Ido wish you would cheer up, old chap,” said Wither sympathetically. “You are getting uncomfortable—like Mr. Mantalini's body, in the midst of our joyousness.”
He was lying curled up, as usual, on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. Kent was brooding over the fire. Fairfax had been rallying him from a doctor's point of view, and he had answered vaguely, striving not to let his friend's rough kindness jar too unbearably. He felt relieved when the doctor was called out to see a patient, and Wither and himself were left alone together.
“I suppose I am making an ass of myself. I have never felt miserable before in all my life, and it must be that I am unused to it——”
“It gets in your way like a man's court-sword on the first time of wearing,” said Wither.
“Somewhat,” replied Kent, with a short laugh. He did not mind Wither's jesting. It came spontaneously from the small, bright-eyed man—was in fact his natural language. “Perhaps it does. I'll get over it some day.”
“It will be all right when she comes back.”
“She has come back.”
“When?”
“Nearly a week ago.”
“And how are matters going between you?”
“I haven't seen her yet,” said Kent moodily, staring into the fire. “That is to say, I have seen her. I have lain in wait for her, so as to catch a glimpse of her as she passed by. But I have not met her.”
“And when do you propose going to see her?”
“God knows! I don't.”
“I don't know whether this isfin de siècleor whether it belongs to the glacial epoch,” said Wither, drawing a breath of bewilderment. “At any rate, has it never struck you, friend John, that being in love with a woman is no reason why you should be rude to her?”
“I have scarcely thought of that.”
“Then, by Jove, the sooner you can get it into your muddled head, the better. What have you been doing with yourself these evenings?”
“Anything to keep away. A meeting of the Geological, another of the Numismatic—a theatre, where there was just such another ass as myself. I couldn't stand it, so I went out and turned into the Empire and tried to find comfort in performing dogs. I have also dined out.”
“You must have been a cheerful lot. What did you say to your partner?”
“Nothing. She wanted to babble on, and I let her babble. Curse the whole thing!” he cried, smiting a block of coal with the poker, so hard that the chips flew over the hearthrug; “To think that it should be my fate to meet the only woman in the whole world who doesn't babble!”
“I should consider it in the light of a privilege,” said Wither.
The next morning, after a night's agony of indecision, he plucked up courage and tapped at the studio door. He entered. Clytie was alone, busily preparing her palette. She paused with the half-squeezed tube in her hand, and looked up at him without rising, her brows slightly knitted. He remained motionless, too, on the threshold, after mechanically shutting the door behind him. He tried to utter the little address of lame excuses which he had framed, but the words stuck, somehow, in his throat. He was only conscious that she was there, in the same room with him again, looking bewilderingly fresh and beautiful in her dark dress, with its dainty painting-apron, too simple almost for the rich colour of her eyes and hair and the stately bend of her neck. Yet even then he noticed she was a trifle paler than usual.
“I meant to have come to see you before,” he stammered.
“Why didn't you? I rather expected you,” she replied calmly.
She finished squeezing her tube, and taking up her palette-knife, went on with her occupation. Kent, instinctively conscious that it is a disadvantage to stand, when morally wrong, before a sitting person who is in the right, drew Winifred's painting-stool away from the easel and sat down.
“You might have come in, if only for five minutes,” said Clytie, as he made no reply. The hand holding the palette-knife trembled a little.
“I wanted to,” replied Kent, finding words with difficulty. “But I couldn't. I am very, very sorry if I have been rude. I am always doing things of this sort.”
“It is not very pleasant for your friends; and I suppose we have been friends.”
“Yes, we have been friends,” he replied, “and I hope we shall continue so—if you will forgive me.”
His voice sounded strange in his own ears. In Clytie's it sounded cold and formal. She was puzzled.
“Oh, of course I forgive you! You have made your apology.”
“Believe me—things have happened. I could not come before, indeed I could not.”
“I never doubted your word, Kent,” said Clytie, with a touch of her old soft manner towards him. “Only it seemed strange not to see you. One gets into a certain groove, and a change from it jars. You see how easy it is to become a Philistine. You are much more a child of the light than I am, in that you have got out of the groove quite easily.”
“You have no right to say that,” said Kent, rising.
“Well, perhaps I have not,” said Clytie, bending intently over her palette. “Anyhow, the fact remains that we parted friends before Christmas, and now that I have come back you are changed. I am very sorry—sorrier than I can say. I have valued your friendship and the help it has given me—I am unchanged, I think so—and, to be franker than my sex generally is, I may say, I am hurt.”
Kent misunderstood. He could not help it. He thought she was grieved at his friendship having changed to love, which the tone in her voice told him could not be returned. All had happened just as he had anticipated. She spoke more in sorrow than in anger; that was the only difference.
“If you would prefer that I did not see you again—or so often,” he said, twisting the brim of his hat.
The words estranged them still further. They were pathetic in their ludicrous inappositeness.
“That you must please yourself about,” replied Clytie, with a quick flush. “I have said all that my pride will let me say in the matter. If you prefer to break off our intercourse, well—so be it!”
