VTOGETHERJe vais où le vent me mèneSans me plaindre où m’effrayer.Je vais où va toute chose,Où va la feuille de roseEt la feuille de laurier!ADAYor two later he moved his few belongings from Jimmy’s rooms to Ann’s. It was her wish. There was no point in concealment. The mews knew; the mews had expected it; the mews did not mind. Mr. Martin was delighted:“It’s what every young woman wants, to throw in her lot with some nice young feller. If they can’t be married, they can’t, and that’s all there is to it. Take mares now— Well, you know what I mean.” He caught the boy with his head in at the door listening, picked up a ledger, and threw it at him. A bad shot, it broke a pane in the glass wall.René had told him all the circumstances, because he knew that the mews was full of gossip, and he was attached enough to the old fellow to wish him to be in possession of the facts.“What I mean to say,” continued Mr. Martin, whenthe boy had fled, “is this: If women must come kerboosting into a man’s life, it’s better for them to come while he’s young and fool enough to enjoy it. There’s a time for everything, as the Bible says, but don’t let her put on you. The best of women will put on a man if he lets her, and that’s bad for both.”That was the advice with which René Fourmy’s second venture in cohabitation was blessed. As usually happens with advice, he was too deeply engrossed in present interests to apply what wisdom it contained to his own case. He drifted down the stream of bliss they had tapped, and, as generously as she, brought into their common stock as much kindness, consideration, and warmth, excitement and curiosity as they needed to take them from moment to moment. Only he brought no laughter, of which she supplied abundance. Both were out early and all day long, and both returned in the evening tired but eager for the new wonder of each other’s company. Indeed it was wonderful, the easy sympathy they had for each other. They could be frank. She had no preconception of what love should be, and took all its delights simply as they came, and her simplicity fed and encouraged his. It was a novelty for him to live from day to day satisfied; a kind of Paradise, if Paradise is a place where the appetites are a little overfed, so that body and mind are brought to indolence.Kilner had disappeared for a time, having made enough to be able to retire to his painting, and René had no other society than the chauffeurs in the shelters during the day and the familiars of Mitcham Mews inthe evening. He became sluggishly content to drift. He was making good money, increased by Ann’s earnings. If he ever thought of the old life in the North at all, it was with lazy contempt and indifference. His first attitude toward London was reversed. He had begun with all the northerner’s contempt for the easy ways of the metropolis. He never read anything but the newspaper, and every evening would read aloud the “fooltong” in theStar.Ann took it for the betting. She put aside two shillings a week for “the horses,” and he joined her in that pursuit. He did not so much enjoy her pleasures as her zest for them, and it became his object to keep that alive. Without that he was at moments aware of a sickening sensation that was truly horrible, making him gird at his surroundings, at certain tricks that Ann had, at habits, gestures, tones in her voice that were like his sister-in-law Elsie’s. He saw the resemblance first on receiving a letter from his brother George:“DEARR,—A pal of mine who has been on the spree saw you in London the other day, says you drove him from the Troc to Bernard Street. I thought you’d have been off that long ago, but there’s no accounting for tastes. I meant to write some time since to say the old man has hopped it again, and the mother has taken up her quarters with us. It seems some money came in—I can’t make out where from—and he grabbed it and offed. It seems to have finished her; she’s shut up tight, sits and knits, toddles off to church whenever there’s a service, never mentions him or you. Elsie can’t get anything out of her, though they talk enough together. It makes the house seem full of women. I’ve never set eyes on you know who since you cleared. I’mdoing well enough, and hope to get something of my own in a few years, though small business don’t stand much chance in these days against the big combines. You’d be amazed at the huge joint warehouses they’re putting up now. Thrigsby’s changing, and things are queer all round. People shift a bit now, what with the Colonies and all that. They don’t stay in offices like they used to do, only it doesn’t seem to make things any better for those who stay. Elsie sends her love; she always was a bit soft on you and didn’t mind a bit when you cleared. I only meant to tell you about the mother, thinking you ought to know. If ever I get to London I’ll look you up.