Chapter THREE: The Tortoiseshell Cat

I

There was a knock at the door.

Gillian, who was dusting books in the inner room, ran out to answer it without taking off the brown holland overall she was wearing, or untying the old, blue, silk handkerchief with which she had covered her head.

Jane Bird stood on the landing.

“Good morning, Tanagra,” she said, her face impassive behind her round spectacles. “_The Times_ has announced that Moloch has devoured your sister, so I’ve come to see if you’ve been singed at all during the sacrifice.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Gillian, torn between shyness, excitement and an unresentful knowledge that Jane was being very impertinent, and that she was not going to be able to snub her for it.

“Don’t you know about the Bottomley Sunbaths for Ricketty Children?” said Jane, “and may I come inside?” She followed Gillian into the inner room and sat down, very tall and flat, like a creature hewn and jointed together out of planks, on the red chesterfield.

“Your brother-in-law has celebrated his marriage by giving a sun-cure installation, in Dorset, to the London Hospital,” she said. “It’s in the papers with photographs of the wedding. There’s one of you in fancy dress, with the fancy hat a little on one side. You oughtn’t to try the piquant style. Undine or Ophelia, with your hair quite down, and no stays, is all you should ever allow yourself.”

“You can’t have Ophelia bridesmaids,” said Gillian, “it would be tactless. Hamlet was such an unmarrying-man. And how nice of Toby! He kept it very quiet. I didn’t know.”

“Very wise of him till he’d got clear of the country, or he’d have all the hospitals in the kingdom after him. I know. I was brought up on the lap of a hospital committee. My father was the director of Addenbrokes till he died. That’s how I know so much more about Life and its Mysteries than most young women. I read all his books, and it wasn’t only medicine. I’m an orphan now, like you. I’ve got a mother—if mother indeed she can be called. She’s third curate, unpaid, at St. Luke’s, and I’ve taken a studio in Buckingham Palace Road for six months.”

“Aren’t you going to Oxford?”

“Nor to Cambridge. They’re coming to me. Do you know Larry Browne?”

“No,” said Gillian.

“You will soon,” Jane assured her. “He knows about you; his father was your father’s tutor at B.N.C., and he’s got a photograph of your father in his studio that might be you with your hair cut short and your nose a size larger. I recognized it because it’s the same one as I saw here the day I called on your sister last summer.”

“It’s the only photograph he ever had taken that wasn’t a snapshot one,” said Gillian. “And why has your Mr. Browne got it? where did he get it?”

“His father had it from your father in the days when you were both unborn. It’s like a nursery rhyme,” said Jane, “and he’s trying to put it into a large allegorical picture he’s going to enter for some prize or other. Up in the top corner—complicated with wings and a halo.”

“I think,” said Gillian, “I think I should like to see it.”

“Come along then,” said Jane Bird; “it’s only on the other side of the bridge.”

They walked together over the bridge and along by the palings of Battersea Park, and as they went Jane told Gillian that she had discarded scholarship for sculpture, and had already sold two figures to a shop in Bond Street.

“They’re not good,” said Jane Bird, “my figures are not good, but they’re very pretty, and I sell them for five pounds apiece.”

Presently they crossed the road, went through the fragment of a gate that hung between two blistered gate-posts in a fence which ran along the footpath between two blocks of flats, and found themselves in a long, asphalted garden, common to a row of studios, where the fires of Spring were vainly striving to cover up the traces of the bonfires of November.

The studios were of commercial build. Red brick, faced with white stone, cut into unnecessary and depressing arabesques above the gutters, held the doors, windows and skylights together. The woodwork of the whole row had originally been painted in that peculiar liver-coloured red which distinguishes the entrances of the Piccadilly and Brompton Tube stations, and is so often used by the London builder to enhance the yellower red of London bricks. But, here and there in the row, an occupant had sickened at the shade and had splashed in white or green over the landlord’s paint. The door of the last studio in the row was new and shining in a rich cobalt.

“That is the azure goal of our pilgrimage,” said Jane Bird, and Gillian found that she dared not ask her to express herself with direct simplicity. Jane was making it perfectly clear that Gillian was no longer in authority and that she, Jane, intended to be as ornate and ridiculous as she pleased, when she pleased; would indeed go out of her way to be ridiculous and ornate, just for the triumph of seeing Gillian check her impulse to protest.

Larry Browne, who opened the door to them, was tall and broad-shouldered, with thick, strong, golden-brown hair that curved without curling from either side of a deep, straight parting dividing his head from crown to brow. He had light eyes; grey-green with yellow gleams in them, and there was a curious triangular fleck in the iris of his left eye that gave him a false expression of being a man with an outward cast. He had a small, neat nose with beautiful wide nostrils that drank the air freely, and a beautiful fresh mouth from one corner of which, at that moment, hung a long cherry-wood pipe with a tassel half-way down its stem, and a china bowl, with a lid to it, painted with robins and forget-me-nots that hopped and twined in and out of the device _Traum und Rauch_ which ran in large black Gothic capitals below its brim. He wore a shantung shirt which had once been blue, but had passed through many washings and was now clouded, like an August sky, where the colour had run, leaving irregular white spaces. An enormous pair of green corduroy trousers was folded into the tops of his brown boots at the ankles, and pleated into a leather belt round his waist. In spite, or even because of, this voluminous garment, the young man appeared remarkable for slenderness and grace as he stood in the doorway, the sunlight beating full on his clear, bright skin, filling the little freckles that crossed from cheek to cheek with colour, and striking a high-light off the curve of the jaw that ran, a clean line, from behind his small flat ear to the end of his slightly pointed chin.

“Behold,” said Jane Bird, still daring Gillian to protest, “the youth is ruddy and withal of a fair countenance and beautiful to look to.”

