The journey back to London was like the waking moments of a dream. He
gazed out of the carriage window. He couldn’t bear to look at Hal;
his eyes seemed dead, as though all the mind behind them was full of
darkened passages. It wasn’t easy to be brave just now, so he turned his
face away from him.
“Teddy.” There was no one in the carriage but themselves. “Did she ever
say anything about me?”
“She said that you were fond of her.”
“Ah, yes, but I don’t mean that. Did she ever say how she felt herself?”
“About you?”
“About me.”
There was hunger in Hal’s voice--hunger in the way he listened for the
answer.
“Not--not exactly. But she liked you immensely. She really did, Hal. She
looked forward most awfully to your coming.”
“Any child would have done that when a man brought her presents. Then
she didn’t say she loved me? No, she wouldn’t say that.”
Hal spoke bitterly. Teddy felt that Desire was being accused and sprang
to her defense. “I don’t see how you could expect her to love you after
what you had done.” The man looked up sharply. “After what I had done!
D’you mean kidnaping her, or something further back?”
“I mean taking her away from her mother.”
Hal laughed gloomily. “No, as you say, a person with no claims on her
couldn’t expect her to love him after that.”
Sinking his head forward, he relapsed into silence and sat staring at
the seat opposite. When the train was galloping through the outskirts of
London, he spoke again.
“I’ve dragged you into something that you don’t understand. Don’t try
to understand it; but there’s something I want to say to you. If ever
you’re tempted to do wrong, remember me. If ever you’re tempted to get
love the wrong way, be strong enough to do without it. It isn’t worth
having. You have to lie and cheat to get it at first, and you have to
lie and cheat to keep some of it when it’s ended.” He turned his face
away, speaking shamefully and hurriedly. “I sinned once, a long while
ago--I don’t know whether you’ve guessed. I’m still paying for it.
You’re paying for it. One day that little girl may have to pay the
biggest price of any of us. I was trying to save her from that.”
Through the window shabby rows of cabs showed up. A porter jumped on the
step, asking if there was any luggage. Hal waved him back. Turning to
Teddy, he said, “When you’ve sinned, you never know where the paying
ends. It touches a thousand lives with its selfishness. Remember me one
day, and be careful.”
Driving home in the hansom, he referred but once to the subject “I’ve
made you suffer. I don’t know how much--boys never tell. I owed you
something; that’s why I spoke to you just now.”
Teddy’s arrival home scattered the last mists of his dream-world. As the
cab drew up before the house, the door flew open and his father burst
out, bundling a mildly protesting old gentleman down the steps.
“No, I don’t paint little pigs,” he was shouting, “and I don’t paint
little girls sucking their thumbs and cooing, ‘I’m baby.’ You’ve come to
the wrong shop, old man; no offense. I’m an artist; the man you’re
looking for is a sign-painter. Good evening.”
The door banged in the old gentleman’s face. Jimmie Boy was so enjoying
his anger that he didn’t notice that in closing the door he was shutting
out his son.
When Teddy had been admitted by Jane, he heard his mother’s
voice dodging through his father’s laughter like a child through a
crowd.
“You needn’t have been so sharp with him, Jimmie. He only wanted to
buy the kind of pictures you don’t paint You can’t expect every one to
understand. Now he’ll go the rounds and talk about you, and you’ll have
another enemy. Why do you do it, my silly old pirate?”
The old pirate pretended to become suspicious that his wife was trying
to lower his standards--trying to persuade him to paint the rubbish that
would sell She protested her innocence. Long after Teddy had made
his presence known the argument continued, half in banter, half in
seriousness. Then it took the familiar turning which led to a discussion
of finance.
He stole away. The impatient world had swept him back into its maelstrom
of realities. It had taken away his breath and staggered his courage.
Hal’s harangue on the consequences of sin had made him see sin
everywhere. He saw his father as sinning when he indulged his genius by
pushing would-be purchasers down his steps. Hal was right--he and Dearie
would have to pay for that; all their lives they had been paying for his
father’s temperament. They had had to go short of everything because he
would insist on trying to exchange his dreams for money.
He wandered out into the garden where his pigeons were flying.
Instinctively his steps led him to the stable. From the stalls he
dragged out _The Garden Enclosed_, which was to have made his father
famous. He gazed at it; as he gazed, the world seemed better. The world
must be a happy place so long as there were women in it like that.
People said that his father hadn’t succeeded; but he had by being true
to what he knew to be best.
He climbed the ladder to the studio where, through long years of
discouragement, his father had refused to stoop below himself. Leaning
from the window, he gazed into the garden. The dusty smell of the ivy
came to him.
There in the darkness his mother found him. Coming in quietly, she
crouched beside him, taking his hands.
“Mother, you’re very beautiful.”
Her heart quickened. “Something’s happened. Once you wouldn’t have said
that.”
“I’ve been thinking about so many things,” he whispered, “about how it
must have helped a man to have had some one like you always to himself.”
“You were thinking,” she brushed his cheek with hers, “you were thinking
about yourself--about the long, long future.”
“Yes.” His voice scarcely reached her. “I was growing frightened because
of Hal. I was feeling kind of lonely. Then I thought of you and Jimmie
Boy. It would be fearful to grow up like Hal.”
“You won’t, Teddy.”
There was a long silence. They could hear each other’s thoughts ticking.
At last he whispered, “Desire said she never had a father.”
“Poor little girl! You must have guessed?”
“Hal?”
Choking back her tears, she nodded.
“Things like that----” He broke off, staring into the darkness. “Things
like that make a boy frightened, when first they’re told him.” She drew
his head down to her shoulder. He lay there without speaking, feeling
sheltered for the moment. All the threats of manhood, the fears that he
might fail, the terror lest he might miss the highest things like Hal,
drew away into the distance.
In the night, when he awoke and they returned, he drove them off with a
new purpose. The pity and white chivalry of his boyhood were aflame
with what he had learnt. Until he met her again, he would keep himself
spotless. She should be to him what the Holy Grail was to Sir Gala-had.
He would fight to be good and great not for his own sake--that would be
lonely; but that he might be strong, when he became a man, to pay the
price for Desire that Hal’s sin had imposed on her.