"Now listen to me. I am serious and friendly tonight, as you must have observed. I have asked you here partly to amuse myself--you belong to my March Past--but also to give you good advice. There has been a volcano--a phenomenon which I too once greatly admired. The eruption is over. Let the conventions do their work now, and clear the rubbish away.

My age is fifty-nine, and I tell you solemnly that the important things in life are little things, and that people are not important at all. Go back to your wife."

He looked at her, and was filled with pity. He knew that he would never be frightened of her again. Only because she was serious and friendly did he trouble himself to reply. "There is one little fact I should like to tell you, as confuting your theory. The idea of a story--a long story--had been in my head for a year. As a dream to amuse myself--the kind of amus.e.m.e.nt you would recommend for the future. I should have had time to write it, but the people round me coloured my life, and so it never seemed worth while. For the story is not likely to pay. Then came the volcano. A few days after it was over I lay in bed looking out upon a world of rubbish. Two men I know--one intellectual, the other very much the reverse--burst into the room. They said, 'What happened to your short stories? They weren't good, but where are they? Why have you stopped writing? Why haven't you been to Italy? You must write. You must go. Because to write, to go, is you.' Well, I have written, and yesterday we sent the long story out on its rounds. The men do not like it, for different reasons. But it mattered very much to them that I should write it, and so it got written. As I told you, this is only one fact; other facts, I trust, have happened in the last five months. But I mention it to prove that people are important, and therefore, however much it inconveniences my wife, I will not go back to her."

"And Italy?" asked Mrs. Failing.

This question he avoided. Italy must wait. Now that he had the time, he had not the money.

"Or what is the long story about, then?"

"About a man and a woman who meet and are happy."

"Somewhat of a tour de force, I conclude."

He frowned. "In literature we needn't intrude our own limitations.

I'm not so silly as to think that all marriages turn out like mine. My character is to blame for our catastrophe, not marriage."

"My dear, I too have married; marriage is to blame."

But here again he seemed to know better.

"Well," she said, leaving the table and moving with her dessert to the mantelpiece, "so you are abandoning marriage and taking to literature.

And are happy."

"Yes."

"Because, as we used to say at Cambridge, the cow is there. The world is real again. This is a room, that a window, outside is the night."

"Go on."

He pointed to the floor. "The day is straight below, shining through other windows into other rooms."

"You are very odd," she said after a pause, "and I do not like you at all. There you sit, eating my biscuits, and all the time you know that the earth is round. Who taught you? I am going to bed now, and all the night, you tell me, you and I and the biscuits go plunging eastwards, until we reach the sun. But breakfast will be at nine as usual.

Good-night."

She rang the bell twice, and her maid came with her candle and her walking-stick: it was her habit of late to go to her room as soon as dinner was over, for she had no one to sit up with. Rickie was impressed by her loneliness, and also by the mixture in her of insight and obtuseness. She was so quick, so clear-headed, so imaginative even.

But all the same, she had forgotten what people were like. Finding life dull, she had dropped lies into it, as a chemist drops a new element into a solution, hoping that life would thereby sparkle or turn some beautiful colour. She loved to mislead others, and in the end her private view of false and true was obscured, and she misled herself. How she must have enjoyed their errors over Stephen! But her own error had been greater, inasmuch as it was spiritual entirely.

Leighton came in with some coffee. Feeling it unnecessary to light the drawing-room lamp for one small young man, he persuaded Rickie to say he preferred the dining-room. So Rickie sat down by the fire playing with one of the lumps of chalk. His thoughts went back to the ford, from which they had scarcely wandered. Still he heard the horse in the dark drinking, still he saw the mystic rose, and the tunnel dropping diamonds. He had driven away alone, believing the earth had confirmed him. He stood behind things at last, and knew that conventions are not majestic, and that they will not claim us in the end.

As he mused, the chalk slipped from his fingers, and fell on the coffee-cup, which broke. The china, said Leighton, was expensive. He believed it was impossible to match it now. Each cup was different. It was a harlequin set. The saucer, without the cup, was therefore useless.

Would Mr. Elliot please explain to Mrs. Failing how it happened.

Rickie promised he would explain.

He had left Stephen preparing to bathe, and had heard him working up-stream like an animal, splashing in the shallows, breathing heavily as he swam the pools; at times reeds snapped, or clods of earth were pulled in. By the fire he remembered it was again November. "Should you like a walk?" he asked Leighton, and told him who stopped in the village tonight. Leighton was pleased. At nine o'clock the two young men left the house, under a sky that was still only bright in the zenith. "It will rain tomorrow," Leighton said.

"My brother says, fine tomorrow."

"Fine tomorrow," Leighton echoed.

"Now which do you mean?" asked Rickie, laughing.

Since the plumes of the fir-trees touched over the drive, only a very little light penetrated. It was clearer outside the lodge gate, and bubbles of air, which Wiltshire seemed to have travelled from an immense distance, broke gently and separately on his face. They paused on the bridge. He asked whether the little fish and the bright green weeds were here now as well as in the summer. The footman had not noticed. Over the bridge they came to the cross-roads, of which one led to Salisbury and the other up through the string of villages to the railway station.

The road in front was only the Roman road, the one that went on to the downs. Turning to the left, they were in Cadford.

"He will be with the Thompsons," said Rickie, looking up at dark eaves.

"Perhaps he's in bed already."

"Perhaps he will be at The Antelope."

"No. Tonight he is with the Thompsons."

"With the Thompsons." After a dozen paces he said, "The Thompsons have gone away."

"Where? Why?"

"They were turned out by Mr. Wilbraham on account of our broken windows."

"Are you sure?"

"Five families were turned out."

"That's bad for Stephen," said Rickie, after a pause. "He was looking forward--oh, it's monstrous in any case!"

"But the Thompsons have gone to London," said Leighton. "Why, that family--they say it's been in the valley hundreds of years, and never got beyond shepherding. To various parts of London."

"Let us try The Antelope, then."

"Let us try The Antelope."

The inn lay up in the village. Rickie hastened his pace. This tyranny was monstrous. Some men of the age of undergraduates had broken windows, and therefore they and their families were to be ruined. The fools who govern us find it easier to be severe. It saves them trouble to say, "The innocent must suffer with the guilty." It even gives them a thrill of pride. Against all this wicked nonsense, against the Wilbrahams and Pembrokes who try to rule our world Stephen would fight till he died.

Stephen was a hero. He was a law to himself, and rightly. He was great enough to despise our small moralities. He was attaining love. This evening Rickie caught Ansell's enthusiasm, and felt it worth while to sacrifice everything for such a man.

"The Antelope," said Leighton. "Those lights under the greatest elm."

"Would you please ask if he's there, and if he'd come for a turn with me. I don't think I'll go in."

Leighton opened the door. They saw a little room, blue with tobacco-smoke. Flanking the fire were deep settles hiding all but the legs of the men who lounged in them. Between the settles stood a table, covered with mugs and gla.s.ses. The scene was picturesque--fairer than the cutgla.s.s palaces of the town.

"Oh yes, he's there," he called, and after a moment's hesitation came out.

"Would he come?"

"No. I shouldn't say so," replied Leighton, with a furtive glance. He knew that Rickie was a milksop. "First night, you know, sir, among old friends."

"Yes, I know," said Rickie. "But he might like a turn down the village.

It looks stuffy inside there, and poor fun probably to watch others drinking."