IVEXPLANATIONMais, hélas! quelle raisonTe fait quitter la maison? . . .Et qu’est-ce que je puis faireQue je ne fasse pour toi?DURINGthe three days of René’s absence Ann did not speak to a soul. She found the comfort of mortification in reading the attorney’s letter from Edinburgh. It made her feel hardly used, and that was pleasant. René had crept into her life under pretext of being at an end of his resources when he was incredibly rich. It was not fair: it was abominable. The grievance became such an obsession as to obscure her real dread and anxiety. In her almost crazy desire to defend herself against the alien power that was coming to him she tore up the letter and burned it. He would not know. She would keep him. She would get him to take her away. It was a good idea of Casey’s. They would all go down into the country. Casey said there were cinemas in the country. Through the whole of the last night she sat brooding in the darkness. Every now and then she would pretend that he was there in the next room,in the bed, and she would cling to this pretense until she had deceived herself and could almost believe that she heard him there. Yes. He was stirring in his sleep as he often did. She would go into the room and run her hand over the pillows. And her disappointment was a relief. It would have been terrible to have found him there when she knew he was away. Where was he? Whom was he with? Why didn’t that beast Kilner know, since it was all that beast’s doing, that sly hulk with his sarcastic way of speaking and his eyes that looked at you as if you were some sort of animal. It must be Kilner who had got him away. She brooded herself into hatred.In the morning she watched the painter go out, and spat after him. Then she took a knife, went up to his room, found the picture on which he was working, and slashed it to ribbons.“Naked women!” she cried as she cut away at the canvas. “Naked women! That’ll teach the filthy brute.”It chanced that she was out when René returned, and he went up to Kilner’s room in the hope of finding him. He saw the havoc that had been wrought, and understood who had done it. When the painter returned René was still trying to piece the canvas together. Without a word Kilner took it in his hands, and sat fingering it. He said:“What luck! What infernal luck! I thought it was going to put me on my feet. One of the Professors had been down to see it and was excited aboutit. He thought he could get it sold for me. There’s months of work in it.”“I shouldn’t have thought——”“I told you she hated me. I didn’t think she’d be clever enough to know how to get back at me. Oh! they are clever, these women, in their own mean little way. Drudges, they are, and drabs. It’s men like you, Fourmy, keep them so, asking them for love and taking the much they choose to give you, and when you sicken of it they take their revenge where they can.”“I never thought——”“No. Damn you! You never do think. By God, I’d rather be the sort of fool to whom a woman is only a meal or a dinner. There’s less mischief in that. What’s the good of your emotions if you can’t control them? You’d much better give it up like the rest of the world, shut yourself up in marriage to keep yourself out of harm’s way. Who the devil are you, that you should claim in life the freedom an artist hopes to get in his art?”There was enough truth in Kilner’s denunciation to enrage René. He had felt so clear and confident, so sure of mastering the event of his evil, and all this bitterness had him once more throbbing and confused.“What,” he cried, “what does a work of art more or less matter? You can’t expect the rest of us to live in filthiness so that you may paint pictures of a beauty that is never seen.”To have stung René into a hot fury seemed toappease the artist somewhat. He grunted and said:“In a way you’re right, and honestly I don’t care a hang about the picture. I can paint it again and better. But I thought I was going to make some money with it, enough to get out of this forever, and it is almost more than I can bear to know that the harm has come through you. It doesn’t matter. I’ll paint it again. I’ll get the fierce little spark of intelligence burning in Eve. I’d left that out. I’ll paint her feeling half confident of her superiority to both God and Adam, and ashamed of having to submit to their fatuous pretense of creation, their old theatrical trick. Art and religion! They stink of the harem and aphrodisiacs, the abominable East, the gods of lust and self-mortification. What has your trumpery idealism to say to that?”He flung the tattered remains of the picture on the fire and held it down. The flames consumed the paint greedily and roared in the chimney.“So much for that,” said Kilner. “Finished! I’ll start again to-morrow. Let’s go and see your little vixen and annoy her by showing that she hasn’t hurt us in the least.”“That’s vindictive.”