Chapter FIVE: Illusion

I

Larry went to Germany. He said he knew a place in the Bavarian Tyrol where in the third week in June the hay was all flowers and no grass and each separate flower had its butterfly coloured to match itself, and that there was an inn, _Zur Goldenen Rose_, at a place called Dinkelsbühl, on the way back, which hadn’t had a chair added to it since the eighteenth century. And, why, when there were these things to be inherited on the Earth, he or anyone should stay in a jerry-built studio in Battersea Park Road——? Larry was in a difficult temper. Heinrich, who couldn’t go with him, partly because his orchestra was active until after the third week in June and partly because he hadn’t any clothes to travel in, was very pensive about it both before and after Larry’s departure from Waterloo in a crashing thunderstorm late one Sunday evening.

Larry was going by Havre. It seemed a long way round and was not so cheap as the other ways. But Larry was in the kind of temper which makes people—and more especially men—go the longest, dearest way on purpose, and gives them some interior satisfaction of the kind which arises from being able to blame others for these self-inflicted aggravations of an initial injury. Larry’s state of mind was in no sense Heinrich’s fault, but Heinrich pined and wilted terribly after his departure.

“I shall have that Hinerik to tea to cheer him up a bit,” said V.V., and Gillian, who admired nothing in V.V.’s rather featureless character so ardently as her real kindliness, went off to Seaford, comforted by the idea of the comfort these two apparently friendless beings would give one another.

Gillian’s errand was not of her seeking. On the day of Larry’s departure she had received a letter in an imitation less exact than her own of Old Winona’s hand. It was dated, “Marine Hotel, Seaford,” and ran:

“MY DEAR GILLIAN,

Miss Macfarlane is very kindly acting as my amanuensis to-day,
and I am asking her to tell you that I have come down here on a
matter of important private business on which I should very much
appreciate the benefit of your advice.

The matter concerns a little gift which I mean to make to our
dear Lilac on her return from her wedding-journey in three
months’ time, and as time presses I shall be glad if you will
come down here for a week or two as soon as your classes at the
Polytechnicum are over.

I enclose a small cheque to cover the necessary expenses, and
remain,

Yours, affectionately,
WINONA BOTTOMLEY.

P.S.—The car will meet you at Lewes.”

“Goodness!” said Gillian when she had read this epistle through twice, “what ever _can_ she be doing? She can’t have gone down to Seaford to knit a shawl for Lilac, and I’ve never known her make anything else. I wonder if she’s mad. The Macfarlane in office has evidently not been able to persuade her that I’m going to her own revered de Stormonts’, which goes on for ever like that dreadful brook, and has no terms. I think I’d better go at once.”

So she telegraphed to the Marine Hotel, called on Jane and excused herself from an engagement to sit to her for that portrait of the Changeling which Larry had never painted and which Jane was now going to attempt, and with the zealous aid of V.V., who washed and ironed odds and ends of ribbon and lace and packed them for her with the utmost delicacy and precision, got herself started for Seaford within twenty-four hours of receiving the summons.

The car met her at Lewes. This simple phrase but poorly conveys the experience of being met by Old Winona’s car. It began on the platform, where two startlingly liveried menials flanked a bowing stationmaster, drawn up, unfortunately, in front of the Pullman in which Gillian had not thought it necessary to travel, although the cheque for expenses had allowed margins in every possible direction. It continued, in processional splendour, with Tompkins bearing her ticket and umbrella before, and Wilkins carrying her reasonably new suit-case and her quite unreasonably battered hat-box behind, and it ended, much to the delight of an admiring crowd, when the car, a Rolls-Royce of the largest size, mistook the road and, with three men to direct and prevent its ways, had to back down one steep and cobbled hill and up another before it could find a space sufficient to turn round in. The ways out of Lewes from the railway station are almost as difficult as if they had been expressly planned for the bewilderment of haughty and companioned chauffeurs.

Miss Macfarlane, a new one, met her in the hall. She was a thin and serious girl who had not done very well at Newnham and was finding private-secretaryship more remunerative but less straightforward than the scholastic career for which Nature had planned and Education had almost fitted her. On the way up to Lady Bottomley’s private suite Gillian gathered that things were in a bad way. “And I am afraid,” said the Miss Macfarlane with depression, “that the fault is partly mine. I had hoped to inspire Lady Bottomley with a wish to visit the châteaux of the Loire herself. Instead of which we are having frightful trouble down here.”

Some of the trouble, it appeared, had been due to the presence at the Marine Hotel of another Belfast baronet’s widow, a lady on a visit of supervision to an only son in a preparatory school who had broken a quantity of bones in a riding accident. This lady, in virtue of her sorrows, had claimed the suite, the best suite on the first floor, for which Lady Bottomley had negotiated.

The air was still surcharged with the fury of the storm which had raged over the claims. Finally, Old Winona had won, on a point of precedence. “Ours is the earlier creation,” she had announced. Sir John had been raised to the title in 1906. And Lady Eaton, whose husband had had to wait until 1908 before his merits had been formally acknowledged by a dilatory government, had admitted her just defeat. The other matter, however, was more serious.

The glories of Chenonceaux and Blois, the architectural resplendency of Amboise, the marvels of Tours for which the mild young secretary had a deep enthusiasm, had been displayed before her employer in so many photographs, diagrams, and literary panegyrics that they had gone to the poor lady’s head.

“She wants,” said Miss Macfarlane, “to have bits of them copied into a kind of composite villa here, and Sir Edwin Lutyens has just refused to do it for her. She will tell you the rest herself.”

