He stopped. He saw that his mother was mopping at her eyes and her hand was fumbling at the tablecloth, and she seemed very old and pitiful to him then, and he knew that he must not hurt her. His father seemed not to have heard him and went on sucking at his pipe, which he smoked with great skill so that the blue smoke only came from the bowl and his mouth at long intervals. He looked all beard and spectacles, impersonal and unexpressive, sitting there by the fireplace, and yet there was humour in his very bulk. Serge felt that he had made an error in tactics, a blunder in manners. These people, his father and mother, were not to be taken by assault. They had ramparts and bulwarks against all comers, perhaps against each other, and their inmost lives were not to be laid bare for the first clamorous belligerent. He realised that his mother’s tears were defensive weapons—a shower of Greek fire and boiling pitch. They were very effective, and they drove Serge back blistered and wounded, but also they roused the devil of obstinacy in him and made him resolved to stay in the queer dark house so full of shadows and to fight with all his might against its oppressive atmosphere, and to win his way through to the hearts of the old woman, his mother, and the bulky, silent, bearded man, his father.
He leaned forward and took his mother’s hand and fondled it. He squeezed it like a lover, and gave a funny little laugh deep down in his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She gave his hand a convulsive, sudden little pressure, and he began to talk about himself and his adventures. How he had wandered in America and worked his way across to Cape Town and gone up-country hunting elephants; and how he had fought in the Zulu War and taught Dutch girls English on a Boer farm, done anything and everything—prospected for gold, diamonds; cheated and been cheated; thrashed and been thrashed; and as he told the smoke came faster from his father’s bowl and pipe, and at last he told how he had taken to painting pictures for a living, because he was starving in Kimberley, and how he made enough money to pay his passage home, and came because he wanted to see green England again and the people with whom he had been happy as a boy.
“Did you get the pictures I sent you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Francis. “I thought some of them very good.”
“I’m glad of that. I don’t know much about it, but they said out there the colour was fine. One or two were sent to London and a picture swell there wrote to me about them.”
Mrs. Folyat said she thought she would like to finish her book before she went to bed, gathered her shawl about her shoulders, told them not to be late, gave Serge her cheek to kiss, and wandered from the room. Serge opened the door and closed it after her.
Francis laid down his pipe. He grunted once or twice and then leaned forward in his chair and said:
“I don’t think I realised before that my children are grown men and women. It makes a difference. One loses the right to interfere, if one ever had any. What are you going to do?”