Thus began the second book of David's life, where so many books of life have begun, and where so many are fated to end—in a garret of a lodging-house. Now, too, began his acquaintance with larger London, no longer the capital of concerts and cafés to him, but the London of grim, inhospitable streets, of dull-faced, tramping crowds, the London that the millions know, sordid and unsmiling—cheerful only for a consideration, a niggard even of its light. There were many evenings when he could not write—in the first months many evenings when he did not attempt to write—and, drifting from Soho, he would rove about the city till late, rove west and east, tempted to unfamiliar quarters by the promise of their names, storing impressions. He supped at coffee-stalls and heard the vagrants talk, and rose at dawn to breakfast among the workers and the wastrels in the five-o'clock public-houses near the markets. On Sundays when it did not rain, and he didn't go to see his mother, he explored the parks, or wandered beyond the stretching tentacles of London in woodland which the monster had not yet absorbed. He journeyed among holiday-makers who were boisterous, but never gay, who shouted, but who never laughed. The outskirts that he found were beautiful, and he yearned to read the hearts of these excursionists who, whether they covered the miles in dreary silence, or shrieked the burden of a cockney song, had always the same vacant gaze, the same sad, hopeless air. He saw that look on everyone, in varying degrees—the London look, bred of the dismal climate and the gloomy streets; he thought that he would recognise a Londoner anywhere, by his eyes. And when he returned, he noted how the fairness of England was disfigured where Englishmen began to build.
The love of London which some men have felt, was never born in David. He could not grow to love it though he tried. In time he came to wonder if he was blind—if something was lacking in him—when he read word-pictures of its "beauty," and knew that he found it execrable. True, there were many nights when the river mesmerised him and he hung rapt upon the bridges, but then the lamps shone only on the water, and the spell lay in the vast suggestiveness of a great city that he did not see.
Occasionally he went to the gallery of a theatre; more often he saved the shilling and bought a book that he coveted. Because he realised that he was not eating enough to feel very strong, he pawned his watch and chain when he had been in Soho about six months. It was a severe pang to him to part with what had been his father's present, even to part with it temporarily, and only the knowledge that his father, if he could advise, would bid him "pop it for all he could get," enabled him to make the sacrifice. A week afterwards, however, his diet had dwindled to its original proportions, and his library had much increased.
Meanwhile his manuscripts came back just as often as he enclosed a stamped and directed envelope. The word "regrets" grew odious to him; in the work of David Lee the word was seldom to be found, and he never wrote it without reluctance. Nobody wanted his poetry, nobody thought it worth printing. The rose-colour gradually faded from, his reveries; at the end of a year the boastfulness of boyhood had passed. He began to realise how stupendous was the task that he had approached so confidently. To attack London with a pen! he felt as if he were throwing sea-shells at a fortress. By degrees, too, he came to understand that a poet must be either celebrated, or ridiculous; the pennies that he spent in a news-room showed him that the poet in adversity appealed to the national sense of humour every week.
He derived encouragement from reading the biographies of great writers of the past—and was depressed when he scanned the reminiscences of successful authors of the day, for these always seemed to have "arrived" so gracefully. It surprised him to note that poverty and disdain had been the portion of only those who were dead.
It happened on a morning in April, the event that he never forgot, a morning when the sky across the chimney-pots was blue, and the sparrows hopped in a strange, yellow light which the oldest bird on the slates told them was called "sunshine." David woke up to find—not that he was famous, but that his jug of hot water supported a communication by which an editor offered him a guinea for a sonnet. And his behaviour was less original than his verse. He burned to impart the news to the drudge in curling-pins who brought in his tea and haddock, he wanted to pat the heads of the children who were playing tip-cat in the roads. In Soho it is never too early nor too late for the children who fill the roads to play tip-cat. In Bloomsbury they incline to roller-skates; in Bayswater—-that happy hunting-ground of the organ-grinder and the street-arab—they "Follow my leader," yelling; but the passion of Soho is tip-cat. He bought a bunch of daffodils on his way to the office, and stuck them on his desk. He was still at Panzetta's—his salary had been raised ten shillings by this time—and the prospect of tendering his resignation shone out to his eager eyes again. The clouds had hidden it so long that he was dazzled. There was the gladness of summer in the sunlight that slanted through the dusty windows; all the temptations of the country lurked in the pennyworth of daffodils beside the ink-pot; he panted to be in the open, free to loose the extravagance of joy that swelled his heart.
"It's the sort of morning," he said in a burst to the accountant, who sat opposite, "that makes you think it's hot out-of-doors and want to go and pick poppies, and hear the rye rustle!"
The accountant lived at Ealing, and travelled by the same train as a distinguished counsel every day. He often mentioned vaingloriously that Sir Edward Jennings had nodded to him on the platform.
"Ah!" he rhapsodised. "With a carriage-and-pair to come and fetch you!"
David was a little less than nineteen when his first verses were accepted; he was a little less than twenty when they were paid for. Thus the thoughtfulness of the Editor provided him with two distinct occasions for rejoicing. He sent several other sonnets to the journal, and some of these were taken also, but a guinea is the professionalPons asinorum, and it was a long time before he cashed a cheque for any larger sum. The bright prospect of resigning the clerkship receded from him like a will-o'-the-wisp, and by-and-by he even smiled at his youthfulness, in remembering how happy that first acceptance of his work had made him feel.
And still he wrote. Sometimes he sat writing poetry, in front of the washhand-stand, until the lamp-flame waned and bobbed, and went out. So grew the manuscripts which were to be submitted to the publishers. Excepting the boarding-house, where Ownie reigned on in widowhood, he visited no one; excepting Vivian, who made his way to the attic at long intervals, no one visited him. Few among the millions in London were more utterly alone than this young man who alternately hoped and despaired, and, whether he was elated or despondent, had never an ear to heed him, heard never a voice that said "Cheer up." Vivian and Ownie were the only persons who ever inquired about his work, and to a dejected man the inquiries of the uncongenial are worse than none at all. No strangers could have been more foreign to each other than were the half-brothers, although they had a myriad memories in common. It is not time that enables people to understand one another, it is temperament. The world is heavy with couples who have sat opposite each other for forty years and are still tone deaf to each other's humour, and stone blind to each other's moods; and a recent acquaintance may say the right things to both. Vivian had encouraged poetry while he thought it might pay; since it didn't pay, he explained that the proper line of action was to deal in something else instead. There was nothing unpractical about the son of the late Mr. Harris; he was the kind of young fellow of whom it may be predicted, even while his pockets are empty, that he will rise somehow, and throw a few of his scruples overboard in the process. He was an occasional caller, but never a companion.
And slowly there crept into David's life a dull resentment of the solitude that had once been a relief, a longing for sympathy, for tenderness—a sense of bitter oppression as he looked in the glass and knew that he must never expect to find these things. And the face of every girl became a glass to him, and he winced before it. When his resources were low, he took his mid-day meal in a vegetarian restaurant, a place with a faint distinctive smell, and a three-course dinner for sixpence. One of the waitresses there was very pretty, and all had arch glances and undertones for the regular customers who cheated hunger with scones and "coffee," or some dish with an attractive name and a strangely nasty taste. Only with David none was ever arch. Once he summoned courage to say more to the pretty waitress than "Two poached eggs, please," and the haughtiness of her eyebrows slew him before she turned away. Often in the streets he saw a negro—black as Elisha had been—and across the crowd the gaze of the aliens would meet for a moment—drawn together by something deeper than curiosity. But neither could lift his silk hat and say to the other, "We are both damned, so let us be friends!" because the influence of civilisation prevented their acting like that, although their skins were the wrong colour.
