← catalogue

Young Earnest: The Romance of a Bad Start in Life

by Gilbert Cannan · English · Gutenberg #48487 · 533,091 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Young Earnest: The Romance of a Bad Start in Life
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Young Earnest: The Romance of a Bad Start in Life

Author: Gilbert Cannan


        
Release date: March 14, 2015 [eBook #48487]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48487

Credits: Produced by Paul Haxo from page images generously made
        available by the Internet Archive, the University of
        California, the Hathi Trust Digital Library, and the
        University of Illinois.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUNG EARNEST: THE ROMANCE OF A BAD START IN LIFE ***

YOUNG EARNEST

THE ROMANCE OF A BAD START IN LIFE


BY

GILBERT CANNAN


Author of "Old Mole," "Round the Corner."


NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1915



     Now my question is: have you a scheme of life consonant with the
     spirit of modern philosophy--with the views of intelligent, moral,
     humane human beings of this period?

          THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND.




COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY




     To
     O. M.


     Words skilled and woven do not make a book
     Except some truth in beauty shine in it.
     I bring you this because you overlook
     My faults to follow out my probing wit.
     And where it fails or falls short of its aim,
     You see design and waste nor praise nor blame
     On the achievement. Stirring to the will,
     Your wit still urges mine to greater skill.




CONTENTS


BOOK ONE
LINDA BROCK

CHAPTER                            PAGE

   I. LOVE IN EARNEST                 3
  II. 166 HOG LANE WEST              13
 III. GEORGE MARRIED                 29
  IV. A RETURN                       41
   V. SETTLING DOWN                  51
  VI. PROFESSOR SMALLMAN             60
 VII. FLYING NEAR THE CANDLE         71
VIII. INTIMACY                       85
  IX. PATERFAMILIAS                  98
   X. HONEYMOON                     109
  XI. MATRIMONY                     130
 XII. ESCAPE                        147


BOOK TWO
ANN PIDDUCK

   I. ADVENTURE IN LONDON           157
  II. MITCHAM MEWS                  169
 III. MR. MARTIN                    182
  IV. LEARNING A TRADE              196
   V. TOGETHER                      206
  VI. KILNER                        219
 VII. OLD LUNT                      226
VIII. RITA AND JOE                  236
  IX. TALK                          254
   X. AN ENCOUNTER                  270
  XI. VISION                        277
 XII. SETTLEMENT                    285


BOOK THREE
CATHLEEN BENTLEY

   I. MEETING                       301
  II. HAPPINESS                     311
 III. THE WEST WIND                 322
  IV. EXPLANATION                   331
   V. THRIGSBY                      343
  VI. THE COMFORT OF RELIGION       362
 VII. CASEY'S VENTURE               370
VIII. THRIVING                      382
  IX. YOUNG LOVE DREAMING           388




BOOK ONE

LINDA BROCK




                             Ha! Ha!
     _So_ you take human nature upon trust?





I

LOVE IN EARNEST


     O that joy so soon should waste
        Or so sweet a bliss
        As a kiss
     Might not forever last!


IT annoyed the young man that at such a time, in such a place, he
should be thinking of his father. Waiting for his beloved, he desired
to have no thought but for her; most loyal intention sadly
unfulfilled, for he could think only of his father, first as a
wondrous being who could skillfully become at will an elephant or a
zebra, or more tranquilly fascinate and absorb by waggling his ears
with no disturbance of his face. The young man, John René Fourmy,
could more clearly remember his father's ears than his features. He
was introspective enough to know that his tenderness for the young
woman, his melting anticipation of her coming, had led him back to the
first adoration of his life, and from that to the tragedy of its
obliteration.

Came the distressing recollection of his father's downfall,
devastating for the boy of three who had witnessed it. He could
visualize it clearly, so sharp had been the cruel impression, the
indignity of it. The bedroom in the little house in the country where
they had lived near Billy Lummas and Sam Ardwick, who had fits in the
road. A room full of bed. In that bed his father and himself eager for
the moment when his father should arise from his bed and fill the
world, and his mother apparently just as eager because she was
entreating and imploring. Only the more did his father wrap himself in
the bedclothes. These suddenly were torn down amid peals of laughter;
a fond scuffle, though the boy perceived not the fondness; up went his
father's nightshirt, his long body was turned over and it was slapped
resoundingly on that place considerately designed by nature to receive
such onslaughts. The slapping was done with the back of a hairbrush,
an instrument that, in alternation with a slipper, was used upon
himself. That a man, that a glorious father should suffer, and,
because he suffered, deserve such an indignity, was too much. A shadow
came over the world, and René remembered flinging himself down by the
bed and shedding passionate tears for the departed glory. Thereafter
his father was no wonder to him, he too was subject to the authority
of his mother, and became henceforth only a tyrannous buffoon,
nervously kind or noisily angry.

Then René remembered the return from the country to a succession of
houses in streets; his father just risen from his bed as he came home
to dinner at midday; bottles of whisky and boxes of cigarettes. And
when at school they asked him what his father was, he used to reply,
"A gentleman. And he went to a public school," that being the formula
which had been given to him to account for existence and all its
puzzlements. Public school and heaven were for a long time confounded
in his mind, and the formula had accounted adequately for his father's
Elijah-like disappearance from the scene when René was ten.

That was all he knew, and there was the sting of injustice in this
present intrusion in the Scottish glen, hallowed by the delights of a
young love which boy and girl had arranged should shake the world into
a wonder at its glory. A sordid family history was a clog upon
romance, and our young man was that earnest creature, a romantic.

A stolen love, for she lived at the great house taken by her father
for the sport of the autumn months, and he was staying with his
great-aunt Janet, an ex-governess, in the village, as he had done ever
since he was eleven, for his holidays.

Now he was nearly twenty, wonderfully in love, punctual to his
appointment, striving for romantic thoughts and able to achieve
nothing but these humiliating memories of his father. He tried
singing; that was of no avail. It did but call to mind his father's
songs. He threw pebbles into the burn, but they gave him no amusement.
Then from his pocket he drew an anthology of love--poems from which he
had been accustomed to read to his fair--and so he lulled himself to
something near the warm mood of expectancy and began to tell himself
that she was very late, that she had failed him on this their last
day. There was a sort of sweet anguish in the disappointment which he
liked so much that he was almost put out when she came.

He leaped to his feet and opened his arms and she sank into them, and
an enchantment descended upon them and they kissed.

He had prepared for her a couch of bracken. On this they lay and
kissed again. This kiss was tragic. The enchantment broke in the
middle, and he found the proximity of her face ridiculous and
embarrassing and his position uncomfortable. He did not tell her so,
and a simulated rapture hid his feelings from her. She sighed:

"Oh, René!"

The sound of his name on her lips never failed to move him, and a
little of the enchantment returned. He could endure her nearness, and
gave her an affectionate little hug quite genuinely warm. It surprised
her into happy laughter.

"Oh, René! it has been more beautiful this year even than last. Of
course we're older. Do you think it goes on for ever and ever, year
after year, growing more and more beautiful?"

"Very few lovers----" began René in a solemn voice, but at once the
generalization offended him and he never reached his predicate. The
subject seemed entirely to satisfy Cathleen. She took his hand in
hers:

"We mustn't stop writing to each other again."

"It was you who stopped."

"I thought----"

"It made it very horrid meeting you again, very anxious, I mean--I
mean I don't know what your life is like."

"You know I shall never find anyone like you, René, never."

He thought with distaste of her brothers, robust, athletic young men,
wonderfully tailored, with a knack of getting the last ounce of effect
out of soap and water. Dirt avoided them; they could not be shabby or
untidy, and they made him feel grubby and shrunken. Oxford and
Cambridge they were, and they stared him into a sort of silly shame
when he spoke of his university, Thrigsby, and yet, through his shame
there would dart tremors of a fierce feeling of moral superiority.
Anyhow, their sister loved him, and never "chipped" him as their young
women "chipped" them. There was never any sign that their young women
took them seriously.

"I will write," said Cathleen. "This year won't seem so long. I
couldn't be certain, last year."

"Are you certain now?"

"Oh, René!"

This time the enchantment was full on them, raced through them,
alarmed them. They moved a little apart.

"Let's talk sense," said he. "I want to marry you."

"Oh, yes."

"They won't let me, you know. I've got my own way to make. In three
years you'll be twenty-one. I shall probably have to stay in Thrigsby
because I can make a living there, but I'll get to London as soon as I
can. You wouldn't like Thrigsby."

"Anywhere with you."

"The people there aren't your sort. My own people won't like my
marrying so young. I've got rotten uncles and aunts backing me because
they think I'm clever. I should have been in business long ago if it
hadn't been for them. My brother's in a shipping office----"

"What did your father do?"

He shifted uneasily on that. The formula seemed empty and a little
vulgar, somehow grimy, to present to her. He answered:

"He drank whisky and smoked cigarettes."

"Oh! I'm sorry."

Almost imperceptibly she shrank away from him, but he saw it.

"You may as well know. We're no great shakes. My old Aunt Janet talks
of the great people she has known, but my mother's just a Thrigsby
'widow' living in a thirty-pound-a-year house in an ex-genteel part of
the town. There are lots of women like her in Thrigsby. You live in
one of those streets and nothing seems to happen. Then you hear that
the lady at No. 53 isn't married to her husband, or that Mr. Twemlow
of 25 has run away from his wife and four children. We lived at 49
Axon Street when my father disappeared. We live at 166 Hog Lane West
now. We've gone up in the world since my brother began to earn money."

He had talked himself into a gloom. The smoke of Thrigsby seemed to
smirch the glade.

"Poor old thing!" said Cathleen. "I don't see that it matters much.
You're you, just the same. We live in a house called Roseneath. It's
in Putney, but we call it London. Father makes a lot of money, and is
a recorder and all the rest of it, but we aren't anything in
particular. We turn up our noses at a lot of people, but there are
lots more people who turn up their noses at us. You'd laugh if you
could see how savage it makes Edith and Rachel sometimes when they
grovel for invitations and don't get them. And it was wonderful what a
difference it made when Basil got his blue at Cambridge. All
Putney----"

She threw out her hands to indicate the extent of her brother's
triumph. Then, realizing how far their talk had taken them from the
sweet employment which was their habit, she crept nearer.

"If I thought all that nonsense was going to upset you, and hang about
you while we're waiting, I'd run away with you to-morrow."

"Oh, my darling!" cried he, overcome by this recklessness and proof of
the seriousness of her intentions. They sat with hands clasped, gazing
into each other's eyes in a charmed happiness.

"Forever and ever," said René.

"Forever and ever," cried she. "It isn't many people who find the real
thing in the first."

He glowed.

"Oh! we must never spoil it."

Then they lay side by side with the volume of love poems between them,
and he read aloud their favorites.

They became very sorrowful as they realized that the last moments of
their golden days were running out, and they held each other close in
a long shy embrace, and they kissed each other fearfully, and Cathleen
could not keep back her tears.

"You will write to me?"

"Oh, yes, yes."

"Good-by, my dear, good-by."

So reluctantly, with dragging steps, they walked out of their glade
and into the path leading to the great house. At the last turn they
embraced again, and parted quickly on a sudden crackling in the woods.
They saw nothing, but they walked on more swiftly, in a silence more
full of fear than of love.

At the garden gate they were met by Mr. Bentley, Cathleen's father. To
René he loomed very large, and he felt a sickening internal
disturbance as he saw that his presence was ignored.

"I've been looking for you everywhere," said Mr. Bentley.

"I've been a walk."

"Your mother wants you."

"At once?"

"She wanted you an hour ago."

Cathleen sped away.

Disconcertingly René knew that her father's whole attention was
concentrated upon him, though the lawyer's little cunning eyes were
not looking at him. They both stood still, with the silence between
them growing colder and colder. René hotly imagined himself saying:

"Sir, I love your daughter and she loves me. I am poor but able. I
have won many prizes at school, and in the Faculty of Economics and
Commercial Science in the University of Thrigsby. I am young, sir,
but----"

When at last he opened his lips he said:

"We--we've been a walk."

"So I perceive."

"The woods are very beautiful at this time of year."

The silence froze.

"Are you staying long?" This came at length in a snappy,
cross-examining voice.

"I go to-morrow."

René was overwhelmed with the grubby shrunk feeling. It seemed so easy
for these people to mount the high horse of their social superiority.

"Will you kindly tell your aunt that we are expecting her to dinner
the day after to-morrow?"

With that Mr. Bentley rolled in at the garden gate (he was a fat
little man) and closed it, though he knew that René's way lay through
the garden.

Raging, the young man walked the necessitated extra mile, infuriated
and chilled by two questions: Had Cathleen removed the bracken from
her hair? and Was that meeting by the gate accident or design?

     .        .        .        .         .         .

That night he asked his Aunt Janet about his father. She dodged his
inquiries, and he could get nothing from her but this:

"I admire your mother more than I can say. She married a bad Fourmy,
and that's as bad as you can get. Poor, too. I was glad when that
little money came to her."

He gave her Mr. Bentley's message, and she said:

"You mustn't let their way of living go upsetting you. It's just
money. You've got to fill the gap between you with more than that."

"With what?"

"You'll find that out."

Did she know of his love? Was she warning him? Did she approve? Did
she think him worthy? How could people survive love and become old and
dull? All these and more questions buzzed about him as he lay in bed.
He brushed them all aside with the cry, "Oh, but I love her!" And,
being young and full of health, he was soon asleep, though a blank
tossing night would have more pleased him and his mood.




II

166 HOG LANE WEST


     The homeward journey was by no means so agreeable.


EVERY year since he had been a small boy, as the carriage rounded the
crag which blots the lake out of sight, René had been moved to tears.
Happiness and brightness were left behind, and every moment brought
him nearer to dullness and dark streets and uncomprehending minds. And
now, as he rounded the crag, Cathleen appeared on the summit, just too
late to meet him or to come within earshot. She was wearing a blue
sunbonnet, and she snatched it from her head and waved it until he was
out of sight. He turned and watched her and tears came, and he could
hardly choke back his sobs, and hoped miserably that the driver of his
fly was not aware of his unmanliness.

In the train he tried to tell himself that he was taking back the
brightness of his love to Thrigsby, but as he came nearer, more and
more powerfully did it seem to reach out to crush his love. By the
time he was out in the Albert Station, he had reached a depression not
to be broken even by the excitement of seeing again the familiar
sights, the trams, the black river, the Collegiate Church, the dark
warehouses, the school where he had spent so many dazed, busy,
monotonous years, the statue of the Prince Consort, the yellow
timber-yards by the canal, the brilliant greengrocer's shop at the
corner of Kite Street, the council school where he had begun his
education, the dirty brick streets among which his whole youth had
been spent. Only some horrid disaster could have relieved him. Even up
to the moment when the door opened he hoped almost desperately to find
some difference in his home.

The erratic servant came to the door. She had a black smudge across
her cheek, and her hair was tousled. She gave him no greeting.

"Oh, it's you," she said, and as she turned he saw that one of her
shoes was split down the heel and had frayed her stocking into what
was known in the family as a "potato."

He heaved his bag into the lobby and passed along to the dining-room,
where he found his mother. She was, as he knew she would be, doing
crochet-work. He kissed her.

"How brown you are!" she said.

"It's been wonderful weather. Aunt Janet sent you some shortbread and
some knitted things."

"I wish she wouldn't. She can't knit, and she's forgotten how old you
are, and makes things as if you were still children. But she's very
good to us. I don't know what I should have done without her."

"She said she admired you more than she can say."

"I've done my best for you."

"She said you married a bad Fourmy."

"I wish she hadn't said that."

René responded to his mother's embarrassment, but he could not spare
her.

"Is that true. Was my father a bad man?"

"He was a gentleman. The Fourmys are proud, clever people. They think
they are always right, and they want everything their own way. That is
all very well if you have money. But, without it-- But why talk of it?
It's all done."

"Did you love my father?"

Mrs. Fourmy brought her hands down into her lap and stopped plying her
needle.

"What's come to you, René?"

He longed to tell his mother that he too loved, and could therefore
understand, but his question had so disarmed her, her eyes looked so
frightened, so expectant of hurt, that he could not continue.

"Oh," he said, "it's just queer, coming back. One can feel all sorts
of things in the house, and----"

"You are like your father in many ways." And she resumed her crochet.

That alarmed him. Like his father? He felt indignant and uncomfortably
self-conscious. He contrasted his hitherto exemplary and successful
career with those mean memories--lying abed, whisky and cigarettes. He
began to protest:

"But he----"

"He was always talking about feeling things the same as you. There was
a lot of good in your father though his own people would never admit
it, and mine could never see it---- But it's no good talking. It's all
done."

"He left you."

"A boy like you can't judge a man."

"Oh, but I know."

"You can't get anything for the like of that out of books. There's
some men can stay with a woman and some can't, and which you'll be
you'll know when you come to it."

René stared at his mother. She looked very small, sitting there by the
empty fireplace. She seemed to be talking to him from a great distance
away, from beyond the Something which he had always felt to be in
life. In the glade in Scotland he had thought to have surmounted it,
but now, when he thought of it, that had already dwindled away and
become as small and rounded as that memory of his father which had
haunted him in his waiting. Cathleen seemed so remote that he was
alarmed. The foundations of omnipotent everlasting love were
undermined! Worst of all, he knew that it had become impossible to
talk of her. Not even her image in his mind could dwell in that house.
And his mother--his mother was saying horrible, worldly things in a
thin, weary voice. In fierce rebellion his innocence rose up against
her. It was impossible for him to admit a fall from grace. Either you
loved or you did not. If you loved, it was forever. If you did not,
then you were damned past all hope; at least you were, if you were a
man. All women were _Dulcineas_ to this _Quixote_.

So moved was he, so distressed, that he lost the sequence of his
thoughts, and they pursued their careers in his head regardless of his
comfort or immediate needs. He was left inarticulate.

"You'll catch all the flies in the house in your mouth if you don't
close it," said his mother.

He snapped his teeth together, and said fiercely:

"All the same, if I treated a woman as my father treated you, I'd
shoot myself."

"Absurd you are. A man needs a fair conceit of himself to do that. And
can't a woman learn to have a life of her own?"

"Women----" began René, but his mother cut him short in a soothing
voice that was almost a caress:

"Keep that for the young ones, my dear. I'm too old to be told what
women are and are not, or to care. Shall we have the shortbread for
tea? George is to be in with Elsie."

"Who's Elsie?"

"Didn't I tell you? George is going to be married."

"George is?"

"Yes." Mrs. Fourmy gave a chuckle that for so tiny a woman was
surprisingly large. "Yes, George has been almost as good at falling in
love as you."

That bowled René middle-stump, and he went out to bring in his bag and
unpack the shortbread and the Shetland jacket he had bought in
Inverness for his mother.

She tried it on and preened herself in it.

"Smart I am. You're a kind boy to me. Do you remember how you two boys
used to say when you were grown up you would be rich and take me to my
old home in Wiltshire? George won't, now he's going to be married."

"But I will," said René. "When I've saved money and can retire, we'll
go and live together."

"I don't know. It's easy to forget old women."

"Oh, come! A man doesn't forget his mother."

"Doesn't he?"

"And old? You're not old."

"I've been old since before you were born."

René gazed down at his mother and marveled at her in painful
astonishment. In her little quiet voice she was saying things that
stabbed into him, or, hardly stabbing, abraded and bruised him. And
suddenly he began almost to perceive that her life was not tranquil,
not the smooth pale flowing he had imagined it to be. He stared down
at her, and she raised her eyes so that they met his. He dared not
even tremble, so fearful was he of betraying his divination and her
eyes flashed a warning, and his mind seized triumphantly upon its
first intellectual mastery of emotion, and he said to himself:

"There are certain feelings and currents of sympathy which can only
dwell in silence."

Then he laughed:

"You must have been pretty when you were a girl."

"Oh," said Mrs. Fourmy, taking up her crochet, "my hair was lovely."

With that she rose and busied herself with preparing tea, taking out
the caddy in which the party brand was kept, and her best table-center
and the ornaments which were reserved for the few elegant occasions
the household could admit.