—Thine, G.—Oh! Kurt Brock has gone in for the aviation and is making quite a name for himself up here.”The letter took René back pleasantly in memory, when he was suddenly startled to find himself meeting George on his own ground, with complacent acceptance of “having a good time,” as the one desirable object which could redeem the ever-present evil. And then he was compelled, from that footing, to see his own revolt as an unaccountable aberration, an eccentricity, an escapade unfortunately disastrous in its consequences. He did not like that, nor did he relish being coupled in George’s mind with his father, who was first indolent, then a vagabond, then irresponsible. His confidence was shaken, and he was made conscious of discrepancy and narrowly aware of having missed something of that which he set out to seek. Experience had taught him that it was no use taking any unhappiness to Ann. She would merely assume that he was unwell and probably dose him with physic from the herbalist’s round the corner. Again, he saw thatGeorge, like Ann, had a gusto in his way of living which he himself lacked, and now only enjoyed vicariously. That could no longer fret his nerves as in the old days it had done; he was fortified by the memory of his act of revolt and the months of entire independence he had enjoyed since his coming to London. He looked up at Ann from his letter.“Bad news?” she said.“I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. My father has cleared out again.”“It’s made you sorry. You always look like that when you think of your home. Sometimes I fancy you really wish you had never come away.”“That’s not true. I’m perfectly content. I’m learning not to blame anybody. That isn’t easy.”“If you’re not sorry, I don’t see why you want to think about it.”“You can’t forget people so completely as all that.”“Your dad seems to be able to.”“I’m not my father.”“No. But sometimes I wish you’d take a leaf out of his book. From what you tell me he does seem able to enjoy himself.”“Don’t I?”“Oh, you’re better than you used to be, but you do frighten me sometimes.”“When?”“Oh, when you look at me and don’t see me, and when I go on talking and you don’t hear a word I’m saying. Sometimes I think it’s only because you had that queer time when you first came to London, andthen I think you can’t be any different. The world does seem upside down, and it seems to me it might be better if we went right away and made a new start somewheres.”It comforted René to find that she, too, had her qualms, and that there was some stir behind her constant and equable good humor. He said:“Oh, no. I think we shall be all right. Only we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that love makes life easier.”“Not much fear of that,” she replied, with an odd little wry smile. “Mr. Martin said to me, he said, ‘This here education makes a man queer to live with. If it isn’t idees,’ he said, ‘it’s niceness; and if it isn’t niceness it’s bloody obstinacy,’ he said. . . . And I do try, Renny, I do reelly, though of course if I hadn’t the work during the day I should feel it more.”“What would you feel?”“Well, I don’t know. Oh, you know, when you look at things a long time, and when you like to sit and smoke and look inside yourself.”“I didn’t know I did that. I don’t see much if I do.”“Well, you do. And I asked Mr. Martin about it and he said it was education, and he said his brother-in-law was like that before he went off his head with religion. And often when I look at you and you are like that I want to put my arms round you and hold you until you stop doing it, and begin to think of me a little.”“But I do think of you all the time.”Then she put her arms round him and held him close until he forgot all but her in the dark pleasure that is called love.And again he drifted and supposed himself content, until one day when a young man hailed him and told him to drive to Islington where there was an exhibition of modern engineering. Halfway there, the young man stopped the car, leaped out excitedly, gripped René by the arm, and cried:“Good Lord, if it isn’t old René!”It was Kurt Brock.“I say!” he said. “What a find!”“The taxi’s mounting up,” said René.“I say, you take me out to Hendon and we’ll have a yarn. They told me you were still at it, and I was meaning to come and see you, but I’m up to my eyes in work. Let me drive.”He took the wheel and sent the car whizzing through the traffic at a speed that made René cry out in protest that he’d have him run in and his license forfeited. Kurt slowed down a little.