Chapter II: Book ONE: Linda Brock (2)

"There's been a row. I've been howling all night. I can't write any more. They can't understand. Vulgar they call you, and they are furious with me. They read one of your letters, opened it if you please. Not fit for a young girl. I'm not to have a heart till I can captivate a rich man old or young, and I am never to have a mind. It's just beastly the things they say, but I can do nothing."

The other letter was from her mother:

"DEAR SIR,--I have read your last letter to my daughter. It is not fit reading for a young girl, or indeed for any pure woman. You will oblige me by not writing again, and I have forbidden my daughter to continue your acquaintance."

He passed both letters over to his mother.

"I told you it was hopeless."

"If you ask my opinion," replied his mother, "I should say you were well rid of her."

"But I can't help loving her."

Mrs. Fourmy sniffed indignantly:

"Love! Well, you can call it love if you like."

"I do," said he very earnestly.

On which his mother staggered him by saying:

"George wouldn't."

In spite of himself, and against the grain, René began to think a little enviously of his brother, master unperplexed of his own and another life.

IV

A RETURN

Why, among us a drowning man has to make for himself the very
straw he's to clutch at!

BOTH René and his mother were excited all day over their projected visit to a music-hall.

Thrigsby had ten of these places of amusement, and they found it hard to decide which to patronize. Only one was outside the possibility of choice, because it had performing seals in the bill, and Mrs. Fourmy could not bear to see animals on the stage. René was for the low comedians, his mother for music; and at last, in the program of one of the suburban halls, she found a musical turn which had once given her immense pleasure. She talked of it all afternoon, adding all the time so generously to its wonder that René began to fear she would be disappointed with the actuality. But her anticipation was so firm as to overbear any shortcomings in the performance, and she saw and heard only what she expected to see and hear. For René there was a very droll comedian who made him shout with laughter. Mrs. Fourmy was shocked at a joke at the expense of the Deity and those who go to heaven, but she was so delighted with her son's pleasure that she swallowed her distaste and laughed too. All the way home they recapitulated their moments of delight, and laughed and melted in remembrance.

It was a lovely evening, and they walked through a residential park, the roads of which were private and flanked and overhung with trees. Lovers lurked in the shadows, and their sweet murmuring could be heard. Mrs. Fourmy took her son's arm:

"You and an old woman like me."

"Won't it be lovely when we live in the country, mother?"

"Oh, but there won't be any music-halls."

"We won't need them in the country with the nights. You should have seen them in Scotland. I used to go into the woods, and sometimes up the hills."

"But with an old, old woman----"

"I won't let you be really old, mother. And up there I used to feel that I didn't really want anybody. That's queer, because I was in love--really, I was."

He began to tingle and burn at the thought of Cathleen and the absurd end of his hopes, and almost tearfully to realize that he was not yet out of love. That discomfort gave him a sense of gladness in his mother's company. It was wonderful the sweetness that had come into their life together, the peace of it and the hope.

He said:

"It won't be long before I can begin to make some money. I'm only waiting for Professor Smallman to come back. His letter was awfully kind. He says there will be no difficulty. I can get first-year pupils, and he can help me to find some journalistic work. Then when I've got my degree I'll get a post, and you won't have to take any more money from the rich Fourmys."

"It's only what helps you now. You don't seem to be a bit ambitious, René."

"Would you like me to be?"

"But you're so clever and everybody else is so stupid. It seems so funny of you to be so pleased with anything you can get."

"Funny?" He could hardly grasp what she meant. She went on:

"You're so good-looking, too. I shouldn't be surprised if you got on and married somebody who was--well, you know."

There was a strain of bitterness in his mother which could infuriate him. To-night he was so happy with her that it made him only sad, and he said gently:

"I don't think I'm the sort that gets on. I say things--in letters, you know."

"But I'd like to see you well off and married to some really nice girl."

"And I'd like to see the girl who could make me give up the idea of living in the country with you."

"I'll come and stay with you."

So they went on gently sparring, both clinging to their separate idylls of the future. They came out of the park into the streets of little shops and small houses like their own, and stopped presently at the German delicatessen store, where they argued as to what they should have for supper, ham or liver sausage. They compromised, and decided on both, with little Swiss cheeses and honey-cakes.

As they came out into Hog Lane West they were accosted by a man who asked René if he could tell him where Hog Lane West was, and which way he should turn to find 166.

"That's my house," said René.

The stranger moved closer to him and had a long look at him. René felt a tug at his arm, and turned to find his mother trembling against him.

"René! René! it's your father!"

"Is it you, Essie?" said the stranger, and he removed his hat.

"You--you---- I'm afraid," said René chokingly, "I'm afraid you'll find the door shut against you. I've--I've often thought what I should do if I set eyes on you again. That's what I shall do. I can't let you come."

"Essie," the stranger turned to Mrs. Fourmy, "I'm dead broke."

"You must come and tell us, but you mustn't stay. We've been out, René and I. We've got supper."

