CHAPTER XXVI
KATE DUVEEN GOES ABROAD
Although Hugh Massinger had reached the cynical age of thirty-seven, he had been so well treated by the Press and the public, that he had no cause to develop a sneer. His essential self-satisfaction saved him from being bored, for to be very pleased with oneself is to be pleased with life in general. His appetites were still ready to be piqued, and he had the same exotic delight in colour that he had had when he was an undergraduate of twenty, and this reaction to colour is one of the subtlest tests of a man’s vitality. When the sex stimulus weakens, when a man becomes even a little disillusioned and a little bored, he no longer thrills to colours. It is a sign that the youth in him is growing grey.
Hugh Massinger’s senses were abnormally excitable. He was city bred, and a sitter in chairs, and a lounger upon lounges, and his ideas upon flowers, woods, fields and the country in general were utterly false, hectic and artificial. He was the sort of sentimentalist who was always talking of the “beautiful intrigues of the plants,” of “the red lust of June,” and the “swelling bosom of August.” His art was a sexual art. His thoughts lay about on cushions, and he never played any kind of game.
About this time Eve discovered that his sentimentality was growing more demonstrative. It was like a yellow dog that fawned round and round her chair, but seemed a little afraid of coming too near. He took a great deal of trouble in trying to make her talk about herself, and in thrusting a syrupy sympathy upon her.
“You are looking tired to-day,” he would say, “I shan’t let you work.”
She would protest that she was not tired.
“Really, I am nothing of the kind.”
“And I have quick eyes. It is that horrible reading-room full of fustiness and indigence. I am ashamed to to send you there.”
She would laugh and study to be more conventional.
“Mr. Massinger, I am a very healthy young woman, and the work interests me.”
“My work?”
“Yes.”
“That is really sweet of you. I like to think your woman’s hands have dabbled in it. Tell me, haven’t you any ambitions of your own—any romantic schemes?”
“Oh, I paint a little in my spare time!”
“The mysteries of colour. You are a vestal, and your colour dreams must be very pure. Supposing we talk this afternoon, and let work alone? And Adolf shall make us coffee.”
Adolf made excellent coffee, and in the oak court-cupboard Massinger kept liqueur glasses and bottles of choice liqueur. It was a harmless sort of æsthetic wickedness, a little accentuated by occasional doses of opium or cannabis indica. Eve would take the coffee, but she could never be persuaded to touch the Benedictine. It reminded her of Massinger’s moonish and intriguing eyes.
At that time she thought of him as a sentimental ass, a man with a fine brain and no common sense. She posed more and more as a very conventional young woman, pretending to be a little shocked by his views of life, and meeting his suggestive friendliness with British obtuseness. She gave him back Ruskin, the Bensons and Carlyle when he talked of Wilde. And yet this pose of hers piqued Massinger all the more sharply, though she did not suspect it. He talked to himself of “educating her,” of “reforming her taste,” and of “teaching her to be a little more sympathetic towards the sweet white frailties of life.”
Early in December Kate’s last evening came, and Eve spent it with her in the Bloomsbury rooms. There were the last odds and ends of packing to be done, the innumerable little feminine necessaries to be stowed away in the corners of the “steamer” trunks. Eve helped, and her more feminine mind offered a dozen suggestions to her more practical friend. Kate Duveen was not apapier poudrewoman. She did not travel with a bagful of sacred little silver topped boxes and bottles, and her stockings were never anything else but black.
“Have you got any hazeline and methylated spirit?”
“No.”
“You must get some on the way to the station. Or I’ll get them in the morning. And have you plenty of thick veiling?”
“My complexion is the last thing I ever think of.”
“You have not forgotten the dictionaries, though.”
“No, nor my notebooks and stylo.”
They had supper together, and then sat over the fire with their feet on the steel fender. Kate Duveen had become silent. She was thinking of James Canterton, and the way he had walked into her room that evening.
“Eve!”
“Yes!”
“I am going to break a promise in order to keep a promise. I think I am justified.”
“What is it?”
“He came here to see me one evening about two months ago.”
“Whom do you mean?”
“James Canterton.”
“And you didn’t tell me!”
“He asked me to promise not to tell, and I liked him for it. I was rather astonished, and I snapped at him. He took it like a big dog. But he asked me to promise something else.”
“What was it?”
“That if ever things were to go badly with you, I would let him know.”
She glanced momentarily at Eve and found that she was staring at the fire, her lips parted slightly, as though she were about to smile, and her eyes were full of a light that was not the mere reflection of the fire. Her whole face had softened, and become mysteriously radiant.
“That was like him.”
“Then I may keep my promise?”
“Yes.”
“I think I can trust you both.”
Eve said nothing.
She saw Kate off in her cab next morning before going to her work at the Museum. They held hands, but did not kiss.
“I’m so glad that you’ve had this good luck. You deserve it.”
“Nonsense. Write; and remember that promise.”
“I hope there will be no need for you to keep it. Good-bye, dear! You’ve been so very good to me.”
She was very sad when Kate had gone, and in the great reading-room such a rush of loneliness came over her that she had but little heart for work. She fell to thinking of Canterton, and of the work they had done together, and the thought of Hugh Massinger and that flat of his in Purbeck Street made her feel that life had cheapened and deteriorated. There was something unwholesome about the man and his art. It humiliated her to think that sincerity had thrust this meaner career upon her.
Punctually at two o’clock she rang the bell of the flat in Purbeck Street. Adolf admitted her. She disliked Adolf’s smile. It was a recent development, and it struck her as being latently offensive.
