Few people, in an outburst of enthusiasm, would select the King's Road, Chelsea, as an ideal locality to reside in. It is an important thoroughfare, no doubt, but it lacks nobility and distinction. There are isolated, quiet spots in it, with houses lying back from the road; and from the upper windows of favoured residences one can obtain a view over Yeitch's or Bull's extensive hothouses, and catch dim shadows of great tropical palms and a mellowed dash of brilliant red and yellow. There are others which look over Portman Square or St. Luke's Churchyard. But on the other hand, there are long stretches of dreary shops and factories, grit and general uncomeliness. Without being squalid, it has a careworn, untidy appearance, as if it was far too much harassed with the petty worries and strain of workaday life to think of cheerful adornment. Few people, except errand boys whose sense either of aesthetics or duty is usually undeveloped, saunter casually along the King's Road. A stranger tries to get out of it as fast as he can; a frequenter has his business to attend to. Fashion does not pass along it, except on tearing drags bound for Hurlingham. It is essentially a small bourgeois part of London, with all the small bourgeois unpretence and honest, if somewhat dismal, solidity.
It was in the middle of such a dreary stretch of the road, some half mile west of Sloane Square, that Clytie found a lodging. The fact that a green-grocer's shop, owned by the landlord of the house, occupied the ground floor was compensated, in a measure, by the existence of a small studio at the back, on the first floor, originally constructed by a struggling photographer, who had since worked his way upwards into a more fashionably perfumed atmosphere. One of Clytie's favourite fellow-students, Winifred Marchpane, who lived in Lower Sloane Street, and whose family obtained their potatoes and salads from Mr. Gurkins, had recommended the establishment, and offered to share with her the expenses of the studio. The cheapness of the rooms suited Clytie's modest purse, and the prospect of pleasant companionship in the studio was an additional attraction. It is true that the acrid smell of the potatoes, when the side door from the shop on to the private entrance lobby was left open, ascended the stairs, together with a vague odour of cooking, bearing upwards, as it were, on savoury breath the disputes of Mrs. Gurkins with the shopboy and the cries of her apparently ever-youthful progeny. The incessant rumble, too, of omnibuses, drays, and furniture vans, and the peculiarly aggressive rattle of tradesmen's carts, shook the floor and the windows and shivered the lustres of the chandelier. There were many drawbacks to elegant life, but Clytie, borrowing some philosophy from a talk with Mrs. Farquharson, proceeded to disregard those she could not eliminate. The sitting-room, when the door was shut and the curtains drawn of an evening, was cosy enough. The pictures, nicknacks, hangings, and other minor accessories of furnished apartments Clytie had returned to Mrs. Gurkins' keeping, on the plea that she scarcely had room for her own—which was true; and, by some miraculous art of persuasion, she had induced Mr. Gurkins to remove the nerve-shattering chandelier, on the ground that she could not work by gaslight—which was not true. She hung thick curtains over the door to keep out noise and odour, broke up the rigidity of the furniture by screens, small tables, and plants, and painted a long panel for the old cottage piano that made it look fresh and companionable. When all the arrangements were completed the room appeared dainty and homelike, bearing, however, here and there, in bold notes of colour, folds of drapery, and odd bits of semi-impressionist painting, a peculiar impress of its tenant's personality.
She was living at last the life she had so passionately longed for. There was not a human being to control her actions, not a conventionality to check the utterance of her thoughts. During her early days here she almost felt tempted to hang up her latchkey over the mantelpiece as a glorious symbol of liberty. It seemed not only to serve to give her entrance to her own modest home, but to be the power that would unlock the heart of the great London that lay before her.
From the first she had little difficulty in finding work. Dealers bought small pictures and gave her orders. She also pleased a firm of publishers to whom she had gone with letters of introduction and specimens of her draughtsmanship, and obtained work in the way of book and magazine illustrating. Her earnings were not large, but there was the promise of success to come. At the end of two years her income was large enough to have enabled her to move from the King's Road into a more refined locality; but she had grown accustomed to its noise and rattle, and to the hurried, joyless stream of life that flowed along it day by day. And Mrs. Gurkins understood her tastes and habits, a quality in a landlady appreciated by women as well as men. So she stayed on.
She read widely during these years, learned much. Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four a woman is capable of vast assimilation of ideas. They can flow into the freshly opened, unpolluted channels of her being, as yet unclogged by the refuse of sorrows and wearinesses. Her rejection of the old formulas, and the paramount necessity of gaining knowledge wherewith to provide herself substitutes, checked in her any impulse towards moral or artistic idealism. She read deeply, instinctively seeking after the roots of life, the elemental passions that shake our nature, be its superstructure never so delicately complex. The dawning knowledge half frightened, half attracted her. The barbaric feminine in her struggled to escape into solitude. With fluttering eyelids downcast it recoiled from the idea of passion as yet unawakened responsively within her. But the higher needs of modernity constrained her to a just, resolute system of inquiry. She learned that there are deeper laws regulating our being than those which could be enunciated at Durdleham tea-tables, where the ingrained habit of non-recognition of them restricted life within narrowest limits, and put, as it were, a prohibition tax upon exoteric sympathy.
At four-and-twenty Clytie was a woman—emotional, impulsive, eager to taste of any new experience. The old rebellious habit of mind had developed into a frank independence. Her step was elastic, her bearing confident. Her life was full and happy.
“I am glad I am a woman now,” she said to Mrs. Farquharson. “I seem to have all the advantages of both sexes.”
“Wait till you're married, my dear,” replied her friend.
Mrs. Farquharson was fond of the use of affectionate irritants. They are often valuable preservatives of friendship.
Clytie laughed.
“I suppose I shall marry some day. I don't want to end up by leading half a life; but I want to have two or three years more of this. I must play at being a man a little longer.”
“A pretty sort of man!” said Mrs. Farquharson, resting her chin on her hand and looking at Clytie with amused eyes. “You are the most deliciously feminine young woman I know. Look at your frock and your hair.”
