"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--
"I think I want to talk."
"I think you do," replied Ansell.
"Shouldn"t I be rather a fool if I went through Cambridge without talking? It"s said never to come so easy again. All the people are dead too. I can"t see why I shouldn"t tell you most things about my birth and parentage and education."
"Talk away. If you bore us, we have books."
With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.
Some people spend their lives in a suburb, and not for any urgent reason. This had been the fate of Rickie. He had opened his eyes to filmy heavens, and taken his first walk on asphalt. He had seen civilization as a row of semi-detached villas, and society as a state in which men do not know the men who live next door. He had himself become part of the grey monotony that surrounds all cities. There was no necessity for this--it was only rather convenient to his father.
Mr. Elliot was a barrister. In appearance he resembled his son, being weakly and lame, with hollow little cheeks, a broad white band of forehead, and stiff impoverished hair. His voice, which he did not transmit, was very suave, with a fine command of cynical intonation.
By altering it ever so little he could make people wince, especially if they were simple or poor. Nor did he transmit his eyes. Their peculiar flatness, as if the soul looked through dirty window-panes, the unkindness of them, the cowardice, the fear in them, were to trouble the world no longer.
He married a girl whose voice was beautiful. There was no caress in it yet all who heard it were soothed, as though the world held some unexpected blessing. She called to her dogs one night over invisible waters, and he, a tourist up on the bridge, thought "that is extraordinarily adequate." In time he discovered that her figure, face, and thoughts were adequate also, and as she was not impossible socially, he married her. "I have taken a plunge," he told his family. The family, hostile at first, had not a word to say when the woman was introduced to them; and his sister declared that the plunge had been taken from the opposite bank.
Things only went right for a little time. Though beautiful without and within, Mrs. Elliot had not the gift of making her home beautiful; and one day, when she bought a carpet for the dining-room that clashed, he laughed gently, said he "really couldn"t," and departed. Departure is perhaps too strong a word. In Mrs. Elliot"s mouth it became, "My husband has to sleep more in town." He often came down to see them, nearly always unexpectedly, and occasionally they went to see him. "Father"s house," as Rickie called it, only had three rooms, but these were full of books and pictures and flowers; and the flowers, instead of being squashed down into the vases as they were in mummy"s house, rose gracefully from frames of lead which lay coiled at the bottom, as doubtless the sea serpent has to lie, coiled at the bottom of the sea.
Once he was let to lift a frame out--only once, for he dropped some water on a creton. "I think he"s going to have taste," said Mr. Elliot languidly. "It is quite possible," his wife replied. She had not taken off her hat and gloves, nor even pulled up her veil. Mr. Elliot laughed, and soon afterwards another lady came in, and they--went away.
"Why does father always laugh?" asked Rickie in the evening when he and his mother were sitting in the nursery.
"It is a way of your father"s."
"Why does he always laugh at me? Am I so funny?" Then after a pause, "You have no sense of humour, have you, mummy?"
Mrs. Elliot, who was raising a thread of cotton to her lips, held it suspended in amazement.
"You told him so this afternoon. But I have seen you laugh." He nodded wisely. "I have seen you laugh ever so often. One day you were laughing alone all down in the sweet peas."
"Was I?"
"Yes. Were you laughing at me?"
"I was not thinking about you. Cotton, please--a reel of No. 50 white from my chest of drawers. Left hand drawer. Now which is your left hand?"
"The side my pocket is."
"And if you had no pocket?"
"The side my bad foot is."
"I meant you to say, "the side my heart is,"" said Mrs. Elliot, holding up the duster between them. "Most of us--I mean all of us--can feel on one side a little watch, that never stops ticking. So even if you had no bad foot you would still know which is the left. No. 50 white, please.
No; I"ll get it myself." For she had remembered that the dark pa.s.sage frightened him.
These were the outlines. Rickie filled them in with the slowness and the accuracy of a child. He was never told anything, but he discovered for himself that his father and mother did not love each other, and that his mother was lovable. He discovered that Mr. Elliot had dubbed him Rickie because he was rickety, that he took pleasure in alluding to his son"s deformity, and was sorry that it was not more serious than his own. Mr.
Elliot had not one sc.r.a.p of genius. He gathered the pictures and the books and the flower-supports mechanically, not in any impulse of love.
He pa.s.sed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he pa.s.sed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one single thing that had the slightest beauty or value. And in time Rickie discovered this as well.
The boy grew up in great loneliness. He worshipped his mother, and she was fond of him. But she was dignified and reticent, and pathos, like tattle, was disgusting to her. She was afraid of intimacy, in case it led to confidences and tears, and so all her life she held her son at a little distance. Her kindness and unselfishness knew no limits, but if he tried to be dramatic and thank her, she told him not to be a little goose. And so the only person he came to know at all was himself.
He would play Halma against himself. He would conduct solitary conversations, in which one part of him asked and another part answered.
It was an exciting game, and concluded with the formula: "Good-bye.
Thank you. I am glad to have met you. I hope before long we shall enjoy another chat." And then perhaps he would sob for loneliness, for he would see real people--real brothers, real friends--doing in warm life the things he had pretended. "Shall I ever have a friend?" he demanded at the age of twelve. "I don"t see how. They walk too fast. And a brother I shall never have."
("No loss," interrupted Widdrington.
"But I shall never have one, and so I quite want one, even now.")
When he was thirteen Mr. Elliot entered on his illness. The pretty rooms in town would not do for an invalid, and so he came back to his home.
One of the first consequences was that Rickie was sent to a public school. Mrs. Elliot did what she could, but she had no hold whatever over her husband.
"He worries me," he declared. "He"s a joke of which I have got tired."