Gilbert Cannan

“ Between quarreling and laughing they had spent all their days, laughing into quarrels, quarreling into tears, and out of them again laughing: the happy life of the poor, the workers, the thoughtless, whom no care could subdue, no joy uplift. What a relief that life had been to him when he had turned from that other life, where all his qualities were exploited and thought and power of expression were used only to sneak advantages, and even love and wedded happiness were valued only as possessions! How it had stripped him of all arrogance and cupidity of mind! ”

“ He saw how little love needs consciousness, and how desperately men stand in need of it. Else are they consumed in love, and never for a moment do their lives take form and color before they sink to dust again, not wholly created before they are destroyed. Ideas of Kilner’s came rushing back to René’s mind, his description of his vision, the slow insistence on being given expression and form in paint, his own helplessness against the tyranny of what his eyes had seen and his imagination mastered. ”

“ Everywhere such coarseness, such greed, such meanness, such conceit. Yet to nurse that disgust is to feel the joy fade away, to hear the song of it die down. There is no justice then, no kindness, and the world is so horrible that the soul takes refuge in a sorry silence. Youth is then a heated torment from which there is no escape, but in a kind of death that brings decay and poisons love. ”

“ Relieved from the strain and obsession of his examination, he had discovered the wonderful pleasure to be got from the mere act of living, from seeing the world freshly every morning, from passing through the day and feeling it slip away from him without his having to demand of it any definite profit in knowledge or money earned. It was a new delight with him just to watch people, a joy that had remained with him from his outburst by the tulips, to sit and gaze at flowers, trees, the sky, water. ”

“ The sting of indignation pricked René into brutality. He had made his effort to reclaim his mother from his father, and failed. He cried:
“What did he do?”
“What do men do when dullness creeps over them and they are mortified with failure?”
There was a note of vengeance in her tone, exasperation perhaps, a savage determination to set abominations before the fatuous innocence of her son. She succeeded. He was beset with horrors and a sick repulsion from his mother who could allow, accept, and seem to rejoice in such contamination. ”

“ You have something in you that you must keep alive. Let the others make the world hideous and vulgar and untidy. It is not your affair. If they won’t or can’t love what you love, then they are not for you and you are not for them. Don’t you think?”
René could find nothing to say. He found it so absorbing to watch Kilner, to listen to his monologue delivered in a voice of wonderful sweetness that seemed always to be trembling into laughter. The zest, the humor of the man thrilled through him, and made him feel that all his life was full of promise, rich and ripe with romance. ”

“ The word “intrusion” brought Cathleen to the crux of her difficulty. She saw, with some exaggeration, that this was her condition, and the quality of her affection, that she had been hungering for possession of her lover with no intrusion from the past.
“O Lotta,” she said, “we are fools to set our faces against what cannot be altered. I thought I had broken away from narrow conventions, but I had only rid myself of the names of things, not of the things themselves, the silly pretense that people wake for a moment out of a sleep in which nothing can happen, love and go to sleep again. ”

“ I will not be used for a creation in which I know no joy. I will not cloak brute creation with a seeming joy distilled by mind and time and custom. I will not be used up and broken and cover indecency with false decency, nor be comforted with the life that has stolen my own. My life shall give life, and for the giving have only the more to give. ”

“ Ah! but the days in Scotland, the graciousness and the fun that those other people knew; the sweetness of waiting upon Cathleen’s coming; her coming, the hours of tenderness and pure laughter, and her warm comradeship and the zest of the emotions they could rouse in each other and turn to a golden glee! But that was all done, and there was now only poverty and disgrace, and beyond, the sniggering of the men who loved nothing but women and the idea of women. ”

“ Marriage knocks a man to pieces and leaves him to put himself together again. Women are more brutal. They don’t mind if marriage turns out to be no more than a pool of mud. Lord, Lord! a woman will bear a child almost every year of her bearing life and be no more than a little girl at the end of it, a prying, stealthy-minded little girl.”
René was enraged and shocked, but excited too, intellectually. He turned to his father and said:
“Father, I want to know, I must know, how you could come back to my mother.”
“That,” said Mr. Fourmy, “is what I am still asking myself.” ”

“ The fun of watching a woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. ”

“ After a long silence, René said:
“I have had nothing in my life but foolishness.”
“There’s no harm in that,” said Kilner. “It’s bitterness that kills. When shall I see you again?”
“Do you want to?” René was startled into asking.
“Of course. I don’t let a friend slip when I’ve found one.”
And gladly René said:
“A friend. I begin work to-morrow at old Martin’s.”
“There’s a man,” answered Kilner. “I must paint his heavy, happy face. It’s the kind of face there won’t be again. The world’s changing. Man wants but little here below? Never again. We want all there is.” ”

