“Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Clementina.
The pious ejaculation was in the nature of a reply to Miss Etta
Concannon, the fragile slip of a girl whose portrait she had painted and
in whose cornflower-blue eyes she had caught the haunting fear. There
was no fear, however, in the eyes to-day. They were bright, direct, and
abnormally serious. She had just announced her intention of becoming a
hospital nurse. Whereupon Clementina had cried: “Lord have mercy upon
us!”
Now it must be stated that Etta Concannon had bestowed on an embarrassed
Clementina her young and ardent affection; secretly, during the sittings
for the portrait which her father had commissioned Clementina to paint
as a wedding present, and openly; when the sittings were ended and she
called upon Clementina as a friend. In the first flush of this avowed
adoration she would send shy little notes, asking whether she might come
to the studio to tea. As she lived quite close by, the missives were
despatched by hand. Clementina, disturbed in the midst of her painting,
would tear a ragged corner from the first bit of paper her eyes fell
upon—note-paper, brown-paper, cartridge-paper—once it was
sand-paper—scribble “Yes” on it with a bit of charcoal and send it out
to the waiting messenger. At last she was driven to desperation.
“My good child,” she said, “can’t you drop in to tea without putting me
to this elaborate correspondence?”
Etta Concannon thought she could, and thence-forward came to tea
unheralded, and, eventually such were her powers of seduction that she
enticed Clementina to her own little den in her father’s house in Cheyne
Walk—a fairy den all water-colour and gossamer very much like herself,
in which Clementina gave the impression of an ogress who had blundered
in by mistake. It was on the first visit that Clementina repudiated the
name of Miss Wing. She hated and loathed it. On Etta’s lips it suggested
a prim, starched governess—the conventional French caricature of the
English Old Maid with long teeth and sharp elbows. She might be an old
maid, but she wasn’t a prim governess. Everybody called her Clementina.
Upon which, to her professed discomfort, Etta threw her arms round her
neck and kissed her and called her a darling. Why Clementina wasted her
time over this chit of a girl she was at a loss to conjecture. She was
about as much use in the world as a rainbow. Yet for some fool reason
(her own expression) Clementina encouraged her, and felt less grim in
her company. The odd part of their intercourse was that the one thing
under heaven they did not talk about was the bullet-headed, bull-necked
young man to whom Etta was engaged—not until one day when, in response
to the following epistle, Clementina brusquely dismissed her sitter,
skewered on a battered hat, and rushed round to Cheyne Walk.
“My dearest, dearest Clementina,—Do come to me. I am in abject misery.
The very worst has happened. I would come to you, but I’m not fit to be
seen.
Your own unhappy
“Etta.”
“My poor child,” cried Clementina, as she entered the bower and beheld a
very dim and watery fairy sobbing on a couch. “Who has been doing this
to you?”
“It’s R-Raymond,” said Etta, chokingly.
To her astonishment Clementina found herself sitting on the couch with
her arms round the girl. Now and then she did the most idiotic things
without knowing in the least why she did them. In this position she
listened to Etta’s heartrending story. It was much involved, here and
there incoherent, told with singular disregard of chronological
sequence. When properly pieced together and shorn of irrelevance, this
is what it amounted to:
Certain doings of the bullet-headed young man, doings not at all
creditable—mean and brutal doings indeed—had reached the ears of
Etta’s father. Now Etta’s father was a retired admiral, and Etta the
beloved child of his old age. The report of Captain Hilyard’s doings had
wounded him in his weakest spot. In a fine fury he telephonically
commanded the alleged wrongdoer to wait upon him without delay. Captain
Hilyard obeyed. The scene of the interview was a private room in the
service club to which Admiral Concannon belonged. Admiral Concannon went
straight to the point—it is an uncomfortable characteristic of British
admirals. The bullet-headed young man not being able to deny the charges
brought against him, Admiral Concannon expressed himself in such terms
as are only polished to their brightest perfection on the quarter-deck
of a man-of-war. The young man showed resentment—amazing impudence,
according to the Admiral—whereupon the Admiral consigned him to the
devil and charged him never to let him (the Admiral) catch him (the
bullet-headed young man) lifting his scoundrelly eyes again to an
innocent young girl. Admiral Concannon came home and told his daughter
as much of the tale of turpitude as was meet for her ears. Captain
Hilyard repaired forthwith in unrighteous wrath to his quarters and
packed off Etta’s letters, with a covering note in which he insinuated
that he was not sorry to have seen the last of her amiable family. It
had all happened that day.
