They sat on through the hot afternoon drowsing in easy chairs by the
open windows, the green-and-orange sunblinds drawn so low that, of all
the world outside, only the glitter of the sun on the river could be
seen under the rims of the sunblinds. Three tawny roses in a slim
rainbow-glass vase dropped their petals hour by hour on the black table
under the mirror and filled the still air of the room with their breath;
the fragrance coming and going in obedience to that mystery of a
flower’s life which gives its odour a rhythm and makes it rise and fall
by a law we do not know.
It was too hot to darn any more socks, and her hands, sleek and languid,
with the scent of V.V.’s unguents still hanging around them, lay idle in
Gillian’s lap, the milky opal in her mother’s engagement-ring which she
always wore, gleaming in the tranquil light with almost as rich a lustre
as the over-polished nail of the finger on which it shone. One of V.V.’s
sharp little knives had slipped and cut into the flesh at the side of
Gillian’s right-hand little finger, and the smarting of this
infinitesimal wound was pain enough to prevent her falling completely
asleep. But V.V., tired and happy, was sleeping, her mouth a little open
and her head fallen sideways against a purple cushion; and, as she
slept, she gave occasional soft, puffing snores, like the engine of a
doll’s train going uphill.
With eyes closed and sagging mouth, V.V.’s face lost the light and glow
which in her waking hours made it so difficult to realize that she was
not as intelligent as she was vivacious. Gillian, watching her, saw what
Larry’s trained eye had taken in at a glance—the abnormal fading away of
the jaw-bone, which, after lifting the chin away from the long, thin
column of the neck, disappeared into the cheek, giving to the lower part
of the side face a flat, unmodelled look. The nose too, long and blunt,
with wide, unwinged nostrils, was unfinished, almost embryonic in its
failure to achieve any dignity of form. And yet the rest of her; the
wide flat shoulders; the thin flanks, and long, harmoniously
proportioned and swift-moving hands and arms; the slim, straight legs
with that moving line from thigh to knee which was to Gillian the first
element of grace in any human beauty, belonged to an inbred fineness, an
inherited civilization which should have had its corresponding signal in
her mind. Gillian had searched the more eagerly for this confirmation of
excellence in V.V., as she grew increasingly aware of her own
enslavement to the infatuating spell which the thought, far more than
the actual presence of the elder woman had established upon her life. It
was galling to her dignity, and contrary to an ascetic strain in her
nature to admit that V.V.’s predominance was due to the eager adoration,
the curiously maternal devotion she professed and practised. Gillian, it
is true, darned V.V.’s stockings and had, since she learned of V.V.’s
ways with her allowance, made it her business to see that V.V. had three
good meals a day, but then she liked the act of darning, and nobody
could be reasonably comfortable themselves with a fellow being starving
within earshot. The rest of their relationship consisted of services
offered; daily, almost hourly oblations by V.V. It was V.V. who
supplemented the duties of Mabel and her rotating colleagues in all
sorts of details for which Gillian had no time. The Bluebelling of
William’s cage was symbolic of her whole attitude to Gillian’s
surroundings. Gillian seldom had cut-flowers in vases because she could
not bear to see flowers die, and so spent more time than she could spare
changing their water and clipping their stalks when she did have any in
her rooms. V.V. kept flowers fresh in water as clear as plate glass in
all three of Gillian’s rooms, and so stimulated a tiny dwarf rose-bush
which Gillian had nurtured for several years, by giving it packets of
some patent forcing compound that it bloomed and withered in a
fortnight.
Once or twice when Gillian had dined or gone to a play with Stephen and
Sophie, V.V. had sat up till after midnight with hot water for her to
wash in, and clean brushes to brush her long hair out before she went to
bed. On hot evenings V.V. produced ice for the Club lemonade; on rainy
afternoons she had tea waiting when Gillian came back from her classes
tired and cross. V.V.’s hours in Jacynthe’s beauty-parlour appeared
elastic; they had interfered with some of Heinrich’s arrangements, but
Gillian remembered with a startled thought as she brooded sleepily in
the deep chair, they never prevented V.V. from being at hand when she
could do anything for Gillian. Where, Gillian wondered with a pang of
remorse, did V.V. get the ice they had had so often since her return
from Seaford? How had she found money to fill both flats with flowers
ever since April? V.V. must have gone without many more meals than
Heinrich had counted, if her brother had drunk or spent her allowance
very often in the past three months. Gillian could not feel honestly
grateful to V.V. for these supererogatory ministrations. They were more
than the services of common friendship, but they checked rather than
encouraged the unique response she made to some other quality than the
slavish activity in V.V. That quality was undeniably a physical one.
