_ He did not stop for the funeral. Mr. Pembroke thought that he had
a bad effect on Agnes, and prevented her from acquiescing in the
tragedy as rapidly as she might have done. As he expressed it,
"one must not court sorrow," and he hinted to the young man that
they desired to be alone.
Rickie went back to the Silts.
He was only there a few days. As soon as term opened he returned
to Cambridge, for which he longed passionately. The journey
thither was now familiar to him, and he took pleasure in each
landmark. The fair valley of Tewin Water, the cutting into
Hitchin where the train traverses the chalk, Baldock Church,
Royston with its promise of downs, were nothing in themselves,
but dear as stages in the pilgrimage towards the abode of peace.
On the platform he met friends. They had all had pleasant
vacations: it was a happy world. The atmosphere alters.
Cambridge, according to her custom, welcomed her sons with open
drains. Pettycury was up, so was Trinity Street, and
navvies peeped out of King's Parade. Here it was gas, there
electric light, but everywhere something, and always a smell. It
was also the day that the wheels fell off the station tram, and
Rickie, who was naturally inside, was among the passengers who
"sustained no injury but a shock, and had as hearty a laugh over
the mishap afterwards as any one."
Tilliard fled into a hansom, cursing himself for having tried to
do the thing cheaply. Hornblower also swept past yelling
derisively, with his luggage neatly piled above his head. "Let's
get out and walk," muttered Ansell. But Rickie was succouring a
distressed female--Mrs. Aberdeen.
"Oh, Mrs. Aberdeen, I never saw you: I am so glad to see you--I
am so very glad." Mrs. Aberdeen was cold. She did not like being
spoken to outside the college, and was also distrait about her
basket. Hitherto no genteel eye had even seen inside it, but in
the collision its little calico veil fell off, and there vas
revealed--nothing. The basket was empty, and never would hold
anything illegal. All the same she was distrait, and "We shall
meet later, sir, I dessy," was all the greeting Rickie got from
her.
"Now what kind of a life has Mrs. Aberdeen?" he exclaimed, as he
and Ansell pursued the Station Road. "Here these bedders come and
make us comfortable. We owe an enormous amount to them, their
wages are absurd, and we know nothing about them. Off they go to
Barnwell, and then their lives are hidden. I just know that Mrs.
Aberdeen has a husband, but that's all. She never will talk about
him. Now I do so want to fill in her life. I see one-half of it.
What's the other half? She may have a real jolly house, in good
taste, with a little garden and books, and pictures. Or, again,
she mayn't. But in any case one ought to know. I know she'd
dislike it, but she oughtn't to dislike. After all, bedders are
to blame for the present lamentable state of things, just as much
as gentlefolk. She ought to want me to come. She ought to
introduce me to her husband."
They had reached the corner of Hills Road. Ansell spoke for the
first time. He said, "Ugh!"
"Drains?"
"Yes. A spiritual cesspool."
Rickie laughed.
"I expected it from your letter."
"The one you never answered?"
"I answer none of your letters. You are quite hopeless by now.
You can go to the bad. But I refuse to accompany you. I refuse to
believe that every human being is a moving wonder of supreme
interest and tragedy and beauty--which was what the letter in
question amounted to. You'll find plenty who will believe it.
It's a very popular view among people who are too idle to think;
it saves them the trouble of detecting the beautiful from the
ugly, the interesting from the dull, the tragic from the
melodramatic. You had just come from Sawston, and were apparently
carried away by the fact that Miss Pembroke had the usual amount
of arms and legs."
Rickie was silent. He had told his friend how he felt, but not
what had happened. Ansell could discuss love and death admirably,
but somehow he would not understand lovers or a dying man, and in
the letter there had been scant allusion to these concrete facts.
Would Cambridge understand them either? He watched some dons who
were peeping into an excavation, and throwing up their hands with
humorous gestures of despair. These men would lecture next week
on Catiline's conspiracy, on Luther, on Evolution, on Catullus.
They dealt with so much and they had experienced so little. Was
it possible he would ever come to think Cambridge narrow? In his
short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths, and that is enough
to disarrange any placid outlook on the world. He knew once for
all that we are all of us bubbles on an extremely rough sea. Into
this sea humanity has built, as it were, some little
breakwaters--scientific knowledge, civilized restraint--so that
the bubbles do not break so frequentlv or so soon. But the sea
has not altered, and it was only a chance that he, Ansell,
Tilliard, and Mrs. Aberdeen had not all been killed in the tram.
They waited for the other tram by the Roman Catholic Church,
whose florid bulk was already receding into twilight. It is the
first big building that the incoming visitor sees. "Oh, here come
the colleges!" cries the Protestant parent, and then learns that
it was built by a Papist who made a fortune out of movable eyes
for dolls. "Built out of doll's eyes to contain idols"--that, at
all events, is the legend and the joke. It watches over the
apostate city, taller by many a yard than anything within, and
asserting, however wildly, that here is eternity, stability, and
bubbles unbreakable upon a windless sea.
A costly hymn tune announced five o'clock, and in the distance
the more lovable note of St. Mary's could be heard, speaking from
the heart of the town. Then the tram arrived--the slow stuffy
tram that plies every twenty minutes between the unknown and the
marketplace--and took them past the desecrated grounds of Downing,
past Addenbrookes Hospital, girt like a Venetian palace with a
mantling canal, past the Fitz William, towering upon immense
substructions like any Roman temple, right up to the gates of
one's own college, which looked like nothing else in the world.
