Chapter VII: Book TWO: Ann Pidduck (2)

"I'd have bet any amount you were an out-of-work writer, or a young man slung out of a respectable house for reading poetry in church. You don't look like the sort of fool who gets messed up by women, though almost any man is that kind of fool."

René tried to protest against that, and to point out that he had been married and therefore serious in his folly, if folly it were. Kilner only grunted at him.

"H'm!" he said. "Looks as if you'd been in the habit of taking things seriously simply because they happened to yourself. That's idiotic. Most things that happen are dirty little jokes, opportunities fumbled because one isn't fit to handle them, or situations forced out of greed or conceit, or injured vanity, or mere pigheadedness. There are divine things happen: doing a good bit of drawing is one of them, finding a friend is another, falling in love is another. Those things happen simply because you can't help doing them, because you'd die one of many deaths if you didn't. Once you've done one of those things, nothing else matters. You have something in you that you must keep alive. Let the others make the world hideous and vulgar and untidy. It is not your affair. If they won't or can't love what you love, then they are not for you and you are not for them. Don't you think?"

René could find nothing to say. He found it so absorbing to watch Kilner, to listen to his monologue delivered in a voice of wonderful sweetness that seemed always to be trembling into laughter. The zest, the humor of the man thrilled through him, and made him feel that all his life was full of promise, rich and ripe with romance.

Kilner began to tell him about painting and painters, about Rembrandt and Van Eyck and Cranach, happy Cranach who could paint women without being either sensual or sentimental, and Dürer and Holbein and della Francesca, and how he himself, the son of a mason in Buckinghamshire, had always painted, at first without taste and without purpose, from sheer delight in objects, their form and their color, and how little by little he had learned to see the beauty shining through them and to wish to have that beauty also shining through his pictures and drawings. And how he had come to London to learn his art, financed by rich people near his home; and how he had assumed that every man who touched brush and paint had also desired to render the shining beauty that used all things for its dwelling-place; and how incidentally he had suffered from arrogance and blown vanity, though never losing sight of his one object; and how he had been taught a certain kind of drawing, to be accurate in imitation, and then again accurate and again accurate; and how he had quarreled with those of his teachers who had wished him not to use the power of accuracy they taught him, but to regard it as in itself an end; quarreled with his fellow-students, with his patrons, with his family, with exhibiting societies, with--apparently--everybody, because he could not learn to keep his opinions to himself or conceive that men who painted vilely with constant sacrifice of beauty to their desire to please, did so because that was how they saw things and how they liked things and loved them so far as they could love at all. And he told René of many love affairs he had had, some casual, some unhappy and desperate, some light-hearted and gay, and one ecstatic though it had lasted only for five weeks in spring. He described with a vivid power how he and she lay in the grass in Richmond Park and the soft air above them was alive with light, quivering up to the blue where the clouds swam and slowly faded out of form and being and other clouds came; and near them was an almond-tree in blossom, and above them shone the gummy buds of the beeches; crisp to the touch was the grass, moist and cool was the earth. And he touched her white arm and she trembled. He trembled too. And she turned her face toward him with a sweet trouble and wonder in her eyes and they kissed.

"That ended in tears, my tears and hers. I was too coarse for her, I think; too violent. She was very delicate and beautiful."

After a long silence, René said:

"I have had nothing in my life but foolishness."

"There's no harm in that," said Kilner. "It's bitterness that kills. When shall I see you again?"

"Do you want to?" René was startled into asking.

"Of course. I don't let a friend slip when I've found one."

And gladly René said:

"A friend. I begin work to-morrow at old Martin's."

"There's a man," answered Kilner. "I must paint his heavy, happy face. It's the kind of face there won't be again. The world's changing. Man wants but little here below? Never again. We want all there is."

IV

LEARNING A TRADE

'Tis my vocation, 'tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.

FOR some weeks our adventurer divided his time between working in Mr. Martin's yard and office, studying the map of London, and being driven about the city in a car of instruction with seven or eight other aspirants to the taxi-driving profession. Most of them were depressed and bored, smoked incessantly, and spoke little, but every now and then René would find one to talk to him and take pity on his gentility and give him advice and consolation. The drives would begin cheerfully enough, often with excitement and humor, but soon listlessness would creep over the party, the more sober individuals would produce maps and notebooks, while the younger would conceitedly assume that their knowledge could not be enlarged, or perhaps they were ashamed to be caught out in ignorance. On the whole, they made René unhappy, for most of them were drifting so helplessly and with such dull indifference. By contrast the energy, the power, and richness of London streets were almost appalling.

