Chapter XIX

It was the last day of March in the following year. A day when spring drew its breath even in London streets. The evening was drawing in, but the daylight still crept colourless into a pretty room high up in some mansions overlooking the river. Jocelyn Ley sat in front of the fireplace, her elbows resting upon her knees and her chin sunk in her hands. Between her arms a grey kitten lay on its back, blinking its dubious eyes, and clawing the air vaguely with one paw. The spitting flames of a wood fire leaped joyfully in a deepening blaze, and there was a scent in the room, sweet and pungent, of burnt pastilles.

At a little table, where she could catch a full light from the bay window, Mrs. Travis bent over the skeleton of a garment.

“If I take it in in the neck, I must let it out under the arms, and that means taking the sleeves out,” she was saying plaintively.

Jocelyn, from her chair, murmured, “Poor dear!” She always treated her aunt with complacent tenderness, as if she were some kind of elderly child. At the same time, if there were anything to be decided upon, she invariably deferred to her opinion, not from respect, but from an inherent dislike of making herself unpleasant--which her aunt by no means shared. Jocelyn was always plastically under the domination of the nearest personality.

“That comes of not being in Paris,” she went on. “You _know_ you can’t get a jacket in London for that price, which doesn’t want altering. I’ll do it for you presently when the puss is asleep.”

Mrs. Travis, turning the garment this way and that, and screwing up her eyes, broke into fragmentary praise of Parisian dressmakers. They were so smart--so cheap, considering--so _chic_, pronouncing it so as to leave upon the mind an impression of yellow fluff and broken egg-shell. Jocelyn stroked the kitten’s furry chest softly.

“Why aren’t we in Paris?” she sighed. “I can’t think what made you take this flat for so long! Chelsea’s nice _for_ London, but I’m so sick of London!”

Mrs. Travis sat back in her chair with a faint rustling of silk and a creaking of stays. She said “Oh!” in a funny little voice, fidgeted her hands once or twice on the table, and then folded them over the garment upon her lap. She was not really thick-skinned. If people differed or found fault with her, she suffered severely, until she had time to see that her own view was the right one. She never admitted herself in the wrong. There was no credit due to her for that, she had simply never learned how. Things might seem against her--in fact, they frequently did--but she was always inwardly convinced that she was in the right. If it had appeared to her that the world was flat, she would have admitted the imparted knowledge that it was round, with a complacent “Yes--it may be so,” but she would have known it to be flat all the same.

She had a queer method of argument too. She would admit everything with a tentative “Yes,” propose some remedy that wildly exceeded necessity; and when this was rejected she would fall back upon things as they were. She had a really fine turn of obstinacy, bone-obstinacy. As to the after effect upon her of argument, there was none.

A short and significant silence followed, while her skin hardened.

“You know I haven’t got any money,” she began at last in a smoothly injured voice. “I can’t bear owing anything. I wasn’t brought up to it, _and I can’t do it_.” Her green eyes seemed to deprecate the possibility of disbelief, but there was nothing except the back of Jocelyn’s head to deprecate, as she leant forward in her chair, and gazed at the fire with moody eyes.

The flames licked the logs, and an occasional red spark darted forth, trying to reach her outstretched feet. The kitten purred softly. Jocelyn’s silence was discomfiting to Mrs. Travis; her eloquence felt faint for lack of contradiction. She began to fan herself slowly with a newspaper and to get a little red.

“You should think more of other people,” she began again. “You know I can’t afford to go abroad. That horrid place has ruined me. I’ve never had any money, to spare, since.” When Mrs. Travis lost all her money, her Puritan education enabled her to see that gambling was immoral--until she had some more. Just now she had some more, but not quite enough--a tight place for her principles.

“It’s not like it used to be there. They try to get everything they can out of one. _I don’t think it’s right._” These words with her conveyed the acme of disapproval. She began to enlarge upon the possibility of corrupt croupiers, weighted tables, pre-arranged cards--devices with refutation writ large upon their faces--but very dear to her. She pouted her lips as she spoke, her hands moved restlessly, and her green eyes kept glancing from the back of Jocelyn’s head to her own lap--signs that she was agitated. She ended by declaring with decision that she would never go near the place again.

