The Longest Journey (16 page)

“There goes an out and outer,” said Stephen; and then, as if introducing an entirely new subject—“Don’t you think Flea Thompson treated me disgracefully?”

“I suppose he did. But I’m scarcely the person to sympathize.” The allusion fell flat, and he had to explain it. “I should have done the same myself,—promised to be away two hours, and stopped four.”

“Stopped—oh—oh, I understand. You being in love, you mean?”

He smiled and nodded.

“Oh, I’ve no objection to Flea loving. He says he can’t help it. But as long as my fists are stronger, he’s got to keep it in line.”

“In line?”

“A man like that, when he’s got a girl, thinks the rest can go to the devil. He goes cutting his work and breaking his word. Wilbraham ought to sack him. I promise you when I’ve a girl I’ll keep her in line, and if she turns nasty, I’ll get another.”

Rickie smiled and said no more. But he was sorry that any one should start life with such a creed—all the more sorry because the creed caricatured his own. He too believed that life should be in a line—a line of enormous length, full of countless interests and countless figures, all well beloved. But woman was not to be “kept” to this line. Rather did she advance it continually, like some triumphant general, making each unit still more interesting, still more lovable, than it had been before. He loved Agnes, not only for herself, but because she was lighting up the human world. But he could scarcely explain this to an inexperienced animal, nor did he make the attempt.

For a long time they proceeded in silence. The hill behind Cadover was in harvest, and the horses moved regretfully between the sheaves. Stephen had picked a
grass leaf, and was blowing catcalls upon it. He blew very well, and this morning all his soul went into the wail. For he was ill. He was tortured with the feeling that he could not get away and do—do something, instead of being civil to this anaemic prig. Four hours in the rain was better than this: he had not wanted to fidget in the rain. But now the air was like wine, and the stubble was smelling of wet, and over his head white clouds trundled more slowly and more seldom through broadening tracts of blue. There never had been such a morning, and he shut up his eyes and called to it. And whenever he called, Rickie shut up his eyes and winced.

At last the blade broke. “We don’t go quick, do we?” he remarked, and looked on the weedy track for another.

“I wish you wouldn’t let me keep you. If you were alone you would be galloping or something of that sort.”

“I was told I must go your pace,” he said mournfully. “And you promised Miss Pembroke not to hurry.”

“Well, I’ll disobey.” But he could not rise above a gentle trot, and even that nearly jerked him out of the saddle.

“Sit like
this
,” said Stephen. “Can’t you—see like
this
?” Rickie lurched forward, and broke his thumbnail on the horse’s neck. It bled a little, and had to be bound up.

“Thank you—awfully kind—no tighter, please—I’m simply spoiling your day.”

“I can’t think how a man can help riding. You’ve only to leave it to the horse so!—so!—just as you leave it to water in swimming.”

Rickie left it to Dido, who stopped immediately.

“I said
leave
it.” His voice rose irritably. “I didn’t say ‘die.’ Of course she stops if you die. First you sit her as if you’re Sandow exercising, and then you sit like a corpse. Can’t you tell her you’re alive? That’s all she wants.”

In trying to convey the information, Rickie dropped his whip. Stephen picked it up and rammed it into the belt of his own Norfolk jacket. He was scarcely a fashionable
horseman. He was not even graceful. But he rode as a living man, though Rickie was too much bored to notice it. Not a muscle in him was idle, not a muscle working hard. When he returned from the gallop his limbs were still unsatisfied and his manners still irritable. He did not know that he was ill: he knew nothing about himself at all.

