Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “I am a revolutionary,” said he, “as the Christ was — as all Christians should be — if there were any Christians. I seek the overthrow of tyranny and injustice, and the triumph of universal brotherhood.”

  “Oh,” said Daphne, as who should say, “Is that all?” and drank.

  “Tell me,” she said, “more about what you mean by revolution.”

  He told her. But he told her first the things that set, in Russia, the revolution, as a star, shining through the mists of blood and tears. The things that we read of every week in our daily papers, the things that do not take away our breakfast appetites. But “Further Outrages in South Russia,”

  “Massacre of Jews at Odessa,”

  “Three Hundred Feasants Shot down by Cossacks,”

  “Children Tortured by Russian Officials” — these in cold black and white are powerless to stir jaded nerves.

  With Daphne it was otherwise. The lancet of the press had not yet inoculated her to horrors. Young, inexperienced, and sensitive, to her it was still terrible that women should be outraged, men burned alive, and children sawn asunder. These things, told in the living voice of one whose own heart had been tom by these things, whose own body had suffered as had the bodies of his fellows, wrung Daphne’s heart with tortures till then unsuspected. That little world of aunts and uncles, comfort and luxury, ill-temper and answering rebellion — this new world of boys and girls chattering of art and drinking cocoa as a dissipation — this other world, only dimly discerned, of girls who were not like the sentimental sweet maidens of fiction, of men who were not like the heroes of novelists — all these worlds died down like a candle flame — went out like a wind-blown candle. And Daphne across the narrow table met face to face for the first time horror, misery, revolt, despair. It all came out in a flood that was not to be stemmed or stopped. The girl listened, helpless and sickened.

  The Russian’s eyes gleamed, his quick hands gesticulated. All the other guests had, by ones and twos, paid their additions and departed. The waiters, in tired resentment, cursed with their glances the laggard two at the table by the window. Because the hours from three to five are — save for such thoughtless unkindnesses as these — the waiter’s own.

  “We ought to go,” said Daphne; “the waiters want us to. And don’t tell me any more! You take away all my courage.”

  “Your courage?” said the Russian as he rose—”it’s our courage that is needed; that is, and will be — so long as life is bitter and freedom is sweet.”

  Daphne, wordless, paid the bill. “And here,” she said, “is the key of your room.”

  “But where is it then — this atelier?” He hung helpless on her answer.

  You have the address in that letter,” she said.

  He looked at it forlornly.

  “But this Stepney,” he said, “how does one find oneself there? It is not possible, mademoiselle, that you abandon me at a moment similar—”

  “You don’t—” Daphne’s heart sank as she realized that she still could refuse him nothing. “Is it that monsieur expects me to go with him, unlock his atelier to arrange his furniture?”

  “How mademoiselle understands me!” he said. And again there was the smile. “But mademoiselle is an angel, a guardian angel.”

  It was not at all what mademoiselle desired, at the moment, to be. But she felt, more strongly than she felt anything else just then, how much the world owed to this man with the scarred arms and the scarred life. The world would not pay. Well, she at least might pay something.

  So she went out into dusty, sunny streets where people turned to look at her and at him, and at each more for being with the other — and guessed at the points of the compass, and accosted policemen, and by road and rail at last got herself and her charge to Stepney.

  “ft is here then,” said Vorontzoff—”it is here that your poors live.”

  “It’s here that your studio is,” said Daphne, making for another policeman.

  It was down a clean road, where in a front garden a tall pear-tree leaned over the pavement its load of baby fruit that would never see maturity — along another road — and there was a big gate, like a Parisian porte cochere, a yard, a motor garage, and a carpenter’s workshop. A man in a blue shirt open at the neck was cleaning a big red automobile.

  “There’s a studio here?” Daphne asked.

  “A stoodio? Not as I know of, miss,” said the man, civil, but amazed at this interrogatory vision from the far West. —

  “It is not an atelier,” said the Russian: it is a grenier — a garret.”

