PART 3 — WILTSHIRE

XXIX

Robert—there is no occasion to mention his surname: he was a young

farmer of some education who tried to coax the aged soil of Wiltshire

scientifically—came to Cadover on business and fell in love with Mrs.

Elliot. She was there on her bridal visit, and he, an obscure nobody,

was received by Mrs. Failing into the house and treated as her social

equal. He was good-looking in a bucolic way, and people sometimes

mistook him for a gentleman until they saw his hands. He discovered

this, and one of the slow, gentle jokes he played on society was to

talk upon some cultured subject with his hands behind his back and

then suddenly reveal them. “Do you go in for boating?” the lady would

ask; and then he explained that those particular weals are made by the

handles of the plough. Upon which she became extremely interested, but

found an early opportunity of talking to some one else.

He played this joke on Mrs. Elliot the first evening, not knowing that

she observed him as he entered the room. He walked heavily, lifting

his feet as if the carpet was furrowed, and he had no evening clothes.

Every one tried to put him at his ease, but she rather suspected that

he was there already, and envied him. They were introduced, and spoke

of Byron, who was still fashionable. Out came his hands—the only rough

hands in the drawing-room, the only hands that had ever worked. She was

filled with some strange approval, and liked him.

After dinner they met again, to speak not of Byron but of manure. The

other people were so clever and so amusing that it relieved her to

listen to a man who told her three times not to buy artificial manure

ready made, but, if she would use it, to make it herself at the last

moment. Because the ammonia evaporated. Here were two packets of

powder. Did they smell? No. Mix them together and pour some coffee—An

appalling smell at once burst forth, and every one began to cough and

cry. This was good for the earth when she felt sour, for he knew when

the earth was ill. He knew, too, when she was hungry: he spoke of her

tantrums—the strange unscientific element in her that will baffle

the scientist to the end of time. “Study away, Mrs. Elliot,” he told

her; “read all the books you can get hold of; but when it comes to the

point, stroll out with a pipe in your mouth and do a bit of guessing.”

As he talked, the earth became a living being—or rather a being with

a living skin,—and manure no longer dirty stuff, but a symbol of

regeneration and of the birth of life from life. “So it goes on for

ever!” she cried excitedly. He replied: “Not for ever. In time the fire

at the centre will cool, and nothing can go on then.”

He advanced into love with open eyes, slowly, heavily, just as he had

advanced across the drawing room carpet. But this time the bride did

not observe his tread. She was listening to her husband, and trying

not to be so stupid. When he was close to her—so close that it was

difficult not to take her in his arms—he spoke to Mr. Failing, and was

at once turned out of Cadover.

“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Failing, as he walked down the drive with his

hand on his guest’s shoulder. “I had no notion you were that sort. Any

one who behaves like that has to stop at the farm.”

“Any one?”

“Any one.” He sighed heavily, not for any personal grievance, but

because he saw how unruly, how barbaric, is the soul of man. After all,

this man was more civilized than most.

“Are you angry with me, sir?” He called him “sir,” not because he was

richer or cleverer or smarter, not because he had helped to educate him

and had lent him money, but for a reason more profound—for the reason

that there are gradations in heaven.

“I did think you—that a man like you wouldn’t risk making people

unhappy. My sister-in-law—I don’t say this to stop you loving her;

something else must do that—my sister-in-law, as far as I know,

doesn’t care for you one little bit. If you had said anything, if she

had guessed that a chance person was in—this fearful state, you would

simply—have opened hell. A woman of her sort would have lost all—”

“I knew that.”

Mr. Failing removed his hand. He was displeased.

“But something here,” said Robert incoherently. “This here.” He struck

himself heavily on the heart. “This here, doing something so unusual,

makes it not matter what she loses—I—” After a silence he asked,

“Have I quite followed you, sir, in that business of the brotherhood of

man?”

“How do you mean?”

“I thought love was to bring it about.”

“Love of another man’s wife? Sensual love? You have understood

nothing—nothing.” Then he was ashamed, and cried, “I understand

nothing myself.” For he remembered that sensual and spiritual are not

easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not two Aphrodites, but one

Aphrodite with a Janus face. “I only understand that you must try to

forget her.”

“I will not try.”

“Promise me just this, then—not to do anything crooked.”

“I’m straight. No boasting, but I couldn’t do a crooked thing—no, not

if I tried.”

And so appallingly straight was he in after years, that Mr. Failing

wished that he had phrased the promise differently.

Robert simply waited. He told himself that it was hopeless; but

something deeper than himself declared that there was hope. He gave up

drink, and kept himself in all ways clean, for he wanted to be worthy

of her when the time came. Women seemed fond of him, and caused him to

reflect with pleasure, “They do run after me. There must be something

in me. Good. I’d be done for if there wasn’t.” For six years he turned

up the earth of Wiltshire, and read books for the sake of his mind,

and talked to gentlemen for the sake of their patois, and each year he

rode to Cadover to take off his hat to Mrs. Elliot, and, perhaps, to

speak to her about the crops. Mr. Failing was generally present, and

it struck neither man that those dull little visits were so many words

out of which a lonely woman might build sentences. Then Robert went to

London on business. He chanced to see Mr. Elliot with a strange lady.

The time had come.

He became diplomatic, and called at Mr. Elliot’s rooms to find things

out. For if Mrs. Elliot was happier than he could ever make her, he

would withdraw, and love her in renunciation. But if he could make

her happier, he would love her in fulfilment. Mr. Elliot admitted him

as a friend of his brother-in-law’s, and felt very broad-minded as he

did so. Robert, however, was a success. The youngish men there found

him interesting, and liked to shock him with tales of naughty London

and naughtier Paris. They spoke of “experience” and “sensations” and

“seeing life,” and when a smile ploughed over his face, concluded

that his prudery was vanquished. He saw that they were much less

vicious than they supposed: one boy had obviously read his sensations

in a book. But he could pardon vice. What he could not pardon was

triviality, and he hoped that no decent woman could pardon it either.

There grew up in him a cold, steady anger against these silly people

who thought it advanced to be shocking, and who described, as something

particularly choice and educational, things that he had understood

and fought against for years. He inquired after Mrs. Elliot, and a

boy tittered. It seemed that she “did not know,” that she lived in a

remote suburb, taking care of a skinny baby. “I shall call some time or

other,” said Robert. “Do,” said Mr. Elliot, smiling. And next time he

saw his wife he congratulated her on her rustic admirer.

She had suffered terribly. She had asked for bread, and had been given

not even a stone. People talk of hungering for the ideal, but there

is another hunger, quite as divine, for facts. She had asked for

facts and had been given “views,” “emotional standpoints,” “attitudes

towards life.” To a woman who believed that facts are beautiful, that

the living world is beautiful beyond the laws of beauty, that manure

is neither gross nor ludicrous, that a fire, not eternal, glows at

the heart of the earth, it was intolerable to be put off with what

the Elliots called “philosophy,” and, if she refused, to be told that

she had no sense of humour. “Marrying into the Elliot family.” It had

sounded so splendid, for she was a penniless child with nothing to

offer, and the Elliots held their heads high. For what reason? What had

they ever done, except say sarcastic things, and limp, and be refined?

Mr. Failing suffered too, but she suffered more, inasmuch as Frederick

was more impossible than Emily. He did not like her, he practically

lived apart, he was not even faithful or polite. These were grave

faults, but they were human ones: she could even imagine them in a man

she loved. What she could never love was a dilettante.

Robert brought her an armful of sweet-peas. He laid it on the table,

put his hands behind his back, and kept them there till the end of the

visit. She knew quite well why he had come, and though she also knew

that he would fail, she loved him too much to snub him or to stare in

virtuous indignation. “Why have you come?” she asked gravely, “and why

have you brought me so many flowers?”

“My garden is full of them,” he answered. “Sweet-peas need picking down.

And, generally speaking, flowers are plentiful in July.”

She broke his present into bunches—so much for the drawing-room, so

much for the nursery, so much for the kitchen and her husband’s room:

he would be down for the night. The most beautiful she would keep for

herself. Presently he said, “Your husband is no good. I’ve watched

him for a week. I’m thirty, and not what you call hasty, as I used to

be, or thinking that nothing matters like the French. No. I’m a plain

Britisher, yet—I—I’ve begun wrong end, Mrs. Elliot; I should have

said that I’ve thought chiefly of you for six years, and that though I

talk here so respectfully, if I once unhooked my hands—”

There was a pause. Then she said with great sweetness, “Thank you; I am

glad you love me,” and rang the bell.

“What have you done that for?” he cried.

“Because you must now leave the house, and never enter it again.”

“I don’t go alone,” and he began to get furious.

Her voice was still sweet, but strength lay in it too, as she said,

“You either go now with my thanks and blessing, or else you go with the

police. I am Mrs. Elliot. We need not discuss Mr. Elliot. I am Mrs.

Elliot, and if you make one step towards me I give you in charge.”

But the maid answered the bell not of the drawing-room, but of the

front door. They were joined by Mr. Elliot, who held out his hand with

much urbanity. It was not taken. He looked quickly at his wife, and

said, “Am I _de trop_?” There was a long silence. At last she said,

“Frederick, turn this man out.”

“My love, why?”

Robert said that he loved her.

“Then I am _de trop_,” said Mr. Elliot, smoothing out his gloves. He

would give these sodden barbarians a lesson. “My hansom is waiting at

the door. Pray make use of it.”

“Don’t!” she cried, almost affectionately. “Dear Frederick, it isn’t a

play. Just tell this man to go, or send for the police.”

“On the contrary; it is French comedy of the best type. Don’t you

agree, sir, that the police would be an inartistic error?” He was

perfectly calm and collected, whereas they were in a pitiable state.

“Turn him out at once!” she cried. “He has insulted your wife. Save

me, save me!” She clung to her husband and wept. “He was going—I had

managed him—he would never have known—” Mr. Elliot repulsed her.

“If you don’t feel inclined to start at once,” he said with easy

civility, “let us have a little tea. My dear sir, do forgive me for

not shooting you. _Nous avons changé tout cela_. Please don’t look so

nervous. Please do unclasp your hands—”

He was alone.

“That’s all right,” he exclaimed, and strolled to the door. The hansom

was disappearing round the corner. “That’s all right,” he repeated in

more quavering tones as he returned to the drawing-room and saw that it

was littered with sweet-peas. Their colour got on his nerves—magenta,

crimson; magenta, crimson. He tried to pick them up, and they escaped.

He trod them underfoot, and they multiplied and danced in the triumph

of summer like a thousand butterflies. The train had left when he got

to the station. He followed on to London, and there he lost all traces.

At midnight he began to realize that his wife could never belong to him

again.

Mr. Failing had a letter from Stockholm. It was never known what

impulse sent them there. “I am sorry about it all, but it was the only

way.” The letter censured the law of England, “which obliges us to

behave like this, or else we should never get married. I shall come

back to face things: she will not come back till she is my wife. He

must bring an action soon, or else we shall try one against him. It

seems all very unconventional, but it is not really, it is only a

difficult start. We are not like you or your wife: we want to be just

ordinary people, and make the farm pay, and not be noticed all our

lives.”

And they were capable of living as they wanted. The class difference,

which so intrigued Mrs. Failing, meant very little to them. It was

there, but so were other things.

They both cared for work and living in the open, and for not speaking

unless they had got something to say. Their love of beauty, like their

love for each other, was not dependent on detail: it grew not from the

nerves but from the soul.

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the

stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of

the wren,

And the tree toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven.”

They had never read these lines, and would have thought them nonsense

if they had. They did not dissect—indeed they could not. But she, at

all events, divined that more than perfect health and perfect weather,

more than personal love, had gone to the making of those seventeen days.

“Ordinary people!” cried Mrs. Failing on hearing the letter. At that

time she was young and daring. “Why, they’re divine! They’re forces of

Nature! They’re as ordinary as volcanoes. We all knew my brother was

disgusting, and wanted him to be blown to pieces, but we never thought

it would happen. Do look at the thing bravely, and say, as I do, that

they are guiltless in the sight of God.”

