Daphne in Fitzroy Street/Chapter 25

T WAS was all over, then. There was nothing to be done. The Fairy Palace was only a Castle in Spain, and Daphne’s own hand had pulled it about her ears. The one clear drop in the nauseous brew poured for her drinking was this—that it had been her hand, and not his.

It would be pleasant to relate that Daphne, brave as ever, faced the inevitable—fought and overcame her sorrow. It would be pleasant, but not true. On the contrary, once compelled to accept defeat, Daphne accepted it thoroughly. She was never one for half measures. It was all over; there was no more fighting to be done. And all her fighting energy set itself to resolute acceptance of the end of fighting. She gave up, lay down, and let the deep waters go over her. Breathless, at first, she questioned, doubted, agonised. If she had acted differently—had been more patient, had done that, left that undone—would this have been otherwise? Was it all her fault? If she had submitted then, as now she submitted, would things have worked round to something less bitter? If she had not had the silly, superb confidence in her power to organise, to engineer all things—if she had left a little to Chance or Fate—or even to Henry? You know the sort of pattern questions like those can draw on the background of white nights? But quite soon she got her breath: The thing was done, and it had to be got over. Some sage has said that the only way to get over sorrow is to go through it. Daphne perceived this truth. So she opened her heart to her sorrow, let it live with her, get up with her, lie down with her; and the deep waters were waters of healing as they are to all who have the desperate courage to lie still and let the waves have their will.

It was Cousin Jane who “held her hand,” as she said later, through those bitter weeks. Cousin Jane quiet, commonplace, offered no intrusive sympathy or pity that would have been intolerable: instead, an understanding reticence that Daphne herself could not have bettered had she stood in the place of comforter to one suffering as she suffered. And the pain was bitter—love, pride, vanity, passion, self-esteem, all lay wounded and bleeding.

After that first wild night when agony could not, and did not care to, disguise itself, Daphne, to all outward seeming, took up her life where she had left it, did her best to go back to that parting of the ways where she had turned aside to follow the path that had promised to lead her to the stars, and had led her—here.

When the others came back riotous and brown with their long holiday in the sun, they found someone who looked and talked and laughed like the old Daphne. She was a little thinner perhaps, and pale, but what else could one expect who stayed in town all the summer? Only Green Eyes understood, and though she never showed it by word or look, Daphne knew that she understood, and hated her for it. Doris found again the adored playfellow and comrade, who was never too busy to play—a comrade missing from these last months.

Everything looked as it had been before. Grass grows quickly; especially on graves. That her heart was broken Daphne had now no doubt whatever. But her ideal of herself was not the girl who sits down and cries over milk spilled or hearts broken. There was his exhibition to see to. She had always wanted to do everything for him. Well, she could do this.

In conjunction with Vorontzoff, that was the worst of it. She would have to face his child-like, frank questionings. How could she meet them? The idea happily came to her of forestalling them by a statement frank as his own questions. She got him alone, in Henry’s studio it was, where they had met to send off the pictures.

“Mr. Henry has gone to Paris,” she said. “Will you be kind, and not ask me any questions? He has gone, and I shall not write to him, and I shall never see him again. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes—no,” said the Russian. “But you will see him again. This world is too small a place to hide oneself from the beloved.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Daphne—“the way you talk. It isn’t only questions. Please, please be kind, and never speak of him to me.”

“Poor little sister,” said Vorontzoff, “but do not forget how little a place is this great world compared to the world that is in our hearts. Have courage. If he has lost you, you have not lost him.”

“After today you won’t talk about it, will you? But I have lost him. And he hasn’t lost me. Now you know everything.”

“It is what I tell you always,” said the Russian impatiently; “You lose not your love while he is your love. Now your soul can be free from selfish longings for happiness to you. You give him your love—you ask no return. You will give, give, always give.”

“Indeed I hope I shan’t,” said Daphne, half laughing with sad eyes.

“You see what you can do for him. You look round. Ah, the exhibition. He leaves you that to do for him. And now to make it good for him—that will be your life. He goes away—he thinks of himself, his art: he is afraid to embrace life. It is too great, too fine. And all the while he thinks it is his art that is so fine, so great. He is excommunicate; but you pray for him and he return to the fold. He is on the wrong path, but you think, think, always think of him, desiring not that he may return to you, but that to the good path he may return, and be wise and strong and happy. And your thoughts are strong like prayers. They control him, they move him to there where your good love wishes him to be—to there where he is best, strongest—his real good self, even if that is somewhere where you are not. It is thus that you possess him. Ah no, little sister. You have not lose him. You hold his soul in your hand.”

“He does not love me,” said Daphne.

“If he does not, that makes him more yours. For you have nothing to take from him—only to give, to give, to give continually. It is like this that God loves us, and so we are His.”

