‘What?’ cried Canyot in a loud voice. ‘It’s impossible! She wouldn’t contemplate such a thing.’
It’s hard to predict what a person like Elise will do, ‘said Ivan quietly.’ But you may be quite right. It would be a sacrifice in some ways.’
Catharine, who had fallen into a sort of meditative trance with her chin propped upon her knees, now struggled to her feet. She bent down and taking Nelly by the wrists tried to pull her up from the couch. ‘I’ve got something very amusing to tell you my dear and I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to say it out before these two.’
Nelly, rather reluctantly, submitted to her violence and allowed herself to be led into the passage. ‘Don’t let Ivan run away,’ shouted Catharine to the painter before she closed the door.
‘I always say,’ remarked Karmakoff, sinking down on the couch vacated by Nelly and lighting a cigarette, ‘that it’s you honest conservatives who do more to retard the progress of the world than any other people.’
‘I don’t believe in the progress of the world,’ replied Canyot drily. ‘Life swings backwards and forwards. Everything has a beginning and an end. It’s all the same old mad game.’
‘Then why,’ murmured the Russian, puffing out a cloud of smoke and arranging himself on the couch with a certain feline grace, ‘why do we fuss ourselves about anything?’
‘I don’t fuss, myself,’ growled the painter stepping back to regard his canvas, upon which was emerging a revel of satyrs and nymphs; ‘it’s just a matter of taste. My taste objects to cruelty and disorder and lechery. I am old-fashioned, that is all. It doesn’t really matter. But I’m not comfortable when I’ve behaved like a cad.’
Karmakoff smiled pleasantly. ‘I suppose you’re thinking at this moment that I’ve behaved like a cad to Catharine?’
Canyot moved up to his canvas and gave it a resolute splash with his brush. His gesture was so drastic that it looked as if he would have greatly enjoyed dabbing that brush across Ivan’s smiling countenance.
‘Heaven forbid,’ he said, ‘that I should interfere between you two. I expect you are perfectly agreed as to what the limits of life are.’
‘What do you mean by the limits of life?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ murmured the painter indifferently, ‘something about life extending a little further than the five senses, I suppose. You mustn’t press me. I’m at work.’
At that moment the passage door opened with a violent outward fling and Catharine burst in upon them. ‘She’s upset. I’ve upset her dreadfully. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know she cared.’
Canyot dropped his brush upon the floor and came forward, his face convulsed with anger. He flung Catharine aside as if she were some intrusive stranger, and rushed to the back of the passage where there was a small box-room filled with spoiled canvases. Here he found Nelly seated in a dark corner shaken with smothered sobs.
‘Darling! my darling!’ he whispered, kneeling beside her and putting his arm around her. ‘Tell me what’s the matter. No! no! never mind! I don’t want to hear anything. Nelly, my darling – I can’t bear to see you like this.’
The girl gently but obstinately pushed him away. ‘Leave me alone, please, Robert,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll be better soon. I’m silly to make such a fuss. It’s nothing really. Please go back to them, Robert, if you don’t mind? I’ll be all right in a minute.’
He obeyed her so far as to move to the further end of the passage. But he would not open the studio door. She made a desperate effort to control herself and rising to her feet passed her hands over her hair and pressed her knuckles into her eyes and against her cheeks.
‘Robert,’ she murmured in a whisper. He came quickly up to her side. ‘Get my things for me, please, my dear, will you? I don’t want to see them like this. I’ll go straight home I think. And don’t let Catharine talk to Karmakoff about me. But she’s sure to do it. She’s sure to do it!’ And her sobs began to break out afresh. Canyot ached to press her to his heart and soothe her tears with kisses from his very soul, but he kept a rigid hold over himself.
‘She shan’t say a word, my dearest one – not a word. But won’t you let me take you home, Nelly? I’ll just say you’re unwell and we’ll go straight off.’
