Quoi! Dieu me punirait éternellement de m'être livré à des
passions qu'il m'a données?
THERE might be nothing to keep him, but yet he stayed five days
longer. For one thing George's children were amusing and a profitable
study. They had discovered that they had only to lie to their parents
to keep them quiet, and, as lying was expected of them, and made
things comfortable, they saw no harm in it. For the rest they did as
they pleased and amused themselves. Little George was the very spit of
his grandfather and a great spinner of yarns. René told him one
morning to ask his mother if he could go out with him. Off trotted the
boy, to return in a moment with a detailed account of the conversation
he had had. It transpired subsequently that Elsie was out at the time.
René told her. She said:
"I don't know what to do about the child. He has such an imagination."
"I prefer to call that invention. Imagination is the one quality in
you that appreciates truth. I should begin if I were you by satisfying
his curiosity. Tell him the truth about anything he wants to know."
"But he wants to know such awful things."
"What awful things?"
"Well, about me and George."
"It's hard to put a lie straight once you've told it. It is terribly
easy to lose your respect for your parents."
"Oh, but little George loves us."
"How do you know?"
"He says so nearly every night."
"Oh, well," said René, "people believe only what they like to
believe."
Elsie was rather ruffled:
"After all, they're our children."
"Certainly. You'll find out what they think of it soon enough."
It was interesting to watch the processes which went to make up the
fool's paradise that George and Elsie, in common with their kind,
called Home, the worship of lip-virtue, the constant practice of mean
little subterfuges, George dodging Elsie's interest and suspicion of
himself, she his of her, and the children, where necessary,
contributing to the comedy and, for the rest, living thoroughly,
selfishly, and callously in their own pursuits.
René found that as long as he would let George talk about bridge,
bowls, and business, or splutter abuse of Radical legislation, and as
long as he allowed Elsie to chatter of the neighbors and children and
music-halls and clothes, they were both quite happy.
With his mother it was otherwise. She was uneasy in his presence and
they could hardly talk at all, except about their relations, the rich
Fourmys, and the shabby tricks they had done; but after a while René
became aware that they were holding a stealthy converse, an
undercurrent to the words they used. He tried all sorts of devices to
bring it to the surface but without success. His mother would relapse
into silence or, without a word, would hurry off to her church and
return impenetrably encased in humility, pale with emotional satiety.
There was something abnormal about her then, something unnatural that
made René's flesh creep. When it had passed he would feel once more
the wildness in her that she kept so savagely repressed.
He recognized at last that he was staying on in the hope of
penetrating her defenses. Having come to that, he attacked her one
night when George and Elsie were out, and he knew there was no service
at the church for her to escape to. Like the dutiful husband he was,
George made a practice of taking Elsie to a music-hall once a week, a
music-hall or two cinemas, as she chose.
Mrs. Fourmy had put down her knitting and said:
"I think I would like a game of patience, René."
He put out the table and the cards and they played. He said:
"I wonder how you can stand seeing them play the old, old game."
"What old game?"
"Marriage. Killing each other in the first few weeks and
then--humbug."
"George is a very good husband and father."
"He lives with a woman in his house and children come automatically."
"He is very good to Elsie."
"He placates her."
Mrs. Fourmy took out the ace of diamonds and covered it. René said:
"Do you ever think, mother, of how we used to say we'd go and live
together?"
"Sometimes. I knew it was just nonsense."
Her eyes gave him a quick little affectionate glance, searching for
affection. Ah! that was better.
"Not such nonsense, either. Why shouldn't you go and live in Aunt
Janet's cottage? It was that I was thinking of, though I never thought
it would be mine."
"I'd be so lonely."
"No lonelier than you are here."
"No."
That escaped her involuntarily. She covered it up.
"You're too old for that sort of talk, René. You're not a boy any
longer."
"I'm much younger than I was then."
"Yes, that's true. Would you come too?"
"No. I--I'm going south again."
"Have you met--her?"
"Yes."
"I thought so." Her hands trembled. "Are you--are you going to live
with her?"
"I hope so."
"It will be living in sin. I couldn't live in your house if I knew
that----"
"You prefer George?"
