BOOK TWO ANN PIDDUCK (continued 2)

René laid his book down.

“Have you got what you want?”

“I? No. I never—— I was going to say I never have. I don’t suppose I ever shall. That makes me hate all the people who settle down in comfort and pretend there is nothing more to want. And as that is nearly everybody, you can imagine the hating part of me is kept pretty busy. That again is a nuisance, because it gets between me and what I want, and makes me waste energy in analyzing myself, my enemies, patrons (when I have any), friends. My relations gave me up as a bad job long ago. They made all sorts of sacrifices because they were led to believe that my talent would in the end make me more comfortable than they had ever been. When they found that I preferred discomfort and penury and starvation to what seemed to them the simple expedient of painting what I was expected to paint (they can’t understand anybody wanting to paint anything else), then they shrank away from me. They could make no more sacrifices. People don’t sacrifice for something they don’t see, and their eyes close just when mine begin to open. We both console ourselves with hatred. I hate what they worship: the capacity for comfort. They hate my incapacity. It is very stupid. I would give almost anything to be able to live without hatred. It seems barely possible, though you come as near to it as any man I ever knew. The pity of it is that you arrive at it by doing and wanting nothing.”

“That’s hardly fair,” replied René. “I’m out and about all day. Every day I clean and oil the car. Often I spend hours on it.”

“You do nothing that could not be done by a less intelligent man than yourself. You may do it more conscientiously, but at its best it is not good enough for your best.”

“But surely that applies to every trade and profession?”

“Does it? I’m certainly not going to generalize. What’s true of you is probably true of thousands of men. I’m not interested in them as I am in you.”

“It is even more true of the work I did before,” said René. “I do feel now that I am doing something. There is money earned at the end of every day, really earned by being useful. But I don’t know that I think about it much. It has become a habit, like everything else.”

“All right, say it has become a habit. Say that a certain amount of your energy is drawn off in habit, what of the rest? That’s what I’m driving at. What of the rest?”

“I read, amuse myself, and Ann——”

“And you are going on forever, working out of habit, reading and amusing yourself, and a woman who——”

“I’ll trouble you not to say anything against Ann.”

“I’m not saying anything against her. She has a perfect right to be herself, but if being herself interferes with me, I have a perfect right to fight for what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“Your friendship.”

“You have it,” replied René, in the tone of one squashing an argument.

“Yes,” said Kilner, “comfortably. You try to make room for me in your little circle of comfort, and, worse still, to use me as a comfort. I can’t stand that. She knows it. That’s why she keeps you away from me.”

René protested:

“She doesn’t.”

“She does. You watch her eyes when she comes in and finds me here.”

René looked up at him uneasily. Kilner pounced on that:

“You are uneasy already. I don’t want to make trouble between you two. You can make quite enough for yourselves, but I mean to dig out of you what I need. I mean to try anyhow until I am satisfied that what I need is not there.”

There was a challenge in this, and René had the surprise of finding himself meeting it. Indeed it was bracing to feel the painter’s vigorous mind searching his own and throwing aside all that he disliked or condemned.

“Ever since,” said René, “ever since our first meeting under the archway, I have felt that there was something in you that I desired to understand, something that, without my understanding it, has made more difference than any other thing in my life.”

Kilner leaned forward.

“Now,” he said, “now we know where we are. Most men pretend with me that they keep the emotional side of their nature for women. They don’t give it them, God knows what they do with it. Most men also confuse their emotions with their imaginations. I think that is why they spend their lives in the uncomfortable search after comfort.”

“And women?” asked René.

“You and I are not concerned for the present with women. It seems to me that you and I are in this queer place for much the same reason, because we were incapable of letting our lives run along the lines laid down for them. I don’t know what you are after; perhaps you don’t know yourself, but I want to tell you what I am after. I’m not a great reader of books. Some of them may have said what I’m trying to say. . . . As long as I can remember I have had the intensest joy through my eyes. I think I’ve said that before. It doesn’t matter. I see things. At first it was just the crude pleasure of form. One thing after another, I let the whole world unroll before my eyes until I was drunk with delight in it and nearly mad. Then forms began to have a meaning and to melt into each other. I began to see relations between different forms. Beauty began to sing in color. With form and color the world was so rich that the strain upon my sight was an agony. My greed brought me to seek consolations which unfortunately did not console. If I accepted comfort, then I lost my delight in form and color and was not comfortable. I found that the way out of that was to select and concentrate. I could only select in a certain passionate mood. In an ecstasy I felt truly that I could recognize the object in the contemplation of which I could find the greatest joy, a joy equal to that of human love, and having this advantage over it that it need not be expressed in physical experience. But, once felt, it must be expressed. I do my best in paint, but it always seems impossible—except when I am actually working. When I look at what I have done, then I know that it is impossible. One can give a little singing hint of it and no more. And then again, turning from that to life, one is disgusted. Everywhere such coarseness, such greed, such meanness, such conceit. Yet to nurse that disgust is to feel the joy fade away, to hear the song of it die down. There is no justice then, no kindness, and the world is so horrible that the soul takes refuge in a sorry silence. Youth is then a heated torment from which there is no escape, but in a kind of death that brings decay and poisons love. . . . There, if you can understand that, you can understand me. I cannot surrender my vision either to comfort or to my own disgust.”

They were silent for some moments. Then René said:

“In here,” he touched his breast, “I know that you are right. I have been trying all this time to understand you with my brain, but now that seems only to be a sieve through which to pass what you have said. You see, I have never tried to express anything, but there have been times in my life when I have been moved enough to understand faintly what you mean. Disgust? I know that too. Almost everything I have ever done seems to me now to have been the result of disgust. I suppose that is why I am what I am. But I’m glad you came in to-night. I was going through another crisis of disgust; I go from one to another.”

“I know,” said Kilner. “A man does when he seeks to find love only in women.”

René winced. His friend laughed at him:

“Oh, you are not the only one. It begins very early. Women exploit their motherhood as they have exploited their womanhood to get us. It is not their fault. Men have kept their joy from them and preserved their brutishness. There is an even more bitter disgust lying in wait for those who seek to find love only outside women.”

Ann came in on that. She stopped inside the door, and glowered at the painter.

“Oh, so you’ve come back?”

“Yes,” said Kilner, rising. “Like a bad penny.”

“Don’t get up. I ain’t no lady. You been talking?”

“Yes,” said René. “Shall I make some tea? Had a good evening?”

“No. Rotten.” She had not moved from the door. Her eyes came back to Kilner. “You can go on talking. I’m off to my bed.”

And she slipped from the door into the bedroom. René met his friend’s eyes. They were grimly ironical.

VII OLD LUNT

The glass is full, and now my glass is run:

And now I live, and now my life is done.

OLD Lunt was a dirty old man who wore a cracked bowler hat rammed down on his head, a frock-coat green with age, trousers that hung in loops and folds about his lean shanks, and boots held together with leather laces and bits of string. He had one room at the corner of the mews, and he lived God knows how. Ann always said that he would stand on the doorstep of a butcher’s shop and sniff like a dog, and stay there until they flung him a scrap of meat. On a Saturday night he was to be seen prowling about the shops, feeling the rabbits and fowls, and then shuffling away as though his appetite had been satisfied through his fingers. He never shaved, but clipped his beard close. The skin hung so loose on his jaws that shaving would have been perilous. His eyes were gray, watery, and red-rimmed, and he had ears like red rosettes.

He used to watch for René to come out, and then wait by his own door to see if the car left the yard. If it did not, then he would come shambling along and stand at the gate of the yard. And if René were working on his car he would edge nearer and nearer until he could peer into the engine. Often he would stand quite silent, and go away without a word. Occasionally he would talk and mumble.

“I remember when there warn’t no railways, and my brother Philip drove his horses from Glossop to Sheffle. They used to say there wouldn’t be no engines. But there was engines. Then they said there wouldn’t be no engines on the road. But there is engines on the road. And things grow worse and worse for poetry.”

With variations, that was his customary address.

About once a month he would sidle up to René and beg for the loan of one shilling, and ten days or a fortnight later he would return a penny or twopence.

“Interest, interest. Times bad. I must ask you to extend the loan.”

Sometimes he would give the coppers wrapped up in old ballads telling of murders and hangings, shipwrecks, battles, national events, some in print, some in writing, all dirty. In this way René became possessed of an ode to the Albert Memorial:

This poem was written on the inside of a grocer’s bag, and when it was handed to René it contained threepence. It was signed Jethro Lunt, and dated April 4, 1887.

One day Old Lunt extended his usual observations, and ended by asking morosely:

“Did you—did you read my poems?”

“Why, yes,” answered René, “all of them.”

