A man's heart may minister comfort to him in the hopes of that
thing for which he yet has no ground to hope.
THE Brocks lived in Galt's Park, an elegant district shut off from the
rest of Thrigsby by gates and unoccupied lodges. Here, in ease and
amid gardens, dwelt families of an old-established prosperity, many
Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, and some of the descendants of
Thrigsby's famous men. Here also were the two hostels of the
university, some schools, one co-educational seminary, the house of a
painter with a great local fame, and that of the municipal organist.
Good men had lived in Galt's Park, and it had once been the center of
Thrigsbeian culture; but now all those who dwell in it have the air of
having been left behind, and the little pink houses are menacing it,
even as they menace the garden of Professor Smallman.
Through the winter René Fourmy came twice a week to coach young Kurt
Brock in mathematics and French. Occasionally he was asked to stay to
lunch, and then he was too sore from the discomfort of Mrs. Brock's
broken English--she was a German from Hamburg--to be able to support
Miss Brock, Linda, in her efforts to make conversation. Also he was
engrossed in the problem first presented to him on his original
meeting with her: Was she, was she not, beautiful? Sometimes for a
fortnight he would decide that she was so, and then his heart would go
out to her in homage, an impersonal emotion bestowed on her as though
she were a tree or a sunset. That she might be intelligent interested
him not at all. Except in the case of Cathleen Bentley, where he had
been surprised into an intimacy, refined and diluted with adoration,
he had regarded women as existing only to receive in ignorance his shy
homage.
As with the Smallmans, so here he had to give his mother a detailed
report of the household and its manner of living. To her they also
were "grand," and she never tired of listening to the tale of their
doings, their servants, what they had to eat and drink, what they sat
on, what they wore, and whom they entertained. He reported
faithfully--the rings on Mrs. Brock's fingers, her richly-clad
inelegant figure, her dog-like eyes that could never smile, her
enormous appetite--whereon Mrs. Fourmy would sigh and say:
"I never was a big eater myself."
Kurt, the boy, René liked, for he was so thoroughly convinced of his
own stupidity that it was impossible to teach him anything. German
only in name, he was English and Thrigsbeian in everything else, and
René felt almost that he belonged to an older generation when he
discovered that Kurt could not remember the horse-trams in the Derby
Road, or a time when there were no motor-cars. Kurt possessed a
motorcycle, or it possessed him, so that almost everything else in his
eyes was "bally rot." He excepted music, which, with his family, he
loved German-fashion, greedily and indiscriminately. His attitude
toward his sister was that of one who knows so much that he has
nothing left to hope. Against his mother and sister he used to protest
to René, whom he thought of as a "poor beggar" but a "good enough
sort." René never saw it, but often Kurt would outmaneuver Linda in
her attempts to waylay his tutor, and once he went so far as to mumble
this warning:
"What I can't stand about women is the way they go nosing round."
"Do they?" asked René, looking up from _Hall and Knight_.
"My sister does. She wants to know how a man works. She's like me with
a motor. Haven't you got sisters?"
"No. I wish I had."
"I don't know. Having a sister like Lin is enough to put a man off
women for life."
"She has always been very charming to me."
Kurt snorted.
Another day he growled out:
"Linda says you are like Schiller. You'd better look out. She said the
last young feller was like Mozart."
"I've never seen a picture of Mozart," replied René.
"Silly sort of face."
That very day Linda outmaneuvered Kurt. As a rule he walked with René
to the gates of Galt's Park, but now, believing his sister to be
safely out of the way, and also wishing to change the tire of his
motorcycle, he let René depart alone, and René was not gone above a
hundred yards when he encountered Linda. He bowed, removed his hat,
and was for making on, when she stopped.
"I'm glad to meet you," she said, with such a smile that René felt
once and for all that she was beautiful, and was so confused by his
own enthusiasm that he did not take the hand she proffered, and put
her to the awkwardness of withdrawing it.
"I--I----" He looked desperately up and down the road, but could find
no topic, and ended lamely by saying:
"I--I like your brother."
