menu_book Chapter 3

CHAPTER III. Few people, in an outburst of enthusiasm, would select the King's Road, Chelsea, as an ideal locality to reside in. It is an important thoroughfare, no doubt, but it lacks nobility and distinction. There are isolated quiet spots in it, with houses lying back from the road, and from

the upper windows of favoured residences one can obtain a view over the ices or bulls' extensive hothouses, and catch dim shadows of great tropical palms and a mellowed dash of brilliant red and yellow. There are others which look over Portman Square or St Luke's Churchyard, but on the other hand there are long stretches of dreary shops and factories, grit and general uncommliness.

Without being squalid, it has a careworn, untidy appearance, as if it was far too much harassed with the petty worries and strains of workaday life to think of cheerful adornment. Few people, except errand boys whose sense either of aesthetics or duty is usually undeveloped, saunter casually along the King's Road. A stranger tries to get out of it as fast as he can.

A frequenter has his business to attend to. Fashion does not pass along it except on tearing drags bound for Hurlingham. It is essentially a small bourgeois part of London, with all the small bourgeois impotence and honest, if somewhat dismal, solidity. It was in the middle of such a dreary stretch of road, some half-mile west of Sloane Square,

that Tleity found a lodging. The fact that a greengrocer's shop, owned by the landlord of the house, occupied the ground floor was compensated in a measure by the existence of a small studio at the back on the first floor, originally constructed by a struggling photographer who had since worked his way upwards into a more fashionably perfumed atmosphere.

One of Tleity's favourite fellow-students, Winifred Marchbane, who lived in lower Sloane Street and whose family obtained their potatoes and salads from Mr. Gherkins, had recommended the establishment and offered to share with her the expenses of the studio. The cheapness of the rooms suited Tleity's modest purse, and the prospect of pleasant companionship in the studio was an additional attraction.

It is true that the acrid smell of the potatoes, when the side door from the shop on to the private entrance lobby was left open, ascended the stairs, together with the vagodder of cooking, bearing upwards, as it were, on savoury breath the disputes of Mrs. Gherkins with the shop-boy and the cries of her apparently ever-youthful progeny. The incessant rumble, too, of omnibuses, drays, and furniture vans, and the peculiarly aggressive

rattle of tradesmen's carts, shook the floor and the windows and shivered the lustres of the chandelier. There were many drawbacks to elegant life, but Tleity, borrowing some philosophy from a talk with Mrs. Farquharson, proceeded to disregard those she could not eliminate. The sitting-room, when the door was shut and the curtains drawn of an evening, was cosy enough.

The pictures, knick-knacks, hangings, and other minor accessories of furnished apartments Tleity had returned to Mrs. Gherkins' keeping on the plea that she scarcely had room for her own, which was true, and by some miraculous art of persuasion she'd induced Mr. Gherkins to remove the nerve-shattering chandelier on the ground that she could not work by gaslight, which was not true.

She hung thick curtains over the door to keep out noise and odour, broke up the rigidity of the furniture by screens, small tables, and plants, and painted a long panel for the old cottage piano that made it look fresh and companionable. When all the arrangements were completed, the room appeared dainty and homelike, bearing, however, pair and there, in bold notes of colour, folds of drapery and odd bits of so

many impressionist painting, a peculiar impress of its tenant's personality. She was living at last the life she had so passionately longed for. There was not a human being to control her actions, not a conventionality to check the utterance of her thoughts. During her early days here she almost felt tempted to hang up her latchkey over the mantelpiece

as a glorious symbol of liberty. It seemed not only to serve to give her entrance to her own modest home, but to be the power that would unlock the heart of the great London that lay before her. From the first she had little difficulty in finding work. Dealers bought small pictures and gave her orders.

She also pleased a firm of publishers to whom she'd gone with letters of introduction and her specimens of her draftsmanship, and obtained work in the way of book and magazine illustrating. Her earnings were not large, but there was a promise of success to come. At the end of two years her income was large enough to have enabled her to move from the King's Road into a more refined locality.

But she got accustomed to its noise and rattle and to the hurried joyless stream of life that flowed along it day by day, and Mrs. Gerkins understood her tastes and habits, her quality in a landlady appreciated by women as well as men. So she stayed on. She read widely during these years, learned much.

Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four a woman is capable of vast assimilation of ideas. They can flow into the freshly opened, unpolluted channels of her being, as yet unclogged by the refuse of sorrows and wearinesses. Her rejection of the old formulas and the paramount necessity of gaining knowledge wherewith

provide herself substitutes, checked in her any impulse towards moral or artistic idealism. She read deeply, instinctively seeking after the roots of life, the elemental passions that shake our nature, be its superstructure never so delicately complex. The dawning knowledge, half frightened, half attracted her. The barbaric feminine in her struggled to escape into solitude.

