CHAPTER XXII
BOSNIA ROAD
It is a suggestive thought that the characteristic effects of our execrable climate have nowhere shown themselves more forcibly than in the atmosphere of the London suburbs. That these suburbs are in some subtle respects the results of our melancholy grey skies no one can doubt. Even the raw red terraces scattered among the dingier and more chastened rows of depressed houses, betray a futile and rather boisterous attempt to introduce a butcher-boy cheerfulness into a world of smuts and rain. The older, sadder houses have taken the tint of their surroundings. They have been poised all these years between the moil and fog of the city, and a countryside that was never theirs, a countryside that is often pictured as wrapped in eternal June, but which for nine months out of the twelve knows grey gloom, mud, and rain.
Their activities alone must have given the modern English such cheerfulness as they possess, while the climate has made them a nation of grumblers. Perhaps the Industrial Revolution saved us from our weather.
Coal and power came and gave us something to do. For what has been the history of England, but the watering of the blood of those who came to dwell in her. It is not necessary to thank the Roman rule for the decadence of the Britons, when their Saxon conquerors in turn sank into sodden, boorish ignorance. The Normans brought red blood and wine to the grey island, but by the fifteenth century the blend had become coarse, cruel, and poor. With the Elizabethans, half the world rushed into new adventure and romance, and England revived. But once again the grey island damped down the ardour, the enthusiasms and the energies of the people. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the population was stagnant, the country poor, coarse and apathetic. Then King Coal arose, and lit a fire for us, and a few great men were born. We found big things to do, and were renewed, in spite of our climate. Yet the question suggests itself, will these subtle atmospheric influences reassert themselves and damp us down once more in the centuries that are to come?
Eve Carfax had elected to live in a London suburb, and had chosen Highbury, perhaps because of childish recollections of pleasant half holidays spent there with a friend of her mother’s, afternoons when muffins and fancy cakes had made bread and butter superfluous, and a jolly old lady had discovered occasional half-crowns in her purse. Eve had taken two rooms in a little red house in Bosnia Road. Why it should have been called Bosnia Road she could not imagine. Each house had a front door with stained glass and a brass letter box, a tiny strip of front garden faced with a low brick wall topped by an iron railing, an iron gate, and a red tiled path. All the houses looked exactly alike. Most of them had a big china bowl or fern pot on a table or pedestal in the window of the ground floor room. There was no originality either in the texture or the draping of the curtains. None of the houses in Bosnia Road had any of that sense of humour possessed by the houses in a village street. There were no jocular leerings, no rollicking leanings up against a neighbour, no expressive and whimsical faces. They were all decently alike, respectably uniform, staring at each other across the road, and never moved to laughter by the absurd discovery that the architect had unconsciously perpetrated a cynical lampoon upon the suburban middle classes.
When one is fighting for the bare necessities of life, one is not conscious of monotony. For Eve, as an adventuress, it had been a question of gaining a foothold and a grip on a ledge with her fingers, and her energies had been concentrated on hanging to the vantage she had gained. She had had good luck, and the good luck had been due to Kate Duveen.
Kate Duveen was an old friend, and Eve had hunted her out in her Bloomsbury lodgings on the third day of her coming to London. They had been at school together before the Carfaxes had taken a cottage in Surrey. Kate Duveen was a brown, lean, straight-backed young woman, with rather marked eyebrows, firm lips, and shrewd eyes. She was a worker, had always been a worker, and though more than one man had wanted to marry her, she had no desire either for marriage or for children. She was a comrade rather than a woman. There was no colour either in her face or in her dress, and her one beauty was her hair. She had a decisive, unsentimental way with her, read a great deal, attended, when possible, every lecture given by Bernard Shaw, and managed to earn about two hundred pounds a year.
It was Kate Duveen who had introduced Eve into Miss Champion’s establishment.
Miss Champion’s profession was somewhat peculiar, though not unique. Her offices were in a turning off Oxford Street, and were situated on the first floor. She was a kind of universal provider, in the sense that she supplied by means of her female staff, the various needs of a cultured and busy public. She equipped men of affairs and politicians with secretaries and expert typists. There were young women who could undertake mechanical drawing or architects’ plans, illustrate books, copy old maps and drawings, undertake research work in the British Museum, design fashion plates, supervise entertainments, act as mistress of the revels at hydros and hotels. Miss Champion had made a success of the venture, partly because she was an excellent business woman, and partly because of her personality. Snow-white hair, a fresh face, a fine figure. These points had helped. She was very debonair, yet very British, and mingled an aristocratic scent of lavender with a suggestion of lawn sleeves. Her offices had no commercial smell. Her patrons were mostly dilettanti people with good incomes, and a particular hobby, authorship, public affairs, china, charities. Miss Champion had some imagination, and the wisdom of a “Foresight.” Good form was held sacred. She was very particular as to that old-fashioned word “deportment.” Her gentlewomen had to be gentlewomen, calm, discreet, unemotional, neat looking lay figures, with good brains and clever hands.
Kate Duveen had introduced Eve to Miss Champion, and Miss Champion happened to have a vacancy that Eve could fill. A patron was writing a book on mediæval hunting, and wanted old pictures and woodcuts copied. Another patron was busy with a colour-book called “Ideal Gardens,” and was asking for fancy plates with plenty of atmosphere. There was some hack research work going begging, and designs for magazine covers to be submitted to one or two art editors, and Eve was lucky enough to find herself earning her living before she had been two weeks in town.
