Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/310



HOUGH Cherry might mock a little at Thomas Roland's whimsies, and at his cult of "A Smooth Surface" as she called it, Roland's christening of Kit as "The Fortunate Youth" betrayed that half laughing insight that comes with maturity. Man has collected an immense store of theory which is useful to him as the small change of existence, but when a big issue gallops up like a March wind, man is apt to forget his little theories. He is inclined to act upon impulse, to let the wind blow through the rags of his social reason. "You do the thing you want to do, Cherry, and afterwards you invent all sorts of nice excuses to prove that you acted like a lawyer, and not like a fool. The lawyer in us is always an afterthought. I fell in love with your face and your voice, not with a category of virtues and vices." When he heard about Mr. Simon Orange, he smiled. "Told you so. Contrasts. Beauty and the Beast. I knew that someone would open Kit's door for him."

Simon Orange opened it very successfully. Call a man an individualist, which means that he objects to being jostled either by mobs or an oligarchy, and you had Orange outlined as a lone, grim, anthropoid creature, hairily grotesque, smashing his way through the jungle. Sometimes, life had caused him to utter cries of rage and of pain, but life, the little oppositions, the class prejudices, had not stopped him. He had been very poor. There had been days when he had had but two shirts to cover his hairy chest, and the tails of these shirts would have fluttered like torn clouds. Even that room of his in St. Mary's Street pictured the long struggle; possessions, books, chairs, a table, a sideboard, an old Turkey carpet snatched up by simian hands and carried off on various occasions. An indefatigable, fierce, laborious creature, with something very human and pleading in the hidden deeps of its brown eyes.