CHAPTER XX
Mygood children, I tell you we’ll go by train,” said Clementina, putting her foot down. “I don’t care a brass button for the chauffeur’s loneliness, and the prospect of his pining away on his journey back to London leaves me cold.”
She had exhausted the delights of the car of thirty-five million dove-power, and was anxious to settle Sheila in Romney Place as quickly as possible.
“As for you two,” she added, “you have had as big a dose of each other as is good for you.”
Only one thing tempted her to linger in Paris—curiosity as to the sentimental degree of the friendship between the lady of her disfavour and Quixtus. That she was a new friend and not an old friend, the exchange of a few remarks with the ingenuous Lady Louisa had enabled her very soon to discover. Clementina looked askance on such violent intimacies. Quixtus, for whose welfare now she felt herself, in an absurd way, responsible, had not the constitution to stand them. The lady might be highly connected and move in the selectest of circles, but she had a hard edge, betraying what Clementina was pleased to call the society hack; she was shallow, insincere; talked out of a hastily stuffed memory instead of an intellect; she had the vulgarity of good breeding, as noticeable a quality as the good-breeding of one in lowly station; she was insufferable—an impossible companion for a man of Quixtus’s mental equipment and sensitive organisation. There was something else about her that baffled Clementina, and further whetted her curiosity.
Neither was Clementina perfect, nor did she look for perfection in this compromise of a world. As an artist she demanded light and shade. “I wouldn’t paint an angel’s portrait,” she said once, “for fifty thousand pounds. And if an angel came to tea with me, the first thing I should do would be to claw off his wings.” Now, no one could deny the light and shade in Lena Fontaine. But there is such a thing as false chiaroscuro, and it offends and perplexes the artist. Lena Fontaine offended and perplexed Clementina.
Again, Clementina, with regard to the chambers of her heart, was somewhat house-proud. Very few were admitted; but once admitted, the favoured mortal was welcome to stay there for ever. Now, behold an exasperating aggravation. She had just received Quixtus in the very best guest-room, and, instead of admiring it and taking his ease in it, here he was hanging halfway out of window, all ears to a common hussy. If she had an insane desire to pull him back by the coat-tails, who can blame her?
No sensible purpose being attainable, however, by lingering in Paris, she gruffly sent temptation packing, and, with her brood under her wing, took the noon train from the Gare du Nord on the following day.
Quixtus was there, at the station, to see them off, his arms filled with packages. As he could not raise his hat when the party approached, he smiled apologetically, looking, according to Tommy, like Father Christmas detected at Midsummer. There was a great bouquet of orchids for Clementina (such a handy, useful thing on the journey from Paris to London!) an enormous bonbonnière of sweets for Etta; a stupendous woolly lamb for Sheila which, on something being done to its anatomy, opened its mouth and gramaphonically chanted the “Jewel Song” fromFaust; and a gold watch for Tommy.
The singing of the lamb, incautiously exploited on the platform, to Sheila’s ecstasy, caused considerable dislocation of railway business. A crowd collected to see the gaunt, scholarly Englishman holding the apocalyptic beast in his arms, all intent on the rapture of the tiny flower-like thing standing open-mouthed before him. Even porters forgot to say “Faites attention,” and stopped their barrows, to listen to the magic song and view the unprecedented spectacle. It was only when the lamb bleated his last note that Quixtus became conscious of his surroundings.
“Good heavens!” said he.
“Do it again,” said Sheila, in her clear contralto, whereat the bystanders laughed.
“Not for anything in the world, my dear. Tommy, take the infernal thing. My dear,” said he, lifting Sheila in his arms, “if I know anything of Tommy, he will have that tune going for the next seven hours.”
She allowed herself to be carried in seraphic content to the entrance of the car in which was the compartment reserved for the party. Tommy carrying the lamb, Clementina and Etta followed.
“That kid’s a wonder,” said Tommy. “She would creep into the heart of a parsnip.”
Clementina, to whom the remark was addressed, walked three or four steps in silence. Then she said:
“Tommy, if I hear you say a thing like that again, I’ll box your ears.”
He stared at her in amazement. He had paid a spontaneous and sincere tribute to the child over whom she had gone crazy. What more could she want? She moved a step in advance, leaving him free to justify himself with Etta, who agreed with him in the proposition that Clementina for the last two days was in a very cranky mood. Very natural, the proposition of the two innocents. How could they divine that the moisture in Clementina’s eyes had nothing whatsoever to do with Sheila’s appreciation of the vocal lamb or her readiness to be carried by Quixtus? How could they divine that, at the possibility of which the cruelty and insolence of youth would have caused them both to shriek with inextinguishable laughter? And how was Tommy, generous-hearted lad that he was, to know that this one unperceptive speech of his sent him hurtling out of the land of Romance down to common earth? Henceforward Tommy, whilst retaining his chamber in Clementina’s heart, was to walk in and out just as he chose. Not the tiniest pang was he again to cause her. But what could Tommy know—what can you or I or any other male thing ever born know of a woman? We walk, good easy men; with confident and careless tread through the familiar garden, and then suddenly terra firma miraculously ceases to exist, and head-over-heels we go down a precipice. How came it that we were unaware of its existence?Mystère!Who could interpret the soul of La Giaconda? Leonardo da Vinci least of all. It is all very well to give a man a vote; he is a transparent animal, and you know the way the dunderhead is going to use it; but the incalculable and pyrotechnic way in which women will use it will make humanity blink. Let us therefore pardon Tommy for staring in amazement at Clementina. He sought refuge in Etta. From Scylla, perhaps, to Charybdis; but for the present, Charybdis sat smiling under her fig-tree, the most innocent and bewitching monster in the world.
