VITHE COMFORT OF RELIGIONQuoi! Dieu me punirait éternellement de m’être livré à des passions qu’il m’a données?THEREmight be nothing to keep him, but yet he stayed five days longer. For one thing George’s children were amusing and a profitable study. They had discovered that they had only to lie to their parents to keep them quiet, and, as lying was expected of them, and made things comfortable, they saw no harm in it. For the rest they did as they pleased and amused themselves. Little George was the very spit of his grandfather and a great spinner of yarns. René told him one morning to ask his mother if he could go out with him. Off trotted the boy, to return in a moment with a detailed account of the conversation he had had. It transpired subsequently that Elsie was out at the time. René told her. She said:“I don’t know what to do about the child. He has such an imagination.”“I prefer to call that invention. Imagination is the one quality in you that appreciates truth. I should begin if I were you by satisfying his curiosity. Tell him the truth about anything he wants to know.”“But he wants to know such awful things.”“What awful things?”“Well, about me and George.”“It’s hard to put a lie straight once you’ve told it. It is terribly easy to lose your respect for your parents.”“Oh, but little George loves us.”“How do you know?”“He says so nearly every night.”“Oh, well,” said René, “people believe only what they like to believe.”Elsie was rather ruffled:“After all, they’re our children.”“Certainly. You’ll find out what they think of it soon enough.”It was interesting to watch the processes which went to make up the fool’s paradise that George and Elsie, in common with their kind, called Home, the worship of lip-virtue, the constant practice of mean little subterfuges, George dodging Elsie’s interest and suspicion of himself, she his of her, and the children, where necessary, contributing to the comedy and, for the rest, living thoroughly, selfishly, and callously in their own pursuits.René found that as long as he would let George talk about bridge, bowls, and business, or splutter abuse of Radical legislation, and as long as he allowed Elsie to chatter of the neighbors and children and music-halls and clothes, they were both quite happy.With his mother it was otherwise. She was uneasy in his presence and they could hardly talk at all, exceptabout their relations, the rich Fourmys, and the shabby tricks they had done; but after a while René became aware that they were holding a stealthy converse, an undercurrent to the words they used. He tried all sorts of devices to bring it to the surface but without success. His mother would relapse into silence or, without a word, would hurry off to her church and return impenetrably encased in humility, pale with emotional satiety. There was something abnormal about her then, something unnatural that made René’s flesh creep. When it had passed he would feel once more the wildness in her that she kept so savagely repressed.He recognized at last that he was staying on in the hope of penetrating her defenses. Having come to that, he attacked her one night when George and Elsie were out, and he knew there was no service at the church for her to escape to. Like the dutiful husband he was, George made a practice of taking Elsie to a music-hall once a week, a music-hall or two cinemas, as she chose.Mrs. Fourmy had put down her knitting and said:“I think I would like a game of patience, René.”He put out the table and the cards and they played. He said:“I wonder how you can stand seeing them play the old, old game.”“What old game?”“Marriage. Killing each other in the first few weeks and then—humbug.”“George is a very good husband and father.”“He lives with a woman in his house and children come automatically.”“He is very good to Elsie.”“He placates her.”Mrs. Fourmy took out the ace of diamonds and covered it. René said:“Do you ever think, mother, of how we used to say we’d go and live together?”“Sometimes. I knew it was just nonsense.”Her eyes gave him a quick little affectionate glance, searching for affection. Ah! that was better.“Not such nonsense, either. Why shouldn’t you go and live in Aunt Janet’s cottage? It was that I was thinking of, though I never thought it would be mine.”“I’d be so lonely.”“No lonelier than you are here.”“No.”That escaped her involuntarily. She covered it up.“You’re too old for that sort of talk, René. You’re not a boy any longer.”“I’m much younger than I was then.”“Yes, that’s true. Would you come too?”“No. I—I’m going south again.”“Have you met—her?”“Yes.”“I thought so.” Her hands trembled. “Are you—are you going to live with her?”“I hope so.”“It will be living in sin. I couldn’t live in your house if I knew that——”“You prefer George?”“I—I—— Please don’t talk about it any more, René.”