BOOK ONE

LINDA BROCK

Ha! Ha! _So_ you take human nature upon trust?

I

LOVE IN EARNEST

O that joy so soon should waste Or so sweet a bliss As a kiss Might not forever last!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, René!"

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

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

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

"We mustn't stop writing to each other again."

"It was you who stopped."

"I thought----"

"It made it very horrid meeting you again, very anxious, I mean--I mean I don't know what your life is like."

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

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

"I will write," said Cathleen. "This year won't seem so long. I couldn't be certain, last year."

"Are you certain now?"

"Oh, René!"

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

"Let's talk sense," said he. "I want to marry you."

"Oh, yes."

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

"Anywhere with you."

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

"What did your father do?"

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

"He drank whisky and smoked cigarettes."

"Oh! I'm sorry."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Forever and ever," said René.

"Forever and ever," cried she. "It isn't many people who find the real thing in the first."

He glowed.

"Oh! we must never spoil it."

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

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

"You will write to me?"

"Oh, yes, yes."

"Good-by, my dear, good-by."

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

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

"I've been looking for you everywhere," said Mr. Bentley.

"I've been a walk."

"Your mother wants you."

"At once?"

"She wanted you an hour ago."

Cathleen sped away.

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

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

When at last he opened his lips he said:

"We--we've been a walk."

"So I perceive."

"The woods are very beautiful at this time of year."

The silence froze.

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

"I go to-morrow."

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

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

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

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

. . . . . .

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

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

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

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

"With what?"

"You'll find that out."

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

II

166 HOG LANE WEST

The homeward journey was by no means so agreeable.

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

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

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

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

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

"How brown you are!" she said.

"It's been wonderful weather. Aunt Janet sent you some shortbread and some knitted things."

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

"She said she admired you more than she can say."

"I've done my best for you."

"She said you married a bad Fourmy."

"I wish she hadn't said that."

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

"Is that true. Was my father a bad man?"

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

"Did you love my father?"

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

"What's come to you, René?"

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

"Oh," he said, "it's just queer, coming back. One can feel all sorts of things in the house, and----"

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

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

"But he----"

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

"He left you."

"A boy like you can't judge a man."

"Oh, but I know."

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

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

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

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

He snapped his teeth together, and said fiercely:

"All the same, if I treated a woman as my father treated you, I'd shoot myself."

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

"Women----" began René, but his mother cut him short in a soothing voice that was almost a caress:

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

"Who's Elsie?"

"Didn't I tell you? George is going to be married."

"George is?"

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

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

She tried it on and preened herself in it.

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

"But I will," said René. "When I've saved money and can retire, we'll go and live together."

"I don't know. It's easy to forget old women."

"Oh, come! A man doesn't forget his mother."

"Doesn't he?"

"And old? You're not old."

"I've been old since before you were born."

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

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

Then he laughed:

"You must have been pretty when you were a girl."

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

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

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

"They are going to be married at once. They've got to be."

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

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

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

"Yes. He told me. How did you know?"

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

"Oh, mother!"

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

René went to the door.

"Hullo! old man!"--René hated to be called "old man"--"Hullo! Got back?"

"Only just."

"This is Elsie--Elsie Sherman. Mother's told you?"

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

"So you're the wonderful brother?"

"Yes. The---- Yes, I'm George's brother. You--you can take your things off in mother's room if you like."

"Or mine," said George.

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

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

"She's pretty."

"When you know her a bit you'll want to go and do likewise, my son."

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

"Mother's got out her best center for you."

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

"Elsie!"

"Coming!"

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

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

"I say, mother, draw it mild."

And Elsie's rather too fervent:

"Of course I know I'm _very_ lucky."

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

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

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

"Oh, _Blumenlied!_" cried Elsie; "I adore that," and she took up the air.

"You've got a pretty voice," said René.

"Have I? I do sing sometimes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't know. To settle down----"

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

"Why do you keep hinting at things, mother?"

"I wasn't hinting. I know, and you will know, and they never will. I could have screamed sometimes tonight."

"I thought you liked her."

"Like? Oh, René, boy, if only you'd grow up and be some use to me!"

"I want to be."

"I know that, and it's something."

"Are you hurt because they----?"

"I've been a foolish woman. I've been seeing more hope for George than there ever was."

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

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

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

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

George returned, whistling.

"I wanted to talk to you," he said.

"Anything you like," replied René.

"You won't mind my putting it bluntly?"

"No."

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

"I see. But I've got another year."

"Can't you teach someone something? You've been learning long enough."

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

"Next month. What are you staring at?"

"Was I staring?"

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

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

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

"The whole thing seems to me so----"

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

"So what?"

"I mean--I liked her. She seems a good sort."

"No nonsense about Elsie."

"Doesn't it make you understand mother more?"

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

"Oh, you think it's me?"

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

"How will you live?"

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

"You're pleased with yourself, then?"

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

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

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

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

. . . . . .

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

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

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

"Do go to bed, René, dear. You're not working already?"

"No, mother. I wasn't working."

"Then you mustn't stay up, wasting the gas and all."

III

GEORGE MARRIED

'Tis an evil lot, and yet Let us make the best of it; If love can live when pleasure dies We two will love, till in our eyes This heart's Hell seem paradise.

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

Cathleen Bentley had written:

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

René described:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mother, I'm in love."

"Well, I never! You're not going to be married now?"

"No. It's hopeless. She's rich. At least her father is."

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

"It isn't only that. Only I can't get away from certain things."

"What things?"

"The horrible things people do."

"You'll be kept busy if you worry about that."

"It's about myself."

"Want to confess? Go on."

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

"Well, well."

"You can't dismiss it like that. I shouldn't be remembering it if it were so easy as that. I met her--you know--in Derby Street----"

"You're not going to tell me the whole story?"

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

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

"Well, you are a funny boy."

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

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

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

René patted her hand.

"It's awfully good of you to listen," he said; "I feel better already. Only George----"

"Don't let George worry you. He can do things you can't. George can keep his mind out of things like that."

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

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

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

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

The other letter was from her mother:

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

He passed both letters over to his mother.

"I told you it was hopeless."

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

"But I can't help loving her."

Mrs. Fourmy sniffed indignantly:

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

"I do," said he very earnestly.

On which his mother staggered him by saying:

"George wouldn't."

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

IV

A RETURN

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

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

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

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

"You and an old woman like me."

"Won't it be lovely when we live in the country, mother?"

"Oh, but there won't be any music-halls."

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

"But with an old, old woman----"

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

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

He said:

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

"It's only what helps you now. You don't seem to be a bit ambitious, René."

"Would you like me to be?"

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

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

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

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

"I don't think I'm the sort that gets on. I say things--in letters, you know."

"But I'd like to see you well off and married to some really nice girl."

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

"I'll come and stay with you."

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

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

"That's my house," said René.

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

"René! René! it's your father!"

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

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

"Essie," the stranger turned to Mrs. Fourmy, "I'm dead broke."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All right," he said.

His father turned and smiled pleasantly.

"That's good of you--very good of you. I'd be in the cart without. I'm--well--I've been---- But we'll talk of that later."

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

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

"That's good," he said. "My first square meal since this morning. That's good, good."

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

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

"It's bigger," said René.

His father turned and scanned him.

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

"You used to have a mustache."

"Yes. Shaved it off in America. Didn't like Roosevelt."

"Have you been to America?"

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

"Like George."

"Isn't George coming in?"

"He's married."

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

"If only you wouldn't talk," protested René in a sudden exasperation.

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

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

"René! René!" cried his mother.

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

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

"It isn't fair! it isn't fair!" he moaned.

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

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

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

"It's me--René!"

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

"I must see you. Something has happened."

"What?"

"Come down and let me in."

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

"Come in. You've wakened Elsie, and she's not at all well."

"But I wanted to see you. Father's come back."

"What?"

"Father's come back."

"Mother all right?"

"She seems quite pleased."

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

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

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

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

V

SETTLING DOWN

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

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

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

"Oh!"

"Shall I help you?"

"_It is_--too heavy for me."

"Where is--he?"

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

"In your room?"

She hesitated:

"We--we sold the old bed, you know."

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

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

"You mustn't make it hard for us, René."

"I--I thought I was making it easy."

"His brothers won't see him."

"Why not?"

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

"You'll let him stay?"

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

"What did he do else?"

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

"You won't tell me, then?"

"I have told you."

"What's he going to do? Go on eating and eating?"

"He'll look for work. Of course, at his age, it won't be easy."

"What's he been doing all this time?"

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

"He didn't think of you then."

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

"But someone must make money."

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

René swung round.

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

"That's dear of you, René. And you will be nice to him, won't you?"

"All right, all right."

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

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

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

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

"Where did we come from?" asked René.

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

"But why are we fixed here?"

"Don't your big books tell you that?"

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

"Big books don't account for humble folk like us."

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

"Yes," he said, "yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George said of his father:

"He's a funny damned old rotter, but you can't help liking him."

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

VI

PROFESSOR SMALLMAN

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

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

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

"It's Liberal, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fourmy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

René said heavily:

"It's like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs and the dirty books."

Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily:

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

"Where do you sell them? To a shop?"

"No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and chapelgoers."

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

"I wish you hadn't told me. It doesn't seem worth while doing anything."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm so glad you could come," said Mrs. Smallman, and she introduced him to Blease.

"Seen you about," said the Jew. "Third-year man, aren't you?"

"Just beginning my third year," said René miserably.

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

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

"Yes. That's where we score over Oxford and Cambridge, though they can never understand that."

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

"She is beautiful," said René to himself.

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

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

"She _is_ beautiful," thought he, and from that moment she had his homage.

Presently she appealed to him:

"Mr. M'Elroy won't have it that Thrigsby is better than London. What do you say?"

"I've never been to London," replied René.

"Don't you love Thrigsby?"

"It's been my home always. I don't know that I ever thought about it."

M'Elroy said:

"One thinks about everything nowadays."

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

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

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

"Well?" he asked. "What's the trouble?"

"My father----" began René.

"Ah! Well?"

"He deserted my mother a long time ago. He came back. My brother's married."

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

"I don't know how old he is. But work? No."

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

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

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

"They have their point of view."

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

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

"No."

"It rather scotches that, then. Pupils? You could make a little that way, but it's drudging work when you're reading as well. I could give you two first-year men, pretty bad, both of them, and Miss Brock, the girl you met at lunch, has a young brother who can't get through the matric. That's as much as you could manage."

René had no notion how much he ought to be paid. He asked, and when he heard the amount his heart overflowed with gratitude, and he walked home with a new vigor in his stride and a prouder carriage of his head. His father and mother were out. His news would not keep, and he went round to George, first changing his brown boots for black. He reckoned that in three terms he would be able to make nearly as much as his brother's whole income, and would have the vacations to repair any damage done to his own work. Then he would take his degree, and the whole world, all life, would open up before him.

VII

FLYING NEAR THE CANDLE

A man's heart may minister comfort to him in the hopes of that thing for which he yet has no ground to hope.

THE Brocks lived in Galt's Park, an elegant district shut off from the rest of Thrigsby by gates and unoccupied lodges. Here, in ease and amid gardens, dwelt families of an old-established prosperity, many Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, and some of the descendants of Thrigsby's famous men. Here also were the two hostels of the university, some schools, one co-educational seminary, the house of a painter with a great local fame, and that of the municipal organist. Good men had lived in Galt's Park, and it had once been the center of Thrigsbeian culture; but now all those who dwell in it have the air of having been left behind, and the little pink houses are menacing it, even as they menace the garden of Professor Smallman.