With fluttering eyelids downcast, it recoiled from the idea as passion as yet unawakened responsibly within her. But the higher needs of modernity constrained her to a just, resolute system of inquiry. She learned that there are deeper laws regulating our being than those which could be enunciated at Dirdal and tea-tables, where the ingrained habit of non-recognition of them restricted

life within narrowest limits, and put, as it were, a prohibition tax upon esoteric sympathy. At four-and-twenty, Clytie was a woman, emotional, impulsive, eager to taste of any new experience. The old rebellious habit of mind had developed into a frank independence. Her step was elastic, her bearing confident. Her life was full and happy.

"'I am glad I am a woman now,' she said to Mrs. Farquharson. "'I seem to have all the advantages of both sexes.' "'Wait till you're married, my dear,' replied her friend.' Mrs. Farquharson was fond of the use of affectionate irritants. They are often valuable preservatives of friendship.

Clytie laughed. "'I suppose I shall marry some day. I don't want to end up by leading half a life. But I want to have two or three more years of this. I must play at being a man a little longer.'

"'A pretty sort of man,' said Mrs. Farquharson, resting her chin on her hand and looking at Clytie with amused eyes. "'You are the most deliciously feminine young woman I know. Look at your frock and your hair.' Judging by outward appearances, Mrs. Farquharson's criticism was correct.

Clytie had the artistic sense in dress. It was like most of her other artistic impulses, with the personal note dominant. Soft textures falling easily into folds, quiet in tone, dark greys, subdued half-shades of yellows, suddenly brightened by a small, daring flash of colour at throat or bosom. Lace, with its creamy, clinging softness, delighted her, and she wore it defiantly,

with a certain sense of triumph that she was perhaps the only girl in England who could wear it with faultless taste. She was of medium height, but her slender, fully formed figure and its erect carriage gave her an air of tallness. Her head, set well on her shoulders, and a habit of holding it back, with the chin pointing

upwards free of the throat, added to the impression of young, fearless womanhood. Her eyes were dark blue, wide apart, yet sunk in finely moulded orbits. A light of humour playing in their depths, together with a soft modelling of the nose contours beneath them, atoned for an impression of hardness and sensuousness that would have been given by the ripe, full lips with their little curl of disdain.

Her face was rounded delicately, that much she inherited from the davenants, but a faint flush of colour showed the buoyant young blood within, just as her deep red hair, with a thousand lights dancing in it, attested the rich, vigorous strain that had asserted itself in her. Clytie was proud, womanlike, of this hair, and had a way of dressing it in bewildering

confusion. Her slayed school friend, Winifred Marchpain, continued to share the studio with her. At first she had been a little afraid of Clytie, whose bold judgments and fearless expression of opinion were not qualified always to attract a timorous, shrinking nature. But gradually the stronger personality had overpowered the weaker, and bound it to itself

by unbreakable bonds. A great friendship had thus arisen between the girls, based on Winifred's side on enthusiastic admiration, almost worship, and on Clytie's on a tender feeling of love and protection. Winifred was one of a large family, her father a retired officer in the army with limited income.

Two of her sisters were governesses, earning their livelihood miles away from home. Another one took charge of the smaller members of the household. Winifred, who had a dainty talent for the painting of still life, supported herself living at home and paying her share of the household expenses. She was a little gentle creature, with dark hair and with a rich colour showing beneath

a brown cheek. Her deep brown eyes had a doglike trustfulness in them, and a steadfastness withal such as makes the heroine. A girl of few moods, few caprices. Her work was always beautifully, conscientiously finished.

She always loved it, always found in it the same quiet charm. There was no element of passion in it to set jarring the strings of futile endeavour. A fine sense of colour and gradation and subtle curve. A supreme delicacy of touch. That was her sole artistic stock in trade, and she never sought to stray beyond the limits

imposed. She had had a little picture accepted at the Academy, hung in a far, far corner. A bunch of marachelle-kneel roses, full-blown, in a Venetian glass vase of exquisitely vain transparencies. A perfect little picture, sweet and pure, like herself.

It was a cold March day. The sun shone cheerfully through the drawn white blinds of the studio skylight, but an east wind blowing outside came in through the cracks and defied the blaze of the fire in the stove. "'You're quite blue with cold,' said Winifred, laying down my stick and pallet.

"'Here, put on this wrap. Why don't you take more care of yourself?' "'I never thought of it,' said Clytie, shivering a little and accepting contentedly the wrap and a caress. "'I was sketching out quite a history of that boy who has just left.'

Winifred drew a stool to Clytie's chair near the far, and took up her position upon it, her favourite one with her, as she could of both the moral solace of sitting at Clytie's feet and the physical comfort of resting her head in Clytie's lap. "'I hope he won't bring all kinds of horrible people into the house. Burglars, you know, like Oliver Twist,' she added vaguely.

"'I suppose it is rather rash picking up a model out of the streets, but he's just the boy I wanted to give character to the group. I was going to paint him one out of my own head.' "'I don't know how you get all these street types out of your head, Clytie. I wish I could do it.'

"'I would like to see you try, you silly child,' said Clytie, laughing. "'Your street Arabs would look like stray cupids hastily huddled up in old clothes by a shocked and modest policeman.' "'I did not mean that. You know I didn't.

