BOOK TWO

ANN PIDDUCK

. . . and make Strange combinations out of common things Like human babes in their brief innocence, And we will search with looks and words of love For hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last.

I

ADVENTURE IN LONDON

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

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

"Hi, mate, time to wake up. Can't leave you no longer."

"Eh? Is this London?"

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

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

"Been ill, mate?"

"No. Why?"

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

"I'm much obliged."

The big clock announced five minutes past eight.

"No luggage?" asked the porter.

"No. No luggage."

"Going to see friends?"

"No."

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

"No."

"You'll want breakfast."

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

"I never see such a sleeper," said the porter.

"I was tired, I think."

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

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

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

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

"Not exactly trouble. Nothing unusual, I mean. It's been going on for a long time."

"They're not after you, then?"

"Oh, no. No one's after me."

The porter's expression showed both disappointment and relief.

"Is it far to Putney?" asked René.

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

"I mean--to walk. I'd like to walk. To see London. I've never seen it, you know."

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

"Someone I know there."

"I see. You'll be going home soon. Return ticket?"

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

"Ain't lost your memory, have you, mate?"

"No," said René. "No. I've lost interest in it, that's all."

"Money? Got any money?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is Putney."

"I want Mr. Bentley's house. It is called Roseneath."

"Mr. Bentley. He's dead. Six months ago."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A near thing that," said he.

"I think I've hurt my foot. I slipped on the tramline. They do stick up just here."

"Can you walk?"

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

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

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

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

"Is it far?"

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

"But I must see you home."

"I 'spect you got someone waiting for you. 'Tain't fair to spoil your fun."

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

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

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

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

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

"What you might call being thrown together," she said.

He could not but smile with her.

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

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

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

"It's not far."

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

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

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

II

MITCHAM MEWS

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

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

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

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

"I don't know where I live."

"Go on. I'm not that sort."

"It's true. I've only just come to London. This morning."

"Leave your things at the station?"

"Things? No, I didn't bring any."

"Well! I never!"

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

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

"'Tisn't a sprain? You don't think it's a sprain? I don't care as long as it isn't a sprain."

"No, I shouldn't think it's a sprain; but you'd better ask someone else."

"Are you Scotch?"

"No. Why do you ask?"

"You talk funny. I say arsk."

"My home's up north."

"Home. Father and mother?"

"Well--no. A wife and all that."

"O-o-h! Married?"

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

"I shouldn't have thought it. You look so young. What did you do?"

"Lectured and took pupils at the university."

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

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

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

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you can't just sit and look at London till it begins to look at you."

"No."

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

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

"You don't want to go home? No?"

He shook his head.

"Popped the lid on it, have you?"

He nodded.

"Got any money?"

"In a bank."

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

"No."

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

And she limped away into the inner room.

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

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

"Well, of all the----" she cried. "I did think you'd have cleared away. Why, you haven't touched your breakfast. Haven't you been out?"

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

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

"Can't I?"

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

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

"That's better," she said. "Nothing to eat all day."

"No. Nothing."

She pondered that.

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

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

"What am I to say?" he asked.

"Don't you know?"

"No."

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

He wrote:

"Dear Linda----"

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

"Dear Linda, Linda Brock, Lin----"

Ann saw his hesitation, and suggested:

"You want your clothes."

He wrote down:

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

He stopped. Ann said:

"The address is 6 Mitcham Mews, West Kensington."

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

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

When she returned, she said:

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

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

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

"Oh! I'd be sorry now if it wasn't true, and you went back."

"I shan't go back."

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

"No. I shan't go back. People can't go back. But my father went back."

"Why did you say that?"

"What did I say?"

"'But my father went back.'"

"Did I? I didn't know I said that. I didn't know I even thought of him."

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

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

Can you see me, gray eyes, Hiding in the tree, Waiting for the moonrise? Gray eyes, look at me, In the apple-tree. Apple-tree, apple-tree.

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

"Give us a kiss, old dear, I'm that hellish dry."

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

"Like old times," said Jimmy. "Ma had lodgers. What Ma didn't know about lodgers----"

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

She turned away.

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

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

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

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

And René said: "Here's luck!"

