It was a severe room, scrupulously neat. Along one side ran a bookcase,
with beaded glass doors, containing, as one might see by peering through
the spaces, the collected, unread literature of two stern generations.
A few old prints, placed in bad lights, hung on the walls. In the centre
of the room was a leather-covered library table, with writing materials
arranged in painful precision. A couch was lined along one wall, in the
draught of the door. On either side of the fireplace were ranged two
stiff leather armchairs.
In one of these chairs sat an old man, in the other a faded woman just
verging upon middle age. The old man was looking at a picture which he
supported on his knees-a narrow, oblong strip of canvas nailed on to
a rough wooden frame. The woman eyed him with some interest, as if
awaiting a decision.
They were father and daughter, and bore a strange family resemblance
to each other. Both faces were pale, their foreheads high and narrow,
marked by faint horizontal lines, their eyes gray and cold, their upper
lips long and thin, setting tightly, without mobility, upon the lower.
The only essential point of difference was that the father's chin was
weakly pointed, the daughter's squarer and harder. Both faces gave one
the impression of negativeness, joylessness, seeming to lack the power
of strong emotive expression. One can see such, minus the refinement
of gentle birth and social amenities, in the pews of obscure dissenting
chapels, testifying that they have been led thither not by strong
convictions, but by the force of mild circumstance.
Indeed, as is the case with hundreds of our upper middle-class families,
the Davenants had descended from a fierce old Puritan stock, and though
the reality of their Puritanism had gradually lost itself in the current
of more respectable orthodoxy, its shadow hung over them still. The
vigorous enthusiasm that spurred the Puritan on to lofty action
was gone; the vague dread of sin that kept him in moral and mental
inactivity alone remained. Perhaps it is this survival amongst us of
the negative element of Puritanism that produces in England the curious
anomaly of education without enlightenment. It has dulled our perception
of life as an art, whose “great incidents,” as Fielding finely says,
“are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the several
members of a fine statue or a noble poem.” It has caused us to live in
a perpetual twilight in which the possibilities of existence loom
fantastic and indistinct. The Davenants were gentlefolk, holding a good
position in the small country town of Durdleham; they visited among
the county families, and, on ordinary, conventional grounds, considered
themselves to belong to the cultured classes. They were the curious yet
familiar product of the old-fashioned, high-church Toryism impregnated
with the Puritan taint.
The light was fading through the French window behind the old man's
chair. He laid down the canvas on his lap and looked in a puzzled way at
the fire. Then he raised it nearer to his eyes for further examination.
“This is really very dreadful,” he said at last, looking at his
daughter.
“Something will have to be done soon,” replied the latter.
“It is so horribly vulgar, Grace,” said the old man; “look at that boy's
nose--and that drunken man--his face is a nightmare of evil. I really
must begin to talk seriously to Clytie.”
Mrs. Blather smiled somewhat pityingly. Since the earliest days of her
long widowhood she had undertaken the charge of her father's house and
the care of her two younger sisters, Janet and Clytie. Her familiarity,
therefore, with the seamy side of Clytie's nature had been of long
duration.
“You might as well talk to that fender, papa,” she said. “Clytie has
got it into her head that she is going to be an artist, and no amount of
talking will get it out.”
“It's all through her visiting those friends of hers, the Farquharsons.
They are not nice people for her to know. I shall not let her go there
again.”
“If she goes on like this there is no knowing what will happen.”
“Where did the child get these repulsive and ungirlish notions from?”
the old man asked querulously.
The conception of the picture was not that of a young girl, and though
the execution was crude and untrained, there was a bold cruelty of touch
that saved it from being amateurish. The canvas was divided into two
panels. On the one was painted a tiny bully of a boy with his arm
rounded across his throat, about to strike a weakly, poverty-stricken
little girl. They were children of the poorest classes, the boy
realistically, offensively dirty--the _petit morveux_ in its absolute
sense. Behind them was the open doorway of a red-brick, jerry-built
cottage, showing a strip of torn and dirty matting along the passage
that lost itself in the gloom beyond. On the other panel was the corner
of a public house in a low slum, the window lights and a gas-lamp
throwing a lurid glare upon wet pavement and the figures of a woman
and a drunken man. The faces were those of the children in the first
picture, and the eternal tragedy was repeating itself. The man's face
was loathsome in its sodden ferocity; the woman, with a child in her
arms, was reeling from the blow. The evident haste in which the panels
had been painted, the glaring, unsoftened colouring, heightened as if by
impressionist design the coarse realism of the effect. Above was written
the legend, “_La joie de vivre_” and in the left-hand bottom corner,
“_Clytie Davenant pinxit_.”
