‘DODO’S DESPAIR’
‘My sympathy, I believe, was rightly bestowed,’ said Marjorie frigidly.
‘I would not see the poorest wandering pedlar start for the Gros Nez
cliffs without helping him to the extent I helped you. Even a pedlar
might have a wife at home, sir. A foolish, fond creature, shedding
tears of anxiety for him in his absence.’
The side-thrust did not seem to scathe Geoffrey’s conscience as it
should have done.
‘Would you make it a special point that this married pedlar should
return you your ribbon, Miss Bartrand?’
‘I make it a point that Mr. Arbuthnot shall do so.’ Marjorie delivered
her ultimatum unflinchingly. ‘The ribbon is worthless, except as a
memento of some happy days I spent in Cadiz once, totally worthless to
any living person but me.’
‘And why should it not be a memento of happy days spent in Guernsey by
myself?’
She looked him straight between the eyes, too hotly, dangerously irate
to make immediate answer.
‘Suppose, leading a prosaic life in the thick of bricks and mortar,
that length of ribbon could act as a kind of talisman.’
‘I don’t understand you in the least.’
‘A charm bringing back to one’s tired eyes and heart the blue summer
night, the smell of moon-coloured hayfields, the whole moment when it
was given to me.’
‘I will suppose nothing of the sort. It was not given. This is vapid,
sentimental talk,’ said Marjorie, concentrating her thoughts firmly on
absent Dinah. ‘And I abhor sentiment.’
‘On that solitary point we agree.’
‘The ribbon I lent you to tie round Mrs. Arbuthnot’s flowers is just a
yard of woven, parti-coloured silk. Buy the best match you can find to
it in the nearest mercer’s shop. It will be as good a talisman.’
‘Are you a materialist, Miss Bartrand? Would you say that the ragged
colours of one of the Duke’s regiments, the pennants of one of Nelson’s
ships, were so much woven silk, more or less stained and weather torn?’
‘I do not see that my sash ribbon can or should be of the smallest
interest to Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,’ observed Marjorie, the blood
leaping, more swiftly than it had done under his praise, to her cheek.
In this moment she was a woman, the childish cotton frock, the hair
hung out to dry, the slim immature figure notwithstanding. A dawning
of her sex’s shame burned at her heart as she turned her looks away
from him. In this moment, were it possible to assign place and date
to matter so intangible, I should say that Geff Arbuthnot first,
distinctly, began to fall in love.
‘And suppose _I_ feel that your sash can and ought to be of the
greatest possible interest to me?’ he urged.
Marjorie found no answer to her hand. If she had been reared under a
different rule to Andros Bartrand’s, if she had associated more with
girls, had frequented afternoon-teas and garden-parties, she would,
doubtless, even in innocent little Sarnia, have learned the formula
by which a married man, hazarding idle speeches, ought mildly and
effectually to be crushed.
Marjorie knew no more of flirtation or of its dialects than she did
of Sanscrit. She had gone through an engagement, once, during a brief
uncomfortable fortnight; an experience which took the taste for
lovers and lovers’ vows most adequately out of her young mouth. And
now--oh, now she never meant to marry! She had her Greek and Latin in
the present, a large outlook for herself and others in the future. Of
flirtation she knew nothing, of engagements she knew too much! And she
liked Geff Arbuthnot, and did not like the duties of repressing his
frivolity, or of ranging herself against him in the civil wars of his
home life. Yet to the utmost of her strength should both these duties
be fulfilled.
‘Your interests were appropriated long before you ever saw me,’ she
replied at last. ‘What hour, this afternoon, would it be convenient,
pray, for me to visit Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Her tone, her look, might for a moment have suggested to Geoffrey
that the secret of his youth had made unto itself wings and flown to
Tintajeux. Only the very supposition were wild! Gaston, Dinah herself
had never suspected the passionate madness which, in the May twilight
of long ago, used to draw him night after night to the little thatched,
rose-covered cottage at Lesser Cheriton.
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot? For anything I know to the contrary, Dinah will be at
home between three and four o’clock.’
‘And at our next reading, sir, you will bring back my ribbon.’
