II166 HOG LANE WESTThe homeward journey was by no means so agreeable.EVERYyear since he had been a small boy, as the carriage rounded the crag which blots the lake out of sight, René had been moved to tears. Happiness and brightness were left behind, and every moment brought him nearer to dullness and dark streets and uncomprehending minds. And now, as he rounded the crag, Cathleen appeared on the summit, just too late to meet him or to come within earshot. She was wearing a blue sunbonnet, and she snatched it from her head and waved it until he was out of sight. He turned and watched her and tears came, and he could hardly choke back his sobs, and hoped miserably that the driver of his fly was not aware of his unmanliness.In the train he tried to tell himself that he was taking back the brightness of his love to Thrigsby, but as he came nearer, more and more powerfully did it seem to reach out to crush his love. By the time he was out in the Albert Station, he had reached a depression not to be broken even by the excitement of seeing again the familiar sights, the trams, the blackriver, the Collegiate Church, the dark warehouses, the school where he had spent so many dazed, busy, monotonous years, the statue of the Prince Consort, the yellow timber-yards by the canal, the brilliant greengrocer’s shop at the corner of Kite Street, the council school where he had begun his education, the dirty brick streets among which his whole youth had been spent. Only some horrid disaster could have relieved him. Even up to the moment when the door opened he hoped almost desperately to find some difference in his home.The erratic servant came to the door. She had a black smudge across her cheek, and her hair was tousled. She gave him no greeting.“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and as she turned he saw that one of her shoes was split down the heel and had frayed her stocking into what was known in the family as a “potato.”He heaved his bag into the lobby and passed along to the dining-room, where he found his mother. She was, as he knew she would be, doing crochet-work. He kissed her.“How brown you are!” she said.“It’s been wonderful weather. Aunt Janet sent you some shortbread and some knitted things.”“I wish she wouldn’t. She can’t knit, and she’s forgotten how old you are, and makes things as if you were still children. But she’s very good to us. I don’t know what I should have done without her.”“She said she admired you more than she can say.”“I’ve done my best for you.”“She said you married a bad Fourmy.”“I wish she hadn’t said that.”René responded to his mother’s embarrassment, but he could not spare her.“Is that true. Was my father a bad man?”“He was a gentleman. The Fourmys are proud, clever people. They think they are always right, and they want everything their own way. That is all very well if you have money. But, without it— But why talk of it? It’s all done.”“Did you love my father?”Mrs. Fourmy brought her hands down into her lap and stopped plying her needle.“What’s come to you, René?”He longed to tell his mother that he too loved, and could therefore understand, but his question had so disarmed her, her eyes looked so frightened, so expectant of hurt, that he could not continue.“Oh,” he said, “it’s just queer, coming back. One can feel all sorts of things in the house, and——”“You are like your father in many ways.” And she resumed her crochet.That alarmed him. Like his father? He felt indignant and uncomfortably self-conscious. He contrasted his hitherto exemplary and successful career with those mean memories—lying abed, whisky and cigarettes. He began to protest:“But he——”“He was always talking about feeling things the same as you. There was a lot of good in your father though his own people would never admit it, and minecould never see it—— But it’s no good talking. It’s all done.”“He left you.”“A boy like you can’t judge a man.”“Oh, but I know.”“You can’t get anything for the like of that out of books. There’s some men can stay with a woman and some can’t, and which you’ll be you’ll know when you come to it.”René stared at his mother. She looked very small, sitting there by the empty fireplace. She seemed to be talking to him from a great distance away, from beyond the Something which he had always felt to be in life. In the glade in Scotland he had thought to have surmounted it, but now, when he thought of it, that had already dwindled away and become as small and rounded as that memory of his father which had haunted him in his waiting. Cathleen seemed so remote that he was alarmed. The foundations of omnipotent everlasting love were undermined! Worst of all, he knew that it had become impossible to talk of her. Not even her image in his mind could dwell in that house. And his mother—his mother was saying horrible, worldly things in a thin, weary voice. In fierce rebellion his innocence rose up against her. It was impossible for him to admit a fall from grace. Either you loved or you did not. If you loved, it was forever. If you did not, then you were damned past all hope; at least you were, if you were a man. All women wereDulcineasto thisQuixote.So moved was he, so distressed, that he lost thesequence of his thoughts, and they pursued their careers in his head regardless of his comfort or immediate needs. He was left inarticulate.