Chapter IX: Book TWO: Ann Pidduck (4)

"How absurd you are, Kurt. But you seem able to sift experience before it comes to you. You seem to be able to do the right thing at the right time."

"I never worry about it. Life seems so simple to me. Directly it looks like being complicated, I switch off and try again. The only thing that worries me is that it looks horribly as though I should never marry. I fall in love all right and somehow that always complicates things, so then I fall out of love. I can't love a complicated woman, and I haven't met an uncomplicated one. They all want to feel more than they do. Play-acting, I call it."

Kilner came in then. He greeted Kurt morosely, for his clothes showed that he came from the brilliant world, the object of the painter's particular detestation, and Kurt's manner might easily be taken for that affability which puts you at your ease and so disconcertingly leaves you there.

René produced beer and tobacco, made room for Kilner by the fireplace, and carried on the discussion:

"Kurt says women want to feel more than they do."

"I don't know about that," replied Kilner, "but my experience is that they generally feel more than the occasion demands. They won't leave anything to the future. I don't think it means anything except that they are not particular. They get so precious little out of men that they grab what they can and let consequences take their chance. I don't blame them either. They begin by taking love seriously, so seriously that they frighten men and make them run away. I keep clear of that, not because I'm frightened, but because I can't find a woman who hasn't been unbalanced by having had some idiot run away from her."

"That's like Kurt," René threw in. "I expect it is because you both have a passion for what you are doing. It gives you a standard. Now I don't pretend to have a passion for taxi-driving, and I suppose that is why I take seriously things that you two are able to ignore."

"H'm," growled Kilner, stretching his long legs. "Not much in that. We're both keen on something which demands health and nerve and self-confidence, a steady hand and a clear head. We can't afford to throw our minds and passions into the common stock. I starve. Your friend has the world at his feet. But we're both outside the world, and have as little truck with it as possible."

"Both," said René, "outside the hypnotic circle." He had to explain that to Kilner, who was excited by the idea.

"I never thought of that," he said. "Yes, by Jove, it's true. They are hypnotized, every man Jack of them, rich and poor alike. Nothing can shake it off except the individual will. Every artist has to go through that. And your light, my friend, is nothing but the vision of the artist. Only hypnotism, the absolute surrender of the will, could account for the horrible distortions that appear in what they call art, what they call morality, the organization of what they call society. I know what Fourmy means. The infernal thing is always cropping up in my work. When an artist has seen what he wants to paint, there is always the danger of his being hypnotized by it, and if he doesn't shake free of that, he is almost bound to paint it badly, however skillful he may be. He may paint a picture that people will like, but he won't create a work of art."

"Isn't it possible for a man to be hypnotized by art?" asked René.

"If he is, he won't be an artist. I've seen students surrender their will one after the other to Raphael, Rembrandt, Manet, Cezanne, not to their love of truth and beauty, but to the masterful skill which their love gave them. If they had surrendered to their love their own wills would have been strengthened, not destroyed. That is always happening: a manner is imitated, mimicked over and over again until at last it is so vilely done, so remote from the original as to have no charm to lead even the stupidest little draughtsman to make a copy. Is it so in life? I don't know. Much the same, perhaps. Weren't there imitations of Byron for generations after him? Something vile the brutes could imitate. No one imitated Shelley."

"Who was he?" asked Kurt.

Kilner stared at him aghast.

"A poet. _The_ poet."

"I suppose I ought to have known," replied Kurt, chuckling at Kilner's annoyance, "but you see I was brought up in a German household. There was a fellow called Schiller they used to talk about, and they named a club after him where they used to eat and drink."

"And what," asked Kilner, "made you take to flying?"

"Oh, I don't know. I always loved engines and speed. And after all, you know, it is the only thing to do."

"Kilner thinks painting is the only thing to do," interjected René.

"I meant for me," answered Kurt. "That may be all right for him. I hate using my brains. Things get muddled at once if I do. I love using my body so that every muscle is called into play, and I loathe illness. It's torture to me to be just a little unwell. I get moments out of my work that make everything else seem nothing at all, just something to laugh at and be merry over."

"Something like that is my life," said Kilner. "A few moments, only they are not enough in themselves. I have to follow them up in spirit and express them."

"And I," said René, "am always hunting about for those moments in life and not finding them."

"Ever known one?"

"No, but I'm absolutely certain they are there. I never knew what I was after until I met Kilner. I'm not certain that I know now. But I've escaped social hypnotism so far, and from what you tell me I seem to be less in danger of hypnotism by my own will than either of you."

"I deny that," cried Kilner angrily. "You are denying the supremacy of the artist. Just because you have dodged a few of the conventional social obligations, you think----"

"I'm not denying anything of the kind. I grant you the artist is supreme and his vision the most potent force in human thought, but the artist also must be a man and must live, or there's an end of his vision. He must be prepared if necessary to live in the hypnotic circle, and he must be strong enough to assert his will in it."