‘I made no promise.’
‘Of what mortal use can a bit of ribbon be to you, Mr. Arbuthnot?’
‘I have had thoughts of turning this particular ribbon into a
book-marker,’ said Geff, boldly imaginative.
‘A book-marker! I ask you--do you think it honest to keep property that
belongs to other people?’
‘My conscience, I must confess, does not prick me.’
‘If I order, will you obey?’
Marjorie had turned abruptly pale. Her mouth quivered.
‘If you order, I submit,’ said Geff, watching her gravely. ‘I will
never go against your smallest wish while I live. You shall have your
ribbon before our next lesson, Miss Bartrand, I promise.’
The shadow of a quarrel was between them when they bade good-bye. And
at the thought of this shadow Marjorie’s illogical spirit was sore
vexed. But I think Geff Arbuthnot walked back to town with a lighter
spirit in his breast than had reigned there since the moment when he
first saw Dinah and Gaston as lovers, hand clasping hand, in the little
Cambridgeshire orchard.
His knowledge of young girls, their instability, their hot and cold
fits, their tempers, their fluctuating emotions, had been derived
from books. So his theories on the subject were mainly worthless. But
men who in after days rival neither Thackeray nor Balzac, do often,
during one phase of their own experience, make keen enough guesses as
to the source of female weakness. Geoffrey felt, with an instinct’s
force, that Marjorie Bartrand’s blanched cheeks, her quivering lip,
her passionate tones, were not the outcome of childish anger. He felt,
with an instinct’s force, that the girl herself was a child no longer.
Whither must this altered state of things tend?
The question was complex; and Geoffrey willingly let it rest. As he
walked the warm air was briar-scented, the birds murmured lazy midday
nothings to each other amidst the lush hedges, the voice of Marjorie
Bartrand filled his heart. What need to hope or fear for the future
when one is twenty-four years old, and the actual living hour has a
hold, delicious as this, upon the senses!
Dinah and her husband were alone together, a quiet little picture of
domestic still life, when Geff reached the hotel.
A vine-trellised slip of courtyard lay outside the north window of
Mrs. Arbuthnot’s sitting-room. Here, during the sunny forenoons,
Gaston, picturesquely bloused, found it pleasant to work, when he was
sufficiently in the vein to work at all. He wore his blouse, was in the
vein, now. That which two days ago was a mass of rough clay, showed the
airy outlines of a baby-girl, seated on a Brobdingnagian shell, one
small foot neatly shoed and socked, the other clasped, naked, between
her dimpled hands, in an attitude of inimitable, three-year-old dismay.
‘We label this work of genius “The Lost Shoe,” or “Dodo’s Despair,” or
some equally pathetic and unhackneyed title,’ remarked the sculptor as
Geff entered upon the scene. ‘We get our so many guineas for it, from
our masters, and solicit further orders, do we not, Dinah?’
‘You should have no master but your art,’ was Dinah’s answer.
‘That is easily said. My wife, as usual, Geff, is urging upon me to
fulfil my mission, to deliver messages, to begin big and serious work.
But I fancy I gauge my own depths justly. I have no messages whatever
to deliver to anybody. These trickeries of Philistine sentiment,’
Gaston pointed with a shapely clay-stained hand to his model, ‘are
always a success. In the first place, they draw tears from Mr. and Mrs.
Prud’homme. In the second, the dealers approve them. What more can an
artist’s heart desire?’
‘Everything,’ replied Dinah.
But she spoke in parenthesis, and under her breath.
‘Am I anatomical, Geoffrey? This must always be important, whether a
man work with or without a mission. How about this bend in the left
knee-joint? Are my muscles right?’
Geoffrey offered one or two strictly professional criticisms; then
after admiring the grace, the charm of the little clay sketch, gave his
uncompromising moral support to Dinah.
Whoever possesses genius--well, talent, no need to fight over
words--lies under the behest of duty. Gaston’s duty, the one straight
and unmistakable road that lay before him, was to abandon conventional
prettiness, to go in for the expression of the highest thoughts that
were in him.
