Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “I see.”

  “You, I suppose, care for me all the time?”

  She would nave liked to say, “I do not care for you at all,” but the pride of her womanhood forbade it.

  “You do care for me?”

  Another pride awoke and fought the first, was beaten, and she said:

  “Yes — or I shouldn’t be here.”

  “I like you for saying that,” he said. “Yes, I like that; but if you try to come between me and my work — I want you to know that I — I mean if you make me choose between my work and you — it is not you I shall choose.”

  “You’re impossible,” she said, and tried to go. “No,” he answered, holding her hand more closely, “I’m only truthful. All men who work feel this more or less. But their minds are swayed by this, that, or the other, and they won’t look the thing in the face. If I loved you more than all the rest of the world I should still love you less than my work. Is that clear?”

  “It is indeed,” said Daphne; “you are impossible.”

  “Not if you face the truth. There’s courage in your face as well as beauty. My work is the thing in me — it’s my atmosphere, my backbone. Bah!

  —— I never was good at metaphors. But one can’t work all the time. There are little flowering comers in life, where one can look at the sun and forget for a very little time what one’s really made for. Can’t a woman understand that that flowery, sunny place is her place? Can’t she wait for a man there —— and be beautiful to him when he comes tired from his work, wanting to rest and to forget?”

  A vision of a home, neat, simple, beautiful, with herself, her beauty at her highest, her helpful womanhood applied to the end for which God gave it — his true helpmeet. She hugged the vision and said angrily, violently almost:

  “Yes, when my lord pleases to throw the handkerchief. I’m to wait humbly in my horrid flower-corner, and when he throws it I’m to pick it up.”

  “Rather, my lady is to keep herself calm, calm and beautiful and patient, and when I am very tired I shall come and lay my head on her knees — like this.”

  He threw his head back and looked at her with eyes that, now, did see her.

  “Isn’t it good enough?” he asked, putting up his hands and drawing down her face to his. “Isn’t it?”

  Her arm went round his neck, and he held her hand under his chin, as he spoke again.

  “You want it to be always like this. You think I don’t care because I don’t kiss you every time you come here. If I let myself do that I should never paint another picture. Other men have a talent for love-making. Let them develop their talent. Mine’s for painting and I don’t mean to bury it in a nest of roses — no, nor of lilies either.”

  “I don’t want you to” — said Daphne, brokenly, her face against his hair—”be always nice to me I mean. On, you know I don’t mean that. But you hardly ever speak to me. I feel as if I’d jumped off the firm land thinking it would be water that I could swim in, and it’s only air, and I’m falling, falling — no, it’s not that either. It’s as if I’d tried to walk on a green meadow, and it was all loose grass and I’d tumbled into a pit and couldn’t get out. But I don’t mind so much if you’ll only talk to me, and not look at me as if you didn’t see me.”

  “Do I do that? Only when I don’t see you, believe me. Lean back and let me look at you. Am I looking at you as though I didn’t see you? Ami? Ami?”

  She covered her face with her hands.

  “I don’t like being shut out,” she said, took his head in her hands and turned it and laid it on her knee again so that he could no longer see her face. “I don’t mind about your work. If only you’d let me help you. Won’t you let me help you?’ “The only way in which you can help me is by letting me alone — by not forcing me to set you beside my work and to choose. I’ve heard chaps say that love was the reward of work. It isn’t, it’s the breathing time between.”

  “Then when you’re working you don’t care about me?”

  “When I’m working I care for nothing else in the world. Now you understand.”

  “You are horribly selfish,” she said.

  “No,” he answered, and raised his head from where it lay. “I’m not selfish, and I’ll prove it. If it isn’t enough for you to be what you can be to me in the times when there’s no work — then go. Leave me. Cut the whole thing. I can do without you.”

  “That’s just it,” said poor Daphne. “I know you can. You don’t care for me at all.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, “if you leave me I shall be very miserable. My work will all go to pieces for awhile, but I shan’t break my heart or ruin my career. But you won’t leave me, my lady, you won’t leave me!”