“I think they are,” replied her husband. “But they are not guiltless in

the sight of man.”

“You conventional!” she exclaimed in disgust. “What they have done

means misery not only for themselves but for others. For your brother,

though you will not think of him. For the little boy—did you think

of him? And perhaps for another child, who will have the whole world

against him if it knows. They have sinned against society, and you do

not diminish the misery by proving that society is bad or foolish.

It is the saddest truth I have yet perceived that the Beloved

Republic”—here she took up a book—“of which Swinburne speaks”—she

put the book down—“will not be brought about by love alone. It will

approach with no flourish of trumpets, and have no declaration of

independence. Self-sacrifice and—worse still—self-mutilation are the

things that sometimes help it most, and that is why we should start

for Stockholm this evening.” He waited for her indignation to subside,

and then continued. “I don’t know whether it can be hushed up. I don’t

yet know whether it ought to be hushed up. But we ought to provide the

opportunity. There is no scandal yet. If we go, it is just possible

there never will be any. We must talk over the whole thing and—”

“—And lie!” interrupted Mrs. Failing, who hated travel.

“—And see how to avoid the greatest unhappiness.”

There was to be no scandal. By the time they arrived Robert had been

drowned. Mrs. Elliot described how they had gone swimming, and how,

“since he always lived inland,” the great waves had tired him. They had

raced for the open sea.

“What are your plans?” he asked. “I bring you a message from Frederick.”

“I heard him call,” she continued, “but I thought he was laughing. When

I turned, it was too late. He put his hands behind his back and sank.

For he would only have drowned me with him. I should have done the

same.”

Mrs. Failing was thrilled, and kissed her. But Mr. Failing knew that

life does not continue heroic for long, and he gave her the message

from her husband: Would she come back to him?

To his intense astonishment—at first to his regret—she replied, “I

will think about it. If I loved him the very least bit I should say no.

If I had anything to do with my life I should say no. But it is simply

a question of beating time till I die. Nothing that is coming matters.

I may as well sit in his drawing-room and dust his furniture, since he

has suggested it.”

And Mr. Elliot, though he made certain stipulations, was positively

glad to see her. People had begun to laugh at him, and to say that his

wife had run away. She had not. She had been with his sister in Sweden.

In a half miraculous way the matter was hushed up. Even the Silts only

scented “something strange.” When Stephen was born, it was abroad. When

he came to England, it was as the child of a friend of Mr. Failing’s.

Mrs. Elliot returned unsuspected to her husband.

But though things can be hushed up, there is no such thing as beating

time; and as the years passed she realized her terrible mistake. When

her lover sank, eluding her last embrace, she thought, as Agnes was

to think after her, that her soul had sunk with him, and that never

again should she be capable of earthly love. Nothing mattered. She

might as well go and be useful to her husband and to the little boy

who looked exactly like him, and who, she thought, was exactly like

him in disposition. Then Stephen was born, and altered her life. She

could still love people passionately; she still drew strength from the

heroic past. Yet, to keep to her bond, she must see this son only as a

stranger. She was protected by the conventions, and must pay them their

fee. And a curious thing happened. Her second child drew her towards

her first. She began to love Rickie also, and to be more than useful

to him. And as her love revived, so did her capacity for suffering.

Life, more important, grew more bitter. She minded her husband more,

not less; and when at last he died, and she saw a glorious autumn,

beautiful with the voices of boys who should call her mother, the end

came for her as well, before she could remember the grave in the alien

north and the dust that would never return to the dear fields that had

given it.

XXX

Stephen, the son of these people, had one instinct that troubled him.

At night—especially out of doors—it seemed rather strange that he

was alive. The dry grass pricked his cheek, the fields were invisible

and mute, and here was he, throwing stones at the darkness or smoking

a pipe. The stones vanished, the pipe would burn out. But he would be

here in the morning when the sun rose, and he would bathe, and run in

the mist. He was proud of his good circulation, and in the morning it

seemed quite natural. But at night, why should there be this difference

between him and the acres of land that cooled all round him until the

sun returned? What lucky chance had heated him up, and sent him, warm

and lovable, into a passive world? He had other instincts, but these

gave him no trouble. He simply gratified each as it occurred, provided

he could do so without grave injury to his fellows. But the instinct to

wonder at the night was not to be thus appeased. At first he had lived

under the care of Mr. Failing—the only person to whom his mother spoke

freely, the only person who had treated her neither as a criminal nor

as a pioneer. In their rare but intimate conversations she had asked

him to educate her son. “I will teach him Latin,” he answered. “The

rest such a boy must remember.” Latin, at all events, was a failure:

who could attend to Virgil when the sound of the thresher arose, and

you knew that the stack was decreasing and that rats rushed more

plentifully each moment to their doom? But he was fond of Mr. Failing,

and cried when he died. Mrs. Elliot, a pleasant woman, died soon after.

There was something fatal in the order of these deaths. Mr. Failing

had made no provision for the boy in his will: his wife had promised

to see to this. Then came Mr. Elliot’s death, and, before the new home

was created, the sudden death of Mrs. Elliot. She also left Stephen no

money: she had none to leave. Chance threw him into the power of Mrs.

Failing. “Let things go on as they are,” she thought. “I will take care

of this pretty little boy, and the ugly little boy can live with the

Silts. After my death—well, the papers will be found after my death,

and they can meet then. I like the idea of their mutual ignorance. It

is amusing.”

He was then twelve. With a few brief intervals of school, he lived in

Wiltshire until he was driven out. Life had two distinct sides—the

drawing-room and the other. In the drawing-room people talked a good

deal, laughing as they talked. Being clever, they did not care for

animals: one man had never seen a hedgehog. In the other life people

talked and laughed separately, or even did neither. On the whole, in

spite of the wet and gamekeepers, this life was preferable. He knew

where he was. He glanced at the boy, or later at the man, and behaved

accordingly. There was no law—the policeman was negligible. Nothing

bound him but his own word, and he gave that sparingly.

It is impossible to be romantic when you have your heart’s desire, and

such a boy disappointed Mrs. Failing greatly. His parents had met for

one brief embrace, had found one little interval between the power of

the rulers of this world and the power of death. He was the child of

poetry and of rebellion, and poetry should run in his veins. But he

lived too near the things he loved to seem poetical. Parted from them,

he might yet satisfy her, and stretch out his hands with a pagan’s

yearning. As it was, he only rode her horses, and trespassed, and

bathed, and worked, for no obvious reason, upon her fields. Affection

she did not believe in, and made no attempt to mould him; and he, for

his part, was very content to harden untouched into a man. His parents

had given him excellent gifts—health, sturdy limbs, and a face not

ugly,—gifts that his habits confirmed. They had also given him a

cloudless spirit—the spirit of the seventeen days in which he was

created. But they had not given him the spirit of their six years of

waiting, and love for one person was never to be the greatest thing he

knew.

“Philosophy” had postponed the quarrel between them. Incurious about

his personal origin, he had a certain interest in our eternal problems.

The interest never became a passion: it sprang out of his physical

growth, and was soon merged in it again. Or, as he put it himself,

“I must get fixed up before starting.” He was soon fixed up as a

materialist. Then he tore up the sixpenny reprints, and never amused

Mrs. Failing so much again.

About the time he fixed himself up, he took to drink. He knew of

no reason against it. The instinct was in him, and it hurt nobody.

Here, as elsewhere, his motions were decided, and he passed at once

from roaring jollity to silence. For those who live on the fuddled

borderland, who crawl home by the railings and maunder repentance in

the morning, he had a biting contempt. A man must take his tumble and

his headache. He was, in fact, as little disgusting as is conceivable;

and hitherto he had not strained his constitution or his will. Nor did

he get drunk as often as Agnes suggested. The real quarrel gathered

elsewhere.

Presentable people have run wild in their youth. But the hour comes

when they turn from their boorish company to higher things. This hour

never came for Stephen. Somewhat a bully by nature, he kept where his

powers would tell, and continued to quarrel and play with the men he

had known as boys. He prolonged their youth unduly. “They won’t settle

down,” said Mr. Wilbraham to his wife. “They’re wanting things. It’s

the germ of a Trades Union. I shall get rid of a few of the worst.”

Then Stephen rushed up to Mrs. Failing and worried her. “It wasn’t

fair. So-and-so was a good sort. He did his work. Keen about it? No.

Why should he be? Why should he be keen about somebody else’s land? But

keen enough. And very keen on football.” She laughed, and said a word

about So-and-so to Mr. Wilbraham. Mr. Wilbraham blazed up. “How could

the farm go on without discipline? How could there be discipline if

Mr. Stephen interfered? Mr. Stephen liked power. He spoke to the men

like one of themselves, and pretended it was all equality, but he took

care to come out top. Natural, of course, that, being a gentleman, he

should. But not natural for a gentleman to loiter all day with poor

people and learn their work, and put wrong notions into their heads,

and carry their newfangled grievances to Mrs. Failing. Which partly

accounted for the deficit on the past year.” She rebuked Stephen. Then

he lost his temper, was rude to her, and insulted Mr. Wilbraham.

The worst days of Mr. Failing’s rule seemed to be returning. And

Stephen had a practical experience, and also a taste for battle, that

her husband had never possessed. He drew up a list of grievances, some

absurd, others fundamental. No newspapers in the reading-room, you

could put a plate under the Thompsons’ door, no level cricket-pitch,

no allotments and no time to work in them, Mrs. Wilbraham’s knife-boy

underpaid. “Aren’t you a little unwise?” she asked coldly. “I am more

bored than you think over the farm.” She was wanting to correct the

proofs of the book and rewrite the prefatory memoir. In her irritation

she wrote to Agnes. Agnes replied sympathetically, and Mrs. Failing,

clever as she was, fell into the power of the younger woman. They

discussed him at first as a wretch of a boy; then he got drunk and

somehow it seemed more criminal. All that she needed now was a personal

grievance, which Agnes casually supplied. Though vindictive, she was

determined to treat him well, and thought with satisfaction of our

distant colonies. But he burst into an odd passion: he would sooner

starve than leave England. “Why?” she asked. “Are you in love?” He

picked up a lump of the chalk—they were by the arbour—and made no

answer. The vicar murmured, “It is not like going abroad—Greater

Britain—blood is thicker than water—” A lump of chalk broke her

drawing-room window on the Saturday.

Thus Stephen left Wiltshire, half-blackguard, half-martyr. Do not brand

him as a socialist. He had no quarrel with society, nor any particular

belief in people because they are poor. He only held the creed of “here

am I and there are you,” and therefore class distinctions were trivial

things to him, and life no decorous scheme, but a personal combat or a

personal truce. For the same reason ancestry also was trivial, and a

man not the dearer because the same woman was mother to them both. Yet

it seemed worth while to go to Sawston with the news. Perhaps nothing

would come of it; perhaps friendly intercourse, and a home while he

looked around.

When they wronged him he walked quietly away. He never thought of

allotting the blame, nor of appealing to Ansell, who still sat brooding

in the side-garden. He only knew that educated people could be

horrible, and that a clean liver must never enter Dunwood House again.

The air seemed stuffy. He spat in the gutter. Was it yesterday he had

lain in the rifle-butts over Salisbury? Slightly aggrieved, he wondered

why he was not back there now. “I ought to have written first,” he

reflected. “Here is my money gone. I cannot move. The Elliots have, as

it were, practically robbed me.” That was the only grudge he retained

against them. Their suspicions and insults were to him as the curses of

a tramp whom he passed by the wayside. They were dirty people, not his

sort. He summed up the complicated tragedy as a “take in.”

