BOOK ONE LINDA BROCK

[Pg 2]

Ha! Ha!

So you take human nature upon trust?

[Pg 3]

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[Pg 4] 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[Pg 5] 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.

[Pg 6]

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.”

[Pg 7]

“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[Pg 8] 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[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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[Pg 11] 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:

[Pg 12]

“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.

[Pg 13]

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[Pg 14] 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.”

[Pg 15]

“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[Pg 16] 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[Pg 17] 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[Pg 18] 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.”