"That's stupid," said Kilner. "As if any of us could escape, as if that weren't precisely what the artist does. Your friend here is the lucky one. He is doing a new thing, exercising a new faculty which is imperfectly developed, so that it is not yet prostituted and abused, as art, science, and love have been. He is still a wonder, even to fools. I who aspire to art, you who aspire to love, are to the world nothing but idiots who have not the _nous_ to help themselves to the plunder and comfort ready to their hands. But you and I are braver than he, for we seek greater things. He is content with physical health and adventure. That is something. It is a higher aim than money and money's worth. But you and I are definitely pledged to accept only the happiness we know to be true, and the sorrow to which our wills can consent."

"I dunno," said Kurt, rising, "but I daresay there's a good deal to be said on the other side. I'm not so sure, though. I know lots of the other people, and they've never given me such an amusing evening. I haven't had such a good time since I came to London, where everybody thinks of nothing but having a good time. I'll come again. Anyhow, you're not worrying about what other folk are thinking of you, and that's the only thing I can't stand. Good night."

Kilner was too excited to go to bed, and he kept René up till three o'clock in the morning talking about a picture he was painting of God creating Eve out of Adam, who was to be shown in an attitude of surrender, though his body gave signs of a fearful agony. Yet was it Adam's will to submit to any torture to attain the knowledge of the almighty joy of creation.

René was curious about the woman's share in the operation, and was vaguely distressed to find that in Kilner's intention Eve was to be no more than beautiful.

"But is she to have no share in creation and the joy of it?"

Kilner was pacing round the room. He waved his fists in the air.

"Don't you see? Don't you see?" he shouted. "Don't you see that we have created her? Even if you drop the myth and take to evolution, don't you see that woman has been nothing but the creature, the instrument of reproduction? Don't you see that man fell in love with her, and with his love slowly humanized her, gave her intelligence, humor, charm?"

"Might it not be," said René, "that woman was first, and evolved man to do the work so that she might reserve more energy for conception? And again, there seems no reason for imagining that either came first. The difference in sex is a great deal more superficial than is generally supposed. It must be. It is aggravated by environment and habit, training and physical processes, but it is not a fundamental difference."

Kilner said:

"You may be right. You sometimes are. But for the purpose of my picture Eve must be stupidly beautiful, just beauty and nothing else. If you like I'll paint another Adam and Eve when he has begun to love her, and through love has come to the desire of knowledge. But I'm afraid her eyes will still be stupid, and she will still think him rather a fool for desiring anything but her."

X

AN ENCOUNTER

Nous ne dépendons point des constitutions ni des chartes, mais
des instincts et des moeurs.

INTELLECTUAL conversation is a very common vice among men who have been subjected to what is called education. The wages of it is commonly a brutal onslaught by the body upon the mind. The intellectual is subject to accesses of bestiality unknown to the manual laborer, who for that reason regards the cultured man with more amusement and contempt than respect and envy.

It was impossible for René to surrender to his exasperated senses. He was too certain of his goal for that, though he could not on any side perceive a way that should lead him to it.

Ann was devoting herself entirely to Rita and her family. She would emerge now and then to inspect him, and to make sure that he was not straying from the path of good sense. She scolded him roundly for his all-night sitting with Kilner--(she had seen the lighted window at two o'clock)--much as the other women in the mews rated their men for drinking or betting. Having delivered herself, she returned to her usual attitude of indulgence and affection, kissed him, tidied his hair and went back to her charges. That might have satisfied a navvy, but it did not satisfy René. He was still mentally inflamed with Kilner's talk, and he wanted very much to know if Ann thought him a fool for desiring anything but her. He was fairly sure she did, but he wanted to be thoroughly, painfully sure. The old reaction, you perceive, from visionary enthusiasm to disgust.

His mood made him thoroughly, savagely approve of Mitcham Mews. It had character; not a nice character, still an appreciable individual quality. Almost all the other habitations he knew of in London were uniforms, disguises. Even the delicious little houses in Westminster were consciously Georgian or Queen Anne, part of an attitude. . . . He was wearying of it all. He had caught something of Kurt's healthiness and desired to do something that contained adventure and risk, and the exercise of more than habitual skill. He hated being at the beck and call of any man or woman who signed to him, and sometimes he gave himself the pleasure of ignoring them if he did not like their looks. Once when he had been summoned by whistle to a house in Bayswater, and its door was opened to emit a large Jew and an expansive Gentile lady of pleasure bent on an evening's snouting in the trough of the West End, he put his fingers to his nose, and drove off as hard as he could. That helped to put him on better terms with his rebellious physical existence. He had insulted it. That was something.

But he could not subdue his excitement. He found two poor little lovers in the Park one night, and took them out into the country free of charge. That squared the outrage on the Jew. It was an active step toward pure romance. The little lovers had occupied less and less space in the car as he brought them home under the moon, and his engine sang a droning bass to the song they were living.

