YOUNG EARNEST

THE ROMANCE OF A
BAD START IN LIFE

BY

GILBERT CANNAN

Author of “Old Mole,” “Round the Corner.”

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1915

Now my question is: have you a scheme of life consonant with the spirit of modern philosophy—with the views of intelligent, moral, humane human beings of this period?

THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND.

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

To
O. M.

Words skilled and woven do not make a book

Except some truth in beauty shine in it.

I bring you this because you overlook

My faults to follow out my probing wit.

And where it fails or falls short of its aim,

You see design and waste nor praise nor blame

On the achievement. Stirring to the will,

Your wit still urges mine to greater skill.

CONTENTS

[BOOK ONE
LINDA BROCK]

Ha! Ha!

So you take human nature upon trust?

[I
LOVE IN EARNEST]

O that joy so soon should waste

Or so sweet a bliss

As a kiss

Might not forever last!

IT annoyed the young man that at such a time, in such a place, he should be thinking of his father. Waiting for his beloved, he desired to have no thought but for her; most loyal intention sadly unfulfilled, for he could think only of his father, first as a wondrous being who could skillfully become at will an elephant or a zebra, or more tranquilly fascinate and absorb by waggling his ears with no disturbance of his face. The young man, John René Fourmy, could more clearly remember his father’s ears than his features. He was introspective enough to know that his tenderness for the young woman, his melting anticipation of her coming, had led him back to the first adoration of his life, and from that to the tragedy of its obliteration.

Came the distressing recollection of his father’s downfall, devastating for the boy of three who had witnessed it. He could visualize it clearly, so sharp had been the cruel impression, the indignity of it. The bedroom in the little house in the country where they had lived near Billy Lummas and Sam Ardwick, who had fits in the road. A room full of bed. In that bed his father and himself eager for the moment when his father should arise from his bed and fill the world, and his mother apparently just as eager because she was entreating and imploring. Only the more did his father wrap himself in the bedclothes. These suddenly were torn down amid peals of laughter; a fond scuffle, though the boy perceived not the fondness; up went his father’s nightshirt, his long body was turned over and it was slapped resoundingly on that place considerately designed by nature to receive such onslaughts. The slapping was done with the back of a hairbrush, an instrument that, in alternation with a slipper, was used upon himself. That a man, that a glorious father should suffer, and, because he suffered, deserve such an indignity, was too much. A shadow came over the world, and René remembered flinging himself down by the bed and shedding passionate tears for the departed glory. Thereafter his father was no wonder to him, he too was subject to the authority of his mother, and became henceforth only a tyrannous buffoon, nervously kind or noisily angry.

Then René remembered the return from the country to a succession of houses in streets; his father just risen from his bed as he came home to dinner at midday; bottles of whisky and boxes of cigarettes. And when at school they asked him what his father was, he used to reply, “A gentleman. And he went to a public school,” that being the formula which had been given to him to account for existence and all its puzzlements. Public school and heaven were for a long time confounded in his mind, and the formula had accounted adequately for his father’s Elijah-like disappearance from the scene when René was ten.

That was all he knew, and there was the sting of injustice in this present intrusion in the Scottish glen, hallowed by the delights of a young love which boy and girl had arranged should shake the world into a wonder at its glory. A sordid family history was a clog upon romance, and our young man was that earnest creature, a romantic.

A stolen love, for she lived at the great house taken by her father for the sport of the autumn months, and he was staying with his great-aunt Janet, an ex-governess, in the village, as he had done ever since he was eleven, for his holidays.

Now he was nearly twenty, wonderfully in love, punctual to his appointment, striving for romantic thoughts and able to achieve nothing but these humiliating memories of his father. He tried singing; that was of no avail. It did but call to mind his father’s songs. He threw pebbles into the burn, but they gave him no amusement. Then from his pocket he drew an anthology of love—poems from which he had been accustomed to read to his fair—and so he lulled himself to something near the warm mood of expectancy and began to tell himself that she was very late, that she had failed him on this their last day. There was a sort of sweet anguish in the disappointment which he liked so much that he was almost put out when she came.

He leaped to his feet and opened his arms and she sank into them, and an enchantment descended upon them and they kissed.

He had prepared for her a couch of bracken. On this they lay and kissed again. This kiss was tragic. The enchantment broke in the middle, and he found the proximity of her face ridiculous and embarrassing and his position uncomfortable. He did not tell her so, and a simulated rapture hid his feelings from her. She sighed:

“Oh, René!”

The sound of his name on her lips never failed to move him, and a little of the enchantment returned. He could endure her nearness, and gave her an affectionate little hug quite genuinely warm. It surprised her into happy laughter.

“Oh, René! it has been more beautiful this year even than last. Of course we’re older. Do you think it goes on for ever and ever, year after year, growing more and more beautiful?”

