Daphne in Fitzroy Street/Chapter 18

HAT was how it all began. Henry, in an incredible correctitude of dress and on Sunday afternoon, called on Miss Claringbold and won her to the admission that he was a most gentlemanly man. She quite understood that his desire to paint Daphne’s portrait was an honour—an understanding emphasized by a visit from Mr. Seddon, who was brought to call by Claud. He balanced a teacup and spoke of Henry as “The Master.” Claud had one of his enthusiasms. He brought everybody to call. To call on Miss Claringbold became a fashion with art students, like wearing green ties or dabbling in lithography. There was a piquancy in the freshness of this withered lady, planted by capricious destiny among the young, consciously exotic flowers of the student-world.

“She is like a November rose among May tulips,” said Seddon.

On that Monday at nine of the morning clock, Daphne Carmichael put on her chains. She went to Henry’s studio, and, for the first time, posed as his model. He greeted her coldly, posed her, and set to work. She was restless, anxious. She wanted him to talk—he would not talk. Everything he drew that morning went into the fireplace. He made her rest often, but even in the rests he walked about, and took no notice of her.

“Your dress,” he said, at the end of the long silent hours, “it’s the dress you wore that night at Seddon’s, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Daphne. “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s perfection,” he said, carelessly, “only it’s absolutely wrong. I want you in something wild and white—with your arms and your neck showing—and your hair—no, your hair’s all right.”

“I’m glad something’s right,” said Daphne, in her embroidered dress and her disappointment.

“Everything’s more than right,” he said, more carelessly than before, “but you must get another dress. Can you do it in a day? Right—then don’t come till Wednesday.”

“I don’t know what sort of dress you want.”

“Don’t you? Then go to Miss Joyce—she’ll show you. I’ll explain to her.”

“Why can’t you explain to me?”

“I have. Come, cheer up. I’ll make some tea.” It was as she sat pouring the tea that he said: “I was quite wrong, come tomorrow, and wear a pinafore.”

They might have been strangers. Pride forbade her to try to show that they were anything else.

She came the next day, in a blue pinafore with purple roses embroidered round the neck, borrowed from Green Eyes.

“Is this right?” she asked.

“You’re beautiful whatever you wear,” he said. “This is Tuesday. It’s three days since Saturday. But I don’t like that pinafore. Is it yours?”

She told him whose it was.

“I wish you’d take it off.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve not got any dress under it.”

“What have you under it?”

“A—a petticoat bodice,” she said, looking straight at him.

“Well,” he said, “I daresay that’s all right. It’s white, I suppose?”

“Yes—oh, yes—it’s white. Yes,” said Daphne, and did not move.

He looked up from fixing paper on a board to say impatiently:

“Why—you’re not ready yet. Do hurry up. There’s the screen.”

Daphne, in the darkness behind the screen, took off the pinafore and was ashamed to be glad that the petticoat bodice was her prettiest one, with much lace, and a blue ribbon that held it round her shoulders. She had fallen in love with it in a shop window in the Tottenham Court Road, and had bought it, and she was glad of it.

“That’s better—that’s right,” said Henry, looking at her through half-closed eyes, as on that first night; “it’s like an evening dress. It’s prettier than most evening dresses.”

That set her more at her ease.

“Now,” he said, and came to her, touching arms and throat, to pose her to his mind, with a touch that might have been his touch on a lay figure. This calmed while it exasperated.

“Now,” he said again, and began to draw with strong, swift fingers. But in a very few moments he threw down the charcoal.

“Hopeless,” he said, “you look like the Soul’s Awakening or the First Communion. By Jove, I could do a Soul’s Awakening that would wake people up—I’ve got some things somewhere”

He fumbled in a big chest, pulling out top-boots, coats, cloaks, draggled ballet skirts, and crumpled muslins.

“Here we are,” he said. “You get into these, and we shall go ahead like a house on fire.”

These, to Daphne’s dainty dismay, were the rough, dark garments and heavy bonnet of a Salvation Army lass—dusty, crumpled, and black to the point of coming off on one’s hands.

“Must I?” she asked.

“Not if you don’t wish to,” he answered.

So she put on the horrid stiff, stuffy things, and her flesh crept at the thought of them.