Gillian did not hear the rest at once, for she had been assigned a suite of her own, bedroom, bathroom and sitting-room, on the second floor, and, having a horror of lifts in descent, had wandered for some time along unfamiliar corridors all carpeted in the same monstrous pattern before she found the rooms Lady Bottomley now triumphantly occupied.

“My dear,” said Old Winona, who, by way of emphasizing the difference between an hotel and her own home, was wearing an imposing bonnet although she had not been out that day, “I am glad you have been able to get away so soon. Do you know anything of architecture?”

“Very little,” said Gillian.

“Socially, I mean,” said Old Winona.

This was difficult, but Gillian was able to gather that what was required of her was information about architects of a more docile temperament than those of riper years or wider fame were proving themselves to possess. Young men, willing to carry out the plans which a lavish and devoted mother was making for her children’s dwelling; impecunious young men, in short, were what the lady sought.

“I have,” said Old Winona, “already purchased the house, an admirable one: south aspect, modern sanitation, large grounds, within easy, but not too easy, reach of the sea. Children,” said Old Winona with a long, prospective look through the closed windows and across the waters of the Channel, “children have been known to escape from their nurses, however numerous.”

“But Lilac——” Gillian began, intending to point out that Lilac, though not yet of age, could swim quite well.

“Not yet—not quite yet, I dare say.” Lilac’s mother-in-law was evidently hopeful, possibly even better informed of the future than Gillian. “But though she has many years before her, there is no time to be lost.”

Dinner was coming up processionally, borne in courses by a staff visibly awed by what had happened during the installation of the occupant of the first-floor suite, before Gillian had heard the whole story. The house intended as a surprise for Lilac and Toby was not to be destroyed. It was a large, three-storied affair, gabled and balconied with terraces to its garden, and Old Winona’s idea was to have replicas of as many of the distinguishing features of the châteaux in question as could possibly be crowded together affixed to the building, so that in none of its aspects it should fail to remind the beholder of at least one, and often of several of them. And, having been told by one famous architect that he thanked her but that, praise God, he was not a reincarnation of Viollet-le-Duc, and by another that nothing would induce him to consider her project, she had applied, very feebly seconded by Miss Macfarlane, to the local builders and found that they simply could not begin to understand her idea. So, knowing that Gillian lived in Chelsea and was therefore surrounded by people who drew and planned for the upper classes, Old Winona had decided to leave the problem in her hands.

Gillian sat up for an hour with the Miss Macfarlane, after the old lady had gone to bed, trying to think of a way to save Lilac from the consequences of the secretary’s plot for foreign travel. Nothing, of that Gillian was quite sure, nothing would induce Lilac to live at Seaford for any part of her time, just as not even the occasion to select her own models would have moved Old Winona abroad without anything less than six months’ preparation.

“You might just as well have told her about Ludwig of Bavaria and gone on touring round all those crazy castles next summer,” she said to Miss Macfarlane, who was horrified, not caring for the idea of visiting any places that were not known to be famous for good art and authenticated history.

But, two days later, having seen the house, which had been originally built as a school, and having interviewed the puzzled builder, Gillian had an inspiration.

Jane would be quite equal to constructing a model of such a fantasia as Old Winona desired; and superintending Jane might distract the old lady for a time and would help to preserve the builder’s sanity which her direction, supplemented by portfolios of photographs and engravings, had severely shaken. And, so long as the house itself remained untouched until Toby and Lilac returned to take up their own responsibilities, it could be put into the market again; whereas, once improved according to plan, it must remain for ever planted on the Bottomley family, only too probably to be known, as other less comprehensive outrages had been known in other places, as Bottomley’s Folly.

The idea pleased Old Winona, and it enchanted Jane, who came down for two days and went back to London with a suit-case full of plans and photographs.

Gillian stayed on at Seaford for another week, bathing and walking over the cliffs towards Cuckmere Haven and up and down the Seven Sisters all morning, and relieving Miss Macfarlane after tea, and going on to Glynde when Lady Bottomley abandoned the Marine Hotel in order to open a bazaar in Belfast in the first week in July.

When she got back to London she found Jane and Mr. Quist fully occupied in modelling, painting, and varnishing such a doll’s-house as had never been made in any studio. Gillian looked in at the workshop on her way home for Victoria.

“Delirious, ain’t it?” said Jane, “and not a staircase, not a gargoyle without documentary evidence of its origin in other brains than ours. The colour I’ll admit is often my own. I’ve never faltered more or less in my great task of happiness since I started this. What a peach, what a queen, your divine Winona! How sumptuous in outlook! A ton of plasticine in the yard and everything handsome about me. I’m having a painting-blouse embroidered with bicycles to keep my mind from being puffed up, and you’ve got to come and sit to me like a ghost at twilight, to prevent my spirit from being snuffed out.”

“I shall have to sit with V.V. at twilight for a bit now,” said Gillian. “I’ve been away for three weeks and she’ll expect me to make it up to her at first.”

“You’ll find V.V. otherwise engaged,” said Jane darkly.

“Goodness!” said Gillian. “Engaged?”

“To the unfortunate being she will call Hinerik,” said Jane.

“But she must be years older.”

“She is. Ten at least. She would be.”

“What ever made them do it?” wondered Gillian.

“Hadn’t you better ask them?” said Jane. “It might be love, you know.”

