Chapter VIII: Book TWO: Ann Pidduck (3)

Sometimes he would give the coppers wrapped up in old ballads telling of murders and hangings, shipwrecks, battles, national events, some in print, some in writing, all dirty. In this way René became possessed of an ode to the Albert Memorial:

Proud monument, thou Christmas cake in stone!
The thing thou meanest never yet has grown
In English soil, a virtue not content
To be its own reward, a virtue bent
On cheating life of man and man of life.
We English have rejoicèd in the strife
Of being, till that virtue chilled our blood
And had us hypnotized and nipped in bud
Our aspiration. We of Shakespeare's line
Had in our living made our life divine
Till, as we grew accustomed to look at you,
We worshiped man transformed into a statue.

This poem was written on the inside of a grocer's bag, and when it was handed to René it contained threepence. It was signed Jethro Lunt, and dated April 4, 1887.

One day Old Lunt extended his usual observations, and ended by asking morosely:

"Did you--did you read my poems?"

"Why, yes," answered René, "all of them."

"Have you really now? No one has read my poems for thirty years. It's only the old ballads I sell now, and them not often. The newspapers do all the murders and hangings. Till the halfpenny newspapers came in, I could sell a murder or two in certain streets. I had one about Charley Peace:

Charles Peace, he played the violin.
Music excited him to sin
Like drink with other men.

Maybe you never heard that?"

"No. I never heard that."

"No. I thought you wouldn't have. You'd hardly be born then. Hard it is to remember that there are some so young they might almost have been born into another world."

He fumbled about in the tails of his coat, humming and crooning to himself, and presently he produced a litter of papers and held them out diffidently, and so shyly that he turned his head away as René put out his hand for them.

"There's forty years' work there," he said. "Forty years. I was thirty-five when I began it, thirty-five, and hopeful, and I finished it five years ago. I wanted to know if you think there's any chance of its being published in a book. I'd like to leave a book behind me. I've been forgotten. I'd like someone to be reminded of me. I've been mortally afraid of the young ones till you. There's something lucky about your face, something that shines in it. There was many faces like yours in my young days, but there was no golden statue in the Gardens then, and this must have been meadows down to the river side."

He pressed his lips together and mumbled. René asked him if he could do with a shilling, but he refused, seemed so hurt that he shriveled and went away.

René kept the manuscript and read it during his off hours on the stands. It began nobly on foolscap, in a bold, spiky hand, and ended pitifully on old envelopes and leaves torn out of penny account books or yellowing sheets from ancient volumes. Thirty lines were written on the back of the title page of a copy of _The City of Dreadful Night_. It was some time before he could find his way through the manuscript. The sheets were not numbered, and they were in no sort of order. Slowly he pieced the poem together, and perceived that it was an epic in ten cantos, blank verse varied with odes. It was called _Lucifer on Earth, or the Rise and Fall of British Industry_, and it was many days before its first reader could make anything out of its confusion. The Gods change: it is difficult to make anything in this century of the God of 1860. Clearly Jethro Lunt hated that God. In fierce rhetoric he denounced His claim to omnipotence, but where exactly his grievance lay, it was impossible to discover. Lucifer in the poem struggled out of Hell, and, catching the Almighty in a moment of boredom, unseated Him and sent Him down to the Infernal Regions for a space to see how He would do there, and afterward, in his spleen, commanded Him to dwell on earth. So God arrived one day in a village in Derbyshire, and, acting upon the commercial principles always employed in his dealings with man, got the inhabitants to apply the mental processes till then only used in the practice of religion, to their everyday life. Then the community became possessed of a horrid energy, set love of gain above love of life, and soon the old, quiet society of squire, farmer, and laborer was broken up, mills were built in the village, their great stacks belched forth smoke over the hills so that the heather was dirty to lie upon; the women left their homes to work in the mills, and children were taken to help them. And wherever God went, the same thing happened.

Meanwhile Lucifer was enraged to find that he was not worshiped as he had hoped. The churches also had gone into business. In Hell he had taken some pleasure in the sins of the flesh, but these had now become so mean, so grubby, and so stealthy that his proud spirit was revolted by them, and he said that if men liked to fritter away their substance in such trumpery they might do so for all he cared, and to occupy himself, he began to investigate the divine power which sustained Heaven and Earth. Then he perceived that God had usurped this power and abused it. He set himself to master it, and when he had done so, waited until men's love of gain had brought them to an intolerable strain so that they must release the spirit in themselves or perish. Then he went down upon the earth and engaged God in mortal combat so that they both perished, and man was left alone to work out his own salvation, for to such desperate issue had God brought them in His mischief. Upon the earth there were singers born of sorrowful women left in anguish by the evils of war and peace, not knowing which was the worse. Slowly their songs came to the ears of men, and then in fierce conflict they wrought upon God's perdition until they had made it shine in the likeness of beauty.