And when he reached home he was brought hard up against the fact that he was Ann's acknowledged lover, and that she was going to have a child by him. It had, he knew, nothing in common with the Jew, but also, he could not help feeling, it had lamentably little in common with the young lovers. It was a fact like the nose on his face, a part of himself, no getting away from it; a fact, however, that brought no illumination. The nose on his face, he thought, must have been once a brilliant discovery. It must have meant a revelation of noses that, among other marvels, there were such things.

There was some zest in the fantastic agility of his intelligence, and this kept him going.

One night as he was passing a glaring public-house in Chelsea, he thought he saw his father go in by the door of the bar parlor. He drew up, stopped his engine, and followed. Sure enough it was his father, aged a little, grayer, but more sprucely clad. Mr. Fourmy was already the center of a little group standing by the counter--painters, models, and men who looked like actors. He was talking away, exactly as he used to do in the Denmark, with the same result in laughter and free drinks. René ordered a Bass and took it to a table at the side, removed his peaked cap, and waited for his father to recognize him. This Mr. Fourmy did in a few minutes, nodded with perfect coolness, and went on with his talk. He kept it up for a few moments longer, "touched" one of his hearers for half-a-crown, and, that done, let the conversation flag, the group dissolve, and came over to his son.

They shook hands. René grinned as he saw his father's amazement at his clothes.

"Well, I'm jiggered," said Mr. Fourmy, "I was fair flummoxed when I saw your face. I didn't notice your togs. I never thought you would come to this."

"I shouldn't have done any good in your profession, father."

"So you've learned some sauce. That's new."

"I've learned a good many things, father, and unlearned more."

"Have you learned what a rotten hole the world is?"

"No. I like it too much to think ill of it."

"Then you haven't had a really bad time. I hoped you'd have a filthy time. You needed it badly, to let some of the gas out of you."

"It's been bad enough," said René. "And there's worse ahead. Are you living in London?"

"I've been here some time. It's a dung-heap. I shall go over to Paris. I'd rather die there than anywhere. There is French blood in us, I believe, and I never could stomach the English and their hypocritical ways. What did they say of Gladstone? 'Plays with the ace up his sleeve, and pretends God put it there.' That's the English way. I like blackguards. I'm a blackguard myself, but I think God ought to be kept out of it. . . . You're looking fit."

"I'm fit enough. George told me you'd left. I'd like to know why. I don't want to open old scores or inquire into your private affairs, but it seemed to me that my mother was very good to you when you came back."

"Well---- It was the same old trouble. Religion. Marriage is none too easy, as you seem to have found. You can worry through if you play fair and fight through the emotional storms that threaten to drown you. Now it isn't fair for a man to draw off his emotional disturbances in drink or money-making or gambling or flirtation; and it isn't fair for a woman to draw off hers in religion. Women are devils at that. They go off to church and come back as cold as ice, with their hands full of little parcels of principles and precepts, all forgiveness and humility and submission and iron virtue. Some men can live with it. I can't. That's the whole story."

"Thank you," said René.

"Now, don't think hardly of your mother. She was brought up to think all men horrible, and she never got over it. I was wild and idiotically affectionate, and couldn't understand why she held back so. When I did understand, the mischief was done; she was hurt and scared, and kept you boys from me. Didn't want you ever to be men--as if she could prevent it! She did try with me when I came back. Perhaps she'd seen and felt more than I thought. It wasn't all church nonsense about accepting your husband, however loathsome he may be to you. Your going off like that set her back again, and back she went to her church. She thought it was all my doing, and perhaps it was."

"No, no," said René.

"I think it was. I ought to have seen that I wasn't fit company for anyone I loved. Too far gone, I suppose, too far gone."

"I'd like you to know that I'm glad it happened. It has saved me from going through life with my eyes shut. I've met good people and understood their goodness. And I've met miserable failures and seen how even they have some sweetness in their lives. And I owe it to you, father, that I have seen the wildness of life beneath the trumpery policing we call civilization, and now I feel that I shall never be blind to it."

"That's all right," said his father, "if you don't let the wildness break up your own self-control. That's what happened to me. Queer how clever two men can be when they understand each other. Can you lend me half-a-sovereign, and then I'll have enough to take me over to Paris?"

René gave his father ten shillings in silver, they shook hands, the old man patting the younger's shoulder, and they quitted the bar parlor together.

As René was starting his engine, a lady came up and asked him to take her to an address in Holland Park. He did so. The lady looked at him curiously as she paid the fare, walked to the gate of the house, turned, hesitated, then came back.

"Excuse me," she said, "you are so like someone I used to know. Aren't you Mr. Fourmy?"

He looked at her, seemed to remember her, but could not place her, though he thought dimly of Scotland.

"Yes," he said, "that's my name."

"Mine," she said, "was Rachel Bentley. I'm married now. I recognized you at once. I was so interested coming along. I hope nothing has----"

"Oh, no," said he, smiling, "I never had any money, you know. I drifted into this. I like it."

"I only thought," she said vaguely. "I mean-- Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm glad it isn't that. Good-by."