Woman, impalpable, insistent, shared the garret with David now. And sometimes she was fair, and sometimes she was dark, but always she was beautiful; for at twenty the gift that man counts best in woman is loveliness; and at thirty it is wit; and at forty it is a keen appreciation of his own. From the dream-women who let him woo them, David heard many odes. At first his visitors were cold—mere Beauties from a hair-dresser's window—and he could only watch them timidly. But by degrees he found his voice, and told them how empty the attic had been before they came; and while he talked, the forms took flesh and blood, the lips whispered love words back to him; they made him confidences, and uttered sweet conceits, and then—Why then, the drudge in curling-pins banged, with a rejected poem, and the room was bare again.
The slim volume for the publishers grew slowly; some evil power of daylight seemed to freeze the verse that he had left aglow, so often was a night of exultation followed by an evening of dismay. A manuscript of sad surprises. Yet at last it was finished, for even he could find no more to alter.
Then its journeys began, and eventually it found a home; but it was not treated kindly there, and it brought him little recognition, and no money. He had scarcely realised the intensity of his prayers for it till it failed; nor had he known what strength he derived from the hope of fame until the hope sank. With the loss of faith in his work, the feeling of desolation deepened. A passion of revolt possessed him as he looked from the mirror to the future and saw himself perpetually alone. Because his misery cried for expression, he picked up his pen again; but though his interest in his art revived as time went by, the bitterness was always in his soul. Even as the years passed, there grew within him a hatred of his own person—a jealousy of every shop-boy who was kissed by a servant-girl for love.
Professor Sorrenford had five daughters, but only the eldest and the youngest were unmarried; the others had removed to homes of their own. The house, of which the early Victorian furniture was falling to decay, stood in a genteel street in Beckenhampton—one of those streets in which every third household hankers after a "paying guest," and shivers at the proposal of a "boarder." On the door a brass plate announced, in worn lettering, that Professor Sorrenford taught music and elocution, and from time immemorial vain efforts had been made to induce the "generals" to pull down their sleeves before they opened that door.
In the dining-room, which was also the parlour—for the drawing-room was reserved for the reception of pupils in the daytime—a girl was lying on the sofa one afternoon before a fire, that needed poking. Her eyes, grey and luminous, and the fashion in which she coiled her abundant hair, gave to her delicate face a character, a grandeur, which she dissipated when she smiled. Her smile was perhaps a little foolish. When her mouth was in repose she looked a woman to die for; when she smiled she was merely a very pretty girl with a pink-and-white complexion and a dimple in her cheek. She wore a pale blue flannelette dressing-gown with a superfluity of ribbons; and as she was not smiling on the sofa, but stitching the dead body of a sea-gull on to her best hat, she had that air of spiritual reflection which always embarrassed her partners so much until they discovered that there was really nothing to be afraid of. This was Hilda, the Professor's youngest. The eldest had been christened "Hebe," but in deference to her wishes no one ever called her so, nor did she ever write the name. She came in now—bringing the other something in a breakfast-cup—a girl with a curvature of the spine.
She was short. Her shoulders were square, her features drawn, the lips were thin and sensitive; only her eyes denoted to a cursory glance that nature had meant her to be beautiful. The angular deformity of the spine that defeated nature's intention had resulted from an accident when she was barely three: a nursemaid's carelessness for a moment—then for the child, inactive, prostrate, long years of suffering while her sisters played. Her mother died before the torture which the doctor described as "rest" had worn to an end, and—as the pastimes of the other girls were denied to her—it was Hebe who came gradually to fill the mother's place: to withhold the bills that would worry the Professor, and to order fish for dinner when the butcher's foot was down. It was her part to cut the sandwiches when the other girls went skating, and to stop behind and devise "high teas" for their return. It was her part, by-and-by, to screw their frocks out of the housekeeping money when they were asked to dances, and to sit up to look at their programmes when they came back. Later still, it was her part to watch lovers come into three lives in turn, and to contrive three trousseaux, and see three younger sisters wooed and wed.
None of the family remembered any longer that she had not been born to stand aside; there is nothing from which we recover more healthily than the affliction of somebody else; and that she had a woman's heart, and all a woman's natural longings herself, was a fact that her poor exterior obscured—to the perception of other people. When we say that we admire a face, we mean, consciously or not, that we admire some attribute that the face suggests to us, and when the exterior repels we seldom speculate very curiously about the soul. To-day, at the age of twenty-six, she found the addition of the tradesmen's bills less disquieting than formerly, by reason of the reduction of the household; and since she earned a little money by her brush, she was able to sweep a number of thorns from the Professor's path. She was not his favourite daughter, because there were hours in which he found the sight of her deformity depressing, but when he was troubled about the rent he often exclaimed with emotion that he didn't know what he would do without her.
"What have you got in that cup, Bee?"
"Mutton broth," she said; "you didn't eat any dinner. Have you been asleep?"
"No," Hilda complained. "I couldn't; just as I was dropping off, half a dozen doors began to slam. Is there any salt in it?" Her voice was small and high. The first time that one heard it pipe from her queenliness one felt dismayed. One felt as if the grand organ stops had produced the effect of a penny whistle.
Bee nodded, and made up the fire. "It's snowing again," she said. "Why didn't you wait till the spring before you had your influenza?—then you might have gone to the seaside afterwards. Doctor Fellowes doesn't think it would do you much good this weather. I met him just now in Market Street, and asked him."
"What did he say?"
"He thought you had better wait till it was warmer and you could sit about more. I went to Tuffington's; I couldn't get any of the books on your list—they haven't had them down, of course. Miss Tuffington said that nobody had asked for them."
Tuffington's was the principal circulating library and bookseller's of Beckenhampton. The proprietor was at present displaying, at three-and-elevenpence-halfpenny, in wadded roan, a line that he had labelled "Tuffington's Series of Padded Poets. Tried, and not found wanting. Specially recommended." It was a rare occurrence to find a recent novel there, however, and he made no reference to padded fiction. Hilda's gesture was more impatient than surprised.
"There were eighteen on that list," she said. "I'm sure I don't know what we subscribe for. I can't keep on readingEast LynneandJane Eyreall my life. Didn't you bring anything at all?"
"They said they'd try to send you up something to-night before they shut. I could only get the book I'd ordered—the one that's criticised in theReview of Reviewsthis month."
"Poetry!" She wrinkled her dainty nose. "What sinful waste of money. Where is it? Let's look."
"It's downstairs—I left it in the hall when I went to see about your broth. Shall I fetch it?"
"Yes, do, or father will pick it up, and then he'll elocute it at us all the evening; I'd rather read it myself than that. Who's in the drawing-room?"
"Nobody. It's Thursday, you know—father's afternoon at Great Hunby. I was going to send in a steak for his supper, but Rose always burns them so; the last we had came up a cinder. I really don't know what to get."
"As the dinner was raw, she's quite sure to burn the supper. Why don't you make him an omelette?"
"He likes something substantial when he comes back," said Bee thoughtfully. "Perhaps eggs and bacon——"
"Eggs and bacon are so soon over," objected Hilda; "and, besides, if they aren't broiling hot——Iknow! Get him a Perrin's pork-pie."