The day’s routine did not vary greatly. She breakfasted at a quarter to eight, and if the weather was fine she walked a part or even the whole of the way to Miss Champion’s, following Upper Street and Pentonville Road, and so through Bloomsbury, where she picked up Kate Duveen. If it was wet she trammed, but she detested the crush for a seat, being a sensitive individualist with a hatred of crowds, however small. Some days she spent most of her time in the Museum reading-room, making notes and drawings which she elaborated afterwards at her desk at Miss Champion’s. If she had nothing but illustrating to do or plates to paint she spent all the day at the office. They were given an hour for lunch, and Eve and Kate Duveen lunched together, getting some variety by patronising Lyons, the Aerated Bread Company, and the Express Dairy in turn. After these very light lunches, and much more solid conversations, came four or five hours more work, with half an hour’s interval for tea. Eve reached Bosnia Road about half past six, often glad to walk the whole way back after the long sedentary hours. At seven she had meat tea, the meat being represented by an egg, or three sardines, or two slices of the very smallest tongue that was sold. Her landlady was genteel, florid, and affable, with that honeyed affability that is one of the surest signs of the humbug. She was a widow, and the possessor of a small pension. Her one child, a gawk of a youth, who was an under-clerk somewhere in the City, had nothing to recommend him. He was a ripening “nut,” and advertised the fact by wearing an enormous collar, a green plush Homburg hat, a grey suit, and brown boots on the Sabbath. Some time ago he had bought a banjo, but when Eve came to Bosnia Road, his vamping was as discordant and stuttering as it could be. He had a voice, and a conviction that he was a comedian, and he could be heard exclaiming, “Put me among the Girls,” a song that always moved Eve to an angry disgust. Now and again he met her on the stairs, but any egregious oglings on his part were blighted before they were born.
“She’s a suffragette! I know ’em.”
That was what he said to his mother. Had he been put among such girls, his little, vain Georgy Porgy of a soul would have been mute and awed.
Eve’s evenings were very lonely. Sometimes Kate Duveen came up from Bloomsbury, but she was a busy woman, and worked and read most nights. If it was fine, Eve went out and walked, wandering round outside Highbury Fields, or down the quiet Canonbury streets, or along Upper Street or Holloway Road. It was very dismal, and these walks made her feel even more lonely than the evenings spent in her room. It seemed such a drifting, solitary existence. Who cared? To whom did it matter whether she went out or stayed at home? As for her sitting-room, she could not get used to the cheap red plush suite, the sentimental pictures, the green and yellow carpet, the disastrous ornaments, the pink and green tiles in the grate. Her own workaday belongings made it a little more habitable, but she felt like Iolanthe in a retired licensed victualler’s parlour.
The nights when Kate Duveen came up from Bloomsbury were full of intelligent relief. They talked, argued, compared ambitions and ideals, and trusted each other with intimate confessions. Several weeks passed before Eve gave Kate Duveen some account of that summer at Fernhill, and Kate Duveen looked stiff and hard over it, and showed Canterton no mercy.
“It always seems to be a married man!”
Eve was up in arms on the other side.
“He was different.”
“Oh, yes, I know!”
“Kate, I hate you when you talk like this.”
“Hate me as much as you like, my dear, you will see with my eyes some day. I have no patience with men.”
Eve softened her passionate partisanship, and tried to make her friend understand.
“Till one has gone through it one does not know what it means. After all, we can’t stamp out Nature, and all that is beautiful in Nature. I, for one, don’t want to. It may have made me suffer. It was worth it, just to be loved by that child.”
“Children are not much better than little savages. Don’t dream sentimental dreams about children. I remember what a little beast I was.”
“There will always be some part of me that you won’t understand, Kate.”
“Perhaps. I’ve no patience with men—selfish, sexual fools. Let’s talk about work.”
CHAPTER XXIII
LIFE AND LETTERS
Saturday afternoons and Sundays gave the pause in Eve’s week of scribbling and reading, and drawing at desk and table. She was infinitely glad of the leisure when it came, only to discover that it often brought a retrospective sadness that could not be conjured away.
Sometimes she went to a matinée or a concert on Saturday afternoon, alternating these breaks with afternoons of hard work. For the Fernhill days, with their subsequent pain and restlessness had left her with a definite ambition. She regarded her present life as a means to an end. She did not intend to be always a scribbler of extracts and a copier of old woodcuts, but had visions of her own art spreading its wings and lifting her out of the crowd. She tried to paint on Sundays, struggling with the atmosphere of Bosnia Road, and attempting to make use of the north light in her back bedroom, while she enlarged and elaborated some of the rough sketches in her sketch book. Her surroundings were trite and dreary enough, but youth and ardour are marvellous torch-bearers, and many a fine thing has been conceived and carried through in a London lodging-house. She had plans for hiring a little studio somewhere, or even of persuading Mrs. Buss, her landlady, to let her have a makeshift shed put up in the useless patch of back garden.
When she looked back on the Fernhill days, they seemed to her very strange and wonderful, covered with a bloom of mystery, touched with miraculous sunlight. She hoped that they would help her to do big work. The memories were in her blood, she was the richer for them, even though she had suffered and still suffered. Now that she was in London the summer seemed more beautiful than it had been, nor did she remind herself that it had happened to be one of those rare fine summers that appear occasionally just to make the average summer seem more paltry. When she had received a cheque for some eighty pounds, representing the sum her furniture had brought her after the payment of all expenses, she had written to Canterton and returned him the hundred pounds he had paid her, pleading that it irked her memories of their comradeship. She had given Kate Duveen’s address, after asking her friend’s consent, and in her letter she had written cheerfully and bravely, desiring Canterton to remember their days together, but not to attempt to see her.
“You will be kind, and not come into this new life of mine. I am not ashamed to say that I have suffered, but that I have nothing to regret. Since I am alone, it is best that I should be alone. You will understand. When the pain has died down, one does not want old wounds reopened.“I think daily of Lynette. Kiss her for me. Some day it may be possible for me to see her again.”
“You will be kind, and not come into this new life of mine. I am not ashamed to say that I have suffered, but that I have nothing to regret. Since I am alone, it is best that I should be alone. You will understand. When the pain has died down, one does not want old wounds reopened.
“I think daily of Lynette. Kiss her for me. Some day it may be possible for me to see her again.”