“Have you really now? No one has read my poems for thirty years. It’s only the old ballads I sell now, and them not often. The newspapers do all the murders and hangings. Till the halfpenny newspapers came in, I could sell a murder or two in certain streets. I had one about Charley Peace:

Maybe you never heard that?”

“No. I never heard that.”

“No. I thought you wouldn’t have. You’d hardly be born then. Hard it is to remember that there are some so young they might almost have been born into another world.”

He fumbled about in the tails of his coat, humming and crooning to himself, and presently he produced a litter of papers and held them out diffidently, and so shyly that he turned his head away as René put out his hand for them.

“There’s forty years’ work there,” he said. “Forty years. I was thirty-five when I began it, thirty-five, and hopeful, and I finished it five years ago. I wanted to know if you think there’s any chance of its being published in a book. I’d like to leave a book behind me. I’ve been forgotten. I’d like someone to be reminded of me. I’ve been mortally afraid of the young ones till you. There’s something lucky about your face, something that shines in it. There was many faces like yours in my young days, but there was no golden statue in the Gardens then, and this must have been meadows down to the river side.”

He pressed his lips together and mumbled. René asked him if he could do with a shilling, but he refused, seemed so hurt that he shriveled and went away.

René kept the manuscript and read it during his off hours on the stands. It began nobly on foolscap, in a bold, spiky hand, and ended pitifully on old envelopes and leaves torn out of penny account books or yellowing sheets from ancient volumes. Thirty lines were written on the back of the title page of a copy of The City of Dreadful Night. It was some time before he could find his way through the manuscript. The sheets were not numbered, and they were in no sort of order. Slowly he pieced the poem together, and perceived that it was an epic in ten cantos, blank verse varied with odes. It was called Lucifer on Earth, or the Rise and Fall of British Industry, and it was many days before its first reader could make anything out of its confusion. The Gods change: it is difficult to make anything in this century of the God of 1860. Clearly Jethro Lunt hated that God. In fierce rhetoric he denounced His claim to omnipotence, but where exactly his grievance lay, it was impossible to discover. Lucifer in the poem struggled out of Hell, and, catching the Almighty in a moment of boredom, unseated Him and sent Him down to the Infernal Regions for a space to see how He would do there, and afterward, in his spleen, commanded Him to dwell on earth. So God arrived one day in a village in Derbyshire, and, acting upon the commercial principles always employed in his dealings with man, got the inhabitants to apply the mental processes till then only used in the practice of religion, to their everyday life. Then the community became possessed of a horrid energy, set love of gain above love of life, and soon the old, quiet society of squire, farmer, and laborer was broken up, mills were built in the village, their great stacks belched forth smoke over the hills so that the heather was dirty to lie upon; the women left their homes to work in the mills, and children were taken to help them. And wherever God went, the same thing happened.

Meanwhile Lucifer was enraged to find that he was not worshiped as he had hoped. The churches also had gone into business. In Hell he had taken some pleasure in the sins of the flesh, but these had now become so mean, so grubby, and so stealthy that his proud spirit was revolted by them, and he said that if men liked to fritter away their substance in such trumpery they might do so for all he cared, and to occupy himself, he began to investigate the divine power which sustained Heaven and Earth. Then he perceived that God had usurped this power and abused it. He set himself to master it, and when he had done so, waited until men’s love of gain had brought them to an intolerable strain so that they must release the spirit in themselves or perish. Then he went down upon the earth and engaged God in mortal combat so that they both perished, and man was left alone to work out his own salvation, for to such desperate issue had God brought them in His mischief. Upon the earth there were singers born of sorrowful women left in anguish by the evils of war and peace, not knowing which was the worse. Slowly their songs came to the ears of men, and then in fierce conflict they wrought upon God’s perdition until they had made it shine in the likeness of beauty.

That, so far as René could make out, was the outline of Old Lunt’s poem. Interspersed were odes in condemnation of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Tennyson, Gladstone, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Augustus Harris, Bulwer Lytton, and Thackeray; in praise of Beaconsfield, George Meredith, Charles Darwin, Cobden, Bradlaugh, General Booth, and Charles Stewart Parnell.

No critic of verse, René was unable to judge of the work’s poetic merit, though he had a shrewd idea that it was small. Historically, it was very valuable to him. The picture was horrible, of an England dotted with communities screwed up in their own vileness, of an energy turned in upon itself, desperately striving to satisfy a demand itself had created. The tension must have been terrific, and the most pitiful part of the poem was its revelation of the author’s gradual yielding to it, the slow ruin of his hopes, the growing repulsion from a world in which he refused to live except upon his own terms. It was possible to mark the exact moment of his plunge into despair, for two-thirds of the way through he suddenly dropped from verse (growing more and more halting) into prose:

“Art is a world of beauty where there is a logic not of this world, but until I have seen beauty here how can I hope to reach it? I must have wings, and if my soul can find neither love nor friendship, how can it ever be fledged for flight? Hatred? That would be something. I cannot hate mediocrity. I can only let it wither me.”

And he let himself be withered, though in that agony there were moments when the words poured melodiously from his brain.

The last sheet was terrible. It contained only a brief description of his room, the grubby ceiling, the sacks on which he lay, the peeling paper on the walls, the cracked window stuffed with rags.

“I lick my lips,” he wrote in a savage scrawl. “Bitter!” Then he had made a blot thus:

and against it he had written: “My world.”

Twice after René had read the manuscript did Old Lunt appear in the yard, but he crept away as soon as there seemed any danger of his being accosted. And then he did not come again.

A busy time followed, and he was forgotten except that, to please him, René had ordered a typewritten copy of the poem to be made—that being the nearest possible approach to the book of his desire. This copy came home at last. Ann was asked to bind it, and did so neatly with the green cloth she had for flower stalks. Then, a night or two later, it was taken to Kilner, for him to decorate the cover. He had been told of it, tried to read it, but could not. However, he designed a decoration for the cover and printed the title and the author’s name in bold letters, and beneath each he placed a blot. That part of the manuscript appealed to him more than all the rest.

“That,” he said, “is what the world is to all your comfortable people, behind the charm and excitement with which they cover and disguise it. The only difference between them and your old man is that he fought to get some light on it and lost. I would rather be he than they. He does take his world with him; theirs they leave behind, caught in the meshes of their factitious morals and conventions.”

“But,” said René, “isn’t he leaving his world all written out?”

“No, the tale of how he sank beneath its weight. It is true enough, anyhow, to have stirred you into a desire to give him pleasure. He has roused you exactly as I have been trying to do these last months.”

“That’s true. I do keep trying to get light on that little black world, but I say to myself that after all the sun’s light is quite enough.”

“It’s enough for beasts and trees. It isn’t enough for men unless they will consent to live like beasts, at the mercy of their instincts, in competition with the beasts, and have a very nasty time of it. No. No. The light your friend was after is the light of the imagination. Let your light so shine. He had never had it, never more than the will to have it. Probably he drank or took to some other form of vice to console himself in his more difficult moments. You’ll never know. Probably we all know that is worth knowing. Young men often make blots like that because life is such an infernal long time in beginning; but for an old man—well, it looks like a sober conclusion, as though he really had faced a fact, and had the sense of humor to go on living in spite of it. There!”

He had finished the cover.

“I hope he’ll like it.”

René took it that same evening to Old Lunt’s room. It was behind a stable and harness room used by a grocer as a store. Its one window looked out on a blank wall of yellow brick. For the rest the room was exactly as the old man had described it; not a stick of furniture in it; sacks thrown in a corner, and on these Old Lunt was lying with his legs crossed, his hand under his head, smiling up into the dim light. The setting sun struck the yellow wall outside the window, and the upper part of the room was filled with an apricot-colored glow. Dust danced in the light. The room was filled with an acrid sweetish smell.

Manuscript in hand, René stepped forward.

“Good evening, sir,” he said, “I thought you——”

He stopped, for he knew that the old man was dead. He had known it before he began to speak, but the sound of his voice brought home to him the mockery of words. Raising the cold right hand, he laid The Rise and Fall of British Industry beneath it.

The light died down. The glow sank into the gloom. He crept away, told the woman next door that Lunt was dead, and she said she would go at once to the crowner’s office.

VIII RITA AND JOE

And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied

All that was left of a woman once,

Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.

ANN had always known Old Lunt. As far back as she could remember the mews had been her playground, and the old man coming and going had been a part of the scene.

She seemed to connect the silence that visited her mate after his death with him, for she filled it with reminiscence and stories about him. He used to sing queer old songs, and sometimes he could be persuaded to tell about the country where he came from and flowers and birds; yarns about his father’s farm and the happiness he had had on it until it came into his brother’s hands, and his brother had gone into the manufacturing. Then there was no home for him in the old stone house.

