The summer came. Clytie went abroad with the Farquharsons, through the old towns of Normandy and Brittany. Kent joined them at St. Malo, and spent his month's holiday with them. This was such a departure from his usual habit of solitary pedestrian travel in the rough wilds of Norway, whither he went every year, with little else than a stick and a knapsack, that Wither had been quite alarmed.
“You'll be taking a holiday with me next,” he had said.
But knowing the terms of intimacy between his friend and Clytie, and knowing Clytie herself,—he had accompanied Kent to the studio, at first out of curiosity to see what kind of “being feminine” Kent had made a friend of, and afterwards because he liked to go there,—whatever sceptical imaginings might have exercised him, he forbore to give them expression. He had only looked at Kent, on saying good-bye, in his odd, half-mocking way, and had chuckled noiselessly to himself when the door had closed upon Kent's broad shoulders.
Kent did not regret Norway. A charm, unknown to him before, filled all the days. The Farquharsons were perfect travelling companions: Caroline bright, satirical, helpful, learned in the ways of men; George easy-going, happy either to lounge in the sun with a pipe and bandy chaff with his wife, whilst Kent and Clytie went their own ways, or to spend an antiquarian afternoon with Kent in some old Keltic village. Clytie seemed also to him to expand under the sunny cheerful influences, to grow more feminine, without falling in his estimation. No; he did not regret Norway. He half formulated an intention of abandoning it permanently and substituting Brittany as his habitual tramping-ground. From the first morning, when his boat steamed slowly through the narrow St. Malo docks, and he saw Clytie waiting there to meet him, he felt friendly towards it. The high ramparted wall, with just the top-story row of green shutters and roofs peeping above it, and beyond them the spire of the cathedral; the glimpse through the sentry-guarded gate up the narrow cobble-paved street, gaudy with blue blouses, red handkerchiefs, and yellow oilskins exposed all along at shop doors; on the quay itself the stalls of the hucksters under the lee of the wall, and the busy crowd of swarthy Breton sailors, porters, and green uniformeddouaniers; and Clytie standing, fresh in her pure colouring heightened by the light summer dress, in the midst of this mellow setting—all the picture fixed itself as a whole indelibly upon his mind, and caused a strange little thrill of pleasure to run through him.
They sat on the sands—the finest in the world, perhaps, when the tide is low—that run in a broad, golden sweep from crag-bastioned, grim old St. Malo to the white houses of Parame, amid the babel of bathers and visitors, watching the types Parisian and English, Kent smoking contentedly, while Clytie filled her sketch-book with oddities of personality and costume. Three days slipped away there very pleasantly.
In spite of its banality as a pleasure resort there is a grim charm about St. Malo that is never quite forgotten by those who have once known it. It has an air of stability, of defiance. It is out of the reach of the improver, extender, and suburb-maker. Its great walls guard it as jealously on three sides as the sea does on the other. Almost alone of populous cities, it can never grow. As he left with the party to continue the tour Kent felt this charm, although his associations with the city had been of the lighter kind. They idled through the old towns: Dol, with its dark granite cathedral, looking rather hewn out of the rock than built; Dinan on its granite steep above the Rance, where the heart of du Guesclin is enshrined; Brieux, Paimpol, over which Pierre Loti has thrown the glamour of his sentiment; Morlaix, and so to Brest, with its great harbour and strong sea breeze from the Atlantic. For Kent this journey was an uninterrupted pleasure. No country is richer in things old, worn by weather and time, than Brittany: here an old chapel built of rough unhewn granite; here a shapeless wayside cross erected by some pious crusader on the ragged hill slope, railed round to prevent the encroachments of the broom and heather; here a Druidic mass of boulders; in the cottages curious smoke-dried strips of old Breton work, ancestral oak carvings, rude brass repousée platters—a thousand antiquarian interests in this gray land. But it is a bright one withal. The fields of yellow colza stretch over the landscape in broad patches of glory; the red-cheeked cider apples glow in the orchards. The chestnut-trees in the grounds of the old feudal château, its fleched gables dimly visible, hang gratefully over the high bounding wall, above the roadway. The peasants still wear the picturesque Breton dress, tasselled hats, embroidered short jackets, and knee-breeches for the men, great white caps and elaborate kirtles for the women. Along the coast the surf beats in a line of angry light upon the rocks, and shows white, in the midst of the blue, around the islets out at sea. And the old fishing villages look as if they were but flotsam and jetsam cast up by Providence around the gray, weather-worn church that has taken them to its bosom.
For a few days after they left Dinan Kent noticed a change in Clytie. She was reserved, thoughtful. It was not until she appeared to have thrown off the weight of an obsessing idea that she grew buoyant and frank again. An incident unknown to him had occurred at Dinan, shaking the girl's heart to its depths.
Her bedroom in the hotel opened, like the others on the same floor, on to a small balcony, the spaces in front of each room being separated by a light iron bar. She was dressing one morning when her attention was aroused by voices in the next room, near the balcony. Her own French window was open. The air was sunny and still, and the voices struck clear.