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

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

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

"He made me laugh," said René.

She gave a little crow of pleasure:

"Good old Jimmy!" she cried.

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

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

"And who," asked René, "is the girl with the baby?"

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

"I think your talk's about as good as I could have, Ann."

Her face lighted up.

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

"And all day long I looked out of the window."

III

MR. MARTIN

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

THE next morning brought a letter from Professor Smallman:

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

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

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

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

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

"But we are saving ourselves. The marriage goes to hell or we do. They can't have both."

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

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

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

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

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

"Je-rusalem!" she cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't you think it's funny?"

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

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

"Oh, did you drive a car?"

"Yes. A little one."

"Then we'll go and see Mr. Martin."

And with this suggestion also he complied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I do hope you'll like it," said Ann, as they walked away.

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

She laughed.

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

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

"What book was that?"

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

'And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm love in.'"

"That's pretty," said Ann Pidduck. "There are pretty things in books, though I never read them."

Said he:

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

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

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

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

"I'm glad you do, Ann. I'm glad you do."

"I dunno----" she seemed to protest.

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

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

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

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

Out of the dark archway came a voice, saying:

"A philosopher in the slums."

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

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

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

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

"I got married."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a long silence, René said:

"I have had nothing in my life but foolishness."

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

"Do you want to?" René was startled into asking.

"Of course. I don't let a friend slip when I've found one."

And gladly René said:

"A friend. I begin work to-morrow at old Martin's."

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

IV

LEARNING A TRADE

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You forgot to put down your flag."

René started and blushed. So he had!

"The fare's half a crown."

"Thank you, . . . sir."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But they've got the Miserables at the Pictures," she said, "and they say it's It."

"Look at the sky, my dear," he protested.

She looked at it.

"Yes. It's all right."

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

"Would you like anywhere better than Kew?" he asked.

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

Here again was spring, the first spring evening.

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

"Dull to-night, aren't you? Are you tired?"

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

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

After a long while she said:

"I didn't know I'd made you angry."

"Angry? My dear child!"

"What is it, then?"

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

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

"How do I know? Ask Kilner."

"That beast, Kilner."

"He's my friend."

"He's no friend of mine."

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

Presently she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and said:

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

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

"Ann, you don't know how beautiful you are."

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

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

"Good night, Ann."

"You needn't go," she whispered.

V

TOGETHER

Je vais où le vent me mène Sans me plaindre où m'effrayer. Je vais où va toute chose, Où va la feuille de rose Et la feuille de laurier!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bad news?" she said.

"I don't know whether it's good or bad. My father has cleared out again."

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

"That's not true. I'm perfectly content. I'm learning not to blame anybody. That isn't easy."

"If you're not sorry, I don't see why you want to think about it."

"You can't forget people so completely as all that."

"Your dad seems to be able to."

"I'm not my father."

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

"Don't I?"

"Oh, you're better than you used to be, but you do frighten me sometimes."

"When?"

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

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

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

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

"What would you feel?"

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

"I didn't know I did that. I don't see much if I do."

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

"But I do think of you all the time."

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

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

"Good Lord, if it isn't old René!"

It was Kurt Brock.

"I say!" he said. "What a find!"

"The taxi's mounting up," said René.

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

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

"Cars crawl so," he said, "once you've tried a flier."

"I've seen your name in the papers."

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

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

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

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

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

"Glorious?" asked Kurt.

"I--I don't know yet," replied René.

"How like you!"

"How do you mean--like me?"

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

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

"I've got used to it now."

"Do you ever open a book?"

"Sometimes. I had a few sent to me."

"Economic books?" asked Kurt.

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

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

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

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

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

"I did that?"

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

René described Ann's two rooms.

"Do you like it? I mean, aren't they rather grubby and piggy?"

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

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

"Can I come and see you? I'm here for a fortnight. My business is up north. Got a factory now. You must come and see it if ever you are----"

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

"I'll come along then. Any night?"

"Almost any night."

"I'll take my chance."

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

"'Member our smash?" asked Kurt.

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

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

"I don't see that."

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

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

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

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

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

VI

KILNER

Could I find a place to be alone with Heaven I would speak my heart out.