Gillian had suffered V.V.’s exaggerated and frequent embraces with a
docility which had surprised her in herself, and lately she had found
herself returning them with a queer thrill of satisfaction. It was
rather wonderful to hear the thump of V.V.’s heart through the thin silk
of her blouse when she kissed you; to feel her cool, strong hands on
your shoulders and to smell the mixed aromatic confusion of scents from
her hair and her face-powder; from the soap she washed with and the
paste she used for her shining, greedy-looking teeth; from the creams
and lotions with which she kept her hands in order. V.V. did not reek of
these things. She was almost morbidly clean and dainty in her person, as
in all her surroundings. Her clothes were worn but spotless, shabby with
much cleaning, limp from many laundries—you had to come very near to her
to know that blended, exciting smell. Gillian knew it well now. It was
V.V.’s most intimate secret; something she could not know herself, even
when she imparted it. And yet it was not a secret after all. It must
have been shared between all sorts of people, the Jackies and Dickies,
the Peters and Brownies and Smithys—they must all have known it in their
day. And that mysterious woman, the one figure in all the picaresque
vagabondage to whom V.V. never gave a name, the shadowy friend with whom
she had gone, oh, but quite years ago, to live in that little flat in
Ostend for which she still owed some one rent, had she too kissed V.V.
and breathed her scented warmth? Gillian was wide awake now, her mind
alive with pictures and speculation. V.V. must have been quite young in
those days. She was only just thirty now and there were at least ten
years between the Mordaunt Club and the home she had left for ever to go
to Ostend. For some reason V.V. didn’t seem to think needed explanation,
her father had refused to let her return to him and her sister when she
wanted to come back. It wasn’t as if she had run away with a man Gillian
reflected. Fathers, she knew, were entitled to be harsh when their
daughters did that, and the partner of their flight either could not or
would not, or, in any case, did not, marry them. But V.V. and her horse
and the borzoi she now kept at Epping had come to England, but not to
V.V.’s home, when the Ostend adventure ended, and V.V. was working at
Jacynthe’s to get herself free from a debt—though to whom she owed the
money and for what and why and where the woman was through whom she came
to be in debt at all, Gillian could even now not understand. It was all
so overlaid with the procession of other women and their affairs which
trailed along the more immediate past of V.V.’s life. She had clearly
loved them all in her way. But not for long. Did she, Gillian wondered,
always love immoderately, with lavish bestowal of material proofs of her
love and so wear herself and them out? V.V.’s face as she sank deeper
into sleep was unlined, but it had shadows on its imperfect beauty. Her
waking face was always pathetic rather than tragic in its shallow
ardour; its expression of her unbridled desire to give; but when the
vivid evidence of that outgoing impulse was shrouded and her face was at
rest, the shadows could be seen, resting lightly, where time and change
might have driven furrows in a more resisting field. Even the
catastrophe to that friendship for which she had left her father’s house
and had not even seen him before he died, had left no mark on her smooth
forehead. Could one love lightly and violently too? And many times?
