Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/249

 work and woman. He caught the glimimer of a charmine intimacy, Roland at the piano, Iris sitting in one of the window seats, singing, so that her voice seemed to go through the room like a river of human laughter and tears and joy. Her singing brought a thickness into Kit's throat, and made him shiver.

The thing that astonished him was that these two were not married. The complete and happy understanding between them was obvious, even to a young man fresh from the Pentreath atmosphere, and it caused Kit much searching of soul. Youth explores, and Kit's questing had a serious and high ardour.

But the music! It was like all the laughing wisdom of the ages translated into sweet sounds, flexible and sensitive, vibrating high above a cast-iron system. This music-room suggested the eternal flux, a vortex with its spirals part of the dim past, and rising into the future. Kit felt that Thomas Roland understood life and the art of living as no young man could understand it.

They sat up till midnight one night, talking, and one phrase of Roland's stuck in Kit's memory.

"Everything is allowable, provided you take care not to hurt people, the people who ought not to be hurt."

Kit had asked him a question.

"But suffering? Oughtn't it to come? What I mean is,—well—look at my father. I always feel."

"Your father has had his dose."

"And you, sir?"

"Oh,—I! Don't let Iris hear you call me sir, you young vagabond. I have had my share, but I have set my fruit in the sun. It is the green apple stage that is painful."

On the morning of his leaving Kit made a request.

"When I come up to hospital, may I drop in here—sometimes?"

He felt that there were things to be learnt, unacademic facts and fancies, in this house at Chelsea.