“Hullo, Aholah!” said the young man in an even voice, removing the pipe from his mouth as he spoke, and shutting down the pewter lid of its bowl with one finger. “Come in. We call your friend Aholah,” he said, turning to Gillian, “partly on account of her iniquities, but also because it was my good fortune to stumble on the derivation of that ancient name. It means ‘she that has her own tent,’ which is Miss Bird’s case, while I,” said Larry Browne, “am forced to share mine with a faun, as you may see for yourself.”

He pulled aside the curtain which shut the little lobby off from the studio itself, letting it fall again as the two girls passed into the gaunt, white room.

Larry Browne’s studio was the usual wilderness of easels, canvases, mahl-sticks and more or less damaged properties, furred with the usual dust, smelling of the customary oil and turpentine. The blinds were not drawn across the skylight and the studio was flooded with sunshine. All the low windows on the farther side were open on to a hedge of box and ivy and Virginia creeper which was noisy with sparrows. Some of the sparrows had hopped in over the window-seat, and three of them were fluttering and pecking on the boards below the model’s throne. A fourth was perched on the knee of the figure which occupied the throne; seated on it with one leg hanging down, the other crossed and bent so that one naked foot lay on the right knee, just behind the unruffled bird.

It was the figure of a man so slight and supple that at a first glance he seemed little more than a child.

He wore a light-blue suit like an engineer’s overall, held up by a tape which passed over his neck from the middle of the garment and left his arms and shoulders as bare as his thin, brown feet. Some one—it was most probably Larry—had stuck an ivy-leaf into the close black curls on each side of the creature’s head, and the stiff corners stood up like horns, widening the low, wide brow and giving to the dark, heavily lashed eyes which looked out from under the thick eyebrows, a woodland air. The face narrowed on either side of a long hooked nose to a chin deeply cleft below a mouth which was at the moment pursed up into a soundless whistle. The faun was holding converse with the sparrow, having for this purpose broken off his attempt to clear up the studio with a long-handled broom which leant up against the throne and served as a perch for yet another brown bird.

“Heinrich,” said Larry Browne, “you must shoo those fowls away. We have other guests.”

The faun, with one liquid movement, broke the angles of his pose and, gathering the complacent sparrows together, bore them, perched on the fingers of either hand to the window and placed them, chirruping, in the hedge outside.

“I go to put on coats, vaistcoats too,” he said with a brilliant, melancholy smile, and vanished.

“Heinrich,” Larry explained, “is a faun by day. At six o’clock he puts on more coats and waistcoats and goes out to play in the second violins at Queen’s Hall. Some of him is German as his name expresses, some of him is Italian, some of him is Jew. His father undoubtedly was Pan. He must have had a good many mothers.”

“And when you’ve done painting him into your fresco,” said Jane Bird, “he’s going to sit to me with a sparrow, real or stuffed.”

“I wonder if William would sit with him,” said Gillian. “It wouldn’t be the same thing as a sparrow, of course.”

“It would be quite another subject,” said Jane. “‘Tame cockatoo devouring wild violinist’ I should think would be what the group would sell as.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gillian, and didn’t look for fear of seeing Jane Bird’s small annotating smile at her capitulation.

“I suppose you’re doing Heinrich as Pan,” said Jane.

“I’m not,” said Larry Browne, “Heinrich with sparrows is clearly a Cytherean theme. Without his overall, as you’ll see presently, he loses touch with nature. But, morning by morning as he sweeps the dust about the floor and encourages those vulgar birds to be perfectly at ease indoors, I’ve wondered what it was he reminded me of. He’s my idea of Cupid.”

“Goodness!” said Gillian.

“Even so,” said Larry. “With a bunch of arrows stuck through the front of that pointed pinafore of his, serious with a sidelong eye—a conscious, predestinate demiurge—enslaved by his own destiny of enslavement.”

“That’s an Orphic Eros, not a Cupid,” said Jane.

“By Orcus out of Aphrodite,” chanted Larry.

“Oh, well,” said Jane, “if you like to mix your parents to fit the faun.... Aren’t you going to be charming to Miss Armstrong? She’s come because your father knew her father.”

Larry Browne was easily charming. He remembered Gerald Armstrong’s visit to his old tutor, soon after his marriage to little Ellen, when Larry himself was a child of six. “He told me about you,” he said to Gillian, “he said you’d only one tooth and no hair. I wanted dreadfully to see you. I didn’t realize you were just a normal baby such as I could see any day in perambulators on Boar’s Hill. He called you ‘my daughter’ and I thought you must be grown up, particularly as he said you had the most beautiful manners, in which alas! you differed from me, as my mother pointed out, rather tactlessly, I thought.”

And Gillian asked more about that visit, and discovered that Larry had been in Munich only a month after they’d left it five years ago, and had had re-introductions to her father which he’d never used, either then or in Paris, where they might have met if he’d only known. It was clear that the whole of Europe was thick with welcome for Larry Browne, and that he never used half his introductions in any place he visited. He had, indeed, it appeared, come to Battersea because London was the only place where you can really hide, “and even here,” said Larry Browne, “I’m subject to the inquisitions of Aholah Bird.”

He showed Gillian the head he had painted from her father’s photograph in the long procession he was designing for a frieze which was the subject set for a certain much-coveted prize that year.

“He’s the Knight. I’m doing imaginary characters, Fairy-Tale ones. I wish you’d sit to me for an hour if you’ve time one morning?”

“What as?” said Jane Bird sharply.

“As a changeling, of course,” said Larry Browne. “I wonder you troubled to ask so answered a question.”

“Of course,” said Jane, “it’s what I’ve always wondered, and now you’ve told me. Well, I wish you luck.”

