XVI

In three years Mr. Pembroke had done much to solidify the day-boys at Sawston School. If they were not solid, they were at all events curdling, and his activities might reasonably turn elsewhere. He had served the school for many years, and it was really time he should be entrusted with a boarding-house. The headmaster, an impulsive man who darted about like a minnow and gave his mother a great deal of trouble, agreed with him, and also agreed with Mrs. Jackson when she said that Mr. Jackson had served the school for many years and that it was really time he should be entrusted with a boarding-house. Consequently, when Dunwood House fell vacant the headmaster found himself in rather a difficult position.

Dunwood House was the largest and most lucrative of the boarding-houses. It stood almost opposite the school buildings. Originally it had been a villa residence—a red-brick villa, covered with creepers and crowned with terracotta dragons. Mr. Annison, founder of its glory, had lived here, and had had one or two boys to live with him. Times changed. The fame of the bishops blazed brighter, the school increased, the one or two boys became a dozen, and an addition was made to Dunwood House that more than doubled its size. A huge new building, replete with every convenience, was stuck on to its right flank. Dormitories, cubicles, studies, a preparation-room, a dining-room, parquet floors, hot-air pipes—no expense was spared, and the twelve boys roamed over it like princes. Baize doors communicated on every floor with Mr. Annison’s part, and he, an anxious gentleman, would stroll backwards and forwards, a little depressed at the hygienic splendours, and conscious of some vanished intimacy. Somehow he had known his boys better when they had all muddled together as one family, and algebras lay strewn upon the drawing room chairs. As the house filled, his interest in it decreased. When he retired—which he did the same summer that Rickie left Cambridge—it had already passed the summit of excellence and was beginning to decline. Its numbers were still satisfactory, and for a little time it would subsist on its past reputation. But that mysterious asset the tone had lowered, and it was therefore of great importance that Mr. Annison’s successor should be a first-class man. Mr. Coates, who came next in seniority, was passed over, and rightly. The choice lay between Mr. Pembroke and Mr. Jackson, the one an organizer, the other a humanist. Mr. Jackson was master of the Sixth, and—with the exception of the headmaster, who was too busy to impart knowledge—the only first-class intellect in the school. But he could not or rather would not, keep order. He told his form that if it chose to listen to him it would learn; if it didn’t, it wouldn’t. One half listened. The other half made paper frogs, and bored holes in the raised map of Italy with their penknives. When the penknives gritted he punished them with undue severity, and then forgot to make them show the punishments up. Yet out of this chaos two facts emerged. Half the boys got scholarships at the University, and some of them—including several of the paper-frog sort—remained friends with him throughout their lives. Moreover, he was rich, and had a competent wife. His claim to Dunwood House was stronger than one would have supposed.

The qualifications of Mr. Pembroke have already been indicated. They prevailed—but under conditions. If things went wrong, he must promise to resign.

“In the first place,” said the headmaster, “you are doing so splendidly with the day-boys. Your attitude towards the parents is magnificent. I—don’t know how to replace you there. Whereas, of course, the parents of a boarder—”

“Of course,” said Mr. Pembroke.

The parent of a boarder, who only had to remove his son if he was discontented with the school, was naturally in a more independent position than the parent who had brought all his goods and chattels to Sawston, and was renting a house there.

“Now the parents of boarders—this is my second point—practically demand that the house-master should have a wife.”

“A most unreasonable demand,” said Mr. Pembroke.

“To my mind also a bright motherly matron is quite sufficient. But that is what they demand. And that is why—do you see?—we HAVE to regard your appointment as experimental. Possibly Miss Pembroke will be able to help you. Or I don’t know whether if ever—” He left the sentence unfinished. Two days later Mr. Pembroke proposed to Mrs. Orr.

He had always intended to marry when he could afford it; and once he had been in love, violently in love, but had laid the passion aside, and told it to wait till a more convenient season. This was, of course, the proper thing to do, and prudence should have been rewarded. But when, after the lapse of fifteen years, he went, as it were, to his spiritual larder and took down Love from the top shelf to offer him to Mrs. Orr, he was rather dismayed. Something had happened. Perhaps the god had flown; perhaps he had been eaten by the rats. At all events, he was not there.

Mr. Pembroke was conscientious and romantic, and knew that marriage without love is intolerable. On the other hand, he could not admit that love had vanished from him. To admit this, would argue that he had deteriorated.

Whereas he knew for a fact that he had improved, year by year. Each year be grew more moral, more efficient, more learned, more genial. So how could he fail to be more loving? He did not speak to himself as follows, because he never spoke to himself; but the following notions moved in the recesses of his mind: “It is not the fire of youth. But I am not sure that I approve of the fire of youth. Look at my sister! Once she has suffered, twice she has been most imprudent, and put me to great inconvenience besides, for if she was stopping with me she would have done the housekeeping. I rather suspect that it is a nobler, riper emotion that I am laying at the feet of Mrs. Orr.” It never took him long to get muddled, or to reverse cause and effect. In a short time he believed that he had been pining for years, and only waiting for this good fortune to ask the lady to share it with him.

Mrs. Orr was quiet, clever, kindly, capable, and amusing and they were old acquaintances. Altogether it was not surprising that he should ask her to be his wife, nor very surprising that she should refuse. But she refused with a violence that alarmed them both. He left her house declaring that he had been insulted, and she, as soon as he left, passed from disgust into tears.

He was much annoyed. There was a certain Miss Herriton who, though far inferior to Mrs. Orr, would have done instead of her. But now it was impossible. He could not go offering himself about Sawston. Having engaged a matron who had the reputation for being bright and motherly, he moved into Dunwood House and opened the Michaelmas term. Everything went wrong. The cook left; the boys had a disease called roseola; Agnes, who was still drunk with her engagement, was of no assistance, but kept flying up to London to push Rickie’s fortunes; and, to crown everything, the matron was too bright and not motherly enough: she neglected the little boys and was overattentive to the big ones. She left abruptly, and the voice of Mrs. Jackson arose, prophesying disaster.

Should he avert it by taking orders? Parents do not demand that a house-master should be a clergyman, yet it reassures them when he is. And he would have to take orders some time, if he hoped for a school of his own. His religious convictions were ready to hand, but he spent several uncomfortable days hunting up his religious enthusiasms. It was not unlike his attempt to marry Mrs. Orr. But his piety was more genuine, and this time he never came to the point. His sense of decency forbade him hurrying into a Church that he reverenced. Moreover, he thought of another solution: Agnes must marry Rickie in the Christmas holidays, and they must come, both of them, to Sawston, she as housekeeper, he as assistant-master. The girl was a good worker when once she was settled down; and as for Rickie, he could easily be fitted in somewhere in the school. He was not a good classic, but good enough to take the Lower Fifth. He was no athlete, but boys might profitably note that he was a perfect gentleman all the same. He had no experience, but he would gain it. He had no decision, but he could simulate it. “Above all,” thought Mr. Pembroke, “it will be something regular for him to do.” Of course this was not “above all.” Dunwood House held that position. But Mr. Pembroke soon came to think that it was, and believed that he was planning for Rickie, just as he had believed he was pining for Mrs. Orr.

Agnes, when she got back from the lunch in Soho, was told of the plan. She refused to give any opinion until she had seen her lover. A telegram was sent to him, and next morning he arrived. He was very susceptible to the weather, and perhaps it was unfortunate that the morning was foggy. His train had been stopped outside Sawston Station, and there he had sat for half an hour, listening to the unreal noises that came from the line, and watching the shadowy figures that worked there. The gas was alight in the great drawing-room, and in its depressing rays he and Agnes greeted each other, and discussed the most momentous question of their lives. They wanted to be married: there was no doubt of that. They wanted it, both of them, dreadfully. But should they marry on these terms?

“I’d never thought of such a thing, you see. When the scholastic agencies sent me circulars after the Tripos, I tore them up at once.”

“There are the holidays,” said Agnes. “You would have three months in the year to yourself, and you could do your writing then.”

“But who’ll read what I’ve written?” and he told her about the editor of the “Holborn.”

She became extremely grave. At the bottom of her heart she had always mistrusted the little stories, and now people who knew agreed with her. How could Rickie, or any one, make a living by pretending that Greek gods were alive, or that young ladies could vanish into trees? A sparkling society tale, full of verve and pathos, would have been another thing, and the editor might have been convinced by it.

“But what does he mean?” Rickie was saying. “What does he mean by life?”

“I know what he means, but I can’t exactly explain. You ought to see life, Rickie. I think he’s right there. And Mr. Tilliard was right when he said one oughtn’t to be academic.”

He stood in the twilight that fell from the window, she in the twilight of the gas. “I wonder what Ansell would say,” he murmured.

“Oh, poor Mr. Ansell!”

He was somewhat surprised. Why was Ansell poor? It was the first time the epithet had been applied to him.

“But to change the conversation,” said Agnes.

“If we did marry, we might get to Italy at Easter and escape this horrible fog.”

“Yes. Perhaps there—” Perhaps life would be there. He thought of Renan, who declares that on the Acropolis at Athens beauty and wisdom do exist, really exist, as external powers. He did not aspire to beauty or wisdom, but he prayed to be delivered from the shadow of unreality that had begun to darken the world. For it was as if some power had pronounced against him—as if, by some heedless action, he had offended an Olympian god. Like many another, he wondered whether the god might be appeased by work—hard uncongenial work. Perhaps he had not worked hard enough, or had enjoyed his work too much, and for that reason the shadow was falling.

“—And above all, a schoolmaster has wonderful opportunities for doing good; one mustn’t forget that.”

To do good! For what other reason are we here? Let us give up our refined sensations, and our comforts, and our art, if thereby we can make other people happier and better. The woman he loved had urged him to do good! With a vehemence that surprised her, he exclaimed, “I’ll do it.”

“Think it over,” she cautioned, though she was greatly pleased.

“No; I think over things too much.”

The room grew brighter. A boy’s laughter floated in, and it seemed to him that people were as important and vivid as they had been six months before. Then he was at Cambridge, idling in the parsley meadows, and weaving perishable garlands out of flowers. Now he was at Sawston, preparing to work a beneficent machine. No man works for nothing, and Rickie trusted that to him also benefits might accrue; that his wound might heal as he laboured, and his eyes recapture the Holy Grail.

XVII

In practical matters Mr. Pembroke was often a generous man. He offered Rickie a good salary, and insisted on paying Agnes as well. And as he housed them for nothing, and as Rickie would also have a salary from the school, the money question disappeared—if not forever, at all events for the present.

“I can work you in,” he said. “Leave all that to me, and in a few days you shall hear from the headmaster. He shall create a vacancy. And once in, we stand or fall together. I am resolved on that.”

Rickie did not like the idea of being “worked in,” but he was determined to raise no difficulties. It is so easy to be refined and high-minded when we have nothing to do. But the active, useful man cannot be equally particular. Rickie’s programme involved a change in values as well as a change of occupation.

“Adopt a frankly intellectual attitude,” Mr. Pembroke continued. “I do not advise you at present even to profess any interest in athletics or organization. When the headmaster writes, he will probably ask whether you are an all-round man. Boldly say no. A bold ‘no’ is at times the best. Take your stand upon classics and general culture.”

Classics! A second in the Tripos. General culture. A smattering of English Literature, and less than a smattering of French.

“That is how we begin. Then we get you a little post—say that of librarian. And so on, until you are indispensable.”

Rickie laughed; the headmaster wrote, the reply was satisfactory, and in due course the new life began.

Sawston was already familiar to him. But he knew it as an amateur, and under an official gaze it grouped itself afresh. The school, a bland Gothic building, now showed as a fortress of learning, whose outworks were the boarding-houses. Those straggling roads were full of the houses of the parents of the day-boys. These shops were in bounds, those out. How often had he passed Dunwood House! He had once confused it with its rival, Cedar View. Now he was to live there—perhaps for many years. On the left of the entrance a large saffron drawing-room, full of cosy corners and dumpy chairs: here the parents would be received. On the right of the entrance a study, which he shared with Herbert: here the boys would be caned—he hoped not often. In the hall a framed certificate praising the drains, the bust of Hermes, and a carved teak monkey holding out a salver. Some of the furniture had come from Shelthorpe, some had been bought from Mr. Annison, some of it was new. But throughout he recognized a certain decision of arrangement. Nothing in the house was accidental, or there merely for its own sake. He contrasted it with his room at Cambridge, which had been a jumble of things that he loved dearly and of things that he did not love at all. Now these also had come to Dunwood House, and had been distributed where each was seemly—Sir Percival to the drawing-room, the photograph of Stockholm to the passage, his chair, his inkpot, and the portrait of his mother to the study. And then he contrasted it with the Ansells’ house, to which their resolute ill-taste had given unity. He was extremely sensitive to the inside of a house, holding it an organism that expressed the thoughts, conscious and subconscious, of its inmates. He was equally sensitive to places. He would compare Cambridge with Sawston, and either with a third type of existence, to which, for want of a better name, he gave the name of “Wiltshire.”

It must not be thought that he is going to waste his time. These contrasts and comparisons never took him long, and he never indulged in them until the serious business of the day was over. And, as time passed, he never indulged in them at all. The school returned at the end of January, before he had been settled in a week. His health had improved, but not greatly, and he was nervous at the prospect of confronting the assembled house. All day long cabs had been driving up, full of boys in bowler hats too big for them; and Agnes had been superintending the numbering of the said hats, and the placing of them in cupboards, since they would not be wanted till the end of the term. Each boy had, or should have had, a bag, so that he need not unpack his box till the morrow, One boy had only a brown-paper parcel, tied with hairy string, and Rickie heard the firm pleasant voice say, “But you’ll bring a bag next term,” and the submissive, “Yes, Mrs. Elliot,” of the reply. In the passage he ran against the head boy, who was alarmingly like an undergraduate. They looked at each other suspiciously, and parted. Two minutes later he ran into another boy, and then into another, and began to wonder whether they were doing it on purpose, and if so, whether he ought to mind. As the day wore on, the noises grew louder-trampings of feet, breakdowns, jolly little squawks—and the cubicles were assigned, and the bags unpacked, and the bathing arrangements posted up, and Herbert kept on saying, “All this is informal—all this is informal. We shall meet the house at eight fifteen.”

And so, at eight ten, Rickie put on his cap and gown,—hitherto symbols of pupilage, now to be symbols of dignity,—the very cap and gown that Widdrington had so recently hung upon the college fountain. Herbert, similarly attired, was waiting for him in their private dining-room, where also sat Agnes, ravenously devouring scrambled eggs. “But you’ll wear your hoods,” she cried. Herbert considered, and them said she was quite right. He fetched his white silk, Rickie the fragment of rabbit’s wool that marks the degree of B.A. Thus attired, they proceeded through the baize door. They were a little late, and the boys, who were marshalled in the preparation room, were getting uproarious. One, forgetting how far his voice carried, shouted, “Cave! Here comes the Whelk.” And another young devil yelled, “The Whelk’s brought a pet with him!”

“You mustn’t mind,” said Herbert kindly. “We masters make a point of never minding nicknames—unless, of course, they are applied openly, in which case a thousand lines is not too much.” Rickie assented, and they entered the preparation room just as the prefects had established order.

Here Herbert took his seat on a high-legged chair, while Rickie, like a queen-consort, sat near him on a chair with somewhat shorter legs. Each chair had a desk attached to it, and Herbert flung up the lid of his, and then looked round the preparation room with a quick frown, as if the contents had surprised him. So impressed was Rickie that he peeped sideways, but could only see a little blotting-paper in the desk. Then he noticed that the boys were impressed too. Their chatter ceased. They attended.