"I got a pair of sleeve-links for George," said René. "Silver and
agate. When's he going to be married? They might do for a wedding
present as well."

"They are going to be married at once. They've got to be."

"I say!" He spun round on that. "I say. Need you have told me? When
she's coming here and all!"

But Mrs. Fourmy was remorseless. She said with biting coldness:

"When George was a little boy, he found out when I was married and
reckoned up from that to the day when he was born, and he let me know
that he knew. He told you too."

"Yes. He told me. How did you know?"

"You looked at me all one Sunday afternoon with your big eyes."

"Oh, mother!"

"There they are. George has forgotten the key. Will you go to the
door? Polly has chosen to-day to clean the kitchen out. She would. She
isn't fit to be seen."

René went to the door.

"Hullo! old man!"--René hated to be called "old man"--"Hullo! Got
back?"

"Only just."

"This is Elsie--Elsie Sherman. Mother's told you?"

Elsie was pretty, as tall as René, and just a shade taller than
George. She took the hand René held out, and squeezed it warmly.

"So you're the wonderful brother?"

"Yes. The---- Yes, I'm George's brother. You--you can take your things
off in mother's room if you like."

"Or mine," said George.

"Don't be silly. I couldn't," said Elsie, with a giggle that made René
hate her. She ran upstairs and George patted his brother on the
shoulder.

"Well? Still good enough for us? What do you think of her?"

"She's pretty."

"When you know her a bit you'll want to go and do likewise, my son."

Standing there huddled with his brother in the narrow lobby that
seemed all coats and umbrellas, René remembered with a horrible
vividness his brother coming to his bed and telling him how his father
and mother were married on such a day and how, five months later, he,
George, was born. And he remembered how he burst into tears, and when
George asked him what he was howling for, he had said: "They didn't
want you," a view of the matter to which George had remained
insensible. He saw now that the revelation had broken the young
intimacy that had always been between them. He said:

"Mother's got out her best center for you."

"Good old mother!" replied George. Then he raised his voice and
bawled:

"Elsie!"

"Coming!"

She came running downstairs. George caught and kissed her, and as they
went along the passage René wondered how it could be possible for one
extra person to make the house seem overfull.

It was certainly a party. Mrs. Fourmy set the note, a ceremonious
expansiveness in opening up the family to its new member. René's
achievements were paraded, and the letter written by his headmaster,
which had finally decided the family that he was too good for
commerce, was produced and read aloud. George's virtues as a son were
extolled and punctuated with his protest:

"I say, mother, draw it mild."

And Elsie's rather too fervent:

"Of course I know I'm _very_ lucky."

They played bridge and René lost fourpence, because he played with his
mother, who never could remember to suit her declarations to her
score, or to return her partner's lead, and had no other notion of
play than to make her aces while she could.

Elsie talked of her family, especially of a rich uncle she had who
kept a timber yard and of a cousin who was a Wesleyan minister. Of her
own immediate relations she spoke affectionately but little.
Altogether she was so anxious to please that René forgot his first
distasteful impression and set himself to make her laugh. She was
grateful to him for that. The evening would not have been a success
for her without abundant laughter, and George's jokes were just a
little heavy. Also she seemed to be slightly afraid of him, as though
in all her responses to him were a small risk, rather more, at any
rate, than she could always venture to take. She warmed to René,
therefore, and between them they kept things lively.

In a silence while George was dealing--for he took his bridge very
seriously--René hummed a bar or two of a piece called _Blumenlied_,
which he had been taught to play as a boy when he worked off the set
of music lessons George had begun and relinquished.

"Oh, _Blumenlied!_" cried Elsie; "I adore that," and she took up the
air.

"You've got a pretty voice," said René.

"Have I? I do sing sometimes."

"Sings?" said George. "I should think so. The family's a concert
party. Everything from the human voice to a piccolo."

They finished the rubber and adjourned to the parlor, where Mrs.
Fourmy drew sweet buzzing notes from the little old piano that seemed
to have come into the world at the same time as herself and to have
shared her experience. She knew all its tricks and could dodge its
defects, and when she played faded songs that had had their day, and
Elsie sang them, René was melted into a mood of loving kindness and
was full of gratitude to the two women, and wished only for their
happiness--an eternity of such happiness as they were giving him now.

He kissed Elsie when she said good-by. She lived only a few streets
away, and George asked him to sit up for him. When the couple were
gone:

"Well?" said Mrs. Fourmy, more to the fireplace than to her son.

"She's too good for George." René thought with dislike of his brother,
sitting with his eyes half-closed, taking a too voluptuous delight in
the music and showing a too proprietary pride in the singer.

"She suits him," rejoined his mother. "George wants to settle down. So
does she. Most people are like that. They settle down, and they think
nothing else can happen to them. You're not like that."

"I don't know. To settle down----"

"Love songs. You think it's all love songs. They think it's all love
songs, or they try to. Warm and comfortable. Oh, but I've seen it too
often."

"Why do you keep hinting at things, mother?"

"I wasn't hinting. I know, and you will know, and they never will. I
could have screamed sometimes tonight."

"I thought you liked her."

"Like? Oh, René, boy, if only you'd grow up and be some use to me!"

"I want to be."

"I know that, and it's something."

"Are you hurt because they----?"

"I've been a foolish woman. I've been seeing more hope for George than
there ever was."

She took up the box of matches from the chimney-piece and stood
fingering it. He hoped she would say more, but nothing came. The
disconcerting sense of the otherness of his mother's world played
about him, and he felt helpless and rather fatuous.

"Bed's the best place for me," she said. "You don't know how I've been
dreading this evening. And it's gone off very well, very well. Good
night, my dear. I'm glad you came home to-day."

She astonished him by kissing him on both cheeks, for ordinarily she
held up her face and he stooped and pecked at it. To-night there was a
kind of suspension of the habits of the household.

He heard her go upstairs, and with surprising celerity get into bed.
Then he sat alone waiting in the dim, jaded dining-room, with the
enormous table designed for a hospitality which was never given, and
the corner cupboard which had been in all the houses the family had
inhabited, and the hanging smoker's cabinet over the mantelpiece which
was used as a medicine chest, and the absurd knick-knacks his father
had collected, and the plaques his father had painted with apples and
cherry-blossom and bulrushes. There was so much in the room that spoke
of his father. The whisky and the boxes of cigarettes used to be kept
in the corner cupboard. On the table he had helped his father to make
the screen out of old Christmas numbers and colored plates of the
_Graphic_ and _Illustrated London News_, which had given him
employment during the whole of one winter. And he was stirred by the
memory of the emotions that must have been behind his mother's strange
incoherence, and he told himself that she had suffered, and that his
father was to blame for it all and could meet with no fate too harsh.

George returned, whistling.

"I wanted to talk to you," he said.

"Anything you like," replied René.

"You won't mind my putting it bluntly?"

"No."

"Well, you see how it is. I've got a rise, but Elsie hasn't a stiver,
and we shall only have enough to pull through on. My money goes out of
this house. You've had a soft time up to now; you can't go on. If you
want to stay in the house you'll have to buckle to and earn some
money, or move to another, or lodgings; but even in the cheapest
lodgings it would be a squeeze with mother's little bit."

"I see. But I've got another year."

"Can't you teach someone something? You've been learning long enough."

"I might. I see I must do something. When are you going to be
married?"

"Next month. What are you staring at?"

"Was I staring?"

"When you were a kid I used to hit you for staring at me like that,
and, by God, I'd like to do it now. Elsie said, she said: 'Your
brother's got all his feelings just under his skin.' Why don't you say
something?"

George rose, went to the corner cupboard and took out a bottle of
whisky. The gesture, the lift of the shoulder, the cock of the back of
the head, reminded René irresistibly of his father. George turned.

"Why can't you stop staring? I'm going to be married. I'm no
different. There's nothing very startling in that, is there?"

"The whole thing seems to me so----"

He stopped, staring more wildly. The word he suppressed was _greedy_,
and it was most painfully explanatory.

"So what?"

"I mean--I liked her. She seems a good sort."

"No nonsense about Elsie."

"Doesn't it make you understand mother more?"

"Mother? She's a queer little devil. Didn't speak to me for a
fortnight after I told her, and she took to going to church again.
She's a rum 'un, is mother. I believe she'd do anything if it wasn't
she's so darned fond of you."

"Oh, you think it's me?"

"If it wasn't for you she'd have chucked the whole thing long ago and
gone right off into a convent or something. She doesn't like the money
part of it being put off on to you. Really, I don't think she minded
anything else. She knows what life is, mother does."

"How will you live?"

"Oh, a snug little house. Her father'll give us furniture. He's an old
sport, he is. Keeps the Denmark, you know, in Upper Kite Street.
'Normous family. Delighted when the girls go off. Elsie worked in a
shop. No more work for Elsie."

"You're pleased with yourself, then?"

"I'm going to be married; that's good enough for any man. Married and
settled down. That's life."

"Is it?" René found George entirely absurd, and he laughed.

"Oh, well," he added, "mother and I will find a way. Good night."

"Good night," replied George. "Go and dream of your books and your
swells. My Elsie'll beat all their women. I know those swell ladies.
Good night."

     .        .        .        .        .         .

Upstairs, in his little room, René took pen, ink, and paper, and wrote
to Cathleen:

"This house is exactly like thirty-one other houses. Parlor, kitchen,
dining-room, three bedrooms above them. That's all. And they are all
full of grubby little lives and the material things they don't express
themselves in. Do you see what I mean? Coming straight from you, from
our woods, from the tall bracken and the heather, I feel trapped. What
I miss, I think, is graciousness. Oh, yes! That is the word. All the
charming ways you have. The easy courtesies with which you smooth over
any roughnesses, any lack of sympathy, so that, even among uncongenial
people, silence is not devastating. And between you and me silence can
be so beautiful, so full of something more melodious than sound. But
here, if there is silence, little uglinesses creep out of dark corners
and fill it. They do not seem to know the difference between silence
and emptiness. My mother has almost frightened me. I can't tell you.
Something terrible and yet silly has happened. I don't understand.
Some things hurt my feelings so that I can never understand them. But
my mother was wonderful all the same, and different, so different that
I was not at all surprised at her. I suppose I knew it all along. She
has suffered as women must not, must not, must not suffer, as I will
never let you suffer. I cannot write love words to you. I can only
tell you that I am building up my life toward you. I have changed. It
all seems enormously serious suddenly. A lot that we have had seems
silly. I want to explain to you. It is terrible that I can't see you
again for a whole year, terrible, terrible. But I love you. I have
begun to see what love is, what a man can be to a woman if he does not
drag her down to his own level. Lovers, I think, should have something
wonderful, something that should illuminate everything so that even
the darkest places and happenings are bearable. Oh, you see what I
mean. I am trying to bring it all, what I feel, to you. You must
understand. This year is different from last, more serious, more
beautiful. Think what it will be when we are ready to be together.
When I think of it I am almost afraid. No one is ever ready for that,
so holy is love. Holy! Holy! Holy! A little boy's voice in a church
singing that expresses it as nothing else can. I have to begin to earn
my living."

He had got so far with his pen racing along in the wake of his
thoughts when his mother knocked at his door:

"Do go to bed, René, dear. You're not working already?"

"No, mother. I wasn't working."

"Then you mustn't stay up, wasting the gas and all."




III

GEORGE MARRIED


     'Tis an evil lot, and yet
     Let us make the best of it;
     If love can live when pleasure dies
     We two will love, till in our eyes
     This heart's Hell seem paradise.


GEORGE married and settled in the newly developed region behind Hog
Lane West. Before he went, he spent a whole evening with his mother
and brother making a list of his possessions, and arguing with them
when they claimed a chair or a piece of china he had bought as family
property. They had been purchased with _his_ money, and they had only
enjoyed a right of user.--(His firm had been through protracted
litigation in the Chancery Courts, and he was up in legal
phrases.)--They must have known that sooner or later he would have a
house of his own. The procuring of a wife seemed to have aggravated
George's acquisitive sense. He was exceedingly conscious of the
extension of his personality and was groping round for material things
wherewith to fortify it. More and more he treated his brother with
condescension, and was continually hinting at the things marriage did
for a man. He had not been so grossly jubilant since his first
encounter with woman, whereof he had given René a full and rapturous
account. René had been more able to understand that excitement than
this. To George the two adventures were apparently of the same order;
to René they were profoundly different, and his brother's
boisterousness induced misery in him. What his mother made of it all,
he could not discover. All day long, and often late at night she was
crocheting at a bed-quilt which she was anxious to have finished
against the wedding. The savage communicativeness which had so
disturbed René on the night of his home-coming was succeeded by
silence and silly chatter, and she was constantly and mysteriously
busy at George's house or with Elsie at the shops.

Cathleen Bentley had written:

"How can you have such a brother? But he is great fun. Tell me more.
And I adore your mother. If only we could be engaged, I would come and
stay with you."

René described:

"George keeps hinting at Things in marriage. He is rather like a man
dreaming of good food, a series of meals magically prepared and set
before him so that he does not need to rise. One meal is cleared away
and another appears. I find it hard to grasp. I imagine his life
otherwise must be dull, though he never seems to mind that. He is what
you call Steady; has been in the same office since he was sixteen, and
will go on in it until he is sixty and past work. Perhaps all his
desire and hope go into this adventure. Perhaps he feels that nothing
lies beyond it, and is therefore cramming everything into it.
Certainly he is not allowing himself room to develop anything out of
it. There's a sort of desperation in him. Now or never. After all, I
suppose he's getting what he wants, but there is a heat in it which
blisters me. That must be because I have known a cool, sweet love with
you. How did it happen? You must try to understand, look down into the
lives of people on a lower level than your own. We have no organized
pleasures, at least not enough of them, and we are really thrown back
on the man and maiden business, casual for the most part. We feel the
grubbiness of it, but they don't. It's fire and warmth to them.
Primitive, isn't it? Like savages rubbing two sticks together. It
doesn't leave much room for affection or charm. It has to be raw or
they can't believe in it, inarticulate as they are, and as I am too
often. We can't make material existence a starting-point as you more
favored ones can do if you choose. Love simply doesn't have a chance
with us. I think you could bring a wonderful happiness into my
mother's life. I keep wanting to tell her about you, and one of these
days I shall. Will you send her some flowers from your garden? We have
a backyard only with five privet bushes growing round an old bicycle
shed. . . ."

Writing to Cathleen was his safety-valve. He could find George amusing
when he had written to her, and when he had a letter from her he could
almost salute his brother as a fellow-lover.

The wedding was a noble piece of work. It was at St. Clement's in
Upper Kite Street, not a hundred yards away from the Denmark, where
there was a rousing breakfast to which Mr. Sherman had invited his
cronies and patrons. There were ponderous jokes about perambulators,
and George, in an excited little speech, said that when he had a house
large enough to accommodate all his family, he would be able to invite
those friends who had come to see him and his Elsie married. Two or
three old women wept; rice, confetti, and slippers were thrown after
the happy pair as they drove off for their honeymoon, and in the
afternoon the party went by train to Cheadley Edge and visited the
caves, and wandered in the woods, and ate an enormous high tea at
Yarker's, the farmhouse which devoted one of its meadows to
cocoanut-shies and roundabouts, and its garden to tea-parties. It was
all good, vulgar, noisy fun, and René was caught in a series of
flirtations with Elsie's sisters and their friends. He kept finding
their hands in his as they swung or walked or sat at tea, and they
seemed to enter into a competition to be isolated with him in the
woods or the caves, but not one of them established an exclusive right
to him for the day, and by the return in the evening the party was
split up into couples and he found himself thrown with his mother, who
had throughout shown a stiff front to pleasantries and was exhausted
by jollifications which for her had not been jolly.

Sitting by her side in the tram as they drove from the station, René
found himself dreading the return to Hog Lane West. George had been an
alien, but a convenient buffer between them. Now they had to establish
a new order of living. George's absence was an actuality with which
they had to deal more vigorously than with his presence. They left his
room empty. Neither had any use for it. The dining-room had been the
living-room of the family. Without George, René and his mother found
themselves relapsing into oppressive silences, and very soon he took
to leaving her in the evenings, and going up to his bedroom and his
books and his work.

He was singularly friendless. His schoolmates had gone into offices
and regarded with strange and rather alarmed eyes his continued
pursuit of academic courses, and in his first years at the university
he had undergone a violent spasm of mental growth which had left him
shy and diffident, resentful of anything that seemed like intrusion
upon his brooding, and impatient of surface relationships and the too
easy friendliness which he saw current on all sides. Also he was
chafed by his position of semi-dependence upon his relations, and
rather scared by the possibility of not doing well enough in his
examinations to justify what was constantly being impressed upon him
as his exceptional opportunity. Therefore he worked on a time-table in
term and out of it, never less than nine hours a day; morning,
afternoon, and evening; and rather harder in vacation than in term. He
had no smallest notion what it was all for. He had an unusual faculty
for learning things and arrangements of ideas, and could always answer
examination questions lucidly, and had so small a conceit of himself
that his work was never spoiled by a nervous anxiety to excel nor
interfered with by the emotionalism of the clever young. He had a
sound, all-round ability, never expected anything to be difficult, and
could quickly master the elements of any study he took up. When that
study led away from practical considerations he was apt to lose
interest in it. He had stopped short of philosophy and pure
mathematics, and the astuteness of his headmaster had led him in his
last year at school to specialize in history and economics. When he
was sent up for a scholarship at Cambridge, he failed because the
beauty of the Backs had so stirred his rather sluggish emotions as to
cause him temporarily to lose his lucidity and shrewdness in dealing
with examination questions, so that he wrote rather at
large--thoroughly enjoying himself--than with particular reference to
the matter in hand. However, he had already won a County Council
Scholarship, and with this he entered Thrigsby University. There he
had done well and had picked up exhibitions and bursaries, striving
for success not so much because he wanted it, as because it was
expected of him.

He lived now in a strange disquietude, reading his set books, Adam
Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall, Cannan, Jevons, various works by
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, amusing himself with the advanced
diagrammatic economists, and grinding away at his special subject,
Coöperation, from the Rochdale pioneers to the European "movement."
All this he did mechanically. His brain had been set going in a
certain direction by amiable instructors whom he had never seen any
reason to doubt, and it was pleasant to let it go on so moving toward
that examination which was to be a gate leading to a profession higher
than the life of commerce from which he had been reclaimed.

So far, so good; but George's marriage had caused a stir-about in him.
In the first place, it posed a domestic problem in economics that
could not be solved on paper, and in the second it had roused him to
moral revolt. He could not forget his affection for George. They had
been great companions as little boys. He himself was in love, knew
that love was sweet, and could not away with the fact that George's
marriage was to some extent a denial of all he had learned and gained
in his own hours of tenderness. He hated to resist the idea that
George was perfectly happy, but he could not help himself. His was no
literary enthusiasm for romance and noble love. He had read very few
romances, and of poetry he knew no more than the anthology to which
Cathleen had introduced him. On the whole, he preferred comfort above
all things, and George made him uncomfortable, set stirring in him an
idealism, a fervor, which so swelled in him as to make him, even in
his outpourings to his beloved, incapable of stringing his ideas
together. Literary persons can gain a great deal of relief by the mere
reiteration of the words "I love you," with variations. Words were to
René only implements, painfully inadequate, for digging out the
fineness which he had begun to perceive behind his feelings. He could
not forgive George for being content with mere feelings undisciplined
and unrefined. He hoped innocently that the honeymoon would bring some
revelation, but when bride and bridegroom returned they were more
distressing than ever. They had lost their shyness. That was all.
George was fatly, complacently "settled down," and could never leave
his wife alone for half an hour on end, but must be always touching
her, teasing her, or openly caressing her, and she seemed to like it
and to make a parade of his attentions.