“Cars crawl so,” he said, “once you’ve tried a flier.”“I’ve seen your name in the papers.”“Yes. I won my first race, Glasgow to Edinburgh round the coast of Scotland. Bit stiff, some of it, with mist and rain. I say, Iamglad to see you. You’re looking fit. Better life than mugging away with books, what? Though I don’t know that I’d care about being out in the streets in all weathers, what?”“Oh, you get used to that. I hate it when the engine goes wrong and I have to stay at home.”They reached Hendon and Kurt took his old friend to see his new monoplane.“Like to go up in her? She’s a snorter. Takes the air like a bird; you can feel her planes stretching to the air, and the engine’s like a cat.”Before he could think twice about it, René found himself sitting up behind Kurt with the machine rushing over the ground and the engine roaring. He could not tell at what point they left the earth, but trees, sheds, houses seemed to fall away as though the earth were tilted up, and then the air rushed in his ears, caught at his throat, pressed hard against his body. He looked down. They were ascending in circles. Roads looked like ribbons, trees like haycocks, trams like toys, men and women were little dots mysteriously and absurdly moving. They hovered for a moment as they turned out of the final circle and made straight for a low gray cloud. Soon they passed through it, and up again. Presently they turned, dipped, and Kurt shut off the engine and they came gliding down; the earth tilted up alarmingly to meet them; houses, trees, sheds slid back into their places. René was startled to find the earth almost immediately flattened out again without the threatened impact, and back they darted to the hangar.“Glorious?” asked Kurt.“I—I don’t know yet,” replied René.“How like you!”“How do you mean—like me?”“I mean, to admit that you don’t know. Half the people I take up pretend they like it, though they hate it really. A few, like you, don’t know, but they don’t say so. I wish I’d been the first man to do it.”René had to walk to get warm again, and he left Kurt in his hangar for a moment to instruct one of his mechanics. He came quickly, caught René by the arm, and laughed, telling him how comic it was to see him in his chauffeur’s clothes, disguised, the truant brother-in-law hiding behind a uniform. René said:“I’ve got used to it now.”“Do you ever open a book?”“Sometimes. I had a few sent to me.”“Economic books?” asked Kurt.“No. But I go on thinking about all that. Habit, I suppose, or perhaps trying to discover what it really is all about, and I don’t know. They used to call it a science, but it can’t be scientific——”“That’s what I say. You do know where you are with an engine. You can eat up distance. But I thought clever people would never understand that. You used not to. Perhaps you’re not clever any more. That’s what I said to Linda. Oh, I’m sorry.”“You needn’t be.” René gulped that out, for indeed he was embarrassed. The days of his torment were brought back suddenly, came savagely breaking through his simple pleasure in the rediscovery of this enlarged Kurt, grown from boy to man without loss of youth and frankness. He extricated himself from his confusion by asking:“How is she?” And at once he was shocked to find out how little he really cared to know.“Linda? Well, she’s a much better sort than she used to be. I don’t know much about women, though I like them well enough. Linda? Oh, she seems happy. She has a house and a piano and a lot of people, goes abroad, little parties of four or five, mixed; musicians and professors, cream of Thrigsby, you know. She wrote a play for the Thrigsby Repertory Theater, all about you and marriage and sex. Rather disgusting, I thought it, but all Thrigsby flocked to see it. All the same, yes, she is nicer. Not so inquisitive; doesn’t romance so wildly. The only objection I have to her now is that she will get me into a corner when I’m at home and talk about you. I think she ought to ignore your existence, as it is no longer her affair. She seems unable to do that, and she fancies I know something about you that she doesn’t, though I’ve told her over and over again that I don’t pretend to understand you or anybody else. I did tell her that you made me feel that what I wanted to do wasn’t necessarily a thing to be ashamed of.”“I did that?”“Well, it was only after you came that I was able to tell the mater that I didn’t want to do as she wished and couldn’t. . . . Where are you living?”René described Ann’s two rooms.