HONEYMOON

That God forbid that made me first your slave

I should in thought control your times of pleasure.

MRS. BROCK granted René an interview. From the worldly standpoint it

was satisfactory. No great objection to the projected alliance was

made, and he learned that Linda had a fortune of her own which

provided her with an income of seven hundred a year. If anything, he

was distressed by the information. He did not regard money as in

itself desirable. The lack of it was a nuisance to be avoided if

possible, but not otherwise to be considered. The past year had led

him to believe that such a lack was easily repaired. It was disturbing

to the few ideas he had on the subject to think that he would not be

able to satisfy any desires in his beloved which she could not herself

supply. However that did not occupy him long, for he was comforted by

Mrs. Brock's explaining that she had discussed the matter with her

daughter--a good, sensible maiden, who admitted that there was a

practical side even to romance--and they had agreed to postpone the

marriage until Mr. Fourmy was settled in a profession. To make this

easier, Linda had consented to go to her relatives in Hamburg for an

indefinite period, though, of course, she would go there as a

betrothed.

He said:

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Brock."

He tried to say more, to remove the affair from the hard, business

footing on which it had been conducted, to lead his prospective

mother-in-law to give him some sign that she regarded him as a

potential member of her family, but she suppressed him by saying:

"Frankly, Mr. Fourmy, I don't think it would be wise of you to marry

with my daughter unless you have at least three hundred a year."

He agreed and withdrew, chilled at the heart. It seemed to end his

wooing and to give him already a slight distaste for Linda. Could she

really have discussed the matter so coolly with her solid mother? It

was a shock to him that women from whom came such great ecstasy were

not themselves all compact of that fiery essence. And seven hundred a

year! That seemed more present to the mind of the mother than the girl

herself. Seven hundred a year was to be sent to Germany until he had

grown into three hundred a year.

However, Linda immensely enjoyed the process of parting. She began it

on the Sunday, and carried it through till the Friday, when she was to

sail from Hull, and she left her betrothed, sad, aching, but

obstinately hopeful. On the Tuesday she said:

"You have changed my whole life. I was drifting. I was trying to take

in too many things. You have made me see."

"What?" asked René very seriously. He was anxious to know.

"Just _see,"_ she replied.

He was left uncomfortably in his own limited world, feeling that she

had shot off into regions to which he could not follow her. He ought

to have been accustomed to that by now, but he could not be. She was

always hinting at the wonderful things she got out of him, but as he

was never conscious of them, he could not understand her. He used to

tell himself that it was her queer roundabout way of delighting in her

love for him.

On the Thursday she said:

"You know, René, at such a distance we shall be able to get our ideas

of each other clear. That is so necessary. We must make an effort to

understand each other."

"Isn't it enough if we love each other?"

"Oh no. That only means making allowances. It isn't enough to do that.

I get frightened sometimes when I think of all the people who are

married, how little they understand each other."

"Then they're married without loving each other."

"I think I see what you mean," and she caught his hand and pressed it

to her bosom. She had become much more demonstrative in these days of

parting. He warmed to her excitement and rushed ahead:

"People who love each other are married. I've been thinking about it.

If people love each other they have the wonderful mutual knowledge

which is marriage. And we have that, haven't we?"

"Oh, wonderfully!"

On the Friday she wept and would not be consoled until he had

consented to go to Hull with her. He had an engagement for the day,

but telegraphed to cancel it and went with her. She clung to him on

the boat, and caused him almost to be carried away from the pier. The

gangway had to be put out for him, and he raced ashore and stood on

the quay waving a pocket-handkerchief and swallowing his tears until

the boat had dipped over the edge of the sea.

They wrote to each other, every day at first, then every other day.

Her letters in their coolness often stabbed him, but he could not

bring his into tone with hers. He poured out everything he thought and

felt without calculation, and with no literary pleasure or excitement.

She was only led into warm confession when some phrase lured her on.

Her greatest enthusiasm was when, at the end of the Academic year, he

sent her the examination lists with his name at the head, and also as

having won the Robert Owen prize and a studentship of eighty pounds a

year for three years.

