He was only there a few days. As soon as term opened he returned to Cambridge, for which he longed pa.s.sionately. 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 pa.s.sengers 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 was 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 frequently 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 a.s.serting, 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 the tutors and resident fellows, who treated with rare dexterity the products that came up yearly from the public schools. They taught the perky boy that he was not everything, and the limp boy that he might be something. They even welcomed those boys who were neither limp nor perky, but odd--those boys who had never been at a public school at all, and such do not find a welcome everywhere. And they did everything with ease--one might almost say with nonchalance, so that the boys noticed nothing, and received education, often for the first time in their lives.
But Rickie turned to none of these friends, for just then he loved his rooms better than any person. They were all he really possessed in the world, the only place he could call his own. Over the door was his name, and through the paint, like a grey ghost, he could still read the name of his predecessor. With a sigh of joy he entered the perishable home that was his for a couple of years. There was a beautiful fire, and the kettle boiled at once. He made tea on the hearth-rug and ate the biscuits which Mrs. Aberdeen had brought for him up from Anderson"s.
"Gentlemen," she said, "must learn to give and take." He sighed again and again, like one who had escaped from danger. With his head on the fender and all his limbs relaxed, he felt almost as safe as he felt once when his mother killed a ghost in the pa.s.sage by carrying him through it in her arms. There was no ghost now; he was frightened at reality; he was frightened at the splendours and horrors of the world.
A letter from Miss Pembroke was on the table. He did not hurry to open it, for she, and all that she did, was overwhelming. She wrote like the Sibyl; her sorrowful face moved over the stars and shattered their harmonies; last night he saw her with the eyes of Blake, a virgin widow, tall, veiled, consecrated, with her hands stretched out against an everlasting wind. Why should she write? Her letters were not for the likes of him, nor to be read in rooms like his.
"We are not leaving Sawston," she wrote. "I saw how selfish it was of me to risk spoiling Herbert"s career. I shall get used to any place.
Now that he is gone, nothing of that sort can matter. Every one has been most kind, but you have comforted me most, though you did not mean to. I cannot think how you did it, or understood so much. I still think of you as a little boy with a lame leg,--I know you will let me say this,--and yet when it came to the point you knew more than people who have been all their lives with sorrow and death."
Rickie burnt this letter, which he ought not to have done, for it was one of the few tributes Miss Pembroke ever paid to imagination. But he felt that it did not belong to him: words so sincere should be for Gerald alone. The smoke rushed up the chimney, and he indulged in a vision. He saw it reach the outer air and beat against the low ceiling of clouds. The clouds were too strong for it; but in them was one c.h.i.n.k, revealing one star, and through this the smoke escaped into the light of stars innumerable. Then--but then the vision failed, and the voice of science whispered that all smoke remains on earth in the form of s.m.u.ts, and is troublesome to Mrs. Aberdeen.
"I am jolly unpractical," he mused. "And what is the point of it when real things are so wonderful? Who wants visions in a world that has Agnes and Gerald?" He turned on the electric light and pulled open the table-drawer. There, among spoons and corks and string, he found a fragment of a little story that he had tried to write last term. It was called "The Bay of the Fifteen Islets," and the action took place on St.
John"s Eve off the coast of Sicily. A party of tourists land on one of the islands. Suddenly the boatmen become uneasy, and say that the island is not generally there. It is an extra one, and they had better have tea on one of the ordinaries. "Pooh, volcanic!" says the leading tourist, and the ladies say how interesting. The island begins to rock, and so do the minds of its visitors. They start and quarrel and jabber. Fingers burst up through the sand-black fingers of sea devils. The island tilts.
The tourists go mad. But just before the catastrophe one man, integer vitae scelerisque purus, sees the truth. Here are no devils. Other muscles, other minds, are pulling the island to its subterranean home.
Through the advancing wall of waters he sees no grisly faces, no ghastly medieval limbs, but--But what nonsense! When real things are so wonderful, what is the point of pretending?
And so Rickie deflected his enthusiasms. Hitherto they had played on G.o.ds and heroes, on the infinite and the impossible, on virtue and beauty and strength. Now, with a steadier radiance, they transfigured a man who was dead and a woman who was still alive.
VII
Love, say orderly people, can be fallen into by two methods: (1) through the desires, (2) through the imagination. And if the orderly people are English, they add that (1) is the inferior method, and characteristic of the South. It is inferior. Yet those who pursue it at all events know what they want; they are not puzzling to themselves or ludicrous to others; they do not take the wings of the morning and fly into the uttermost parts of the sea before walking to the registry office; they cannot breed a tragedy quite like Rickie"s.