While Rickie was being carried upstairs, and while Ansell (had he known

it) was dashing about the streets for him, he lay under a railway

arch trying to settle his plans. He must pay back the friends who had

given him shillings and clothes. He thought of Flea, whose Sundays he

was spoiling—poor Flea, who ought to be in them now, shining before

his girl. “I daresay he’ll be ashamed and not go to see her, and then

she’ll take the other man.” He was also very hungry. That worm Mrs.

Elliot would be through her lunch by now. Tying his braces round

him, and tearing up those old wet documents, he stepped forth to make

money. A villainous young brute he looked: his clothes were dirty, and

he had lost the spring of the morning. Touching the walls, frowning,

talking to himself at times, he slouched disconsolately northwards;

no wonder that some tawdry girls screamed at him, or that matrons

averted their eyes as they hurried to afternoon church. He wandered

from one suburb to another, till he was among people more villainous

than himself, who bought his tobacco from him and sold him food. Again

the neighbourhood “went up,” and families, instead of sitting on their

doorsteps, would sit behind thick muslin curtains. Again it would “go

down” into a more avowed despair. Far into the night he wandered, until

he came to a solemn river majestic as a stream in hell. Therein were

gathered the waters of Central England—those that flow off Hindhead,

off the Chilterns, off Wiltshire north of the Plain. Therein they

were made intolerable ere they reached the sea. But the waters he had

known escaped. Their course lay southward into the Avon by forests

and beautiful fields, even swift, even pure, until they mirrored the

tower of Christchurch and greeted the ramparts of the Isle of Wight.

Of these he thought for a moment as he crossed the black river and

entered the heart of the modern world. Here he found employment. He was

not hampered by genteel traditions, and, as it was near quarter-day,

managed to get taken on at a furniture warehouse. He moved people from

the suburbs to London, from London to the suburbs, from one suburb to

another. His companions were hurried and querulous. In particular,

he loathed the foreman, a pious humbug who allowed no swearing, but

indulged in something far more degraded—the Cockney repartee. The

London intellect, so pert and shallow, like a stream that never reaches

the ocean, disgusted him almost as much as the London physique, which

for all its dexterity is not permanent, and seldom continues into the

third generation. His father, had he known it, had felt the same; for

between Mr. Elliot and the foreman the gulf was social, not spiritual:

both spent their lives in trying to be clever. And Tony Failing had

once put the thing into words: “There’s no such thing as a Londoner.

He’s only a country man on the road to sterility.”

At the end of ten days he had saved scarcely anything. Once he passed

the bank where a hundred pounds lay ready for him, but it was still

inconvenient for him to take them. Then duty sent him to a suburb not

very far from Sawston. In the evening a man who was driving a trap

asked him to hold it, and by mistake tipped him a sovereign. Stephen

called after him; but the man had a woman with him and wanted to show

off, and though he had meant to tip a shilling, and could not afford

that, he shouted back that his sovereign was as good as any one’s, and

that if Stephen did not think so he could do various things and go to

various places. On the action of this man much depends. Stephen changed

the sovereign into a postal order, and sent it off to the people at

Cadford. It did not pay them back, but it paid them something, and he

felt that his soul was free.

A few shillings remained in his pocket. They would have paid his

fare towards Wiltshire, a good county; but what should he do there?

Who would employ him? Today the journey did not seem worth while.

“Tomorrow, perhaps,” he thought, and determined to spend the money on

pleasure of another kind. Two-pence went for a ride on an electric

tram. From the top he saw the sun descend—a disc with a dark red edge.

The same sun was descending over Salisbury intolerably bright. Out of

the golden haze the spire would be piercing, like a purple needle; then

mists arose from the Avon and the other streams. Lamps flickered, but

in the outer purity the villages were already slumbering. Salisbury

is only a Gothic upstart beside these. For generations they have come

down to her to buy or to worship, and have found in her the reasonable

crisis of their lives; but generations before she was built they were

clinging to the soil, and renewing it with sheep and dogs and men,

who found the crisis of their lives upon Stonehenge. The blood of

these men ran in Stephen; the vigour they had won for him was as yet

untarnished; out on those downs they had united with rough women to

make the thing he spoke of as “himself”; the last of them has rescued

a woman of a different kind from streets and houses such as these. As

the sun descended he got off the tram with a smile of expectation. A

public-house lay opposite, and a boy in a dirty uniform was already

lighting its enormous lamp. His lips parted, and he went in.

Two hours later, when Rickie and Herbert were going the rounds, a brick

came crashing at the study window. Herbert peered into the garden, and

a hooligan slipped by him into the house, wrecked the hall, lurched up

the stairs, fell against the banisters, balanced for a moment on his

spine, and slid over. Herbert called for the police. Rickie, who was

upon the landing, caught the man by the knees and saved his life.

“What is it?” cried Agnes, emerging.

“It’s Stephen come back,” was the answer. “Hullo, Stephen!”

XXXI

Hither had Rickie moved in ten days—from disgust to penitence, from

penitence to longing from a life of horror to a new life, in which he

still surprised himself by unexpected words. Hullo, Stephen! For the

son of his mother had come back, to forgive him, as she would have

done, to live with him, as she had planned.

“He’s drunk this time,” said Agnes wearily. She too had altered: the

scandal was ageing her, and Ansell came to the house daily.

“Hullo, Stephen!”

But Stephen was now insensible.

“Stephen, you live here—”

“Good gracious me!” interposed Herbert. “My advice is, that we all go

to bed. The less said the better while our nerves are in this state.

Very well, Rickie. Of course, Wonham sleeps the night if you wish.”

They carried the drunken mass into the spare room. A mass of scandal

it seemed to one of them, a symbol of redemption to the other. Neither

acknowledged it a man, who would answer them back after a few hours’

rest.

“Ansell thought he would never forgive me,” said Rickie. “For once he’s

wrong.”

“Come to bed now, I think.” And as Rickie laid his hand on the

sleeper’s hair, he added, “You won’t do anything foolish, will you? You

are still in a morbid state. Your poor mother—Pardon me, dear boy; it

is my turn to speak out. You thought it was your father, and minded. It

is your mother. Surely you ought to mind more?”

“I have been too far back,” said Rickie gently. “Ansell took me on a

journey that was even new to him. We got behind right and wrong, to a

place where only one thing matters—that the Beloved should rise from

the dead.”

“But you won’t do anything rash?”

“Why should I?”

“Remember poor Agnes,” he stammered. “I—I am the first to acknowledge

that we might have pursued a different policy. But we are committed

to it now. It makes no difference whose son he is. I mean, he is the

same person. You and I and my sister stand or fall together. It was our

agreement from the first. I hope—No more of these distressing scenes

with her, there’s a dear fellow. I assure you they make my heart bleed.”

“Things will quiet down now.”

“To bed now; I insist upon that much.”

“Very well,” said Rickie, and when they were in the passage, locked the

door from the outside. “We want no more muddles,” he explained.

Mr. Pembroke was left examining the hall. The bust of Hermes was

broken. So was the pot of the palm. He could not go to bed without once

more sounding Rickie. “You’ll do nothing rash,” he called. “The notion

of him living here was, of course, a passing impulse. We three have

adopted a common policy.”

“Now, you go away!” called a voice that was almost flippant. “I never

did belong to that great sect whose doctrine is that each one should

select—at least, I’m not going to belong to it any longer. Go away to

bed.”

“A good night’s rest is what you need,” threatened Herbert, and

retired, not to find one for himself.

But Rickie slept. The guilt of months and the remorse of the last ten

days had alike departed. He had thought that his life was poisoned, and

lo! it was purified. He had cursed his mother, and Ansell had replied,

“You may be right, but you stand too near to settle. Step backwards.

Pretend that it happened to me. Do you want me to curse my mother?

Now, step forward and see whether anything has changed.” Something had

changed. He had journeyed—as on rare occasions a man must—till he

stood behind right and wrong. On the banks of the grey torrent of life,

love is the only flower. A little way up the stream and a little way

down had Rickie glanced, and he knew that she whom he loved had risen

from the dead, and might rise again. “Come away—let them die out—let

them die out.” Surely that dream was a vision! To-night also he hurried

to the window—to remember, with a smile, that Orion is not among the

stars of June.

“Let me die out. She will continue,” he murmured, and in making plans

for Stephen’s happiness, fell asleep.

Next morning after breakfast he announced that his brother must live

at Dunwood House. They were awed by the very moderation of his tone.

“There’s nothing else to be done. Cadover’s hopeless, and a boy of

those tendencies can’t go drifting. There is also the question of a

profession for him, and his allowance.”

“We have to thank Mr. Ansell for this,” was all that Agnes could say;

and “I foresee disaster,” was the contribution of Herbert.

“There’s plenty of money about,” Rickie continued. “Quite a man’s-worth

too much. It has been one of our absurdities. Don’t look so sad,

Herbert. I’m sorry for you people, but he’s sure to let us down easy.”

For his experience of drunkards and of Stephen was small.

He supposed that he had come without malice to renew the offer of ten

days ago.

“It is the end of Dunwood House.”

Rickie nodded, and hoped not. Agnes, who was not looking well, began to

cry. “Oh, it is too bad,” she complained, “when I’ve saved you from him

all these years.” But he could not pity her, nor even sympathize with

her wounded delicacy. The time for such nonsense was over. He would

take his share of the blame: it was cant to assume it all.

Perhaps he was over-hard. He did not realize how large his share was,

nor how his very virtues were to blame for her deterioration. “If I

had a girl, I’d keep her in line,” is not the remark of a fool nor

of a cad. Rickie had not kept his wife in line. He had shown her all

the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love; and in consequence

she was the worse woman after two years of marriage, and he, on this

morning of freedom, was harder upon her than he need have been.

The spare room bell rang. Herbert had a painful struggle between

curiosity and duty, for the bell for chapel was ringing also, and he

must go through the drizzle to school. He promised to come up in the

interval. Rickie, who had rapped his head that Sunday on the edge of

the table, was still forbidden to work. Before him a quiet morning lay.

Secure of his victory, he took the portrait of their mother in his hand

and walked leisurely upstairs. The bell continued to ring.

“See about his breakfast,” he called to Agnes, who replied, “Very

well.” The handle of the spare room door was moving slowly. “I’m

coming,” he cried. The handle was still. He unlocked and entered, his

heart full of charity.

But within stood a man who probably owned the world.

Rickie scarcely knew him; last night he had seemed so colorless, no

negligible. In a few hours he had recaptured motion and passion and the

imprint of the sunlight and the wind. He stood, not consciously heroic,

with arms that dangled from broad stooping shoulders, and feet that

played with a hassock on the carpet. But his hair was beautiful against

the grey sky, and his eyes, recalling the sky unclouded, shot past the

intruder as if to some worthier vision. So intent was their gaze that

Rickie himself glanced backwards, only to see the neat passage and the

banisters at the top of the stairs. Then the lips beat together twice,

and out burst a torrent of amazing words.

“Add it all up, and let me know how much. I’d sooner have died. It

never took me that way before. I must have broken pounds’ worth. If

you’ll not tell the police, I promise you shan’t lose, Mr. Elliot, I

swear. But it may be months before I send it. Everything is to be new.

You’ve not to be a penny out of pocket, do you see? Do let me go, this

once again.”

“What’s the trouble?” asked Rickie, as if they had been friends for

years. “My dear man, we’ve other things to talk about. Gracious me,

what a fuss! If you’d smashed the whole house I wouldn’t mind, so long

as you came back.”

“I’d sooner have died,” gulped Stephen.

“You did nearly! It was I who caught you. Never mind yesterday’s rag.

What can you manage for breakfast?”

The face grew more angry and more puzzled. “Yesterday wasn’t a rag,” he

said without focusing his eyes. “I was drunk, but naturally meant it.”

“Meant what?”

“To smash you. Bad liquor did what Mrs. Elliot couldn’t. I’ve put

myself in the wrong. You’ve got me.”

It was a poor beginning.

“As I have got you,” said Rickie, controlling himself, “I want to have

a talk with you. There has been a ghastly mistake.”