“You know that I don't wish to do that,” he said in a low voice. “Let me see you sometimes. Could I see you this evening, for instance?”
“No; I am sorry, I am going—I am dining out. Some other time. You know my hours.”
He stepped forward and shook hands with her to say good-bye, thus breaking through an established custom between them of non-handshaking. He reflected on this a moment afterward. It seemed an omen of the dissolution of their friendship.
When he had gone Clytie felt as if she would like to cry. What did it all mean? Why did Kent wish to break with her? She put down her palette and sat in her chair near the stove. She felt unhappy, lonely. She was in that strange state of uncertainty about the present, which often takes the form, with women especially in certain moods, of a presentiment of future trouble. “I wish Winnie would come,” she half repeated to herself. But almost on top of the thought entered one of Mrs. Gurkins's curly-haired children bringing her a note. It was from Winifred, who was suddenly called out of town on business and could not come on that day to the studio. Clytie mechanically tore up the note and scattered the pieces over the coals. She was not subject to fits of personal depression—independent entirely of the artistic side of her life. But the air seemed charged with disturbing, conflicting elements.
Soon she roused herself and went over to her easel, where for some time she worked steadily. A lay-figure clad in a child's ragged frock stood near by and she painted in the lights of the skirt, with mechanical precision of touch. But her thoughts were far away. Then the face that she had painted attracted her attention. It was that of a child—merry and smiling—but with the little London street girl's precocious wisdom. It was cleverly executed. Clytie had seized the suggestion of the everlasting feminine in the face, accentuating it ever so little. It seemed to laugh mockingly at her, out of the canvas, as who should say—“Look at me. Child as I am, I am as old as the world, and I can tell you secrets that you know not of.”
“You wise little witch,” said Clytie, after a while, standing back, with head inclined in critical surveyal of her work. “I wish you could tell me what is the matter with Kent.”
And then for the first time Mrs. Farquharson's idle, jesting words came into her mind:
“Take care that he has not gone and fallen in love with somebody!”
And the child's old face seemed to add a mocking confirmation.
This would explain all: his sudden change, the stiffness of his letter; his shrinking from seeing her; the awkwardness of his apology; the vague phrase, “things have happened,” which had puzzled her. The more she thought of it the more probable did this solution seem. It caused her a little heaviness of heart. Certain strange imaginings had come to her, too, this week. She needed the strength of Kent's friendship.
There are no persons harder to read and easier to misunderstand than those of whom we are fondest. There are two common causes of mutual miscomprehension. First we take it too much for granted that we can read the heart of another human being; and secondly, we are too apt to conclude that affinities sharpen perception to such an extent that the unexpressed becomes luminously expressive. This is a curious fact, too little recognised in our minor problems in social statics. Clytie had fallen into the one error, Kent into the other.
For the first time in her life Clytie felt afraid. The sense of what was missing in her life dawned, half shadowy, before her. She was different from other girls of her age, more advanced, as the phrase goes. For the majority of women come in ignorance to emotion; they feel, before they realise that they are learning. But Clytie in her eager search after the roots of existence had learned much, with feelings as yet untried. In this knowledge, if as yet there was no sorrow, there was fear. If Kent had come to her at this moment with a passionate avowal of his love, she would have yielded to him. Her fear would have melted away into joyousness, the rich springs of her nature would have been opened, and her destiny would have been accomplished. But neither of them knew this. He was engaged in the humorous task of trying to kill love, and she was half consciously tending along a path strangely diverging from his.
She dined that evening at the Farquharsons'. Hammerdyke was the only other guest. It was a bright, cosy meal, and Clytie soon forgot her depression of the morning. Caroline was at her merriest, proud of her three companions—of each in an especial manner. George was mildly satirical, as usual. He wore his velvet jacket, in which he found more happiness than in his ceremonial dress-coat. His dry touch of humour was pleasantly antagonistic to Hammerdyke's stronger personality and downright views of life. The latter laughed heartily, almost boyishly at his rebuker, like one who is accustomed to indulgence on the part of others for caprices of action and language. These, coming from a lesser man, might have been repugnant to the sensitive; but from him they seemed to bear a physical justification.
As he sat opposite her, talking in off-hand, picturesque fashion of incidents in his adventurous life, Clytie could not help looking with a feeling somewhat akin to awe at the man who had gone through such things and could speak of them so lightly. She listened, interposed a question here and there, wondered what it would feel like to treat those memories in so familiar a fashion. A new page of life seemed to lie open before her, quivering with sensations beyond her ken.
“Didn't you ever feel horribly afraid?” asked Caroline, while he was sketching some of his more recent exploring experiences.
“I did so,” he confessed frankly, “but I had my devils well under control. I had the power to string a mutineer up on the nearest tree or to pot him with my revolver, and somehow they rather funked me. If it had entered their woolly heads to go for me all together they would have made short work of me—but no one liked to take the initiative.”
“Did you ever try kindness, on these expeditions—by way of experiment?” asked Farquharson.
