Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Really not,” Daphne answered, a little crossly. “Everyone will be horribly disappointed, but I suppose you know best,” Claud said, in a really quite broken-hearted way. “Seddon is coming, and Henry and—”

  Daphne did not hear who else was coming.

  She went back into her room, with Doris’s arms round her waist.

  “Now I’m going to be the goodest, mousiest Dormouse that ever was. I’m going to whisper and creep, and not make my Daffy’s head worse. Shall I tell you a story, Daffy dear, or would you rather play lions?”

  Daphne set her teeth. She might just as well have gone to the theatre. Perhaps it would have done her head good. Oh — what was the use of lying to herself, with her heart in her throat trying to choke her. Fool! Idiot! —

  “I’ll play anything you like my Dormouse — only if it’s lions let’s play they’ve all got colds and lost their voices.”

  She was conscientious with the play. To enter thoroughly into Doris’s game seemed somehow to be paying for something. And the effort brought its own reward. The enormous swelling sense of loss and folly lessened, and by the time Doris had fallen asleep — an event coincident with her head’s meeting the pillow, her sister was able to sit down and be merely miserable. Not furious, resentful, finding herself intolerable, but merely miserable.

  “I think we’ll go away,” she told herself, “it’s perfectly absurd that a man I really dislike should interest me like this. Why should I want to meet him? I don’t want to meet him. I’m glad I didn’t go. I’ll join the Slade in October. How does he know I couldn’t learn to draw? I will learn to draw. I’ll begin to draw now.”

  But she did not begin to draw then. She sat near the window watching the gold haze of the western sky through the black of the ash-leaves, and presently remembered the spring green of the chestnut tree in the school garden.

  “How could I?” she asked herself. “What a child I was! I wonder whether I shall ever really fall in love.” She lost herself in a reverie — to be really in love — to see only one face distinctly in a world of shadows, to be the slave of a look — from one pair of eyes — no, any coloured eyes —— of course — not necessarily topaz-coloured eyes — to hold as a live, haunting memory the slow lingering withdrawal of a hand — anybody’s hand. To thrill to the sound of one footstep — to have one’s whole life set to the tune of one voice — to hear that voice say “I love you!” Oneself to say — how would it sound if she said it?

  “I love you, I love you,” said Daphne, aloud. Her hands lay on her lap, her eyes were liquid with looking very far off to where love might be — her lips trembled, a little apart.

  “I beg your pardon?” said a voice at the open trap-door.

  Daphne leapt to her feet. Had she said those words aloud? She could not have said them.

  Because if she had—”

  “May I come in?” said a voice that might well set some people’s life to its tune. “Why did you write that letter?”

  “The child’s asleep,” said Daphne. She had drawn near to the trap-door and now looked down to where, from its dark square, a white face was upturned to her.

  “I will be very quiet. May I come in?”

  Daphne had carefully learned the conventions of Fitzroy Street. Must she violate them because this man was Mr. Henry, the artist for whom she had refused to sit?

  “Come in,” she said, “I will light the lamp.”

  She lighted it, and set it on the chest of drawers where the light would not fall on Doris’s face. “Won’t you sit down?” she said.

  “You,” said he, and she sat down in the armchair that Uncle Hamley had sent. He stood before her.

  “Why did you write that letter?” he asked again, but at the same moment she said, “I thought you were at ‘The Gondoliers.’”

  “I was — but I came away.”

  Silence.

  “They said your head ached. Does it?” his voice was very low, very gentle.

  “Not now,” said Daphne, “it’s better. Won’t you sit down?”

  “Won’t you let me stand and look at you?” What would you have said in answer to that, my lady who reads this?

  Daphne said, “Mayn’t I make you some coffee?” He said, “No, thank you. I had been looking at you a long time before—”

  Daphne felt her cheeks burn — was he — could he be going to say “before you spoke?” Had she spoken! Had she said those impossible words aloud? The air, through all the words that had been spoken since, still seemed to hold the echo of them.

  “Before I ventured to break in on your day-dream. What were you dreaming about?”

  That, too, was not easy to answer. Daphne said, “It was very kind of you to come and ask after me.”

  “Don’t make that mistake,” he said, very earnestly, “I’m never kind.”

  Daphne thought of the Russian. Caught at the thought as a way out into the safe shallows of ordinary conversation.

  “Mr. Vorontzoff’s living in a dream of wonderful work. He’s like a man possessed. He—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Mr. Vorontzoff,” Henry said with gentle persistence. “I want to know why you wrote that letter.”

  “What letter?” said Daphne stupidly.

  “Saying you wouldn’t sit?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  “Because you won’t?”

  She gave her shoulders an impatient shake. “Very well, because I won’t.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t care to.”

  “You sit to the sketch-club — and to Winston —— and to all sorts of people. Am I to take it that you dislike me, personally?”

  “Of course not.” She wished he would not stand over her in that masterful, possessive way. “Then what is it?”

  “I’ve no need to sit for anyone. My uncle has given me an allowance,” she found herself saying. “But you’ll sit for me?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” said Daphne.

