Chapter XII: Book THREE: Cathleen Bentley (3)

"Good luck," he said. "Good luck, old man. Elsie really has loved having you, and I'm sorry you're leaving dear, old, dirty Thrigsby."

"Good-by," said René. "I'll let you know what happens to me, if anything does. I don't think I shall stay in London."

"Good-by, then. By George, I shall be late!" And he set off at a run.

René only had ten minutes more. Most of that was taken up with seeing the children off to the kindergarten they attended. Mrs. Fourmy had stayed in her bed. He went up to see her. She clung to him, but spoke no word, and he was too deeply moved to speak. She looked old and frail and very small in her bed. At last she said:

"You're glad to go?"

"Yes."

Her eyes looked hunger and reproach. She turned her face away.

"Good-by."

"Good-by, mother. George is a good fellow, isn't he?"

"Oh, yes. And I find the children a great comfort." She said that in a perfectly toneless voice. The contrast between it and what she had looked only a moment before shocked René. He mastered himself and kissed her and hurried away.

Elsie said:

"It has been a treat. You really are a sight for sore eyes, René. I never thought you would grow into such a handsome man. I do wish George didn't have to go to that office. It makes him so pasty."

"Let me know when you have a birthday," said René, "and you shall have another tailor-made."

"It's next week," said Elsie innocently.

"Right you are. You shall have it."

. . . . . .

At last he was in the train. No sleep this time. Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, the hills by Elstree, London. A taxi took him hot speed to the hostel. Cathleen was not yet back from her work. Lotta met him with a grave face. She had had a terrible time with Ann, who had alternated between a dog-like gratitude to herself and harsh defiance of Cathleen and all the other young women of the hostel. The situation had been impossible. To appease her she was allowed to see his letter, and after a few hours' brooding on it--not without tears--she had demanded the twenty pounds. With that, apparently, she had cabled to Joe and Rita and another friend in Canada, had packed up her boxes, stolen away early in the morning, and got on board at Southampton, whither she had been traced.

"Poor little Ann," said René.

"I told you she had courage."

"She has that. To go out to a new life----"

"Our interference must have been intolerable to a spirit like hers. But what could we do? Even from you----"

"It is horrible that disasters should interfere with human comradeship."

"It is horrible, but they do interfere."

"Does Cathleen know?"

"Yes. I told her last night."

"Well?"

"It seemed to bring home to her for the first time how terrible and ugly it was. You don't mind my saying that, but the past always does cast its shadow."

"Yes. It can be dispelled."

"Only with time."

"Yes."

Lotta said:

"I like the way you face things. There is no one like you for that--except Cathleen. . . . Where will you live now?"

"For the time being, with Kilner, I think."

"I found him a little studio in Hampstead. He is delighted and happy with it."

"I'll go there now, if you don't mind."

Lotta gave him the direction, and in a few minutes by Tube he was with Kilner, whom he found hard at work at a new Adam and Eve, squaring the composition on to the canvas.

"It's pouring money," said Kilner. "Your twenty pounds came one day and the next I heard that two drawings of mine had been sold, a head of Old Lunt and a half-length of Martin patting a horse's rump. . . . Casey's been up here every day asking for you."

"Casey? What does he want? Money? I'm not a millionaire."

"The poor devil has to leave London. It's eating up the little piece of his lung left by South Africa."

"That's bad."

"Seen anybody?"

"Only Miss Cleethorpe."

"She's a fine woman. I think I shall marry her. She's twenty years older than I am, but that is just about enough to bring a woman within reach of an artist."

"But----"

"Oh! she began it. We've already been down to her cottage in the country--I like that too. You'll have to fork out for a wedding present."

"I'll cancel your debts. But, are you really?"

"Fourmy," said Kilner, "you're an incorrigible romantic. I'm a realist, and like love's young dream to remain a dream. Life is a long, slow, dreary business, and I want a woman I can live with. . . ."

"Did you say that to Lotta?"

"Not in so many words, but in effect."