Bee brightened. Its pride in its pork-pies is a cult in Beckenhampton—they obsess the local mind—but there are pies and pies, and Perrin's are the pinnacle. If the King were to consent to sup in a Beckenhampton ménage, the breathless question, "What shall we give him?" would be disposed of when someone exclaimed, "Give him a Perrin's pork-pie."
"That's it," she said. "I'll tell Rose to run out now. I don't know what I was about not to think of it—I might have brought one in with me."
She went downstairs again promptly, and, when she returned, the book that she had bought was in her hands. This had not, as had Rossetti and Tennyson and the others in the "line," the cachet of Mr. Tuffington's "special recommendation"; it was a mere work that he did not stock. She gave it to her sister, and lit the gas.
"There you are," she smiled; "it will be something to go on with, though itispoetry."
"Anything is livelier than the advertisement sheets of the newspaper," said Hilda, unwrapping it, "if you're sure you don't want it yourself. I'm so dull I could read Shakespeare. What a hideous cover! 'A Celibate's Love Songs—byDavid Lee.' Why did you order it; is he anybody? He only seems to have written one thing before."
"TheReview of Reviewssaid he had genius," answered Bee, "and parts of the criticism made me think I should like it. No, you can be quite comfortable with it; I'll wait till they send up your novel."
She pushed an armchair to the hearth and sat down as if she were tired. She was, as she had said, in no hurry for the book, though she had been eager to read it a week ago; her mind was full of other thoughts this afternoon, now that she was free to think them. There was the picture that she was unable to begin; it floated through her brain, elusive and incongruent. She had been so pleased last week when she came back from Elphick's farm, but the more she pondered over the photographs that she had taken there, the more she was perplexed. It was that barn with the lichened roof that threw her out. Such colour! She couldn't bring herself to forget the barn; yet, if she didn't, the picture would be quite different from the one she proposed to paint. Her camera was always leading her into temptation, she reflected. She had bought it to see how her subjects composed, and to photograph the trunks and branches of trees, in order to study their form at her leisure; but since she had had it she was constantly preparing disappointments for herself, constantly happening on the impracticable. She stared into the fire, her elbows on her lap. Her gaze was wide while she was wondering; then her lids drooped low, and lower, as on the blank canvas of her mental view there grew laboriously a conception. Her chin was raised, and mechanically her thumb made little downward movements in the air.
The silence lasted perhaps a quarter of an hour; it was broken by the younger girl. She turned on the sofa petulantly: "Read to me, Bee, there's a dear!" she exclaimed. "My eyes ache, and the light makes them worse."
"I thought you hated being read to?" said Bee, starting, and hoping that the start wasn't noticed, because it would be considered affectation.
"Not by you; it's elocution lessons in disguise that get on my nerves. Do go on—it's very pretty here and there."
Bee took the book reluctantly, and began to read by an effort. For an instant the fact that she had been curious about it was dormant in her mind, but almost immediately she remembered, and the cause of her curiosity—the expectation of finding in the poetry just the passionate protest that was in her own heart—brought a little eagerness into her voice. Very soon she came to some lines that had been quoted in the review. She read them twice—once to Hilda, and once to herself; and again she thanked the man for saying that.
"It's rather nice, isn't it?" Hilda commented, as she paused.
"Yes," she said, "it's rather 'nice.'"
But she held the book before her face as she went on. The man revealed her secrets—told all that she felt every day of her life—and she was afraid that Hilda must know it, though Hilda didn't. Her mind and spirit responded vehemently to his verse. He was voicing her soul, uttering the emotions which nature woke in her, and which she had never been taught to express in her art; he cried aloud thoughts that she had nursed in bitterness, and thoughts that she had shrunk from, too cowardly to own. Once she questioned if the poet was a man at all. Wasn't it the outcry of a woman, hungry and resentful like herself, only gifted with the power to interpret, and the courage to avow?
She questioned only for a minute; man's deification of woman's beauty, a man's illusions about women, thrilled through the verse too strongly for her to be deceived; but a deep interest in his personality mingled with her gratitude for his work. It was a keener interest than had been stirred in her by any other pen; she even fancied that she must understand him better than any other of his readers. She would have given much to hear him talk, and though it was impossible—though she knew that few things were more unlikely than that she would ever meet him—she winced in reflecting that the very deformity which intensified her appreciation of his genius would make her appreciation a still poorer thing in his regard.
She was not reading now. The present pause had lasted so long that the fear that Hilda must divine spurred her to the next line guiltily, and she glanced across at Hilda as she read it; but Hilda was asleep. She was glad. She did not want to read any more just yet, or rather she did not want to read any further. She wanted to turn back, and read some of the stanzas again. There was the page that had brought before her eyes so vividly a view of the Little Tester churchyard from the hill. It had made her wonder if he had ever been there when the poplars were blackening against the sky, and all was vague suggestion but the lamplit windows of the cottagers, and the ghostly gravestones of their dead. She had often meant to paint an impression there, and when she had found the page, the desire to do so flamed in her again, fiercer for her admiration of the verse.
If she could have expressed the feelings that the scene aroused in her, the woman would have been a great painter, for she felt deeply and originally, in spite of the local art-school where the tuition—as in almost every English art-school—tended to crush the instinctive feeling of the students. Her brush had provided her only happiness, just as the school—where she had begun to study when she was about fifteen—had provided her only training, but she paid for the hours of happiness with days of dumb despair. She could not stand before this or any other scene, and express clearly what it meant to her, and, baffled, she knew it. She painted very pretty pictures of average merit, poetical things with considerable charm, but further she could not go. She felt that her pictures lied about her almost as basely as her body lied. She tried to believe that they maligned her because she was still young; she reminded herself often that the greatest of our landscape painters had not accomplished the work that made them famous until they were nearly forty—in Constable's case not till later. She did not know that her stumbling-block was that while she had heard a great deal about the virtues of Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, and Ford Madox Brown, a great deal about the eighteenth-century masterpieces and the technique of Reynolds, and Gainsborough, and Romney, she had heard nothing at all about the virtue of going to Nature direct for her impressions—had never been told that her own likings were as valuable as Rembrandt's, or Velazquez', if she would only set them down with sufficient sincerity and courage.
She was one of many—one of the crowd of artists possessing a certain amount of talent and individuality—who are born in England, but whom England cannot teach. And for lack of the guidance that is not to be had in their own country they are for ever stultifying themselves, instead of doing what was promised by their natural gifts. They learn to imitate the work of the painter who has scored the biggest success of the year; to try to imitate the old masters; to treat deliberately a commonplace subject in a commonplace way, with a view to pleasing the Powers of the Royal Academy. What they do not learn is to stand with an open mind, receptive and emotional, in a scene of the every-day life about them, forgetting all the pictures they have seen, and all the juries, and the ignorance of the British picture-buying public, until they know that the thing they are feeling and wanting to convey isn't a mere memory of the work of someone else, but a true impression of life or nature drawn from their inner selves. If Hebe Sorrenford could have studied in Paris for four or five years, she would have been, a better painter, and a happier woman. But she did not realise it. And, as the Professor could not have spared her, it was perhaps as well that she did not.
