_Ant._ Come, I'll be out of the ague,
For to live thus is not indeed to live,
It is a mockery and abuse of life.
I will not henceforth serve myself by halves!
Love all or nothing.
_Delio._ Your own virtue save you!
HE spent hours brooding, prowling in the streets, in whose dull
monotony his mind had grown so undisturbedly, responding to their
small gaieties and smaller excitements, but moving on in the even
smoothness of their life. It seemed incredible to him that such
turmoil could have come out of them, and yet that turmoil had begun
even before his marriage, before he had met his wife. Was there some
strangeness in himself? Of his nature he became doubtful and
suspicious. Yet the habit of acceptance was too strong in him; even
his misery he could accept. Very laboriously he strove to come by an
idea of himself, and was only the more confused when he arrived at
this:
"They won't come out to meet me, and when I go out to meet them, they
run away. I cannot enjoy their pleasures, and they seem to want
nothing else. It gets worse and worse. I couldn't even talk to Elsie
now. Almost anyone can make me seem ridiculous."
Linda wrote to him:
"Can't you see, Ren dear, that there are some things won't bear
thinking of, and spoil with thinking. You poor, tortured thing!"
(Least of all did he want pity from her.) "I know you don't really
want to think, and you don't think easily, like most people. At least
you seem to hate thinking without coming to a conclusion. It is
something finer than obstinacy, because it isn't at all for yourself
that you want--what you want. What do you want? Isn't it enough to be
happy? Oh, my dear, do let us be happy! I have been crying every
night. It isn't that I mind being apart; husbands and wives must be
apart sometimes if their life is to be possible and decent, but I
can't bear our being apart in spirit."
Then she had understood! She had seen the gulf between them. She would
help him to bridge it.
He hastened to her joyfully, and caught her up in a great embrace, so
that she laughed in delicious terror.
And the torment began again. She had seen, understood, nothing. She
was only for teasing, wheedling, cajoling him into submission. She
told him--carefully choosing her moment--that she would bear him
children, and for a little while, a second or two, he was appeased.
Then his excited imagination worked on that. A child would mean only
another entity in the house, the empty house, where there was no love
to absorb it and foster its growth; more antagonism; more separation;
his child or hers, it would not be both. He could not see at all
clearly, but the idea of it had for him now something horrible. With
no count of his words he said:
"I do not wish for anything that you yourself do not want."
"I want it."
"Then why talk of it?"
"A man and a woman----"
"Talk of us, woman, talk of us. God! You don't know how you spoil
things with your busy mind. True things, simple things, lovely things,
things that lie deep in heart and mind, there is nothing that you will
not shape and mold and knead and twist into your own image, pretty,
pretty, charming. Oh, the lies of it all, the lies, the lies, the
lies! And you never know what you are doing. All is for your pleasure.
Nothing can lead you beyond that. And everything that menaces your
pleasure you draw with your busy brain into words, words."
"You don't know what you are saying."
"No."
He looked up at her with his eyes glazed and dull, his jaw trembling,
his fingers rubbing over and over again upon his thumbs.
"If you have said what is true, then you must hate me."
"Yes."
He stated it as though it were a plain fact well coated over by habit,
so that it could give no pain. She was tranquil, seemed to have tight
control over herself. She walked twice up and down the room. Then she
turned to him and said very quietly:
"I knew a long time ago that if it ever came to a scene it would be
the end. I suppose I'm not romantic enough for you. I don't know what
it is. But I know enough to feel that a scene with you would be
serious. Even little girls know that men must have scenes. It's a kind
of love-making with them. You're different."
"Yes."
"I can't pretend that you haven't hurt me."
"I'm sorry."
"Oh, I'd like to pretend. But I've changed, too. I suppose you can't
marry without being changed. A woman who loses her husband looks
silly. But she needn't if she doesn't feel it. You can't pretend.
Neither can I. You've taught me that. We've failed where nearly
everybody else fails, but we admit it. What's the good of pitching
good life after bad? It's no one's business but our own. They'll talk.
Let them talk."
He hardly heard what she said. He was weary of her voice droning on
and on.
"If it is the end," he muttered, "then there is no more to be said."
He walked round to Professor Smallman's. He had no notion of the time.