René would come away boiling from an evening spent at their house,
which they had called The Nest, and he would sit, either cooling
himself with his large books, or heightening his fury with letters to
Cathleen, now returned to Putney, which is called London. He never
revised what he wrote. He had rather forgotten the charm of his boyish
love-making, and had lost the young trick of visualizing his fair,
needing more from her than her beauty, and now used her as an outlet,
assuming in her a sympathy which neither her past conduct nor her
letters revealed. The mere fact of writing was enough, and his letters
became intimate and self-revelatory, a kind of running, general
confession. Sometimes they were of enormous length, and the envelopes
he sent away were bulky and bulging.

One night he stopped in the middle of a letter, turned back and read,
realizing that he had laid bare the whole of his brother's sexual life
so far as he knew it. He was filled with a thick horror, tore the
letter up, and went down to his mother to escape from the train of
thought which had led to such indiscretion and betrayal. He did not
escape, but found himself plunged in confession:

"Mother, I'm in love."

"Well, I never! You're not going to be married now?"

"No. It's hopeless. She's rich. At least her father is."

"So that's why you look so queerly at Elsie. You can't expect them to
be all alike."

"It isn't only that. Only I can't get away from certain things."

"What things?"

"The horrible things people do."

"You'll be kept busy if you worry about that."

"It's about myself."

"Want to confess? Go on."

"I mean, George and I used to talk--you know. Well, it got beyond
talk. Uncle Alfred gave me ten shillings once. I spent it--that way."

"Well, well."

"You can't dismiss it like that. I shouldn't be remembering it if it
were so easy as that. I met her--you know--in Derby Street----"

"You're not going to tell me the whole story?"

"I must tell someone. I met her and she took me down a lot of streets.
She walked along briskly in a business-like way, and I slunk along
behind with my coat collar turned up and my cap over my eyes, and I
kept shivering, though it wasn't cold. We came to a little house and
she knocked at the door, and a fat woman with red arms came to it. She
just looked at us and said: 'Full up.' We went on to another little
house, but I couldn't get that out of my mind, and the room there was
so horrible that I ran away, and that's all."

Mrs. Fourmy looked up at the clock, into the fire, round at the corner
cupboard. At last she said:

"Well, you are a funny boy."

"I'm in love all right," he said; "but I fed as if I'd never like to
marry and just go on with you forever and ever. I could find a sort of
happiness in just making enough for us to live on."

His mother came over to him and laid her hands on his shoulders:

"Don't make trouble for yourself, my dear. Don't do that. Let things
alone. Trouble comes fast enough, and all your plans and thoughts and
hopes aren't enough to deal with them. That's your father all over.
Always wanting a little better than he got, and always getting a
little worse than he deserved. Suppose we go out together once a week.
That'll stop us getting into the way of sitting too much alone. And if
the girl's the right sort of girl she won't let being rich and all
that stand in her way."

René patted her hand.

"It's awfully good of you to listen," he said; "I feel better already.
Only George----"

"Don't let George worry you. He can do things you can't. George can
keep his mind out of things like that."

He felt immensely relieved. His confession seemed to have filled the
vacancy left by George. Between himself and his mother there was
established a more living relationship. There had been some authority
in her comfortable words which had led him back to the old
unconsidered position in which she was the central warmth of the home
in which he lived. For a time at least he could be at rest and accept
that things were so because they were so and not otherwise.

Gradually they won back to happy insignificant chatter, and planned
that on the following evening they would go to a music-hall together.

The postman broke in upon their talk. He brought two letters for René.
One was from Cathleen, and very short:


"There's been a row. I've been howling all night. I can't write any
more. They can't understand. Vulgar they call you, and they are
furious with me. They read one of your letters, opened it if you
please. Not fit for a young girl. I'm not to have a heart till I can
captivate a rich man old or young, and I am never to have a mind. It's
just beastly the things they say, but I can do nothing."


The other letter was from her mother:


"DEAR SIR,--I have read your last letter to my daughter. It is not fit
reading for a young girl, or indeed for any pure woman. You will
oblige me by not writing again, and I have forbidden my daughter to
continue your acquaintance."


He passed both letters over to his mother.

"I told you it was hopeless."

"If you ask my opinion," replied his mother, "I should say you were
well rid of her."

"But I can't help loving her."

Mrs. Fourmy sniffed indignantly:

"Love! Well, you can call it love if you like."

"I do," said he very earnestly.

On which his mother staggered him by saying:

"George wouldn't."

In spite of himself, and against the grain, René began to think a
little enviously of his brother, master unperplexed of his own and
another life.




IV

A RETURN


     Why, among us a drowning man has to make for himself the very
     straw he's to clutch at!


BOTH René and his mother were excited all day over their projected
visit to a music-hall.

Thrigsby had ten of these places of amusement, and they found it hard
to decide which to patronize. Only one was outside the possibility of
choice, because it had performing seals in the bill, and Mrs. Fourmy
could not bear to see animals on the stage. René was for the low
comedians, his mother for music; and at last, in the program of one of
the suburban halls, she found a musical turn which had once given her
immense pleasure. She talked of it all afternoon, adding all the time
so generously to its wonder that René began to fear she would be
disappointed with the actuality. But her anticipation was so firm as
to overbear any shortcomings in the performance, and she saw and heard
only what she expected to see and hear. For René there was a very
droll comedian who made him shout with laughter. Mrs. Fourmy was
shocked at a joke at the expense of the Deity and those who go to
heaven, but she was so delighted with her son's pleasure that she
swallowed her distaste and laughed too. All the way home they
recapitulated their moments of delight, and laughed and melted in
remembrance.

It was a lovely evening, and they walked through a residential park,
the roads of which were private and flanked and overhung with trees.
Lovers lurked in the shadows, and their sweet murmuring could be
heard. Mrs. Fourmy took her son's arm:

"You and an old woman like me."

"Won't it be lovely when we live in the country, mother?"

"Oh, but there won't be any music-halls."

"We won't need them in the country with the nights. You should have
seen them in Scotland. I used to go into the woods, and sometimes up
the hills."

"But with an old, old woman----"

"I won't let you be really old, mother. And up there I used to feel
that I didn't really want anybody. That's queer, because I was in
love--really, I was."

He began to tingle and burn at the thought of Cathleen and the absurd
end of his hopes, and almost tearfully to realize that he was not yet
out of love. That discomfort gave him a sense of gladness in his
mother's company. It was wonderful the sweetness that had come into
their life together, the peace of it and the hope.

He said:

"It won't be long before I can begin to make some money. I'm only
waiting for Professor Smallman to come back. His letter was awfully
kind. He says there will be no difficulty. I can get first-year
pupils, and he can help me to find some journalistic work. Then when
I've got my degree I'll get a post, and you won't have to take any
more money from the rich Fourmys."

"It's only what helps you now. You don't seem to be a bit ambitious,
René."

"Would you like me to be?"

"But you're so clever and everybody else is so stupid. It seems so
funny of you to be so pleased with anything you can get."

"Funny?" He could hardly grasp what she meant. She went on:

"You're so good-looking, too. I shouldn't be surprised if you got on
and married somebody who was--well, you know."

There was a strain of bitterness in his mother which could infuriate
him. To-night he was so happy with her that it made him only sad, and
he said gently:

"I don't think I'm the sort that gets on. I say things--in letters,
you know."

"But I'd like to see you well off and married to some really nice
girl."

"And I'd like to see the girl who could make me give up the idea of
living in the country with you."

"I'll come and stay with you."

So they went on gently sparring, both clinging to their separate
idylls of the future. They came out of the park into the streets of
little shops and small houses like their own, and stopped presently at
the German delicatessen store, where they argued as to what they
should have for supper, ham or liver sausage. They compromised, and
decided on both, with little Swiss cheeses and honey-cakes.

As they came out into Hog Lane West they were accosted by a man who
asked René if he could tell him where Hog Lane West was, and which way
he should turn to find 166.

"That's my house," said René.

The stranger moved closer to him and had a long look at him. René felt
a tug at his arm, and turned to find his mother trembling against him.

"René! René! it's your father!"

"Is it you, Essie?" said the stranger, and he removed his hat.

"You--you---- I'm afraid," said René chokingly, "I'm afraid you'll
find the door shut against you. I've--I've often thought what I should
do if I set eyes on you again. That's what I shall do. I can't let you
come."

"Essie," the stranger turned to Mrs. Fourmy, "I'm dead broke."

"You must come and tell us, but you mustn't stay. We've been out, René
and I. We've got supper."

Her voice thinned away. She could speak no more. Her hand pressed René
to move on, and they set out toward their house with the man
following. René held the garden gate open, and stayed for a moment
fumbling for his key. When he found it, his father and mother were
standing silhouetted against the glass panel of the door. He let them
in, and, obeying an obscure instinct that stirred in him, went
upstairs to leave them alone together. Not for long. He found that in
his confusion he had taken the viands with him. He gained a few
moments in the kitchen preparing a tray (Polly was out for the evening
and not yet returned), and then, with the dishes clattering as he
walked, he rejoined them in the dining-room.

He had not consciously expected anything, but as he entered the
dining-room he saw his father with his back turned to him at the
corner cupboard with his hand on the key, his head cocked, his
shoulders up, very like George, and it was as though he had foreseen
it. It was uncanny and his heart ached in a sort of dread.

His mother's face was shining with a glowing excitement, and she
looked away from him as she said:

"Your father wants us to let him stay for a little. There's George's
room, you know, and I want him to."

René felt helpless. The emergency was too strong for him.

"All right," he said.

His father turned and smiled pleasantly.

"That's good of you--very good of you. I'd be in the cart without.
I'm--well--I've been---- But we'll talk of that later."

"Talk!" murmured René, aghast. "Who would talk? Who could find
anything to say?" Miserably he laid out the plates round the big
hospitable table, so big, so hospitable, that it was out of place and
forbidding.

Mr. Fourmy had already helped himself to whisky. (George always kept a
bottle in the house in case he and Elsie should drop in of an
evening.) They drew up to the table and went through a mockery of
eating. The bread was bitter in René's mouth, and the dainties they
had bought were tasteless. Mrs. Fourmy talked in a toneless twittering
voice of the music-hall performance, while René stole glances at his
father and avoided meeting his eyes. If he met his eyes he felt, in
spite of himself, amused, charmed, tickled, somehow pleased, and with
that pleasure was mixed a salt savor of pity, so that it was
irresistible and led on wonderfully to a sure promise of adventure.
René kept muttering to himself: "He's a bad man. A bad Fourmy, and you
can't do worse than that." This memory he flung with a look at his
mother, only to realize as he looked that she had no thought for him,
but, like him, was stealing glances at his father and avoiding meeting
the little keen humorous eyes. And his father went on eating hungrily
and heartily. Half a loaf of bread he ate, and two-thirds of the ham
and all the liver sausage. Then he looked wistfully at the
honey-cakes, but desisted, produced a packet of cigarettes, and began
to smoke.

"That's good," he said. "My first square meal since this morning.
That's good, good."

He moved from the table into the big red velvet chair by the fire.

"Good, very good. And it's a real home-coming. After all, this isn't
so very different from the old house."

"It's bigger," said René.

His father turned and scanned him.

"I can hardly realize you yet, young man. Can't allow for your growing
up. Can only just trace the face I remember. Your nose has grown."

"You used to have a mustache."

"Yes. Shaved it off in America. Didn't like Roosevelt."

"Have you been to America?"

"Been the devil's own dance, up and down America, North and South,
Philippines, Malay Settlement--that's Rangoon--China, back to America.
Wonderful how you meet Thrigsby folk all over the world. Hundreds of
young men everywhere who seem to have been at school with you and
George. I've had enough. Want to settle down."

"Like George."

"Isn't George coming in?"

"He's married."

"The devil he is! And am I a grandfather? Lord! what a world it is for
breeding! Think of me just fifty and a grandfather. What things do
happen to a man, to be sure."

"If only you wouldn't talk," protested René in a sudden exasperation.

"To be sure," returned his father genially. "I'm the prodigal. Must
give you time to take me in while we digest the fatted calf."

"It's not that!" René was swept by his indignation on to his feet. "It
isn't that! Only I never thought of this. You come in, and you sit
there in your old chair as though you'd only gone out yesterday. And
it's over ten years, and I can hardly remember you, and I know all the
time that you're my father, and--and--I don't know you. It's simply
beastly. I don't know why it is, but it is."

"René! René!" cried his mother.

"Steady, old girl," said Mr. Fourmy, with an almost tender firmness.
He turned quietly round in his chair until he was looking sideways up
at René. "Look here, young man, it takes two to make a scene, and I
won't have it. It's no good trying to make a scene simply because you
expected to have one if ever I came back. I spanked you the day before
I left for throwing a knife at your brother in one of your baresark
fits, and for two pins I'd turn you up and spank you now."

Then René's memory played him a scurvy trick. "Boot or brush?" he
asked himself, and a sick anger rose in him and hot tears welled into
his eyes. He gasped and gurgled inarticulately, thinking he was making
an appeal to his mother, but through his tears he seemed to see his
father growing larger and larger, and in a gust of terror he lunged
out of the room, seized his cap, and rushed from the house.

"It isn't fair! it isn't fair!" he moaned.

Other young men he knew had difficulties with their fathers, but to
have a father suddenly materialize out of thin air and step back with
exasperating ease into a relationship which a part of his family at
least had forgotten, was too critical for the mind to bear. René had
been priding himself on the fact that at last he was to be as other
young men, a wage-earner, a reputable citizen, a prop to his mother, a
credit to his family and his own aspirations. And here suddenly he was
to begin all over again. His painful emotions were akin to those of a
small boy on the arrival of a new baby in his home, or to those of a
tit on finding a cuckoo's monstrous egg in its nest, and, being of a
cultivated intelligence, he could not immediately and robustly draw on
his instinct to adjust himself to the new circumstances.

He called on George. The Nest was in darkness. He went on hammering at
the door until the window above it was thrown open.

"Who's there?" snarled George. "If it's the police, the window's left
open for the cat, and I'm damned if I shut it."

"It's me--René!"

"What the hell do you want at this time of night?"

"I must see you. Something has happened."

"What?"

"Come down and let me in."

He was filled with a cold and shuddering feeling of being ridiculous
as he waited. He wanted to run away, but that would have been even
more absurd. The chain of the door rattled, the bolts rapped back, and
George said:

"Come in. You've wakened Elsie, and she's not at all well."

"But I wanted to see you. Father's come back."

"What?"

"Father's come back."

"Mother all right?"

"She seems quite pleased."

"Then there's nothing more to be said. If you don't like him, tell him
he's got to pay the rent. That'll clear him out fast enough. Good
night."

George seized René by the arm, lifted him through the door on to the
step, closed the door, shot the bolts and the chain. In his
astonishment René found himself nearly back at 166 before he could
realize the outrage that had been done to his feelings. He had wanted
to tell George that the atmosphere of the house was just horrible, and
George had never thought of that.

166 was in darkness too. How grim these little houses were in the
darkness! How they invited violence and the wickedness of the night!
How derelict they seemed! How fit for the harboring of wandering, evil
men! Now he thought of his father as evil, a shadow come to obliterate
the brightness that had grown and filled the house since George's
departure.

He let himself in, saw that all the lights were out downstairs, the
large coals taken from the dining-room fire, the windows and doors
fastened. Then he crept upstairs on tiptoe in his stockinged feet and
groped fearfully toward his mother's door, half dreading some awful
discovery. He could hear no sound. As he passed George's room there
came out of it his father's rich, familiar snore.




V

SETTLING DOWN


     O the mad days that I have spent! and to see how many of mine old
     acquaintances are dead!


PROFESSOR SMALLMAN had been lent by his university to deliver a series
of lectures in America, and some weeks of the term would pass before
his return. René, therefore, had no escape from his father. Breakfast,
dinner, tea, and supper, he was there all the time on his best
behavior, though with a naughty malice stirring in him and peeping out
of his eyes. He ate--how he ate! Hardly a meal left remnants enough to
provide for the next, and butcher's meat, which before had only been
got every third day, was now brought to the house every morning. In an
access of filial devotion, René had undertaken to relieve his mother
of household accounts, always a plague to her, and the little
blood-stained butcher's bills alarmed him by their number and the
amount of money they represented. He hardly spoke to his father,
avoided him, shut himself up in his bedroom, and there realized
horribly that he was also avoiding his mother, that she made no
protest, not even by glance or gesture, and that they were making him
feel the intruder. The change in his mother was amazing. She was three
times as active, and was often for hours together without her
crochet-work. She, who was accustomed for days never to leave the
house, now went out every afternoon with her husband to walk in
Potter's Park, or in the evening to visit the streets where they had
lived, and to seek out old acquaintances. When her son was present she
was discreet, and prattled reminiscently of people he had never known,
or remembered only as names and remote presences. But often when he
was in his room, he would hear them below talking excitedly, and his
mother laughing or protesting. And he came to think of them as "they,"
and they seemed to have so little they cared to or could share with
him.

One black night he had when, after coming in late in the afternoon, he
found his mother unaided moving the heavy iron bedstead and wire
mattress from George's room to her own. He gulped down his dismay, and
stood on the stairs watching her. She had not heard him, and went on
until suddenly she caught sight of him and jumped.

"Oh!"

"Shall I help you?"

"_It is_--too heavy for me."

"Where is--he?"

"He went out. He thought he saw old Mr. Timperley in Derby Street
to-day. Of course you don't remember Mr. Timperley."

"In your room?"

She hesitated:

"We--we sold the old bed, you know."

He helped her without another word. Together in silence they put
George's bed up alongside her own, and in silence when it was done
René left her. He went to his room and sat, staring unseeing at the
five privet bushes and the old bicycle shed.

Presently she came to him and sat on his bed, and gazed at him like a
mournful, shy little bird.

"You mustn't make it hard for us, René."

"I--I thought I was making it easy."

"His brothers won't see him."

"Why not?"

"They won't. They're hard people, the Fourmys. They can't forget the
past. They say they won't help me any more if I let him stay, and not
a penny will they leave me."

"You'll let him stay?"

"He knows it was cruel of him to leave as--as he did. But he had a lot
to bear, really he did, René. He was very proud. It's his pride has
been against him always, René."

"What did he do else?"

"Nothing very much. Only people talked. And he didn't get on. That was
his pride too. You can do anything if only you get on. He never could
work for other people. He was a clever man too. You get your
cleverness from him. I'm sure it's not from me. He was always trying
different things, but he couldn't get on. He did some silly things
too."

"You won't tell me, then?"

"I have told you."

"What's he going to do? Go on eating and eating?"

"He'll look for work. Of course, at his age, it won't be easy."

"What's he been doing all this time?"

"He's been rich and lost it all again. He came back to England with
quite a lot of money."

"He didn't think of you then."

"He lost it nearly all. Do be nice to him, René! He thinks such a lot
of you. George is quite nice, and Elsie loves him already, but he
thinks most of you. I've been telling him how wonderful you've been,
and he says nothing must interfere with your career."

"But someone must make money."

"Only for a little. He says we could make much more with my money if
it were re-invested."

René swung round.

"He's not to touch that, do you hear? You're a soft fool, mother. He's
not to touch that. I'll work myself to the bone first."

"That's dear of you, René. And you will be nice to him, won't you?"

"All right, all right."

She kissed him and flitted away, and presently, to the devastation of
his attempts to adopt what he considered a worldly and wise point of
view of the matter, he heard her singing in her room. A loathing and
disgust rushed through him. Men and women! Men and women! It was
George all over again, quintessence of George, here on the very
fringes of his being. No escape from it! In the little house, all but
the tiniest noises could be heard from end to end of it.

His father came home late that night. He hummed as he groped upstairs
and fumbled his way along the passage to the front room. The full
hours of the night in towns, where huddled creatures live, poured in
upon René as he lay in sleeplessness, staring, staring at the
never-darkened sky.