That, so far as René could make out, was the outline of Old Lunt's poem. Interspersed were odes in condemnation of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Tennyson, Gladstone, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Augustus Harris, Bulwer Lytton, and Thackeray; in praise of Beaconsfield, George Meredith, Charles Darwin, Cobden, Bradlaugh, General Booth, and Charles Stewart Parnell.

No critic of verse, René was unable to judge of the work's poetic merit, though he had a shrewd idea that it was small. Historically, it was very valuable to him. The picture was horrible, of an England dotted with communities screwed up in their own vileness, of an energy turned in upon itself, desperately striving to satisfy a demand itself had created. The tension must have been terrific, and the most pitiful part of the poem was its revelation of the author's gradual yielding to it, the slow ruin of his hopes, the growing repulsion from a world in which he refused to live except upon his own terms. It was possible to mark the exact moment of his plunge into despair, for two-thirds of the way through he suddenly dropped from verse (growing more and more halting) into prose:

"Art is a world of beauty where there is a logic not of this world, but until I have seen beauty here how can I hope to reach it? I must have wings, and if my soul can find neither love nor friendship, how can it ever be fledged for flight? Hatred? That would be something. I cannot hate mediocrity. I can only let it wither me."

And he let himself be withered, though in that agony there were moments when the words poured melodiously from his brain.

The last sheet was terrible. It contained only a brief description of his room, the grubby ceiling, the sacks on which he lay, the peeling paper on the walls, the cracked window stuffed with rags.

"I lick my lips," he wrote in a savage scrawl. "Bitter!" Then he had made a blot thus:

[Image: A black circle approximately 5 mm in diameter]

and against it he had written: "My world."

Twice after René had read the manuscript did Old Lunt appear in the yard, but he crept away as soon as there seemed any danger of his being accosted. And then he did not come again.

A busy time followed, and he was forgotten except that, to please him, René had ordered a typewritten copy of the poem to be made--that being the nearest possible approach to the book of his desire. This copy came home at last. Ann was asked to bind it, and did so neatly with the green cloth she had for flower stalks. Then, a night or two later, it was taken to Kilner, for him to decorate the cover. He had been told of it, tried to read it, but could not. However, he designed a decoration for the cover and printed the title and the author's name in bold letters, and beneath each he placed a blot. That part of the manuscript appealed to him more than all the rest.

"That," he said, "is what the world is to all your comfortable people, behind the charm and excitement with which they cover and disguise it. The only difference between them and your old man is that he fought to get some light on it and lost. I would rather be he than they. He does take his world with him; theirs they leave behind, caught in the meshes of their factitious morals and conventions."

"But," said René, "isn't he leaving his world all written out?"

"No, the tale of how he sank beneath its weight. It is true enough, anyhow, to have stirred you into a desire to give him pleasure. He has roused you exactly as I have been trying to do these last months."

"That's true. I do keep trying to get light on that little black world, but I say to myself that after all the sun's light is quite enough."

"It's enough for beasts and trees. It isn't enough for men unless they will consent to live like beasts, at the mercy of their instincts, in competition with the beasts, and have a very nasty time of it. No. No. The light your friend was after is the light of the imagination. Let your light so shine. He had never had it, never more than the will to have it. Probably he drank or took to some other form of vice to console himself in his more difficult moments. You'll never know. Probably we all know that is worth knowing. Young men often make blots like that because life is such an infernal long time in beginning; but for an old man--well, it looks like a sober conclusion, as though he really had faced a fact, and had the sense of humor to go on living in spite of it. There!"

He had finished the cover.

"I hope he'll like it."

René took it that same evening to Old Lunt's room. It was behind a stable and harness room used by a grocer as a store. Its one window looked out on a blank wall of yellow brick. For the rest the room was exactly as the old man had described it; not a stick of furniture in it; sacks thrown in a corner, and on these Old Lunt was lying with his legs crossed, his hand under his head, smiling up into the dim light. The setting sun struck the yellow wall outside the window, and the upper part of the room was filled with an apricot-colored glow. Dust danced in the light. The room was filled with an acrid sweetish smell.

Manuscript in hand, René stepped forward.

"Good evening, sir," he said, "I thought you----"

He stopped, for he knew that the old man was dead. He had known it before he began to speak, but the sound of his voice brought home to him the mockery of words. Raising the cold right hand, he laid _The Rise and Fall of British Industry_ beneath it.

The light died down. The glow sank into the gloom. He crept away, told the woman next door that Lunt was dead, and she said she would go at once to the crowner's office.

VIII

RITA AND JOE

And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.

ANN had always known Old Lunt. As far back as she could remember the mews had been her playground, and the old man coming and going had been a part of the scene.

She seemed to connect the silence that visited her mate after his death with him, for she filled it with reminiscence and stories about him. He used to sing queer old songs, and sometimes he could be persuaded to tell about the country where he came from and flowers and birds; yarns about his father's farm and the happiness he had had on it until it came into his brother's hands, and his brother had gone into the manufacturing. Then there was no home for him in the old stone house.