Judging by outward appearances Mrs. Farquharson's criticism was correct. Clytie had the artistic sense in dress. It was like most of her other artistic impulses, with the personal note dominant—soft textures, falling easily into folds, quiet in tone, dark grays, subdued half shades of yellows, suddenly brightened by a small, daring flash of colour at throat or bosom. Lace, with its creamy, clinging softness delighted her, and she wore it defiantly, with a certain sense of triumph that she was perhaps the only girl in England who could wear it with faultless taste.
She was of medium height, but her slender, fully formed figure and its erect carriage gave her an air of tallness. Her head set well on her shoulders, and a habit of holding it back, with the chin pointing upwards, free of the throat, added to the impression of young, fearless womanhood. Her eyes were dark blue, wide apart, yet sunk in finely moulded orbits. A light of humour playing in their depths, together with a soft modelling of the nose contours beneath them, atoned for an impression of hardness and sensuousness that would have been given by the ripe, full lips with their little curl of disdain. Her face was rounded delicately—that much she inherited from the Davenants—but a faint flush of colour showed the buoyant young blood within, just as her deep red hair, with a thousand lights dancing in it, attested the rich, vigorous strain that had asserted itself in her. She was proud, womanlike, of this hair, and had a way of dressing it in bewildering confusion.
Her Slade School friend, Winifred Marchpane, continued to share the studio with her. At first she had been a little afraid of Clytie, whose bold judgments and fearless expression of opinion were not qualified always to attract a timorous, shrinking nature. But gradually the stronger personality had overpowered the weaker and bound it to itself by unbreakable bonds. A great friendship had thus arisen between the girls, based on Winifred's side on enthusiastic admiration, almost worship, and on Clytie's on a tender feeling of love and protection.
Winifred was one of a large family, her father, a retired officer in the army with limited income. Two of her sisters were governesses, earning their livelihood miles away from home. Another one took charge of the smaller members of the household. Winifred, who had a dainty talent for the painting of still life, supported herself, living at home and paying her share of the household expenses. She was a little, gentle creature, with dark hair, and with a rich colour showing beneath a brown cheek. Her deep brown eyes had a doglike trustfulness in them, and a steadfastness withal such as makes the heroine. A girl of few moods, few caprices. Her work was always beautifully, conscientiously finished. She always loved it, always found in it the same quiet charm. There was no element of passion in it to set jarring the strings of futile endeavour. A fine sense of colour and gradation and subtle curve, a supreme delicacy of touch—that was her sole artistic stock in trade, and she never sought to stray beyond the limits imposed. She had had a little picture accepted at the Academy, hung in a far, far corner—a bunch of Maréchal Niel roses, full-blown, in a Venetian glass vase of exquisitely veined transparencies—a perfect little picture, sweet and pure, like herself.
It was a cold March day. The sun shone cheerfully through the drawn white blinds of the studio skylight, but an east wind blowing outside came in through the cracks and defied the blaze of the fire in the stove.
“You are quite blue with cold,” said Winifred, laying down mahl-stick and palette. “Here, put on this wrap. Why don't you take more care of yourself?”
“I never thought of it,” said Clytie, shivering a little and accepting contentedly the wrap and a caress. “I was sketching out quite a history of that boy who has just left.”
Winifred drew a stool to Clytie's chair near the fire and took up her position upon it—a favourite one with her, as she could have both the moral solace of sitting at Clytie's feet, and the physical comfort of resting her head in Clytie's lap.
“I hope he won't bring all kinds of horrible people into the house—burglars, you know, like Oliver Twist,” she added vaguely.
“I suppose it is rather rash picking up a model out of the streets. But he is just the boy I wanted to give character to the group. I was going to paint in one out of my own head.”
“I don't know how you get all those street types out of your head, Clytie. I wish I could do it.”
“I would like to see you try, you silly child,” said Clytie, laughing. “Your street arabs would look like stray Cupids hastily huddled up in old clothes by a shocked and modest policeman!”
“I did not mean that; you know I didn't. What I meant was—I wish I could paint without models. I don't think I could paint a common flat leaf without having it before me. As for painting that”—and she pointed to a basket standing by her easel, overflowing with anemones, snowdrops, and violets obtained that morning by Mr. Gurkins from Covent Garden—“without a copy, I might just as soon think of flying.”
“You are an artist, Winnie, and love your art for its own sake. I am not quite so sure that I do, now. To have to finish all the thousand little convolutions of those bells would drive me raving mad. I should like to have a ghost as sculptors do, only mine would do the finishing and put in all the nuisance of detail. That's why I can get on without models. It saves time. I can bring home a face with me from the streets, and I can paint it in rapidly, and then I am done. I suppose I oughtn't to be, but Burrowes seems satisfied. He says he has got quite a 'line' in my pictures—the correct ones—and is thinking of raising the price. I am sure that man has been a linen-draper.”
“If you could remember the boy's face why do you bring him here?” asked Winifred. “I only want to know why you want him so particularly, dear,” she added, raising her chin and looking upwards at Clytie.
The boy had been ragged and uncared-for, not exactly a street urchin, but on a vague borderland of respectability, between the newspaper arab and the errand boy.—a hybrid with the vices of many strains.
“Do you really want to know, Winnie?” said Clytie. “Perhaps you'll be shocked. However, you'll have to know sooner or later: I am going to make a picture of him on my own account, just a little bit more fantastic than he is, and call him a—an—oh, dear! what shall I call him?”
“An elf?”
“Good gracious, no. What have I to do with elves and fairies and that sort of thing? He is the son of Cophetua—supposing the king had not married the beggar maid.”
“Then why not the son of any other king?”
“Why not, indeed?” said Clytie drily. “Or of any other beggar maid?”
“Oh!” said Winifred, looking into the fire.
And then after a pause:
“What makes you think that?”
“Did you see his mother? I did. Such a stupid-looking, red-faced woman. I think she said she was a charwoman by profession. There are generations of drudgery in her face, whereas in Jack's there is vigour and intelligence—something so different; he must have some better strain of blood in him than she and a husband of her class can have given him. Don't you think so, dear?”
“He's a very pretty boy,” replied Winifred, “but, oh, he is so dirty and”—with a shudder—“so animal.”