From this torment to escape he could find no other solace than the
attempt to be "nice" to his father. It was forced on him, and after
the first plunge he found it not so very difficult, and there was some
reward in his mother's anxious satisfaction. Both men played up to
keep things lively for the woman, and the elder set himself almost
desperately to make the younger laugh. At first when they were alone
together Mr. Fourmy made the mistake of trying droll stories spiced
and hot on his son, but he was met with a stare so blank and
uncomprehending, so freezing, that he never tried them again. Then,
more successfully, he drew on his own reminiscences, and practiced his
not inconsiderable talent for caricature and exaggerated mimicry upon
the odd characters he had known and the members of his own family.
This met with encouragement from René, who was interested. From his
father's chuckling monologue he learned that the Fourmys were the
oddest family that ever was--Scotch, French, Dutch, Jewish, reg'lar
English, in fact; Nonconformist for generations; clever, close, proud,
hard, acquisitive, narrow, pious, with occasional outcrops of
wickedness to leaven the lump; shy, harsh, undemonstrative; loathing
any kind of excess; clinging to the middle way, bound never to rise
above respectable mediocrity; dreading anything so conspicuous as
eminence; never reaching to any higher public office than a District
Council or a Board of Guardians.

"Two of my brothers are Guardians," said Mr. Fourmy, "and they could
predict no worse for me than that I should come to the workhouse. They
know well enough that no Fourmy could ever get to prison. We can't be
bad enough."

"Where did we come from?" asked René.

"Scotland, but that's a long time ago. Your great-aunt Janet's father
started a tannery somewhere near Lancaster. That would be somewhere
about the time of Napoleon. At least, I remember reading a little book
the old gentleman wrote about a tour he made in France and Germany
when the Continent was opened up after Elba and all that."

"But why are we fixed here?"

"Don't your big books tell you that?"

For once in a way René saw that his father was twitting him.

"Big books don't account for humble folk like us."

"The biggest books do, my boy." And to René's surprise and delight his
father raised his voice and trolled out some verses that excited and
exalted him. They were all about joy and freedom and the awfulness of
losing them, but no single phrase bit into his mind to take possession
of it.

"Yes," he said, "yes."

"Pooh!" said his father. "If we understood that we'd none of us be
here, neither rich nor poor. We get a little excited about it, at
least you and I do, but we can't go any further--not far enough into
our own minds, I mean--and we are left weaker for the attack of all
the things that drag us down and bind us fast. A little squeeze for
bread and butter, and we say it doesn't matter, but may come all in
good time. I used to be rather good at poetry, could remember anything
I read or heard. Can't do that now. I used to love it. The Fourmys
hate it. Lord! when I had my last row with my father, when he had said
his say, I let fly at him with a page and a half of Milton and wound
up with Shakespeare--you know: 'Let me not to the marriage of true
minds----'"

"I know," said René, though he had never read the Sonnets.

"Lord! I was a young man, I was, and I went on being young for a
surprisingly long time. It seemed there wasn't anything in the world
could take it from me. But it came to an end at last. How you do make
me talk, to be sure! I wish you'd tell me about yourself."

That shut René up completely. There was nothing to tell, nothing that
would not dwindle and shrivel up in the telling. There was such
mockery in this disturbing father of his that his timid little
emotions, his shy desire to think well of him, to like him, to set
what he found in him against what he knew and had heard, hid away,
curled up in his mind and created a horrid congestion. But his father
had a certain fascination for him, and it was a relief to get him to
talk. He never did learn why the Fourmys, rich and poor, were fixed
where they were in the middle-class of Thrigsby, but he did get
flashes and sparks which promised elucidation, and he did begin to
discover that there were worlds on worlds outside, and minds which
were not afraid of thought and not wholly set on money and the good
opinion of others. It was a painful mystery to him that his father's
mind should lead him on so far, give him a shining promise of
beauty--though beauty was the very last word that in his shyness of
himself he would have used--and then by a cruel sleight of hand
present him only with caricatures of Fourmys and neighbors and George.

Mr. Fourmy on his elder son is worth quoting. He said:

"George is a reg'lar Fourmy, a thorough Unitarian. They want one God.
George desires to live in the worship of the one flesh."

He seemed to like George, was often at The Nest, and when George and
Elsie came to them there was tapped in the queer man a vein of
ribaldry which made René, even as he laughed, blush that such things
could be said before a woman.

George said of his father:

"He's a funny damned old rotter, but you can't help liking him."

René had to admit that, but the increase in the weekly bills gave him
many a sick moment, and though his father spent many hours away from
home, there was never any talk of his finding work. Very quickly the
household absorbed its new inmate and adjusted its habits, so far as
was necessary, to his. Mr. Fourmy bought paints and brushes, and with
these he would amuse himself all day. At half-past eight in the
evening he would disappear, and often not return until the small hours
of the morning. He never asked for money, and seemed always able to
procure anything he wanted.




VI

PROFESSOR SMALLMAN


     As the reader's curiosity (if he hath any) must be now awake, and
     hungry, we shall provide to feed it as fast as we can.


EXCEPT for Mrs. Fourmy few letters came to 166, and it was a great
excitement for René when, a few weeks before the end of term, he came
down in the morning to find a parcel waiting for him on the breakfast
table. His father and mother watched him eagerly as he opened it, to
find two large brown volumes, a German economic treatise translated by
a Scots professor. A printed slip headed _Thrigsby Post_ requested Mr.
Fourmy to send a review not exceeding four hundred words in length
within a week. Pride and elation moved René. His cheeks glowed, his
eyes shone, he caressed the covers of the books, took them up, and
turned over the leaves. It was the first sign of recognition from the
world outside school and university.

"Professor Smallman said he would get me some reviewing." René could
only speak in gasps. He could not take his eyes off the books, and
when his father reached out his hand for them, his impulse was to hug
them and keep them from him. "He said he thought he could get me some.
But I never thought of the _Post_. It's such a good paper."

"It's Liberal, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fourmy.

"Yes. But of course I shouldn't have anything to do with that side of
it." René had always been given to understand that he was a
Conservative, and that only chapel people were Liberals.

He ate very little breakfast, and immediately afterward rushed
upstairs, made his bed, and lay on it gloating over the precious
books, picking up first one volume and then the other, hardly reading
them, and beginning already to compose his review based on Professor
Smallman's dislike of the translator. Then he began to wonder how much
he would be paid for it--one, two, four, five guineas. The editor of
the _Post_ was a very rich man. Would they print his name? Presently
his happiness was so intense that he could not bear not to share it,
and he went downstairs. His mother had gone out. His father was in the
dining-room painting. He had the lid of a cigar box and was covering
it with a copy of a nude reproduced in some magazine from a picture in
the Paris Salon of that year. René watched him. He worked with minute
strokes of the brush, caressingly, carefully. Already he had painted
several copies of the same picture.

"Why do you always paint the same thing?" asked René.

"Nothing else worth painting." Mr. Fourmy stopped, looked up at his
son, winked, and hissed like a goose in a peculiar mocking laughter he
affected when he was most roguish. "She's a beauty, this one. Like to
have seen the original. Women. Not much else men care about, as you'll
find presently. I can sell as many of these as I care to paint. I'm
going to do her smaller though, so's she can be carried in the
waistcoat pocket or a letter-case. I've got a watchmaker's glass, so's
I can see what I'm doing with the brush." And he took out the glass
and screwed it into his eye and looked chuckling up at René. He was
absurdly, childishly pleased with himself.

"Does mother know?" asked René, all his elation oozing away.

"She don't know I sell 'em. I didn't know I could myself. Never saw
what's been under my nose all my life. But he's a clever man, is your
father, much too clever to be a burden on his wife and family. Knock
him down one day and he's up the next."

René said heavily:

"It's like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs
and the dirty books."

Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily:

"This, my boy, is art, hand-painted in oils. Put a gilt frame round it
and it's quite respectable. These swine think art is a bawdy thing."

"Where do you sell them? To a shop?"

"No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and
chapelgoers."

René sat dejectedly looking into the fire. At last he said:

"I wish you hadn't told me. It doesn't seem worth while doing
anything."

He went back to his room, but his joy in the books had filtered away.
To read through them was a heavy task which had become to him nothing
but the commercial traffic of his time, knowledge, and brains for
money. He had no motive for doing it but the cold necessity of somehow
making a living. All day long he read and read until his eyes ached,
and he sat far into the night writing and rewriting until he had
produced four hundred words that looked like the sort of stuff he read
in the literary columns of the newspapers.

A depressed mood of appalling skepticism seized him. His father and
mother, his brother and sister-in-law, these were his world, and they
were contented with a monotonous small happiness, and he was the fool
to look for more. Ah! but the days in Scotland, the graciousness and
the fun that those other people knew; the sweetness of waiting upon
Cathleen's coming; her coming, the hours of tenderness and pure
laughter, and her warm comradeship and the zest of the emotions they
could rouse in each other and turn to a golden glee! But that was all
done, and there was now only poverty and disgrace, and beyond, the
sniggering of the men who loved nothing but women and the idea of
women.

He kept back his review for three days, being fearful lest the editor
should think him careless or over-eager, and he rather prided himself
on his cunning in doing so. It was his first attempt to manipulate the
impression he might make, and the illusion of subtle activity it
brought gave him some solace in his misery.



Other books came from the _Post_, and he wrote to thank Professor
Smallman, who invited him to lunch on Sunday.

He had been twice before to the Professor's house, to the garden party
which he gave annually to work off the social obligations incurred
during the academic year. For Thrigsby he had a very good garden, and
an old house in a neighborhood which still bore some traces of a rural
character, though the regiments of little pink brick houses were
bearing down on it with an alarming swiftness. His garden contained
three plum trees and a pear tree, gooseberry and currant bushes, and
raspberry canes.

Mrs. Fourmy had thought the Smallmans must be what she called "grand
people," since they had lunch instead of dinner; but Mr. Fourmy
remembered a Mr. Smallman who used to live in Kite Street and had two
sons, of whom this might very well be one--a good-looking boy, neat
and solemn, just a little too neat and obliging, always opening gates
for old ladies and picking up handkerchiefs dropped by old
gentlemen--that sort of boy. "Would call me 'Sir' the only time I ever
spoke to him. I'll be bound that's the one."

It helped René a little to know for certain that the Professor had
once been a boy, but Mrs. Smallman he remembered as a lady of a
gentleness and kindness almost terrifying, so kind that she had a way
of not seeming to hear you when you were stuttering out some
preposterously foolish remark. Everything was so easy for her; she was
so sure of the strength of her position as a good hostess and the wife
of a popular and important man; and there were the children, who were
allowed to look down from the nursery window at the garden party. You
could not talk to Mrs. Smallman long without having your eyes drawn to
them, and then, if you were a sensitive person like René, you felt
that this house was full of an intimacy jealous of its beauty, so that
it repelled strangers. Friendliness there was, but it ended abruptly;
the wife's eyes lighting on the husband, the husband's on the wife, or
the eyes of both meeting and turning to the children at the window
could bring it to a cruel and sudden close.

René could not explain to himself the uneasiness that came over him at
the garden parties, or the dread of it that overwhelmed him as he
pushed open the gate and rang the bell on that Sunday.

There was a bright green parasol in the hall table, and by it were two
bowler hats. From the drawing-room came a faint buzz of chatter, and
he saw that it contained the Professor and his wife; Blease, the
Jewish Professor of English; M'Elroy, the great man of the University,
captain of the cricket eleven, President of the Union--it would take a
page to enumerate his distinctions; a little man who looked like an
unsuccessful attempt to repeat the Professor; and a young lady in a
bright green costume. René observed at once that the other men were
wearing black boots, and became dreadfully conscious of his own new
brown pair.

"I'm so glad you could come," said Mrs. Smallman, and she introduced
him to Blease.

"Seen you about," said the Jew. "Third-year man, aren't you?"

"Just beginning my third year," said René miserably.

Blease had made his remark sound friendly, and acute. Rather clever of
a Professor to be able to place a man outside his own subject!

"We stand for something, you know," continued Blease. "Culture! A
handful of men upholding the standard. Good for us to be kept in touch
with working life. Don't you think so, M'Elroy?"

"Yes. That's where we score over Oxford and Cambridge, though they can
never understand that."

Their talk was above René. He remembered Cambridge as a place of
enthralling beauty, but to compare this and that was rather too
sweeping for him, and he found it baffling, and to regard himself as
standing for anything was entirely foreign to his temper. The talk
shot to and fro above him, and he found his eyes being engaged by the
bright green. The young lady was sparkling, easy, gay, a little figure
of energy and charm.

"She is beautiful," said René to himself.

Then he decided that she was not beautiful. She turned her face into
another light, and beauty came into it again; another turn and it
vanished. A will-o'-the-wisp, the hunting of which became an absorbing
pursuit.

At lunch René sat opposite her, and hardly ever took his eyes from her
face. Only when he seemed in danger of meeting her gaze did he turn
away. Once he met her eyes and she smiled, seemed to be considering
him gravely and very seriously in the depths of her mind, then
dismissed him.

"She _is_ beautiful," thought he, and from that moment she had his
homage.

Presently she appealed to him:

"Mr. M'Elroy won't have it that Thrigsby is better than London. What
do you say?"

"I've never been to London," replied René.

"Don't you love Thrigsby?"

"It's been my home always. I don't know that I ever thought about it."

M'Elroy said:

"One thinks about everything nowadays."

Something in the young man's tone roused René to protest.

"Oh no . . . lots of things one does without . . ." But he swallowed
the rest. A sudden flow and ebb of emotion had left him speechless,
and he felt utterly foreign to the company and to the charmed
atmosphere of the household. Mrs. Smallman talked to him for a little,
but he felt that she was speaking through him at her husband, so that
he could not keep his face toward her, but was constantly turning
toward the Professor as though the reply were to come from him, or
would at any rate be worthless without his indorsement. And always the
Professor smiled with a vague friendliness that was disconcerting.

After the meal he was taken to the study, a long room with books all
round the walls, ponderous books, blue books, year after year of
reports of learned institutions; reproductions of Italian pictures;
photographs of Mrs. Smallman on the mantelpiece, a photograph of Mrs.
Smallman on the desk. René was given a large chair and a small cigar,
which he began to smoke before he realized what he was doing. He
rarely smoked, did not care for it, and presently he dropped the cigar
into the fireplace. The Professor stood looking out of the window. Two
of the children were playing under the plum-tree. The feeling of being
thrust out assailed René. The Professor turned:

"Well?" he asked. "What's the trouble?"

"My father----" began René.

"Ah! Well?"

"He deserted my mother a long time ago. He came back. My brother's
married."

"I see. So you're the only possible breadwinner. Any work in your
father? How old is he?"

"I don't know how old he is. But work? No."

"It's bad luck, but it often happens. I've had to keep my father since
he was fifty. What about your family? The name's well known in
Thrigsby."

So Professor Smallman was the boy his father remembered! René gained
confidence. It was something to know that his experience was not
singular.

"They did help until my father came back. They won't now, and I don't
want them to. They don't understand the pain of receiving charity
uncharitably given. They call it ingratitude."

"They have their point of view."

"So have I mine," said René, astonished at his own boldness.

"Your work's good," said the Professor. "Tweeddale's reports of you
were always excellent. As you know, I don't come in touch with men
until their third year, and then only if they're good. You can take
that from me. I must tell you--it wouldn't be fair not to--that one
doesn't know in the least how good you are going to be. One has an
uncertainty about you. In a way, that's all to the good. I like what
you've written for the _Post_. So does Pigott the editor. What about
journalism? Do you write easily?"

"No."

"It rather scotches that, then. Pupils? You could make a little that
way, but it's drudging work when you're reading as well. I could give
you two first-year men, pretty bad, both of them, and Miss Brock, the
girl you met at lunch, has a young brother who can't get through the
matric. That's as much as you could manage."

René had no notion how much he ought to be paid. He asked, and when he
heard the amount his heart overflowed with gratitude, and he walked
home with a new vigor in his stride and a prouder carriage of his
head. His father and mother were out. His news would not keep, and he
went round to George, first changing his brown boots for black. He
reckoned that in three terms he would be able to make nearly as much
as his brother's whole income, and would have the vacations to repair
any damage done to his own work. Then he would take his degree, and
the whole world, all life, would open up before him.




VII

FLYING NEAR THE CANDLE


     A man's heart may minister comfort to him in the hopes of that
     thing for which he yet has no ground to hope.


THE Brocks lived in Galt's Park, an elegant district shut off from the
rest of Thrigsby by gates and unoccupied lodges. Here, in ease and
amid gardens, dwelt families of an old-established prosperity, many
Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, and some of the descendants of
Thrigsby's famous men. Here also were the two hostels of the
university, some schools, one co-educational seminary, the house of a
painter with a great local fame, and that of the municipal organist.
Good men had lived in Galt's Park, and it had once been the center of
Thrigsbeian culture; but now all those who dwell in it have the air of
having been left behind, and the little pink houses are menacing it,
even as they menace the garden of Professor Smallman.

Through the winter René Fourmy came twice a week to coach young Kurt
Brock in mathematics and French. Occasionally he was asked to stay to
lunch, and then he was too sore from the discomfort of Mrs. Brock's
broken English--she was a German from Hamburg--to be able to support
Miss Brock, Linda, in her efforts to make conversation. Also he was
engrossed in the problem first presented to him on his original
meeting with her: Was she, was she not, beautiful? Sometimes for a
fortnight he would decide that she was so, and then his heart would go
out to her in homage, an impersonal emotion bestowed on her as though
she were a tree or a sunset. That she might be intelligent interested
him not at all. Except in the case of Cathleen Bentley, where he had
been surprised into an intimacy, refined and diluted with adoration,
he had regarded women as existing only to receive in ignorance his shy
homage.

As with the Smallmans, so here he had to give his mother a detailed
report of the household and its manner of living. To her they also
were "grand," and she never tired of listening to the tale of their
doings, their servants, what they had to eat and drink, what they sat
on, what they wore, and whom they entertained. He reported
faithfully--the rings on Mrs. Brock's fingers, her richly-clad
inelegant figure, her dog-like eyes that could never smile, her
enormous appetite--whereon Mrs. Fourmy would sigh and say:

"I never was a big eater myself."

Kurt, the boy, René liked, for he was so thoroughly convinced of his
own stupidity that it was impossible to teach him anything. German
only in name, he was English and Thrigsbeian in everything else, and
René felt almost that he belonged to an older generation when he
discovered that Kurt could not remember the horse-trams in the Derby
Road, or a time when there were no motor-cars. Kurt possessed a
motorcycle, or it possessed him, so that almost everything else in his
eyes was "bally rot." He excepted music, which, with his family, he
loved German-fashion, greedily and indiscriminately. His attitude
toward his sister was that of one who knows so much that he has
nothing left to hope. Against his mother and sister he used to protest
to René, whom he thought of as a "poor beggar" but a "good enough
sort." René never saw it, but often Kurt would outmaneuver Linda in
her attempts to waylay his tutor, and once he went so far as to mumble
this warning:

"What I can't stand about women is the way they go nosing round."

"Do they?" asked René, looking up from _Hall and Knight_.

"My sister does. She wants to know how a man works. She's like me with
a motor. Haven't you got sisters?"

"No. I wish I had."

"I don't know. Having a sister like Lin is enough to put a man off
women for life."

"She has always been very charming to me."

Kurt snorted.



Another day he growled out:

"Linda says you are like Schiller. You'd better look out. She said the
last young feller was like Mozart."

"I've never seen a picture of Mozart," replied René.

"Silly sort of face."

That very day Linda outmaneuvered Kurt. As a rule he walked with René
to the gates of Galt's Park, but now, believing his sister to be
safely out of the way, and also wishing to change the tire of his
motorcycle, he let René depart alone, and René was not gone above a
hundred yards when he encountered Linda. He bowed, removed his hat,
and was for making on, when she stopped.

"I'm glad to meet you," she said, with such a smile that René felt
once and for all that she was beautiful, and was so confused by his
own enthusiasm that he did not take the hand she proffered, and put
her to the awkwardness of withdrawing it.

"I--I----" He looked desperately up and down the road, but could find
no topic, and ended lamely by saying:

"I--I like your brother."

"Oh! Kurt! But I am glad to have met you. I hoped you would be at the
Smallmans last Sunday. I was so disappointed." Her voice too was
beautiful in its friendly, emphatic cadences.

"I--I wasn't asked."

"Oh, you aren't _asked_. You go. Everybody goes."

(He had never been able to identify himself with everybody, or to take
everybody's doing for a reason for his own.)