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

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

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

René laid his book down.

"Have you got what you want?"

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

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

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

"But surely that applies to every trade and profession?"

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

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

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

"I read, amuse myself, and Ann----"

"And you are going on forever, working out of habit, reading and amusing yourself, and a woman who----"

"I'll trouble you not to say anything against Ann."

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

"What do you want?"

"Your friendship."

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

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

René protested:

"She doesn't."

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

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

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

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

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

Kilner leaned forward.

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

"And women?" asked René.

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

They were silent for some moments. Then René said:

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

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

René winced. His friend laughed at him:

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

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

"Oh, so you've come back?"

"Yes," said Kilner, rising. "Like a bad penny."

"Don't get up. I ain't no lady. You been talking?"

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

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

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

VII

OLD LUNT

The glass is full, and now my glass is run: And now I live, and now my life is done.

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

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

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

With variations, that was his customary address.

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

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

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

Proud monument, thou Christmas cake in stone! The thing thou meanest never yet has grown In English soil, a virtue not content To be its own reward, a virtue bent On cheating life of man and man of life. We English have rejoicèd in the strife Of being, till that virtue chilled our blood And had us hypnotized and nipped in bud Our aspiration. We of Shakespeare's line Had in our living made our life divine Till, as we grew accustomed to look at you, We worshiped man transformed into a statue.

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

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

"Did you--did you read my poems?"

"Why, yes," answered René, "all of them."

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

Charles Peace, he played the violin. Music excited him to sin Like drink with other men.

Maybe you never heard that?"

"No. I never heard that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Image: A black circle approximately 5 mm in diameter]

and against it he had written: "My world."

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

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

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

"But," said René, "isn't he leaving his world all written out?"

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

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

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

He had finished the cover.

"I hope he'll like it."

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

Manuscript in hand, René stepped forward.

"Good evening, sir," he said, "I thought you----"

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

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

VIII

RITA AND JOE

And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied All that was left of a woman once, Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.

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

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

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

"Garn! 'E ain't no scholard."

"'Struth. 'E's a college gent."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I--I beg your pardon, Ann. Why didn't you say so before?"

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

"I'm sorry. Can I do anything to help?"

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

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

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

"That's bad. But she ought to have thought of herself."

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

"Don't you ever look ahead, Ann?"

"No. What's the good? Whenever I do, it only frightens me."

"Are you frightened of anything now?"

"A little."

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

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

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

"Ann!"

She looked at him queerly, almost maliciously.

"What did y'expect? Making me so fond of you?"

He said lamely:

"I--I hadn't thought of it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He described Hog Lane West.

"No. The other one, I mean."

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

Then in the same dry, weary voice she said:

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

"For God's sake," cried he, "for God's sake keep that out of it."

"I do try to, Renny, dear. But I can't help thinking about her sometimes when you're like that----"

"Don't talk about it, Ann, don't talk about it. Go to sleep."

"Kiss me, then. I couldn't go to sleep till you'd kissed me. Not to-night. It _is_ all right, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes. It's all right, bless you."

"I don't want to be a drag on you, Renny, dear. It _is_ a blessing we're not married, isn't it?"

"That doesn't matter."

"That's what I say. If it's right it can't stop, can it? If it's wrong, it must."

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

"Good night. We _have_ been happy."

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

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

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

"Jezebubble! That's what you are! Jezebubble! Throwing people down!"

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

Ann called:

"Take him away."

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

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

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

"Was that a joy ride?" asked Joe.

"No charge," replied René.

"I've spat in the car. Is there any charge for that?"

"I'll smack your head if you do it again."

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

"That," he said, "is to show I know you're a gentleman, and what I thinks of yer."

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

"I'll have the law on yer," yelled Joe, trying to shout himself into a fury.

"Then you'll have to walk home. Maybe that would sober you."

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

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

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

"Woffor did you take me out into the bloomin' country?"

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

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

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

"'Ome, and drive like 'Ell. I'll stand the bally fines."

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

"I say," he said, "I say. They've blabbed."

"Blabbed! What do you mean? Who's blabbed?"

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

"Keep quiet," said René. "He'll hear you. Perhaps he isn't waiting for you."

