Chapter IV: Book ONE: Linda Brock (4)

He saw the Headmaster on the morning of Speech day, and was warmly thanked for the honor he had brought to the school, and was engaged to appear on the first day of the following term. Desiring to see his old form-master, Mr. Beenham, he went to his room and was surprised to find his desk empty and the boys playing cricket with a German Grammar and a ball of paper tied with string. As he left the school he asked the porter after Mr. Beenham, and the porter told him that story. It upset him. Of all human beings he had regarded Old Mole as the least human, but now he was desiring to exercise his released intelligence, his power of penetration, his imagination upon the surrounding world. All his faculties had been concentrated upon economics as a means to an end, the life which lay beyond examinations. Professor Smallman and the Headmaster had made him feel that the life beyond was distressingly like the life before, and now this disaster to Old Mole came as some small assurance that there were adventures though they might be never so foolish. The Professor had mildly alarmed his pupil by pointing out the similarity of their careers. Admire Smallman as he might, it was not _that_ to which René wished to come. It was not that he had any excitement in contemplating the future. On the contrary: the present was too absorbing. Everybody was charming to him, seemed to be proud of him; the rich Fourmys had asked him to their houses--and he had refused. He found himself being listened to, respected, given the right to have views and opinions. He had neither, and was too honest to evolve them for the occasion. And when the future insisted upon engaging his attention, he filled it with Linda and was happy.

He refused to go to Scotland, half despising his memories of it.

He was happy, simply engrossed in his own comfortable sensations. He had set out to do a thing and done it well, better even than he or anyone else had anticipated; he was in love and engaged to be married upon the condition of making three hundred a year. His success had made that easily possible; his studentship, one hundred and fifty from the school, more from the _Post_, possible examination papers, lectures; his hardly-won book knowledge had been shaped by his reputation into a marketable commodity.

But his real happiness lay apart from all these things, from success, from love, from the easy commerce of his abilities. Relieved from the strain and obsession of his examination, he had discovered the wonderful pleasure to be got from the mere act of living, from seeing the world freshly every morning, from passing through the day and feeling it slip away from him without his having to demand of it any definite profit in knowledge or money earned. It was a new delight with him just to watch people, a joy that had remained with him from his outburst by the tulips, to sit and gaze at flowers, trees, the sky, water. He had times of feeling wonderfully remote, when the habits on which he won through the day seemed ridiculous, though trivially pleasurable. In this mood he would sometimes realize with a start that it was now his father and he who were companions, his mother who was the stranger. And he would bring himself up on that and tell himself that his mother had his love and championship if any were needed. But he would rejoice in his father's gusto in eating, drinking, smoking, painting, talking, all that the queer man did. Against that too he would react and tell himself that his father was futile. But was not his mother futile also? And was not futility with gusto the better of the two?

He was too happy for the business of weighing up between his father and his mother, too absorbed in the glowing introspection to which he had been brought; introspection without analysis; a brooding, almost a floating over faculties in himself faintly stirring, reaching out to exercise themselves on everything within his reach. The world was very wonderful: its possibilities were endless; its treasures lay immeasurable only for the stretching out of his hand; and it was a delicious pleasure to him not to stretch out his hand, but to know that one day he need but make a gesture to have all its marvels pouring in on him. That those older than himself had but a small share of them disturbed him not at all. He had no doubt but his would be the infallible gesture, and, without conceit, during this happy time, he cherished a firm belief in his unique quality.

All his new delights were expressed in his letters to Linda in Germany. She analyzed them for him, not always accurately, but the mental process was new and exciting to him, and he began to appreciate her intellectual activity. They discussed his character at great length. He said: "I suppose I am, or have been--for I often find myself wanting to laugh nowadays--too serious." She replied: "Not too serious, my dear. It is impossible to be that in this heartless age. (Oh! What a lot you can learn about England by going abroad!) Not too serious. No. What you lack, I think, is power of observation. What you must realize is that things have a surface and a surface value. Of course _you_ cannot be content with that value, but you must not expect surface things to have any value in the region of profound things, the region in which, poor dear, you have always lived." Faithfully he set about cultivating surface values, but he never could laugh at things that were just amusing; he never could laugh unless he were moved to laughter. He was, for instance, baffled and made sorry by the family jests which left George and Elsie exhausted by their noisy mirth.