“And that is your last word?” asked a woman's voice in French. She used the familiarton. Her accents were tearful and pleading.
“Yes,” replied a man's voice brutally. “There, there! Do not make any scenes. I go because it is my good pleasure. What have you to say against it?”
“But I love you, I love you, Armand!”
“Bah!” laughed the man, “they say that always. Here are the thousand francs.”
Clytie, who had involuntarily overheard this scrap of the conversation, hastened to shut the window. The sounds died away into murmurs dimly perceptible through the partition wall. Then she heard the room door slam violently and a heavy step tramp down the passage.
Some two hours later she was sitting in the salon of the hotel, reading the papers and looking idly out upon the market-booths in the littleplace. Kent and Farquharson had gone out together to devote a scientific forenoon to the monuments of the town, and Caroline was writing letters in her own room. Clytie was alone. Suddenly the door opened and a woman, scarcely more than a girl, appeared on the threshold. She made a step forward, but perceiving Clytie by the window, she hesitated, irresolute whether to advance or retire. Clytie looked up quickly, caught a glance which she interpreted as one of appeal.
“Oh, enter, mademoiselle,” she said, with a smile.
The newcomer murmured a “Merci,” entered, closed the door, and sitting down on the faded sofa by the wall, commenced turning over the pages of an old illustrated paper. Clytie went on with herFigaro. Presently her ear caught a little sniffling sob. She turned round. Her companion was squeezing a wet rag of a handkerchief in her hand, her head turned away towards the paper; she was crying. Clytie rose, moved softly across the room. But as she was going through the doorway she saw the girl, abandoning herself to her misery, bury her face upon the sofa cushion. Clytie was touched. She went back to the girl, laid her hand softly on her shoulder.
“Mademoiselle!”
The girl started, raised a pretty, tear-stained face, looked at Clytie wistfully out of her light blue eyes, her lips quivering.
“You are in trouble,” said Clytie.
“Oh, mademoiselle, you are very good,” cried the other—“oui; je suis bien malheureuse. But you must leave me. You are a young girl well brought up, whilst I——Merci, mademoiselle; you can do nothing.”
The voice struck a chord of association. Where had she heard it recently? Quickly it flashed upon her, the scrap of dialogue she had overheard that morning. The girl again hid her face. The low-cut dress, beloved by Frenchwomen, disclosed a shapely neck, on which clustered coquettishly a few tiny madcap curls below the smooth, upbrushed, fair hair. Her figure was young and graceful, relaxed now in the attitude of abandonment.
Clytie looked down upon her wonderingly, her heart beating. Her maidenhood urged her to fly; a higher sense of life bade her stay a moment by the sobbing figure. She had never, to her knowledge, been near to one of the great unclassed—still less spoken. She remembered the few cynical words of the man; they seemed to give her a pain at the heart akin to nausea. She remembered the pleading tones: “Je t'aime Je t'aime bien!” and her pity went forth upon the woman.
“I don't ask you to tell me,” she said very gently. “But we may talk a little, mayn't we? Perhaps it may ease you—a woman—the same age,”—Clytie stumbled in the foreign language,—“and perhaps not so well brought up—after all, a woman.”
“Oh, mademoiselle, you do not understand. This life!” her shoulders shivered expressively. “After all, it is bearable; but when, with all that, one loves—ah!”
“He is not worth it,” cried Clytie. “He is a scoundrel—I know what he is!”
The girl raised her face quickly.
“You know him? You know Armand? Ah, no; you spoke at random. Yes, he is base, cruel, but that does not prevent it. Mademoiselle, you are good, you are sweet. It is not many who would have spoken. You will let me sit here near you for a little? Ah,mon Dieu,” she went on rapidly, “you cannot imagine what it is—never, never to talk to a woman whom one can respect, and who may not betray you; and then the only persons one can respect are the men, who despise one. And even they—one can love them, but they are cowardly, hard, selfish!”
“There are some good men,” observed Clytie.
“That may be,” returned the other, finally drying her eyes, and putting up her hand to her hair in tidying touches—“that may be, but we don't often see them. Oh, mademoiselle, I know well that I should be ashamed of showing you what I am, but when you touched my shoulder it was like a good sister of the convent,”—Clytie smiled in spite of herself at the comparison,—“and it touched my heart.”
“And I too have a confession to make,” said Clytie, gently interrupting. “This morning—I overheard—my room is next to yours——”
“Ah, it was you who shut the window?”
“Yes. So I know, mademoiselle—at least I can judge. And are you quite alone now?”
The girl shrugged her shoulders.
“What would you have? He has gone, and I must go too. One does not amuse oneself here alone.”
“And where are you going?”
“To Paris. In the middle of summer. It is not gay. Everyone will knowqu'il via plantée là. But one must live. Ah! you are happy, you other honest women!” She talked on, in half-cynical, half-artless confidence, as is the way of her race, forgetting in her need of expansion that her hearer was the English girl well brought up. She dilated on her present trouble, her life in Paris, her creditors, the spitefulness of women, the brutality of men. Clytie listened with mingled feelings of horror and pity. She was so young, this girl, so fresh for all the soil of Paris, and yet taking, from use, the whole horror of her life as a matter of course, realising it only in rare emotional moments. Here was a rejecter of formulas, of a race that has thrown off convention ever since Rahab harboured the spies! Too fragile, delicate she looked for this social warfare. Whither was she tending? Clytie had a supreme, lurid moment of introspection. Only two or three such come in a lifetime.
