Chapter III: Book ONE: Linda Brock (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well? Did you talk German?"

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

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

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

"Oh! Then!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You can tell almost everything in music."

"If you have anything to tell."

"How droll you are--so literal."

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

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

"Who can?" asked she.

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

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

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

"But you are the drollest dear."

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

"By God, but I do love you."

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

VIII

INTIMACY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah! Passion!"

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

"But do you think he will do anything?"

"He will do what he thinks right."

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

Professor Smallman smiled in his charming, uninterested way.

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

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

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

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

It was arranged.

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

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

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

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

"But they'll think----"

"I don't care what they think."

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

"No. You never do."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linda laughed merrily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Linda answered:

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

"I would rather give it to you."

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

"Linda, you can't."

"Can't what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"René! René! Quiet! Not now! Wait!"

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

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

"The flowers are very pretty."

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

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

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

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

She said:

"I knew it would come."

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

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

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

"Yes."

"Isn't it fun?"

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

"Is Elsie better in her own house?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

PATERFAMILIAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In desperation René led the conversation elsewhere.

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

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

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

"How were they different?" René would ask.

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

René looked puzzled. His mother laughed.

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

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

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

Mrs. Fourmy looked at him and replied:

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

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

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

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

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

"Fun!" He looked incredulous.

"Yes. We were very happy then."

He pounced eagerly on that.

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

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

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

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

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

"What did he do?"

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

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

Drearily he said:

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

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

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

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

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

"What then?"

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

"Oh!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X

HONEYMOON

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

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

He said:

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Brock."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just _see,"_ she replied.

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

On the Thursday she said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, wonderfully!"

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

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

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

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

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