The Bohemian Girl Part 19

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

'His mama implied that you had lured her poor boy to your room. I suppose she thinks you provided the red paint, too.'

Janet Striker made a face. 'And Jarrold-known-as-Cosgrove has been sent off to Mama's country house with two male nurses. Detective Sergeant Munro is keeping me up to date.'

Denton scowled. 'Some house arrest - hard time in a stately home. Couple of medical men to look in weekly, presumably with lunch laid on. Hard on them, too.'

Janet Striker laughed. 'No good being angry.'

'He's getting off as good as scot-free. I'd tan his hide for him.'

They were eating at Pinoli's in Wardour Street. He was in 'informal' evening clothes - short black jacket with silk revers, white waistcoat, white tie - and she was in a new suit of a dark-green wool tailored to an almost masculine cut, the jacket thigh-length like a frock coat, the skirt box-pleated at the front and back to accommodate her long stride. 'I like that dress,' he said.

'It isn't a dress; it's a suit. You look like a successful manufacturer. '

'Good a disguise as any.'

'I thought you enjoyed being an outsider.'

'It's no good if you have to work at it. Working at it is Bohemian, isn't it - the Slade kids in their rags?'

She laughed. 'I'd never take you for a Bohemian.'

A week had gone by. The book's end was in sight, if he could keep up the pace. She'd spent a night at his house; a meeting at her hotel had proved less happy - he'd taken a room overnight, had come to her room. It had seemed 'sordid', in her word. He had had to admit it had been pretty scatty. He said, 'We have to make some better arrangement.'

'We will.' She had a small, ridiculous hat perched on her forehead; it looked like a soldier's pillbox, except that instead of a chinstrap it had a ribbon that went around the back of her head. She said, 'I keep feeling that that thing is falling off into my food.'

'It's perky.'

'"Perky"! Mrs Cohan has an idea for a kind of homburg with a fancy band.'

'Mrs Cohan. Wife to the Stepney Jew-Boy?' Cohan. Wife to the Stepney Jew-Boy?'

'They live in the same house as I did, two floors down. She sews - six days a week, making shirts to sell for three-and-six apiece, for which she gets fourpence each. He has no job, as you know. And they're good people, Denton! She does magnificent embroidery - in Poland, she did wedding dresses and court gowns. She's going to make me more dresses. We're thinking along rather Janey-Morris-y lines.'

Denton looked blank.

'William Morris's bride. The original Pre-Raphaelite woman. No No corset and her hair unbound. Ruth Castle told me about her when I was a beginner.' corset and her hair unbound. Ruth Castle told me about her when I was a beginner.'

'You'll be a sight on Oxford Street.'

'I shan't wear them on Oxford Street. I'll wear them at home, and this sort of thing -' she pulled at one lapel of her jacket - 'when I'm out.'

'Now who's planning to wear a disguise?'

'Well-There'll be a real me and a pretend me, and the real one will live at home - if ever I get a home again. I'm so sick of hotels!'

'I don't know much about women's clothes.'

'Do you know much about women? Yes, of course you do. I think you mean you don't care care about women's clothes.' She sipped wine. about women's clothes.' She sipped wine.

'I care about you.'

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They stumbled along. Cohan finished getting the weeds and brambles out of the back garden. He and Atkins started to plan what they'd plant in the spring. Mrs Striker moved to another hotel. When Denton said to Cohan that he understood he was a priest descended from Aaron, Cohan said, 'I am not beink a very good Jew.' Nonetheless, when Denton told him what Fred Oldaston had said about Mrs Franken and her two wh.o.r.ehouses, Cohan had looked severe and said he didn't need work that much.

Denton continued to write, the end now in sight. One day, Atkins reminded him that he was supposed to go to a party at his publishers - the launching of the book of ghost stories that Lang had told him about. He groaned, said he wouldn't go, but he did go, because Janet Striker told him he should. And because he couldn't be with her that evening.

At six on a bl.u.s.tery afternoon, he went up the creaking stairs that led to Gweneth and Burse and through 'reception', which was simply a part of the corridor that connected the offices. The party was in the room where they packaged the books, swept more or less clean and provided with a table where sherry and several platters of things in jelly stood. He looked around from the doorway, seeking somebody to kill the time with before he could decently leave. He was wearing an old morning coat, which Atkins had said 'would do' because it was still early and he wasn't going on anywhere, but most of the other men - and they were mostly men - were in some form of evening dress.

