IV

The door of Number 36 stood open and lamplight poured out from the room

over the dark landing where Gordon had not yet lit the gas-jet, when

Gillian, carrying the china bowl and a bunch of purple centaureas from a

basket of flowers which Sophie had left at the flat on her way from

Glynde that afternoon, reached the third floor of the house across the

courtyard, soon after eight o’clock.

It was, Gillian saw, one of the large, two-windowed rooms. The windows

looked westward, across the tops of the trees in the gardens of Cheyne

Row, and through them, lower than the lamplight, there still came the

glow of a late, red sunset. Accustomed as she was to the roofs and

chimneys of the street, or to the windows of the house across the

courtyard as the familiar views from the Club windows, Gillian felt, as

she entered this lit and quiet room, as though she were going into some

far country.

Her own rooms and those of the Countess and of the Middletons, the only

flats beside her own and Mrs. Barraclough’s into which she had so far

entered, were all colour-washed a uniform cream, with white paint on the

doors and window-frames and skirting-boards; and this colour scheme was,

so Mrs. Barraclough had told the Armstrongs when they took their flat,

the rule of the Club.

But Miss Vanderleyden had evidently been allowed to break that rule, for

her walls were tinted lavender, and all the woodwork that surrounded

them was black. Long curtains, a shade darker than the walls, and

touched by the sunset into a rosy mauve, hung at the windows, and two

red, wooden candlesticks on the black chimney-shelf matched two painted

Norwegian chairs which stood on either side of a low black table. A wide

divan against the wall at one end of the room was covered with black

satin and heaped with red and green cushions, and the bare boards of the

floor were black and shining. There were no pictures on the walls, but a

mirror in a red frame hung from ceiling to floor between the windows,

and over the fireplace there spread a fan-shaped case in which hundreds

of South Sea Island shells were ranged together in a geometrical

pattern. Gillian looked for books, but there were none to be seen.

“Perhaps she keeps them behind those strange curtains,” she thought,

noting that three of the far corners of the long room were curtained off

with what was obviously stuff from Burnets in Garrick Street, a shop

into which Lilac, who preferred her cretonnes flowered, had definitely

forbidden Gillian to go when they were furnishing Number Seven.

A strong smell of freshly made coffee filled the whole landing; but of

Miss Vanderleyden herself there was no trace. Gillian crossed the room

and went over to the open window. Between two blocks of houses she saw

the river move, still burnished in the fading light, and voices rose

faintly from the small gardens under the trees below, where the dwellers

in Cheyne Row were sitting out in the cool of the day. In one of the

gardens a row of Chinese lanterns had been festooned between the

branches, and some one was lighting them as if in preparation for a

festivity. One green, one orange and one variegated globe were already

swinging in the dusk and Gillian was waiting with absorbed, delightful

speculation as to the probable colour of the fourth lantern, when a

sound close beside her made her turn. Miss Vanderleyden was standing by

the table on which she had placed a Benares tray with coffee-cups. She

was gazing with lighted eyes, not at Gillian, but at her own reflection

in the long, scarlet-rimmed mirror between the windows.

“Come and look,” she said, without taking her eyes away from the glass

before her.

Gillian obeyed. Miss Vanderleyden had taken the red candlesticks from

over the fireplace and had lighted the tall, white candles they held and

had placed them on the table so that their wavering flames lit up her

face as she leaned between them. The door, still open behind her, showed

the dark abyss of the unlit landing beyond, which repeated itself in

profound obscurity in the depths of the looking-glass. Out of the heart

of the darkness the vivid face floated midway on the surface of the

mirror—wide, white brow, wide, luminous eyes, wide, smiling mouth. Miss

Vanderleyden had not changed the soft, dark, brown dress she had been

wearing when they first met, and Gillian saw that the large,

old-fashioned topaz brooch still fastening the lace at her throat was

matched by a pair of heavy gold bracelets which she wore on either arm.

The stones in these antique, fetter-like jewels threw out reflections

into the mirror and seemed to illuminate the hands which, raised on

their finger-tips from the dark surface of the table, as though each had

a separate existence in the shadowy picture, completed without belonging

to, the whole reflection.

“Look at yourself,” laughed the mouth in the mirror, and the mirrored

eyes met Gillian’s as she gazed.

And Gillian saw herself, a moth-pale phantom behind the radiant head.

Her white frock glimmered grey in the background, the candle-light

glinted in her hair so faintly that its blondness looked silver above

the molten glow of Miss Vanderleyden’s topaz and gold. Only her

rose-flushed cheeks, and the starry glitter of the eyes she hardly knew

for hers, prevailed with the ardent image that challenged her, and

proved her able to meet the challenge.

