HILARY PUTS AN END TO IT
Like flies caught among the impalpable and smoky threads of cobwebs,
so men struggle in the webs of their own natures, giving here a
start, there a pitiful small jerking, long sustained, and failing
into stillness. Enmeshed they were born, enmeshed they die, fighting
according to their strength to the end; to fight in the hope of freedom,
their joy; to die, not knowing they are beaten, their reward. Nothing,
too, is more to be remarked than the manner in which Life devises for
each man the particular dilemmas most suited to his nature; that which
to the man of gross, decided, or fanatic turn of mind appears a simple
sum, to the man of delicate and speculative temper seems to have no
answer.
So it was with Hilary in that special web wherein his spirit struggled,
sunrise unto sunset, and by moonlight afterward. Inclination, and the
circumstances of a life which had never forced him to grips with either
men or women, had detached him from the necessity for giving or taking
orders. He had almost lost the faculty. Life had been a picture with
blurred outlines melting into a softly shaded whole. Not for years had
anything seemed to him quite a case for “Yes” or “No.” It had been
his creed, his delight, his business, too, to try and put himself in
everybody's place, so that now there were but few places where he did
not, speculatively speaking, feel at home.
Putting himself into the little model's place gave him but small
delight. Making due allowance for the sentiment men naturally import
into their appreciation of the lives of women, his conception of her
place was doubtless not so very wrong.
Here was a child, barely twenty years of age, country bred, neither a
lady nor quite a working-girl, without a home or relatives, according to
her own account--at all events, without those who were disposed to help
her--without apparently any sort of friend; helpless by nature, and
whose profession required a more than common wariness--this girl he
was proposing to set quite adrift again by cutting through the single
slender rope which tethered her. It was like digging up a little
rose-tree planted with one's own hands in some poor shelter, just
when it had taken root, and setting it where the full winds would beat
against it. To do so brusque and, as it seemed to Hilary, so inhumane
a thing was foreign to his nature. There was also the little matter of
that touch of fever--the distant music he had been hearing since the
waggons came in to Covent Garden.
With a feeling that was almost misery, therefore, he waited for her on
Monday afternoon, walking to and fro in his study, where all the walls
were white, and all the woodwork coloured like the leaf of a cigar;
where the books were that colour too, in Hilary's special deerskin
binding; where there were no flowers nor any sunlight coming through
the windows, but plenty of sheets of paper--a room which youth seemed to
have left for ever, the room of middle age!
He called her in with the intention of at once saying what he had to
say, and getting it over in the fewest words. But he had not reckoned
fully either with his own nature or with woman's instinct. Nor had he
allowed--being, for all his learning, perhaps because of it, singularly
unable to gauge the effects of simple actions--for the proprietary
relations he had established in the girl's mind by giving her those
clothes.
As a dog whose master has it in his mind to go away from him, stands
gazing up with tragic inquiry in his eyes, scenting to his soul that
coming cruelty--as a dog thus soon to be bereaved, so stood the little
model.
By the pose of every limb, and a fixed gaze bright as if tears were
behind it, and by a sort of trembling, she seemed to say: 'I know why
you have sent for me.'
When Hilary saw her stand like that he felt as a man might when told to
flog his fellow-creature. To gain time he asked her what she did with
herself all day. The little model evidently tried to tell herself that
her foreboding had been needless.
Now that the mornings were nice--she said with some animation--she got
up much earlier, and did her needlework first thing; she then “did out”
the room. There were mouse-holes in her room, and she had bought a trap.
She had caught a mouse last night. She hadn't liked to kill it; she had
put it in a tin box, and let it go when she went out. Quick to see that
Hilary was interested in this, as well he might be, she told him that
she could not bear to see cats hungry or lost dogs, especially lost
dogs, and she described to him one that she had seen. She had not liked
to tell a policeman; they stared so hard. Those words were of strange
omen, and Hilary turned his head away. The little model, perceiving that
she had made an effect of some sort, tried to deepen it. She had
heard they did all sorts of things to people--but, seeing at once from
Hilary's face that she was not improving her effect, she broke off
suddenly, and hastily began to tell him of her breakfast, of how
comfortable she was now she had got her clothes; how she liked her room;
how old Mr. Creed was very funny, never taking any notice of her when he
met her in the morning. Then followed a minute account of where she had
been trying to get work; of an engagement promised; Mr. Lennard, too,
still wanted her to pose to him. At this she gashed a look at Hilary,
then cast down her eyes. She could get plenty of work if she began that
way. But she hadn't, because he had told her not, and, of course, she
didn't want to; she liked coming to Mr. Stone so much. And she got on
very well, and she liked London, and she liked the shops. She mentioned
neither Hughs nor Mrs. Hughs. In all this rigmarole, told with such
obvious purpose, stolidity was strangely mingled with almost cunning
quickness to see the effect made; but the dog-like devotion was never
quite out of her eyes when they were fixed on Hilary.