“I am glad of that,” said Jocelyn quietly. She frowned, as she gazed at the dull glow playing fitfully on the charring logs. There was a minute or two of silence. A hundred memories were thronging in the girl’s mind, ghosts of long hours when the sun had blazed, mocking the torment of her spirit, when the star-flecked vault of the heavens had looked down, cold and pitiless, upon her shame and misery. She put her hands over her face.

Presently there came a sudden, uneasy creak from the chair where Mrs. Travis was sitting--one would not have ventured to predict its meaning--and she began to speak.

“You’ve not been looking very well lately, my dear,” she said with a little tentative cough. “I think perhaps we ought to go south for Easter. ‘Monte’ is nice, then, just for a week.”

Jocelyn did not speak for a minute. She could not control her voice, and it trembled when she answered--

“You can go, of course, if you want to, I shall stay here. I _hate_ the place.” She got up. “I thought you said just now you were never going there again!” As she spoke, she walked across to the window. Throwing it open, she stood leaning against it, looking out over the river.

Mrs. Travis sniffed subduedly with surprise and anger. It was unlike her niece to oppose her, it was unlike her to speak with emotion. She collected herself in her chair. On this occasion, it must be confessed, it took her while a person might count ten to see that she had not contradicted herself. Then she rose from her seat, the uncompleted garment in her hand. Throwing her feet out well in front of her, she walked to the door, an imposing figure in black silk.

“It was entirely on your account,” she said with dignity, opening the door, and going out with a rustle of offended petticoats.

Jocelyn, left alone, shrugged her shoulders. The grey kitten had followed her across the room, and was rubbing its arched back against her dress. She stooped, and picked it up.

She felt very lonely. The soft west wind driving the broken sky over the grey, untroubled river, was sweet with the mysterious scent of growing things, of the sap in the trees, of the earth after rain, of the flow of life; the spring scent that seems to tell us to begin again, stirs the blood to vague, unimaged longing, grips our hearts with a sweet aching.

It was the meeting of the lights--the buildings and chimneys loomed from across the river like shadowy monsters, peering into the dusk with reddening eyes. The lighted lamps on the steadfast bridges seemed to her to fling their greetings from one to the other, daring in linked chains the gathering gloom. She counted three barges, huge, amphibious beasts, creeping, black and sluggish, up river against the ebbtide. The dull hoot of a distant steamer, plying westwards, was carried now and again to her ears on the wind. The streets murmured ceaselessly from the back, roosting sparrows twittered sleepily in the trees, and from the square tower of the old church came a chime of Lenten bells. She leaned over the balcony. The bare boughs of the trees in the garden below swayed slowly. One by one the lamps of the embankment flared up; and beyond, under the drift of the restless sky, under the breath of the homeless wind, the river flowed, grey and untroubled, to the sea. The river, grey with the knowledge of the meanness and tragedy of life, untroubled in its strength and in its constancy; a philosopher to whom men confide all secrets, the recoil of the fainting spirit, the stirring of great endeavours; an image of human life, unceasing in the ebbing and flowing tides of surface emotion, whereon the traffic of living shifts to and fro, resistless in its unseen stream which is ever compelled to that mysterious sea where truth lies hidden, where life ends and life begins. Tears started into the girl’s eyes. The vague solemnity of the evening, the soft breath of spring in the air, bewildered her. She had a longing to know what it all meant, to _feel_ the life stirring in that width of darkened water, in the flashing, yellow lights, in the wind that fanned her flushed face. She stretched out her arms with a sudden movement, and thought, “Ah! not to be so terribly alone!” Surely, all that she saw, felt, heard, could give her some companionship!

The wind fanned and passed her by, the lamps shone with a hard light, the river flowed cold and relentless. No truth, no life, no solace! She was alone! She turned away with an aching, as if some one had struck her in the chest.

