December Love

by Robert Hichens

  CHAPTER I

  Miss Van Tuyn, enthroned among distinguished and definite Georgians in animbus of smoke, presently began to wonder what had become of a certainyoung man. Despite the clamour of voices about her, and the necessityfor showing incessantly that, although she had never bothered to paintcubist pictures or to write minor poetry, or even to criticize andappreciate meticulously those who did, she was cleverer than anyGeorgian of them all, her mind would slip away to Berkeley Square. Shehad, of course, noted young Craven's tacit resistance to the pressureof her desire, and her girlish vanity had resented it. But she hadremembered that even in these active days of the ruthless development ofthe ego a sense of politeness, of what is "due" from one human beingto another, still lingers in some perhaps old-fashioned bosoms. LadySellingworth was elderly. Craven might have thought it was his absoluteduty to protect her from the possible dangers lurking between RegentStreet and Berkeley Square. But as time went on, despite the salliesof Dick Garstin, the bloodless cynicisms of Enid Blunt, who countedinsolence as the chief of the virtues, the amorous sentimentalities ofthe Turkish refugee from Smyrna, whose moral ruin had been brought aboutby a few lines of praise from Pierre Loti, the touching appreciationsof prison life by Penitence Murray, and the voluble intellectuality ofThapoulos, Jennings and Smith the sculptor, Miss Van Tuyn began tofeel absent-minded. Her power of attraction was quite evidently beingseriously challenged. She was now certain--how could she not be--thatCraven had not merely gone to Number 18A, but had also "gone in."

  That was unnecessary. It was even very strange. For she, Beryl Van Tuyn,was at least thirty-six years younger than Lady Sellingworth.

  Miss Van Tuyn had an almost inordinate belief in the attraction youthholds for men. She had none of the hidden diffidence which had been sucha troubling element in Lady Sellingworth's nature. Nor was there any impwhich sat out of reach and mocked her. The violet eyes were satirical;but her satire was reserved for others, and was seldom or never directedagainst herself. She possessed a supply of self-assurance such asLady Sellingworth had never had, though for many years she had hadthe appearance of it. Having this inordinate belief and this strongself-assurance, having also youth and beauty, and remembering certainlittle things which seemed to her proof positive that Craven was quiteas susceptible to physical emotions as are most healthy and normalyoung men, she wondered why he had not returned to the Cafe Royal afterleaving Lady Sellingworth decorously at her door. He had known perfectlywell that she wished him to return. She had not even been subtle inconveying the wish to him. And yet he had defied it.

  Or perhaps Lady Sellingworth had defied it for him.

  Miss Van Tuyn was really as fond of Lady Sellingworth as she could be ofa woman. She felt strongly the charm which so many others had felt.Lady Sellingworth also interested her brain and aroused strongly thecuriosity which was a marked feature of her "make-up." She had calledLady Sellingworth a book of wisdom. She was also much influenced bydistinction and personal prestige. About the distinction of her friendthere could be no doubt; and the prestige of a once-famous woman of theworld, and of a formerly great beauty whose name would have its placein the annals of King Edward the Seventh, still lingered about thenow-faded recluse of Berkeley Square. But till this moment Miss Van Tuynhad never thought of Lady Sellingworth as a possible rival to herself.

  Even now when the idea presented itself to her she was inclined todismiss it as too absurd for consideration. And yet Craven had not comeback, although he must know she was expecting him.

  Perhaps Lady Sellingworth had made him go in against his will.

  Miss Van Tuyn remembered the photograph she had seen at Mrs. Ackroyd's.That woman had the face of one who was on the watch for new lovers. Anddoes a woman ever change? Only that very night she herself had said toCraven, as they walked from Soho to Regent Street, that she had a theoryof the changelessness of character. Or perhaps she had really meantof temperament. She had even said that she believed that the LadySellingworth of to-day was to all intents and purposes the LadySellingworth of yesterday and of the other days of her past. If thatwere so--and she had meant what she had said--then in the white-hairedwoman, who seemed now indifferent to admiration and leagues removed fromvanity, there still dwelt a woman on the pounce.

