CHAPTER XLII

I met Owen at the station, and, as he jumped out of the carriage, he cried, “I’ve got the letter. It was waiting for me when I reached home.” He waved it triumphantly in my face, beaming with the delight of it and with the pleasure of showing it to me.

“I can’t possibly read it here,” I said, grasping his bag.

“And I say, you know, you did rippingly in the exams. I knew you would.”

He had come down by the first train, and I wanted to take him for a bathe, but he was so excited that he could hardly listen to me. I had brought our towels, and I delivered Owen’s bag to a carman outside to take up to the house.

“Where are we going now? It was jolly decent of him writing, wasn’t it?”

“Who? Tolstoy? Not bad. But we’re going to bathe: I waited for you. It’s some distance away, unless you would rather wade in off the shore; there’s plenty of time, however.”

“I’ll do whatever you like.”

“Then I think we’ll go round to Maggie’s Leap.”

As we went we talked of his precious letter. “You won’t like it, I daresay,” he said. “It’s not much in your line.”

“I wish you would tell me what my line is. I’ve been trying to discover during the last fortnight.”

“I know very well.... There’s one thing he says that I can’t quite――――”

“Well?”

“Well, it’s this: He says everything is in the Gospels. What people have got to do is to read over the words of Christ, and mark with a red pencil everything that is perfectly clear to them.”

“A red pencil?”

Owen was too eager to notice anything. “Yes. What are you amused at? Then you cut those bits out, and never bother about the rest. In what you cut out you’ll find everything that it is necessary to know in order to map out your life and your work. The whole teaching of Christ, all that is essential, will be in those bits. Later on you may read over the other things, that were obscure, and perhaps some of them will by then be plain. I am to consider what kind of work I have a taste for, and at the same time the work I devote myself to must fulfil certain tests or I am to have nothing to do with it. Work you do with your hands is best of all. I haven’t shown the letter at home yet. I thought I’d think it quietly over down here and talk about it with you. We’ll read the Gospels together. My father wants me to be a solicitor and go into his place, but I don’t want that. On the other hand, I must make up my mind soon, I suppose. I’m seventeen, you know.”

I took the letter from him, and read it slowly and with some difficulty as we walked along. After that, I thought over it for a while.

“Will you have to earn your living?”

“Yes, naturally. There are a good many of us, you know.”

“Then I don’t see how the Gospels are going to help you, no matter what way you mark them.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll have to live as other people do, unless you can afford to be different; and other people don’t live according to the Gospels.”

Owen was silent.

“A carpenter, a gardener, for instance,” he began, “couldn’t they live in accordance with the teaching of Christ? Tolstoy says I will never be happy unless I do.”

“It’s all very well for Tolstoy talking: he is his own master and has plenty of money. But how can you be a carpenter or a gardener? Your father would never allow you to, and the first thing would be a quarrel with him. We go down here, over this wall.”

Owen scrambled after me.

“A man must leave his father and his mother.”

“Yes, Owen dear, but you’re not a bit the kind of man who does, to say nothing of leaving your brother and your sisters. At any rate, while you are learning to be a gardener your father will have to keep you.”

“I only mentioned those trades because they happened to occur to me; there are plenty of others.”

“There are not plenty: that’s just the difficulty I’ve been finding.”

We clambered down on to the rocks, from which the sea stretched away, deep and clear and blue, glittering in the hot sunshine, moving with a low, smooth swell, like some huge, splendid, living creature.

“You will require a profession in which you can be your own master from the very beginning. It wouldn’t do to be subordinate to anybody who hadn’t had a letter from Tolstoy, or perhaps even read ‘Anna Karénine.’ If you go in for the Church, for example, you will have to do what you are told until you get a church of your own, when you’ll be always having rows with your parishioners and elders, for, of course, you’ll have to preach the Tolstoy gospel or the tests will get in the way. If you become a doctor you won’t make a living, because you will want to doctor the widows and the fatherless, who are no use in the matter of fees. I admit the lawyer idea is absurd――even without Tolstoy and the Gospels it wouldn’t have done――and no doubt your father only thought of it because he’s a solicitor himself. You’ll have to be content with something that fulfils perhaps one or two of the tests. Then, when you get married and have a swarm of children, your wife will rise in revolt against them _all_.”