She went on:

"I wanted to ask you if you would care to come and hear me play at the
Goetheverein--that's the German club--next Wednesday. It's a good
program; Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms. You'll love Beethoven."

"My mother plays, but her piano has yellow keys, and the music is
faded like the keys."

"It must be beautiful to understand your mother. Professor Smallman
has told me all about you, and I do hope you'll come."

"I'd like to come."

"That's settled then. We have supper at the Verein, and I'll introduce
you to some people you'll like to know. It's nice to know your
friends' friends, don't you think?"

René felt vaguely uneasy.

"Friends' friends," he repeated almost interrogatively.

"Friends," said Miss Brock, "are those whom you have always known you
would meet." This she said with a kind of recklessness that was almost
exaltation. It certainly startled René into something like emotion,
into the desire to respond. For the first time during their
conversation his eyes met hers full, and he was confronted with a
smile so charmingly inquisitive that he was compelled to satisfy their
curiosity and he jerked out:

"Yes. Friends."

And it seemed to him that she had given and he had
accepted--something. Gift and acceptance were so surreptitious that
the nature of them was a matter of almost complete indifference. The
great thing was the giving and the accepting, and the excitement of
the transaction drowned the little emotion that had stirred in him.
One more glance he stole at her, and he saw that she was satisfied,
that their conversation was at an end. Yet neither could end it, and
it was a relief to both when Kurt came hooting and snorting by on his
motorcycle.

"Till Wednesday then," said Miss Brock.

"You--you didn't say what time."

"Oh! Eight o'clock. But you might like to come with us--call for us at
half-past seven. I wish you could speak German."

"I do a little."

"Mother will like that. Good-by."

She turned and walked away. René stood rooted to the ground. At his
feet he saw her handkerchief. He stooped and picked it up. He dared
not run after her. He pressed the handkerchief to his lips, then
angrily squeezed it up into a ball and thrust it into his trousers
pocket. This done, he shook himself, threw back his head, and strode
vigorously homeward. He said to himself:

"I'm damned if I read love poems to her."

He had arrived at the conclusion that but for the love poems things
would never have got so maddeningly out of hand with that other maiden
in Scotland.

He added:

"But she really is beautiful."

Reading a book at supper that night, he knocked a glass of beer over
onto his trousers, fumbled for his handkerchief, found Linda's, mopped
up the beer with it, and gave it to his mother to be washed. She
washed it with her own hands that night, ironed it, and placed it on
his dressing-table so that next morning he was confronted by the
embroidered name--Linda.

On the Wednesday evening he clad himself in his best black coat, the
same he had had since he was seventeen, put on a white dicky and
cuffs, and punctually at 7:30 stood between the stucco pillars on
either side of the Brocks' front door. The family was waiting for him
in the hall. The women were muffled up in veils, and Kurt was wearing
a very smart overcoat and new patent-leather boots. Behind Kurt in the
darkness--for the hall was lit only by one flickering gas-jet in a
ground-glass globe--stood another male figure. This advanced into the
light and was revealed as M'Elroy.

"You know each other," said Linda.

Kurt cut in with:

"Of course, and Fourmy thinks he is so like Mozart."

René felt a pang of uneasiness. He turned to Linda to find her eyes
resting now on M'Elroy, now on himself, with quick little darting
glances that seemed to take in every detail. It exasperated him to be
pitted against M'Elroy, but, the rivalry having been introduced,
though unsought by himself, he rose to it, and so, he felt, did
M'Elroy. By way of protest René moved nearer to Mrs. Brock, who was
sitting on the bottom stair.

"Gut Abend!" he said. "Ich bin----"

"Na, Sie sprechen Deutsch? So ist's gut. Ist mir sehr lieb Deutsch zu
hören."

"Aber nicht----"

"Sie sprechen sehr gut. Mein Sohn wird nie Deutsch sprechen. Im
Goetheverein aber, wo man so schöne Musik----"

"Ja," interrupted René at a venture, and he found that, with these
three expressions, he could get along very well and keep Mrs. Brock
perfectly happy talking away as she never did when the use of English
oppressed her. She never stopped. She talked him into the cab that
came for them, out of it, up the stairs into the German club, and into
the concert-room where she presented him to other women like herself,
who nodded and smiled at his fumbled utterances--and talked.

The room was arranged like a restaurant with little tables all round
it, and the platform at one end slightly raised. For the most part the
audience sat in little family groups and drank beer and ate
sandwiches. René found himself confined between Mrs. Brock and another
stout matron, and began to feel rather oppressed and to wish he had
not come. Kurt and M'Elroy had joined a band of young men who took
possession of a corner and looked on at the scene with English
disapproval of its Germanism. Some of them René knew for Meyers and
Schoeners and Krauses of the second and third generation.

The room was soon filled with smoke, and the atmosphere became very
thick, but the Germans ate and drank till their faces shone. And
greedily they gulped down the music, which was beautiful and charming
and sentimental by turns, though all seemed to meet with the same
approval. A pale young Jew played the violin until René was near tears
and Mrs. Brock heaved fat sighs of contentment; a portly Austrian with
a sweet little tenor voice sang Schubert's Trout song so neatly and
with such ease that René wriggled with pleasure; and there were
quartets and a solo flute and a piano duet by two little blonde girls
with pink legs and absurd pale eyes, with which they ogled their papa
in the audience and the portrait of the Emperor William on the wall;
and Linda played a Beethoven sonata (rather dull), and the Prelude of
Rachmaninoff, which was received with thunderous applause. She wore a
white dress and looked very fine, plump, and comely, with her white
hands hovering over her and descending on the keys, and her head
swaying until upon the close of the music it drooped to show a
beautiful line from her neck to her waist. René had been so moved by
the music that his eyes caught greedily at this extra pleasure, and
they never moved from Linda's face as she stepped down from the
platform, and came forward looking for her party. She was greeted with
"Prosits" and raised tankards as she passed between the tables. Then
she stopped and gazed over to the corner where Kurt was sitting.
M'Elroy stood up to catch her attention. René saw that, and also how
Linda shrank away from the assertion and the claim, feigned that she
had not seen, and threaded her way toward her mother's table. To cover
her coming, René began to talk wildly in German:

"Das war wunderschön. Ich habe nie solches Klavierspiel gehört. Ich
bin----"

"Linda versteht. Ja. Aber sie fühlt nicht mehr als----" And a torrent
of long-involved sentences descended on René and brought him to a
hopeless bewilderment. That had been his growing condition. This
incursion into a foreign world, into an atmosphere of easy social
intercourse, was for him, a dweller among the humble ingregarious
inhabitants of mediocre streets, an ordeal, a fierce conflict with
impressions. Already to have had so much music to absorb had put some
strain upon him. The effort to follow Mrs. Brock's conversation had
been exhausting, and to save himself he clung to Linda and the idea of
Linda. He rose as she came up. She stood for a moment with her hand in
her mother's, looking, for a brief space, like a Cranach Eve, all
charm and tenderness, the very bloom of womanhood upon her. She took
his chair, and he had to fetch another. He was forced to place it
close to hers, so that he had some difficulty in not touching her.
Presently she moved so that the smallest accidental gesture must make
him touch her. He edged away, and she turned and looked at him
searchingly, inquisitively. His face was blank as that of a statue.
His mind knew no thought. He seemed to himself to be drowning in a
languor that was part weariness, part excitement, at her propinquity.

She laughed, and her laughter roused him, but already she was talking
animatedly to her mother and her mother's friends, and René became
absorbed in contemplating her honey-colored hair, the rounding line of
her shoulder, the pretty modeling of her cheek and neck. And, through
her conversation with her mother, with her white shoulders and the
pretty modeling of her cheek and neck she carried on with René an
intercourse more terrifyingly intimate than any he had ever known. He
had a disquieting sense of using more faculties than he had ever
suspected in himself. It was pleasantly adventurous, but to a youth of
his virtue it savored too alarmingly of black magic that her attention
should be upon him while her words were elsewhere, and that he should
be so keenly aware of her. It sent the room whirling round him, made
his identity, which hitherto had seemed definite enough for all the
apparent purposes of life, melt and trickle away, and cruelly
transferred the center of his universe from himself to Linda. And,
when she looked toward him again, it was almost as though she had
surprised his state, so certain did she look, but still inquisitive
and malicious.

"Well? Did you talk German?"

"I said you were _wunderschön_." He leaned forward so that his hand
touched her arm. He was so desperate that boldness was his only
course. She had taken something from him. He was in a mood to claim
it.

"Am I?" she said. "You looked as if you didn't see me."

"But I did see you all the time, especially when you drooped your
head."

"Oh! Then!"

And with the acuteness of his desperation he perceived that she was
aware of the effectiveness of the drooping of her head. That made him
angry, though he knew not why.

"It's so hot in here," she resumed; "will you take me home? It would
be nice to walk. The others will drive."

She explained to her mother, and René followed her, torn between
expectancy and alarm. At the door he met M'Elroy. For a moment he was
delighted to see that hero, saw in him an agent of relief.

"It's too bad, Linda," said M'Elroy; "I haven't had a word with you
all evening."

"Well? There are other evenings, and we are both so young." She said
this with a rather pretty German accent, the assumption of which
seemed to infuriate M'Elroy, for he flung off with an angry "All
right!" and left them. Linda smiled slowly to herself, and René was
conscious of a doom settling on himself, and all his hope seemed to
have gone with M'Elroy.

They parted to go to their respective cloakrooms, and René told
himself that she would change her mind, would dismiss him also and
wait for her mother, that what his eyes had seen he had not seen,
that, after all, Linda desired of him nothing but the common civility
of his escort. But all his attempted evasions only excited him the
more, and by the time he met Linda again at the door he was speechless
and in a sweat.

The night was cool, clouded, and dark. René walked very fast.

"I can't keep this up," said Linda, and he dropped to a crawl.

"That's better," she said with a sigh, as they walked down the nigh
empty streets. "Oh, dear, I should be so sorry if you hadn't been
happy."

"I--I was happy. I loved the music."

"You can tell almost everything in music."

"If you have anything to tell."

"How droll you are--so literal."

"Miss Brock----" said René. They were walking very slowly now. They
had turned down the last lighted street before the darkness of Galt's
Park. It gaped before them, inviting, menacing, romantic, rousing him
to a mood of antagonism to the growing fascination she was exercising
over him.

"Droll?" he said. "I don't know. I mean what I say, though. I can't
always say what I mean."

"Who can?" asked she.

"I mean, suppose you have a feeling for anything, for your father or
your mother or something beautiful, and the feeling is so big that it
can't get out----"

"One gets to think," said Linda in a quiet little voice, soothing,
caressing, "that men don't have feelings like that."

They passed through the gates into the darkness of the Park. They
walked on in silence, slower, slower, till they came to a weeping tree
that hung right over the footpath. Here they stopped altogether. The
blood beat at his temples, he was near choking, and there was Linda in
his arms and he had kissed her, shyly, coolly, almost defiantly. It
was soon over, but she lingered, and out of the darkness came her
voice saying:

"But you are the drollest dear."

Stung into a passionate desire to justify his situation, he cried:

"By God, but I do love you."

A little cry from her (he scarcely heard it), a strong embrace, and
there came another kiss, wherein was neither sweetness nor delight,
but only a bitter hunger.




VIII

INTIMACY


     By hunger sharply sped
     To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use.


SOON René found himself engaged upon an intimacy with Linda
Brock--that is to say, he was ever at her command, her constant
escort, her listener. She talked of everything, seemed to empty her
mind for him. Everything she discussed--the relation of the individual
to the race, the race's rights in the individual, childbirth, the
upbringing of children, and the position of women. He had not her
reading, and was at first fogged by her discourse, her voluble
juggling with topics and ideas that could not enter his mind without
engendering a certain heat and releasing some emotion. It was not
long, however, before he found himself master of her jargon, not long
either before she found out how to use it to bring him to a confusion
from which there was no issue but by kisses and embraces, and because
he kissed and embraced he loved, or believed that he loved. All his
unhappiness he ascribed to their necessary separations, and he was
persuaded that his soreness could be healed, his dissatisfactions
repaired in a future possession. The force of old habit kept his
working life intact, and there he was happy and proud to think that in
his love there should be so noble a coolness. He tried to explain this
to her, and she said:

"Yes, of course. You must keep your work separate. Love and fine
thinking, you know."

He liked the phrase, not knowing it for a quotation; but he never
observed that she always set herself to disturb his coolness, and
never let him go from her till it was drowned in a flood of warmth.

She took him in hand, made him buy clothes, gloves, spats, chose his
ties for him and his shirts; discovered that he only wore one shirt a
week, and tacitly informed him that two was the irreducible minimum;
persuaded him to abolish the parting in his hair and to brush it back;
to abandon his straight for winged collars; presented him with
gaily-colored socks; lent him books, modern works of fiction and
fashionable philosophy; induced him to become a member of the Union,
though she could never get him to speak at debates. On her instigation
he joined a tennis club in the summer term, proved rather skillful,
and was invited by M'Elroy to play for the University second team.

Linda was ambitious for him, but she could not make him ambitious, and
she failed to develop opinions in him; but always, just as she was
despairing of him and on the point of dismissing him from her mind as
dull, he would come out with some simple comment that delighted her
with its directness and force. Then she would go to Professor Smallman
and talk about René, and the Professor would say:

"A good sound brain. Nothing unusual except that one feels in him
things unroused. No passion."

"Ah! Passion!"

"Yes," he said, purring, "I put it rather neatly, I think, the other
day. The temperament of a clerk with a brain too good for that kind of
work. He has a conscience."

"But do you think he will do anything?"

"He will do what he thinks right."

"Then you do agree that he is a force? I feel that so strongly about
him."

Professor Smallman smiled in his charming, uninterested way.

"Not much good being a force if you are an economist. That's
specialist's work. Even business would be better."

And Linda began to map out a career for René--business, the city
council, Parliament, and thereafter--who knows?



René was very docile. His friendship for Linda made life more
gracious, more full, and he was shedding the awkwardness that had
grown on him during his two years of solitude. He was able to go to
Professor Smallman's whenever he liked, and other houses had been
thrown open to him.

At first he had endeavored to bring the new spirit that he had won
into his life at home, but his father had become merely ribald, and in
his mother the spark of feeling that had been struck out of her on his
return from Scotland had died away and would not come again. What she
felt and thought she concealed with chatter, and too many of her notes
were now exasperatingly echoes of her husband's. For a short while
René went through an agony of shame when he felt his parents as a drag
on him, and he could never return home without an acute feeling of
sadness. To counteract this he used to talk to Linda of his mother as
she had been before his father's return, brave, humorous, quick to see
and to understand. In such talk Linda delighted, and she made him
promise to introduce her to his household.

It was arranged.

"Afternoon tea, I suppose," said Mrs. Fourmy. "Thin bread and butter
in the parlor."

"I think she'd like what we always have. She particularly said you
weren't to make any fuss."

"But I'd like to wear my black silk. I don't often, now."

"You can wear what you like, mother. Only let us have tea as we always
have it. I'm sure she'd like it better. Not sardines or tinned salmon
or any of those things. They only have light tea because they have
dinner afterward. It would be silly of us to pretend to be anything
but what we are."

"But they'll think----"

"I don't care what they think."

Mrs. Fourmy stole a quick glance at him and said:

"No. You never do."

Her tone roused him to a hope that the old mother had come again, and
he turned to her, only to see the quick light die down in her eyes and
into them come the querulous questioning expression that seemed to
forbid him to pass beyond the empty words and looks she gave him. He
realized then how false an idea he must have given to Linda, and he
wished she were not coming.



When the day arrived, just before he went to fetch Linda he sought out
his mother, and found her dressing in her room with his father lying
on his bed smoking and reading.

"I'm going now," said René. "I shan't be more than half an hour."

"I don't mind betting," chuckled his father, "that you'll be more than
that. There's no end to it when these women get to dressing up for
each other. Look at your mother; she's been brushing her hair this
half-hour past."

"I thought you were out," said René, cold with an almost hatred.

"Me? Tea-partying's my line. Always has been."

"Don't tease him," said Mrs. Fourmy. "Don't tease him."

Mr. Fourmy had his waistcoat unbuttoned, so that to René he seemed all
fat stomach bulging through coarse shirting. He turned away in
disgust. As he closed the door he heard his mother say:

"It isn't fair when the boy's in love."

He held the door open, and heard his father turn on the creaking bed
and laugh and say:

"Love? A gawk like that? Statues are his line, not women."

Upon that René so lost himself in a sick dread that he was hardly
conscious as he walked, and seemed to have been marvelously propelled
from Hog Lane to Galt's Park.

Linda was ready for him in a light muslin frock and an adorable little
tip-tilted hat. He had never seen her so pretty.

They decided to walk by way of Potter's Park to see the flowers. René
could hardly get his words out, but he felt that he must do something
to explain.

"You may be disappointed, you know. It mayn't be all that you think it
is."

"Oh, but I have seen the outside of the house, and one knows what to
expect. I mean, if you saw the outside of our house you'd know the
inside was pretty much the same as hundreds of others. The curtains
always give you away. And nearly all the houses on this side of
Thrigsby are like yours. When I was at school I knew a girl who lived
next door to you. And, of course, I'm excited because it is--don't you
think--reassuring when you are fond of people to know that they have
relations like the rest of the world."

René's shyness, the delicacy of his feelings had forced upon her the
use of the phrase, "fond of each other." For all the excitement she
had roused in him he had never become possessive nor made any attempt
to assert a monopoly. And one evening when she had flirted with
M'Elroy at the tennis club he had left her to it, apparently not at
all distressed, and subsequently he visited on her none of the
jealousy she had expected. With M'Elroy her relationship had become
nothing but jealousy, and she preferred René's diffidence to that. And
also, as she had shaped René outwardly, so inwardly she hoped to mold
him to her liking. M'Elroy was too conceited for that.

"I promise you I shan't be disappointed," she said.

"I want to ask you not to mind anything my father may say. He does
talk so. I hoped he would not be in."

"You dear silly, I shan't mind anything. I shall like it. I want to
see how you live, and if I don't like anything it will only be the
more wonderful that you are you."

He gripped her arm very tight. She laughed though he hurt her. It was
the first uninvited caress he had given her.

"You are so strong," she said, and she took his arm and did not
relinquish it until they came to the gate of 166.

To his dismay René found Elsie with his father and mother. She
declared that she had only dropped in, but she was arrayed in her most
garish best and had put on her primmest and most artificial manner,
talking mincingly like a chorus girl. And she patronized Linda,
swaggered over her as the married woman, chattered about her darling
baby, and made the party so uncomfortable that Linda could not hold
her own, and a gloom would have descended on them had not Mr. Fourmy
come to the rescue and told droll stories, spiced and hot, of the
doings of women in various parts of the world. He cut into Elsie's
gushing stories with the story of the marine and the admiral's French
governess, and wound up:

"In Brazil the women eat men. No half measures. Eat you they do. Look
to the right or the left and they knife you. What I can't make out,
Miss Brock, is why any men stay in England."

Linda laughed merrily.

"Hardly complimentary to us! But you came back, you know."

"So I did, for my old age. England's an old man's country."

"You won't get me to believe that, or René either."

"Ah, but René can't see things as they are. Short-sighted René is. And
George is blind; isn't he, Elsie?"

Elsie giggled. She had been wanting to giggle for some time, and the
appeal to her set her off. She could not stop herself.

"Oh! Lor'!" she gasped, "you are funny, Mr. Fourmy. You ought to be in
a pantomime. I never laugh like I do with you."

And once more Elsie dominated the party. René wilted. Linda drank the
many cups of tea pressed on her by Mrs. Fourmy in her nervous anxiety.
Conversation flagged, sputtered, and Mr. Fourmy in desperation kept
Elsie giggling with familiar jokes. Linda laughed at them too, and
René sank into gloom and his mother watched him anxiously.

At five o'clock Elsie gave a little scream and said she must hurry
away to see that the servant (she had no servant) had made George's
tea. She hurried away, and then, relieved of the oppression of her
presence, René was just beginning to hope for better things when
Linda, to escape from the table, asked if she might see the picture on
the easel in the corner of the room. Delighted, Mr. Fourmy turned the
picture to the light. Linda bit her lip and a dimple came in her
cheek.