II

Heinrich was extremely pleased about his engagement. He wore a “Mizpah” ring, which V.V. had given him, and a rather small Trilby hat which he had disinterred from some forgotten cupboard himself. Arrayed in these additions to his toilet, he called formally on Gillian that evening. V.V. was not at home. She was working late in Bond Street all that week, renewing the youth of the fashionable clientele before its final exodus from town.

“I have taken ze responsibility for zis life,” he explained, as though V.V. were another cat or sparrow. “V.V. has never enough money till ze end of ze munz. For ze last two, tree, four, five days she does eat nozzing.”

“Heinrich! What ever do you mean?” Gillian was startled. It had never occurred to her to inquire into V.V.’s finances, but all sorts of instances crowded into her mind at Heinrich’s words.

“I mean what I say. V.V. has not enough money for food for four weeks, only for tree. In ze force week she starve. On ze first day of ze monz she have fresh money. Zen she eat. So I marry her.” Heinrich was delighted with the adequacy of this solution.

“Have you got married while I was away?”

“Not yet. It is to come. Now we food on love.”

This was beyond Gillian. “Will she live with you and Larry in the studio when you do marry?” she asked, turning to practical matters for relief.

“No. I give ze studio to Larry for himself. V.V. and I we go in many countries. Countries where it is warm. Italy and Africa and Hindustan,” said Heinrich.

“You’ll have to wait then,” said Gillian with reference to the golden liberty which was known to lie behind the clauses of Heinrich’s uncle’s will.

“A little, yes. But not so much time as before. I go to my ozzer onkel, and tell to him zat now I marry. And he say I may have some money out of ze will, from him. He is not quite a good man—but there is in him a little goodness sometimes. I sign him a paper so that he have twice as much out of ze will by and then. And I get sree hundred pounds for each year till ze will is over.”

Unversed though she was in the ethics of finance, Gillian had a distant feeling that Heinrich’s uncle was being the not quite good man Heinrich had admitted him to be in the question of that other uncle’s will on which his future depended. But Heinrich had done his best for V.V.

And he looked taller and braver, more nearly a man, and rather distressingly a little less like a fairy than he had seemed to her till now.

“Does V.V. want to marry you?” she asked.

“Oh, very much.”

In the dark of her mind Gillian felt a jealous pang. V.V. then had forgotten her.

“I go now to take her to dinner, in a restaurant: proper dinner,” said Heinrich impressively, “wiz prrawns.”

* * * * *

Late that night there was a furtive knock at Gillian’s bedroom door. Gillian called “Come in,” wondering who could be there. It was V.V. She stood in the doorway smiling, excited.

“Oh, you darling,” she said in a hungry whisper, “oh, you darling.”

“V.V.! how did you get in? Gordon locked up hours ago.”

“I had your house-key copied while you were away,” said V.V., and did not wait to hear how Gillian took this announcement, but strode across the room and knelt by the bedside, thrusting her long, strong, bony arms in under the bed-clothes and dragging Gillian to the edge of the bed in an almost angry hug.

Gillian struggled out of the straining clasp and sat up, pulling the ends of her long plaits from under the sheet and shaking out the crumpled bows of blue ribbon with which they were tied.

“V.V., how thrilling!”

“Isn’t it! isn’t it!” said V.V., burying her face in Gillian’s shoulder. Her hair smelt of brilliantine—a sweet, heavy smell like scented-geranium leaves when you pinch them—and of fresh Virginia-cigarette smoke, and she had been drinking liqueur. She was shaking all over and Gillian could feel the quick, pushing beat of her heart vibrate in the wire of the stretched spring-mattress of the little iron bedstead.

“Goodness!” said Gillian, putting one arm round V.V.’s trembling shoulder. “Are you as happy as all that?”

“Of course I am, you darling, aren’t you?”

“Well, no! You can’t expect me to be quite as excited as you are—or as Heinrich is.”

“Hinerik? What’s he got to do with it?” V.V. sat back on her heels and frowned. “I’m excited because I’ve got you back again. You know that, you monkey.”

Gillian felt uncomfortable. She had not expected this pudicity in V.V.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I thought you knew I knew. Heinrich told me. So did Jane.”

“Oh, that,” said V.V., “that’s Hinerik’s funeral.”

“I thought it was to be your wedding.”

“P’r’aps. Some day. But we won’t bother about silly old weddings now I’ve got you back again.”

“Get the basket-chair and a cushion and come and talk to me a minute,” said Gillian, clasping her hands round her knees outside the bed-clothes and preparing to conduct an inquisition. “You tell me such a lot about your life, all in bits, and I can’t ever put them quite together in any real plan.”

“Oh, mine’s not been a planny life,” said V.V., dragging the chair and cushion close to the bedside.

“Well, never mind about the whole of it now,” said Gillian, “but try, if you can, to tell me what Heinrich meant about you not having proper meals some weeks.”

“Oh yes.” V.V. was frank as always, with a baffling and allusive frankness that more often than not darkened the situation she attempted to illuminate. “My brother, you know. He’s not quite all there—not mad you know, but sometimes he drinks a little, and sometimes he goes out and paints the town red, and then he can’t send me the whole of my allowance.”

“I didn’t know you had an allowance. I thought you worked in Bond Street.”

“Oh, that’s a debt. The rent for the flat at Ostend. I’ll be paid by October and then I shan’t go to silly old Jacynthe’s any more.”

“But V.V., if your brother is like that he oughtn’t to have the money to control. You ought to have it and send him his allowance.”

“Yes, I know. But he’s the eldest, and a man. He’s the trustee too, but I don’t like him. If I marry Hinerik and he can get hold of his money we’ll put my brother into a home and he can have it all.”

