“I think you’re right,” said Widdrington softly. “But we are bloodless brutes. I wonder whether-If we were different people—something might be done to save him. That is the curse of being a little intellectual. You and our sort have always seen too clearly. We stand aside—and meanwhile he turns into stone. Two philosophic youths repining in the British Museum! What have we done? What shall we ever do? Just drift and criticize, while people who know what they want snatch it away from us and laugh.”
“Perhaps you are that sort. I’m not. When the moment comes I shall hit out like any ploughboy. Don’t believe those lies about intellectual people. They’re only written to soothe the majority. Do you suppose, with the world as it is, that it’s an easy matter to keep quiet? Do you suppose that I didn’t want to rescue him from that ghastly woman? Action! Nothing’s easier than action; as fools testify. But I want to act rightly.”
“The superintendent is looking at us. I must get back to my work.”
“You think this all nonsense,” said Ansell, detaining him. “Please remember that if I do act, you are bound to help me.”
Widdrington looked a little grave. He was no anarchist. A few plaintive cries against Mrs. Elliot were all that he prepared to emit.
“There’s no mystery,” continued Ansell. “I haven’t the shadow of a plan in my head. I know not only Rickie but the whole of his history: you remember the day near Madingley. Nothing in either helps me: I’m just watching.”
“But what for?”
“For the Spirit of Life.”
Widdrington was surprised. It was a phrase unknown to their philosophy. They had trespassed into poetry.
“You can’t fight Medusa with anything else. If you ask me what the Spirit of Life is, or to what it is attached, I can’t tell you. I only tell you, watch for it. Myself I’ve found it in books. Some people find it out of doors or in each other. Never mind. It’s the same spirit, and I trust myself to know it anywhere, and to use it rightly.”
But at this point the superintendent sent a message.
Widdrington then suggested a stroll in the galleries. It was foggy: they needed fresh air. He loved and admired his friend, but today he could not grasp him. The world as Ansell saw it seemed such a fantastic place, governed by brand-new laws. What more could one do than to see Rickie as often as possible, to invite his confidence, to offer him spiritual support? And Mrs. Elliot—what power could “fuse” a respectable woman?
Ansell consented to the stroll, but, as usual, only breathed depression. The comfort of books deserted him among those marble goddesses and gods. The eye of an artist finds pleasure in texture and poise, but he could only think of the vanished incense and deserted temples beside an unfurrowed sea.
“Let us go,” he said. “I do not like carved stones.”
“You are too particular,” said Widdrington. “You are always expecting to meet living people. One never does. I am content with the Parthenon frieze.” And he moved along a few yards of it, while Ansell followed, conscious only of its pathos.
“There’s Tilliard,” he observed. “Shall we kill him?”
“Please,” said Widdrington, and as he spoke Tilliard joined them. He brought them news. That morning he had heard from Rickie: Mrs. Elliot was expecting a child.
“A child?” said Ansell, suddenly bewildered.
“Oh, I forgot,” interposed Widdrington. “My cousin did tell me.”
“You forgot! Well, after all, I forgot that it might be, We are indeed young men.” He leant against the pedestal of Ilissus and remembered their talk about the Spirit of Life. In his ignorance of what a child means he wondered whether the opportunity he sought lay here.
“I am very glad,” said Tilliard, not without intention. “A child will draw them even closer together. I like to see young people wrapped up in their child.”
“I suppose I must be getting back to my dissertation,” said Ansell. He left the Parthenon to pass by the monuments of our more reticent beliefs—the temple of the Ephesian Artemis, the statue of the Cnidian Demeter. Honest, he knew that here were powers he could not cope with, nor, as yet, understand.
XXI
The mists that had gathered round Rickie seemed to be breaking. He had found light neither in work for which he was unfitted nor in a woman who had ceased to respect him, and whom he was ceasing to love. Though he called himself fickle and took all the blame of their marriage on his own shoulders, there remained in Agnes certain terrible faults of heart and head, and no self-reproach would diminish them. The glamour of wedlock had faded; indeed, he saw now that it had faded even before wedlock, and that during the final months he had shut his eyes and pretended it was still there. But now the mists were breaking.
That November the supreme event approached. He saw it with Nature’s eyes. It dawned on him, as on Ansell, that personal love and marriage only cover one side of the shield, and that on the other is graven the epic of birth. In the midst of lessons he would grow dreamy, as one who spies a new symbol for the universe, a fresh circle within the square. Within the square shall be a circle, within the circle another square, until the visual eye is baffled. Here is meaning of a kind. His mother had forgotten herself in him. He would forget himself in his son.
