IX

Gillian had a dazed, deafening headache. She couldn’t stay on and

chatter to the wedding-guests. She couldn’t go on and dine at Claridge’s

before the theatre-party with which the day was to end.

Old Winona had another Macfarlane to look after her now. Gillian was

absolved from her duties and was going to take a proper secretarial

course in order to fit her for real life, a business for which life at

99 was no sort of preparation. So Gillian was free to go home to the

Club by herself; Mrs. Barraclough was making a complete orgy of it with

the Roehamptons and the Glyndes.

She took off her preposterous hat, shook the powder out of her hair, put

on a hooded cloak and slipped out of the busy, indifferent hotel into

the April twilight and walked down to the river.

It was a soft, dim evening, heavy with spring. The plane-trees on the

Embankment were shaking the fine splinters of their stamens out of the

little tasselled bracts that opened with soft popping noises in the

still leafless boughs. The air was as clouded and green-grey as the

water; the figures hurrying to get out of the Park before the gate

closed for the night moved on the other side of the river as if behind

glass in an aquarium.

Gillian leaned across the parapet and let the breeze that blew

down-stream cool her aching flushed face. The tide was low. A few

desultory gulls, the stragglers of the main fleet which had put to sea

with the onset of mild weather some weeks earlier, scavenged quietly in

the mud at the water’s edge. A police-boat prowled up from Vauxhall; two

barges keeping to mid-channel travelled with the ebb, their sails set to

catch what airs might stir to aid them. The evening was not so much

peaceful as indifferent. Gillian lingered on, and an increasing

desolation preyed within her. What was it that Lilac had done?

“Lilac will always know that she is paying for a fake.” That was what

her father had said. Was Toby a fake? Lilac had wanted him. She had

wanted him so much that she had at last stretched out her soft arm and

taken him by guile with her rosy, tapping fingers. Gillian never

remembered that hand, creeping into the lamplight and shaking all poor

Toby’s unhappy resistance, without a shock of wonder. What exactly was

it that Lilac had done to him? How did she know she could do it? It was

predatory, her gesture, yet it gave away something that could never be

taken back again. Lilac had been paying, paying deliberately, for Toby.

But was it Toby, the essential Toby, that dim, kind, gentle Toby who

loved horses and fine engravings and had such clumsy hands and such

vague, beseeching eyes that Lilac had bought with the lilt of a song

from a fairy-tale? Or was it what Toby stood for? Was it only the power

to buy everything, to go everywhere, to make, if she chose, such a

crammed and monotonous wilderness of any house as Old Winona had made of

99, that Lilac really wanted in Toby? wanted it so much that she had

confused Toby, who was not in the least magnificent with the

magnificence she could reach through him? Gillian thought with a slow

gust of remorse of that far-off, unconsidered Millicent who too, in her

day, had wanted Toby, and who was now—neither she nor Lilac had ever

stopped to ask if she were dead—at least she had never spoken of Toby’s

first wife to Lilac. What Toby had said to Lilac about her was their own

affair; but Gillian might have spared her a thought.

Lower and lower in her own esteem she plunged, down into the dark

undergrowth where motives lie tangled in egoism and vanity. Jealousy of

her sister; envy of Lilac’s freedom; feeble self-pity for her own

loneliness—as if she didn’t want to be alone—assailed her as she groped

in the shadows of her heart. What an aftermath of a wedding! Why

couldn’t she be happy because Lilac was free, because she had both hands

full of what she most wanted? Gillian wanted freedom too. But it wasn’t,

after all, freedom that someone else’s money could give her. Lilac had

freed herself with one hand by fettering the other. In a way she was

more bound than Gillian, who could never hope to be freer than she was

now.

Gillian’s headache was gone; it had faded out with the daylight. The sky

was quite black above the Embankment lights now, and the tide was rising

and taking fresh reflections, long swords of light from the lamps on the

bridges, as the waters broadened beneath them. Gillian turned her face

to go home, her self-reviling over. But there was still an ache of

disappointment in her thoughts. What was it she had asked of this day,

that thing for herself, that secret and peculiar enjoyment which had not

been given to her? Long ago, when she was a child, she had known this

unsatisfied ache. “I’m not hungry, but I know there’s something very

delicious I’ve not eaten,” she had explained to her father. Now the ache

was there, but she knew what she had missed. It was the climax of the

wedding-service which had never come; the moment when, in her prayer for

Lilac, she had hoped, had meant to reach out and touch her father’s

spirit if it could be possible that that spirit remained aware of her.

