December Love Part 21

PART THREE

CHAPTER I

Miss Van Tuyn, enthroned among distinguished and definite Georgians in a nimbus of smoke, presently began to wonder what had become of a certain young man. Despite the clamour of voices about her, and the necessity for showing incessantly that, although she had never bothered to paint cubist pictures or to write minor poetry, or even to criticize and appreciate meticulously those who did, she was cleverer than any Georgian of them all, her mind would slip away to Berkeley Square. She had, of course, noted young Craven's tacit resistance to the pressure of her desire, and her girlish vanity had resented it. But she had remembered that even in these active days of the ruthless development of the ego a sense of politeness, of what is "due" from one human being to another, still lingers in some perhaps old-fashioned bosoms. Lady Sellingworth was elderly. Craven might have thought it was his absolute duty to protect her from the possible dangers lurking between Regent Street and Berkeley Square. But as time went on, despite the sallies of d.i.c.k Garstin, the bloodless cynicisms of Enid Blunt, who counted insolence as the chief of the virtues, the amorous sentimentalities of the Turkish refugee from Smyrna, whose moral ruin had been brought about by a few lines of praise from Pierre Loti, the touching appreciations of prison life by Penitence Murray, and the voluble intellectuality of Thapoulos, Jennings and Smith the sculptor, Miss Van Tuyn began to feel absent-minded. Her power of attraction was quite evidently being seriously challenged. She was now certain--how could she not be--that Craven had not merely gone to Number 18A, but had also "gone in."

That was unnecessary. It was even very strange. For she, Beryl Van Tuyn, was at least thirty-six years younger than Lady Sellingworth.

Miss Van Tuyn had an almost inordinate belief in the attraction youth holds for men. She had none of the hidden diffidence which had been such a troubling element in Lady Sellingworth's nature. Nor was there any imp which sat out of reach and mocked her. The violet eyes were satirical; but her satire was reserved for others, and was seldom or never directed against herself. She possessed a supply of self-a.s.surance such as Lady Sellingworth had never had, though for many years she had had the appearance of it. Having this inordinate belief and this strong self-a.s.surance, having also youth and beauty, and remembering certain little things which seemed to her proof positive that Craven was quite as susceptible to physical emotions as are most healthy and normal young men, she wondered why he had not returned to the Cafe Royal after leaving Lady Sellingworth decorously at her door. He had known perfectly well that she wished him to return. She had not even been subtle in conveying the wish to him. And yet he had defied it.

Or perhaps Lady Sellingworth had defied it for him.

Miss Van Tuyn was really as fond of Lady Sellingworth as she could be of a woman. She felt strongly the charm which so many others had felt.

Lady Sellingworth also interested her brain and aroused strongly the curiosity which was a marked feature of her "make-up." She had called Lady Sellingworth a book of wisdom. She was also much influenced by distinction and personal prestige. About the distinction of her friend there could be no doubt; and the prestige of a once-famous woman of the world, and of a formerly great beauty whose name would have its place in the annals of King Edward the Seventh, still lingered about the now-faded recluse of Berkeley Square. But till this moment Miss Van Tuyn had never thought of Lady Sellingworth as a possible rival to herself.

Even now when the idea presented itself to her she was inclined to dismiss it as too absurd for consideration. And yet Craven had not come back, although he must know she was expecting him.

Perhaps Lady Sellingworth had made him go in against his will.

Miss Van Tuyn remembered the photograph she had seen at Mrs. Ackroyd's.

That woman had the face of one who was on the watch for new lovers. And does a woman ever change? Only that very night she herself had said to Craven, as they walked from Soho to Regent Street, that she had a theory of the changelessness of character. Or perhaps she had really meant of temperament. She had even said that she believed that the Lady Sellingworth of to-day was to all intents and purposes the Lady Sellingworth of yesterday and of the other days of her past. If that were so--and she had meant what she had said--then in the white-haired woman, who seemed now indifferent to admiration and leagues removed from vanity, there still dwelt a woman on the pounce.

Young Craven was very good-looking, and there was something interesting about his personality. His casual manner, which was nevertheless very polite, was attractive. His blue eyes and black hair gave him an almost romantic appearance. He was very quiet, but was certainly far from being cold. And he undoubtedly understood a great deal, and must have had many experiences of which he never talked. Miss Van Tuyn was subtle enough to know that he was subtle too. She had made up her mind to explore his subtlety. And now someone else was exploring it in Berkeley Square.

The line reappeared in her low white forehead, and her cult for Lady Sellingworth, like flannel steeped in water, underwent a shrinking process. She felt strongly the indecency of grasping old age. And through her there floated strange echoes of voices which had haunted Lady Sellingworth's youth, voices which had died away long ago in Berkeley Square, but which are captured by succeeding generations of women, and which persist through the ages, finding ever new dwellings.

