They sat down in the corridor amid ladies in every stage of fatigue — haggard ladies, scarlet ladies, ladies with parcels that twisted from every finger like joints of meat. Gentlemen were scarcer, but all were of the sub-fashionable type, to which Rickie himself now belonged.
“I haven’t done anything,” he said feebly. “Ate, read, been rude to tradespeople, talked to Widdrington. Herbert arrived this morning. He has brought a most beautiful photograph of the Parthenon.”
“Mr. Widdrington?”
“Yes.”
“What did you talk about?”
She might have heard every word. It was only the feeling of pleasure that he wished to conceal. Even when we love people, we desire to keep some corner secret from them, however small: it is a human right: it is personality. She began to cross-question him, but they were interrupted. A young lady at an adjacent table suddenly rose and cried, “Yes, it is you. I thought so from your walk.” It was Maud Ansell.
“Oh, do come and join us!” he cried. “Let me introduce my wife.” Maud bowed quite stiffly, but Agnes, taking it for ill-breeding, was not offended.
“Then I will come!” she continued in shrill, pleasant tones, adroitly poising her tea things on either hand, and transferring them to the Elliots’ table. “Why haven’t you ever come to us, pray?”
“I think you didn’t ask me!”
“You weren’t to be asked.” She sprawled forward with a wagging finger. But her eyes had the honesty of her brother’s. “Don’t you remember the day you left us? Father said, ‘Now, Mr. Elliot— ‘ Or did he call you ‘Elliot’? How one does forget. Anyhow, father said you weren’t to wait for an invitation, and you said, ‘No, I won’t.’ Ours is a fair-sized house,” — she turned somewhat haughtily to Agnes,— “and the second spare room, on account of a harp that hangs on the wall, is always reserved for Stewart’s friends.”
“How is Mr. Ansell, your brother?” Maud’s face fell. “Hadn’t you heard?” she said in awe-struck tones.
“No.”
“He hasn’t got his fellowship. It’s the second time he’s failed. That means he will never get one. He will never be a don, nor live in Cambridge and that, as we had hoped.”
“Oh, poor, poor fellow!” said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been. “I am so very sorry.”
But Maud turned to Rickie. “Mr. Elliot, you might know. Tell me. What is wrong with Stewart’s philosophy? What ought he to put in, or to alter, so as to succeed?”
Agnes, who knew better than this, smiled.
“I don’t know,” said Rickie sadly. They were none of them so clever, after all.
“Hegel,” she continued vindictively. “They say he’s read too much Hegel. But they never tell him what to read instead. Their own stuffy books, I suppose. Look here — no, that’s the ‘Windsor.’” After a little groping she produced a copy of “Mind,” and handed it round as if it was a geological specimen. “Inside that there’s a paragraph written about something Stewart’s written about before, and there it says he’s read too much Hegel, and it seems now that that’s been the trouble all along.” Her voice trembled. “I call it most unfair, and the fellowship’s gone to a man who has counted the petals on an anemone.”
Rickie had no inclination to smile.
“I wish Stewart had tried Oxford instead.”
“I don’t wish it!”
“You say that,” she continued hotly, “and then you never come to see him, though you knew you were not to wait for an invitation.”
“If it comes to that, Miss Ansell,” retorted Rickie, in the laughing tones that one adopts on such occasions, “Stewart won’t come to me, though he has had an invitation.”
“Yes,” chimed in Agnes, “we ask Mr. Ansell again and again, and he will have none of us.”
Maud looked at her with a flashing eye. “My brother is a very peculiar person, and we ladies can’t understand him. But I know one thing, and that’s that he has a reason all round for what he does. Look here, I must be getting on. Waiter! Wai-ai-aiter! Bill, please. Separately, of course. Call the Army and Navy cheap! I know better!”
“How does the drapery department compare?” said Agnes sweetly.
The girl gave a sharp choking sound, gathered up her parcels, and left them. Rickie was too much disgusted with his wife to speak.
