VSETTLING DOWNO the mad days that I have spent! and to see how many of mine old acquaintances are dead!PROFESSORSMALLMANhad been lent by his university to deliver a series of lectures in America, and some weeks of the term would pass before his return. René, therefore, had no escape from his father. Breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, he was there all the time on his best behavior, though with a naughty malice stirring in him and peeping out of his eyes. He ate—how he ate! Hardly a meal left remnants enough to provide for the next, and butcher’s meat, which before had only been got every third day, was now brought to the house every morning. In an access of filial devotion, René had undertaken to relieve his mother of household accounts, always a plague to her, and the little blood-stained butcher’s bills alarmed him by their number and the amount of money they represented. He hardly spoke to his father, avoided him, shut himself up in his bedroom, and there realized horribly that he was also avoiding his mother, that she made no protest, not even by glance or gesture, and that they weremaking him feel the intruder. The change in his mother was amazing. She was three times as active, and was often for hours together without her crochet-work. She, who was accustomed for days never to leave the house, now went out every afternoon with her husband to walk in Potter’s Park, or in the evening to visit the streets where they had lived, and to seek out old acquaintances. When her son was present she was discreet, and prattled reminiscently of people he had never known, or remembered only as names and remote presences. But often when he was in his room, he would hear them below talking excitedly, and his mother laughing or protesting. And he came to think of them as “they,” and they seemed to have so little they cared to or could share with him.One black night he had when, after coming in late in the afternoon, he found his mother unaided moving the heavy iron bedstead and wire mattress from George’s room to her own. He gulped down his dismay, and stood on the stairs watching her. She had not heard him, and went on until suddenly she caught sight of him and jumped.“Oh!”“Shall I help you?”“It is—too heavy for me.”“Where is—he?”“He went out. He thought he saw old Mr. Timperley in Derby Street to-day. Of course you don’t remember Mr. Timperley.”“In your room?”She hesitated:“We—we sold the old bed, you know.”He helped her without another word. Together in silence they put George’s bed up alongside her own, and in silence when it was done René left her. He went to his room and sat, staring unseeing at the five privet bushes and the old bicycle shed.Presently she came to him and sat on his bed, and gazed at him like a mournful, shy little bird.“You mustn’t make it hard for us, René.”“I—I thought I was making it easy.”“His brothers won’t see him.”“Why not?”“They won’t. They’re hard people, the Fourmys. They can’t forget the past. They say they won’t help me any more if I let him stay, and not a penny will they leave me.”“You’ll let him stay?”“He knows it was cruel of him to leave as—as he did. But he had a lot to bear, really he did, René. He was very proud. It’s his pride has been against him always, René.”“What did he do else?”“Nothing very much. Only people talked. And he didn’t get on. That was his pride too. You can do anything if only you get on. He never could work for other people. He was a clever man too. You get your cleverness from him. I’m sure it’s not from me. He was always trying different things, but he couldn’t get on. He did some silly things too.”“You won’t tell me, then?”“I have told you.”“What’s he going to do? Go on eating and eating?”“He’ll look for work. Of course, at his age, it won’t be easy.”“What’s he been doing all this time?”“He’s been rich and lost it all again. He came back to England with quite a lot of money.”“He didn’t think of you then.”“He lost it nearly all. Do be nice to him, René! He thinks such a lot of you. George is quite nice, and Elsie loves him already, but he thinks most of you. I’ve been telling him how wonderful you’ve been, and he says nothing must interfere with your career.”“But someone must make money.”“Only for a little. He says we could make much more with my money if it were re-invested.”René swung round.“He’s not to touch that, do you hear? You’re a soft fool, mother. He’s not to touch that. I’ll work myself to the bone first.”“That’s dear of you, René. And you will be nice to him, won’t you?”“All right, all right.”She kissed him and flitted away, and presently, to the devastation of his attempts to adopt what he considered a worldly and wise point of view of the matter, he heard her singing in her room. A loathing and disgust rushed through him. Men and women! Men and women! It was George all over again, quintessence of George, here on the very fringes of his being.No escape from it! In the little house, all but the tiniest noises could be heard from end to end of it.His father came home late that night. He hummed as he groped upstairs and fumbled his way along the passage to the front room. The full hours of the night in towns, where huddled creatures live, poured in upon René as he lay in sleeplessness, staring, staring at the never-darkened sky.From this torment to escape he could find no other solace than the attempt to be “nice” to his father. It was forced on him, and after the first plunge he found it not so very difficult, and there was some reward in his mother’s anxious satisfaction. Both men played up to keep things lively for the