He was at his duties when the news arrived—taking preparation. Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman’s tenderness. Though they despised Rickie, and had suffered under Agnes’s meanness, their one thought this term was to be gentle and to give no trouble.
“Rickie—one moment—”
His face grew ashen. He followed Herbert into the passage, closing the door of the preparation room behind him. “Oh, is she safe?” he whispered.
“Yes, yes,” said Herbert; but there sounded in his answer a sombre hostile note.
“Our boy?”
“Girl—a girl, dear Rickie; a little daughter. She—she is in many ways a healthy child. She will live—oh yes.” A flash of horror passed over his face. He hurried into the preparation room, lifted the lid of his desk, glanced mechanically at the boys, and came out again.
Mrs. Lewin appeared through the door that led into their own part of the house.
“Both going on well!” she cried; but her voice also was grave, exasperated.
“What is it?” he gasped. “It’s something you daren’t tell me.”
“Only this”—stuttered Herbert. “You mustn’t mind when you see—she’s lame.”
Mrs. Lewin disappeared. “Lame! but not as lame as I am?”
“Oh, my dear boy, worse. Don’t—oh, be a man in this. Come away from the preparation room. Remember she’ll live—in many ways healthy—only just this one defect.”
The horror of that week never passed away from him. To the end of his life he remembered the excuses—the consolations that the child would live; suffered very little, if at all; would walk with crutches; would certainly live. God was more merciful. A window was opened too wide on a draughty day—after a short, painless illness his daughter died. But the lesson he had learnt so glibly at Cambridge should be heeded now; no child should ever be born to him again.
XXII
That same term there took place at Dunwood House another event. With their private tragedy it seemed to have no connection; but in time Rickie perceived it as a bitter comment. Its developments were unforeseen and lasting. It was perhaps the most terrible thing he had to bear.
Varden had now been a boarder for ten months. His health had broken in the previous term,—partly, it is to be feared, as the result of the indifferent food—and during the summer holidays he was attacked by a series of agonizing earaches. His mother, a feeble person, wished to keep him at home, but Herbert dissuaded her. Soon after the death of the child there arose at Dunwood House one of those waves of hostility of which no boy knows the origin nor any master can calculate the course. Varden had never been popular—there was no reason why he should be—but he had never been seriously bullied hitherto. One evening nearly the whole house set on him. The prefects absented themselves, the bigger boys stood round and the lesser boys, to whom power was delegated, flung him down, and rubbed his face under the desks, and wrenched at his ears. The noise penetrated the baize doors, and Herbert swept through and punished the whole house, including Varden, whom it would not do to leave out. The poor man was horrified. He approved of a little healthy roughness, but this was pure brutalization. What had come over his boys? Were they not gentlemen’s sons? He would not admit that if you herd together human beings before they can understand each other the great god Pan is angry, and will in the end evade your regulations and drive them mad. That night the victim was screaming with pain, and the doctor next day spoke of an operation. The suspense lasted a whole week. Comment was made in the local papers, and the reputation not only of the house but of the school was imperilled. “If only I had known,” repeated Herbert—“if only I had known I would have arranged it all differently. He should have had a cubicle.” The boy did not die, but he left Sawston, never to return.
The day before his departure Rickie sat with him some time, and tried to talk in a way that was not pedantic. In his own sorrow, which he could share with no one, least of all with his wife, he was still alive to the sorrows of others. He still fought against apathy, though he was losing the battle.
“Don’t lose heart,” he told him. “The world isn’t all going to be like this. There are temptations and trials, of course, but nothing at all of the kind you have had here.”
“But school is the world in miniature, is it not, sir?” asked the boy, hoping to please one master by echoing what had been told him by another. He was always on the lookout for sympathy—: it was one of the things that had contributed to his downfall.
“I never noticed that myself. I was unhappy at school, and in the world people can be very happy.”
Varden sighed and rolled about his eyes. “Are the fellows sorry for what they did to me?” he asked in an affected voice. “I am sure I forgive them from the bottom of my heart. We ought to forgive our enemies, oughtn’t we, sir?”
“But they aren’t your enemies. If you meet in five years’ time you may find each other splendid fellows.”