“Very few lovers——” began René in a solemn voice, but at once the generalization offended him and he never reached his predicate. The subject seemed entirely to satisfy Cathleen. She took his hand in hers:

“We mustn’t stop writing to each other again.”

“It was you who stopped.”

“I thought——”

“It made it very horrid meeting you again, very anxious, I mean—I mean I don’t know what your life is like.”

“You know I shall never find anyone like you, René, never.”

He thought with distaste of her brothers, robust, athletic young men, wonderfully tailored, with a knack of getting the last ounce of effect out of soap and water. Dirt avoided them; they could not be shabby or untidy, and they made him feel grubby and shrunken. Oxford and Cambridge they were, and they stared him into a sort of silly shame when he spoke of his university, Thrigsby, and yet, through his shame there would dart tremors of a fierce feeling of moral superiority. Anyhow, their sister loved him, and never “chipped” him as their young women “chipped” them. There was never any sign that their young women took them seriously.

“I will write,” said Cathleen. “This year won’t seem so long. I couldn’t be certain, last year.”

“Are you certain now?”

“Oh, René!”

This time the enchantment was full on them, raced through them, alarmed them. They moved a little apart.

“Let’s talk sense,” said he. “I want to marry you.”

“Oh, yes.”

“They won’t let me, you know. I’ve got my own way to make. In three years you’ll be twenty-one. I shall probably have to stay in Thrigsby because I can make a living there, but I’ll get to London as soon as I can. You wouldn’t like Thrigsby.”

“Anywhere with you.”

“The people there aren’t your sort. My own people won’t like my marrying so young. I’ve got rotten uncles and aunts backing me because they think I’m clever. I should have been in business long ago if it hadn’t been for them. My brother’s in a shipping office——”

“What did your father do?”

He shifted uneasily on that. The formula seemed empty and a little vulgar, somehow grimy, to present to her. He answered:

“He drank whisky and smoked cigarettes.”

“Oh! I’m sorry.”

Almost imperceptibly she shrank away from him, but he saw it.

“You may as well know. We’re no great shakes. My old Aunt Janet talks of the great people she has known, but my mother’s just a Thrigsby ‘widow’ living in a thirty-pound-a-year house in an ex-genteel part of the town. There are lots of women like her in Thrigsby. You live in one of those streets and nothing seems to happen. Then you hear that the lady at No. 53 isn’t married to her husband, or that Mr. Twemlow of 25 has run away from his wife and four children. We lived at 49 Axon Street when my father disappeared. We live at 166 Hog Lane West now. We’ve gone up in the world since my brother began to earn money.”

He had talked himself into a gloom. The smoke of Thrigsby seemed to smirch the glade.

“Poor old thing!” said Cathleen. “I don’t see that it matters much. You’re you, just the same. We live in a house called Roseneath. It’s in Putney, but we call it London. Father makes a lot of money, and is a recorder and all the rest of it, but we aren’t anything in particular. We turn up our noses at a lot of people, but there are lots more people who turn up their noses at us. You’d laugh if you could see how savage it makes Edith and Rachel sometimes when they grovel for invitations and don’t get them. And it was wonderful what a difference it made when Basil got his blue at Cambridge. All Putney——”

She threw out her hands to indicate the extent of her brother’s triumph. Then, realizing how far their talk had taken them from the sweet employment which was their habit, she crept nearer.

“If I thought all that nonsense was going to upset you, and hang about you while we’re waiting, I’d run away with you to-morrow.”

“Oh, my darling!” cried he, overcome by this recklessness and proof of the seriousness of her intentions. They sat with hands clasped, gazing into each other’s eyes in a charmed happiness.

“Forever and ever,” said René.

“Forever and ever,” cried she. “It isn’t many people who find the real thing in the first.”

He glowed.

“Oh! we must never spoil it.”

Then they lay side by side with the volume of love poems between them, and he read aloud their favorites.

They became very sorrowful as they realized that the last moments of their golden days were running out, and they held each other close in a long shy embrace, and they kissed each other fearfully, and Cathleen could not keep back her tears.

“You will write to me?”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“Good-by, my dear, good-by.”

So reluctantly, with dragging steps, they walked out of their glade and into the path leading to the great house. At the last turn they embraced again, and parted quickly on a sudden crackling in the woods. They saw nothing, but they walked on more swiftly, in a silence more full of fear than of love.

At the garden gate they were met by Mr. Bentley, Cathleen’s father. To René he loomed very large, and he felt a sickening internal disturbance as he saw that his presence was ignored.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” said Mr. Bentley.

“I’ve been a walk.”

“Your mother wants you.”

“At once?”

“She wanted you an hour ago.”

Cathleen sped away.

Disconcertingly René knew that her father’s whole attention was concentrated upon him, though the lawyer’s little cunning eyes were not looking at him. They both stood still, with the silence between them growing colder and colder. René hotly imagined himself saying:

“Sir, I love your daughter and she loves me. I am poor but able. I have won many prizes at school, and in the Faculty of Economics and Commercial Science in the University of Thrigsby. I am young, sir, but——”

When at last he opened his lips he said:

“We—we’ve been a walk.”

