BOOK ONE LINDA BROCK (continued 3)

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, the lies of it all, the lies, the lies, the lies! And you never know what you are doing. All is for your pleasure. Nothing can lead you beyond that. And everything that menaces your pleasure you draw with your busy brain into words, words.”

“You don’t know what you are saying.”

“No.”

He looked up at her with his eyes glazed and dull, his jaw trembling, his fingers rubbing over and over again upon his thumbs.

“If you have said what is true, then you must hate me.”

“Yes.”

He stated it as though it were a plain fact well coated over by habit, so that it could give no pain. She was tranquil, seemed to have tight control over herself. She walked twice up and down the room. Then she turned to him and said very quietly:

“I knew a long time ago that if it ever came to a scene it would be the end. I suppose I’m not romantic enough for you. I don’t know what it is. But I know enough to feel that a scene with you would be serious. Even little girls know that men must have scenes. It’s a kind of love-making with them. You’re different.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t pretend that you haven’t hurt me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I’d like to pretend. But I’ve changed, too. I suppose you can’t marry without being changed. A woman who loses her husband looks silly. But she needn’t if she doesn’t feel it. You can’t pretend. Neither can I. You’ve taught me that. We’ve failed where nearly everybody else fails, but we admit it. What’s the good of pitching good life after bad? It’s no one’s business but our own. They’ll talk. Let them talk.”

He hardly heard what she said. He was weary of her voice droning on and on.

“If it is the end,” he muttered, “then there is no more to be said.”

He walked round to Professor Smallman’s. He had no notion of the time. Mrs. Smallman admitted him, saw that something was wrong, showed him into the study, and left him. He stood leaning against the doorpost. The Professor was sitting in his great chair with a cigar in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other.

“Good evening,” said René. “I have left my wife.”

Down went the Professor’s legs, round came his head out of the great chair:

“Great God!”

“I just walked round to tell you. I don’t know why.”

“But, my dear fellow, what on earth— Not two years.”

“Is it?”

“I say. Is she? Would you like Freda to go round?”

“No. She is quite calm. It’s finished. It’s she who said it. It never began.”

“Come, come. Sit down. You’d better sleep here to-night.”

“No, thanks. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

“Tut, tut! My good Fourmy!”

“I mean it,” said René dispassionately.

“Wait a moment.”

The Professor hurried out of the room, and René could hear him in the hall talking eagerly to his wife. He was seized with a dreary impatience of these good people, with their unfailing kindness. He knew perfectly well that in a moment they would return, husband and wife, the husband and wife, and throw him scraps of their happiness for comfort and persuasion, while with their exchange of glances they would bar him out. No. That was intolerable. He stepped to the French window, opened it, and walked out, round the house and through the garden into the street.

Another false move checked; another false relationship ended.

He slept that night at the Denmark, lied and enjoyed lying to Mr. Sherman, saying that his wife was away and he had lost his key and could not wake the servants. He sat in his room at the Denmark feeling at peace and very confident, until his father came. Then he sat with the boon company, told them one or two stories that he was able to remember from the stock of the Common Room, told them heavily, dully, so that they gained in comicality and roused laughter. His father seemed to him rather contemptible. He enjoyed his own old jests as much as his audience, and that was displeasing to René’s fastidious mood.

He walked home with his father, who was loquacious and tiresome. At last René interrupted him:

“Father, do you mind not talking while I tell you what I have to tell? I have left Linda. I can’t tell you why without being unjust to her, because I can’t see clearly enough. She said it was finished, and so it is. I am extraordinarily happy. I never was so happy in my life. I have, in effect, told Professor Smallman to go to hell, and I shall do the same with anybody else who tries to interfere. I don’t know what I am going to do, and I don’t care. It is quite clear to me that there is no room for Linda and me in the same set of people. They talk so. I have no intention of continuing the life I have been leading. Everything I have ever done, as long as I can remember, has been because someone else wanted me to do it, or because someone else thought I could. It has been surprising and delightful, but never satisfying. George has made a better thing out of his life than I. At least he has done what he wanted to do, though you and I may not think much of it. I don’t think I can see my mother. I would dearly like to, but I could not bear it. She would make me feel something, and at present I feel nothing at all. But I can remember her face against mine, and her voice saying: ‘I have always tried to do my best.’ Good night. Give her my love.”

He turned on his heel, but his father caught him by the arm:

“Don’t be a young lunatic,” he said. “You can’t go like that.”

“I can,” answered René, puzzled that anybody should deny what was actually happening. “I can. Don’t you see that I am going?”

“Look here, I’m a bit of a queer one myself, but do you know what you are doing?”

“For the first time in my life,” said René, “I know what I am doing. And I like it so immensely that I am going on doing it. You can’t stop me. Nothing can stop me. You said yourself that we live in a world of women, and I want to make the best of it.”

His father let go of his arm.

“Good Lord!” he said, “I’ve had my day, but I never was so cracked as that.”

Then he acquiesced in his son’s indifference, nodded his head in a light parting, and went his way.

René’s thoughts were reaching out to Scotland, to his Aunt Janet’s, where he had known the best of his boyhood. He walked to a station and found the London express waiting, with little knots of people standing by the carriage doors, and porters bustling with luggage and lamps and pillows, all wearing the stealthy, excited air of importance of travelers by night. Putney was London, or near London. Why Putney? He did not know, but he wanted to go there. He bought a ticket, boarded a train as it was moving, and sat in a corner seat gazing at the lights of the towns and saying to himself: “That’s Ockley,” because when he had taken his first railway journey by night he had asked what the lights were, and his mother had said: “That’s Ockley.”