It must be acknowledged that Tom’s heart had sunk a little when he saw
the flat in Bloomsbury. The thought of May, with her queenly
Madonna-like beauty, moving through the low rooms or sitting by the
small-paned window seemed dreadfully incongruous. But when May came, as
she did a few days later, Tom found that the effect was that the rooms
were glorified.
It was characteristic of him that before settling into his new narrow
house he made a clean sweep of everything which was unnecessary and
marketable. He argued that they had better start with a little capital
rather than a few bibelots, and that a couple of pieces of Dresden china
or a valuable terra-cotta from Tanagra would only look absurdly out of
place among the appurtenances of cheap lodgings. He and May had a small
tussle over a few pictures which old Mr. Carlingford had given him
during his lifetime.
“But they are not good pictures,” argued Tom, “and I don’t in any case
see what we want with them. Besides, it appears that there’s a
half-year’s rent owing for the Grosvenor Square house. No, we must sell
everything, May. I only hope there will be something over. I suppose the
blue blood of all the Carlingfords ought to be up; but as far as I am
concerned it isn’t.”
“I think you might keep a picture or two,” said May.
“My dear May, it’s impossible. I can’t think what we should do if we had
nothing over. But I suppose some one would lend us something.”
May frowned; the idea grated on her.
“We can’t do that, Tom--that’s impossible. Besides, who is there?”
“Perhaps Lady Ramsden might,” said Tom. “She certainly would if it
occurred to her; but I don’t think things occur to her much. But I quite
feel with you about borrowing.”
The outstanding debts when added together made a total which rather
appalled Tom, and it was with some anxiety that he awaited the result of
his sales. The upshot was that they were the possessors of £150 capital.
Tom drew rather a long face when he thought of the rapidity with which
money used to melt in the old days. But Demeter would be finished in a
few weeks.
They had settled in during the first week of July, and as they sat
together after dinner they talked matters over. To both of them it
appeared rather amusing than otherwise to dine off leg of mutton and
rice pudding at the top of a house in Bloomsbury. May, with a view to
being useful, had had an interview with the cook, and retailed it to
Tom.
“We shall have poached eggs for breakfast,” she said, “and at lunch the
rest of the mutton as hash. I think hash is delicious!”
Tom was looking over some figures.
“£151 4_s._ 3_d._ is the exact amount, May,” he said.
“Isn’t that an awful lot?” said May. “Why, Ted used to live on £200 at
Cambridge, I know, and he said it was possible to get on on much less.”
Tom grinned.
“I wonder what I used to spend at Cambridge,” he said. “I wish I had
some of that now.”
May sat down by him.
“Tom, I think it will be great fun,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to
work for my living; and I can help you, can’t I, by seeing the cook and
arranging about hash, and mending things.”
“I shouldn’t mind if it wasn’t for you,” said Tom.
“Oh, but I enjoy it awfully--I do really! And you know, dear, I shall
see more of you. I shan’t have to make any calls, and we shan’t have to
go out to dinner; also I shall mend your socks.”
“I’m glad I followed Wallingthorpe’s advice about one thing,” said Tom,
“and learned how to finish a statue myself. If I hadn’t learned that I
should have had to hire two of those Italian fellows, and that would
have been no end of expense. Six weeks from now will see it done, May.”
It is difficult to realize, unless one has tried it, how hard it is for
a man who has been accustomed to live, if not luxuriously, at least
extremely comfortably, to maintain his cheerfulness when he has to make
every shilling go as far as it can. Tom, who had been always very
extravagant, simply because he had never been obliged to learn the value
of money, was suddenly brought face to face with the widely-known fact
that wanting a thing is not the same as getting it. Neither he nor May
had the least realized what it was to live in an atmosphere of slight
discomfort, to have the smell of dinner steal up an hour before
dinner-time and invade every corner of the house, to be waited upon by a
slatternly girl who breathed very hard and had dirty hands, to sit on
horse-hair sofas, to have a cracked mirror over the fireplace, to be
obliged to consider the relative prices of beef and mutton, and to
banish once and for ever the idea of eating well-cooked food. These
details seem small enough, but when all the details of life are slightly
disagreeable, however trifling each is in itself, they make up an
_ensemble_ which is slightly disagreeable too. Before they lost their
money both Tom and May would have declared that it could not possibly
make any difference to either of them, provided they were together, that
the house should smell of dinner, or that as soon as one castor of the
table was repaired another broke; but even as water will wear away a
stone, these little things wore away the edge of their serenity.