Three weeks passed before Kate Duveen handed Eve a letter as they crossed Russell Square in the direction of Tottenham Court Road. It was a raw, misty morning, and the plane trees, with their black boles and boughs, looked sombre and melancholy.
“This came for you.”
She saw the colour rise in Eve’s face, and the light that kindled deep down in her eyes.
“Not cured yet!”
“Have I asked to be cured?”
Eve read Canterton’s letter at her desk at Miss Champion’s. It was a longish letter, and as she read it she seemed to hear him talking in the fir woods below Orchards Corner.
“Dear Eve,—I write to you as a man who has been humbled, and who has had to bear the bitterness of not being able to make amends.“I came to see things with your eyes, quite suddenly, the very morning that you went away. I took Lynette with me to Orchards Corner, to show her as a symbol of my surrender. But you had gone.“I was humbled. And the silence that shut me in humbled me still more.“I did not try to discover things, though that might have been easy.“As to your leaving Fernhill so suddenly, I managed to smother all comment upon that.“You had been offered, unexpectedly, a very good post in London, and your mother’s death had made you feel restless at Orchards Corner. That was what I said.“Lynette talks of you very often. It is, ‘When will Miss Eve come down to see us?’ ‘Won’t she spend her holidays here?’ ‘Won’t you take me to London, daddy, to see Miss Eve?’“As for this money that you have returned to me, I have put it aside and added a sum to it for a certain purpose that has taken my fancy. I let you return it to me, because I have some understanding of your pride.“I am glad, deeply glad, that good luck has come to you. If I can serve you at any time and in any way, you can count on me to the last breath.“I am a different man, in some respects, from the man I was three months ago. Try to realise that. Try to realise what it suggests.“If you realise it, will you let me see you now and again, just as a comrade and a friend?“Say yes or no.“James Canterton.”
“Dear Eve,—I write to you as a man who has been humbled, and who has had to bear the bitterness of not being able to make amends.
“I came to see things with your eyes, quite suddenly, the very morning that you went away. I took Lynette with me to Orchards Corner, to show her as a symbol of my surrender. But you had gone.
“I was humbled. And the silence that shut me in humbled me still more.
“I did not try to discover things, though that might have been easy.
“As to your leaving Fernhill so suddenly, I managed to smother all comment upon that.
“You had been offered, unexpectedly, a very good post in London, and your mother’s death had made you feel restless at Orchards Corner. That was what I said.
“Lynette talks of you very often. It is, ‘When will Miss Eve come down to see us?’ ‘Won’t she spend her holidays here?’ ‘Won’t you take me to London, daddy, to see Miss Eve?’
“As for this money that you have returned to me, I have put it aside and added a sum to it for a certain purpose that has taken my fancy. I let you return it to me, because I have some understanding of your pride.
“I am glad, deeply glad, that good luck has come to you. If I can serve you at any time and in any way, you can count on me to the last breath.
“I am a different man, in some respects, from the man I was three months ago. Try to realise that. Try to realise what it suggests.
“If you realise it, will you let me see you now and again, just as a comrade and a friend?
“Say yes or no.
“James Canterton.”
Eve was bemused all day, her eyes looking through her work into infinite distances. She avoided Kate Duveen, whose unsentimental directness would have hurt her, lunched by herself, and walked home alone to Bosnia Road. She sat staring at the fire most of the evening before she wrote to Canterton.
“Your letter has made me both sad and happy, Jim. Don’t feel humbled on my account. The humiliation should be mine, because neither the world nor I could match your magnanimity.“Sometimes my heart is very hungry for sight of Lynette.“Yes, I am working hard. It is better that I should say ‘No.’“Eve.”
“Your letter has made me both sad and happy, Jim. Don’t feel humbled on my account. The humiliation should be mine, because neither the world nor I could match your magnanimity.
“Sometimes my heart is very hungry for sight of Lynette.
“Yes, I am working hard. It is better that I should say ‘No.’
“Eve.”
Four days passed before Kate handed her another letter.
“Perhaps you are right, and I am wrong. If it is your wish that I should not see you, I bow to it with all reverence.“Do not think that I do not understand.“Some day, perhaps, you will come to see Lynette. Or I could bring her up to town and leave her at your friend’s for you to find her. I promise to lay no ambuscades. When you have gone I can call for her again.“I should love her better because she had been near you.”
“Perhaps you are right, and I am wrong. If it is your wish that I should not see you, I bow to it with all reverence.
“Do not think that I do not understand.
“Some day, perhaps, you will come to see Lynette. Or I could bring her up to town and leave her at your friend’s for you to find her. I promise to lay no ambuscades. When you have gone I can call for her again.
“I should love her better because she had been near you.”
Kate Duveen was hard at work one evening, struggling, with the help of a dictionary, through a tough book on German philosophy, when the maid knocked at her door.
“What is it, Polly?”
The girl’s name was Ermentrude, but Kate persisted in calling her Polly.
“There’s a gentleman downstairs, miss. ’E’s sent up ’is card. ’E wondered whether you’d see ’im.”
Kate glanced at the card and read, “James Canterton.”
She hesitated a moment.
“Yes, I will see him. Ask him up.”
Her hard, workaday self had risen as to a challenge. She felt an almost fierce eagerness to meet this man, to give him battle, and rout him with her truth-telling and sarcastic tongue. Canterton, as she imagined him, stood for all the old man-made sexual conveniences, and the social makeshift that she hated. He was the big, prejudiced male, grudging a corner of the working world to women, but ready enough to make use of them when his passions or his sentiments were stirred.
When he came into the room she did not rise from the table, but remained sitting there with her books before her.
“Miss Duveen?”
“Yes. Will you shut the door and sit down?”
She spoke with a rigid asperity, and he obeyed her, but without any sign of embarrassment or nervousness. There was just a subtle something that made her look at him more intently, more interestedly, as though he was not the sort of man she had expected to see.
