BOOK ONE LINDA BROCK

BOOK ONE LINDA BROCK

Ha! Ha!

So you take human nature upon trust?

I LOVE IN EARNEST

O that joy so soon should waste

Or so sweet a bliss

As a kiss

Might not forever last!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, René!”

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

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

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

“We mustn’t stop writing to each other again.”

“It was you who stopped.”

“I thought——”

“It made it very horrid meeting you again, very anxious, I mean—I mean I don’t know what your life is like.”

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

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

“I will write,” said Cathleen. “This year won’t seem so long. I couldn’t be certain, last year.”

“Are you certain now?”

“Oh, René!”

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

“Let’s talk sense,” said he. “I want to marry you.”

“Oh, yes.”

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

“Anywhere with you.”

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

“What did your father do?”

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

“He drank whisky and smoked cigarettes.”

“Oh! I’m sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Forever and ever,” said René.

“Forever and ever,” cried she. “It isn’t many people who find the real thing in the first.”

He glowed.

“Oh! we must never spoil it.”

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

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

“You will write to me?”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“Good-by, my dear, good-by.”

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

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

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” said Mr. Bentley.

“I’ve been a walk.”

“Your mother wants you.”

“At once?”

“She wanted you an hour ago.”

Cathleen sped away.

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

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

When at last he opened his lips he said:

“We—we’ve been a walk.”

“So I perceive.”

“The woods are very beautiful at this time of year.”

The silence froze.

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

“I go to-morrow.”

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

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

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

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

. . . . . .

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

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

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

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

“With what?”

“You’ll find that out.”

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

II 166 HOG LANE WEST

The homeward journey was by no means so agreeable.

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

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

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

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

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

“How brown you are!” she said.

“It’s been wonderful weather. Aunt Janet sent you some shortbread and some knitted things.”

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

“She said she admired you more than she can say.”

“I’ve done my best for you.”

“She said you married a bad Fourmy.”

“I wish she hadn’t said that.”

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

“Is that true. Was my father a bad man?”

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

“Did you love my father?”

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

“What’s come to you, René?”

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

“Oh,” he said, “it’s just queer, coming back. One can feel all sorts of things in the house, and——”

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

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

“But he——”

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

“He left you.”

“A boy like you can’t judge a man.”

“Oh, but I know.”

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

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

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

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

He snapped his teeth together, and said fiercely:

“All the same, if I treated a woman as my father treated you, I’d shoot myself.”

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

“Women——” began René, but his mother cut him short in a soothing voice that was almost a caress:

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

“Who’s Elsie?”

“Didn’t I tell you? George is going to be married.”

“George is?”

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

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

She tried it on and preened herself in it.

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

“But I will,” said René. “When I’ve saved money and can retire, we’ll go and live together.”

“I don’t know. It’s easy to forget old women.”

“Oh, come! A man doesn’t forget his mother.”

“Doesn’t he?”

“And old? You’re not old.”

“I’ve been old since before you were born.”

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

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

Then he laughed:

“You must have been pretty when you were a girl.”

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

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

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

“They are going to be married at once. They’ve got to be.”

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

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

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

“Yes. He told me. How did you know?”

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

“Oh, mother!”

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

René went to the door.

“Hullo! old man!”—René hated to be called “old man”—“Hullo! Got back?”

“Only just.”

“This is Elsie—Elsie Sherman. Mother’s told you?”

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

“So you’re the wonderful brother?”

“Yes. The—— Yes, I’m George’s brother. You—you can take your things off in mother’s room if you like.”

“Or mine,” said George.

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

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

“She’s pretty.”

“When you know her a bit you’ll want to go and do likewise, my son.”

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

“Mother’s got out her best center for you.”

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

“Elsie!”

“Coming!”

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

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

“I say, mother, draw it mild.”

And Elsie’s rather too fervent:

“Of course I know I’m very lucky.”

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

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

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

“Oh, Blumenlied!” cried Elsie; “I adore that,” and she took up the air.

“You’ve got a pretty voice,” said René.

“Have I? I do sing sometimes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know. To settle down——”

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

“Why do you keep hinting at things, mother?”

“I wasn’t hinting. I know, and you will know, and they never will. I could have screamed sometimes tonight.”

“I thought you liked her.”

“Like? Oh, René, boy, if only you’d grow up and be some use to me!”

“I want to be.”

“I know that, and it’s something.”

“Are you hurt because they——?”

“I’ve been a foolish woman. I’ve been seeing more hope for George than there ever was.”

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

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

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

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

George returned, whistling.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

“Anything you like,” replied René.

“You won’t mind my putting it bluntly?”

“No.”

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

“I see. But I’ve got another year.”

“Can’t you teach someone something? You’ve been learning long enough.”

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

“Next month. What are you staring at?”

“Was I staring?”

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

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

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

“The whole thing seems to me so——”

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

“So what?”

“I mean—I liked her. She seems a good sort.”

“No nonsense about Elsie.”

“Doesn’t it make you understand mother more?”

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

“Oh, you think it’s me?”

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

“How will you live?”

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

“You’re pleased with yourself, then?”

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

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

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

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

. . . . . .

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

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

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

“Do go to bed, René, dear. You’re not working already?”

“No, mother. I wasn’t working.”

“Then you mustn’t stay up, wasting the gas and all.”

III GEORGE MARRIED

’Tis an evil lot, and yet

Let us make the best of it;

If love can live when pleasure dies

We two will love, till in our eyes

This heart’s Hell seem paradise.

