_ >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. Interstate 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.
THE END.
The Longest Journey, by E. M. Forster (Edward Morgan Forster) _