II

“This is a good room to come back to,” said Herrick. “That hall and the woman, and poor Merry shuffling up to do his duty! It made me shiver.”

“The sight of duty does make one shiver,” said Miss Herrick. “The actual doing of it would kill one, I think.”

Emily Herrick was a tall, dark woman of fifty, half-sister to Herrick, with a face that somehow recalled an attractive idol’s, iron-grey hair wound in plaits about her head, and a quick, deep voice.

“Merry knows what the duty is,” said Herrick. “For my life, I don’t.”

“One couldn’t know what that duty was,” said Miss Herrick. “It could only be felt, and perhaps you have too good a brain to do things in that way.”

“Let us leave it at that,” said Herrick.

“To think that you made the school!” said Emily. “For it was you who made it. But of course you would do the creative part.”

“Yes, yes. And I could go on with it,” said Herrick.

“Of course you could,” said Emily. “Wouldn’t it be dreadful if you had to? Or if you did? It is almost dreadful that you could.”

“Yes, yes, it is,” said Herrick. “I am an ordinary man.”

“I didn’t mean that, darling,” said Emily. “They say that teachers are born, not made. I know that schoolmasters are. And it was for a schoolmaster that we wanted Mr. Merry.”

“It is for a schoolmaster we have him, anyhow,” said Herrick, sitting down at his desk.

“We must get out of the way of talking as if we were not honest, Nicholas,” said Emily. “Anyone dishonest beside Mr. Merry would be such a waste, and wastefulness in a school is so unwise. And Mr. Merry has such charm in all that he does.”

“Merry is as open as the day,” said Herrick.

“Of course,” said Emily. “That is what I meant. What charm could there be in dishonesty apart from that? Ought you to write any more today, dear? You have written more than usual, after being up all night.”

“I must go on separating my papers from old Crabbe’s,” said Herrick. “I found some things of his to go through, and I took some of my own to deal with. I knew it would be a long night. And he did not want much looking to, poor old Crabbe! Eighty-nine if he was a day, and a long sinking, as if he were not done out enough to die! He did not suffer, or hardly, and Masson and Bumpus and I watched by him at the end. Well, may we all do as well, die at ninety, easily, and with our friends round us. I had rather have friends than children. Men with the same outlook, not people looking for their main spell after we are gone! Well, Emily, I hope you will watch by me one day, as I watched by my old friend last night.”

“How beautifully you speak, darling!” said Emily, putting up her glass to look at her brother. “And what a lot of good you have done! But I don’t think you have made very kind plans for me. But perhaps you have left my deathbed to Mr. Merry. There is no reason why he shouldn’t take all your responsibilities. And to carry out your scheme for yourself for an outsider, is very rare of you. It could hardly be expected for one of your own family.”

“Ah, Emily,” said Herrick. “You are twenty years younger than me. That is a thing we don’t reckon with, but it is there. You don’t look back or forward yet. We can’t look forward really; but I think I can look back, and see my life as not lacking.”

Herrick lived in his disappointment that in letters he had done only critical work.

“I never look back on my life,” said Emily. “It seems to be lacking in too much. You are so brave. There are William and Richard coming in. Guests must not be torn between admiration and anxiety, like people in the house.”

William Masson was a tall, large man in late middle age, with loose limbs and loose clothes, and a weather-beaten, high-boned face. He seemed an example of all the uneasinesses combined into ease.

His companion was a little, dark man about fifty-six, with eyes sunk deeply in a working face.

The two were Fellows and dons at Herrick’s college, and had meant romance for each other in youth. They had watched with Herrick at the deathbed of an old don, who had outlived his friends.

“Well, well,” said Herrick, “so he is gone, the old man! We shall all be in his place one day. I am fortunate in having you all younger than me. I have not to think of dying, surrounded by no one who is of my own kind and age. I can’t help being glad that it is I who will have to look to you at the end, and not you to me.”

“He has been explaining to me,” said Emily, “how I must die, unattended, while he has everybody kept alive for him. Nicholas has a wonderful gift for getting the best out of others. Think of Mr. Merry.”

“I never cease to revere you for that, Herrick,” said Bumpus.

“I don’t really revere Nicholas so much as Mr. Merry,” said Emily. “At least, I don’t know. It was wonderful of Nicholas. I thought it mattered about Mr. Merry’s not being educated, as we were having him for a schoolmaster.”

“Yes, yes,” said Masson, in his high, stammering voice. “I confess I rather thought that.”

“I did not think that,” said Bumpus. “But I didn’t know what did matter. The thing Merry has, isn’t a thing one could guess.”

