The Longest Journey Read online

  Mrs. Aberdeen left them.

  "He wants pulling up sharply. There is nothing original in absent-mindedness. True originality lies elsewhere. Really, the lower classes have no nous. However can I wear such deformities?" For he had been madly trying to cram a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe.

  "Don't!" said Agnes hastily. "Don't touch the poor fellow's things." The sight of the smart, stubby patent leather made her almost feel faint. She had known Rickie for many years, but it seemed so dreadful and so different now that he was a man. It was her first great contact with the abnormal, and unknown fibres of her being rose in revolt against it. She frowned when she heard his uneven tread upon the stairs.

  "Agnes—before he arrives—you ought never to have left me and gone to his rooms alone. A most elementary transgression. Imagine the unpleasantness if you had found him with friends. If Gerald—"

  Rickie by now had got into a fluster. At the kitchens he had lost his head, and when his turn came—he had had to wait—he had yielded his place to those behind, saying that he didn't matter. And he had wasted more precious time buying bananas, though he knew that the Pembrokes were not partial to fruit. Amid much tardy and chaotic hospitality the meal got under way. All the spoons and forks were anyhow, for Mrs. Aberdeen's virtues were not practical. The fish seemed never to have been alive, the meat had no kick, and the cork of the college claret slid forth silently, as if ashamed of the contents. Agnes was particularly pleasant. But her brother could not recover himself. He still remembered their desolate arrival, and he could feel the waters of the Pem eating into his instep.

  "Rickie," cried the lady, "are you aware that you haven't congratulated me on my engagement?"

  Rickie laughed nervously, and said, "Why no! No more I have."

  "Say something pretty, then."

  "I hope you'll be very happy," he mumbled. "But I don't know anything about marriage."

  "Oh, you awful boy! Herbert, isn't he just the same? But you do know something about Gerald, so don't be so chilly and cautious. I've just realized, looking at those groups, that you must have been at school together. Did you come much across him?"

  "Very little," he answered, and sounded shy. He got up hastily, and began to muddle with the coffee.

  "But he was in the same house. Surely that's a house group?"

  "He was a prefect." He made his coffee on the simple system. One had a brown pot, into which the boiling stuff was poured. Just before serving one put in a drop of cold water, and the idea was that the grounds fell to the bottom.

  "Wasn't he a kind of athletic marvel? Couldn't he knock any boy or master down?"

  "Yes."

  "If he had wanted to," said Mr. Pembroke, who had not spoken for some time.

  "If he had wanted to," echoed Rickie. "I do hope, Agnes, you'll be most awfully happy. I don't know anything about the army, but I should think it must be most awfully interesting."

  Mr. Pembroke laughed faintly.

  "Yes, Rickie. The army is a most interesting profession,—the profession of Wellington and Marlborough and Lord Roberts; a most interesting profession, as you observe. A profession that may mean death—death, rather than dishonour."

  "That's nice," said Rickie, speaking to himself. "Any profession may mean dishonour, but one isn't allowed to die instead. The army's different. If a soldier makes a mess, it's thought rather decent of him, isn't it, if he blows out his brains? In the other professions it somehow seems cowardly."

  "I am not competent to pronounce," said Mr. Pembroke, who was not accustomed to have his schoolroom satire commented on. "I merely know that the army is the finest profession in the world. Which reminds me, Rickie—have you been thinking about yours?"

  "No."

  "Not at all?"

  "No."

  "Now, Herbert, don't bother him. Have another meringue."

  "But, Rickie, my dear boy, you're twenty. It's time you thought. The Tripos is the beginning of life, not the end. In less than two years you will have got your B.A. What are you going to do with it?"

  "I don't know."

  "You're M.A., aren't you?" asked Agnes; but her brother proceeded—

  "I have seen so many promising, brilliant lives wrecked simply on account of this—not settling soon enough. My dear boy, you must think. Consult your tastes if possible—but think. You have not a moment to lose. The Bar, like your father?"

  "Oh, I wouldn't like that at all."

  "I don't mention the Church."

  "Oh, Rickie, do be a clergyman!" said Miss Pembroke. "You'd be simply killing in a wide-awake."

  He looked at his guests hopelessly. Their kindness and competence overwhelmed him. "I wish I could talk to them as I talk to myself," he thought. "I'm not such an ass when I talk to myself. I don't believe, for instance, that quite all I thought about the cow was rot." Aloud he said, "I've sometimes wondered about writing."

  "Writing?" said Mr. Pembroke, with the tone of one who gives everything its trial. "Well, what about writing? What kind of writing?"

  "I rather like,"—he suppressed something in his throat,—"I rather like trying to write little stories."

  "Why, I made sure it was poetry!" said Agnes. "You're just the boy for poetry."

  "I had no idea you wrote. Would you let me see something? Then I could judge."

  The author shook his head. "I don't show it to any one. It isn't anything. I just try because it amuses me."

  "What is it about?"

  "Silly nonsense."

  "Are you ever going to show it to any one?"

  "I don't think so."

  Mr. Pembroke did not reply, firstly, because the meringue he was eating was, after all, Rickie's; secondly, because it was gluey and stuck his jaws together. Agnes observed that the writing was really a very good idea: there was Rickie's aunt,—she could push him.