The boy would not admit this. He had been reading some revivalistic literature. “We ought to forgive our enemies,” he repeated; “and however wicked they are, we ought not to wish them evil. When I was ill, and death seemed nearest, I had many kind letters on this subject.”
Rickie knew about these “many kind letters.” Varden had induced the silly nurse to write to people—people of all sorts, people that he scarcely knew or did not know at all—detailing his misfortune, and asking for spiritual aid and sympathy.
“I am sorry for them,” he pursued. “I would not like to be like them.”
Rickie sighed. He saw that a year at Dunwood House had produced a sanctimonious prig. “Don’t think about them, Varden. Think about anything beautiful—say, music. You like music. Be happy. It’s your duty. You can’t be good until you’ve had a little happiness. Then perhaps you will think less about forgiving people and more about loving them.”
“I love them already, sir.” And Rickie, in desperation, asked if he might look at the many kind letters.
Permission was gladly given. A neat bundle was produced, and for about twenty minutes the master perused it, while the invalid kept watch on his face. Rooks cawed out in the playing-fields, and close under the window there was the sound of delightful, good-tempered laughter. A boy is no devil, whatever boys may be. The letters were chilly productions, somewhat clerical in tone, by whomsoever written. Varden, because he was ill at the time, had been taken seriously. The writers declared that his illness was fulfilling some mysterious purpose: suffering engendered spiritual growth: he was showing signs of this already. They consented to pray for him, some majestically, others shyly. But they all consented with one exception, who worded his refusal as follows:—
Dear A.C. Varden,—
I ought to say that I never remember seeing you. I am sorry that you are ill, and hope you are wrong about it. Why did you not write before, for I could have helped you then? When they pulled your ear, you ought to have gone like this (here was a rough sketch). I could not undertake praying, but would think of you instead, if that would do. I am twenty-two in April, built rather heavy, ordinary broad face, with eyes, etc. I write all this because you have mixed me with some one else, for I am not married, and do not want to be. I cannot think of you always, but will promise a quarter of an hour daily (say 7.00-7.15 A.M.), and might come to see you when you are better—that is, if you are a kid, and you read like one. I have been otter-hunting—
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Wonham
XXIII
Riekie went straight from Varden to his wife, who lay on the sofa in her bedroom. There was now a wide gulf between them. She, like the world she had created for him, was unreal.
“Agnes, darling,” he began, stroking her hand, “such an awkward little thing has happened.”
“What is it, dear? Just wait till I’ve added up this hook.”
She had got over the tragedy: she got over everything.
When she was at leisure he told her. Hitherto they had seldom mentioned Stephen. He was classed among the unprofitable dead.
She was more sympathetic than he expected. “Dear Rickie,” she murmured with averted eyes. “How tiresome for you.”
“I wish that Varden had stopped with Mrs. Orr.”
“Well, he leaves us for good tomorrow.”
“Yes, yes. And I made him answer the letter and apologize. They had never met. It was some confusion with a man in the Church Army, living at a place called Codford. I asked the nurse. It is all explained.”
“There the matter ends.”
“I suppose so—if matters ever end.”
“If, by ill-luck, the person does call. I will just see him and say that the boy has gone.”
“You, or I. I have got over all nonsense by this time. He’s absolutely nothing to me now.” He took up the tradesman’s book and played with it idly. On its crimson cover was stamped a grotesque sheep. How stale and stupid their life had become!
“Don’t talk like that, though,” she said uneasily. “Think how disastrous it would be if you made a slip in speaking to him.”
“Would it? It would have been disastrous once. But I expect, as a matter of fact, that Aunt Emily has made the slip already.”
His wife was displeased. “You need not talk in that cynical way. I credit Aunt Emily with better feeling. When I was there she did mention the matter, but only once. She, and I, and all who have any sense of decency, know better than to make slips, or to think of making them.”
Agnes kept up what she called “the family connection.” She had been once alone to Cadover, and also corresponded with Mrs. Failing. She had never told Rickie anything about her visit nor had he ever asked her. But, from this moment, the whole subject was reopened.
“Most certainly he knows nothing,” she continued. “Why, he does not even realize that Varden lives in our house! We are perfectly safe—unless Aunt Emily were to die. Perhaps then—but we are perfectly safe for the present.”
“When she did mention the matter, what did she say?”
“We had a long talk,” said Agnes quietly. “She told me nothing new—nothing new about the past, I mean. But we had a long talk about the present. I think” and her voice grew displeased again—“that you have been both wrong and foolish in refusing to make up your quarrel with Aunt Emily.”
