There is Bohemianism still--there will always be Bohemianism. But
the present will never wear the same air of fantasy as the past. It
is the same with all things. Every circumstance take its colour from
the immediate surroundings, and you cannot expect to get the same
light-hearted Bohemianism in the midst of an orderly, church-going,
police-conducted district. What hope is there for a troubadour
nowadays with the latest regulations upon street noises? We must
dispense with troubadours and get our Romance elsewhere. So
everything has to suit itself to its own time--Bohemianism with the
rest.
One essential quality there is, however, in this Vie de Boheme that
will never alter. It demands that those who live it, shall be careless
of the morrow; it expects an absolute liberty of soul, let manners
and conditions be what they may. You will still find that; you will
always find it. Certain souls must be free and they always seek out
the spots of the earth where social restrictions, social exigencies,
are least of all in force. They live where life is freest; they eat
their meals where it is not compulsory for them to be on their best
behaviour. You cannot expect the Bohemian to be a slave, and to
customs least of all. The only well-ruled line that he can follow
is the customary prompting of his own instinct.
Such a spot--an ideal corner of all unconventionality--is Soho. They
say that Greek Street is the worst street in London. You must say
something is the worst, to show how bad and good things are. Then
why not Greek Street? But for no definite reason. It is really no
worse than many another and, with a few more lamps to light its
darkened pathways, it might earn that reputation for respectability
which would endear it to the most exacting of British matrons. All
the doubtful deeds are only done in dark streets. Light is the sole
remedy; you will see crime retreating before it like some crawling
vermin that dares not show its face. Therefore, why blame Greek
Street and those who live there? The county council are to blame that
they do not cleanse the place with light.
Bad or good, though--whatever it may be--it is part of Soho; the
refuge of Bohemianism to which district Traill brought Sally Bishop
on that Thursday evening.
Outside the restaurant in Old Compton Street with its latticed
windows, and its almost spotless white lintels and the low-roofed
doorway, a barrel-organ was twirling tunes to which two or three
girls danced a clumsy step. In the doorway itself, at the top of the
precipitous flight of stairs that led immediately to the room below,
stood Madame, the proprietor's wife--ready to welcome all who came.
Her round, French, good-natured face beamed when she saw Traill, and
her little brown eyes gleamed with genuine approval as they swept
over Sally.
"Bon soir, Monsieur; bon soir, Madame."
Every lady is Madame, however many during the week Monsieur may
choose to bring, and she makes a romance of every single one of them.
Her own days are memories, but, being French, she still lives in the
romance of others.
"Good evening," said Traill; "how's the business--good?"
"Mais, oui, Monsieur; les affaires vont assez bien."
They climbed down the narrow little staircase, made narrower and
almost impassable by the pots of evergreens placed for decoration
upon some of the steps. There, in the flood of light, the little room
papered in gold, hung with pictures advertising the place, all done
by needy customers--mostly French--who had given them to the
establishment for a few francs, or out of the fullness of their hearts,
they were greeted in welcome again by Berthe, the little waitress.
"Bon soir, Monsieur; bon soir, Madame."
It was like the cuckoo hopping from the clock to sing his note at
every quarter.
There were little tables in every corner, all covered with
virgin-white cloths and, in the centre of each, a vase full of
chrysanthemums. It was all in order--all spick and span--French,
every touch of it.
"Ou voulez-vous asseoir, Monsieur? Sous l'escalier?"
Under the staircase by which they had just descended, two tiny tables
had been placed--babies, thrust into the corner, looking plaintively
for company. An Englishman would probably have made a cupboard of
the place for odds and ends.
Traill consulted Sally. She did not mind. Anything in her mood would
have pleased her. The atmosphere of all that was foreign in
everything around her had lifted her above ordinary considerations.
Under the stairs, then, they sat, Traill's head almost touching the
sloping roof above him.
"Well, what do you think you'd like to have?" he asked. And Berthe
stood by, patiently waiting, content to study the little details that
made up Madame's costume; her eyes were lit with the same romantic
interest which the proprietress had shown on their arrival.
"I don't mind."
"Well, will you have escargots?"
"What's that?"
"Snails."
Sally shook her head with a grimace and smiled. Berthe tittered with
laughter.
"Monsieur is funning, he would not eat escargots himself." She smiled
at Sally, the smile that opens confidence and invites you within;
no grudging of it between the teeth, ill-favoured and starved, as
we do the thing in this country.
