VIIFLYING NEAR THE CANDLEA man’s heart may minister comfort to him in the hopes of that thing for which he yet has no ground to hope.THEBrocks lived in Galt’s Park, an elegant district shut off from the rest of Thrigsby by gates and unoccupied lodges. Here, in ease and amid gardens, dwelt families of an old-established prosperity, many Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, and some of the descendants of Thrigsby’s famous men. Here also were the two hostels of the university, some schools, one co-educational seminary, the house of a painter with a great local fame, and that of the municipal organist. Good men had lived in Galt’s Park, and it had once been the center of Thrigsbeian culture; but now all those who dwell in it have the air of having been left behind, and the little pink houses are menacing it, even as they menace the garden of Professor Smallman.Through the winter René Fourmy came twice a week to coach young Kurt Brock in mathematics and French. Occasionally he was asked to stay to lunch, and then he was too sore from the discomfort of Mrs. Brock’s broken English—she was a German fromHamburg—to be able to support Miss Brock, Linda, in her efforts to make conversation. Also he was engrossed in the problem first presented to him on his original meeting with her: Was she, was she not, beautiful? Sometimes for a fortnight he would decide that she was so, and then his heart would go out to her in homage, an impersonal emotion bestowed on her as though she were a tree or a sunset. That she might be intelligent interested him not at all. Except in the case of Cathleen Bentley, where he had been surprised into an intimacy, refined and diluted with adoration, he had regarded women as existing only to receive in ignorance his shy homage.As with the Smallmans, so here he had to give his mother a detailed report of the household and its manner of living. To her they also were “grand,” and she never tired of listening to the tale of their doings, their servants, what they had to eat and drink, what they sat on, what they wore, and whom they entertained. He reported faithfully—the rings on Mrs. Brock’s fingers, her richly-clad inelegant figure, her dog-like eyes that could never smile, her enormous appetite—whereon Mrs. Fourmy would sigh and say:“I never was a big eater myself.”Kurt, the boy, René liked, for he was so thoroughly convinced of his own stupidity that it was impossible to teach him anything. German only in name, he was English and Thrigsbeian in everything else, and René felt almost that he belonged to an older generation when he discovered that Kurt could not rememberthe horse-trams in the Derby Road, or a time when there were no motor-cars. Kurt possessed a motorcycle, or it possessed him, so that almost everything else in his eyes was “bally rot.” He excepted music, which, with his family, he loved German-fashion, greedily and indiscriminately. His attitude toward his sister was that of one who knows so much that he has nothing left to hope. Against his mother and sister he used to protest to René, whom he thought of as a “poor beggar” but a “good enough sort.” René never saw it, but often Kurt would outmaneuver Linda in her attempts to waylay his tutor, and once he went so far as to mumble this warning:“What I can’t stand about women is the way they go nosing round.”“Do they?” asked René, looking up fromHall and Knight.“My sister does. She wants to know how a man works. She’s like me with a motor. Haven’t you got sisters?”“No. I wish I had.”“I don’t know. Having a sister like Lin is enough to put a man off women for life.”“She has always been very charming to me.”Kurt snorted.Another day he growled out:“Linda says you are like Schiller. You’d better look out. She said the last young feller was like Mozart.”“I’ve never seen a picture of Mozart,” replied René.“Silly sort of face.”That very day Linda outmaneuvered Kurt. As a rule he walked with René to the gates of Galt’s Park, but now, believing his sister to be safely out of the way, and also wishing to change the tire of his motorcycle, he let René depart alone, and René was not gone above a hundred yards when he encountered Linda. He bowed, removed his hat, and was for making on, when she stopped.“I’m glad to meet you,” she said, with such a smile that René felt once and for all that she was beautiful, and was so confused by his own enthusiasm that he did not take the hand she proffered, and put her to the awkwardness of withdrawing it.