatical and
bumptious, but he was not prepared to find him peevish. Athletes,
he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal
if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you,
and then went on their way rejoicing. For this, Rickie thought,
there is something to be said: he had escaped the sin of despising
the physically strong—a sin against which the physically weak must
guard. But here was Dawes returning again and again to the subject
of the University, full of transparent jealousy and petty spite,
nagging, nagging, nagging, like a maiden lady who has not been invited
to a tea-party. Rickie wondered whether, after all, Ansell and the
extremists might not be right, and bodily beauty and strength be signs
of the soul’s damnation.

He glanced at Agnes. She was writing down some orderings for the
tradespeople on a piece of paper. Her handsome face was intent on the
work. The bench on which she and Gerald were sitting had no back,
but she sat as straight as a dart. He, though strong enough to sit
straight, did not take the trouble.

“Why don’t they talk to each other?” thought Rickie.

“Gerald, give this paper to the cook.”

“I can give it to the other slavey, can’t I?”

“She’d be dressing.”

“Well, there’s Herbert.”

“He’s busy. Oh, you know where the kitchen is. Take it to the cook.”

He disappeared slowly behind the tree.

“What do you think of him?” she immediately asked. He murmured civilly.

“Has he changed since he was a schoolboy?”

“In a way.”

“Do tell me all about him. Why won’t you?”

She might have seen a flash of horror pass over Rickie’s face. The
horror disappeared, for, thank God, he was now a man, whom civilization
protects. But he and Gerald had met, as it were, behind the scenes,
before our decorous drama opens, and there the elder boy had done
things to him—absurd things, not worth chronicling separately. An
apple-pie bed is nothing; pinches, kicks, boxed ears, twisted arms,
pulled hair, ghosts at night, inky books, befouled photographs, amount
to very little by themselves. But let them be united and continuous,
and you have a hell that no grown-up devil can devise. Between Rickie
and Gerald there lay a shadow that darkens life more often than we
suppose. The bully and his victim never quite forget their first
relations. They meet in clubs and country houses, and clap one another
on the back; but in both the memory is green of a more strenuous day,
when they were boys together.

He tried to say, “He was the right kind of boy, and I was the wrong
kind.” But Cambridge would not let him smooth the situation over
by self-belittlement. If he had been the wrong kind of boy, Gerald
had been a worse kind. He murmured, “We are different, very,” and
Miss Pembroke, perhaps suspecting something, asked no more. But
she kept to the subject of Mr. Dawes, humorously depreciating her
lover and discussing him without reverence. Rickie laughed, but felt
uncomfortable. When people were engaged, he felt that they should be
outside criticism. Yet here he was criticizing. He could not help it.
He was dragged in.

“I hope his ankle is better.”

“Never was bad. He’s always fussing over something.”

“He plays next week in a match, I think Herbert says.”

“I dare say he does.”

“Shall we be going?”

“Pray go if you like. I shall stop at home. I’ve had enough of cold
feet.”

It was all very colourless and odd.

Gerald returned, saying, “I can’t stand your cook. What’s she want to
ask me questions for? I can’t stand talking to servants. I say, ‘If I
speak to you, well and good’—and it’s another thing besides if she
were pretty.”

“Well, I hope our ugly cook will have lunch ready in a minute,” said
Agnes. “We’re frightfully unpunctual this morning, and I daren’t say
anything, because it was the same yesterday, and if I complain again
they might leave. Poor Rickie must be starved.”

“Why, the Silts gave me all these sandwiches and I’ve never eaten them.
They always stuff one.”

“And you thought you’d better, eh?” said Mr. Dawes, “in case you
weren’t stuffed here.”

Miss Pembroke, who house-kept somewhat economically, looked annoyed.

The voice of Mr. Pembroke was now heard calling from the house,
“Frederick! Frederick! My dear boy, pardon me. It was an important
letter about the Church Defence, otherwise— Come in and see your room.”

He was glad to quit the little lawn. He had learnt too much there. It
was dreadful: they did not love each other. More dreadful even than the
case of his father and mother, for they, until they married, had got on
pretty well. But this man was already rude and brutal and cold: he was
still the school bully who twisted up the arms of little boys, and ran
pins into them at chapel, and struck them in the stomach when they were
swinging on the horizontal bar. Poor Agnes; why ever had she done it?
Ought not somebody to interfere?

He had forgotten his sandwiches, and went back to get them.

Gerald and Agnes were locked in each other’s arms.

He only looked for a moment, but the sight burnt into his brain. The
man’s grip was the stronger. He had drawn the woman on to his knee, was
pressing her, with all his strength, against him. Already her hands
slipped off him, and she whispered, “Don’t you hurt—” Her face had no
expression. It stared at the intruder and never saw him. Then her lover
kissed it, and immediately it shone with mysterious beauty, like some
star.

Rickie limped away without the sandwiches, crimson and afraid. He
thought, “Do such things actually happen?” and he seemed to be looking
down coloured valleys. Brighter they glowed, till gods of pure flame
were born in them, and then he was looking at pinnacles of virgin snow.
While Mr. Pembroke talked, the riot of fair images increased.

They invaded his being and lit lamps at unsuspected shrines. Their
orchestra commenced in that suburban house, where he had to stand aside
for the maid to carry in the luncheon. Music flowed past him like a
river. He stood at the springs of creation and heard the primeval
monotony. Then an obscure instrument gave out a little phrase.

The river continued unheeding. The phrase was repeated and a listener
might know it was a fragment of the Tune of tunes. Nobler instruments
accepted it, the clarionet protected, the brass encouraged, and it rose
to the surface to the whisper of violins. In full unison was Love born,
flame of the flame, flushing the dark river beneath him and the virgin
snows above. His wings were infinite, his youth eternal; the sun was
a jewel on his finger as he passed it in benediction over the world.
Creation, no longer monotonous, acclaimed him, in widening melody, in
brighter radiances. Was Love a column of fire? Was he a torrent of
song? Was he greater than either—the touch of a man on a woman?

It was the merest accident that Rickie had not been disgusted. But this
he could not know.

Mr. Pembroke, when he called the two dawdlers into lunch, was aware of
a hand on his arm and a voice that murmured, “Don’t—they may be happy.”

He stared, and struck the gong. To its music they approached, priest
and high priestess.

“Rickie, can I give these sandwiches to the boot boy?” said the one.
“He would love them.”

“The gong! Be quick! The gong!”

“Are you smoking before lunch?” said the other.

But they had got into heaven, and nothing could get them out of it.
Others might think them surly or prosaic. He knew. He could remember
every word they spoke. He would treasure every motion, every glance of
either, and so in time to come, when the gates of heaven had shut, some
faint radiance, some echo of wisdom might remain with him outside.

As a matter of fact, he saw them very little during his visit. He
checked himself because he was unworthy. What right had he to pry, even
in the spirit, upon their bliss? It was no crime to have seen them
on the lawn. It would be a crime to go to it again. He tried to keep
himself and his thoughts away, not because he was ascetic, but because
they would not like it if they knew. This behaviour of his suited them
admirably. And when any gracious little thing occurred to them—any
little thing that his sympathy had contrived and allowed—they put it
down to chance or to each other.

So the lovers fall into the background. They are part of the distant
sunrise, and only the mountains speak to them. Rickie talks to Mr.
Pembroke, amidst the unlit valleys of our over-habitable world.




IV


Sawston School had been founded by a tradesman in the seventeenth
century. It was then a tiny grammar-school in a tiny town, and the
City Company who governed it had to drive half a day through the woods
and heath on the occasion of their annual visit. In the twentieth
century they still drove, but only from the railway station; and
found themselves not in a tiny town, nor yet in a large one, but
amongst innumerable residences, detached and semi-detached, which
had gathered round the school. For the intentions of the founder had
been altered, or at all events amplified, instead of educating the
“poore of my home,” he now educated the upper classes of England.
The change had taken place not so very far back. Till the nineteenth
century the grammar-school was still composed of day scholars from the
neighbourhood. Then two things happened. Firstly, the school’s property
rose in value, and it became rich. Secondly, for no obvious reason, it
suddenly emitted a quantity of bishops. The bishops, like the stars
from a Roman candle, were all colours, and flew in all directions,
some high, some low, some to distant colonies, one into the Church
of Rome. But many a father traced their course in the papers; many a
mother wondered whether her son, if properly ignited, might not burn
as bright; many a family moved to the place where living and education
were so cheap, where day-boys were not looked down upon, and where
the orthodox and the up-to-date were said to be combined. The school
doubled its numbers. It built new class-rooms, laboratories and a
gymnasium. It dropped the prefix “Grammar.” It coaxed the sons of the
local tradesmen into a new foundation, the “Commercial School,” built
a couple of miles away. And it started boarding-houses. It had not the
gracious antiquity of Eton or Winchester, nor, on the other hand, had
it a conscious policy like Lancing, Wellington, and other purely modern
foundations. Where traditions served, it clung to them. Where new
departures seemed desirable, they were made. It aimed at producing the
average Englishman, and, to a very great extent, it succeeded.

Here Mr. Pembroke passed his happy and industrious life. His technical
position was that of master to a form low down on the Modern Side.
But his work lay elsewhere. He organized. If no organization existed,
he would create one. If one did exist, he would modify it. “An
organization,” he would say, “is after all not an end in itself. It
must contribute to a movement.” When one good custom seemed likely to
corrupt the school, he was ready with another; he believed that without
innumerable customs there was no safety, either for boys or men.

Perhaps he is right, and always will be right. Perhaps each of us
would go to ruin if for one short hour we acted as we thought fit, and
attempted the service of perfect freedom. The school caps, with their
elaborate symbolism, were his; his the many-tinted bathing-drawers,
that showed how far a boy could swim; his the hierarchy of jerseys and
blazers. It was he who instituted Bounds, and call, and the two sorts
of exercise-paper, and the three sorts of caning, and “The Sawtonian,”
a bi-terminal magazine. His plump finger was in every pie. The dome of
his skull, mild but impressive, shone at every master’s meeting. He was
generally acknowledged to be the coming man.

His last achievement had been the organization of the day-boys. They
had been left too much to themselves, and were weak in _esprit de
corps_; they were apt to regard home, not school, as the most important
thing in their lives. Moreover, they got out of their parents’ hands;
they did their preparation any time and some times anyhow. They shirked
games, they were out at all hours, they ate what they should not, they
smoked, they bicycled on the asphalt. Now all was over. Like boarders,
they were to be in at 7:15 P.M., and were not allowed out after unless
with a written order from their parent or guardian; they, too, must
work at fixed hours in the evening, and before breakfast next morning
from 7 to 8. Games were compulsory. They must not go to parties in term
time. They must keep to bounds. Of course the reform was not complete.
It was impossible to control the dieting, though, on a printed
circular, day-parents were implored to provide simple food. And it is
also believed that some mothers disobeyed the rule about preparation,
and allowed their sons to do all the work over-night and have a longer
sleep in the morning. But the gulf between day-boys and boarders was
considerably lessened, and grew still narrower when the day-boys too
were organized into a House with house-master and colours of their own.
“Through the House,” said Mr. Pembroke, “one learns patriotism for
the school, just as through the school one learns patriotism for the
country. Our only course, therefore, is to organize the day-boys into a
House.” The headmaster agreed, as he often did, and the new community
was formed. Mr. Pembroke, to avoid the tongues of malice, had refused
the post of house-master for himself, saying to Mr. Jackson, who taught
the sixth, “You keep too much in the background. Here is a chance for
you.” But this was a failure. Mr. Jackson, a scholar and a student,
neither felt nor conveyed any enthusiasm, and when confronted with his
House, would say, “Well, I don’t know what we’re all here for. Now I
should think you’d better go home to your mothers.” He returned to his
background, and next term Mr. Pembroke was to take his place.

Such were the themes on which Mr. Pembroke discoursed to Rickie’s civil
ear. He showed him the school, and the library, and the subterranean
hall where the day-boys might leave their coats and caps, and where,
on festal occasions, they supped. He showed him Mr. Jackson’s pretty
house, and whispered, “Were it not for his brilliant intellect, it
would be a case of Quickmarch!” He showed him the racquet-court,
happily completed, and the chapel, unhappily still in need of funds.
Rickie was impressed, but then he was impressed by everything. Of
course a House of day-boys seemed a little shadowy after Agnes and
Gerald, but he imparted some reality even to that.

“The racquet-court,” said Mr. Pembroke, “is most gratifying. We never
expected to manage it this year. But before the Easter holidays every
boy received a subscription card, and was given to understand that he
must collect thirty shillings. You will scarcely believe me, but they
nearly all responded. Next term there was a dinner in the great school,
and all who had collected, not thirty shillings, but as much as a
pound, were invited to it—for naturally one was not precise for a few
shillings, the response being the really valuable thing. Practically
the whole school had to come.”

“They must enjoy the court tremendously.”

“Ah, it isn’t used very much. Racquets, as I daresay you know, is
rather an expensive game. Only the wealthier boys play—and I’m
sorry to say that it is not of our wealthier boys that we are always
the proudest. But the point is that no public school can be called
first-class until it has one. They are building them right and left.”

“And now you must finish the chapel?”

“Now we must complete the chapel.” He paused reverently, and said, “And
here is a fragment of the original building.” Rickie at once had a rush
of sympathy. He, too, looked with reverence at the morsel of Jacobean
brickwork, ruddy and beautiful amidst the machine-squared stones of the
modern apse. The two men, who had so little in common, were thrilled
with patriotism. They rejoiced that their country was great, noble, and
old.

“Thank God I’m English,” said Rickie suddenly.

“Thank Him indeed,” said Mr. Pembroke, laying a hand on his back.

“We’ve been nearly as great as the Greeks, I do believe. Greater, I’m
sure, than the Italians, though they did get closer to beauty. Greater
than the French, though we do take all their ideas. I can’t help
thinking that England is immense. English literature certainly.”

Mr. Pembroke removed his hand. He found such patriotism somewhat
craven. Genuine patriotism comes only from the heart. It knows no
parleying with reason. English ladies will declare abroad that there
are no fogs in London, and Mr. Pembroke, though he would not go to
this, was only restrained by the certainty of being found out. On this
occasion he remarked that the Greeks lacked spiritual insight, and had
a low conception of woman.

“As to women—oh! there they were dreadful,” said Rickie, leaning his
hand on the chapel. “I realize that more and more. But as to spiritual
insight, I don’t quite like to say; and I find Plato too difficult, but
I know men who don’t, and I fancy they mightn’t agree with you.”

“Far be it from me to disparage Plato. And for philosophy as a whole I
have the greatest respect. But it is the crown of a man’s education,
not the foundation. Myself, I read it with the utmost profit, but I
have known endless trouble result from boys who attempt it too soon,
before they were set.”

“But if those boys had died first,” cried Rickie with sudden vehemence,
“without knowing what there is to know—”

“Or isn’t to know!” said Mr. Pembroke sarcastically.