woman, and the elder set himself almost desperately to make the younger laugh. At first when they were alone together Mr. Fourmy made the mistake of trying droll stories spiced and hot on his son, but he was met with a stare so blank and uncomprehending, so freezing, that he never tried them again. Then, more successfully, he drew on his own reminiscences, and practiced his not inconsiderable talent for caricature and exaggerated mimicry upon the odd characters he had known and the members of his own family. This met with encouragement from René, who was interested. From his father’s chuckling monologue he learned that the Fourmys were the oddest family that ever was—Scotch, French, Dutch, Jewish, reg’lar English, in fact; Nonconformist for generations; clever, close, proud, hard, acquisitive, narrow, pious, with occasional outcrops of wickedness to leaven the lump;shy, harsh, undemonstrative; loathing any kind of excess; clinging to the middle way, bound never to rise above respectable mediocrity; dreading anything so conspicuous as eminence; never reaching to any higher public office than a District Council or a Board of Guardians.“Two of my brothers are Guardians,” said Mr. Fourmy, “and they could predict no worse for me than that I should come to the workhouse. They know well enough that no Fourmy could ever get to prison. We can’t be bad enough.”“Where did we come from?” asked René.“Scotland, but that’s a long time ago. Your great-aunt Janet’s father started a tannery somewhere near Lancaster. That would be somewhere about the time of Napoleon. At least, I remember reading a little book the old gentleman wrote about a tour he made in France and Germany when the Continent was opened up after Elba and all that.”“But why are we fixed here?”“Don’t your big books tell you that?”For once in a way René saw that his father was twitting him.“Big books don’t account for humble folk like us.”“The biggest books do, my boy.” And to René’s surprise and delight his father raised his voice and trolled out some verses that excited and exalted him. They were all about joy and freedom and the awfulness of losing them, but no single phrase bit into his mind to take possession of it.“Yes,” he said, “yes.”“Pooh!” said his father. “If we understood that we’d none of us be here, neither rich nor poor. We get a little excited about it, at least you and I do, but we can’t go any further—not far enough into our own minds, I mean—and we are left weaker for the attack of all the things that drag us down and bind us fast. A little squeeze for bread and butter, and we say it doesn’t matter, but may come all in good time. I used to be rather good at poetry, could remember anything I read or heard. Can’t do that now. I used to love it. The Fourmys hate it. Lord! when I had my last row with my father, when he had said his say, I let fly at him with a page and a half of Milton and wound up with Shakespeare—you know: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds——’”“I know,” said René, though he had never read the Sonnets.“Lord! I was a young man, I was, and I went on being young for a surprisingly long time. It seemed there wasn’t anything in the world could take it from me. But it came to an end at last. How you do make me talk, to be sure! I wish you’d tell me about yourself.”That shut René up completely. There was nothing to tell, nothing that would not dwindle and shrivel up in the telling. There was such mockery in this disturbing father of his that his timid little emotions, his shy desire to think well of him, to like him, to set what he found in him against what he knew and had heard, hid away, curled up in his mind and created a horrid congestion. But his father had a certain fascinationfor him, and it was a relief to get him to talk. He never did learn why the Fourmys, rich and poor, were fixed where they were in the middle-class of Thrigsby, but he did get flashes and sparks which promised elucidation, and he did begin to discover that there were worlds on worlds outside, and minds which were not afraid of thought and not wholly set on money and the good opinion of others. It was a painful mystery to him that his father’s mind should lead him on so far, give him a shining promise of beauty—though beauty was the very last word that in his shyness of himself he would have used—and then by a cruel sleight of hand present him only with caricatures of Fourmys and neighbors and George.Mr. Fourmy on his elder son is worth quoting. He said:“George is a reg’lar Fourmy, a thorough Unitarian. They want one God. George desires to live in the worship of the one flesh.”He seemed to like George, was often at The Nest, and when George and Elsie came to them there was tapped in the queer man a vein of ribaldry which made René, even as he laughed, blush that such things could be said before a woman.George said of his father:“He’s a funny damned old rotter, but you can’t help liking him.”René had to admit that, but the increase in the weekly bills gave him many a sick moment, and though his father spent many hours away from home, there was never any talk of his finding work. Very quicklythe household absorbed its new inmate and adjusted its habits, so far as was necessary, to his. Mr. Fourmy bought paints and brushes, and with these he would amuse himself all day. At half-past eight in the evening he would disappear, and often not return until the small hours of the morning. He never asked for money, and seemed always able to procure anything he wanted.
O the mad days that I have spent! and to see how many of mine old acquaintances are dead!