“Not much. You can't afford to fool away your life for the sake of an experiment. Oh, no! my dear sir, the noble savage does not swarm much round about the slave tracks in Central Africa. The Zulus may be different. I don't know—I've never seen much of them—but Fuzzywuz and his neighbours can only understand brute force.”
“I don't quite see, now, how you got all that power,” said Farquharson. “Did you establish yourself as a little king—or what?”
“Oh, no!” returned Hammerdyke, laughing. “When I had finished with the Soudan I wanted to while away a few months in the interior, and as the Belgians wanted a road made through the forest I offered to see things were done straight for them. As for the authority—judicial and that sort of thing—one takes that as a matter of course. The niggers don't know anything about it, except that there is a white man bossing them. They think it's all right, so what does it matter?”
“Then you hire a set of woolly-headed navvies, and if they lapse from your standard of virtue, you shoot them—is that the idea?”
“Somewhat. In mere slips one employs theargumentum ad bacculinum. It isn't pleasant, but it's the only way.”
“You are not going back again, are you, Thornton?” Caroline asked, wishing to turn the conversation. She believed in Thornton, in his power by divine right to blow all the tribes of Central Africa from the cannon's mouth if it so pleased him, but she saw that George was not sympathetic. It was a sore little point with her that her husband did not share all her enthusiasm for Thornton. “You are going to settle down now, really?” she added.
“Who knows?” he replied. “All things become monotonous after a time—even playing potentate. That's why I am here—with the intention of giving civilisation a chance. Some fine morning I may wake up and think that it would be nice to have a little excitement, and then I may pack up my things and start for No Man's Land again.”
“It must be a stirring life,” said Clytie half aloud, with a quick glance at Hammerdyke.
“It is the best life. Action, excitement, keen enjoyment of everything! You should take a turn at it, George.”
But George shook his head.
“I have a wife dependent upon me. Otherwise you may be sure I would leave this effete and effeminate civilisation and start to-morrow.”
“I don't think you would do much good out there,” said Mrs. Farquharson candidly.
They finished dinner early and went up to the drawing-room, which not long afterwards was filled with the heterogeneous crowd that the Farquharsons loved to gather round them. This reception was instead of the ordinary Sunday one, and was in Thornton's honour, although it was not unusual for Caroline thus to change her evening, scattering warning post-cards the day before. Kent, being on the list, had received one that morning, and before he saw Clytie had been half wondering whether he should go to Harley Street. So he had put his question as to Clytie's evening engagement tentatively. Her somewhat evasive reply had decided him. He would not inflict his society upon her. As Clytie's eye wandered over the familiar figures in the drawing-room, she involuntarily sought for Kent's. It seemed strange that he should not be there, for during the autumn he had scarcely missed a Sunday. One or two friends came up and asked after him. On the occasion of one inquiry, Mrs. Farquharson and Thornton were standing by her.
“Who is Kent that everybody is talking about—if I may ask?” said Hammerdyke.
“Kent?” interposed Caroline. “Oh if you know Clytie, you must know Kent. They are a kind of Mentor and Egeria combination.”
“That's lucid,” said Hammerdyke, laughing. “I hope you will present me to him one of these days, Miss Davenant.” Clytie replied with a commonplace, smiling absently. She was sad at heart about Kent.
Soon Redgrave, the R. A. who had given Clytie her first encouragement in her art, came up to talk with her. He had been following her career with some interest. Since the exhibition of “Jack” he had not seen her, and he took the opportunity of offering his congratulations, criticising the picture favourably. Then he inquired after its successor.
“But I don't think you will ever become a great artist, if you keep to that semi-impressionist style.”
Being a portrait-painter of exquisite finish, Redgrave was prejudiced against the school of Degas. He mentioned his name with some acerbity.
“Talking treason again, Redgrave?” asked a thin, wiry man in gold spectacles, who had overheard. “Don't listen to him, Miss Davenant. He is archaic and eating his soul out with jealousy. There's no one in England who can touch you in your particular line. You stick to it!”
“You are quoting the rubbish you wrote in your paper, French,” said Redgrave, laughing. “Now, whom are you going to believe, this newspaper man or me?”
“Whoever will help me best to sell my pictures,” laughed Clytie.
“Then leave your future with me,” said Mr. French, rubbing his hands as he moved away.
“You didn't mean that?” asked Redgrave.
“A little. One must live. Higher art, to use the cant phrase, would satisfy one's soul's needs better—but it would not those of the body.”
Redgrave looked at her for a moment, as if meditating over her rich colouring and fine vitality. A body such as hers had its needs. He smiled a little sadly and shook his head.
“You would not sacrifice your life for your art?”
“No,” replied Clytie, with quick frankness, “I wouldn't. The fuller one's life, the fuller one's art. The one is a reflection of the other. At least it is so with me.”
“I'll paint your portrait one of these days for nothing,” said Redgrave somewhat irrelevantly.
Clytie flushed a little at the compliment.
“What are you going to put into me?”
“The question whether even the most emancipated of young women ever has art in her soul,” said Redgrave, with a quiet smile.
