Chapter X: Book THREE: Cathleen Bentley (1)

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."