“Or what there isn’t to know. Exactly. That’s it.”

“My dear Rickie, what do you mean? If an old friend may be frank,
you are talking great rubbish.” And, with a few well-worn formulae,
he propped up the young man’s orthodoxy. The props were unnecessary.
Rickie had his own equilibrium. Neither the Revivalism that assails
a boy at about the age of fifteen, nor the scepticism that meets him
five years later, could sway him from his allegiance to the church
into which he had been born. But his equilibrium was personal, and the
secret of it useless to others. He desired that each man should find
his own.

“What does philosophy do?” the propper continued. “Does it make a man
happier in life? Does it make him die more peacefully? I fancy that in
the long-run Herbert Spencer will get no further than the rest of us.
Ah, Rickie! I wish you could move among the school boys, and see their
healthy contempt for all they cannot touch!” Here he was going too far,
and had to add, “Their spiritual capacities, of course, are another
matter.” Then he remembered the Greeks, and said, “Which proves my
original statement.”

Submissive signs, as of one propped, appeared in Rickie’s face.
Mr. Pembroke then questioned him about the men who found Plato not
difficult. But here he kept silence, patting the school chapel gently,
and presently the conversation turned to topics with which they were
both more competent to deal.

“Does Agnes take much interest in the school?”

“Not as much as she did. It is the result of her engagement. If our
naughty soldier had not carried her off, she might have made an ideal
schoolmaster’s wife. I often chaff him about it, for he a little
despises the intellectual professions. Natural, perfectly natural. How
can a man who faces death feel as we do towards _mensa_ or _tupto_?”

“Perfectly true. Absolutely true.”

Mr. Pembroke remarked to himself that Frederick was improving.

“If a man shoots straight and hits straight and speaks straight, if his
heart is in the right place, if he has the instincts of a Christian
and a gentleman—then I, at all events, ask no better husband for my
sister.”

“How could you get a better?” he cried. “Do you remember the thing in
‘The Clouds’?” And he quoted, as well as he could, from the invitation
of the Dikaios Logos, the description of the young Athenian, perfect
in body, placid in mind, who neglects his work at the Bar and trains
all day among the woods and meadows, with a garland on his head and
a friend to set the pace; the scent of new leaves is upon them; they
rejoice in the freshness of spring; over their heads the plane-tree
whispers to the elm, perhaps the most glorious invitation to the
brainless life that has ever been given.

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Pembroke, who did not want a brother-in-law out of
Aristophanes. Nor had he got one, for Mr. Dawes would not have bothered
over the garland or noticed the spring, and would have complained that
the friend ran too slowly or too fast.

“And as for her—!” But he could think of no classical parallel for
Agnes. She slipped between examples. A kindly Medea, a Cleopatra with
a sense of duty—these suggested her a little. She was not born in
Greece, but came overseas to it—a dark, intelligent princess. With all
her splendour, there were hints of splendour still hidden—hints of an
older, richer, and more mysterious land. He smiled at the idea of her
being “not there.” Ansell, clever as he was, had made a bad blunder.
She had more reality than any other woman in the world.

Mr. Pembroke looked pleased at this boyish enthusiasm. He was fond
of his sister, though he knew her to be full of faults. “Yes, I envy
her,” he said. “She has found a worthy helpmeet for life’s journey,
I do believe. And though they chafe at the long engagement, it is a
blessing in disguise. They learn to know each other thoroughly before
contracting more intimate ties.”

Rickie did not assent. The length of the engagement seemed to him
unspeakably cruel. Here were two people who loved each other, and they
could not marry for years because they had no beastly money. Not all
Herbert’s pious skill could make this out a blessing. It was bad enough
being “so rich” at the Silts; here he was more ashamed of it than ever.
In a few weeks he would come of age and his money be his own. What a
pity things were so crookedly arranged. He did not want money, or at
all events he did not want so much.

“Suppose,” he meditated, for he became much worried over
this,—“suppose I had a hundred pounds a year less than I shall have.
Well, I should still have enough. I don’t want anything but food,
lodging, clothes, and now and then a railway fare. I haven’t any
tastes. I don’t collect anything or play games. Books are nice to
have, but after all there is Mudie’s, or if it comes to that, the Free
Library. Oh, my profession! I forgot I shall have a profession. Well,
that will leave me with more to spare than ever.” And he supposed
away till he lost touch with the world and with what it permits, and
committed an unpardonable sin.

It happened towards the end of his visit—another airless day of that
mild January. Mr. Dawes was playing against a scratch team of cads, and
had to go down to the ground in the morning to settle something. Rickie
proposed to come too.

Hitherto he had been no nuisance. “You will be frightfully bored,” said
Agnes, observing the cloud on her lover’s face. “And Gerald walks like
a maniac.”

“I had a little thought of the Museum this morning,” said Mr. Pembroke.
“It is very strong in flint arrow-heads.”

“Ah, that’s your line, Rickie. I do envy you and Herbert the way you
enjoy the past.”

“I almost think I’ll go with Dawes, if he’ll have me. I can walk quite
fast just to the ground and back. Arrowheads are wonderful, but I don’t
really enjoy them yet, though I hope I shall in time.”

Mr. Pembroke was offended, but Rickie held firm.

In a quarter of an hour he was back at the house alone, nearly crying.

“Oh, did the wretch go too fast?” called Miss Pembroke from her bedroom
window.

“I went too fast for him.” He spoke quite sharply, and before he had
time to say he was sorry and didn’t mean exactly that, the window had
shut.

“They’ve quarrelled,” she thought. “Whatever about?”

She soon heard. Gerald returned in a cold stormy temper. Rickie had
offered him money.

“My dear fellow don’t be so cross. The child’s mad.”

“If it was, I’d forgive that. But I can’t stand unhealthiness.”

“Now, Gerald, that’s where I hate you. You don’t know what it is to
pity the weak.”

“Woman’s job. So you wish I’d taken a hundred pounds a year from him.
Did you ever hear such blasted cheek? Marry us—he, you, and me—a
hundred pounds down and as much annual—he, of course, to pry into all
we did, and we to kowtow and eat dirt-pie to him. If that’s Mr. Rickety
Elliot’s idea of a soldier and an Englishman, it isn’t mine, and I wish
I’d had a horse-whip.”

She was roaring with laughter. “You’re babies, a pair of you, and
you’re the worst. Why couldn’t you let the little silly down gently?
There he was puffing and sniffing under my window, and I thought he’d
insulted you. Why didn’t you accept?”

“Accept?” he thundered.

“It would have taken the nonsense out of him for ever. Why, he was only
talking out of a book.”

“More fool he.”

“Well, don’t be angry with a fool. He means no harm. He muddles all day
with poetry and old dead people, and then tries to bring it into life.
It’s too funny for words.”

Gerald repeated that he could not stand unhealthiness.

“I don’t call that exactly unhealthy.”

“I do. And why he could give the money’s worse.”

“What do you mean?”

He became shy. “I hadn’t meant to tell you. It’s not quite for a lady.”
For, like most men who are rather animal, he was intellectually a
prude. “He says he can’t ever marry, owing to his foot. It wouldn’t
be fair to posterity. His grandfather was crocked, his father too,
and he’s as bad. He thinks that it’s hereditary, and may get worse
next generation. He’s discussed it all over with other Undergrads. A
bright lot they must be. He daren’t risk having any children. Hence the
hundred quid.”

She stopped laughing. “Oh, little beast, if he said all that!”

He was encouraged to proceed. Hitherto he had not talked about their
school days. Now he told her everything,—the “barley-sugar,” as he
called it, the pins in chapel, and how one afternoon he had tied him
head-downward on to a tree trunk and then ran away—of course only for
a moment.

For this she scolded him well. But she had a thrill of joy when she
thought of the weak boy in the clutches of the strong one.




V


Gerald died that afternoon. He was broken up in the football match.
Rickie and Mr. Pembroke were on the ground when the accident took
place. It was no good torturing him by a drive to the hospital, and he
was merely carried to the little pavilion and laid upon the floor. A
doctor came, and so did a clergyman, but it seemed better to leave him
for the last few minutes with Agnes, who had ridden down on her bicycle.

It was a strange lamentable interview. The girl was so accustomed to
health, that for a time she could not understand. It must be a joke
that he chose to lie there in the dust, with a rug over him and his
knees bent up towards his chin. His arms were as she knew them, and
their admirable muscles showed clear and clean beneath the jersey. The
face, too, though a little flushed, was uninjured: it must be some
curious joke.

“Gerald, what have you been doing?”

He replied, “I can’t see you. It’s too dark.”

“Oh, I’ll soon alter that,” she said in her old brisk way. She opened
the pavilion door. The people who were standing by it moved aside. She
saw a deserted meadow, steaming and grey, and beyond it slateroofed
cottages, row beside row, climbing a shapeless hill. Towards London the
sky was yellow. “There. That’s better.” She sat down by him again, and
drew his hand into her own. “Now we are all right, aren’t we?”

“Where are you?”

This time she could not reply.

“What is it? Where am I going?”

“Wasn’t the rector here?” said she after a silence.

“He explained heaven, and thinks that I—but—I couldn’t tell a parson;
but I don’t seem to have any use for any of the things there.”

“We are Christians,” said Agnes shyly. “Dear love, we don’t talk about
these things, but we believe them. I think that you will get well and
be as strong again as ever; but, in any case, there is a spiritual
life, and we know that some day you and I—”

“I shan’t do as a spirit,” he interrupted, sighing pitifully. “I want
you as I am, and it cannot be managed. The rector had to say so. I
want—I don’t want to talk. I can’t see you. Shut that door.”

She obeyed, and crept into his arms. Only this time her grasp was the
stronger. Her heart beat louder and louder as the sound of his grew
more faint. He was crying like a little frightened child, and her lips
were wet with his tears. “Bear it bravely,” she told him.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “It isn’t to be done. I can’t see you,” and
passed from her trembling with open eyes.

She rode home on her bicycle, leaving the others to follow. Some ladies
who did not know what had happened bowed and smiled as she passed, and
she returned their salute.

“Oh, miss, is it true?” cried the cook, her face streaming with tears.

Agnes nodded. Presumably it was true. Letters had just arrived: one
was for Gerald from his mother. Life, which had given them no warning,
seemed to make no comment now. The incident was outside nature, and
would surely pass away like a dream. She felt slightly irritable, and
the grief of the servants annoyed her.

They sobbed. “Ah, look at his marks! Ah, little he thought—little he
thought!” In the brown holland strip by the front door a heavy football
boot had left its impress. They had not liked Gerald, but he was a man,
they were women, he had died. Their mistress ordered them to leave her.

For many minutes she sat at the foot of the stairs, rubbing her eyes.
An obscure spiritual crisis was going on.

Should she weep like the servants? Or should she bear up and trust in
the consoler Time? Was the death of a man so terrible after all? As she
invited herself to apathy there were steps on the gravel, and Rickie
Elliot burst in. He was splashed with mud, his breath was gone, and
his hair fell wildly over his meagre face. She thought, “These are the
people who are left alive!” From the bottom of her soul she hated him.

“I came to see what you’re doing,” he cried.

“Resting.”

He knelt beside her, and she said, “Would you please go away?”

“Yes, dear Agnes, of course; but I must see first that you mind.” Her
breath caught. Her eyes moved to the treads, going outwards, so firmly,
so irretrievably.

He panted, “It’s the worst thing that can ever happen to you in all
your life, and you’ve got to mind it—you’ve got to mind it. They’ll
come saying, ‘Bear up—trust to time.’ No, no; they’re wrong. Mind it.”

Through all her misery she knew that this boy was greater than they
supposed. He rose to his feet, and with intense conviction cried: “But
I know—I understand. It’s your death as well as his. He’s gone, Agnes,
and his arms will never hold you again. In God’s name, mind such a
thing, and don’t sit fencing with your soul. Don’t stop being great;
that’s the one crime he’ll never forgive you.”

She faltered, “Who—who forgives?”

“Gerald.”

At the sound of his name she slid forward, and all her dishonesty left
her. She acknowledged that life’s meaning had vanished. Bending down,
she kissed the footprint. “How can he forgive me?” she sobbed. “Where
has he gone to? You could never dream such an awful thing. He couldn’t
see me though I opened the door—wide—plenty of light; and then he
could not remember the things that should comfort him. He wasn’t a—he
wasn’t ever a great reader, and he couldn’t remember the things. The
rector tried, and he couldn’t—I came, and I couldn’t—” She could not
speak for tears. Rickie did not check her. He let her accuse herself,
and fate, and Herbert, who had postponed their marriage. She might have
been a wife six months; but Herbert had spoken of self-control and of
all life before them. He let her kiss the footprints till their marks
gave way to the marks of her lips. She moaned. “He is gone—where is
he?” and then he replied quite quietly, “He is in heaven.”

She begged him not to comfort her; she could not bear it.

“I did not come to comfort you. I came to see that you mind. He is in
heaven, Agnes. The greatest thing is over.”

Her hatred was lulled. She murmured, “Dear Rickie!” and held up her
hand to him. Through her tears his meagre face showed as a seraph’s
who spoke the truth and forbade her to juggle with her soul. “Dear
Rickie—but for the rest of my life what am I to do?”

“Anything—if you remember that the greatest thing is over.”

“I don’t know you,” she said tremulously. “You have grown up in a
moment. You never talked to us, and yet you understand it all. Tell me
again—I can only trust you—where he is.”

“He is in heaven.”

“You are sure?”

It puzzled her that Rickie, who could scarcely tell you the time
without a saving clause, should be so certain about immortality.




VI


He did not stop for the funeral. Mr. Pembroke thought that he had a bad
effect on Agnes, and prevented her from acquiescing in the tragedy as
rapidly as she might have done. As he expressed it, “one must not court
sorrow,” and he hinted to the young man that they desired to be alone.

Rickie went back to the Silts.

He was only there a few days. As soon as term opened he returned to
Cambridge, for which he longed passionately. The journey thither
was now familiar to him, and he took pleasure in each landmark. The
fair valley of Tewin Water, the cutting into Hitchin where the train
traverses the chalk, Baldock Church, Royston with its promise of downs,
were nothing in themselves, but dear as stages in the pilgrimage
towards the abode of peace. On the platform he met friends. They had
all had pleasant vacations: it was a happy world. The atmosphere alters.

Cambridge, according to her custom, welcomed her sons with open drains.
Pettycury was up, so was Trinity Street, and navvies peeped out of
King’s Parade. Here it was gas, there electric light, but everywhere
something, and always a smell. It was also the day that the wheels fell
off the station tram, and Rickie, who was naturally inside, was among
the passengers who “sustained no injury but a shock, and had as hearty
a laugh over the mishap afterwards as any one.”

Tilliard fled into a hansom, cursing himself for having tried to do the
thing cheaply. Hornblower also swept past yelling derisively, with his
luggage neatly piled above his head. “Let’s get out and walk,” muttered
Ansell. But Rickie was succouring a distressed female—Mrs. Aberdeen.

