The next morning sunlight shone in upon Jenny's rose-dyed awakening.
Flushed with dreams, she blinked, murmuring in sleepy surprise:
"Oo--er! if it isn't a fine day."
"It's glorious," corroborated May emphatically.
"Oh, it's lovely; let's all wave flags."
"You were a mad thing last night," said May.
"Don't take any notice, dee-ar. I was feeling funnified."
"Opening the window like that and shouting out in your sleep and
cuddling me all night long."
"Did I?" inquired Jenny curiously.
"Did you? I should think you did. Not half."
"Well, if you're a little love and make me a cup of tea, I'll tell you
all about it."
"About what?"
"About him. Oh, May, he's lovely. Oh, he's It."
"Who is?"
"A fellow I met this week."
"What, another?"
"Ah, but this one's the One and Only."
"Go on, I know your One and Onlies."
"Oh, but May, he's a young dream, is My Friend the Prince. I'm going to
meet him this afternoon with young Irene."
"And have a proper game with him, I suppose, and do the poor boy in and
say good-by."
"I hope I sha'n't never say good-by to him. Never, I do."
"You have got it bad."
"I know. Listen, May. He's rather tall and he's got a nice complexion,
only his mother says he's rather pale, and he's got very white teeth and
a mouth that's always moving, and simply glorious eyes."
"What color?"
"Blue. And he talks very nice, and his name's Maurice. But whatever you
do, don't say nothing to mother about it."
"As if I should."
Mrs. Raeburn came into the room at that moment.
"Are you lazy girls going to get up?"
"Oh, ma, _don't_ be silly. Get up? Oh, what a liberty!"
"Lying in bed on this lovely morning," protested Mrs. Raeburn.
"That's it. Now you carry on about the lovely morning. Young May's
already woke me up once to look at the sun. All I know is it makes the
room look most shocking dusty."
The day deepened from a morning of pale gold to an amber afternoon,
whose melting splendor suffused the thin blue autumn sky with a
glittering haze. Jenny stood pensive awhile upon the doorstep.
"Hark, what a noise the birds are all making. Whatever's the matter?"
"They're pleased it's fine," said May.
"Oh, they're pleased, too, are they?" Jenny exclaimed, as, with a long
shadow leading her slim form, she went through a world of russet leaves
and cheeping sparrows to meet her lover.
At the club there was a message from Irene to say she was ill and unable
to keep the appointment.
"That's funny," Jenny thought. "Seems as if it's bound to be."
Through Leicester Square she went with eyes that twisted a hundred necks
in retrospect. Down Charing Cross Road she hurried, past the old men
peering into the windows of bookshops, past the _delicatessen_ shops
full of gold and silver paper, past a tall, gloomy church haunted by
beggars, hurrying faster and faster until she swung into the sunlight
of Shaftesbury Avenue. There was Maurice studying very earnestly the
photographs outside the Palace Theater.
"Here I am, Claude," she laughed over his shoulder.
"Oh, I am glad you've come," he said.
"Irene couldn't come. She's ill. Shame, isn't it?"
"Really," said Maurice, trying to seem concerned. "Let's go and have
tea."
"Oh, you unnatural man. Aren't you sorry she's ill?"
"I can't be sorry you're alone. Where shall we have tea?"
"Where _you_ like."
"I know a funny little shop off Soho Square where there aren't many
people."
"Don't you like people, then?"
"Not always."
Soho Square held the heart of autumn that afternoon. London had
surrendered this quiet corner to pastoral meditation. Here, among the
noise of many sparrows and sibilance of dead leaves on the unfrequented
pavement, one realized in the perishable hour's flight the immortality
of experience.
"More birds," said Jenny.
"Don't they make a row and don't the leaves look ripping in this light?"
"There's another one getting excited over the day."
"Well, it is superb," said Maurice. "Only I wish there weren't such a
smell of pickles. I say, would you mind going on ahead and then turning
back and meeting me?"
"Oo-er, whatever for?"
"I want to see how jolly you'd look coming round the corner under the
trees."
"You are funny."
"I suppose you think I'm absurd. But really, you know, you do look like
a Dresden shepherdess with your heart-shaped face and slanting eyes."
"Thanks for those few nuts."
"No, really, do go on, won't you?"
"I certainly sha'n't. People would think we was mad."
"What do people matter?"
"Hark at him. Now he's crushed the world."