Heinrich came back, rather more human, in a very shiny blue serge suit, a wisp of frayed tie holding the soft collar of his grey flannel shirt together, and they all four went out into Battersea Park and gave the raven in the aviary in the maze everything that was left over from the studio breakfast that morning.

II

The laburnum-tree in the courtyard was dropping its amber-and-lemon florets in the sunlight, and the sparse blossom of the lilac-bush against the wall by Mrs. Barraclough’s window sent up a breath of such fragrance as its soot-clogged pores could still render to the morning air, as Gillian washed her breakfast-dishes. She had been late the night before, having gone with Jane and Larry to hear Heinrich play the violin by himself at another studio, after the Queen’s Hall orchestra had dispersed for the night.

Heinrich, looking more unlike a Cupid than anything Gillian had ever seen, had played melodies in a piercing sequence, choosing them from orchestrated or fully harmonized scores and giving them in the naked strangeness of a single string. The air from Borodine’s musician’s quartette; the subject of the last movement of Smetana’s _Aus meinem Leben_; a phrase from a Bach three-part invention; “Cherry Ripe”; the pizzicato passage from one scherzo movement of Mozart, and other tunes, half-recognized or quite unknown, sang again in Gillian’s memory as she stood at the sink by the open window and let the water from the tap rush over the old Spode plate, the leadless glaze milk-jug, the Nanking teapot with its sodden, shabby bamboo handle, and the wide-pink-bordered Rouen cup and saucer she always used for breakfast.

How lovely running water was, even out of an indifferently polished brass tap! How unearthly some of Heinrich’s playing had been! Faint and thin and high like a gnat’s music. How late it was! Nearly eleven o’clock. The milk-cart had clattered out, before she was awake; the butcher-boy’s bicycle had crunched swiftly over the gravel in the courtyard while she dressed; the ten-o’clock postman had knocked at all the doors where he had letters to deliver while she was sitting over her breakfast. Gillian felt she was getting demoralized. No Lilac to consider at night when she came in. No work to get her out of bed before she had finished her sleep in the morning. It would be a good thing when the vacancy at the secretarial school fell in next week and she had more motive in her days again. How did that Borodine tune end?—up or down? She turned off the tap and whistled the melody through softly to herself. No, that wasn’t right. Odd that she could hear it in her head and not be able to reproduce it properly. Humming was worse than whistling. Her voice made the oddest noises. She hadn’t a pretty voice. Still it hadn’t made, it couldn’t have made that queer little sound. Gillian stopped her low, uncertain singing and leaned out into the sunlight to listen. Yes. The sound was coming up from below, a shrill, hoarse, tiny cry. Not unlike Heinrich saying “No” when they had tried to make him play again last night.

She leaned out farther, her two hands clutching the window-sill. How lovely it was to feel the sun on her neck, down between her shoulder-blades as her holland overall stuck out and made a tunnel there. A lock of her hair broke loose and hung vertically, soft and long, below the level of the window so that the sun shone through it and made it golden and iridescent. She shook her head a little to make the light dance in her hair, and saw with such a glow of vanity as only the straight-haired can feel that the movement made it curl a little at the tip.

And still the little cry came up, tired and pleading. It sounded like the mewing of a cat. But it was against the rules of the Club for any member to have a cat, and Mr. Gordon’s Crack, a stout and arrogant fox-terrier, made it his vocation to preserve the yard against strays. But it certainly sounded like a cat. Gillian leaned out a little farther, so far that one shoe slipped on its sole from the stone floor and swung out behind her leaving her poised on one foot and two hands. Yes. She could see it—wedged in under the foot-scraper by the door five storeys below her—a kitten. Crack had probably chased it under the iron bar and had tired of the game, and nobody had seen it to set it free. What a good thing Gillian had heard it! What a good thing, after all, that she had time on her hands, this lovely, dancing, shining day!

Down the ten flights of stone steps, eight to a flight, two to a landing, she ran twisting up her flying hair as she went. The courtyard was still empty and the kitten had wriggled itself free of the door-scraper when she reached it; but it was mewing none the less.

Gillian had seldom seen a less attractive cat. It was not so very young, not so disarmingly small, now that she was on the same level with it. It was almost not a kitten any longer, and it was tortoiseshell, a brand she didn’t admire, and Manx, a thing she had never been able to bear. It had the four white feet and the white chest and face peculiar to its kind, and it was very dirty. Its nose was pink and dirty and its pink-rimmed eyes were sore. Gillian sat on her heels to examine it more closely. It smelled of indescribable things as well as of stale fish. And it mewed—oh, how it mewed!

“I wonder if you’re hungry?” said Gillian. “Perhaps this awful smell of a dead sardine was eaten by some stronger cat who fought you for it.”

The cat stopped mewing and took a step nearer to Gillian; then it pushed its cold nose and weak whisker against her hand and slithered the whole of its brindled flank against her knee with the travelling pressure cats exert in order to produce for themselves the sensation of being stroked.

“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” said Gillian, “you’re not clean enough, even if this overall is going to the wash.” But the cat had whisked round and was sleeking its other side along her knee, offering the pink, unprotected obscenity beneath its upright stump of a tail to Gillian’s inspection.

“Oh! I don’t like you at all,” said Gillian. And she stood up.

But the cat, having attracted attention, was minded to secure a friend. It began to wind round and round Gillian’s ankles, once more uttering its short, exhausted mew.

“After all,” said Gillian, “you may be really hungry, and if you were a pretty and attractive cat you’d not be here or some one else would have taken charge of you long ago.”

And, closing her eyes, she stooped and took the unhappy thing by the scruff of its neck and wrapped it in the front of her overall. It made no resistance, and as she carried it upstairs she could feel the faint thrill of a purr creeping through the holland folds in which it lay.