“I—I——” He looked desperately up and down the road, but could find no topic, and ended lamely by saying:“I—I like your brother.”“Oh! Kurt! But I am glad to have met you. I hoped you would be at the Smallmans last Sunday. I was so disappointed.” Her voice too was beautiful in its friendly, emphatic cadences.“I—I wasn’t asked.”“Oh, you aren’tasked.You go. Everybody goes.”(He had never been able to identify himself with everybody, or to take everybody’s doing for a reason for his own.)She went on:“I wanted to ask you if you would care to come and hear me play at the Goetheverein—that’s the German club—next Wednesday. It’s a good program;Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms. You’ll love Beethoven.”“My mother plays, but her piano has yellow keys, and the music is faded like the keys.”“It must be beautiful to understand your mother. Professor Smallman has told me all about you, and I do hope you’ll come.”“I’d like to come.”“That’s settled then. We have supper at the Verein, and I’ll introduce you to some people you’ll like to know. It’s nice to know your friends’ friends, don’t you think?”René felt vaguely uneasy.“Friends’ friends,” he repeated almost interrogatively.“Friends,” said Miss Brock, “are those whom you have always known you would meet.” This she said with a kind of recklessness that was almost exaltation. It certainly startled René into something like emotion, into the desire to respond. For the first time during their conversation his eyes met hers full, and he was confronted with a smile so charmingly inquisitive that he was compelled to satisfy their curiosity and he jerked out:“Yes. Friends.”And it seemed to him that she had given and he had accepted—something. Gift and acceptance were so surreptitious that the nature of them was a matter of almost complete indifference. The great thing was the giving and the accepting, and the excitement of the transaction drowned the little emotion that had stirredin him. One more glance he stole at her, and he saw that she was satisfied, that their conversation was at an end. Yet neither could end it, and it was a relief to both when Kurt came hooting and snorting by on his motorcycle.“Till Wednesday then,” said Miss Brock.“You—you didn’t say what time.”“Oh! Eight o’clock. But you might like to come with us—call for us at half-past seven. I wish you could speak German.”“I do a little.”“Mother will like that. Good-by.”She turned and walked away. René stood rooted to the ground. At his feet he saw her handkerchief. He stooped and picked it up. He dared not run after her. He pressed the handkerchief to his lips, then angrily squeezed it up into a ball and thrust it into his trousers pocket. This done, he shook himself, threw back his head, and strode vigorously homeward. He said to himself:“I’m damned if I read love poems to her.”He had arrived at the conclusion that but for the love poems things would never have got so maddeningly out of hand with that other maiden in Scotland.He added:“But she really is beautiful.”Reading a book at supper that night, he knocked a glass of beer over onto his trousers, fumbled for his handkerchief, found Linda’s, mopped up the beer with it, and gave it to his mother to be washed. She washed it with her own hands that night, ironed it,and placed it on his dressing-table so that next morning he was confronted by the embroidered name—Linda.On the Wednesday evening he clad himself in his best black coat, the same he had had since he was seventeen, put on a white dicky and cuffs, and punctually at 7:30 stood between the stucco pillars on either side of the Brocks’ front door. The family was waiting for him in the hall. The women were muffled up in veils, and Kurt was wearing a very smart overcoat and new patent-leather boots. Behind Kurt in the darkness—for the hall was lit only by one flickering gas-jet in a ground-glass globe—stood another male figure. This advanced into the light and was revealed as M’Elroy.“You know each other,” said Linda.Kurt cut in with:“Of course, and Fourmy thinks he is so like Mozart.”René felt a pang of uneasiness. He turned to Linda to find her eyes resting now on M’Elroy, now on himself, with quick little darting glances that seemed to take in every detail. It exasperated him to be pitted against M’Elroy, but, the rivalry having been introduced, though unsought by himself, he rose to it, and so, he felt, did M’Elroy. By way of protest René moved nearer to Mrs. Brock, who was sitting on the bottom stair.“Gut Abend!” he said. “Ich bin——”“Na, Sie sprechen Deutsch? So ist’s gut. Ist mir sehr lieb Deutsch zu hören.”