“I am going to paint a picture some day that will astonish you,” replied Clytie, with a laugh.
“Ah! So is everyone. When will that some day be? I hardly know a painter or a writer or a musician that has not something he is going to do some day—a three-act drama all ready, bar transcription on paper—a masterpiece all complete, bar the mechanical transference to canvas.”
“Oh, Mr. Redgrave, if you are going to moralise like that, I'll report you to Mr. Farquharson. You had much better sit down and take me round the studios.”
But Redgrave was carried off before he had time to begin, and Clytie joined a large group standing and sitting round the fire. They were the younger, less responsible members of the company, and were talking nonsense. Singleton, a clean-shaven, red-faced man and a minor poet, was explaining what he called the Physical Basis of Life. Professor Huxley, by the way, has treated the subject differently.
“The man who cannot dine,” Mr. Singleton was saying, “cannot feel. He has not his proper equipment of senses. He is an imperfection, a waster.”
“That does not apply to women, I hope,” said Mrs. Tredegar, a languid, well-preserved woman, who was suspected of hankerings after a long defunct æstheticism. “I have been feeling all my life—and I can't remember to have ever dined.”
“I did once—at the Café Anglais. By Jove, it was good!” interpolated a fair-haired youth, who leaped eagerly at objectivities in the conversation.
“Your enthusiasm does you credit!” said Singleton. “You'll die yet, of a hopeless passion.”
Then, turning to Mrs. Tredegar:
“Of course it applies to women.La femme qui dîne, aime. Put it into French, and you see the force of it at once.”
“Ah, but if you put it the other way about.La femme qui aime——It is horrible; it takes all the romance away,” said Mrs. Tredegar.
“Oh, dear!” sighed Mr. Singleton, clasping his little plump hands resignedly. “Are we still to adore the well-conducted person who goes on cutting bread and butter? Oh, believe me, Edwin Smith and Angelina Brown can't love, any more than they can appreciate Château-Mouton. They possess for each other a faint current of sexual attraction, which produces between them a mild excess of amiability. A lot of vanity comes in, as they like to parade the possession of each other before the envious. They call themselves lovers, and follow the traditions they have been taught in the novels they have misunderstood and the hints they have received from observance of their friends. The furthest they can go is to clasp hands limply under a sofa-cushion, when they think no one is looking.”
“That's humbug,” said the youth. “I have been in love myself.”
“Precisely,” said Mr. Singleton, “and you know nothing at all about it. Cultivate all your senses first, my young friend, and then you may fit yourself for falling in love.”
“And how is one to begin?” asked Mrs. Tredegar.
“Well, first cultivate a choice taste in food, wine, and cigarettes. Then disabuse yourself of the idea that the angelic, either in man or woman, is in any way desirable; purge yourself of that clog to all true appreciation of sensation—that interfering bugbear which still survives with an effete superstition—known as a conscience; get into an Hellenic state of mind by joyous perception of the beautiful, and realise that the supreme cultivation of theegois theultima ratioof existence.”
“But then we should only love ourselves,” observed a dissentient.
“As self-knowledge is the beginning of all wisdom, so is self-love the beginning of all passion,” returned Mr. Singleton oracularly.
During the frivolous chorus that followed this remark, Hammerdyke crossed the room and sat down by Clytie's side. “You seem to be very merry over here. What is it all about?” he asked.
“It's only Mr. Singleton trying to play with paradoxes,” Clytie replied, laughing. “He is a chartered libertine, and nobody minds him.”
“That always strikes me as so odd when I get back to civilised life—the tremendous amount of talking one has to get through—and no one seems to get any further with it. Everybody seems bound to provide himself with a theory of life, as they call it—either sincere or paradoxical. Why do they do it?”
He had pulled his chair a little aside, so that, when Clytie turned round, they were cut off from the main group close by. She replied laughingly to his question, and the conversation took a light, personal turn.
“I seem to have known you so long,” he said after a while, “and yet this is the first time I have been able to say a word to you by yourself. I used to hear of you, you know, in Africa, when Caroline sent me a budget of news. I used quite to wonder what you were like.”
“Caroline and I are great friends,” she replied. “She has been very, very kind to me.”
“Yes—a good sort, isn't she? She used to keep me posted up in all kinds of things, as I say—you amongst them. At last I built up a little romance about you!”
“What a crash it must have come down with!”
“I am not so sure of that. Time will show. It was just after one of her letters that I read the story of 'Marjorie Daw,' which some good people sent me down with a package of books from Cairo. Do you know it?”
“I have read it, but forgotten it,” replied Clytie.
Now, she remembered it very well. The words had come almost involuntarily. She was a little angry with herself. But it was pleasant to lean back in the armchair, amidst the babel of voices and heavy cloud of cigarette smoke, and be talked to thus pleasantly.
