The long autumn months rolled on, bringing little new to Clytie or to
Kent. Clytie continued to paint her small _genre_ pictures, but with
a more certain touch, a restraint which a deeper insight into life
compelled. They did not satisfy her now, however, as they used to. She
had more articulate longings after an art which should be higher, more
comprehensive, more responsive to certain subtler and at the same time
more stirring impulses within her.
“I want to paint something that may live,” she said to Kent, “something
I can throw my whole soul into, something I can look at when it is
finished and say: 'There, that is final; that expresses consummately
everything I have ever felt and dreamed.'”
“If you can ever say that, you will cease to be an artist,” he replied
in his matter-of-fact way.
“Perhaps so. But I must try. And the subject, the subject?”
“Wait,” said Kent. “If it ever comes, it will do so of itself.”
Clytie waited, but the subject did not come. Meanwhile she had her hands
full with orders, both for pictures and for magazine illustrations. Her
life was full, as far as work could make it. Winifred came regularly
to the studio, as usual, cheering her with sweet companionship. She had
spent her summer holiday at the seaside, treating out of her own
purse her two little brothers to a holiday. She came back with glowing
reminiscences of her adventures, the humorous naughtinesses of the
children, the odds and ends of character she had met with. Her only
regret was that her dear Clytie had not been there too.
“I should have thrown those horrid children, Reggie and Arthur, into the
sea!” exclaimed Clytie.
“Oh, no, you wouldn't. They simply adore you. They are nice children,
aren't they, now?”
“You little goose!” cried Clytie, kissing the warm brown cheek. “They
are like you, the sweetest little children in the world. When are they
coming to tea?”
These teas in the studio were red-letter days for Winifred's brothers
and sisters. They worshipped Clytie, who had keen sympathy with the
unconventionalities of childhood. She made grotesque caricatures of
them, at which they screamed with laughter, or sat on the hearthrug with
them and talked the nonsense that bright children love. Their joy
was complete if Kent came in. They called him “Kent,” took complete
possession of him, presented him to Clytie as a pet trifle they carried
about with them. He, too, was fond of these debauches, and seldom missed
attending them if he could leave the Museum in time. He loved to see
Clytie take her part in them. She seemed to him even more sweet and
womanly than Winifred when she had a child on her lap, and her dark red
hair was touching the black ruffled curls. He told her so one day, and
the colour came into her cheeks as she laughed.
Another occasional visitor in the studio was Treherne, the young
clergyman whom Clytie had met at the Farquharson's numismatic
dinner-party. Kent and herself had run across him at a Bond Street
gallery where some paintings by the impressionists Degas and Monet
were on view. He was looking ill and overworked. He replied to their
inquiries that he had been forced to give up his North London parish and
take lighter duties near Victoria. As he lived in her neighbourhood, he
hoped that Clytie would allow him to call one day and see her pictures;
“Jack” at the exhibition had aroused his admiration. Clytie readily gave
him her “day,” when Miss Marchpane and herself were at home to their
friends, and hoped he would come. He called, found a certain charm in
the bright talk of the studio, exhilarating after the dull rounds among
his parishioners, and soon became a constant visitor. Perhaps the charm
of a pair of soft brown eyes attracted him more than he thought of
confessing. Towards the end of the year, however, he bought, through a
dealer, two of Winifred's dainty pictures.
The days shortened, the painting light grew less and less, and the time
came for Clytie to pay her Christmas visit to Durdleham. She had not
been there for a year, and her heart longed at times for the familiar
faces and the voices of her own kith and kin. She thought that, perhaps,
now she had grown older, her father and sisters would think her mode
of life less unnatural, less likely to result in moral shipwreck. The
letters, too, she had been receiving from them lately were kinder, more
affectionate in tone. Mrs. Blather longed to have her dear Clytie back
amongst them once more, and Janet wrote touchingly of the vacant chair
at the dinner table. Clytie anticipated much quiet pleasure from her
visit. The need of an attitude of rebellion was past, and she could
throw herself lovingly, with no fear of compromising her independence,
into all the mild interests of the household. There were times when
a tenderer, softer chord vibrated in her heart, suggesting sadly the
sweetness of home and loved family ties. She was human, with the foolish
human craving for things that are not. She could not abandon her free
artistic life; but if she could fill it with gentler, softer graces! In
these moods she clung to Winifred, loving her for this element of sweet
womanliness she brought into the rooms in the King's Road that were her
home. It was with this range of feelings uppermost in her heart that she
went to Durdleham.