“Aber nicht——”“Sie sprechen sehr gut. Mein Sohn wird nie Deutsch sprechen. Im Goetheverein aber, wo man so schöne Musik——”“Ja,” interrupted René at a venture, and he found that, with these three expressions, he could get along very well and keep Mrs. Brock perfectly happy talking away as she never did when the use of English oppressed her. She never stopped. She talked him into the cab that came for them, out of it, up the stairs into the German club, and into the concert-room where she presented him to other women like herself, who nodded and smiled at his fumbled utterances—and talked.The room was arranged like a restaurant with little tables all round it, and the platform at one end slightly raised. For the most part the audience sat in little family groups and drank beer and ate sandwiches. René found himself confined between Mrs. Brock and another stout matron, and began to feel rather oppressed and to wish he had not come. Kurt and M’Elroy had joined a band of young men who took possession of a corner and looked on at the scene with English disapproval of its Germanism. Some of them René knew for Meyers and Schoeners and Krauses of the second and third generation.The room was soon filled with smoke, and the atmosphere became very thick, but the Germans ate and drank till their faces shone. And greedily they gulped down the music, which was beautiful and charming and sentimental by turns, though all seemed to meet with the same approval. A pale young Jew played the violinuntil René was near tears and Mrs. Brock heaved fat sighs of contentment; a portly Austrian with a sweet little tenor voice sang Schubert’s Trout song so neatly and with such ease that René wriggled with pleasure; and there were quartets and a solo flute and a piano duet by two little blonde girls with pink legs and absurd pale eyes, with which they ogled their papa in the audience and the portrait of the Emperor William on the wall; and Linda played a Beethoven sonata (rather dull), and the Prelude of Rachmaninoff, which was received with thunderous applause. She wore a white dress and looked very fine, plump, and comely, with her white hands hovering over her and descending on the keys, and her head swaying until upon the close of the music it drooped to show a beautiful line from her neck to her waist. René had been so moved by the music that his eyes caught greedily at this extra pleasure, and they never moved from Linda’s face as she stepped down from the platform, and came forward looking for her party. She was greeted with “Prosits” and raised tankards as she passed between the tables. Then she stopped and gazed over to the corner where Kurt was sitting. M’Elroy stood up to catch her attention. René saw that, and also how Linda shrank away from the assertion and the claim, feigned that she had not seen, and threaded her way toward her mother’s table. To cover her coming, René began to talk wildly in German:“Das war wunderschön. Ich habe nie solches Klavierspiel gehört. Ich bin——”“Linda versteht. Ja. Aber sie fühlt nicht mehrals——” And a torrent of long-involved sentences descended on René and brought him to a hopeless bewilderment. That had been his growing condition. This incursion into a foreign world, into an atmosphere of easy social intercourse, was for him, a dweller among the humble ingregarious inhabitants of mediocre streets, an ordeal, a fierce conflict with impressions. Already to have had so much music to absorb had put some strain upon him. The effort to follow Mrs. Brock’s conversation had been exhausting, and to save himself he clung to Linda and the idea of Linda. He rose as she came up. She stood for a moment with her hand in her mother’s, looking, for a brief space, like a Cranach Eve, all charm and tenderness, the very bloom of womanhood upon her. She took his chair, and he had to fetch another. He was forced to place it close to hers, so that he had some difficulty in not touching her. Presently she moved so that the smallest accidental gesture must make him touch her. He edged away, and she turned and looked at him searchingly, inquisitively. His face was blank as that of a statue. His mind knew no thought. He seemed to himself to be drowning in a languor that was part weariness, part excitement, at her propinquity.She laughed, and her laughter roused him, but already she was talking animatedly to her mother and her mother’s friends, and René became absorbed in contemplating her honey-colored hair, the rounding line of her