The room was almost full. The prefects, instead of lolling disdainfully in the back row, were ranged like councillors beneath the central throne. This was an innovation of Mr. Pembroke’s. Carruthers, the head boy, sat in the middle, with his arm round Lloyd. It was Lloyd who had made the matron too bright: he nearly lost his colours in consequence. These two were grown up. Beside them sat Tewson, a saintly child in the spectacles, who had risen to this height by reason of his immense learning. He, like the others, was a school prefect. The house prefects, an inferior brand, were beyond, and behind came the indistinguishable many. The faces all looked alike as yet—except the face of one boy, who was inclined to cry.

“School,” said Mr. Pembroke, slowly closing the lid of the desk,—“school is the world in miniature.” Then he paused, as a man well may who has made such a remark. It is not, however, the intention of this work to quote an opening address. Rickie, at all events, refused to be critical: Herbert’s experience was far greater than his, and he must take his tone from him. Nor could any one criticize the exhortations to be patriotic, athletic, learned, and religious, that flowed like a four-part fugue from Mr. Pembroke’s mouth. He was a practised speaker—that is to say, he held his audience’s attention. He told them that this term, the second of his reign, was THE term for Dunwood House; that it behooved every boy to labour during it for his house’s honour, and, through the house, for the honour of the school. Taking a wider range, he spoke of England, or rather of Great Britain, and of her continental foes. Portraits of empire-builders hung on the wall, and he pointed to them. He quoted imperial poets. He showed how patriotism had broadened since the days of Shakespeare, who, for all his genius, could only write of his country as—

“This fortress built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This hazy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea.”

And it seemed that only a short ladder lay between the preparation room and the Anglo-Saxon hegemony of the globe. Then he paused, and in the silence came “sob, sob, sob,” from a little boy, who was regretting a villa in Guildford and his mother’s half acre of garden.

“Come, come,” he said pleasantly, as they ended with harmonies in the style of Richard Strauss. “This will never do. We must grapple with the anthem this term—you’re as tuneful as—as day-boys!”

Hearty laughter, and then the whole house filed past them and shook hands.

“But how did it impress you?” Herbert asked, as soon as they were back in their own part. Agnes had provided them with a tray of food: the meals were still anyhow, and she had to fly at once to see after the boys.

“I liked the look of them.”

“I meant rather, how did the house impress you as a house?”

“I don’t think I thought,” said Rickie rather nervously. “It is not easy to catch the spirit of a thing at once. I only saw a roomful of boys.”

“My dear Rickie, don’t be so diffident. You are perfectly right. You only did see a roomful of boys. As yet there’s nothing else to see. The house, like the school, lacks tradition. Look at Winchester. Look at the traditional rivalry between Eton and Harrow. Tradition is of incalculable importance, if a school is to have any status. Why should Sawston be without?”

“Yes. Tradition is of incalculable value. And I envy those schools that have a natural connection with the past. Of course Sawston has a past, though not of the kind that you quite want. The sons of poor tradesmen went to it at first. So wouldn’t its traditions be more likely to linger in the Commercial School?” he concluded nervously.

“You have a great deal to learn—a very great deal. Listen to me. Why has Sawston no traditions?” His round, rather foolish, face assumed the expression of a conspirator. Bending over the mutton, he whispered, “I can tell you why. Owing to the day-boys. How can traditions flourish in such soil? Picture the day-boy’s life—at home for meals, at home for preparation, at home for sleep, running home with every fancied wrong. There are day-boys in your class, and, mark my words, they will give you ten times as much trouble as the boarders, late, slovenly, stopping away at the slightest pretext. And then the letters from the parents! ‘Why has my boy not been moved this term?’ ‘Why has my boy been moved this term?’ ‘I am a dissenter, and do not wish my boy to subscribe to the school mission.’ ‘Can you let my boy off early to water the garden?’ Remember that I have been a day-boy house-master, and tried to infuse some esprit de corps into them. It is practically impossible. They come as units, and units they remain. Worse. They infect the boarders. Their pestilential, critical, discontented attitude is spreading over the school. If I had my own way—”

He stopped somewhat abruptly.

“Was that why you laughed at their singing?”

“Not at all. Not at all. It is not my habit to set one section of the school against the other.”

After a little they went the rounds. The boys were in bed now. “Good-night!” called Herbert, standing in the corridor of the cubicles, and from behind each of the green curtains came the sound of a voice replying, “Good-night, sir!” “Good-night,” he observed into each dormitory.

Then he went to the switch in the passage and plunged the whole house into darkness. Rickie lingered behind him, strangely impressed. In the morning those boys had been scattered over England, leading their own lives. Now, for three months, they must change everything—see new faces, accept new ideals. They, like himself, must enter a beneficent machine, and learn the value of esprit de corps. Good luck attend them—good luck and a happy release. For his heart would have them not in these cubicles and dormitories, but each in his own dear home, amongst faces and things that he knew.

Next morning, after chapel, he made the acquaintance of his class. Towards that he felt very differently. Esprit de corps was not expected of it. It was simply two dozen boys who were gathered together for the purpose of learning Latin. His duties and difficulties would not lie here. He was not required to provide it with an atmosphere. The scheme of work was already mapped out, and he started gaily upon familiar words—

“Pan, ovium custos, tua si tibi Maenala curae Adsis, O Tegaee, favens.”

“Do you think that beautiful?” he asked, and received the honest answer, “No, sir; I don’t think I do.” He met Herbert in high spirits in the quadrangle during the interval. But Herbert thought his enthusiasm rather amateurish, and cautioned him.

“You must take care they don’t get out of hand. I approve of a lively teacher, but discipline must be established first.”

“I felt myself a learner, not a teacher. If I’m wrong over a point, or don’t know, I mean to tell them at once.” Herbert shook his head.

“It’s different if I was really a scholar. But I can’t pose as one, can I? I know much more than the boys, but I know very little. Surely the honest thing is to be myself to them. Let them accept or refuse me as that. That’s the only attitude we shall any of us profit by in the end.”

Mr. Pembroke was silent. Then he observed, “There is, as you say, a higher attitude and a lower attitude. Yet here, as so often, cannot we find a golden mean between them?”

“What’s that?” said a dreamy voice. They turned and saw a tall, spectacled man, who greeted the newcomer kindly, and took hold of his arm. “What’s that about the golden mean?”

“Mr. Jackson—Mr. Elliot: Mr. Elliot—Mr. Jackson,” said Herbert, who did not seem quite pleased. “Rickie, have you a moment to spare me?”

But the humanist spoke to the young man about the golden mean and the pinchbeck mean, adding, “You know the Greeks aren’t broad church clergymen. They really aren’t, in spite of much conflicting evidence. Boys will regard Sophocles as a kind of enlightened bishop, and something tells me that they are wrong.”

“Mr. Jackson is a classical enthusiast,” said Herbert. “He makes the past live. I want to talk to you about the humdrum present.”

“And I am warning him against the humdrum past. That’s another point, Mr. Elliot. Impress on your class that many Greeks and most Romans were frightfully stupid, and if they disbelieve you, read Ctesiphon with them, or Valerius Flaccus. Whatever is that noise?”

“It comes from your class-room, I think,” snapped the other master.

“So it does. Ah, yes. I expect they are putting your little Tewson into the waste-paper basket.”

“I always lock my class-room in the interval—”

“Yes?”

“—and carry the key in my pocket.”

“Ah. But, Mr. Elliot, I am a cousin of Widdrington’s. He wrote to me about you. I am so glad. Will you, first of all, come to supper next Sunday?”

“I am afraid,” put in Herbert, “that we poor housemasters must deny ourselves festivities in term time.”

“But mayn’t he come once, just once?”

“May, my dear Jackson! My brother-in-law is not a baby. He decides for himself.”

Rickie naturally refused. As soon as they were out of hearing, Herbert said, “This is a little unfortunate. Who is Mr. Widdrington?”

“I knew him at Cambridge.”

“Let me explain how we stand,” he continued, after a pause.

“Jackson is the worst of the reactionaries here, while I—why should I conceal it?—have thrown in my lot with the party of progress. You will see how we suffer from him at the masters’ meetings. He has no talent for organization, and yet he is always inflicting his ideas on others. It was like his impertinence to dictate to you what authors you should read, and meanwhile the sixth-form room like a bear-garden, and a school prefect being put into the waste-paper basket. My good Rickie, there’s nothing to smile at. How is the school to go on with a man like that? It would be a case of ‘quick march,’ if it was not for his brilliant intellect. That’s why I say it’s a little unfortunate. You will have very little in common, you and he.”

Rickie did not answer. He was very fond of Widdrington, who was a quaint, sensitive person. And he could not help being attracted by Mr. Jackson, whose welcome contrasted pleasantly with the official breeziness of his other colleagues. He wondered, too, whether it is so very reactionary to contemplate the antique.

“It is true that I vote Conservative,” pursued Mr. Pembroke, apparently confronting some objector. “But why? Because the Conservatives, rather than the Liberals, stand for progress. One must not be misled by catch-words.”

“Didn’t you want to ask me something?”

“Ah, yes. You found a boy in your form called Varden?”

“Varden? Yes; there is.”

“Drop on him heavily. He has broken the statutes of the school. He is attending as a day-boy. The statutes provide that a boy must reside with his parents or guardians. He does neither. It must be stopped. You must tell the headmaster.”

“Where does the boy live?”

“At a certain Mrs. Orr’s, who has no connection with the school of any kind. It must be stopped. He must either enter a boarding-house or go.”

“But why should I tell?” said Rickie. He remembered the boy, an unattractive person with protruding ears, “It is the business of his house-master.”

“House-master—exactly. Here we come back again. Who is now the day-boys’ house-master? Jackson once again—as if anything was Jackson’s business! I handed the house back last term in a most flourishing condition. It has already gone to rack and ruin for the second time. To return to Varden. I have unearthed a put-up job. Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Orr are friends. Do you see? It all works round.”

“I see. It does—or might.”

“The headmaster will never sanction it when it’s put to him plainly.”

“But why should I put it?” said Rickie, twisting the ribbons of his gown round his fingers.

“Because you’re the boy’s form-master.”

“Is that a reason?”

“Of course it is.”

“I only wondered whether—” He did not like to say that he wondered whether he need do it his first morning.

“By some means or other you must find out—of course you know already, but you must find out from the boy. I know—I have it! Where’s his health certificate?”

“He had forgotten it.”

“Just like them. Well, when he brings it, it will be signed by Mrs. Orr, and you must look at it and say, ‘Orr—Orr—Mrs. Orr?’ or something to that effect, and then the whole thing will come naturally out.”

The bell rang, and they went in for the hour of school that concluded the morning. Varden brought his health certificate—a pompous document asserting that he had not suffered from roseola or kindred ailments in the holidays—and for a long time Rickie sat with it before him, spread open upon his desk. He did not quite like the job. It suggested intrigue, and he had come to Sawston not to intrigue but to labour. Doubtless Herbert was right, and Mr. Jackson and Mrs. Orr were wrong. But why could they not have it out among themselves? Then he thought, “I am a coward, and that’s why I’m raising these objections,” called the boy up to him, and it did all come out naturally, more or less. Hitherto Varden had lived with his mother; but she had left Sawston at Christmas, and now he would live with Mrs. Orr. “Mr. Jackson, sir, said it would be all right.”

“Yes, yes,” said Rickie; “quite so.” He remembered Herbert’s dictum: “Masters must present a united front. If they do not—the deluge.” He sent the boy back to his seat, and after school took the compromising health certificate to the headmaster. The headmaster was at that time easily excited by a breach of the constitution. “Parents or guardians,” he reputed—“parents or guardians,” and flew with those words on his lips to Mr. Jackson. To say that Rickie was a cat’s-paw is to put it too strongly. Herbert was strictly honourable, and never pushed him into an illegal or really dangerous position; but there is no doubt that on this and on many other occasions he had to do things that he would not otherwise have done. There was always some diplomatic corner that had to be turned, always something that he had to say or not to say. As the term wore on he lost his independence—almost without knowing it. He had much to learn about boys, and he learnt not by direct observation—for which he believed he was unfitted—but by sedulous imitation of the more experienced masters. Originally he had intended to be friends with his pupils, and Mr. Pembroke commended the intention highly; but you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for “personal intercourse,” substituted the safer “personal influence,” and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them. Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life’s duties. But here is a subject in which we must inevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie’s line, so he abandoned these subjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy. In the house he did as Herbert did, and referred all doubtful subjects to him. In his form, oddly enough, he became a martinet. It is so much simpler to be severe. He grasped the school regulations, and insisted on prompt obedience to them. He adopted the doctrine of collective responsibility. When one boy was late, he punished the whole form. “I can’t help it,” he would say, as if he was a power of nature. As a teacher he was rather dull. He curbed his own enthusiasms, finding that they distracted his attention, and that while he throbbed to the music of Virgil the boys in the back row were getting unruly. But on the whole he liked his form work: he knew why he was there, and Herbert did not overshadow him so completely.

What was amiss with Herbert? He had known that something was amiss, and had entered into partnership with open eyes. The man was kind and unselfish; more than that he was truly charitable, and it was a real pleasure to him to give—pleasure to others. Certainly he might talk too much about it afterwards; but it was the doing, not the talking, that he really valued, and benefactors of this sort are not too common. He was, moreover, diligent and conscientious: his heart was in his work, and his adherence to the Church of England no mere matter of form. He was capable of affection: he was usually courteous and tolerant. Then what was amiss? Why, in spite of all these qualities, should Rickie feel that there was something wrong with him—nay, that he was wrong as a whole, and that if the Spirit of Humanity should ever hold a judgment he would assuredly be classed among the goats? The answer at first sight appeared a graceless one—it was that Herbert was stupid. Not stupid in the ordinary sense—he had a business-like brain, and acquired knowledge easily—but stupid in the important sense: his whole life was coloured by a contempt of the intellect. That he had a tolerable intellect of his own was not the point: it is in what we value, not in what we have, that the test of us resides. Now, Rickie’s intellect was not remarkable. He came to his worthier results rather by imagination and instinct than by logic. An argument confused him, and he could with difficulty follow it even on paper. But he saw in this no reason for satisfaction, and tried to make such use of his brain as he could, just as a weak athlete might lovingly exercise his body. Like a weak athlete, too, he loved to watch the exploits, or rather the efforts, of others—their efforts not so much to acquire knowledge as to dispel a little of the darkness by which we and all our acquisitions are surrounded. Cambridge had taught him this, and he knew, if for no other reason, that his time there had not been in vain. And Herbert’s contempt for such efforts revolted him. He saw that for all his fine talk about a spiritual life he had but one test for things—success: success for the body in this life or for the soul in the life to come. And for this reason Humanity, and perhaps such other tribunals as there may be, would assuredly reject him.

XVIII

Meanwhile he was a husband. Perhaps his union should have been emphasized before. The crown of life had been attained, the vague yearnings, the misread impulses, had found accomplishment at last. Never again must he feel lonely, or as one who stands out of the broad highway of the world and fears, like poor Shelley, to undertake the longest journey. So he reasoned, and at first took the accomplishment for granted. But as the term passed he knew that behind the yearning there remained a yearning, behind the drawn veil a veil that he could not draw. His wedding had been no mighty landmark: he would often wonder whether such and such a speech or incident came after it or before. Since that meeting in the Soho restaurant there had been so much to do—clothes to buy, presents to thank for, a brief visit to a Training College, a honeymoon as brief. In such a bustle, what spiritual union could take place? Surely the dust would settle soon: in Italy, at Easter, he might perceive the infinities of love. But love had shown him its infinities already. Neither by marriage nor by any other device can men insure themselves a vision; and Rickie’s had been granted him three years before, when he had seen his wife and a dead man clasped in each other’s arms. She was never to be so real to him again.

