Chapter SEVEN: The Fourth Movement

I

Queen’s Hall was three-parts full of the regular Saturday Concert audience listening to a regular Saturday Concert.

It was almost as foggy inside the hall as it was out in the streets, and the light streamed down from the red, silk valances round the great chandeliers over the orchestra in straight slanting lines, and cut yellow, flat-headed cones of illumination out of the misty dusk.

Gillian sat in the darkness at the back of the two-shilling gallery. How she got there was more than she could remember. They had nailed Aunt Elizabeth down in her coffin that morning and there was no more to do in the house where Maggie held lugubrious tea-parties for the reception of all licensed comers in preparation for the funeral on Monday. Lilac had missed Gillian’s telegrams at Curragh and would only reach Euston at six o’clock that evening, and Gillian, who could neither stay at Highgate nor go back to the Club, was waiting till it was time to go to the station to meet her.

She could not stay in the house at Highgate now that Aunt Elizabeth’s face was hidden in darkness, and she could not go back to the Club and sit in the room where Larry had stood and told her that Heinrich was dead.

Larry had been waiting for her the night she had gone back after seeing the doctor and the lawyer and the men who wanted to know about Aunt Elizabeth’s grave. V.V. was with him at first, but they had sent her away. Jane had come and taken her away, leaving Gillian and Larry alone. Larry had told her what had happened and presently Jane had come back and had said to Larry:

“Dearest, you will have to give evidence at the inquest to-morrow. But I think we shall be able to keep her out of it.”

But they weren’t keeping V.V. out of it because they loved her or were sorry for her, only because it was the decent thing to do. And Gillian was to be kept out of it as well. Nobody, not even Mrs. Gordon, had seen Heinrich in the fog on Wednesday afternoon looking for V.V.

“All the mud will be splashed on Larry,” said Jane, her face one set and constant glare. “V.V. will be his broken-hearted _fiancée_ who was away at the time, and you—you won’t come into it at all.”

It was Mr. Quist who had found Heinrich on Thursday evening. He had gone down to the studio to get a book Jane had left there and wanted to have sent to Felday, and the people in the studio next door had said that the mewing of the cat had disturbed them all day long. So Mr. Quist had got a ladder and had broken the skylight and had looked in. He had seen Heinrich sitting queerly in a chair in the middle of the studio. And Heinrich had torn up all Larry’s studies of V.V.; the drawings and sketches for the fire-picture he was going to paint; and he had broken the little figure of Gillian, the Rapunzel statue Jane had made and given to Larry to take care of just before they went away, the figure Gillian had never seen which was to be a surprise for her at Christmas. He had piled the ruined fragments in a heap in front of the dais. He had put on his blue overall and had swept all the dust and rubbish from the floor and had covered the fragments with it. He had pulled out the big Italian chair and had sat in front of the pile of rubbish and had put the barrel of the pistol he was so frightened of into his mouth and pulled the trigger. And the pistol had been loaded after all. And the little cat was sliding round his feet mewing, mewing....

“He must have done it just before we got there,” said Gillian.

“Or just after you had gone away; it doesn’t much matter now,” said Larry.

“Larry, did you know that he minded about me?”

“Of course I knew. I minded myself.”

“But I didn’t. I didn’t dream—why didn’t you warn me?”

“Jane did. I spoke to Jane about it. She wouldn’t believe me at first. She said she’d ask you.”

“She did, but only the day before—two days before—and besides, I didn’t understand.”

“You should have understood,” said Larry. “Everybody else did. Are you going to live with her?”

“With V.V.? No. I never was. She talked about it a lot. But I thought it was only talk.”

“It was a good deal more than talk to him.”

“How did you know? Did he say anything?”

“I loved him, that’s how I knew. But that, again, is something I don’t suppose you would understand.”

The sick trouble in his face had deepened as he looked away from Gillian out into the courtyard and at the staircase window of the other house which Jane was passing on her way down from V.V.’s flat.

And then Jane had come and taken Larry away.