“Like a howdah in the Zoo,” he grumbled. “Mother Failing will buy elephants.” And he proceeded to criticize his benefactress. Rickie, keenly alive to bad taste, tried to stop him, and gained instead a criticism of religion. Stephen overthrew the Mosaic cosmogony. He pointed out the discrepancies in the Gospels. He levelled his wit against the most beautiful spire in the world, now rising against the southern sky. Between whiles he went for a gallop. After a time Rickie stopped listening, and simply went his way. For Dido was a perfect mount, and as indifferent to the motions of Æneas as if she was strolling in the Elysian fields. He had had a bad night, and the strong air made him sleepy. The wind blew from the Plain. Cadover and its valley had disappeared, and though they had not climbed much and could not see far, there was a sense of infinite space. The fields were enormous, like fields on the Continent, and the brilliant sun showed up their colours well. The green of the turnips, the gold of the harvest, and the brown of the newly turned clods, were each contrasted with morsels of grey down. But the general effect was pale, or rather silvery, for Wiltshire is not a county of heavy tints. Beneath these colours lurked the unconquerable chalk, and wherever the soil was poor it emerged. The grassy track, so gay with scabious and bedstraw, was snow-white at the bottom of its ruts. A dazzling amphitheatre gleamed in the flank of a distant hill, cut for some Olympian audience. And here and there, whatever the surface crop, the earth broke into little
embankments, little ditches, little mounds: there had been no lack of drama to solace the gods.

In Cadover, the perilous house, Agnes had already parted from Mrs. Failing. His thoughts returned to her. Was she, the soul of truth, in safety? Was her purity vexed by the lies and selfishness? Would she elude the caprice which had, he vaguely knew, caused suffering before? Ah, the frailty of joy! Ah, the myriads of longings that pass without fruition, and the turf grows over them! Better men, women as noble—they had died up here and their dust had been mingled, but only their dust. These are morbid thoughts, but who dare contradict them? There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line, and some of us have Rickie’s temperament, or his experiences, and admit it.

So he mused, that anxious little speck, and all the land seemed to comment on his fears and on his love.

Their path lay upward, over a great bald skull, half grass, half stubble. It seemed each moment there would be a splendid view. The view never came, for none of the inclines were sharp enough, and they moved over the skull for many minutes, scarcely shifting a landmark or altering the blue fringe of the distance. The spire of Salisbury did alter, but very slightly, rising and falling like the mercury in a thermometer. At the most it would be half hidden; at the least the tip would show behind the swelling barrier of earth. They passed two elder-trees—a great event. The bare patch, said Stephen, was owing to the gallows. Rickie nodded. He had lost all sense of incident. In this great solitude—more solitary than any Alpine range—he and Agnes were floating alone and for ever, between the shapeless earth and the shapeless clouds. An immense silence seemed to move towards them. A lark stopped singing, and they were glad of it.
They were approaching the Throne of God. The silence touched them; the earth and all danger dissolved, but ere they quite vanished Rickie heard himself saying, “Is it exactly what we intended?”

“Yes,” said a man’s voice; “it’s the old plan.” They were in another valley. Its sides were thick with trees. Down it ran another stream and another road: it, too, sheltered a string of villages. But all was richer, larger, and more beautiful—the valley of the Avon below Amesbury.

“I’ve been asleep!” said Rickie, in awestruck tones.

“Never!” said the other facetiously. “Pleasant dreams?”

“Perhaps—I’m really tired of apologizing to you. How long have you been holding me on?”

“All in the day’s work.” He gave him back the reins.

“Where’s that round hill?”

“Gone where the good niggers go. I want a drink.”

This is Nature’s joke in Wiltshire—her one joke. You toil on windy slopes, and feel very primeval. You are miles from your fellows, and lo! a little valley full of elms and cottages. Before Rickie had waked up to it, they had stopped by a thatched public-house, and Stephen was yelling like a maniac for beer.

There was no occasion to yell. He was not very thirsty, and they were quite ready to serve him. Nor need he have drunk in the saddle, with the air of a warrior who carries important dispatches and has not the time to dismount. A real soldier, bound on a similar errand, rode up to the inn, and Stephen feared that he would yell louder, and was hostile. But they made friends and treated each other, and slanged the proprietor and ragged the pretty girls; while Rickie, as each wave of vulgarity burst over him, sunk his head lower and lower, and wished that the earth would swallow him up. He was only used to Cambridge, and to a very small corner of that. He and his friends
there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results from a little beer.

