‘Yes. You cannot say it. You see yourself as “in the presence of a lady”. So you cannot even mention the word “privy”, no more than Mr Balneal with his “cabinet”.’
Her mimicking of that lilting French was savage.
‘And I’ve no doubt,’ she went on, ‘that you refused even to take in some of the other things he wrapped in his muslin-cloth of pretty words. He was talking about prostitution. Do you know that if that trade is sufficiently brought to light it can be finished with? Ended? But no, all you and your Mr Balneal will do is to talk of doves, soiled doves, Children of Night and unfortunates.’
Godfrey, quailing under this unexpected assault, and knowing it to be to an extent justified, yet experienced a feeling of almost dazzled awe that this girl could take such things and handle them confidently as he himself handled his brushes. He was also not a little thankful that the applause for Balneal was so loud and long. With any luck it would have blotted out at least the more vigorous of Elizabeth’s words.
But it seemed not to have been entirely effective. Miss Marcham tapped him on the arm.
‘You were speaking of doves,’ she said. ‘I heard Miss Hills refer to doves.’
‘Yes.’
It was all he could say.
‘So charming. So soft. I always think Nature is so interesting. In the summer, of course.’
‘Yes,’ Godfrey said. ‘Yes, it is.’
And then he was aware that, while his attention had been distracted, Elizabeth had left her chair and was advancing towards the short flight of carpet-covered steps leading up to the platform.
For a moment he thought of hurrying across and forcibly detaining her. But he knew at once that she would not let him.
‘Oh,’ said Miss Marcham, ‘Miss Hills, she is going up there. I must introduce her to the Bishop. But those steps. Mr Mann, do you think they are perfectly safe?’
‘I think’, Godfrey said, ‘that Miss Hills is going to talk to the Bishop without an introduction.
‘Dear me, how very strange.’
Up on the platform Elizabeth had indeed gone straight over to the Bishop and Balneal. And it soon became apparent that she was addressing them as unequivocally as she had spoken to him.
‘But—But—’ he heard Balneal positively bleating. ‘But, madam, I have six children.’
He felt tempted to laugh. And then he saw the Bishop.
A benign figure he might be with that broad face and rosy bald head. But he was also undoubtedly a man of authority from purple stock to ample black gaiters. And he was now, plainly, turning that full authority on Elizabeth.
‘Unsafe, quite unsafe.’
His voice was a deep tolling of unhesitating command. But Elizabeth was answering him.
Godfrey half rose, full of unformed thoughts of hurrying up on to the platform and interposing himself between this girl and the formidable figure looming down on her. But what could he say? Elizabeth would not let him deflect her with any common courtesies.
He sat beside Miss Marcham and watched helpless to prevent the brow-beating. Fragments of the confrontation floated to him amid the buzz of conversation all around.
‘… no use, no use at all, merely covering up what …’
And the Bishop commanding her to be less outspoken. And Balneal squeakily outraged. ‘My Lord, really I must beg you to …’ And Elizabeth again. ‘No, my Lord, they must be brought to the light, brought to the light to wriggle and to die.’
Godfrey felt a great surge of admiration for the straight-backed proud-breasted figure up there. He wanted to crush her in his arms.
Oh yes, he recorded of himself. Oh yes, I am in love. Now.
And he vowed torrentially then that he would paint her. He would paint her, not facing an angry Bishop of the Church of England, but facing as angry an enemy. He would jettison all those ideas of yesterday. He would throw in his lot now with this sea-challenging creature, however far she went in her voyaging, whatever course she set, to whatever impossible northern pole.
Chapter Six
In the ensuing weeks, however, Godfrey’s plan to paint the woman he was now sure he loved did not make the swift progress he had envisaged when he had escorted her back to Brook Street after they had accompanied to her home a Miss Marcham almost in palpitations at seeing Elizabeth so closely engaged with the Bishop. He had broached the plan to her the moment he could, but, though she had agreed without hesitation to sit, he had had to acknowledge that her thoughts had not been wholly with him. The fact of the matter was that the Bishop had asked her to join the Committee of the Society for the Promotion of Sanitary Visiting Among the London Poor.