He would return home exhausted and confused, and, to avoid thought, would go on with his map, taking Hyde Park Corner, Oxford Circus, and the Bank as the centers of three circles into which he had divided the city of his future operations. He found it easy to memorize the thoroughfares that connected them and their dependent roads. He had observed that certain districts were devoid of cabs or cab-ranks, and marking these districts off on his map, he concentrated upon the rest. The cabs served to connect one moneyed region with another, and with the stations and places of business and pleasure. And he selected the moneyed district where he would begin when he had his cab.

Casey was a Liverpool Irishman who had begun life as a clerk in a shipping office and had then, at twenty-seven, revolted and gone out to South Africa to work in the mines until one of his lungs gave out. Then he came home and had a nasty time in London in an office until he was told by a doctor that he must find some outdoor occupation. With the little money he had left, he had learned how to drive and repair a car, had been with one of the big companies for some time; then married a niece of old Martin's and thought he could do better by working for him on a profit-sharing basis. That was René's arrangement; he was given the alternative of buying his car on the hire-purchase system and using the yard as a garage, but on Casey's advice chose the first proposition. Casey said it was better, because you needed capital to stand the heavy wear and tear of a car in constant use in London traffic. That settled, Casey took his novice out in the early morning to satisfy himself that the car would not suffer at his hands. He was delighted with the way the machine was handled. René, too, was pleased. He had been rather nervous at the thought of driving a more powerful engine than that to which he had been accustomed; but the greater power was only an added pleasure and no difficulty.

He took out his license and received a number and a number-plate, joined the union, bought a thick green suit that buttoned up to his neck, shiny leggings, and a peaked cap; a waterproof overall, enormous gloves, a leather purse, a rug. Then on a day early in the autumn he drove his car out of the mews and plunged into the eastward stream of traffic. He had not gone above a hundred yards when he was hailed by a gentleman in tail-coat and top-hat carrying a red brief-bag. Drawing up by the curb, he flung back his arm and opened the door as he had seen drivers do, and received the one word: Temple.

Absurdly hoping that he would be seen by no one who knew him, and feeling that the eyes of the occupant of the car were boring into the back of his neck, he drove to the Temple, and there received more exact directions from the gentleman, who poked his head out of the window, until they stopped outside a doorway with steps covered with the leaves of a plane-tree. The gentleman got out:

"You forgot to put down your flag."

René started and blushed. So he had!

"The fare's half a crown."

"Thank you, . . . sir."

He was given two and nine. His first tip! Threepence.

It was a busy day. He had only half an hour to wait on the stand which he had chosen for his headquarters. He drove home at night worn out and sleepy.

The excitement did not last. Very soon he hardly noticed his fares; a stick or an umbrella raised in the street, a whistle blown by a servant, and off he sped, shipped his freight, and discharged it uninterested. From his district in the morning the gentlemen went to their business; later in the day their ladies went to the shops; in the evening both went about their pleasures. Occasionally he was taken out to the suburbs, far west or north, but for the most part it was routine work, varied in the evenings, sometimes, with the conveyance of brilliantly-attired young men and women from a restaurant to a theater in the West End, or of dubious couples to dubious habitations.

And he was happy. The monotony was a relief. It never ceased to be a source of pride to him to keep the paint and brass of his car gleaming and his engine sweet and in tune. Always it was a delight to him at night, when the traffic was abated, to let the throttle open and send the car spinning and humming over the shining streets. If he lost interest in his fares, he never weakened in his joy in the streets with their color and activity, as changing as the sky or as the water in the river, their music swelling through the day, to almost every hour its individual harmony, a music growing and falling with the seasons: vigor and hope in October; in the winter a humorous desperation out of which grew miraculously the spring, and that again was lost in the maddening rout of June and then the slackness and the excited pleasure-hunting of the summer months when the genius of the city flees before the horde of aliens and visitors who come to gape and peer and see the sights. He was happy, and most of all he loved his independence, to be free of organization of any kind. Company? The car was company. He and it worked together. Here was no uncertainty, no fumbling. The day's work was marked out and must be well done. There was always satisfaction in it and never compromise, never the sense of being driven on by some obscure and undirected energy other than his own that had so often overcome him in Thrigsby. And because his mind and body were engaged in the discipline of skilled work, his intellect, his imagination began to grow, to reach out, to desire to use their powers upon all that he observed and thought and felt. A little joy grew in him slowly and brought him at first to a dreaming, wistful mood wherein desires expanded of which he did not begin to be conscious until spring airs stirred in London.

Through the winter the habit of labor and his pride in it brought him slowly nearer to understanding of Ann Pidduck and her absorption in fun. He began to share her pleasure in relaxation. She taught him to dance, and they attended shilling balls together and she communicated to him her Cockney pleasure in the streets, the prowling in the lighted thoroughfares, the making of chance acquaintances, the full gusto of broad jests. He introduced her to Kilner and tried to make her include him in their intimacy and their jaunts; but she seemed to be scared of the artist, and when René appeared with him would make excuses of other engagements.