The servant entered to lay the supper, the pork-pie crowned by parsley on the dish. She said the master had complained that the beer from the new barrel was thick, and inquired if she should draw some for him, or bring up a bottle of stout. Bee replied that her father would rather have the stout.
He came home soon afterwards, a man with mild manners, and a dejected back, who had written several songs that had never been published, and one song that had been successful—under another composer's name. He had also a sanguine temperament, which had survived the corrections of thirty years. A musician who had never learnt to blow his own trumpet, he had failed for want of audacity; and because he was always eager to persuade himself that it was policy to accept injustice rather than face an unpleasant interview, he was inclined, like most men who yield in the wrong places, to be exacting and consequential at home.
"Worn out, father?"
"Eh?" He bent to their caresses, and sank into a chair.
"Worn out?"
He sighed, stretching his feet for slippers.
Bee brought them to him, and moved the footstool.
"What news?" he asked. "How's the invalid?"
"The invalid has trimmed a hat," Hilda answered. "How did you get on to-day, dear?"
He sighed again. "Young Simpson isn't coming back next term. So much for Simpson!"
"So much the less for us," she said. "Why not?"
"Because he's a curate and puffed with vanity, and I let him choose 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' last lesson and pretended he didn't squeak. He's so highly satisfied with his elocutionary graces that he thinks he has nothing more to learn. That's the worst of the elocution pupils; if you encourage them, they get conceited and give you up; and if you don't encourage them, they get disheartened and give you up. Pupils——" He spread his hands seeking epithets to stigmatise pupils.
"And the Mayor?" said Bee. "It was the Mayor's morning with you, wasn't it?"
"The Mayor, my dear, was, if possible, more hopeless than ever. He talks through his teeth, and as to his finals, you never get even ag. Half the forty minutes go in grammar lessons—not to be mentioned of course. I've been working on his Address with him now for a fortnight, and he still says 'Gentlemen, you was.'"
She laughed. "There's nothing like leather," she said. The Mayor had made his fortune out of boots. "It seems only the other day we used to see his wife scrubbing her doorstep when we went through Hippodrome Place."
"Anyhow his wife carries the position better than he does," Hilda put in. "You might almost take her for a lady if you looked at her in a hurry."
"And if you didn't hear her speak," added the Professor. His gaze wandered to the dish, rested on the pie, and gladdened. "A Perrin's?" he exclaimed. "Good children! I'm hungry." He rubbed his hands, and shuffled to the table. "Let's sit down. Yes," he went on—but he spoke slowly now, because to cut a Perrin's was a rite—"yes, young Simpson is leaving. And Miss Kimber's class—well, you know about Miss Kimber's class! Only seven piano thumpers now, as against twelve at midsummer. If it weren't for the private lessons at the room, it would hardly pay to go over to Great Hunby on Mondays and Thursdays any more. Hilda, my dear, did I give you a piece of the jelly?"
She bent her stately head to see. The grace of her slender figure had been apparent when she moved from the couch, the length of limb. At the mean table, laid with a soiled cloth, she looked a goddess to whom men might offer worship, sacrifices, for the recompense of her regard. To offer her pork-pie seemed a profanation—until she smiled.
"The school advertises your name inThe Herald," said Bee. "There's that."
"Yes," he admitted, "there's the ad., and of course it means recommendations to other schools, too. Still the fees are not high, and the little girls are not interesting."
"Wait till the opera is produced!" she said. "It will be taken some day, and then——"
"Ah, yes," echoed Hilda, "wait till the opera is produced! Father conducting, and us—'we,' which is it?—in a private box. Has any manager got it now, Dad?"
Years ago, so many years ago that they told falsehoods to one another about its age, pretending that the poor dear was less ancient than it was, the man had written a light opera, the librettist being a friend even unluckier than he. By half the theatres in London, and many in the provinces, this opera had been rejected. Its leaves were tattered, and the librettist had long since renounced his pen in favour of auctioneering in the North. But the Professor nursed his illusion still, still wove dreams around his opera over his evening pipe. It was the family fetich. They played its airs, and sang its lyrics, and laughed—still laughed—at the auctioneer's familiar jokes. When their best friends supped with them, the piano was opened and "Father's opera", was the feature of the entertainment. When it happened, as it sometimes did, that the receipt of the discoloured bundle was acknowledged by a curt managerial note, the composer, who had so little to encourage him, was uplifted by that—in fancy felt the baton in his fingers and foretasted all the rapture of his First Night. At such times he paid visits; his eyes twinkled, and his stoop had nearly gone. "They're nibbling, my boy!" he would say. And then again, with a beam and a toss of the head, "The managers are nibbling!" But when it is added that the score was musicianly and the airs were tuneful, and that the rejected work would have been performed long before puns went out of fashion if Sorrenford had only been a well-known name, there remains less humour in the pathos than his acquaintances enjoyed.
The old man looked up from his plate and smiled roguishly.
"It's odd you should mention the opera just now," he said. "Because there's a prospect! I told you all the bad news first, and was keeping that for the end. Wait till we've finished supper, and I will"—he chuckled—"I will a tale unfold!"
They were all eagerness, but they knew his idiosyncrasies too well to demur at the delay. Until the moment arrived which, for no good reason, he had fixed upon to tell his tale, questions would be useless. They exchanged glances, wondering how good the news really was, and recalling past "prospects," that they might not be disappointed when the facts came out.
Presently they rose and went back to the hearth. He filled his pipe carefully, extinguished the spill, and placed it with deliberation on the mantelpiece. Next he made himself comfortable in the only comfortable chair.
"Ha!" he said.
"Well, Dad?"
"Well, my dears, it has been whispered to me——Mind, this is to go no further; you mustn't mention this. I was told in confidence."
"Yes, father, yes? We won't breathe a word."
"Well, I was told in confidence"—he puffed placidly—"that the Theatre Royal is—changing hands!"
They were a little slow. "Changing hands?"
"I'm told that Mobsby is likely to give it up. I hear that in a few months' time the Royal may be run by some other manager—a manager who, one may say without being unduly sanguine, is sure to be more enterprising, for new brooms sweep clean."
"Ah!" said Bee, "you think the opera will have another chance there?"
"Oh, oh!" cried Hilda.
"Think?" His expression was gay, his manner important, there was even a tremor of triumph in his tone. "Think? Don't you see for yourself what it means? My dear, women are very dense in practical matters, really—your poor mother, God bless her, was just the same. Don't you see that it is one of the best things that could have happened for the opera? I'm not sure, I'm not by any means sure, that it isn't quite the best thing. Remember who I am. I'm somebody here; not rich, far from it, but in my way—in the little world of Beckenhampton-a personage. I may say that, I think?—I don't want to flatter myself, but 'in my way, in the little world of Beckenhampton, a personage'?"
"Yes, yes, Dad—a personage; of course you are!"
"Good! So far so good. Well, what follows?" He took three slow whiffs of the pipe again. "The new manager wants to ingratiate himself with the Beckenhampton public. He says to himself, 'I could hardly do a cleverer stroke of business than open my campaign with the work of one of the oldest and most respected of the residents.' It's as good for him to get the opera as for me to give it to him. Our interests are identical; we—so to speak—we link arms!"
They caught a little of his confidence, and affected more.
"But won't the touring companies stand in the way?" they asked.