“Wrong and wise, I should say.”
“It isn’t to be expected that she—so much older and so sensitive—can make the first step. But I know she’d he glad to see you.”
“As far as I can remember that final scene in the garden, I accused her of ‘forgetting what other people were like.’ She’ll never pardon me for saying that.”
Agnes was silent. To her the phrase was meaningless. Yet Rickie was correct: Mrs. Failing had resented it more than anything.
“At all events,” she suggested, “you might go and see her.”
“No, dear. Thank you, no.”
“She is, after all—” She was going to say “your father’s sister,” but the expression was scarcely a happy one, and she turned it into, “She is, after all, growing old and lonely.”
“So are we all!” he cried, with a lapse of tone that was now characteristic in him.
“She oughtn’t to be so isolated from her proper relatives.”
There was a moment’s silence. Still playing with the book, he remarked, “You forget, she’s got her favourite nephew.”
A bright red flush spread over her cheeks. “What is the matter with you this afternoon?” she asked. “I should think you’d better go for a walk.”
“Before I go, tell me what is the matter with you.” He also flushed. “Why do you want me to make it up with my aunt?”
“Because it’s right and proper.”
“So? Or because she is old?”
“I don’t understand,” she retorted. But her eyes dropped. His sudden suspicion was true: she was legacy hunting.
“Agnes, dear Agnes,” he began with passing tenderness, “how can you think of such things? You behave like a poor person. We don’t want any money from Aunt Emily, or from any one else. It isn’t virtue that makes me say it: we are not tempted in that way: we have as much as we want already.”
“For the present,” she answered, still looking aside.
“There isn’t any future,” he cried in a gust of despair.
“Rickie, what do you mean?”
What did he mean? He meant that the relations between them were fixed—that there would never be an influx of interest, nor even of passion. To the end of life they would go on beating time, and this was enough for her. She was content with the daily round, the common task, performed indifferently. But he had dreamt of another helpmate, and of other things.
“We don’t want money—why, we don’t even spend any on travelling. I’ve invested all my salary and more. As far as human foresight goes, we shall never want money.” And his thoughts went out to the tiny grave. “You spoke of ‘right and proper,’ but the right and proper thing for my aunt to do is to leave every penny she’s got to Stephen.”
Her lip quivered, and for one moment he thought that she was going to cry. “What am I to do with you?” she said. “You talk like a person in poetry.”
“I’ll put it in prose. He’s lived with her for twenty years, and he ought to be paid for it.”
Poor Agnes! Indeed, what was she to do? The first moment she set foot in Cadover she had thought, “Oh, here is money. We must try and get it.” Being a lady, she never mentioned the thought to her husband, but she concluded that it would occur to him too. And now, though it had occurred to him at last, he would not even write his aunt a little note.
He was to try her yet further. While they argued this point he flashed out with, “I ought to have told him that day when he called up to our room. There’s where I went wrong first.”
“Rickie!”
“In those days I was sentimental. I minded. For two pins I’d write to him this afternoon. Why shouldn’t he know he’s my brother? What’s all this ridiculous mystery?”
She became incoherent.
“But WHY not? A reason why he shouldn’t know.”
“A reason why he SHOULD know,” she retorted. “I never heard such rubbish! Give me a reason why he should know.”
“Because the lie we acted has ruined our lives.”
She looked in bewilderment at the well-appointed room.
“It’s been like a poison we won’t acknowledge. How many times have you thought of my brother? I’ve thought of him every day—not in love; don’t misunderstand; only as a medicine I shirked. Down in what they call the subconscious self he has been hurting me.” His voice broke. “Oh, my darling, we acted a lie then, and this letter reminds us of it and gives us one more chance. I have to say ‘we’ lied. I should be lying again if I took quite all the blame. Let us ask God’s forgiveness together. Then let us write, as coldly as you please, to Stephen, and tell him he is my father’s son.”
Her reply need not be quoted. It was the last time he attempted intimacy. And the remainder of their conversation, though long and stormy, is also best forgotten.