She looked at him quickly, a rapid tender look, full of affectionate gratitude. ‘No – no, Robert, I don’t wish that. It’s sweet of you, old friend, but I don’t wish it. Get my things, please, dear. I shall be quite all right.’
He saw that her mind was made up and he went straight into the studio and possessed himself of her hat and cloak. Catharine was huddled on the couch, clinging like a great frightened child to Karmakoff. ‘How is she?’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry I told her! I’d no idea she’d take it like that.’
‘She is going home alone,’ said Canyot, turning away with her things on his arm. ‘We must let her do exactly what she wishes. I’ll come back when I’ve seen her into the subway.’
‘She knows how to change at Grand Central?’ asked Karmakoff quietly.
‘The shuttle to Times Square, you mean?’ said Canyot. ‘Yes, I’ll tell her. If by any chance I don’t come back you’ll make yourselves comfortable here won’t you? You know where my tea is Catharine?’ And once more the door was shut between the studio and the passage.
Nelly did not let Canyot go a step further with her than the entrance to the Lexington Avenue subway. She made him leave her at the top of the steps.
‘Sorry for having made such an idiot of myself, Robert,’ she said as she gave him her hand. ‘I knew Richard was having an affair with someone. It was only a shock to me to hear Catharine talk about him – you know? – in the way she does. I’ll be all right now, my dear. Goodbye – God bless you, Robert.’
He turned sadly up the street, and feeling himself singularly disinclined to go back to his studio he made his way into the park and walked blindly, engrossed in miserable thoughts, across its least frequented spaces.
Nelly got out at the Grand Central and made her way through the conflicting streams of people to the little shuttle train for Times Square. She had to stand, during this short journey, clinging to a leather strap, and the mass of indifferent humanity that were jammed against her weighed down her spirit with an infinite discouragement.
It was even worse when she emerged at Times Square. Well, she thought, has this place been named! In those underground corridors extending indefinitely in every direction, with their little green and black arrows pointing backwards and forwards, and their confluent streams of people, it certainly did seem as though she had arrived at the spot in the universe where time and motion became identical.
As she struggled against the crowd, she experienced the queer feeling that her real conscious mind was somewhere out of all this, and that the Nelly thus pushed and jostled was a mere helpless automaton among other automatons. A horrible feeling of mechanical indifference seized her. Her real mind seemed to have escaped out of her flesh, leaving nothing but a mass of quivering exposed nerves that could suffer passively without end but could take no initiative. She found herself thinking with relief of the quietness of her father’s body lying in Littlegate churchyard, ‘free among the dead’.
Confused by the bewildering corridors and stairways she got finally swept by the crowd into an uptown train on the Seventh Avenue subway instead of a downtown one.
Her first intimation of this mistake came to her when the train was just leaving the next station marked Fiftieth Street. She got up from her seat and looked around her in dismay. Her eyes had such panic in them that one man whispered to another; a little old coloured woman who had been sitting next her hazarded the remark, ‘Wrong station, honey?’
Other, less sympathetic observations reached her, such as, ‘She’s up against it!’ ‘Some girl, too!’ with various humorous asides which were quite unintelligible to Nelly’s English ears.
She got out hurriedly at the next stop which proved to be Columbus Circle – another symbolic name!
Here a hopeless weariness descended upon her and when she had climbed the steps and emerged into the great open space near the entrance to the park she leaned against the edge of a newspaper stand and began to cry without caring who noticed it.
A man who was buying the New Republic raised his hat. His head was large and powerfully moulded, his figure of corresponding weight and dignity. ‘Can I do anything for you, lady?’ he said kindly. Nelly pulled herself together with a gallant effort and dried her eyes. ‘I’m so ashamed of myself,’ she murmured. ‘I’m not often like this. I’m not feeling very well.’