“So I perceive.”

“The woods are very beautiful at this time of year.”

The silence froze.

“Are you staying long?” This came at length in a snappy, cross-examining voice.

“I go to-morrow.”

René was overwhelmed with the grubby shrunk feeling. It seemed so easy for these people to mount the high horse of their social superiority.

“Will you kindly tell your aunt that we are expecting her to dinner the day after to-morrow?”

With that Mr. Bentley rolled in at the garden gate (he was a fat little man) and closed it, though he knew that René’s way lay through the garden.

Raging, the young man walked the necessitated extra mile, infuriated and chilled by two questions: Had Cathleen removed the bracken from her hair? and Was that meeting by the gate accident or design?

. . . . . .

That night he asked his Aunt Janet about his father. She dodged his inquiries, and he could get nothing from her but this:

“I admire your mother more than I can say. She married a bad Fourmy, and that’s as bad as you can get. Poor, too. I was glad when that little money came to her.”

He gave her Mr. Bentley’s message, and she said:

“You mustn’t let their way of living go upsetting you. It’s just money. You’ve got to fill the gap between you with more than that.”

“With what?”

“You’ll find that out.”

Did she know of his love? Was she warning him? Did she approve? Did she think him worthy? How could people survive love and become old and dull? All these and more questions buzzed about him as he lay in bed. He brushed them all aside with the cry, “Oh, but I love her!” And, being young and full of health, he was soon asleep, though a blank tossing night would have more pleased him and his mood.

[II
166 HOG LANE WEST]

The homeward journey was by no means so agreeable.

EVERY year since he had been a small boy, as the carriage rounded the crag which blots the lake out of sight, René had been moved to tears. Happiness and brightness were left behind, and every moment brought him nearer to dullness and dark streets and uncomprehending minds. And now, as he rounded the crag, Cathleen appeared on the summit, just too late to meet him or to come within earshot. She was wearing a blue sunbonnet, and she snatched it from her head and waved it until he was out of sight. He turned and watched her and tears came, and he could hardly choke back his sobs, and hoped miserably that the driver of his fly was not aware of his unmanliness.

In the train he tried to tell himself that he was taking back the brightness of his love to Thrigsby, but as he came nearer, more and more powerfully did it seem to reach out to crush his love. By the time he was out in the Albert Station, he had reached a depression not to be broken even by the excitement of seeing again the familiar sights, the trams, the black river, the Collegiate Church, the dark warehouses, the school where he had spent so many dazed, busy, monotonous years, the statue of the Prince Consort, the yellow timber-yards by the canal, the brilliant greengrocer’s shop at the corner of Kite Street, the council school where he had begun his education, the dirty brick streets among which his whole youth had been spent. Only some horrid disaster could have relieved him. Even up to the moment when the door opened he hoped almost desperately to find some difference in his home.

The erratic servant came to the door. She had a black smudge across her cheek, and her hair was tousled. She gave him no greeting.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and as she turned he saw that one of her shoes was split down the heel and had frayed her stocking into what was known in the family as a “potato.”

He heaved his bag into the lobby and passed along to the dining-room, where he found his mother. She was, as he knew she would be, doing crochet-work. He kissed her.

“How brown you are!” she said.

“It’s been wonderful weather. Aunt Janet sent you some shortbread and some knitted things.”

“I wish she wouldn’t. She can’t knit, and she’s forgotten how old you are, and makes things as if you were still children. But she’s very good to us. I don’t know what I should have done without her.”

“She said she admired you more than she can say.”

“I’ve done my best for you.”

“She said you married a bad Fourmy.”

“I wish she hadn’t said that.”

René responded to his mother’s embarrassment, but he could not spare her.

“Is that true. Was my father a bad man?”

“He was a gentleman. The Fourmys are proud, clever people. They think they are always right, and they want everything their own way. That is all very well if you have money. But, without it— But why talk of it? It’s all done.”

“Did you love my father?”

Mrs. Fourmy brought her hands down into her lap and stopped plying her needle.

“What’s come to you, René?”

He longed to tell his mother that he too loved, and could therefore understand, but his question had so disarmed her, her eyes looked so frightened, so expectant of hurt, that he could not continue.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s just queer, coming back. One can feel all sorts of things in the house, and——”

“You are like your father in many ways.” And she resumed her crochet.

That alarmed him. Like his father? He felt indignant and uncomfortably self-conscious. He contrasted his hitherto exemplary and successful career with those mean memories—lying abed, whisky and cigarettes. He began to protest:

“But he——”

“He was always talking about feeling things the same as you. There was a lot of good in your father though his own people would never admit it, and mine could never see it—— But it’s no good talking. It’s all done.”

“He left you.”

“A boy like you can’t judge a man.”