For all her talk Ann could not break in upon René’s silence, and his eyes would implore her to cease, yet she could not cease. She went on and on talking, for she dreaded his silence as she dreaded his solemnity. They made life heavy and evil for her. If a man was unhappy, there were plenty of distractions and consolations. Everybody was unhappy at times, but no one in his senses clung to his unhappiness the way Renny did. It was an exasperation to her to have him like this—“mooning and dithering to himself”—because he had been so much more complacent and docile than she had expected. She had looked for trouble, but he had slipped into her ways, and shared her pleasures with an astonishing ease and grace, so much so that she had had the mortification of hearing two women in the mews arguing about him:

“Garn! ’E ain’t no scholard.”

“’Struth. ’E’s a college gent.”

“’Im! They might come to see a working girl, but they wouldn’t take up with ’er.”

The trouble she had looked for should have been between herself and him, and she was prepared to tackle it so soon as it showed its head, but this trouble he kept to himself, outside her. And though she called it unhappiness, she knew well enough that he was not unhappy.

Indeed, it was a joy to him to find himself more and more alive to the world, the little, grubby, amusing corner of it in Mitcham Mews, and the great roaring whirlpool outside in which lay his work. His pleasure in London was no longer purely emotional; no longer did he, as it were, implore London to let him be a part of it. He was working in it, contributing to its life, to its bustle and noise; but since his talks with Kilner and his reading of the poetical works of the old ragamuffin, he had been able little by little to detach himself from it and watch all that was going on. Truly there was never a more amusing city! Everything was on show. Everybody had the air of expecting to be looked at and admired; though everybody pretended also that he or she had no such expectation. When provincials arrived in London they seemed to feel all this and to wince before it, but soon they perked up their heads and behaved as though all eyes were upon them. And they went to the show-places, those of which there had been talk in their homes from their earliest recollection. But everything else also was a show to them. More and more the shops tended to become shows. Government offices were being pulled down and rebuilt to make more show. Exalted personages were bent on making a show of their common humanity. Even in the city, the offices in which Londoners worked—the counting-house behind the shop—were being razed to the ground to give place to colossal palaces of ferro-concrete and marble and plate-glass. Motor-cars were growing more and more garish and glossy; the advertisements on the hoardings were more and more crudely colored. For whom was the show? For whom was all the outpouring and display of wealth? Hardly, thought René, for Mitcham Mews, that sink of the submerged and those who could only just hold their heads above water. He thought he could find the answer in the miles and miles of little houses like the house in Hog Lane, six rooms, attics, and cellars, constantly stretching out to the west and to the east; the unceasing expansion of mediocrity, a flooring of concrete, warranted fireproof, to keep the fantastic creations of wealth uncontaminated by the sources from which wealth sprang.

These were no general speculations. As he detached himself from the spectacle of London, and observed and brought humor and charity to bear on his observations, it became more and more clear to him that in this fantastic atmosphere he could not live. He was conscious of energy within himself. Upward from Mitcham Mews led to the mediocrity of the little houses, to those who lived in the dazzlement of the shows, forgetting life, forgetting death. Downward? There was no downward without sinking into the disgusting vices which repelled him. Beyond the mediocrity was only the show where everything was sterilized, thought castrated, art hermaphrodite. (Kilner knew too much of that.) At the same time, he felt that his present mode of life could not go on much longer. There would certainly be a move from Mitcham Mews, but he wanted it also to be a decision, not a mere change of houses.

Ann returned to her idea of trying a new country, and for a time he played with the idea. It had its seductions. The long voyage: the indolent life on board ship; the possibility as they slipped away from existence in England of shedding those elements in themselves which prevented the full sympathy desired by their affection; the settling in a country where class differences were not so acute. But, he felt rather than saw, that would mean isolation with Ann, and his feeling was against it. When she tried to discuss it with him, to get him to consider the respective merits of Canada or Australia, he was evasive in his replies and soon forced her to drop it. She would show a little disappointment, but would reassure herself by saying:

“There’s no place like old England,” or: “Sally Wade’s in Canada, and she does miss dear old London.”

He was so absorbed in his thoughts and his growing certainty that he did not notice how few of his evenings he spent with her. Because she was cheerful, he imagined that she must be finding her own amusement and satisfaction. He saw a great deal of Kilner, and when the painter was otherwise engaged, liked to be out in the streets on duty. Without knowing why, he had begun to desire to save money. Every shilling put by added to his sense of independence and potential freedom. He had commenced with a money-box, but finding Ann one day shaking coins out of it, he opened an account with the Post Office Savings Bank. He said nothing to her at the moment and was angry with himself for letting it pass, but it was impossible to reopen the subject later. He told himself that Mitcham Mews was no harbor of strict morals, that its inhabitants did more or less what they wanted to do, and therefore made it enjoyable for him to live among them. (That was the reason Kilner had given him for living among the very poor. They had the same liberty as the very rich, with none of their pretensions or false responsibilities.) He had dismissed the matter from his mind when it was brought home to him one night on his returning late from work.

Rita and her husband lived opposite Martin’s yard. As he came out of it, René was confronted by Ann leaving their house with a basin under her arm.

“I’ve been seeing Rita,” she said. “Joe’s been out of work since the coal strike, and he’s going on the drink. Her time’s coming, and someone’s got to do for her. It was for her I took the money.”

“I—I beg your pardon, Ann. Why didn’t you say so before?”

“It was the way you looked, Renny, dear. You do frighten me so.”

“I’m sorry. Can I do anything to help?”

“It may be to-morrow. Anyway, soon. Would you mind keeping Joe away? He’s not your sort, I know, but he must be kept away.”

“All right. He shall be kept away. Is she in for a bad time?”

“I’m afraid she is. Work’s been so skeery of Joe these times that it’s been all she’s been able to do to feed the children.”

“That’s bad. But she ought to have thought of herself.”

“Sometimes,” said Ann, “there isn’t room for everybody to be thought of. If you can get through a day or two it’s as much as you can manage without thinking what’s going to happen in a month’s time.”

“Don’t you ever look ahead, Ann?”

“No. What’s the good? Whenever I do, it only frightens me.”

“Are you frightened of anything now?”

“A little.”

They had reached their room and she had begun to wriggle out of her clothes.

“I don’t like your being frightened, my dear. There’s nothing can hurt us, and being hurt is no great thing.”

“All in the day’s work, eh? Oh, well. Some things. But, don’t you see, I think I’m going to be like Rita.”

“Ann!”

She looked at him queerly, almost maliciously.

“What did y’expect? Making me so fond of you?”

He said lamely:

“I—I hadn’t thought of it.”

She was stung into silence. Presently she crept into bed and lay with her face to the wall. In a tone of almost petulant disappointment she said at length:

“I fancied that was why you were putting by all that money. I was pleased about that, I was.”

René sat on gloomily in the outer room, listening, waiting for her to go to sleep. He was full of resentment against he knew not what. Her almost cynical practicality? Her acceptance without wonder of the new fact? As with the rest of his life, so now he was able to detach himself from her. She had been pleased with him because he had begun to make provision, as she thought, against the probable event. She had announced the event as one regretting the pleasantness of the past, almost as one diffidently presenting a bill—commercialization. Horribly their relationship was stripped of their individualities; they were just a man and a woman separated by that which they had together created. They had known kindness and fellowship, mutual forbearance and gratitude, and now they were despoiled of these good things. He was left impotent while she bowed to the disagreeable fact and was absorbed in it. And he began to see that they had long been borne toward this separation, and to escape from the pain of it he had turned to Kilner and the things of the mind, while she had comforted herself with the things of the flesh, the sufferings of the child-ridden Rita, who now seemed to him typical of the life of the mews, a creature crushed by circumstance, by responsibilities which she could not face, a house which she could not clean, children whom she could neither feed nor clothe, a husband whom she was unable to keep from deterioration. And to think that for one moment he had seen beauty in her, when she had appeared almost as a symbol of maternity, which must be—must it not?—always and invariably beautiful and to be worshiped. His idealism came crumbling down as he could not away with the knowledge that Ann had lost in beauty for him.

It was no revulsion, no withering of his feeling for her; rather it was that the brutal fact had a burning quality to peel away the trimmings from what he felt.

He found himself groping back in his life before Ann came into it. Nothing quite the same had happened to him before. The perishing of his young desire had left him in a whirling excitement which contained less torture than this obsession of cold realization. Bereft now of all that had made his life good and pleasant and amusing, he could only appreciate Ann and the experience that lay before her, appreciate, but not understand. That was too horrible. She had been so dear to him; such a good, kind, true, brave little soul. The resentment that he could not altogether escape he visited on Rita, as Ann had from the first visited hers on Kilner.