“Ah,” said Henry, when she re-appeared, “that’s something like. Now look at me as if—never mind, look at me as you like. Here’s the tambourine. Hold it high—that’s right. Now then!” She had sat before to the sketch-club, to Green Eyes, to himself yesterday, but always someone had called time, as at a prize-fight. Now there was no one to call time. Henry had forgotten time in his work. Had forgotten her. Had forgotten everything but the work in hand. In the long looks that he gave her his eyes did not see her, but only the vision that would materialise as his picture. He had chosen a difficult pose for her. It grew more and more difficult. Intense weariness gave way to sharp pains in the arm he had raised. The neck he had turned grew stiff. The minutes fell slowly past, each minute longer than the last. She kept unbroken silence. And still his charcoal passed with swift, dry rustle over the paper. Pain grown intense merged in weariness that was almost oblivion.

“Why don’t you talk?” he said, and, after a pause, “Do talk if you want to; it will keep your face from that dreadful set expression that it’s getting.”

She did not answer.

“Do talk,” he said again.

“I can’t,” she said. “You—I Oh!” She dropped her arms, took two steps forward, swerved and sank into his armchair. Consciousness was going but it clung to her long enough for her to hear the intense irritation in his “Lord, she’s fainted!”

When consciousness fully returned he was fanning her with a sheet of drawing paper, and his eyes were on the far wall of his studio. But there had been a half-conscious moment when she had half believed that she was held in his arms and that his lips were on her face.

“I am so sorry,” he said politely, and the paper swayed with mechanical regularity, “it was most thoughtless of me. You must always sing out when you’re tired. You see I get lost when I’m working, and I don’t notice things. Are you better now? If you are I’ll get lunch.”

Daphne learned the limits of her endurance, and just before they were reached learned to “sing out.” But she thought bitterly that he might have seen when she was tired. St. Hilary would have seen—Claud would have seen. And the hours were long—long—long. Daphne had time to think, and thought was not always pleasant. To maintain a tiring position, with brief rests, for eight hours a day, with no talk to distract one’s attention from muscles that ached and heart that hungered, when one might have been doing all sorts of pleasant things with people who liked one, or with Doris whom one loved. She could look at him, it was true, The pose demanded that. It was something to see him. To have him entirely to herself—that seemed good at first. But quite soon she began to realise that she had not at all got him. He had got her, that was certain, but she, in those long hours, had nothing of him but his preoccupied face—the eyes that were the eyes of a stranger—the lips that did not move to speak or to smile. In the rest intervals he would walk up and down, hands in pockets, now and then pausing to scowl at the canvas, to add a touch, or occupy himself with his palette.

She reached home too tired to play with Doris, too tired for anything but to lie flat on her bed and listen to Cousin Jane’s prim, gentle chatter, Doris’s hushed rompings, as the child was undressed and made ready for bed. She would rouse herself for the evening meal, and, perhaps, for some little meeting of friends—but through it all she was tired to the soul. And her sleep was restless and broken. Again and again she told herself, in those grey hours when one tells oneself the truth and more than the truth, that the whole business was a mirage, that she was giving every thought, every dream, her strength, her youth, her beauty, and getting nothing in return.

And then, before she had time to nerve herself to break the chain—he would offer her some sudden sweet caress, some abrupt, poignant love-word, and she would feel that to live for him was little enough—since was she not ready to die for him it he needed her?

But the constant strain of desire constantly denied, the desire of a girl for romance, the desire of a woman for caresses—this wore upon her, hollowed her cheeks a little, and lessening her beauty heightened her charm. Not in his eyes, however, and she knew it.

“You are much more difficult to paint than I expected. You change and change and change. I’ve got you all wrong. I shall scrape this thing and begin another,” he said at the end of a long day of silent work for him, silent endurance for her.

“I won’t sit for another picture,” she said. She was trembling, and her hands were very cold, “it is too much. You take all my life out of me. I can’t bear it.”

“I thought,” he said, mildly, “that you liked to help me.”

“I don’t help you,” she said vehemently; “it’s not me—it’s the shape of my face and the colour of my hair. Any other model would do just as well. You don’t want anything from me—not the real me that thinks and feels and—and is real. Oh, I won’t sit to you any more, anyhow, not even for this picture. I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of you. You don’t care about me. You never speak to me, you never look at me—I’m just your model. I—— Oh, I wish I’d never come. I wish I’d never seen you. I wish I were dead!”

He came to her then, held her hands, looked in her eyes, brought a red rose from the table and laid it against her cold lips.