For the first few days after Clytie's departure Kent laboured honestly
and doggedly in his old way. But gradually he began to feel a lack of
interest in his pursuits, to be vaguely conscious that the conditions of
things were upset, and then he wished that Clytie had not gone.
One evening he was sitting in his room with a litter of proof-sheets
lying idly before him. He felt depressed. It was a new sensation. It
puzzled him, annoyed him, made him angry with himself, like a man's
first unsuspected attack of the gout. He rose and walked about. His fire
had nearly gone out, his lamp had been flaring and the room was filled
with its acrid smoke. He could not open the window, for the sleet and
rain were beating against the panes. He stopped for a moment watching
the water dribble outside down the glass. Then he turned away
impatiently, seeking solace from his book-backs and pictures. But they
seemed to look back upon him unsympathetically, as if reproaching him
for the bare floor, the untidy dresser, and the cheerless hearth. He
rekindled his fire, filled a pipe, and sat down to think.
Kent was not given to introspection. His external interests in life were
too engrossing for him to think deeply or continuously about himself.
Such a habit of mind he used vehemently to deprecate as morbid,
egotistical. But now this strange depression, this vague sense of loss,
compelled him to account for it to his reason. He began in a sober,
materialistic way to review his general health (there are philosophers
amongst us who refer all moods to the liver, not looking upon it,
however, like the ancients, as the seat of the affections!), to question
some little disappointments he had had with regard to his great work,
and to dwell upon the futility of existence--the suggestion of which he
should have been logical enough to see was the result and not the cause
of his state of mind. But he was not logical. Few men are when the great
facts of inner life are in question; for in the course of logic “none of
us would see salvation,” as far as this world's happiness is
concerned. Gradually a truth dawned upon him. He missed the ever-ready
companionship he had enjoyed for nearly a year. He missed Clytie. He
found that for the first time in his life since he was a baby he had
been depending for something on a woman. He had never realised until
then the strength of that unknown subtle influence, the withdrawal of
which left him so weak, so unable to put forth all his powers. At
first he thought that it was merely the abrupt interruption of pleasant
habits, the sudden jerk out of a well-oiled groove. Telling himself he
was satisfied with this solution, he resolutely went back to his writing
and began to correct his proof-sheets. But gradually his attention
wandered again. These sudden impulses to work against the grain soon
spend themselves out and produce greater lassitude than before.
He tossed down his pencil in disgust and swung round towards the fire.
It was Clytie herself, then, that he missed. He missed her in spite of
her being a woman, he told himself. And yet the picture rose before his
mind of Clytie's dainty room and Clytie sitting there opposite to him,
her hand, with falling lace at wrist, pressed into the softness of her
hair. Why had she not written a line to him?
Yes, he missed her. But why should that make his work distasteful?
He was puzzled. One thing alone was clear, his loneliness was growing
intolerable. He threw on his waterproof, and, leaving his work, trudged
through the rain to the “monastery,” at South Kensington.
Wither was alone. Fairfax and Greene were dining out. The little man
had been too lazy and sybaritic to face the cold and wet outside. He
had clad himself in pyjamas and dressing-gown, and was reading a French
novel on the couch drawn up in front of the fire. His diminutive
figure looked absurdly small and wizened in his loose wrap. He nodded
affectionately at Kent, explained briefly the fact of his being alone,
and, while Kent was hunting in a familiar corner for the pair of
slippers always there in readiness for his use, went on with his
reading.
“Get me some whiskey, old chap,” he said without looking up. “I have
been dying for some this last hour and I have been too lazy to stir off
the sofa.”
Kent, as usual, supplied Wither's wants and poured out a glass for
himself.
“Lazy little beggar,” he said kindly as he sat down in the great
saddle-bag chair. “How do you manage to get through your work?”
Wither laughed.
“I thought you knew better than to ask me that.”
It was a tradition in the “monastery” that Wither never did any work.