shoulder, the pretty modeling of her cheek and neck. And, through her conversation with her mother, with her white shoulders and the prettymodeling of her cheek and neck she carried on with René an intercourse more terrifyingly intimate than any he had ever known. He had a disquieting sense of using more faculties than he had ever suspected in himself. It was pleasantly adventurous, but to a youth of his virtue it savored too alarmingly of black magic that her attention should be upon him while her words were elsewhere, and that he should be so keenly aware of her. It sent the room whirling round him, made his identity, which hitherto had seemed definite enough for all the apparent purposes of life, melt and trickle away, and cruelly transferred the center of his universe from himself to Linda. And, when she looked toward him again, it was almost as though she had surprised his state, so certain did she look, but still inquisitive and malicious.“Well? Did you talk German?”“I said you werewunderschön.” He leaned forward so that his hand touched her arm. He was so desperate that boldness was his only course. She had taken something from him. He was in a mood to claim it.“Am I?” she said. “You looked as if you didn’t see me.”“But I did see you all the time, especially when you drooped your head.”“Oh! Then!”And with the acuteness of his desperation he perceived that she was aware of the effectiveness of the drooping of her head. That made him angry, though he knew not why.“It’s so hot in here,” she resumed; “will you take me home? It would be nice to walk. The others will drive.”She explained to her mother, and René followed her, torn between expectancy and alarm. At the door he met M’Elroy. For a moment he was delighted to see that hero, saw in him an agent of relief.“It’s too bad, Linda,” said M’Elroy; “I haven’t had a word with you all evening.”“Well? There are other evenings, and we are both so young.” She said this with a rather pretty German accent, the assumption of which seemed to infuriate M’Elroy, for he flung off with an angry “All right!” and left them. Linda smiled slowly to herself, and René was conscious of a doom settling on himself, and all his hope seemed to have gone with M’Elroy.They parted to go to their respective cloakrooms, and René told himself that she would change her mind, would dismiss him also and wait for her mother, that what his eyes had seen he had not seen, that, after all, Linda desired of him nothing but the common civility of his escort. But all his attempted evasions only excited him the more, and by the time he met Linda again at the door he was speechless and in a sweat.The night was cool, clouded, and dark. René walked very fast.“I can’t keep this up,” said Linda, and he dropped to a crawl.“That’s better,” she said with a sigh, as they walked down the nigh empty streets. “Oh, dear, I should be so sorry if you hadn’t been happy.”“I—I was happy. I loved the music.”“You can tell almost everything in music.”“If you have anything to tell.”“How droll you are—so literal.”“Miss Brock——” said René. They were walking very slowly now. They had turned down the last lighted street before the darkness of Galt’s Park. It gaped before them, inviting, menacing, romantic, rousing him to a mood of antagonism to the growing fascination she was exercising over him.“Droll?” he said. “I don’t know. I mean what I say, though. I can’t always say what I mean.”“Who can?” asked she.“I mean, suppose you have a feeling for anything, for your father or your mother or something beautiful, and the feeling is so big that it can’t get out——”“One gets to think,” said Linda in a quiet little voice, soothing, caressing, “that men don’t have feelings like that.”They passed through the gates into the darkness of the Park. They walked on in silence, slower, slower, till they came to a weeping tree that hung right over the footpath. Here they stopped altogether. The blood beat at his temples, he was near choking, and there was Linda in his arms and he had kissed her, shyly, coolly, almost defiantly. It was soon over, but she lingered, and out of the darkness came her voice saying:“But you are the drollest dear.”Stung into a passionate desire to justify his situation, he cried:“By God, but I do love you.”A little cry from her (he scarcely heard it), a strong embrace, and there came another kiss, wherein was neither sweetness nor delight, but only a bitter hunger.
A man’s heart may minister comfort to him in the hopes of that thing for which he yet has no ground to hope.
