'Tis an evil lot, and yet
Let us make the best of it;
If love can live when pleasure dies
We two will love, till in our eyes
This heart's Hell seem paradise.
GEORGE married and settled in the newly developed region behind Hog
Lane West. Before he went, he spent a whole evening with his mother
and brother making a list of his possessions, and arguing with them
when they claimed a chair or a piece of china he had bought as family
property. They had been purchased with _his_ money, and they had only
enjoyed a right of user.--(His firm had been through protracted
litigation in the Chancery Courts, and he was up in legal
phrases.)--They must have known that sooner or later he would have a
house of his own. The procuring of a wife seemed to have aggravated
George's acquisitive sense. He was exceedingly conscious of the
extension of his personality and was groping round for material things
wherewith to fortify it. More and more he treated his brother with
condescension, and was continually hinting at the things marriage did
for a man. He had not been so grossly jubilant since his first
encounter with woman, whereof he had given René a full and rapturous
account. René had been more able to understand that excitement than
this. To George the two adventures were apparently of the same order;
to René they were profoundly different, and his brother's
boisterousness induced misery in him. What his mother made of it all,
he could not discover. All day long, and often late at night she was
crocheting at a bed-quilt which she was anxious to have finished
against the wedding. The savage communicativeness which had so
disturbed René on the night of his home-coming was succeeded by
silence and silly chatter, and she was constantly and mysteriously
busy at George's house or with Elsie at the shops.
Cathleen Bentley had written:
"How can you have such a brother? But he is great fun. Tell me more.
And I adore your mother. If only we could be engaged, I would come and
stay with you."
René described:
"George keeps hinting at Things in marriage. He is rather like a man
dreaming of good food, a series of meals magically prepared and set
before him so that he does not need to rise. One meal is cleared away
and another appears. I find it hard to grasp. I imagine his life
otherwise must be dull, though he never seems to mind that. He is what
you call Steady; has been in the same office since he was sixteen, and
will go on in it until he is sixty and past work. Perhaps all his
desire and hope go into this adventure. Perhaps he feels that nothing
lies beyond it, and is therefore cramming everything into it.
Certainly he is not allowing himself room to develop anything out of
it. There's a sort of desperation in him. Now or never. After all, I
suppose he's getting what he wants, but there is a heat in it which
blisters me. That must be because I have known a cool, sweet love with
you. How did it happen? You must try to understand, look down into the
lives of people on a lower level than your own. We have no organized
pleasures, at least not enough of them, and we are really thrown back
on the man and maiden business, casual for the most part. We feel the
grubbiness of it, but they don't. It's fire and warmth to them.
Primitive, isn't it? Like savages rubbing two sticks together. It
doesn't leave much room for affection or charm. It has to be raw or
they can't believe in it, inarticulate as they are, and as I am too
often. We can't make material existence a starting-point as you more
favored ones can do if you choose. Love simply doesn't have a chance
with us. I think you could bring a wonderful happiness into my
mother's life. I keep wanting to tell her about you, and one of these
days I shall. Will you send her some flowers from your garden? We have
a backyard only with five privet bushes growing round an old bicycle
shed. . . ."
Writing to Cathleen was his safety-valve. He could find George amusing
when he had written to her, and when he had a letter from her he could
almost salute his brother as a fellow-lover.
The wedding was a noble piece of work. It was at St. Clement's in
Upper Kite Street, not a hundred yards away from the Denmark, where
there was a rousing breakfast to which Mr. Sherman had invited his
cronies and patrons. There were ponderous jokes about perambulators,
and George, in an excited little speech, said that when he had a house
large enough to accommodate all his family, he would be able to invite
those friends who had come to see him and his Elsie married. Two or
three old women wept; rice, confetti, and slippers were thrown after
the happy pair as they drove off for their honeymoon, and in the
afternoon the party went by train to Cheadley Edge and visited the
caves, and wandered in the woods, and ate an enormous high tea at
Yarker's, the farmhouse which devoted one of its meadows to
cocoanut-shies and roundabouts, and its garden to tea-parties. It was
all good, vulgar, noisy fun, and René was caught in a series of
flirtations with Elsie's sisters and their friends. He kept finding
their hands in his as they swung or walked or sat at tea, and they
seemed to enter into a competition to be isolated with him in the
woods or the caves, but not one of them established an exclusive right
to him for the day, and by the return in the evening the party was
split up into couples and he found himself thrown with his mother, who
had throughout shown a stiff front to pleasantries and was exhausted
by jollifications which for her had not been jolly.