Then there were evenings of talk with Kilner, René hardly listening to him but rejoicing in the vigor of his words. He was painting in his spare time and on Saturdays and Sundays, and through his pictures and the painter's enthusiasm for things seen René learned to use his eyes. That was a slow process, too. Often he saw beautiful things and creatures that so moved him that he lost sight of them, and dwelt only in the emotion they had roused, falsifying his vision. He would constantly be overcome in that way when he tried to describe anything he had seen to his friend, who would then turn upon him and call him a bloody liar, and a sentimentalist, and a filthy spitter upon the world's beauty, a crapulous cheat, trying to steal a winged joy and turn it into a selfish pleasure; and much more that was beyond René except that he would feel ashamed but also invigorated by being so fiercely flung back into humility. Kilner took him to the National Gallery and very carefully explained the difference between a real picture and a fraud. There were, according to him, very few real pictures. He talked René into a very pretty bewilderment from which his hours with Ann were a welcome relief. There everything was what it seemed, everybody was taken (more or less) at his or her own valuation; there was fun to be extracted from everything and everybody, if only you approached them good-humoredly enough. And if you failed and did not find the expected fun--Oh, well, try elsewhere. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.

And then one morning Spring came to London. The black trees were powdered with green; the air was magical; the car was filled with a blithe new energy; the light gave the street and the things and people in them form and definiteness. René was up and out very early that morning to take a family to one of the stations. Three children were going away to the country. They beamed at him as though he were already a part of their coming delights. He laughed at them, and they said he was a nice funny driver, and was he coming to the country, too? Uncle George had got a new calf which they would like him to see. When he had unloaded the happy party at the station--it was that at which he had arrived the year before--he caught sight of the hill at Highgate, like a green mountain towering above the long gray streets. He turned northward and sped out over the hills and far away. Here the trees were less advanced than in London, but their green was peeping, and in a field were ewes and lambs. He stopped his engine and stood by the fence and gazed at them. Two of the lambs were playing, running races backward and forward. In the sky there were little clouds, and they too seemed to be playing. He remembered words of Kilner's:

"Real seeing is through, not with, your eyes. Then you recognize that all things visible are within you as well as without. Then the spirit in you sees the spirit shining in all things, and it is only the spirit that can really see."

And away up north was a black city, dark and hard and remorseless, from which he had escaped. The memory of it clung to him now and filled him with a stabbing terror that, though it could not rob him of his joy, could yet bring him to a new discontent, a hungry and almost angry desire.

Back then he went to the city, and all day long busily plied his trade. To-day he closely observed all things. The wonder of the early morning was gone. He hated those who hired him, the insolent women and busy, indifferent men, for it seemed to him that they had destroyed it. Unconsciously he contrasted these people, who went so insensibly about their habitual stale employments, with the happy children going to the country.

He was engaged to seek amusement with Ann that night. She was for the Pictures, but he persuaded her to go on the top of a bus to Kew.

"But they've got the Miserables at the Pictures," she said, "and they say it's It."

"Look at the sky, my dear," he protested.

She looked at it.

"Yes. It's all right."

Usually now when he met her in the evening he kissed her, because she expected it. She had kissed him first when he had given her a present at Christmas, and thereafter it became their practice, comradely. To-night he did not kiss her. He was stirred at the sight of her; her friendliness, the bright greeting of her eyes thrust him back into himself and inwardly alarmed him. And she looked up at him and laughed mischievously, and swung her body from the hips up, and then moved slowly away from him, pouting her lips.

"Would you like anywhere better than Kew?" he asked.

"Wimbledon, where we saw the picture-actors. D'you remember?" They boarded a bus and were swiftly borne out over the river, up through the holiday town that had reminded him of Buxton, and out to the wide common. There they wandered. A thin moon came up. They passed whispering lovers, and men and women for whom that word was too great.

Here again was spring, the first spring evening.

Ann chattered, but René spoke never a word. Once she said:

"Dull to-night, aren't you? Are you tired?"

Her questions met with so hard a silence that she too ceased to talk.

She thought he must be offended with her, and as they returned she slipped her hand on his knee. He gripped her forearm, held it for a moment, then put her away from him.

After a long while she said:

"I didn't know I'd made you angry."

"Angry? My dear child!"

"What is it, then?"

"This damned world. This morning I took three happy children to the country, and all day long I've been at the beck and call of men and women who have lost the power and the will to be happy."

"I don't know how you know. And you're not very good at it yourself to-night, are you?"

"How do I know? Ask Kilner."

"That beast, Kilner."

"He's my friend."

"He's no friend of mine."

Then again he was silent. The thought of Kilner had made him just a little angry with her. With Kilner the day that had begun so beautifully might have come to a glorious and brave end.

Presently she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder and said:

"Don't be cross. You'll soon be dead, and it's no good being cross. I do like being with you, really, even when we can't have fun, and you go wasting your time thinking."

