As the reader's curiosity (if he hath any) must be now awake, and
hungry, we shall provide to feed it as fast as we can.
EXCEPT for Mrs. Fourmy few letters came to 166, and it was a great
excitement for René when, a few weeks before the end of term, he came
down in the morning to find a parcel waiting for him on the breakfast
table. His father and mother watched him eagerly as he opened it, to
find two large brown volumes, a German economic treatise translated by
a Scots professor. A printed slip headed _Thrigsby Post_ requested Mr.
Fourmy to send a review not exceeding four hundred words in length
within a week. Pride and elation moved René. His cheeks glowed, his
eyes shone, he caressed the covers of the books, took them up, and
turned over the leaves. It was the first sign of recognition from the
world outside school and university.
"Professor Smallman said he would get me some reviewing." René could
only speak in gasps. He could not take his eyes off the books, and
when his father reached out his hand for them, his impulse was to hug
them and keep them from him. "He said he thought he could get me some.
But I never thought of the _Post_. It's such a good paper."
"It's Liberal, isn't it?" asked Mrs. Fourmy.
"Yes. But of course I shouldn't have anything to do with that side of
it." René had always been given to understand that he was a
Conservative, and that only chapel people were Liberals.
He ate very little breakfast, and immediately afterward rushed
upstairs, made his bed, and lay on it gloating over the precious
books, picking up first one volume and then the other, hardly reading
them, and beginning already to compose his review based on Professor
Smallman's dislike of the translator. Then he began to wonder how much
he would be paid for it--one, two, four, five guineas. The editor of
the _Post_ was a very rich man. Would they print his name? Presently
his happiness was so intense that he could not bear not to share it,
and he went downstairs. His mother had gone out. His father was in the
dining-room painting. He had the lid of a cigar box and was covering
it with a copy of a nude reproduced in some magazine from a picture in
the Paris Salon of that year. René watched him. He worked with minute
strokes of the brush, caressingly, carefully. Already he had painted
several copies of the same picture.
"Why do you always paint the same thing?" asked René.
"Nothing else worth painting." Mr. Fourmy stopped, looked up at his
son, winked, and hissed like a goose in a peculiar mocking laughter he
affected when he was most roguish. "She's a beauty, this one. Like to
have seen the original. Women. Not much else men care about, as you'll
find presently. I can sell as many of these as I care to paint. I'm
going to do her smaller though, so's she can be carried in the
waistcoat pocket or a letter-case. I've got a watchmaker's glass, so's
I can see what I'm doing with the brush." And he took out the glass
and screwed it into his eye and looked chuckling up at René. He was
absurdly, childishly pleased with himself.
"Does mother know?" asked René, all his elation oozing away.
"She don't know I sell 'em. I didn't know I could myself. Never saw
what's been under my nose all my life. But he's a clever man, is your
father, much too clever to be a burden on his wife and family. Knock
him down one day and he's up the next."
René said heavily:
"It's like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs
and the dirty books."
Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily:
"This, my boy, is art, hand-painted in oils. Put a gilt frame round it
and it's quite respectable. These swine think art is a bawdy thing."
"Where do you sell them? To a shop?"
"No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and
chapelgoers."
René sat dejectedly looking into the fire. At last he said:
"I wish you hadn't told me. It doesn't seem worth while doing
anything."
He went back to his room, but his joy in the books had filtered away.
To read through them was a heavy task which had become to him nothing
but the commercial traffic of his time, knowledge, and brains for
money. He had no motive for doing it but the cold necessity of somehow
making a living. All day long he read and read until his eyes ached,
and he sat far into the night writing and rewriting until he had
produced four hundred words that looked like the sort of stuff he read
in the literary columns of the newspapers.