“You’ll catch all the flies in the house in your mouth if you don’t close it,” said his mother.He snapped his teeth together, and said fiercely:“All the same, if I treated a woman as my father treated you, I’d shoot myself.”“Absurd you are. A man needs a fair conceit of himself to do that. And can’t a woman learn to have a life of her own?”“Women——” began René, but his mother cut him short in a soothing voice that was almost a caress:“Keep that for the young ones, my dear. I’m too old to be told what women are and are not, or to care. Shall we have the shortbread for tea? George is to be in with Elsie.”“Who’s Elsie?”“Didn’t I tell you? George is going to be married.”“George is?”“Yes.” Mrs. Fourmy gave a chuckle that for so tiny a woman was surprisingly large. “Yes, George has been almost as good at falling in love as you.”That bowled René middle-stump, and he went out to bring in his bag and unpack the shortbread and the Shetland jacket he had bought in Inverness for his mother.She tried it on and preened herself in it.“Smart I am. You’re a kind boy to me. Do you remember how you two boys used to say when you were grown up you would be rich and take me to myold home in Wiltshire? George won’t, now he’s going to be married.”“But I will,” said René. “When I’ve saved money and can retire, we’ll go and live together.”“I don’t know. It’s easy to forget old women.”“Oh, come! A man doesn’t forget his mother.”“Doesn’t he?”“And old? You’re not old.”“I’ve been old since before you were born.”René gazed down at his mother and marveled at her in painful astonishment. In her little quiet voice she was saying things that stabbed into him, or, hardly stabbing, abraded and bruised him. And suddenly he began almost to perceive that her life was not tranquil, not the smooth pale flowing he had imagined it to be. He stared down at her, and she raised her eyes so that they met his. He dared not even tremble, so fearful was he of betraying his divination and her eyes flashed a warning, and his mind seized triumphantly upon its first intellectual mastery of emotion, and he said to himself:“There are certain feelings and currents of sympathy which can only dwell in silence.”Then he laughed:“You must have been pretty when you were a girl.”“Oh,” said Mrs. Fourmy, taking up her crochet, “my hair was lovely.”With that she rose and busied herself with preparing tea, taking out the caddy in which the party brand was kept, and her best table-center and theornaments which were reserved for the few elegant occasions the household could admit.“I got a pair of sleeve-links for George,” said René. “Silver and agate. When’s he going to be married? They might do for a wedding present as well.”“They are going to be married at once. They’ve got to be.”“I say!” He spun round on that. “I say. Need you have told me? When she’s coming here and all!”But Mrs. Fourmy was remorseless. She said with biting coldness:“When George was a little boy, he found out when I was married and reckoned up from that to the day when he was born, and he let me know that he knew. He told you too.”“Yes. He told me. How did you know?”“You looked at me all one Sunday afternoon with your big eyes.”“Oh, mother!”“There they are. George has forgotten the key. Will you go to the door? Polly has chosen to-day to clean the kitchen out. She would. She isn’t fit to be seen.”René went to the door.“Hullo! old man!”—René hated to be called “old man”—“Hullo! Got back?”“Only just.”“This is Elsie—Elsie Sherman. Mother’s told you?”Elsie was pretty, as tall as René, and just a shadetaller than George. She took the hand René held out, and squeezed it warmly.“So you’re the wonderful brother?”“Yes. The—— Yes, I’m George’s brother. You—you can take your things off in mother’s room if you like.”“Or mine,” said George.“Don’t be silly. I couldn’t,” said Elsie, with a giggle that made René hate her. She ran upstairs and George patted his brother on the shoulder.“Well? Still good enough for us? What do you think of her?”“She’s pretty.”“When you know her a bit you’ll want to go and do likewise, my son.”Standing there huddled with his brother in the narrow lobby that seemed all coats and umbrellas, René remembered with a horrible vividness his brother coming to his bed and telling him how his father and mother were married on such a day and how, five months later, he, George, was born. And he remembered how he burst into tears, and when George asked him what he was howling for, he had said: “They didn’t want you,” a view of the matter to which George had remained insensible. He saw now that the revelation had broken the young intimacy that had always been between them. He said:“Mother’s got out her best center for you.”“Good old mother!” replied George. Then he raised his voice and bawled:“Elsie!”