"Oh! Kurt! But I am glad to have met you. I hoped you would be at the
Smallmans last Sunday. I was so disappointed." Her voice too was
beautiful in its friendly, emphatic cadences.
"I--I wasn't asked."
"Oh, you aren't _asked_. You go. Everybody goes."
(He had never been able to identify himself with everybody, or to take
everybody's doing for a reason for his own.)
She went on:
"I wanted to ask you if you would care to come and hear me play at the
Goetheverein--that's the German club--next Wednesday. It's a good
program; Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms. You'll love Beethoven."
"My mother plays, but her piano has yellow keys, and the music is
faded like the keys."
"It must be beautiful to understand your mother. Professor Smallman
has told me all about you, and I do hope you'll come."
"I'd like to come."
"That's settled then. We have supper at the Verein, and I'll introduce
you to some people you'll like to know. It's nice to know your
friends' friends, don't you think?"
René felt vaguely uneasy.
"Friends' friends," he repeated almost interrogatively.
"Friends," said Miss Brock, "are those whom you have always known you
would meet." This she said with a kind of recklessness that was almost
exaltation. It certainly startled René into something like emotion,
into the desire to respond. For the first time during their
conversation his eyes met hers full, and he was confronted with a
smile so charmingly inquisitive that he was compelled to satisfy their
curiosity and he jerked out:
"Yes. Friends."
And it seemed to him that she had given and he had
accepted--something. Gift and acceptance were so surreptitious that
the nature of them was a matter of almost complete indifference. The
great thing was the giving and the accepting, and the excitement of
the transaction drowned the little emotion that had stirred in him.
One more glance he stole at her, and he saw that she was satisfied,
that their conversation was at an end. Yet neither could end it, and
it was a relief to both when Kurt came hooting and snorting by on his
motorcycle.
"Till Wednesday then," said Miss Brock.
"You--you didn't say what time."
"Oh! Eight o'clock. But you might like to come with us--call for us at
half-past seven. I wish you could speak German."
"I do a little."
"Mother will like that. Good-by."
She turned and walked away. René stood rooted to the ground. At his
feet he saw her handkerchief. He stooped and picked it up. He dared
not run after her. He pressed the handkerchief to his lips, then
angrily squeezed it up into a ball and thrust it into his trousers
pocket. This done, he shook himself, threw back his head, and strode
vigorously homeward. He said to himself:
"I'm damned if I read love poems to her."
He had arrived at the conclusion that but for the love poems things
would never have got so maddeningly out of hand with that other maiden
in Scotland.
He added:
"But she really is beautiful."
Reading a book at supper that night, he knocked a glass of beer over
onto his trousers, fumbled for his handkerchief, found Linda's, mopped
up the beer with it, and gave it to his mother to be washed. She
washed it with her own hands that night, ironed it, and placed it on
his dressing-table so that next morning he was confronted by the
embroidered name--Linda.
On the Wednesday evening he clad himself in his best black coat, the
same he had had since he was seventeen, put on a white dicky and
cuffs, and punctually at 7:30 stood between the stucco pillars on
either side of the Brocks' front door. The family was waiting for him
in the hall. The women were muffled up in veils, and Kurt was wearing
a very smart overcoat and new patent-leather boots. Behind Kurt in the
darkness--for the hall was lit only by one flickering gas-jet in a
ground-glass globe--stood another male figure. This advanced into the
light and was revealed as M'Elroy.
"You know each other," said Linda.
Kurt cut in with:
"Of course, and Fourmy thinks he is so like Mozart."
René felt a pang of uneasiness. He turned to Linda to find her eyes
resting now on M'Elroy, now on himself, with quick little darting
glances that seemed to take in every detail. It exasperated him to be
pitted against M'Elroy, but, the rivalry having been introduced,
though unsought by himself, he rose to it, and so, he felt, did
M'Elroy. By way of protest René moved nearer to Mrs. Brock, who was
sitting on the bottom stair.