THEBrocks lived in Galt’s Park, an elegant district shut off from the rest of Thrigsby by gates and unoccupied lodges. Here, in ease and amid gardens, dwelt families of an old-established prosperity, many Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, and some of the descendants of Thrigsby’s famous men. Here also were the two hostels of the university, some schools, one co-educational seminary, the house of a painter with a great local fame, and that of the municipal organist. Good men had lived in Galt’s Park, and it had once been the center of Thrigsbeian culture; but now all those who dwell in it have the air of having been left behind, and the little pink houses are menacing it, even as they menace the garden of Professor Smallman.
Through the winter René Fourmy came twice a week to coach young Kurt Brock in mathematics and French. Occasionally he was asked to stay to lunch, and then he was too sore from the discomfort of Mrs. Brock’s broken English—she was a German fromHamburg—to be able to support Miss Brock, Linda, in her efforts to make conversation. Also he was engrossed in the problem first presented to him on his original meeting with her: Was she, was she not, beautiful? Sometimes for a fortnight he would decide that she was so, and then his heart would go out to her in homage, an impersonal emotion bestowed on her as though she were a tree or a sunset. That she might be intelligent interested him not at all. Except in the case of Cathleen Bentley, where he had been surprised into an intimacy, refined and diluted with adoration, he had regarded women as existing only to receive in ignorance his shy homage.
As with the Smallmans, so here he had to give his mother a detailed report of the household and its manner of living. To her they also were “grand,” and she never tired of listening to the tale of their doings, their servants, what they had to eat and drink, what they sat on, what they wore, and whom they entertained. He reported faithfully—the rings on Mrs. Brock’s fingers, her richly-clad inelegant figure, her dog-like eyes that could never smile, her enormous appetite—whereon Mrs. Fourmy would sigh and say:
“I never was a big eater myself.”
Kurt, the boy, René liked, for he was so thoroughly convinced of his own stupidity that it was impossible to teach him anything. German only in name, he was English and Thrigsbeian in everything else, and René felt almost that he belonged to an older generation when he discovered that Kurt could not rememberthe horse-trams in the Derby Road, or a time when there were no motor-cars. Kurt possessed a motorcycle, or it possessed him, so that almost everything else in his eyes was “bally rot.” He excepted music, which, with his family, he loved German-fashion, greedily and indiscriminately. His attitude toward his sister was that of one who knows so much that he has nothing left to hope. Against his mother and sister he used to protest to René, whom he thought of as a “poor beggar” but a “good enough sort.” René never saw it, but often Kurt would outmaneuver Linda in her attempts to waylay his tutor, and once he went so far as to mumble this warning:
“What I can’t stand about women is the way they go nosing round.”
“Do they?” asked René, looking up fromHall and Knight.
“My sister does. She wants to know how a man works. She’s like me with a motor. Haven’t you got sisters?”
“No. I wish I had.”
“I don’t know. Having a sister like Lin is enough to put a man off women for life.”
“She has always been very charming to me.”
Kurt snorted.
Another day he growled out:
“Linda says you are like Schiller. You’d better look out. She said the last young feller was like Mozart.”
“I’ve never seen a picture of Mozart,” replied René.
“Silly sort of face.”
That very day Linda outmaneuvered Kurt. As a rule he walked with René to the gates of Galt’s Park, but now, believing his sister to be safely out of the way, and also wishing to change the tire of his motorcycle, he let René depart alone, and René was not gone above a hundred yards when he encountered Linda. He bowed, removed his hat, and was for making on, when she stopped.
“I’m glad to meet you,” she said, with such a smile that René felt once and for all that she was beautiful, and was so confused by his own enthusiasm that he did not take the hand she proffered, and put her to the awkwardness of withdrawing it.
“I—I——” He looked desperately up and down the road, but could find no topic, and ended lamely by saying:
“I—I like your brother.”