"However did you find this lovely little place?" asked Sally, when
the girl had gone with Traill's order.
"Deux consommes, deux!" shouted Berthe through a door at the end of
the room. "Deux consommes, deux!" came the distant echo from the
kitchen.
Traill leant his elbow on the table and looked at her--let his eyes
rest on every feature, last of all her eyes, and held them.
"By not looking for it," he said. "By passing it one evening at about
the time for dinner, seeing the new-old bottle-panes in the leaded
windows, looking down these stairs and getting a rough-drawn
impression that the place was cosy, a rough-drawn impression in which
the bottle-panes suggested that they had some sort of ideas in their
heads, these people--and the little pots of evergreen down the stairs
with the ugly red frilled paper round them that made you think that
they had known the country--lived in it. All that blurred together
in a mazy idea that it was sure to be cosy. Then I came downstairs,
saw all these little tables with their vases of flowers, the spotless
serviettes sticking up like white horns out of the wine-glasses, saw
the beaming face of Berthe over there; was greeted with, 'Bon soir,
Monsieur;' and so I dined. That's a year and a half ago. I've had
my dinner, on an average, three times a week here ever since."
"It must be nice to be a man," said Sally.
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know; to dine where you like, find out these quaint
little places, never to have to think of the impression you give by
what you do."
He leaned back in his chair, and smiled at her. "We have to think
just as much as you do, in most of the things we really want to do.
I didn't want particularly to dine in such a place as this, that
evening I came here. It seemed no liberty to me. There are things
I might give the world to be able to do, yet haven't the liberty.
What do you want with liberty--the liberty to come and go wherever
you please?" He smiled at her again. "What good would it do you?"
Sally wondered what Miss Hallard would say if she were to hear this.
She wondered what she would have said herself, had the expression
of such ideas come from Mr. Arthur. There was no doubt that she would
have repudiated them with vehement denial. With Traill she said
nothing--felt that he was right. Why was that? She could not tell.
It was beyond her power to analyze the situation as closely as it
required. It was beyond her ability to realize that a man may say
he is the son of God, if it be that he has behind the words the power
of the personality of a Jesus Christ. Traill had the personality--the
dominance behind him in what he said--that was all. He might have
told her that women were only the chattels of men, born to slavery,
the property of their masters, and she would not have denied it to
him.
"What in the name of God are women?" he had said more than once in
his life--"Is one of them ever worth all the while?" And he thought
he had meant it. To a great extent, he acted up to it as well. These
are the questions that men of the type put to themselves over and
over again--but there are Cleopatras to mate with Antonys, Helens
of Troy and Lady Hamiltons who can snap their fingers in the face
of such odds and win. But Sally was not of this blood. She is the
lamb that goes willing to the slaughter, the woman, whom a man like
Traill, when once he holds the trembling threads of her affection,
can drive to the uttermost.
"Then you give no liberty to a woman?" she said.
"No--not the liberty she talks about. Not the idea of liberty that
she gets from these suffragist pamphleteers."
"I'd like you to meet my friend, Miss Hallard," said Sally.
"Why? Who's Miss Hallard? What is she?"
"She's an artist--I share rooms with her."
"Why would you like me to meet her?"
"I'd like to hear you two argue. She thinks just the opposite. She
thinks--"
"I never argue with a woman," Traill interrupted.
"You think so poorly of us?" She tried to say it with spirit--struck
the flint in her eyes, contracted her lips to the hard, thin line.
"As women? No--the very best." Her looks did not worry him. Water
pouring over marble runs off as smoothly. "You want to be judged as
men--you never will be till you can cut your hair short and dress
the part. Clothes have the deuce of a lot to do with it. I can love
a woman, but, my God, I can't argue with her."
He leant back to let Berthe put the plates of soup before them, and
Sally watched his face. It was very hard--high cheek-bones from which
the flesh drooped in hollows to the jaws, the grey eyes well set,
neither deep nor prominent, but flinching at nothing. There was no
great show of intellectuality in the forehead--it was broad, smooth,
but not high; yet none of the features were small. The jaw was square,
the upper lip long. At one end the mouth seemed to bend upwards in
a twist of irony, rather than humour, and the lips themselves were
thin--lips that could cut each word to a point if they chose, before
they uttered it, a mouth by no means sensitive to the hard things
it could speak.