Sitting by her side in the tram as they drove from the station, René
found himself dreading the return to Hog Lane West. George had been an
alien, but a convenient buffer between them. Now they had to establish
a new order of living. George's absence was an actuality with which
they had to deal more vigorously than with his presence. They left his
room empty. Neither had any use for it. The dining-room had been the
living-room of the family. Without George, René and his mother found
themselves relapsing into oppressive silences, and very soon he took
to leaving her in the evenings, and going up to his bedroom and his
books and his work.
He was singularly friendless. His schoolmates had gone into offices
and regarded with strange and rather alarmed eyes his continued
pursuit of academic courses, and in his first years at the university
he had undergone a violent spasm of mental growth which had left him
shy and diffident, resentful of anything that seemed like intrusion
upon his brooding, and impatient of surface relationships and the too
easy friendliness which he saw current on all sides. Also he was
chafed by his position of semi-dependence upon his relations, and
rather scared by the possibility of not doing well enough in his
examinations to justify what was constantly being impressed upon him
as his exceptional opportunity. Therefore he worked on a time-table in
term and out of it, never less than nine hours a day; morning,
afternoon, and evening; and rather harder in vacation than in term. He
had no smallest notion what it was all for. He had an unusual faculty
for learning things and arrangements of ideas, and could always answer
examination questions lucidly, and had so small a conceit of himself
that his work was never spoiled by a nervous anxiety to excel nor
interfered with by the emotionalism of the clever young. He had a
sound, all-round ability, never expected anything to be difficult, and
could quickly master the elements of any study he took up. When that
study led away from practical considerations he was apt to lose
interest in it. He had stopped short of philosophy and pure
mathematics, and the astuteness of his headmaster had led him in his
last year at school to specialize in history and economics. When he
was sent up for a scholarship at Cambridge, he failed because the
beauty of the Backs had so stirred his rather sluggish emotions as to
cause him temporarily to lose his lucidity and shrewdness in dealing
with examination questions, so that he wrote rather at
large--thoroughly enjoying himself--than with particular reference to
the matter in hand. However, he had already won a County Council
Scholarship, and with this he entered Thrigsby University. There he
had done well and had picked up exhibitions and bursaries, striving
for success not so much because he wanted it, as because it was
expected of him.
He lived now in a strange disquietude, reading his set books, Adam
Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall, Cannan, Jevons, various works by
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, amusing himself with the advanced
diagrammatic economists, and grinding away at his special subject,
Coöperation, from the Rochdale pioneers to the European "movement."
All this he did mechanically. His brain had been set going in a
certain direction by amiable instructors whom he had never seen any
reason to doubt, and it was pleasant to let it go on so moving toward
that examination which was to be a gate leading to a profession higher
than the life of commerce from which he had been reclaimed.
So far, so good; but George's marriage had caused a stir-about in him.
In the first place, it posed a domestic problem in economics that
could not be solved on paper, and in the second it had roused him to
moral revolt. He could not forget his affection for George. They had
been great companions as little boys. He himself was in love, knew
that love was sweet, and could not away with the fact that George's
marriage was to some extent a denial of all he had learned and gained
in his own hours of tenderness. He hated to resist the idea that
George was perfectly happy, but he could not help himself. His was no
literary enthusiasm for romance and noble love. He had read very few
romances, and of poetry he knew no more than the anthology to which
Cathleen had introduced him. On the whole, he preferred comfort above
all things, and George made him uncomfortable, set stirring in him an
idealism, a fervor, which so swelled in him as to make him, even in
his outpourings to his beloved, incapable of stringing his ideas
together. Literary persons can gain a great deal of relief by the mere
reiteration of the words "I love you," with variations. Words were to
René only implements, painfully inadequate, for digging out the
fineness which he had begun to perceive behind his feelings. He could
not forgive George for being content with mere feelings undisciplined
and unrefined. He hoped innocently that the honeymoon would bring some
revelation, but when bride and bridegroom returned they were more
distressing than ever. They had lost their shyness. That was all.
George was fatly, complacently "settled down," and could never leave
his wife alone for half an hour on end, but must be always touching
her, teasing her, or openly caressing her, and she seemed to like it
and to make a parade of his attentions.