Standing near the outer wall, where windows looked down into Bell Yard, was Henry James, who was undoubtedly going on to dinner somewhere, to judge by his formal evening clothes and the fact that he was an aggressive diner-out. As Denton looked his way, James raised his eyes, recognized him and nodded. James was tallish, rather heavy, with shrewd, hard eyes; only a few years older than Denton, also American, but he had sat out the American Civil War while Denton had fought it - a divide that was to separate their generation for the rest of their lives. Denton felt towards him the faint resentment the soldier feels for men who haven't served, then a counter-balancing remorse for his own prejudice; James, on the other hand, seemed to feel something the reverse, so the two were always pleasant to each other out of guilt. As writers and as men, they were very different, yet they always gravitated towards each other.

'I read your latest with considerable interest,' James said as soon as Denton was close, 'and, I think, with satisfaction, although that is hardly a word that honours a work, I suppose, when heard by the author, or am I presuming to impose my own sensibilities on someone else's, hardly unheard of in the world of books.' He chuckled. Denton said something vague; he was never good at accepting praise, worse at giving it when it came to other people's books. James was le maitre le maitre to his sycophants, but Denton couldn't pretend to worship at his shrine. James put his fingers and thumb around Denton's arm just above the elbow as if measuring it. He moved in closer and said in a low voice, 'Do they do you pretty well at this publishers?' He looked around the room. to his sycophants, but Denton couldn't pretend to worship at his shrine. James put his fingers and thumb around Denton's arm just above the elbow as if measuring it. He moved in closer and said in a low voice, 'Do they do you pretty well at this publishers?' He looked around the room.

Do him pretty well? Denton said, 'We mostly get along.'

'I'm never entirely confident of my publishers, whoever they be. The matter of royalty is vexing, constantly vexing, offered at a certain level and then haggled over as if the Man of Galilee had driven the money-changers out of the temple and into the publishing office.' He shook Denton's arm a little. 'What do you think of these people who call themselves "agents"? They a.s.sure me they can lever better terms from the publishers, their letters sometimes quite impertinent, but then they confess they require some of it for themselves, a situation that I must admit gives me unease, not because I am naive in the ways of business, because I am not, but rather the opposite, for no one can have hovered about books for as long as I without learning that the income to be made from a book is finite and represents a sum that can be divided into only so many pieces without, like the crow in the Aesop's fable - or is it the monkey? how one's memory plays tricks - dividing it into nothingness. I wonder if these would-be "agents" are not simply opportunists who think authors are fools.'

Denton admitted that he had had some letters from would-be agents himself and was tempted.

'Exactly. But one doesn't want to be the first to step into this perhaps inviting pool and find it to be not sweet water but something unsavoury, perhaps in fact corrosive.' James stood with his head slightly bent, still holding Denton's arm, his bright eyes scavenging the room like those of some intelligent bird, a pied crow that, if its tongue were split and it were taught to talk, would say malicious things. It was as if James were always on the lookout for scandal or at least its potential, James's idea of the world of fiction, at least in Denton's view, being very close to gossip. Such an approach was not Denton's, just as James's ambience was not his. As if guessing his thought, James shook his arm again and said, 'Our work is very different, yours and mine, yet both are to be admired. That is rather a conundrum. I have been thinking about it a good deal for a preface. The house of fiction has many windows, has it not?'

'For us to look out of ?' Denton laughed. 'I'd have said it was a house that had many doors.'

'Aha, you shift my metaphor. Perhaps a separate entrance for ladies, at least, if not a separate house. No, I was thinking of the way we see and what we see and then what we do with what we see, each from his own window. Tell me now, what do you make of the vulgar concept of "the plot"? People who don't know any better are forever asking me where I get my plots, as if I bought them with my shirts at a guinea a dozen. You don't worry yourself greatly over "the plot", surely?'

Denton tried to think about it. He lacked James's interest in criticism, seldom worked in such terms. 'I suppose I begin with situation,' he said. He thought of the book he was trying to finish, the husband and wife and the ghostly child. 'Or an exchange. Some kind of interaction.'

'Aha! Very good. Interaction. Mmm. And then "the plot" comes along like a child's wooden toy that gets pulled on a string, mechanically bobbing its head and wagging its tail. Yes. I quite agree. Although I begin rather differently; how matters not.' His eyes had continued to dart about, even though his head was down and he and Denton might have seemed to be discussing secrets.