For all her talk Ann could not break in upon René's silence, and his eyes would implore her to cease, yet she could not cease. She went on and on talking, for she dreaded his silence as she dreaded his solemnity. They made life heavy and evil for her. If a man was unhappy, there were plenty of distractions and consolations. Everybody was unhappy at times, but no one in his senses clung to his unhappiness the way Renny did. It was an exasperation to her to have him like this--"mooning and dithering to himself"--because he had been so much more complacent and docile than she had expected. She had looked for trouble, but he had slipped into her ways, and shared her pleasures with an astonishing ease and grace, so much so that she had had the mortification of hearing two women in the mews arguing about him:

"Garn! 'E ain't no scholard."

"'Struth. 'E's a college gent."

"'Im! They might come to see a working girl, but they wouldn't take up with 'er."

The trouble she had looked for should have been between herself and him, and she was prepared to tackle it so soon as it showed its head, but this trouble he kept to himself, outside her. And though she called it unhappiness, she knew well enough that he was not unhappy.

Indeed, it was a joy to him to find himself more and more alive to the world, the little, grubby, amusing corner of it in Mitcham Mews, and the great roaring whirlpool outside in which lay his work. His pleasure in London was no longer purely emotional; no longer did he, as it were, implore London to let him be a part of it. He was working in it, contributing to its life, to its bustle and noise; but since his talks with Kilner and his reading of the poetical works of the old ragamuffin, he had been able little by little to detach himself from it and watch all that was going on. Truly there was never a more amusing city! Everything was on show. Everybody had the air of expecting to be looked at and admired; though everybody pretended also that he or she had no such expectation. When provincials arrived in London they seemed to feel all this and to wince before it, but soon they perked up their heads and behaved as though all eyes were upon them. And they went to the show-places, those of which there had been talk in their homes from their earliest recollection. But everything else also was a show to them. More and more the shops tended to become shows. Government offices were being pulled down and rebuilt to make more show. Exalted personages were bent on making a show of their common humanity. Even in the city, the offices in which Londoners worked--the counting-house behind the shop--were being razed to the ground to give place to colossal palaces of ferro-concrete and marble and plate-glass. Motor-cars were growing more and more garish and glossy; the advertisements on the hoardings were more and more crudely colored. For whom was the show? For whom was all the outpouring and display of wealth? Hardly, thought René, for Mitcham Mews, that sink of the submerged and those who could only just hold their heads above water. He thought he could find the answer in the miles and miles of little houses like the house in Hog Lane, six rooms, attics, and cellars, constantly stretching out to the west and to the east; the unceasing expansion of mediocrity, a flooring of concrete, warranted fireproof, to keep the fantastic creations of wealth uncontaminated by the sources from which wealth sprang.

These were no general speculations. As he detached himself from the spectacle of London, and observed and brought humor and charity to bear on his observations, it became more and more clear to him that in this fantastic atmosphere he could not live. He was conscious of energy within himself. Upward from Mitcham Mews led to the mediocrity of the little houses, to those who lived in the dazzlement of the shows, forgetting life, forgetting death. Downward? There was no downward without sinking into the disgusting vices which repelled him. Beyond the mediocrity was only the show where everything was sterilized, thought castrated, art hermaphrodite. (Kilner knew too much of that.) At the same time, he felt that his present mode of life could not go on much longer. There would certainly be a move from Mitcham Mews, but he wanted it also to be a decision, not a mere change of houses.

Ann returned to her idea of trying a new country, and for a time he played with the idea. It had its seductions. The long voyage: the indolent life on board ship; the possibility as they slipped away from existence in England of shedding those elements in themselves which prevented the full sympathy desired by their affection; the settling in a country where class differences were not so acute. But, he felt rather than saw, that would mean isolation with Ann, and his feeling was against it. When she tried to discuss it with him, to get him to consider the respective merits of Canada or Australia, he was evasive in his replies and soon forced her to drop it. She would show a little disappointment, but would reassure herself by saying:

"There's no place like old England," or: "Sally Wade's in Canada, and she does miss dear old London."

He was so absorbed in his thoughts and his growing certainty that he did not notice how few of his evenings he spent with her. Because she was cheerful, he imagined that she must be finding her own amusement and satisfaction. He saw a great deal of Kilner, and when the painter was otherwise engaged, liked to be out in the streets on duty. Without knowing why, he had begun to desire to save money. Every shilling put by added to his sense of independence and potential freedom. He had commenced with a money-box, but finding Ann one day shaking coins out of it, he opened an account with the Post Office Savings Bank. He said nothing to her at the moment and was angry with himself for letting it pass, but it was impossible to reopen the subject later. He told himself that Mitcham Mews was no harbor of strict morals, that its inhabitants did more or less what they wanted to do, and therefore made it enjoyable for him to live among them. (That was the reason Kilner had given him for living among the very poor. They had the same liberty as the very rich, with none of their pretensions or false responsibilities.) He had dismissed the matter from his mind when it was brought home to him one night on his returning late from work.

