“He’s a funny damned old rotter, but you can’t help liking him.”
René had to admit that, but the increase in the weekly bills gave him many a sick moment, and though his father spent many hours away from home, there was never any talk of his finding work. Very quickly the household absorbed its new inmate and adjusted its habits, so far as was necessary, to his. Mr. Fourmy bought paints and brushes, and with these he would amuse himself all day. At half-past eight in the evening he would disappear, and often not return until the small hours of the morning. He never asked for money, and seemed always able to procure anything he wanted.
[VI
PROFESSOR SMALLMAN]
As the reader’s curiosity (if he hath any) must be now awake, and hungry, we shall provide to feed it as fast as we can.
EXCEPT for Mrs. Fourmy few letters came to 166, and it was a great excitement for René when, a few weeks before the end of term, he came down in the morning to find a parcel waiting for him on the breakfast table. His father and mother watched him eagerly as he opened it, to find two large brown volumes, a German economic treatise translated by a Scots professor. A printed slip headed Thrigsby Post requested Mr. Fourmy to send a review not exceeding four hundred words in length within a week. Pride and elation moved René. His cheeks glowed, his eyes shone, he caressed the covers of the books, took them up, and turned over the leaves. It was the first sign of recognition from the world outside school and university.
“Professor Smallman said he would get me some reviewing.” René could only speak in gasps. He could not take his eyes off the books, and when his father reached out his hand for them, his impulse was to hug them and keep them from him. “He said he thought he could get me some. But I never thought of the Post. It’s such a good paper.”
“It’s Liberal, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Fourmy.
“Yes. But of course I shouldn’t have anything to do with that side of it.” René had always been given to understand that he was a Conservative, and that only chapel people were Liberals.
He ate very little breakfast, and immediately afterward rushed upstairs, made his bed, and lay on it gloating over the precious books, picking up first one volume and then the other, hardly reading them, and beginning already to compose his review based on Professor Smallman’s dislike of the translator. Then he began to wonder how much he would be paid for it—one, two, four, five guineas. The editor of the Post was a very rich man. Would they print his name? Presently his happiness was so intense that he could not bear not to share it, and he went downstairs. His mother had gone out. His father was in the dining-room painting. He had the lid of a cigar box and was covering it with a copy of a nude reproduced in some magazine from a picture in the Paris Salon of that year. René watched him. He worked with minute strokes of the brush, caressingly, carefully. Already he had painted several copies of the same picture.