Hugh Massinger was curled up on the lounge, reading one of Shaw’s plays. He loathed Shaw, but read him as a dog worries something that it particularly detests. He sat up, his moonish eyes smiling, and Eve realised for the first time that his eyes and Adolf’s were somewhat alike.
She sat down at the table, and began to arrange her notebooks.
“You looktristeto-day.”
“Do I?”
“I am growing very understanding towards your moods.”
She caught the challenge on the shield of a casual composure.
“I lost a friend this morning.”
“Not by death?”
“Oh, no! She has gone abroad. One does not like losing the only friend one has in London.”
He leaned forward with a gesture of protest.
“Now you have hurt me.”
“Hurt you, Mr. Massinger!”
“I thought that I was becoming something of a friend.”
She made herself look at him with frank, calm eyes.
“It had not occurred to me. I really am very much obliged to you. Shall I begin to read out my notes?”
He did not answer for a moment, but remained looking at her with sentimental solemnity.
“My dear lady, you will not put me off like that. I am much too sympathetic to be repulsed so easily. I don’t like to see you sad. Adolf shall make coffee, and we will give up work this afternoon and chatter. You shall discover a friend——”
She said, very quietly:
“I would rather work, Mr. Massinger. Work is very soothing.”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE BOURGEOIS OF CLARENDON ROAD
Mrs. Buss had surrendered at last to Eve’s persuasions, and a jobbing carpenter had erected a section-built shed in the back garden at Bosnia Road. The shed had a corrugated iron roof, and Mrs. Buss had stipulated that the roof should be painted a dull red, so that it might “tone” with the red brick houses. The studio was lined with matchboarding, had a skylight in the roof, and was fitted with an anthracite stove. The whole affair cost Eve about twenty-five pounds, with an additional two shillings added to the weekly rent of her rooms. She paid for the studio out of the money she had received from the sale of the furniture at Orchards Corner, and her capital had now dwindled to about forty-five pounds.
Every morning on her way towards Highbury Corner, Eve passed the end of Clarendon Grove, a road lined with sombre, semi-detached houses, whose front gardens were full of plane trees, ragged lilacs and privets, and scraggy laburnums. Eve, who was fairly punctual, passed the end of Clarendon Grove about a quarter to nine each morning, and there was another person who was just as punctual in quite a detached and unpremeditated way. Sometimes she saw him coming out of a gate about a hundred yards down Clarendon Grove, sometimes he was already turning the corner, or she saw his broad fat back just ahead of her, always on the same side of the street.
She christened him “the Highbury Clock,” or “the British Bourgeois.” He was a shortish, square-built man of about five-and-forty, with clumsy shoulders, a round head, and big feet. He turned his toes out like a German when he walked, and he always went at the same pace, and always carried a black handbag. His face was round, phlegmatic, good tempered, and wholly commonplace, the eyes blue and rather protuberant, the nose approximating to what is vulgarly called the “shoe-horn type,” the mouth hidden by a brownish walrus moustache. He looked the most regular, reliable, and solid person imaginable in his top-hat, black coat, and neatly pressed grey trousers. Eve never caught him hurrying, and she imagined that in hot weather he ought to wear an alpaca coat.
They sighted each other pretty regularly for some three months before chance caused them to strike up a casual acquaintanceship. One wet day the Bourgeois gave up his seat to Eve in a crowded tram. After that he took off his hat to her whenever she happened to pass across the end of Clarendon Grove in front of him. One morning they arrived at the corner at the same moment, and the Bourgeois wished her “good morning.”
They walked as far as Upper Street together. It seemed absurd for two humans whose paths touched so often not to smile and exchange a few words about the weather, and so it came about that they joined forces whenever the Bourgeois was near enough to the corner for Eve not to have to indulge in any conscious loitering.
He was a very decent sort of man, and his name was Mr. Parfit. He was something in the neighbourhood of Broad Street, but what it was he did not state, and Eve did not inquire. In due course she discovered that he was a bachelor, that he had lived for fifteen years in the same rooms, that he had a passion for romantic novels, and that he went regularly to Queen’s Hall. He spent Sunday in his slippers, readingThe Referee. A three weeks’ holiday once a year satisfied any vagrant impulses he might feel, and he spent these three weeks at Ramsgate, Hastings or Brighton.
“I like to be in a crowd,” he told Eve, “with plenty of youngsters about. There’s nothing I like better than sitting on the sands with a pipe and a paper, watching the kids making castles and pies, and listening to Punch and Judy. Seems to make one feel young.”
She liked Mr. Parfit, and often wondered why he had not married. Perhaps he was one of those men who preferred being a very excellent uncle rather than a bored father, for she gathered that he was fond of other people’s children, and was always ready with his pennies. He had a sly, laborious, porcine humour, and a chuckle that made his cheeks wrinkle and his eyes grow smaller. He was exceedingly polite to Eve, and though at times he seemed inclined to be good-naturedly personal, she knew that it was part of his nature and not a studied attempt at familiarity.
Eve was glad to have this very human person to talk to, for she found life increasingly lonely, now that Kate Duveen had gone. Mr. Parfit had a fatherly way with him, and though his culture was crude and raw, he had a shrewd outlook upon things in general that was not unamusing. London, too, was in the thick of the mud and muck of a wet winter, and Eve found that she was growing more susceptible to the depressing influence of bad weather. It spoilt her morning’s walk, and caused a quite unnecessary expenditure on trams and ’buses, and roused her to a kind of rage when she pulled up her blind in the morning and saw the usual drizzle making the slate roofs glisten. She associated her new studio with rain, for there always seemed to be a pattering sound upon the corrugated iron roof when she shut herself in to work.