“Well, he fascinates me,” said Clytie meditatively. “I am going to paint one of my wildest pictures—all for my own self—and a bit for you if you like, Winnie.” Winnie accepted this tribute of affection with a little flush of pleasure, although Clytie's “own” pictures seldom gave her unqualified æsthetic delight, and turned her face towards Clytie, who laughed in her frank way.
“Don't look at me with those great eyes of yours, child! You make me angry for you. They are just the sort of eyes that make women miserable. You must not trust in people like that, believe me.”
“I trust them when they are good like you, dear.”
“Oh, but you mustn't. Don't you know I am the wickedest girl going—always thinking of the most dreadful things? Look at the wall. How can you love anybody that can do these silly things?”
She pointed to a series of grotesque charcoal caricatures on the studio wall. She had been dissatisfied a day or two back with a picture she had been engaged on for a month, and in a fit of wilfulness had daubed it out and then proceeded to make a cruel, fantastic travesty of it on the wall.
“You wanted your tea, dear, just as you do now,” replied Winifred.
This tea hour was Winifred's great delight. At home, on account of the children, they had to sit round the dining table and butter their own thick slices of bread and drink out of substantial breakfast cups. In the studio the girls had provided a dainty little afternoon tea equipage, and Mrs. Gurkins always cut thin bread and butter from a fancy loaf. Generally it was Winifred who poured out the tea, but to-day Clytie busied herself with the cups, thus making some slight amends, perhaps, for having shocked Winifred. Women are full of these odd feminine impulses, and other women understand them. Men don't.
They sat talking, as they usually did, over their tea, and long afterwards, until it was time for Winifred to go home. As they were taking leave of each other on the landing a man sprang up the stairs, checked himself, and raised a slouch hat as he passed them and vanished up the next flight. He was a fresh-faced man, with a brown and tawny beard; tawny ends, too, to his moustaches; bright gray eyes flashing humourously as he passed the girls. His dress was careless, loose and unfashionable, yet it was marked with a certain individuality.
“Who is that?” Winifred whispered when the last foot of the ascending figure had disappeared.
“That's another protest,” said Clytie—“a better one. He has the courage of his convictions.”
“What do you mean, Clytie?”
“Well, can't you recognise a protest when you see one?”
“Oh, Clytie, don't tease and puzzle me,” cried Winifred, giving her friend's arm a little shake. “Do you know him?”
“Of course not. How should I? But Mrs. Gurkins was telling me about him only this morning. His name is Kent. He seems to frighten the life out of her, and therefore I say he is a protest. Now you know, so run away home.”
When Winifred had reached the street door Clytie leaned over the banisters and called after her.
“Winnie! I must have been in a sweet temper this afternoon.”
“Of course, dear. Why do you say so?”
“Because you have left your basket of anemones for me to take care of!”
When Winifred had gone Clytie took an omnibus to Cheyne Walk, where some friends of hers lived, and after her visit returned to her solitary dinner. It argued some strength of mind in Clytie that she did not give way, as many lonely women do, to a distaste for ordinary food, and a corresponding craving for the miscellaneous and not over wholesome meal denominated high tea. She had not reached the stage of feminine depression and sense of helplessness when inchoate banqueting on bread and butter and penny buns seems to bring cheerless solace. Her temperament seemed almost virile in its vigour, and although she had her sex's antipathy to gastronomy, she nevertheless found it reasonable that she should be provided with a decently served dinner. Besides, Mrs. Gurkins, who was professionally interested in food stuffs, held solid views on the subject. She herself had a good appetite, and her little girl children ate everything they could lay their little white teeth to; she did not believe in not being hungry. It was one of her grievances that her other lodger, Mr. Kent upstairs, cooked his own victuals scramblingly, and would not allow her to see that his wants were duly satisfied. Accordingly she bestowed extra care upon Clytie.
After the cloth was removed Clytie continued the book she had been reading during the meal, and at last flung it aside. She rose and walked about the room, somewhat restless. She felt lonely—vaguely desirous of action, and yet idle. Was it a dumb premonition of fate, this restlessness? At any rate it led her to perform a trivial action which set in motion the currents of her future life.
She sat down at her writing table that stood in the recess between the fireplace and the light-curtained window and lit a couple of candles, whose pretty red paper shades threw a rosy glow around the corner of the room. It was only a simple note that she scribbled, hastily, boldly, as was her wont. Then she left the candles burning, and returned to her armchair by the fire and gave herself up to meditation.
The boy model she had engaged that morning interested' her powerfully. She shrank from an insistence upon the solution of the little problem she had offered to Winifred during the afternoon, hovering over and away from it. Her sense of type and personality was too acute not to be profoundly struck by the difference between his mother and himself. On the one hand was dulness, commonness, a coarse-fibred nature responsive to the stirrings of neither hope nor despair, a dull, uncomplaining drudge; on the other hand a quick, fiery temperament, showing itself in flashing black eyes, delicate nostrils, wiry, curly brown hair—all made picturesque by unqualified dirt. And yet, despite this refinement of feature, there was cruelty, brutality even, written on the childish face. That might be the fault of his upbringing, thought Clytie. But his beauty—where did it come from? She smiled as she thought of King Cophetua. It was the beggar maiden's grace that had won the king's heart, and grace was a quality that Jack's mother most distinctly lacked. Clytie felt dimly conscious of being on the verge of an appalling discovery. Her reading had been catholic enough, and her independent acquaintance with life sufficiently broad, to render the fact familiar to her that kings and beggar maidens if they fall in love with each other usually dispense with the ceremony of marriage. But then love pardons all—a formula in Clytie's new theory of social statics, perhaps wisely not accepted in Durdleham—and all the sorrow in lawlessness that had come within Clytie's small experience had been in her eyes sanctified by love. Yet who could have loved this woman? She was not more than three-and-thirty now—young enough to show that she had never possessed the mere attraction of comeliness. The boy remained, however, a living proof.
She thought of Winifred, and sighed a little. Why should she be forever craving after this strange hidden knowledge, after the taste of things bitter, when there was so much sweetness in life? The thought of Winifred's pure, gentle touch in flowers and delicate bloom of fruit and calm, transparent glass came over her like a rebuke. And then she smiled again, remembering how Winifred had coaxed her once to try and paint a bunch of roses, and how dismayed she had been at the egregious failure. No; the cobbler must not go beyond his last.