The porters were glad to see them, but wished it had been a
hansom. "Our luggage," explained Rickie, "comes in the hotel
omnibus, if you would kindly pay a shilling for mine." Ansell
turned aside to some large lighted windows, the abode of a
hospitable don, and from other windows there floated familiar
voices and the familiar mistakes in a Beethoven sonata. The
college, though small, was civilized, and proud of its
civilization. It was not sufficient glory to be a Blue there, nor
an additional glory to get drunk. Many a maiden lady who had read
that Cambridge men were sad dogs, was surprised and perhaps a
little disappointed at the reasonable life which greeted her.
Miss Appleblossom in particular had had a tremendous shock. The
sight of young fellows making tea and drinking water had made her
wonder whether this was Cambridge College at all. "It is so," she
exclaimed afterwards. "It is just as I say; and what's more, I
wouldn't have it otherwise; Stewart says it's as easy as easy to
get into the swim, and not at all expensive." The direction of
the swim was determined a little by the genius of the place--for
places have a genius, though the less we talk about it the
better--and a good deal by the tutors and resident fellows, who
treated with rare dexterity the products that came up yearly from
the public schools. They taught the perky boy that he was not
everything, and the limp boy that he might be something. They
even welcomed those boys who were neither limp nor perky, but
odd--those boys who had never been at a public school at all, and
such do not find a welcome everywhere. And they did everything
with ease--one might almost say with nonchalance, so that the
boys noticed nothing, and received education, often for the first
time in their lives.
But Rickie turned to none of these friends, for just then he
loved his rooms better than any person. They were all he really
possessed in the world, the only place he could call his own.
Over the door was his name, and through the paint, like a grey
ghost, he could still read the name of his predecessor. With a
sigh of joy he entered the perishable home that was his for a
couple of years. There was a beautiful fire, and the kettle
boiled at once. He made tea on the hearth-rug and ate the
biscuits which Mrs. Aberdeen had brought for him up from
Anderson's. "Gentlemen," she said, "must learn to give and take."
He sighed again and again, like one who had escaped from danger.
With his head on the fender and all his limbs relaxed, he felt
almost as safe as he felt once when his mother killed a ghost in
the passage by carrying him through it in her arms. There was no
ghost now; he was frightened at reality; he was frightened at the
splendours and horrors of the world.
A letter from Miss Pembroke was on the table. He did not hurry to
open it, for she, and all that she did, was overwhelming. She
wrote like the Sibyl; her sorrowful face moved over the stars and
shattered their harmonies; last night he saw her with the eyes of
Blake, a virgin widow, tall, veiled, consecrated, with her hands
stretched out against an everlasting wind. Whv should she write?
Her letters were not for the likes of him, nor to be read in
rooms like his.
"We are not leaving Sawston," she wrote. "I saw how selfish it
was of me to risk spoiling Herbert's career. I shall get used to
any place. Now that he is gone, nothing of that sort can matter.
Every one has been most kind, but you have comforted me most,
though you did not mean to. I cannot think how you did it, or
understood so much. I still think of you as a little boy with a
lame leg,--I know you will let me say this,--and yet when it came
to the point you knew more than people who have been all their
lives with sorrow and death."
Rickie burnt this letter, which he ought not to have done, for it
was one of the few tributes Miss Pembroke ever paid to
imagination. But he felt that it did not belong to him: words so
sincere should be for Gerald alone. The smoke rushed up the
chimney, and he indulged in a vision. He saw it reach the outer
air and beat against the low ceiling of clouds. The clouds were
too strong for it; but in them was one chink, revealing one star,
and through this the smoke escaped into the light of stars
innumerable. Then--but then the vision failed, and the voice of
science whispered that all smoke remains on earth in the form of
smuts, and is troublesome to Mrs. Aberdeen.
"I am jolly unpractical," he mused. "And what is the point of it
when real things are so wonderful? Who wants visions in a world
that has Agnes and Gerald?" He turned on the electric light and
pulled open the table-drawer. There, among spoons and corks and
string, he found a fragment of a little story that he had tried
to write last term. It was called "The Bay of the Fifteen
Islets," and the action took place on St. John's Eve off the
coast of Sicily. A party of tourists land on one of the islands.
Suddenly the boatmen become uneasy, and say that the island is
not generally there. It is an extra one, and they had better have
tea on one of the ordinaries. "Pooh, volcanic!" says the leading
tourist, and the ladies say how interesting. The island begins to
rock, and so do the minds of its visitors. They start and quarrel
and jabber. Fingers burst up through the sand-black fingers of
sea devils. The island tilts. The tourists go mad. But just
before the catastrophe one man, integer vitce scelerisque
purus, sees the truth. Here are no devils. Other muscles, other
minds, are pulling the island to its subterranean home. Through
the advancing wall of waters he sees no grisly faces, no ghastly
medieval limbs, but--But what nonsense! When real things are so
wonderful, what is the point of pretending?
And so Rickie deflected his enthusiasms. Hitherto they had played
on gods and heroes, on the infinite and the impossible, on virtue
and beauty and strength. Now, with a steadier radiance, they
transfigured a man who was dead and a woman who was still alive. _