Why should Kilner on the one hand, and Rita on the other, draw them apart? Why had they created nothing that could be shared outside themselves? Why should that which they had created destroy that which they had valued in their life together? Why—and he came firmly back to his real obsession—why should they have so isolated themselves that the natural consequence of their love, if love it were, should be an intrusion, a shock greater than they could bear?

He listened again. Ann’s breathing seemed to tell that she was asleep. He crept in to her. She was awake. After what seemed an age, she said in a dry, weary voice:

“I keep trying to think what kind of a house you lived in.”

He described Hog Lane West.

“No. The other one, I mean.”

“Oh, that?” He told her it was like a little house in some Gardens not far away.

Then in the same dry, weary voice she said:

“I have been trying to think what she felt when you left her.”

“For God’s sake,” cried he, “for God’s sake keep that out of it.”

“I do try to, Renny, dear. But I can’t help thinking about her sometimes when you’re like that——”

“Don’t talk about it, Ann, don’t talk about it. Go to sleep.”

“Kiss me, then. I couldn’t go to sleep till you’d kissed me. Not to-night. It is all right, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. It’s all right, bless you.”

“I don’t want to be a drag on you, Renny, dear. It is a blessing we’re not married, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“That’s what I say. If it’s right it can’t stop, can it? If it’s wrong, it must.”

He kissed her to stop her talking. She sighed contentedly, slid her arm into his and pressed her face against his shoulder.

“Good night. We have been happy.”

And in two minutes she was asleep. He too was glad of the happiness they had. He was a little infected with her fatalism. If there were to be calamities, there had been stores of frank pleasure and true delight to draw upon in defense against them.

By killing off an imaginary grandmother, Ann procured a half-day off from her work and spent the afternoon with Rita, who was weak and dispirited by the great heat which filled the mews with stale air and brought old fumes and stenches from the stables. There had been thunder and storms, and the two youngest children were down with colic. Joe had disappeared with Click and Billy, who, to Rita’s great distress, had begun to seek her husband’s company and to give him money—at least she supposed they did, for he had nowhere else to get it. All day long Rita talked about a bed her mother had bought for the best bedroom just before she married again, a beautiful bed with four big brass knobs and sixteen little brass knobs, and a bit of brass making a pattern at the head. And it had a real eiderdown, and the springs were not like ordinary springs, but spirals. When she had exhausted the wonder of the bed she began an endless story of the aspidistra and Mr. ’Awkins who undertook to water it and forgot for a whole week, when the leaves one by one went yellow and brown. Into this story was woven all the romance that had ever crept into Rita’s life, and as a good deal had crept in through the unlikeliest corners, it was a long story. She kept it going, as it were, by killing off the leaves of the aspidistra to mark the chapters. Mr. ’Awkins was a wonderful man, but he never quite said it, and Joe wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Joe really did seem to be fond of her, “and mother could be awful.” Besides Joe did promise to make a home for her, and they did go and look at furniture on Saturdays, but always after they had looked at furniture they used to go to music-halls, so they never had the money to buy it. And then they got married.

For hours Ann sat listening to the woman’s voice droning on. The elder children had been taken charge of by neighbors. The others needed constant attention. Joe came home in the evening, merrily drunk. Ann met him at the door and told him he could not come in. He swore at her and vowed he would. She struggled with him. He was fuddled and uncertain on his legs, and she very quickly had him slithering down the stairs. He sat at the bottom and roared:

“Jezebubble! That’s what you are! Jezebubble! Throwing people down!”

Ann had gone to the window, and seeing René in the yard opposite, she called to him and told him to take Joe away and make him sober. René came running up, dragged Joe to his feet, lugged him into the yard, and held his head under the tap. Joe spluttered and cursed, and when he was released, stood up with the water streaming from his hair, eyes, and mouth. He showed fight. René caught him by the neck and threatened to turn on the tap again unless he showed himself amenable to reason.

Ann called:

“Take him away.”

René nodded, picked Joe up in his arms, and threw him on the floor of his car and drove him out far beyond Uxbridge into the country. There by a black pinewood they stopped. René got down and laughed, for Joe had picked himself up and was sitting perkily with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, with his hat on one side, pretending to be a lord.

“Aw! Chauffah!” he said. “Dwive me to Piccadilly Circus. I want to buy a box of matches.” Changing his tone, he added: “You don’t ’appen to ’ave a fag on yer, guvnor?”

René gave him a cigarette and a match, lit one himself, and sat by the side of the road.

“Was that a joy ride?” asked Joe.

“No charge,” replied René.

“I’ve spat in the car. Is there any charge for that?”

“I’ll smack your head if you do it again.”

Joe looked warily and solemnly at him, then deliberately spat on the floor of the car.

“That,” he said, “is to show I know you’re a gentleman, and what I thinks of yer.”

René dragged him out of the car, smacked his head, and flung him into the bracken.

“I’ll have the law on yer,” yelled Joe, trying to shout himself into a fury.

“Then you’ll have to walk home. Maybe that would sober you.”

“No ’arm, me lord, no ’arm. It’s looking for work, guvnor, that’s what it is. It makes you fuddled. ’Struth it does. Here am I with five children, doing my duty by my country, and I can’t get work. Five children. ‘Good!’ says you, being a gentleman and well provided for. ‘Who’s to support ’em?’ says I. ‘You,’ says you. ‘Let me work,’ says I. ‘There ain’t no work,’ says you. ‘There’s going to be work for as few as possible in this ’ere country,’ you says. ‘Chuck your flaming union,’ you says, ‘blackleg the bloody unionists,’ you says, ‘and there’ll be heaps of work at one farving per hour.’ ‘Five children,’ says I. ‘Good,’ says you. ‘They’ve got hungry little bellies,’ says I. ‘Have they?’ says you. ‘Let ’em come and watch the blokes coming to my dinner-party to-night.’” He had worked himself up to an excitement which he could not contain, and he burst into tears.

“’Struth is, sir,” he said presently, “I ain’t getting enough to eat, and you know how it is with my missus.”

“Ann Pidduck is looking after her,” said René, “and I promised to look after you.”

“Woffor did you take me out into the bloomin’ country?”

“I hardly know. One doesn’t worry about distance in the car. She said: ‘Take him away.’ So I took you away. I’m afraid I have rather a literal mind.”

“Well, it’s pretty here, ain’t it? I took my eldest into the country once. When he got back he said to his mother, he said: ‘There was parrots in all the trees, and as for cows there was more than one.’ ’E’d never seen any bird but sparrows and a parrot. I s’pose he thought anything bigger than a sparrow must be a parrot. What they’ll grow up like, Gawd knows, and He don’t care. It makes me sick to think of another one coming. I’d like to know what the ’Ell Gawd’s playing at making a man so that ’e ’as a great love o’ women and can’t get enough t’eat. Us workin’-men ought to be eunuchs, so we ought. If you got a spark o’ spirit in you it does you down every time. You can take me back now, guvnor. I’ll be good.”

He climbed up into the car, resumed his lordly attitude, lit a cigarette, and said:

“’Ome, and drive like ’Ell. I’ll stand the bally fines.”

The pathos of the man’s grotesque humor springing up through his misery moved René so much that he forgot his own perplexity and desired only to please him. He drove back full tilt, guessing that it was late for the “controls” to be manned, and they reached the yard just as the lamps in the mews were being lit. As they came out of the yard they saw a policeman standing at the door opposite. Joe put René between himself and the constable, and they went up to Ann’s room. There the electrician peeped out.

“I say,” he said, “I say. They’ve blabbed.”

“Blabbed! What do you mean? Who’s blabbed?”

“It’s Click and Billy I mean. They’d got stuff. I don’t know where they got it. They made me help get rid of it. I ’ad to get money somewheres. Click’s a Catholic, and he says stealing isn’t stealing if you’re starving. They must have been nabbed. I ain’t a thief, guvnor. I only helped get rid of the stuff. They said I could because I was known respectable. Respectability ain’t done me no good afore.”

“Keep quiet,” said René. “He’ll hear you. Perhaps he isn’t waiting for you.”

“’E ain’t moved. I know how they look when they’re on the cop. Devils! Sly devils! I seen ’em take Click afore now and old Bessie.”

“Be quiet, you fool. Sit down and have something to eat.”

He placed three cold sausages in front of Joe. They vanished. He produced a piece of ham. That was soon gnawed to the bone. Half a loaf of bread and a small tin of bloater paste soon followed, and Joe began to caress his stomach affectionately.

“Look here,” said René. “What will it mean if they get you?”

“First offender. I’d get off, all right. But the crooks ’ll never let me alone, and the police ’ll have me marked down as a man to nab if ever they want a ’spected person.”