Hence the tears.
“I thought you wrote me that the worst had happened,” said Clementina.
“Well, hasn’t it?”
“Good Lord!” cried Clementina. “It’s the very best thing that ever
happened to you in all your born days.”
In the course of a week Clementina brought the sorrowing damsel round to
her own way of thinking.
“Do you know,” said Etta, “I used to be rather afraid of him.”
“Any fool could see that,” said Clementina.
“Did you guess?” This with wide-open cornflower eyes.
“Look at your portrait and you’ll see,” said Clementina, mindful of the
avalanche of memories which the portrait of Tommy Burgrave’s
rough-and-ready criticism of the bullet-headed young man had started on
its overwhelming career. “Have you ever looked at it?”
“Of course I have.”
“To look at a thing and to see it,” remarked Clementina, “are two
entirely different propositions. For instance, you looked at that young
man, but you didn’t see him. Yet your soul saw him and was afraid. Your
father too—I can’t understand what he was about when he consented to
the engagement.”
“Captain Hilyard’s father and he were old mess-mates,” said Etta.
“Old messmakers!” snapped Clementina. “And what made you accept him?”
Etta looked mournful. “I don’t know.”
“The next time you engage yourself to a young man, just be sure that you
do know. I suppose this one said, ‘Dilly, dilly, come and be killed,’
and you went like the foolish little geese in the nursery rhyme.”
“They were ducks, dear,” laughed Etta, taking Clementina’s grim face
between her dainty hands. “Ducks like you.”
Clementina suffered the caress with a wry mouth.
“I think you’re getting better,” she said. “And I’m jolly glad of it. To
have one young idiot on my hands ill with congestion of the lungs and
another ill with congestion of the heart—both at the same time—is more
than I bargained for. I suppose you think I’m a sort of Sister of
Charity. Why don’t you do as your father tells you and go down to your
Aunt What’s-her-name in Somersetshire?”
Etta made a grimace. “Aunt Elmira would drive me crazy. You’re much more
wholesome for me. And as for father”—she tossed her pretty head—“he
has to do what he’s told.”
So Etta remained in town, her convalescence synchronising with that of
Tommy Burgrave. Clementina began to find time to breathe and to make up
arrears of work. As soon as Tommy was able to take his walks abroad, and
Etta to seek distraction in the society of her acquaintance, Clementina
shut herself up in her studio, forbidding the young people to come near
her, and for a week painted the livelong day. At last, one morning two
piteous letters were smuggled almost simultaneously into the studio.
“. . . I haven’t seen you for months and months. Do let me come to
dinner to-night. . . . Tommy.”
“. . . Oh darling, DO come to tea this afternoon. . . . Etta.”
“I shall go and paint in the Sahara,” cried Clementina. But she seized
two dirty scraps of paper and scrawled on them:
“Lord, yes, child, come to dinner.”
“Lord, yes, child, I’ll come to tea.” and having folded them crookedly
despatched them to her young friends.
It was during this visit of Clementina to the fairy bower in Cheyne Walk
that Etta informed her of her intention of becoming a hospital nurse.
“Lord have mercy upon us!” cried Clementina.
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” said Etta.
“The idea is preposterous,” replied Clementina. “What need have you to
work for your living?”
“I want to do something useful in the world.”
“You’ll do much better by remaining ornamental,” said Clementina. “It’s
only when a woman is as ugly as sin and as poor as charity that she need
be useful; that’s to say while she’s unmarried. When she’s married she
has got as much as she can do to keep her husband and children in order.
A girl like you with plenty of money and the devil’s own prettiness has
got to stay at home and fulfil her destiny.”
Etta, sitting on the window seat, looked at the Thames, seen in patches
of silver through the fresh greenery of the Embankment trees.