René would come away boiling from an evening spent at their house,
which they had called The Nest, and he would sit, either cooling
himself with his large books, or heightening his fury with letters to
Cathleen, now returned to Putney, which is called London. He never
revised what he wrote. He had rather forgotten the charm of his boyish
love-making, and had lost the young trick of visualizing his fair,
needing more from her than her beauty, and now used her as an outlet,
assuming in her a sympathy which neither her past conduct nor her
letters revealed. The mere fact of writing was enough, and his letters
became intimate and self-revelatory, a kind of running, general
confession. Sometimes they were of enormous length, and the envelopes
he sent away were bulky and bulging.
One night he stopped in the middle of a letter, turned back and read,
realizing that he had laid bare the whole of his brother's sexual life
so far as he knew it. He was filled with a thick horror, tore the
letter up, and went down to his mother to escape from the train of
thought which had led to such indiscretion and betrayal. He did not
escape, but found himself plunged in confession:
"Mother, I'm in love."
"Well, I never! You're not going to be married now?"
"No. It's hopeless. She's rich. At least her father is."
"So that's why you look so queerly at Elsie. You can't expect them to
be all alike."
"It isn't only that. Only I can't get away from certain things."
"What things?"
"The horrible things people do."
"You'll be kept busy if you worry about that."
"It's about myself."
"Want to confess? Go on."
"I mean, George and I used to talk--you know. Well, it got beyond
talk. Uncle Alfred gave me ten shillings once. I spent it--that way."
"Well, well."
"You can't dismiss it like that. I shouldn't be remembering it if it
were so easy as that. I met her--you know--in Derby Street----"
"You're not going to tell me the whole story?"
"I must tell someone. I met her and she took me down a lot of streets.
She walked along briskly in a business-like way, and I slunk along
behind with my coat collar turned up and my cap over my eyes, and I
kept shivering, though it wasn't cold. We came to a little house and
she knocked at the door, and a fat woman with red arms came to it. She
just looked at us and said: 'Full up.' We went on to another little
house, but I couldn't get that out of my mind, and the room there was
so horrible that I ran away, and that's all."
Mrs. Fourmy looked up at the clock, into the fire, round at the corner
cupboard. At last she said:
"Well, you are a funny boy."
"I'm in love all right," he said; "but I fed as if I'd never like to
marry and just go on with you forever and ever. I could find a sort of
happiness in just making enough for us to live on."
His mother came over to him and laid her hands on his shoulders:
"Don't make trouble for yourself, my dear. Don't do that. Let things
alone. Trouble comes fast enough, and all your plans and thoughts and
hopes aren't enough to deal with them. That's your father all over.
Always wanting a little better than he got, and always getting a
little worse than he deserved. Suppose we go out together once a week.
That'll stop us getting into the way of sitting too much alone. And if
the girl's the right sort of girl she won't let being rich and all
that stand in her way."
René patted her hand.
"It's awfully good of you to listen," he said; "I feel better already.
Only George----"
"Don't let George worry you. He can do things you can't. George can
keep his mind out of things like that."
He felt immensely relieved. His confession seemed to have filled the
vacancy left by George. Between himself and his mother there was
established a more living relationship. There had been some authority
in her comfortable words which had led him back to the old
unconsidered position in which she was the central warmth of the home
in which he lived. For a time at least he could be at rest and accept
that things were so because they were so and not otherwise.
Gradually they won back to happy insignificant chatter, and planned
that on the following evening they would go to a music-hall together.
The postman broke in upon their talk. He brought two letters for René.
One was from Cathleen, and very short:
"There's been a row. I've been howling all night. I can't write any
more. They can't understand. Vulgar they call you, and they are
furious with me. They read one of your letters, opened it if you
please. Not fit for a young girl. I'm not to have a heart till I can
captivate a rich man old or young, and I am never to have a mind. It's
just beastly the things they say, but I can do nothing."
The other letter was from her mother:
"DEAR SIR,--I have read your last letter to my daughter. It is not fit
reading for a young girl, or indeed for any pure woman. You will
oblige me by not writing again, and I have forbidden my daughter to
continue your acquaintance."
He passed both letters over to his mother.
"I told you it was hopeless."
"If you ask my opinion," replied his mother, "I should say you were
well rid of her."
"But I can't help loving her."
Mrs. Fourmy sniffed indignantly:
"Love! Well, you can call it love if you like."
"I do," said he very earnestly.
On which his mother staggered him by saying:
"George wouldn't."
In spite of himself, and against the grain, René began to think a
little enviously of his brother, master unperplexed of his own and
another life.