“I can choose a suitable wife, and there’s no need to have a swarm of children. I shall have just as many as I can afford to bring up properly.... That reminds me, I brought you down the ‘Kreutzer Sonata.’ It’s in my bag.”

“That’s all right; but it’s always people like you, frightfully earnest and moral and all the rest of it, who have families of twelve or thirteen.”

“I tell you I won’t have them,” said Owen, impatiently.

“But Tolstoy himself――――”

“I don’t care a hang about Tolstoy.”

“Oh――h! Owen!”

“Tolstoy could give his children a decent start in life; and if he can do that, the more such a man has the better.”

During the latter part of this conversation, all of which Owen was taking in dead seriousness, we were undressing, and I now dived into the deep, green, glittering water. I turned on my back and lay watching Owen, distinctly uneasy, stand hesitating on the edge of the rock.

“Is it cold?” he asked.

“No; come along.”

He pulled his shirt slowly off. “I brought you down some of the short stories too.”

I laughed. “All right; I’ll read them when I come out.”

But Owen was really anxious now only about the temperature of the water. He floundered in and came up spluttering. I was a much better swimmer than he, and circled about him, showing off, delighting in the power I felt. We swam out for fifty yards or so, and I timed my stroke with Owen’s. He looked very funny. His eyes stared straight before him as if he were set on some desperate adventure. On our way back I splashed him a little and he got angry, swallowing a lot of water. I told him how contrary to the teaching of the Gospels this was; when I asked him to drink a pint of salt water he should swallow a quart; etc., etc.

When we got to the rocks and he had scrambled out, scraping his knees and one of his elbows in doing so, for it was not easy to get out unless you knew the way, he was quite offended, and would hardly speak to me. I was shaking with laughter, but I said I was sorry and gave him some sticking-plaster. He took the sticking-plaster, but would have none of my sympathy, and on the way home I had to soothe him into a better temper. Then, as usual, the cloud passed quite suddenly, and he was all right. As we drew near the house I wondered, uneasily, what he would think of my father, and what he would think of my home. Before coming to us he had been staying in Scotland with people who had evidently possessed yachts and motor-cars and all kinds of things, whereas we could not even boast a spare bed, and he would have to sleep with me.

When we came in, I introduced him to my father, who was working in the garden, and before dinner was over I was delighted to see that they were going to get on well together. Owen seemed to notice none of his peculiar habits, or, if he did, he was perfectly indifferent to them. He displayed an extraordinary interest in the school, asking all kinds of questions, and bringing out his own theories of education, which may or may not have emanated from the sage in Russia. I let them talk together without interfering much. I could see that my father was very favourably impressed, though the fact that such an admirable youth happened to be a particular friend of mine was naturally perplexing. Owen was frightfully polite. He called my father “Sir,” and listened deferentially to everything he had to say, never offering his own opinion as of any particular value. They talked almost exclusively of education. Owen told how he was teaching a boy at home in the evenings, the son of their coachman, and how clever this boy was, and how he had got Mr. Gill senior to promise to pay his college fees if he did well at school during the next year or two. It was the first time I had heard of the matter, but I supposed it was the mysterious something which had interfered with his own work, and had made him so anxious about retaining his exhibition. “Didn’t _he_ do splendidly?” Owen said suddenly, nodding his head in my direction.

“Peter can be clever enough when he chooses,” my father answered dryly.

This was to prevent me from exaggerating the merit of my achievement, but I did not care, for in my own mind my performance was somewhat stale already, and I did not give a fig for such distinctions. It occurred to me, as I watched them and listened to them, that Owen and my father were perhaps more alike, mentally and spiritually, than Owen and I, though my father had but a fraction of Owen’s fineness, and none of his generosity. They were related as a coarse weed and a delicate flower might be, but I was of a different genus. And then I thought that, though I cared little for Gerald, and loved Owen, perhaps it was Gerald with whom I had really most in common.