He turned, and their eyes met, and he astonished her by saying:

"Ann, you don't know how beautiful you are."

She gave a little cry on that, put out her hand, and this time he held it strongly clasped. They could be happy in their silence then.

When they reached the mews she said she had supper in her room and he could come up if he liked. They ate and drank and were very merry, and it was late when he rose to go. He opened the door. She was at his side.

"Good night, Ann."

"You needn't go," she whispered.

V

TOGETHER

Je vais où le vent me mène
Sans me plaindre où m'effrayer.
Je vais où va toute chose,
Où va la feuille de rose
Et la feuille de laurier!

A DAY or two later he moved his few belongings from Jimmy's rooms to Ann's. It was her wish. There was no point in concealment. The mews knew; the mews had expected it; the mews did not mind. Mr. Martin was delighted:

"It's what every young woman wants, to throw in her lot with some nice young feller. If they can't be married, they can't, and that's all there is to it. Take mares now-- Well, you know what I mean." He caught the boy with his head in at the door listening, picked up a ledger, and threw it at him. A bad shot, it broke a pane in the glass wall.

René had told him all the circumstances, because he knew that the mews was full of gossip, and he was attached enough to the old fellow to wish him to be in possession of the facts.

"What I mean to say," continued Mr. Martin, when the boy had fled, "is this: If women must come kerboosting into a man's life, it's better for them to come while he's young and fool enough to enjoy it. There's a time for everything, as the Bible says, but don't let her put on you. The best of women will put on a man if he lets her, and that's bad for both."

That was the advice with which René Fourmy's second venture in cohabitation was blessed. As usually happens with advice, he was too deeply engrossed in present interests to apply what wisdom it contained to his own case. He drifted down the stream of bliss they had tapped, and, as generously as she, brought into their common stock as much kindness, consideration, and warmth, excitement and curiosity as they needed to take them from moment to moment. Only he brought no laughter, of which she supplied abundance. Both were out early and all day long, and both returned in the evening tired but eager for the new wonder of each other's company. Indeed it was wonderful, the easy sympathy they had for each other. They could be frank. She had no preconception of what love should be, and took all its delights simply as they came, and her simplicity fed and encouraged his. It was a novelty for him to live from day to day satisfied; a kind of Paradise, if Paradise is a place where the appetites are a little overfed, so that body and mind are brought to indolence.

Kilner had disappeared for a time, having made enough to be able to retire to his painting, and René had no other society than the chauffeurs in the shelters during the day and the familiars of Mitcham Mews in the evening. He became sluggishly content to drift. He was making good money, increased by Ann's earnings. If he ever thought of the old life in the North at all, it was with lazy contempt and indifference. His first attitude toward London was reversed. He had begun with all the northerner's contempt for the easy ways of the metropolis. He never read anything but the newspaper, and every evening would read aloud the "fooltong" in the _Star_. Ann took it for the betting. She put aside two shillings a week for "the horses," and he joined her in that pursuit. He did not so much enjoy her pleasures as her zest for them, and it became his object to keep that alive. Without that he was at moments aware of a sickening sensation that was truly horrible, making him gird at his surroundings, at certain tricks that Ann had, at habits, gestures, tones in her voice that were like his sister-in-law Elsie's. He saw the resemblance first on receiving a letter from his brother George:

"DEAR R,--A pal of mine who has been on the spree saw you in London the other day, says you drove him from the Troc to Bernard Street. I thought you'd have been off that long ago, but there's no accounting for tastes. I meant to write some time since to say the old man has hopped it again, and the mother has taken up her quarters with us. It seems some money came in--I can't make out where from--and he grabbed it and offed. It seems to have finished her; she's shut up tight, sits and knits, toddles off to church whenever there's a service, never mentions him or you. Elsie can't get anything out of her, though they talk enough together. It makes the house seem full of women. I've never set eyes on you know who since you cleared. I'm doing well enough, and hope to get something of my own in a few years, though small business don't stand much chance in these days against the big combines. You'd be amazed at the huge joint warehouses they're putting up now. Thrigsby's changing, and things are queer all round. People shift a bit now, what with the Colonies and all that. They don't stay in offices like they used to do, only it doesn't seem to make things any better for those who stay. Elsie sends her love; she always was a bit soft on you and didn't mind a bit when you cleared. I only meant to tell you about the mother, thinking you ought to know. If ever I get to London I'll look you up.--Thine, G.--Oh! Kurt Brock has gone in for the aviation and is making quite a name for himself up here."