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

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

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

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

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

"All right. You sit here. I'll go and see how things are over there."

The policeman eyed René as he went in.

"Want anything?"

"No, sir. No."

"There's nothing going on here, nothing unusual. Confinement."

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

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

"But doesn't that mean that he's done for? You know better than I."

"You don't get much of a chance."

"Then we'll do what we can. Tell the policeman he isn't sleeping here to-night."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, don't, Joe, don't!"

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

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

IX

TALK

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So long!"

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

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

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

"You'll see a bit of difference if you come to Mitcham Mews," said René.

"I'll come to-night."

"Good."

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

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

"Oh, him!" she said. "Fancy you knowing him!"

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

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

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

"I didn't know he had a friend like you, Mr. Brock, or I shouldn't have dared to be fond of him--perhaps."

"Is that a tribute to my personality or to my reputation."

"Well," said Ann, "you do brighten things up."

"One for old Solemn!" said Kurt. "I hoped you'd have cured him."

"Oh! I don't want him to be cured. I don't want him to be different."

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

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

"Did you fly here?"

"Not this time, my lad."

"Oncet," said the piping voice, "oncet we 'ad a bird-cage."

"With a bird in it?"

"No. We kep' a ball in it and marbles."

"What happened to it?"

"Farver popped it. I seen an airyoplane oncet."

"Did you? Where?"

"In ve Park. A little boy 'ad it."

"Right ho! We'll send you an airyoplane like that."

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

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

"Well?" said René. "A bit of difference?"

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

"Do I?"

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

"Then it's not a bad thing?"

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

"But some things make you think."

"What things?"

"Having no money is one of them."

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

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

"And the capitalists?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Kurt says women want to feel more than they do."

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

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

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

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

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

"Isn't it possible for a man to be hypnotized by art?" asked René.

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

"Who was he?" asked Kurt.

Kilner stared at him aghast.

"A poet. _The_ poet."

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

"And what," asked Kilner, "made you take to flying?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Ever known one?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kilner said:

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

X

AN ENCOUNTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I shouldn't have done any good in your profession, father."

"So you've learned some sauce. That's new."

"I've learned a good many things, father, and unlearned more."

"Have you learned what a rotten hole the world is?"

"No. I like it too much to think ill of it."

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

"It's been bad enough," said René. "And there's worse ahead. Are you living in London?"

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

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

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

"Thank you," said René.

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

"No, no," said René.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," he said, "that's my name."

"Mine," she said, "was Rachel Bentley. I'm married now. I recognized you at once. I was so interested coming along. I hope nothing has----"

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

"I only thought," she said vaguely. "I mean-- Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm glad it isn't that. Good-by."

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

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

XI

VISION

pollás d'odous èlthonta phrontidos planois [Transliterated from the Greek]

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

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

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

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

"Ann, dear, don't be silly."

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

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

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

"You go and see her to-morrow, and you'll find her all right."

"I don't want to see her ever again, nasty ungrateful rubbish!"

"Then I'll go and see her."

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

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

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

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

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

She went on:

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

He said quietly:

"Have you done?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I will not! I will not!"

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

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

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

"The lamps aren't lit to-night. It's very dark. Do you hear? Stars shining. Wonderful stars. Better than lamps. I say, stars are better than lamps."

At length René said:

"Yes. Stars are much better than lamps. Lamps are only to prevent people committing a nuisance. Stars don't give a damn if they do."

"I quite agree," said Kilner. "Drink this brandy."

When he had drunk, René said:

"Women ought to be like stars."

"Rubbish!" grunted Kilner. "Women ought to be like women."

"I've been trying to understand things."

"Awful mistake. A fellow like you can't understand things. He can only live them. That's why you have such a rotten time. No power of expression. If only you could write or draw, or play some instrument--though I hate music. But if you could, you wouldn't be you."

"You're a clever fellow, Kilner. I wish you'd tell me what's the matter with me."

"Too much vitality for a society which dislikes it, as it always will as long as it prefers the shadow to the substance, bad art to good, and imitations of things to the things themselves."

René looked disappointed. Kilner patted his hand.