“I know what you’re thinking of, dear,” she said, with the indulgent
solemnity of the Reverend Mother of a Convent, “but I shall never
marry.”
“Rubbish,” said Clementina.
“I’ve made up my mind, quite made up my mind.”
Clementina sighed. Youth is so solemn, so futile, so like the youth of
all the generations that have passed away. The child was suffering from
one of the natural sequelæ of a ruptured engagement. Once maidens in her
predicament gat them into nunneries and became nuns and that was the end
of them. Whether they regretted their rash act or not, who can say?
Nowadays they rush into philanthropic or political activity, contriving
happy evenings for costermongers or unhappy afternoons for Cabinet
Ministers. The impulse driving them to nunnery, Whitechapel, or Caxton
Hall has always been merely a reaction of sex; and the duration of the
period of reaction is proportionate to the degree of brokenness of the
heart. As soon as the heart is mended, sex has her triumphant way again
and leaps in response to the eternal foolishness that the maiden blushes
to read in the eyes of a comely creature in trousers. This Clementina
knew, as all those—and only those—whose youth is behind them know it;
and so, when Etta with an air of cold finality said that she had made up
her mind, Clementina sighed. It was so ludicrously pathetic. Etta’s
heart had not even been broken; it had not sustained the wee-est,
tiniest fracture; it had been roughly handled; that was all. In a
month’s time she would no more yearn to become a hospital nurse than to
follow the profession of a chimney-sweep. In a month’s time she would be
flirting with merry, whole-hearted outrageousness. In a month’s time, if
the True Prince came along, she might be in love. Really in love. What a
wonderful gift to a man would be the love of this fragrant wisp of
womanhood!
“I’ve quite made up my mind, dear,” she repeated.
“Then there’s nothing more to be said,” replied Clementina.
A shade of disappointment spread over the girl’s face, like a little
cloud over a May morning. She jumped from the window-seat and slid to a
stool by Clementina’s chair.
“But there’s lots to be said. Lots. It’s a tremendously important
decision in life.”
“Tremendous,” said Clementina.
“It means that I’ll die an old maid.”
“Like me,” said Clementina.
“If I’m like you I won’t care a bit!”
“Lord save us,” said Clementina.
The girl actually took it for granted that she enjoyed being an old
maid.
“I’ll have a little house in the country all covered with honeysuckle,
and a pony-trap and a dog and a cat and you’ll come and stay with me.”
“I thought you were going to be a hospital nurse,” said Clementina.
“So I am; but I’ll live in the house when I’m off duty.”
Clementina rolled a cigarette. Etta knelt bolt upright and offered a
lighted match. Now when a lissom-figured girl kneels bolt upright, with
a shapely head thrown ever so little back, and stretches out her arm,
there are few things more adorable in this world of beauty. Clementina
looked at her for full ten seconds with the eyes of a Moses on Mount
Nebo—supposing (a bewildering hypothesis) that Moses had been an artist
and a woman—and then, disregarding cigarette and lighted match, she
laid her hands on the girl’s shoulders and shook her gently so that she
sank back on her heels, and the match went out.
“Oh, you dear, delightful, silly, silly child.”
She rose abruptly and went to the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette for
herself. Etta laughed in blushing confusion.
“But darling, nurses do have times off now and then.”
“I wasn’t thinking about nurses at all,” said Clementina.
“Then what were you thinking of?” asked Etta; still sitting on her heels
and craning her head round.
“Never mind,” said Clementina. “But what will you want an old frump like
me in your house for?”
“To listen to my troubles,” said the girl.
Clementina walked home through the soft May sunshine, a smile twinkling
in her little beady eyes and the corners of her lips twisted into an
expression of deep melancholy. If she had been ten years younger there
would have been no smile in her eyes. If she had been ten years older a
corroborative smile would have played about her lips. But at thirty-five
a woman in Clementina’s plight often does not know whether to laugh or
to cry, and if she is a woman with a sense of humour she does both at
once. The eternal promise, the eternal message vibrated through the air.