"Tschut! Let him give it a production, that's all I want—a fortnight, a week, even a night will be enough to make it known. Once it is heard, there will be offers from London. It will get about how the audience received it; the managers will see the criticisms—I shall post them to all the principal theatres myself. I think, I really do think, that the poor opera has got its chance at last!"
He mixed some whisky and water, and dilated on the subject till his daughters' bedtime. At eleven o'clock they kissed him and went upstairs. In their hearts they felt a little ashamed, because they had pretended to more enthusiasm than the great tidings aroused. The Professor hummed snatches of the overture, and lay back, seeing visions in the fire.
"Do you think it's really of any consequence that the theatre is changing hands?" inquired Hilda on the landing.
"Oh, I don't know," said Bee drearily. "Poor father! Let's hope it is, as long as we can!"
They had occupied separate rooms since there had been rooms to spare, and when Bee went into hers she took David Lee's book with her. She sat under the gas bracket, reading—a little crooked figure with rapt eyes—until the clock of St. Sepulchre's boomed her to her feet, dismayed.
She was standing in her studio, in front of her Academy picture, wondering lazily when it would be finished, and if it would get in. She had exhibited several times at Birmingham and Manchester, and last spring her "The Grove is all a Pale Frail Mist" in the Leeds Exhibition had sold for thirty guineas, but she had had nothing hung yet in the Royal Academy, though she had sent there more than once.
Her studio was an attic. On the discoloured walls, and stacked in corners on the floor, were early works—a record to the investigator of the various stages she had passed. They were all there—the pictures that one would have expected to find. There were the usual attempts at family portraits, the usual still-life groups of ginger-jars, Japanese fans, and bowls of flowers; there were the more ambitious canvases depicting lackadaisical females posturing in medieval landscapes—painstaking exaggerations of a famous man's most obvious faults. There were the subjects with silver beeches and willowy streams, painted after she had given her heart to landscape for good and all, and had returned to Beckenhampton entranced by the work of Corot. Compared with those early insincerities the picture on the easel was a masterpiece; but she was not looking at them for encouragement—indeed not many of them were in a position to be observed—nor was she at work, though the colours on the palette were freshly set. Although her gaze wandered constantly from the picture to the study beside it—showing in miniature the same stretch of gorse-grown common, the same sunk wayfarer upon a bench—her brush was motionless, and presently she tossed it to the table with a gesture of impatience.
She was thinking ofA Celibate's Love Songs. A fortnight had passed since she bought it, and the volume haunted her. She had been filled by an intense desire to write to the author, to tell him of the effect his poetry had had on her, also to ask him one or two questions about it. Such impulses are obeyed by a thousand women every day in the year, but to this woman, remote, unfashionable, the desire seemed so romantic, and even immodest, that she blushed at the temptation. She wondered again if such things were done, wondered if the appreciation of an obscure, bent, plain little artist would excite his ridicule.
It was the latter doubt that deterred her most strongly, the fear that he might scoff. The sensitiveness to her deformity which made it an ordeal to her to confront a stranger, which made her ashamed of her Christian name, rendered her shy even in correspondence, and she shrank as much from revealing herself on paper as in speech. Still this correspondent would not know that she was bent, or plain, or an obscure artist, so there would be nothing for him to scoff at, excepting, perhaps, the way she expressed her ideas. She reflected for a moment that the "H. Sorrenford," which was her usual signature, might even conceal her sex.
That fancy faded almost as it rose. Since her object in writing would be to obtain an answer, she ought to enclose an envelope stamped and addressed. Yes, he was bound to know that the appreciation was a woman's. She faltered again, and wished that the poet were not a man.
In one respect she resembled all the readers who want autographs or information; she was supported by the remembrance that she meant to spare him the expense of the penny stamp. It emboldened her to begin the letter. She had not a sentence in her mind when she sat down, and her opening lines were the lines that popular authors have come to know by heart—the lines with which even less favoured authors are familiar. Before long, though, the knowledge that she was free to destroy the letter when it was finished made her spontaneous, and she ceased to consider the propriety of her action, forgot to question whether he would sneer or not.
She was not a literary woman and she did not write literary English, but she was an unhappy woman, who for the first time in her life had experienced the joy of finding herself understood; and she came nearer to uttering what she meant with her untutored pen than she had ever done with her misguided brush. Because she was not literary, she believed that when she suppressed the pronoun "I" she stilled the personal note, and the true value of the letter lay in its suggestiveness. The pleasure of expressing her love, her gratitude for the verse was very great, and though she chose to ignore the fact that the pages were destined to meet his eyes, the inward consciousness of it remained forceful.
When the letter was written, she read it slowly through, and twice she made as if to tear it up. But she did not tear it up; she put it away irresolutely. It occurred to her now that she could direct it only to the office of the publisher, and several times during the day she wondered if the publisher would forward it. Once in recalling something that she had said, she regretted a word that had been used, and she wished she could substitute a weaker one. She went to the studio and took the letter out and examined it. She wrote with a "J," and the word was thick and black; the alteration would be noticeable. She did not like the thought of that, was averse from giving to an unaffected letter an air of artifice, and she was reluctant to copy it. She stood hesitating a long while. But how foolish she was! She had not decided yet that she meant to post it at all.
The same on the morrow; she vacillated hourly. She wanted so much to post it, but it seemed such a preposterous thing to do; the more she reflected, the more certain she was that she would feel ashamed if she yielded to the desire. Still she would put the letter in the pocket of her jacket! She could determine whether it should go into the pillar-box or the fire while she was out.
Beckenhampton itself is not picturesque, though the outskirts are pretty enough. The visitor finds nothing to admire in the town save the factory-girls, some of whom are beautiful—excepting on Sunday when they wear their best clothes and mock pearl necklaces. She was tired to death of the long, dull, stuccoed roads that offered nothing to the imagination. She crossed the market-place and passed a post-office and made her way towards London Street. In London Street the Misses Simpson nodded to her without stopping. They agreed that she was "beginning to look old, poor girl," as they went on. In her hand were the letter, and the cheesemonger's bill, which she was about to pay. The fancy did not strike her, but the two things that she held were typical of her existence.
She paid the bill and turned homeward. Now she walked more slowly, and when she reached the post-office again, she paused. She moved a step closer to it—and wavered. The thought came, to embarrass her, that she was making herself more ridiculous still by so much hesitation. At the worst the man would throw the thing aside and forget it. She wished that it had been sent at once, or that she had never written it at all. The whole incident seemed to her intolerably stupid. She pushed the letter hastily into the box.
Yes, David's success had come. It had not been won so easily as was imagined by the readers who had never heard of him till now, for he had written for many papers—verse and articles too—beforeA Celibate's Love Songsappeared. It had not come so soon that success intoxicated him; but it had come a decade earlier than it comes as a rule even to the fortunate.
It was the pity of it, that the recognition he had wooed so ardently found his embrace at last a little passionless. "A humbug" his friends, if he had had any, would have called him when he hinted as much, but some of Fame's fairness had faded in the courtship, or the wooer had lost some of his capacity for rapture.
The "interviews" and the introductions that might have been his were not forthcoming because nobody had met him yet, but he was conscious of no sacrifice in waiving them; on the contrary, he shrank distressed from the thought of thrusting his negro face? between the public and their appreciation of his verse. Mr. Norton, his publisher, might have intimated suavely that his personality had a distinct commercial value, but David had even excused himself from calling on his publisher.