"Gut Abend!" he said. "Ich bin----"
"Na, Sie sprechen Deutsch? So ist's gut. Ist mir sehr lieb Deutsch zu
hören."
"Aber nicht----"
"Sie sprechen sehr gut. Mein Sohn wird nie Deutsch sprechen. Im
Goetheverein aber, wo man so schöne Musik----"
"Ja," interrupted René at a venture, and he found that, with these
three expressions, he could get along very well and keep Mrs. Brock
perfectly happy talking away as she never did when the use of English
oppressed her. She never stopped. She talked him into the cab that
came for them, out of it, up the stairs into the German club, and into
the concert-room where she presented him to other women like herself,
who nodded and smiled at his fumbled utterances--and talked.
The room was arranged like a restaurant with little tables all round
it, and the platform at one end slightly raised. For the most part the
audience sat in little family groups and drank beer and ate
sandwiches. René found himself confined between Mrs. Brock and another
stout matron, and began to feel rather oppressed and to wish he had
not come. Kurt and M'Elroy had joined a band of young men who took
possession of a corner and looked on at the scene with English
disapproval of its Germanism. Some of them René knew for Meyers and
Schoeners and Krauses of the second and third generation.
The room was soon filled with smoke, and the atmosphere became very
thick, but the Germans ate and drank till their faces shone. And
greedily they gulped down the music, which was beautiful and charming
and sentimental by turns, though all seemed to meet with the same
approval. A pale young Jew played the violin until René was near tears
and Mrs. Brock heaved fat sighs of contentment; a portly Austrian with
a sweet little tenor voice sang Schubert's Trout song so neatly and
with such ease that René wriggled with pleasure; and there were
quartets and a solo flute and a piano duet by two little blonde girls
with pink legs and absurd pale eyes, with which they ogled their papa
in the audience and the portrait of the Emperor William on the wall;
and Linda played a Beethoven sonata (rather dull), and the Prelude of
Rachmaninoff, which was received with thunderous applause. She wore a
white dress and looked very fine, plump, and comely, with her white
hands hovering over her and descending on the keys, and her head
swaying until upon the close of the music it drooped to show a
beautiful line from her neck to her waist. René had been so moved by
the music that his eyes caught greedily at this extra pleasure, and
they never moved from Linda's face as she stepped down from the
platform, and came forward looking for her party. She was greeted with
"Prosits" and raised tankards as she passed between the tables. Then
she stopped and gazed over to the corner where Kurt was sitting.
M'Elroy stood up to catch her attention. René saw that, and also how
Linda shrank away from the assertion and the claim, feigned that she
had not seen, and threaded her way toward her mother's table. To cover
her coming, René began to talk wildly in German:
"Das war wunderschön. Ich habe nie solches Klavierspiel gehört. Ich
bin----"
"Linda versteht. Ja. Aber sie fühlt nicht mehr als----" And a torrent
of long-involved sentences descended on René and brought him to a
hopeless bewilderment. That had been his growing condition. This
incursion into a foreign world, into an atmosphere of easy social
intercourse, was for him, a dweller among the humble ingregarious
inhabitants of mediocre streets, an ordeal, a fierce conflict with
impressions. Already to have had so much music to absorb had put some
strain upon him. The effort to follow Mrs. Brock's conversation had
been exhausting, and to save himself he clung to Linda and the idea of
Linda. He rose as she came up. She stood for a moment with her hand in
her mother's, looking, for a brief space, like a Cranach Eve, all
charm and tenderness, the very bloom of womanhood upon her. She took
his chair, and he had to fetch another. He was forced to place it
close to hers, so that he had some difficulty in not touching her.
Presently she moved so that the smallest accidental gesture must make
him touch her. He edged away, and she turned and looked at him
searchingly, inquisitively. His face was blank as that of a statue.
His mind knew no thought. He seemed to himself to be drowning in a
languor that was part weariness, part excitement, at her propinquity.