Gillian did not see V.V. again. The Jacky who shared the flat with her had returned from South Africa and was looking after her. She appeared to be a very sensible and decent creature, and quite equal to V.V., who, said Jane coldly, was really very much distressed, and as Gillian was in trouble herself she had better leave V.V. to her own friends.

That was last night. And this morning she had found a list of the Saturday concerts. Heinrich had given it to her because she said she wanted to know what she’d be likely to hear before she went to any of them. And she had been to none. And now Heinrich’s place in the second violins was already filled by some other player, someone to whom his failure was probably a godsend, and she was there because in some aching, remorseful fashion she knew that if there were any knowledge or remembrance in the dim places where his eager soul had exiled itself, he would be eased of some part of his torment because she had gone there for his sake.

She had slept heavily all night, numb with the fatigue of the past three days, but she had wakened unrefreshed and it had not been worth the trouble to get herself any breakfast. It was Mabel’s week in the other house and the maid on duty on Gillian’s floor had upset her milkcan, being new to the flats and consequently unable to retain her hold upon any object that happened to be in her grasp when William addressed her as “Pretty Dear” out of the darkness of seven o’clock in the morning. Kind Mrs. Middleton, hearing the clatter, had come in with a cup of early tea and had stayed to condole and confer with Gillian and to be scandalized that Gillian had made no effort to get black raiment for the funeral.

“But I shan’t go to the funeral,” said Gillian. “Aunt Elizabeth wouldn’t think it right. Only the men of the family—that’ll be Toby and Old Cousin Mortimer from Ludlow—will go. Lilac and I will stay at Highgate, with you and her other friends.”

But Mrs. Middleton would argue, and Gillian had slipped out to escape the questions she knew must come as soon as the news of Heinrich’s death travelled up from the kitchens, where it must already be known, and came to Mrs. Middleton’s ears.

She had wandered on the Embankment with no bread to give to the gulls who wheeled out of the mist, their red legs hanging straight like coral-branches from their down-white bodies as they screamed past her face. Their broken, mewing cries seemed like a devil’s echo of that other mewing, the thought of which drove all the blood of her body in a cold flood back to her sickened heart.

There, by the river, where she had so often found comfort, where she had escaped so often from her small, half-imagined griefs, the real and awful sorrow, the harrowing remorse for her own share in the disaster she was facing, broke in upon her with wave after wave of mounting desolation. All the beauty she had ever found by the river was gone; washed away by this horror. The ash-grey water, sluggish under the hidden sky, lapped against the pier by the bridges with a cold reiterated syllable—“dead—dead—dead.” Gillian drifted on to the flat sound till she came to Vauxhall. For half an hour she wandered in the Tate Gallery. All the pictures there seemed to repeat the sound of the river in paint. Ophelia floating on the flower-encumbered stream; Icarus livid among the soaring feathers of his wings; the child in Luke Fildes’ life-size bestseller; Chatterton, dead at his attic window; the sickening giants struggling or gloating over corpses in the symbolism of Watts; the anatomical perfection of Leighton’s Sea giving up its dead; the bird crushed in the grip of the Minotaur—could they paint nothing but this? Did the men who put paint on canvas with such hideous competence know anything about the crazed disillusionment that had killed Heinrich? Had they ever imagined the ineffable, almost contemptuous peace which Death had set upon Elizabeth Mortimer’s smiling mask?

And then the memory of the faint, ironic curve into which the dead mouth had fallen before they shut it away from sight, came back to Gillian, terrifying, abasing her with the thought that Aunt Elizabeth knew of her folly and condemned her from the grave to which she herself had gone in righteousness and joy.

Out past Westminster and up Whitehall she wandered. She did not pause in Trafalgar Square to look with derision at dead painters’ crucifixions and _pietàs_. Her mind was heavy with refusal of the consolations their very existence implied. Her eye had offended and she had not plucked it out. She was fit to be eternally cast into the outer darkness where she was now wandering. She could not enter any Christian church and pray for the pagan Heinrich; and no prayer of hers need reach the heaven for which Aunt Elizabeth had saved her own soul.