Her voice thinned away. She could speak no more. Her hand pressed René to move on, and they set out toward their house with the man following. René held the garden gate open, and stayed for a moment fumbling for his key. When he found it, his father and mother were standing silhouetted against the glass panel of the door. He let them in, and, obeying an obscure instinct that stirred in him, went upstairs to leave them alone together. Not for long. He found that in his confusion he had taken the viands with him. He gained a few moments in the kitchen preparing a tray (Polly was out for the evening and not yet returned), and then, with the dishes clattering as he walked, he rejoined them in the dining-room.

He had not consciously expected anything, but as he entered the dining-room he saw his father with his back turned to him at the corner cupboard with his hand on the key, his head cocked, his shoulders up, very like George, and it was as though he had foreseen it. It was uncanny and his heart ached in a sort of dread.

His mother's face was shining with a glowing excitement, and she looked away from him as she said:

"Your father wants us to let him stay for a little. There's George's room, you know, and I want him to."

René felt helpless. The emergency was too strong for him.

"All right," he said.

His father turned and smiled pleasantly.

"That's good of you--very good of you. I'd be in the cart without. I'm--well--I've been---- But we'll talk of that later."

"Talk!" murmured René, aghast. "Who would talk? Who could find anything to say?" Miserably he laid out the plates round the big hospitable table, so big, so hospitable, that it was out of place and forbidding.

Mr. Fourmy had already helped himself to whisky. (George always kept a bottle in the house in case he and Elsie should drop in of an evening.) They drew up to the table and went through a mockery of eating. The bread was bitter in René's mouth, and the dainties they had bought were tasteless. Mrs. Fourmy talked in a toneless twittering voice of the music-hall performance, while René stole glances at his father and avoided meeting his eyes. If he met his eyes he felt, in spite of himself, amused, charmed, tickled, somehow pleased, and with that pleasure was mixed a salt savor of pity, so that it was irresistible and led on wonderfully to a sure promise of adventure. René kept muttering to himself: "He's a bad man. A bad Fourmy, and you can't do worse than that." This memory he flung with a look at his mother, only to realize as he looked that she had no thought for him, but, like him, was stealing glances at his father and avoiding meeting the little keen humorous eyes. And his father went on eating hungrily and heartily. Half a loaf of bread he ate, and two-thirds of the ham and all the liver sausage. Then he looked wistfully at the honey-cakes, but desisted, produced a packet of cigarettes, and began to smoke.

"That's good," he said. "My first square meal since this morning. That's good, good."

He moved from the table into the big red velvet chair by the fire.

"Good, very good. And it's a real home-coming. After all, this isn't so very different from the old house."

"It's bigger," said René.

His father turned and scanned him.

"I can hardly realize you yet, young man. Can't allow for your growing up. Can only just trace the face I remember. Your nose has grown."

"You used to have a mustache."

"Yes. Shaved it off in America. Didn't like Roosevelt."

"Have you been to America?"

"Been the devil's own dance, up and down America, North and South, Philippines, Malay Settlement--that's Rangoon--China, back to America. Wonderful how you meet Thrigsby folk all over the world. Hundreds of young men everywhere who seem to have been at school with you and George. I've had enough. Want to settle down."

"Like George."

"Isn't George coming in?"

"He's married."

"The devil he is! And am I a grandfather? Lord! what a world it is for breeding! Think of me just fifty and a grandfather. What things do happen to a man, to be sure."

"If only you wouldn't talk," protested René in a sudden exasperation.

"To be sure," returned his father genially. "I'm the prodigal. Must give you time to take me in while we digest the fatted calf."

"It's not that!" René was swept by his indignation on to his feet. "It isn't that! Only I never thought of this. You come in, and you sit there in your old chair as though you'd only gone out yesterday. And it's over ten years, and I can hardly remember you, and I know all the time that you're my father, and--and--I don't know you. It's simply beastly. I don't know why it is, but it is."

"René! René!" cried his mother.

"Steady, old girl," said Mr. Fourmy, with an almost tender firmness. He turned quietly round in his chair until he was looking sideways up at René. "Look here, young man, it takes two to make a scene, and I won't have it. It's no good trying to make a scene simply because you expected to have one if ever I came back. I spanked you the day before I left for throwing a knife at your brother in one of your baresark fits, and for two pins I'd turn you up and spank you now."

Then René's memory played him a scurvy trick. "Boot or brush?" he asked himself, and a sick anger rose in him and hot tears welled into his eyes. He gasped and gurgled inarticulately, thinking he was making an appeal to his mother, but through his tears he seemed to see his father growing larger and larger, and in a gust of terror he lunged out of the room, seized his cap, and rushed from the house.

"It isn't fair! it isn't fair!" he moaned.

Other young men he knew had difficulties with their fathers, but to have a father suddenly materialize out of thin air and step back with exasperating ease into a relationship which a part of his family at least had forgotten, was too critical for the mind to bear. René had been priding himself on the fact that at last he was to be as other young men, a wage-earner, a reputable citizen, a prop to his mother, a credit to his family and his own aspirations. And here suddenly he was to begin all over again. His painful emotions were akin to those of a small boy on the arrival of a new baby in his home, or to those of a tit on finding a cuckoo's monstrous egg in its nest, and, being of a cultivated intelligence, he could not immediately and robustly draw on his instinct to adjust himself to the new circumstances.