Kurt Brock persuaded him to go with him for a tour in a side-car attached to his motor-cycle. Then did René become swollen and puffed up with the glory of the world. The exuberant boy was a tonic in himself; the speed he maintained was intoxicating; and they burst out of the long suburbs of Thrigsby into the Cheshire plain, over to the sea, the Welsh mountains, down the Severn and Wye valleys. To René, whose existence for so many years had lain only in Thrigsby and the little Scots village, it was being shot out into life. The return to Thrigsby made him miserable. Also association with Kurt had pricked the small bubble of his vanity. Kurt, so hopeless with books, was amazingly efficient with his machine, equal to every emergency, daring, inexhaustible, masterful. He had said many things which René had found disturbing and alarming. The boy had everything so cut and dried; no room in his life, it seemed, for folly, certainly none for brooding. He confessed one night, as they sat sleepily in a public-house parlor, that he wanted to be an airman. René could not applaud the ambition.

"Hardly fair to your mother, or, suppose you were in love, to--well."

"People talk a lot of bally rot about love. They seem to think it means bagging a woman like a rabbit and shutting her up in a hutch to breed."

"Well," said René, "marriage does mean living together and a certain amount of responsibility."

"I dunno. I've never been in love, but I'm not going to either, unless I get something that goes off with a bang and lets me and her get on a bit." His mania was for getting on. When René wanted lunch, Kurt would hold out for another place "only twenty miles on."

Another night René returned to the subject of women and love, Kurt's audacities having a horrid fascination for him, and the boy said:

"I dunno, but if a woman said she loved me and wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do because she said she loved me, I should know she was a liar."

René tried to point out that life and love were not so simple as all that, but there was no turning Kurt. He had the thing worked out neatly to his own satisfaction, and he was not going to bother his head about it any more.

"Bad enough," he said, "to have a legal speed limit without having a private limit in the home."

A letter from Linda reached René at one of their stopping-places. She declared herself terrified at the thought of his being with her brother. "Do keep him from going more than thirty miles an hour."

At once René was on her side against Kurt and exasperated him by asking perpetually: "What are we doing now?" To which Kurt invariably replied: "Damn near fifty."

The tour ended in a river in Derbyshire. Kurt took a curly wooden bridge at thirty miles an hour, carried away the railing, and plunged René and machine into six feet of water. Kurt could not swim, and René hauled him out and screamed at him:

"You deserve to be killed! You deserve to be killed! Taking the bridge like that."

Kurt grinned:

"You don't know how funny you looked in the bath-chair toppling over. What a smash! What idiots to have a bridge like that. It's no good for anything except a push-bike. I'll get a car if the insurance people stump up."

René was really shocked at his callousness, and as they sat in blankets while their clothes were being dried, he took him to task, delivered himself of a pedagogic exhortation and ended by saying:

"Kurt! Kurt! I believe you have no feeling!"

"Nerves! What's the good of them anyway? But I'm jolly grateful to you for pulling me out. I must learn to swim. It might be jolly awkward if I tried to fly to America. Wouldn't it be grand if I was the first man to do it?"

Something in the boy's tone thrilled René and he felt a pang, a sudden, painful knowledge that he loved Kurt, and, when he was left alone, Kurt's clothes having dried first, he was faintly uneasy, half wondering, yet not admitting the doubt to himself, whether he had really loved anybody else. Then he told himself that it was only because Kurt had treated him with his boy's frankness, and because he had not with anybody else been brought face to face with anything so terrible as death. And then he found himself in a brief dream asking if life also was not terrible, and love? And if----? But such thoughts he refused to think. Into his brooding happiness had come a new zest, and he would not waste one moment of it upon doubt, philosophic or particular.

They returned to Thrigsby by train, and René found himself committed to a lie about the accident. If the truth came out, said Kurt, his mother would not allow him to have that car.

What was there in common, thought René, between Linda and Kurt? She had not his frankness. (He was frank even in his lying.) She was subtle, given to theory. Her brother had, cut and dried, not so much a theory as a program. With Kurt René had had a robust pleasure which he had never enjoyed with Linda, and it was so far above all other pleasures that he took it for the goal to aim at, the prize to be won, when he should have broken down the barrier of sex and overcome her taste for teasing, and put an end to all those irritations which he ascribed to their ridiculous position as engaged persons, irritations that even in her letters pricked and stung him. He was slow to come by a thought, and when he possessed one always insisted upon its relevance to existence, while she seemed most to revel in ideas when they were most irrelevant. In their correspondence, her letters grew longer as the months passed. (After his success she had assumed "intellect" in him.) His letters became more precise and brief. He had no doubt of her. She had taken the place of the examination as the next stage in being, beyond which would lie, to borrow her phrase, the "real, real life."

