During the long, hot August, which variously dispersed the rest of
their acquaintances, the intimacy of that ill-assorted couple, the
bird of passage Rainham, and Oswyn the artist, was able to ripen.
They met occasionally at Brodonowski's, of which dingy restaurant
they had now almost a monopoly; for its artistic session had been
prorogued, and the "boys" were scattered, departing one by one, as
their purses and inclinations prompted, to resume acquaintance with
their favourite "bits" in Cornwall, or among the orchards and moors
of Brittany, to study mountains in sad Merioneth, or to paint ocean
rollers and Irish peasants in ultimate Galway. On the occasion of
their second meeting, Rainham having (a trifle diffidently, for the
painter was not a questionable man) evinced a curiosity as to his
summer movements, Oswyn had scornfully repudiated such a notion.
"Thank God!" he cried, "I have outworn that mania of searching for
prettiness. London is big enough for me. My work is here, and the
studies I want are here, and here I stay till the end of all things.
I hate the tame country faces, the aggressive stillness and the
silent noise, the sentiment and the sheep of it. Give me the streets
and the yellow gas, the roar of the City, smoke, haggard faces,
flaming omnibuses, parched London, and the river rolling oilily by
the embankment like Styx at night when the lamps shine."
He drew in a breath thirstily, as though the picture were growing on
canvas before him.
"Well, if you want river subjects you must come and find them at
Blackpool," said Rainham; and Oswyn had replied abruptly that he
would.
And he kept his word, not once but many times, dropping down on
Rainham suddenly, unexplainedly, after his fashion, as it were from
the clouds, in the late afternoon, when the clerks had left. He
would chat there for an hour or two in his spasmodic, half-sullen
way, in which, however, an increasing cordiality mingled, making,
before he retired once more into space, some colour notes of the
yard or the river, or at times a rough sketch, which was never
without its terse originality.
Rainham began to look forward to these visits with a recurring
pleasure. Oswyn's beautiful genius and Oswyn's savage humours
fascinated him, and no less his pleasing, personal ambiguity. He
seemed to be a person without antecedents, as he was certainly
without present ties. Except that he painted, and so must have
a place to paint in, he might have lodged precariously in a
doss-house, or on door-steps, or under the Adelphi arches with those
outcasts of civilization to whom, in personal appearance, one might
not deny he bore a certain resemblance. To no one did he reveal his
abiding-place, and it was the merest tradition of little authority
that a man from Brodonowski's had once been taken to his studio. By
no means a perspicuous man, and to be approached perhaps charily;
yet Rainham, as his acquaintance progressed, found himself from time
to time brought up with a certain surprise, as he discovered, under
all his savage cynicism, his overweening devotion to a depressing
theory, a very real vein of refinement, of delicate mundane
sensibility, revealed perhaps in a chance phrase or diffidence, or
more often in some curiously fine touch to canvas of his rare,
audacious brush. The incongruities of the man, his malice, his
coarseness, his reckless generosity, gave Rainham much food for
thought. And, indeed, that parched empty August seemed full of
problematical issues; and he had, on matters of more import than the
enigmatic mind of a new friend, to be content at last to be tossed
to and fro on the winds of vain conjecture.
Lightmark and the Sylvesters occupied him much; but beyond a brief
note from Mrs. Sylvester in Lucerne, which told him nothing that he
would know, there came to him no news from Switzerland. In the
matter of the girl whom he had befriended, recklessly, he told
himself at times, difficulties multiplied. A sort of dumb devil
seemed to have entered into her, and, with the best will in the
world, it was a merely pecuniary assistance which he could give her,
half angry with himself the while that his indolent good nature (it
appeared to him little else) forbade him to cast back at her what
seemed a curious ingratitude almost passing the proverbial feminine
perversity, and let her go her own way as she would have it. On two
occasions, since that chance meeting in the Park, he had called
at the lodging in which he had helped her to install herself; and
from the last he had come away with a distinct sense of failure.
Something had come between them, an alien influence was in the
air, and the mystery which surrounded the girl, he saw with
disappointment, she would not of her own accord assist to dissipate.
And yet there was nothing offensive in her attitude, only it had
changed, lacked frankness.