A depressed mood of appalling skepticism seized him. His father and
mother, his brother and sister-in-law, these were his world, and they
were contented with a monotonous small happiness, and he was the fool
to look for more. Ah! but the days in Scotland, the graciousness and
the fun that those other people knew; the sweetness of waiting upon
Cathleen's coming; her coming, the hours of tenderness and pure
laughter, and her warm comradeship and the zest of the emotions they
could rouse in each other and turn to a golden glee! But that was all
done, and there was now only poverty and disgrace, and beyond, the
sniggering of the men who loved nothing but women and the idea of
women.
He kept back his review for three days, being fearful lest the editor
should think him careless or over-eager, and he rather prided himself
on his cunning in doing so. It was his first attempt to manipulate the
impression he might make, and the illusion of subtle activity it
brought gave him some solace in his misery.
Other books came from the _Post_, and he wrote to thank Professor
Smallman, who invited him to lunch on Sunday.
He had been twice before to the Professor's house, to the garden party
which he gave annually to work off the social obligations incurred
during the academic year. For Thrigsby he had a very good garden, and
an old house in a neighborhood which still bore some traces of a rural
character, though the regiments of little pink brick houses were
bearing down on it with an alarming swiftness. His garden contained
three plum trees and a pear tree, gooseberry and currant bushes, and
raspberry canes.
Mrs. Fourmy had thought the Smallmans must be what she called "grand
people," since they had lunch instead of dinner; but Mr. Fourmy
remembered a Mr. Smallman who used to live in Kite Street and had two
sons, of whom this might very well be one--a good-looking boy, neat
and solemn, just a little too neat and obliging, always opening gates
for old ladies and picking up handkerchiefs dropped by old
gentlemen--that sort of boy. "Would call me 'Sir' the only time I ever
spoke to him. I'll be bound that's the one."
It helped René a little to know for certain that the Professor had
once been a boy, but Mrs. Smallman he remembered as a lady of a
gentleness and kindness almost terrifying, so kind that she had a way
of not seeming to hear you when you were stuttering out some
preposterously foolish remark. Everything was so easy for her; she was
so sure of the strength of her position as a good hostess and the wife
of a popular and important man; and there were the children, who were
allowed to look down from the nursery window at the garden party. You
could not talk to Mrs. Smallman long without having your eyes drawn to
them, and then, if you were a sensitive person like René, you felt
that this house was full of an intimacy jealous of its beauty, so that
it repelled strangers. Friendliness there was, but it ended abruptly;
the wife's eyes lighting on the husband, the husband's on the wife, or
the eyes of both meeting and turning to the children at the window
could bring it to a cruel and sudden close.
René could not explain to himself the uneasiness that came over him at
the garden parties, or the dread of it that overwhelmed him as he
pushed open the gate and rang the bell on that Sunday.
There was a bright green parasol in the hall table, and by it were two
bowler hats. From the drawing-room came a faint buzz of chatter, and
he saw that it contained the Professor and his wife; Blease, the
Jewish Professor of English; M'Elroy, the great man of the University,
captain of the cricket eleven, President of the Union--it would take a
page to enumerate his distinctions; a little man who looked like an
unsuccessful attempt to repeat the Professor; and a young lady in a
bright green costume. René observed at once that the other men were
wearing black boots, and became dreadfully conscious of his own new
brown pair.
"I'm so glad you could come," said Mrs. Smallman, and she introduced
him to Blease.
"Seen you about," said the Jew. "Third-year man, aren't you?"
"Just beginning my third year," said René miserably.
Blease had made his remark sound friendly, and acute. Rather clever of
a Professor to be able to place a man outside his own subject!
"We stand for something, you know," continued Blease. "Culture! A
handful of men upholding the standard. Good for us to be kept in touch
with working life. Don't you think so, M'Elroy?"
"Yes. That's where we score over Oxford and Cambridge, though they can
never understand that."
Their talk was above René. He remembered Cambridge as a place of
enthralling beauty, but to compare this and that was rather too
sweeping for him, and he found it baffling, and to regard himself as
standing for anything was entirely foreign to his temper. The talk
shot to and fro above him, and he found his eyes being engaged by the
bright green. The young lady was sparkling, easy, gay, a little figure
of energy and charm.
