Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  Three minutes of ostentatious sweeping and furtive observation were enough for Mrs. Delarue.

  “Cheer up, me dear,” she said abruptly, “more’s been lost on market days!”

  “I’m all right,” said the girl, adding a thank-you, as an after-thought.

  “That’s what we all of us says, when it comes to be the morning after,” said Mrs. Delarue.

  Daphne opened a book. It was the only shield she could think of against the woman’s horrible penetration.

  “Lor bless you,” Mrs. Delarue disregarded the shield, “you ain’t the only one. Went to the theatre last night, didn’t you? So did my Mr. Henry. ‘T wouldn’t be the same theatre, not likely! But he got out of bed the wrong side this morning same as what you’ve done.”

  Daphne pretended to read.

  “I s ‘pose it wasn’t the same theatre?” Mrs. Delarue mildly suggested.

  “I didn’t go,” said Daphne. “I had a headache last night.”

  “‘E’s got one this morning,” said Mrs. Delarue triumphantly. “What was I a telling you? ‘E was cursing in ‘is bath fit to split ‘imself — and the floor a mask of water where ‘e’d splashed. ‘E’s always that way when ‘e’s been on the bust.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Daphne, very uncomfortable.

  “I don’t want to ask no questions,” said Mrs. Delarue, “it was never me ‘abit, but if you did ‘ave a bit of a tiff why not let bygones be bygones? You ‘ wouldn’t like to drive a young man to low courses, miss, would you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” repeated Daphne, much more uncomfortable than before.

  “Well, miss, since you ask me,” said Mrs. Delarue, putting down the dust-pan and brush and settling her hands palms downward upon her hips, “I’ll tell you.”

  “I didn’t ask you anything.”

  “If there’s a thing I do ‘ate it’s insinuendoes,” Mrs. Delarue went on. “Let all be straight and above-board’s what I say. Well then, miss, I see ‘im come out of ‘ere last night, looking like a devil, and seeing your light I knowed you was in — and the others all out for me daughter see’d ’em go, and when he come out like that and went straight to the Horse Shoe calling for brandies and sodas, for I follered him and heard it with these very ears, I know’d there’d been a bit of a tiff, and I says to myself, I’ll give the young gell a warning — no offence, miss, young lady’ I meant of course — for I know my gentlemen, every one of them, and what they’ll do if druv.”

  “Please don’t,” said Daphne urgently. “I want to read, Mrs. Delarue, and Mr. Henry’s affairs don’t concern you, or me either.”

  “I might be your mother, miss,” said Mrs. Delarue with sudden pathos. “You ‘aven’t got one to speak a word in season. That old maid aunt of yours ‘asn’t got it in ‘er. And I say this sollim. Don’t you trifle with ‘im, miss, for ‘e won’t stand it I ow ‘im.”

  “I’m not trifling with anybody,” said Daphne impatiently. “Do stop talking, Mrs. Delarue, if you can’t talk anything but nonsense.”

  “Nonsense or no nonsense,” said the charwoman, “it’s gospel truth. Don’t you be so ‘ard, miss. You and ‘im was made for each other — I said so first time I ever seed you. If you’re highty-tighty with ‘im you’ll rue it all your born days.”

  “Look here, Mrs. Delarue,” said Daphne. “I won’t have it. Do you hear? I’m sure you mean kindly, but Mr. Henry — there’s nothing — I mean I hardly know Mr. Henry at all. You’ve got a lot of romantic rubbish in your head. Please let me go on with my reading.”

  “One of my gentlemen,” Mrs. Delarue related, calmly, “he got the ‘orrors and died of them in ‘orspital — H Ward it was — which just proves it, ‘e says to me—’e says — he knew his friends, ‘e did pore boy, ‘e says: ‘If girls only knew how they drive a chap to the pit,”e says, ‘they wouldn’t say the ‘arsh things they do.’ And you and Mr.’Enry being like I said made for each other if ever there was a pair since Adam—”

  “I’m going out,” said Daphne, flung on mackintosh and hat, and stooped for her walking shoes. “Mrs. Delarue, I forbid you to say another word.”

