The house was extraordinarily quiet. Anthony kept listening for the
heavy tread of a sentry, the raucous cry of a German voice, or the sound
of a restless fellow-prisoner turning on his bed. Instead, he felt like
a tangible substance the guarded silence of the old, thick walls. He was
glad he had the electric light fully on. It showed him that it was,
after all, an ordinary, empty room, a place you could get in and out of
easily.
It had been his own, and everything in it recalled the memories of his
boyhood. He could count the roses on the worn carpet, and see the hole
he had burned in it under the window by a drop of acid. The old oak
wardrobe was roughened and eaten into by time. It had made a splendid
shy hole for treasures, mixed up with superfluous underclothes.
The book-case in the corner held all Anthony’s school prizes, a fine,
solid row of young achievements. It had always hurt Anthony’s feelings
that the squire never cared to look at them, and it had hurt the
squire’s feelings that Anthony had cared to win them when Tom was
content with cups and bats.
Everything in the room came back to Tom. Tom was in old school
photograph groups on the walls. It had seemed incredibly important to
Anthony at the time to buy them, though, as a form of decoration, they
resembled a paper of pins, and now he could hardly remember the fellows’
names. They were healthy, well-made boys, with short futures. Most of
them were dead. Tom was usually sitting in the center with a cup or a
presentation bat behind him. Anthony tried to hurry away from that
well-known direct gaze, looking straight out of the photograph at him;
but however fast he hurried, Tom’s eyes followed him. Anthony tried to
fix his mind instead upon the prints of Watts and Burne-Jones which he
had bought with a sense of thrilled compulsion in his early twenties,
and hadn’t had time to get rid of afterward.
He remembered that he had once encouraged the tenderest fancies for the
half-starved, anemic creatures with long necks and heavy hair; but he
could not rouse in himself the faintest interest in these weary ladies
now. Anthony had not wanted real women in his youth. He had been afraid
of them, and later on he had despised women. It is always simpler for
young men to despise what they are afraid of: it makes them feel less
afraid; but it sometimes gives them in later life more reason for fear.
Anthony despised women because he thought that they interfered with a
man’s work. Bad women interfered with it intermittently, and good women
interfered with it all the time. They did not understand the abstract,
and Anthony, perhaps fortunately for himself, had not time to stop and
explain it to them. Anthony remembered a curious, wistful saying of
Tom’s: “It must make a fellow feel rather like the Almighty to keep as
straight as you do.” It _had_ made Anthony feel rather like the
Almighty, but his virtue had isolated him. In order to exercise it he
had become rigid, and rigidity is seldom popular with women.
Anthony had never been a success with them. Either they wanted to
attract Anthony, and found they couldn’t, or they did not want to
attract him, and suspected him of thinking they did. In either case
women misled Anthony, and avoided him when they couldn’t mislead him.
But for the sake of Pannell he would have to marry now.
Anthony’s mind slipped indolently over his sister’s friends; he had none
of his own under forty. “Women become interesting,” he thought, “when
they cease to be attractive.”
Ursula’s and Gladys’s friends were far too young to suit him. They
considered themselves grown up, of course. They had round, firm cheeks
like pink tennis-balls, and the eyes of intelligent puppies. Physically
they were everything a woman should be, but they never opened a book,
and would look frightened and drop things if Anthony spoke to them.
Daphne’s friends were of the right age, but she was apt to like clever
women who had been misunderstood by their families. Anthony disliked
women who were misunderstood, and he suspected all cleverness in women.
If it was genuine, and not a mere ruse of the unattractive, he
considered that it led to grave nervous disorders.
Anthony wanted a wife without a nerve, with great practical common
sense, like the best type of elderly trained nurse. She must not be more
than twenty-five years old, with plenty of knowledge of actual life and
its processes and no abstract intelligence.
Abstract intelligence played the devil with women. They carried their
emotions into it, and thought with their blood. They poured personality
into the universe as a man pours water into a jug, and the universe was
not made to hold personality. Women were never impersonal, and they were
most dangerous when they were being clever about hiding it. They could
not deal straight with fact. They did not have even a temptation without
a serpent to support it, and they were capable of melting down the
multiplication table into a channel for personal drama. Anthony’s
thoughts became a little vague at this point. He did not exactly want to
marry a woman without charm; but he had got his mind away from Tom, at
all events, or thought he had.
