Daphne in Fitzroy Street/Chapter 26

EWS travels by odd channels—Things “get round,” as we say. And by one channel or another came to Henry the news of Daphne’s marriage to Stephen St. Hilary. It must have come from some acquaintance, if one comes to think of it, because it came to him in the street. He was on his way to a picture gallery, where there was a show by a new man, a genius. The tidings did not turn him aside from his purpose. He heard it, dropped a few banal flowers of speech on the bride’s path, and went on to his picture gallery. It was in Paris, somewhere on the Quays.

“She was bound to marry someone, of course,” he seems to have told himself, adding a rider about her having been certain to be miserable with him.

Then he looked at the new man’s pictures, and saw that they were very good.

“They’re better than mine, confound him,” he appears to have admitted, and then fell deep in thought. I cannot transcribe for you the thought of Henry. His thought has always been a sealed book to me. All I know is that it caught, grasped, held him, that he sat on a narrow bench which he did not feel, opposite a picture which he did not see—and that quite abruptly something happened to him.

Things do happen to people. That is what makes life so interesting. Things do so definitely and without doubt happen. I cannot explain what it was that happened now. All I know is—and this I only know because Henry afterwards said so—that something happened to him then and there, in the picture gallery, something that changed him, so that never any more could he be as he had been. The raw Philistine mocks at sudden conversions. But they happen. They do happen. One is converted from black to white, from white to black, by a sudden, convincing magic-lantern revelation, and, thereafter, life is never again at all the same. Religious people understand this; to mystics it is the A B C of their mysticism. To us, the common people, it is the great miracle. Whatever it is, it befell Henry.

He went home to his hotel—it was the Hotel of the Universe and Portugal Reunited—and perceived that in himself elements even more contradictory were united definitely and forever.

We all get what we deserve, they say. Heaven knows what Henry deserved, and heaven alone knows what he got. Whatever it was, it served to colour the weeks that followed. In work or play, in meeting friends and skirmishing with enemies, Henry—at least so he said later, believed himself to be not one, but two. He felt himself to be at one and the same time the Henry who had posed, worked, made love, made mischief, done kindnesses and forgotten them, inflicted pain and laughed at it—and the Henry who had attained enlightenment. And the two warred unceasingly. Much knowledge came to him, in odd unrelated bits like the stray pieces of a child’s puzzle, but, the key lacking, he could not make of the scattered coloured fragments any coherent whole. Until the day when he went to the Musée de Cluny.

The Musée de Cluny holds very beautiful furniture in a very beautiful house, with, as annexe, a ruined Roman bath, and, as setting, a calm green garden.

It was in this garden that Henry, sitting dejected on a stone seat that had been part of a Roman pillar, saw suddenly, beneath dazzling green and gold of moving leaves, Daphne of Fitzroy Street, moving toward him with sunshine in her hair as it had always been, and in her eyes, as always, the light of life.

So the time had come. He had known that it must come. One would have to learn to meet her as one meets people who have not the light of life in their eyes. He rose and went toward her, and as her eyes, becoming aware of him, met his, all the detached bits of that puzzle which his life had lately been to him wriggled into place, joined up and presented to him the complete picture of himself. Not without plain-spoken explanatory legend, either.

He went to meet her, nastily getting ready a bow and a false smile; he would have passed her. What was there that he could find to say to another man’s wife, who might have been his? But Daphne’s outstretched hand took from him the choice of speaking or not speaking.

“How are you?” she said. “Isn’t it lovely here? I think it’s the loveliest place in Paris. We often come here.”

“It is lovely,” he owned; and he says he thought that she might have spared him the “we.” “But how was she to know?” he admits having asked himself.

“I suppose even you were satisfied with the exhibition?” she went on, making conversation.

“The public’s an Ass,” he said. “By the way, I have to thank you for all you did for my pictures—Peter Vorontzoff told me. If it hadn’t been for your kindness the thing wouldn’t have gone off at all.”

“Oh, but I liked doing it. You know I always liked organising things—running a show—”

Then she was sorry she had said that.

