BOOK TWO ANN PIDDUCK

BOOK TWO ANN PIDDUCK

. . . and make

Strange combinations out of common things

Like human babes in their brief innocence,

And we will search with looks and words of love

For hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last.

I ADVENTURE IN LONDON

Et quelle est la femme qui ne chercherait pas à vous rendre heureux!

HE awoke with a parched mouth and cramped limbs to find himself being shaken and to hear a voice saying:

“Hi, mate, time to wake up. Can’t leave you no longer.”

“Eh? Is this London?”

“Aye, and London it’s been these three hours past. You came in by the five-twenty-five, and I couldn’t get you to wake up, I couldn’t. You’re in the sidings.”

René shook himself and clambered down with the red-headed railway porter, and walked with him across the rails through several coaches, back to the station.

“Been ill, mate?”

“No. Why?”

“I never see such a face. Got more than your fair share of bones in it. It was that made me leave you.”

“I’m much obliged.”

The big clock announced five minutes past eight.

“No luggage?” asked the porter.

“No. No luggage.”

“Going to see friends?”

“No.”

“You’ll excuse me asking, but I don’t like letting you go alone with a face like that. D’you know London?”

“No.”

“You’ll want breakfast.”

René realized that he was hungry. The porter took him to a pull-up in a noisy street, filled with the clang of tramcars and the roar and rattle of heavy drays coming from the goods yard. They had coffee and ham and great hunks of bread.

“I never see such a sleeper,” said the porter.

“I was tired, I think.”

That struck the porter as a good joke. He kept on chuckling to himself and saying:

“Tired? I should think you was. Tired! He says he was tired!”

Presently he became solemn and leaned across the deal-topped table.

“I can’t make you out, mate. I don’t know if you’re a gent or what. You’re from the North. It’s easy to see that. What is it? Trouble?”

“Not exactly trouble. Nothing unusual, I mean. It’s been going on for a long time.”

“They’re not after you, then?”

“Oh, no. No one’s after me.”

The porter’s expression showed both disappointment and relief.

“Is it far to Putney?” asked René.

“It’s where the boat-race is,” said the porter. “I been there. An hour in a bus or train.”

“I mean—to walk. I’d like to walk. To see London. I’ve never seen it, you know.”

“It’d be Fulham Road, I fancy, though I don’t know those parts well. Friends at Putney?”

“Someone I know there.”

“I see. You’ll be going home soon. Return ticket?”

“No. I just wanted to see London. At least, there was a train going to London.”

“Ain’t lost your memory, have you, mate?”

“No,” said René. “No. I’ve lost interest in it, that’s all.”

“Money? Got any money?”

René thrust his hand into his pocket and produced three pounds and a few shillings.

“And no friends,” said the porter to himself. “Well, you are a corker, and no mistake! Set on going to Putney, are you?” René nodded. “Well, if you want a friend, come to me.” And he wrote down an address in Kentish Town which René pocketed without looking at it.

“But if I was you,” said the little man, “I should go back home, I should, really. See your friends and go back home. I had a brother once who got crossed in love. Took it something crool, he did, and walked out of the house one day after breakfast and went to Canada. We sent him the money to come home, and now he’s doing well in the drysalting. Good-by, mate, and good luck.”

He held out a grimy paw, and René clasped it warmly. It was, he felt, a good beginning.

For some time he sat in the pull-up watching the busy trade in victuals, the burly carters, weedy clerks and boys come in and gulp down their food and drink as though the beginning of the day’s work hardly left them time for their natural necessities. It was all oddly familiar and like enough to the life he had been accustomed to in the school and university among factories and warehouses. Only, as he looked out of the window, the light was different, softer and more generous. It was exciting and invited him out.

He paid the bill, returned to the station, and washed and had himself shaved. As he left the barber’s shop he saw a train loading up for its journey to Thrigsby, and he stayed and watched it go out for the pleasure of feeling that he was not in it. Then he turned briskly away for the adventure of the plunge into London.

A foreign city! He could hardly understand the language spoken by the people in the streets. Within a quarter of a mile he came on a great garden with trees and grass, and down a street he could see more trees. A keen air was blowing. It was invigorating and whipped up his blood. In Thrigsby, when the air was keen it was unpleasant and devastating. The boarding-houses and private hotels in the region of the station seemed to him very lordly houses. They had wide, handsome doors that were in themselves a welcome—a welcoming and no indifferent city. It seemed to him that the people in the streets were aware of each other. At least he was aware of them, and pleased with every kind of person. So many of them were amused, so many found it good to be walking the streets, and they had some mind and energy to spare from the business of the moment. Even the people in the sordid streets through which he passed had the air of bearing their squalor good-humoredly. No one was moody or grimly silent. And there was color. He knew the color of many country-sides, but always on entering the cities he had felt as though a dirty sponge had been passed over his vision. Certain streets seemed to be filled with a dancing, colored light. He was lured on from one to another, with no thought of time or direction. Some of the great thoroughfares were so familiar from pictures that he felt at home in them, and was queerly put out when they led on to places and views of which he had no recollection. Finding himself approaching a church as well known to him as the Collegiate Church in Thrigsby, he said to himself with a sudden thrill of almost awe: “This is the Strand!” And then down a street he caught sight of water. The river! He almost ran down toward it.

The tide was up, the river at its broadest. On the other side were great platforms surmounted with tall cranes that seemed higher than the highest steeple. Beyond were towers, chimneys, domes, standing out against the sky that so delighted and refreshed him. That sky and the water in the wide sweep of the river! Friendliness and power! The river seemed to bear on its broad back the bridges, the tall buildings, the bustling energy about them, the twin masses of the city built up on its flanks. And along the river with the tide came a lovely air, sweetening and restoring. That was indeed a welcome, and he felt that he had passed into another world and become its citizen. He felt no more the strain of the crisis through which he had passed. The years of unceasing labor that lay between his boyhood and this moment were wiped out. The current of his being flowed again. He was as eager as a boy, as ripe for adventure, weighed down only by the memory of the dark little house that had been his home, and that other house so full of gracious things, so empty of all that could justify their graciousness. And, like a boy, he lacked purpose. He had nothing but his fantastic desire to go to Putney, and he was reluctant to tear himself away from the fascination of the river. But the porter had said the boat-race was rowed at Putney and the river must be there also.

So he walked along the river past the Houses of Parliament. He had once made a cardboard replica of it as a child, and, remembering that, his mind was filled with other childish memories—illnesses, books, fights with George, games and exploits with other boys, next-door neighbors, the small girl at his first school who had cast a blight over his life by announcing that she was in love with him— Past the tall chimneys at Chelsea; and then, taking a wrong turning, he found himself in a desolate region, almost as desolate as any in Thrigsby but for the generous sky above it. And the two sides of little houses did not so dreadfully close in upon the street as they did in the mean quarters of the northern city. Nothing here was so cramping and destroying as there.

At length he came to Putney Bridge and crossed it into what looked like a holiday town, Southport, or Buxton, or Matlock. He asked a policeman the way to Putney.

“This is Putney.”

“I want Mr. Bentley’s house. It is called Roseneath.”

“Mr. Bentley. He’s dead. Six months ago.”

René asked to be directed to his house. The tidings he had received had made his memory of Mr. Bentley very clear—gruff, kindly, patronizing, a little pompous, conscious of being a success and “somebody.” He had his name printed very large on luggage labels, and the note-paper on which Cathleen used to write was crested, with something about Judex on the scroll beneath the crest. And Mrs. Bentley was always tired, and her husband used to keep everybody flying round to fetch and carry for her. But they had very nice ways, and their house in Scotland was always open, even if it was overfull of athletic young men, highly polished and oppressively clean.

When he came to the house, René found it empty. He was disappointed with its aspect. It was very like the Brocks’ house in Galt’s Park, must have been built about the same time; stucco with absurd Gothic windows; a square porch, rooms on either side of it. He was disappointed, for he had thought of the Bentleys living in a region remote and inaccessible, beyond anything he had ever known or could know. He remembered the agent’s description of his own house—“an eminently desirable family residence.” This house bore almost the same recommendation. The fantastic London that he had shaped in his mind began to fall away. It had something in common with Thrigsby, was connected with it by something more than the deep sleep in which he had been borne hither. He felt rather foolish standing there by the empty house, and saw with dismay how much more foolish he would have been if the house had been occupied and the Bentleys accessible. He had a sick fear as he saw how irresponsibly he had acted, and how separate his impulse had been from his will.

“All the same,” he said, “it is done. It is done. I thought I should always know what would happen to me, but this I did not know. It makes it easy for Linda. The Smallmans will help her to see how badly I have behaved. They will like saying it and explaining to all their friends. They will talk about all they did for me. I never wanted them to do anything. I never wanted— If I had been like George and gone into business? But I could not have stood that, either. It would have been over sooner. Other people stand things, worse things, too. Oh, well—I can’t.”