The woman of five-and-thirty heard it instinctively and rejected it
intellectually. She hurried her pace and gripped her
umbrella—Clementina always carried a great, untidy, bulging
umbrella—as if to assure herself that it would rain to-morrow from
leaden skies. But the day laughed at her, and the gardens which she
passed flaunted lilac and laburnum and pink may and springtide and youth
before her, and buttercups looked at her with a mocking air of
innocence. Forget-me-nots in window-boxes leaned forward and whispered,
“See how fresh and young we are.” A very young plane tree looked
impudently green; in its dainty fragility it suggested Etta.
“Drat the child,” said Clementina, and she walked along, shutting her
eyes to the immature impertinences of the spring. But outside the window
of a fruiterer’s in the Royal Hospital Road she stopped short, with a
little inward gasp. A bunch of parrot-tulips—great riotous gold things
splashed all over with their crimson hearts’ blood, flared like the
sunset flames of a tropical summer. As a hungry tomtit flies straight to
a shred of meat, she went in and bought them.
When she reached her house in Romney Place she peeped for the last (and
the hundredth) time into the open mouth of the twisted white paper
cornet.
“They’ll make a nice bit of colour on the dinner-table for Tommy,” she
said to herself.
O Clementina! O Woman! What in the name of Astarte had the gold and
crimson reprobates to do with Tommy?
She let herself in with her key, traversed her Sheraton drawing-room,
and opened the door leading on to the studio gallery. Tommy was below,
walking up and down like a young wild beast in a cage. His usually tidy
hair was ruffled, as though frenzied fingers had disturbed its calm.
Clementina called out:
“You asked if you could come to dinner. Six o’clock isn’t dinner-time.”
“I know,” he cried up at her. “I’ve been here for an hour.”
She went down the spiral staircase and confronted him.
“What have you been doing to your hair? It’s like Ferdinand’s in _The
Tempest_. And;” noticing a new note of violence in the customary
peaceful chaos of the studio, “why have you been kicking my cushions
about?”
“My uncle has gone stick, stark, staring, raving, lunatic mad,” said
Tommy.
He turned on his heel and strode to the other end of the studio.
Clementina threw the parrot-tulips on a chair and drew off her left-hand
old cotton glove, which she cast on the tulips. Then for a while, during
Tommy’s retreat and approach, she gazed thoughtfully at the thumb-tip
which protruded from the right-hand glove.
“I’m not at all surprised,” she said, when Tommy joined her.
“How else can you account for it?” cried Tommy, flinging his arms wide.
“Account for what?”
“What he has done. Listen. A week ago he came to see me, as jolly as
could be. You were there——”
“About as jolly as a slug,” said Clementina.
“Anyway he was all right. I told the dear old chap I had unaccountably
exceeded my allowance—and he sent me a cheque next day, just as he
always does. This afternoon a card is brought up to me—my uncle’s card.
Written on it in his handwriting: ‘To introduce Mr. Theodore
Vandermeer.’”
“What name?” asked Clementina, pricking her ears.
“Vandermeer.”
“Go on.”
“I tell the servant to show him in—and in comes a dilapidated devil
looking like a mangy fox——”
“That’s the man.”
“Do you know him?”
“All right. Go on.”
“—— who squirms and wriggles and beats about the bush, and at last
tells me that he is commissioned by my uncle to inform me that unless I
give up painting and go into some infernal City office within a month
he’ll stop my allowance and cut me out of his will.”
Clementina worked the thumb-tip through the hole in the right hand glove
until the entire thumb was visible.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
Tommy waved his arms. “I must try to see my uncle and ask him what’s the
meaning of it. Of course I’ve no claim on him—but he’s a rich man and
fond of me and all that—and, when my poor mother died, he sort of
adopted me and gave me to understand that I needn’t worry. So I haven’t
worried. And when I took up with painting he encouraged me all he knew.
It’s damnable!” He paused, and strode three or four paces up the studio
and three or four back, as though to work off the dangerous excess of
damnability in the situation. “It isn’t as if I were an idle waster
going to the devil. I’ve worked jolly hard, haven’t I? I’ve put my back
into it, and I’m beginning to do something. Only last week I was telling
him about the New Gallery picture—he seemed quite pleased—and now,
without a minute’s warning, he sends this foxy-faced jackal to tell me
to go into an office. It’s—it’s—God knows what it isn’t!”
