Chapter FOUR: Larry Browne (1)

I

Heinrich, barefooted as was his custom, and wearing the light-blue slops in which he always performed his self-appointed task, was trundling a mop across the studio floor the next morning when Gillian went down to see how the little cat had prospered among the birds. It was half-past ten and Sunday. The church-bells on the Battersea side and those fainter peals which came from over the water had stimulated the canary, which hung in an extremely fine cage in front of the long window by the hedge, to such tremendous matins of its own that Heinrich did not hear her knock at the open door. Gillian, on the threshold, waited while Heinrich swept on. He brought an entire seriousness and a complete lack of method to his work, and was, when Gillian arrived, absorbed in chasing a dandelion-seed which had blown in from the waste places of the Park, across the width of the studio floor, stalking the mist-like intruder with elaborate patience. He approached it with creeping stealth, hardly breathing as he lifted the oiled mop-head at the end of its long pole before the blow that would bring his prey to rest, only to see the spiky phantom dance away in the wind he had raised. The sparrows were everywhere. He drove them off from the immediate field, isolating the drifting seed. The sparrows appeared to have abandoned their vendetta against the canary now that it was caged, and to be pursuing their lawful occasions again with the usual noise and fluster. Some of them were perched round the rim of Larry’s zinc sponge-bath which had been pulled out from the bedroom at the back of the studio and filled with clean water for them to bathe in, and one, as Gillian came to the door, had flown up from the water and was shaking the drops out of its wings, perched on the crown of Heinrich’s black, devoted head.

Heinrich’s estimate of the little cat’s character was being abundantly justified; for the creature was seated on the model’s throne, mildly washing its face with its paw, while, three feet away, a couple of sparrows were picking at the bird-seed which the canary scattered from the seed-box in the cage above them.

“Puss, puss,” called Gillian from the doorway. The little cat took no notice. Either it did not hear her or it had already forgotten her in the new security of its home. But Heinrich heard and came towards her, dragging the mop behind him, his face a little anxious with the eagerness of his welcome.

“I beg that you will enter,” said Heinrich. “Have you been long at ze door? I hear nozzing for ze cantata of my canary. It shall cease.” He laid the long-handled mop down on the floor in the place where he stood, stumbled slightly over it, regaining his half-lost balance with the lightest ease, and bustled, if so lithe and gentle a movement could be called bustling, after the sparrows, clearing them from the room in handfuls and putting them out at the casement which he closed upon them.

“It’s like putting toys away in a cupboard,” said Gillian, who never tired of watching the clearing process Heinrich always accomplished before attending to a visitor.

“Zeze sparrows are my toys,” said Heinrich. “My canary is my friend.”

“And what is the cat going to be?”

Heinrich met this conversational inanity with a seriousness it had not been framed to elicit.

“Tell me,” he questioned, his blue eyes very lustrous and dewy under their long lashes, “have you complete responsibility for ze life of zis little cat?”

“Goodness!” Gillian was alarmed. “I don’t even know if it belongs to anybody. It adopted me, and I’ve been feeding it with a friend. Here are its sardines. It has only had three out of the box.”

Heinrich took the oily tin, over which Gillian had tried unsuccessfully to re-roll the lid that curled back from its contents on its key opener, and counted the sardines with his thin forefinger.

“Ten fishes,” he announced. “Are zeze not your own food for to-day?”

“Mine! No! I hate sardines, especially in oil. So does William. They belong to the cat, really.”

Heinrich picked a sardine out of the tin with his fingers and carried it by the tail across to the throne where the cat still continued its perfunctory cleansing.

“See, Minchoulina!” he chanted, “a fish!”

But the cat had evidently gorged its fill on some earlier meal and, collapsing into one of those acrobatic postures with which the meanest cat can put the proudest human to scorn, went on licking its way over its person with an increase of zeal.

“When you know me better,” said Heinrich gently, “you shall dance and sing when I come.” And he carried the sardine back to its tin which he had laid on the floor beside the mop.

“And zis friend,” persisted Heinrich, putting the sardine carefully into its oil again, “is it her cat?”

“No. I don’t think so. No, I’m sure it isn’t. She has a dog. She’s gone away to see it. You can have the cat for your very own if you like, and if Larry doesn’t mind. Where is Larry?”

“Charing Cross.”

“Gone to meet a friend?”

“No, gone to go a walk.”

“What a funny place to walk to!”

“Oh, he will not walk zere. Afterwards he will walk all day. But at Charing Cross he get a train.”

“Don’t you ever go with Larry for his walks?”

“Me? Sometimes. Yes. But I do not like so many hills and so much rain. And to-day I must play in my orchestra in the afternoon.”

“Heinrich,” said Gillian, sitting down on the window-seat and taking off her hat, “I’m going to stay and help you put the studio really tidy. Tell me how did you and Larry ever come to share it?”

Heinrich brought the mop and the sardine-tin over to the window-seat and sat down with them, cross-legged on the floor in front of Gillian.

“Zis studio is mine,” said Heinrich; “it is left me by my uncle, and I let it to Larrie, and he take me wiz it. Quite simple. There is room for two people. In two years I am rich by my uncle’s money which is still now in his will, until I shall be older, zen I _give_ zis studio to Larrie.”

“And where will you live then?”

“Everywhere,” said Heinrich gravely but with decision.

Gillian thought the programme admirable and they discussed it in much of its possible detail as they worked together at putting the studio really tidy. Gillian was glad of so good an excuse for not going back to the Club. She had been piqued at V. V.’s sudden departure yesterday and had an unreasoning desire that V. V. should in her turn wonder what had become of her.