“It's a pretty little tale,” said Thornton. “A man writes letters to amuse a sick friend—broken leg, I think—and describes an imaginary young lady living opposite him. And the broken-legged man falls violently in love with this Marjorie Daw and starts off to see her as soon as he is well—and is moved to much wrath when he finds out the truth. Well, I am afraid I must confess that I made a kind of Marjorie Daw out of you—although I haven't exactly come over in search of you. So you see that we are old acquaintances—on one side, at least.”
“Caroline must have been saying very foolish things about me,” said Clytie. “I remember Marjorie Daw now. I am not the least bit like her.”
“I never said you were,” he returned, looking at her boldly, a smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “I did not think so then, either. And since I am in for a kind of confession, I may as well say it did not occur to me that I should ever meet you. Now that we have met—under my cousin's wing, so to speak—I hope we shall make friends.”
“You speak as if we had quarrelled,” said Clytie.
“Well, I thought perhaps you might have been a little vexed at my confession. Are you?”
“No,” said Clytie, looking at him in her quick, frank way. “Why should I?”
Hammerdyke did not reply, but smiled and shrugged his shoulders a little.
“Well, since you are so particular as to the wording, let usbefriends. For Caroline's sake,” he added after a short pause.
“Very well, for Caroline's sake,” repeated Clytie. “Only, you know I am a very humble person.”
“Oh, no! I know too much about you. You are by way of becoming a great artist—and it would be a privilege for an uncultivated barbarian like me. Tell me, how could we begin being friends?”
“Well, suppose you tell me some of the wonders you have seen.”
“'Anthropophagi, or men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders'? Very well—and you shall show me your pictures. Will you let me come and see them sometime or the other? Do!”
He spoke low, with a touch of softness in his voice. Clytie felt flattered, touched. It was a little tribute to her womanhood to be pleaded with, especially by a man who, in the eyes of the world, was a recognised heroic figure. There was a latent light, too, in the depths of his dark eyes, a sign of reserved power and strange, unknown forces, that pleased her strangely. All the day she had felt sore, ill at ease, with a little aching, chafing sense of loss. The time had seemed woefully out of joint, and the setting of it right again utterly beyond her powers. But now the world's equilibrium seemed more stable.
“I am not sure whether you would care for my pictures,” she said.
“Oh, I have seen those that Caroline has,” he replied. “I made her show them to me. I don't know what your art word is—but they seem to me to have a grip upon life that I like.”
He could not have chosen words more flattering to Clytie. They summed up bluntly the whole of her ambitions.
“You see, I like real things,” he went on. “Something I can catch hold of. All this talk of Art with a capital A, and metaphysical preciousness, is so much froth—at any rate to me. But perhaps you put a capital to it?”
“I do, sometimes.”
“Well, then, you will teach me what it means. Will you? It will be a way of teaching me something about yourself.”
“Oh, I am not worth your learning,” replied Clytie, with a laugh. “But you can come and see my pictures, if you like.”
“Thank you,” said Hammerdyke, as he rose in obedience to a beckoning glance from Mr. Farquharson, who was sitting on the other side of the room. “I will come as soon as you will let me. To-morrow, can I?”
He looked at her pleadingly, admiringly. Clytie was suddenly brought in contact with a new force, against which she felt powerless.
“Yes, you can come to-morrow,” she said
It was an evening in mid-February that Clytie went to a dance given by the Redgraves in their large house in St. John's Wood. Redgrave met her almost as soon as she arrived in the dancing-room.
“So you have come at last—we had almost despaired of seeing you. I think there are a good many men you know—all dying to dance with you.”
“Oh, give me a little breathing time,” laughed Clytie. “You have had time to fix on your cap and bells, let me adjust mine.”
“Don't touch yourself or you would spoil the effect,” said Redgrave, mixing the metaphor for the sake of an opportunity of expressing his admiration of her beauty. “I wish I could paint that portrait of you now: 'Clytie, woman and artist.' There is one advantage about that combination—it assures perfect taste in dress.”
He looked her up and down critically, stroking his long gray beard.
“I am glad you like me,” said Clytie. “It cost me sleepless nights, I assure you. Didn't you know it was my serious occupation in life?”
“Well, my dear, I hope you will have your reward,” replied Redgrave, laughing—“only you won't find anybody who admires you and your genius half as heartily as I do.”
He nodded, smiled, and left her as one or two men came up to her, programme in hand. She gave them the dances they requested, and took a seat near the door by the side of some ladies of her acquaintance, watching animatedly the waltz that was in progress.
“Good-evening, Miss Davenant,” said a voice, deep and resonant, that made her start and the colour mount into her cheeks.
It was Thornton Hammerdyke.
“You see I procured the invitation, and here I am. Where is your programme?”
He took her card attached with its bit of silk to her fan, and scribbled recklessly.
“You have nearly filled it all up!” she exclaimed.
“Naturally,” he replied. “Let us dance out the fag-end of this.”
She took his arm gaily, and with him entered the whirl of dancers.
“You are looking dazzling to-night,” he said. “What witchery have you to make your eyes so blue and your hair so glorious?”
She shook her head and smiled half inwardly, thinking of Redgrave's late compliment and differentiating it from this. Each man was honest, in his own way.