“It is Mr. Canterton of Fernhill, is it not?”
“Yes.”
She was merciless enough to sit there in silence, with her rigid, watchful face, waiting for him to break the frost. Her mood had passed suddenly beyond mere prejudice. She felt the fighting spirit in her piqued by a suspicion that she was dealing with no ordinary man.
He sat in one of her arm-chairs, facing her, and meeting her eyes with perfect candour.
“I am wondering whether I must explain——”
“Your call, and its object?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think it is necessary. I think I know why you have come.”
“So much the better.”
She caught him up as though he were assuming her to be a possible accomplice.
“I may as well tell you that you will get nothing out of me. She does not live here.”
“Perhaps you will tell me what you imagine my object to be.”
“You want Eve Carfax’s address.”
For the first time she saw that she had stung him.
“Then I can assure you you are wrong. I have no intention of asking for it. It is a point of honour.”
She repeated the words slowly, and in a quiet and ironical voice.
“A point of honour!”
She became conscious of his smile, a smile that began deep down in his eyes. It angered her a little, because it suggested that his man’s knowledge was deeper, wiser, and kinder than hers.
“I take it, Miss Duveen, that you are Eve’s very good friend.”
“I hope so.”
“That is exactly why I have come to you. Understand me, Eve is not to know that I have been here.”
“Thank you. Please dictate what you please.”
“I will. I want you to tell me just how she is—if she is in really bearable surroundings?”
Kate’s eyes studied him over her books. Here was something more vital than German philosophy.
“Mr. Canterton, I ought to tell you that I know a little of what has happened this summer. Not that Eve is a babbler——”
“I am glad that you know.”
“Really. I should not have thought that you would be glad.”
“I am. Will you answer my question?”
“And may I ask what claim you have to be told anything about Eve?”
He answered her quietly, “I have no right at all.”
A smile, very like a glimmer of approval, flickered in her eyes.
“You recognise that. Wasn’t it rather a pity——”
“Miss Duveen, I have not come here to justify anything. I wanted a fine, working comradeship, and Eve showed me, that for a particular reason, it was impossible. Till I met her there was nothing on earth so dear to me as my child, Lynette. When Eve came into my life she shared it with the child. Is it monstrous or impertinent that I should desire to know whether she is in the way of being happy?”
Kate saw in him a man different from the common crowd of men, and Eve’s defence of him recurred to her. His frankness was the frankness of strength. His bronzed head, with its blue eyes and generous mouth began to take on a new dignity.
“Mr. Canterton, I am not an admirer of men.”
“You should have studied flowers.”
“Thank you. I will answer your question. Eve is earning a living. It is not luxury, but it is better than most women workers can boast of. She works hard. And she has ambitions.”
He answered at once.
“I am glad of that. Ambition—the drive of life, is everything. You have given me good news.”
Kate Duveen sat in thought a moment, staring at the pages of German philosophy.
“Mr. Canterton, I’m interested. I am going to be intrusive. Is it possible for a man to be impersonal?”
“Yes, and no. It depends upon the plane to which one has climbed.”
“You could be impersonally kind to Eve.”
“I think that I told you that I am very fond of my youngster, Lynette. That is personal and yet impersonal. It is not of the flesh.”
She nodded her head, and he rose.
“I will ask you to promise me two things.”
“What are they?”
“That if Eve should wish to see Lynette, I may leave the child here, and call for her again after Eve has gone?”
Kate considered the point.
“Yes, that’s sensible enough. I can see no harm in it. And the other thing?”
“That if Eve should be in trouble at any time, you will promise to let me know?”
She looked at him sharply.
“Wait! It flashed across your mind that I am waiting for my opportunity? You are descending to the level of the ordinary man whom you despise. I asked this, because I should want to help her without her knowing.”
Kate Duveen stood up.
“You scored a hit there. Yes, I’ll promise that. Of course, Eve will never know you have been here.”
“I rely on you there. Men are apt to forget that women have pride.”
She held out a hand to him.
“There’s my pledge. I can assure you that I had some bitter things under my tongue when you came in. I have not said them.”
“They could not have hurt more than some of my own thoughts have hurt me. That’s the mistake people make. The whip does not wound so much as compassion.”
“Yes, that’s true. A blow puts our egotism in a temper. I’ll remember that!”
“I am glad that you are Eve’s friend.”
Kate Duveen stood looking down into the fire after Canterton had gone.
“One must not indulge in absolute generalities,” she thought. “Men can be big—sometimes. Now for this stodgy old German.”
CHAPTER XXIV
EVE’S SENSE OF THE LIMITATIONS OF LIFE
Eve’s London moods began to be more complex, and tinged with discontent.
The homelessness of the great city depressed her. She felt its chaotic vastness, knowing all the while that there was ordered purpose behind all its seeming chaos, and that all its clamour and hurry and crowded interplay of energies had meaning and significance. There were some few men who ruled, and who perhaps understood, but the crowd! She knew herself to be one of the crowd driven forward by necessity that barked like a brisk sheepdog round and about a drove of sheep. Sometimes her mood was one of passionate resentment. London was so abominably ugly, and the eternal and seemingly senseless hurry tired her brain and her eyes. She had no cockney instincts, and the characteristic smells of the great city aroused no feeling of affectionate satisfaction. The odours connected with burnt oil and petrol, pickle and jam factories, the laying of asphalt, breweries, Covent Garden, the Meat Market, had no familiar suggestiveness. Nor did the shops interest her for the moment. She had left the more feminine part of herself at Fernhill, and was content to wear black.