No doubt he had at that time paid her triumph less attention than he should have done. Because it really had been a remarkable feat. The Bishop he knew by reputation well. He was not a man to receive new ideas. Beneath a silken soft public manner he had an oaken obstinacy. But Elizabeth had overcome it. Quite what had made the final breach in the old man’s defences Godfrey had not learnt. He had reproached himself afterwards for not in his own excitement asking her. All he had gathered had been that Elizabeth had not scrupled to say she would publicly oppose the Society, so perhaps the Bishop had calculated that it might be better safely to house this unexpected firebrand.
The move had apparently horrified Arthur Balneal. Elizabeth had said that he had withdrawn his hand from hers in parting as if he had been asked to give a friendly clasp to a rattlesnake. And her grey eyes had cascaded with laughter.
She was wonderful. He had thought that more than once. She was so completely sure. He had realised then, as he had not before, the sheer extent of her belief that she knew the answer. It had up to then been hidden under her acknowledgement of Lady Augusta’s kindnesses, but then he had seen it to the full. No wonder she had succeeded in making herself a medical practitioner. Beneath that womanly exterior was a pure-forged blade of steel.
And how would he convey that in paint? It was on that question that his initial enthusiasm had checked. It had not proved easy to find the exactly right answer. He would paint her somehow fighting, yes. But how? And conquering. But whom? Against whom precisely ought she to be seen in battle?
Lying in his narrow bed in Gillingham Place that night after the St James’s Hall meeting he had battered at the problem. His whirling thoughts had brought him to the point of elaborating a tremendous caricature of Reason soundly thrashing Prejudice, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the Bishop of Stanmore, when he had jerked himself into sense. No, his whole raison d’être as a person was to express in paint what he truly felt and believed. And he felt now, beyond all reservations, that he should portray this faith of Elizabeth’s which he was proud to share. So there must be a subject that would convey this. But what? What?
His small bedroom had seemed intolerably hot and stuffy as he had continued to wrestle with this wiry ghost. And it had been only near dawn that he had at last given up, decided that he must have sleep and had sought it in the stratagem he hated most, recourse to sexual excitement.
On the night of the day he had decided that he must make Elizabeth his, it had been in the imagined and active arms of Lisa that he had lain at last.
But the next day did not miraculously bring him his answer. Nor did the days that followed. He asked himself if he was after all not in sympathy with Elizabeth. And angrily retorted that that must be. He was in love with her. He hoped to make her his wife, to share her life. So he must be able to paint her as she was and with all that she stood for. But time passed and he could not find the answer.
So when a little later with the drawing to a close of the Season Elizabeth set out with the Bosworths for their Wiltshire estate, instead of feeling that a void was about to stretch out before him as he had expected, he almost welcomed her departure. He had agreed to go down there before Christmas and he hoped that a period of solitariness in London with, as they said, ‘nobody in town’ would mysteriously reveal to him just what the missing setting for the picture sh
ould be.
Elizabeth had suggested that he might perhaps begin his painting in Wiltshire. When she got back to London she intended to move into rooms of her own with perhaps a companion and devote all her time to her new work. ‘So I fancy I shall not have many hours free to sit in front of your easel.’
‘No, of course, you will not. But may I hope apart from that to see you quite frequently.’
‘I should like that very much.’
Often in the hot and smelly London days that followed and on into the gradual start of autumn Godfrey held up that declaration in front of himself like a jewel. It was almost all he had to comfort him. The departure of his muse did not enable him immediately to see her in a paintable light, as he had hoped. And, though at first he spent a great deal of time reading the histories of heroic women from the Queen of the Amazons to Boadicea and on to fighting Queen Bess, not one of them set up in him any sympathetic fire like that which had blazed up in his mind two years earlier when he had read Goethe’s poem about the distant Tasso.