At twelve o’clock, while Heinrich retired to his room behind the gallery to assume his “coats,” and Gillian was washing her hands in the little lavatory which opened out of Larry’s room on the ground floor, preparatory to making a salad for luncheon, Larry himself walked in. He was wearing light, rough tweeds, carried a metal-pointed cherry-wood stick and was rather cross.

“I’ve missed the only train in the day,” he said, “and I’m not in the mood to go anywhere but to Coldharbour. The rhododendrons will be out in the wood on the Ockley side and there’ll be bluebells left beyond Tanhurst and I sent Mrs. Print a post-card to say I would have lard-buns for tea.”

“Can nothing be done about it?” said Gillian.

“Yes. We can take a ’bus—a motor-omnibus from the Latchmere at one o’clock, and you are coming with me. It won’t take us to Coldharbour, but it will take us to the larch-wood and the buns, and I’ve got sandwiches enough for two here already and we’ll commandeer Heinrich’s lettuce. That’ll larn him to be a rabbit.”

“Heinrich can have the cat’s sardines,” said Gillian, feeling, as she dried the lettuce and put on her hat, that larch-woods near Coldharbour were more than an offset to a dog at Epping.

II

The larch-wood grew on one side of the hollow bridle-path that led across the hill from Broadmoor to Pitland Street. The rest of the way was through pine and birch with some oak scrub and a holly-bush or so at the intersection of the main bridle-path with the smaller tracks which ran straight down the slope.

They came out through a beech-tunnel that switch-backed narrowly between palings and, at a turn in the path, saw the aisles of green larch-boles shot with violet rising out of the bracken, greener at that time of year than the feathery green of the curved, fine arabesques of the branches above it.

It was nearly four o’clock when Gillian and Larry reached the larch-wood, and the sun, held up by the long shadow of Holmbury Hill, behind which in another two hours’ time it would be setting, was sending slanting rays between the trunks of the trees.

The bluebells Larry had promised were there, though not in great masses: but their coming disturbed a jay which fled away from them through the purple tree-trunks, flying low so that the light flashed on his blue head and picked out the black-and-white feathers in his wide, strong wings. The brambles were all in bloom under the green fronds of bracken and their pinky-white flowers repeated the tender rose of the horizon seen beyond the green veil of the larch-spindles.

“It’s softer than the mountain larch-woods with snow behind them,” said Gillian.

“Colouring’s sentimental,” said Larry, “but the drawing’s good. I’m going to use it for the background of my fresco design. It’ll repeat well, and I can change to sky instead of the hill behind it for the figures. Panoramic pathetic fallacy. Dawn for the Changeling. You’re very like a Dawn anyhow, Gillian; and twilight for the piping Eros. Can’t put a violin into symbolism—and the lewte’s an instrument I never could a-bear. It’s a filthy job altogether—I wish I’d never started on it. I could draw Heinrich for ever, but this making a photograph-gallery of one’s friends....”

“Then why do it?”

“Oh! I dunno. Hand to the plough and all that. Besides, it _is_ a good idea. Why can’t you be the Eternal Feminine you look, Gillian, and cheer the artist in his despondent hours?”

“I thought you meant it. Besides, I can quite see that there are times when you would get tired of an idea like that. Are you putting all your friends in?”

“No. Nor half mine enemies either. What could you do with Bird in a fresco, for instance?”

“If you were Augustus John——” said Gillian.

“I shouldn’t be going in for a London County Council prize competition, my poor dear Dawn. Try to rise to daylight, or is it your tea you need?”

“No, not yet. Let’s stay here. I like this mauve and green and rosy wood. Why didn’t we bring Heinrich?”

“You think that because Heinrich can pick up sparrows in his hands as though they were tennis-balls, that he’d be at home in a wood among squirrels and nuts. But you are quite wrong. Heinrich is brother to the sparrow who is a city bird. He’s good with Cockneys. But he’s an indoor pet—that’s why the canary is not wasted on him, or that dreadful little cat you’ve planted on us. But put him in the open and he’s lost. Think of Heinrich in tweeds! It can’t be done. Heinrich suggests the spirit of the wild to people who’ve only read about it in the Classics. He’s Art. He’s the eternal Will to be Other. But there’s nothing of the English public-school boy, the country gentleman about him. And that’s the man who really enjoys your muddy lanes and your streaking red sunsets and says ‘pretty dear’ to the rabbits he’s going to shoot.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gillian, “but you introduced me to Heinrich as a faun.”

“And did you ever see a faun in Surrey? Or in Devonshire? Or in Wales? I’ve heard of fairies in Wales. Little grey men with long beards who don’t mean to let you see them—and there’s a lot of dialect ballad metre about pixies on Dartymoor; but the faun—the faun, my child, is the invention of the sophisticated artist.”

“Heinrich’s not sophisticated.”

“Heinrich in his way is a genius. But the home of his soul is Leicester Square. I found him, covered with sparrows, on a bench in front of that soaring tribute to Shakespeare which so fittingly presides over the Empire, the Alhambra and Daly’s.”

“He’d be all right at Taormina,” said Gillian.

“And when his uncle’s money comes out of his will”—Larry grew emphatic and a little angry—“he shall go there, if I can keep the vultures away from him till then.”

“I suppose people might swoop down on him if he had money to give away.”

“Yes, they would. But that isn’t what I was thinking of.”

“What did you mean by vultures, then?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Heinrich’s very endearing,” said Gillian, passing on from vultures, “he’s the kind of thing you’d like to put in your pocket and take home to keep with your dolls.”

Larry looked at her quickly. It was the same sharp, surprised look she’d seen jump into Toby’s eyes the day she found the chopped volume of _Poems and Ballads_.