“I must. You love me far more than you love George, and yet you prefer to accept a home from him rather than from me.”“Certain things are wrong, René.”“I take my chance of that.”“We aren’t given any choice.”“Hell in this world or hell in the next.”“Don’t speak lightly of such things, René.”“I saw my father in London.”Mrs. Fourmy let the cards trickle from her hands, and sat staring at him with weary, frightened eyes.“You are your father over again.”“He told me. Then it was your love or your religion——”“Don’t, René, don’t!”He could not continue. He watched her living again in the agony of the memory, righting with it, fighting it back, stifling the hunger in herself. He rose to leave her. She thought he was already gone, and slipped to her knees in an attitude of prayer.René went to his room at the back of the house, the exact counterpart of his old den. He cursed that jealous God, that brutal invention of cowardice which has laid waste the western world. His rage only subsided when he came to think of Cathleen. He took paper and pen and wrote to her:“I seem hardly at all different from the boy who used to write to you. It is almost exactly the sameroom, the same hour, only now it is my brother and sister-in-law who occupy the big bed in the big front room. The window looks out at the same lighted windows opposite. And I am the same except that I know myself better and am more sure. What an extraordinary phantasmagoria between our parting and our meeting! How worthless and external adventures can be! How worthless and external the more intimate relationships! But without adventure, without mistakes, folly, suffering, how is that discovery to be made? I suppose my brother never could have made it, but he must have had, perhaps even now he has, his moments when his desire tugs against his little round of habits. He would call himself a happy man, and perhaps he is so. Perhaps we all get what we desire. That would be a comfortable creed, and I could believe it were it not for my mother. One is not born of a woman for nothing. Something binds. There is a deeper knowledge than that of the mind. There is in my mother a quality with which I feel at home, free. But she withholds it from me. I feel she hates it in me, as in herself, as in my father. Hard to find anything else in common between them. I told you that story of how she surrendered to him when he came back. It must have been that in her, taken unawares. It had lived without alarm for so long. It had been stirred in her when I came back from Scotland so full of that idiotic love for you—and after that, I can’t follow. Too near to it perhaps, or perhaps it is obscured in me by all I have gone through since. But now she baffles me. She has suffered. Yes.We all suffer, but suffering leads to discovery, to joy, or life is altogether barren. She suffers, she must suffer from living here in the dull house, but she takes her suffering and bottles it up, sterilizes it with religion. Her comfort! From the bottom of my heart I hate it. When she is full of what she calls her religion, then I can only bear with her by my inborn knowledge of her, and for that only the more do I detest the poison that has ruined her splendid life. And how it has been exploited, this voluptuous, selfish pleasure which they dare to call prayer and worship, this cowardly refusal to follow suffering withersoever it leads. I cannot be tolerant about it. To thousands I know, it is no more than bridge or bowls to my brother George, a pastime. But with her, and with all who have a capacity for suffering, it is a passionate negation, and to have lived at all must be a horror. You see, I am almost inarticulate about it. I have tried to break through it and failed. She saw, and closed her eyes, as she must have seen time and again. The delight of seeing almost deliberately debased to fear. I wish I were more used to thinking about people, then I could make it more clear. But it doesn’t seem much use, for I go on believing in them and liking them and expecting all sorts of things that never come. Oh, the freedom that I find with you, and the thought of you! Everything you understand, and all the differences between us we can just laugh at and use. I must take you to some place where we can build up a healthy life. Now that I have money, I thought for a time that we wouldgo and live in Scotland in my house. (How odd that looks. I really am pleased with my possessions for the first time.) That would not do. There must be work and activity. We’ll have a brave time making plans to keep each other and everybody we know happy and keen. No more grubby humbugging, and no more Mitcham Mews. We’ll find a way. . . .”There came a tap at his door. He went to open it. His mother stood there.“Aren’t you going to bed, René? George and Elsie came home long ago.”“I was writing a letter.”“You shouldn’t stay up, wasting the gas and all.”