"I--I---- Please don't talk about it any more, René."
"I must. You love me far more than you love George, and yet you prefer
to accept a home from him rather than from me."
"Certain things are wrong, René."
"I take my chance of that."
"We aren't given any choice."
"Hell in this world or hell in the next."
"Don't speak lightly of such things, René."
"I saw my father in London."
Mrs. Fourmy let the cards trickle from her hands, and sat staring at
him with weary, frightened eyes.
"You are your father over again."
"He told me. Then it was your love or your religion----"
"Don't, René, don't!"
He could not continue. He watched her living again in the agony of the
memory, righting with it, fighting it back, stifling the hunger in
herself. He rose to leave her. She thought he was already gone, and
slipped to her knees in an attitude of prayer.
René went to his room at the back of the house, the exact counterpart
of his old den. He cursed that jealous God, that brutal invention of
cowardice which has laid waste the western world. His rage only
subsided when he came to think of Cathleen. He took paper and pen and
wrote to her:
"I seem hardly at all different from the boy who used to write to you.
It is almost exactly the same room, the same hour, only now it is my
brother and sister-in-law who occupy the big bed in the big front
room. The window looks out at the same lighted windows opposite. And I
am the same except that I know myself better and am more sure. What an
extraordinary phantasmagoria between our parting and our meeting! How
worthless and external adventures can be! How worthless and external
the more intimate relationships! But without adventure, without
mistakes, folly, suffering, how is that discovery to be made? I
suppose my brother never could have made it, but he must have had,
perhaps even now he has, his moments when his desire tugs against his
little round of habits. He would call himself a happy man, and perhaps
he is so. Perhaps we all get what we desire. That would be a
comfortable creed, and I could believe it were it not for my mother.
One is not born of a woman for nothing. Something binds. There is a
deeper knowledge than that of the mind. There is in my mother a
quality with which I feel at home, free. But she withholds it from me.
I feel she hates it in me, as in herself, as in my father. Hard to
find anything else in common between them. I told you that story of
how she surrendered to him when he came back. It must have been that
in her, taken unawares. It had lived without alarm for so long. It had
been stirred in her when I came back from Scotland so full of that
idiotic love for you--and after that, I can't follow. Too near to it
perhaps, or perhaps it is obscured in me by all I have gone through
since. But now she baffles me. She has suffered. Yes. We all suffer,
but suffering leads to discovery, to joy, or life is altogether
barren. She suffers, she must suffer from living here in the dull
house, but she takes her suffering and bottles it up, sterilizes it
with religion. Her comfort! From the bottom of my heart I hate it.
When she is full of what she calls her religion, then I can only bear
with her by my inborn knowledge of her, and for that only the more do
I detest the poison that has ruined her splendid life. And how it has
been exploited, this voluptuous, selfish pleasure which they dare to
call prayer and worship, this cowardly refusal to follow suffering
withersoever it leads. I cannot be tolerant about it. To thousands I
know, it is no more than bridge or bowls to my brother George, a
pastime. But with her, and with all who have a capacity for suffering,
it is a passionate negation, and to have lived at all must be a
horror. You see, I am almost inarticulate about it. I have tried to
break through it and failed. She saw, and closed her eyes, as she must
have seen time and again. The delight of seeing almost deliberately
debased to fear. I wish I were more used to thinking about people,
then I could make it more clear. But it doesn't seem much use, for I
go on believing in them and liking them and expecting all sorts of
things that never come. Oh, the freedom that I find with you, and the
thought of you! Everything you understand, and all the differences
between us we can just laugh at and use. I must take you to some place
where we can build up a healthy life. Now that I have money, I thought
for a time that we would go and live in Scotland in my house. (How odd
that looks. I really am pleased with my possessions for the first
time.) That would not do. There must be work and activity. We'll have
a brave time making plans to keep each other and everybody we know
happy and keen. No more grubby humbugging, and no more Mitcham Mews.
We'll find a way. . . ."
There came a tap at his door. He went to open it. His mother stood
there.
"Aren't you going to bed, René? George and Elsie came home long ago."
"I was writing a letter."
"You shouldn't stay up, wasting the gas and all."