The letter took René back pleasantly in memory, when he was suddenly startled to find himself meeting George on his own ground, with complacent acceptance of "having a good time," as the one desirable object which could redeem the ever-present evil. And then he was compelled, from that footing, to see his own revolt as an unaccountable aberration, an eccentricity, an escapade unfortunately disastrous in its consequences. He did not like that, nor did he relish being coupled in George's mind with his father, who was first indolent, then a vagabond, then irresponsible. His confidence was shaken, and he was made conscious of discrepancy and narrowly aware of having missed something of that which he set out to seek. Experience had taught him that it was no use taking any unhappiness to Ann. She would merely assume that he was unwell and probably dose him with physic from the herbalist's round the corner. Again, he saw that George, like Ann, had a gusto in his way of living which he himself lacked, and now only enjoyed vicariously. That could no longer fret his nerves as in the old days it had done; he was fortified by the memory of his act of revolt and the months of entire independence he had enjoyed since his coming to London. He looked up at Ann from his letter.

"Bad news?" she said.

"I don't know whether it's good or bad. My father has cleared out again."

"It's made you sorry. You always look like that when you think of your home. Sometimes I fancy you really wish you had never come away."

"That's not true. I'm perfectly content. I'm learning not to blame anybody. That isn't easy."

"If you're not sorry, I don't see why you want to think about it."

"You can't forget people so completely as all that."

"Your dad seems to be able to."

"I'm not my father."

"No. But sometimes I wish you'd take a leaf out of his book. From what you tell me he does seem able to enjoy himself."

"Don't I?"

"Oh, you're better than you used to be, but you do frighten me sometimes."

"When?"

"Oh, when you look at me and don't see me, and when I go on talking and you don't hear a word I'm saying. Sometimes I think it's only because you had that queer time when you first came to London, and then I think you can't be any different. The world does seem upside down, and it seems to me it might be better if we went right away and made a new start somewheres."

It comforted René to find that she, too, had her qualms, and that there was some stir behind her constant and equable good humor. He said:

"Oh, no. I think we shall be all right. Only we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that love makes life easier."

"Not much fear of that," she replied, with an odd little wry smile. "Mr. Martin said to me, he said, 'This here education makes a man queer to live with. If it isn't idees,' he said, 'it's niceness; and if it isn't niceness it's bloody obstinacy,' he said. . . . And I do try, Renny, I do reelly, though of course if I hadn't the work during the day I should feel it more."

"What would you feel?"

"Well, I don't know. Oh, you know, when you look at things a long time, and when you like to sit and smoke and look inside yourself."

"I didn't know I did that. I don't see much if I do."

"Well, you do. And I asked Mr. Martin about it and he said it was education, and he said his brother-in-law was like that before he went off his head with religion. And often when I look at you and you are like that I want to put my arms round you and hold you until you stop doing it, and begin to think of me a little."

"But I do think of you all the time."

Then she put her arms round him and held him close until he forgot all but her in the dark pleasure that is called love.

And again he drifted and supposed himself content, until one day when a young man hailed him and told him to drive to Islington where there was an exhibition of modern engineering. Halfway there, the young man stopped the car, leaped out excitedly, gripped René by the arm, and cried:

"Good Lord, if it isn't old René!"

It was Kurt Brock.

"I say!" he said. "What a find!"

"The taxi's mounting up," said René.

"I say, you take me out to Hendon and we'll have a yarn. They told me you were still at it, and I was meaning to come and see you, but I'm up to my eyes in work. Let me drive."

He took the wheel and sent the car whizzing through the traffic at a speed that made René cry out in protest that he'd have him run in and his license forfeited. Kurt slowed down a little.

"Cars crawl so," he said, "once you've tried a flier."

"I've seen your name in the papers."

"Yes. I won my first race, Glasgow to Edinburgh round the coast of Scotland. Bit stiff, some of it, with mist and rain. I say, I _am_ glad to see you. You're looking fit. Better life than mugging away with books, what? Though I don't know that I'd care about being out in the streets in all weathers, what?"

"Oh, you get used to that. I hate it when the engine goes wrong and I have to stay at home."

They reached Hendon and Kurt took his old friend to see his new monoplane.

"Like to go up in her? She's a snorter. Takes the air like a bird; you can feel her planes stretching to the air, and the engine's like a cat."

Before he could think twice about it, René found himself sitting up behind Kurt with the machine rushing over the ground and the engine roaring. He could not tell at what point they left the earth, but trees, sheds, houses seemed to fall away as though the earth were tilted up, and then the air rushed in his ears, caught at his throat, pressed hard against his body. He looked down. They were ascending in circles. Roads looked like ribbons, trees like haycocks, trams like toys, men and women were little dots mysteriously and absurdly moving. They hovered for a moment as they turned out of the final circle and made straight for a low gray cloud. Soon they passed through it, and up again. Presently they turned, dipped, and Kurt shut off the engine and they came gliding down; the earth tilted up alarmingly to meet them; houses, trees, sheds slid back into their places. René was startled to find the earth almost immediately flattened out again without the threatened impact, and back they darted to the hangar.

