V.V. was sitting in front of a fire burning clear, and licked with flame
as only a newly lit fire can burn. She had left the window-sash thrown
up from below, and the stirring night-airs blew the curtains about so
that they made shadows in the lamplight from the windows on the opposite
side of the courtyard. The eager fire and the waving curtains filled the
room with a dance of flame and shade. The great Fortuna on her rope
above the world; Saint Hubert praying to the crucifix that rises between
the horns of the stag he has hunted till sundown, were revealed and
hidden as the flames leapt and the curtain waved across the white wall
where they hung, the tall white bookcase between them.
She sat in the red-leather couch, her astonishing eyes watching the
doorway, her dark mouth fixed in a steady smile. The firelight moved in
the great waves of her hair, burnishing their heavy curves, and flashed
on the whiteness of her even teeth. She wore a dress of some thin silk
many times washed to a faint brick-red, and her long hands, their wrists
held in the tawny bracelets she always wore, lay palm to palm in her
lap, the finger-tips catching the light above the sharp angle made by
her knees which jutted sharply through the stuff of her clinging skirt
as though it were a skeleton and not a woman sitting under the rusty
silk that fell to the rug at her feet hiding them in its folds.
Gillian stood in the doorway smiling back at the firelit face. It shone
out against the background of book-filled shelves behind it, gathering
up the glint of the lettered bindings, their reds and yellows and browns
in one living concentration of colour and light.
“God! What a colour scheme!” said Larry from behind her shoulder.
“A fire’s nice on a wet evening, isn’t it?” said V.V., stretching her
hands to the blaze but making no other movement. “I’ve had supper ready
for an hour.”
“You’ll have to stay to supper with us, Larry,” said Gillian. “This is
Miss Vanderleyden who lives at Number Thirty-Six in the other house.
V.V., this is Mr. Browne. He’s adopted our cat.”
“Well,” said Larry, “that’s one way of putting it. I’ve been told that a
cat, I hesitate to believe it was ever Miss Vanderleyden’s, and you say
it wasn’t yours, Gillian—I’ve been told that a female cat has been added
to the menagerie at my studio without my consent.”
“I didn’t know it was a she,” said Gillian.
“All tortoiseshells are,” said Larry. “That is one of the beautiful
truths which are universal.”
“Oh,” said V.V., “Mrs. Gordon said there’s been a fuss about it and I
found a silly letter from Mrs. Barraclough when I got in. Was it your
cat after all?”
“I’ve just told you, V.V.,”—Gillian had already noticed that V.V. often
did not quite follow everything that was said—“I’ve explained I’ve given
the cat to Larry. It was a stray.”
“Oh, was it?”
“Yes. Where have you put supper, and is there enough for three?”
“In the other room. Didn’t you see as you came through?”
“No; we thought the book-room was on fire.”
V.V. laughed quite heartily at this and then, suddenly becoming
practical and administrative, she announced that there was hot water for
Gillian to wash and enough for Larry, too, if he didn’t mind washing at
the sink, and that they could get tidy while she dished up.
“Does this vision dwell with you?” asked Larry while V.V. disappeared to
ration the boiling water.
“Not exactly, but she knows where I keep everything. Isn’t she lovely?”
“She looked gaudy in the firelight when we came in, but the drawing of
her face is bad. Nose wrong. No chin.”
“I thought you looked as if you wanted to draw her.”
“I am going to paint her. Her colour’s exciting.”
V.V. had made a fine supper. A strange, sliced sausage which she said
came from Looms, which might, for all Gillian knew, be a suburb of
Epping; a crisp salad, not cut with a knife but lightly torn, and
sprinkled with a dew of lemon-juice and a frosting of brown sugar; a
junket with cream in which the huge Bottomley strawberries were drowned;
the macaroons; the Buszard cake; a bottle of white wine; a loaf of brown
bread; a dish of radishes, and her own as well as Gillian’s butter, made
enough for three. V.V. had laid these things out in dishes, some of them
her own, some of them Gillian’s and had brought over two amber glass
candlesticks with dangling lustres which she had inherited from an aunt
and which were the joy of Gillian’s life at that moment. Two tall
candles stuck in these heirlooms lit the feast and threw down white
copies of their flames that lay like waving petals on the dark, waxed
surface of the table.
“Poor Heinrich! we might have fetched him,” said Gillian half-way
through her second macaroon.
“No, we mightn’t.” Larry was heaping his plate with the
cream-extinguished strawberries. “He’s quite happy. He’s got all the
cheese for his mice.”
“What about that little cat?” asked V.V. “Is Heinrich the name you’ve
given him?”
“Heinrich,” Larry informed her, “is a mouse-tamer. It’s a more difficult
thing to be than a lion-tamer. He also tames sparrows. That is difficult
too. It is also quite messy. Worse than William who is but one and, I
suppose, trained for the house.”
“You suppose wrong,” said Gillian, “but no matter. Go on telling V.V.
about Heinrich.”