“Appalling person!” she gasped. “It was naughty of me, but I couldn’t help it. What a dreadful fate for a clever man! To fail in life completely, and then to be thrown back on a family like that!”
“Maud is a snob and a Philistine. But, in her case, something emerges.”
She glanced at him, but proceeded in her suavest tones, “Do let us make one great united attempt to get Mr. Ansell to Sawston.”
“No.”
“What a changeable friend you are! When we were engaged you were always talking about him.”
“Would you finish your tea, and then we will buy the linoleum for the cubicles.”
But she returned to the subject again, not only on that day but throughout the term. Could nothing be done for poor Mr. Ansell? It seemed that she could not rest until all that he had once held dear was humiliated. In this she strayed outside her nature: she was unpractical. And those who stray outside their nature invite disaster. Rickie, goaded by her, wrote to his friend again. The letter was in all ways unlike his old self. Ansell did not answer it. But he did write to Mr. Jackson, with whom he was not acquainted.
“Dear Mr. Jackson, —
“I understand from Widdrington that you have a large house. I would like to tell you how convenient it would be for me to come and stop in it. June suits me best. —
“Yours truly,
“Stewart Ansell”
To which Mr. Jackson replied that not only in June but during the whole year his house was at the disposal of Mr. Ansell and of any one who resembled him.
But Agnes continued her life, cheerfully beating time. She, too, knew that her marriage was a failure, and in her spare moments regretted it. She wished that her husband was handsomer, more successful, more dictatorial. But she would think, “No, no; one mustn’t grumble. It can’t be helped.” Ansell was wrong in sup-posing she might ever leave Rickie. Spiritual apathy prevented her. Nor would she ever be tempted by a jollier man. Here criticism would willingly alter its tone. For Agnes also has her tragedy. She belonged to the type — not necessarily an elevated one — that loves once and once only. Her love for Gerald had not been a noble passion: no imagination transfigured it. But such as it was, it sprang to embrace him, and he carried it away with him when he died. Les amours gui suivrent sont moins involuntaires: by an effort of the will she had warmed herself for Rickie.
She is not conscious of her tragedy, and therefore only the gods need weep at it. But it is fair to remember that hitherto she moves as one from whom the inner life has been withdrawn.
XXV
“I am afraid,” said Agnes, unfolding a letter that she had received in the morning, “that things go far from satisfactorily at Cadover.”
The three were alone at supper. It was the June of Rickie’s second year at Sawston.
“Indeed?” said Herbert, who took a friendly interest. “In what way?
“Do you remember us talking of Stephen — Stephen Wonham, who by an odd coincidence— “
“Yes. Who wrote last year to that miserable failure Varden. I do.”
“It is about him.”
“I did not like the tone of his letter.”
Agnes had made her first move. She waited for her husband to reply to it. But he, though full of a painful curiosity, would not speak. She moved again.
“I don’t think, Herbert, that Aunt Emily, much as I like her, is the kind of person to bring a young man up. At all events the results have been disastrous this time.”
“What has happened?”
“A tangle of things.” She lowered her voice. “Drink.”
“Dear! Rea
lly! Was Mrs. Failing fond of him?”
“She used to be. She let him live at Cadover ever since he was a little boy. Naturally that cannot continue.”
Rickie never spoke.
“And now he has taken to be violent and rude,” she went on.
“In short, a beggar on horseback. Who is he? Has he got relatives?”
“She has always been both father and mother to him. Now it must all come to an end. I blame her — and she blames herself — for not being severe enough. He has grown up without fixed principles. He has always followed his inclinations, and one knows the result of that.”
Herbert assented. “To me Mrs. Failing’s course is perfectly plain. She has a certain responsibility. She must pay the youth’s passage to one of the colonies, start him handsomely in some business, and then break off all communications.”
“How funny! It is exactly what she is going to do.”
“I shall then consider that she has behaved in a thoroughly honourable manner.” He held out his plate for gooseberries. “His letter to Varden was neither helpful nor sympathetic, and, if written at all, it ought to have been both. I am not in the least surprised to learn that he has turned out badly. When you write next, would you tell her how sorry I am?”