Thus the first effect of Varden’s letter was to make them quarrel. They had not openly disagreed before. In the evening he kissed her and said, “How absurd I was to get angry about things that happened last year. I will certainly not write to the person.” She returned the kiss. But he knew that they had destroyed the habit of reverence, and would quarrel again. On his rounds he looked in at Varden and asked nonchalantly for the letter. He carried it off to his room. It was unwise of him, for his nerves were already unstrung, and the man he had tried to bury was stirring ominously. In the silence he examined the handwriting till he felt that a living creature was with him, whereas he, because his child had died, was dead. He perceived more clearly the cruelty of Nature, to whom our refinement and piety are but as bubbles, hurrying downwards on the turbid waters. They break, and the stream continues. His father, as a final insult, had brought into the world a man unlike all the rest of them, a man dowered with coarse kindliness and rustic strength, a kind of cynical ploughboy, against whom their own misery and weakness might stand more vividly relieved. “Born an Elliot—born a gentleman.” So the vile phrase ran. But here was an Elliot whose badness was not even gentlemanly. For that Stephen was bad inherently he never doubted for a moment and he would have children: he, not Rickie, would contribute to the stream; he, through his remote posterity, might mingled with the unknown sea.
Thus musing he lay down to sleep, feeling diseased in body and soul. It was no wonder that the night was the most terrible he had ever known. He revisited Cambridge, and his name was a grey ghost over the door. Then there recurred the voice of a gentle shadowy woman, Mrs. Aberdeen, “It doesn’t seem hardly right.” Those had been her words, her only complaint against the mysteries of change and death. She bowed her head and laboured to make her “gentlemen” comfortable. She was labouring still. As he lay in bed he asked God to grant him her wisdom; that he might keep sorrow within due bounds; that he might abstain from extreme hatred and envy of Stephen. It was seldom that he prayed so definitely, or ventured to obtrude his private wishes. Religion was to him a service, a mystic communion with good; not a means of getting what he wanted on the earth. But tonight, through suffering, he was humbled, and became like Mrs. Aberdeen. Hour after hour he awaited sleep and tried to endure the faces that frothed in the gloom—his aunt’s, his father’s, and, worst of all, the triumphant face of his brother. Once he struck at it, and awoke, having hurt his hand on the wall. Then he prayed hysterically for pardon and rest.
Yet again did he awake, and from a more mysterious dream. He heard his mother crying. She was crying quite distinctly in the darkened room. He whispered, “Never mind, my darling, never mind,” and a voice echoed, “Never mind—come away—let them die out—let them die out.” He lit a candle, and the room was empty. Then, hurrying to the window, he saw above mean houses the frosty glories of Orion.
Henceforward he deteriorates. Let those who censure him suggest what he should do. He has lost the work that he loved, his friends, and his child. He remained conscientious and decent, but the spiritual part of him proceeded towards ruin.
XXIV
The coming months, though full of degradation and anxiety, were to bring him nothing so terrible as that night. It was the crisis of this agony. He was an outcast and a failure. But he was not again forced to contemplate these facts so clearly. Varden left in the morning, carrying the fatal letter with him. The whole house was relieved. The good angel was with the boys again, or else (as Herbert preferred to think) they had learnt a lesson, and were more humane in consequence. At all events, the disastrous term concluded quietly.
In the Christmas holidays the two masters made an abortive attempt to visit Italy, and at Easter there was talk of a cruise in the Aegean. Herbert actually went, and enjoyed Athens and Delphi. The Elliots paid a few visits together in England. They returned to Sawston about ten days before school opened, to find that Widdrington was again stopping with the Jacksons. Intercourse was painful, for the two families were scarcely on speaking terms; nor did the triumphant scaffoldings of the new boarding-house make things easier. (The party of progress had carried the day.) Widdrington was by nature touchy, but on this occasion he refused to take offence, and often dropped in to see them. His manner was friendly but critical. They agreed he was a nuisance. Then Agnes left, very abruptly, to see Mrs. Failing, and while she was away Rickie had a little stealthy intercourse.
Her absence, convenient as it was, puzzled him. Mrs. Silt, half goose, half stormy-petrel, had recently paid a flying visit to Cadover, and thence had flown, without an invitation, to Sawston. Generally she was not a welcome guest. On this occasion Agnes had welcomed her, and—so Rickie thought—had made her promise not to tell him something that she knew. The ladies had talked mysteriously. “Mr. Silt would be one with you there,” said Mrs. Silt. Could there be any connection between the two visits?
Agnes’s letters told him nothing: they never did. She was too clumsy or too cautious to express herself on paper. A drive to Stonehenge; an anthem in the Cathedral; Aunt Emily’s love. And when he met her at Waterloo he learnt nothing (if there was anything to learn) from her face.