Rita and her husband lived opposite Martin's yard. As he came out of it, René was confronted by Ann leaving their house with a basin under her arm.

"I've been seeing Rita," she said. "Joe's been out of work since the coal strike, and he's going on the drink. Her time's coming, and someone's got to do for her. It was for her I took the money."

"I--I beg your pardon, Ann. Why didn't you say so before?"

"It was the way you looked, Renny, dear. You do frighten me so."

"I'm sorry. Can I do anything to help?"

"It may be to-morrow. Anyway, soon. Would you mind keeping Joe away? He's not your sort, I know, but he must be kept away."

"All right. He shall be kept away. Is she in for a bad time?"

"I'm afraid she is. Work's been so skeery of Joe these times that it's been all she's been able to do to feed the children."

"That's bad. But she ought to have thought of herself."

"Sometimes," said Ann, "there isn't room for everybody to be thought of. If you can get through a day or two it's as much as you can manage without thinking what's going to happen in a month's time."

"Don't you ever look ahead, Ann?"

"No. What's the good? Whenever I do, it only frightens me."

"Are you frightened of anything now?"

"A little."

They had reached their room and she had begun to wriggle out of her clothes.

"I don't like your being frightened, my dear. There's nothing can hurt us, and being hurt is no great thing."

"All in the day's work, eh? Oh, well. Some things. But, don't you see, I think I'm going to be like Rita."

"Ann!"

She looked at him queerly, almost maliciously.

"What did y'expect? Making me so fond of you?"

He said lamely:

"I--I hadn't thought of it."

She was stung into silence. Presently she crept into bed and lay with her face to the wall. In a tone of almost petulant disappointment she said at length:

"I fancied that was why you were putting by all that money. I was pleased about that, I was."

René sat on gloomily in the outer room, listening, waiting for her to go to sleep. He was full of resentment against he knew not what. Her almost cynical practicality? Her acceptance without wonder of the new fact? As with the rest of his life, so now he was able to detach himself from her. She had been pleased with him because he had begun to make provision, as she thought, against the probable event. She had announced the event as one regretting the pleasantness of the past, almost as one diffidently presenting a bill--commercialization. Horribly their relationship was stripped of their individualities; they were just a man and a woman separated by that which they had together created. They had known kindness and fellowship, mutual forbearance and gratitude, and now they were despoiled of these good things. He was left impotent while she bowed to the disagreeable fact and was absorbed in it. And he began to see that they had long been borne toward this separation, and to escape from the pain of it he had turned to Kilner and the things of the mind, while she had comforted herself with the things of the flesh, the sufferings of the child-ridden Rita, who now seemed to him typical of the life of the mews, a creature crushed by circumstance, by responsibilities which she could not face, a house which she could not clean, children whom she could neither feed nor clothe, a husband whom she was unable to keep from deterioration. And to think that for one moment he had seen beauty in her, when she had appeared almost as a symbol of maternity, which must be--must it not?--always and invariably beautiful and to be worshiped. His idealism came crumbling down as he could not away with the knowledge that Ann had lost in beauty for him.

It was no revulsion, no withering of his feeling for her; rather it was that the brutal fact had a burning quality to peel away the trimmings from what he felt.

He found himself groping back in his life before Ann came into it. Nothing quite the same had happened to him before. The perishing of his young desire had left him in a whirling excitement which contained less torture than this obsession of cold realization. Bereft now of all that had made his life good and pleasant and amusing, he could only appreciate Ann and the experience that lay before her, appreciate, but not understand. That was too horrible. She had been so dear to him; such a good, kind, true, brave little soul. The resentment that he could not altogether escape he visited on Rita, as Ann had from the first visited hers on Kilner.

Why should Kilner on the one hand, and Rita on the other, draw them apart? Why had they created nothing that could be shared outside themselves? Why should that which they had created destroy that which they had valued in their life together? Why--and he came firmly back to his real obsession--why should they have so isolated themselves that the natural consequence of their love, if love it were, should be an intrusion, a shock greater than they could bear?

He listened again. Ann's breathing seemed to tell that she was asleep. He crept in to her. She was awake. After what seemed an age, she said in a dry, weary voice:

"I keep trying to think what kind of a house you lived in."

He described Hog Lane West.

"No. The other one, I mean."

"Oh, that?" He told her it was like a little house in some Gardens not far away.

Then in the same dry, weary voice she said:

"I have been trying to think what she felt when you left her."

"For God's sake," cried he, "for God's sake keep that out of it."

"I do try to, Renny, dear. But I can't help thinking about her sometimes when you're like that----"

"Don't talk about it, Ann, don't talk about it. Go to sleep."

"Kiss me, then. I couldn't go to sleep till you'd kissed me. Not to-night. It _is_ all right, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes. It's all right, bless you."