Few things are more circumscribed than "widespread literary fame"; and David's was only spreading. ThoughA Celibate's Love Songswas in brisk demand, and a second edition, the author's mother in her boarding-house at Regent's Park had not heard of it yet; Vivian was travelling, as business-manager of a dramatic company; and at present the poet's parentage had not transpired. At Panzetta's somebody might have given the kick-off to a ball of personal gossip, remembering the whisper of the ex-clerk's tendencies, but before a volume of poems penetrated to Panzetta's it would have to see, not two, but twenty editions.
In solitude as complete as when he saw his first sonnet printed, or when—as an unattached journalist—he bade the clerkship good-bye, David lived to-day. The residence of the "new poet whom Mr. Norton had discovered"—there are always paragraphists who talk naively of the publisher or manager "discovering" a writer who has been pealing at the bell for years—was a philistine and even shabby first-floor in an undesirable street shadowed by Gray's Inn Road. On his notepaper he ignored Gray's Inn Road, and flaunted Mecklenburgh Square. When he worked, his eyes rested now on an oleograph of Romeo and Juliet in a gilt frame, instead of on a washhand-stand, and his meals were laid by a domestic who removed her curling-pins by noon, and was clean by tea-time. One does not attain distinction as a poet without acquiring certain luxuries.
He was not writing this morning; he seldom did much good until the gas was lighted—until the bawl of hawkers, and the riot of children, and the clatter and crash of milk-cans had ceased. In the evening there were only piano-organs to prevent his earning a living, and by ten or eleven o'clock even these finished. He was not writing; when the second post was delivered, he had his overcoat spread on the table, and was trying to expunge a grease-spot with a rag soaked in turpentine. There was a letter for him. Though the servant was slow in coming upstairs, the grease spot was still slower in yielding to his treatment, and when she thudded across the room, he was still rubbing vigorously.
His publisher's name was on the envelope, so he put the rag down, wondering if there was any important news. At the sight of an enclosure, and a printed slip conveying Mr. Norton's compliments, he said "damn," for enclosures usually proved to be circulars from Press-cutting agencies. He opened Bee's letter with little interest, and fingers that smelt of turpentine.
The feeling roused in him by the first lines was a very commonplace one—the gratified flutter of a young artist who is praised—but after a few seconds the letter affected him more subtly. It was not merely that "Miss H. Sorrenford," who desired a reply, admired his work; so did more authoritative critics. Nor was it simply that he was thankful to her for owning it; he had been thankful to them too. It wasn't only that her appreciation was intelligent; a few of the criticisms had been more than that. The arresting fact was that he was stirred by curiosity about her. For once a woman permitted him a glimpse of her soul, and the loneliness of his life made the strange event more fascinating. He wondered who she was, and how she looked, and was humiliated to reflect how disenchanted she would be if she could see him. He read the letter twice before he put it in his pocket, and smiled again at the diffidence of her beginning. What was the picture in her mind—the seclusion of a study, a secretary sorting the poet's morning mail? He regarded his surroundings ruefully.
He thought he would reply to her on the morrow, but the curiosity she had wakened in him did not subside; on the contrary, her letter kept recurring to him during the day, and he pondered what he should say. He was young enough to quake lest his response should dethrone him. Because the matter was engrossing he sat down to answer her the same afternoon, and he found himself writing at much greater length than he had intended.
As he took the second sheet of paper, the doubt arose whether such prolixity would not cheapen him in her view. Unaccustomed to a crown, he was of course afraid of its slipping off. He left the table, and revolved a polite and colourless note that seemed more consistent with the position to which she elevated him; but he wasn't satisfied with it. To assist his meditations he re-read her letter, and now he realised that at the back of his mind lay the desire to hear from her again. The note would frustrate it. He returned to the table, and went on with the fifth page. By dint of squeezing his wisdom a good deal he contrived to avoid encroaching on page six.
Late on the next day but one, he received a few lines of acknowledgment from her. They were grateful, but they provided no reason for his addressing her any more. He was chagrined, and it would have astonished Bee much to know how often David Lee's thoughts turned to her.
At the end of a week she was sufficiently astonished; she recognised the writing on the envelope and the package a shade incredulously. He begged her acceptance of his first book, which he hoped she would like as well as his second. He even hinted that he awaited her opinion of it with considerable eagerness. She thanked him by return of post, and when another week had gone by, her opinion was expressed. She had written with a faltering pen this time, because she did not like his first book so well as his second, and was perturbed by the necessity for saying so.
David put down the letter discomfited. He had been looking for it every day, and the knowledge that he had been impatient made him angrier still. He was incensed with himself for having provoked the disappointment. Why had he sent her the book? The tepidity of her praise! Never a superlative. Besides, in parts she failed to see his meaning. After all, she was less spiritual than he had thought her!
If her earliest letter had stirred his imagination less deeply, the correspondence which he had rescued once would now have been allowed to die; as it was, he wrote to her not long afterwards, defending himself from her criticism, and explaining a passage which he said she misunderstood. It was manifest that he was wounded. She replied—evidently abased by his displeasure—that she had not presumed to "criticise." So does humility juggle with words. The poet was appeased; and then mortified to feel that he had been a churl. He scribbled a line of deprecation. Also, angling for further favours, he tied an inquiry to the end of it.
Thus the correspondence entered upon its second stage. In its second stage they exchanged letters at longer intervals, but he ceased to invent pretexts for asking her to reply, and she signed herself, "Sincerely yours, H. Sorrenford," instead of "Yours very truly." When the spring came, he complained: "It is nearly a month since I heard from you—the bareness of the breakfast-table affronts me every morning," and Bee, who had been the prey of scruples, put them from her, and wrote again.
They were wholly natural, the letters that had begun to mean so much; they would have seemed unnatural only if they had been published, with an editor's "Foreword" proclaiming that the writers were strangers to each other. David wrote on impulse in the hours when he was loneliest; Bee responded gladly when the temptation to confess herself was too strong to be denied. There was no news in the letters; hers especially were poor in facts—her thoughts about a book he had recommended to her, the impression of a ramble through the fields, seldom more. He was surprised sometimes to reflect how little he knew about the woman whom at other times he seemed to know so well. It surprised the woman that she could unveil her soul with such audacity to a man she had not met.
Only in moments she realised that she was able to write without constraint because they had not met. He didn't know her, and unknown, she was unembarrassed; the disparity between her body and her mind ceased to oppress her until the envelope was sealed. She would not even tell him she was an artist, lest he should make inquiries, and discover that she was deformed. In their sensitiveness to their exteriors, as well as in their hunger for love, these two were akin. Often when the man wrote to her, he shivered in imagining her aversion if she could see her correspondent's face. Often when the woman posted her answers, she was ashamed, conjecturing his fancy-portrait of her and cowering before her crooked shadow on the road.