Through the winter René Fourmy came twice a week to coach young Kurt Brock in mathematics and French. Occasionally he was asked to stay to lunch, and then he was too sore from the discomfort of Mrs. Brock's broken English--she was a German from Hamburg--to be able to support Miss Brock, Linda, in her efforts to make conversation. Also he was engrossed in the problem first presented to him on his original meeting with her: Was she, was she not, beautiful? Sometimes for a fortnight he would decide that she was so, and then his heart would go out to her in homage, an impersonal emotion bestowed on her as though she were a tree or a sunset. That she might be intelligent interested him not at all. Except in the case of Cathleen Bentley, where he had been surprised into an intimacy, refined and diluted with adoration, he had regarded women as existing only to receive in ignorance his shy homage.

As with the Smallmans, so here he had to give his mother a detailed report of the household and its manner of living. To her they also were "grand," and she never tired of listening to the tale of their doings, their servants, what they had to eat and drink, what they sat on, what they wore, and whom they entertained. He reported faithfully--the rings on Mrs. Brock's fingers, her richly-clad inelegant figure, her dog-like eyes that could never smile, her enormous appetite--whereon Mrs. Fourmy would sigh and say:

"I never was a big eater myself."

Kurt, the boy, René liked, for he was so thoroughly convinced of his own stupidity that it was impossible to teach him anything. German only in name, he was English and Thrigsbeian in everything else, and René felt almost that he belonged to an older generation when he discovered that Kurt could not remember the horse-trams in the Derby Road, or a time when there were no motor-cars. Kurt possessed a motorcycle, or it possessed him, so that almost everything else in his eyes was "bally rot." He excepted music, which, with his family, he loved German-fashion, greedily and indiscriminately. His attitude toward his sister was that of one who knows so much that he has nothing left to hope. Against his mother and sister he used to protest to René, whom he thought of as a "poor beggar" but a "good enough sort." René never saw it, but often Kurt would outmaneuver Linda in her attempts to waylay his tutor, and once he went so far as to mumble this warning:

"What I can't stand about women is the way they go nosing round."

"Do they?" asked René, looking up from _Hall and Knight_.

"My sister does. She wants to know how a man works. She's like me with a motor. Haven't you got sisters?"

"No. I wish I had."

"I don't know. Having a sister like Lin is enough to put a man off women for life."

"She has always been very charming to me."

Kurt snorted.

Another day he growled out:

"Linda says you are like Schiller. You'd better look out. She said the last young feller was like Mozart."

"I've never seen a picture of Mozart," replied René.

"Silly sort of face."

That very day Linda outmaneuvered Kurt. As a rule he walked with René to the gates of Galt's Park, but now, believing his sister to be safely out of the way, and also wishing to change the tire of his motorcycle, he let René depart alone, and René was not gone above a hundred yards when he encountered Linda. He bowed, removed his hat, and was for making on, when she stopped.

"I'm glad to meet you," she said, with such a smile that René felt once and for all that she was beautiful, and was so confused by his own enthusiasm that he did not take the hand she proffered, and put her to the awkwardness of withdrawing it.

"I--I----" He looked desperately up and down the road, but could find no topic, and ended lamely by saying:

"I--I like your brother."

"Oh! Kurt! But I am glad to have met you. I hoped you would be at the Smallmans last Sunday. I was so disappointed." Her voice too was beautiful in its friendly, emphatic cadences.

"I--I wasn't asked."

"Oh, you aren't _asked_. You go. Everybody goes."

(He had never been able to identify himself with everybody, or to take everybody's doing for a reason for his own.)

She went on:

"I wanted to ask you if you would care to come and hear me play at the Goetheverein--that's the German club--next Wednesday. It's a good program; Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms. You'll love Beethoven."

"My mother plays, but her piano has yellow keys, and the music is faded like the keys."

"It must be beautiful to understand your mother. Professor Smallman has told me all about you, and I do hope you'll come."

"I'd like to come."

"That's settled then. We have supper at the Verein, and I'll introduce you to some people you'll like to know. It's nice to know your friends' friends, don't you think?"

René felt vaguely uneasy.

"Friends' friends," he repeated almost interrogatively.

"Friends," said Miss Brock, "are those whom you have always known you would meet." This she said with a kind of recklessness that was almost exaltation. It certainly startled René into something like emotion, into the desire to respond. For the first time during their conversation his eyes met hers full, and he was confronted with a smile so charmingly inquisitive that he was compelled to satisfy their curiosity and he jerked out:

"Yes. Friends."

And it seemed to him that she had given and he had accepted--something. Gift and acceptance were so surreptitious that the nature of them was a matter of almost complete indifference. The great thing was the giving and the accepting, and the excitement of the transaction drowned the little emotion that had stirred in him. One more glance he stole at her, and he saw that she was satisfied, that their conversation was at an end. Yet neither could end it, and it was a relief to both when Kurt came hooting and snorting by on his motorcycle.

"Till Wednesday then," said Miss Brock.

"You--you didn't say what time."

"Oh! Eight o'clock. But you might like to come with us--call for us at half-past seven. I wish you could speak German."

"I do a little."

"Mother will like that. Good-by."

She turned and walked away. René stood rooted to the ground. At his feet he saw her handkerchief. He stooped and picked it up. He dared not run after her. He pressed the handkerchief to his lips, then angrily squeezed it up into a ball and thrust it into his trousers pocket. This done, he shook himself, threw back his head, and strode vigorously homeward. He said to himself:

"I'm damned if I read love poems to her."

He had arrived at the conclusion that but for the love poems things would never have got so maddeningly out of hand with that other maiden in Scotland.

He added:

"But she really is beautiful."

Reading a book at supper that night, he knocked a glass of beer over onto his trousers, fumbled for his handkerchief, found Linda's, mopped up the beer with it, and gave it to his mother to be washed. She washed it with her own hands that night, ironed it, and placed it on his dressing-table so that next morning he was confronted by the embroidered name--Linda.

On the Wednesday evening he clad himself in his best black coat, the same he had had since he was seventeen, put on a white dicky and cuffs, and punctually at 7:30 stood between the stucco pillars on either side of the Brocks' front door. The family was waiting for him in the hall. The women were muffled up in veils, and Kurt was wearing a very smart overcoat and new patent-leather boots. Behind Kurt in the darkness--for the hall was lit only by one flickering gas-jet in a ground-glass globe--stood another male figure. This advanced into the light and was revealed as M'Elroy.

"You know each other," said Linda.

Kurt cut in with:

"Of course, and Fourmy thinks he is so like Mozart."

René felt a pang of uneasiness. He turned to Linda to find her eyes resting now on M'Elroy, now on himself, with quick little darting glances that seemed to take in every detail. It exasperated him to be pitted against M'Elroy, but, the rivalry having been introduced, though unsought by himself, he rose to it, and so, he felt, did M'Elroy. By way of protest René moved nearer to Mrs. Brock, who was sitting on the bottom stair.

"Gut Abend!" he said. "Ich bin----"

"Na, Sie sprechen Deutsch? So ist's gut. Ist mir sehr lieb Deutsch zu hören."

"Aber nicht----"

"Sie sprechen sehr gut. Mein Sohn wird nie Deutsch sprechen. Im Goetheverein aber, wo man so schöne Musik----"

"Ja," interrupted René at a venture, and he found that, with these three expressions, he could get along very well and keep Mrs. Brock perfectly happy talking away as she never did when the use of English oppressed her. She never stopped. She talked him into the cab that came for them, out of it, up the stairs into the German club, and into the concert-room where she presented him to other women like herself, who nodded and smiled at his fumbled utterances--and talked.

The room was arranged like a restaurant with little tables all round it, and the platform at one end slightly raised. For the most part the audience sat in little family groups and drank beer and ate sandwiches. René found himself confined between Mrs. Brock and another stout matron, and began to feel rather oppressed and to wish he had not come. Kurt and M'Elroy had joined a band of young men who took possession of a corner and looked on at the scene with English disapproval of its Germanism. Some of them René knew for Meyers and Schoeners and Krauses of the second and third generation.

The room was soon filled with smoke, and the atmosphere became very thick, but the Germans ate and drank till their faces shone. And greedily they gulped down the music, which was beautiful and charming and sentimental by turns, though all seemed to meet with the same approval. A pale young Jew played the violin until René was near tears and Mrs. Brock heaved fat sighs of contentment; a portly Austrian with a sweet little tenor voice sang Schubert's Trout song so neatly and with such ease that René wriggled with pleasure; and there were quartets and a solo flute and a piano duet by two little blonde girls with pink legs and absurd pale eyes, with which they ogled their papa in the audience and the portrait of the Emperor William on the wall; and Linda played a Beethoven sonata (rather dull), and the Prelude of Rachmaninoff, which was received with thunderous applause. She wore a white dress and looked very fine, plump, and comely, with her white hands hovering over her and descending on the keys, and her head swaying until upon the close of the music it drooped to show a beautiful line from her neck to her waist. René had been so moved by the music that his eyes caught greedily at this extra pleasure, and they never moved from Linda's face as she stepped down from the platform, and came forward looking for her party. She was greeted with "Prosits" and raised tankards as she passed between the tables. Then she stopped and gazed over to the corner where Kurt was sitting. M'Elroy stood up to catch her attention. René saw that, and also how Linda shrank away from the assertion and the claim, feigned that she had not seen, and threaded her way toward her mother's table. To cover her coming, René began to talk wildly in German:

"Das war wunderschön. Ich habe nie solches Klavierspiel gehört. Ich bin----"

"Linda versteht. Ja. Aber sie fühlt nicht mehr als----" And a torrent of long-involved sentences descended on René and brought him to a hopeless bewilderment. That had been his growing condition. This incursion into a foreign world, into an atmosphere of easy social intercourse, was for him, a dweller among the humble ingregarious inhabitants of mediocre streets, an ordeal, a fierce conflict with impressions. Already to have had so much music to absorb had put some strain upon him. The effort to follow Mrs. Brock's conversation had been exhausting, and to save himself he clung to Linda and the idea of Linda. He rose as she came up. She stood for a moment with her hand in her mother's, looking, for a brief space, like a Cranach Eve, all charm and tenderness, the very bloom of womanhood upon her. She took his chair, and he had to fetch another. He was forced to place it close to hers, so that he had some difficulty in not touching her. Presently she moved so that the smallest accidental gesture must make him touch her. He edged away, and she turned and looked at him searchingly, inquisitively. His face was blank as that of a statue. His mind knew no thought. He seemed to himself to be drowning in a languor that was part weariness, part excitement, at her propinquity.

She laughed, and her laughter roused him, but already she was talking animatedly to her mother and her mother's friends, and René became absorbed in contemplating her honey-colored hair, the rounding line of her shoulder, the pretty modeling of her cheek and neck. And, through her conversation with her mother, with her white shoulders and the pretty modeling of her cheek and neck she carried on with René an intercourse more terrifyingly intimate than any he had ever known. He had a disquieting sense of using more faculties than he had ever suspected in himself. It was pleasantly adventurous, but to a youth of his virtue it savored too alarmingly of black magic that her attention should be upon him while her words were elsewhere, and that he should be so keenly aware of her. It sent the room whirling round him, made his identity, which hitherto had seemed definite enough for all the apparent purposes of life, melt and trickle away, and cruelly transferred the center of his universe from himself to Linda. And, when she looked toward him again, it was almost as though she had surprised his state, so certain did she look, but still inquisitive and malicious.

"Well? Did you talk German?"

"I said you were _wunderschön_." He leaned forward so that his hand touched her arm. He was so desperate that boldness was his only course. She had taken something from him. He was in a mood to claim it.

"Am I?" she said. "You looked as if you didn't see me."

"But I did see you all the time, especially when you drooped your head."

"Oh! Then!"

And with the acuteness of his desperation he perceived that she was aware of the effectiveness of the drooping of her head. That made him angry, though he knew not why.

