WHEN, half an hour later, he approached Jersey Villas, he noticed that
the house-door was open; then, as he reached the gate, saw it make a
frame for an unexpected presence. Mrs. Ryves, in her bonnet and jacket,
looked out from it as if she were expecting something—as if she had been
passing to and fro to watch. Yet when he had expressed to her that it
was a delightful welcome she replied that she had only thought there
might possibly be a cab in sight. He offered to go and look for one,
upon which it appeared that after all she was not, as yet at least, in
need. He went back with her into her sitting-room, where she let him
know that within a couple of days she had seen clearer what was best; she
had determined to quit Jersey Villas and had come up to take away her
things, which she had just been packing and getting together.
“I wrote you last night a charming letter in answer to yours,” Baron
said. “You didn’t mention in yours that you were coming up.”
“It wasn’t your answer that brought me. It hadn’t arrived when I came
away.”
“You’ll see when you get back that my letter is charming.”
“I daresay.” Baron had observed that the room was not, as she had
intimated, in confusion—Mrs. Ryves’s preparations for departure were not
striking. She saw him look round and, standing in front of the fireless
grate with her hands behind her, she suddenly asked: “Where have you come
from now?”
“From an interview with a literary friend.”
“What are you concocting between you?”
“Nothing at all. We’ve fallen out—we don’t agree.”
“Is he a publisher?”
“He’s an editor.”
“Well, I’m glad you don’t agree. I don’t know what he wants, but,
whatever it is, don’t do it.”
“He must do what _I_ want!” said Baron.
“And what’s that?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you when he has done it!” Baron begged her to let him
hear the “musical idea” she had mentioned in her letter; on which she
took off her hat and jacket and, seating herself at her piano, gave him,
with a sentiment of which the very first notes thrilled him, the
accompaniment of his song. She phrased the words with her sketchy
sweetness, and he sat there as if he had been held in a velvet vise,
throbbing with the emotion, irrecoverable ever after in its freshness, of
the young artist in the presence for the first time of “production”—the
proofs of his book, the hanging of his picture, the rehearsal of his
play. When she had finished he asked again for the same delight, and
then for more music and for more; it did him such a world of good, kept
him quiet and safe, smoothed out the creases of his spirit. She dropped
her own experiments and gave him immortal things, and he lounged there,
pacified and charmed, feeling the mean little room grow large and vague
and happy possibilities come back. Abruptly, at the piano, she called
out to him: “Those papers of yours—the letters you found—are not in the
house?”
“No, they’re not in the house.”
“I was sure of it! No matter—it’s all right!” she added. She herself
was pacified—trouble was a false note. Later he was on the point of
asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were not in the
house; but he let it pass. The subject was a profitless riddle—a puzzle
that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness,
as one opened one’s eyes to it. He closed his eyes—he wanted another
vision. Besides, she had shown him that she had extraordinary senses—her
explanation would have been stranger than the fact. Moreover they had
other things to talk about, in particular the question of her putting off
her return to Dover till the morrow and dispensing meanwhile with the
valuable protection of Sidney. This was indeed but another face of the
question of her dining with him somewhere that evening (where else should
she dine?)—accompanying him, for instance, just for an hour of Bohemia,
in their deadly respectable lives, to a jolly little place in Soho. Mrs.
Ryves declined to have her life abused, but in fact, at the proper
moment, at the jolly little place, to which she did accompany him—it
dealt in macaroni and Chianti—the pair put their elbows on the crumpled
cloth and, face to face, with their little emptied coffee-cups pushed
away and the young man’s cigarette lighted by her command, became
increasingly confidential. They went afterwards to the theatre, in cheap
places, and came home in “busses” and under umbrellas.
On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mind as he had
never turned anything before; it was the question of whether, at the end,
she would let him come into her sitting-room for five minutes. He felt
on this point a passion of suspense and impatience, and yet for what
would it be but to tell her how poor he was? This was literally the
moment to say it, so supremely depleted had the hour of Bohemia left him.
Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in the course of the day his
whole temper on the subject of certain fitnesses had changed. At Jersey
Villas (it was near midnight, and Mrs. Ryves, scratching a light for her
glimmering taper, had said: “Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you
like!”), in her precarious parlour, which was indeed, after the
brilliances of the evening, a return to ugliness and truth, she let him
stand while he explained that he had certainly everything in the way of
fame and fortune still to gain, but that youth and love and faith and
energy—to say nothing of her supreme dearness—were all on his side. Why,
if one’s beginnings were rough, should one add to the hardness of the
conditions by giving up the dream which, if she would only hear him out,
would make just the blessed difference? Whether Mrs. Ryves heard him out
or not is a circumstance as to which this chronicle happens to be silent;
but after he had got possession of both her hands and breathed into her
face for a moment all the intensity of his tenderness—in the relief and
joy of utterance he felt it carry him like a rising flood—she checked him
with better reasons, with a cold, sweet afterthought in which he felt
there was something deep. Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier
than ever, yet it had never meant so many fears and pains—impossibilities
and memories, independences and pieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache
for the ruin of a friendship that had been happy. She had liked him—if
she hadn’t she wouldn’t have let him think so!—but she protested that she
had not, in the odious vulgar sense, “encouraged” him. Moreover she
couldn’t talk of such things in that place, at that hour, and she begged
him not to make her regret her good-nature in staying over. There were
peculiarities in her position, considerations insurmountable. She got
rid of him with kind and confused words, and afterwards, in the dull,
humiliated night, he felt that he had been put in his place. Women in
her situation, women who after having really loved and lost, usually
lived on into the new dawns in which old ghosts steal away. But there
was something in his whimsical neighbour that struck him as terribly
invulnerable.