It was the first time in her experience of life that any direct personal

appeal had aroused in her this profoundly personal, this intense and

definitely physical reply. Miss Vanderleyden’s look had, Gillian could

see it in her own reflection, changed the colour of her face, the

expression of her own eyes and lips. For a moment they stood side by

side looking at themselves and at one another in the dark pool of the

mirror, and then Miss Vanderleyden spoke.

“Aren’t we a nice contrast?” she said in the same flat, shallow voice as

had startled Gillian that afternoon with its audible contradiction of

all that her eyes could see.

* * * * *

They drank their coffee, which was very good, sitting together on the

black divan which was neither so soft nor so comfortable as it looked,

being as Miss Vanderleyden explained with some pride, constructed out of

her trunks and a spare mattress, and far too hard to be used as a bed

except by actresses of whom, it appeared, Miss Vanderleyden knew all

kinds.

“And most of them will sleep on anything, poor dears, when they are

resting,” she stated, without explaining why an actress should be able

to rest in such discomfort.

Statements of this nature, based on some occult information which,

whether she could not or would not, she certainly did not impart, formed

a staple of Miss Vanderleyden’s conversation and helped to send Gillian

home across the courtyard to her own flat at midnight in a state of

mingled exaltation and bewilderment. But some account of herself the

wonderful creature had given, though few of the details were

consecutive.

Her name, as she had already said, was Victoria Vanderleyden, but she

was usually called “Victor” by her friends, and she invited Gillian to

use this sobriquet from the beginning because she could see that they

were going to be real pals. Gillian had been able without rejecting the

advance or accepting the actual title of “real pal” to select from a

choice of other names, to all of which the lady had answered in her day,

the alternatives “V.V.” and “Viva,” and had made it clear that the “G”

in her own name was a soft one. “V.V.,” it seemed, had the blood of an

authentic missionary in her veins, and so her title to benefit by the

Club was clearer than the Armstrongs’ had been. Her father’s brother—“a

real Dutchman” (Gillian could not make out to what extent the brothers

differed in their respective Dutchness) had been a missionary in Borneo,

and it was from him that she had inherited the trophy of shells. But

some of her life had certainly been spent in Ostend, and she appeared to

have a root or two as far north as Blackpool. A person called “Daisy”

flickered in and out of the dialogue and, just before they parted,

Gillian gathered that this was no lady but Miss Vanderleyden’s brother,

who appeared to be a gentleman of independent means.

These details were, in review, unsatisfactory and, added to the fact,

which Gillian remembered Mrs. Barraclough deploring that Miss

Vanderleyden was employed in a beauty-parlour, gave her a sense of

having taken a step into an unknown and even a perilous region. But

Gillian was not in the least afraid of the unknown and, as she looked

for a third time that evening at her own reflection, this last time in

her own toilet-mirror in her own bedroom, she knew that she must go on

with the adventure.

For her mirror showed her what V.V.’s mirror had shown her, the second

time she had seen herself there—a new, and an undeniably changed and

prettier Gillian. And she wanted to see this girl again.

“You don’t know how to do your hair,” V.V. had said after half an hour’s

talk with her new pal. “I can make it look twice as much. Do you mind?”

And Gillian, who had been told till she was tired that she did her hair

infamously, had submitted without the least reluctance while V.V.’s

long, swift, cunning hands drew out the pins from the “bun” at the back

of her head and untwisted the tight coils into which Gillian drove a

dozen hairpins like carpenters’ nails twice or three times a day, in the

despairing hope that they would hold her troublesome locks in place.

V.V. had produced a set of long-bristled brushes, bleached with constant

washing and innocent of any trace of the varnish with which their

wooden backs had been originally finished, and several large

professional-looking combs. And then, with a long, steady stroke and a

light lifting of each separate strand, she had worked her way from brow

to nape of the head beneath the showering hair that fell as straight as

rain over the elbows of the girl who sat with folded hands in the

straight-backed red Norwegian chair beneath the hanging-lamp in that

quiet room. V.V. brushed and brushed, crooning with pleasure as the fine

hair rose and crackled through the bristles before they let each shining

lock slide back into its place again.

“Lovely, lovely, hair,” she babbled, and Gillian hardly heard the

foolish voice as the cool hands moved through her hair soothing and

lulling, and flattering her senses till she almost slept.

“Now,” said V.V. “Sit up, I’m going to plait it over your ears.”

“Why, I look like a German schoolgirl,” said Gillian when the plaiting

was over and the two long ropes had been coiled one each side of the

parting which divided her head into two smooth shining segments, “and

the pins hurt my ears dreadfully.”