"It's so hot in here," she resumed; "will you take me home? It would be nice to walk. The others will drive."

She explained to her mother, and René followed her, torn between expectancy and alarm. At the door he met M'Elroy. For a moment he was delighted to see that hero, saw in him an agent of relief.

"It's too bad, Linda," said M'Elroy; "I haven't had a word with you all evening."

"Well? There are other evenings, and we are both so young." She said this with a rather pretty German accent, the assumption of which seemed to infuriate M'Elroy, for he flung off with an angry "All right!" and left them. Linda smiled slowly to herself, and René was conscious of a doom settling on himself, and all his hope seemed to have gone with M'Elroy.

They parted to go to their respective cloakrooms, and René told himself that she would change her mind, would dismiss him also and wait for her mother, that what his eyes had seen he had not seen, that, after all, Linda desired of him nothing but the common civility of his escort. But all his attempted evasions only excited him the more, and by the time he met Linda again at the door he was speechless and in a sweat.

The night was cool, clouded, and dark. René walked very fast.

"I can't keep this up," said Linda, and he dropped to a crawl.

"That's better," she said with a sigh, as they walked down the nigh empty streets. "Oh, dear, I should be so sorry if you hadn't been happy."

"I--I was happy. I loved the music."

"You can tell almost everything in music."

"If you have anything to tell."

"How droll you are--so literal."

"Miss Brock----" said René. They were walking very slowly now. They had turned down the last lighted street before the darkness of Galt's Park. It gaped before them, inviting, menacing, romantic, rousing him to a mood of antagonism to the growing fascination she was exercising over him.

"Droll?" he said. "I don't know. I mean what I say, though. I can't always say what I mean."

"Who can?" asked she.

"I mean, suppose you have a feeling for anything, for your father or your mother or something beautiful, and the feeling is so big that it can't get out----"

"One gets to think," said Linda in a quiet little voice, soothing, caressing, "that men don't have feelings like that."

They passed through the gates into the darkness of the Park. They walked on in silence, slower, slower, till they came to a weeping tree that hung right over the footpath. Here they stopped altogether. The blood beat at his temples, he was near choking, and there was Linda in his arms and he had kissed her, shyly, coolly, almost defiantly. It was soon over, but she lingered, and out of the darkness came her voice saying:

"But you are the drollest dear."

Stung into a passionate desire to justify his situation, he cried:

"By God, but I do love you."

A little cry from her (he scarcely heard it), a strong embrace, and there came another kiss, wherein was neither sweetness nor delight, but only a bitter hunger.

VIII

INTIMACY

By hunger sharply sped To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use.

SOON René found himself engaged upon an intimacy with Linda Brock--that is to say, he was ever at her command, her constant escort, her listener. She talked of everything, seemed to empty her mind for him. Everything she discussed--the relation of the individual to the race, the race's rights in the individual, childbirth, the upbringing of children, and the position of women. He had not her reading, and was at first fogged by her discourse, her voluble juggling with topics and ideas that could not enter his mind without engendering a certain heat and releasing some emotion. It was not long, however, before he found himself master of her jargon, not long either before she found out how to use it to bring him to a confusion from which there was no issue but by kisses and embraces, and because he kissed and embraced he loved, or believed that he loved. All his unhappiness he ascribed to their necessary separations, and he was persuaded that his soreness could be healed, his dissatisfactions repaired in a future possession. The force of old habit kept his working life intact, and there he was happy and proud to think that in his love there should be so noble a coolness. He tried to explain this to her, and she said:

"Yes, of course. You must keep your work separate. Love and fine thinking, you know."

He liked the phrase, not knowing it for a quotation; but he never observed that she always set herself to disturb his coolness, and never let him go from her till it was drowned in a flood of warmth.

She took him in hand, made him buy clothes, gloves, spats, chose his ties for him and his shirts; discovered that he only wore one shirt a week, and tacitly informed him that two was the irreducible minimum; persuaded him to abolish the parting in his hair and to brush it back; to abandon his straight for winged collars; presented him with gaily-colored socks; lent him books, modern works of fiction and fashionable philosophy; induced him to become a member of the Union, though she could never get him to speak at debates. On her instigation he joined a tennis club in the summer term, proved rather skillful, and was invited by M'Elroy to play for the University second team.

Linda was ambitious for him, but she could not make him ambitious, and she failed to develop opinions in him; but always, just as she was despairing of him and on the point of dismissing him from her mind as dull, he would come out with some simple comment that delighted her with its directness and force. Then she would go to Professor Smallman and talk about René, and the Professor would say:

"A good sound brain. Nothing unusual except that one feels in him things unroused. No passion."

"Ah! Passion!"

"Yes," he said, purring, "I put it rather neatly, I think, the other day. The temperament of a clerk with a brain too good for that kind of work. He has a conscience."

"But do you think he will do anything?"

"He will do what he thinks right."

"Then you do agree that he is a force? I feel that so strongly about him."

Professor Smallman smiled in his charming, uninterested way.

"Not much good being a force if you are an economist. That's specialist's work. Even business would be better."

And Linda began to map out a career for René--business, the city council, Parliament, and thereafter--who knows?

René was very docile. His friendship for Linda made life more gracious, more full, and he was shedding the awkwardness that had grown on him during his two years of solitude. He was able to go to Professor Smallman's whenever he liked, and other houses had been thrown open to him.

At first he had endeavored to bring the new spirit that he had won into his life at home, but his father had become merely ribald, and in his mother the spark of feeling that had been struck out of her on his return from Scotland had died away and would not come again. What she felt and thought she concealed with chatter, and too many of her notes were now exasperatingly echoes of her husband's. For a short while René went through an agony of shame when he felt his parents as a drag on him, and he could never return home without an acute feeling of sadness. To counteract this he used to talk to Linda of his mother as she had been before his father's return, brave, humorous, quick to see and to understand. In such talk Linda delighted, and she made him promise to introduce her to his household.

It was arranged.

"Afternoon tea, I suppose," said Mrs. Fourmy. "Thin bread and butter in the parlor."

"I think she'd like what we always have. She particularly said you weren't to make any fuss."

"But I'd like to wear my black silk. I don't often, now."

"You can wear what you like, mother. Only let us have tea as we always have it. I'm sure she'd like it better. Not sardines or tinned salmon or any of those things. They only have light tea because they have dinner afterward. It would be silly of us to pretend to be anything but what we are."

"But they'll think----"

"I don't care what they think."

Mrs. Fourmy stole a quick glance at him and said:

"No. You never do."

Her tone roused him to a hope that the old mother had come again, and he turned to her, only to see the quick light die down in her eyes and into them come the querulous questioning expression that seemed to forbid him to pass beyond the empty words and looks she gave him. He realized then how false an idea he must have given to Linda, and he wished she were not coming.

When the day arrived, just before he went to fetch Linda he sought out his mother, and found her dressing in her room with his father lying on his bed smoking and reading.

"I'm going now," said René. "I shan't be more than half an hour."

"I don't mind betting," chuckled his father, "that you'll be more than that. There's no end to it when these women get to dressing up for each other. Look at your mother; she's been brushing her hair this half-hour past."

"I thought you were out," said René, cold with an almost hatred.

"Me? Tea-partying's my line. Always has been."

"Don't tease him," said Mrs. Fourmy. "Don't tease him."

Mr. Fourmy had his waistcoat unbuttoned, so that to René he seemed all fat stomach bulging through coarse shirting. He turned away in disgust. As he closed the door he heard his mother say:

"It isn't fair when the boy's in love."

He held the door open, and heard his father turn on the creaking bed and laugh and say:

"Love? A gawk like that? Statues are his line, not women."

Upon that René so lost himself in a sick dread that he was hardly conscious as he walked, and seemed to have been marvelously propelled from Hog Lane to Galt's Park.

Linda was ready for him in a light muslin frock and an adorable little tip-tilted hat. He had never seen her so pretty.

They decided to walk by way of Potter's Park to see the flowers. René could hardly get his words out, but he felt that he must do something to explain.

"You may be disappointed, you know. It mayn't be all that you think it is."

"Oh, but I have seen the outside of the house, and one knows what to expect. I mean, if you saw the outside of our house you'd know the inside was pretty much the same as hundreds of others. The curtains always give you away. And nearly all the houses on this side of Thrigsby are like yours. When I was at school I knew a girl who lived next door to you. And, of course, I'm excited because it is--don't you think--reassuring when you are fond of people to know that they have relations like the rest of the world."

René's shyness, the delicacy of his feelings had forced upon her the use of the phrase, "fond of each other." For all the excitement she had roused in him he had never become possessive nor made any attempt to assert a monopoly. And one evening when she had flirted with M'Elroy at the tennis club he had left her to it, apparently not at all distressed, and subsequently he visited on her none of the jealousy she had expected. With M'Elroy her relationship had become nothing but jealousy, and she preferred René's diffidence to that. And also, as she had shaped René outwardly, so inwardly she hoped to mold him to her liking. M'Elroy was too conceited for that.

"I promise you I shan't be disappointed," she said.

"I want to ask you not to mind anything my father may say. He does talk so. I hoped he would not be in."

"You dear silly, I shan't mind anything. I shall like it. I want to see how you live, and if I don't like anything it will only be the more wonderful that you are you."

He gripped her arm very tight. She laughed though he hurt her. It was the first uninvited caress he had given her.

"You are so strong," she said, and she took his arm and did not relinquish it until they came to the gate of 166.

To his dismay René found Elsie with his father and mother. She declared that she had only dropped in, but she was arrayed in her most garish best and had put on her primmest and most artificial manner, talking mincingly like a chorus girl. And she patronized Linda, swaggered over her as the married woman, chattered about her darling baby, and made the party so uncomfortable that Linda could not hold her own, and a gloom would have descended on them had not Mr. Fourmy come to the rescue and told droll stories, spiced and hot, of the doings of women in various parts of the world. He cut into Elsie's gushing stories with the story of the marine and the admiral's French governess, and wound up:

"In Brazil the women eat men. No half measures. Eat you they do. Look to the right or the left and they knife you. What I can't make out, Miss Brock, is why any men stay in England."

Linda laughed merrily.

"Hardly complimentary to us! But you came back, you know."

"So I did, for my old age. England's an old man's country."

"You won't get me to believe that, or René either."

"Ah, but René can't see things as they are. Short-sighted René is. And George is blind; isn't he, Elsie?"

Elsie giggled. She had been wanting to giggle for some time, and the appeal to her set her off. She could not stop herself.

"Oh! Lor'!" she gasped, "you are funny, Mr. Fourmy. You ought to be in a pantomime. I never laugh like I do with you."

And once more Elsie dominated the party. René wilted. Linda drank the many cups of tea pressed on her by Mrs. Fourmy in her nervous anxiety. Conversation flagged, sputtered, and Mr. Fourmy in desperation kept Elsie giggling with familiar jokes. Linda laughed at them too, and René sank into gloom and his mother watched him anxiously.

At five o'clock Elsie gave a little scream and said she must hurry away to see that the servant (she had no servant) had made George's tea. She hurried away, and then, relieved of the oppression of her presence, René was just beginning to hope for better things when Linda, to escape from the table, asked if she might see the picture on the easel in the corner of the room. Delighted, Mr. Fourmy turned the picture to the light. Linda bit her lip and a dimple came in her cheek.

"Not bad for an amateur," said Mr. Fourmy. "Just the lid of a cigar-box and a little paint. I never did care about anything but the figure."

He took the picture up and looked at it lovingly, and with pride and in a queer confidential voice that startled René and stung Mrs. Fourmy into a sudden attention, he said:

"You can understand an old man liking to do something with his hands, and it's strange how, when I paint a little bit like that"--he pointed to the hip--"it brings back wonderful moments I have had and rare pleasures, not just in remembering, but as they were--wonderful!"