“She has certainly grown much worse of late,” sighed Mrs. Blather,
holding out her thin, short hand to shield her face from the fire.
There was a pause of some moments. Mr. Davenant ceased nursing the
picture and stood it on the floor.
“Have you quite made up your mind, papa,” said Mrs. Blather at length,
“not to let Clytie go to the Slade School in London?”
“It is out of the question,” replied the old man.
“I don't think so, papa. It would perhaps do her good. A year or so's
hard work would take all these silly ideas out of her.”
“I question it,” said Mr. Davenant. “They are not silly ideas. They are
debased, degraded ideas.”
“My dear papa, they are only fads. All young girls have them. Look how
crazy Janet was to join the cookery classes. We let her join, and now
she hates the sight of a pie-dish. With Clytie it is quite the same,
only she wants to daub.”
“Well, let her daub in a decent way at home,” replied the old man
testily.
Mrs. Blather shrugged her lean shoulders.
“We have tried that and it hasn't succeeded, apparently,” she said
drily. “You seldom come in her way; you don't know how unpleasant things
are for Janet and myself. What do you think she had the impertinence
to tell me this morning? She said that we were not real people. We
were machines or abstractions based, I think she said, on a formula,
or something of that sort. She was pining to live amongst living human
beings. And then she is so rude to visitors. What do you think she said
to the vicar, who came, at Janet's request, to talk to her about her
shameful neglect of her religious duties? She said, if he was a pillar
of the Church, she saw no reason why she should be a seat-cushion.”
“Tut, tut,” said the old man angrily. He was vicar's churchwarden, and a
power in the parish.
“And then,” continued Mrs. Blather, “when I scolded her for her
rudeness, she said that if she had been a man she would have sworn at
him for his impertinence. Really people will soon be afraid of coming to
the house.”
“They will indeed,” said Mr. Davenant.
Like a wise woman, Mrs. Blather did not press her point. She knew she
had thoroughly alarmed her father and had shown him but one way out of
the difficulty. His taking it, if left to himself, was only a question
of time. She rang the bell for the servant to come and light Mr.
Davenant's gas, and then she left him to his reflections.
Mr. Davenant possessed some landed property, which he had occupied his
life in mismanaging. Fortunately for him, his wife had brought him a
small fortune which sufficed to keep up a position, modest when compared
with that of the Davenants of former days, but still high enough to
satisfy the social aspirations of his family. He had lived a colourless
life, severe and respectable. Even his university days had passed in
a dull uniformity, leaving no glamour behind them. He had walked
honourably and blindly in the paths his parents had indicated, and, now
that he was nearing the end of the journey, thanked God for having given
him the grace not to err from them. He had married when still fairly
young, and he had loved his wife in a gentlemanly, passionless way. She,
poor thing, had filled up so small a space in life that she had faded
out of it almost unnoticed--even by himself. He had no storms of joy or
sorrow to look back upon. His thoughts, as he brooded over the fireside,
generally wandered back to trifling incidents: ancient municipal
interests, the mortgages on his estate, the boundary quarrels with the
old earl, his neighbour.
But lately he had been thinking anxiously over his daughter Clytie.
She had suddenly developed out of a naughty, rebellious child into a
problem. He assumed as a matter of course that he bore her the ordinary
well-regulated parental affection, but in his heart of hearts he never
really loved her. Until lately it had not occurred to him to think
of her as anything but a child of his with a singularly unfortunate
disposition which time would modify. But time, on the contrary, was
accentuating it, and he realised at last that Clytie had a distinct
individuality. His philosophy had left many things in heaven and earth
undreamed of. He was mystified, puzzled. How could he and his delicate
wife have brought this bright-haired, full-blooded, impulsive creature
into existence? Her sisters were gentle, quiet women, possessing the
virtues inculcated in his conception of life. Clytie seemed to possess
none of them. The peasant woman in the legend could not have wondered
more over her changeling. How could a daughter of his and a sister
of Janet's scoff at sacred things, defy social rules, and have an
imagination that ran riot in scenes of drunkenness and outcast life?
Physiology might grant a solution to the old man's problem in the law
of the alternation of heredity. His father's youngest brother had been a
family black sheep, and being the only one of the generation who had led
an eventful career, was naturally never mentioned by his relations, and
the record of his life perished with him. But it is possible that the
positive enthusiastic principle of Clytie's Puritan descent, reasserting
itself once in every other generation, to the horror of the negative
principle that otherwise ran through the race continuously, came out in
her with all its strength and vigour. It brought her eager, panting up
to the brink of our surging nineteenth century life, imperiously bidding
her plunge in and take her part in the tumult.
She was now nineteen, an age when girls try to realise themselves.