  Young Craven was very good-looking, and there was something interestingabout his personality. His casual manner, which was nevertheless verypolite, was attractive. His blue eyes and black hair gave him an almostromantic appearance. He was very quiet, but was certainly far from beingcold. And he undoubtedly understood a great deal, and must have had manyexperiences of which he never talked. Miss Van Tuyn was subtle enoughto know that he was subtle too. She had made up her mind to explore hissubtlety. And now someone else was exploring it in Berkeley Square.The line reappeared in her low white forehead, and her cult for LadySellingworth, like flannel steeped in water, underwent a shrinkingprocess. She felt strongly the indecency of grasping old age. Andthrough her there floated strange echoes of voices which had hauntedLady Sellingworth's youth, voices which had died away long ago inBerkeley Square, but which are captured by succeeding generations ofwomen, and which persist through the ages, finding ever new dwellings.

  The night was growing late, but the Georgians bitterly complained of theabsurdity of London having a closing time. The heat and the noiseseemed to swell with the passing of the hours, and a curious and anemicbrutality dawned with the midnight upon many of the faces around thenarrow tables. They looked at the same time bloodless and hard. Eyesfull of languor, or feverish with apparent expectation of some impendingadventure, stared fixedly through the smoke wreaths at other eyes in thedistance. Loud voices hammered through the murk. Foreheads beaded withperspiration began to look painfully expressive. It was as if all faceswere undressed.

  Dick Garstin, the famous painter, a small, slight, clean-shaven man, wholooked like an intellectual jockey with his powerful curved nose, thin,close-set lips, blue cheeks and prominent, bony chin, and who fosteredthe illusion deliberately by dressing in large-checked suits of asporting cut, with big buttons and mighty pockets, kept on steadilydrinking green chartreuse and smoking small, almost black, cigars. Hewas said to be made of iron, and certainly managed to combine perpetualdissipation with an astonishing amount of hard and admirable work. Hismodels he usually found--or so he said--at the Cafe Royal, and he madea speciality of painting the portraits of women of the demi-monde,of women who drank, or took drugs, who were morphia maniacs, or werevictims of other unhealthy and objectionable crazes. Nothing whollysane, nothing entirely normal, nothing that suggested cold water, freshair or sunshine, made any appeal to him. A daisy in the grass bored him;a gardenia emitting its strangely unreal perfume on a dung heap broughtall his powers into play. He was an eccentric of genius, and in hisstrangeness was really true to himself, although normal people were aptto assert that his unlikeness to them was a pose. Simplicity, healthygoodness, the radiance of unsmirched youth seemed to his eyes whollyinexpressive. He loved the rotten as a dog loves garbage, and he raisedit by his art to fascination. Even admirable people, walking through hisoccasional one-man exhibitions, felt a lure in his presentations of sin,of warped womanhood, and, gazing at the blurred faces, the dilated eyes,the haggard mouths, the vicious hands of his portraits, were shiveringlyconscious of missed experiences, and for the moment felt ill at easewith what seemed just there, and just then, the dullness of virtue. Theevil admired him because he made evil wonderful. To the perverse he wasalmost as a god.

  Miss Van Tuyn was an admirer of Dick Garstin. She thought him a greatpainter, but apart from his gift his mind interested her intensely. Hehad a sort of melancholy understanding of human nature and of life,a strangely sure instinct in probing to the bottom of psychologicalmysteries, a cruelly sure hand in tearing away the veils which thevictims hoped would shroud their weaknesses and sins. These gifts madeher brain respect him, and tickled her youthful curiosity. It was reallyfor Dick that she had specially wished Lady Sellingworth to join theGeorgi
ans that night. And now, in her secret vexation, she was moved tospeak of the once famous Edwardian.

  "Have you ever heard of Lady Sellingworth?" she said, leaning her elbowon the marble table in front of her, and bending towards Dick Garstin sothat he might hear her through the uproar.

  He finished one more chartreuse and turned his small black eyes uponher. Pin-points of piercing light gleamed in them. He lifted his large,coarse and capable painter's hand to his lips, put his cigar stumpbetween them, inhaled a quantity of smoke, blew it out through his hairynostrils, and then said in a big bass voice:

  "Never. Why should I have? I hate society women."

  Miss Van Tuyn suppressed a smile at the absurd and hackneyed phrase,which reminded her of picture papers. For a moment she thought of DickGarstin as a sort of inverted snob. But she wanted something from him,so she pursued her conversational way, and inflicted upon him a rapiddescription of Lady Sellingworth, as she had been and as she was,recording the plunge from artificial youth into perfectly naturalelderliness which had now, to her thinking, become definite old age.