“Do you like it? I mean, aren’t they rather grubby and piggy?”René thought it over with a clear picture in his mind of Ann’s room and Jimmy’s and Kilner’s, and thewomen standing at the doors and leaning out of the windows, and the children playing in the muck. For him it was all colored emotionally. Moments of distaste he could remember, but nothing like the offended fastidiousness expressed in Kurt’s tone.“Well, yes. Untidy and careless. One day’s work slops over into the next day. But, you know, my home was not so very unlike that. I used to hate it at home when I got back at night to find my bed unmade. That used to happen.”“Can I come and see you? I’m here for a fortnight. My business is up north. Got a factory now. You must come and see it if ever you are——”“I don’t think I’m likely to go north again. I feel that’s finished. I don’t know why. It isn’t that I have any hatred for it, or any bitterness about what happened. Only I feel on firmer ground here, as though I had taken root.”“I’ll come along then. Any night?”“Almost any night.”“I’ll take my chance.”They shook hands, Kurt with a grip that squeezed René’s knuckles together until the pain was horrible.“’Member our smash?” asked Kurt.René grinned at the recollection. He was very pleased and comfortable. To have established a connection with the past through Kurt was to have it made without shock of shame or injury to vanity. Through Kurt’s frank mind it was cleaned and shaped for him, presented to him so that he must make the necessary effort to strike out of himself the lightwhich should reveal it, the light of humor. It was a very faint gleam that came out of him, but it was enough to serve and to imprint the picture on his mind, give him possession of it, and deliver him from the anguish which attended all his dark contemplations.“Oh, yes,” he said, “and I remember how I lectured you. And now the positions are reversed.”“I don’t see that.”An elegant young man in a gray suit came up, with a beautiful woman of a loveliness and charm that took René’s breath away.“How do, Kurt?” said the young man, stepping in front of him. “Lady Clewer wishes to be——”Kurt shook hands with the beautiful lady and with her and her companion walked away toward the knot of brilliant persons gathered round a biplane that had just come to earth.Flushed and tingling at the hurt, René rushed away, savagely wound up his engine, and glided back into the city, to the narrow place where he had till now lived in comfort and the pleasures of simplicity. Small and confined he saw it now, mean and untidy. But it had been and was still his refuge. He had been happy, and the world had ignored his happiness and snatched it away from him. He was actively angry and jealous.He frightened Ann by the hungry affection with which he greeted her when she came home, after working overtime to keep pace with a rush of work at her factory. She liked it too. It was exciting. Yet she could not conceal her fear. She was more than his match in exuberance, but here was a demand uponher that she could not recognize and very soon she was in tears; not her happy tears that had so often reconciled him and made him gleeful and proud. He was humbled and acutely conscious of separation from her, though they clung together. For a few moments the whole weight of their relationship was thrown upon their loyalty, and it did not yield. She slept at last, her hand in his, but he lay awake staring back into the past, fascinated as the light growing in him showed it up in continually sharpening relief—his parting from his father; him he could see very clearly; but his mother was in shadow, sitting, head down, hands busy, never stirring, in acceptance. And Linda? He could see her at that absurd tea-party when his father had shown her his picture. She walked into his life then. They sat by the tulips and she was gone. He could remember his own desire and after, only its horrible, inexplicable disappearance.
Je vais où le vent me mèneSans me plaindre où m’effrayer.Je vais où va toute chose,Où va la feuille de roseEt la feuille de laurier!
Je vais où le vent me mène
Sans me plaindre où m’effrayer.
Je vais où va toute chose,
Où va la feuille de rose
Et la feuille de laurier!
ADAYor two later he moved his few belongings from Jimmy’s rooms to Ann’s. It was her wish. There was no point in concealment. The mews knew; the mews had expected it; the mews did not mind. Mr. Martin was delighted:
“It’s what every young woman wants, to throw in her lot with some nice young feller. If they can’t be married, they can’t, and that’s all there is to it. Take mares now— Well, you know what I mean.” He caught the boy with his head in at the door listening, picked up a ledger, and threw it at him. A bad shot, it broke a pane in the glass wall.
