“How absurd you are, Kilner. You turn everything into a picture as soon as you are interested in it at all. Purpose! I feel like a little schoolboy who has to interview his headmaster. I felt just the same once when I had been amusing myself with throwing paper out of the window. The headmaster saw it, but not the culprit. Then I was away from school ill, and the whole form got into trouble because no one would own up.”
Kilner shouted with laughter:
“What a picture of the young Fourmy. Doing just what he wanted to do and evading the consequences by luck. I bet it had all blown over by the time you got back.”
“Oh, yes,” said René, “but I confessed, and no one was very annoyed.”
He went round to Ann’s room with a sinking at his heart. She must be told, she must be made to understand, and she never would. He felt immeasurably older than she, responsible for her, and rather helpless. She was out. He gazed round at the room and was touched by its poverty and thriftlessness, the cheap little ornaments on the mantelshelf, the souvenirs of Margate and Southend, the cigarette cards pinned to the wall, to make, with a mirror, its only ornaments. Here they had sat, so many evenings, he and she, in a kind of playing at happiness. Here they had quarreled. 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! The simple innocence of those who sell themselves for bread, and know nothing of the business for which they are used, and more despise than envy the shows in the production of which more than half their efforts are expended. Ann’s scorn of “ladies,” believing them all to be light women, her hatred of charity organization inspectors (she had routed them more than once when they meddled with Rita), Insurance Cards, and Old Age Pensions. She resented being underpaid, but even more she loathed the spirit which tried to supplement the underpayment with instruction in virtue made impossible by it, with doles and callous assistance. It had not escaped her that the motor-cars in the mews cost more to maintain than the income of any one of the families who lived above them. But she loved her little bare rooms, and if she were allowed to keep them and the happiness that filled them she asked no more. The brave independence: that was what René had prized in her, what was expressed in her room. He had contributed nothing to it but a little comfort, an easy chair, a few books, and his pleasure in her. He knew that she treasured that above everything in the world, and he must take it from her. He was shaken with cowardice and dread and pity—by pity most of all. That bound him to her, dragged him down. He had not expected it, so clear had everything seemed in the light of his healthful experience. And, he knew, pity from him would be to her of all things the most hateful. He could not shake free of it, and it absorbed him.
He heard her footsteps on the short flight of stairs. He was filled with a longing to escape. With her hand on the door he lost his head and fled into the inner room. He heard her go to the fireplace and sit in the easy-chair. She sat silently brooding. Then she heard him in the inner room. She had heard that before, and he was never there. Slowly she came into the inner room, and he could just see her smoothing the pillows with her hands. She caught the sound of his breathing and stood stock-still. He could not move. She came toward him groping with her hands. She touched him.
“Renny, dear.”
She was pressed close to him. Her arms went round his neck.
“I knew you’d come back.”
He caressed her soothingly, gently, consumed and burning in his pity for her, and his terror lest she should discover it too suddenly.