Fic: Idyll XII

[phantomtomato]

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Fandom: The Longest Journey - E.M. Forster
Relationship: Stewart Ansell/Rickie Elliot
Words: 2,733

Title is taken from the poem of the same title by Theocritus, who Rickie calls the greatest of the Greek poets.

Summary

During their final term at Cambridge, Stewart once more engages Rickie in a discussion of whether a cow exists.

Two men sat in a chalk-scarred meadow near Madingley, as friends of great intimacy were wont to do during a final summer term. Stewart Ansell, with his heels dug into a track of soft white rock, watched his friend, Rickie Elliot, make swift work of flower stems. Deftly, lean fingers plaited yellow buttercups and the tiny, fractal blossoms of cow parsley into crowns fit for characters of fantasy. This was what Stewart admired most about his closest friend: his passion for beauty.

And then, incongruous with the day, his friend sighed. Though Rickie placed these wondrous crowns upon each of their heads—and Stewart ached to catch his hands in comfort as Rickie did so—a melancholy had dropped just as surely onto Rickie’s shoulders, which were not broad enough to bear it. “We are bound to get narrow,” he said. “Cambridge is so tiny. The great world looks down on it.”

Rickie crossed his lame ankle under his good one. The thickness of the malformed boot was barely noticeable, even so close; a second sole, a lift inside the heel. But the action was unconscious, and uncalculated. It was mere habit, to hide the irregularity, ingrained so deeply that dear friendship could not override it.

“Do you still write your stories?” Stewart asked.

“Yes,” Rickie answered him, “though they’re very bad. Why?”

“If they are quite bad, then the great world looks down upon them, as well. And yet you write them.”

Rickie was bewildered. He’d never been any good at argument, and Stewart had never been any good at straight talk, and yet their admiration of one another held them together. So used to their pidgin of disparate languages, art and philosophy, Stewart continued: “Let us return to the cow.”

“Ah, a curse on your cow!” Rickie said, with bright laughter which lifted his face and made Stewart smile, in turn.

“She takes that rather poorly.”

“You’re right, it isn’t the cow that I curse—it’s you, I think, for your dogged re-use of her.”

“But you follow the metaphor?”

“No, not at all.”

“The metaphor,” Stewart explained, to much mirthful annoyance, “is that if she exists when no soul is there to witness her, then all must exist around her. She and her field and her herd are real.” For no other man would Stewart attempt plain speech. Rickie, alone, merited that distinction; Rickie, who listened with wide eyes and a thoughtful nod, as though earnestly weighing the meaning of each word. “I say that the cow does exist.”

“Once again,” Rickie admitted, fiddling an early harebell between his writer’s fingers, splotched with ink, “I cannot follow you.”

“I wish you said as much to Tilliard during these past years of debate!” Stewart lamented. “It would have knocked him off of his plinth.”

“I didn’t follow him, either.”

“But you kept mum, though I would have welcomed it more eagerly than any of his fetid little thoughts—no matter; that time has passed. Unless you should like to take that stance tonight when I discourse on Schopenhauer? No. Well, it was a worthy attempt. The cow is Cambridge, my dear. She is real in her specificity. The ‘great world,’ in its unreality, is not a cow at all.”

“If Cambridge is a cow, she’s a British White,” said Rickie, “with the deepest black fur in her ears and the purest white coat, not a single flea-spot to mar her hide.” Stewart encouraged him to say more. “She calves each year and sends her babes willingly to the slaughter while she remains strong, if a little academic as the years pass over her.”

“What!” Stewart laughed, shoving Rickie’s shoulder; Rickie, feeble, tipped into a patch of clover.

Indignant, Rickie straightened his toppled flower crown and replied, “I can imagine a cow.”

“You have imagined a sublime cow, a supreme cow. She puts my objective cow to shame. I endeavor to envision your cow, forevermore, when I play with this philosophy.”

“Now I feel mocked.”

“Not at all!” Stewart exclaimed, launching himself, in his passion, to lie on his belly beside his friend. He plucked a clover flower, purple and perfectly round, and placed it on Rickie’s chest in apology. It looked lovely against Rickie’s navy tie—this was a shade of that beauty which Rickie managed always to pull from the mundane. “You do imagine a cow, and you imagine her with more feeling than I ever could. This is why I need you, and why I am driven to despair when you talk of a ‘great world’ existing somewhere beyond us, here and now. For it is my philosophy that there isn’t such a thing, and if you chase that rainbow, you’ll wear down to the meanest version of yourself. It isn’t in man’s best nature to pursue what cannot exist.”

“But I write stories about dryads and fauns, dear fellow. My mind is already full of things that do not exist.”