“I believe,” said Clementina, looking at her thumb, “that there are
quite worthy young men in City offices.”
“I would sooner go into a stoke-hole,” cried Tommy. “Oh, it’s
phantasmagorical!”
He sat down on the platform of the throne and buried his head in his
hands.
“Cheer up,” said Clementina. “The world hasn’t come to an end yet and we
haven’t had dinner.”
She opened a door at the back of the studio that communicated with the
kitchen regions and, calling out for Eliza, was answered by a distant
voice.
“Go to the grocer’s and fetch a bottle of champagne for dinner.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the voice, coming nearer. “What kind of champagne?”
“I don’t know,” said Clementina. “But tell him to send the best bottle
he has got.”
“What a good sort you are,” said Tommy.
Neither were alarmed by the prospective quality of this vaguely selected
vintage. How holy is simplicity! It enables men and women to face and
pass through terrors without recognising them.
Clementina took off her hat and right-hand glove, and rolled a
cigarette. Tommy burst out again:
“Why didn’t he send for me and tell me so himself? Why didn’t he write?
Why did he charter this seedy, ugly scoundrel? I asked the wretch. He
said my uncle thought that such a delicate communication had better be
made through a third party. But what’s my uncle doing—associating with
such riff-raff? Why didn’t he choose a gentleman? This chap looks as if
he’d murder you for tuppence.”
The young are apt to exaggerate the defects of those who have not gained
their esteem. As a matter of fact, acknowledged afterwards by Tommy,
Vandermeer had accomplished his unpleasant mission with considerable
tact and delicacy. Tommy was an upstanding, squarely built young Saxon,
with a bright blue eye, and there was a steep flight of stairs leading
down from his studio.
“Once I fed him on ham and beef round the corner,” said Clementina.
“The devil you did,” said Tommy.
Clementina related the episode and her subsequent conversation with
Quixtus.
“I give it up,” said Tommy. “I knew that my uncle was greatly upset by
the trial—and I have been thinking that perhaps it has rather unhinged
his mind—and that was why he took up with such a scarecrow. But he has
apparently been a friend of his for years. It shows you how little we
know of our fellow creatures,” he moralised. “If there ever was a chap I
thought I knew inside out it was my Uncle Ephraim.” Then pity smote him.
“If he’s really off his head, it’s tragic. He was the best and dearest
and kindest-hearted fellow in the world.”
“Did you ask the man whether your uncle had gone mad?”
“Of course I did—in so many words. Man seemed to look on it as an
astonishing suggestion. He said my uncle had long disapproved of my
taking up painting as a profession, and now had arrived at the
conviction that the best thing for me was a commercial career—a
commercial career!”
So do Thrones and Dominations, I imagine, speak of the mundane
avocations of a mere Angel.
“If you refuse, you’ll be giving up three hundred a year now and heaven
knows how much afterwards,” said Clementina.
“And if I accepted I would be giving up my self-respect, my art, my
dreams, every thing that makes for Life—Life with the biggest of
capital L’s. By George, no! If my uncle won’t listen to reason I’ll not
listen to unreason, and there’s an end of it. I’ll pull through
somehow.”
“Good,” said Clementina, who had remained remarkably silent. “I was
waiting to hear you say that. If you had hesitated I should have told
you to go home and dine by yourself. A little starvation and struggle
and fringe to your trousers will be the making of you. As for your
uncle, if he’s crazy he’s crazy, and there’s an end of it, as you say.
Let’s talk no more about it. What made you beg to come to dinner this
evening?” she asked, with a resumption of her aggressive manner.
“The desire of the moth for the star,” he laughed.
She responded in her grim way, and bade him amuse himself while she went
upstairs to wash her face and hands. Clementina did wash her face,
literally, scrubbing it with Old Brown Windsor soap and towelling it
vigorously afterwards, thereby accomplishing, as her feminine
acquaintances asserted, the ruin of her skin. She rose and went to the
foot of the stairs. Tommy’s eye fell on the parrot-tulips in their white
comet.