“Oh, Mrs. Aberdeen, I never saw you: I am so glad to see you—I am so
very glad.” Mrs. Aberdeen was cold. She did not like being spoken to
outside the college, and was also distrait about her basket. Hitherto
no genteel eye had even seen inside it, but in the collision its little
calico veil fell off, and there was revealed—nothing. The basket was
empty, and never would hold anything illegal. All the same she was
distrait, and “We shall meet later, sir, I dessy,” was all the greeting
Rickie got from her.

“Now what kind of a life has Mrs. Aberdeen?” he exclaimed, as he and
Ansell pursued the Station Road. “Here these bedders come and make us
comfortable. We owe an enormous amount to them, their wages are absurd,
and we know nothing about them. Off they go to Barnwell, and then their
lives are hidden. I just know that Mrs. Aberdeen has a husband, but
that’s all. She never will talk about him. Now I do so want to fill in
her life. I see one-half of it. What’s the other half? She may have a
real jolly house, in good taste, with a little garden and books, and
pictures. Or, again, she mayn’t. But in any case one ought to know. I
know she’d dislike it, but she oughtn’t to dislike. After all, bedders
are to blame for the present lamentable state of things, just as much
as gentlefolk. She ought to want me to come. She ought to introduce me
to her husband.”

They had reached the corner of Hills Road. Ansell spoke for the first
time. He said, “Ugh!”

“Drains?”

“Yes. A spiritual cesspool.”

Rickie laughed.

“I expected it from your letter.”

“The one you never answered?”

“I answer none of your letters. You are quite hopeless by now. You can
go to the bad. But I refuse to accompany you. I refuse to believe that
every human being is a moving wonder of supreme interest and tragedy
and beauty—which was what the letter in question amounted to. You’ll
find plenty who will believe it. It’s a very popular view among people
who are too idle to think; it saves them the trouble of detecting the
beautiful from the ugly, the interesting from the dull, the tragic from
the melodramatic. You had just come from Sawston, and were apparently
carried away by the fact that Miss Pembroke had the usual amount of
arms and legs.”

Rickie was silent. He had told his friend how he felt, but not what had
happened. Ansell could discuss love and death admirably, but somehow
he would not understand lovers or a dying man, and in the letter there
had been scant allusion to these concrete facts. Would Cambridge
understand them either? He watched some dons who were peeping into
an excavation, and throwing up their hands with humorous gestures of
despair. These men would lecture next week on Catiline’s conspiracy,
on Luther, on Evolution, on Catullus. They dealt with so much and they
had experienced so little. Was it possible he would ever come to think
Cambridge narrow? In his short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths,
and that is enough to disarrange any placid outlook on the world.
He knew once for all that we are all of us bubbles on an extremely
rough sea. Into this sea humanity has built, as it were, some little
breakwaters—scientific knowledge, civilized restraint—so that the
bubbles do not break so frequently or so soon. But the sea has not
altered, and it was only a chance that he, Ansell, Tilliard, and Mrs.
Aberdeen had not all been killed in the tram.

They waited for the other tram by the Roman Catholic Church, whose
florid bulk was already receding into twilight. It is the first big
building that the incoming visitor sees. “Oh, here come the colleges!”
cries the Protestant parent, and then learns that it was built by a
Papist who made a fortune out of movable eyes for dolls. “Built out of
doll’s eyes to contain idols”—that, at all events, is the legend and
the joke. It watches over the apostate city, taller by many a yard than
anything within, and asserting, however wildly, that here is eternity,
stability, and bubbles unbreakable upon a windless sea.

A costly hymn tune announced five o’clock, and in the distance the more
lovable note of St. Mary’s could be heard, speaking from the heart of
the town. Then the tram arrived—the slow stuffy tram that plies every
twenty minutes between the unknown and the marketplace—and took them
past the desecrated grounds of Downing, past Addenbrookes Hospital,
girt like a Venetian palace with a mantling canal, past the Fitz
William, towering upon immense substructions like any Roman temple,
right up to the gates of one’s own college, which looked like nothing
else in the world. The porters were glad to see them, but wished it
had been a hansom. “Our luggage,” explained Rickie, “comes in the
hotel omnibus, if you would kindly pay a shilling for mine.” Ansell
turned aside to some large lighted windows, the abode of a hospitable
don, and from other windows there floated familiar voices and the
familiar mistakes in a Beethoven sonata. The college, though small, was
civilized, and proud of its civilization. It was not sufficient glory
to be a Blue there, nor an additional glory to get drunk. Many a maiden
lady who had read that Cambridge men were sad dogs, was surprised and
perhaps a little disappointed at the reasonable life which greeted her.
Miss Appleblossom in particular had had a tremendous shock. The sight
of young fellows making tea and drinking water had made her wonder
whether this was Cambridge College at all. “It is so,” she exclaimed
afterwards. “It is just as I say; and what’s more, I wouldn’t have it
otherwise; Stewart says it’s as easy as easy to get into the swim,
and not at all expensive.” The direction of the swim was determined a
little by the genius of the place—for places have a genius, though the
less we talk about it the better—and a good deal by the tutors and
resident fellows, who treated with rare dexterity the products that
came up yearly from the public schools. They taught the perky boy that
he was not everything, and the limp boy that he might be something.
They even welcomed those boys who were neither limp nor perky, but
odd—those boys who had never been at a public school at all, and
such do not find a welcome everywhere. And they did everything with
ease—one might almost say with nonchalance, so that the boys noticed
nothing, and received education, often for the first time in their
lives.

But Rickie turned to none of these friends, for just then he loved his
rooms better than any person. They were all he really possessed in the
world, the only place he could call his own. Over the door was his
name, and through the paint, like a grey ghost, he could still read the
name of his predecessor. With a sigh of joy he entered the perishable
home that was his for a couple of years. There was a beautiful fire,
and the kettle boiled at once. He made tea on the hearth-rug and
ate the biscuits which Mrs. Aberdeen had brought for him up from
Anderson’s. “Gentlemen,” she said, “must learn to give and take.” He
sighed again and again, like one who had escaped from danger. With his
head on the fender and all his limbs relaxed, he felt almost as safe as
he felt once when his mother killed a ghost in the passage by carrying
him through it in her arms. There was no ghost now; he was frightened
at reality; he was frightened at the splendours and horrors of the
world.

A letter from Miss Pembroke was on the table. He did not hurry to open
it, for she, and all that she did, was overwhelming. She wrote like
the Sibyl; her sorrowful face moved over the stars and shattered their
harmonies; last night he saw her with the eyes of Blake, a virgin
widow, tall, veiled, consecrated, with her hands stretched out against
an everlasting wind. Why should she write? Her letters were not for the
likes of him, nor to be read in rooms like his.

“We are not leaving Sawston,” she wrote. “I saw how selfish it was of
me to risk spoiling Herbert’s career. I shall get used to any place.
Now that he is gone, nothing of that sort can matter. Every one has
been most kind, but you have comforted me most, though you did not mean
to. I cannot think how you did it, or understood so much. I still think
of you as a little boy with a lame leg,—I know you will let me say
this,—and yet when it came to the point you knew more than people who
have been all their lives with sorrow and death.”

Rickie burnt this letter, which he ought not to have done, for it was
one of the few tributes Miss Pembroke ever paid to imagination. But
he felt that it did not belong to him: words so sincere should be for
Gerald alone. The smoke rushed up the chimney, and he indulged in a
vision. He saw it reach the outer air and beat against the low ceiling
of clouds. The clouds were too strong for it; but in them was one
chink, revealing one star, and through this the smoke escaped into the
light of stars innumerable. Then—but then the vision failed, and the
voice of science whispered that all smoke remains on earth in the form
of smuts, and is troublesome to Mrs. Aberdeen.

“I am jolly unpractical,” he mused. “And what is the point of it when
real things are so wonderful? Who wants visions in a world that has
Agnes and Gerald?” He turned on the electric light and pulled open the
table-drawer. There, among spoons and corks and string, he found a
fragment of a little story that he had tried to write last term. It was
called “The Bay of the Fifteen Islets,” and the action took place on
St. John’s Eve off the coast of Sicily. A party of tourists land on one
of the islands. Suddenly the boatmen become uneasy, and say that the
island is not generally there. It is an extra one, and they had better
have tea on one of the ordinaries. “Pooh, volcanic!” says the leading
tourist, and the ladies say how interesting. The island begins to
rock, and so do the minds of its visitors. They start and quarrel and
jabber. Fingers burst up through the sand—black fingers of sea devils.
The island tilts. The tourists go mad. But just before the catastrophe
one man, _integer vitae scelerisque purus_, sees the truth. Here are
no devils. Other muscles, other minds, are pulling the island to its
subterranean home. Through the advancing wall of waters he sees no
grisly faces, no ghastly medieval limbs, but—But what nonsense! When
real things are so wonderful, what is the point of pretending?

And so Rickie deflected his enthusiasms. Hitherto they had played on
gods and heroes, on the infinite and the impossible, on virtue and
beauty and strength. Now, with a steadier radiance, they transfigured a
man who was dead and a woman who was still alive.




VII


Love, say orderly people, can be fallen into by two methods: (1)
through the desires, (2) through the imagination. And if the orderly
people are English, they add that (1) is the inferior method, and
characteristic of the South. It is inferior. Yet those who pursue it
at all events know what they want; they are not puzzling to themselves
or ludicrous to others; they do not take the wings of the morning and
fly into the uttermost parts of the sea before walking to the registry
office; they cannot breed a tragedy quite like Rickie’s.

He is, of course, absurdly young—not twenty-one—and he will be engaged
to be married at twenty-three. He has no knowledge of the world; for
example, he thinks that if you do not want money you can give it to
friends who do. He believes in humanity because he knows a dozen decent
people. He believes in women because he has loved his mother. And his
friends are as young and as ignorant as himself. They are full of the
wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup—let us call it the
teacup—of experience, which has made men of Mr. Pembroke’s type what
they are. Oh, that teacup! To be taken at prayers, at friendship, at
love, till we are quite sane, efficient, quite experienced, and quite
useless to God or man. We must drink it, or we shall die. But we need
not drink it always. Here is our problem and our salvation. There comes
a moment—God knows when—at which we can say, “I will experience no
longer. I will create. I will be an experience.” But to do this we must
be both acute and heroic. For it is not easy, after accepting six cups
of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of the hostess. And to Rickie
this moment has not, as yet, been offered.

Ansell, at the end of his third year, got a first in the Moral Science
Tripos. Being a scholar, he kept his rooms in college, and at once
began to work for a Fellowship. Rickie got a creditable second in the
Classical Tripos, Part I., and retired to sallow lodgings in Mill Lane,
carrying with him the degree of B.A. and a small exhibition, which was
quite as much as he deserved. For Part II. he read Greek Archaeology,
and got a second. All this means that Ansell was much cleverer than
Rickie. As for the cow, she was still going strong, though turning a
little academic as the years passed over her.

“We are bound to get narrow,” sighed Rickie. He and his friend were
lying in a meadow during their last summer term. In his incurable love
for flowers he had plaited two garlands of buttercups and cow-parsley,
and Ansell’s lean Jewish face was framed in one of them. “Cambridge is
wonderful, but—but it’s so tiny. You have no idea—at least, I think
you have no idea—how the great world looks down on it.”

“I read the letters in the papers.”

“It’s a bad look-out.”

“How?”

“Cambridge has lost touch with the times.”

“Was she ever intended to touch them?”

“She satisfies,” said Rickie mysteriously, “neither the professions,
nor the public schools, nor the great thinking mass of men and women.
There is a general feeling that her day is over, and naturally one
feels pretty sick.”

“Do you still write short stories?”

“Why?”

“Because your English has gone to the devil. You think and talk in
Journalese. Define a great thinking mass.”

Rickie sat up and adjusted his floral crown.

“Estimate the worth of a general feeling.”

Silence.

“And thirdly, where is the great world?”

“Oh that—!”

“Yes. That,” exclaimed Ansell, rising from his couch in violent
excitement. “Where is it? How do you set about finding it? How long
does it take to get there? What does it think? What does it do? What
does it want? Oblige me with specimens of its art and literature.”
Silence. “Till you do, my opinions will be as follows: There is no
great world at all, only a little earth, for ever isolated from the
rest of the little solar system. The earth is full of tiny societies,
and Cambridge is one of them. All the societies are narrow, but some
are good and some are bad—just as one house is beautiful inside and
another ugly. Observe the metaphor of the houses: I am coming back
to it. The good societies say, ‘I tell you to do this because I am
Cambridge.’ The bad ones say, ‘I tell you to do that because I am the
great world,—not because I am ‘Peckham,’ or ‘Billingsgate,’ or ‘Park
Lane,’ but ‘because I am the great world.’ They lie. And fools like
you listen to them, and believe that they are a thing which does not
exist and never has existed, and confuse ‘great,’ which has no meaning
whatever, with ‘good,’ which means salvation. Look at this great
wreath: it’ll be dead tomorrow. Look at that good flower: it’ll come up
again next year. Now for the other metaphor. To compare the world to
Cambridge is like comparing the outsides of houses with the inside of a
house. No intellectual effort is needed, no moral result is attained.
You only have to say, ‘Oh, what a difference!’ and then come indoors
again and exhibit your broadened mind.”

“I never shall come indoors again,” said Rickie. “That’s the whole
point.” And his voice began to quiver. “It’s well enough for those
who’ll get a Fellowship, but in a few weeks I shall go down. In a few
years it’ll be as if I’ve never been up. It matters very much to me
what the world is like. I can’t answer your questions about it; and
that’s no loss to you, but so much the worse for me. And then you’ve
got a house—not a metaphorical one, but a house with father and
sisters. I haven’t, and never shall have. There’ll never again be a
home for me like Cambridge. I shall only look at the outside of homes.
According to your metaphor, I shall live in the street, and it matters
very much to me what I find there.”

“You’ll live in another house right enough,” said Ansell, rather
uneasily. “Only take care you pick out a decent one. I can’t think why
you flop about so helplessly, like a bit of seaweed. In four years
you’ve taken as much root as any one.”

“Where?”

“I should say you’ve been fortunate in your friends.”

“Oh—that!” But he was not cynical—or cynical in a very tender way.
He was thinking of the irony of friendship—so strong it is, and so
fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open
stream. Nature has no use for us: she has cut her stuff differently.
Dutiful sons, loving husbands, responsible fathers—these are what she
wants, and if we are friends it must be in our spare time. Abram and
Sarai were sorrowful, yet their seed became as sand of the sea, and
distracts the politics of Europe at this moment. But a few verses of
poetry is all that survives of David and Jonathan.