René had told him all the circumstances, because he knew that the mews was full of gossip, and he was attached enough to the old fellow to wish him to be in possession of the facts.
“What I mean to say,” continued Mr. Martin, whenthe boy had fled, “is this: If women must come kerboosting into a man’s life, it’s better for them to come while he’s young and fool enough to enjoy it. There’s a time for everything, as the Bible says, but don’t let her put on you. The best of women will put on a man if he lets her, and that’s bad for both.”
That was the advice with which René Fourmy’s second venture in cohabitation was blessed. As usually happens with advice, he was too deeply engrossed in present interests to apply what wisdom it contained to his own case. He drifted down the stream of bliss they had tapped, and, as generously as she, brought into their common stock as much kindness, consideration, and warmth, excitement and curiosity as they needed to take them from moment to moment. Only he brought no laughter, of which she supplied abundance. Both were out early and all day long, and both returned in the evening tired but eager for the new wonder of each other’s company. Indeed it was wonderful, the easy sympathy they had for each other. They could be frank. She had no preconception of what love should be, and took all its delights simply as they came, and her simplicity fed and encouraged his. It was a novelty for him to live from day to day satisfied; a kind of Paradise, if Paradise is a place where the appetites are a little overfed, so that body and mind are brought to indolence.
Kilner had disappeared for a time, having made enough to be able to retire to his painting, and René had no other society than the chauffeurs in the shelters during the day and the familiars of Mitcham Mews inthe evening. He became sluggishly content to drift. He was making good money, increased by Ann’s earnings. If he ever thought of the old life in the North at all, it was with lazy contempt and indifference. His first attitude toward London was reversed. He had begun with all the northerner’s contempt for the easy ways of the metropolis. He never read anything but the newspaper, and every evening would read aloud the “fooltong” in theStar.Ann took it for the betting. She put aside two shillings a week for “the horses,” and he joined her in that pursuit. He did not so much enjoy her pleasures as her zest for them, and it became his object to keep that alive. Without that he was at moments aware of a sickening sensation that was truly horrible, making him gird at his surroundings, at certain tricks that Ann had, at habits, gestures, tones in her voice that were like his sister-in-law Elsie’s. He saw the resemblance first on receiving a letter from his brother George:
“DEARR,—A pal of mine who has been on the spree saw you in London the other day, says you drove him from the Troc to Bernard Street. I thought you’d have been off that long ago, but there’s no accounting for tastes. I meant to write some time since to say the old man has hopped it again, and the mother has taken up her quarters with us. It seems some money came in—I can’t make out where from—and he grabbed it and offed. It seems to have finished her; she’s shut up tight, sits and knits, toddles off to church whenever there’s a service, never mentions him or you. Elsie can’t get anything out of her, though they talk enough together. It makes the house seem full of women. I’ve never set eyes on you know who since you cleared. I’mdoing well enough, and hope to get something of my own in a few years, though small business don’t stand much chance in these days against the big combines. You’d be amazed at the huge joint warehouses they’re putting up now. Thrigsby’s changing, and things are queer all round. People shift a bit now, what with the Colonies and all that. They don’t stay in offices like they used to do, only it doesn’t seem to make things any better for those who stay. Elsie sends her love; she always was a bit soft on you and didn’t mind a bit when you cleared. I only meant to tell you about the mother, thinking you ought to know. If ever I get to London I’ll look you up.—Thine, G.—Oh! Kurt Brock has gone in for the aviation and is making quite a name for himself up here.”
