A little this side of Madingley, to the left of the road, there is a secluded dell, paved with grass and planted with fir-trees.
It could not have been worth a visit twenty years ago, for then it was only a scar of chalk, and it is not worth a visit at the present day, for the trees have grown too thick and choked it.
But when Rickie was up, it chanced to be the brief season of its romance, a season as brief for a chalk-pit as a man--its divine interval between the bareness of boyhood and the stuffiness of age. Rickie had discovered it in his second term, when the January snows had melted and left fiords and lagoons of clearest water between the inequalities of the floor. The place looked as big as Switzerland or Norway--as indeed for the moment it was--and he came upon it at a time when his life too was beginning to expand. Accordingly the dell became for him a kind of church--a church where indeed you could do anything you liked, but where anything you did would be transfigured. Like the ancient Greeks, he could even laugh at his holy place and leave it no less holy.
He chatted gaily about it, and about the pleasant thoughts with which it inspired him; he took his friends there; he even took people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with the aesthete, he would possibly not have introduced him. If the dell was to bear any inscription, he would have liked it to be "This way to Heaven," painted on a sign-post by the high-road, and he did not realize till later years that the number of visitors would not thereby have sensibly increased.
On the blessed Monday that the Pembrokes left, he walked out here with three friends. It was a day when the sky seemed enormous.
One cloud, as large as a continent, was voyaging near the sun, whilst other clouds seemed anchored to the horizon, too lazy or too happy to move. The sky itself was of the palest blue, paling to white where it approached the earth; and the earth, brown, wet, and odorous, was engaged beneath it on its yearly duty of decay. Rickie was open to the complexities of autumn; he felt extremely tiny--extremely tiny and extremely important; and perhaps the combination is as fair as any that exists. He hoped that all his life he would never be peevish or unkind.
"Elliot is in a dangerous state," said Ansell. They had reached the dell, and had stood for some time in silence, each leaning against a tree. It was too wet to sit down.
"How's that?" asked Rickie, who had not known he was in any state at all. He shut up Keats, whom he thought he had been reading, and slipped him back into his coat-pocket. Scarcely ever was he without a book.
"He's trying to like people."
"Then he's done for," said Widdrington. "He's dead.""He's trying to like Hornblower."
The others gave shrill agonized cries.
"He wants to bind the college together. He wants to link us to the beefy set.""I do like Hornblower," he protested. "I don't try.""And Hornblower tries to like you."
"That part doesn't matter."
"But he does try to like you. He tries not to despise you. It is altogether a most public-spirited affair.""Tilliard started them," said Widdrington. "Tilliard thinks it such a pity the college should be split into sets.""Oh, Tilliard!" said Ansell, with much irritation. "But what can you expect from a person who's eternally beautiful? The other night we had been discussing a long time, and suddenly the light was turned on. Every one else looked a sight, as they ought. But there was Tilliard, sitting neatly on a little chair, like an undersized god, with not a curl crooked. I should say he will get into the Foreign Office.""Why are most of us so ugly?" laughed Rickie.
"It's merely a sign of our salvation--merely another sign that the college is split.""The college isn't split," cried Rickie, who got excited on this subject with unfailing regularity. "The college is, and has been, and always will be, one. What you call the beefy set aren't a set at all. They're just the rowing people, and naturally they chiefly see each other; but they're always nice to me or to any one. Of course, they think us rather asses, but it's quite in a pleasant way.""That's my whole objection," said Ansell. "What right have they to think us asses in a pleasant way? Why don't they hate us? What right has Hornblower to smack me on the back when I've been rude to him?""Well, what right have you to be rude to him?""Because I hate him. You think it is so splendid to hate no one.
I tell you it is a crime. You want to love every one equally, and that's worse than impossible it's wrong. When you denounce sets, you're really trying to destroy friendship.""I maintain," said Rickie--it was a verb he clung to, in the hope that it would lend stability to what followed--"I maintain that one can like many more people than one supposes.""And I maintain that you hate many more people than you pretend.""I hate no one," he exclaimed with extraordinary vehemence, and the dell re-echoed that it hated no one.
"We are obliged to believe you," said Widdrington, smiling a little "but we are sorry about it.""Not even your father?" asked Ansell.
Rickie was silent.
"Not even your father?"
The cloud above extended a great promontory across the sun. It only lay there for a moment, yet that was enough to summon the lurking coldness from the earth.
"Does he hate his father?" said Widdrington, who had not known.
"Oh, good!"
"But his father's dead. He will say it doesn't count.""Still, it's something. Do you hate yours?"
Ansell did not reply. Rickie said: "I say, I wonder whether one ought to talk like this?""About hating dead people?"
"Yes--"
"Did you hate your mother?" asked Widdrington.
Rickie turned crimson.