“Indeed I will. Two years ago, when she was already a little anxious, she did so wish you could undertake him.
“I could not alter a grown man.” But in his heart he thought he could, and smiled at his sister amiably. “Terrible, isn’t it?” he remarked to Rickie. Rickie, who was trying not to mind anything, assented. And an onlooker would have supposed them a dispassionate trio, who were sorry both for Mrs. Failing and for the beggar who would bestride her horses’ backs no longer. A new topic was introduced by the arrival of the evening post.
Herbert took up all the letters, as he often did.
“Jackson?” he exclaimed. “What does the fellow want?” He read, and his tone was mollified, “‘Dear Mr. Pembroke, — Could you, Mrs. Elliot, and Mr. Elliot come to supper with us on Saturday next? I should not merely be pleased, I should be grateful. My wife is writing formally to Mrs. Elliot’ — (Here, Agnes, take your letter), — but I venture to write as well, and to add my more uncouth entreaties.’ — An olive-branch. It is time! But (ridiculous person!) does he think that we can leave the House deserted and all go out pleasuring in term time? — Rickie, a letter for you.”
“Mine’s the formal invitation,” said Agnes. “How very odd! Mr. Ansell will be there. Surely we asked him here! Did you know he knew the Jacksons?”
“This makes refusal very difficult,” said Herbert, who was anxious to accept. “At all events, Rickie ought to go.”
“I do not want to go,” said Rickie, slowly opening his own letter. “As Agnes says, Ansell has refused to come to us. I cannot put myself out for him.”
“Who’s yours from?” she demanded.
“Mrs. Silt,” replied Herbert, who had seen the handwriting. “I trust she does not want to pay us a visit this term, with the examinations impending and all the machinery at full pressure. Though, Rickie, you will have to accept the Jacksons’ invitation.”
“I cannot possibly go. I have been too rude; with Widdrington we always meet here. I’ll stop with the boys— “ His voice caught suddenly. He had opened Mrs. Silt’s letter.
“The Silts are not ill, I hope?”
“No. But, I say,” — he looked at his wife,— “I do think this is going too far. Really, Agnes.”
“What has happened?”
“It is going too far,” he repeated. He was nerving himself for another battle. “I cannot stand this sort of thing. There are limits.”
He laid the letter down. It was Herbert who picked it up, and read: “Aunt Emily has just written to us. We are so glad that her troubles are over, in spite of the expense. It never does to live apart from one’s own relatives so much as she has done up to now. He goes next Saturday to Canada. What you told her about him just turned the scale. She has asked us— “
“No, it’s too much,” he interrupted. “What I told her — told her about him — no, I will have it out at last. Agnes!”
“Yes?” said his wife, raising her eyes from Mrs. Jackson’s formal invitation.
“It’s you — it’s you. I never mentioned him to her. Why, I’ve never seen her or written to her since. I accuse you.”
Then Herbert overbore him, and he collapsed. He was asked what he meant. Why was he so excited? Of what did he accuse his wife. Each time he spoke more feebly, and before long the brother and sister were laughing at him. He felt bewildered, like a boy who knows that he is right but cannot put his case correctly. He repeated, “I’ve never mentioned him to her. It’s a libel. Never in my life.” And they cried, “My dear Rickie, what an absurd fuss!” Then his brain cleared. His eye fell on the letter that his wife had received from his aunt, and he reopened the battle.
“Agnes, give me that letter, if you please.”
“Mrs. Jackson’s?”
“My aunt’s.”
She put her hand on it, and looked at him doubtfully. She saw that she had failed to bully him.
“My aunt’s letter,” he repeated, rising to his feet and bending over the table towards her.
“Why, dear?”
“Yes, why indeed?” echoed Herbert. He too had bullied Rickie, but from a purer motive: he had tried to stamp out a dissension between husband and wife. It was not the first time he had intervened.