Indeed his university career ended in a blaze of glory. Professor

Smallman sent for him and assured him that on his papers he was an

absolutely first-class man, and the university could not afford to

lose him. Of course there was no vacancy as yet, and the teaching of

economics was a miserably-paid profession, but in the meanwhile he

could procure a supernumerary post on the staff of the Grammar School

which would leave him free to take up any appointment that cropped up.

He could also continue his reviewing, unless he thought of going on to

Oxford or Cambridge, when, of course, the school and the university

would help him. For a career, a degree at one of the major

universities was almost essential.

"I don't mind telling you," said the Professor, "that it is pretty

much my own career over again, though there are things you can do that

I never could. You've more imagination. Cambridge economics are very

much alive just now. If you would care to----"

"I must make an income," said René. He was elated, but also

disgruntled, suffering from a reaction. He had prepared his subject

for the examination, and having succeeded, had lost interest in it.

Vaguely he had so arranged his life that until this examination he

would do as he was told to do, so that after it he might do things

because he wanted to do them. On the whole, he rather resented the

Professor's continued interference in his affairs. However, he agreed

with the first plan. Cambridge meant another three years preparing for

another examination, and he was Thrigsbeian enough to feel that it was

not a "man's work."

He saw the Headmaster on the morning of Speech day, and was warmly

thanked for the honor he had brought to the school, and was engaged to

appear on the first day of the following term. Desiring to see his old

form-master, Mr. Beenham, he went to his room and was surprised to

find his desk empty and the boys playing cricket with a German Grammar

and a ball of paper tied with string. As he left the school he asked

the porter after Mr. Beenham, and the porter told him that story. It

upset him. Of all human beings he had regarded Old Mole as the least

human, but now he was desiring to exercise his released intelligence,

his power of penetration, his imagination upon the surrounding world.

All his faculties had been concentrated upon economics as a means to

an end, the life which lay beyond examinations. Professor Smallman and

the Headmaster had made him feel that the life beyond was

distressingly like the life before, and now this disaster to Old Mole

came as some small assurance that there were adventures though they

might be never so foolish. The Professor had mildly alarmed his pupil

by pointing out the similarity of their careers. Admire Smallman as he

might, it was not _that_ to which René wished to come. It was not that

he had any excitement in contemplating the future. On the contrary:

the present was too absorbing. Everybody was charming to him, seemed

to be proud of him; the rich Fourmys had asked him to their

houses--and he had refused. He found himself being listened to,

respected, given the right to have views and opinions. He had neither,

and was too honest to evolve them for the occasion. And when the

future insisted upon engaging his attention, he filled it with Linda

and was happy.

He refused to go to Scotland, half despising his memories of it.

He was happy, simply engrossed in his own comfortable sensations. He

had set out to do a thing and done it well, better even than he or

anyone else had anticipated; he was in love and engaged to be married

upon the condition of making three hundred a year. His success had

made that easily possible; his studentship, one hundred and fifty from

the school, more from the _Post_, possible examination papers,

lectures; his hardly-won book knowledge had been shaped by his

reputation into a marketable commodity.

But his real happiness lay apart from all these things, from success,

from love, from the easy commerce of his abilities. Relieved from the

strain and obsession of his examination, he had discovered the

wonderful pleasure to be got from the mere act of living, from seeing

the world freshly every morning, from passing through the day and

feeling it slip away from him without his having to demand of it any

definite profit in knowledge or money earned. It was a new delight

with him just to watch people, a joy that had remained with him from

his outburst by the tulips, to sit and gaze at flowers, trees, the

sky, water. He had times of feeling wonderfully remote, when the

habits on which he won through the day seemed ridiculous, though

trivially pleasurable. In this mood he would sometimes realize with a

start that it was now his father and he who were companions, his

mother who was the stranger. And he would bring himself up on that and

tell himself that his mother had his love and championship if any were

needed. But he would rejoice in his father's gusto in eating,

drinking, smoking, painting, talking, all that the queer man did.

