VIPROFESSOR SMALLMANAs the reader’s curiosity (if he hath any) must be now awake, and hungry, we shall provide to feed it as fast as we can.EXCEPTfor Mrs. Fourmy few letters came to 166, and it was a great excitement for René when, a few weeks before the end of term, he came down in the morning to find a parcel waiting for him on the breakfast table. His father and mother watched him eagerly as he opened it, to find two large brown volumes, a German economic treatise translated by a Scots professor. A printed slip headedThrigsby Postrequested Mr. Fourmy to send a review not exceeding four hundred words in length within a week. Pride and elation moved René. His cheeks glowed, his eyes shone, he caressed the covers of the books, took them up, and turned over the leaves. It was the first sign of recognition from the world outside school and university.“Professor Smallman said he would get me some reviewing.” René could only speak in gasps. He could not take his eyes off the books, and when his father reached out his hand for them, his impulse was to hug them and keep them from him. “He said hethought he could get me some. But I never thought of thePost.It’s such a good paper.”“It’s Liberal, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Fourmy.“Yes. But of course I shouldn’t have anything to do with that side of it.” René had always been given to understand that he was a Conservative, and that only chapel people were Liberals.He ate very little breakfast, and immediately afterward rushed upstairs, made his bed, and lay on it gloating over the precious books, picking up first one volume and then the other, hardly reading them, and beginning already to compose his review based on Professor Smallman’s dislike of the translator. Then he began to wonder how much he would be paid for it—one, two, four, five guineas. The editor of thePostwas a very rich man. Would they print his name? Presently his happiness was so intense that he could not bear not to share it, and he went downstairs. His mother had gone out. His father was in the dining-room painting. He had the lid of a cigar box and was covering it with a copy of a nude reproduced in some magazine from a picture in the Paris Salon of that year. René watched him. He worked with minute strokes of the brush, caressingly, carefully. Already he had painted several copies of the same picture.“Why do you always paint the same thing?” asked René.“Nothing else worth painting.” Mr. Fourmy stopped, looked up at his son, winked, and hissed like a goose in a peculiar mocking laughter he affectedwhen he was most roguish. “She’s a beauty, this one. Like to have seen the original. Women. Not much else men care about, as you’ll find presently. I can sell as many of these as I care to paint. I’m going to do her smaller though, so’s she can be carried in the waistcoat pocket or a letter-case. I’ve got a watchmaker’s glass, so’s I can see what I’m doing with the brush.” And he took out the glass and screwed it into his eye and looked chuckling up at René. He was absurdly, childishly pleased with himself.“Does mother know?” asked René, all his elation oozing away.“She don’t know I sell ’em. I didn’t know I could myself. Never saw what’s been under my nose all my life. But he’s a clever man, is your father, much too clever to be a burden on his wife and family. Knock him down one day and he’s up the next.”René said heavily:“It’s like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs and the dirty books.”Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily:“This, my boy, is art, hand-painted in oils. Put a gilt frame round it and it’s quite respectable. These swine think art is a bawdy thing.”“Where do you sell them? To a shop?”“No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and chapelgoers.”René sat dejectedly looking into the fire. At last he said:“I wish you hadn’t told me. It doesn’t seem worth while doing anything.”He went back to his room, but his joy in the books had filtered away. To read through them was a heavy task which had become to him nothing but the commercial traffic of his time, knowledge, and brains for money. He had no motive for doing it but the cold necessity of somehow making a living. All day long he read and read until his eyes ached, and he sat far into the night writing and rewriting until he had produced four hundred words that looked like the sort of stuff he read in the literary columns of the newspapers.A depressed mood of appalling skepticism seized him. His father and mother, his brother and sister-in-law, these were his world, and they were contented with a monotonous small happiness, and he was the fool to look for more. Ah! but the days in Scotland, the graciousness and the fun that those other people knew; the sweetness of waiting upon Cathleen’s coming; her coming, the hours of tenderness and pure laughter, and her warm comradeship and the zest of the emotions they could rouse in each other and turn to a golden glee! But that was all done, and there was now only poverty and disgrace, and beyond, the sniggering of the men who loved nothing but women and the idea of women.He kept back his review for three days, being fearful lest the editor should think him careless or over-eager, and he rather prided himself on his cunning in doing so. It was his first attempt to manipulate the impression he might make, and the illusion of subtleactivity it brought gave him some solace in his misery.Other books came from thePost,and he wrote to thank Professor Smallman, who invited him to lunch on Sunday.He had been twice before to the Professor’s house, to the garden party which he gave annually to work off