"One has to be fanciful on such an afternoon."
"You're right."
"I suppose I couldn't kiss you here?"
"Oh, of course. Wouldn't you like to sit down on the curb and put your
arm round my waist?"
"As a matter of fact, I should."
"Well, I shouldn't. See? Where's this unnatural tea-shop?"
"Just here."
"It looks like the Exhibition."
It was a dim coffee-shop hung with rugs and gongs. The smoke of many
cigarettes and joss-sticks had steeped the gloom with Arabian airs.
"It is in a way a caravanserai," said Maurice.
"A what?" said Jenny.
"A caravanserai--a Turkish pub, if you like it better."
"You and I _are_ seeing life to-day."
"I like my coffee freshly ground," Maurice explained.
"Well, I like tea."
"The tea's very good here. It's China."
"But I think China tea's terrible. More like burnt water than tea."
"I'm afraid you don't appreciate the East," he said.
"No, I don't if it means China tea."
"I wish I could take you away with me to Japan. We'd sit under a
magnolia and you should have a kiss for every petal that fell."
"That sounds rather nice."
"You know you yourself are a bit Japanesy."
"Don't say that. I hate to be told that."
"It's the slant in your eyes."
"I don't like my eyes," said Jenny emphatically.
"I do."
"One pleased, any old way."
"I love your eyes," said Maurice earnestly. "But I made a mistake when I
said you were Japanese. You're Slav--Russian, you know."
"I must be a procession of all nations, according to you."
"But you are frightfully subtle."
"Anything else? You're sure I'm not a bighead?"
"A what?" said Maurice.
"A pantomime bighead."
Maurice laughed.
"Men always talk about my eyes," Jenny went on. "They often call me the
girl with the saucy eyes, or the squiny eyes, _which_ I don't like. And
yet, for all my strange appearance, if I want a man to be struck on me,
he always is."
"Did you want me to be struck on you?"
"I suppose I must have."
"Is that why you made us see Irene home first--so that you could be
alone with me?"
"I suppose so. Any more questions? You're worse than my sister, and
she'd ask the tail off a cat."
"Hum!"
"Cheer up, Puzzled Willy."
"Have you ever--er--well, insisted on having the person you wanted
before?"
"No, I've not. Not like that. I can't make myself out sometimes. I don't
understand myself. I do a thing all of a sudden and the next minute I
couldn't tell anybody why I done it."
"I might have thought you were running after me," said Maurice.
"Who cares? If you did, it wouldn't matter to me. If I wanted you to
make a fool of yourself, you'd make a fool of yourself."
"But supposing I made a fool of you?" asked Maurice, slightly nettled.
"I don't think you could."
"But I might. After all, I may be as attractive to women as you are to
men. Perhaps we've both met our match. I admit you fascinate me. From
the first moment I saw you, I wanted you. I told you that. And you?"
"I wanted you," said Jenny simply.
"It is love at first sight. And yet, do you know, I had an instinct to
make you not like me."
"You couldn't."
"Couldn't I?" said Maurice, breathless. The heavy air of the coffee-shop
vibrated with unheard passionate melodies.
"No," said Jenny, gazing full at the young lover opposite, while Eros
shook his torch, and the gay deep eyes, catching the warm light, shone
as they had never shone for any man before. "But why did you try to make
me not like you?"
"I felt afraid," said Maurice. "I'm not very old, but I've made two
girls unhappy, and I had a presentiment that you would be the revenge
for them."
"I've made boys unhappy," said Jenny. "And I thought you were sent to
pay me out."
"But I shall always love you," said Maurice, putting his hand across the
little table and clasping her fingers close.
"So shall I you."
"We're lucky, aren't we?"
"Rather."
"I feel sorry for people who aren't in love with you. But don't let's
talk here any more. Let's go back to my rooms," he suggested.
"I've got to be in the theater by half-past seven."
"I know, but we've plenty of time. It's only just half-past five."
"Where do you live?"
"Westminster. Looking over the river. I've got a largish studio. Quite a
jolly room. I share the floor below with a friend."
"What's he like?"
"Castleton? Funny chap. I don't expect you'd care for him much. Women
don't usually. But don't let's talk about Castleton. Let's talk about
Jenny and Maurice."
Outside the fumes of the coffee-shop were blown away by soft autumnal
breezes.
"We'll dash it in a taxi. Look, there's a salmon-colored one. What luck!