Quoi! Dieu me punirait éternellement de m’être livré à des passions qu’il m’a données?
THEREmight be nothing to keep him, but yet he stayed five days longer. For one thing George’s children were amusing and a profitable study. They had discovered that they had only to lie to their parents to keep them quiet, and, as lying was expected of them, and made things comfortable, they saw no harm in it. For the rest they did as they pleased and amused themselves. Little George was the very spit of his grandfather and a great spinner of yarns. René told him one morning to ask his mother if he could go out with him. Off trotted the boy, to return in a moment with a detailed account of the conversation he had had. It transpired subsequently that Elsie was out at the time. René told her. She said:
“I don’t know what to do about the child. He has such an imagination.”
“I prefer to call that invention. Imagination is the one quality in you that appreciates truth. I should begin if I were you by satisfying his curiosity. Tell him the truth about anything he wants to know.”
“But he wants to know such awful things.”
“What awful things?”
“Well, about me and George.”
“It’s hard to put a lie straight once you’ve told it. It is terribly easy to lose your respect for your parents.”
“Oh, but little George loves us.”
“How do you know?”
“He says so nearly every night.”
“Oh, well,” said René, “people believe only what they like to believe.”
Elsie was rather ruffled:
“After all, they’re our children.”
“Certainly. You’ll find out what they think of it soon enough.”
It was interesting to watch the processes which went to make up the fool’s paradise that George and Elsie, in common with their kind, called Home, the worship of lip-virtue, the constant practice of mean little subterfuges, George dodging Elsie’s interest and suspicion of himself, she his of her, and the children, where necessary, contributing to the comedy and, for the rest, living thoroughly, selfishly, and callously in their own pursuits.
René found that as long as he would let George talk about bridge, bowls, and business, or splutter abuse of Radical legislation, and as long as he allowed Elsie to chatter of the neighbors and children and music-halls and clothes, they were both quite happy.
With his mother it was otherwise. She was uneasy in his presence and they could hardly talk at all, exceptabout their relations, the rich Fourmys, and the shabby tricks they had done; but after a while René became aware that they were holding a stealthy converse, an undercurrent to the words they used. He tried all sorts of devices to bring it to the surface but without success. His mother would relapse into silence or, without a word, would hurry off to her church and return impenetrably encased in humility, pale with emotional satiety. There was something abnormal about her then, something unnatural that made René’s flesh creep. When it had passed he would feel once more the wildness in her that she kept so savagely repressed.
He recognized at last that he was staying on in the hope of penetrating her defenses. Having come to that, he attacked her one night when George and Elsie were out, and he knew there was no service at the church for her to escape to. Like the dutiful husband he was, George made a practice of taking Elsie to a music-hall once a week, a music-hall or two cinemas, as she chose.
Mrs. Fourmy had put down her knitting and said:
“I think I would like a game of patience, René.”
He put out the table and the cards and they played. He said:
“I wonder how you can stand seeing them play the old, old game.”
“What old game?”
“Marriage. Killing each other in the first few weeks and then—humbug.”
“George is a very good husband and father.”
“He lives with a woman in his house and children come automatically.”
“He is very good to Elsie.”
“He placates her.”
Mrs. Fourmy took out the ace of diamonds and covered it. René said:
“Do you ever think, mother, of how we used to say we’d go and live together?”
“Sometimes. I knew it was just nonsense.”
Her eyes gave him a quick little affectionate glance, searching for affection. Ah! that was better.
“Not such nonsense, either. Why shouldn’t you go and live in Aunt Janet’s cottage? It was that I was thinking of, though I never thought it would be mine.”
“I’d be so lonely.”
“No lonelier than you are here.”
“No.”
That escaped her involuntarily. She covered it up.
“You’re too old for that sort of talk, René. You’re not a boy any longer.”
“I’m much younger than I was then.”
“Yes, that’s true. Would you come too?”
“No. I—I’m going south again.”
“Have you met—her?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so.” Her hands trembled. “Are you—are you going to live with her?”
“I hope so.”
“It will be living in sin. I couldn’t live in your house if I knew that——”
“You prefer George?”