“I don’t want him to be mine,” she said. “I want to”

“You want to be his. I know. And it is so you will be his.”

“No. I want to forget him.”

“Ah,” said the Russian, dropping the ball of string, “it is true. You are a child: the children forget so quick. You will forget what you have suffered for him, but not what you have done for him. To the work! Courage! Let us dispatch ourselves to exspeed his pictures to the exposition where the world shall see them and know how he is great.”

He waved the brown paper, picked up the string and entangled his feet in it.

“It is well, little sister,” he said, struggling as in a coarse cobweb, and answering the demand of her eyes. “It is well. After this moment I speak no more of him. All is said.”

It was bitter-sweet work, dragging out from their leaning places in the dark ante-room those canvases which he and she had looked at together, tying them up face to face, with the little wooden pegs between, to keep the paint from possible hurt. To remember the ones he had chosen was easy. Not so easy to make her own choice among the others that were to hang on the wall that was “worth twice as much as any wall in Europe.” She might have known—on that horrible day when he passed her as one passes a stranger, she might have known.

Over her own portrait she hesitated. Vorontzoff did not hesitate. “We expose it,” he said. “Is it not the chef d’œuvre? We expose it, but on it we place the red sign of sold, and at the end it returns to our Henry.”

Daphne’s face looked at her from the halo of the Salvation Army bonnet, and now she saw, for the first time, what it was that Henry had painted there.

“I think,” she said, “I would rather not have it in the exhibition.”

For she saw written more plainly than in any words it could have been written all the passion and longing of her love for the man who had painted it—the man who had seen how she wanted him and who had not wanted her.

“You find it tell your secrets,” said Vorontzoff, with the deadly insight of his race. “But I tell you no. To me and you it say it: yes. Because we know, me and you. But to the others who know not it tell nothing but the love of heaven and the hope of the Lord coming in clouds of glory to save the world. Do not be like a woman, my child, to think only of yourself and hide away his best work because you helped him to do it. Be rather the brave comrade, and show the world what it is, this, his great work.”

“Oh, all right. Never mind. Do what you like,” said Daphne. “I believe he wanted to show it, though he said he didn’t.”

“See then,” the Russian was triumphant, “how he requires a comrade to help. So often we have the two wishes that contradict almost exactly. One only so little stronger than the other, so that we cannot tell which shall win while they fight like wild bulls in our souls. Then comes the good comrade, and sees what we cannot—the true desire superlative, and translates it for us into the action. We send the picture.”

It was already framed. There only remained the tying of it up in brown paper ready for its case. Daphne did it, while Vorontzoff achieved incredible entanglements with the ball of string.

It was all very hard, but quite wonderfully it was helpful. In all the business arrangements for the exhibition—the hanging even—she had to be at Vorontzoff’s elbow, explaining, arguing, insisting. She knew how Henry meant the pictures to be hung. The picture-dealer knew how he meant them to be hung. In the inevitable collisions, her fighting strength came out again. She was doing something for him, and she would do it well. Mr. Berners had no such driving force behind his neat little plans as lent power to Daphne’s. She had her way.

And the weeks went by—and it was this work, so lightly asked by him, by her so freely given, that seemed to make life possible. She worked harder than she had ever worked at anything in her life—naming the pictures, for Henry never named anything, revising the catalogue, overseeing the advertisements. She knew nothing of any of these things, but she made it her business to know, as she had always made it her business to master the details of any scheme she chose to undertake. And, as usual, she succeeded. Only once in her life had she tried and failed. Only once.

The naming of the pictures was difficult. She knew how Henry hated what he called literary titles. Yet one could not call everything a nocturne or a symphony. “Nightpiece” did for the embankment picture, but it was difficult to find other names as non-committal. Her own portrait she could not name. “Portrait of Miss Daphne Carmichael” was what it purported to be. “Girl transfigured by longing,” was what it was. Vorontzoff solved the problem and called it “La Vie Eternelle,” which served.

And Daphne’s organising, supplementing the merit of the pictures and the name of Vorontzoff, achieved the purpose that had served her instead of happiness for those weeks. Parliament was sitting. London was full, the Spirit of the Age was propitious: the show was a success, complete and instantaneous. From the very first there was no doubt about it.

The critics, heartened by Vorontzoff’s continental reputation, set themselves to praise the less known work of Henry, though some few thought it clever to belittle his work. But the thing was done. Every picture was sold, and sold as Mr. Berners had foretold, at a price that made the 50 per cent. an unimportant loss. The weary faces of great ladies, of courtesans, of ladies’ maids, waiters, footmen—painted with ruthless fidelity and the brush of a master—weary rich folk, sick for a new sensation, crowded to buy them. They were more popular than the brutal East End tragedies on the canvases of Vorontzoff.