It gave him no pleasure to think that he was different from other people. Rather the reverse; it brought an acute pang of something like shame. He moved on. He lost himself in the polite streets of Putney with their little gardens, but came at last to another bridge. The sun was setting, and he stood and watched it weave a changing tapestry on the sky.

“So the days go,” he said. “I think I never noticed a day go before. There must have been something very wrong with me.”

That lightened his heart. To have confessed his failure was already in some sort to justify it, and though the cloud upon his mind had grown darker, he was sensible of a release of feeling. He could breathe again. He was no longer the cramped, huddled creature that he had been all day. He could rejoice as the sky grew dark and the stars came out and the glow of the great city went up into the sky. There were patches in the sky so lurid that they filled him with alarm that they must mean fire. He moved toward one of those lurid patches and found himself presently in a narrow thoroughfare crowded with men and women, youths and maidens. The street was streaked with light and darkness. Cheap bazaars were thronged; shops filled with automatic machines of entertainment were garishly lit; there were butchers’ and greengrocers’ shops open to the air, blazing with color under electric and naphtha lamps; there were stalls in the road, barrows of artificial flowers; white kinematograph houses; terra-cotta music-halls and theaters; crimson-tiled and green-brick public-houses; swarms of human beings, talking, laughing, singing, the laughter of excited girls. He shrank within himself from the harsh vitality of it all. He was filled with a dread of calling down some of the laughter upon himself. The road grew narrower, the wheeled traffic more congested; the yellow and red trams seemed to fill the street. Motor-cars, trams, carts, all moved slowly and cautiously. A little girl started to move across the road, her eyes fixed on someone or something she had seen on the other side. Another step and she would be under a motor-car. René moved to save her. At the same moment, from the other side, he saw a young woman dart out, catch the child up, fling her back, and rush on in her own impetus. She slipped in the tramline, and almost fell just within his reach. He caught her arm, pulled her up, and dragged both her and the child back to his own side of the road. The traffic moved on and no one seemed to have seen what had happened. The child saw her opportunity and dashed over in safety, leaving René and the young woman together.

“A near thing that,” said he.

“I think I’ve hurt my foot. I slipped on the tramline. They do stick up just here.”

“Can you walk?”

She tried, but twisted up her face with the pain of it.

“O-o-oh! Crimes! Let me hold on to you.”

He supported her, and she found that she could just hobble.

“Rotten luck!” she said. “I was going to a dance. Don’t you love dancing? Just like me, though; if there’s ever any trouble going, I get it. I shall have to go home now.”

“Is it far?”

“Not far. The busses go by. Any old bus from that corner.” They had come to a circus where many roads meet. “Mitcham Mews. Number six. Don’t you trouble. You just put me into the bus.”

“But I must see you home.”

“I ’spect you got someone waiting for you. ’Tain’t fair to spoil your fun.”

“This is much better fun than anything I can imagine doing!”

“’Tain’t my idea of fun, helping a lame duck over a stile. It’s good of you, anyway. Penny fare.”

They boarded a bus and she leaned down and prodded at her ankle to discover where and how much it hurt.

“It’s only ricked, I think,” she said. “It feels like your neck when your head goes gammy. I don’t think it’s a sprain.”

René was filled with admiration of her vivacious prettiness. She had an oval face; a dark complexion beautifully colored, ivory most delicately colored with crimson; wide-set eyes that were still merry in spite of the pain smoldering in them; a pouting mouth that, as she talked, showed perfect teeth, small and even brilliant, strong as an animal’s dark hair neatly arranged under a rather common hat. She had a necklet of imitation pearls round her soft throat. Her dress was neat, but just a little shabby. She laughed lightly, and her laughter lit up her face with a radiant happiness.

“What you might call being thrown together,” she said.

He could not but smile with her.

“I’m rather glad,” he answered. “Do you know that I hadn’t spoken to a soul but a railway porter and a policeman since early morning?”

“Reely,” said she. “I think I’d die if I couldn’t talk. Here’s where we get off. O-o-oh!”

She hung more heavily on his arm as they descended. They stood for a moment to watch the bus jolt back into its top gear and go roaring up the wide and almost empty street.

“It’s not far.”

They moved slowly for some fifty yards, past empty shops, until they came to an archway plastered on either side with the bills of local music-halls, and lit with an old gas-jet. Through the archway they turned and came to a dark place, very quiet, with long low buildings on either side of it, and a great litter of paper and refuse on the pavement, and handcarts and vans uptilted. The ground floors of the buildings were all taken up with doors, the first floors with little windows, in some of which were flower-boxes and bird-cages and hanging ferns. One or two of the windows were lit up. From the other end, far up, came the glaring lights of a motor-car. It stopped, and they could hear the purr of its sweetly running engine.

“That’s Mr. Ripley,” said the young woman. “He’s often out at night. He’s a oner, he is. Down to Brighton and back and all that, you know.”

René did not know, but he was pleased and excited. London had ceased to be a spectacle to him. He had been drawn into an adventure, taken to a place where people lived—and a very strange place—the friendliest of hands was on his arm, the cheeriest of voices ringing in his ears.

II MITCHAM MEWS

Do not her dark eyes tell thee thou art not despised? The Heaven’s messenger! All Heaven’s blessings be hers.

“I’M sorry,” she said, “but you’ll have to help me upstairs. Wasn’t I a fool to go and get tripped up like that?—O-o-h! Hercules!”

René took her in his arms and carried her up the narrow little stairs. She opened the door and asked him to come in and have a cup of tea. After she had put the kettle on and lit the gas she sat and took a long look at him.

“I like you,” she said. “And I suppose I shan’t see you again. That’s always the way. The people you like best you see only once, or in the train, or going by in a bus. Is it far where you live?”

“I don’t know where I live.”

“Go on. I’m not that sort.”

“It’s true. I’ve only just come to London. This morning.”

“Leave your things at the station?”

“Things? No, I didn’t bring any.”

“Well! I never!”

She shrugged her amazement away, his adventures being no business of hers.

After she had made the tea she removed her shoes and stockings and examined her ankle. It was inflamed and slightly swollen. She made him rub it, giving little gasps as he touched or wrenched the soreness.

“’Tisn’t a sprain? You don’t think it’s a sprain? I don’t care as long as it isn’t a sprain.”

“No, I shouldn’t think it’s a sprain; but you’d better ask someone else.”

“Are you Scotch?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“You talk funny. I say arsk.”

“My home’s up north.”

“Home. Father and mother?”

“Well—no. A wife and all that.”

“O-o-h! Married?”

She looked unhappy and uncomfortable for a moment. Then she said:

“I shouldn’t have thought it. You look so young. What did you do?”

“Lectured and took pupils at the university.”

“College? I know. There’s a big school just round here. I suppose it’s something like that. I seen the teachers. Half-baked they look, some of them. Was that it?”

“I don’t know what it was. Things came to a head suddenly. I was taken by surprise. I think it will take me some time to realize quite what has happened.”

She asked his name. He gave it and she hers, Ann Pidduck, and she worked in a factory, pickles and condiments, at the packing, putting wooden boxes together with a machine that drove in four nails at a time. Once she had been ill and sent away and taught the artificial flowers, and she did that too, in her spare time, for some hat-shops in the High Street, and for one or two ladies she knew. She used to live at home with her mother, who had turned religious and couldn’t put up with a bit of fun. And she had a friend who lived in these rooms when there were still horses in the mews, but the friend had gone out to Canada on a farm, “where you get married at once if you’re anything like.” She broke off her story:

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you can’t just sit and look at London till it begins to look at you.”

“No.”

“You look as if you’d like to sit there forever and ever. Oh, you do look tired, poor thing! But keep awake a little, there’s a dear. I must know what I’m going to do with you.”

He could hardly keep his attention fixed on what she was saying, but he fastened his eyes on her to make her understand that he was listening.

“You don’t want to go home? No?”

He shook his head.

“Popped the lid on it, have you?”

He nodded.

“Got any money?”

“In a bank.”

“All right. You’ll want clothes and things. You can write. Only I want to know; it’s nothing I shouldn’t like? Is it?”

“No.”

“I don’t want you to tell me, but I wouldn’t like to think you’d done something you’d be sorry for. . . . You haven’t drunk your tea. I say, you haven’t drunk your tea. Asleep. I’m off. Good night.”

And she limped away into the inner room.

When he awoke the next day he remembered that she had come to him in the morning, shaken him out of his deep sleep, and made him understand that he could have her bed, sent him staggering toward it, and then, as he sank back into unconsciousness, he remembered hearing the door slam.