“Coming!”She came running downstairs. George caught and kissed her, and as they went along the passage René wondered how it could be possible for one extra person to make the house seem overfull.It was certainly a party. Mrs. Fourmy set the note, a ceremonious expansiveness in opening up the family to its new member. René’s achievements were paraded, and the letter written by his headmaster, which had finally decided the family that he was too good for commerce, was produced and read aloud. George’s virtues as a son were extolled and punctuated with his protest:“I say, mother, draw it mild.”And Elsie’s rather too fervent:“Of course I know I’mverylucky.”They played bridge and René lost fourpence, because he played with his mother, who never could remember to suit her declarations to her score, or to return her partner’s lead, and had no other notion of play than to make her aces while she could.Elsie talked of her family, especially of a rich uncle she had who kept a timber yard and of a cousin who was a Wesleyan minister. Of her own immediate relations she spoke affectionately but little. Altogether she was so anxious to please that René forgot his first distasteful impression and set himself to make her laugh. She was grateful to him for that. The evening would not have been a success for her without abundant laughter, and George’s jokes were just a little heavy. Also she seemed to be slightly afraidof him, as though in all her responses to him were a small risk, rather more, at any rate, than she could always venture to take. She warmed to René, therefore, and between them they kept things lively.In a silence while George was dealing—for he took his bridge very seriously—René hummed a bar or two of a piece calledBlumenlied,which he had been taught to play as a boy when he worked off the set of music lessons George had begun and relinquished.“Oh,Blumenlied!” cried Elsie; “I adore that,” and she took up the air.“You’ve got a pretty voice,” said René.“Have I? I do sing sometimes.”“Sings?” said George. “I should think so. The family’s a concert party. Everything from the human voice to a piccolo.”They finished the rubber and adjourned to the parlor, where Mrs. Fourmy drew sweet buzzing notes from the little old piano that seemed to have come into the world at the same time as herself and to have shared her experience. She knew all its tricks and could dodge its defects, and when she played faded songs that had had their day, and Elsie sang them, René was melted into a mood of loving kindness and was full of gratitude to the two women, and wished only for their happiness—an eternity of such happiness as they were giving him now.He kissed Elsie when she said good-by. She lived only a few streets away, and George asked him to sit up for him. When the couple were gone:“Well?” said Mrs. Fourmy, more to the fireplace than to her son.“She’s too good for George.” René thought with dislike of his brother, sitting with his eyes half-closed, taking a too voluptuous delight in the music and showing a too proprietary pride in the singer.“She suits him,” rejoined his mother. “George wants to settle down. So does she. Most people are like that. They settle down, and they think nothing else can happen to them. You’re not like that.”“I don’t know. To settle down——”“Love songs. You think it’s all love songs. They think it’s all love songs, or they try to. Warm and comfortable. Oh, but I’ve seen it too often.”“Why do you keep hinting at things, mother?”“I wasn’t hinting. I know, and you will know, and they never will. I could have screamed sometimes tonight.”“I thought you liked her.”“Like? Oh, René, boy, if only you’d grow up and be some use to me!”“I want to be.”“I know that, and it’s something.”“Are you hurt because they——?”“I’ve been a foolish woman. I’ve been seeing more hope for George than there ever was.”She took up the box of matches from the chimney-piece and stood fingering it. He hoped she would say more, but nothing came. The disconcerting sense of the otherness of his mother’s world played about him, and he felt helpless and rather fatuous.“Bed’s the best place for me,” she said. “You don’t know how I’ve been dreading this evening. And it’s gone off very well, very well. Good night, my dear. I’m glad you came home to-day.”She astonished him by kissing him on both cheeks, for ordinarily she held up her face and he stooped and pecked at it. To-night there was a kind of suspension of the habits of the household.He heard her go upstairs, and with surprising celerity get into bed. Then he sat alone waiting in the dim, jaded dining-room, with the enormous table designed for a hospitality which was never given, and the corner cupboard which had been in all the houses the family had inhabited, and the hanging smoker’s cabinet over the mantelpiece which was used as a medicine chest, and the absurd knick-knacks his father had collected, and the plaques his father had painted with apples and cherry-blossom and bulrushes. There was so much in the room that spoke of his father. The whisky and the boxes of cigarettes used to be kept in the corner cupboard. On the table he had helped his father to make the screen out of old Christmas numbers and colored plates of theGraphicandIllustrated London News, which had given him employment during the whole of one winter. And he was stirred by the memory of the emotions that must have been behind his mother’s strange incoherence, and he told himself that she had suffered, and that his father was to blame for it all and could meet with no fate too harsh.George returned, whistling.“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.“Anything you like,” replied René.“You won’t mind my putting it bluntly?”