She ran about the house looking handsomer than ever. Her cheerful voice gave orders to the servants. As he sat in the study correcting compositions, she would dart in and give him a kiss. “Dear girl—” he would murmur, with a glance at the rings on her hand. The tone of their marriage life was soon set. It was to be a frank good-fellowship, and before long he found it difficult to speak in a deeper key.

One evening he made the effort. There had been more beauty than was usual at Sawston. The air was pure and quiet. Tomorrow the fog might be here, but today one said, “It is like the country.” Arm in arm they strolled in the side-garden, stopping at times to notice the crocuses, or to wonder when the daffodils would flower. Suddenly he tightened his pressure, and said, “Darling, why don’t you still wear ear-rings?”

“Ear-rings?” She laughed. “My taste has improved, perhaps.”

So after all they never mentioned Gerald’s name. But he hoped it was still dear to her. He did not want her to forget the greatest moment in her life. His love desired not ownership but confidence, and to a love so pure it does not seem terrible to come second.

He valued emotion—not for itself, but because it is the only final path to intimacy. She, ever robust and practical, always discouraged him. She was not cold; she would willingly embrace him. But she hated being upset, and would laugh or thrust him off when his voice grew serious. In this she reminded him of his mother. But his mother—he had never concealed it from himself—had glories to which his wife would never attain: glories that had unfolded against a life of horror—a life even more horrible than he had guessed. He thought of her often during these earlier months. Did she bless his union, so different to her own? Did she love his wife? He tried to speak of her to Agnes, but again she was reluctant. And perhaps it was this aversion to acknowledge the dead, whose images alone have immortality, that made her own image somewhat transient, so that when he left her no mystic influence remained, and only by an effort could he realize that God had united them forever.

They conversed and differed healthily upon other topics. A rifle corps was to be formed: she hoped that the boys would have proper uniforms, instead of shooting in their old clothes, as Mr. Jackson had suggested. There was Tewson; could nothing be done about him? He would slink away from the other prefects and go with boys of his own age. There was Lloyd: he would not learn the school anthem, saying that it hurt his throat. And above all there was Varden, who, to Rickie’s bewilderment, was now a member of Dunwood House.

“He had to go somewhere,” said Agnes. “Lucky for his mother that we had a vacancy.”

“Yes—but when I meet Mrs. Orr—I can’t help feeling ashamed.”

“Oh, Mrs. Orr! Who cares for her? Her teeth are drawn. If she chooses to insinuate that we planned it, let her. Hers was rank dishonesty. She attempted to set up a boarding-house.”

Mrs. Orr, who was quite rich, had attempted no such thing. She had taken the boy out of charity, and without a thought of being unconstitutional. But in had come this officious “Limpet” and upset the headmaster, and she was scolded, and Mrs. Varden was scolded, and Mr. Jackson was scolded, and the boy was scolded and placed with Mr. Pembroke, whom she revered less than any man in the world. Naturally enough, she considered it a further attempt of the authorities to snub the day-boys, for whose advantage the school had been founded. She and Mrs. Jackson discussed the subject at their tea-parties, and the latter lady was sure that no good, no good of any kind, would come to Dunwood House from such ill-gotten plunder.

“We say, ‘Let them talk,’” persisted Rickie, “but I never did like letting people talk. We are right and they are wrong, but I wish the thing could have been done more quietly. The headmaster does get so excited. He has given a gang of foolish people their opportunity. I don’t like being branded as the day-boy’s foe, when I think how much I would have given to be a day-boy myself. My father found me a nuisance, and put me through the mill, and I can never forget it particularly the evenings.”

“There’s very little bullying here,” said Agnes.

“There was very little bullying at my school. There was simply the atmosphere of unkindness, which no discipline can dispel. It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Physical pain doesn’t hurt—at least not what I call hurt—if a man hits you by accident or play. But just a little tap, when you know it comes from hatred, is too terrible. Boys do hate each other: I remember it, and see it again. They can make strong isolated friendships, but of general good-fellowship they haven’t a notion.”

“All I know is there’s very little bullying here.”

“You see, the notion of good-fellowship develops late: you can just see its beginning here among the prefects: up at Cambridge it flourishes amazingly. That’s why I pity people who don’t go up to Cambridge: not because a University is smart, but because those are the magic years, and—with luck—you see up there what you couldn’t see before and mayn’t ever see again.

“Aren’t these the magic years?” the lady demanded.

He laughed and hit at her. “I’m getting somewhat involved. But hear me, O Agnes, for I am practical. I approve of our public schools. Long may they, flourish. But I do not approve of the boarding-house system. It isn’t an inevitable adjunct—”

“Good gracious me!” she shrieked. “Have you gone mad?”

“Silence, madam. Don’t betray me to Herbert, or I’ll give us the sack. But seriously, what is the good of, throwing boys so much together? Isn’t it building their lives on a wrong basis? They don’t understand each other. I wish they did, but they don’t. They don’t realize that human beings are simply marvellous. When they do, the whole of life changes, and you get the true thing. But don’t pretend you’ve got it before you have. Patriotism and esprit de corps are all very well, but masters a little forget that they must grow from sentiment. They cannot create one. Cannot-cannot—cannot. I never cared a straw for England until I cared for Englishmen, and boys can’t love the school when they hate each other. Ladies and gentlemen, I will now conclude my address. And most of it is copied out of Mr. Ansell.”

The truth is, he was suddenly ashamed. He had been carried away on the flood of his old emotions. Cambridge and all that it meant had stood before him passionately clear, and beside it stood his mother and the sweet family life which nurses up a boy until he can salute his equals. He was ashamed, for he remembered his new resolution—to work without criticizing, to throw himself vigorously into the machine, not to mind if he was pinched now and then by the elaborate wheels.

“Mr. Ansell!” cried his wife, laughing somewhat shrilly. “Aha! Now I understand. It’s just the kind of thing poor Mr. Ansell would say. Well, I’m brutal. I believe it does Varden good to have his ears pulled now and then, and I don’t care whether they pull them in play or not. Boys ought to rough it, or they never grow up into men, and your mother would have agreed with me. Oh yes; and you’re all wrong about patriotism. It can, can, create a sentiment.”

She was unusually precise, and had followed his thoughts with an attention that was also unusual. He wondered whether she was not right, and regretted that she proceeded to say, “My dear boy, you mustn’t talk these heresies inside Dunwood House! You sound just like one of that reactionary Jackson set, who want to fling the school back a hundred years and have nothing but day-boys all dressed anyhow.”

“The Jackson set have their points.”

“You’d better join it.”

“The Dunwood House set has its points.” For Rickie suffered from the Primal Curse, which is not—as the Authorized Version suggests—the knowledge of good and evil, but the knowledge of good-and-evil.

“Then stick to the Dunwood House set.”

“I do, and shall.” Again he was ashamed. Why would he see the other side of things? He rebuked his soul, not unsuccessfully, and then they returned to the subject of Varden.

“I’m certain he suffers,” said he, for she would do nothing but laugh. “Each boy who passes pulls his ears—very funny, no doubt; but every day they stick out more and get redder, and this afternoon, when he didn’t know he was being watched, he was holding his head and moaning. I hate the look about his eyes.”

“I hate the whole boy. Nasty weedy thing.”

“Well, I’m a nasty weedy thing, if it comes to that.”

“No, you aren’t,” she cried, kissing him. But he led her back to the subject. Could nothing be suggested? He drew up some new rules—alterations in the times of going to bed, and so on—the effect of which would be to provide fewer opportunities for the pulling of Varden’s ears. The rules were submitted to Herbert, who sympathized with weakliness more than did his sister, and gave them his careful consideration. But unfortunately they collided with other rules, and on a closer examination he found that they also ran contrary to the fundamentals on which the government of Dunwood House was based. So nothing was done. Agnes was rather pleased, and took to teasing her husband about Varden. At last he asked her to stop. He felt uneasy about the boy—almost superstitious. His first morning’s work had brought sixty pounds a year to their hotel.

XIX

They did not get to Italy at Easter. Herbert had the offer of some private pupils, and needed Rickie’s help. It seemed unreasonable to leave England when money was to be made in it, so they went to Ilfracombe instead. They spent three weeks among the natural advantages and unnatural disadvantages of that resort. It was out of the season, and they encamped in a huge hotel, which took them at a reduction. By a disastrous chance the Jacksons were down there too, and a good deal of constrained civility had to pass between the two families. Constrained it was not in Mr. Jackson’s case. At all times he was ready to talk, and as long as they kept off the school it was pleasant enough. But he was very indiscreet, and feminine tact had often to intervene. “Go away, dear ladies,” he would then observe. “You think you see life because you see the chasms in it. Yet all the chasms are full of female skeletons.” The ladies smiled anxiously. To Rickie he was friendly and even intimate. They had long talks on the deserted Capstone, while their wives sat reading in the Winter Garden and Mr. Pembroke kept an eye upon the tutored youths. “Once I had tutored youths,” said Mr. Jackson, “but I lost them all by letting them paddle with my nieces. It is so impossible to remember what is proper.” And sooner or later their talk gravitated towards his central passion—the Fragments of Sophocles. Some day (“never,” said Herbert) he would edit them. At present they were merely in his blood. With the zeal of a scholar and the imagination of a poet he reconstructed lost dramas—Niobe, Phaedra, Philoctetes against Troy, whose names, but for an accident, would have thrilled the world. “Is it worth it?” he cried. “Had we better be planting potatoes?” And then: “We had; but this is the second best.”

Agnes did not approve of these colloquies. Mr. Jackson was not a buffoon, but he behaved like one, which is what matters; and from the Winter Garden she could see people laughing at him, and at her husband, who got excited too. She hinted once or twice, but no notice was taken, and at last she said rather sharply, “Now, you’re not to, Rickie. I won’t have it.”

“He’s a type that suits me. He knows people I know, or would like to have known. He was a friend of Tony Failing’s. It is so hard to realize that a man connected with one was great. Uncle Tony seems to have been. He loved poetry and music and pictures, and everything tempted him to live in a kind of cultured paradise, with the door shut upon squalor. But to have more decent people in the world—he sacrificed everything to that. He would have ‘smashed the whole beauty-shop’ if it would help him. I really couldn’t go as far as that. I don’t think one need go as far—pictures might have to be smashed, but not music or poetry; surely they help—and Jackson doesn’t think so either.”

“Well, I won’t have it, and that’s enough.” She laughed, for her voice had a little been that of the professional scold. “You see we must hang together. He’s in the reactionary camp.”

“He doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know that he is in any camp at all.”

“His wife is, which comes to the same.”

“Still, it’s the holidays—” He and Mr. Jackson had drifted apart in the term, chiefly owing to the affair of Varden. “We were to have the holidays to ourselves, you know.” And following some line of thought, he continued, “He cheers one up. He does believe in poetry. Smart, sentimental books do seem absolutely absurd to him, and gods and fairies far nearer to reality. He tries to express all modern life in the terms of Greek mythology, because the Greeks looked very straight at things, and Demeter or Aphrodite are thinner veils than ‘The survival of the fittest’, or ‘A marriage has been arranged,’ and other draperies of modern journalese.”

“And do you know what that means?”

“It means that poetry, not prose, lies at the core.”

“No. I can tell you what it means—balder-dash.”

His mouth fell. She was sweeping away the cobwebs with a vengeance. “I hope you’re wrong,” he replied, “for those are the lines on which I’ve been writing, however badly, for the last two years.”

“But you write stories, not poems.”

He looked at his watch. “Lessons again. One never has a moment’s peace.”

“Poor Rickie. You shall have a real holiday in the summer.” And she called after him to say, “Remember, dear, about Mr. Jackson. Don’t go talking so much to him.”

Rather arbitrary. Her tone had been a little arbitrary of late. But what did it matter? Mr. Jackson was not a friend, and he must risk the chance of offending Widdrington. After the lesson he wrote to Ansell, whom he had not seen since June, asking him to come down to Ilfracombe, if only for a day. On reading the letter over, its tone displeased him. It was quite pathetic: it sounded like a cry from prison. “I can’t send him such nonsense,” he thought, and wrote again. But phrase it as he would the letter always suggested that he was unhappy. “What’s wrong?” he wondered. “I could write anything I wanted to him once.” So he scrawled “Come!” on a post-card. But even this seemed too serious. The post-card followed the letters, and Agnes found them all in the waste-paper basket.

Then she said, “I’ve been thinking—oughtn’t you to ask Mr. Ansell over? A breath of sea air would do the poor thing good.”

There was no difficulty now. He wrote at once, “My dear Stewart, We both so much wish you could come over.” But the invitation was refused. A little uneasy he wrote again, using the dialect of their past intimacy. The effect of this letter was not pathetic but jaunty, and he felt a keen regret as soon as it slipped into the box. It was a relief to receive no reply.

He brooded a good deal over this painful yet intangible episode. Was the pain all of his own creating? or had it been produced by something external? And he got the answer that brooding always gives—it was both. He was morbid, and had been so since his visit to Cadover—quicker to register discomfort than joy. But, none the less, Ansell was definitely brutal, and Agnes definitely jealous. Brutality he could understand, alien as it was to himself. Jealousy, equally alien, was a harder matter. Let husband and wife be as sun and moon, or as moon and sun. Shall they therefore not give greeting to the stars? He was willing to grant that the love that inspired her might be higher than his own. Yet did it not exclude them both from much that is gracious? That dream of his when he rode on the Wiltshire expanses—a curious dream: the lark silent, the earth dissolving. And he awoke from it into a valley full of men.

She was jealous in many ways—sometimes in an open humorous fashion, sometimes more subtly, never content till “we” had extended our patronage, and, if possible, our pity. She began to patronize and pity Ansell, and most sincerely trusted that he would get his fellowship. Otherwise what was the poor fellow to do? Ridiculous as it may seem, she was even jealous of Nature. One day her husband escaped from Ilfracombe to Morthoe, and came back ecstatic over its fangs of slate, piercing an oily sea. “Sounds like an hippopotamus,” she said peevishly. And when they returned to Sawston through the Virgilian counties, she disliked him looking out of the windows, for all the world as if Nature was some dangerous woman.

He resumed his duties with a feeling that he had never left them. Again he confronted the assembled house. This term was again the term; school still the world in miniature. The music of the four-part fugue entered into him more deeply, and he began to hum its little phrases. The same routine, the same diplomacies, the same old sense of only half knowing boys or men—he returned to it all: and all that changed was the cloud of unreality, which ever brooded a little more densely than before. He spoke to his wife about this, he spoke to her about everything, and she was alarmed, and wanted him to see a doctor. But he explained that it was nothing of any practical importance, nothing that interfered with his work or his appetite, nothing more than a feeling that the cow was not really there. She laughed, and “how is the cow today?” soon passed into a domestic joke.

XX

Ansell was in his favourite haunt—the reading-room of the British Museum. In that book-encircled space he always could find peace. He loved to see the volumes rising tier above tier into the misty dome. He loved the chairs that glide so noiselessly, and the radiating desks, and the central area, where the catalogue shelves curve, round the superintendent’s throne. There he knew that his life was not ignoble. It was worth while to grow old and dusty seeking for truth though truth is unattainable, restating questions that have been stated at the beginning of the world. Failure would await him, but not disillusionment. It was worth while reading books, and writing a book or two which few would read, and no one, perhaps, endorse. He was not a hero, and he knew it. His father and sister, by their steady goodness, had made this life possible. But, all the same, it was not the life of a spoilt child.