They paid him at his office for lending it a gentlemanly tone. As a
matter of fact, like most clever, lazy men, he generally did an ordinary
man's day's work in a few hours.
He stretched himself out luxuriously and lit a cigarette.
“Have you ever read this?” he asked, holding up his novel. It was
Bourget's “Cruelle Enigme.”
Kent nodded.
“I skimmed it through here one night while waiting for you. I have no
patience with that sort of thing.”
“Possibly not,” remarked Wither, “but that's a fact about yourself, and
not about the book.”
“I don't believe it is human life,” replied Kent. “People can't make
animal passion the keynote of their lives nowadays.”
“Why not nowadays?”
“The conditions of life prevent it. The savage has furious brute
instincts, which he gratifies occasionally, when his mind is not
taken up with fighting and hunting for his food. It may be the guiding
principle in a splendid barbarism like some Eastern courts, where men
have little else to think of. But in our modern civilisation there are
other interests too absorbing. The hurry of life is too great.”
“What about the empty-minded women you are always railing at?”
“They are all absorbed in their futilities--at least most of them,” he
added, correcting himself; “but even when idle they are not beasts. Now
this woman you are reading about is a beast.”
Wither eyed him curiously.
“You are talking nonsense, old chap. If she had been simply that, she
would not have been a problem to the psychologist. The enigma was the
sudden burst into animalism in the midst of a love that was almost
idyllic.”
“Bosh!” said Kent. “It was the same old hideous adultery.”
“Oh, well! if you go on those lines, I am done,” replied Wither,
shrugging his shoulders. “I thought we were a little more advanced in
our ideas in this establishment.”
“You know I don't mean that,” said Kent, puffing violently at his pipe.
“The legality of the connection has nothing to do with it. It is the
eternal coupling of the male and the female that revolts me. Pah! They
might as well write a novel on the loves of the pastures.”
“If I could write French, I should like to try it,” said Wither. “It
would be interesting.”
“There is too much of that sort of thing written and talked about,” said
Kent. “It's sickening. It's degradation of humanity.”
“Well, it's not uncommon,” said Wither, with a sphinxlike smile playing
round the corners of his mouth as he gazed upwards at the cigarette
smoke.
“Look here, Wither,” said Kent; “I have a higher faith in humanity. You
profess to be a cynic, a man of the world, and you delight in calling
yourself nonmoral. That's all foolishness, I know. You are the kindest
hearted little chap in the world. But can you, as a man of intellectual
tastes, sympathise with all this animalism?”
Wither threw away his cigarette, and bending forward laid his hand on
Kent's knee.
“My dear old boy,” he said, with more earnestness than he generally
displayed, “I do call myself a man of the world, for I'm in it and I
love it, and I have a very decent bowing acquaintance as well with
its pals, the Flesh and the Devil. I know something of men, and as for
women, it has been my lot to have been petted by a good few--my
size lends itself to that sort of thing. In fact, Gulliver with the
Brobdingnag maids of honour is not in it with me. I know all about 'em;
and I tell you, old chap, that the Beast, sometimes with a big B and
sometimes in diamond type, lies in the nature of us all. There is not a
living being with pure blood in his or her veins who is not overmastered
at times by the principle of sex. You scoff at Bourget as a writer of
morbid and impossible fiction. Look at your daily papers. Don't you
see parsons of hitherto blameless lives running off with their cooks,
virtuous women ruining their lives and their husbands' for the sake of
some Hercules of a scoundrel--just as the patrician ladies in Rome went
mad over the charioteers in the circus! Man alive! it is the Beast, the
Beast that may slumber in an old maid's bosom until she is sixty and
then drive her into the arms of her footman. How otherwise have you
accounted for these things?”
“I have not tried,” replied Kent simply. “They have not interested me.
They are diseases of the brain, for the physiologist to study, like
suicide and murder. I don't believe in them in normal everyday life.”
There was a long pause, broken only by Wither's request that Kent should
put some coals on the fire, and the rattling of the operation. Wither
resumed his reading and Kent pulled at his pipe in silence. At last the
former looked up and said suddenly:
“Why do you think people marry?”
“That's funny,” replied Kent, with a slight start. “I was just wondering
myself. I don't know: money, companionship, family, idiocy--God knows
what.”