“Well, I always trust myself to judge a person at sight,” said Herrick. “It is borne in upon me how a person is this or that. And I never find myself wrong. It is a gift that we are either with or without.”

“I believe gifts are like that,” said Bumpus.

“That is unkind, Dickie,” said Emily.

“You may have to see us all out, Herrick,” said Bumpus. “You are past the danger age.”

“It is true that people who live to be seventy often do live to a great age,” said Herrick. “They are in a sense out of danger.”

“I believe you seem to be planning my death,” said Emily, “and without any arrangements at all for my deathbed. I hope you really do trust Mr. Merry. Not only with the kind of trust that does for boys.”

“I am sixty,” said Masson. “I claim also to be out of danger.”

“How exacting you all are about your amount of life!” said Bumpus. “But of course we are all of us too good to die.”

“Well, well, we shall go on, doing things it has been in us to do here, that we have not done,” said Herrick. “Ah, you do not think so, Emily. But this modern thought has you in its grip. You will grow out of it.”

“That will be nice and flexible of me, to grow out of things at fifty. They say that unusual people do develop very late.”

“I can’t understand how people fear death,” said Herrick. “It seems to me the most usual, natural thing, the last thing to be feared.”

“It is very usual. It might even be called universal,” said Bumpus.

“Don’t be shallow and witty, Dickie,” said Emily. “Nicholas was speaking of deeper truth.”

“I don’t find anything shocking in seeing death ahead for me,” said Masson.

“No, you see it as it is, and yourself as you are,” said Bumpus. “You are a long way above and below the rest of us. Below is the wrong word.”

“I should have thought he was above everything,” said Emily. “I never like to think of it for him. It must be so hard to be like that. We are very brave to be able to talk about death. As brave as people who feel able to make their wills.”

“I always wondered why Crabbe never wrote,” said Herrick. “He should have, shouldn’t he? Shouldn’t he now have written?”

“He never did. Not a line,” said Bumpus.

“I suppose a search after anything would be no good? I came across two or three scraps of different things. They are over there with my papers. But nothing of use.”

“No, no, no,” said Masson, firmly for him. “A search for anything would be no good. He had nothing. He kept nothing. He was as light as air. He had no friends but ourselves. No contemporaries outliving him. There seems to be no one to be notified of his death.”

“That is how Nicholas wants me to be,” said Emily.

“Ah!” said Herrick.

“He has died as he lived,” went on Masson. “Keeping nothing, needing nothing, asking nothing. A search of his rooms would be like searching a field.”

“You ought to write, William,” said Emily. “You really have written, after saying things like that.”

“I have been thinking of writing again,” said Bumpus, putting his hand over his eyes. “But I expect you all forget that I ever wrote. I don’t know if you do remember how dramatic I was once as a youth, when⁠—natural and reasonable it seemed to me then⁠—I caused a manuscript to be put into the grave of a friend? I have written nothing since. I didn’t mean that his death prevented me from writing later. That sort of thing comes out, if it is there. Though it is astonishing how many of us are capable of a single thing. But I have been writing a little book lately. I don’t know why I should say little, except that it is short.”

“This is good to hear, Richard,” said Masson.

“Too good,” said Emily. “I am so jealous for Nicholas. And he hasn’t a story in his life, either. I mean, not a beautiful story.”

“I seem as if I must still write like a boy,” said Bumpus, more freely and eagerly. “I find myself having to prune and tighten and mature. I don’t know if it is breaking off in youth that makes me go on as if from where I left off. I don’t believe we are ever much farther than at twenty-five.”

“I don’t think I am,” said Herrick. “For I also am thinking of bringing out a little book soon. Yes, Emily, you may look at me through that glass. I put off telling you until I should have the countenance of friends. For pleading guilty to turning real author at seventy! So we coincide, Bumpus. But I wish our ages coincided.”

“This is surely coincidence enough,” said Bumpus.

“I don’t wish anything more,” said Emily. “And how wonderful we are to have you coincide! It is selfless and beautiful of William and me.”

“That is what I feel,” said Bumpus.

“And I also am pleased with my little book,” went on Herrick, taking his sister’s hand, “and also don’t know why I call it little, except that it is short. Short it is, and that’s the truth; though I don’t know why we should prefer a long book. If a book is a whole in itself, why is its length any matter?”

“But you do prefer a long one, darling,” said Emily. “I always like that side of you. And now I know it is the simplicity of greatness. But don’t make the book any longer. It is so careless of popular opinion to leave it short.”