The cat was hungry. It lapped up two saucers full of milk almost as quickly as Gillian could pour them out, and it ate, with quivers and sharp, sudden jerks of the head, a cold sausage she had meant to have had with a lettuce for her own lunch.

When it had finished eating, not because it seemed satisfied but because there was no more to give it, Gillian bathed its eyes with some warm boracic lotion and saw, with loathing, that it was lapping the water from the bowl when she returned from putting the muslin rag she had used into the dustbin.

“_Schamlos!_” said Gillian. “I apologize to Heinrich for having let your voice remind me of him. Now you must go home. I daren’t let William know you’ve called.”

So she put on her hat, carried the kitten down to the street with her, set it down at a street-corner, and then walked up to South Kensington to look at some T’ang horses in the Museum about which Larry Browne had been talking the evening before.

Later in the day she went to tea with Old Winona, who was having all the post-cards sent her by the honeymoon couple as they progressed round the world along the most frequented tracks, framed and incorporated in a screen of fretwork. She herself was inclined to have the whole screen gilded, but Gillian thought it would look better, or at any rate that the pictures themselves would show better if the fretting were all black. So they were having one fold of the screen blacked and another gilded in order to see which pleased the greater number more. Winnie Roehampton had been in that morning and had suggested that they should get a third fold done pea-green.

“I think Lady Roehampton must have said that in fun,” said Gillian.

“Well, my dear,” Old Winona conceded, “her manner _was_ a little playful. Shall we say no more about it?”

“We can always say we liked the black one best,” said Gillian.

“Or the gilded one,” said Old Winona, who did not intend to like the black one at all herself.

It was dusk before Gillian reached the Club again. She had stayed to see whether there would be any cards from Colombo by the seven-o’clock post, escaping before dinner as she was expecting Jane in later in the evening. As she reached the door in the courtyard there came a soft rubbing around her ankles and once more the short, hungry mew of the stray tortoiseshell rose to her ears.

“Goodness,” said Gillian, “have you come for the night?”

It seemed that such was the animal’s intention. It followed her upstairs, or rather, to be accurate, it came upstairs with her feet, purring as it slithered around and almost under them at every step.

“It would,” said Gillian, “be far less trouble to carry you. Less dangerous also. But that would be encouragement—and I don’t want to encourage you.”

But the human attitude, so long as it is not brutally repulsive, makes no difference to a cat. This one, meek outcast though it seemed, had that soft persistence by means of which the meek obtain fulfilment of the promise that they shall inherit the earth. Up to the fifth floor it squirmed, escaping injury as only a cat can, every time Gillian stumbled over its soft and moving form.

“I shall let William see you this time,” said Gillian.

But William proved an unexpected failure so far as discouraging the pensioner went. After a preliminary greeting of “Bow-wow-Bow-wow-wow” (William always got his animals wrong and had insulted Crack and seriously alienated Mr. Gordon by shouting “Baa-lamb” after the fox-terrier at their first meeting) he took very kindly to the tortoiseshell. And when Gillian, feeling that there was no need to deprive William of his wonted freedom because this dingy stray had invited itself to supper, let William out of his cage before she sat down to the table, William not only refrained from shooing the cat away from the plate of scraps Gillian cut for it from the boiled beef and suet dumpling which had come up for her dinner from the kitchens, but waddled across the floor with crusts of bread for the visitor’s plate himself.

“Pretty cocky,” said William surprisingly, as he deposited each fresh crust, “pretty cocky,” and finally, deserting his perch on the back of Gillian’s chair, he established himself on the top rung of the fender-rail and turned his boot-button eye downwards on the eating, furry thing, and fixed it with cold, unwinking goodwill.

And then the tortoiseshell cat broke down the last barrier of Gillian’s resistance to its adoption of herself and home by sitting up on its horrid stump of a tail when she began to clear the table and, with the aid of its pale, dry, little tongue and a grimy forepaw, beginning, very feebly, to wash itself.

“Goodness,” said Gillian for the second time that evening. “If I’m a reforming influence in your poor little life I suppose you’ll have to stay.”

“Weak,” said Jane Bird when she came in and heard the story, “weak but characteristic. There is no reason in logic or morals why any creature should reform itself under your roof against your will. Besides, it’s a vagabond. It has a bleary eye. It doesn’t want to stay. It only wants to get you into trouble. I shall take it down to its native gutter when I go.” And she did.

But the next morning, while Gillian was having her breakfast, the now familiar mew, slightly stronger and more insistent came up from the foot-scraper by the courtyard door.

She had received a letter by the early post telling her that she might, if she liked, begin her training at once at the very exclusive establishment Lilac had selected as the proper place in which her sister was to be polished into fitness for a Cabinet Minister’s confidence, and she was in a hurry to avail herself of the sudden vacancy in Miss de Stormont’s exclusive ranks. So she dressed to go out and, taking a jug of milk and a saucer in one hand, she locked up the flat and went downstairs intending to nourish the kitten by stealth behind the little box hedge that had succeeded in growing half across the north side of the yard.

But, by the time she reached the door-scraper, the kitten had stopped mewing, and had almost disappeared into the box hedge. The stub of its tail alone was visible, and that quivered as though the rest of its person were in the act of consuming food. Gillian put her jug and saucer down on the ground-floor scullery window-sill and stalked the beggar to its grove. There, on the stony soil from which the box hedge sprung, stood a shallow bowl, a china bowl with a spiked, green dragon coiled around it, a beautiful bowl that was still half full of Devonshire cream.