In the next chair to him sat Widdrington, engaged in his historical research. His desk was edged with enormous volumes, and every few moments an assistant brought him more. They rose like a wall against Ansell. Towards the end of the morning a gap was made, and through it they held the following conversation.

“I’ve been stopping with my cousin at Sawston.”

“M’m.”

“It was quite exciting. The air rang with battle. About two-thirds of the masters have lost their heads, and are trying to produce a gimcrack copy of Eton. Last term, you know, with a great deal of puffing and blowing, they fixed the numbers of the school. This term they want to create a new boarding-house.”

“They are very welcome.”

“But the more boarding-houses they create, the less room they leave for day-boys. The local mothers are frantic, and so is my queer cousin. I never knew him so excited over sub-Hellenic things. There was an indignation meeting at his house. He is supposed to look after the day-boys’ interests, but no one thought he would—least of all the people who gave him the post. The speeches were most eloquent. They argued that the school was founded for day-boys, and that it’s intolerable to handicap them. One poor lady cried, ‘Here’s my Harold in the school, and my Toddie coming on. As likely as not I shall be told there is no vacancy for him. Then what am I to do? If I go, what’s to become of Harold; and if I stop, what’s to become of Toddie?’ I must say I was touched. Family life is more real than national life—at least I’ve ordered all these books to prove it is—and I fancy that the bust of Euripides agreed with me, and was sorry for the hot-faced mothers. Jackson will do what he can. He didn’t quite like to state the naked truth-which is, that boardinghouses pay. He explained it to me afterwards: they are the only, future open to a stupid master. It’s easy enough to be a beak when you’re young and athletic, and can offer the latest University smattering. The difficulty is to keep your place when you get old and stiff, and younger smatterers are pushing up behind you. Crawl into a boarding-house and you’re safe. A master’s life is frightfully tragic. Jackson’s fairly right himself, because he has got a first-class intellect. But I met a poor brute who was hired as an athlete. He has missed his shot at a boarding-house, and there’s nothing in the world for him to do but to trundle down the hill.”

Ansell yawned.

“I saw Rickie too. Once I dined there.”

Another yawn.

“My cousin thinks Mrs. Elliot one of the most horrible women he has ever seen. He calls her ‘Medusa in Arcady.’ She’s so pleasant, too. But certainly it was a very stony meal.”

“What kind of stoniness”

“No one stopped talking for a moment.”

“That’s the real kind,” said Ansell moodily. “The only kind.”

“Well, I,” he continued, “am inclined to compare her to an electric light. Click! she’s on. Click! she’s off. No waste. No flicker.”

“I wish she’d fuse.”

“She’ll never fuse—unless anything was to happen at the main.”

“What do you mean by the main?” said Ansell, who always pursued a metaphor relentlessly.

Widdrington did not know what he meant, and suggested that Ansell should visit Sawston to see whether one could know.

“It is no good me going. I should not find Mrs. Elliot: she has no real existence.”

“Rickie has.”

“I very much doubt it. I had two letters from Ilfracombe last April, and I very much doubt that the man who wrote them can exist.” Bending downwards he began to adorn the manuscript of his dissertation with a square, and inside that a circle, and inside that another square. It was his second dissertation: the first had failed.

“I think he exists: he is so unhappy.”

Ansell nodded. “How did you know he was unhappy?”

“Because he was always talking.” After a pause he added, “What clever young men we are!”

“Aren’t we? I expect we shall get asked in marriage soon. I say, Widdrington, shall we—?”

“Accept? Of course. It is not young manly to say no.”

“I meant shall we ever do a more tremendous thing,—fuse Mrs. Elliot.”

“No,” said Widdrington promptly. “We shall never do that in all our lives.” He added, “I think you might go down to Sawston, though.”

“I have already refused or ignored three invitations.”

“So I gathered.”

“What’s the good of it?” said Ansell through his teeth. “I will not put up with little things. I would rather be rude than to listen to twaddle from a man I’ve known.

“You might go down to Sawston, just for a night, to see him.”

“I saw him last month—at least, so Tilliard informs me. He says that we all three lunched together, that Rickie paid, and that the conversation was most interesting.”

“Well, I contend that he does exist, and that if you go—oh, I can’t be clever any longer. You really must go, man. I’m certain he’s miserable and lonely. Dunwood House reeks of commerce and snobbery and all the things he hated most. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t make any friends. He is so odd, too. In this day-boy row that has just started he’s gone for my cousin. Would you believe it? Quite spitefully. It made quite a difficulty when I wanted to dine. It isn’t like him either the sentiments or the behaviour. I’m sure he’s not himself. Pembroke used to look after the day-boys, and so he can’t very well take the lead against them, and perhaps Rickie’s doing his dirty work—and has overdone it, as decent people generally do. He’s even altering to talk to. Yet he’s not been married a year. Pembroke and that wife simply run him. I don’t see why they should, and no more do you; and that’s why I want you to go to Sawston, if only for one night.”

Ansell shook his head, and looked up at the dome as other men look at the sky. In it the great arc lamps sputtered and flared, for the month was again November. Then he lowered his eyes from the cold violet radiance to the books.

“No, Widdrington; no. We don’t go to see people because they are happy or unhappy. We go when we can talk to them. I cannot talk to Rickie, therefore I will not waste my time at Sawston.”

“I think you’re right,” said Widdrington softly. “But we are bloodless brutes. I wonder whether-If we were different people—something might be done to save him. That is the curse of being a little intellectual. You and our sort have always seen too clearly. We stand aside—and meanwhile he turns into stone. Two philosophic youths repining in the British Museum! What have we done? What shall we ever do? Just drift and criticize, while people who know what they want snatch it away from us and laugh.”

“Perhaps you are that sort. I’m not. When the moment comes I shall hit out like any ploughboy. Don’t believe those lies about intellectual people. They’re only written to soothe the majority. Do you suppose, with the world as it is, that it’s an easy matter to keep quiet? Do you suppose that I didn’t want to rescue him from that ghastly woman? Action! Nothing’s easier than action; as fools testify. But I want to act rightly.”

“The superintendent is looking at us. I must get back to my work.”

“You think this all nonsense,” said Ansell, detaining him. “Please remember that if I do act, you are bound to help me.”

Widdrington looked a little grave. He was no anarchist. A few plaintive cries against Mrs. Elliot were all that he prepared to emit.

“There’s no mystery,” continued Ansell. “I haven’t the shadow of a plan in my head. I know not only Rickie but the whole of his history: you remember the day near Madingley. Nothing in either helps me: I’m just watching.”

“But what for?”

“For the Spirit of Life.”

Widdrington was surprised. It was a phrase unknown to their philosophy. They had trespassed into poetry.

“You can’t fight Medusa with anything else. If you ask me what the Spirit of Life is, or to what it is attached, I can’t tell you. I only tell you, watch for it. Myself I’ve found it in books. Some people find it out of doors or in each other. Never mind. It’s the same spirit, and I trust myself to know it anywhere, and to use it rightly.”

But at this point the superintendent sent a message.

Widdrington then suggested a stroll in the galleries. It was foggy: they needed fresh air. He loved and admired his friend, but today he could not grasp him. The world as Ansell saw it seemed such a fantastic place, governed by brand-new laws. What more could one do than to see Rickie as often as possible, to invite his confidence, to offer him spiritual support? And Mrs. Elliot—what power could “fuse” a respectable woman?

Ansell consented to the stroll, but, as usual, only breathed depression. The comfort of books deserted him among those marble goddesses and gods. The eye of an artist finds pleasure in texture and poise, but he could only think of the vanished incense and deserted temples beside an unfurrowed sea.

“Let us go,” he said. “I do not like carved stones.”

“You are too particular,” said Widdrington. “You are always expecting to meet living people. One never does. I am content with the Parthenon frieze.” And he moved along a few yards of it, while Ansell followed, conscious only of its pathos.

“There’s Tilliard,” he observed. “Shall we kill him?”

“Please,” said Widdrington, and as he spoke Tilliard joined them. He brought them news. That morning he had heard from Rickie: Mrs. Elliot was expecting a child.

“A child?” said Ansell, suddenly bewildered.

“Oh, I forgot,” interposed Widdrington. “My cousin did tell me.”

“You forgot! Well, after all, I forgot that it might be, We are indeed young men.” He leant against the pedestal of Ilissus and remembered their talk about the Spirit of Life. In his ignorance of what a child means he wondered whether the opportunity he sought lay here.

“I am very glad,” said Tilliard, not without intention. “A child will draw them even closer together. I like to see young people wrapped up in their child.”

“I suppose I must be getting back to my dissertation,” said Ansell. He left the Parthenon to pass by the monuments of our more reticent beliefs—the temple of the Ephesian Artemis, the statue of the Cnidian Demeter. Honest, he knew that here were powers he could not cope with, nor, as yet, understand.

XXI

The mists that had gathered round Rickie seemed to be breaking. He had found light neither in work for which he was unfitted nor in a woman who had ceased to respect him, and whom he was ceasing to love. Though he called himself fickle and took all the blame of their marriage on his own shoulders, there remained in Agnes certain terrible faults of heart and head, and no self-reproach would diminish them. The glamour of wedlock had faded; indeed, he saw now that it had faded even before wedlock, and that during the final months he had shut his eyes and pretended it was still there. But now the mists were breaking.

That November the supreme event approached. He saw it with Nature’s eyes. It dawned on him, as on Ansell, that personal love and marriage only cover one side of the shield, and that on the other is graven the epic of birth. In the midst of lessons he would grow dreamy, as one who spies a new symbol for the universe, a fresh circle within the square. Within the square shall be a circle, within the circle another square, until the visual eye is baffled. Here is meaning of a kind. His mother had forgotten herself in him. He would forget himself in his son.

He was at his duties when the news arrived—taking preparation. Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman’s tenderness. Though they despised Rickie, and had suffered under Agnes’s meanness, their one thought this term was to be gentle and to give no trouble.

“Rickie—one moment—”

His face grew ashen. He followed Herbert into the passage, closing the door of the preparation room behind him. “Oh, is she safe?” he whispered.

“Yes, yes,” said Herbert; but there sounded in his answer a sombre hostile note.

“Our boy?”

“Girl—a girl, dear Rickie; a little daughter. She—she is in many ways a healthy child. She will live—oh yes.” A flash of horror passed over his face. He hurried into the preparation room, lifted the lid of his desk, glanced mechanically at the boys, and came out again.

Mrs. Lewin appeared through the door that led into their own part of the house.

“Both going on well!” she cried; but her voice also was grave, exasperated.

“What is it?” he gasped. “It’s something you daren’t tell me.”

“Only this”—stuttered Herbert. “You mustn’t mind when you see—she’s lame.”

Mrs. Lewin disappeared. “Lame! but not as lame as I am?”

“Oh, my dear boy, worse. Don’t—oh, be a man in this. Come away from the preparation room. Remember she’ll live—in many ways healthy—only just this one defect.”

The horror of that week never passed away from him. To the end of his life he remembered the excuses—the consolations that the child would live; suffered very little, if at all; would walk with crutches; would certainly live. God was more merciful. A window was opened too wide on a draughty day—after a short, painless illness his daughter died. But the lesson he had learnt so glibly at Cambridge should be heeded now; no child should ever be born to him again.

XXII

That same term there took place at Dunwood House another event. With their private tragedy it seemed to have no connection; but in time Rickie perceived it as a bitter comment. Its developments were unforeseen and lasting. It was perhaps the most terrible thing he had to bear.

Varden had now been a boarder for ten months. His health had broken in the previous term,—partly, it is to be feared, as the result of the indifferent food—and during the summer holidays he was attacked by a series of agonizing earaches. His mother, a feeble person, wished to keep him at home, but Herbert dissuaded her. Soon after the death of the child there arose at Dunwood House one of those waves of hostility of which no boy knows the origin nor any master can calculate the course. Varden had never been popular—there was no reason why he should be—but he had never been seriously bullied hitherto. One evening nearly the whole house set on him. The prefects absented themselves, the bigger boys stood round and the lesser boys, to whom power was delegated, flung him down, and rubbed his face under the desks, and wrenched at his ears. The noise penetrated the baize doors, and Herbert swept through and punished the whole house, including Varden, whom it would not do to leave out. The poor man was horrified. He approved of a little healthy roughness, but this was pure brutalization. What had come over his boys? Were they not gentlemen’s sons? He would not admit that if you herd together human beings before they can understand each other the great god Pan is angry, and will in the end evade your regulations and drive them mad. That night the victim was screaming with pain, and the doctor next day spoke of an operation. The suspense lasted a whole week. Comment was made in the local papers, and the reputation not only of the house but of the school was imperilled. “If only I had known,” repeated Herbert—“if only I had known I would have arranged it all differently. He should have had a cubicle.” The boy did not die, but he left Sawston, never to return.

The day before his departure Rickie sat with him some time, and tried to talk in a way that was not pedantic. In his own sorrow, which he could share with no one, least of all with his wife, he was still alive to the sorrows of others. He still fought against apathy, though he was losing the battle.

“Don’t lose heart,” he told him. “The world isn’t all going to be like this. There are temptations and trials, of course, but nothing at all of the kind you have had here.”

“But school is the world in miniature, is it not, sir?” asked the boy, hoping to please one master by echoing what had been told him by another. He was always on the lookout for sympathy—: it was one of the things that had contributed to his downfall.

“I never noticed that myself. I was unhappy at school, and in the world people can be very happy.”

Varden sighed and rolled about his eyes. “Are the fellows sorry for what they did to me?” he asked in an affected voice. “I am sure I forgive them from the bottom of my heart. We ought to forgive our enemies, oughtn’t we, sir?”

“But they aren’t your enemies. If you meet in five years’ time you may find each other splendid fellows.”

The boy would not admit this. He had been reading some revivalistic literature. “We ought to forgive our enemies,” he repeated; “and however wicked they are, we ought not to wish them evil. When I was ill, and death seemed nearest, I had many kind letters on this subject.”

Rickie knew about these “many kind letters.” Varden had induced the silly nurse to write to people—people of all sorts, people that he scarcely knew or did not know at all—detailing his misfortune, and asking for spiritual aid and sympathy.

“I am sorry for them,” he pursued. “I would not like to be like them.”

Rickie sighed. He saw that a year at Dunwood House had produced a sanctimonious prig. “Don’t think about them, Varden. Think about anything beautiful—say, music. You like music. Be happy. It’s your duty. You can’t be good until you’ve had a little happiness. Then perhaps you will think less about forgiving people and more about loving them.”

“I love them already, sir.” And Rickie, in desperation, asked if he might look at the many kind letters.

Permission was gladly given. A neat bundle was produced, and for about twenty minutes the master perused it, while the invalid kept watch on his face. Rooks cawed out in the playing-fields, and close under the window there was the sound of delightful, good-tempered laughter. A boy is no devil, whatever boys may be. The letters were chilly productions, somewhat clerical in tone, by whomsoever written. Varden, because he was ill at the time, had been taken seriously. The writers declared that his illness was fulfilling some mysterious purpose: suffering engendered spiritual growth: he was showing signs of this already. They consented to pray for him, some majestically, others shyly. But they all consented with one exception, who worded his refusal as follows:—

Dear A.C. Varden,—

I ought to say that I never remember seeing you. I am sorry that you are ill, and hope you are wrong about it. Why did you not write before, for I could have helped you then? When they pulled your ear, you ought to have gone like this (here was a rough sketch). I could not undertake praying, but would think of you instead, if that would do. I am twenty-two in April, built rather heavy, ordinary broad face, with eyes, etc. I write all this because you have mixed me with some one else, for I am not married, and do not want to be. I cannot think of you always, but will promise a quarter of an hour daily (say 7.00-7.15 A.M.), and might come to see you when you are better—that is, if you are a kid, and you read like one. I have been otter-hunting—

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Wonham

XXIII

Riekie went straight from Varden to his wife, who lay on the sofa in her bedroom. There was now a wide gulf between them. She, like the world she had created for him, was unreal.