“Oh! Kurt! But I am glad to have met you. I hoped you would be at the Smallmans last Sunday. I was so disappointed.” Her voice too was beautiful in its friendly, emphatic cadences.
“I—I wasn’t asked.”
“Oh, you aren’tasked.You go. Everybody goes.”
(He had never been able to identify himself with everybody, or to take everybody’s doing for a reason for his own.)
She went on:
“I wanted to ask you if you would care to come and hear me play at the Goetheverein—that’s the German club—next Wednesday. It’s a good program;Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms. You’ll love Beethoven.”
“My mother plays, but her piano has yellow keys, and the music is faded like the keys.”
“It must be beautiful to understand your mother. Professor Smallman has told me all about you, and I do hope you’ll come.”
“I’d like to come.”
“That’s settled then. We have supper at the Verein, and I’ll introduce you to some people you’ll like to know. It’s nice to know your friends’ friends, don’t you think?”
René felt vaguely uneasy.
“Friends’ friends,” he repeated almost interrogatively.
“Friends,” said Miss Brock, “are those whom you have always known you would meet.” This she said with a kind of recklessness that was almost exaltation. It certainly startled René into something like emotion, into the desire to respond. For the first time during their conversation his eyes met hers full, and he was confronted with a smile so charmingly inquisitive that he was compelled to satisfy their curiosity and he jerked out:
“Yes. Friends.”
And it seemed to him that she had given and he had accepted—something. Gift and acceptance were so surreptitious that the nature of them was a matter of almost complete indifference. The great thing was the giving and the accepting, and the excitement of the transaction drowned the little emotion that had stirredin him. One more glance he stole at her, and he saw that she was satisfied, that their conversation was at an end. Yet neither could end it, and it was a relief to both when Kurt came hooting and snorting by on his motorcycle.
“Till Wednesday then,” said Miss Brock.
“You—you didn’t say what time.”
“Oh! Eight o’clock. But you might like to come with us—call for us at half-past seven. I wish you could speak German.”
“I do a little.”
“Mother will like that. Good-by.”
She turned and walked away. René stood rooted to the ground. At his feet he saw her handkerchief. He stooped and picked it up. He dared not run after her. He pressed the handkerchief to his lips, then angrily squeezed it up into a ball and thrust it into his trousers pocket. This done, he shook himself, threw back his head, and strode vigorously homeward. He said to himself:
“I’m damned if I read love poems to her.”
He had arrived at the conclusion that but for the love poems things would never have got so maddeningly out of hand with that other maiden in Scotland.
He added:
“But she really is beautiful.”
Reading a book at supper that night, he knocked a glass of beer over onto his trousers, fumbled for his handkerchief, found Linda’s, mopped up the beer with it, and gave it to his mother to be washed. She washed it with her own hands that night, ironed it,and placed it on his dressing-table so that next morning he was confronted by the embroidered name—Linda.
On the Wednesday evening he clad himself in his best black coat, the same he had had since he was seventeen, put on a white dicky and cuffs, and punctually at 7:30 stood between the stucco pillars on either side of the Brocks’ front door. The family was waiting for him in the hall. The women were muffled up in veils, and Kurt was wearing a very smart overcoat and new patent-leather boots. Behind Kurt in the darkness—for the hall was lit only by one flickering gas-jet in a ground-glass globe—stood another male figure. This advanced into the light and was revealed as M’Elroy.
“You know each other,” said Linda.
Kurt cut in with:
“Of course, and Fourmy thinks he is so like Mozart.”
René felt a pang of uneasiness. He turned to Linda to find her eyes resting now on M’Elroy, now on himself, with quick little darting glances that seemed to take in every detail. It exasperated him to be pitted against M’Elroy, but, the rivalry having been introduced, though unsought by himself, he rose to it, and so, he felt, did M’Elroy. By way of protest René moved nearer to Mrs. Brock, who was sitting on the bottom stair.