“They do not—but they could!” Rickie did not see the distinction. “It is like so,” Stewart explained, “they are creatures of myth, but they are discrete beings, like our friendly cow. That they do not exist doesn’t preclude their definiteness. But what definition shall we give of the ‘great world’ which you so fear? Yes, it is fear—if it weren’t fear, you would not have sighed so—whose right is it to create that world, to maintain it, to participate in it? So I say that such a concept cannot exist, and those who would tell you otherwise are liars.”

“There is an expectation of a home.” Rickie was obstinate. “A man is expected to be a brother, a son, a husband—a father, eventually. Those concerns do not arise from Cambridge, but something greater.”

“Not Cambridge, no, but Wiltshire, perhaps. Or Mother England, and I will stretch to allow her, for what she lacks in specific locality she gains in bloody patriotism. But concepts created under her banner do not generalize to a global scope without alteration.”

Still, Rickie shook his head. In silence, he raised the clover flower to his lips, teasing them with the soft petal tips; the sunlight refracted through them and brought color to his wan mouth, suddenly bright pink. Stewart stared without shame. He kept his head turned, one cheek against the trampled grass, and watched Rickie’s sharp profile: the pale skin, drawn tight over his nose and jaw and brow; the fine hair falling back from a high forehead; the faint rash of red, oh to be so sensitive!, arising from the rub of the high collar on a bare neck.

“You see,” Rickie said, with the flower jumping against his mobile lower lip, “you have a house—not a metaphorical one. You have a father, and sisters. Whereas it matters very much to me what the world is like outside of Cambridge, for she is the only home that I have ever claimed. My mother is dead, and missed; my father is dead, and unmissed. I have no siblings, only an aunt who doesn’t care for me and cousins who care less still. You see that your philosophy suggests there is nothing greater by which I can plan my life, only a series of places to inhabit. I mind that decision in a way that you do not.”

Uncomfortable, Stewart contemplated that he had, perhaps, been an ass. “You take care to make a decent choice,” he heard himself say, and watched with distress as displeasure flowed across Rickie’s handsome face. He aimed to rescue their tendre and said, “I will never understand why you make yourself an impression of a damp rag, darling. You have not passed an idle four years. No, do not pretend at surprise, its modesty does not suit—you have found success in your friendships. Or, at least selfishly, I should hope.”

“Oh, that!” Rickie said, a casual dismissal filled with no ill-intent, and striking so hard nonetheless. Stewart withdrew to himself, beginning to brood.

He had meant very much of this friendship, during their four years at Cambridge. Rickie was not a philosopher, nor very interested in Moral Studies, and some practical instinct demanded that Stewart would have moved on from the connection when their paths early diverged. There was no hope of Rickie keeping pace in the evening discourses and paper-readings which he so faithfully attended, or sometimes hosted, allowing burnt matches to singe his carpet and sardine plates to litter his fender. It was an event of note when Rickie even spoke, treading into the discussion of reality, or Hegel, or Schopenhauer—less remarkable were his contributions on the Greeks, which he treated as formality, being a scholar of the classics. Widdrington had dared to wonder, not so long after the awkwardness of Rickie’s first great confession of his familial angst, whether the time had come to separate, the Moral Philosophers as their own group of intimates. Stewart had risen to uncharacteristic vehemence in maintaining the circle. Was Rickie not more real than simpering Tilliard?

Were Stewart more logical, he might then have seen his particular softness for Rickie Elliot, which exceeded the mere need for an aesthetic perspective, however quiet, in their debates. He was permitted some illogicality. Rickie was his most intimate, his dearest; it was Stewart who fancied himself the most significant tie in Rickie’s present life. And perhaps he was, but what a distress to know that Rickie planned for a future without that immutable truth!

Rickie turned to face Stewart. A blade of grass tickled the tip of his nose, making it twitch, like he was a nervous spring rabbit. He dropped his hand, the one with the clover flower, to the ground between their shoulders. It lay with palm open and fingers curled towards the sky, the flower forgotten within them. “I wish we were labelled,” he said.

“Why?”

But Rickie kept deeper thoughts to himself and asked after the time, which was near noon. “Blast!” He stood up. “I’ve got lunch with that girl—”

Stewart sat. He felt dirt, pebbles, and mulched meadow-grass along his back. “Don’t go.”

“I must—I shall see you this evening.”

Stewart caught his ankle, his bad leg, laughing at the feeble attempt Rickie made to free himself. “She’s not there, she’s not real,” Stewart insisted, “and yet you pretend she is, hopping to lunch and tea and—and you not having invited her, at that! Yet you let this figment take you away from me.”

“Let me go,” Rickie complained, trying very hard not to smile.

Bold because of that small slant of lips, Stewart said, “It’s much better for you to talk to me.”