"Not bad for an amateur," said Mr. Fourmy. "Just the lid of a
cigar-box and a little paint. I never did care about anything but the
figure."

He took the picture up and looked at it lovingly, and with pride and
in a queer confidential voice that startled René and stung Mrs. Fourmy
into a sudden attention, he said:

"You can understand an old man liking to do something with his hands,
and it's strange how, when I paint a little bit like that"--he pointed
to the hip--"it brings back wonderful moments I have had and rare
pleasures, not just in remembering, but as they were--wonderful!"

"I think so," said Linda with unwonted simplicity, and Mr. Fourmy took
her hand, stooped over it, and kissed it.

René looked at his mother, she at him, and Linda, turning to Mrs.
Fourmy, smiled and said:

"I am so glad to have come, Mrs. Fourmy. René and I are such friends.
We have such great hopes for him and I wanted to see you. Will you
take me home, René?"

Mr. Fourmy opened the door of the room for her, hurried ahead to open
the front door, and with a tremendous dignity, bowed again over
Linda's hand, thanked her for coming, and said:

"May life be good to you, and very amusing."

And Linda answered:

"I'd like to buy your picture, Mr. Fourmy. Will you send it to me when
it is finished?"

"I would rather give it to you."

René's horror sent him flying down to the gate. It was a minute or two
before Linda came. She was smiling, and Mr. Fourmy had come out on to
the doorstep to watch her walk down. René saw his eyes follow her and
appreciate her movements, and he became acutely, alarmingly conscious
that she also was a woman. He was frightened of her as she came up to
him, but he was also angry, and he let fly:

"Linda, you can't."

"Can't what?"

"You can't let my father give you his beastly picture. You didn't seem
to mind. I thought you would. I thought you would. He sits all day
doing those things over and over again."

"Oh, René, don't be silly. I'm older than you."

That was the first he had heard of it, and it dashed him. That a man
should love, could love a woman older than himself was in flat
contradiction to all his notions. He was furious. Linda went on:

"Two years older. Twenty years older in experience and knowledge. You
think like a silly little boy."

In a rage he turned on his heel and left her. But at once a fierce
hunger to be with her seized him, to clutch her by the arm as he had
clutched her before, and to hurt her more, to feel her soft flesh
yielding under his grip. That desire was stronger than his fury, and
he ran after her, and caught her up just at the gates of Potter's
Park.

"I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. I do beg your pardon. I can't
help it. I must be with you."

And he seized her arm and rushed her ahead for a few paces until she
cried out at the hurt:

"René! René! Quiet! Not now! Wait!"

She was as excited as he, but not, like him, absorbed in her
excitement. It was a delight to her.

He released her, and she led him to a seat opposite a bed of Darwin
tulips, red and mauve and yellow. He sat by her side trembling,
drowning in a flood of savage emotion, thinking not at all. Slowly he
became aware of the tulips in front of him, and he said:

"The flowers are very pretty."

That relaxed the tension he was in, and he stretched out his legs and
stared up into the sky, and presently he broke into words:

"And the summer sky is beautiful, but not so beautiful as you, and I
love you."

His arms were folded on his chest, and he seemed to be hardly
conscious of his words Then in a calmer voice he said:

"I never noticed before how the sky is always changing and moving and
alive. I would like to sit like this until it all grows dark and the
stars come out and the glow of the lights of the town goes up into it?
And, Linda, it has all become very different, hasn't it?"

She said:

"I knew it would come."

Then they laughed together, and René clapped his hand on her knee and
told her she was a wonderful darling.

Linda observed then that they had begun to attract attention, and she
rose and walked quickly away. He followed her slowly, thrilling to the
present, seeing nothing in the world but her brave little figure in
muslin with the tip-tilted hat. Her hair was golden in the sun, and
her neck was white and the lines of her shoulders were lovely. René
touched her lightly as he came up with her.

"We're going to be married," he said.

"Yes."

"Isn't it fun?"

Her answer struck him as amusing and he laughed. She asked:

"Is Elsie better in her own house?"

"Oh, she's a good sort, really, and George--that's my brother--George
couldn't have done better."

"I have an idea from the way you speak that I shall rather like
George."

"I didn't say anything to show I like him."

"No, darling." (René's heart leaped at the word.) "No. I think you
dislike him. You hate your father. He is impossible, but such a dear."

René, sensitive in his ecstasy, for the tulips and the sky and she had
brought him to nothing less, felt a malice in her that scratched at
his heart. But, loving her, worshiping the new radiant intimacy that
had sprung up between them, he loved even her malice.

They walked home slowly, laughing over the mischances, the absurdity
of the tea-party, and when they reached her house she made him come
in, played to him for an hour, and sent him home drunk with love. He
called it love, for he suspected not that it could have any other
name. She had promised to marry him as soon as he had his degree and a
position, and he was to write to her mother and make a formal
proposal, since Mrs. Brock was old-fashioned enough and German enough
to desire that much of formal ceremony.




IX

PATERFAMILIAS


     The foolish man thereat woxe wondrous blith
     As if the word so spoken were half donne.


SO far René's success had come from his power to do what had been
expected of him. He had done it without delight or enthusiasm but with
the concentration which came from his lack of interest either in the
past or the future. From the interest of others in himself he had been
able to borrow a little excitement every now and then, but he could
never sustain it. It was not lack of energy, mental or physical, but
rather that, doing what was expected of him, he did it well enough to
lead to further expectation, and this gave him a constant surprise at
himself to keep his existence zestful. He was not altogether
indifferent, but he could accept. He accepted that Linda loved him,
and was equally prepared to accept that she loved him no longer,
subject, of course, to any incidental pain he might suffer. Believing
in everything that happened with no power of definition or
intellectual curiosity, he could never at any given moment realize his
position without reference to others, and therefore, when he found
himself embroiled in this tender, disturbing relationship with Linda
Brock, he needed to bring it to the test of all his other
relationships--with his father, his mother, his brother, M'Elroy,
Kurt, and Professor and Mrs. Smallman. He could not talk about it to
any of them, but he hoped to find in all some appreciation of the new
wonder that had come upon him, and he desired, for his comfort, to
find out what in this new development was expected of him. Here he was
baffled. Everybody was either tactful or insensible. Things inanimate
had changed enormously for him. Streets, houses, trees, had taken on a
new beauty, a friendliness that made room for his emotions; but people
lagged distressfully, and he often had an unhappy sense of leaving
them behind, or, as he talked and listened to them, they would
dwindle. And yet, at the same time, he found them so wonderful that,
in their failure to respond to his need, they seemed to him to be
untrue to their own wonder. He knew not the nature of his need, but he
was left subtly conscious of its being left unsatisfied. He ascribed
his discomfort to his love, and called it "being in love." It gave him
an insatiable desire for Linda's society, presence, contact; a harsh
sensibility to her beauty; an appreciation of her physical qualities
upon which he never dared to think, because it led him back in thought
to the moment of her colloquy with his father when he had felt so
strangely that he and his mother were not of their world. In this
distress his mind could find ease in the idea of marriage. That
settled the future and appointed an end to the force that urged him on
so mysteriously and powerfully; but, accustomed as he was to living
humbly in the present, he needed somehow to escape the isolation into
which the desire for Linda had cast him. He worked harder than he had
ever done, but when he was not working, and issued from the coolness
of that limited mental activity, he was visited by a craving that not
even Linda could slake. He found most comfort in children and the idea
of children. He would go and see Mrs. Smallman, and sit with her in
the garden and silently watch Martin and Bridget playing over the
meager lawn under the plum-tree. He would talk to Mrs. Smallman about
indifferent things, and go sick at heart as he saw how her eyes and
mind were upon the children, how little occupied with himself, and how
rigidly she kept him from that mystery which he desired to comprehend.
Again he would play with the children with an admirable success, so
that they would admit him as one of themselves, only as he emerged
from the game to be met with an applauding smile from the charming
lady, which made him feel that she admired his performance but could
not herself admit him. She was friendly and amiable, and would ask him
to come again; and he would hear from Linda how well Mrs. Smallman
thought of him--"Such a nice boy, and so fond of children"--but she
kept him separate. He tried once or twice to tell Mrs. Smallman about
Linda.

"She is such a clever girl," she would say. "A good musician, of
course. My husband says she could take a first easily in almost any
subject. I am sure she will make a good wife, just the kind of girl to
make a man successful. We have often been surprised that she has not
married before, but of course she is a girl who could only live
happily with a good brain. It does make such a difference."

Everything she said led back to her own bliss and exceptional fortune;
and while René gave her due homage for her motherhood, her wifedom,
her gracious happy home, yet he came almost to hate these things
without knowing that it was because they were securely barred in. Yet
he could not keep away nor refrain from his attempts to storm the
citadel.

He would try through Smallman, who was even more exasperating. He
seemed to divine that his pupil was groping after some reassurance of
human beauty, but he would hint darkly at the difficulties of married
life, generalize about the simplicity of human needs, whisper of the
revelation of fatherhood, and, just as he had René sitting forward in
excited anticipation of the longed-for marvel, he would double and
turn aside into the discussion of economic problems, or the
unsatisfactory nature of the academic life in Thrigsby. And then, with
the children, René would see that Smallman could never enter into
their games or their minds as thoroughly as himself.

On the whole he preferred George's gross swaggering over his
paternity, and there was a sure satisfaction in watching his
sister-in-law suckle her baby. But there again George and his wife
took upon themselves an excessive credit for the achievement, hoarded
it, invested it in everybody whom they could get to take it, seeming
to use the child as a means of gaining admiration for themselves. They
seemed to be incapable of recovering from the astonishment of anything
so natural happening to themselves, and they too, a little more
exuberantly and less charmingly, barred René out.

"By Jove!" George would say, "there is nothing like it. It's wonderful
what you can do without when you've got that. And, as I was saying to
Elsie, I can't make out what swells do who have a nurse. I can't tell
you how jolly glad I was when the monthly went and we could have it
all to ourselves."

To René George was so horrible when he talked so, that he would forget
the sentimental satisfaction he had had in the contemplation of the
change wrought in the household by the advent of his nephew.

"And imagine," George said once, "that one never thinks of it. You get
making love and all that. Just a bit o' fun, as likely as not, and it
leads to this. By God, it's a big thing. Hark at the little beggar. I
tell you, René, my heart sometimes stops with fright when a long time
goes by and he doesn't howl. Oh, well, your day will come. It'll come,
all right. Don't you worry!"

In desperation René led the conversation elsewhere.

And at home things were hardly better. He felt that his mother did not
like Linda, though she showed no reluctance to talk of her, or indeed
to praise her. Perhaps Linda had frightened her. And sometimes René
would feel that his mother had a real horror of love and marriage and
all but the most superficial and sentimental relations of the sexes.
He would wonder how that could be reconciled with her reception of his
father or her excited business before the coming of Elsie's baby. She
was often disconcertingly silent when he came home from some
employment with Linda, and he learned that he must not tell her what
he had been doing.

Sometimes she would begin of her own accord to talk of Linda:

"She has such eyes. She sees everything. You feel she knows every
stitch of clothing you have on. And the things she wears herself--
Well! But she's very pleasant and she's got a pretty smile. Girls were
very different in my day."

"How were they different?" René would ask.

"I don't know. Different. I can't say. We were more patient. There
were some things we didn't talk of. But, of course, she's not English.
That would account for a good deal. If you weren't so set on her I
should say she was making a fool of herself. Girls often do, you know,
with a sort of man they've not been used to. But I will say this for
you, René, you're not one not to take a girl seriously."

René looked puzzled. His mother laughed.

"Go on, you great gaby; don't tell me you don't know what you can do
with those eyes of yours."

This annoyed him with its suggestion of a deliberate manipulation on
his part of the springs of affection.

"Oh, mother," he said, "you've been so different since my father came
back, and I'm different, and everything seems to be changing so
swiftly that it is hard to tell--hard to tell where we are. We seem so
far away from the old life, just you and I together."

Mrs. Fourmy looked at him and replied:

"You remind me of the times when you were a little boy and used to sit
with an ashen face, very thin, with the tears rolling down your
cheeks. And when I asked you what was the matter you used to say: 'I'm
heavy.' You weren't like an ordinary boy. You seemed to feel things."

"I seem to feel things now," he said miserably; "but I don't know what
things they are." Then, encouraged by the warm interest he felt in
her, he added: "But I can't want not to feel." And, daring a stroke
against the new baleful influence at work in the house, he told her of
his recollection of the scene in the bedroom when she had spanked his
father.

"Well now," she said, "to think of your remembering that."

"It made all the difference," said he, "all the difference in the
world."

"Oh, you poor mite," cried his mother; "and you couldn't see it was in
fun?"

"Fun!" He looked incredulous.

"Yes. We were very happy then."

He pounced eagerly on that.

"Happy? Were you happy? And now? And now?"

That was coming to closer quarters than she had courage for. She sank
into indifference.

"We're old now," she said, and he felt that she too had barred him
out. She also may have felt it, for she shifted uncomfortably and led
the talk away from herself and presently to praise of his father.

"He was too clever," she said, "and I couldn't see how clever he was.
I wanted him to beat his brothers in their own line, and I wanted him
to love you two boys in my way instead of his. Of course I'm not
clever, René, and I can't say where things got wrong. It's wonderful
how he's settled down now. I never thought he would. And I want you to
be nice to him, René, for my sake. Even if you're not going to be here
much longer, I would like you to do that. He feels his position so."

The sting of indignation pricked René into brutality. He had made his
effort to reclaim his mother from his father, and failed. He cried:

"What did he do?"

"What do men do when dullness creeps over them and they are mortified
with failure?"

There was a note of vengeance in her tone, exasperation perhaps, a
savage determination to set abominations before the fatuous innocence
of her son. She succeeded. He was beset with horrors and a sick
repulsion from his mother who could allow, accept, and seem to rejoice
in such contamination.

Drearily he said:

"He's a dirty man," and upon that expression of opinion he left her.



However he did attempt to be more amiable with his father, and even
went so far as to accompany him to the Denmark of an evening, and was
there astonished to find how the old fellow by sheer wit and masterful
presence lorded it over the company of clerks, shopkeepers, theater
musicians, agents, brokers, bagmen, school teachers, the odd
characters, the small talents of the neighborhood. René noticed that
Mr. Sherman plied his father with drink to keep him lively, and that
there seemed no question of payment for it. Mr. Fourmy paid in talk,
yarns, jests, jokes, impromptu fantasies, with sly hits at the
eccentrics of the assembly. And although René hated the atmosphere,
the smoke, the drink, the greedy lapping up of gross laughter, the
pouncing on scraps of filth and equivocal utterances, he could not
escape some admiration of his father. This grew as they left the place
and Mr. Fourmy shook off his air of large geniality and took his son
by the arm and asked if they might go for a walk together.

"To think," he said, "of your remembering a thing like that. And it
did make a change too. You used to come running down the road to meet
me when I came back from town. You stopped doing that. I noticed it
once or twice, and then I gave no more heed to it. I never was much of
a one to give heed to things. Can't stand things dull. Never could. I
couldn't do what you're doing now, plodding away with those fat books
of yours. It seems wonderful to me. I looked into one of them the
other day. No. I never had the mind for it."

"Father," said René solemnly, "when I was born, what did you feel
like?"

"Lord love a duck! What a question! I'd been expecting it, you know.
And George was there, you know. But I'll tell you this, my lad. A
child's wonderfully separate at once, and no amount of clucking will
ever make it anything else. It's got its own separate life like the
rest of us. We're all separate, and it's just as well not to forget
it. We're never allowed to forget it for long. I forgot it. I thought
we were a nice little happy family with no individuals in it at
all--except myself. And then----"

"What then?"

"Then, my son, there was a nasty mess."

"Oh!"

"There always is a nasty mess. Marriage knocks a man to pieces and
leaves him to put himself together again. Women are more brutal. They
don't mind if marriage turns out to be no more than a pool of mud.
Lord, Lord! a woman will bear a child almost every year of her bearing
life and be no more than a little girl at the end of it, a prying,
stealthy-minded little girl."

René was enraged and shocked, but excited too, intellectually. He
turned to his father and said:

"Father, I want to know, I must know, how you could come back to my
mother."

"That," said Mr. Fourmy, "is what I am still asking myself."

René swung round and struck his father full on the mouth, thrilled
sickeningly to the impact and raised his hand to strike again. Mr.
Fourmy caught him by the wrist and dragged him up so that their faces
were close together, both breathing heavily:

"Steady," whispered the older man, "steady! steady on, boy. It's the
women bitching at you got into your blood. You're a good boy, a
virtuous boy. Things are hard for virtue. Listen to me. Do you hear?"
René nodded. "Very well then. Life's a damn dirty business, and it
grows damneder and damneder as time goes on. It got so damned for me
that I cleared out. See?" René nodded. "I cleared out till I could see
that it was damn funny. Then I came back. It was grinding me as it is
grinding you."

He patted his son's arm so affectionately that René choked and the
tears ran down his cheeks.

They walked on, René lurching, until his father took his arm again and
led him. There was a moon over them, and as he led, Mr. Fourmy said:

"On a night like this even Thrigsby is beautiful. Lord! How I used to
hate the place. But when I had seen things I came to know that it is
like any other. There are good men in it and good things, and over all
the same slime of meanness and fear that only very few can penetrate.
We live in a world of women, boy, and we must make the best of it."

René hardly heard him, but he could feel the pressure of his hand and
was glad that here, at last, was one nature that did not bar him out.
It was so astonishing as to be repellent, but he was so hungry for
comfort that he could not withdraw.




X

HONEYMOON


     That God forbid that made me first your slave
     I should in thought control your times of pleasure.


MRS. BROCK granted René an interview. From the worldly standpoint it
was satisfactory. No great objection to the projected alliance was
made, and he learned that Linda had a fortune of her own which
provided her with an income of seven hundred a year. If anything, he
was distressed by the information. He did not regard money as in
itself desirable. The lack of it was a nuisance to be avoided if
possible, but not otherwise to be considered. The past year had led
him to believe that such a lack was easily repaired. It was disturbing
to the few ideas he had on the subject to think that he would not be
able to satisfy any desires in his beloved which she could not herself
supply. However that did not occupy him long, for he was comforted by
Mrs. Brock's explaining that she had discussed the matter with her
daughter--a good, sensible maiden, who admitted that there was a
practical side even to romance--and they had agreed to postpone the
marriage until Mr. Fourmy was settled in a profession. To make this
easier, Linda had consented to go to her relatives in Hamburg for an
indefinite period, though, of course, she would go there as a
betrothed.

He said:

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Brock."

He tried to say more, to remove the affair from the hard, business
footing on which it had been conducted, to lead his prospective
mother-in-law to give him some sign that she regarded him as a
potential member of her family, but she suppressed him by saying:

"Frankly, Mr. Fourmy, I don't think it would be wise of you to marry
with my daughter unless you have at least three hundred a year."

He agreed and withdrew, chilled at the heart. It seemed to end his
wooing and to give him already a slight distaste for Linda. Could she
really have discussed the matter so coolly with her solid mother? It
was a shock to him that women from whom came such great ecstasy were
not themselves all compact of that fiery essence. And seven hundred a
year! That seemed more present to the mind of the mother than the girl
herself. Seven hundred a year was to be sent to Germany until he had
grown into three hundred a year.

However, Linda immensely enjoyed the process of parting. She began it
on the Sunday, and carried it through till the Friday, when she was to
sail from Hull, and she left her betrothed, sad, aching, but
obstinately hopeful. On the Tuesday she said:

"You have changed my whole life. I was drifting. I was trying to take
in too many things. You have made me see."

"What?" asked René very seriously. He was anxious to know.

"Just _see,"_ she replied.

He was left uncomfortably in his own limited world, feeling that she
had shot off into regions to which he could not follow her. He ought
to have been accustomed to that by now, but he could not be. She was
always hinting at the wonderful things she got out of him, but as he
was never conscious of them, he could not understand her. He used to
tell himself that it was her queer roundabout way of delighting in her
love for him.