“How did Heinrich find out?”

“Oh, he just came to dinner and there wasn’t any. Old Mrs. Gordon wouldn’t send any up because I’d not paid my book. She’s generally quite good about waiting, but when she came up on Saturday with the books, I was unpacking some bath-salts and she seemed to think I could have done without them.”

“Oh, V.V., that’s why you’re so thin.”

“Oh, I was always bony, even”—V.V. did not intend to be enigmatic—“even at Ostend.”

And then she yawned and Gillian said she was sleepy too, and V.V. kissed her and went over to her own flat.

III

“V.V.,” said Gillian, “I can’t make out why your bedroom is so different from this room.”

They were sitting in the large room at Number Thirty-Six, and Gillian was contrasting its considered effects, seen by daylight to be hastily contrived, with the muslin and pink ribbons of V.V.’s bedroom, the outer of the two communicating rooms that completed the set, into the inner of which Gillian had never penetrated.

“Oh,” said V.V., “this is all Jacky’s furniture. She’s on tour, Cape Town and Australia. She won’t be back till Christmas. She was very good to me when I was down on my luck.”

“But you mayn’t sublet flats in the Club, or be away for more than three months at a time.”

“We haven’t sublet. We live together. But it’s mostly her furniture. Hers and Peter’s.”

“Who’s Peter?” Gillian was conscious of a growing irritation as each new woman with a man’s name emerged from the horde of V.V.’s acquaintances.

“Oh, Peter’s Smithy. I was with her before I met Jacky. She’s married now. She won’t ask for her furniture because we quarrelled and she doesn’t want Evelyn to know that she lived with me. She never told him that. He was in the same company on tour and he never came to our flat.”

Gillian did not pursue Smithy and Evelyn into the seclusion of their matrimonial relationships. She was not particularly interested in their vague and distant passage through V.V.’s life and she was beginning to dread the copious and unilluminating anecdote with which V.V. replied to any polite manifestation of concern for the fortunes of these drifting adventurers.

V.V. was polishing her manicure-tools. She sat on a low seat by the table, a duster on her knees and her case of instruments, emptied of its contents, lying by them on an outspread sheet of the _Daily Mail_. The sun, shining on her bent head, brought out chestnut lights in the waves of her dark hair and showed her pale skin, yellowed and sallow below her ears where her neck had not been covered with the fine, perfumed powder she always used.

Gillian sat in the window darning her socks. Her attention was absorbed in the in-and-out in-and-out of her short darning-needle, as it drove its way backwards and forwards through the warp and woof of the thread which stretched across the painted glass of the china darning-egg in the heel of her brown stocking. There was something very satisfying to Gillian about a good large darn. It gave the stocking, which had looked so desperate and uncomfortable with a ragged hole in it, a cared-for and rather interesting appearance of having survived adventure and being prepared for more, and it was, of all necessary mending, the most interesting to do, surpassing the sewing on of buttons, always a tiresome business, especially when, as usually happened, the buttons didn’t quite match and the strong cotton was missing.

She was in V.V.’s flat for the day because her own was given over to the workmen who were installing a telephone in Number Seven. This was a gift of Lady Bottomley’s, who, on several occasions, had wished to telephone to Gillian without success for the sufficient reason that there was no telephone at the Club.

The innovation was being showered upon her in recognition of the donor’s sense of the services Gillian had rendered in introducing Jane Bird. It was also a valedictory beneficence. Having learnt by one of those rich coincidences which do occur even in the most heavily sheltered lives, that the Royal Princess who was to open the next bazaar on her horizon had just returned from visiting the châteaux of the Loire, Old Winona had decided that what Royalty had done she could do also, and Miss Macfarlane, her days heavy with time-tables, hotel tariffs and interviews with Cook’s clerks and couriers, was realizing the profound sadness of having a long-treasured dream come true (as it so often comes true in this trying world) more than a little wrong.

Jane had gone with them, but not Gillian. This was entirely Gillian’s own fault, for an invitation so pressing that it had almost the force of a command, had been issued to her as soon as the decision to go at all had been reached. And she had refused, alleging that the three weeks already spent at Seaford must be made up before the Secretarial School closed for a fortnight in August. Old Winona, who respected a business reason, had acquiesced insisting, however, that the occasion must be marked in some way, and choosing the telephone as its monument.

To Miss Macfarlane (her real name Gillian discovered was Bronx-Prittlewell, and this did seem an excuse for going on calling her Macfarlane)—to the harassed secretary Gillian confessed that the prospect of three weeks’ pilgrimage from one best hotel to another in a party consisting of Old Winona, her maid, a courier, three chauffeurs, two cars, as well as Jane and herself, was so asphyxiating that she felt as if they would all be smothered if she, Gillian, added herself and her luggage to the caravan. But, in her heart of hearts, she knew that she would have endured the restraints and adored the enjoyments of such a pilgrimage with the utmost indifference to one and abandonment to the other if it had not meant separating herself again from V.V.