PROFESSORSMALLMANhad been lent by his university to deliver a series of lectures in America, and some weeks of the term would pass before his return. René, therefore, had no escape from his father. Breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, he was there all the time on his best behavior, though with a naughty malice stirring in him and peeping out of his eyes. He ate—how he ate! Hardly a meal left remnants enough to provide for the next, and butcher’s meat, which before had only been got every third day, was now brought to the house every morning. In an access of filial devotion, René had undertaken to relieve his mother of household accounts, always a plague to her, and the little blood-stained butcher’s bills alarmed him by their number and the amount of money they represented. He hardly spoke to his father, avoided him, shut himself up in his bedroom, and there realized horribly that he was also avoiding his mother, that she made no protest, not even by glance or gesture, and that they weremaking him feel the intruder. The change in his mother was amazing. She was three times as active, and was often for hours together without her crochet-work. She, who was accustomed for days never to leave the house, now went out every afternoon with her husband to walk in Potter’s Park, or in the evening to visit the streets where they had lived, and to seek out old acquaintances. When her son was present she was discreet, and prattled reminiscently of people he had never known, or remembered only as names and remote presences. But often when he was in his room, he would hear them below talking excitedly, and his mother laughing or protesting. And he came to think of them as “they,” and they seemed to have so little they cared to or could share with him.
One black night he had when, after coming in late in the afternoon, he found his mother unaided moving the heavy iron bedstead and wire mattress from George’s room to her own. He gulped down his dismay, and stood on the stairs watching her. She had not heard him, and went on until suddenly she caught sight of him and jumped.
“Oh!”
“Shall I help you?”
“It is—too heavy for me.”
“Where is—he?”
“He went out. He thought he saw old Mr. Timperley in Derby Street to-day. Of course you don’t remember Mr. Timperley.”
“In your room?”
She hesitated:
“We—we sold the old bed, you know.”
He helped her without another word. Together in silence they put George’s bed up alongside her own, and in silence when it was done René left her. He went to his room and sat, staring unseeing at the five privet bushes and the old bicycle shed.
Presently she came to him and sat on his bed, and gazed at him like a mournful, shy little bird.
“You mustn’t make it hard for us, René.”
“I—I thought I was making it easy.”
“His brothers won’t see him.”
“Why not?”
“They won’t. They’re hard people, the Fourmys. They can’t forget the past. They say they won’t help me any more if I let him stay, and not a penny will they leave me.”
“You’ll let him stay?”
“He knows it was cruel of him to leave as—as he did. But he had a lot to bear, really he did, René. He was very proud. It’s his pride has been against him always, René.”
“What did he do else?”
“Nothing very much. Only people talked. And he didn’t get on. That was his pride too. You can do anything if only you get on. He never could work for other people. He was a clever man too. You get your cleverness from him. I’m sure it’s not from me. He was always trying different things, but he couldn’t get on. He did some silly things too.”
“You won’t tell me, then?”
“I have told you.”
“What’s he going to do? Go on eating and eating?”
“He’ll look for work. Of course, at his age, it won’t be easy.”
“What’s he been doing all this time?”
“He’s been rich and lost it all again. He came back to England with quite a lot of money.”
“He didn’t think of you then.”
“He lost it nearly all. Do be nice to him, René! He thinks such a lot of you. George is quite nice, and Elsie loves him already, but he thinks most of you. I’ve been telling him how wonderful you’ve been, and he says nothing must interfere with your career.”
“But someone must make money.”
“Only for a little. He says we could make much more with my money if it were re-invested.”
René swung round.
“He’s not to touch that, do you hear? You’re a soft fool, mother. He’s not to touch that. I’ll work myself to the bone first.”
“That’s dear of you, René. And you will be nice to him, won’t you?”
“All right, all right.”
She kissed him and flitted away, and presently, to the devastation of his attempts to adopt what he considered a worldly and wise point of view of the matter, he heard her singing in her room. A loathing and disgust rushed through him. Men and women! Men and women! It was George all over again, quintessence of George, here on the very fringes of his being.No escape from it! In the little house, all but the tiniest noises could be heard from end to end of it.
His father came home late that night. He hummed as he groped upstairs and fumbled his way along the passage to the front room. The full hours of the night in towns, where huddled creatures live, poured in upon René as he lay in sleeplessness, staring, staring at the never-darkened sky.