She had laid breakfast for him, tea, bread and butter, and an egg lying ready to be boiled in a saucepan. He was at first petulant at her absence, but shook himself up enough to see that he was not in a position to feel any such thing, and to be amazed at his own acquiescence in the unexpected. It was somehow disreputable, this discovery of himself in a strange room after two nights spent in his clothes. He had not even removed his boots. His gratitude to Ann Pidduck was appreciably lessened as he remembered that she had not thought to take them off for him. To put a man in her bed with his boots on! That was, to say the least of it, distasteful. It was sufficiently against the grain of his physical and mental habits to send his thoughts flying back to the life he had left, but they were caught in the mists of the excitement and pain through which he had passed, and he relapsed into an insensate pondering, forgot his breakfast, his surroundings, and sat unheeding through the day, until Ann returned in the evening. She brought flowers.

“Well, of all the——” she cried. “I did think you’d have cleared away. Why, you haven’t touched your breakfast. Haven’t you been out?”

He had not exactly forgotten her. Indeed, he had been awaiting her coming, but now he was puzzled because her return was so expected, and it ought to have been unexpected. He felt injured, that he had been cheated, that things on this side of his crisis were too much like things on the other side: a woman, habit, meals, interest in his appetite.

“Wake up, stoopid,” said Ann. “You’ll be wasting off like the niggers in Africa if you don’t wake up. You can’t go sleeping on forever.”

“Can’t I?”

“Well, you can, of course, but if you do, I’ll be thinking you’re a case. You’re not a case, are you? You weren’t last night.”

She spoke as though to be called a case was the horridest of insults, and he took it as such and roused himself not to deserve it.

“That’s better,” she said. “Nothing to eat all day.”

“No. Nothing.”

She pondered that.

“I expect your stomach knows best. Now, then, stir yourself. You got to write home.”

She gave him writing materials and he drew up to the table and sat staring at the blank sheet of paper. He took pen in hand, but could not write, could not concentrate his will even that much.

“What am I to say?” he asked.

“Don’t you know?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m blowed! If you aren’t the funniest. . . . It’s to your wife! Don’t you know what to say to your wife?”

He wrote:

“Dear Linda——”

Then he thought of Linda in a friendly, distant fashion, as someone charming and taking whom he had known, of whom it was pleasant to think.

“Dear Linda, Linda Brock, Lin——”

Ann saw his hesitation, and suggested:

“You want your clothes.”

He wrote down:

“I want my clothes. I don’t think I want my books. You can sell the car. You gave me a nice picture once by some German. I think I should like you to send that. I have been walking about London. It is very wonderful. A railway porter was nice to me, and there are other friendly people.”

He stopped. Ann said:

“The address is 6 Mitcham Mews, West Kensington.”

He wrote that down. There was something else he wanted to say, but he could not fix in his mind a sufficient image of Linda to be able to write to her. So he gave it up presently and only added: “That’s all,” and his signature.

The letter was addressed and stamped, and Ann, still limping, took it to the post.

When she returned, she said:

“I’ve fixed you up. You’re to sleep with Jimmy at No. 10 until your things come, and then we’ll begin to think. You’re not much use to anybody now, are you?”

“No,” said he. Then he began to stammer out an apology.

“Silly,” said Ann. “Just a lost boy, that’s what you are. Lucky for you it was me and not the police found you. They’d have sent you back where you came from.” She saw that it was useless to joke with René and soon dropped her bantering tone. She took him for a walk round the houses, and was delighted when he remembered that he must have a clean collar and a toothbrush; a return to grace, or sense.

“Oh! I’d be sorry now if it wasn’t true, and you went back.”

“I shan’t go back.”

Her question, the necessity of responding to her spontaneity, brought back in a sudden flood his will, and he had a quick pleasure in feeling the air upon his face and seeing the evening color of the streets.

“No. I shan’t go back. People can’t go back. But my father went back.”

“Why did you say that?”

“What did I say?”

“‘But my father went back.’”

“Did I? I didn’t know I said that. I didn’t know I even thought of him.”

“I know,” said Ann. “It’s like suddenly finding yourself talking aloud. And don’t you feel a fool if there’s anybody listening?”

They bought collar, toothbrush, pajamas, and a red sausage for supper. With these they returned to Mitcham Mews and had to wait up until Jimmy at No. 10 turned up. He did so about one o’clock, a strange figure strutting up the mews, beaming all over his face, and humming:

He had on a mortar-board cap, a white collar reaching up to his ears, an enormous black bow tie, a red satin waistcoat hung with chains, and his face was blacked except for one eye and a quarter of an inch all round his mouth. He carried a banjo. As he saw Ann he drew his hand across the strings and croaked out in a hoarse voice:

“Give us a kiss, old dear, I’m that hellish dry.”

“Oh, go on. You got to behave yourself now, Jimmy, now you got a lodger.”

“Like old times,” said Jimmy. “Ma had lodgers. What Ma didn’t know about lodgers——”

“Give it a rest,” said Ann. “Do keep off the comic for a bit. Mr. Fourmy wants to get to bed. So do I, and you’ll have the neighbors up, the way voices go ringing up the mews. Good night.”

She turned away.

“Good night, old gal,” said Jimmy, and he led René up the stairs of No. 10. “Good sort, that gal. Likes her bit o’ fun same as any gal, but she’s a tiddler, she is. Independent! I don’t fink. Gals look arter theirselves nowadays. Cos why? Cos they’re three to one. We don’t go round, us men. What a awful thought! There’s your bed, Mr. —— What’s your name? ’Ardly a gent’s bed, but you can lie on it, and what more can be said of any bed?”

He went into the inner room and began undressing, talking all the while, explaining that minstrelsy was only one of his professions, that he had had a rotten day, not a smile in the world; that he wouldn’t try again for a week, not if he starved; that Mr. Fourmy must be prepared for a shock when he saw him without his black, as it made such a difference, and that there was a silver lining to every cloud. He got into bed without removing his black, for René heard no sound of water, and talked himself to sleep. . . . René lay sleepless, this third night of his adventure, and rejoiced as one who had awakened from a long and painful dream. Jimmy amused him, Ann amused him, and all amusement was new to him.

Jimmy woke up talking, ran out in nightshirt and trousers, and returned with a jug of beer and a loaf of bread. That was breakfast. He sat on René’s bed and they consumed their fare together.

“Gardening to-day,” said Jimmy. “Ladies all want their gardens dug up these days. I got two or three gardens. They call me Gardener, though I ain’t no blooming gardener. ‘D’you think sweet peas will do in the smoke, gardener?’ they say. I dunno, but I sticks ’em all in. They gets it all out of a book, and what’s good enough for them is good enough for me. Gardener! Well, here’s luck!”

And René said: “Here’s luck!”

When he was washed, Jimmy appeared as a sandy-haired man with a fuchsia-colored face, fattish, shapeless, with little twinkling, blinking eyes. Round and ball-like his head was, round and ball-like his body, and he bounced in all his movements. He was grotesque, but not so grotesque as the idea René had of him, the idea which haunted him as he sat alone in the scantily-furnished room, with no desire to go out or to claim with the world any relationship but those which chance had thrown his way, with Ann and the minstrel-gardener. He spent many hours gazing out of the window at the children playing in the litter and adding to it. There were swarms of children; little girls in charge of babies, not so very much smaller than themselves; boys tirelessly passing from one game to another, stopping only when a car came up the mews or was brought out to be sluiced down or oiled. There were one or two men who sat all day as listless as himself. They smoked, chewed straws, occasionally talked, disappeared at intervals round the corner, but returned to smoke, chew straws, and talk occasionally. They were unconcerned, inattentive, and unmoved. René saw one of them earn a coin of some sort by holding a tool for a chauffeur while he groped in his engine. There were women who sat in the windows for hours together, gazing out with unseeing eyes; other women who stood in the doors and talked. One young woman in the evening came and stood in a doorway with a baby in her arms. The light had grown very soft. It fell upon her, and surrounded her with an atmosphere that gave her beauty. René’s eyes rested on her gladly, but without conscious appreciation. Then, very slowly, he began to see something that appealed to him and accounted for her fascination: the line of her body drooping under the weight of the child in her arms, her whole body one unconscious, comforting caress of protection. While she stood there René saw nothing else, and he watched her until the light faded and she disappeared, slipped away like a vision, into the darkness. Somehow he felt that his day had not been in vain.

Ann came to inspect his quarters and to take him out. He was very happy to see her, and she seemed to feel it, for she said:

“I knew you’d be better to-day. A good night’s rest. That’s what you wanted. But I was afraid Jimmy would keep you up with his nonsense.”

“He made me laugh,” said René.

She gave a little crow of pleasure:

“Good old Jimmy!” she cried.

Then she asked him had he seen anyone that day, and he described some of the people he had seen. As he described she told histories, so that presently for René Mitcham Mews seemed a place bursting with human energy, passions, disasters, jokes, follies, and frailties—just the sort of place he had been seeking. There was Old Lunt, who sold ballads and wrote letters for the people who had never learned to write; there was Maggie, who went out as a midwife to keep the families of her two daughters; Bellfield the furniture-remover, who had a strange young man come to see him sometimes, who was like no one else in the world; Mr. Martin, who used to keep the livery at the end of the mews and had now gone in for taxicabs; Fat Bessie, who went out charring and had an idiot son to whom her whole life was devoted; Billy and Click, who were wrong ’uns, dirty wrong ’uns, but too clever to be caught, though they would be one day.