  “Not if wild horses drawed me, miss. Least said, soonest mended’s what I always say.”

  She flopped on her knees to tie Daphne’s shoelaces, and sniffed pitifully as she did it.

  “I don’t mean no ‘arm, miss,” she said very humbly, “don’t you think that. You see, miss, I didn’t ‘ave the young man I fancied, meself. It was me own doing. I got a bit highty-tighty with ‘im an’ off ‘e went. ‘E was a baker. Charlie ‘is name was.”

  “But you married Mr. Delarue.”

  “To me sorrow,” said Mr. Delarue’s widow. “Never sober from week’s end to week’s end ‘e wasn’t, and it was a word and a blow with him. But there — if I begin about me troubles! I put ‘im away ‘ansome — I will say that, which was what ‘e’d no right to expect. ‘E can’t throw that up agin me anyway.”

  “Of course he can’t, now he’s dead,” said Daphne. “Oh, miss,” said Mrs. Delarue, very shocked indeed, “there’s another an’ a better world, you know, for people to throw things up at each other in —— if anything to throw. But Delarue ‘e ain’t got nothing. ‘Beloved husband of’ on the stone, and ‘deeply regretted.’ If that ain’t enough ‘e’s ‘ard to please. Not that he always wasn’t, when alive, if you come to that.”

  “Do you think, then,” said Daphne, interested, “that you’ll meet him in the other world?”

  “I hope I know me catechism,” said Mrs. Delarue, “course I shall. An’ Charlie too. An’ that slut of a gell’e married when ‘e couldn’t get me. Charlie’ll understand the difference betwixt us then and see what he lost. I should quite look forward to it if it wasn’t for the dying part, in between. Seems so odd to think of it being my funeral and me not there.”

  “And your husband,” said Daphne—”I suppose you’ll be glad to see him again and—”

  “Not me ‘usband, miss, if you please. Mr. Delarue I’ll meet with quite friendly, but no ‘usband. In ‘eaven there ain’t no marrying nor giving of yourself away. That’s the rule. That’s what I always think’s so comforting.”

  “But suppose you’d married Charlie, would you have liked there not being any marrying in heaven?” Mrs. Delarue flushed and giggled like a schoolgirl, but she blinked her eyes, too.

  “Oh, Miss Daphne,” she said, “go on with you! For shame! If I’d married Charlie we’d a found some way to get around the rules up there, you trust us two for that, me dear?”

  Daphne smiled. She could not help it.

  “Just the same as what you and Mr. Henry would, me dear,” the charwoman added pensively, as Daphne disappeared down the trap-door.

  The rain was splashing on the shiny pavements, the gutters ran stream-like. Daphne stood a moment in indecision. It was all very well to say, “Go out,” but where should she go? “To Henry’s studio,” said a voice she hushed with burning check — to Henry’s studio, to see why he was unhappy, to hear his voice say that she was beautiful, to feel, perhaps, his arm round her shoulders. She could say she had come to say she would not sit for him had he left her so suddenly last night? Perhaps — the thought came so unexpectedly that she had no courage ready to face it with — perhaps he had only kissed her because he thought she cared — because he thought if he condescended to that she would consent to sit to him. He wanted a model and he thought he could buy one with a kiss.

  “I won’t sit to him I won’t see him again. I’ll go and see Mr. Vorontzoff,” and she looked at the flooded street; “and I’II go all the way in a hansom,” she added.

  “Forty-seven Wednesbury Road, Bow,” she told, the dripping driver of the hansom she hailed—”and stop,” she added, “at a post-office.”

  At the post-office she wrote a letter-card. “I have changed my mind. I will not sit for you,” underlining the not so fiercely that the jaded post office pen spluttered and splintered. She licked round t
he blue oblong and hammered it together on the desk with her fist.

  “Somebody’s going to catch it,” one clerk said to another.

  She went out with it in her hand, hesitated and got into the cab. “Stop at 63 Great Ormonde Street,” she said.

  When they got there, “Will you take this letter up for me?” she asked the cabman, looking up at him from the wet pavement. “I’ll stand by the horse’s head.”