So eagerly did he look forward to that illumination that things and people had lost their interest for him. The question of income was settled; the problem of his father and mother engaged him no more. They had suddenly become old to him, settled, left to grope along with their own affairs and difficulties. This made life at 166 easier. He had stood between his father and mother, and had now removed himself. His mother was more free in her chatter, his father less strained and more jovial in his talk. René had told them of his engagement and of Linda's wealth, and this, coupled with his success, had made them acquiesce in his translation to a superior sphere and even take some pride in it. For a short while he had qualms on seeing his mother let him go so lightly, but he faced the fact and did not let it obtrude upon his dreams of graciousness and freedom.

All these events had delivered him for the first enjoyment of his youth, and his thoughts were like bees in a flowering lime-tree. They were disturbed by nothing but Linda's letters. The more she teased and flattered his "intellect," the more he dwelt upon the future when the teasing and the flattery would have ceased, and his warm satisfaction would be invigorated by the zestful sharing of married life. He made no plans and hardly considered those she threw out. She had ambitions for him. They were too fantastic to be noticed.

A silence of three weeks alarmed him. She broke it with the announcement of her return, and the expression of her desire to be married at once, and a request that he would meet her in London, for she was crossing by Flushing.

It was early spring. He obtained a day's leave of absence from school, and met her at Fenchurch Street. He saw no more of London than was to be seen as a background to her profile as they drove to Euston. She was different from the image he had formed of her during her absence, smaller, even prettier, more vivacious and effective. They kissed when they met, rather to his astonishment, for he had not the least desire to kiss her but only to consider her. She began to talk at once:

"It has done wonders for you. You look so much more confident and bigger. Your success I mean. And you really are distinguished-looking. How do you like your work?"

"I do it without---- No, I haven't thought about it."

"I wanted them to take you into the business--Brock and M'Elroy, you know. But old Mr. M'Elroy wouldn't hear of it. They wanted me to marry Jack M'Elroy. Perhaps I should have done it if I hadn't met you."

That did not please him at all, though it was obviously intended to do so. She went on:

"But we'll show them that we can do better on our own lines, won't we? Father used to say that commerce was sordid however honest you tried to be, and after all, it isn't work for a first-rate man, is it?"

Her insistence on his success and abilities worried him. It was not for this he had been waiting. He wanted her to tell him what had brought her to her abrupt decision to be married sooner than they had planned. He tried to lead her on to that but could bring her to no other intimacy than that of little caresses with her hands. He would not admit his disappointment, and all through the four hours' journey kept on telling himself that he was glad to see her. And indeed he was glad. Her coming brought the promised future nearer.

She gave him no time to ponder his disappointment or the hole it knocked in his brooding pleasure. They chose a house, fifty pounds a year, with a garden, in Galt's Park. He took his mother to see it, and she assumed the manner she had had in the old days for the visits of the "rich Fourmys."

A fortnight's shopping furnished the house, and he had the satisfaction of supplying the furniture for his study out of a check sent by his Aunt Janet. The trousseau took another three weeks, and Mrs. Brock, with an eye to wedding presents, would not hear of the day being fixed until after an interval of six weeks. A miserable time. Linda seemed to think of everything but her bridegroom.

For the honeymoon the Yorkshire coast was chosen, by whom it was not very clear. René had wanted Derbyshire; Linda had proposed the Lakes, but, a fortnight before the marriage, Mrs. Smallman had appeared on the scene and taken charge, instructed them, tactfully and almost tacitly, in the correct deportment of those about to be married. She kept the couple apart, spent days and evenings with Linda, and made her keep René distracted. The Smallmans had spent their honeymoon on the Yorkshire coast; they knew of a charming little private hotel overlooking Ravenscar; theirs had been the perfect honeymoon, one which had never come to an end. So might--must--it be with René's; and so it would be if goodwill, advice, kindly glances, friendly instruction, could bring it about. The Professor expanded:

"It is wonderful when all that you have loved in a dream, as it were, materializes and is there in your hands. Only you feel so confoundedly unworthy. And then, when you are married and settled down, you get so abominably accustomed to it. No one could be more devoted than my wife and I, but we find that if we do not keep ourselves alive with outside interests, we begin to wear each other down. It isn't easy--marriage. I can say all this now, because if I don't I never shall. And, after all, you know, I like you, Fourmy. We shall work together and be good friends, but we lose something, you know. A certain kind of intimacy we can never have again."