‘I am destitute of high thoughts,’ said Gaston, his refined,
intellectual face belying the assertion. ‘I have not the prophet’s
_rôle_. If I tried to soar, I should immediately afterwards have to
climb down. I have no original ideas to embody----’
‘Gaston!’ broke, with an accent of denial, from Dinah’s lips.
‘And the dealers, Farrago in Pall Mall especially, are my masters.
Before I left town Farrago’s advice was memorable. “The market demands
nothing classic in statuettes, Mr. Arbuthnot. Nothing romantic. Above
all, nothing to make us think. The market demands trifles, sir,
trifles. Objects for the smoke-room or boudoir. Domestic amenities, as
you agreeably say, for Monsieur and Madame Prud’homme! And, for wider
sections of society, ‘flavour.’ In any case, trifles. Nothing, if you
please, to make us think.”’
‘Instead of obeying,’ exclaimed Dinah, ‘you ought to say, “I, Gaston
Arbuthnot, must do such and such work, no other. Let Mr. Farrago take
my statuettes or leave them, as he likes.”’
‘That style of talk is for giants, my dear child--putting aside the
fact that I am bound to Farrago for another six months. Carlyle talked
so to the Edinburgh Reviewers. Viewed by the light of after success his
talk may sound grand. If Carlyle had not speedily written the “French
Revolution” it would have been called “tall.”’
‘But I want you to write your “French Revolution” in clay,’ Dinah
persisted. ‘Here, in Guernsey, you know, you planned to make studies,
always studies, for the great work you will set about in Florence. But
then,’ a piece of embroidery was between Dinah’s hands; she lifted her
eyes from her wools and silks at this juncture, and fixed them, full of
earnest reproach, on Gaston, ‘there have been unfortunate throw-backs.’
‘Throw-backs! As how?’ Gaston Arbuthnot applied himself to the
correction of one of the points anatomically criticised by Geoffrey.
‘As long as I am bound to Farrago, even feminine morality, my love,
will allow that I should be honest. Every saleable thing I do must
pass, as per contract, through Farrago’s hands. Taking one day with
another, I have got through rather more work than the average, here in
Guernsey.’
‘Have you put your own thoughts into form, Gaston? This model, when it
is finished’--she glanced somewhat coldly at ‘Dodo’s Despair’--‘will be
a portrait of Rahnee Thorne simply.’
‘Rahnee Thorne idealised!’ Gaston’s rejoinder was made with the
unruffled temper that characterised him. ‘My clay infant has flesh upon
her bones, and an infant’s face. Rahnee, though I love the child, is
but a poor little wizened Bengalee, at her best.’
‘Will the portrait of Rahnee’s mamma, the model you have on hand at The
Bungalow, need to be idealised also?’
‘Dinah, you should be magnanimous.’ And with a movement that in a less
composed man might have been a shrug of the shoulders, Mr. Arbuthnot
prepared to clean the clay from his hands. ‘A pretty woman--well, if
you shake your head, an exceedingly beautiful woman--need never utter a
sarcasm about a plain one.’
At the negative compliment a colour, soft as the pure pink veining of
a shell cameo, stained Dinah’s face. Her breast throbbed. And all the
time the speech, delicious in sound, signified nothing. Gaston had
been engaged for days past to escort plain Mrs. Linda to the rose-show,
and felt not the smallest temptation to break his engagement. Dinah
must be magnanimous! Dinah’s husband, after two or three hours’ facile
work on ‘Dodo’s Despair,’ needed relaxation, and would have it.
‘You ought to take me to the show, Geff,’ she pleaded, turning round
half jestingly, half in earnest, to Geoffrey. ‘What would Linda Thorne,
what would Gaston think, if I suddenly made my appearance among all the
fine ladies of Guernsey?’
‘Linda Thorne might have her own views,’ said Gaston. ‘When Dinah
Arbuthnot shows her face, every fine lady, in Guernsey, or elsewhere,
must be on the spot eclipsed.’
Whatever Dinah thought, Geff knew that a certain insincerity underlay
the speech, and controlled a pungent remark with effort. The friendship
of the Arbuthnot trio was never more sharply paradoxical than at this
moment.