He called on George. The Nest was in darkness. He went on hammering at the door until the window above it was thrown open.

"Who's there?" snarled George. "If it's the police, the window's left open for the cat, and I'm damned if I shut it."

"It's me--René!"

"What the hell do you want at this time of night?"

"I must see you. Something has happened."

"What?"

"Come down and let me in."

He was filled with a cold and shuddering feeling of being ridiculous as he waited. He wanted to run away, but that would have been even more absurd. The chain of the door rattled, the bolts rapped back, and George said:

"Come in. You've wakened Elsie, and she's not at all well."

"But I wanted to see you. Father's come back."

"What?"

"Father's come back."

"Mother all right?"

"She seems quite pleased."

"Then there's nothing more to be said. If you don't like him, tell him he's got to pay the rent. That'll clear him out fast enough. Good night."

George seized René by the arm, lifted him through the door on to the step, closed the door, shot the bolts and the chain. In his astonishment René found himself nearly back at 166 before he could realize the outrage that had been done to his feelings. He had wanted to tell George that the atmosphere of the house was just horrible, and George had never thought of that.

166 was in darkness too. How grim these little houses were in the darkness! How they invited violence and the wickedness of the night! How derelict they seemed! How fit for the harboring of wandering, evil men! Now he thought of his father as evil, a shadow come to obliterate the brightness that had grown and filled the house since George's departure.

He let himself in, saw that all the lights were out downstairs, the large coals taken from the dining-room fire, the windows and doors fastened. Then he crept upstairs on tiptoe in his stockinged feet and groped fearfully toward his mother's door, half dreading some awful discovery. He could hear no sound. As he passed George's room there came out of it his father's rich, familiar snore.

V

SETTLING DOWN

O the mad days that I have spent! and to see how many of mine old
acquaintances are dead!

PROFESSOR SMALLMAN had been lent by his university to deliver a series of lectures in America, and some weeks of the term would pass before his return. René, therefore, had no escape from his father. Breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, he was there all the time on his best behavior, though with a naughty malice stirring in him and peeping out of his eyes. He ate--how he ate! Hardly a meal left remnants enough to provide for the next, and butcher's meat, which before had only been got every third day, was now brought to the house every morning. In an access of filial devotion, René had undertaken to relieve his mother of household accounts, always a plague to her, and the little blood-stained butcher's bills alarmed him by their number and the amount of money they represented. He hardly spoke to his father, avoided him, shut himself up in his bedroom, and there realized horribly that he was also avoiding his mother, that she made no protest, not even by glance or gesture, and that they were making him feel the intruder. The change in his mother was amazing. She was three times as active, and was often for hours together without her crochet-work. She, who was accustomed for days never to leave the house, now went out every afternoon with her husband to walk in Potter's Park, or in the evening to visit the streets where they had lived, and to seek out old acquaintances. When her son was present she was discreet, and prattled reminiscently of people he had never known, or remembered only as names and remote presences. But often when he was in his room, he would hear them below talking excitedly, and his mother laughing or protesting. And he came to think of them as "they," and they seemed to have so little they cared to or could share with him.

One black night he had when, after coming in late in the afternoon, he found his mother unaided moving the heavy iron bedstead and wire mattress from George's room to her own. He gulped down his dismay, and stood on the stairs watching her. She had not heard him, and went on until suddenly she caught sight of him and jumped.

"Oh!"

"Shall I help you?"

"_It is_--too heavy for me."

"Where is--he?"

"He went out. He thought he saw old Mr. Timperley in Derby Street to-day. Of course you don't remember Mr. Timperley."

"In your room?"

She hesitated:

"We--we sold the old bed, you know."

He helped her without another word. Together in silence they put George's bed up alongside her own, and in silence when it was done René left her. He went to his room and sat, staring unseeing at the five privet bushes and the old bicycle shed.

Presently she came to him and sat on his bed, and gazed at him like a mournful, shy little bird.

"You mustn't make it hard for us, René."

"I--I thought I was making it easy."

"His brothers won't see him."

"Why not?"

"They won't. They're hard people, the Fourmys. They can't forget the past. They say they won't help me any more if I let him stay, and not a penny will they leave me."

"You'll let him stay?"

"He knows it was cruel of him to leave as--as he did. But he had a lot to bear, really he did, René. He was very proud. It's his pride has been against him always, René."

"What did he do else?"

"Nothing very much. Only people talked. And he didn't get on. That was his pride too. You can do anything if only you get on. He never could work for other people. He was a clever man too. You get your cleverness from him. I'm sure it's not from me. He was always trying different things, but he couldn't get on. He did some silly things too."

"You won't tell me, then?"

"I have told you."

"What's he going to do? Go on eating and eating?"

"He'll look for work. Of course, at his age, it won't be easy."

"What's he been doing all this time?"

"He's been rich and lost it all again. He came back to England with quite a lot of money."