Gillian had no time to waste. The cat had evidently found a richer benefactor than herself and, musing a little who it might be in this Club who had cream for a cat and could set it before the creature in a piece which looked like part of the loot from Pekin, she hurried off to her first class in Buckingham Gate.

The new surroundings, the unfamiliar routine drove this small but pictorial mystery from her mind for the rest of the day. But at four o’clock (Miss de Stormont gave short hours, half-past ten till one, and an hour and a half after luncheon to prepare for the next day) it came back to her with a thrill of romantic excitement as she turned in under the archway from the street and saw that the cat was lapping from the same bowl once more, but that this time the green dragon coiled over the faintly dimpled glaze, in the open, from the flagstone by the door-scraper.

III

All her life long Gillian had been a spectator. The joys of her life had been the joys of the eye and the mind. Her sorrows had been few. The loss of her father, although she was unaware of it, had been mitigated for her, as it could not have been in a more physically passionate creature, by the consolations of that kingdom of the spirit wherein his companionship had taught her to travel. Her mind, in a very literal sense, was its own place. Since her father’s death she had possessed it alone. Trained by him to make æsthetic discriminations and to take her own pleasure in any manifestation of life or art, not only as the only valid test of its worth, but as the highest form of happiness attainable in human experience, she had, without any conscious intention, failed to develop the faculty for establishing personal relationships, for taking root in any place or affection, which her essentially friendly and enthusiastic nature should have encouraged. Lilac, who was both more captious and less affectionate than her sister, had many friends, useful, ornamental or merely pleasant, with whom she quarrelled or amused herself, and had whirled her way through several love-affairs before she met Toby Bottomley and decided that in him she had found the husband she required. But Gillian depended for her friendships either on circumstance, or on the determination of those who were willing to pursue. Love-affairs she had none. There had been two strange episodes, both of them of almost the same kind, in which infatuated strangers had applied to her parents for permission to address her, and, on the second occasion, Gillian, who was by then nearly twenty-two, had had some trouble in assuring her widowed and excusably flustered mother that she didn’t even know the young man by sight.

“Do you mean to tell me, Gillian,” her mother had said when discussing the matter, “do you seriously mean to tell me that this is another case of that student at Lausanne all over again?”

And Gillian had assured her mother that, so far as her conscious knowledge of the affair was concerned, this was indeed a repetition of that old vexation. And it had seemed to her that she was once again an onlooker at a play, the central character of which was a man who had fallen in love with a girl to whom he had never spoken a word.

But that afternoon, through the clear May sunshine that was beginning to turn golden with the westering beams, there came to Gillian, as to a long-prepared appointment, a creature who filled the eye to overflowing with that completed harmony between experience and imagination which, when it comes to any empty heart, is the most unmistakable of all vanquishing powers.

She was sitting on her heels, having taken off her hat as soon as she was inside the gateway (Gillian never wore a hat a minute longer than she needed, and not always so long as she should), and was watching the cat and admiring the bowl, when the door of the opposite building opened and a tall, dark woman came out and stood at the top of the steps.

Even before she came down to the courtyard and claimed it, Gillian knew that this was the owner of the china bowl, the Providence that dispensed clotted cream to dirty little strays. But as she came with a swift, steady stride, the free rapid movement of a woman who had been much with horses, who had ridden from childhood, Gillian also knew, with a thrill of recognition so strange, so new to her experience that the shock of it took away all sense of any other consideration, that she beheld in the flesh the very image of a perfection wrought by her own imaginings in the secret places of her dreaming mind. This was not a beautiful creature for all the world to see and gape at, it was the figure—unique of its kind—for which the shrine of her spirit had stood empty and waiting till now.

Dark hair, “curled like breakers of the sea” away from a low brow under which clear, tawny eyes shone beneath fine, exquisitely arched eyebrows; a wide mouth parted like a ripe pomegranate in a smile that showed white, even teeth, each separated from its fellow; an impression of clear red and white in the complexion, and, above all, that swift, scythe-like movement from hip to knee as the figure approached her where she crouched on the doorstep beside the lapping, oblivious cat, these were the first things Gillian was aware of as she gazed stupidly upwards into the vivid face.

“Is this your little cat?”

The voice was a disappointment: flat, metallic, not coming from any depth, curiously old and lifeless for so vital-seeming a possessor.

“Oh, no!” said Gillian, “we aren’t allowed to keep cats in the Club; didn’t you know?”

“Yes, I knew,” said the stranger, “but I thought you might be keeping one.”

“You must have thought I was behaving very badly to it,” Gillian retorted, “if you’ve been feeding it too.”

“Oh, well, I saw it was hungry. It’s been about for some days. I can see it from my window.” She made no attempt to excuse herself for the implied charge of neglect. Gillian thought she couldn’t have noticed it.

“I _heard_ it,” said Gillian. “I couldn’t see it at first. It seems to prefer this side of the yard.”

“Yes,” said the stranger. “So you live in the Club?”

“I do,” said Gillian, “my name is Gillian Armstrong.”

“Do you spell it with a J?”

“No,” said Gillian, “it’s a soft G, like gilly-flower. I can see you live in the Club,” she went on, “because you’ve come out without a hat, but I’ve never seen you before. Are you a new member?”

“Yes, rather new. I came in last year. I know you quite well by sight. I see you from my window.”

“That’s because I don’t have curtains across mine,” said Gillian. “Up on the top floor it doesn’t really seem necessary. And Mrs. Gordon told me, when I asked if people could see in from below, that she’d never seen nothing wrong in my rooms.”

The other laughed, a short dry “honk” that added no more mirth to her steadily smiling eyes.

“Mrs. Gordon is a scream,” she said, “so is Mr. Gordon. Do you like his dog?”

“No,” said Gillian. “I can’t bear Crack, and I don’t think you’d better leave this lovely bowl down here. Crack will break it, you know.”