“That’s how the vultures feel,” he said shortly.

“But mine isn’t a devouring wish.”

“No. I don’t suppose it would be. You’d better leave it at that.”

So they watched a nuthatch pulling its way up the bole of a tree in front of them; and wondered why it was there instead of the squirrels which seemed more probable in such a place; and smoked Petit Caporal cigarettes, which Larry got from a little shop near Victoria and pretended to like, though Gillian, who wasn’t much of a smoker herself, didn’t see how he could. And then they went down to Pitland Street and came to Honeysuckle Cottage, so called because of the honeysuckle bush which stood at the garden gate and was visited by gardeners for miles around, being something of a curiosity. It was beginning to flower and was full of bees that day, and Mrs. Print, who counted it one among many occasions of her pride, stood by it, like a benevolent witch, a bent, smiling figure in a black dress and a white apron, with smooth hair, still black, parted tightly on either side of a nutcracker face that looked as if it were carved out of old ivory.

“Hurry up, Mr. Browne,” she called to him as they crossed the green in front of the house, “them lard-buns you ordered is baking themselves dry, and it’s going to rain. You’ll be getting the young lady damp.”

The sky had clouded over, and as they drank strong Indian tea, heavy with cream, and ate what Gillian thought was bilberry, but Mrs. Print called “Hurt jam,” in her parlour, the rain began to fall outside. Mrs. Print’s parlour was a room as full of flowering geraniums and other hot-house plants as if it had been a conservatory instead of being the chamber in which Mrs. Print stored the strange and occasionally valuable things she’d spent a lifetime buying at the sales at great houses in the countryside both here in Surrey and in Lincolnshire where she’d gone in marriage with her first husband, a Mr. Booty of those parts. She had returned at Mr. Booty’s death to her mother’s house which she had inherited and to which she had welcomed Mr. Print, a meek little man whom she had married, chiefly, said Larry, who recounted Mrs. Print’s history to Gillian over their tea, because he was a gardener by trade and could give professional services to the honeysuckle bush.

“It’s my belief, Mrs. Print,” said Larry, repeating what was clearly an old and trusted joke, “that you and Mr. Print do something to that bush to prevent its being a creeper. It isn’t a freak of nature at all, but just a common work of art.”

Mrs. Print picked up a crumb from the Brussels carpet and smoothed a plush chair-back that hung over the interlacing pattern of a beautiful Heppelwhite settee.

“You’ve said that before, sir,” she answered with friendly scorn; “if you was a gardener yourself you’d know better. How’s Miss Jerusalem?”

This appeared to be a frontal attack of considerable weight, for Larry’s golden freckles disappeared into his blush as he answered, rather hurriedly, “Oh, quite well, I fancy. What about getting to the station in all this rain?”

“I’ll step round and see if Mandible’s got a trap going.” Mrs. Print was immediately side-tracked by the appeal to her instinct for preserving the young from damp.

And accordingly, ten minutes later, Gillian entranced, watched Mrs. Print in an enormous black straw wide-awake trimmed with a plain band of what was now very rusty black ribbon, her shoulders protected from the elements by a small three-cornered red woolen shawl and carrying a large, green cotton umbrella, “step” down the garden path and out across the green on her way to see about a trap.

“Couldn’t we have gone ourselves?” she asked, feeling very young and ruthless for exposing so bent a frame to the weather on her behalf.

“We might have tried to go, but we shouldn’t have gone. It’s my belief that Mrs. Print takes a commission on orders for Mandible’s trap and likes to book them herself.”

Presently Mrs. Print came back up the garden path and stood outside the open glass door of the sitting-room while she unpinned her skirts and shook the rain out of her umbrella.

“Mandible’s took the trap over to Malquoits with a party hisself,” she announced over her shoulder, “but Madge’ll put the old pony into the closed conveyance for ye, and you’ll have to be startin’ soon as she’s a slow driver and the roads is slippery with all this wet.”

The June rain was falling heavily by this time. It washed the sandy path before Honeysuckle Cottage into a golden ridge between two brawling torrents which ran down to a pool at the south side of the green to meet the motor-road where the rods of water broke into circles of spray with a beating patter as they hit its shining, tarry blackness.

The “closed conveyance” driven by a small, morose girl from the brim of whose straw hat the rain was falling in a stream over her large, melancholy nose, swished through the rivulets beneath its wheels and drew up outside the gate, where it stood, wreathed in the steam from the old pony’s devoted and unclipped flanks, and waited while they said good-bye to Mrs. Print. It was a very small, very old brougham; a metropolitan, luxurious padded trifle with silver-and-ivory handles to its doors, and ivory knots and buttons for the brocaded window-straps and arm-rests, the heavy crimson cords and the flower-vase clip, the pencil-tray and the hanging letter case, with which it still was fitted. There was a shelf, under the window behind the coachman’s box, high enough to take the paper-bordered bouquet of the lady it had once carried to Court or to the Opera in the days when the Empress Eugénie visited her royal cousin at Buckingham Palace. Two cords buttoned across the roof had once held the silk hat of her escort when she drove out in the daytime and could make room for one beside her silken skirts. It might have been the original coupé designed by and built for the fashionable beauty who first called her carriage after the original garden-chaise of the fierce Lord Brougham; so neat was its finish, so brave the excellence of its frame, so heroic the resistance to age and decay which the cracked but still valiant leather of the coachwork, and the remaining varnish on its slender wheels still offered to the eye. Even the unkempt and dejected pony who stood, too low for his position, between the curving shafts, could not destroy the serious elegance, the accomplished and considered frivolity of its air.