V.V. herself had been quite unscrupulous about it, and had declared that she would not look after William if Gillian went to France. She had not looked after William while Gillian was at Seaford. He had gone down to the basement for the period of Gillian’s absence, on a visit to the Gordons who looked upon him with mingled admiration and terror as being “almost a Christian.” And, Christian or no, William had come back with Mabel’s sniff and Mr. Gordon’s cough and Mrs. Gordon’s raucous cry of “’Arry!” (this being the title by which Mr. Gordon was known on the hearth) added to his repertoire, and was in consequence rather more than Gillian could bear at times. For William was always immensely proud of any new phrases he had acquired, and had sniffed and coughed and summoned ’Arry with penetrating distinctness and with reiterations which would not be quenched for at least half an hour every time Gillian had come into the flat since her return. She had vowed that she would never go away again unless either V.V. or Heinrich were left behind in charge of him. But Heinrich had gone to Bristol for a Musical Festival in which the orchestra to which he belonged was competing, and V.V. thrust her own deserted state as well as her refusal to harbour William into the scale when Gillian had hesitated over the invitation from Knightsbridge.

So Gillian saw the expedition start without her and remained at home to solace V.V. and to strive to soften William’s memories of kitchen life.

On this particular Saturday morning he was entertaining the telephone men with the whole of his repertoire and Gillian, having warned them that everything they said would be repeated by the bird, hoping in that way to keep William pure from the grosser profanities of proletarian expletive, darned her stockings and listened to V.V., and prayed that William would not and could not learn to make a noise like telephone men hammering telephone nails into the well-built and very resisting walls of the Mordaunt Club.

V.V. prattled on, cleaning the blades of the tiny knives and slender scissors in her outfit, taking minute stains out of the ivory file-handles and the pushing and picking instruments, fitting fresh chamois leather on the large wooden buffers for nail-polishing, testing the screw tops and the glass stoppers of some bottles and putting fresh corks into others. She worked without much method but with fastidious care. Everything about V.V. was fastidiously cared for, immaculate, crisp or shining according to its kind, from the glass of the window-panes in her flat, which sparkled every day of the year as the windows of Gillian’s rooms only sparkled for two or three days after the quarterly cleaning, to the Japanese paper napkins which replaced table-linen in her domain and which she used extravagantly and burned after every meal. V.V. might go without food in the weeks when her allowance ran short, but she would not go without soap and hot water.

“I wonder,” said Gillian, “if it’s eating so little or washing so much that makes you so thin.”

“I ’xpec’ it’s a bit of both,” said V.V., whose speech was far more slovenly than her person; and she rambled on into a fresh tangle of autobiography in which Smithy and the landlady of some theatrical lodgings in Wrexham and a box of Keating’s powder all played equally ambiguous parts.

“What I can’t understand,” said Gillian as the story finally lost itself in a species of delta with V.V. sitting on Smithy’s dress-basket all one Sunday morning in the cloak-room of a Welsh railway station whose name V.V. kept, quite unsuccessfully, trying to retrieve from a long list of railway stations she had waited in, “what I keep on trying to get you to explain, V.V., is why if you’ve never been an actress you travelled about so much with touring companies. Were you really never on the stage?”

“Never quite,” replied V.V., “I walked on once in a play Jackie was in, _The Notorious Mrs. Something_ I think it was, or else _When Knights Were Bold_, I’m not sure, but I was too tall for the clothes and they got a girl the next night. I was sharing Peter’s rooms then. She was ill and couldn’t afford things, and my being there helped. It’s cheaper travelling two.”

“You’re a kind creature,” said Gillian.

V.V. changed the subject.

“Come along, Gillian, put your horrid old stockings away and I’ll do your hands for you.”

“Wait one minute. I must just put one more thread through this darn to make it tight. It’s such a beauti_full_ darn, V.V., worth having a blistered toe for. I walked that toe through in Richmond Park on Friday evening, seeing the full moon with deer, and I’ve darned it all into the hole again, moon, and mist over the lake, and an owl that hooted and flew—no, it didn’t fly, what is the proper word for the way owls make no noise when they go through the space in front of your nose at night?”

“How you do talk!” said V.V., filling the dragon bowl with warm soapsuds and a little sponge, “make haste or we shan’t get both hands done before lunchtime.”

So Gillian put away her darning and pushed up the sleeves of her cotton frock. She lay back among the gay cushions of Jackie’s Russian-ballet room which V.V. piled one by one into the big arm-chair by the window, with consummate knowledge of where you did and where you didn’t need a cushion to be. And, one hand laid on the clean towel on V.V.’s knee while she dabbled in the warm, scented soapsuds in the green-dragon bowl with the other, Gillian forgot the flatness of V.V.’s voice, the baldness of her narrative style, forgot that she could never talk to V.V. about the shape of a word, or the meaning of a colour, or the way people took in life, but could only ask her questions to which V.V. never could give coherent answers. She could let herself be petted and caressed and flattered and told how each of her fingers as it passed under file and cutter and emery board to the ultimate polishing, exceeded any finger that V.V. had ever polished before in the beauty of its shape, the fineness of its skin, the rising of the half-moons at the base of its nail and the colour of the tip. It was all nonsense, of course, nonsense of the worst kind, but it was extraordinarily soothing on a hot midsummer day at the end of a long week of shorthand and typing, card-indexing and tables of precedence, and the most preposterous lectures on how to address envelopes to persons of title, it was balmy and cooling to lie back in heavenly comfort and let your mind be vitiated by it for an hour. Gillian would have been very lonely after Lilac’s wedding if she had not found V.V.

IV

They sat on through the hot afternoon drowsing in easy chairs by the open windows, the green-and-orange sunblinds drawn so low that, of all the world outside, only the glitter of the sun on the river could be seen under the rims of the sunblinds. Three tawny roses in a slim rainbow-glass vase dropped their petals hour by hour on the black table under the mirror and filled the still air of the room with their breath; the fragrance coming and going in obedience to that mystery of a flower’s life which gives its odour a rhythm and makes it rise and fall by a law we do not know.