"He didn't think of you then."

"He lost it nearly all. Do be nice to him, René! He thinks such a lot of you. George is quite nice, and Elsie loves him already, but he thinks most of you. I've been telling him how wonderful you've been, and he says nothing must interfere with your career."

"But someone must make money."

"Only for a little. He says we could make much more with my money if it were re-invested."

René swung round.

"He's not to touch that, do you hear? You're a soft fool, mother. He's not to touch that. I'll work myself to the bone first."

"That's dear of you, René. And you will be nice to him, won't you?"

"All right, all right."

She kissed him and flitted away, and presently, to the devastation of his attempts to adopt what he considered a worldly and wise point of view of the matter, he heard her singing in her room. A loathing and disgust rushed through him. Men and women! Men and women! It was George all over again, quintessence of George, here on the very fringes of his being. No escape from it! In the little house, all but the tiniest noises could be heard from end to end of it.

His father came home late that night. He hummed as he groped upstairs and fumbled his way along the passage to the front room. The full hours of the night in towns, where huddled creatures live, poured in upon René as he lay in sleeplessness, staring, staring at the never-darkened sky.

From this torment to escape he could find no other solace than the attempt to be "nice" to his father. It was forced on him, and after the first plunge he found it not so very difficult, and there was some reward in his mother's anxious satisfaction. Both men played up to keep things lively for the woman, and the elder set himself almost desperately to make the younger laugh. At first when they were alone together Mr. Fourmy made the mistake of trying droll stories spiced and hot on his son, but he was met with a stare so blank and uncomprehending, so freezing, that he never tried them again. Then, more successfully, he drew on his own reminiscences, and practiced his not inconsiderable talent for caricature and exaggerated mimicry upon the odd characters he had known and the members of his own family. This met with encouragement from René, who was interested. From his father's chuckling monologue he learned that the Fourmys were the oddest family that ever was--Scotch, French, Dutch, Jewish, reg'lar English, in fact; Nonconformist for generations; clever, close, proud, hard, acquisitive, narrow, pious, with occasional outcrops of wickedness to leaven the lump; shy, harsh, undemonstrative; loathing any kind of excess; clinging to the middle way, bound never to rise above respectable mediocrity; dreading anything so conspicuous as eminence; never reaching to any higher public office than a District Council or a Board of Guardians.

"Two of my brothers are Guardians," said Mr. Fourmy, "and they could predict no worse for me than that I should come to the workhouse. They know well enough that no Fourmy could ever get to prison. We can't be bad enough."

"Where did we come from?" asked René.

"Scotland, but that's a long time ago. Your great-aunt Janet's father started a tannery somewhere near Lancaster. That would be somewhere about the time of Napoleon. At least, I remember reading a little book the old gentleman wrote about a tour he made in France and Germany when the Continent was opened up after Elba and all that."

"But why are we fixed here?"

"Don't your big books tell you that?"

For once in a way René saw that his father was twitting him.

"Big books don't account for humble folk like us."

"The biggest books do, my boy." And to René's surprise and delight his father raised his voice and trolled out some verses that excited and exalted him. They were all about joy and freedom and the awfulness of losing them, but no single phrase bit into his mind to take possession of it.

"Yes," he said, "yes."

"Pooh!" said his father. "If we understood that we'd none of us be here, neither rich nor poor. We get a little excited about it, at least you and I do, but we can't go any further--not far enough into our own minds, I mean--and we are left weaker for the attack of all the things that drag us down and bind us fast. A little squeeze for bread and butter, and we say it doesn't matter, but may come all in good time. I used to be rather good at poetry, could remember anything I read or heard. Can't do that now. I used to love it. The Fourmys hate it. Lord! when I had my last row with my father, when he had said his say, I let fly at him with a page and a half of Milton and wound up with Shakespeare--you know: 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds----'"

"I know," said René, though he had never read the Sonnets.

"Lord! I was a young man, I was, and I went on being young for a surprisingly long time. It seemed there wasn't anything in the world could take it from me. But it came to an end at last. How you do make me talk, to be sure! I wish you'd tell me about yourself."

That shut René up completely. There was nothing to tell, nothing that would not dwindle and shrivel up in the telling. There was such mockery in this disturbing father of his that his timid little emotions, his shy desire to think well of him, to like him, to set what he found in him against what he knew and had heard, hid away, curled up in his mind and created a horrid congestion. But his father had a certain fascination for him, and it was a relief to get him to talk. He never did learn why the Fourmys, rich and poor, were fixed where they were in the middle-class of Thrigsby, but he did get flashes and sparks which promised elucidation, and he did begin to discover that there were worlds on worlds outside, and minds which were not afraid of thought and not wholly set on money and the good opinion of others. It was a painful mystery to him that his father's mind should lead him on so far, give him a shining promise of beauty--though beauty was the very last word that in his shyness of himself he would have used--and then by a cruel sleight of hand present him only with caricatures of Fourmys and neighbors and George.