“Well—good-bye,” she hastened to add. “Paris seems to be full of old acquaintances—and friends. The Seddons are here—and Colombe—and her motor man. They’re engaged, you know, and Claud’s over too and”

“Must you really go?” he suddenly asked. And he had not at all meant to ask it. “You’ve only just come, haven’t you? Can’t you spare me a few minutes? I found out one or two things, quite important things—to me, I mean—a little while ago. I should like to tell you about them. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” said Daphne, politely, and they walked side by side to the seat that had once been a pillar.

She wore a white dress, and a hat that shaded her face. She was more beautiful than ever; he saw this, but he did not look at her. They were silent—and people walked past them, and the sky was blue through sunlit trees.

“Well?” she said at last, breaking the long silence with perfect self-possession.

He did not answer.

“You wanted to tell me?” she spoke out of a still longer silence.

“Yes,” he said, and seemed to rouse himself. “The whole thing’s ancient history now, so I may speak as frankly—mayn’t I?—as though I were detailing discoveries among the excavations in Babylon or Carthage.”

“Certainly,” said Daphne, with aloof courtesy.

“You’re changed,” he broke out suddenly; “you’re changed, absolutely.”

“I am older and wiser than when you knew me, Mr. Henry,” she said, looking young as Psyche and innocent as a wood nymph. “But that wasn’t what you wanted to say?”

“What I want to say’s very difficult. Do you believe in sudden conversions? I mean in a sort of kaleidoscope shifting of everything in life, when the pattern and the proportions and the colours all change suddenly, and can never be the same any more?”

“Of course I do,” she answered, and against her will remembered how the kaleidoscope had changed when Henry had kissed her—that first time, in the attic where the cisterns uttered their ceaseless cynical comment on life and love and destiny.

“Well, I never used to believe in them—or in anything that was worth believing in, for that matter. I thought that the pattern was the pattern I chose to make it, and that it would always be like that.”

“That would-be quite nice, if one could always be sure of making pretty patterns,” she said. “I used to think I could. But that was when I was a silly school-girl.”

“I thought it long after I was old enough to know better. You don’t mind my talking about myself, do you?”

“It was always one of your special subjects,” she answered, sweetly.

“Ah,” said he, “Daphne Carmichael would never have said that—in Fitzroy Street.”

“Daphne Carmichael never said anything sensible in Fitzroy Street. Go on please.”

“Well, you know when I was a boy I studied over here and in Munich, and all over the place—and I could always make the pattern I wanted. And I saw other men making beautiful patterns, and then just when they were getting more than beautiful there’d be—a—’a patter of feet and little feet,’ don’t you know—and the whole design would be trampled out, scattered, kicked to pieces, done for, forever. There might be a new pattern, but—”

“Yes,” said Daphne, “of course that particular pattern that was kicked to pieces was always the finest in the world; the new pattern, whatever it was, couldn’t possibly be better.”

“I thought not, then. And I wanted to be stronger than all these other chaps. I didn’t mean to have my pattern spoiled. My general attitude, as far as I can reconstruct it, was ‘Wha daur meddle wi me?’”

“A strong, defensive attitude. I see.”

“And being friends with other men, and letting all sorts of things that weren’t work get into your life—that seemed to me so fatal. And praise—I was afraid of that. I wanted to stand alone and be great—all to myself—I! It is amusing when you come to think of it, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” she said.

“And there were girls,” he went on, slowly.

“Yes,” said Daphne with the air of one who had never been a girl, “there always are.”

“It would,” he broke off to say reproachfully, “have been easier to say all this to Daphne of Fitzroy Street.”

“I don’t mean to be unsympathetic,” said Daphne of the Cluny garden; and she spoke as one speaks to a stranger to whom one wishes to be polite. “I assure you I am quite interested.”

He sighed. But spoke again.

“I deserve everything. You know that silly pose of mine—the charcoal dust and the untidy studio and the bad manners—all that was really”

“I see—a danger signal. A gentle warning to friends and admirers and—girls. You are considerate: and I suppose they usually understood?”

“No—they didn’t. Nobody did. Why should anyone have understood anything so idiotic? People simply thought, I imagine, that I hadn’t learned how to behave, that I was afraid of cold water and soap. I wanted them to think that I was too absorbed in what I was pleased to call my art, to care about any of the ordinary comforts and joys of life. I wanted them to think that my art was my life. I don’t suppose anyone ever did think it, except me.”