“Hallo, Mrs. Print,” said Larry, surveying the “trap” between the spreading leaves of a huge arum lily which stood in the parlour-window, “why have I never seen this remnant of forgotten splendour before?”

“You generally walks to the station, sir,” said Mrs. Print dryly.

She had returned from escorting Gillian to the vehicle under her green umbrella, and was now waiting for Larry to pursue through his various pockets the exact equivalent in coin of the tea they had consumed.

“Mrs. Print is certainly a fairy. Is she your godmother, Larry?” said Gillian as they drove away, the rain drumming on the roof and misting over the windows of the little carriage where they sat, hunched and crowded on account of Larry’s height and rucksack and the thickness of his tweeds. Larry fidgeted and wiped the mist on the inside of the window next him with a too easy unconcern.

“Oh, the Honeysuckle Bush is a great place for reading-parties. I’ve known her ever since my first year at Trinity.”

Larry was silent for the rest of the drive. The noise of the rain, the clop-clopping of the pony’s hoofs on the wet asphalt, the swish of overhanging branches across the roof of the little brougham which held them both so tightly, made it easy not to talk and Gillian, tired with the long day in the open—they had walked eight miles to get to the larch-woods—lay back against the worn but not ragged brocade of the padded lining and wondered with a little sting of envy who Miss Jerusalem was.

It must, thought Gillian, be rather wonderful to be a friend of Larry Browne; very friendly to have been with him at Cambridge—there were girls as well as men who belonged to that near past of his! Some of them had come to the studio, easy, laughing creatures who talked of swimming and tennis, of walking tours and winter sports and only very casually of “jobs” which they took, not because they had to work to live, but because it was better fun to be doing something. Miss Jerusalem, she supposed, was one of these.

It was none of her business, and she had not fallen in love with this tall, careless, beautiful Larry Browne; but, if ever she could come back to live the life on earth again, as some people imagined possible, and if she might, remembering this life, make her choice of the next time, it would—of this she had long been sure—it would be that she might be one of this free and happy company who were cradled in learning, and to whom money was a means already granted and never an end to be pursued, hardly even a necessity to be toiled for.

The sudden chilling of the summer air that had come with the rain, fell also on Gillian’s mood as they travelled slowly between half-seen hedges, down the long, gradual hill to the station in the valley. Larry Browne, the friendly, argumentative companion and guide of the sunlit hours of the day had now grown strange, detached, almost inimical. Gillian had a sudden and desolating wonder. Was she boring him? The thought had never occurred to her before, but if it should be—how was he, how was she, to endure the rest of the cool, dim journey back to London?

In the train Larry, who had cheered up as soon as they were released from the antique confinement of Mandible’s closed conveyance, unpacked his rucksack and offered her her choice of _The Three Mulla-Mulgars_ and _Georgian Poetry_ to read till they got to Charing Cross. Gillian, who had bought the anthology when it came out, chose the novel, which turned out not to be a novel at all, but something so much better that she came up as from the depths of a well to realize that the train had stopped at Waterloo Junction which was why it had suddenly grown too dark to read. The wistful merriment of the monkey-pilgrimage she had been following with a sense of a new world to explore had chased away her own cloud of self-pity, and she saw with a free heart the lemon and lavender of a clearing sky reflected in the lamp-spangled waters of the Thames as the train moved slowly into Charing Cross, and the lit clock of the tower of Westminster pointed to half-past eight.

It was cold at Charing Cross. It was cold on the top of the No. 11 omnibus which trundled slowly down the rain-washed slope of Whitehall and took its almost solitary way along Victoria Street, splashing through the pools of petrol and water that had settled in the uneven shallows of the traffic-furrowed road. Gillian’s spirits drooped again. She was lonely. She was ending the day farther away from Larry than she had been before it began. Lilac was at the other side of the world by now, in Japan. There would be no one in the little flat under the roof of the Mordaunt Club. The grate in the inner room would be empty, bare and clean, the chimney swept for the summer. She did not even know if there were a bundle of firewood in the cupboard by the scullery sink, and there was a hole in her right stocking, right round the base of her great toe, and her feet were cold, and by the time she had walked from King’s Road to the Club, her feet in the thin shoes in which she had walked so far that day, would be wet through. Gillian wished she were there in the cold twilight, with the door locked, having a thorough good cry. The omnibus stopped with a grinding jerk. Larry helped her off the step with a kind hand under her elbow, which he held a moment in his warm, firm palm as they walked along the slippery pavement together.

“Dumpy? Come and have supper with Heinrich and his mice—oh yes, he has mice out when the sparrows have gone to roost. There’s sure to be cheese and eggs, and we might make coffee and omelette with the Primus.”

“Oh, Larry! May I?”

“Yes, of course,” said Larry.

“I’ve got some macaroons and a Buszard cake,” said Gillian as they passed the Club; “shall we get them too?—and Lady Bottomley often sends down strawberries on Sunday.”

“Up we go to see,” said Larry, with enthusiasm.

* * * * *

A golden flicker of light under the door of Number Seven crept across the landing to their feet as they reached the top of the stairs.

“Whoever—whatever!” Gillian was alarmed. “Is it on fire?”

“What a first-rate idea,” said Larry, “let’s hope it is a good one—omne ignotum pro magnifico, or Hope for the best, as they say in the schoolroom. Hadn’t we better go in and see?”

For Gillian was hesitating on the doorway. Her key was not in her pocket.

“I’m frightened, Larry.”

“The longer you wait the more frightened you’ll be. Is the door locked?”

“I forget, I’ll try.”