She seemed embarrassed by her own generous impulse, and it was a relief to him when she turned away. He waited for a moment to see if it was her own house. She opened the door with a key. He took note of the number, and, as he passed, of the cab-rank at the end of the road.

It was some time before he knew why he had done this, many hours before he was confronted with the image of Cathleen Bentley, in the woods of Scotland; Cathleen shaking the bracken from her hair, smiling up at him in the musing, perplexed happiness of her youth.

XI

VISION

pollás d'odous èlthonta phrontidos planois [Transliterated from
the Greek]

THERE came a letter from Joe to say that he had obtained work with a good firm within a week of landing, and would soon be able to save or borrow enough to pay for his wife and children to join him. Rita, who had sunk into a despondent lethargy, was roused to excitement and began to thrill the children with tales of the adventure before them. She quickly recovered her health and energy, and wrested the control of her affairs from Ann, who did not like it. Feeling ran high, and things came to such a pass that the two women quarreled, and Rita so far forgot herself as to fling a sneer about marriage-lines at her friend. Ann came running to René for comfort, and tried to enrage him at the tale of such base ingratitude. He was not to be enraged, however, for he had been pondering the subject of gratitude and come to the conclusion that he who lays claim to it forfeits it. He tried to explain to Ann that she had overdone her kindness and should have known the moment to withdraw. She was dismayed.

"Of course," she cried, "you would take her side against mine."

"It isn't a question of sides. You couldn't expect her to let you go on running her house forever."

"A shiftless little fool like that! I wouldn't have minded if she'd only said 'Thank you.' Not a word did she say, but just flung you in my face. And now you say she's right! I wish you'd never come, I do."

"Ann, dear, don't be silly."

"I do wish it with all my heart and soul. You've made me be different. You've made me want to do good things, and then you're nothing but a shadow slipping away. And, oh! it does hurt so."

"Dear, dear Ann, don't you see that Rita wanted to get rid of you and didn't know how to without a quarrel?"

"Why should she want to get rid of me? Nice mess she'd have been in without you and me."

"You go and see her to-morrow, and you'll find her all right."

"I don't want to see her ever again, nasty ungrateful rubbish!"

"Then I'll go and see her."

"You won't see me again if you do. I can up and off when I like. We're not married, remember."

"You leave me nothing to say. I've learned a good deal from the people in the mews, but not their way of quarreling."

He had been irritated into the reproof and was sorry as soon as it was uttered. She was furious. Never before had she lost her temper with him, though they had had wordy passages. Now she turned and rent him:

"I don't believe you're a man at all, and I don't believe you've got a heart. Squabble, you call it? I wish you would. You sit there with your fishy eyes staring at nothing, thinking, thinking, thinking. What's the good of it all? Who's right and who's wrong? What's it matter? If you loved me I'd be right whatever I did. Go on! Look at me! You don't know me, don't you? I'm the woman you've been living with these last two years. That's who I am. If you're sick of me, why don't you say so? I'm no lady, thank God. I do know when I'm not wanted. I'm not going to stay with any man on God's earth when he doesn't want me. I've nearly left you time and time again, when you've looked at me like that."

He brushed his hand across his eyes. He was feeling sick and dazed. She looked so ugly.

She went on:

"I've put up with things because of you, I have. You don't know what people say, or care. You won't never know what they say, you're that blooming innocent, thinking everybody means well. I've put up with things, and been glad of 'em, and I've put up with things from you that I couldn't have believed any woman would ever have to put up with----"

He said quietly:

"Have you done?"

She gasped at him, tried to stop, but because she had begun to enjoy her fury, she forced the note and screamed at him:

"You want a virgin saint to live with you, not a woman."

Now she stopped, aghast at herself, horrified by the pain and disgust she had brought into his eyes. He could hardly speak, and jerked out:

"I didn't know. . . . I didn't know I'd done all that to you, Ann. I'm so terribly sorry. I seem to make a mess of things always."

She had turned her back on him, and he knew that she was weeping. He had no desire to console her. He wished only to get away. Neither could break the heavy silence that followed the storm. He left her, though he could hardly move, so acute was his physical exhaustion. Groping his way along the wall of the mews, he counted the doors until he came to Kilner's. The rooms were empty. He flung himself on the bed and lay chilled and racked, thinking only of Ann weeping, unmoved, detached, feeling neither sorrow nor hate. She had robbed him of all capacity of emotion, all power of thought. The storm had been so unlocked for. Rita was so remote from them. Why should Rita and anything she said or did have let loose upon them so violent a convulsion?

Ann weeping, Ann silent, so appallingly silent. Her silence weighed on him more than her words. Desire grew in him slowly and painfully, a desire to understand. He remembered exactly what he had said to her, and the words seemed meaningless. Her silence had killed them. They were genuine as he spoke them. Speaking them, he had surmounted his disgust and horror at her rage. Yet there was an even more burning fury in her silence. She was weeping; Ann, the gay little comrade, was weeping, and her tears had moved him not at all.

