Chapter FOUR: Larry Browne (2)

“No,” said Jane, “I can’t do him out of my head, and he hasn’t been able to sit to me. He’s very busy about something or other.”

“Heinrich’s always busy. I’ve never seen such an occupied creature. Besides, he’s rehearsing a new Russian Symphony, and there are afternoon concerts.”

At that moment there was a knock at the workshop door, and before anyone could reply to it, Larry himself walked in. Gillian saw Jane’s immediately suppressed movement towards Mr. Quist’s purchase, and saw how that movement had directed Larry’s eyes to the effigy, which stood in its niche on the same wall as the door, so that it was invisible to anyone entering the studio.

“Hullo!” Larry swung round to look at the figure. “I say, Jane, that’s pretty cruel,” he said. “What made you do it?”

“My prophetic soul, of the wide world dreaming on things to come, I suppose. These things are in the air.” But it was odd how unhappy her voice was.

“Le Beau Brummell de nos jours. Well, I seem to be making a success there, at any rate. Are you going to give it to me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s sold.”

“Jane, don’t be a fool! You can’t sell my portrait.”

“It isn’t a portrait. You didn’t sit for it. It’s a fantasy.”

“It’s a simpering horror. You’re to destroy it.”

“It isn’t mine to destroy.”

“Then I will.”

Larry took a step towards the figure, but Mr. Quist reached it first. With a practised hand he swathed the property in its butter-muslin shroud and, lifting it from the stand, carried it back to the loose-box where the statues were packed.

Larry watched him go and gave a short laugh.

“Sorry, Jane. I’ve lost my temper, and you’ve got to help me to find it again at once. You must promise not to let whoever has bought it have that idiotic thing.”

“He’s paid for it,” said Jane, “and I’m going out to see the Guard change at the Palace. I’ve got an order for a Grenadier complete with busby”—and going to a peg on the wall, she took down her hat and gloves and marched out of the still open workshop door. Larry looked for a moment as though he were about to involve Gillian in the discussion, and then, tossing his hair back with the very gesture Jane had caught for the figure which still stood uncovered on the work-table, he followed her into the street.

Gillian waited a moment to let them get a start so that she might not appear to be following, and while she waited, Mr. Quist came out from the loose-box again and began to wrap up the laughing Larry.

“I’m afraid, Mr. Quist,” said Gillian, feeling foolish for speaking and yet nervously unable to keep silence, “I’m afraid Miss Bird and Mr. Browne have misunderstood each other about your figure.”

Mr. Quist looked at Gillian over the top of his glasses.

“Sublimation. Sublimation,” he said.

Gillian, who had never heard of the theories of Vienna or the practices of Zurich, had not the faintest idea of what Mr. Quist meant.

It was the first time she had heard his voice. It was a thick, smooth voice, and she thought there was a note of triumph in it. She did not feel she was going to like Mr. Quist, and she was not at all sorry that he made no attempt at further conversation before she said good-bye and went out.

V

Whenever Gillian felt she had come to something she didn’t want to think about, she either cleaned out William’s cage or went to see Aunt Elizabeth. William’s cage was, of course, cleaned out every day. That is, he had fresh seed, fresh water and fresh sand as punctually as Gillian had her own breakfast. Indeed, there had been mornings in the Pelham House days when Gillian’s breakfast had been omitted in favour of William’s cage. It was in recognition of what she called her sister’s slavery that Lilac had once tried to teach William the hymn which says:

“All my wants by thee supplied,
All my sins by thee forgiven,”

as a surprise while Gillian was away. But William, who was a pronounced eclectic, had welcomed Gillian’s return from a holiday with the remark, “Hello—sins forgiven? Bow-wow,” and had then gone off into peals of very strident laughter in imitation of Mabel, who had, at her own request, undertaken the care of William’s food and cage during his rightful servant’s absence. But, in moments of doubt or pain, there was no more successful anodyne than half an hour’s extra attendance on the cage. William, who enjoyed extra attendance, always assisted with might and main at all efforts towards the promotion of his own well-being, and while William was helping and encouraging you there was no time for metaphysical brooding or morbid self-analysis. Sometimes, when she wanted practical advice or felt the moment was come for facing rather than escaping her problem, Gillian would go to Highgate. But it was a long way to Highgate, and, besides, Mrs. Mortimer was away just then, and, even if she had been available, Gillian was not at all sure that she could have had any patience with so insubstantial a grief as the one she now carried. For Gillian was fighting a shadow which was never vanquished and had now become so constant in assailing that she could no longer doubt the existence of the shape which cast it. One day, and that day might be to-morrow, she felt, the shadow would pass her by and leave her face to face with the reality in which it originated, and of that day she was afraid.

