_ A little this side of Madingley, to the left of the road, there
is a secluded dell, paved with grass and planted with fir-trees.
It could not have been worth a visit twenty years ago, for then
it was only a scar of chalk, and it is not worth a visit at the
present day, for the trees have grown too thick and choked it.
But when Rickie was up, it chanced to be the brief season of its
romance, a season as brief for a chalk-pit as a man--its divine
interval between the bareness of boyhood and the stuffiness of
age. Rickie had discovered it in his second term, when the
January snows had melted and left fiords and lagoons of clearest
water between the inequalities of the floor. The place looked as
big as Switzerland or Norway--as indeed for the moment it was--
and he came upon it at a time when his life too was beginning to
expand. Accordingly the dell became for him a kind of church--a
church where indeed you could do anything you liked, but where
anything you did would be transfigured. Like the ancient Greeks,
he could even laugh at his holy place and leave it no less holy.
He chatted gaily about it, and about the pleasant thoughts with
which it inspired him; he took his friends there; he even took
people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed
a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was
never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar
herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he
forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he
would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he
had agreed with the aesthete, he would possibly not have
introduced him. If the dell was to bear any inscription, he would
have liked it to be "This way to Heaven," painted on a sign-post
by the high-road, and he did not realize till later years that
the number of visitors would not thereby have sensibly increased.
On the blessed Monday that the Pembrokes left, he walked out here
with three friends. It was a day when the sky seemed enormous.
One cloud, as large as a continent, was voyaging near the sun,
whilst other clouds seemed anchored to the horizon, too lazy or
too happy to move. The sky itself was of the palest blue, paling
to white where it approached the earth; and the earth, brown,
wet, and odorous, was engaged beneath it on its yearly duty of
decay. Rickie was open to the complexities of autumn; he felt
extremely tiny--extremely tiny and extremely important; and
perhaps the combination is as fair as any that exists. He hoped
that all his life he would never be peevish or unkind.
"Elliot is in a dangerous state," said Ansell. They had reached
the dell, and had stood for some time in silence, each leaning
against a tree. It was too wet to sit down.
"How's that?" asked Rickie, who had not known he was in any state
at all. He shut up Keats, whom he thought he had been reading,
and slipped him back into his coat-pocket. Scarcely ever was he
without a book.
"He's trying to like people."
"Then he's done for," said Widdrington. "He's dead."
"He's trying to like Hornblower."
The others gave shrill agonized cries.
"He wants to bind the college together. He wants to link us to
the beefy set."
"I do like Hornblower," he protested. "I don't try."
"And Hornblower tries to like you."
"That part doesn't matter."
"But he does try to like you. He tries not to despise you. It is
altogether a most public-spirited affair."
"Tilliard started them," said Widdrington. "Tilliard thinks it
such a pity the college should be split into sets."
"Oh, Tilliard!" said Ansell, with much irritation. "But what can
you expect from a person who's eternally beautiful? The other
night we had been discussing a long time, and suddenly the light
was turned on. Every one else looked a sight, as they ought. But
there was Tilliard, sitting neatly on a little chair, like an
undersized god, with not a curl crooked. I should say he will get
into the Foreign Office."
"Why are most of us so ugly?" laughed Rickie.
"It's merely a sign of our salvation--merely another sign that
the college is split."
"The college isn't split," cried Rickie, who got excited on this
subject with unfailing regularity. "The college is, and has been,
and always will be, one. What you call the beefy set aren't a set
at all. They're just the rowing people, and naturally they
chiefly see each other; but they're always nice to me or to any
one. Of course, they think us rather asses, but it's quite in a
pleasant way."
"That's my whole objection," said Ansell. "What right have they
to think us asses in a pleasant way? Why don't they hate us? What
right has Hornblower to smack me on the back when I've been rude
to him?"
"Well, what right have you to be rude to him?"
"Because I hate him. You think it is so splendid to hate no one.
I tell you it is a crime. You want to love every one equally, and
that's worse than impossible it's wrong. When you denounce sets,
you're really trying to destroy friendship."
"I maintain," said Rickie--it was a verb he clung to, in the hope
that it would lend stability to what followed--"I maintain that
one can like many more people than one supposes."