Against that too he would react and tell himself that his father was

futile. But was not his mother futile also? And was not futility with

gusto the better of the two?

He was too happy for the business of weighing up between his father

and his mother, too absorbed in the glowing introspection to which he

had been brought; introspection without analysis; a brooding, almost a

floating over faculties in himself faintly stirring, reaching out to

exercise themselves on everything within his reach. The world was very

wonderful: its possibilities were endless; its treasures lay

immeasurable only for the stretching out of his hand; and it was a

delicious pleasure to him not to stretch out his hand, but to know

that one day he need but make a gesture to have all its marvels

pouring in on him. That those older than himself had but a small share

of them disturbed him not at all. He had no doubt but his would be the

infallible gesture, and, without conceit, during this happy time, he

cherished a firm belief in his unique quality.

All his new delights were expressed in his letters to Linda in

Germany. She analyzed them for him, not always accurately, but the

mental process was new and exciting to him, and he began to appreciate

her intellectual activity. They discussed his character at great

length. He said: "I suppose I am, or have been--for I often find

myself wanting to laugh nowadays--too serious." She replied: "Not too

serious, my dear. It is impossible to be that in this heartless age.

(Oh! What a lot you can learn about England by going abroad!) Not too

serious. No. What you lack, I think, is power of observation. What you

must realize is that things have a surface and a surface value. Of

course _you_ cannot be content with that value, but you must not

expect surface things to have any value in the region of profound

things, the region in which, poor dear, you have always lived."

Faithfully he set about cultivating surface values, but he never could

laugh at things that were just amusing; he never could laugh unless he

were moved to laughter. He was, for instance, baffled and made sorry

by the family jests which left George and Elsie exhausted by their

noisy mirth.

Kurt Brock persuaded him to go with him for a tour in a side-car

attached to his motor-cycle. Then did René become swollen and puffed

up with the glory of the world. The exuberant boy was a tonic in

himself; the speed he maintained was intoxicating; and they burst out

of the long suburbs of Thrigsby into the Cheshire plain, over to the

sea, the Welsh mountains, down the Severn and Wye valleys. To René,

whose existence for so many years had lain only in Thrigsby and the

little Scots village, it was being shot out into life. The return to

Thrigsby made him miserable. Also association with Kurt had pricked

the small bubble of his vanity. Kurt, so hopeless with books, was

amazingly efficient with his machine, equal to every emergency,

daring, inexhaustible, masterful. He had said many things which René

had found disturbing and alarming. The boy had everything so cut and

dried; no room in his life, it seemed, for folly, certainly none for

brooding. He confessed one night, as they sat sleepily in a

public-house parlor, that he wanted to be an airman. René could not

applaud the ambition.

"Hardly fair to your mother, or, suppose you were in love, to--well."

"People talk a lot of bally rot about love. They seem to think it

means bagging a woman like a rabbit and shutting her up in a hutch to

breed."

"Well," said René, "marriage does mean living together and a certain

amount of responsibility."

"I dunno. I've never been in love, but I'm not going to either, unless

I get something that goes off with a bang and lets me and her get on a

bit." His mania was for getting on. When René wanted lunch, Kurt would

hold out for another place "only twenty miles on."

Another night René returned to the subject of women and love, Kurt's

audacities having a horrid fascination for him, and the boy said:

"I dunno, but if a woman said she loved me and wouldn't let me do what

I wanted to do because she said she loved me, I should know she was a

liar."

René tried to point out that life and love were not so simple as all

that, but there was no turning Kurt. He had the thing worked out

neatly to his own satisfaction, and he was not going to bother his

head about it any more.

"Bad enough," he said, "to have a legal speed limit without having a

private limit in the home."

A letter from Linda reached René at one of their stopping-places. She

declared herself terrified at the thought of his being with her

brother. "Do keep him from going more than thirty miles an hour."

At once René was on her side against Kurt and exasperated him by

asking perpetually: "What are we doing now?" To which Kurt invariably

replied: "Damn near fifty."