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

Cathleen Bentley had written:

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

René described:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mother, I’m in love.”

“Well, I never! You’re not going to be married now?”

“No. It’s hopeless. She’s rich. At least her father is.”

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

“It isn’t only that. Only I can’t get away from certain things.”

“What things?”

“The horrible things people do.”

“You’ll be kept busy if you worry about that.”

“It’s about myself.”

“Want to confess? Go on.”

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

“Well, well.”

“You can’t dismiss it like that. I shouldn’t be remembering it if it were so easy as that. I met her—you know—in Derby Street——”

“You’re not going to tell me the whole story?”

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

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

“Well, you are a funny boy.”

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

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

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

René patted her hand.

“It’s awfully good of you to listen,” he said; “I feel better already. Only George——”

“Don’t let George worry you. He can do things you can’t. George can keep his mind out of things like that.”

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

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

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

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

The other letter was from her mother:

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

He passed both letters over to his mother.

“I told you it was hopeless.”

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

“But I can’t help loving her.”

Mrs. Fourmy sniffed indignantly:

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

“I do,” said he very earnestly.

On which his mother staggered him by saying:

“George wouldn’t.”

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

IV A RETURN

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

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

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

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

“You and an old woman like me.”

“Won’t it be lovely when we live in the country, mother?”

“Oh, but there won’t be any music-halls.”

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

“But with an old, old woman——”

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

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

He said:

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

“It’s only what helps you now. You don’t seem to be a bit ambitious, René.”

“Would you like me to be?”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think I’m the sort that gets on. I say things—in letters, you know.”

“But I’d like to see you well off and married to some really nice girl.”

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

“I’ll come and stay with you.”

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

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

“That’s my house,” said René.

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

“René! René! it’s your father!”

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

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

“Essie,” the stranger turned to Mrs. Fourmy, “I’m dead broke.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All right,” he said.

His father turned and smiled pleasantly.

“That’s good of you—very good of you. I’d be in the cart without. I’m—well—I’ve been—— But we’ll talk of that later.”

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

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

“That’s good,” he said. “My first square meal since this morning. That’s good, good.”

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

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

“It’s bigger,” said René.

His father turned and scanned him.

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

“You used to have a mustache.”

“Yes. Shaved it off in America. Didn’t like Roosevelt.”

“Have you been to America?”

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

“Like George.”

“Isn’t George coming in?”

“He’s married.”

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

“If only you wouldn’t talk,” protested René in a sudden exasperation.

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

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

“René! René!” cried his mother.

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

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

“It isn’t fair! it isn’t fair!” he moaned.

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

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

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

“It’s me—René!”

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

“I must see you. Something has happened.”

“What?”

“Come down and let me in.”

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

“Come in. You’ve wakened Elsie, and she’s not at all well.”

“But I wanted to see you. Father’s come back.”

“What?”

“Father’s come back.”

“Mother all right?”

“She seems quite pleased.”

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

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

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

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

V SETTLING DOWN

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

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

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

“Oh!”

“Shall I help you?”

“It is—too heavy for me.”

“Where is—he?”

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

“In your room?”

She hesitated:

“We—we sold the old bed, you know.”

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

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

“You mustn’t make it hard for us, René.”

“I—I thought I was making it easy.”

“His brothers won’t see him.”

“Why not?”

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

“You’ll let him stay?”

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

“What did he do else?”

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

“You won’t tell me, then?”

“I have told you.”

“What’s he going to do? Go on eating and eating?”

“He’ll look for work. Of course, at his age, it won’t be easy.”

“What’s he been doing all this time?”

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

“He didn’t think of you then.”

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

“But someone must make money.”

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

René swung round.

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

“That’s dear of you, René. And you will be nice to him, won’t you?”

“All right, all right.”

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

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

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

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

“Where did we come from?” asked René.

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

“But why are we fixed here?”

“Don’t your big books tell you that?”

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

“Big books don’t account for humble folk like us.”

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

“Yes,” he said, “yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George said of his father:

“He’s a funny damned old rotter, but you can’t help liking him.”

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

VI PROFESSOR SMALLMAN

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

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

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

“It’s Liberal, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Fourmy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

René said heavily:

“It’s like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs and the dirty books.”

Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily:

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

“Where do you sell them? To a shop?”

“No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and chapelgoers.”

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

“I wish you hadn’t told me. It doesn’t seem worth while doing anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m so glad you could come,” said Mrs. Smallman, and she introduced him to Blease.

“Seen you about,” said the Jew. “Third-year man, aren’t you?”

“Just beginning my third year,” said René miserably.

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

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

“Yes. That’s where we score over Oxford and Cambridge, though they can never understand that.”

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

“She is beautiful,” said René to himself.

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

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

“She is beautiful,” thought he, and from that moment she had his homage.

Presently she appealed to him:

“Mr. M’Elroy won’t have it that Thrigsby is better than London. What do you say?”

“I’ve never been to London,” replied René.

“Don’t you love Thrigsby?”

“It’s been my home always. I don’t know that I ever thought about it.”

M’Elroy said:

“One thinks about everything nowadays.”

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

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

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

“Well?” he asked. “What’s the trouble?”

“My father——” began René.

“Ah! Well?”

“He deserted my mother a long time ago. He came back. My brother’s married.”

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

“I don’t know how old he is. But work? No.”

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

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

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

“They have their point of view.”

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

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