Mrs. Smallman admitted him, saw that something was wrong, showed him
into the study, and left him. He stood leaning against the doorpost.
The Professor was sitting in his great chair with a cigar in one hand
and a glass of whisky in the other.
"Good evening," said René. "I have left my wife."
Down went the Professor's legs, round came his head out of the great
chair:
"Great God!"
"I just walked round to tell you. I don't know why."
"But, my dear fellow, what on earth-- Not two years."
"Is it?"
"I say. Is she? Would you like Freda to go round?"
"No. She is quite calm. It's finished. It's she who said it. It never
began."
"Come, come. Sit down. You'd better sleep here to-night."
"No, thanks. I don't want to see you ever again."
"Tut, tut! My good Fourmy!"
"I mean it," said René dispassionately.
"Wait a moment."
The Professor hurried out of the room, and René could hear him in the
hall talking eagerly to his wife. He was seized with a dreary
impatience of these good people, with their unfailing kindness. He
knew perfectly well that in a moment they would return, husband and
wife, _the_ husband and wife, and throw him scraps of their happiness
for comfort and persuasion, while with their exchange of glances they
would bar him out. No. That was intolerable. He stepped to the French
window, opened it, and walked out, round the house and through the
garden into the street.
Another false move checked; another false relationship ended.
He slept that night at the Denmark, lied and enjoyed lying to Mr.
Sherman, saying that his wife was away and he had lost his key and
could not wake the servants. He sat in his room at the Denmark feeling
at peace and very confident, until his father came. Then he sat with
the boon company, told them one or two stories that he was able to
remember from the stock of the Common Room, told them heavily, dully,
so that they gained in comicality and roused laughter. His father
seemed to him rather contemptible. He enjoyed his own old jests as
much as his audience, and that was displeasing to René's fastidious
mood.
He walked home with his father, who was loquacious and tiresome. At
last René interrupted him:
"Father, do you mind not talking while I tell you what I have to tell?
I have left Linda. I can't tell you why without being unjust to her,
because I can't see clearly enough. She said it was finished, and so
it is. I am extraordinarily happy. I never was so happy in my life. I
have, in effect, told Professor Smallman to go to hell, and I shall do
the same with anybody else who tries to interfere. I don't know what I
am going to do, and I don't care. It is quite clear to me that there
is no room for Linda and me in the same set of people. They talk so. I
have no intention of continuing the life I have been leading.
Everything I have ever done, as long as I can remember, has been
because someone else wanted me to do it, or because someone else
thought I could. It has been surprising and delightful, but never
satisfying. George has made a better thing out of his life than I. At
least he has done what he wanted to do, though you and I may not think
much of it. I don't think I can see my mother. I would dearly like to,
but I could not bear it. She would make me feel something, and at
present I feel nothing at all. But I can remember her face against
mine, and her voice saying: 'I have always tried to do my best.' Good
night. Give her my love."
He turned on his heel, but his father caught him by the arm:
"Don't be a young lunatic," he said. "You can't go like that."
"I can," answered René, puzzled that anybody should deny what was
actually happening. "I can. Don't you see that I _am_ going?"
"Look here, I'm a bit of a queer one myself, but do you know what you
are doing?"
"For the first time in my life," said René, "I know what I am doing.
And I like it so immensely that I am going on doing it. You can't stop
me. Nothing can stop me. You said yourself that we live in a world of
women, and I want to make the best of it."
His father let go of his arm.
"Good Lord!" he said, "I've had my day, but I never was so cracked as
that."
Then he acquiesced in his son's indifference, nodded his head in a
light parting, and went his way.
René's thoughts were reaching out to Scotland, to his Aunt Janet's,
where he had known the best of his boyhood. He walked to a station and
found the London express waiting, with little knots of people standing
by the carriage doors, and porters bustling with luggage and lamps and
pillows, all wearing the stealthy, excited air of importance of
travelers by night. Putney was London, or near London. Why Putney? He
did not know, but he wanted to go there. He bought a ticket, boarded a
train as it was moving, and sat in a corner seat gazing at the lights
of the towns and saying to himself: "That's Ockley," because when he
had taken his first railway journey by night he had asked what the
lights were, and his mother had said: "That's Ockley."