"Too intellectual! Personal, then. What's wrong with you, my friend, is that you are out for the grand passion. It doesn't happen more than about once in two hundred years. Why? I don't know. It depends on two people, you see, and I suppose two first-rate people don't often meet. The rest of us lie about our love affairs to make them tolerable. I lied that night when I first met you. I wanted to make an impression. The only reason for lying I ever knew. I told you my one decent love affair lasted for five weeks. It didn't. It lasted for exactly five seconds, the time of the kiss under the almond-tree in which it was born and died. Nothing more was possible, she being she and I being I. It was a decent business because we didn't try to pretend it was anything else. So far as it went, it was so true as to make falseness impossible. We shall both live on that for the rest of our lives. Just enough to make marriage impossible for us. We shall both marry someone else for company, and as a defense against a growing tendency to promiscuity. You don't seem to have that tendency. Life's too serious for you. You are incapable of a love affair without an attempt to make it a spiritual thing. Where we get excited, you get exalted, which is infernally bad luck on the average woman. Feelin' better?"

"Yes," said René, "but you do talk a lot of drivel."

"Hurray!" cried Kilner. "He's beginning to find himself. I wonder if you'll ever see how funny you are?"

"I wonder?" said René, and he turned over, and in one moment was fast asleep.

XII

SETTLEMENT

Our conscious actions are as a drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones.

ANN came round in the morning, very petulant and angry because she had lost half-a-sovereign. This had so upset her that, once she was satisfied that René was not so ill as he looked, she had no other interest, and could only give vent to her annoyance in little splutters of irritation. She sat by René and talked about it until he had to ask her to go away.

"All right," she said, "I know when I'm not wanted. But I do hate doing a thing like that. I can't think how I did it."

"There was once," said Kilner, seeing how she was fretting his friend, "a crooked woman who lived in a crooked house, and she lost a crooked sixpence."

"I know that story. Only it wasn't a crooked woman. It was Mrs. Vinegar, and she lived in a bottle, and she lost a sixpence and broke the bottle sweeping for it. Oh, Renny, he thinks I'm like Mrs. Vinegar! I am awful, I know."

René smiled at Kilner. Ann said:

"If there's any overtime to-day, I'll take it. Will you--be back to-night?"

"I think I'll stay here if you don't mind."

"Will you-- You'll let me come and see you?" She seemed to appeal to Kilner. He nodded. His consent comforted her, and she rose to go. René took her hand and said:

"Ann, dear, I want you to believe that whatever happens I am always your friend."

She answered:

"I saw Rita this morning. She's all right."

"That's good."

"I was awful, wasn't I? Something seemed to come over me. I didn't want to be a beast, really I didn't. Only I do hate it when you can say what you mean and I can't. I do want to make it up, Renny. Only it doesn't seem like ordinary rows, does it?"

"Come and see me to-night, Ann. You might tell old Martin I can't take the car out to-day."

"You're not ill, are you?"

"No. Only what you'd call queer."

Kilner followed her out.

"What's the matter with him?" she asked.

"You."

"Oh!" She was dismayed.

"I don't mean it in any insulting sense. His affections and yours don't work in the same way."

"I don't understand."

"That's it."

"I do understand more than you think, Mr. Kilner. If a feller wants to leave a girl, I say she's a fool to try and keep him. I don't believe Renny's that sort. I don't believe he'd see a girl left."

"He's done it once."

"Oh! Her! That's different. She wasn't fond of him like I am."

"You don't know."

"Don't I? Besides, she was one of your ladies. I'm sorry for them, always keeping one eye lifting on what other ladies are going to think."

"Suppose he did leave you."

"That's not your business, Mr. Kilner. If he did, I'd know you'd been making him upset with your talk."

"It isn't all talk."

"What is it, then?"

"Something just as deep as what you call love; probably deeper."

They had walked down the street leading to the mews, and now came to the corner. Ann stopped and stood hesitating. Her hand went up, and she pulled at her lower lip and shifted her feet uneasily.

"I known girls be left," she muttered, "girls like me. They pulled through somehow. But I don't think they was fond of the men like I am of him. And you say he's fond of me. I know there isn't anybody else."

"Is that all you care about?"

