He was too happy for the business of weighing up between his father and his mother, too absorbed in the glowing introspection to which he had been brought; introspection without analysis; a brooding, almost a floating over faculties in himself faintly stirring, reaching out to exercise themselves on everything within his reach. The world was very wonderful: its possibilities were endless; its treasures lay immeasurable only for the stretching out of his hand; and it was a delicious pleasure to him not to stretch out his hand, but to know that one day he need but make a gesture to have all its marvels pouring in on him. That those older than himself had but a small share of them disturbed him not at all. He had no doubt but his would be the infallible gesture, and, without conceit, during this happy time, he cherished a firm belief in his unique quality.
All his new delights were expressed in his letters to Linda in Germany. She analyzed them for him, not always accurately, but the mental process was new and exciting to him, and he began to appreciate her intellectual activity. They discussed his character at great length. He said: “I suppose I am, or have been—for I often find myself wanting to laugh nowadays—too serious.” She replied: “Not too serious, my dear. It is impossible to be that in this heartless age. (Oh! What a lot you can learn about England by going abroad!) Not too serious. No. What you lack, I think, is power of observation. What you must realize is that things have a surface and a surface value. Of course you cannot be content with that value, but you must not expect surface things to have any value in the region of profound things, the region in which, poor dear, you have always lived.” Faithfully he set about cultivating surface values, but he never could laugh at things that were just amusing; he never could laugh unless he were moved to laughter. He was, for instance, baffled and made sorry by the family jests which left George and Elsie exhausted by their noisy mirth.
Kurt Brock persuaded him to go with him for a tour in a side-car attached to his motor-cycle. Then did René become swollen and puffed up with the glory of the world. The exuberant boy was a tonic in himself; the speed he maintained was intoxicating; and they burst out of the long suburbs of Thrigsby into the Cheshire plain, over to the sea, the Welsh mountains, down the Severn and Wye valleys. To René, whose existence for so many years had lain only in Thrigsby and the little Scots village, it was being shot out into life. The return to Thrigsby made him miserable. Also association with Kurt had pricked the small bubble of his vanity. Kurt, so hopeless with books, was amazingly efficient with his machine, equal to every emergency, daring, inexhaustible, masterful. He had said many things which René had found disturbing and alarming. The boy had everything so cut and dried; no room in his life, it seemed, for folly, certainly none for brooding. He confessed one night, as they sat sleepily in a public-house parlor, that he wanted to be an airman. René could not applaud the ambition.
“Hardly fair to your mother, or, suppose you were in love, to—well.”
“People talk a lot of bally rot about love. They seem to think it means bagging a woman like a rabbit and shutting her up in a hutch to breed.”
“Well,” said René, “marriage does mean living together and a certain amount of responsibility.”
“I dunno. I’ve never been in love, but I’m not going to either, unless I get something that goes off with a bang and lets me and her get on a bit.” His mania was for getting on. When René wanted lunch, Kurt would hold out for another place “only twenty miles on.”
Another night René returned to the subject of women and love, Kurt’s audacities having a horrid fascination for him, and the boy said:
“I dunno, but if a woman said she loved me and wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do because she said she loved me, I should know she was a liar.”
René tried to point out that life and love were not so simple as all that, but there was no turning Kurt. He had the thing worked out neatly to his own satisfaction, and he was not going to bother his head about it any more.