“Ho! Have you turned Christian?”“I’m not going to have Ann moithered.”“And why not? She must learn her lesson.”“Let me find out why she did it first.”“I know why she did it. Because she thought I had taken you away from her.”“She can’t have been jealous of you.”“Women are always jealous of a man’s men friends. They know his feeling can be just as strong for them without being weakened by sex. And they hate that— Now, a feeling fortified by sex—ah! but that doesn’t happen.”“That,” said René, “is exactly what has happened.”“Eh? To you?”René nodded, and he told Kilner something of the walk in the west wind, the meeting with Cathleen, the deliverance it had brought to both of them.“Does she know? Ann, I mean.”“No. I haven’t seen her.”“She must have felt it. Poor little devil! No, I’ll not see her. It’s between you two—my rotten picture, Ann’s rotten little dream of happiness, both destroyed. You look like a destroyer, my friend. It’s in your eyes, your gestures, and movements. Absolute purpose, absolute desire. There’s nothing else worth having.”“How absurd you are, Kilner. You turn everything into a picture as soon as you are interested in it at all. Purpose! I feel like a little schoolboy who has to interview his headmaster. I felt just the same once when I had been amusing myself with throwing paper out of the window. The headmaster saw it, but not the culprit. Then I was away from school ill, and the whole form got into trouble because no one would own up.”Kilner shouted with laughter:“What a picture of the young Fourmy. Doing just what he wanted to do and evading theconsequences by luck. I bet it had all blown over by the time you got back.”“Oh, yes,” said René, “but I confessed, and no one was very annoyed.”He went round to Ann’s room with a sinking at his heart. She must be told, she must be made to understand, and she never would. He felt immeasurably older than she, responsible for her, and rather helpless. She was out. He gazed round at the room and was touched by its poverty and thriftlessness, the cheap little ornaments on the mantelshelf, the souvenirs of Margate and Southend, the cigarette cards pinned to the wall, to make, with a mirror, its only ornaments. Here they had sat, so many evenings, he and she, in a kind of playing at happiness. Here they had quarreled. Between quarreling and laughing they had spent all their days, laughing into quarrels, quarreling into tears, and out of them again laughing: the happy life of the poor, the workers, the thoughtless, whom no care could subdue, no joy uplift. What a relief that life had been to him when he had turned from that other life, where all his qualities were exploited and thought and power of expression were used only to sneak advantages, and even love and wedded happiness were valued only as possessions! How it had stripped him of all arrogance and cupidity of mind! The simple innocence of those who sell themselves for bread, and know nothing of the business for which they are used, and more despise than envy the shows in the production of which more than half their efforts are expended. Ann’s scorn of“ladies,” believing them all to be light women, her hatred of charity organization inspectors (she had routed them more than once when they meddled with Rita), Insurance Cards, and Old Age Pensions. She resented being underpaid, but even more she loathed the spirit which tried to supplement the underpayment with instruction in virtue made impossible by it, with doles and callous assistance. It had not escaped her that the motor-cars in the mews cost more to maintain than the income of any one of the families who lived above them. But she loved her little bare rooms, and if she were allowed to keep them and the happiness that filled them she asked no more. The brave independence: that was what René had prized in her, what was expressed in her room. He had contributed nothing to it but a little comfort, an easy chair, a few books, and his pleasure in her. He knew that she treasured that above everything in the world, and he must take it from her. He was shaken with cowardice and dread and pity—by pity most of all. That bound him to her, dragged him down. He had not expected it, so clear had everything seemed in the light of his healthful experience. And, he knew, pity from him would be to her of all things the most hateful. He could not shake free of it, and it absorbed him.He heard her footsteps on the short flight of stairs. He was filled with a longing to escape. With her hand on the door he lost his head and fled into the inner room. He heard her go to the fireplace and sit in the easy-chair. She sat silently brooding. Then she heard him in the inner room. She had heard that before,and he was never there. Slowly she came into the inner room, and he could just see her smoothing the pillows with her hands. She caught the sound of his breathing and stood stock-still. He could not move. She came toward him groping with her hands. She touched him.