She discovered that she was a greater problem to herself than to her
sisters. They simply looked upon her as odd, eccentric, unpleasant
to live with, and if she had not been their sister would have almost
gathered up their skirts around them as they passed her by. But she was
conscious of a craving within her that did not proceed from mere wilful
caprice. In her earlier girlhood she had thought long and humbly over
her shortcomings. Why could she not be as contented and dutiful as
Janet? Why could not the interests that satisfied her sisters' life
satisfy hers? Often and often an impulse of scorn and ridicule at the
littleness of Durdleham would overmaster her, and then would follow a
passionate fit of remorse and repentance, received with coldness
and ruffled dignity on her sisters' part, that would send her back
humiliated and rebellious to her room. From what springs of desire did
all this proceed? Whither were these impulses tending?
Ever since she could hold a pencil she had been able to draw. She had
received lessons in painting later on, and had covered canvas after
canvas with the graceful futilities the Durdleham art teacher suggested.
He was a landscape painter, and Clytie had little or no feeling for
landscape. Bright colour, vivid contrast, sharp tone, attracted her, but
the quiet grays and faint blues of our English scenery came out dull and
mechanical when she tried to paint them. At last she gave up her lessons
in despair, much to the wonderment of Janet, who improved greatly under
instruction, and turned out neat, complacent little water-colours which
she sold at bazaars or distributed among her friends. For months Clytie
never touched a brush. Art of this sort revolted her. It was soulless,
futile. But by degrees, as the breach between herself and her
sisters widened, her power of painting became a source of ineffable
consolation--a means of self-commune. She could give external expression
to the voices that haunted her. She read books with the eagerness
only exhibited by the young girl craving for self-development; and
the pictures they vividly impressed on her young imaginative brain she
transferred to paper or canvas--not lovingly, tenderly, with the pure
artistic delight of gradual creation, but hurriedly, feverishly, longing
to see the thing done, the impression realised in a way in which she
could understand it. When finished, or rather as soon as it had reached
an impressionist stage of artistic completeness, she would feast her
heart upon it for a day or two, and then throw it away, or let it lie
about in a corner disregarded and forgotten.
Until she was nearly eighteen Mrs. Blather had scrupulously supervised
her reading, and Clytie, chafing with irritation, had been compelled
either to submit or to smuggle condemned books into the house and read
them surreptitiously. But at last her angry impatience at the impeccable
literature that satisfied her sisters' needs burst its restraints,
and resisted vehemently and finally all censorship on the part of Mrs.
Blather.
It was not wholesome, this solitary, emotional, imaginative life.
Her health showed signs of giving way. They called in a doctor, who
prescribed rest and a change of air. One of her aunts, who lived in
London, happened to want a companion for a tour on the Continent, and
with many misgivings undertook to take Clytie with her. To the girl the
trip was an endless succession of delight. Impressions followed each
other too fast for her to realise them. The superficial features of
continental life, familiar and commonplace enough to the ordinary
traveller, were new to her. Groups at street corners, strangely attired
soldiers, odd un-English-looking shops, the very waiters hurrying along
through the intricacies of café tables with their fantastically laden
trays, all excited her, filled her with the exhilaration of life and
movement. Her aunt, who had hitherto shared the family opinion of
Clytie, wondered greatly at the transformation. It never occurred to
her that this was the natural Clytie filling her heart at last with the
emotions it had hungered for.
It was during this time, at a pension in Dresden, that she formed the
acquaintance of the Farquharsons. Miss Davenant discovered that they and
herself had common acquaintances in London, and that she had heard of
Mr. Farquharson as an archæologist of some repute.
The acquaintance thus formed developed quickly into a pleasant intimacy
of travel. Mrs. Farquharson, a bright, clever woman of forty, was
attracted toward Clytie, who, for her part, found in her new friend
a natural sympathy that touched her heart. So far did their sudden
friendship go, that before they parted Clytie had conditionally accepted
an invitation to visit the archæologist and his wife in Harley Street.
When Mr. Davenant's permission was asked he at first demurred. He
had the country-bred man's distrust of strangers; but when his sister
vouched for the social position of the Farquharsons he reluctantly
consented. Clytie paid her promised visit the following winter. This
was one of the turning points of her life. For the first time she
found herself in an intellectual, artistic society. It was a glimpse
of another world. At Durdleham young men seldom came to the house. When
they did, they avoided her and talked platitudes to her sisters. At
dinner parties the men remained in the dining-room long after the
ladies had left. They seemed to regard them as somewhat picturesque but
wearisome household adjuncts, whose absence their masculine intellects
unreservedly welcomed; conversation with their partner was a dinner
incident to be got through, like shaving or putting on their white ties
beforehand. And the Durdleham ladies seemed to take this as a matter of
course, and were equally happy to get by themselves and gossip mildly.