"I think so," said Linda with unwonted simplicity, and Mr. Fourmy took her hand, stooped over it, and kissed it.

René looked at his mother, she at him, and Linda, turning to Mrs. Fourmy, smiled and said:

"I am so glad to have come, Mrs. Fourmy. René and I are such friends. We have such great hopes for him and I wanted to see you. Will you take me home, René?"

Mr. Fourmy opened the door of the room for her, hurried ahead to open the front door, and with a tremendous dignity, bowed again over Linda's hand, thanked her for coming, and said:

"May life be good to you, and very amusing."

And Linda answered:

"I'd like to buy your picture, Mr. Fourmy. Will you send it to me when it is finished?"

"I would rather give it to you."

René's horror sent him flying down to the gate. It was a minute or two before Linda came. She was smiling, and Mr. Fourmy had come out on to the doorstep to watch her walk down. René saw his eyes follow her and appreciate her movements, and he became acutely, alarmingly conscious that she also was a woman. He was frightened of her as she came up to him, but he was also angry, and he let fly:

"Linda, you can't."

"Can't what?"

"You can't let my father give you his beastly picture. You didn't seem to mind. I thought you would. I thought you would. He sits all day doing those things over and over again."

"Oh, René, don't be silly. I'm older than you."

That was the first he had heard of it, and it dashed him. That a man should love, could love a woman older than himself was in flat contradiction to all his notions. He was furious. Linda went on:

"Two years older. Twenty years older in experience and knowledge. You think like a silly little boy."

In a rage he turned on his heel and left her. But at once a fierce hunger to be with her seized him, to clutch her by the arm as he had clutched her before, and to hurt her more, to feel her soft flesh yielding under his grip. That desire was stronger than his fury, and he ran after her, and caught her up just at the gates of Potter's Park.

"I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. I do beg your pardon. I can't help it. I must be with you."

And he seized her arm and rushed her ahead for a few paces until she cried out at the hurt:

"René! René! Quiet! Not now! Wait!"

She was as excited as he, but not, like him, absorbed in her excitement. It was a delight to her.

He released her, and she led him to a seat opposite a bed of Darwin tulips, red and mauve and yellow. He sat by her side trembling, drowning in a flood of savage emotion, thinking not at all. Slowly he became aware of the tulips in front of him, and he said:

"The flowers are very pretty."

That relaxed the tension he was in, and he stretched out his legs and stared up into the sky, and presently he broke into words:

"And the summer sky is beautiful, but not so beautiful as you, and I love you."

His arms were folded on his chest, and he seemed to be hardly conscious of his words Then in a calmer voice he said:

"I never noticed before how the sky is always changing and moving and alive. I would like to sit like this until it all grows dark and the stars come out and the glow of the lights of the town goes up into it? And, Linda, it has all become very different, hasn't it?"

She said:

"I knew it would come."

Then they laughed together, and René clapped his hand on her knee and told her she was a wonderful darling.

Linda observed then that they had begun to attract attention, and she rose and walked quickly away. He followed her slowly, thrilling to the present, seeing nothing in the world but her brave little figure in muslin with the tip-tilted hat. Her hair was golden in the sun, and her neck was white and the lines of her shoulders were lovely. René touched her lightly as he came up with her.

"We're going to be married," he said.

"Yes."

"Isn't it fun?"

Her answer struck him as amusing and he laughed. She asked:

"Is Elsie better in her own house?"

"Oh, she's a good sort, really, and George--that's my brother--George couldn't have done better."

"I have an idea from the way you speak that I shall rather like George."

"I didn't say anything to show I like him."

"No, darling." (René's heart leaped at the word.) "No. I think you dislike him. You hate your father. He is impossible, but such a dear."

René, sensitive in his ecstasy, for the tulips and the sky and she had brought him to nothing less, felt a malice in her that scratched at his heart. But, loving her, worshiping the new radiant intimacy that had sprung up between them, he loved even her malice.

They walked home slowly, laughing over the mischances, the absurdity of the tea-party, and when they reached her house she made him come in, played to him for an hour, and sent him home drunk with love. He called it love, for he suspected not that it could have any other name. She had promised to marry him as soon as he had his degree and a position, and he was to write to her mother and make a formal proposal, since Mrs. Brock was old-fashioned enough and German enough to desire that much of formal ceremony.

IX

PATERFAMILIAS

The foolish man thereat woxe wondrous blith As if the word so spoken were half donne.

SO far René's success had come from his power to do what had been expected of him. He had done it without delight or enthusiasm but with the concentration which came from his lack of interest either in the past or the future. From the interest of others in himself he had been able to borrow a little excitement every now and then, but he could never sustain it. It was not lack of energy, mental or physical, but rather that, doing what was expected of him, he did it well enough to lead to further expectation, and this gave him a constant surprise at himself to keep his existence zestful. He was not altogether indifferent, but he could accept. He accepted that Linda loved him, and was equally prepared to accept that she loved him no longer, subject, of course, to any incidental pain he might suffer. Believing in everything that happened with no power of definition or intellectual curiosity, he could never at any given moment realize his position without reference to others, and therefore, when he found himself embroiled in this tender, disturbing relationship with Linda Brock, he needed to bring it to the test of all his other relationships--with his father, his mother, his brother, M'Elroy, Kurt, and Professor and Mrs. Smallman. He could not talk about it to any of them, but he hoped to find in all some appreciation of the new wonder that had come upon him, and he desired, for his comfort, to find out what in this new development was expected of him. Here he was baffled. Everybody was either tactful or insensible. Things inanimate had changed enormously for him. Streets, houses, trees, had taken on a new beauty, a friendliness that made room for his emotions; but people lagged distressfully, and he often had an unhappy sense of leaving them behind, or, as he talked and listened to them, they would dwindle. And yet, at the same time, he found them so wonderful that, in their failure to respond to his need, they seemed to him to be untrue to their own wonder. He knew not the nature of his need, but he was left subtly conscious of its being left unsatisfied. He ascribed his discomfort to his love, and called it "being in love." It gave him an insatiable desire for Linda's society, presence, contact; a harsh sensibility to her beauty; an appreciation of her physical qualities upon which he never dared to think, because it led him back in thought to the moment of her colloquy with his father when he had felt so strangely that he and his mother were not of their world. In this distress his mind could find ease in the idea of marriage. That settled the future and appointed an end to the force that urged him on so mysteriously and powerfully; but, accustomed as he was to living humbly in the present, he needed somehow to escape the isolation into which the desire for Linda had cast him. He worked harder than he had ever done, but when he was not working, and issued from the coolness of that limited mental activity, he was visited by a craving that not even Linda could slake. He found most comfort in children and the idea of children. He would go and see Mrs. Smallman, and sit with her in the garden and silently watch Martin and Bridget playing over the meager lawn under the plum-tree. He would talk to Mrs. Smallman about indifferent things, and go sick at heart as he saw how her eyes and mind were upon the children, how little occupied with himself, and how rigidly she kept him from that mystery which he desired to comprehend. Again he would play with the children with an admirable success, so that they would admit him as one of themselves, only as he emerged from the game to be met with an applauding smile from the charming lady, which made him feel that she admired his performance but could not herself admit him. She was friendly and amiable, and would ask him to come again; and he would hear from Linda how well Mrs. Smallman thought of him--"Such a nice boy, and so fond of children"--but she kept him separate. He tried once or twice to tell Mrs. Smallman about Linda.

"She is such a clever girl," she would say. "A good musician, of course. My husband says she could take a first easily in almost any subject. I am sure she will make a good wife, just the kind of girl to make a man successful. We have often been surprised that she has not married before, but of course she is a girl who could only live happily with a good brain. It does make such a difference."

Everything she said led back to her own bliss and exceptional fortune; and while René gave her due homage for her motherhood, her wifedom, her gracious happy home, yet he came almost to hate these things without knowing that it was because they were securely barred in. Yet he could not keep away nor refrain from his attempts to storm the citadel.

He would try through Smallman, who was even more exasperating. He seemed to divine that his pupil was groping after some reassurance of human beauty, but he would hint darkly at the difficulties of married life, generalize about the simplicity of human needs, whisper of the revelation of fatherhood, and, just as he had René sitting forward in excited anticipation of the longed-for marvel, he would double and turn aside into the discussion of economic problems, or the unsatisfactory nature of the academic life in Thrigsby. And then, with the children, René would see that Smallman could never enter into their games or their minds as thoroughly as himself.

On the whole he preferred George's gross swaggering over his paternity, and there was a sure satisfaction in watching his sister-in-law suckle her baby. But there again George and his wife took upon themselves an excessive credit for the achievement, hoarded it, invested it in everybody whom they could get to take it, seeming to use the child as a means of gaining admiration for themselves. They seemed to be incapable of recovering from the astonishment of anything so natural happening to themselves, and they too, a little more exuberantly and less charmingly, barred René out.

"By Jove!" George would say, "there is nothing like it. It's wonderful what you can do without when you've got that. And, as I was saying to Elsie, I can't make out what swells do who have a nurse. I can't tell you how jolly glad I was when the monthly went and we could have it all to ourselves."

To René George was so horrible when he talked so, that he would forget the sentimental satisfaction he had had in the contemplation of the change wrought in the household by the advent of his nephew.

"And imagine," George said once, "that one never thinks of it. You get making love and all that. Just a bit o' fun, as likely as not, and it leads to this. By God, it's a big thing. Hark at the little beggar. I tell you, René, my heart sometimes stops with fright when a long time goes by and he doesn't howl. Oh, well, your day will come. It'll come, all right. Don't you worry!"

In desperation René led the conversation elsewhere.

And at home things were hardly better. He felt that his mother did not like Linda, though she showed no reluctance to talk of her, or indeed to praise her. Perhaps Linda had frightened her. And sometimes René would feel that his mother had a real horror of love and marriage and all but the most superficial and sentimental relations of the sexes. He would wonder how that could be reconciled with her reception of his father or her excited business before the coming of Elsie's baby. She was often disconcertingly silent when he came home from some employment with Linda, and he learned that he must not tell her what he had been doing.

Sometimes she would begin of her own accord to talk of Linda:

"She has such eyes. She sees everything. You feel she knows every stitch of clothing you have on. And the things she wears herself-- Well! But she's very pleasant and she's got a pretty smile. Girls were very different in my day."

"How were they different?" René would ask.

"I don't know. Different. I can't say. We were more patient. There were some things we didn't talk of. But, of course, she's not English. That would account for a good deal. If you weren't so set on her I should say she was making a fool of herself. Girls often do, you know, with a sort of man they've not been used to. But I will say this for you, René, you're not one not to take a girl seriously."

René looked puzzled. His mother laughed.

"Go on, you great gaby; don't tell me you don't know what you can do with those eyes of yours."

This annoyed him with its suggestion of a deliberate manipulation on his part of the springs of affection.

"Oh, mother," he said, "you've been so different since my father came back, and I'm different, and everything seems to be changing so swiftly that it is hard to tell--hard to tell where we are. We seem so far away from the old life, just you and I together."

Mrs. Fourmy looked at him and replied:

"You remind me of the times when you were a little boy and used to sit with an ashen face, very thin, with the tears rolling down your cheeks. And when I asked you what was the matter you used to say: 'I'm heavy.' You weren't like an ordinary boy. You seemed to feel things."

"I seem to feel things now," he said miserably; "but I don't know what things they are." Then, encouraged by the warm interest he felt in her, he added: "But I can't want not to feel." And, daring a stroke against the new baleful influence at work in the house, he told her of his recollection of the scene in the bedroom when she had spanked his father.

"Well now," she said, "to think of your remembering that."