“Renny, dear.”She was pressed close to him. Her arms went round his neck.“I knew you’d come back.”He caressed her soothingly, gently, consumed and burning in his pity for her, and his terror lest she should discover it too suddenly.He tried to draw her into the outer room, but she clung to him and kept him in the darkness, forcing him to feel her animal possession of him and hunger for him. Rage and the desire for self-preservation thrust back his pity and he carried her back to the outer room.Then it was some moments before she could recover herself. She stood giggling and laughing nervously, almost hysterically.“Renny, dear,” she said, “you did say once we’d go off together. I want to. I want to. I’m sorry I went on working. I oughtn’t to have done that. We ought to have had a house and me looking after it.”“You would have been even more unhappy.”“I’m not unhappy, Renny, dear. You’ve come back. And there’s that coming——”(“She must be kept off that,” he thought.)“Old Martin’s been that kind,” she said. “He says he’ll see us through if it’s money.”“I can make enough money,” he replied, and then stopped, puzzled and startled by the malicious pleasure that came into her eyes. He leaned forward the better to see her, for the gas jet was flickering, and she turned away with a half smile that was exasperatingly silly.“It isn’t money,” he said, “and you know it. I’ve seen Kilner.”She was instantly defiant on that.“Well, and what had he to say for himself?”“Nothing you would understand.”“Heuh! Clever, aren’t you, you two, when you get your heads together.”She began to lay supper. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I’ve not felt like eating while you’ve been away. Where you been?”“Away,” he answered. “Out of London.”“To your home?”“No.”“I thought you’d have gone to your home.”“There’s nothing to take me there. I’ve been with friends.”“Women?”“Yes.”She had nothing to say to that. He went on:“One of them I knew years ago, when I was a boy.”“That’s not so long ago. A lady?”“Yes.”“A lady wouldn’t take up with you now.”“She works for her living.”“The same as me?”“The same as you.”“Well. What of it?”“We went down into the country, she and I and her friend.”“I don’t want to know about that.”“But I want to tell you.”She stood by the table and her fingers drew patterns on the cloth.“What is it you want to tell me?”“I’m in love with her.”Ann’s lips set in a hard line, and her eyes narrowed and her brows scowled.“Did you come back to tell me that?”“Yes.”“Why? Did you think I’d want to know?”“I’m so sorry.”“Sorry, you devil? You came down to torment me. You’d better go, d’ye hear.”René could not move. He was fascinated by the suffering in the little creature, melted and weakened by his pity for her.“You’d better go,” she repeated. “And tell her you left a poor girl hating you, and see how she’ll like that. Sorry! That’s what you say when you step on a fellow’s foot in a bus. Sorry! When you got a girl body and soul, and you throw her away like dirt.”“I came back.”“Yes. To tell me that. To tell me I was dirt, tothrow me down for her to walk on so’s she shan’t get her feet wet.”She changed her tone and asked quietly:“You knew her before me?”“Long years before.”“Before that other one as you married?”“Before that.”“And she’s pretty and has pretty things?”“I’ve told her about you.”“Oh! and she sent you back! Thank you for nothing.”“She did not. I came of my own accord. I couldn’t leave you like that.”“I’d rather you did. I’d rather you did. My Christ! I can’t bear to see you sitting there and talking and talking——”He rose to his feet: “I can’t leave you, Ann. I couldn’t leave you like you are. . . .”She leaned across the table and put out her hand.“Look here, Renny. D’you love me?”“Yes.”“Heh!” She gave a snarl of incredulity. “Heh! See here! D’you want me!”Her eyes were staring at him cunningly, invitingly. He saw that she half believed his weakness would lead him to evasion or consent to her will. He waited, and made her repeat her question.“D’you want me?”“I want your happiness,” he said. “I don’t believe you will find it in me.”She was inarticulate. Her eyes closed and sheswayed. She jerked her head toward the door. He took that for a sign that he was to go, and moved round the table. She was before him, crouching, barring the way. Strangled sobbing sounds came from her throat. He stretched out his hands to implore her, to tell her of his almost intolerable pity. She sprang at him. She had a knife in her hand. He saw it flash, felt a burning pain in his breast, and fell. He could see her face twisted in an agony of fear close to his. Spittle from her lips fell upon his cheek. Her hands were busy at his breast. He lost consciousness.
Mais, hélas! quelle raisonTe fait quitter la maison? . . .Et qu’est-ce que je puis faireQue je ne fasse pour toi?