“Oh, but I know.”

“You can’t get anything for the like of that out of books. There’s some men can stay with a woman and some can’t, and which you’ll be you’ll know when you come to it.”

René stared at his mother. She looked very small, sitting there by the empty fireplace. She seemed to be talking to him from a great distance away, from beyond the Something which he had always felt to be in life. In the glade in Scotland he had thought to have surmounted it, but now, when he thought of it, that had already dwindled away and become as small and rounded as that memory of his father which had haunted him in his waiting. Cathleen seemed so remote that he was alarmed. The foundations of omnipotent everlasting love were undermined! Worst of all, he knew that it had become impossible to talk of her. Not even her image in his mind could dwell in that house. And his mother—his mother was saying horrible, worldly things in a thin, weary voice. In fierce rebellion his innocence rose up against her. It was impossible for him to admit a fall from grace. Either you loved or you did not. If you loved, it was forever. If you did not, then you were damned past all hope; at least you were, if you were a man. All women were Dulcineas to this Quixote.

So moved was he, so distressed, that he lost the sequence of his thoughts, and they pursued their careers in his head regardless of his comfort or immediate needs. He was left inarticulate.

“You’ll catch all the flies in the house in your mouth if you don’t close it,” said his mother.

He snapped his teeth together, and said fiercely:

“All the same, if I treated a woman as my father treated you, I’d shoot myself.”

“Absurd you are. A man needs a fair conceit of himself to do that. And can’t a woman learn to have a life of her own?”

“Women——” began René, but his mother cut him short in a soothing voice that was almost a caress:

“Keep that for the young ones, my dear. I’m too old to be told what women are and are not, or to care. Shall we have the shortbread for tea? George is to be in with Elsie.”

“Who’s Elsie?”

“Didn’t I tell you? George is going to be married.”

“George is?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Fourmy gave a chuckle that for so tiny a woman was surprisingly large. “Yes, George has been almost as good at falling in love as you.”

That bowled René middle-stump, and he went out to bring in his bag and unpack the shortbread and the Shetland jacket he had bought in Inverness for his mother.

She tried it on and preened herself in it.

“Smart I am. You’re a kind boy to me. Do you remember how you two boys used to say when you were grown up you would be rich and take me to my old home in Wiltshire? George won’t, now he’s going to be married.”

“But I will,” said René. “When I’ve saved money and can retire, we’ll go and live together.”

“I don’t know. It’s easy to forget old women.”

“Oh, come! A man doesn’t forget his mother.”

“Doesn’t he?”

“And old? You’re not old.”

“I’ve been old since before you were born.”

René gazed down at his mother and marveled at her in painful astonishment. In her little quiet voice she was saying things that stabbed into him, or, hardly stabbing, abraded and bruised him. And suddenly he began almost to perceive that her life was not tranquil, not the smooth pale flowing he had imagined it to be. He stared down at her, and she raised her eyes so that they met his. He dared not even tremble, so fearful was he of betraying his divination and her eyes flashed a warning, and his mind seized triumphantly upon its first intellectual mastery of emotion, and he said to himself:

“There are certain feelings and currents of sympathy which can only dwell in silence.”

Then he laughed:

“You must have been pretty when you were a girl.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Fourmy, taking up her crochet, “my hair was lovely.”

With that she rose and busied herself with preparing tea, taking out the caddy in which the party brand was kept, and her best table-center and the ornaments which were reserved for the few elegant occasions the household could admit.

“I got a pair of sleeve-links for George,” said René. “Silver and agate. When’s he going to be married? They might do for a wedding present as well.”

“They are going to be married at once. They’ve got to be.”

“I say!” He spun round on that. “I say. Need you have told me? When she’s coming here and all!”

But Mrs. Fourmy was remorseless. She said with biting coldness:

“When George was a little boy, he found out when I was married and reckoned up from that to the day when he was born, and he let me know that he knew. He told you too.”

“Yes. He told me. How did you know?”

“You looked at me all one Sunday afternoon with your big eyes.”

“Oh, mother!”

“There they are. George has forgotten the key. Will you go to the door? Polly has chosen to-day to clean the kitchen out. She would. She isn’t fit to be seen.”

René went to the door.

“Hullo! old man!”—René hated to be called “old man”—“Hullo! Got back?”

“Only just.”

“This is Elsie—Elsie Sherman. Mother’s told you?”

Elsie was pretty, as tall as René, and just a shade taller than George. She took the hand René held out, and squeezed it warmly.

“So you’re the wonderful brother?”

“Yes. The—— Yes, I’m George’s brother. You—you can take your things off in mother’s room if you like.”

“Or mine,” said George.

“Don’t be silly. I couldn’t,” said Elsie, with a giggle that made René hate her. She ran upstairs and George patted his brother on the shoulder.

“Well? Still good enough for us? What do you think of her?”

“She’s pretty.”

“When you know her a bit you’ll want to go and do likewise, my son.”

