BOOK THREE

CATHLEEN BENTLEY

So between them love did shine That the truth saw his right Flaming in the phoenix' sight, Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same; Single nature's double name Neither two nor one was called.

I

MEETING

He trieth the sea after many shipwrecks; and beats still on that door which he never saw opened.

WHEN Ann and Kilner left René, he was filled with anger against them, first of all, fleetingly, with the petulance of a sick man at being left alone without his having expressed a wish for it, and then at their treating him as a sick man when he was nothing of the kind, but only passing through a crisis in which not even sympathy could help him much. Kilner was so cocksure just because he had a peculiar delight in putting paint on canvas; and Ann--poor dear little Ann!--she loved to have things and people at her mercy and to keep them there. And she could make no attempt to understand them, because if she did so, that would be to believe in them and let them be free to work out their own destiny. He knew how little freedom she would even grant himself, and his mind, spurred by revolt into high activity, went straight to its mark, the place where freedom most clearly promised--absurdly, the door through which he had seen Rachel Bentley pass. That led to his clearest and most beautiful memory, the days in Scotland, the happy boyhood when delight had grown from year to year, to flower at last in the coming of Cathleen. Very vivid was his recollection of their first meeting in his aunt's house: himself very coltish and shy, she charmingly self-conscious and alert. It was the first year the Bentleys had taken the big house, and she had come round by the road. His aunt had asked him to show Cathleen the short cut through the woods. She chattered until his shyness overcame him, and then they walked in a miserable silence. He comforted himself by regarding her as a little girl, which to his young prudishness made his involuntary adoration of her beauty legitimate. He could never take his eyes off her, and she began to amuse herself with him and try her coquetries upon his oversensitiveness. He suffered terribly. She was caught in her own wiles, and she too suffered. It was a relief to both when, the first year, they parted.

The next year she was not so lovely, and had lost or disguised her wildness. It was not long before he discovered that he could rouse it in her. Then began their meetings in the woods.

At the thought of her now his affection for Ann, his warm regard for Kilner faded away. They were meaningless without her. He knew not where she was. His only clue was Rachel. Cathleen, too, might go to that house. He would wait until she came. If the worst came to the worst, he would ask Rachel. He must satisfy himself that he was not covering that sweet past with illusions. The meeting with Rachel had brought it all flooding back to bring him to acute discontent with the present. It was one thing to sigh sentimentally over happy days. To do that was to obscure them. It was quite another thing to have happy days demanding egress through his life, growing through the thick-set years like a tree through a wall.

He stole away directly Kilner and Ann were out of sight, found he had only a sovereign, and turned into the tobacconist's round the corner for change. It was also a news-agent's, and he bought a newspaper and, as he was borne along by the bus, read of his aunt's death. Strange, he thought, that all his thoughts should be clustered round her house just then. The wise old woman, with her dear foibles: what had her long life been? The end of it was sweet and true and full of grace. Not only his mother had been helped in her troubles. That he knew. The old lady's meager income became supple and elastic under the touch of generous charity that never spoiled its gifts with the demand for gratitude. She once said to René: "Better be ungrateful than cramped with gratitude." Read Dante upside down she might in her old age, but she could quote him from her heart:

Ed io a lui: Io mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo che ditta dentro, vo significando.

She had made René learn a little Italian and get that by heart. It began now to have a meaning for him, and he repeated it to himself as he came near the road in which stood Rachel's house.

He took up his stand at the corner and waited. He had been there nearly an hour when a car drove up and a spruce, middle-aged gentleman got out, walked up the path, and admitted himself with a key. Rachel's husband? Far too old for her.

Another hour's waiting. A young woman came along the road. René thought for a moment it was she, and his heart leaped. She did not see him. She turned in at the gate, knocked at the door, and was admitted. No, he decided, that was not Cathleen.

Then he told himself he was a fool, that only by the unlikeliest chance would she be there to-day. He walked away, but was back again in ten minutes. In another twenty the door opened and the young woman came out. She stood for a moment at the gate. It could not be Cathleen, she was too tall and slender. In his eager hope and curiosity he moved toward her. He was not a yard away from her when she turned and their eyes met. Neither stirred. They were stilled by the wonder of it. A spell was on them, and slowly in both grew the dreadful knowledge that a word or a gesture would break it. In his heart René prayed: "Oh! let it break into happiness," and his will leaped into being and decided that it must be so and he laughed. She said:

"Oh! René!"

It was no echo of the old cry, but the same filled with a new music.

Their hands met in the conventional salute. She said:

"I have been thinking of you so much."

"Much?" said he. "I have been thinking of nothing else. And I was not sure that it was you when you went in just now."

"I saw you, but I didn't recognize you. Rachel told me she had met you."

"Did she tell you where?"

"I had to dig it out of her. She was very hushed and secret. Rachel is funny. I've been looking at taxi-drivers ever since. They are a very plain lot of men."

"Where do you live now?"

"In Bloomsbury. I am working for my living, you know."

"I'm glad of that, but I shouldn't have thought it necessary."

"My father died."

"I heard that."

"He left nearly all his money to another woman: another family. I suppose he liked them better than us. I had a row with my mother over it. It appears she knew all about it and never minded. Only when it came to her having less money than she thought, she developed a horrid conscience and denounced my father to us. I hadn't thought about such things, but I was fond of my father, and it wasn't fair to vilify him after his death. I didn't understand it in the very least, but I stood up for him, and of course I said a lot of stupid, cruel things. I went to see the other woman. She was quite old, older than mother, rather vulgar, but jolly and warm-hearted and kind, and, from the way she talked, I could see she really did love my father and was very proud of him. You know, he made his own way. His father was a barber in Rickham, in Hertfordshire. She came from there, too. I told mother I had seen her, and she was furious, and said I was too young to know anything about such things. I pointed out that she had told me, and she declared she never imagined that I would understand. Then she put it all down to my taste for low company, meaning you. That annoyed me, and I told her you were a very learned and brilliant person. She said Thrigsby wasn't a real university, and its degrees did not count. You weren't a gentleman, and it was terrible how all the professions were being invaded by little whipper-snappers with a thin coating of book knowledge. So I asked her point-blank why she married my father, and she said he was extremely successful. Father had left us each two hundred pounds. I asked for that, and said I would earn my own living. I should have a year in which to look round. She said no one would ever marry me if I worked. I told her that the little I had learned of her life didn't make me anxious to be married. She became very solemn on that, and told me I couldn't possibly remain unmarried, because I was too pretty. I said I thought women could look after themselves, and obviously other arrangements were possible, and sometimes more profitable. That was an odious thing to say, but we had irritated each other out of all decency, and for vulgarity the other woman was an angel to us. I couldn't stay with my mother; I had said too much. She knew if I stayed it would make it hard for her to play the devoted widow; and also, if she could be the broken-hearted parent, it would give her a good start. She pounced on that, and let me go with her most lugubrious blessing and most ghoulish doubts. She prophesied almost gleefully that I would go to the bad, and helped me along by treating me as if I had already done so. Then I plunged into the wicked world. It was very disappointing. I had been led to suppose that no woman was safe alone. The wicked world has absolutely disregarded me. Occasionally some miserable little man or pale-faced boy has sidled up to me in the street and said, 'Excuse me, miss'--or 'Haven't we met before?' They don't alarm me. I say I won't excuse them or that I haven't met them, and they look very comically cast down, and say 'Beg pardon' and shuffle off. Sometimes I am so sorry for them that I feel inclined to run after them and tell them to cheer up, because it's quite easy to find affection if you only set about it the right way. They think it's adventure they want, but it isn't. It's only affection, some sort of human contact. I understood that, because I too was lonely. But those poor little men were so dull. I can't bear being dull, and I hate to see it in others; I hate to see them settling down to it. That's what mother wanted me to do. I might have done it, too, if father hadn't died. You know it seems quite pleasant to flirt and spend money, and find a husband and go on flirting and spending money. I'd never seen anyone die before, and it did make me feel ashamed. All of us were changed by it for a little. We became very shy of each other, and wanted to be nice, and began to talk about the things we really thought and felt inside ourselves. Then all that slipped away, and we were just the same as before until we talked about father's money, and then we were all angry. I suppose I hadn't quite recovered from the strain of his death, because all that hurt me, and I could only think that I had really loved him, and might have loved him much more if things had been somehow different. And then when I saw that kind, common woman it opened up another kind of life going on apart from money and position and amusement, all the things we were so proud of. It horrified me at first, of course. It is dreadful because it is secret. In itself-- Well, anyhow, the only other thing in my life that was the least bit like it and could stand against it was my absurd little affair with you in Scotland. So you see, I had begun to think of you even before Rachel met you."

"Absurd!" René winced at the word.

"Wasn't it? I couldn't have gone on with it, you know. It made me feel so helpless, and I felt so mean, letting you care so much. Your letters used to frighten me."

"But you cared for me?"

"Yes, yes; with one eye on you and the other on my mother."

René thought that over uneasily. He was disconcerted by this cool young woman. The enchantment of their meeting had roused and invigorated him, and, as usual, he had surrendered to the emotional flux of the encounter and was prepared for wonders, which, as usual, did not come, or, at least, were not palpable. His eyes never left her face. It was lit with a smile of happiness, an incommunicable joy.

Unconscious of their surroundings they had reached Kensington Gardens, and stood by the railings outside the Palace looking over the Round Pond. A gray October day: the trees gaunt and shabby; the heavy clouds tumbled and ragged. A cold northwest wind was blowing. René's ungloved hands were blue.

He gripped Cathleen's arm, and she turned her happy eyes on him.

"That's good," she said. "You were so strong then."

"Cathleen, I mustn't lose sight of you again. You make me forget everything that has been, though that isn't quite what I wanted to say."

"I shan't lose sight of you, my dear. It doesn't matter what happens to either of us."

René said:

"A good deal has happened to me."

"Tell me."

He told her. She received his story in silence. At last she said:

"If you have a friend, it doesn't matter what he does. All the same, it's a nuisance."

"What is?"

"The nuisance is that I'm a woman and you're a man. Can friendship get over that?"

"Love," said René, "can master everything. I love you. Shall we start with that? That's clear, anyhow."

"Clear? Oh, yes; but it means being very certain about it and definite. Some of the charm of love goes. It is gone already from me."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't. I'm trying not to pity you. Oh, René, my foolish dear, I only want to love you and help you."

"It is you who are strong," he said.

She moved closer to him, so that she could just touch him.

"We shall need all the strength we can get if we are not to be broken--strength and patience."

"I have a friend," said he, "who thinks that all the confusion comes from sloth and fear."

"I should like to meet that friend."

II

HAPPINESS

Human lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions I call servitude. For a man who is submissive to his emotions is not in power over himself, but in the hands of fortune to such an extent that he is often constrained, although he may see what is better for him, to follow what is worse.--SPINOZA'S _Ethics_.

CATHLEEN lived in Bloomsbury with a friend of hers, a Miss Cleethorpe, who managed a hostel for young women, clerks, schoolmistresses, shop girls. René took her there after their long conversation in Kensington Gardens, and then, feeling the impossibility of going back to Mitcham Mews, went up to Kentish Town to see his friend the sandy-haired railway porter. He had visited him once before, about a year ago, and could think of no one else with whom he might take refuge. The little man was delighted to see him:

"It's the sleeper!" he cried. "Lord! I've often wondered if you'd go off again, and when you told me you were in the taxi-driving, I said to myself: 'Well, that'll keep him awake.'"