There was a force, a malign thrusting-on, at work, in the lives around her; she saw it more and more, to which her own experience gave her no clue. It seemed to go by the name of Love, but in its manifestation it was the most unloving impulse in the world. It lay, Gillian had known that, behind Lilac’s whole attitude to Toby; it was, she had seen it, implicit in Toby’s submission to Lilac. And now it was binding and hurting Jane Bird, making her cruel and vulgar and yet giving her a power over Larry which he resented but did not deny. Larry had been angry with Jane. That was clear enough and easy to understand—but he had followed her when she defied him, and it was to his own defeat he had gone.

Gillian knew very little about sex. She had escaped the definite physiological instruction which most people of her age and station had had administered to them in their teens. A little vague botany, put before her with the best intentions while she was at school, had bored without enlightening her. Flowers were flowers. Diagrams of their works with straight black tines leading out of them like so many stamens, with A, B, C, and D at their tips, had seemed to her of far less use or interest than the pages of the little green Huxley’s Physiology, another class-book which had been brought to her notice at the same time. But that concise and well-illustrated manual confines its guidance to the alimentary canal and the organs of sight and hearing, and it had never occurred to Gillian to make any connexion between the two branches of knowledge. They had been laid before her, separately, in a hopeful spirit, by parents and guardians who shrank from directer methods of illumination, and who credited adolescent curiosity with greater powers of accurate deduction than there was any sound reason for supposing it to possess. Gillian had failed entirely to deduce. She had assimilated one set of facts and rejected the other; for she had a clear and honest mind and chose by instinct, competent instruction in preference to tentative and disingenuous information set up as an analogy which she had not the means to follow.

Later on, when disturbances in her own development might have turned her mind inwards, she had been in the full tide of that friendship with her father which had filled them both with so deep and so shared a passion for impersonal beauty that human love, except as it found its expression in Art and Letters, had seemed a matter which might very well wait its time. Gerald Armstrong, like so many men of his type when they begin to meet on its own ground the first blossoming of the mind they have trained, had fallen in love with his daughter, idealizing the crystalline beauty of her girl’s mind, loving the eager courage of its unflawed innocence and jealously guarding that virginal quality from any taint of a dark knowledge she might never need to bear. When she had asked him what

“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”

meant, he had given her _Madame Bovary_ to read, and had adored her for the comment with which she returned the book to him: “I suppose the French of those days were even more different from us than they are now.”

When he died and she was left with his books, she had taken to those they had not read together, the same spirit of detached and impersonal enjoyment of literary quality as had distinguished his own appreciations, and had retained unimpaired the habit he had never checked since the day when he had first discovered it, of classing any allusions or franknesses she did not understand as “Elizabethanisms,” a term he himself had once used to dismiss a very early inquiry as to the precise meaning of a passage she and Lilac had failed to elucidate in the psalms for the day when Lilac was seven and she was nine years old.

And before Gillian could venture very far by herself, her father’s more valuable and rarer books had been sold, and she had been allowed to keep for her own use only such ordinary editions of the classics as would not fetch more than remainder prices in an auctioneer’s rooms. Out of these she got all she required, either as food for her own mind or as material for those lessons in literature which she had so disastrously added to the curriculum of Pelham House. But in actual knowledge of life she moved, at twenty-three, in the same occasionally troubled but still enchanted dream as she had known at seventeen, when her father died.