“All right. You sit here. I’ll go and see how things are over there.”

The policeman eyed René as he went in.

“Want anything?”

“No, sir. No.”

“There’s nothing going on here, nothing unusual. Confinement.”

Ann heard his voice and came down to him. They walked up the mews. Rita was in a delirium. She kept reproaching Joe over and over again for not buying a fire-screen he had promised her. And then she seemed to be living over again in some scene of jealousy. Joe must not come near her. It might not be safe. René told her his news. Ann said:

“She guessed that. It’s that’s broken her up so. She thinks she isn’t a respectable woman any longer. I don’t know that it wouldn’t be best to let him be taken.”

“But doesn’t that mean that he’s done for? You know better than I.”

“You don’t get much of a chance.”

“Then we’ll do what we can. Tell the policeman he isn’t sleeping here to-night.”

“All right. All right. I don’t think I’ll be back till the morning, and then I’ll have to go to work. So good night, Renny, dear. It is good of you.”

They parted. He heard her tell the policeman how things were in the house, and that Joe would not be sleeping there that night, but at his mother’s off the Fulham Road. The policeman asked for the address, and she gave it him pat, and after a moment or two he rolled away. René gave him three minutes, then returned to Joe and told him what had happened, gave him a shilling for a doss, and asked him to meet him in the morning at the cab-rank in Lancaster Gate.

“If I pay your passage to Canada, will you go? You can get a start out there and have your family out after you. We’ll look after them.”

“Will I go?” cried Joe. “I’ve had enough of this ’ere blasted country. Will I go? D’you know that’s been in my mind ever since that there joy ride. I says to myself, I says, moving’s that easy. You been stuck still, Joe, my buck, that’s what’s been the matter with you.”

René kept cave while the poor devil slunk out of the mews, and then followed him, saw him mount a bus and be borne away eastward, standing up and waving his hand as long as he was in sight.

His passing left René stranded. He had been caught up in the eddy of that little drama, and then flung back into his solitude, and, though he was cheered by his activity, he was also depressed by the horrid grubbiness of the life that had been revealed to him; nothing in the world for Joe but the procuring of food, the bare satisfaction of desire; an amused fondness for his children. That horrible capacity for happiness in degradation.

He stood below the lighted window of Rita’s room. A moaning came out of it. A thin voice almost screaming:

“Oh, don’t, Joe, don’t!”

There were appalling silences. Then whisperings. A long silence that chilled him to the heart. At length the cry of the new-born child, a cry of pain. Then again silence, broken only by the sound of water and the clink of metal against crockery.

In that moment René became almost unbearably alive to the suffering of the woman, and to all suffering, and to his own.

IX TALK

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

IT takes an unconscionable long time to extort money from the Post Office Savings Bank, and René borrowed from his employer to pay Joe’s passage and the guarantee demanded by the Canadian immigration authorities. Joe could not thank him, but only, with tears in his eyes, shake him by the hand.

“You know,” he said, “I could never have gone if I’d once been in prison. That’s where they has you. If wishing could do it, you’ll have good luck. And if praying’s any good I don’t mind trying that, though I’m not much of a hand at it and out of practice.”

He gave René a crumpled dirty letter to Rita, and bade him tell her that his last thought was for her, and that when she came out he would be on the quay to meet her.

“I’ve told ’er in my letter it was you put a heart into me, guvnor. I’d been feeding on it that long it was nearly all eat away.”

At last the train moved—(René had taken him to the station with his few possessions, smuggled out under the very eyes of the policeman)—Joe leaped into his carriage and sang out:

“So long!”

“Good luck!” cried René, as he moved away through the crowd of tearful women and young men on the platform.

As he was leaving the station he met Kurt, just returned from a flying visit to Thrigsby. He explained that he had been called away on business or would have been round before to pay his promised visit.

“I told them at home I’d seen you. My mother turned on a face like a window-shutter—you know, the iron kind they have in Paris, and clank down in the small hours of the morning just to make sure no one shall sleep the night through. Funny old thing! I suppose she regards you as one dead. Silly thing to do, when I’d just told her you were very much alive. Linda was quite excited and started pumping up all sorts of emotions until I asked her how long it was since she had even thought of you. Then she stopped that game. She knows it isn’t any use with me. I once said to her, ‘My dear girl, if you really felt all the emotions you pretend to feel, you’d be dead in a week.’ I never could stand that sort of thing myself. She gets them out of books, you know, and really sometimes it is quite impressive, or would be, if it weren’t so disgustingly false. It is wonderful to feel things, but you can’t feel things all the time and be sane. No one can. One’s too busy. It’s beastly to make that sort of thing cheap as they do on the stage and in Linda’s mucky novels—Oh, she’s written another play, all about my mother this time. Well, after a bit she cooled down and I told her you were quite pleased with yourself, earning an humble but honest living. She wanted to know if you were alone. I said I didn’t know, but anyhow it wasn’t her affair. She agreed, and said that anything she might do wasn’t your affair either. Then she talked a great deal of nonsense about your being the New Man, with too much vitality and intellectual energy for the outworn institutions of a demoded society, and a lot more rot of that kind. The fact is, of course, that she prefers living without you and doesn’t want any fuss. The scandal had made her interesting to Thrigsby, and she can find all sorts of silly people there who want to be instructed in the art of being advanced, to think shocking things and to live without shocks of any kind. Linda’s shock is keeping quite a lot of people going. I told her I should see you again and she asked me to give you her love, and to say that she is quite happy and hopes you will go and see her play when it is acted in London by the Thrigsby Players. I say, you must have thought me a swine that day at Hendon. That was a Lord and a Lady. These people haven’t any manners, and one gets like them. I’m their particular pet just now. You should see me hobnobbing with Cabinet Ministers and theater managers. It is terrible how alike they are.”

“You’ll see a bit of difference if you come to Mitcham Mews,” said René.

“I’ll come to-night.”

“Good.”

Rita had come successfully through her ordeal, and she was in the dreaming bliss of having her baby by her side, with no other thought in her mind than the satisfaction of its contact, the blessed charge of its helpless little life, not yet, nor for a long time to come, separate from her own. Ann took René up to see her, and he gave her Joe’s letter and told her how pleased he had been to go, and how he was looking forward to her joining him. To account for his sudden disappearance they invented a tale of an offer of immediate work, conditional upon his sailing at once. The whole thing had been so sudden (they said) that there was no time for her to be told or for him to wait to see her. Did she believe them? She looked incredulously from one to the other, but, holding the letter tightly crumpled up in her hand, she decided at length that it was a good thing to believe, and sighed out her thankfulness. She had relations who would help her until Joe sent, and when she was well she would be able to work.

Ann had engaged old Bessie to come in during the day, and asked René if he would mind her spending all her evenings with Rita, and sometimes sleeping with her for the first few days. He was only too glad that she had found a task which could absorb her energies. He told her Kurt was coming, and asked if he might bring him over to see her. She had seen Kurt’s photograph in the paper and was quite fluttered.

“Oh, him!” she said. “Fancy you knowing him!”

He did not tell her how Kurt was related to him.

However, Kurt blurted it out before he had been with Ann five minutes. René looked sheepish.

“Come, now, Miss Ann,” laughed Kurt, “you didn’t expect him to have no one belonging to him or to keep him hidden away from us forever and ever. Because you are fond of him you don’t expect him to be utterly lost to all his friends, do you?”

“I didn’t know he had a friend like you, Mr. Brock, or I shouldn’t have dared to be fond of him—perhaps.”

“Is that a tribute to my personality or to my reputation.”

“Well,” said Ann, “you do brighten things up.”

“One for old Solemn!” said Kurt. “I hoped you’d have cured him.”

“Oh! I don’t want him to be cured. I don’t want him to be different.”

René’s vanity was bristling, but in the face of their good humor he could not let it appear. He envied Kurt his ease and the skill with which he gauged Ann’s humor to strike laughter out of her, so much so that he could not mind being the subject of it. Her laughter was affectionate.

They were in Rita’s room, and she lay gazing fascinated at Kurt’s brown face, with its merry eyes flashing blue light as he laughed and talked. The children had been told that the great flying man was coming. They had been staring at him with round eyes. At last one of them said:

“Did you fly here?”

“Not this time, my lad.”

“Oncet,” said the piping voice, “oncet we ’ad a bird-cage.”

“With a bird in it?”

“No. We kep’ a ball in it and marbles.”

“What happened to it?”

“Farver popped it. I seen an airyoplane oncet.”

“Did you? Where?”

“In ve Park. A little boy ’ad it.”

“Right ho! We’ll send you an airyoplane like that.”

The children looked at each other, scared at this promised good fortune. Then they embraced and rocked each other to and fro.