“Agnes, darling,” he began, stroking her hand, “such an awkward little thing has happened.”

“What is it, dear? Just wait till I’ve added up this hook.”

She had got over the tragedy: she got over everything.

When she was at leisure he told her. Hitherto they had seldom mentioned Stephen. He was classed among the unprofitable dead.

She was more sympathetic than he expected. “Dear Rickie,” she murmured with averted eyes. “How tiresome for you.”

“I wish that Varden had stopped with Mrs. Orr.”

“Well, he leaves us for good tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes. And I made him answer the letter and apologize. They had never met. It was some confusion with a man in the Church Army, living at a place called Codford. I asked the nurse. It is all explained.”

“There the matter ends.”

“I suppose so—if matters ever end.”

“If, by ill-luck, the person does call. I will just see him and say that the boy has gone.”

“You, or I. I have got over all nonsense by this time. He’s absolutely nothing to me now.” He took up the tradesman’s book and played with it idly. On its crimson cover was stamped a grotesque sheep. How stale and stupid their life had become!

“Don’t talk like that, though,” she said uneasily. “Think how disastrous it would be if you made a slip in speaking to him.”

“Would it? It would have been disastrous once. But I expect, as a matter of fact, that Aunt Emily has made the slip already.”

His wife was displeased. “You need not talk in that cynical way. I credit Aunt Emily with better feeling. When I was there she did mention the matter, but only once. She, and I, and all who have any sense of decency, know better than to make slips, or to think of making them.”

Agnes kept up what she called “the family connection.” She had been once alone to Cadover, and also corresponded with Mrs. Failing. She had never told Rickie anything about her visit nor had he ever asked her. But, from this moment, the whole subject was reopened.

“Most certainly he knows nothing,” she continued. “Why, he does not even realize that Varden lives in our house! We are perfectly safe—unless Aunt Emily were to die. Perhaps then—but we are perfectly safe for the present.”

“When she did mention the matter, what did she say?”

“We had a long talk,” said Agnes quietly. “She told me nothing new—nothing new about the past, I mean. But we had a long talk about the present. I think” and her voice grew displeased again—“that you have been both wrong and foolish in refusing to make up your quarrel with Aunt Emily.”

“Wrong and wise, I should say.”

“It isn’t to be expected that she—so much older and so sensitive—can make the first step. But I know she’d he glad to see you.”

“As far as I can remember that final scene in the garden, I accused her of ‘forgetting what other people were like.’ She’ll never pardon me for saying that.”

Agnes was silent. To her the phrase was meaningless. Yet Rickie was correct: Mrs. Failing had resented it more than anything.

“At all events,” she suggested, “you might go and see her.”

“No, dear. Thank you, no.”

“She is, after all—” She was going to say “your father’s sister,” but the expression was scarcely a happy one, and she turned it into, “She is, after all, growing old and lonely.”

“So are we all!” he cried, with a lapse of tone that was now characteristic in him.

“She oughtn’t to be so isolated from her proper relatives.”

There was a moment’s silence. Still playing with the book, he remarked, “You forget, she’s got her favourite nephew.”

A bright red flush spread over her cheeks. “What is the matter with you this afternoon?” she asked. “I should think you’d better go for a walk.”

“Before I go, tell me what is the matter with you.” He also flushed. “Why do you want me to make it up with my aunt?”

“Because it’s right and proper.”

“So? Or because she is old?”

“I don’t understand,” she retorted. But her eyes dropped. His sudden suspicion was true: she was legacy hunting.

“Agnes, dear Agnes,” he began with passing tenderness, “how can you think of such things? You behave like a poor person. We don’t want any money from Aunt Emily, or from any one else. It isn’t virtue that makes me say it: we are not tempted in that way: we have as much as we want already.”

“For the present,” she answered, still looking aside.

“There isn’t any future,” he cried in a gust of despair.

“Rickie, what do you mean?”

What did he mean? He meant that the relations between them were fixed—that there would never be an influx of interest, nor even of passion. To the end of life they would go on beating time, and this was enough for her. She was content with the daily round, the common task, performed indifferently. But he had dreamt of another helpmate, and of other things.

“We don’t want money—why, we don’t even spend any on travelling. I’ve invested all my salary and more. As far as human foresight goes, we shall never want money.” And his thoughts went out to the tiny grave. “You spoke of ‘right and proper,’ but the right and proper thing for my aunt to do is to leave every penny she’s got to Stephen.”

Her lip quivered, and for one moment he thought that she was going to cry. “What am I to do with you?” she said. “You talk like a person in poetry.”

“I’ll put it in prose. He’s lived with her for twenty years, and he ought to be paid for it.”

Poor Agnes! Indeed, what was she to do? The first moment she set foot in Cadover she had thought, “Oh, here is money. We must try and get it.” Being a lady, she never mentioned the thought to her husband, but she concluded that it would occur to him too. And now, though it had occurred to him at last, he would not even write his aunt a little note.

He was to try her yet further. While they argued this point he flashed out with, “I ought to have told him that day when he called up to our room. There’s where I went wrong first.”

“Rickie!”

“In those days I was sentimental. I minded. For two pins I’d write to him this afternoon. Why shouldn’t he know he’s my brother? What’s all this ridiculous mystery?”

She became incoherent.

“But WHY not? A reason why he shouldn’t know.”

“A reason why he SHOULD know,” she retorted. “I never heard such rubbish! Give me a reason why he should know.”

“Because the lie we acted has ruined our lives.”

She looked in bewilderment at the well-appointed room.

“It’s been like a poison we won’t acknowledge. How many times have you thought of my brother? I’ve thought of him every day—not in love; don’t misunderstand; only as a medicine I shirked. Down in what they call the subconscious self he has been hurting me.” His voice broke. “Oh, my darling, we acted a lie then, and this letter reminds us of it and gives us one more chance. I have to say ‘we’ lied. I should be lying again if I took quite all the blame. Let us ask God’s forgiveness together. Then let us write, as coldly as you please, to Stephen, and tell him he is my father’s son.”

Her reply need not be quoted. It was the last time he attempted intimacy. And the remainder of their conversation, though long and stormy, is also best forgotten.

Thus the first effect of Varden’s letter was to make them quarrel. They had not openly disagreed before. In the evening he kissed her and said, “How absurd I was to get angry about things that happened last year. I will certainly not write to the person.” She returned the kiss. But he knew that they had destroyed the habit of reverence, and would quarrel again. On his rounds he looked in at Varden and asked nonchalantly for the letter. He carried it off to his room. It was unwise of him, for his nerves were already unstrung, and the man he had tried to bury was stirring ominously. In the silence he examined the handwriting till he felt that a living creature was with him, whereas he, because his child had died, was dead. He perceived more clearly the cruelty of Nature, to whom our refinement and piety are but as bubbles, hurrying downwards on the turbid waters. They break, and the stream continues. His father, as a final insult, had brought into the world a man unlike all the rest of them, a man dowered with coarse kindliness and rustic strength, a kind of cynical ploughboy, against whom their own misery and weakness might stand more vividly relieved. “Born an Elliot—born a gentleman.” So the vile phrase ran. But here was an Elliot whose badness was not even gentlemanly. For that Stephen was bad inherently he never doubted for a moment and he would have children: he, not Rickie, would contribute to the stream; he, through his remote posterity, might mingled with the unknown sea.

Thus musing he lay down to sleep, feeling diseased in body and soul. It was no wonder that the night was the most terrible he had ever known. He revisited Cambridge, and his name was a grey ghost over the door. Then there recurred the voice of a gentle shadowy woman, Mrs. Aberdeen, “It doesn’t seem hardly right.” Those had been her words, her only complaint against the mysteries of change and death. She bowed her head and laboured to make her “gentlemen” comfortable. She was labouring still. As he lay in bed he asked God to grant him her wisdom; that he might keep sorrow within due bounds; that he might abstain from extreme hatred and envy of Stephen. It was seldom that he prayed so definitely, or ventured to obtrude his private wishes. Religion was to him a service, a mystic communion with good; not a means of getting what he wanted on the earth. But tonight, through suffering, he was humbled, and became like Mrs. Aberdeen. Hour after hour he awaited sleep and tried to endure the faces that frothed in the gloom—his aunt’s, his father’s, and, worst of all, the triumphant face of his brother. Once he struck at it, and awoke, having hurt his hand on the wall. Then he prayed hysterically for pardon and rest.

Yet again did he awake, and from a more mysterious dream. He heard his mother crying. She was crying quite distinctly in the darkened room. He whispered, “Never mind, my darling, never mind,” and a voice echoed, “Never mind—come away—let them die out—let them die out.” He lit a candle, and the room was empty. Then, hurrying to the window, he saw above mean houses the frosty glories of Orion.

Henceforward he deteriorates. Let those who censure him suggest what he should do. He has lost the work that he loved, his friends, and his child. He remained conscientious and decent, but the spiritual part of him proceeded towards ruin.

XXIV

The coming months, though full of degradation and anxiety, were to bring him nothing so terrible as that night. It was the crisis of this agony. He was an outcast and a failure. But he was not again forced to contemplate these facts so clearly. Varden left in the morning, carrying the fatal letter with him. The whole house was relieved. The good angel was with the boys again, or else (as Herbert preferred to think) they had learnt a lesson, and were more humane in consequence. At all events, the disastrous term concluded quietly.

In the Christmas holidays the two masters made an abortive attempt to visit Italy, and at Easter there was talk of a cruise in the Aegean. Herbert actually went, and enjoyed Athens and Delphi. The Elliots paid a few visits together in England. They returned to Sawston about ten days before school opened, to find that Widdrington was again stopping with the Jacksons. Intercourse was painful, for the two families were scarcely on speaking terms; nor did the triumphant scaffoldings of the new boarding-house make things easier. (The party of progress had carried the day.) Widdrington was by nature touchy, but on this occasion he refused to take offence, and often dropped in to see them. His manner was friendly but critical. They agreed he was a nuisance. Then Agnes left, very abruptly, to see Mrs. Failing, and while she was away Rickie had a little stealthy intercourse.

Her absence, convenient as it was, puzzled him. Mrs. Silt, half goose, half stormy-petrel, had recently paid a flying visit to Cadover, and thence had flown, without an invitation, to Sawston. Generally she was not a welcome guest. On this occasion Agnes had welcomed her, and—so Rickie thought—had made her promise not to tell him something that she knew. The ladies had talked mysteriously. “Mr. Silt would be one with you there,” said Mrs. Silt. Could there be any connection between the two visits?

Agnes’s letters told him nothing: they never did. She was too clumsy or too cautious to express herself on paper. A drive to Stonehenge; an anthem in the Cathedral; Aunt Emily’s love. And when he met her at Waterloo he learnt nothing (if there was anything to learn) from her face.

“How did you enjoy yourself?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Were you and she alone?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes other people.”

“Will Uncle Tony’s Essays be published?”

Here she was more communicative. The book was at last in proof. Aunt Emily had written a charming introduction; but she was so idle, she never finished things off.

They got into an omnibus for the Army and Navy Stores: she wanted to do some shopping before going down to Sawston.

“Did you read any of the Essays?”

“Every one. Delightful. Couldn’t put them down. Now and then he spoilt them by statistics—but you should read his descriptions of Nature. He agrees with you: says the hills and trees are alive! Aunt Emily called you his spiritual heir, which I thought nice of her. We both so lamented that you have stopped writing.” She quoted fragments of the Essays as they went up in the Stores’ lift.

“What else did you talk about?”

“I’ve told you all my news. Now for yours. Let’s have tea first.”

They sat down in the corridor amid ladies in every stage of fatigue—haggard ladies, scarlet ladies, ladies with parcels that twisted from every finger like joints of meat. Gentlemen were scarcer, but all were of the sub-fashionable type, to which Rickie himself now belonged.

“I haven’t done anything,” he said feebly. “Ate, read, been rude to tradespeople, talked to Widdrington. Herbert arrived this morning. He has brought a most beautiful photograph of the Parthenon.”

“Mr. Widdrington?”

“Yes.”

“What did you talk about?”

She might have heard every word. It was only the feeling of pleasure that he wished to conceal. Even when we love people, we desire to keep some corner secret from them, however small: it is a human right: it is personality. She began to cross-question him, but they were interrupted. A young lady at an adjacent table suddenly rose and cried, “Yes, it is you. I thought so from your walk.” It was Maud Ansell.

“Oh, do come and join us!” he cried. “Let me introduce my wife.” Maud bowed quite stiffly, but Agnes, taking it for ill-breeding, was not offended.

“Then I will come!” she continued in shrill, pleasant tones, adroitly poising her tea things on either hand, and transferring them to the Elliots’ table. “Why haven’t you ever come to us, pray?”

“I think you didn’t ask me!”

“You weren’t to be asked.” She sprawled forward with a wagging finger. But her eyes had the honesty of her brother’s. “Don’t you remember the day you left us? Father said, ‘Now, Mr. Elliot—’ Or did he call you ‘Elliot’? How one does forget. Anyhow, father said you weren’t to wait for an invitation, and you said, ‘No, I won’t.’ Ours is a fair-sized house,”—she turned somewhat haughtily to Agnes,—“and the second spare room, on account of a harp that hangs on the wall, is always reserved for Stewart’s friends.”

“How is Mr. Ansell, your brother?” Maud’s face fell. “Hadn’t you heard?” she said in awe-struck tones.

“No.”

“He hasn’t got his fellowship. It’s the second time he’s failed. That means he will never get one. He will never be a don, nor live in Cambridge and that, as we had hoped.”

“Oh, poor, poor fellow!” said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been. “I am so very sorry.”

But Maud turned to Rickie. “Mr. Elliot, you might know. Tell me. What is wrong with Stewart’s philosophy? What ought he to put in, or to alter, so as to succeed?”

Agnes, who knew better than this, smiled.

“I don’t know,” said Rickie sadly. They were none of them so clever, after all.

“Hegel,” she continued vindictively. “They say he’s read too much Hegel. But they never tell him what to read instead. Their own stuffy books, I suppose. Look here—no, that’s the ‘Windsor.’” After a little groping she produced a copy of “Mind,” and handed it round as if it was a geological specimen. “Inside that there’s a paragraph written about something Stewart’s written about before, and there it says he’s read too much Hegel, and it seems now that that’s been the trouble all along.” Her voice trembled. “I call it most unfair, and the fellowship’s gone to a man who has counted the petals on an anemone.”

Rickie had no inclination to smile.

“I wish Stewart had tried Oxford instead.”

“I don’t wish it!”

“You say that,” she continued hotly, “and then you never come to see him, though you knew you were not to wait for an invitation.”

“If it comes to that, Miss Ansell,” retorted Rickie, in the laughing tones that one adopts on such occasions, “Stewart won’t come to me, though he has had an invitation.”

“Yes,” chimed in Agnes, “we ask Mr. Ansell again and again, and he will have none of us.”

Maud looked at her with a flashing eye. “My brother is a very peculiar person, and we ladies can’t understand him. But I know one thing, and that’s that he has a reason all round for what he does. Look here, I must be getting on. Waiter! Wai-ai-aiter! Bill, please. Separately, of course. Call the Army and Navy cheap! I know better!”

