Chapter X: Part 3: Wiltshire (1)

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.”