“DEARR,—A pal of mine who has been on the spree saw you in London the other day, says you drove him from the Troc to Bernard Street. I thought you’d have been off that long ago, but there’s no accounting for tastes. I meant to write some time since to say the old man has hopped it again, and the mother has taken up her quarters with us. It seems some money came in—I can’t make out where from—and he grabbed it and offed. It seems to have finished her; she’s shut up tight, sits and knits, toddles off to church whenever there’s a service, never mentions him or you. Elsie can’t get anything out of her, though they talk enough together. It makes the house seem full of women. I’ve never set eyes on you know who since you cleared. I’mdoing well enough, and hope to get something of my own in a few years, though small business don’t stand much chance in these days against the big combines. You’d be amazed at the huge joint warehouses they’re putting up now. Thrigsby’s changing, and things are queer all round. People shift a bit now, what with the Colonies and all that. They don’t stay in offices like they used to do, only it doesn’t seem to make things any better for those who stay. Elsie sends her love; she always was a bit soft on you and didn’t mind a bit when you cleared. I only meant to tell you about the mother, thinking you ought to know. If ever I get to London I’ll look you up.—Thine, G.—Oh! Kurt Brock has gone in for the aviation and is making quite a name for himself up here.”
The letter took René back pleasantly in memory, when he was suddenly startled to find himself meeting George on his own ground, with complacent acceptance of “having a good time,” as the one desirable object which could redeem the ever-present evil. And then he was compelled, from that footing, to see his own revolt as an unaccountable aberration, an eccentricity, an escapade unfortunately disastrous in its consequences. He did not like that, nor did he relish being coupled in George’s mind with his father, who was first indolent, then a vagabond, then irresponsible. His confidence was shaken, and he was made conscious of discrepancy and narrowly aware of having missed something of that which he set out to seek. Experience had taught him that it was no use taking any unhappiness to Ann. She would merely assume that he was unwell and probably dose him with physic from the herbalist’s round the corner. Again, he saw thatGeorge, like Ann, had a gusto in his way of living which he himself lacked, and now only enjoyed vicariously. That could no longer fret his nerves as in the old days it had done; he was fortified by the memory of his act of revolt and the months of entire independence he had enjoyed since his coming to London. He looked up at Ann from his letter.
“Bad news?” she said.
“I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. My father has cleared out again.”
“It’s made you sorry. You always look like that when you think of your home. Sometimes I fancy you really wish you had never come away.”
“That’s not true. I’m perfectly content. I’m learning not to blame anybody. That isn’t easy.”
“If you’re not sorry, I don’t see why you want to think about it.”
“You can’t forget people so completely as all that.”
“Your dad seems to be able to.”
“I’m not my father.”
“No. But sometimes I wish you’d take a leaf out of his book. From what you tell me he does seem able to enjoy himself.”
“Don’t I?”
“Oh, you’re better than you used to be, but you do frighten me sometimes.”
“When?”
“Oh, when you look at me and don’t see me, and when I go on talking and you don’t hear a word I’m saying. Sometimes I think it’s only because you had that queer time when you first came to London, andthen I think you can’t be any different. The world does seem upside down, and it seems to me it might be better if we went right away and made a new start somewheres.”
It comforted René to find that she, too, had her qualms, and that there was some stir behind her constant and equable good humor. He said:
“Oh, no. I think we shall be all right. Only we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that love makes life easier.”
“Not much fear of that,” she replied, with an odd little wry smile. “Mr. Martin said to me, he said, ‘This here education makes a man queer to live with. If it isn’t idees,’ he said, ‘it’s niceness; and if it isn’t niceness it’s bloody obstinacy,’ he said. . . . And I do try, Renny, I do reelly, though of course if I hadn’t the work during the day I should feel it more.”
“What would you feel?”
“Well, I don’t know. Oh, you know, when you look at things a long time, and when you like to sit and smoke and look inside yourself.”
“I didn’t know I did that. I don’t see much if I do.”
“Well, you do. And I asked Mr. Martin about it and he said it was education, and he said his brother-in-law was like that before he went off his head with religion. And often when I look at you and you are like that I want to put my arms round you and hold you until you stop doing it, and begin to think of me a little.”
“But I do think of you all the time.”
Then she put her arms round him and held him close until he forgot all but her in the dark pleasure that is called love.