It was too hot to darn any more socks, and her hands, sleek and languid, with the scent of V.V.’s unguents still hanging around them, lay idle in Gillian’s lap, the milky opal in her mother’s engagement-ring which she always wore, gleaming in the tranquil light with almost as rich a lustre as the over-polished nail of the finger on which it shone. One of V.V.’s sharp little knives had slipped and cut into the flesh at the side of Gillian’s right-hand little finger, and the smarting of this infinitesimal wound was pain enough to prevent her falling completely asleep. But V.V., tired and happy, was sleeping, her mouth a little open and her head fallen sideways against a purple cushion; and, as she slept, she gave occasional soft, puffing snores, like the engine of a doll’s train going uphill.

With eyes closed and sagging mouth, V.V.’s face lost the light and glow which in her waking hours made it so difficult to realize that she was not as intelligent as she was vivacious. Gillian, watching her, saw what Larry’s trained eye had taken in at a glance—the abnormal fading away of the jaw-bone, which, after lifting the chin away from the long, thin column of the neck, disappeared into the cheek, giving to the lower part of the side face a flat, unmodelled look. The nose too, long and blunt, with wide, unwinged nostrils, was unfinished, almost embryonic in its failure to achieve any dignity of form. And yet the rest of her; the wide flat shoulders; the thin flanks, and long, harmoniously proportioned and swift-moving hands and arms; the slim, straight legs with that moving line from thigh to knee which was to Gillian the first element of grace in any human beauty, belonged to an inbred fineness, an inherited civilization which should have had its corresponding signal in her mind. Gillian had searched the more eagerly for this confirmation of excellence in V.V., as she grew increasingly aware of her own enslavement to the infatuating spell which the thought, far more than the actual presence of the elder woman had established upon her life. It was galling to her dignity, and contrary to an ascetic strain in her nature to admit that V.V.’s predominance was due to the eager adoration, the curiously maternal devotion she professed and practised. Gillian, it is true, darned V.V.’s stockings and had, since she learned of V.V.’s ways with her allowance, made it her business to see that V.V. had three good meals a day, but then she liked the act of darning, and nobody could be reasonably comfortable themselves with a fellow being starving within earshot. The rest of their relationship consisted of services offered; daily, almost hourly oblations by V.V. It was V.V. who supplemented the duties of Mabel and her rotating colleagues in all sorts of details for which Gillian had no time. The Bluebelling of William’s cage was symbolic of her whole attitude to Gillian’s surroundings. Gillian seldom had cut-flowers in vases because she could not bear to see flowers die, and so spent more time than she could spare changing their water and clipping their stalks when she did have any in her rooms. V.V. kept flowers fresh in water as clear as plate glass in all three of Gillian’s rooms, and so stimulated a tiny dwarf rose-bush which Gillian had nurtured for several years, by giving it packets of some patent forcing compound that it bloomed and withered in a fortnight.

