Daphne in Fitzroy Street/Chapter 15

NCLE HAMLEY’S chairs and tables included a carpet, a coal-scuttle, fenders—quite a miscellany of useful objects.

“And,” said Miss Claringbold, “you know, my dear, they’re new, most of them. He must have felt very kindly toward you. He’s certainly bought those brass fenders. And four of them! At the Stores, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I shouldn’t wonder either,” said Daphne. “Oh, people are nice really, all of them—if you take them the right way.”

“Not Laburnum aunts; they’re not nice,” said Doris, firmly. “Oh, what a beauty rocking chair.” She climbed into it. “I can rock all round the room on it. I do love Uncle Hamley. I do love everybody. What time’s Claud coming?”

“Claud?” Miss Claringbold dropped the corner of the carpet which, with Daphne, she was unfolding.

“He’s” began Daphne.

“He’s a fairy prince,” said Doris, pulling the brown paper off the brass coal-scuttle handle; “he’s going to marry Daphne!”

“Doris! You are too bad. It’s nothing of the kind. You know it’s not true.” Daphne’s ears were crimson.

“He said so,” said Doris, “he did, he did. The night you dressed up and he was a king and you were a beggar maid. He said so!”

Cousin Jane had sat down very abruptly.

“Oh, that,” said Daphne relieved; “that was just acting you know, Sister Jenny.”

“I see,” said Cousin Jane, slowly.

“Oh dear,” Daphne’s thought told her, “now there’s going to be no end of a bother.”

“And are you acquainted with many gentlemen?” Cousin Jane asked.

“Heaps,” Daphne answered, recklessly, “and heaps of girls, too. It’s not like Lewisham. We’re all friends together here—like a big family of brothers and sisters. You’ll see. I thought it was odd when we came first. But you wait. There’s no nonsense of that sort—you’ll see.”

“I may be old-fashioned,” said Cousin Jane, “but”

“No, you mayn’t,” cried Daphne, “you mayn’t be old-fashioned, not for a minute. Aunt Emily’s old-fashioned. You’re going to be new, new, new—like Doris and me. Don’t you see, Laburnum Villa was arranged on purpose for people to be unhappy in. Fitzroy Street’s arranged for people to do as they like.”

This was true, and discreet Fate decreed that neither Daphne nor Cousin Jane should ever, in all their experience of Fitzroy Street, have the least little glimmering of the extent to which it was true.

“But” said Cousin Jane.

“Yes, I know,” said Daphne, smoothing out the carpet, “but”

“When I was young” said Cousin Jane.

“Things are always different from what they were when other people were young,” Daphne announced another great truth and stood up, flushed from carpet-pulling. “And oh, Sister Jenny, aren’t you glad things are different from Laburnum Villa? I know you are. Aunt Emily would hate it all because it’s so different, but you won’t, because you’re different too.”

It was different. The life in the one room, where you did for yourself, with pleasant flutter of timid amusement, all the things that all your life servants had done for you. The tentative essays in cookery, where failure was a joke, and success a triumph. The very shops were different. In Lewisham you went through dull decorous roads to a shop where the shopman’s face was as familiar, and as uninteresting, as your own, with a list of someone else’s writing, left it, and presently the shopman sent the things home—to someone else’s house. Here, you went out into a street that was a bazaar, bought in strange, foreign-looking shops objects of your own choice, paid for them, and brought them home in your own tired, delighted arms. Sometimes, even, you bought things off barrows—flowers, for instance, or lettuces, or strawberries, or cherries. And in the streets something was forever happening. Through them flowed the stream of life, muddy perhaps, turbulent sometimes, but still a stream. The Lewisham roads were mere canals; and their water was stagnant.