Leaving the three children in the compartment, Clementina and Quixtus walked, for the last few moments before the train started, up and down the platform.
“I suppose you’ll soon be coming back to London?” said Clementina.
“I think so,” said he. “Now that the Grand Prix is over Paris is emptying rapidly.”
“Parrot!” thought Clementina, once more confounding the instructress; but she said blandly; “What difference in the world can it make to you whether Paris is empty or not?”
He smiled good-naturedly. “To tell the honest truth, none. Yes. I must be getting home again.”
“Of course there’ll be a certain amount of worry over Hammersley’s affairs,” she said; “but I hope you’ve got something else to do to occupy your mind.”
“I want to settle down to systematic work,” replied Quixtus.
“What kind of work?”
“Well,” said he, with an apologetic air, “I mean to extend my little handbook on ‘The Household Arts of the Neolithic Age’ into an authoritative and comprehensive treatise. I’ve been gathering material for years. I’m anxious to begin.”
“Begin to-morrow,” said Clementina. “And whenever you feel lonely come and read bits of it to Sheila and me.”
And thus came about the surprising and monstrous alliance between Clementina and Prehistoric Man. Dead men’s jawbones had some use after all.
“En voiture!” cried the guard.
“Good-bye, my dear Clementina,” said Quixtus, “we have had a memorable meeting.”
“We have, indeed. You are sending away three very happy people.”
“Why not four?”
But she only smiled wryly and said: “Good-bye, God bless you. And keep out of mischief,” and clambered into the train.
The train began to move, to the faint strains of the “Jewel Song” inFaust, and Sheila blew him kisses from the carriage window. He responded until the little white face disappeared. Then he thought of Clementina.
“The very best, but the most enigmatic woman in the world,” said he.
Which was a very sweeping statement for a man of his scientific accuracy.
Entirely ignorant of the word of the enigma, he went back to the spotless flower of insulted womanhood, who took him off to lunch with her French friends. She welcomed his undivided homage. That fishfag of a creature, as she characterised Clementina in conversation with Lady Louisa, made her feel uncomfortable. Even now that she had gone, the problem of Quixtus’s removal from her sphere of influence remained. The child was the stake to which he was fettered within that sphere. Could she break the chains? Therein seemed to lie the only solution—unless by audacity and adroitness she uprooted the stake and carried it, with Quixtus, chains and all, into her own territory.
She had a talk after lunch with Huckaby. The luncheon-party had broken up into groups of two or three, who wandered about the cool enclosure of the Bois de Boulogne restaurant where the feast had been given, and, half by chance, half by design, the two had joined company. Their conversation on the evening of Quixtus’s departure from Paris had deeply affected their mutual relations. Each felt conscious of presenting a less tarnished front to the other, and each, not hypocritically, began to assume a little halo of virtue in the pathetic hope that the other would be impressed by its growing radiance. During the few days of Quixtus’s absence they had become friends and exchanged confidences. Huckaby convinced her of the sincerity of his desire to reform. He described his life. He had worked when work came his way—but work has a curious habit of shrinking from the drunkard’s way; a bit of teaching, a bit of free-lance journalism, a bit of hack compilation in the British Museum; he had borrowed far and wide; he had not been over-scrupulous on the point of financial honour. Hunger had driven him. Lena Fontaine shivered at the horrors through which he had struggled. All he desired was cleanliness in life and body and surroundings. She understood. Material cleanliness had been and would be hers; but cleanliness of life she yearned for as much as he did. But for him, the man, with the given boon of honourable employment, it was an easy matter. For her, the woman, tired and soul-sick, what avenue lay open? She, in her turn, told him of incidents in her career at which he shuddered. “Throw it up, throw it up,” he counselled. She smiled bitterly. What could be the end of the bird of prey who assumed the habits of the dove? She could marry, he replied, before it was too late. Marry, ay! But whom? She had not dared confide to him her hope. So close, however, being their relations, Huckaby had not failed to acquaint her with the important scope of his conversation with Quixtus the day before. Quixtus’s changed demeanour, obvious to her at once, confirmed his announcement. She welcomed it with more joy than Huckaby could appreciate. For behind the pity that had paralysed beak and talon, the new-born hope and the curious liking she had conceived for the mild, crazy gentleman, stalked the instinctive aversion which the sane feel towards those whose wits have gone ever so little astray. The news had come as an immense relief. Now she could meet him on normal ground. All was fair.
They found two chairs by a little table under a tree, at the back of the Châlet Restaurant and secluded from the gaiety and laughter of the front. Nothing human was in sight save, through the tall, masking acacias and shrubs, the white gleams of cooks and hurrying, aproned waiters.
“Let us sit,” she said. “How good it is to get a little cool and quiet. Thisvie de cabaretis getting on my nerves. I’m weary to death of it.”
Huckaby laughed. “It’s still enough novelty to me to be pleasant.”
She accepted a cigarette. They smoked for a while.
“How’s goodness getting on?” she asked.
“By leaps and bounds daily. I’m becoming a fanatical believer in the copy-book. I’m virtuous. I’m happy. Industry is a virtue. My virtue is to be rewarded by industry. Therefore virtue is its own reward.”
“What industry?”