"He's never looked at anybody else. I'd feel better if he did. What call has he to go and make trouble if there isn't anybody else? Lots of girls would have chucked work when they'd found a man like that to live on. They get sick of being on their own. I've been on my own since I was sixteen, and I couldn't give it up for anybody."

"And yet you expect him to give it up?"

"No, I don't. I expect him to stand by me, that's all. I have my feelings too. He's not the only person in the world with feelings. I'm very fond of him, Mr. Kilner, but sometimes I think he's a bit soft, and I do hate a softy. Ooh! I'll be late."

She walked swiftly away. Very young she looked. She moved not gracefully, but with a birdlike energy that was pleasing. Kilner, surveying her figure, approved of it, until he came to her shoulders. They were slightly stooping and rounded, and she swung them awkwardly as she walked.

"Ugly and weak," said Kilner to himself. "Stooping over an infernal machine. Taken something out of her. Not her spirit. Given her a cramped habit of body. Nonsense. No good trying to account for it. He is simply not in love with her, never has been, nor she with him."

He went up to his room and found it empty. No René. No sign of him at Ann's. He had not been seen at the yard. His car was out with a temporary driver. A child in the mews had seen him in the main road. He had gone into a tobacconist's and then climbed on a bus. The tobacconist remembered his coming in to get change for a sovereign. He looked rather strange and excited. "It's a fine day," said the tobacconist. "Fine, be blowed," replied René. "It's as empty as hell." "I wouldn't say that," said the tobacconist, "with the sun shining." "But I do say it," insisted René. "You couldn't call that shining." And then another customer came in.

Kilner had some knowledge of his friend's ways and haunts, but he sought in vain.

He met Ann in the evening with his news. She looked scared and protested:

"He's gone to his home. He must have gone to his home. You could tell he was always fond of his mother."

"What makes you think that?"

"He wouldn't go anywhere else."

"Did he talk about his home?"

"Hardly a word. But he told me he'd met his father. He's gone to his home. He'll be back."

"I don't feel so sure about that."

"Well, I know he'd never go back to the old life, books and all that. He said he never would. He said he'd learned more about econ-- What d'you call it?"

"Economics."

"That's it. He said he'd learned more through being with me than in four years' work at books and lectures."

"I should call that an exaggerated statement."

"He'll come back. I know he wouldn't see me left."

They met Martin rolling to his home. When they told him, he screwed a chuckle out of himself and squeezed his eyes up tight.

"Onsettled," he said, "onsettled. I seen it a-coming on. Thinks I to myself, I thinks, when I sees him coming in in the morning: 'Brewing up for trouble, you are, young man; but whether it'll be Glory to God or Down with them as pays wages, or what, I don't know.' I was going to say he'd better have a holiday, and now he's snoofed it."

"He'll come back," said Ann.

"Don't you go counting on that, my pretty. He ain't our class, and never could be. You've only to see him drink to know that. If he was our class he'd be worse'n the rest of us. Don't you go counting on that."

"He'll come back. He ain't a sneak."

"When it comes to women," said Martin, "any man's neither more nor less than what he can be. But if you find it lonely waiting you can come and sit with me. I ain't a-going to see you let down, my pretty, not for want of money or a helping hand. If your heart's set on him, I can't do nothing there; but, Lor' bless you, hearts ain't everything."

"Good for you, Mr. Martin," said Kilner.

"Oh, I know a thing or two." The fat man winked. "You don't have to do with 'orses for nothing. I had a 'orse once took a uncommon fancy to a goat there was in the mews. Had to see it every day. The goat was sold, and that there 'orse pined away. I kept on a-telling of him that no goat in the world was worth losing a feed of oats for, and at last he got so precious hungry he believed it, and I never did see a 'orse so glad to eat. Fancies come and go, but your belly lets you know it's there till you die. Will you come in, too, Mr. Kilner?"

"No, thanks. I must get to bed early. Work in the morning."

When Kilner had gone, old Martin said to Ann with an affectionate touch on her arm:

"That young man has a 'ead screwed on his shoulders."

"He's all head," said Ann, "and I hate him."