This talk reminded René of the occasion when George had taken him as a small boy to the swimming baths, made him stand on the edge practicing strokes, and then pushed him into the deep end.

The night before his departure, his mother came into his room and sat on his bed and looked long at him:

"I can't bear to think of your bed empty to-morrow," she said.

"Better send it to the new house," replied he.

"I can hardly realize that you are a man and going to have a wife. It seems only the other day that you were a little boy, learning to cook in the kitchen. Do you remember? And now I suppose you'll have late dinner. It is queer. I used to be able to think of you as a boy at school, but I can never imagine you as a teacher, in a gown, too. And it's even harder to think of you----"

"You shall come and stay with us."

"Oh, I couldn't!" She looked toward the door.

"You could come without father."

"Don't be hard on your father, René."

"No. That's all over."

"I'm so glad."

She stooped over him and kissed him. Then she took his head in her hands and pressed her cheek against his, and on his forehead he felt her warm tears. She murmured:

"I've always tried to do my best."

Then she left him, and he felt the tears rising to his own eyes, and he lay in worship of the beautiful kindness of women. They seemed to hold in fee so much of life's loveliness, to be able to open to a man fair regions that else were hidden to him all his days. He was eager for the morrow's adventure.

The wedding made him feel that it was not by his own will that he was being married, but that in some fantastic way he had been brought to it by Mrs. Brock and the Smallmans and, incongruously, by his father and George, and was doing it to oblige them. The collective will of several persons was using him and Linda as pawns in an aimless game.

The ceremony took place in a very ugly Lutheran chapel, and the recited words had no meaning for his bewildered mind. George and Elsie--whom he remembered in the middle of it--had had a reason for their marriage. His own seemed purposeless--No. Did it not open up to him an unending tenderness like that given him by his mother last night? He stole a glance at Linda. She was all pride and blushes, rather breathlessly intent upon the ceremony, which seemed to have some emotional significance for her.

They had two rooms reserved for them in the little hotel. They avoided them, and preferred to be out of doors. They took food with them to escape dinner before the other visitors and walked the three miles to the top of Ravenscar. There they sat in the heather and gazed out seaward in silence. On the way they had talked little, except to comment on the broken sky, the color in the moors, the still shining sea, gray and green. They sat in silence, and he felt utterly alone, cut off from his old life with no new life begun. And almost angrily he thrust away the idea of the woman sitting there by his side. So charming she had been in the glamour of the future, so irrelevant she seemed now that he was thrust away with her to find or fail to find in her a life to replace that which had slipped away from him. He had prized that old life so little while it was his, but it had been familiar, his habitual garment. It had been fashioned with his growth. She had been outside it; that had been her fascination. But he was stripped of it, and he had nothing wherewith to approach her. And suddenly he saw that he was failing her, that such thoughts were a betrayal of her trust in him. After all, she too had shed her old life. He was fearful lest she should become aware of his treachery. He said:

"When I was away with Kurt----" And at once he knew that he had made a false move. The thought of Kurt filled him with the memory of the free joy he had had on that excursion, and he could not but contrast it with the mean and sickly hesitation of this. What was it? What was he afraid of? Afraid of the woman? Oh, come! Did he not love her and she him? What was there to dread in love?

She said:

"Oh, René, we didn't come away to talk of Kurt."

"No."

"We didn't come away to talk."

"No."

She came close to his side.

"René, kiss me. Say you love me."

"I love you."

But it was better to sit in silence and gaze out at the sea, gray and green.

She clung to him, caressed him, used absurd little phrases, English and German.

"I loved you," she said, "from the first moment when you came into the Smallmans' drawing-room. I was wearing green. Do you remember?"

"Green. Yes. I remember. I saw your parasol in the hall."

"And you loved me from the moment when you saw my parasol."

She laughed. That was better. It broke the heavy brooding in him that had brought him to such suspense.

The evening air chilled them, and they walked home under the stars. She clung to him and sang ditties of love and trysts and sentimental disasters. When they reached their sitting-room she came to him and placed her hand under his chin, pressed his lips with her forefinger, and then kissed him. Then she left him.

In the early hours of the morning he was out on the seashore, wandering aimlessly, nervously, dejectedly. Every now and then he threw up his head and took in a great draught of the keen morning air blowing in from the sea. That invigorated, cleansed him. Suddenly he crouched on the sands and hid his face in his hands, and cried within himself:

"I can't go on. I can't go back. Oh, Love, my love."