Yes. He would be glad to let him have a bed. Wanting to sleep, eh? He often felt like that himself: day after day, day after day, working, and the suburban traffic growing so fast that they couldn't put on enough trains, and the station morning and evening was like Bedlam.

"London," he said, "is not what it was when I first came to it. I used to know all the regular gentlemen. But now--well, I tell you, they don't have a nod for anyone. A bee-line for the city in the morning, and a bee-line for home in the evening. It makes you feel small, it does."

René sympathized with him. His days also had been devoted to impersonal service, and he had known the humiliation of it.

Now his only desire was to see Cathleen again. To taste once more the vigor and keen energy with which her presence filled him. The thought of her was not enough. It roused a flood of emotion too strong for his unpracticed control. He warmed to the idea of her beauty. When he was with her her beauty was axiomatic, food for rejoicing without disturbance, a mere accident, one to be thankful for, yet no more than a light bidding to the thrilling pursuit of her elusiveness.

He had arranged to see her the next day in the evening. She worked as secretary in an Art School and was not free until after five. He spent the day in happy brooding over the coming delight of seeing her, and preparing with boyish dandyism for it. He had his hair cut and his chin shaved (he had grown a mustache), and he bought a clean shirt and collar. In a book shop he saw the anthology from which they had read together and could not resist going in and buying it. He was ashamed of himself when he had done that, and hid it away among the railway porter's rather strange collection of books--More's _Utopia_, _The Master Christian_, _Marcus Aurelius_, some books of Edward Carpenter's, _Foxe's Book of Martyrs_, and _Arsène Lupin_.

Cathleen received him in her little bed-sitting-room at the top of the big grim house, which smelled of food, ink, and washing. She had made her den very pretty, and he recognized a picture he had given her long ago, and one or two trinkets that her mother had had in her boudoir in Scotland. The walls were of plain brown paper, and there were gay-colored stuffs by the windows and on the sofa.

She took in his spruceness at a glance, was pleased by it, and laughed.

"I must give you a buttonhole," she said, "as I used to do. You look so wonderfully the same."

René trembled as she came to him and pinned a flower in his coat.

"Sit down," she said. "I think we can talk better here."

René sat awkwardly on the sofa, she by the fire, which she stirred with the poker.

"Well," she said, "I feel rather a beast. I couldn't help flirting with you a little yesterday. That's got to stop."

"Were you--flirting?"

"I was."

"I thought you were glad to see me--as glad as I was to see you."

"I was glad. I'd been having a foolishly miserable time. Living in this house is rather terrible with nothing but women, unmarried women. You don't know. They come here young, many of them from the country. Then they go out to work in the day and come in in the evening. They haven't enough money to pay for amusements. They're too respectable to look for fun in the streets. They hardly dare have a man-friend, the others are so jealous, so rigid, so uncomprehending."

René said:

"I had a feeling that my presence here was an offense."

Cathleen laughed:

"That's why I asked you. I thought it would do them good to see you. It did me so much good. I think I was getting infected by it. Lotta, my friend, escapes into the country now and then. She has a cottage. I go too sometimes, but her consolations are not mine. She has a garden and makes jams and fruit-wines. I want something more than that. I don't want to console myself until I have to. If I were going to do that I might just as well have stayed with my mother. On the other hand, I don't want to flirt with you, my friend. It wouldn't be fair to you."

"What do you want, then?"

"I want to be able to assume that we love each other. We can be frank then. It sounds uncomfortably intellectual, I know, but that will be less disastrous than being uncomfortably emotional. You used to think about these things. You made me think. You haven't stopped?"

"No. No. But I have such a longing for simplicity. I don't know why there is all this fuss made about love."

"Because people will exploit the first excitement of it. Blake said:

He who catches a joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise."

"I don't know about that," said René. "All I know is that I don't want to let you go."

"But you may have to. We had a wonderful thing yesterday. We may not be able to rise to it again."

"I don't care about that. I want _you_."

"Only because we had that moment yesterday."

"I don't know why it is."

"But I know and I care, and I want to keep the memory of it. I don't mind it's being darkened by circumstances, if it must be, but I do mind it's being spoiled by our own weakness. Men are always girding at women for caring about nothing but love. They may gird fairly when we are untrue to love and let men belittle it with their impatience and arrogance. I ought not to say that to you, because you have tried, and I have done nothing but argue with myself."

"I think you have found something which I have not even begun to see."

"And argued about it."

"I don't see what else you could do."

Cathleen thrust silently at the fire and said savagely:

"Oh! don't you? I thought I was going to be so free with my two hundred pounds. Free, to do what? Walk in suffrage processions, break windows, insult policemen. I was free to do what I liked, but I liked nothing very much. I was too fastidious and could not take what came. Things did come. They lacked this or that necessary for my satisfaction. When my money was gone I had to creep into shelter away from the freedom I did not know how to use, and ask for work to keep myself alive, just like the girls and women in this house, who keep themselves alive for nothing, so far as I can see, except the pleasure of being tired and bored and malicious. I was in a bad way, René, when I met you. I used to go to Rachel, who is the only one of the family who will have anything to do with me, and sometimes I envied her in her stupid, unhappy comfort. She doesn't get on with her husband, but she has a nice house and two children who alternately infuriate and amuse her. That was impossible for me. I'd hate it, just living with a man to keep a household together. But then even now I've hated the alternative I had arrived at, this being huddled away with a lot of useless women. Working women! A genteel occupation to support a genteel existence. The selfishness of it! People like to pretend that motherhood solves everything for a woman. It may give occupation to a dependent woman, but why should it destroy her selfishness any more than another physical fact? If she insists on it too much, it cannot do anything but accentuate her selfishness. Women can be just as greedy about motherhood as about eating or drinking or love, and they can just as easily spoil it with overindulgence. Don't look so unhappy, René. I'm not arguing with you. I've had to think so much, and for months I haven't had a soul to talk to like this. Even Lotta has her world so shaped and trim (she's efficient, you see) that all my doubts and wonderings are just an annoyance to her, though no one could be kinder. I don't know what I should have done without her. It was such a comfort to find a woman working really well, without insisting that hers is the only way of living, and doing good without wanting to be thankful for it. She made me patient. When you have decided what you do not wish to do, you are apt to think anything different must be better. You're not sorry you made the ordinary career impossible for yourself?"

"Sorry?" said René, puzzled. "It was never a thing to be sorry about or glad about. It just happened and I felt better. And now I have met you and everything is changed again. I didn't go to my home last night."

"No?"

"I went to an old friend of mine who lives happily and contentedly. I wanted to see happiness and contentment. Somehow you had made me sure of myself, and I felt that everything was changed. But the change was in myself. In nearly everybody I have been more conscious of the things they lack than of the things they have. I had been bolstering myself up with contempt--for myself as well as everything else. It was that or being sorry for myself. Always a struggle. I can't see it clearly yet: like righting without weapons and without a cause. I had no desire to live irregularly and uncomfortably or to come in conflict with accepted opinion as to conduct. But I don't see why opinion should be antagonistic to a man's private affairs. I wasn't antagonistic. I was only doing confusedly what I felt very clearly and had always felt to be right. I feel certain now that I ought to have done so long before. I'd like to explain that to all sorts of people, except that honestly I can't take much interest in it. I had a vague sickening feeling that the end of the world had come, but that was only because I could not see an inch before me. The end of the world did not come, neither for me nor for--her. It seems stupid to be explaining all this to you. I know you will not think I am excusing myself, because I am sure you accept me as I am----"

"Theoretically," said Cathleen, looking up at him with a quick smile. "You see, I have lived on theory, not my own, either; Lotta's. And I don't know whether my theory can hold out against your practice, any more than my sentimental girlish fictions could. You upset them, you know, and you are just as disconcerting as ever. Shall you go on with your work?"

"I can't think of anything else I should like so well."

"And that girl?"

"That's what we have both been thinking about all the time."

"Yes."

Cathleen rose and walked over to the window and looked out. She stood then for so long that René followed her and laid his hand on her shoulder. The window gave on to a row of back gardens with a few trees, black and bare. Opposite was a lighted window through which could be seen four girls sewing--stitch, stitch, stitch.

"I have often watched them," said Cathleen, "and wondered what might be in their lives. Desire? Religion? Love? What is it makes it possible for them to work so mechanically and so happily."

"Fun," said René. "They want fun, spiced with the risk of having to pay for it."

"Is she like that?"

"She was. But there is something more."

"There would be," said Cathleen. "She couldn't love you without being moved out of herself and the habits of her class. That is why I am sorry for her. Are you going back to her?"

"Not yet."

"I think you ought to write to her."

"I was waiting until I had seen you again, and made quite sure----

"And you are sure now?"

"I feel now that we shall always be together, gazing out on the world."

"And finding it so wonderful."

They were silent then, and in each for other was the same song of life and love, a music passing thought and understanding. So they remained for a time that was no time, hardly conscious of their bodies whose slight contact gave them strength for flight. Easily they ranged back in spirit to their youth, and caught up its sweetness and melody.

They were broken in upon by Miss Cleethorpe, a pale, gray-haired lady whose eyes smiled kindly amusement at their helplessness. Bringing help to the helpless and forcing them to help themselves was the whole practice of her life. Lovers, dogs, indigent young women, were the material in which she worked.

She was presented to René, and gave him a grip of the hand that startled him with its vigor. Turning to Cathleen, she said:

"The girls have sent up a deputation to me to say you have had a man in your room for the last two hours, that it is against the rules, and that it is not quite proper. Ten minutes they could have overlooked. I said that Mr. Fourmy was a very old friend, and that I knew all about it, but they insisted that I must come and chaperone you, and here I am. Speaks well for my authority, doesn't it?"

René was so distressed at the thought of the young women contemning Cathleen that he was almost speechless. He muttered that he must go.

"You mustn't go," said Lotta, "before I have thanked you for what you have done for Cathleen. She came home last night looking perfectly radiant--and look at her now." (She had turned up the lights.)

Cathleen was standing with her hands lightly clasped in front of her, her head thrown back, her lips parted, and in her eyes a golden tenderness. She smiled and shook her head slowly, and came to her friend and kissed her. Lotta put her arms round her and hugged her.

"You two poor sillies," she said, "what a heavy burden you have shouldered."

René grinned:

"I don't feel the weight of it," he said.

Lotta gazed full at him. He met her eyes, searching him.

"Are you going back to your stables?" she asked.

"I want two more days of this."

"Would you like to take it down to the country? There's a west wind blowing over my hills, and winter is coming in."

Like children, René and Cathleen gazed at each other in surprised delight.

III

THE WEST WIND

Days, that in spite Of darkness, by the light Of a clear mind are day all night

NORTHWEST of London there are hills, where the air is eager and the upper winds are caught in woods as they come cloud-bearing from the wild sky. Often the winds fling clouds about the hills and leave them entangled in the woods. Such a cloud they had left on the Saturday morning when Lotta Cleethorpe brought René and Cathleen to her retreat, an old white cottage on the border of a long common brown with dead heather, orange with wet withered bracken, olive-green with the gorse and the close-cropped grass under the gray mist. Out of this, as they drove from the station, loomed trees and haystacks and houses. A public-house and a church stood at the end of the common. Soon they passed a blacksmith's shop with the bellows in full blast, the sparks flying and the smith's huge arms and swart face lit up by the red glow. There came out the merry clink of hammers on the anvil, and then the hiss of the red-hot metal plunged into water.