“I wish we were labelled,” said Rickie. He wished that all the
confidence and mutual knowledge that is born in such a place as
Cambridge could be organized. People went down into the world saying,
“We know and like each other; we shan’t forget.” But they did forget,
for man is so made that he cannot remember long without a symbol; he
wished there was a society, a kind of friendship office, where the
marriage of true minds could be registered.

“Why labels?”

“To know each other again.”

“I have taught you pessimism splendidly.” He looked at his watch.

“What time?”

“Not twelve.”

Rickie got up.

“Why go?” He stretched out his hand and caught hold of Rickie’s ankle.

“I’ve got that Miss Pembroke to lunch—that girl whom you say never’s
there.”

“Then why go? All this week you have pretended Miss Pembroke awaited
you. Wednesday—Miss Pembroke to lunch. Thursday—Miss Pembroke to tea.
Now again—and you didn’t even invite her.”

“To Cambridge, no. But the Hall man they’re stopping with has so many
engagements that she and her friend can often come to me, I’m glad to
say. I don’t think I ever told you much, but over two years ago the
man she was going to marry was killed at football. She nearly died
of grief. This visit to Cambridge is almost the first amusement she
has felt up to taking. Oh, they go back tomorrow! Give me breakfast
tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“But I shall see you this evening. I shall be round at your paper on
Schopenhauer. Lemme go.”

“Don’t go,” he said idly. “It’s much better for you to talk to me.”

“Lemme go, Stewart.”

“It’s amusing that you’re so feeble. You—simply—can’t—get—away. I
wish I wanted to bully you.”

Rickie laughed, and suddenly overbalanced into the grass. Ansell, with
unusual playfulness, held him prisoner. They lay there for few minutes,
talking and ragging aimlessly. Then Rickie seized his opportunity and
jerked away.

“Go, go!” yawned the other. But he was a little vexed, for he was a
young man with great capacity for pleasure, and it pleased him that
morning to be with his friend. The thought of two ladies waiting lunch
did not deter him; stupid women, why shouldn’t they wait? Why should
they interfere with their betters? With his ear on the ground he
listened to Rickie’s departing steps, and thought, “He wastes a lot
of time keeping engagements. Why will he be pleasant to fools?” And
then he thought, “Why has he turned so unhappy? It isn’t as if he’s a
philosopher, or tries to solve the riddle of existence. And he’s got
money of his own.” Thus thinking, he fell asleep.

Meanwhile Rickie hurried away from him, and slackened and stopped, and
hurried again. He was due at the Union in ten minutes, but he could not
bring himself there. He dared not meet Miss Pembroke: he loved her.

The devil must have planned it. They had started so gloriously; she had
been a goddess both in joy and sorrow. She was a goddess still. But
he had dethroned the god whom once he had glorified equally. Slowly,
slowly, the image of Gerald had faded. That was the first step. Rickie
had thought, “No matter. He will be bright again. Just now all the
radiance chances to be in her.” And on her he had fixed his eyes.
He thought of her awake. He entertained her willingly in dreams. He
found her in poetry and music and in the sunset. She made him kind
and strong. She made him clever. Through her he kept Cambridge in its
proper place, and lived as a citizen of the great world. But one night
he dreamt that she lay in his arms. This displeased him. He determined
to think a little about Gerald instead. Then the fabric collapsed.

It was hard on Rickie thus to meet the devil. He did not deserve it,
for he was comparatively civilized, and knew that there was nothing
shameful in love. But to love this woman! If only it had been any one
else! Love in return—that he could expect from no one, being too ugly
and too unattractive. But the love he offered would not then have been
vile. The insult to Miss Pembroke, who was consecrated, and whom he
had consecrated, who could still see Gerald, and always would see him,
shining on his everlasting throne—this was the crime from the devil,
the crime that no penance would ever purge. She knew nothing. She never
would know. But the crime was registered in heaven.

He had been tempted to confide in Ansell. But to what purpose? He
would say, “I love Miss Pembroke.” and Stewart would reply, “You ass.”
And then. “I’m never going to tell her.” “You ass,” again. After all,
it was not a practical question; Agnes would never hear of his fall.
If his friend had been, as he expressed it, “labelled”; if he had
been a father, or still better a brother, one might tell him of the
discreditable passion. But why irritate him for no reason? Thinking “I
am always angling for sympathy; I must stop myself,” he hurried onward
to the Union.

He found his guests half way up the stairs, reading the advertisements
of coaches for the Long Vacation. He heard Mrs. Lewin say, “I wonder
what he’ll end by doing.” A little overacting his part, he apologized
nonchalantly for his lateness.

“It’s always the same,” cried Agnes. “Last time he forgot I was coming
altogether.” She wore a flowered muslin—something indescribably liquid
and cool. It reminded him a little of those swift piercing streams,
neither blue nor green, that gush out of the dolomites. Her face was
clear and brown, like the face of a mountaineer; her hair was so
plentiful that it seemed banked up above it; and her little toque,
though it answered the note of the dress, was almost ludicrous, poised
on so much natural glory. When she moved, the sunlight flashed on her
ear-rings.

He led them up to the luncheon-room. By now he was conscious of his
limitations as a host, and never attempted to entertain ladies in
his lodgings. Moreover, the Union seemed less intimate. It had a
faint flavour of a London club; it marked the undergraduate’s nearest
approach to the great world. Amid its waiters and serviettes one felt
impersonal, and able to conceal the private emotions. Rickie felt that
if Miss Pembroke knew one thing about him, she knew everything. During
this visit he took her to no place that he greatly loved.

“Sit down, ladies. Fall to. I’m sorry. I was out towards Coton with a
dreadful friend.”

Mrs. Lewin pushed up her veil. She was a typical May-term chaperon,
always pleasant, always hungry, and always tired. Year after year she
came up to Cambridge in a tight silk dress, and year after year she
nearly died of it. Her feet hurt, her limbs were cramped in a canoe,
black spots danced before her eyes from eating too much mayonnaise. But
still she came, if not as a mother as an aunt, if not as an aunt as a
friend. Still she ascended the roof of King’s, still she counted the
balls of Clare, still she was on the point of grasping the organization
of the May races. “And who is your friend?” she asked.

“His name is Ansell.”

“Well, now, did I see him two years ago—as a bedmaker in something
they did at the Foot Lights? Oh, how I roared.”

“You didn’t see Mr. Ansell at the Foot Lights,” said Agnes, smiling.

“How do you know?” asked Rickie.

“He’d scarcely be so frivolous.”

“Do you remember seeing him?”

“For a moment.”

What a memory she had! And how splendidly during that moment she had
behaved!

“Isn’t he marvellously clever?”

“I believe so.”

“Oh, give me clever people!” cried Mrs. Lewin. “They are kindness
itself at the Hall, but I assure you I am depressed at times. One
cannot talk bump-rowing for ever.”

“I never hear about him, Rickie; but isn’t he really your greatest
friend?”

“I don’t go in for greatest friends.”

“Do you mean you like us all equally?”

“All differently, those of you I like.”

“Ah, you’ve caught it!” cried Mrs. Lewin. “Mr. Elliot gave it you there
well.”

Agnes laughed, and, her elbows on the table, regarded them both through
her fingers—a habit of hers. Then she said, “Can’t we see the great
Mr. Ansell?”

“Oh, let’s. Or would he frighten me?”

“He would frighten you,” said Rickie. “He’s a trifle weird.”

“My good Rickie, if you knew the deathly dullness of Sawston—every
one saying the proper thing at the proper time, I so proper, Herbert
so proper! Why, weirdness is the one thing I long for! Do arrange
something.”

“I’m afraid there’s no opportunity. Ansell goes some vast bicycle ride
this afternoon; this evening you’re tied up at the Hall; and tomorrow
you go.”

“But there’s breakfast tomorrow,” said Agnes. “Look here, Rickie, bring
Mr. Ansell to breakfast with us at Buoys.”

Mrs. Lewin seconded the invitation.

“Bad luck again,” said Rickie boldly; “I’m already fixed up for
breakfast. I’ll tell him of your very kind intention.”

“Let’s have him alone,” murmured Agnes.

“My dear girl, I should die through the floor! Oh, it’ll be all right
about breakfast. I rather think we shall get asked this evening by that
shy man who has the pretty rooms in Trinity.”

“Oh, very well. Where is it you breakfast, Rickie?”

He faltered. “To Ansell’s, it is—” It seemed as if he was making some
great admission. So self-conscious was he, that he thought the two
women exchanged glances. Had Agnes already explored that part of him
that did not belong to her? Would another chance step reveal the part
that did? He asked them abruptly what they would like to do after lunch.

“Anything,” said Mrs. Lewin,—“anything in the world.”

A walk? A boat? Ely? A drive? Some objection was raised to each. “To
tell the truth,” she said at last, “I do feel a wee bit tired, and
what occurs to me is this. You and Agnes shall leave me here and have
no more bother. I shall be perfectly happy snoozling in one of these
delightful drawing-room chairs. Do what you like, and then pick me up
after it.”

“Alas, it’s against regulations,” said Rickie. “The Union won’t trust
lady visitors on its premises alone.”

“But who’s to know I’m alone? With a lot of men in the drawing-room,
how’s each to know that I’m not with the others?”

“That would shock Rickie,” said Agnes, laughing. “He’s frightfully
high-principled.”

“No, I’m not,” said Rickie, thinking of his recent shiftiness over
breakfast.

“Then come for a walk with me. I want exercise. Some connection of ours
was once rector of Madingley. I shall walk out and see the church.”

Mrs. Lewin was accordingly left in the Union.

“This is jolly!” Agnes exclaimed as she strode along the somewhat
depressing road that leads out of Cambridge past the observatory. “Do I
go too fast?”

“No, thank you. I get stronger every year. If it wasn’t for the look of
the thing, I should be quite happy.”

“But you don’t care for the look of the thing. It’s only ignorant
people who do that, surely.”

“Perhaps. I care. I like people who are well-made and beautiful. They
are of some use in the world. I understand why they are there. I cannot
understand why the ugly and crippled are there, however healthy they
may feel inside. Don’t you know how Turner spoils his pictures by
introducing a man like a bolster in the foreground? Well, in actual
life every landscape is spoilt by men of worse shapes still.”

“You sound like a bolster with the stuffing out.” They laughed. She
always blew his cobwebs away like this, with a puff of humorous
mountain air. Just now—the associations he attached to her were
various—she reminded him of a heroine of Meredith’s—but a heroine at
the end of the book. All had been written about her. She had played
her mighty part, and knew that it was over. He and he alone was not
content, and wrote for her daily a trivial and impossible sequel.

Last time they had talked about Gerald. But that was some six months
ago, when things felt easier. Today Gerald was the faintest blur.
Fortunately the conversation turned to Mr. Pembroke and to education.
Did women lose a lot by not knowing Greek? “A heap,” said Rickie,
roughly. But modern languages? Thus they got to Germany, which he had
visited last Easter with Ansell; and thence to the German Emperor, and
what a to-do he made; and from him to our own king (still Prince of
Wales), who had lived while an undergraduate at Madingley Hall. Here it
was. And all the time he thought, “It is hard on her. She has no right
to be walking with me. She would be ill with disgust if she knew. It is
hard on her to be loved.”

They looked at the Hall, and went inside the pretty little church. Some
Arundel prints hung upon the pillars, and Agnes expressed the opinion
that pictures inside a place of worship were a pity. Rickie did not
agree with this. He said again that nothing beautiful was ever to be
regretted.

“You’re cracked on beauty,” she whispered—they were still inside the
church. “Do hurry up and write something.”

“Something beautiful?”

“I believe you can. I’m going to lecture you seriously all the way
home. Take care that you don’t waste your life.”

They continued the conversation outside. “But I’ve got to hate my own
writing. I believe that most people come to that stage—not so early
though. What I write is too silly. It can’t happen. For instance, a
stupid vulgar man is engaged to a lovely young lady. He wants her to
live in the towns, but she only cares for woods. She shocks him this
way and that, but gradually he tames her, and makes her nearly as dull
as he is. One day she has a last explosion—over the snobby wedding
presents—and flies out of the drawing-room window, shouting, ‘Freedom
and truth!’ Near the house is a little dell full of fir-trees, and she
runs into it. He comes there the next moment. But she’s gone.”

“Awfully exciting. Where?”

“Oh Lord, she’s a Dryad!” cried Rickie, in great disgust. “She’s turned
into a tree.”

“Rickie, it’s very good indeed. The kind of thing has something in it.
Of course you get it all through Greek and Latin. How upset the man
must be when he sees the girl turn.”

“He doesn’t see her. He never guesses. Such a man could never see a
Dryad.”

“So you describe how she turns just before he comes up?”

“No. Indeed I don’t ever say that she does turn. I don’t use the word
‘Dryad’ once.”

“I think you ought to put that part plainly. Otherwise, with such an
original story, people might miss the point. Have you had any luck with
it?”

“Magazines? I haven’t tried. I know what the stuff’s worth. You see, a
year or two ago I had a great idea of getting into touch with Nature,
just as the Greeks were in touch; and seeing England so beautiful,
I used to pretend that her trees and coppices and summer fields of
parsley were alive. It’s funny enough now, but it wasn’t funny then,
for I got in such a state that I believed, actually believed, that
Fauns lived in a certain double hedgerow near the Gog Magogs, and one
evening I walked a mile sooner than go through it alone.”

“Good gracious!” She laid her hand on his shoulder.

He moved to the other side of the road. “It’s all right now. I’ve
changed those follies for others. But while I had them I began to
write, and even now I keep on writing, though I know better. I’ve got
quite a pile of little stories, all harping on this ridiculous idea of
getting into touch with Nature.”

“I wish you weren’t so modest. It’s simply splendid as an idea.
Though—but tell me about the Dryad who was engaged to be married. What
was she like?”

“I can show you the dell in which the young person disappeared. We pass
it on the right in a moment.”

“It does seem a pity that you don’t make something of your talents. It
seems such a waste to write little stories and never publish them. You
must have enough for a book. Life is so full in our days that short
stories are the very thing; they get read by people who’d never tackle
a novel. For example, at our Dorcas we tried to read out a long affair
by Henry James—Herbert saw it recommended in ‘The Times.’ There was no
doubt it was very good, but one simply couldn’t remember from one week
to another what had happened. So now our aim is to get something that
just lasts the hour. I take you seriously, Rickie, and that is why I am
so offensive. You are too modest. People who think they can do nothing
so often do nothing. I want you to plunge.”

It thrilled him like a trumpet-blast. She took him seriously. Could he
but thank her for her divine affability! But the words would stick in
his throat, or worse still would bring other words along with them. His
breath came quickly, for he seldom spoke of his writing, and no one,
not even Ansell, had advised him to plunge.

“But do you really think that I could take up literature?”

“Why not? You can try. Even if you fail, you can try. Of course
we think you tremendously clever; and I met one of your dons at
tea, and he said that your degree was not in the least a proof of
your abilities: he said that you knocked up and got flurried in
examinations. Oh!”—her cheek flushed,—“I wish I was a man. The whole
world lies before them. They can do anything. They aren’t cooped up
with servants and tea parties and twaddle. But where’s this dell where
the Dryad disappeared?”