  He raised himself a little till his head lay in the curve of her arm. “It’s all quite simple,” he said, “if you’ll only try to understand.”

  “I do,” she answered; “almost all your life’s to be given to your work. You’ll live with that in a dream. Ana when you wake up I’m to be there, in case you happen to remember me.”

  “No,” he said; “it’s when I have time to rest, I want you to be there waiting for me in my dream —— like this.” He drew her closer.

  ‘Because, you see—” he was going on, but she stopped him.

  Ah, no,” she said, “don’t talk any more.”

  “But I thought you liked me to talk to you,” he persisted.

  “Not now — not like this. Don’t talk any more. Let me pretend for a minute or two that you like me always and not just when you’ve nothing else to do.”

  “I hate pretences,” he said, but after that he said no more, and his arm went round her.

  It was she who broke the silence, speaking a little breathlessly.

  “Ah,” she said, “you do care really — you do like me.”

  Instantly he freed himself from her arm and stood up.

  “I do. I like you very much — let me pose you again. I mustn’t lose all the light.”

  This was the fabric of her life. But it was not all her life. There were all the friends she had made among the artists and art-students — there was Cousin Jane, there was Claud, there was Uncle Hamley — and presently, after all sorts of delays, there was the picnic. Henry would not go. “Why should I,” he asked, “want to see you among all those people when I can see you alone?” And by that time she knew him too well to press the point.

  It had been planned to begin the day with a railway journey, but Seddon came round to Claud’s rooms the evening before with a beautiful suggestion of motor-cars. Daphne was called down to give the casting vote.

  “The motor-car is the emblem of sordid modernity and Mammon worship, dear Miss Carmichael, is it not?” Seddon said. “The Mammon worship against which we are all pledged to fight to the last drop of our blood. What nobler victory than to enslave the motor, Mammon’s badge, to the service of the arts? My own,” he added modestly, “is a forty h p. Mércèdes, and I can borrow a couple of Daimlers. The picnic is in Miss Carmichael’s honour, I take it? I entreat permission to lead captive motors in her train — Una enslaved the lion, did she not? — and we should all be much more comfortable.”

  “The picnic is in Miss Claringbold’s honour,” said Daphne, “and I’ve never been in a motor-car, and I think they’re most frightfully wicked. And I should like it most awfully. You do have lovely ideas, Mr. Seddon.”

  “He has a lovely lot of money to burn,” said Claud.

  “And I burn it on the Altar of Art,” cried Seddon, delighted with the metaphor.

  “You’re a jolly good fellow,” said Claud, thumping him on the back. “You always said you’d do these things if you ever got any money, and by Jove I believe you’re the only man in the world who ever did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Stuck to his bargain. I believe you made a compact with the devil or the Angel Gabriel or some one that if you got money you’d spend it on making things jolly for other people. And you’ve kept to it.” />
  “It is all of you who make things delightful for me,” said Seddon, prettily. “I make bold to say that there is not another man of my income in England, nay in Europe, who has so many delightful friends. Do you not think that I am a happy man, Miss Carmichael?”

  “I am sure you are — and deserve to be,” she said.

  “Ah, if we only got our deserts,” he said, “I should not now be where I have the happiness to be,” he bowed to point the compliment. “You will communicate with the rest of the party and I will come round with the cars and collect everybody. At nine? Yes. You will give me a list. Our Henry is of the party?”

  “He won’t come. Too busy he says,” Claud told him.

  “Ah, he is no doubt achieving with blood and tears the masterpieces which are to figure in the exhibition which he and Mr. Vorontzoff have projected.”

  “He is painting Miss Carmichael’s portrait,” said Claud, bluntly. He would so much have liked to do that himself, and while he had hesitated from motives of delicate consideration Henry, with no manners and covered with charcoal, had asked — and to him had been given.

  Seddon looked at her oddly — and she quailed in spirit.

