Later in the week, Gillian went to tea with Jane Bird in her workshop in
Buckingham Palace Road. It was conveniently situated for the purpose,
being on the way home from the Secretarial School.
Jane had called the place her studio when she first took it, but since
she had begun to sell her figures she had changed the name.
“It’s not Art, it’s Commerce that I woo behind these portals,” she
explained. “Besides! Look at it!”
The place was certainly business-like. It had originally been a
coach-house and stables, and the loose-box and stalls still remained as
store-rooms, divided from the larger portion in which Jane, standing at
a long table on trestles, worked on her plasticine figures.
“I keep three going at a time, one being modelled, one being painted,
one being varnished. Mr. Quist has invented a varnish which is
transparent without being shiny.”
Mr. Quist, a little olive-skinned man with a shock of white hair, who
worked in his shirt-sleeves and wore a red tie and a gold watch-chain,
looked up and bowed his acknowledgment of this introduction, but did not
speak. He was varnishing a figure with a camel’s-hair brush which he
dipped with marked precision into a clear, colourless liquid that
seethed in a glass retort under a spirit-lamp.
Gillian went across the workshop to look at the figure. It stood about
eighteen inches from the square base on which it was moulded and which
was painted in the semblance of a sandy path between two flower borders.
The figure was that of an old, bent woman in a black full-skirted gown
with a bodice buttoned tight across the hollow, stooping chest. It
stood, leaning forward, supporting itself with two claw-thin,
parchment-white hands on the crook of a large, bushy, green umbrella.
The face, keen and delicate, like an old ivory, was framed in smooth
bands of dark brown hair gathered into a bag-like net at the back of the
fine, old head.
“Goodness!” said Gillian. “It’s Mrs. Print.”
“Goodness!” mocked Jane Bird, “how did you know?”
“Larry took me to tea there last Sunday.”
“The Pirate! Mrs. Print’s mine. Larry had no right to share her. I’d
have taken you there myself.”
“Oh, dear!” Gillian was remorseful. “Why didn’t I say ‘by the pricking
of my thumbs’? Anyone can see she’s a witch—a good witch.”
“She’s nothing of the kind. She’s a village landlady who knows her
business, but you make every-think into a fairy-tale.”
“Well, look at her! Look what you’ve done with her! How did you get that
black-velvet net effect on her hair?”
“How did she get a chenille net? I don’t suppose there’s another within
a hundred miles of London. Did she tell you about her teeth?”
“I don’t think she’d got any.”
“She hasn’t. And she hasn’t had for years. She bites with her gums.
They’ve grown hard and sharp, and she reads without spectacles, and she
takes her mother out in a bath-chair every Saturday afternoon.”
“Jane! what magnificent people you know! Larry and Heinrich and Mrs.
Print.”
“Magnificent isn’t the right word for either Heinrich or Mrs. Print.
Larry, perhaps.”
Mr. Quist looked up from his varnishing. He pushed his gold-rimmed
spectacles up on to his forehead, put his paint-brush down on a glass
tray, dropped a glass extinguisher over the blue flame of the
spirit-lamp and, without a word, trotted off across the workshop and
disappeared into the loose-box.
“Jane, who is Mr. Quist? He doesn’t look like a workman.”
“He’s a genius. And I know no more about him than you can see for
yourself. He called here one morning to buy a figure he’d seen in that
shop I told you about. They’d sold that one and he wanted another, and I
wouldn’t make one for him. So he told me about his varnish.”
“It sounds like the Great Panjandrum! Did he speak?”
“Not much. The bare minimum. We carry on mostly in pregnant silences.
I’m good at mute eloquence.”
“I know you are. But I shouldn’t have thought two could have been
eloquent enough that way.”
“Well, we are. He’s gone to fetch the Larrys for you.”
Mr. Quist emerged from the loose-box carrying in either hand a veiled
object, much like a priest bearing two chalices to a sick parishioner.
Mr. Quist jerked his head sideways and Jane, advancing to meet him, took
one of the muslin-shaded figures from him and placed it on the
work-table. Mr. Quist carried the figure he still retained to a shelf
with a small, carved canopy, evidently prepared for the exhibition of
completed figures, and then returned to unveil the one Jane had taken
from him.
It was Larry Browne in his wide green corduroys, his blue, cloudy shirt
open, his straight hair a little heightened in colour so as to balance
the gay mosaic of paint on the palette he was holding, his head thrown
back and a little on one side as if he were watching a smoke-ring he had
blown. The right arm hung straight from the shoulder and slightly
backwards, and a cigarette burned between the fingers of the hanging
hand.