After a time she had found herself waiting in the gallery-queue on the staircase outside Queen’s Hall; and finally, jostled and elbowed by enthusiasts who would not, if struggling could avail their eyes, miss any turn of the conductor’s wrist, any wafture of his expressive hair or necktie, she had found a seat high up in a corner against the wall.

She did not trouble about a programme. The orchestra played one of the well-known overtures. A violinist executed some Dvorák; there was a Martial work—Elgar, Gillian thought, and another violin solo, and the first part of the programme was over.

Gillian was only musical at second hand. For the most part she was content to feel without understanding what she heard. Unless she had a score to read she could not follow any orchestrated music at all. But both by taste and training she was happier listening to a symphony she knew well, or hearing chamber-music with which she had some acquaintance than she was where any but the greatest artists sang. Words were spoilt by music to Gillian, though she often turned the music she knew into words. It was one of the secret personal idiosyncrasies she discovered to Heinrich, that when she had learnt to know any great music by ear she remembered it in a notation of words, just as in her childhood she had done as Jane Bird did and had made profane verses to hymn-tunes. Heinrich had not been musical in this same secondary, literary sense, though he knew and loved the tunes in what he played. But once, following her lead, he too had set a melody to words. Nothing in the first part of the programme had gone to any words for Gillian; but, after the first item on the second half was over, there was a longish pause, and then the orchestra gave forth the first subject of Tchaikowsky’s B Minor Symphony. And Heinrich, his great eyes laughing with pleasure, his fiddle tucked under his ear, stood before her singing in his voice that was almost the voice of the strings from which he drew the tune, singing at Gillian’s bidding, but singing for V.V., who hardly listened to him, his one absurd, exotic phrase:

“_Wir sollen nicht mehr auseinander gehen_”—the phrase repeated itself, _nicht auseinander, nicht auseinander_ soared the violins, and the whole orchestra repeated it like an oath, _Wir sollen nicht mehr auseinander gehen_. Was it only of V.V. Heinrich had been thinking when the melody, the perfect love-phrase of the music, had drawn this sentimentalism up from the recesses of his polyglot vocabulary? It might have been. And yet Heinrich was better than that. He was not, like V.V., incapable of any idea that had not a direct personal implication—_Nicht mehr auseinander gehen_—that was the ideal of all lovers. Would any German girl, Gillian wondered, hearing it exotic and appealing from Heinrich’s impish lips have loved him as V.V. could not imagine doing? Or would she have laughed at his queer passion as V.V. had done. It was a terrible thing to face—that claim—love me or I die. After all it was almost what V.V. had said to her, and she had turned away from it with all the force within her. You couldn’t let another human being set up a right in you like that. Larry hadn’t. He had said it was the primal curse.

The orchestra marched on until the time and the key had changed and the first bars of the five-four allegro were racing along the wood-wind and up and down the strings. Heinrich had made no words for that, only a funny little laughing song that had run against the tune. There was more music in Heinrich than in Gillian—she could not have pointed any melody like that. She could not even quite remember how Heinrich had done it. It flickered in her mind as the movement danced on: presently it would flicker out altogether—and be just a little, forgotten trick, like his way of getting the sparrows together in his hand and throwing them out into the ivy on the wall beyond the studio window.

Heinrich had refused to make words for the rest of the symphony, and as it rioted on melodiously Gillian’s attention flagged and she half-dozed in her airless corner, her eyes dazzled by the angles of light which cut one another just within her line of vision. And then the descending chords of the fourth movement, the Adagio Lamentoso, broke heavy with anger and despair. And they made words so plain that Gillian felt the whole hall was ringing with them. “O poor Larry Browne,” they called, “O poor Larry Browne.” Like a foolish, tragic, nursery rhyme. And it was Jane’s voice, and Lilac’s, and even V.V.’s heaping anger upon her because of what had been done to Larry and to Heinrich. What was it Jane had said? “Spattering mud on Larry.” She had done that. It was clear that in some horrible way, which was a part of the things she did not even now quite understand, Larry was being laid under an imputation of which she, Gillian, had been the source.