“No.”“Well, you see how it is. I’ve got a rise, but Elsie hasn’t a stiver, and we shall only have enough to pull through on. My money goes out of this house. You’ve had a soft time up to now; you can’t go on. If you want to stay in the house you’ll have to buckle to and earn some money, or move to another, or lodgings; but even in the cheapest lodgings it would be a squeeze with mother’s little bit.”“I see. But I’ve got another year.”“Can’t you teach someone something? You’ve been learning long enough.”“I might. I see I must do something. When are you going to be married?”“Next month. What are you staring at?”“Was I staring?”“When you were a kid I used to hit you for staring at me like that, and, by God, I’d like to do it now. Elsie said, she said: ‘Your brother’s got all his feelings just under his skin.’ Why don’t you say something?”George rose, went to the corner cupboard and took out a bottle of whisky. The gesture, the lift of the shoulder, the cock of the back of the head, reminded René irresistibly of his father. George turned.“Why can’t you stop staring? I’m going to be married. I’m no different. There’s nothing very startling in that, is there?”“The whole thing seems to me so——”He stopped, staring more wildly. The word he suppressed wasgreedy,and it was most painfully explanatory.“So what?”“I mean—I liked her. She seems a good sort.”“No nonsense about Elsie.”“Doesn’t it make you understand mother more?”“Mother? She’s a queer little devil. Didn’t speak to me for a fortnight after I told her, and she took to going to church again. She’s a rum ’un, is mother. I believe she’d do anything if it wasn’t she’s so darned fond of you.”“Oh, you think it’s me?”“If it wasn’t for you she’d have chucked the whole thing long ago and gone right off into a convent or something. She doesn’t like the money part of it being put off on to you. Really, I don’t think she minded anything else. She knows what life is, mother does.”“How will you live?”“Oh, a snug little house. Her father’ll give us furniture. He’s an old sport, he is. Keeps the Denmark, you know, in Upper Kite Street. ’Normous family. Delighted when the girls go off. Elsie worked in a shop. No more work for Elsie.”“You’re pleased with yourself, then?”“I’m going to be married; that’s good enough for any man. Married and settled down. That’s life.”“Is it?” René found George entirely absurd, and he laughed.“Oh, well,” he added, “mother and I will find a way. Good night.”“Good night,” replied George. “Go and dream of your books and your swells. My Elsie’ll beat all their women. I know those swell ladies. Good night.”. . . . . .Upstairs, in his little room, René took pen, ink, and paper, and wrote to Cathleen:“This house is exactly like thirty-one other houses. Parlor, kitchen, dining-room, three bedrooms above them. That’s all. And they are all full of grubby little lives and the material things they don’t express themselves in. Do you see what I mean? Coming straight from you, from our woods, from the tall bracken and the heather, I feel trapped. What I miss, I think, is graciousness. Oh, yes! That is the word. All the charming ways you have. The easy courtesies with which you smooth over any roughnesses, any lack of sympathy, so that, even among uncongenial people, silence is not devastating. And between you and me silence can be so beautiful, so full of something more melodious than sound. But here, if there is silence, little uglinesses creep out of dark corners and fill it. They do not seem to know the difference between silence and emptiness. My mother has almost frightened me. I can’t tell you. Something terrible and yet silly has happened. I don’t understand. Some things hurt my feelings so that I can never understand them. But my mother was wonderful all the same, and different, so different that I was not at all surprised at her. I suppose I knew itall along. She has suffered as women must not, must not, must not suffer, as I will never let you suffer. I cannot write love words to you. I can only tell you that I am building up my life toward you. I have changed. It all seems enormously serious suddenly. A lot that we have had seems silly. I want to explain to you. It is terrible that I can’t see you again for a whole year, terrible, terrible. But I love you. I have begun to see what love is, what a man can be to a woman if he does not drag her down to his own level. Lovers, I think, should have something wonderful, something that should illuminate everything so that even the darkest places and happenings are bearable. Oh, you see what I mean. I am trying to bring it all, what I feel, to you. You must understand. This year is different from last, more serious, more beautiful. Think what it will be when we are ready to be together. When I think of it I am almost afraid. No one is ever ready for that, so holy is love. Holy! Holy! Holy! A little boy’s voice in a church singing that expresses it as nothing else can. I have to begin to earn my living.”He had got so far with his pen racing along in the wake of his thoughts when his mother knocked at his door:“Do go to bed, René, dear. You’re not working already?”“No, mother. I wasn’t working.”“Then you mustn’t stay up, wasting the gas and all.”
The homeward journey was by no means so agreeable.