The night was growing late, but the Georgians bitterly complained of the absurdity of London having a closing time. The heat and the noise seemed to swell with the pa.s.sing of the hours, and a curious and anemic brutality dawned with the midnight upon many of the faces around the narrow tables. They looked at the same time bloodless and hard. Eyes full of languor, or feverish with apparent expectation of some impending adventure, stared fixedly through the smoke wreaths at other eyes in the distance. Loud voices hammered through the murk. Foreheads beaded with perspiration began to look painfully expressive. It was as if all faces were undressed.

d.i.c.k Garstin, the famous painter, a small, slight, clean-shaven man, who looked like an intellectual jockey with his powerful curved nose, thin, close-set lips, blue cheeks and prominent, bony chin, and who fostered the illusion deliberately by dressing in large-checked suits of a sporting cut, with big b.u.t.tons and mighty pockets, kept on steadily drinking green chartreuse and smoking small, almost black, cigars. He was said to be made of iron, and certainly managed to combine perpetual dissipation with an astonishing amount of hard and admirable work. His models he usually found--or so he said--at the Cafe Royal, and he made a speciality of painting the portraits of women of the demi-monde, of women who drank, or took drugs, who were morphia maniacs, or were victims of other unhealthy and objectionable crazes. Nothing wholly sane, nothing entirely normal, nothing that suggested cold water, fresh air or sunshine, made any appeal to him. A daisy in the gra.s.s bored him; a gardenia emitting its strangely unreal perfume on a dung heap brought all his powers into play. He was an eccentric of genius, and in his strangeness was really true to himself, although normal people were apt to a.s.sert that his unlikeness to them was a pose. Simplicity, healthy goodness, the radiance of unsmirched youth seemed to his eyes wholly inexpressive. He loved the rotten as a dog loves garbage, and he raised it by his art to fascination. Even admirable people, walking through his occasional one-man exhibitions, felt a lure in his presentations of sin, of warped womanhood, and, gazing at the blurred faces, the dilated eyes, the haggard mouths, the vicious hands of his portraits, were shiveringly conscious of missed experiences, and for the moment felt ill at ease with what seemed just there, and just then, the dullness of virtue. The evil admired him because he made evil wonderful. To the perverse he was almost as a G.o.d.

Miss Van Tuyn was an admirer of d.i.c.k Garstin. She thought him a great painter, but apart from his gift his mind interested her intensely. He had a sort of melancholy understanding of human nature and of life, a strangely sure instinct in probing to the bottom of psychological mysteries, a cruelly sure hand in tearing away the veils which the victims hoped would shroud their weaknesses and sins. These gifts made her brain respect him, and tickled her youthful curiosity. It was really for d.i.c.k that she had specially wished Lady Sellingworth to join the Georgians that night. And now, in her secret vexation, she was moved to speak of the once famous Edwardian.

"Have you ever heard of Lady Sellingworth?" she said, leaning her elbow on the marble table in front of her, and bending towards d.i.c.k Garstin so that he might hear her through the uproar.

He finished one more chartreuse and turned his small black eyes upon her. Pin-points of piercing light gleamed in them. He lifted his large, coa.r.s.e and capable painter's hand to his lips, put his cigar stump between them, inhaled a quant.i.ty of smoke, blew it out through his hairy nostrils, and then said in a big ba.s.s voice:

"Never. Why should I have? I hate society women."

Miss Van Tuyn suppressed a smile at the absurd and hackneyed phrase, which reminded her of picture papers. For a moment she thought of d.i.c.k Garstin as a sort of inverted sn.o.b. But she wanted something from him, so she pursued her conversational way, and inflicted upon him a rapid description of Lady Sellingworth, as she had been and as she was, recording the plunge from artificial youth into perfectly natural elderliness which had now, to her thinking, become definite old age.

The painter gave her a sort of deep and melancholy attention, keeping the two pin-points of light directed steadily upon her.

"Did you ever know a woman doing such a thing as that, d.i.c.k?" she asked.

"Did you ever know of a woman clinging to her youth, and then suddenly, in a moment, flinging all pretence of it away from her?"

He did not trouble, or perhaps did not choose, to answer her question, but instead made the statement:

"She had been thrown off by some lover. In a moment of furious despair, thinking all was over for her for ever, she let everything go. And then she hadn't the cheek to try to take any of it back. She hadn't the _toupet_. But"--he flung a large hand stained with pigments out in an ugly, insolent gesture--"any one of these _fleurs du mal_ would have jumped back from the white to the bronze age when the fit was pa.s.sed, without caring a d.a.m.n what anyone thought of them. All the moral bravery is in the underworld. That is why I paint it."

"That is absolute truth," said Jennings, who was sitting next to d.i.c.k Garstin and smoking an enormous pipe. "The lower you go the more truth you find."

"Then I suppose the gutter is full of it," said Miss Van Tuyn.