  “Isn’t there any place here that a gentleman hired to work in? We’ve got the key of something. She held out her hand to the Russian. “The she said, impatiently. “The key of the atelier.”

  He felt in his pockets, vaguely at first, then in growing disquiet. An agitated interval yielded only their certainty that he had lost the key. —

  “Will mademoiselle remain here till I return to the Mont Blanc and find the key which without doubt remains over there, upon the table where we déjeunered?” —

  No, mademoiselle would not. —

  “Isn’t there,” she asked the motor man, “some responsible person, a clerk or a foreman, or what ever he is, or something of that sort?” —

  Something of that sort was produced from a glass-fronted workshop, high on one side of the yard, a sort of greenhouse on stilts. Another key was found, and then, surprisingly, a door to fit the key.

  Up wooden steps incredibly steep and narrow, gritty and ruinous to dress flounces, steps under j which a gas-engine pulsed feverishly, and above; which trams ran at doubtful and disconcerting! intervals. At the top of the steps a narrow, square platform. From this a door opening into a loft — many-windowed and sky-lighted, bare raftered, bleak.

  “This is the workshop the gentleman engaged,” said the foreman, or whatever he was, with an air of stating a fact, unbelievable, but still a fact. —

  “Thank you,” said Daphne. And he went away. There was furniture in the room — odds and ends, chairs and tables, easels, canvases, a few packing cases heaped or scattered in an equal confusion. Crockery dustily not at home on floor or furniture. In one corner a brick parapet surrounded a hearth desolate with the ashes of a fire long burnt out. The chimney, naked and bald, projected its crude yellow brick into the room. But what took the eye, arresting attention and even movement, was a dull sea of brown paper and straw that spread knee-deep over the room — a sea that crackled like a stirred snapdragon when one moved, and in repose obscured the base of all objects.

  “This dear Henry,” observed the Russian, tenderly, “he has a golden heart. Already he has commenced to disembale my effects.”

  “I wish he had done a little more while he was about it,” Daphne thought and looked.

  “But it is nothing,” the Russian answered the look. “He has done almost all. You and me, mademoiselle, we put ourselves to the work. A little half hour — zut — all is order and beauty.”

  It was four hours later that Daphne emerged from the dusty spray of the last wave of brown paper and straw. The Russian had been worse than useless. Sent out to buy a broom he had failed to come across one. Instead he bought a kettle “to make the kitchen,” as he gaily explained. Commanded to purchase a pail he brought a saucepan. When soap was needed he brought candles — so that at last Daphne left him in charge sitting on a packing case smoking eternal cigarettes, and went shopping herself.. It was an afternoon of the hardest work she had ever done. Yet she enjoyed it. For was she not face to face with Real Things, and was she not now, as almost always hitherto, proving herself competent — able to deal with circumstances, and to deal with them masterfully?

  It was a room not handsome, indeed, but at least habitable, on which she turned, at the last, eyes of pride.

  “There!” she said, “now all is in order. You say you can sleep on the floor — so I suppose you’ve everything you want I suppose you’ll put your bed in the little room when you
get one. I’ll wash my hands and go.”

  She had to fetch the water herself from the tap in the yard, for Vorontzoff smoked on, hypnotized as Russians are apt to be by the energy of their friends.

  Her cotton gown, that had been so fresh, was crumpled and soiled, her hair dusty, and on the roses of the little hat-garden there was dust, too. “Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand. Vorontzoff got off his packing-case to take it “Au revoir, mademoiselle,” he said, “you are an angel of goodness, and when I paint the true beautiful it is you who shall be my only model I ask no other. I will not have other. I go to dream of you all the night in the house that you have made so charming for me.”

  There was no trace of gallantry in his speech. Only the open gratitude and admiration of one human being for another.

  “I’m very glad,” said Daphne, and truly, “to have been able to do anything.”

  “You are as good as you are beautiful,” he said, and kissed her hand; “it is too much for one woman’s share.”

  “Oh — good-bye,” said Daphne, awkwardly.

  Then she stumbled down those precipitous, dirty steps and across the yard, quiet now; for the gas-engine had ceased to pulsate and the men gone to their homes.