But the change in the outdoor world was a mere ripple compared to the great change in the inner life. For her to be welcomed and petted, who had so long been snubbed or ignored, to find herself listened to when she spoke—spoken to when she was silent, to find herself treated as though she mattered, as though, so she put it to herself, as though she were anyone else. From her chill position of domestic doormat at Aunt Emily’s, the spinster lady found herself caught up as in a warm compelling cloud—lifted to a pedestal, by hands that loved her. Her opinions seemed to count, her little speeches were answered, her little jokes laughed at. Daphne seemed to have thrown an arm about her—against the world. And the child loved her. Little unimportant things treasured from her long ago childhood—the things memory holds to the last—these were important now. When Doris in the sudden bursts of affection that come when a child is tired of play, hugged her and said: “Now Sister Jenny, you tell me all about when you was a little girl,” there was incredibly much to tell. About the old man who had lived next door, and cared for nothing only to collect pins. “He stuck them into his coat-sleeves, dear, rows and rows and rows of them, till his arm looked as if it were encased in silver armour, it did indeed.” And about how she had used to go fishing with her cousin James—“a little stream between Hildenborough and Sevenoaks, it was, my dear,” and had caught trout. “Your grandmamma used to let the cook grill them for our breakfast. They were quite delicious.” And how she had once shot at a rook, with a bow and arrow, and killed it. “Your father said I was a sportsman, my dear, and I remember how proud I was.”

No one else had ever cared to hear of these memories. But now—“I kept one of its feathers, my dear—would you like to see it?”

Doris would like, very much. So out of a long shell-covered box came the long, black, rusty feather. There were other things in the box—pieces of hair done up in squarely folded papers, dried flowers, a bow of blue ribbon crushed flat and frayed where the folds were, a crockery rabbit, white with black spots, couched on a green crockery grass-plot.

“Oh, the rabbit, the rabbit!” cried Doris.

“I used to love the rabbit better than anything in the world, when I was quite little,” Miss Claringbold told the child. “My cousin James—your father, my dear—bought it for me at Sandhurst Fair. He had only one penny and he spent it on that. He was always very noble-hearted, was your father. I used to take the rabbit to bed with me every night. I couldn’t go to sleep unless I had it in my arms.”

“I wish I had a rabbit,” said Doris. “I’m sure I’ll never sleep again unless I’ve got a rabbit to be in my arms.”

“I’ll buy you one,” said Cousin Jane.

“Ah, but that wouldn’t be a tame rabbit,” said Doris, rubbing her face coaxingly against the other face. “I’d like this one, Sister Jenny—cause it’s tame and used to going to sleep in people’s armses. Do let me have this rabbit, Sister Jenny.”

Cousin Jane let her have that rabbit—and within the day Doris had dropped it on the hearth and broken it into three pieces. Then the rabbit was mended with cement, and went back to the shell-box, with a new set of memories wrapped round it.

Claud came to call on her, also Green Eyes. Green Eyes was “nice” to Cousin Jane, but it was Claud who, as she said later, treated her like a queen. He brought her tea, brought her cake, brought her a cushion, talked to her, not all the time, which would have made her uncomfortable, but much more than he talked to anyone else. He made jokes—to her—showing that he really considered her clever enough to understand jokes. He talked to her about the Royal Academy, and St. Ives, and the Welsh mountains, and his mother and his “work,” and never seemed to notice that she was a person whom people had not been used to speak to unless they wanted her to do something for them. Miss Claringbold watched anxiously for any signs of what she would have called the tender passion, and surprised Claud’s open secret in the first five minutes. But she looked in vain for any corresponding manifestation from Daphne.

“Poor young man,” she said to herself. “Well, perhaps she’ll be a good influence.”

“You must let me take you to the National Gallery,” Claud was saying, “or the Tate perhaps, or both. There are lots of pictures you’d like.”

“I have not been to any picture gallery since I was a young girl,” said Miss Claringbold. “My Cousin James, Daphne’s father, you know, took me four times.”

Claud noted the careful numeral, and in the dry-bones of his duty-kindness, live pity and understanding awoke.

“I am so glad you have come to live with Daphne,” he lied. “If she should be ill—or Doris. And it’s so nice to have someone to show things to—I feel as though you were a distinguished foreigner.”

“I know I’m very ignorant,” said Miss Claringbold.

“You know I didn’t mean that,” said Claud, “how can you!” And her heart warmed to the nice boy who spoke to her almost as to an equal, who did not seem to remember the twenty-five sad years that lay between her and him. “You know I only meant—why, of course, when you live in a place you never see the sights. I knew a chap who d lived in Paris for years and had never seen the Venus of Milo.”

“You see,” said Cousin Jane, “I—I have not had much leisure. Being here with the girls is the first holiday I have had for a—for a considerable number of years.”

“We’ll make it a jolly holiday if we can.” Claud was throwing himself more and more energetically into his part. He looked across to where Daphne and Green Eyes, deep in talk together, absently kept up the ball of a conversation with Doris. “Daphne and Doris and I are going into the country for a day soon—of course you’ll come too. It will be most awfully nice. I’m sure you love the country.”