July was broiling hot that year, and day by day the sun baked the studio
where Tom worked till it was like an oven. The blinds of the skylight
were tattered, and rays of light came hotly down as if through a
magnifying glass, making little bright spots on the dingy walls. Tom got
rather exasperated one morning, because in adjusting the blind he had
torn it further, and a long jagged slit of light fell on his face as he
worked. It would have to be mended in the evening, but something must be
done at once, and with a brilliant inspiration he got the blacking-pot
and painted the offending glass with it. Then the brush slipped from his
hand and fell on the top of Demeter’s head, and it took Tom ten minutes
to get a sponge and clean it. It was certainly more comfortable in
Grosvenor Square; but he tried to persuade himself that these things
were details, as indeed they were.
Soon the blacking caked off with the heat of the sun and came filtering
down in tiny flakes, and the gash of light fell down into the studio
again. Tom lost his temper a little, and climbed up again to paste some
paper over it. The paste would not stick at first, and he pressed the
thin glass too hard and a small pane broke. It was only a small pane,
but it had to be mended. Then the smell of food began.
Consequently when the slatternly servant came in to say that lunch was
ready, Tom was not very serene. He said that they must keep the smell of
cooking down; it was only because they forgot to shut a door or open a
window, and it must not occur again. He put on his coat and went fuming
into the dining-room.
“May dear,” he said, “the smell of cooking is quite intolerable. I
should think on these hot days we could do with cold lunch, couldn’t we?
It makes one perfectly sick!”
“I told them to get a rabbit for lunch,” she said. “You know you told me
you were tired of mutton.”
“The studio smelt like a menagerie,” grumbled Tom.
May was a little hurt in her mind. She had hoped Tom would be pleased at
her remembering to get something instead of the mutton, and she was
silent. In a moment Tom spoke again.
“And I’ve broken a pane of glass in the skylight. That blind is torn to
rags. You haven’t been in this morning.”
“I had to take the baby out,” said May; “and there was some shopping to
be done.”
Tom suddenly laid down his knife and fork.
“I draw the line at high rabbit,” he said. “I should think this
particular one died a natural death some time in June.”
“It’s very hard to get good meat in this weather,” said May; “it won’t
keep. But mine isn’t so very bad.”
“Where’s the beer?” asked Tom in his lowest audible voice.
May looked vaguely round the table. She was vexed that Tom should behave
like this; and yet, after all, it was nothing.
“I think Sally’s forgotten it,” she said.
Tom sighed resignedly and rang the bell, and sat drumming with his
fingers on the table waiting for it to be answered. Nothing happened,
and he rang again, this time louder; and soon the shuffling of ill-shod
feet was heard on the stairs.
“Beer,” said Tom, curtly.
The feet shuffled away again and the two sat in silence. May had given
the rabbit up as a bad job, and for the time she felt inclined to treat
Tom in the same way. When people were in great trouble she knew exactly
what to do, but when they were suffering from merely an absence of beer
and a height of rabbit she was completely at a loss. Tom sat in gloomy
silence and stared at the darned tablecloth and the plated forks. What
an idiot he had been, he thought, to sell everything. It would have been
much better to have taken unfurnished lodgings, and have forks which it
didn’t make you ill to eat off. The entrance of the slovenly servant
with a jug put an end for the moment to his regrets. He poured out a
glass and drank some.
“Tepid,” he said.
It was too ridiculous, and May broke out into a laugh.