Conscientiously when he was not reading he set himself exercises in drawing from life. He filled whole sketchbooks with chance figures that caught his fancy in the streets, a half-mad organ-grinder leaning back to balance his box-like instrument, the lady at the Zoo whose soft small voice saying ‘I always end with the serpents’ had caught his attention, a devil-may-care girl leaning against a street-post cracking nuts between her teeth and tossing them at passing men. This last, he told himself, had attracted him only because of her unexpected air of liveliness and simplicity and had meant no more to him that any of the scores of other figures his pencil had caught.
But, as the weeks passed and the coming April and the Academy grew nearer while still nothing struck that reverberating chord that Goethe’s ‘Tasso’ had once done for him, he grew rapidly more and more despondent. There were books still that he had earlier promised himself he would read but he found he lacked the energy to tackle them. The weather had become cold and this he saw as the reason he had abandoned his sketching. He took to spending occasional afternoons at his club, then he went there every afternoon and then every afternoon and most evenings. He knew he was wasting his time. He did not even greatly like the men he met at the club. Indeed, he had been on the point of resigning and if it had not been that his trustees had paid his subscription he would have done so long before. It was not the sort of place a painter, someone devoting himself heart and soul to his art, should have had time for.
But now he had time for it, and plenty. His skill on the billiard table grew immensely.
At last the day for his visit to Wiltshire arrived. With a sudden upward soaring of spirits he boarded the train. Elizabeth, in an hour or two he would see her. And that was what he needed, the inspiration of her presence. Once he saw her again he would be able to work his way to a knowledge of what it was he wanted to paint. It had been removal from her that had put the black mood of the past weeks on him. And that was to be expected when you loved a woman and were deprived of any possibility of seeing her. As they thundered through the countryside, empty and dark under low cloud, the conviction grew in him that he was about to put an end to his troubles.
Was it too soon to talk to Sir Charles about marriage? It was not as though he were penniless, or that he depended even on his paint-brush for an income. His trustees would without doubt release his capital if he proposed to marry a person as suitable as Elizabeth. He could support her properly, provide a house, perhaps a carriage. And surely Lady Augusta at least had deliberately brought the two of them together as long ago as the night of her ball. Yes, at the first convenient opportunity he would talk to Sir Charles.
But the white fire of his rising spirits was damped abruptly enough. On getting out of the dogcart that had brought him from the station, Elizabeth, there in the hall of the big house to greet him, asked almost without preliminary in what setting it was that he was going to paint her.
He could only stammer out that he had not yet decided.
She looked at once disappointed.
‘You have brought what you need to begin the picture?’ she asked, not without a touch of sharpness.
‘Oh yes. Yes, indeed. My crayons are here, and my paints. The easel was too big for the dogcart. They are bringing it up later. It is simply that I have not yet chosen the subject for which you are to be model.’
‘But you have had so many weeks to choose.’
He had given her almost at the very start of their friendship the right to reprove him. He could hardly object now that she was exercising it.
But something of his sudden-struck sulkiness must have shown, because in an instant Elizabeth smiled at him.
‘No, forgive me,’ she said. ‘I ought not to have broached the subject so promptly on your arrival. And you must be cold and hungry. But, to tell the truth, I have been pining here.’
Pining? Had he not too?
‘I am sorry to hear it.’
‘It is, once again, the delays that have come between what I want to do, what I am ready and more than ready to do, and the doing of it. Aunt Augusta is very kind, but she would not hear of it when I wanted to leave before Christmas.’
‘You are ready to start now?’
‘Of course. I have been ready since the end of October at least. I have found, thanks to Aunt Augusta, a companion to share rooms with. She has even found the rooms. They are in Gower Street. I could start work tomorrow. Can you wonder that I have pined?’
And I, Godfrey thought, have pined for precisely the opposite reason.
‘So my painting you was to have served as an admirable distraction and you have been disappointed?’