“We’ve passed it.” He had meant to pass it. It was too beautiful. All
he had read, all he had hoped for, all he had loved, seemed to quiver
in its enchanted air. It was perilous. He dared not enter it with such
a woman.

“How long ago?” She turned back. “I don’t want to miss the dell. Here
it must be,” she added after a few moments, and sprang up the green
bank that hid the entrance from the road. “Oh, what a jolly place!”

“Go right in if you want to see it,” said Rickie, and did not offer
to go with her. She stood for a moment looking at the view, for a few
steps will increase a view in Cambridgeshire. The wind blew her dress
against her. Then, like a cataract again, she vanished pure and cool
into the dell.

The young man thought of her feelings no longer. His heart throbbed
louder and louder, and seemed to shake him to pieces. “Rickie!”

She was calling from the dell. For an answer he sat down where he was,
on the dust-bespattered margin. She could call as loud as she liked.
The devil had done much, but he should not take him to her.

“Rickie!”—and it came with the tones of an angel. He drove his fingers
into his ears, and invoked the name of Gerald. But there was no sign,
neither angry motion in the air nor hint of January mist. June—fields
of June, sky of June, songs of June. Grass of June beneath him, grass
of June over the tragedy he had deemed immortal. A bird called out of
the dell: “Rickie!”

A bird flew into the dell.

                   •       •       •       •       •

“Did you take me for the Dryad?” she asked. She was sitting down with
his head on her lap. He had laid it there for a moment before he went
out to die, and she had not let him take it away.

“I prayed you might not be a woman,” he whispered.

“Darling, I am very much a woman. I do not vanish into groves and
trees. I thought you would never come.”

“Did you expect—?”

“I hoped. I called hoping.”

Inside the dell it was neither June nor January. The chalk walls barred
out the seasons, and the fir-trees did not seem to feel their passage.
Only from time to time the odours of summer slipped in from the wood
above, to comment on the waxing year. She bent down to touch him with
her lips.

He started, and cried passionately, “Never forget that your greatest
thing is over. I have forgotten: I am too weak. You shall never forget.
What I said to you then is greater than what I say to you now. What he
gave you then is greater than anything you will get from me.”

She was frightened. Again she had the sense of something abnormal. Then
she said, “What is all this nonsense?” and folded him in her arms.




VIII


Ansell stood looking at his breakfast-table, which was laid for four
instead of two. His bedmaker, equally peevish, explained how it had
happened. Last night, at one in the morning, the porter had been awoke
with a note for the kitchens, and in that note Mr. Elliot said that all
these things were to be sent to Mr. Ansell’s.

“The fools have sent the original order as well. Here’s the lemon-sole
for two. I can’t move for food.”

“The note being ambiguous, the Kitchens judged best to send it all.”
She spoke of the kitchens in a half-respectful, half-pitying way, much
as one speaks of Parliament.

“Who’s to pay for it?” He peeped into the new dishes. Kidneys entombed
in an omelette, hot roast chicken in watery gravy, a glazed but pallid
pie.

“And who’s to wash it up?” said the bedmaker to her help outside.

Ansell had disputed late last night concerning Schopenhauer, and was a
little cross and tired. He bounced over to Tilliard, who kept opposite.
Tilliard was eating gooseberry jam.

“Did Elliot ask you to breakfast with me?”

“No,” said Tilliard mildly.

“Well, you’d better come, and bring every one you know.”

So Tilliard came, bearing himself a little formally, for he was not
very intimate with his neighbour. Out of the window they called to
Widdrington. But he laid his hand on his stomach, thus indicating it
was too late.

“Who’s to pay for it?” repeated Ansell, as a man appeared from the
Buttery carrying coffee on a bright tin tray.

“College coffee! How nice!” remarked Tilliard, who was cutting the pie.
“But before term ends you must come and try my new machine. My sister
gave it me. There is a bulb at the top, and as the water boils—”

“He might have counter-ordered the lemon-sole. That’s Rickie all over.
Violently economical, and then loses his head, and all the things go
bad.”

“Give them to the bedder while they’re hot.” This was done. She
accepted them dispassionately, with the air of one who lives without
nourishment. Tilliard continued to describe his sister’s coffee machine.

“What’s that?” They could hear panting and rustling on the stairs.

“It sounds like a lady,” said Tilliard fearfully. He slipped the piece
of pie back. It fell into position like a brick.

“Is it here? Am I right? Is it here?” The door opened and in came Mrs.
Lewin. “Oh horrors! I’ve made a mistake.”

“That’s all right,” said Ansell awkwardly.

“I wanted Mr. Elliot. Where are they?”

“We expect Mr. Elliot every moment,” said Tilliard.

“Don’t tell me I’m right,” cried Mrs. Lewin, “and that you’re the
terrifying Mr. Ansell.” And, with obvious relief, she wrung Tilliard
warmly by the hand.

“I’m Ansell,” said Ansell, looking very uncouth and grim.

“How stupid of me not to know it,” she gasped, and would have gone on
to I know not what, but the door opened again. It was Rickie.

“Here’s Miss Pembroke,” he said. “I am going to marry her.”

There was a profound silence.

“We oughtn’t to have done things like this,” said Agnes, turning to
Mrs. Lewin. “We have no right to take Mr. Ansell by surprise. It is
Rickie’s fault. He was that obstinate. He would bring us. He ought to
be horsewhipped.”

“He ought, indeed,” said Tilliard pleasantly, and bolted. Not till he
gained his room did he realize that he had been less apt than usual. As
for Ansell, the first thing he said was, “Why didn’t you counter-order
the lemon-sole?”

In such a situation Mrs. Lewin was of priceless value. She led the way
to the table, observing, “I quite agree with Miss Pembroke. I loathe
surprises. Never shall I forget my horror when the knife-boy painted
the dove’s cage with the dove inside. He did it as a surprise. Poor
Parsival nearly died. His feathers were bright green!”

“Well, give me the lemon-soles,” said Rickie. “I like them.”

“The bedder’s got them.”

“Well, there you are! What’s there to be annoyed about?”

“And while the cage was drying we put him among the bantams. They had
been the greatest allies. But I suppose they took him for a parrot or
a hawk, or something that bantams hate; for while his cage was drying
they picked out his feathers, and _picked_ out his feathers, and
_Picked_ out his feathers, till he was perfectly bald. ‘Hugo, look,’
said I. ‘This is the end of Parsival. Let me have no more surprises.’
He burst into tears.”

Thus did Mrs. Lewin create an atmosphere. At first it seemed unreal,
but gradually they got used to it, and breathed scarcely anything
else throughout the meal. In such an atmosphere everything seemed of
small and equal value, and the engagement of Rickie and Agnes like
the feathers of Parsival, fluttered lightly to the ground. Ansell was
generally silent. He was no match for these two quite clever women.
Only once was there a hitch.

They had been talking gaily enough about the betrothal when Ansell
suddenly interrupted with, “When is the marriage?”

“Mr. Ansell,” said Agnes, blushing, “I wish you hadn’t asked that. That
part’s dreadful. Not for years, as far as we can see.”

But Rickie had not seen as far. He had not talked to her of this at
all. Last night they had spoken only of love. He exclaimed, “Oh,
Agnes—don’t!” Mrs. Lewin laughed roguishly.

“Why this delay?” asked Ansell.

Agnes looked at Rickie, who replied, “I must get money, worse luck.”

“I thought you’d got money.”

He hesitated, and then said, “I must get my foot on the ladder, then.”

Ansell began with, “On which ladder?” but Mrs. Lewin, using the
privilege of her sex, exclaimed, “Not another word. If there’s a thing
I abominate, it is plans. My head goes whirling at once.” What she
really abominated was questions, and she saw that Ansell was turning
serious. To appease him, she put on her clever manner and asked him
about Germany. How had it impressed him? Were we so totally unfitted to
repel invasion? Was not German scholarship overestimated? He replied
discourteously, but he did reply; and if she could have stopped him
thinking, her triumph would have been complete.

When they rose to go, Agnes held Ansell’s hand for a moment in her own.

“Good-bye,” she said. “It was very unconventional of us to come as we
did, but I don’t think any of us are conventional people.”

He only replied, “Good-bye.” The ladies started off. Rickie lingered
behind to whisper, “I would have it so. I would have you begin square
together. I can’t talk yet—I’ve loved her for years—I can’t think what
she’s done it for. I’m going to write short stories. I shall start this
afternoon. She declares there may be something in me.”

As soon as he had left, Tilliard burst in, white with agitation, and
crying, “Did you see my awful _faux pas_—about the horsewhip? What
shall I do? I must call on Elliot. Or had I better write?”

“Miss Pembroke will not mind,” said Ansell gravely. “She is
unconventional.” He knelt in an arm-chair and hid his face in the back.

“It was like a bomb,” said Tilliard.

“It was meant to be.”

“I do feel a fool. What must she think?”

“Never mind, Tilliard. You’ve not been as big a fool as myself. At all
events, you told her he must be horsewhipped.”

Tilliard hummed a little tune. He hated anything nasty, and there was
nastiness in Ansell. “What did you tell her?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“What do you think of it?”

“I think: Damn those women.”

“Ah, yes. One hates one’s friends to get engaged. It makes one feel so
old: I think that is one of the reasons. The brother just above me has
lately married, and my sister was quite sick about it, though the thing
was suitable in every way.”

“Damn _these_ women, then,” said Ansell, bouncing round in the chair.
“Damn these particular women.”

“They looked and spoke like ladies.”

“Exactly. Their diplomacy was ladylike. Their lies were ladylike.
They’ve caught Elliot in a most ladylike way. I saw it all during the
one moment we were natural. Generally we were clattering after the
married one, whom—like a fool—I took for a fool. But for one moment
we were natural, and during that moment Miss Pembroke told a lie, and
made Rickie believe it was the truth.”

“What did she say?”

“She said ‘we see’ instead of ‘I see.’”

Tilliard burst into laughter. This jaundiced young philosopher, with
his kinky view of life, was too much for him.

“She said ‘we see,’” repeated Ansell, “instead of ‘I see,’ and she made
him believe that it was the truth. She caught him and makes him believe
that he caught her. She came to see me and makes him think that it is
his idea. That is what I mean when I say that she is a lady.”

“You are too subtle for me. My dull eyes could only see two happy
people.”

“I never said they weren’t happy.”

“Then, my dear Ansell, why are you so cut up? It’s beastly when a
friend marries,—and I grant he’s rather young,—but I should say it’s
the best thing for him. A decent woman—and you have proved not one
thing against her—a decent woman will keep him up to the mark and stop
him getting slack. She’ll make him responsible and manly, for much as I
like Rickie, I always find him a little effeminate. And, really,”—his
voice grew sharper, for he was irritated by Ansell’s conceit, “and,
really, you talk as if you were mixed up in the affair. They pay a
civil visit to your rooms, and you see nothing but dark plots and
challenges to war.”

“War!” cried Ansell, crashing his fists together. “It’s war, then!”

“Oh, what a lot of tommy-rot,” said Tilliard. “Can’t a man and woman
get engaged? My dear boy—excuse me talking like this—what on earth is
it to do with us? We’re his friends, and I hope we always shall be, but
we shan’t keep his friendship by fighting. We’re bound to fall into
the background. Wife first, friends some way after. You may resent the
order, but it is ordained by nature.”

“The point is, not what’s ordained by nature or any other fool, but
what’s right.”

“You are hopelessly unpractical,” said Tilliard, turning away. “And let
me remind you that you’ve already given away your case by acknowledging
that they’re happy.”

“She is happy because she has conquered; he is happy because he has
at last hung all the world’s beauty on to a single peg. He was always
trying to do it. He used to call the peg humanity. Will either of
these happinesses last? His can’t. Hers only for a time. I fight this
woman not only because she fights me, but because I foresee the most
appalling catastrophe. She wants Rickie, partly to replace another man
whom she lost two years ago, partly to make something out of him. He
is to write. In time she will get sick of this. He won’t get famous.
She will only see how thin he is and how lame. She will long for a
jollier husband, and I don’t blame her. And, having made him thoroughly
miserable and degraded, she will bolt—if she can do it like a lady.”

Such were the opinions of Stewart Ansell.




IX


Seven letters written in June:—


Cambridge.

Dear Rickie,

I would rather write, and you can guess what kind of letter this is
when I say it is a fair copy: I have been making rough drafts all
the morning. When I talk I get angry, and also at times try to be
clever—two reasons why I fail to get attention paid to me. This is a
letter of the prudent sort. If it makes you break off the engagement,
its work is done. You are not a person who ought to marry at all. You
are unfitted in body: that we once discussed. You are also unfitted
in soul: you want and you need to like many people, and a man of that
sort ought not to marry. “You never were attached to that great sect”
who can like one person only, and if you try to enter it you will
find destruction. I have read in books and I cannot afford to despise
books, they are all that I have to go by—that men and women desire
different things. Man wants to love mankind; woman wants to love one
man. When she has him her work is over. She is the emissary of Nature,
and Nature’s bidding has been fulfilled. But man does not care a damn
for Nature—or at least only a very little damn. He cares for a hundred
things besides, and the more civilized he is the more he will care for
these other hundred things, and demand not only a wife and children,
but also friends, and work, and spiritual freedom.

I believe you to be extraordinarily civilized.—Yours ever,

S.A.


Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road, Sawston.

Dear Ansell,

But I’m in love—a detail you’ve forgotten. I can’t listen to English
Essays. The wretched Agnes may be an “emissary of Nature,” but I only
grinned when I read it. I may be extraordinarily civilized, but I
don’t feel so; I’m in love, and I’ve found a woman to love me, and I
mean to have the hundred other things as well. She wants me to have
them—friends and work, and spiritual freedom, and everything. You
and your books miss this, because your books are too sedate. Read
poetry—not only Shelley. Understand Beatrice, and Clara Middleton, and
Brunhilde in the first scene of Gotterdammerung. Understand Goethe when
he says “the eternal feminine leads us on,” and don’t write another
English Essay.—Yours ever affectionately,

R.E.


Cambridge.

Dear Rickie,

What am I to say? “Understand Xanthippe, and Mrs. Bennet, and Elsa in
the question scene of Lohengrin”? “Understand Euripides when he says
the eternal feminine leads us a pretty dance”? I shall say nothing of
the sort. The allusions in this English Essay shall not be literary. My
personal objections to Miss Pembroke are as follows:—(1) She is not
serious. (2) She is not truthful.


Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road,
Sawston.