He had counted on her to open up new wonders and sweet joys, and together they had attained nothing but heat and hunger and distress.

XI

MATRIMONY

Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,
An' let poor damned bodies be:
I'm sure sma' pleasure it can gie
Ev'n to a deil
To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me
An' hear us squeal.

HE returned to her. She was in dressing-gown, fresh, indolent, gay. She held out her hand to him.

"What a strange man you are! Couldn't you sleep?"

"No. I couldn't sleep.

"Poor old thing. I slept wonderfully."

Had she felt nothing? Had she no suspicion of the agony that had driven him from her side? Of the sick hope of comfort and reassurance that had brought him back to her? A faint shadow of fear had crossed her face on his entrance, but it had vanished when he spoke.

Indeed he was reassured. Her gaiety and charm disarmed him. The sun came streaming through the window upon her hair; her eyes danced; she glowed in her health and physical well-being. He had no other creature to whom to turn. Under the spell of her radiance he appealed to her, who had wounded him, to repair the hurt. She petted him, made much of him, denied him the relief of activity, and had him to sit with her in the heather with his head in her lap while she crooned to him of how happy she was, and how proud a wife, and how this honeymoon would never come to an end. There was a drugging beauty in her voice that soothed him and had him dwelling in a honeyed sleep. It was sweet to lie in the sun and gaze through half-closed lids at the pale sky and stifle the voices of hostility that stirred in him at her touch, at the caressing notes in her voice, at her perpetual drone of contented triumph. She allowed him silence, but then only the more keenly could he feel her presence. She would sigh out of it:

"A--a--ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet, lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!"

He thought of Kurt, and his mania for moving on.

She said:

"René! What do you like best in the world? I should like to give it you."

He answered:

"Peace."

"Peace? Isn't this peace?"

Anger stirred in him on that. How could she talk of peace when to him every moment throbbed with menace? He turned over on his side away from her.

"Can there ever be peace," he asked, "between a man and a woman?"

"What do you mean?"

He made no reply.

"Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you mean." And she dodged aside into phrases--the war of the sexes, the difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little.

"I meant you and me," he said, biting out his words.

"Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us. We couldn't be more wonderful. Could we?"

"I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can't help thinking of those damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said: 'How wonderful we are!'"

That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and jumped to her feet.

"Oh, I never thought----"

She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out behind her. He came up to her.

"What did you never think?"

"That on our second day you would be satirical."

He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested:

"I said what I felt. Mayn't I do that? I didn't think it would hurt you, really, I didn't. Linda, I----

"Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more than you can say. And you don't know how uncomfortable it is."

She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood pondering it.

"I can't help it," he said slowly, "I'm made like that. I can't be comfortable."

Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open.

"I know you can't," she said, "but I can, and you mustn't spoil it for me."

He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her and cried:

"Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would----"

"What would you do?"

"I don't know. But I would move heaven and earth to give it back to you."

"I believe you would, and that makes me love you."

He weakened to her will, and not again during their honeymoon did he let slip in expression or gesture the tiniest hint of the storm let loose in him. Small periods of solitude he could procure at night when she had retired for her astonishingly lengthy toilette. Then in suppression of his fire and rebellion, in the effort to keep a tight control on it even within himself, he became aware of a strength, a firmness that, out of all that he had lost of youth and ease and pleasant happiness and the charm of living, emerged as gain. Yet it was not in his nature to count it up nor to hoard. He could find much to rejoice over, the splendor of the night, the keen winds, the huge waves splashing under the wind, and all he would take to his wife for her to turn into charm. And she would weave her spells round him. Her tone, her eyes, her warmth, that was so like tenderness as almost to deceive him into acquiescence, all said to him: "Forget! Forget!" But every fiber of his will was stretched in the effort to remember and gain knowledge--to remember how this thing had come about, that he should have so much and so little love for this woman, by what blindness he had come to it, and what in all his slow growth to manhood should have brought him to such sweet mockery of it. These were not his words. He was groping beyond words, beyond actions; his captured force was searching through his life to find forces to sustain it, to urge it on, to release that slow-moving stream that had brought him thus far to be chained and confined. He who had realized so little was struggling to realize himself, to find within himself the power that should break this woman in her complacent dwelling in the pleasure of their love and set him free and her. For he had begun dimly to perceive that she too was to be thought of, and in his effort he was gentle with her. This was hard, for against his gentleness she chafed. She wanted turbulence, upheaval, suspected not the stirring in his depths and was forever agitating the surface of his being. Once or twice she did call forth the anger, and then she reveled in her delicious fright and was so quiet as to alarm him and drive him back into his gentleness. Out of this she stirred him. It was to her only an odious sluggishness.