"And I maintain that you hate many more people than you pretend."
"I hate no one," he exclaimed with extraordinary vehemence, and
the dell re-echoed that it hated no one.
"We are obliged to believe you," said Widdrington, smiling a
little "but we are sorry about it."
"Not even your father?" asked Ansell.
Rickie was silent.
"Not even your father?"
The cloud above extended a great promontory across the sun. It
only lay there for a moment, yet that was enough to summon the
lurking coldness from the earth.
"Does he hate his father?" said Widdrington, who had not known.
"Oh, good!"
"But his father's dead. He will say it doesn't count."
"Still, it's something. Do you hate yours?"
Ansell did not reply. Rickie said: "I say, I wonder whether one
ought to talk like this?"
"About hating dead people?"
"Yes--"
"Did you hate your mother?" asked Widdrington.
Rickie turned crimson.
"I don't see Hornblower's such a rotter," remarked the other man,
whose name was James.
"James, you are diplomatic," said Ansell. "You are trying to tide
over an awkward moment. You can go."
Widdrington was crimson too. In his wish to be sprightly he had
used words without thinking of their meanings. Suddenly he
realized that "father" and "mother" really meant father and
mother--people whom he had himself at home. He was very
uncomfortable, and thought Rickie had been rather queer. He too
tried to revert to Hornblower, but Ansell would not let him. The
sun came out, and struck on the white ramparts of the dell.
Rickie looked straight at it. Then he said abruptly--
"I think I want to talk."
"I think you do," replied Ansell.
"Shouldn't I be rather a fool if I went through Cambridge without
talking? It's said never to come so easy again. All the people
are dead too. I can't see why I shouldn't tell you most things
about my birth and parentage and education."
"Talk away. If you bore us, we have books."
With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The
reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.
Some people spend their lives in a suburb, and not for any urgent
reason. This had been the fate of Rickie. He had opened his eyes
to filmy heavens, and taken his first walk on asphalt. He had
seen civilization as a row of semi-detached villas, and society
as a state in which men do not know the men who live next door.
He had himself become part of the grey monotony that surrounds
all cities. There was no necessity for this--it was only rather
convenient to his father.
Mr. Elliot was a barrister. In appearance he resembled his son,
being weakly and lame, with hollow little cheeks, a broad white
band of forehead, and stiff impoverished hair. His voice, which
he did not transmit, was very suave, with a fine command of
cynical intonation. By altering it ever so little he could make
people wince, especially if they were simple or poor. Nor did he
transmit his eyes. Their peculiar flatness, as if the soul looked
through dirty window-panes, the unkindness of them, the
cowardice, the fear in them, were to trouble the world no longer.
He married a girl whose voice was beautiful. There was no caress
in it yet all who heard it were soothed, as though the world held
some unexpected blessing. She called to her dogs one night over
invisible waters, and he, a tourist up on the bridge, thought
"that is extraordinarily adequate." In time he discovered that
her figure, face, and thoughts were adequate also, and as she was
not impossible socially, he married her. "I have taken a plunge,"
he told his family. The family, hostile at first, had not a word
to say when the woman was introduced to them; and his sister
declared that the plunge had been taken from the opposite bank.
Things only went right for a little time. Though beautiful
without and within, Mrs. Elliot had not the gift of making her
home beautiful; and one day, when she bought a carpet for the
dining-room that clashed, he laughed gently, said he "really
couldn't," and departed. Departure is perhaps too strong a word.
In Mrs. Elliot's mouth it became, "My husband has to sleep more
in town." He often came down to see them, nearly always
unexpectedly, and occasionally they went to see him. "Father's
house," as Rickie called it, only had three rooms, but these were
full of books and pictures and flowers; and the flowers, instead
of being squashed down into the vases as they were in mummy's
house, rose gracefully from frames of lead which lay coiled at
the bottom, as doubtless the sea serpent has to lie, coiled at
the bottom of the sea. Once he was let to lift a frame out--only
once, for he dropped some water on a creton. "I think he's
going to have taste," said Mr. Elliot languidly. "It is quite
possible," his wife replied. She had not taken off her hat and
gloves, nor even pulled up her veil. Mr. Elliot laughed, and soon
afterwards another lady came in, and they--went away.