London gave her to the full the “damned anonymous” feeling, making her realise that she had no corner of her very own. The best of us have some measure of sensitive egoism, an individuality that longs to leave its personal impress upon something, even on the sand by the seashore, and London is nothing but a great, trampled cattle-pen, where thousands of hoofs leave nothing but a churn of mud. People build pigeon houses in their back yards, or train nasturtiums up strings, when they live down by Stepney. Farther westwards it is the sensitive individualism that makes many a Londoner country mad. The self-conscious self resents the sameness, the crowding mediocrity, the thousands of little tables that carry the same food for thousands of people, the thousands of seats in indistinguishable buses and cars, the thousands of little people who rush on the same little errands along the pavements. For there is a bitter uniformity even in the midst of a luxurious variety, when the purse limits the outlook, and a week at Southend-on-Sea may be the wildest of life’s adventures.
Eve began to have the country hunger very badly. Autumn had gone, and the winter rains and fogs had set in, and her thoughts went back to Fernhill as she remembered it in summer, and as she imagined it in autumn. What a green and spacious world she had left. The hush of the pine woods on a windless day, when nothing moved save an occasional squirrel. The blaze of roses in June. The blue horizons, the great white clouds sailing, the purple heathland, the lush valleys with their glimmerings of water! What autumn pictures rose before her, tantalising her sense of beauty. She saw the bracken turning bronze and gold, the larch woods changing to amber, the maples and beeches flaming pyres of saffron, scarlet and gold. Those soft October mornings with the grass grey with dew, and the sunlight struggling with white mists. She began to thirst for beauty, and it was a thirst that picture galleries could not satisfy.
Even that last letter of hers to Canterton toned with her feeling of cramped finality. She had written “No,” but often her heart cried “Yes,” with an impetuous yearning towards sympathy and understanding. What a masterful and creative figure was his when she compared him with these thousands of black-coated men who scuttled hither and thither on business that was someone else’s. She felt that she could be content with more spiritual things, with a subtle perfume of life that made this City existence seem gross and material and petty.
Her daily walks from Highbury to Miss Champion’s helped to accentuate the tendencies of these moods of hers. Sometimes Kate Duveen would walk a great part of the way back with her, and Eve, who was the more impressionable of the two, led her friend into many suggestive discussions. Upper Street, Islington, saddened her. It seemed so typical of the social scheme from which she was trying to escape.
“Doesn’t all this make you feel that it is a city of slaves?”
“That depends, perhaps, on one’s digestion.”
“But does it? These people are slaves, without knowing it. Things are thrust on them, and they think they choose.”
“Nothing but suggestion, after all.”
“Look, I will show you.”
Eve stopped in front of a picture shop.
“What’s your opinion of all that is in there?”
“Hopeless, sentimental tosh, of course. But it suits the people.”
“It is what is given them, and they take it. There is not one thing in that window that has any glimmer of genius, or even of distinction.”
“What do you expect in Islington?”
“I call it catering for slaves, and that worst sort of slavery that does not realise its own condition.”
They walked on and passed a bookshop. Eve turned back.
“Look again!”
Kate Duveen laughed.
“I suppose, for instance, that annoys you?”
She pointed to a row of a dozen copies of a very popular novel written by a woman, and called “The Renunciation.”
“It does annoy me.”
“That toshy people rave over tosh! A friend of mine knows the authoress. She is a dowdy little bourgeoise who lives in a country town, and they tell me that book has made her ten thousand pounds. She thinks she has a mission, and that she is a second George Eliot.”
“Doesn’t it annoy you?”
“Why should it? Fools’ money for a fool’s tale. What do you expect? I suppose donkeys think that there is nothing on earth like a donkey’s braying!”
“All the same, it helps my argument, that these people are slaves, only capable of swallowing just what is given them.”
“I dare say you are right. We ought to change a lot of this in the next fifty years!”
“I wonder. You see, he taught me a good deal, in the country, about growth and evolution, and all that has come from the work of Mendel, De Vries and Bates. He doesn’t believe in London. He called it an orchid house, and said he preferred a few wholesome and indigenous weeds.”
“All the more reason for believing that this sort of London won’t last. We shall get something better.”
“We may do, if we can get rid of some of the politicians.”
It was about this time that Eve began to realise the limitations of her present life, and to look towards a very problematical future. It seemed more than probable that “means to the end” would absorb all her energies, and that the end itself would never arrive. She found that her hack work was growing more and more supreme, and that she had no leisure for her own art. She felt tired at night, and on Saturdays she was more tempted to go to a theatre than to sit at home in Bosnia Road and try to produce pictures. Sundays, too, became sterile. She stayed in bed till ten, and when she had had breakfast she found the suburban atmosphere weighing upon her spirits. Church bells rang; decorous people in Sunday clothes passed her window on their way to church or chapel. If she went for a walk she everywhere met a suggestion of respectable relaxation that dominated her energies and sent her home depressed and cynical. As for the afternoons, they were spoilt for her by Mr. Albert Buss’s banjo, though how his genteel mother reconciled herself to banjo-playing on a Sunday Eve could not imagine. Three or four friends joined him. Eve saw them saunter in at the gate, with dandy canes, soft hats, and an air of raw doggishness. They usually stared hard at her window. The walls and floors were thin, and Eve could hear much that they said, especially when Mrs. Buss went out for her afternoon walk, and left the “nuts” together. They talked about horse-racing and girls.
“She’s a little bit of all right!”
“You bet!”
“Ain’t afraid to go home in the dark!”
“What sort of young lady’s the lodger, Bert? Anything on?”
“Not my style. Ain’t taking any!”
“Go on, you don’t know how to play up to a girl. I’d get round anything in London.”
Just about dusk Mr. Buss and his friends sauntered out on love adventures, and Mrs. Buss sat down at her piano and sung hymns with a sort of rolling, throaty gusto. Eve found it almost unendurable, so much so that she abandoned the idea of trying to use her Sundays at Bosnia Road, and asked Kate Duveen to let her spend the day with her in Bloomsbury.