“You did?”

“Oh, I did, right enough. I hypnotised myself into believing the whole silly business. My art! Why, I was in the most deep and deadly earnest about it—like a schoolboy is about his stamp-collection. You see?”

“Yes, indeed,” murmured the sympathetic voice of Daphne, whose eyes were occupied with the water of the Roman bath.

“And much more. I was in earnest about it, like an early Christian about the incense and the idols. I thought it was rather fine of me—very fine, let’s say, quite out of the way fine. Here I’d got this great talent—genius, I think I used to call it in my modest soliloquies—and nothing was to be allowed to interfere with it. Oh, God help all fools!”

“Amen,” said Daphne, still polite.

“Of course,” he said, “I’ve no right to wish that you’d be yourself, but”

“But I am myself,” she said. “I’m not Daphne Carmichael of Fitzroy Street any more, you know,”

“Yes, I know. I know right enough. You don’t even care to hear”

“Yes, I do—oh, indeed I do!” The voice was almost the voice of the Fitzroy Street Daphne. It soothed and lured him to the resumption of his tale. She listened with downcast eyes that sparkled.

“I took a pleasure in being hurt, in hurting myself—and offered up the pain as a sacrifice to—my idol. Yes, of course, the idol wasn’t my art at all. It was me—me—charcoal-dusty, rude, blind cruel, careless. Just me—forgive the French locution. After all we’re in Paris.”

“Quite so,” said Daphne, playing with her white parasol’s china handle.

“I may speak frankly, mayn’t I? It can’t matter to you now—and I do want to tell you.”

“Do,” she said, cordially.

“Well then—I didn’t mind how much I hurt other people. It hurt me to hurt them and that made it seem noble, a sort of martyrdom, you know, for the sake of that damned art-fetish, as if art that was worth its salt couldn’t take care of itself without being kept in cotton wool. As if you could divorce art from life without ruining both. As if art wasn’t strong enough to live out of doors. Well, the silly glass house I kept it in is smashed now, anyhow. And even after September”

“Never mind September.” Her voice was low now, and a little hurried.

“Do allow me to turn the knife in my own wounds. It can’t hurt you to look on. Even then I felt I was being noble in some obscure idiotic way—following the light, don’t you know, and all that.”

He paused.

“Of course it was all rot,” he said slowly, “but I think it kept me from going mad, all the same, after September, you know. That, and telling myself how young—I mean that a very young girl couldn’t really be hurt, as I’d had the silly courage to hurt myself.”

“Yes,” said Daphne, “that must have been the greatest possible comfort—if you wanted comfort.”

“Well,” he urged, thinking how soon her hurt had healed under the ministrations of her other lover—her husband, “it was true, anyhow. And so I went on, and every time I thought of—of September—and the summer, it hurt like blazes. And I thought what a splendid chap I was. It sounds very silly, doesn’t it? But I assure you it was as real to me as—as the law of gravitation—while it lasted. And then, quite suddenly, all in a minute, the kaleidoscope shifted, and I saw.”

“You saw?”

“What I’m saying isn’t impertinence. But I don’t wonder you look disgusted. I’m just showing you my bare soul. And I know it’s not pretty. It was at a picture gallery. It was a show of that big Frenchman’s—what’s his name?—a man worth fifty of me.”

“I don’t know his name, then,” Daphne allowed herself to say.

“Never mind. Well, I looked at his pictures—they’re fine, mind you—as good as any modern stuff there is, and before I knew it I found myself with a sort of simple, quiet waking-up feeling, saying: ‘Yes, and what are they all worth? Suppose he’d never painted them, wouldn’t all the things that matter have gone on just the same?’”

“You are changed,” said Daphne, abruptly. “You never used to throw the door open like this.”

“No, I used to keep the door shut—and pinch anyone’s fingers who tried to get it open, pretending there was something real inside, when really there wasn’t anything.”

“You were saying?”

“I was saying? Oh, yes, about that chap’s pictures. Well, I said to myself, ‘Suppose he’d never put brush to canvas? Take the best of them—take the whole lot—are they worth making one girl miserable for, for half a day?’ And I knew they weren’t. And then I thought of my rotten work”

“It isn’t,” said Daphne: “You can say what you like of yourself—I dare say you know best—but your work is all right.”