"Well, I'm----"

"You're not a bit glad. You're horrified. Common-sense is and always will be sordid to you. Lotta and I cooked chestnuts over a fire. We shall go on cooking chestnuts till we die. How's Ann?"

"Gone."

"I thought that would happen. You and I busted her between us--her pride, her joy in living, her rather slovenly habits of mind. You didn't know you were doing it. I did. I'm an awful swine. I told Lotta all about it--as we were cooking chestnuts. She refused to believe me."

There was a tap at the door, and Casey appeared. He rushed excitedly at René, and began to pour out an excited tale of how he had found the very thing, a livery yard at Rickham, thirty miles out of London to the northwest.

"Our station," said Kilner. "Lotta's and mine."

"It's a busy little town, but it needs brisking up, like you say, Mr. Fourmy; it needs motor-cars and a garage. That yard's the very thing, only a hundred yards from the station. There are people with cars living near, but they have to go five miles for repairs, and the trades-people can't have cars, because there is no one to look after them. It's _the_ chance. I've got an option on the yard till next week. Will you take it up? I've got a map. See?"

He produced his map and showed the geographical advantages of Rickham. It had already good water and electric light. Its train service had been enormously improved, and it only needed the country round to be opened up. "Don't you see, Mr. Fourmy, it's your idea?"

René had half-forgotten it. Casey explained, and showed the ring of little country towns round London, how they had come to life again, as markets, as centers, and how in many of them factories were being built and all kinds of people were coming out from London to live in or near them.

Kilner was interested, and said to René:

"So you think that is how things are going to work themselves out? It's an attractive idea, the country for food, a ring of industrial centers, and the exchanges in the middle of it all. Some sort of shape and design instead of the muddle we're in. It might even make room for the artist."

Casey said:

"When I heard you'd come in for some money I couldn't rest until I'd found what I wanted, and there it is. Will you come in?"

"I'll go down and look at it," said René. "I'm quite certain I can't live in your Thrigsby or your Londons any more, and I couldn't live in the country without doing the work of the country."

"Can't see you as a farmer," said Kilner.

René promised to go with Casey the next day.

. . . . . .

He was enchanted with Rickham and with the yard. It had a small Georgian house attached to it, and the stables were built round a quadrangle with a gallery leading to rooms above them. Through the stables was a walled garden, and beyond that again a bowling green by the edge of a stream. The whole was freehold and wonderfully cheap. Rickham apparently was not yet awake to its glorious future in the English democracy in spite of its two cinemas, and the strong Liberalism of its opinions. It had one church and fifteen chapels, a Salvation Army barracks, and a public house every twenty yards. On the hill behind it villas were being erected, and along the valley little houses were being built for workpeople. On either side of the river just outside the old town the tall chimneys of factories were rising by the steel skeletons of new workshops. Clearly there was some truth in what Casey said. They undertook to buy the stables and walked into a lawyer's office to give instructions.

So certain had Casey been that René would come in with him that he had already engaged mechanics in London, and written up to various firms to apply for agencies. They were bombarded with applications from the local builders to carry out the necessary alterations, and on the advice of their solicitor arranged a contract. Before any work was begun Casey insisted on having an illuminated sign, "Garage," fixed above the gate, and below it, the name of the firm, "Casey & Fourmy."

"Looks like business, that," he said, as they stood in the street and surveyed it with satisfaction. "Give the town something to talk about. No advertisement like talk."

VIII

THRIVING

"Were you married in a church, Ursula?"

"We were not, brother: none but gorgios, cripples, and lubbenys
are ever married in a church: we took each other's words."