“Don’t be heartless,” he said.

“It’s not I,” said she.

Then he sat down on the floor at her feet still holding her hand, and spoke.

“Look here,” he said, “have you ever done any work?”

“Lots,” said Daphne.

“Then you ought to understand.”

“I believe I do.”

“Not you!” he said, and his voice caressed. “But it’s like this. I’m painting your portrait—when it’s done it will be good, if you’ll only not change like a sunset and be different every day. When I am at work there is nothing in the world for me but the work I’m doing. There may be other ways of working. If there are I don’t know them. That’s my way. When I’m working I don’t care a straw for anyone in the world—not even for you.”

“I see.”

“You, I suppose, care for me all the time?”

She would have liked to say, “I do not care for you at all,” but the pride of her womanhood forbade it.

“You do care for me?”

Another pride awoke and fought the first, was beaten, and she said:

“Yes—or I shouldn’t be here.”

“I like you for saying that,” he said. “Yes, I like that; but if you try to come between me and my work—I want you to know that I—I mean if you make me choose between my work and you—it is not you I shall choose.”

“You’re impossible,” she said, and tried to go.

“No,” he answered, holding her hand more closely, “I’m only truthful. All men who work feel this more or less. But their minds are swayed by this, that, or the other, and they won’t look the thing in the face. If I loved you more than all the rest of the world I should still love you less than my work. Is that clear?”

“It is indeed,” said Daphne; “you are impossible.”

“Not if you face the truth. There’s courage in your face as well as beauty. My work is the thing in me—it’s my atmosphere, my backbone. Bah!—I never was good at metaphors. But one can’t work all the time. There are little flowering corners in life, where one can look at the sun and forget for a very little time what one’s really made for. Can’t a woman understand that that flowery, sunny place is her place? Can’t she wait for a man there—and be beautiful to him when he comes tired from his work, wanting to rest and to forget?”

A vision of a home, neat, simple, beautiful, with herself, her beauty at her highest, her helpful womanhood applied to the end for which God gave it—his true helpmeet. She hugged the vision and said angrily, violently almost:

“Yes, when my lord pleases to throw the handkerchief. I’m to wait humbly in my horrid flower-corner, and when he throws it I’m to pick it up.”

“Rather, my lady is to keep herself calm, calm and beautiful and patient, and when I am very tired I shall come and lay my head on her knees—like this.”

He threw his head back and looked at her with eyes that, now, did see her.

“Isn’t it good enough?” he asked, putting up his hands and drawing down her face to his. “Isn’t it?”

Her arm went round his neck, and he held her hand under his chin, as he spoke again.

“You want it to be always like this. You think I don’t care because I don’t kiss you every time you come here. If I let myself do that I should never paint another picture. Other men have a talent for love-making. Let them develop their talent. Mine’s for painting and I don’t mean to bury it in a nest of roses—no, nor of lilies either.”

“I don’t want you to”—said Daphne, brokenly, her face against his hair—“be always nice to me I mean. On, you know I don’t mean that. But you hardly ever speak to me. I feel as if I’d jumped off the firm land thinking it would be water that I could swim in, and it’s only air, and I’m falling, falling—no, it’s not that either. It’s as if I’d tried to walk on a green meadow, and it was all loose grass and I’d tumbled into a pit and couldn’t get out. But I don’t mind so much if you’ll only talk to me, and not look at me as if you didn’t see me.”

“Do I do that? Only when I don’t see you, believe me. Lean back and let me look at you. Am I looking at you as though I didn’t see you? Am I? Am I?”

She covered her face with her hands.

“I don’t like being shut out,” she said, took his head in her hands and turned it and laid it on her knee again so that he could no longer see her face. “I don’t mind about your work. If only you’d let me help you. Won’t you let me help you?”

“The only way in which you can help me is by letting me alone—by not forcing me to set you beside my work and to choose. I’ve heard chaps say that love was the reward of work. It isn’t, it’s the breathing time between.”

“Then when you’re working you don’t care about me?”

“When I’m working I care for nothing else in the world. Now you understand.”

“You are horribly selfish,” she said.

“No,” he answered, and raised his head from where it lay. “I’m not selfish, and I’ll prove it. If it isn’t enough for you to be what you can be to me in the times when there’s no work—then go. Leave me. Cut the whole thing. I can do without you.”