The tour ended in a river in Derbyshire. Kurt took a curly wooden

bridge at thirty miles an hour, carried away the railing, and plunged

René and machine into six feet of water. Kurt could not swim, and René

hauled him out and screamed at him:

"You deserve to be killed! You deserve to be killed! Taking the bridge

like that."

Kurt grinned:

"You don't know how funny you looked in the bath-chair toppling over.

What a smash! What idiots to have a bridge like that. It's no good for

anything except a push-bike. I'll get a car if the insurance people

stump up."

René was really shocked at his callousness, and as they sat in

blankets while their clothes were being dried, he took him to task,

delivered himself of a pedagogic exhortation and ended by saying:

"Kurt! Kurt! I believe you have no feeling!"

"Nerves! What's the good of them anyway? But I'm jolly grateful to you

for pulling me out. I must learn to swim. It might be jolly awkward if

I tried to fly to America. Wouldn't it be grand if I was the first man

to do it?"

Something in the boy's tone thrilled René and he felt a pang, a

sudden, painful knowledge that he loved Kurt, and, when he was left

alone, Kurt's clothes having dried first, he was faintly uneasy, half

wondering, yet not admitting the doubt to himself, whether he had

really loved anybody else. Then he told himself that it was only

because Kurt had treated him with his boy's frankness, and because he

had not with anybody else been brought face to face with anything so

terrible as death. And then he found himself in a brief dream asking

if life also was not terrible, and love? And if----? But such thoughts

he refused to think. Into his brooding happiness had come a new zest,

and he would not waste one moment of it upon doubt, philosophic or

particular.

They returned to Thrigsby by train, and René found himself committed

to a lie about the accident. If the truth came out, said Kurt, his

mother would not allow him to have that car.

What was there in common, thought René, between Linda and Kurt? She

had not his frankness. (He was frank even in his lying.) She was

subtle, given to theory. Her brother had, cut and dried, not so much a

theory as a program. With Kurt René had had a robust pleasure which he

had never enjoyed with Linda, and it was so far above all other

pleasures that he took it for the goal to aim at, the prize to be won,

when he should have broken down the barrier of sex and overcome her

taste for teasing, and put an end to all those irritations which he

ascribed to their ridiculous position as engaged persons, irritations

that even in her letters pricked and stung him. He was slow to come by

a thought, and when he possessed one always insisted upon its

relevance to existence, while she seemed most to revel in ideas when

they were most irrelevant. In their correspondence, her letters grew

longer as the months passed. (After his success she had assumed

"intellect" in him.) His letters became more precise and brief. He had

no doubt of her. She had taken the place of the examination as the

next stage in being, beyond which would lie, to borrow her phrase, the

"real, real life."

So eagerly did he look forward to that illumination that things and

people had lost their interest for him. The question of income was

settled; the problem of his father and mother engaged him no more.

They had suddenly become old to him, settled, left to grope along with

their own affairs and difficulties. This made life at 166 easier. He

had stood between his father and mother, and had now removed himself.

His mother was more free in her chatter, his father less strained and

more jovial in his talk. René had told them of his engagement and of

Linda's wealth, and this, coupled with his success, had made them

acquiesce in his translation to a superior sphere and even take some

pride in it. For a short while he had qualms on seeing his mother let

him go so lightly, but he faced the fact and did not let it obtrude

upon his dreams of graciousness and freedom.

All these events had delivered him for the first enjoyment of his

youth, and his thoughts were like bees in a flowering lime-tree. They

were disturbed by nothing but Linda's letters. The more she teased and

flattered his "intellect," the more he dwelt upon the future when the

teasing and the flattery would have ceased, and his warm satisfaction

would be invigorated by the zestful sharing of married life. He made

no plans and hardly considered those she threw out. She had ambitions

for him. They were too fantastic to be noticed.

A silence of three weeks alarmed him. She broke it with the

announcement of her return, and the expression of her desire to be

married at once, and a request that he would meet her in London, for

she was crossing by Flushing.

