The Longest Journey (36 page)

“Stephen, wait a minute. What do you mean?”

“Wait’s what we won’t do,” said Stephen at the gate.

“I must ask—–”

He did wait for a minute, and sobs were heard, faint, hopeless, vindictive. Then he trudged away, and Rickie soon lost his colour and his form. But a voice persisted, saying, “Come, I do mean it. Come; I will take care of you, I can manage you.”

The words were kind; yet it was not for their sake that Rickie plunged into the impalpable cloud. In the voice he had found a surer guarantee. Habits and sex may change with the new generation, features may alter with the play of a private passion, but a voice is apart from these. It lies nearer to the racial essence and perhaps to the divine; it can, at all events, overleap one grave.

Mr. Pembroke did not receive a clear account of what had happened when he returned for the interval. His sister—he told her frankly—was concealing something from him. She could make no reply. Had she gone mad, she wondered. Hitherto she had pretended to love her husband. Why choose such a moment for the truth?

“But I understand Rickie’s position,” he told her. “It is an unbalanced position, yet I understand it; I noted its approach while he was ill. He imagines himself his brother’s keeper. Therefore we must make concessions. We must negotiate.” The negotiations were still progressing in November, the month during which this story draws to its close.

“I understand his position,” he then told her. “It is both weak and defiant. He is still with those Ansells. Read this letter, which thanks me for his little stories. We sent them last month, you remember—such of them as we could find. It seems that he fills up his time by writing: he has already written a book.”

She only gave him half her attention, for a beautiful wreath had just arrived from the florist’s. She was taking it up to the cemetery: today her child had been dead a year.

“On the other hand, he has altered his will. Fortunately, he cannot alter much. But I fear that what is not settled on you, will go. Should I read what I wrote on this point, and also my minutes of the interview with old Mr. Ansell, and the copy of my correspondence with Stephen Wonham?”

But her fly was announced. While he put the wreath in for her, she ran for a moment upstairs. A few tears had
come to her eyes. A scandalous divorce would have been more bearable than this withdrawal. People asked, “Why did her husband leave her?” and the answer came, “Oh, nothing particular; he only couldn’t stand her; she lied and taught him to lie; she kept him from the work that suited him, from his friends, from his brother,—in a word, she tried to run him, which a man won’t pardon.” A few tears; not many. To her, life never showed itself as a classic drama, in which, by trying to advance our fortunes, we shatter them. She had turned Stephen out of Wiltshire, and he fell like a thunderbolt on Sawston and on herself. In trying to gain Mrs. Failing’s money she had probably lost money which would have been her own. But irony is a subtle teacher, and she was not the woman to learn from such lessons as these. Her suffering was more direct. Three men had wronged her; therefore she hated them, and, if she could, would do them harm.

“These negotiations are quite useless,” she told Herbert when she came downstairs. “We had much better bide our time. Tell me just about Stephen Wonham, though.”

He drew her into the study again. “Wonham is or was in Scotland, learning to farm with connections of the Ansells: I believe the money is to go towards setting him up. Apparently he is a hard worker. He also drinks!”

She nodded and smiled. “More than he did?”

“My informant, Mr. Tilliard—oh, I ought not to have mentioned his name. He is one of the better sort of Rickie’s Cambridge friends, and has been dreadfully grieved at the collapse, but he does not want to be mixed up in it. This autumn he was up in the Lowlands, close by, and very kindly made a few unobtrusive inquiries for me. The man is becoming an habitual drunkard.”

She smiled again. Stephen had evoked her secret, and she hated him more for that than for anything else that he had done. The poise of his shoulders that morning—it was no more—had recalled Gerald. If only she had not
been so tired! He had reminded her of the greatest thing she had known, and to her cloudy mind this seemed degradation. She had turned to him as to her lover; with a look, which a man of his type understood, she had asked for his pity; for one terrible moment she had desired to be held in his arms. Even Herbert was surprised when she said, “I’m glad he drinks. I hope he’ll kill himself. A man like that ought never to have been born.”

“Perhaps the sins of the parents are visited on the children,” said Herbert, taking her to the carriage. “Yet it is not for us to decide.”

“I feel sure he will be punished. What right has he—–” She broke off. What right had he to our common humanity? It was a hard lesson for any one to learn. For Agnes it was impossible. Stephen was illicit, abnormal, worse than a man diseased. Yet she had turned to him: he had drawn out the truth.

“My dear, don’t cry,” said her brother, drawing up the windows. “I have great hopes of Mr. Tilliard—the Silts have written—Mrs. Failing will do what she can—–”

As she drove to the cemetery, her bitterness turned against Ansell, who had kept her husband alive in the days after Stephen’s expulsion. If he had not been there, Rickie would have renounced his mother and his brother and all the outer world, troubling no one. The mystic, inherent in him, would have prevailed. So Ansell himself had told her. And Ansell, too, had sheltered the fugitives and given them money, and saved them from the ludicrous checks that so often stop young men. But when she reached the cemetery, and stood beside the tiny grave, all her bitterness, all her hatred were turned against Rickie.

“But he’ll come back in the end,” she thought. “A wife has only to wait. What are his friends beside me? They too will marry. I have only to wait. His book, like all that he has done, will fail. His brother is drinking himself
away. Poor aimless Rickie! I have only to keep civil. He will come back in the end.”