“That’s just it,” said poor Daphne. “I know you can. You don’t care for me at all.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “if you leave me I shall be very miserable. My work will all go to pieces for awhile, but I shan’t break my heart or ruin my career. But you won’t leave me, my lady, you won’t leave me!”

He raised himself a little till his head lay in the curve of her arm. “It’s all quite simple,” he said, “if you’ll only try to understand.”

“I do,” she answered; “almost all your life’s to be given to your work. You’ll live with that in a dream. And when you wake up I’m to be there, in case you happen to remember me.”

“No,” he said; “it’s when I have time to rest, I want you to be there waiting for me in my dream—like this.” He drew her closer.

“Because, you see” he was going on, but she stopped him.

“Ah, no,” she said, “don’t talk any more.”

“But I thought you liked me to talk to you,” he persisted.

“Not now—not like this. Don’t talk any more. Let me pretend for a minute or two that you like me always and not just when you’ve nothing else to do.”

“I hate pretences,” he said, but after that he said no more, and his arm went round her.

It was she who broke the silence, speaking a little breathlessly.

“Ah,” she said, “you do care really—you do like me.”

Instantly he freed himself from her arm and stood up.

“I do. I like you very much—let me pose you again. I mustn’t lose all the light.”

This was the fabric of her life. But it was not all her life. There were all the friends she had made among the artists and art-students—there was Cousin Jane, there was Claud, there was Uncle Hamley—and presently, after all sorts of delays, there was the picnic. Henry would not go. “Why should I,” he asked, “want to see you among all those people when I can see you alone?” And by that time she knew him too well to press the point.

It had been planned to begin the day with a railway journey, but Seddon came round to Claud’s rooms the evening before with a beautiful suggestion of motor-cars. Daphne was called down to give the casting vote.

“The motor-car is the emblem of sordid modernity and Mammon worship, dear Miss Carmichael, is it not?” Seddon said. “The Mammon worship against which we are all pledged to fight to the last drop of our blood. What nobler victory than to enslave the motor, Mammon’s badge, to the service of the arts? My own,” he added modestly, “is a forty h.p. Mércèdes, and I can borrow a couple of Daimlers. The picnic is in Miss Carmichael’s honour, I take it? I entreat permission to lead captive motors in her train—Una enslaved the lion, did she not?—and we should all be much more comfortable.”

“The picnic is in Miss Claringbold’s honour,” said Daphne, “and I’ve never been in a motor-car, and I think they’re most frightfully wicked. And I should like it most awfully. You do have lovely ideas, Mr. Seddon.”

“He has a lovely lot of money to burn,” said Claud.

“And I burn it on the Altar of Art,” cried Seddon, delighted with the metaphor.

“You’re a jolly good fellow,” said Claud, thumping him on the back. “You always said you’d do these things if you ever got any money, and by Jove I believe you’re the only man in the world who ever did it.”

“Did what?”

“Stuck to his bargain. I believe you made a compact with the devil or the Angel Gabriel or someone that if you got money you’d spend it on making things jolly for other people. And you’ve kept to it.”

“It is all of you who make things delightful for me,” said Seddon, prettily. “I make bold to say that there is not another man of my income in England, nay, in Europe, who has so many delightful friends. Do you not think that I am a happy man, Miss Carmichael?”

“I am sure you are—and deserve to be,” she said.

“Ah, if we only got our deserts,” he said, “I should not now be where I have the happiness to be,” he bowed to point the compliment. “You will communicate with the rest of the party and I will come round with the cars and collect everybody. At nine? Yes. You will give me a list. Our Henry is of the party?”

“He won’t come. Too busy he says,” Claud told him.

“Ah, he is no doubt achieving with blood and tears the masterpieces which are to figure in the exhibition which he and Mr. Vorontzoff have projected.”

“He is painting Miss Carmichael’s portrait,” said Claud, bluntly. He would so much have liked to do that himself, and while he had hesitated from motives of delicate consideration, Henry, with no manners and covered with charcoal, had asked—and to him had been given.

Seddon looked at her oddly—and she quailed in spirit.

Would he—now, before Claud, restate his conviction, so oddly shared by Mrs. Delarue, that she and Henry were made for each other? She believed him capable of it.

“I think Mr. Henry has done all the pictures he means to show in October,” she said, very quickly. “He is not exactly doing my portrait. It is my coloured hair that is so difficult to find. He doesn’t know any model who has it—not naturally, I mean, and you can always tell, can’t you?”

