“She is a dear old woman, your mother.”
In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed, he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made:
“Linda Brock has no back to her mind.”
It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded, brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: “See! This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of it.” If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes, that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.
And he began to question his everyday life. It seemed mechanical. He had been shaped for the position he filled, fitted into it so tightly that he could never move. He would be carried on forever by the machine that had caught him up as a small boy when they had marked him down in the Lower Third. (They had written to his mother: “He is a boy of whom the school will one day be proud.” And she had been so elated by the words.) He had accepted the force of the machine and let it take the place of his own will. That was unpracticed. He had used it for nothing. The machine had carried him to security and given him things apparently so coveted that his brother George could not now speak to him naturally, so great was his awe of his success. It was so easy to think the thoughts required by the machine. A kind of education had been pumped into him. He had now only to pump that same kind of education into other young men. The machine was efficient, himself efficient in it. There was satisfaction in that. But all the other men with whom he worked were elusive; so many of them, under the pleasant manners of the common-room, concealed despondency, a mood of resignation that was epidemic, more virulent at one time than another. Against that, too, René was in revolt. Instinctively he felt that if he surrendered to it he would fall also to that other danger in his domestic life.
He tried to understand Linda. She was so successful. So many people liked her. Her social progress was amazing. Efficiency always gave him pleasure, and it was delightful to him, though he hated it, to feel her skillfully consolidating their position. She was tremendously active in all external things. It was her inward activity that he wished to understand. What were the things that satisfied that clever brain of hers? What her heart? He had long ago swept aside her pseudo-science, sociology, physiology, psychology, as external to herself, things worn as she wore clothes, very well, to be becoming and in the mode. It pleased her intellectually to talk of a hypothetical man and woman. What did that hypothetical man and woman become in art? He followed her in her reading, her music—so far as one so uninstructed could follow at all. . . . German sentimental lieder, colored lanterns over water, sweet flirtations, violins in the distance; a sighing for the passing of youth; a lingering over the sweets of love, with ultimately a withdrawal from love; a perfume. That was her art. In her drawing-room she had impressionist and post-impressionist drawings; in her own room she had pictures of young men and maidens in ballrooms and canoes and French boudoirs.
He could see the charm of the things she loved, always melted to them, but never without a reaction, an angry stiffening of the will.
At the same time, while his emotional interest in her faded, he found an increasing pleasure in watching her, in noting her movements as one marks a lovely animal in its cage. That, at any rate, was satisfying. She had beautiful lines, gestures that could thrill him with their grace, and he liked the skill with which she clothed herself to give every one of her attractions free play.
It was not long before she became aware of his cold, indolent appreciation, and resented it, and plunged him back into the excitement which could make him writhe. It was then that they came into direct conflict, he clinging to his intellectual admiration for her and cool appreciation of her quality, she determined to deprive him of it.