It was eleven o’clock. Gillian had had her bath and the round shallow
tin which V.V. had only just re-enamelled pink inside and bright blue
out, was still full of fragrant soapsuds iridescent in the firelight and
whispering to themselves with a little, soft, hissing noise of tiny
bubbles as they coalesced and broke. She had put the lamp on a table by
the window so that her shadow should not fall on the blind, and she
stood in front of the fire, her feet rosy on the blue bath-mat, her arms
raised to take the pins out of her hair.
A few small flames, blue and transparent, moved softly, flowing together
like liquid mercury across the blackened surface of the still unburnt
coal that arched the ruddy caverns of the fire from which an even glow
enveloped her as she stood, supple and tingling from the water. Her
bath-towel hung drying over a chair on one side of the fireplace, her
nightgown threaded with two coloured ribbons, mauve and blue this time,
lay warming on another. She hunched one shoulder and rubbed her chin
against its rounded smoothness and she saw her shadow cast by the
firelight on the white wall behind her. She shook her head to free the
coils of her hair. They slid down her back, two thick ropes warm and
faintly scented with camomile-flower tea blended with an imprisoned
memory of the day’s fog. Taking an end in each hand she turned her back
to the fire and, holding out her arms to their full length, she shook
out her hair so that it fell slowly and made a great fan-shaped shadow
on the wall. She ran to the dressing-table to take a comb, stilting
along on the top of each great-toe like a ballet-dancer, and then,
returning to the zone of warmth and firelight, she combed and
disentangled and pulled away the knots until her hair hung straight and
smooth hiding her breast and shoulders in a moving veil. Her face peered
at her, laughing at its own reflection in a little mirror framed in
black, carved ivy-leaves which hung above the fireplace between a white,
china rabbit and an old, green, glass door-stop, all three cherished
relics of her childhood. The tick of the falling ash in the grate; the
creaking of the wicker-chair on the cushions of which _Emma_ still lay,
open in the middle of the Box Hill party; the swish of a passing taxi in
the street below muffled by the closed window and drawn curtains, seemed
like little desultory tunes played to the accompaniment of a silence
that was, like a ray of light that twists together all the colour of a
rainbow, only the gathering together of distant, undistinguishable
clamour of many sounds. Gillian, alone in her closed room, its white
walls gilded and rosy with lamp- and firelight, its warm air laden with
the clean scent of soap and water and violet-powder and loosened hair
which in five minutes would be chased away by the cold night-air when
she opened her window and got into bed, felt herself caught into a bliss
of solitude, safe, anonymous, ignored. She was alone, alone. No claims,
no duty, no criticism could touch her. The disfiguring humiliation of
the clothes she could never quite wear as other people wore the same, or
slightly better chosen raiment, was no longer about her. She was free,
and fine and lovely. She cupped her chin in her hands and saw in the
mirror how the point of each shoulder broke through the cloud of hair
hanging over it, like a young moon in an outcast sky. She shook back her
hair and, with a hand on each hip, bent her body backwards till she felt
her hair touch her ankles. She stretched up her arms till the shadow of
her hands on the ceiling almost met the shadow of the chair on which her
bath-towel hung. She made a rabbit of her hands, as children do, and it
scampered round the walls; she played tricks with her shadows, the tall
one on the wall opposite the fire, and the wavering one by the door,
cast by the lamp which was flickering and dying down because its oil was
nearly spent. She tried to make them meet and become one shadow. She
stood on one leg with the palm of her foot over her straightened knee
and let the light shine through the arch; she tried to look through the
arch and almost slipped and fell. As she straightened herself again she
remembered that it was Lilac who did that, and that, even when she was
twelve, she had never succeeded in doing it three times running,
herself. “I’m getting too old to do it at all,” she said and put out her
hand to take her nightgown.
* * * * *
There was a sudden rush of cold air into the room as the door opened and
closed quickly again shutting V.V. in.
Gillian clutched at her nightgown and tried to slip it on.
“Don’t, don’t,” laughed V.V., “I love you as you are, you witch,” and
she slipped across the room and pulled the thin cambric till it tore
across.
“V.V.! how dare you!” said Gillian, and she wrapped herself from chin to
toe in the warm bath-towel, folding her hair in with it in her haste and
indignation.