EVERYyear since he had been a small boy, as the carriage rounded the crag which blots the lake out of sight, René had been moved to tears. Happiness and brightness were left behind, and every moment brought him nearer to dullness and dark streets and uncomprehending minds. And now, as he rounded the crag, Cathleen appeared on the summit, just too late to meet him or to come within earshot. She was wearing a blue sunbonnet, and she snatched it from her head and waved it until he was out of sight. He turned and watched her and tears came, and he could hardly choke back his sobs, and hoped miserably that the driver of his fly was not aware of his unmanliness.
In the train he tried to tell himself that he was taking back the brightness of his love to Thrigsby, but as he came nearer, more and more powerfully did it seem to reach out to crush his love. By the time he was out in the Albert Station, he had reached a depression not to be broken even by the excitement of seeing again the familiar sights, the trams, the blackriver, the Collegiate Church, the dark warehouses, the school where he had spent so many dazed, busy, monotonous years, the statue of the Prince Consort, the yellow timber-yards by the canal, the brilliant greengrocer’s shop at the corner of Kite Street, the council school where he had begun his education, the dirty brick streets among which his whole youth had been spent. Only some horrid disaster could have relieved him. Even up to the moment when the door opened he hoped almost desperately to find some difference in his home.
The erratic servant came to the door. She had a black smudge across her cheek, and her hair was tousled. She gave him no greeting.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and as she turned he saw that one of her shoes was split down the heel and had frayed her stocking into what was known in the family as a “potato.”
He heaved his bag into the lobby and passed along to the dining-room, where he found his mother. She was, as he knew she would be, doing crochet-work. He kissed her.
“How brown you are!” she said.
“It’s been wonderful weather. Aunt Janet sent you some shortbread and some knitted things.”
“I wish she wouldn’t. She can’t knit, and she’s forgotten how old you are, and makes things as if you were still children. But she’s very good to us. I don’t know what I should have done without her.”
“She said she admired you more than she can say.”
“I’ve done my best for you.”
“She said you married a bad Fourmy.”
“I wish she hadn’t said that.”
René responded to his mother’s embarrassment, but he could not spare her.
“Is that true. Was my father a bad man?”
“He was a gentleman. The Fourmys are proud, clever people. They think they are always right, and they want everything their own way. That is all very well if you have money. But, without it— But why talk of it? It’s all done.”
“Did you love my father?”
Mrs. Fourmy brought her hands down into her lap and stopped plying her needle.
“What’s come to you, René?”
He longed to tell his mother that he too loved, and could therefore understand, but his question had so disarmed her, her eyes looked so frightened, so expectant of hurt, that he could not continue.
“Oh,” he said, “it’s just queer, coming back. One can feel all sorts of things in the house, and——”
“You are like your father in many ways.” And she resumed her crochet.
That alarmed him. Like his father? He felt indignant and uncomfortably self-conscious. He contrasted his hitherto exemplary and successful career with those mean memories—lying abed, whisky and cigarettes. He began to protest:
“But he——”
“He was always talking about feeling things the same as you. There was a lot of good in your father though his own people would never admit it, and minecould never see it—— But it’s no good talking. It’s all done.”
“He left you.”
“A boy like you can’t judge a man.”
“Oh, but I know.”
“You can’t get anything for the like of that out of books. There’s some men can stay with a woman and some can’t, and which you’ll be you’ll know when you come to it.”
René stared at his mother. She looked very small, sitting there by the empty fireplace. She seemed to be talking to him from a great distance away, from beyond the Something which he had always felt to be in life. In the glade in Scotland he had thought to have surmounted it, but now, when he thought of it, that had already dwindled away and become as small and rounded as that memory of his father which had haunted him in his waiting. Cathleen seemed so remote that he was alarmed. The foundations of omnipotent everlasting love were undermined! Worst of all, he knew that it had become impossible to talk of her. Not even her image in his mind could dwell in that house. And his mother—his mother was saying horrible, worldly things in a thin, weary voice. In fierce rebellion his innocence rose up against her. It was impossible for him to admit a fall from grace. Either you loved or you did not. If you loved, it was forever. If you did not, then you were damned past all hope; at least you were, if you were a man. All women wereDulcineasto thisQuixote.
So moved was he, so distressed, that he lost thesequence of his thoughts, and they pursued their careers in his head regardless of his comfort or immediate needs. He was left inarticulate.
“You’ll catch all the flies in the house in your mouth if you don’t close it,” said his mother.
He snapped his teeth together, and said fiercely:
“All the same, if I treated a woman as my father treated you, I’d shoot myself.”