  She got back to Fitzroy Street somehow, found Doris asleep on the fat lap of Mrs. Delarue, dismissed that constant and significant guardian, and tumbled herself and the child into bed, worn out, body and soul, with all that the day had laid upon her. She had had two adventures. And two men had told her that she was beautiful.

  Her mind was in a whirl of dust, brown paper, French phrases, charcoally bandages, stories of blood and tears knocked at her heart; but her last waking sensations mingled the smell of musk and paraffin with the memory of that hand, so slow to let go her hand — a physical memory, poignant, vivid, insistent

  CHAPTER XII. MODEL

  AND the lingering, slow, last touch of that hand filled the last dreaming or the first waking moment of the morning. Then came the memories of the day that yesterday had been; the interest, the fullness of it all. Then sudden and sharp a sense of treachery to Doris. She had left the child all alone, for more than half the day, alone with a dull charwoman, while she herself was greedily revelling —— yes, she would spare herself no crushing adverb —— positively revelling in visits to grimy studios, luncheons with perfect strangers, hard work, and being told she was beautiful. She drew closer to her shoulder the little dark head that already with the close habit of years lay in the hollow of her arm.

  “My own little Dormouse,” she whispered, softly, “all the men in the world aren’t half so interesting as you are. Oh, how could I leave you alone like that?” She laid her face against the little face. The gentle love-touch woke the child, who yawned, smiled sleepily, and put up a soft mouth and an arm warm with slumber.

  “Own Daffy,” she said, “did you come into bed dressed up in dreams? ‘Cause I never felt you get in. Perhaps it was my dreams was so thick I couldn’t.”

  “Did you miss me dreadfully all yesterday, my Dor-y-mouse. I am so sorry. I couldn’t help it,”

  “Oh, yes, I missed you,” said the child, cuddling her head into its accustomed place under her sister’s chin. “I missed you so dreadfully as never was, and Mrs. Delarue sang to me about the Goldenair a ‘angin’ downer back, and the Honeysuckle on the Bee, and I had another egg for tea, and we played puss in corners and hunt the thimble; and I haven’t enjoyed myself so much since we came in the train with the first prince man.”

  “It doesn’t make my neglecting her any better for me, even if she didn’t miss me,” Daphne told herself. “Oh dear, I wish I knew Uncle Hamley’s address.”

  “To-day you’ll tell me all about how pink that cat was,” said Doris, squirming with agitated delight at the prospect, “and then when Mrs. Delarue comes I’ll tell her. But she won’t believe how pink it was, whatever I say. I tried to tell her that part yesterday. Isn’t she nice, Daffy? Daffy, why are aunts so horrid and Mrs. Delarueses so nice? Why can’t it be the other way round, Daff?”

  The exactly right sort of letter to enlist Cousin Jane’s sympathies and draw from her Uncle Hamley’s address seemed quite easy to write until one began to write it. Then it changed its face. An hour of vain effort, a floor littered with torn failures, and the growing restlessness of Doris decided that this was a task for the quiet of the night-time.

  “Come on then — lessons!” she said. “Your dog shall be blue to-day, my Dormouse.”

  “You haven’t told me any of the pink things yet, that you promised about my cat,” said Dons, deeply reproachful.

  That night Daphne was swept in a gay party to see from the gallery a Shaw play. Green Eyes, chained by some illustrations to be finished for the morrow, mounted guard over Doris.

  Then someone got Daphne several thousand envelopes to address — envelopes to enclose the circular of some wonderful new art magazine or other. These took days and nights, and still Cousin Jane’s letter was not written. But Doris was not being neglected. The dog was blue, the cow was mad, the rat was pale — and their subsequent histories showed why. And the child no longer sighed for the cook. She had many friends now. Everyone who came to the house warming — that took up another writing evening — fell in love with Doris, and she had worshippers to her heart’s content till she was put to bed — provisionally — in Claud’s room, so that what was left of the evening’s revels might not disturb her. That was the night when the curtains were put up, and Daphne perceived how good a thing it may be to be poor in good company.