On weekdays, when it happened to be fine and not too cold, she and Kate would spend the twenty minutes after lunch in St. James’s Park, sitting on a seat and watching the irrepressible sparrows or the machinations of a predatory cat. The bare trees stood out against the misty blue of the London horizon, and even when the sun shone, the sunlight seemed very thin and feeble. Other people sat on the seats, and read, or ate food out of paper bags. Very rarely were these people conversational. They appeared to have many thoughts to brood over, and nothing to say.
Kate Duveen had noticed a change in Eve. There was a different look in her eyes. She, too, was less talkative, and sometimes a cynical note came into her voice.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Was I thinking?”
“You haven’t said anything for five minutes.”
“One can be conscious of an inner atmosphere, without calling it thought.”
“Much fog about?”
Some of the sensitive fire came back into Eve’s eyes.
“Kate, I am horribly afraid of being crushed—of becoming one of the crowd. It seems to me that one may never have time to be oneself.”
“You mean that the effort to live leaves no margin?”
“That’s it. I suppose most of us find in the end that we are the slaves of our hack work, and that our ambitions die of slow starvation. Think of it. Think of the thousands of people who had something to do or say, and were smothered by getting a living.”
“It’s the usual thing. I felt it myself. I nearly gave up; but I set my teeth and scratched. I’ve determined to fight through—to refuse to be smothered. I’ll get my independence, somehow.”
“Sometimes I feel that I must throw up all this bread and butter stuff, and stake everything on one adventure.”
“Then don’t do it. I have seen people try it. Ninety-nine out of the hundred come back broken, far worse off than they were before. They’re humble, docile things for the rest of their lives. Carry the harness without a murmur. Not a kick left, I know.”
“I have been thinking of a secretaryship. It might give me more leisure—breathing space——”
“Try it!”
“Are you being ironical?”
“Not a bit. I’ll speak to Miss Champion. She’s not a bad sort, so long as you are tweety-tweety and never cause any complications.”
“I wish you would speak to her.”
“I will.”
Kate Duveen had peculiar influence with Miss Champion, perhaps because she was not afraid of her. Miss Champion thought her a very sound and reliable young woman, a young woman whose health and strength seemed phenomenal, and who never caused any friction by going down with influenza, and so falling into arrears with her work. Kate Duveen had made herself a very passable linguist. She could draw, type, scribble shorthand, do book-keeping, write a good magazine article or edit the ladies’ page of a paper. Every year she spent her three weeks’ holiday abroad, and had seen a good deal of Germany, Italy and France. Miss Champion always said that Kate Duveen had succeeded in doing a very difficult thing—combining versatility with efficiency.
“So Miss Carfax would like a secretaryship? I suppose you think her suitable?”
“There is not a safer girl in London.”
“I understand you. Because she has looks.”
“I think you can ignore them. She is very keen to get on.”
“Very well. I will look out for something to suit her.”
“I’m much obliged to you, Miss Champion. I believe in Eve Carfax.”
CHAPTER XXV
HUGH MASSINGER, ESQ.
Hugh Massinger, Esq., was a person of some distinction as a novelist, and an æsthetic dabbler in Gothic mysteries. His novel “The Torch Lily” had had a great sale, especially in the United States, where an enthusiastic reviewer had compared it to Flaubert’s “Salambo.” Hugh Massinger had edited “Marie de France” and the “Romance of the Rose,” issued an abridged “Froissart,” and published books on “The Mediæval Colour-sense,” and “The Higher Love of Provence.” His poems, sensuous, Swinburnian fragments, full of purple sunsets and precious stones, roses, red mouths and white bosoms had fascinated some of those erotic and over-civilised youngsters who turn from Kipling as from raw meat.
When Miss Champion offered Eve the post of secretary to Hugh Massinger, she accepted it as a piece of unexpected good fortune, for it seemed to be the very berth that she had hoped for, but feared to get.
Miss Champion said some characteristic things.
“Of course, you know who Mr. Massinger is? Yes. You have read ‘The Torch Lily’? A little bold, but so full of colour. I must warn you that he is just a trifle eccentric. You are to call and see him at ten o’clock to-morrow at his flat in Purbeck Street. The terms are two pounds a week, which, of course, includes my commission.”
“I am very grateful to you, Miss Champion. I hope I shall satisfy Mr. Massinger.”
Miss Champion looked at her meaningly.
“The great thing, Miss Carfax, is to be impersonal. Always the work, and nothing but the work. That is how my protegées have always succeeded.”
Eve concluded that Hugh Massinger was rather young.
Miss Champion had stated that he was eccentric, but it was not the kind of eccentricity that Eve had expected to find in Purbeck Street. A youngish manservant with a bleached and dissolute face showed her into a long room that was hung from floor to ceiling with black velvet. The carpet was a pure white pile, and with the ceiling made the room look like a black box fitted with a white bottom and lid. There was only one window, and no furniture beyond a lounge covered with blood-red velvet, two bronze bowls on hammered iron pedestals, an antique oak table, two joint-stools, and a very finely carved oak court-cupboard in one corner. The fire burnt in an iron brazier standing in an open fireplace. There were no mirrors in the room, and on each square of the black velvet hangings a sunflower was embroidered in gold silk. Heraldic glass had been inserted into the centre panels of the window, and in the recess a little silver tripod lamp burnt with a bluish flame, and gave out a faint perfume.
Eve had walked from Kate Duveen’s. It was the usual wet day, and the streets were muddy, and as she sat on the joint-stool the valet had offered her she saw that she had left footprints on the white pile carpet. It seemed rather an unpropitious beginning, bringing London mud into this eccentric gentleman’s immaculate room.
She was still looking at the footprints, when the black hangings were pushed aside, and a long, thin, yellow-faced young man appeared. He was wrapped in a black velvet dressing-gown, and wore sandals.
“Miss Carfax, I presume?”
Eve had risen.
“Yes.”
“Please sit down. I’m afraid I am rather late this morning.”