“Absurd you are. A man needs a fair conceit of himself to do that. And can’t a woman learn to have a life of her own?”
“Women——” began René, but his mother cut him short in a soothing voice that was almost a caress:
“Keep that for the young ones, my dear. I’m too old to be told what women are and are not, or to care. Shall we have the shortbread for tea? George is to be in with Elsie.”
“Who’s Elsie?”
“Didn’t I tell you? George is going to be married.”
“George is?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Fourmy gave a chuckle that for so tiny a woman was surprisingly large. “Yes, George has been almost as good at falling in love as you.”
That bowled René middle-stump, and he went out to bring in his bag and unpack the shortbread and the Shetland jacket he had bought in Inverness for his mother.
She tried it on and preened herself in it.
“Smart I am. You’re a kind boy to me. Do you remember how you two boys used to say when you were grown up you would be rich and take me to myold home in Wiltshire? George won’t, now he’s going to be married.”
“But I will,” said René. “When I’ve saved money and can retire, we’ll go and live together.”
“I don’t know. It’s easy to forget old women.”
“Oh, come! A man doesn’t forget his mother.”
“Doesn’t he?”
“And old? You’re not old.”
“I’ve been old since before you were born.”
René gazed down at his mother and marveled at her in painful astonishment. In her little quiet voice she was saying things that stabbed into him, or, hardly stabbing, abraded and bruised him. And suddenly he began almost to perceive that her life was not tranquil, not the smooth pale flowing he had imagined it to be. He stared down at her, and she raised her eyes so that they met his. He dared not even tremble, so fearful was he of betraying his divination and her eyes flashed a warning, and his mind seized triumphantly upon its first intellectual mastery of emotion, and he said to himself:
“There are certain feelings and currents of sympathy which can only dwell in silence.”
Then he laughed:
“You must have been pretty when you were a girl.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Fourmy, taking up her crochet, “my hair was lovely.”
With that she rose and busied herself with preparing tea, taking out the caddy in which the party brand was kept, and her best table-center and theornaments which were reserved for the few elegant occasions the household could admit.
“I got a pair of sleeve-links for George,” said René. “Silver and agate. When’s he going to be married? They might do for a wedding present as well.”
“They are going to be married at once. They’ve got to be.”
“I say!” He spun round on that. “I say. Need you have told me? When she’s coming here and all!”
But Mrs. Fourmy was remorseless. She said with biting coldness:
“When George was a little boy, he found out when I was married and reckoned up from that to the day when he was born, and he let me know that he knew. He told you too.”
“Yes. He told me. How did you know?”
“You looked at me all one Sunday afternoon with your big eyes.”
“Oh, mother!”
“There they are. George has forgotten the key. Will you go to the door? Polly has chosen to-day to clean the kitchen out. She would. She isn’t fit to be seen.”
René went to the door.
“Hullo! old man!”—René hated to be called “old man”—“Hullo! Got back?”
“Only just.”
“This is Elsie—Elsie Sherman. Mother’s told you?”
Elsie was pretty, as tall as René, and just a shadetaller than George. She took the hand René held out, and squeezed it warmly.
“So you’re the wonderful brother?”
“Yes. The—— Yes, I’m George’s brother. You—you can take your things off in mother’s room if you like.”
“Or mine,” said George.
“Don’t be silly. I couldn’t,” said Elsie, with a giggle that made René hate her. She ran upstairs and George patted his brother on the shoulder.
“Well? Still good enough for us? What do you think of her?”
“She’s pretty.”
“When you know her a bit you’ll want to go and do likewise, my son.”
Standing there huddled with his brother in the narrow lobby that seemed all coats and umbrellas, René remembered with a horrible vividness his brother coming to his bed and telling him how his father and mother were married on such a day and how, five months later, he, George, was born. And he remembered how he burst into tears, and when George asked him what he was howling for, he had said: “They didn’t want you,” a view of the matter to which George had remained insensible. He saw now that the revelation had broken the young intimacy that had always been between them. He said:
“Mother’s got out her best center for you.”
“Good old mother!” replied George. Then he raised his voice and bawled:
“Elsie!”
“Coming!”
She came running downstairs. George caught and kissed her, and as they went along the passage René wondered how it could be possible for one extra person to make the house seem overfull.
It was certainly a party. Mrs. Fourmy set the note, a ceremonious expansiveness in opening up the family to its new member. René’s achievements were paraded, and the letter written by his headmaster, which had finally decided the family that he was too good for commerce, was produced and read aloud. George’s virtues as a son were extolled and punctuated with his protest:
“I say, mother, draw it mild.”