It was a comfort to him that he could admire her. She touched nothing but she gave it charm. She changed the Mapledom of their room to an originality of elegance. Her ingenuity and adroitness with herself were a source of amusement and amazement to him. The fun of watching a woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. Sometimes she would bring out in her talk of them qualities and foibles that he had not remarked, though on her indication he was forced to admit that they were surprisingly there. Other times she seemed to shape them to fit in with a fantastic world of her own. And that would be little less amusing than her criticisms. He could admire her, but his admiration made him feel how remote she was, how unpossessed, how little he desired possession, and how, in all things, she invited to it.

Perhaps she felt some of his uneasiness, for she said toward the end of their stay:

"I suppose a honeymoon can never be the same to a man as it is to a woman." (The hypothetical man and woman of all her arguments.) "A man must have his work."

"I've been thinking," said René, "that we never know what we want but when we have it."

"How true!" She had a way of making agreement with him a sort of flattery, than which he found little more distasteful.

And as they drove to the station she looked round at the hills and the rocky coast-line, and murmured:

"It will be something to remember. It _is_ a pretty place."

For him it had a beauty that had stirred him like nothing else he had ever known. For him also, till now, all things had been charming, but the desolate moors, the stubborn cliffs had led him away from charm to beauty and the savage joy of living in resistance.

The return to their world shocked him. From those weeks of the profoundest emotions that had ever shaken him to come back to amiable superficial relationships left him floundering, made him, when he had collected himself, feel how utterly dependent he was upon his wife. He was committed to her, isolated with her. The loneliness of that day upon Ravenscar was nothing to the loneliness in the multitude.

Linda was immediately busy organizing her household, buying, buying all day long; visiting, receiving visitors; she had crowds of friends and gushing acquaintances, and they easily assimilated her husband, were interested in him as they were interested in her wall-papers, her furniture, her plans for the little garden, her gowns, her china. He used to watch eagerly, almost hungrily, for a sign that they recognized his existence apart from hers, but no sign ever came. To the women he was something belonging to dear Linda, and therefore to be admired since she was reputed to get the best of everything; to the men, hard-headed, commercial gentry, he seemed to be baffling and ominous, for they either fished nervously and falteringly for his views or left him in the silence to which their geniality reduced him.

He resumed his work at the school where he had not yet learned to disengage himself from his schoolboy's sensations--dread of the headmaster, an inclination to run along the corridors when the bell sounded, a desire to smack cheeky little boys over the head, reluctance to attend prayers in the morning. At the end of the year a vacancy occurred on the staff of the university and he was appointed to fill it.

His first tussle with Linda came with his assertion of a desire to be alone in his study when he was working. She had made a practice of settling down with him in the evening with her sewing, or some clerical work connected with one of the various committees to which she had had herself appointed--social and rescue work, Arts and Crafts, the University Musical Society, the Thrigsby Amateur Dramatic Club, the Goethe Society, etc. She had learned to be silent, but by the plying of her needle or the scratching of her pen she disturbed and distracted him. He put up with it for some time, but at last it was too strong for him, and he protested.

"But Mrs. Smallman sits with her husband every evening."

"He may be used to it, and she has a capacity for doing nothing which you do not share."

"But it's so absurd to have two fires lit in the evening."

"I'd rather not work then, and come and sit with you."

"But you must work. You never say anything."

"Then I must work alone."

"Why must you?"

"Because I can't work any other way."

"What is it disturbs you? I won't do it if you'll tell me."

"I can't tell you. It's just having you there."

"Then you-- Then you-- Oh, well! There's nothing more to say if you feel like that about me."

"Linda, don't be silly. It isn't about you."

She had already fluttered out of the room and closed the door very slowly, so that its movement was the most eloquent reproach.

Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood of tears and a fierce hunger for possession and to be possessed by him compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers, no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation. Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year married:

"The room over the study--that would be the best for the nursery when we want one."

"But, René," she answered, after a pause, "we don't want to have children yet, do we?"

Despair seized him. He could not look at her.

"No. No. Of course, it is as you please."

She smiled awry:

"Oh, my dear, I didn't mean you to take it like that. It sounded horrid, I know. But for modern men and women, it ought to be possible----"

He could not let her finish. He hated her talk of "modern men and women," as though some change had come over human nature.