“Jane, it’s lovely,” said Gillian, “so long, so graceful, so alive.
But—but—he isn’t painting—his face is all wrong, not concentrated.”
“No,” said Jane. “He doesn’t. Didn’t you know?”
“But he does, I’ve seen him. I’m sitting to him. And he has proper
models. And there’s Heinrich.”
“He draws,” said Jane, “quite well. And he plans all sorts of pictures.
And he squeezes miles of Windsor and Newton out on that wonderful
palette of his. It belonged to Arnold Boecklin. Did you know?”
“Yes,” said Gillian. “I’ve often wondered why he got it.”
“It was a bad debt. A very bad debt. He shouldn’t have taken it. It’s
part of his curse. He is so interested in being interesting, in the
details, in literaryishness—and he’s got such an audience, and enough
money to live on. He’ll never paint. Not unless——” Jane smudged a
thumb-load of plasticine vindictively on to the figure she had left when
Gillian came in, and began scraping it off again, and left her sentence
unfinished.
“Well,” said Gillian, “I don’t think it will be much of a pity if he
never finishes that procession of a fresco for the competition. But he’s
going to paint V.V. Vanderleyden in the fire.”
“Golly, what a name!” said Jane rudely. “Who is it? Another?”
“She’s one of the Club members. He saw her in my flat on Sunday.”
“Has he taken her to Mrs. Print’s?”
“Not yet. He doesn’t seem to take many people there, really, Jane. Only
me and Miss Jerusalem.”
Jane’s high colour ebbed away and her face looked streaked and queer
between the black bosses of her hair.
“That’s me,” she snapped. “Jane Ursula Mayne—they called me ‘Jerusalem’
when I was little. They used to send me to Mrs. Print’s for weeks
together after measles and things.”
“What a lovely name for a little girl!”
Gillian watched the blood flow back into Jane’s flat cheeks and
remembered how Larry’s blush had swamped his freckles at the same name.
Why hadn’t Larry told her that at the Honeysuckle Bush Jane was
“Jerusalem”? It was such an addition to Jane.
“May I see the other figure—the one on the stand?”
Mr. Quist removed the second veil with a flick which might or might not
be an expression of feeling.
It was Larry again: slim and dapper and sleek in the hard white and
black of evening dress, white waistcoat, white tie, white gloves. The
figure was shown buttoning one glove critically, lovingly, the whole
attitude expressive of intense absorption in the matter so charmingly in
hand. It was finished with a minute perfection, a ridiculous attention
to detail, Pre-Raphaelite in its insistence on every button, every seam.
Gillian, who had never seen Larry wearing any garments of the kind, was
forced to admit that this Larry was even more accurately portrayed than
the other.
“Jane,” she cried, “what a horrid thing! Just like one of those painted
plaster figures they put in shop-windows.”
Jane was angry. “How can you be such a philistine! Look at the
modelling! Look at the pose! It’s a masterpiece.”
“I don’t like it,” Gillian persisted.
“Like it. You like your pictures pretty, I suppose. You aren’t meant to
like it. It’s a warning. Larry’ll revert to type, he’ll be just like
that before he’s done.”
“Has he seen it?”
“Not yet. He shall before it goes home, though.”
“Jane! you’ve not sold it?”
Jane nodded, and by a rustle that came from the direction where Mr.
Quist was varnishing Mrs. Print, Gillian understood that he was the
purchaser.
Gillian was puzzled. She had thought Jane and Larry were friends.
“Have you done Heinrich yet?” she asked, more to change the difficult
subject than because she thought this possible.
“No,” said Jane, “I can’t do him out of my head, and he hasn’t been able
to sit to me. He’s very busy about something or other.”
“Heinrich’s always busy. I’ve never seen such an occupied creature.
Besides, he’s rehearsing a new Russian Symphony, and there are afternoon
concerts.”
At that moment there was a knock at the workshop door, and before anyone
could reply to it, Larry himself walked in. Gillian saw Jane’s
immediately suppressed movement towards Mr. Quist’s purchase, and saw
how that movement had directed Larry’s eyes to the effigy, which stood
in its niche on the same wall as the door, so that it was invisible to
anyone entering the studio.
“Hullo!” Larry swung round to look at the figure. “I say, Jane, that’s
pretty cruel,” he said. “What made you do it?”
“My prophetic soul, of the wide world dreaming on things to come, I
suppose. These things are in the air.” But it was odd how unhappy her
voice was.
“Le Beau Brummell de nos jours. Well, I seem to be making a success
there, at any rate. Are you going to give it to me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s sold.”
“Jane, don’t be a fool! You can’t sell my portrait.”