“I can always tell,” said Seddon, dreamily. “Will the portrait—I mean the picture—be for sale, Miss Carmichael? Already I have been fortunate enough to secure some half-dozen masterpieces by our Henry. Seven is the mystical number. I should be indeed the favourite of the gods if I could count my treasures as seven, and the seventh the sevenfold prize—the portrait of Miss Carmichael.”

“It isn’t a bit like me, at present,” said Daphne.

“Not to your eyes perhaps,” Seddon allowed—“in its unfinished state of course, no. Yes. But the completed masterpiece? Dear lady, I have a new interest in life.”

Daphne hoped intensely that Henry would not sell that picture—that he would want to keep it to look at when she was not there, to talk to, perhaps, as he did not talk to her. The hopelessness of that hope took her suddenly and she laughed aloud. Claud looked scandalised and Seddon said very simply:

“Have I said anything foolish?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I laughed from mere lightness of heart. It isn’t every day that has a motor-drive in store for its tomorrow. Claud, have you any postcards? Because if you have, Mr. Seddon would post them for us”—Mr. Seddon murmured sweetly about Mercury—“and we must let everyone know they’re to be fetched by motor cars, like grand-dukes.”

“This exhibition of the Master’s,” said Seddon, as Daphne and Claud wrote postcards, kneeling opposite each other at the table, “it is a new idea.”

“It’s Vorontzoff’s idea,” said Claud. “Old Henry would never have bothered. He just paints—and if he sells he sells, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t care. He hasn’t his living to earn like the rest of us. That’s why hardly anyone has heard of him yet, though he’s been at it for years.”

“And how came Mr. Vorontzoff into the Master’s life?” Seddon asked.

“Oh, Henry knew him in Paris—and when he came over here he was rather decent to him—lent him money and set him on his legs. And Vorontzoff has egged him on to this, to show his gratitude, I suppose. He says the show is going to make everyone in England sit up—everyone, that is, who knows a picture from a pork-pie. It’ll be rather a long way, going to fetch him, by the way.”

“If you have a decent motor there are no long ways in London,” said Seddon.

“And I think it would be fun going to fetch him in a motor. You don’t know what his studio’s like, Mr. Seddon.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Seddon, “I have made expeditions to the Far East. It was my happy destiny to acquire two of his pictures there—I wish it had been twenty. In his way he is a very great man. Are these all the postcards? I will post them. Au revoir, dearest Miss Carmichael. Winston, your stairs are death-traps.”

“I’ll light you,” said the other man, and Daphne was left alone.

“I say,” Claud said, when he came back, “what a fellow Seddon is, isn’t he? He simply insists on providing the hampers for tomorrow. Wouldn’t hear of anything else. I’m certain the gates of heaven will be specially enlarged to admit him. He is a brick. But I don’t know that we ought to let him stand treat in the way he does.”

“Why,” said Daphne, open-eyed, “can’t you see that ‘standing treat’ is all the good his money is to him? I think it’s so awfully nice of all of you to let him enjoy his money in the only way he could ever care about.”

“You’re always right,” said Claud, with admiration.

“And he appreciates his blessings,” she went on. “He’s right. As he says, I don’t suppose there’s another rich man in the world who has such nice friends—friends who let him stand treat just as if he were one of themselves. Don’t you see? What he likes so much is to pretend that he’s one of you—a hard-up art student, and that he’s just got a windfall that lets him stand treat for once—just as you all stand treat when any money happens to happen to any of you. If he made friends with rich people, his money wouldn’t buy him anything but a sameness with them—I’m saying it very badly”

“No, you’re not,” said Claud. “Go on.”

“But among you—among us,” she hastily added, “it buys him the wonderful delicate pleasure of making us all happy and of pretending that it’s only this once, and that next time we shall stand treat.”

“By Jove,” said Claud, “you do know how to put things. Yes, I see. And if ever I do get there, I’ll stand old Seddon a treat he’ll remember all his days.”

“Ah, you don’t see,” said Daphne. “Don’t you see that you’re standing him the treat now, by letting him in as an equal, by letting him stand you the treats, which is all he cares about?”

“You think he’s such an altruist as that?” Claud asked.

“I think he’s a dear,” said Daphne, “and,” she added, thoughtfully, “I think it must be very, very lonely up there among his stocks and shares and banking accounts and things.”