My Dear Stewart,

You couldn’t know. I didn’t know for a moment. But this letter of yours
is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me yet—more
wonderful (I don’t exaggerate) than the moment when Agnes promised to
marry me. I always knew you liked me, but I never knew how much until
this letter. Up to now I think we have been too much like the strong
heroes in books who feel so much and say so little, and feel all the
more for saying so little. Now that’s over and we shall never be that
kind of an ass again. We’ve hit—by accident—upon something permanent.
You’ve written to me, “I hate the woman who will be your wife,” and
I write back, “Hate her. Can’t I love you both?” She will never come
between us, Stewart (She wouldn’t wish to, but that’s by the way),
because our friendship has now passed beyond intervention. No third
person could break it. We couldn’t ourselves, I fancy. We may quarrel
and argue till one of us dies, but the thing is registered. I only
wish, dear man, you could be happier. For me, it’s as if a light was
suddenly held behind the world.

R.E.


Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road,
Sawston.

Dear Mrs. Lewin,

The time goes flying, but I am getting to learn my wonderful boy. We
speak a great deal about his work. He has just finished a curious thing
called “Nemi”—about a Roman ship that is actually sunk in some lake. I
cannot think how he describes the things, when he has never seen them.
If, as I hope, he goes to Italy next year, he should turn out something
really good. Meanwhile we are hunting for a publisher. Herbert believes
that a collection of short stories is hard to get published. It is,
after all, better to write one long one.

But you must not think we only talk books. What we say on other topics
cannot so easily be repeated! Oh, Mrs Lewin, he is a dear, and dearer
than ever now that we have him at Sawston. Herbert, in a quiet way, has
been making inquiries about those Cambridge friends of his. Nothing
against them, but they seem to be terribly eccentric. None of them
are good at games, and they spend all their spare time thinking and
discussing. They discuss what one knows and what one never will know
and what one had much better not know. Herbert says it is because they
have not got enough to do.—Ever your grateful and affectionate friend,

Agnes Pembroke


Shelthorpe, 9 Sawston Park Road,
Sawston.

Dear Mr. Silt,

Thank you for the congratulations, which I have handed over to the
delighted Rickie.

(The congratulations were really addressed to Agnes—a social blunder
which Mr. Pembroke deftly corrects.)

I am sorry that the rumor reached you that I was not pleased. Anything
pleases me that promises my sister’s happiness, and I have known your
cousin nearly as long as you have. It will be a very long engagement,
for he must make his way first. The dear boy is not nearly as wealthy
as he supposed; having no tastes, and hardly any expenses, he used to
talk as if he were a millionaire. He must at least double his income
before he can dream of more intimate ties. This has been a bitter pill,
but I am glad to say that they have accepted it bravely.

Hoping that you and Mrs. Silt will profit by your week at Margate.—I
remain, yours very sincerely,

Herbert Pembroke


Cadover, Wilts.

Dear Miss Pembroke—Agnes,

I hear that you are going to marry my nephew. I have no idea what he is
like, and wonder whether you would bring him that I may find out. Isn’t
September rather a nice month? You might have to go to Stone Henge,
but with that exception would be left unmolested. I do hope you will
manage the visit. We met once at Mrs. Lewin’s, and I have a very clear
recollection of you.—Believe me, yours sincerely,

Emily Failing




X


The rain tilted a little from the south-west. For the most part it fell
from a grey cloud silently, but now and then the tilt increased, and
a kind of sigh passed over the country as the drops lashed the walls,
trees, shepherds, and other motionless objects that stood in their
slanting career. At times the cloud would descend and visibly embrace
the earth, to which it had only sent messages; and the earth itself
would bring forth clouds—clouds of a whiter breed—which formed in
shallow valleys and followed the courses of the streams. It seemed the
beginning of life. Again God said, “Shall we divide the waters from the
land or not? Was not the firmament labour and glory sufficient?” At all
events it was the beginning of life pastoral, behind which imagination
cannot travel.

Yet complicated people were getting wet—not only the shepherds. For
instance, the piano-tuner was sopping. So was the vicar’s wife. So
were the lieutenant and the peevish damsels in his Battleston car.
Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring
and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal
man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is
vegetarian.

Inside an arbour—which faced east, and thus avoided the bad
weather—there sat a complicated person who was dry. She looked at the
drenched world with a pleased expression, and would smile when a cloud
would lay down on the village, or when the rain sighed louder than
usual against her solid shelter. Ink, paperclips, and foolscap paper
were on the table before her, and she could also reach an umbrella, a
waterproof, a walking-stick, and an electric bell. Her age was between
elderly and old, and her forehead was wrinkled with an expression of
slight but perpetual pain. But the lines round her mouth indicated that
she had laughed a great deal during her life, just as the clean tight
skin round her eyes perhaps indicated that she had not often cried. She
was dressed in brown silk. A brown silk shawl lay most becomingly over
her beautiful hair.

After long thought she wrote on the paper in front of her, “The subject
of this memoir first saw the light at Wolverhampton on May the 14th,
1842.” She laid down her pen and said “Ugh!” A robin hopped in and she
welcomed him. A sparrow followed and she stamped her foot. She watched
some thick white water which was sliding like a snake down the gutter
of the gravel path. It had just appeared. It must have escaped from a
hollow in the chalk up behind. The earth could absorb no longer. The
lady did not think of all this, for she hated questions of whence and
wherefore, and the ways of the earth (“our dull stepmother”) bored her
unspeakably. But the water, just the snake of water, was amusing, and
she flung her golosh at it to dam it up. Then she wrote feverishly,
“The subject of this memoir first saw the light in the middle of the
night. It was twenty to eleven. His pa was a parson, but he was not his
pa’s son, and never went to heaven.” There was the sound of a train,
and presently white smoke appeared, rising laboriously through the
heavy air. It distracted her, and for about a quarter of an hour she
sat perfectly still, doing nothing. At last she pushed the spoilt paper
aside, took a fresh piece, and was beginning to write, “On May the 14th,
1842,” when there was a crunch on the gravel, and a furious voice said,
“I am sorry for Flea Thompson.”

“I daresay I am sorry for him too,” said the lady; her voice was
languid and pleasant. “Who is he?”

“Flea’s a liar, and the next time we meet he’ll be a football.” Off
slipped a sodden ulster. He hung it up angrily upon a peg: the arbour
provided several.

“But who is he, and why has he that disastrous name?”

“Flea? Fleance. All the Thompsons are named out of Shakespeare. He
grazes the Rings.”

“Ah, I see. A pet lamb.”

“Lamb! Shepherd!”

“One of my Shepherds?”

“The last time I go with his sheep. But not the last time he sees me. I
am sorry for him. He dodged me today.”

“Do you mean to say”—she became animated—“that you have been out in
the wet keeping the sheep of Flea Thompson?”

“I had to.” He blew on his fingers and took off his cap. Water trickled
over his unshaven cheeks. His hair was so wet that it seemed worked
upon his scalp in bronze.

“Get away, bad dog!” screamed the lady, for he had given himself a
shake and spattered her dress with water. He was a powerful boy of
twenty, admirably muscular, but rather too broad for his height. People
called him “Podge” until they were dissuaded. Then they called him
“Stephen” or “Mr. Wonham.” Then he said, “You can call me Podge if you
like.”

“As for Flea—!” he began tempestuously. He sat down by her, and
with much heavy breathing told the story,—“Flea has a girl at
Wintersbridge, and I had to go with his sheep while he went to see her.
Two hours. We agreed. Half an hour to go, an hour to kiss his girl, and
half an hour back—and he had my bike. Four hours! Four hours and seven
minutes I was on the Rings, with a fool of a dog, and sheep doing all
they knew to get the turnips.”

“My farm is a mystery to me,” said the lady, stroking her fingers.

“Some day you must really take me to see it. It must be like a Gilbert
and Sullivan opera, with a chorus of agitated employers. How is it that
I have escaped? Why have I never been summoned to milk the cows, or
flay the pigs, or drive the young bullocks to the pasture?”

He looked at her with astonishingly blue eyes—the only dry things he
had about him. He could not see into her: she would have puzzled an
older and clever man. He may have seen round her.

“A thing of beauty you are not. But I sometimes think you are a joy for
ever.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, you understand right enough,” she exclaimed irritably, and then
smiled, for he was conceited, and did not like being told that he was
not a thing of beauty. “Large and steady feet,” she continued, “have
this disadvantage—you can knock down a man, but you will never knock
down a woman.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’m not likely—”

“Oh, never mind—never, never mind. I was being funny. I repent. Tell
me about the sheep. Why did you go with them?”

“I did tell you. I had to.”

“But why?”

“He had to see his girl.”

“But why?”

His eyes shot past her again. It was so obvious that the man had to see
his girl. For two hours though—not for four hours seven minutes.

“Did you have any lunch?”

“I don’t hold with regular meals.”

“Did you have a book?”

“I don’t hold with books in the open. None of the older men read.”

“Did you commune with yourself, or don’t you hold with that?”

“Oh Lord, don’t ask me!”

“You distress me. You rob the Pastoral of its lingering romance. Is
there no poetry and no thought in England? Is there no one, in all
these downs, who warbles with eager thought the Doric lay?”

“Chaps sing to themselves at times, if you mean that.”

“I dream of Arcady. I open my eyes. Wiltshire. Of Amaryllis: Flea
Thompson’s girl. Of the pensive shepherd, twitching his mantle blue:
you in an ulster. Aren’t you sorry for me?”

“May I put in a pipe?”

“By all means put a pipe in. In return, tell me of what you were
thinking for the four hours and the seven minutes.”

He laughed shyly. “You do ask a man such questions.”

“Did you simply waste the time?”

“I suppose so.”

“I thought that Colonel Robert Ingersoll says you must be strenuous.”

At the sound of this name he whisked open a little cupboard, and
declaring, “I haven’t a moment to spare,” took out of it a pile of
“Clarion” and other reprints, adorned as to their covers with bald or
bearded apostles of humanity. Selecting a bald one, he began at once
to read, occasionally exclaiming, “That’s got them,” “That’s knocked
Genesis,” with similar ejaculations of an aspiring mind. She glanced
at the pile. Reran, minus the style. Darwin, minus the modesty. A
comic edition of the book of Job, by “Excelsior,” Pittsburgh, Pa. “The
Beginning of Life,” with diagrams. “Angel or Ape?” by Mrs. Julia P.
Chunk. She was amused, and wondered idly what was passing within his
narrow but not uninteresting brain. Did he suppose that he was going to
“find out”? She had tried once herself, but had since subsided into a
sprightly orthodoxy. Why didn’t he read poetry, instead of wasting his
time between books like these and country like that?

The cloud parted, and the increase of light made her look up. Over
the valley she saw a grave sullen down, and on its flanks a little
brown smudge—her sheep, together with her shepherd, Fleance Thompson,
returned to his duties at last. A trickle of water came through the
arbour roof. She shrieked in dismay.

“That’s all right,” said her companion, moving her chair, but still
keeping his place in his book.

She dried up the spot on the manuscript. Then she wrote: “Anthony
Eustace Failing, the subject of this memoir, was born at
Wolverhampton.” But she wrote no more. She was fidgety. Another drop
fell from the roof. Likewise an earwig. She wished she had not been
so playful in flinging her golosh into the path. The boy who was
overthrowing religion breathed somewhat heavily as he did so. Another
earwig. She touched the electric bell.

“I’m going in,” she observed. “It’s far too wet.” Again the cloud
parted and caused her to add, “Weren’t you rather kind to Flea?” But
he was deep in the book. He read like a poor person, with lips apart
and a finger that followed the print. At times he scratched his ear, or
ran his tongue along a straggling blonde moustache. His face had after
all a certain beauty: at all events the colouring was regal—a steady
crimson from throat to forehead: the sun and the winds had worked on
him daily ever since he was born. “The face of a strong man,” thought
the lady. “Let him thank his stars he isn’t a silent strong man, or I’d
turn him into the gutter.” Suddenly it struck her that he was like an
Irish terrier. He worried infinity as if it was a bone. Gnashing his
teeth, he tried to carry the eternal subtleties by violence. As a man
he often bored her, for he was always saying and doing the same things.
But as a philosopher he really was a joy for ever, an inexhaustible
buffoon. Taking up her pen, she began to caricature him. She drew a
rabbit-warren where rabbits were at play in four dimensions. Before
she had introduced the principal figure, she was interrupted by the
footman. He had come up from the house to answer the bell. On seeing
her he uttered a respectful cry.

“Madam! Are you here? I am very sorry. I looked for you everywhere. Mr.
Elliot and Miss Pembroke arrived nearly an hour ago.”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Failing. “Take these papers. Where’s
the umbrella? Mr. Stephen will hold it over me. You hurry back and
apologize. Are they happy?”

“Miss Pembroke inquired after you, madam.”

“Have they had tea?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Leighton!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I believe you knew she was here all the time. You didn’t want to wet
your pretty skin.”

“You must not call me ‘she’ to the servants,” said Mrs. Failing as they
walked away, she limping with a stick, he holding a great umbrella over
her. “I will not have it.” Then more pleasantly, “And don’t tell him he
lies. We all lie. I knew quite well they were coming by the four-six
train. I saw it pass.”

“That reminds me. Another child run over at the Roman crossing.
Whish—bang—dead.”

“Oh my foot! Oh my foot, my foot!” said Mrs. Failing, and paused to
take breath.

“Bad?” he asked callously.

Leighton, with bowed head, passed them with the manuscript and
disappeared among the laurels. The twinge of pain, which had been
slight, passed away, and they proceeded, descending a green airless
corridor which opened into the gravel drive.

“Isn’t it odd,” said Mrs. Failing, “that the Greeks should be
enthusiastic about laurels—that Apollo should pursue any one who could
possibly turn into such a frightful plant? What do you make of Rickie?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Shall I lend you his story to read?”

He made no reply.

“Don’t you think, Stephen, that a person in your precarious position
ought to be civil to my relatives?”

“Sorry, Mrs. Failing. I meant to be civil. I only hadn’t—anything to
say.”

She laughed. “Are you a dear boy? I sometimes wonder; or are you a
brute?”

Again he had nothing to say. Then she laughed more mischievously, and
said—

“How can you be either, when you are a philosopher? Would you mind
telling me—I am so anxious to learn—what happens to people when they
die?”

“Don’t ask _me_.” He knew by bitter experience that she was making fun
of him.

“Oh, but I do ask you. Those paper books of yours are so up-to-date.
For instance, what has happened to the child you say was killed on the
line?”

The rain increased. The drops pattered hard on the leaves, and outside
the corridor men and women were struggling, however stupidly, with the
facts of life. Inside it they wrangled. She teased the boy, and laughed
at his theories, and proved that no man can be an agnostic who has a
sense of humour. Suddenly she stopped, not through any skill of his,
but because she had remembered some words of Bacon: “The true atheist
is he whose hands are cauterized by holy things.” She thought of her
distant youth. The world was not so humorous then, but it had been more
important. For a moment she respected her companion, and determined to
vex him no more.

They left the shelter of the laurels, crossed the broad drive, and were
inside the house at last. She had got quite wet, for the weather would
not let her play the simple life with impunity. As for him, he seemed a
piece of the wet.