“How did you enjoy yourself?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Were you and she alone?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes other people.”
“Will Uncle Tony’s Essays be published?”
Here she was more communicative. The book was at last in proof. Aunt Emily had written a charming introduction; but she was so idle, she never finished things off.
They got into an omnibus for the Army and Navy Stores: she wanted to do some shopping before going down to Sawston.
“Did you read any of the Essays?”
“Every one. Delightful. Couldn’t put them down. Now and then he spoilt them by statistics—but you should read his descriptions of Nature. He agrees with you: says the hills and trees are alive! Aunt Emily called you his spiritual heir, which I thought nice of her. We both so lamented that you have stopped writing.” She quoted fragments of the Essays as they went up in the Stores’ lift.
“What else did you talk about?”
“I’ve told you all my news. Now for yours. Let’s have tea first.”
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! Really! 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.
“‘Handsome’ is the word,” said Herbert. “I hope not indulgently. He does not deserve indulgence.”
And she knew that he, like herself, could remember money, and that it lent an acknowledged halo to her cause.
“It is not a savoury subject,” he continued, with sudden stiffness. “I understand why Rickie is so hysterical. My impulse”—he laid his hand on her shoulder—“is to abandon it at once. But if I am to be of any use to you, I must hear it all. There are moments when we must look facts in the face.”
She did not shrink from the subject as much as he thought, as much as she herself could have wished. Two years before, it had filled her with a physical loathing. But by now she had accustomed herself to it.
“I am afraid, Bertie boy, there is nothing else to bear, I have tried to find out again and again, but Aunt Emily will not tell me. I suppose it is natural. She wants to shield the Elliot name. She only told us in a fit of temper; then we all agreed to keep it to ourselves; then Rickie again mismanaged her, and ever since she has refused to let us know any details.”
“A most unsatisfactory position.” “So I feel.” She sat down again with a sigh. Mrs. Failing had been a great trial to her orderly mind. “She is an odd woman. She is always laughing. She actually finds it amusing that we know no more.”
“They are an odd family.”
“They are indeed.”
Herbert, with unusual sweetness, bent down and kissed her.
She thanked him.
Their tenderness soon passed. They exchanged it with averted eyes. It embarrassed them. There are moments for all of us when we seem obliged to speak in a new unprofitable tongue. One might fancy a seraph, vexed with our normal language, who touches the pious to blasphemy, the blasphemous to piety. The seraph passes, and we proceed unaltered—conscious, however, that we have not been ourselves, and that we may fail in this function yet again. So Agnes and Herbert, as they proceeded to discuss the Jackson’s supper-party, had an uneasy memory of spiritual deserts, spiritual streams.
XXVI
Poor Mr. Ansell was actually sitting in the garden of Dunwood House. It was Sunday morning. The air was full of roasting beef. The sound of a manly hymn, taken very fast, floated over the road from the school chapel. He frowned, for he was reading a book, the Essays of Anthony Eustace Failing.
He was here on account of this book—at least so he told himself. It had just been published, and the Jacksons were sure that Mr. Elliot would have a copy. For a book one may go anywhere. It would not have been logical to enter Dunwood House for the purpose of seeing Rickie, when Rickie had not come to supper yesterday to see him. He was at Sawston to assure himself of his friend’s grave. With quiet eyes he had intended to view the sods, with unfaltering fingers to inscribe the epitaph. Love remained. But in high matters he was practical. He knew that it would be useless to reveal it.
“Morning!” said a voice behind him.
He saw no reason to reply to this superfluous statement, and went on with his reading.
“Morning!” said the voice again.
As for the Essays, the thought was somewhat old-fashioned, and he picked many holes in it; nor was he anything but bored by the prospect of the brotherhood of man. However, Mr. Failing stuck to his guns, such as they were, and fired from them several good remarks. Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity (coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something), and his avowed preference for coarseness. Vulgarity, to him, had been the primal curse, the shoddy reticence that prevents man opening his heart to man, the power that makes against equality. From it sprang all the things that he hated—class shibboleths, ladies, lidies, the game laws, the Conservative party—all the things that accent the divergencies rather than the similarities in human nature. Whereas coarseness—But at this point Herbert Pembroke had scrawled with a blue pencil: “Childish. One reads no further.”
“Morning!” repeated the voice.