And again he drifted and supposed himself content, until one day when a young man hailed him and told him to drive to Islington where there was an exhibition of modern engineering. Halfway there, the young man stopped the car, leaped out excitedly, gripped René by the arm, and cried:
“Good Lord, if it isn’t old René!”
It was Kurt Brock.
“I say!” he said. “What a find!”
“The taxi’s mounting up,” said René.
“I say, you take me out to Hendon and we’ll have a yarn. They told me you were still at it, and I was meaning to come and see you, but I’m up to my eyes in work. Let me drive.”
He took the wheel and sent the car whizzing through the traffic at a speed that made René cry out in protest that he’d have him run in and his license forfeited. Kurt slowed down a little.
“Cars crawl so,” he said, “once you’ve tried a flier.”
“I’ve seen your name in the papers.”
“Yes. I won my first race, Glasgow to Edinburgh round the coast of Scotland. Bit stiff, some of it, with mist and rain. I say, Iamglad to see you. You’re looking fit. Better life than mugging away with books, what? Though I don’t know that I’d care about being out in the streets in all weathers, what?”
“Oh, you get used to that. I hate it when the engine goes wrong and I have to stay at home.”
They reached Hendon and Kurt took his old friend to see his new monoplane.
“Like to go up in her? She’s a snorter. Takes the air like a bird; you can feel her planes stretching to the air, and the engine’s like a cat.”
Before he could think twice about it, René found himself sitting up behind Kurt with the machine rushing over the ground and the engine roaring. He could not tell at what point they left the earth, but trees, sheds, houses seemed to fall away as though the earth were tilted up, and then the air rushed in his ears, caught at his throat, pressed hard against his body. He looked down. They were ascending in circles. Roads looked like ribbons, trees like haycocks, trams like toys, men and women were little dots mysteriously and absurdly moving. They hovered for a moment as they turned out of the final circle and made straight for a low gray cloud. Soon they passed through it, and up again. Presently they turned, dipped, and Kurt shut off the engine and they came gliding down; the earth tilted up alarmingly to meet them; houses, trees, sheds slid back into their places. René was startled to find the earth almost immediately flattened out again without the threatened impact, and back they darted to the hangar.
“Glorious?” asked Kurt.
“I—I don’t know yet,” replied René.
“How like you!”
“How do you mean—like me?”
“I mean, to admit that you don’t know. Half the people I take up pretend they like it, though they hate it really. A few, like you, don’t know, but they don’t say so. I wish I’d been the first man to do it.”
René had to walk to get warm again, and he left Kurt in his hangar for a moment to instruct one of his mechanics. He came quickly, caught René by the arm, and laughed, telling him how comic it was to see him in his chauffeur’s clothes, disguised, the truant brother-in-law hiding behind a uniform. René said:
“I’ve got used to it now.”
“Do you ever open a book?”
“Sometimes. I had a few sent to me.”
“Economic books?” asked Kurt.
“No. But I go on thinking about all that. Habit, I suppose, or perhaps trying to discover what it really is all about, and I don’t know. They used to call it a science, but it can’t be scientific——”
“That’s what I say. You do know where you are with an engine. You can eat up distance. But I thought clever people would never understand that. You used not to. Perhaps you’re not clever any more. That’s what I said to Linda. Oh, I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be.” René gulped that out, for indeed he was embarrassed. The days of his torment were brought back suddenly, came savagely breaking through his simple pleasure in the rediscovery of this enlarged Kurt, grown from boy to man without loss of youth and frankness. He extricated himself from his confusion by asking:
“How is she?” And at once he was shocked to find out how little he really cared to know.