Mais, hélas! quelle raison
Te fait quitter la maison? . . .
Et qu’est-ce que je puis faire
Que je ne fasse pour toi?
DURINGthe three days of René’s absence Ann did not speak to a soul. She found the comfort of mortification in reading the attorney’s letter from Edinburgh. It made her feel hardly used, and that was pleasant. René had crept into her life under pretext of being at an end of his resources when he was incredibly rich. It was not fair: it was abominable. The grievance became such an obsession as to obscure her real dread and anxiety. In her almost crazy desire to defend herself against the alien power that was coming to him she tore up the letter and burned it. He would not know. She would keep him. She would get him to take her away. It was a good idea of Casey’s. They would all go down into the country. Casey said there were cinemas in the country. Through the whole of the last night she sat brooding in the darkness. Every now and then she would pretend that he was there in the next room,in the bed, and she would cling to this pretense until she had deceived herself and could almost believe that she heard him there. Yes. He was stirring in his sleep as he often did. She would go into the room and run her hand over the pillows. And her disappointment was a relief. It would have been terrible to have found him there when she knew he was away. Where was he? Whom was he with? Why didn’t that beast Kilner know, since it was all that beast’s doing, that sly hulk with his sarcastic way of speaking and his eyes that looked at you as if you were some sort of animal. It must be Kilner who had got him away. She brooded herself into hatred.
In the morning she watched the painter go out, and spat after him. Then she took a knife, went up to his room, found the picture on which he was working, and slashed it to ribbons.
“Naked women!” she cried as she cut away at the canvas. “Naked women! That’ll teach the filthy brute.”
It chanced that she was out when René returned, and he went up to Kilner’s room in the hope of finding him. He saw the havoc that had been wrought, and understood who had done it. When the painter returned René was still trying to piece the canvas together. Without a word Kilner took it in his hands, and sat fingering it. He said:
“What luck! What infernal luck! I thought it was going to put me on my feet. One of the Professors had been down to see it and was excited aboutit. He thought he could get it sold for me. There’s months of work in it.”
“I shouldn’t have thought——”
“I told you she hated me. I didn’t think she’d be clever enough to know how to get back at me. Oh! they are clever, these women, in their own mean little way. Drudges, they are, and drabs. It’s men like you, Fourmy, keep them so, asking them for love and taking the much they choose to give you, and when you sicken of it they take their revenge where they can.”
“I never thought——”
“No. Damn you! You never do think. By God, I’d rather be the sort of fool to whom a woman is only a meal or a dinner. There’s less mischief in that. What’s the good of your emotions if you can’t control them? You’d much better give it up like the rest of the world, shut yourself up in marriage to keep yourself out of harm’s way. Who the devil are you, that you should claim in life the freedom an artist hopes to get in his art?”
There was enough truth in Kilner’s denunciation to enrage René. He had felt so clear and confident, so sure of mastering the event of his evil, and all this bitterness had him once more throbbing and confused.
“What,” he cried, “what does a work of art more or less matter? You can’t expect the rest of us to live in filthiness so that you may paint pictures of a beauty that is never seen.”
To have stung René into a hot fury seemed toappease the artist somewhat. He grunted and said:
“In a way you’re right, and honestly I don’t care a hang about the picture. I can paint it again and better. But I thought I was going to make some money with it, enough to get out of this forever, and it is almost more than I can bear to know that the harm has come through you. It doesn’t matter. I’ll paint it again. I’ll get the fierce little spark of intelligence burning in Eve. I’d left that out. I’ll paint her feeling half confident of her superiority to both God and Adam, and ashamed of having to submit to their fatuous pretense of creation, their old theatrical trick. Art and religion! They stink of the harem and aphrodisiacs, the abominable East, the gods of lust and self-mortification. What has your trumpery idealism to say to that?”
He flung the tattered remains of the picture on the fire and held it down. The flames consumed the paint greedily and roared in the chimney.
“So much for that,” said Kilner. “Finished! I’ll start again to-morrow. Let’s go and see your little vixen and annoy her by showing that she hasn’t hurt us in the least.”
“That’s vindictive.”
“Ho! Have you turned Christian?”
“I’m not going to have Ann moithered.”