  “Why not ring, miss, and hand it in?” he sensibly asked.

  “I want to be sure it gets to — it gets there at once,” she said. “I know you’ll take it up safely.”

  Touched by her confidence he climbed heavily from his perch.

  “You just go up to the second floor, and then along a passage like a bridge and up some more stairs. You’ll see the name. Just put it under the door. There’s no answer.”

  She stood in the rain, feeling a certain pleasure in the discomfort of damp ankles and an umbrella that dripped loudly on her shoulders. When the cabman returned he banged the door after him, winked and came close to her.

  “I give it into is own ‘ands, miss,” he said confidentially, and climbed to his place.

  Daphne climbed to hers.

  “Drive quickly, please,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the closed door of number 63.

  “It’s all right, miss,” he said, “‘e can’t come out. ‘E’s got a lady there. I see through the crack er the door — in white she was, very flash.”

  In Newgate Street she raised the trap to say, “Did the gentleman say anything when you gave him the letter?”

  “No, miss,” he answered, with one eye for the traffic and one for her flushed face and bright eyes, “nothing special.”

  Daphne’s star did not shine that morning. In the Mile End Road the horse came down, and could not find its feet again. A crowd sprang up, apparently out of the ground, stared curiously at the horse, more curiously at the lady. Daphne jumped out, pushed much more than his fare into the hand of the man as he stood rubbing his forehead and cursing his horse and his luck, put up the umbrella, and started to walk what was left of the way. It was much longer than she had thought it would be. The drive had been such a horrible drive — so long, so long, so long. The last time she had come that way she had travelled by the District Railway, and the distance had been nothing. She plodded on through the rain. Her ankles were wet now, so were the skirts that flapped against them. Her wrists were wet between sleeve and glove, and the water dripped through the umbrella and ran in cold trickles down her neck. The mackintosh and the burning fire of her indignation against Henry kept her warm. The thought of the lady seen “through the crack er the door all in white, very flash,” turned her sick — set her trembling. And still she walked and walked down the wide street that seemed to have no end. Its end did come for her, however, with the name of a road she remembered. She turned down it, found Wednesbury Road and the archway and the desolate yard where the water dripped from stacked wood and dirty steps, and the rain was over all, like a curtain woven of steel wire.

  She climbed the steep dirty steps to the studio door. And then for the first time thought — if he should be out.

  He was. He would be. It was just like life. The door was locked, and she stood there under the gray dripping sky. A train hurtled by shaking the rotten steps and hooting at her, as it seemed. She stood still To wait there was impossible, ridiculous. She must go home again. A sob rose in her throat. She had not known till then how she had been looking forward to shelter, to a welcome, to — Hot tears started to her eyes, met the rain-drops that she had ceased to ward off with her umbrella. Two or three men watched her curiously from the glass-fronted workshop across the yard. She did not know herself watched — she could not help crying. She felt so small, so unimportant, so ill-used, and so very, very wet She fumbled among her skirts — there ought to be a handkerchief somewhere.

  Then there were steps in the yard and on the stair. The Russian’s mild, tired eyes met the blue swimming ones of his visitor.

  ‘Daphne Carmichael!” he cried, “what is it — an unhappiness? But enter, my child, enter.” He tried one pocket after another, and made a gesture of despair. “The key,” he said. “I have lost it — I am the child of the unhappy hour — and you have come — oh, it is too much.

  “Have you tried all your pockets?” Daphne asked, sniffing to suggest a cold that should explain her brimming eyes.

  “You weep. Oh dear Father of Heaven — you weep — and I have lost the key!”

  A little more and he would have wept himself. Daphne, perceiving this laughed; unconvincingly, but she laughed.

  “I am sure you have,” she said, “but — the window.”

  It was close above them — easily to be attained from the broad step-top where they stood.

  “Never,” the Russian asserted as he raised the sash with blunt, blackened finger nails, “never have I known such geniuses as the English. I should have stayed here for ever, and never had the thought of the window.”

  Daphne believed him.

  He climbed in, opened the door.

  “Now enter, sweet angel of mercy,” he said. “You must be an angel,” he added as she passed the threshold, “only on angel’s wings could you have come so quickly.”