“A bright lot,” said Ann. “And then, of course, there’s me—and you. They’ll laugh at you at first. They laugh at everything and everybody new. But you mustn’t mind that. They’ll borrow money from you, but don’t you never lend them more than sixpence, if it’s Maggie or Bessie; twopence if it’s any of the men.”

“And who,” asked René, “is the girl with the baby?”

“Oh, that’s Rita. Baby? She’s got four, and another coming. She’s all right. Bit washed out with it. Makes her stupid and sly. But she’s all right, and Joe’s a good sort. One o’ them as is always in and out of work. I dunno why. I think he’s the sort as can’t work with a beast above him. ’Lectrician. If you want a feller to talk, he’s the one.”

“I think your talk’s about as good as I could have, Ann.”

Her face lighted up.

“Is it? I am glad. Ooh! It is nice to have you call me that. D’you know, I couldn’t stop thinking of you all day long. And it didn’t stop me working neither. I did best day I’ve done for a long time.”

“And all day long I looked out of the window.”

III MR. MARTIN

The innocencie that is in me is a kinde of simple-plaine innocencie without vigor or art.

THE next morning brought a letter from Professor Smallman:

“MY DEAR FOURMY,—My first impulse was to come down and implore you to return, to think of your career, or, if you are incapable of doing that, of us, to whom your career and, I may say, your happiness, are things of some moment. Linda forbade me to do that. She is well, but shows signs of strain. Frankly, I can understand neither of you. Bitterness, grievances keep men and women apart, but neither of these is in her. She alarms me. She seems to me to be grappling with an emotional situation with her intellect. That seems to me to be dangerous. She said of you: ‘His intellect only comes into play when he is emotionally sure,’ and gave me that, which I do not pretend to understand, as a reason for letting you go your way. I cannot do that without protest. She says: ‘Men and women have the right to adjust their own difficulties and repair their own mistakes without reference to outside opinion, or, indeed, outside affection.’ I cannot agree. My feeling is all against it. When a man and woman marry, they create a social entity which they are not entitled to destroy without consulting society. That is putting it at its very lowest, without thinking for a moment of the spiritual entity which marriage creates. You two seem to have agreed to disregard that——”

René read no more. The old exasperation that the well-meaning Smallman had roused in him surged through him now, and he took pen and paper and wrote:

“MY DEAR, GOOD, KINDLY IDIOT,—When no spiritual entity is created, then no social entity is created; nothing is created but an amorphous relationship which is hostile to society, and such relationships it is the duty of decent people to avoid and to destroy. Nothing is created, and if by good luck the calamity of having children is averted, then there is nothing to destroy; then those who are apart in fact are better also apart in appearance.”

So, with a startling suddenness he was driven to a conclusion, and knew that, come what might, he would abide by it. What Smallman had said of Linda strengthened him, gave him a clearer idea of her than he had ever had, an idea, moreover, in which with heart and mind he could rejoice. There was fight in her, too.

He took up the Professor’s letter once more. It was rather a good letter, ably setting out everything to be considered, the various interests that would be injured—relations, friends, the university, the little community of cultured persons who would be delivered up to coarse, commercial Thrigsby and its tongues. Clearly Smallman’s dread was lest all these interests should be drawn down in the wreck of the young couple’s marriage, and René could shudder and sympathize at the suffering and distress he might be causing. His resolution weakened a little until he thought of Linda, and then he said:

“But we are saving ourselves. The marriage goes to hell or we do. They can’t have both.”

Smallman’s letter ended with a sentence worth the whole of the rest. It was as though he had written himself into something near imaginative perception and true friendship:

“But, my dear fellow, if you are resolved to continue in this blind and cruel folly, I can only pray and hope that the tragic trial it must be may make a man of you. Though you may be lost to us, I will pray, I believe in you enough to think, that you will not be altogether lost.”

René tore up his first indignant note, and wrote another, saying how much he appreciated the friendship and affection, how it had become impossible to turn back, and how it pleased him to know that between himself and those who had been his friends there would be the separation of circumstance, not that of enmity and bitterness.

This done, he posted his reply and wired to his bank in Thrigsby to find out how much money he possessed.

He received the answer later when he was with Ann at tea: Fifty-five pounds.

“Je-rusalem!” she cried.

“I spent very little,” he explained, “and my wife had seven hundred a year.”

“Seven hundred!” She was scared. “Seven hundred! And you chucked that to come and live in Mitcham Mews! Well, no wonder they say the world’s going balmy.”

She was both relieved and awed by his vast wealth, and allowed him to take her to a music-hall, where her pleasure brimmed over so that he could share it.

The fifty-five pounds changed her attitude toward him somewhat, made her more sure of him, relieved her, perhaps, of anxiety. She lost the nervous discomfort that had shown itself in deference toward him, and she could now consider him as a practical proposition and no longer as the delightful but alarming perplexity he had been. She had time to breathe, to let things go their own way, until it became necessary to do something. She asked him questions about his old life to discover any talent or capacity that might be turned to account.

“If the worst comes to the worst,” she said, “I could teach you the paper flowers. You could do a lot in the daytime, and I’m sure we could sell most of them.”

He was quite prepared to make paper flowers. He was so fascinated by her capacity for the rough business of living and for extracting enjoyment out of almost everything she touched, that he was her admiring pupil, to be and do anything she might expect.

At the music-hall a comedian had made the audience scream with laughter by his antic burlesque of a motorist. René was amused, but never smiled. Ann turned to him in some distress and said:

“Don’t you think it’s funny?”

She had laughed till the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“It’s quite funny, but so old-fashioned. Cars don’t break down like that now. I have driven hundreds of miles and never been stopped on the road.”

“Oh, did you drive a car?”

“Yes. A little one.”

“Then we’ll go and see Mr. Martin.”

And with this suggestion also he complied.

At the other end the mews were approached by a wide street flanked by little houses which were let off in flats and rooms; two flats of four rooms in each house. Mr. Martin lived in the last house, had always lived there since the houses were built, because it was next to his livery stables and convenient, for he had so much flesh to carry that he carried it as little as possible. He rose early in the morning and rolled into the glass office in his yard, where there were still two horses, a victoria, and a closed carriage, which he kept, partly because he could not bear to be without a horse, and partly because he still had some small business with old ladies and gentlemen of his former connection who disliked motors, or could not conceive of ceremonious visiting except in a horse-drawn vehicle. Besides, he had three taxicabs, and had drifted into a trade in accessories and sundries with the chauffeurs in the mews, the nearest garage being half a mile away and beyond their walking distance. He knew everyone in the mews, and everyone liked him, and as he sat in his office all day long he had a succession of visitors. A groom and a boy composed his staff, and the boy was mostly away on errands for Mr. Martin’s housekeeping, because he would not admit any woman to his house. Such cleaning as it got was done by the groom. Not that Martin disliked women; he was fond of them, but he was afraid of them.

“Let ’em set foot in your house,” he used to say, “and they’ll stay. Once let ’em start doing for you and they do for you altogether.”

(He had been married to an extraordinarily capable woman and could not endure a sloven.)

Ann he had known since she was a child, when he had caught her in bravado stealing a horseshoe “for luck” out of his yard. And he had carried her and her booty into his house to show his wife the little girl who was braver than the boys who had egged her on to do it; for the boys had scuttled away on his approach. Then his wife had tied the horseshoe up with a pink ribbon and sent proud Ann away with it and a halfpenny, and permission to visit the yard whenever she liked. And when Mrs. Martin died and for a whole week the fat man sat in his house and mourned, Ann was the first to visit him and bring him out of the lethargy that had come upon him. Later, when the livery business went into a galloping consumption, it was in talk with Ann that Mr. Martin plucked up his energy to use his yard, of which he possessed the freehold, for a taxicab business.

She had told him about René, who received a warm welcome when she took him into the office one evening. The very geniality of his reception made René shy, and the old fellow put him to such a shrewd scrutiny that he felt he was being weighed up and measured in his worthiness of friendship with Ann.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” wheezed Mr. Martin. “Any friend of hers is a friend of mine.” Then he came to business. He knew nothing of motor-cars himself, but the cab business needed likely young fellers, different kind of feller from ’orses; they needed ’ands and a heart to understand, something special, an inborn gift. “Lookin’ at you, I should say you didn’t ’ave it. But motors, well, that’s a thing you can learn. A motor can’t take a dislike to you same as a ’orse, and, likewise, a motor can’t take a fancy to you and work ’is ’eart out for you, same as a ’orse. I’ve ’ad ’orses, if you’ll believe me, as it’s been a honor to drive, and I’ve never ’ad a ’orse as could abide Mrs. Martin, God bless ’er! It was a great grief to me, that was.”