  The painter gave her a sort of deep and melancholy attention, keepingthe two pin-points of light directed steadily upon her.

  "Did you ever know a woman doing such a thing as that, Dick?" she asked."Did you ever know of a woman clinging to her youth, and then suddenly,in a moment, flinging all pretence of it away from her?"

  He did not trouble, or perhaps did not choose, to answer her question,but instead made the statement:

  "She had been thrown off by some lover. In a moment of furious despair,thinking all was over for her for ever, she let everything go. Andthen she hadn't the cheek to try to take any of it back. She hadn't the_toupet_. But"--he flung a large hand stained with pigments out in anugly, insolent gesture--"any one of these _fleurs du mal_ would havejumped back from the white to the bronze age when the fit was passed,without caring a damn what anyone thought of them. All the moral braveryis in the underworld. That is why I paint it."

  "That is absolute truth," said Jennings, who was sitting next to DickGarstin and smoking an enormous pipe. "The lower you go the more truthyou find."

  "Then I suppose the gutter is full of it," said Miss Van Tuyn.

  "The Cafe Royal is," said Garstin. "There are free women here. Yourwomen of society are for ever waiting on the opinion of what they calltheir set--God help them! Your Lady Sellingworth, for instance--wouldshe dare, after showing herself as an old woman, to become a young womanagain? Not she! Her precious set would laugh at her for it. But Cora,for instance--" He pointed to a table a little way off, at which a womanwas sitting alone. "Do you suppose Cora cares one single damn what you,or I, or anyone else thinks of her? She knows we all know exactly whatshe is, and it makes not a particle of difference to her. She'll tellyou, or anyone else, what her nature is. If you don't happen to like it,you can go to Hell--for her. That's a free woman. Look at her face. Why,it's great, because her life and what she is is written all over it.I've painted her, and I'll paint her again. She's a human document, nota sentimental Valentine. Waiter! Waiter!"

  His sonorous bass rolled out, dominating the uproar around him. MissVan Tuyn looked at the woman he had been speaking of. She was tall,emaciated, high shouldered. Her face was dead white, with brightlypainted lips. She had dark and widely dilated eyes which looked hungry,observant and desperate. The steadiness of their miserable gaze was likethat of an animal. She was dressed in a perfectly cut coat and skirtwith a neat collar and a black tie. Both her elbows were on the table,and her sharp white chin was supported by her hands, on which she worewhite gloves sewn with black. Her features were good, and the shapeof her small head was beautiful. Her expression was intense, butabstracted. In front of her was a small tumbler half full of a liquidthe colour of water.

  A waiter brought Garstin a gin-and-soda. He mixed drinks in an almoststupefying way, as few men can without apparent ill-effects unless theyare Russians.

  "Cora--a free woman, by God!" he observed, lighting another of his smallbut deadly cigars.

  Enid Blunt, who was sitting with Smith the sculptor and others at theadjoining table, began slowly, and with an insolent drawl, reciting asonnet. She was black as the night. Even her hands looked swarthy.There were yellow lights in her eyes. Her voice was guttural, and shepronounced English with a strong German accent, although she had noGerman blood in her veins and had never been in Germany. The littleBolshevik, who had the face of a Russian peasant, candid eyes and asquat figure, listened with an air of profound and somehow innocentattention. She possessed neither morals nor manners, denied theexistence of God, and wished to pull the whole fabric of Europeancivilization to pieces. Her small brain was obsessed by a desire foranarchy. She hated all laws and was really a calmly ferocious littleanimal. But she looked like a creature of the fields, and had somethingof the shepherdess in her round grey eyes. Thapoulos, a Levantine, whohad once been a courier in Athens, but who was now a rich banker witha taste for Bohemia, kept one thin yellow hand on her shoulder as heappeared to listen, with her, to the sonnet. Smith, with whom the littleBolshevik was allied for the time, and who did in clay very much whatGarstin did on canvas, but more roughly and with less subtlety, lookedat the Levantine's hand with indifference. A large heavy man, withsquare shoulders and short bowed legs, he scarcely knew why he hadanything to do with Anna, or remembered how they had come together. Hedid not understand her at all, but she cooked certain Russian disheswhich he liked, and minded dirt as little as he did. Perhaps that lackof minding had thrown them together. He did not know; nobody knew orcared.