This look got through the weakest places in what little armour Nature
had bestowed on him. It touched one of the least conceited and most
amiable of men profoundly. He felt it an honour that anything so young
as this should regard him in that way. He had always tried to keep
out of his mind that which might have given him the key to her special
feeling for himself--those words of the painter of still life: “She's
got a story of some sort.” But it flashed across him suddenly like an
inspiration: If her story were the simplest of all stories--the direct,
rather brutal, love affair of a village boy and girl--would not she,
naturally given to surrender, be forced this time to the very antithesis
of that young animal amour which had brought on her such, sharp
consequences?
But, wherever her devotion came from, it seemed to Hilary the grossest
violation of the feelings of a gentleman to treat it ungratefully. Yet
it was as if for the purpose of saying, “You are a nuisance to me, or
worse!” that he had asked her to his study. Her presence had hitherto
chiefly roused in him the half-amused, half-tender feelings of one who
strokes a foal or calf, watching its soft uncouthness; now, about to
say good-bye to her, there was the question of whether that was the only
feeling.
Miranda, stealing out between her master and his visitor, growled.
The little model, who was stroking a china ash-tray with her ungloved,
inky fingers, muttered, with a smile, half pathetic, half cynical: “She
doesn't like me! She knows I don't belong here. She hates me to come.
She's jealous!”
Hilary said abruptly:
“Tell me! Have you made any friends since you've been in London?”
The girl flashed a look at him that said:
'Could I make you jealous?'
Then, as though guilty of afar too daring thought, drooped her head, and
answered:
“No.”
“Not one?”
The little model repeated almost passionately: “No. I don't want any
friends; I only want to be let alone.”
Hilary began speaking rapidly.
“But these Hughs have not left you alone. I told you, I thought you
ought to move; I've taken another room for you quite away from them.
Leave your furniture with a week's rent, and take your trunk quietly
away to-morrow in a cab without saying a word to anyone. This is the new
address, and here's the money for your expenses. They're dangerous for
you, those people.”
The little model muttered desperately: “But I don't care what they do!”
Hilary went on: “Listen! You mustn't come here again, or the man will
trace you. We will take care you have what's necessary till you can get
other work.”
The little model looked up at him without a word. Now that the thin
link which bound her to some sort of household gods had snapped, all the
patience and submission bred in her by village life, by the hard facts
of her story, and by these last months in London, served her well
enough. She made no fuss. Hilary saw a tear roll down her cheek.
He turned his head away, and said: “Don't cry, my child!”
Quite obediently the little model swallowed the tear. A thought seemed
to strike her:
“But I could see you, Mr. Dallison, couldn't I, sometimes?”
Seeing from his face that this was not in the programme, she stood
silent again, looking up at him.
It was a little difficult for Hilary to say: “I can't see you because my
wife is jealous!” It was cruel to tell her: “I don't want to see you!”
besides, it was not true.
“You'll soon be making friends,” he said at last, “and you can always
write to me”; and with a queer smile he added: “You're only just
beginning life; you mustn't take these things to heart; you'll find
plenty of people better able to advise and help you than ever I shall
be!”
The little model answered this by seizing his hand with both of hers.
She dropped it again at once, as if guilty of presumption, and stood
with her head bent. Hilary, looking down on the little hat which, by his
special wish, contained no feathers, felt a lump rise in his throat.
“It's funny,” he said; “I don't know your Christian name.”
“Ivy,” muttered the little model.
“Ivy! Well, I'll write to you. But you must promise me to do exactly as
I said.”
The girl looked up; her face was almost ugly--like a child's in whom a
storm of feeling is repressed.
“Promise!” repeated Hilary.
With a bitter droop of her lower lip, she nodded, and suddenly put her
hand to her heart. That action, of which she was clearly unconscious,
so naively, so almost automatically was it done, nearly put an end to
Hilary's determination.
“Now you must go,” he said.
The little model choked, grew very red, and then quite white.
“Aren't I even to say good-bye to Mr. Stone?”
Hilary shook his head.
“He'll miss me,” she said desperately. “He will. I know he will!”
“So shall I,” said Hilary. “We can't help that.”
The little model drew herself up to her full height; her breast heaved
beneath the clothes which had made her Hilary's. She was very like “The
Shadow” at that moment, as though whatever Hilary might do there she
would be--a little ghost, the spirit of the helpless submerged world,
for ever haunting with its dumb appeal the minds of men.
“Give me your hand,” said Hilary.
The little model put out her not too white, small hand. It was soft,
clinging: and as hot as fire.
“Good-bye, my dear, and bless you!”
The little model gave him a look with who-knows-what of reproach in it,
and, faithful to her training, went submissively away.
Hilary did not look after her, but, standing by the lofty mantelpiece
above the ashes of the fire, rested his forehead on his arm. Not even a
fly's buzzing broke the stillness. There was sound for all that-not of
distant music, but of blood beating in his ears and temples.