"I don't want to be a drag on you, Renny, dear. It _is_ a blessing we're not married, isn't it?"

"That doesn't matter."

"That's what I say. If it's right it can't stop, can it? If it's wrong, it must."

He kissed her to stop her talking. She sighed contentedly, slid her arm into his and pressed her face against his shoulder.

"Good night. We _have_ been happy."

And in two minutes she was asleep. He too was glad of the happiness they had. He was a little infected with her fatalism. If there were to be calamities, there had been stores of frank pleasure and true delight to draw upon in defense against them.

By killing off an imaginary grandmother, Ann procured a half-day off from her work and spent the afternoon with Rita, who was weak and dispirited by the great heat which filled the mews with stale air and brought old fumes and stenches from the stables. There had been thunder and storms, and the two youngest children were down with colic. Joe had disappeared with Click and Billy, who, to Rita's great distress, had begun to seek her husband's company and to give him money--at least she supposed they did, for he had nowhere else to get it. All day long Rita talked about a bed her mother had bought for the best bedroom just before she married again, a beautiful bed with four big brass knobs and sixteen little brass knobs, and a bit of brass making a pattern at the head. And it had a real eiderdown, and the springs were not like ordinary springs, but spirals. When she had exhausted the wonder of the bed she began an endless story of the aspidistra and Mr. 'Awkins who undertook to water it and forgot for a whole week, when the leaves one by one went yellow and brown. Into this story was woven all the romance that had ever crept into Rita's life, and as a good deal had crept in through the unlikeliest corners, it was a long story. She kept it going, as it were, by killing off the leaves of the aspidistra to mark the chapters. Mr. 'Awkins was a wonderful man, but he never quite said it, and Joe wouldn't take no for an answer, and Joe really did seem to be fond of her, "and mother could be awful." Besides Joe did promise to make a home for her, and they did go and look at furniture on Saturdays, but always after they had looked at furniture they used to go to music-halls, so they never had the money to buy it. And then they got married.

For hours Ann sat listening to the woman's voice droning on. The elder children had been taken charge of by neighbors. The others needed constant attention. Joe came home in the evening, merrily drunk. Ann met him at the door and told him he could not come in. He swore at her and vowed he would. She struggled with him. He was fuddled and uncertain on his legs, and she very quickly had him slithering down the stairs. He sat at the bottom and roared:

"Jezebubble! That's what you are! Jezebubble! Throwing people down!"

Ann had gone to the window, and seeing René in the yard opposite, she called to him and told him to take Joe away and make him sober. René came running up, dragged Joe to his feet, lugged him into the yard, and held his head under the tap. Joe spluttered and cursed, and when he was released, stood up with the water streaming from his hair, eyes, and mouth. He showed fight. René caught him by the neck and threatened to turn on the tap again unless he showed himself amenable to reason.

Ann called:

"Take him away."

René nodded, picked Joe up in his arms, and threw him on the floor of his car and drove him out far beyond Uxbridge into the country. There by a black pinewood they stopped. René got down and laughed, for Joe had picked himself up and was sitting perkily with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, with his hat on one side, pretending to be a lord.

"Aw! Chauffah!" he said. "Dwive me to Piccadilly Circus. I want to buy a box of matches." Changing his tone, he added: "You don't 'appen to 'ave a fag on yer, guvnor?"

René gave him a cigarette and a match, lit one himself, and sat by the side of the road.

"Was that a joy ride?" asked Joe.

"No charge," replied René.

"I've spat in the car. Is there any charge for that?"

"I'll smack your head if you do it again."

Joe looked warily and solemnly at him, then deliberately spat on the floor of the car.

"That," he said, "is to show I know you're a gentleman, and what I thinks of yer."

René dragged him out of the car, smacked his head, and flung him into the bracken.

"I'll have the law on yer," yelled Joe, trying to shout himself into a fury.

"Then you'll have to walk home. Maybe that would sober you."

"No 'arm, me lord, no 'arm. It's looking for work, guvnor, that's what it is. It makes you fuddled. 'Struth it does. Here am I with five children, doing my duty by my country, and I can't get work. Five children. 'Good!' says you, being a gentleman and well provided for. 'Who's to support 'em?' says I. 'You,' says you. 'Let me work,' says I. 'There ain't no work,' says you. 'There's going to be work for as few as possible in this 'ere country,' you says. 'Chuck your flaming union,' you says, 'blackleg the bloody unionists,' you says, 'and there'll be heaps of work at one farving per hour.' 'Five children,' says I. 'Good,' says you. 'They've got hungry little bellies,' says I. 'Have they?' says you. 'Let 'em come and watch the blokes coming to my dinner-party to-night.'" He had worked himself up to an excitement which he could not contain, and he burst into tears.

"'Struth is, sir," he said presently, "I ain't getting enough to eat, and you know how it is with my missus."

"Ann Pidduck is looking after her," said René, "and I promised to look after you."

"Woffor did you take me out into the bloomin' country?"