It was early spring. He obtained a day's leave of absence from school,

and met her at Fenchurch Street. He saw no more of London than was to

be seen as a background to her profile as they drove to Euston. She

was different from the image he had formed of her during her absence,

smaller, even prettier, more vivacious and effective. They kissed when

they met, rather to his astonishment, for he had not the least desire

to kiss her but only to consider her. She began to talk at once:

"It has done wonders for you. You look so much more confident and

bigger. Your success I mean. And you really are distinguished-looking.

How do you like your work?"

"I do it without---- No, I haven't thought about it."

"I wanted them to take you into the business--Brock and M'Elroy, you

know. But old Mr. M'Elroy wouldn't hear of it. They wanted me to marry

Jack M'Elroy. Perhaps I should have done it if I hadn't met you."

That did not please him at all, though it was obviously intended to do

so. She went on:

"But we'll show them that we can do better on our own lines, won't we?

Father used to say that commerce was sordid however honest you tried

to be, and after all, it isn't work for a first-rate man, is it?"

Her insistence on his success and abilities worried him. It was not

for this he had been waiting. He wanted her to tell him what had

brought her to her abrupt decision to be married sooner than they had

planned. He tried to lead her on to that but could bring her to no

other intimacy than that of little caresses with her hands. He would

not admit his disappointment, and all through the four hours' journey

kept on telling himself that he was glad to see her. And indeed he was

glad. Her coming brought the promised future nearer.

She gave him no time to ponder his disappointment or the hole it

knocked in his brooding pleasure. They chose a house, fifty pounds a

year, with a garden, in Galt's Park. He took his mother to see it, and

she assumed the manner she had had in the old days for the visits of

the "rich Fourmys."

A fortnight's shopping furnished the house, and he had the

satisfaction of supplying the furniture for his study out of a check

sent by his Aunt Janet. The trousseau took another three weeks, and

Mrs. Brock, with an eye to wedding presents, would not hear of the day

being fixed until after an interval of six weeks. A miserable time.

Linda seemed to think of everything but her bridegroom.

For the honeymoon the Yorkshire coast was chosen, by whom it was not

very clear. René had wanted Derbyshire; Linda had proposed the Lakes,

but, a fortnight before the marriage, Mrs. Smallman had appeared on

the scene and taken charge, instructed them, tactfully and almost

tacitly, in the correct deportment of those about to be married. She

kept the couple apart, spent days and evenings with Linda, and made

her keep René distracted. The Smallmans had spent their honeymoon on

the Yorkshire coast; they knew of a charming little private hotel

overlooking Ravenscar; theirs had been the perfect honeymoon, one

which had never come to an end. So might--must--it be with René's; and

so it would be if goodwill, advice, kindly glances, friendly

instruction, could bring it about. The Professor expanded:

"It is wonderful when all that you have loved in a dream, as it were,

materializes and is there in your hands. Only you feel so confoundedly

unworthy. And then, when you are married and settled down, you get so

abominably accustomed to it. No one could be more devoted than my wife

and I, but we find that if we do not keep ourselves alive with outside

interests, we begin to wear each other down. It isn't easy--marriage.

I can say all this now, because if I don't I never shall. And, after

all, you know, I like you, Fourmy. We shall work together and be good

friends, but we lose something, you know. A certain kind of intimacy

we can never have again."

This talk reminded René of the occasion when George had taken him as a

small boy to the swimming baths, made him stand on the edge practicing

strokes, and then pushed him into the deep end.

The night before his departure, his mother came into his room and sat

on his bed and looked long at him:

"I can't bear to think of your bed empty to-morrow," she said.

"Better send it to the new house," replied he.

"I can hardly realize that you are a man and going to have a wife. It

seems only the other day that you were a little boy, learning to cook

in the kitchen. Do you remember? And now I suppose you'll have late

dinner. It is queer. I used to be able to think of you as a boy at

school, but I can never imagine you as a teacher, in a gown, too. And

it's even harder to think of you----"

"You shall come and stay with us."