She grew more moody, and her moodiness drove her into desperate little dissipations, such as a seat in the upper circle at His Majesty’s or the Haymarket, a dinner at an Italian restaurant, or a tea at Fuller’s. She found London less depressing after dark, and learnt to understand how the exotic city, with its night jewels glittering, appealed to people who were weary of greyness. Her sun-hunger and her country-hunger had become so importunate that she had spent one Sunday in the country, taking train to Guildford, and walking up to the Hog’s Back. The Surrey hills had seemed dim and sad, and away yonder she had imagined Fernhill, with its fir woods and its great pleasaunce. She had felt rather like an outcast, and the day had provoked such sadness in her that she went no more into the country.
The extraordinary loneliness of such a life as hers filled her at times with cynical amusement. How absurd it was, this crowded solitude of London; this selfish, suspicious, careless materialism. No one bothered. More than once she felt whimsically tempted to catch some passing woman by the arm, and to say “Stop and talk to me. I am human, and I have a tongue.” After tea she would often loiter along Regent Street or Oxford Street, looking rather aimlessly into the shops, and studying the faces of the people who passed; but she found that she had to abandon this habit of loitering, for more than once men spoke to her, looking in her face with a look that made her grow cold with a white anger.
It was inevitable that she should contrast this London life with the life at Fernhill, and compare all other men with James Canterton. She could not help making the comparison, nor did the comparison, when made, help her to forget. The summer had given her her first great experience, and all this subsequent loneliness intensified the vividness of her memories. She yearned to see Lynette, to feel the child’s warm hands touching her. She longed, too, for Canterton, to be able to look into his steady eyes, to feel his clean strength near her, to realise that she was not alone. Yes, he was clean, while these men who passed her in the streets seemed horrible, greedy and pitiless. They reminded her of the people in Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings, people with grotesque and leering faces, out of whose eyes nameless sins escaped.
The flat in Purbeck Street offered her other contrasts after the rain and the wet streets and the spattering mud from the wheels of motor-buses. It was eccentric but unwholesome, luxurious, and effeminate, with suggestions of an extreme culture and an individual idea of beauty. Coming straight from a cheap lunch eaten off a marble-topped table to this muffled, scented room, was like passing from a colliery slum to a warm and scented bath in a Roman villa. Eve noticed that her shoes always seemed muddy, and she laughed over it, and apologised.
“I always leave marks on your white carpet.”
“You should read Baudelaire in order to realise that a thing that is white is of no value without a few symbolical stains. Supposing I have a glass case put over one of your footprints, so that Adolf shall not wash them all away?”
That was just what she disliked about Hugh Massinger. He was for ever twisting what she said into an excuse for insinuating that he found her charming and provocative. He did not play at gallantry like a gentleman. A circuitous cleverness and a natural cowardliness kept him from being audaciously frank. He fawned like a badly bred dog, and she liked his fawnings so little that she began to wonder at last whether this fool was in any way serious.
One morning it snowed hard before breakfast for about an hour, and by one o’clock London was a city of slush. Eve felt depressed, and her shoes and stockings and the bottom of her skirt were sodden when she reached the flat in Purbeck Street. Adolf smiled his usual smile, and confessed that Mr. Massinger had not expected her.
“Ma Donna! I never thought you would brave this horrible weather.”
He threw a book aside and was up, solicitous, and not a little pleased at the chance of being tender.
“I suppose English weather is part of the irony of life!”
“Good heavens! Your shoes and skirt are wet!”
“A little.”
He piled two or three cushions in front of the fire.
“Do sit down and take your shoes and stockings off, and dry your skirt.”
She sat down and took off her shoes.
“Stockings too! I can be very fatherly and severe. Do you think it immodest to show your bare feet? You must have a liqueur; it will warm you.”
“I would rather not.”
“Oh, come! You are a pale Iseult to-day.”
“Thank you, I would rather not.”
“Then Adolf shall make us coffee.”
He rang the bell.
“Adolf, coffee and some biscuits! And bring that purple scarf of mine.”
The scarf arrived first, and Massinger held it spread over his hands like a shop-assistant showing off a length of silk.
“Two little white empresses shall wear the purple. No work this afternoon. I am going to try to make you forget the weather.”
Adolf came in noiselessly with the coffee, set it on a stool beside Eve, and departed just as noiselessly, and with an absolutely expressionless face. The way he had of effacing himself made Eve more conscious of his existence.
The fire was comforting, so was the coffee. She could have slipped into a mood of soothed indolence if Massinger had not been present. But his leering obsequiousness had disturbed her, and she found herself facing that eternal problem as to how a woman should behave to a man who employed her and paid for her time. Was it necessary to quarrel with all this sentimental by-play? She still held to her impression that he was a very great ass.
“This detestable climate! It brutalises us. It makes one understand why the English drink beer, and love to see the red corpses of animals hung up in shops. A gross climate, and a gross people.”
Eve had wrapped the purple scarf round her feet.
“If we could be sure of a little sunshine every other day!”
She was staring at the fire, and Massinger was studying her with an interested intentness. Thought and desire were mingled at the back of his pale eyes.
“Sunshine—clear, yellow light! Don’t you yearn for it?”
“Who does not? With the exception of the people who have been baked in the tropics.”
“And it is so near. The people who are free can always find it.”
