When she got back to the Club, Gillian crept up to her flat very softly
so as not to be heard of William, whose cage stood in the outer of the
double-rooms on the courtyard side, and let herself into the single-room
on the street side of the building which she still kept as a bedroom,
though, strictly speaking, she should have given it up when Lilac left.
She did not want William’s possible song of welcome or the light in one
of the courtyard windows to announce her return. She wanted, for this
one evening, to be alone, free from V.V.’s kindness and cherishing, free
from her interminable chatter, and from the necessity of responding to
the ardour of her impulsive embraces. She might, of course, find one of
V.V.’s notes—“Darling, put a light in the window when you come in and
I’ll come across”—but this she would—she must, for once, ignore. If only
she did not meet V.V., or find her waiting on the landing.
But there was no eager shadow waiting on the darkened staircase when she
let herself in after closing-time, no three-cornered note fell out from
the letters in her letter-box when she unlocked it, almost furtively,
outside her bedroom door. And, perverse as she felt it to be, Gillian
was surprised, disappointed, hurt at this failure of the very
importunity she had tried to avoid.
She had not seen V.V. before going out in the morning: it was quite
possible that she had gone to Queen’s Hall and that Heinrich had taken
her back to supper at the studio after the Symphony Concert that
evening. She hoped so. She hoped so much that Jane was wrong about V.V.
making Heinrich unhappy. It was strange to think that V.V. and Aunt
Elizabeth were both women, and that both of them used the same word and
meant such different things when they spoke of loving. “But, then,” said
Gillian as she drew the blankets up above her ears, “I suppose Uncle
Evan must have been extremely unlike Heinrich.”
Yesterday’s threat of fog had established itself in suffocating
fulfilment when Gillian woke next morning.
By three o’clock it had so blinded the eyes and irritated the throat of
everybody in the school in Buckingham Palace Road that Miss de Stormont
declared the last lecture suspended and sent her students home an hour
and a half before the usual time. Gillian groped her way back to Chelsea
on foot, all the omnibuses having given up attempting to run at noon.
She had not had time to see V.V. that morning, but as she came out of
the fog to the railings by the gateway to the Club she knew that she
wanted nothing so much as to find V.V. with a huge fire and tea waiting
for her when she got upstairs. “And if she’s not in my flat, I shall go
over to Thirty-Six,” said Gillian to herself.
But she was so sure that V.V. would be waiting for her in her own rooms
that she tried the door on the top landing without unlocking it. It was
locked. V.V. had not come over. Gillian propped her dispatch-case
against the wall on her lifted knees as she groped in it for her
latch-key. A small movement behind the curtain which shut off the
scullery corridor from the landing made her pause before she could find
the key in the darkness on which the single gas-jet in its wire cage
only threw more obscuring shadows.
“Who’s there?” she called, and was a little frightened at the note of
fear in her own voice.
A shadow detached itself from the gloom.
“It is I,” said a reedy voice.
“Heinrich. What are you doing without an overcoat in this weather?”
“I come for V.V.,” said the thin voice sternly. “You will please give
her up to me now.”
“Oh, I thought she must be with you,” said Gillian.
“You know she is here,” said Heinrich.
But when the door was unlocked Gillian’s two rooms were dark and
untenanted. No fire had been lit in either, though fires were laid in
both.
Gillian lit two candles and put a match to the fire in the outer
sitting-room.
“Will you stay and have tea here,” she asked, “or will you go over to
V.V.’s flat? You see she is not in mine.”
“V.V. is somewhere wiz you. She is not in her flat. She has not been
zere since before yesterday. She is wiz you.”
“Don’t be silly, Heinrich. I haven’t seen V.V. since Sunday. Why—what
_have_ you got?”
“A pistol—wiz bullets in him.”
“Goodness! Is it yours? Can you work it?”
“No. I do not know how to work it. But I can pull somesing till it works
himself. It belongs to Larry. I bring it here to frighten you. I am,”
said Heinrich, “frightened of it myself.”