We must have that. They're rather rare. Taxi! Taxi!"
The driver of the favored hue pulled up beside the pavement.
"Four-twenty-two Grosvenor Road, Westminster."
"I wonder," said Maurice, glancing round at Jenny and taking her slim
gloved hand in his. "I wonder whether taxis will ever be as romantic as
hansoms. They aren't yet somehow. All the same, there's a tremendous
thrill in tearing through this glorious September weather. Oh, London,"
he shouted, bouncing in excitement up and down on the springy cushions,
"London, you're wonderful."
Jenny shook his hand as a nurse reproves a child.
"Keep still," she commanded. "The man'll think you're potty."
"But I am potty. You're potty. The world's potty, and we're in love. My
sweet and lovely Jenny, I'm in love with you.
"There was a young lady called Jenny,
Whose eyes, some men said, were quite squiny."
"Oh, Maurice, you _are_ awful," she protested.
But, Apollo urging him, Maurice would finish:
"When they said: 'You're our fate,'
She replied, 'It's too late.'
So they went away sad and grew skinny."
"Lunatic!" she said. "And don't talk about getting thin. Look at me.
Nothing but skin and grief."
"Nonsense," said Maurice, and went on rhyming:
"There was a young lady said: 'What!
My figure is going to pot.'"
And then two more lines that will have to be filled in like your figure,
and then:
"They all of them said: 'No it's not.'"
"Well, you're not much more than a rasher of wind yourself," commented
Jenny.
"Ha! ha!" shouted Maurice. "That's good. Hullo, here's Trafalgar Square.
Aren't we going a pace down Whitehall? Jenny, there aren't any words for
what I feel."
He hugged her close.
"Oh, mind!" she protested, withdrawing from the embrace. "People can see
us."
"My dear, they don't matter. They don't matter a damn. Not one of them
matters the tiniest dash."
Nor did they indeed to lovers in the warm apricot of a fine September
sunset. What to them were dusty clerks with green shining elbows, and
government officials and policemen, and old women with baskets of tawny
chrysanthemums? Fairies only were fit to be their companions. The taxi
hummed on over the road shadowed by the stilted Gothic of the Houses of
Parliament, hummed out of the shadow and into Grosvenor Road, where the
sun was splashing the river with pools of coppery light. The stream was
losing its burnished ripples and a gray mist was veiling the
fire-crowned chimneys of Nine Elms when the taxi drew up by 422
Grosvenor Road.
"Right to the very top," called Maurice. "I do hope you don't mind."
As he spoke he caught her round the waist and gathered her to his side
to climb the stairs.
"It's an old house. I've got an attic for my studio. Castleton's out. An
old woman buried somewhere near the center of the earth cooks for me.
When you see her, you'll think she's arrived via Etna. Jenny, I'm
frightfully excited at showing you my studio."
At last they reached the topmost landing, which was lit by a skylight
opaque with spiders' webs and dust. The landing itself was full of
rubbish, old clothes, and tattered volumes and, as if Maurice sought to
emulate Phaethon, a bicycle.
"Not in these!" said Jenny. "You _don't_ carry that up and down all
these stairs every day?"
"Never," said Maurice gayly. "Not once since I carried it up for the
first time a year ago."
"You silly old thing."
"I am. I am. But isn't it splendid to be able to be silly?"
He opened the door of the studio and Jenny walked into what seemed an
astonishingly large room. There were windows at either end and a long
skylight overhead. The ceiling was raftered and on the transverse beams
were heaped all sorts of things that young men bring to London but never
use, such as cricket-bats and tennis-racquets and skates.
The windows on one side looked out over the river, over barges going up
on the full flood, and chimneys flying streamers of pearl-gray smoke.
The windows on the other side opened on to a sea of roofs that rolled
away down to a low line of purple cloud above whose bronzed and jagged
edge the Byzantine tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in silhouette
against a sky of primrose very lucent and serene.
There was a wide fireplace with a scarred rug before it and on either
side a deal seat with high straight back. There were divans by the same
craftsman along the whitewashed walls, and shelves of tumbled books.
Here and there were broken statues and isolated lead-bound panes of
colored glass, with an easel and a model's throne and the trunk of a lay
figure. There was a large table littered with papers and tins of
pineapple and a broken bag of oranges very richly hued in the sunset.
