“Not at all. I’d finished my work. I’m alone. I’m always alone in this house. Have you ever thought how lonely a man can be in his own house? . . . You’ve not? You don’t think? May be you’re wise, though, maybe again, you’re only young. Well, I tell you, a man can be very lonely in his own house, but not many are as lonely as I am. Looking at it purely philosophically it’s something of an achievement—in a negative sort of way. I mean, not many men can have all that nature has provided for a man and get nothing at all out of it. Nearly all men manage to get some pickings for their vanity, but I don’t even get that. I get nothing. . . . So do hundreds of thousands of people. They can’t. But the difference between them and me is that they can pretend and I can’t. Nature’s very wasteful. She produces far more men and women than she wants. Just a few are sound and really alive. The rest are shadows. I’m a shadow. I don’t know what you are. A sort of betwixt and between I should say, just looking at you. The real men make loveliness, and the intelligent shadows have a sort of echo of it and have a sort of reflected life through it. The rest wither away and are dead years and years before they die. What I can’t stand though is their damned cruelty. I can’t expect you to make much of that. I talk like that for hours to old Tibby. She’s the most real person in this house, and the rest of us are sticking to her like leeches. She’s had no life of her own, hasn’t Tibby, and sometimes she will stand and look at me and say, ‘You’re a wonderful talker, man,’ and I’ll say, ‘I’m nothing else, woman.’ Queer people, we are. But we’re all queer in this place to go on living in the darkness and mist of it as we do. I’ve met your father. He’s a comfortable man. It must be very pleasant to have a comfortable man in the house.”
Frederic did his best to follow him in his harangue, and, though he could make very little of it all, he was interested and wanted him to go on. He had never been in a house like it before. Never had he had such a sensation of empty darkness, and he wanted very much to know what was in the rest of the house besides the boy who had spoken to him on the doorstep and Tibby and the cat. And what did they all do when old Lawrie got drunk?
The boy Bennett came into the room, walked across to the book-shelves by the window, took down a book and went out again without taking the smallest notice of his father.
The old man watched him with a sort of hunger, and he took a piece of paper and tore it up into a thousand pieces and let them flutter down on to the floor at his feet.
Frederic plunged into his own affairs and said:
“Do you remember some drawings I showed you? My brother’s come back. I think he wants them. The boy at the club . . .”
“I have them.”
“You remember Mr. Beecroft said he was a genius.”
“Beecroft’s a sot and a fool. But they’re good. Things seen and felt. I’ve given over asking for more than that.”