René and Kurt took their leave and passed out into the mews.

“Well?” said René. “A bit of difference?”

“I don’t know about that. But I’m always finding that where other folk see only riches or poverty or manners or personal tricks and habits, I see only people, and they are much the same everywhere. I nearly always like them. I’m not like you. I don’t expect anything much.”

“Do I?”

“Always. That’s what one loves about you. You were the only person who ever expected anything of me, and you gave me confidence to expect something of myself.”

“Then it’s not a bad thing?”

“It’s a splendid thing in a way, only you need to be able to love a lot of people to bear up against your disappointments. I can’t do that. I find them too amusing. I’m too easily pleased with everything they do, and, of course, I never stop to think.”

“But some things make you think.”

“What things?”

“Having no money is one of them.”

“I don’t know that the poor worry much about thinking, and lack of money is chronic with them.”

“Joe tried to think. The trouble was that he didn’t know how. It took him as far as the Trade Union, and left him there expecting it to do the rest. That’s the trouble all round. There has been thinking enough to make the union, but not enough to use it. The mere fact of union seems to swamp thought, even in the leaders. When they speak they are always trying to say not what they themselves think, but what they fancy the collective body of men wants them to think. The result is that events always move just a little too fast for them, and they are tied hand and foot and left to the mercy of the capitalists who can afford to wait longer to see how the cat is going to jump.”

“And the capitalists?”

“My friend Martin is the only one I know. But I imagine they are just the same. They expect their money to do their thinking for them. Money and crowds have just the same hypnotic effect. Do you remember on one of our tours when we were driving at night with the big headlight showing up the road fifty yards in front of us? It was a summer night, and as we flashed past trees the birds for a moment took us for the sun and began to wake up. It was amusing, the swish of the wind we made in the trees, the sudden singing of the birds, who sank to sleep again in the darkness we left behind us. And then as we drove along a woodland road a rabbit darted out into our light, and could not get out of it. If we drove slowly he ran slowly. If we put on pace to scare him away he kept ahead of us. If we stopped he couched down with his ears back and his eyes starting out of his head, absolutely confined by the walls of darkness round our light, and, I suppose, hypnotized by his own terror. It seems to me that human thought is a light like ours, and that individual men rush into it like the rabbit and cannot get out of it. It needs only a little plunge into the darkness to be back safe and happy in your own life, but they can’t take the plunge. We were able to turn the light off the rabbit at a cross-road to let him go, but nothing can take the light of human thought off men. The analogy is rather interesting, because the light of human thought is not borne by a horrible engine, but only seems so to those who are hypnotized by their own terror, and it seems normal to be scurrying away from it and to die—morally—of exhaustion. A few men, when they come into the light, are brave enough to step out of it to discover whence it comes. They find it kindled in themselves and, tracing it to its source, they find it in the will to live, and they reach the determination to carry it farther over the world they live in, in order to break down the walls of darkness.”

“That is rather beyond me,” said Kurt. “I’m no good at ideas. If you let me keep to people I’m all right. Some people do me good; other people make me feel cramped and choked. I’m not clever enough to know why. And there are lots of nice people with whom it is quite enough if one can make them laugh. They don’t seem to matter either way.”

“You see,” said René, “human thought doesn’t shine until it is energized with feeling and brought into contact with the divine power that keeps things going. That is what the scared people take for a remorseless, swift, destroying engine.”

“I remember now,” said Kurt, “that Linda said you were a mystic. That was when you were an economist, and I told her it was nonsense, because no mystic could read a page of Marshall—wasn’t that your fat book?”

“I don’t know whether it’s mysticism or not, but I can’t accept experience without sifting it. I suppose if I could do that I should still be in Thrigsby keeping up appearances.”

“And Linda would never have written her plays. That would have been a pity.”

“How absurd you are, Kurt. But you seem able to sift experience before it comes to you. You seem to be able to do the right thing at the right time.”

“I never worry about it. Life seems so simple to me. Directly it looks like being complicated, I switch off and try again. The only thing that worries me is that it looks horribly as though I should never marry. I fall in love all right and somehow that always complicates things, so then I fall out of love. I can’t love a complicated woman, and I haven’t met an uncomplicated one. They all want to feel more than they do. Play-acting, I call it.”

Kilner came in then. He greeted Kurt morosely, for his clothes showed that he came from the brilliant world, the object of the painter’s particular detestation, and Kurt’s manner might easily be taken for that affability which puts you at your ease and so disconcertingly leaves you there.

René produced beer and tobacco, made room for Kilner by the fireplace, and carried on the discussion:

“Kurt says women want to feel more than they do.”

“I don’t know about that,” replied Kilner, “but my experience is that they generally feel more than the occasion demands. They won’t leave anything to the future. I don’t think it means anything except that they are not particular. They get so precious little out of men that they grab what they can and let consequences take their chance. I don’t blame them either. They begin by taking love seriously, so seriously that they frighten men and make them run away. I keep clear of that, not because I’m frightened, but because I can’t find a woman who hasn’t been unbalanced by having had some idiot run away from her.”

“That’s like Kurt,” René threw in. “I expect it is because you both have a passion for what you are doing. It gives you a standard. Now I don’t pretend to have a passion for taxi-driving, and I suppose that is why I take seriously things that you two are able to ignore.”

“H’m,” growled Kilner, stretching his long legs. “Not much in that. We’re both keen on something which demands health and nerve and self-confidence, a steady hand and a clear head. We can’t afford to throw our minds and passions into the common stock. I starve. Your friend has the world at his feet. But we’re both outside the world, and have as little truck with it as possible.”

“Both,” said René, “outside the hypnotic circle.” He had to explain that to Kilner, who was excited by the idea.

“I never thought of that,” he said. “Yes, by Jove, it’s true. They are hypnotized, every man Jack of them, rich and poor alike. Nothing can shake it off except the individual will. Every artist has to go through that. And your light, my friend, is nothing but the vision of the artist. Only hypnotism, the absolute surrender of the will, could account for the horrible distortions that appear in what they call art, what they call morality, the organization of what they call society. I know what Fourmy means. The infernal thing is always cropping up in my work. When an artist has seen what he wants to paint, there is always the danger of his being hypnotized by it, and if he doesn’t shake free of that, he is almost bound to paint it badly, however skillful he may be. He may paint a picture that people will like, but he won’t create a work of art.”

“Isn’t it possible for a man to be hypnotized by art?” asked René.

“If he is, he won’t be an artist. I’ve seen students surrender their will one after the other to Raphael, Rembrandt, Manet, Cezanne, not to their love of truth and beauty, but to the masterful skill which their love gave them. If they had surrendered to their love their own wills would have been strengthened, not destroyed. That is always happening: a manner is imitated, mimicked over and over again until at last it is so vilely done, so remote from the original as to have no charm to lead even the stupidest little draughtsman to make a copy. Is it so in life? I don’t know. Much the same, perhaps. Weren’t there imitations of Byron for generations after him? Something vile the brutes could imitate. No one imitated Shelley.”

“Who was he?” asked Kurt.

Kilner stared at him aghast.

“A poet. The poet.”

“I suppose I ought to have known,” replied Kurt, chuckling at Kilner’s annoyance, “but you see I was brought up in a German household. There was a fellow called Schiller they used to talk about, and they named a club after him where they used to eat and drink.”

“And what,” asked Kilner, “made you take to flying?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I always loved engines and speed. And after all, you know, it is the only thing to do.”

“Kilner thinks painting is the only thing to do,” interjected René.

“I meant for me,” answered Kurt. “That may be all right for him. I hate using my brains. Things get muddled at once if I do. I love using my body so that every muscle is called into play, and I loathe illness. It’s torture to me to be just a little unwell. I get moments out of my work that make everything else seem nothing at all, just something to laugh at and be merry over.”

“Something like that is my life,” said Kilner. “A few moments, only they are not enough in themselves. I have to follow them up in spirit and express them.”

“And I,” said René, “am always hunting about for those moments in life and not finding them.”

“Ever known one?”

“No, but I’m absolutely certain they are there. I never knew what I was after until I met Kilner. I’m not certain that I know now. But I’ve escaped social hypnotism so far, and from what you tell me I seem to be less in danger of hypnotism by my own will than either of you.”

“I deny that,” cried Kilner angrily. “You are denying the supremacy of the artist. Just because you have dodged a few of the conventional social obligations, you think——”

“I’m not denying anything of the kind. I grant you the artist is supreme and his vision the most potent force in human thought, but the artist also must be a man and must live, or there’s an end of his vision. He must be prepared if necessary to live in the hypnotic circle, and he must be strong enough to assert his will in it.”