“I don't suppose I am very wicked after all,” she said to herself.
She rested her chin upon her hand and let her thoughts wander idly, building up a romance for Jack. He was a foundling, of noble parents, and Mrs. Burmester was only his foster mother. Then she roused herself with a little exclamation of disgust:
“What a perfectly Durdleham solution!”
The next moment, with an instinct common to folks whether at Durdleham or London, she sprang from her chair and cried:
“There's something burning!”
The room in fact was full of thin smoke, and, as Clytie rose, a snake of red flame ran up the curtains by the writing-desk. She rushed to them, but as soon as she had touched them, the folds being shaken out, the whole burst into a blaze. She fled to the door about to scream “Fire!” at the top of her voice.
What happened next neither she nor John Kent could afterwards exactly explain. He was on his way downstairs when the door was suddenly thrown open and a stream of light burst on to the gloomy landing. Clytie ran almost into his arms crying, “My room is on fire!” and then he was tearing down blazing, fiery curtains, smothering them with rugs, and stamping out glowing masses of drapery amid much smoke and confusion. It did not take very long to extinguish the flames, but the struggle while it lasted was fierce and exciting. Clytie stood by watching him, her hand at her throat. It was a new sensation to her to have a man acting for her in an emergency. She had failed. She saw by the man's energy, his fearless dealing with the blazing mass, his strength, his violence, that she never could have succeeded. She admired him, was angry at it; felt herself a helpless woman, was angry at that too; wished that the danger had been a little greater, at which she was more angry than ever.
However, when the last traces of the fire were extinguished, and the man stood before her, somewhat out of breath, wiping his forehead, this little train of emotions came to an end. She gazed piteously at her curtainless windows and scorched wainscoting. He turned and opened the window, whence the damp, gusty wind whirled the smoke in billowing drifts about the room.
“There!” he said, with a breath of relief.
“Oh, how can I thank you?” said Clytie. + “Don't,” he replied with cheerful laconism. “I am glad I was handy—for your sake as well as my own. I live upstairs.”
“I know; I have seen you come in and out. In fact, you passed us to-day. But still you have saved the whole house, and I thank you very, very much!”
“How did it all happen?” he asked, removing for the first time his white slouch hat and disclosing a shock of brown curly hair.
“The candle-shade on the desk; do you see? It must have caught fire and toppled over on to the curtains. I was sitting here and forgot I had left the candles alight; and then I smelled something burning and saw the curtains in a blaze. Then I ran out to call somebody.”
“That was very stupid,” said Kent, pushing back the desk from the middle of the room, where he had wheeled it; “by opening the door you made the things burn quicker. All you had to do was to drag down the curtains and cover them with the hearthrug. And then it is very silly to use paper candle-shades. They are no good, and they are always causing accidents. I hope you are not going to get any more.”
The assured paternal air with which Kent delivered himself of this little speech did away with its apparent rudeness. Clytie, who at first looked rather resentfully at her rebuker, laughed.
They bent down together to restore order among the singed rugs. Beneath them was Kent's waterproof, on to which he had thrown the blazing curtains. It was very badly burned and of course rendered useless.
“It is utterly ruined!” exclaimed Clytie, examining the holes with a helpless expression of regret on her face.
And then her eyes suddenly fell upon a great ugly red splash upon his hand. He withdrew it hastily, but she caught the sleeve of his coat. The stuff came away between her fingers.
“You have burned yourself horribly. Oh, what can I do?”
“It's nothing,” said Kent. “It doesn't hurt. I'll go and put something on it. Please don't trouble. Goodnight.”
He moved towards the door, with his hat and burned waterproof in his hand. But Clytie could not let him leave in this way. The woman in her was moved.
“Oh, please don't go until I have seen what harm you have got. I should feel so unhappy about it. I may be able to dress it for you—until you can see a doctor.”
She spoke so sincerely, so frankly, and looked at him with such genuine concern, that he surrendered with a good grace. He came forward to the table where the big lamp was burning and put out his arm for her inspection. It was really injured, and was beginning to be exceedingly painful.
“What can I do for it?” she asked rather helplessly.
“Oh, some olive oil and a bit of rag will be the best.”
Clytie produced some cotton wool and some oil from a cruet in the sideboard and then sought after some linen to bandage with. Kent noticed that she did not ask him for his handkerchief, nor did she use her own, but went rather impulsively to a workbasket and tore off a strip of soft material that was lying on the top. It was very expensive stuff, and the whole piece of work of which it was to form a part was spoiled. It was characteristic of her. Another woman would have remembered where she had stored some odds and ends of old linen.
Kent watched her curiously as she was bending over his hand. He had often seen her before, but his life went on so far outside the sphere of women that he had scarcely given her a thought as he had passed her by. He had never even inquired her name. From the mere fact of her renting the studio it had come involuntarily to his knowledge that she followed pursuits more or less artistic; but his curiosity had never been aroused. Now that he had been suddenly thrown into close contact with her he was interested. He smiled at himself for the unwonted pleasure he found in watching the lights dancing through her hair, the brows contracted ever so little in the absorption of her occupation, the long nervous fingers, set on the broad palm, deftly arranging the cotton wool, the scrap of old lace at her throat and wrists. She was pretty, striking, to look upon, but he had not formed a very high impression of her otherwise. It was just the sort of thing a woman would do, to run out of the room when it was on fire, to give up thinking for herself in any emergency and trust blindly in Providence—or a man. It is a strange thing that those men who see least of women know most concerning them.
As she raised her head after pinning the bandage she caught the expression of amusement on his face. He was quick to note the little shadow of resentment that passed over hers.
“I was thinking what a mess I should have made of it by myself,” he said with a tact that surprised him. “Thank you very much.”
“It was the least I could do,” replied Clytie. “I feel so guilty about it all—and your poor waterproof too.”
“It's a very old one,” he replied good-humouredly, holding the garment out for inspection. “My friends will be delighted. They have threatened to cut me in the streets if they saw me in it again. So you see you have secured my friendship for me. And I shall get on much better with an umbrella to-night.”