René said:

"The beginning of it all."

"Of what?" asked Lotta.

"Modern life." And he found himself thinking of Kurt, who had just added to his laurels the first prize in a race to Berlin.

They reached Lotta's cottage. Apple-trees stood by the gate, a clipped box-tree by the door. A sheepdog came bounding along the road, cleared the gate, and pawed frantically at Lotta until she crouched and he could lay his forelegs on her shoulders and lick her face in a frenzied greeting.

"He lives at the public-house when I am not here, but he refuses to regard it as anything but lodgings. Down, Sammy! You know Cathleen. Say How do to Mr. Fourmy."

Sammy cocked his head, looked the other way, and lifted his paw. René shook it. The dog returned to his mistress, who said:

"I can't keep my hands off the garden. It has got into such a dreadful state. You two had better go for a walk. You'll find toadstools in the woods and there may be a few blackberries left."

She gave them a basket and sent them forth.

When they came to the woods, René said:

"It wants only the river and I could believe that we had never lost each other for a single day. There were just such mists then: the same drip in the trees, the same mysterious shrouding of the life of the woods."

They wandered for miles, happy, hardly conscious of each other in the joy they shared. The mist clung about their hair, their eyebrows, and whipped up the color in their cheeks and made their eyes to shine. Each new path they came to was a promise of adventure, and always in color and mystery and the play of light the woods fulfilled that promise. René jumped all the stiles and teased Cathleen because she was only a woman and could not do the same, and she pointed out that men needed to do extravagant things like jumping stiles or they became flabby, whereas women had a more instinctive economy and were physically more subtle.

"Women," said René, "are ridiculous."

"From a man's point of view. No more ridiculous than a man from a woman's point of view. The absurdity disappears when they love each other. Then male extravagance and feminine subtlety are only incidentals----"

"Wise young woman."

"I'm a fraud really, René. It's pure Lotta. She was trained as a doctor, you know, and really has watched people. I only guess."

"That's my trouble, too. I only feel quite sure when I reach a certain stage of emotion."

"I never feel quite sure. Nor does Lotta. How can anyone? She says she has observed certain things. She says men and women only make love to each other as a rule because they love each other so little that they have nothing else in common."

"And you and I----?"

"Have everything."

René laughed.

"Except the power to jump stiles."

"Oh! I love to see you do it."

"And I love to see your inability."

"We both get over it. That is all that matters."

"That's a hard, common-sensible woman."

They reached a place where the trees--beech, pine, and larch--came marching up a steep hill, so steep that they could see over the tops of the trees out to the plain beneath. The mists wreathed and broke. A pale blue sky shone through them, and the sun cast pale yellow lights. Cathleen began to sing as they plunged down the hill. René started to run, could not stop himself, and went tearing down, shouting like mad until he was brought up by a wide ditch. There he turned and watched Cathleen threading her way through the trees, singing. The wind came roaring, whispering and muttering through the leaves, and the trees swayed and moaned. Cathleen came running the last few yards, and he caught her. She held up her laughing face and they kissed, and the wind seemed to sweep through them and set them swaying like the trees. Their blood raced in their glee.

On the way back they gathered blackberries, and in a green clearing in the woods they found mushrooms. Happy they were to take such treasure back to Lotta, their friend, who had made such wonders possible for them.

She had supper ready for them, the lamp and the fire lit, the curtains drawn in the cozy kitchen. After they had eaten, they sat with cigarettes and coffee and peppermints round the fire.

Lotta said:

"I knew you would find what you wanted here. I think all lovers should bring their love to the earth and let the wind know that it is there. How can you love in streets and houses? They drive the sweetness out of it and keep it unnaturally excited. I have seen so much of that. Women especially are so house-conscious. They hate everything in love which threatens their pride of possession and position. They live so jealously that they want jealousy even in their love----"

"Thank you," said René.

"For what?"

"For being so frank. I never was in a house before where there was no oppression in the atmosphere."

"The house is so much happier since I came to it. It was occupied before by an old woman who never set foot outside the door for thirty years. We talk abusively about life in London, but life in villages is even more sordid. Country people live even more meanly and graspingly than townsfolk. There is more stagnation. They are all inbred. The people here are all married to cousins, and they are queer in the head and abnormal. Personally, I think the great towns grew out of the necessity for breaking all that up. English life was far too like a novel by Emily Brontë. It had to be broken up and readjusted. It was much more that than the desire for money. You are both such children that you have hardly had time to realize the kind of life in which you were brought up. You have both shaken free of it with the violence that makes one so hopeful of the younger generation. When you are as old as I am, you will be able to realize far more than I have done. The readjustment will be more nearly completed. The reaction from the evils of industrial life will be even more violent than the reaction from those of agrarian life. You will know how rare love is, and you will rejoice that it was given to you to feel it, even though, as it must not, it were to end to-night." She turned to René and smiled at him with her soft eyes. "Cathleen has told me."

"Yes," he said. "I seem to have floundered into being forced to live my own life in my own way."

"Cathleen too. You can only do it together. Neither of you could put up with a mate who desired less and regarded every emotion as a bond instead of a liberation. Love is the release of the spirit or it is not love."

"And if others are to be unhappy?"

"That is their affair. You don't seem to have let that worry you much until now."

"I never saw things so clearly before. There came a crisis, and I just plunged blindly. I have a horror of doing that again."

"But I don't think you'll ever mind making a fool of yourself, René. You never did," said Cathleen.

"Perhaps not, my dear, but I should hate to make a fool of you."

"Everyone," said Lotta, "makes mistakes. It isn't everyone who will admit them. Once they are admitted they often turn out extremely profitable. Really I don't see that you two need have any but financial anxiety, and that is easily surmounted. Marriage? Neither of you has a scrap of conventional religion. You can't possibly be worried by scruples. Really the marriage laws of this country are in such a mess that it has become almost a duty for decent people to transgress them. They won't be altered in our time, so there is nothing for it but to disregard them. You have quite enough real difficulties to face without troubling yourselves about artificial ones. A few virtuous people won't know you? What are they to you or you to them?"

"It all comes back," said Cathleen, "to that girl."

"She took her risks. She knew that. They have courage, some of those girls."

"Is courage," asked René, "all that is necessary?"

"I think so. It is only lack of courage that has made rules of conduct and religious maxims and precepts--crutches and props. We're all very stupid at conduct, but if we live by rule and habit there is no hope of our getting any better."

"But you have rules for your hostel."

"I always allow them to be broken when there is anything to be gained by it. I love defiance, but I hate slyness. Rules must be broken, they must not be evaded. But we are beginning to talk for the sake of talking, and Cathleen is nearly asleep. I'm glad you have had a good day."

"Such a day," he said, "as I never had. I seem to have found that for which I have always been searching, and it has made everything valuable, even those things that I have most hated."

"I hope," said Lotta, "that you don't think you have arrived at any conclusion. It is impossible to decide anything about life. It is possible only to live--sometimes."

They went to bed very early. The wind had risen to. a gale and screamed in the chimneys and the eaves.

Hardly had René sunk into sleep, the quick easy slumber of health and peace, than he was roused by a fearful din. Leaping out of bed, he ran to the window and opened it. The wind came rushing in upon his bare chest and made him gasp for breath. Out on the road was a crowd of men armed with rattles, tin cans, kettles, baths, which they banged and whirled in the air as they marched solemnly up the road to the next cottage. There they moved slowly up and down, making a terrible noise and chanting:

There's evil enough between wind and water Without your tumbling of the farmer's daughter. Do you hear Billy Bows behind the door? There's no honest girl shall be a whore, With a billy, billy, billy, Billy blow.

They kept this up for a couple of hours in the wind and the rain, until at last with three groans and hoots they broke up and trailed off into the darkness.

René asked Lotta next morning what they might be doing, and she told him that the man in the cottage was an unpopular character who had been annoying and molesting a girl in the village.

"That is public opinion. They wouldn't have minded if he had been a popular man, or a rich man. They would have blamed the girl in that case."

Lotta was staying on for a day or two. René took Cathleen back to London. He told her he was going to his work and Mitcham Mews and Ann.

"You heard what Lotta said?"

"About the noise last night and the girl?"

"Yes. I think it's true. Ann will be blamed by her own class."

"Would you like me to go and see her?"

"I don't know. I'll tell you that when I have got things straight with her--if I ever do."

"I can wait, René," she said. "Time doesn't seem to matter now. Isn't Lotta splendid?"

"Splendid!"

They shook hands as they parted, and each promised to write.

IV

EXPLANATION

Mais, hélas! quelle raison Te fait quitter la maison? . . . Et qu'est-ce que je puis faire Que je ne fasse pour toi?

DURING the three days of René's absence Ann did not speak to a soul. She found the comfort of mortification in reading the attorney's letter from Edinburgh. It made her feel hardly used, and that was pleasant. René had crept into her life under pretext of being at an end of his resources when he was incredibly rich. It was not fair: it was abominable. The grievance became such an obsession as to obscure her real dread and anxiety. In her almost crazy desire to defend herself against the alien power that was coming to him she tore up the letter and burned it. He would not know. She would keep him. She would get him to take her away. It was a good idea of Casey's. They would all go down into the country. Casey said there were cinemas in the country. Through the whole of the last night she sat brooding in the darkness. Every now and then she would pretend that he was there in the next room, in the bed, and she would cling to this pretense until she had deceived herself and could almost believe that she heard him there. Yes. He was stirring in his sleep as he often did. She would go into the room and run her hand over the pillows. And her disappointment was a relief. It would have been terrible to have found him there when she knew he was away. Where was he? Whom was he with? Why didn't that beast Kilner know, since it was all that beast's doing, that sly hulk with his sarcastic way of speaking and his eyes that looked at you as if you were some sort of animal. It must be Kilner who had got him away. She brooded herself into hatred.

In the morning she watched the painter go out, and spat after him. Then she took a knife, went up to his room, found the picture on which he was working, and slashed it to ribbons.

"Naked women!" she cried as she cut away at the canvas. "Naked women! That'll teach the filthy brute."

It chanced that she was out when René returned, and he went up to Kilner's room in the hope of finding him. He saw the havoc that had been wrought, and understood who had done it. When the painter returned René was still trying to piece the canvas together. Without a word Kilner took it in his hands, and sat fingering it. He said:

"What luck! What infernal luck! I thought it was going to put me on my feet. One of the Professors had been down to see it and was excited about it. He thought he could get it sold for me. There's months of work in it."

"I shouldn't have thought----"

"I told you she hated me. I didn't think she'd be clever enough to know how to get back at me. Oh! they are clever, these women, in their own mean little way. Drudges, they are, and drabs. It's men like you, Fourmy, keep them so, asking them for love and taking the much they choose to give you, and when you sicken of it they take their revenge where they can."

"I never thought----"

"No. Damn you! You never do think. By God, I'd rather be the sort of fool to whom a woman is only a meal or a dinner. There's less mischief in that. What's the good of your emotions if you can't control them? You'd much better give it up like the rest of the world, shut yourself up in marriage to keep yourself out of harm's way. Who the devil are you, that you should claim in life the freedom an artist hopes to get in his art?"

There was enough truth in Kilner's denunciation to enrage René. He had felt so clear and confident, so sure of mastering the event of his evil, and all this bitterness had him once more throbbing and confused.

"What," he cried, "what does a work of art more or less matter? You can't expect the rest of us to live in filthiness so that you may paint pictures of a beauty that is never seen."