That was what annoyed him as he rode down the new valley with two chattering companions. He was more skilled than they were in the principles of human existence, but he was not so indecently familiar with the examples. A sordid village scandal—such as Stephen described as a huge joke—sprang from certain defects in human nature, with which he was theoretically acquainted. But the example! He blushed at it like a maiden lady, in spite of its having a parallel in a beautiful idyll of Theocritus. Was experience going to be such a splendid thing after all? Were the outside of houses so very beautiful?

“That spicy!” the soldier was saying. “Got any more like that?”

“I’se got a pome,” said Stephen, and drew a piece of paper from his pocket. The valley had broadened. Old Sarum rose before them, ugly and majestic.

“Write this yourself?” he asked, chuckling.

“Rather,” said Stephen, lowering his head and kissing Æneas between the ears.

“But who’s old Em’ly?” Rickie winced and frowned.

“Now you’re asking.

“I am so tired,” said Rickie. Why should he stand it any longer? He would go home to the woman he loved. “Do you mind if I give up Salisbury?”

“But we’ve seen nothing!” cried Stephen.

“I shouldn’t enjoy anything, I am so absurdly tired.”

“Left turn, then—all in the day’s work.” He bit at his moustache angrily.

“Good gracious me, man!—of course I’m going back alone. I’m not going to spoil your day. How could you think it of me?”

Stephen gave a loud sigh of relief. “If you do want to go home, here’s your whip. Don’t fall off. Say to her
you
wanted it, or there might be ructions.”

“Certainly. Thank you for your kind care of me.”

Soon he was out of earshot. Soon they were lost to view. Soon they were out of his thoughts. He forgot the coarseness and the drinking and the ingratitude. A few months ago he would not have forgotten so quickly, and he might also have detected something else. But a lover is dogmatic. To him the world shall be beautiful and pure. When it is not, he ignores it.

“He’s not tired,” said Stephen to the soldier; “he wants his girl.” And they winked at each other, and cracked jokes over the eternal comedy of love. They asked each other if they’d let a girl spoil a morning’s ride. They both exhibited a profound cynicism. Stephen, who was quite without ballast, described the household at Cadover: he should say that Rickie would find Miss Pembroke kissing the footman.

“I say the footman’s kissing old Em’ly.”

“Jolly day,” said Stephen. His voice was suddenly constrained. He was not sure whether he liked the soldier after all, nor whether he had been wise in showing him his compositions.

“All right, Thomas. That’ll do.”

“I wish you’d dry up, like a good fellow. This is the lady’s horse, you know, hang it, after all.”

“In-deed!”

“Don’t you see—when a fellow’s on a horse, he can’t let another fellow—kind of—don’t you know?”

The man did know. “There’s sense in that,” he said approvingly. Peace was restored, and they would have reached Salisbury if they had not had some more beer. It unloosed the soldier’s fancies, and again he spoke of old Em’ly, and recited the poem, with Aristophanic variations.

“Jolly day,” repeated Stephen, with a straightening of the eyebrows and a quick glance at the other’s body. He then warned him against the variations. In consequence he was accused of being a member of the Y.M.C.A. His blood boiled at this. He refuted the charge, and became great friends with the soldier, for the third time.

“Any objection to ‘Sorcy Mr. and Mrs. Tackleton’?”

“Rather not.”

The soldier sang “Saucy Mr. and Mrs. Tackleton.” It is really a work for two voices, most of the sauciness disappearing when taken as a solo. Nor is Mrs. Tackleton’s name Em’ly.

“I call it a jolly rotten song,” said Stephen crossly. “I won’t stand being got at.”

“P’r’aps y’like therold song. Lishen.

“Now, that’s wrong.” He rode up close to the singer.

“Shright.”

“ ’Tisn’t.”

“It’s as my mother taught me.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll not alter from mother’s way.”

Stephen was baffled. Then he said, “How does your mother make it rhyme?”

“Wot?”

“Squat. You’re an ass, and I’m not. Poems want rhymes. ‘Alley’ comes next line.”

He said “alley” was—welcome to come if it liked.

“It can’t. You want Sally. Sally—alley. Em’ly—alley doesn’t do.”