Any suggestion of subtle and decadent wickedness that the room possessed was diluted by Hugh Massinger’s appearance. There was a droopingness about him, and his face was one of those long yellow faces that fall away in flaccid curves from the forehead to the chin. His nose drooped at the tip, his eyes were melancholy under drooping lids; his chin receded, and lost itself rather fatuously in a length of thin neck. His hair was of the same tint as his smooth, sand-coloured face, where a brownish moustache rolled over a wet mouth. He stooped badly, and his shoulders were narrow.
“I called on Miss Champion some days ago. My work requires special ability. Shall I explain?”
“Please.”
He smiled like an Oriental, and, curling himself on the lounge, brought a black metal cigarette case out of the pocket of his dressing-gown.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not in the least.”
“Perhaps you will join me?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
She was surprised when he laughed a rather foolish laugh.
“That’s quite a phrase, ‘The Women who Don’t!’ I keep a toyshop for phrases.”
He puffed his cigarette and began to explain the work to her in a soft and sacramental voice that somehow made her want to laugh. He talked as though he were reading blank-verse or some prose poem that was full of mysterious precocity. But she forgot his sing-song voice in becoming conscious of his eyes. They were moonish and rather muddy, and seemed to be apprizing her, looking her up and down and in and out with peculiar interest. She did not like Hugh Massinger’s eyes. They made her feel that she was being touched.
“I am writing a book on mediæval life, especially in regard to its æsthetic values. There is a good deal of research to be done, and old illustrations, illuminations and tapestries to be reproduced. It is to be a big book, quite comprehensive.”
Eve soon discovered that Hugh Massinger could not be impersonal in anything that he undertook. The “I” “I” “I” oozed out everywhere.
“Miss Champion assured me that you are a fine colourist. Colour is the blood of life. That is why people who are colour mystics can wear black. The true colour, like the blood, is underneath. I noticed, directly I came into the room, that you were wearing black. It convinced me at once that you would be a sympathetic worker. My art requires sympathy.”
She smiled disarmingly.
“I’m afraid my black is conventional.”
“I should say that it is not. I suppose you have worked in the Museum?”
“For two or three months.”
“Deathly place! How life goes to dust and to museums! I’ll not ask you to go there more than I can help.”
His melancholy eyes drooped over her, and filled her with a determination to be nothing but practical. She thought of Kate Duveen.
“It’s my work, and I’m used to it.”
“The place kills me.”
“I don’t mind it at all. I think most of us need a certain amount of work to do that we don’t like doing, because, if we can always do what we like, we end by doing nothing.”
He blinked at her.
“Now, I never expected to hear you say that. It is so very British.”
“I make a living in England!” and she laughed. “Will you tell me exactly what you want me to do?”
Massinger gathered himself up from the lounge, went to the oak cupboard, and brought out a manuscript book covered with black velvet, and with the inevitable sunflower embroidered on it.
“I had better give you a list of the books I want you to dip into.”
Eve took a notebook and a pencil from her bag, and for the next ten minutes she was kept busy scribbling down ancient and unfamiliar titles. Many of them smelt of Caxton, and Wynkyn de Worde, and of the Elizabethans. There were books on hunting, armour, dress, domestic architecture, painted glass, ivories and enamels; also herbals, chap-books, monastic chronicles, Exchequer rolls and copies of charters. Hugh Massinger might be an æsthetic ass, but he seemed to be a somewhat learned one.
“I think you will map out the days as follows: In the morning I will ask you to go to the Museum and make notes and drawings. In the afternoon you can submit them to me here, and I will select what I require, and advise you as to what to hunt up next day. I suppose you won’t mind answering some of my letters?”
“Miss Champion said that I was to act as your secretary.”
“Blessed word! I am pestered with letters. They tried to get me to manage several of those silly pageants. They don’t understand the Middle Ages, these moderns.”
She wanted to keep to practical things.
“What time shall I go to the Museum?”
He stared.
“I never worry about time—when you like.”
“And how long will you want me here?”
“I never work after five o’clock, except, of course, when I feel creative.”
She stood up, putting her notebook back into her bag.
“Then, shall I start to-morrow?”
“If it pleases you.”
“Of course.”
He accompanied her to the door, and opened it for her, looking with half furtive intentness into her face.
“I think we shall get on very well together, Miss Carfax.”
“I hope so.”
She went out with a vague feeling of contempt and distaste.
Within a week Eve discovered that she was growing interested in her new work, and also interested, in a negative fashion, in Hugh Massinger. He was a rather baffling person, impressing her as a possible genius and as a palpable fool. She usually found him curled up on the lounge, smoking a hookah, and looking like an Oriental, sinister and sleepy. For some reason or other, his smile made her think of a brass plate that had not been properly cleaned, and was smeary. Once or twice the suspicion occurred to her that he took drugs.
But directly he began to use his brain towards some definite end, she felt in the presence of a different creature. His eyes lost their sentimental moonishness; his thin and shallow hands seemed to take a virile grip; his voice changed, and his mouth tightened. The extraordinary mixture of matter that she brought back from the Museum jumbled in her notes was seized on and sorted, and spread out with wonderful lucidity. His knowledge astonished her, and his familiarity with monkish Latin and Norman French and early English. The complex, richly coloured life of the Middle Ages seemed to hang before him like a splendid tapestry. He appeared to know every fragment of it, every shade, every faded incident, and he would take the tangle of threads she brought him and knot them into their places with instant precision. His favourite place was on the lounge, his manuscript books spread round him while he jotted down a fact here and there, or sometimes recorded a whole passage.
But directly his intellectual interest relaxed he became flabby, sentimental, and rather fulsome in his personalities. The manservant would bring in tea, and Massinger would insist on Eve sharing it with him. He always drank China tea, and it reminded her of Fernhill, and the teas in the gardens, only the two men were so very different. Massinger had a certain playfulness, but it was the playfulness of a cat. His pale, intent eyes made her uncomfortable. She did not mind listening while he talked about himself, but when he tried to lure her into giving him intimate matter in return, she felt mute, and on her guard.
