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