From this torment to escape he could find no other solace than the attempt to be “nice” to his father. It was forced on him, and after the first plunge he found it not so very difficult, and there was some reward in his mother’s anxious satisfaction. Both men played up to keep things lively for the woman, and the elder set himself almost desperately to make the younger laugh. At first when they were alone together Mr. Fourmy made the mistake of trying droll stories spiced and hot on his son, but he was met with a stare so blank and uncomprehending, so freezing, that he never tried them again. Then, more successfully, he drew on his own reminiscences, and practiced his not inconsiderable talent for caricature and exaggerated mimicry upon the odd characters he had known and the members of his own family. This met with encouragement from René, who was interested. From his father’s chuckling monologue he learned that the Fourmys were the oddest family that ever was—Scotch, French, Dutch, Jewish, reg’lar English, in fact; Nonconformist for generations; clever, close, proud, hard, acquisitive, narrow, pious, with occasional outcrops of wickedness to leaven the lump;shy, harsh, undemonstrative; loathing any kind of excess; clinging to the middle way, bound never to rise above respectable mediocrity; dreading anything so conspicuous as eminence; never reaching to any higher public office than a District Council or a Board of Guardians.
“Two of my brothers are Guardians,” said Mr. Fourmy, “and they could predict no worse for me than that I should come to the workhouse. They know well enough that no Fourmy could ever get to prison. We can’t be bad enough.”
“Where did we come from?” asked René.
“Scotland, but that’s a long time ago. Your great-aunt Janet’s father started a tannery somewhere near Lancaster. That would be somewhere about the time of Napoleon. At least, I remember reading a little book the old gentleman wrote about a tour he made in France and Germany when the Continent was opened up after Elba and all that.”
“But why are we fixed here?”
“Don’t your big books tell you that?”
For once in a way René saw that his father was twitting him.
“Big books don’t account for humble folk like us.”
“The biggest books do, my boy.” And to René’s surprise and delight his father raised his voice and trolled out some verses that excited and exalted him. They were all about joy and freedom and the awfulness of losing them, but no single phrase bit into his mind to take possession of it.
“Yes,” he said, “yes.”
“Pooh!” said his father. “If we understood that we’d none of us be here, neither rich nor poor. We get a little excited about it, at least you and I do, but we can’t go any further—not far enough into our own minds, I mean—and we are left weaker for the attack of all the things that drag us down and bind us fast. A little squeeze for bread and butter, and we say it doesn’t matter, but may come all in good time. I used to be rather good at poetry, could remember anything I read or heard. Can’t do that now. I used to love it. The Fourmys hate it. Lord! when I had my last row with my father, when he had said his say, I let fly at him with a page and a half of Milton and wound up with Shakespeare—you know: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds——’”
“I know,” said René, though he had never read the Sonnets.
“Lord! I was a young man, I was, and I went on being young for a surprisingly long time. It seemed there wasn’t anything in the world could take it from me. But it came to an end at last. How you do make me talk, to be sure! I wish you’d tell me about yourself.”
That shut René up completely. There was nothing to tell, nothing that would not dwindle and shrivel up in the telling. There was such mockery in this disturbing father of his that his timid little emotions, his shy desire to think well of him, to like him, to set what he found in him against what he knew and had heard, hid away, curled up in his mind and created a horrid congestion. But his father had a certain fascinationfor him, and it was a relief to get him to talk. He never did learn why the Fourmys, rich and poor, were fixed where they were in the middle-class of Thrigsby, but he did get flashes and sparks which promised elucidation, and he did begin to discover that there were worlds on worlds outside, and minds which were not afraid of thought and not wholly set on money and the good opinion of others. It was a painful mystery to him that his father’s mind should lead him on so far, give him a shining promise of beauty—though beauty was the very last word that in his shyness of himself he would have used—and then by a cruel sleight of hand present him only with caricatures of Fourmys and neighbors and George.
Mr. Fourmy on his elder son is worth quoting. He said:
“George is a reg’lar Fourmy, a thorough Unitarian. They want one God. George desires to live in the worship of the one flesh.”
He seemed to like George, was often at The Nest, and when George and Elsie came to them there was tapped in the queer man a vein of ribaldry which made René, even as he laughed, blush that such things could be said before a woman.
George said of his father:
“He’s a funny damned old rotter, but you can’t help liking him.”
René had to admit that, but the increase in the weekly bills gave him many a sick moment, and though his father spent many hours away from home, there was never any talk of his finding work. Very quicklythe household absorbed its new inmate and adjusted its habits, so far as was necessary, to his. Mr. Fourmy bought paints and brushes, and with these he would amuse himself all day. At half-past eight in the evening he would disappear, and often not return until the small hours of the morning. He never asked for money, and seemed always able to procure anything he wanted.