mr torrance openly objected to ann’s epitaph for david morgan, preferring his own choice of one from shelley’s “mont blanc”:

“and what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

if to the human mind’s imaginings

silence and solitude were vacancy?”

“but” said mr morgan, “shelley was born only a hundred years ago, and died at thirty, i think that in the matter of mountains an older man is better.”

“but, father,” said roland, “how do you know that jeremiah was not drowned at thirty with a copy of ‘ecclesiastes’ clasped to his bosom?”

“you read and see, my son,” answered mr morgan. “shelley could not pass himself off as an old man, though you know he did once claim to be eighty-nine, and jeremiah would not have pretended to be thirty. that is only my opinion. i prefer the prophet, like ann.”

[113]

mr torrance muttered that anyone who preferred jeremiah to shelley had no right to an opinion. it was just like mr torrance. he was always saying foolish things and fairly often doing them, and yet we felt, and mr morgan once declared, that he had in him the imperishable fire of a divine, mysterious wisdom. after walking the full length of the abbey road, where he lived, to discover him smiling in his dark study, was sufficient proof that he had a wisdom past understanding.

abbey road was over two miles long. at its south end was a double signboard, pointing north “to london,” south “to forden, field, and cowmore”; at its north end it ran into pure london. every year the horse-chestnut branches had to be shortened in may because their new leaf smothered the signboard. as if anyone who had reached that point could wish to be directed to london! almost as few could wish to know the way in order to avoid it. but the horse-chestnut had to suffer. it was fortunate in not being cut down altogether and carried away. the cemetery saved it. the acute angle between the abbey road and another was filled by a large new cemetery, and the tree was the first of a long line within its railings. even[114] had the signboard been on the other side of the road it would have been as badly off among the tall thorns and stunted elms of the hedges. behind this hedge was a waste, wet field, grazed over by a sad horse or two all through the year; for on account partly of the cemetery, partly of the factory which manufactured nobody quite knew what except stench, this field could not be let or sold. along its far side ran a river which had no sooner begun to rejoice in its freedom to make rush and reed at pleasure on the border of the field than it found itself at the walls of the factory. northward, past the cemetery and the factory, began the houses of abbey road, first a new house, occupied but with a deserted though not wild garden, and next to it a twin house, left empty. then followed a sluttery of a few pairs or blocks of small houses, also new, on both sides of the road—new and yet old, with the faces of children who are smeared, soiled, and doomed, at two. they bordered on the old inn, “the woodman’s arms,” formerly the first house, having a large kitchen garden, and masses of dahlias and sunflowers behind. it lay back a good space from the road, and this space was gravel up to the porch, and in the middle of it stood a stone drinking trough.[115] often a gypsy’s cart and a couple of long dogs panting in the sun were to be seen outside, helping the inn to a country look, a little dingy and decidedly private and homely, so that what with the distance between the road and the front door, and the gypsy’s cart, the passer-by was apt to go on until he came to an ordinary building erected for the sale of beer and spirits, and for nothing else. such a one lay not much further on, beyond a row of cottages contemporary with “the woodman’s arms.” these had long narrow gardens behind wooden posts and rails—gardens where everything tall, old-fashioned, and thick grew at their own sweet will, almost hiding the cottages of wood covered in creeper. you could just see that some were empty, their windows smashed or roughly boarded up, and that others were waiting for some old woman to die before they also had their windows smashed or boarded up. the dahlias, the rose-of-sharon, the sweet rocket, the snow-on-the-mountains, the nasturtiums, the sunflowers, flourished too thick for weeds to make headway, and so probably with small help from the inhabitants, the gardens earned many a wave of the whip from passing drivers. the row of cottages meant “the first bit of country,” with a sweep at one[116] end, a rat-catcher at the other, announced in modest lettering. between the last of them and the new public-house a puddled lane ran up along old and thick, but much broken, hedges to the horse-slaughterer’s. “the victoria hotel” was built in the jubilee year of that sovereign, and was a broad-faced edifice of brick with too conspicuous stone work round the windows and doorways and at the corners. the doors were many and mostly of glass. the landlord of “the victoria” had no time to stand on his doorstep—whichever was his—like the landlord of “the woodman”; moreover, all his doorsteps were right on the road, and he could have seen only the long row of cottages, by the same builder, which looked as if cut off from a longer, perhaps an endless row, with a pair of shears; while from the old inn could be seen grass sloping to the willows of the river, and a clump of elms hiding the factory chimneys. all the glass and brass of the “victoria” shone spotless as if each customer out of the regiments in the crowded straight streets gave it a rub on entering and leaving.