To Sally it both feared and fascinated. Whenever he was not looking,
she could not take her eyes away. In the pictures in her mind, it
showed itself most often in ironic rage; yet he could look at her
with an expression that wooed the softest of thoughts in her heart.
Then she felt a slave, and would have given him the world, held in
her fingers, the gift would have seemed so small.
He looked up quickly from his plate--all motions of his head were
alert. "Why don't you begin your soup?" he asked.
She laughed quietly, and commenced at once with childlike obedience.
"Has Mr. Arthur said anything to you since?" he inquired presently.
For a short moment she hesitated--then she admitted it.
"When?"
"Monday evening."
"Oh--the day you had lunch with me."
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
Again she hesitated.
"What right have I to ask--eh?" he interrupted before she could frame
the words to reply. "Isn't that what you're sticking over? Of course
I've no right but interest. You brought me the interest, you
know--but I apologize for it all the same. Berthe!"
"Oui--Monsieur."
"Maquereaux grilles; and I want something to drink."
Berthe went to the bottom of the stairs, leaning on the third step
with her hand and calling up to the room above.
"Alexandre!"
"Why does she do that?" inquired Sally.
"She's calling for Alexandre, the waiter who runs out across the
street--obediently but slowly--with your pennies to buy your wine.
They don't have a license here."
Alexandre made his appearance with a big red cardboard cover in his
hand, which looked as if it held a copy of a weekly paper. This was
the wine list. Traill gripped it from him, giving the number almost
at the same moment.
Alexandre waited patiently for a moment, then deferentially
suggested that he should be given the money, having received which,
the little staircase swallowed up his tall, thin body again. It was
all like playing at keeping restaurant, only everything worked
without a hitch, which would never have happened if it had really
been only a game.
"I apologize," Traill repeated, when Alexandre had disappeared.
"But there's no need to," said Sally, quickly. "I think it's very
kind of you to take the interest that you do. And I suppose"--her
eyes roamed plaintively round the room, rather than at that moment
meet his; "I suppose I should have told you without your asking."
"Why?" he leaned a little forward.
"I don't know. Because I wanted to, I expect."
Her eyes fell to the table. She made tiny pellets of bread between
her fingers and placed them one by one in a row, knowing that his
eyes were searching through her. In that little moment, the silence
vibrated with the current of their thoughts. Traill pulled himself
together--laying hand upon anything that came within his reach.
"Look at this knife," he said in a dry voice, picking up the nearest
to him. "Ever seen such a handle? it's shrunk in the wash." The bone
handle of it was bent round, twisted like a ram's horn. "I generally
get this about once a week. It's an old friend by this time."
She looked at it, scarcely seeing, and forced a smile that could not
quite remove the furrow of silent intensity from her brows. Traill
saw that. He could not take his eyes from her face. Her almost
childish passivity was like a slow and heavy poison in his blood.
It crept gradually and gradually through the veins, leaving fire
wherever it touched.
Alexandre came back with the wine, and broke the spell of it. He
spread the change out on the table, and the sound of it then, at that
moment, was like the breaking of a thousand little pieces of glass,
over which his presence walked with clumsy feet.
"Well, what did Mr. Arthur say?" Traill asked when Alexandre had
disappeared again and Berthe had brought them their second course.
Sally looked up and smiled at his encouragement, a smile that lit
through him. He could feel it dancing in his eyes.
"He asked me if I had made up my mind," she replied.
"Made up your mind to marry him?"
"Yes."
The pause was heavy, it seemed to swing against them.
"And you? What did you say?"
He tried to conceal the burning of his interest to know. His voice
was steady--each note of each word quiet, true, subdued; but when
the brain is tautened, vibrating as was his, it gives out of itself
unconsciously. She felt the strain in her mind as well, just as though
a wire, drawn out, were stretched between them. She heard the note,
half-dominant in his speech. However quiet his voice, he could not
dull her ears to that.
"Oh, I told him I couldn't; it was impossible. I don't love him, I
never should love him. How could one take a step like that on no other
basis than wanting a home? What a home it would be! I should be
miserable."
These were her beliefs. She placed love before everything--lifted
it to the altar as you raise a saint and worshipped with bent knees
and silently moving lips. To understand the great-hearted love of
a greatly loving woman, you must know the joy of greatly giving. She
loves to give; she gives to love. Out of her breast, out of her heart,
with arms laden to the breaking--dragged down by the weight of her
gifts, she will give, and give, and give, holding nothing back,
grudging nothing, forgetting all she has ever given in the blind joy
of what is left to be bestowed. This, when it comes to a woman, is
what she means by love as she kneels down in the silent chapel of
her own heart and worships. This was the passion as Sally understood
it. Her whole desire was to give, and to Mr. Arthur she could have
given nothing.