Ansell read further, for here was the book of a man who had tried, however unsuccessfully, to practice what he preached. Mrs. Failing, in her Introduction, described with delicate irony his difficulties as a landlord; but she did not record the love in which his name was held. Nor could her irony touch him when he cried: “Attain the practical through the unpractical. There is no other road.” Ansell was inclined to think that the unpractical is its own reward, but he respected those who attempted to journey beyond it. We must all of us go over the mountains. There is certainly no other road.
“Nice morning!” said the voice.
It was not a nice morning, so Ansell felt bound to speak. He answered: “No. Why?” A clod of earth immediately struck him on the back. He turned round indignantly, for he hated physical rudeness. A square man of ruddy aspect was pacing the gravel path, his hands deep in his pockets. He was very angry. Then he saw that the clod of earth nourished a blue lobelia, and that a wound of corresponding size appeared on the pie-shaped bed. He was not so angry. “I expect they will mind it,” he reflected. Last night, at the Jacksons’, Agnes had displayed a brisk pity that made him wish to wring her neck. Maude had not exaggerated. Mr. Pembroke had patronized through a sorrowful voice and large round eyes. Till he met these people he had never been told that his career was a failure. Apparently it was. They would never have been civil to him if it had been a success, if they or theirs had anything to fear from him.
In many ways Ansell was a conceited man; but he was never proud of being right. He had foreseen Rickie’s catastrophe from the first, but derived from this no consolation. In many ways he was pedantic; but his pedantry lay close to the vineyards of life—far closer than that fetich Experience of the innumerable tea-cups. He had a great many facts to learn, and before he died he learnt a suitable quantity. But he never forgot that the holiness of the heart’s imagination can alone classify these facts—can alone decide which is an exception, which an example. “How unpractical it all is!” That was his comment on Dunwood House. “How unbusiness-like! They live together without love. They work without conviction. They seek money without requiring it. They die, and nothing will have happened, either for themselves or for others.” It is a comment that the academic mind will often make when first confronted with the world.
But he was becoming illogical. The clod of earth had disturbed him. Brushing the dirt off his back, he returned to the book. What a curious affair was the essay on “Gaps”! Solitude, star-crowned, pacing the fields of England, has a dialogue with Seclusion. He, poor little man, lives in the choicest scenery—among rocks, forests, emerald lawns, azure lakes. To keep people out he has built round his domain a high wall, on which is graven his motto—“Procul este profani.” But he cannot enjoy himself. His only pleasure is in mocking the absent Profane. They are in his mind night and day. Their blemishes and stupidities form the subject of his great poem, “In the Heart of Nature.” Then Solitude tells him that so it always will be until he makes a gap in the wall, and permits his seclusion to be the sport of circumstance. He obeys. The Profane invade him; but for short intervals they wander elsewhere, and during those intervals the heart of Nature is revealed to him.
This dialogue had really been suggested to Mr. Failing by a talk with his brother-in-law. It also touched Ansell. He looked at the man who had thrown the clod, and was now pacing with obvious youth and impudence upon the lawn. “Shall I improve my soul at his expense?” he thought. “I suppose I had better.” In friendly tones he remarked, “Were you waiting for Mr. Pembroke?”
“No,” said the young man. “Why?”
Ansell, after a moment’s admiration, flung the Essays at him. They hit him in the back. The next moment he lay on his own back in the lobelia pie.
“But it hurts!” he gasped, in the tones of a puzzled civilization. “What you do hurts!” For the young man was nicking him over the shins with the rim of the book cover. “Little brute-ee—ow!”
“Then say Pax!”
Something revolted in Ansell. Why should he say Pax? Freeing his hand, he caught the little brute under the chin, and was again knocked into the lobelias by a blow on the mouth.
“Say Pax!” he repeated, pressing the philosopher’s skull into the mould; and he added, with an anxiety that was somehow not offensive, “I do advise you. You’d really better.”
Ansell swallowed a little blood. He tried to move, and he could not. He looked carefully into the young man’s eyes and into the palm of his right hand, which at present swung unclenched, and he said “Pax!”
“Shake hands!” said the other, helping him up. There was nothing Ansell loathed so much as the hearty Britisher; but he shook hands, and they stared at each other awkwardly. With civil murmurs they picked the little blue flowers off each other’s clothes. Ansell was trying to remember why they had quarrelled, and the young man was wondering why he had not guarded his chin properly. In the distance a hymn swung off—
“Fight the good. Fight with. All thy. Might.”
They would be across from the chapel soon.
“Your book, sir?”
“Thank you, sir—yes.”