beyond the “victoria” the road straightened itself after a twist, and was now lined by a hundred houses of one pattern but broken by[117] several branch streets. these were older houses of gray stucco, possessing porches, short flights of steps up to the doors, basements, and the smallest of front gardens packed with neglected laurel, privet, marigold, and chickweed. at the end of the hundred—at no. 367—a man walking “to london” would begin to feel tired, and would turn off the pavement into the road, or else cross to the other side where the scattered new shops and half-built houses had as yet no footway except uneven bare earth. on this side the turnings were full of new houses and pavements, and admitted the eye to views of the welter of slate roofs crowding about the artificial banks of the river which ran as in a pit. of the branch streets interrupting the stucco hundred, one showed a wide, desolate, untouched field of more and more thistles in the middle, more and more nettles at the edge, and, facing it, a paltry miracle of brand-new villas newly risen out of a similar field; the second was the straight line of a new street, with kerb-stones neat and new, but not a house yet among the nettles; another, an old lane, was still bordered by tender-leafed lime trees, preserved to deck the gardens of houses to come. the lane now and then had a gypsy’s fire in it for a few hours,[118] and somebody had told the story that aurelius was born under one of the trees; to which aurelius answered, “the trees and i were born about the same time, but a hundred miles apart.”

the stucco line gave way to a short row of brick houses, low and as plain as possible, lying well back from the road behind their split-oak fences, thorn hedges, laburnums and other fancy trees. ivy climbed over all; each was neat and cheerful, but the group had an exclusive expression. yet they had to look upon half-built shops and houses, varied by a stretch of tarred and barbed fence protecting the playing ground of some football club, whose notice board stood side by side with an advertisement of the land for building on leasehold; over the fence leaned an old cart-horse with his hair between his eyes.

there followed repetitions and variations of these things—inhabited houses, empty houses, houses being erected, fields threatened by houses—and finally a long, gloomy unbroken cliff of stained stucco. the tall houses, each with a basement and a long flight of steps up to a pillared porch, curved away to the number 593, and the celebrated “horse-shoe hotel” next door, which looked with dignity and still more[119] ostentation, above its potted bay-trees, on the junction of abbey road and two busy thoroughfares. opposite the tall stucco cliff a continuous but uneven line of newish mean shops of every kind and not more than half the height of the private houses, curved to a public-house as large as the “horse-shoe” which it faced.

as each rook knows its nest among the scores on the straight uniform beeches, so doubtless each inhabitant could after a time distinguish his own house in this monotonous series, even without looking at the number, provided that there was light and that he was not drunk. each house had three storeys, the first of them bay-windowed, above the basement. probably each was divided between two, or, like no. 497, between three, families. who had the upper storeys i never knew, except that there was an old woman who groaned on the stairs, a crying baby and its mother, and some men. i heard them speak, or cry, or tread the stairs lightly or heavily, but never happened to see any of them, unless that woman was one who was going to enter the gate at the same time as i one evening, but at the sight of me went past with a jug of something half hid under her black jacket. the basement, the floor above, and[120] the garden, were rented to one family, viz., mr torrance, his wife and four children.

the garden was a square containing one permanent living thing, and one only, an apple tree which bore large fluted apples of palest yellow on the one bough remaining green among the grey barkless ones. all round the tree the muddy gravel had been trodden, by children playing, so hard that not a weed or blade of grass ever pierced it. up to it and down to it led two narrow and steep flights of steps, the lower for the children and the mother ascending from the kitchen or living room, the upper for mr torrance who used to sit in the back room writing books, except in the mornings when he taught drawing at several schools. he wrote at an aged and time-worn black bureau, from which he could sometimes see the sunlight embracing the apple tree. but into that room the sunlight could not enter without a miracle, or by what so seldom happened as to seem one—the standing open of an opposite window just so that it threw a reflection of the late sun for about three minutes. even supposing that the sunlight came that way, little could have penetrated that study; for the french windows were ponderously draped by tapestry of dark green with a black pattern,[121] and on one side the bureau, on the other a bookcase, stood partly before the panes. no natural light could reach the ceiling or the corners. instead of light, books covered the walls, books in a number of black-stained bookcases of various widths, all equal in height with the room, except one that was cut short by a grate in which i never saw a fire. the other few interspaces held small old pictures or prints in dark frames, and a dismal canvas darkened, probably, by some friendly hand. most of the books were old, many were very old. the huge, blackened slabs of theology and drama emitted nothing but gloom. the red bindings which make some libraries tolerable had been exorcised from his shelves by the spirits of black and of darkest brown.

the sullen host of books left little room for furniture. nevertheless, there was a massive table of ancient oak, always laden with books, and apparently supported by still other books. six chairs of similar character had long succeeded in retaining places in front of the books, justifying themselves by bearing each a pile or a chaos of books. dark as wintry heather were the visible portions of the carpet. the door was hung with the same black and green tapestry[122] as the windows; if opened, it disclosed the mere blackness of a passage crowded with more books and ancestral furniture.

