Could I find a place to be alone with Heaven
I would speak my heart out.
THE next night Ann went out alone. She insisted that it must be alone,
though she gave him her most happy smile to reassure him.
He sat reading a copy of _Extracts from Browning_ which he had bought
for twopence from old Lunt. The book was against his temper, but he
found a certain pleasure in making himself read from page to page. At
nine o'clock Kilner came in. He was gaunt and haggard, and his collar
was dirty. He nodded, produced a pipe, and sank, as he lit it, into
the wicker chair opposite René's.
"You're comfortable in here," he said. "Snug. I suppose once you're
settled in here of a night you don't give a blast what goes on in the
world outside. One doesn't when one has got what one wants."
René laid his book down.
"Have you got what you want?"
"I? No. I never---- I was going to say I never have. I don't suppose I
ever shall. That makes me hate all the people who settle down in
comfort and pretend there is nothing more to want. And as that is
nearly everybody, you can imagine the hating part of me is kept pretty
busy. That again is a nuisance, because it gets between me and what I
want, and makes me waste energy in analyzing myself, my enemies,
patrons (when I have any), friends. My relations gave me up as a bad
job long ago. They made all sorts of sacrifices because they were led
to believe that my talent would in the end make me more comfortable
than they had ever been. When they found that I preferred discomfort
and penury and starvation to what seemed to them the simple expedient
of painting what I was expected to paint (they can't understand
anybody wanting to paint anything else), then they shrank away from
me. They could make no more sacrifices. People don't sacrifice for
something they don't see, and their eyes close just when mine begin to
open. We both console ourselves with hatred. I hate what they worship:
the capacity for comfort. They hate my incapacity. It is very stupid.
I would give almost anything to be able to live without hatred. It
seems barely possible, though you come as near to it as any man I ever
knew. The pity of it is that you arrive at it by doing and wanting
nothing."
"That's hardly fair," replied René. "I'm out and about all day. Every
day I clean and oil the car. Often I spend hours on it."
"You do nothing that could not be done by a less intelligent man than
yourself. You may do it more conscientiously, but at its best it is
not good enough for your best."
"But surely that applies to every trade and profession?"
"Does it? I'm certainly not going to generalize. What's true of you is
probably true of thousands of men. I'm not interested in them as I am
in you."
"It is even more true of the work I did before," said René. "I do feel
now that I am doing something. There is money earned at the end of
every day, really earned by being useful. But I don't know that I
think about it much. It has become a habit, like everything else."
"All right, say it has become a habit. Say that a certain amount of
your energy is drawn off in habit, what of the rest? That's what I'm
driving at. What of the rest?"
"I read, amuse myself, and Ann----"
"And you are going on forever, working out of habit, reading and
amusing yourself, and a woman who----"
"I'll trouble you not to say anything against Ann."
"I'm not saying anything against her. She has a perfect right to be
herself, but if being herself interferes with me, I have a perfect
right to fight for what I want."
"What do you want?"
"Your friendship."
"You have it," replied René, in the tone of one squashing an argument.
"Yes," said Kilner, "comfortably. You try to make room for me in your
little circle of comfort, and, worse still, to use me as a comfort. I
can't stand that. She knows it. That's why she keeps you away from
me."
René protested:
"She doesn't."
"She does. You watch her eyes when she comes in and finds me here."
René looked up at him uneasily. Kilner pounced on that:
"You are uneasy already. I don't want to make trouble between you two.
You can make quite enough for yourselves, but I mean to dig out of you
what I need. I mean to try anyhow until I am satisfied that what I
need is not there."
There was a challenge in this, and René had the surprise of finding
himself meeting it. Indeed it was bracing to feel the painter's
vigorous mind searching his own and throwing aside all that he
disliked or condemned.
"Ever since," said René, "ever since our first meeting under the
archway, I have felt that there was something in you that I desired to
understand, something that, without my understanding it, has made more
difference than any other thing in my life."
Kilner leaned forward.
"Now," he said, "now we know where we are. Most men pretend with me
that they keep the emotional side of their nature for women. They
don't give it them, God knows what they do with it. Most men also
confuse their emotions with their imaginations. I think that is why
they spend their lives in the uncomfortable search after comfort."
"And women?" asked René.
"You and I are not concerned for the present with women. It seems to
me that you and I are in this queer place for much the same reason,
because we were incapable of letting our lives run along the lines
laid down for them. I don't know what you are after; perhaps you don't
know yourself, but I want to tell you what I am after. I'm not a great
reader of books. Some of them may have said what I'm trying to say.
. . . As long as I can remember I have had the intensest joy through
my eyes. I think I've said that before. It doesn't matter. I see
things. At first it was just the crude pleasure of form. One thing
after another, I let the whole world unroll before my eyes until I was
drunk with delight in it and nearly mad. Then forms began to have a
meaning and to melt into each other. I began to see relations between
different forms. Beauty began to sing in color. With form and color
the world was so rich that the strain upon my sight was an agony. My
greed brought me to seek consolations which unfortunately did not
console. If I accepted comfort, then I lost my delight in form and
color and was not comfortable. I found that the way out of that was to
select and concentrate. I could only select in a certain passionate
mood. In an ecstasy I felt truly that I could recognize the object in
the contemplation of which I could find the greatest joy, a joy equal
to that of human love, and having this advantage over it that it need
not be expressed in physical experience. But, once felt, it must be
expressed. I do my best in paint, but it always seems
impossible--except when I am actually working. When I look at what I
have done, then I know that it is impossible. One can give a little
singing hint of it and no more. And then again, turning from that to
life, one is disgusted. Everywhere such coarseness, such greed, such
meanness, such conceit. Yet to nurse that disgust is to feel the joy
fade away, to hear the song of it die down. There is no justice then,
no kindness, and the world is so horrible that the soul takes refuge
in a sorry silence. Youth is then a heated torment from which there is
no escape, but in a kind of death that brings decay and poisons love.
. . . There, if you can understand that, you can understand me. I
cannot surrender my vision either to comfort or to my own disgust."
They were silent for some moments. Then René said:
"In here," he touched his breast, "I know that you are right. I have
been trying all this time to understand you with my brain, but now
that seems only to be a sieve through which to pass what you have
said. You see, I have never tried to express anything, but there have
been times in my life when I have been moved enough to understand
faintly what you mean. Disgust? I know that too. Almost everything I
have ever done seems to me now to have been the result of disgust. I
suppose that is why I am what I am. But I'm glad you came in to-night.
I was going through another crisis of disgust; I go from one to
another."
"I know," said Kilner. "A man does when he seeks to find love only in
women."
René winced. His friend laughed at him:
"Oh, you are not the only one. It begins very early. Women exploit
their motherhood as they have exploited their womanhood to get us. It
is not their fault. Men have kept their joy from them and preserved
their brutishness. There is an even more bitter disgust lying in wait
for those who seek to find love only outside women."
Ann came in on that. She stopped inside the door, and glowered at the
painter.
"Oh, so you've come back?"
"Yes," said Kilner, rising. "Like a bad penny."
"Don't get up. I ain't no lady. You been talking?"
"Yes," said René. "Shall I make some tea? Had a good evening?"
"No. Rotten." She had not moved from the door. Her eyes came back to
Kilner. "You can go on talking. I'm off to my bed."
And she slipped from the door into the bedroom. René met his friend's
eyes. They were grimly ironical.