Standing there huddled with his brother in the narrow lobby that seemed all coats and umbrellas, René remembered with a horrible vividness his brother coming to his bed and telling him how his father and mother were married on such a day and how, five months later, he, George, was born. And he remembered how he burst into tears, and when George asked him what he was howling for, he had said: “They didn’t want you,” a view of the matter to which George had remained insensible. He saw now that the revelation had broken the young intimacy that had always been between them. He said:

“Mother’s got out her best center for you.”

“Good old mother!” replied George. Then he raised his voice and bawled:

“Elsie!”

“Coming!”

She came running downstairs. George caught and kissed her, and as they went along the passage René wondered how it could be possible for one extra person to make the house seem overfull.

It was certainly a party. Mrs. Fourmy set the note, a ceremonious expansiveness in opening up the family to its new member. René’s achievements were paraded, and the letter written by his headmaster, which had finally decided the family that he was too good for commerce, was produced and read aloud. George’s virtues as a son were extolled and punctuated with his protest:

“I say, mother, draw it mild.”

And Elsie’s rather too fervent:

“Of course I know I’m very lucky.”

They played bridge and René lost fourpence, because he played with his mother, who never could remember to suit her declarations to her score, or to return her partner’s lead, and had no other notion of play than to make her aces while she could.

Elsie talked of her family, especially of a rich uncle she had who kept a timber yard and of a cousin who was a Wesleyan minister. Of her own immediate relations she spoke affectionately but little. Altogether she was so anxious to please that René forgot his first distasteful impression and set himself to make her laugh. She was grateful to him for that. The evening would not have been a success for her without abundant laughter, and George’s jokes were just a little heavy. Also she seemed to be slightly afraid of him, as though in all her responses to him were a small risk, rather more, at any rate, than she could always venture to take. She warmed to René, therefore, and between them they kept things lively.

In a silence while George was dealing—for he took his bridge very seriously—René hummed a bar or two of a piece called Blumenlied, which he had been taught to play as a boy when he worked off the set of music lessons George had begun and relinquished.

“Oh, Blumenlied!” cried Elsie; “I adore that,” and she took up the air.

“You’ve got a pretty voice,” said René.

“Have I? I do sing sometimes.”

“Sings?” said George. “I should think so. The family’s a concert party. Everything from the human voice to a piccolo.”

They finished the rubber and adjourned to the parlor, where Mrs. Fourmy drew sweet buzzing notes from the little old piano that seemed to have come into the world at the same time as herself and to have shared her experience. She knew all its tricks and could dodge its defects, and when she played faded songs that had had their day, and Elsie sang them, René was melted into a mood of loving kindness and was full of gratitude to the two women, and wished only for their happiness—an eternity of such happiness as they were giving him now.

He kissed Elsie when she said good-by. She lived only a few streets away, and George asked him to sit up for him. When the couple were gone:

“Well?” said Mrs. Fourmy, more to the fireplace than to her son.

“She’s too good for George.” René thought with dislike of his brother, sitting with his eyes half-closed, taking a too voluptuous delight in the music and showing a too proprietary pride in the singer.

“She suits him,” rejoined his mother. “George wants to settle down. So does she. Most people are like that. They settle down, and they think nothing else can happen to them. You’re not like that.”

“I don’t know. To settle down——”

“Love songs. You think it’s all love songs. They think it’s all love songs, or they try to. Warm and comfortable. Oh, but I’ve seen it too often.”

“Why do you keep hinting at things, mother?”

“I wasn’t hinting. I know, and you will know, and they never will. I could have screamed sometimes tonight.”

“I thought you liked her.”

“Like? Oh, René, boy, if only you’d grow up and be some use to me!”

“I want to be.”

“I know that, and it’s something.”

“Are you hurt because they——?”

“I’ve been a foolish woman. I’ve been seeing more hope for George than there ever was.”

She took up the box of matches from the chimney-piece and stood fingering it. He hoped she would say more, but nothing came. The disconcerting sense of the otherness of his mother’s world played about him, and he felt helpless and rather fatuous.

“Bed’s the best place for me,” she said. “You don’t know how I’ve been dreading this evening. And it’s gone off very well, very well. Good night, my dear. I’m glad you came home to-day.”

She astonished him by kissing him on both cheeks, for ordinarily she held up her face and he stooped and pecked at it. To-night there was a kind of suspension of the habits of the household.

He heard her go upstairs, and with surprising celerity get into bed. Then he sat alone waiting in the dim, jaded dining-room, with the enormous table designed for a hospitality which was never given, and the corner cupboard which had been in all the houses the family had inhabited, and the hanging smoker’s cabinet over the mantelpiece which was used as a medicine chest, and the absurd knick-knacks his father had collected, and the plaques his father had painted with apples and cherry-blossom and bulrushes. There was so much in the room that spoke of his father. The whisky and the boxes of cigarettes used to be kept in the corner cupboard. On the table he had helped his father to make the screen out of old Christmas numbers and colored plates of the Graphic and Illustrated London News, which had given him employment during the whole of one winter. And he was stirred by the memory of the emotions that must have been behind his mother’s strange incoherence, and he told himself that she had suffered, and that his father was to blame for it all and could meet with no fate too harsh.