At last the girl rose from the sofa in the quick French way.
“Forgive me, mademoiselle, for talking like this. I had forgotten. You see well that you could not have helped me otherwise than you have done by sitting by my side. I must not encroach upon your time. Adieu, mademoiselle, and thank you; oh, a thousand times, thanks. I shall not forget you.”
She was going. Clytie rose and went towards her, her face a little flushed, but kindness in her eyes.
“You will shake hands,à l'Anglaise?” she said.
The girl looked her quickly in the face, and then impulsively seized the proffered hand in both hers and kissed it twice rapidly. Then she ran from the room.
Clytie went back to her seat by the window and looked out upon the market-sellers. But she did not see much, as tears stood in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
She did not tell Mrs. Farquharson of this incident, but kept it in her heart as a secret and strange revelation of life—something precious, mysterious, awful. During her drive with the others in the afternoon she was strangely silent. Kent rallied her on her depression in his bluff, kind-hearted manner. She smiled absently, complained of a headache, then shivered with a wave of recollection. For days the spectre haunted her, sometimes looking at her through the light blue eyes of the girl, and sometimes taking a dual form, in which the coarse drudge features of the mother of Jack, the model, were dimly visible. And a question hummed in her ears: “Was this the aspect of life that men kept so jealously hidden from women?”
But Clytie was young and vigorous, with fresh bright blood leaping in her veins. The thrill of the salt breeze and the whole-hearted laughter of her friends soon prevented these imaginings from becoming morbid, and gradually the first sharp impression dulled more or less down to the level of her other experiences of things. She gave herself up again to the freedom and gaiety of the trip, to the unfeigned delight of Kent, who had been beginning to wonder whether, for unknown reasons, some coolness had arisen between them.
He forbore to allude to the subject until the night when they were all returning together from St. Malo to Southampton. He had found her a sheltered corner of the upper deck, rigged up a screen of rugs, comfortably established her in a canvas chair with many wraps. Most of the passengers had gone below. They were almost alone. The voices of two men in an opposite corner came vaguely out of the darkness. All was still save for the continuous rattle and wash, which at sea forms a strange kind of silence in itself.
“Aren't you sorry it is over?” asked Clytie from the dimness of her wraps. “We did nothing very wonderful, but it has been very pleasant—a thing to look back upon.”
“'A garnered joy for after-time.'”
“You are waxing poetical.”
“Oh, that's Wither. He was poetical in his youth. You would hardly think it of him. I have always thought that line rather pretty. Anyhow, it is true in the present case.”
“And we haven't quarrelled,” said Clytie, “in spite of the maxim, 'If you want to lose a friend, travel with him.' But I don't think I could quarrel with you. You wrap yourself round with such imperturbable superiority.”
“The metaphor is mixed, but proceed,” interrupted Kent.
“Well, it's not worth while playing to such a bad house.”
“I don't see what we should have to quarrel about,” returned Kent, laughing. “We each give the other credit for independent opinions; and as for action, if you wanted to go to the right and I to the left, I suppose I should give in and let you have your way—if it were not contrary to common sense.”
“And if it were? If it were simply idiotic?”
“Perhaps I should go with you then, to keep you out of harm's way.”
“Thank you,” murmured Clytie rather touched, looking up restfully at the stars.
There was a little silence. Kent puffed at his pipe. The glow attracted George Farquharson, who had just come up on the deck and was groping about for them in the darkness.
“Going to stay here all night?” he asked.
“Most of it,” replied Clytie.
“Kent making you comfortable?”
Clytie murmured an easeful affirmative, and Farquharson, nodding a good-night, disappeared into the darkness.
“Apropos of quarrelling,” said Kent after a while. “Do you know, I thought once, for a few days, you were vexed with me for something—after we left Dinan. Were you?”
Clytie felt the words like a touch of ice. Why had Kent blundered so tactlessly?
“Oh, why do you mention that?” she cried. “The only painful thing in all the trip. Something that I saw at Dinan—I was put out. Was I very disagreeable? It did not refer to you in any way, dear friend.”
“Pardon me if I have touched on a sore place,” replied Kent. “I find I have a good deal to learn in these matters. Will you make a compact with me to tell me if ever I offend you? Your friendship has grown so valuable and dear a thing to me that the idea of running the risk of losing it makes me—what shall I say? Well, I couldn't bear it. I don't often talk like this,—sentiment comes out of me very awkwardly,—but when I do say anything of the sort I mean it. Believe me.”
Clytie put out her gloved hand and touched him lightly on the arm. She, too, felt that she had certain need of him. A little thrill of tenderness passed through her as she turned her head towards him to reply.