“You look like a fairy-tale princess,” said V.V. “I wish Dicky could see

you. She’d simply love to draw you.”

It certainly was an improvement, but, now that she was back in her own

room again, Gillian felt quite sure that Lilac would never allow her to

wear her hair like that: and she unpinned the plaits knowing that she

would twist her hair as usual and drive the long black hairpins into it

in the morning, and cram her hat down on the solid lump in the same old

way as ever, before setting out to her humdrum day in the correct

establishment of Miss de Stormont in the Buckingham Palace Road.

During the next three or four days the intimacy between Gillian and V.V.

grew like a gourd until, by Saturday morning, they were free of one

another’s rooms and crockery; community of tea-things being one of the

consequences of intimacy at the Mordaunt Club.

On Saturday morning a bomb fell.

“DEAR MISS ARMSTRONG,” wrote Mrs. Barraclough on the die-stamped

correspondence-card she always used when reprehending members by

letter:

“I am writing to Miss Vanderleyden as well as to yourself in

order to request most emphatically that you will not continue to

encourage stray cats about in the courtyard. I understand that

you and she are in the habit of feeding a most objectionable and

probably diseased animal there night and morning, and must forbid

you to continue the practice.

Yours faithfully,

THEODORA BARRACLOUGH,

Secretary.”

“And,” said Mrs. Gordon, who delivered the letter with her weekly bill

and made no secret of having lifted the damp and yielding flap of the

envelope in order to read the note on her way up, “Mr. Gordon’s going to

set Crack on the little beast if it begins its mewing again to-night, I

can tell you.”

Gillian, as Mrs. Gordon very well knew, had got the little beast shut up

in the inner room where William was helping it to the coarser seeds of

Parrot Food in the intervals of eating the hemp out of the mixture

himself. She made no reply to this sally but paid her bill and said that

she would herself carry down the answer to Mrs. Barraclough’s letter and

post it in Mrs. Barraclough’s letter-box when she went out later in the

morning.

“Miss Vanderleyden ain’t got hers yet,” said Mrs. Gordon vindictively,

moving on. “A telegram come for her from Eppin’ ware she keeps that

great dog of ’ers, this morning, and she’s gone off in a great state.

Borrerd Mr. Gordon’s A.B.C., the one you threw away in Febewry, miss, to

look out a train she did, and I hope she catches it.”

“If she looked it up in a February time-table I’m afraid she’s missed it

then,” said Gillian. “It’s June now, you know, Mrs. Gordon.”

But Mrs. Gordon was panting heavily across the landing and made as if

she had not heard Miss Armstrong’s fear.

All day long Gillian pattered crossly about the flat, feeding the most

objectionable and probably diseased little creature which followed her

in and out of the two living-rooms and twice got out on the landing and

mewed there “as if,” said Gillian to it, as she drove it in again, “as

if it were not enough to have tempted me into a misdemeanour, and you

must now advertise that I’m engaged in crime on your account.”

Something must be done with the animal, and she certainly was not going

to let Crack do it. Once the desperate thought of taking it up to

Highgate and throwing it on Aunt Elizabeth’s mercies came to her. But

Aunt Elizabeth’s mercies were not tender towards cats, and, though

Atkinson might have sheltered it richly in the basement at 99, he was

just then having a holiday and Gillian had no faith in the humanity of

the first footman who was taking his place and who was not on friendly

terms with the cook.

William, too, seemed to be siding with Authority. “Good-bye,” he had

observed rather severely to the cat several times since lunch, and when

Gillian began to get tea and put down a sardine beside the saucer of

milk for her guest, William raised his yellow crest and sang, “God save

our Gray——” with unmistakable emphasis.

“All right, William,” said Gillian, losing her temper, “you needn’t

shout like that. I’m going to take it to the chemist next door to the

_Blue Cockatoo_ and get it prussic-acided. So there.”

She caught the little cat and put it into an old Gladstone bag of her

father’s and set off with misery and dislike in her heart to spend a

shilling on murder.

Half-way to the chemist’s she met Heinrich.

He was coming away from the studio and was tightly buttoned into the

short jacket of his blue suit so that he looked smaller than ever. He

wore no hat, and one diaphanous black curl stood up, like a smoke-wreath

in still air, from the very middle of his forehead making his long nose

seem longer than before. His eyes were unusually blue and fierce.

“I go to buy a cage,” he announced with dramatic abruptness, stopping

Gillian who had not intended to speak to anyone till her deed were

accomplished, “a cage in which to shelter the beautiful canary Larrie

gives to me. Zoze sparrows, zey pluck at ’im. Zey are proletariat birds.