“Don’t be so cross, Tom,” she said. “What does it matter? You haven’t
said a word to me all lunch time except to blame me for something.”
Tom made the necessary effort and laughed too.
“I’m very sorry, dear,” he said. “I’ve been behaving like a pig. As you
say, it doesn’t matter. But a lot of things which don’t matter, one on
the top of the other, are trying. First it was the sun, and then the
blacking, and then the broken glass, and then the menagerie smell, and
then no beer and high rabbit, and then hot beer.”
Tom left his seat and took a cigarette. He had resolved to smoke pipes
for the future as being cheaper, but it was no use selling the remainder
of his cigarettes. Even his clean sweep did not include them.
Pleasant things and disagreeable things alike leave a little taste
behind. A pleasant episode may be succeeded by an unpleasant one, or a
disagreeable episode by an agreeable one, but the effect of neither
wholly perishes. May and Tom alike asked themselves what could matter
less than a smell in the studio or a stray slop-pail on the stairs; but
an atmosphere, however slightly sordid, of things even so unimportant as
a rabbit-smell or a slop-pail, produces its effect on all but those who
are genuine Bohemians, and who would rather miss squalor and sordidness.
Unfortunately neither May nor Tom had the slightest strain of Bohemian
blood in them, and they were not inoculated against the subtle poisons
of slop-pails and kitchen smells.
But Demeter progressed and the baby throve, and July went by with hot
footsteps. During the day the heat was too scorching to render walking
agreeable, and it was almost worse in their sunbaked flat than in the
streets. More than once they thought of moving to some cooler house, but
shillings were no longer to be treated lightly. The hot spell, they told
themselves, could not last long, and it had been business enough to get
Demeter up the flights of stairs. Her progress had been regal and
dignified, and she had congested the traffic of the house for
three-quarters of an hour. So May used often to take the baby into the
British Museum, where the gods and goddesses seem to live in a
perpetually equable atmosphere; and it was here that Mr. Thomas made his
first piece of deductive reasoning. He pointed one day with a little
pink fist to the horse’s head in the Parthenon pediment and distinctly
said, “Gee gee.” Tom was delighted, and considered Manvers entirely
refuted in his belief that the Elgin marbles were unintelligible: even a
baby could understand them. Two days later Mr. Thomas conferred a
similar distinction on Tom’s own work when, after a prolonged wide-eyed
inspection, he said, “Lady.”
Tom worked as much as he could without a model, copying exactly his clay
sketch; but for the “lady’s” arms one was necessary. And she too helped
to melt the £150. She certainly had superb arms, and she stood
splendidly. She also added her contribution--a not unimportant one--to
the little jars which sometimes occurred between Tom and May.
She was a young woman of unquestionably fine physique, but her tongue
was a rather unruly member, and she spoke freely. Tom used to tell her
to be quiet and stand, but sometimes she came out with something very
breezy and sudden. She once made a particularly breezy remark when May
was there. May turned to Tom flushing, and asked him in French to tell
her to be quiet. Tom, who had a great sympathy with life in all its
forms--the model’s remark was not a particularly vicious form--smiled,
but told her to be silent. May left the room.
The girl’s eyes followed her out of the room, and then without moving
she spoke to Tom.
“Well, ayn’t she perticler? A lydy friend of mine, she----”
“Never mind about your lady friends. You’ve moved your arm. A little
more forward, please and the wrist more bent.”
May was sitting in the dining-room when Tom came in for lunch, looking
angry and flushed.
“Tom, you mustn’t have that woman in the house,” she said. “She is
abominable.”
“Who?” asked Tom, who had forgotten the occurence.
“The model, of course.”
Tom raised his eyebrows.
“Why?--Oh, I remember. Do you mean that thing she said this morning?”
“Of course I do.”
“But, my dear May, it really doesn’t matter much, does it? I don’t let
her talk, and as a model she is one in a thousand. Besides, what did she
say? I’ve forgotten. Nothing very bad, was it?”