“ Kilner was pacing round the room. He waved his fists in the air.
“Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” he shouted. “Don’t you see that we have created her? Even if you drop the myth and take to evolution, don’t you see that woman has been nothing but the creature, the instrument of reproduction? Don’t you see that man fell in love with her, and with his love slowly humanized her, gave her intelligence, humor, charm?”
“Might it not be,” said René, “that woman was first, and evolved man to do the work so that she might reserve more energy for conception? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Linda was quite excited and started pumping up all sorts of emotions until I asked her how long it was since she had even thought of you. Then she stopped that game. She knows it isn’t any use with me. I once said to her, ‘My dear girl, if you really felt all the emotions you pretend to feel, you’d be dead in a week.’ I never could stand that sort of thing myself. She gets them out of books, you know, and really sometimes it is quite impressive, or would be, if it weren’t so disgustingly false. It is wonderful to feel things, but you can’t feel things all the time and be sane. No one can. ”

“ He would try through Smallman, who was even more exasperating. He seemed to divine that his pupil was groping after some reassurance of human beauty, but he would hint darkly at the difficulties of married life, generalize about the simplicity of human needs, whisper of the revelation of fatherhood, and, just as he had René sitting forward in excited anticipation of the longed-for marvel, he would double and turn aside into the discussion of economic problems, or the unsatisfactory nature of the academic life in Thrigsby. ”

“ He had to explain that to Kilner, who was excited by the idea.
“I never thought of that,” he said. “Yes, by Jove, it’s true. They are hypnotized, every man Jack of them, rich and poor alike. Nothing can shake it off except the individual will. Every artist has to go through that. And your light, my friend, is nothing but the vision of the artist. Only hypnotism, the absolute surrender of the will, could account for the horrible distortions that appear in what they call art, what they call morality, the organization of what they call society. I know what Fourmy means. ”

“ René started, and groped back to the world of the senses. A tall thin figure loomed up in front of him, [Pg 192] and a pale, eager face with a jutting nose and large eyes smiled at him.
“Kilner, my name,” said the owner of it. “I’ve noticed you, walking about in a hungry dream. Down on your luck? So am I. Best of luck in a way. When the world doesn’t want you, it gives you time to look at it and think about it, and discover that it is really good. Otherwise you have to take so much on hearsay, and then of course you are not entitled to have an opinion about it, much less any feeling.” ”

“ Other young men he knew had difficulties with their fathers, but to have a father suddenly materialize out of thin air and step back with exasperating ease into a relationship which a part of his family at least had forgotten, was too critical for the mind to bear. René had been priding himself on the fact that at last he was to be as other young men, a wage-earner, a reputable citizen, a prop to his mother, a credit to his family and his own aspirations. ”

“ He patted his son’s arm so affectionately that René choked and the tears ran down his cheeks.
They walked on, René lurching, until his father took his arm again and led him. There was a moon over them, and as he led, Mr. Fourmy said:
“On a night like this even Thrigsby is beautiful. Lord! How I used to hate the place. But when I had seen things I came to know that it is like any other. There are good men in it and good things, and over all the same slime of meanness and fear that only very few can penetrate. We live in a world of women, boy, and we must make the best of it.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ I fall in love all right and somehow that always complicates things, so then I fall out of love. I can’t love a complicated woman, and I haven’t met an uncomplicated one. They all want to feel more than they do. Play-acting, I call it.”
Kilner came in then. He greeted Kurt morosely, for his clothes showed that he came from the brilliant world, the object of the painter’s particular detestation, and Kurt’s manner might easily be taken for that affability which puts you at your ease and so disconcertingly leaves you there. ”

“ Lotta said:
“I knew you would find what you wanted here. I think all lovers should bring their love to the earth and let the wind know that it is there. How can you love in streets and houses? They drive the sweetness out of it and keep it unnaturally excited. I have seen so much of that. Women especially are so house-conscious. They hate everything in love which threatens their pride of possession and position. They live so jealously that they want jealousy even in their love——”
“Thank you,” said René. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fourmy looked up at the clock, into the fire, round at the corner cupboard. At last she said:
“Well, you are a funny boy.”
“I’m in love all right,” he said; “but I fed as if I’d never like to marry and just go on with you forever and ever. I could find a sort of happiness in just making enough for us to live on.”
His mother came over to him and laid her hands on his shoulders:
“Don’t make trouble for yourself, my dear. Don’t do that. Let things alone. Trouble comes fast enough, and all your plans and thoughts and hopes aren’t enough to deal with them. That’s your father all over. ”

“ LEARNING A TRADE ’Tis my vocation, ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.
FOR some weeks our adventurer divided his time between working in Mr. Martin’s yard and office, studying the map of London, and being driven about the city in a car of instruction with seven or eight other aspirants to the taxi-driving profession. Most of them were depressed and bored, smoked incessantly, and spoke little, but every now and then René would find one to talk to him and take pity on his gentility and give him advice and consolation. ”

“ She received his story in silence. At last she said:
“If you have a friend, it doesn’t matter what he does. All the same, it’s a nuisance.”
“What is?”
“The nuisance is that I’m a woman and you’re a man. Can friendship get over that?”
“Love,” said René, “can master everything. I love you. ”