"Lor'! There's talking. How women do like to make a man wriggle. I never was much in the wriggling line myself, not being the build for it. But a 'ead's worth having, too. I never had much 'ead myself. Too affectionate myself. What a pretty little thing you was, to be sure. Feeling it bad, my pretty?"

"Hellish bad," replied Ann.

"There, there."

"I never thought I'd feel anything so bad. I want to hate him, but I can't. I do hate that Kilner. I'd like to see him dead."

"There, there. 'Orses has wunnerful strong dislikes, too."

Ann said:

"It's enough to make a woman scream, the way men talk."

Old Martin's huge face expanded in astonishment. He reached out his hand for a pipe, filled it, conveyed it to his mouth, and sank into a brooding silence. He broke it at length to say:

"Women has a great scorn o' men, and I don't know but what they deserve it."

"If there's one thing I hate," said Ann, "it's being dished. I suppose I always knew it couldn't last. It was too wonderful. You don't know how kind he was in his ways, never wanting anything you didn't want yourself. And that was awful, too, because it made you afraid to want anything. It seemed to shame you. He was always shaming me, and I did feel awful sometimes. But it was lovely when we went for rides on tops of buses."

This appreciation of René's qualities as a housemate seemed to bore old Martin, for he took up a newspaper and began making notes and calculations from the betting columns.

"Hullo!" he said. "This must be some connection of his. 'Miss Janet Fourmy of Elgin, N.B.' 'Miss Fourmy,' it says, 'was a distinguished German and Italian scholar, a Goethe translator, a contributor to the Scottish Encyclo--' what you may call it. 'In her youth she was familiar with the famous Edinburgh circle which gathered round _Maga_ and did much valuable philological work, and was for a time governess to the late Archbishop of Canterbury who never ceased to express his admiration for her intellect and gifts. She had many friendships with the interesting figures of her day, and it is believed that she has left some record of them.'"

"He told me about her," said Ann. "He used to go and stay with her, and she used to read an Italian book called Dante, with the pages upside down. She was very old, but good to him, and she thought Lord John Russell was in love with her."

"Lord who?"

"I don't know who he was, but that's the name. Renny says it was her weakness. She lived all alone, and it's very dreary in the winter in Scotland. She had met a lot of lords in her time, and she liked to remember more than she'd met. And she'd never married, and Renny says she thought it sounded well to account for it by saying that Lord John Russell was in love with her. It wasn't always him----"

"Well! the things women do think of. I shall say I remained a widower because of Madame Tussaud."

"She was fond of Renny," said Ann, and that seemed on her lips the noblest possible epitaph for old Janet. She added:

"Perhaps that's where he's gone."

"I shouldn't think so. It costs a pile o' money to go to Elgin, N.B. It's a good deal north o' Bedford, which is the farthest I ever went with the 'orses. That was in eighteen-eighty-four."

He settled down for a story. Fortunately for Ann, he was allowed to get no further than clearing his throat, when he was cut short by the entry of Casey.

"Evening, miss," said he. "I seen your young man in the neighborhood of Holland Park, standing on a street corner. I nodded to him, but he looked clean through me. Very queer, I thought. We've been good pals. When I came back an hour later he was still there. I was empty that time. So I stopped. 'Keeping the pavement warm,' I said, cheerful like. 'Trying to warm myself,' said he. 'Draughty weather to be doing that in the streets,' I said. 'You go home, Casey,' he said. 'Oh, well,' I thought, 'we're all fools, and every fool to his own folly.' So I left him. I came home that way just now and he'd gone."

"We been talking about him all evening," said Martin, "me and Annie here."

"He's one of the best hands at an engine that ever I saw. And that brings me to what I want to talk to you about, guvnor. I been to see the doctor again, and he says London's doing me a bit of no good, and if I go on with it, it'll do me in. Now I've got an idea. Leastways it isn't all my idea but mostly hisn, young Fourmy's."

"If you knew about 'orses, there's a good livery at Barnet."