“I’m going to collaborate with our friend in the new book he’s talking about,” replied Huckaby, with a surviving touch of boastfulness. “There is also a possibility of my taking over the secretaryship of the Anthropological Society.”
“You’re lucky,” said Lena Fontaine.
“How’s goodness with you?”
“The usual slump. Shares going dirt cheap. No one seems to have any use for virtue in a woman.”
“Husbands seem to have, as I’ve already suggested to you.”
“Have you any particular husband to suggest?”
He cast on her a glance of admiration, for in her outward seeming she was an object for any man’s forgivable desire, and he said in a tone not wholly of banter:
“The humble individual in front of you would have no chance, I suppose?”
She laughed. “None whatever.”
“You’ll pardon my presumption in making the offer; but could I,en galant homme, do otherwise?”
“No,” she replied, good-humouredly, “you couldn’t. If you had five thousand a year, it would give me to think, for you’re not unsympathetic. But as you haven’t, I’ve no use for you—as a husband,bien entendu.”
It was a jest. They laughed. Presently a cloud obscured the sunshine of her laughter. She leaned over the table.
“Eustace Huckaby, are you or are you not my friend?”
For once in her dealings with a man whose goodwill she desperately craved, she was sincere. She dropped the conscious play of glance and tone; but she forgot the liquid splendour of her eyes and the dangerous nearness of her face to his.
“Your friend?” he cried, laying his hand on her wrist. “Can you doubt it? I am indeed. I swear it.”
“Do you know why I’m staying here—apparently wasting my time?”
“I’ve supposed something was up; but my supposition seemed too absurd!”
“Why absurd?”
“Quixtus as a husband?”
“Yes. Why not?”
He released her wrist and fell back in his chair. He frowned and tugged at his beard.
“Do you care for him?”
“Yes. In a way. I sincerely do. If you mean—have I fallen desperately in love with him?—well, I haven’t. That would be absurd. It’s not my habit to fall in love.”
“What would you get out of it?”
She made an impatient gesture. “Rest. Peace. Happiness. He’s a wealthy man and would give me all the comfort I need. I couldn’t face poverty. And he would be kind to me.”
“And he—pardon the brutality of my question—what would he get out of it?”
“I’m a lady, after all,” she said, “and I know how to run a large house—and as a woman I’m not unattractive. And I’d run straight. Temperamentally I am straight. That’s frank. Whatever impulses I’ve had within me with regard to running off the rails have been the other way. Oh, God, yes,” she added, with a little shiver and averted eyes, “I’d run straight.”
“What about ghosts of the past rising up and queering things?”
“I’d take my chance. I’ve bluffed myself out of tight places already, and I could bluff again.”
Huckaby lit another cigarette. “He looks on you as a spotless angel of purity,” said he. “If he married you on that assumption, and learned things afterwards, there would be the devil to pay. He’s been hit like that already, and he went off his head. I shouldn’t like him to have another experience. Why not tell him something—just a little?”
She raised both hands in nervous protest. “Oh, no, no. The woman who does that is a fool. It never comes off. Let him take me for what he thinks I am, and I’ll see that I remain so. Trust me. It will be all right. You’re the only impediment.”
“I?”
“Of course. You have it in your power to give me away at any time. That’s why I asked you whether you were my friend.”
Huckaby tugged at his beard, and pondered deeply. He meant, with all the fresh energy of new resolve, to be loyal to Quixtus. But how could he stand in the way of a woman seeking salvation? Moral sense, however, is a plant of gradual growth. Huckaby’s as yet was not adequate to the solution of the perplexing problem. Lena Fontaine held out her hand, palm upward, across the table.
“Speak,” she said.
He took her hand and pressed it.
“I’ll be your friend in this,” said he.
She thanked him with her eyes, and rose.
“Let us go back to the others, or they’ll think we’re having a horrible flirtation.”
On this and on the succeeding days she discovered a subtle change in Quixtus’s attitude towards her. His manner had grown, if possible, more courteous; it betrayed a more delicate admiration, a more graceful homage to the beautiful and charming woman. Before his Marseilles visit she had found it an easy task to appeal to the fool that grins in every man. A trick of eyes and voice was enough to set him love-making in what she had termed the Quixtine manner. Now the task was more difficult. She found herself confronted by a greater sensitiveness that did not respond to the obvious invitation. He was up in the clouds, more chivalrous, more idealistic. With a sigh, she gathered her skirts together and climbed to the higher plane.
And all this on Quixtus’s part was sheer remorse—atonement for the unspeakable insult. The thought of having dared to make coarse love to this exquisite creature filled him with horrified dismay. That the lady had appeared rather to like the coarse love-making he did not stop to consider. Certainly, in his crazy exultation, he had proclaimed her a fruit ripe to his hand, but that was only an additional vulgarity which had stained that peculiar phase of his being. The result of the reaction was to accentuate the reverential conception of woman, which, by reason of a temperament dreamy and poetic and of a scholarly life remote from the disillusionising conflicts of sex, he had always entertained. He comported himself therefore towards her with scrupulous delicacy, resolved that not a word or intonation that could be construed into an affront should ever pass his lips.
The fine weather broke. Torrential rains swept Paris. The meteorologists talked learnedly about cyclonic disturbances in the Atlantic which would affect the weather adversely for some time to come. Lena Fontaine began to reflect. Summer Paris in rain is no place for junketing, even on the high planes. It offers to the visitor nothing but the boredom of hotel and restaurant. She knew the elementary axiom of sex relations, that the woman who bores a man is lost. The high planes were all right when you looked down from them on charming objective things; but, after all, a man has to be amused, and fun on the high planes is a humour dangerously attenuated. She announced an immediate departure from Paris.