MEANWHILE his relations with Cathleen remained in abeyance. What she had accepted in the excitement of events, she needed to reconcile with her calmer thoughts. That was not so easy. She was brought to doubt of herself. She had been more hurt than she had realized, and she feared she was too weak for the suffering that filled her. For many weeks it was a pain to her to see René, for she could not but remember the destruction and misery he had brought into other lives. She had no support, for her rupture with her family had made an end of the ideas in which she had been instructed as a child, and she had no experience to draw upon, and Lotta's theories, when it came to cold practice, vanished into the air. She could not avoid jealousy of the past; and, with that in her, she could not bring herself to take the plunge into a life so different from any she had ever imagined. René was so patient, and had flung himself with such ardor into his new work, that she had begun to tell herself that he had no need of her, that she too was in a sense his victim, since his meeting with her had enabled him to break with the past only to thrust the weight of it upon her. The superficiality of her conceptions was betrayed and made plain to her, broken up by one fixed idea, the thought of Ann's child. How could he have let that go? How could he thrust that back into the past? How could his feeling for herself have broken clear of that? And Ann? How could she set thousands of miles between herself and him? If she had stayed, they could have wrestled with the reality. They could have made provision in their lives for the inimical new life. But Ann, in her desperation, had left them to deal only with an idea, a shadow, a memory. René apparently could ignore it. He was full of enthusiasm and happiness. He seemed to consider Ann's flight as a declaration of independence and to acquiesce in it. Had he felt nothing at all? Could a man come in contact with that mystery and remain unmoved? Must not such defiance of Nature be fraught with appalling consequences, to end in the worst state of all, indifference?

She hugged her difficulties to herself, and dared speak of them to no one, for she was possessed by the shyness bred by a fixed idea. At last Lotta caught her out in deliberate avoidance of René and asked what had come to her. Little by little she dragged her trouble out of her, and tried to reassure her and bring her to reason.

"You should ask him about it," she said. "He must have thought it out He did not forget her. You must remember that. It was not a case of his feeling for you wiping her out of his mind. My own view is that Nature is entirely indifferent, and I don't believe parents and children do naturally and inevitably have any feeling for each other. Indeed, Nature is so indifferent that our thoughts about it are rather impertinent. It is obvious that children do not always bind men and women, and I imagine they must often have the contrary effect; always, I should say, when they have for each other only the kind of selfish affection which resents any intrusion. Surely that is why so many women turn from their husbands to their children----"

The word "intrusion" brought Cathleen to the crux of her difficulty. She saw, with some exaggeration, that this was her condition, and the quality of her affection, that she had been hungering for possession of her lover with no intrusion from the past.

"O Lotta," she said, "we are fools to set our faces against what cannot be altered. I thought I had broken away from narrow conventions, but I had only rid myself of the names of things, not of the things themselves, the silly pretense that people wake for a moment out of a sleep in which nothing can happen, love and go to sleep again. We are stupid, trying to keep all our loves separate. We can't do anything but stumble from one love to another, can we?"

"It is what all of us do, and Nature has to take her chance. It is degrading to have one's folly and weakness, even one's mistakes, used by Nature, but that is the way of the world, and I think a real love can always get the better of it."

"I have tried so hard."

"You should see it from his point of view. Suppose it was you who had been trapped by Nature's indifference. You would feel hardly used if he let jealousy stand between you and him."

"But René couldn't."

"Perhaps. Why should _you?_ It really does hurt me to see you two wasting time and youth, two absolutely free people in a world that takes its greatest pride in its waste of opportunity. You are behaving abominably. Really, if you let him be much longer he will settle down with Mr. Casey, and discover that he can do at any rate comfortably without you, and keep you as an ideal. That happened to me when I was a girl. I let things slip by until I woke up one fine day to find that I was nothing but an ideal and had no hope of ever becoming anything else, even though I had married him. So I never did. Love changes, like everything else. It grows in us and dies. Very short is the time when it can be taken and built into our lives. If that time be let slip away then love dies down. If that happens, then life can never be anything more than amusing."

"If it should be too late?" said Cathleen, alarmed.

"It won't be," replied Lotta; "he has been to me and I said I would send you down to him."

At the week-end Cathleen went to Rickham. She found René in overalls taking down the back axle of a car. His face and hands and hair were smeared with grease.

"Hullo!" he said.

And Cathleen answered:

"I hope I'm not in the way."