"I sometimes think," he said, "that no single word has the same meaning for the two of us. Your Love is not my Love, your Yes is not my Yes, your No is not mine."

"Oh, René, you do say some terrible things! Sometimes you frighten me. Sometimes you are just a helpless silly baby, and sometimes you seem to know more than anybody I ever met. You are so strong, but you don't seem to know what to do with your strength, and I am terrified of you . . . Oh, I don't know what to do with you! Can't we be just happy?"

"Just happy! . . . I suppose we can."

"We have been . . . Haven't we?"

"We have been," he said, but the words in his mind were: "No more than happy."

To avoid hurting her he had abandoned the use of even that much introspective power that he had come by in Yorkshire by the sea. Now he worked, let the days run by on the wheels of habit, and gave her as good a counterfeit as he could make of what she desired.

She decided in her own mind that he was working too hard, and must be taken out of his solitude, which she ascribed to his inability to find his feet socially after being lifted out of his own class, and dumped into hers. Her brother was wanting to get rid of his first small two-cylinder car to buy a new 30-40 h.p. She made him an offer for the little car, and he closed with it and undertook to teach René to drive.

That was not a very difficult matter. Two lessons sufficed, and René was left with the car on his hands and no knowledge of its mechanism.

"But what shall I do if it breaks down?"

"It can't break down," said Kurt. "The magneto can't go wrong. If she stops, clean the sparking plug or put in a new one. It must be that or the jet."

René tried to read a book about motor-cars, but could not apply its technicalities to his own machine. He spent some days in and about and under the car, tracing out the principles on which it worked, and following its transmission of energy from cylinder to clutch, from clutch to gear, gear to back-axle. When he had done that he felt some confidence in driving, came to know the moods of his engine, and to take an extraordinary pleasure in handling it. Every week-end he made some excursion with Kurt or Linda, and sometimes alone. He explored the country for fifty miles round Thrigsby, and discovered to his dismay the vastness of the network of industrial towns, and, to his delight, the loveliness of the still uncontaminated country.

At first the change produced the effect Linda had desired. He had a new energy which enabled him to take the dull work of the week lightly. He seemed to have caught some of Kurt's enthusiasm together with a little of his good humor and tolerance. But these qualities he could not assume without the frankness that nourished them. Soon he was no longer deceived by the counterfeit he had evolved for his wife's satisfaction, and could not evade the fact that his excursions were desired chiefly as an escape from it. Their two habitual lives were organized effectively enough; it was when their lives met that there was insufficiency, fumbling, distrust, evasion. He could not altogether conceal from her the disgust and almost horror that he felt on being faced with the deception he had practiced on himself, and through himself on her. She saw his distress, could not altogether understand, felt that she was giving him too many opportunities to escape from her, and in her turn began to counterfeit an interest in his enthusiasms and to insist on occupying a seat in the car whenever he went away, whether Kurt was with him or not. Kurt had an affectionate pampering way with her, a mere expedient for striking harmony between their different natures, which René as usual, taking seriously, misread as contempt. This, unknown to himself, encouraged the growth of the hatred which he had never allowed to rear its head. . . . And Linda, a little wearied by now of the part of the lover, had begun to play the part of the devoted, settled wife, to throw up round herself as bulwarks her advantages--her charming house, her ample means, her distinguished husband, a man of learning and culture in a commercial atmosphere, leisure among the unleisured. It was only an experiment on her part, but she gave it a thorough trial. When it failed she had her moments of despair. She had felt her husband's withdrawal from her, at least the removal of the deceit which covered it. She was enraged, determined to break him into submission, flung the whole force of her nature into the effort and failed again. Then, to escape boredom, she began to amuse herself with her sufferings. She would lead him on to talk in his inarticulate fashion of what he felt and then play upon his emotions and bring him back abruptly to her own charm, to realize her greater skill and agility in life, her rightness in the business of living and presenting a brave front to the world, and sometimes he would almost admit that she was right, and that, after all, since he could produce nothing definitely superior to her desire, he had better yield and give her those good things that, in their easy circumstances, they were privileged to enjoy--charm and excitement and pleasure. But he could not. Life had always been hard for him. He could not consent to have it easy. All that she fed on turned to bitterness in his mouth.

He tried to tell her once of the tenderness his mother had given him on the night before he had come to her, the pure joy that, but for the omen at his heart, he had taken for a foretaste of the heaven he was to enter. She said:

"She is a dear old woman, your mother."

In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed, he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made:

"Linda Brock has no back to her mind."

It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded, brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: "See! This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of it." If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes, that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.