“How does the drapery department compare?” said Agnes sweetly.

The girl gave a sharp choking sound, gathered up her parcels, and left them. Rickie was too much disgusted with his wife to speak.

“Appalling person!” she gasped. “It was naughty of me, but I couldn’t help it. What a dreadful fate for a clever man! To fail in life completely, and then to be thrown back on a family like that!”

“Maud is a snob and a Philistine. But, in her case, something emerges.”

She glanced at him, but proceeded in her suavest tones, “Do let us make one great united attempt to get Mr. Ansell to Sawston.”

“No.”

“What a changeable friend you are! When we were engaged you were always talking about him.”

“Would you finish your tea, and then we will buy the linoleum for the cubicles.”

But she returned to the subject again, not only on that day but throughout the term. Could nothing be done for poor Mr. Ansell? It seemed that she could not rest until all that he had once held dear was humiliated. In this she strayed outside her nature: she was unpractical. And those who stray outside their nature invite disaster. Rickie, goaded by her, wrote to his friend again. The letter was in all ways unlike his old self. Ansell did not answer it. But he did write to Mr. Jackson, with whom he was not acquainted.

“Dear Mr. Jackson,—

“I understand from Widdrington that you have a large house. I would like to tell you how convenient it would be for me to come and stop in it. June suits me best.—

“Yours truly,

“Stewart Ansell”

To which Mr. Jackson replied that not only in June but during the whole year his house was at the disposal of Mr. Ansell and of any one who resembled him.

But Agnes continued her life, cheerfully beating time. She, too, knew that her marriage was a failure, and in her spare moments regretted it. She wished that her husband was handsomer, more successful, more dictatorial. But she would think, “No, no; one mustn’t grumble. It can’t be helped.” Ansell was wrong in sup-posing she might ever leave Rickie. Spiritual apathy prevented her. Nor would she ever be tempted by a jollier man. Here criticism would willingly alter its tone. For Agnes also has her tragedy. She belonged to the type—not necessarily an elevated one—that loves once and once only. Her love for Gerald had not been a noble passion: no imagination transfigured it. But such as it was, it sprang to embrace him, and he carried it away with him when he died. Les amours gui suivrent sont moins involuntaires: by an effort of the will she had warmed herself for Rickie.

She is not conscious of her tragedy, and therefore only the gods need weep at it. But it is fair to remember that hitherto she moves as one from whom the inner life has been withdrawn.

XXV

“I am afraid,” said Agnes, unfolding a letter that she had received in the morning, “that things go far from satisfactorily at Cadover.”

The three were alone at supper. It was the June of Rickie’s second year at Sawston.

“Indeed?” said Herbert, who took a friendly interest. “In what way?

“Do you remember us talking of Stephen—Stephen Wonham, who by an odd coincidence—”

“Yes. Who wrote last year to that miserable failure Varden. I do.”

“It is about him.”

“I did not like the tone of his letter.”

Agnes had made her first move. She waited for her husband to reply to it. But he, though full of a painful curiosity, would not speak. She moved again.

“I don’t think, Herbert, that Aunt Emily, much as I like her, is the kind of person to bring a young man up. At all events the results have been disastrous this time.”

“What has happened?”

“A tangle of things.” She lowered her voice. “Drink.”

“Dear! Really! Was Mrs. Failing fond of him?”

“She used to be. She let him live at Cadover ever since he was a little boy. Naturally that cannot continue.”

Rickie never spoke.

“And now he has taken to be violent and rude,” she went on.

“In short, a beggar on horseback. Who is he? Has he got relatives?”

“She has always been both father and mother to him. Now it must all come to an end. I blame her—and she blames herself—for not being severe enough. He has grown up without fixed principles. He has always followed his inclinations, and one knows the result of that.”

Herbert assented. “To me Mrs. Failing’s course is perfectly plain. She has a certain responsibility. She must pay the youth’s passage to one of the colonies, start him handsomely in some business, and then break off all communications.”

“How funny! It is exactly what she is going to do.”

“I shall then consider that she has behaved in a thoroughly honourable manner.” He held out his plate for gooseberries. “His letter to Varden was neither helpful nor sympathetic, and, if written at all, it ought to have been both. I am not in the least surprised to learn that he has turned out badly. When you write next, would you tell her how sorry I am?”

“Indeed I will. Two years ago, when she was already a little anxious, she did so wish you could undertake him.

“I could not alter a grown man.” But in his heart he thought he could, and smiled at his sister amiably. “Terrible, isn’t it?” he remarked to Rickie. Rickie, who was trying not to mind anything, assented. And an onlooker would have supposed them a dispassionate trio, who were sorry both for Mrs. Failing and for the beggar who would bestride her horses’ backs no longer. A new topic was introduced by the arrival of the evening post.

Herbert took up all the letters, as he often did.

“Jackson?” he exclaimed. “What does the fellow want?” He read, and his tone was mollified, “‘Dear Mr. Pembroke,—Could you, Mrs. Elliot, and Mr. Elliot come to supper with us on Saturday next? I should not merely be pleased, I should be grateful. My wife is writing formally to Mrs. Elliot’—(Here, Agnes, take your letter),—but I venture to write as well, and to add my more uncouth entreaties.’—An olive-branch. It is time! But (ridiculous person!) does he think that we can leave the House deserted and all go out pleasuring in term time?—Rickie, a letter for you.”

“Mine’s the formal invitation,” said Agnes. “How very odd! Mr. Ansell will be there. Surely we asked him here! Did you know he knew the Jacksons?”

“This makes refusal very difficult,” said Herbert, who was anxious to accept. “At all events, Rickie ought to go.”

“I do not want to go,” said Rickie, slowly opening his own letter. “As Agnes says, Ansell has refused to come to us. I cannot put myself out for him.”

“Who’s yours from?” she demanded.

“Mrs. Silt,” replied Herbert, who had seen the handwriting. “I trust she does not want to pay us a visit this term, with the examinations impending and all the machinery at full pressure. Though, Rickie, you will have to accept the Jacksons’ invitation.”

“I cannot possibly go. I have been too rude; with Widdrington we always meet here. I’ll stop with the boys—” His voice caught suddenly. He had opened Mrs. Silt’s letter.

“The Silts are not ill, I hope?”

“No. But, I say,”—he looked at his wife,—“I do think this is going too far. Really, Agnes.”

“What has happened?”

“It is going too far,” he repeated. He was nerving himself for another battle. “I cannot stand this sort of thing. There are limits.”

He laid the letter down. It was Herbert who picked it up, and read: “Aunt Emily has just written to us. We are so glad that her troubles are over, in spite of the expense. It never does to live apart from one’s own relatives so much as she has done up to now. He goes next Saturday to Canada. What you told her about him just turned the scale. She has asked us—”

“No, it’s too much,” he interrupted. “What I told her—told her about him—no, I will have it out at last. Agnes!”

“Yes?” said his wife, raising her eyes from Mrs. Jackson’s formal invitation.

“It’s you—it’s you. I never mentioned him to her. Why, I’ve never seen her or written to her since. I accuse you.”

Then Herbert overbore him, and he collapsed. He was asked what he meant. Why was he so excited? Of what did he accuse his wife. Each time he spoke more feebly, and before long the brother and sister were laughing at him. He felt bewildered, like a boy who knows that he is right but cannot put his case correctly. He repeated, “I’ve never mentioned him to her. It’s a libel. Never in my life.” And they cried, “My dear Rickie, what an absurd fuss!” Then his brain cleared. His eye fell on the letter that his wife had received from his aunt, and he reopened the battle.

“Agnes, give me that letter, if you please.”

“Mrs. Jackson’s?”

“My aunt’s.”

She put her hand on it, and looked at him doubtfully. She saw that she had failed to bully him.

“My aunt’s letter,” he repeated, rising to his feet and bending over the table towards her.

“Why, dear?”

“Yes, why indeed?” echoed Herbert. He too had bullied Rickie, but from a purer motive: he had tried to stamp out a dissension between husband and wife. It was not the first time he had intervened.

“The letter. For this reason: it will show me what you have done. I believe you have ruined Stephen. You have worked at it for two years. You have put words into my mouth to ‘turn the scale’ against him. He goes to Canada—and all the world thinks it is owing to me. As I said before—I advise you to stop smiling—you have gone a little too far.”

They were all on their feet now, standing round the little table. Agnes said nothing, but the fingers of her delicate hand tightened upon the letter. When her husband snatched at it she resisted, and with the effect of a harlequinade everything went on the floor—lamb, mint sauce, gooseberries, lemonade, whisky. At once they were swamped in domesticities. She rang the bell for the servant, cries arose, dusters were brought, broken crockery (a wedding present) picked up from the carpet; while he stood wrathfully at the window, regarding the obscured sun’s decline.

“I MUST see her letter,” he repeated, when the agitation was over. He was too angry to be diverted from his purpose. Only slight emotions are thwarted by an interlude of farce.

“I’ve had enough of this quarrelling,” she retorted. “You know that the Silts are inaccurate. I think you might have given me the benefit of the doubt. If you will know—have you forgotten that ride you took with him?”

“I—” he was again bewildered. “The ride where I dreamt—”

“The ride where you turned back because you could not listen to a disgraceful poem?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The poem was Aunt Emily. He read it to you and a stray soldier. Afterwards you told me. You said, ‘Really it is shocking, his ingratitude. She ought to know about it’ She does know, and I should be glad of an apology.”

He had said something of the sort in a fit of irritation. Mrs. Silt was right—he had helped to turn the scale.

“Whatever I said, you knew what I meant. You knew I’d sooner cut my tongue out than have it used against him. Even then.” He sighed. Had he ruined his brother? A curious tenderness came over him, and passed when he remembered his own dead child. “We have ruined him, then. Have you any objection to ‘we’? We have disinherited him.”

“I decide against you,” interposed Herbert. “I have now heard both sides of this deplorable affair. You are talking most criminal nonsense. ‘Disinherit!’ Sentimental twaddle. It’s been clear to me from the first that Mrs. Failing has been imposed upon by the Wonham man, a person with no legal claim on her, and any one who exposes him performs a public duty—”

“—And gets money.”

“Money?” He was always uneasy at the word. “Who mentioned money?”

“Just understand me, Herbert, and of what it is that I accuse my wife.” Tears came into his eyes. “It is not that I like the Wonham man, or think that he isn’t a drunkard and worse. He’s too awful in every way. But he ought to have my aunt’s money, because he’s lived all his life with her, and is her nephew as much as I am. You see, my father went wrong.” He stopped, amazed at himself. How easy it had been to say! He was withering up: the power to care about this stupid secret had died.

When Herbert understood, his first thought was for Dunwood House.

“Why have I never been told?” was his first remark.

“We settled to tell no one,” said Agnes. “Rickie, in his anxiety to prove me a liar, has broken his promise.”

“I ought to have been told,” said Herbert, his anger increasing. “Had I known, I could have averted this deplorable scene.”

“Let me conclude it,” said Rickie, again collapsing and leaving the dining-room. His impulse was to go straight to Cadover and make a business-like statement of the position to Stephen. Then the man would be armed, and perhaps fight the two women successfully, But he resisted the impulse. Why should he help one power of evil against another? Let them go intertwined to destruction. To enrich his brother would be as bad as enriching himself. If their aunt’s money ever did come to him, he would refuse to accept it. That was the easiest and most dignified course. He troubled himself no longer with justice or pity, and the next day he asked his wife’s pardon for his behaviour.

In the dining-room the conversation continued. Agnes, without much difficulty, gained her brother as an ally. She acknowledged that she had been wrong in not telling him, and he then declared that she had been right on every other point. She slurred a little over the incident of her treachery, for Herbert was sometimes clearsighted over details, though easily muddled in a general survey. Mrs. Failing had had plenty of direct causes of complaint, and she dwelt on these. She dealt, too, on the very handsome way in which the young man, “though he knew nothing, had never asked to know,” was being treated by his aunt.

“‘Handsome’ is the word,” said Herbert. “I hope not indulgently. He does not deserve indulgence.”

And she knew that he, like herself, could remember money, and that it lent an acknowledged halo to her cause.

“It is not a savoury subject,” he continued, with sudden stiffness. “I understand why Rickie is so hysterical. My impulse”—he laid his hand on her shoulder—“is to abandon it at once. But if I am to be of any use to you, I must hear it all. There are moments when we must look facts in the face.”

She did not shrink from the subject as much as he thought, as much as she herself could have wished. Two years before, it had filled her with a physical loathing. But by now she had accustomed herself to it.

“I am afraid, Bertie boy, there is nothing else to bear, I have tried to find out again and again, but Aunt Emily will not tell me. I suppose it is natural. She wants to shield the Elliot name. She only told us in a fit of temper; then we all agreed to keep it to ourselves; then Rickie again mismanaged her, and ever since she has refused to let us know any details.”

“A most unsatisfactory position.” “So I feel.” She sat down again with a sigh. Mrs. Failing had been a great trial to her orderly mind. “She is an odd woman. She is always laughing. She actually finds it amusing that we know no more.”

“They are an odd family.”

“They are indeed.”

Herbert, with unusual sweetness, bent down and kissed her.

She thanked him.

Their tenderness soon passed. They exchanged it with averted eyes. It embarrassed them. There are moments for all of us when we seem obliged to speak in a new unprofitable tongue. One might fancy a seraph, vexed with our normal language, who touches the pious to blasphemy, the blasphemous to piety. The seraph passes, and we proceed unaltered—conscious, however, that we have not been ourselves, and that we may fail in this function yet again. So Agnes and Herbert, as they proceeded to discuss the Jackson’s supper-party, had an uneasy memory of spiritual deserts, spiritual streams.

XXVI

Poor Mr. Ansell was actually sitting in the garden of Dunwood House. It was Sunday morning. The air was full of roasting beef. The sound of a manly hymn, taken very fast, floated over the road from the school chapel. He frowned, for he was reading a book, the Essays of Anthony Eustace Failing.

He was here on account of this book—at least so he told himself. It had just been published, and the Jacksons were sure that Mr. Elliot would have a copy. For a book one may go anywhere. It would not have been logical to enter Dunwood House for the purpose of seeing Rickie, when Rickie had not come to supper yesterday to see him. He was at Sawston to assure himself of his friend’s grave. With quiet eyes he had intended to view the sods, with unfaltering fingers to inscribe the epitaph. Love remained. But in high matters he was practical. He knew that it would be useless to reveal it.

“Morning!” said a voice behind him.

He saw no reason to reply to this superfluous statement, and went on with his reading.

“Morning!” said the voice again.

As for the Essays, the thought was somewhat old-fashioned, and he picked many holes in it; nor was he anything but bored by the prospect of the brotherhood of man. However, Mr. Failing stuck to his guns, such as they were, and fired from them several good remarks. Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity (coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something), and his avowed preference for coarseness. Vulgarity, to him, had been the primal curse, the shoddy reticence that prevents man opening his heart to man, the power that makes against equality. From it sprang all the things that he hated—class shibboleths, ladies, lidies, the game laws, the Conservative party—all the things that accent the divergencies rather than the similarities in human nature. Whereas coarseness—But at this point Herbert Pembroke had scrawled with a blue pencil: “Childish. One reads no further.”

“Morning!” repeated the voice.

Ansell read further, for here was the book of a man who had tried, however unsuccessfully, to practice what he preached. Mrs. Failing, in her Introduction, described with delicate irony his difficulties as a landlord; but she did not record the love in which his name was held. Nor could her irony touch him when he cried: “Attain the practical through the unpractical. There is no other road.” Ansell was inclined to think that the unpractical is its own reward, but he respected those who attempted to journey beyond it. We must all of us go over the mountains. There is certainly no other road.