He began to think again, and to think with a new power. His body was cold and aching. His mind seemed to leave it. His mind played about Ann, the figure of Ann, weeping in silence. It played maliciously about her, stripped her, let down her hair, revealed her nakedly as woman, short-legged, wide-hipped, small-breasted, not so unlike a boy save for the excrescences and distortions created by her physical functions. That was too horrible. With an effort of will he brushed it aside, wrenched away from its fascination. Her individuality was restored to her and a little warmth crept into his vision of her. He was not sensible of her charm, and he was free of all lover's memory of her attraction. His mind went probing into hers, saw how it delighted in impressions, but could make no store of them; how her delight had been increased by love and how she had used her love to aggravate her sensibility to the point of intoxication; how the fierce hunger for intoxication had desired to feed on him, and how her love for him had made her desire to bring him to the same condition. He saw her innocence; how free she was of deliberate purpose and set greed; how animal and yet how little sensual; and how she was snared in her own ignorance of love and its ways. Trapped she was and baffled. She could have been so happy with a mate as ignorant as herself, as willing to be snared. They could so easily have perished together, and sunk into resignation, she and such a mate. And inexorable nature had made her fruitful, to bring forth in her rage, when she would be spent with tearing at the meshes that had caught her. She would go on tearing, tearing, and he could spare her nothing. His strength could not sustain her. She desired only his weakness, to have him with her, caught and struggling; to have him by her side, spent and broken, to take comfort in the child.

He seemed to himself to be so near this fate, so nearly caught, that he cried out:

"I will not! I will not!"

For a moment the words startled him and shook him out of his stupor. Then his agony came back with a redoubled fury, and in the desperate hope of fighting it back he let words come tumbling out, hurling them from him:

"I will not be used for a creation in which I know no joy. I will not cloak brute creation with a seeming joy distilled by mind and time and custom. I will not be used up and broken and cover indecency with false decency, nor be comforted with the life that has stolen my own. My life shall give life, and for the giving have only the more to give. That which I have done with the spirit not awakened in me is done and no longer a part of me. That which the spirit does in me lives on forever and ever."

Kilner found him lying in the darkness, staring with vacant eyes. He was terrified. René looked so deathly. He sat by his side and chafed his hands, and caressed him tenderly, soothed him, spoke to him in little staccato phrases, and went on with them until he seemed to listen:

"The lamps aren't lit to-night. It's very dark. Do you hear? Stars shining. Wonderful stars. Better than lamps. I say, stars are better than lamps."

At length René said:

"Yes. Stars are much better than lamps. Lamps are only to prevent people committing a nuisance. Stars don't give a damn if they do."

"I quite agree," said Kilner. "Drink this brandy."

When he had drunk, René said:

"Women ought to be like stars."

"Rubbish!" grunted Kilner. "Women ought to be like women."

"I've been trying to understand things."

"Awful mistake. A fellow like you can't understand things. He can only live them. That's why you have such a rotten time. No power of expression. If only you could write or draw, or play some instrument--though I hate music. But if you could, you wouldn't be you."

"You're a clever fellow, Kilner. I wish you'd tell me what's the matter with me."

"Too much vitality for a society which dislikes it, as it always will as long as it prefers the shadow to the substance, bad art to good, and imitations of things to the things themselves."

René looked disappointed. Kilner patted his hand.

"Too intellectual! Personal, then. What's wrong with you, my friend, is that you are out for the grand passion. It doesn't happen more than about once in two hundred years. Why? I don't know. It depends on two people, you see, and I suppose two first-rate people don't often meet. The rest of us lie about our love affairs to make them tolerable. I lied that night when I first met you. I wanted to make an impression. The only reason for lying I ever knew. I told you my one decent love affair lasted for five weeks. It didn't. It lasted for exactly five seconds, the time of the kiss under the almond-tree in which it was born and died. Nothing more was possible, she being she and I being I. It was a decent business because we didn't try to pretend it was anything else. So far as it went, it was so true as to make falseness impossible. We shall both live on that for the rest of our lives. Just enough to make marriage impossible for us. We shall both marry someone else for company, and as a defense against a growing tendency to promiscuity. You don't seem to have that tendency. Life's too serious for you. You are incapable of a love affair without an attempt to make it a spiritual thing. Where we get excited, you get exalted, which is infernally bad luck on the average woman. Feelin' better?"

"Yes," said René, "but you do talk a lot of drivel."

"Hurray!" cried Kilner. "He's beginning to find himself. I wonder if you'll ever see how funny you are?"

"I wonder?" said René, and he turned over, and in one moment was fast asleep.

XII

SETTLEMENT

Our conscious actions are as a drop in the sea as compared with
our unconscious ones.

ANN came round in the morning, very petulant and angry because she had lost half-a-sovereign. This had so upset her that, once she was satisfied that René was not so ill as he looked, she had no other interest, and could only give vent to her annoyance in little splutters of irritation. She sat by René and talked about it until he had to ask her to go away.