Mr. Fourmy on his elder son is worth quoting. He said:

"George is a reg'lar Fourmy, a thorough Unitarian. They want one God. George desires to live in the worship of the one flesh."

He seemed to like George, was often at The Nest, and when George and Elsie came to them there was tapped in the queer man a vein of ribaldry which made René, even as he laughed, blush that such things could be said before a woman.

George said of his father:

"He's a funny damned old rotter, but you can't help liking him."

René had to admit that, but the increase in the weekly bills gave him many a sick moment, and though his father spent many hours away from home, there was never any talk of his finding work. Very quickly the household absorbed its new inmate and adjusted its habits, so far as was necessary, to his. Mr. Fourmy bought paints and brushes, and with these he would amuse himself all day. At half-past eight in the evening he would disappear, and often not return until the small hours of the morning. He never asked for money, and seemed always able to procure anything he wanted.

VI

PROFESSOR SMALLMAN

As the reader's curiosity (if he hath any) must be now awake, and
hungry, we shall provide to feed it as fast as we can.

EXCEPT for Mrs. Fourmy few letters came to 166, and it was a great excitement for René when, a few weeks before the end of term, he came down in the morning to find a parcel waiting for him on the breakfast table. His father and mother watched him eagerly as he opened it, to find two large brown volumes, a German economic treatise translated by a Scots professor. A printed slip headed _Thrigsby Post_ requested Mr. Fourmy to send a review not exceeding four hundred words in length within a week. Pride and elation moved René. His cheeks glowed, his eyes shone, he caressed the covers of the books, took them up, and turned over the leaves. It was the first sign of recognition from the world outside school and university.

"Professor Smallman said he would get me some reviewing." René could only speak in gasps. He could not take his eyes off the books, and when his father reached out his hand for them, his impulse was to hug them and keep them from him. "He said he thought he could get me some. But I never thought of the _Post_. It's such a good paper."

"It's Liberal, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fourmy.

"Yes. But of course I shouldn't have anything to do with that side of it." René had always been given to understand that he was a Conservative, and that only chapel people were Liberals.

He ate very little breakfast, and immediately afterward rushed upstairs, made his bed, and lay on it gloating over the precious books, picking up first one volume and then the other, hardly reading them, and beginning already to compose his review based on Professor Smallman's dislike of the translator. Then he began to wonder how much he would be paid for it--one, two, four, five guineas. The editor of the _Post_ was a very rich man. Would they print his name? Presently his happiness was so intense that he could not bear not to share it, and he went downstairs. His mother had gone out. His father was in the dining-room painting. He had the lid of a cigar box and was covering it with a copy of a nude reproduced in some magazine from a picture in the Paris Salon of that year. René watched him. He worked with minute strokes of the brush, caressingly, carefully. Already he had painted several copies of the same picture.

"Why do you always paint the same thing?" asked René.

"Nothing else worth painting." Mr. Fourmy stopped, looked up at his son, winked, and hissed like a goose in a peculiar mocking laughter he affected when he was most roguish. "She's a beauty, this one. Like to have seen the original. Women. Not much else men care about, as you'll find presently. I can sell as many of these as I care to paint. I'm going to do her smaller though, so's she can be carried in the waistcoat pocket or a letter-case. I've got a watchmaker's glass, so's I can see what I'm doing with the brush." And he took out the glass and screwed it into his eye and looked chuckling up at René. He was absurdly, childishly pleased with himself.

"Does mother know?" asked René, all his elation oozing away.

"She don't know I sell 'em. I didn't know I could myself. Never saw what's been under my nose all my life. But he's a clever man, is your father, much too clever to be a burden on his wife and family. Knock him down one day and he's up the next."

René said heavily:

"It's like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs and the dirty books."

Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily:

"This, my boy, is art, hand-painted in oils. Put a gilt frame round it and it's quite respectable. These swine think art is a bawdy thing."

"Where do you sell them? To a shop?"

"No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and chapelgoers."

René sat dejectedly looking into the fire. At last he said:

"I wish you hadn't told me. It doesn't seem worth while doing anything."

He went back to his room, but his joy in the books had filtered away. To read through them was a heavy task which had become to him nothing but the commercial traffic of his time, knowledge, and brains for money. He had no motive for doing it but the cold necessity of somehow making a living. All day long he read and read until his eyes ached, and he sat far into the night writing and rewriting until he had produced four hundred words that looked like the sort of stuff he read in the literary columns of the newspapers.

A depressed mood of appalling skepticism seized him. His father and mother, his brother and sister-in-law, these were his world, and they were contented with a monotonous small happiness, and he was the fool to look for more. Ah! but the days in Scotland, the graciousness and the fun that those other people knew; the sweetness of waiting upon Cathleen's coming; her coming, the hours of tenderness and pure laughter, and her warm comradeship and the zest of the emotions they could rouse in each other and turn to a golden glee! But that was all done, and there was now only poverty and disgrace, and beyond, the sniggering of the men who loved nothing but women and the idea of women.

He kept back his review for three days, being fearful lest the editor should think him careless or over-eager, and he rather prided himself on his cunning in doing so. It was his first attempt to manipulate the impression he might make, and the illusion of subtle activity it brought gave him some solace in his misery.