Denton thought about how they must look, then reminded himself that they were the only Americans there. The outsiders. It might have been the t.i.tle of a Jamesian novel. He said, 'I'd have said that you and I stand on the outside of the windows with our noses pressed against the gla.s.s, not that we were looking from the inside out.'

James let go of his arm. His little smile seemed almost apologetic. 'You are made of even harder stuff than I. I fear it's important to me to be safely inside.' He prepared to move off. He pulled down a cuff and touched his white necktie. 'I see Edmund Gosse over there. I must ask him about someone to paint my portrait. My publisher insists upon a portrait frontispiece for a collected works. I was to have been painted by Himple, RA, but he suddenly decamped for places unknown. I suppose this was "artistic" of him, but it leaves me in what Americans of our generation call "a pickle". I have waited for him for months. Really, one should be able to be "artistic" and still maintain some regularity to one's life.' He gave Denton his small smile and a glance from his sharp eyes, up through his brows. 'Thank you for your most helpful comments about our craft.'

Denton was able to get away twenty minutes after that. He had smiled at Lang and avoided Gweneth, the publisher who thought he had cheated them out of the motor car.

Atkins had circled a small article in the military-affairs page of The Times The Times. Denton found it open on his morning tray: END OF AN OFFICER'S TRIAL 'Compa.s.sion' Cited in Guilty Verdict The court-martial proceedings against Lieutenant Aubrey Heseltine, Imperial Yeomanry, ended yesterday with a verdict of guilty to a lesser included charge. The reduction in charge, from Withdrawal in the Face of the Enemy to Failure to Obey a Lawful Order, was the result, a spokesman for the court-martial board said, of consideration for Lieutenant Heseltine's medical condition. He is said to be suffering from a nervous disorder.

The officer was sentenced to loss of three months' pay, loss of emoluments and privileges, and return of his commission to the Crown without compensation. He is not to use the rank or wear the King's uniform again in any circ.u.mstances.

Several witnesses spoke to his medical condition and to his good conduct before the incident at Spattenkopje which led to the charge.

'Poor devil,' Denton muttered.

'If he'd been other ranks, they'd have shot him.' Atkins was pouring tea. 'Bloo-ha! Discipline! Make an example of him!' Atkins had turned himself into a fat general of about seventy. 'My hat!'

'I'll go see him.'

'You finish that book, General. There's bills to pay.'

'I can finish the book and and go see him.' He bit into a piece of toast. 'What's happening?' go see him.' He bit into a piece of toast. 'What's happening?'

'Today, you mean? The usual. Mrs Char coming to do the rooms.'

'Good time for me to be out of the house. Don't let her into my room.'

'Cleanliness is next to G.o.dliness.'

'G.o.d isn't an author.'

He thought he needed a reason to visit Heseltine - he could hardly show up and say something like I thought as you'd been found guilty, I'd drop by I thought as you'd been found guilty, I'd drop by - so he put one of the photographic copies of Mary Thomason's drawing into a leather case and carried it along. And it would be an opportunity to try the art dealer, Geddys, again. Or hadn't he promised Munro to leave Mary Thomason to the police? Meaning to Guillam and his little empire. Who had done nothing. - so he put one of the photographic copies of Mary Thomason's drawing into a leather case and carried it along. And it would be an opportunity to try the art dealer, Geddys, again. Or hadn't he promised Munro to leave Mary Thomason to the police? Meaning to Guillam and his little empire. Who had done nothing.

A sleety rain was coming down. He put on a pair of heavy tweed trousers he'd had since his first winter in London, a single-breasted wool coat that matched nothing but its own waistcoat, and another of the high collars that he despised.

'Find me some shirts with soft collars,' he snarled to Atkins.

'Not proper.'

'To h.e.l.l with "proper". I feel as if I'm wearing a slave collar.'

'Have to get them made special, Colonel - cost you.'

'And worth it.'

He pulled on an unfitted tweed ulster that billowed around his legs, something else he had bought years before. It had the virtue of keeping the rain off, but it was as heavy as the flock of sheep it had come from. Only as wide as his shoulders at the top, it expanded to yards of circ.u.mference at the skirts.

'If the wind is blowing, I'll sail away over the rooftops of London,' he said as he went down to the front door. 'I'll send you a postcard from Paris.'

'If you'd had me when you bought that garment, you'd not have bought it.' Atkins handed him a soft tweed hat. 'This hat's really for shooting, mind.'