“I put myself down for all those dances,” he went on, “because there is not a woman in the room fit to look at after you. I couldn't dance with them, and I should have been bored and irritated with standing and watching you dancing with other people. Then we can get away and sit by ourselves.”
“But what are all the men to do, to whom I have to be polite?”
“They must give way to the man to whom you are always fascinating. I scarcely saw you at all yesterday. Now is my chance, and I am going to make the most of it.”
“Yes, but there are the sacred conventionalities.”
“I thought you went in for being superior to them.”
“So I am in a general way; I attach no intrinsic value to them—but they are useful as counters in one's dealings.”
He laughed; pressed the fingers that he held in his left hand.
“To-night no checks are taken! It must be all solid gold—the true, real Clytie. As for people talking, you are glorious enough in your beauty to defy them. What can you and I care for idle gossip?”
The words thrilled through her. Womanlike she had humbled herself before his greatness. To be raised thus by him to his empyrean, whence they could look down upon the rest of earth-bound mortality, in common grandeur, made her heart swell with a not ignoble pride.
“We shall do whatever you like,” she whispered.
To this pitch of intimacy had the past three weeks brought them—a long enough period for an infinite number of things to happen—none the less real for being subjective. Nothing had changed in their external lives. Hammerdyke went into society, read a paper here and there on his travels, digested many bad dinners and worse flattery, played cards, smoked, and drank with his fellows. Clytie painted assiduously, read, exchanged visits with her friends. Kent was missing from her life. She saw him rarely, at odd moments, when they talked commonplaces and avoided by tacit consent the subject of their disunion. They were “league-sundered by the silent gulf between.” He told her that he was thinking of accepting an offer privately made to him by one of the heads of his department, of leave of absence for three months for the purpose of studying the numismatic collections of certain foreign capitals. The prospect was enticing, as he could thus have the run of the continental libraries, whereby his own great work could be considerably advanced.
Clytie listened kindly, wished him good luck. He went from her sad at heart, and she was angry with herself and humiliated at feeling somewhat relieved at the idea of his absence. It was not that she regretted the old life less. Its memories were still precious. But Kent's departure would clear the way to a better understanding of herself.
Much had happened during the past three weeks—the discovery of a new world for Clytie in which all was strange, beset with vague dangers, vibrating with a tremulous joy akin to terror. She had been lifted off her feet, hurried against her will into a whirl of new sensations. At first she resisted with fierce virgin pride; then gradually she began to close her eyes for a short sweet spell and allow herself to be drifted by the current; finally she gave up struggling. The history of most women at their first contact with passion.
The story of this period is very simple. In its first developments love is usually not ultra complex. Given a man and a woman and conditions for meeting freely alone; further, a sudden overmastering passion on the part of the man, a half known, unfulfilled need in the woman; given these premises, and a child can deduce the result. It is the fundamental law of sex. Only when the sentimentalities and more delicate affinities come into play, when the needs of the finer animal man begin to cry after their satisfying, does love leave its simple phase and gird itself with its infinite many-coloured web of complexities. At first the mind may see the web glimmering in a far-away twilight—but heeds it not as long as the sense is held captive.
Two remarkable personalities had met, Thornton Hammerdyke and Clytie. With the intensity of a strong animal nature he had fallen in love with her, with her beauty, charm, and directness. Her magnificent vitality drew him, compelled him. He shut his eyes to every other interest. The sense that he wanted her was sufficient justification for setting all else aside. He never even thought of marriage in the first flush of his passion. But that was the result of habit. Passion is a very different thing from the serene considerations that, according to the Book of Common Prayer, induce people to enter into the holy state of matrimony—and Thornton was quite free from any considerations of the kind. So that when marriage dawned upon his mind as a necessary condition, he accepted it, as a reckless sacrifice, as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. He was a man whose life had been passed in hot, headstrong action. Desire imperiously compelled immediate gratification. Since loving Clytie entailed marriage, he resolved to marry her forthwith.
He informed Mrs. Farquharson of the fact, in his masterful manner.
“I am going to marry Clytie—so get yourself a wedding garment.” Mrs. Farquharson jumped up, clapped her hands. She would not have been a woman had the possibilities of this match not occurred to her seductively. The announcement, however, anticipated her hopes.
“Oh, Thornton,” she cried, “I am so glad! I have been longing for it. You two are made for each other. I must go down and see Clytie this afternoon!”
“Better not,” said Thornton. “I'm going. Besides, I don't think Clytie knows it yet.”
Caroline's face fell a little. “Oh! I thought you meant you were engaged, and that sort of thing.”
“That's a detail—it doesn't matter. She's going to marry me, and you'll come and dance at the wedding.”
Caroline kept her counsel, but she worked steadily in Thornton's cause, sang his praises to Clytie, invented many occasions for bringing them together. She believed with all the fervent loyalty of her nature that this marriage was an ideal one for her cousin and her friend, and had at heart equally the interests of each.
