The Longest Journey (5 page)

He did not catch cold, but while he was out his mother died. She only survived her husband eleven days, a coincidence which was recorded on their tombstone.

Such, in substance, was the story which Rickie told his friends as they stood together in the shelter of the dell. The green bank at the entrance hid the road and the world, and now, as in spring, they could see nothing but snow-white ramparts and the evergreen foliage of the firs. Only from time to time would a beech leaf flutter in from the woods above, to comment on the waning year, and the warmth and radiance of the sun would vanish behind a passing cloud.

About the greatcoat he did not tell them, for he could not have spoken of it without tears.

Mr. Ansell, a provincial draper of moderate prosperity, ought by rights to have been classed not with the cow, but with those phenomena that are not really there. But his son, with pardonable illogicality, excepted him. He never suspected that his father might be the subjective product of a diseased imagination. From his earliest years he had taken him for granted, as a most undeniable and lovable fact. To be born one thing and grow up another—Ansell had accomplished this without weakening one of the ties that bound him to his home. The rooms above the shop still seemed as comfortable, the garden behind it as gracious, as they had seemed fifteen years before, when he would sit behind Miss Appleblossom’s central throne, and she, like some allegorical figure, would send the change and receipted bills spinning away from her in little boxwood balls. At first the young man had attributed these happy relations to his own tact. But in time he perceived that the tact was all on the side of his father. Mr. Ansell was not merely a man of some education; he had what no education can bring—the power of detecting what is important. Like many fathers, he had spared no expense over his boy,—he had borrowed money to start him at a rapacious and fashionable private school; he had sent him to tutors; he had sent him to Cambridge. But he knew that all this was not the important thing. The important thing was freedom. The boy must use his education as he chose, and if he paid his father back it would certainly not be in his own coin. So when Stewart said, “At Cambridge, can I read for the Moral Science Tripos?” Mr. Ansell had only replied, “This philosophy—do you say that it lies behind everything?”

“Yes, I think so. It tries to discover what is good and true.”

“Then, my boy, you had better read as much of it as you can.”

And a year later: “I’d like to take up this philosophy seriously, but I don’t feel justified.”

“Why not?”

“Because it brings in no return. I think I’m a great philosopher, but then all philosophers think that, though they don’t dare to say so. But, however great I am, I shan’t earn money. Perhaps I shan’t ever be able to keep myself. I shan’t even get a good social position. You’ve only to say one word, and I’ll work for the Civil Service. I’m good enough to get in high.”

Mr. Ansell liked money and social position. But he knew that there is a more important thing, and replied, “You must take up this philosophy seriously, I think.”

“Another thing—there are the girls.”

“There is enough money now to get Mary and Maud as good husbands as they deserve.” And Mary and Maud took the same view.

It was in this plebeian household that Rickie spent part of the Christmas vacation. His own home, such as it was, was with the Silts, needy cousins of his father’s, and combined to a peculiar degree the restrictions of hospitality with the discomforts of a boarding-house. Such pleasure as he had outside Cambridge was in the homes of his friends, and it was a particular joy and honour to visit Ansell, who, though as free from social snobbishness as most of us will ever manage to be, was rather careful when he drove up to the façade of his shop.

“I like our new lettering,” he said thoughtfully. The words “Stewart Ansell” were repeated again and again along the High Street—curly gold letters that seemed to float in tanks of glazed chocolate.

“Rather!” said Rickie. But he wondered whether one of the bonds that kept the Ansell family united might not be their complete absence of taste—a surer bond by far than the identity of it. And he wondered this again when he sat at tea opposite a long row of crayons—Stewart as a baby, Stewart as a small boy with large feet, Stewart as a larger boy with smaller feet, Mary reading a book whose leaves were as thick as eiderdowns. And yet again did he wonder it when he woke with a gasp in the night to find a harp in luminous paint throbbing and glowering at him from the adjacent wall. “Watch and pray” was written on the harp, and until Rickie hung a towel over it the exhortation was partially successful.

It was a very happy visit. Miss Appleblossom—who now acted as housekeeper—had met him before, during her never-forgotten expedition to Cambridge, and her admiration of University life was as shrill and as genuine now as it had been then. The girls at first were a little aggressive, for on his arrival he had been tired, and Maud had taken it for haughtiness, and said he was looking down on them. But this passed. They did not fall in love with him, nor he with them, but a morning was spent very pleasantly in snow-balling in the back garden. Ansell was rather different to what he was in Cambridge, but to Rickie not less attractive. And there was a curious charm in the hum of the shop, which swelled into a roar if one opened the partition door on a market-day.

“Listen to your money!” said Rickie. “I wish I could hear mine. I wish my money was alive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Mine’s dead money. It’s come to me through about six dead people—silently.”

“Getting a little smaller and a little more respectable each time, on account of the death-duties.”

“It needed to get respectable.”

“Why? Did your people, too, once keep a shop?”

“Oh, not as bad as that! They only swindled. About a hundred years ago an Elliot did something shady and founded the fortunes of our house.”

“I never knew any one so relentless to his ancestors. You make up for your soapiness towards the living.”

“You’d be relentless if you’d heard the Silts, as I have, talk about ‘a fortune, small perhaps, but unsoiled by trade!’ Of course Aunt Emily is rather different. Oh, goodness me! I’ve forgotten my aunt. She lives not so far. I shall have to call on her.”

Accordingly he wrote to Mrs. Failing, and said he should like to pay his respects. He told her about the Ansells, and so worded the letter that she might reasonably have sent an invitation to his friend.

She replied that she was looking forward to their
tête-à-tête
.

“You mustn’t go round by the trains,” said Mr. Ansell. “It means changing at Salisbury. By the road it’s no great way. Stewart shall drive you over Salisbury Plain, and fetch you too.”