“Heinrich, for the moment, follows mouse- and sparrow-taming as a hobby.
He lives by his fiddle and with me. With, but not _on_. I pay him no
rent and the studio is his. He pays me no board and the studio is mine.
One day Heinrich will be rich.”
“How rich?” asked V.V., gleaming.
“Oh, quite. His uncle had foolish, dilatory ideas about Heinrich’s
majority, and there are things in Chancery for him. A grasping place.
But that’s neither here nor there. Heinrich has his own joys and his
needs are few. If only he could wear my clothes his needs would be
none.”
Larry looked down, a little self-consciously, at his long tweed-covered
legs, and Gillian thought of the yellow and pink, blue, silk skirts and
Brobdingnagian trousers he usually wore when at work, and of Heinrich’s
shiny serge suit and the pathetic blue slops slung round his thin bird’s
neck as he mopped the studio floor after his birds.
“At this moment,” said Larry, warming to his work, “Heinrich is most
probably marching on tip-toe, a sort of solemn dance—an antic hay—all
round the studio. He’ll have lighted a little, bronze, Roman lamp with
olive-oil and a wick made out of the marrow of a seven-months child and
it will be burning blue and violet in the middle of the floor, and,
after him, there will skip mice of all ages, on _their_ toes, their
pink, little, sharp-nailed toes, and sparrows, walking in their sleep,
will come in twos and threes and dance with them, and, at the tail of
the procession, your tortoiseshell cat, Miss Vanderleyden, will be
walking on his hind legs, and the canary will have broken cage and be
perched on the bow as he fiddles—oh yes, he’ll be fiddling away, and
spiders will come swinging down on threads from the roof and all the
cockroaches from the studio next door will look in——”
Larry paused for breath.
“What a queer little man he must be,” said V.V. “I should like to meet
him.”
Gillian was almost afraid that V.V. believed it all, but she did not
like to tell her that Larry was just talking, in case she had really
understood. It was difficult with two people you didn’t know very well.
After all, she’d not known Larry much more than a month and V.V. less
than a week. Besides, what Larry had said was true, in a way. Heinrich
might at any time make friends with a spider, even though Gillian hoped
he wouldn’t with a cockroach, and it was more than probable that he was
at that very moment fiddling a tune for the little cat to dance to.
“Shall we go and call on that funny man?” said V.V.
But when they got to the studio all was quiet. Nobody was fiddling,
nobody was dancing and the canary, its head long since under its wing,
was asleep, a ball of pale down on the perch of its cage high up in the
shadows of the soaring roof.
The table was laid with an untouched supper for two; bread, cheese, a
mug of beer and a plate of green apples, and, curled in a corner of a
divan, among sketches and scarves and half-empty boxes of crayons,
Heinrich slept, with the tortoiseshell cat purring quietly, asleep,
beside him.
“What a shame,” said V.V. “He’s waited for you and never touched a thing
himself. Let’s wake him and give him his supper now.”
So they woke Heinrich who admitted that he was very hungry—it was now
almost eleven o’clock—and V.V. set to and made a cheese omelette of a
high superiority, and the cat had all the milk and Heinrich had all the
beer which made him astonishingly gay and polyglot.
“Heinrich talks all the languages there are,” Larry explained to V.V.,
“talks them all with a foreign accent and I don’t believe he gets any of
them quite right, but he gets most of them far better than we get any of
them except our own, and as he’s not got one quite of his own——”
“Oh, I expect he’s got one of his own all right,” said V.V., “but he
keeps it dark.”
“Mein bester,” said Larry, “she’s insulting you. Can you hear her?”
Heinrich was sitting on the floor, his hands clasped round his knees,
rocking slightly to and fro. His eyes were fixed on V.V.’s face as she
sat above him in a gilded Italian chair with a large green apple in her
hand. Gillian thought he was paler than usual, but he was always so pale
that this might only be her fancy.
Suddenly Heinrich spoke in a high, quick voice, rocking to and fro in
time to the words.
“Ich liebe dich,” said Heinrich with conviction.
“Mich reiz’ deine schöne Gestalt.
“Und bist du nicht willig,” he chanted, the wind rising in the music
behind his voice:—
“Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt.”
“There!” cried V.V., in some alarm, “I told you so! He’s talking some
outlandish language of his own. Does anyone understand him?”
But Larry was rolling in his chair in a paroxysm of joy.
“Oh, Heinrich, you unmatchable treasure! Your virtue is beyond rubies,”
he shouted. “_So brauch’ ich Gewalt. Gewalt!_ Did you hear it, Gillian?”
“Yes,” said Gillian, a little dazed, “and I think, in a way, he would—he
could, I mean.”
“I told you he’d got a funny language of his own,” Miss Vanderleyden
reiterated, her eyes shifting quickly from Gillian’s smile to Larry’s
laughter-wrinkled face.
“You know, the Erlkönig wasn’t brawny after all. Play it to us,
Heinrich, you haven’t played to us this evening. Get your fiddle and
spin.”
