One of the more universal aspects of human wickedness is the willingness of almost everyone to indulge in spiteful gossip. Even the ‘nicest people’, such as Miss Dunbury, and Mrs Osmore, and Dominic Wiggins, and May Blackett were in general prepared to smile at nastiness and even sometimes to repeat it. Someone who was never idly gossiped to because of his virtuous austerity was William Eastcote; but in this respect as in others he was exceptional. Ennistone gossip was fairly certain about some matters, deliciously uncertain about others, and in general far from consistent. It was agreed that the old man wanted to ‘get rid of’ his grandchild and had offered her ‘like a pet calf’ to Tom McCaffrey. Whether this was also a ‘a shot-gun situation’ remained unclear, but as people smilingly observed, ‘time would show’. (This scandal spread a lot of happiness around in Ennistone, and on a utilitarian argument could thus be justified.) Some held that Tom had passed Hattie on to George, others that George, out of spite against Tom, had ‘carried her off’. Hattie was agreed to be ‘fearfully stuck up’, but had her defenders who regarded her as ‘a helpless victim of scheming men’, and her critics who were prepared to go to almost any lengths in regarding her as, according to their own moral tastes, ‘emancipated’ or ‘corrupt’. In some versions Diane and even Mrs Belton played prime roles and the Slipper House was represented (on view already traditional in Ennistone) as an abode of sin. The notion that George had made Hattie pregnant and Tom, in the goodness of his heart, was to marry her was a further sophistication of the tale which hardly anyone believed but almost everyone repeated.
For all of Wednesday and most of Thursday John Robert remained barricaded in his house, not answering the door-bell. He sat and struggled with his colossal hurt pride and with his anger, anger against Tom, against George, and against fate, which somehow included the two girls. He grieved over his Ennistone, his childhood home, his sacred place in which he had had faith, now spoilt and blackened and made forever uninhabitable. And over there, at the Slipper House which he had been so childishly pleased to give to Hattie, all was suspect, besmirched, irrevocably ruined; so much so as even to make him reluctant to find out ‘what had really happened’. He had not questioned Tom carefully, partly because he was so extremely angry and partly because he had made up his mind early on that Tom would tell any lie to protect himself. His rage against Tom was intensified by the knowledge that his own perfectly asinine policies had introduced the boy into the scene in the first place. His anger against George, and his conviction that George was the real villain, was from an older and deeper source. John Robert had received George’s long letter at the Institute on Tuesday morning and had already tossed it unopened into the waste-paper basket before he looked at the Gazette. After he had seen the articles he retrieved the letter and tore it up unread into small pieces. All this time, as he remembered and reflected, the philosopher sat quiet, motionless, in the upstairs room where he had been conceived and born, upon the iron bedstead, moved from the next-door room, upon which he had slept as a child. He did not dare to sit downstairs for fear someone might look at him through the window. Throughout Wednesday, after Tom’s departure, and for most of Thursday he sat and digested and regurgitated his rage. He knew the girls would do nothing till he came. It did not occur to him that it was cruel to keep them waiting.
Hurt vanity automatically brings with it the resentment that demands revenge: to reassert one’s value by passing on the hurt. ‘I am not to be trifled with. Someone will suffer for this.’ Certainly John Robert wanted to run to the Ennistone Gazette office, drag the editor into the street and kick his ribs in; this was abstract compared with what he felt about the two McCaffreys. Wild ideas of punishing Tom (thrashing him or ruining his university career, or ‘dragging him through the law courts’) soon faded, however. There was nothing he could do to Tom. Equally, and indeed all the more so as it appeared on reflection, there was nothing he could do to George. Of course he could go round to Drudsdale and smash his fist into George’s face. But if he were to run at George like a mad dog and savage him and break up his house, would this not be doing exactly what George wanted? George had been attempting for years to attract John Robert’s attention, to provoke a ‘happening’ which would establish a ‘bond’ between them. George had wanted to occupy John Robert’s mind; he had been, as the philosopher was vaguely aware, hurt and maddened by John Robert’s calm coldness, by the evident fact that John Robert not only did not care about him, but did not think about him. This policy, which was effected without effort, was not totally uncoloured by malice. The tiny corner of John Robert’s mind which was aware of George had experienced a fleeting satisfaction as he had thrown away George’s unopened letter and completely forgotten George in the next moment: a serene oblivion which had unfortunately not lasted long. But now - it appeared that George had won. John Robert was now as obsessed with George as George was with John Robert. The fatal connection, now running through Hattie, had tied them together at last.
John Robert did not, when he was able to think, doubt that the loathsome unread letter had contained impertinences about the girl. (Herein he displayed his lack of understanding of George’s character.) He pictured the bland round face, the boyish short-square-toothed smile. He conceived of writing to George. But could any words that existed express what he wanted to say? Now at last, when he had made out just what a victory his enemy had won, he felt that nothing would serve, nothing would do except to kill George. Nothing else at all ever would make the world right again.
While John Robert Rozanov was sitting on his bed at 16 Hare Lane, Tom McCaffrey was sitting on his at Travancore Avenue. Like John Robert, Tom was imprisoned, tortured and paralysed. He could not leave Ennistone, that was impossible. He wrote a letter to his tutor saying that he was ill. He was in fact ill, he had a feverish cold. (He thought, that’s Bobbie Benning’s cold. I shouldn’t have put on his bear’s head. I could feel it was all damp and noisome inside.) He was also, he felt, well on the way to becoming mentally ill. It was Tom’s first experience of demons. Demons, like viruses, live in every human organism, but in some happy lives never become active. Tom was now aware of the demons and that they were his demons. He stayed on in Ennistone because he could not leave behind the problems which could only be solved here, even though it was also impossible to solve them. He stayed secretly because he took John Robert’s threats seriously. Tom could not imagine how John Robert could ‘do him harm’ but he was taking no chances. He had never before been at the receiving end of vindictive hatred, and he was very shaken by it. He did not doubt John Robert’s strong active ill-will. So, although he stayed in Ennistone, he did not, for the rest of Wednesday and most of Thursday, set foot outside, and when darkness fell he pulled the heavily lined curtains carefully and turned on, at the back of the house, one well-shaded lamp. On Wednesday night he went to bed early and dreamt about Fiona Gates. (He had been hurt by John Robert’s sneer at his mother.) In the dream Fiona appeared as a ghost with long trailing hair, wearing a white shift or petticoat. She seemed to be unable to speak, but held out her hands to him in a piteous gesture as if begging him for help. He thought, she’s so young, so young. He woke in distress just after midnight and lay upon his bed tossing and turning in paroxysms of misery and remorse and resentment and fear.