“Yes,” she said, “oh, yes,” and told him of the country between Hildenborough and Sevenoaks. Claud hated to think how he hated the thought that that day in the country would be shared by anyone but Daphne and him. What a day it might have been! What a day it would be! Suddenly he decided that the more people who came on that expedition the better it would be for his enjoyment of it. So he spoke across the room to Green Eyes, and asked her if she, too, would not be of the party. She would.

“Then I’ll ask one or two other people,” he said. “We’ll make a regular beano of it.”

“Beano?” Cousin Jane repeated.

“Beano—beanfeast—special occasion. In your honour, Miss Claringbold. Let’s fix the day.” So they fixed it.

And all this time, days and days, almost a fortnight, Daphne had neither seen Henry, nor heard of him. He did not come to the sketch-club. There seemed to be a fixed resolve on everyone’s part not to mention him. Even Mrs. Delarue, bristling to a possible conflict with Miss Claringbold, spoke of him no longer.

Daphne felt a growing irritation with people because they were not Henry, with all the little incidents of her life because they had nothing to do with him.

“I don’t like the man,” she told herself (and Columbine). “I think there’s something sinister about him. Sinister’s such an expressive word, isn’t it? And of course he’s most dreadfully conceited. Someone ought to give him a lesson.”

It was on a Sunday that Daphne was spurred by a power she did not understand to do something which in anyone else she would have termed rather horrid. Cousin Jane had gone to the Temple Church. Daphne and the child were to meet her afterward in the garden of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There are several ways of getting from Fitzroy Street to this garden. Daphne chose to choose as the shortest the one that lay through Great Ormonde Street. She noticed, in Southampton Row, that Doris’s shoelace was undone, and she deliberately forebore to tie it till she was close to the door that led to Mr. Henry’s studio. Then she said: “Your shoe’s untied, my pigeon,” thought better of it, walked another half-dozen yards, and then stooped to tie the brown silk.

Then the two walked on, down the length of his street. They did not meet him, and the adventurous sally yielded no result save hot ears in the remembrance.

The picnic party was growing. Claud, the charm of the proposed tête-à-tête once broken, gave invitations recklessly. And everyone accepted. It was two days before the day that the letter came. Daphne knew the handwriting and felt that she would have known that it was from him even had the name and address been typed on the hand-made envelope. She opened the envelope with a hairpin, running it along the top to spare the seal—

“:

“I am wanting a model for a thing I’m doing. Will you sit for me from nine to five daily, beginning next Monday?

“Yours faithfully, “.”

What had she expected?

Not this.

Suddenly, Pique disguising itself as Prudence and a dignified reserve seized on Daphne. She wrote:

“:

“I am sorry to say that I have no time to spare at present.

“Yours truly, “.”}}

posted the letter at once, and wished she hadn’t. Reading and answering the letter lasted five minutes. Wishing she hadn’t seemed likely to last indefinitely. The wishing was so intense that it gave her a headache, and she could not go to the theatre with the others, who had made up a party, at least Claud had made up a party, to go and see “The Gondoliers” from the gallery.

She was very sorry, she said, but her head was too awful for anything. And tomorrow was the picnic.

“Shan’t I stay with you,” Cousin Jane asked, adorned by a new bonnet and delightful anticipations.

“No, really not,” said Daphne, seeing her off on the stairs.

“Oh, do come,” Claud pleaded, “it’ll do you good. There’s nothing like the gallery to cure a headache. Do come.”

“Really not,” Daphne answered, a little crossly. “

Everyone will be horribly disappointed, but I suppose you know best,” Claud said, in a really quite broken-hearted way. “Seddon is coming, and Henry and”

Daphne did not hear who else was coming.

She went back into her room, with Doris’s arms round her waist.

“Now I’m going to be the goodest, mousiest Dormouse that ever was. I’m going to whisper and creep, and not make my Daffy’s head worse. Shall I tell you a story, Daffy dear, or would you rather play lions?”

Daphne set her teeth. She might just as well have gone to the theatre. Perhaps it would have done her head good. Oh—what was the use of lying to herself, with her heart in her throat trying to choke her. Fool! Idiot!