What I meant was, I wish I could paint without models. I don't think I could paint a common flat leaf without having it before me. As for painting that,' and she pointed to a basket standing by her easel, overflowing with anemones, snow-drops, and violets, attained that morning by Mr. Gherkins from Covent Garden, "'without a copy I might just as soon think of flying.'

"'You are an artist, Winnie, and love your art for its own sake. I'm not quite so sure that I do now. To have to finish all the thousand little convolutions of those bells would drive me raving mad. I should like to have a ghost, as sculptors do, and in mine would do the finishing and

put in all the nuisance of detail. That's why I can get on without models. Saves time. I can bring home a face with me from the streets, and I can paint it in rapidly, and then I'm done.

I suppose I oughtn't to be, but Burroughs seems satisfied. He says he's got quite a line in my pictures, the great ones, and is thinking of raising the price. I'm sure that man has been a linen draper.' "'If you could remember the boy's face, why do you bring him here?' asked Winifred.

"'I do want to know why you want him so particularly, dear,' she added, raising her chin and looking upwards at Tlity. The boy had been ragged and uncared for, not exactly a street urchin, but on the vague borderland of respectability between the newspaper Arab and the errand boy, a hybrid with the vices of many strains.

"'Do you really want to know, Winnie?' said Tlity. "'Perhaps you'll be shocked. However, you'll have to know sooner or later. I'm going to make a picture of him on my own account, just a little bit more fantastic than he is, and call him on a—'

"'Oh dear, what shall I call him?' "'An elf?' "'Oh, good gracious, no. What have I to do with elves and fairies and that sort of thing? He's the son of Cofeture, supposing the king had not married the beggar maid.'

"'Then why not the son of any other king?' "'Why not indeed?' said Tlity dryly, or of any other beggar maid.' "'Oh,' said Winifred, looking into the fire. And then after a pause, "'what makes you think that?

Did you see his mother?' "'I did. Such a stupid-looking, red-faced woman. I think she said she was a charwoman by profession. There are generations of drudgery in her face, whereas in Jack's there is vigor and

intelligence—something so different. He must have some better strain of blood in him than she and a husband of her class could have given him. Don't you think so, dear? He's a very pretty boy.'

Reply Winifred. "'But oh, he's so dirty and—' With a shudder. "'—so animal.' "'Well, he fascinates me,' said Tlity meditatively.

I'm going to paint one of my wildest pictures, all for my own self, and a bit for you if you like, Winnie.' Winnie accepted this tribute of affection with a little flush of pleasure, although Tlity's own pictures seldom gave her unqualified aesthetic delight, and turned her face towards Tlity, who laughed in her frank way.

Don't look at me with those great eyes of yours, child. You make me angry for you. They are just the sort of eyes that make women miserable. You must not trust in people like that, believe me. I trust them when they are good like you, dear.'

"'Oh, but you mustn't. Don't you know I am the wickedest girl going, always thinking of the most dreadful things? Look at the wall. How could I love anybody that could do these silly things?' She pointed to a series of grotesque charcoal caricatures on the studio wall.

She had been dissatisfied a day or two back with a picture she had been engaged on for a month, and in a fit of wilfulness had daubed it out and then proceeded to make a cruel, fantastic travesty of it on the wall. "'You wanted your tea, dear, just as you do now,' replied Winifred. This tea hour was Winifred's great delight.

At home, on account of the children, they had to sit round the dining table and butter their own thick slices of bread and drink out of substantial breakfast cups. In the studio the girls were provided a dainty little afternoon tea equipage, and Mrs. Gerkins always cut thin bread and butter from a fancy loaf. Generally it was Winifred who poured out the tea, but today Tlity busy herself with the cups,

thus making some slight amends perhaps for having shocked Winifred. Women are full of these odd feminine impulses, and other women understand them. Men don't. They sat talking, as they usually did, over their tea, and long afterwards, until it was time for Winifred to go home. As they were taking leave of each other on the landing, a man sprang up the

stairs, checked himself, and raised a slouch hat as he passed them, and vanished up the next flight. He was a fresh-faced man with a brown and tawny beard, tawny ends too to his moustaches, bright grey eyes flashing humorously as he passed the girls. His dress was careless, loose, and unfashionable, yet it was marked with a certain individuality. Who is that? Winifred whispered when the last foot of the ascending figure had disappeared.

That's another protest, said Tlity, a better one. He has the courage of his convictions. What do you mean, Tlity? Well, can't you recognise a protest when you see one? Oh, Tlity, don't tease and posse me, cried Winifred, giving her friend's arm a little shake. Do you know him? Of course not, how should I? But Mrs. Gerkins was telling me about him only this morning. His name is Kent. He seems to frighten the life out of her, therefore I say

he is a protest. Now you know, so run away home. When Winifred reached the street door, Tlity leaned over the banisters and called after her. Winnie, I must have been in a sweet temper this afternoon. Of course, dear, why do you say so? Because you left your basket of anemones for me to take care of. End of chapter 3