V.V. sat down in the basket-chair, throwing _Emma_ on the floor beside
her with no concern for the crumpling pages.
“Have you missed me?” she said.
“Of course I have,” said Gillian, surprised to feel herself trembling as
she stood holding the bath-towel round her like a shawl. “Have you been
with Heinrich?”
“No. Not since Monday. I had a quarrel with him on Monday. I’ve kept
away from both of you on purpose since.”
V.V. was pale and tired. She had evidently been out in the fog all day
for her hair hung damp and heavy under the brim of her hat and there
were black smudges on her imperfectly powdered face.
“Poor Heinrich has been here in a dreadful state of anxiety this
evening,” said Gillian.
“Has he? The little fool.”
“Oh, V.V.! He was really distressed about you. He thought you were with
me.”
“So I am.”
“Yes, now, but this was between five and six.”
“Well, he knows I’m with you now.”
“Oh, then you have seen him.”
“No, not yet. But I’m going to.”
V.V. got up out of the creaking chair and in two swift strides had
crossed the narrow room and was at the window. She pulled aside the
curtains and threw up the sash. “Come here,” she said to Gillian as she
leaned out over the sill.
Gillian stumbled in her heavy swathing to V.V.’s side.
“Look there. Did you ever see such an idiot,” said V.V.
Gillian leaned out beside her and looked. The fog had cleared off and a
fine, chill rain was falling. Down on the pavement on the opposite side
of the street, standing under a lamp-post Heinrich waited looking up at
the lighted window. He was still without hat or overcoat and even from
the fifth story Gillian could see how sharp and white his face was.
“Go home, Hinerik,” called V.V. “I told you I’d be here,” and dragging
Gillian back with her she slammed the window down again and drew the
curtains.
“V.V., what are you doing?” said Gillian, her teeth chattering with the
sudden cold.
“Teaching him his place,” said V.V. sullenly. “I told him on Monday that
you and I were going to live together in a flat of our own——”
“But, V.V.——”
“Yes, we are. You know we are. Well, he didn’t like it.”
“But of course he didn’t——”
“You be quiet. I told him, like it or not, that’s what I was going to
do. So then he said I thought more of you than I did of him and I said,
yes, and had done from the beginning——”
“Oh, V.V., how could you?”
“Well, it’s true—and it’s time Master Hinerik made up his mind to it.
And I said you knew it.”
“That was a lie, V.V.”
“Oh, was it? Of course you knew it. Haven’t I been with you day after
day and night after night when he was alone or hanging about in the
courtyard till old Gordon turned him out——”
“V.V.! V.V.!”
“Well, I said if he couldn’t see what was as plain as the nose on his
silly face I’d tell him. And I did tell him. I told him I’d always gone
with girls and that you were worth ten of any boy, let alone a little
Dago like him. What are you crying about, Gillian? It’s the plain
truth.”
“It don’t know what you _mean_, V.V. You can’t feel the same about me as
you did about Heinrich when you were going to marry him.”
“Oh, well, not the same, but I’d sooner live with any girl than with
him. And I said we were going to Ostend together for Christmas.”
“You know we’re not. It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”
“Well, it won’t be the last. I’ve been down to Epping and paid off the
rent of that flat so’s I can go back there all right—not to the flat,
we’ll go to an hotel. And I stayed on to make you worry, darling. Did
you worry about your V.V.?”
It was amazing, it was sickening, but V.V. was clearly unable to realize
how what she had told was affecting Gillian.
“V.V., what brought Heinrich up here again to-night? How did you know
he’d be there?”
“He’s there most nights,” said V.V., “and I wrote to him from Epping
this morning to make sure. I told him I’d be coming home to give you
your bath. He’d get it by the last post.”
Gillian felt herself turning giddy. She put out one hand to steady
herself on the back of a chair, and the bath-towel slipped from her
shoulder loosening a strand of hair with it.
“Oh, you darling,” said V.V., “take off the horrid ugly towel and let
V.V. brush out your hair and make you all nice and comfy.”
“If you dare to come near me,” said Gillian, and she choked between each
word. “If you dare to touch me I’ll ring the night-bell and have the
Gordons and Mrs. Barraclough up to take you out of my room. I’m going to
dress and go to Heinrich now, myself. He’s ill, he’s nearly mad.”