And Elsie’s rather too fervent:
“Of course I know I’mverylucky.”
They played bridge and René lost fourpence, because he played with his mother, who never could remember to suit her declarations to her score, or to return her partner’s lead, and had no other notion of play than to make her aces while she could.
Elsie talked of her family, especially of a rich uncle she had who kept a timber yard and of a cousin who was a Wesleyan minister. Of her own immediate relations she spoke affectionately but little. Altogether she was so anxious to please that René forgot his first distasteful impression and set himself to make her laugh. She was grateful to him for that. The evening would not have been a success for her without abundant laughter, and George’s jokes were just a little heavy. Also she seemed to be slightly afraidof him, as though in all her responses to him were a small risk, rather more, at any rate, than she could always venture to take. She warmed to René, therefore, and between them they kept things lively.
In a silence while George was dealing—for he took his bridge very seriously—René hummed a bar or two of a piece calledBlumenlied,which he had been taught to play as a boy when he worked off the set of music lessons George had begun and relinquished.
“Oh,Blumenlied!” cried Elsie; “I adore that,” and she took up the air.
“You’ve got a pretty voice,” said René.
“Have I? I do sing sometimes.”
“Sings?” said George. “I should think so. The family’s a concert party. Everything from the human voice to a piccolo.”
They finished the rubber and adjourned to the parlor, where Mrs. Fourmy drew sweet buzzing notes from the little old piano that seemed to have come into the world at the same time as herself and to have shared her experience. She knew all its tricks and could dodge its defects, and when she played faded songs that had had their day, and Elsie sang them, René was melted into a mood of loving kindness and was full of gratitude to the two women, and wished only for their happiness—an eternity of such happiness as they were giving him now.
He kissed Elsie when she said good-by. She lived only a few streets away, and George asked him to sit up for him. When the couple were gone:
“Well?” said Mrs. Fourmy, more to the fireplace than to her son.
“She’s too good for George.” René thought with dislike of his brother, sitting with his eyes half-closed, taking a too voluptuous delight in the music and showing a too proprietary pride in the singer.
“She suits him,” rejoined his mother. “George wants to settle down. So does she. Most people are like that. They settle down, and they think nothing else can happen to them. You’re not like that.”
“I don’t know. To settle down——”
“Love songs. You think it’s all love songs. They think it’s all love songs, or they try to. Warm and comfortable. Oh, but I’ve seen it too often.”
“Why do you keep hinting at things, mother?”
“I wasn’t hinting. I know, and you will know, and they never will. I could have screamed sometimes tonight.”
“I thought you liked her.”
“Like? Oh, René, boy, if only you’d grow up and be some use to me!”
“I want to be.”
“I know that, and it’s something.”
“Are you hurt because they——?”
“I’ve been a foolish woman. I’ve been seeing more hope for George than there ever was.”
She took up the box of matches from the chimney-piece and stood fingering it. He hoped she would say more, but nothing came. The disconcerting sense of the otherness of his mother’s world played about him, and he felt helpless and rather fatuous.
“Bed’s the best place for me,” she said. “You don’t know how I’ve been dreading this evening. And it’s gone off very well, very well. Good night, my dear. I’m glad you came home to-day.”
She astonished him by kissing him on both cheeks, for ordinarily she held up her face and he stooped and pecked at it. To-night there was a kind of suspension of the habits of the household.
He heard her go upstairs, and with surprising celerity get into bed. Then he sat alone waiting in the dim, jaded dining-room, with the enormous table designed for a hospitality which was never given, and the corner cupboard which had been in all the houses the family had inhabited, and the hanging smoker’s cabinet over the mantelpiece which was used as a medicine chest, and the absurd knick-knacks his father had collected, and the plaques his father had painted with apples and cherry-blossom and bulrushes. There was so much in the room that spoke of his father. The whisky and the boxes of cigarettes used to be kept in the corner cupboard. On the table he had helped his father to make the screen out of old Christmas numbers and colored plates of theGraphicandIllustrated London News, which had given him employment during the whole of one winter. And he was stirred by the memory of the emotions that must have been behind his mother’s strange incoherence, and he told himself that she had suffered, and that his father was to blame for it all and could meet with no fate too harsh.
George returned, whistling.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.
“Anything you like,” replied René.
“You won’t mind my putting it bluntly?”
“No.”