Once or twice when Gillian had dined or gone to a play with Stephen and Sophie, V.V. had sat up till after midnight with hot water for her to wash in, and clean brushes to brush her long hair out before she went to bed. On hot evenings V.V. produced ice for the Club lemonade; on rainy afternoons she had tea waiting when Gillian came back from her classes tired and cross. V.V.’s hours in Jacynthe’s beauty-parlour appeared elastic; they had interfered with some of Heinrich’s arrangements, but Gillian remembered with a startled thought as she brooded sleepily in the deep chair, they never prevented V.V. from being at hand when she could do anything for Gillian. Where, Gillian wondered with a pang of remorse, did V.V. get the ice they had had so often since her return from Seaford? How had she found money to fill both flats with flowers ever since April? V.V. must have gone without many more meals than Heinrich had counted, if her brother had drunk or spent her allowance very often in the past three months. Gillian could not feel honestly grateful to V.V. for these supererogatory ministrations. They were more than the services of common friendship, but they checked rather than encouraged the unique response she made to some other quality than the slavish activity in V.V. That quality was undeniably a physical one. Gillian had suffered V.V.’s exaggerated and frequent embraces with a docility which had surprised her in herself, and lately she had found herself returning them with a queer thrill of satisfaction. It was rather wonderful to hear the thump of V.V.’s heart through the thin silk of her blouse when she kissed you; to feel her cool, strong hands on your shoulders and to smell the mixed aromatic confusion of scents from her hair and her face-powder; from the soap she washed with and the paste she used for her shining, greedy-looking teeth; from the creams and lotions with which she kept her hands in order. V.V. did not reek of these things. She was almost morbidly clean and dainty in her person, as in all her surroundings. Her clothes were worn but spotless, shabby with much cleaning, limp from many laundries—you had to come very near to her to know that blended, exciting smell. Gillian knew it well now. It was V.V.’s most intimate secret; something she could not know herself, even when she imparted it. And yet it was not a secret after all. It must have been shared between all sorts of people, the Jackies and Dickies, the Peters and Brownies and Smithys—they must all have known it in their day. And that mysterious woman, the one figure in all the picaresque vagabondage to whom V.V. never gave a name, the shadowy friend with whom she had gone, oh, but quite years ago, to live in that little flat in Ostend for which she still owed some one rent, had she too kissed V.V. and breathed her scented warmth? Gillian was wide awake now, her mind alive with pictures and speculation. V.V. must have been quite young in those days. She was only just thirty now and there were at least ten years between the Mordaunt Club and the home she had left for ever to go to Ostend. For some reason V.V. didn’t seem to think needed explanation, her father had refused to let her return to him and her sister when she wanted to come back. It wasn’t as if she had run away with a man Gillian reflected. Fathers, she knew, were entitled to be harsh when their daughters did that, and the partner of their flight either could not or would not, or, in any case, did not, marry them. But V.V. and her horse and the borzoi she now kept at Epping had come to England, but not to V.V.’s home, when the Ostend adventure ended, and V.V. was working at Jacynthe’s to get herself free from a debt—though to whom she owed the money and for what and why and where the woman was through whom she came to be in debt at all, Gillian could even now not understand. It was all so overlaid with the procession of other women and their affairs which trailed along the more immediate past of V.V.’s life. She had clearly loved them all in her way. But not for long. Did she, Gillian wondered, always love immoderately, with lavish bestowal of material proofs of her love and so wear herself and them out? V.V.’s face as she sank deeper into sleep was unlined, but it had shadows on its imperfect beauty. Her waking face was always pathetic rather than tragic in its shallow ardour; its expression of her unbridled desire to give; but when the vivid evidence of that outgoing impulse was shrouded and her face was at rest, the shadows could be seen, resting lightly, where time and change might have driven furrows in a more resisting field. Even the catastrophe to that friendship for which she had left her father’s house and had not even seen him before he died, had left no mark on her smooth forehead. Could one love lightly and violently too? And many times? Gillian knew that V.V. loved her with a kind of obsession now—and there was Heinrich—V.V. loved him too. Of course she did. He was away just now, which was why she had so much time for Gillian. And she was missing him, missing his love-making. It must, thought Gillian, throwing a shy, hurried thought after an idea which had skimmed across her mind like a swallow in flight, it must be very touching to be made love to by Heinrich. Rather like the flattering, miraculous advances a squirrel had once made to her when she was quite a little girl and had spent a whole day being most happily lost in a wood. Heinrich had made love to V.V. like that, and V.V. had kissed him and thrust her scented fingers into his hair and laughed in her throat, and he had felt her heart beating and smelt her spicy odour and had kissed her softly and whispered to her as though she were a mouse or a sparrow or their poor, dull, little tortoiseshell cat. It must have been like that. It must have been very sweet and wonderful. And V.V. was missing it all. How should she not miss such a thing, she whose whole happiness lay in demonstration of that kind? That was why her hands were so often round Gillian’s neck in these days, and why her clear eyes, hazel-brown, black-ringed, lovely eyes, looked at her with such an overwhelmingly dewy appeal. Gillian felt the tight little core of resistance to V.V. which had been hard in her heart, melt into pity and love. Dear V.V., kind, lavish, squandering V.V.! Why should Gillian stiffen herself against so warm, so human, so fragrant an adoration as this transferred and wistful passion? “And how much nicer for Heinrich, and safer, to have me occupying till he comes,” said Gillian, coming to the surface of her reverie in a bubble of laughter. “V.V. must love somebody aloud all the time. Suppose she’d fixed on Larry or some other man? Heinrich would have minded that.”

And then, suddenly, she remembered why Larry had gone away. It was much easier not to have love-affairs, unless you were rich like Toby and could marry them at once. Would waiting till Heinrich’s money came out of his uncle’s will and make him really rich, put enmity between him and V.V.? She hoped not. Heinrich would take enmity so seriously. And V.V. wasn’t serious about anything but kissing; and kissing, after all, isn’t a serious matter.

There was a sudden knock at the door. V.V. woke with a start and sat up in her long chair, putting up her hands to arrange her perfectly tidy hair with the instinctive gesture of one whose personal appearance is her constant thought.

“Who ever can that be?” said V.V.

The knock was repeated and seemed to emerge from a background of more complicated though muffled noises.

“Oh! _Come_ in!” shouted V.V. through a yawn.

The door was pushed open and Mabel’s voice, carried on the clamour that rushed in, as a soloist sings with the accompanying orchestra, was heard delivering a message.

“Please, Miss Armstrong, Mrs. Barraclough says it’s William again, and will you go over to your own flat and see to him.”

William’s voice certainly could be heard in the din; but it was not its chief ingredient. It rose and fell, tossed about like a cork on the surface of the flood of sound that stormed in through the open door from the landing and from the courtyard beyond the landing window. The noise was the noise of many pianos in conflict over one piece of music. From the floor below Number Thirty-Six but from the flat on the courtyard side there rose the Ballade in A Flat, played loudly, heavily, horribly, with steady thumpings and the dreadful vibrations of an instrument on the loud pedal of which an unrelenting foot is pressed without lifting.

“Goodness!” said Gillian, “that’s the new tenant at Twenty-Nine. Mrs. Barraclough told me she’d had a piano left her by a friend. Do you think it’s driven her mad?”

“It’s driving the Countess madder,” V.V. grinned as she leaned through her scullery window and looked out over the courtyard with Gillian at her side.

The Countess, her window wide to the afternoon, was, in her turn and with enormous _brio_, rendering Chopin with all the assurance of a compatriot and all the calculated resonance of a powerful mistress of the instrument. Neither in _tempo_, nor in the exact place each performer had reached in her interpretation was there any pretence by either player at synchronizing the two performances. They were intended to clash and they clashed. That William should have joined in the din was both natural and comic; but a touch of pathos was added to the conflict by Mrs. Middleton, who, with sturdy perseverance in well-doing, was pedalling away at the harmonium she usually only employed on Sunday evenings and, all stops drawn, was attempting to sound the note, not so much of Christian forbearance as of holy awe, by sending out the tune of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” in a series of simple but heartfelt chords.