On the Thursday she said:

"You know, René, at such a distance we shall be able to get our ideas
of each other clear. That is so necessary. We must make an effort to
understand each other."

"Isn't it enough if we love each other?"

"Oh no. That only means making allowances. It isn't enough to do that.
I get frightened sometimes when I think of all the people who are
married, how little they understand each other."

"Then they're married without loving each other."

"I think I see what you mean," and she caught his hand and pressed it
to her bosom. She had become much more demonstrative in these days of
parting. He warmed to her excitement and rushed ahead:

"People who love each other are married. I've been thinking about it.
If people love each other they have the wonderful mutual knowledge
which is marriage. And we have that, haven't we?"

"Oh, wonderfully!"

On the Friday she wept and would not be consoled until he had
consented to go to Hull with her. He had an engagement for the day,
but telegraphed to cancel it and went with her. She clung to him on
the boat, and caused him almost to be carried away from the pier. The
gangway had to be put out for him, and he raced ashore and stood on
the quay waving a pocket-handkerchief and swallowing his tears until
the boat had dipped over the edge of the sea.



They wrote to each other, every day at first, then every other day.
Her letters in their coolness often stabbed him, but he could not
bring his into tone with hers. He poured out everything he thought and
felt without calculation, and with no literary pleasure or excitement.
She was only led into warm confession when some phrase lured her on.
Her greatest enthusiasm was when, at the end of the Academic year, he
sent her the examination lists with his name at the head, and also as
having won the Robert Owen prize and a studentship of eighty pounds a
year for three years.

Indeed his university career ended in a blaze of glory. Professor
Smallman sent for him and assured him that on his papers he was an
absolutely first-class man, and the university could not afford to
lose him. Of course there was no vacancy as yet, and the teaching of
economics was a miserably-paid profession, but in the meanwhile he
could procure a supernumerary post on the staff of the Grammar School
which would leave him free to take up any appointment that cropped up.
He could also continue his reviewing, unless he thought of going on to
Oxford or Cambridge, when, of course, the school and the university
would help him. For a career, a degree at one of the major
universities was almost essential.

"I don't mind telling you," said the Professor, "that it is pretty
much my own career over again, though there are things you can do that
I never could. You've more imagination. Cambridge economics are very
much alive just now. If you would care to----"

"I must make an income," said René. He was elated, but also
disgruntled, suffering from a reaction. He had prepared his subject
for the examination, and having succeeded, had lost interest in it.
Vaguely he had so arranged his life that until this examination he
would do as he was told to do, so that after it he might do things
because he wanted to do them. On the whole, he rather resented the
Professor's continued interference in his affairs. However, he agreed
with the first plan. Cambridge meant another three years preparing for
another examination, and he was Thrigsbeian enough to feel that it was
not a "man's work."

He saw the Headmaster on the morning of Speech day, and was warmly
thanked for the honor he had brought to the school, and was engaged to
appear on the first day of the following term. Desiring to see his old
form-master, Mr. Beenham, he went to his room and was surprised to
find his desk empty and the boys playing cricket with a German Grammar
and a ball of paper tied with string. As he left the school he asked
the porter after Mr. Beenham, and the porter told him that story. It
upset him. Of all human beings he had regarded Old Mole as the least
human, but now he was desiring to exercise his released intelligence,
his power of penetration, his imagination upon the surrounding world.
All his faculties had been concentrated upon economics as a means to
an end, the life which lay beyond examinations. Professor Smallman and
the Headmaster had made him feel that the life beyond was
distressingly like the life before, and now this disaster to Old Mole
came as some small assurance that there were adventures though they
might be never so foolish. The Professor had mildly alarmed his pupil
by pointing out the similarity of their careers. Admire Smallman as he
might, it was not _that_ to which René wished to come. It was not that
he had any excitement in contemplating the future. On the contrary:
the present was too absorbing. Everybody was charming to him, seemed
to be proud of him; the rich Fourmys had asked him to their
houses--and he had refused. He found himself being listened to,
respected, given the right to have views and opinions. He had neither,
and was too honest to evolve them for the occasion. And when the
future insisted upon engaging his attention, he filled it with Linda
and was happy.

He refused to go to Scotland, half despising his memories of it.

He was happy, simply engrossed in his own comfortable sensations. He
had set out to do a thing and done it well, better even than he or
anyone else had anticipated; he was in love and engaged to be married
upon the condition of making three hundred a year. His success had
made that easily possible; his studentship, one hundred and fifty from
the school, more from the _Post_, possible examination papers,
lectures; his hardly-won book knowledge had been shaped by his
reputation into a marketable commodity.

But his real happiness lay apart from all these things, from success,
from love, from the easy commerce of his abilities. Relieved from the
strain and obsession of his examination, he had discovered the
wonderful pleasure to be got from the mere act of living, from seeing
the world freshly every morning, from passing through the day and
feeling it slip away from him without his having to demand of it any
definite profit in knowledge or money earned. It was a new delight
with him just to watch people, a joy that had remained with him from
his outburst by the tulips, to sit and gaze at flowers, trees, the
sky, water. He had times of feeling wonderfully remote, when the
habits on which he won through the day seemed ridiculous, though
trivially pleasurable. In this mood he would sometimes realize with a
start that it was now his father and he who were companions, his
mother who was the stranger. And he would bring himself up on that and
tell himself that his mother had his love and championship if any were
needed. But he would rejoice in his father's gusto in eating,
drinking, smoking, painting, talking, all that the queer man did.
Against that too he would react and tell himself that his father was
futile. But was not his mother futile also? And was not futility with
gusto the better of the two?

He was too happy for the business of weighing up between his father
and his mother, too absorbed in the glowing introspection to which he
had been brought; introspection without analysis; a brooding, almost a
floating over faculties in himself faintly stirring, reaching out to
exercise themselves on everything within his reach. The world was very
wonderful: its possibilities were endless; its treasures lay
immeasurable only for the stretching out of his hand; and it was a
delicious pleasure to him not to stretch out his hand, but to know
that one day he need but make a gesture to have all its marvels
pouring in on him. That those older than himself had but a small share
of them disturbed him not at all. He had no doubt but his would be the
infallible gesture, and, without conceit, during this happy time, he
cherished a firm belief in his unique quality.

All his new delights were expressed in his letters to Linda in
Germany. She analyzed them for him, not always accurately, but the
mental process was new and exciting to him, and he began to appreciate
her intellectual activity. They discussed his character at great
length. He said: "I suppose I am, or have been--for I often find
myself wanting to laugh nowadays--too serious." She replied: "Not too
serious, my dear. It is impossible to be that in this heartless age.
(Oh! What a lot you can learn about England by going abroad!) Not too
serious. No. What you lack, I think, is power of observation. What you
must realize is that things have a surface and a surface value. Of
course _you_ cannot be content with that value, but you must not
expect surface things to have any value in the region of profound
things, the region in which, poor dear, you have always lived."
Faithfully he set about cultivating surface values, but he never could
laugh at things that were just amusing; he never could laugh unless he
were moved to laughter. He was, for instance, baffled and made sorry
by the family jests which left George and Elsie exhausted by their
noisy mirth.



Kurt Brock persuaded him to go with him for a tour in a side-car
attached to his motor-cycle. Then did René become swollen and puffed
up with the glory of the world. The exuberant boy was a tonic in
himself; the speed he maintained was intoxicating; and they burst out
of the long suburbs of Thrigsby into the Cheshire plain, over to the
sea, the Welsh mountains, down the Severn and Wye valleys. To René,
whose existence for so many years had lain only in Thrigsby and the
little Scots village, it was being shot out into life. The return to
Thrigsby made him miserable. Also association with Kurt had pricked
the small bubble of his vanity. Kurt, so hopeless with books, was
amazingly efficient with his machine, equal to every emergency,
daring, inexhaustible, masterful. He had said many things which René
had found disturbing and alarming. The boy had everything so cut and
dried; no room in his life, it seemed, for folly, certainly none for
brooding. He confessed one night, as they sat sleepily in a
public-house parlor, that he wanted to be an airman. René could not
applaud the ambition.

"Hardly fair to your mother, or, suppose you were in love, to--well."

"People talk a lot of bally rot about love. They seem to think it
means bagging a woman like a rabbit and shutting her up in a hutch to
breed."

"Well," said René, "marriage does mean living together and a certain
amount of responsibility."

"I dunno. I've never been in love, but I'm not going to either, unless
I get something that goes off with a bang and lets me and her get on a
bit." His mania was for getting on. When René wanted lunch, Kurt would
hold out for another place "only twenty miles on."

Another night René returned to the subject of women and love, Kurt's
audacities having a horrid fascination for him, and the boy said:

"I dunno, but if a woman said she loved me and wouldn't let me do what
I wanted to do because she said she loved me, I should know she was a
liar."

René tried to point out that life and love were not so simple as all
that, but there was no turning Kurt. He had the thing worked out
neatly to his own satisfaction, and he was not going to bother his
head about it any more.

"Bad enough," he said, "to have a legal speed limit without having a
private limit in the home."

A letter from Linda reached René at one of their stopping-places. She
declared herself terrified at the thought of his being with her
brother. "Do keep him from going more than thirty miles an hour."

At once René was on her side against Kurt and exasperated him by
asking perpetually: "What are we doing now?" To which Kurt invariably
replied: "Damn near fifty."

The tour ended in a river in Derbyshire. Kurt took a curly wooden
bridge at thirty miles an hour, carried away the railing, and plunged
René and machine into six feet of water. Kurt could not swim, and René
hauled him out and screamed at him:

"You deserve to be killed! You deserve to be killed! Taking the bridge
like that."

Kurt grinned:

"You don't know how funny you looked in the bath-chair toppling over.
What a smash! What idiots to have a bridge like that. It's no good for
anything except a push-bike. I'll get a car if the insurance people
stump up."

René was really shocked at his callousness, and as they sat in
blankets while their clothes were being dried, he took him to task,
delivered himself of a pedagogic exhortation and ended by saying:

"Kurt! Kurt! I believe you have no feeling!"

"Nerves! What's the good of them anyway? But I'm jolly grateful to you
for pulling me out. I must learn to swim. It might be jolly awkward if
I tried to fly to America. Wouldn't it be grand if I was the first man
to do it?"

Something in the boy's tone thrilled René and he felt a pang, a
sudden, painful knowledge that he loved Kurt, and, when he was left
alone, Kurt's clothes having dried first, he was faintly uneasy, half
wondering, yet not admitting the doubt to himself, whether he had
really loved anybody else. Then he told himself that it was only
because Kurt had treated him with his boy's frankness, and because he
had not with anybody else been brought face to face with anything so
terrible as death. And then he found himself in a brief dream asking
if life also was not terrible, and love? And if----? But such thoughts
he refused to think. Into his brooding happiness had come a new zest,
and he would not waste one moment of it upon doubt, philosophic or
particular.

They returned to Thrigsby by train, and René found himself committed
to a lie about the accident. If the truth came out, said Kurt, his
mother would not allow him to have that car.



What was there in common, thought René, between Linda and Kurt? She
had not his frankness. (He was frank even in his lying.) She was
subtle, given to theory. Her brother had, cut and dried, not so much a
theory as a program. With Kurt René had had a robust pleasure which he
had never enjoyed with Linda, and it was so far above all other
pleasures that he took it for the goal to aim at, the prize to be won,
when he should have broken down the barrier of sex and overcome her
taste for teasing, and put an end to all those irritations which he
ascribed to their ridiculous position as engaged persons, irritations
that even in her letters pricked and stung him. He was slow to come by
a thought, and when he possessed one always insisted upon its
relevance to existence, while she seemed most to revel in ideas when
they were most irrelevant. In their correspondence, her letters grew
longer as the months passed. (After his success she had assumed
"intellect" in him.) His letters became more precise and brief. He had
no doubt of her. She had taken the place of the examination as the
next stage in being, beyond which would lie, to borrow her phrase, the
"real, real life."

So eagerly did he look forward to that illumination that things and
people had lost their interest for him. The question of income was
settled; the problem of his father and mother engaged him no more.
They had suddenly become old to him, settled, left to grope along with
their own affairs and difficulties. This made life at 166 easier. He
had stood between his father and mother, and had now removed himself.
His mother was more free in her chatter, his father less strained and
more jovial in his talk. René had told them of his engagement and of
Linda's wealth, and this, coupled with his success, had made them
acquiesce in his translation to a superior sphere and even take some
pride in it. For a short while he had qualms on seeing his mother let
him go so lightly, but he faced the fact and did not let it obtrude
upon his dreams of graciousness and freedom.

All these events had delivered him for the first enjoyment of his
youth, and his thoughts were like bees in a flowering lime-tree. They
were disturbed by nothing but Linda's letters. The more she teased and
flattered his "intellect," the more he dwelt upon the future when the
teasing and the flattery would have ceased, and his warm satisfaction
would be invigorated by the zestful sharing of married life. He made
no plans and hardly considered those she threw out. She had ambitions
for him. They were too fantastic to be noticed.

A silence of three weeks alarmed him. She broke it with the
announcement of her return, and the expression of her desire to be
married at once, and a request that he would meet her in London, for
she was crossing by Flushing.



It was early spring. He obtained a day's leave of absence from school,
and met her at Fenchurch Street. He saw no more of London than was to
be seen as a background to her profile as they drove to Euston. She
was different from the image he had formed of her during her absence,
smaller, even prettier, more vivacious and effective. They kissed when
they met, rather to his astonishment, for he had not the least desire
to kiss her but only to consider her. She began to talk at once:

"It has done wonders for you. You look so much more confident and
bigger. Your success I mean. And you really are distinguished-looking.
How do you like your work?"

"I do it without---- No, I haven't thought about it."

"I wanted them to take you into the business--Brock and M'Elroy, you
know. But old Mr. M'Elroy wouldn't hear of it. They wanted me to marry
Jack M'Elroy. Perhaps I should have done it if I hadn't met you."

That did not please him at all, though it was obviously intended to do
so. She went on:

"But we'll show them that we can do better on our own lines, won't we?
Father used to say that commerce was sordid however honest you tried
to be, and after all, it isn't work for a first-rate man, is it?"

Her insistence on his success and abilities worried him. It was not
for this he had been waiting. He wanted her to tell him what had
brought her to her abrupt decision to be married sooner than they had
planned. He tried to lead her on to that but could bring her to no
other intimacy than that of little caresses with her hands. He would
not admit his disappointment, and all through the four hours' journey
kept on telling himself that he was glad to see her. And indeed he was
glad. Her coming brought the promised future nearer.



She gave him no time to ponder his disappointment or the hole it
knocked in his brooding pleasure. They chose a house, fifty pounds a
year, with a garden, in Galt's Park. He took his mother to see it, and
she assumed the manner she had had in the old days for the visits of
the "rich Fourmys."

A fortnight's shopping furnished the house, and he had the
satisfaction of supplying the furniture for his study out of a check
sent by his Aunt Janet. The trousseau took another three weeks, and
Mrs. Brock, with an eye to wedding presents, would not hear of the day
being fixed until after an interval of six weeks. A miserable time.
Linda seemed to think of everything but her bridegroom.

For the honeymoon the Yorkshire coast was chosen, by whom it was not
very clear. René had wanted Derbyshire; Linda had proposed the Lakes,
but, a fortnight before the marriage, Mrs. Smallman had appeared on
the scene and taken charge, instructed them, tactfully and almost
tacitly, in the correct deportment of those about to be married. She
kept the couple apart, spent days and evenings with Linda, and made
her keep René distracted. The Smallmans had spent their honeymoon on
the Yorkshire coast; they knew of a charming little private hotel
overlooking Ravenscar; theirs had been the perfect honeymoon, one
which had never come to an end. So might--must--it be with René's; and
so it would be if goodwill, advice, kindly glances, friendly
instruction, could bring it about. The Professor expanded:

"It is wonderful when all that you have loved in a dream, as it were,
materializes and is there in your hands. Only you feel so confoundedly
unworthy. And then, when you are married and settled down, you get so
abominably accustomed to it. No one could be more devoted than my wife
and I, but we find that if we do not keep ourselves alive with outside
interests, we begin to wear each other down. It isn't easy--marriage.
I can say all this now, because if I don't I never shall. And, after
all, you know, I like you, Fourmy. We shall work together and be good
friends, but we lose something, you know. A certain kind of intimacy
we can never have again."

This talk reminded René of the occasion when George had taken him as a
small boy to the swimming baths, made him stand on the edge practicing
strokes, and then pushed him into the deep end.



The night before his departure, his mother came into his room and sat
on his bed and looked long at him:

"I can't bear to think of your bed empty to-morrow," she said.

"Better send it to the new house," replied he.

"I can hardly realize that you are a man and going to have a wife. It
seems only the other day that you were a little boy, learning to cook
in the kitchen. Do you remember? And now I suppose you'll have late
dinner. It is queer. I used to be able to think of you as a boy at
school, but I can never imagine you as a teacher, in a gown, too. And
it's even harder to think of you----"

"You shall come and stay with us."

"Oh, I couldn't!" She looked toward the door.

"You could come without father."

"Don't be hard on your father, René."

"No. That's all over."

"I'm so glad."

She stooped over him and kissed him. Then she took his head in her
hands and pressed her cheek against his, and on his forehead he felt
her warm tears. She murmured:

"I've always tried to do my best."

Then she left him, and he felt the tears rising to his own eyes, and
he lay in worship of the beautiful kindness of women. They seemed to
hold in fee so much of life's loveliness, to be able to open to a man
fair regions that else were hidden to him all his days. He was eager
for the morrow's adventure.



The wedding made him feel that it was not by his own will that he was
being married, but that in some fantastic way he had been brought to
it by Mrs. Brock and the Smallmans and, incongruously, by his father
and George, and was doing it to oblige them. The collective will of
several persons was using him and Linda as pawns in an aimless game.

The ceremony took place in a very ugly Lutheran chapel, and the
recited words had no meaning for his bewildered mind. George and
Elsie--whom he remembered in the middle of it--had had a reason for
their marriage. His own seemed purposeless--No. Did it not open up to
him an unending tenderness like that given him by his mother last
night? He stole a glance at Linda. She was all pride and blushes,
rather breathlessly intent upon the ceremony, which seemed to have
some emotional significance for her.



They had two rooms reserved for them in the little hotel. They avoided
them, and preferred to be out of doors. They took food with them to
escape dinner before the other visitors and walked the three miles to
the top of Ravenscar. There they sat in the heather and gazed out
seaward in silence. On the way they had talked little, except to
comment on the broken sky, the color in the moors, the still shining
sea, gray and green. They sat in silence, and he felt utterly alone,
cut off from his old life with no new life begun. And almost angrily
he thrust away the idea of the woman sitting there by his side. So
charming she had been in the glamour of the future, so irrelevant she
seemed now that he was thrust away with her to find or fail to find in
her a life to replace that which had slipped away from him. He had
prized that old life so little while it was his, but it had been
familiar, his habitual garment. It had been fashioned with his growth.
She had been outside it; that had been her fascination. But he was
stripped of it, and he had nothing wherewith to approach her. And
suddenly he saw that he was failing her, that such thoughts were a
betrayal of her trust in him. After all, she too had shed her old
life. He was fearful lest she should become aware of his treachery. He
said:

"When I was away with Kurt----" And at once he knew that he had made a
false move. The thought of Kurt filled him with the memory of the free
joy he had had on that excursion, and he could not but contrast it
with the mean and sickly hesitation of this. What was it? What was he
afraid of? Afraid of the woman? Oh, come! Did he not love her and she
him? What was there to dread in love?

She said:

"Oh, René, we didn't come away to talk of Kurt."

"No."

"We didn't come away to talk."

"No."

She came close to his side.

"René, kiss me. Say you love me."

"I love you."

But it was better to sit in silence and gaze out at the sea, gray and
green.

She clung to him, caressed him, used absurd little phrases, English
and German.

