All her life long Gillian had been a spectator. The joys of her life had
been the joys of the eye and the mind. Her sorrows had been few. The
loss of her father, although she was unaware of it, had been mitigated
for her, as it could not have been in a more physically passionate
creature, by the consolations of that kingdom of the spirit wherein his
companionship had taught her to travel. Her mind, in a very literal
sense, was its own place. Since her father’s death she had possessed it
alone. Trained by him to make æsthetic discriminations and to take her
own pleasure in any manifestation of life or art, not only as the only
valid test of its worth, but as the highest form of happiness attainable
in human experience, she had, without any conscious intention, failed to
develop the faculty for establishing personal relationships, for taking
root in any place or affection, which her essentially friendly and
enthusiastic nature should have encouraged. Lilac, who was both more
captious and less affectionate than her sister, had many friends,
useful, ornamental or merely pleasant, with whom she quarrelled or
amused herself, and had whirled her way through several love-affairs
before she met Toby Bottomley and decided that in him she had found the
husband she required. But Gillian depended for her friendships either on
circumstance, or on the determination of those who were willing to
pursue. Love-affairs she had none. There had been two strange episodes,
both of them of almost the same kind, in which infatuated strangers had
applied to her parents for permission to address her, and, on the second
occasion, Gillian, who was by then nearly twenty-two, had had some
trouble in assuring her widowed and excusably flustered mother that she
didn’t even know the young man by sight.
“Do you mean to tell me, Gillian,” her mother had said when discussing
the matter, “do you seriously mean to tell me that this is another case
of that student at Lausanne all over again?”
And Gillian had assured her mother that, so far as her conscious
knowledge of the affair was concerned, this was indeed a repetition of
that old vexation. And it had seemed to her that she was once again an
onlooker at a play, the central character of which was a man who had
fallen in love with a girl to whom he had never spoken a word.
But that afternoon, through the clear May sunshine that was beginning to
turn golden with the westering beams, there came to Gillian, as to a
long-prepared appointment, a creature who filled the eye to overflowing
with that completed harmony between experience and imagination which,
when it comes to any empty heart, is the most unmistakable of all
vanquishing powers.
She was sitting on her heels, having taken off her hat as soon as she
was inside the gateway (Gillian never wore a hat a minute longer than
she needed, and not always so long as she should), and was watching the
cat and admiring the bowl, when the door of the opposite building opened
and a tall, dark woman came out and stood at the top of the steps.
Even before she came down to the courtyard and claimed it, Gillian knew
that this was the owner of the china bowl, the Providence that dispensed
clotted cream to dirty little strays. But as she came with a swift,
steady stride, the free rapid movement of a woman who had been much with
horses, who had ridden from childhood, Gillian also knew, with a thrill
of recognition so strange, so new to her experience that the shock of it
took away all sense of any other consideration, that she beheld in the
flesh the very image of a perfection wrought by her own imaginings in
the secret places of her dreaming mind. This was not a beautiful
creature for all the world to see and gape at, it was the figure—unique
of its kind—for which the shrine of her spirit had stood empty and
waiting till now.
Dark hair, “curled like breakers of the sea” away from a low brow under
which clear, tawny eyes shone beneath fine, exquisitely arched eyebrows;
a wide mouth parted like a ripe pomegranate in a smile that showed
white, even teeth, each separated from its fellow; an impression of
clear red and white in the complexion, and, above all, that swift,
scythe-like movement from hip to knee as the figure approached her where
she crouched on the doorstep beside the lapping, oblivious cat, these
were the first things Gillian was aware of as she gazed stupidly upwards
into the vivid face.
“Is this your little cat?”
The voice was a disappointment: flat, metallic, not coming from any
depth, curiously old and lifeless for so vital-seeming a possessor.
“Oh, no!” said Gillian, “we aren’t allowed to keep cats in the Club;
didn’t you know?”
“Yes, I knew,” said the stranger, “but I thought you might be keeping
one.”
“You must have thought I was behaving very badly to it,” Gillian
retorted, “if you’ve been feeding it too.”
“Oh, well, I saw it was hungry. It’s been about for some days. I can see
it from my window.” She made no attempt to excuse herself for the
implied charge of neglect. Gillian thought she couldn’t have noticed it.
“I _heard_ it,” said Gillian. “I couldn’t see it at first. It seems to
prefer this side of the yard.”
“Yes,” said the stranger. “So you live in the Club?”
“I do,” said Gillian, “my name is Gillian Armstrong.”
“Do you spell it with a J?”
“No,” said Gillian, “it’s a soft G, like gilly-flower. I can see you
live in the Club,” she went on, “because you’ve come out without a hat,
but I’ve never seen you before. Are you a new member?”
“Yes, rather new. I came in last year. I know you quite well by sight. I
see you from my window.”
“That’s because I don’t have curtains across mine,” said Gillian. “Up on
the top floor it doesn’t really seem necessary. And Mrs. Gordon told me,
when I asked if people could see in from below, that she’d never seen
nothing wrong in my rooms.”
The other laughed, a short dry “honk” that added no more mirth to her
steadily smiling eyes.
“Mrs. Gordon is a scream,” she said, “so is Mr. Gordon. Do you like his
dog?”
“No,” said Gillian. “I can’t bear Crack, and I don’t think you’d better
leave this lovely bowl down here. Crack will break it, you know.”
The cat had licked the last smear of cream from the sides of the bowl,
and was now rubbing itself round the stranger’s ankles. Gillian with the
bowl in her hands, stood up.
“Shall I wash it for you?” she said; “I’ll do it with my tea-things and
send it over by the maid who brings my dinner.”
“Oh, don’t let Mabel bring it,” said the stranger, betraying what seemed
to Gillian an extraordinary familiarity with the arrangements of the
Club under which the four little housemaids revolved from floor to floor
with each returning moon, so that you had the same maid for a month at a
time and then passed into the hands of one of the other three. Gillian
herself was quite incapable of finding out or of remembering which maid
was waiting on any other floor but her own, though she had gathered from
the verbosities of Mrs. Gordon that some floors were more popular with
the servants than others, either because of the kindness of their
occupiers or because of the more sensational furniture and adventures
which occasionally distinguished one member from another in the gossip
of the Club.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Mabel is the rough one, she might drop
it. How did you know it was Mabel’s turn on our landing?”
“Mabel did my floor last month,” said the stranger, “and she told me she
was going to yours in time for the wedding.”
Gillian knew that a wave of resentment flowed through some dim backwater
of her mind at this intrusion, but it was drowned in the flood of
expectation with which she accepted a suggestion that, if she really
insisted on washing out the Chinese bowl, its owner would be delighted
to see her with it in her own flat.
“My name is Victoria Vanderleyden,” she said, “and I live at Number 36.
Do come up to coffee.”
Gillian had never been bidden to go anywhere “to coffee” before, but she
took the formula to indicate that she would be expected immediately
after dinner, and she accepted the invitation saying she would come as
soon as she had turned the cat out for the night. For the cat was
already inside the door, looking back over its shoulder, a little
impatiently at Gillian, and plainly intending to dine with her that
night also.