for the rest of my life what am I to do?”
“Anything—if you remember that the greatest thing is over.”
“I don’t know you,” she said tremulously. “You have grown up in a moment. You never talked to us, and yet you understand it all. Tell me again—I can only trust you—where he is.”
“He is in heaven.”
“You are sure?”
It puzzled her that Rickie, who could scarcely tell you the time without a saving clause, should be so certain about immortality.
VI
Table of Contents
He did not stop for the funeral. Mr. Pembroke thought that he had a bad effect on Agnes, and prevented her from acquiescing in the tragedy as rapidly as she might have done. As he expressed it, “one must not court sorrow,” and he hinted to the young man that they desired to be alone.
Rickie went back to the Silts.
He was only there a few days. As soon as term opened he returned to Cambridge, for which he longed passionately. The journey thither was now familiar to him, and he took pleasure in each landmark. The fair valley of Tewin Water, the cutting into Hitchin where the train traverses the chalk, Baldock Church, Royston with its promise of downs, were nothing in themselves, but dear as stages in the pilgrimage towards the abode of peace. On the platform he met friends. They had all had pleasant vacations: it was a happy world. The atmosphere alters.
Cambridge, according to her custom, welcomed her sons with open drains. Pettycury was up, so was Trinity Street, and navvies peeped out of King’s Parade. Here it was gas, there electric light, but everywhere something, and always a smell. It was also the day that the wheels fell off the station tram, and Rickie, who was naturally inside, was among the passengers who “sustained no injury but a shock, and had as hearty a laugh over the mishap afterwards as any one.”
Tilliard fled into a hansom, cursing himself for having tried to do the thing cheaply. Hornblower also swept past yelling derisively, with his luggage neatly piled above his head. “Let’s get out and walk,” muttered Ansell. But Rickie was succouring a distressed female—Mrs. Aberdeen.
“Oh, Mrs. Aberdeen, I never saw you: I am so glad to see you—I am so very glad.” Mrs. Aberdeen was cold. She did not like being spoken to outside the college, and was also distrait about her basket. Hitherto no genteel eye had even seen inside it, but in the collision its little calico veil fell off, and there vas revealed—nothing. The basket was empty, and never would hold anything illegal. All the same she was distrait, and “We shall meet later, sir, I dessy,” was all the greeting Rickie got from her.
“Now what kind of a life has Mrs. Aberdeen?” he exclaimed, as he and Ansell pursued the Station Road. “Here these bedders come and make us comfortable. We owe an enormous amount to them, their wages are absurd, and we know nothing about them. Off they go to Barnwell, and then their lives are hidden. I just know that Mrs. Aberdeen has a husband, but that’s all. She never will talk about him. Now I do so want to fill in her life. I see one-half of it. What’s the other half? She may have a real jolly house, in good taste, with a little garden and books, and pictures. Or, again, she mayn’t. But in any case one ought to know. I know she’d dislike it, but she oughtn’t to dislike. After all, bedders are to blame for the present lamentable state of things, just as much as gentlefolk. She ought to want me to come. She ought to introduce me to her husband.”
They had reached the corner of Hills Road. Ansell spoke for the first time. He said, “Ugh!”
“Drains?”
“Yes. A spiritual cesspool.”
Rickie laughed.
“I expected it from your letter.”
“The one you never answered?”
“I answer none of your letters. You are quite hopeless by now. You can go to the bad. But I refuse to accompany you. I refuse to believe that every human being is a moving wonder of supreme interest and tragedy and beauty—which was what the letter in question amounted to. You’ll find plenty who will believe it. It’s a very popular view among people who are too idle to think; it saves them the trouble of detecting the beautiful from the ugly, the interesting from the dull, the tragic from the melodramatic. You had just come from Sawston, and were apparently carried away by the fact that Miss Pembroke had the usual amount of arms and legs.”
Rickie was silent. He had told his friend how he felt, but not what had happened. Ansell could discuss love and death admirably, but somehow he would not understand lovers or a dying man, and in the letter there had been scant allusion to these concrete facts. Would Cambridge understand them either? He watched some dons who were peeping into an excavation, and throwing up their hands with humorous gestures of despair. These men would lecture next week on Catiline’s conspiracy, on Luther, on Evolution, on Catullus. They dealt with so much and they had experienced so little. Was it possible he would ever come to think Cambridge narrow? In his short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths, and that is enough to disarrange any placid outlook on the world. He knew once for all that we are all of us bubbles on an extremely rough sea. Into this sea humanity has built, as it were, some little breakwaters—scientific knowledge, civilized restraint—so that the bubbles do not break so frequentlv or so soon. But the sea has not altered, and it was only a chance that he, Ansell, Tilliard, and Mrs. Aberdeen had not all been killed in the tram.
They waited for the other tram by the Roman Catholic Church, whose florid bulk was already receding into twilight. It is the first big building that the incoming visitor sees. “Oh, here come the colleges!” cries the Protestant parent, and then learns that it was built by a Papist who made a fortune out of movable eyes for dolls. “Built out of doll’s eyes to contain idols”—that, at all events, is the legend and the joke. It watches over the apostate city, taller by many a yard than anything within, and asserting, however wildly, that here is eternity, stability, and bubbles unbreakable upon a windless sea.
A costly hymn tune announced five o’clock, and in the distance the more lovable note of St. Mary’s could be heard, speaking from the heart of the town. Then the tram arrived—the slow stuffy tram that plies every twenty minutes between the unknown and the marketplace—and took them past the desecrated grounds of Downing, past Addenbrookes Hospital, girt like a Venetian palace with a mantling canal, past the Fitz William, towering upon immense substructions like any Roman temple, right up to the gates of one’s own college, which looked like nothing else in the world. The porters were glad to see them, but wished it had been a hansom. “Our luggage,” explained Rickie, “comes in the hotel omnibus, if you would kindly pay a shilling for mine.” Ansell turned aside to some large lighted windows, the abode of a hospitable don, and from other windows there floated familiar voices and the familiar mistakes in a Beethoven sonata. The college, though small, was civilized, and proud of its civilization. It was not sufficient glory to be a Blue there, nor an additional glory to get drunk. Many a maiden lady who had read that Cambridge men were sad dogs, was surprised and perhaps a little disappointed at the reasonable life which greeted her. Miss Appleblossom in particular had had a tremendous shock. The sight of young fellows making tea and drinking water had made her wonder whether this was Cambridge College at all. “It is so,” she exclaimed afterwards. “It is just as I say; and what’s more, I wouldn’t have it otherwise; Stewart says it’s as easy as easy to get into the swim, and not at all expensive.” The direction of the swim was determined a little by the genius of the place—for places have a genius, though the less we talk about it the better—and a good deal by