“Look here,” she cried, as he hurried up to his attic, “don’t shave!”

He was delighted with the permission.

“I have an idea that Miss Pembroke is of the type that pretends to be
unconventional and really isn’t. I want to see how she takes it. Don’t
shave.”

In the drawing-room she could hear the guests conversing in the subdued
tones of those who have not been welcomed. Having changed her dress and
glanced at the poems of Milton, she went to them, with uplifted hands
of apology and horror.

“But I must have tea,” she announced, when they had assured her that
they understood. “Otherwise I shall start by being cross. Agnes, stop
me. Give me tea.”

Agnes, looking pleased, moved to the table and served her hostess.
Rickie followed with a pagoda of sandwiches and little cakes.

“I feel twenty-seven years younger. Rickie, you are so like your
father. I feel it is twenty-seven years ago, and that he is bringing
your mother to see me for the first time. It is curious—almost
terrible—to see history repeating itself.”

The remark was not tactful.

“I remember that visit well,” she continued thoughtfully, “I suppose
it was a wonderful visit, though we none of us knew it at the time. We
all fell in love with your mother. I wish she would have fallen in love
with us. She couldn’t bear me, could she?”

“I never heard her say so, Aunt Emily.”

“No; she wouldn’t. I am sure your father said so, though. My dear boy,
don’t look so shocked. Your father and I hated each other. He said so,
I said so, I say so; say so too. Then we shall start fair.—Just a
cocoanut cake.—Agnes, don’t you agree that it’s always best to speak
out?”

“Oh, rather, Mrs. Failing. But I’m shockingly straightforward.”

“So am I,” said the lady. “I like to get down to the bedrock.—Hullo!
Slippers? Slippers in the drawingroom?”

A young man had come in silently. Agnes observed with a feeling of
regret that he had not shaved. Rickie, after a moment’s hesitation,
remembered who it was, and shook hands with him. “You’ve grown since I
saw you last.”

He showed his teeth amiably.

“How long was that?” asked Mrs. Failing.

“Three years, wasn’t it? Came over from the Ansells—friends.”

“How disgraceful, Rickie! Why don’t you come and see me oftener?”

He could not retort that she never asked him.

“Agnes will make you come. Oh, let me introduce—Mr. Wonham—Miss
Pembroke.”

“I am deputy hostess,” said Agnes. “May I give you some tea?”

“Thank you, but I have had a little beer.”

“It is one of the shepherds,” said Mrs. Failing, in low tones.

Agnes smiled rather wildly. Mrs. Lewin had warned her that Cadover
was an extraordinary place, and that one must never be astonished at
anything. A shepherd in the drawing-room! No harm. Still one ought
to know whether it was a shepherd or not. At all events he was in
gentleman’s clothing. She was anxious not to start with a blunder, and
therefore did not talk to the young fellow, but tried to gather what he
was from the demeanour of Rickie.

“I am sure, Mrs. Failing, that you need not talk of ‘making’ people
come to Cadover. There will be no difficulty, I should say.”

“Thank you, my dear. Do you know who once said those exact words to me?”

“Who?”

“Rickie’s mother.”

“Did she really?”

“My sister-in-law was a dear. You will have heard Rickie’s praises, but
now you must hear mine. I never knew a woman who was so unselfish and
yet had such capacities for life.”

“Does one generally exclude the other?” asked Rickie.

“Unselfish people, as a rule, are deathly dull. They have no colour.
They think of other people because it is easier. They give money
because they are too stupid or too idle to spend it properly on
themselves. That was the beauty of your mother—she gave away, but she
also spent on herself, or tried to.”

The light faded out of the drawing-room, in spite of it being September
and only half-past six. From her low chair Agnes could see the trees by
the drive, black against a blackening sky. That drive was half a mile
long, and she was praising its gravelled surface when Rickie called in
a voice of alarm, “I say, when did our train arrive?”

“Four-six.”

“I said so.”

“It arrived at four-six on the time-table,” said Mr. Wonham. “I want to
know when it got to the station?”

“I tell you again it was punctual. I tell you I looked at my watch. I
can do no more.”

Agnes was amazed. Was Rickie mad? A minute ago and they were boring
each other over dogs. What had happened?

“Now, now! Quarrelling already?” asked Mrs. Failing.

The footman, bringing a lamp, lit up two angry faces.

“He says—”

“He says—”

“He says we ran over a child.”

“So you did. You ran over a child in the village at four-seven by my
watch. Your train was late. You couldn’t have got to the station till
four-ten.”

“I don’t believe it. We had passed the village by four-seven. Agnes,
hadn’t we passed the village? It must have been an express that ran
over the child.”

“Now is it likely”—he appealed to the practical world—“is it likely
that the company would run a stopping train and then an express three
minutes after it?”

“A child—” said Rickie. “I can’t believe that the train killed a
child.” He thought of their journey. They were alone in the carriage.
As the train slackened speed he had caught her for a moment in his
arms. The rain beat on the windows, but they were in heaven.

“You’ve got to believe it,” said the other, and proceeded to “rub it
in.” His healthy, irritable face drew close to Rickie’s. “Two children
were kicking and screaming on the Roman crossing. Your train, being
late, came down on them. One of them was pulled off the line, but the
other was caught. How will you get out of that?”

“And how will you get out of it?” cried Mrs. Failing, turning the
tables on him. “Where’s the child now? What has happened to its soul?
You must know, Agnes, that this young gentleman is a philosopher.”

“Oh, drop all that,” said Mr. Wonham, suddenly collapsing.

“Drop it? Where? On my nice carpet?”

“I hate philosophy,” remarked Agnes, trying to turn the subject, for
she saw that it made Rickie unhappy.

“So do I. But I daren’t say so before Stephen. He despises us women.”

“No, I don’t,” said the victim, swaying to and fro on the window-sill,
whither he had retreated.

“Yes, he does. He won’t even trouble to answer us. Stephen! Podge!
Answer me. What has happened to the child’s soul?”

He flung open the window and leant from them into the dusk. They heard
him mutter something about a bridge.

“What did I tell you? He won’t answer my question.”

The delightful moment was approaching when the boy would lose his
temper: she knew it by a certain tremor in his heels.

“There wants a bridge,” he exploded. “A bridge instead of all this
rotten talk and the level-crossing. It wouldn’t break you to build a
two-arch bridge. Then the child’s soul, as you call it—well, nothing
would have happened to the child at all.”

A gust of night air entered, accompanied by rain. The flowers in the
vases rustled, and the flame of the lamp shot up and smoked the glass.
Slightly irritated, she ordered him to close the window.




XI


Cadover was not a large house. But it is the largest house with which
this story has dealings, and must always be thought of with respect.
It was built about the year 1800, and favoured the architecture of
ancient Rome—chiefly by means of five lank pilasters, which stretched
from the top of it to the bottom. Between the pilasters was the glass
front door, to the right of them the drawing room windows, to the left
of them the windows of the dining-room, above them a triangular area,
which the better-class servants knew as a “pendiment,” and which had in
its middle a small round hole, according to the usage of Palladio. The
classical note was also sustained by eight grey steps which led from
the building down into the drive, and by an attempt at a formal garden
on the adjoining lawn. The lawn ended in a Ha-ha (“Ha! ha! who shall
regard it?”), and thence the bare land sloped down into the village.
The main garden (walled) was to the left as one faced the house, while
to the right was that laurel avenue, leading up to Mrs. Failing’s
arbour.

It was a comfortable but not very attractive place, and, to a certain
type of mind, its situation was not attractive either. From the
distance it showed as a grey box, huddled against evergreens. There
was no mystery about it. You saw it for miles. Its hill had none of
the beetling romance of Devonshire, none of the subtle contours that
prelude a cottage in Kent, but profferred its burden crudely, on a huge
bare palm. “There’s Cadover,” visitors would say. “How small it still
looks. We shall be late for lunch.” And the view from the windows,
though extensive, would not have been accepted by the Royal Academy.
A valley, containing a stream, a road, a railway; over the valley
fields of barley and wurzel, divided by no pretty hedges, and passing
into a great and formless down—this was the outlook, desolate at all
times, and almost terrifying beneath a cloudy sky. The down was called
“Cadbury Range” (“Cocoa Squares” if you were young and funny), because
high upon it—one cannot say “on the top,” there being scarcely any
tops in Wiltshire—because high upon it there stood a double circle
of entrenchments. A bank of grass enclosed a ring of turnips, which
enclosed a second bank of grass, which enclosed more turnips, and in
the middle of the pattern grew one small tree. British? Roman? Saxon?
Danish? The competent reader will decide. The Thompson family knew it
to be far older than the Franco-German war. It was the property of
Government. It was full of gold and dead soldiers who had fought with
the soldiers on Castle Rings and been beaten. The road to Londinium,
having forded the stream and crossed the valley road and the railway,
passed up by these entrenchments. The road to London lay half a mile to
the right of them.

To complete this survey one must mention the church and the farm,
both of which lay over the stream in Cadford. Between them they ruled
the village, one claiming the souls of the labourers, the other their
bodies. If a man desired other religion or other employment he must
leave. The church lay up by the railway, the farm was down by the
water meadows. The vicar, a gentle charitable man, scarcely realized
his power, and never tried to abuse it. Mr. Wilbraham, the agent, was
of another mould. He knew his place, and kept others to theirs: all
society seemed spread before him like a map. The line between the
county and the local, the line between the labourer and the artisan—he
knew them all, and strengthened them with no uncertain touch.
Everything with him was graduated—carefully graduated civility towards
his superior, towards his inferiors carefully graduated incivility.
So—for he was a thoughtful person—so alone, declared he, could things
be kept together.

Perhaps the Comic Muse, to whom so much is now attributed, had caused
his estate to be left to Mr. Failing. Mr. Failing was the author of
some brilliant books on socialism,—that was why his wife married
him—and for twenty-five years he reigned up at Cadover and tried to
put his theories into practice. He believed that things could be kept
together by accenting the similarities, not the differences of men.
“We are all much more alike than we confess,” was one of his favourite
speeches. As a speech it sounded very well, and his wife had applauded;
but when it resulted in hard work, evenings in the reading-rooms,
mixed-parties, and long unobtrusive talks with dull people, she got
bored. In her piquant way she declared that she was not going to love
her husband, and succeeded. He took it quietly, but his brilliancy
decreased. His health grew worse, and he knew that when he died there
was no one to carry on his work. He felt, besides, that he had done
very little. Toil as he would, he had not a practical mind, and could
never dispense with Mr. Wilbraham. For all his tact, he would often
stretch out the hand of brotherhood too soon, or withhold it when
it would have been accepted. Most people misunderstood him, or only
understood him when he was dead. In after years his reign became a
golden age; but he counted a few disciples in his life-time, a few
young labourers and tenant farmers, who swore tempestuously that he was
not really a fool. This, he told himself, was as much as he deserved.

Cadover was inherited by his widow. She tried to sell it; she tried to
let it; but she asked too much, and as it was neither a pretty place
nor fertile, it was left on her hands. With many a groan she settled
down to banishment. Wiltshire people, she declared, were the stupidest
in England. She told them so to their faces, which made them no
brighter. And their county was worthy of them: no distinction in it—no
style—simply land.

But her wrath passed, or remained only as a graceful fretfulness. She
made the house comfortable, and abandoned the farm to Mr. Wilbraham.
With a good deal of care she selected a small circle of acquaintances,
and had them to stop in the summer months. In the winter she would
go to town and frequent the salons of the literary. As her lameness
increased she moved about less, and at the time of her nephew’s visit
seldom left the place that had been forced upon her as a home. Just
now she was busy. A prominent politician had quoted her husband. The
young generation asked, “Who is this Mr. Failing?” and the publishers
wrote, “Now is the time.” She was collecting some essays and penning an
introductory memoir.

Rickie admired his aunt, but did not care for her. She reminded
him too much of his father. She had the same affliction, the same
heartlessness, the same habit of taking life with a laugh—as if life
is a pill! He also felt that she had neglected him. He would not have
asked much: as for “prospects,” they never entered his head, but she
was his only near relative, and a little kindness and hospitality
during the lonely years would have made incalculable difference. Now
that he was happier and could bring her Agnes, she had asked him to
stop at once. The sun as it rose next morning spoke to him of a new
life. He too had a purpose and a value in the world at last. Leaning
out of the window, he gazed at the earth washed clean and heard through
the pure air the distant noises of the farm.

But that day nothing was to remain divine but the weather. His aunt,
for reasons of her own, decreed that he should go for a ride with
the Wonham boy. They were to look at Old Sarum, proceed thence to
Salisbury, lunch there, see the sights, call on a certain canon for
tea, and return to Cadover in the evening. The arrangement suited no
one. He did not want to ride, but to be with Agnes; nor did Agnes want
to be parted from him, nor Stephen to go with him. But the clearer the
wishes of her guests became, the more determined was Mrs. Failing to
disregard them. She smoothed away every difficulty, she converted every
objection into a reason, and she ordered the horses for half-past nine.

“It is a bore,” he grumbled as he sat in their little private
sitting-room, breaking his finger-nails upon the coachman’s gaiters. “I
can’t ride. I shall fall off. We should have been so happy here. It’s
just like Aunt Emily. Can’t you imagine her saying afterwards, ‘Lovers
are absurd. I made a point of keeping them apart,’ and then everybody
laughing.”

With a pretty foretaste of the future, Agnes knelt before him and did
the gaiters up. “Who is this Mr. Wonham, by the bye?”

“I don’t know. Some connection of Mr. Failing’s, I think.”

“Does he live here?”

“He used to be at school or something. He seems to have grown into a
tiresome person.”

“I suppose that Mrs. Failing has adopted him.”

“I suppose so. I believe that she has been quite kind. I do hope she’ll
be kind to you this morning. I hate leaving you with her.”

“Why, you say she likes me.”

“Yes, but that wouldn’t prevent—you see she doesn’t mind what she says
or what she repeats if it amuses her. If she thought it really funny,
for instance, to break off our engagement, she’d try.”

“Dear boy, what a frightful remark! But it would be funnier for us to
see her trying. Whatever could she do?”

He kissed the hands that were still busy with the fastenings. “Nothing.
I can’t see one thing. We simply lie open to each other, you and I.
There isn’t one new corner in either of us that she could reveal.
It’s only that I always have in this house the most awful feeling of
insecurity.”

“Why?”

“If any one says or does a foolish thing it’s always here. All the
family breezes have started here. It’s a kind of focus for aimed and
aimless scandal. You know, when my father and mother had their special
quarrel, my aunt was mixed up in it,—I never knew how or how much—but
you may be sure she didn’t calm things down, unless she found things
more entertaining calm.”

“Rickie! Rickie!” cried the lady from the garden, “Your riding-master’s
impatient.”

“We really oughtn’t to talk of her like this here,” whispered Agnes.
“It’s a horrible habit.”