  "Well, I'm a free woman," said Miss Van Tuyn, in answer to Garstin'sexclamation about Cora. "But you've never bothered to paint me."

  She spoke with a touch of irritation. Somehow things seemed to be goingvaguely wrong for her to-night.

  "I suppose I am not near enough to the gutter yet," she added.

  "You're too much of the out-of-door type for me," said Garstin, lookingat her with almost fierce attention. "There isn't a line about youexcept now and then in your forehead just above the nose. And even thatonly comes from bad temper."

  "Really, Dick," said Miss Van Tuyn, "you are absurd. It's putting yourart into a strait waistcoat only to paint Cafe Royal types. But if youwant lines Lady Sellingworth ought to sit for you."

  Her mind that night could not detach itself from Lady Sellingworth.In the midst of the noise, and crush, and strong light of the cafe shecontinually imagined a spacious, quiet, and dimly lit room, very calm,very elegant, faintly scented with flowers; she continually visualizedtwo figures near together, talking quietly, earnestly, confidentially.Why had she allowed Jennings to lead her astray? She might have been inthat spacious room, too, if she had not been stupid.

  "I want to ask you something about Lady Sellingworth," she continued."Come a little nearer."

  Garstin shifted his chair.

  "But I don't know her," he said, rumpling his hair with an air ofboredom. "An old society woman! What's the good of that to me? What haveI to do with dowagers? Bow wow dowagers! Even Rembrandt--"

  "Now, Dick, don't be a bore! If you would only listen occasionally,instead of continually--"

  "Go ahead, young woman! And bend down a little more. Why don't you takeoff your hat?"

  "I will."

  She did so quickly, and bent her lovely head nearer to him.

  "That's better. You've got a damned fine head. Ceres might have ownedit. But classical stuff is no good to me. You ought to have been paintedby Leighton and hung on the line in the precious old Royal Academy."

  Again the tell-tale mark appeared above the bridge of Miss Van Tuyn'scharming nose.

  "I painted by a Royal Academician!" she exclaimed. "Thank you, Dick!"

  Garstin, who was as mischievous as a monkey, and who loved to play catand mouse with a woman, continued to gaze at her with his assumption offierce attention.

  "But Leighton being unfortunately dead, we can't go to him for yourportrait," he continued gravel
y. "I think we shall have to hand you overto McEvoy. Smith!" he suddenly roared.

  "Well, what is it, Dick, what is it?" said the sculptor in a thin voice,with high notes which came surprisingly through the thicket of tangledhair about the cavern of his mouth.

  "Who shall paint Beryl as Ceres?"

  "I refuse to be painted by anyone as Ceres!" said Miss Van Tuyn, almostviciously.

  "It ought to have been Leighton. But he's been translated. I suggestedMcEvoy."

  "Oh, Lord! He'd take the substance out of her, make her transparent!"

  "I have it then! Orpen! It shall be Orpen! Then she will be hung on theline."

  "You talk as if I were the week's washing," said Miss Van Tuyn,recovering herself. "But I would rather be on the clothes-line than onthe line at the Royal Academy. No, Dick, I shall wait."

  "What for, my girl?"

  "For you to get over your acute attack of Cafe Royal. You don't know howthey laugh at you in Paris for always painting morphinomanes and chloraldrinkers. That sort of thing was done to death in France in the youth ofDegas. It may be new over here. But England always lags behind in art,always follows at the heels of the French. You are too big a man--"

  "I've got it, Smith," said Garstin, interrupting in the quiet even voiceof one who had been indulging an undisturbed process of steady thought,and who now announced the definite conclusion reached. "I have it. FrankDicksee is the man!"