She sat down at her piano, and began to play, a rhapsody of Brahms. The chords rang full and true under her slender fingers, the passionate throb of unending life seemed to beat in them. It was as though Nature were singing a song of full rejoicing, in the echoes of lofty mountains, in the rustling of yellow cornfields, in the medley of river torrents, and the hush of the unstained sea.

She played with her head bent a little forward, and with parted lips, and her dark eyes seemed trying to reach, beyond the music of the notes, a secret, mysterious and unfathomable. She was lost in the melody which swelled quivering into the room. When she had played the last bar, she left her hands nerveless and cold upon the keys. Suddenly, she bent her head down upon them in an uncontrollable burst of weeping. It seemed to her that all around the pulse of life was throbbing, in herself alone it stood still....

A long ten months of a struggle to forget, spent in the daily society of a lady, kind-hearted, but to whom an inscrutable Providence had given as much spiritual insight as to a sack of potatoes, had told upon her strength and her nerves. She had had no support except in her own indomitable pride. Of acquaintances she had many; of friends, from the wandering manner of her life, few, and those not at hand. Religion was an empty word with her, she had never come into contact with it. She had, indeed, a love for art, but neither energy nor strength of will to study consistently.

From time to time she gave herself up to music, working from morning till night at Brahms, Schumann, Chopin, or Bach to the great discomfort of her aunt, who fidgeted in her seat at Brahms or Chopin, well-nigh howled at Bach, and would plaintively murmur requests for “The Bee’s Wedding,” upon which she had been brought up. She went to as many concerts as she could, and even once persuaded Mrs. Travis to accompany her. That lady sat through a magnificent performance with resigned placidity, saying from time to time “Very nice” in a drooping voice; and as they came out, gathered her black silk skirts vigorously in both hands, and stepping, large and brisk, through the crowd, remarked with relief, “There’ll be just time to call at Louise’s about my new bonnet!”

Jocelyn had never the heart to ask her to go again. All the same, a few days afterwards Mrs. Travis had suddenly passed a criticism upon an intricate passage of the music--a criticism which just missed being masterly. An astounding lady!

At first, it seemed long ago now, when memory was roused in her, Jocelyn had shrunk from the violent despair of her own moods; they were followed by days of headache and exhaustion, when nothing seemed to matter at all, except to feel well. Then would come days, and even weeks, when she would fling herself into the life of the passing moment, and almost forget; but always there seemed a blight over life--nothing, not even music, had any meaning; everything passed her by and left her untouched, with a sense of incompleteness. She recalled the old days, when each event and each pleasure had been, as it were, stamped with its meaning in large surface letters, and wondered.

She had kept her promise to Giles. She wrote once a month, giving him a bare chronicle of her movements and doings, at a great cost to herself; and yet, perhaps for that very reason, she would not willingly have given up writing. She would think of him sometimes with pity, often with longing, again with a wayward and inconsistent anger.

Why did he not write?

She had begged him in her first letter not to answer; and he had obeyed. The pessimism of her native distrust always besieged her.

He could not care--no man would care for so long! She wanted him, and she did not want him. For the last month she had not written; she had no longer those violent moods of despair, but she had felt too profoundly discouraged.

She had grown thinner and paler, and her face was hardly ever without its look of defeat. Her aunt’s personality seemed altogether too much for her in these days; she had a feeling of suffocation and of great loneliness.

She would sit at the window sometimes for hours, watching the river, longing to get away upon it to the sea, far away to the East, to countries where no one knew her, where the sun was bright, and she might begin her life again. At other times she knew that even _that_ could not give her what she wanted, or fill the vague longing within her. The winter months in London had been dreary and terrible, but her heart had never ached as now, when the spring wind stirred, and the sap coursed in the budding trees....

Presently she lifted her face, flushed and tear-stained. She went to the glass and arranged her hair--she had a horror of public emotion. Her aunt would be coming back! She took up a piece of work, and began passing the needle mechanically in and out--it was almost too dark to see.

The door was opened. She expected to hear her aunt’s smoothly offended voice, but the servant announced--

“Mr. Nielsen!”