“That’s stupid,” said Kilner. “As if any of us could escape, as if that weren’t precisely what the artist does. Your friend here is the lucky one. He is doing a new thing, exercising a new faculty which is imperfectly developed, so that it is not yet prostituted and abused, as art, science, and love have been. He is still a wonder, even to fools. I who aspire to art, you who aspire to love, are to the world nothing but idiots who have not the nous to help themselves to the plunder and comfort ready to their hands. But you and I are braver than he, for we seek greater things. He is content with physical health and adventure. That is something. It is a higher aim than money and money’s worth. But you and I are definitely pledged to accept only the happiness we know to be true, and the sorrow to which our wills can consent.”

“I dunno,” said Kurt, rising, “but I daresay there’s a good deal to be said on the other side. I’m not so sure, though. I know lots of the other people, and they’ve never given me such an amusing evening. I haven’t had such a good time since I came to London, where everybody thinks of nothing but having a good time. I’ll come again. Anyhow, you’re not worrying about what other folk are thinking of you, and that’s the only thing I can’t stand. Good night.”

Kilner was too excited to go to bed, and he kept René up till three o’clock in the morning talking about a picture he was painting of God creating Eve out of Adam, who was to be shown in an attitude of surrender, though his body gave signs of a fearful agony. Yet was it Adam’s will to submit to any torture to attain the knowledge of the almighty joy of creation.

René was curious about the woman’s share in the operation, and was vaguely distressed to find that in Kilner’s intention Eve was to be no more than beautiful.

“But is she to have no share in creation and the joy of it?”

Kilner was pacing round the room. He waved his fists in the air.

“Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” he shouted. “Don’t you see that we have created her? Even if you drop the myth and take to evolution, don’t you see that woman has been nothing but the creature, the instrument of reproduction? Don’t you see that man fell in love with her, and with his love slowly humanized her, gave her intelligence, humor, charm?”

“Might it not be,” said René, “that woman was first, and evolved man to do the work so that she might reserve more energy for conception? And again, there seems no reason for imagining that either came first. The difference in sex is a great deal more superficial than is generally supposed. It must be. It is aggravated by environment and habit, training and physical processes, but it is not a fundamental difference.”

Kilner said:

“You may be right. You sometimes are. But for the purpose of my picture Eve must be stupidly beautiful, just beauty and nothing else. If you like I’ll paint another Adam and Eve when he has begun to love her, and through love has come to the desire of knowledge. But I’m afraid her eyes will still be stupid, and she will still think him rather a fool for desiring anything but her.”

X AN ENCOUNTER

Nous ne dépendons point des constitutions ni des chartes, mais des instincts et des mœurs.

INTELLECTUAL conversation is a very common vice among men who have been subjected to what is called education. The wages of it is commonly a brutal onslaught by the body upon the mind. The intellectual is subject to accesses of bestiality unknown to the manual laborer, who for that reason regards the cultured man with more amusement and contempt than respect and envy.

It was impossible for René to surrender to his exasperated senses. He was too certain of his goal for that, though he could not on any side perceive a way that should lead him to it.

Ann was devoting herself entirely to Rita and her family. She would emerge now and then to inspect him, and to make sure that he was not straying from the path of good sense. She scolded him roundly for his all-night sitting with Kilner—(she had seen the lighted window at two o’clock)—much as the other women in the mews rated their men for drinking or betting. Having delivered herself, she returned to her usual attitude of indulgence and affection, kissed him, tidied his hair and went back to her charges. That might have satisfied a navvy, but it did not satisfy René. He was still mentally inflamed with Kilner’s talk, and he wanted very much to know if Ann thought him a fool for desiring anything but her. He was fairly sure she did, but he wanted to be thoroughly, painfully sure. The old reaction, you perceive, from visionary enthusiasm to disgust.

His mood made him thoroughly, savagely approve of Mitcham Mews. It had character; not a nice character, still an appreciable individual quality. Almost all the other habitations he knew of in London were uniforms, disguises. Even the delicious little houses in Westminster were consciously Georgian or Queen Anne, part of an attitude. . . . He was wearying of it all. He had caught something of Kurt’s healthiness and desired to do something that contained adventure and risk, and the exercise of more than habitual skill. He hated being at the beck and call of any man or woman who signed to him, and sometimes he gave himself the pleasure of ignoring them if he did not like their looks. Once when he had been summoned by whistle to a house in Bayswater, and its door was opened to emit a large Jew and an expansive Gentile lady of pleasure bent on an evening’s snouting in the trough of the West End, he put his fingers to his nose, and drove off as hard as he could. That helped to put him on better terms with his rebellious physical existence. He had insulted it. That was something.

But he could not subdue his excitement. He found two poor little lovers in the Park one night, and took them out into the country free of charge. That squared the outrage on the Jew. It was an active step toward pure romance. The little lovers had occupied less and less space in the car as he brought them home under the moon, and his engine sang a droning bass to the song they were living.

And when he reached home he was brought hard up against the fact that he was Ann’s acknowledged lover, and that she was going to have a child by him. It had, he knew, nothing in common with the Jew, but also, he could not help feeling, it had lamentably little in common with the young lovers. It was a fact like the nose on his face, a part of himself, no getting away from it; a fact, however, that brought no illumination. The nose on his face, he thought, must have been once a brilliant discovery. It must have meant a revelation of noses that, among other marvels, there were such things.

There was some zest in the fantastic agility of his intelligence, and this kept him going.

One night as he was passing a glaring public-house in Chelsea, he thought he saw his father go in by the door of the bar parlor. He drew up, stopped his engine, and followed. Sure enough it was his father, aged a little, grayer, but more sprucely clad. Mr. Fourmy was already the center of a little group standing by the counter—painters, models, and men who looked like actors. He was talking away, exactly as he used to do in the Denmark, with the same result in laughter and free drinks. René ordered a Bass and took it to a table at the side, removed his peaked cap, and waited for his father to recognize him. This Mr. Fourmy did in a few minutes, nodded with perfect coolness, and went on with his talk. He kept it up for a few moments longer, “touched” one of his hearers for half-a-crown, and, that done, let the conversation flag, the group dissolve, and came over to his son.

They shook hands. René grinned as he saw his father’s amazement at his clothes.

“Well, I’m jiggered,” said Mr. Fourmy, “I was fair flummoxed when I saw your face. I didn’t notice your togs. I never thought you would come to this.”

“I shouldn’t have done any good in your profession, father.”

“So you’ve learned some sauce. That’s new.”

“I’ve learned a good many things, father, and unlearned more.”

“Have you learned what a rotten hole the world is?”

“No. I like it too much to think ill of it.”

“Then you haven’t had a really bad time. I hoped you’d have a filthy time. You needed it badly, to let some of the gas out of you.”

“It’s been bad enough,” said René. “And there’s worse ahead. Are you living in London?”

“I’ve been here some time. It’s a dung-heap. I shall go over to Paris. I’d rather die there than anywhere. There is French blood in us, I believe, and I never could stomach the English and their hypocritical ways. What did they say of Gladstone? ‘Plays with the ace up his sleeve, and pretends God put it there.’ That’s the English way. I like blackguards. I’m a blackguard myself, but I think God ought to be kept out of it. . . . You’re looking fit.”

“I’m fit enough. George told me you’d left. I’d like to know why. I don’t want to open old scores or inquire into your private affairs, but it seemed to me that my mother was very good to you when you came back.”

“Well—— It was the same old trouble. Religion. Marriage is none too easy, as you seem to have found. You can worry through if you play fair and fight through the emotional storms that threaten to drown you. Now it isn’t fair for a man to draw off his emotional disturbances in drink or money-making or gambling or flirtation; and it isn’t fair for a woman to draw off hers in religion. Women are devils at that. They go off to church and come back as cold as ice, with their hands full of little parcels of principles and precepts, all forgiveness and humility and submission and iron virtue. Some men can live with it. I can’t. That’s the whole story.”

“Thank you,” said René.

“Now, don’t think hardly of your mother. She was brought up to think all men horrible, and she never got over it. I was wild and idiotically affectionate, and couldn’t understand why she held back so. When I did understand, the mischief was done; she was hurt and scared, and kept you boys from me. Didn’t want you ever to be men—as if she could prevent it! She did try with me when I came back. Perhaps she’d seen and felt more than I thought. It wasn’t all church nonsense about accepting your husband, however loathsome he may be to you. Your going off like that set her back again, and back she went to her church. She thought it was all my doing, and perhaps it was.”

“No, no,” said René.

“I think it was. I ought to have seen that I wasn’t fit company for anyone I loved. Too far gone, I suppose, too far gone.”