May put down her knife and fork.
“Tom, can’t you see? It hurts me that she should be here. It makes me
feel ill. It is not right to have a girl like that in the house.”
Tom crumbled his bread attentively.
“I think you take rather an exaggerated view of it, dear,” he said. “Of
course that class of young woman is not very particular in its language;
but what has that to do with me?”
“She is wicked,” said May.
“Really you seem to me to build a good deal on one remark. Of course I
am sorry you heard it. She expected to be allowed to talk as much as she
pleased at first; but I stopped that.”
“Tom, how can you condone that sort of thing? Oh----”
“I don’t condone it. I don’t allow her to talk. Besides, one doesn’t
select a model for her morals, but for her muscles.”
“Do you refuse to dismiss her?”
Tom looked up in surprise.
“You surely can’t expect me to send her away, and spend perhaps a week,
perhaps more, in getting another? In addition to that, I have engaged
her for a week more.”
“Pay her the money and let her go,” said May.
“My dear May, we can’t afford to throw models and money about in that
manner. She has most beautiful hands. Wallingthorpe told me he had never
seen such a lovely piece of modelling from elbow to finger tips.”
“Ah,” said May, suddenly, “you don’t know--you don’t understand. Will
you never understand me? Can’t you see what it means to me?”
Tom could be very patient and gentle.
“I think you’ve worked yourself up about it, May,” he said. “We won’t
talk of it just now. Let us talk of it this evening. I must get back to
my work. And don’t be unreasonable.”
“You will not dismiss the model at once?”
“Do you mean now--this afternoon?”
May got up too, and went to the window and threw it open.
“Ah, yes, of course I mean now,” she said. “When there is a right and a
wrong, how do you dare to put off your choice?”
“May, you ask an impossibility,” said he.
May felt she was losing control over herself. She had a headache, the
heat was stifling, and her equilibrium was upset.
“You don’t care, you don’t care!” she said with passion.
“I care very much that you should speak to me like that,” said Tom. “I
will promise to think it over. This afternoon I shall go on working with
the same model.”
He turned and left the room, his hands thrust deep down in his pockets,
puzzled and vexed. He was really unable to understand his wife. She
seemed to him wholly unreasonable. The girl was one of the ordinary
class. Wallingthorpe had often employed her, and he, as Tom knew, was
rather particular and fanciful in his choice. He had once told Tom, in
his florid manner, that it made him unable to work if he knew that a
woman, whom he was using to help out his idea of what a thing should be,
did not live up to the splendid possibilities which--which--just so.
His model had made an improper remark--a remark, by the way, which
would have passed with a laugh if made by a man among men--and he was
seriously expected to dismiss her, to pay her for an extra week, and
lose his time in hunting for another, who could not possibly be as good.
Tom had begun to get in a fever to have Demeter finished. He felt it was
to be his challenge. If Demeter was not good--was not of the best--he
had been wrong, he had done what Wallingthorpe had told him he was
doing, trying to fly, and only succeeding in standing on tiptoe. The
sort of scene he had been through with May, threw him out of gear--it
dimmed his eye and unnerved his hand. Why could she not be more
tolerant, less apt to judge? Of course, Tom confessed, she was right in
principle. If he could get two identical models, one of whom was breezy
and the other not, he would choose the unbreezy one. But what had a
model’s character to do with her muscles? Besides, May was building an
absurd superstructure on a very slight foundation. It was ridiculous;
and he set to work.
Meantime, May, in the other room, was scarcely more content. Her
fastidiousness had been touched; she had winced at what the girl said,
as if under physical pain. Tom did not know, he did not care to know,
she told herself bitterly, how much she disliked the thought of his
having the girl in the house. The face of the Demeter was May’s face,
and that the arms should be the arms of such a woman seemed to her
positively insulting. This she had not told Tom; she felt it too keenly,
and it was a grievance the force of which he could not appreciate if he
did not appreciate the other. She felt hot, tired, ill-used,
misunderstood, and the worst of it all was that she was afraid she had
been a little unreasonable. She was, she had a suspicion, a little
unreasonable still, and she felt convinced that she would continue to be
a little unreasonable. Then she veered round and told herself that she
was perfectly right, and that Tom was hard and unfeeling, and then,
between the heat and the headache and the worry, she had a dismal little
cry all to herself.