"All right," she said, "I know when I'm not wanted. But I do hate doing a thing like that. I can't think how I did it."

"There was once," said Kilner, seeing how she was fretting his friend, "a crooked woman who lived in a crooked house, and she lost a crooked sixpence."

"I know that story. Only it wasn't a crooked woman. It was Mrs. Vinegar, and she lived in a bottle, and she lost a sixpence and broke the bottle sweeping for it. Oh, Renny, he thinks I'm like Mrs. Vinegar! I am awful, I know."

René smiled at Kilner. Ann said:

"If there's any overtime to-day, I'll take it. Will you--be back to-night?"

"I think I'll stay here if you don't mind."

"Will you-- You'll let me come and see you?" She seemed to appeal to Kilner. He nodded. His consent comforted her, and she rose to go. René took her hand and said:

"Ann, dear, I want you to believe that whatever happens I am always your friend."

She answered:

"I saw Rita this morning. She's all right."

"That's good."

"I was awful, wasn't I? Something seemed to come over me. I didn't want to be a beast, really I didn't. Only I do hate it when you can say what you mean and I can't. I do want to make it up, Renny. Only it doesn't seem like ordinary rows, does it?"

"Come and see me to-night, Ann. You might tell old Martin I can't take the car out to-day."

"You're not ill, are you?"

"No. Only what you'd call queer."

Kilner followed her out.

"What's the matter with him?" she asked.

"You."

"Oh!" She was dismayed.

"I don't mean it in any insulting sense. His affections and yours don't work in the same way."

"I don't understand."

"That's it."

"I do understand more than you think, Mr. Kilner. If a feller wants to leave a girl, I say she's a fool to try and keep him. I don't believe Renny's that sort. I don't believe he'd see a girl left."

"He's done it once."

"Oh! Her! That's different. She wasn't fond of him like I am."

"You don't know."

"Don't I? Besides, she was one of your ladies. I'm sorry for them, always keeping one eye lifting on what other ladies are going to think."

"Suppose he did leave you."

"That's not your business, Mr. Kilner. If he did, I'd know you'd been making him upset with your talk."

"It isn't all talk."

"What is it, then?"

"Something just as deep as what you call love; probably deeper."

They had walked down the street leading to the mews, and now came to the corner. Ann stopped and stood hesitating. Her hand went up, and she pulled at her lower lip and shifted her feet uneasily.

"I known girls be left," she muttered, "girls like me. They pulled through somehow. But I don't think they was fond of the men like I am of him. And you say he's fond of me. I know there isn't anybody else."

"Is that all you care about?"

"He's never looked at anybody else. I'd feel better if he did. What call has he to go and make trouble if there isn't anybody else? Lots of girls would have chucked work when they'd found a man like that to live on. They get sick of being on their own. I've been on my own since I was sixteen, and I couldn't give it up for anybody."

"And yet you expect him to give it up?"

"No, I don't. I expect him to stand by me, that's all. I have my feelings too. He's not the only person in the world with feelings. I'm very fond of him, Mr. Kilner, but sometimes I think he's a bit soft, and I do hate a softy. Ooh! I'll be late."

She walked swiftly away. Very young she looked. She moved not gracefully, but with a birdlike energy that was pleasing. Kilner, surveying her figure, approved of it, until he came to her shoulders. They were slightly stooping and rounded, and she swung them awkwardly as she walked.

"Ugly and weak," said Kilner to himself. "Stooping over an infernal machine. Taken something out of her. Not her spirit. Given her a cramped habit of body. Nonsense. No good trying to account for it. He is simply not in love with her, never has been, nor she with him."

He went up to his room and found it empty. No René. No sign of him at Ann's. He had not been seen at the yard. His car was out with a temporary driver. A child in the mews had seen him in the main road. He had gone into a tobacconist's and then climbed on a bus. The tobacconist remembered his coming in to get change for a sovereign. He looked rather strange and excited. "It's a fine day," said the tobacconist. "Fine, be blowed," replied René. "It's as empty as hell." "I wouldn't say that," said the tobacconist, "with the sun shining." "But I do say it," insisted René. "You couldn't call that shining." And then another customer came in.

Kilner had some knowledge of his friend's ways and haunts, but he sought in vain.

He met Ann in the evening with his news. She looked scared and protested:

"He's gone to his home. He must have gone to his home. You could tell he was always fond of his mother."

"What makes you think that?"

"He wouldn't go anywhere else."

"Did he talk about his home?"

"Hardly a word. But he told me he'd met his father. He's gone to his home. He'll be back."

"I don't feel so sure about that."

"Well, I know he'd never go back to the old life, books and all that. He said he never would. He said he'd learned more about econ-- What d'you call it?"

"Economics."

"That's it. He said he'd learned more through being with me than in four years' work at books and lectures."

"I should call that an exaggerated statement."

"He'll come back. I know he wouldn't see me left."

They met Martin rolling to his home. When they told him, he screwed a chuckle out of himself and squeezed his eyes up tight.

