O that joy so soon should waste
Or so sweet a bliss
As a kiss
Might not forever last!
IT annoyed the young man that at such a time, in such a place, he
should be thinking of his father. Waiting for his beloved, he desired
to have no thought but for her; most loyal intention sadly
unfulfilled, for he could think only of his father, first as a
wondrous being who could skillfully become at will an elephant or a
zebra, or more tranquilly fascinate and absorb by waggling his ears
with no disturbance of his face. The young man, John René Fourmy,
could more clearly remember his father's ears than his features. He
was introspective enough to know that his tenderness for the young
woman, his melting anticipation of her coming, had led him back to the
first adoration of his life, and from that to the tragedy of its
obliteration.
Came the distressing recollection of his father's downfall,
devastating for the boy of three who had witnessed it. He could
visualize it clearly, so sharp had been the cruel impression, the
indignity of it. The bedroom in the little house in the country where
they had lived near Billy Lummas and Sam Ardwick, who had fits in the
road. A room full of bed. In that bed his father and himself eager for
the moment when his father should arise from his bed and fill the
world, and his mother apparently just as eager because she was
entreating and imploring. Only the more did his father wrap himself in
the bedclothes. These suddenly were torn down amid peals of laughter;
a fond scuffle, though the boy perceived not the fondness; up went his
father's nightshirt, his long body was turned over and it was slapped
resoundingly on that place considerately designed by nature to receive
such onslaughts. The slapping was done with the back of a hairbrush,
an instrument that, in alternation with a slipper, was used upon
himself. That a man, that a glorious father should suffer, and,
because he suffered, deserve such an indignity, was too much. A shadow
came over the world, and René remembered flinging himself down by the
bed and shedding passionate tears for the departed glory. Thereafter
his father was no wonder to him, he too was subject to the authority
of his mother, and became henceforth only a tyrannous buffoon,
nervously kind or noisily angry.
Then René remembered the return from the country to a succession of
houses in streets; his father just risen from his bed as he came home
to dinner at midday; bottles of whisky and boxes of cigarettes. And
when at school they asked him what his father was, he used to reply,
"A gentleman. And he went to a public school," that being the formula
which had been given to him to account for existence and all its
puzzlements. Public school and heaven were for a long time confounded
in his mind, and the formula had accounted adequately for his father's
Elijah-like disappearance from the scene when René was ten.
That was all he knew, and there was the sting of injustice in this
present intrusion in the Scottish glen, hallowed by the delights of a
young love which boy and girl had arranged should shake the world into
a wonder at its glory. A sordid family history was a clog upon
romance, and our young man was that earnest creature, a romantic.
A stolen love, for she lived at the great house taken by her father
for the sport of the autumn months, and he was staying with his
great-aunt Janet, an ex-governess, in the village, as he had done ever
since he was eleven, for his holidays.
Now he was nearly twenty, wonderfully in love, punctual to his
appointment, striving for romantic thoughts and able to achieve
nothing but these humiliating memories of his father. He tried
singing; that was of no avail. It did but call to mind his father's
songs. He threw pebbles into the burn, but they gave him no amusement.
Then from his pocket he drew an anthology of love--poems from which he
had been accustomed to read to his fair--and so he lulled himself to
something near the warm mood of expectancy and began to tell himself
that she was very late, that she had failed him on this their last
day. There was a sort of sweet anguish in the disappointment which he
liked so much that he was almost put out when she came.
He leaped to his feet and opened his arms and she sank into them, and
an enchantment descended upon them and they kissed.
He had prepared for her a couch of bracken. On this they lay and
kissed again. This kiss was tragic. The enchantment broke in the
middle, and he found the proximity of her face ridiculous and
embarrassing and his position uncomfortable. He did not tell her so,
and a simulated rapture hid his feelings from her. She sighed:
"Oh, René!"
The sound of his name on her lips never failed to move him, and a
little of the enchantment returned. He could endure her nearness, and
gave her an affectionate little hug quite genuinely warm. It surprised
her into happy laughter.
"Oh, René! it has been more beautiful this year even than last. Of
course we're older. Do you think it goes on for ever and ever, year
after year, growing more and more beautiful?"
"Very few lovers----" began René in a solemn voice, but at once the
generalization offended him and he never reached his predicate. The
subject seemed entirely to satisfy Cathleen. She took his hand in
hers:
"We mustn't stop writing to each other again."
"It was you who stopped."
"I thought----"
"It made it very horrid meeting you again, very anxious, I mean--I
mean I don't know what your life is like."
"You know I shall never find anyone like you, René, never."
He thought with distaste of her brothers, robust, athletic young men,
wonderfully tailored, with a knack of getting the last ounce of effect
out of soap and water. Dirt avoided them; they could not be shabby or
untidy, and they made him feel grubby and shrunken. Oxford and
Cambridge they were, and they stared him into a sort of silly shame
when he spoke of his university, Thrigsby, and yet, through his shame
there would dart tremors of a fierce feeling of moral superiority.
Anyhow, their sister loved him, and never "chipped" him as their young
women "chipped" them. There was never any sign that their young women
took them seriously.
"I will write," said Cathleen. "This year won't seem so long. I
couldn't be certain, last year."
"Are you certain now?"
"Oh, René!"
This time the enchantment was full on them, raced through them,
alarmed them. They moved a little apart.
"Let's talk sense," said he. "I want to marry you."
"Oh, yes."