Gillian knew that V.V. loved her with a kind of obsession now—and there
was Heinrich—V.V. loved him too. Of course she did. He was away just
now, which was why she had so much time for Gillian. And she was missing
him, missing his love-making. It must, thought Gillian, throwing a shy,
hurried thought after an idea which had skimmed across her mind like a
swallow in flight, it must be very touching to be made love to by
Heinrich. Rather like the flattering, miraculous advances a squirrel had
once made to her when she was quite a little girl and had spent a whole
day being most happily lost in a wood. Heinrich had made love to V.V.
like that, and V.V. had kissed him and thrust her scented fingers into
his hair and laughed in her throat, and he had felt her heart beating
and smelt her spicy odour and had kissed her softly and whispered to her
as though she were a mouse or a sparrow or their poor, dull, little
tortoiseshell cat. It must have been like that. It must have been very
sweet and wonderful. And V.V. was missing it all. How should she not
miss such a thing, she whose whole happiness lay in demonstration of
that kind? That was why her hands were so often round Gillian’s neck in
these days, and why her clear eyes, hazel-brown, black-ringed, lovely
eyes, looked at her with such an overwhelmingly dewy appeal. Gillian
felt the tight little core of resistance to V.V. which had been hard in
her heart, melt into pity and love. Dear V.V., kind, lavish, squandering
V.V.! Why should Gillian stiffen herself against so warm, so human, so
fragrant an adoration as this transferred and wistful passion? “And how
much nicer for Heinrich, and safer, to have me occupying till he comes,”
said Gillian, coming to the surface of her reverie in a bubble of
laughter. “V.V. must love somebody aloud all the time. Suppose she’d
fixed on Larry or some other man? Heinrich would have minded that.”
And then, suddenly, she remembered why Larry had gone away. It was much
easier not to have love-affairs, unless you were rich like Toby and
could marry them at once. Would waiting till Heinrich’s money came out
of his uncle’s will and make him really rich, put enmity between him and
V.V.? She hoped not. Heinrich would take enmity so seriously. And V.V.
wasn’t serious about anything but kissing; and kissing, after all, isn’t
a serious matter.
There was a sudden knock at the door. V.V. woke with a start and sat up
in her long chair, putting up her hands to arrange her perfectly tidy
hair with the instinctive gesture of one whose personal appearance is
her constant thought.
“Who ever can that be?” said V.V.
The knock was repeated and seemed to emerge from a background of more
complicated though muffled noises.
“Oh! _Come_ in!” shouted V.V. through a yawn.
The door was pushed open and Mabel’s voice, carried on the clamour that
rushed in, as a soloist sings with the accompanying orchestra, was heard
delivering a message.
“Please, Miss Armstrong, Mrs. Barraclough says it’s William again, and
will you go over to your own flat and see to him.”
William’s voice certainly could be heard in the din; but it was not its
chief ingredient. It rose and fell, tossed about like a cork on the
surface of the flood of sound that stormed in through the open door from
the landing and from the courtyard beyond the landing window. The noise
was the noise of many pianos in conflict over one piece of music. From
the floor below Number Thirty-Six but from the flat on the courtyard
side there rose the Ballade in A Flat, played loudly, heavily, horribly,
with steady thumpings and the dreadful vibrations of an instrument on
the loud pedal of which an unrelenting foot is pressed without lifting.
“Goodness!” said Gillian, “that’s the new tenant at Twenty-Nine. Mrs.
Barraclough told me she’d had a piano left her by a friend. Do you think
it’s driven her mad?”
“It’s driving the Countess madder,” V.V. grinned as she leaned through
her scullery window and looked out over the courtyard with Gillian at
her side.
The Countess, her window wide to the afternoon, was, in her turn and
with enormous _brio_, rendering Chopin with all the assurance of a
compatriot and all the calculated resonance of a powerful mistress of
the instrument. Neither in _tempo_, nor in the exact place each
performer had reached in her interpretation was there any pretence by
either player at synchronizing the two performances. They were intended
to clash and they clashed. That William should have joined in the din
was both natural and comic; but a touch of pathos was added to the
conflict by Mrs. Middleton, who, with sturdy perseverance in well-doing,
was pedalling away at the harmonium she usually only employed on Sunday
evenings and, all stops drawn, was attempting to sound the note, not so
much of Christian forbearance as of holy awe, by sending out the tune of
“Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” in a series of simple but heartfelt
chords.
“I don’t think,” said Gillian, sobbing with laughter as she raced across
the courtyard and up the ten flights of steps to her own flat, “I really
do _not_ think that William is to be blamed for this.”