Thornton very quickly constituted himself a factor in Clytie's life. She saw him almost every day in Harley Street, at home, or at the houses of common acquaintances. His influence grew strong upon her. Glimpses of the physical joy of life flashed before her like revelations. For the first time she doubted the possibilities of the artistic life. They seemed shadowy, unsatisfying.
From Thornton seemed to come realisation that something stronger, more real, positive lay beyond them—the delight of living in pulse and nerve and bodily fibre. Yet, unlike a man, a woman cannot live by sense alone. Sentiment invariably plays its part. This in Clytie's case was fed by the glamour of Thornton's heroic history, so different from that of ordinary men, whose lives, compared with his, seemed tame and colourless. The glow of his personality bathed magically all his actions, all his words. In his superb manhood he stood before her eyes as the incarnation of physical force, the victorious protest against the shams of art, culture, and other pale shades of our morbid civilisation. When she was lifted high with him in this triumph, sense and sentiment were fused together and she was wholly at his mercy. Thornton had come into her life at the most delicately critical moment of a woman's career, when the current of her nature, checked at the turning-point between friendship and love, struggles tumultuously for some other channel into which to empty itself.
“We shall do whatever you like,” she said to Thornton, during their waltz. It was the first definite surrender she had made to him. She was surprised that it cost her so little, seemed so sweet and natural.
“Then you and I will defy the world!” he replied.
They paused to rest for a moment, leaning against the wall. An elderly man came up, shook hands with her, and opened a desultory conversation with Thornton. Clytie looked amusedly at the animated scene, tabulating mentally, by force of habit, the types that passed and repassed before her. Seldom had it struck her before so forcibly how few of her fellow-creatures possessed the secret of the joy of life. How many of the couples circling round, backing, glissading in that dizzying mass of motion were really gladdened by what they were doing? Stout men puffed around with a serious air of responsibility. Tall men, with drooping moustaches, paced languidly in time, scarcely heeding their partners, who expressionlessly suffered themselves to be guided hither and thither through the throng. The robust youth of either sex seemed to look upon dancing as an athletic exercise, and waltzed with the intent fervour of tennis players on their mettle before a big gallery. Only here and there did a girl, safe in the arms of a good dancer, half close her eyes and surrender herself to the sensuous charm of motion in perfect time with the throbs of music. Mankind is astonishingly ignorant of the essential qualities of many of its habitual pleasures. So thought Clytie, in the thrill of her new knowledge. The orchestra began the opening bars of thecoda. Thornton turned away from the elderly gentleman, and putting his arm round Clytie's waist led her away, without a word, to finish the waltz.
“How delightful it is to dance with someone who is not bored by it!” she said, when the music stopped and they were pushing their way through the crowd towards the door.
He laughed in his boyish way, throwing back his head.
“I had better not answer that remark,” he replied.
“Why?”
She looked askance at him as she asked, just as any little peasant girl would have done. Certain conditions bring all humanity to one level. He pressed the hand that was on his arm lightly against his side.
“Let us get away by ourselves, and I will tell you,” he said.
But this opportunity did not occur. Thornton was captured by his hostess for introducing purposes, Clytie waylaid by brother artists for dances. When Thornton and herself were able to find seats the music struck up the prelude of the next waltz, and Clytie was discovered and led off by her partner. Only three men, exclusive of Thornton, had been fortunate enough to find places on her programme.
The hours passed away swiftly. She forgot her life, her responsibilities, her needs. During the three dances with the fortunate—which were early in the evening—she flashed with wit and merriment, her partners thinking with masculine self-esteem that they were the fine steel that had caused these scintillations. But more than one woman there that night observed how Clytie's eyes ever and anon caught those of Thornton, who was standing by the doorway. When the two danced together, men watched them curiously.
“If the principle of natural selection could always be carried out like that!” said French, the journalist, to Redgrave.
“Physically, yes; but——”
“But what? If the human race sprang exclusively from such parents, what a glorious race it would be!”
“It might be a very good thing for the race,” replied Redgrave drily; “but I was thinking of the parents—at least of one of them.”
“Nonsense! a marriage like that would be ideal,” said French.
Redgrave shook his head.
“I doubt it,” he said, with some earnestness. “I know a little of Clytie Davenant. I may claim to have discovered her. She has the blood of life in her, it is true—but she has the finer artistic temperament as well. Mark my words, French; if she marries that man she will lose her art clean—clean; and not another 'Jack' will she ever be able to paint. Many of us men artists are ruined by marriage. A woman artist, to whom it means fifty times more, runs fifty times more risk.”
“Well, perhaps we are a bit previous,” said French laughing, and turned the conversation.
Later in the evening Thornton and Clytie came out of the dancing-room. She was flushed, dazed with the music, the noise, the electric light and the heavy scent of cut flowers; confused, too, by Thornton's presence, by the after-pressure of his arm around her waist, overwrought a little by his personal magnetism.
They threaded their way through the crowd that lined the passage and the stairs, went through the brilliantly lit studio with its polished oak floor and wealth of hangings and costly decoration, into the models' dressing-room beyond, that had been turned into a small boudoir for the occasion. Many couples were wandering about the studio, examining the pictures and the china, but the dressing-room had escaped notice.