"Onsettled," he said, "onsettled. I seen it a-coming on. Thinks I to myself, I thinks, when I sees him coming in in the morning: 'Brewing up for trouble, you are, young man; but whether it'll be Glory to God or Down with them as pays wages, or what, I don't know.' I was going to say he'd better have a holiday, and now he's snoofed it."

"He'll come back," said Ann.

"Don't you go counting on that, my pretty. He ain't our class, and never could be. You've only to see him drink to know that. If he was our class he'd be worse'n the rest of us. Don't you go counting on that."

"He'll come back. He ain't a sneak."

"When it comes to women," said Martin, "any man's neither more nor less than what he can be. But if you find it lonely waiting you can come and sit with me. I ain't a-going to see you let down, my pretty, not for want of money or a helping hand. If your heart's set on him, I can't do nothing there; but, Lor' bless you, hearts ain't everything."

"Good for you, Mr. Martin," said Kilner.

"Oh, I know a thing or two." The fat man winked. "You don't have to do with 'orses for nothing. I had a 'orse once took a uncommon fancy to a goat there was in the mews. Had to see it every day. The goat was sold, and that there 'orse pined away. I kept on a-telling of him that no goat in the world was worth losing a feed of oats for, and at last he got so precious hungry he believed it, and I never did see a 'orse so glad to eat. Fancies come and go, but your belly lets you know it's there till you die. Will you come in, too, Mr. Kilner?"

"No, thanks. I must get to bed early. Work in the morning."

When Kilner had gone, old Martin said to Ann with an affectionate touch on her arm:

"That young man has a 'ead screwed on his shoulders."

"He's all head," said Ann, "and I hate him."

"Lor'! There's talking. How women do like to make a man wriggle. I never was much in the wriggling line myself, not being the build for it. But a 'ead's worth having, too. I never had much 'ead myself. Too affectionate myself. What a pretty little thing you was, to be sure. Feeling it bad, my pretty?"

"Hellish bad," replied Ann.

"There, there."

"I never thought I'd feel anything so bad. I want to hate him, but I can't. I do hate that Kilner. I'd like to see him dead."

"There, there. 'Orses has wunnerful strong dislikes, too."

Ann said:

"It's enough to make a woman scream, the way men talk."

Old Martin's huge face expanded in astonishment. He reached out his hand for a pipe, filled it, conveyed it to his mouth, and sank into a brooding silence. He broke it at length to say:

"Women has a great scorn o' men, and I don't know but what they deserve it."

"If there's one thing I hate," said Ann, "it's being dished. I suppose I always knew it couldn't last. It was too wonderful. You don't know how kind he was in his ways, never wanting anything you didn't want yourself. And that was awful, too, because it made you afraid to want anything. It seemed to shame you. He was always shaming me, and I did feel awful sometimes. But it was lovely when we went for rides on tops of buses."

This appreciation of René's qualities as a housemate seemed to bore old Martin, for he took up a newspaper and began making notes and calculations from the betting columns.

"Hullo!" he said. "This must be some connection of his. 'Miss Janet Fourmy of Elgin, N.B.' 'Miss Fourmy,' it says, 'was a distinguished German and Italian scholar, a Goethe translator, a contributor to the Scottish Encyclo--' what you may call it. 'In her youth she was familiar with the famous Edinburgh circle which gathered round _Maga_ and did much valuable philological work, and was for a time governess to the late Archbishop of Canterbury who never ceased to express his admiration for her intellect and gifts. She had many friendships with the interesting figures of her day, and it is believed that she has left some record of them.'"

"He told me about her," said Ann. "He used to go and stay with her, and she used to read an Italian book called Dante, with the pages upside down. She was very old, but good to him, and she thought Lord John Russell was in love with her."

"Lord who?"

"I don't know who he was, but that's the name. Renny says it was her weakness. She lived all alone, and it's very dreary in the winter in Scotland. She had met a lot of lords in her time, and she liked to remember more than she'd met. And she'd never married, and Renny says she thought it sounded well to account for it by saying that Lord John Russell was in love with her. It wasn't always him----"

"Well! the things women do think of. I shall say I remained a widower because of Madame Tussaud."

"She was fond of Renny," said Ann, and that seemed on her lips the noblest possible epitaph for old Janet. She added:

"Perhaps that's where he's gone."

"I shouldn't think so. It costs a pile o' money to go to Elgin, N.B. It's a good deal north o' Bedford, which is the farthest I ever went with the 'orses. That was in eighteen-eighty-four."

He settled down for a story. Fortunately for Ann, he was allowed to get no further than clearing his throat, when he was cut short by the entry of Casey.

"Evening, miss," said he. "I seen your young man in the neighborhood of Holland Park, standing on a street corner. I nodded to him, but he looked clean through me. Very queer, I thought. We've been good pals. When I came back an hour later he was still there. I was empty that time. So I stopped. 'Keeping the pavement warm,' I said, cheerful like. 'Trying to warm myself,' said he. 'Draughty weather to be doing that in the streets,' I said. 'You go home, Casey,' he said. 'Oh, well,' I thought, 'we're all fools, and every fool to his own folly.' So I left him. I came home that way just now and he'd gone."