To have stung René into a hot fury seemed to appease the artist somewhat. He grunted and said:

"In a way you're right, and honestly I don't care a hang about the picture. I can paint it again and better. But I thought I was going to make some money with it, enough to get out of this forever, and it is almost more than I can bear to know that the harm has come through you. It doesn't matter. I'll paint it again. I'll get the fierce little spark of intelligence burning in Eve. I'd left that out. I'll paint her feeling half confident of her superiority to both God and Adam, and ashamed of having to submit to their fatuous pretense of creation, their old theatrical trick. Art and religion! They stink of the harem and aphrodisiacs, the abominable East, the gods of lust and self-mortification. What has your trumpery idealism to say to that?"

He flung the tattered remains of the picture on the fire and held it down. The flames consumed the paint greedily and roared in the chimney.

"So much for that," said Kilner. "Finished! I'll start again to-morrow. Let's go and see your little vixen and annoy her by showing that she hasn't hurt us in the least."

"That's vindictive."

"Ho! Have you turned Christian?"

"I'm not going to have Ann moithered."

"And why not? She must learn her lesson."

"Let me find out why she did it first."

"I know why she did it. Because she thought I had taken you away from her."

"She can't have been jealous of you."

"Women are always jealous of a man's men friends. They know his feeling can be just as strong for them without being weakened by sex. And they hate that-- Now, a feeling fortified by sex--ah! but that doesn't happen."

"That," said René, "is exactly what has happened."

"Eh? To you?"

René nodded, and he told Kilner something of the walk in the west wind, the meeting with Cathleen, the deliverance it had brought to both of them.

"Does she know? Ann, I mean."

"No. I haven't seen her."

"She must have felt it. Poor little devil! No, I'll not see her. It's between you two--my rotten picture, Ann's rotten little dream of happiness, both destroyed. You look like a destroyer, my friend. It's in your eyes, your gestures, and movements. Absolute purpose, absolute desire. There's nothing else worth having."

"How absurd you are, Kilner. You turn everything into a picture as soon as you are interested in it at all. Purpose! I feel like a little schoolboy who has to interview his headmaster. I felt just the same once when I had been amusing myself with throwing paper out of the window. The headmaster saw it, but not the culprit. Then I was away from school ill, and the whole form got into trouble because no one would own up."

Kilner shouted with laughter:

"What a picture of the young Fourmy. Doing just what he wanted to do and evading the consequences by luck. I bet it had all blown over by the time you got back."

"Oh, yes," said René, "but I confessed, and no one was very annoyed."

He went round to Ann's room with a sinking at his heart. She must be told, she must be made to understand, and she never would. He felt immeasurably older than she, responsible for her, and rather helpless. She was out. He gazed round at the room and was touched by its poverty and thriftlessness, the cheap little ornaments on the mantelshelf, the souvenirs of Margate and Southend, the cigarette cards pinned to the wall, to make, with a mirror, its only ornaments. Here they had sat, so many evenings, he and she, in a kind of playing at happiness. Here they had quarreled. Between quarreling and laughing they had spent all their days, laughing into quarrels, quarreling into tears, and out of them again laughing: the happy life of the poor, the workers, the thoughtless, whom no care could subdue, no joy uplift. What a relief that life had been to him when he had turned from that other life, where all his qualities were exploited and thought and power of expression were used only to sneak advantages, and even love and wedded happiness were valued only as possessions! How it had stripped him of all arrogance and cupidity of mind! The simple innocence of those who sell themselves for bread, and know nothing of the business for which they are used, and more despise than envy the shows in the production of which more than half their efforts are expended. Ann's scorn of "ladies," believing them all to be light women, her hatred of charity organization inspectors (she had routed them more than once when they meddled with Rita), Insurance Cards, and Old Age Pensions. She resented being underpaid, but even more she loathed the spirit which tried to supplement the underpayment with instruction in virtue made impossible by it, with doles and callous assistance. It had not escaped her that the motor-cars in the mews cost more to maintain than the income of any one of the families who lived above them. But she loved her little bare rooms, and if she were allowed to keep them and the happiness that filled them she asked no more. The brave independence: that was what René had prized in her, what was expressed in her room. He had contributed nothing to it but a little comfort, an easy chair, a few books, and his pleasure in her. He knew that she treasured that above everything in the world, and he must take it from her. He was shaken with cowardice and dread and pity--by pity most of all. That bound him to her, dragged him down. He had not expected it, so clear had everything seemed in the light of his healthful experience. And, he knew, pity from him would be to her of all things the most hateful. He could not shake free of it, and it absorbed him.

He heard her footsteps on the short flight of stairs. He was filled with a longing to escape. With her hand on the door he lost his head and fled into the inner room. He heard her go to the fireplace and sit in the easy-chair. She sat silently brooding. Then she heard him in the inner room. She had heard that before, and he was never there. Slowly she came into the inner room, and he could just see her smoothing the pillows with her hands. She caught the sound of his breathing and stood stock-still. He could not move. She came toward him groping with her hands. She touched him.

"Renny, dear."

She was pressed close to him. Her arms went round his neck.

"I knew you'd come back."

He caressed her soothingly, gently, consumed and burning in his pity for her, and his terror lest she should discover it too suddenly.

He tried to draw her into the outer room, but she clung to him and kept him in the darkness, forcing him to feel her animal possession of him and hunger for him. Rage and the desire for self-preservation thrust back his pity and he carried her back to the outer room.

Then it was some moments before she could recover herself. She stood giggling and laughing nervously, almost hysterically.

"Renny, dear," she said, "you did say once we'd go off together. I want to. I want to. I'm sorry I went on working. I oughtn't to have done that. We ought to have had a house and me looking after it."

"You would have been even more unhappy."

"I'm not unhappy, Renny, dear. You've come back. And there's that coming----"

("She must be kept off that," he thought.)

"Old Martin's been that kind," she said. "He says he'll see us through if it's money."

"I can make enough money," he replied, and then stopped, puzzled and startled by the malicious pleasure that came into her eyes. He leaned forward the better to see her, for the gas jet was flickering, and she turned away with a half smile that was exasperatingly silly.

"It isn't money," he said, "and you know it. I've seen Kilner."

She was instantly defiant on that.

"Well, and what had he to say for himself?"

"Nothing you would understand."

"Heuh! Clever, aren't you, you two, when you get your heads together."

She began to lay supper. "I'm hungry," she said. "I've not felt like eating while you've been away. Where you been?"

"Away," he answered. "Out of London."

"To your home?"

"No."

"I thought you'd have gone to your home."

"There's nothing to take me there. I've been with friends."

"Women?"

"Yes."

She had nothing to say to that. He went on:

"One of them I knew years ago, when I was a boy."

"That's not so long ago. A lady?"

"Yes."

"A lady wouldn't take up with you now."

"She works for her living."

"The same as me?"

"The same as you."

"Well. What of it?"

"We went down into the country, she and I and her friend."

"I don't want to know about that."

"But I want to tell you."

She stood by the table and her fingers drew patterns on the cloth.

"What is it you want to tell me?"

"I'm in love with her."

Ann's lips set in a hard line, and her eyes narrowed and her brows scowled.

"Did you come back to tell me that?"

"Yes."

"Why? Did you think I'd want to know?"

"I'm so sorry."

"Sorry, you devil? You came down to torment me. You'd better go, d'ye hear."

René could not move. He was fascinated by the suffering in the little creature, melted and weakened by his pity for her.

"You'd better go," she repeated. "And tell her you left a poor girl hating you, and see how she'll like that. Sorry! That's what you say when you step on a fellow's foot in a bus. Sorry! When you got a girl body and soul, and you throw her away like dirt."

"I came back."

"Yes. To tell me that. To tell me I was dirt, to throw me down for her to walk on so's she shan't get her feet wet."

She changed her tone and asked quietly:

"You knew her before me?"

"Long years before."

"Before that other one as you married?"

"Before that."

"And she's pretty and has pretty things?"

"I've told her about you."

"Oh! and she sent you back! Thank you for nothing."

"She did not. I came of my own accord. I couldn't leave you like that."

"I'd rather you did. I'd rather you did. My Christ! I can't bear to see you sitting there and talking and talking----"

He rose to his feet: "I can't leave you, Ann. I couldn't leave you like you are. . . ."

She leaned across the table and put out her hand.

"Look here, Renny. D'you love me?"

"Yes."

"Heh!" She gave a snarl of incredulity. "Heh! See here! D'you want me!"

Her eyes were staring at him cunningly, invitingly. He saw that she half believed his weakness would lead him to evasion or consent to her will. He waited, and made her repeat her question.

"D'you want me?"

"I want your happiness," he said. "I don't believe you will find it in me."

She was inarticulate. Her eyes closed and she swayed. She jerked her head toward the door. He took that for a sign that he was to go, and moved round the table. She was before him, crouching, barring the way. Strangled sobbing sounds came from her throat. He stretched out his hands to implore her, to tell her of his almost intolerable pity. She sprang at him. She had a knife in her hand. He saw it flash, felt a burning pain in his breast, and fell. He could see her face twisted in an agony of fear close to his. Spittle from her lips fell upon his cheek. Her hands were busy at his breast. He lost consciousness.

V

THRIGSBY

Nothing I'll bear from thee But nakedness, thou detestable town!

THAT was an appalling night. René lay with his wound roughly staunched. Ann crouched in the darkness by the bedside, fondling his hand, clinging to him, occasionally weeping. Both watched the light come creeping over the roofs and chimneys. Neither could say a word. Their eyes met, and hers were fixed hungrily on his face like a dog's that has been whipped for fighting. She looked so scared that he desired only to reassure her.

"Ann," he said.

She kissed his hand and fondled it, and pressed it to her cheek, and bathed it in her tears and kissed away the tears.

"You'd better fetch Kilner," he said. "He'll know what to do."

"Don't let him know how it happened. Don't let him know I did it."

"No. Go and fetch him."

"Oh! I thought you was dead. I thought you was dead. Oh! Renny, dear, what should I ha' done if you'd been dead, my dear?"

"Go and fetch Kilner. He'll tell us what to do."

She brought Kilner and left them together. René made a clumsy attempt to shield Ann in a very incoherent account of the affair. Kilner saw through it but acquiesced in the intention.

"Can you move?" he asked.

"I think so."

"Can you walk to a doctor's? There's one just round the corner. Better than having him here. Some doctors talk. You'll be better out of this."

Leaning on Kilner's arm, René managed to reach the doctor's, but there he fainted. Kilner invented a story of an early morning street attack, and the doctor, who was not interested, swallowed it. He patched René up, gave him a prescription, and told him to call again that day. René disliked the man so much that he refused inwardly ever to go near him again. Between them they had half the fee, and promised to send round the rest.

Kilner made René comfortable in his room and was then sent off to find Miss Cleethorpe.

Lotta came at once. She and Kilner liked each other. Kilner had begun to see the affair in a humorous light. Anything to do with René was to him never very far short of absurdity.

"I wish I'd thought of it like that before," he said. "I'd never have let him go to her. I might have known he would make a mess of it. He was simply bursting with exaltation, and when he's like that it never occurs to him that other people may have a different view. I half believe he expected Ann to share his enthusiasm for the other lady----"

Lotta could not help laughing, though she protested: "What a shame!"

"I can't help it," said Kilner, "other people's love affairs always are comic, and Fourmy--well, he is simply inappropriate in a community of creatures who live by cunning."

