[VII
FLYING NEAR THE CANDLE]
A man’s heart may minister comfort to him in the hopes of that thing for which he yet has no ground to hope.
THE Brocks lived in Galt’s Park, an elegant district shut off from the rest of Thrigsby by gates and unoccupied lodges. Here, in ease and amid gardens, dwelt families of an old-established prosperity, many Germans, Armenians, and Greeks, and some of the descendants of Thrigsby’s famous men. Here also were the two hostels of the university, some schools, one co-educational seminary, the house of a painter with a great local fame, and that of the municipal organist. Good men had lived in Galt’s Park, and it had once been the center of Thrigsbeian culture; but now all those who dwell in it have the air of having been left behind, and the little pink houses are menacing it, even as they menace the garden of Professor Smallman.
Through the winter René Fourmy came twice a week to coach young Kurt Brock in mathematics and French. Occasionally he was asked to stay to lunch, and then he was too sore from the discomfort of Mrs. Brock’s broken English—she was a German from Hamburg—to be able to support Miss Brock, Linda, in her efforts to make conversation. Also he was engrossed in the problem first presented to him on his original meeting with her: Was she, was she not, beautiful? Sometimes for a fortnight he would decide that she was so, and then his heart would go out to her in homage, an impersonal emotion bestowed on her as though she were a tree or a sunset. That she might be intelligent interested him not at all. Except in the case of Cathleen Bentley, where he had been surprised into an intimacy, refined and diluted with adoration, he had regarded women as existing only to receive in ignorance his shy homage.
As with the Smallmans, so here he had to give his mother a detailed report of the household and its manner of living. To her they also were “grand,” and she never tired of listening to the tale of their doings, their servants, what they had to eat and drink, what they sat on, what they wore, and whom they entertained. He reported faithfully—the rings on Mrs. Brock’s fingers, her richly-clad inelegant figure, her dog-like eyes that could never smile, her enormous appetite—whereon Mrs. Fourmy would sigh and say:
“I never was a big eater myself.”
Kurt, the boy, René liked, for he was so thoroughly convinced of his own stupidity that it was impossible to teach him anything. German only in name, he was English and Thrigsbeian in everything else, and René felt almost that he belonged to an older generation when he discovered that Kurt could not remember the horse-trams in the Derby Road, or a time when there were no motor-cars. Kurt possessed a motorcycle, or it possessed him, so that almost everything else in his eyes was “bally rot.” He excepted music, which, with his family, he loved German-fashion, greedily and indiscriminately. His attitude toward his sister was that of one who knows so much that he has nothing left to hope. Against his mother and sister he used to protest to René, whom he thought of as a “poor beggar” but a “good enough sort.” René never saw it, but often Kurt would outmaneuver Linda in her attempts to waylay his tutor, and once he went so far as to mumble this warning:
“What I can’t stand about women is the way they go nosing round.”
“Do they?” asked René, looking up from Hall and Knight.
“My sister does. She wants to know how a man works. She’s like me with a motor. Haven’t you got sisters?”