O the mad days that I have spent! and to see how many of mine old
acquaintances are dead!
PROFESSOR SMALLMAN had been lent by his university to deliver a series
of lectures in America, and some weeks of the term would pass before
his return. René, therefore, had no escape from his father. Breakfast,
dinner, tea, and supper, he was there all the time on his best
behavior, though with a naughty malice stirring in him and peeping out
of his eyes. He ate--how he ate! Hardly a meal left remnants enough to
provide for the next, and butcher's meat, which before had only been
got every third day, was now brought to the house every morning. In an
access of filial devotion, René had undertaken to relieve his mother
of household accounts, always a plague to her, and the little
blood-stained butcher's bills alarmed him by their number and the
amount of money they represented. He hardly spoke to his father,
avoided him, shut himself up in his bedroom, and there realized
horribly that he was also avoiding his mother, that she made no
protest, not even by glance or gesture, and that they were making him
feel the intruder. The change in his mother was amazing. She was three
times as active, and was often for hours together without her
crochet-work. She, who was accustomed for days never to leave the
house, now went out every afternoon with her husband to walk in
Potter's Park, or in the evening to visit the streets where they had
lived, and to seek out old acquaintances. When her son was present she
was discreet, and prattled reminiscently of people he had never known,
or remembered only as names and remote presences. But often when he
was in his room, he would hear them below talking excitedly, and his
mother laughing or protesting. And he came to think of them as "they,"
and they seemed to have so little they cared to or could share with
him.
One black night he had when, after coming in late in the afternoon, he
found his mother unaided moving the heavy iron bedstead and wire
mattress from George's room to her own. He gulped down his dismay, and
stood on the stairs watching her. She had not heard him, and went on
until suddenly she caught sight of him and jumped.
"Oh!"
"Shall I help you?"
"_It is_--too heavy for me."
"Where is--he?"
"He went out. He thought he saw old Mr. Timperley in Derby Street
to-day. Of course you don't remember Mr. Timperley."
"In your room?"
She hesitated:
"We--we sold the old bed, you know."
He helped her without another word. Together in silence they put
George's bed up alongside her own, and in silence when it was done
René left her. He went to his room and sat, staring unseeing at the
five privet bushes and the old bicycle shed.
Presently she came to him and sat on his bed, and gazed at him like a
mournful, shy little bird.
"You mustn't make it hard for us, René."
"I--I thought I was making it easy."
"His brothers won't see him."
"Why not?"
"They won't. They're hard people, the Fourmys. They can't forget the
past. They say they won't help me any more if I let him stay, and not
a penny will they leave me."
"You'll let him stay?"
"He knows it was cruel of him to leave as--as he did. But he had a lot
to bear, really he did, René. He was very proud. It's his pride has
been against him always, René."
"What did he do else?"
"Nothing very much. Only people talked. And he didn't get on. That was
his pride too. You can do anything if only you get on. He never could
work for other people. He was a clever man too. You get your
cleverness from him. I'm sure it's not from me. He was always trying
different things, but he couldn't get on. He did some silly things
too."
"You won't tell me, then?"
"I have told you."
"What's he going to do? Go on eating and eating?"
"He'll look for work. Of course, at his age, it won't be easy."
"What's he been doing all this time?"
"He's been rich and lost it all again. He came back to England with
quite a lot of money."
"He didn't think of you then."
"He lost it nearly all. Do be nice to him, René! He thinks such a lot
of you. George is quite nice, and Elsie loves him already, but he
thinks most of you. I've been telling him how wonderful you've been,
and he says nothing must interfere with your career."
"But someone must make money."
"Only for a little. He says we could make much more with my money if
it were re-invested."
René swung round.
"He's not to touch that, do you hear? You're a soft fool, mother. He's
not to touch that. I'll work myself to the bone first."
"That's dear of you, René. And you will be nice to him, won't you?"
"All right, all right."
She kissed him and flitted away, and presently, to the devastation of
his attempts to adopt what he considered a worldly and wise point of
view of the matter, he heard her singing in her room. A loathing and
disgust rushed through him. Men and women! Men and women! It was
George all over again, quintessence of George, here on the very
fringes of his being. No escape from it! In the little house, all but
the tiniest noises could be heard from end to end of it.
His father came home late that night. He hummed as he groped upstairs
and fumbled his way along the passage to the front room. The full
hours of the night in towns, where huddled creatures live, poured in
upon René as he lay in sleeplessness, staring, staring at the
never-darkened sky.