And his fancy sketched a score of portraits of her. She had youth—he was sure of that—yet she was not so young that her outlook was a girl's. She had beauty—manlike, he clung to that, although he had so good a cause to know that lovely thoughts may inhabit unlovely homes. But after it was said, how little had been told! He craved the definite. Was she fair, or was she dark? Were her eyes brown or blue? What colour was her hair? Was she small, or queenly? At once he longed to see her, and trembled at the thought of revealing himself to her astounded gaze. Frequently he was harassed by the thought that an opportunity for their meeting would occur, and he wondered what excuse he could offer for avoiding it. Her letters were friendly, frank; one day he might open one to learn that she was coming to town. How could he dare to greet her? "I am David Lee." He foresaw her start, the colour falling from her face, the effort with which she put out her hand after the shock. And then? Yes, they would talk together for a little while unhappily; she would be painstakingly polite and struggle to conceal the dismay that he read in her every tone and gesture. And afterwards there would be a difference in her letters; and by degrees they would grow shorter, and presently they would cease—and the woman who had given him a new interest in life would be lost. While he could retain this sweet and strange companionship he swore he would retain it. The shock must come to her some time, he supposed, from a newspaper paragraph; for the present——But cowardice could not quiet his curiosity, and again and again he wished that he could see her once; always he wondered how she looked.
Bee's dread of his suggesting a visit to her was deepened by the fact that if she seemed reluctant to receive him, her correspondence would assume a clandestine air. Into the woman's life as well had come a new and eager fascination; she, too, desired and feared together. She wanted to hear him talk; she did not ask herself if he was handsome, but she wanted to hear him talk. What joy to have a presence that he would approve! To be able to tear open his welcome letters with no misgiving; one day to read that he was coming, and go down to the drawing-room, a graceful figure in a becoming frock, without the terror of reading consternation in his gaze. She pictured her entrance as it must be: his blank astonishment as she appeared on the threshold; their perfunctory conversation, with a lump in her throat; his pitiful pretence that he was pleased that he had come. How her letters would shrivel in his remembrance! She bowed her head.
Each was fast falling in love with an individuality; each was frightened at the thought of meeting the other's eyes. The man said bitterly, "She would shrink from a mulatto!" The woman sighed, "No doubt he thinks me beautiful!"
April was drawing to a close, and every evening the Professor said, "Have you heard from the Academy, my dear?" and sighed when she answered "No." She had begun to conclude that "The Sun's Last Rays" was rejected, and it distressed her to think of the money that she had laid out on the frame. Before the order for that frame was given, the price had been exhaustively debated at the supper-table; she knew that a good frame was a recommendation to a hanging committee—her father had argued that "an artist's work ought to stand on its own merits." In his demeanour now she read a reproach of her extravagance, and each time that he asked her if she had heard yet, it was a greater effort to her to reply.
At last, however—one evening when hope had almost died in her—the servant entered the room with a letter. The Professor lolled in the armchair smoking his pipe; Hilda was engrossed in a "new novel" from Turlington's—published in the previous spring—and Bee herself was sitting idle. Her thoughts flew to David Lee as she watched the girl advance towards her. She had withheld from her family the fact of her correspondence with the poet—withheld it, not because they would regard her friendship with him as an impropriety, but because they would consider she was making herself ridiculous—and she prayed that her father would not ask from whom the letter came. The handwriting relieved her anxiety, and the crest on the flap excited her. The next moment she pulled her varnishing ticket from the envelope.
"From the Academy, my dear?"
"Yes," she exclaimed, "I've got in!"
"What's that?" said Hilda, glancing up from the book. "Got in? Oh, have you—how nice!"
"What do they say?" inquired the old man. "Let me see!"
"It's a ticket for varnishing day," she said. "I wonder how I'm hung."
"Very odd," he remarked, "that they didn't send it you before." He read the ticket attentively, pursing his lips, and turned it over, as if a clue to the delay might be discovered at the back. "What did I tell you? I knew it would be all right. A pity you wasted such a lot on the frame now, eh, my dear?"
She could not perceive that the mistake was demonstrated, but his legitimate triumphs were so few that it would have been petty of her to grudge him an illusory one. "It must have been among the doubtfuls," she explained—"the pictures they didn't make up their minds about at once—that's why I didn't hear before."
"Of course," he said, "there are pictures that are put away to be examined again; the committee can't decide about them right off. Whether they are, taken eventually depends—er—depends on circumstances. They are called the 'doubtfuls.'" He returned her information to her with the air of letting her into a secret. "I expect they thought it a bit dull, you know—a bit dull. It's pretty—it's a pretty thing—but it wants more sunshine. It isn't bright enough. You haven't got the blaze of the gorse into it; that's what you've failed in—you haven't got the blaze of the gorse."
"It's eight o'clock in the evening," she said. "The title is 'The Sun's Last Rays.'"
The sunshine was paling from her spirits too. Extraordinary, she reflected, that it was possible for those who always meant well always to miss saying the things one wanted to hear. Both he and Hilda were genuinely pleased—she knew it—yet how flat the news had fallen! And neither of them had cried, "I wonder how you're hung!"
"Y-e-s, you don't convey the glory of summer, unfortunately; the thing isn't gay enough; there's no heat in it, no glare. That's what's the matter with it, my dear—there isn't the glare there should be. Now, to do justice to that scene, to paint it to advantage, you should have shown it on a scorching afternoon, under a vivid sky. The tramp on the seat should have been hot—mopping his forehead. There might even have been a touch of humour in the figure of the tramp. As it is, he only looks tired. You understand what I mean?"
"Oh yes," she murmured, "I understand. But that isn't the picture I wanted to do. I meant the wayfarer to look tired. I wanted to get what George Eliot called 'the sadness of a summer's evening' into it."
"Mopping his forehead with a red handkerchief, now, would be natural; and the red would liven the picture up. You might paint a red handkerchief in before the Academy opens, mightn't you? Think it over, my dear. A red handkerchief and a brighter light on the gorse would improve the thing wonderfully. It's a pity the man isn't more to the front, more important. He isn't prominent enough. That's where the fault lies really—the tramp isn't prominent enough."
Though it exasperated him to hear the ignorant try to criticise music, he never hesitated to dogmatise about the arts of which he knew nothing himself; and as she listened to him, the elation that had been born within her faded into lassitude. The fact that good news had come appeared to be already forgotten; her sister, having said, "How nice," was again immersed in the novel, and while her father discoursed didactically without once speculating how her picture had been hung, it seemed to Bee that her successes were always made an opportunity for homilies in her home rather than for rejoicing.
How her work had been hung, and how it would look, were doubts that filled her mind when she travelled to town on varnishing day. It was only in moments she even remembered that she was nearing the city that held David Lee. She knew the change that removal from the studio wrought in the aspect of a picture, and she crossed the great courtyard—as an exhibitor for the first time—with increasing nervousness. She went upstairs, and for a quarter of an hour wandered through the rooms in an unavailing search. Then she discovered her work, high in a corner, beside a picture of a child in a bright blue frock, playing with a puppy on a Brussels carpet. She stopped with a heart-quake. Though she had prepared herself to be disappointed, the shock sickened her. Surrounded by other pictures, also clashing with it in subject and treatment, and viewed in the harsh light of the Academy, her quiet landscape appeared to her insignificant and unfamiliar. She marvelled that there could have been hours when she was pleased with it; she stood rooted there, seeking the qualities that had endeared it to her. They had gone—everything had gone! It was the ghost of the landscape that she had painted that appalled her from the Academy walls. The ghost of it. She drooped drearily to a step-ladder and sat down. When she had recovered sufficiently to return to the picture, she put on a light varnish, which brought up the colour of the parts that had sunk in; but varnish could not brighten her mood, and she had little hope that "No. 790" would ever find a purchaser.