"It made all the difference," said he, "all the difference in the world."

"Oh, you poor mite," cried his mother; "and you couldn't see it was in fun?"

"Fun!" He looked incredulous.

"Yes. We were very happy then."

He pounced eagerly on that.

"Happy? Were you happy? And now? And now?"

That was coming to closer quarters than she had courage for. She sank into indifference.

"We're old now," she said, and he felt that she too had barred him out. She also may have felt it, for she shifted uncomfortably and led the talk away from herself and presently to praise of his father.

"He was too clever," she said, "and I couldn't see how clever he was. I wanted him to beat his brothers in their own line, and I wanted him to love you two boys in my way instead of his. Of course I'm not clever, René, and I can't say where things got wrong. It's wonderful how he's settled down now. I never thought he would. And I want you to be nice to him, René, for my sake. Even if you're not going to be here much longer, I would like you to do that. He feels his position so."

The sting of indignation pricked René into brutality. He had made his effort to reclaim his mother from his father, and failed. He cried:

"What did he do?"

"What do men do when dullness creeps over them and they are mortified with failure?"

There was a note of vengeance in her tone, exasperation perhaps, a savage determination to set abominations before the fatuous innocence of her son. She succeeded. He was beset with horrors and a sick repulsion from his mother who could allow, accept, and seem to rejoice in such contamination.

Drearily he said:

"He's a dirty man," and upon that expression of opinion he left her.

However he did attempt to be more amiable with his father, and even went so far as to accompany him to the Denmark of an evening, and was there astonished to find how the old fellow by sheer wit and masterful presence lorded it over the company of clerks, shopkeepers, theater musicians, agents, brokers, bagmen, school teachers, the odd characters, the small talents of the neighborhood. René noticed that Mr. Sherman plied his father with drink to keep him lively, and that there seemed no question of payment for it. Mr. Fourmy paid in talk, yarns, jests, jokes, impromptu fantasies, with sly hits at the eccentrics of the assembly. And although René hated the atmosphere, the smoke, the drink, the greedy lapping up of gross laughter, the pouncing on scraps of filth and equivocal utterances, he could not escape some admiration of his father. This grew as they left the place and Mr. Fourmy shook off his air of large geniality and took his son by the arm and asked if they might go for a walk together.

"To think," he said, "of your remembering a thing like that. And it did make a change too. You used to come running down the road to meet me when I came back from town. You stopped doing that. I noticed it once or twice, and then I gave no more heed to it. I never was much of a one to give heed to things. Can't stand things dull. Never could. I couldn't do what you're doing now, plodding away with those fat books of yours. It seems wonderful to me. I looked into one of them the other day. No. I never had the mind for it."

"Father," said René solemnly, "when I was born, what did you feel like?"

"Lord love a duck! What a question! I'd been expecting it, you know. And George was there, you know. But I'll tell you this, my lad. A child's wonderfully separate at once, and no amount of clucking will ever make it anything else. It's got its own separate life like the rest of us. We're all separate, and it's just as well not to forget it. We're never allowed to forget it for long. I forgot it. I thought we were a nice little happy family with no individuals in it at all--except myself. And then----"

"What then?"

"Then, my son, there was a nasty mess."

"Oh!"

"There always is a nasty mess. Marriage knocks a man to pieces and leaves him to put himself together again. Women are more brutal. They don't mind if marriage turns out to be no more than a pool of mud. Lord, Lord! a woman will bear a child almost every year of her bearing life and be no more than a little girl at the end of it, a prying, stealthy-minded little girl."

René was enraged and shocked, but excited too, intellectually. He turned to his father and said:

"Father, I want to know, I must know, how you could come back to my mother."

"That," said Mr. Fourmy, "is what I am still asking myself."

René swung round and struck his father full on the mouth, thrilled sickeningly to the impact and raised his hand to strike again. Mr. Fourmy caught him by the wrist and dragged him up so that their faces were close together, both breathing heavily:

"Steady," whispered the older man, "steady! steady on, boy. It's the women bitching at you got into your blood. You're a good boy, a virtuous boy. Things are hard for virtue. Listen to me. Do you hear?" René nodded. "Very well then. Life's a damn dirty business, and it grows damneder and damneder as time goes on. It got so damned for me that I cleared out. See?" René nodded. "I cleared out till I could see that it was damn funny. Then I came back. It was grinding me as it is grinding you."

He patted his son's arm so affectionately that René choked and the tears ran down his cheeks.

They walked on, René lurching, until his father took his arm again and led him. There was a moon over them, and as he led, Mr. Fourmy said:

"On a night like this even Thrigsby is beautiful. Lord! How I used to hate the place. But when I had seen things I came to know that it is like any other. There are good men in it and good things, and over all the same slime of meanness and fear that only very few can penetrate. We live in a world of women, boy, and we must make the best of it."

René hardly heard him, but he could feel the pressure of his hand and was glad that here, at last, was one nature that did not bar him out. It was so astonishing as to be repellent, but he was so hungry for comfort that he could not withdraw.

X

HONEYMOON

That God forbid that made me first your slave I should in thought control your times of pleasure.

MRS. BROCK granted René an interview. From the worldly standpoint it was satisfactory. No great objection to the projected alliance was made, and he learned that Linda had a fortune of her own which provided her with an income of seven hundred a year. If anything, he was distressed by the information. He did not regard money as in itself desirable. The lack of it was a nuisance to be avoided if possible, but not otherwise to be considered. The past year had led him to believe that such a lack was easily repaired. It was disturbing to the few ideas he had on the subject to think that he would not be able to satisfy any desires in his beloved which she could not herself supply. However that did not occupy him long, for he was comforted by Mrs. Brock's explaining that she had discussed the matter with her daughter--a good, sensible maiden, who admitted that there was a practical side even to romance--and they had agreed to postpone the marriage until Mr. Fourmy was settled in a profession. To make this easier, Linda had consented to go to her relatives in Hamburg for an indefinite period, though, of course, she would go there as a betrothed.

He said:

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Brock."

He tried to say more, to remove the affair from the hard, business footing on which it had been conducted, to lead his prospective mother-in-law to give him some sign that she regarded him as a potential member of her family, but she suppressed him by saying:

"Frankly, Mr. Fourmy, I don't think it would be wise of you to marry with my daughter unless you have at least three hundred a year."

He agreed and withdrew, chilled at the heart. It seemed to end his wooing and to give him already a slight distaste for Linda. Could she really have discussed the matter so coolly with her solid mother? It was a shock to him that women from whom came such great ecstasy were not themselves all compact of that fiery essence. And seven hundred a year! That seemed more present to the mind of the mother than the girl herself. Seven hundred a year was to be sent to Germany until he had grown into three hundred a year.

However, Linda immensely enjoyed the process of parting. She began it on the Sunday, and carried it through till the Friday, when she was to sail from Hull, and she left her betrothed, sad, aching, but obstinately hopeful. On the Tuesday she said:

"You have changed my whole life. I was drifting. I was trying to take in too many things. You have made me see."

"What?" asked René very seriously. He was anxious to know.

"Just _see,"_ she replied.

He was left uncomfortably in his own limited world, feeling that she had shot off into regions to which he could not follow her. He ought to have been accustomed to that by now, but he could not be. She was always hinting at the wonderful things she got out of him, but as he was never conscious of them, he could not understand her. He used to tell himself that it was her queer roundabout way of delighting in her love for him.

On the Thursday she said:

"You know, René, at such a distance we shall be able to get our ideas of each other clear. That is so necessary. We must make an effort to understand each other."

"Isn't it enough if we love each other?"

"Oh no. That only means making allowances. It isn't enough to do that. I get frightened sometimes when I think of all the people who are married, how little they understand each other."

"Then they're married without loving each other."

"I think I see what you mean," and she caught his hand and pressed it to her bosom. She had become much more demonstrative in these days of parting. He warmed to her excitement and rushed ahead:

"People who love each other are married. I've been thinking about it. If people love each other they have the wonderful mutual knowledge which is marriage. And we have that, haven't we?"

"Oh, wonderfully!"

On the Friday she wept and would not be consoled until he had consented to go to Hull with her. He had an engagement for the day, but telegraphed to cancel it and went with her. She clung to him on the boat, and caused him almost to be carried away from the pier. The gangway had to be put out for him, and he raced ashore and stood on the quay waving a pocket-handkerchief and swallowing his tears until the boat had dipped over the edge of the sea.

They wrote to each other, every day at first, then every other day. Her letters in their coolness often stabbed him, but he could not bring his into tone with hers. He poured out everything he thought and felt without calculation, and with no literary pleasure or excitement. She was only led into warm confession when some phrase lured her on. Her greatest enthusiasm was when, at the end of the Academic year, he sent her the examination lists with his name at the head, and also as having won the Robert Owen prize and a studentship of eighty pounds a year for three years.

Indeed his university career ended in a blaze of glory. Professor Smallman sent for him and assured him that on his papers he was an absolutely first-class man, and the university could not afford to lose him. Of course there was no vacancy as yet, and the teaching of economics was a miserably-paid profession, but in the meanwhile he could procure a supernumerary post on the staff of the Grammar School which would leave him free to take up any appointment that cropped up. He could also continue his reviewing, unless he thought of going on to Oxford or Cambridge, when, of course, the school and the university would help him. For a career, a degree at one of the major universities was almost essential.

"I don't mind telling you," said the Professor, "that it is pretty much my own career over again, though there are things you can do that I never could. You've more imagination. Cambridge economics are very much alive just now. If you would care to----"

"I must make an income," said René. He was elated, but also disgruntled, suffering from a reaction. He had prepared his subject for the examination, and having succeeded, had lost interest in it. Vaguely he had so arranged his life that until this examination he would do as he was told to do, so that after it he might do things because he wanted to do them. On the whole, he rather resented the Professor's continued interference in his affairs. However, he agreed with the first plan. Cambridge meant another three years preparing for another examination, and he was Thrigsbeian enough to feel that it was not a "man's work."

He saw the Headmaster on the morning of Speech day, and was warmly thanked for the honor he had brought to the school, and was engaged to appear on the first day of the following term. Desiring to see his old form-master, Mr. Beenham, he went to his room and was surprised to find his desk empty and the boys playing cricket with a German Grammar and a ball of paper tied with string. As he left the school he asked the porter after Mr. Beenham, and the porter told him that story. It upset him. Of all human beings he had regarded Old Mole as the least human, but now he was desiring to exercise his released intelligence, his power of penetration, his imagination upon the surrounding world. All his faculties had been concentrated upon economics as a means to an end, the life which lay beyond examinations. Professor Smallman and the Headmaster had made him feel that the life beyond was distressingly like the life before, and now this disaster to Old Mole came as some small assurance that there were adventures though they might be never so foolish. The Professor had mildly alarmed his pupil by pointing out the similarity of their careers. Admire Smallman as he might, it was not _that_ to which René wished to come. It was not that he had any excitement in contemplating the future. On the contrary: the present was too absorbing. Everybody was charming to him, seemed to be proud of him; the rich Fourmys had asked him to their houses--and he had refused. He found himself being listened to, respected, given the right to have views and opinions. He had neither, and was too honest to evolve them for the occasion. And when the future insisted upon engaging his attention, he filled it with Linda and was happy.

He refused to go to Scotland, half despising his memories of it.

He was happy, simply engrossed in his own comfortable sensations. He had set out to do a thing and done it well, better even than he or anyone else had anticipated; he was in love and engaged to be married upon the condition of making three hundred a year. His success had made that easily possible; his studentship, one hundred and fifty from the school, more from the _Post_, possible examination papers, lectures; his hardly-won book knowledge had been shaped by his reputation into a marketable commodity.