He lay back against the cushions on the lounge, his eyes still on her, and shining with an incipient smile.
“You leave the grey country at dusk, and travel through the night, and then the dawn comes up, all orange and gold, and the cypresses hold up their beckoning fingers. There the sea is blue, and there are flowers, roses, carnations, wallflowers, stocks, and mimosa; oranges and lemons hang on the trees, and the white villas shine among palms and olives.”
His voice became insinuating, and took on its sing-song blank-verse cadence.
“Have you ever seen Monte Carlo?”
“No.”
“It is a vulgar world to the vulgar. But that delectable little world has an esoteric meaning. The sun shines, and it is easier to make love under a blue sky. And then, all those little towns on the edge of the blue sea, and the grey rock villages, and the adventures up mule-paths. Think of a mule-path, and pine woods, and sunlight, and a bottle of red wine.”
She laughed, but with a tremor of self-consciousness.
“It is useful to think of such things, just to realise how very far away they are.”
“Nothing is far away, when one has the magic carpet of gold. Have the courage to dream, and there you are.”
He got up, wandered round the room with a wavering glance at her, and then came across to the fire.
“Just think of ‘Monte’ and the sunlight, and the gay pagan life. It is worth experiencing. Dream of it for a week in London. Are you getting dry?”
He went down suddenly on one knee and felt her skirt, and in another moment he had touched one of her feet.
“The little white empress is warm. How would she like to walk the terraces at Monte Carlo?”
Eve kept very still. She had an abrupt glimpse of the meaning of his suggestions, and of all that was moving towards her in this man’s mind. Intuition told her that she would rebuff him more thoroughly by treating him as a sentimental idiot than by flattening him with anger, as if he were a man.
“Please don’t do that. It’s foolish, and makes me want to laugh. I think it’s time we were serious. I am ready for work.”
For an instant his eyes looked sulky and dangerous.
“What a practical person it is.”
“And what a long time you have taken to find that out. I’m afraid I’m not in the least sentimental.”
Hugh Massinger went back to the lounge like a cat that has been laughed at.
CHAPTER XXVIII
CANTERTON’S COTTAGE AND MISS CHAMPION’S MORALITY
Three days before Christmas, Eve spent a quarter of an hour in a big toyshop in quest of something that she could send Lynette, and her choice came to rest upon a miniature cooking-stove fitted with a three-trayed oven, pots and pans, and a delightful little copper kettle. The stove cost her a guinea, but it was a piece of extravagance that warmed her heart.
She wrote on a card:
“For cooking Fairy Food in the Wilderness. Miss Eve sends ever so much love.”
Eve had kept back one Latimer sketch, a little “post card” picture of a stone Psyche standing in thought on the edge of a marble pool, with a mass of cypresses for a background, and a circle of white water lilies at her feet. She sent the picture to Canterton with a short letter, but she did not give him her address.
“I feel that I must send you Christmas wishes. This is a little fragment I had kept by me, and I should like you to have it. Plenty of hard work keeps me from emulating the pose of Psyche in the picture. I am spending Christmas alone, but I shall paint, and think of Lynette entertaining Father Christmas.“My friend, Kate Duveen, has gone abroad for six months. I think when the spring comes I shall be driven to escape into the country as an artistic tramp.“I have just built a studio. It measures fourteen feet by ten, and lives in a back garden. So one is not distracted by having beautiful things to look at.“I send you all the wishes that I can wish.“Eve.”
“I feel that I must send you Christmas wishes. This is a little fragment I had kept by me, and I should like you to have it. Plenty of hard work keeps me from emulating the pose of Psyche in the picture. I am spending Christmas alone, but I shall paint, and think of Lynette entertaining Father Christmas.
“My friend, Kate Duveen, has gone abroad for six months. I think when the spring comes I shall be driven to escape into the country as an artistic tramp.
“I have just built a studio. It measures fourteen feet by ten, and lives in a back garden. So one is not distracted by having beautiful things to look at.
“I send you all the wishes that I can wish.
“Eve.”
When she posted the letter and sent off Lynette’s parcel, she felt that they were passing across a vacant space into another world that never touched her own. It was like a dream behind her consciousness. She wondered, as she wandered away from the post office, whether she would ever see Fernhill again.
If the incident saddened her and accentuated her sense of loneliness, that letter of hers, and the picture of the Latimer Psyche, saddened Canterton still more poignantly. It was possible that he had secretly hoped that Eve would relent a little, and that she would suffer him to approach her again and let his honour spend itself in some comradely service. He did not want to open up old wounds, but he desired to know all that was happening to her, to feel that she was within sight, that he did not love a mere memory.
Lynette’s delight baffled him.
“Now, that’s just what I wanted. Isn’t it like Miss Eve to think of it? I must write to her, daddy. Where’s she say she’s living now?”
“In London.”
“Why doesn’t she come for Christmas?”
“Because she’s so very busy. You write and thank her, old lady, and I’ll send your letter with mine.”
Lynette produced a longish letter, and Canterton wrote one of his own. He enclosed a five pound note, addressed the envelope to Miss Eve Carfax, c/o Miss Kate Duveen, and sent it into the unknown to take its chance.
He had written:
“It still hurts me not a little that you will not trust me with your address. I give you my promise never to come to you unless you send for me.“Buy yourself something for the studio from me and Lynette. Even if you spend the money on flowers I shall be quite happy.”
“It still hurts me not a little that you will not trust me with your address. I give you my promise never to come to you unless you send for me.