Love, according to the best authorities known to Gillian, was the guide to many a wandering bark; many waters could not quench it; it suffered, endured, and hoped all things; it made the world go round, in which last connexion it was assisted by the blessing of the Church in the Solemnization of Matrimony. When it made people ridiculous or tiresome it was called Calf Love; when it was transferred from its legitimate objects it was called Sin; and when, as sometimes happened, particularly on the Continent, it took place between people who had conscientious objections to marriage, it was called Free. So far, this conspectus of an important but not personally urgent business had met any case which had come under her observation; but, lately, Gillian had begun to suspect its adequacy. Toby and Lilac had made what is called a love-match. Had not Mrs. Middleton given them for a present an illuminated copy, in a frame, of a work supposed to be a translation into more adequate terms of the well-known passage from Corinthians? It had made Gillian’s blood boil at the time, particularly the improvement, which ran:

“Love has no taste for anything which is impure but a responsive
delight in all that is genuine.”

But it certainly was about love, and Gillian had always understood that, as a definition, however translated, the original had never been bettered. Possibly there were things about love which Saint Paul did not know. Times had changed, and love with them. There was Modern Love. There were the sixteen-line pseudo-sonnets—“We are betrayed by what is false within”—“A kiss is but a kiss now, and no wave of a great flood....” Gillian had always thought that an interesting but rather exaggerated way of referring to a kiss. “Love that had robbed us of immortal things,” that was better, a beautiful line, all o’s—better, Gillian thought, than the one about the swan and the twilight wave, which didn’t somehow come in quite naturally. “I suppose he’d seen a swan at twilight, and used it up for his last line in the same way as Tennyson used his nature notes.” Gillian didn’t care about these detachable beauties. You didn’t find them in Shakespeare’s sonnets. All the great lines fitted there: “The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,” or, “Come in the rearward of a conquered woe.” ...

VI

By the time Gillian got back to the Club she had walked herself out of love to literature, and there, on a happy well-known path, she was herself again. No need to give William second sand, after all. But she’d do it, for a treat, for William’s treat, and he should walk up and down outside the window of her bedroom on the street side while she did it, and address the children on their way home from school at half-past four, a performance he, and they, enjoyed vastly.

But when she turned into the courtyard she was met by an excited crowd headed by Mrs. Gordon and superintended from the window of her ground-floor flat by Mrs. Barraclough herself. Club members, some of whom Gillian had never seen before, were visible at windows or present on the gravel under the laburnum-tree, and a first glance informed Gillian that V.V. was not among them. But the Countess, in hat, veil, gloves, parasol, and a fan, was conspicuous; as was Mrs. Middleton, whose hair was coming down and who had buttoned the blouse she had donned in haste in most of the wrong holes.

And over the noise of the mob, drowning it in a torrent of excruciating protest, flooding the sky with clamour, the voice of William shrieked from the open window of the book-room under the roof.

“Oh, Miss!” cried Mrs. Gordon, trundling towards Gillian as she emerged from the archway. “’Ere you are at last. ’E’s been goin’ on like this for a _h_our or more, and none of us can’t get anywhere near ’im to pacify of ’im.”

“Oh, dear,” said Gillian, “but haven’t you my duplicate key?”

“No, Miss, that I ’aven’t.” Mrs. Gordon was righteousness under outrage. “That Miss Vanderleyden come and borrowed it off me to take ’im a piece of groundsel, and she’ve gone off with it and ’ere we are.”

“And groundsel isn’t a bit good for him,” said Mrs. Middleton, “we all know that. Do you think dear William is dying in agony?”

“No,” said Gillian, “he’s evidently perfectly well. Only cross. I’m so very sorry. I’ll go straight up and scold him.”

Up she went, accompanied by Mrs. Middleton, who loved William with passion, and followed at a speaking distance by the Countess, who made no mystery of her feelings towards “this savage bird.”

And, even as she ran, listening to the sympathetic bleat of Mrs. Middleton at her side and pursued by the blistering invective of the Countess behind her, Gillian was conscious that Mrs. Gordon’s pardonable rancour against Miss Vanderleyden was shared by her fellow members. And it was not because she had locked a screaming William in and disturbed them all over their tea that they were angry with V.V. She felt that in a way they were glad to have this excuse for saying, “So _very_ peculiar. A little officious. Members should _never_ borrow the duplicate key.”