The doors at the Mordaunt Club were so constructed that, even if you forgot to lock them as you went out, nobody who didn’t know the secret of the handles could open them from the outside.

Gillian pushed the knob and the door fell back.

The light came leaping and glowing from the inner room. Someone had kindled a fire in the empty grate.

III

V.V. was sitting in front of a fire burning clear, and licked with flame as only a newly lit fire can burn. She had left the window-sash thrown up from below, and the stirring night-airs blew the curtains about so that they made shadows in the lamplight from the windows on the opposite side of the courtyard. The eager fire and the waving curtains filled the room with a dance of flame and shade. The great Fortuna on her rope above the world; Saint Hubert praying to the crucifix that rises between the horns of the stag he has hunted till sundown, were revealed and hidden as the flames leapt and the curtain waved across the white wall where they hung, the tall white bookcase between them.

She sat in the red-leather couch, her astonishing eyes watching the doorway, her dark mouth fixed in a steady smile. The firelight moved in the great waves of her hair, burnishing their heavy curves, and flashed on the whiteness of her even teeth. She wore a dress of some thin silk many times washed to a faint brick-red, and her long hands, their wrists held in the tawny bracelets she always wore, lay palm to palm in her lap, the finger-tips catching the light above the sharp angle made by her knees which jutted sharply through the stuff of her clinging skirt as though it were a skeleton and not a woman sitting under the rusty silk that fell to the rug at her feet hiding them in its folds.

Gillian stood in the doorway smiling back at the firelit face. It shone out against the background of book-filled shelves behind it, gathering up the glint of the lettered bindings, their reds and yellows and browns in one living concentration of colour and light.

“God! What a colour scheme!” said Larry from behind her shoulder.

“A fire’s nice on a wet evening, isn’t it?” said V.V., stretching her hands to the blaze but making no other movement. “I’ve had supper ready for an hour.”

“You’ll have to stay to supper with us, Larry,” said Gillian. “This is Miss Vanderleyden who lives at Number Thirty-Six in the other house. V.V., this is Mr. Browne. He’s adopted our cat.”

“Well,” said Larry, “that’s one way of putting it. I’ve been told that a cat, I hesitate to believe it was ever Miss Vanderleyden’s, and you say it wasn’t yours, Gillian—I’ve been told that a female cat has been added to the menagerie at my studio without my consent.”

“I didn’t know it was a she,” said Gillian.

“All tortoiseshells are,” said Larry. “That is one of the beautiful truths which are universal.”

“Oh,” said V.V., “Mrs. Gordon said there’s been a fuss about it and I found a silly letter from Mrs. Barraclough when I got in. Was it your cat after all?”

“I’ve just told you, V.V.,”—Gillian had already noticed that V.V. often did not quite follow everything that was said—“I’ve explained I’ve given the cat to Larry. It was a stray.”

“Oh, was it?”

“Yes. Where have you put supper, and is there enough for three?”

“In the other room. Didn’t you see as you came through?”

“No; we thought the book-room was on fire.”

V.V. laughed quite heartily at this and then, suddenly becoming practical and administrative, she announced that there was hot water for Gillian to wash and enough for Larry, too, if he didn’t mind washing at the sink, and that they could get tidy while she dished up.

“Does this vision dwell with you?” asked Larry while V.V. disappeared to ration the boiling water.

“Not exactly, but she knows where I keep everything. Isn’t she lovely?”

“She looked gaudy in the firelight when we came in, but the drawing of her face is bad. Nose wrong. No chin.”

“I thought you looked as if you wanted to draw her.”

“I am going to paint her. Her colour’s exciting.”

V.V. had made a fine supper. A strange, sliced sausage which she said came from Looms, which might, for all Gillian knew, be a suburb of Epping; a crisp salad, not cut with a knife but lightly torn, and sprinkled with a dew of lemon-juice and a frosting of brown sugar; a junket with cream in which the huge Bottomley strawberries were drowned; the macaroons; the Buszard cake; a bottle of white wine; a loaf of brown bread; a dish of radishes, and her own as well as Gillian’s butter, made enough for three. V.V. had laid these things out in dishes, some of them her own, some of them Gillian’s and had brought over two amber glass candlesticks with dangling lustres which she had inherited from an aunt and which were the joy of Gillian’s life at that moment. Two tall candles stuck in these heirlooms lit the feast and threw down white copies of their flames that lay like waving petals on the dark, waxed surface of the table.

“Poor Heinrich! we might have fetched him,” said Gillian half-way through her second macaroon.

“No, we mightn’t.” Larry was heaping his plate with the cream-extinguished strawberries. “He’s quite happy. He’s got all the cheese for his mice.”

“What about that little cat?” asked V.V. “Is Heinrich the name you’ve given him?”

“Heinrich,” Larry informed her, “is a mouse-tamer. It’s a more difficult thing to be than a lion-tamer. He also tames sparrows. That is difficult too. It is also quite messy. Worse than William who is but one and, I suppose, trained for the house.”

“You suppose wrong,” said Gillian, “but no matter. Go on telling V.V. about Heinrich.”

“Heinrich, for the moment, follows mouse- and sparrow-taming as a hobby. He lives by his fiddle and with me. With, but not _on_. I pay him no rent and the studio is his. He pays me no board and the studio is mine. One day Heinrich will be rich.”

“How rich?” asked V.V., gleaming.

“Oh, quite. His uncle had foolish, dilatory ideas about Heinrich’s majority, and there are things in Chancery for him. A grasping place. But that’s neither here nor there. Heinrich has his own joys and his needs are few. If only he could wear my clothes his needs would be none.”