She laughed, and her laughter roused him, but already she was talking
animatedly to her mother and her mother's friends, and René became
absorbed in contemplating her honey-colored hair, the rounding line of
her shoulder, the pretty modeling of her cheek and neck. And, through
her conversation with her mother, with her white shoulders and the
pretty modeling of her cheek and neck she carried on with René an
intercourse more terrifyingly intimate than any he had ever known. He
had a disquieting sense of using more faculties than he had ever
suspected in himself. It was pleasantly adventurous, but to a youth of
his virtue it savored too alarmingly of black magic that her attention
should be upon him while her words were elsewhere, and that he should
be so keenly aware of her. It sent the room whirling round him, made
his identity, which hitherto had seemed definite enough for all the
apparent purposes of life, melt and trickle away, and cruelly
transferred the center of his universe from himself to Linda. And,
when she looked toward him again, it was almost as though she had
surprised his state, so certain did she look, but still inquisitive
and malicious.
"Well? Did you talk German?"
"I said you were _wunderschön_." He leaned forward so that his hand
touched her arm. He was so desperate that boldness was his only
course. She had taken something from him. He was in a mood to claim
it.
"Am I?" she said. "You looked as if you didn't see me."
"But I did see you all the time, especially when you drooped your
head."
"Oh! Then!"
And with the acuteness of his desperation he perceived that she was
aware of the effectiveness of the drooping of her head. That made him
angry, though he knew not why.
"It's so hot in here," she resumed; "will you take me home? It would
be nice to walk. The others will drive."
She explained to her mother, and René followed her, torn between
expectancy and alarm. At the door he met M'Elroy. For a moment he was
delighted to see that hero, saw in him an agent of relief.
"It's too bad, Linda," said M'Elroy; "I haven't had a word with you
all evening."
"Well? There are other evenings, and we are both so young." She said
this with a rather pretty German accent, the assumption of which
seemed to infuriate M'Elroy, for he flung off with an angry "All
right!" and left them. Linda smiled slowly to herself, and René was
conscious of a doom settling on himself, and all his hope seemed to
have gone with M'Elroy.
They parted to go to their respective cloakrooms, and René told
himself that she would change her mind, would dismiss him also and
wait for her mother, that what his eyes had seen he had not seen,
that, after all, Linda desired of him nothing but the common civility
of his escort. But all his attempted evasions only excited him the
more, and by the time he met Linda again at the door he was speechless
and in a sweat.
The night was cool, clouded, and dark. René walked very fast.
"I can't keep this up," said Linda, and he dropped to a crawl.
"That's better," she said with a sigh, as they walked down the nigh
empty streets. "Oh, dear, I should be so sorry if you hadn't been
happy."
"I--I was happy. I loved the music."
"You can tell almost everything in music."
"If you have anything to tell."
"How droll you are--so literal."
"Miss Brock----" said René. They were walking very slowly now. They
had turned down the last lighted street before the darkness of Galt's
Park. It gaped before them, inviting, menacing, romantic, rousing him
to a mood of antagonism to the growing fascination she was exercising
over him.
"Droll?" he said. "I don't know. I mean what I say, though. I can't
always say what I mean."
"Who can?" asked she.
"I mean, suppose you have a feeling for anything, for your father or
your mother or something beautiful, and the feeling is so big that it
can't get out----"
"One gets to think," said Linda in a quiet little voice, soothing,
caressing, "that men don't have feelings like that."
They passed through the gates into the darkness of the Park. They
walked on in silence, slower, slower, till they came to a weeping tree
that hung right over the footpath. Here they stopped altogether. The
blood beat at his temples, he was near choking, and there was Linda in
his arms and he had kissed her, shyly, coolly, almost defiantly. It
was soon over, but she lingered, and out of the darkness came her
voice saying:
"But you are the drollest dear."
Stung into a passionate desire to justify his situation, he cried:
"By God, but I do love you."
A little cry from her (he scarcely heard it), a strong embrace, and
there came another kiss, wherein was neither sweetness nor delight,
but only a bitter hunger.