"You've hit it," replied Lotta. "I've been trying to understand what it was made him so exceptional. Creatures who live by cunning---- Thank you, Mr. Kilner."

"All artists are like that. Cunning is no use in the pursuit of art. But they are insulated by their work as ordinary people are by convention and habit. No artist takes personal relationships seriously. They happen. He handles them well or makes a mess of them. It does not greatly matter. The ordinary being cannot appreciate any personal relationship until it is conventionalized and stripped of its vigor and value. Well--you have seen your Fourmy in action."

"And well worth seeing too."

Kilner told her what he could make of the new disaster, and how Ann had hated him and destroyed his work.

"I imagine," he said, "that the same blind instinct operated against Fourmy. He's creative also in a way. My pictures, his life, his precious romantic life, are both things slowly shaped out of chaos, and the creative process in a man is absolutely indifferent to the stupid security most women value. Ann did her ridiculous little best to stop it in both of us."

"Poor girl," said Lotta, "I can imagine the two of you driving her distracted. After all, what she was going through was important to her."

"But only to her. She wanted it to be important for him. It couldn't be: it was quite meaningless."

"Nature is cruelly indifferent."

"If she weren't," said Kilner, "we should never have developed intelligence, let alone imagination."

"What are we to do with them?"

"I'll look after Fourmy if you'll take charge of Ann. Only, remember, you are not supposed to know that she did it, and, please, I have told you nothing about my picture."

The caution was unnecessary, for Ann tumbled out a full confession as she sank into the comfort of Lotta's kindness. She guessed at once who Lotta was, but was too exhausted for resentment. She had dragged herself off to her work in order to fill in the creeping hours.

Lotta said she was a friend of René's, and wished to help, and asked if there was anything she could do. Ann burst into tears and rolled her head from side to side, and cried:

"Oh! I wish I was dead, I do. I nearly did myself in last night when he lay there in the dark not saying a word. I wish I had--I wish I had. I never been so miserable. . . ."

Lotta comforted her as best she could, clumsily dropping a word in here and there as Ann poured out her confused narrative.

Ann kept on saying:

"He ought to have gone if he wanted to go."

"But he couldn't leave you like that----"

"It was seeing him again done it. I couldn't bear it, seeing him and knowing he was wanting to go."

"He was wanting you to feel that--that he was not going out of indifference to you."

"He doesn't want me. He said that."

"My dear child, you mustn't think about it like that. You must see that it is ended now."

"I'll never care for anybody again--not like that."

"Don't make things harder for yourself. How do you know?"

"You're only young once."

"Love is stronger when youth is gone."

Ann believed that. She wanted to believe in Lotta, and she sat very quietly, almost like a child, while the quiet, gentle woman tried to explain to her that René had taken nothing away, that their love must die for all it had lacked, that there was no disgrace in a failure to bring a love to life, that it was happening everywhere, every day, and that a dead love was the most horrible of prisons. And, said Lotta, if a child was to be born, it were better not to bring it into such captivity, better not to have the joy and beauty of motherhood spoiled by jealousy and disappointment in the failure of love. Ann wept anew. People were so kind, she said: there was Old Martin, and now there was Lotta; and she had only dreaded her loneliness of being left alone to face "that." Lotta said there was no question of being left alone. If Ann liked, she could come to her hostel as maid, and when her time came she could go out to the country.

"I think," said Lotta, "that all children ought to be born and bred in the country. Don't you?"

"The mews," replied Ann, "is not much of a place for them."

She did not quite like the idea of being "in service," but Lotta explained that it did not necessarily mean for always. Once the baby was born and provided for, Ann could go back to her factory and take up her life, if she wished, where it was before René came into it.

"But I'll always want to hear about him," said Ann.

"Of course. He'll always want to hear about you."

"And see him."

"He'll want to see you too."

So it was arranged, and Ann promised to be at the hostel next morning.

When Lotta had gone, she sat down and wrote:

"DEAR RENNY,--I do want you to forgive me. I have been awful, but not without excuse. I do like Miss Lotta. She's been an angel to me and made me feel awfuller. I'm going to her. A letter for you to say you 'ad come into some money. I tore it up when I first began to feel bad toward you. I don't feel bad any more.--Your loving ANN."

This confession reached René at the same time as a letter from his brother George conveying the same news. The attorney in Edinburgh had written to say he had no reply from Mr. René Fourmy, and to ask for information as to his whereabouts. "This," said George, "has been a bit of a shock to us. We'd counted on something from the old lady. However, it makes a difference to you. If you feel inclined to come up and see us I'll be glad to have you. I suppose you'll give up the street-slogging. The old man has been in London. Did you see him?"

René announced his intention of going to Thrigsby. His mind was going back and back over his life in the attempt to understand it. If he could see George and his mother, he felt and hoped that he might be able to follow up the threads placed in his hands by his chance encounter with his father.

A day or two later saw him arriving at the Albert Station with his arm in a sling. George was there to meet him.

"Hullo, old sport," he said, "been in the wars?"

René told the lie invented by Kilner for the doctor.

"By Jove," said George, "you have been roughing it. I'll tell that to the youngsters in our office when they get dotty about Canada and the Wild West. Wild West of London, eh?" and he chuckled at his own joke.

"Elsie's quite excited," he said, as they boarded the Hog Lane tram.

"And mother?" asked René.

"Well. Hum. You'll find a difference in the mother."

René was struck by many changes. New warehouses, new rows of shops, some attempt to bring distinction into the architecture of the city, though, for the most part, nothing but ostentation was attained. They passed the university. There were new buildings there, more like an insurance office than ever. Streets that he remembered as respectable and prosperous had become slums swarming with grimy children. A great piece had been taken out of Potter's Park for the building of a hideous art gallery. The trams now passed down Hog Lane West, with the result that most of the houses had apartment cards in their fanlights. George had moved from The Nest into 168. He could get a larger house for the same rent. His house was exactly the same as their old home. It gave René a depressing idea that nothing had changed. George was fatter: Elsie thinner. They had four children.

George was in the same office, and, as he said, had flung away ambition: too many children to take risks, and after all there was nothing in the small firm now. The one or two connections you depended on might go bust any day. It needed enormous capital to stand the fluctuations of prices. He had got a rise by pretending to go and was quite content. He played bowls in the summer and bridge in the winter. And Elsie? What with the house and the mother she had plenty to do, plenty to do.

As René walked along the passage he felt uncannily certain that he would find his mother sitting by the fireplace knitting. And it was so. She raised her eyes and looked at him with timid anxiety, held out her cheek to be kissed, went on knitting, and said:

"Now sit down and give an account of yourself."

He edited his experiences, and she listened without interest. Most of his talk was of Kilner.

"Artists are very immoral men, aren't they?"

René shrugged.

"It depends," he said, "on what you mean by morality."

"There _are_ rules," said she, "and commandments."

"My friend has rules," he replied, "rather good ones. He dislikes doing anything which interferes with his power to paint."

"To me that sounds very selfish."

"I don't think we can argue about that, mother."

"No. I suppose you made very little money."

"Three pounds a week."

"I suppose you could do with that, with only yourself to keep. Though it seems a pity, considering the amount of time and money spent on your education."

Was it his mother speaking? What had happened to her? Whence had come the dry hardness in her voice? Why were her eyes so dead? They used to steal quick little glances when she spoke. Now she only stared listlessly. A home-coming? This for a home? In the house next door there had been some stirring of life: the night when he had returned home from Scotland: the strange days after his father's restoration.

The windows of the room were shut. René felt stifled. He made some excuse and went away out of the house, and roamed through the familiar streets. There were many houses empty: the gardens, some of which had once been trim, were now unkempt. The whole district was dismal and devitalized. Only the red trams clanging and clanking down the cobbled streets made any stir and gaiety.

He found himself presently in Galt's Park. The little pink brick houses had invaded it. Many of the big houses were pulled down: others were being demolished, and only jagged walls and gaping windows were left. On the site of the Brocks' house stood a little red-brick chapel outside which were announcements in Welsh and English. That gave him a shock. Some of the past life had been brushed away. He disliked the idea of its room being usurped by a chapel, a place of Christian worship. He did not know why he disliked this idea so much, but it was connected vaguely with the image of his mother sitting in that room, knitting and talking in an empty voice, and clinging obstinately to rules of conduct.

At the other end of Galt's Park he came on a new street, flung straight across what he remembered as fields. Following its dreary length, he found himself near the Smallmans' house. It was now completely shut in with little pink brick houses. He turned in at the gate, rang at the bell and asked the maid if he could see the Professor. He was left waiting in the hall where he had seen Linda's green parasol. Here, too, there was no change. The Professor came out looking very mysterious. He took a hat down, seized René by the arm and led him out into the street.

"Well, well," he said. "I'm glad to see you, glad to see you. How are you?"

"Very well." René felt inclined to laugh. Clearly the Professor was trying not to hurt his feelings and to disguise the fact that he did not think him fit to enter his house, that temple of domesticity.

"Tell me about yourself. One doesn't lose interest, you know."

This time René did not edit his experiences.

"I had heard stories," said the Professor. "I was reluctant to believe them."

"Why?"

"Well--er-- You know--one expects----"

"That every man will do his duty."

"It is hardly a subject for satire," said the Professor.

René exploded:

"Good God! What else is it a subject for? England expects? Does the whole duty of man consist in self-mutilation? Why, then, the noblest man is he who shirks every responsibility, let his mind rot and his feelings wither, so that he can attain a devilish efficiency at the job into which he tumbles before he has begun to develop enough to know what he can do. These are your successful men, your pundits, your Lord Mayors, your merchant princes, your politicians----"

"My dear Fourmy, I think you should recollect that you hardly gave yourself time to recognize what Thrigsby stands for, the greatest industrial center in the world."

"I had time enough to realize what it has done for my father, my mother, my brother, and myself."

"Two wrongs do not make a right, and I do not think you set about remedying matters in the right way. You had every opportunity here. You had escaped the pressure of industrialism. You had good brains."

"Brains!" cried René. "I had escaped from industrialism only to talk about it."

"We are doing useful work. The defects of the system are slowly being recognized as a result of our investigations."

"Can't you realize them without investigation? Aren't they as plain as the nose on your face?"

"You can't find a remedy without investigation. That leads to mere sentimental socialism. But why need we quarrel about that? You didn't like the work. I hope you found more satisfaction in your vagabondage."

"London is just as bad, rather worse, because the wickedness of it all is glossed over with a kind of boastfulness. Here you either make money or you don't. There, as far as I can see, your only chance is to spend money: not that I saw much of that except from the outside; still I did see all sorts and kinds of people, and you can make rough conclusions about them."

"You don't mind my suggesting that you were hardly in a condition to make impartial observations?"

"We don't seem able to use the same terms. You still think I was a fool not to stay in my nice little home, with my nice little job and my nice little income."

"I don't judge you. I only say that if everybody were to do the same----"

"I only wish more people would. There'd soon be an end of congestion. I only came round to-night because I couldn't stand the sight of my brother settling down to his nice little home and my mother fast freezing into a nice old lady--and then I find you terrified lest I should enter and pollute your nice little home. I tell you, what I have seen to-day has settled me. I came up here in a muddle about it all, half feeling that I had made an ass of myself, but I'm absolutely certain now----"

"But a man must think of his wife and children, and, indeed, you are unjust. I have no fear of your disturbing my household. We should be only too glad to see you, only it happened, if you must know, that my wife was expecting Linda Brock. She uses her own name now."

René gave a shout of laughter.