“Oh, spitfire!” said V.V., still cheerful but a little uneasy, “and you
can’t go to a man’s studio in the middle of the night, you naughty one.
Shocking!”
“You shall come too,” said Gillian. “Sit down in the basket-chair and
wait for me.”
Trembling and sick she dressed hastily, twisting her hair up anyhow and
pulling a knitted cap over it to keep it together.
“Now,” she said, when she had found the keys of the outside door and
gate, “are you ready?”
“I’m cold and hungry and tired,” whimpered V.V., “and Hinerik will only
be cross.”
But Gillian had no pity for V.V.’s weariness.
* * * * *
It was some minutes before they could get the high barred gate under the
archway open. The lock was often hard to deal with when two or three
people had locked and unlocked it on one evening and V.V., at any rate,
had come in since it had been closed at ten by Gordon. But Gillian was
not to be hindered by a lock. Finally the key turned and the gate swung
open.
“I’ll leave it unlocked in case we can’t get in again,” she said,
pulling it to gently.
They set off over the bridge, but Gillian could not make V.V. hurry. She
protested that she was dog-tired and once or twice she stopped and
leaned against the parapet and really did seem to be exhausted. The
night-rain on her already rain-soaked clothing was cold and heavy. But
still Gillian had no pity. There was no room in her aching mind for any
trouble but Heinrich’s. She had turned him out dazed with misery, had
let him go wavering off into the fog to find V.V.’s letter. And he had
stood there under the street-lamp while she was sleeking her skin and
playing silly games with her shadow, staring up at her window, so numb
with despair that he had not even seen V.V. herself as she crept into
the Club an hour ago.
The ragged wooden gate of the studio gardens was unlatched and flapping
feebly on its hinges in the wind. But there was no light in any of the
studio windows. Some of them were uninhabited except in the daytime, and
the occupants of the others were either in bed or abroad on their
private occasions. The blue door Larry had painted was locked and no
gleam from within came through any crack over the fanlight.
“He’s gone to bed,” said V.V. “I told you so.”
“He’s not asleep if he is in bed,” said Gillian, and she knocked at the
door. She knocked first with her knuckles, then hammered with a stone
she found in the gravel of the path. She called him by name. “Heinrich,
Heinrich. It’s Gillian. V.V.’s come to you.” She rattled at the
door-handle; she tried to climb on the ledge of the small high window,
but it was too narrow to hold her foot. A window was opened by some
disturbed sleeper in one of the houses that backed on to the studio
gardens, but the only sound that came from behind the locked and bolted
door was the faint, melancholy mewing of the little tortoiseshell cat.
“He’s not there,” said V.V. “I knew it was no good coming. He’s prob’ly
gone off to some other studio where there’s a party. Oh, do come home.
You’ll catch your death of cold and so shall I.”
“I shall come down again first thing in the morning,” said Gillian. “I
believe he’s in there all the time.”
“With that screaming cat,” said V.V., “just like him.”
* * * * *
But the next morning there was a telegram from Maggie.
“Please come at once. The Mistress has been taken seriously ill.”
* * * * *
When Gillian got to Highgate, Aunt Elizabeth was lying dead in her
chair, her hands stiffening round the leather case in which the
miniature of Evan Mortimer was closed. And the luminous, still smile
that the living never wear raised the corners of her mouth and lifted
her shadowed eyelids into an angel’s beauty.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
THE FOURTH MOVEMENT
I
Queen’s Hall was three-parts full of the regular Saturday Concert
audience listening to a regular Saturday Concert.
It was almost as foggy inside the hall as it was out in the streets, and
the light streamed down from the red, silk valances round the great
chandeliers over the orchestra in straight slanting lines, and cut
yellow, flat-headed cones of illumination out of the misty dusk.
Gillian sat in the darkness at the back of the two-shilling gallery. How
she got there was more than she could remember. They had nailed Aunt
Elizabeth down in her coffin that morning and there was no more to do in
the house where Maggie held lugubrious tea-parties for the reception of
all licensed comers in preparation for the funeral on Monday. Lilac had
missed Gillian’s telegrams at Curragh and would only reach Euston at six
o’clock that evening, and Gillian, who could neither stay at Highgate
nor go back to the Club, was waiting till it was time to go to the
station to meet her.