But Stephen, with a countryman’s persistency, continued on his own

line. He meant to be civil, but Rickie went cold round the mouth. For

he had not even been angry with them. Until he was drunk, they had been

dirty people—not his sort. Then the trivial injury recurred, and he

had reeled to smash them as he passed. “And I will pay for everything,”

was his refrain, with which the sighing of raindrops mingled. “You

shan’t lose a penny, if only you let me free.”

“You’ll pay for my coffin if you talk like that any longer! Will you,

one, forgive my frightful behaviour; two, live with me?” For his only

hope was in a cheerful precision.

Stephen grew more agitated. He thought it was some trick.

“I was saying I made an unspeakable mistake. Ansell put me right, but

it was too late to find you. Don’t think I got off easily. Ansell

doesn’t spare one. And you’ve got to forgive me, to share my life, to

share my money.—I’ve brought you this photograph—I want it to be the

first thing you accept from me—you have the greater right—I know all

the story now. You know who it is?”

“Oh yes; but I don’t want to drag all that in.”

“It is only her wish if we live together. She was planning it when she

died.”

“I can’t follow—because—to share your life? Did you know I called

here last Sunday week?”

“Yes. But then I only knew half. I thought you were my father’s son.”

Stephen’s anger and bewilderment were increasing. He stuttered.

“What—what’s the odds if you did?”

“I hated my father,” said Rickie. “I loved my mother.” And never had

the phrases seemed so destitute of meaning.

“Last Sunday week,” interrupted Stephen, his voice suddenly rising, “I

came to call on you. Not as this or that’s son. Not to fall on your

neck. Nor to live here. Nor—damn your dirty little mind! I meant to

say I didn’t come for money. Sorry. Sorry. I simply came as I was, and

I haven’t altered since.”

“Yes—yet our mother—for me she has risen from the dead since then—I

know I was wrong—”

“And where do I come in?” He kicked the hassock. “_I_ haven’t risen

from the dead. _I_ haven’t altered since last Sunday week. I’m—” He

stuttered again. He could not quite explain what he was. “The man

towards Andover—after all, he was having principles. But you’ve—” His

voice broke. “I mind it—I’m—_I_ don’t alter—blackguard one week—live

here the next—I keep to one or the other—you’ve hurt something most

badly in me that I didn’t know was there.”

“Don’t let us talk,” said Rickie. “It gets worse every minute. Simply

say you forgive me; shake hands, and have done with it.”

“That I won’t. That I couldn’t. In fact, I don’t know what you mean.”

Then Rickie began a new appeal—not to pity, for now he was in no mood

to whimper. For all its pathos, there was something heroic in this

meeting. “I warn you to stop here with me, Stephen. No one else in the

world will look after you. As far as I know, you have never been really

unhappy yet or suffered, as you should do, from your faults. Last night

you nearly killed yourself with drink. Never mind why I’m willing to

cure you. I am willing, and I warn you to give me the chance. Forgive

me or not, as you choose. I care for other things more.”

Stephen looked at him at last, faintly approving. The offer was

ridiculous, but it did treat him as a man.

“Let me tell you of a fault of mine, and how I was punished for it,”

continued Rickie. “Two years ago I behaved badly to you, up at the

Rings. No, even a few days before that. We went for a ride, and I

thought too much of other matters, and did not try to understand you.

Then came the Rings, and in the evening, when you called up to me most

kindly, I never answered. But the ride was the beginning. Ever since

then I have taken the world at second-hand. I have bothered less and

less to look it in the face—until not only you, but every one else has

turned unreal. Never Ansell: he kept away, and somehow saved himself.

But every one else. Do you remember in one of Tony Failing’s books,

‘Cast bitter bread upon the waters, and after many days it really does

come back to you’? This had been true of my life; it will be equally

true of a drunkard’s, and I warn you to stop with me.”

“I can’t stop after that cheque,” said Stephen more gently. “But I do

remember the ride. I was a bit bored myself.”

Agnes, who had not been seeing to the breakfast, chose this moment to

call from the passage. “Of course he can’t stop,” she exclaimed. “For

better or worse, it’s settled. We’ve none of us altered since last

Sunday week.”

“There you’re right, Mrs. Elliot!” he shouted, starting out of the

temperate past. “We haven’t altered.” With a rare flash of insight he

turned on Rickie. “I see your game. You don’t care about _me_ drinking,

or to shake _my_ hand. It’s some one else you want to cure—as it were,

that old photograph. You talk to me, but all the time you look at the

photograph.” He snatched it up.

“I’ve my own ideas of good manners, and to look friends between the

eyes is one of them; and this”—he tore the photograph across “and

this”—he tore it again—“and these—” He flung the pieces at the man,

who had sunk into a chair. “For my part, I’m off.”

Then Rickie was heroic no longer. Turning round in his chair, he

covered his face. The man was right. He did not love him, even as he

had never hated him. In either passion he had degraded him to be a

symbol for the vanished past. The man was right, and would have been

lovable. He longed to be back riding over those windy fields, to be

back in those mystic circles, beneath pure sky. Then they could have

watched and helped and taught each other, until the word was a reality,

and the past not a torn photograph, but Demeter the goddess rejoicing

in the spring. Ah, if he had seized those high opportunities! For

they led to the highest of all, the symbolic moment, which, if a man

accepts, he has accepted life.

The voice of Agnes, which had lured him then (“For my sake,” she had

whispered), pealed over him now in triumph. Abruptly it broke into sobs

that had the effect of rain. He started up. The anger had died out of

Stephen’s face, not for a subtle reason but because here was a woman,

near him, and unhappy.

She tried to apologize, and brought on a fresh burst of tears.

Something had upset her. They heard her locking the door of her room.

From that moment their intercourse was changed.

“Why does she keep crying today?” mused Rickie, as if he spoke to some

mutual friend.

“I can make a guess,” said Stephen, and his heavy face flushed.

“Did you insult her?” he asked feebly.

“But who’s Gerald?”

Rickie raised his hand to his mouth.

“She looked at me as if she knew me, and then gasps ‘Gerald,’ and

started crying.”

“Gerald is the name of some one she once knew.”

“So I thought.” There was a long silence, in which they could hear a

piteous gulping cough. “Where is he now?” asked Stephen.

“Dead.”

“And then you—?”

Rickie nodded.

“Bad, this sort of thing.”

“I didn’t know of this particular thing. She acted as if she had

forgotten him. Perhaps she had, and you woke him up. There are queer

tricks in the world. She is overstrained. She has probably been

plotting ever since you burst in last night.”

“Against me?”

“Yes.”

Stephen stood irresolute. “I suppose you and she pulled together?” he

said at last.

“Get away from us, man! I mind losing you. Yet it’s as well you don’t

stop.”

“Oh, _that’s_ out of the question,” said Stephen, brushing his cap.

“If you’ve guessed anything, I’d be obliged if you didn’t mention it.

I’ve no right to ask, but I’d be obliged.”

He nodded, and walked slowly along the landing and down the stairs.

Rickie accompanied him, and even opened the front door. It was as if

Agnes had absorbed the passion out of both of them. The suburb was now

wrapped in a cloud, not of its own making. Sigh after sigh passed along

its streets to break against dripping walls. The school, the houses

were hidden, and all civilization seemed in abeyance. Only the simplest

sounds, the simplest desires emerged. They agreed that this weather was

strange after such a sunset.

“That’s a collie,” said Stephen, listening.

“I wish you’d have some breakfast before starting.”

“No food, thanks. But you know—” He paused. “It’s all been a muddle, and

I’ve no objection to your coming along with me.”

The cloud descended lower.

“Come with me as a man,” said Stephen, already out in the mist. “Not as

a brother; who cares what people did years back? We’re alive together,

and the rest is cant. Here am I, Rickie, and there are you, a fair

wreck. They’ve no use for you here,—never had any, if the truth was

known,—and they’ve only made you beastly. This house, so to speak, has

the rot. It’s common-sense that you should come.”

“Stephen, wait a minute. What do you mean?”

“Wait’s what we won’t do,” said Stephen at the gate.

“I must ask—”

He did wait for a minute, and sobs were heard, faint, hopeless,

vindictive. Then he trudged away, and Rickie soon lost his colour and

his form. But a voice persisted, saying, “Come, I do mean it. Come; I

will take care of you, I can manage you.”

The words were kind; yet it was not for their sake that Rickie plunged

into the impalpable cloud. In the voice he had found a surer guarantee.

Habits and sex may change with the new generation, features may alter

with the play of a private passion, but a voice is apart from these. It

lies nearer to the racial essence and perhaps to the divine; it can, at

all events, overleap one grave.

XXXII

Mr. Pembroke did not receive a clear account of what had happened when

he returned for the interval. His sister—he told her frankly—was

concealing something from him. She could make no reply. Had she gone

mad, she wondered. Hitherto she had pretended to love her husband. Why

choose such a moment for the truth?

“But I understand Rickie’s position,” he told her. “It is an unbalanced

position, yet I understand it; I noted its approach while he was

ill. He imagines himself his brother’s keeper. Therefore we must

make concessions. We must negotiate.” The negotiations were still

progressing in November, the month during which this story draws to its

close.

“I understand his position,” he then told her. “It is both weak and

defiant. He is still with those Ansells. Read this letter, which thanks

me for his little stories. We sent them last month, you remember—such

of them as we could find. It seems that he fills up his time by

writing: he has already written a book.”

She only gave him half her attention, for a beautiful wreath had just

arrived from the florist’s. She was taking it up to the cemetery: today

her child had been dead a year.

“On the other hand, he has altered his will. Fortunately, he cannot

alter much. But I fear that what is not settled on you, will go. Should

I read what I wrote on this point, and also my minutes of the interview

with old Mr. Ansell, and the copy of my correspondence with Stephen

Wonham?”

But her fly was announced. While he put the wreath in for her, she ran

for a moment upstairs. A few tears had come to her eyes. A scandalous

divorce would have been more bearable than this withdrawal. People

asked, “Why did her husband leave her?” and the answer came, “Oh,

nothing particular; he only couldn’t stand her; she lied and taught him

to lie; she kept him from the work that suited him, from his friends,

from his brother,—in a word, she tried to run him, which a man won’t

pardon.” A few tears; not many. To her, life never showed itself as a

classic drama, in which, by trying to advance our fortunes, we shatter

them. She had turned Stephen out of Wiltshire, and he fell like a

thunderbolt on Sawston and on herself. In trying to gain Mrs. Failing’s

money she had probably lost money which would have been her own. But

irony is a subtle teacher, and she was not the woman to learn from such

lessons as these. Her suffering was more direct. Three men had wronged

her; therefore she hated them, and, if she could, would do them harm.

“These negotiations are quite useless,” she told Herbert when she came

downstairs. “We had much better bide our time. Tell me just about

Stephen Wonham, though.”

He drew her into the study again. “Wonham is or was in Scotland,

learning to farm with connections of the Ansells: I believe the money

is to go towards setting him up. Apparently he is a hard worker. He

also drinks!”

She nodded and smiled. “More than he did?”

“My informant, Mr. Tilliard—oh, I ought not to have mentioned his

name. He is one of the better sort of Rickie’s Cambridge friends, and

has been dreadfully grieved at the collapse, but he does not want to

be mixed up in it. This autumn he was up in the Lowlands, close by,

and very kindly made a few unobtrusive inquiries for me. The man is

becoming an habitual drunkard.”

She smiled again. Stephen had evoked her secret, and she hated him more

for that than for anything else that he had done. The poise of his

shoulders that morning—it was no more—had recalled Gerald.

If only she had not been so tired! He had reminded her of the greatest

thing she had known, and to her cloudy mind this seemed degradation.

She had turned to him as to her lover; with a look, which a man of his

type understood, she had asked for his pity; for one terrible moment

she had desired to be held in his arms. Even Herbert was surprised when

she said, “I’m glad he drinks. I hope he’ll kill himself. A man like

that ought never to have been born.”

