“We’re old now,” she said, and he felt that she too had barred him out. She also may have felt it, for she shifted uncomfortably and led the talk away from herself and presently to praise of his father.
“He was too clever,” she said, “and I couldn’t see how clever he was. I wanted him to beat his brothers in their own line, and I wanted him to love you two boys in my way instead of his. Of course I’m not clever, René, and I can’t say where things got wrong. It’s wonderful how he’s settled down now. I never thought he would. And I want you to be nice to him, René, for my sake. Even if you’re not going to be here much longer, I would like you to do that. He feels his position so.”
The sting of indignation pricked René into brutality. He had made his effort to reclaim his mother from his father, and failed. He cried:
“What did he do?”
“What do men do when dullness creeps over them and they are mortified with failure?”
There was a note of vengeance in her tone, exasperation perhaps, a savage determination to set abominations before the fatuous innocence of her son. She succeeded. He was beset with horrors and a sick repulsion from his mother who could allow, accept, and seem to rejoice in such contamination.
Drearily he said:
“He’s a dirty man,” and upon that expression of opinion he left her.
However he did attempt to be more amiable with his father, and even went so far as to accompany him to the Denmark of an evening, and was there astonished to find how the old fellow by sheer wit and masterful presence lorded it over the company of clerks, shopkeepers, theater musicians, agents, brokers, bagmen, school teachers, the odd characters, the small talents of the neighborhood. René noticed that Mr. Sherman plied his father with drink to keep him lively, and that there seemed no question of payment for it. Mr. Fourmy paid in talk, yarns, jests, jokes, impromptu fantasies, with sly hits at the eccentrics of the assembly. And although René hated the atmosphere, the smoke, the drink, the greedy lapping up of gross laughter, the pouncing on scraps of filth and equivocal utterances, he could not escape some admiration of his father. This grew as they left the place and Mr. Fourmy shook off his air of large geniality and took his son by the arm and asked if they might go for a walk together.