René had been primed with the wonders of Mrs. Martin and Ann had told him the story of the horseshoe, and he was able to sympathize and show his sympathy. He set his case before Mr. Martin.

“’Tain’t many men,” said the livery-keeper, “as turns from books to work. ’Tain’t many as can. I seen many a good man go wrong through books—discontented, uppish, faddy, nothin’ good enough. But they was mostly too old or middle-aged. When a man gets idees, there’s nothin’ to be done with him. That’s my experience, and I been sitting here these forty years. But perhaps you’re young enough.”

“Young enough to try, anyhow,” said René, and that brought the old man back to the affair of the moment. He had a new car on order, and when it arrived it would be given to Casey, and then René could have Casey’s machine, a Renault. In the meantime, it would be necessary for him to study up the knowledge of London preparatory to taking out his license. Casey would tell him all about that, and if he liked he could come into the office and help with the books and the accessories and earn fifteen shillings a week. He closed with that, and arranged to begin the next day, coming very early in the morning so that he could meet Casey.

“I do hope you’ll like it,” said Ann, as they walked away.

“I’m sure I shall,” said he. “I like the old fellow, and I must do something, and that’s better than blacking my face and gardening.”

She laughed.

“It does seem queer, after all your book-learning.”

“When I look back on it, my dear Ann, I can only remember reading one book with pleasure after I was a child and did everything with pleasure.”

“What book was that?”

“It was an anthology. Something like this was in it:

“That’s pretty,” said Ann Pidduck. “There are pretty things in books, though I never read them.”

Said he:

“I never had the feeling of it until now. I think something went wrong with me that I couldn’t feel.”

“But you must have, to suffer like you did and run away.”

“I’m beginning to think that I ran away because I couldn’t feel, but only melt into a sort of exasperated heat.”

“But that’s like when you lie awake when you’re very young and fancy no one wants you, and simply long for someone to want you very much. Oh, you do make me go on.”

“I’m glad you do, Ann. I’m glad you do.”

“I dunno——” she seemed to protest.

“You must let me say that because I never had such a friend as you.”

“Oh! Oh! The world seems all upside down. I oughtn’t to. I oughtn’t to be friends, because you are different. You know you are. It isn’t the same. It isn’t like having a bit o’ fun, and since you came, I’m off my bit o’ fun.”

He caught her hands, and in the confused emotion that had seized him, tried to kiss her; but she broke away and ran up the mews, leaving him standing under the lamp in the archway. He did not move. He was filled with a sweet, healing tenderness that soothed his trouble and made him feel curiously and happily sure of himself, and his mind flew back to the book from which he had quoted, and to all the associations it had brought in its train. And he had lost the uncomfortable sense of a violent change in his life, and began to perceive the inevitability of good and bad, hope and despond, driving him on to adventure and through adventure to appreciation of the mere fact of living, so that the things that happened were almost without significance. No longer did he have any dread of his fate; up or down, it was no great matter; a certain kind of agony it was impossible, it was vile and degrading to bear; a certain kind of happiness it was worth any suffering, any bewilderment to find. And yet happiness was hardly the word for it. Happiness was associated in his mind with being content, settled down, established, a part of surrounding circumstances, without reaction. This that he was beginning to perceive necessitated effort and will, fierce endeavor without ceasing. For an image of it he could find nothing better than tearing about the country with Kurt. Only that was aimless, containing nothing but the pleasure of the moment and the risk of disaster. The conception germinating in his mind had all the swiftness and the peril, but it had also immense purpose, irresistible force, and he said aloud:

“Force! Huge force, gripping you, holding you, bearing you on to its purpose which is also your own, so that always you are sure, always stronger than yourself.”

Out of the dark archway came a voice, saying:

“A philosopher in the slums.”

René started, and groped back to the world of the senses. A tall thin figure loomed up in front of him, and a pale, eager face with a jutting nose and large eyes smiled at him.

“Kilner, my name,” said the owner of it. “I’ve noticed you, walking about in a hungry dream. Down on your luck? So am I. Best of luck in a way. When the world doesn’t want you, it gives you time to look at it and think about it, and discover that it is really good. Otherwise you have to take so much on hearsay, and then of course you are not entitled to have an opinion about it, much less any feeling.”

“I was just beginning to feel extraordinarily happy about it all, though I have come to grief, and am a source of great anxiety to my friends.”

“Friends? They never want anything but one’s external comfort. They will dine with you, walk with you, talk with you, sleep with you, but think with you, feel with you, they will not. It’s not their fault. They don’t want to be anything but charming. We who want charm only with truth find ourselves in trouble in no time at all. What did you try to do?”

“I got married.”

“Oh! Is that all? I thought you must be a painter or a writer or—I’m a painter. But I can’t sell a damn thing, so I work for a furniture-dealer until I’ve saved enough to keep me going for a few months. Come up and talk.”

They went up to No. 16. Kilner produced cigarettes and continued:

“I’d have bet any amount you were an out-of-work writer, or a young man slung out of a respectable house for reading poetry in church. You don’t look like the sort of fool who gets messed up by women, though almost any man is that kind of fool.”

René tried to protest against that, and to point out that he had been married and therefore serious in his folly, if folly it were. Kilner only grunted at him.

“H’m!” he said. “Looks as if you’d been in the habit of taking things seriously simply because they happened to yourself. That’s idiotic. Most things that happen are dirty little jokes, opportunities fumbled because one isn’t fit to handle them, or situations forced out of greed or conceit, or injured vanity, or mere pigheadedness. There are divine things happen: doing a good bit of drawing is one of them, finding a friend is another, falling in love is another. Those things happen simply because you can’t help doing them, because you’d die one of many deaths if you didn’t. Once you’ve done one of those things, nothing else matters. You have something in you that you must keep alive. Let the others make the world hideous and vulgar and untidy. It is not your affair. If they won’t or can’t love what you love, then they are not for you and you are not for them. Don’t you think?”

René could find nothing to say. He found it so absorbing to watch Kilner, to listen to his monologue delivered in a voice of wonderful sweetness that seemed always to be trembling into laughter. The zest, the humor of the man thrilled through him, and made him feel that all his life was full of promise, rich and ripe with romance.

Kilner began to tell him about painting and painters, about Rembrandt and Van Eyck and Cranach, happy Cranach who could paint women without being either sensual or sentimental, and Dürer and Holbein and della Francesca, and how he himself, the son of a mason in Buckinghamshire, had always painted, at first without taste and without purpose, from sheer delight in objects, their form and their color, and how little by little he had learned to see the beauty shining through them and to wish to have that beauty also shining through his pictures and drawings. And how he had come to London to learn his art, financed by rich people near his home; and how he had assumed that every man who touched brush and paint had also desired to render the shining beauty that used all things for its dwelling-place; and how incidentally he had suffered from arrogance and blown vanity, though never losing sight of his one object; and how he had been taught a certain kind of drawing, to be accurate in imitation, and then again accurate and again accurate; and how he had quarreled with those of his teachers who had wished him not to use the power of accuracy they taught him, but to regard it as in itself an end; quarreled with his fellow-students, with his patrons, with his family, with exhibiting societies, with—apparently—everybody, because he could not learn to keep his opinions to himself or conceive that men who painted vilely with constant sacrifice of beauty to their desire to please, did so because that was how they saw things and how they liked things and loved them so far as they could love at all. And he told René of many love affairs he had had, some casual, some unhappy and desperate, some light-hearted and gay, and one ecstatic though it had lasted only for five weeks in spring. He described with a vivid power how he and she lay in the grass in Richmond Park and the soft air above them was alive with light, quivering up to the blue where the clouds swam and slowly faded out of form and being and other clouds came; and near them was an almond-tree in blossom, and above them shone the gummy buds of the beeches; crisp to the touch was the grass, moist and cool was the earth. And he touched her white arm and she trembled. He trembled too. And she turned her face toward him with a sweet trouble and wonder in her eyes and they kissed.

“That ended in tears, my tears and hers. I was too coarse for her, I think; too violent. She was very delicate and beautiful.”

After a long silence, René said:

“I have had nothing in my life but foolishness.”

“There’s no harm in that,” said Kilner. “It’s bitterness that kills. When shall I see you again?”

“Do you want to?” René was startled into asking.

“Of course. I don’t let a friend slip when I’ve found one.”

And gladly René said:

“A friend. I begin work to-morrow at old Martin’s.”

“There’s a man,” answered Kilner. “I must paint his heavy, happy face. It’s the kind of face there won’t be again. The world’s changing. Man wants but little here below? Never again. We want all there is.”

IV LEARNING A TRADE

’Tis my vocation, ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.