  Would he — now, before Claud, restate his conviction, so oddly shared by Mrs. Delarue, that she and Henry were made for each other? She believed him capable of it.

  “I think Mr. Henry has done all the pictures he means to show in October,” she said, very quickly. “He is not exactly doing my portrait. It is my coloured hair that is so difficult to find. He doesn’t know any model who has it — not naturally, I mean, and you can always tell, can’t you?”

  “I can always tell,” said Seddon, dreamily. “Will the portrait — I mean the picture — be for sale, Miss Carmichael? Already I have been fortunate enough to secure some half-dozen masterpieces by our Henry. Seven is the mystical number. I should be indeed the favourite of the gods if I could count my treasures as seven, and the seventh the sevenfold prize — the portrait of Miss Carmichael.”

  “It isn’t a bit like me, at present,” said Daphne. “Not to your eyes perhaps,” Seddon allowed—”in its unfinished state of course, no. Yes. But the completed masterpiece? Dear lady, I have a new interest in life.”

  Daphne hoped intensely that Henry would not sell that picture — that he would want to keep it to look at when she was not there, to talk to, perhaps, as he did not talk to her. The hopelessness of that hope took her suddenly and she laughed aloud. Claud looked scandalized and Seddon said very simply:

  “Have I said anything foolish?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I laughed from mere lightness of heart. It isn’t every day that has a motor-drive in store for its to-morrow. Claud, have you any postcards? Because if you have Mr. Seddon would post them for us” — Mr. Seddon murmured sweetly about Mercury—”and we must let every one know they’re to be fetched by motor cars, like grand-dukes.”

  “This exhibition of the Master’s,” said Seddon, as Daphne and Claud wrote postcards, kneeling opposite each other at the table, it is a new idea.” It’s Vorontzoff’s idea,” said Claud. “Old Henry would never have bothered. He just paints —— and if he sells he sells, and if he doesn’t, ne doesn’t care. He hasn’t his living to earn like the rest of us. That’s why hardly any one has heard of him yet, though he’s been at it for years.”

  “And how came Mr. Vorontzoff into the Master’s life?” Seddon asked.

  “Oh, Henry knew him in Paris — and when he came over here he was rather decent to him — lent him money and set him on his legs. And Vorontzoff has egged him on to this, to show his gratitude, I suppose. He says the show is going to make everyone in England sit up — every one, that is, who knows a picture from a pork-pie. It’ll be rather a long way, going to fetch him, by the way.”

  “If you have a decent motor there are no long ways in London,” said Seddon.

  “And I think it would be fun going to fetch him in a motor. You don’t know what his studio’s like, Mr. Seddon.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Seddon, “I have made expeditions to the Far East. It was my happy destiny to acquire two of his pictures there — I wish it had been twenty. In his way he is a very great man. Are these all the postcards? I will post them. Au revoir, dearest Miss Carmichael. Winston, your stairs are death-traps.”

  “I’ll light you,” said the other man, and Daphne was left alone.

  “I say,” Claud said, when he came back, “what a fellow Seddon is, isn’t he? He simply insists on providing the hampers for to-morrow. Wouldn’t hear of anything else. I’m certain the gates of heaven will be specially enlarged to admit him. He is a brick. But I don’t know that we ought to let him stand treat in the way he does.”

  “Why,” said Daphne, open-eyed, “can’t you see that ‘standing treat is all the good his money is to him? I think it’s so awfully nice of all of you to let him enjoy his money in the only way he could ever care about.”

  “You’re always right,” said Claud, with admiration.

  “And he appreciates his blessings,” she went on. “He9s right. As he says, I don’t suppose there’s another rich man in the world who has such nice friends — friends who let him stand treat just as if he were one of themselves. Don’t you see? What he likes so much is to pretend that he’s one of you — a hard-up art student, and that he’s just got a windfall that lets him stand treat for once —— just as you all stand treat when any money happens to happen to any of you. If he made friends with rich people, his money wouldn’t buy him anything but a sameness with them — I’m saying it very badly—”

  “No, you’re not,” said Claud. “Go on.”