"Why does father always laugh?" asked Rickie in the evening when
he and his mother were sitting in the nursery.
"It is a way of your father's."
"Why does he always laugh at me? Am I so funny?" Then after a
pause, "You have no sense of humour, have you, mummy?"
Mrs. Elliot, who was raising a thread of cotton to her lips, held
it suspended in amazement.
"You told him so this afternoon. But I have seen you laugh." He
nodded wisely. "I have seen you laugh ever so often. One day you
were laughing alone all down in the sweet peas."
"Was I?"
"Yes. Were you laughing at me?"
"I was not thinking about you. Cotton, please--a reel of No. 50
white from my chest of drawers. Left hand drawer. Now which is
your left hand?"
"The side my pocket is."
"And if you had no pocket?"
"The side my bad foot is."
"I meant you to say, 'the side my heart is,' " said Mrs. Elliot,
holding up the duster between them. "Most of us--I mean all of
us--can feel on one side a little watch, that never stops
ticking. So even if you had no bad foot you would still know
which is the left. No. 50 white, please. No; I'll get it myself."
For she had remembered that the dark passage frightened him.
These were the outlines. Rickie filled them in with the slowness
and the accuracy of a child. He was never told anything, but he
discovered for himself that his father and mother did not love
each other, and that his mother was lovable. He discovered that
Mr. Elliot had dubbed him Rickie because he was rickety, that he
took pleasure in alluding to his son's deformity, and was sorry
that it was not more serious than his own. Mr. Elliot had not one
scrap of genius. He gathered the pictures and the books and the
flower-supports mechanically, not in any impulse of love. He
passed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he
passed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite
like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one
single thing that had the slightest beauty or value. And in time
Rickie discovered this as well.
The boy grew up in great loneliness. He worshipped his mother,
and she was fond of him. But she was dignified and reticent, and
pathos, like tattle, was disgusting to her. She was afraid of
intimacy, in case it led to confidences and tears, and so all her
life she held her son at a little distance. Her kindness and
unselfishness knew no limits, but if he tried to be dramatic and
thank her, she told him not to be a little goose. And so the only
person he came to know at all was himself. He would play
Halma against himself. He would conduct solitary conversations,
in which one part of him asked and another part answered. It was
an exciting game, and concluded with the formula: "Good-bye.
Thank you. I am glad to have met you. I hope before long we shall
enjoy another chat." And then perhaps he would sob for
loneliness, for he would see real people--real brothers, real
friends--doing in warm life the things he had pretended. "Shall I
ever have a friend?" he demanded at the age of twelve. "I don't
see how. They walk too fast. And a brother I shall never have."
("No loss," interrupted Widdrington.
"But I shall never have one, and so I quite want one, even now.")
When he was thirteen Mr. Elliot entered on his illness. The
pretty rooms in town would not do for an invalid, and so he came
back to his home. One of the first consequences was that Rickie
was sent to a public school. Mrs. Elliot did what she could, but
she had no hold whatever over her husband.
"He worries me," he declared. "He's a joke of which I have got
tired."
"Would it be possible to send him to a private tutor's?"
"No," said Mr. Elliot, who had all the money. "Coddling."
"I agree that boys ought to rough it; but when a boy is lame and
very delicate, he roughs it sufficiently if he leaves home.
Rickie can't play games. He doesn't make friends. He isn't
brilliant. Thinking it over, I feel that as it's like this, we
can't ever hope to give him the ordinary education. Perhaps you
could think it over too." No.
"I am sure that things are best for him as they are. The
day-school knocks quite as many corners off him as he can stand.
He hates it, but it is good for him. A public school will not be
good for him. It is too rough. Instead of getting manly and hard,
he will--"
"My head, please."
Rickie departed in a state of bewildered misery, which was
scarcely ever to grow clearer.