“East and West” had a vogue unprecedented—unforeseen by any save by the girl and the two men who had made it, and Seddon hugged himself on the pictures he had had the luck and the wit to buy before all this gold and fame came to Henry’s door.

Henry, all the time, was abroad, in Paris, Dresden, Vienna. Vorontzoff wrote to him, sent him little stacks of press notices. But no word came from him.

And now that there was nothing more to do for him save to read and re-read his press notices and stick them in a book, Daphne grew suddenly very tired.

Somebody must have seen this, because there came a quite unprovoked gift from Uncle Hamley—a hundred pounds—and the request that Daphne and the child and Jane should go away somewhere for the winter. Vorontzoff was going to Paris. Henry was in Rome. No one, not even oneself, could suspect one of running after him. Why should not they all go to Paris? They went. The big room in Fitzroy Street was shut up. The cisterns gurgled and giggled alone together, telling each other who knows what cold-blooded stories of warm human folly and suffering. The room proclaimed on its windows that it was to be let, furnished or otherwise, but in neither state did it attract a tenant.

They only waited for the now near wedding of Madeleine and Mr. Seddon, and then it was no longer a room in Fitzroy Street but a flat in the Rue de Rennes—a new life, a new stage, new supers in Daphne’s life drama. There were new living interests that blotted out the faces of dead memories. The grass grows on graves—and presently weeds grow too, and flowers.

There was the new flat to arrange, to organise, to make a home of. Cousin Jane, happy, busy, and important, to guide and encourage. Doris to play with, and take to and from the Convent School in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. There was Vorontzoff, full of dreams and schemes and plans for the regeneration of the world. Full, too, of home-tendernesses, of gentle gratitudes—a friend better than a brother.

“Daphne must have a career,” he said. “Not art! No! my faith, there are too many artists in the world. But much too many! Why not the school of agriculture? To learn about the brown earth that is never ungrateful, and pays back a hundredfold all gifts given to it? To live in the beautiful life of trees and flowers. Someday a little farm—in England, a farm with many flowers and patient beasts that know you. The sketch pleases, is it not?”

The sketch suddenly flashed before tired eyes in all its allurement of green restfulness and growing beauty, did please. Daphne became a student of agriculture. And she studied intensely, strongly, as she did everything. And slowly the cloud lifted. Life, she perceived, was not wholly bitter. The great waters were retreating. Slowly, slowly, till only sometimes she heard their faint withdrawing beat on the shores of this new world, a world lacking the golden summer lights of that other world where she had staked something that she would never have again. Staked and lost. Well, there were other things.

The crowded life of a city chattering incessantly in the tongue she loved better than her own, the gleaming challenge of the Boulevards—in face of it all how dared one, for very shame, not be gay? The days, the lengthening days of spring, when buds swelled to bursting like the hearts of children overfull of sudden joy, the swift, clean river where willows grow happily in the very middle of the city, sheltering the patient anglers in their shadows, the woods of St. Cloud and Clamart, the haunted formal splendour of Versailles, and through it all the spring, growing, growing, the winter over, summer beckoning across boulevards growing green—the barrows in the streets alight with pink pæony and guelder rose: youth insistent clamouring for its birthright of joy and laughter. And in it all the mysterious magic of time and change, working, working, molelike, underground, to make a new palace for a new princess. And the palace was preparing, and the princess, all unknown to herself, was making ready.

For, of all that the bitter months had taught patience now stood forth crowned, the lesson best earned, perhaps—since the world is what it is—most needed. Never again would Daphne, open-armed, run though the sunshine to meet joy halfway. It was that gay, glad welcome of life that Henry had first loved in her. And that, for good and all, was over. If ever in the green ways of spring or summer joy should meet her again, it would not be she that would advance to meet it. Rather she would stand aloof and repellent, distrusting anything that seemed to promise what once had been promised to her by everything. And if love ever came to her again, he would have to come, she promised herself, as a suppliant, to be pitied or not pitied, at her free will, not as a conqueror resistless, a strong man armed.

Time and change were busy with Daphne, and in the full splendour of spring a day came when she could look into her heart, and assure herself that her eyes no longer met there those eyes of his that she had likened to smoked topazes, when she could again draw free breath, love the new green of the trees, the new love-notes of the birds, could, surprised and doubtful, question her heart deeply, only in the end to say sincerely to a soul that suddenly felt free: “It is all over. Thank God, I do not love him any more!”

“But oh,” she told herself, “if only he would love me again, and try once again to make me love him! That is what I really want. That’s what would make the world really good again. If only I could hurt him as he hurt me. What’s the use of my not loving him when I can’t tell him so?”