He was, she knew, almost Heinrich’s guardian. He had meant to take his faun to the warmth and light in which his frail and delicate nature could flourish and grow in joy. But Larry would never be able to take Heinrich to Taormina now. Larry had not saved him from the vultures after all. He could never bear to live in the studio again. Perhaps, even now, at the inquest Larry was being blamed—censured was the word—the coroner censured the witness—for leaving his pistol loaded—for leaving Heinrich alone with a loaded pistol. For leaving Heinrich alone with his anger and his fear.

Suddenly the lights grew together, they began to revolve like rockets, and the music swelled and increased to an intolerable shouting, and everyone in the galleries leaned forward and pointed at her, and they all shouted in time to the chords—they all shouted Larry’s name. Gillian stood up in her place—“Larry, Larry”—she shouted with them; and then the reeling lights and the shouting voices became one black confusion into which she was falling, falling——

* * * * *

Someone—she did not know who it was—was holding her by the arm on the pavement outside. A taxi with the door open stood by the kerb.

“Where shall I take you?” said a strange, kind voice.

“To Euston, to meet the Irish Mail,” said Gillian.

And then she fainted.

II

The curtains were of the richest satin and they were so voluminous that even when they were drawn right across the windows they fell in close corrugation to the velvet pile of the carpet which covered the floor. But carpet and curtains were plain and of a very soft, dull, rose-colour, and there was not an inch of fringe or an attempt at a true-lover’s knot to be seen on them. And the room, though large, was not very high, and there were no mirrors on the plain cream walls nor in the doors of the plain walnut cupboard that ran along the wall opposite the fireplace. And the only picture in the room was a large uncompromising water-colour of a race-horse in a flat, wooden frame which hung over the fireplace. A huge photograph of Old Winona, framed in silver, stood on a writing-table between the windows, but the frame was quite plain, and the bed in which Gillian lay, though it was deliciously comfortable with sheets of heavy, cool linen, smooth as silk and blankets as light as the down quilt above them, was narrow, with plain head- and foot-boards, to match the wardrobe.

She was in Toby’s room on the top-floor at Knightsbridge, which was for the moment, so Lilac had explained to her, the only spare room in the house, Toby having moved down to the room with a dressing-room on the floor below next door to Lilac’s temporary quarters.

“When we get into Norfolk Street you shall have a whole floor to yourself,” said Lilac.

But Gillian had refused the installation saying she would rather go back to the Club if Mrs. Barraclough would tolerate William there after all.

“It would be awkward for you to have a wage-earning sister in the house,” said Gillian, “and wages I intend to earn after Christmas.”

And Lilac had not argued with Gillian, though she had tried to make Jane Bird do so when Jane had come to tea that afternoon. Jane, however, sided with Gillian.

“She’s quite right. She’d ruin herself, living up to your standard in hats and gloves alone, in Norfolk Street,” said Jane, “even if she did live rent- and food-free. Whereas at the Club with me and Larry as social outlets she’ll be affluent, and you can provide her with the right kind of trimmings when you feel she won’t quite do as she is for special occasions.”

Gillian, from her pillows, expressed her gratitude to Jane, and when Lilac left them alone together Jane said more.

“You wouldn’t be happy with them anyhow,” she said; “they don’t want the same things as you do. Toby may have wanted some of them once, but he’s forgetting. You’d better let Lilac go. She’ll be a Leader of London Society in three years and Toby’ll be in the House of Lords before she’s done with him. You’d come quite as bad a cropper there as you did with your Vanderleyden. It’s no use being intimate out of your own class.”

“But I haven’t got a class,” protested Gillian.

“Oh yes, you have. But it isn’t a very large one. I’m in it. That’s why I’ll never be rich, though my figures are getting quite degradingly fashionable. And Larry’s really in it. I think I shall keep him there. We’re married, you know.”

