THE stairs of number 7b Great Ormonde Street lacked the spacious quality of Daphne’s own staircase, for number 13 had been a great house once, where salons had been held, and hooped and powdered gentry of the Third George’s time had passed up and down those stairs which now echoed so emptily to the pitter-patter of Doris’s brown shoes, and the more strenuous music of Claud’s big boots. The houses in Great Ormonde Street have never, one imagines, welcomed any guest more finicking than a prosperous tradesman and his comfortable family; and now they are fallen to a social level from which no well-to-do tradesman would choose his associates—no respectable tradesman, even, however well or ill Fate determined the matter of his doing. The houses now—at least some of them, for there were just men in Zoar if not in Sodom, and one must not hurt the feelings of any—are mean and grimy. Queer trades are plied there. Men accurately costumed as stage anarchists go furtively in and out. Strange, frowzy ladies in unmentionable undress haunt the basements—ladies whose toilets seem all to depend desperately on the one hand with which they close errant bodices across their bosoms, while with the other they open the door to callers. They are affable ladies, and visitors find them kind and helpful.
“I dunno, my dear,” said the one who opened the door to Daphne; “he may be in, or he mayn’t. I tell you what—you just go up and see. You know the way, I lay.”
“No,” said Daphne.
“Oh, a new one? You look out for his temper, then. That’s my advice—if you’re new.”
“New?” said Daphne.
“Ain’t you a model?”
Daphne reflected that she was.
“Yes,” she said, “but”
“Oh, it’s all right,” said the frowzy lady. “New to it, ain’t you? But it’s what we must all come to, isn’t it?—that or something else. It’ll be all the same a hundred years ’ence. It’s the second floor and turn to the right and along the passage across the roofs and then up all the stairs there are. I’d run up with you, it being your first time, only I was just doing me hair.”
“Thank you,” said Daphne, and went.
The stairs were as frowzy as the lady. On the first floor a door was open, affording glimpses of plush and displaying with little reserve triumphs of the cheap cabinetmaker’s art. The second floor lodger used its landing as a kitchen. An evil lamp stank there—a cooking lamp, on it a crooked-handled kettle, belching forth violent steam. There was a pot of drooping musk on the staircase window ledge, and it seemed that the reeking scent of musk that filled the air could not all come from one innocent earth-rooted plant. Then came a glass door, and a glass-framed ridge across roofs. Daphne thought of the Bridge of Sighs as represented in oleographic reproductions of the work of the late Mr. Turner. Then three steps, another door, a short passage—corridor is too wide a name for it—then more stairs very steep and many, and finally a door, not quite shut, on which she knocked, a knock that had no effect on the perceptible universe. The place allotted in Daphne’s scheme of things to Daphne’s heart felt hollow. One’s heart in moments of extreme nervousness doesn’t really beat heavily as novelists would have us believe—it seems to go away altogether. And it is missed.
She knocked again.
“Damnation!” was the immediate response. “Come in, can’t you?”
“I can,” said Daphne, very distinctly, “but I don’t think I will.”
There was a pause. Then:
“I am very sorry. Will you please come in. If you don’t I must come to the door, and if I do”
Visions of blood “spurting out all over” painted the stone-coloured door red, and that with no niggard brush. Daphne pushed the door open and entered.
No blood was visible.
The studio was large and airy, in violent contrast to the musk-paraffin staircase. In the middle of it, on a small couch, lay the invalid raised on one elbow, scowling at the door. He found a false, polite smile, difficult as it seemed.
“Do come in,” he said, in a voice that matched the smile to a shade. “I knew it was you when you spoke, and yet I knew it couldn’t be. Come in – is it some more art-criticism? All I have is at your service.”
“Mrs. Delarue said you’d hurt your foot,” said Daphne, bluntly, standing about a yard inside the door with her wad of white handkerchiefs held between her ungloved hands.
“So you hastened to the rescue. How kind! And how prompt!”
“Mr. Winston was out—and Mrs. Delarue was afraid to come back without him. She said you would swear so.”
“I see. So you offered to come instead. How suitable!”
“She begged me to come,” said Daphne, steadily. “I thought you were really hurt, or I shouldn’t have come.”
“Of course not,” said Henry. “I quite see that. And?”
“She said you would bleed to death,” said Daphne.
“She is full of imaginative humour. Yes?”
“And she said there was an errand. Can I get you anything?” She made herself ask the question. After all, a man hurt is a hurt man, even if he be also a bear.
“No, thank you. I couldn’t think of troubling you.”
“I’m sorry I’ve troubled you. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” said he, with a politeness more insolent than any insolence. “Thank you so much for calling. It was too sweet of you. No—don’t go. For God’s sake don’t leave me like this.”
The “God’s sake” caught Daphne in the full swing of her sudden angry turn to the door.
It was Henry who had spoken, of course—there was no one else in the room—but it was not in any voice that she had ever heard.
“Can I,” she said, very coldly, “be of any service to you?”
He had raised himself on his elbow and was leaning forward eagerly.
“There’s that chap I was telling Winston about yesterday,” he said, in tones wholly matter of fact and friendly. “Could you take him a note from me—and a key? He’s all alone in London. Doesn’t know a soul, and doesn’t speak a word—of negotiable English, I mean. You speak French, Billy says.”
“Yes,” said Daphne, slowly, “yes. I’ll do that.” To refuse had been sheer inhumanity to an unknown Russian, who, after all, had done one no harm.
“I don’t know what sort of chap he is—except that he knows how to draw. He’s a great pot in continental circles.”
“Yes,” said she again. “I’ll go.”
“And you won’t curse me if he hasn’t the polished manners of a Labour Member of Parliament?”
“I don’t curse people,” said she, coldly, “and all the people I meet haven’t got polished manners. Shall I get you the paper and things to write?”
“On that table,” said he, curtly. Daphne groped among a mass of sketches, paint-pots, brushes, pencils, jars, pots, paint boxes, pastels, and a litter of papers, the whole unified by charcoal dust as a winter world by snow.
“Thank you,” he carelessly said, and wrote, Daphne standing very upright, with a very marked air of waiting with accentuated patience till he should be ready.
“Won’t you sit down?” he interjected in the middle of the letter, but she would not hear.
“There, then,” he said, putting the envelope to pale lips, “and—thank you very much.”
“Not at all,” said the girl.
“Before you go,” he said, with an air of its being almost nothing but just worth mentioning, “will you forgive me?”
Daphne was not enough on her guard to refuse the obvious question.
“What for?”
“For being such a brute beast when you came in. I’m sorry. Things take me like that sometimes. I am sorry. Is that enough?”
“Quite,” said Daphne, colder than ice. “Good-bye.” To take the note she held out her hand. He caught it and held it.
“It’s not,” he said in the voice of a very sorry child, “it’s not just words. Will you really forgive me? Honestly. You’ve behaved like a decent human being to me, and I’ve behaved like a pig and an ape. I want that washed out.”
She moved her hand, but it was held and not tenderly.
“In the waters of forgiveness,” he said, “you’re very kind, you’re extraordinarily beautiful, and I can’t forgive myself. But your forgiveness would be something.”
She made shift to laugh, and get her hand away.
“Of course!” she said. “And it’s nothing. It serves me right for interfering.”
“It’s not nothing if you say that,” he said, with an air almost imbecile in its travesty of childish repentance; “it was the right thing for you to come. So few people do the right thing.”
She stood looking down at the note. It is so difficult to know the answers to wholly unexpected speeches.
“But,” she said, suddenly, “how shall I know the man?”
“Oh,” he answered, glibly, “that’s all right. He’s a Russian-looking chap, long hair, and a beard that—here, give me the pencil again.”
She saw grow under his pencil the presentment of a low-browed, high-cheekboned, shock-headed man with large, dark, appealing eyes. “There,” he said, holding out the sketch, “you can’t mistake him. By the way, he’s as helpless as the new-born. All Russians are. If he’s in any sort of awful hole—lost his luggage or forgotten his name, or anything, you might be a guiding hand. Do you mind?” He spoke as to a friend of years’ standing.
“No,” said she, “I don’t mind. Good-bye.”
“Must you go?” he said, as though nothing could have surprised him more.
“Yes, of course I must go.”
“Very well,” he said, discontentedly, “go then.”
“There isn’t anything else, is there?” she asked, doubtfully. She ought to have gone, of course. She wanted to go—but still—“Is you foot really bad? Mayn’t I send a doctor?”
“No; but—what’s that in your other hand?” He spoke as though the hand he had held were in some way set apart. But she did not notice this till afterward, when she lived through the interview again as she walked back to Fitzroy Street.
“Handkerchiefs,” she said, in a tone of studied, sordid commonplace, “for your foot.”
“May I have one?”
“All of them, if you like,” said Daphne; “but oughtn’t it to be bathed or something?” It was only right to suggest this, even if one did hate the man.
“Yes.”
“Shall I get some water?”
Incredibly she accepted the quiet affirmative of his answer, and found herself presently under his instructions heating water at the gas-stove in a little slip of a kitchen.
“Shall I bathe if for you?” she asked, standing at the door with the black kettle in one hand and a basin in the other. Surely he would see, at last, the mockery of her attitude’s humbleness.
“No,” he said. “I mean no, thank you. If you’ll put the water here, and then help me to tie it up.”
She did these things. The wound as she saw it lost nine-tenths of Mrs. Delarue’s estimate of it—but it was a cut, and a deep one. It was the worst wound she had ever seen, and it made her feel rather sick, but she dried it and, lips close set, bandaged it with firm fingers and eyes that avoided the charcoal-grimed, blood-stained rags that had served as first-aid.
“What clever hands you have,” he said, looking at them as they worked; “it’s a pity they can’t draw.”
For the first time as she rose from her knees he let his eyes meet hers fully. She had not, she told herself, really seen his eyes before.
“I’m sorry,” he said, very gently, “that I said you were beautiful.”
Again she had not the skill to refuse him the “Why?”
“Because you didn’t like it. I won’t again.”
And again she found no rules for her reply.
“Have you got things to eat here?” was all she found to say.
“Enough to go on with. You might send Winston along, if you see him.”
“I will. Good-bye. I suppose you can move about, to get things?”
“Oh Lord, yes—thank you. I can hop if it comes to that. Good-bye.”
He held out his hand; and hers, as it left his, felt that it was not willingly released.
“It’s peace, then,” he said. “I’m quite forgiven?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Daphne, clumsily, and, on the words, somehow, got away.
Fitzroy Street seemed quite near, as places are near in the sudden evasions of a dream. She must wash her hands and change her dress. Everything was blackened with the all-pervasive charcoal dust of that Great Ormonde Street studio.
Doris was polishing her plate and glass and spoon under Mrs. Delarue’s directions.
“Regular little housekeeper she’s going to learn to be,” said the charwoman. “And how did you find him, miss?”
“He’s all right,” said Daphne. “I’m going on his errand. Doris, you can come, too.”
“I’d rather stay with Mrs. Delarue and be a regular little housekeeper,” said Doris, tripping over the long apron pinned round her neck by her custodian, and blundering against her sister.
“No inconvenience to me, miss,” said Mrs. Delarue; “if I might boil me an egg with a cup of tea, I could set here and darn my gentlemen’s socks as well as not, and you be free as air to do his errand and take him back his answer, which no doubt he’ll be worriting himself to fiddlestrings over.”
“There isn’t any answer,” said Daphne, shortly, and disappeared behind the sagging line that supported the curtain behind which was the “dressing room,” “but I shall be very much obliged if you can stay with Miss Doris for half an hour.”
“I’ll stay along of her till her bedtime, if you like,” said the charwoman. “All my gentlemen is tidied for the day, so no calls on my time, my dear, and don’t you hurry,”
“Thank you,” said Daphne, “I’ll be back in half an hour. Oh!”—she remembered suddenly the possible claims of Russian incompetence—“I may be kept longer.”
Mrs. Delarue nodded knowingly to herself.
“You’ll stay with Miss Doris till I come home?”
“Now would I leave the dear lamb?” Mrs. Delarue asked; and Doris added: “I should lock the door if she wanted to, and throw the key into the ash-bin—or the ash-tree. Isn’t that a funny joke I made, Daffy? They’re different kinds of ashes, of course,” she added, doubtfully.
“That’s what makes the joke so funny,” said Daphne.
The way from Fitzroy Street to the Mont Blanc is not very easy to find when one has not only not been out alone in London, but has hardly been out alone anywhere. There was a good deal of tacking through Soho streets, and among the bare backs and sides of theatres before Daphne at last found Gerrard Street and the little white-faced restaurant with the two round-topped bay trees in tubs outside it.
The patron received her at the door with a bow and smile. Pleasant, that. Not so pleasant the scrutiny, face by face, of the “clients” seated close together at the little crowded tables. To stand in a summer gown that would be at home in a country rose-garden, with a hat that is, in fact, a little garden of roses, and to stare into the eyes of twenty complete strangers in succession, demands some sang-froid. Much, indeed. More, to be exact, than Daphne could command. She glanced at the patron with more appeal in her eyes than she knew of.
“Mademoiselle cherche?” he responded with instant courtesy, stepping to her side.
“Un Monsieur Russe”—she unrolled the sketch, and handed it to him. All the eyes in the little diningroom were turned on her, forks being suspended in mid-air on their way to the mouths of the curious. Daphne, flushed, withdrew behind the glass screen that separates the passage from the dining-room.
“But perfectly,” said the patron, returning the sketch. “This gentleman is in the salon above. He has the air to await someone.”
Daphne stumbled on the edge of her dress as she went up the stairs. Above was another dining-room, smaller, less crowded. At the table in the corner by the open window sat the Russian. He was very unkempt, and very shabby; his elbows were on the table, and his haggard eyes watched the door. He had, as the patron had said, the air to await someone. His eyes did not change as Daphne entered. Indeed, why should they? She walked straight to his table and sat down facing him. He made a little courteous gesture that was half a bow, moved the vinegar and oil out of her way, and resumed his fixed scrutiny of the entrance.
Daphne unfolded her table-napkin and said:
“Mr. Vorontzoff?”
The start that he gave and the sudden terror in his eyes recalled all the stories she had ever read of Underground Russia. A hot flush of sympathy dyed her face and neck:
She made haste to lay the note before him. He looked from her to it, and back again. What he saw in her face reassured him. She answered what she had seen in his face with:
“De la part d’un ami. All goes well.”
He got his eyes from her face to the note, tore it open and read. Instantly his face cleared like an April sky after rain, and broke into the smile which is one of the chief charms of your Russian—a smile sunny yet with a deep, undying memory of storms gone by.
“Now, in effect, all goes well! My friend writes that mademoiselle will be today the guardian angel. But how they are good, the English! Mademoiselle, I avow it to you. My money comes not from Paris—it is to you that I shall owe my déjeuner.”
“Willingly, monsieur,” said the girl, pulling off her gloves. “Monsieur has commanded?”
“I have awaited the arrival of ce cher Henry,” said he, and beckoned to the waiter.
Daphne had, she reflected, wanted adventures. Well, now she had them. The ministering angel’s visit to that blackened studio, and to that studio’s owner—its details hidden away at the back of her mind to be taken out and played with later—and now the incident, in itself an event, of lunching in a little French restaurant with a perfect stranger who had, for anything she knew, killed a prison governor or a general of Cossacks and a Russian Grand Duke or two. She crumbled her bread, searching for a suitable conversational opening.
“You are newly arrived in London?” was all she found.
“But yes. It is a strange town. So rich—so rotten.”
“Are you staying long?”
“I desire to see the poor, the oppressed. To draw them. For so long we make the attack through the ears only—and the rich are very deaf—all. I figure to myself an exhibition of paintings in which I will show, to the eyes even of the half-blind, the slime of misery on which they build their palaces.”
“You mean,” said Daphne, lamely enough, “that you’re going to paint poor people?”
“I shall paint misery,” said the Russian, dropping his spoon in the soup so that it splashed across the table onto Daphne’s fried potatoes. “Misery everywhere where I shall see it. In the faces of the tired rich and the tired poor; in the houses that are like the styes of sick pigs and the houses that are like imperial palaces; in the eyes of the children and the old men; in the wrinkled, knotted red hands of the women who work; the listless white hands of the women who are idle. I shall paint so that all must see. The fear of the thief and the weariness of the harlot—I shall paint the Thing that Is.”
“Don’t you think,” said Daphne, timidly, “that if the world’s so dreadful, you ought to paint beautiful things?”
“Roses and nightingales—and the baby’s bath and the first Communion! Bah! there are many to paint these, and many to buy. I paint men as man has made them. And for beauty,” he added, resuming the bedabbled soup spoon, “all that I paint is beautiful—I paint it so.”
“Did you paint those sort of pictures in Russia?” she asked.
“But surely. It is so that I am made. I paint the thing that I see. And in my country it is forbidden to see anything but the glory of the Czar. It is for that I am here.”
“Did they—did they put you in prison?”
He thrust up the sleeve of his worn coat and a hitherto unsuspected shirt sleeve; there were curious twisted scars serpentining across the forearm. Daphne shuddered and put down her fork.
The Russian smiled—that childlike, confiding smile of his.
“La, la, my child,” he said, “that is nothing. I am like that on all my body. But I am here alive, and living to work. And I drink to you,” he raised an empty glass, “and to your friend the amiable Henry. But it is he who has the genius, is it not? It is he who has the heart and the spirit—the touch sure, the hand fine.”
“I don’t know,” said Daphne, and suddenly felt again on her hand the last touch of Henry’s. “I haven’t seen any of his pictures. Is he really a great artist?”
“But yes, he is great. He knows to draw the thing that is. My exhibition it is to him and me—to us two—none other. The world shall see his genius.”
“And yours,” said Daphne, politely.
“His genius,” said the Russian, “and my sufferings. Filet de veau Marengo. And mademoiselle drinks nothing?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Daphne blushed, remembering the raised and empty glass, “what?”
He took the wine card and ordered Médoc.
“Ah, my fortune I have wasted,” he said. “When I, too, flattered myself to draw only what the world thinks to be the beautiful, it was champagne I ordered. When we put our hand in a friend’s purse we make economies—and it is Médoc.”
“Have champagne, if you like,” said Daphne, helpless before the memory of those twisted scars. She could go without, oh, anything, rather than that anything should be denied to the man with that arm.
“But no,” he said; “it was only a little pleasantry to égayer our dejeuner. In prison there was not even Médoc.”
When the wine came he raised his glass, not to Henry, but to “The Social Revolution!”
Daphne’s glass was filled, but she jibbed at the toast. He set down his glass.
“You fear the word?” he said.
“Are you an anarchist, or a nihilist, or what?” Daphne asked hurriedly.
“I am a revolutionary,” said he, “as the Christ was—as all Christians should be—if there were any Christians. I seek the overthrow of tyranny and injustice, and the triumph of universal brotherhood.”
“Oh,” said Daphne, as who should say, “Is that all?” and drank.
“Tell me,” she said, “more about what you mean by revolution.”
He told her. But he told her first the things that set, in Russia, the revolution, as a star, shining through the mists of blood and tears. The things that we read of every week in our daily papers, the things that do not take away our breakfast appetites. But “Further Outrages in South Russia,” “Massacre of Jews at Odessa,” “Three Hundred Peasants Shot down by Cossacks,” “Children Tortured by Russian Officials”—these in cold black and white are powerless to stir jaded nerves.
With Daphne it was otherwise. The lancet of the press had not yet inoculated her to horrors. Young, inexperienced, and sensitive, to her it was still terrible that women should be outraged, then burned alive, and children sawn asunder. These things, told in the living voice of one whose own heart had been torn by these things, whose own body had suffered as had the bodies of his fellows, wrung Daphne’s heart with tortures till then unsuspected. That little world of aunts and uncles, comfort and luxury, ill-temper and answering rebellion—this new world of boys and girls chattering of art and drinking cocoa as a dissipation—this other world, only dimly discerned, of girls who were not like the sentimental sweet maidens of fiction, of men who were not like the heroes of novelists—all these worlds died down like a candle flame—went out like a wind-blown candle. And Daphne across the narrow table met face to face for the first time horror, misery, revolt, despair. It all came out in a flood that was not to be stemmed or stopped. The girl listened, helpless and sickened.
The Russian’s eyes gleamed, his quick hands gesticulated. All the other guests had, by ones and twos, paid their additions and departed. The waiters, in tired resentment, cursed with their glances the laggard two at the table by the window. Because the hours from three to five are—save for such thoughtless unkindnesses as these—the waiter’s own.
“We ought to go,” said Daphne; “the waiters want us to. And don’t tell me any more! You take away all my courage.”
“Your courage?” said the Russian as he rose—“it’s our courage that is needed; that is, and will be—so long as life is bitter and freedom is sweet.”
Daphne, wordless, paid the bill. “And here,” she said, “is the key of your room.”
“But where is it then—this atelier?” He hung helpless on her answer.
“You have the address in that letter,” she said.
He looked at it forlornly.
“But this Stepney,” he said, “how does one find oneself there? It is not possible, mademoiselle, that you abandon me at a moment similar”
“You don’t” Daphne’s heart sank as she realised that she still could refuse him nothing. “Is it that monsieur expects me to go with him, unlock his atelier to arrange his furniture?”
“How mademoiselle understands me!” he said. And again there was the smile. “But mademoiselle is an angel, a guardian angel.”
It was not at all what mademoiselle desired, at the moment, to be. But she felt, more strongly than she felt anything else just then, how much the world owed to this man with the scarred arms and the scarred life. The world would not pay. Well, she at least might pay something.
So she went out into dusty, sunny streets where people turned to look at her and at him, and at each more for being with the otherand guessed at the points of the compass, and accosted policemen, and by road and rail at last got herself and her charge to Stepney.
“It is here then,” said Vorontzoff—“it is here that your poors live.”
“It’s here that your studio is,” said Daphne, making for another policeman.
It was down a clean road, where in a front garden a tall pear-tree leaned over the pavement its load of baby fruit that would never see maturity—along another road—and there was a big gate, like a Parisian porte cochere, a yard, a motor garage, and a carpenter’s workshop. A man in a blue shirt open at the neck was cleaning a big red automobile.
“There’s a studio here?” Daphne asked.
“A stoodio? Not as I know of, miss,” said the man, civil, but amazed at this interrogatory vision from the far West.
“It is not an atelier,” said the Russian: “it is a grenier—a garret.”
“Isn’t there any place here that a gentleman hired to work in? We’ve got the key of something.” She held out her hand to the Russian. “The key,” she said, impatiently. “The key of the atelier.”
He felt in his pockets, vaguely at first, then in growing disquiet. An agitated interval yielded only their certainty that he had lost the key.
“Will mademoiselle remain here till I return to the Mont Blanc and find the key which without doubt remains over there, upon the table where we déjeunered?”
No, mademoiselle would not.
“Isn’t there,” she asked the motor man, “some responsible person, a clerk or a foreman, or what ever he is, or something of that sort?”
Something of that sort was produced from a glass-fronted workshop, high on one side of the yard, a sort of greenhouse on stilts. Another key was found, and then, surprisingly, a door to fit the key.