“I wish⁠ ⁠… I wonder why we give voice to these wishes; but I wish old Crabbe had lived to see you with a book written, Herrick,” said Masson. “He always said that you were a man who would write, if you put yourself to it.”

“Just what Nicholas has been saying of him,” said Emily. “How beautiful they both are!”

“I have been a long fool, idle through seventy years of a good life,” said Herrick. “But I don’t know that I can wish that about Crabbe. I feel as if I should not have written this book, apart from his death; as if it would not have shaped itself in my mind as I now feel it. Of course there is no connection. None at all. None. But it came to me, as I sat there, the whole thing, the whole book. There it was. I can’t explain it.”

“It doesn’t seem good management,” said Emily. “To keep your book to yourself for seventy years, and then have Mr. Crabbe die to make it come out. But you are not a good manager; and Mr. Merry can’t do more than most of our life for both of us, and my death. And Mr. Crabbe was ninety, and you had it all so nice for him.”

“How long will it take you actually to write it, Herrick?” said Bumpus.

“I have it this time,” said Herrick. “I have been letting it grow in my head. Because of course in a way it has been there for some time. It is as good as written down. It was the form of it that flashed on me. I do things much in my head, as you know.”

“Oh, Nicholas, I didn’t know. I do admire you,” said Emily.

“I think I have found myself at last,” said Herrick. “I think that, God willing, I shall have done my little bit for my generation, done what every man ought to do, before he dies.”

“You don’t really think it is what every man ought to do,” said Emily. “I do hope it isn’t.”

“Assuming God, you wouldn’t do much if he wasn’t willing,” said Masson.

Bumpus laughed, and looked almost proudly at Masson.

“Are we going to be broad and wicked?” said Emily. “I like that, because I am not very educated, and so still young in my mind. Really, it would be nice to have some religion, and not go on without ever any comfort. And I am not like Nicholas, who is really God’s equal, and not his child at all. I think it is better not to have God than to be like that with him.”

“It is rather empty for him not to be had,” said Bumpus. “He always seems to me a pathetic figure, friendless and childless and set up alone in a miserable way.”

“Yes, he has a touch of William in him,” said Emily. “But you know he isn’t childless. We give even our boys more advantages than that. Mrs. Merry gives it to them.”

“You can have him childless in these days,” said Bumpus. “But if you have him, I like him really. I like him not childless, and grasping and fond of praise. I like the human and family interest.”

“Yes, he tends to be neutral nowadays,” said Masson. “Perhaps I do resemble him in that.”

“And he had such a personality,” said Emily. “Such a superior, vindictive and overindulgent one. He is one of the best drawn characters in fiction.”

“I really cannot listen to this,” said Herrick.

“Isn’t it quietly conscientious of Herrick, to be behind the parents’ backs what he is to their faces?” said Bumpus. “What he would be to their faces if he saw them.”

“I am deeply grateful to Merry,” said Herrick. “Nobody knows what seeing them is.”

“Mr. Merry does,” said Emily. “I am not grateful to him. I am cringing under a load of obligation. And he is a tragic figure, and haunts me. Now to Mrs. Merry I am just healthily grateful. And to Miss Basden my gratitude is quite of a brisk, employing kind. I almost feel more kindly to Mr. Burgess, who has to have the opposite of gratitude, though I never quite know why. Now I must go and ask Mrs. Merry if we may ask you to stay to dinner. I always think Nicholas and I carry that off so well, having to ask permission to have guests.”

“How Emily runs on and on, doesn’t she?” said Herrick. “Day after day, year after year, the stream never runs dry.”

“It doesn’t seem that it could,” said Masson; “that Emily could ever be subject to age.”

“I always wonder if she had any youth,” said Bumpus, his eyes sweeping over Masson. “She seems somehow ageless, to have nothing to do with age.”

“You knew her when she was young,” said Herrick. “But you were young too, then. She was wonderfully like what she is now. No, I think in a sense she had no youth, just as in a way she will have no old age. She is of that type. A rare one.”

“I think the two omissions compensate for each other,” said Masson.

“I do not. I like the whole of experience,” said Bumpus.

“I always wonder,” went on Herrick, in the tone of a man who kept back nothing of his heart, “if I should have been happier or unhappier without her. I am never bound by convention; and the question arises in the case of any intimate relationship, however good. We could all have moulded ourselves differently.”

“We can’t change the stuff in the mould,” said Masson.

“And Emily is a woman with a good deal of the man in her,” said Bumpus.