"We been talking about him all evening," said Martin, "me and Annie here."

"He's one of the best hands at an engine that ever I saw. And that brings me to what I want to talk to you about, guvnor. I been to see the doctor again, and he says London's doing me a bit of no good, and if I go on with it, it'll do me in. Now I've got an idea. Leastways it isn't all my idea but mostly hisn, young Fourmy's."

"If you knew about 'orses, there's a good livery at Barnet."

Casey persisted:

"My idea is this: There's just a few want motors in London. Something's happening in the place. Well, one night in the cab-rank young Fourmy, Young Earnest, as we call him, took out the map of fifty miles round, and he pointed out how the railways go out of London like spokes of a wheel. Between the spokes, he says, is where London is going to live if it is made possible, and motors ought to make it possible. He says if you choose your place properly, so as to link up the main roads and two railways, you'd be bound to make a living. There's enough houses already. Soon there'll be factories and works out there. Then there'll be more houses. I didn't believe it at first. I said: 'But if all the people live out there, what's to become of dear old London?' 'London,' he says, 'will be a clearing-house and capital, a real center.' I didn't understand altogether what he was talking about, but I've been out to see for myself, and what he says is happening. All the little country towns have cinemas and new shops, and in the suburbs there are whole streets of houses empty. I'm no good for the West End traffic, and I want to try my luck at the other, if I can get hold of any capital."

"Ah! Capital!" said Martin. "That wants a bit of getting, capital does."

Clearly he had not understood a word of what Casey was talking about. He had his own idea of London, and was not going to change it or admit the possibility of change. From one year's end to the other he never left the mews. His yard might actually be filled with motor-cars, but for him it was really a sanctuary of the 'orses. Their smell still clung about it. The one horse he had left had little else to do but provide the smell.

However, he liked Casey, and was distressed to find him taking to ideas:

"Don't you go worrying your head about what is and is not, Casey. Heads wasn't made for that. Heads was made to have eyes in, and mouths, the same as 'orses. All you got to do, all any man's got to do, is to earn his keep and pay his shot, same as a 'orse. When he's done that, 'e's got to behave nice to them as is in stable with him. And every now and then he gets his little canter and may be turned out to grass."

"I'm no Nebuchadnezzar," retorted Casey, "and I want to be on my own."

"No man can be on his own if he ain't got no capital."

"That's what I've been saying."

"Ah!" said Martin mysteriously, to baffle Casey's obstinacy. "Ah! that wants getting, that does. If it was 'orses now----"

Casey saw that it was hopeless. Nothing would budge the fat man from his yard. Cars! They were a necessary evil, not to be encouraged beyond the limit of necessity.

Ann wanted to know more about René, but Casey could tell her nothing. He repeated his eulogy of young Fourmy's skill as a driver, and added:

"We've got has-been gentlemen on the ranks, scores of them. But they're not like him. It's a treat to hear him talk, it is. They wanted him, a lot of them did, to pitch into the union, but he doesn't seem to think much of trade-unions. He says they can't do anything yet, in the way of fighting I mean, because they want to make us all middle-classes, and that ain't good enough. If I could get him to go along with me!"

Ann said:

"He hasn't been home all day. Didn't he say anything to you?"

"He did say one day: 'I'm getting sick of this, carting men and women like cattle.' It seems to have got on his nerves a bit. Too good for it, I suppose."

"It would be a good thing," said she, "if we went into the country, though I don't know what I'd do. I do love London and all the lights and that, and the shops."

Said Casey:

"You should see the nights in Africa. Some parts you can walk a hundred miles and never see a light. Nothing but stars, and fewer of them than we have here. Flat and empty as the sea some of the country, going on forever and ever in the darkness."

Ann shivered:

"Ugh!" she said. "It makes me think of Renny. I don't know why. He'd like it, I think."

"Yes. I think he likes big things."

It was late. Near twelve o'clock. The lamps in the mews flickered as Ann returned to her rooms. The post had brought a note from René, posted in the north of London. He said: "Please tell old Martin I shall be away three days. I will come back then. I think I have it all settled in my mind. I want to get it clear for you, too. You have been so good to me, my dear, and I owe you so much.--R."

There was also a letter for him. She struggled against the desire to open it, and conquered it for that night. The next morning, however, the temptation was too strong for her, and she steamed it open. It was from a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh to say that the late Miss Janet Fourmy had left René the residue of her estate, which, after certain small legacies had been paid, would amount to nearly four thousand pounds. The house in Scotland would also be his, and all the deceased lady's personal effects.

Ann went to her work that day shivering with excitement. René's enormous wealth frightened her. She could put up a fight against his intelligence, his brooding, his silence; but against this she felt powerless, and knew within her heart that her battle was already lost.

She was a forewoman now, and she gave the girls under her the worst day they ever remembered.