“And why not? She must learn her lesson.”
“Let me find out why she did it first.”
“I know why she did it. Because she thought I had taken you away from her.”
“She can’t have been jealous of you.”
“Women are always jealous of a man’s men friends. They know his feeling can be just as strong for them without being weakened by sex. And they hate that— Now, a feeling fortified by sex—ah! but that doesn’t happen.”
“That,” said René, “is exactly what has happened.”
“Eh? To you?”
René nodded, and he told Kilner something of the walk in the west wind, the meeting with Cathleen, the deliverance it had brought to both of them.
“Does she know? Ann, I mean.”
“No. I haven’t seen her.”
“She must have felt it. Poor little devil! No, I’ll not see her. It’s between you two—my rotten picture, Ann’s rotten little dream of happiness, both destroyed. You look like a destroyer, my friend. It’s in your eyes, your gestures, and movements. Absolute purpose, absolute desire. There’s nothing else worth having.”
“How absurd you are, Kilner. You turn everything into a picture as soon as you are interested in it at all. Purpose! I feel like a little schoolboy who has to interview his headmaster. I felt just the same once when I had been amusing myself with throwing paper out of the window. The headmaster saw it, but not the culprit. Then I was away from school ill, and the whole form got into trouble because no one would own up.”
Kilner shouted with laughter:
“What a picture of the young Fourmy. Doing just what he wanted to do and evading theconsequences by luck. I bet it had all blown over by the time you got back.”
“Oh, yes,” said René, “but I confessed, and no one was very annoyed.”
He went round to Ann’s room with a sinking at his heart. She must be told, she must be made to understand, and she never would. He felt immeasurably older than she, responsible for her, and rather helpless. She was out. He gazed round at the room and was touched by its poverty and thriftlessness, the cheap little ornaments on the mantelshelf, the souvenirs of Margate and Southend, the cigarette cards pinned to the wall, to make, with a mirror, its only ornaments. Here they had sat, so many evenings, he and she, in a kind of playing at happiness. Here they had quarreled. Between quarreling and laughing they had spent all their days, laughing into quarrels, quarreling into tears, and out of them again laughing: the happy life of the poor, the workers, the thoughtless, whom no care could subdue, no joy uplift. What a relief that life had been to him when he had turned from that other life, where all his qualities were exploited and thought and power of expression were used only to sneak advantages, and even love and wedded happiness were valued only as possessions! How it had stripped him of all arrogance and cupidity of mind! The simple innocence of those who sell themselves for bread, and know nothing of the business for which they are used, and more despise than envy the shows in the production of which more than half their efforts are expended. Ann’s scorn of“ladies,” believing them all to be light women, her hatred of charity organization inspectors (she had routed them more than once when they meddled with Rita), Insurance Cards, and Old Age Pensions. She resented being underpaid, but even more she loathed the spirit which tried to supplement the underpayment with instruction in virtue made impossible by it, with doles and callous assistance. It had not escaped her that the motor-cars in the mews cost more to maintain than the income of any one of the families who lived above them. But she loved her little bare rooms, and if she were allowed to keep them and the happiness that filled them she asked no more. The brave independence: that was what René had prized in her, what was expressed in her room. He had contributed nothing to it but a little comfort, an easy chair, a few books, and his pleasure in her. He knew that she treasured that above everything in the world, and he must take it from her. He was shaken with cowardice and dread and pity—by pity most of all. That bound him to her, dragged him down. He had not expected it, so clear had everything seemed in the light of his healthful experience. And, he knew, pity from him would be to her of all things the most hateful. He could not shake free of it, and it absorbed him.
He heard her footsteps on the short flight of stairs. He was filled with a longing to escape. With her hand on the door he lost his head and fled into the inner room. He heard her go to the fireplace and sit in the easy-chair. She sat silently brooding. Then she heard him in the inner room. She had heard that before,and he was never there. Slowly she came into the inner room, and he could just see her smoothing the pillows with her hands. She caught the sound of his breathing and stood stock-still. He could not move. She came toward him groping with her hands. She touched him.
“Renny, dear.”
She was pressed close to him. Her arms went round his neck.
“I knew you’d come back.”
He caressed her soothingly, gently, consumed and burning in his pity for her, and his terror lest she should discover it too suddenly.