“But you're surely not going out to-night!” cried Clytie, moving to the window and shutting it, as if he were intending to escape through it. “It is pouring wet, and you would catch cold in your hand—it would get inflamed, or something dreadful. It is stupid of people not to take care of themselves. It's hurting fearfully, isn't it? Tell me.”
She looked at him so frankly, her head thrown back a little, and spoke with such a faint touch of imperiousness in her voice, that Kent checked his impulse of retreat. “Of course it hurts. But I don't mind. If one minded all the little pains of this life, one would have no time for anything else. Besides, I am used to rough it a bit. It is my own choice, more or less, and I like it.”
Clytie remembered the strange stories Mrs. Gurkins had told her about Kent's way of life. She had listened to them with idle interest, never imagining that Kent and herself would ever become acquainted. Now that he alluded to his habits she felt bound to confess her share in the gossip, which she did somewhat rebelliously, checking certain more timorous promptings of silence.
“So you see I know all about you,” she said in conclusion. “When people are eccentric they become, as it were, public characters. Now if you were to talk to Mrs. Gurkins——”
“Heavens forbid!” cried Kent with much warmth. “I was fleeing from her this afternoon when I nearly knocked you down.”
“Why?” asked Clytie, laughing.
“I don't know—instinct, I suppose. Perhaps I have been wrong. Otherwise I might have known something more of you. It's a bad compliment, I am aware, but I have been here a whole year and I have never seen or heard your name. Might I know whom I have had the pleasure of assisting? I did not in the least care before, but now it is different.”
There was an honesty and directness in his voice that pleased Clytie. She felt glad he had asked her. There is a touch of susceptible vanity even in the most emancipated of women.
“My name is Davenant, and I am by way of being an artist—that is to say, I gain my living by it.”
Her eyes wandered unconsciously round the room hung with many of her half-finished sketches. Kent followed her glance, and then crossed to the wall and examined one or two of the pictures.
“Are these yours?” he asked, turning round quickly.
They were charcoal sketches of street scenes, direct and daring. Kent received Clytie's nod of assent, and glanced at the pictures and then at her again, as if trying to reconcile the two.
“Is all your work of this kind?”
“Mostly. Sometimes I draw it milder,” she added, with a smile, “when definite orders come in; but I feel more at home with this sort of thing.”
Kent returned to the centre of the room, where he had been standing before.
“I am not an artist myself,” he said, “but I have been brought up in an atmosphere of art and I love it. My father was Rupert Kent, painter-etcher; he did that little thing over your mantelpiece.”
“Isn't it a perfect little piece of work?” said Clytie, looking round at it. “I am very fond of it.”
“So was my father. Well, you see, I am not a Philistine in art matters, and when I say your work interests me I mean it. I should like to look at some more of it. Where is it to be found?”
“You can come anytime to my studio if you like. It is my place of business, you know, and perhaps you may get me some orders. Art is terribly mercenary in these days.”
“I want to see the things you do for yourself,” said Kent bluntly, ignoring the little hedge wherewith she had fenced her invitation. “It will be very kind of you to let me come.”
Clytie held out her hand to him as he bade her goodnight and thanked him for his help.
“And now that we know each other,” she said, “I hope—I hope you won't cut me on the stairs.”
When he had gone Clytie looked ruefully at the damage that had been done. Her pretty inside curtains were destroyed; the heavy outer ones burned into great charred holes. The carpet and hearthrug were badly scorched, and the side of her writing-table warped and blistered. As she gazed at the wreck she went over the little scene in her mind. Why had she stood still, leaving the whole of the work to Kent? What must he have thought of her?
If he had been any ordinary man of her acquaintance she would have been still angry with herself for her helplessness, and her anger would have reflected itself on him. But now she put the question to herself more through curiosity than irritation. There was a simplicity about the man that attracted her. His words had been blunt, almost rude sometimes, but his voice had been kind, his manner protective, straightforward. She had signally marked her approbation for him by asking him to visit her studio, a privilege she only accorded to a few tried and very sympathetic men friends. Kent interested her, and yet she had not the slightest desire to transfer her impression of him to canvas.
The next morning she gave Winifred an account of the last evening's incidents, confessing her own impressions in her wilful, half-cynical way. Her friend listened meekly, wondering at her earnestness. The curtains had caught fire, a gentleman had come opportunely to her aid, had burned his hand, which she had tended in common courtesy. It was all so very natural. As for feeling humiliated at being helped by a man, what are women put in the world for except to yield and give way before men?
But Winifred did not say this to Clytie.
John Kent, antiquarian, scientist, Bohemian, and assistant curator in the British Museum, dwelt in the attics, far above the limit of the stair carpet. By the time you had reached them you had lost all sound of the thoroughfare below, and even when you looked out of the windows all sense of locality was lost. Nothing could be seen but roofs and chimney-pots, except on very clear days, when, through an accidental vista of streets, the tops of the trees in Chelsea Hospital were dimly visible. But in Kent's rooms no one cared to look out of window. In the first place, it was difficult of access, and in the second, the extraordinary appearance of the apartment riveted one's attention entirely to things within.
On the floor was neither carpet nor rug. The place of a fender was supplied by three large iron tripods, waifs from some dismantled chemical laboratory, which, when they were not otherwise engaged as footstools, served to support a kettle, a saucepan, and a glue-pot. All around the walls, with just one space for the door, ran a broad deal dresser that did duty for several tables, and below it, here and there, were cunningly contrived cupboards. Above, every inch of wall was covered: one side completely with books, the others with pictures, mostly old engravings, little masters such as Cranach and Behm, a frame of perfect little Aldegravers, a Prince Rupert mezzo, two Woolmers with their exquisite wavy lines, Bewicks, and a magnificent modern Jacquemart etching of a Sèvres vase. The intermediate spaces were filled up with a heterogeneous assortment of curios. The dresser-table was likewise laden with books, coin cases, scientific specimens, strange weapons, old axe-heads, Japanese sword hilts cunningly carved, newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and papers innumerable. There were only two fairly clear spaces around the whole extent: one where Kent worked, and another where he took such meals as he had in his lodgings. Save for one solitary leather writing-chair, the centre of the large room was absolutely empty; but in a corner, on the floor, were piled up a set of canvas deck-chairs which Kent brought out and opened whenever he had visitors.