The cat had licked the last smear of cream from the sides of the bowl, and was now rubbing itself round the stranger’s ankles. Gillian with the bowl in her hands, stood up.

“Shall I wash it for you?” she said; “I’ll do it with my tea-things and send it over by the maid who brings my dinner.”

“Oh, don’t let Mabel bring it,” said the stranger, betraying what seemed to Gillian an extraordinary familiarity with the arrangements of the Club under which the four little housemaids revolved from floor to floor with each returning moon, so that you had the same maid for a month at a time and then passed into the hands of one of the other three. Gillian herself was quite incapable of finding out or of remembering which maid was waiting on any other floor but her own, though she had gathered from the verbosities of Mrs. Gordon that some floors were more popular with the servants than others, either because of the kindness of their occupiers or because of the more sensational furniture and adventures which occasionally distinguished one member from another in the gossip of the Club.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Mabel is the rough one, she might drop it. How did you know it was Mabel’s turn on our landing?”

“Mabel did my floor last month,” said the stranger, “and she told me she was going to yours in time for the wedding.”

Gillian knew that a wave of resentment flowed through some dim backwater of her mind at this intrusion, but it was drowned in the flood of expectation with which she accepted a suggestion that, if she really insisted on washing out the Chinese bowl, its owner would be delighted to see her with it in her own flat.

“My name is Victoria Vanderleyden,” she said, “and I live at Number 36. Do come up to coffee.”

Gillian had never been bidden to go anywhere “to coffee” before, but she took the formula to indicate that she would be expected immediately after dinner, and she accepted the invitation saying she would come as soon as she had turned the cat out for the night. For the cat was already inside the door, looking back over its shoulder, a little impatiently at Gillian, and plainly intending to dine with her that night also.

IV

The door of Number 36 stood open and lamplight poured out from the room over the dark landing where Gordon had not yet lit the gas-jet, when Gillian, carrying the china bowl and a bunch of purple centaureas from a basket of flowers which Sophie had left at the flat on her way from Glynde that afternoon, reached the third floor of the house across the courtyard, soon after eight o’clock.

It was, Gillian saw, one of the large, two-windowed rooms. The windows looked westward, across the tops of the trees in the gardens of Cheyne Row, and through them, lower than the lamplight, there still came the glow of a late, red sunset. Accustomed as she was to the roofs and chimneys of the street, or to the windows of the house across the courtyard as the familiar views from the Club windows, Gillian felt, as she entered this lit and quiet room, as though she were going into some far country.

Her own rooms and those of the Countess and of the Middletons, the only flats beside her own and Mrs. Barraclough’s into which she had so far entered, were all colour-washed a uniform cream, with white paint on the doors and window-frames and skirting-boards; and this colour scheme was, so Mrs. Barraclough had told the Armstrongs when they took their flat, the rule of the Club.

But Miss Vanderleyden had evidently been allowed to break that rule, for her walls were tinted lavender, and all the woodwork that surrounded them was black. Long curtains, a shade darker than the walls, and touched by the sunset into a rosy mauve, hung at the windows, and two red, wooden candlesticks on the black chimney-shelf matched two painted Norwegian chairs which stood on either side of a low black table. A wide divan against the wall at one end of the room was covered with black satin and heaped with red and green cushions, and the bare boards of the floor were black and shining. There were no pictures on the walls, but a mirror in a red frame hung from ceiling to floor between the windows, and over the fireplace there spread a fan-shaped case in which hundreds of South Sea Island shells were ranged together in a geometrical pattern. Gillian looked for books, but there were none to be seen. “Perhaps she keeps them behind those strange curtains,” she thought, noting that three of the far corners of the long room were curtained off with what was obviously stuff from Burnets in Garrick Street, a shop into which Lilac, who preferred her cretonnes flowered, had definitely forbidden Gillian to go when they were furnishing Number Seven.

A strong smell of freshly made coffee filled the whole landing; but of Miss Vanderleyden herself there was no trace. Gillian crossed the room and went over to the open window. Between two blocks of houses she saw the river move, still burnished in the fading light, and voices rose faintly from the small gardens under the trees below, where the dwellers in Cheyne Row were sitting out in the cool of the day. In one of the gardens a row of Chinese lanterns had been festooned between the branches, and some one was lighting them as if in preparation for a festivity. One green, one orange and one variegated globe were already swinging in the dusk and Gillian was waiting with absorbed, delightful speculation as to the probable colour of the fourth lantern, when a sound close beside her made her turn. Miss Vanderleyden was standing by the table on which she had placed a Benares tray with coffee-cups. She was gazing with lighted eyes, not at Gillian, but at her own reflection in the long, scarlet-rimmed mirror between the windows.

“Come and look,” she said, without taking her eyes away from the glass before her.

Gillian obeyed. Miss Vanderleyden had taken the red candlesticks from over the fireplace and had lighted the tall, white candles they held and had placed them on the table so that their wavering flames lit up her face as she leaned between them. The door, still open behind her, showed the dark abyss of the unlit landing beyond, which repeated itself in profound obscurity in the depths of the looking-glass. Out of the heart of the darkness the vivid face floated midway on the surface of the mirror—wide, white brow, wide, luminous eyes, wide, smiling mouth. Miss Vanderleyden had not changed the soft, dark, brown dress she had been wearing when they first met, and Gillian saw that the large, old-fashioned topaz brooch still fastening the lace at her throat was matched by a pair of heavy gold bracelets which she wore on either arm. The stones in these antique, fetter-like jewels threw out reflections into the mirror and seemed to illuminate the hands which, raised on their finger-tips from the dark surface of the table, as though each had a separate existence in the shadowy picture, completed without belonging to, the whole reflection.