Zere is somesing alive in your bag,” he ended, suddenly diverted from

his own mission by unmistakable signs of struggle in the interior of

Gillian’s burden.

Gillian explained her dilemma and the cat in the bag grew violent.

“Oh,” said Heinrich, “ze poor animal will perish of himself in that

confinement and zere will be no need to call on ze chemist. You shall

just srow him in ze river.”

“Goodness,” said Gillian, “how horrid. I must let him out.”

“Come on ze Embankment to a seat,” said Heinrich. “I go wiz you. I will

look at zis cat. My canary is all right for now. I have shut out all

zoze sparrows till I shall give him a cage.”

“What’s happened to the cage he came in?” asked Gillian as they hurried

to a seat. “Larry can’t have brought a canary home in a piece of paper.”

“Oh, it is somevere,” said Heinrich vaguely. “I sink we have lost it. It

was a small, old cage. Perhaps Larrie sit on it.”

They reached the seat just in time. The little cat had given up the

struggle to escape and was gasping for dear life at the bottom of the

bag when they opened it.

Heinrich lifted the mottled, furry body out and laid it across his

knees. The creature had improved a great deal during its friendship with

Gillian, but it was still an unprepossessing cat. Heinrich stroked it

with his dark, thin hands and lifted one corner of its drooping mouth.

“It lives. It jumps,” he announced. And presently, with a twitch or two,

the tortoiseshell cat was itself again.

“It is a bad little cat,” said Heinrich, looking at it with mild

criticism as it sat morosely on his knee, and lifted one paw after

another with a tearing noise out of the serge of the trouser-leg, into

which it had struck its claws to ensure its grip of the position. “Quite

a bad little cat. It shall come to live in ze studio wiz Larrie and wiz

me.”

“But, Heinrich, won’t it eat your canary, and frighten your sparrows?”

“No,” said Heinrich, “I say it is a bad little cat. If it would eat

canaries and sparrows it would be a good little cat. I will take it in

my hand.”

And he went back, across the river, towards the studio carrying the bad

little cat in his arms.

CHAPTER FOUR.

LARRY BROWNE

I

Heinrich, barefooted as was his custom, and wearing the light-blue slops

in which he always performed his self-appointed task, was trundling a

mop across the studio floor the next morning when Gillian went down to

see how the little cat had prospered among the birds. It was half-past

ten and Sunday. The church-bells on the Battersea side and those fainter

peals which came from over the water had stimulated the canary, which

hung in an extremely fine cage in front of the long window by the hedge,

to such tremendous matins of its own that Heinrich did not hear her

knock at the open door. Gillian, on the threshold, waited while Heinrich

swept on. He brought an entire seriousness and a complete lack of method

to his work, and was, when Gillian arrived, absorbed in chasing a

dandelion-seed which had blown in from the waste places of the Park,

across the width of the studio floor, stalking the mist-like intruder

with elaborate patience. He approached it with creeping stealth, hardly

breathing as he lifted the oiled mop-head at the end of its long pole

before the blow that would bring his prey to rest, only to see the spiky

phantom dance away in the wind he had raised. The sparrows were

everywhere. He drove them off from the immediate field, isolating the

drifting seed. The sparrows appeared to have abandoned their vendetta

against the canary now that it was caged, and to be pursuing their

lawful occasions again with the usual noise and fluster. Some of them

were perched round the rim of Larry’s zinc sponge-bath which had been

pulled out from the bedroom at the back of the studio and filled with

clean water for them to bathe in, and one, as Gillian came to the door,

had flown up from the water and was shaking the drops out of its wings,

perched on the crown of Heinrich’s black, devoted head.

Heinrich’s estimate of the little cat’s character was being abundantly

justified; for the creature was seated on the model’s throne, mildly

washing its face with its paw, while, three feet away, a couple of

sparrows were picking at the bird-seed which the canary scattered from

the seed-box in the cage above them.

“Puss, puss,” called Gillian from the doorway. The little cat took no

notice. Either it did not hear her or it had already forgotten her in

the new security of its home. But Heinrich heard and came towards her,

dragging the mop behind him, his face a little anxious with the

eagerness of his welcome.

“I beg that you will enter,” said Heinrich. “Have you been long at ze

door? I hear nozzing for ze cantata of my canary. It shall cease.” He

laid the long-handled mop down on the floor in the place where he stood,

stumbled slightly over it, regaining his half-lost balance with the

lightest ease, and bustled, if so lithe and gentle a movement could be

called bustling, after the sparrows, clearing them from the room in

handfuls and putting them out at the casement which he closed upon them.