"But I'd like to see her. How is she?"

"Her mother died six months ago and left her a great deal of money, a fortune. We had no idea she was so rich. Linda wrote some plays, you know. She has bought the theater and presented it to the Players. I am one of the trustees. Thrigsby is very proud of the theater----

"It used to be music when I was young," said René, "and the orchestra was always in debt."

"Art," said the Professor, "cannot be expected to pay for itself. We are running the theater to a certain extent in connection with the university----"

He had assumed the voice in which he lectured. René cut him short:

"I'd like to see Linda. Will you take me back with you."

"I--er----"

"You needn't thrust me on her. Just ask her if she'd like to see me, and come out and tell me: yes or no. After all, if it comes to that, we're still married. I believe, by the brutal laws of the country, I could insist on seeing her whether she liked it or not. You might tell her that I have come into some money also."

"Really? I'm so glad."

"Hurrah!" cried René, "you think I'll have to live up to it and settle down."

"It would certainly be a splendid thing if----"

The Professor's whole attitude toward him was changed. Already, it was clear, he was beginning to plan a grand scene of reconciliation, a reformed René, a forgiving Linda, the Smallman family in the background, symbolical of Impregnable Matrimony. René caught the hint and his mind played with it and blew it out into a grotesque. It gave him so much pleasure that he chuckled and said:

"It won't do, you know. We couldn't come together again without a scandal."

The Professor was so intent on his own thoughts that he did not notice the savage irony of the remark. He said:

"It would soon die down."

"Sooner than the other?"

"Well----!"

"I've got you there," observed René. "It wasn't fair though. I hadn't the slightest intention of doing any such thing."

"Why, then----?"

"Why do I want to see her? I don't know. I want to. Isn't that reason enough?"

They had returned to the house.

"You just ask her. Tell her I'm in Thrigsby for a few days and would like to see her. If she doesn't wish it, don't worry. I'll wait ten minutes."

"Very well," said the Professor, not altogether giving up hope, "I'll tell her, but the way you talk of it seems to me almost indecent."

He let himself in at the front door, and in ten minutes was out again.

"Very well," he said, "she will see you. . . . If you don't mind, my wife has gone up to her room."

"I wonder," thought René, "what they would make of Ann. They wouldn't mind my leaving her."

He felt rather nervous as he reached the threshold of the study, but stiffened himself for the plunge. The door opened and he found himself shaking Linda warmly by the hand and asking after her health, and explaining how he came to be in Thrigsby. Linda was noticeably plumper, rounder, and more solid. He could see no charm in her and thought her unsuitably dressed, tactlessly, provincially. On the whole, he liked her. The handshake was firm, her eyes were frank.

"It was nice of you to come and see me," she said. "So much better to have no nonsense about it."

"If you like," said the Professor, "I--I--will----"

Linda appealed to René.

"Oh, no. I've nothing to say. I only wanted to know that there was to be no nonsense between us. I'm very glad. I wish we could have arrived at that sooner, but I suppose that was impossible."

Linda smiled:

"You've changed, René. That would have been blasphemy to you a few years ago. You hated coming to your senses."

"I should think so," said the Professor.

"You're not going to stay in Thrigsby?" asked Linda.

"No. That's impossible, even if I wanted to. We should be crossing each other's tracks. Not that I should mind that, but---- Well, it wouldn't do, would it?"

"No. I prefer being without a husband. Really, for an active woman it seems to me to be the ideal condition. She has a status and no risk."

The Professor sat bolt upright:

"What _do_ you mean, Linda?"

"I won't insist on the advantages if it shocks you, Phil. René understands me."

"Oh, yes," said René, "Linda means she can lose her head without any danger of getting married."

The Professor exploded:

"I never heard of anything so--so abominable."

"But I did mean that," said Linda. "Women do lose their heads, you know, even when they are married. Ask Freda. Don't look so hurt. She and I were talking it over yesterday, and we agreed that the law was so horrid that all I could do was to disregard it. And if René is willing that is what I propose doing. You shall represent the world at large. You do represent its opinion. You know----"

"I do not."

Linda passed over the interruption:

"You are the world at large and I say to you: 'This man is no longer my husband.' No more than that should be necessary. You don't want any more than that, do you, René?"

"Even that seems to me a needless statement of fact, but perhaps I'm extreme."

The Professor rose and stood with his back to the fireplace: "All this," he said, "is extremely distasteful. You are making a mock of marriage."

Said René:

"We know more about it than you. We've tried disruption and you haven't. We're both the better for it. The fact is, there is no such thing as marriage. There are marriages, and precious few of them. Yours, no doubt, is one of the few."

The Professor was mollified, swallowed the harangue he had prepared, and sat down again.

René took Linda to her house in a remote suburb. She said:

"You know I quite dreaded meeting you again. I always had a feeling I should. The poor dear Professor was quite disappointed because we didn't make a scene."

"Oh, he didn't mind once we made it quite clear that we were casting no shadow of doubt upon the sanctity of his own domestic happiness. They're all like that."

"I'm sure he's quite convinced that you have become very wicked. Have you?"

"No. Strict monogamist."

"What do you mean by that?"

"One wife at a time."

Linda laughed at him. "You always were uncompromising."

Her laughter grated on René. He had a revulsion of feeling against her. She was, he realized, and always had been, cynical.

At her gate she held his hand for a long time, and asked him if he would not come and see her again.

"I think not," he said.

"I wish you would. We might be such friends. And you have become so interesting."

"I think not," he repeated. "Any friendship we might have would only be an----" He could not find the word and stopped rather foolishly. He could not move until he had found it. So they stood there hand in hand waiting in a ridiculous and empty silence.

"Would be what?" she asked in irritation.

He found the word.

"An impertinence."

She shook his hand from hers almost angrily and walked away.

He knew then why he had come to Thrigsby. It was to make a clean cut with her. That achieved, there was nothing more in the grim city of his youth to keep him.

VI

THE COMFORT OF RELIGION

Quoi! Dieu me punirait éternellement de m'être livré à des passions qu'il m'a données?

THERE might be nothing to keep him, but yet he stayed five days longer. For one thing George's children were amusing and a profitable study. They had discovered that they had only to lie to their parents to keep them quiet, and, as lying was expected of them, and made things comfortable, they saw no harm in it. For the rest they did as they pleased and amused themselves. Little George was the very spit of his grandfather and a great spinner of yarns. René told him one morning to ask his mother if he could go out with him. Off trotted the boy, to return in a moment with a detailed account of the conversation he had had. It transpired subsequently that Elsie was out at the time. René told her. She said:

"I don't know what to do about the child. He has such an imagination."

"I prefer to call that invention. Imagination is the one quality in you that appreciates truth. I should begin if I were you by satisfying his curiosity. Tell him the truth about anything he wants to know."

"But he wants to know such awful things."

"What awful things?"

"Well, about me and George."

"It's hard to put a lie straight once you've told it. It is terribly easy to lose your respect for your parents."

"Oh, but little George loves us."

"How do you know?"

"He says so nearly every night."

"Oh, well," said René, "people believe only what they like to believe."

Elsie was rather ruffled:

"After all, they're our children."

"Certainly. You'll find out what they think of it soon enough."

It was interesting to watch the processes which went to make up the fool's paradise that George and Elsie, in common with their kind, called Home, the worship of lip-virtue, the constant practice of mean little subterfuges, George dodging Elsie's interest and suspicion of himself, she his of her, and the children, where necessary, contributing to the comedy and, for the rest, living thoroughly, selfishly, and callously in their own pursuits.

René found that as long as he would let George talk about bridge, bowls, and business, or splutter abuse of Radical legislation, and as long as he allowed Elsie to chatter of the neighbors and children and music-halls and clothes, they were both quite happy.

With his mother it was otherwise. She was uneasy in his presence and they could hardly talk at all, except about their relations, the rich Fourmys, and the shabby tricks they had done; but after a while René became aware that they were holding a stealthy converse, an undercurrent to the words they used. He tried all sorts of devices to bring it to the surface but without success. His mother would relapse into silence or, without a word, would hurry off to her church and return impenetrably encased in humility, pale with emotional satiety. There was something abnormal about her then, something unnatural that made René's flesh creep. When it had passed he would feel once more the wildness in her that she kept so savagely repressed.

He recognized at last that he was staying on in the hope of penetrating her defenses. Having come to that, he attacked her one night when George and Elsie were out, and he knew there was no service at the church for her to escape to. Like the dutiful husband he was, George made a practice of taking Elsie to a music-hall once a week, a music-hall or two cinemas, as she chose.

Mrs. Fourmy had put down her knitting and said:

"I think I would like a game of patience, René."

He put out the table and the cards and they played. He said:

"I wonder how you can stand seeing them play the old, old game."

"What old game?"

"Marriage. Killing each other in the first few weeks and then--humbug."

"George is a very good husband and father."

"He lives with a woman in his house and children come automatically."

"He is very good to Elsie."

"He placates her."

Mrs. Fourmy took out the ace of diamonds and covered it. René said:

"Do you ever think, mother, of how we used to say we'd go and live together?"

"Sometimes. I knew it was just nonsense."

Her eyes gave him a quick little affectionate glance, searching for affection. Ah! that was better.

"Not such nonsense, either. Why shouldn't you go and live in Aunt Janet's cottage? It was that I was thinking of, though I never thought it would be mine."

"I'd be so lonely."

"No lonelier than you are here."

"No."

That escaped her involuntarily. She covered it up.

"You're too old for that sort of talk, René. You're not a boy any longer."

"I'm much younger than I was then."

"Yes, that's true. Would you come too?"

"No. I--I'm going south again."

"Have you met--her?"

"Yes."

"I thought so." Her hands trembled. "Are you--are you going to live with her?"

"I hope so."

"It will be living in sin. I couldn't live in your house if I knew that----"

"You prefer George?"

"I--I---- Please don't talk about it any more, René."

"I must. You love me far more than you love George, and yet you prefer to accept a home from him rather than from me."

"Certain things are wrong, René."

"I take my chance of that."

"We aren't given any choice."

"Hell in this world or hell in the next."

"Don't speak lightly of such things, René."

"I saw my father in London."

Mrs. Fourmy let the cards trickle from her hands, and sat staring at him with weary, frightened eyes.

"You are your father over again."

"He told me. Then it was your love or your religion----"

"Don't, René, don't!"

He could not continue. He watched her living again in the agony of the memory, righting with it, fighting it back, stifling the hunger in herself. He rose to leave her. She thought he was already gone, and slipped to her knees in an attitude of prayer.