“Didn't I call you 'dear friend' just now? And I meant it, too. You are too honest, too single-hearted, ever to offend me, as you say. If I am ever rebellious with you it will be my own fault, and I shall know it. And as I really have got some common sense, I shall be sorry for it. But you won't expect me to tell you so every time, will you? You will have to take it for granted.”
“You always make yourself out worse than you are,” replied Kent. “Very few people know you. The Farquharsons, myself, Winifred, do. I should like to go with you wherever you go, and tell folks not to believe you, to prove to them what a——”
“Oh, stop! stop!” cried Clytie, with a little laugh. “This sojourn in the land of compliments has infected you. Oh, no; I am ordinary; not bad, not good. You see, if I had had anybody to care for specially, and who cared for me, I might have shown up differently. I have hardly had a chance of seeming otherwise than selfish. Opportunity makes the saint as much as it makes the thief.”
Kent meditated, framing a reply. The right words would not come until it seemed that too long an interval had elapsed. There was another silence—one of those pleasant ones between friends when they feel in sympathy. Clytie at last broke it.
“Would you have had such a conversation as this with a man friend?”
“No—at least—well, no. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. The idea occurred to me,” replied Clytie.
The long autumn months rolled on, bringing little new to Clytie or to Kent. Clytie continued to paint her smallgenrepictures, but with a more certain touch, a restraint which a deeper insight into life compelled. They did not satisfy her now, however, as they used to. She had more articulate longings after an art which should be higher, more comprehensive, more responsive to certain subtler and at the same time more stirring impulses within her.
“I want to paint something that may live,” she said to Kent, “something I can throw my whole soul into, something I can look at when it is finished and say: 'There, that is final; that expresses consummately everything I have ever felt and dreamed.'”
“If you can ever say that, you will cease to be an artist,” he replied in his matter-of-fact way.
“Perhaps so. But I must try. And the subject, the subject?”
“Wait,” said Kent. “If it ever comes, it will do so of itself.”
Clytie waited, but the subject did not come. Meanwhile she had her hands full with orders, both for pictures and for magazine illustrations. Her life was full, as far as work could make it. Winifred came regularly to the studio, as usual, cheering her with sweet companionship. She had spent her summer holiday at the seaside, treating out of her own purse her two little brothers to a holiday. She came back with glowing reminiscences of her adventures, the humorous naughtinesses of the children, the odds and ends of character she had met with. Her only regret was that her dear Clytie had not been there too.
“I should have thrown those horrid children, Reggie and Arthur, into the sea!” exclaimed Clytie.
“Oh, no, you wouldn't. They simply adore you. They are nice children, aren't they, now?”
“You little goose!” cried Clytie, kissing the warm brown cheek. “They are like you, the sweetest little children in the world. When are they coming to tea?”
These teas in the studio were red-letter days for Winifred's brothers and sisters. They worshipped Clytie, who had keen sympathy with the unconventionalities of childhood. She made grotesque caricatures of them, at which they screamed with laughter, or sat on the hearthrug with them and talked the nonsense that bright children love. Their joy was complete if Kent came in. They called him “Kent,” took complete possession of him, presented him to Clytie as a pet trifle they carried about with them. He, too, was fond of these debauches, and seldom missed attending them if he could leave the Museum in time. He loved to see Clytie take her part in them. She seemed to him even more sweet and womanly than Winifred when she had a child on her lap, and her dark red hair was touching the black ruffled curls. He told her so one day, and the colour came into her cheeks as she laughed.
Another occasional visitor in the studio was Treherne, the young clergyman whom Clytie had met at the Farquharson's numismatic dinner-party. Kent and herself had run across him at a Bond Street gallery where some paintings by the impressionists Degas and Monet were on view. He was looking ill and overworked. He replied to their inquiries that he had been forced to give up his North London parish and take lighter duties near Victoria. As he lived in her neighbourhood, he hoped that Clytie would allow him to call one day and see her pictures; “Jack” at the exhibition had aroused his admiration. Clytie readily gave him her “day,” when Miss Marchpane and herself were at home to their friends, and hoped he would come. He called, found a certain charm in the bright talk of the studio, exhilarating after the dull rounds among his parishioners, and soon became a constant visitor. Perhaps the charm of a pair of soft brown eyes attracted him more than he thought of confessing. Towards the end of the year, however, he bought, through a dealer, two of Winifred's dainty pictures.
The days shortened, the painting light grew less and less, and the time came for Clytie to pay her Christmas visit to Durdleham. She had not been there for a year, and her heart longed at times for the familiar faces and the voices of her own kith and kin. She thought that, perhaps, now she had grown older, her father and sisters would think her mode of life less unnatural, less likely to result in moral shipwreck. The letters, too, she had been receiving from them lately were kinder, more affectionate in tone. Mrs. Blather longed to have her dear Clytie back amongst them once more, and Janet wrote touchingly of the vacant chair at the dinner table. Clytie anticipated much quiet pleasure from her visit. The need of an attitude of rebellion was past, and she could throw herself lovingly, with no fear of compromising her independence, into all the mild interests of the household. There were times when a tenderer, softer chord vibrated in her heart, suggesting sadly the sweetness of home and loved family ties. She was human, with the foolish human craving for things that are not. She could not abandon her free artistic life; but if she could fill it with gentler, softer graces! In these moods she clung to Winifred, loving her for this element of sweet womanliness she brought into the rooms in the King's Road that were her home. It was with this range of feelings uppermost in her heart that she went to Durdleham.