"Glorious?" asked Kurt.

"I--I don't know yet," replied René.

"How like you!"

"How do you mean--like me?"

"I mean, to admit that you don't know. Half the people I take up pretend they like it, though they hate it really. A few, like you, don't know, but they don't say so. I wish I'd been the first man to do it."

René had to walk to get warm again, and he left Kurt in his hangar for a moment to instruct one of his mechanics. He came quickly, caught René by the arm, and laughed, telling him how comic it was to see him in his chauffeur's clothes, disguised, the truant brother-in-law hiding behind a uniform. René said:

"I've got used to it now."

"Do you ever open a book?"

"Sometimes. I had a few sent to me."

"Economic books?" asked Kurt.

"No. But I go on thinking about all that. Habit, I suppose, or perhaps trying to discover what it really is all about, and I don't know. They used to call it a science, but it can't be scientific----"

"That's what I say. You do know where you are with an engine. You can eat up distance. But I thought clever people would never understand that. You used not to. Perhaps you're not clever any more. That's what I said to Linda. Oh, I'm sorry."

"You needn't be." René gulped that out, for indeed he was embarrassed. The days of his torment were brought back suddenly, came savagely breaking through his simple pleasure in the rediscovery of this enlarged Kurt, grown from boy to man without loss of youth and frankness. He extricated himself from his confusion by asking:

"How is she?" And at once he was shocked to find out how little he really cared to know.

"Linda? Well, she's a much better sort than she used to be. I don't know much about women, though I like them well enough. Linda? Oh, she seems happy. She has a house and a piano and a lot of people, goes abroad, little parties of four or five, mixed; musicians and professors, cream of Thrigsby, you know. She wrote a play for the Thrigsby Repertory Theater, all about you and marriage and sex. Rather disgusting, I thought it, but all Thrigsby flocked to see it. All the same, yes, she is nicer. Not so inquisitive; doesn't romance so wildly. The only objection I have to her now is that she will get me into a corner when I'm at home and talk about you. I think she ought to ignore your existence, as it is no longer her affair. She seems unable to do that, and she fancies I know something about you that she doesn't, though I've told her over and over again that I don't pretend to understand you or anybody else. I did tell her that you made me feel that what I wanted to do wasn't necessarily a thing to be ashamed of."

"I did that?"

"Well, it was only after you came that I was able to tell the mater that I didn't want to do as she wished and couldn't. . . . Where are you living?"

René described Ann's two rooms.

"Do you like it? I mean, aren't they rather grubby and piggy?"

René thought it over with a clear picture in his mind of Ann's room and Jimmy's and Kilner's, and the women standing at the doors and leaning out of the windows, and the children playing in the muck. For him it was all colored emotionally. Moments of distaste he could remember, but nothing like the offended fastidiousness expressed in Kurt's tone.

"Well, yes. Untidy and careless. One day's work slops over into the next day. But, you know, my home was not so very unlike that. I used to hate it at home when I got back at night to find my bed unmade. That used to happen."

"Can I come and see you? I'm here for a fortnight. My business is up north. Got a factory now. You must come and see it if ever you are----"

"I don't think I'm likely to go north again. I feel that's finished. I don't know why. It isn't that I have any hatred for it, or any bitterness about what happened. Only I feel on firmer ground here, as though I had taken root."

"I'll come along then. Any night?"

"Almost any night."

"I'll take my chance."

They shook hands, Kurt with a grip that squeezed René's knuckles together until the pain was horrible.

"'Member our smash?" asked Kurt.

René grinned at the recollection. He was very pleased and comfortable. To have established a connection with the past through Kurt was to have it made without shock of shame or injury to vanity. Through Kurt's frank mind it was cleaned and shaped for him, presented to him so that he must make the necessary effort to strike out of himself the light which should reveal it, the light of humor. It was a very faint gleam that came out of him, but it was enough to serve and to imprint the picture on his mind, give him possession of it, and deliver him from the anguish which attended all his dark contemplations.

"Oh, yes," he said, "and I remember how I lectured you. And now the positions are reversed."

"I don't see that."

An elegant young man in a gray suit came up, with a beautiful woman of a loveliness and charm that took René's breath away.

"How do, Kurt?" said the young man, stepping in front of him. "Lady Clewer wishes to be----"

Kurt shook hands with the beautiful lady and with her and her companion walked away toward the knot of brilliant persons gathered round a biplane that had just come to earth.

Flushed and tingling at the hurt, René rushed away, savagely wound up his engine, and glided back into the city, to the narrow place where he had till now lived in comfort and the pleasures of simplicity. Small and confined he saw it now, mean and untidy. But it had been and was still his refuge. He had been happy, and the world had ignored his happiness and snatched it away from him. He was actively angry and jealous.