Other books came from the _Post_, and he wrote to thank Professor Smallman, who invited him to lunch on Sunday.

He had been twice before to the Professor's house, to the garden party which he gave annually to work off the social obligations incurred during the academic year. For Thrigsby he had a very good garden, and an old house in a neighborhood which still bore some traces of a rural character, though the regiments of little pink brick houses were bearing down on it with an alarming swiftness. His garden contained three plum trees and a pear tree, gooseberry and currant bushes, and raspberry canes.

Mrs. Fourmy had thought the Smallmans must be what she called "grand people," since they had lunch instead of dinner; but Mr. Fourmy remembered a Mr. Smallman who used to live in Kite Street and had two sons, of whom this might very well be one--a good-looking boy, neat and solemn, just a little too neat and obliging, always opening gates for old ladies and picking up handkerchiefs dropped by old gentlemen--that sort of boy. "Would call me 'Sir' the only time I ever spoke to him. I'll be bound that's the one."

It helped René a little to know for certain that the Professor had once been a boy, but Mrs. Smallman he remembered as a lady of a gentleness and kindness almost terrifying, so kind that she had a way of not seeming to hear you when you were stuttering out some preposterously foolish remark. Everything was so easy for her; she was so sure of the strength of her position as a good hostess and the wife of a popular and important man; and there were the children, who were allowed to look down from the nursery window at the garden party. You could not talk to Mrs. Smallman long without having your eyes drawn to them, and then, if you were a sensitive person like René, you felt that this house was full of an intimacy jealous of its beauty, so that it repelled strangers. Friendliness there was, but it ended abruptly; the wife's eyes lighting on the husband, the husband's on the wife, or the eyes of both meeting and turning to the children at the window could bring it to a cruel and sudden close.

René could not explain to himself the uneasiness that came over him at the garden parties, or the dread of it that overwhelmed him as he pushed open the gate and rang the bell on that Sunday.

There was a bright green parasol in the hall table, and by it were two bowler hats. From the drawing-room came a faint buzz of chatter, and he saw that it contained the Professor and his wife; Blease, the Jewish Professor of English; M'Elroy, the great man of the University, captain of the cricket eleven, President of the Union--it would take a page to enumerate his distinctions; a little man who looked like an unsuccessful attempt to repeat the Professor; and a young lady in a bright green costume. René observed at once that the other men were wearing black boots, and became dreadfully conscious of his own new brown pair.

"I'm so glad you could come," said Mrs. Smallman, and she introduced him to Blease.

"Seen you about," said the Jew. "Third-year man, aren't you?"

"Just beginning my third year," said René miserably.

Blease had made his remark sound friendly, and acute. Rather clever of a Professor to be able to place a man outside his own subject!

"We stand for something, you know," continued Blease. "Culture! A handful of men upholding the standard. Good for us to be kept in touch with working life. Don't you think so, M'Elroy?"

"Yes. That's where we score over Oxford and Cambridge, though they can never understand that."

Their talk was above René. He remembered Cambridge as a place of enthralling beauty, but to compare this and that was rather too sweeping for him, and he found it baffling, and to regard himself as standing for anything was entirely foreign to his temper. The talk shot to and fro above him, and he found his eyes being engaged by the bright green. The young lady was sparkling, easy, gay, a little figure of energy and charm.

"She is beautiful," said René to himself.

Then he decided that she was not beautiful. She turned her face into another light, and beauty came into it again; another turn and it vanished. A will-o'-the-wisp, the hunting of which became an absorbing pursuit.

At lunch René sat opposite her, and hardly ever took his eyes from her face. Only when he seemed in danger of meeting her gaze did he turn away. Once he met her eyes and she smiled, seemed to be considering him gravely and very seriously in the depths of her mind, then dismissed him.

"She _is_ beautiful," thought he, and from that moment she had his homage.

Presently she appealed to him:

"Mr. M'Elroy won't have it that Thrigsby is better than London. What do you say?"

"I've never been to London," replied René.

"Don't you love Thrigsby?"

"It's been my home always. I don't know that I ever thought about it."

M'Elroy said:

"One thinks about everything nowadays."

Something in the young man's tone roused René to protest.

"Oh no . . . lots of things one does without . . ." But he swallowed the rest. A sudden flow and ebb of emotion had left him speechless, and he felt utterly foreign to the company and to the charmed atmosphere of the household. Mrs. Smallman talked to him for a little, but he felt that she was speaking through him at her husband, so that he could not keep his face toward her, but was constantly turning toward the Professor as though the reply were to come from him, or would at any rate be worthless without his indorsement. And always the Professor smiled with a vague friendliness that was disconcerting.

After the meal he was taken to the study, a long room with books all round the walls, ponderous books, blue books, year after year of reports of learned institutions; reproductions of Italian pictures; photographs of Mrs. Smallman on the mantelpiece, a photograph of Mrs. Smallman on the desk. René was given a large chair and a small cigar, which he began to smoke before he realized what he was doing. He rarely smoked, did not care for it, and presently he dropped the cigar into the fireplace. The Professor stood looking out of the window. Two of the children were playing under the plum-tree. The feeling of being thrust out assailed René. The Professor turned:

"Well?" he asked. "What's the trouble?"