All the fixtures in the room he had made with his own hands. Manual labour was a delight to him. He also cooked his own food and cleaned out the room. The latter operation consisted in raking out the ashes from his grate and laying the fire afresh. No peace-destroying woman disturbed the precincts with broom and duster. When the dust grew so thick that it interfered with his breathing and clouded the lens of his microscope he went round with an old towel flicking and flapping with great energy, and then he watered the floor out of an old bronchitis-kettle.
Kent was a happy man. He had convictions, enthusiasms; manifold interests in life for his lighter moments, one great absorbing work for his serious hours. His slender income sufficed amply for all his wants, and there was always a margin over for the purchase of an occasional rare edition or print or curio. Whenever his salary was increased that margin was greater. His mode of life never changed, for the simple reason that he considered it to be the most delightful one possible. Purple, fine linen, and sumptuous fare had no charms for him. It was always with much groaning of spirit that he put on dress clothes when he went out into the world. He cared not for the high places in the synagogues. Provided he had not to wait outside the doors, the pit of a theatre was a place as desirable as the stalls.
In his friends too he was happy—a few men different from himself and from each other—and to these he clung loyally. But the conditions of his life removed him from feminine influences. Beyond those girls in his immediate family circle, whom he called by their Christian names and treated with an old-fashioned, brotherly protection, scolding them when they did foolish things, such as wearing light shoes in wet weather, performing little services for them when they behaved themselves nicely, he never troubled his head about womankind.
On the night when Clytie's curtains caught fire he had been on his way to visit a coterie of three bachelor friends who shared a house in South Kensington. They were accustomed to his nocturnal appearances, and the worse the night and the later it grew the more likely was Kent to present himself at the sitting-room door, a dripping, ruddy apparition, his cheeks and beard glistening with raindrops. And then he would throw off his mackintosh, call for slippers, and join the circle round the fire. The thoughts of the dreary tramp home between two and three never seemed to dismay him. Cheerlessness of environment in no way affected his happiness.
They formed the chief part of his social life, these three friends, tried by the changes in fibre, tastes, affinities, that over half a score of years effect. There was Fairfax, the doctor, ruddy, full-blooded, magnetic with health and vitality, whose brass plate shone huge on the front door, inviting confidence; Greene, the solicitor, shrewd, hard-headed, a speaker of few words; and Wither, the civil servant, the little gnomelike man, full of strange sayings, whimsical, non-moral, a man of boyish, elfin beauty, trusted by men, petted by women. Of the three Kent loved Wither best. Wither saw deeper into the world's mysteries than he, but his own sturdy honest sense had kept the other from many an abyss.
After bidding Clytie good-night, Kent stood irresolute on the landing. Should he wrap the remains of his waterproof around him, and still go whither his truest happiness had hitherto always led him? Considerations of the chill, sleeting night and the throbbing pain in his hand went for nothing in his decision. The girl who had tended the burn had almost besought him not to go out. To disregard her would be an act of discourtesy. Thus thought honest Kent as he turned on his heel and slowly mounted the stair. But his evening had been spoiled, he told his briarwood pipe, with a consoling sense of martyrdom, and the cause thereof was feminine.
“It is just the silly sort of thing that Agatha would do,” he said to himself.
Agatha was his sister, whom he pitied intensely for being a woman. He thought of Clytie's pictures, the signs of virility in them, and he began to pity Clytie too. Yet there was a difference of kind in his sentiments. He pitied his sister for being constrained to ambitionless-ness and futility; he was sorry for the handicap of sex to Clytie's ambitions.
In some such attitude of mind towards her he knocked at the studio door the following afternoon. It is true that a warning throb of the bourgeois in him, that still sometimes mutely guided the Bohemian along certain tracks, had made him consider for a vague moment the correctness of calling so immediately upon Clytie; but the directness and simplicity of his nature disregarded it. It was only natural that Clytie should like to know how his burned hand was faring.
He found the girls busily painting, Winifred at the side, with her basket of flowers near her, Clytie standing at her easel, in the middle of the room, her back to the door, her face turned half round to see who would enter in response to her call.
On the floor by the fireside sprawled Jack, the model, eating an orange. His face was still dirty, his curly hair matted. Winifred had pathetically besought Clytie to have him washed. Why should his poor little face be all over dirt?
“Because it could not exist without it,” Clytie had answered. “It was so before he was born.”
Winifred had given her one of her appealing looks from swimming brown eyes, and Clytie, remorseful, had run impulsively up and caressed and kissed her. But she had not washed Jack's face. He scrambled to his feet and looked defiantly, like a young animal, at Kent when he entered.
The ground-glass roof, the white walls scored over with Clytie's fantasies, and the bright red curtain at the back behind the stove gave a singular setting to the picture.
Clytie's eyes brightened. She threw a cloth over the picture she was engaged on.
“How good of you to come—and the hand?”
“A trifle. It will be quite well in a few days; I thought you would not mind my coming to tell you how your doctoring had succeeded. I am keeping it in a sling—so; otherwise I should be always trying to use it. You are none the worse, Miss Davenant?”
“I? Why should I?”
“Oh, nerves, shock, headache—and all that. My mother, I know, would have been upset for a week.”
Clytie laughed; a gay little laugh. She pierced through the words to the simplicity that lay behind them.
“I have never cultivated nerves, Mr. Kent. They sadly interfere with practical life. How do you think Miss Marchpane and I would get on with this sort of thing”—and she nodded towards Jack—“if we had nerves? Winifred, this is Mr. Kent, who put out my fire last night. Miss Marchpane and I share the studio together, you know.”
“You work on very different lines,” said Kent after a while, leaning back in his chair so as to catch a glimpse of Winifred's tiny canvas. “What a strange thing temperament is! I suppose neither of you does landscape.”
“Oh, yes, Winifred. Dainty little bits of meadow and stream. I can't; I always want to put legs and arms to my trees, and make the branches twist and writhe about, like Gustave Doré in the 'Wandering Jew.'”
