Chapter II

He was adrift again now, while he waited for his tribunal, perilously adrift: wandering down to Miss Mowbray’s and half-heartedly joining in the talk, with his thoughts elsewhere; wandering into theatres when the performance was nearly over, seeking in vain that which might distract and hold him. Hold him.... Was there anything on earth that could hold him, now that Alan had gone? And now that Alan had gone, his life was one stupendous aching regret that what had happened that last night had not happened sooner. The senselessness of all his repression and self-denial stood revealed to him. Seeing at last with Alan’s eyes, and in the light of his own experience, he recognised that herein had lain the real perversion: in the continuous struggle between brain and body, the continuous struggle to suppress his instincts and force them into ways not natural to them. It had not lain in his passion for Alan. That, and that alone, given the peculiarities of his nature, had been right, had been beautiful, because it was truthful. He could curse himself now for the short-sightedness, for the principle of imagined æstheticism that had made him for so long resist his own impulses.

If only.... And now it was too late. Alan was behind the bars, and Dennis left with the burning knowledge of all that he had missed. What, indeed, was there that could hold him now? Yet despite his desire to be held, at times he longed with weary irritability, to be able to sever all ties; to break from his family; from Antoinette; perhaps, like O’Farrell, to escape to Ireland; to live in truth the life of the outlaw and outcast that he was.

Perpetual argument, achieving no result, and ending always in the same inevitable deadlock, was carried on between the two conflicting strains of his nature.

“It would break your mother’s heart.”

“She’s got the three others, and they are more satisfactory than I am.”

“She loves you more than the others—and differently.”

Dennis groaned, impatient of this wealth of affection to which he could make no adequate return. He loved his mother—but she was not the pivot of his existence, as he was of hers.

There was Antoinette, too, with her useless gifts, with her useless pleading that he might accept them. Sometimes he hated her for his very inability to accept them; and sometimes he could laugh at the futility, the grotesque, ludicrous futility of these ties that held him—and held him—and did not hold him. But if he broke them, he asked himself, what then? What then?

Doubtless the Central Appeal Tribunal would in some measure furnish the reply.