But William, who had felt lonely since the telephone men had gone home
at noon, was making up for several hours of silence. Refreshed by sleep,
and strengthened by a pickled onion which one of the workmen had shared
with him at the lunch interval, he was in full song and in no mind to
stop for anybody. Even when the instrumental contest had subsided until
none but the missionary strains of good Mrs. Middleton’s harmonium
continued to break the evening peace, William sang on. And,
unfortunately the competition had stimulated his memory, from the dark
and backward abysm of which he had dredged up fragments, taught him by
the lewd sailors who had carried him from the tropic isle which saw his
hatching. These he now scattered to the Mordaunt Club with piercing
distinctness just as they came back to his undiscriminating mind. And
presently, Mrs. Middleton, her pacific task accomplished, closed down
the folding lid of her harmonium and took her feet from the red-carpeted
pedals. And still William flung loud, obscene snatches from his marine
repertory out of the double mufflings of green baize and Mexican blanket
which Gillian had flung over his cage, hardly caring if she stifled
William’s self so long as his songs were stifled too.
* * * * *
V.V. came up to dinner, with a muslin-covered basin of ice in one hand
and _Pharaoh’s Book of Dreams_ in the other.
“All the old cats on my landing have written to complain about the new
member,” she said.
“I’m sure the Countess will complain of William,” said Gillian, “and
Mrs. Barraclough has warned me that if anyone does he’ll have to go.”
“Shall you let him? Poor old cocky.”
“No, of course not. I shall _take_ him away.”
“Oh, Gillian—where?”
“To wherever I go, of course.”
“You wouldn’t leave the Club!”
“I should have to.”
“And poor V.V. too?”
“Well, in any case you’ll leave when you marry, and besides, we don’t
know yet that I’ll have to go.”
However, as they were drinking their coffee in the book-room Mabel came
up, very full of importance, and delivered a letter from Mrs.
Barraclough in which Gillian was given a final warning.
“I will overlook the matter this last time,” wrote Mrs. Barraclough, “as
William, in spite of several representations made to me by some of the
members, cannot be held entirely responsible for this afternoon’s
disturbance, but I must be very plain with you that this _is_ the last
time.”
“I’ll tell you what, darling,” said V.V., her eyes very bright in the
cloud of cigarette smoke she blew about her head as she sat curled up in
a corner of the chesterfield. “We’ll take a ducky little flat together
on the Embankment past Beaufort Street and keep William in the window
and buy those white china elephants you want so badly from the shop in
King’s Road to go with him, and we can have a real bath with a geyser to
it, and no more cans of hot water up from the kitchen or boiled on the
Primus for our bedroom tub. Won’t that be lovely?”
“It would be very nice to have a flat with a proper bath and electric
light in it,” said Gillian, “but, if you can find one, you’ll have to
take Heinrich there, not me.”
“Oh, him,” said V.V. “He’s sent me a picture post-card, such a funny
one. Look!”
Gillian, who had seen some of the coloured comic post-cards with which
V.V. cheered her betrothed on his travels, looked rather anxiously at
the response which V.V. drew from the pages of _Pharaoh’s Dream Book_.
Heinrich, however, had not replied in kind. He had been over to Wells
and had sent V.V. an enchanting picture of a head from one of the
cornices.
“He’s not written anything on it but the address and put a little H down
in one corner. It’s a dull sort of thing to get, I think,” said V.V.
without rancour.
“I think it’s perfectly lovely,” said Gillian, “and it’s a little like
you—the way the hair parts, and the eyebrows. That’s why he chose it.”
“Me! Like that ugly stone thing! I hope not,” said V.V., and she tore
the card across and threw the pieces into Gillian’s waste-paper basket.
That night, when she had brushed out her hair and shown her how much
more becoming two narrow ribbons of different colours threaded in the
lace of her nightgown were than one wide one, V.V. pulled down her own
hair, slipped out of her old silk dress, and, her thin arms looking very
brown and dusky in contrast to her white underclothes, proceeded to sit
cross-legged on the floor with a candle on either side of her, to
interpret her own and Gillian’s dreams from the pages of the ragged book
she had brought upstairs with her.