“Nice morning!” said the voice.

It was not a nice morning, so Ansell felt bound to speak. He answered: “No. Why?” A clod of earth immediately struck him on the back. He turned round indignantly, for he hated physical rudeness. A square man of ruddy aspect was pacing the gravel path, his hands deep in his pockets. He was very angry. Then he saw that the clod of earth nourished a blue lobelia, and that a wound of corresponding size appeared on the pie-shaped bed. He was not so angry. “I expect they will mind it,” he reflected. Last night, at the Jacksons’, Agnes had displayed a brisk pity that made him wish to wring her neck. Maude had not exaggerated. Mr. Pembroke had patronized through a sorrowful voice and large round eyes. Till he met these people he had never been told that his career was a failure. Apparently it was. They would never have been civil to him if it had been a success, if they or theirs had anything to fear from him.

In many ways Ansell was a conceited man; but he was never proud of being right. He had foreseen Rickie’s catastrophe from the first, but derived from this no consolation. In many ways he was pedantic; but his pedantry lay close to the vineyards of life—far closer than that fetich Experience of the innumerable tea-cups. He had a great many facts to learn, and before he died he learnt a suitable quantity. But he never forgot that the holiness of the heart’s imagination can alone classify these facts—can alone decide which is an exception, which an example. “How unpractical it all is!” That was his comment on Dunwood House. “How unbusiness-like! They live together without love. They work without conviction. They seek money without requiring it. They die, and nothing will have happened, either for themselves or for others.” It is a comment that the academic mind will often make when first confronted with the world.

But he was becoming illogical. The clod of earth had disturbed him. Brushing the dirt off his back, he returned to the book. What a curious affair was the essay on “Gaps”! Solitude, star-crowned, pacing the fields of England, has a dialogue with Seclusion. He, poor little man, lives in the choicest scenery—among rocks, forests, emerald lawns, azure lakes. To keep people out he has built round his domain a high wall, on which is graven his motto—“Procul este profani.” But he cannot enjoy himself. His only pleasure is in mocking the absent Profane. They are in his mind night and day. Their blemishes and stupidities form the subject of his great poem, “In the Heart of Nature.” Then Solitude tells him that so it always will be until he makes a gap in the wall, and permits his seclusion to be the sport of circumstance. He obeys. The Profane invade him; but for short intervals they wander elsewhere, and during those intervals the heart of Nature is revealed to him.

This dialogue had really been suggested to Mr. Failing by a talk with his brother-in-law. It also touched Ansell. He looked at the man who had thrown the clod, and was now pacing with obvious youth and impudence upon the lawn. “Shall I improve my soul at his expense?” he thought. “I suppose I had better.” In friendly tones he remarked, “Were you waiting for Mr. Pembroke?”

“No,” said the young man. “Why?”

Ansell, after a moment’s admiration, flung the Essays at him. They hit him in the back. The next moment he lay on his own back in the lobelia pie.

“But it hurts!” he gasped, in the tones of a puzzled civilization. “What you do hurts!” For the young man was nicking him over the shins with the rim of the book cover. “Little brute-ee—ow!”

“Then say Pax!”

Something revolted in Ansell. Why should he say Pax? Freeing his hand, he caught the little brute under the chin, and was again knocked into the lobelias by a blow on the mouth.

“Say Pax!” he repeated, pressing the philosopher’s skull into the mould; and he added, with an anxiety that was somehow not offensive, “I do advise you. You’d really better.”

Ansell swallowed a little blood. He tried to move, and he could not. He looked carefully into the young man’s eyes and into the palm of his right hand, which at present swung unclenched, and he said “Pax!”

“Shake hands!” said the other, helping him up. There was nothing Ansell loathed so much as the hearty Britisher; but he shook hands, and they stared at each other awkwardly. With civil murmurs they picked the little blue flowers off each other’s clothes. Ansell was trying to remember why they had quarrelled, and the young man was wondering why he had not guarded his chin properly. In the distance a hymn swung off—

“Fight the good. Fight with. All thy. Might.”

They would be across from the chapel soon.

“Your book, sir?”

“Thank you, sir—yes.”

“Why!” cried the young man—“why, it’s ‘What We Want’! At least the binding’s exactly the same.”

“It’s called ‘Essays,’” said Ansell.

“Then that’s it. Mrs. Failing, you see, she wouldn’t call it that, because three W’s, you see, in a row, she said, are vulgar, and sound like Tolstoy, if you’ve heard of him.”

Ansell confessed to an acquaintance, and then said, “Do you think ‘What We Want’ vulgar?” He was not at all interested, but he desired to escape from the atmosphere of pugilistic courtesy, more painful to him than blows themselves.

“It IS the same book,” said the other—“same title, same binding.” He weighed it like a brick in his muddy hands.

“Open it to see if the inside corresponds,” said Ansell, swallowing a laugh and a little more blood with it.

With a liberal allowance of thumb-marks, he turned the pages over and read, “‘the rural silence that is not a poet’s luxury but a practical need for all men.’ Yes, it is the same book.” Smiling pleasantly over the discovery, he handed it back to the owner.

“And is it true?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is it true that rural silence is a practical need?”

“Don’t ask me!”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“What?”

“Rural silence.”

“A field with no noise in it, I suppose you mean. I don’t understand.”

Ansell smiled, but a slight fire in the man’s eye checked him. After all, this was a person who could knock one down. Moreover, there was no reason why he should be teased. He had it in him to retort “No. Why?” He was not stupid in essentials. He was irritable—in Ansell’s eyes a frequent sign of grace. Sitting down on the upturned seat, he remarked, “I like the book in many ways. I don’t think ‘What We Want’ would have been a vulgar title. But I don’t intend to spoil myself on the chance of mending the world, which is what the creed amounts to. Nor am I keen on rural silences.”

“Curse!” he said thoughtfully, sucking at an empty pipe.

“Tobacco?”

“Please.”

“Rickie’s is invariably—filthy.”

“Who says I know Rickie?”

“Well, you know his aunt. It’s a possible link. Be gentle with Rickie. Don’t knock him down if he doesn’t think it’s a nice morning.”

The other was silent.

“Do you know him well?”

“Kind of.” He was not inclined to talk. The wish to smoke was very violent in him, and Ansell noticed how he gazed at the wreaths that ascended from bowl and stem, and how, when the stem was in his mouth, he bit it. He gave the idea of an animal with just enough soul to contemplate its own bliss. United with refinement, such a type was common in Greece. It is not common today, and Ansell was surprised to find it in a friend of Rickie’s. Rickie, if he could even “kind of know” such a creature, must be stirring in his grave.

“Do you know his wife too?”

“Oh yes. In a way I know Agnes. But thank you for this tobacco. Last night I nearly died. I have no money.”

“Take the whole pouch—do.”

After a moment’s hesitation he did. “Fight the good” had scarcely ended, so quickly had their intimacy grown.

“I suppose you’re a friend of Rickie’s?”

Ansell was tempted to reply, “I don’t know him at all.” But it seemed no moment for the severer truths, so he said, “I knew him well at Cambridge, but I have seen very little of him since.”

“Is it true that his baby was lame?”

“I believe so.”

His teeth closed on his pipe. Chapel was over. The organist was prancing through the voluntary, and the first ripple of boys had already reached Dunwood House. In a few minutes the masters would be here too, and Ansell, who was becoming interested, hurried the conversation forward.

“Have you come far?”

“From Wiltshire. Do you know Wiltshire?” And for the first time there came into his face the shadow of a sentiment, the passing tribute to some mystery. “It’s a good country. I live in one of the finest valleys out of Salisbury Plain. I mean, I lived.”

“Have you been dismissed from Cadover, without a penny in your pocket?”

He was alarmed at this. Such knowledge seemed simply diabolical. Ansell explained that if his boots were chalky, if his clothes had obviously been slept in, if he knew Mrs. Failing, if he knew Wiltshire, and if he could buy no tobacco—then the deduction was possible. “You do just attend,” he murmured.

The house was filling with boys, and Ansell saw, to his regret, the head of Agnes over the thuyia hedge that separated the small front garden from the side lawn where he was sitting. After a few minutes it was followed by the heads of Rickie and Mr. Pembroke. All the heads were turned the other way. But they would find his card in the hall, and if the man had left any message they would find that too. “What are you?” he demanded. “Who are you—your name—I don’t care about that. But it interests me to class people, and up to now I have failed with you.”

“I—” He stopped. Ansell reflected that there are worse answers. “I really don’t know what I am. Used to think I was something special, but strikes me now I feel much like other chaps. Used to look down on the labourers. Used to take for granted I was a gentleman, but really I don’t know where I do belong.”

“One belongs to the place one sleeps in and to the people one eats with.”

“As often as not I sleep out of doors and eat by myself, so that doesn’t get you any further.”

A silence, akin to poetry, invaded Ansell. Was it only a pose to like this man, or was he really wonderful? He was not romantic, for Romance is a figure with outstretched hands, yearning for the unattainable. Certain figures of the Greeks, to whom we continually return, suggested him a little. One expected nothing of him—no purity of phrase nor swift edged thought. Yet the conviction grew that he had been back somewhere—back to some table of the gods, spread in a field where there is no noise, and that he belonged for ever to the guests with whom he had eaten. Meanwhile he was simple and frank, and what he could tell he would tell to any one. He had not the suburban reticence. Ansell asked him, “Why did Mrs. Failing turn you out of Cadover? I should like to hear that too.”

“Because she was tired of me. Because, again, I couldn’t keep quiet over the farm hands. I ask you, is it right?” He became incoherent. Ansell caught, “And they grow old—they don’t play games—it ends they can’t play.” An illustration emerged. “Take a kitten—if you fool about with her, she goes on playing well into a cat.”

“But Mrs. Failing minded no mice being caught.”

“Mice?” said the young man blankly. “What I was going to say is, that some one was jealous of my being at Cadover. I’ll mention no names, but I fancy it was Mrs. Silt. I’m sorry for her if it was. Anyhow, she set Mrs. Failing against me. It came on the top of other things—and out I went.”

“What did Mrs. Silt, whose name I don’t mention, say?”

He looked guilty. “I don’t know. Easy enough to find something to say. The point is that she said something. You know, Mr.—I don’t know your name, mine’s Wonham, but I’m more grateful than I can put it over this tobacco. I mean, you ought to know there is another side to this quarrel. It’s wrong, but it’s there.”

Ansell told him not to be uneasy: he lad already guessed that there might be another side. But he could not make out why Mr. Wonham should have come straight from the aunt to the nephew. They were now sitting on the upturned seat. “What We Want,” a good deal shattered, lay between them.

“On account of above-mentioned reasons, there was a row. I don’t know—you can guess the style of thing. She wanted to treat me to the colonies, and had up the parson to talk soft-sawder and make out that a boundless continent was the place for a lad like me. I said, ‘I can’t run up to the Rings without getting tired, nor gallop a horse out of this view without tiring it, so what is the point of a boundless continent?’ Then I saw that she was frightened of me, and bluffed a bit more, and in the end I was nipped. She caught me—just like her! when I had nothing on but flannels, and was coming into the house, having licked the Cadchurch team. She stood up in the doorway between those stone pilasters and said, ‘No! Never again!’ and behind her was Wilbraham, whom I tried to turn out, and the gardener, and poor old Leighton, who hates being hurt. She said, ‘There’s a hundred pounds for you at the London bank, and as much more in December. Go!’ I said, ‘Keep your—money, and tell me whose son I am.’ I didn’t care really. I only said it on the off-chance of hurting her. Sure enough, she caught on to the doorhandle (being lame) and said, ‘I can’t—I promised—I don’t really want to,’ and Wilbraham did stare. Then—she’s very queer—she burst out laughing, and went for the packet after all, and we heard her laugh through the window as she got it. She rolled it at me down the steps, and she says, ‘A leaf out of the eternal comedy for you, Stephen,’ or something of that sort. I opened it as I walked down the drive, she laughing always and catching on to the handle of the front door. Of course it wasn’t comic at all. But down in the village there were both cricket teams, already a little tight, and the mad plumber shouting ‘Rights of Man!’ They knew I was turned out. We did have a row, and kept it up too. They daren’t touch Wilbraham’s windows, but there isn’t much glass left up at Cadover. When you start, it’s worth going on, but in the end I had to cut. They subscribed a bob here and a bob there, and these are Flea Thompson’s Sundays. I sent a line to Leighton not to forward my own things: I don’t fancy them. They aren’t really mine.” He did not mention his great symbolic act, performed, it is to be feared, when he was rather drunk and the friendly policeman was looking the other way. He had cast all his flannels into the little millpond, and then waded himself through the dark cold water to the new clothes on the other side. Some one had flung his pipe and his packet after him. The packet had fallen short. For this reason it was wet when he handed it to Ansell, and ink that had been dry for twenty-three years had begun to run again.

“I wondered if you’re right about the hundred pounds,” said Ansell gravely. “It is pleasant to be proud, but it is unpleasant to die in the night through not having any tobacco.”

“But I’m not proud. Look how I’ve taken your pouch! The hundred pounds was—well, can’t you see yourself, it was quite different? It was, so to speak, inconvenient for me to take the hundred pounds. Or look again how I took a shilling from a boy who earns nine bob a-week! Proves pretty conclusively I’m not proud.”

Ansell saw it was useless to argue. He perceived, beneath the slatternly use of words, the man, buttoned up in them, just as his body was buttoned up in a shoddy suit,—and he wondered more than ever that such a man should know the Elliots. He looked at the face, which was frank, proud, and beautiful, if truth is beauty. Of mercy or tact such a face knew little. It might be coarse, but it had in it nothing vulgar or wantonly cruel. “May I read these papers?” he said.

“Of course. Oh yes; didn’t I say? I’m Rickie’s half-brother, come here to tell him the news. He doesn’t know. There it is, put shortly for you. I was saying, though, that I bolted in the dark, slept in the rifle-butts above Salisbury, the sheds where they keep the cardboard men, you know, never locked up as they ought to be. I turned the whole place upside down to teach them.”

“Here is your packet again,” said Ansell. “Thank you. How interesting!” He rose from the seat and turned towards Dunwood House. He looked at the bow-windows, the cheap picturesque gables, the terracotta dragons clawing a dirty sky. He listened to the clink of plates and to the voice of Mr. Pembroke taking one of his innumerable roll-calls. He looked at the bed of lobelias. How interesting! What else was there to say?

“One must be the son of some one,” remarked Stephen. And that was all he had to say. To him those names on the moistened paper were mere antiquities. He was neither proud of them nor ashamed. A man must have parents, or he cannot enter the delightful world. A man, if he has a brother, may reasonably visit him, for they may have interests in common. He continued his narrative, how in the night he had heard the clocks, how at daybreak, instead of entering the city, he had struck eastward to save money,—while Ansell still looked at the house and found that all his imagination and knowledge could lead him no farther than this: how interesting!

“—And what do you think of that for a holy horror?”

“For a what?” said Ansell, his thoughts far away.

“This man I am telling you about, who gave me a lift towards Andover, who said I was a blot on God’s earth.”

One o’clock struck. It was strange that neither of them had had any summons from the house.

“He said I ought to be ashamed of myself. He said, ‘I’ll not be the means of bringing shame to an honest gentleman and lady.’ I told him not to be a fool. I said I knew what I was about. Rickie and Agnes are properly educated, which leads people to look at things straight, and not go screaming about blots. A man like me, with just a little reading at odd hours—I’ve got so far, and Rickie has been through Cambridge.”