“Perhaps the sins of the parents are visited on the children,” said

Herbert, taking her to the carriage. “Yet it is not for us to decide.”

“I feel sure he will be punished. What right has he—” She broke off.

What right had he to our common humanity? It was a hard lesson for

any one to learn. For Agnes it was impossible. Stephen was illicit,

abnormal, worse than a man diseased. Yet she had turned to him: he had

drawn out the truth.

“My dear, don’t cry,” said her brother, drawing up the windows. “I have

great hopes of Mr. Tilliard—the Silts have written—Mrs. Failing will

do what she can—”

As she drove to the cemetery, her bitterness turned against Ansell,

who had kept her husband alive in the days after Stephen’s expulsion.

If he had not been there, Rickie would have renounced his mother and

his brother and all the outer world, troubling no one. The mystic,

inherent in him, would have prevailed. So Ansell himself had told her.

And Ansell, too, had sheltered the fugitives and given them money, and

saved them from the ludicrous checks that so often stop young men. But

when she reached the cemetery, and stood beside the tiny grave, all her

bitterness, all her hatred were turned against Rickie.

“But he’ll come back in the end,” she thought. “A wife has only to

wait. What are his friends beside me? They too will marry. I have only

to wait. His book, like all that he has done, will fail. His brother is

drinking himself away. Poor aimless Rickie! I have only to keep civil.

He will come back in the end.”

She had moved, and found herself close to the grave of Gerald. The

flowers she had planted after his death were dead, and she had not

liked to renew them. There lay the athlete, and his dust was as the

little child’s whom she had brought into the world with such hope, with

such pain.

XXXIII

That same day Rickie, feeling neither poor nor aimless, left the

Ansells’ for a night’s visit to Cadover. His aunt had invited him—why,

he could not think, nor could he think why he should refuse the

invitation. She could not annoy him now, and he was not vindictive.

In the dell near Madingley he had cried, “I hate no one,” in his

ignorance. Now, with full knowledge, he hated no one again. The weather

was pleasant, the county attractive, and he was ready for a little

change.

Maud and Stewart saw him off. Stephen, who was down for the holiday,

had been left with his chin on the luncheon table. He had wanted to

come also. Rickie pointed out that you cannot visit where you have

broken the windows. There was an argument—there generally was—and now

the young man had turned sulky.

“Let him do what he likes,” said Ansell. “He knows more than we do. He

knows everything.”

“Is he to get drunk?” Rickie asked.

“Most certainly.”

“And to go where he isn’t asked?”

Maud, though liking a little spirit in a man, declared this to be

impossible.

“Well, I wish you joy!” Rickie called, as the train moved away. “He

means mischief this evening. He told me piously that he felt it beating

up. Good-bye!”

“But we’ll wait for you to pass,” they cried. For the Salisbury train

always backed out of the station and then returned, and the Ansell

family, including Stewart, took an incredible pleasure in seeing it do

this.

The carriage was empty. Rickie settled himself down for his little

journey. First he looked at the coloured photographs. Then he read the

directions for obtaining luncheon-baskets, and felt the texture of

the cushions. Through the windows a signal-box interested him. Then

he saw the ugly little town that was now his home, and up its chief

street the Ansells’ memorable facade. The spirit of a genial comedy

dwelt there. It was so absurd, so kindly. The house was divided against

itself and yet stood. Metaphysics, commerce, social aspirations—all

lived together in harmony. Mr. Ansell had done much, but one was

tempted to believe in a more capricious power—the power that abstains

from “nipping.” “One nips or is nipped, and never knows beforehand,”

quoted Rickie, and opened the poems of Shelley, a man less foolish than

you supposed. How pleasant it was to read! If business worried him,

if Stephen was noisy or Ansell perverse, there still remained this

paradise of books. It seemed as if he had read nothing for two years.

Then the train stopped for the shunting, and he heard protests from

minor officials who were working on the line. They complained that some

one who didn’t ought to, had mounted on the footboard of the carriage.

Stephen’s face appeared, convulsed with laughter. With the action of a

swimmer he dived in through the open window, and fell comfortably on

Rickie’s luggage and Rickie. He declared it was the finest joke ever

known. Rickie was not so sure. “You’ll be run over next,” he said.

“What did you do that for?”

“I’m coming with you,” he giggled, rolling all that he could on to the

dusty floor.

“Now, Stephen, this is too bad. Get up. We went into the whole question

yesterday.”

“I know; and I settled we wouldn’t go into it again, spoiling my

holiday.”

“Well, it’s execrable taste.”

Now he was waving to the Ansells, and showing them a piece of soap: it

was all his luggage, and even that he abandoned, for he flung it at

Stewart’s lofty brow.

“I can’t think what you’ve done it for. You know how strongly I felt.”

Stephen replied that he should stop in the village; meet Rickie at the

lodge gates; that kind of thing.

“It’s execrable taste,” he repeated, trying to keep grave.

“Well, you did all you could,” he exclaimed with sudden sympathy.

“Leaving me talking to old Ansell, you might have thought you’d got

your way. I’ve as much taste as most chaps, but, hang it! your aunt

isn’t the German Emperor. She doesn’t own Wiltshire.”

“You ass!” sputtered Rickie, who had taken to laugh at nonsense again.

“No, she isn’t,” he repeated, blowing a kiss out of the window to

maidens. “Why, we started for Wiltshire on the wet morning!”

“When Stewart found us at Sawston railway station?” He smiled happily.

“I never thought we should pull through.”

“Well, we _didn’t_. We never did what we meant. It’s nonsense that I

couldn’t have managed you alone. I’ve a notion. Slip out after your

dinner this evening, and we’ll get thundering tight together.”

“I’ve a notion I won’t.”

“It’d do you no end of good. You’ll get to know people—shepherds,

carters—” He waved his arms vaguely, indicating democracy. “Then

you’ll sing.”

“And then?”

“Plop.”

“Precisely.”

“But I’ll catch you,” promised Stephen. “We shall carry you up the hill

to bed. In the morning you wake, have your row with old Em’ly, she

kicks you out, we meet—we’ll meet at the Rings!” He danced up and down

the carriage. Some one in the next carriage punched at the partition,

and when this happens, all lads with mettle know that they must punch

the partition back.

“Thank you. I’ve a notion I won’t,” said Rickie when the noise had

subsided—subsided for a moment only, for the following conversation

took place to an accompaniment of dust and bangs. “Except as regards

the Rings. We will meet there.”

“Then I’ll get tight by myself.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will. I swore to do something special this evening. I feel like

it.”

“In that case, I get out at the next station.” He was laughing, but

quite determined. Stephen had grown too dictatorial of late. The

Ansells spoilt him. “It’s bad enough having you there at all. Having

you there drunk is impossible. I’d sooner not visit my aunt than think,

when I sat with her, that you’re down in the village teaching her

labourers to be as beastly as yourself. Go if you will. But not with

me.”

“Why shouldn’t I have a good time while I’m young, if I don’t harm any

one?” said Stephen defiantly.

“Need we discuss it again? Because you harm yourself.”

“Oh, I can stop myself any minute I choose. I just say ‘I won’t’ to you

or any other fool, and I don’t.”

Rickie knew that the boast was true. He continued, “There is also a

thing called Morality. You may learn in the Bible, and also from the

Greeks, that your body is a temple.”

“So you said in your longest letter.”

“Probably I wrote like a prig, for the reason that I have never been

tempted in this way; but surely it is wrong that your body should

escape you.”

“I don’t follow,” he retorted, punching.

“It isn’t right, even for a little time, to forget that you exist.”

“I suppose you’ve never been tempted to go to sleep?”

Just then the train passed through a coppice in which the grey

undergrowth looked no more alive than firewood. Yet every twig in it

was waiting for the spring. Rickie knew that the analogy was false, but

argument confused him, and he gave up this line of attack also.

“Do be more careful over life. If your body escapes you in one thing,

why not in more? A man will have other temptations.”

“You mean women,” said Stephen quietly, pausing for a moment in this

game. “But that’s absolutely different. That would be harming some one

else.”

“Is that the only thing that keeps you straight?”

“What else should?” And he looked not into Rickie, but past him, with

the wondering eyes of a child. Rickie nodded, and referred himself to

the window.

He observed that the country was smoother and more plastic. The woods

had gone, and under a pale-blue sky long contours of earth were

flowing, and merging, rising a little to bear some coronal of beeches,

parting a little to disclose some green valley, where cottages stood

under elms or beside translucent waters. It was Wiltshire at last.

The train had entered the chalk. At last it slackened at a wayside

platform. Without speaking he opened the door.

“What’s that for?”

“To go back.”

Stephen had forgotten the threat. He said that this was not playing the

game.

“Surely!”

“I can’t have you going back.”

“Promise to behave decently then.”

He was seized and pulled away from the door.

“We change at Salisbury,” he remarked. “There is an hour to wait. You

will find me troublesome.”

“It isn’t fair,” exploded Stephen. “It’s a lowdown trick. How can I let

you go back?”

“Promise, then.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes. Y.M.C.A. But for this occasion only.”

“No, no. For the rest of your holiday.”

“Yes, yes. Very well. I promise.”

“For the rest of your life?”

Somehow it pleased him that Stephen should bang him crossly with his

elbow and say, “No. Get out. You’ve gone too far.” So had the train.

The porter at the end of the wayside platform slammed the door, and

they proceeded toward Salisbury through the slowly modulating downs.

Rickie pretended to read. Over the book he watched his brother’s face,

and wondered how bad temper could be consistent with a mind so radiant.

In spite of his obstinacy and conceit, Stephen was an easy person to

live with. He never fidgeted or nursed hidden grievances, or indulged

in a shoddy pride. Though he spent Rickie’s money as slowly as he

could, he asked for it without apology: “You must put it down against

me,” he would say. In time—it was still very vague—he would rent or

purchase a farm. There is no formula in which we may sum up decent

people. So Ansell had preached, and had of course proceeded to offer a

formula: “They must be serious, they must be truthful.” Serious not in

the sense of glum; but they must be convinced that our life is a state

of some importance, and our earth not a place to beat time on. Of so

much Stephen was convinced: he showed it in his work, in his play, in

his self-respect, and above all—though the fact is hard to face—in his

sacred passion for alcohol. Drink, today, is an unlovely thing. Between

us and the heights of Cithaeron the river of sin now flows. Yet the

cries still call from the mountain, and granted a man has responded to

them, it is better he respond with the candour of the Greek.

“I shall stop at the Thompsons’ now,” said the disappointed reveller.

“Prayers.”

Rickie did not press his triumph, but it was a happy moment, partly

because of the triumph, partly because he was sure that his brother

must care for him. Stephen was too selfish to give up any pleasure

without grave reasons. He was certain that he had been right to

disentangle himself from Sawston, and to ignore the threats and tears

that still tempted him to return. Here there was real work for him to

do. Moreover, though he sought no reward, it had come. His health was

better, his brain sound, his life washed clean, not by the waters of

sentiment, but by the efforts of a fellow-man. Stephen was man first,

brother afterwards. Herein lay his brutality and also his virtue. “Look

me in the face. Don’t hang on me clothes that don’t belong—as you did

on your wife, giving her saint’s robes, whereas she was simply a woman

of her own sort, who needed careful watching. Tear up the photographs.

Here am I, and there are you. The rest is cant.” The rest was not cant,

and perhaps Stephen would confess as much in time. But Rickie needed a

tonic, and a man, not a brother, must hold it to his lips.

“I see the old spire,” he called, and then added, “I don’t mind seeing

it again.”

“No one does, as far as I know. People have come from the other side of

the world to see it again.”

“Pious people. But I don’t hold with bishops.” He was young enough to

be uneasy. The cathedral, a fount of superstition, must find no place

in his life. At the age of twenty he had settled things.