‘Won’t you let me get you a taxi?’ said the tall man whose face seemed vaguely familiar to Nelly, though where she had seen him, or anyone like him, she could not remember. While addressing her he continued to hold his hat, which was a soft broad-brimmed felt one, in his right hand, while with his left he stroked her jacket reassuringly with the New Republic.
A sort of blackness began now to descend on the girl’s eyes, blackness crossed by little vibrations of white light. She nodded eagerly however and the tall man stopped a passing taxi and assisted her into it. He handed the driver a couple of dollar bills; only after he had done that did he put his head into the window and ask her for an address.
By that time the blackness was very dense around Nelly Moreton’s brain and without realizing what she said she uttered the words ‘Elise Angel’.
The man’s friendly physiognomy became illuminated with a new interest. ‘Ah! you’re one of her girls are you? That’s where you belong, is it? Well! tell her that Pat Ryan says she must give you some of his especial cognac.’ And he shouted an address in clear terms to the driver who started his car without further question.
Nelly sank back on the cushioned seat, too faint to realize in the least what was happening and too dizzy to breathe another word.
The air beating on her face through the open window saved her from becoming actually unconscious, but she felt too wretched to think anything or even to feel anything. A blank numbness, inert and obscure, took possession of her and sealed up her mind and senses.
They stopped in front of the well-appointed apartment house where Elise Angel had her rooms.
The driver got down from his seat and approached the door of the taxi. He mechanically held the door open, gazing down the street and meditating upon matters in no way connected with cabs or houses or fares.
While he stood thus, waiting in professional indifference for her to emerge, the door of the house opened and Elise and Richard came down the steps.
Richard looked straight into the taxi window. He was laughing at some remark Elise had just made and his eyes were bright, his cheeks flushed. Elise, sweeping majestically down the steps just behind him, laid her hand at that moment upon his arm. She bent towards him as she did so and whispered something which made him laugh yet louder. Then he turned his head and they both moved down the street.
Richard, had he been challenged, could not have told what vehicle it was that was waiting there. His heart was full of excitement and happiness. He was in a trance of obvious delight.
But he had smiled straight into Nelly’s wide-open bewildered eyes; and when the other whispered to him and putting her hand on his arm led him away, an ice-cold stab of an emotion the girl had never known before pierced her heart.
The sight of Richard had brought her consciousness back; but it was only brought back to be startled into sharp incredible pain at what she saw. To her bewildered mind it seemed as if her husband had recognized her, had laughed in her face, and in callous disregard of her distress had gone off, jesting about her with his new love.
But her brain was working only too normally now and her fit of faintness was gone.
‘Number sixty-six! Where I was told to go to, Marm,’ repeated the driver. To the end of her days Nelly would associate that particular number with the stark desolation of that moment.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said quietly. ‘Will you please go to number one Charlton Street.’
The man looked slightly surprised at this order, but closed the door again and mounted his seat. He was considerate in his demands upon her purse, however, when they reached her own house, exacting only sixty cents in addition to what Mr Pat Ryan had given him.
Nelly mounted the stairs to her room with chaos in her heart. One wild notion succeeded another in her brain. She would leave Richard, she thought. She would go off somewhere into the country and stay there till her child was born. She would borrow money from Robert, risk the voyage, and go back to Sussex. She would seek refuge with Mrs Shotover who, no doubt for old acquaintance sake, would take her in.
All these ideas surged through her mind as she climbed the stairs. When she reached her own floor she was a little surprised to find the door of her apartment standing ajar. She must have forgotten to close it when she went out that morning.
She pushed it open and entered quickly to discover, to her immense surprise, a completely unknown young man smoking a cigarette in Richard’s armchair.
The stranger rose at her entrance and began stammering and apologizing. ‘I am Roger Lamb,’ he said. ‘You don’t know me, but I’m a cousin of your friend Olive Shelter. My grandmother was a Shelter and we’ve kept up the connection. I’ve never seen Cousin Olive – I’ve never been to Europe – but she wrote to tell me you were here.’