Each holiday he found his father more irritable, and a little
weaker. Mrs. Elliot was quickly growing old. She had to manage
the servants, to hush the neighbouring children, to answer the
correspondence, to paper and re-paper the rooms--and all for the
sake of a man whom she did not like, and who did not conceal his
dislike for her. One day she found Rickie tearful, and said
rather crossly, "Well, what is it this time?"
He replied, "Oh, mummy, I've seen your wrinkles your grey hair--
I'm unhappy."
Sudden tenderness overcame her, and she cried, "My darling, what
does it matter? Whatever does it matter now?"
He had never known her so emotional. Yet even better did he
remember another incident. Hearing high voices from his father's
room, he went upstairs in the hope that the sound of his tread
might stop them. Mrs. Elliot burst open the door, and seeing him,
exclaimed, "My dear! If you please, he's hit me." She tried to
laugh it off, but a few hours later he saw the bruise which the
stick of the invalid had raised upon his mother's hand.
God alone knows how far we are in the grip of our bodies. He
alone can judge how far the cruelty of Mr. Elliot was the outcome
of extenuating circumstances. But Mrs. Elliot could accurately
judge of its extent.
At last he died. Rickie was now fifteen, and got off a whole
week's school for the funeral. His mother was rather strange. She
was much happier, she looked younger, and her mourning was as
unobtrusive as convention permitted. All this he had expected.
But she seemed to be watching him, and to be extremely anxious
for his opinion on any, subject--more especially on his father.
Why? At last he saw that she was trying to establish confidence
between them. But confidence cannot be established in a moment.
They were both shy. The habit of years was upon them, and they
alluded to the death of Mr. Elliot as an irreparable loss.
"Now that your father has gone, things will be very different."
"Shall we be poorer, mother?" No.
"Oh!"
"But naturally things will be very different."
"Yes, naturally."
"For instance, your poor father liked being near London, but I
almost think we might move. Would you like that?"
"Of course, mummy." He looked down at the ground. He was not
accustomed to being consulted, and it bewildered him.
"Perhaps you might like quite a different life better?"
He giggled.
"It's a little difficult for me," said Mrs. Elliot, pacing
vigorously up and down the room, and more and more did her black
dress seem a mockery. "In some ways you ought to be consulted:
nearly all the money is left to you, as you must hear some time
or other. But in other ways you're only a boy. What am I to do?"
"I don't know," he replied, appearing more helpless and unhelpful
than he really was.
"For instance, would you like me to arrange things exactly as I
like?"
"Oh do!" he exclaimed, thinking this a most brilliant suggestion.
"The very nicest thing of all." And he added, in his
half-pedantic, half-pleasing way, "I shall be as wax in your
hands, mamma."
She smiled. "Very well, darling. You shall be." And she pressed
him lovingly, as though she would mould him into something
beautiful.
For the next few days great preparations were in the air. She
went to see his father's sister, the gifted and vivacious Aunt
Emily. They were to live in the country--somewhere right in the
country, with grass and trees up to the door, and birds singing
everywhere, and a tutor. For he was not to go back to school.
Unbelievable! He was never to go back to school, and the head-
master had written saying that he regretted the step, but that
possibly it was a wise one.
It was raw weather, and Mrs. Elliot watched over him with
ceaseless tenderness. It seemed as if she could not do too much
to shield him and to draw him nearer to her.
"Put on your greatcoat, dearest," she said to him.
"I don't think I want it," answered Rickie, remembering that he
was now fifteen.
"The wind is bitter. You ought to put it on."
"But it's so heavy."
"Do put it on, dear."
He was not very often irritable or rude, but he answered, "Oh, I
shan't catch cold. I do wish you wouldn't keep on bothering."
He did not catch cold, but while he was out his mother died. She
only survived her husband eleven days, a coincidence which was
recorded on their tombstone.
Such, in substance, was the story which Rickie told his friends
as they stood together in the shelter of the dell. The green bank
at the entrance hid the road and the world, and now, as in
spring, they could see nothing but snow-white ramparts and the
evergreen foliage of the firs. Only from time to time would a
beech leaf flutter in from the woods above, to comment on the
waning year, and the warmth and radiance of the sun would vanish
behind a passing cloud.
About the greatcoat he did not tell them, for he could not have
spoken of it without tears. _