But his real happiness lay apart from all these things, from success, from love, from the easy commerce of his abilities. Relieved from the strain and obsession of his examination, he had discovered the wonderful pleasure to be got from the mere act of living, from seeing the world freshly every morning, from passing through the day and feeling it slip away from him without his having to demand of it any definite profit in knowledge or money earned. It was a new delight with him just to watch people, a joy that had remained with him from his outburst by the tulips, to sit and gaze at flowers, trees, the sky, water. He had times of feeling wonderfully remote, when the habits on which he won through the day seemed ridiculous, though trivially pleasurable. In this mood he would sometimes realize with a start that it was now his father and he who were companions, his mother who was the stranger. And he would bring himself up on that and tell himself that his mother had his love and championship if any were needed. But he would rejoice in his father's gusto in eating, drinking, smoking, painting, talking, all that the queer man did. Against that too he would react and tell himself that his father was futile. But was not his mother futile also? And was not futility with gusto the better of the two?

He was too happy for the business of weighing up between his father and his mother, too absorbed in the glowing introspection to which he had been brought; introspection without analysis; a brooding, almost a floating over faculties in himself faintly stirring, reaching out to exercise themselves on everything within his reach. The world was very wonderful: its possibilities were endless; its treasures lay immeasurable only for the stretching out of his hand; and it was a delicious pleasure to him not to stretch out his hand, but to know that one day he need but make a gesture to have all its marvels pouring in on him. That those older than himself had but a small share of them disturbed him not at all. He had no doubt but his would be the infallible gesture, and, without conceit, during this happy time, he cherished a firm belief in his unique quality.

All his new delights were expressed in his letters to Linda in Germany. She analyzed them for him, not always accurately, but the mental process was new and exciting to him, and he began to appreciate her intellectual activity. They discussed his character at great length. He said: "I suppose I am, or have been--for I often find myself wanting to laugh nowadays--too serious." She replied: "Not too serious, my dear. It is impossible to be that in this heartless age. (Oh! What a lot you can learn about England by going abroad!) Not too serious. No. What you lack, I think, is power of observation. What you must realize is that things have a surface and a surface value. Of course _you_ cannot be content with that value, but you must not expect surface things to have any value in the region of profound things, the region in which, poor dear, you have always lived." Faithfully he set about cultivating surface values, but he never could laugh at things that were just amusing; he never could laugh unless he were moved to laughter. He was, for instance, baffled and made sorry by the family jests which left George and Elsie exhausted by their noisy mirth.

Kurt Brock persuaded him to go with him for a tour in a side-car attached to his motor-cycle. Then did René become swollen and puffed up with the glory of the world. The exuberant boy was a tonic in himself; the speed he maintained was intoxicating; and they burst out of the long suburbs of Thrigsby into the Cheshire plain, over to the sea, the Welsh mountains, down the Severn and Wye valleys. To René, whose existence for so many years had lain only in Thrigsby and the little Scots village, it was being shot out into life. The return to Thrigsby made him miserable. Also association with Kurt had pricked the small bubble of his vanity. Kurt, so hopeless with books, was amazingly efficient with his machine, equal to every emergency, daring, inexhaustible, masterful. He had said many things which René had found disturbing and alarming. The boy had everything so cut and dried; no room in his life, it seemed, for folly, certainly none for brooding. He confessed one night, as they sat sleepily in a public-house parlor, that he wanted to be an airman. René could not applaud the ambition.

"Hardly fair to your mother, or, suppose you were in love, to--well."

"People talk a lot of bally rot about love. They seem to think it means bagging a woman like a rabbit and shutting her up in a hutch to breed."

"Well," said René, "marriage does mean living together and a certain amount of responsibility."

"I dunno. I've never been in love, but I'm not going to either, unless I get something that goes off with a bang and lets me and her get on a bit." His mania was for getting on. When René wanted lunch, Kurt would hold out for another place "only twenty miles on."

Another night René returned to the subject of women and love, Kurt's audacities having a horrid fascination for him, and the boy said:

"I dunno, but if a woman said she loved me and wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do because she said she loved me, I should know she was a liar."

René tried to point out that life and love were not so simple as all that, but there was no turning Kurt. He had the thing worked out neatly to his own satisfaction, and he was not going to bother his head about it any more.

"Bad enough," he said, "to have a legal speed limit without having a private limit in the home."

A letter from Linda reached René at one of their stopping-places. She declared herself terrified at the thought of his being with her brother. "Do keep him from going more than thirty miles an hour."

At once René was on her side against Kurt and exasperated him by asking perpetually: "What are we doing now?" To which Kurt invariably replied: "Damn near fifty."

The tour ended in a river in Derbyshire. Kurt took a curly wooden bridge at thirty miles an hour, carried away the railing, and plunged René and machine into six feet of water. Kurt could not swim, and René hauled him out and screamed at him:

"You deserve to be killed! You deserve to be killed! Taking the bridge like that."

Kurt grinned:

"You don't know how funny you looked in the bath-chair toppling over. What a smash! What idiots to have a bridge like that. It's no good for anything except a push-bike. I'll get a car if the insurance people stump up."

René was really shocked at his callousness, and as they sat in blankets while their clothes were being dried, he took him to task, delivered himself of a pedagogic exhortation and ended by saying:

"Kurt! Kurt! I believe you have no feeling!"

"Nerves! What's the good of them anyway? But I'm jolly grateful to you for pulling me out. I must learn to swim. It might be jolly awkward if I tried to fly to America. Wouldn't it be grand if I was the first man to do it?"

Something in the boy's tone thrilled René and he felt a pang, a sudden, painful knowledge that he loved Kurt, and, when he was left alone, Kurt's clothes having dried first, he was faintly uneasy, half wondering, yet not admitting the doubt to himself, whether he had really loved anybody else. Then he told himself that it was only because Kurt had treated him with his boy's frankness, and because he had not with anybody else been brought face to face with anything so terrible as death. And then he found himself in a brief dream asking if life also was not terrible, and love? And if----? But such thoughts he refused to think. Into his brooding happiness had come a new zest, and he would not waste one moment of it upon doubt, philosophic or particular.

They returned to Thrigsby by train, and René found himself committed to a lie about the accident. If the truth came out, said Kurt, his mother would not allow him to have that car.

What was there in common, thought René, between Linda and Kurt? She had not his frankness. (He was frank even in his lying.) She was subtle, given to theory. Her brother had, cut and dried, not so much a theory as a program. With Kurt René had had a robust pleasure which he had never enjoyed with Linda, and it was so far above all other pleasures that he took it for the goal to aim at, the prize to be won, when he should have broken down the barrier of sex and overcome her taste for teasing, and put an end to all those irritations which he ascribed to their ridiculous position as engaged persons, irritations that even in her letters pricked and stung him. He was slow to come by a thought, and when he possessed one always insisted upon its relevance to existence, while she seemed most to revel in ideas when they were most irrelevant. In their correspondence, her letters grew longer as the months passed. (After his success she had assumed "intellect" in him.) His letters became more precise and brief. He had no doubt of her. She had taken the place of the examination as the next stage in being, beyond which would lie, to borrow her phrase, the "real, real life."

So eagerly did he look forward to that illumination that things and people had lost their interest for him. The question of income was settled; the problem of his father and mother engaged him no more. They had suddenly become old to him, settled, left to grope along with their own affairs and difficulties. This made life at 166 easier. He had stood between his father and mother, and had now removed himself. His mother was more free in her chatter, his father less strained and more jovial in his talk. René had told them of his engagement and of Linda's wealth, and this, coupled with his success, had made them acquiesce in his translation to a superior sphere and even take some pride in it. For a short while he had qualms on seeing his mother let him go so lightly, but he faced the fact and did not let it obtrude upon his dreams of graciousness and freedom.

All these events had delivered him for the first enjoyment of his youth, and his thoughts were like bees in a flowering lime-tree. They were disturbed by nothing but Linda's letters. The more she teased and flattered his "intellect," the more he dwelt upon the future when the teasing and the flattery would have ceased, and his warm satisfaction would be invigorated by the zestful sharing of married life. He made no plans and hardly considered those she threw out. She had ambitions for him. They were too fantastic to be noticed.

A silence of three weeks alarmed him. She broke it with the announcement of her return, and the expression of her desire to be married at once, and a request that he would meet her in London, for she was crossing by Flushing.

It was early spring. He obtained a day's leave of absence from school, and met her at Fenchurch Street. He saw no more of London than was to be seen as a background to her profile as they drove to Euston. She was different from the image he had formed of her during her absence, smaller, even prettier, more vivacious and effective. They kissed when they met, rather to his astonishment, for he had not the least desire to kiss her but only to consider her. She began to talk at once:

"It has done wonders for you. You look so much more confident and bigger. Your success I mean. And you really are distinguished-looking. How do you like your work?"

"I do it without---- No, I haven't thought about it."

"I wanted them to take you into the business--Brock and M'Elroy, you know. But old Mr. M'Elroy wouldn't hear of it. They wanted me to marry Jack M'Elroy. Perhaps I should have done it if I hadn't met you."

That did not please him at all, though it was obviously intended to do so. She went on:

"But we'll show them that we can do better on our own lines, won't we? Father used to say that commerce was sordid however honest you tried to be, and after all, it isn't work for a first-rate man, is it?"

Her insistence on his success and abilities worried him. It was not for this he had been waiting. He wanted her to tell him what had brought her to her abrupt decision to be married sooner than they had planned. He tried to lead her on to that but could bring her to no other intimacy than that of little caresses with her hands. He would not admit his disappointment, and all through the four hours' journey kept on telling himself that he was glad to see her. And indeed he was glad. Her coming brought the promised future nearer.

She gave him no time to ponder his disappointment or the hole it knocked in his brooding pleasure. They chose a house, fifty pounds a year, with a garden, in Galt's Park. He took his mother to see it, and she assumed the manner she had had in the old days for the visits of the "rich Fourmys."

A fortnight's shopping furnished the house, and he had the satisfaction of supplying the furniture for his study out of a check sent by his Aunt Janet. The trousseau took another three weeks, and Mrs. Brock, with an eye to wedding presents, would not hear of the day being fixed until after an interval of six weeks. A miserable time. Linda seemed to think of everything but her bridegroom.

For the honeymoon the Yorkshire coast was chosen, by whom it was not very clear. René had wanted Derbyshire; Linda had proposed the Lakes, but, a fortnight before the marriage, Mrs. Smallman had appeared on the scene and taken charge, instructed them, tactfully and almost tacitly, in the correct deportment of those about to be married. She kept the couple apart, spent days and evenings with Linda, and made her keep René distracted. The Smallmans had spent their honeymoon on the Yorkshire coast; they knew of a charming little private hotel overlooking Ravenscar; theirs had been the perfect honeymoon, one which had never come to an end. So might--must--it be with René's; and so it would be if goodwill, advice, kindly glances, friendly instruction, could bring it about. The Professor expanded:

"It is wonderful when all that you have loved in a dream, as it were, materializes and is there in your hands. Only you feel so confoundedly unworthy. And then, when you are married and settled down, you get so abominably accustomed to it. No one could be more devoted than my wife and I, but we find that if we do not keep ourselves alive with outside interests, we begin to wear each other down. It isn't easy--marriage. I can say all this now, because if I don't I never shall. And, after all, you know, I like you, Fourmy. We shall work together and be good friends, but we lose something, you know. A certain kind of intimacy we can never have again."

This talk reminded René of the occasion when George had taken him as a small boy to the swimming baths, made him stand on the edge practicing strokes, and then pushed him into the deep end.

The night before his departure, his mother came into his room and sat on his bed and looked long at him:

"I can't bear to think of your bed empty to-morrow," she said.

"Better send it to the new house," replied he.