René went to his room at the back of the house, the exact counterpart of his old den. He cursed that jealous God, that brutal invention of cowardice which has laid waste the western world. His rage only subsided when he came to think of Cathleen. He took paper and pen and wrote to her:

"I seem hardly at all different from the boy who used to write to you. It is almost exactly the same room, the same hour, only now it is my brother and sister-in-law who occupy the big bed in the big front room. The window looks out at the same lighted windows opposite. And I am the same except that I know myself better and am more sure. What an extraordinary phantasmagoria between our parting and our meeting! How worthless and external adventures can be! How worthless and external the more intimate relationships! But without adventure, without mistakes, folly, suffering, how is that discovery to be made? I suppose my brother never could have made it, but he must have had, perhaps even now he has, his moments when his desire tugs against his little round of habits. He would call himself a happy man, and perhaps he is so. Perhaps we all get what we desire. That would be a comfortable creed, and I could believe it were it not for my mother. One is not born of a woman for nothing. Something binds. There is a deeper knowledge than that of the mind. There is in my mother a quality with which I feel at home, free. But she withholds it from me. I feel she hates it in me, as in herself, as in my father. Hard to find anything else in common between them. I told you that story of how she surrendered to him when he came back. It must have been that in her, taken unawares. It had lived without alarm for so long. It had been stirred in her when I came back from Scotland so full of that idiotic love for you--and after that, I can't follow. Too near to it perhaps, or perhaps it is obscured in me by all I have gone through since. But now she baffles me. She has suffered. Yes. We all suffer, but suffering leads to discovery, to joy, or life is altogether barren. She suffers, she must suffer from living here in the dull house, but she takes her suffering and bottles it up, sterilizes it with religion. Her comfort! From the bottom of my heart I hate it. When she is full of what she calls her religion, then I can only bear with her by my inborn knowledge of her, and for that only the more do I detest the poison that has ruined her splendid life. And how it has been exploited, this voluptuous, selfish pleasure which they dare to call prayer and worship, this cowardly refusal to follow suffering withersoever it leads. I cannot be tolerant about it. To thousands I know, it is no more than bridge or bowls to my brother George, a pastime. But with her, and with all who have a capacity for suffering, it is a passionate negation, and to have lived at all must be a horror. You see, I am almost inarticulate about it. I have tried to break through it and failed. She saw, and closed her eyes, as she must have seen time and again. The delight of seeing almost deliberately debased to fear. I wish I were more used to thinking about people, then I could make it more clear. But it doesn't seem much use, for I go on believing in them and liking them and expecting all sorts of things that never come. Oh, the freedom that I find with you, and the thought of you! Everything you understand, and all the differences between us we can just laugh at and use. I must take you to some place where we can build up a healthy life. Now that I have money, I thought for a time that we would go and live in Scotland in my house. (How odd that looks. I really am pleased with my possessions for the first time.) That would not do. There must be work and activity. We'll have a brave time making plans to keep each other and everybody we know happy and keen. No more grubby humbugging, and no more Mitcham Mews. We'll find a way. . . ."

There came a tap at his door. He went to open it. His mother stood there.

"Aren't you going to bed, René? George and Elsie came home long ago."

"I was writing a letter."

"You shouldn't stay up, wasting the gas and all."

VII

CASEY'S VENTURE

Fortis imaginatio venerat casum.

CATHLEEN replied:

"I think you are hard on your mother. You love her too well to judge her, but you read yourself into her. You do that with me too, and I am sometimes alarmed when I think how I may disappoint you. But then I trust you so completely. You give so much that what you give turns at once into a gift from me to you, and that makes me give too. So it goes on like rain and cloud and river. Don't try to upset your little family. They won't like it. Keep all the upsetting for me. I love it and need it constantly."

He was very happy with this letter, carried it in his pocket and fingered it continually. Under its influence he ceased to chafe against his surroundings, and made no further attempt to force himself on his mother, and in her shy way she seemed to take pleasure in his exuberance.

The Edinburgh attorney sent an advance of £100. He posted £20 to Kilner, and besought him to leave Mitcham Mews and find a studio or go down into the country. Another twenty he sent to Lotta for Ann. He bought his mother an Indian shawl and provided Elsie with two dresses, tailor-made. The children were taken to a toy shop and allowed to select three treasures each. Little George hesitated for a long time between a helmet and a whip, and finally chose the latter because his small brother was no good as a soldier, but quite fair as a horse.

When René announced that he must go, George declared that they would "make an evening of it," and they played bridge until ten, and then in the parlor Mrs. Fourmy drew soft music from the old piano with its yellow keys. Under her hand the beauty of the Moonlight Sonata seemed faded, and René thought sadly that it was like the beauty of her life, faded and gone to dust. And as she played he took down the old family copy of Shakespeare, a vulgar edition spoiled with colored portraits of actors and actresses. He opened it at random and his eyes fell on these words:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages: Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

And tears came to his eyes, and he was filled with love and appreciation for these good kinsfolk of his who found such wealth in their little happiness and were so easily consoled in their little sorrows. And in the music it seemed that he and his mother could meet, had found a language which both could understand, a song to unite passionate acceptance and passionate denial in the peace of the soul.

George said he never did think much of classical music, and asked Elsie to sing his favorite song: "Poppyland."

That done, they joined hands and sang "For Auld Lang Syne."

His mother came to see René in his bed. She said:

"You won't come again."

"How do you know that?"

"I feel it. You've been very good and you have made me very happy."

"Then I'll come again."

"I don't want you to come again. You'll never be the same. George is always the same."

René remembered how his father had said she had done her best to keep them from ever being men.

"All right, mother. I wouldn't like it to be a pain for you to see me."

She smiled.

"It always is pain, René, dear, because I had to let you go."

He drew her down to him and kissed her. She said:

"An old woman like me."

He whispered:

"There'll always be some music that I can never hear without thinking of you."

"Yes," she said. "You were always the one to listen. And your father liked it too--some things."

"I'll think of that too."

"Yes. Think kindly of your father. We both did try."

And she crept away. René called after her, but she did not hear him. He wished to keep her with him, to try to find some word that should comfort her. But he knew at once that the word would elude him, that there was nothing to say, that he and she were lost to each other, and must go their ways. All his efforts, all his hopes could wake no response in her. The mention of his father made him know how dearly she had loved the man, and he began to perceive the subtle force of love, how it can live in defiance of the will, and even through the failing of desire; how it uses even differences, even ruptures to bind and sustain; and how even the most selfish souls are knit with others, though it be to the destruction of every pleasant joy. He saw how little love needs consciousness, and how desperately men stand in need of it. Else are they consumed in love, and never for a moment do their lives take form and color before they sink to dust again, not wholly created before they are destroyed. Ideas of Kilner's came rushing back to René's mind, his description of his vision, the slow insistence on being given expression and form in paint, his own helplessness against the tyranny of what his eyes had seen and his imagination mastered. René began to understand that, to lose sense of time, to find in himself also a vision that had possessed him always. Only, unlike Kilner, he could not trace it back to any moment of ecstasy, any keen appreciation of some natural beauty, or the play of light. Light! That was the creating idea. Kilner responded to the light of the sun, René to the light of the imagination, the light of the sun wrought upon by men's minds, so that their life also had its sun to bring fertility, and make the body a spirit and love an intellectual thing; the light of the sun stored through all the generations to dissipate the terrors of life and the power of death, to concentrate upon all beloved objects and show them in their loveliness as visions urging to creation. And in his love of woman man seeks no reflection of his light but the flash of hers, that her beauty may not perish.

René in his joy began to sing to himself. It was the song Cathleen had sung in the woods. He could see her again as she was there in the green haze of the woods, in the dappled light, mysterious and wild.

From that he deliberately turned away to fix his gaze on the humorous reality, because there was nothing that he did not desire to sweep into his joy. He lit a match and gazed round the little, cheaply furnished room, the ugly toilet service, the yellow dressing-table, the silly patterned wall-paper of pallid roses, the execrable pictures on the wall. His eyes were dazzled by the light, and they ached. Came darkness again, and he hummed to himself as he thought of the morrow and the train, with its wheels humming along the rails, taking him nearer the goal of his desire.

. . . . . .

In the morning George shook him warmly by the hand when he came down, again as he was putting on his coat, and again, twice, as he set out for business.

"Good luck," he said. "Good luck, old man. Elsie really has loved having you, and I'm sorry you're leaving dear, old, dirty Thrigsby."

"Good-by," said René. "I'll let you know what happens to me, if anything does. I don't think I shall stay in London."

"Good-by, then. By George, I shall be late!" And he set off at a run.

René only had ten minutes more. Most of that was taken up with seeing the children off to the kindergarten they attended. Mrs. Fourmy had stayed in her bed. He went up to see her. She clung to him, but spoke no word, and he was too deeply moved to speak. She looked old and frail and very small in her bed. At last she said:

"You're glad to go?"

"Yes."

Her eyes looked hunger and reproach. She turned her face away.

"Good-by."

"Good-by, mother. George is a good fellow, isn't he?"

"Oh, yes. And I find the children a great comfort." She said that in a perfectly toneless voice. The contrast between it and what she had looked only a moment before shocked René. He mastered himself and kissed her and hurried away.

Elsie said:

"It has been a treat. You really are a sight for sore eyes, René. I never thought you would grow into such a handsome man. I do wish George didn't have to go to that office. It makes him so pasty."

"Let me know when you have a birthday," said René, "and you shall have another tailor-made."

"It's next week," said Elsie innocently.

"Right you are. You shall have it."

. . . . . .

At last he was in the train. No sleep this time. Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, the hills by Elstree, London. A taxi took him hot speed to the hostel. Cathleen was not yet back from her work. Lotta met him with a grave face. She had had a terrible time with Ann, who had alternated between a dog-like gratitude to herself and harsh defiance of Cathleen and all the other young women of the hostel. The situation had been impossible. To appease her she was allowed to see his letter, and after a few hours' brooding on it--not without tears--she had demanded the twenty pounds. With that, apparently, she had cabled to Joe and Rita and another friend in Canada, had packed up her boxes, stolen away early in the morning, and got on board at Southampton, whither she had been traced.

"Poor little Ann," said René.

"I told you she had courage."

"She has that. To go out to a new life----"

"Our interference must have been intolerable to a spirit like hers. But what could we do? Even from you----"

"It is horrible that disasters should interfere with human comradeship."

"It is horrible, but they do interfere."

"Does Cathleen know?"

"Yes. I told her last night."

"Well?"

"It seemed to bring home to her for the first time how terrible and ugly it was. You don't mind my saying that, but the past always does cast its shadow."

"Yes. It can be dispelled."

"Only with time."

"Yes."

Lotta said:

"I like the way you face things. There is no one like you for that--except Cathleen. . . . Where will you live now?"

"For the time being, with Kilner, I think."

"I found him a little studio in Hampstead. He is delighted and happy with it."

"I'll go there now, if you don't mind."

Lotta gave him the direction, and in a few minutes by Tube he was with Kilner, whom he found hard at work at a new Adam and Eve, squaring the composition on to the canvas.

"It's pouring money," said Kilner. "Your twenty pounds came one day and the next I heard that two drawings of mine had been sold, a head of Old Lunt and a half-length of Martin patting a horse's rump. . . . Casey's been up here every day asking for you."

"Casey? What does he want? Money? I'm not a millionaire."

"The poor devil has to leave London. It's eating up the little piece of his lung left by South Africa."

"That's bad."

"Seen anybody?"

"Only Miss Cleethorpe."

"She's a fine woman. I think I shall marry her. She's twenty years older than I am, but that is just about enough to bring a woman within reach of an artist."

"But----"

"Oh! she began it. We've already been down to her cottage in the country--I like that too. You'll have to fork out for a wedding present."

"I'll cancel your debts. But, are you really?"

"Fourmy," said Kilner, "you're an incorrigible romantic. I'm a realist, and like love's young dream to remain a dream. Life is a long, slow, dreary business, and I want a woman I can live with. . . ."

"Did you say that to Lotta?"

"Not in so many words, but in effect."

"Well, I'm----"

"You're not a bit glad. You're horrified. Common-sense is and always will be sordid to you. Lotta and I cooked chestnuts over a fire. We shall go on cooking chestnuts till we die. How's Ann?"

"Gone."