yet mr torrance smiled whenever a visitor, or his wife, or one or all of his children, but, above all, when aurelius entered the room. no doubt he did not always smile when he was alone writing; for he wrote what he was both reluctant and incompetent to write, at the request of a firm of publishers whose ambition was to have a bad, but nice-looking, book on everything and everybody, written by some young university man with private means, by some vegetarian spinster, or a doomed hack like mr torrance. had he owned copies of all these works they would have made a long row of greens and reds decorated by patterns and lettering in gold. he did not speak of his work, or of himself, but listened, smiled, or—with the children—laughed, and allowed himself at worst the remark that things were not so bad as they seemed. he was full of laughter, but all clever people thought him devoid of humour. in his turn, he admired all clever people, but was uninfluenced by them, except that he read the books which they praised and at once forgot them—he had read sir thomas browne’s[123] “quincunx,” but could not say what a quincunx was. aurelius used to tease him sometimes, i think, in order to prove that the smile was invincible. mr torrance was one of the slowest and ungainliest of men, but he was never out of love or even out of patience with aurelius, the most lightsome of men, or of the superfluous race. he had fine wavy hair like silk fresh from the cocoon, and blue eyes of perfect innocence and fearlessness placed well apart in a square, bony, and big-nosed face that was always colourless. as he wrote, one or all of the children were likely to cry until they were brought into his study, where he had frequently to leave them to avoid being submerged in the chaos set moving by their play. he smiled at it, or if he could not smile, he laughed. if the children were silent for more than a little time he would go out into the passage and call downstairs to make sure that all was well, whereupon at least one must cry, and his wife must shriek to him in that high, sour voice which was always at the edge of tears. often she came before he called, to stand at his door, talking, complaining, despairing, weeping; and though very sorry, mr torrance smiled, and as soon as she had slammed the door he went on with his exquisite small[124] handwriting, or, at most, he went out and counted the apples again. one or more of the children was always ill, nor was any ever well. they were untidy, graceless, and querulous, in looks resembling their mother, whose face seemed to have grown and shaped itself to music—a music that would set the teeth of a corpse on edge. she was never at the end of her work, but often of her strength. she was cruel to all in her impatience, and in her swift, giddy remorse cruel to herself also. she seemed to love and enjoy nothing, yet she would not leave the house on any account, and seldom her work. whatever she did she could not ruffle her husband or wring from him anything but a smile and a slow, kind sentence. not that he was content, or dull, or made of lead or wood. he would have liked to dress his wife and children as prettily as they could choose, to ride easily everywhere, anywhere, all over the world if it pleased them, seeing, hearing, tasting nothing but what they thought best on earth. but save in verse he never did so. it was one of his pains that seldom more than once or twice a year came the mood for doing what seemed to him the highest he could, namely, write verses. also he had bad health; his[125] pipe, of the smallest size, half filled with the most harmless and tasteless tobacco, lay cold on the bureau, just tasted and then allowed to go out. ale he loved, partly for its own sake, partly to please aurelius, but it did not love him. it was one of the jokes concerning him, that he could not stand the cold of his morning bath unless he repeated the words,

“up with me, up with me, into the sky,

for thy song, lark, is strong.”

he said them rapidly, and in an agony of solemnity, as he squeezed the sponge, and though this fact had become very widely known indeed, he did not give up the habit. had he given up every kind of food condemned by himself or his doctors, he would have lived solely on love in that dark, that cold, that dead room. he was fond of company, but he knew nobody in all those thronged streets, unless it was an old woman or two, and their decrepit, needy husbands. he was a farmer’s son, and knew little more of london than ann, since he had moved into abbey road shortly after his first child was born, and had not been able to extricate himself from the books and furniture.

i see him, as soon as i have sat down by the window, swing round in his chair and look[126] grim as he lights his tobacco with difficulty—then smile and let the smoke pour out of his mouth before beginning to talk, which means that in a few minutes he has laid down the pipe unconsciously, and that it will remain untouched. the children come in; he opens the french windows, and goes down the steps to the apple tree, carrying half the children, followed by the other half. up he climbs, awkwardly in his black clothes, and getting that grim look under the strain, but smiling at last. he picks all of the seven apples and descends with them. the children are perfectly silent. “this one,” he begins, “is for annie because she is so small. and this for jack because he is a good boy. and this for claude because he is bad and we are all sorry for him. and this for dorothy because she is so big.” he gives me one, and dorothy another to take down to her mother, and the last he stows away.

mr torrance was often fanciful, and as most people said, affected, in speech. he was full of what appeared to be slight fancies that made others blush uncomfortably. he had rash admirations for more conspicuously fanciful persons, who wore extraordinary clothes or ate or drank in some extraordinary manner. he[127] never said an unkind thing. by what aid, in addition to the various brown breads to which he condemned himself, did he live, and move, and have his being with such gladness?

his books are not the man. they are known only to students at the british museum who get them out once and no more, for they discover hasty compilations, ill-arranged, inaccurate, and incomplete, and swollen to a ridiculous size for the sake of gain. they contain not one mention of the house under the hill where he was born.