“I’ve got my own philosophy,” he once told Ansell, “and I don’t care a

straw about yours.” Ansell’s mirth had annoyed him not a little. And

it was strange that one so settled should feel his heart leap up at

the sight of an old spire. “I regard it as a public building,” he told

Rickie, who agreed. “It’s useful, too, as a landmark.” His attitude

today was defensive. It was part of a subtle change that Rickie had

noted in him since his return from Scotland. His face gave hints of a

new maturity. “You can see the old spire from the Ridgeway,” he said,

suddenly laying a hand on Rickie’s knee, “before rain as clearly as any

telegraph post.”

“How far is the Ridgeway?”

“Seventeen miles.”

“Which direction?”

“North, naturally. North again from that you see Devizes, the vale of

Pewsey, and the other downs. Also towards Bath. It is something of a

view. You ought to get on the Ridgeway.”

“I shouldn’t have time for that.”

“Or Beacon Hill. Or let’s do Stonehenge.”

“If it’s fine, I suggest the Rings.”

“It will be fine.” Then he murmured the names of villages.

“I wish you could live here,” said Rickie kindly. “I believe you love

these particular acres more than the whole world.”

Stephen replied that this was not the case: he was only used to them.

He wished they were driving out, instead of waiting for the Cadchurch

train.

They had advanced into Salisbury, and the cathedral, a public building,

was grey against a tender sky. Rickie suggested that, while waiting for

the train, they should visit it. He spoke of the incomparable north

porch. “I’ve never been inside it, and I never will. Sorry to shock

you, Rickie, but I must tell you plainly. I’m an atheist. I don’t

believe in anything.”

“I do,” said Rickie.

“When a man dies, it’s as if he’s never been,” he asserted. The train

drew up in Salisbury station. Here a little incident took place which

caused them to alter their plans.

They found outside the station a trap driven by a small boy, who had

come in from Cadford to fetch some wire-netting. “That’ll do us,” said

Stephen, and called to the boy, “If I pay your railway-ticket back,

and if I give you sixpence as well, will you let us drive back in the

trap?” The boy said no. “It will be all right,” said Rickie. “I am Mrs.

Failing’s nephew.” The boy shook his head. “And you know Mr. Wonham?”

The boy couldn’t say he didn’t. “Then what’s your objection? Why? What

is it? Why not?” But Stephen leant against the time-tables and spoke of

other matters.

Presently the boy said, “Did you say you’d pay my railway-ticket back,

Mr. Wonham?”

“Yes,” said a bystander. “Didn’t you hear him?”

“I heard him right enough.”

Now Stephen laid his hand on the splash-board, saying, “What I want,

though, is this trap here of yours, see, to drive in back myself;”

and as he spoke the bystander followed him in canon, “What he wants,

though, is that there trap of yours, see, to drive hisself back in.”

“_I’ve_ no objection,” said the boy, as if deeply offended. For a time he

sat motionless, and then got down, remarking, “I won’t rob you of your

sixpence.”

“Silly little fool,” snapped Rickie, as they drove through the town.

Stephen looked surprised. “What’s wrong with the boy? He had to think

it over. No one had asked him to do such a thing before. Next time he’d

let us have the trap quick enough.”

“Not if he had driven in for a cabbage instead of wire-netting.”

“He never would drive in for a cabbage.”

Rickie shuffled his feet. But his irritation passed. He saw that the

little incident had been a quiet challenge to the civilization that

he had known. “Organize.” “Systematize.” “Fill up every moment,”

“Induce _esprit de corps_.” He reviewed the watchwords of the last two

years, and found that they ignored personal contest, personal truces,

personal love. By following them Sawston School had lost its quiet

usefulness and become a frothy sea, wherein plunged Dunwood House, that

unnecessary ship. Humbled, he turned to Stephen and said, “No, you’re

right. Nothing is wrong with the boy. He was honestly thinking it out.”

But Stephen had forgotten the incident, or else he was not inclined to

talk about it. His assertive fit was over.

The direct road from Salisbury to Cadover is extremely dull. The

city—which God intended to keep by the river; did she not move there,

being thirsty, in the reign of William Rufus?—the city had strayed out

of her own plain, climbed up her slopes, and tumbled over them in ugly

cataracts of brick. The cataracts are still short, and doubtless they

meet or create some commercial need. But instead of looking towards

the cathedral, as all the city should, they look outwards at a pagan

entrenchment, as the city should not. They neglect the poise of the

earth, and the sentiments she has decreed. They are the modern spirit.

Through them the road descends into an unobtrusive country where,

nevertheless, the power of the earth grows stronger. Streams do divide.

Distances do still exist. It is easier to know the men in your valley

than those who live in the next, across a waste of down. It is easier

to know men well. The country is not paradise, and can show the vices

that grieve a good man everywhere. But there is room in it, and leisure.

“I suppose,” said Rickie as the twilight fell, “this kind of thing

is going on all over England.” Perhaps he meant that towns are after

all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one

another, have lost themselves. But he got no response, and expected

none. Turning round in his seat, he watched the winter sun slide out

of a quiet sky. The horizon was primrose, and the earth against it

gave momentary hints of purple. All faded: no pageant would conclude

the gracious day, and when he turned eastward the night was already

established.

“Those verlands—” said Stephen, scarcely above his breath.

“What are verlands?”

He pointed at the dusk, and said, “Our name for a kind of field.” Then

he drove his whip into its socket, and seemed to swallow something.

Rickie, straining his eyes for verlands, could only see a tumbling

wilderness of brown.

“Are there many local words?”

“There have been.”

“I suppose they die out.”

The conversation turned curiously. In the tone of one who replies, he

said, “I expect that some time or other I shall marry.”

“I expect you will,” said Rickie, and wondered a little why the reply

seemed not abrupt. “Would we see the Rings in the daytime from here?”

“(We do see them.) But Mrs. Failing once said no decent woman would

have me.”

“Did you agree to that?”

“Drive a little, will you?”

The horse went slowly forward into the wilderness, that turned from

brown to black. Then a luminous glimmer surrounded them, and the air

grew cooler: the road was descending between parapets of chalk.

“But, Rickie, mightn’t I find a girl—naturally not refined—and be

happy with her in my own way? I would tell her straight I was nothing

much—faithful, of course, but that she should never have all my

thoughts. Out of no disrespect to her, but because all one’s thoughts

can’t belong to any single person.”

While he spoke even the road vanished, and invisible water came

gurgling through the wheel-spokes. The horse had chosen the ford. “You

can’t own people. At least a fellow can’t. It may be different for a

poet. (Let the horse drink.) And I want to marry some one, and don’t

yet know who she is, which a poet again will tell you is disgusting.

Does it disgust you? Being nothing much, surely I’d better go gently.

For it’s something rather outside that makes one marry, if you follow

me: not exactly oneself. (Don’t hurry the horse.) We want to marry, and

yet—I can’t explain. I fancy I’ll go wading: this is our stream.”

Romantic love is greater than this. There are men and women—we know it

from history—who have been born into the world for each other, and for

no one else, who have accomplished the longest journey locked in each

other’s arms. But romantic love is also the code of modern morals, and,

for this reason, popular. Eternal union, eternal ownership—these are

tempting baits for the average man. He swallows them, will not confess

his mistake, and—perhaps to cover it—cries “dirty cynic” at such a

man as Stephen.

Rickie watched the black earth unite to the black sky. But the sky

overhead grew clearer, and in it twinkled the Plough and the central

stars. He thought of his brother’s future and of his own past, and of

how much truth might lie in that antithesis of Ansell’s: “A man wants

to love mankind, a woman wants to love one man.” At all events, he and

his wife had illustrated it, and perhaps the conflict, so tragic in

their own case, was elsewhere the salt of the world. Meanwhile Stephen

called from the water for matches: there was some trick with paper

which Mr. Failing had showed him, and which he would show Rickie now,

instead of talking nonsense. Bending down, he illuminated the dimpled

surface of the ford. “Quite a current,” he said, and his face flickered

out in the darkness. “Yes, give me the loose paper, quick! Crumple it

into a ball.”

Rickie obeyed, though intent on the transfigured face. He believed

that a new spirit dwelt there, expelling the crudities of youth. He

saw steadier eyes, and the sign of manhood set like a bar of gold upon

steadier lips. Some faces are knit by beauty, or by intellect, or by a

great passion: had Stephen’s waited for the touch of the years?

But they played as boys who continued the nonsense of the railway

carriage. The paper caught fire from the match, and spread into a

rose of flame. “Now gently with me,” said Stephen, and they laid it

flower-like on the stream. Gravel and tremulous weeds leapt into sight,

and then the flower sailed into deep water, and up leapt the two arches

of a bridge. “It’ll strike!” they cried; “no, it won’t; it’s chosen the

left,” and one arch became a fairy tunnel, dropping diamonds. Then it

vanished for Rickie; but Stephen, who knelt in the water, declared that

it was still afloat, far through the arch, burning as if it would burn

forever.

XXXIV

The carriage that Mrs. Failing had sent to meet her nephew returned

from Cadchurch station empty. She was preparing for a solitary dinner

when he somehow arrived, full of apologies, but more sedate than she

had expected. She cut his explanations short. “Never mind how you got

here. You are here, and I am quite pleased to see you.” He changed his

clothes and they proceeded to the dining-room.

There was a bright fire, but the curtains were not drawn. Mr. Failing

had believed that windows with the night behind are more beautiful

than any pictures, and his widow had kept to the custom. It was brave

of her to persevere, lumps of chalk having come out of the night last

June. For some obscure reason—not so obscure to Rickie—she had

preserved them as mementoes of an episode. Seeing them in a row on the

mantelpiece, he expected that their first topic would be Stephen. But

they never mentioned him, though he was latent in all that they said.

It was of Mr. Failing that they spoke. The Essays had been a success.

She was really pleased. The book was brought in at her request, and

between the courses she read it aloud to her nephew, in her soft yet

unsympathetic voice. Then she sent for the press notices—after all no

one despises them—and read their comments on her introduction. She

wielded a graceful pen, was apt, adequate, suggestive, indispensable,

unnecessary. So the meal passed pleasantly away, for no one could so

well combine the formal with the unconventional, and it only seemed

charming when papers littered her stately table.

“My man wrote very nicely,” she observed. “Now, you read me something

out of him that you like. Read ‘The True Patriot.’”

He took the book and found: “Let us love one another. Let our children,

physical and spiritual, love one another. It is all that we can do.

Perhaps the earth will neglect our love. Perhaps she will confirm it,

and suffer some rallying-point, spire, mound, for the new generations

to cherish.”

“He wrote that when he was young. Later on he doubted whether we had

better love one another, or whether the earth will confirm anything. He

died a most unhappy man.”

He could not help saying, “Not knowing that the earth had confirmed

him.”

“Has she? It is quite possible. We meet so seldom in these days, she

and I. Do you see much of the earth?”

“A little.”

“Do you expect that she will confirm you?”

“It is quite possible.”

“Beware of her, Rickie, I think.”

“I think not.”

“Beware of her, surely. Going back to her really is going

back—throwing away the artificiality which (though you young people

won’t confess it) is the only good thing in life. Don’t pretend you are

simple. Once I pretended. Don’t pretend that you care for anything but

for clever talk such as this, and for books.”

“The talk,” said Leighton afterwards, “certainly was clever. But it

meant something, all the same.” He heard no more, for his mistress told

him to retire.

“And my nephew, this being so, make up your quarrel with your wife.”

She stretched out her hand to him with real feeling. “It is easier now

than it will be later. Poor lady, she has written to me foolishly and

often, but, on the whole, I side with her against you. She would grant

you all that you fought for—all the people, all the theories. I have

it, in her writing, that she will never interfere with your life again.”

“She cannot help interfering,” said Rickie, with his eyes on the black

windows. “She despises me. Besides, I do not love her.”

“I know, my dear. Nor she you. I am not being sentimental. I say

once more, beware of the earth. We are conventional people, and

conventions—if you will but see it—are majestic in their way, and

will claim us in the end. We do not live for great passions or for

great memories, or for anything great.”