“If you would accept the escort of Huckaby and myself, we should be honoured,” said Quixtus. “Unless of course we should be in the way.”
She laughed. “My dear friend, did you ever hear of men being in the way when women were travelling? A lone woman is never more conspicuously lonesome thanen voyage. All the other women around who have men to look after them look at one with a kind of patronising pity, as though they said; ‘Poor thing that can’t rake up a man from anywhere.’ And it makes one want to scratch.”
“Does it really?” smiled Quixtus.
“It does.” She laughed again and sighed. “A lone woman has much to put up with. Malicious tongues not the least.”
“My dear Mrs. Fontaine,” said he, “what tongue could be so malicious as to speak evil of you?”
“There are thousands in this gossipy world. Our little friendship andcamaraderieof the last fortnight—sweetness and innocence itself—who knows what misinterpretation slanderers might put on it?”
Quixtus flushed, and drew his gaunt body to its full height. “I’m not pugilistic by habit,” said he, “but if any man made such an insinuation, I should knock him down.”
“It would be more likely a woman.”
“Then,” said he, “I think I could manage to convey to her, without brutality, that she was a disgrace to her sex.”
She fluttered a glance at him. “I should like to have you always as a champion.”
“If I understand the word gentleman aright,” said Quixtus, “he is always the champion of the unprotected woman.”
His tone assured her that this Early-Victorian sentiment was not mere gallantry. He meant it, indignant still at the idea of misconstruction of their friendship.
“I happen to be a woman,” she said, “and seek the particular rather than the general. I saidmychampion, Dr. Quixtus. Now don’t say that the greater includes the less, or I shall fall through the floor.”
He was too much in earnest to smile with her in her coquetry.
“Mrs. Fontaine,” said he, with a bow, “no one will ever dare speak evil of you in my presence.”
She rose—they were sitting in the lounge.
“Thank you,” she said, falling in with his earnest mood. “Thank you. I shall go back to London with a light heart.”
And like a wise woman, she cut short the conversation, and went upstairs to dress for dinner.
CHAPTER XXI
Julybrought in halcyon days for everybody.
They were halcyon days for Clementina. There were neglected portraits to complete, new sitters for whom to squeeze in appointments, a host of stimulating things, not the least of which was the beloved atmosphere, half-turpentine, half-poetry, of the studio. Only the painter can know the delight of the mere feel of the long-forsaken brush, and the sight of the blobs of colour oozing out from the tubes on to the palette. Most of us, returning to toil after holiday, sigh over departed joys. To the painter the joy of getting back to his easel is worth all the joys that have departed. Clementina plunged into work as a long-stranded duck plunges into water. By rising at dawn, a practice contrary to her habit, she managed to keep pace with her work and to attend to the various affairs which her new responsibilities entailed. Her days were filled to overflowing, and filled with extraordinary happiness. A nurse was engaged for Sheila, a kind and buxom widow who also found herself living in halcyon days. She could do practically whatever she liked, as her charge was seldom in her company. The child had her being in the studio, playing happily and quietly in a corner, thus realising Clementina’s dream, or watching her paint, with great, wondering eyes. The process fascinated her. She would sit for an hour at a time, good as gold, absorbed in the magic of the brush-strokes, clasping the dingy Pinkie tight against her bosom. Tommy appeared one day with a box of paints, a miniature easel, and a great mass of uncoloured fashion-plates of beautiful ladies in gorgeous raiment. A lesson or two inspired Sheila with artistic zeal, so that often a sitter would come upon the two of them painting breathlessly, Clementina screwing up her eyes, darting backwards and forwards to her canvas, and the dainty child seated on a milking-stool and earnestly making animated rainbows of the beautiful ladies in the fashion-plates.
Then there was the tedious process of obtaining probate of Hammersley’s will. Luckily, he had wound up all his affairs in Shanghai, to the common satisfaction of himself and his London house, so that no complications arose from the latter quarter. Indeed, the firm gave the executors its cordial assistance. But the London house had to be interviewed, and lawyers had to be interviewed, and Quixtus and all kinds of other people, and papers had to be read and signed, and affidavits to be made, and head-splitting intricacies of business and investments to be mastered. All this ate up many of the sunny hours.
Tommy and Etta had halcyon days of their own, which, but by the free use of curmudgeonly roughness, would have merged into Clementina’s. Etta had cajoled an infuriated admiral, raving round the room after a horsewhip, into a stern parent who consented to receive Tommy, explicitly reserving to himself the right to throw him out of window should the young man not take his fancy. Tommy called and was allowed to depart peacefully by the front door. Then Quixtus; incited thereto by Tommy, called upon the Admiral with the awful solemnity of a father in a French play, with the result that Tommy was invited to dinner at the Admiral’s and given as much excellent old port as he could stand. After which the Admiral called on Clementina, whom he had not met before. During the throes of horsewhip hunting he had threatened to visit her there and then and give her a piece of his mind—which at that moment was more like a hunk of molten lava than anything else. But the arts and wiles of Etta had prevailed so that the above scheduled sequence of events had been observed. Clementina, caught in the middle of a hot afternoon’s painting, received him, bedaubed and bedraggled, in the studio, whose chaos happened to be that day more than usually confounded. The Admiral, accustomed to the point-device females of his world, and making the spick and span of the quarter-deck a matter of common morality in material surroundings, went from Romney Place an obfuscated man.