“Buy yourself something for the studio from me and Lynette. Even if you spend the money on flowers I shall be quite happy.”
And since Kate Duveen’s landlady did not know Eve’s address, and happened to be a conscientious soul, Canterton’s letter was put into another envelope and sent to hunt Kate down in the land of the lotus and the flamingo.
Christmas Day was bright and frosty, and Canterton wandered out alone after breakfast with Eve’s letter in his pocket. The great nurseries were deserted, and Canterton had this world of his to himself, even the ubiquitous Lavender not troubling to go beyond the region of the hot-houses. Canterton left the home gardens behind, cut across a plantation of young pines, cypresses and cedars towards some of the wilder ground that had been largely left to Nature. Here, under the northerly shelter of a towering fir wood there happened to be an out-cropping of rock, brown black hummocks of sandstone piled in natural disorder, and looking like miniature mountains.
Building had been going on here, and it was the building itself that held Canterton’s thoughts. A cottage stood with its back to the fir wood, a Tudor cottage built of oak and white plaster, and deep thatched with blackened heather. The lattices were in, and blinked back the December sunlight. A terrace of flat stones had been laid in front of the cottage, and a freshly planted yew hedge shut in the future garden that was still littered with builders’ debris, mortar-boards, planks, messes of plaster and cement. The windows of the cottage looked southwards towards the blue hills, and just beyond the yew hedge lay the masses of sandstone that were being made into a rock garden. Earth had been carted and piled about. Dwarf trees, saxifrages, aubrietias, anemones, alyssum, arabis, thrift, sedums, irises, hundreds of tulips, squills, crocuses, and narcissi had been planted. By next spring the black brown rocks would be splashed with colour—purple and white, blue and gold, rose, green and scarlet.
On the cross-beam of the timber porch the date of the year had been cut. Canterton stood and looked at it, thinking how strange a significance those figures had for him.
He took a key out of his pocket, unlocked the door, and climbed the half finished staircase to one of the upper rooms. And for a while he stood at the window, gazing towards the December sun hanging low in the southern sky.
Would she ever come to live in this cottage?
He wondered.
Canterton rarely discussed his affairs with anybody, and the cottage had been half built before Gertrude had heard of its existence. And when she had discovered it, Canterton had told her quite calmly what it was for.
“I shall have to have help here. Eve Carfax may come back. She is trying this berth in London for a year. She understands colour-gardening better than anybody I have come across. If she fails me, I shall have to get someone else. I think Drinkwater is making a very good job of the cottage. I wanted something that is not conventional.”
Gertrude had suggested that if the cottage were likely to remain unoccupied for a while she might use it temporarily as a country rest-house for some of a London friend’s rescued “Magdalens.” She had been surprised at the almost fierce way Canterton had stamped on the suggestion.
“Thank you. You will do nothing of the kind.”
It was not part of his dream that this speculative cottage that he had built for Eve should be so used.
Besides, every detail had been thought out to please eyes that sought and found the beauty in everything. The little dining-room was to be panelled oak, the window-seats were deep enough to make cushioned lounges where one could lie and read. All the timber used was oak, from the beams that were left showing in the ceiling to the panel-work of the cupboards and the treads and newel-posts of the stairs. The door-fittings were of hammered steel, the hearths laid with dark green tiles. A little electric light plant was to be fitted, with a tiny gas engine and dynamo in an outhouse behind the cottage.
Canterton spent the greater part of Christmas morning wandering from room to room, studying the views from the different windows, and examining the work the men had put in during the previous week. He also drew a trial plan of the garden, sitting on one of the window-seats, and using a pencil and the back of a letter. Both cottage and garden were parts of a piece of speculative devotion, and in them his strength found self-expression.
Meanwhile “the Bourgeois” of Clarendon Grove became very much more talkative just about Christmas time. Eve met him at the corner of the road on three successive mornings, and his person suggested holly berries, roast beef, and a pudding properly alight. He seemed festive and unable to help being confidential.
“Suppose you’ll be going away to friends?”
She told Mr. Parfit that she would be spending Christmas quite alone.
“I say, that’s not good for you! What, no kids, and no party?”
“No.”
“Christmas isn’t Christmas without kids. I always go to my sister Jane’s at Croydon. Good sort, Jane. Two boys and two girls. All healthy, too. Makes you feel young to see them eat. I always go down on Christmas Eve with a Tate’s sugar box full of presents. That’s the sort of Christmas that suits me A1!”
He looked at her benignantly.
“Should you like to know Jane? She’s a good sort.”
“I should like to know her.”
“Look here! I’ll tell her to come and call on you. Do the social thing. Pity you can’t join us all for Christmas. We’d soon make you feel at home.”
His eyes were a trifle apologetic, but very kind, and his kindness touched her. He was quite sincere in what he said, and she discovered a new sensitiveness in him.
“It’s good of you to think of such a thing. One finds life rather lonely at times. Croydon is a long way off, but perhaps your sister will come and see me some day.”
He began to talk very fast of a sudden.
“Oh, you’d like Jane, and she’d like you, and the youngsters are jolly kids, and not a bit spoilt. We must fix up the social business. I’m a fool of a bachelor. I was made to be married, but somehow I haven’t. Funny thing, life! One gets in a groove, and it takes something big to get one out again.”
He laughed, and wished her good morning rather abruptly, explaining that he was going down to the City by train.
Eve had felt touched, amused, and a little puzzled. She thought what an excellent uncle he must make with the round, Christmas face, and the Tate’s sugar-box full of presents. And on Christmas morning she found a parcel from him lying on the breakfast table.
