If John had those sensations about Felix, so—when he was away from
John—had Felix about himself. He had never quite grown out of the
feeling that to make himself conspicuous in any way was bad form.
In common with his three brothers he had been through the mills of
gentility—those unique grinding machines of education only found in his
native land. Tod, to be sure, had been publicly sacked at the end of his
third term, for climbing on to the headmaster's roof and filling up two
of his chimneys with football pants, from which he had omitted to remove
his name. Felix still remembered the august scene—the horrid thrill of
it, the ominous sound of that: “Freeland minimus!” the ominous sight of
poor little Tod emerging from his obscurity near the roof of the Speech
Room, and descending all those steps. How very small and rosy he had
looked, his bright hair standing on end, and his little blue eyes
staring up very hard from under a troubled frown. And the august hand
holding up those sooty pants, and the august voice: “These appear to
be yours, Freeland minimus. Were you so good as to put them down my
chimneys?” And the little piping, “Yes, sir.”
“May I ask why, Freeland minimus?”
“I don't know, sir.”
“You must have had some reason, Freeland minimus?”
“It was the end of term, sir.”
“Ah! You must not come back here, Freeland minimus. You are too
dangerous, to yourself, and others. Go to your place.”
And poor little Tod ascending again all those steps, cheeks more
terribly rosy than ever, eyes bluer, from under a still more troubled
frown; little mouth hard set; and breathing so that you could hear him
six forms off. True, the new Head had been goaded by other outrages, the
authors of which had not omitted to remove their names; but the want
of humor, the amazing want of humor! As if it had not been a sign of
first-rate stuff in Tod! And to this day Felix remembered with delight
the little bubbling hiss that he himself had started, squelched at once,
but rippling out again along the rows like tiny scattered lines of fire
when a conflagration is suppressed. Expulsion had been the salvation of
Tod! Or—his damnation? Which? God would know, but Felix was not certain.
Having himself been fifteen years acquiring 'Mill' philosophy, and
another fifteen years getting rid of it, he had now begun to think
that after all there might be something in it. A philosophy that took
everything, including itself, at face value, and questioned nothing, was
sedative to nerves too highly strung by the continual examination of the
insides of oneself and others, with a view to their alteration. Tod,
of course, having been sent to Germany after his expulsion, as one
naturally would be, and then put to farming, had never properly acquired
'Mill' manner, and never sloughed it off; and yet he was as sedative a
man as you could meet.
Emerging from the Tube station at Hampstead, he moved toward home under
a sky stranger than one might see in a whole year of evenings. Between
the pine-trees on the ridge it was opaque and colored like pinkish
stone, and all around violent purple with flames of the young green,
and white spring blossom lit against it. Spring had been dull and
unimaginative so far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered
torrents; Felix wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.
He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.
The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint
underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic
sense. Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other
apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them—admiring the
rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers,
the books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling
would sweep over him: “By George, do I really own all this, when my
ideal is 'bread and water, and on feast days a little bit of cheese'?”
True, he was not to blame for the niceness of his things—Flora did it;
but still—there they were, a little hard to swallow for an epicurean.
It might, of course, have been worse, for if Flora had a passion for
collecting, it was a very chaste one, and though what she collected cost
no little money, it always looked as if it had been inherited, and—as
everybody knows—what has been inherited must be put up with, whether it
be a coronet or a cruet-stand.
To collect old things, and write poetry! It was a career; one would
not have one's wife otherwise. She might, for instance, have been like
Stanley's wife, Clara, whose career was wealth and station; or John's
wife, Anne, whose career had been cut short; or even Tod's wife,
Kirsteen, whose career was revolution. No—a wife who had two, and only
two children, and treated them with affectionate surprise, who was never
out of temper, never in a hurry, knew the points of a book or play,
could cut your hair at a pinch; whose hand was dry, figure still good,
verse tolerable, and—above all—who wished for no better fate than Fate
had given her—was a wife not to be sneezed at. And Felix never had. He
had depicted so many sneezing wives and husbands in his books, and knew
the value of a happy marriage better perhaps than any one in England. He
had laid marriage low a dozen times, wrecked it on all sorts of rocks,
and had the greater veneration for his own, which had begun early,
manifested every symptom of ending late, and in the meantime walked down
the years holding hands fast, and by no means forgetting to touch lips.