"I thought that would happen. You and I busted her between us--her pride, her joy in living, her rather slovenly habits of mind. You didn't know you were doing it. I did. I'm an awful swine. I told Lotta all about it--as we were cooking chestnuts. She refused to believe me."

There was a tap at the door, and Casey appeared. He rushed excitedly at René, and began to pour out an excited tale of how he had found the very thing, a livery yard at Rickham, thirty miles out of London to the northwest.

"Our station," said Kilner. "Lotta's and mine."

"It's a busy little town, but it needs brisking up, like you say, Mr. Fourmy; it needs motor-cars and a garage. That yard's the very thing, only a hundred yards from the station. There are people with cars living near, but they have to go five miles for repairs, and the trades-people can't have cars, because there is no one to look after them. It's _the_ chance. I've got an option on the yard till next week. Will you take it up? I've got a map. See?"

He produced his map and showed the geographical advantages of Rickham. It had already good water and electric light. Its train service had been enormously improved, and it only needed the country round to be opened up. "Don't you see, Mr. Fourmy, it's your idea?"

René had half-forgotten it. Casey explained, and showed the ring of little country towns round London, how they had come to life again, as markets, as centers, and how in many of them factories were being built and all kinds of people were coming out from London to live in or near them.

Kilner was interested, and said to René:

"So you think that is how things are going to work themselves out? It's an attractive idea, the country for food, a ring of industrial centers, and the exchanges in the middle of it all. Some sort of shape and design instead of the muddle we're in. It might even make room for the artist."

Casey said:

"When I heard you'd come in for some money I couldn't rest until I'd found what I wanted, and there it is. Will you come in?"

"I'll go down and look at it," said René. "I'm quite certain I can't live in your Thrigsby or your Londons any more, and I couldn't live in the country without doing the work of the country."

"Can't see you as a farmer," said Kilner.

René promised to go with Casey the next day.

. . . . . .

He was enchanted with Rickham and with the yard. It had a small Georgian house attached to it, and the stables were built round a quadrangle with a gallery leading to rooms above them. Through the stables was a walled garden, and beyond that again a bowling green by the edge of a stream. The whole was freehold and wonderfully cheap. Rickham apparently was not yet awake to its glorious future in the English democracy in spite of its two cinemas, and the strong Liberalism of its opinions. It had one church and fifteen chapels, a Salvation Army barracks, and a public house every twenty yards. On the hill behind it villas were being erected, and along the valley little houses were being built for workpeople. On either side of the river just outside the old town the tall chimneys of factories were rising by the steel skeletons of new workshops. Clearly there was some truth in what Casey said. They undertook to buy the stables and walked into a lawyer's office to give instructions.

So certain had Casey been that René would come in with him that he had already engaged mechanics in London, and written up to various firms to apply for agencies. They were bombarded with applications from the local builders to carry out the necessary alterations, and on the advice of their solicitor arranged a contract. Before any work was begun Casey insisted on having an illuminated sign, "Garage," fixed above the gate, and below it, the name of the firm, "Casey & Fourmy."

"Looks like business, that," he said, as they stood in the street and surveyed it with satisfaction. "Give the town something to talk about. No advertisement like talk."

VIII

THRIVING

"Were you married in a church, Ursula?"

"We were not, brother: none but gorgios, cripples, and lubbenys are ever married in a church: we took each other's words."

MEANWHILE his relations with Cathleen remained in abeyance. What she had accepted in the excitement of events, she needed to reconcile with her calmer thoughts. That was not so easy. She was brought to doubt of herself. She had been more hurt than she had realized, and she feared she was too weak for the suffering that filled her. For many weeks it was a pain to her to see René, for she could not but remember the destruction and misery he had brought into other lives. She had no support, for her rupture with her family had made an end of the ideas in which she had been instructed as a child, and she had no experience to draw upon, and Lotta's theories, when it came to cold practice, vanished into the air. She could not avoid jealousy of the past; and, with that in her, she could not bring herself to take the plunge into a life so different from any she had ever imagined. René was so patient, and had flung himself with such ardor into his new work, that she had begun to tell herself that he had no need of her, that she too was in a sense his victim, since his meeting with her had enabled him to break with the past only to thrust the weight of it upon her. The superficiality of her conceptions was betrayed and made plain to her, broken up by one fixed idea, the thought of Ann's child. How could he have let that go? How could he thrust that back into the past? How could his feeling for herself have broken clear of that? And Ann? How could she set thousands of miles between herself and him? If she had stayed, they could have wrestled with the reality. They could have made provision in their lives for the inimical new life. But Ann, in her desperation, had left them to deal only with an idea, a shadow, a memory. René apparently could ignore it. He was full of enthusiasm and happiness. He seemed to consider Ann's flight as a declaration of independence and to acquiesce in it. Had he felt nothing at all? Could a man come in contact with that mystery and remain unmoved? Must not such defiance of Nature be fraught with appalling consequences, to end in the worst state of all, indifference?

She hugged her difficulties to herself, and dared speak of them to no one, for she was possessed by the shyness bred by a fixed idea. At last Lotta caught her out in deliberate avoidance of René and asked what had come to her. Little by little she dragged her trouble out of her, and tried to reassure her and bring her to reason.

"You should ask him about it," she said. "He must have thought it out He did not forget her. You must remember that. It was not a case of his feeling for you wiping her out of his mind. My own view is that Nature is entirely indifferent, and I don't believe parents and children do naturally and inevitably have any feeling for each other. Indeed, Nature is so indifferent that our thoughts about it are rather impertinent. It is obvious that children do not always bind men and women, and I imagine they must often have the contrary effect; always, I should say, when they have for each other only the kind of selfish affection which resents any intrusion. Surely that is why so many women turn from their husbands to their children----"

The word "intrusion" brought Cathleen to the crux of her difficulty. She saw, with some exaggeration, that this was her condition, and the quality of her affection, that she had been hungering for possession of her lover with no intrusion from the past.

"O Lotta," she said, "we are fools to set our faces against what cannot be altered. I thought I had broken away from narrow conventions, but I had only rid myself of the names of things, not of the things themselves, the silly pretense that people wake for a moment out of a sleep in which nothing can happen, love and go to sleep again. We are stupid, trying to keep all our loves separate. We can't do anything but stumble from one love to another, can we?"

"It is what all of us do, and Nature has to take her chance. It is degrading to have one's folly and weakness, even one's mistakes, used by Nature, but that is the way of the world, and I think a real love can always get the better of it."

"I have tried so hard."

"You should see it from his point of view. Suppose it was you who had been trapped by Nature's indifference. You would feel hardly used if he let jealousy stand between you and him."

"But René couldn't."

"Perhaps. Why should _you?_ It really does hurt me to see you two wasting time and youth, two absolutely free people in a world that takes its greatest pride in its waste of opportunity. You are behaving abominably. Really, if you let him be much longer he will settle down with Mr. Casey, and discover that he can do at any rate comfortably without you, and keep you as an ideal. That happened to me when I was a girl. I let things slip by until I woke up one fine day to find that I was nothing but an ideal and had no hope of ever becoming anything else, even though I had married him. So I never did. Love changes, like everything else. It grows in us and dies. Very short is the time when it can be taken and built into our lives. If that time be let slip away then love dies down. If that happens, then life can never be anything more than amusing."

"If it should be too late?" said Cathleen, alarmed.

"It won't be," replied Lotta; "he has been to me and I said I would send you down to him."

At the week-end Cathleen went to Rickham. She found René in overalls taking down the back axle of a car. His face and hands and hair were smeared with grease.

"Hullo!" he said.

And Cathleen answered:

"I hope I'm not in the way."

"All right. Only stand clear of the machine. There never was such ubiquitous stuff as motor grease. I shan't be long. It's a broken crown-wheel, I think-- Oh! here's Casey. Casey, take Miss Bentley round the garden. Have tea in the parlor, and I'll join you when I've cleaned up."

It was a couple of hours before René joined them. During that time Cathleen had to listen to his praises, and to hear how the business, after a slow beginning, had begun to pick up, until now they had almost as much work as they could do with their present staff.

"I'm sorry," said René. "It's a new customer, and he wants the car for to-morrow morning, and I couldn't take any of the men off their jobs. It is good to see you. Have you seen the house?"

No. Casey had only shown her the garden.

After tea René took her over the house.

"It wants you," he said.

"I knew that. I sent in my resignation yesterday."

"When will you come?"

"In a month's time."

"Forever and ever?"

"It feels like that now."

"Yes. There doesn't seem to have been anything but you and I. You're a little slip of a woman to fill the whole world." And he lifted her clean off her feet. She lay back in his arms and her eyes closed, and he could feel her whole body surrender to his strength, her whole spirit come out to meet his in love.

IX

YOUNG LOVE DREAMING

EVERY year they visited Scotland and brought new stores of happiness to the dell where they had first discovered it. Always, René declared, through their joy there ran the song of the burn, and the wind in the trees, the beauty that had first awakened him. They made high holiday. Cathleen liked to stroll about the woods or lie in them with a book (she could hardly get him to read at all). He loved to wander over the moors alone or to go striding over the hills, and to come back to her in the evening. When they spent their days apart they would meet in the dell, and, as of old time, he would make a couch of bracken for her. And he would lie by her side and rejoice in her beauty, fondle her, praise her, tease her.

"I don't believe," he would say, "we shall ever be old."

"Not when you look at the children" (they had three) "and see how they grow?"

"Least of all then. I watch them and discover new worlds in them, and often through them I discover new wonders in you."

"Don't you know me by this time?"

"Every day I find you more astonishing and strange. Sometimes I come into your room in the morning and watch you sleeping, and I feel very lonely then. You are so remote. It is like waiting for the dawn. Then I see consciousness waking in you. Then your eyes open and you gaze innocently out upon the world. And you see me and are satisfied."

"And you?"

"I know that another day has come, another opportunity, a new turn in the adventure."

"Is it always an adventure?"

"Always. Unending desire."

"For me," she said, "it is peace and knowledge. It would be stifling if I had not you to kindle them."

René kissed her and laughed:

"The whole duty of man," he said, "to keep the flame alight in woman."

She became serious on that.

"It's true, René. You nearly let me wither away, and my life dwindle to ashes. I am often sick with fear when I think of it, how near I came to being one of your failures."

On such evenings they would talk until darkness crept into the woods, and they woke to their mysterious night life when their sweetest songs are sung, and they are filled with magic snares and lurking dangers and conflicts. Sweet comfort was it to be together then amid so much menace and alien power, and they would go warily hand in hand until they came within sight of the lights of the great house. Then they would almost run until they reached the open lawn where the free air would beat upon their faces.

"I always feel," René said once, "as though we had had a narrow escape."

"In the woods, do you mean, or in life?"

"Both."

"Escape from what, my dear?"

"I know," he said. "This is the truth of us. Escape from sleep and death."

Transcriber's Note

This transcription is based on images posted by the Internet Archive scanned from a copy made available by the University of California:

archive.org/details/youngearnestroma00canniala

The 1915 edition published by T. Fisher Unwin was used a secondary source, especially to check the hyphenation of compound words printed at the end of a line in the primary source. Images of this edition are available at:

catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100199704

The following changes were noted:

-- The name "René" is almost always printed in the source text with the acute over the second "e". The few cases where the name was printed as "Réne" have been changed for consistency.

-- p. 189: so that he could meet Casey."--Deleted the closing quotation mark at the end of the paragraph.

-- p. 209: Thrigby's changing, and things are queer all round.--Changed "Thrigby's" to "Thrigsby's".