William, it turned out, had a real grievance. Touched by one of those synchronizing impulses which it was her queer gift to receive and act upon, V.V. had herself come over and had given William fresh seed, fresh sand, and fresh water, as well as the bunch of groundsel which now lay, severely mauled but uneaten, on the bottom of his cage. But not content with these ministrations, she had, with a zeal commensurate to the protest it had evoked, polished the whole of the cage, bar by bar, wire by wire, with Bluebell. It stood there glittering in the afternoon sun, the brass ring by which it was carried from room to room a perfect blaze of reflected light. The room reeked of the polish, and it was against this smell quite as much as in disapproval of the unwonted scintillation of his home, that William’s voice was still most devastatingly raised.

It was not until she had quieted the bird that Gillian caught sight of a three-cornered note, stuck in the back of the old settee and addressed to her in V.V.’s black, curly handwriting, out of which the tops of the t’s and d’s stuck like pins in an untidy pincushion:

“Belovedest” (V.V. had an expansive epistolary style), “I’ve
polished up Cocky’s cage for a s’prize and I’m going to the
concert with Hinerik, so don’t look me up till I get in. A
thousand kisses—V.V.”

Gillian sat with William rubbing his beak against her ear and clucking, “Pretty Cocky! Pretty Cocky! S’rimps for tea,” and tore the note into tiny fragments, wondering why V.V.’s letters moved her to nothing but dismay, when V.V.’s presence had in it the power to fill her with transporting joy. The soft, thick, gilt-edged paper on which the note was written tore without sound into pieces, each of which showed at the furred indefinite edges little glistering filaments of the pulp from which it had been dried. Almost like blotting-paper, she thought, remembering how sore her middle finger had been for days when she had sliced it against the sharp, hard corner of the note-paper on which she used to imitate the Bottomley signature from Knightsbridge.

Presently, to her surprise, Larry knocked at the door.

“I’ve come to tell you,” he said, pushing his hair back from his eyes as he subsided into the chesterfield, “I’ve come to tell you that I’m sorry I let fly at Jane as I did. It was a rotten thing to do, anyway, and with you there”—he flicked a fragment of the torn letter away from the back of the couch with his hand as if disposing of himself and his behaviour for a while.

“I didn’t like that figure myself,” Gillian conceded, “but Jane seemed to think you deserved it.”

“So I do.” said Larry moodily. “I’m a rotter.”

“That’s silly,” said Gillian. “It was rather rotten of Jane, you know, as well—to sell it, I mean.”

“Oh, Jane’s got to get her own back. Besides, she didn’t make it to sell it. She made it because she thinks I ought to do one thing at once. She’s afraid of my atavistic impulses. In a way she’s right. But life’s a great thing in so many ways. And Jane’ll only hear of me having it in one.”

“Well, one thing at a time is the only way if you’re going to do anything great.”

“Who wants to do anything great? It’s like being a non-drinker, a non-smoker, and a Nonconformist like an old gardener of ours, because he wanted to be sure of living a long time in this world and missing hell-fire in the next. The great object of life is living—not saving life up to do things with. I’d rather die of life at thirty than hang on ‘doing.’”

“Jane believes in doing things.”

“I ought to know what Jane believes by this time.”

“Larry, are you in love with Jane?”

“No. Not now. That’s the trouble.”

“I don’t think,” said Gillian slowly, “I don’t really suppose that I quite understand about being in love.”

“Your state is the more gracious.”

“Well. It’s supposed to bring happiness.”

“It’s the devil. It has the primal, eldest curse upon it.”

“Oh, Larry—that was murder, not love.”

“It wasn’t. You’re a shallow, superficial child, and you’re talking like a parrot—like that William of yours.”

“But the King in _Hamlet_ had killed his brother, that’s what his offence was rank about.”

“What had he done it for? Shakespeare was a subtler johnny than that. Read your Bible. What is the eldest curse? Not Cain’s. Golly, no! His was easy, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth’—lots of us are that, and like it. No, the primal, eldest curse is Adam’s: ‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman.’ _Enmity_—‘It shall bruise thy head.’ That’s love,” said Larry. And he thrust both hands deep into the pockets of his flannel trousers—he was wearing a perfectly normal, grey flannel suit that afternoon—and began to whistle, through his teeth, a tune which Gillian recognized after a bar or two to be “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”

But she was quite sure that Larry had no notion of what he was whistling, and she didn’t tell him.