“Goodness!” said Gillian, “has this been going on for long?”

“Since he came back from Dinkelsbühl. It was the white porcelain stove that made me see I could not allow him, with it, to pass out of my life. And we were afraid Heinrich was gone beyond recall to the Vanderleyden.”

“Oh, Jane!”

“Yes. I know. She’s gone off to Ostend with someone called Mick or Nick. A female. Mrs. Barraclough has let her rooms to a real missionary this time: false teeth and no mean moustache. She tilled the Chinese vineyard in her day, I’m told.”

“I don’t believe you till vineyards,” said Gillian. “Where are you and Larry going to live?”

“In a converted mews, behind Brompton Oratory. It looks out on the greenest of green gardens and we’re painting it Reckitt’s blue and orange in our spare time.”

“What do you do with the rest of your time?”

“Gillian,” said Jane firmly, “we kiss each other.”

* * * * *

Jane had gone. She had left a single Christmas rose behind her. It stood on a table by the fire, in a toothbrush-glass full of water which Jane had fetched for it from the dressing-room before she left, and it was unfolding its pinky-yellow petals so quickly in the heat that Gillian could already see the pollen-soft stamens at its heart. Presently the petals would fall on the polished wood, just as the petals of the gloire de Dijon roses had fallen on the table in V.V.’s room last July on the day when the idea of their living together in the same flat had first been suggested.

Gillian did not remember that she had assented to it even then, but that did not lessen her sense of guilt. What was it Aunt Elizabeth had said? Love must blossom in the spirit. There had been no spiritual blossoming in all her infatuation for V.V. She had known that all the time. She had gone on taking all the pleasure, breathing the heady incense, yielding to the senseless spell of that haunting, physical charm that never once fulfilled the promise it always half suggested. What it was that had so lured her mind and stirred her senses Gillian had never known. She had followed blindly, but her blindness had been wilful. Always she might have opened her eyes.

And now the waking dream was over. Heinrich was dead. Larry might have gone after him if it had not been for Jane who had seen and known all the time.

* * * * *

It was Jane who had made many dark things clear to Gillian a few days earlier. Lilac had sent for Jane, not understanding the confused and shaken trouble of Gillian’s state.

“She says you are angry with her,” said Lilac.

“So I was,” said Jane, “but, I admit, she can’t have known what she was really in for. But now this dreadful thing has happened she ought to be told.”

And Jane had told Gillian. And in telling her Jane had lost the bitterness of her anger against Gillian and found her love there still. And Gillian had seen the morning of her ignorance melt into a hard, bleak, unenchanted day.

The only person who had escaped unhurt was V.V. But she was unhurt because, and this Gillian knew now, because long ago V.V. had been so maimed, her soul had been so warped and stunted by some influence she could still recall though she was too vitiated to resent it, that nothing that happened to her now would make very much difference. You cannot shipwreck a derelict.

V.V. had gone her own way, and Gillian could not follow her. She had taken the first steps on the road down which V.V. was disappearing, and had come back again to the place where it started.

And now that road was closed.

THE END

OLD GUARD HOUSE
NOVEMBER, 1925

THEODORE
DREISER’S
FIRST NOVEL SINCE 1915

An American
Tragedy

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Transcriber’s Notes

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical and punctuation errors as well as variations in hyphenation were silently amended. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

[p. 27]:
... of your school, as I have taken due precaution ...
... of your school, as I have taken due precaution to ...

[p. 108]:
... was no reason, in Mrs. Mordaunt’s self-disciplining ...
... was no reason, in Mrs. Mortimer’s self-disciplining ...

[p. 125]:
... a woodland air. The face narrowed on either side a ...
... a woodland air. The face narrowed on either side of a ...

[p. 128]:
... raven in the aviary in the maze everything that was ...
... raven in the aviary in the maze everything that was left ...

[p. 139]:
... wore a hat a minute longer than she need, and not ...
... wore a hat a minute longer than she needed, and not ...