George returned, whistling.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

“Anything you like,” replied René.

“You won’t mind my putting it bluntly?”

“No.”

“Well, you see how it is. I’ve got a rise, but Elsie hasn’t a stiver, and we shall only have enough to pull through on. My money goes out of this house. You’ve had a soft time up to now; you can’t go on. If you want to stay in the house you’ll have to buckle to and earn some money, or move to another, or lodgings; but even in the cheapest lodgings it would be a squeeze with mother’s little bit.”

“I see. But I’ve got another year.”

“Can’t you teach someone something? You’ve been learning long enough.”

“I might. I see I must do something. When are you going to be married?”

“Next month. What are you staring at?”

“Was I staring?”

“When you were a kid I used to hit you for staring at me like that, and, by God, I’d like to do it now. Elsie said, she said: ‘Your brother’s got all his feelings just under his skin.’ Why don’t you say something?”

George rose, went to the corner cupboard and took out a bottle of whisky. The gesture, the lift of the shoulder, the cock of the back of the head, reminded René irresistibly of his father. George turned.

“Why can’t you stop staring? I’m going to be married. I’m no different. There’s nothing very startling in that, is there?”

“The whole thing seems to me so——”

He stopped, staring more wildly. The word he suppressed was greedy, and it was most painfully explanatory.

“So what?”

“I mean—I liked her. She seems a good sort.”

“No nonsense about Elsie.”

“Doesn’t it make you understand mother more?”

“Mother? She’s a queer little devil. Didn’t speak to me for a fortnight after I told her, and she took to going to church again. She’s a rum ’un, is mother. I believe she’d do anything if it wasn’t she’s so darned fond of you.”

“Oh, you think it’s me?”

“If it wasn’t for you she’d have chucked the whole thing long ago and gone right off into a convent or something. She doesn’t like the money part of it being put off on to you. Really, I don’t think she minded anything else. She knows what life is, mother does.”

“How will you live?”

“Oh, a snug little house. Her father’ll give us furniture. He’s an old sport, he is. Keeps the Denmark, you know, in Upper Kite Street. ’Normous family. Delighted when the girls go off. Elsie worked in a shop. No more work for Elsie.”

“You’re pleased with yourself, then?”

“I’m going to be married; that’s good enough for any man. Married and settled down. That’s life.”

“Is it?” René found George entirely absurd, and he laughed.

“Oh, well,” he added, “mother and I will find a way. Good night.”

“Good night,” replied George. “Go and dream of your books and your swells. My Elsie’ll beat all their women. I know those swell ladies. Good night.”

. . . . . .

Upstairs, in his little room, René took pen, ink, and paper, and wrote to Cathleen:

“This house is exactly like thirty-one other houses. Parlor, kitchen, dining-room, three bedrooms above them. That’s all. And they are all full of grubby little lives and the material things they don’t express themselves in. Do you see what I mean? Coming straight from you, from our woods, from the tall bracken and the heather, I feel trapped. What I miss, I think, is graciousness. Oh, yes! That is the word. All the charming ways you have. The easy courtesies with which you smooth over any roughnesses, any lack of sympathy, so that, even among uncongenial people, silence is not devastating. And between you and me silence can be so beautiful, so full of something more melodious than sound. But here, if there is silence, little uglinesses creep out of dark corners and fill it. They do not seem to know the difference between silence and emptiness. My mother has almost frightened me. I can’t tell you. Something terrible and yet silly has happened. I don’t understand. Some things hurt my feelings so that I can never understand them. But my mother was wonderful all the same, and different, so different that I was not at all surprised at her. I suppose I knew it all along. She has suffered as women must not, must not, must not suffer, as I will never let you suffer. I cannot write love words to you. I can only tell you that I am building up my life toward you. I have changed. It all seems enormously serious suddenly. A lot that we have had seems silly. I want to explain to you. It is terrible that I can’t see you again for a whole year, terrible, terrible. But I love you. I have begun to see what love is, what a man can be to a woman if he does not drag her down to his own level. Lovers, I think, should have something wonderful, something that should illuminate everything so that even the darkest places and happenings are bearable. Oh, you see what I mean. I am trying to bring it all, what I feel, to you. You must understand. This year is different from last, more serious, more beautiful. Think what it will be when we are ready to be together. When I think of it I am almost afraid. No one is ever ready for that, so holy is love. Holy! Holy! Holy! A little boy’s voice in a church singing that expresses it as nothing else can. I have to begin to earn my living.”