“You must take off all metal and one garment before you begin,” she
explained. “We used to do it at Ostend.”
“V.V.! If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t do it here. I don’t want
to know about my dreams, anyway. They are my own, and I know what they
mean to me.”
“Oh, all right, ducky. I thought it would amuse you, pertickly as you
said you’d dreamed of flowers, and that’s a lucky dream always.”
And gathering herself and her oracle together, she rose from the floor
and, coming over to the dressing-table where Gillian was still braiding
her hair, she kissed the back of her neck and the shoulders round which
the blue and mauve ribbon she had threaded held the lace of Gillian’s
nightgown together.
“You baby,” said V.V. “I should like to eat you.”
“V.V., if you don’t take care I shall knock your lovely front teeth out
with my hair-brush,” said Gillian. “Go home now before Gordon locks up,
and eat a bun instead.”
“I haven’t any buns, and you are being dreadfully cross to your V.V.,”
she said. But she went home in quite a good temper, having once more
reverted to the glories of the possible flat with gas and a geyser in
it, which she was sure they could find without much trouble. V.V. seemed
to know all there was to know about dear little flats.
“All the same,” said Gillian to herself when V.V. had gone, “I hope she
won’t find one till Heinrich gets his money settled. I don’t think I
could bear to live all day and all night in the same flat as dear V.V. I
must have some lucid intervals. And there’s nothing lucid about her.”
CHAPTER SIX.
AUNT ELIZABETH
I
“It’s high time I came home again,” said Lilac. “_Look_ at your hat.”
Gillian took off her hat and looked at it. It was an old one she had
retrimmed herself.
“What a funny expression ‘high time’ is,” she said. “It’s like ‘now
then.’ You know what it means, but it doesn’t mean anything at all when
you think about it.”
Lilac made the noise that is written down as “pish” or “tush” to convey
her opinion of that remark and returned to her point. Lilac had a most
feminine gift for returning to the point.
“Your clothes are past praying for, and you say ‘Goodness’ twice a day
instead of once a week. You _have_ been left to yourself.”
Lilac had as evidently been left to herself, for she had come back from
her honeymoon travels more emphatic and more critical, more woman of the
world and more beautifully dressed than she had been able to be when the
combined influence of Gillian and poverty had kept her relatively
easy-going and only tentatively fashionable.
“Your hat’s a marvel,” said Gillian, “so neat and yet so gaudy. It looks
expensive all over even though it’s so plain. Paris, I suppose?”
“Vienna, my dear.” Lilac was infinitely up to date: almost in front of
date, Gillian thought, once more reflecting on the oddness, the strong
commerciality of the phrase “up to date,” but this time keeping her
comments to herself while Lilac chattered on of how _no_body went to
Paris now for really new ideas in clothes. All the cleverest things came
from Vienna, which was more Russian than the Russian ballet, so far as
colour and decoration went.
She had brought Gillian an enormous grey fox muff and stole from Vienna
and a string of clear glass beads that hung down to her knee and then
ended in a cerise-and-magenta tassel to bring out the green colour of
the glass.
“Just like that poem in _Georgian Poetry_,” said Gillian, “and they’ll
go most wonderfully with V.V.’s flat.”
“Well, I hope you’ll wear them there,” said Lilac, “and not come to my
house in them or in any other string of beads, like a savage. I’d never
have got them myself. It was Toby’s idea. He said they looked like you.”
“How lovely of Toby!”
“Well,” said Lilac, “he seemed to think I should want to wear them
because they reminded him of you. Men _are_ the queerest creatures.”
“Oh! Poor Toby! He wanted to be able to see them every day, and now
you’ve given them to me.”
“You can wear them when Toby takes you out to dinner, and I hope he’ll
be calm about it when you catch your knee in them and they break and
roll about on the floor at the Berkeley or get caught in the spring-seat
at a theatre. Beads,” said Lilac, “should be seen but not weared.”
“Does Toby let you make nursery jokes?”
“Toby would let me do anything so long as I didn’t prevent him getting
back to England in time for fox-huntin’. We’re going to Ireland next
week about horses and then back to wherever it is he’s got that horrid,
cold, little house you can’t get to from anywhere.”