"What did he say?" asked Traill, quietly. A man always speaks
somewhat in awe, somewhat in deference, of another whose hopes have
been flung to the ground; speaks of him as if he were a prisoner in
a condemned cell--fool enough no doubt, but made a man again by the
meeting of his fate. "What did he say?" he repeated.
Across Sally's mind pictures were rushing in kaleidoscope. The
remembrance of Mr. Arthur as he had left her at the door and turned
away, shuffling his steps along the pathway--the sight of Janet and
herself, with heads raised from the pillow, listening to the muffled,
disordered sounds in the next room--the recollection of Mr. Arthur's
face the next morning as she had passed him in the hall, the eyes
dull--steam, as it were, upon a window-pane--and the unhealthy
shadows beneath. He had grudged her a good morning, but that was all,
and she had scarcely seen him since then. He had been out every
evening.
"He said very little," she replied, "but I know he felt it very much."
"How do you know?"
"Well, that night when he came in--" the words refused utterance.
She looked up quaintly, appealing to him, desiring to be understood
without further explanation.
"Drunk?" said Traill.
She nodded.
"Poor devil!"
A thousand apprehensions fled--darkening--across her face. So pass
a flight of starlings with a thousand whirring wings that sweep out
light of the sun.
"You think I treated him badly?"
"No, I didn't say so."
"But you think it?" She begged eagerly, importunately.
"No, no, my dear child; no. What else could you do?"
"But you felt sorry for him?"
"Do you forbid it? I was putting myself in his shoes, feeling for
the moment what he must have felt. Sift it down and you'll find at
the bottom that I really said poor devil for myself." He laughed as
he looked at her. "Well, now," he went on, "we're getting more than
halfway through dinner and we haven't decided where we're going to
yet. What's it to be?"
"Really, I don't mind a little bit."
"Oh, you never give any help at all."
She laughed light-heartedly. "I find I get along quite all right if
I let you choose."
"You're satisfied?"
"Absolutely."
"Well, then; I'm not going to offer inviolable judgment. I'm only
going to make a suggestion."
"What is it?"
"My rooms are in Regent Street--"
"I know; I looked up the number the other day in the _Who's Who?_
after we'd had lunch."
"Was that to know if I'd told the truth?" He held her eyes for the
answer as you put your metal in the vice.
"No, of course not! How could you think I'd dream of such a thing?"
"Many women might."
"I certainly shouldn't."
A look of tenderness as it passed across his face freed her. She
turned her eyes away. He was finding her so absolutely a child, and
on the moment paused. There is a moment when a pause holds possibility
laden full in its two hands. He let it slip by--it rode off like a
feather on the wind. He lost sight of it.
"Well, what's your suggestion?" she asked.
"That we should come back to Regent Street, sit and talk; we'll have
our coffee there; I'll show you how to make it."
He tried to run the whole sentence through. Set it on its feet, and
pushed it to the conclusion that it might seem natural,
unpremeditated. She saw nothing forced; but his ears burnt to the
stumbling sounds. The breath caught in his nostrils as he waited for
her definite refusal.
"I think that would be lovely," she said with genuine interest.
He let the breath slowly free, checked, curbed, the bearing rein upon
it all the way. He imagined he had found country innocence in London,
and for the moment stood aghast at it; could not see that it was her
trust in him, blindly, implicitly placed, against all knowledge of
the world. He stood for a gentleman in her eyes--that Apsley Manor,
the late Sir William Hewitt Traill, C.B., they all helped to conjure
the vision in her mind. She knew the world well enough in her gentle
way; but this man was a gentleman.
Yet he saw little of this and, in a broadness of heart, warned her.
"I say nothing for or against myself," he said, "and this has not
been put to you as a test; I want you to come, I really hope you'll
come. But you'd be foolish beyond words if you indiscriminately
accepted such an invitation from any man."
"I know that," she replied firmly.
"And you'll come?"
"Yes; I've said I would."
"Why do you make the exception?"
"Because I know you're a gentleman. I trust you implicitly."
That went to the heart of him--drove home--the words quivering where
they struck.