“You scarcely look like a painter of the weird,” said Kent.
“You think I have not enough strength of imagination?”
“You have too much strength of mind,” returned Kent judiciously. “You hanker too much after the real. I can only judge,” he hastily added by way of explanation, “by what I can see of your work around me.”
“You will get into difficulties,” said Clytie, laughing. “One moment you accuse me of nerves, and the next of strong-mindedness. Which is right, Winnie?”
“I should be telling too much or too little if I were to say,” replied Winifred. “Mr. Kent will have to judge for himself. We had better show him something to go by.”
They turned to an exhibition of Clytie's paintings; small stacks of canvases were ranged on the floor, along the walls; here and there one hanging or standing on a table or on an easel. Clytie stood by in her nonchalant, professional way, giving a word or two of necessary explanation as Winifred placed them one by one upon an easel for Kent's inspection. Painters, sculptors, musicians and actors have a moral advantage over poets and novelists, in that they are not ashamed of their work. An artist shows you his picture frankly and hopes you will like it; if a poet reads you a sonnet, he has an all-devouring dread lest you may deem him a prig. And the strange part of it is that you do; whereas you think the painter rather a good fellow. A little problem in sociological aesthetics.
As Kent looked at the pictures he lost his sense of Clytie's Agatha-like behaviour of the previous evening. He forgot even to pity her. He expressed genuine admiration for her work, interspersing his remarks with outspoken criticism which Clytie recognised as deeper than that of the mere virtuoso. It was qualified, too, by the supreme attribute of simple common sense. He judged the pictures on their merits; he judged Clytie as a woman of genius, strong mind, out of the ordinary run of women. The inner promptings and cravings that had thus found artistic expression it was beyond his philosophy to suspect. Nor did Clytie think of enlightening him.
“I like your realism,” he said. “It is straightforward. There's always a great danger of this sort of thing degenerating into morbidness. But if you can keep it true, it's healthy; it means sober, honest work, and not an intermittent fever. I see you work off your superfluous energy on the walls.”
“Oh, I forgot them,” cried Clytie somewhat shamefacedly. “You must not look at them, please. They are not part of the show. Miss Marchpane gets tired of flowers and peach-bloom, and sometimes——”
“Clytie!” cried Winifred reproachfully.
Clytie laughed; and Kent with her. The light jest brought them nearer together.
“No; I do that when I feel wicked,” said Clytie. “I paint a nice, correct little picture for the nice, correct people who are going to buy it, and then I grow angry with them and feel I should like to shock them, take the stiffening out of them, reduce them to elemental bits of humanity. Look at this group of street urchins. I am doing that on order for my dealer. Here is Jack—look at him now staring into the stove with the unreasoning content of a young dog. Doesn't he seem nice and conventional in the picture? You can hear the young lady of the house saying to the curate, 'Aren't these little street children too delightful?' Now if they were shown the real Jack, it would give them to think, as the French say—and they hate doing that. This ismyidea of the real Jack.”
She whisked the cloth off the easel and showed Kent the charcoalébaucheof her own particular study of the urchin.
She had worked rapidly that day, with the feverishness that Kent deprecated. Whether she would convert the sketch into a finished picture she did not know. She had desired to fix the haunting impression of Jack's possible history.
Kent was somewhat startled by the suddenness of the presentation. There was the boy, refined, delicate in feature, great-eyed, curly-haired, but repulsive with cruelty and animalism; in a degraded attitude, head bent forward, knees bent, lips parted in a sneer.
“He does not look like that now,” said Kent, comparing the original with the copy.
“Wait,” said Clytie. Then imperiously to the urchin: “Jack, what are you thinking of?”
He turned, looked up at her shiftingly.
“Dunno.”
“Weren't you thinking of the nice little story of the cat you told me this morning?”
No answer.
“It's about a stray cat that came into his mother's house half dead, you know, and this boy was so kind to it—like a dear little girl——”
“Yer lie!” cried the boy, starting to his feet. “Oi told yer Oi killed 'er. I lammed her bloomin' 'ed open with a chopper. I 'ates cats!”
“Voilà!” said Clytie. “That's the real Jack. That's the Jack I'd like to startle Peckham Rye with.”
And then turning to the boy:
“That will do for to-day, Jack. Here's your shilling; give it to your mother.”
“Shan't,” said Jack.
“Oh, but you must,” said Winifred; “look how hard your poor mother has to work to keep you, Jack.”
“She's bloomin' well got ter,” said Jack. “I aint going to give 'er no money. She never gives me none.”
“But your mother will beat you,” said Clytie.
“Wot do I care?”
“And your father, you sweet boy?” asked Kent.
“Aint got none.”
“Never had one?” continued Kent.
“No; mother aint that sort. Blamed glad.”
“Here, you'd better run away,” said Clytie hurriedly. “Keep your shilling and make yourself as ill as you like with it. Come the day after to-morrow—Friday. Can you remember? It's unnecessary to request you not to wash between then and now. Go on. Good-bye. Out you get.”
The boy took up the remains of his cap and went, with an air of relief, out of the room.
“What a little brute!” said Kent. “Why don't you try to reform him—make him human?”
“He is human,” cried Clytie with some warmth. “That's why I cultivate him. Delightfully human! Refreshing! As for reforming him”—with a shrug of her shoulders—“I am not a Sunday-school teacher. I have nothing to do with the submerged tenth; let the good respectable folks who have submerged them raise them with their polite and respectable hands. I am an artist—a student of life—what you will. Each one to his trade. Perhaps when I have got what I want out of Jack it may amuse me to show him the desirability of not 'lamming cats' bloomin' 'eds open with a chopper.' I don't know—I'm not altogether devoid of moral sense. Winifred's tender heart may be touched, and between the two of us we may turn him out a mild-eyed journeyman carpenter, a member of the Y. M. C. A., a model of all the virtues. But I very much doubt it. He has vice in his blood. But perhaps I am wounding some of your susceptibilities, Mr. Kent? You may be a social reformer, and keener than I on these matters. If so, pardon me. We artists are privileged, you know, to view life from our own standpoint.”