She could not stay in the house at Highgate now that Aunt Elizabeth’s
face was hidden in darkness, and she could not go back to the Club and
sit in the room where Larry had stood and told her that Heinrich was
dead.
Larry had been waiting for her the night she had gone back after seeing
the doctor and the lawyer and the men who wanted to know about Aunt
Elizabeth’s grave. V.V. was with him at first, but they had sent her
away. Jane had come and taken her away, leaving Gillian and Larry alone.
Larry had told her what had happened and presently Jane had come back
and had said to Larry:
“Dearest, you will have to give evidence at the inquest to-morrow. But I
think we shall be able to keep her out of it.”
But they weren’t keeping V.V. out of it because they loved her or were
sorry for her, only because it was the decent thing to do. And Gillian
was to be kept out of it as well. Nobody, not even Mrs. Gordon, had seen
Heinrich in the fog on Wednesday afternoon looking for V.V.
“All the mud will be splashed on Larry,” said Jane, her face one set and
constant glare. “V.V. will be his broken-hearted _fiancée_ who was away
at the time, and you—you won’t come into it at all.”
It was Mr. Quist who had found Heinrich on Thursday evening. He had gone
down to the studio to get a book Jane had left there and wanted to have
sent to Felday, and the people in the studio next door had said that the
mewing of the cat had disturbed them all day long. So Mr. Quist had got
a ladder and had broken the skylight and had looked in. He had seen
Heinrich sitting queerly in a chair in the middle of the studio. And
Heinrich had torn up all Larry’s studies of V.V.; the drawings and
sketches for the fire-picture he was going to paint; and he had broken
the little figure of Gillian, the Rapunzel statue Jane had made and
given to Larry to take care of just before they went away, the figure
Gillian had never seen which was to be a surprise for her at Christmas.
He had piled the ruined fragments in a heap in front of the dais. He had
put on his blue overall and had swept all the dust and rubbish from the
floor and had covered the fragments with it. He had pulled out the big
Italian chair and had sat in front of the pile of rubbish and had put
the barrel of the pistol he was so frightened of into his mouth and
pulled the trigger. And the pistol had been loaded after all. And the
little cat was sliding round his feet mewing, mewing....
“He must have done it just before we got there,” said Gillian.
“Or just after you had gone away; it doesn’t much matter now,” said
Larry.
“Larry, did you know that he minded about me?”
“Of course I knew. I minded myself.”
“But I didn’t. I didn’t dream—why didn’t you warn me?”
“Jane did. I spoke to Jane about it. She wouldn’t believe me at first.
She said she’d ask you.”
“She did, but only the day before—two days before—and besides, I didn’t
understand.”
“You should have understood,” said Larry. “Everybody else did. Are you
going to live with her?”
“With V.V.? No. I never was. She talked about it a lot. But I thought it
was only talk.”
“It was a good deal more than talk to him.”
“How did you know? Did he say anything?”
“I loved him, that’s how I knew. But that, again, is something I don’t
suppose you would understand.”
The sick trouble in his face had deepened as he looked away from Gillian
out into the courtyard and at the staircase window of the other house
which Jane was passing on her way down from V.V.’s flat.
And then Jane had come and taken Larry away.
Gillian did not see V.V. again. The Jacky who shared the flat with her
had returned from South Africa and was looking after her. She appeared
to be a very sensible and decent creature, and quite equal to V.V., who,
said Jane coldly, was really very much distressed, and as Gillian was in
trouble herself she had better leave V.V. to her own friends.
That was last night. And this morning she had found a list of the
Saturday concerts. Heinrich had given it to her because she said she
wanted to know what she’d be likely to hear before she went to any of
them. And she had been to none. And now Heinrich’s place in the second
violins was already filled by some other player, someone to whom his
failure was probably a godsend, and she was there because in some
aching, remorseful fashion she knew that if there were any knowledge or
remembrance in the dim places where his eager soul had exiled itself, he
would be eased of some part of his torment because she had gone there
for his sake.
She had slept heavily all night, numb with the fatigue of the past three
days, but she had wakened unrefreshed and it had not been worth the
trouble to get herself any breakfast. It was Mabel’s week in the other
house and the maid on duty on Gillian’s floor had upset her milkcan,
being new to the flats and consequently unable to retain her hold upon
any object that happened to be in her grasp when William addressed her
as “Pretty Dear” out of the darkness of seven o’clock in the morning.