“Gut Abend!” he said. “Ich bin——”
“Na, Sie sprechen Deutsch? So ist’s gut. Ist mir sehr lieb Deutsch zu hören.”
“Aber nicht——”
“Sie sprechen sehr gut. Mein Sohn wird nie Deutsch sprechen. Im Goetheverein aber, wo man so schöne Musik——”
“Ja,” interrupted René at a venture, and he found that, with these three expressions, he could get along very well and keep Mrs. Brock perfectly happy talking away as she never did when the use of English oppressed her. She never stopped. She talked him into the cab that came for them, out of it, up the stairs into the German club, and into the concert-room where she presented him to other women like herself, who nodded and smiled at his fumbled utterances—and talked.
The room was arranged like a restaurant with little tables all round it, and the platform at one end slightly raised. For the most part the audience sat in little family groups and drank beer and ate sandwiches. René found himself confined between Mrs. Brock and another stout matron, and began to feel rather oppressed and to wish he had not come. Kurt and M’Elroy had joined a band of young men who took possession of a corner and looked on at the scene with English disapproval of its Germanism. Some of them René knew for Meyers and Schoeners and Krauses of the second and third generation.
The room was soon filled with smoke, and the atmosphere became very thick, but the Germans ate and drank till their faces shone. And greedily they gulped down the music, which was beautiful and charming and sentimental by turns, though all seemed to meet with the same approval. A pale young Jew played the violinuntil René was near tears and Mrs. Brock heaved fat sighs of contentment; a portly Austrian with a sweet little tenor voice sang Schubert’s Trout song so neatly and with such ease that René wriggled with pleasure; and there were quartets and a solo flute and a piano duet by two little blonde girls with pink legs and absurd pale eyes, with which they ogled their papa in the audience and the portrait of the Emperor William on the wall; and Linda played a Beethoven sonata (rather dull), and the Prelude of Rachmaninoff, which was received with thunderous applause. She wore a white dress and looked very fine, plump, and comely, with her white hands hovering over her and descending on the keys, and her head swaying until upon the close of the music it drooped to show a beautiful line from her neck to her waist. René had been so moved by the music that his eyes caught greedily at this extra pleasure, and they never moved from Linda’s face as she stepped down from the platform, and came forward looking for her party. She was greeted with “Prosits” and raised tankards as she passed between the tables. Then she stopped and gazed over to the corner where Kurt was sitting. M’Elroy stood up to catch her attention. René saw that, and also how Linda shrank away from the assertion and the claim, feigned that she had not seen, and threaded her way toward her mother’s table. To cover her coming, René began to talk wildly in German:
“Das war wunderschön. Ich habe nie solches Klavierspiel gehört. Ich bin——”
“Linda versteht. Ja. Aber sie fühlt nicht mehrals——” And a torrent of long-involved sentences descended on René and brought him to a hopeless bewilderment. That had been his growing condition. This incursion into a foreign world, into an atmosphere of easy social intercourse, was for him, a dweller among the humble ingregarious inhabitants of mediocre streets, an ordeal, a fierce conflict with impressions. Already to have had so much music to absorb had put some strain upon him. The effort to follow Mrs. Brock’s conversation had been exhausting, and to save himself he clung to Linda and the idea of Linda. He rose as she came up. She stood for a moment with her hand in her mother’s, looking, for a brief space, like a Cranach Eve, all charm and tenderness, the very bloom of womanhood upon her. She took his chair, and he had to fetch another. He was forced to place it close to hers, so that he had some difficulty in not touching her. Presently she moved so that the smallest accidental gesture must make him touch her. He edged away, and she turned and looked at him searchingly, inquisitively. His face was blank as that of a statue. His mind knew no thought. He seemed to himself to be drowning in a languor that was part weariness, part excitement, at her propinquity.