Casey persisted:

"My idea is this: There's just a few want motors in London. Something's happening in the place. Well, one night in the cab-rank young Fourmy, Young Earnest, as we call him, took out the map of fifty miles round, and he pointed out how the railways go out of London like spokes of a wheel. Between the spokes, he says, is where London is going to live if it is made possible, and motors ought to make it possible. He says if you choose your place properly, so as to link up the main roads and two railways, you'd be bound to make a living. There's enough houses already. Soon there'll be factories and works out there. Then there'll be more houses. I didn't believe it at first. I said: 'But if all the people live out there, what's to become of dear old London?' 'London,' he says, 'will be a clearing-house and capital, a real center.' I didn't understand altogether what he was talking about, but I've been out to see for myself, and what he says is happening. All the little country towns have cinemas and new shops, and in the suburbs there are whole streets of houses empty. I'm no good for the West End traffic, and I want to try my luck at the other, if I can get hold of any capital."

"Ah! Capital!" said Martin. "That wants a bit of getting, capital does."

Clearly he had not understood a word of what Casey was talking about. He had his own idea of London, and was not going to change it or admit the possibility of change. From one year's end to the other he never left the mews. His yard might actually be filled with motor-cars, but for him it was really a sanctuary of the 'orses. Their smell still clung about it. The one horse he had left had little else to do but provide the smell.

However, he liked Casey, and was distressed to find him taking to ideas:

"Don't you go worrying your head about what is and is not, Casey. Heads wasn't made for that. Heads was made to have eyes in, and mouths, the same as 'orses. All you got to do, all any man's got to do, is to earn his keep and pay his shot, same as a 'orse. When he's done that, 'e's got to behave nice to them as is in stable with him. And every now and then he gets his little canter and may be turned out to grass."

"I'm no Nebuchadnezzar," retorted Casey, "and I want to be on my own."

"No man can be on his own if he ain't got no capital."

"That's what I've been saying."

"Ah!" said Martin mysteriously, to baffle Casey's obstinacy. "Ah! that wants getting, that does. If it was 'orses now----"

Casey saw that it was hopeless. Nothing would budge the fat man from his yard. Cars! They were a necessary evil, not to be encouraged beyond the limit of necessity.

Ann wanted to know more about René, but Casey could tell her nothing. He repeated his eulogy of young Fourmy's skill as a driver, and added:

"We've got has-been gentlemen on the ranks, scores of them. But they're not like him. It's a treat to hear him talk, it is. They wanted him, a lot of them did, to pitch into the union, but he doesn't seem to think much of trade-unions. He says they can't do anything yet, in the way of fighting I mean, because they want to make us all middle-classes, and that ain't good enough. If I could get him to go along with me!"

Ann said:

"He hasn't been home all day. Didn't he say anything to you?"

"He did say one day: 'I'm getting sick of this, carting men and women like cattle.' It seems to have got on his nerves a bit. Too good for it, I suppose."

"It would be a good thing," said she, "if we went into the country, though I don't know what I'd do. I do love London and all the lights and that, and the shops."

Said Casey:

"You should see the nights in Africa. Some parts you can walk a hundred miles and never see a light. Nothing but stars, and fewer of them than we have here. Flat and empty as the sea some of the country, going on forever and ever in the darkness."

Ann shivered:

"Ugh!" she said. "It makes me think of Renny. I don't know why. He'd like it, I think."

"Yes. I think he likes big things."

It was late. Near twelve o'clock. The lamps in the mews flickered as Ann returned to her rooms. The post had brought a note from René, posted in the north of London. He said: "Please tell old Martin I shall be away three days. I will come back then. I think I have it all settled in my mind. I want to get it clear for you, too. You have been so good to me, my dear, and I owe you so much.--R."

There was also a letter for him. She struggled against the desire to open it, and conquered it for that night. The next morning, however, the temptation was too strong for her, and she steamed it open. It was from a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh to say that the late Miss Janet Fourmy had left René the residue of her estate, which, after certain small legacies had been paid, would amount to nearly four thousand pounds. The house in Scotland would also be his, and all the deceased lady's personal effects.

Ann went to her work that day shivering with excitement. René's enormous wealth frightened her. She could put up a fight against his intelligence, his brooding, his silence; but against this she felt powerless, and knew within her heart that her battle was already lost.

She was a forewoman now, and she gave the girls under her the worst day they ever remembered.