“I—I—— Please don’t talk about it any more, René.”
“I must. You love me far more than you love George, and yet you prefer to accept a home from him rather than from me.”
“Certain things are wrong, René.”
“I take my chance of that.”
“We aren’t given any choice.”
“Hell in this world or hell in the next.”
“Don’t speak lightly of such things, René.”
“I saw my father in London.”
Mrs. Fourmy let the cards trickle from her hands, and sat staring at him with weary, frightened eyes.
“You are your father over again.”
“He told me. Then it was your love or your religion——”
“Don’t, René, don’t!”
He could not continue. He watched her living again in the agony of the memory, righting with it, fighting it back, stifling the hunger in herself. He rose to leave her. She thought he was already gone, and slipped to her knees in an attitude of prayer.
René went to his room at the back of the house, the exact counterpart of his old den. He cursed that jealous God, that brutal invention of cowardice which has laid waste the western world. His rage only subsided when he came to think of Cathleen. He took paper and pen and wrote to her:
“I seem hardly at all different from the boy who used to write to you. It is almost exactly the sameroom, the same hour, only now it is my brother and sister-in-law who occupy the big bed in the big front room. The window looks out at the same lighted windows opposite. And I am the same except that I know myself better and am more sure. What an extraordinary phantasmagoria between our parting and our meeting! How worthless and external adventures can be! How worthless and external the more intimate relationships! But without adventure, without mistakes, folly, suffering, how is that discovery to be made? I suppose my brother never could have made it, but he must have had, perhaps even now he has, his moments when his desire tugs against his little round of habits. He would call himself a happy man, and perhaps he is so. Perhaps we all get what we desire. That would be a comfortable creed, and I could believe it were it not for my mother. One is not born of a woman for nothing. Something binds. There is a deeper knowledge than that of the mind. There is in my mother a quality with which I feel at home, free. But she withholds it from me. I feel she hates it in me, as in herself, as in my father. Hard to find anything else in common between them. I told you that story of how she surrendered to him when he came back. It must have been that in her, taken unawares. It had lived without alarm for so long. It had been stirred in her when I came back from Scotland so full of that idiotic love for you—and after that, I can’t follow. Too near to it perhaps, or perhaps it is obscured in me by all I have gone through since. But now she baffles me. She has suffered. Yes.We all suffer, but suffering leads to discovery, to joy, or life is altogether barren. She suffers, she must suffer from living here in the dull house, but she takes her suffering and bottles it up, sterilizes it with religion. Her comfort! From the bottom of my heart I hate it. When she is full of what she calls her religion, then I can only bear with her by my inborn knowledge of her, and for that only the more do I detest the poison that has ruined her splendid life. And how it has been exploited, this voluptuous, selfish pleasure which they dare to call prayer and worship, this cowardly refusal to follow suffering withersoever it leads. I cannot be tolerant about it. To thousands I know, it is no more than bridge or bowls to my brother George, a pastime. But with her, and with all who have a capacity for suffering, it is a passionate negation, and to have lived at all must be a horror. You see, I am almost inarticulate about it. I have tried to break through it and failed. She saw, and closed her eyes, as she must have seen time and again. The delight of seeing almost deliberately debased to fear. I wish I were more used to thinking about people, then I could make it more clear. But it doesn’t seem much use, for I go on believing in them and liking them and expecting all sorts of things that never come. Oh, the freedom that I find with you, and the thought of you! Everything you understand, and all the differences between us we can just laugh at and use. I must take you to some place where we can build up a healthy life. Now that I have money, I thought for a time that we wouldgo and live in Scotland in my house. (How odd that looks. I really am pleased with my possessions for the first time.) That would not do. There must be work and activity. We’ll have a brave time making plans to keep each other and everybody we know happy and keen. No more grubby humbugging, and no more Mitcham Mews. We’ll find a way. . . .”
There came a tap at his door. He went to open it. His mother stood there.
“Aren’t you going to bed, René? George and Elsie came home long ago.”
“I was writing a letter.”
“You shouldn’t stay up, wasting the gas and all.”