This new life certainly allowed her more leisure, for there were afternoons when Hugh Massinger did not work at all, and Eve went home early to Bosnia Road. On these afternoons she managed to snatch an hour’s daylight, but the stuff she produced did not please her. She had all the craftsman’s discontent in her favour, but the glow seemed to have gone out of her colours.
Kate Duveen wanted to know all about Hugh Massinger. She had read some of his poetry, and thought it “erotic tosh.”
Eve was quite frank.
“He interests me, but I don’t like him.”
“Why not?”
“Instinct! Some people don’t strike one as being clean.”
She described the black velvet room, and the way Massinger dressed. Kate’s nostrils dilated.
“Faugh, that sort of fool! Do you mean to say he receives you in a dressing-gown and sandals?”
“It is part of the pose.”
“I wonder why it is that when a man is clever in the artistic way, he so often behaves like an ass? I thought the art pose was dying out. Can you imagine Bergson, or Ross, or Treves, or Nansen, dressing up and scenting themselves and sitting on a divan? People who play with words seem to get tainted, and too beastly self-conscious.”
“He rather amuses me.”
“Do his lips drop honey? If there is one kind of man I hate it’s the man who talks clever, sentimental slosh.”
“I don’t encourage the honey.”
Kate came in flushed one day to the little corner table they frequented in one of Lyons’s shops. It was an unusual thing for Kate to be flushed, or to show excitement. Something had happened.
“Great news?”
Her eyes shone.
“I’ve got it at last.”
“Your travelling berth?”
“Yes. A serious-minded young widow wants a travelling companion, secretary, etc. Rage for cosmopolitan colour, pictures and peoples. We begin with Egypt, go on to the Holy Land, Damascus, Constantinople. Then back to the South of France, do Provence and the towns and châteaux, wander down to Italy and Sicily, and just deign to remember the Tyrol and Germany on the way home. It’s gorgeous!”
Eve flushed too.
“Kate, I am glad.”
“My languages did it! She can speak French, but no German or Italian. And the pay’s first-class. I always wanted to specialise in this sort of vagabondage.”
“You’ll write books!”
“Who knows! We must celebrate. We’ll dine at the Hotel d’Italie, and go and see Pavlova at the Palace. It’s my day.”
Despite her delight in Kate’s good fortune, Eve had a personal regret haunting the background of her consciousness. Kate Duveen was her one friend in London. She would miss her bracing, cynical strength.
They dined at the Hotel d’Italie in one of the little upper rooms, and Kate talked Italian to the waiters, and made Eve drink her health in very excellent Barolo. She had been lucky in getting seats at the Palace, two reserved tickets having been sent back only ten minutes before she had called.
Eve had never seen Pavlova before, and the black-coated and conventional world melted out of her consciousness as she sat and watched the Russian dancer. That fragile, magical, childlike figure seemed to have been conceived in the heart of a white flame. It was life, and all the strange and manifold suggestions of life vibrating and glowing in one slight body. Eve began to see visions, as she sat in the darkness and watched Pavlova moving to Chopin’s music. Pictures flashed and vanished, moods expressed in colour. The sun went down behind black pine woods, and a wind wailed. A half-naked girl dressed in skins and vine leaves fled from the brown arms of a young barbarian. A white butterfly flitted among Syrian roses. She heard bees at work, birds singing in the dawn. And then, it was the pale ghost of Francesca drifting through the moonlight with death in her eyes and hair.
Then the woman’s figure was joined by a man’s figure, and Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody was in the air. The motive changed. Something bacchic, primitive, passionate leapt in the blood. Eve sat thrilled, with half-closed eyes. Those two figures, the woman’s and the man’s, seemed to rouse some wild, elemental spirit in her, to touch an undreamt-of subconsciousness that lay concealed under the workaday life. Desire, the exultation of desire, and the beauty of it were very real to her. She felt breathless and ready to weep.
When it was over, and she and Kate were passing out with the crowd, a kind of languor descended on her, like the languor that comes after the senses have been satisfied. It was not a sensual feeling, although it was of the body. Kate too was silent. Pavlova’s dancing had reacted on her strangely.
“Let’s walk!”
“Would you rather?”
“Yes.”
“As far as my rooms. Then I shall put you in a taxi.”
They had to wait awhile before crossing the road, as motors were swarming up.
“That woman’s a genius. She made me feel like a rusty bit of clockwork!”
“She had a most extraordinary effect on me!”
Kate took Eve’s arm.
“The thing’s pure, absolutely pure, and yet, she seems to show you what you never believed was in you. It’s the soul of the world coming out to dance, and making you understand all that is in us women. Heavens, I found myself feeling like a Greek girl, a little drunk with wine, and still more drunk with love.”
“Kate—you!”
“Yes, and it was not beastly, as those things usually are. I’m not an emotional person. I suppose it is the big subconscious creature in one answering a language that our clever little heads don’t understand.”
Eve was thinking.
“I envy that woman!”
“Why?”
“Because she has a genius, and because she has been able to express her genius, and because she has succeeded in conquering the crowd. They don’t know how clever she is, but they go and see her dance. Think what it means being a supreme artist, and yet popular. For once the swine seem to appreciate the pearl.”
They were making their way through a crowd of loiterers at the corner of Tottenham Court Road, when a tall man brushed against them and stepped aside. He wore a black wideawake hat, a low collar with a bunchy black silk tie, and a loose black coat with a tuberose in the buttonhole. He stared first at Kate, and then at Eve with a queer, comprehensive, apprizing stare. Suddenly he took off his hat.
The women passed on.
“Beast!”
Kate’s mouth was iron.
“That was Hugh Massinger.”
“Hugh Massinger!”
“Yes.”
“Eve, I said ‘beast,’ and I still mean it.”
“Your impression?”
“Yes. I don’t think old Champion ought to have sent you to that sort of man.”