“Well,” said Gillian, “I’m not exactly frightened. But you’d better put
it down on the table and have some tea. If it’s Larry’s it won’t be
loaded. Larry knows better than to let you have loaded pistols to play
with.”
“Larry does not know I play wiz it. He has gone wiz Jane up the hill out
of ze fog. And I come here for V.V.”
“I’ve told you V.V. isn’t here. I’ve not seen her since Sunday. What
makes you think she’s here?”
“She tell me so herself. She said to me ‘whenever you cannot find me I
shall be wiz Gillian.’”
“Oh, she just meant I might know where she was or she might be here. Are
you sure she is not in her own flat?”
“I know she is not. She tell me she is wiz you.”
Gillian was cross. It was cold and foggy and she wanted her tea and
Heinrich was being very obstinate and trying.
“Look here, Heinrich,” she began, and then, in the light of the candles
which were burning higher now, she saw his face. Jane had been right. He
had a curious look. His eyes _were_ odd, almost squinting, with deep,
dark hollows on each side of the nose so that they seemed to have grown
nearer together.
“Let’s go over to the other house and look for her,” she said.
“I will look first for her in the books-room please,” said Heinrich.
So Gillian let him look, and carried a candle into the inner room to
show him that V.V. was not there. But all it showed them was the empty,
red chesterfield and the Great Fortuna who danced on her tight-rope in
the flickering light.
“Come,” said Gillian, “we shall find her in her own room.”
The doors of the large and of the smaller rooms in the house across the
courtyard were locked and there were several letters visible through the
glass of V.V.’s uncleared letter-box.
“We’ll ask Mrs. Gordon if she knows where V.V. is,” Gillian decided as
they came downstairs together. Heinrich shivered a little. He was
wearing neither overcoat nor hat. “You must put that weapon in your
pocket though,” Gillian admonished him. “Mrs. Gordon would be scared
past speech if she were to see such a thing.”
But Mrs. Gordon had seen nothing of V.V. for some days.
“I see her on Saturday wen she paid her book,” said Mrs. Gordon, “and
yet again at middle-day Monday wen she went out with that ’at with the
red feather in it, if you take me, miss, the oxydized one like the ’at
Miss Gordon wears of an afternoon. But since then I’ve seen nothing of
her and she’s not been having any meals from the kitching.”
“Did she leave her keys with you?”
“’Arry!” screamed Mrs. Gordon suddenly down the kitchen stairs to the
top of which she had mounted in reply to Gillian’s ring. “Wot abart
Number Thirty-Six?”
Mr. and Mrs. Gordon always spoke of the tenants as warders are said to
speak of the convicts in their charge.
“Bin away since Chewsdy,” boomed a voice from below, “left no key
downstairs neither.”
“There now.” Mrs. Gordon was satisfied that her statements had
corroboration. “Wot did I say. She’s off after that dog of hers again, I
suppose. Makes as much trouble as if ’e was a Christian.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Gordon. I dare say that’s what has happened,” and
Gillian closed the door although Mrs. Gordon betrayed symptoms of her
being able to continue the conversation further. Gillian did not wish
Heinrich to be drawn into it, hoped he had escaped Mrs. Gordon’s notice
altogether, above all did not wish his pistol to be remarked. She didn’t
for one moment think the pistol was loaded or feel that Heinrich himself
was dangerous; but he was so agitated and unhappy that she knew he
couldn’t bear such a fuss and clamour as the discovery that he bore
firearms would arouse in the Gordons’ domain. “Suppose they set Crack on
him,” thought Gillian, “as they would have done on that poor little cat.
He’d break.” Heinrich did indeed look strained and taut; Gillian had
never before realized what the expression “reaching the breaking-point”
really meant.
Out in the courtyard, in the angles of lamplight that came down from
above the doors of the two houses, he was almost invisible, a faint
shade in the fog which was moving and lifting as the tide set
down-stream in the river.