Larry looked down, a little self-consciously, at his long tweed-covered legs, and Gillian thought of the yellow and pink, blue, silk skirts and Brobdingnagian trousers he usually wore when at work, and of Heinrich’s shiny serge suit and the pathetic blue slops slung round his thin bird’s neck as he mopped the studio floor after his birds.

“At this moment,” said Larry, warming to his work, “Heinrich is most probably marching on tip-toe, a sort of solemn dance—an antic hay—all round the studio. He’ll have lighted a little, bronze, Roman lamp with olive-oil and a wick made out of the marrow of a seven-months child and it will be burning blue and violet in the middle of the floor, and, after him, there will skip mice of all ages, on _their_ toes, their pink, little, sharp-nailed toes, and sparrows, walking in their sleep, will come in twos and threes and dance with them, and, at the tail of the procession, your tortoiseshell cat, Miss Vanderleyden, will be walking on his hind legs, and the canary will have broken cage and be perched on the bow as he fiddles—oh yes, he’ll be fiddling away, and spiders will come swinging down on threads from the roof and all the cockroaches from the studio next door will look in——”

Larry paused for breath.

“What a queer little man he must be,” said V.V. “I should like to meet him.”

Gillian was almost afraid that V.V. believed it all, but she did not like to tell her that Larry was just talking, in case she had really understood. It was difficult with two people you didn’t know very well. After all, she’d not known Larry much more than a month and V.V. less than a week. Besides, what Larry had said was true, in a way. Heinrich might at any time make friends with a spider, even though Gillian hoped he wouldn’t with a cockroach, and it was more than probable that he was at that very moment fiddling a tune for the little cat to dance to.

“Shall we go and call on that funny man?” said V.V.

But when they got to the studio all was quiet. Nobody was fiddling, nobody was dancing and the canary, its head long since under its wing, was asleep, a ball of pale down on the perch of its cage high up in the shadows of the soaring roof.

The table was laid with an untouched supper for two; bread, cheese, a mug of beer and a plate of green apples, and, curled in a corner of a divan, among sketches and scarves and half-empty boxes of crayons, Heinrich slept, with the tortoiseshell cat purring quietly, asleep, beside him.

“What a shame,” said V.V. “He’s waited for you and never touched a thing himself. Let’s wake him and give him his supper now.”

So they woke Heinrich who admitted that he was very hungry—it was now almost eleven o’clock—and V.V. set to and made a cheese omelette of a high superiority, and the cat had all the milk and Heinrich had all the beer which made him astonishingly gay and polyglot.

“Heinrich talks all the languages there are,” Larry explained to V.V., “talks them all with a foreign accent and I don’t believe he gets any of them quite right, but he gets most of them far better than we get any of them except our own, and as he’s not got one quite of his own——”

“Oh, I expect he’s got one of his own all right,” said V.V., “but he keeps it dark.”

“Mein bester,” said Larry, “she’s insulting you. Can you hear her?”

Heinrich was sitting on the floor, his hands clasped round his knees, rocking slightly to and fro. His eyes were fixed on V.V.’s face as she sat above him in a gilded Italian chair with a large green apple in her hand. Gillian thought he was paler than usual, but he was always so pale that this might only be her fancy.

Suddenly Heinrich spoke in a high, quick voice, rocking to and fro in time to the words.

“Ich liebe dich,” said Heinrich with conviction.

“Mich reiz’ deine schöne Gestalt.

“Und bist du nicht willig,” he chanted, the wind rising in the music behind his voice:—

“Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt.”

“There!” cried V.V., in some alarm, “I told you so! He’s talking some outlandish language of his own. Does anyone understand him?”

But Larry was rolling in his chair in a paroxysm of joy.

“Oh, Heinrich, you unmatchable treasure! Your virtue is beyond rubies,” he shouted. “_So brauch’ ich Gewalt. Gewalt!_ Did you hear it, Gillian?”

“Yes,” said Gillian, a little dazed, “and I think, in a way, he would—he could, I mean.”

“I told you he’d got a funny language of his own,” Miss Vanderleyden reiterated, her eyes shifting quickly from Gillian’s smile to Larry’s laughter-wrinkled face.

“You know, the Erlkönig wasn’t brawny after all. Play it to us, Heinrich, you haven’t played to us this evening. Get your fiddle and spin.”

Larry, for all his mocking tongue, was very proud of this odd, gifted, incalculable friend.

So Heinrich got his fiddle and spun the mist and the wind and the night-ride through the storm, and rocked them with the galloping horse, and cried to them with the terrified child, and stirred them with the sound of the goblin’s insatiable desire.

* * * * *

Gillian and V.V. went home in the small hours. They walked across the bridge in the light of an old moon lying on its back low in the sky, having refused to be accompanied by either Larry or Heinrich. It was V.V. who had insisted.

“We shall be seen coming in by one of the old cats,” she said, “and they’ll think you’ve come in too.”

“Goodness!” said Gillian, “what a horrid thought. But they couldn’t.”

“Oh, yes, they could,” and V.V. proceeded to tell how the Countess had written to Mrs. Barraclough, once when one of V.V.’s actresses was being put up on the hard divan, to complain that Miss Vanderleyden’s visitor had come home after midnight with a man, _who was never seen to leave_!

“What did Mrs. Barraclough do? Did she come up and look in your cupboard for him?”

“No,” said V.V. “She wrote to the Countess and said she was so sorry to hear that she’d felt obliged to sit up all night in that way, but that she felt quite sure I was able to chaperone my guests myself.”

“Did he?” said Larry.

“Did who, what?”

“Leave.”

“He never came in, of course. The Countess lost sight of him in the archway, I suppose. Serve her right if she did sit up till morning.”