"I hardly know. One doesn't worry about distance in the car. She said: 'Take him away.' So I took you away. I'm afraid I have rather a literal mind."

"Well, it's pretty here, ain't it? I took my eldest into the country once. When he got back he said to his mother, he said: 'There was parrots in all the trees, and as for cows there was more than one.' 'E'd never seen any bird but sparrows and a parrot. I s'pose he thought anything bigger than a sparrow must be a parrot. What they'll grow up like, Gawd knows, and He don't care. It makes me sick to think of another one coming. I'd like to know what the 'Ell Gawd's playing at making a man so that 'e 'as a great love o' women and can't get enough t'eat. Us workin'-men ought to be eunuchs, so we ought. If you got a spark o' spirit in you it does you down every time. You can take me back now, guvnor. I'll be good."

He climbed up into the car, resumed his lordly attitude, lit a cigarette, and said:

"'Ome, and drive like 'Ell. I'll stand the bally fines."

The pathos of the man's grotesque humor springing up through his misery moved René so much that he forgot his own perplexity and desired only to please him. He drove back full tilt, guessing that it was late for the "controls" to be manned, and they reached the yard just as the lamps in the mews were being lit. As they came out of the yard they saw a policeman standing at the door opposite. Joe put René between himself and the constable, and they went up to Ann's room. There the electrician peeped out.

"I say," he said, "I say. They've blabbed."

"Blabbed! What do you mean? Who's blabbed?"

"It's Click and Billy I mean. They'd got stuff. I don't know where they got it. They made me help get rid of it. I 'ad to get money somewheres. Click's a Catholic, and he says stealing isn't stealing if you're starving. They must have been nabbed. I ain't a thief, guvnor. I only helped get rid of the stuff. They said I could because I was known respectable. Respectability ain't done me no good afore."

"Keep quiet," said René. "He'll hear you. Perhaps he isn't waiting for you."

"'E ain't moved. I know how they look when they're on the cop. Devils! Sly devils! I seen 'em take Click afore now and old Bessie."

"Be quiet, you fool. Sit down and have something to eat."

He placed three cold sausages in front of Joe. They vanished. He produced a piece of ham. That was soon gnawed to the bone. Half a loaf of bread and a small tin of bloater paste soon followed, and Joe began to caress his stomach affectionately.

"Look here," said René. "What will it mean if they get you?"

"First offender. I'd get off, all right. But the crooks 'll never let me alone, and the police 'll have me marked down as a man to nab if ever they want a 'spected person."

"All right. You sit here. I'll go and see how things are over there."

The policeman eyed René as he went in.

"Want anything?"

"No, sir. No."

"There's nothing going on here, nothing unusual. Confinement."

Ann heard his voice and came down to him. They walked up the mews. Rita was in a delirium. She kept reproaching Joe over and over again for not buying a fire-screen he had promised her. And then she seemed to be living over again in some scene of jealousy. Joe must not come near her. It might not be safe. René told her his news. Ann said:

"She guessed that. It's that's broken her up so. She thinks she isn't a respectable woman any longer. I don't know that it wouldn't be best to let him be taken."

"But doesn't that mean that he's done for? You know better than I."

"You don't get much of a chance."

"Then we'll do what we can. Tell the policeman he isn't sleeping here to-night."

"All right. All right. I don't think I'll be back till the morning, and then I'll have to go to work. So good night, Renny, dear. It is good of you."

They parted. He heard her tell the policeman how things were in the house, and that Joe would not be sleeping there that night, but at his mother's off the Fulham Road. The policeman asked for the address, and she gave it him pat, and after a moment or two he rolled away. René gave him three minutes, then returned to Joe and told him what had happened, gave him a shilling for a doss, and asked him to meet him in the morning at the cab-rank in Lancaster Gate.

"If I pay your passage to Canada, will you go? You can get a start out there and have your family out after you. We'll look after them."

"Will I go?" cried Joe. "I've had enough of this 'ere blasted country. Will I go? D'you know that's been in my mind ever since that there joy ride. I says to myself, I says, moving's that easy. You been stuck still, Joe, my buck, that's what's been the matter with you."

René kept _cave_ while the poor devil slunk out of the mews, and then followed him, saw him mount a bus and be borne away eastward, standing up and waving his hand as long as he was in sight.

His passing left René stranded. He had been caught up in the eddy of that little drama, and then flung back into his solitude, and, though he was cheered by his activity, he was also depressed by the horrid grubbiness of the life that had been revealed to him; nothing in the world for Joe but the procuring of food, the bare satisfaction of desire; an amused fondness for his children. That horrible capacity for happiness in degradation.

He stood below the lighted window of Rita's room. A moaning came out of it. A thin voice almost screaming:

"Oh, don't, Joe, don't!"

There were appalling silences. Then whisperings. A long silence that chilled him to the heart. At length the cry of the new-born child, a cry of pain. Then again silence, broken only by the sound of water and the clink of metal against crockery.