“I don’t think,” said Gillian, sobbing with laughter as she raced across the courtyard and up the ten flights of steps to her own flat, “I really do _not_ think that William is to be blamed for this.”

But William, who had felt lonely since the telephone men had gone home at noon, was making up for several hours of silence. Refreshed by sleep, and strengthened by a pickled onion which one of the workmen had shared with him at the lunch interval, he was in full song and in no mind to stop for anybody. Even when the instrumental contest had subsided until none but the missionary strains of good Mrs. Middleton’s harmonium continued to break the evening peace, William sang on. And, unfortunately the competition had stimulated his memory, from the dark and backward abysm of which he had dredged up fragments, taught him by the lewd sailors who had carried him from the tropic isle which saw his hatching. These he now scattered to the Mordaunt Club with piercing distinctness just as they came back to his undiscriminating mind. And presently, Mrs. Middleton, her pacific task accomplished, closed down the folding lid of her harmonium and took her feet from the red-carpeted pedals. And still William flung loud, obscene snatches from his marine repertory out of the double mufflings of green baize and Mexican blanket which Gillian had flung over his cage, hardly caring if she stifled William’s self so long as his songs were stifled too.

* * * * *

V.V. came up to dinner, with a muslin-covered basin of ice in one hand and _Pharaoh’s Book of Dreams_ in the other.

“All the old cats on my landing have written to complain about the new member,” she said.

“I’m sure the Countess will complain of William,” said Gillian, “and Mrs. Barraclough has warned me that if anyone does he’ll have to go.”

“Shall you let him? Poor old cocky.”

“No, of course not. I shall _take_ him away.”

“Oh, Gillian—where?”

“To wherever I go, of course.”

“You wouldn’t leave the Club!”

“I should have to.”

“And poor V.V. too?”

“Well, in any case you’ll leave when you marry, and besides, we don’t know yet that I’ll have to go.”

However, as they were drinking their coffee in the book-room Mabel came up, very full of importance, and delivered a letter from Mrs. Barraclough in which Gillian was given a final warning.

“I will overlook the matter this last time,” wrote Mrs. Barraclough, “as William, in spite of several representations made to me by some of the members, cannot be held entirely responsible for this afternoon’s disturbance, but I must be very plain with you that this _is_ the last time.”

“I’ll tell you what, darling,” said V.V., her eyes very bright in the cloud of cigarette smoke she blew about her head as she sat curled up in a corner of the chesterfield. “We’ll take a ducky little flat together on the Embankment past Beaufort Street and keep William in the window and buy those white china elephants you want so badly from the shop in King’s Road to go with him, and we can have a real bath with a geyser to it, and no more cans of hot water up from the kitchen or boiled on the Primus for our bedroom tub. Won’t that be lovely?”

“It would be very nice to have a flat with a proper bath and electric light in it,” said Gillian, “but, if you can find one, you’ll have to take Heinrich there, not me.”

“Oh, him,” said V.V. “He’s sent me a picture post-card, such a funny one. Look!”

Gillian, who had seen some of the coloured comic post-cards with which V.V. cheered her betrothed on his travels, looked rather anxiously at the response which V.V. drew from the pages of _Pharaoh’s Dream Book_. Heinrich, however, had not replied in kind. He had been over to Wells and had sent V.V. an enchanting picture of a head from one of the cornices.

“He’s not written anything on it but the address and put a little H down in one corner. It’s a dull sort of thing to get, I think,” said V.V. without rancour.

“I think it’s perfectly lovely,” said Gillian, “and it’s a little like you—the way the hair parts, and the eyebrows. That’s why he chose it.”

“Me! Like that ugly stone thing! I hope not,” said V.V., and she tore the card across and threw the pieces into Gillian’s waste-paper basket.

That night, when she had brushed out her hair and shown her how much more becoming two narrow ribbons of different colours threaded in the lace of her nightgown were than one wide one, V.V. pulled down her own hair, slipped out of her old silk dress, and, her thin arms looking very brown and dusky in contrast to her white underclothes, proceeded to sit cross-legged on the floor with a candle on either side of her, to interpret her own and Gillian’s dreams from the pages of the ragged book she had brought upstairs with her.

“You must take off all metal and one garment before you begin,” she explained. “We used to do it at Ostend.”

“V.V.! If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t do it here. I don’t want to know about my dreams, anyway. They are my own, and I know what they mean to me.”

“Oh, all right, ducky. I thought it would amuse you, pertickly as you said you’d dreamed of flowers, and that’s a lucky dream always.”

And gathering herself and her oracle together, she rose from the floor and, coming over to the dressing-table where Gillian was still braiding her hair, she kissed the back of her neck and the shoulders round which the blue and mauve ribbon she had threaded held the lace of Gillian’s nightgown together.

“You baby,” said V.V. “I should like to eat you.”

“V.V., if you don’t take care I shall knock your lovely front teeth out with my hair-brush,” said Gillian. “Go home now before Gordon locks up, and eat a bun instead.”

“I haven’t any buns, and you are being dreadfully cross to your V.V.,” she said. But she went home in quite a good temper, having once more reverted to the glories of the possible flat with gas and a geyser in it, which she was sure they could find without much trouble. V.V. seemed to know all there was to know about dear little flats.

“All the same,” said Gillian to herself when V.V. had gone, “I hope she won’t find one till Heinrich gets his money settled. I don’t think I could bear to live all day and all night in the same flat as dear V.V. I must have some lucid intervals. And there’s nothing lucid about her.”