“Look at yourself,” laughed the mouth in the mirror, and the mirrored eyes met Gillian’s as she gazed.

And Gillian saw herself, a moth-pale phantom behind the radiant head. Her white frock glimmered grey in the background, the candle-light glinted in her hair so faintly that its blondness looked silver above the molten glow of Miss Vanderleyden’s topaz and gold. Only her rose-flushed cheeks, and the starry glitter of the eyes she hardly knew for hers, prevailed with the ardent image that challenged her, and proved her able to meet the challenge.

It was the first time in her experience of life that any direct personal appeal had aroused in her this profoundly personal, this intense and definitely physical reply. Miss Vanderleyden’s look had, Gillian could see it in her own reflection, changed the colour of her face, the expression of her own eyes and lips. For a moment they stood side by side looking at themselves and at one another in the dark pool of the mirror, and then Miss Vanderleyden spoke.

“Aren’t we a nice contrast?” she said in the same flat, shallow voice as had startled Gillian that afternoon with its audible contradiction of all that her eyes could see.

* * * * *

They drank their coffee, which was very good, sitting together on the black divan which was neither so soft nor so comfortable as it looked, being as Miss Vanderleyden explained with some pride, constructed out of her trunks and a spare mattress, and far too hard to be used as a bed except by actresses of whom, it appeared, Miss Vanderleyden knew all kinds.

“And most of them will sleep on anything, poor dears, when they are resting,” she stated, without explaining why an actress should be able to rest in such discomfort.

Statements of this nature, based on some occult information which, whether she could not or would not, she certainly did not impart, formed a staple of Miss Vanderleyden’s conversation and helped to send Gillian home across the courtyard to her own flat at midnight in a state of mingled exaltation and bewilderment. But some account of herself the wonderful creature had given, though few of the details were consecutive.

Her name, as she had already said, was Victoria Vanderleyden, but she was usually called “Victor” by her friends, and she invited Gillian to use this sobriquet from the beginning because she could see that they were going to be real pals. Gillian had been able without rejecting the advance or accepting the actual title of “real pal” to select from a choice of other names, to all of which the lady had answered in her day, the alternatives “V.V.” and “Viva,” and had made it clear that the “G” in her own name was a soft one. “V.V.,” it seemed, had the blood of an authentic missionary in her veins, and so her title to benefit by the Club was clearer than the Armstrongs’ had been. Her father’s brother—“a real Dutchman” (Gillian could not make out to what extent the brothers differed in their respective Dutchness) had been a missionary in Borneo, and it was from him that she had inherited the trophy of shells. But some of her life had certainly been spent in Ostend, and she appeared to have a root or two as far north as Blackpool. A person called “Daisy” flickered in and out of the dialogue and, just before they parted, Gillian gathered that this was no lady but Miss Vanderleyden’s brother, who appeared to be a gentleman of independent means.

These details were, in review, unsatisfactory and, added to the fact, which Gillian remembered Mrs. Barraclough deploring that Miss Vanderleyden was employed in a beauty-parlour, gave her a sense of having taken a step into an unknown and even a perilous region. But Gillian was not in the least afraid of the unknown and, as she looked for a third time that evening at her own reflection, this last time in her own toilet-mirror in her own bedroom, she knew that she must go on with the adventure.

For her mirror showed her what V.V.’s mirror had shown her, the second time she had seen herself there—a new, and an undeniably changed and prettier Gillian. And she wanted to see this girl again.

“You don’t know how to do your hair,” V.V. had said after half an hour’s talk with her new pal. “I can make it look twice as much. Do you mind?”

And Gillian, who had been told till she was tired that she did her hair infamously, had submitted without the least reluctance while V.V.’s long, swift, cunning hands drew out the pins from the “bun” at the back of her head and untwisted the tight coils into which Gillian drove a dozen hairpins like carpenters’ nails twice or three times a day, in the despairing hope that they would hold her troublesome locks in place.

V.V. had produced a set of long-bristled brushes, bleached with constant washing and innocent of any trace of the varnish with which their wooden backs had been originally finished, and several large professional-looking combs. And then, with a long, steady stroke and a light lifting of each separate strand, she had worked her way from brow to nape of the head beneath the showering hair that fell as straight as rain over the elbows of the girl who sat with folded hands in the straight-backed red Norwegian chair beneath the hanging-lamp in that quiet room. V.V. brushed and brushed, crooning with pleasure as the fine hair rose and crackled through the bristles before they let each shining lock slide back into its place again.

“Lovely, lovely, hair,” she babbled, and Gillian hardly heard the foolish voice as the cool hands moved through her hair soothing and lulling, and flattering her senses till she almost slept.

“Now,” said V.V. “Sit up, I’m going to plait it over your ears.”

“Why, I look like a German schoolgirl,” said Gillian when the plaiting was over and the two long ropes had been coiled one each side of the parting which divided her head into two smooth shining segments, “and the pins hurt my ears dreadfully.”

“You look like a fairy-tale princess,” said V.V. “I wish Dicky could see you. She’d simply love to draw you.”

It certainly was an improvement, but, now that she was back in her own room again, Gillian felt quite sure that Lilac would never allow her to wear her hair like that: and she unpinned the plaits knowing that she would twist her hair as usual and drive the long black hairpins into it in the morning, and cram her hat down on the solid lump in the same old way as ever, before setting out to her humdrum day in the correct establishment of Miss de Stormont in the Buckingham Palace Road.

During the next three or four days the intimacy between Gillian and V.V. grew like a gourd until, by Saturday morning, they were free of one another’s rooms and crockery; community of tea-things being one of the consequences of intimacy at the Mordaunt Club.

