It was a wonderful ecstatic evening, the sort Rosaleen expected of
artists. The studio was crowded, suffocatingly hot, filled with a joyful
young riot. Except for Lawrence, they were all young. There was Miss
Gosorkus and a man she had brought, there were the two English girls
with three of their countrymen, there was a male cousin of Miss Mell’s
and three young ships’ officers known to her, and two old friends from
her art school. There was a distrait young Frenchman desperately in love
with Enid, and a lot of other people who drifted in and out. There was a
terrific amount of noise; they were wilfully, exaggeratedly noisy; they
sang, shouted and stamped. The old phonograph blared its loudest, and
the couples danced as best they could in the crowd. They drank the punch
and the champagne and grew wilder and wilder. Rosaleen, astonished and
delighted, believed herself actually to be witnessing one of those
“orgies” so often mentioned in the papers as taking place in artists’
studios. It was not till long, long afterward that she realised how
innocent, how decent, how happy it really was, how young....
At first she was rather ignored. Enid was so dazzling that she captured
all the strangers, and the rest of the crowd all knew Dodo Mell and went
to her in preference to Rosaleen. But, by the time the thing was in full
swing, she, too, had at last secured the exclusive attention of someone;
she, too, like Enid, like Devery, younger of the English girls, like the
two Art School girls, had a man standing at her side and admiring her
when he wasn’t dancing with her. She didn’t know his name or who he was,
but he was amusing and rather attractive; a curly-haired, black-eyed
young man, looking rather like a sprightly devil, with outstanding ears
which gave him a singularly alert air.
Suddenly, almost of one accord, they all wearied of dancing.
“Let’s go out somewhere,” said Rosaleen’s young man. It was the classic
suggestion, and they all agreed joyfully.
“I’ll take you all to the Brevoort for supper,” said the magnificent
Lawrence.
Rosaleen was passing about a basket of cigarettes, and she happened at
that instant to be standing at his elbow. And she said, with polite and
surprised joy:
“How _nice_!”
He turned and looked at her, fixed his monocle and stared at her.
“I’d forgotten all about _you_!” he said. “What are _you_ doing?”
“Having a lovely time!” she told him, with a smile.
“You look very pretty,” he said. “Very sweet....”
And she fancied, half ashamed of the fancy, that again his face changed
as it had done that afternoon in his studio.
He bent his lordly head.
“I want to speak to you!” he whispered. “Slip into the back room and
wait!”
A little reluctant, but very curious, she did so; and for five very long
minutes stood in there, with the gas turned low, and the two cots piled
with imposing male overcoats and sticks, and the furs and wraps of the
girls. The sound of the music and the dancing feet made her impatient:
someone shouted “One more before we go! Put on a _good_ record, Enid!”
She really couldn’t have endured it much longer, if Lawrence hadn’t
come. But, though he had said he wanted to speak to her, he stood there
speechless, fingering his monocle, not even looking at her. At last he
said:
“Er ... Rosaleen!... It occurred to me--wouldn’t you like to stop for
your Miss Waters?”
She thought she had never heard a kinder, a more generous idea.
“Why, yes, I _would_!” she said. “It’s very nice of you to think of
that!”
“Then we’d better arrange this way. You go downstairs with the others,
but slip into my studio. The door’s open and it’s dark; no one will
notice you. Then I’ll make some excuse to get away from them, and I’ll
come back here with a taxi.”
“A taxi! We won’t need a taxi. It’s only a step. And I don’t see why we
need to make such a secret of it all----”
“Enid would make a row,” he said with a frown. “No; do it my way, if you
please!”
V
The dawn was coming when the taxi drew up to the door. Lawrence got out,
helped Rosaleen to descend, and while he paid the enormous reckoning she
stood in the dim street, over which hung that strange air of suspense
which comes before the sunrise. The street lights still burned, but
against a palely clear sky; the sparrows in the park were beginning to
stir.
Lawrence opened the front door with his key and they entered the dark
hall, musty with the smell of cooking, of paints. Outside his own door
he held out a hand and she took it; an immense, fat hand.
“Now then, it’s all _right_, isn’t it?” he said, with exaggerated
heartiness. “No ill feeling, is there? We’re the best of friends?”
“Oh, yes!” said Rosaleen, brightly, and in her mind added:
“If only I can get away from you and never, never set eyes on you again
...!”
A desolating weariness was upon her; her limbs were like lead as she
climbed the stairs. Her chief desire was not to wake Mell and
Bainbridge; the idea of having to talk to them, to open her lips even to
answer them, was intolerable. She had had her fill of talking that
night.
For the sake of ventilation the girls always slept with the curtains
between the rooms drawn back and the studio windows open; and so it was
now. She could see them there in the back room, solemnly still, on their
cots, with the faint breeze of the sunrise blowing through the big room
and lifting a fine, cindery dust from the hearth. Rosaleen sat down near
the window and rested her head on her arms, on the broad sill.
Now that the sun had got up, the whole thing began to assume the
character of a nightmare. Her tired brain began to confuse the memory of
Lawrence with the drawing of a gargoyle she had seen in his studio the
day before. In a blurred memory she seemed to see him as a sort of
monster who had for hours and hours been sitting by her side and
talking. Talking and talking and talking. And about what, do you
suppose, but to urge her to run away with him. She had said she _didn’t
want to_, but he had considered that of no importance. He had considered
it a matter for logic, for reasoning. He had tried to show her the
advantages; and when she persisted in saying that she didn’t want to, he
had become offensive and horrible. He had never had the faintest
intention of going after Miss Waters; the taxi, by his command, went
speeding through Central Park, up Riverside Drive, went on through
roads and streets unknown to her, while Lawrence talked, shouted,
bullied her. She had never imagined anything so horrible. And yet she
wasn’t afraid of him. Perhaps some feminine instinct informed her that a
talking man, like a barking dog, is not to be feared.
And, quite suddenly, touched by some obscure impulse, he had become
sorry. He had called himself a brute and a beast; he said he must have
been mad, and she was privately inclined to agree with him. She didn’t
know that it was his theory that women are to be won by force, by
daring. With her, love could only be the outcome of sympathy. She could
only love a man because she liked him. But she was not so much angry at
Lawrence as disgusted and astonished. When he begged for her forgiveness
she gave it promptly, and hoped that this would be the end of this
immeasurably painful scene. But it was not enough. Nothing would do but
a reconciliation, and for this it appeared necessary to go to a road
house and have supper and more champagne. She sat at the table with him
in the crowded, noisy dining-room, while he acted the jovial host; she
had a constrained but polite smile for his pleasantries. She had been as
diplomatic with him as if he had been a lunatic.
All the way home he had worshipped her as an angel. He said he wasn’t
fit to live in the same world with her....
And now, with the world awake, the sun shining, the streets alive, for
the first time since the wretched fiasco, Rosaleen began to weep for
young Landry.