“I can’t make your friend out,” he said to Etta. “I don’t mind telling you that if I had seen her, I should never have allowed you to visit her. I found her looking more like a professional rabbit-skinner than a lady, and when I went to sit down I had to clear away a horrid plate of half-finished cold pie, by George, from the chair. She contradicted me flatly in everything I said about you—as if I didn’t know my own child—and filled me up with advice.”
“And wasn’t it good, dear?”
“No advice is ever good. Like Nebuchadnezzar’s food, it may be wholesome but it isn’t good. And then she turned round and talked the most downright common sense about women I’ve ever heard a woman utter. And then, by Jove, I don’t know how it happened—I never talk shop, you know——”
“Of course you don’t, dear, never,” said Etta.
“Of course I don’t—but somehow we got on to the subject, and she showed a more intelligent appreciation of the state of naval affairs than any man I’ve met for a long time! As for those superficial, theoretical donkeys at the Club——”
“And what else, darling?” said Etta, who had often heard about the donkeys, but now was dying to hear about Clementina. “Do tell me what she talked about. She must have talked about me. Didn’t she?”
“About you! I’ve told you.” He took her chin in his hand—she was sitting on a footstool, her arms about his knee.
“You can’t have told me everything, dear.”
“I think she informed me that her selection of a husband for you was a damned sight better than mine—I beg your pardon, my dear, she didn’t say ‘damned’—and then the little girl you’re always talking of came in, and the rabbit-skinner seemed to turn into an ordinary sort of woman and took me up, and, in a way, threw me down on the floor to play with the child.”
“What did you play at, dad? When I was little you used to pretend to swallow a fork. Did you swallow a fork?”
The iron features relaxed into a smile.
“I did, my dear, and it was the cold pie fork, wiped on a bit of newspaper. And last of all, what do you think she said?”
“No one on earth could guess, dear, what Clementina might have said.”
“She actually asked me to sit for a crayon sketch. Said my face was interesting to her as an artist, and she would like to make a study of it for her own pleasure. Now what pleasure could anybody on earth find in looking at my ugly old mug?”
“But, dear, you have a most beautiful mug,” cried Etta. “I don’t mean beautiful like the photographs of popular actors—but full of strength and character—just the fine face that appeals to the artist.”
“Do you think so?” asked the Admiral.
“I’m sure.” She ran to a little table and brought a Florentine mirror. “Look.”
He looked. Instinctively the man of sixty-five touched the finely-curving grizzled hair about his temples.
“You’re a silly child,” said he.
She kissed him. “Now confess. You had the goodest of good times with Clementina this afternoon.”
“I don’t mind owning,” said the Admiral, “that I found her a most intelligent woman.”
And that is the way that all of us sons of Adam, even Admirals of the British Fleet, can be beguiled by the daughters of Eve.
Halcyon days were they for Quixtus, for whom London wore an entirely different aspect from the Aceldama he had left. Instead of its streets and squares stretching out before him as the scene of potential devilry, it smiled upon him as the centre of manifold pleasant interests. He had the great work to attack, the final picture that mortal knowledge could draw of that far off, haunting phase of human life before the startling use of iron was known to mankind. It was not to be a dull catalogue of dead things. The dead things, a million facts, were to be the skeleton on which he would build his great vivid flesh-and-blood story—the dream of his life, which only now did he feel the vital impulse to realise. He had his club and his cronies, harmless folk, beneath whose mild exterior he no longer divined horrible corruption. From them all he received congratulations on his altered mien. The change had done him good. He was looking ten years younger. Some chaffed him, after the way of men. Wonderful place, Paris. He found a stimulating interest in his new responsibilities. Vestiges of his perfunctory legal training remained and enabled him to unravel simple complications in the Hammersley affairs, much to Clementina’s admiration and his own satisfaction. He discovered a pleasure once more in the occasional society of Tommy, and concerned himself seriously with his love-making and his painting. He spoke of him to Dawkins, the rich donor of the Anthropological Society portrait, to whom Tommy had alluded with such disrespect to Clementina. Dawkins visited Tommy’s studio and walked away with a couple of pictures, after having paid such a price as to make the young man regard him as a fairy godfather in vast white waistcoat and baggy trousers. Quixtus also entertained Tommy and Etta at lunch at the Carlton, Mrs. Fontaine completing the quartette. “I should have liked it better,” said Clementina, when she heard of the incident (as she heard all that happened to the lovers), “I should have liked it better if he hadn’t brought Mrs. Fontaine into it.” Whereat Tommy winked at Etta, unbeknown to Clementina.
Quixtus’s friendship with the spotless flower of womanhood continued. He had tea with her in her prettily-furnished little house in Pont Street, where he met several of her acquaintances, people of unquestionable position in the London world, and attended one or two receptions and even a dance at which she was present. Very skilfully she drew him into her circle and adroitly played him in public as a serious aspirant to her spotless hand. There were many who called him the variegated synonyms of a fool, for to hard-bitten worldlings few illusions are left concerning a woman like Lena Fontaine; but they shrugged their shoulders cynically, and viewed the capture with amused interest. Only the most jaded complained. If she wanted to give them a sensation, why did she not go a step further and lead about a bishop on her string? But these uncharitable remarks did not reach Quixtus’s ears. The word went round that he was a man of distinguished scientific position—whether he was a metallurgist or a brain specialist no one at the tired end of the London season either knew or cared to know—and, his courtly and scholarly demeanour confirming the rumour, the corner of Vanity Fair in which Lena Fontaine fought to hold her position paid him considerable deference. The flattery of the frivolous pleased him, as it has pleased many a good, simple man before him. He thought Mrs. Fontaine’s friends very charming, though perhaps not over-intellectual people. He went among them, however, scarce knowing why. A card of invitation would come by post from Lady Anything, whom he had once met. Before he had time to obey his first impulse and decline, Lena Fontaine’s voice would be heard over the telephone.