She had promised herself to wait with closed eyes for the words:

“... whose daughters ye are so long as ye do well and are not

afraid with any amazement.”

and they had never been spoken.

Lilac and Old Winona together had had the service thoroughly pruned. The

Bishop had tweetled an inaudible little sermon over the married pair,

the murmurs of which were drowned to the congregation in the creaking of

the bridesmaids’ gilded flower-baskets as they stood separated from the

bride and fidgeting in the aisle for the end of the performance. There

had been little need for consecrated phrases at the Pantomime Wedding.

CHAPTER THREE.

THE TORTOISESHELL CAT

I

There was a knock at the door.

Gillian, who was dusting books in the inner room, ran out to answer it

without taking off the brown holland overall she was wearing, or untying

the old, blue, silk handkerchief with which she had covered her head.

Jane Bird stood on the landing.

“Good morning, Tanagra,” she said, her face impassive behind her round

spectacles. “_The Times_ has announced that Moloch has devoured your

sister, so I’ve come to see if you’ve been singed at all during the

sacrifice.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Gillian, torn between shyness,

excitement and an unresentful knowledge that Jane was being very

impertinent, and that she was not going to be able to snub her for it.

“Don’t you know about the Bottomley Sunbaths for Ricketty Children?”

said Jane, “and may I come inside?” She followed Gillian into the inner

room and sat down, very tall and flat, like a creature hewn and jointed

together out of planks, on the red chesterfield.

“Your brother-in-law has celebrated his marriage by giving a sun-cure

installation, in Dorset, to the London Hospital,” she said. “It’s in the

papers with photographs of the wedding. There’s one of you in fancy

dress, with the fancy hat a little on one side. You oughtn’t to try the

piquant style. Undine or Ophelia, with your hair quite down, and no

stays, is all you should ever allow yourself.”

“You can’t have Ophelia bridesmaids,” said Gillian, “it would be

tactless. Hamlet was such an unmarrying-man. And how nice of Toby! He

kept it very quiet. I didn’t know.”

“Very wise of him till he’d got clear of the country, or he’d have all

the hospitals in the kingdom after him. I know. I was brought up on the

lap of a hospital committee. My father was the director of Addenbrokes

till he died. That’s how I know so much more about Life and its

Mysteries than most young women. I read all his books, and it wasn’t

only medicine. I’m an orphan now, like you. I’ve got a mother—if mother

indeed she can be called. She’s third curate, unpaid, at St. Luke’s, and

I’ve taken a studio in Buckingham Palace Road for six months.”

“Aren’t you going to Oxford?”

“Nor to Cambridge. They’re coming to me. Do you know Larry Browne?”

“No,” said Gillian.

“You will soon,” Jane assured her. “He knows about you; his father was

your father’s tutor at B.N.C., and he’s got a photograph of your father

in his studio that might be you with your hair cut short and your nose a

size larger. I recognized it because it’s the same one as I saw here the

day I called on your sister last summer.”

“It’s the only photograph he ever had taken that wasn’t a snapshot one,”

said Gillian. “And why has your Mr. Browne got it? where did he get it?”

“His father had it from your father in the days when you were both

unborn. It’s like a nursery rhyme,” said Jane, “and he’s trying to put

it into a large allegorical picture he’s going to enter for some prize

or other. Up in the top corner—complicated with wings and a halo.”

“I think,” said Gillian, “I think I should like to see it.”

“Come along then,” said Jane Bird; “it’s only on the other side of the

bridge.”

They walked together over the bridge and along by the palings of

Battersea Park, and as they went Jane told Gillian that she had

discarded scholarship for sculpture, and had already sold two figures to

a shop in Bond Street.

“They’re not good,” said Jane Bird, “my figures are not good, but

they’re very pretty, and I sell them for five pounds apiece.”

Presently they crossed the road, went through the fragment of a gate

that hung between two blistered gate-posts in a fence which ran along

the footpath between two blocks of flats, and found themselves in a

long, asphalted garden, common to a row of studios, where the fires of

Spring were vainly striving to cover up the traces of the bonfires of

November.