“Let me go, Stewart.”

“You simply can’t get away!”

Rickie laughed, the smile breaking through his ineffective stoicism and landing him on his bum, back in the grass. Seized by opportunity, Stewart threw himself atop his friend. He easily won their tussle. For what little strength he had in his scholar’s arms and narrow frame, he would always beat out Rickie on account of the handicap, and he sat astride Rickie’s hips now, cheering as he ground Rickie’s wrists into the dirt.

“Do you cry Pax?” Stewart taunted, an unusual glory for him who had been at the mercy of so many other boys during his weedy youth.

Shouting, Rickie said, “Never, you brute!” His collar was in a state and his jacket lay open. The flower crowns were trampled beneath them. Color had risen, finally, to Rickie’s face and now painted his cheeks an uneven red, becoming for their suggestion of life—and reality—in the body of this friend, if not for the classical reasons of artistic beauty. But beauty in the classical sense had always been Rickie’s academic purview, and it was his yearning distance from it which made his mind into the thing that it was, which Stewart admired above all. What was a body, with its skinny chest and lame leg and drawn face, if not a temporary vessel for the intangible self? Which made it more real than anything—if it could perish, if it was marked by this perishability, then it was the most gorgeous artifact of all.

Stewart was so struck by the culmination of his philosophy that he became dumb. He looked into the shining, sweating face of his friend and said, “If you will not give me Pax, I will take it in kind,” and he bent to kiss him.

Their lips touched for the brief seconds of a chaste kiss, a gesture of peace—and then lingered for many more, beyond the precepts of a mere gesture. Stewart came up gasping, aware of his inexperience, and hurting for more.

“I—” said Rickie. Stewart acknowledged that there were worse responses. He was saved from ranking them; Rickie started again. “All right. Do it once more.”

Bending down, Stewart let up his hands. He took pleasure in the moment before they connected, this time, their breath landing softly on the other’s face, tickling his lips like the clover flower had so recently done the same—Stewart had not known at the time that he wished to be the clover flower kissing his friend, but he was aware now, his eyes opened wide so that he could see the distant cow for what she was. Rickie, who lived so easily in the mundane, and did not need metaphors in order to grasp it, proved this again: he put a hand in Stewart’s hair, where it was overlong in the back, and closed their distance.

What it was to feel his friend buck up under him! One would never guess at Rickie’s lameness if experiencing the strength of his body in desire, wrapping its arm around Stewart’s middle and pulling until they were flush from chest to shin. Surely the back of Rickie’s suit was damp, as the knees of Stewart’s trousers had become; surely the hour of the luncheon had ticked over, steadily passing beyond fashionable lateness. Still there was nothing which would willingly part Stewart from their kiss, from the metaphorical warmth of ‘labelling’ his dearest friend to the undeniably real heat where their groins pressed together. Moaning with an embarrassment of want, Stewart buried his face into Rickie’s collar and laughed.

“Pax, my dear,” he called feebly, for he felt like the man afflicted with weakness, between the two of them. “Pax, Pax.”

“It isn’t I who wrestled a man down,” Rickie said.

“Nor would I have been able, with any man but you; yet it is you who comes out the victor. I have been vanquished beyond words.”

“Rather the opposite, I think.”

“Then offer your help to occupy my mouth,” Stewart said, trying on his newfound bluster. He thought it suited him very well, if Rickie’s admiring glance and soft-curving smile were any answer.

Rickie kissed him once, a tender thing which met with a hand gracing the line of a jaw. “Only I really do need to go, old man, if only to make an ass of myself with apologies.”

“What matters the difference between being an ass for a late arrival versus being an ass for missing something entirely?” Stewart asked, ever drawn to philosophy.

“Not much to you, I am sure, but something to these friends.” Stewart frowned at the appellation, and Rickie, blushing, corrected. “Not a friend as you are my dear friend,” he insisted.

Stewart relented. “Go, go,” he said, rolling back into the grass so sweetly trampled by their love, feeling the physical ache of its incompletion but willing to wait for that fulfillment.

“I shall see you tonight, for Schopenhauer?” Rickie asked, bounding up with as much sprightliness as his leg would allow.

“Only if you promise to stay after—we were not quite done here.”

Red as a beet, Rickie promised.

Stewart, alone in the meadow, held a crumpled flower crown in his hands. The buttercups were nearly mashed to paste and the cow parsley scantly better. But in its maltreatment, the scent of the flowers had grown more powerful, and now it was a rich beacon of fresh, green summer. He placed it on his chest—his shirt was already quite ruined—and listened to the familiar rhythm of Rickie’s departing steps. He thought he understood Rickie’s wish for labels, if they brought always this happiness. Thus thinking, he fell asleep.