One afternoon, finding that he could leave the dock early, he made
another effort. He stopped before one in a dingy row of small
houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the
Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively. A
slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of
drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for "Mrs. Crichton" by
ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in
black sat with her head bent over a typewriter. She rose, as he came
in, a little nervously, and stood, her thin hands clasped in front
of her, looking up at him with expectant, terrified eyes.
"I am sorry to alarm you," he said stiffly. "I came to see if I
could do anything for you, and to tell you once more that I can do
nothing for you unless you are open with me, unless you help me."
The woman looked away to where the child sat, in a corner of the
small room, playing with some disused cotton reels.
"You are very kind, sir," she said in a low, uneasy voice; "but I
want nothing, we want very little, the child and I; and with what
your kindness in getting me the machine helps us to, we have
enough."
"You don't want to be reinstated, to get back your lover, to have
your child acknowledged?"
The girl flushed; her hands, which were still locked together,
trembled a little.
"I don't want for nothing, sir, except to be left alone."
Then she added, looking him straight in the face now, with a certain
rude dignity:
"I wouldn't seem ungrateful, sir, for your great kindness. I think
you are the best man I ever met. Oh, believe me, I am not
ungrateful, sir! But it is no good, not a scrap, though once I
thought it. We must get along as we can now, the child and I--shame
and all."
She sighed, gazed intently for a silent minute at the keys of the
elaborate machine before her, and then continued, speaking very
slowly, as if she were afraid of drawing too largely on her
newly-found candour.
"Why should I keep it from you? It makes me feel a liar every time I
see you. I will be quite plain with you, sir; perhaps the truth's
best, though it's hard enough. I've seen him; that's why I couldn't
tell you any more. And it's all over and done, and God help us! We
must make the best of it. You see, sir, he is married," said the
girl, with a sharp intonation in her voice like a sob.
Rainham had sunk into a chair wearily; he looked up at her now,
drawing a long breath, which, for some reason he could not analyse,
was replete with relief.
"Married?" he ejaculated; "are you sure?"
"Sure enough," said Kitty Crichton. "He told me so."
"Do you care for this fellow?" he asked curiously after a while.
The flush on her face had faded into two hectic spots on either
cheek; there was a lack of all animation in her voice, whether of
hope or indignation; she had the air of a person who gave up, who
was terribly tired of things.
"Care?" she echoed. "I don't rightly know, sir; I think it's all
dead together--love and anger, and my good looks and all. I care for
the child, and I don't want to harry or hunt him down for the sake
of what has been,--that's all."
He regarded her with the same disinterested pity which had seized
him when he saw her first. There were only ruins of a beauty that
must have once been striking. As he watched her a doubt assailed
him, whether, after all, he had not been deceived by a bare
resemblance; whether, in effect, she had ever been actually
identical with that brilliant Pierrette whose likeness had so amazed
him in Lightmark's rooms.
"By the way," he asked suddenly, "you told me you have been a model:
did--was this man a painter? Has he ever painted you?"
The girl fell back a step or two irresolutely.
"Ah! why do you trouble so? What does it matter?" Then she added
faintly, but hurriedly stumbling over her words:
"He wasn't a painter--only for amusement; he didn't exhibit. He was
a newspaper writer. But he couldn't get work, and got a place in a
foreign-going steamer, to keep accounts, I think. That was
afterwards, and that's why I looked for him at your dock. They told
me the ship had been there, but it wasn't true. Ah! let me be, sir,
let me be!"
She broke off hastily, clasping her hands across her breast.
The story, though incoherent, was possible; Rainham could see no
motive for her deceiving him, and yet he believed she was lying. He
merely shrugged his shoulders, with a rising lassitude. He seemed to
have been infected by her own dreariness, to labour under a
disability of doing or saying any more; he, too, gave it up. He
wanted to get away out of the dingy room; its rickety table and
chairs, its two vulgar vases on the stained mantel, its gross
upholstery, seemed too trenchantly sordid in the strong August sun.
The child's golden head--she was growing intelligent now, and strong
on her legs--was the one bright spot in the room. He stopped to pat
it with a great pity, a sense of too much pathos in things flooding
him, before he passed out again into the mean street.