“I’d like you to know that I’m glad it happened. It has saved me from going through life with my eyes shut. I’ve met good people and understood their goodness. And I’ve met miserable failures and seen how even they have some sweetness in their lives. And I owe it to you, father, that I have seen the wildness of life beneath the trumpery policing we call civilization, and now I feel that I shall never be blind to it.”

“That’s all right,” said his father, “if you don’t let the wildness break up your own self-control. That’s what happened to me. Queer how clever two men can be when they understand each other. Can you lend me half-a-sovereign, and then I’ll have enough to take me over to Paris?”

René gave his father ten shillings in silver, they shook hands, the old man patting the younger’s shoulder, and they quitted the bar parlor together.

As René was starting his engine, a lady came up and asked him to take her to an address in Holland Park. He did so. The lady looked at him curiously as she paid the fare, walked to the gate of the house, turned, hesitated, then came back.

“Excuse me,” she said, “you are so like someone I used to know. Aren’t you Mr. Fourmy?”

He looked at her, seemed to remember her, but could not place her, though he thought dimly of Scotland.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s my name.”

“Mine,” she said, “was Rachel Bentley. I’m married now. I recognized you at once. I was so interested coming along. I hope nothing has——”

“Oh, no,” said he, smiling, “I never had any money, you know. I drifted into this. I like it.”

“I only thought,” she said vaguely. “I mean— Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’m glad it isn’t that. Good-by.”

She seemed embarrassed by her own generous impulse, and it was a relief to him when she turned away. He waited for a moment to see if it was her own house. She opened the door with a key. He took note of the number, and, as he passed, of the cab-rank at the end of the road.

It was some time before he knew why he had done this, many hours before he was confronted with the image of Cathleen Bentley, in the woods of Scotland; Cathleen shaking the bracken from her hair, smiling up at him in the musing, perplexed happiness of her youth.

XI VISION

πολλάς δ’οδους ἐλθοντα ϕροντιδος πλανοις

THERE came a letter from Joe to say that he had obtained work with a good firm within a week of landing, and would soon be able to save or borrow enough to pay for his wife and children to join him. Rita, who had sunk into a despondent lethargy, was roused to excitement and began to thrill the children with tales of the adventure before them. She quickly recovered her health and energy, and wrested the control of her affairs from Ann, who did not like it. Feeling ran high, and things came to such a pass that the two women quarreled, and Rita so far forgot herself as to fling a sneer about marriage-lines at her friend. Ann came running to René for comfort, and tried to enrage him at the tale of such base ingratitude. He was not to be enraged, however, for he had been pondering the subject of gratitude and come to the conclusion that he who lays claim to it forfeits it. He tried to explain to Ann that she had overdone her kindness and should have known the moment to withdraw. She was dismayed.

“Of course,” she cried, “you would take her side against mine.”

“It isn’t a question of sides. You couldn’t expect her to let you go on running her house forever.”

“A shiftless little fool like that! I wouldn’t have minded if she’d only said ‘Thank you.’ Not a word did she say, but just flung you in my face. And now you say she’s right! I wish you’d never come, I do.”

“Ann, dear, don’t be silly.”

“I do wish it with all my heart and soul. You’ve made me be different. You’ve made me want to do good things, and then you’re nothing but a shadow slipping away. And, oh! it does hurt so.”

“Dear, dear Ann, don’t you see that Rita wanted to get rid of you and didn’t know how to without a quarrel?”

“Why should she want to get rid of me? Nice mess she’d have been in without you and me.”

“You go and see her to-morrow, and you’ll find her all right.”

“I don’t want to see her ever again, nasty ungrateful rubbish!”

“Then I’ll go and see her.”

“You won’t see me again if you do. I can up and off when I like. We’re not married, remember.”

“You leave me nothing to say. I’ve learned a good deal from the people in the mews, but not their way of quarreling.”

He had been irritated into the reproof and was sorry as soon as it was uttered. She was furious. Never before had she lost her temper with him, though they had had wordy passages. Now she turned and rent him:

“I don’t believe you’re a man at all, and I don’t believe you’ve got a heart. Squabble, you call it? I wish you would. You sit there with your fishy eyes staring at nothing, thinking, thinking, thinking. What’s the good of it all? Who’s right and who’s wrong? What’s it matter? If you loved me I’d be right whatever I did. Go on! Look at me! You don’t know me, don’t you? I’m the woman you’ve been living with these last two years. That’s who I am. If you’re sick of me, why don’t you say so? I’m no lady, thank God. I do know when I’m not wanted. I’m not going to stay with any man on God’s earth when he doesn’t want me. I’ve nearly left you time and time again, when you’ve looked at me like that.”

He brushed his hand across his eyes. He was feeling sick and dazed. She looked so ugly.

She went on:

“I’ve put up with things because of you, I have. You don’t know what people say, or care. You won’t never know what they say, you’re that blooming innocent, thinking everybody means well. I’ve put up with things, and been glad of ’em, and I’ve put up with things from you that I couldn’t have believed any woman would ever have to put up with——”

He said quietly:

“Have you done?”

She gasped at him, tried to stop, but because she had begun to enjoy her fury, she forced the note and screamed at him:

“You want a virgin saint to live with you, not a woman.”

Now she stopped, aghast at herself, horrified by the pain and disgust she had brought into his eyes. He could hardly speak, and jerked out:

“I didn’t know. . . . I didn’t know I’d done all that to you, Ann. I’m so terribly sorry. I seem to make a mess of things always.”

She had turned her back on him, and he knew that she was weeping. He had no desire to console her. He wished only to get away. Neither could break the heavy silence that followed the storm. He left her, though he could hardly move, so acute was his physical exhaustion. Groping his way along the wall of the mews, he counted the doors until he came to Kilner’s. The rooms were empty. He flung himself on the bed and lay chilled and racked, thinking only of Ann weeping, unmoved, detached, feeling neither sorrow nor hate. She had robbed him of all capacity of emotion, all power of thought. The storm had been so unlocked for. Rita was so remote from them. Why should Rita and anything she said or did have let loose upon them so violent a convulsion?

Ann weeping, Ann silent, so appallingly silent. Her silence weighed on him more than her words. Desire grew in him slowly and painfully, a desire to understand. He remembered exactly what he had said to her, and the words seemed meaningless. Her silence had killed them. They were genuine as he spoke them. Speaking them, he had surmounted his disgust and horror at her rage. Yet there was an even more burning fury in her silence. She was weeping; Ann, the gay little comrade, was weeping, and her tears had moved him not at all.

He began to think again, and to think with a new power. His body was cold and aching. His mind seemed to leave it. His mind played about Ann, the figure of Ann, weeping in silence. It played maliciously about her, stripped her, let down her hair, revealed her nakedly as woman, short-legged, wide-hipped, small-breasted, not so unlike a boy save for the excrescences and distortions created by her physical functions. That was too horrible. With an effort of will he brushed it aside, wrenched away from its fascination. Her individuality was restored to her and a little warmth crept into his vision of her. He was not sensible of her charm, and he was free of all lover’s memory of her attraction. His mind went probing into hers, saw how it delighted in impressions, but could make no store of them; how her delight had been increased by love and how she had used her love to aggravate her sensibility to the point of intoxication; how the fierce hunger for intoxication had desired to feed on him, and how her love for him had made her desire to bring him to the same condition. He saw her innocence; how free she was of deliberate purpose and set greed; how animal and yet how little sensual; and how she was snared in her own ignorance of love and its ways. Trapped she was and baffled. She could have been so happy with a mate as ignorant as herself, as willing to be snared. They could so easily have perished together, and sunk into resignation, she and such a mate. And inexorable nature had made her fruitful, to bring forth in her rage, when she would be spent with tearing at the meshes that had caught her. She would go on tearing, tearing, and he could spare her nothing. His strength could not sustain her. She desired only his weakness, to have him with her, caught and struggling; to have him by her side, spent and broken, to take comfort in the child.

He seemed to himself to be so near this fate, so nearly caught, that he cried out:

“I will not! I will not!”

For a moment the words startled him and shook him out of his stupor. Then his agony came back with a redoubled fury, and in the desperate hope of fighting it back he let words come tumbling out, hurling them from him:

“I will not be used for a creation in which I know no joy. I will not cloak brute creation with a seeming joy distilled by mind and time and custom. I will not be used up and broken and cover indecency with false decency, nor be comforted with the life that has stolen my own. My life shall give life, and for the giving have only the more to give. That which I have done with the spirit not awakened in me is done and no longer a part of me. That which the spirit does in me lives on forever and ever.”

Kilner found him lying in the darkness, staring with vacant eyes. He was terrified. René looked so deathly. He sat by his side and chafed his hands, and caressed him tenderly, soothed him, spoke to him in little staccato phrases, and went on with them until he seemed to listen: