It was a long night of love, and when at last Revelstoke slept, Monica lay beside him feeling triumphant and re-born. He was hers. Though he had spoken coldly to her, and bargained, and said flatly that he did not love her, she was confident. She would win him at last. He should be brought to say it. He would love her, and tell her so.
3
What the critics said was a matter of concern to all of the menagerie, and it was during the week that their opinions appeared, and were chewed over at Thirty-two Tite Street, that Monica’s new relationship with Giles became apparent to the inner circle of Lantern.
It was Persis who was first to learn of it. The day after the party in Dean’s Yard she strolled round to Tite Street at about four o’clock in the afternoon, expecting a brief quarrel and a reconciliation. But when she climbed the stair to Giles’ apartment she found the outer door closed.
This was something unknown to her. Giles never closed that door except as a signal that he was working, and was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Since she had known him, he had never closed it except when she was in the flat, and very rarely then. She could not conceive that it was meant to exclude her, so she tried the handle. The door was locked. This certainly did not mean that Giles was from home, for he seldom troubled to lock his flat. She knocked, peremptorily. There was a stirring inside, so she gave the door a hearty kick. It opened, and Monica appeared in the crack, dressed in slacks and with a scarf tied around her head; in her hand was a mop.
“Shhh!” said Monica laying a finger to her smiling lips.
“What d’you mean, ‘Shh!’ “
“I mean Giles is sleeping, and you’ll disturb him.”
“Sleeping! And what are you doing, may I ask?”
“Cleaning the kitchen,” said Monica; “somebody’s left it in an awful mess. If you like to come back later this evening, I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see you.”
The door closed. If Persis had been the swooning kind, she would have swooned with rage. As it was, she gave the door a few more kicks, and stamped down the stairs.
The encounter gave a new dimension to Monica’s happiness. She had driven Giles from Courtfield Gardens that morning before seven o’clock, for she did not want him to be found there by Mrs Merry, and she had no idea how long the landlady would sleep. Shortly after the shops opened she had followed him to Tite Street in a taxi, bearing with her brooms, soaps and cleansers, as well as the necessaries for a splendid breakfast. She served him his food on a tray, kissed him, and told him to go back to sleep, as she meant to be busy for several hours. He was too astonished to resist.
“My God, I have fallen into the hands of a Good Woman,” he said, as she left the room, but she merely smiled as she closed his door.
Then began such a ridding-out as the flat had never known since Giles had lived there. All Ma Gall’s hatred of slopdolly housekeeping, transfigured by love, was unleashed in Monica; she shook things, beat them, scrubbed and scoured them, rubbed, polished and dusted them; wearing rubber gloves, and using lye and a knife, she scraped the rancid and inveterate grease out of the stove; she washed every dish; she got rid of a large, reeking jam-pail, which had been the flat’s principal ash-tray for some months and had never been emptied. She washed Pyewacket’s dish, to the cat’s astonishment and displeasure. She raised an extraordinary dust, and worked miracles. When she was finished, after six hours’ toil, the flat was only moderately dirty—which was cleaner than it had been since she had known it. It smelled better. It looked better. But except for the dirt, nothing in it was altered.
Monica was too wise to move things about, or attempt to impose order on Giles’ chaos. She was content to clean up the chaos, but not to alter it. Music and books still heaped the top of the piano, but they no longer blackened the hands. The large trestle table which was covered with Lantern papers was still heaped high, but the heaps were neater around the edges. The bathroom was gleaming, and some underthings of Persis’, which customarily hung on a piece of twine from corner to corner, had been removed, and were awaiting removal in a bag in the kitchen. And the kitchen—its stench no longer caught at the throat, the dirty linoleum and the foul grey mess beneath it had been removed from the drying board; two tins of cleanser had gone into the waste-pipe so that when it belched (as it did whenever water went down it) it belched a harsh, carbolic smell, and not a breath from the charnel-house. All the things for which Giles cared nothing had been cleaned and put straight; all things for which he cared had been cleaned and left in familiar disorder.
And to cap it all, Persis had come and been repulsed. Monica was happy as any bride in her dream house. She drew a bath in the clean bathroom, lay down in it, and sang a few snatches recollected from The Discoverie of Witchcraft.
“I have been gathering Wolves’ hairs
The mad Dog’s foam, and the Adder’s ears;
The spurgings of a dead man’s Eyes,
And all since the Evening Star did rise.”
It was not ideal as an outpouring of the joy of love (though it was not without some reference to her house-cleaning work) and she did not sing it in the hope of catching Giles’ ear. It was a simple burst of delight. But Giles put his head around the door.
“Didn’t know you could sing any of that,” said he.
Remembering his words of the night before, she did not make a show of concealment, but lay still in the water.
“I can sing all the soprano part. Do you want tea? I’ll be out in a minute.”
She could not bring herself to use the unpleasant towel, nor yet the shower curtain, so she had to dry herself on her head-scarf and her handkerchief, and remain damp where these would not suffice. She did not care. She sang as she mopped, patted and fanned herself dry:
“A Murderer, yonder, was hung in Chains,
The Sun and the Wind had shrunk his Veins;
I bit off a Sinew; I clipp’d his Hair,
I brought off his Rags, that danc’d i’ th’ Air.”
“You’ve been busy,” said Giles, when she took tea into the workroom.
Monica made no reply. She had made several resolutions as she worked, and one of them was that she would never draw attention to anything she did for him, or seem to seek praise. Patient Griselda was only one of the parts she meant to play in the life of Giles Revelstoke and it was certainly not the principal one. Nor did she mean to camp in that flat. So when she had fed him the sort of tea he liked—large chunks of thickly buttered bread smeared with jam, strong tea and soggy plumcake—she said that she would have to go, as she had work to do for Molloy.
“There’ll probably be people looking in during the evening,” said she. “Shall I get the papers and see if there is anything about the broadcast? Persis was here earlier, and I gathered that she will be back again.”
“Very likely,” said Giles. But as soon as she had gone, he burst into loud laughter. He was thinking of Persis.
4
When Monica returned at nine o’clock, the menagerie was assembled, and it was characteristic of them that they all said they wanted to see the papers, but none of them had bought any. When she appeared with all the principal ones, fresh and clean, they fell upon them eagerly, and rumpled them, and read pieces aloud derisively, to show how superior they were to the events of the day. But of the lot, only two papers had brief references to the broadcast.
By the following Sunday, when all the papers which might be expected to say anything about The Discoverie had made their appearance, there was a creditable total of seven notices. They ranged from two brief, cautious comments on the quality of performance through four others, which were complimentary in a pleasant but unimportant fashion about the work itself, assuring the public that Giles was “promising” and “original” and that his score was “musicianly”. But the longest, and most impressive, in the most influential of the Sunday journals, was the one by Stanhope Aspinwall.
It would have delighted most composers. It treated The Discoverie of Wit
chcraft seriously, complimented Giles on the fine sense of form which it revealed, praised the splendid melodic gift which Domdaniel had mentioned, and also called attention to the inferiority of the purely instrumental passages, though it said that they were interestingly laid out for the small group of instruments used. But it was the two final paragraphs which made Giles angry. They read:
“In spite of the high quality of the work as a whole, and the brilliance of many pages, the hearer who hopes for great things from Mr Revelstoke may be disturbed by a quality in The Discoverie of Witchcraft which can only be called ‘literary’. The choice of theme is strongly romantic, and none the worse for that—but it is a literary form of romance. The portions of the text which are not by Ben Jonson are drawn from two seventeenth-century books on witchcraft which have no particular grace of style but which have, from time to time, roused the enthusiasm of amateurs of literary curiosa. Even the skill of the musical treatment of this matter cannot persuade us to take the theme—witchcraft—seriously. In another composer this would cause no concern; we should be sure that he would grow out of it. But Mr Revelstoke is known—indeed, principally known, at present—to the musical world as a musical journalist. Though musical gifts and literary skill have often gone hand in hand there comes a time when one or the other must take the lead. Mr Revelstoke will forgive me if I point out that, as Schumann, Berlioz and Debussy in their time had to give up their avocation as writers to embrace their fate as composers, that time has also come to him. In brief, he must give up what he does well and devote himself to what he does best.
“What he does best is to match fine poetry with eloquent, graceful and seemingly inevitable melody. The cantata form of the composition under review is commandingly used, and it is this sense of drama, even more than the lyric passages, which make Discoverie an important new work; there is a foreshadowing here of that rare creature, a real composer of opera. But Mr Revelstoke must find his way toward opera not through his present literary enthusiasms, but by clearing the literary rubbish from the springs of his musical inspiration.”
“But it’s a rave, old man,” said Bun Eccles when he had read it. “You said he’d given you a rocket, but it’s a rave! He says you’re marvellous, and all you’ve got to do to be twice as marvellous is to get down to work. Cor stone the bleedin’ rooks, you don’t know what a bad notice is! Why, I’ve seen chaps—painters—really chewed up in the papers; told to go and find some honest, obscure work, and trouble the world no more—that kind of thing. I don’t understand what’s eating you.”
“I will not be school-mastered, and lectured, and ticked off by Mr Bloody Aspinwall,” said Revelstoke. “I will not be told to stop writing criticism of critics by a critic. I will not be known-best-about by a man who knows nothing of me except what he reads in Lantern.”
“He just wants to shut you up,” said Persis. “You’ve probably exposed him so often as an incompetent that he’s taken this way of revenging himself. You’re dead right, Giles; you’d be a fool to pay any attention.”
This was the opinion of Tuke and Tooley, as well. They did not want Giles to lose his enthusiasm for Lantern. They knew that if he withdrew from the magazine it could not survive another issue, for not only did he supply the workroom and most of the enthusiasm, but he also supplied Monica, whose secretarial work had made the production of the magazine much easier.
“Of course you have it all your own way,” said Tuke; “you have only to reply to this in Lantern, and that will be the end of Mr Aspinwall. It will be one of the few times when a creative artist has been able to answer a critic quickly and finally.”
Monica could understand nothing of this. She thought Aspinwall’s notice wonderful. And when she found opportunity, she looked through the back numbers of Lantern, and found no attack upon that critic whatever from Giles’ hand. What she did find, in an early copy, was a suggestion in one of Giles’ articles that he admired Aspinwall’s judgement alone among the London critics of the day. It made no sense to her. Giles’ ravings against Aspinwall seemed sheer perversity.
But she did not say so. A week, during which their intimacy had grown every day, had taught her that contradiction was not the way to reach Revelstoke’s heart, or his head. He could not bear to be crossed in anything. He could only be reasoned with about matters which were of no importance to him. And so she kept silent about what she thought until she had either ceased to think it, or had banished her disagreement to the depths of her mind, as disloyalty. She did not join very readily in the general condemnation of Aspinwall; she did not, as the witty Persis did, refer to him always by an obscenity which somewhat resembled his name; she did not speak as though he were an enemy of everything that the Lantern group stood for. She had resolved that she would not try to make Giles anything other than what he was. And her compliance was showing results.
“Quite plainly there is a new maîtresse en litre,” said Tuke to Tooley one day as they climbed the stairs. And Bridget Tooley, who had already changed her attitude toward Persis, marvelled once again at how long it took even Phanuel Tuke to see what a woman saw at once.
5
The word “mistress”, insofar as she had thought of it at all, had always held a dark splendour for Monica. Because of her beauty, even Persis had not spoiled this notion that women who lived with men out of wedlock breathed a special, exciting and romantic air. But now she was a mistress herself, and although it had its excitements and rare, deep satisfactions it was by no means what she had, dimly, foreseen. It was very agreeable to be deferred to by Tuke and Tooley, and to see the baleful glint in Persis’ fine eyes, but there was a lot of hard work about it.
Giles liked comfort, though he had no intention of supplying it for himself, and once the flat was running in a reasonably orderly manner, he wanted it to continue that way. And Lantern, now that she had a bigger say in its production, took more of her time. Giles made a pretext to ask Domdaniel to cancel her German and Italian lessons, so that this time would be provided. And he began to work her mercilessly at her singing lessons. The success of Discoverie had raised his ambition as a composer to a new pitch. He hunted out and revised his songs—which were far more numerous than Odingsels’ estimate of fifty—and it was her task to copy the new versions neatly; under his tuition she became a quick, deft and pleasantly ornamental copyist. But he also began to write new songs, and as she was at hand, he arranged the tessitura of these new works to suit her voice, making them inconveniently high for the majority of singers. His choice of lyrics tended toward poets not widely popular and usually dead; his settings of modern verse were few. His sensitivity to poetry, and to the rhythms of English, was reflected in all his songs, but in the new works it expressed itself in complications of time, and in prolongations of phrase, which made them very hard to study, though wonderfully easy to hear. It was Monica’s delight, and also her despair, to slave at these songs through countless revisions, while the composer visited upon her all the irritation and dissatisfaction which he felt with himself. Giles never praised her. When a song had reached its final form, and she had sung it precisely as he wanted it, he would sometimes say, “Got it now, I think.” But it was of himself that he was speaking.
The flat ceased to be the hang-out of the menagerie, for Giles was too busy to be bothered with them, except when Lantern work was to be done, or when he wanted conversation and a party. Of course they blamed Monica for coming between him and his old friends. And of course they wondered what on earth he saw in her.
Sometimes she joined in this wonder herself, for as a lover Giles was fully as demanding as he was when he was teaching her to sing what he had written. Indeed, the two kinds of experience were uncomfortably similar. He could be tender, but he could not be patient. He was experimental and ingenious, demanding for himself aspects of pleasure which she could not comprehend, and therefore could provide only by happy accident. If luck was not with her he might scold; worse, he might laugh at her. Once, after what had seemed to her
a wonderful, ecstatic afternoon in the pokey little bedroom of the flat, she had turned to him, certain that the moment had come, whispering, “Do you love me?” He had replied, “What if I say no?” The sardonic glint in his eye warned her not to press the matter. She could not conceal her hurt, so she rose, dressed herself, and made him the stodgy, jammy tea-meal which he liked. She knew better than to ask that question again.
She did not spend the nights at Tite Street. She did not dare, for fear that Mrs Merry would tell Mr Boykin, who would tell Mr Andrew, who would tell the Bridgetower Trust—who would tell her mother. But except for her lessons with Murtagh Molloy she spent almost all of her waking hours there. Her first decision to preserve some aloofness from Giles had quickly weakened; the harder he worked her, the more he nagged her about the most minute details of her singing, the more tyrannous his demands as a lover, the less was she able to keep away from him.
Bun Eccles alone of the menagerie seemed to have any true estimate of her relationship to Giles.
“You’ve certainly got it bad, kid,” said he to her one day as they sat in The Willing Horse.
“Worse than bad,” she replied. “It’s abject.”
“Well, cheer up. You’ll get over it.”
“Only when I’m dead.”
“Bad as that?”
“Yes; bad as that.”
It was Bun who sent her to a physician.
“You got trouble enough, Monny, without getting landed with a baby. You can’t expect Giles to do anything about it. He belongs in the great nineteenth-century tradition, when geniuses littered the earth with stupider-than-average kids. So you just cut along and see my friend Doc Barwick; I’ll tell him you’re coming, and why, and he’ll put you wise. Self-preservation is the first law of fallen women and a couple o’ quids’ worth of prevention is better than fifty guineas’ worth of dangerous cure.”
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