The floor was covered with matting, over which were scattered Persian
rugs whose arabesques of mauve and puce were merged in a depth of warm
color by the fleeting daylight. On the walls were autotypes of Mona Lisa
and Botticelli's Venus, of the Prince of Orange and little Philip the
Fourth, on his great horse. There was also an alleged Rubens, the
purchase of Maurice's first year at Oxford, from the responsibility of
whose possession he had never recovered. There were drawings on the
wall itself of arms and legs and breasts and necks, and a row of casts
in plaster of Paris. Here and there on shelves were blue ginger-jars,
Burmese masks and rolls of Florentine end-papers. There was a
grandfather-clock, lacquered and silent, which leaned slightly forward
to ponder its appearance in a Venetian mirror whose frame was blown in a
design of pink and blue roses and shepherds. The window-curtains were
chintz in a pattern of faded crimson birds and brown vine-leaves stained
with mildew. In one corner was a pile of brocaded green satin that was
intended to cover the undulating horsehair sofa before the fire.
Maurice's room was a new experience to Jenny.
"What a shocking untidy place!" she exclaimed. "What! It's like Madge
Wilson's mother's second-hand shop in the New Kent Road. You don't
_live_ here?"
"Yes, I do," said Maurice.
"Sleep here?"
"No; I sleep underneath. I've a bedroom with Castleton."
"Untidy, like this is?"
"No, rather tidy. Bath-tub, Sandow exerciser, and photographs of my
sisters by Ellis and Walery. Quite English and respectable."
Jenny went on:
"Doesn't all this mess ever get on your nerves? Don't you ever go mad to
clear it up?"
"You shall be mistress here and clear up when you like."
"All right, Artist Bill. I suppose you are an artist?"
"I don't know what I am. I'd like best to be a sculptor. You must sit
for me."
"The only artist I ever sat for I took off my belt to in the finish."
"Why?"
"He annoyed me. Go on. What else are you?"
"I'd like to be a musician."
"You've got a jolly fine piano, any way," said Jenny, sitting down to a
Bechstein grand to pick out some of Miss Victoria Monk's songs with the
right hand while she held a cigarette in the left.
"Then I write a bit," said Maurice. "Criticisms, you know. I told you I
wrote a notice of your ballet. I'm twenty-four and I shall come into a
certain amount of money, and my people live in a large house in Surrey
and oh, I--well--I'm a _dilettante_. Now you know my history."
"Whatever on earth's a dilly--you do use the most unnatural words. I
shall call you Dictionary Dick."
"Look here, let's chuck explanations," said Maurice. "I simply must kiss
you. Let's go and look out at the river."
He pulled her towards the window and flung it wide open. Together they
leaned out, smoking. The sparrows were silent now. They could hear the
splash and gurgle of the water against the piers, and the wind shaking
the plane tree bare along the embankment. They watched the lamp-lighter
go past on his twinkling pilgrimage. They listened to the thunder of
London streets a long way off. Their cigarettes were finished. Together
they dropped to extinction in a shower of orange sparks below.
Maurice drew Jenny back into the darkening room.
"Look! The windows are like big sapphires," he said, and caught her to
his arms. They stood enraptured in the dusk and shadows of the old
house. Round them Attic shapes glimmered: the gods of Greece regarded
them: Aphrodite laughed.
"Don't all these statues frighten you?" said Jenny.
"No, they're too beautiful."
"Oh!" screamed Jenny. "Oh! She moved. She moved."
"Don't be foolish, child. You're excited."
"I must go to the theater. It's late. I do feel silly."
"I'll drive you down."
"But I'll come again," she said. "Only next time we'll light the gas
when it gets dark. I hate these statues. They're like skelingtons."
"I'm going to make a statue of you. May I? Dancing?"
"If you like."
"I adore you."
"So do I you," said Jenny.
"Not so much as I do."
"Just as much, Mr. Knowall," she said, shaking her head.
They kissed once more.
"Jenny, Jenny!" It was almost a poignant cry. "Jenny, I wish this moment
were a thousand years. But never mind, we shall always be lovers."
"I hope we shall."
"Why only hope? We shall. We must."
"You never know," she whispered. "Men are funny; you never know."
"Don't you trust me?"
"I trust nobody. Yes, I do. I trust you."
"My darling, darling!"
Then downstairs they went, closer locked on every step, close together
with hearts beating, the world before them, and the stars winking
overhead.