  At this moment Jennings, who for some time had been uneasily gropingthrough his beard, and turning the rings round and round on his thindamp fingers, broke in with a flood of speech about modern French art,in which names of all the latest painters of Paris spun by like twigs ona spate of turbulent water. The Georgians were soon up and after himin full cry. It was now nearly closing time, and several friends ofGarstin's, models and others, who had been scattered about in the cafe,and who were on their way out, stopped to hear what was going on. Someadherents of Jennings also came up. The discussion became animated.Voices waxed roaringly loud or piercingly shrill. The little Bolshevik,suddenly losing her round faced calm and the shepherdess look inher eyes, burst forth in a voluble outcry in praise of the beauty ofanarchy, expressing herself in broken English, spoken with a cockneyaccent, in broken French and liquid Russian. Enid Blunt, increasinglyguttural, and mingling German words with her Bedford Park English,refuted, or strove to refute, Jennings's ecstatic praise of Frenchverse, citing rapidly poems composed by members of the Sitwell group,songs of Siegfried Sassoon, and even lyrics by Lady Margaret Sackvilleand Miss Victoria Sackville West. Jennings, who thought he was stillspeaking about pictures and statues, though he had now abandoned thepainters and sculptors to their horrid fates in the hands of Garstin andSmith, replied with a vivacity rather Gallic than British, and finally,emerging almost with passion from his native language, burst into theonly tongue which expresses anything properly, and assailed his enemyin fluent French. Thapoulos muttered comments in modern Greek. And theTurkish refugee from Smyrna quoted again and again the words of praisefrom Pierre Loti, which had made of him a moral wreck, a nuisance to allwho came into contact with him, a mere prancing megalomaniac.

  Miss Van Tuyn did not join in the carnival of praises and condemnations.She had suddenly recovered her mental balance. Her native irony wasroused from its sleep. She was once more the cool, self-possessed andbeautiful girl from whose violet eyes satire looked out on all thoseabout her.

  "Let them all make fools of themselves for my benefit," was hercomfortable thought as she listened to the chatter of tongues.

  Even Garstin was being thoroughly absurd, although his adherents stoodround catching his vociferations as if they were so many preciousjewels.

  "The most ridiculous human beings in the world at certain momentsare those who work in the arts," was Miss Van Tuyn's mental comment."Painters, poets, composers, novelists! All these people are living inblinkers. They can't see the wide world. They can only see studies andstudios."

  She wished she had Craven with her to share in her silent irony. At thatmoment she felt some of the very common conceit of the rich dilettante,who tastes but who never creates, for whom indeed most of the creationis arduously accomplished.

  "They sweat for me, exhaust themselves for me, tear each other to piecesfor me! If I were not here, if the world contained no such productsas Beryl Van Tuyn and her like, female and male, what would all theGarstins, and Jenningses and Smiths and Enid Blunts do?"

  And she felt superior in her incapacity to create because of hercapacity to judge. Wrongly she might, and probably did, judge, but sheand her like judged, spent much of their lives in eagerly judging. Andthe poor creators, whatever they might say, whatever airs theymight give themselves, toiled to gain the favourable judgment of theinnumerable Beryl Van Tuyns.

  Closing time put an end at last to the fracas of tongues. Even geniusesmust be driven forth from the electric light to the stars, howeverunwilling to go into a healthy atmosphere.

  There was a general movement. Miss Van Tuyn put on her hat and furcoat, the latter with the assistance of Jennings. Garstin slipped intoa yellow and brown ulster, and jammed a soft hat on to his head with itsthick tangle of hair. He lit another cigar and waved his hand to Cora,who was on her way out with a friend.

  "A free woman--by God!" he said once more, swinging round to where MissVan Tuyn was standing between Jennings and Thapoulos. "I'll paint heragain. I'll make a masterpiece of her."

  "I'm sure you will. But now walk with me to the Hyde Park Hotel. It's onyour way to Chelsea."

  "She doesn't care whether I paint her or not. Cora doesn't care. Artmeans nothing to her. She's out for life, hunks of life. She's afterlife like a hungry dog after the refuse on a scrap heap. That's why I'llpaint her. She's hungry. Look at her face."

  Miss Van Tuyn, perhaps moved by the sudden, almost ferocious urgencyof his loud bass voice, turned to have a last look at the woman who was"out for life"; but Cora was already lost in the crowd, and insteadof gazing into the dead-white face which suggested to her some strangeputrefaction, she gazed full into the face of a man. He was not faroff--by the doorway through which people were streaming out into RegentStreet--and he happened to be looking at her. She had been expecting tosee a whiteness which was corpse-like. Instead she was almost startledby the sight of a skin which suggested to her one of her own preciousbronzes in Paris. It was certainly less deep in colour, but its smoothand equal, unvarying tint of brown somehow recalled to her thosetreasures which she genuinely loved and assiduously collected. And hewas marvellously handsome as some of her bronzes were handsome, withstrong, manly, finely cut features--audacious features, she thought. Hismouth specially struck her by its full-lipped audacity. He was tall andhad an athletic figure. She could not help swiftly thinking what acurse the modern wrappings of such a figure were; the tubes of clothor serge--he wore blue serge--the unmeaning waistcoat with tie andpale-blue collar above it, the double-breasted jacket. And then shesaw his eyes. Magnificent eyes, she thought them, soft, intelligent,appealing, brown like his skin and hair. And they were gazing at herwith a sort of sympathetic intention.