“Are you going to Lady Anything’s on Friday?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She has asked you, I know. I’m going.”
“Oh?”
“Do come. Lady Anything tells me she has got some interesting people to meet you; and I shall be so miserable if you’re not there.”
Who was he to cause misery to the spotless lady? The victim yielded, and blandly unconscious of feminine guile was paraded before the interesting people as the latest and most lasting conquest of Lena Fontaine’s bow and spear.
August plans were discussed. She was thinking of Dinard. What was Quixtus proposing to do? He had not considered the question. Had contemplated work in London. She held up her hands. London in August! How could he exist in the stuffy place? He needed a real holiday.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know where to go,” said he.
Very delicately she suggested Dinard. He objected in his shy way. Dinard was the haunt of fashion and frivolity.
“I should walk about the place like a daw among peacocks,” said he.
“But why should you be a daw? Why not do a little peacocking? Colour in life would be good for you. And I would undertake to keep your feathers trim.”
He smiled, half-allured, half-repelled by the idea of strutting among such gay birds. To refuse the spotless lady’s request downright was an act of discourtesy of which he was incapable. He gave a vague and qualified assent to the proposal, which she did not then tempt him to make more definite. Content with her progress, she bided her time.
Quixtus had little leisure to reflect on the sceptical attitude towards humanity which, theoretically, he still maintained. In addition to all these hour-absorbing interests, Sheila began to occupy a considerable place in his life. Sometimes he would call at Romney Place; sometimes Clementina would bring the child to Russell Square; sometimes, when Clementina was too busy, Sheila came in the nurse’s charge. He cleared out a large room at the top of the house, which was to be Sheila’s nursery when she took up her quarters there. It needed re-papering, re-carpeting, re-furnishing, he decided. Nothing like cheerful surroundings for impressionable childhood. With this in view, he carried off Sheila one day to a firm of wall-paper dealers, so that she could choose a pattern for herself. Sheila sat solemnly on the sofa by his side while the polite assistant turned over great strips of paper. At last she decided. A bewildering number of parrots to the square yard, all with red bodies and blue tails, darting about among green foliage on which pink roses grew miraculously, was the chosen design. Quixtus hesitated; but Sheila was firm. They proudly took home a strip to try against the wall. Clementina, hearing from Sheila of her exploit, rushed up the next afternoon to Russell Square, and blinked her eyes before the dazzling thing.
“It’s only you, Ephraim, that could have taken a child of five to select wall-papers.”
“I will own that the result is disastrous,” he said, ruefully. “But she set her heart upon it.”
She sighed. “You’re two babies together. I see I’ve got to fix up that nursery myself.” She looked at him with a woman’s delicious pity. What could a lone man know of the fitting up of nurseries?
“You hear what your auntie says?” he asked—the child was sitting on his knee. “We’re in disgrace.”
“If you’re in disgrace you go in the corner,” said Sheila.
“Let us go in the corner, then.”
“If you hold me very tight,” said Sheila.
But Clementina came up and forgave them, and kissed the little face peeping over Quixtus’s shoulder.
“It does my heart good to see you with her,” she cried, with rare demonstrativeness.
It was true. Sheila’s sweet ways with Tommy and Etta caused her ever so little a pang of jealousy. Her increasing fondness for Quixtus made Clementina thrill with pleasure. You may say that Clementina, essentially just, was scrupulous not to encroach upon Quixtus’s legal half-share in the child’s esteem. But a sense of justice is not an emotion. And it was emotion, silly, feminine, romantic emotion, which she did not try to explain to herself, that filled her eyes with moisture whenever she saw the two happy together.
She laid her hand upon the fair hair.
“Do you love your Uncle Ephim?”
“I adore him,” said Sheila.
“Your uncle fully reciprocates the sentiment, my dear,” said Quixtus, his hand also instinctively rising to caress the hair.
So the hands of the guardians touched. Clementina withdrew hers and turned away quickly, so that he should not see the flush that sprang into her face.
“We must be getting home now, dear,” she said. “Auntie is wasting precious daylight.” And with her old abruptness she left him.
He followed her down the stairs. “My dear Clementina,” said he, standing bareheaded at his front door, “I wonder whether you realise how Sheila and yourself light up this dull old house for me.”
She sniffed scornfully. “Ilight up?”
“You,” said he, with smiling emphasis.
She looked at him queerly for an instant, and then went her way.
The next time he saw her, a few days afterwards, one late afternoon, when she was tired after a heavy day’s painting, she railed at him, with a return of her old biting manner. He looked surprised and pained. She relented.
“Forgive me, my good Ephraim,” she said, “but I’ve the rough luck to be a woman. No man alive can ever conjecture what a devil of a thing that is to be.”
He smiled. “You mustn’t overwork,” said he. “A woman hasn’t the brute strength of a man.”
“You’re delicious!” she said.
But she was kind—exceedingly kind, to him thereafter, and fitted up the nursery in a way that made the two babies beam with delight. So Quixtus lived halcyon days.