Hanging up the gray top hat, he went in search of her. He found her in
his dressing-room, surrounded by a number of little bottles, which
she was examining vaguely, and putting one by one into an 'inherited'
waste-paper basket. Having watched her for a little while with a certain
pleasure, he said:
“Yes, my dear?”
Noticing his presence, and continuing to put bottles into the basket,
she answered:
“I thought I must—they're what dear Mother's given us.”
There they lay—little bottles filled with white and brown fluids, white
and blue and brown powders; green and brown and yellow ointments; black
lozenges; buff plasters; blue and pink and purple pills. All beautifully
labelled and corked.
And he said in a rather faltering voice:
“Bless her! How she does give her things away! Haven't we used ANY?”
“Not one. And they have to be cleared away before they're stale, for
fear we might take one by mistake.”
“Poor Mother!”
“My dear, she's found something newer than them all by now.”
Felix sighed.
“The nomadic spirit. I have it, too!”
And a sudden vision came to him of his mother's carved ivory face, kept
free of wrinkles by sheer will-power, its firm chin, slightly aquiline
nose, and measured brows; its eyes that saw everything so quickly, so
fastidiously, its compressed mouth that smiled sweetly, with a resolute
but pathetic acceptation. Of the piece of fine lace, sometimes black,
sometimes white, over her gray hair. Of her hands, so thin now, always
moving a little, as if all the composure and care not to offend any eye
by allowing Time to ravage her face, were avenging themselves in that
constant movement. Of her figure, that was short but did not seem so,
still quick-moving, still alert, and always dressed in black or gray.
A vision of that exact, fastidious, wandering spirit called Frances
Fleeming Freeland—that spirit strangely compounded of domination and
humility, of acceptation and cynicism; precise and actual to the
point of desert dryness; generous to a point that caused her family to
despair; and always, beyond all things, brave.
Flora dropped the last little bottle, and sitting on the edge of the
bath let her eyebrows rise. How pleasant was that impersonal humor which
made her superior to other wives!
“You—nomadic? How?”
“Mother travels unceasingly from place to place, person to person, thing
to thing. I travel unceasingly from motive to motive, mind to mind; my
native air is also desert air—hence the sterility of my work.”
Flora rose, but her eyebrows descended.
“Your work,” she said, “is not sterile.”
“That, my dear,” said Felix, “is prejudice.” And perceiving that she
was going to kiss him, he waited without annoyance. For a woman of
forty-two, with two children and three books of poems—and not knowing
which had taken least out of her—with hazel-gray eyes, wavy eyebrows
darker than they should have been, a glint of red in her hair; wavy
figure and lips; quaint, half-humorous indolence, quaint, half-humorous
warmth—was she not as satisfactory a woman as a man could possibly have
married!
“I have got to go down and see Tod,” he said. “I like that wife of his;
but she has no sense of humor. How much better principles are in theory
than in practice!”
Flora repeated softly, as if to herself:
“I'm glad I have none.” She was at the window leaning out, and Felix
took his place beside her. The air was full of scent from wet leaves,
alive with the song of birds thanking the sky. Suddenly he felt her
arm round his ribs; either it or they—which, he could not at the moment
tell—seemed extraordinarily soft....
Between Felix and his young daughter, Nedda, there existed the only
kind of love, except a mother's, which has much permanence—love based on
mutual admiration. Though why Nedda, with her starry innocence, should
admire him, Felix could never understand, not realizing that she read
his books, and even analyzed them for herself in the diary which she
kept religiously, writing it when she ought to have been asleep. He had
therefore no knowledge of the way his written thoughts stimulated the
ceaseless questioning that was always going on within her; the thirst to
know why this was and that was not. Why, for instance, her heart ached
so some days and felt light and eager other days? Why, when people wrote
and talked of God, they seemed to know what He was, and she never did?