"I can hardly realize that you are a man and going to have a wife. It seems only the other day that you were a little boy, learning to cook in the kitchen. Do you remember? And now I suppose you'll have late dinner. It is queer. I used to be able to think of you as a boy at school, but I can never imagine you as a teacher, in a gown, too. And it's even harder to think of you----"

"You shall come and stay with us."

"Oh, I couldn't!" She looked toward the door.

"You could come without father."

"Don't be hard on your father, René."

"No. That's all over."

"I'm so glad."

She stooped over him and kissed him. Then she took his head in her hands and pressed her cheek against his, and on his forehead he felt her warm tears. She murmured:

"I've always tried to do my best."

Then she left him, and he felt the tears rising to his own eyes, and he lay in worship of the beautiful kindness of women. They seemed to hold in fee so much of life's loveliness, to be able to open to a man fair regions that else were hidden to him all his days. He was eager for the morrow's adventure.

The wedding made him feel that it was not by his own will that he was being married, but that in some fantastic way he had been brought to it by Mrs. Brock and the Smallmans and, incongruously, by his father and George, and was doing it to oblige them. The collective will of several persons was using him and Linda as pawns in an aimless game.

The ceremony took place in a very ugly Lutheran chapel, and the recited words had no meaning for his bewildered mind. George and Elsie--whom he remembered in the middle of it--had had a reason for their marriage. His own seemed purposeless--No. Did it not open up to him an unending tenderness like that given him by his mother last night? He stole a glance at Linda. She was all pride and blushes, rather breathlessly intent upon the ceremony, which seemed to have some emotional significance for her.

They had two rooms reserved for them in the little hotel. They avoided them, and preferred to be out of doors. They took food with them to escape dinner before the other visitors and walked the three miles to the top of Ravenscar. There they sat in the heather and gazed out seaward in silence. On the way they had talked little, except to comment on the broken sky, the color in the moors, the still shining sea, gray and green. They sat in silence, and he felt utterly alone, cut off from his old life with no new life begun. And almost angrily he thrust away the idea of the woman sitting there by his side. So charming she had been in the glamour of the future, so irrelevant she seemed now that he was thrust away with her to find or fail to find in her a life to replace that which had slipped away from him. He had prized that old life so little while it was his, but it had been familiar, his habitual garment. It had been fashioned with his growth. She had been outside it; that had been her fascination. But he was stripped of it, and he had nothing wherewith to approach her. And suddenly he saw that he was failing her, that such thoughts were a betrayal of her trust in him. After all, she too had shed her old life. He was fearful lest she should become aware of his treachery. He said:

"When I was away with Kurt----" And at once he knew that he had made a false move. The thought of Kurt filled him with the memory of the free joy he had had on that excursion, and he could not but contrast it with the mean and sickly hesitation of this. What was it? What was he afraid of? Afraid of the woman? Oh, come! Did he not love her and she him? What was there to dread in love?

She said:

"Oh, René, we didn't come away to talk of Kurt."

"No."

"We didn't come away to talk."

"No."

She came close to his side.

"René, kiss me. Say you love me."

"I love you."

But it was better to sit in silence and gaze out at the sea, gray and green.

She clung to him, caressed him, used absurd little phrases, English and German.

"I loved you," she said, "from the first moment when you came into the Smallmans' drawing-room. I was wearing green. Do you remember?"

"Green. Yes. I remember. I saw your parasol in the hall."

"And you loved me from the moment when you saw my parasol."

She laughed. That was better. It broke the heavy brooding in him that had brought him to such suspense.

The evening air chilled them, and they walked home under the stars. She clung to him and sang ditties of love and trysts and sentimental disasters. When they reached their sitting-room she came to him and placed her hand under his chin, pressed his lips with her forefinger, and then kissed him. Then she left him.

In the early hours of the morning he was out on the seashore, wandering aimlessly, nervously, dejectedly. Every now and then he threw up his head and took in a great draught of the keen morning air blowing in from the sea. That invigorated, cleansed him. Suddenly he crouched on the sands and hid his face in his hands, and cried within himself:

"I can't go on. I can't go back. Oh, Love, my love."

He had counted on her to open up new wonders and sweet joys, and together they had attained nothing but heat and hunger and distress.

XI

MATRIMONY

Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee, An' let poor damned bodies be: I'm sure sma' pleasure it can gie Ev'n to a deil To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me An' hear us squeal.

HE returned to her. She was in dressing-gown, fresh, indolent, gay. She held out her hand to him.

"What a strange man you are! Couldn't you sleep?"

"No. I couldn't sleep.

"Poor old thing. I slept wonderfully."

Had she felt nothing? Had she no suspicion of the agony that had driven him from her side? Of the sick hope of comfort and reassurance that had brought him back to her? A faint shadow of fear had crossed her face on his entrance, but it had vanished when he spoke.

Indeed he was reassured. Her gaiety and charm disarmed him. The sun came streaming through the window upon her hair; her eyes danced; she glowed in her health and physical well-being. He had no other creature to whom to turn. Under the spell of her radiance he appealed to her, who had wounded him, to repair the hurt. She petted him, made much of him, denied him the relief of activity, and had him to sit with her in the heather with his head in her lap while she crooned to him of how happy she was, and how proud a wife, and how this honeymoon would never come to an end. There was a drugging beauty in her voice that soothed him and had him dwelling in a honeyed sleep. It was sweet to lie in the sun and gaze through half-closed lids at the pale sky and stifle the voices of hostility that stirred in him at her touch, at the caressing notes in her voice, at her perpetual drone of contented triumph. She allowed him silence, but then only the more keenly could he feel her presence. She would sigh out of it:

"A--a--ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet, lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!"

He thought of Kurt, and his mania for moving on.

She said:

"René! What do you like best in the world? I should like to give it you."

He answered:

"Peace."

"Peace? Isn't this peace?"

Anger stirred in him on that. How could she talk of peace when to him every moment throbbed with menace? He turned over on his side away from her.

"Can there ever be peace," he asked, "between a man and a woman?"

"What do you mean?"

He made no reply.

"Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you mean." And she dodged aside into phrases--the war of the sexes, the difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little.

"I meant you and me," he said, biting out his words.

"Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us. We couldn't be more wonderful. Could we?"

"I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can't help thinking of those damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said: 'How wonderful we are!'"

That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and jumped to her feet.

"Oh, I never thought----"

She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out behind her. He came up to her.

"What did you never think?"

"That on our second day you would be satirical."

He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested:

"I said what I felt. Mayn't I do that? I didn't think it would hurt you, really, I didn't. Linda, I----

"Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more than you can say. And you don't know how uncomfortable it is."

She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood pondering it.

"I can't help it," he said slowly, "I'm made like that. I can't be comfortable."

Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open.

"I know you can't," she said, "but I can, and you mustn't spoil it for me."

He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her and cried:

"Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would----"

"What would you do?"

"I don't know. But I would move heaven and earth to give it back to you."

"I believe you would, and that makes me love you."

He weakened to her will, and not again during their honeymoon did he let slip in expression or gesture the tiniest hint of the storm let loose in him. Small periods of solitude he could procure at night when she had retired for her astonishingly lengthy toilette. Then in suppression of his fire and rebellion, in the effort to keep a tight control on it even within himself, he became aware of a strength, a firmness that, out of all that he had lost of youth and ease and pleasant happiness and the charm of living, emerged as gain. Yet it was not in his nature to count it up nor to hoard. He could find much to rejoice over, the splendor of the night, the keen winds, the huge waves splashing under the wind, and all he would take to his wife for her to turn into charm. And she would weave her spells round him. Her tone, her eyes, her warmth, that was so like tenderness as almost to deceive him into acquiescence, all said to him: "Forget! Forget!" But every fiber of his will was stretched in the effort to remember and gain knowledge--to remember how this thing had come about, that he should have so much and so little love for this woman, by what blindness he had come to it, and what in all his slow growth to manhood should have brought him to such sweet mockery of it. These were not his words. He was groping beyond words, beyond actions; his captured force was searching through his life to find forces to sustain it, to urge it on, to release that slow-moving stream that had brought him thus far to be chained and confined. He who had realized so little was struggling to realize himself, to find within himself the power that should break this woman in her complacent dwelling in the pleasure of their love and set him free and her. For he had begun dimly to perceive that she too was to be thought of, and in his effort he was gentle with her. This was hard, for against his gentleness she chafed. She wanted turbulence, upheaval, suspected not the stirring in his depths and was forever agitating the surface of his being. Once or twice she did call forth the anger, and then she reveled in her delicious fright and was so quiet as to alarm him and drive him back into his gentleness. Out of this she stirred him. It was to her only an odious sluggishness.

It was a comfort to him that he could admire her. She touched nothing but she gave it charm. She changed the Mapledom of their room to an originality of elegance. Her ingenuity and adroitness with herself were a source of amusement and amazement to him. The fun of watching a woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. Sometimes she would bring out in her talk of them qualities and foibles that he had not remarked, though on her indication he was forced to admit that they were surprisingly there. Other times she seemed to shape them to fit in with a fantastic world of her own. And that would be little less amusing than her criticisms. He could admire her, but his admiration made him feel how remote she was, how unpossessed, how little he desired possession, and how, in all things, she invited to it.

Perhaps she felt some of his uneasiness, for she said toward the end of their stay:

"I suppose a honeymoon can never be the same to a man as it is to a woman." (The hypothetical man and woman of all her arguments.) "A man must have his work."

"I've been thinking," said René, "that we never know what we want but when we have it."

"How true!" She had a way of making agreement with him a sort of flattery, than which he found little more distasteful.

And as they drove to the station she looked round at the hills and the rocky coast-line, and murmured:

"It will be something to remember. It _is_ a pretty place."

For him it had a beauty that had stirred him like nothing else he had ever known. For him also, till now, all things had been charming, but the desolate moors, the stubborn cliffs had led him away from charm to beauty and the savage joy of living in resistance.

The return to their world shocked him. From those weeks of the profoundest emotions that had ever shaken him to come back to amiable superficial relationships left him floundering, made him, when he had collected himself, feel how utterly dependent he was upon his wife. He was committed to her, isolated with her. The loneliness of that day upon Ravenscar was nothing to the loneliness in the multitude.

Linda was immediately busy organizing her household, buying, buying all day long; visiting, receiving visitors; she had crowds of friends and gushing acquaintances, and they easily assimilated her husband, were interested in him as they were interested in her wall-papers, her furniture, her plans for the little garden, her gowns, her china. He used to watch eagerly, almost hungrily, for a sign that they recognized his existence apart from hers, but no sign ever came. To the women he was something belonging to dear Linda, and therefore to be admired since she was reputed to get the best of everything; to the men, hard-headed, commercial gentry, he seemed to be baffling and ominous, for they either fished nervously and falteringly for his views or left him in the silence to which their geniality reduced him.

He resumed his work at the school where he had not yet learned to disengage himself from his schoolboy's sensations--dread of the headmaster, an inclination to run along the corridors when the bell sounded, a desire to smack cheeky little boys over the head, reluctance to attend prayers in the morning. At the end of the year a vacancy occurred on the staff of the university and he was appointed to fill it.

His first tussle with Linda came with his assertion of a desire to be alone in his study when he was working. She had made a practice of settling down with him in the evening with her sewing, or some clerical work connected with one of the various committees to which she had had herself appointed--social and rescue work, Arts and Crafts, the University Musical Society, the Thrigsby Amateur Dramatic Club, the Goethe Society, etc. She had learned to be silent, but by the plying of her needle or the scratching of her pen she disturbed and distracted him. He put up with it for some time, but at last it was too strong for him, and he protested.

"But Mrs. Smallman sits with her husband every evening."

"He may be used to it, and she has a capacity for doing nothing which you do not share."

"But it's so absurd to have two fires lit in the evening."

