“I never cease to revere you for that, Herrick,” said Bumpus.
“I don’t really revere Nicholas so much as Mr. Merry,” said Emily. “At least, I don’t know. It was wonderful of Nicholas. I thought it mattered about Mr. Merry’s not being educated, as we were having him for a schoolmaster.”
“Yes, yes,” said Masson, in his high, stammering voice. “I confess I rather thought that.”
“I did not think that,” said Bumpus. “But I didn’t know what did matter. The thing Merry has, isn’t a thing one could guess.”
“Well, I always trust myself to judge a person at sight,” said Herrick. “It is borne in upon me how a person is this or that. And I never find myself wrong. It is a gift that we are either with or without.”
“I believe gifts are like that,” said Bumpus.
“That is unkind, Dickie,” said Emily.
“You may have to see us all out, Herrick,” said Bumpus. “You are past the danger age.”
“It is true that people who live to be seventy often do live to a great age,” said Herrick. “They are in a sense out of danger.”
“I believe you seem to be planning my death,” said Emily, “and without any arrangements at all for my deathbed. I hope you really do trust Mr. Merry. Not only with the kind of trust that does for boys.”
“I am sixty,” said Masson. “I claim also to be out of danger.”
“How exacting you all are about your amount of life!” said Bumpus. “But of course we are all of us too good to die.”
“Well, well, we shall go on, doing things it has been in us to do here, that we have not done,” said Herrick. “Ah, you do not think so, Emily. But this modern thought has you in its grip. You will grow out of it.”
“That will be nice and flexible of me, to grow out of things at fifty. They say that unusual people do develop very late.”
“I can’t understand how people fear death,” said Herrick. “It seems to me the most usual, natural thing, the last thing to be feared.”
“It is very usual. It might even be called universal,” said Bumpus.
“Don’t be shallow and witty, Dickie,” said Emily. “Nicholas was speaking of deeper truth.”
“I don’t find anything shocking in seeing death ahead for me,” said Masson.
“No, you see it as it is, and yourself as you are,” said Bumpus. “You are a long way above and below the rest of us. Below is the wrong word.”
“I should have thought he was above everything,” said Emily. “I never like to think of it for him. It must be so hard to be like that. We are very brave to be able to talk about death. As brave as people who feel able to make their wills.”
“I always wondered why Crabbe never wrote,” said Herrick. “He should have, shouldn’t he? Shouldn’t he now have written?”
“He never did. Not a line,” said Bumpus.
“I suppose a search after anything would be no good? I came across two or three scraps of different things. They are over there with my papers. But nothing of use.”
“No, no, no,” said Masson, firmly for him. “A search for anything would be no good. He had nothing. He kept nothing. He was as light as air. He had no friends but ourselves. No contemporaries outliving him. There seems to be no one to be notified of his death.”
“That is how Nicholas wants me to be,” said Emily.
“Ah!” said Herrick.
“He has died as he lived,” went on Masson. “Keeping nothing, needing nothing, asking nothing. A search of his rooms would be like searching a field.”
“You ought to write, William,” said Emily. “You really have written, after saying things like that.”
“I have been thinking of writing again,” said Bumpus, putting his hand over his eyes. “But I expect you all forget that I ever wrote. I don’t know if you do remember how dramatic I was once as a youth, when—natural and reasonable it seemed to me then—I caused a manuscript to be put into the grave of a friend? I have written nothing since. I didn’t mean that his death prevented me from writing later. That sort of thing comes out, if it is there. Though it is astonishing how many of us are capable of a single thing. But I have been writing a little book lately. I don’t know why I should say little, except that it is short.”
“This is good to hear, Richard,” said Masson.
“Too good,” said Emily. “I am so jealous for Nicholas. And he hasn’t a story in his life, either. I mean, not a beautiful story.”
“I seem as if I must still write like a boy,” said Bumpus, more freely and eagerly. “I find myself having to prune and tighten and mature. I don’t know if it is breaking off in youth that makes me go on as if from where I left off. I don’t believe we are ever much farther than at twenty-five.”
“I don’t think I am,” said Herrick. “For I also am thinking of bringing out a little book soon. Yes, Emily, you may look at me through that glass. I put off telling you until I should have the countenance of friends. For pleading guilty to turning real author at seventy! So we coincide, Bumpus. But I wish our ages coincided.”
“This is surely coincidence enough,” said Bumpus.
“I don’t wish anything more,” said Emily. “And how wonderful we are to have you coincide! It is selfless and beautiful of William and me.”
“That is what I feel,” said Bumpus.
“And I also am pleased with my little book,” went on Herrick, taking his sister’s hand, “and also don’t know why I call it little, except that it is short. Short it is, and that’s the truth; though I don’t know why we should prefer a long book. If a book is a whole in itself, why is its length any