In spite of qualms of conscience, these were halcyon days for Huckaby. He had already entered on his duties as Quixtus’s assistant in the preparation of the monumental work on “The Household Arts of the Neolithic Age.” There were hundreds of marked passages in books to transcribe, with accurate notes of reference, hundreds of learned periodicals in all languages with articles bearing on the subject to be condensed and indexed, thousands of notes of Quixtus’s to be collated, thousands of photographs and drawings to be classified. Never having been admitted into the inner factory of his patron’s work, he was astonished at the enormous amount of material, the evidence of the unsuspected patient labour of years. He began to feel a new respect for Quixtus, whom hitherto he had regarded as a dilettante. Of course, he knew that Quixtus had a European reputation. He had not taken the reputation seriously. Like Clementina, he had been wont to scoff at prehistoric man. Now he realised for the first time that a man cannot gain a European reputation in any branch of human activity without paying the price in toil; that there are qualities of energy, brain and will inherent in any man who takes front rank; that there must be a calm, infinite thoroughness in his work which is beyond the power of the smaller man. No wonder his French colleagues called Quixtuscher maître, and deferred to his judgment. In his workroom Quixtus was a great man, and Huckaby, seeing him now in his workroom; recognised the fact.
The prospects of his appointment as secretary to the Anthropological Society were also fair. Hitherto the responsibilities of that position had been borne by one of the members in an honorary capacity, a paid and unimportant underling performing the clerical duties. But for the last year or so the operations of the society having extended, the secretaryship had become too great a tax on the time of any unpaid and no matter how enthusiastic gentleman. The Council therefore had practically determined on the appointment of a salaried secretary, and were much impressed by the qualifications of the President’s nominee. A secretary who can print below his name on official papers the fact that he is a Master of Arts and late Fellow of his College lends distinction to any learned society. A snuffy, seedy, and crotchety member had been put forward as an opposition candidate. But his chances were small. Huckaby’s star was in the ascendant.
It was a happy day for him when he moved his books and few other belongings from the evil garret where he had lived to modest but cheerful lodgings near Russell Square. He looked for the last time around the room which had been the scene of so many degradations, of so many despairs, of so many torturings of soul. All that was a part of his past life; the greasy wall-paper, the rickety deal furniture, the filth-sodden, ragged carpet, the slimy soot on the window-sill that had crept in from the circumambient chimney-stacks through the ill-fitting window-sash, the narrow, rank bed—all that had been part and parcel of his being. The familiar smell of uncared-for, unclean human lives saturated the house. He shuddered and slammed the door and tore down the stairs. Never again! Never again, so help him God! A short while afterwards he was busy arranging his books in the bright, clean sitting-room of his new lodgings, and a neat maid in white cap, cuffs, and apron brought in afternoon tea, which she disposed in decent fashion on a little table. When she had gone, he stood and looked down upon the dainty array. He realised that henceforward this was his home. He picked up from a plate a little three-cornered watercress sandwich; but instead of eating it, he stared at it, and the tears rolled down his face.
One day, however, towards the end of July, was marked by a black cloud. His day’s work being over he was walking with light step to his lodgings, when he saw in the distance, awaiting him, almost on his doorstep, the sinister forms of Billiter and Vandermeer. His first impulse was to turn and flee; but they had already caught sight of him and were advancing to meet him. He went on.
“Hullo, old friend,” said Billiter, in a beery voice. “So we’ve tracked you down, eh? We called at the old place, and found you had gone and left no address. Thought you would give us the slip, eh?”
He still wore the costume in which he had gone racing with Quixtus; but after constant use it had begun to look shabby. His linen was of the dingiest. His face had grown more bloated. Vandermeer, pinched, foxy, and rusty, thrust his hard felt hat to the back of his head, and, hands on hips, looked threateningly at Huckaby.
“I suppose you know you’ve been playing a low-down game.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” said Huckaby.
“Oh, don’t you,” said Billiter. “Look at you and look at us. Who’s been getting all the fat, and who all the lean? We have something to say to you, old friend, so let’s get indoors and have it out between us.”
He made a move, accompanied by Vandermeer, towards the front door. But Huckaby checked them, stricken with sudden revolt. His past life should not defile the sanctity of his new home. He would not admit them across his threshold.
“No,” said he. “Whatever we’ve got to say to one another can be said here.”
“All right,” said Vandermeer, sulkily. “There’s a quiet pub at the corner.”
“I’ve chucked pubs,” said Huckaby.
“Come off it,” sneered Billiter. “At any rate, you can stand a round of drinks.”
“I’ve chucked drink, too,” said Huckaby. “I’ve sworn off. I’ll never touch a drop of liquor as long as I live—and I advise you fellows to do the same.”
They burst out laughing, asked him for tickets for his next temperance lecture, and then began to abuse him after the manner of their kind.
“This is a decent street,” said Huckaby, “so please don’t make a row.”
“We’re not making any row,” cried Billiter. “We only want our share of the money.”
“What money? Didn’t I write and tell you the whole thing was off? She couldn’t stick it, and neither could I. Quixtus hasn’t given her one penny piece.”
“We’ll see what the lady has to say about that,” growled Billiter.
“You’re going to leave that lady alone henceforth and for ever,” said Huckaby, with a new ring of authority in his voice.
The others sneered. Since when had Huckaby constituted himself squire of dames? Billiter, with profane asseveration, would do exactly what he chose. Wasn’t it his scheme? He deserved his share. Vandermeer gloomily reminded him that he had cast doubts from the first on Huckaby’s probity. He had put them in the cart in fine fashion. They refused to believe in Lena Fontaine’s squeamishness. Huckaby grew impatient.