  "Aunt Emily never pushes any one; she says they always rebound and crush her."

  "I only had the pleasure of seeing your aunt once. I should have thought her a quite uncrushable person. But she would be sure to help you."

  "I couldn't show her anything. She'd think them even sillier than they are."

  "Always running yourself down! There speaks the artist!"

  "I'm not modest," he said anxiously. "I just know they're bad."

  Mr. Pembroke's teeth were clear of meringue, and he could refrain no longer. "My dear Rickie, your father and mother are dead, and you often say your aunt takes no interest in you. Therefore your life depends on yourself. Think it over carefully, but settle, and having once settled, stick. If you think that this writing is practicable, and that you could make your living by it—that you could, if needs be, support a wife—then by all means write. But you must work. Work and drudge. Begin at the bottom of the ladder and work upwards."

  Rickie's head drooped. Any metaphor silenced him. He never thought of replying that art is not a ladder—with a curate, as it were, on the first rung, a rector on the second, and a bishop, still nearer heaven, at the top. He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman, whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot, and generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot lead to it.

  "Of course I don't really think about writing," he said, as he poured the cold water into the coffee. "Even if my things ever were decent, I don't think the magazines would take them, and the magazines are one's only chance. I read somewhere, too, that Marie Corelli's about the only person who makes a thing out of literature. I'm certain it wouldn't pay me."

  "I never mentioned the word 'pay,'" said Mr. Pembroke uneasily.

  "You must not consider money. There are ideals too."

  "I have no ideals."

  "Rickie!" she exclaimed. "Horrible boy!"

  "No, Agnes, I have no ideals." Then he got very red, for it was a phrase he had caught from Ansell, and he could not remember what came next.

  "The
person who has no ideals," she exclaimed, "is to be pitied."

  "I think so too," said Mr. Pembroke, sipping his coffee. "Life without an ideal would be like the sky without the sun."

  Rickie looked towards the night, wherein there now twinkled innumerable stars—gods and heroes, virgins and brides, to whom the Greeks have given their names.

  "Life without an ideal—" repeated Mr. Pembroke, and then stopped, for his mouth was full of coffee grounds. The same affliction had overtaken Agnes. After a little jocose laughter they departed to their lodgings, and Rickie, having seen them as far as the porter's lodge, hurried, singing as he went, to Ansell's room, burst open the door, and said, "Look here! Whatever do you mean by it?"

  "By what?" Ansell was sitting alone with a piece of paper in front of him. On it was a diagram—a circle inside a square, inside which was again a square.

  "By being so rude. You're no gentleman, and I told her so." He slammed him on the head with a sofa cushion. "I'm certain one ought to be polite, even to people who aren't saved." ("Not saved" was a phrase they applied just then to those whom they did not like or intimately know.) "And I believe she is saved. I never knew any one so always good-tempered and kind. She's been kind to me ever since I knew her. I wish you'd heard her trying to stop her brother: you'd have certainly come round. Not but what he was only being nice as well. But she is really nice. And I thought she came into the room so beautifully. Do you know—oh, of course, you despise music—but Anderson was playing Wagner, and he'd just got to the part where they sing

  'Rheingold!

  'Rheingold!

  and the sun strikes into the waters, and the music, which up to then has so often been in E flat—"

  "Goes into D sharp. I have not understood a single word, partly because you talk as if your mouth was full of plums, partly because I don't know whom you're talking about." "Miss Pembroke—whom you saw."

  "I saw no one."

  "Who came in?"

  "No one came in."

  "You're an ass!" shrieked Rickie. "She came in. You saw her come in. She and her brother have been to dinner."

  "You only think so. They were not really there."

  "But they stop till Monday."

  "You only think that they are stopping."

  "But—oh, look here, shut up! The girl like an empress—"

  "I saw no empress, nor any girl, nor have you seen them."

  "Ansell, don't rag."

  "Elliot, I never rag, and you know it. She was not really there."

  There was a moment's silence. Then Rickie exclaimed, "I've got you. You say—or was it Tilliard?—no, YOU say that the cow's there. Well—there these people are, then. Got you. Yah!"

  "Did it never strike you that phenomena may be of two kinds: ONE, those which have a real existence, such as the cow; TWO, those which are the subjective product of a diseased imagination, and which, to our destruction, we invest with the semblance of reality? If this never struck you, let it strike you now."

  Rickie spoke again, but received no answer. He paced a little up and down the sombre roam. Then he sat on the edge of the table and watched his clever friend draw within the square a circle, and within the circle a square, and inside that another circle, and inside that another square.

  "Why will you do that?"

  No answer.

  "Are they real?"

  "The inside one is—the one in the middle of everything, that there's never room enough to draw."