'Maybe I'll shoot somebody, then.' He didn't, however, take the new revolver, the danger supposedly over now that Jarrold-known-as-Cosgrove was in his luxurious detention.

He wanted to walk, but it was too foul a day - sleet blowing in sheets from the west, wet slush piling up along the edges of pavements; part of a newspaper came pelting down the street, head-high, and he backed out of its path. His elastic-sided boots were soaked by the time he reached Russell Square, and he gave in and waved over a cab.

Albany Court was deserted, its plane trees bare now, the old man who stood nominal watch at the gate huddled in a kiosk. He merely waved Denton through, not willing to suffer a wetting. Heseltine's 'man' - what was his name? Jenkins? Jenks? - opened the door. He was freshly shaven but his skin was blotchy, splashes of red on his nose and cheeks like stains. It was early in the day; he seemed sober. He even seemed to remember Denton.

'Mr Heseltine isn't well, sir.'

'I just thought he might like to look at something.' Denton lifted the leather case a few inches.

'I'll just see.' Jenks - the name was certainly Jenks; he was sure now - made a slow about-face and felt his way across the room. Presumably he was drunk, after all. Denton wondered if it suited Jenks best to have Heseltine 'ill', confined to his room, not out and about where he could check the level of the sherry and ask questions.

'Coming right out, sir. Tea? Or coffee? It's morning. Isn't it?'

'Nothing, thanks. And yes, it's morning.'

Heseltine appeared, again in a long dressing gown, a common wool scarf at his throat instead of collar and tie. They shook hands. Heseltine said, 'You heard, I'm sure.' He seemed quite calm.

'I'm sorry it turned out as it did.'

'It could have been worse.' Heseltine took a cigarette from a box, offered Denton one, then stood with his unlighted. 'There comes a point during the court martial when you say, "What's the worst that can happen?" and you realize that the worst is is happening. That you're already there, already prepared.' He struck a match. 'My father was heartbroken. For me.' happening. That you're already there, already prepared.' He struck a match. 'My father was heartbroken. For me.'

'I'm sorry.'

'He's a clergyman. Had I told you that? Quiet little village, rather quintessentially English, quite out of date. He believes in goodness. Is a good man himself. He said, "Come home. All will be well."' He lit the cigarette.

'Will all be well?' Denton murmured.

Heseltine tried to laugh; the voice sounded cracked.

'I thought you might like to see this.' Denton opened the clasp on the leather envelope. 'It's a drawing of the young woman who wrote the note you found in your painting.' He looked towards the Wesselons.

'Wherever did you get it?'

'Probably somebody she modelled for did it.' He handed the drawing over. Heseltine looked at it, perhaps more out of politeness than real interest. Denton watched his eyes travel over the drawing, then down to the corners where the two miniatures were. For an instant, something happened to his face - a gathering between the brows, a dipping of the head to look more closely - and then there was an almost visibly conscious recovery that included a glance at Denton. 'Very nice,' he said. He handed the drawing back.

'I thought you'd seen something.'

'Oh, no. The little sketches are hard to see. The head is quite well done.'

'Some of the students at the Slade recognized her, anyway.'

'What's happened to her?'

Denton shook his head. 'I've reported it to the police. Nothing else to be done, I guess.'

'I've been thinking about that young woman. Rather looking for things to think about, you know. I wondered - you'll find this the morbid thought of a disappointed man, I suppose - I wondered if she put the note in the painting so it would be found.'

'And you found it.'

'Not by me. Somebody else. It sounds rather daft now I say it. I thought she might have meant it for the person who was trying to "hurt" her - isn't that what you told me? Put in the back of the painting like that, it could have been for somebody at the shop. Or - I told you somebody else had been going to buy the Wesselons.'

'In an envelope with my name on it?'

'Yes, that's rather the sticking place, isn't it. Well, it was just a thought. Not much of one, as it turns out.'

Heseltine didn't seem really to care. If Mary Thomason had once had some interest for him, even some idea that he might achieve something by helping her, it was gone. They chatted in a desultory way for a few more minutes. Denton said, 'How's Jenks been behaving? '

'Oh, he's atrocious. I shall have to get rid of him.' But he had said that before. He came to the door with Denton and paused, fingers on the k.n.o.b as if he meant to hold it closed. 'My father wants me to come home.'

'It might be the best thing.'

'It sounds absurd, but I can't face those people.' He put his hand on the doork.n.o.b. 'I may go away.'