She had often reflected with a tremor that when David Lee went to the Academy, he might observe her work and recognise her name in the catalogue. In the novels that Hilda borrowed from Tuffington's the Academy was always revealing somebody's identity to someone else. "He moved to where the crowd was densest, and a minute later a half-cry escaped his lips. The scene that had never faded from his memory—the scene of their farewell—glowed upon the canvas. He knew that only one hand could have portrayed it—knew that the artist who had leapt to fame must be the trustful girl whom he had loved and lost!" Now that there was no danger of the work attracting Mr. Lee's notice, she wondered why she had feared its doing so; her misgiving that it might lead to his finding out the truth about her seemed ridiculous. She even parted regretfully with the prospect of arousing his admiration.
In the train, her despondence was deepened by the thought of having to give an account of the day's experiences when she arrived. While she could imagine nothing sweeter than to be approaching a home where affection was interpreted by tact, her soul fainted before the ordeal of detailing the disappointment to her father and Hilda. She knew that she would feel worse in the parlour than she did in the train, that, besides being dejected, she would be incensed. Whether things went well, or whether they went badly, she mused, it was an equal effort to have to talk about them if the listeners seized upon the trivial, and ignored the point—if they put faith in what they were meant to smile at, and were sceptical where they were asked to believe. How often she had gone home brimming with news, and no sooner imparted the first item than she wished fervently that she hadn't any at all!
The porters bawled "Becken'ampton," and she got out with a sigh, and made her way—dusty, unwilling, tired—towards the house. When she entered it, there were some letters lying on the hall table, and she saw one among them for herself from David. She picked it up, rejoicing; a flush warmed the whiteness of her cheeks, and she forgot she was fatigued. Her home-coming had been happier than she expected after all.
In June she went to Surrey for a month. She generally managed to make studies in the country during a few weeks in the year, and more often than not took Hilda with her, the Professor agreeing to their departure with as generous an air as if he were paying the expenses. Hilda went with her again this time. They had the luck to light on Godstone, where they found surprisingly attractive quarters, and—what was stranger still—a sufficiency of simple food, the typical village consisting chiefly of drawbacks and public-houses.
Godstone was quite exceptional. Although it was the very quintessence of the country—all cows, and clover, and quietude—the milk there was not watered with an audacity that would have startled a dairyman of the London slums. Fresh butter could actually be obtained without much difficulty, at a price only a little higher than it was sold at in the cities. Crowning marvel in the country, they were not bowed under a burden of obligation in securing green vegetables, though that was certainly because the Kemps grew such luxuries in the garden. Village tradesmen never "supply" what the customer orders—they occasionally "oblige him" with it. To foster a fine spirit of indifferentism there is nothing like the knowledge that your competitors are as bad as yourself. Laundresses and village tradesmen are the only truly independent classes in England.
Of course there were drawbacks even here. There were, for instance, a butcher's and a grocer's opposite Daisymead, and this meant flies and wasps investigating Daisymead in large numbers. The butcher threw the onus of the wasps on the grocer's sugar, and the grocer said, that wasps were harmless things if you hadn't no fear of 'em, and was bitter about the butcher's flies. Panics were frequent in the lodgers' parlour, and as the window faced the shops, it became a question whether it was better to be stifled or stung.
In the morning, while the artist worked, Hilda loitered under the apple-trees, and languished in basket-chairs and light frocks where the shade lay deepest in the landlord's field. One could see the railway from the field, and many a young fellow in the trains saw Hilda, and regretted that Godstone wasn't his destination. In the afternoon there was the tangle of the woods to wander through—so close that it was a constant temptation to get lost there. And there was the way that began with wild strawberry blossom, and rose to wooded heights, below which the county spread like a green tablecloth decked with a box of toys; and then, after avenues of giant firs where darkness fell, no matter how fierce the sun, there were the surprises of lichened glades where one tiptoed among the ferns in hope of fairies. With her easel, and her canvases, and her camera, Bee found the days all too short. She found the days too short, but there was a charm in the evenings too. The final saunter along the still white road before supper, just as far as the gate where the rabbits scampered, or the bridge by the water-mill where strange birds sometimes flashed among the boughs; the hush of the little lamplit room with a book afterwards; if one liked, a glimpse of the stars from the garden-path, a breath of the flowers—and then to bed.
She had written to David a few days after her arrival, and his first letter to Surrey came when she had been installed in Daisymead about a fortnight. She opened it by the little stack of hay which was all that the field had granted this year.
He wrote that her description of her surroundings made London still more loathsome to him, that he wished vainly he could escape from it. A somewhat laboured reference to his journalistic work followed—a plaint that though they had become such good friends, it seemed unlikely they would meet. A pucker crept between her brows as she read; she wondered why he said that, wondered why he found it necessary all at once to harp upon the difficulties of taking a short journey to see her. It was as if he were warning her not to expect him. Had he interpreted her enthusiasm for the place as a hint to him to come? She tried, discomfited, to remember what her words had been. After a minute she went on reading, and then she saw that all this had been the prelude to a request—a none too skilful prelude; but that she did not see. "So I have been summoning my courage to ask you——" She scanned the next lines rapidly, and the letter quivered in her hand. He asked her for her photograph.
She leant against the fence, dismayed. Her first thought—to explain that she hadn't a likeness of herself to send—forsook her under the fear of his thinking her ungracious if she did not promise to be photographed when she went home. Confused, she sought an excuse that would sound natural. Never had she exaggerated her disfigurement more morbidly, never had her face appeared uglier to her, her shoulders higher, her back more bent. To send him her photograph? She felt that it demanded the courage of a heroine.
His petition darkened the day to her; it threatened her in the night; she woke to be harassed by it again. To send him her photograph—to show him what she was? Again and again she asked herself if her hold on him was strong enough to withstand the revelation. Momentarily she wished she were a man; it was woman's mission to be beautiful. And he, he shrank from ugliness, she could read it in his work. To him "woman" meant "beauty"—
"Beauty of worshipped form and face ...Sweet hands, sweet hair, sweet cheeks, sweet eyes,sweet mouth,Each singly wooed and won."
The lines of Rossetti's that had flouted her insignificance since she was a girl, jeered at her now. She found no comfort in the next:—
"Yet most with the sweet soulShall love's espousals then be knit."
Yes, "then"—after the rest was wooed! "Woman" meant features to inspire men, and a form to make them mad. In a transport of imagination she imagined almost with a man's desires, and hung before her glass, abased.
But, after all, how could confession rob her of her happiness? She had woven the tie between them of her thoughts, her spirit; it was her mind that pleased him—how could the knowledge that she was misshapen destroy his interest in her mind? She insisted that it could not—and deep in her heart was hurt to feel that his interest in her was this purely intellectual thing. He cared too little for her hand-clasp even to travel to see her. Then she was a fool to hesitate—she would write him the truth! Next, resentment scorched her that, caring so little, he had put this humiliation upon her. A whim, a spasm of curiosity, and he had made her suffer so. Her misery cried that he was not worth it, but tears sprang to her eyes at the same moment. She would write to him before her courage failed her. She would write as soon as Hilda was settled in the field for the morning; her folly should end to-day!
She was eager to write at once, fearful that if she waited long, her mood would change. When she saw the landlady's daughter in the passage, she asked her to come to the parlour before she went out and take a letter to the post. The girl said she wouldn't forget, and the arrangement, trivial though it was, gave to the woman a sense of something accomplished. She was dimly aware, too, that it would shorten her ordeal.