He had sent her a big box of chocolates and two new novels, and had written a note. It was a rather clumsy and apologetic note, but it pleased her.
“Dear Miss Carfax,—Please accept these trifles. I don’t know whether you will think me an impertinent old fogey, but there you are. I couldn’t send you a turkey, you know. Too large an order for one.“I wish you were spending Christmas with us. Better luck next year.“Very sincerely yours,“John Parfit.”
“Dear Miss Carfax,—Please accept these trifles. I don’t know whether you will think me an impertinent old fogey, but there you are. I couldn’t send you a turkey, you know. Too large an order for one.
“I wish you were spending Christmas with us. Better luck next year.
“Very sincerely yours,
“John Parfit.”
Eve found it rather a struggle to pull through Christmas, and then, as though for a contrast, came her disagreement with Hugh Massinger. It was a serious disagreement, so serious that she took a taxi back to Bosnia Road at three in the afternoon, angry, shocked, and still flushed with scorn.
She went down to Miss Champion’s next morning, and was immediately shown into Miss Champion’s private room. The lady of the white hair and the fresh face had put on the episcopal sleeves. She met Eve with an air of detached and judicial stateliness, seated herself behind her roll-top desk, and pointed Eve to a chair.
“I have come to tell you that I have given up my secretaryship.”
She had a feeling that Hugh Massinger had put in an early pleader, and she was not surprised when Miss Champion picked up a letter that was lying open on the desk.
“This is a most deplorable incident, Miss Carfax.”
Her tone challenged Eve.
“It is more contemptible than deplorable!”
“Mr. Massinger has written me a letter, a letter of apology and explanation. Of course, I have nothing to say in defence of such misunderstandings. But you actually struck him.”
Eve’s face flamed.
“Yes, you must understand——”
“But I fail to understand.”
“The man is a cad.”
“Miss Carfax, these things don’t happen unless a woman is indiscreet. I think I insisted on your remembering that a woman must be impersonal.”
Eve was amazed. She had come to Miss Champion, counting on a woman’s sympathy, and some show of decent scorn of a man who misused a situation as Hugh Massinger had done.
“Miss Champion, you suggest it was my fault.”
“Mr. Massinger is a man of culture. He has written, giving me an explanation. I do not say that I accept it in its entirety. But without some provocation, thoughtless provocation, perhaps——”
“May I see the letter?”
“Certainly not. It is confidential.”
“Of course, he accuses me? It was a cowardly thing—a mean thing.”
“He offers explanations.”
“Which you accept?”
“With certain reservations, yes.”
Eve held her breath. She felt humiliated, angry, and astonished.
“I never thought it possible that you would take such a view as this.”
“Let me explain, Miss Carfax, that Icannot help taking this view. I have to insist on an absolutely impersonal attitude. My profession cannot be carried on satisfactorily without it. I regret it, but I am afraid you are not quite suited to delicate positions of responsibility.”
Eve said quietly, “Please don’t go into explanations. You would rather not have me on your staff.”
“I am a stickler for etiquette, rather old-fashioned. One has to be.”
“Yes, I understand. So long as everything looks nice on the surface. I think we had better say nothing more. I only came to tell you the truth, and sometimes the truth is awkward.”
She rose, biting her lip, and keeping her hands clenched. It was monstrous, incredible, that this woman should be on the man’s side, and that she should throw insinuations in her face. If she had surrendered to Hugh Massinger and kept quiet, nothing would have been said, and nothing might have happened. She felt nauseated, inflamed.
“I am sorry, Miss Carfax——”
“Oh, please don’t say that! It makes me feel more cynical.”
CHAPTER XXIX
EARNING A LIVING
The affair of Hugh Massinger, and Miss Champion’s attitude towards it, provided Eve with an experience that threw a glare of new light upon the life of a woman who sets out to earn her own living. She had no need to go to the dramatists to be instructed, for she had touched the problem with her own hands, and discovered the sexual hypocrisy that Kate Duveen had always railed at. Here was she, lonely and struggling on the edge of life, and a man of Hugh Massinger’s reputation and intelligence could do nothing more honourable to help her than to suggest the advantages of a sentimental seduction. Miss Champion, the woman, had failed to take the woman’s part. Her middle-class cowardice was all for hushing things up, for accusing the insulted girl of indiscretions, for reproaching her with not failing to be a temptation to men. No smoke without some fire. It was safer to discharge such a young woman than to defend her. And Miss Champion’s nostrils were very shy and sensitive. She was an automatic machine that reacted to any copper coin that could be called a convention. Certain things never ought to happen, and if they happened they never ought to be mentioned.
This affair inaugurated hard times for Eve, nor did the bitterness that it aroused in her help her to bear the new life with philosophy. It had had something of the effect on her that the first discovery of sex has upon a sensitive child. She felt disgusted, shocked, saddened. Life would never be quite the same, at least, so she told herself, for this double treachery had shaken her trust, and she wondered whether all men were like Hugh Massinger, and all women careful hypocrites like Miss Champion.
She longed for Kate Duveen’s sharp and acrid sincerity. Hers was a personality that might take the raw taste out of her mouth, but Eve did not write to Kate to tell her what had happened. Her pride was still able to keep its own flag flying, and it seemed contemptible to cry out and complain over the first wound.