From this torment to escape he could find no other solace than the
attempt to be "nice" to his father. It was forced on him, and after
the first plunge he found it not so very difficult, and there was some
reward in his mother's anxious satisfaction. Both men played up to
keep things lively for the woman, and the elder set himself almost
desperately to make the younger laugh. At first when they were alone
together Mr. Fourmy made the mistake of trying droll stories spiced
and hot on his son, but he was met with a stare so blank and
uncomprehending, so freezing, that he never tried them again. Then,
more successfully, he drew on his own reminiscences, and practiced his
not inconsiderable talent for caricature and exaggerated mimicry upon
the odd characters he had known and the members of his own family.
This met with encouragement from René, who was interested. From his
father's chuckling monologue he learned that the Fourmys were the
oddest family that ever was--Scotch, French, Dutch, Jewish, reg'lar
English, in fact; Nonconformist for generations; clever, close, proud,
hard, acquisitive, narrow, pious, with occasional outcrops of
wickedness to leaven the lump; shy, harsh, undemonstrative; loathing
any kind of excess; clinging to the middle way, bound never to rise
above respectable mediocrity; dreading anything so conspicuous as
eminence; never reaching to any higher public office than a District
Council or a Board of Guardians.
"Two of my brothers are Guardians," said Mr. Fourmy, "and they could
predict no worse for me than that I should come to the workhouse. They
know well enough that no Fourmy could ever get to prison. We can't be
bad enough."
"Where did we come from?" asked René.
"Scotland, but that's a long time ago. Your great-aunt Janet's father
started a tannery somewhere near Lancaster. That would be somewhere
about the time of Napoleon. At least, I remember reading a little book
the old gentleman wrote about a tour he made in France and Germany
when the Continent was opened up after Elba and all that."
"But why are we fixed here?"
"Don't your big books tell you that?"
For once in a way René saw that his father was twitting him.
"Big books don't account for humble folk like us."
"The biggest books do, my boy." And to René's surprise and delight his
father raised his voice and trolled out some verses that excited and
exalted him. They were all about joy and freedom and the awfulness of
losing them, but no single phrase bit into his mind to take possession
of it.
"Yes," he said, "yes."
"Pooh!" said his father. "If we understood that we'd none of us be
here, neither rich nor poor. We get a little excited about it, at
least you and I do, but we can't go any further--not far enough into
our own minds, I mean--and we are left weaker for the attack of all
the things that drag us down and bind us fast. A little squeeze for
bread and butter, and we say it doesn't matter, but may come all in
good time. I used to be rather good at poetry, could remember anything
I read or heard. Can't do that now. I used to love it. The Fourmys
hate it. Lord! when I had my last row with my father, when he had said
his say, I let fly at him with a page and a half of Milton and wound
up with Shakespeare--you know: 'Let me not to the marriage of true
minds----'"
"I know," said René, though he had never read the Sonnets.
"Lord! I was a young man, I was, and I went on being young for a
surprisingly long time. It seemed there wasn't anything in the world
could take it from me. But it came to an end at last. How you do make
me talk, to be sure! I wish you'd tell me about yourself."
That shut René up completely. There was nothing to tell, nothing that
would not dwindle and shrivel up in the telling. There was such
mockery in this disturbing father of his that his timid little
emotions, his shy desire to think well of him, to like him, to set
what he found in him against what he knew and had heard, hid away,
curled up in his mind and created a horrid congestion. But his father
had a certain fascination for him, and it was a relief to get him to
talk. He never did learn why the Fourmys, rich and poor, were fixed
where they were in the middle-class of Thrigsby, but he did get
flashes and sparks which promised elucidation, and he did begin to
discover that there were worlds on worlds outside, and minds which
were not afraid of thought and not wholly set on money and the good
opinion of others. It was a painful mystery to him that his father's
mind should lead him on so far, give him a shining promise of
beauty--though beauty was the very last word that in his shyness of
himself he would have used--and then by a cruel sleight of hand
present him only with caricatures of Fourmys and neighbors and George.
Mr. Fourmy on his elder son is worth quoting. He said:
"George is a reg'lar Fourmy, a thorough Unitarian. They want one God.
George desires to live in the worship of the one flesh."
He seemed to like George, was often at The Nest, and when George and
Elsie came to them there was tapped in the queer man a vein of
ribaldry which made René, even as he laughed, blush that such things
could be said before a woman.
George said of his father:
"He's a funny damned old rotter, but you can't help liking him."
René had to admit that, but the increase in the weekly bills gave him
many a sick moment, and though his father spent many hours away from
home, there was never any talk of his finding work. Very quickly the
household absorbed its new inmate and adjusted its habits, so far as
was necessary, to his. Mr. Fourmy bought paints and brushes, and with
these he would amuse himself all day. At half-past eight in the
evening he would disappear, and often not return until the small hours
of the morning. He never asked for money, and seemed always able to
procure anything he wanted.