Kind Mrs. Middleton, hearing the clatter, had come in with a cup of
early tea and had stayed to condole and confer with Gillian and to be
scandalized that Gillian had made no effort to get black raiment for the
funeral.
“But I shan’t go to the funeral,” said Gillian. “Aunt Elizabeth wouldn’t
think it right. Only the men of the family—that’ll be Toby and Old
Cousin Mortimer from Ludlow—will go. Lilac and I will stay at Highgate,
with you and her other friends.”
But Mrs. Middleton would argue, and Gillian had slipped out to escape
the questions she knew must come as soon as the news of Heinrich’s death
travelled up from the kitchens, where it must already be known, and came
to Mrs. Middleton’s ears.
She had wandered on the Embankment with no bread to give to the gulls
who wheeled out of the mist, their red legs hanging straight like
coral-branches from their down-white bodies as they screamed past her
face. Their broken, mewing cries seemed like a devil’s echo of that
other mewing, the thought of which drove all the blood of her body in a
cold flood back to her sickened heart.
There, by the river, where she had so often found comfort, where she had
escaped so often from her small, half-imagined griefs, the real and
awful sorrow, the harrowing remorse for her own share in the disaster
she was facing, broke in upon her with wave after wave of mounting
desolation. All the beauty she had ever found by the river was gone;
washed away by this horror. The ash-grey water, sluggish under the
hidden sky, lapped against the pier by the bridges with a cold
reiterated syllable—“dead—dead—dead.” Gillian drifted on to the flat
sound till she came to Vauxhall. For half an hour she wandered in the
Tate Gallery. All the pictures there seemed to repeat the sound of the
river in paint. Ophelia floating on the flower-encumbered stream; Icarus
livid among the soaring feathers of his wings; the child in Luke Fildes’
life-size bestseller; Chatterton, dead at his attic window; the
sickening giants struggling or gloating over corpses in the symbolism of
Watts; the anatomical perfection of Leighton’s Sea giving up its dead;
the bird crushed in the grip of the Minotaur—could they paint nothing
but this? Did the men who put paint on canvas with such hideous
competence know anything about the crazed disillusionment that had
killed Heinrich? Had they ever imagined the ineffable, almost
contemptuous peace which Death had set upon Elizabeth Mortimer’s smiling
mask?
And then the memory of the faint, ironic curve into which the dead mouth
had fallen before they shut it away from sight, came back to Gillian,
terrifying, abasing her with the thought that Aunt Elizabeth knew of her
folly and condemned her from the grave to which she herself had gone in
righteousness and joy.
Out past Westminster and up Whitehall she wandered. She did not pause in
Trafalgar Square to look with derision at dead painters’ crucifixions
and _pietàs_. Her mind was heavy with refusal of the consolations their
very existence implied. Her eye had offended and she had not plucked it
out. She was fit to be eternally cast into the outer darkness where she
was now wandering. She could not enter any Christian church and pray for
the pagan Heinrich; and no prayer of hers need reach the heaven for
which Aunt Elizabeth had saved her own soul.
After a time she had found herself waiting in the gallery-queue on the
staircase outside Queen’s Hall; and finally, jostled and elbowed by
enthusiasts who would not, if struggling could avail their eyes, miss
any turn of the conductor’s wrist, any wafture of his expressive hair or
necktie, she had found a seat high up in a corner against the wall.
She did not trouble about a programme. The orchestra played one of the
well-known overtures. A violinist executed some Dvorák; there was a
Martial work—Elgar, Gillian thought, and another violin solo, and the
first part of the programme was over.
Gillian was only musical at second hand. For the most part she was
content to feel without understanding what she heard. Unless she had a
score to read she could not follow any orchestrated music at all. But
both by taste and training she was happier listening to a symphony she
knew well, or hearing chamber-music with which she had some acquaintance
than she was where any but the greatest artists sang. Words were spoilt
by music to Gillian, though she often turned the music she knew into
words. It was one of the secret personal idiosyncrasies she discovered
to Heinrich, that when she had learnt to know any great music by ear she
remembered it in a notation of words, just as in her childhood she had
done as Jane Bird did and had made profane verses to hymn-tunes.