He threw up his head. “We do.”

“Now listen to me. I am serious and friendly tonight, as you must have

observed. I have asked you here partly to amuse myself—you belong

to my March Past—but also to give you good advice. There has been a

volcano—a phenomenon which I too once greatly admired. The eruption

is over. Let the conventions do their work now, and clear the rubbish

away. My age is fifty-nine, and I tell you solemnly that the important

things in life are little things, and that people are not important at

all. Go back to your wife.”

He looked at her, and was filled with pity. He knew that he would never

be frightened of her again. Only because she was serious and friendly

did he trouble himself to reply. “There is one little fact I should

like to tell you, as confuting your theory. The idea of a story—a long

story—had been in my head for a year. As a dream to amuse myself—the

kind of amusement you would recommend for the future. I should have

had time to write it, but the people round me coloured my life, and so

it never seemed worth while. For the story is not likely to pay. Then

came the volcano. A few days after it was over I lay in bed looking out

upon a world of rubbish. Two men I know—one intellectual, the other

very much the reverse—burst into the room. They said, ‘What happened

to your short stories? They weren’t good, but where are they? Why have

you stopped writing? Why haven’t you been to Italy? You must write. You

must go. Because to write, to go, is you.’ Well, I have written, and

yesterday we sent the long story out on its rounds. The men do not like

it, for different reasons. But it mattered very much to them that I

should write it, and so it got written. As I told you, this is only one

fact; other facts, I trust, have happened in the last five months. But

I mention it to prove that people are important, and therefore, however

much it inconveniences my wife, I will not go back to her.”

“And Italy?” asked Mrs. Failing.

This question he avoided. Italy must wait. Now that he had the time, he

had not the money.

“Or what is the long story about, then?”

“About a man and a woman who meet and are happy.”

“Somewhat of a _tour de force_, I conclude.”

He frowned. “In literature we needn’t intrude our own limitations. I’m

not so silly as to think that all marriages turn out like mine. My

character is to blame for our catastrophe, not marriage.”

“My dear, I too have married; marriage is to blame.”

But here again he seemed to know better.

“Well,” she said, leaving the table and moving with her dessert to the

mantelpiece, “so you are abandoning marriage and taking to literature.

And are happy.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because, as we used to say at Cambridge, the cow is there. The world

is real again. This is a room, that a window, outside is the night—”

“Go on.”

He pointed to the floor. “The day is straight below, shining through

other windows into other rooms.”

“You are very odd,” she said after a pause, “and I do not like you at

all. There you sit, eating my biscuits, and all the time you know that

the earth is round. Who taught you? I am going to bed now, and all the

night, you tell me, you and I and the biscuits go plunging eastwards,

until we reach the sun. But breakfast will be at nine as usual.

Good-night.”

She rang the bell twice, and her maid came with her candle and her

walking-stick: it was her habit of late to go to her room as soon

as dinner was over, for she had no one to sit up with. Rickie was

impressed by her loneliness, and also by the mixture in her of insight

and obtuseness. She was so quick, so clear-headed, so imaginative even.

But all the same, she had forgotten what people were like. Finding life

dull, she had dropped lies into it, as a chemist drops a new element

into a solution, hoping that life would thereby sparkle or turn some

beautiful colour. She loved to mislead others, and in the end her

private view of false and true was obscured, and she misled herself.

How she must have enjoyed their errors over Stephen! But her own error

had been greater, inasmuch as it was spiritual entirely.

Leighton came in with some coffee. Feeling it unnecessary to light the

drawing-room lamp for one small young man, he persuaded Rickie to say

he preferred the dining-room. So Rickie sat down by the fire playing

with one of the lumps of chalk. His thoughts went back to the ford,

from which they had scarcely wandered. Still he heard the horse in the

dark drinking, still he saw the mystic rose, and the tunnel dropping

diamonds. He had driven away alone, believing the earth had confirmed

him. He stood behind things at last, and knew that conventions are not

majestic, and that they will not claim us in the end.

As he mused, the chalk slipped from his fingers, and fell on the

coffee-cup, which broke. The china, said Leighton, was expensive. He

believed it was impossible to match it now. Each cup was different.

It was a harlequin set. The saucer, without the cup, was therefore

useless. Would Mr. Elliot please explain to Mrs. Failing how it

happened.

Rickie promised he would explain.

He had left Stephen preparing to bathe, and had heard him working

up-stream like an animal, splashing in the shallows, breathing heavily

as he swam the pools; at times reeds snapped, or clods of earth were

pulled in. By the fire he remembered it was again November. “Should

you like a walk?” he asked Leighton, and told him who stopped in the

village tonight. Leighton was pleased. At nine o’clock the two young

men left the house, under a sky that was still only bright in the

zenith. “It will rain tomorrow,” Leighton said.

“My brother says, fine tomorrow.”

“Fine tomorrow,” Leighton echoed.

“Now which do you mean?” asked Rickie, laughing.

Since the plumes of the fir-trees touched over the drive, only a

very little light penetrated. It was clearer outside the lodge gate,

and bubbles of air, which seemed to have travelled from an immense

distance, broke gently and separately on his face. They paused on the

bridge. He asked whether the little fish and the bright green weeds

were here now as well as in the summer. The footman had not noticed.

Over the bridge they came to the cross-roads, of which one led to

Salisbury and the other up through the string of villages to the

railway station. The road in front was only the Roman road, the one

that went on to the downs. Turning to the left, they were in Cadford.

“He will be with the Thompsons,” said Rickie, looking up at dark eaves.

“Perhaps he’s in bed already.”

“Perhaps he will be at The Antelope.”

“No. Tonight he is with the Thompsons.”

“With the Thompsons.” After a dozen paces he said, “The Thompsons have

gone away.”

“Where? Why?”

“They were turned out by Mr. Wilbraham on account of our broken

windows.”

“Are you sure?”

“Five families were turned out.”

“That’s bad for Stephen,” said Rickie, after a pause. “He was looking

forward—oh, it’s monstrous in any case!”

“But the Thompsons have gone to London,” said Leighton. “Why, that

family—they say it’s been in the valley hundreds of years, and never

got beyond shepherding. To various parts of London.”

“Let us try The Antelope, then.”

“Let us try The Antelope.”

The inn lay up in the village. Rickie hastened his pace. This tyranny

was monstrous. Some men of the age of undergraduates had broken

windows, and therefore they and their families were to be ruined. The

fools who govern us find it easier to be severe. It saves them trouble

to say, “The innocent must suffer with the guilty.” It even gives

them a thrill of pride. Against all this wicked nonsense, against the

Wilbrahams and Pembrokes who try to rule our world Stephen would fight

till he died. Stephen was a hero. He was a law to himself, and rightly.

He was great enough to despise our small moralities. He was attaining

love. This evening Rickie caught Ansell’s enthusiasm, and felt it worth

while to sacrifice everything for such a man.

“The Antelope,” said Leighton. “Those lights under the greatest elm.”

“Would you please ask if he’s there, and if he’d come for a turn with

me. I don’t think I’ll go in.”

Leighton opened the door. They saw a little room, blue with

tobacco-smoke. Flanking the fire were deep settles hiding all but the

legs of the men who lounged in them. Between the settles stood a table,

covered with mugs and glasses. The scene was picturesque—fairer than

the cutglass palaces of the town.

“Oh yes, he’s there,” he called, and after a moment’s hesitation came

out.

“Would he come?”

“No. I shouldn’t say so,” replied Leighton, with a furtive glance. He

knew that Rickie was a milksop. “First night, you know, sir, among old

friends.”

“Yes, I know,” said Rickie. “But he might like a turn down the village.

It looks stuffy inside there, and poor fun probably to watch others

drinking.”

Leighton shut the door.

“What was that he called after you?”

“Oh, nothing. A man when he’s drunk—he says the worst he’s ever heard.

At least, so they say.”

“A man when he’s drunk?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“But Stephen isn’t drinking?”

“No, no.”

“He couldn’t be. If he broke a promise—I don’t pretend he’s a saint. I

don’t want him one. But it isn’t in him to break a promise.”

“Yes, sir; I understand.”

“In the train he promised me not to drink—nothing theatrical: just a

promise for these few days.”

“No, sir.” “‘No, sir,’” stamped Rickie. “‘Yes! no! yes!’ Can’t you

speak out? Is he drunk or isn’t he?”

Leighton, justly exasperated, cried, “He can’t stand, and I’ve told you

so again and again.”

“Stephen!” shouted Rickie, darting up the steps. Heat and the smell of

beer awaited him, and he spoke more furiously than he had intended. “Is

there any one here who’s sober?” he cried. The landlord looked over

the bar angrily, and asked him what he meant. He pointed to the deep

settles. “Inside there he’s drunk. Tell him he’s broken his word, and I

will not go with him to the Rings.”

“Very well. You won’t go with him to the Rings,” said the landlord,

stepping forward and slamming the door in his face.

In the room he was only angry, but out in the cool air he remembered

that Stephen was a law to himself. He had chosen to break his word, and

would break it again. Nothing else bound him. To yield to temptation is

not fatal for most of us. But it was the end of everything for a hero.

“He’s suddenly ruined!” he cried, not yet remembering himself. For a

little he stood by the elm-tree, clutching the ridges of its bark. Even

so would he wrestle tomorrow, and Stephen, imperturbable, reply, “My

body is my own.” Or worse still, he might wrestle with a pliant Stephen

who promised him glibly again. While he prayed for a miracle to convert

his brother, it struck him that he must pray for himself. For he, too,

was ruined.

“Why, what’s the matter?” asked Leighton. “Stephen’s only being with

friends. Mr. Elliot, sir, don’t break down. Nothing’s happened bad. No

one’s died yet, or even hurt themselves.” Ever kind, he took hold of

Rickie’s arm, and, pitying such a nervous fellow, set out with him for

home. The shoulders of Orion rose behind them over the topmost boughs

of the elm. From the bridge the whole constellation was visible, and

Rickie said, “May God receive me and pardon me for trusting the earth.”

“But, Mr. Elliot, what have you done that’s wrong?”

“Gone bankrupt, Leighton, for the second time. Pretended again that

people were real. May God have mercy on me!”

Leighton dropped his arm. Though he did not understand, a chill of

disgust passed over him, and he said, “I will go back to The Antelope.

I will help them put Stephen to bed.”

“Do. I will wait for you here.” Then he leant against the parapet and

prayed passionately, for he knew that the conventions would claim him

soon. God was beyond them, but ah, how far beyond, and to be reached

after what degradation! At the end of this childish detour his wife

awaited him, not less surely because she was only his wife in name. He

was too weak. Books and friends were not enough. Little by little she

would claim him and corrupt him and make him what he had been; and the

woman he loved would die out, in drunkenness, in debauchery, and her

strength would be dissipated by a man, her beauty defiled in a man. She

would not continue. That mystic rose and the face it illumined meant

nothing. The stream—he was above it now—meant nothing, though it

burst from the pure turf and ran for ever to the sea. The bather, the

shoulders of Orion—they all meant nothing, and were going nowhere. The

whole affair was a ridiculous dream.

Leighton returned, saying, “Haven’t you seen Stephen? They say he

followed us: he can still walk: I told you he wasn’t so bad.”

“I don’t think he passed me. Ought one to look?” He wandered a little

along the Roman road. Again nothing mattered. At the level-crossing he

leant on the gate to watch a slow goods train pass. In the glare of the

engine he saw that his brother had come this way, perhaps through some

sodden memory of the Rings, and now lay drunk over the rails. Wearily

he did a man’s duty. There was time to raise him up and push him into

safety. It is also a man’s duty to save his own life, and therefore

he tried. The train went over his knees. He died up in Cadover,

whispering, “You have been right,” to Mrs. Failing.