the social obligations incurred during the academic year. For Thrigsby he had a very good garden, and an old house in a neighborhood which still bore some traces of a rural character, though the regiments of little pink brick houses were bearing down on it with an alarming swiftness. His garden contained three plum trees and a pear tree, gooseberry and currant bushes, and raspberry canes.Mrs. Fourmy had thought the Smallmans must be what she called “grand people,” since they had lunch instead of dinner; but Mr. Fourmy remembered a Mr. Smallman who used to live in Kite Street and had two sons, of whom this might very well be one—a good-looking boy, neat and solemn, just a little too neat and obliging, always opening gates for old ladies and picking up handkerchiefs dropped by old gentlemen—that sort of boy. “Would call me ‘Sir’ the only time I ever spoke to him. I’ll be bound that’s the one.”It helped René a little to know for certain that the Professor had once been a boy, but Mrs. Smallman he remembered as a lady of a gentleness and kindness almost terrifying, so kind that she had a way of notseeming to hear you when you were stuttering out some preposterously foolish remark. Everything was so easy for her; she was so sure of the strength of her position as a good hostess and the wife of a popular and important man; and there were the children, who were allowed to look down from the nursery window at the garden party. You could not talk to Mrs. Smallman long without having your eyes drawn to them, and then, if you were a sensitive person like René, you felt that this house was full of an intimacy jealous of its beauty, so that it repelled strangers. Friendliness there was, but it ended abruptly; the wife’s eyes lighting on the husband, the husband’s on the wife, or the eyes of both meeting and turning to the children at the window could bring it to a cruel and sudden close.René could not explain to himself the uneasiness that came over him at the garden parties, or the dread of it that overwhelmed him as he pushed open the gate and rang the bell on that Sunday.There was a bright green parasol in the hall table, and by it were two bowler hats. From the drawing-room came a faint buzz of chatter, and he saw that it contained the Professor and his wife; Blease, the Jewish Professor of English; M’Elroy, the great man of the University, captain of the cricket eleven, President of the Union—it would take a page to enumerate his distinctions; a little man who looked like an unsuccessful attempt to repeat the Professor; and a young lady in a bright green costume. René observed at once that the other men were wearing black boots,and became dreadfully conscious of his own new brown pair.“I’m so glad you could come,” said Mrs. Smallman, and she introduced him to Blease.“Seen you about,” said the Jew. “Third-year man, aren’t you?”“Just beginning my third year,” said René miserably.Blease had made his remark sound friendly, and acute. Rather clever of a Professor to be able to place a man outside his own subject!“We stand for something, you know,” continued Blease. “Culture! A handful of men upholding the standard. Good for us to be kept in touch with working life. Don’t you think so, M’Elroy?”“Yes. That’s where we score over Oxford and Cambridge, though they can never understand that.”Their talk was above René. He remembered Cambridge as a place of enthralling beauty, but to compare this and that was rather too sweeping for him, and he found it baffling, and to regard himself as standing for anything was entirely foreign to his temper. The talk shot to and fro above him, and he found his eyes being engaged by the bright green. The young lady was sparkling, easy, gay, a little figure of energy and charm.“She is beautiful,” said René to himself.Then he decided that she was not beautiful. She turned her face into another light, and beauty came into it again; another turn and it vanished. Awill-o’-the-wisp, the hunting of which became an absorbing pursuit.At lunch René sat opposite her, and hardly ever took his eyes from her face. Only when he seemed in danger of meeting her gaze did he turn away. Once he met her eyes and she smiled, seemed to be considering him gravely and very seriously in the depths of her mind, then dismissed him.“Sheisbeautiful,” thought he, and from that moment she had his homage.Presently she appealed to him:“Mr. M’Elroy won’t have it that Thrigsby is better than London. What do you say?”“I’ve never been to London,” replied René.“Don’t you love Thrigsby?”“It’s been my home always. I don’t know that I ever thought about it.”M’Elroy said:“One thinks about everything nowadays.”Something in the young man’s tone roused René to protest.“Oh no . . . lots of things one does without . . .” But he swallowed the rest. A sudden flow and ebb of emotion had left him speechless, and he felt utterly foreign to the company and to the charmed atmosphere of the household. Mrs. Smallman talked to him for a little, but he felt that she was speaking through him at her husband, so that he could not keep his face toward her, but was constantly turning toward the Professor as though the reply were to come from him, or would at any rate be worthlesswithout his indorsement. And always the Professor smiled with a vague friendliness that was disconcerting.After the meal he was taken to the study, a long room with books all round the walls, ponderous books, blue books, year after year of reports of learned institutions; reproductions of Italian pictures; photographs of Mrs. Smallman on the mantelpiece, a photograph of Mrs. Smallman on the desk. René was given a large chair and a small cigar, which he began to smoke before he realized what he was doing. He rarely smoked, did not care for it, and presently he dropped the cigar into the fireplace. The Professor stood looking out of the window. Two of the children were playing under the plum-tree. The feeling of being thrust out assailed René. The Professor turned:“Well?” he asked. “What’s the trouble?”