“It has always struck me that you would be the first of us to go,” said
the other in pure, idle maliciousness.
“I?” cried Kent, with a gesture of disgust. “I marry! give up my work,
procreate children I couldn't support! Have to kiss and pet and fondle a
woman----”
“Well, you need not do that unless you like,” replied Wither, laughing
in his gnomelike way. “She might expect it, but she would be soon
consoled by the blessedness of pure spirituality.”
Kent's reply was interrupted by the return of the absentees, Fairfax,
the doctor, and Greene.
“I am so glad you fellows have come back,” said Kent; “Wither has been
drivelling on his favourite topic until I was beginning to loathe him.”
“He's an immoral little wretch,” said the doctor, throwing his greatcoat
on Wither's curled-up body--“a pocket Mephistopheles. We keep him here
as a kind of Familiar. Oh, what rot dining out is!” he added, with a
yawn and a stretch as he seated his burly form on the foot of the couch.
“I wish I had stayed at home.”
“I wish you had,” said Kent. “Let us have just one rubber before I go.
There is time.”
But Kent walked home that night with a new trouble at his heart that
kept him awake a great part of the night.
Meanwhile Clytie was not enjoying herself at Durdleham. At first there
were eager embraces, trifling tendernesses and solicitudes. The dear
prodigal had returned, but the fatted calf was killed discreetly, lest
it should convey a husk-flavoured reproach. Grace and Janet bubbled over
with light Durdleham gossip, seeking to interest, and Clytie earnestly
and sympathetically sought to be in touch with her surroundings. It
was a real heartfelt effort on both sides towards harmony. But it soon
became patent that these efforts were unavailing. Clytie saw the old
prejudices barring her at every turn. She recognised with the bitterness
of disillusionment that she was the bit of grit in the family machinery,
stopping the smoothness of its working. As long as she identified
herself with Durdleham interests things went well; but as soon as she,
in her turn, ventured to sketch the bright incidents in her town life
she felt a check in the current of mutual sympathy. If she was reserved,
her sisters complained. They ought to know something of her friends, her
occupations. When she was expansive they shrank cold and crablike into
their mail of prejudice.
Her intimacy with a strange Bohemian man was a thorn in the side of
the family. Mr. Davenant considered it extremely injudicious, and Mrs.
Blather whispered to him that she scarcely thought it moral. Janet was
too horrified to allude directly to the circumstance. But, in her neat,
prim bedchamber, she prayed to the Almighty to lead her erring sister
out of the paths of temptation. She duly informed Clytie of this act of
piety, and when Clytie burst into laughter that was nearer to tears than
to merriment, left the room in virtuous indignation.
Clytie could not help confessing to herself that she longed for Kent's
companionship, with its broader sympathies and inspiring influences,
but the view the household took of it pained her with a sense of aching
discomfort, and made her feel a strange diffidence in writing to him as
she had promised. She at last addressed him a short little note, stiff
and constrained, which reached him the morning after his conversation
with Wither and did not help to cheer him. Too proud to wait for an
opportunity of posting this letter herself, she placed it on the hall
slab together with the rest of the outgoing correspondence of the
family. Although a hundred letters might have lain there for post
without any one of them attracting Mrs. Blather's attention,--she
was too pure-minded a gentlewoman for idle curiosity to be one of
her failings,--it was too good an opportunity for the imps who seem
sometimes to regulate human affairs to let slip, and as a matter of
course Mrs. Blather's eye fell upon the address.
“So you are keeping up a violent correspondence with that man,” she
remarked acidly to Clytie. It is the way of some women to exaggerate.
Clytie bit her lip, cheeking an impulsive answer. What was the use of a
retort?
Women of broad, liberal education, with interests beyond the nursery,
still-room, and the afternoon-tea table, are known to live together,
like men, in comparative harmony. They have learned the lesson the
higher, broader life teaches of rising or declining instinctively to
another being's plane of thought or feeling. It is hardly a fault of sex
that women are petty, spiteful, and intolerant. When the conditions of
life are narrow and illiberal any human being, man or woman, runs the
risk of being shaped by them. And that is why Mrs. Blather and Janet,
good, upright women according to their lights, subordinated their
affection to their principles, and stood away shocked from their sister.