Up wooden steps incredibly steep and narrow, gritty and ruinous to dress flounces, steps under which a gas-engine pulsed feverishly, and above which trains ran at doubtful and disconcerting! intervals. At the top of the steps a narrow, square platform. From this a door opening into a loft—many-windowed and sky-lighted, bare raftered, bleak.
“This is the workshop the gentleman engaged,” said the foreman, or whatever he was, with an air of stating a fact, unbelievable, but still a fact.
“Thank you,” said Daphne. And he went away.
There was furniture in the room—odds and ends, chairs and tables, easels, canvases, a few packing cases heaped or scattered in an equal confusion. Crockery dustily not at home on floor or furniture. In one corner a brick parapet surrounded a hearth desolate with the ashes of a fire long burnt out. The chimney, naked and bald, projected its crude yellow brick into the room. But what took the eye, arresting attention and even movement, was a dull sea of brown paper and straw that spread knee-deep over the room—a sea that crackled like a stirred snapdragon when one moved, and in repose obscured the base of all objects.
“This dear Henry,” observed the Russian, tenderly, “he has a golden heart. Already he has commenced to disembale my effects.”
“I wish he had done a little more while he was about it,” Daphne thought and looked.
“But it is nothing,” the Russian answered the look. “He has done almost all. You and me, mademoiselle, we put ourselves to the work. A little half hour—zut—all is order and beauty.”
It was four hours later that Daphne emerged from the dusty spray of the last wave of brown paper and straw. The Russian had been worse than useless. Sent out to buy a broom he had failed to come across one. Instead he bought a kettle “to make the kitchen,” as he gaily explained. Commanded to purchase a pail he brought a saucepan. When soap was needed he brought candles – so that at last Daphne left him in charge sitting on a packing case smoking eternal cigarettes, and went shopping herself. It was an afternoon of the hardest work she had ever done. Yet she enjoyed it. For was she not face to face with Real Things, and was she not now, as almost always hitherto, proving herself competent—able to deal with circumstances, and to deal with them masterfully?
It was a room not handsome, indeed, but at least habitable, on which she turned, at the last, eyes of pride.
“There!” she said, “now all is in order. You say you can sleep on the floor—so I suppose you’ve everything you want I suppose you’ll put your bed in the little room when you get one. I’ll wash my hands and go.”
She had to fetch the water herself from the tap in the yard, for Vorontzoff smoked on, hypnotised as Russians are apt to be by the energy of their friends.
Her cotton gown, that had been so fresh, was crumpled and soiled, her hair dusty, and on the roses of the little hat-garden there was dust, too.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand.
Vorontzoff got off his packing-case to take it “Au revoir, mademoiselle,” he said, “you are an angel of goodness, and when I paint the true beautiful it is you who shall be my only model. I ask no other. I will not have other. I go to dream of you all the night in the house that you have made so charming for me.”
There was no trace of gallantry in his speech. Only the open gratitude and admiration of one human being for another.
“I’m very glad,” said Daphne, and truly, “to have been able to do anything.”
“You are as good as you are beautiful,” he said, and kissed her hand; “it is too much for one woman’s share.”
“Oh—good-bye,” said Daphne, awkwardly.
Then she stumbled down those precipitous, dirty steps and across the yard, quiet now; for the gas-engine had ceased to pulsate and the men gone to their homes.
She got back to Fitzroy Street somehow, found Doris asleep on the fat lap of Mrs. Delarue, dismissed that constant and significant guardian, and tumbled herself and the child into bed, worn out, body and soul, with all that the day had laid upon her. She had had two adventures. And two men had told her that she was beautiful.
Her mind was in a whirl of dust, brown paper, French phrases, charcoally bandages, stories of blood and tears knocked at her heart; but her last waking sensations mingled the smell of musk and paraffin with the memory of that hand, so slow to let go her hand—a physical memory, poignant, vivid, insistent