One thing was certain, her income had stopped abruptly. She had about thirty-five pounds left to her credit at the bank. The rent of her rooms was a pound a week, and she found that her food cost her about twelve shillings, this sum including the sixpenny lunches and fourpenny teas that she had in the City. Putting her expenditure at thirty-five shillings a week, she had enough money to last her for twenty weeks, granted, of course, that nothing unexpected happened, and that she had not to face a doctor’s bill.
It behoved her to bustle round, to cast her net here, there, and everywhere for work. She entered her name at several “Agencies,” but found that the agents were none too sanguine when she had to confess that she could neither write shorthand nor use a typewriter. Her abilities were of that higher order whose opportunities are more limited. People did not want artistic cleverness. The need was all for drudges.
During her first workless week at Bosnia Road, she designed a number of fashion plates, and painted half a dozen little pictures. She called at one of the despised picture shops, and suggested to the proprietor that he might be willing to sell these pictures on commission. The proprietor, a depressed and flabby dyspeptic, was not encouraging.
“I could fill my window with that sort of stuff if I wanted to. People don’t want flowers and country cottages. Can’t you paint pink babies and young mothers, and all that?”
Eve went elsewhere, and after many wanderings, discovered a gentleman in the West Central district who was ready to show her pictures in his window. He was a little more appreciative, and had a better digestion than the man who had talked of babies.
“Yes, that’s quite a nice patch of colour. I don’t mind showing them. People sometimes like to get the real thing—cheap.”
“What would one ask for a thing of this kind?”
“Oh, half a crown to five shillings. One can’t expect much more.”
“Not so much as for a joint of meat!”
He was laconic.
“Well, you see, miss, we’ve all got digestions, but not many of us have taste.”
Her next attempt was to dispose of some of her dress designs, and since she had become familiar at Miss Champion’s with the names of certain firms who were willing to buy such creations, she knew where to find a possible market. It seemed wiser to call in person than to send the designs by post, and she spent a whole day trying to interview responsible persons in West End establishments. One firm rebuffed her with the frank statement that they were over-supplied with such creations. At two other places she was told to leave her designs to be looked at. At her last attempt she succeeded in obtaining an interview with a hungry-looking and ill-tempered elderly woman who was writing letters in a little glass-panelled office at the back of a big shop.
Eve disliked the woman from the first glance, but she was grateful to her for having taken the trouble to give her an interview.
“I wondered whether Messrs. Smith might have any use for designs for new spring and summer frocks?”
The woman looked at her from under cunning eyelids.
“Sit down. Let me see.”
Eve unwrapped the drawings and handed them to the person in authority, who glanced through them as though she were shuffling a pack of cards.
“Had any technical training? Not much, I think.”
“I have lived in Paris.”
“That’s an excuse, I suppose. There are one or two possible ideas here. Leave the designs. I’ll consider them.”
She laid them down on her desk and looked at Eve in a way that told her that she was expected to go.
“I had better leave my address.”
“Isn’t it on the cards?”
“No!”
“Then write it.”
She pushed a pen and ink towards Eve, and turned to resume the work that had been interrupted.
When Eve had gone, the good lady picked up the designs, looked them carefully through, and then pushed the button of a bell in the wall behind her. A flurried young woman with a snub nose, and untidy yellow hair, came in.
“Here, Miss Rush, copy those two. Then pack them all up and send them back to the address written on that one. Say we’ve looked at them, and that none are suitable.”
The snub-nosed young woman understood, and two of Eve’s designs were appropriated, at a cost to Messrs. Smith of twopence for postage. That was good business. The whole batch was returned to Eve in the course of three days, with a laconic type-written statement that the designs had received careful consideration, but had been found to be unsuitable.
She had not seen Mr. Parfit since the loss of her secretaryship, in fact, not since Christmas, the morning walks to Highbury Corner having become unnecessary. On the afternoon of the second Saturday in January, Eve happened to be standing at her window, dressed to go out, when she saw him strolling along the path on the other side of the road. He glanced at her window as he passed, and, turning when he had gone some thirty yards, came slowly back again.
A sudden hunger for companionship seized her, a desire to listen to a friendly voice, and to feel that she was not utterly alone. She hurried out, drawing on her gloves, and found “the Bourgeois of Clarendon Grove” on the point of repassing her doorway.
He raised his hat, beamed, and came across.
“Why, here you are! I hope you haven’t been ill?”
“No.”
“I began to get quite worried.”
It gave her pleasure to find that someone had troubled to wonder what had happened.
“I have given up my post, and so I have no reason for starting out early.”
His round eyes studied her attentively.
“Oh, that’s it!”
He had sense enough not to begin by asking questions.
“I was just going to take a breather round by the Fields. Suppose you’re booked for something?”
“No.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I tell you all about Christmas! Jane’s coming to look you up.”
“That’s very good of her.”
They started off together with a tacit acceptance of the situation, Mr. Parfit showing an elaborate politeness in taking the outside of the pavement. His whole air was that of a cheery and paternal bachelor on his very best and most benignant behaviour. And Eve, without knowing quite why, trusted him.
“We had a gorgeous time down at Croydon.”
“I’m so glad. I enjoyed the chocolates and the books. I suppose the sugar-box was a great success?”
“Rather! I had a joke with the kids. I had two lots of presents, one lot on top, the other down below. Up above there were two pairs of socks for Percy, a prayer-book for Fred, a box of needles and cottons for Beatie, and a goody-goody book for Mab. You should have seen their faces, and the way the little beggars tried to gush and do the polite. ‘Oh, uncle, it’s just what I wanted!’ But it was all right down below. They found the right sort of loot down there.”