“I’ll play anything you like my Dormouse—only if it’s lions let’s play they’ve all got colds and lost their voices.”

She was conscientious with the play. To enter thoroughly into Doris’s game seemed somehow to be paying for something. And the effort brought its own reward. The enormous swelling sense of loss and folly lessened, and by the time Doris had fallen asleep—an event coincident with her head’s meeting the pillow, her sister was able to sit down and be merely miserable. Not furious, resentful, finding herself intolerable, but merely miserable.

“I think we’ll go away,” she told herself, “it’s perfectly absurd that a man I really dislike should interest me like this. Why should I want to meet him? I don’t want to meet him. I’m glad I didn’t go. I’ll join the Slade in October. How does he know I couldn’t learn to draw? I will learn to draw. I’ll begin to draw now.”

But she did not begin to draw then. She sat near the window watching the gold haze of the western sky through the black of the ash-leaves, and presently remembered the spring green of the chestnut tree in the school garden.

“How could I?” she asked herself. “What a child I was! I wonder whether I shall ever really fall in love.” She lost herself in a reverie—to be really in love—to see only one face distinctly in a world of shadows, to be the slave of a look—from one pair of eyes—no, any coloured eyes – of course – not necessarily topaz-coloured eyes—to hold as a live, haunting memory the slow lingering withdrawal of a hand—anybody’s hand. To thrill to the sound of one footstep—to have one’s whole life set to the tune of one voice—to hear that voice say “I love you!” Oneself to say—how would it sound if she said it?

“I love you, I love you,” said Daphne, aloud. Her hands lay on her lap, her eyes were liquid with looking very far off to where love might be—her lips trembled, a little apart.

“I beg your pardon?” said a voice at the open trap-door.

Daphne leapt to her feet. Had she said those words aloud? She could not have said them. Because if she had

“May I come in?” said a voice that might well set some people’s life to its tune. “Why did you write that letter?”

“The child’s asleep,” said Daphne. She had drawn near to the trap-door and now looked down to where, from its dark square, a white face was upturned to her.

“I will be very quiet. May I come in?”

Daphne had carefully learned the conventions of Fitzroy Street. Must she violate them because this man was Mr. Henry, the artist for whom she had refused to sit?

“Come in,” she said, “I will light the lamp.”

She lighted it, and set it on the chest of drawers where the light would not fall on Doris’s face.

“Won’t you sit down?” she said.

“You,” said he, and she sat down in the armchair that Uncle Hamley had sent. He stood before her.

“Why did you write that letter?” he asked again, but at the same moment she said, “I thought you were at ‘The Gondoliers.’”

“I was—but I came away.”

Silence.

“They said your head ached. Does it?” his voice was very low, very gentle.

“Not now,” said Daphne, “it’s better. Won’t you sit down?”

“Won’t you let me stand and look at you?”

What would you have said in answer to that, my lady who reads this?

Daphne said, “Mayn’t I make you some coffee?”

He said, “No, thank you. I had been looking at you a long time before”

Daphne felt her cheeks burn—was he—could he be going to say “before you spoke?” Had she spoken! Had she said those impossible words aloud? The air, through all the words that had been spoken since, still seemed to hold the echo of them.

“Before I ventured to break in on your day-dream. What were you dreaming about?”

That, too, was not easy to answer. Daphne said, “It was very kind of you to come and ask after me.”

“Don’t make that mistake,” he said, very earnestly, “I’m never kind.”

Daphne thought of the Russian. Caught at the thought as a way out into the safe shallows of ordinary conversation.

“Mr. Vorontzoff’s living in a dream of wonderful work. He’s like a man possessed. He”

“I don’t want to talk about Mr. Vorontzoff,” Henry said with gentle persistence. “I want to know why you wrote that letter.”

“What letter?” said Daphne stupidly.

“Saying you wouldn’t sit?”

“Because I can’t.”

“Because you won’t?”

She gave her shoulders an impatient shake. “Very well, because I won’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t care to.”

“You sit to the sketch-club—and to Winston—and to all sorts of people. Am I to take it that you dislike me, personally?”

“Of course not.”

She wished he would not stand over her in that masterful, possessive way.

“Then what is it?”

“I’ve no need to sit for anyone. My uncle has given me an allowance,” she found herself saying.

“But you’ll sit for me?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” said Daphne.