FOR some weeks our adventurer divided his time between working in Mr. Martin’s yard and office, studying the map of London, and being driven about the city in a car of instruction with seven or eight other aspirants to the taxi-driving profession. Most of them were depressed and bored, smoked incessantly, and spoke little, but every now and then René would find one to talk to him and take pity on his gentility and give him advice and consolation. The drives would begin cheerfully enough, often with excitement and humor, but soon listlessness would creep over the party, the more sober individuals would produce maps and notebooks, while the younger would conceitedly assume that their knowledge could not be enlarged, or perhaps they were ashamed to be caught out in ignorance. On the whole, they made René unhappy, for most of them were drifting so helplessly and with such dull indifference. By contrast the energy, the power, and richness of London streets were almost appalling.

He would return home exhausted and confused, and, to avoid thought, would go on with his map, taking Hyde Park Corner, Oxford Circus, and the Bank as the centers of three circles into which he had divided the city of his future operations. He found it easy to memorize the thoroughfares that connected them and their dependent roads. He had observed that certain districts were devoid of cabs or cab-ranks, and marking these districts off on his map, he concentrated upon the rest. The cabs served to connect one moneyed region with another, and with the stations and places of business and pleasure. And he selected the moneyed district where he would begin when he had his cab.

Casey was a Liverpool Irishman who had begun life as a clerk in a shipping office and had then, at twenty-seven, revolted and gone out to South Africa to work in the mines until one of his lungs gave out. Then he came home and had a nasty time in London in an office until he was told by a doctor that he must find some outdoor occupation. With the little money he had left, he had learned how to drive and repair a car, had been with one of the big companies for some time; then married a niece of old Martin’s and thought he could do better by working for him on a profit-sharing basis. That was René’s arrangement; he was given the alternative of buying his car on the hire-purchase system and using the yard as a garage, but on Casey’s advice chose the first proposition. Casey said it was better, because you needed capital to stand the heavy wear and tear of a car in constant use in London traffic. That settled, Casey took his novice out in the early morning to satisfy himself that the car would not suffer at his hands. He was delighted with the way the machine was handled. René, too, was pleased. He had been rather nervous at the thought of driving a more powerful engine than that to which he had been accustomed; but the greater power was only an added pleasure and no difficulty.

He took out his license and received a number and a number-plate, joined the union, bought a thick green suit that buttoned up to his neck, shiny leggings, and a peaked cap; a waterproof overall, enormous gloves, a leather purse, a rug. Then on a day early in the autumn he drove his car out of the mews and plunged into the eastward stream of traffic. He had not gone above a hundred yards when he was hailed by a gentleman in tail-coat and top-hat carrying a red brief-bag. Drawing up by the curb, he flung back his arm and opened the door as he had seen drivers do, and received the one word: Temple.

Absurdly hoping that he would be seen by no one who knew him, and feeling that the eyes of the occupant of the car were boring into the back of his neck, he drove to the Temple, and there received more exact directions from the gentleman, who poked his head out of the window, until they stopped outside a doorway with steps covered with the leaves of a plane-tree. The gentleman got out:

“You forgot to put down your flag.”

René started and blushed. So he had!

“The fare’s half a crown.”

“Thank you, . . . sir.”

He was given two and nine. His first tip! Threepence.

It was a busy day. He had only half an hour to wait on the stand which he had chosen for his headquarters. He drove home at night worn out and sleepy.

The excitement did not last. Very soon he hardly noticed his fares; a stick or an umbrella raised in the street, a whistle blown by a servant, and off he sped, shipped his freight, and discharged it uninterested. From his district in the morning the gentlemen went to their business; later in the day their ladies went to the shops; in the evening both went about their pleasures. Occasionally he was taken out to the suburbs, far west or north, but for the most part it was routine work, varied in the evenings, sometimes, with the conveyance of brilliantly-attired young men and women from a restaurant to a theater in the West End, or of dubious couples to dubious habitations.

And he was happy. The monotony was a relief. It never ceased to be a source of pride to him to keep the paint and brass of his car gleaming and his engine sweet and in tune. Always it was a delight to him at night, when the traffic was abated, to let the throttle open and send the car spinning and humming over the shining streets. If he lost interest in his fares, he never weakened in his joy in the streets with their color and activity, as changing as the sky or as the water in the river, their music swelling through the day, to almost every hour its individual harmony, a music growing and falling with the seasons: vigor and hope in October; in the winter a humorous desperation out of which grew miraculously the spring, and that again was lost in the maddening rout of June and then the slackness and the excited pleasure-hunting of the summer months when the genius of the city flees before the horde of aliens and visitors who come to gape and peer and see the sights. He was happy, and most of all he loved his independence, to be free of organization of any kind. Company? The car was company. He and it worked together. Here was no uncertainty, no fumbling. The day’s work was marked out and must be well done. There was always satisfaction in it and never compromise, never the sense of being driven on by some obscure and undirected energy other than his own that had so often overcome him in Thrigsby. And because his mind and body were engaged in the discipline of skilled work, his intellect, his imagination began to grow, to reach out, to desire to use their powers upon all that he observed and thought and felt. A little joy grew in him slowly and brought him at first to a dreaming, wistful mood wherein desires expanded of which he did not begin to be conscious until spring airs stirred in London.

Through the winter the habit of labor and his pride in it brought him slowly nearer to understanding of Ann Pidduck and her absorption in fun. He began to share her pleasure in relaxation. She taught him to dance, and they attended shilling balls together and she communicated to him her Cockney pleasure in the streets, the prowling in the lighted thoroughfares, the making of chance acquaintances, the full gusto of broad jests. He introduced her to Kilner and tried to make her include him in their intimacy and their jaunts; but she seemed to be scared of the artist, and when René appeared with him would make excuses of other engagements.

Then there were evenings of talk with Kilner, René hardly listening to him but rejoicing in the vigor of his words. He was painting in his spare time and on Saturdays and Sundays, and through his pictures and the painter’s enthusiasm for things seen René learned to use his eyes. That was a slow process, too. Often he saw beautiful things and creatures that so moved him that he lost sight of them, and dwelt only in the emotion they had roused, falsifying his vision. He would constantly be overcome in that way when he tried to describe anything he had seen to his friend, who would then turn upon him and call him a bloody liar, and a sentimentalist, and a filthy spitter upon the world’s beauty, a crapulous cheat, trying to steal a winged joy and turn it into a selfish pleasure; and much more that was beyond René except that he would feel ashamed but also invigorated by being so fiercely flung back into humility. Kilner took him to the National Gallery and very carefully explained the difference between a real picture and a fraud. There were, according to him, very few real pictures. He talked René into a very pretty bewilderment from which his hours with Ann were a welcome relief. There everything was what it seemed, everybody was taken (more or less) at his or her own valuation; there was fun to be extracted from everything and everybody, if only you approached them good-humoredly enough. And if you failed and did not find the expected fun—Oh, well, try elsewhere. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.

And then one morning Spring came to London. The black trees were powdered with green; the air was magical; the car was filled with a blithe new energy; the light gave the street and the things and people in them form and definiteness. René was up and out very early that morning to take a family to one of the stations. Three children were going away to the country. They beamed at him as though he were already a part of their coming delights. He laughed at them, and they said he was a nice funny driver, and was he coming to the country, too? Uncle George had got a new calf which they would like him to see. When he had unloaded the happy party at the station—it was that at which he had arrived the year before—he caught sight of the hill at Highgate, like a green mountain towering above the long gray streets. He turned northward and sped out over the hills and far away. Here the trees were less advanced than in London, but their green was peeping, and in a field were ewes and lambs. He stopped his engine and stood by the fence and gazed at them. Two of the lambs were playing, running races backward and forward. In the sky there were little clouds, and they too seemed to be playing. He remembered words of Kilner’s:

“Real seeing is through, not with, your eyes. Then you recognize that all things visible are within you as well as without. Then the spirit in you sees the spirit shining in all things, and it is only the spirit that can really see.”

And away up north was a black city, dark and hard and remorseless, from which he had escaped. The memory of it clung to him now and filled him with a stabbing terror that, though it could not rob him of his joy, could yet bring him to a new discontent, a hungry and almost angry desire.

Back then he went to the city, and all day long busily plied his trade. To-day he closely observed all things. The wonder of the early morning was gone. He hated those who hired him, the insolent women and busy, indifferent men, for it seemed to him that they had destroyed it. Unconsciously he contrasted these people, who went so insensibly about their habitual stale employments, with the happy children going to the country.

He was engaged to seek amusement with Ann that night. She was for the Pictures, but he persuaded her to go on the top of a bus to Kew.

“But they’ve got the Miserables at the Pictures,” she said, “and they say it’s It.”

“Look at the sky, my dear,” he protested.

She looked at it.

“Yes. It’s all right.”