Why people had to suffer; and the world be black to so many millions?
Why one could not love more than one man at a time? Why—a thousand
things? Felix's books supplied no answers to these questions, but they
were comforting; for her real need as yet was not for answers, but
ever for more questions, as a young bird's need is for opening its beak
without quite knowing what is coming out or going in. When she and her
father walked, or sat, or went to concerts together, their talk was
neither particularly intimate nor particularly voluble; they made to
each other no great confidences. Yet each was certain that the other was
not bored—a great thing; and they squeezed each other's little fingers
a good deal—very warming. Now with his son Alan, Felix had a continual
sensation of having to keep up to a mark and never succeeding—a feeling,
as in his favorite nightmare, of trying to pass an examination for which
he had neglected to prepare; of having to preserve, in fact, form
proper to the father of Alan Freeland. With Nedda he had a sense of
refreshment; the delight one has on a spring day, watching a clear
stream, a bank of flowers, birds flying. And Nedda with her father—what
feeling had she? To be with him was like a long stroking with a touch
of tickle in it; to read his books, a long tickle with a nice touch of
stroking now and then when one was not expecting it.
That night after dinner, when Alan had gone out and Flora into a dream,
she snuggled up alongside her father, got hold of his little finger, and
whispered:
“Come into the garden, Dad; I'll put on goloshes. It's an awfully nice
moon.”
The moon indeed was palest gold behind the pines, so that its radiance
was a mere shower of pollen, just a brushing of white moth-down over
the reeds of their little dark pond, and the black blur of the flowering
currant bushes. And the young lime-trees, not yet in full leaf, quivered
ecstatically in that moon-witchery, still letting fall raindrops of
the past spring torrent, with soft hissing sounds. A real sense in
the garden, of God holding his breath in the presence of his own youth
swelling, growing, trembling toward perfection! Somewhere a bird—a
thrush, they thought—mixed in its little mind as to night and day, was
queerly chirruping. And Felix and his daughter went along the dark wet
paths, holding each other's arms, not talking much. For, in him, very
responsive to the moods of Nature, there was a flattered feeling, with
that young arm in his, of Spring having chosen to confide in him this
whispering, rustling hour. And in Nedda was so much of that night's
unutterable youth—no wonder she was silent! Then, somehow—neither
responsible—they stood motionless. How quiet it was, but for a distant
dog or two, and the stilly shivering-down of the water drops, and the
far vibration of the million-voiced city! How quiet and soft and fresh!
Then Nedda spoke:
“Dad, I do so want to know everything.”
Not rousing even a smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration
seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the
very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her
parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white throat, he answered:
“It'll all come soon enough, my pretty!”
To think that she must come to an end like the rest, having found out
almost nothing, having discovered just herself, and the particle of God
that was within her! But he could not, of course, say this.
“I want to FEEL. Can't I begin?”
How many millions of young creatures all the world over were sending up
that white prayer to climb and twine toward the stars, and—fall to earth
again! And nothing to be answered, but:
“Time enough, Nedda!”
“But, Dad, there are such heaps of things, such heaps of people, and
reasons, and—and life; and I know nothing. Dreams are the only times, it
seems to me, that one finds out anything.”
“As for that, my child, I am exactly in your case. What's to be done for
us?”
She slid her hand through his arm again.
“Don't laugh at me!”
“Heaven forbid! I meant it. You're finding out much quicker than I. It's
all folk-music to you still; to me Strauss and the rest of the tired
stuff. The variations my mind spins—wouldn't I just swap them for the
tunes your mind is making?”
“I don't seem making tunes at all. I don't seem to have anything to make
them of. Take me down to see 'the Tods,' Dad!”
Why not? And yet—! Just as in this spring night Felix felt so much,
so very much, lying out there behind the still and moony dark, such
marvellous holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind
this innocent petition, he could not help the feeling of a lurking
fatefulness. That was absurd. And he said: “If you wish it, by all
means. You'll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others, I can't say,
but your aunt is an experience, and experiences are what you want, it
seems.”
Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.