Their traditional ideals of femininity had been sinned against. The
crime was all but unpardonable. It was always present with them, always
assuming fresh, distorted shapes. They were on a different plane from
Clytie, and viewed all her actions in a false perspective.
Clytie was hurt, wounded in her womanly pride. She knew that there
was much clay in her composition, and often felt with chastening
self-abasement how much nearer the angels Winifred was than herself.
Yet she was accustomed to live in an atmosphere free from reproach.
Winifred, Kent, the Farquharsons, and others of her friends might touch
with light, tender finger on here and there an imperfection in her
character or conduct; for this she was grateful, knowing the deeper
feelings of esteem and respect that prompted. But to move in a circle
where she was looked upon as a black sheep, as a girl on the path
to unutterable abysses, galled her to the quick, sent the hot blood
mounting in stinging waves to her cheek, leaving the heart cold. Yet
she had learned not to blame her sisters over much. She had lost her
militant scorn of Jacob. Kent had taught her that although Esau might
possess the higher birthright which no bartering of pottage could
alienate, there was still saving grace in the stolen birthright which
Jacob guarded so jealously. But this knowledge did not make her heart
less sore.
The happiest time in this Christmas visit was when she could get away
into the old lumber-attic in which she had dreamed so many girlish
dreams. It had long been dismantled of the Liberty curtains, Persian
rugs, and cheap Japaneseries that had lent it the suggestion of artistic
atmosphere the girl of eighteen had craved. It was bare now, except for
a table and chair and a few odds and ends of artist's materials, but a
fire could be laid in the grate to make things look cheery, and there
was still the deeply recessed attic-window where she could stand and
look out over the same drear landscape. It was only the ordinary midland
succession of fields, now black with winter, and pastures through
which the river ran, its course only indicated by the fringing line
of pollards and willows. Away on the slope to the west rose a clump
of trees from which peeped a few houses and a church spire, the little
village of Wexwith. In the foreground ran the highroad skirted with new
red-brick cottages, a touch of sordidness added by man to the ungenerous
dreariness of nature. Once this had affected Clytie with a sense of the
unutterable melancholy of things. The young are prone to be so affected.
They are rather proud when they realise it; it is a kind of youthful
vanity. But Clytie, like the wiser among us, sought brightness as she
grew older, and although she could not consider the landscape cheerful,
looked at it only through the memories of five years. Every spot had
associations for her. There was the cottage where she had seen the
little bully strike his playmate, the original conception of the picture
that had helped to cause her welcome banishment from home. Next to it
used to live the old beldame who threw out of doors the custards and
jellies that Janet with angelic perseverance used to take her.
What cruel mockery she used to make of Janet in those days! Now she
submissively helped to carry the custards. Behind the swelling uplands
over the village the sun set, a red ball in the wintry sky. For how many
wild fantastic daubs had not that formed a background!
It was during these reveries that the picture subject she craved
commenced to haunt her as it gradually shaped itself into definiteness.
Since her singular interview with the French girl at Dinan a lurid gleam
streamed from the gates ajar of mysteries that had baffled her. She had
read widely and deeply; but books are only the gloss of life, they are
not the text. Its secrets must be read in the living world, with much
pain and sleeplessness and wearied eyes. The throbbing page had been
presented to Clytie for one sharp moment, blazing, the while, in letters
of flame. Such knowledge changes lingering girlhood into womanhood
without the aid of passion. It changes sex-pride into sex-sorrow--in
higher natures, be it understood. And this sex-sorrow runs in channels
hollowed out by ever-varying circumstance and temperament. It flows
in the patient, all-enduring devotion of the sister labouring among
outcasts, in the militant enthusiasm of the social reformer. It quivers
in the hearts of teachers like George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. It lives in the souls of some mothers who tremulously watch
the shaping of their daughter's destiny. With Clytie it ran confluent
with her artistic impulses. It had influenced them vaguely, dimly,
hauntingly for months, but now, at last, stirringly, proclaiming itself,
insistently demanding expression.
The subject was found: Faustina in her innocent maidenhood. The problem:
how to manifest the foreshadowings of passion on the young, clear face?
