“Just why Rickie brings me,” said Miss Pembroke.
“And I suppose you’re here to study life?” said Tilliard, sitting down.
“I don’t know,” said Rickie, gazing round at the waiters and the guests.
“Doesn’t one want to see a good deal of life for writing? There’s life of a sort in Soho,—Un peu de faisan, s’il vows plait.”
Agnes also grabbed at the waiter, and paid. She always did the paying, Rickie muddled with his purse.
“I’m cramming,” pursued Tilliard, “and so naturally I come into contact with very little at present. But later on I hope to see things.” He blushed a little, for he was talking for Rickie’s edification. “It is most frightfully important not to get a narrow or academic outlook, don’t you think? A person like Ansell, who goes from Cambridge, home—home, Cambridge—it must tell on him in time.”
“But Mr. Ansell is a philosopher.”
“A very kinky one,” said Tilliard abruptly. “Not my idea of a philosopher. How goes his dissertation?”
“He never answers my letters,” replied Rickie. “He never would. I’ve heard nothing since June.”
“It’s a pity he sends in this year. There are so many good people in. He’d have afar better chance if he waited.”
“So I said, but he wouldn’t wait. He’s so keen about this particular subject.”
“What is it?” asked Agnes.
“About things being real, wasn’t it, Tilliard?”
“That’s near enough.”
“Well, good luck to him!” said the girl. “And good luck to you, Mr. Tilliard! Later on, I hope, we’ll meet again.”
They parted. Tilliard liked her, though he did not feel that she was quite in his couche sociale. His sister, for instance, would never have been lured into a Soho restaurant—except for the experience of the thing. Tilliard’s couche sociale permitted experiences. Provided his heart did not go out to the poor and the unorthodox, he might stare at them as much as he liked. It was seeing life.
Agnes put her lover safely into an omnibus at Cambridge Circus. She shouted after him that his tie was rising over his collar, but he did not hear her. For a moment she felt depressed, and pictured quite accurately the effect that his appearance would have on the editor. The editor was a tall neat man of forty, slow of speech, slow of soul, and extraordinarily kind. He and Rickie sat over a fire, with an enormous table behind them whereon stood many books waiting to be reviewed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and paused.
Rickie smiled feebly.
“Your story does not convince.” He tapped it. “I have read it with very great pleasure. It convinces in parts, but it does not convince as a whole; and stories, don’t you think, ought to convince as a whole?”
“They ought indeed,” said Rickie, and plunged into self-depreciation. But the editor checked him.
“No—no. Please don’t talk like that. I can’t bear to hear any one talk against imagination. There are countless openings for imagination,—for the mysterious, for the supernatural, for all the things you are trying to do, and which, I hope, you will succeed in doing. I’m not objecting to imagination; on the contrary, I’d advise you to cultivate it, to accent it. Write a really good ghost story and we’d take it at once. Or”—he suggested it as an alternative to imagination—“or you might get inside life. It’s worth doing.”
“Life?” echoed Rickie anxiously.
He looked round the pleasant room, as if life might be fluttering there like an imprisoned bird. Then he looked at the editor: perhaps he was sitting inside life at this very moment. “See life, Mr. Elliot, and then send us another story.” He held out his hand. “I am sorry I have to say ‘No, thank you’; it’s so much nicer to say, ‘Yes, please.’” He laid his hand on the young man’s sleeve, and added, “Well, the interview’s not been so alarming after all, has it?”
“I don’t think that either of us is a very alarming person,” was not Rickie’s reply. It was what he thought out afterwards in the omnibus. His reply was “Ow,” delivered with a slight giggle.
As he rumbled westward, his face was drawn, and his eyes moved quickly to the right and left, as if he would discover something in the squalid fashionable streets some bird on the wing, some radiant archway, the face of some god beneath a beaver hat. He loved, he was loved, he had seen death and other things; but the heart of all things was hidden. There was a password and he could not learn it, nor could the kind editor of the “Holborn” teach him. He sighed, and then sighed more piteously. For had he not known the password once—known it and forgotten it already? But at this point his fortunes become intimately connected with those of Mr. Pembroke.
PART 2: SAWSTON
XVI
Table of Contents
In three years Mr. Pembroke had done much to solidify the day-boys at Sawston School. If they were not solid, they were at all events curdling, and his activities might reasonably turn elsewhere. He had served the school for many years, and it was really time he should be entrusted with a boarding-house. The headmaster, an impulsive man who darted about like a minnow and gave his mother a great deal of trouble, agreed with him, and also agreed with Mrs. Jackson when she said that Mr. Jackson had served the school for many years and that it was really time he should be entrusted with a boarding-house. Consequently, when Dunwood House fell vacant the headmaster found himself in rather a difficult position.
Dunwood House was the largest and most lucrative of the boarding-houses. It stood almost opposite the school buildings. Originally it had been a villa residence—a red-brick villa, covered with creepers and crowned with terracotta dragons. Mr. Annison, founder of its glory, had lived here, and had had one or two boys to live with him. Times changed. The fame of the bishops blazed brighter, the school increased, the one or two boys became a dozen, and an addition was made to Dunwood House that more than doubled its size. A huge new building, replete with every convenience, was stuck on to its right flank. Dormitories, cubicles, studies, a preparation-room, a dining-room, parquet floors, hot-air pipes—no expense was spared, and the twelve boys roamed over it like princes. Baize doors communicated on every floor with Mr. Annison’s part, and he, an anxious gentleman, would stroll backwards and forwards, a little depressed at the hygienic splendours, and conscious of some vanished intimacy. Somehow he had known his boys better when they had all muddled together as one family, and algebras lay strewn upon the drawing room chairs. As the house filled, his interest in it decreased. When he retired—which he did the same summer that Rickie left Cambridge—it had already passed the summit of excellence and was beginning to decline. Its numbers were still satisfactory, and for a little time it would subsist on its past reputation. But that mysterious asset the tone had lowered, and it was therefore of great importance that Mr. Annison’s successor should be a first-class man. Mr. Coates, who came next in seniority, was passed over, and rightly. The choice lay between Mr. Pembroke and Mr. Jackson, the one an organizer, the other a humanist. Mr. Jackson was master of the Sixth, and—with the exception of the headmaster, who was too busy to impart knowledge—the only first-class intellect in the school. But he could not or rather would not, keep order. He told his form that if it chose to listen to him it would learn; if it didn’t, it wouldn’t. One half listened. The other half made paper frogs, and bored holes in the raised map of Italy with their penknives. When the penknives gritted he punished them with undue severity, and then forgot to make them show the punishments up. Yet out of this chaos two facts emerged. Half the boys got scholarships at the University, and some of them—including several of the paper-frog sort— remained friends with him throughout their lives. Moreover, he was rich, and had a competent wife.