On Saturday morning a bomb fell.

“DEAR MISS ARMSTRONG,” wrote Mrs. Barraclough on the die-stamped
correspondence-card she always used when reprehending members by
letter:

“I am writing to Miss Vanderleyden as well as to yourself in
order to request most emphatically that you will not continue to
encourage stray cats about in the courtyard. I understand that
you and she are in the habit of feeding a most objectionable and
probably diseased animal there night and morning, and must forbid
you to continue the practice.

Yours faithfully,
THEODORA BARRACLOUGH,
Secretary.”

“And,” said Mrs. Gordon, who delivered the letter with her weekly bill and made no secret of having lifted the damp and yielding flap of the envelope in order to read the note on her way up, “Mr. Gordon’s going to set Crack on the little beast if it begins its mewing again to-night, I can tell you.”

Gillian, as Mrs. Gordon very well knew, had got the little beast shut up in the inner room where William was helping it to the coarser seeds of Parrot Food in the intervals of eating the hemp out of the mixture himself. She made no reply to this sally but paid her bill and said that she would herself carry down the answer to Mrs. Barraclough’s letter and post it in Mrs. Barraclough’s letter-box when she went out later in the morning.

“Miss Vanderleyden ain’t got hers yet,” said Mrs. Gordon vindictively, moving on. “A telegram come for her from Eppin’ ware she keeps that great dog of ’ers, this morning, and she’s gone off in a great state. Borrerd Mr. Gordon’s A.B.C., the one you threw away in Febewry, miss, to look out a train she did, and I hope she catches it.”

“If she looked it up in a February time-table I’m afraid she’s missed it then,” said Gillian. “It’s June now, you know, Mrs. Gordon.”

But Mrs. Gordon was panting heavily across the landing and made as if she had not heard Miss Armstrong’s fear.

All day long Gillian pattered crossly about the flat, feeding the most objectionable and probably diseased little creature which followed her in and out of the two living-rooms and twice got out on the landing and mewed there “as if,” said Gillian to it, as she drove it in again, “as if it were not enough to have tempted me into a misdemeanour, and you must now advertise that I’m engaged in crime on your account.”

Something must be done with the animal, and she certainly was not going to let Crack do it. Once the desperate thought of taking it up to Highgate and throwing it on Aunt Elizabeth’s mercies came to her. But Aunt Elizabeth’s mercies were not tender towards cats, and, though Atkinson might have sheltered it richly in the basement at 99, he was just then having a holiday and Gillian had no faith in the humanity of the first footman who was taking his place and who was not on friendly terms with the cook.

William, too, seemed to be siding with Authority. “Good-bye,” he had observed rather severely to the cat several times since lunch, and when Gillian began to get tea and put down a sardine beside the saucer of milk for her guest, William raised his yellow crest and sang, “God save our Gray——” with unmistakable emphasis.

“All right, William,” said Gillian, losing her temper, “you needn’t shout like that. I’m going to take it to the chemist next door to the _Blue Cockatoo_ and get it prussic-acided. So there.”

She caught the little cat and put it into an old Gladstone bag of her father’s and set off with misery and dislike in her heart to spend a shilling on murder.

Half-way to the chemist’s she met Heinrich.

He was coming away from the studio and was tightly buttoned into the short jacket of his blue suit so that he looked smaller than ever. He wore no hat, and one diaphanous black curl stood up, like a smoke-wreath in still air, from the very middle of his forehead making his long nose seem longer than before. His eyes were unusually blue and fierce.

“I go to buy a cage,” he announced with dramatic abruptness, stopping Gillian who had not intended to speak to anyone till her deed were accomplished, “a cage in which to shelter the beautiful canary Larrie gives to me. Zoze sparrows, zey pluck at ’im. Zey are proletariat birds. Zere is somesing alive in your bag,” he ended, suddenly diverted from his own mission by unmistakable signs of struggle in the interior of Gillian’s burden.

Gillian explained her dilemma and the cat in the bag grew violent.

“Oh,” said Heinrich, “ze poor animal will perish of himself in that confinement and zere will be no need to call on ze chemist. You shall just srow him in ze river.”

“Goodness,” said Gillian, “how horrid. I must let him out.”

“Come on ze Embankment to a seat,” said Heinrich. “I go wiz you. I will look at zis cat. My canary is all right for now. I have shut out all zoze sparrows till I shall give him a cage.”

“What’s happened to the cage he came in?” asked Gillian as they hurried to a seat. “Larry can’t have brought a canary home in a piece of paper.”

“Oh, it is somevere,” said Heinrich vaguely. “I sink we have lost it. It was a small, old cage. Perhaps Larrie sit on it.”

They reached the seat just in time. The little cat had given up the struggle to escape and was gasping for dear life at the bottom of the bag when they opened it.

Heinrich lifted the mottled, furry body out and laid it across his knees. The creature had improved a great deal during its friendship with Gillian, but it was still an unprepossessing cat. Heinrich stroked it with his dark, thin hands and lifted one corner of its drooping mouth.

“It lives. It jumps,” he announced. And presently, with a twitch or two, the tortoiseshell cat was itself again.

“It is a bad little cat,” said Heinrich, looking at it with mild criticism as it sat morosely on his knee, and lifted one paw after another with a tearing noise out of the serge of the trouser-leg, into which it had struck its claws to ensure its grip of the position. “Quite a bad little cat. It shall come to live in ze studio wiz Larrie and wiz me.”

“But, Heinrich, won’t it eat your canary, and frighten your sparrows?”

“No,” said Heinrich, “I say it is a bad little cat. If it would eat canaries and sparrows it would be a good little cat. I will take it in my hand.”

And he went back, across the river, towards the studio carrying the bad little cat in his arms.