"I'd rather not work then, and come and sit with you."

"But you must work. You never say anything."

"Then I must work alone."

"Why must you?"

"Because I can't work any other way."

"What is it disturbs you? I won't do it if you'll tell me."

"I can't tell you. It's just having you there."

"Then you-- Then you-- Oh, well! There's nothing more to say if you feel like that about me."

"Linda, don't be silly. It isn't about you."

She had already fluttered out of the room and closed the door very slowly, so that its movement was the most eloquent reproach.

Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood of tears and a fierce hunger for possession and to be possessed by him compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers, no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation. Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year married:

"The room over the study--that would be the best for the nursery when we want one."

"But, René," she answered, after a pause, "we don't want to have children yet, do we?"

Despair seized him. He could not look at her.

"No. No. Of course, it is as you please."

She smiled awry:

"Oh, my dear, I didn't mean you to take it like that. It sounded horrid, I know. But for modern men and women, it ought to be possible----"

He could not let her finish. He hated her talk of "modern men and women," as though some change had come over human nature.

"I sometimes think," he said, "that no single word has the same meaning for the two of us. Your Love is not my Love, your Yes is not my Yes, your No is not mine."

"Oh, René, you do say some terrible things! Sometimes you frighten me. Sometimes you are just a helpless silly baby, and sometimes you seem to know more than anybody I ever met. You are so strong, but you don't seem to know what to do with your strength, and I am terrified of you . . . Oh, I don't know what to do with you! Can't we be just happy?"

"Just happy! . . . I suppose we can."

"We have been . . . Haven't we?"

"We have been," he said, but the words in his mind were: "No more than happy."

To avoid hurting her he had abandoned the use of even that much introspective power that he had come by in Yorkshire by the sea. Now he worked, let the days run by on the wheels of habit, and gave her as good a counterfeit as he could make of what she desired.

She decided in her own mind that he was working too hard, and must be taken out of his solitude, which she ascribed to his inability to find his feet socially after being lifted out of his own class, and dumped into hers. Her brother was wanting to get rid of his first small two-cylinder car to buy a new 30-40 h.p. She made him an offer for the little car, and he closed with it and undertook to teach René to drive.

That was not a very difficult matter. Two lessons sufficed, and René was left with the car on his hands and no knowledge of its mechanism.

"But what shall I do if it breaks down?"

"It can't break down," said Kurt. "The magneto can't go wrong. If she stops, clean the sparking plug or put in a new one. It must be that or the jet."

René tried to read a book about motor-cars, but could not apply its technicalities to his own machine. He spent some days in and about and under the car, tracing out the principles on which it worked, and following its transmission of energy from cylinder to clutch, from clutch to gear, gear to back-axle. When he had done that he felt some confidence in driving, came to know the moods of his engine, and to take an extraordinary pleasure in handling it. Every week-end he made some excursion with Kurt or Linda, and sometimes alone. He explored the country for fifty miles round Thrigsby, and discovered to his dismay the vastness of the network of industrial towns, and, to his delight, the loveliness of the still uncontaminated country.

At first the change produced the effect Linda had desired. He had a new energy which enabled him to take the dull work of the week lightly. He seemed to have caught some of Kurt's enthusiasm together with a little of his good humor and tolerance. But these qualities he could not assume without the frankness that nourished them. Soon he was no longer deceived by the counterfeit he had evolved for his wife's satisfaction, and could not evade the fact that his excursions were desired chiefly as an escape from it. Their two habitual lives were organized effectively enough; it was when their lives met that there was insufficiency, fumbling, distrust, evasion. He could not altogether conceal from her the disgust and almost horror that he felt on being faced with the deception he had practiced on himself, and through himself on her. She saw his distress, could not altogether understand, felt that she was giving him too many opportunities to escape from her, and in her turn began to counterfeit an interest in his enthusiasms and to insist on occupying a seat in the car whenever he went away, whether Kurt was with him or not. Kurt had an affectionate pampering way with her, a mere expedient for striking harmony between their different natures, which René as usual, taking seriously, misread as contempt. This, unknown to himself, encouraged the growth of the hatred which he had never allowed to rear its head. . . . And Linda, a little wearied by now of the part of the lover, had begun to play the part of the devoted, settled wife, to throw up round herself as bulwarks her advantages--her charming house, her ample means, her distinguished husband, a man of learning and culture in a commercial atmosphere, leisure among the unleisured. It was only an experiment on her part, but she gave it a thorough trial. When it failed she had her moments of despair. She had felt her husband's withdrawal from her, at least the removal of the deceit which covered it. She was enraged, determined to break him into submission, flung the whole force of her nature into the effort and failed again. Then, to escape boredom, she began to amuse herself with her sufferings. She would lead him on to talk in his inarticulate fashion of what he felt and then play upon his emotions and bring him back abruptly to her own charm, to realize her greater skill and agility in life, her rightness in the business of living and presenting a brave front to the world, and sometimes he would almost admit that she was right, and that, after all, since he could produce nothing definitely superior to her desire, he had better yield and give her those good things that, in their easy circumstances, they were privileged to enjoy--charm and excitement and pleasure. But he could not. Life had always been hard for him. He could not consent to have it easy. All that she fed on turned to bitterness in his mouth.

He tried to tell her once of the tenderness his mother had given him on the night before he had come to her, the pure joy that, but for the omen at his heart, he had taken for a foretaste of the heaven he was to enter. She said:

"She is a dear old woman, your mother."

In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed, he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made:

"Linda Brock has no back to her mind."

It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded, brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: "See! This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of it." If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes, that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.

And he began to question his everyday life. It seemed mechanical. He had been shaped for the position he filled, fitted into it so tightly that he could never move. He would be carried on forever by the machine that had caught him up as a small boy when they had marked him down in the Lower Third. (They had written to his mother: "He is a boy of whom the school will one day be proud." And she had been so elated by the words.) He had accepted the force of the machine and let it take the place of his own will. That was unpracticed. He had used it for nothing. The machine had carried him to security and given him things apparently so coveted that his brother George could not now speak to him naturally, so great was his awe of his success. It was so easy to think the thoughts required by the machine. A kind of education had been pumped into him. He had now only to pump that same kind of education into other young men. The machine was efficient, himself efficient in it. There was satisfaction in that. But all the other men with whom he worked were elusive; so many of them, under the pleasant manners of the common-room, concealed despondency, a mood of resignation that was epidemic, more virulent at one time than another. Against that, too, René was in revolt. Instinctively he felt that if he surrendered to it he would fall also to that other danger in his domestic life.

He tried to understand Linda. She was so successful. So many people liked her. Her social progress was amazing. Efficiency always gave him pleasure, and it was delightful to him, though he hated it, to feel her skillfully consolidating their position. She was tremendously active in all external things. It was her inward activity that he wished to understand. What were the things that satisfied that clever brain of hers? What her heart? He had long ago swept aside her pseudo-science, sociology, physiology, psychology, as external to herself, things worn as she wore clothes, very well, to be becoming and in the mode. It pleased her intellectually to talk of a hypothetical man and woman. What did that hypothetical man and woman become in art? He followed her in her reading, her music--so far as one so uninstructed could follow at all. . . . German sentimental _lieder_, colored lanterns over water, sweet flirtations, violins in the distance; a sighing for the passing of youth; a lingering over the sweets of love, with ultimately a withdrawal from love; a perfume. That was her art. In her drawing-room she had impressionist and post-impressionist drawings; in her own room she had pictures of young men and maidens in ballrooms and canoes and French boudoirs.

He could see the charm of the things she loved, always melted to them, but never without a reaction, an angry stiffening of the will.

At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying. She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their grace, and he liked the skill with which she clothed herself to give every one of her attractions free play.

It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive him of it.

At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried:

"You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from abominations."

"Ah!" She too was angry now. "What else is it?"

"By God!" he said. "I thought it led to love."

And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on hearing his father's cynicism.

For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext--wished to have some of the rooms papered--and went to stay with her mother.

XII

ESCAPE

_Ant._ Come, I'll be out of the ague, For to live thus is not indeed to live, It is a mockery and abuse of life. I will not henceforth serve myself by halves! Love all or nothing. _Delio._ Your own virtue save you!

HE spent hours brooding, prowling in the streets, in whose dull monotony his mind had grown so undisturbedly, responding to their small gaieties and smaller excitements, but moving on in the even smoothness of their life. It seemed incredible to him that such turmoil could have come out of them, and yet that turmoil had begun even before his marriage, before he had met his wife. Was there some strangeness in himself? Of his nature he became doubtful and suspicious. Yet the habit of acceptance was too strong in him; even his misery he could accept. Very laboriously he strove to come by an idea of himself, and was only the more confused when he arrived at this:

"They won't come out to meet me, and when I go out to meet them, they run away. I cannot enjoy their pleasures, and they seem to want nothing else. It gets worse and worse. I couldn't even talk to Elsie now. Almost anyone can make me seem ridiculous."

Linda wrote to him:

"Can't you see, Ren dear, that there are some things won't bear thinking of, and spoil with thinking. You poor, tortured thing!" (Least of all did he want pity from her.) "I know you don't really want to think, and you don't think easily, like most people. At least you seem to hate thinking without coming to a conclusion. It is something finer than obstinacy, because it isn't at all for yourself that you want--what you want. What do you want? Isn't it enough to be happy? Oh, my dear, do let us be happy! I have been crying every night. It isn't that I mind being apart; husbands and wives must be apart sometimes if their life is to be possible and decent, but I can't bear our being apart in spirit."

Then she had understood! She had seen the gulf between them. She would help him to bridge it.

He hastened to her joyfully, and caught her up in a great embrace, so that she laughed in delicious terror.

And the torment began again. She had seen, understood, nothing. She was only for teasing, wheedling, cajoling him into submission. She told him--carefully choosing her moment--that she would bear him children, and for a little while, a second or two, he was appeased. Then his excited imagination worked on that. A child would mean only another entity in the house, the empty house, where there was no love to absorb it and foster its growth; more antagonism; more separation; his child or hers, it would not be both. He could not see at all clearly, but the idea of it had for him now something horrible. With no count of his words he said:

"I do not wish for anything that you yourself do not want."

"I want it."

"Then why talk of it?"

"A man and a woman----"

"Talk of us, woman, talk of us. God! You don't know how you spoil things with your busy mind. True things, simple things, lovely things, things that lie deep in heart and mind, there is nothing that you will not shape and mold and knead and twist into your own image, pretty, pretty, charming. Oh, the lies of it all, the lies, the lies, the lies! And you never know what you are doing. All is for your pleasure. Nothing can lead you beyond that. And everything that menaces your pleasure you draw with your busy brain into words, words."

"You don't know what you are saying."

"No."

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

"Yes."

"I can't pretend that you haven't hurt me."

"I'm sorry."

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

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

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

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

"Good evening," said René. "I have left my wife."

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

"Great God!"

"I just walked round to tell you. I don't know why."

"But, my dear fellow, what on earth-- Not two years."

"Is it?"

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

"No. She is quite calm. It's finished. It's she who said it. It never began."

"Come, come. Sit down. You'd better sleep here to-night."

"No, thanks. I don't want to see you ever again."

"Tut, tut! My good Fourmy!"

"I mean it," said René dispassionately.

"Wait a moment."

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

Another false move checked; another false relationship ended.

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

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

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

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

"Don't be a young lunatic," he said. "You can't go like that."

"I can," answered René, puzzled that anybody should deny what was actually happening. "I can. Don't you see that I _am_ going?"

"Look here, I'm a bit of a queer one myself, but do you know what you are doing?"

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

His father let go of his arm.

"Good Lord!" he said, "I've had my day, but I never was so cracked as that."

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

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