"I loved you," she said, "from the first moment when you came into the
Smallmans' drawing-room. I was wearing green. Do you remember?"

"Green. Yes. I remember. I saw your parasol in the hall."

"And you loved me from the moment when you saw my parasol."

She laughed. That was better. It broke the heavy brooding in him that
had brought him to such suspense.

The evening air chilled them, and they walked home under the stars.
She clung to him and sang ditties of love and trysts and sentimental
disasters. When they reached their sitting-room she came to him and
placed her hand under his chin, pressed his lips with her forefinger,
and then kissed him. Then she left him.



In the early hours of the morning he was out on the seashore,
wandering aimlessly, nervously, dejectedly. Every now and then he
threw up his head and took in a great draught of the keen morning air
blowing in from the sea. That invigorated, cleansed him. Suddenly he
crouched on the sands and hid his face in his hands, and cried within
himself:

"I can't go on. I can't go back. Oh, Love, my love."

He had counted on her to open up new wonders and sweet joys, and
together they had attained nothing but heat and hunger and distress.




XI

MATRIMONY


     Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
     An' let poor damned bodies be:
     I'm sure sma' pleasure it can gie
                 Ev'n to a deil
     To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me
                 An' hear us squeal.


HE returned to her. She was in dressing-gown, fresh, indolent, gay.
She held out her hand to him.

"What a strange man you are! Couldn't you sleep?"

"No. I couldn't sleep.

"Poor old thing. I slept wonderfully."

Had she felt nothing? Had she no suspicion of the agony that had
driven him from her side? Of the sick hope of comfort and reassurance
that had brought him back to her? A faint shadow of fear had crossed
her face on his entrance, but it had vanished when he spoke.

Indeed he was reassured. Her gaiety and charm disarmed him. The sun
came streaming through the window upon her hair; her eyes danced; she
glowed in her health and physical well-being. He had no other creature
to whom to turn. Under the spell of her radiance he appealed to her,
who had wounded him, to repair the hurt. She petted him, made much of
him, denied him the relief of activity, and had him to sit with her in
the heather with his head in her lap while she crooned to him of how
happy she was, and how proud a wife, and how this honeymoon would
never come to an end. There was a drugging beauty in her voice that
soothed him and had him dwelling in a honeyed sleep. It was sweet to
lie in the sun and gaze through half-closed lids at the pale sky and
stifle the voices of hostility that stirred in him at her touch, at
the caressing notes in her voice, at her perpetual drone of contented
triumph. She allowed him silence, but then only the more keenly could
he feel her presence. She would sigh out of it:

"A--a--ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet,
lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!"

He thought of Kurt, and his mania for moving on.

She said:

"René! What do you like best in the world? I should like to give it
you."

He answered:

"Peace."

"Peace? Isn't this peace?"

Anger stirred in him on that. How could she talk of peace when to him
every moment throbbed with menace? He turned over on his side away
from her.

"Can there ever be peace," he asked, "between a man and a woman?"

"What do you mean?"

He made no reply.

"Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you
mean." And she dodged aside into phrases--the war of the sexes, the
difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the
feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of
abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless
difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and
the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him
amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little.

"I meant you and me," he said, biting out his words.

"Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us.
We couldn't be more wonderful. Could we?"

"I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can't help thinking of those
damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said:
'How wonderful we are!'"

That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and
jumped to her feet.

"Oh, I never thought----"

She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the
sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out
behind her. He came up to her.

"What did you never think?"

"That on our second day you would be satirical."

He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the
saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested:

"I said what I felt. Mayn't I do that? I didn't think it would hurt
you, really, I didn't. Linda, I----

"Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more
than you can say. And you don't know how uncomfortable it is."

She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in
himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood
pondering it.

"I can't help it," he said slowly, "I'm made like that. I can't be
comfortable."

Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to
bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open.

"I know you can't," she said, "but I can, and you mustn't spoil it for
me."

He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her
and cried:

"Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would----"

"What would you do?"

"I don't know. But I would move heaven and earth to give it back to
you."

"I believe you would, and that makes me love you."



He weakened to her will, and not again during their honeymoon did he
let slip in expression or gesture the tiniest hint of the storm let
loose in him. Small periods of solitude he could procure at night when
she had retired for her astonishingly lengthy toilette. Then in
suppression of his fire and rebellion, in the effort to keep a tight
control on it even within himself, he became aware of a strength, a
firmness that, out of all that he had lost of youth and ease and
pleasant happiness and the charm of living, emerged as gain. Yet it
was not in his nature to count it up nor to hoard. He could find much
to rejoice over, the splendor of the night, the keen winds, the huge
waves splashing under the wind, and all he would take to his wife for
her to turn into charm. And she would weave her spells round him. Her
tone, her eyes, her warmth, that was so like tenderness as almost to
deceive him into acquiescence, all said to him: "Forget! Forget!" But
every fiber of his will was stretched in the effort to remember and
gain knowledge--to remember how this thing had come about, that he
should have so much and so little love for this woman, by what
blindness he had come to it, and what in all his slow growth to
manhood should have brought him to such sweet mockery of it. These
were not his words. He was groping beyond words, beyond actions; his
captured force was searching through his life to find forces to
sustain it, to urge it on, to release that slow-moving stream that had
brought him thus far to be chained and confined. He who had realized
so little was struggling to realize himself, to find within himself
the power that should break this woman in her complacent dwelling in
the pleasure of their love and set him free and her. For he had begun
dimly to perceive that she too was to be thought of, and in his effort
he was gentle with her. This was hard, for against his gentleness she
chafed. She wanted turbulence, upheaval, suspected not the stirring in
his depths and was forever agitating the surface of his being. Once or
twice she did call forth the anger, and then she reveled in her
delicious fright and was so quiet as to alarm him and drive him back
into his gentleness. Out of this she stirred him. It was to her only
an odious sluggishness.

It was a comfort to him that he could admire her. She touched nothing
but she gave it charm. She changed the Mapledom of their room to an
originality of elegance. Her ingenuity and adroitness with herself
were a source of amusement and amazement to him. The fun of watching a
woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption
in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old
fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her
choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in
her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her
pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. Sometimes
she would bring out in her talk of them qualities and foibles that he
had not remarked, though on her indication he was forced to admit that
they were surprisingly there. Other times she seemed to shape them to
fit in with a fantastic world of her own. And that would be little
less amusing than her criticisms. He could admire her, but his
admiration made him feel how remote she was, how unpossessed, how
little he desired possession, and how, in all things, she invited to
it.

Perhaps she felt some of his uneasiness, for she said toward the end
of their stay:

"I suppose a honeymoon can never be the same to a man as it is to a
woman." (The hypothetical man and woman of all her arguments.) "A man
must have his work."

"I've been thinking," said René, "that we never know what we want but
when we have it."

"How true!" She had a way of making agreement with him a sort of
flattery, than which he found little more distasteful.

And as they drove to the station she looked round at the hills and the
rocky coast-line, and murmured:

"It will be something to remember. It _is_ a pretty place."

For him it had a beauty that had stirred him like nothing else he had
ever known. For him also, till now, all things had been charming, but
the desolate moors, the stubborn cliffs had led him away from charm to
beauty and the savage joy of living in resistance.



The return to their world shocked him. From those weeks of the
profoundest emotions that had ever shaken him to come back to amiable
superficial relationships left him floundering, made him, when he had
collected himself, feel how utterly dependent he was upon his wife. He
was committed to her, isolated with her. The loneliness of that day
upon Ravenscar was nothing to the loneliness in the multitude.

Linda was immediately busy organizing her household, buying, buying
all day long; visiting, receiving visitors; she had crowds of friends
and gushing acquaintances, and they easily assimilated her husband,
were interested in him as they were interested in her wall-papers, her
furniture, her plans for the little garden, her gowns, her china. He
used to watch eagerly, almost hungrily, for a sign that they
recognized his existence apart from hers, but no sign ever came. To
the women he was something belonging to dear Linda, and therefore to
be admired since she was reputed to get the best of everything; to the
men, hard-headed, commercial gentry, he seemed to be baffling and
ominous, for they either fished nervously and falteringly for his
views or left him in the silence to which their geniality reduced him.

He resumed his work at the school where he had not yet learned to
disengage himself from his schoolboy's sensations--dread of the
headmaster, an inclination to run along the corridors when the bell
sounded, a desire to smack cheeky little boys over the head,
reluctance to attend prayers in the morning. At the end of the year a
vacancy occurred on the staff of the university and he was appointed
to fill it.

His first tussle with Linda came with his assertion of a desire to be
alone in his study when he was working. She had made a practice of
settling down with him in the evening with her sewing, or some
clerical work connected with one of the various committees to which
she had had herself appointed--social and rescue work, Arts and
Crafts, the University Musical Society, the Thrigsby Amateur Dramatic
Club, the Goethe Society, etc. She had learned to be silent, but by
the plying of her needle or the scratching of her pen she disturbed
and distracted him. He put up with it for some time, but at last it
was too strong for him, and he protested.

"But Mrs. Smallman sits with her husband every evening."

"He may be used to it, and she has a capacity for doing nothing which
you do not share."

"But it's so absurd to have two fires lit in the evening."

"I'd rather not work then, and come and sit with you."

"But you must work. You never say anything."

"Then I must work alone."

"Why must you?"

"Because I can't work any other way."

"What is it disturbs you? I won't do it if you'll tell me."

"I can't tell you. It's just having you there."

"Then you-- Then you-- Oh, well! There's nothing more to say if you
feel like that about me."

"Linda, don't be silly. It isn't about you."

She had already fluttered out of the room and closed the door very
slowly, so that its movement was the most eloquent reproach.

Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood
of tears and a fierce hunger for possession and to be possessed by him
compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This
brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the
desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his
position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the
existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers,
no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation.
Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year
married:

"The room over the study--that would be the best for the nursery when
we want one."

"But, René," she answered, after a pause, "we don't want to have
children yet, do we?"

Despair seized him. He could not look at her.

"No. No. Of course, it is as you please."

She smiled awry:

"Oh, my dear, I didn't mean you to take it like that. It sounded
horrid, I know. But for modern men and women, it ought to be
possible----"

He could not let her finish. He hated her talk of "modern men and
women," as though some change had come over human nature.

"I sometimes think," he said, "that no single word has the same
meaning for the two of us. Your Love is not my Love, your Yes is not
my Yes, your No is not mine."

"Oh, René, you do say some terrible things! Sometimes you frighten me.
Sometimes you are just a helpless silly baby, and sometimes you seem
to know more than anybody I ever met. You are so strong, but you don't
seem to know what to do with your strength, and I am terrified of you
. . . Oh, I don't know what to do with you! Can't we be just happy?"

"Just happy! . . . I suppose we can."

"We have been . . . Haven't we?"

"We have been," he said, but the words in his mind were: "No more than
happy."

To avoid hurting her he had abandoned the use of even that much
introspective power that he had come by in Yorkshire by the sea. Now
he worked, let the days run by on the wheels of habit, and gave her as
good a counterfeit as he could make of what she desired.



She decided in her own mind that he was working too hard, and must be
taken out of his solitude, which she ascribed to his inability to find
his feet socially after being lifted out of his own class, and dumped
into hers. Her brother was wanting to get rid of his first small
two-cylinder car to buy a new 30-40 h.p. She made him an offer for the
little car, and he closed with it and undertook to teach René to
drive.

That was not a very difficult matter. Two lessons sufficed, and René
was left with the car on his hands and no knowledge of its mechanism.

"But what shall I do if it breaks down?"

"It can't break down," said Kurt. "The magneto can't go wrong. If she
stops, clean the sparking plug or put in a new one. It must be that or
the jet."

René tried to read a book about motor-cars, but could not apply its
technicalities to his own machine. He spent some days in and about and
under the car, tracing out the principles on which it worked, and
following its transmission of energy from cylinder to clutch, from
clutch to gear, gear to back-axle. When he had done that he felt some
confidence in driving, came to know the moods of his engine, and to
take an extraordinary pleasure in handling it. Every week-end he made
some excursion with Kurt or Linda, and sometimes alone. He explored
the country for fifty miles round Thrigsby, and discovered to his
dismay the vastness of the network of industrial towns, and, to his
delight, the loveliness of the still uncontaminated country.

At first the change produced the effect Linda had desired. He had a
new energy which enabled him to take the dull work of the week
lightly. He seemed to have caught some of Kurt's enthusiasm together
with a little of his good humor and tolerance. But these qualities he
could not assume without the frankness that nourished them. Soon he
was no longer deceived by the counterfeit he had evolved for his
wife's satisfaction, and could not evade the fact that his excursions
were desired chiefly as an escape from it. Their two habitual lives
were organized effectively enough; it was when their lives met that
there was insufficiency, fumbling, distrust, evasion. He could not
altogether conceal from her the disgust and almost horror that he felt
on being faced with the deception he had practiced on himself, and
through himself on her. She saw his distress, could not altogether
understand, felt that she was giving him too many opportunities to
escape from her, and in her turn began to counterfeit an interest in
his enthusiasms and to insist on occupying a seat in the car whenever
he went away, whether Kurt was with him or not. Kurt had an
affectionate pampering way with her, a mere expedient for striking
harmony between their different natures, which René as usual, taking
seriously, misread as contempt. This, unknown to himself, encouraged
the growth of the hatred which he had never allowed to rear its head.
. . . And Linda, a little wearied by now of the part of the lover, had
begun to play the part of the devoted, settled wife, to throw up round
herself as bulwarks her advantages--her charming house, her ample
means, her distinguished husband, a man of learning and culture in a
commercial atmosphere, leisure among the unleisured. It was only an
experiment on her part, but she gave it a thorough trial. When it
failed she had her moments of despair. She had felt her husband's
withdrawal from her, at least the removal of the deceit which covered
it. She was enraged, determined to break him into submission, flung
the whole force of her nature into the effort and failed again. Then,
to escape boredom, she began to amuse herself with her sufferings. She
would lead him on to talk in his inarticulate fashion of what he felt
and then play upon his emotions and bring him back abruptly to her own
charm, to realize her greater skill and agility in life, her rightness
in the business of living and presenting a brave front to the world,
and sometimes he would almost admit that she was right, and that,
after all, since he could produce nothing definitely superior to her
desire, he had better yield and give her those good things that, in
their easy circumstances, they were privileged to enjoy--charm and
excitement and pleasure. But he could not. Life had always been hard
for him. He could not consent to have it easy. All that she fed on
turned to bitterness in his mouth.

He tried to tell her once of the tenderness his mother had given him
on the night before he had come to her, the pure joy that, but for the
omen at his heart, he had taken for a foretaste of the heaven he was
to enter. She said:

"She is a dear old woman, your mother."

In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed,
he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he
remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made:

"Linda Brock has no back to her mind."

It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her
to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded,
brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: "See!
This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of
it." If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was
often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as
far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far
estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes,
that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her
womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.

And he began to question his everyday life. It seemed mechanical. He
had been shaped for the position he filled, fitted into it so tightly
that he could never move. He would be carried on forever by the
machine that had caught him up as a small boy when they had marked him
down in the Lower Third. (They had written to his mother: "He is a boy
of whom the school will one day be proud." And she had been so elated
by the words.) He had accepted the force of the machine and let it
take the place of his own will. That was unpracticed. He had used it
for nothing. The machine had carried him to security and given him
things apparently so coveted that his brother George could not now
speak to him naturally, so great was his awe of his success. It was so
easy to think the thoughts required by the machine. A kind of
education had been pumped into him. He had now only to pump that same
kind of education into other young men. The machine was efficient,
himself efficient in it. There was satisfaction in that. But all the
other men with whom he worked were elusive; so many of them, under the
pleasant manners of the common-room, concealed despondency, a mood of
resignation that was epidemic, more virulent at one time than another.
Against that, too, René was in revolt. Instinctively he felt that if
he surrendered to it he would fall also to that other danger in his
domestic life.

He tried to understand Linda. She was so successful. So many people
liked her. Her social progress was amazing. Efficiency always gave him
pleasure, and it was delightful to him, though he hated it, to feel
her skillfully consolidating their position. She was tremendously
active in all external things. It was her inward activity that he
wished to understand. What were the things that satisfied that clever
brain of hers? What her heart? He had long ago swept aside her
pseudo-science, sociology, physiology, psychology, as external to
herself, things worn as she wore clothes, very well, to be becoming
and in the mode. It pleased her intellectually to talk of a
hypothetical man and woman. What did that hypothetical man and woman
become in art? He followed her in her reading, her music--so far as
one so uninstructed could follow at all. . . . German sentimental
_lieder_, colored lanterns over water, sweet flirtations, violins in
the distance; a sighing for the passing of youth; a lingering over the
sweets of love, with ultimately a withdrawal from love; a perfume.
That was her art. In her drawing-room she had impressionist and
post-impressionist drawings; in her own room she had pictures of young
men and maidens in ballrooms and canoes and French boudoirs.

He could see the charm of the things she loved, always melted to them,
but never without a reaction, an angry stiffening of the will.

At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found
an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one
marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying.
She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their
grace, and he liked the skill with which she clothed herself to give
every one of her attractions free play.

It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent
appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the
excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came
into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for
her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive
him of it.

At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him
for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried:

"You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from
abominations."

"Ah!" She too was angry now. "What else is it?"

"By God!" he said. "I thought it led to love."

And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on
hearing his father's cynicism.

For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext--wished
to have some of the rooms papered--and went to stay with her mother.




XII

ESCAPE


       _Ant._   Come, I'll be out of the ague,
                For to live thus is not indeed to live,
                It is a mockery and abuse of life.
                I will not henceforth serve myself by halves!
                Love all or nothing.
     _Delio._   Your own virtue save you!


HE spent hours brooding, prowling in the streets, in whose dull
monotony his mind had grown so undisturbedly, responding to their
small gaieties and smaller excitements, but moving on in the even
smoothness of their life. It seemed incredible to him that such
turmoil could have come out of them, and yet that turmoil had begun
even before his marriage, before he had met his wife. Was there some
strangeness in himself? Of his nature he became doubtful and
suspicious. Yet the habit of acceptance was too strong in him; even
his misery he could accept. Very laboriously he strove to come by an
idea of himself, and was only the more confused when he arrived at
this:

"They won't come out to meet me, and when I go out to meet them, they
run away. I cannot enjoy their pleasures, and they seem to want
nothing else. It gets worse and worse. I couldn't even talk to Elsie
now. Almost anyone can make me seem ridiculous."

Linda wrote to him:

"Can't you see, Ren dear, that there are some things won't bear
thinking of, and spoil with thinking. You poor, tortured thing!"
(Least of all did he want pity from her.) "I know you don't really
want to think, and you don't think easily, like most people. At least
you seem to hate thinking without coming to a conclusion. It is
something finer than obstinacy, because it isn't at all for yourself
that you want--what you want. What do you want? Isn't it enough to be
happy? Oh, my dear, do let us be happy! I have been crying every
night. It isn't that I mind being apart; husbands and wives must be
apart sometimes if their life is to be possible and decent, but I
can't bear our being apart in spirit."

Then she had understood! She had seen the gulf between them. She would
help him to bridge it.

He hastened to her joyfully, and caught her up in a great embrace, so
that she laughed in delicious terror.

And the torment began again. She had seen, understood, nothing. She
was only for teasing, wheedling, cajoling him into submission. She
told him--carefully choosing her moment--that she would bear him
children, and for a little while, a second or two, he was appeased.
Then his excited imagination worked on that. A child would mean only
another entity in the house, the empty house, where there was no love
to absorb it and foster its growth; more antagonism; more separation;
his child or hers, it would not be both. He could not see at all
clearly, but the idea of it had for him now something horrible. With
no count of his words he said:

"I do not wish for anything that you yourself do not want."

"I want it."

"Then why talk of it?"

"A man and a woman----"

"Talk of us, woman, talk of us. God! You don't know how you spoil
things with your busy mind. True things, simple things, lovely things,
things that lie deep in heart and mind, there is nothing that you will
not shape and mold and knead and twist into your own image, pretty,
pretty, charming. Oh, t

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/48487