“My father——” began René.“Ah! Well?”“He deserted my mother a long time ago. He came back. My brother’s married.”“I see. So you’re the only possible breadwinner. Any work in your father? How old is he?”“I don’t know how old he is. But work? No.”“It’s bad luck, but it often happens. I’ve had to keep my father since he was fifty. What about your family? The name’s well known in Thrigsby.”So Professor Smallman was the boy his father remembered! René gained confidence. It was something to know that his experience was not singular.“They did help until my father came back. They won’t now, and I don’t want them to. They don’t understand the pain of receiving charity uncharitably given. They call it ingratitude.”“They have their point of view.”“So have I mine,” said René, astonished at his own boldness.“Your work’s good,” said the Professor. “Tweeddale’s reports of you were always excellent. As you know, I don’t come in touch with men until their third year, and then only if they’re good. You can take that from me. I must tell you—it wouldn’t be fair not to—that one doesn’t know in the least how good you are going to be. One has an uncertainty about you. In a way, that’s all to the good. I like what you’ve written for thePost.So does Pigott the editor. What about journalism? Do you write easily?”“No.”“It rather scotches that, then. Pupils? You could make a little that way, but it’s drudging work when you’re reading as well. I could give you two first-year men, pretty bad, both of them, and Miss Brock, the girl you met at lunch, has a young brother who can’t get through the matric. That’s as much as you could manage.”René had no notion how much he ought to be paid. He asked, and when he heard the amount his heart overflowed with gratitude, and he walked home with a new vigor in his stride and a prouder carriage of his head. His father and mother were out.His news would not keep, and he went round to George, first changing his brown boots for black. He reckoned that in three terms he would be able to make nearly as much as his brother’s whole income, and would have the vacations to repair any damage done to his own work. Then he would take his degree, and the whole world, all life, would open up before him.
As the reader’s curiosity (if he hath any) must be now awake, and hungry, we shall provide to feed it as fast as we can.
EXCEPTfor Mrs. Fourmy few letters came to 166, and it was a great excitement for René when, a few weeks before the end of term, he came down in the morning to find a parcel waiting for him on the breakfast table. His father and mother watched him eagerly as he opened it, to find two large brown volumes, a German economic treatise translated by a Scots professor. A printed slip headedThrigsby Postrequested Mr. Fourmy to send a review not exceeding four hundred words in length within a week. Pride and elation moved René. His cheeks glowed, his eyes shone, he caressed the covers of the books, took them up, and turned over the leaves. It was the first sign of recognition from the world outside school and university.
“Professor Smallman said he would get me some reviewing.” René could only speak in gasps. He could not take his eyes off the books, and when his father reached out his hand for them, his impulse was to hug them and keep them from him. “He said hethought he could get me some. But I never thought of thePost.It’s such a good paper.”
“It’s Liberal, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Fourmy.
“Yes. But of course I shouldn’t have anything to do with that side of it.” René had always been given to understand that he was a Conservative, and that only chapel people were Liberals.
He ate very little breakfast, and immediately afterward rushed upstairs, made his bed, and lay on it gloating over the precious books, picking up first one volume and then the other, hardly reading them, and beginning already to compose his review based on Professor Smallman’s dislike of the translator. Then he began to wonder how much he would be paid for it—one, two, four, five guineas. The editor of thePostwas a very rich man. Would they print his name? Presently his happiness was so intense that he could not bear not to share it, and he went downstairs. His mother had gone out. His father was in the dining-room painting. He had the lid of a cigar box and was covering it with a copy of a nude reproduced in some magazine from a picture in the Paris Salon of that year. René watched him. He worked with minute strokes of the brush, caressingly, carefully. Already he had painted several copies of the same picture.
“Why do you always paint the same thing?” asked René.
“Nothing else worth painting.” Mr. Fourmy stopped, looked up at his son, winked, and hissed like a goose in a peculiar mocking laughter he affectedwhen he was most roguish. “She’s a beauty, this one. Like to have seen the original. Women. Not much else men care about, as you’ll find presently. I can sell as many of these as I care to paint. I’m going to do her smaller though, so’s she can be carried in the waistcoat pocket or a letter-case. I’ve got a watchmaker’s glass, so’s I can see what I’m doing with the brush.” And he took out the glass and screwed it into his eye and looked chuckling up at René. He was absurdly, childishly pleased with himself.