But in Harley Street Clytie found a different order of things. Men and
women seemed to have interests in common and to discuss them on a basis
of perfect equality. She found, too, women speaking authoritatively on
certain subjects and listened to with deference by men. All, young
and old, talked to her as if she were as much absorbed in life as
themselves. No one made her rage with humiliation by tolerating her with
an air of languid or pompous condescension. Even the frivolities and
platitudes of everyday conversation were treated in a way new to her
experience. The talk was keen, incisive, exaggerated. Everyone could
say what he wished without fear of springing some mine of prejudice or
prudery. The atmosphere of the house breathed freedom of thought and
action. She beheld others putting into form her own vague aspirations.
She saw people who wrote, painted, acted, living fully and intensely
every day. Even the professed idlers whom she met seemed to hold their
fingers on the throb of life around them.
In the streets--she had been but little in London before--she saw things
strange and fascinating--things she had read about, dreamed of, painted,
and yet not understood. She was appalled by her ignorance, the narrow
gauge of her sympathies. What did all this restless life in the great
city mean, its wild cries and passions that struck upon her tightly
strung nerves with a deep, mysterious resonance?
She filled a sketch-book with the vivid impressions each day brought
her, seeking, as her way was, to realise them by tearing them out of
herself, and giving them objectivity. A royal academician picked up
the book from the corner of a table in the drawing-room, where Clytie,
falling easily into the careless ways of the household, had thrown it.
He was turning over the pages when Clytie perceived him, and rushed
impulsively to him across the room.
“Oh! you mustn't look at that, Mr. Redgrave. Please don't!”
He looked up at her amusedly.
“Why not? It is rather interesting. Why don't you learn to draw?”
“What would be the good?” she said. “This suits my purpose.”
The other shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly.
“That all depends upon what your purpose is,” he replied. “If you want
to become an artist you must train properly for it.”
Become an artist! The words haunted her all that night. They opened up
before her infinite vistas of possibilities, life in the midst of the
world, the knowledge of its greatnesses and its mysteries.
In the morning she wrote to him. He invited her to come to his studio
and talk over the matter. She asked Mrs. Farquharson to accompany
her, but her hostess was engaged at the hour in question. Clytie looked
disappointed. The home traditions asserted themselves and prevented her
from thinking it possible to go unchaperoned. Mrs. Farquharson divined
this and laughed in her bright way.
“Goodness gracious, my dear,” she said, “the man isn't going to eat
you!”
So Clytie went alone to the studio to learn her destiny.
“You have great talent,” said the artist, “but it needs cultivation.
After two or three years' severe training you may do something.”
Then Clytie asked him the question that had been burning her heart for
two days.
“Do you think I shall ever be able to earn my own living?”
“You might do that now, if you chose, and had patience,” he replied.
“How?”
“By book illustrating.”
“But I want to become a great artist.”
“Doubtless. Most of us do. You may if you try hard, and love art for
art's sake. But,” he added, looking at her keenly--“there always is a
'but,' Miss Davenant.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked quickly.
“_Parce que_, as the French say--begging your pardon.”
And that was practically the end of the conversation.
All this had happened to Clytie three months before Mrs. Blather had
discovered the offending picture in Clytie's attic studio and had
carried it to her father. After this foretaste of life the girl wearied
more than ever of Durdleham with its soullessness, its stagnation, its
prim formulas. A dangerous reaction of spirit set in, leading her
to long spells of hopeless melancholy, alternating with outbursts of
passionate rebellion. She would stand for hours in the recess of her
window gazing over the flat stretch of country, and dreaming strange
dreams of the world that lay beyond the dreary horizon--dreams in which
sharp reminiscence mingled with fancy in vague, weird shapes. But still
she was beginning to realise herself, her needs, her vague cravings. Her
passionate desires now flowed into some definite channel--to escape at
all costs from Durdleham, and consequently to enter that free world of
art the glimpse of which had enchanted her.
The scenes between her sisters and herself were of daily occurrence. The
narrower, gentler women were shocked at her wilfulnesses, her unladylike
behaviour; she was revolted to her soul at the pettiness and sordidness
of the disputes. Existence at Durdleham had become impossible.
“For God's sake, Gracie, let me go away from here,” she cried one day,
“or I shall hate you--and I want to love you if I can. Let me go to
London. Auntie will take me in. Oh, my God! I shall go mad in this place
among you.”
And Mrs. Blather, for the sake of her own tranquillity and the
reputation of the family, made up her mind that Clytie should have her
desire and that Durdleham should know her no more. And in the end Mrs.
Blather gained her father's consent to the arrangement; but the old man
looked upon Clytie almost as a lost soul.