An owl shrieked under his window. He knew it was an owl, but the shriek
curiously haunted and disturbed him. He got out of bed and began to walk
up and down the room; it did not help him very much, because he had
already got all the help there is to be got from this form of exercise
while he was a prisoner. Still, it was curiously better to think about
prison than to think about Tom.
To-morrow he had promised to tell his people his experiences; his mother
had helped him to put it off a day. It would be wiser, perhaps, to
prepare beforehand what he meant to tell them. It wouldn’t do if he ran
off the rails anywhere and told them the truth.
It was not that the truth was so bad, but that you could not tell it. It
was so misleading. It would be like giving a coherent explanation of
Christian Science to a hard-headed business man with a toothache.
It would have been easier to tell them perhaps—everything would have
been easier—if they had not all been so silent about Tom. That was what
made the house so infernally full of his presence. There was nothing
secret about Tom; he was the most open person alive: but now he was
being hushed up until everything became aware of him.
The moment Anthony had entered the hall he had felt conscious of the
weight of this silence. It was in the servants’ faces, and had taken
possession of inanimate things. The very walking-sticks in the hall
seemed under the weight of it, and silence brooded over the staircase
and in all the empty spaces of the rooms. Everything was waiting for Tom
to come and use it; everything had belonged to Tom and was still his.
All the evening the house waited. They hadn’t put off dinner, because
that was a meal which was never put off for anybody; but when the clock
struck eight all their eyes had gone to the door expectantly.
The squire gave an impatient sigh. He had always been impatient with Tom
for being late, but he had never really minded. Nobody said anything;
they had just gone in to dinner, and the squire had opened a bottle of
old wine and been vexed with Anthony for not drinking more of it. Of
course he was really vexed with Anthony for being Anthony, but he put it
down to the wine.
Anthony made up his mind to speak of Tom to his father directly they
were alone after dinner; but the words stuck in his throat. He was
afraid of breaking into something that mustn’t be broken into. He had a
feeling that the beauty of his home was unsubstantial. He was intensely
aware of it: the spotless, delicate linen; the shining, unobtrusive
silver; the quiet comfort and security of all its simplest processes. It
seemed to Anthony that the bared voice of pain might break it all to
pieces. It would be like touching porcelain with a hammer.
He longed for his father to speak of Tom, but Mr. Arden said nothing. He
was heroically accepting the return of the wrong son, and his heroism
cost Anthony his father’s confidence. Mr. Arden was kind to Anthony and
even mildly cheerful, but he held his son away from his grief. The
squire had not shared his sorrow even with his wife. He had spared her.
“I think we won’t talk of Tom, my dear, at present,” was what he had
said to her after the first few desolate hours, and Mrs. Arden had
appeared spared. She had kissed him silently and left the room. Tom
unspoken of had settled down upon the house; no one spoke of him, and no
one remembered him as Tom, and no one forgot him as a grief. It made
Anthony feel in some strange way as if he was to blame for not being
killed as well. He had gone to bed as soon as he could, and even here he
couldn’t get away from his false impression of Tom.
He opened the door of his room and listened. The house was perfectly
still; he could hear the old clock down-stairs creak each time its heavy
pendulum swung to and fro.
It used to creak like that when he and Tom were in the night nursery
up-stairs, and they came out of it to hang over the banisters to listen.
If it was very dark and late, they sometimes thought it wasn’t the
clock, but a bad old man creeping up-stairs to catch them; but they
never went back into the night nursery until they had stopped being
afraid, because they knew they mustn’t be cowards. They knew that as
soon as they knew anything.
Tom’s room was at the end of the passage nearest the stables, because
Tom loved to hear the grooms hiss over the horses early in the morning.
Anthony felt that he must go to Tom’s room and find him. It wasn’t any
use waiting any longer; only Tom could drive away the weight of this
delusive ghost.
Everything was in order, and except that the order was a little too
perfect it looked just as it used to look when Tom was in it. There were
his boating cups and sport trophies on the mantelpiece; a cricket-bat
stood in the corner, and Tom’s school cap with colors hung over his
fishing-rod.
There was a row of pipes over the writing-table by the window, and a
series of sporting prints decorated the walls.
Nothing had been changed; the familiar smell of good leather, a great
deal used, lingered over all the furniture. Anthony went to the
writing-table and picked up a small, shabby red book. It was called “My
Friends’ Opinions,” and had been given to Tom by Daphne on his sixteenth
birthday.
It contained a series of printed questions on one page, with blank
spaces for answers upon the opposite side, and would probably, as far as
Tom was concerned, have remained blank if he had not been overtaken by
influenza and a rainy day.
