He would be an engineer. Mr. Belk’s brother had taken him into his works at Durlingham. He wasn’t seventeen, yet he knew how to make engines. He had a strong, lumbering body. His heart would go on thump-thumping with regular strokes, like a stupid piston, not like Roddy’s heart, excited, quivering, hurrying, suddenly checking. His eyes drew his mother away. You were glad when they were gone.
“You can see what they think,” Roddy said. “Everybody thinks it.”
“Everybody thinks what?”
“That I’m a cad to be sticking here, doing nothing, living on Mamma’s money.”
“It doesn’t matter. They’ve no business to think.”
“No. But Mamma thinks it. She says I ought to get something to do. She talks about Mark and Dan. She can’t see—” He stopped, biting his lip.
“If I were like Mark—if I could do things. That beast Norman Waugh can do things. He doesn’t live on his mother’s money. She sees that. …
“She doesn’t know what’s the matter with me. She thinks it’s only my heart. And it isn’t. It’s me. I’m an idiot. I can’t even do office work like Dan. … She thinks I’ll be all right if I go away far enough, where she won’t see me. Mind you, I should be all right if I’d gone into the Navy. She knows if I hadn’t had that beastly rheumatic fever I’d have been in the Navy or the Merchant Service now. It’s all rot not passing you. As if walking about on a ship’s deck was worse for your heart than digging in a garden. It certainly couldn’t be worse than farming in Canada.”
“Farming? In Canada?”
“That’s her idea. It’ll kill me to do what I want. It won’t kill me to do what she wants.”
He brooded.
“Mark did what he wanted. He went away and left her. Brute as I am, I wouldn’t have done that. She doesn’t know that’s why I’m sticking here. I can’t leave her. I’d rather die.”
Roddy too. He had always seemed to go his own way without caring, living his secret life, running, jumping, grinning at you. And he, too, was compelled to adore Mark and yet to cling helplessly, hopelessly, to Mamma. When he said things about her he was struggling against her, trying to free himself. He flung himself off and came back, to cling harder. And he was nineteen.
“After all,” he said, “why shouldn’t I stay? It’s not as if I didn’t dig in the garden and look after Papa. If I went she’d have to get somebody.”
“I thought you wanted to go?” she said.
“So I did. So I do, for some things. But when it comes to the point—”
“When it comes to the point?”
“I funk it.”
“Because of Mamma?”
“Because of me. That idiocy. Supposing I had to do something I couldn’t do? … That’s why I shall have to go away somewhere where it won’t matter, where she won’t know anything about it.”
The frightened look was in his eyes again.
In her heart a choking, breathless voice talked of unhappiness, coming, coming. Unhappiness that no beauty could assuage. Her will hardened to shut it out.
When the road turned again they met Mr. James. He walked with queer, jerky steps, his arms bowed out stiffly.
As he passed he edged away from you. His mouth moved as if he were trying not to laugh.
They knew about Mr. James now. His mind hadn’t grown since he was five years old. He could do nothing but walk. Martha, the old servant, dressed and undressed him.
“I shall have to go,” Roddy said. “If I stay here I shall look like Mr. James. I shall walk with my arms bowed out, Catty’ll dress and undress me.”
Chapter XXI
I
They hated the piano. They had pushed it away against the dark outside wall. Its strings were stiff with cold, and when the rain came its wooden hammers swelled so that two notes struck together in the bass.
The piano-tuner made them move it to the inner wall in the large, bright place that belonged to the cabinet. Mamma was annoyed because Mary had taken the piano-tuner’s part.
Mamma loved the cabinet. She couldn’t bear to see it standing in the piano’s dark corner where the green Chinese bowls hardly showed behind the black glimmer of the panes. The light fell full on the ragged, faded silk of the piano, and on the long scar across its lid. It was like a poor, shabby relation.
It stood there in the quiet room, with its lid shut, patient, reproachful, waiting for you to come and play on it.
When Mary thought of the piano her heart beat faster, her fingers twitched, the full, sensitive tips tingled and ached to play. When she couldn’t play she lay awake at night thinking of the music.
She was trying to learn the “Sonata Appassionata,” going through it bar by bar, slowly and softly, so that nobody outside the room should hear it. That was better than not playing it at all. But sometimes you would forget, and as soon as you struck the loud chords in the first movement Papa would come in and stop you. And the Sonata would go on sounding inside you, trying to make you play it, giving you no peace.
Towards six o’clock she listened for his feet in the flagged passage. When the front door slammed behind him she rushed to the piano. There might be a whole hour before Roddy fetched him from the Buck Hotel. If you could only reach the last movement, the two thundering chords, and then—the Presto.
The music beat on the thick stone walls of the room and was beaten back, its fine, live throbbing blunted by overtones of discord. You longed to open all the doors and windows of the house, to push back