Kent threw up his hand and dropped it—a little gesture of deprecation. He, too, had large views on humanity and its needs. He was even then sacrificing comfort, fame, ease, such as other men understand them, so as to serve it. But it was according to his own capabilities. It was a darling scientific work, that on the most modest computation would take him twenty years to complete—an unthankful task; his name to be remembered with reverential gratitude by some half dozen workers, to perish unheard of by the remaining millions of mankind. But these half dozen would use the result of his life's energies to the advancement of human prosperity, and that thought glowed within Kent's heart. Still a man has not time for all things. He honestly disclaimed pretensions to being a social reformer. He was also artistically sympathetic enough to appreciate Clytie's attitude as regards Jack. He was nearer to her in spirit than Winifred, who was pained at Clytie's speech. She would have cried out with the sharpness of the pain had it not been for Kent's presence. And she would have been revolted at the cynical callousness had it not been for the blind adoration with which she bowed before Clytie. Whatever Clytie did was right, she told herself, and she was a poor little body who could not understand these things. But her heart bled for Jack, and she wondered why Clytie's did not bleed also.
“I spoke idly,” said Kent. “I am sorry. If all artists set about reforming their models, their hands would be too full for art. But he is a little brute all the same, and, as you say, Peckham Rye would be startled by him. But why do you want to shock Philistia?”
“Wouldyoulike to live in it, be of it, and worship at comfortably timed intervals in its correctly appointed temple of Dagon?”
“No,” laughed Kent. “They wouldn't have me in it. I think they could stand less of me than I of them. They are God's creatures after all, you know. If you prick them, they bleed—and so forth. If they admire your little pictures, which I too admire vastly, there must be some saving grace in the Philistines.”
Clytie shrugged her shoulders.
“But why should I be obliged to paint in their way, and not in my way? That is what irritates me.”
“Have you tried them with your way, as you call it?”
Even Winifred could scarcely forbear flashing at Clytie a little smile of tender malice.
“God bless my soul!” she whispered softly, and the two broke into unconstrained laughter.
“Winifred is quoting, Mr. Kent. It was an elderly gentleman, stout, florid, lots of watch-chain—one of my patrons. He had bought one of my pictures at the dealer's, and came for another. Burrowes showed him one of my own own things. Winifred and I happened to be at the back of the shop at the time. The old gentleman put on his spectacles, looked at the picture, gave such a jump, held it in the light, and then gasped out: 'God bless my soul, Burrowes, has the young woman taken to drink?'”
“What did you do?”
“I don't know what I should have done if Winnie had not held me back.” As it was, Burrowes whispered to him that the artist was overhearing the conversation.
“'Well, it will do her good,' says the old gentleman, and he went out storming. Then Burrowes came to me and complained that I had lost him a customer. He has the soul of a pork-butcher, that man!”
Then turning to Kent, her cheeks still flushed with anecdotal animation:
“That's how it is, you see!”
“Well,” said Kent, “perhaps you have reason to owe Philistia a grudge. I haven't. If it shuts its respectable doors on me, I shrug my shoulders and set up my wigwam outside, where I can smoke my pipe in peace. It is better not to care for the world—or anything, for that matter, if one has work to do. One's keenness on life ought to leave one no time for hating one's fellow-creatures.”
Winifred looked at Clytie, expecting to see her resent the implied rebuke. But Clytie only laughed softly to herself, leaning back in her chair, looking at her finger tips.
“You are by way of being a tonic, Mr. Kent,” she said, without looking at him.
Kent was disconcerted, could not find a reply. He stroked his tawny beard and moustache with his free hand, and looked at her somewhat puzzled. He had uttered his own robust faith, and she had seized a personal reference with which she appeared not displeased.
At last he said:
“I don't mean to imply that you are cynical, Miss Davenant. But you are a little vindictive. I, too, often think of that passage in 'Sartor Resartus' where Carlyle strips the clothes off the courtiers at St. James's and leaves them bare, with their bowings and scrapings—do you remember? Well, it would be a very good thing for them. You would come down to pure humanity and find it really a very lovable, great-hearted thing after all.”
“Then, for goodness' sake, let us begin to strip the clothes off them at once!” cried Clytie, changing her attitude, with her usual suddenness. “That's what I want to do. I want real men, real women; that's why I take human nature in the rough”—making a comprehensive sweep with her hand round the studio—“The clothes these things wear don't matter; you can see the passions working through the rents and tears.”
“Umph!” said Kent. “You may see something that will frighten you one of these days. There's plenty of good in humanity, but there's plenty of bad. You had better get hold of what is good first. It will give you a foundation.”
Shortly afterwards Kent took his leave. He had paid a longer visit than he had anticipated. He found himself pitying Clytie again upon new, less definable grounds. He was much struck by her work, her frankness, her independence. She was a novelty to him, different from the few other women he knew. She seemed to have everything calculated to make a woman happy and her life full, and yet he was sorry for her. Why, he could not tell.
He went up to his attics, and prepared to spend his usual working evening. Afterwards, towards half-past eleven, he might walk across to South Kensington. He took from one of the cupboards beneath the dresser-table plates, knife and fork, a half-finished tin of sardines, bread and butter. This, together with a bottle of beer, formed his frugal evening meal. His midday dinner he took at an Italian restaurant near the Museum. He ate standing, walking about his room between the mouthfuls, selecting the books he would require for his work, and pausing now and then over an idly opened volume. His meal finished, he collected the soiled utensils and stacked them on the landing outside his door for Mrs. Gurkins to remove, wash, and return to the same place in the morning. Then he lit his pipe, and settled down to his long evening's work.
Thoughts of burned hand, new-found friends, occupied him not. The crisp whisk of the leaves of his reference-books, the rapid whirr of his quill pen, the occasional bubble of his green-shaded reading-lamp, were the only signs of external life of which he was conscious. The rest of the bare-floored room, with its oddly covered walls, was deep in shadow. But the light shone in a circle upon the pile of books and papers on which he was engaged, and lit up strongly his honest, resolute face, with its intent gray eyes and its kindly mouth half hidden in the moustache and beard. Kent was happy. The darling work, that served him as mistress, religion, ambition—over which he had never known a heartache—held him in its enchantment. And the wet slips grew in number around him.