For the first few days after Clytie's departure Kent laboured honestly and doggedly in his old way. But gradually he began to feel a lack of interest in his pursuits, to be vaguely conscious that the conditions of things were upset, and then he wished that Clytie had not gone.
One evening he was sitting in his room with a litter of proof-sheets lying idly before him. He felt depressed. It was a new sensation. It puzzled him, annoyed him, made him angry with himself, like a man's first unsuspected attack of the gout. He rose and walked about. His fire had nearly gone out, his lamp had been flaring and the room was filled with its acrid smoke. He could not open the window, for the sleet and rain were beating against the panes. He stopped for a moment watching the water dribble outside down the glass. Then he turned away impatiently, seeking solace from his book-backs and pictures. But they seemed to look back upon him unsympathetically, as if reproaching him for the bare floor, the untidy dresser, and the cheerless hearth. He rekindled his fire, filled a pipe, and sat down to think.
Kent was not given to introspection. His external interests in life were too engrossing for him to think deeply or continuously about himself. Such a habit of mind he used vehemently to deprecate as morbid, egotistical. But now this strange depression, this vague sense of loss, compelled him to account for it to his reason. He began in a sober, materialistic way to review his general health (there are philosophers amongst us who refer all moods to the liver, not looking upon it, however, like the ancients, as the seat of the affections!), to question some little disappointments he had had with regard to his great work, and to dwell upon the futility of existence—the suggestion of which he should have been logical enough to see was the result and not the cause of his state of mind. But he was not logical. Few men are when the great facts of inner life are in question; for in the course of logic “none of us would see salvation,” as far as this world's happiness is concerned. Gradually a truth dawned upon him. He missed the ever-ready companionship he had enjoyed for nearly a year. He missed Clytie. He found that for the first time in his life since he was a baby he had been depending for something on a woman. He had never realised until then the strength of that unknown subtle influence, the withdrawal of which left him so weak, so unable to put forth all his powers. At first he thought that it was merely the abrupt interruption of pleasant habits, the sudden jerk out of a well-oiled groove. Telling himself he was satisfied with this solution, he resolutely went back to his writing and began to correct his proof-sheets. But gradually his attention wandered again. These sudden impulses to work against the grain soon spend themselves out and produce greater lassitude than before.
He tossed down his pencil in disgust and swung round towards the fire. It was Clytie herself, then, that he missed. He missed her in spite of her being a woman, he told himself. And yet the picture rose before his mind of Clytie's dainty room and Clytie sitting there opposite to him, her hand, with falling lace at wrist, pressed into the softness of her hair. Why had she not written a line to him?
Yes, he missed her. But why should that make his work distasteful? He was puzzled. One thing alone was clear, his loneliness was growing intolerable. He threw on his waterproof, and, leaving his work, trudged through the rain to the “monastery,” at South Kensington.
Wither was alone. Fairfax and Greene were dining out. The little man had been too lazy and sybaritic to face the cold and wet outside. He had clad himself in pyjamas and dressing-gown, and was reading a French novel on the couch drawn up in front of the fire. His diminutive figure looked absurdly small and wizened in his loose wrap. He nodded affectionately at Kent, explained briefly the fact of his being alone, and, while Kent was hunting in a familiar corner for the pair of slippers always there in readiness for his use, went on with his reading.
“Get me some whiskey, old chap,” he said without looking up. “I have been dying for some this last hour and I have been too lazy to stir off the sofa.”
Kent, as usual, supplied Wither's wants and poured out a glass for himself.
“Lazy little beggar,” he said kindly as he sat down in the great saddle-bag chair. “How do you manage to get through your work?”
Wither laughed.
“I thought you knew better than to ask me that.”
It was a tradition in the “monastery” that Wither never did any work. They paid him at his office for lending it a gentlemanly tone. As a matter of fact, like most clever, lazy men, he generally did an ordinary man's day's work in a few hours.
He stretched himself out luxuriously and lit a cigarette.
“Have you ever read this?” he asked, holding up his novel. It was Bourget's “Cruelle Enigme.”
Kent nodded.
“I skimmed it through here one night while waiting for you. I have no patience with that sort of thing.”
“Possibly not,” remarked Wither, “but that's a fact about yourself, and not about the book.”
“I don't believe it is human life,” replied Kent. “People can't make animal passion the keynote of their lives nowadays.”
“Why not nowadays?”
“The conditions of life prevent it. The savage has furious brute instincts, which he gratifies occasionally, when his mind is not taken up with fighting and hunting for his food. It may be the guiding principle in a splendid barbarism like some Eastern courts, where men have little else to think of. But in our modern civilisation there are other interests too absorbing. The hurry of life is too great.”