And he began to question his everyday life. It seemed mechanical. He had been shaped for the position he filled, fitted into it so tightly that he could never move. He would be carried on forever by the machine that had caught him up as a small boy when they had marked him down in the Lower Third. (They had written to his mother: "He is a boy of whom the school will one day be proud." And she had been so elated by the words.) He had accepted the force of the machine and let it take the place of his own will. That was unpracticed. He had used it for nothing. The machine had carried him to security and given him things apparently so coveted that his brother George could not now speak to him naturally, so great was his awe of his success. It was so easy to think the thoughts required by the machine. A kind of education had been pumped into him. He had now only to pump that same kind of education into other young men. The machine was efficient, himself efficient in it. There was satisfaction in that. But all the other men with whom he worked were elusive; so many of them, under the pleasant manners of the common-room, concealed despondency, a mood of resignation that was epidemic, more virulent at one time than another. Against that, too, René was in revolt. Instinctively he felt that if he surrendered to it he would fall also to that other danger in his domestic life.

He tried to understand Linda. She was so successful. So many people liked her. Her social progress was amazing. Efficiency always gave him pleasure, and it was delightful to him, though he hated it, to feel her skillfully consolidating their position. She was tremendously active in all external things. It was her inward activity that he wished to understand. What were the things that satisfied that clever brain of hers? What her heart? He had long ago swept aside her pseudo-science, sociology, physiology, psychology, as external to herself, things worn as she wore clothes, very well, to be becoming and in the mode. It pleased her intellectually to talk of a hypothetical man and woman. What did that hypothetical man and woman become in art? He followed her in her reading, her music--so far as one so uninstructed could follow at all. . . . German sentimental _lieder_, colored lanterns over water, sweet flirtations, violins in the distance; a sighing for the passing of youth; a lingering over the sweets of love, with ultimately a withdrawal from love; a perfume. That was her art. In her drawing-room she had impressionist and post-impressionist drawings; in her own room she had pictures of young men and maidens in ballrooms and canoes and French boudoirs.

He could see the charm of the things she loved, always melted to them, but never without a reaction, an angry stiffening of the will.

At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying. She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their grace, and he liked the skill with which she clothed herself to give every one of her attractions free play.

It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive him of it.

At last she brought him to an angry, reckless violence. She chid him for it. Almost weeping in his mortification and shame, he cried:

"You talk as though marriage were just a covering up, a shelter from abominations."

"Ah!" She too was angry now. "What else is it?"

"By God!" he said. "I thought it led to love."

And again he found himself in that blind fury that had seized him on hearing his father's cynicism.

For some days they avoided each other. She made some pretext--wished to have some of the rooms papered--and went to stay with her mother.

XII

ESCAPE

_Ant._ Come, I'll be out of the ague,
For to live thus is not indeed to live,
It is a mockery and abuse of life.
I will not henceforth serve myself by halves!
Love all or nothing.
_Delio._ Your own virtue save you!

HE spent hours brooding, prowling in the streets, in whose dull monotony his mind had grown so undisturbedly, responding to their small gaieties and smaller excitements, but moving on in the even smoothness of their life. It seemed incredible to him that such turmoil could have come out of them, and yet that turmoil had begun even before his marriage, before he had met his wife. Was there some strangeness in himself? Of his nature he became doubtful and suspicious. Yet the habit of acceptance was too strong in him; even his misery he could accept. Very laboriously he strove to come by an idea of himself, and was only the more confused when he arrived at this:

"They won't come out to meet me, and when I go out to meet them, they run away. I cannot enjoy their pleasures, and they seem to want nothing else. It gets worse and worse. I couldn't even talk to Elsie now. Almost anyone can make me seem ridiculous."

Linda wrote to him:

"Can't you see, Ren dear, that there are some things won't bear thinking of, and spoil with thinking. You poor, tortured thing!" (Least of all did he want pity from her.) "I know you don't really want to think, and you don't think easily, like most people. At least you seem to hate thinking without coming to a conclusion. It is something finer than obstinacy, because it isn't at all for yourself that you want--what you want. What do you want? Isn't it enough to be happy? Oh, my dear, do let us be happy! I have been crying every night. It isn't that I mind being apart; husbands and wives must be apart sometimes if their life is to be possible and decent, but I can't bear our being apart in spirit."

Then she had understood! She had seen the gulf between them. She would help him to bridge it.

He hastened to her joyfully, and caught her up in a great embrace, so that she laughed in delicious terror.