  “You looked very beautiful when you were sitting dreaming. I could have watched you for ever, only you — —”

  He stopped. Was he going to say “only you spoke” — no — he went on—”only suddenly I seemed to wake up, and then I saw it wasn’t fair to watch you when you didn’t know I was there —

  I might have read your soul.”

  “I’m afraid people’s souls don’t show in their faces.”

  “Yes — they do. Always when they’re alone or when they’re with the people they love. Sometimes when they’re with people they don’t care twopence about. Your soul’s showing now — a little bit, through veils.”

  “You do talk the most awful nonsense,” Daphne made herself say, and moved as though she would have risen.

  “Ah, don’t move; go on looking like that.”

  Daphne felt an absurd regret that her dress should be that old green cotton one.

  “I haven’t seen you,” said Henry, “since that night on the stairs.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said quickly, “at Mr. Seddon’s — the dinner-party, you know.”

  “Ah — I’d forgotten that.” She was angry with herself then. Why should she not have forgotten and he remembered? That was how it went in books “I’ve thought about you,” he said, “a good deal, And you have thought about me?”

  “Why should I,” she asked. And in an effort to change the current of everything. “Do let me make you some coffee.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” he retorted, not concerning himself with the coffee.

  “What is there to think about?”

  “For me?”

  “No — for me — I mean?”

  “Well — you might have thought that you would like me to hold your hands.”

  “Mr. Henry!”

  “Oh — of course you never have” — he calmed her sudden movement, “but you asked me what there was to think about. How quiet it is here. And the two lights — and the glow dying out in the sky. Have you ever wanted anything frightfully and not
had it?”

  “No,” said Daphne, “I always get what I want.”

  “So,” he said very slowly, “do I.”

  Pause. Then —

  “I want you to sit for me. Will you?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a middle-aged cousin with me. She wouldn’t approve.”

  “You could make her approve. You could make anyone do anything.”

  Daphne told herself that she wished he would go. Her hands were very cold and her heart was beating irregularly. She was restless and unnerved under his eyes.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you know how beautiful you are.”

  “I know,” she said, “that you are talking a great deal of nonsense. Hadn’t you better go back to ‘The Gondoliers’?”

  “Not till you’ve said you’ll sit for me.”

  “But I won’t—”

  His eyes held hers. She made herself look away, and then looked back.

  “You will!”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  “No!”

  He was kneeling by her. He had taken her hand. “By heaven,” he said, “you have the most beautiful hands in the world. No — don’t take it away. Let me hold it a moment. It’s nothing to you, and to me — it’s so very much.”

  She did not take away the hand. He leaned nearer to her. Instinctively she threw her head back against the velvet of the chair.

  “Take your hand away from him — get up — make some coffee — light the other lamp — anything but what you are doing,” she told herself and sat moveless, hushed as a bird that looks in a serpent’s eyes.

  He was leaning over the arm of the chair, and still his eyes held hers.

  “Daphne,” he said, “Daphne. It’s a beautiful name. It’s the only name for you.”

  Every nerve stretched tight as a harp-string, she flattened her neck and head against the far corner of the chair.

  “Daphne,” he said again, in that voice that might well have been the life’s music of some one else, “Daphne, kiss me—”

  She could not speak; she could hardly breathe. His eyes still held hers. His face did not move, and yet their faces were drawing nearer together.

  “Kiss me,” he said again. And he only needed to move his head forward a very, very little to take the lips she did not refuse. She drew back from that kiss and hid her eyes in his neck. His arm went round her shoulders. Almost at once he put her back into the embrace of the chair very gently, very definitely. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them he was at the other end of the room, looking down at the sleeping Doris.

  “How lovely children are when they’re asleep,” he said. “The loveliest things in the world, I think.”

  “Yes,” said Daphne, very low.

  “I must be off,” he said, “you will sit for me; won’t you?” His tone was careless and commonplace, as though he had asked a cup of cold water, or the loan of a penknife.

  “Yes.”

  “On Monday?”

  “Yes.”

  “At nine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good night’”

  And he was gone.

  “It was lovely,” the others told her when she met them in Claud’s room to serve the cocoa she had promised to have ready for them, “everyone turned up, even Henry — but he had to go early. He said there was a trifle that he must get to-night.”

  “He wouldn’t get it; all the shops would be shut,” said Cousin Jane.

  “Oh,” said Claud, “Henry always gets what he wants.”

  CHAPTER XVI. ADVISED

  WHEN Daphne looks back at that summer it seems to her that the sun always shone. She sees always the glare of the glazed shop-fronts, the dry pavement that scorched one’s feet, the fruit and flowers and barrows wheeled by hoarse-voiced, anxious-looking people, who sold everything very cheaply. She sees through the iron railings of University College the students sitting on the grass eating their lunch, or having inviting looking tea-parties, the coloured pinafores of the girl students, the interesting attitudes and coloured neckties of the young men. She sees the women in the little by-streets that to them were home, and to her short cuts, combing out their hair on their door-steps. And everywhere little children playing in the dust. For the sake of Doris she would like to take each child of those thousands, and wash it and dress it cleanly and sweetly, kiss it, and set it to play in a green field of buttercups and daisies. For the sake of Doris, whom she loves. Doris, meanwhile, is given over, for eight hours of the twelve that make a child’s day, to Cousin Jane. For it is on her way to and from Henry’s studio that Doris gets to know so well those narrow streets where one has to be careful where one walks, because doorsteps and pavements and gutters are alive with little playing children. There are children not older than Doris, playing the careful, anxious mother to little ones who can just walk, just crawl, and even to pale babes whose age is counted by weeks, whose heavy heads loll on necks thin and fragile. In the evening all the windows look like the boxes in a play-house. At each window is at least one spectator of the drama of life in the street below. In the street there are dramatic arguments, fights sometimes.