  II

  A little this side of Madingley, to the left of the road, there is a secluded dell, paved with grass and planted with fir-trees. It could not have been worth a visit twenty years ago, for then it was only a scar of chalk, and it is not worth a visit at the present day, for the trees have grown too thick and choked it. But when Rickie was up, it chanced to be the brief season of its romance, a season as brief for a chalk-pit as a man—its divine interval between the bareness of boyhood and the stuffiness of age. Rickie had discovered it in his second term, when the January snows had melted and left fiords and lagoons of clearest water between the inequalities of the floor. The place looked as big as Switzerland or Norway—as indeed for the moment it was—and he came upon it at a time when his life too was beginning to expand. Accordingly the dell became for him a kind of church—a church where indeed you could do anything you liked, but where anything you did would be transfigured. Like the ancient Greeks, he could even laugh at his holy place and leave it no less holy. He chatted gaily about it, and about the pleasant thoughts with which it inspired him; he took his friends there; he even took people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with the aesthete, he would possibly not have introduced him. If the dell was to bear any inscription, he would have liked it to be "This way to Heaven," painted on a sign-post by the high-road, and he did not realize till later years that the number of visitors would not thereby have sensibly increased.

  On the blessed Monday that the Pembrokes left, he walked out here with three friends. It was a day when the sky seemed enormous. One cloud, as large as a continent, was voyaging near the sun, whilst other clouds seemed anchored to the horizon, too lazy or too happy to move. The sky itself was of the palest blue, paling to white where it approached the earth; and the earth, brown, wet, and odorous, was engaged beneath it on its yearly duty of decay. Rickie was open to the complexities of autumn; he felt extremely tiny—extremely tiny and extremely important; and perhaps the combination is as fair as any that exists. He hoped that all his life he would never be peevish or unkind.

  "Elliot is in a dangerous state," said Ansell. They had reached the dell, and had stood for some time in silence, each leaning against a tree. It was too wet to sit down.

  "How's that?" asked Rickie, who had not known he was in any state at all. He shut up Keats, whom he thought he had been reading, and slipped him back into his coat-pocket. Scarcely ever was he without a book.

  "He's trying to like people."

  "Then he's done for," said Widdrington. "He's dead."

  "He's trying to like Hornblower."

  The others gave shrill agonized cries.

  "He wants to bind the college together. He wants to link us to the beefy set."

  "I do like Hornblower," he protested. "I don't try."

  "And Hornblower tries to like you."

  "That part doesn't matter."

  "But he does try to like you. He tries not to despise you. It is altogether a most public-spirited affair."

  "Tilliard started them," said Widdrington. "Tilliard thinks it such a pity the college should be split into sets."

  "Oh, Tilliard!" said Ansell, with much irritation. "But what can you expect from a person who's eternally beautiful? The other night we had been discussing a long time, and suddenly the light was turned on. Every one else looked a sight, as they ought. But there was Tilliard, sitting neatly on a little chair, like an undersized god, with not a curl crooked. I should say he will get into the Foreign Office."

  "Why are most of us so ugly?" laughed Rickie.

  "It's merely a sign of our salvation—merely another sign that the college is split."

  "The college isn't split," cried Rickie, who got excited on this subject with unfailing regularity. "The college is, and has been, and always will be, one. What you call the beefy set aren't a set at all. They're just the rowing people, and naturally they chiefly see each other; but they're always nice to me or to any one. Of course, they think us rather asses, but it's quite in a pleasant way."

  "That's my whole objection," said Ansell. "What right have they to think us asses in a pleasant way? Why don't they hate us? What right has Hornblower to smack me on the back when I've been rude to him?"

  "
Well, what right have you to be rude to him?"

  "Because I hate him. You think it is so splendid to hate no one. I tell you it is a crime. You want to love every one equally, and that's worse than impossible it's wrong. When you denounce sets, you're really trying to destroy friendship."

  "I maintain," said Rickie—it was a verb he clung to, in the hope that it would lend stability to what followed—"I maintain that one can like many more people than one supposes."

  "And I maintain that you hate many more people than you pretend."

  "I hate no one," he exclaimed with extraordinary vehemence, and the dell re-echoed that it hated no one.

  "We are obliged to believe you," said Widdrington, smiling a little "but we are sorry about it."

  "Not even your father?" asked Ansell.

  Rickie was silent.

  "Not even your father?"

  The cloud above extended a great promontory across the sun. It only lay there for a moment, yet that was enough to summon the lurking coldness from the earth.

  "Does he hate his father?" said Widdrington, who had not known. "Oh, good!"

  "But his father's dead. He will say it doesn't count."

  "Still, it's something. Do you hate yours?"

  Ansell did not reply. Rickie said: "I say, I wonder whether one ought to talk like this?"

  "About hating dead people?"

  "Yes—"

  "Did you hate your mother?" asked Widdrington.

  Rickie turned crimson.

  "I don't see Hornblower's such a rotter," remarked the other man, whose name was James.

  "James, you are diplomatic," said Ansell. "You are trying to tide over an awkward moment. You can go."

  Widdrington was crimson too. In his wish to be sprightly he had used words without thinking of their meanings. Suddenly he realized that "father" and "mother" really meant father and mother—people whom he had himself at home. He was very uncomfortable, and thought Rickie had been rather queer. He too tried to revert to Hornblower, but Ansell would not let him. The sun came out, and struck on the white ramparts of the dell. Rickie looked straight at it. Then he said abruptly—