The studios were of commercial build. Red brick, faced with white stone,

cut into unnecessary and depressing arabesques above the gutters, held

the doors, windows and skylights together. The woodwork of the whole row

had originally been painted in that peculiar liver-coloured red which

distinguishes the entrances of the Piccadilly and Brompton Tube

stations, and is so often used by the London builder to enhance the

yellower red of London bricks. But, here and there in the row, an

occupant had sickened at the shade and had splashed in white or green

over the landlord’s paint. The door of the last studio in the row was

new and shining in a rich cobalt.

“That is the azure goal of our pilgrimage,” said Jane Bird, and Gillian

found that she dared not ask her to express herself with direct

simplicity. Jane was making it perfectly clear that Gillian was no

longer in authority and that she, Jane, intended to be as ornate and

ridiculous as she pleased, when she pleased; would indeed go out of her

way to be ridiculous and ornate, just for the triumph of seeing Gillian

check her impulse to protest.

Larry Browne, who opened the door to them, was tall and

broad-shouldered, with thick, strong, golden-brown hair that curved

without curling from either side of a deep, straight parting dividing

his head from crown to brow. He had light eyes; grey-green with yellow

gleams in them, and there was a curious triangular fleck in the iris of

his left eye that gave him a false expression of being a man with an

outward cast. He had a small, neat nose with beautiful wide nostrils

that drank the air freely, and a beautiful fresh mouth from one corner

of which, at that moment, hung a long cherry-wood pipe with a tassel

half-way down its stem, and a china bowl, with a lid to it, painted with

robins and forget-me-nots that hopped and twined in and out of the

device _Traum und Rauch_ which ran in large black Gothic capitals below

its brim. He wore a shantung shirt which had once been blue, but had

passed through many washings and was now clouded, like an August sky,

where the colour had run, leaving irregular white spaces. An enormous

pair of green corduroy trousers was folded into the tops of his brown

boots at the ankles, and pleated into a leather belt round his waist. In

spite, or even because of, this voluminous garment, the young man

appeared remarkable for slenderness and grace as he stood in the

doorway, the sunlight beating full on his clear, bright skin, filling

the little freckles that crossed from cheek to cheek with colour, and

striking a high-light off the curve of the jaw that ran, a clean line,

from behind his small flat ear to the end of his slightly pointed chin.

“Behold,” said Jane Bird, still daring Gillian to protest, “the youth is

ruddy and withal of a fair countenance and beautiful to look to.”

“Hullo, Aholah!” said the young man in an even voice, removing the pipe

from his mouth as he spoke, and shutting down the pewter lid of its bowl

with one finger. “Come in. We call your friend Aholah,” he said, turning

to Gillian, “partly on account of her iniquities, but also because it

was my good fortune to stumble on the derivation of that ancient name.

It means ‘she that has her own tent,’ which is Miss Bird’s case, while

I,” said Larry Browne, “am forced to share mine with a faun, as you may

see for yourself.”

He pulled aside the curtain which shut the little lobby off from the

studio itself, letting it fall again as the two girls passed into the

gaunt, white room.

Larry Browne’s studio was the usual wilderness of easels, canvases,

mahl-sticks and more or less damaged properties, furred with the usual

dust, smelling of the customary oil and turpentine. The blinds were not

drawn across the skylight and the studio was flooded with sunshine. All

the low windows on the farther side were open on to a hedge of box and

ivy and Virginia creeper which was noisy with sparrows. Some of the

sparrows had hopped in over the window-seat, and three of them were

fluttering and pecking on the boards below the model’s throne. A fourth

was perched on the knee of the figure which occupied the throne; seated

on it with one leg hanging down, the other crossed and bent so that one

naked foot lay on the right knee, just behind the unruffled bird.

It was the figure of a man so slight and supple that at a first glance

he seemed little more than a child.

He wore a light-blue suit like an engineer’s overall, held up by a tape

which passed over his neck from the middle of the garment and left his

arms and shoulders as bare as his thin, brown feet. Some one—it was most

probably Larry—had stuck an ivy-leaf into the close black curls on each

side of the creature’s head, and the stiff corners stood up like horns,

widening the low, wide brow and giving to the dark, heavily lashed eyes

which looked out from under the thick eyebrows, a woodland air. The face

narrowed on either side of a long hooked nose to a chin deeply cleft

below a mouth which was at the moment pursed up into a soundless

whistle. The faun was holding converse with the sparrow, having for this

purpose broken off his attempt to clear up the studio with a

long-handled broom which leant up against the throne and served as a

perch for yet another brown bird.