“The letter. For this reason: it will show me what you have done. I believe you have ruined Stephen. You have worked at it for two years. You have put words into my mouth to ‘turn the scale’ against him. He goes to Canada — and all the world thinks it is owing to me. As I said before — I advise you to stop smiling — you have gone a little too far.”
They were all on their feet now, standing round the little table. Agnes said nothing, but the fingers of her delicate hand tightened upon the letter. When her husband snatched at it she resisted, and with the effect of a harlequinade everything went on the floor — lamb, mint sauce, gooseberries, lemonade, whisky. At once they were swamped in domesticities. She rang the bell for the servant, cries arose, dusters were brought, broken crockery (a wedding present) picked up from the carpet; while he stood wrathfully at the window, regarding the obscured sun’s decline.
“I MUST see her letter,” he repeated, when the agitation was over. He was too angry to be diverted from his purpose. Only slight emotions are thwarted by an interlude of farce.
“I’ve had enough of this quarrelling,” she retorted. “You know that the Silts are inaccurate. I think you might have given me the benefit of the doubt. If you will know — have you forgotten that ride you took with him?”
“I— “ he was again bewildered. “The ride where I dreamt— “
“The ride where you turned back because you could not listen to a disgraceful poem?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The poem was Aunt Emily. He read it to you and a stray soldier. Afterwards you told me. You said, ‘Really it is shocking, his ingratitude. She ought to know about it’ She does know, and I should be glad of an apology.”
He had said something of the sort in a fit of irritation. Mrs. Silt was right — he had helped to turn the scale.
“Whatever I said, you knew what I meant. You knew I’d sooner cut my tongue out than have it used against him. Even then.” He sighed. Had he ruined his brother? A curious tenderness came over him, and passed when he remembered his own dead child. “We have ruined him, then. Have you any objection to ‘we’? We have disinherited him.”
“I decide against you,” interposed Herbert. “I have now heard both sides of this deplorable affair. You are talking most criminal nonsense. ‘Disinherit!’ Sentimental twaddle. It’s been clear to me from the first that Mrs. Failing has been imposed upon by the Wonham man, a person with no legal claim on her, and any one who exposes him performs a public duty— “
“ — And
gets money.”
“Money?” He was always uneasy at the word. “Who mentioned money?”
“Just understand me, Herbert, and of what it is that I accuse my wife.” Tears came into his eyes. “It is not that I like the Wonham man, or think that he isn’t a drunkard and worse. He’s too awful in every way. But he ought to have my aunt’s money, because he’s lived all his life with her, and is her nephew as much as I am. You see, my father went wrong.” He stopped, amazed at himself. How easy it had been to say! He was withering up: the power to care about this stupid secret had died.
When Herbert understood, his first thought was for Dunwood House.
“Why have I never been told?” was his first remark.
“We settled to tell no one,” said Agnes. “Rickie, in his anxiety to prove me a liar, has broken his promise.”
“I ought to have been told,” said Herbert, his anger increasing. “Had I known, I could have averted this deplorable scene.”
“Let me conclude it,” said Rickie, again collapsing and leaving the dining-room. His impulse was to go straight to Cadover and make a business-like statement of the position to Stephen. Then the man would be armed, and perhaps fight the two women successfully, But he resisted the impulse. Why should he help one power of evil against another? Let them go intertwined to destruction. To enrich his brother would be as bad as enriching himself. If their aunt’s money ever did come to him, he would refuse to accept it. That was the easiest and most dignified course. He troubled himself no longer with justice or pity, and the next day he asked his wife’s pardon for his behaviour.
In the dining-room the conversation continued. Agnes, without much difficulty, gained her brother as an ally. She acknowledged that she had been wrong in not telling him, and he then declared that she had been right on every other point. She slurred a little over the incident of her treachery, for Herbert was sometimes clearsighted over details, though easily muddled in a general survey. Mrs. Failing had had plenty of direct causes of complaint, and she dwelt on these. She dealt, too, on the very handsome way in which the young man, “though he knew nothing, had never asked to know,” was being treated by his aunt.
Works of E M Forster Page 36