“Why!” cried the young man—“why, it’s ‘What We Want’! At least the binding’s exactly the same.”
“It’s called ‘Essays,’” said Ansell.
“Then that’s it. Mrs. Failing, you see, she wouldn’t call it that, because three W’s, you see, in a row, she said, are vulgar, and sound like Tolstoy, if you’ve heard of him.”
Ansell confessed to an acquaintance, and then said, “Do you think ‘What We Want’ vulgar?” He was not at all interested, but he desired to escape from the atmosphere of pugilistic courtesy, more painful to him than blows themselves.
“It IS the same book,” said the other—“same title, same binding.” He weighed it like a brick in his muddy hands.
“Open it to see if the inside corresponds,” said Ansell, swallowing a laugh and a little more blood with it.
With a liberal allowance of thumb-marks, he turned the pages over and read, “‘the rural silence that is not a poet’s luxury but a practical need for all men.’ Yes, it is the same book.” Smiling pleasantly over the discovery, he handed it back to the owner.
“And is it true?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Is it true that rural silence is a practical need?”
“Don’t ask me!”
“Have you ever tried it?”
“What?”
“Rural silence.”
“A field with no noise in it, I suppose you mean. I don’t understand.”
Ansell smiled, but a slight fire in the man’s eye checked him. After all, this was a person who could knock one down. Moreover, there was no reason why he should be teased. He had it in him to retort “No. Why?” He was not stupid in essentials. He was irritable—in Ansell’s eyes a frequent sign of grace. Sitting down on the upturned seat, he remarked, “I like the book in many ways. I don’t think ‘What We Want’ would have been a vulgar title. But I don’t intend to spoil myself on the chance of mending the world, which is what the creed amounts to. Nor am I keen on rural silences.”
“Curse!” he said thoughtfully, sucking at an empty pipe.
“Tobacco?”
“Please.”
“Rickie’s is invariably—filthy.”
“Who says I know Rickie?”
“Well, you know his aunt. It’s a possible link. Be gentle with Rickie. Don’t knock him down if he doesn’t think it’s a nice morning.”
The other was silent.
“Do you know him well?”
“Kind of.” He was not inclined to talk. The wish to smoke was very violent in him, and Ansell noticed how he gazed at the wreaths that ascended from bowl and stem, and how, when the stem was in his mouth, he bit it. He gave the idea of an animal with just enough soul to contemplate its own bliss. United with refinement, such a type was common in Greece. It is not common today, and Ansell was surprised to find it in a friend of Rickie’s. Rickie, if he could even “kind of know” such a creature, must be stirring in his grave.
“Do you know his wife too?”
“Oh yes. In a way I know Agnes. But thank you for this tobacco. Last night I nearly died. I have no money.”
“Take the whole pouch—do.”
After a moment’s hesitation he did. “Fight the good” had scarcely ended, so quickly had their intimacy grown.
“I suppose you’re a friend of Rickie’s?”
Ansell was tempted to reply, “I don’t know him at all.” But it seemed no moment for the severer truths, so he said, “I knew him well at Cambridge, but I have seen very little of him since.”
“Is it true that his baby was lame?”
“I believe so.”
His teeth closed on his pipe. Chapel was over. The organist was prancing through the voluntary, and the first ripple of boys had already reached Dunwood House. In a few minutes the masters would be here too, and Ansell, who was becoming interested, hurried the conversation forward.
“Have you come far?”
“From Wiltshire. Do you know Wiltshire?” And for the first time there came into his face the shadow of a sentiment, the passing tribute to some mystery. “It’s a good country. I live in one of the finest valleys out of Salisbury Plain. I mean, I lived.”
“Have you been dismissed from Cadover, without a penny in your pocket?”
He was alarmed at this. Such knowledge seemed simply diabolical. Ansell explained that if his boots were chalky, if his clothes had obviously been slept in, if he knew Mrs. Failing, if he knew Wiltshire, and if he could buy no tobacco—then the deduction was possible. “You do just attend,” he murmured.
The house was filling with boys, and Ansell saw, to his regret, the head of Agnes over the thuyia hedge that separated the small front garden from the side lawn where he was sitting. After a few minutes it was followed by the heads of Rickie and Mr. Pembroke. All the heads were turned the other way. But they would find his card in the hall, and if the man had left any message they would find that too. “What are you?” he demanded. “Who are you—your name—I don’t care about that. But it interests me to class people, and up to now I have failed with you.”