“There’s too much snow,” said Ansell.

“Then the girls shall take you in their sledge.”

“That I will,” said Maud, who was not unwilling to see the inside of Cadover. But Rickie went round by the trains.

“We have all missed you,” said Ansell, when he returned. “There is a general feeling that you are no nuisance, and had better stop till the end of the vac.”

This he could not do. He was bound for Christmas to the Silts—“as a
real
guest,” Mrs. Silt had written, underlining the word “real” twice. And after Christmas he must go to the Pembrokes.

“These are no reasons. The only real reason for doing a thing is because you want to do it. I think the talk about ‘engagements’ is cant.”

“I think perhaps it is,” said Rickie. But he went. Never
had the turkey been so athletic, or the plum-pudding tied into its cloth so tightly. Yet he knew that both these symbols of hilarity had cost money, and it went to his heart when Mr. Silt said in a hungry voice, “Have you thought at all of what you want to be? No? Well, why should you? You have no need to be anything.” And at dessert: “I wonder who Cadover goes to? I expect money will follow money. It always does.” It was with a guilty feeling of relief that he left for the Pembrokes’.

The Pembrokes lived in an adjacent suburb, or rather “sububurb,”—the tract called Sawston, celebrated for its public school. Their style of life, however, was not particularly suburban. Their house was small and its name was Shelthorpe, but it had an air about it which suggested a certain amount of money and a certain amount of taste. There were decent water-colours in the drawing-room. Madonnas of acknowledged merit hung upon the stairs. A replica of the Hermes of Praxiteles—of course only the bust—stood in the hall with a real palm behind it. Agnes, in her slap-dash way, was a good housekeeper, and kept the pretty things well dusted. It was she who insisted on the strip of brown holland that led diagonally from the front door to the door of Herbert’s study: boys’ grubby feet should not go treading on her Indian square. It was she who always cleaned the picture-frames and washed the bust and the leaves of the palm. In short, if a house could speak—and sometimes it does speak more clearly than the people who live in it—the house of the Pembrokes would have said, “I am not quite like other houses, yet I am perfectly comfortable. I contain works of art and a microscope and books. But I do not live for any of these things or suffer them to disarrange me. I live for myself and for the greater houses that shall come after me. Yet in me neither the cry of money nor the cry for money shall ever be heard.”

Mr. Pembroke was at the station. He did better as a
host than as a guest, and welcomed the young man with real friendliness.

“We were all coming, but Gerald has strained his ankle slightly, and wants to keep quiet, as he is playing next week in a match. And, needless to say, that explains the absence of my sister.”

“Gerald Dawes?”

“Yes; he’s with us. I’m so glad you’ll meet again.”

“So am I,” said Rickie with extreme awkwardness. “Does he remember me?”

“Vividly.”

Vivid also was Rickie’s remembrance of him.

“A splendid fellow,” asserted Mr. Pembroke.

“I hope that Agnes is well.”

“Thank you, yes; she is well. And I think you’re looking more like other people yourself.”

“I’ve been having a very good time with a friend.”

“Indeed. That’s right. Who was that?”

Rickie had a young man’s reticence. He generally spoke of “a friend,” “a person I know,” “a place I was at.” When the book of life is opening, our readings are secret, and we are unwilling to give chapter and verse. Mr. Pembroke, who was half way through the volume, and had skipped or forgotten the earlier pages, could not understand Rickie’s hesitation, nor why with such awkwardness he should pronounce the harmless dissyllable “Ansell.”

“Ansell? Wasn’t that the pleasant fellow who asked us to lunch?”

“No. That was Anderson, who keeps below. You didn’t see Ansell. The ones who came to breakfast were Tilliard and Hornblower.”

“Of course. And since then you have been with the Silts. How are they?”

“Very well, thank you. They want to be remembered to you.”

The Pembrokes had formerly lived near the Elliots, and
had shown great kindness to Rickie when his parents died. They were thus rather in the position of family friends.

“Please remember us when you write.” He added, almost roguishly, “The Silts are kindness itself. All the same, it must be just a little—dull, we thought, and we thought that you might like a change. And of course we are delighted to have you besides. That goes without saying.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Rickie, who had accepted the invitation because he felt he ought to.

“Not a bit. And you mustn’t expect us to be otherwise than quiet on the holidays. There is a library of a sort, as you know, and you will find Gerald a splendid fellow.”

“Will they be married soon?”

“Oh no!” whispered Mr. Pembroke, shutting his eyes, as if Rickie had made some terrible
faux pas
. “It will be a very long engagement. He must make his way first. I have seen such endless misery result from people marrying before they have made their way.”

“Yes. That is so,” said Rickie despondently, thinking of the Silts.

“It’s a sad unpalatable truth,” said Mr. Pembroke, thinking that the despondency might be personal, “but one must accept it. My sister and Gerald, I am thankful to say, have accepted it, though naturally it has been a little pill.”

Their cab lurched around the corner as he spoke, and the two patients came in sight. Agnes was leaning over the creosoted garden-gate, and behind her there stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one. He was fair and clean-shaven, and his colourless hair was cut rather short. The sun was in his eyes, and they, like his mouth, seemed scarcely more than slits in his healthy skin. Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started. Round his neck went an up-and-down
collar and a mauve-and-gold tie, and the rest of his limbs were hidden by a grey lounge suit, carefully creased in the right places.

“Lovely! Lovely!” cried Agnes, banging on the gate. “Your train must have been to the minute.”

“Hullo!” said the athlete, and vomited with the greeting a cloud of tobacco-smoke. It must have been imprisoned in his mouth some time, for no pipe was visible.