  Suddenly she felt oddly restored. Really she had had a bad evening.Things had not gone quite right for her. She had saved the situation ina measure just at the end by taking refuge in irony. But in her ironyshe had been quite alone. And to be quite alone in anything is apt tobe dull. Craven had let her down. Lady Sellingworth had not playedthe game--or had played it too well, which was worse. Garstin had beenunusually tiresome with his allusions to the Royal Academy and hispreposterous concentration on the Cora woman.

  This brown stranger's gaze was really like manna falling from heaven ina hungry land. She boldly returned the gaze, stared, trusting to her ownbeauty. And as she stared she tried to sum up the stranger, and failed.She guessed him a little over thirty, but not much. And there somehow,after the quick, instinctive guess at his age, she stuck.

  "Come on, Beryl!"

  Garstin's deep strong voice startled her. At that mom
ent she felt angrywith him for calling her by her Christian name, though he had done itever since they had first made friends--if they were friends--in Paristwo years ago, when he had come to have a look at her bronzes with aFrench painter whom she knew well.

  "You are going to walk back with me?"

  "To be sure I am. He is devilish good looking, but he ought to be out ofthose clothes."

  "Dick!"

  He smiled at her sardonically. She knew that he seldom missed anything,but his sharp observation in the midst of the squash of people goingout of the cafe took her genuinely aback. And then he had got at herthought, at one of her most definite thoughts at least, about the brownstranger!

  "You are disgustingly clever," she said, as they made their way out,followed by the Georgians and their attendant cosmopolitans. "I believeI dislike you for it to-night."

  "Then take a cab home and I'll walk."

  "No, thank you. I'd rather endure your abominable intelligence."

  He smiled, curling up the left corner of his sensual mouth.

  "Come on then. Don't bother about good-byes to all these fools. They'llnever stop talking if they once begin good-bying. Like sheep they don'tknow how to get away from each other since they've been herded together.Come on! Come on!"

  He thrust an arm through hers and almost roughly, but forcibly, got heraway through the throng. As he did so she was pushed by, or accidentallypushed against, several people. For a brief instant she was in contactwith a man. She felt his side, the bone of one of his hips. It was theman who had looked at her in the cafe. She saw in the night the gleamof his big brown eyes looking down into hers. Then she and Garstin weretramping--Garstin always seemed to be tramping when he walked--over thepavement of Regent Street.

  "Catch on tight! Let's get across and down to Piccadilly."

  "Very well."

  Presently they were passing the Ritz. They got away from the houses onthat side. Now on their left were the tall railings that divided themfrom the stretching spaces of the Park shrouded in the darkness andmystery of night.

  "Well, my girl, what are you after?" said Garstin, who never troubledabout the conventionalities, and seemed never to care what anyonethought of him and his ways. "Go ahead. Let me have it. I'm notcoming in to your beastly hotel, you know. So get on with your bow wowDowager."

  "So you remember that I had begun--"

  "Of course I do."

  "Do you ever miss anything--let anything escape you?"

  "I don't know. Well, what is it?"

  "I wanted to tell you something about Lady Sellingworth which haspuzzled me and a friend of mine. It is a sort of social mystery."

  "Social! Oh, Lord!"

  "Now, Dick, don't be a snob. You are a snob in your pretended hatred ofall decent people."

  "D'you call your society dames decent?"

  "Be quiet if you can! You're worse than a woman."

  He did not say anything. His horsey profile looked hard andexpressionless in the night. As she glanced at it she could not helpthinking of Newmarket. He ought surely to have been a jockey with thatface and figure.

  "You are listening?"

  He said nothing. But he turned his face and she saw the two pin-pointsof light. That was enough. She told him about the theft of LadySellingworth's jewels, her neglect of all endeavour to recover them, herimmediate plunge into middle-age after the theft, and her avoidance ofgeneral society ever since.

  "What do you make of it?" she asked, when she had finished.

  "Make of it?"

  "Yes."

  "Does your little mind find it mysterious?"