She had moved, and found herself close to the grave of Gerald. The flowers she had planted after his death were dead, and she had not liked to renew them. There lay the athlete, and his dust was as the little child’s whom she had brought into the world with such hope, with such pain.

That same day Rickie, feeling neither poor nor aimless, left the Ansells’ for a night’s visit to Cadover. His aunt had invited him—why, he could not think, nor could he think why he should refuse the invitation. She could not annoy him now, and he was not vindictive. In the dell near Madingley he had cried, “I hate no one,” in his ignorance. Now, with full knowledge, he hated no one again. The weather was pleasant, the country attractive, and he was ready for a little change.

Maud and Stewart saw him off. Stephen, who was down for a holiday, had been left with his chin on the luncheon-table. He had wanted to come to Cadover also. Rickie pointed out that you cannot visit where you have broken the windows. There was an argument—there generally was—and now the young man had turned sulky.

“Let him do what he likes,” said Ansell. “He knows more than we do. He knows everything.”

“Is he to get drunk?” Rickie asked.

“Most certainly.”

“And to go where he isn’t asked?”

Maud, though liking a little spirit in a man, declared this to be impossible.

“Well, I wish you joy!” Rickie called, as the train moved away. “He means mischief this evening. He told me piously that he felt it beating up. Good-bye!”

“But we’ll wait for you to pass,” they cried. For the Salisbury train always backed out of the station and then returned, and the Ansell family, including Stewart, took an incredible pleasure in seeing it do this.

The carriage was empty. Rickie settled himself down for his little journey. First he looked at the coloured photographs. Then he read the directions for obtaining luncheon-baskets, and felt the texture of the cushions. Through the windows a signal-box interested him. Then he saw the ugly little town that was now his home, and up its chief street the Ansells’ memorable façade. The spirit of a genial comedy dwelt there. It was so absurd, so kindly. The house was divided against itself and yet stood. Metaphysics, commerce, social aspirations—all lived together in harmony. Mr. Ansell had done much, but one was tempted to believe in a more capricious power—the power that abstains from “nipping.” “One nips or is nipped, and never knows beforehand,” quoted Rickie, and opened the poems of Shelley, a man less foolish than you supposed. How pleasant it was to read! If business worried him, if Stephen was noisy or Ansell perverse, there still remained this paradise of books. It seemed as if he had read nothing for two years.

Then the train stopped for the shunting, and he heard protests from minor officials who were working on the line. They complained that some one who didn’t ought to, had mounted on the footboard of the carriage. Stephen’s face appeared, convulsed with laughter. With the action of a swimmer he dived in through the open window, and fell comfortably on Rickie’s luggage and Rickie. He declared it was the finest joke ever known. Rickie was
not so sure. “You’ll be run over next,” he said. “What did you do that for?”

“I’m coming with you,” he giggled, rolling all that he could on to the dusty floor.

“Now, Stephen, this is too bad. Get up. We went into the whole question yesterday.”

“I know; and I settled we wouldn’t go into it again, spoiling my holiday.”

“Well, it’s execrable taste.”

Now he was waving to the Ansells, and showing them a piece of soap: it was all his luggage, and even that he abandoned, for he flung it at Stewart’s lofty brow.

“I can’t think what you’ve done it for. You know how strongly I felt.”

Stephen replied that he should stop in the village; meet Rickie at the lodge gates; that kind of thing.

“It’s execrable taste,” he repeated, trying to keep grave.

“Well, you did all you could,” he exclaimed with sudden sympathy. “Leaving me talking to old Ansell, you might have thought you’d got your way. I’ve as much taste as most chaps, but, hang it! your aunt isn’t the German Emperor. She doesn’t own Wiltshire.”

“You ass!” sputtered Rickie, who had taken to laugh at nonsense again.

“No, she isn’t,” he repeated, blowing a kiss out of the window to maidens. “Why, we started for Wiltshire on the wet morning!”

“When Stewart found us at Sawston railway station?” He smiled happily. “I never thought we should pull through.”

“Well, we
didn’t
. We never did what we meant. It’s nonsense that I couldn’t have managed you alone. I’ve a notion. Slip out after your dinner this evening, and we’ll get thundering tight together.”

“I’ve a notion I won’t.”

“It’d do you no end of good. You’ll get to know
people—shepherds, carters—–” He waved his arms vaguely, indicating democracy. “Then you’ll sing.”

“And then?”

“Plop.”

“Precisely.”

“But I’ll catch you,” promised Stephen. “We shall carry you up the hill to bed. In the morning you wake, have your row with old Em’ly, she kicks you out, we meet—we’ll meet at the Rings!” He danced up and down the carriage. Some one in the next carriage punched at the partition, and when this happens, all lads with mettle know that they must punch the partition back.

“Thank you. I’ve a notion I won’t,” said Rickie when the noise had subsided—subsided for a moment only, for the following conversation took place to an accompaniment of dust and bangs. “Except as regards the Rings. We will meet there.”

“Then I’ll get tight by myself.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will. I swore to do something special this evening. I feel like it.”

“In that case, I get out at the next station.” He was laughing, but quite determined. Stephen had grown too dictatorial of late. The Ansells spoilt him. “It’s bad enough having you there at all. Having you there drunk is impossible. I’d sooner not visit my aunt than think, when I sat with her, that you’re down in the village teaching her labourers to be as beastly as yourself. Go if you will. But not with me.”