"She is beautiful," said René to himself.
Then he decided that she was not beautiful. She turned her face into
another light, and beauty came into it again; another turn and it
vanished. A will-o'-the-wisp, the hunting of which became an absorbing
pursuit.
At lunch René sat opposite her, and hardly ever took his eyes from her
face. Only when he seemed in danger of meeting her gaze did he turn
away. Once he met her eyes and she smiled, seemed to be considering
him gravely and very seriously in the depths of her mind, then
dismissed him.
"She _is_ beautiful," thought he, and from that moment she had his
homage.
Presently she appealed to him:
"Mr. M'Elroy won't have it that Thrigsby is better than London. What
do you say?"
"I've never been to London," replied René.
"Don't you love Thrigsby?"
"It's been my home always. I don't know that I ever thought about it."
M'Elroy said:
"One thinks about everything nowadays."
Something in the young man's tone roused René to protest.
"Oh no . . . lots of things one does without . . ." But he swallowed
the rest. A sudden flow and ebb of emotion had left him speechless,
and he felt utterly foreign to the company and to the charmed
atmosphere of the household. Mrs. Smallman talked to him for a little,
but he felt that she was speaking through him at her husband, so that
he could not keep his face toward her, but was constantly turning
toward the Professor as though the reply were to come from him, or
would at any rate be worthless without his indorsement. And always the
Professor smiled with a vague friendliness that was disconcerting.
After the meal he was taken to the study, a long room with books all
round the walls, ponderous books, blue books, year after year of
reports of learned institutions; reproductions of Italian pictures;
photographs of Mrs. Smallman on the mantelpiece, a photograph of Mrs.
Smallman on the desk. René was given a large chair and a small cigar,
which he began to smoke before he realized what he was doing. He
rarely smoked, did not care for it, and presently he dropped the cigar
into the fireplace. The Professor stood looking out of the window. Two
of the children were playing under the plum-tree. The feeling of being
thrust out assailed René. The Professor turned:
"Well?" he asked. "What's the trouble?"
"My father----" began René.
"Ah! Well?"
"He deserted my mother a long time ago. He came back. My brother's
married."
"I see. So you're the only possible breadwinner. Any work in your
father? How old is he?"
"I don't know how old he is. But work? No."
"It's bad luck, but it often happens. I've had to keep my father since
he was fifty. What about your family? The name's well known in
Thrigsby."
So Professor Smallman was the boy his father remembered! René gained
confidence. It was something to know that his experience was not
singular.
"They did help until my father came back. They won't now, and I don't
want them to. They don't understand the pain of receiving charity
uncharitably given. They call it ingratitude."
"They have their point of view."
"So have I mine," said René, astonished at his own boldness.
"Your work's good," said the Professor. "Tweeddale's reports of you
were always excellent. As you know, I don't come in touch with men
until their third year, and then only if they're good. You can take
that from me. I must tell you--it wouldn't be fair not to--that one
doesn't know in the least how good you are going to be. One has an
uncertainty about you. In a way, that's all to the good. I like what
you've written for the _Post_. So does Pigott the editor. What about
journalism? Do you write easily?"
"No."
"It rather scotches that, then. Pupils? You could make a little that
way, but it's drudging work when you're reading as well. I could give
you two first-year men, pretty bad, both of them, and Miss Brock, the
girl you met at lunch, has a young brother who can't get through the
matric. That's as much as you could manage."
René had no notion how much he ought to be paid. He asked, and when he
heard the amount his heart overflowed with gratitude, and he walked
home with a new vigor in his stride and a prouder carriage of his
head. His father and mother were out. His news would not keep, and he
went round to George, first changing his brown boots for black. He
reckoned that in three terms he would be able to make nearly as much
as his brother's whole income, and would have the vacations to repair
any damage done to his own work. Then he would take his degree, and
the whole world, all life, would open up before him.