But it was as if a voice was driving insistently into his brain.
“When you had taken away all you could?
“What about all that was left?
“What about all there would always be left?
“What about where it came from?”
And he seemed to rise before himself, emptying the ocean with a thimble — like a personage in some old story he had been told.
“— — A little supper?”
“I s’pose” said Jacky, looking round the room, “you couldn’t never get more’n you wanted?”
“I never got anything I wanted,” said Mrs. Bates, “until my angel upstairs — —”
“An’ ’ow’ve yer got all this ’ere, if yer don’t want it?”
“Why, that? — Oh well you see my poor father was a very rich man, he left me all sorts of things. I hardly noticed.
“I think I had better show you,” she said, contemplating the boy with a helpful air, “some pictures of all the other houses, this is only a cottage.”
She reached out for a vellum album lying on the table.
“This is my place in town — — and this — — here is —
“I have only shown you these,” she added, when they came to her Villa in Biarritz, “because I wanted to tell you that with it all, my father was not a happy man.
“I look upon it as a very great lesson.”
And Jacky, who seemed not to have heard, asked,
“Was yer father thrifty?”
“Thrifty? Well, yes, you might say he was thrifty; on a very large scale.”
“A, very — large — —” repeated Jacky with autohypnotic concentration, “Oh.” And at last, “Yes, I, understand.”
Meditatively he began to stroke the puce brocaded velvet covering the chair on which he sat.
“That’s very,” smiled his hostess, “very old.”
“Old?” he enquired, surprised.
“Ah,” she said, “there are things to which age gives greater value, and other old things which have no value at all.”
“Would you mind,” said Jacky earnestly, “saying that over again.”
“— to which—” he repeated after her musingly, “—age— Yer mean its jus’ bein’ old stuff? — gives greater — value— And is value the same as wot is price?”
“It is,” smiled Mrs. Bates benignly.
He ate in silence some more of the chicken in aspic she had given him. Their light of loveable mischief had dimmed to reflections more profound as he raised his eyes to hers.
“D’yer know, mam,” he said, “Something must ’ave sent me to yer. To prevent me from going wrong.”
She was all surprised. Youths, she reflected, seemed as a genus to have spiritual attributes she could never have guessed. She felt suddenly glad that she had on the outset of her discoveries secured, however, the very best.
This was very nice of course, but after all, nothing, compared to Hyde who had wanted—“To make the whole world smell of flowers.”
Mrs. Bates was by nature a mono-maternalist.
“I’ve learnt more to-night,” concluded Jacky, “than I never ’ave.”
+
The atmosphere of the rag-shop was rather disturbed, on the morrow. A motherly heart having invited the tired lad to sleep on the library couch — he had lost himself from a picnic he had told Mrs. Bates, “dreamin’ of Peter Pan”—and given him a goodly breakfast—
It was eleven o’clock before Jacky burst into his home.
He found it had shrunk. It was somehow smaller than himself.
“Go’ mercy me,” cried Mother Sider, “To think I might really ’ave giv’ birth to a criminal — at this time o’ the mornin’. ”
She was frightened by some awesome change in her son, who seemed to be catching his breath.
“Muther,” he demanded in a stormy whisper, “ ‘As it ever struck you how much much richer the ’onest ones is?”
“Rich, rich, I never ’ad nothing to do with it—‘rich’!”
+
The ego of Ian Gore found nothing at all in his surroundings to utilise in the structure of the visible edifice of his spirit. Not even the coins that so much more properly came his way, than for Jacky Sider, could he make serviceable.
There was, according to him, “no intrinsic beauty within range of the parasites on the shop-keeper.
“The artist out of his own brain and his own sinews had made for his own spiritual indulgence all that has been appropriated by culture.
“A drop of his sweat transforms to fabulous fortunes — in the simulacrum of our understanding— The seventh wonder of the world of Croesus proceeds unaided out of his eye. Everything of superlative value must be formed from nothing.”
His clean sweeping attitude to the world in which he found himself was that it had not yet been made.
Even the darling girls in the dust of urban spring must wait for seductiveness until they should be “made over” by him.
Nor was there any horticulture for his passions in the temperate zone of his parents’ marriage.
There was no lurking penetralia of their home to intrigue his pubescent fancy to define. No warmth of shadow receding from the daily habitude.
Mr. and Mrs. Gore were reserved, as people who have no reserves. Their household gods were so sanctified that they had never known their names. Counterpoised and empty scales. Loving and respecting each other for having done a dirty thing, and for, that the bonds of matrimony had made of it as if it had never been. Ian’s mother always spoke of “your father” as though he had something ominous about him, and concurrently a dispensation from Providence.
They both seemed only with the years to be scrupulously washing themselves away.
Like millions and millions of us, they were living off a literature that has worn down to asterisks.
Ian, in opposition to his beginnings in their polished vacuum, had been passed through the fine filters of many minds, with particular reference to the cooling quality of those minds, having received no inoculation of sensuality among the animated furniture that so unaccountably stood for his parentage, instinctively conjectured that he might rather to have been conceived of some circumstance virile and intransigent, like a boxing-match.
And it was this absence of conviction of continuity with anything antedating him that instigated him to create anew.
At the art school he found the first latitude for his rearrangements where the actual that had been lacking to him revealed itself malconformed by denutrition and inactivity.
The nude model as a self-condemning protest against the overclothed.
He regarded the poor bare man, sagging on his staff, with his eyes of a lizard that had known no sun, and the excrescences of his unproud knees confounding his symmetry.
And in this invalid desert of northerly light, the Hermes of Praxiteles had been raising himself in eternal commentary.
Ian was huge above the students, straddled there with his bronze head reared over his coarse garb of a house painter and in his eyes, like bloodstones, flickered sudden lights of violent suspicions; he would now and then turn from his scrutiny, to spit aside. He was chewing tobacco.
Then he spat himself out of the door.
When he returned he was holding high up from the ground something unrecognisable, and dangling limply, and damp. The rope was coiled loosely through his fist.
He stretched the clothesline across a corner of the studio, and shifted the wooden pegs into position. A pair of drawers and a cotton shirt hung from them, upside down. They had been washed by the porter’s wife in the little back courtyard where Ian had found them.