In that moment René became almost unbearably alive to the suffering of the woman, and to all suffering, and to his own.

IX

TALK

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him
declare what he seeth.

IT takes an unconscionable long time to extort money from the Post Office Savings Bank, and René borrowed from his employer to pay Joe's passage and the guarantee demanded by the Canadian immigration authorities. Joe could not thank him, but only, with tears in his eyes, shake him by the hand.

"You know," he said, "I could never have gone if I'd once been in prison. That's where they has you. If wishing could do it, you'll have good luck. And if praying's any good I don't mind trying that, though I'm not much of a hand at it and out of practice."

He gave René a crumpled dirty letter to Rita, and bade him tell her that his last thought was for her, and that when she came out he would be on the quay to meet her.

"I've told 'er in my letter it was you put a heart into me, guvnor. I'd been feeding on it that long it was nearly all eat away."

At last the train moved--(René had taken him to the station with his few possessions, smuggled out under the very eyes of the policeman)--Joe leaped into his carriage and sang out:

"So long!"

"Good luck!" cried René, as he moved away through the crowd of tearful women and young men on the platform.

As he was leaving the station he met Kurt, just returned from a flying visit to Thrigsby. He explained that he had been called away on business or would have been round before to pay his promised visit.

"I told them at home I'd seen you. My mother turned on a face like a window-shutter--you know, the iron kind they have in Paris, and clank down in the small hours of the morning just to make sure no one shall sleep the night through. Funny old thing! I suppose she regards you as one dead. Silly thing to do, when I'd just told her you were very much alive. Linda was quite excited and started pumping up all sorts of emotions until I asked her how long it was since she had even thought of you. Then she stopped that game. She knows it isn't any use with me. I once said to her, 'My dear girl, if you really felt all the emotions you pretend to feel, you'd be dead in a week.' I never could stand that sort of thing myself. She gets them out of books, you know, and really sometimes it is quite impressive, or would be, if it weren't so disgustingly false. It is wonderful to feel things, but you can't feel things all the time and be sane. No one can. One's too busy. It's beastly to make that sort of thing cheap as they do on the stage and in Linda's mucky novels--Oh, she's written another play, all about my mother this time. Well, after a bit she cooled down and I told her you were quite pleased with yourself, earning an humble but honest living. She wanted to know if you were alone. I said I didn't know, but anyhow it wasn't her affair. She agreed, and said that anything she might do wasn't your affair either. Then she talked a great deal of nonsense about your being the New Man, with too much vitality and intellectual energy for the outworn institutions of a demoded society, and a lot more rot of that kind. The fact is, of course, that she prefers living without you and doesn't want any fuss. The scandal had made her interesting to Thrigsby, and she can find all sorts of silly people there who want to be instructed in the art of being advanced, to think shocking things and to live without shocks of any kind. Linda's shock is keeping quite a lot of people going. I told her I should see you again and she asked me to give you her love, and to say that she is quite happy and hopes you will go and see her play when it is acted in London by the Thrigsby Players. I say, you must have thought me a swine that day at Hendon. That was a Lord and a Lady. These people haven't any manners, and one gets like them. I'm their particular pet just now. You should see me hobnobbing with Cabinet Ministers and theater managers. It is terrible how alike they are."

"You'll see a bit of difference if you come to Mitcham Mews," said René.

"I'll come to-night."

"Good."

Rita had come successfully through her ordeal, and she was in the dreaming bliss of having her baby by her side, with no other thought in her mind than the satisfaction of its contact, the blessed charge of its helpless little life, not yet, nor for a long time to come, separate from her own. Ann took René up to see her, and he gave her Joe's letter and told her how pleased he had been to go, and how he was looking forward to her joining him. To account for his sudden disappearance they invented a tale of an offer of immediate work, conditional upon his sailing at once. The whole thing had been so sudden (they said) that there was no time for her to be told or for him to wait to see her. Did she believe them? She looked incredulously from one to the other, but, holding the letter tightly crumpled up in her hand, she decided at length that it was a good thing to believe, and sighed out her thankfulness. She had relations who would help her until Joe sent, and when she was well she would be able to work.

Ann had engaged old Bessie to come in during the day, and asked René if he would mind her spending all her evenings with Rita, and sometimes sleeping with her for the first few days. He was only too glad that she had found a task which could absorb her energies. He told her Kurt was coming, and asked if he might bring him over to see her. She had seen Kurt's photograph in the paper and was quite fluttered.

"Oh, him!" she said. "Fancy you knowing him!"

He did not tell her how Kurt was related to him.

However, Kurt blurted it out before he had been with Ann five minutes. René looked sheepish.

"Come, now, Miss Ann," laughed Kurt, "you didn't expect him to have no one belonging to him or to keep him hidden away from us forever and ever. Because you are fond of him you don't expect him to be utterly lost to all his friends, do you?"