She laughed, and her laughter roused him, but already she was talking animatedly to her mother and her mother’s friends, and René became absorbed in contemplating her honey-colored hair, the rounding line of her shoulder, the pretty modeling of her cheek and neck. And, through her conversation with her mother, with her white shoulders and the prettymodeling of her cheek and neck she carried on with René an intercourse more terrifyingly intimate than any he had ever known. He had a disquieting sense of using more faculties than he had ever suspected in himself. It was pleasantly adventurous, but to a youth of his virtue it savored too alarmingly of black magic that her attention should be upon him while her words were elsewhere, and that he should be so keenly aware of her. It sent the room whirling round him, made his identity, which hitherto had seemed definite enough for all the apparent purposes of life, melt and trickle away, and cruelly transferred the center of his universe from himself to Linda. And, when she looked toward him again, it was almost as though she had surprised his state, so certain did she look, but still inquisitive and malicious.
“Well? Did you talk German?”
“I said you werewunderschön.” He leaned forward so that his hand touched her arm. He was so desperate that boldness was his only course. She had taken something from him. He was in a mood to claim it.
“Am I?” she said. “You looked as if you didn’t see me.”
“But I did see you all the time, especially when you drooped your head.”
“Oh! Then!”
And with the acuteness of his desperation he perceived that she was aware of the effectiveness of the drooping of her head. That made him angry, though he knew not why.
“It’s so hot in here,” she resumed; “will you take me home? It would be nice to walk. The others will drive.”
She explained to her mother, and René followed her, torn between expectancy and alarm. At the door he met M’Elroy. For a moment he was delighted to see that hero, saw in him an agent of relief.
“It’s too bad, Linda,” said M’Elroy; “I haven’t had a word with you all evening.”
“Well? There are other evenings, and we are both so young.” She said this with a rather pretty German accent, the assumption of which seemed to infuriate M’Elroy, for he flung off with an angry “All right!” and left them. Linda smiled slowly to herself, and René was conscious of a doom settling on himself, and all his hope seemed to have gone with M’Elroy.
They parted to go to their respective cloakrooms, and René told himself that she would change her mind, would dismiss him also and wait for her mother, that what his eyes had seen he had not seen, that, after all, Linda desired of him nothing but the common civility of his escort. But all his attempted evasions only excited him the more, and by the time he met Linda again at the door he was speechless and in a sweat.
The night was cool, clouded, and dark. René walked very fast.
“I can’t keep this up,” said Linda, and he dropped to a crawl.
“That’s better,” she said with a sigh, as they walked down the nigh empty streets. “Oh, dear, I should be so sorry if you hadn’t been happy.”
“I—I was happy. I loved the music.”
“You can tell almost everything in music.”
“If you have anything to tell.”
“How droll you are—so literal.”
“Miss Brock——” said René. They were walking very slowly now. They had turned down the last lighted street before the darkness of Galt’s Park. It gaped before them, inviting, menacing, romantic, rousing him to a mood of antagonism to the growing fascination she was exercising over him.
“Droll?” he said. “I don’t know. I mean what I say, though. I can’t always say what I mean.”
“Who can?” asked she.
“I mean, suppose you have a feeling for anything, for your father or your mother or something beautiful, and the feeling is so big that it can’t get out——”
“One gets to think,” said Linda in a quiet little voice, soothing, caressing, “that men don’t have feelings like that.”
They passed through the gates into the darkness of the Park. They walked on in silence, slower, slower, till they came to a weeping tree that hung right over the footpath. Here they stopped altogether. The blood beat at his temples, he was near choking, and there was Linda in his arms and he had kissed her, shyly, coolly, almost defiantly. It was soon over, but she lingered, and out of the darkness came her voice saying:
“But you are the drollest dear.”
Stung into a passionate desire to justify his situation, he cried:
“By God, but I do love you.”
A little cry from her (he scarcely heard it), a strong embrace, and there came another kiss, wherein was neither sweetness nor delight, but only a bitter hunger.