“It’s like putting toys away in a cupboard,” said Gillian, who never

tired of watching the clearing process Heinrich always accomplished

before attending to a visitor.

“Zeze sparrows are my toys,” said Heinrich. “My canary is my friend.”

“And what is the cat going to be?”

Heinrich met this conversational inanity with a seriousness it had not

been framed to elicit.

“Tell me,” he questioned, his blue eyes very lustrous and dewy under

their long lashes, “have you complete responsibility for ze life of zis

little cat?”

“Goodness!” Gillian was alarmed. “I don’t even know if it belongs to

anybody. It adopted me, and I’ve been feeding it with a friend. Here are

its sardines. It has only had three out of the box.”

Heinrich took the oily tin, over which Gillian had tried unsuccessfully

to re-roll the lid that curled back from its contents on its key opener,

and counted the sardines with his thin forefinger.

“Ten fishes,” he announced. “Are zeze not your own food for to-day?”

“Mine! No! I hate sardines, especially in oil. So does William. They

belong to the cat, really.”

Heinrich picked a sardine out of the tin with his fingers and carried it

by the tail across to the throne where the cat still continued its

perfunctory cleansing.

“See, Minchoulina!” he chanted, “a fish!”

But the cat had evidently gorged its fill on some earlier meal and,

collapsing into one of those acrobatic postures with which the meanest

cat can put the proudest human to scorn, went on licking its way over

its person with an increase of zeal.

“When you know me better,” said Heinrich gently, “you shall dance and

sing when I come.” And he carried the sardine back to its tin which he

had laid on the floor beside the mop.

“And zis friend,” persisted Heinrich, putting the sardine carefully into

its oil again, “is it her cat?”

“No. I don’t think so. No, I’m sure it isn’t. She has a dog. She’s gone

away to see it. You can have the cat for your very own if you like, and

if Larry doesn’t mind. Where is Larry?”

“Charing Cross.”

“Gone to meet a friend?”

“No, gone to go a walk.”

“What a funny place to walk to!”

“Oh, he will not walk zere. Afterwards he will walk all day. But at

Charing Cross he get a train.”

“Don’t you ever go with Larry for his walks?”

“Me? Sometimes. Yes. But I do not like so many hills and so much rain.

And to-day I must play in my orchestra in the afternoon.”

“Heinrich,” said Gillian, sitting down on the window-seat and taking off

her hat, “I’m going to stay and help you put the studio really tidy.

Tell me how did you and Larry ever come to share it?”

Heinrich brought the mop and the sardine-tin over to the window-seat and

sat down with them, cross-legged on the floor in front of Gillian.

“Zis studio is mine,” said Heinrich; “it is left me by my uncle, and I

let it to Larrie, and he take me wiz it. Quite simple. There is room for

two people. In two years I am rich by my uncle’s money which is still

now in his will, until I shall be older, zen I _give_ zis studio to

Larrie.”

“And where will you live then?”

“Everywhere,” said Heinrich gravely but with decision.

Gillian thought the programme admirable and they discussed it in much of

its possible detail as they worked together at putting the studio really

tidy. Gillian was glad of so good an excuse for not going back to the

Club. She had been piqued at V. V.’s sudden departure yesterday and had

an unreasoning desire that V. V. should in her turn wonder what had

become of her.

At twelve o’clock, while Heinrich retired to his room behind the gallery

to assume his “coats,” and Gillian was washing her hands in the little

lavatory which opened out of Larry’s room on the ground floor,

preparatory to making a salad for luncheon, Larry himself walked in. He

was wearing light, rough tweeds, carried a metal-pointed cherry-wood

stick and was rather cross.

“I’ve missed the only train in the day,” he said, “and I’m not in the

mood to go anywhere but to Coldharbour. The rhododendrons will be out in

the wood on the Ockley side and there’ll be bluebells left beyond

Tanhurst and I sent Mrs. Print a post-card to say I would have lard-buns

for tea.”

“Can nothing be done about it?” said Gillian.

“Yes. We can take a ’bus—a motor-omnibus from the Latchmere at one

o’clock, and you are coming with me. It won’t take us to Coldharbour,

but it will take us to the larch-wood and the buns, and I’ve got

sandwiches enough for two here already and we’ll commandeer Heinrich’s

lettuce. That’ll larn him to be a rabbit.”

“Heinrich can have the cat’s sardines,” said Gillian, feeling, as she

dried the lettuce and put on her hat, that larch-woods near Coldharbour

were more than an offset to a dog at Epping.