"I didn't know he had a friend like you, Mr. Brock, or I shouldn't have dared to be fond of him--perhaps."

"Is that a tribute to my personality or to my reputation."

"Well," said Ann, "you do brighten things up."

"One for old Solemn!" said Kurt. "I hoped you'd have cured him."

"Oh! I don't want him to be cured. I don't want him to be different."

René's vanity was bristling, but in the face of their good humor he could not let it appear. He envied Kurt his ease and the skill with which he gauged Ann's humor to strike laughter out of her, so much so that he could not mind being the subject of it. Her laughter was affectionate.

They were in Rita's room, and she lay gazing fascinated at Kurt's brown face, with its merry eyes flashing blue light as he laughed and talked. The children had been told that the great flying man was coming. They had been staring at him with round eyes. At last one of them said:

"Did you fly here?"

"Not this time, my lad."

"Oncet," said the piping voice, "oncet we 'ad a bird-cage."

"With a bird in it?"

"No. We kep' a ball in it and marbles."

"What happened to it?"

"Farver popped it. I seen an airyoplane oncet."

"Did you? Where?"

"In ve Park. A little boy 'ad it."

"Right ho! We'll send you an airyoplane like that."

The children looked at each other, scared at this promised good fortune. Then they embraced and rocked each other to and fro.

René and Kurt took their leave and passed out into the mews.

"Well?" said René. "A bit of difference?"

"I don't know about that. But I'm always finding that where other folk see only riches or poverty or manners or personal tricks and habits, I see only people, and they are much the same everywhere. I nearly always like them. I'm not like you. I don't expect anything much."

"Do I?"

"Always. That's what one loves about you. You were the only person who ever expected anything of me, and you gave me confidence to expect something of myself."

"Then it's not a bad thing?"

"It's a splendid thing in a way, only you need to be able to love a lot of people to bear up against your disappointments. I can't do that. I find them too amusing. I'm too easily pleased with everything they do, and, of course, I never stop to think."

"But some things make you think."

"What things?"

"Having no money is one of them."

"I don't know that the poor worry much about thinking, and lack of money is chronic with them."

"Joe tried to think. The trouble was that he didn't know how. It took him as far as the Trade Union, and left him there expecting it to do the rest. That's the trouble all round. There has been thinking enough to make the union, but not enough to use it. The mere fact of union seems to swamp thought, even in the leaders. When they speak they are always trying to say not what they themselves think, but what they fancy the collective body of men wants them to think. The result is that events always move just a little too fast for them, and they are tied hand and foot and left to the mercy of the capitalists who can afford to wait longer to see how the cat is going to jump."

"And the capitalists?"

"My friend Martin is the only one I know. But I imagine they are just the same. They expect their money to do their thinking for them. Money and crowds have just the same hypnotic effect. Do you remember on one of our tours when we were driving at night with the big headlight showing up the road fifty yards in front of us? It was a summer night, and as we flashed past trees the birds for a moment took us for the sun and began to wake up. It was amusing, the swish of the wind we made in the trees, the sudden singing of the birds, who sank to sleep again in the darkness we left behind us. And then as we drove along a woodland road a rabbit darted out into our light, and could not get out of it. If we drove slowly he ran slowly. If we put on pace to scare him away he kept ahead of us. If we stopped he couched down with his ears back and his eyes starting out of his head, absolutely confined by the walls of darkness round our light, and, I suppose, hypnotized by his own terror. It seems to me that human thought is a light like ours, and that individual men rush into it like the rabbit and cannot get out of it. It needs only a little plunge into the darkness to be back safe and happy in your own life, but they can't take the plunge. We were able to turn the light off the rabbit at a cross-road to let him go, but nothing can take the light of human thought off men. The analogy is rather interesting, because the light of human thought is not borne by a horrible engine, but only seems so to those who are hypnotized by their own terror, and it seems normal to be scurrying away from it and to die--morally--of exhaustion. A few men, when they come into the light, are brave enough to step out of it to discover whence it comes. They find it kindled in themselves and, tracing it to its source, they find it in the will to live, and they reach the determination to carry it farther over the world they live in, in order to break down the walls of darkness."

"That is rather beyond me," said Kurt. "I'm no good at ideas. If you let me keep to people I'm all right. Some people do me good; other people make me feel cramped and choked. I'm not clever enough to know why. And there are lots of nice people with whom it is quite enough if one can make them laugh. They don't seem to matter either way."

"You see," said René, "human thought doesn't shine until it is energized with feeling and brought into contact with the divine power that keeps things going. That is what the scared people take for a remorseless, swift, destroying engine."

"I remember now," said Kurt, "that Linda said you were a mystic. That was when you were an economist, and I told her it was nonsense, because no mystic could read a page of Marshall--wasn't that your fat book?"

"I don't know whether it's mysticism or not, but I can't accept experience without sifting it. I suppose if I could do that I should still be in Thrigsby keeping up appearances."

"And Linda would never have written her plays. That would have been a pity."