“And Mrs. Elliot?”

“Oh, she won’t mind, and I told the man so; but he kept on saying, ‘I’ll not be the means of bringing shame to an honest gentleman and lady,’ until I got out of his rotten cart.” His eye watched the man a Nonconformist, driving away over God’s earth. “I caught the train by running. I got to Waterloo at—”

Here the parlour-maid fluttered towards them, Would Mr. Wonham come in? Mrs. Elliot would be glad to see him now.

“Mrs. Elliot?” cried Ansell. “Not Mr. Elliot?”

“It’s all the same,” said Stephen, and moved towards the house.

“You see, I only left my name. They don’t know why I’ve come.”

“Perhaps Mr. Elliot sees me meanwhile?”

The parlour-maid looked blank. Mr. Elliot had not said so. He had been with Mrs. Elliot and Mr. Pembroke in the study. Now the gentlemen had gone upstairs.

“All right, I can wait.” After all, Rickie was treating him as he had treated Rickie, as one in the grave, to whom it is futile to make any loving motion. Gone upstairs—to brush his hair for dinner! The irony of the situation appealed to him strongly. It reminded him of the Greek Drama, where the actors know so little and the spectators so much.

“But, by the bye,” he called after Stephen, “I think I ought to tell you—don’t—”

“What is it?”

“Don’t—” Then he was silent. He had been tempted to explain everything, to tell the fellow how things stood, that he must avoid this if he wanted to attain that; that he must break the news to Rickie gently; that he must have at least one battle royal with Agnes. But it was contrary to his own spirit to coach people: he held the human soul to be a very delicate thing, which can receive eternal damage from a little patronage. Stephen must go into the house simply as himself, for thus alone would he remain there.

“I ought to knock my pipe out? Was that it?” “By no means. Go in, your pipe and you.”

He hesitated, torn between propriety and desire. Then he followed the parlour-maid into the house smoking. As he entered the dinner-bell rang, and there was the sound of rushing feet, which died away into shuffling and silence. Through the window of the boys’ dining-hall came the colourless voice of Rickie—“‘Benedictus benedicat.’”

Ansell prepared himself to witness the second act of the drama; forgetting that all this world, and not part of it, is a stage.

XXVII

The parlour-maid took Mr. Wonham to the study. He had been in the drawing-room before, but had got bored, and so had strolled out into the garden. Now he was in better spirits, as a man ought to be who has knocked down a man. As he passed through the hall he sparred at the teak monkey, and hung his cap on the bust of Hermes. And he greeted Mrs. Elliot with a pleasant clap of laughter. “Oh, I’ve come with the most tremendous news!” he cried.

She bowed, but did not shake hands, which rather surprised him. But he never troubled over “details.” He seldom watched people, and never thought that they were watching him. Nor could he guess how much it meant to her that he should enter her presence smoking. Had she not said once at Cadover, “Oh, please smoke; I love the smell of a pipe”?

“Would you sit down? Exactly there, please.” She placed him at a large table, opposite an inkpot and a pad of blotting-paper.

“Will you tell your ‘tremendous news’ to me? My brother and my husband are giving the boys their dinner.”

“Ah!” said Stephen, who had had neither time nor money for breakfast in London.

“I told them not to wait for me.”

So he came to the point at once. He trusted this handsome woman. His strength and his youth called to hers, expecting no prudish response. “It’s very odd. It is that I’m Rickie’s brother. I’ve just found out. I’ve come to tell you all.”

“Yes?”

He felt in his pocket for the papers. “Half-brother I ought to have said.”

“Yes?”

“I’m illegitimate. Legally speaking, that is, I’ve been turned out of Cadover. I haven’t a penny. I—”

“There is no occasion to inflict the details.” Her face, which had been an even brown, began to flush slowly in the centre of the cheeks. The colour spread till all that he saw of her was suffused, and she turned away. He thought he had shocked her, and so did she. Neither knew that the body can be insincere and express not the emotions we feel but those that we should like to feel. In reality she was quite calm, and her dislike of him had nothing emotional in it as yet.

“You see—” he began. He was determined to tell the fidgety story, for the sooner it was over the sooner they would have something to eat. Delicacy he lacked, and his sympathies were limited. But such as they were, they rang true: he put no decorous phantom between him and his desires.

“I do see. I have seen for two years.” She sat down at the head of the table, where there was another ink-pot. Into this she dipped a pen. “I have seen everything, Mr. Wonham—who you are, how you have behaved at Cadover, how you must have treated Mrs. Failing yesterday; and now”—her voice became very grave—“I see why you have come here, penniless. Before you speak, we know what you will say.”

His mouth fell open, and he laughed so merrily that it might have given her a warning. But she was thinking how to follow up her first success. “And I thought I was bringing tremendous news!” he cried. “I only twisted it out of Mrs. Failing last night. And Rickie knows too?”

“We have known for two years.”

“But come, by the bye,—if you’ve known for two years, how is it you didn’t—” The laugh died out of his eyes. “You aren’t ashamed?” he asked, half rising from his chair. “You aren’t like the man towards Andover?”

“Please, please sit down,” said Agnes, in the even tones she used when speaking to the servants; “let us not discuss side issues. I am a horribly direct person, Mr. Wonham. I go always straight to the point.” She opened a chequebook. “I am afraid I shall shock you. For how much?”

He was not attending.

“There is the paper we suggest you shall sign.” She pushed towards him a pseudo-legal document, just composed by Herbert.

“In consideration of the sum of..., I agree to perpetual silence—to restrain from libellous...never to molest the said Frederick Elliot by intruding—‘”

His brain was not quick. He read the document over twice, and he could still say, “But what’s that cheque for?”

“It is my husband’s. He signed for you as soon as we heard you were here. We guessed you had come to be silenced. Here is his signature. But he has left the filling in for me. For how much? I will cross it, shall I? You will just have started a banking account, if I understand Mrs. Failing rightly. It is not quite accurate to say you are penniless: I heard from her just before you returned from your cricket. She allows you two hundred a-year, I think. But this additional sum—shall I date the cheque Saturday or for tomorrow?”

At last he found words. Knocking his pipe out on the table, he said slowly, “Here’s a very bad mistake.”

“It is quite possible,” retorted Agnes. She was glad she had taken the offensive, instead of waiting till he began his blackmailing, as had been the advice of Rickie. Aunt Emily had said that very spring, “One’s only hope with Stephen is to start bullying first.” Here he was, quite bewildered, smearing the pipe-ashes with his thumb. He asked to read the document again. “A stamp and all!” he remarked.

They had anticipated that his claim would exceed two pounds.

“I see. All right. It takes a fool a minute. Never mind. I’ve made a bad mistake.”

“You refuse?” she exclaimed, for he was standing at the door. “Then do your worst! We defy you!”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Elliot,” he said roughly. “I don’t want a scene with you, nor yet with your husband. We’ll say no more about it. It’s all right. I mean no harm.”

“But your signature then! You must sign—you—”

He pushed past her, and said as he reached for his cap, “There, that’s all right. It’s my mistake. I’m sorry.” He spoke like a farmer who has failed to sell a sheep. His manner was utterly prosaic, and up to the last she thought he had not understood her. “But it’s money we offer you,” she informed him, and then darted back to the study, believing for one terrible moment that he had picked up the blank cheque. When she returned to the hall he had gone. He was walking down the road rather quickly. At the corner he cleared his throat, spat into the gutter, and disappeared.

“There’s an odd finish,” she thought. She was puzzled, and determined to recast the interview a little when she related it to Rickie. She had not succeeded, for the paper was still unsigned. But she had so cowed Stephen that he would probably rest content with his two hundred a-year, and never come troubling them again. Clever management, for one knew him to be rapacious: she had heard tales of him lending to the poor and exacting repayment to the uttermost farthing. He had also stolen at school. Moderately triumphant, she hurried into the side-garden: she had just remembered Ansell: she, not Rickie, had received his card.

“Oh, Mr. Ansell!” she exclaimed, awaking him from some day-dream. “Haven’t either Rickie or Herbert been out to you? Now, do come into dinner, to show you aren’t offended. You will find all of us assembled in the boys’ dining-hall.”

To her annoyance he accepted.

“That is, if the Jacksons are not expecting you.”

The Jacksons did not matter. If he might brush his clothes and bathe his lip, he would like to come.

“Oh, what has happened to you? And oh, my pretty lobelias!”

He replied, “A momentary contact with reality,” and she, who did not look for sense in his remarks, hurried away to the dining-hall to announce him.

The dining-hall was not unlike the preparation room. There was the same parquet floor, and dado of shiny pitchpine. On its walls also were imperial portraits, and over the harmonium to which they sang the evening hymns was spread the Union Jack. Sunday dinner, the most pompous meal of the week, was in progress. Her brother sat at the head of the high table, her husband at the head of the second. To each he gave a reassuring nod and went to her own seat, which was among the junior boys. The beef was being carried out; she stopped it. “Mr. Ansell is coming,” she called. “Herbert there is more room by you; sit up straight, boys.” The boys sat up straight, and a respectful hush spread over the room.

“Here he is!” called Rickie cheerfully, taking his cue from his wife. “Oh, this is splendid!” Ansell came in. “I’m so glad you managed this. I couldn’t leave these wretches last night!” The boys tittered suitably. The atmosphere seemed normal. Even Herbert, though longing to hear what had happened to the blackmailer, gave adequate greeting to their guest: “Come in, Mr. Ansell; come here. Take us as you find us!”

“I understood,” said Stewart, “that I should find you all. Mrs. Elliot told me I should. On that understanding I came.”

It was at once evident that something had gone wrong.

Ansell looked round the room carefully. Then clearing his throat and ruffling his hair, he began—“I cannot see the man with whom I have talked, intimately, for an hour, in your garden.”

The worst of it was they were all so far from him and from each other, each at the end of a tableful of inquisitive boys. The two masters looked at Agnes for information, for her reassuring nod had not told them much. She looked hopelessly back.

“I cannot see this man,” repeated Ansell, who remained by the harmonium in the midst of astonished waitresses. “Is he to be given no lunch?”

Herbert broke the silence by fresh greetings. Rickie knew that the contest was lost, and that his friend had sided with the enemy. It was the kind of thing he would do. One must face the catastrophe quietly and with dignity. Perhaps Ansell would have turned on his heel, and left behind him only vague suspicions, if Mrs. Elliot had not tried to talk him down. “Man,” she cried—“what man? Oh, I know—terrible bore! Did he get hold of you?”—thus committing their first blunder, and causing Ansell to say to Rickie, “Have you seen your brother?”

“I have not.”

“Have you been told he was here?”

Rickie’s answer was inaudible.

“Have you been told you have a brother?”

“Let us continue this conversation later.”

“Continue it? My dear man, how can we until you know what I’m talking about? You must think me mad; but I tell you solemnly that you have a brother of whom you’ve never heard, and that he was in this house ten minutes ago.” He paused impressively. “Your wife has happened to see him first. Being neither serious nor truthful, she is keeping you apart, telling him some lie and not telling you a word.”

There was a murmur of alarm. One of the prefects rose, and Ansell set his back to the wall, quite ready for a battle. For two years he had waited for his opportunity. He would hit out at Mrs. Elliot like any ploughboy now that it had come. Rickie said: “There is a slight misunderstanding. I, like my wife, have known what there is to know for two years”—a dignified rebuff, but their second blunder.

“Exactly,” said Agnes. “Now I think Mr. Ansell had better go.”

“Go?” exploded Ansell. “I’ve everything to say yet. I beg your pardon, Mrs. Elliot, I am concerned with you no longer. This man”—he turned to the avenue of faces—“this man who teaches you has a brother. He has known of him two years and been ashamed. He has—oh—oh—how it fits together! Rickie, it’s you, not Mrs. Silt, who must have sent tales of him to your aunt. It’s you who’ve turned him out of Cadover. It’s you who’ve ordered him to be ruined today.”

Now Herbert arose. “Out of my sight, sir! But have it from me first that Rickie and his aunt have both behaved most generously. No, no, Agnes, I’ll not be interrupted. Garbled versions must not get about. If the Wonham man is not satisfied now, he must be insatiable. He cannot levy blackmail on us for ever. Sir, I give you two minutes; then you will be expelled by force.”

“Two minutes!” sang Ansell. “I can say a great deal in that.” He put one foot on a chair and held his arms over the quivering room. He seemed transfigured into a Hebrew prophet passionate for satire and the truth. “Oh, keep quiet for two minutes,” he cried, “and I’ll tell you something you’ll be glad to hear. You’re a little afraid Stephen may come back. Don’t be afraid. I bring good news. You’ll never see him nor any one like him again. I must speak very plainly, for you are all three fools. I don’t want you to say afterwards, ‘Poor Mr. Ansell tried to be clever.’ Generally I don’t mind, but I should mind today. Please listen. Stephen is a bully; he drinks; he knocks one down; but he would sooner die than take money from people he did not love. Perhaps he will die, for he has nothing but a few pence that the poor gave him and some tobacco which, to my eternal glory, he accepted from me. Please listen again. Why did he come here? Because he thought you would love him, and was ready to love you. But I tell you, don’t be afraid. He would sooner die now than say you were his brother. Please listen again—”

“Now, Stewart, don’t go on like that,” said Rickie bitterly. “It’s easy enough to preach when you are an outsider. You would be more charitable if such a thing had happened to yourself. Easy enough to be unconventional when you haven’t suffered and know nothing of the facts. You love anything out of the way, anything queer, that doesn’t often happen, and so you get excited over this. It’s useless, my dear man; you have hurt me, but you will never upset me. As soon as you stop this ridiculous scene we will finish our dinner. Spread this scandal; add to it. I’m too old to mind such nonsense. I cannot help my father’s disgrace, on the one hand; nor, on the other, will I have anything to do with his blackguard of a son.”

So the secret was given to the world. Agnes might colour at his speech; Herbert might calculate the effect of it on the entries for Dunwood House; but he cared for none of these things. Thank God! he was withered up at last.

“Please listen again,” resumed Ansell. “Please correct two slight mistakes: firstly, Stephen is one of the greatest people I have ever met; secondly, he’s not your father’s son. He’s the son of your mother.”

It was Rickie, not Ansell, who was carried from the hall, and it was Herbert who pronounced the blessing—

“Benedicto benedicatur.”

A profound stillness succeeded the storm, and the boys, slipping away from their meal, told the news to the rest of the school, or put it in the letters they were writing home.

XXVIII

The soul has her own currency. She mints her spiritual coinage and stamps it with the image of some beloved face. With it she pays her debts, with it she reckons, saying, “This man has worth, this man is worthless.” And in time she forgets its origin; it seems to her to be a thing unalterable, divine. But the soul can also have her bankruptcies.

Perhaps she will be the richer in the end. In her agony she learns to reckon clearly. Fair as the coin may have been, it was not accurate; and though she knew it not, there were treasures that it could not buy. The face, however beloved, was mortal, and as liable as the soul herself to err. We do but shift responsibility by making a standard of the dead.

There is, indeed, another coinage that bears on it not man’s image but God’s. It is incorruptible, and the soul may trust it safely; it will serve her beyond the stars. But it cannot give us friends, or the embrace of a lover, or the touch of children, for with our fellow mortals it has no concern. It cannot even give the joys we call trivial—fine weather, the pleasures of meat and drink, bathing and the hot sand afterwards, running, dreamless sleep. Have we learnt the true discipline of a bankruptcy if we turn to such coinage as this? Will it really profit us so much if we save our souls and lose the whole world?