Usually now when he met her in the evening he kissed her, because she expected it. She had kissed him first when he had given her a present at Christmas, and thereafter it became their practice, comradely. To-night he did not kiss her. He was stirred at the sight of her; her friendliness, the bright greeting of her eyes thrust him back into himself and inwardly alarmed him. And she looked up at him and laughed mischievously, and swung her body from the hips up, and then moved slowly away from him, pouting her lips.

“Would you like anywhere better than Kew?” he asked.

“Wimbledon, where we saw the picture-actors. D’you remember?” They boarded a bus and were swiftly borne out over the river, up through the holiday town that had reminded him of Buxton, and out to the wide common. There they wandered. A thin moon came up. They passed whispering lovers, and men and women for whom that word was too great.

Here again was spring, the first spring evening.

Ann chattered, but René spoke never a word. Once she said:

“Dull to-night, aren’t you? Are you tired?”

Her questions met with so hard a silence that she too ceased to talk.

She thought he must be offended with her, and as they returned she slipped her hand on his knee. He gripped her forearm, held it for a moment, then put her away from him.

After a long while she said:

“I didn’t know I’d made you angry.”

“Angry? My dear child!”

“What is it, then?”

“This damned world. This morning I took three happy children to the country, and all day long I’ve been at the beck and call of men and women who have lost the power and the will to be happy.”

“I don’t know how you know. And you’re not very good at it yourself to-night, are you?”

“How do I know? Ask Kilner.”

“That beast, Kilner.”

“He’s my friend.”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

Then again he was silent. The thought of Kilner had made him just a little angry with her. With Kilner the day that had begun so beautifully might have come to a glorious and brave end.

Presently she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and said:

“Don’t be cross. You’ll soon be dead, and it’s no good being cross. I do like being with you, really, even when we can’t have fun, and you go wasting your time thinking.”

He turned, and their eyes met, and he astonished her by saying:

“Ann, you don’t know how beautiful you are.”

She gave a little cry on that, put out her hand, and this time he held it strongly clasped. They could be happy in their silence then.

When they reached the mews she said she had supper in her room and he could come up if he liked. They ate and drank and were very merry, and it was late when he rose to go. He opened the door. She was at his side.

“Good night, Ann.”

“You needn’t go,” she whispered.

V TOGETHER

Je vais où le vent me mène

Sans me plaindre où m’effrayer.

Je vais où va toute chose,

Où va la feuille de rose

Et la feuille de laurier!

A DAY or two later he moved his few belongings from Jimmy’s rooms to Ann’s. It was her wish. There was no point in concealment. The mews knew; the mews had expected it; the mews did not mind. Mr. Martin was delighted:

“It’s what every young woman wants, to throw in her lot with some nice young feller. If they can’t be married, they can’t, and that’s all there is to it. Take mares now— Well, you know what I mean.” He caught the boy with his head in at the door listening, picked up a ledger, and threw it at him. A bad shot, it broke a pane in the glass wall.

René had told him all the circumstances, because he knew that the mews was full of gossip, and he was attached enough to the old fellow to wish him to be in possession of the facts.

“What I mean to say,” continued Mr. Martin, when the boy had fled, “is this: If women must come kerboosting into a man’s life, it’s better for them to come while he’s young and fool enough to enjoy it. There’s a time for everything, as the Bible says, but don’t let her put on you. The best of women will put on a man if he lets her, and that’s bad for both.”

That was the advice with which René Fourmy’s second venture in cohabitation was blessed. As usually happens with advice, he was too deeply engrossed in present interests to apply what wisdom it contained to his own case. He drifted down the stream of bliss they had tapped, and, as generously as she, brought into their common stock as much kindness, consideration, and warmth, excitement and curiosity as they needed to take them from moment to moment. Only he brought no laughter, of which she supplied abundance. Both were out early and all day long, and both returned in the evening tired but eager for the new wonder of each other’s company. Indeed it was wonderful, the easy sympathy they had for each other. They could be frank. She had no preconception of what love should be, and took all its delights simply as they came, and her simplicity fed and encouraged his. It was a novelty for him to live from day to day satisfied; a kind of Paradise, if Paradise is a place where the appetites are a little overfed, so that body and mind are brought to indolence.

Kilner had disappeared for a time, having made enough to be able to retire to his painting, and René had no other society than the chauffeurs in the shelters during the day and the familiars of Mitcham Mews in the evening. He became sluggishly content to drift. He was making good money, increased by Ann’s earnings. If he ever thought of the old life in the North at all, it was with lazy contempt and indifference. His first attitude toward London was reversed. He had begun with all the northerner’s contempt for the easy ways of the metropolis. He never read anything but the newspaper, and every evening would read aloud the “fooltong” in the Star. Ann took it for the betting. She put aside two shillings a week for “the horses,” and he joined her in that pursuit. He did not so much enjoy her pleasures as her zest for them, and it became his object to keep that alive. Without that he was at moments aware of a sickening sensation that was truly horrible, making him gird at his surroundings, at certain tricks that Ann had, at habits, gestures, tones in her voice that were like his sister-in-law Elsie’s. He saw the resemblance first on receiving a letter from his brother George:

“DEAR R,—A pal of mine who has been on the spree saw you in London the other day, says you drove him from the Troc to Bernard Street. I thought you’d have been off that long ago, but there’s no accounting for tastes. I meant to write some time since to say the old man has hopped it again, and the mother has taken up her quarters with us. It seems some money came in—I can’t make out where from—and he grabbed it and offed. It seems to have finished her; she’s shut up tight, sits and knits, toddles off to church whenever there’s a service, never mentions him or you. Elsie can’t get anything out of her, though they talk enough together. It makes the house seem full of women. I’ve never set eyes on you know who since you cleared. I’m doing well enough, and hope to get something of my own in a few years, though small business don’t stand much chance in these days against the big combines. You’d be amazed at the huge joint warehouses they’re putting up now. Thrigsby’s changing, and things are queer all round. People shift a bit now, what with the Colonies and all that. They don’t stay in offices like they used to do, only it doesn’t seem to make things any better for those who stay. Elsie sends her love; she always was a bit soft on you and didn’t mind a bit when you cleared. I only meant to tell you about the mother, thinking you ought to know. If ever I get to London I’ll look you up.—Thine, G.—Oh! Kurt Brock has gone in for the aviation and is making quite a name for himself up here.”

The letter took René back pleasantly in memory, when he was suddenly startled to find himself meeting George on his own ground, with complacent acceptance of “having a good time,” as the one desirable object which could redeem the ever-present evil. And then he was compelled, from that footing, to see his own revolt as an unaccountable aberration, an eccentricity, an escapade unfortunately disastrous in its consequences. He did not like that, nor did he relish being coupled in George’s mind with his father, who was first indolent, then a vagabond, then irresponsible. His confidence was shaken, and he was made conscious of discrepancy and narrowly aware of having missed something of that which he set out to seek. Experience had taught him that it was no use taking any unhappiness to Ann. She would merely assume that he was unwell and probably dose him with physic from the herbalist’s round the corner. Again, he saw that George, like Ann, had a gusto in his way of living which he himself lacked, and now only enjoyed vicariously. That could no longer fret his nerves as in the old days it had done; he was fortified by the memory of his act of revolt and the months of entire independence he had enjoyed since his coming to London. He looked up at Ann from his letter.

“Bad news?” she said.

“I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. My father has cleared out again.”

“It’s made you sorry. You always look like that when you think of your home. Sometimes I fancy you really wish you had never come away.”

“That’s not true. I’m perfectly content. I’m learning not to blame anybody. That isn’t easy.”

“If you’re not sorry, I don’t see why you want to think about it.”

“You can’t forget people so completely as all that.”

“Your dad seems to be able to.”

“I’m not my father.”

“No. But sometimes I wish you’d take a leaf out of his book. From what you tell me he does seem able to enjoy himself.”

“Don’t I?”

“Oh, you’re better than you used to be, but you do frighten me sometimes.”

“When?”

“Oh, when you look at me and don’t see me, and when I go on talking and you don’t hear a word I’m saying. Sometimes I think it’s only because you had that queer time when you first came to London, and then I think you can’t be any different. The world does seem upside down, and it seems to me it might be better if we went right away and made a new start somewheres.”

It comforted René to find that she, too, had her qualms, and that there was some stir behind her constant and equable good humor. He said:

“Oh, no. I think we shall be all right. Only we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that love makes life easier.”

“Not much fear of that,” she replied, with an odd little wry smile. “Mr. Martin said to me, he said, ‘This here education makes a man queer to live with. If it isn’t idees,’ he said, ‘it’s niceness; and if it isn’t niceness it’s bloody obstinacy,’ he said. . . . And I do try, Renny, I do reelly, though of course if I hadn’t the work during the day I should feel it more.”

“What would you feel?”

“Well, I don’t know. Oh, you know, when you look at things a long time, and when you like to sit and smoke and look inside yourself.”

“I didn’t know I did that. I don’t see much if I do.”