  This speech seemed to her but the usual irrelevancy of a Russian, and she passed by it into the unspeakable confusion of the studio.

  “All is in disorder,” sighed Vorontzoff—”if only you had come later! But then I should not so soon nave had this pleasure.”

  A sudden shiver took hold of Daphne, shook her irresistibly.

  “You are cold,” he said.

  “I — I am very wet,” said she.

  “I make some fire — at the instant I make some fire,” he said. “You out you of your habits. I dry them.”

  While he busied himself with sticks and coals and newspaper she took off mackintosh and hat, and sleek, soaked gloves. But in the end it was she who made the fire.

  “Your feet,” he said, looking at the foot that rested on the brick hearth—’your shoes that were brown are black with rain. Out them, out them, out all this humidity that enrheums.”

  She took off her shoes, and her stockinged feet showed stains with wet.

  “And the stockings — the stockings, too,” he cried. “See — I turn away not to embarrass. I bring the vodka.”

  To take off the stockings seemed sensible. She did it He returned with a bottle.

  “Not to drink,” he explained. “I applique it to your feet.”

  Daphne laughed.

  “Is that good against colds? I will apply it,” she said, and did.

  A ragged but comfortable chair, one’s cold bare feet on brick-work rapidly warming. No wet umbrella to carry, no heavy slapping folds of mackintosh.

  “Oh, this is nice,” said Daphne. “I am glad I came.”

  “And I! You are in the poor atelier like a rose in the coat of a beggar. Now I make you coffee.” But in the end it was Daphne who made it.

  “Show me your pictures,” she said. And he showed them. Daphne knew nothing about pictures, but she knew a little about pain. The agony —— the long-drawn, lifelong wretchedness that these pictures of the East End expressed was something that, by imagination and the sympathy of an unspoiled heart, she could understand.

  “Oh, you are great. They are splendid,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “When people see these they — must understand.”

  “Understand? What is it that they shall understand?”

  “Where it is that we have put our brothers,” said Daphne.

  “Ah, that is well said.” The Russian came near to her. “Now you are one of us — you, too, are Socialist. You, too, understand that for us there can be no rest, no joy, no delight in life till we have overthrown the system that turns the light of all those lives to darkness.”

  “It is splendid,” she said, “to be able to say all this in pictures.”

  “You,” he told
her, simply, “say it all in the closing of your lips as you look — in the softness of your beautiful eyes. Tell me, why did I find you weeping when I came to my door.

  “I wasn’t weeping,” said Daphne.

  “Ah, my child,” he said, very sadly, “truth is stronger than all the world. And why lie to me? Did I not see your eyes, like wet flowers? Tell me what it is that you weep? Brothers should help each other.”

  “I — I was tired,” said Daphne, “and — and life is much more difficult than you think it is going to be.”

  “Truth,” said the Russian, squatting on the brick hearth, “truth and again truth, and always truth. There is nothing else that prevents the life to be difficult. In art, truth. In life, truth. And in love, because you are only young once, truth too. Does he not love you?”

  To be cast out of one’s home by the plain speaking of one’s charwoman, to seek the refuge of a friend’s house only to be met by Russian plain speaking which is the plain speaking of children or angels —— it was hard.

  “I don’t know,” she found herself saying.

  “No matter,” said Vorontzoff, eagerly, ‘if he does not love it is he who loses. For the love seek not to gain. The love seek to give. Give him all your heart, even though he know it never. It is giving, giving, giving that makes us near to God and all beautiful things.”

  At that moment Daphne had an instant of clear perception. She knew then that the love — if it were love — that was playing the earthquake with all her dreams, convictions, ideas, was not the love that seeks to give, without reward or recompense.

  She saw it. She even said it.

  “I want to be loved,” she said.

  “Ah, poor child,” said the Russian—”that is the fountain of bitter waters.”

  “But suppose he does—”

  “That is not thy affair. It is thou must love, with all thy soul, without hope of return, without thought of self. That is the water of life, that quenches the thirst of the soul. You have not had lunch? no? I go to buy food.”