BOOK ONE LINDA BROCK (continued 2)

“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.