Tears are a secretion, but they are sometimes a solution; they seem
occasionally to carry off the cause of the irritation; and the upshot
was that the prevailing feeling in May’s mind when she had finished was
that she was sorry to have vexed Tom. He really had behaved with great
patience to her; he didn’t wholly understand her, that is true, but he
was a dear, good boy, and she had been a little exasperating.
Fate, in fact, seemed just to have woke up to the existence of Tom. For
twenty-five years she really appeared to have forgotten about him, and
let him go on in his own pleasant way exactly as he chose. But some
malignant spirit had reminded her of his existence, and she was just
reminding him that he was not his own master. She made him another
little visit the same afternoon, while he was working, in the shape of a
tradesman’s boy with a bill.
Tom tore open the envelope and was confronted by a request to pay thirty
pounds for a block of Carrara marble which he had bought for a relief he
was working at. It had been ordered before the smash came, and he had
supposed that it had been paid with the other bills. He dismissed the
boy, and wrote a note to the agent who had managed his affairs, asking
whether a bill of thirty pounds, for a block of Carrara, had not been
paid. He had given orders that every bill should be paid. He clung
desperately to the hope that a mistake had occurred, and that the bill
had been sent in twice. And then for the first time he felt that
emotion, which is stronger than all others--fear, blank fear. Thirty
pounds was a solid fraction of their capital. And what would happen
next?
He could not pay it. Surely they would wait. Tom thought, with a
regretful sigh, of the patient tradesmen who had so often waited till he
could bother himself to draw a cheque. But somehow, by a strange
unreasonableness, now that he was in want of money, he was almost eager
to pay his debts, whereas, when he never thought about money at all, he
never felt the slightest inclination to do so. But Fate was playing with
him and frightening him. He had a horrible dread of these surprises, and
he felt that the inner knowledge of this sum owing would be poison.
Besides, it would be necessary to keep it from May, and the thought of
concealing things from May was untenable.
The answer came back from the agent; no, the bill had not been sent in
before. Tom went on working with mechanical accuracy, thinking of that
horrible thirty pounds. After all, why pay it at once? Of course there
would be no kind of difficulty with the tradesman. He remembered
ordering the block with Wallingthorpe. The price was a large one, and he
had not dealt at the shop before, and the man had hesitated, wondering
if his master would wish him to send it before it had been paid for.
But when Tom gave the Grosvenor Square address he was perfectly
satisfied.
What he wanted was to gain time. Thirty pounds represented so many days’
work, and why cut that off? Demeter must be finished; he must show the
world what he meant. The artist’s need of expressing himself cried aloud
in him. To finish Demeter, and do, if only once, the best he could, was
necessary. Necessary? It was the only necessary thing in the world for
him except--except May and the baby.
Tom put down his chisel.
“You can go,” he said to the model. “It is close on four.”
The girl stretched herself. She had posed for nearly an hour, and she
was a little stiff, and for the moment Tom forgot about bills and
everything else, looking at the splendid line of her form from shoulder
to ankle beneath the clinging drapery.
“At ten to-morrow?” she asked.
With a flash the whole scene with May came back over him. He walked to
the window, putting on his coat, and stood there a moment. She repeated
her question.
“Unless you hear to the contrary,” said Tom. “It’s all right. You will
be paid all the same. Put your address down here. I will send if I don’t
want you.”
She retired behind the screen to change her clothes, and Tom still stood
where he was. Just as she was passing out he stopped her.
“I don’t want to be inquisitive,” he said, “but tell me this: you are
straight, aren’t you?”
The girl flushed.
“Strite! Who says I’m not strite? Your wife, I’ll be bound.”