Lilac was on the whole discontented; a little with Toby, Gillian
thought, and a little with life. She had no definite, spoken grievance
except one against Gillian for not preventing the house at Seaford
altogether.
“Of course, neither Toby nor I will ever go near it. Never, never,
never. She’s got that ridiculous clay model all over the billiard-room
table at Knightsbridge, and the Bird, looking like an owl, to explain it
to us. Why ever did you let her?”
“But how could I help it?”
“Well, she says you advised her. And Seaford of all inhuman
wildernesses. We could have done with a house at Ascot, and there are
schools there.”
“I’m sorry. But she’d bought the house before I knew and she thought
you’d like one near Glynde.”
“Pish!” said Lilac again. “And, anyway, it was you who got Bird into it.
Painting all over those cauliflowers and gargoyles. It’s like a
lunatic’s house. It’s worse than the Phené toy in Oakley Street.”
“Well,” said Gillian, “Jane’s going to have it in her show in Grafton
Street. In the middle of the room with the portrait figures all round.
It’s very amusing, and awfully clever too. She’s not made a mess of it.”
“Oh, the model’s all right as a joke, and some of Bird’s figures are
very good. She’s going to be a rage. She’s the best friend you’ve got. I
think you ought to drop the others.”
“Really! Lilac——”
“Yes! Don’t look at me as though I had a smut on my nose. My face is
perfectly clean, and I mean what I say. You have no taste in people.
Larry Browne’s all right. He belongs to quite a good family. All that
living in a studio and wearing a big hat is just pose. He ought to have
gone into the Home Office and done a little painting in his spare time,
then you could have married him.”
“But, Lilac——”
“Oh, yes, I know you never think of how you are to get out of all this
nonsense about earning your living. But I think of it for you. No one
but rather an odd sort of man would marry you. Unless, of course, I can
_make_ you dress properly and look at things in an ordinary common-sense
way.”
“Lilac darling, I’m perfectly happy as I am. And quite ordinary enough
to keep myself out of an asylum.”
“For the present. But look at the lunatics you go about with.”
“Lilac!”
“Yes. I saw you yesterday in Sloane Street with something rather like an
Italian organ-grinder without the organ and the monkey. Without a hat
too.”
“Oh, that was Heinrich. He plays in the Queen’s Hall orchestra.”
“Look here, Gillian. You can’t be seen about with a man who plays in a
band; and Bird told me yesterday that you’d got another crony, a woman
hairdresser with a wild name.”
“That’s too bad of Jane. She’s always been horrid about poor V.V. I
think she’s jealous because Larry has drawn and painted her so much
since he came back. She’s engaged to be married to Heinrich. They are
both perfect dears.”
“Well, Jane Bird does not approve of the woman, and I’ve seen the
band-player myself. Let them marry one another, by all means, as soon as
possible, and then you’ll be rid of both of them.”
“No, I shan’t. They can’t marry for some time. And I’m very probably
going to share a small flat with V.V., so as to be able to make a home
for William. Mrs. Barraclough has given me notice for him again, and,
this time, he must go.”
“Nonsense, Gillian. If you must leave the Club, go and live with Aunt
Elizabeth. She’s very frail and lonely. I was up there yesterday. She
asked about you. Have you been to see her lately?”
“N-no. Not since she came back from Matlock.”
“It hasn’t done her much good. And you’d far better cherish her a little
and leave these fearful wildfowl you’ve collected alone. Toby and I’ll
take William on if you want a home for him, There’s a conservatory in
the house we saw yesterday in Norfolk Street that would suit him very
well.”
“I’ll think about William, and I’ll go to see Aunt Elizabeth on Tuesday.
It’s her birthday.”
“So it is. I’d almost forgotten. We shall be in Ireland. I must have
some flowers sent up.”
And Lilac gathered her sable coat about her and cast a rather wistful
look round the flat.
“Good-bye, Jilly dear. In some ways I envy you for being here still, in
spite of the oil-lamps and the bedroom bath. You’re free, and the rooms
are very peaceful, once you get up all these stairs.”