“It isn’t a portrait. You didn’t sit for it. It’s a fantasy.”
“It’s a simpering horror. You’re to destroy it.”
“It isn’t mine to destroy.”
“Then I will.”
Larry took a step towards the figure, but Mr. Quist reached it first.
With a practised hand he swathed the property in its butter-muslin
shroud and, lifting it from the stand, carried it back to the loose-box
where the statues were packed.
Larry watched him go and gave a short laugh.
“Sorry, Jane. I’ve lost my temper, and you’ve got to help me to find it
again at once. You must promise not to let whoever has bought it have
that idiotic thing.”
“He’s paid for it,” said Jane, “and I’m going out to see the Guard
change at the Palace. I’ve got an order for a Grenadier complete with
busby”—and going to a peg on the wall, she took down her hat and gloves
and marched out of the still open workshop door. Larry looked for a
moment as though he were about to involve Gillian in the discussion, and
then, tossing his hair back with the very gesture Jane had caught for
the figure which still stood uncovered on the work-table, he followed
her into the street.
Gillian waited a moment to let them get a start so that she might not
appear to be following, and while she waited, Mr. Quist came out from
the loose-box again and began to wrap up the laughing Larry.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Quist,” said Gillian, feeling foolish for speaking and
yet nervously unable to keep silence, “I’m afraid Miss Bird and Mr.
Browne have misunderstood each other about your figure.”
Mr. Quist looked at Gillian over the top of his glasses.
“Sublimation. Sublimation,” he said.
Gillian, who had never heard of the theories of Vienna or the practices
of Zurich, had not the faintest idea of what Mr. Quist meant.
It was the first time she had heard his voice. It was a thick, smooth
voice, and she thought there was a note of triumph in it. She did not
feel she was going to like Mr. Quist, and she was not at all sorry that
he made no attempt at further conversation before she said good-bye and
went out.
V
Whenever Gillian felt she had come to something she didn’t want to think
about, she either cleaned out William’s cage or went to see Aunt
Elizabeth. William’s cage was, of course, cleaned out every day. That
is, he had fresh seed, fresh water and fresh sand as punctually as
Gillian had her own breakfast. Indeed, there had been mornings in the
Pelham House days when Gillian’s breakfast had been omitted in favour of
William’s cage. It was in recognition of what she called her sister’s
slavery that Lilac had once tried to teach William the hymn which says:
“All my wants by thee supplied,
All my sins by thee forgiven,”
as a surprise while Gillian was away. But William, who was a pronounced
eclectic, had welcomed Gillian’s return from a holiday with the remark,
“Hello—sins forgiven? Bow-wow,” and had then gone off into peals of very
strident laughter in imitation of Mabel, who had, at her own request,
undertaken the care of William’s food and cage during his rightful
servant’s absence. But, in moments of doubt or pain, there was no more
successful anodyne than half an hour’s extra attendance on the cage.
William, who enjoyed extra attendance, always assisted with might and
main at all efforts towards the promotion of his own well-being, and
while William was helping and encouraging you there was no time for
metaphysical brooding or morbid self-analysis. Sometimes, when she
wanted practical advice or felt the moment was come for facing rather
than escaping her problem, Gillian would go to Highgate. But it was a
long way to Highgate, and, besides, Mrs. Mortimer was away just then,
and, even if she had been available, Gillian was not at all sure that
she could have had any patience with so insubstantial a grief as the one
she now carried. For Gillian was fighting a shadow which was never
vanquished and had now become so constant in assailing that she could no
longer doubt the existence of the shape which cast it. One day, and that
day might be to-morrow, she felt, the shadow would pass her by and leave
her face to face with the reality in which it originated, and of that
day she was afraid.
There was a force, a malign thrusting-on, at work, in the lives around
her; she saw it more and more, to which her own experience gave her no
clue. It seemed to go by the name of Love, but in its manifestation it
was the most unloving impulse in the world. It lay, Gillian had known
that, behind Lilac’s whole attitude to Toby; it was, she had seen it,
implicit in Toby’s submission to Lilac. And now it was binding and
hurting Jane Bird, making her cruel and vulgar and yet giving her a
power over Larry which he resented but did not deny. Larry had been
angry with Jane. That was clear enough and easy to understand—but he had
followed her when she defied him, and it was to his own defeat he had
gone.