"Oh, I couldn't!" She looked toward the door.

"You could come without father."

"Don't be hard on your father, René."

"No. That's all over."

"I'm so glad."

She stooped over him and kissed him. Then she took his head in her

hands and pressed her cheek against his, and on his forehead he felt

her warm tears. She murmured:

"I've always tried to do my best."

Then she left him, and he felt the tears rising to his own eyes, and

he lay in worship of the beautiful kindness of women. They seemed to

hold in fee so much of life's loveliness, to be able to open to a man

fair regions that else were hidden to him all his days. He was eager

for the morrow's adventure.

The wedding made him feel that it was not by his own will that he was

being married, but that in some fantastic way he had been brought to

it by Mrs. Brock and the Smallmans and, incongruously, by his father

and George, and was doing it to oblige them. The collective will of

several persons was using him and Linda as pawns in an aimless game.

The ceremony took place in a very ugly Lutheran chapel, and the

recited words had no meaning for his bewildered mind. George and

Elsie--whom he remembered in the middle of it--had had a reason for

their marriage. His own seemed purposeless--No. Did it not open up to

him an unending tenderness like that given him by his mother last

night? He stole a glance at Linda. She was all pride and blushes,

rather breathlessly intent upon the ceremony, which seemed to have

some emotional significance for her.

They had two rooms reserved for them in the little hotel. They avoided

them, and preferred to be out of doors. They took food with them to

escape dinner before the other visitors and walked the three miles to

the top of Ravenscar. There they sat in the heather and gazed out

seaward in silence. On the way they had talked little, except to

comment on the broken sky, the color in the moors, the still shining

sea, gray and green. They sat in silence, and he felt utterly alone,

cut off from his old life with no new life begun. And almost angrily

he thrust away the idea of the woman sitting there by his side. So

charming she had been in the glamour of the future, so irrelevant she

seemed now that he was thrust away with her to find or fail to find in

her a life to replace that which had slipped away from him. He had

prized that old life so little while it was his, but it had been

familiar, his habitual garment. It had been fashioned with his growth.

She had been outside it; that had been her fascination. But he was

stripped of it, and he had nothing wherewith to approach her. And

suddenly he saw that he was failing her, that such thoughts were a

betrayal of her trust in him. After all, she too had shed her old

life. He was fearful lest she should become aware of his treachery. He

said:

"When I was away with Kurt----" And at once he knew that he had made a

false move. The thought of Kurt filled him with the memory of the free

joy he had had on that excursion, and he could not but contrast it

with the mean and sickly hesitation of this. What was it? What was he

afraid of? Afraid of the woman? Oh, come! Did he not love her and she

him? What was there to dread in love?

She said:

"Oh, René, we didn't come away to talk of Kurt."

"No."

"We didn't come away to talk."

"No."

She came close to his side.

"René, kiss me. Say you love me."

"I love you."

But it was better to sit in silence and gaze out at the sea, gray and

green.

She clung to him, caressed him, used absurd little phrases, English

and German.

"I loved you," she said, "from the first moment when you came into the

Smallmans' drawing-room. I was wearing green. Do you remember?"

"Green. Yes. I remember. I saw your parasol in the hall."

"And you loved me from the moment when you saw my parasol."

She laughed. That was better. It broke the heavy brooding in him that

had brought him to such suspense.

The evening air chilled them, and they walked home under the stars.

She clung to him and sang ditties of love and trysts and sentimental

disasters. When they reached their sitting-room she came to him and

placed her hand under his chin, pressed his lips with her forefinger,

and then kissed him. Then she left him.

In the early hours of the morning he was out on the seashore,

wandering aimlessly, nervously, dejectedly. Every now and then he

threw up his head and took in a great draught of the keen morning air

blowing in from the sea. That invigorated, cleansed him. Suddenly he

crouched on the sands and hid his face in his hands, and cried within

himself:

"I can't go on. I can't go back. Oh, Love, my love."

He had counted on her to open up new wonders and sweet joys, and

together they had attained nothing but heat and hunger and distress.