“Well, you see how it is. I’ve got a rise, but Elsie hasn’t a stiver, and we shall only have enough to pull through on. My money goes out of this house. You’ve had a soft time up to now; you can’t go on. If you want to stay in the house you’ll have to buckle to and earn some money, or move to another, or lodgings; but even in the cheapest lodgings it would be a squeeze with mother’s little bit.”
“I see. But I’ve got another year.”
“Can’t you teach someone something? You’ve been learning long enough.”
“I might. I see I must do something. When are you going to be married?”
“Next month. What are you staring at?”
“Was I staring?”
“When you were a kid I used to hit you for staring at me like that, and, by God, I’d like to do it now. Elsie said, she said: ‘Your brother’s got all his feelings just under his skin.’ Why don’t you say something?”
George rose, went to the corner cupboard and took out a bottle of whisky. The gesture, the lift of the shoulder, the cock of the back of the head, reminded René irresistibly of his father. George turned.
“Why can’t you stop staring? I’m going to be married. I’m no different. There’s nothing very startling in that, is there?”
“The whole thing seems to me so——”
He stopped, staring more wildly. The word he suppressed wasgreedy,and it was most painfully explanatory.
“So what?”
“I mean—I liked her. She seems a good sort.”
“No nonsense about Elsie.”
“Doesn’t it make you understand mother more?”
“Mother? She’s a queer little devil. Didn’t speak to me for a fortnight after I told her, and she took to going to church again. She’s a rum ’un, is mother. I believe she’d do anything if it wasn’t she’s so darned fond of you.”
“Oh, you think it’s me?”
“If it wasn’t for you she’d have chucked the whole thing long ago and gone right off into a convent or something. She doesn’t like the money part of it being put off on to you. Really, I don’t think she minded anything else. She knows what life is, mother does.”
“How will you live?”
“Oh, a snug little house. Her father’ll give us furniture. He’s an old sport, he is. Keeps the Denmark, you know, in Upper Kite Street. ’Normous family. Delighted when the girls go off. Elsie worked in a shop. No more work for Elsie.”
“You’re pleased with yourself, then?”
“I’m going to be married; that’s good enough for any man. Married and settled down. That’s life.”
“Is it?” René found George entirely absurd, and he laughed.
“Oh, well,” he added, “mother and I will find a way. Good night.”
“Good night,” replied George. “Go and dream of your books and your swells. My Elsie’ll beat all their women. I know those swell ladies. Good night.”
. . . . . .
Upstairs, in his little room, René took pen, ink, and paper, and wrote to Cathleen:
“This house is exactly like thirty-one other houses. Parlor, kitchen, dining-room, three bedrooms above them. That’s all. And they are all full of grubby little lives and the material things they don’t express themselves in. Do you see what I mean? Coming straight from you, from our woods, from the tall bracken and the heather, I feel trapped. What I miss, I think, is graciousness. Oh, yes! That is the word. All the charming ways you have. The easy courtesies with which you smooth over any roughnesses, any lack of sympathy, so that, even among uncongenial people, silence is not devastating. And between you and me silence can be so beautiful, so full of something more melodious than sound. But here, if there is silence, little uglinesses creep out of dark corners and fill it. They do not seem to know the difference between silence and emptiness. My mother has almost frightened me. I can’t tell you. Something terrible and yet silly has happened. I don’t understand. Some things hurt my feelings so that I can never understand them. But my mother was wonderful all the same, and different, so different that I was not at all surprised at her. I suppose I knew itall along. She has suffered as women must not, must not, must not suffer, as I will never let you suffer. I cannot write love words to you. I can only tell you that I am building up my life toward you. I have changed. It all seems enormously serious suddenly. A lot that we have had seems silly. I want to explain to you. It is terrible that I can’t see you again for a whole year, terrible, terrible. But I love you. I have begun to see what love is, what a man can be to a woman if he does not drag her down to his own level. Lovers, I think, should have something wonderful, something that should illuminate everything so that even the darkest places and happenings are bearable. Oh, you see what I mean. I am trying to bring it all, what I feel, to you. You must understand. This year is different from last, more serious, more beautiful. Think what it will be when we are ready to be together. When I think of it I am almost afraid. No one is ever ready for that, so holy is love. Holy! Holy! Holy! A little boy’s voice in a church singing that expresses it as nothing else can. I have to begin to earn my living.”
He had got so far with his pen racing along in the wake of his thoughts when his mother knocked at his door:
“Do go to bed, René, dear. You’re not working already?”
“No, mother. I wasn’t working.”
“Then you mustn’t stay up, wasting the gas and all.”