Eve laughed, and was surprised at the spontaneity of her own laughter. She had not laughed like that for many weeks.
“I think you must be a delightful uncle.”
“Now, do you, really? It really makes it seem worth doing, you know. You’d like the kids.”
“I’m sure I should.”
“They’re little sports, the lot of them.”
She found presently that he was trying to turn the conversation towards herself, and he manœuvred with more delicacy than she had imagined him to possess. She met the attempt by making a show of frankness.
“I did not like my berth, so I threw it up. Meanwhile I am trying to do a little business in paintings and fashion plates, while I look out for something else.”
“Suppose you are rather particular?”
“I don’t want to take just anything that comes, if I can help it.”
“Of course not. You’ve got brains.”
“I can’t do the ordinary things that women are supposed to do—type and write shorthand and keep books.”
She noticed that his expression had grown more serious.
“We’re all for utility in these days, you know. Beastly unromantic world. We can only get our adventures by reading novels. I’m sorry for the girls who have to work. They don’t get fair opportunities, or a fair starting chance, except the few who can afford to spend a little money on special education. It’s no fun supplying cheap labour.”
“I suppose not.”
He drew a very deep and mind-deciding breath.
“No offence meant, but if I can be of use at any time, just give me the word.”
“It’s very kind of you to say that.”
“Nonsense, not a bit of it. We are both workers, aren’t we?”
Some days Eve got panic. A great cloud shadow seemed to be drifting towards her, and already she felt it chilling her, and shutting out the sunlight. She asked herself what was going to happen if she spent all her capital before she found a means of earning money regularly, and she lay awake at night, plotting all manner of schemes. Her sense of loneliness and isolation became a black cupboard into which Fate shut her ever and again as a harsh nurse shuts up a disobedient child. She thought of leaving Bosnia Road and of moving into cheaper quarters, and she cut her economies to the lowest point. Even Mrs. Buss’s face reflected her penuriousness, for the florid woman was less succulently urbane, and showed a tendency to be curt and off-hand.
Eve had begun to realise what a great city meant, with its agonies and its struggles. It was like a huge black pool in which one went drifting round and round with thousands of other creatures, clutching at straws, and even at other struggling things in the effort to keep afloat. There was always the thought of the ooze below, and the horror of submergence. Sometimes this troubled mind-picture reminded her of the wreck of the Titanic, with hundreds of little black figures swarming like beetles in the water, drowning each other in the lust to live. It was when the panic moods seized her that she was troubled by these morbid visions, for one loses one’s poise at such times, and one’s fears loom big and sinister as through a fog.
She had sold one picture in a fortnight, and it had brought her exactly three and sixpence. Her fashion-plates were returned. The various agencies were able to offer her situations as a domestic servant, the reality being indecently disguised under the description of “lady help.” She rebelled at the suggestion, and even a panic mood could not reduce her to considering that particular form of slavery, her pride turning desperate and aggressive, and crying out that it would be better for her to indulge in any sort of adventure, to turn suffragette and break windows, rather than go into some middle-class household as an anomaly, and be the victim of some other woman’s moods and prejudices.
Certain assertions that Canterton had made to her developed a sharp and vital significance. It ought not to be necessary for sensitive women to have to go down and work in the shambles. Money is a protective covering; art a mere piece of beautiful flimsiness that cannot protect the wearer from cold winds and contempt. The love of money is nothing more than the love of life and the harmony of full self-expression. Only amazing luck or a curious concatenation of coincidences can bring ability to the forefront when that ability starts with an empty pocket. People do not want art, but only to escape from being bored. Most of those who patronise any form of art do so for the sake of ostentation, that their money and their success may advertise themselves.
She realised now what she had lost in abandoning that life at Fernhill, and she looked back on it as something very near the ideal, green, spacious, sympathetic, free from all the mean and petty anxieties, a life wherein she could express all that was finest in her, without having to dissipate her enthusiasm on the butter-dish or the coal-box. It had meant protection and comradeship. She was sufficiently human in a feminine sense to feel the need of them, and there was a sufficiency of the clinging spirit in her to make her regret that she had gained a so-called independence. She was nearer now to discovering why some women are loved and others ignored. Evolution has taught the male to feel protective, and the expressing of this protective tenderness provides man with one of the most beautifying experiences that life can give. The aggressive and independent woman may satisfy a new steel-bright pride, but she has set herself against one of the tendencies of Nature. Argue as one may about evolving a new atmosphere, of redistributing the factors of life, this old fact remains. The aggressive and independent woman will never be loved in the same way. No doubt she will protest that her aim is to escape from this conception of love—sexual domination, that is what it has been dubbed, and rightly so in the multitude of cases. But a cloud of contentions cannot damp out the under-truth. The newmade woman will never challenge all that is best in man. She will continue to remain in ignorance of what man is.
Even in her panic moments Eve could not bring herself to write to Canterton. She felt that she could not reopen the past, when it was she who had closed it. She recoiled from putting herself in a position that might make it possible for him to offer her money.
One of the hardest parts of it all was that she had to live the whole time with her anxious economies. She could not afford to escape from them, to pay to forget. A shilling was a big consideration, a penny every bit a penny. Once or twice, when she was feeling particularly miserable, she let herself go to the desperate extent of a half-crown seat in the pit. And the next day she would regret the extravagance, and lunch on a scone and a glass of milk.
Then Mr. Parfit appeared in the light of a provider of amusements. One Thursday evening she had a note from him, written in his regular, commercial hand.