“Oh, well,” said Larry, “if it means keeping Countesses out of their beds till dawn, and you’re quite sure——”

“That Heinrich gives me the creeps,” chattered V.V. as they walked home; “his fiddle and those eyes. And you did look such a thin, tired little thing, I wanted to take you home and brush your hair and put you nice and comfy in your little bed-a-bies long ago. I came home for a surprise for you this morning and you weren’t there. I said to Dicky that you’d be wondering where ever I’d got to yesterday, but she had Jerry and Frank coming and poor old Biddles had had to have a pill. So I lit the fire and got supper ready and all, and we could have had such a nice cosy little evening all to ourselves, and then you came in with your Larry and spoilt everything.”

“But V.V., you were quite pleased to see Larry, and, please, he’s not particularly mine.”

Gillian was irritated a little by V.V.’s chatter. It was very late; she herself was really tired and it seemed beyond understanding that anyone could have listened to Heinrich’s fiddle and not still be silent in the mood it had woven round them all. Larry was still in it, she was sure, and Heinrich himself had never come out of it at all, but had sat, a shadow among shadows, in the darkness round the model-throne, plucking fragments of melancholy airs out of his violin while they said good-night.

V.V. was a puzzle. In the moonlight, with her rich colour greyed into monochrome, Gillian could see what Larry meant about her nose being clumsy and her chin weak. They seemed to reinforce the vapid, babbling voice, making it sillier than it sounded by day or in the lamplight. Only the swift, smooth walk, the balanced rhythm of knee and shoulder moving in continuous, co-ordinated harmony kept their beauty. They were a lilt of the enchantment under which Gillian had fallen, beating time to the pulses of her heart, carrying her back to the room overlooking the gardens, to the compelling magic of the face which had shone out of the dark mirror on the night when Gillian had washed up the cat’s cream-bowl, only a week ago.

“Is Biddles your dog?” She asked the question to escape from the creeping disillusionment that sickened beneath her fatigue.

“Yes, he is, the darling. Dicky’s keeping him till I can afford to have a cottage. He’s a borzoi. They’re very delicate, you know, and Biddles bites—that’s why he’s at Epping.”

Gillian was too tired to ask whether biting dogs were cured or endured at Epping.

They let themselves into the courtyard stealthily and then, because it might wake Mrs. Barraclough, who lived on the ground floor, if V.V. were to open the hall door and go up to her flat in the farther house, she came up to Gillian’s and slept, in borrowed night-gear, on the red couch by the embers of the fire she had kindled.

Gillian slept well that night. V.V. had carried out her programme and had brushed Gillian’s hair and braided it into two long plaits which she tied with ribbons and pulled out over the sheet on each side of Gillian’s face as she tucked her up in bed.

“It’s my flat,” Gillian had protested, “I ought to be putting you to bed really.”

“But you’re not,” said V.V. She stood by the bedside, a lighted candle in her hand, and looked down at the tired girl with a brooding eagerness. Then stooping swiftly, she kissed Gillian, kissed her with a little gurgling murmur, as if a mother were kissing her baby, kissed her twice on her open, astonished mouth.

“How odd of V.V.,” said Gillian sleepily to herself when the door had closed behind her, and the room was dark and still. And she pulled her handkerchief from under her pillow and wiped her lips as if she had taken a drink from the tumbler of water which stood on a table beside her bed.

IV

Later in the week, Gillian went to tea with Jane Bird in her workshop in Buckingham Palace Road. It was conveniently situated for the purpose, being on the way home from the Secretarial School.

Jane had called the place her studio when she first took it, but since she had begun to sell her figures she had changed the name.

“It’s not Art, it’s Commerce that I woo behind these portals,” she explained. “Besides! Look at it!”

The place was certainly business-like. It had originally been a coach-house and stables, and the loose-box and stalls still remained as store-rooms, divided from the larger portion in which Jane, standing at a long table on trestles, worked on her plasticine figures.

“I keep three going at a time, one being modelled, one being painted, one being varnished. Mr. Quist has invented a varnish which is transparent without being shiny.”

Mr. Quist, a little olive-skinned man with a shock of white hair, who worked in his shirt-sleeves and wore a red tie and a gold watch-chain, looked up and bowed his acknowledgment of this introduction, but did not speak. He was varnishing a figure with a camel’s-hair brush which he dipped with marked precision into a clear, colourless liquid that seethed in a glass retort under a spirit-lamp.

Gillian went across the workshop to look at the figure. It stood about eighteen inches from the square base on which it was moulded and which was painted in the semblance of a sandy path between two flower borders. The figure was that of an old, bent woman in a black full-skirted gown with a bodice buttoned tight across the hollow, stooping chest. It stood, leaning forward, supporting itself with two claw-thin, parchment-white hands on the crook of a large, bushy, green umbrella. The face, keen and delicate, like an old ivory, was framed in smooth bands of dark brown hair gathered into a bag-like net at the back of the fine, old head.

“Goodness!” said Gillian. “It’s Mrs. Print.”

“Goodness!” mocked Jane Bird, “how did you know?”

“Larry took me to tea there last Sunday.”

“The Pirate! Mrs. Print’s mine. Larry had no right to share her. I’d have taken you there myself.”

“Oh, dear!” Gillian was remorseful. “Why didn’t I say ‘by the pricking of my thumbs’? Anyone can see she’s a witch—a good witch.”

“She’s nothing of the kind. She’s a village landlady who knows her business, but you make every-think into a fairy-tale.”

“Well, look at her! Look what you’ve done with her! How did you get that black-velvet net effect on her hair?”