Larry, for all his mocking tongue, was very proud of this odd, gifted,
incalculable friend.
So Heinrich got his fiddle and spun the mist and the wind and the
night-ride through the storm, and rocked them with the galloping horse,
and cried to them with the terrified child, and stirred them with the
sound of the goblin’s insatiable desire.
* * * * *
Gillian and V.V. went home in the small hours. They walked across the
bridge in the light of an old moon lying on its back low in the sky,
having refused to be accompanied by either Larry or Heinrich. It was
V.V. who had insisted.
“We shall be seen coming in by one of the old cats,” she said, “and
they’ll think you’ve come in too.”
“Goodness!” said Gillian, “what a horrid thought. But they couldn’t.”
“Oh, yes, they could,” and V.V. proceeded to tell how the Countess had
written to Mrs. Barraclough, once when one of V.V.’s actresses was being
put up on the hard divan, to complain that Miss Vanderleyden’s visitor
had come home after midnight with a man, _who was never seen to leave_!
“What did Mrs. Barraclough do? Did she come up and look in your cupboard
for him?”
“No,” said V.V. “She wrote to the Countess and said she was so sorry to
hear that she’d felt obliged to sit up all night in that way, but that
she felt quite sure I was able to chaperone my guests myself.”
“Did he?” said Larry.
“Did who, what?”
“Leave.”
“He never came in, of course. The Countess lost sight of him in the
archway, I suppose. Serve her right if she did sit up till morning.”
“Oh, well,” said Larry, “if it means keeping Countesses out of their
beds till dawn, and you’re quite sure——”
“That Heinrich gives me the creeps,” chattered V.V. as they walked home;
“his fiddle and those eyes. And you did look such a thin, tired little
thing, I wanted to take you home and brush your hair and put you nice
and comfy in your little bed-a-bies long ago. I came home for a surprise
for you this morning and you weren’t there. I said to Dicky that you’d
be wondering where ever I’d got to yesterday, but she had Jerry and
Frank coming and poor old Biddles had had to have a pill. So I lit the
fire and got supper ready and all, and we could have had such a nice
cosy little evening all to ourselves, and then you came in with your
Larry and spoilt everything.”
“But V.V., you were quite pleased to see Larry, and, please, he’s not
particularly mine.”
Gillian was irritated a little by V.V.’s chatter. It was very late; she
herself was really tired and it seemed beyond understanding that anyone
could have listened to Heinrich’s fiddle and not still be silent in the
mood it had woven round them all. Larry was still in it, she was sure,
and Heinrich himself had never come out of it at all, but had sat, a
shadow among shadows, in the darkness round the model-throne, plucking
fragments of melancholy airs out of his violin while they said
good-night.
V.V. was a puzzle. In the moonlight, with her rich colour greyed into
monochrome, Gillian could see what Larry meant about her nose being
clumsy and her chin weak. They seemed to reinforce the vapid, babbling
voice, making it sillier than it sounded by day or in the lamplight.
Only the swift, smooth walk, the balanced rhythm of knee and shoulder
moving in continuous, co-ordinated harmony kept their beauty. They were
a lilt of the enchantment under which Gillian had fallen, beating time
to the pulses of her heart, carrying her back to the room overlooking
the gardens, to the compelling magic of the face which had shone out of
the dark mirror on the night when Gillian had washed up the cat’s
cream-bowl, only a week ago.
“Is Biddles your dog?” She asked the question to escape from the
creeping disillusionment that sickened beneath her fatigue.
“Yes, he is, the darling. Dicky’s keeping him till I can afford to have
a cottage. He’s a borzoi. They’re very delicate, you know, and Biddles
bites—that’s why he’s at Epping.”
Gillian was too tired to ask whether biting dogs were cured or endured
at Epping.
They let themselves into the courtyard stealthily and then, because it
might wake Mrs. Barraclough, who lived on the ground floor, if V.V. were
to open the hall door and go up to her flat in the farther house, she
came up to Gillian’s and slept, in borrowed night-gear, on the red couch
by the embers of the fire she had kindled.
Gillian slept well that night. V.V. had carried out her programme and
had brushed Gillian’s hair and braided it into two long plaits which she
tied with ribbons and pulled out over the sheet on each side of
Gillian’s face as she tucked her up in bed.
“It’s my flat,” Gillian had protested, “I ought to be putting you to bed
really.”
“But you’re not,” said V.V. She stood by the bedside, a lighted candle
in her hand, and looked down at the tired girl with a brooding
eagerness. Then stooping swiftly, she kissed Gillian, kissed her with a
little gurgling murmur, as if a mother were kissing her baby, kissed her
twice on her open, astonished mouth.
“How odd of V.V.,” said Gillian sleepily to herself when the door had
closed behind her, and the room was dark and still. And she pulled her
handkerchief from under her pillow and wiped her lips as if she had
taken a drink from the tumbler of water which stood on a table beside
her bed.