“Oh, I have had more to do with women than you two have,” said Herrick. “I am not as much off the common line. But most of my life’s relationships have been with men. But that is what I meant. I wonder what I should have been, if I had not had Emily. And, William, you are thinking, what would she have been. But I am never the slave of convention.”

“Don’t stop,” said Emily, returning. “I like talk that is unfit for me. It is having to get used to Nicholas, who is not the slave of convention, as he says. Fancy being able to say that truthfully!”

“I believe in the interest of oneself, you know,” said Herrick, going on as if he had not heard his sister. “I take the deepest interest in myself, apart from egotism of personality, though I may have that. And I have no condemnation for egotists. I think they are often the higher type.”

“This is not the kind of unfitness I meant,” said Emily. “It does sound wicked, but not with a wickedness that I like.”

“I think on the whole they are not,” said Masson.

“You could not be an egotist, William, whether or no you wanted it,” said Bumpus.

“Surely everybody would want it,” said Emily. “I am sure it would be dreadful not to be one. Isn’t it, William?”

“Egotism is a gift, like anything else,” said Herrick.

“Then I grow prouder and prouder of you, darling,” said Emily. “An author and an egotist, and both of them such lovely things.”

“I suppose your book is a novel, Herrick? Mine is,” said Bumpus.

“Yes, yes. A short novel,” said Herrick. “I hold no brief for long books, as I say.”

“Real books coming out of our own heads!” said Bumpus. “And not just printed unkindness to other people’s.”

“My first original piece of writing!” said Herrick. “That I should have to say it at seventy! Not just what Richard has said. Ah, I have felt that. Not that I have not done good work in that way. And it all has to be done. But my first book. Probably my only book, though many would be surprised to hear me say so. I thrill like a youth at the thought of seeing it out.”

“Oh, so do I,” said Emily. “But not like a youth. Though I should love to do that once again. And it is better and safer at seventy. It will have to have the respect due to age, anyhow. But I am afraid Mr. Merry will think it is a story book. Perhaps we had better keep it from him.”

“He must know about it when it comes out,” said Masson.

“No, I don’t think Mr. Merry knows about books when they come out,” said Emily.

Masson and Bumpus returned to the college, entered Masson’s rooms, and sat for a time in silence.

“Well, William,” said Bumpus, “I have protested that I have written a book. You must know that it is your part to seem to want to talk about it.”

“If you would like to talk of it with me,” said Masson. “I think that men who take only to science, cannot be on the point enough in these things to be bearable.”

“I suppose you will not read it,” said Bumpus. “Or if you do, will not tell me what you think of it.”

“Am⁠—am I of the sort to read it?” said Masson. “I hesitate, as I say, to inflict the alien touch.”

“It is this that thirty years has brought us to,” said Bumpus.

“I⁠—I think it is a good thing to come to, to keep to,” said Masson, his voice going high. “I think it is the worst thing about intimacy, that it may blunt every edge.”

“Yes, yes. Edges are the only thing,” said Bumpus. “It is odd about Herrick, isn’t it? His writing a book.”

“Odd, is it?” said Masson. “Oughtn’t he to have written before?”

“That does seem to me the alien touch,” said Bumpus.

“Well, perhaps it will hardly be a good book,” said Masson.

Bumpus laughed.

“I should have said that Herrick knew too well for that. He has his hand on his name with great skill. ‘Oughtn’t he to have written?’ That is what he has done. I don’t follow. It is certainly odd how both he and I seem to have come to it suddenly. It is dwelling on the time when I sacrificed my other book, that has brought me to it. My mind has been on it lately. I don’t know why I should be sensitive about it. My feelings had nothing in them to be ashamed of. This book seems to start out of all that, somehow, to go on from it. Well, there is nothing between.”

“In that way,” said Masson. “You⁠—you feel deeply about the book, Richard?”

“Yes,” said Bumpus, leaning forward, looking small and tense and alive. “I have wanted to write all my life, felt it was this, it was mine to want. And it seemed not to come to me, after the early time when things happened as we know. There seems to be one book in a good many of us. And, of course, that one book of mine was mine no longer.”

“No, no,” said Masson, not raising his eyes.

“So this means much to me,” said Bumpus, looking at Masson.

“It⁠—it means then much to me,” said Masson. “Perhaps Herrick’s book is the one book in him that is in many of us.”

“No,” said Bumpus, laughing. “I have more than one in me, and Herrick has not one at all.”

“Then the book must explain itself,” said Masson.

“I believe I am capable of any meanness,” said Bumpus suddenly, “short of actually cheating people of their own.”

“Is there much meanness short of some form of that,” said Masson.

“No, no, none that matters,” said Bumpus.