He frightened Ann by the hungry affection with which he greeted her when she came home, after working overtime to keep pace with a rush of work at her factory. She liked it too. It was exciting. Yet she could not conceal her fear. She was more than his match in exuberance, but here was a demand upon her that she could not recognize and very soon she was in tears; not her happy tears that had so often reconciled him and made him gleeful and proud. He was humbled and acutely conscious of separation from her, though they clung together. For a few moments the whole weight of their relationship was thrown upon their loyalty, and it did not yield. She slept at last, her hand in his, but he lay awake staring back into the past, fascinated as the light growing in him showed it up in continually sharpening relief--his parting from his father; him he could see very clearly; but his mother was in shadow, sitting, head down, hands busy, never stirring, in acceptance. And Linda? He could see her at that absurd tea-party when his father had shown her his picture. She walked into his life then. They sat by the tulips and she was gone. He could remember his own desire and after, only its horrible, inexplicable disappearance.

VI

KILNER

Could I find a place to be alone with Heaven
I would speak my heart out.

THE next night Ann went out alone. She insisted that it must be alone, though she gave him her most happy smile to reassure him.

He sat reading a copy of _Extracts from Browning_ which he had bought for twopence from old Lunt. The book was against his temper, but he found a certain pleasure in making himself read from page to page. At nine o'clock Kilner came in. He was gaunt and haggard, and his collar was dirty. He nodded, produced a pipe, and sank, as he lit it, into the wicker chair opposite René's.

"You're comfortable in here," he said. "Snug. I suppose once you're settled in here of a night you don't give a blast what goes on in the world outside. One doesn't when one has got what one wants."

René laid his book down.

"Have you got what you want?"

"I? No. I never---- I was going to say I never have. I don't suppose I ever shall. That makes me hate all the people who settle down in comfort and pretend there is nothing more to want. And as that is nearly everybody, you can imagine the hating part of me is kept pretty busy. That again is a nuisance, because it gets between me and what I want, and makes me waste energy in analyzing myself, my enemies, patrons (when I have any), friends. My relations gave me up as a bad job long ago. They made all sorts of sacrifices because they were led to believe that my talent would in the end make me more comfortable than they had ever been. When they found that I preferred discomfort and penury and starvation to what seemed to them the simple expedient of painting what I was expected to paint (they can't understand anybody wanting to paint anything else), then they shrank away from me. They could make no more sacrifices. People don't sacrifice for something they don't see, and their eyes close just when mine begin to open. We both console ourselves with hatred. I hate what they worship: the capacity for comfort. They hate my incapacity. It is very stupid. I would give almost anything to be able to live without hatred. It seems barely possible, though you come as near to it as any man I ever knew. The pity of it is that you arrive at it by doing and wanting nothing."

"That's hardly fair," replied René. "I'm out and about all day. Every day I clean and oil the car. Often I spend hours on it."

"You do nothing that could not be done by a less intelligent man than yourself. You may do it more conscientiously, but at its best it is not good enough for your best."

"But surely that applies to every trade and profession?"

"Does it? I'm certainly not going to generalize. What's true of you is probably true of thousands of men. I'm not interested in them as I am in you."

"It is even more true of the work I did before," said René. "I do feel now that I am doing something. There is money earned at the end of every day, really earned by being useful. But I don't know that I think about it much. It has become a habit, like everything else."

"All right, say it has become a habit. Say that a certain amount of your energy is drawn off in habit, what of the rest? That's what I'm driving at. What of the rest?"

"I read, amuse myself, and Ann----"

"And you are going on forever, working out of habit, reading and amusing yourself, and a woman who----"

"I'll trouble you not to say anything against Ann."

"I'm not saying anything against her. She has a perfect right to be herself, but if being herself interferes with me, I have a perfect right to fight for what I want."

"What do you want?"

"Your friendship."

"You have it," replied René, in the tone of one squashing an argument.

"Yes," said Kilner, "comfortably. You try to make room for me in your little circle of comfort, and, worse still, to use me as a comfort. I can't stand that. She knows it. That's why she keeps you away from me."

René protested:

"She doesn't."

"She does. You watch her eyes when she comes in and finds me here."

René looked up at him uneasily. Kilner pounced on that:

"You are uneasy already. I don't want to make trouble between you two. You can make quite enough for yourselves, but I mean to dig out of you what I need. I mean to try anyhow until I am satisfied that what I need is not there."

There was a challenge in this, and René had the surprise of finding himself meeting it. Indeed it was bracing to feel the painter's vigorous mind searching his own and throwing aside all that he disliked or condemned.

"Ever since," said René, "ever since our first meeting under the archway, I have felt that there was something in you that I desired to understand, something that, without my understanding it, has made more difference than any other thing in my life."

Kilner leaned forward.