“Never mind my wife,” said Tom. “Just tell me, will you? I shall believe
you, of course.”
But the lower classes, when they happen to be respectable, are just as
proud of it as the upper classes--perhaps more proud. The girl was
thoroughly angry.
“I’ll thank you to tell her not to say things agin me what are not true,
and never likely to be, s’elp me Gawd. An’ what does she know about me?
You’re too good for her, Mr. Carlingford, with her narsty back-biting
ways. I knew she was up to some mischief this morning. Strite? I’m as
strite as she is, an’ striter, too, for I don’t talk ill of folks behind
their backs. An’ good night to you, sir!”
She flounced out of the room and left Tom to make the best of what she
had said.
“Well, that’s all right, at any rate,” he thought to himself. “I shall
tell May.”
He filled a pipe and sat in the window, his elbows on the sash. Forty
feet below lay the hot street, down which the sun shone pitilessly; but
soon it sank below the house-roofs, and a merciful little breeze sprang
up from the west. Tom leant out to enjoy it more and let it ruffle his
hair. He was tired and weary, but his brain went back to the same old
incessant question, “What next? what next?”
Supposing Demeter was a success--not in his sense of the word, but in
the financial sense, well and good. If not, what? Three weeks more.
There was money for three weeks more, including the wages of the model;
and if this bill was not paid, for six. If all went well Demeter would
be finished in a month. What next? what next? There were May and the
baby, there was the nurse, there was himself. He left himself out of
the reckoning. But the others had to be reckoned for. He must get money
somehow. But if Demeter brought him none, where was it to come from? He
thought of the horrible little statuette which May kept on the
mantelpiece, and he went to look at it. It was not finished, but it
would not take long to finish it. Would it come to that? Was that the
shrunken reality to which all his dreams of art were going to awake? For
he felt conclusively within himself that he could not do both. If he
abandoned his great aim for a moment he abandoned it for ever. There was
no going back. He could not earn his living with things like that, and
with the other hand, so to speak, do sacrifice to his mistress. The
house of Rimmon or the temple of the Lord--one or the other, but not
possibly both.
When his day’s work was over he and May usually went out for an hour or
two before dinner, and before many minutes were up she came to look for
him. She wanted to say she was sorry, but she very much wished that Tom
would help her out with it. But as they drank tea before going out, Tom
was silent, thinking of other things.
But at last he looked up.
“Another week with the model,” he said, “and then I can get on alone for
a time. Oh, by the way, May, I think you judged her harshly to-day; in
fact, I am sure you did.”
“Yes, Tom. I am sorry,” said May. “I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
“Poor old girl, you look rather done up with the heat! There’s nothing
wrong, is there, May?”
“No. It’s only the heat and--and being sorry.”
“I wish we could get away,” said Tom; “but I can’t move till this thing
is off my hands. But why don’t you go down to Applethorpe for a week?”
“Not without you. But you’ll come away when it’s finished?”
Tom walked up and down the room.
“May, I’m frightened,” he said, “horribly frightened, and it’s a bad
feeling. A bill came in this afternoon, which of course I thought had
been paid with the rest.”
“A bill? How much for?”
“Thirty pounds?”
“Oh, Tom!”
“It frightened me. I’m losing nerve. I don’t see that we can pay it now.
There is no reason why it shouldn’t stand over. If no one will buy
Demeter the time will come, and come soon, when we must get money
somehow, and I think I shall let it stand over till she’s finished. I
hope to goodness I shan’t be dunned for it. I used not to mind being
dunned when I was at Cambridge, and had plenty of money; but it’s no fun
now. They county-courted me once--I’ve got the summons still. I think if
I was county-courted now I should die of it.”
“But what are we to do?”
“I only want to finish Demeter. There will be money enough for that, if
the bill stands over.”
“And when Demeter is finished?” asked May.
“When she is finished I shall have done my best. And if others do not
think my best good----”
Tom left the sentence unfinished.