“Well, you do. And I asked Mr. Martin about it and he said it was education, and he said his brother-in-law was like that before he went off his head with religion. And often when I look at you and you are like that I want to put my arms round you and hold you until you stop doing it, and begin to think of me a little.”

“But I do think of you all the time.”

Then she put her arms round him and held him close until he forgot all but her in the dark pleasure that is called love.

And again he drifted and supposed himself content, until one day when a young man hailed him and told him to drive to Islington where there was an exhibition of modern engineering. Halfway there, the young man stopped the car, leaped out excitedly, gripped René by the arm, and cried:

“Good Lord, if it isn’t old René!”

It was Kurt Brock.

“I say!” he said. “What a find!”

“The taxi’s mounting up,” said René.

“I say, you take me out to Hendon and we’ll have a yarn. They told me you were still at it, and I was meaning to come and see you, but I’m up to my eyes in work. Let me drive.”

He took the wheel and sent the car whizzing through the traffic at a speed that made René cry out in protest that he’d have him run in and his license forfeited. Kurt slowed down a little.

“Cars crawl so,” he said, “once you’ve tried a flier.”

“I’ve seen your name in the papers.”

“Yes. I won my first race, Glasgow to Edinburgh round the coast of Scotland. Bit stiff, some of it, with mist and rain. I say, I am glad to see you. You’re looking fit. Better life than mugging away with books, what? Though I don’t know that I’d care about being out in the streets in all weathers, what?”

“Oh, you get used to that. I hate it when the engine goes wrong and I have to stay at home.”

They reached Hendon and Kurt took his old friend to see his new monoplane.

“Like to go up in her? She’s a snorter. Takes the air like a bird; you can feel her planes stretching to the air, and the engine’s like a cat.”

Before he could think twice about it, René found himself sitting up behind Kurt with the machine rushing over the ground and the engine roaring. He could not tell at what point they left the earth, but trees, sheds, houses seemed to fall away as though the earth were tilted up, and then the air rushed in his ears, caught at his throat, pressed hard against his body. He looked down. They were ascending in circles. Roads looked like ribbons, trees like haycocks, trams like toys, men and women were little dots mysteriously and absurdly moving. They hovered for a moment as they turned out of the final circle and made straight for a low gray cloud. Soon they passed through it, and up again. Presently they turned, dipped, and Kurt shut off the engine and they came gliding down; the earth tilted up alarmingly to meet them; houses, trees, sheds slid back into their places. René was startled to find the earth almost immediately flattened out again without the threatened impact, and back they darted to the hangar.

“Glorious?” asked Kurt.

“I—I don’t know yet,” replied René.

“How like you!”

“How do you mean—like me?”

“I mean, to admit that you don’t know. Half the people I take up pretend they like it, though they hate it really. A few, like you, don’t know, but they don’t say so. I wish I’d been the first man to do it.”

René had to walk to get warm again, and he left Kurt in his hangar for a moment to instruct one of his mechanics. He came quickly, caught René by the arm, and laughed, telling him how comic it was to see him in his chauffeur’s clothes, disguised, the truant brother-in-law hiding behind a uniform. René said:

“I’ve got used to it now.”

“Do you ever open a book?”

“Sometimes. I had a few sent to me.”

“Economic books?” asked Kurt.

“No. But I go on thinking about all that. Habit, I suppose, or perhaps trying to discover what it really is all about, and I don’t know. They used to call it a science, but it can’t be scientific——”

“That’s what I say. You do know where you are with an engine. You can eat up distance. But I thought clever people would never understand that. You used not to. Perhaps you’re not clever any more. That’s what I said to Linda. Oh, I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be.” René gulped that out, for indeed he was embarrassed. The days of his torment were brought back suddenly, came savagely breaking through his simple pleasure in the rediscovery of this enlarged Kurt, grown from boy to man without loss of youth and frankness. He extricated himself from his confusion by asking:

“How is she?” And at once he was shocked to find out how little he really cared to know.

“Linda? Well, she’s a much better sort than she used to be. I don’t know much about women, though I like them well enough. Linda? Oh, she seems happy. She has a house and a piano and a lot of people, goes abroad, little parties of four or five, mixed; musicians and professors, cream of Thrigsby, you know. She wrote a play for the Thrigsby Repertory Theater, all about you and marriage and sex. Rather disgusting, I thought it, but all Thrigsby flocked to see it. All the same, yes, she is nicer. Not so inquisitive; doesn’t romance so wildly. The only objection I have to her now is that she will get me into a corner when I’m at home and talk about you. I think she ought to ignore your existence, as it is no longer her affair. She seems unable to do that, and she fancies I know something about you that she doesn’t, though I’ve told her over and over again that I don’t pretend to understand you or anybody else. I did tell her that you made me feel that what I wanted to do wasn’t necessarily a thing to be ashamed of.”

“I did that?”

“Well, it was only after you came that I was able to tell the mater that I didn’t want to do as she wished and couldn’t. . . . Where are you living?”

René described Ann’s two rooms.

“Do you like it? I mean, aren’t they rather grubby and piggy?”

René thought it over with a clear picture in his mind of Ann’s room and Jimmy’s and Kilner’s, and the women standing at the doors and leaning out of the windows, and the children playing in the muck. For him it was all colored emotionally. Moments of distaste he could remember, but nothing like the offended fastidiousness expressed in Kurt’s tone.

“Well, yes. Untidy and careless. One day’s work slops over into the next day. But, you know, my home was not so very unlike that. I used to hate it at home when I got back at night to find my bed unmade. That used to happen.”

“Can I come and see you? I’m here for a fortnight. My business is up north. Got a factory now. You must come and see it if ever you are——”

“I don’t think I’m likely to go north again. I feel that’s finished. I don’t know why. It isn’t that I have any hatred for it, or any bitterness about what happened. Only I feel on firmer ground here, as though I had taken root.”

“I’ll come along then. Any night?”

“Almost any night.”

“I’ll take my chance.”

They shook hands, Kurt with a grip that squeezed René’s knuckles together until the pain was horrible.

“’Member our smash?” asked Kurt.

René grinned at the recollection. He was very pleased and comfortable. To have established a connection with the past through Kurt was to have it made without shock of shame or injury to vanity. Through Kurt’s frank mind it was cleaned and shaped for him, presented to him so that he must make the necessary effort to strike out of himself the light which should reveal it, the light of humor. It was a very faint gleam that came out of him, but it was enough to serve and to imprint the picture on his mind, give him possession of it, and deliver him from the anguish which attended all his dark contemplations.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “and I remember how I lectured you. And now the positions are reversed.”

“I don’t see that.”

An elegant young man in a gray suit came up, with a beautiful woman of a loveliness and charm that took René’s breath away.

“How do, Kurt?” said the young man, stepping in front of him. “Lady Clewer wishes to be——”

Kurt shook hands with the beautiful lady and with her and her companion walked away toward the knot of brilliant persons gathered round a biplane that had just come to earth.

Flushed and tingling at the hurt, René rushed away, savagely wound up his engine, and glided back into the city, to the narrow place where he had till now lived in comfort and the pleasures of simplicity. Small and confined he saw it now, mean and untidy. But it had been and was still his refuge. He had been happy, and the world had ignored his happiness and snatched it away from him. He was actively angry and jealous.

He frightened Ann by the hungry affection with which he greeted her when she came home, after working overtime to keep pace with a rush of work at her factory. She liked it too. It was exciting. Yet she could not conceal her fear. She was more than his match in exuberance, but here was a demand upon her that she could not recognize and very soon she was in tears; not her happy tears that had so often reconciled him and made him gleeful and proud. He was humbled and acutely conscious of separation from her, though they clung together. For a few moments the whole weight of their relationship was thrown upon their loyalty, and it did not yield. She slept at last, her hand in his, but he lay awake staring back into the past, fascinated as the light growing in him showed it up in continually sharpening relief—his parting from his father; him he could see very clearly; but his mother was in shadow, sitting, head down, hands busy, never stirring, in acceptance. And Linda? He could see her at that absurd tea-party when his father had shown her his picture. She walked into his life then. They sat by the tulips and she was gone. He could remember his own desire and after, only its horrible, inexplicable disappearance.

VI KILNER

Could I find a place to be alone with Heaven

I would speak my heart out.

THE next night Ann went out alone. She insisted that it must be alone, though she gave him her most happy smile to reassure him.

He sat reading a copy of Extracts from Browning which he had bought for twopence from old Lunt. The book was against his temper, but he found a certain pleasure in making himself read from page to page. At nine o’clock Kilner came in. He was gaunt and haggard, and his collar was dirty. He nodded, produced a pipe, and sank, as he lit it, into the wicker chair opposite René’s.

“You’re comfortable in here,” he said. “Snug. I suppose once you’re settled in here of a night you don’t give a blast what goes on in the world outside. One doesn’t when one has got what one wants.”