  Then the Russian came to tea, and Doris and he loved each other at first sight. The fact that they both talked French further endeared each to the other. Russians never go away from your house at all, of their own initiative, so there was another evening gone; and it might have been a whole night and a day, a week, a month, a year, Daphne felt; only Claud came up at midnight because he heard voices and thought it was another party, and took the Russian away almost forcibly and set him with his feet on the pavement of Oxford Street, and his face toward the East.

  Next day Daphne went with him to a picture gallery, where she spent two awestruck hours listening to his views on art, and felt that she was learning a good deal; but the only piece of definite information which she was able to remember afterward was to the effect that we are on the other side of a dark blind, and that the most any artist could ever do was to prick a hole in the curtain, so as to show one glimpse, pin-hole size, of the glory beyond.

  “And that,” said he, ‘is done also by anyone who is good to the poors. Any one who has a kind impulse, a noble thought. It is the same thing — all.

  She got rid of him at her door.

  And now she would write to Cousin Jane. Doris would still be at tea with the gazelle lady. She found cool quiet in the room where the cisterns babbled of fountains, mountain streams, and ideal landscapes, and wrote:

  ‘My dear Cousin Jane: I feel in my heart that you cannot, do not, blame me for what I did. I could not see Doris suffer. You were kind to her. You know what it is to love someone, and you understand. We have no more money now. Will you send me Uncle Hamley’s address? I must go to him.” And so on, a long, pleading, explanatory letter. She stamped it — she would post it at once, and put it in her pocket for the purpose. But then Doris came home full of the joys of her tea-party, where someone had stood on his head to please her—”and all his coats went the wrong way, Daffy, and his weskit didn’t join at all, and he did look so silly,” — and the letter was forgotten.

  A faintly shining background to all these days — or rather an almost invisible silken thread running through them — had been the thought that in any moment of any one of them one might meet again the most disagreeable man one ever had met. But this had not happened. To-night the sketch-club met. Daphne was to sit; Mrs. Delarue was to take care of Doris.

  It was not so tiring as she expected. Everyone was kind and friendly, and the eyes constantly fixed on her in that cataleptic st
are peculiar to artists drawing from the life were not so disconcerting as one might have expected. At any rate, no one looked at her through disdainful, half-shut lids. Someone said that she posed beautifully. That made the stiffness in her neck easier to bear. Some one else said that Bill had gone to a dance, dissipated dog, and yet another someone said that Henry might perhaps look in for a minute. He was wanting a model — and the someone, a stranger to Daphne, had told him that there was a new one.

  Being a model was pleasanter at first than she had thought. But the room was hot and the hour grew late. Also she was posed so that she could not see the door. And there is something extraordinarily exasperating in not being able to see a door which every now and then opens and shuts. When the rests came she looked to see who had come in. It was never Henry. And the lot of the amateur model grows harder with every moment. She was very tired.

  And then, at the very end, when she had got away from the sketch-club, had reached her own house and had got nearly up the stairs, there was Aunt Jane’s letter to post. She felt it, square and cornerish, in her pocket as she held up her dress for the last and steepest climb.

  “Oh, bother,” she said, turned and went down.

  She ran out of the door, straight into the arms of a man who was passing. He caught her by the elbows to steady them both in the shock of impact, and as he let her go, to the tune of an apology and the flourish of a raised hat, she saw that it was Henry. This sounds unlikely, but it was so. And that was the only time that it ever was Henry, though Daphne ran up against people in the street quite as often as any of us.

  Hullo — the district nurse!” he said. It was true that she had bound up a cut finger at the sketch club, but how should he know that? “I hope I haven’t hurt you, Miss Carmichael. My lame foot makes me clumsy. Let me post your letter for you.”

  “Not if you’re lame,” said Daphne. “Mrs. Delarue said you were better.”

  “It was kind of you to ask.”

  “Not at all. Good night.” She ran along the street to the pillar box. When she came back he was standing there.