"Now," he said, "now we know where we are. Most men pretend with me that they keep the emotional side of their nature for women. They don't give it them, God knows what they do with it. Most men also confuse their emotions with their imaginations. I think that is why they spend their lives in the uncomfortable search after comfort."

"And women?" asked René.

"You and I are not concerned for the present with women. It seems to me that you and I are in this queer place for much the same reason, because we were incapable of letting our lives run along the lines laid down for them. I don't know what you are after; perhaps you don't know yourself, but I want to tell you what I am after. I'm not a great reader of books. Some of them may have said what I'm trying to say. . . . As long as I can remember I have had the intensest joy through my eyes. I think I've said that before. It doesn't matter. I see things. At first it was just the crude pleasure of form. One thing after another, I let the whole world unroll before my eyes until I was drunk with delight in it and nearly mad. Then forms began to have a meaning and to melt into each other. I began to see relations between different forms. Beauty began to sing in color. With form and color the world was so rich that the strain upon my sight was an agony. My greed brought me to seek consolations which unfortunately did not console. If I accepted comfort, then I lost my delight in form and color and was not comfortable. I found that the way out of that was to select and concentrate. I could only select in a certain passionate mood. In an ecstasy I felt truly that I could recognize the object in the contemplation of which I could find the greatest joy, a joy equal to that of human love, and having this advantage over it that it need not be expressed in physical experience. But, once felt, it must be expressed. I do my best in paint, but it always seems impossible--except when I am actually working. When I look at what I have done, then I know that it is impossible. One can give a little singing hint of it and no more. And then again, turning from that to life, one is disgusted. Everywhere such coarseness, such greed, such meanness, such conceit. Yet to nurse that disgust is to feel the joy fade away, to hear the song of it die down. There is no justice then, no kindness, and the world is so horrible that the soul takes refuge in a sorry silence. Youth is then a heated torment from which there is no escape, but in a kind of death that brings decay and poisons love. . . . There, if you can understand that, you can understand me. I cannot surrender my vision either to comfort or to my own disgust."

They were silent for some moments. Then René said:

"In here," he touched his breast, "I know that you are right. I have been trying all this time to understand you with my brain, but now that seems only to be a sieve through which to pass what you have said. You see, I have never tried to express anything, but there have been times in my life when I have been moved enough to understand faintly what you mean. Disgust? I know that too. Almost everything I have ever done seems to me now to have been the result of disgust. I suppose that is why I am what I am. But I'm glad you came in to-night. I was going through another crisis of disgust; I go from one to another."

"I know," said Kilner. "A man does when he seeks to find love only in women."

René winced. His friend laughed at him:

"Oh, you are not the only one. It begins very early. Women exploit their motherhood as they have exploited their womanhood to get us. It is not their fault. Men have kept their joy from them and preserved their brutishness. There is an even more bitter disgust lying in wait for those who seek to find love only outside women."

Ann came in on that. She stopped inside the door, and glowered at the painter.

"Oh, so you've come back?"

"Yes," said Kilner, rising. "Like a bad penny."

"Don't get up. I ain't no lady. You been talking?"

"Yes," said René. "Shall I make some tea? Had a good evening?"

"No. Rotten." She had not moved from the door. Her eyes came back to Kilner. "You can go on talking. I'm off to my bed."

And she slipped from the door into the bedroom. René met his friend's eyes. They were grimly ironical.

VII

OLD LUNT

The glass is full, and now my glass is run:
And now I live, and now my life is done.

OLD Lunt was a dirty old man who wore a cracked bowler hat rammed down on his head, a frock-coat green with age, trousers that hung in loops and folds about his lean shanks, and boots held together with leather laces and bits of string. He had one room at the corner of the mews, and he lived God knows how. Ann always said that he would stand on the doorstep of a butcher's shop and sniff like a dog, and stay there until they flung him a scrap of meat. On a Saturday night he was to be seen prowling about the shops, feeling the rabbits and fowls, and then shuffling away as though his appetite had been satisfied through his fingers. He never shaved, but clipped his beard close. The skin hung so loose on his jaws that shaving would have been perilous. His eyes were gray, watery, and red-rimmed, and he had ears like red rosettes.

He used to watch for René to come out, and then wait by his own door to see if the car left the yard. If it did not, then he would come shambling along and stand at the gate of the yard. And if René were working on his car he would edge nearer and nearer until he could peer into the engine. Often he would stand quite silent, and go away without a word. Occasionally he would talk and mumble.

"I remember when there warn't no railways, and my brother Philip drove his horses from Glossop to Sheffle. They used to say there wouldn't be no engines. But there was engines. Then they said there wouldn't be no engines on the road. But there is engines on the road. And things grow worse and worse for poetry."

With variations, that was his customary address.

About once a month he would sidle up to René and beg for the loan of one shilling, and ten days or a fortnight later he would return a penny or twopence.

"Interest, interest. Times bad. I must ask you to extend the loan."