She wrote of him to Mrs. Lewin afterwards as “one who has failed in

all he undertook; one of the thousands whose dust returns to the dust,

accomplishing nothing in the interval. Agnes and I buried him to the

sound of our cracked bell, and pretended that he had once been alive.

The other, who was always honest, kept away.”

XXXV

From the window they looked over a sober valley, whose sides were

not too sloping to be ploughed, and whose trend was followed by a

grass-grown track. It was late on Sunday afternoon, and the valley was

deserted except for one labourer, who was coasting slowly downward on

a rosy bicycle. The air was very quiet. A jay screamed up in the woods

behind, but the ring-doves, who roost early, were already silent.

Since the window opened westward, the room was flooded with light, and

Stephen, finding it hot, was working in his shirtsleeves.

“You guarantee they’ll sell?” he asked, with a pen between his teeth.

He was tidying up a pile of manuscripts.

“I guarantee that the world will be the gainer,” said Mr. Pembroke,

now a clergyman, who sat beside him at the table with an expression of

refined disapproval on his face.

“I’d got the idea that the long story had its points, but that these

shorter things didn’t—what’s the word?”

“‘Convince’ is probably the word you want. But that type of criticism

is quite a thing of the past. Have you seen the illustrated American

edition?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Might I send you a copy? I think you ought to possess one.”

“Thank you.” His eye wandered. The bicycle had disappeared into

some trees, and thither, through a cloudless sky, the sun was also

descending.

“Is all quite plain?” said Mr. Pembroke. “Submit these ten stories to

the magazines, and make your own terms with the editors. Then—I have

your word for it—you will join forces with me; and the four stories in

my possession, together with yours, should make up a volume, which we

might well call ‘Pan Pipes.’”

“Are you sure ‘Pan Pipes’ haven’t been used up already?”

Mr. Pembroke clenched his teeth. He had been bearing with this sort of

thing for nearly an hour. “If that is the case, we can select another.

A title is easy to come by. But that is the idea it must suggest. The

stories, as I have twice explained to you, all centre round a Nature

theme. Pan, being the god of—”

“I know that,” said Stephen impatiently.

“—Being the god of—”

“All right. Let’s get furrard. I’ve learnt that.”

It was years since the schoolmaster had been interrupted, and he could

not stand it. “Very well,” he said. “I bow to your superior knowledge

of the classics. Let us proceed.”

“Oh yes—the introduction. There must be one. It was the introduction

with all those wrong details that sold the other book.”

“You overwhelm me. I never penned the memoir with that intention.”

“If you won’t do one, Mrs. Keynes must!”

“My sister leads a busy life. I could not ask her. I will do it myself

since you insist.”

“And the binding?”

“The binding,” said Mr. Pembroke coldly, “must really be left to the

discretion of the publisher. We cannot be concerned with such details.

Our task is purely literary.” His attention wandered. He began to

fidget, and finally bent down and looked under the table. “What have we

here?” he asked.

Stephen looked also, and for a moment they smiled at each other over

the prostrate figure of a child, who was cuddling Mr. Pembroke’s boots.

“She’s after the blacking,” he explained. “If we left her there, she’d

lick them brown.”

“Indeed. Is that so very safe?”

“It never did me any harm. Come up! Your tongue’s dirty.”

“Can I—” She was understood to ask whether she could clean her tongue

on a lollie.

“No, no!” said Mr. Pembroke. “Lollipops don’t clean little girls’

tongues.”

“Yes, they do,” he retorted. “But she won’t get one.” He lifted her on

his knee, and rasped her tongue with his handkerchief.

“Dear little thing,” said the visitor perfunctorily. The child began

to squall, and kicked her father in the stomach. Stephen regarded her

quietly. “You tried to hurt me,” he said. “Hurting doesn’t count.

Trying to hurt counts. Go and clean your tongue yourself. Get off my

knee.” Tears of another sort came into her eyes, but she obeyed him.

“How’s the great Bertie?” he asked.

“Thank you. My nephew is perfectly well. How came you to hear of his

existence?”

“Through the Silts, of course. It isn’t five miles to Cadover.”

Mr. Pembroke raised his eyes mournfully. “I cannot conceive how the

poor Silts go on in that great house. Whatever she intended, it could

not have been that. The house, the farm, the money,—everything down

to the personal articles that belong to Mr. Failing, and should have

reverted to his family!”

“It’s legal. Intestate succession.”

“I do not dispute it. But it is a lesson to one to make a will. Mrs.

Keynes and myself were electrified.”

“They’ll do there. They offered me the agency, but—” He looked down

the cultivated slopes. His manners were growing rough, for he saw few

gentlemen now, and he was either incoherent or else alarmingly direct.

“However, if Lawrie Silt’s a Cockney like his father, and if my next

is a boy and like me—” A shy beautiful look came into his eyes, and

passed unnoticed. “They’ll do,” he repeated. “They turned out Wilbraham

and built new cottages, and bridged the railway, and made other

necessary alterations.” There was a moment’s silence.

Mr. Pembroke took out his watch. “I wonder if I might have the trap? I

mustn’t miss my train, must I? It is good of you to have granted me an

interview. It is all quite plain?”

“Yes.”

“A case of half and half—division of profits.”

“Half and half?” said the young farmer slowly. “What do you take me

for? Half and half, when I provide ten of the stories and you only

four?”

“I—I—” stammered Mr. Pembroke.

“I consider you did me over the long story, and I’m damned if you do me

over the short ones!”

“Hush! if you please, hush!—if only for your little girl’s sake.”

He lifted a clerical palm.

“You did me,” his voice drove, “and all the thirty-nine Articles won’t

stop me saying so. That long story was meant to be mine. I got it

written. You’ve done me out of every penny it fetched. It’s dedicated

to me—flat out—and you even crossed out the dedication and tidied me

out of the introduction. Listen to me, Pembroke. You’ve done people

all your life—I think without knowing it, but that won’t comfort us.

A wretched devil at your school once wrote to me, and he’d been done.

Sham food, sham religion, sham straight talks—and when he broke down,

you said it was the world in miniature.” He snatched at him roughly.

“But I’ll show you the world.” He twisted him round like a baby, and

through the open door they saw only the quiet valley, but in it a

rivulet that would in time bring its waters to the sea. “Look even at

that—and up behind where the Plain begins and you get on the solid

chalk—think of us riding some night when you’re ordering your hot

bottle—that’s the world, and there’s no miniature world. There’s one

world, Pembroke, and you can’t tidy men out of it. They answer you back

do you hear?—they answer back if you do them. If you tell a man this

way that four sheep equal ten, he answers back you’re a liar.”

Mr. Pembroke was speechless, and—such is human nature—he chiefly

resented the allusion to the hot bottle; an unmanly luxury in which he

never indulged; contenting himself with nightsocks. “Enough—there is

no witness present—as you have doubtless observed.” But there was. For

a little voice cried, “Oh, mummy, they’re fighting—such fun—” and

feet went pattering up the stairs. “Enough. You talk of ‘doing,’ but

what about the money out of which you ‘did’ my sister? What about this

picture”—he pointed to a faded photograph of Stockholm—“which you

caused to be filched from the walls of my house? What about—enough!

Let us conclude this disheartening scene. You object to my terms. Name

yours. I shall accept them. It is futile to reason with one who is the

worse for drink.”

Stephen was quiet at once. “Steady on!” he said gently. “Steady on

in that direction. Take one-third for your four stories and the

introduction, and I will keep two-thirds for myself.” Then he went

to harness the horse, while Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back,

desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was

unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon

blurred over what had happened. To him all criticism was “rudeness”: he

never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong. All his

life he had ordered little human beings about, and now he was equally

magisterial to big ones: Stephen was a fifth-form lout whom, owing to

some flaw in the regulations, he could not send up to the headmaster to

be caned.

This attitude makes for tranquillity. Before long he felt merely an

injured martyr. His brain cleared. He stood deep in thought before the

only other picture that the bare room boasted—the Demeter of Cnidus.

Outside the sun was sinking, and its last rays fell upon the immortal

features and the shattered knees. Sweet-peas offered their fragrance,

and with it there entered those more mysterious scents that come from

no one flower or clod of earth, but from the whole bosom of evening.

He tried not to be cynical. But in his heart he could not regret that

tragedy, already half-forgotten, conventionalized, indistinct. Of

course death is a terrible thing. Yet death is merciful when it weeds

out a failure. If we look deep enough, it is all for the best. He

stared at the picture and nodded.

Stephen, who had met his visitor at the station, had intended to drive

him back there. But after their spurt of temper he sent him with

the boy. He remained in the doorway, glad that he was going to make

money, glad that he had been angry; while the glow of the clear sky

deepened, and the silence was perfected, and the scents of the night

grew stronger. Old vagrancies awoke, and he resolved that, dearly as he

loved his house, he would not enter it again till dawn. “Goodnight!”

he called, and then the child came running, and he whispered, “Quick,

then! Bring me a rug.” “Good-night,” he repeated, and a pleasant voice

called through an upper window, “Why good-night?” He did not answer

until the child was wrapped up in his arms.

“It is time that she learnt to sleep out,” he cried. “If you want me,

we’re out on the hillside, where I used to be.”

The voice protested, saying this and that.

“Stewart’s in the house,” said the man, “and it cannot matter, and I am

going anyway.”

“Stephen, I wish you wouldn’t. I wish you wouldn’t take her. Promise

you won’t say foolish things to her. Don’t—I wish you’d come up for a

minute—”

The child, whose face was laid against his, felt the muscles in it

harden.

“Don’t tell her foolish things about yourself—things that aren’t any

longer true. Don’t worry her with old dead dreadfulness. To please

me—don’t.”

“Just tonight I won’t, then.”

“Stevie, dear, please me more—don’t take her with you.”

At this he laughed impertinently. “I suppose I’m being kept in line,”

she called, and, though he could not see her, she stretched her arms

towards him. For a time he stood motionless, under her window, musing

on his happy tangible life. Then his breath quickened, and he wondered

why he was here, and why he should hold a warm child in his arms. “It’s

time we were starting,” he whispered, and showed the sky, whose orange

was already fading into green. “Wish everything goodnight.”

“Good-night, dear mummy,” she said sleepily. “Goodnight, dear house.

Good-night, you pictures—long picture—stone lady. I see you through

the window—your faces are pink.”

The twilight descended. He rested his lips on her hair, and carried

her, without speaking, until he reached the open down. He had often

slept here himself, alone, and on his wedding-night, and he knew that

the turf was dry, and that if you laid your face to it you would

smell the thyme. For a moment the earth aroused her, and she began to

chatter. “My prayers—” she said anxiously. He gave her one hand, and

she was asleep before her fingers had nestled in its palm. Their touch

made him pensive, and again he marvelled why he, the accident, was

here. He was alive and had created life. By whose authority? Though he

could not phrase it, he believed that he guided the future of our race,

and that, century after century, his thoughts and his passions would

triumph in England. The dead who had evoked him, the unborn whom he

would evoke—he governed the paths between them. By whose authority?

Out in the west lay Cadover and the fields of his earlier youth, and

over them descended the crescent moon. His eyes followed her decline,

and against her final radiance he saw, or thought he saw, the outline

of the Rings. He had always been grateful, as people who understood him

knew. But this evening his gratitude seemed a gift of small account.

The ear was deaf, and what thanks of his could reach it? The body was

dust, and in what ecstasy of his could it share? The spirit had fled,

in agony and loneliness, never to know that it bequeathed him salvation.

He filled his pipe, and then sat pressing the unlit tobacco with his

thumb. “What am I to do?” he thought. “Can he notice the things he gave

me? A parson would know. But what’s a man like me to do, who works all

his life out of doors?” As he wondered, the silence of the night was

broken. The whistle of Mr. Pembroke’s train came faintly, and a lurid

spot passed over the land—passed, and the silence returned. One thing

remained that a man of his sort might do. He bent down reverently and

saluted the child; to whom he had given the name of their mother.