  "Well, isn't it rather odd for a woman who loses fifty thousand pounds'worth of jewels never to try to get them back?"

  "Not if they were stolen by a lover."

  "You think--"

  "It's as obvious as that Martin, R.A., can't paint and I can."

  "But I believe they were stolen at the _Gare du Nord_. Now does thatlook like a lover?"

  "I didn't say the _Gare du Nord_ looked like a lover."

  "Don't be utterly ridiculous."

  "I don't care where they were stolen--your old dowager's Gew-gaws.Depend upon it they were stolen by some man she'd been mixed up with,and she knew it, and didn't dare to prosecute. I can't see any mysteryin the matter."

  "Perhaps you are right."

  "Of course I am right."

  Miss Van Tuyn said nothing for two or three minutes. Her mind had gonefrom Lady Sellingworth to Craven, and then flitted on--she did not knowwhy--to the man who had gazed at her so strangely in the Cafe Royal. Shehad been feeling rather neglected, badly treated almost, and his lookhad restored her to her normal supreme self-confidence. That fact wouldalways be to the stranger's credit. She wondered very much who he was.His good looks had almost startled her. She began also to wonder whatGarstin had thought of him. Garstin seldom painted men. But he did sonow and then. Two of his finest portraits were of men: one a Bretonfisherman who looked like an apache of the sea, the other a Spanishbullfighter dressed in his Sunday clothes with the book of the Massin his hand. Miss Van Tuyn had seen them both. She now found herselfwishing that Garstin would paint a portrait of the man who had lookedat her. But was he a Cafe Royal type? At present Garstin painted nothingwhich did not come out of the Cafe Royal.

  "That man--" she said abruptly.

  "I was just wondering when we should get to him!" interjected Garstin."I thought your old dowager wouldn't keep us away from him for long."

  "I suppose you know by this time, Dick, that I don't care in the leastwhat you think of me."

  "The only reason I bother about you is because you are a thoroughlyindependent cuss and have a damned fine head."

  "Why don't you paint me?"

  "I may come to it. But if I do I'm mortally afraid they'll make anacademician of me. Go on about your man."

  "Didn't you think him a wonderful type?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me! If you want to paint someone, what do you do?"

  "Do? Go up and tell him or her to come along to the studio."

  "Whether you know them or not?"

  "Of course."

  "You ought to paint that man."

  "Just because you want me to pick hum up and then introduce him to you.I don't paint for reasons of that kind."

  "Have you ever seen him before to-night?"

  "Yes. I saw him last night."

  "For the first time?"

  "Yes."

  "At the Cafe Royal?"

  "Yes."

  "What do you think he is?"

  "Probably a successful blackmailer."

  For some obscure reason Miss Van Tuyn felt outraged by this opinion ofGarstin.

  "The fact is," she said, but in quite an impersonal voice, "that yourmind is getting warped by living always among the scum of London, andby studying and painting only the scum. It really is a great pity. Apainter ought to be a man of the world, not a man of the underworld."

  "And the _a propos_ of all this?" asked Garstin

  "You are beginning to see the morphia maniac, the drunkard, the cocainefiend, the prostitute, the--"

  "Blackmailer?"

  "Yes, the blackmailer, if you like, in everyone you meet. You live ina sort of bad dream, Dick. You paint in a bad dream. If you go on likethis you will lose all sense of the true values."

  "But I honestly do believe the man you want me to pick up and thenintroduce to you to be a successful blackmailer."

  "Why? Do you know anything about him?"

  "Absolutely nothing."

  "Then your supposition about him is absurd and rather disgusting."

  "It isn't a supposition."

  "What is it then?"

  "Perhaps you don't realize, my girl, that I'm highly sensitive."

  "You seldom seem so. But, of course, I realize that you couldn't paintas you do unless you were."

  "Instead of using the word supposition in connexion with a fellowlike myself your discrimination should have led you to choose
the wordinstinct."

  "Oh?"

  "Let's cross over. Catch on!"

  They crossed to the side of the road next to Hyde Park.

  "My instinct tells me that the magnificently handsome man who staredat you to-night is of the tribe that lives by making those who areindiscreetly susceptible to beauty pay heavy tribute, in hard cashor its equivalent. He is probably a king in the underworld. Perhaps Ireally will paint him. No, I'm not coming in."

  He left her on the doorstep of the hotel and tramped off towardsChelsea.