“Linda? Well, she’s a much better sort than she used to be. I don’t know much about women, though I like them well enough. Linda? Oh, she seems happy. She has a house and a piano and a lot of people, goes abroad, little parties of four or five, mixed; musicians and professors, cream of Thrigsby, you know. She wrote a play for the Thrigsby Repertory Theater, all about you and marriage and sex. Rather disgusting, I thought it, but all Thrigsby flocked to see it. All the same, yes, she is nicer. Not so inquisitive; doesn’t romance so wildly. The only objection I have to her now is that she will get me into a corner when I’m at home and talk about you. I think she ought to ignore your existence, as it is no longer her affair. She seems unable to do that, and she fancies I know something about you that she doesn’t, though I’ve told her over and over again that I don’t pretend to understand you or anybody else. I did tell her that you made me feel that what I wanted to do wasn’t necessarily a thing to be ashamed of.”
“I did that?”
“Well, it was only after you came that I was able to tell the mater that I didn’t want to do as she wished and couldn’t. . . . Where are you living?”
René described Ann’s two rooms.
“Do you like it? I mean, aren’t they rather grubby and piggy?”
René thought it over with a clear picture in his mind of Ann’s room and Jimmy’s and Kilner’s, and thewomen standing at the doors and leaning out of the windows, and the children playing in the muck. For him it was all colored emotionally. Moments of distaste he could remember, but nothing like the offended fastidiousness expressed in Kurt’s tone.
“Well, yes. Untidy and careless. One day’s work slops over into the next day. But, you know, my home was not so very unlike that. I used to hate it at home when I got back at night to find my bed unmade. That used to happen.”
“Can I come and see you? I’m here for a fortnight. My business is up north. Got a factory now. You must come and see it if ever you are——”
“I don’t think I’m likely to go north again. I feel that’s finished. I don’t know why. It isn’t that I have any hatred for it, or any bitterness about what happened. Only I feel on firmer ground here, as though I had taken root.”
“I’ll come along then. Any night?”
“Almost any night.”
“I’ll take my chance.”
They shook hands, Kurt with a grip that squeezed René’s knuckles together until the pain was horrible.
“’Member our smash?” asked Kurt.
René grinned at the recollection. He was very pleased and comfortable. To have established a connection with the past through Kurt was to have it made without shock of shame or injury to vanity. Through Kurt’s frank mind it was cleaned and shaped for him, presented to him so that he must make the necessary effort to strike out of himself the lightwhich should reveal it, the light of humor. It was a very faint gleam that came out of him, but it was enough to serve and to imprint the picture on his mind, give him possession of it, and deliver him from the anguish which attended all his dark contemplations.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “and I remember how I lectured you. And now the positions are reversed.”
“I don’t see that.”
An elegant young man in a gray suit came up, with a beautiful woman of a loveliness and charm that took René’s breath away.
“How do, Kurt?” said the young man, stepping in front of him. “Lady Clewer wishes to be——”
Kurt shook hands with the beautiful lady and with her and her companion walked away toward the knot of brilliant persons gathered round a biplane that had just come to earth.
Flushed and tingling at the hurt, René rushed away, savagely wound up his engine, and glided back into the city, to the narrow place where he had till now lived in comfort and the pleasures of simplicity. Small and confined he saw it now, mean and untidy. But it had been and was still his refuge. He had been happy, and the world had ignored his happiness and snatched it away from him. He was actively angry and jealous.
He frightened Ann by the hungry affection with which he greeted her when she came home, after working overtime to keep pace with a rush of work at her factory. She liked it too. It was exciting. Yet she could not conceal her fear. She was more than his match in exuberance, but here was a demand uponher that she could not recognize and very soon she was in tears; not her happy tears that had so often reconciled him and made him gleeful and proud. He was humbled and acutely conscious of separation from her, though they clung together. For a few moments the whole weight of their relationship was thrown upon their loyalty, and it did not yield. She slept at last, her hand in his, but he lay awake staring back into the past, fascinated as the light growing in him showed it up in continually sharpening relief—his parting from his father; him he could see very clearly; but his mother was in shadow, sitting, head down, hands busy, never stirring, in acceptance. And Linda? He could see her at that absurd tea-party when his father had shown her his picture. She walked into his life then. They sat by the tulips and she was gone. He could remember his own desire and after, only its horrible, inexplicable disappearance.