“What about the empty-minded women you are always railing at?”
“They are all absorbed in their futilities—at least most of them,” he added, correcting himself; “but even when idle they are not beasts. Now this woman you are reading about is a beast.”
Wither eyed him curiously.
“You are talking nonsense, old chap. If she had been simply that, she would not have been a problem to the psychologist. The enigma was the sudden burst into animalism in the midst of a love that was almost idyllic.”
“Bosh!” said Kent. “It was the same old hideous adultery.”
“Oh, well! if you go on those lines, I am done,” replied Wither, shrugging his shoulders. “I thought we were a little more advanced in our ideas in this establishment.”
“You know I don't mean that,” said Kent, puffing violently at his pipe. “The legality of the connection has nothing to do with it. It is the eternal coupling of the male and the female that revolts me. Pah! They might as well write a novel on the loves of the pastures.”
“If I could write French, I should like to try it,” said Wither. “It would be interesting.”
“There is too much of that sort of thing written and talked about,” said Kent. “It's sickening. It's degradation of humanity.”
“Well, it's not uncommon,” said Wither, with a sphinxlike smile playing round the corners of his mouth as he gazed upwards at the cigarette smoke.
“Look here, Wither,” said Kent; “I have a higher faith in humanity. You profess to be a cynic, a man of the world, and you delight in calling yourself nonmoral. That's all foolishness, I know. You are the kindest hearted little chap in the world. But can you, as a man of intellectual tastes, sympathise with all this animalism?”
Wither threw away his cigarette, and bending forward laid his hand on Kent's knee.
“My dear old boy,” he said, with more earnestness than he generally displayed, “I do call myself a man of the world, for I'm in it and I love it, and I have a very decent bowing acquaintance as well with its pals, the Flesh and the Devil. I know something of men, and as for women, it has been my lot to have been petted by a good few—my size lends itself to that sort of thing. In fact, Gulliver with the Brobdingnag maids of honour is not in it with me. I know all about 'em; and I tell you, old chap, that the Beast, sometimes with a big B and sometimes in diamond type, lies in the nature of us all. There is not a living being with pure blood in his or her veins who is not overmastered at times by the principle of sex. You scoff at Bourget as a writer of morbid and impossible fiction. Look at your daily papers. Don't you see parsons of hitherto blameless lives running off with their cooks, virtuous women ruining their lives and their husbands' for the sake of some Hercules of a scoundrel—just as the patrician ladies in Rome went mad over the charioteers in the circus! Man alive! it is the Beast, the Beast that may slumber in an old maid's bosom until she is sixty and then drive her into the arms of her footman. How otherwise have you accounted for these things?”
“I have not tried,” replied Kent simply. “They have not interested me. They are diseases of the brain, for the physiologist to study, like suicide and murder. I don't believe in them in normal everyday life.”
There was a long pause, broken only by Wither's request that Kent should put some coals on the fire, and the rattling of the operation. Wither resumed his reading and Kent pulled at his pipe in silence. At last the former looked up and said suddenly:
“Why do you think people marry?”
“That's funny,” replied Kent, with a slight start. “I was just wondering myself. I don't know: money, companionship, family, idiocy—God knows what.”
“It has always struck me that you would be the first of us to go,” said the other in pure, idle maliciousness.
“I?” cried Kent, with a gesture of disgust. “I marry! give up my work, procreate children I couldn't support! Have to kiss and pet and fondle a woman——”
“Well, you need not do that unless you like,” replied Wither, laughing in his gnomelike way. “She might expect it, but she would be soon consoled by the blessedness of pure spirituality.”
Kent's reply was interrupted by the return of the absentees, Fairfax, the doctor, and Greene.
“I am so glad you fellows have come back,” said Kent; “Wither has been drivelling on his favourite topic until I was beginning to loathe him.”
“He's an immoral little wretch,” said the doctor, throwing his greatcoat on Wither's curled-up body—“a pocket Mephistopheles. We keep him here as a kind of Familiar. Oh, what rot dining out is!” he added, with a yawn and a stretch as he seated his burly form on the foot of the couch. “I wish I had stayed at home.”
“I wish you had,” said Kent. “Let us have just one rubber before I go. There is time.”
But Kent walked home that night with a new trouble at his heart that kept him awake a great part of the night.
Meanwhile Clytie was not enjoying herself at Durdleham. At first there were eager embraces, trifling tendernesses and solicitudes. The dear prodigal had returned, but the fatted calf was killed discreetly, lest it should convey a husk-flavoured reproach. Grace and Janet bubbled over with light Durdleham gossip, seeking to interest, and Clytie earnestly and sympathetically sought to be in touch with her surroundings. It was a real heartfelt effort on both sides towards harmony. But it soon became patent that these efforts were unavailing. Clytie saw the old prejudices barring her at every turn. She recognised with the bitterness of disillusionment that she was the bit of grit in the family machinery, stopping the smoothness of its working. As long as she identified herself with Durdleham interests things went well; but as soon as she, in her turn, ventured to sketch the bright incidents in her town life she felt a check in the current of mutual sympathy. If she was reserved, her sisters complained. They ought to know something of her friends, her occupations. When she was expansive they shrank cold and crablike into their mail of prejudice.