He tried to draw her into the outer room, but she clung to him and kept him in the darkness, forcing him to feel her animal possession of him and hunger for him. Rage and the desire for self-preservation thrust back his pity and he carried her back to the outer room.
Then it was some moments before she could recover herself. She stood giggling and laughing nervously, almost hysterically.
“Renny, dear,” she said, “you did say once we’d go off together. I want to. I want to. I’m sorry I went on working. I oughtn’t to have done that. We ought to have had a house and me looking after it.”
“You would have been even more unhappy.”
“I’m not unhappy, Renny, dear. You’ve come back. And there’s that coming——”
(“She must be kept off that,” he thought.)
“Old Martin’s been that kind,” she said. “He says he’ll see us through if it’s money.”
“I can make enough money,” he replied, and then stopped, puzzled and startled by the malicious pleasure that came into her eyes. He leaned forward the better to see her, for the gas jet was flickering, and she turned away with a half smile that was exasperatingly silly.
“It isn’t money,” he said, “and you know it. I’ve seen Kilner.”
She was instantly defiant on that.
“Well, and what had he to say for himself?”
“Nothing you would understand.”
“Heuh! Clever, aren’t you, you two, when you get your heads together.”
She began to lay supper. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I’ve not felt like eating while you’ve been away. Where you been?”
“Away,” he answered. “Out of London.”
“To your home?”
“No.”
“I thought you’d have gone to your home.”
“There’s nothing to take me there. I’ve been with friends.”
“Women?”
“Yes.”
She had nothing to say to that. He went on:
“One of them I knew years ago, when I was a boy.”
“That’s not so long ago. A lady?”
“Yes.”
“A lady wouldn’t take up with you now.”
“She works for her living.”
“The same as me?”
“The same as you.”
“Well. What of it?”
“We went down into the country, she and I and her friend.”
“I don’t want to know about that.”
“But I want to tell you.”
She stood by the table and her fingers drew patterns on the cloth.
“What is it you want to tell me?”
“I’m in love with her.”
Ann’s lips set in a hard line, and her eyes narrowed and her brows scowled.
“Did you come back to tell me that?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Did you think I’d want to know?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry, you devil? You came down to torment me. You’d better go, d’ye hear.”
René could not move. He was fascinated by the suffering in the little creature, melted and weakened by his pity for her.
“You’d better go,” she repeated. “And tell her you left a poor girl hating you, and see how she’ll like that. Sorry! That’s what you say when you step on a fellow’s foot in a bus. Sorry! When you got a girl body and soul, and you throw her away like dirt.”
“I came back.”
“Yes. To tell me that. To tell me I was dirt, tothrow me down for her to walk on so’s she shan’t get her feet wet.”
She changed her tone and asked quietly:
“You knew her before me?”
“Long years before.”
“Before that other one as you married?”
“Before that.”
“And she’s pretty and has pretty things?”
“I’ve told her about you.”
“Oh! and she sent you back! Thank you for nothing.”
“She did not. I came of my own accord. I couldn’t leave you like that.”
“I’d rather you did. I’d rather you did. My Christ! I can’t bear to see you sitting there and talking and talking——”
He rose to his feet: “I can’t leave you, Ann. I couldn’t leave you like you are. . . .”
She leaned across the table and put out her hand.
“Look here, Renny. D’you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Heh!” She gave a snarl of incredulity. “Heh! See here! D’you want me!”
Her eyes were staring at him cunningly, invitingly. He saw that she half believed his weakness would lead him to evasion or consent to her will. He waited, and made her repeat her question.
“D’you want me?”
“I want your happiness,” he said. “I don’t believe you will find it in me.”
She was inarticulate. Her eyes closed and sheswayed. She jerked her head toward the door. He took that for a sign that he was to go, and moved round the table. She was before him, crouching, barring the way. Strangled sobbing sounds came from her throat. He stretched out his hands to implore her, to tell her of his almost intolerable pity. She sprang at him. She had a knife in her hand. He saw it flash, felt a burning pain in his breast, and fell. He could see her face twisted in an agony of fear close to his. Spittle from her lips fell upon his cheek. Her hands were busy at his breast. He lost consciousness.