There was something so grave and quaint about this youth’s manner that Nelly felt drawn towards him at once. She begged him to sit down while she took off her things and tidied herself up. Incidentally she slipped into the kitchen and lit the gas under the kettle. ‘I must have some tea,’ she said to herself; then she gazed at her face in the looking glass as she used her brush and comb.
Presently she laid down these objects and began smoothing out the little wrinkles round her mouth and eyes with the tips of her fingers.
She was shocked by the drawn look of her face; as if in these last hours the skin had grown tighter and less soft.
A faint shadow of her old elfish smile flickered back at her from her staring disillusioned eyes.
Then her face hardened into a mask of bitterness and a strange expression of recklessness passed across it. The queer thought came into her head – Richard’s got tired of me. He has this other woman. What does it matter what I do now? It was with this reckless expression still upon her face that she returned to her guest.
In the first few minutes before she got the kettle to boil and the tea poured out the conversation between herself and her visitor was broken and perfunctory. When they had drunk a few cups, however, they began to grow quite intimate.
Roger Lamb persuaded Nelly to try one of his own cigarettes which were a different sort from those Richard smoked. Settled comfortably in the deep armchair listening to his whimsical talk, the girl felt as if she were recovering from an anaesthetic.
It appeared that her young visitor was a journalist – a dramatic critic – attached to one of the largest of the New York evening papers. He seemed to know all the people Nelly knew and a great many she had only heard of by name, and she was struck by the way he spoke of them, without any of that tang of spiteful disparagement which she had come to associate with artistic people.
Of Catharine Gordon, for instance, he spoke with peculiar respect. ‘She has the heart of a child,’ he said. ‘She would be the happiest thing alive if she were less generous-minded. People take advantage of her.’
‘Don’t you think she’s a little affected?’ said Nelly.
‘Not a bit of it! She has her own manner; why not? but that’s natural to her. It’s a cruel thing she should be so involved with Karmakoff.’
‘Don’t you like him?’ said Nelly, a little startled. ‘I thought everybody liked Ivan.’
Roger Lamb laughed. ‘Of course I like him,’ he responded. ‘But I can’t honestly say I think he’s very good for Catharine. She’s an elemental; and he’s a fire spirit. He withers her up.’
With an irresistible impuls
e Nelly led the conversation round to the problem by which she herself was confronted. ‘It’s all so wretchedly mixed up, this business of men and women. Don’t you think so? Whether for instance a man who knows a girl is false to him should go on just the same, or should have it out with her and make her confess? Doesn’t it seem to you that it’s disgusting when a man knows he’s being deceived and made a fool of and he just does nothing?’
Roger Lamb became very grave. He got up from where he was sitting and walked about the room. Nelly began to fear that in her indirect hovering round her own situation she had prodded an open wound.
‘We’re all too touchy,’ he burst out at last, ‘over this business of deception. Our idea is that when a person we love loves someone else they triumph over us unless they confess everything. But, you know, if they did confess everything we should regard them as heartless and callous beasts. We should accuse them of abominable bad manners. It’s all frightfully difficult. But I don’t believe myself that a woman who deceives a man enjoys doing it or derides or despises the man she deceives. I think if we were a little more generous lots of these people who “deceive” us would come back to us all right. It’s often a mere passing attraction. It’s our bitterness and jealousy that drives them on.’
Nelly made a little grimace at this point. ‘But it’s so disgusting− the idea of sharing a person! I’m sure I should despise anyone who tamely submitted to that sort of thing. I should feel they’d no self-respect.’
Roger Lamb bit his underlip and threw back his head like a restive horse. He had fine eyes and a sensitive mouth but his nose and chin were shapeless and badly moulded.
‘Oh, this self-respect!’ he burst out. ‘It’s the cause of half the misery in the world. Have you ever met Pat Ryan, by the way? No relation to the great financier.’
The introduction of this name gave Nelly a bitter stab.
After My Fashion Page 25