“Even if it were, the whole lot of it isn’t worth all that I’ve paid for it—let alone making you sad for half an hour. That was what I saw—though even then I didn’t know I saw it—and I wanted to tell you, that’s all.”

“I see,” she said: “That’s all?”

“I don’t suppose I shall ever see you again,” he said—“not to talk to really, I mean. And I wanted to tell you. I was a vain, blind fool and I’ve paid for it; I think I’ve paid a little of the price. And there’s more to pay. Oh, quite a lot more. And I thought I’d like you to know. That’s all.”

“That’s all!” said Daphne slowly. “Yes—well—it was nice of you to tell me—and I’m sorry if you’ve had to pay. Because it was really quite unimportant to me. I mean it didn’t hurt me really. Those sort of sentimental sufferings are almost all imagination and romance, aren’t they? And now I must really go. I’m so glad I met you. Good-bye!”

“Mayn’t I walk home with you?” he asked. To walk along the streets of Paris beside Mr. St. St. Hilary’s wife could not ease heartache. It was not ease he wanted, it seems. It was to turn the knife in the wound—see her eyes and her hair—to hear that voice of hers—to feel her presence beside him, and know to the depths of his awakened heart what it was that he had thrown away.

“Certainly,” she said “I shall be charmed. We really ought to have heaps of things to talk of, besides you—oughtn’t we?”

“Heaps,” he agreed; and they walked in unbroken silence to the door of the flats where her lodging was in the Rue de Rennes.

At the foot of her stairs she paused and held out her hand to him.

“I’ll see you, if I may, to your very door,” he said, and, as they went up the stairs, “I haven’t asked after anyone I ought to have asked after. How’s your cousin, and Doris, and your—Mr. St Hilary?”

“My cousin blossoms like the rose,” said Daphne; “and Doris flourishes like a green baize tree, as she says.”

“And Mr. St. Hilary?” If you are going to turn knives in wounds you may as well turn them with vigour and no relentings.

“Mr. St Hilary? On, he’s very well, I believe,” was Daphne’s astonishing reply. “I do wish I could have gone to the wedding!”

“What wedding?” Henry asked, and stopped short, above and below them the hollow solitude of the empty staircase. They were now at the second story.

“Why, his and Green Eyes’,” said Daphne, her foot on the first step of the next flight “Didn’t you know they were married?”

“But,” said Henry, leaning an arm on the polished banisters and looking up at her, “but if he’s married Green Eyes—who is it that you’ve married?”

“Oh—I?” she said, steadily mounting, “I’m not married, and not likely to be.”

Then it was the old Henry, the Henry of the charcoal and the Great Ormonde Street studio, who took three steps at once and caught her arm.

“Not likely to be?—aren’t you—aren’t you?” And his eyes, as of old, implored, wooed, commanded.

“No,” she said, very definitely. “Let me go—I don’t love you any more.”

“Don’t you? Don’t you? Ah, what’s the use of saying that? Don’t I know you?”

“No; you don’t know me. I’m not the Daphne you used to know.”

“You’re my Daphne anyhow,” he said, in the old masterful way, and put his arms round her.

“No—no—no. I’m not that silly girl. You’ve taught me too much. I can’t unlearn it all. I don’t love you—I don’t love you.”

“You do, you do! I’ll teach you new wisdom—I Oh, my love. And it’s not too late after all?”

“I tell you I don’t love you now—I don’t know how I ever could have,” she said, and, saying it, yielded to his arms and hid her eyes against his neck. “Kiss me,” he said.

“No, no,” she said. “I tell you, I’m not the girl you used to love.”

His lips were close to hers. “You are, you are; it’s not true,” he said.

But it was true. Her whole soul and body trembled and thrilled to the unbelievable joy of his arms about her—but the girl who had loved him last year, the girl whose innocent passion of hope and faith had drawn him even to this, was not there in his arms, could never, whatever life might hold for those two, be in his arms again.

The Daphne of Fitzroy Street, was not now anymore, anywhere—could never, anywhere, anymore, be again.