  The evenings were light and long that summer, so it seems to her remembrance, and very slowly died in the afterglow that merged in the wonderful lighting of London. The lights were so varied. There was the heavy yellow light of Leicester Square. Daphne avoided this. It made her feel ashamed though she did not know why. The lights of Oxford Street were better. The days and the nights, as she remembers them, were hot and dry and alive with the swarming, crawling life of the streets.

  Only one day she remembers to have been wet — the day of the picnic. It dawned wild and windy, and though hope held out through breakfast the desperate sheets of rain that beat against the windows changed, after that, to a straight, steady downpour that drowned hope beyond hope of recovery.

  Claud looked in to ask “what they thought.”

  Only one thing was possible to think: Impossible. Cousin Jane said it.

  “Oh, it can’t go on,” said Doris, piteously; “it hasn’t rained ever since I can remember, almost.”

  “Well, it’s raining now, chicken,” said Winston, rather shortly. “I’m much more disappointed than you are. So now you know.”

  “You’re not,” cried Doris, “you’re not. You can’t be. You none of you are. If you were you’d do what you ought to, and make it stop.”

  “I wish I could,” said Claud, sitting on the edge of the trap-door with his long legs disappearing into the void below.

  “Then why don’t you pray for fair weather like they do in church?” the child asked. “There’s enough of you. Sister Jenny told me two or three together was enough, and now there’s four, counting me. Do begin to say your prayers now. This minute, and it’ll stop. I know it will.”

  Daphne broke the embarrassed pause.

  “It wouldn’t be fair,” she said, earnestly. “You only pray for fine weather when everybody wants it. We want it to be fine to-day, but I expect all the farmers have been praying for rain for weeks and weeks, and it wouldn’t do for us to interfere just when they’re getting it. You see people want different things and—”

  “I don’t see the use of saying prayers at all if everyone wants something different said Doris.

  “I’ll tell you all about it another time,” said Daphne, desperately, and with a guilty knowledge that she had been glad of the rain, glad that there would be no picnic. Everyone else was disappointed. People did indeed want different things. She alone was glad that this would be a day when she would be alone a little — able to take out her memories of last night, to look at them, analyze them. She put her hand to her head.

  “Your head’s aching again,” said Claud, lowering his voice to show that ne desired a confidential conference. Daphne drew near. Cousin Jane began to put the breakfast things together. “Doris, go to the window and see if you can’t see a bit of blue sky —— just enough to make a cat a pair of breeches,” Cla
ud urged.

  “Cats don’t wear sky-blue breeches — they have cat-skin breeches, you know they do,” said Doris, not moving.

  “Well, you look, all the same. If you look very hard perhaps a bit of blue will come, and if it comes it means it s going to clear up and be fine.”

  The child went, but—”I don’t believe in your old sky-blue cats,” she said. “You want to say something to Daffy, and you want me not to hear.”

  Claud came up through the trap-door and taking the tray out of Cousin Jane’s hands, carried it to the sink at the end of the room farthest from where Doris with her back to the window surveyed the interior with gloom.

  “She’s dreadfully discerning,” he said to Miss Claringbold. “I did really want to say — let me take you to a picture gallery or something. Don’t say yes, if you ‘d rather not — and since Doris hasn’t heard me propose it she won’t be disappointed if you refuse. But I shall.”

  Cousin Jane did not refuse.

  “It will be delightful. You are very kind,” she said, fluttering a little. “You’d like that, Daphne dear, won’t you?”

  “I think Daphne’s head isn’t well enough,” said Winston with conscious nobility: “she’d like a quiet day — wouldn’t you?”

  If Claud had not already been Daphne’s, that grateful smile of hers would have enslaved him.

  So Doris was told that though no cats could be tailored from such a sky as that, life still held delights that rain could not spoil — and with a little rustle and fuss of preparation they went.

  Daphne banged down the trap-door, threw herself on her bed, and thought. At least she did not think —— she surrendered herself to the physical memory of that moment when he had held her in his arm — the moment that went before she liked less. She would not look at it. She drugged herself with the memory of that arm round her shoulders. That had been his doing. The other — she would not think of the other. Yet really, of course, it had been his doing too. She would never have done it if he had not made her. She had not done it, really. All the same —

  Mrs. Delarue, coming noisily up with dust-pan and brush, routed the reverie. Daphne sprang up, and opened the trap-door to admit Mrs. Delarue’s hat, a flighty affair with a flattened straight purple feather, on whose brim dust lay, as it lies on a top-shelf long disused.