He is, of course, absurdly young--not twenty-one and he will be engaged to be married at twenty-three. He has no knowledge of the world; for example, he thinks that if you do not want money you can give it to friends who do. He believes in humanity because he knows a dozen decent people. He believes in women because he has loved his mother. And his friends are as young and as ignorant as himself. They are full of the wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup--let us call it the teacup--of experience, which has made men of Mr. Pembroke"s type what they are. Oh, that teacup! To be taken at prayers, at friendship, at love, till we are quite sane, efficient, quite experienced, and quite useless to G.o.d or man. We must drink it, or we shall die. But we need not drink it always. Here is our problem and our salvation. There comes a moment--G.o.d knows when--at which we can say, "I will experience no longer. I will create. I will be an experience." But to do this we must be both acute and heroic. For it is not easy, after accepting six cups of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of the hostess. And to Rickie this moment has not, as yet, been offered.
Ansell, at the end of his third year, got a first in the Moral Science Tripos. Being a scholar, he kept his rooms in college, and at once began to work for a Fellowship. Rickie got a creditable second in the Cla.s.sical Tripos, Part I., and retired to sallow lodgings in Mill bane, carrying with him the degree of B.A. and a small exhibition, which was quite as much as he deserved. For Part II. he read Greek Archaeology, and got a second. All this means that Ansell was much cleverer than Rickie. As for the cow, she was still going strong, though turning a little academic as the years pa.s.sed over her.
"We are bound to get narrow," sighed Rickie. He and his friend were lying in a meadow during their last summer term. In his incurable love for flowers he had plaited two garlands of b.u.t.tercups and cow-parsley, and Ansell"s lean Jewish face was framed in one of them. "Cambridge is wonderful, but--but it"s so tiny. You have no idea--at least, I think you have no idea--how the great world looks down on it."
"I read the letters in the papers."
"It"s a bad look-out."
"How?"
"Cambridge has lost touch with the times."
"Was she ever intended to touch them?"
"She satisfies," said Rickie mysteriously, "neither the professions, nor the public schools, nor the great thinking ma.s.s of men and women. There is a general feeling that her day is over, and naturally one feels pretty sick."
"Do you still write short stories?"
"Because your English has gone to the devil. You think and talk in Journalese. Define a great thinking ma.s.s."
Rickie sat up and adjusted his floral crown.
"Estimate the worth of a general feeling."
Silence.
"And thirdly, where is the great world?"
"Oh that--!"
"Yes. That," exclaimed Ansell, rising from his couch in violent excitement. "Where is it? How do you set about finding it? How long does it take to get there? What does it think? What does it do? What does it want? Oblige me with specimens of its art and literature." Silence.
"Till you do, my opinions will be as follows: There is no great world at all, only a little earth, for ever isolated from the rest of the little solar system. The earth is full of tiny societies, and Cambridge is one of them. All the societies are narrow, but some are good and some are bad--just as one house is beautiful inside and another ugly. Observe the metaphor of the houses: I am coming back to it. The good societies say, "I tell you to do this because I am Cambridge." The bad ones say, "I tell you to do that because I am the great world, not because I am "Peckham," or "Billingsgate," or "Park Lane," but "because I am the great world." They lie. And fools like you listen to them, and believe that they are a thing which does not exist and never has existed, and confuse "great," which has no meaning whatever, with "good," which means salvation. Look at this great wreath: it"ll be dead tomorrow. Look at that good flower: it"ll come up again next year. Now for the other metaphor. To compare the world to Cambridge is like comparing the outsides of houses with the inside of a house. No intellectual effort is needed, no moral result is attained. You only have to say, "Oh, what a difference!" and then come indoors again and exhibit your broadened mind."
"I never shall come indoors again," said Rickie. "That"s the whole point." And his voice began to quiver. "It"s well enough for those who"ll get a Fellowship, but in a few weeks I shall go down. In a few years it"ll be as if I"ve never been up. It matters very much to me what the world is like. I can"t answer your questions about it; and that"s no loss to you, but so much the worse for me. And then you"ve got a house--not a metaphorical one, but a house with father and sisters. I haven"t, and never shall have. There"ll never again be a home for me like Cambridge. I shall only look at the outside of homes. According to your metaphor, I shall live in the street, and it matters very much to me what I find there."
"You"ll live in another house right enough," said Ansell, rather uneasily. "Only take care you pick out a decent one. I can"t think why you flop about so helplessly, like a bit of seaweed. In four years you"ve taken as much root as any one."
"Where?"
"I should say you"ve been fortunate in your friends."