"All right. Only stand clear of the machine. There never was such ubiquitous stuff as motor grease. I shan't be long. It's a broken crown-wheel, I think-- Oh! here's Casey. Casey, take Miss Bentley round the garden. Have tea in the parlor, and I'll join you when I've cleaned up."

It was a couple of hours before René joined them. During that time Cathleen had to listen to his praises, and to hear how the business, after a slow beginning, had begun to pick up, until now they had almost as much work as they could do with their present staff.

"I'm sorry," said René. "It's a new customer, and he wants the car for to-morrow morning, and I couldn't take any of the men off their jobs. It is good to see you. Have you seen the house?"

No. Casey had only shown her the garden.

After tea René took her over the house.

"It wants you," he said.

"I knew that. I sent in my resignation yesterday."

"When will you come?"

"In a month's time."

"Forever and ever?"

"It feels like that now."

"Yes. There doesn't seem to have been anything but you and I. You're a little slip of a woman to fill the whole world." And he lifted her clean off her feet. She lay back in his arms and her eyes closed, and he could feel her whole body surrender to his strength, her whole spirit come out to meet his in love.

IX

YOUNG LOVE DREAMING

EVERY year they visited Scotland and brought new stores of happiness to the dell where they had first discovered it. Always, René declared, through their joy there ran the song of the burn, and the wind in the trees, the beauty that had first awakened him. They made high holiday. Cathleen liked to stroll about the woods or lie in them with a book (she could hardly get him to read at all). He loved to wander over the moors alone or to go striding over the hills, and to come back to her in the evening. When they spent their days apart they would meet in the dell, and, as of old time, he would make a couch of bracken for her. And he would lie by her side and rejoice in her beauty, fondle her, praise her, tease her.

"I don't believe," he would say, "we shall ever be old."

"Not when you look at the children" (they had three) "and see how they grow?"

"Least of all then. I watch them and discover new worlds in them, and often through them I discover new wonders in you."

"Don't you know me by this time?"

"Every day I find you more astonishing and strange. Sometimes I come into your room in the morning and watch you sleeping, and I feel very lonely then. You are so remote. It is like waiting for the dawn. Then I see consciousness waking in you. Then your eyes open and you gaze innocently out upon the world. And you see me and are satisfied."

"And you?"

"I know that another day has come, another opportunity, a new turn in the adventure."

"Is it always an adventure?"

"Always. Unending desire."

"For me," she said, "it is peace and knowledge. It would be stifling if I had not you to kindle them."

René kissed her and laughed:

"The whole duty of man," he said, "to keep the flame alight in woman."

She became serious on that.

"It's true, René. You nearly let me wither away, and my life dwindle to ashes. I am often sick with fear when I think of it, how near I came to being one of your failures."

On such evenings they would talk until darkness crept into the woods, and they woke to their mysterious night life when their sweetest songs are sung, and they are filled with magic snares and lurking dangers and conflicts. Sweet comfort was it to be together then amid so much menace and alien power, and they would go warily hand in hand until they came within sight of the lights of the great house. Then they would almost run until they reached the open lawn where the free air would beat upon their faces.

"I always feel," René said once, "as though we had had a narrow escape."

"In the woods, do you mean, or in life?"

"Both."

"Escape from what, my dear?"

"I know," he said. "This is the truth of us. Escape from sleep and death."

Transcriber's Note

This transcription is based on images posted by the Internet Archive scanned from a copy made available by the University of California:

archive.org/details/youngearnestroma00canniala

The 1915 edition published by T. Fisher Unwin was used a secondary source, especially to check the hyphenation of compound words printed at the end of a line in the primary source. Images of this edition are available at:

catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100199704

The following changes were noted:

-- The name "René" is almost always printed in the source text with the acute over the second "e". The few cases where the name was printed as "Réne" have been changed for consistency.

-- p. 189: so that he could meet Casey."--Deleted the closing quotation mark at the end of the paragraph.

-- p. 209: Thrigby's changing, and things are queer all round.--Changed "Thrigby's" to "Thrigsby's".