"The Cafe Royal is," said Garstin. "There are free women here. Your women of society are for ever waiting on the opinion of what they call their set--G.o.d help them! Your Lady Sellingworth, for instance--would she dare, after showing herself as an old woman, to become a young woman again? Not she! Her precious set would laugh at her for it. But Cora, for instance--" He pointed to a table a little way off, at which a woman was sitting alone. "Do you suppose Cora cares one single d.a.m.n what you, or I, or anyone else thinks of her? She knows we all know exactly what she is, and it makes not a particle of difference to her. She'll tell you, or anyone else, what her nature is. If you don't happen to like it, you can go to h.e.l.l--for her. That's a free woman. Look at her face. Why, it's great, because her life and what she is is written all over it.

I've painted her, and I'll paint her again. She's a human doc.u.ment, not a sentimental Valentine. Waiter! Waiter!"

His sonorous ba.s.s rolled out, dominating the uproar around him. Miss Van Tuyn looked at the woman he had been speaking of. She was tall, emaciated, high shouldered. Her face was dead white, with brightly painted lips. She had dark and widely dilated eyes which looked hungry, observant and desperate. The steadiness of their miserable gaze was like that of an animal. She was dressed in a perfectly cut coat and skirt with a neat collar and a black tie. Both her elbows were on the table, and her sharp white chin was supported by her hands, on which she wore white gloves sewn with black. Her features were good, and the shape of her small head was beautiful. Her expression was intense, but abstracted. In front of her was a small tumbler half full of a liquid the colour of water.

A waiter brought Garstin a gin-and-soda. He mixed drinks in an almost stupefying way, as few men can without apparent ill-effects unless they are Russians.

"Cora--a free woman, by G.o.d!" he observed, lighting another of his small but deadly cigars.

Enid Blunt, who was sitting with Smith the sculptor and others at the adjoining table, began slowly, and with an insolent drawl, reciting a sonnet. She was black as the night. Even her hands looked swarthy.

There were yellow lights in her eyes. Her voice was guttural, and she p.r.o.nounced English with a strong German accent, although she had no German blood in her veins and had never been in Germany. The little Bolshevik, who had the face of a Russian peasant, candid eyes and a squat figure, listened with an air of profound and somehow innocent attention. She possessed neither morals nor manners, denied the existence of G.o.d, and wished to pull the whole fabric of European civilization to pieces. Her small brain was obsessed by a desire for anarchy. She hated all laws and was really a calmly ferocious little animal. But she looked like a creature of the fields, and had something of the shepherdess in her round grey eyes. Thapoulos, a Levantine, who had once been a courier in Athens, but who was now a rich banker with a taste for Bohemia, kept one thin yellow hand on her shoulder as he appeared to listen, with her, to the sonnet. Smith, with whom the little Bolshevik was allied for the time, and who did in clay very much what Garstin did on canvas, but more roughly and with less subtlety, looked at the Levantine's hand with indifference. A large heavy man, with square shoulders and short bowed legs, he scarcely knew why he had anything to do with Anna, or remembered how they had come together. He did not understand her at all, but she cooked certain Russian dishes which he liked, and minded dirt as little as he did. Perhaps that lack of minding had thrown them together. He did not know; n.o.body knew or cared.

"Well, I'm a free woman," said Miss Van Tuyn, in answer to Garstin's exclamation about Cora. "But you've never bothered to paint me."

She spoke with a touch of irritation. Somehow things seemed to be going vaguely wrong for her to-night.

"I suppose I am not near enough to the gutter yet," she added.

"You're too much of the out-of-door type for me," said Garstin, looking at her with almost fierce attention. "There isn't a line about you except now and then in your forehead just above the nose. And even that only comes from bad temper."

"Really, d.i.c.k," said Miss Van Tuyn, "you are absurd. It's putting your art into a strait waistcoat only to paint Cafe Royal types. But if you want lines Lady Sellingworth ought to sit for you."

Her mind that night could not detach itself from Lady Sellingworth.

In the midst of the noise, and crush, and strong light of the cafe she continually imagined a s.p.a.cious, quiet, and dimly lit room, very calm, very elegant, faintly scented with flowers; she continually visualized two figures near together, talking quietly, earnestly, confidentially.

Why had she allowed Jennings to lead her astray? She might have been in that s.p.a.cious room, too, if she had not been stupid.

"I want to ask you something about Lady Sellingworth," she continued.

"Come a little nearer."

Garstin shifted his chair.

"But I don't know her," he said, rumpling his hair with an air of boredom. "An old society woman! What's the good of that to me? What have I to do with dowagers? Bow wow dowagers! Even Rembrandt--"

"Now, d.i.c.k, don't be a bore! If you would only listen occasionally, instead of continually--"

"Go ahead, young woman! And bend down a little more. Why don't you take off your hat?"

"I will."

She did so quickly, and bent her lovely head nearer to him.

"That's better. You've got a d.a.m.ned fine head. Ceres might have owned it. But cla.s.sical stuff is no good to me. You ought to have been painted by Leighton and hung on the line in the precious old Royal Academy."

Again the tell-tale mark appeared above the bridge of Miss Van Tuyn's charming nose.

"I painted by a Royal Academician!" she exclaimed. "Thank you, d.i.c.k!"