“How did she get a chenille net? I don’t suppose there’s another within a hundred miles of London. Did she tell you about her teeth?”

“I don’t think she’d got any.”

“She hasn’t. And she hasn’t had for years. She bites with her gums. They’ve grown hard and sharp, and she reads without spectacles, and she takes her mother out in a bath-chair every Saturday afternoon.”

“Jane! what magnificent people you know! Larry and Heinrich and Mrs. Print.”

“Magnificent isn’t the right word for either Heinrich or Mrs. Print. Larry, perhaps.”

Mr. Quist looked up from his varnishing. He pushed his gold-rimmed spectacles up on to his forehead, put his paint-brush down on a glass tray, dropped a glass extinguisher over the blue flame of the spirit-lamp and, without a word, trotted off across the workshop and disappeared into the loose-box.

“Jane, who is Mr. Quist? He doesn’t look like a workman.”

“He’s a genius. And I know no more about him than you can see for yourself. He called here one morning to buy a figure he’d seen in that shop I told you about. They’d sold that one and he wanted another, and I wouldn’t make one for him. So he told me about his varnish.”

“It sounds like the Great Panjandrum! Did he speak?”

“Not much. The bare minimum. We carry on mostly in pregnant silences. I’m good at mute eloquence.”

“I know you are. But I shouldn’t have thought two could have been eloquent enough that way.”

“Well, we are. He’s gone to fetch the Larrys for you.”

Mr. Quist emerged from the loose-box carrying in either hand a veiled object, much like a priest bearing two chalices to a sick parishioner. Mr. Quist jerked his head sideways and Jane, advancing to meet him, took one of the muslin-shaded figures from him and placed it on the work-table. Mr. Quist carried the figure he still retained to a shelf with a small, carved canopy, evidently prepared for the exhibition of completed figures, and then returned to unveil the one Jane had taken from him.

It was Larry Browne in his wide green corduroys, his blue, cloudy shirt open, his straight hair a little heightened in colour so as to balance the gay mosaic of paint on the palette he was holding, his head thrown back and a little on one side as if he were watching a smoke-ring he had blown. The right arm hung straight from the shoulder and slightly backwards, and a cigarette burned between the fingers of the hanging hand.

“Jane, it’s lovely,” said Gillian, “so long, so graceful, so alive. But—but—he isn’t painting—his face is all wrong, not concentrated.”

“No,” said Jane. “He doesn’t. Didn’t you know?”

“But he does, I’ve seen him. I’m sitting to him. And he has proper models. And there’s Heinrich.”

“He draws,” said Jane, “quite well. And he plans all sorts of pictures. And he squeezes miles of Windsor and Newton out on that wonderful palette of his. It belonged to Arnold Boecklin. Did you know?”

“Yes,” said Gillian. “I’ve often wondered why he got it.”

“It was a bad debt. A very bad debt. He shouldn’t have taken it. It’s part of his curse. He is so interested in being interesting, in the details, in literaryishness—and he’s got such an audience, and enough money to live on. He’ll never paint. Not unless——” Jane smudged a thumb-load of plasticine vindictively on to the figure she had left when Gillian came in, and began scraping it off again, and left her sentence unfinished.

“Well,” said Gillian, “I don’t think it will be much of a pity if he never finishes that procession of a fresco for the competition. But he’s going to paint V.V. Vanderleyden in the fire.”

“Golly, what a name!” said Jane rudely. “Who is it? Another?”

“She’s one of the Club members. He saw her in my flat on Sunday.”

“Has he taken her to Mrs. Print’s?”

“Not yet. He doesn’t seem to take many people there, really, Jane. Only me and Miss Jerusalem.”

Jane’s high colour ebbed away and her face looked streaked and queer between the black bosses of her hair.

“That’s me,” she snapped. “Jane Ursula Mayne—they called me ‘Jerusalem’ when I was little. They used to send me to Mrs. Print’s for weeks together after measles and things.”

“What a lovely name for a little girl!”

Gillian watched the blood flow back into Jane’s flat cheeks and remembered how Larry’s blush had swamped his freckles at the same name. Why hadn’t Larry told her that at the Honeysuckle Bush Jane was “Jerusalem”? It was such an addition to Jane.

“May I see the other figure—the one on the stand?”

Mr. Quist removed the second veil with a flick which might or might not be an expression of feeling.

It was Larry again: slim and dapper and sleek in the hard white and black of evening dress, white waistcoat, white tie, white gloves. The figure was shown buttoning one glove critically, lovingly, the whole attitude expressive of intense absorption in the matter so charmingly in hand. It was finished with a minute perfection, a ridiculous attention to detail, Pre-Raphaelite in its insistence on every button, every seam. Gillian, who had never seen Larry wearing any garments of the kind, was forced to admit that this Larry was even more accurately portrayed than the other.

“Jane,” she cried, “what a horrid thing! Just like one of those painted plaster figures they put in shop-windows.”

Jane was angry. “How can you be such a philistine! Look at the modelling! Look at the pose! It’s a masterpiece.”

“I don’t like it,” Gillian persisted.

“Like it. You like your pictures pretty, I suppose. You aren’t meant to like it. It’s a warning. Larry’ll revert to type, he’ll be just like that before he’s done.”

“Has he seen it?”

“Not yet. He shall before it goes home, though.”

“Jane! you’ve not sold it?”

Jane nodded, and by a rustle that came from the direction where Mr. Quist was varnishing Mrs. Print, Gillian understood that he was the purchaser.

Gillian was puzzled. She had thought Jane and Larry were friends.

“Have you done Heinrich yet?” she asked, more to change the difficult subject than because she thought this possible.