Gillian knew very little about sex. She had escaped the definite
physiological instruction which most people of her age and station had
had administered to them in their teens. A little vague botany, put
before her with the best intentions while she was at school, had bored
without enlightening her. Flowers were flowers. Diagrams of their works
with straight black tines leading out of them like so many stamens, with
A, B, C, and D at their tips, had seemed to her of far less use or
interest than the pages of the little green Huxley’s Physiology, another
class-book which had been brought to her notice at the same time. But
that concise and well-illustrated manual confines its guidance to the
alimentary canal and the organs of sight and hearing, and it had never
occurred to Gillian to make any connexion between the two branches of
knowledge. They had been laid before her, separately, in a hopeful
spirit, by parents and guardians who shrank from directer methods of
illumination, and who credited adolescent curiosity with greater powers
of accurate deduction than there was any sound reason for supposing it
to possess. Gillian had failed entirely to deduce. She had assimilated
one set of facts and rejected the other; for she had a clear and honest
mind and chose by instinct, competent instruction in preference to
tentative and disingenuous information set up as an analogy which she
had not the means to follow.
Later on, when disturbances in her own development might have turned her
mind inwards, she had been in the full tide of that friendship with her
father which had filled them both with so deep and so shared a passion
for impersonal beauty that human love, except as it found its expression
in Art and Letters, had seemed a matter which might very well wait its
time. Gerald Armstrong, like so many men of his type when they begin to
meet on its own ground the first blossoming of the mind they have
trained, had fallen in love with his daughter, idealizing the
crystalline beauty of her girl’s mind, loving the eager courage of its
unflawed innocence and jealously guarding that virginal quality from any
taint of a dark knowledge she might never need to bear. When she had
asked him what
“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”
meant, he had given her _Madame Bovary_ to read, and had adored her for
the comment with which she returned the book to him: “I suppose the
French of those days were even more different from us than they are
now.”
When he died and she was left with his books, she had taken to those
they had not read together, the same spirit of detached and impersonal
enjoyment of literary quality as had distinguished his own
appreciations, and had retained unimpaired the habit he had never
checked since the day when he had first discovered it, of classing any
allusions or franknesses she did not understand as “Elizabethanisms,” a
term he himself had once used to dismiss a very early inquiry as to the
precise meaning of a passage she and Lilac had failed to elucidate in
the psalms for the day when Lilac was seven and she was nine years old.
And before Gillian could venture very far by herself, her father’s more
valuable and rarer books had been sold, and she had been allowed to keep
for her own use only such ordinary editions of the classics as would not
fetch more than remainder prices in an auctioneer’s rooms. Out of these
she got all she required, either as food for her own mind or as material
for those lessons in literature which she had so disastrously added to
the curriculum of Pelham House. But in actual knowledge of life she
moved, at twenty-three, in the same occasionally troubled but still
enchanted dream as she had known at seventeen, when her father died.
Love, according to the best authorities known to Gillian, was the guide
to many a wandering bark; many waters could not quench it; it suffered,
endured, and hoped all things; it made the world go round, in which last
connexion it was assisted by the blessing of the Church in the
Solemnization of Matrimony. When it made people ridiculous or tiresome
it was called Calf Love; when it was transferred from its legitimate
objects it was called Sin; and when, as sometimes happened, particularly
on the Continent, it took place between people who had conscientious
objections to marriage, it was called Free. So far, this conspectus of
an important but not personally urgent business had met any case which
had come under her observation; but, lately, Gillian had begun to
suspect its adequacy. Toby and Lilac had made what is called a
love-match. Had not Mrs. Middleton given them for a present an
illuminated copy, in a frame, of a work supposed to be a translation
into more adequate terms of the well-known passage from Corinthians? It
had made Gillian’s blood boil at the time, particularly the improvement,
which ran:
“Love has no taste for anything which is impure but a responsive
delight in all that is genuine.”
But it certainly was about love, and Gillian had always understood that,
as a definition, however translated, the original had never been
bettered. Possibly there were things about love which Saint Paul did not
know. Times had changed, and love with them. There was Modern Love.
There were the sixteen-line pseudo-sonnets—“We are betrayed by what is
false within”—“A kiss is but a kiss now, and no wave of a great
flood....” Gillian had always thought that an interesting but rather
exaggerated way of referring to a kiss. “Love that had robbed us of
immortal things,” that was better, a beautiful line, all o’s—better,
Gillian thought, than the one about the swan and the twilight wave,
which didn’t somehow come in quite naturally. “I suppose he’d seen a
swan at twilight, and used it up for his last line in the same way as
Tennyson used his nature notes.” Gillian didn’t care about these
detachable beauties. You didn’t find them in Shakespeare’s sonnets. All
the great lines fitted there: “The mortal moon hath her eclipse
endured,” or, “Come in the rearward of a conquered woe.” ...