The Longest Journey Read Online Free

to those whom they did not like or intimatelyknow.) “And I believe she is saved. I never knew any one so always good-tempered and kind. She’s been kind to me ever since I knew her. I wish you’d heard her trying to stop her brother: you’d have certainly come round. Not but what he was only being nice as well. But she is really nice. And I thought she came into the room so beautifully. Do you know—oh, of course, you despise music—but Anderson was playing Wagner, and he’d just got to the part where they sing
    ‘Rheingold!

Rheingold!’
    and the sun strikes into the waters, and the music, which up to then has so often been in E flat—–”
    “Goes into D sharp. I have not understood a single word, partly because you talk as if your mouth was full of plums, partly because I don’t know whom you’re talking about.”
    “Miss Pembroke—whom you saw.”
    “I saw no one.”
    “Who came in?”
    “No one came in.”
    “You’re an ass!” shrieked Rickie. “She came in. You saw her come in. She and her brother have been to dinner.”
    “You only think so. They were not really there.”
    “But they stop till Monday.”
    “You only think that they are stopping.”
    “But—oh, look here, shut up! The girl like an empress—–”
    “I saw no empress, nor any girl, nor have you seen them.”
    “Ansell, don’t rag.”
    “Elliot, I never rag, and you know it. She was not really there.”
    There was a moment’s silence. Then Rickie exclaimed,“I’ve got you. You say—or was it Tilliard?—no,
you
say that the cow’s there. Well—there these people are, then. Got you. Yah!”
    “Did it never strike you that phenomena may be of two kinds:
one
, those which have a real existence, such as the cow;
two
, those which are the subjective product of a diseased imagination, and which, to our destruction, we invest with the semblance of reality? If this never struck you, let it strike you now.”
    Rickie spoke again, but received no answer. He paced a little up and down the sombre room. Then he sat on the edge of the table and watched his clever friend draw within the square a circle, and within the circle a square, and inside that another circle, and inside that another square.
    “Why will you do that?”
    No answer.
    “Are they real?”
    “The inside one is—the one in the middle of everything, that there’s never room enough to draw.”

2

    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