Heinrich had not been musical in this same secondary, literary sense,
though he knew and loved the tunes in what he played. But once,
following her lead, he too had set a melody to words. Nothing in the
first part of the programme had gone to any words for Gillian; but,
after the first item on the second half was over, there was a longish
pause, and then the orchestra gave forth the first subject of
Tchaikowsky’s B Minor Symphony. And Heinrich, his great eyes laughing
with pleasure, his fiddle tucked under his ear, stood before her singing
in his voice that was almost the voice of the strings from which he drew
the tune, singing at Gillian’s bidding, but singing for V.V., who hardly
listened to him, his one absurd, exotic phrase:
“_Wir sollen nicht mehr auseinander gehen_”—the phrase repeated itself,
_nicht auseinander, nicht auseinander_ soared the violins, and the whole
orchestra repeated it like an oath, _Wir sollen nicht mehr auseinander
gehen_. Was it only of V.V. Heinrich had been thinking when the melody,
the perfect love-phrase of the music, had drawn this sentimentalism up
from the recesses of his polyglot vocabulary? It might have been. And
yet Heinrich was better than that. He was not, like V.V., incapable of
any idea that had not a direct personal implication—_Nicht mehr
auseinander gehen_—that was the ideal of all lovers. Would any German
girl, Gillian wondered, hearing it exotic and appealing from Heinrich’s
impish lips have loved him as V.V. could not imagine doing? Or would she
have laughed at his queer passion as V.V. had done. It was a terrible
thing to face—that claim—love me or I die. After all it was almost what
V.V. had said to her, and she had turned away from it with all the force
within her. You couldn’t let another human being set up a right in you
like that. Larry hadn’t. He had said it was the primal curse.
The orchestra marched on until the time and the key had changed and the
first bars of the five-four allegro were racing along the wood-wind and
up and down the strings. Heinrich had made no words for that, only a
funny little laughing song that had run against the tune. There was more
music in Heinrich than in Gillian—she could not have pointed any melody
like that. She could not even quite remember how Heinrich had done it.
It flickered in her mind as the movement danced on: presently it would
flicker out altogether—and be just a little, forgotten trick, like his
way of getting the sparrows together in his hand and throwing them out
into the ivy on the wall beyond the studio window.
Heinrich had refused to make words for the rest of the symphony, and as
it rioted on melodiously Gillian’s attention flagged and she half-dozed
in her airless corner, her eyes dazzled by the angles of light which cut
one another just within her line of vision. And then the descending
chords of the fourth movement, the Adagio Lamentoso, broke heavy with
anger and despair. And they made words so plain that Gillian felt the
whole hall was ringing with them. “O poor Larry Browne,” they called, “O
poor Larry Browne.” Like a foolish, tragic, nursery rhyme. And it was
Jane’s voice, and Lilac’s, and even V.V.’s heaping anger upon her
because of what had been done to Larry and to Heinrich. What was it Jane
had said? “Spattering mud on Larry.” She had done that. It was clear
that in some horrible way, which was a part of the things she did not
even now quite understand, Larry was being laid under an imputation of
which she, Gillian, had been the source.
He was, she knew, almost Heinrich’s guardian. He had meant to take his
faun to the warmth and light in which his frail and delicate nature
could flourish and grow in joy. But Larry would never be able to take
Heinrich to Taormina now. Larry had not saved him from the vultures
after all. He could never bear to live in the studio again. Perhaps,
even now, at the inquest Larry was being blamed—censured was the
word—the coroner censured the witness—for leaving his pistol loaded—for
leaving Heinrich alone with a loaded pistol. For leaving Heinrich alone
with his anger and his fear.
Suddenly the lights grew together, they began to revolve like rockets,
and the music swelled and increased to an intolerable shouting, and
everyone in the galleries leaned forward and pointed at her, and they
all shouted in time to the chords—they all shouted Larry’s name. Gillian
stood up in her place—“Larry, Larry”—she shouted with them; and then the
reeling lights and the shouting voices became one black confusion into
which she was falling, falling——
* * * * *
Someone—she did not know who it was—was holding her by the arm on the
pavement outside. A taxi with the door open stood by the kerb.
“Where shall I take you?” said a strange, kind voice.
“To Euston, to meet the Irish Mail,” said Gillian.
And then she fainted.