"They won't let me, you know. I've got my own way to make. In three
years you'll be twenty-one. I shall probably have to stay in Thrigsby
because I can make a living there, but I'll get to London as soon as I
can. You wouldn't like Thrigsby."
"Anywhere with you."
"The people there aren't your sort. My own people won't like my
marrying so young. I've got rotten uncles and aunts backing me because
they think I'm clever. I should have been in business long ago if it
hadn't been for them. My brother's in a shipping office----"
"What did your father do?"
He shifted uneasily on that. The formula seemed empty and a little
vulgar, somehow grimy, to present to her. He answered:
"He drank whisky and smoked cigarettes."
"Oh! I'm sorry."
Almost imperceptibly she shrank away from him, but he saw it.
"You may as well know. We're no great shakes. My old Aunt Janet talks
of the great people she has known, but my mother's just a Thrigsby
'widow' living in a thirty-pound-a-year house in an ex-genteel part of
the town. There are lots of women like her in Thrigsby. You live in
one of those streets and nothing seems to happen. Then you hear that
the lady at No. 53 isn't married to her husband, or that Mr. Twemlow
of 25 has run away from his wife and four children. We lived at 49
Axon Street when my father disappeared. We live at 166 Hog Lane West
now. We've gone up in the world since my brother began to earn money."
He had talked himself into a gloom. The smoke of Thrigsby seemed to
smirch the glade.
"Poor old thing!" said Cathleen. "I don't see that it matters much.
You're you, just the same. We live in a house called Roseneath. It's
in Putney, but we call it London. Father makes a lot of money, and is
a recorder and all the rest of it, but we aren't anything in
particular. We turn up our noses at a lot of people, but there are
lots more people who turn up their noses at us. You'd laugh if you
could see how savage it makes Edith and Rachel sometimes when they
grovel for invitations and don't get them. And it was wonderful what a
difference it made when Basil got his blue at Cambridge. All
Putney----"
She threw out her hands to indicate the extent of her brother's
triumph. Then, realizing how far their talk had taken them from the
sweet employment which was their habit, she crept nearer.
"If I thought all that nonsense was going to upset you, and hang about
you while we're waiting, I'd run away with you to-morrow."
"Oh, my darling!" cried he, overcome by this recklessness and proof of
the seriousness of her intentions. They sat with hands clasped, gazing
into each other's eyes in a charmed happiness.
"Forever and ever," said René.
"Forever and ever," cried she. "It isn't many people who find the real
thing in the first."
He glowed.
"Oh! we must never spoil it."
Then they lay side by side with the volume of love poems between them,
and he read aloud their favorites.
They became very sorrowful as they realized that the last moments of
their golden days were running out, and they held each other close in
a long shy embrace, and they kissed each other fearfully, and Cathleen
could not keep back her tears.
"You will write to me?"
"Oh, yes, yes."
"Good-by, my dear, good-by."
So reluctantly, with dragging steps, they walked out of their glade
and into the path leading to the great house. At the last turn they
embraced again, and parted quickly on a sudden crackling in the woods.
They saw nothing, but they walked on more swiftly, in a silence more
full of fear than of love.
At the garden gate they were met by Mr. Bentley, Cathleen's father. To
René he loomed very large, and he felt a sickening internal
disturbance as he saw that his presence was ignored.
"I've been looking for you everywhere," said Mr. Bentley.
"I've been a walk."
"Your mother wants you."
"At once?"
"She wanted you an hour ago."
Cathleen sped away.
Disconcertingly René knew that her father's whole attention was
concentrated upon him, though the lawyer's little cunning eyes were
not looking at him. They both stood still, with the silence between
them growing colder and colder. René hotly imagined himself saying:
"Sir, I love your daughter and she loves me. I am poor but able. I
have won many prizes at school, and in the Faculty of Economics and
Commercial Science in the University of Thrigsby. I am young, sir,
but----"
When at last he opened his lips he said:
"We--we've been a walk."
"So I perceive."
"The woods are very beautiful at this time of year."
The silence froze.
"Are you staying long?" This came at length in a snappy,
cross-examining voice.
"I go to-morrow."
René was overwhelmed with the grubby shrunk feeling. It seemed so easy
for these people to mount the high horse of their social superiority.
"Will you kindly tell your aunt that we are expecting her to dinner
the day after to-morrow?"
With that Mr. Bentley rolled in at the garden gate (he was a fat
little man) and closed it, though he knew that René's way lay through
the garden.
Raging, the young man walked the necessitated extra mile, infuriated
and chilled by two questions: Had Cathleen removed the bracken from
her hair? and Was that meeting by the gate accident or design?
. . . . . .
That night he asked his Aunt Janet about his father. She dodged his
inquiries, and he could get nothing from her but this:
"I admire your mother more than I can say. She married a bad Fourmy,
and that's as bad as you can get. Poor, too. I was glad when that
little money came to her."
He gave her Mr. Bentley's message, and she said:
"You mustn't let their way of living go upsetting you. It's just
money. You've got to fill the gap between you with more than that."
"With what?"
"You'll find that out."
Did she know of his love? Was she warning him? Did she approve? Did
she think him worthy? How could people survive love and become old and
dull? All these and more questions buzzed about him as he lay in bed.
He brushed them all aside with the cry, "Oh, but I love her!" And,
being young and full of health, he was soon asleep, though a blank
tossing night would have more pleased him and his mood.