“Heinrich dear,” said Gillian, “she’s not here. She’s probably been held
up in the fog in Essex. Hadn’t you better go back to the studio? Perhaps
she’s waiting for you there.”
“She told me she will always be wiz you,” persisted Heinrich in the
thin, high voice.
“I’ll come and tell you or I’ll send her if she’s not too tired, the
minute she comes, if she does come to me, to-night. But I don’t think
she will. There’ll be a letter from her in the morning. Perhaps even
to-night. Perhaps there’s one waiting for you at the studio this very
minute.”
“I shall find a letter if I go back?” asked the voice anxiously.
“Yes, I think so. Anyway, go and see. And get an overcoat and a muffler
if you come out again. And a hat, Heinrich.”
Gillian went with him to the gateway of the Club and watched him drift
away and vanish into the dim mists by the river. Then she went up to her
own flat again.
The fire she had kindled hastily was out, quenched by the heavy air, and
the candles burnt sullenly in the yellow stillness. It was getting late;
a clattering of dishes on the lower landings announced the serving of
dinner. Gillian decided to leave the fire alone and to eat her dinner as
quickly as possible without taking off her outdoor clothes. It was a
lonely, dismal thing to do, but she intended to make up for it by having
the largest fire her bedroom grate would hold, and a double quantity of
hot water for her bath and to devote an hour to washing the fog out of
herself before she went to bed. She would read _Emma_ till the last post
came. _Emma_ was just the right book for a foggy night. She would enjoy
getting too hot eating Mr. Knightley’s strawberries, she would avoid the
long cold drive with the proposing Mr. Elton, and she would look up all
Mr. Woodhouse’s gruels. She would put on her old, padded, silk
dressing-gown, shabby but faded into such a satisfying, dim,
rose-colour, and sit in the big basket-chair which would go on giving
out companionable creaks all night afterwards, and there would be no
Lilac to grumble at the noise it made, saying that each creak woke her
out of a dream it sounded so like a pistol-shot at night. Poor Heinrich
and his borrowed pistol. She hoped he was all right and that V.V. had
either gone to the studio or written to him. Anyhow it was warm at the
studio with that white porcelain stove that Larry had brought home with
him, each tile painted with a different bird on a flowering branch; and
the little cat would be there to keep him company. Gillian was glad to
think he had the little cat.
Mabel, clearing away the dinner-dishes, agreed to bring up two large
cans of bath-water and volunteered the news that the fog had blowed off
to Battersea. She also offered to light the bedroom fire seeing that she
must have laid the sitting-room one badly that morning for it to have
gone out as it had done. This was kind of Mabel, for it was not her duty
to light, only to lay the fires in the various rooms she waited on. But,
ever since the day when Gillian had gone unexpectedly into her scullery
and had found the postman kissing Mabel behind the curtains and had told
neither Mrs. Barraclough nor Mrs. Gordon, Mabel had done a great many
little services of that kind for Number Seven.
So Gillian settled down in the big basket-chair with _Emma_ and _Songs
before Sunrise_ in the new Pineapple Edition; shrugged her shoulders
luxuriously up and down in the soft silk of her dressing-gown; toasted
her feet at the big fire and waited for the last post and for the two
cans of boiling water that would come up just before the house was
closed for the night.
But there was no letter from V.V. by the last post and when Mabel
staggered into the room, wreathed in clouds of steam from the two huge
cans she had carried upstairs at ten o’clock, she said that Miss
Vanderleyden’s flat was still empty.
“Maybe,” said Mabel hopefully, “she’s met with a haxident. Lots of
people is run over in these ere fogs you know, miss.”
And William, from under the baize cover which kept him warm and silent
in his corner for the night, roused by Mabel’s familiar voice, stirred
on his perch and gave his only too realistic imitation of Mabel’s loud,
persistent sniff.