Her intimacy with a strange Bohemian man was a thorn in the side of the family. Mr. Davenant considered it extremely injudicious, and Mrs. Blather whispered to him that she scarcely thought it moral. Janet was too horrified to allude directly to the circumstance. But, in her neat, prim bedchamber, she prayed to the Almighty to lead her erring sister out of the paths of temptation. She duly informed Clytie of this act of piety, and when Clytie burst into laughter that was nearer to tears than to merriment, left the room in virtuous indignation.
Clytie could not help confessing to herself that she longed for Kent's companionship, with its broader sympathies and inspiring influences, but the view the household took of it pained her with a sense of aching discomfort, and made her feel a strange diffidence in writing to him as she had promised. She at last addressed him a short little note, stiff and constrained, which reached him the morning after his conversation with Wither and did not help to cheer him. Too proud to wait for an opportunity of posting this letter herself, she placed it on the hall slab together with the rest of the outgoing correspondence of the family. Although a hundred letters might have lain there for post without any one of them attracting Mrs. Blather's attention,—she was too pure-minded a gentlewoman for idle curiosity to be one of her failings,—it was too good an opportunity for the imps who seem sometimes to regulate human affairs to let slip, and as a matter of course Mrs. Blather's eye fell upon the address.
“So you are keeping up a violent correspondence with that man,” she remarked acidly to Clytie. It is the way of some women to exaggerate.
Clytie bit her lip, cheeking an impulsive answer. What was the use of a retort?
Women of broad, liberal education, with interests beyond the nursery, still-room, and the afternoon-tea table, are known to live together, like men, in comparative harmony. They have learned the lesson the higher, broader life teaches of rising or declining instinctively to another being's plane of thought or feeling. It is hardly a fault of sex that women are petty, spiteful, and intolerant. When the conditions of life are narrow and illiberal any human being, man or woman, runs the risk of being shaped by them. And that is why Mrs. Blather and Janet, good, upright women according to their lights, subordinated their affection to their principles, and stood away shocked from their sister. Their traditional ideals of femininity had been sinned against. The crime was all but unpardonable. It was always present with them, always assuming fresh, distorted shapes. They were on a different plane from Clytie, and viewed all her actions in a false perspective.
Clytie was hurt, wounded in her womanly pride. She knew that there was much clay in her composition, and often felt with chastening self-abasement how much nearer the angels Winifred was than herself. Yet she was accustomed to live in an atmosphere free from reproach. Winifred, Kent, the Farquharsons, and others of her friends might touch with light, tender finger on here and there an imperfection in her character or conduct; for this she was grateful, knowing the deeper feelings of esteem and respect that prompted. But to move in a circle where she was looked upon as a black sheep, as a girl on the path to unutterable abysses, galled her to the quick, sent the hot blood mounting in stinging waves to her cheek, leaving the heart cold. Yet she had learned not to blame her sisters over much. She had lost her militant scorn of Jacob. Kent had taught her that although Esau might possess the higher birthright which no bartering of pottage could alienate, there was still saving grace in the stolen birthright which Jacob guarded so jealously. But this knowledge did not make her heart less sore.
The happiest time in this Christmas visit was when she could get away into the old lumber-attic in which she had dreamed so many girlish dreams. It had long been dismantled of the Liberty curtains, Persian rugs, and cheap Japaneseries that had lent it the suggestion of artistic atmosphere the girl of eighteen had craved. It was bare now, except for a table and chair and a few odds and ends of artist's materials, but a fire could be laid in the grate to make things look cheery, and there was still the deeply recessed attic-window where she could stand and look out over the same drear landscape. It was only the ordinary midland succession of fields, now black with winter, and pastures through which the river ran, its course only indicated by the fringing line of pollards and willows. Away on the slope to the west rose a clump of trees from which peeped a few houses and a church spire, the little village of Wexwith. In the foreground ran the highroad skirted with new red-brick cottages, a touch of sordidness added by man to the ungenerous dreariness of nature. Once this had affected Clytie with a sense of the unutterable melancholy of things. The young are prone to be so affected. They are rather proud when they realise it; it is a kind of youthful vanity. But Clytie, like the wiser among us, sought brightness as she grew older, and although she could not consider the landscape cheerful, looked at it only through the memories of five years. Every spot had associations for her. There was the cottage where she had seen the little bully strike his playmate, the original conception of the picture that had helped to cause her welcome banishment from home. Next to it used to live the old beldame who threw out of doors the custards and jellies that Janet with angelic perseverance used to take her. What cruel mockery she used to make of Janet in those days! Now she submissively helped to carry the custards. Behind the swelling uplands over the village the sun set, a red ball in the wintry sky. For how many wild fantastic daubs had not that formed a background!