“This is soothing after the glare,” said Clytie, sitting down restfully on a divan.
Great palms screened the door, the room was hung with dark, heavy drapery, and between them shaded electric lamps shed a subdued light. Thornton sat down by her side. After a while the steps and talking in the adjacent studio ceased, and there rose from below the faint strains of the music and the dull rhythmic thud of the dancers.
“What were we talking about? I forget,” said Clytie, after a short silence, and then, meeting his eyes fixed upon her, she turned away her head:
“Don't! I can't bear it,” she murmured involuntarily.
Then he caught her hand: “Clytie, you are adorable, glorious, bewitching!” he cried, and kissed her quickly, twice, on the corner of her lips. She snatched her hand away and started to her feet, pale and trembling, her eyes blazing.
“Why did you do that? You have no right to do that!”
He rose, went to her, caught her wrists again—but this time she was powerless to withdraw them, and he spoke in a quick, deep voice:
“I have the right to kiss you—to kiss you and kiss you till the world's end—for I love you—and I would sacrifice all I have got—my life itself, for one kiss from you—I loved you, wanted you, from the first time I saw you—when the suddenly lit light revealed your beauty to me, and you sprang glorious, bewildering out of the darkness.”
“Let me go, let me go!” she murmured, faintly struggling.
“Not until you tell me that I have the right to kiss you—I know you will give it, you must! Clytie, I am stronger than most men, and my love is stronger than most men's and will not be denied—I will make you, force you to love me as passionately as I love you. Look at me. Speak! say just a word!”
She flashed a swift, sidelong glance at him, and met his eyes with the light burning in their dark depths. His passion intoxicated her.
“You know,” she murmured. The words came almost without volition.
He released her hands. She remained standing for a moment, motionless with downcast eyes. Then she lifted them once more shyly, met his, and uttered a short gasping cry as he caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately.
“You will be my wife, and let our whole lives be one long kiss?”
“Yes,” she said, below her breath.
A little later Thornton put her into a cab, and she drove home. The cold night air invigorated her relaxed body, but seemed to benumb her mind. She could not think—only feel Thornton's kisses upon her. The rest of the subjective and objective universe was a blank. Only when the cab stopped and the driver asked the number of her house through the trap-door in the roof, was she conscious of external things. Then she found that he had driven a long way past the familiar door. As he turned round grumblingly, she was aware of being chilled through from her drive across London, and longed to get indoors.
It was not until she told Winifred the next morning that she realised the great change that had come over her life.
“I am going to marry Mr. Hammerdyke.”
The commonplace statement, thus uttered for the first time, seemed like a cold decree of fate, inevitable, irresistible. Winifred cried a little at the thought of losing her.
“But you will be happy, my darling,” she said, smiling through her tears. “He is so brave and strong and handsome, and he must love you better than his life.”
“Yes, dear,” said Clytie, gently stroking her friend's brown hair (Winifred was sitting at her feet) and looking tenderly at her pure, upturned face. But her own, bent down, was aflame with reminiscence.
“When is it to be? Not for a long, long time, I hope,” said Winifred.
“Almost immediately—he wants it—there is no particular reason for waiting.”
“I felt it was coming some day,” said Winifred; “but I did not expect it so soon.”
“It is best,” said Clytie—“best that it should be at once; the interval between the old life and the new would be too trying if it were drawn out.”
“You always do what is best, dear,” whispered Winifred in her trustful way. “Oh! you must be happy, very, very happy, Clytie dear.”
Clytie leaned back in her chair, caressing her friend's cheek with the back of her hand, and looked around the studio. It came almost as a shock to her to realise that in a short, short time she would have to bid farewell to all that had grown up around her artistic life. The grotesque caricatures on the walls stared at her like meaningless shadows. Her palette, brushes, and paraphernalia of rags and turpentine bottles lay strewn about like the properties of a forgotten comedy. The unfinished pictures on easels and stands lost their fascination. Only Winifred's little study on the other side of the studio seemed unchanged—retaining its virginal freshness and purity. But the sound of a step on the landing outside, buoyant, elastic, dispelled all wistful regrets. She sprang to her feet as Winifred rose, and listened, transformed into a radiant woman, with quivering depths in her dark blue eyes, her red lips parted in a half smile, her chin raised showing the full neck.
A moment or two afterwards Mrs. Gurkins appeared at the studio door.
“Mr. Hammerdyke, miss. I have shown him into the sitting-room,” she said, and then retired.
“I knew it was he,” said Clytie.
“Go, dear,” said Winifred, putting her arm round Clytie's waist and moving with her across the studio to the door.
Clytie kissed her laughingly and disappeared. But two tears rolled down Winifred's cheek as she went back to the chair by the stove; and then she flung herself down where she had been sitting, and burying her face in her arm, began to cry bitterly.
“I don't like him, I don't like him; he will spoil my darling,” she moaned.
Sometimes knowledge is given to those who seek after it least.