He had got so far with his pen racing along in the wake of his thoughts when his mother knocked at his door:

“Do go to bed, René, dear. You’re not working already?”

“No, mother. I wasn’t working.”

“Then you mustn’t stay up, wasting the gas and all.”

[III
GEORGE MARRIED]

’Tis an evil lot, and yet

Let us make the best of it;

If love can live when pleasure dies

We two will love, till in our eyes

This heart’s Hell seem paradise.

GEORGE married and settled in the newly developed region behind Hog Lane West. Before he went, he spent a whole evening with his mother and brother making a list of his possessions, and arguing with them when they claimed a chair or a piece of china he had bought as family property. They had been purchased with his money, and they had only enjoyed a right of user.—(His firm had been through protracted litigation in the Chancery Courts, and he was up in legal phrases.)—They must have known that sooner or later he would have a house of his own. The procuring of a wife seemed to have aggravated George’s acquisitive sense. He was exceedingly conscious of the extension of his personality and was groping round for material things wherewith to fortify it. More and more he treated his brother with condescension, and was continually hinting at the things marriage did for a man. He had not been so grossly jubilant since his first encounter with woman, whereof he had given René a full and rapturous account. René had been more able to understand that excitement than this. To George the two adventures were apparently of the same order; to René they were profoundly different, and his brother’s boisterousness induced misery in him. What his mother made of it all, he could not discover. All day long, and often late at night she was crocheting at a bed-quilt which she was anxious to have finished against the wedding. The savage communicativeness which had so disturbed René on the night of his home-coming was succeeded by silence and silly chatter, and she was constantly and mysteriously busy at George’s house or with Elsie at the shops.

Cathleen Bentley had written:

“How can you have such a brother? But he is great fun. Tell me more. And I adore your mother. If only we could be engaged, I would come and stay with you.”

René described:

“George keeps hinting at Things in marriage. He is rather like a man dreaming of good food, a series of meals magically prepared and set before him so that he does not need to rise. One meal is cleared away and another appears. I find it hard to grasp. I imagine his life otherwise must be dull, though he never seems to mind that. He is what you call Steady; has been in the same office since he was sixteen, and will go on in it until he is sixty and past work. Perhaps all his desire and hope go into this adventure. Perhaps he feels that nothing lies beyond it, and is therefore cramming everything into it. Certainly he is not allowing himself room to develop anything out of it. There’s a sort of desperation in him. Now or never. After all, I suppose he’s getting what he wants, but there is a heat in it which blisters me. That must be because I have known a cool, sweet love with you. How did it happen? You must try to understand, look down into the lives of people on a lower level than your own. We have no organized pleasures, at least not enough of them, and we are really thrown back on the man and maiden business, casual for the most part. We feel the grubbiness of it, but they don’t. It’s fire and warmth to them. Primitive, isn’t it? Like savages rubbing two sticks together. It doesn’t leave much room for affection or charm. It has to be raw or they can’t believe in it, inarticulate as they are, and as I am too often. We can’t make material existence a starting-point as you more favored ones can do if you choose. Love simply doesn’t have a chance with us. I think you could bring a wonderful happiness into my mother’s life. I keep wanting to tell her about you, and one of these days I shall. Will you send her some flowers from your garden? We have a backyard only with five privet bushes growing round an old bicycle shed. . . .”

Writing to Cathleen was his safety-valve. He could find George amusing when he had written to her, and when he had a letter from her he could almost salute his brother as a fellow-lover.

The wedding was a noble piece of work. It was at St. Clement’s in Upper Kite Street, not a hundred yards away from the Denmark, where there was a rousing breakfast to which Mr. Sherman had invited his cronies and patrons. There were ponderous jokes about perambulators, and George, in an excited little speech, said that when he had a house large enough to accommodate all his family, he would be able to invite those friends who had come to see him and his Elsie married. Two or three old women wept; rice, confetti, and slippers were thrown after the happy pair as they drove off for their honeymoon, and in the afternoon the party went by train to Cheadley Edge and visited the caves, and wandered in the woods, and ate an enormous high tea at Yarker’s, the farmhouse which devoted one of its meadows to cocoanut-shies and roundabouts, and its garden to tea-parties. It was all good, vulgar, noisy fun, and René was caught in a series of flirtations with Elsie’s sisters and their friends. He kept finding their hands in his as they swung or walked or sat at tea, and they seemed to enter into a competition to be isolated with him in the woods or the caves, but not one of them established an exclusive right to him for the day, and by the return in the evening the party was split up into couples and he found himself thrown with his mother, who had throughout shown a stiff front to pleasantries and was exhausted by jollifications which for her had not been jolly.

Sitting by her side in the tram as they drove from the station, René found himself dreading the return to Hog Lane West. George had been an alien, but a convenient buffer between them. Now they had to establish a new order of living. George’s absence was an actuality with which they had to deal more vigorously than with his presence. They left his room empty. Neither had any use for it. The dining-room had been the living-room of the family. Without George, René and his mother found themselves relapsing into oppressive silences, and very soon he took to leaving her in the evenings, and going up to his bedroom and his books and his work.