“Haven’t you each received a letter from Quixtus’s solicitors? Haven’t you each signed an agreement not to worry him—on forfeiture of your allowance? Now I swear to God that if either of you molest her, you’ll be molesting Quixtus. I’ll jolly well see to that. She’ll tell me, and I’ll tell him—and bang! goes the monthly money.”
Vandermeer’s shrewd wits began to work.
“Molest her and we molest Quixtus? Oho! Is that the little game? She’s going to marry him, eh?”
“If she does, what the blazes has that got to do with you?” Huckaby cried, fiercely. “You just let the woman alone. You’ve got a damned sight more out of Quixtus than you ever expected, and you ought to be satisfied.”
“We ought to get more,” said Billiter, “considering what we’ve done for him.”
“You won’t,” said Huckaby, and seeing that they both still regarded Quixtus as a subject for further exploitation, “Let me tell you something,” said he, “a few simple facts that alter the situation completely. Let us take a turn down the street.”
And as they walked, he told them briefly of Hammersley’s death and the Marseilles visit and the return of Quixtus, a changed man, with Clementina and the child. The bee, on which they had reckoned for honey, had left Quixtus’s bonnet. There was no more Bedlamite talk about wickedness. Their occupation as evil counsellors had gone for ever. They had better accept thankfully what they had, and disappear. Any action directed against either Quixtus or Lena Fontaine would automatically bring about the demise of the goose with the golden eggs. At last he convinced them of the futility of blackmail; but they parted from him, each with a burning sense of wrong. Lena Fontaine and Huckaby had put them in the cart. They were left, they were done, they were stung—they were all things that slang has invented to describe the position of men deceived by those in whom they trusted.
“And she’s going to marry him,” said Vandermeer.
“Huckaby didn’t say so,” replied Billiter.
“He didn’t contradict it. She’s going to marry him, and you bet that son of a pawn-ticket will get his commission.”
“Well, we can’t help ourselves,” said Billiter.
“H’m!” said Vandermeer, darkly.
Huckaby, conscious of victory, went home, and taking an old student’s text of the “Phædo” from his shelves, abstracted his mind from the sordid happenings of the modern world.
It was a day or two after this adventure of Huckaby’s that Quixtus informed Clementina of his intention of giving a dinner-party, in honour of Tommy and Etta’s engagement. She commended the project; a nice little intimate dinner——
“I’m afraid I’m planning rather a large affair,” said he, apologetically. “A party of about twenty people.”
“Lord save us!” cried Clementina, “where are you going to dig them up from?”
He stretched out his long, thin legs. They were sitting on a bench in the gardens of Russell Square, Sheila having strayed a few yards to investigate the contents of a perambulator in charge of a smiling and friendly nursemaid.
“There are people to whom I owe a return of hospitality,” said he, with a smile, “and I think a certain amount of formality is due to Admiral Concannon.”
“All right,” said Clementina, “who are they?”
“There are the Admiral and yourself and Tommy and Etta, Lord and Lady Radfield, General and Mrs. Barnes, Sir Edward and Lady Quinn, Doorly—the novelist, you know—Mrs. Fontaine and Lady Louisa Malling——”
Clementina stiffened. The blood seemed to flow from her heart, leaving it an intolerable icicle. “Why Mrs. Fontaine?”
“Why not?”
“Why should Mrs. Fontaine be asked to Etta’s party?”
“She’s a charming woman,” said Quixtus.
“Just a shallow society hack,” said Clementina, to whom Quixtus had not confided his adventures in the gay world, not through conscious disingenuousness, but assuming that such chronicles would not interest her.
“I’m afraid you do her an injustice,” he said, warmly. “Mrs. Fontaine has very brilliant social gifts. I’m sorry, my dear Clementina, that we disagree on the point; but anyhow she must be invited. As a matter of fact, it was she who suggested the party.”
Clementina opened her lips to speak, and then closed them with a snap. Mother Eve sat at her elbow and murmured words of good counsel. Not by abuse is an infatuated and quixotic man weaned from seductresses. She swallowed her anger and fierce jealousy.
“In that case, my dear Ephraim,” she said, with mincing civility, “there is no question about it. Of course she must be invited.”
“Of course,” said he.
“Who else are to come?”
He ran through the list. One or two of the prospective guests she knew personally, others by name; as to the personalities of those unknown to her she made polite inquiries. So unwontedly sugared were her phrases that Quixtus, simple man, forgot her outburst.
“You haven’t given a dinner-party like this for a long time.”
“Not for many years. Of course I have had men’s dinners—chiefly my colleagues in the Anthropological Society. But this is a new venture.”
“I wish it every success,” said Clementina, mendaciously. “The only wrong note in it would be myself. Oh yes, my dear Ephraim,” she said, anticipating his protest, “I’m not made for such a galaxy of fashion. I tread upon daintily covered corns. I’m a savage—all right in my wigwam with those I care for—but no use in a drawing-room. You must leave me out of it.”
Quixtus, shocked and hurt, turned and put out both hands in appeal.
“My dearest friend, how can you say such things? You positively must come.”
“My dearest friend,” she replied, forcing her grim lips into a smile, “I positively won’t.”
And that was the end of the matter. She parted from him cordially, and went home with more devils tearing her to pieces with redhot pincers than had ever been dreamed of in Quixtus’s demonology.