第65章 XIX(2)

"It means that poetry, not prose, lies at the core.""No. I can tell you what it means--balder-dash."His mouth fell. She was sweeping away the cobwebs with a vengeance. "I hope you're wrong," he replied, "for those are the lines on which I've been writing, however badly, for the last two years.""But you write stories, not poems."

He looked at his watch. "Lessons again. One never has a moment's peace.""Poor Rickie. You shall have a real holiday in the summer." And she called after him to say, "Remember, dear, about Mr. Jackson.

Don't go talking so much to him."

Rather arbitrary. Her tone had been a little arbitrary of late.

But what did it matter? Mr. Jackson was not a friend, and he must risk the chance of offending Widdrington. After the lesson he wrote to Ansell, whom he had not seen since June, asking him to come down to Ilfracombe, if only for a day. On reading the letter over, its tone displeased him. It was quite pathetic: it sounded like a cry from prison. "I can't send him such nonsense," he thought, and wrote again. But phrase it as he would the letter always suggested that he was unhappy. "What's wrong?" he wondered. "I could write anything I wanted to him once." So he scrawled "Come!" on a post-card. But even this seemed too serious. The post-card followed the letters, and Agnes found them all in the waste-paper basket.

Then she said, "I've been thinking--oughtn't you to ask Mr. Ansell over? A breath of sea air would do the poor thing good."There was no difficulty now. He wrote at once, "My dear Stewart, We both so much wish you could come over." But the invitation was refused. A little uneasy he wrote again, using the dialect of their past intimacy. The effect of this letter was not pathetic but jaunty, and he felt a keen regret as soon as it slipped into the box. It was a relief to receive no reply.

He brooded a good deal over this painful yet intangible episode.

Was the pain all of his own creating? or had it been produced by something external? And he got the answer that brooding always gives--it was both. He was morbid, and had been so since his visit to Cadover--quicker to register discomfort than joy. But, none the less, Ansell was definitely brutal, and Agnes definitely jealous. Brutality he could understand, alien as it was to himself. Jealousy, equally alien, was a harder matter. Let husband and wife be as sun and moon, or as moon and sun. Shall they therefore not give greeting to the stars? He was willing to grant that the love that inspired her might be higher than his own. Yet did it not exclude them both from much that is gracious?

That dream of his when he rode on the Wiltshire expanses--a curious dream: the lark silent, the earth dissolving. And he awoke from it into a valley full of men.

She was jealous in many ways--sometimes in an open humorous fashion, sometimes more subtly, never content till "we" had extended our patronage, and, if possible, our pity. She began to patronize and pity Ansell, and most sincerely trusted that he would get his fellowship. Otherwise what was the poor fellow to do? Ridiculous as it may seem, she was even jealous of Nature.

One day her husband escaped from Ilfracombe to Morthoe, and came back ecstatic over its fangs of slate, piercing an oily sea.

"Sounds like an hippopotamus," she said peevishly. And when they returned to Sawston through the Virgilian counties, she disliked him looking out of the windows, for all the world as if Nature was some dangerous woman.

He resumed his duties with a feeling that he had never left them. Again he confronted the assembled house. This term was again the term; school still the world in miniature. The music of the four-part fugue entered into him more deeply, and he began to hum its little phrases. The same routine, the same diplomacies, the same old sense of only half knowing boys or men--he returned to it all: and all that changed was the cloud of unreality, which ever brooded a little more densely than before. He spoke to his wife about this, he spoke to her about everything, and she was alarmed, and wanted him to see a doctor. But he explained that it was nothing of any practical importance, nothing that interfered with his work or his appetite, nothing more than a feeling that the cow was not really there. She laughed, and "how is the cow today?" soon passed into a domestic joke.