“Does mother know?” asked René, all his elation oozing away.
“She don’t know I sell ’em. I didn’t know I could myself. Never saw what’s been under my nose all my life. But he’s a clever man, is your father, much too clever to be a burden on his wife and family. Knock him down one day and he’s up the next.”
René said heavily:
“It’s like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs and the dirty books.”
Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily:
“This, my boy, is art, hand-painted in oils. Put a gilt frame round it and it’s quite respectable. These swine think art is a bawdy thing.”
“Where do you sell them? To a shop?”
“No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and chapelgoers.”
René sat dejectedly looking into the fire. At last he said:
“I wish you hadn’t told me. It doesn’t seem worth while doing anything.”
He went back to his room, but his joy in the books had filtered away. To read through them was a heavy task which had become to him nothing but the commercial traffic of his time, knowledge, and brains for money. He had no motive for doing it but the cold necessity of somehow making a living. All day long he read and read until his eyes ached, and he sat far into the night writing and rewriting until he had produced four hundred words that looked like the sort of stuff he read in the literary columns of the newspapers.
A depressed mood of appalling skepticism seized him. His father and mother, his brother and sister-in-law, these were his world, and they were contented with a monotonous small happiness, and he was the fool to look for more. Ah! but the days in Scotland, the graciousness and the fun that those other people knew; the sweetness of waiting upon Cathleen’s coming; her coming, the hours of tenderness and pure laughter, and her warm comradeship and the zest of the emotions they could rouse in each other and turn to a golden glee! But that was all done, and there was now only poverty and disgrace, and beyond, the sniggering of the men who loved nothing but women and the idea of women.
He kept back his review for three days, being fearful lest the editor should think him careless or over-eager, and he rather prided himself on his cunning in doing so. It was his first attempt to manipulate the impression he might make, and the illusion of subtleactivity it brought gave him some solace in his misery.
Other books came from thePost,and he wrote to thank Professor Smallman, who invited him to lunch on Sunday.
He had been twice before to the Professor’s house, to the garden party which he gave annually to work off the social obligations incurred during the academic year. For Thrigsby he had a very good garden, and an old house in a neighborhood which still bore some traces of a rural character, though the regiments of little pink brick houses were bearing down on it with an alarming swiftness. His garden contained three plum trees and a pear tree, gooseberry and currant bushes, and raspberry canes.
Mrs. Fourmy had thought the Smallmans must be what she called “grand people,” since they had lunch instead of dinner; but Mr. Fourmy remembered a Mr. Smallman who used to live in Kite Street and had two sons, of whom this might very well be one—a good-looking boy, neat and solemn, just a little too neat and obliging, always opening gates for old ladies and picking up handkerchiefs dropped by old gentlemen—that sort of boy. “Would call me ‘Sir’ the only time I ever spoke to him. I’ll be bound that’s the one.”
It helped René a little to know for certain that the Professor had once been a boy, but Mrs. Smallman he remembered as a lady of a gentleness and kindness almost terrifying, so kind that she had a way of notseeming to hear you when you were stuttering out some preposterously foolish remark. Everything was so easy for her; she was so sure of the strength of her position as a good hostess and the wife of a popular and important man; and there were the children, who were allowed to look down from the nursery window at the garden party. You could not talk to Mrs. Smallman long without having your eyes drawn to them, and then, if you were a sensitive person like René, you felt that this house was full of an intimacy jealous of its beauty, so that it repelled strangers. Friendliness there was, but it ended abruptly; the wife’s eyes lighting on the husband, the husband’s on the wife, or the eyes of both meeting and turning to the children at the window could bring it to a cruel and sudden close.
René could not explain to himself the uneasiness that came over him at the garden parties, or the dread of it that overwhelmed him as he pushed open the gate and rang the bell on that Sunday.
There was a bright green parasol in the hall table, and by it were two bowler hats. From the drawing-room came a faint buzz of chatter, and he saw that it contained the Professor and his wife; Blease, the Jewish Professor of English; M’Elroy, the great man of the University, captain of the cricket eleven, President of the Union—it would take a page to enumerate his distinctions; a little man who looked like an unsuccessful attempt to repeat the Professor; and a young lady in a bright green costume. René observed at once that the other men were wearing black boots,and became dreadfully conscious of his own new brown pair.
“I’m so glad you could come,” said Mrs. Smallman, and she introduced him to Blease.
“Seen you about,” said the Jew. “Third-year man, aren’t you?”