“Heinrich,” said Larry Browne, “you must shoo those fowls away. We have

other guests.”

The faun, with one liquid movement, broke the angles of his pose and,

gathering the complacent sparrows together, bore them, perched on the

fingers of either hand to the window and placed them, chirruping, in the

hedge outside.

“I go to put on coats, vaistcoats too,” he said with a brilliant,

melancholy smile, and vanished.

“Heinrich,” Larry explained, “is a faun by day. At six o’clock he puts

on more coats and waistcoats and goes out to play in the second violins

at Queen’s Hall. Some of him is German as his name expresses, some of

him is Italian, some of him is Jew. His father undoubtedly was Pan. He

must have had a good many mothers.”

“And when you’ve done painting him into your fresco,” said Jane Bird,

“he’s going to sit to me with a sparrow, real or stuffed.”

“I wonder if William would sit with him,” said Gillian. “It wouldn’t be

the same thing as a sparrow, of course.”

“It would be quite another subject,” said Jane. “‘Tame cockatoo

devouring wild violinist’ I should think would be what the group would

sell as.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gillian, and didn’t look for fear of seeing Jane

Bird’s small annotating smile at her capitulation.

“I suppose you’re doing Heinrich as Pan,” said Jane.

“I’m not,” said Larry Browne, “Heinrich with sparrows is clearly a

Cytherean theme. Without his overall, as you’ll see presently, he loses

touch with nature. But, morning by morning as he sweeps the dust about

the floor and encourages those vulgar birds to be perfectly at ease

indoors, I’ve wondered what it was he reminded me of. He’s my idea of

Cupid.”

“Goodness!” said Gillian.

“Even so,” said Larry. “With a bunch of arrows stuck through the front

of that pointed pinafore of his, serious with a sidelong eye—a

conscious, predestinate demiurge—enslaved by his own destiny of

enslavement.”

“That’s an Orphic Eros, not a Cupid,” said Jane.

“By Orcus out of Aphrodite,” chanted Larry.

“Oh, well,” said Jane, “if you like to mix your parents to fit the

faun.... Aren’t you going to be charming to Miss Armstrong? She’s come

because your father knew her father.”

Larry Browne was easily charming. He remembered Gerald Armstrong’s visit

to his old tutor, soon after his marriage to little Ellen, when Larry

himself was a child of six. “He told me about you,” he said to Gillian,

“he said you’d only one tooth and no hair. I wanted dreadfully to see

you. I didn’t realize you were just a normal baby such as I could see

any day in perambulators on Boar’s Hill. He called you ‘my daughter’ and

I thought you must be grown up, particularly as he said you had the most

beautiful manners, in which alas! you differed from me, as my mother

pointed out, rather tactlessly, I thought.”

And Gillian asked more about that visit, and discovered that Larry had

been in Munich only a month after they’d left it five years ago, and had

had re-introductions to her father which he’d never used, either then or

in Paris, where they might have met if he’d only known. It was clear

that the whole of Europe was thick with welcome for Larry Browne, and

that he never used half his introductions in any place he visited. He

had, indeed, it appeared, come to Battersea because London was the only

place where you can really hide, “and even here,” said Larry Browne,

“I’m subject to the inquisitions of Aholah Bird.”

He showed Gillian the head he had painted from her father’s photograph

in the long procession he was designing for a frieze which was the

subject set for a certain much-coveted prize that year.

“He’s the Knight. I’m doing imaginary characters, Fairy-Tale ones. I

wish you’d sit to me for an hour if you’ve time one morning?”

“What as?” said Jane Bird sharply.

“As a changeling, of course,” said Larry Browne. “I wonder you troubled

to ask so answered a question.”

“Of course,” said Jane, “it’s what I’ve always wondered, and now you’ve

told me. Well, I wish you luck.”

Heinrich came back, rather more human, in a very shiny blue serge suit,

a wisp of frayed tie holding the soft collar of his grey flannel shirt

together, and they all four went out into Battersea Park and gave the

raven in the aviary in the maze everything that was left over from the

studio breakfast that morning.