It was during these reveries that the picture subject she craved commenced to haunt her as it gradually shaped itself into definiteness. Since her singular interview with the French girl at Dinan a lurid gleam streamed from the gates ajar of mysteries that had baffled her. She had read widely and deeply; but books are only the gloss of life, they are not the text. Its secrets must be read in the living world, with much pain and sleeplessness and wearied eyes. The throbbing page had been presented to Clytie for one sharp moment, blazing, the while, in letters of flame. Such knowledge changes lingering girlhood into womanhood without the aid of passion. It changes sex-pride into sex-sorrow—in higher natures, be it understood. And this sex-sorrow runs in channels hollowed out by ever-varying circumstance and temperament. It flows in the patient, all-enduring devotion of the sister labouring among outcasts, in the militant enthusiasm of the social reformer. It quivers in the hearts of teachers like George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It lives in the souls of some mothers who tremulously watch the shaping of their daughter's destiny. With Clytie it ran confluent with her artistic impulses. It had influenced them vaguely, dimly, hauntingly for months, but now, at last, stirringly, proclaiming itself, insistently demanding expression.
The subject was found: Faustina in her innocent maidenhood. The problem: how to manifest the foreshadowings of passion on the young, clear face?
Clytie spent hours in her attic trying to fix the summer lightnings of features that flashed elusively before her mind. She wished she were in London, to go abroad in the highways seeking after a face. It seemed to her that in the great city she would find the one she wanted, in the park, at the theatre, perhaps among the subdued black rows of women—lines of suppressed volcanic workings—in some great shop. But in Durdleham volcanoes were extinct or regulated by formula to erupt with mild propriety. She began to feel the frenzied weariness of helplessness. If only she could talk to someone—to Kent.
One day Mrs. Blather came into the attic. Clytie was dreaming before incoherent charcoal streaks. The fire had burned low and the draught of the opening door made her shiver.
“Why, Clytie, child, you are blue with cold,” said her sister, wrapping her gray woollen shawl more tightly round her thin shoulders. “Why do you mope up here?”
“I am not moping, Gracie,” replied Clytie; “I am only working—conceiving a picture, that's all.”
“Oh, but you oughtn't to do any work. Have you not come down for a holiday? What's the good of burning the candle at both ends? Come down to the drawing-room and talk to the Howatsons; they are inquiring after you.”
“But I am in such a mess!” laughed Clytie, showing her blackened finger tips.
“Well, come down and tidy yourself in my room; there is a fire, and you can warm yourself for a few minutes.” Clytie followed her sister down the stairs to the latter's bedroom, where a cheerful fire warmed the cold clean chintz of the hangings. Mrs. Blather sat down by the hearth, while Clytie washed her hands and touched her hair.
“Why don't you tell us more of your work, Clytie?” she said propitiatingly. “Here you are being criticised in the newspapers, quite like a famous person, and we at home know nothing of it.”
“Why, Gracie, I thought it did not interest you much.”
“We would take an interest if you would only let us.”
“But, you see, I paint such queer pictures. I don't think they are your style. And then pictures are not portable like books. If I wrote poetry, you could be deluged with presentation copies; but even we ourselves lose all the result of our work when the picture is sold.”
“Of course, but you might write and talk more. And with regard to the 'queer' pictures, don't you think, if you made us your confidantes, the pictures might be a little less—'queer'? You see, Clytie, you are young, and it is your nature to run into extremes. If you were just a little bit restrained by older folks, would you not get what you are so fond of talking about—'truth'—in your work?”
Clytie was somewhat puzzled at Mrs. Blather's conciliatory tone. Was this an effort towards a better understanding, or was it a disguised lecture? She finished her hasty toilet and went and stood by the fire near her sister, her foot on the fender.
“Thank you very much, Gracie,” she said, “but would you always understand? Perhaps,” she added, smiling, after a pause, “you would want to restrain too much—and where would the picture be?”
“Well, why not try? What is the picture to be about that you are working at now?”
The blood rushed to Clytie's cheeks, which, bent down, caught the added glow of the fire—a contrast, with her rich colour, to the clear, waxen, negative face of her sister. She broke suddenly into a nervous laugh.
“There! Even from the beginning I couldn't discuss it with you, Gracie. It is only a girl's face—I can't tell you anything more about it.”
“Well, that's what I complain of,” said Mrs. Blather with growing acidity. “You keep your own sisters in ignorance of your life, and confide everything to this Mr. Kent, who is nothing to you.”
“How do you know I have told Mr. Kent about this picture?”
“I was not referring to this one, though by your manner I see you have.”
“Well, yes, I have,” said Clytie, “because—because—he has the artistic temperament—and he can seize an idea—in fact—why are you saying this to me, Gracie?”
“Because you are not going the right way, Clytie; and it is my duty as your elder sister, who has looked after you since you were so high, to make a last effort to bring you within some restraining influences. We don't like your intimacy with Mr. Kent. It is not what we have been taught to think right. I know you look down upon us as narrow-minded at Durdleham. I think it is better for us. We are shut in, perhaps, between high walls, but the high walls keep us safe.”
They were silent for a few moments, then Clytie said: “Gracie, don't you think this subject has been enough discussed? It is wasting words and spoiling good intentions. Suppose we go down to the Howatsons.”