  “But among you — among us,” she hastily added, “it buys him the wonderful delicate pleasure of making us all happy and of pretending that it’s only this once, and that next time we shall stand treat.”

  “By Jove,” said Claud, “you do know how to put things. Yes, I see. And if ever I do get there, I’ll stand old Seddon a treat he’ll remember all his days.”

  “Ah, you don’t see,” said Daphne. “Don’t you see that you’re standing him the treat now, by letting him in as an equal, by letting him stand you the treats, which is all ne cares about?”

  “You think he’s such an altruist as that?” Claud asked.

  “I think he’s a dear,” said Daphne, “and,” she added, thoughtfully, “I think it must be very, very lonely up there among his stocks and shares and banking accounts and things.”

  CHAPTER XIX. DENIED

  DORIS began the day by pulling open, with small, sharp fingers the eyes of Cousin Jane, and then skipping across the floor with a slapping of bare feet on boards to do the same service for Daphne.

  “Wake up, wake up,” she whispered in her sister’s neck; “it’s picnic morning, and the sun has been shining for thousands and thousands of years.” Daphne had two reasons for not being in any hurry for the sun to shine on this particular day. For to-day she would not see Henry, and it was almost certain that she would see Stephen St. Hilary. Henry had declined his invitation, and Vorontzoff in answering his had asked leave to bring his friend Monsieur St. Hilaire. She did not want to see Monsieur St. Hilaire ever again. That talk of friendship was all very well, and had bridged an awkward chasm, but she had no use for the friendship of her first lover. Still — the sun was shining, a new blue muslin dress spread crisp alluring flounces from the nail where it hung ready. She was young, and, all said and done, a picnic was a picnic.

  “Be a dormouse with all the pillows, while Daffy gets dressed,” she urged, springing up.

  “All the blankets and sheets too,” said Doris. “I’ll be a dormouse that’s made itself a nest inside of a giant’s pin-cushion — but it’s all pinny inside so you can’t ‘spect the dormouse to be quiet very long:, because whenever it sneezes the pins bite it.”

  Through the toilet of the others the child’s voice ran on.

  “Where’ve you got to, Daffs? Is your stockings on yet, and your shoes? I should p
ut on my out-of-door shoes now, to save time. Sister Jenny, when it comes to your hair let me come and look —— I want to see you put the hairpins in your mouth.”

  “Whatever put such a thing into your head? I don’t put hairpins in my mouth,” Miss Claringbold affirmed.

  “Well, Mrs. Delarue does. It makes her look like she’d swallowed a hedgehog and left bits of it sticking out. She does her hair at your looking-glass always when she’s done the room, if you’re not here, with a bit of comb that lives in her pocket in a piece of newspaper. When I grow up I’ll have a bittety comb in a newspaper home, and whenever I come to a new looking-glass I’ll do my hair in it. Oh, that’s poetry.

  “A bittety comb

  In a newspaper home.

  A bittety comb

  In a newspaper home!”

  Song replaced speech, till the discovery that she was a mole and not a dormouse at all roused her to the necessity of building a mole palace with the bed-clothes.

  “Silly old mole,

  He lives in a hole.”

  she called from the midst of the labyrinth.

  “Silly old mole,

  He lives in a hole.

  The mole is blind —

  I don’t mind!”

  “Isn’t that an unkind poetry, Daff? Claud taught it to me. And it isn’t true, because I do mind, dreadfully. If I was to meet a mole that was blind I should give him my compliments and kind sympathy, like Mrs. Delarue does to people when their husbands die. Shall we see any moles to-day, Daff?”

  “I don’t know,” said Daphne, “but there’ll be rabbits, I know that. Claud said so.”

  “He said me that too. Little frisky-whisky rabbits with white stick-up tails and ears that go like that.”

  Bed could not contain her energetic illustration of the ways of the ears of rabbits.