“Cook’s bad, but can’t be parted with, don’t you know? She’s up to
games of her own, is the fair Gertrude. They found a baby she’d just
had in a dressing-table drawer, so Adelaide told me while she was
sitting. Time for confidences, eh? Seen my portrait of her? In the
New----”
They were half-way upstairs by this time. The artist opened the
drawing-room door and disclosed Adelaide sitting, as he had predicted,
on a yellow satin sofa, with her head resting on black satin cushions.
There was room for one man beside her. The bounder slipped easily and
voluptuously into that place, and Ensor with a spasm of jealous
disgust, took an early opportunity of making his adieux, and left
them.
He never dined in the house again. He could not bring himself to risk
meeting men of that stamp.
Yet he pitied her. He admired her. Her great discontented eyes haunted
him. He felt as if a white plaining woman’s hand was outstretched to
him from out of a weltering sea of bounderism. Adelaide, a lady, could
not really like that sort of man? No, for she liked him. She wrote
continually begging him to accept her hospitality--hospitality of all
kinds. She began to vary skilfully the form of her invitations, but he
still refused all invitations to meals at her house.
At last she suggested that if he could not stand her cook he should
take her out to dine at “some low pot house,” so she phrased it. He
laughed. For he knew that if he should succumb to her blandishments,
he would certainly take her to a decent fairly respectable restaurant:
he would not pander to her taste for Bohemianism, but save her from
herself and her friends.
As he thought it over after each fresh invitation, a taste for this
form of social humanitarianism grew on him. He began to fancy the idea
of rescuing this really nice girl and taking her to decent places and
showing her how a decent man would behave. The girl was motherless,
her father did not pretend to look after her. She had a fine generous
character, was large in her ideas, she gave freely, she was kind to
her own sex, and would never go back on any one. The disreputable
cook, now,--he was sure that in keeping her on, poor Miss Favarger was
really undertaking a work of charity. The woman had obviously had what
is called a misfortune, she had possibly gone through what is also
called a tragedy. Adelaide was obviously not the sort of person who
would ever cast a human being out of doors, under any circumstances
whatever, especially a woman in the condition in which the cook had
presumably found herself. Lazy, preoccupied, indifferent, she made no
excuse for her shameful tolerance, and even condescended to discuss
the details of it with such worms as Ensor’s fellow guest of a few
weeks ago. That was merely an error of taste, the result of her
unmothered, unchaperoned state. She was at bottom a really well-bred
woman. Ensor, a rover, a man who had knocked about the world and yet
preserved his vast shyness and a modicum of innocence, thought he saw
clearly that the time and place were out of joint with Adelaide. Her
morals were mediæval, with no present parallel except perhaps one
that should be found in the milieu of the South Sea Islands.
So he came to invite her to dine with him at Prince’s and even
Kettner’s; she had tea with him on the slopes in Kensington Gardens;
they walked together in Hyde Park on Sundays, Adelaide protesting
vehemently that she hated dressing up and posing as one of the smart
set. In vain Ensor assured her that to mingle casually with that
select denomination at Church Parade, was not to be within a hundred
miles of being “of” it: that to dine at Kettner’s with a man alone was
sufficiently unconventional. Adelaide continued to protest, to beg him
to take her to his flat, and to discuss sex questions in a loud voice
over restaurant dinner tables. She called it Eugenics.
Ensor did not really enjoy these discussions, the young woman, sitting
there, her elbows on the table, her hands propping her hard chin, her
burning eyes fixed on him made it almost impossible for him to eat a
solid British dinner, and keep his British countenance at the same
time.
He could stand any amount of talk of this kind from platforms, or on
the stage with the footlights between him and the exponents of the new
Feeling, the New World Movement, the new Morality; here, under the
shaded red lights, with discreet foreign waiters gliding about the
chance commensals; the face to face discussion of such topics outraged
his simple sensitiveness and ordinary sense of decency. The only thing
that at all saved the situation was the girl’s astonishing absence of
self-consciousness. She talked like a boy--a clever, morbid,
self-conscious lad just home from college, her sedulous use of slang
helped the impression. Yet all the while her eyes belied her and
occasionally her voice. Now and then an outrageous note of sex
bitterness pierced through her level lazy accents and brought their
talk home with a rush from the plane of impersonality. With Adelaide
it was when her eyes ceased to look passionate and eager but became
sombre and heavy, instead: it was when her sharp grating voice grew
soft and mellow and trailing that Ensor feared her most, and such
moments were growing more and more frequent as their meetings went on.
He stood to his guns, however, he was not one to throw even a
graceless woman over.
Had he not been the most retiring, most modest of men he would have
realized that Adelaide Favarger was in love with him. He would have
disliked--he would have refused to realize it, for it would have
forced him to formulate his own feeling for her, and that was a queer
mixture of sensual pity, and revolted fascination. There were times
when he thought he fully grasped what she wanted of him and was glad
of her assumption that his refusal to dine with her in Portland Place
represented merely a protest against the inefficiency of her cook.
This theory, which at all times and all seasons she put before him,
and which she had freely proffered as an explanation of his “snubbing”
of her, was a convenience to him, since it effectually masked his
reluctance to be the father of her eugenical child.
* * * * * * *
Like her other men friends, Ensor always saw Adelaide Favarger home
after their evenings together. Unlike the others, however, he always
left her punctiliously on the doorstep, as soon as her front door
answered to her key and the cavernous gulf of the hall swallowed her
up. No Bianca Capello business for him! She used to tease him about
this, she used the romantic illustration, with a point of bitterness.
She had now accepted the situation and no longer even asked him to
come in. Her “Good-nights” were a miracle of sour brevity and
conciseness.
One night in July they had been to the Exhibition together and had sat
late listening to the band playing “Tristan.” The out-door performance
represented a pale vapid reflection of the original orchestral heat
and passion merely, but out there in the murky shadow-thridden
radiance, in the dust-fumed air, it was effective. Adelaide had talked
less than usual. The summer nights that year were long and clear. When
rather late, they returned to it, satiate of romance, great, wide
Portland Place seemed to sleep lonely under a Norwegian midnight.
Nothing so cold even as a moonbeam shone on its raddled stones and
stern house fronts, except where a tree in the garden next to
Adelaide’s house hung over her steps on one side and lent it some
mystery. There was a big party higher up the street and some
stationary taxicabs stood waiting in the middle of the roadway, black,
vague, a file of indistinguishable shapes, whence the figure of a man
now and then disengaged himself, did something to his vehicle and was
absorbed into the mass again. Adelaide had insisted on Ensor’s
dismissing their own cab at Oxford Circus, and together they walked
across the broad stone-paved expanse. The girl held her exiguous
skirts tightly round her thin, airily poised legs. She knew they were
fine, she knew she had a beautiful figure.
She gained the broad flat step in front of her door and turned a
little sideways to the man who stood waiting for her to effect her
entry and bid her a hasty good-bye as usual. He was a little bemused
by “Tristan” he was looking dreamily back across the street they had
just traversed, his head full of carefully conceived, adroitly moving
harmonies.…
“Come in and have a drink?” Adelaide said carelessly, but her voice
was rough and throaty.
The demand appeared to startle him. He thought he had cured her of all
that. Her request was out of all order and he did not reply at once.…