This unfortunate combination had produced Tom’s opinions, written in a
round school-boy hand, and as he had not changed them since his
sixteenth birthday, they remained the sole expression of his
unexpressive personality.
Anthony picked up the book and read it slowly, as if he were listening
to Tom’s voice.
“What is your favorite flower?” the inquisition began.
Tom had written, “A rose,” because he felt that he was safe with roses.
You could not catch him out there; most people preferred roses.
“What is your favorite Christian name?”
Tom had felt this to be a snare, and had confused the issue. He had put
“Bluebell” and “Eleanore.” Bluebell was Tom’s sole excursion into prose
fancy. He had never met a “Bluebell,” and the name corresponded to
Anthony’s Burne-Jones ladies. Eleanore was supported by fact; she was
Tom’s favorite mare.
“What character do you admire most in fiction?”
“_Hereward the Wake._”
_Hereward_ wasn’t really a character at all, but all that fighting had
made him sound like one to Tom, and his battle-cry was worth many
austere virtues.
“In history?”
“Richard Cœur de Lion.” Richard, too, had escaped the strictest moral
elevation, but his title and the Holy Land preserved him.
“In real life?”
“My father.” There was nothing to be said to this statement except that
in the day of calamity the squire had come across it and been enabled to
hold up his head.
“Your favorite book?”
“‘Black Beauty’ and ‘Tom Brown’s School Days.’ Besides, these are the
only ones I have read through by myself except when I had to.”
Hunting was, of course, Tom’s chief pastime.
The questions did not go very deeply into religious matters. Tom had got
out of them neatly by mentioning “the Church of England” and “the
Bible.”
The inquiry ended romantically with, “What is your favorite quotation?”
This surprised Anthony, for Tom had written “Those friends thou hast and
their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel.” Of
course this was what Tom would do, but Anthony had not known that he
read Shakspere, and Tom had added another line, though he was obviously
unaware that it did not belong to the quotation above it: “For truth is
truth to the end of the reckoning.”
Anthony put the book down. He felt as if Tom couldn’t haunt him any
more. Tom had got to the end of the reckoning first; that was all there
was to it.
The night before Tom’s regiment had left England, Anthony had asked Tom
what he thought about death. He had not put it like that of course,
because Tom would not have known how to deal with an abstraction. He had
said, “What do you feel about things, old chap? D’you mind awfully the
idea of going out?” And Tom had answered after a pause, as if the
question was not wholly new to him: “Oh, I don’t know. It seems simple
enough. Look at rabbits—you know what I mean: you’re awfully alive one
moment, and then just a little bit of limp fur the next. I’ve often
thought it funny, but never particularly terrible. What do you feel
about it yourself?”
“You mustn’t judge by my feelings,” Anthony had answered. “You see, it’s
my profession to fight death. Frankly, I hate it. I’ve tried to get the
better of it for years, but beyond a certain point you can’t. Nobody
ever has. It downs you. I dare say I shan’t mind extinction for myself.
The act of death is generally unconscious, and if it isn’t, it is so
disagreeable that no sane man would wish to prolong it. I never have
believed there was the ghost of a life afterward.”
This had shocked Tom considerably. He had said:
“Oh, well, you know, I believe in the church and all that up to a
certain point, of course; and then there’s the Bible. I’m not a clever
chap like you, but I honestly feel as if it must be all right somehow,
if one does the best one can, you know, and all that. There must be
something in it.”
Anthony smiled at this remembrance; then he shivered as he turned to go
back to his own room.
He was wondering again if death had come to Tom quickly, like the shot
rabbit, one moment all alive and next a little bit of limp flesh and
blood, funny, but not terrible?
He dared not let himself think of the alternative, and either way, what
_had_ come afterward? Nothing, as he believed, or whatever it was that
Tom was groping after, when he asserted that: “It must be all right
somehow. There must be something in it.”
“For truth is truth to the end of the reckoning.” That was the only
enigmatical statement that Anthony had ever known Tom endorse; for it
was enigmatic to any one else but Tom.
It was all very well for Tom to talk as if truth was the next door
neighbor’s pig, but how was Anthony to find it so ascertainable? And how
could he bear not to find it, when it included, as it included now, the
possibility of Tom’s own immortality?
There was a tentative scratch at the door. Max had awakened to find
Anthony gone and tracked him methodically down the passage. Truth was
not enigmatical to Max. He had only to follow his instincts, which led
him unerringly in the direction of his master.