“Why?”
“He promised Mr Torrance he would write and wait for an answer every Midsummer day, if not oftener, wherever he might be. He has now missed two Midsummers, which he would not do—you know he could not do such a thing to Mr Torrance—if he was in his right mind. He wasn’t young, and perhaps he had to pay for keeping his young looks so long.”
“Why? How old could he be?” I said quickly, forgetting how long ago it was that I met him first.
“I know he is fifty,” said Ann.
I did not answer because it seemed ridiculous and I did not want to be rude to Ann. I should have said a moment before, had I been asked, that he was thirty. But Ann was right.
“Where was he last heard of, Ann?”
“I went myself with little Henry Morgan and Jessie to a place called Oatham, or something like it, where he last wrote from. He had been an under-gardener there for nearly two years, and we saw the man and his wife who let him a room and looked after him. They said he seemed to be well-off, and of course he would. You know he ate little, smoked and drank nothing, and gave nothing to any known charities. They remembered him very well because he taught them to play cards and was very clean and very silent. ‘As clean as a lady,’ she said to Jessie, who only said, ‘Cleaner.’ You know her way. The man did not like him, I know. He said Aurelius used to sit as quiet as a book and never complained of anything. ‘He never ate half he paid for, I will say that,’ said he. ‘He was too fond of flowers, too, for an under-gardener, and used to ask why daisies and fluellen and such-like were called weeds. There was something wrong with him, something on his conscience perhaps.’ The squire’s agent, a Mr Theobald, said the same when he came in. He thought there was something wrong. He said such people were unnecessary. Nothing could be done with them. They were no better than wild birds compared with pheasants, even when they could sing, which some of them could do, but not Aurelius. They caused a great deal of trouble, said my lord the agent of my lord the squire, yet you couldn’t put them out of the way. He remarked that Aurelius never wrote any letters and never received any—that looked bad, too. ‘What we want,’ said he—‘is a little less Theobald,’ said Jessie, but the man didn’t notice her. ‘What we want is efficiency. How are we to get it with the likes of this Mr What’s-his-name in the way? They neither produce like the poor nor consume like the rich, and it is by production and consumption that the world goes round, I say. He was a bit of a poacher, too. I caught him myself letting a hare out of a snare—letting it out, so he said. I said nothing to the squire, but the chap had to go.’ And that’s all we shall hear about Aurelius,” said Ann. “He left there in the muck of February. They didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t care, though he provided them with gossip for a year to come. The woman asked me how old he was. Before I could have answered, her husband said: ‘About thirty I should say.’ The woman could not resist saying snappily: ‘Fifty’....”
Aurelius was gone, then. It cannot have surprised anyone. What was surprising was the way he used to reappear after long absences. While he was present everyone liked him, but he had something unreal about him or not like a man of this world. When that squire’s agent called his under-gardener a superfluous man, he was a brute and he was wrong, but he saw straight. If we accept his label there must always have been some superfluous men since the beginning, men whom the extravagant ingenuity of creation has produced out of sheer delight in variety, by-products of its immense processes. Sometimes I think it was some of these superfluous men who invented God and all the gods and godlets. Some of them have been killed, some enthroned, some sainted, for it. But in a civilisation like ours the superfluous abound and even flourish. They are born in palace and cottage and under hedges. Often they are fortunate in being called mad from early years; sometimes they live a brief, charmed life without toil, envied almost as much as the animals by drudges; sometimes they are no more than delicate instruments on which men play melodies of agony and sweetness.
The superfluous are those who cannot find society with which they are in some sort of harmony. The magic circle drawn round us all at birth surrounds these in such a way that it will never overlap, far less become concentric with, the circles of any other in the whirling multitudes. The circle is a high wall guarded as if it were a Paradise, not a Hell, “with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms”: or it is no more than a shell border round the garden of a child, and there is no one so feeble but he can slip over it, or shift it, or trample it down, though powerless to remove it. Some of these weaker ones might seem to have several circles enclosing them, which are thus upset or trampled one by one as childhood advances. Everybody discovers that he can cross their borders. They do not retaliate. These are the superfluous who are kept alive to perform the most terrible or most loathsome tasks. Rarely do their tyrants see their eyes gleaming in their dungeons, and draw back or hurl a stone like a man who has almost trodden upon a fox.
But the superfluous are not always unfortunate; we who knew Aurelius would never call him unfortunate. There are some—and more than ever in these days when even the strongest do not condemn outright, and when deaths less unpleasant to the executioner have been discovered—some who escape the necessity to toil and spin for others, and do not spend their ease in manacles. Many of the women among the hunted are not slaughtered as soon as caught. They are kept in artfully constructed and choicely decorated cages where their captors try to force them to sing over and over again the notes which were their allurement at first; a few survive to wear white locks and trouble with a new note the serenity of the palaces where their cages are suspended. The superfluous have been known to learn the ways of their superiors, to make little camps unmolested in the midst of the foreign land, to enjoy a life admired of many and sometimes envied, but insincerely.