“The habit of the country, Agnes. Ugh, this gossip!” Suddenly he flung
his arms over her. “Dear—dear—let’s beware of I don’t know what—of
nothing at all perhaps.”

“Oh, buck up!” yelled the irritable Stephen. “Which am I to
shorten—left stirrup or right?”

“Left!” shouted Agnes.

“How many holes?”

They hurried down. On the way she said: “I’m glad of the warning. Now
I’m prepared. Your aunt will get nothing out of me.”

Her betrothed tried to mount with the wrong foot according to his
invariable custom. She also had to pick up his whip. At last they
started, the boy showing off pretty consistently, and she was left
alone with her hostess.

“Dido is quiet as a lamb,” said Mrs. Failing, “and Stephen is a good
fielder. What a blessing it is to have cleared out the men. What shall
you and I do this heavenly morning?”

“I’m game for anything.”

“Have you quite unpacked?”

“Yes.”

“Any letters to write?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go to my arbour. No, we won’t. It gets the morning sun, and
it’ll be too hot today.” Already she regretted clearing out the men. On
such a morning she would have liked to drive, but her third animal had
gone lame. She feared, too, that Miss Pembroke was going to bore her.
However, they did go to the arbour. In languid tones she pointed out
the various objects of interest.

“There’s the Cad, which goes into the something, which goes into the
Avon. Cadbury Rings opposite, Cadchurch to the extreme left: you can’t
see it. You were there last night. It is famous for the drunken parson
and the railway-station. Then Cad Dauntsey. Then Cadford, that side of
the stream, connected with Cadover, this. Observe the fertility of the
Wiltshire mind.”

“A terrible lot of Cads,” said Agnes brightly.

Mrs. Failing divided her guests into those who made this joke and those
who did not. The latter class was very small.

“The vicar of Cadford—not the nice drunkard—declares the name is
really ‘Chadford,’ and he worried on till I put up a window to St. Chad
in our church. His Cambridge wife pronounces it ‘Hyadford.’ I could
smack them both. How do you like Podge? Ah! you jump; I meant you to.
How do you like Podge Wonham?”

“Very nice,” said Agnes, laughing.

“Nice! He is a hero.”

There was a long interval of silence. Each lady looked, without
much interest, at the view. Mrs. Failing’s attitude towards Nature
was severely aesthetic—an attitude more sterile than the severely
practical. She applied the test of beauty to shadow and odour and
sound; they never filled her with reverence or excitement; she never
knew them as a resistless trinity that may intoxicate the worshipper
with joy. If she liked a ploughed field, it was only as a spot of
colour—not also as a hint of the endless strength of the earth. And
today she could approve of one cloud, but object to its fellow. As for
Miss Pembroke, she was not approving or objecting at all. “A hero?” she
queried, when the interval had passed. Her voice was indifferent, as if
she had been thinking of other things.

“A hero? Yes. Didn’t you notice how heroic he was?”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Not at dinner? Ah, Agnes, always look out for heroism at dinner. It is
their great time. They live up to the stiffness of their shirt fronts.
Do you mean to say that you never noticed how he set down Rickie?”

“Oh, that about poetry!” said Agnes, laughing. “Rickie would not mind
it for a moment. But why do you single out that as heroic?”

“To snub people! to set them down! to be rude to them! to make them
feel small! Surely that’s the lifework of a hero?”

“I shouldn’t have said that. And as a matter of fact Mr. Wonham was
wrong over the poetry. I made Rickie look it up afterwards.”

“But of course. A hero always is wrong.”

“To me,” she persisted, rather gently, “a hero has always been a strong
wonderful being, who champions—”

“Ah, wait till you are the dragon! I have been a dragon most of my
life, I think. A dragon that wants nothing but a peaceful cave.
Then in comes the strong, wonderful, delightful being, and gains a
princess by piercing my hide. No, seriously, my dear Agnes, the chief
characteristics of a hero are infinite disregard for the feelings of
others, plus general inability to understand them.”

“But surely Mr. Wonham—”

“Yes; aren’t we being unkind to the poor boy. Ought we to go on
talking?”

Agnes waited, remembering the warnings of Rickie, and thinking that
anything she said might perhaps be repeated.

“Though even if he was here he wouldn’t understand what we are saying.”

“Wouldn’t understand?”

Mrs. Failing gave the least flicker of an eye towards her companion.
“Did you take him for clever?”

“I don’t think I took him for anything.” She smiled. “I have been
thinking of other things, and another boy.”

“But do think for a moment of Stephen. I will describe how he spent
yesterday. He rose at eight. From eight to eleven he sang. The song was
called, ‘Father’s boots will soon fit Willie.’ He stopped once to say
to the footman, ‘She’ll never finish her book. She idles: ‘She’ being
I. At eleven he went out, and stood in the rain till four, but had the
luck to see a child run over at the level-crossing. By half-past four
he had knocked the bottom out of Christianity.”

Agnes looked bewildered.

“Aren’t you impressed? I was. I told him that he was on no account
to unsettle the vicar. Open that cupboard, one of those sixpenny
books tells Podge that he’s made of hard little black things, another
that he’s made of brown things, larger and squashy. There seems a
discrepancy, but anything is better for a thoughtful youth than to be
made in the Garden of Eden. Let us eliminate the poetic, at whatever
cost to the probable.” Then for a moment she spoke more gravely. “Here
he is at twenty, with nothing to hold on by. I don’t know what’s to be
done. I suppose it’s my fault. But I’ve never had any bother over the
Church of England; have you?”

“Of course I go with my Church,” said Miss Pembroke, who hated this
style of conversation. “I don’t know, I’m sure. I think you should
consult a man.”

“Would Rickie help me?”

“Rickie would do anything he can.” And Mrs. Failing noted the half
official way in which she vouched for her lover. “But of course Rickie
is a little—complicated. I doubt whether Mr. Wonham would understand
him. He wants—doesn’t he?—some one who’s a little more assertive and
more accustomed to boys. Some one more like my brother.”

“Agnes!” she seized her by the arm. “Do you suppose that Mr. Pembroke
would undertake my Podge?”

She shook her head. “His time is so filled up. He gets a boarding-house
next term. Besides—after all I don’t know what Herbert would do.”

“Morality. He would teach him morality. The Thirty-Nine Articles may
come of themselves, but if you have no morals you come to grief.
Morality is all I demand from Mr. Herbert Pembroke. He shall be excused
the use of the globes. You know, of course, that Stephen’s expelled
from a public school? He stole.”

The school was not a public one, and the expulsion, or rather request
for removal, had taken place when Stephen was fourteen. A violent spasm
of dishonesty—such as often heralds the approach of manhood—had
overcome him. He stole everything, especially what was difficult to
steal, and hid the plunder beneath a loose plank in the passage. He was
betrayed by the inclusion of a ham. This was the crisis of his career.
His benefactress was just then rather bored with him. He had stopped
being a pretty boy, and she rather doubted whether she would see him
through. But she was so raged with the letters of the schoolmaster, and
so delighted with those of the criminal, that she had him back and gave
him a prize.

“No,” said Agnes, “I didn’t know. I should be happy to speak to
Herbert, but, as I said, his time will be very full. But I know he has
friends who make a speciality of weakly or—or unusual boys.”

“My dear, I’ve tried it. Stephen kicked the weakly boys and robbed
apples with the unusual ones. He was expelled again.”

Agnes began to find Mrs. Failing rather tiresome. Wherever you trod on
her, she seemed to slip away from beneath your feet. Agnes liked to
know where she was and where other people were as well. She said: “My
brother thinks a great deal of home life. I daresay he’d think that Mr.
Wonham is best where he is—with you. You have been so kind to him.
You”—she paused—“have been to him both father and mother.”

“I’m too hot,” was Mrs. Failing’s reply. It seemed that Miss Pembroke
had at last touched a topic on which she was reticent. She rang the
electric bell,—it was only to tell the footman to take the reprints to
Mr. Wonham’s room,—and then murmuring something about work, proceeded
herself to the house.

“Mrs. Failing—” said Agnes, who had not expected such a speedy end to
their chat.

“Call me Aunt Emily. My dear?”

“Aunt Emily, what did you think of that story Rickie sent you?”

“It is bad,” said Mrs. Failing. “But. But. But.” Then she escaped,
having told the truth, and yet leaving a pleasurable impression behind
her.




XII


The excursion to Salisbury was but a poor business—in fact, Rickie
never got there. They were not out of the drive before Mr. Wonham began
doing acrobatics. He showed Rickie how very quickly he could turn
round in his saddle and sit with his face to Æneas’s tail. “I see,”
said Rickie coldly, and became almost cross when they arrived in this
condition at the gate behind the house, for he had to open it, and was
afraid of falling. As usual, he anchored just beyond the fastenings,
and then had to turn Dido, who seemed as long as a battleship. To his
relief a man came forward, and murmuring, “Worst gate in the parish,”
pushed it wide and held it respectfully. “Thank you,” cried Rickie;
“many thanks.” But Stephen, who was riding into the world back first,
said majestically, “No, no; it doesn’t count. You needn’t think it
does. You make it worse by touching your hat. Four hours and seven
minutes! You’ll see me again.” The man answered nothing.

“Eh, but I’ll hurt him,” he chanted, as he swung into position. “That
was Flea. Eh, but he’s forgotten my fists; eh, but I’ll hurt him.”

“Why?” ventured Rickie. Last night, over cigarettes, he had been bored
to death by the story of Flea. The boy had a little reminded him of
Gerald—the Gerald of history, not the Gerald of romance. He was more
genial, but there was the same brutality, the same peevish insistence
on the pound of flesh.

“Hurt him till he learns.”

“Learns what?”

“Learns, of course,” retorted Stephen. Neither of them was very civil.
They did not dislike each other, but they each wanted to be somewhere
else—exactly the situation that Mrs. Failing had expected.

“He behaved badly,” said Rickie, “because he is poorer than we are, and
more ignorant. Less money has been spent on teaching him to behave.”

“Well, I’ll teach him for nothing.”

“Perhaps his fists are stronger than yours!”

“They aren’t. I looked.”

After this conversation flagged. Rickie glanced back at Cadover, and
thought of the insipid day that lay before him. Generally he was
attracted by fresh people, and Stephen was almost fresh: they had been
to him symbols of the unknown, and all that they did was interesting.
But now he cared for the unknown no longer. He knew.

Mr. Wilbraham passed them in his dog-cart, and lifted his hat to his
employer’s nephew. Stephen he ignored: he could not find him on the map.

“Good morning,” said Rickie. “What a lovely morning!”

“I say,” called the other, “another child dead!” Mr. Wilbraham, who had
seemed inclined to chat, whipped up his horse and left them.

“There goes an out and outer,” said Stephen; and then, as if
introducing an entirely new subject—“Don’t you think Flea Thompson
treated me disgracefully?”

“I suppose he did. But I’m scarcely the person to sympathize.” The
allusion fell flat, and he had to explain it. “I should have done the
same myself,—promised to be away two hours, and stopped four.”

“Stopped—oh—oh, I understand. You being in love, you mean?”

He smiled and nodded.

“Oh, I’ve no objection to Flea loving. He says he can’t help it. But as
long as my fists are stronger, he’s got to keep it in line.”

“In line?”

“A man like that, when he’s got a girl, thinks the rest can go to the
devil. He goes cutting his work and breaking his word. Wilbraham ought
to sack him. I promise you when I’ve a girl I’ll keep her in line, and
if she turns nasty, I’ll get another.”

Rickie smiled and said no more. But he was sorry that any one should
start life with such a creed—all the more sorry because the creed
caricatured his own. He too believed that life should be in a line—a
line of enormous length, full of countless interests and countless
figures, all well beloved. But woman was not to be “kept” to this line.
Rather did she advance it continually, like some triumphant general,
making each unit still more interesting, still more lovable, than it
had been before. He loved Agnes, not only for herself, but because she
was lighting up the human world. But he could scarcely explain this to
an inexperienced animal, nor did he make the attempt.

For a long time they proceeded in silence. The hill behind Cadover
was in harvest, and the horses moved regretfully between the sheaves.
Stephen had picked a grass leaf, and was blowing catcalls upon it. He
blew very well, and this morning all his soul went into the wail. For
he was ill. He was tortured with the feeling that he could not get away
and do—do something, instead of being civil to this anaemic prig. Four
hours in the rain was better than this: he had not wanted to fidget in
the rain. But now the air was like wine, and the stubble was smelling
of wet, and over his head white clouds trundled more slowly and more
seldom through broadening tracts of blue. There never had been such
a morning, and he shut up his eyes and called to it. And whenever he
called, Rickie shut up his eyes and winced.

At last the blade broke. “We don’t go quick, do we?” he remarked, and
looked on the weedy track for another.

“I wish you wouldn’t let me keep you. If you were alone you would be
galloping or something of that sort.”

“I was told I must go your pace,” he said mournfully. “And you promised
Miss Pembroke not to hurry.”

“Well, I’ll disobey.” But he could not rise above a gentle trot, and
even that nearly jerked him out of the saddle.

“Sit like _this_,” said Stephen. “Can’t you—see like _this_?” Rickie
lurched forward, and broke his thumb nail on the horse’s neck. It bled
a little, and had to be bound up.

“Thank you—awfully kind—no tighter, please—I’m simply spoiling your
day.”

“I can’t think how a man can help riding. You’ve only to leave it to
the horse so!—so!—just as you leave it to water in swimming.”

Rickie left it to Dido, who stopped immediately.

“I said _leave_ it.” His voice rose irritably. “I didn’t say ‘die.’
Of course she stops if you die. First you sit her as if you’re Sandow
exercising, and then you sit like a corpse. Can’t you tell her you’re
alive? That’s all she wants.”

In trying to convey the information, Rickie dropped his whip. Stephen
picked it up and rammed it into the belt of his own Norfolk jacket.
He was scarcely a fashionable horseman. He was not even graceful. But
he rode as a living man, though Rickie was too much bored to notice
it. Not a muscle in him was idle, not a muscle working hard. When he
returned from the gallop his limbs were still unsatisfied and his
manners still irritable. He did not know that he was ill: he knew
nothing about himself at all.

“Like a howdah in the Zoo,” he grumbled. “Mother Failing will buy
elephants.” And he proceeded to criticize his benefactress. Rickie,
keenly alive to bad taste, tried to stop him, and gained instead a
criticism of religion. Stephen overthrew the Mosaic cosmogony. He
pointed out the discrepancies in the Gospels. He levelled his wit
against the most beautiful spire in the world, now rising against
the southern sky. Between whiles he went for a gallop. After a time
Rickie stopped listening, and simply went his way. For Dido was a
perfect mount, and as indifferent to the motions of Æneas as if she
was strolling in the Elysian fields. He had had a bad night, and the
strong air made him sleepy. The wind blew from the Plain. Cadover and
its valley had disappeared, and though they had not cl

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