Clytie spent hours in her attic trying to fix the summer lightnings of
features that flashed elusively before her mind. She wished she were in
London, to go abroad in the highways seeking after a face. It seemed
to her that in the great city she would find the one she wanted, in
the park, at the theatre, perhaps among the subdued black rows of
women--lines of suppressed volcanic workings--in some great shop. But in
Durdleham volcanoes were extinct or regulated by formula to erupt
with mild propriety. She began to feel the frenzied weariness of
helplessness. If only she could talk to someone--to Kent.
One day Mrs. Blather came into the attic. Clytie was dreaming before
incoherent charcoal streaks. The fire had burned low and the draught of
the opening door made her shiver.
“Why, Clytie, child, you are blue with cold,” said her sister, wrapping
her gray woollen shawl more tightly round her thin shoulders. “Why do
you mope up here?”
“I am not moping, Gracie,” replied Clytie; “I am only
working--conceiving a picture, that's all.”
“Oh, but you oughtn't to do any work. Have you not come down for a
holiday? What's the good of burning the candle at both ends? Come down
to the drawing-room and talk to the Howatsons; they are inquiring after
you.”
“But I am in such a mess!” laughed Clytie, showing her blackened finger
tips.
“Well, come down and tidy yourself in my room; there is a fire, and you
can warm yourself for a few minutes.” Clytie followed her sister down
the stairs to the latter's bedroom, where a cheerful fire warmed the
cold clean chintz of the hangings. Mrs. Blather sat down by the hearth,
while Clytie washed her hands and touched her hair.
“Why don't you tell us more of your work, Clytie?” she said
propitiatingly. “Here you are being criticised in the newspapers, quite
like a famous person, and we at home know nothing of it.”
“Why, Gracie, I thought it did not interest you much.”
“We would take an interest if you would only let us.”
“But, you see, I paint such queer pictures. I don't think they are your
style. And then pictures are not portable like books. If I wrote poetry,
you could be deluged with presentation copies; but even we ourselves
lose all the result of our work when the picture is sold.”
“Of course, but you might write and talk more. And with regard to the
'queer' pictures, don't you think, if you made us your confidantes,
the pictures might be a little less--'queer'? You see, Clytie, you are
young, and it is your nature to run into extremes. If you were just a
little bit restrained by older folks, would you not get what you are so
fond of talking about--'truth'--in your work?”
Clytie was somewhat puzzled at Mrs. Blather's conciliatory tone. Was
this an effort towards a better understanding, or was it a disguised
lecture? She finished her hasty toilet and went and stood by the fire
near her sister, her foot on the fender.
“Thank you very much, Gracie,” she said, “but would you always
understand? Perhaps,” she added, smiling, after a pause, “you would want
to restrain too much--and where would the picture be?”
“Well, why not try? What is the picture to be about that you are working
at now?”
The blood rushed to Clytie's cheeks, which, bent down, caught the added
glow of the fire--a contrast, with her rich colour, to the clear, waxen,
negative face of her sister. She broke suddenly into a nervous laugh.
“There! Even from the beginning I couldn't discuss it with you, Gracie.
It is only a girl's face--I can't tell you anything more about it.”
“Well, that's what I complain of,” said Mrs. Blather with growing
acidity. “You keep your own sisters in ignorance of your life, and
confide everything to this Mr. Kent, who is nothing to you.”
“How do you know I have told Mr. Kent about this picture?”
“I was not referring to this one, though by your manner I see you have.”
“Well, yes, I have,” said Clytie, “because--because--he has the artistic
temperament--and he can seize an idea--in fact--why are you saying this
to me, Gracie?”
“Because you are not going the right way, Clytie; and it is my duty as
your elder sister, who has looked after you since you were so high, to
make a last effort to bring you within some restraining influences.
We don't like your intimacy with Mr. Kent. It is not what we have been
taught to think right. I know you look down upon us as narrow-minded at
Durdleham. I think it is better for us. We are shut in, perhaps, between
high walls, but the high walls keep us safe.”
They were silent for a few moments, then Clytie said: “Gracie, don't you
think this subject has been enough discussed? It is wasting words and
spoiling good intentions. Suppose we go down to the Howatsons.”