"My father----" began René.

"Ah! Well?"

"He deserted my mother a long time ago. He came back. My brother's married."

"I see. So you're the only possible breadwinner. Any work in your father? How old is he?"

"I don't know how old he is. But work? No."

"It's bad luck, but it often happens. I've had to keep my father since he was fifty. What about your family? The name's well known in Thrigsby."

So Professor Smallman was the boy his father remembered! René gained confidence. It was something to know that his experience was not singular.

"They did help until my father came back. They won't now, and I don't want them to. They don't understand the pain of receiving charity uncharitably given. They call it ingratitude."

"They have their point of view."

"So have I mine," said René, astonished at his own boldness.

"Your work's good," said the Professor. "Tweeddale's reports of you were always excellent. As you know, I don't come in touch with men until their third year, and then only if they're good. You can take that from me. I must tell you--it wouldn't be fair not to--that one doesn't know in the least how good you are going to be. One has an uncertainty about you. In a way, that's all to the good. I like what you've written for the _Post_. So does Pigott the editor. What about journalism? Do you write easily?"

"No."

"It rather scotches that, then. Pupils? You could make a little that way, but it's drudging work when you're reading as well. I could give you two first-year men, pretty bad, both of them, and Miss Brock, the girl you met at lunch, has a young brother who can't get through the matric. That's as much as you could manage."

René had no notion how much he ought to be paid. He asked, and when he heard the amount his heart overflowed with gratitude, and he walked home with a new vigor in his stride and a prouder carriage of his head. His father and mother were out. His news would not keep, and he went round to George, first changing his brown boots for black. He reckoned that in three terms he would be able to make nearly as much as his brother's whole income, and would have the vacations to repair any damage done to his own work. Then he would take his degree, and the whole world, all life, would open up before him.

VII

FLYING NEAR THE CANDLE

A man's heart may minister comfort to him in the hopes of that
thing for which he yet has no ground to hope.

THE Brocks lived in Galt's Park, an elegant district shut off from the rest of Thrigsby by gates and unoccupied lodges. Here, in ease and amid gardens, dwelt families of an old-established prosperity, many Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, and some of the descendants of Thrigsby's famous men. Here also were the two hostels of the university, some schools, one co-educational seminary, the house of a painter with a great local fame, and that of the municipal organist. Good men had lived in Galt's Park, and it had once been the center of Thrigsbeian culture; but now all those who dwell in it have the air of having been left behind, and the little pink houses are menacing it, even as they menace the garden of Professor Smallman.

Through the winter René Fourmy came twice a week to coach young Kurt Brock in mathematics and French. Occasionally he was asked to stay to lunch, and then he was too sore from the discomfort of Mrs. Brock's broken English--she was a German from Hamburg--to be able to support Miss Brock, Linda, in her efforts to make conversation. Also he was engrossed in the problem first presented to him on his original meeting with her: Was she, was she not, beautiful? Sometimes for a fortnight he would decide that she was so, and then his heart would go out to her in homage, an impersonal emotion bestowed on her as though she were a tree or a sunset. That she might be intelligent interested him not at all. Except in the case of Cathleen Bentley, where he had been surprised into an intimacy, refined and diluted with adoration, he had regarded women as existing only to receive in ignorance his shy homage.

As with the Smallmans, so here he had to give his mother a detailed report of the household and its manner of living. To her they also were "grand," and she never tired of listening to the tale of their doings, their servants, what they had to eat and drink, what they sat on, what they wore, and whom they entertained. He reported faithfully--the rings on Mrs. Brock's fingers, her richly-clad inelegant figure, her dog-like eyes that could never smile, her enormous appetite--whereon Mrs. Fourmy would sigh and say:

"I never was a big eater myself."

Kurt, the boy, René liked, for he was so thoroughly convinced of his own stupidity that it was impossible to teach him anything. German only in name, he was English and Thrigsbeian in everything else, and René felt almost that he belonged to an older generation when he discovered that Kurt could not remember the horse-trams in the Derby Road, or a time when there were no motor-cars. Kurt possessed a motorcycle, or it possessed him, so that almost everything else in his eyes was "bally rot." He excepted music, which, with his family, he loved German-fashion, greedily and indiscriminately. His attitude toward his sister was that of one who knows so much that he has nothing left to hope. Against his mother and sister he used to protest to René, whom he thought of as a "poor beggar" but a "good enough sort." René never saw it, but often Kurt would outmaneuver Linda in her attempts to waylay his tutor, and once he went so far as to mumble this warning:

"What I can't stand about women is the way they go nosing round."

"Do they?" asked René, looking up from _Hall and Knight_.

"My sister does. She wants to know how a man works. She's like me with a motor. Haven't you got sisters?"

"No. I wish I had."

"I don't know. Having a sister like Lin is enough to put a man off women for life."