“What are you going to do with those gaudy things?”
Clementina had forgotten them. The curious impulse of the blood that had
led to their purchase had been spent. Tommy’s news had puzzled her and
had taken her mind off foolishness. She glanced at them somewhat
ashamedly.
“Stick them in water, of course,” she replied. “You don’t suppose I’m
going to wear them?”
“Why not?” cried Tommy, and, snatching out a great gold and crimson
bloom, he held it against her black hair and swarthy brow. “By Jove. You
look stunning!”
Clementina, in a tone of some asperity, told him not to be a fool, and
mounted the stairs with unaccountably burning cheeks.
At dinner, Tommy, inspired by more than three-fourths of the grocer’s
best bottle of champagne talked glowingly of his prospects in the event
of his uncle’s craziness not being a transitory disorder. After all, the
world was his oyster, and he knew the trick of opening it. Most people
bungled, and jabbed their fingers through trying to prize it open at the
wrong end. The wise man, said he, in the tone of an infant Solon, was he
who not only made a mock of misfortune, but bent it to his own use as an
instrument for the attainment of happiness. When challenged, he
confessed that he got this gem of sapience out of a book. But it was
jolly true, wasn’t it? Really, he was looking forward to poverty. He was
sick of silk hats and patent leather boots and the young women he met at
tea-parties. Nature beat the lot. Nature for him. Thoreau—“The boy’s
going as cracked as his uncle!” cried Clementina—Thoreau, he insisted,
had found out the truth. He would give up his studio, take a labourer’s
cottage in the country at two shillings a week, live on lentils, paint
immortal though perhaps not instantaneously remunerative landscapes by
day and do all sorts of things with his pencil for the sake of a
livelihood by night. He knew of a beautiful cottage, two rooms and a
kitchen, near Hagbourne, in Berkshire. The place was a forest of
cherry-trees. Nothing more breathlessly beautiful on the earth than the
whole of a countryside quivering with cherry-blossom—except the same
countryside when it was a purple mist of cherries. Geoffrey King had the
cottage last summer. There was a bit of a garden which he could
cultivate—cherry-trees in it, of course; also flowers and vegetables.
He would supply Clementina with pansies and potatoes all the year round.
There was a pig-sty, too—useful in case he wanted to run a pig. When
Clementina was tired of London, she could come to the cottage and he
would sleep in the pig-sty.
For the second time that day she asked:
“What will you want an old frump like me in the house for?”
“To look at my pictures,” said Tommy.
Clementina sniffed. “I thought as much,” she said. “Really, the callous
selfishness of old age is saint-like altruism compared with the fresh,
spontaneous egotism of youth.”
Tommy, accustomed to her sharp sayings, only laughed boyishly. How was
he to guess the history of the parrot-tulips? He was mildly surprised,
however, when she decided to spend the evening, not in the studio, but
in the stiff, Sheraton drawing-room. He protested. It was so much
jollier in the studio. She asked why.
“This place has no character, no personality. It looks like a show
drawing-room in a furniture dealer’s window. It has nothing to do with
you. It means nothing.”
“That’s just why I want to sit in it,” said Clementina. “You can go to
the studio, if you like.”
“That wouldn’t be polite,” said Tommy.
She shrugged her shoulders and sat down at the piano and played scraps
of Mozart, Beethoven, and Grieg—memories of girlhood—with the inexpert
musician’s uncertainty of touch. Tommy wandered restlessly about the
room examining the Bartolozzis and the backs of the books in the
glass-protected cases. At last he became conscious of strain. He leant
over the piano, and waited until she had broken down hopelessly in a
fragment of Peer Gynt.
“Have I said or done anything wrong, Clementina? If so, I’m dreadfully
sorry.”
She shut the piano with a bang.
“You poor, motherless babe,” she cried. “Whom would you go to with your
troubles, if you hadn’t got me?”
Tommy smiled vaguely.
“Deuce knows,” said he.
“Then let us go down to the studio and talk about them,” said
Clementina.