She was to meet the Clouds at Lucerne. She had hoped for Paris, but
there was the Swiss-German adorer who would not be denied. Laura never
found it easy to deny. So she spent a good-natured, chafing week in the
Berne household, which, falling in love with her, enthusiastically and
inexorably overfed her. From that hot-bed of sentiment and rich meals
the train bore her away one fine spring morning, with a pimple on her
tongue, but her duty done.
It was a bother being nice to people who bored you ... but it was the
only way you could pay back the gods for being nice to you ... ran her
philosophy. She only hoped the gods would go on being nice when they met
again.... Two years was a long time.... Would the gods have altered
much?... One can’t tell from photographs.... But gods don’t alter ...
therein lies their godhead.... Now she, Laura——Oh, how she wondered if
he would like her in long skirts?
The train fussed into the unplatformed station-way at half-past one, and
tipped her out, as it seemed afterwards, onto the very lake edge, much
as an elderly fairy, with a sense of duty, drops a stray godchild in
elf-land for a week; and so puffed off again in its overworked fashion,
leaving her, open-mouthed, before the enchanted hollow of Lucerne.
She might well gasp, forgetting her holiday, forgetting even
“Justin-an’-Italy,” for long intoxicated minutes; for she was a painter,
a painter unproven, a painter who had just sold her birthright for that
same Justin-an’-Italy, but who was not therefore free of the torment of
her eyes, her all-absorbing eyes and her itching finger-tips: and
Lucerne was a portrait that day fit for the ten-leagued canvas and the
brush of comet’s hair, a king’s daughter, glorious within, revealed and
royal in a dazzle of blue.
It was a blue beyond belief, a blue enamelled thinly upon the gold plate
of the sun, upon the antique-black of space itself. The great mountains,
the rounded sky, the very air seemed carved, solidly, like the cup in
the fairy tale, out of a single sapphire, fretted over with pearls that
were clouds and the diamond glitter of the snow line, while far below
the thin bridge lay across the lake like a felled tree in a clearing of
English bluebells.
“My word!” marvelled Laura inadequately. “My word!” and then, with a
deep breath—“_Oh_, my word!”
Her hand was at her mouth, hiding it because it trembled, as she stared
and stared. She never outgrew that instinctive, characteristic gesture,
that unconscious obedience to the law of her experience—“Never show what
you feel.” Her delight in that triumphant blue was thoughtless, almost
physical: she felt it whirl her like a wind. Yet, because she must
always share her good things, at the back of her mind an indignant
outcry began for “all of them” in forsaken Rue Honorine.
“My word! Wouldn’t they go mad! It’s a shame!”
She could see the broad thumb of Monsieur plastering an imaginary canvas
with unctuous blobs and quorls, and the pretty pastel ardour of
Elisabeth, and the despair of the water-colourists: she heard again the
rumorous voice of the _classe_, the depths and shallows of appreciation,
the shared delight in vision of those who have learned, who are learning
to see: and then, mingling with those familiar voices, a voice yet more
familiar, uplifted in the immemorial opening—
“Pretty good, isn’t it?”
“Justin!”
She wheeled. Beauty was forgotten, was a nothing, a phrase, a dead leaf.
The high hills were cardboard, the sky a back-cloth and no more, for the
well-to-do tweed figure, the one figure of Henry Justin Cloud.
And thus we teach Nature her place!
“Justin! Oh, how lovely! But you’re not due till four! Where’s Mrs.
Cloud? I was just off to see the Lion. I thought there was time. You
said four. Oh, I am disappointed. I meant to meet you properly, on the
platform. You did say four!” She was comically unwilling to give up the
picture in her mind, of herself on the platform and the train dashing
in, and the faces at the carriage window.
He explained as they shook hands and beamed at each other—
“We changed our minds—started a day sooner to break the journey for
Mother. She’s at the hotel. We could nip up and see the Lion still if
you liked, while she has her nap. There’s loads of time.”
Laura was all eagerness and acquiescence, and they crossed the bridge
and swung off at Justin’s pace up the sweep of the road. Not that she
wanted to see the Lion _qua_ Lion any more, though five minutes ago she
had been as earnest a sightseer as ever read an illustrated _Life of
Thorwaldsen_ and _What the Moon Saw_. But as a mediary between her
shyness and this stranger who was Justin, who had caught her before she
had powdered her nose and put her thoughts in order, the Lion was
invaluable. Justin, with a little help, would talk contentedly about
him, and that would give her time.... Time for what? But that she could
not have told you.
The truth was, of course, that the excitement that had sustained her for
weeks was over, and its effect, like that of any other drug, wearing
off. But she only knew that she was suddenly limp and shy. She smiled
and talked with her mouth, but her eyes were quite grave as she watched
Justin. She felt a forgotten, uneasily familiar sensation creeping over
and through her, as a mist or a ghost goes through locked doors, a ghost
that spoke with her own voice, whispering—“But—but this isn’t Justin? I
had forgotten he was like this——”
And yet he was just the same as ever.... Not quite so tall, perhaps, as
she had remembered him ... or she had grown taller.... He was pleased to
see her, she was sure, but he had nothing much to say until they reached
the Lion. The Lion was most helpful....
Justin explained to Laura that it was a Neo-Classic Lion, and therefore
less admirable than the Lions in Trafalgar Square, which were from
life—Zoo life. “I see!” said Laura. She was sure he must have been
reading the same biography, but she thought she had better not ask him.
But she did ask him why he approved of the Trafalgar Square Lions, when
he had so often girded at ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ in Green Gates
parlour. Justin, warming, said that Landseer was a photographer, but
that photography was honester than imitation anyway, and explained that
Thorwaldsen had got his ideas from the Assyrian plaques in the British
Museum. They would look them up one day when they got home again and
then she would see. All this, and now that he was once started, so very
much more, with such a familiar air of unburdening himself, such an
assumption of her entire interest, such an implied re-definition of her
status as his particular property, that the ghost melted away again, as
it always did when Justin smiled at her, and she said defiantly to the
Lion—
“I don’t care. I like him this way.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------