"She has always been very charming to me."

Kurt snorted.

Another day he growled out:

"Linda says you are like Schiller. You'd better look out. She said the last young feller was like Mozart."

"I've never seen a picture of Mozart," replied René.

"Silly sort of face."

That very day Linda outmaneuvered Kurt. As a rule he walked with René to the gates of Galt's Park, but now, believing his sister to be safely out of the way, and also wishing to change the tire of his motorcycle, he let René depart alone, and René was not gone above a hundred yards when he encountered Linda. He bowed, removed his hat, and was for making on, when she stopped.

"I'm glad to meet you," she said, with such a smile that René felt once and for all that she was beautiful, and was so confused by his own enthusiasm that he did not take the hand she proffered, and put her to the awkwardness of withdrawing it.

"I--I----" He looked desperately up and down the road, but could find no topic, and ended lamely by saying:

"I--I like your brother."

"Oh! Kurt! But I am glad to have met you. I hoped you would be at the Smallmans last Sunday. I was so disappointed." Her voice too was beautiful in its friendly, emphatic cadences.

"I--I wasn't asked."

"Oh, you aren't _asked_. You go. Everybody goes."

(He had never been able to identify himself with everybody, or to take everybody's doing for a reason for his own.)

She went on:

"I wanted to ask you if you would care to come and hear me play at the Goetheverein--that's the German club--next Wednesday. It's a good program; Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms. You'll love Beethoven."

"My mother plays, but her piano has yellow keys, and the music is faded like the keys."

"It must be beautiful to understand your mother. Professor Smallman has told me all about you, and I do hope you'll come."

"I'd like to come."

"That's settled then. We have supper at the Verein, and I'll introduce you to some people you'll like to know. It's nice to know your friends' friends, don't you think?"

René felt vaguely uneasy.

"Friends' friends," he repeated almost interrogatively.

"Friends," said Miss Brock, "are those whom you have always known you would meet." This she said with a kind of recklessness that was almost exaltation. It certainly startled René into something like emotion, into the desire to respond. For the first time during their conversation his eyes met hers full, and he was confronted with a smile so charmingly inquisitive that he was compelled to satisfy their curiosity and he jerked out:

"Yes. Friends."

And it seemed to him that she had given and he had accepted--something. Gift and acceptance were so surreptitious that the nature of them was a matter of almost complete indifference. The great thing was the giving and the accepting, and the excitement of the transaction drowned the little emotion that had stirred in him. One more glance he stole at her, and he saw that she was satisfied, that their conversation was at an end. Yet neither could end it, and it was a relief to both when Kurt came hooting and snorting by on his motorcycle.

"Till Wednesday then," said Miss Brock.

"You--you didn't say what time."

"Oh! Eight o'clock. But you might like to come with us--call for us at half-past seven. I wish you could speak German."

"I do a little."

"Mother will like that. Good-by."

She turned and walked away. René stood rooted to the ground. At his feet he saw her handkerchief. He stooped and picked it up. He dared not run after her. He pressed the handkerchief to his lips, then angrily squeezed it up into a ball and thrust it into his trousers pocket. This done, he shook himself, threw back his head, and strode vigorously homeward. He said to himself:

"I'm damned if I read love poems to her."

He had arrived at the conclusion that but for the love poems things would never have got so maddeningly out of hand with that other maiden in Scotland.

He added:

"But she really is beautiful."

Reading a book at supper that night, he knocked a glass of beer over onto his trousers, fumbled for his handkerchief, found Linda's, mopped up the beer with it, and gave it to his mother to be washed. She washed it with her own hands that night, ironed it, and placed it on his dressing-table so that next morning he was confronted by the embroidered name--Linda.

On the Wednesday evening he clad himself in his best black coat, the same he had had since he was seventeen, put on a white dicky and cuffs, and punctually at 7:30 stood between the stucco pillars on either side of the Brocks' front door. The family was waiting for him in the hall. The women were muffled up in veils, and Kurt was wearing a very smart overcoat and new patent-leather boots. Behind Kurt in the darkness--for the hall was lit only by one flickering gas-jet in a ground-glass globe--stood another male figure. This advanced into the light and was revealed as M'Elroy.

"You know each other," said Linda.

Kurt cut in with:

"Of course, and Fourmy thinks he is so like Mozart."

René felt a pang of uneasiness. He turned to Linda to find her eyes resting now on M'Elroy, now on himself, with quick little darting glances that seemed to take in every detail. It exasperated him to be pitted against M'Elroy, but, the rivalry having been introduced, though unsought by himself, he rose to it, and so, he felt, did M'Elroy. By way of protest René moved nearer to Mrs. Brock, who was sitting on the bottom stair.

"Gut Abend!" he said. "Ich bin----"

"Na, Sie sprechen Deutsch? So ist's gut. Ist mir sehr lieb Deutsch zu hören."

"Aber nicht----"

"Sie sprechen sehr gut. Mein Sohn wird nie Deutsch sprechen. Im Goetheverein aber, wo man so schöne Musik----"