“Just beginning my third year,” said René miserably.
Blease had made his remark sound friendly, and acute. Rather clever of a Professor to be able to place a man outside his own subject!
“We stand for something, you know,” continued Blease. “Culture! A handful of men upholding the standard. Good for us to be kept in touch with working life. Don’t you think so, M’Elroy?”
“Yes. That’s where we score over Oxford and Cambridge, though they can never understand that.”
Their talk was above René. He remembered Cambridge as a place of enthralling beauty, but to compare this and that was rather too sweeping for him, and he found it baffling, and to regard himself as standing for anything was entirely foreign to his temper. The talk shot to and fro above him, and he found his eyes being engaged by the bright green. The young lady was sparkling, easy, gay, a little figure of energy and charm.
“She is beautiful,” said René to himself.
Then he decided that she was not beautiful. She turned her face into another light, and beauty came into it again; another turn and it vanished. Awill-o’-the-wisp, the hunting of which became an absorbing pursuit.
At lunch René sat opposite her, and hardly ever took his eyes from her face. Only when he seemed in danger of meeting her gaze did he turn away. Once he met her eyes and she smiled, seemed to be considering him gravely and very seriously in the depths of her mind, then dismissed him.
“Sheisbeautiful,” thought he, and from that moment she had his homage.
Presently she appealed to him:
“Mr. M’Elroy won’t have it that Thrigsby is better than London. What do you say?”
“I’ve never been to London,” replied René.
“Don’t you love Thrigsby?”
“It’s been my home always. I don’t know that I ever thought about it.”
M’Elroy said:
“One thinks about everything nowadays.”
Something in the young man’s tone roused René to protest.
“Oh no . . . lots of things one does without . . .” But he swallowed the rest. A sudden flow and ebb of emotion had left him speechless, and he felt utterly foreign to the company and to the charmed atmosphere of the household. Mrs. Smallman talked to him for a little, but he felt that she was speaking through him at her husband, so that he could not keep his face toward her, but was constantly turning toward the Professor as though the reply were to come from him, or would at any rate be worthlesswithout his indorsement. And always the Professor smiled with a vague friendliness that was disconcerting.
After the meal he was taken to the study, a long room with books all round the walls, ponderous books, blue books, year after year of reports of learned institutions; reproductions of Italian pictures; photographs of Mrs. Smallman on the mantelpiece, a photograph of Mrs. Smallman on the desk. René was given a large chair and a small cigar, which he began to smoke before he realized what he was doing. He rarely smoked, did not care for it, and presently he dropped the cigar into the fireplace. The Professor stood looking out of the window. Two of the children were playing under the plum-tree. The feeling of being thrust out assailed René. The Professor turned:
“Well?” he asked. “What’s the trouble?”
“My father——” began René.
“Ah! Well?”
“He deserted my mother a long time ago. He came back. My brother’s married.”
“I see. So you’re the only possible breadwinner. Any work in your father? How old is he?”
“I don’t know how old he is. But work? No.”
“It’s bad luck, but it often happens. I’ve had to keep my father since he was fifty. What about your family? The name’s well known in Thrigsby.”
So Professor Smallman was the boy his father remembered! René gained confidence. It was something to know that his experience was not singular.
“They did help until my father came back. They won’t now, and I don’t want them to. They don’t understand the pain of receiving charity uncharitably given. They call it ingratitude.”
“They have their point of view.”
“So have I mine,” said René, astonished at his own boldness.
“Your work’s good,” said the Professor. “Tweeddale’s reports of you were always excellent. As you know, I don’t come in touch with men until their third year, and then only if they’re good. You can take that from me. I must tell you—it wouldn’t be fair not to—that one doesn’t know in the least how good you are going to be. One has an uncertainty about you. In a way, that’s all to the good. I like what you’ve written for thePost.So does Pigott the editor. What about journalism? Do you write easily?”
“No.”
“It rather scotches that, then. Pupils? You could make a little that way, but it’s drudging work when you’re reading as well. I could give you two first-year men, pretty bad, both of them, and Miss Brock, the girl you met at lunch, has a young brother who can’t get through the matric. That’s as much as you could manage.”
René had no notion how much he ought to be paid. He asked, and when he heard the amount his heart overflowed with gratitude, and he walked home with a new vigor in his stride and a prouder carriage of his head. His father and mother were out.His news would not keep, and he went round to George, first changing his brown boots for black. He reckoned that in three terms he would be able to make nearly as much as his brother’s whole income, and would have the vacations to repair any damage done to his own work. Then he would take his degree, and the whole world, all life, would open up before him.