He was singularly friendless. His schoolmates had gone into offices and regarded with strange and rather alarmed eyes his continued pursuit of academic courses, and in his first years at the university he had undergone a violent spasm of mental growth which had left him shy and diffident, resentful of anything that seemed like intrusion upon his brooding, and impatient of surface relationships and the too easy friendliness which he saw current on all sides. Also he was chafed by his position of semi-dependence upon his relations, and rather scared by the possibility of not doing well enough in his examinations to justify what was constantly being impressed upon him as his exceptional opportunity. Therefore he worked on a time-table in term and out of it, never less than nine hours a day; morning, afternoon, and evening; and rather harder in vacation than in term. He had no smallest notion what it was all for. He had an unusual faculty for learning things and arrangements of ideas, and could always answer examination questions lucidly, and had so small a conceit of himself that his work was never spoiled by a nervous anxiety to excel nor interfered with by the emotionalism of the clever young. He had a sound, all-round ability, never expected anything to be difficult, and could quickly master the elements of any study he took up. When that study led away from practical considerations he was apt to lose interest in it. He had stopped short of philosophy and pure mathematics, and the astuteness of his headmaster had led him in his last year at school to specialize in history and economics. When he was sent up for a scholarship at Cambridge, he failed because the beauty of the Backs had so stirred his rather sluggish emotions as to cause him temporarily to lose his lucidity and shrewdness in dealing with examination questions, so that he wrote rather at large—thoroughly enjoying himself—than with particular reference to the matter in hand. However, he had already won a County Council Scholarship, and with this he entered Thrigsby University. There he had done well and had picked up exhibitions and bursaries, striving for success not so much because he wanted it, as because it was expected of him.

He lived now in a strange disquietude, reading his set books, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall, Cannan, Jevons, various works by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, amusing himself with the advanced diagrammatic economists, and grinding away at his special subject, Coöperation, from the Rochdale pioneers to the European “movement.” All this he did mechanically. His brain had been set going in a certain direction by amiable instructors whom he had never seen any reason to doubt, and it was pleasant to let it go on so moving toward that examination which was to be a gate leading to a profession higher than the life of commerce from which he had been reclaimed.

So far, so good; but George’s marriage had caused a stir-about in him. In the first place, it posed a domestic problem in economics that could not be solved on paper, and in the second it had roused him to moral revolt. He could not forget his affection for George. They had been great companions as little boys. He himself was in love, knew that love was sweet, and could not away with the fact that George’s marriage was to some extent a denial of all he had learned and gained in his own hours of tenderness. He hated to resist the idea that George was perfectly happy, but he could not help himself. His was no literary enthusiasm for romance and noble love. He had read very few romances, and of poetry he knew no more than the anthology to which Cathleen had introduced him. On the whole, he preferred comfort above all things, and George made him uncomfortable, set stirring in him an idealism, a fervor, which so swelled in him as to make him, even in his outpourings to his beloved, incapable of stringing his ideas together. Literary persons can gain a great deal of relief by the mere reiteration of the words “I love you,” with variations. Words were to René only implements, painfully inadequate, for digging out the fineness which he had begun to perceive behind his feelings. He could not forgive George for being content with mere feelings undisciplined and unrefined. He hoped innocently that the honeymoon would bring some revelation, but when bride and bridegroom returned they were more distressing than ever. They had lost their shyness. That was all. George was fatly, complacently “settled down,” and could never leave his wife alone for half an hour on end, but must be always touching her, teasing her, or openly caressing her, and she seemed to like it and to make a parade of his attentions.

René would come away boiling from an evening spent at their house, which they had called The Nest, and he would sit, either cooling himself with his large books, or heightening his fury with letters to Cathleen, now returned to Putney, which is called London. He never revised what he wrote. He had rather forgotten the charm of his boyish love-making, and had lost the young trick of visualizing his fair, needing more from her than her beauty, and now used her as an outlet, assuming in her a sympathy which neither her past conduct nor her letters revealed. The mere fact of writing was enough, and his letters became intimate and self-revelatory, a kind of running, general confession. Sometimes they were of enormous length, and the envelopes he sent away were bulky and bulging.

One night he stopped in the middle of a letter, turned back and read, realizing that he had laid bare the whole of his brother’s sexual life so far as he knew it. He was filled with a thick horror, tore the letter up, and went down to his mother to escape from the train of thought which had led to such indiscretion and betrayal. He did not escape, but found himself plunged in confession:

“Mother, I’m in love.”

“Well, I never! You’re not going to be married now?”

“No. It’s hopeless. She’s rich. At least her father is.”

“So that’s why you look so queerly at Elsie. You can’t expect them to be all alike.”

“It isn’t only that. Only I can’t get away from certain things.”

“What things?”