“You looked very beautiful when you were sitting dreaming. I could have watched you forever, only you”

He stopped. Was he going to say “only you spoke”—no—he went on—“only suddenly I seemed to wake up, and then I saw it wasn’t fair to watch you when you didn’t know I was there—I might have read your soul.”

“I’m afraid people’s souls don’t show in their faces.”

“Yes—they do. Always when they’re alone or when they’re with the people they love. Sometimes when they’re with people they don’t care twopence about. Your soul’s showing now—a little bit, through veils.”

“You do talk the most awful nonsense,” Daphne made herself say, and moved as though she would have risen.

“Ah, don’t move; go on looking like that.”

Daphne felt an absurd regret that her dress should be that old green cotton one.

“I haven’t seen you,” said Henry, “since that night on the stairs.”

“Oh, yes,” she said quickly, “at Mr. Seddon’s—the dinner-party, you know.”

“Ah—I’d forgotten that.” She was angry with herself then. Why should she not have forgotten and he remembered? That was how it went in books

“I’ve thought about you,” he said, “a good deal, And you have thought about me?”

“Why should I,” she asked. And in an effort to change the current of everything. “Do let me make you some coffee.”

“Why shouldn’t you?” he retorted, not concerning himself with the coffee.

“What is there to think about?”

“For me?”

“No—for me—I mean?”

“Well—you might have thought that you would like me to hold your hands.”

“Mr. Henry!”

“Oh—of course you never have”—he calmed her sudden movement, “but you asked me what there was to think about. How quiet it is here. And the two lights—and the glow dying out in the sky. Have you ever wanted anything frightfully and not had it?”

“No,” said Daphne, “I always get what I want.”

“So,” he said very slowly, “do I.”

Pause. Then—

“I want you to sit for me. Will you?”

“I can’t. I’ve got a middle-aged cousin with me. She wouldn’t approve.”

“You could make her approve. You could make anyone do anything.”

Daphne told herself that she wished he would go. Her hands were very cold and her heart was beating irregularly. She was restless and unnerved under his eyes.

“I wonder,” he said, “if you know how beautiful you are.”

“I know,” she said, “that you are talking a great deal of nonsense. Hadn’t you better go back to ‘The Gondoliers’?”

“Not till you’ve said you’ll sit for me.”

“But I won’t”

His eyes held hers. She made herself look away, and then looked back.

“You will!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No!”

He was kneeling by her. He had taken her hand.

“By heaven,” he said, “you have the most beautiful hands in the world. No—don’t take it away. Let me hold it a moment. It’s nothing to you, and to me—it’s so very much.”

She did not take away the hand. He leaned nearer to her. Instinctively she threw her head back against the velvet of the chair.

“Take your hand away from him—get up—make some coffee—light the other lamp—anything but what you are doing,” she told herself and sat moveless, hushed as a bird that looks in a serpent’s eyes.

He was leaning over the arm of the chair, and still his eyes held hers.

“Daphne,” he said, “Daphne. It’s a beautiful name. It’s the only name for you.”

Every nerve stretched tight as a harp-string, she flattened her neck and head against the far corner of the chair.

“Daphne,” he said again, in that voice that might well have been the life’s music of someone else, “Daphne, kiss me”

She could not speak; she could hardly breathe. His eyes still held hers. His face did not move, and yet their faces were drawing nearer together.

“Kiss me,” he said again. And he only needed to move his head forward a very, very little to take the lips she did not refuse. She drew back from that kiss and hid her eyes in his neck. His arm went round her shoulders. Almost at once he put her back into the embrace of the chair very gently, very definitely. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them he was at the other end of the room, looking down at the sleeping Doris.

“How lovely children are when they’re asleep,” he said. “The loveliest things in the world, I think.”

“Yes,” said Daphne, very low.

“I must be off,” he said, “you will sit for me; won’t you?” His tone was careless and commonplace, as though he had asked a cup of cold water, or the loan of a penknife.

“Yes.”

“On Monday?”

“Yes.”

“At nine?”

“Yes.”

“Good night’”

And he was gone.

“It was lovely,” the others told her when she met them in Claud’s room to serve the cocoa she had promised to have ready for them, “everyone turned up, even Henry—but he had to go early. He said there was a trifle that he must get to-night.”

“He wouldn’t get it; all the shops would be shut,” said Cousin Jane.

“Oh,” said Claud, “Henry always gets what he wants.”