He had meant it to sound sympathetic and it had sounded not a little bitter.
‘No,’ Elizabeth answered quickly. ‘Not that. I will tell you how I had thought of your painting. It was to be a cannon.’
‘A cannon?’
She laughed, more at the oddness of her choice of metaphor than at anything else.
‘No, truly, that was the way I saw it. I felt that your putting on to canvas of myself as you saw me would be as if the cannon-shell, prepared these weeks past, was being aimed and fired. To shoot into the midst of the enemy.’
‘And, alas,’ Godfrey said, catching at last her mood of sympathetic gaiety, ‘the artilleryman had yet to drag his piece into the firing-line.’
But very quickly, when he had left her, the current of misery set strongly in once more. All her lightness could not disguise the fact that he had failed her.
And in the days that followed the flow of misery did not abate. No notion of the rôle in which he would paint Elizabeth entered his head. He made excuses to her that in any case the days were too grey for him to work, and was glad that they were so. He entered with a somewhat over-hectic enjoyment into the various entertainments the Bosworths offered, the dinner parties, the visits to neighbouring houses, the shooting parties, a mount with the Hunt. And instead of spending long hours talking with Elizabeth he played billiards.
So there was never any question of taking Sir Charles aside and solemnly discussing with him his prospects. And he left, sooner than he had meant to, only a couple of days after Christmas, before even Elizabeth was departing. As the country porter carried his big unwieldy easel, never once set up, along to the guard’s van of the train, a thought stirred uneasily in his head. It was a thought he tried not to let come to the surface. Had he passed here in Wiltshire some high-water mark in his relationship with Elizabeth? Had the tide begun to turn? To run out?
Even when Elizabeth, within a very short time of her return to London, wrote and told him simply that she was now settled in at Gower Street the mood of misery that he had brought back with him from that Christmas did not alter. He went almost at once to visit her but with a settled heaviness.
Yet he felt after the landlady, a bustlingly clean and comfortable figure in white starched apron and white cap, had ushered him into Elizabeth’s sitting-room that he ough
t to be full of delight for her. The rooms seemed to suit her so well. After barely a week’s occupation they were already a settled oasis of warm and ordered domesticity. A neat fire glowed and spluttered occasionally with flame in the grate. The hearth in front of it was swept and clean. Its brass fender glinted in the warm light. Round it were comfortable red armchairs, with behind one of them a heavy screen keeping out the winter draughts from the thickly curtained windows. The landlady soon brought in tea things which she set out on the red table-cover under the yellowy-warm glow of a tall brass lamp, putting a kettle on the hob of the fire where it gave out a tiny singing note. Everything was as neat as it could be and shining with polish.
Godfrey, while he was being introduced to Elizabeth’s companion, a Miss Watkyn, a lady who had published two volumes of poems that had made a little stir, felt himself full of an aching desire to be truly part of the life that was being lived here. But as Miss Watkyn, a pale thin-featured person with a great mass of dark hair that made her look as if she were being continually harassed by a burden of fears, darted exclamations of enthusiasm at him—he was an artist: she too had her art—he knew that he was a visitor and he felt altogether like a visitor, an intruder.
He knew that, as things had gone between himself and Elizabeth in Wiltshire, and still seemed to be going, he was becoming every day in less and less of a position to ask her to let him occupy at some time the chair now dedicated to Miss Watkyn. But he ought soon to have been able to make that momentous request. The lines that they had both in the summer seemed to be travelling along should have been bringing them day by day, hour by hour, closer together. And he could feel now that they were not.
It was not Miss Watkyn’s excess of enthusiasm at a chance mention of Garibaldi and his Redshirts, for all the fuss it created, that was keeping them apart now. It was that he was unable to extend to Elizabeth that secret stream of sympathy he ought to be putting out. He ought to be telling her that he was ready to begin the picture she was to be his model for. Even in front of Miss Watkyn, whose peals of excited sympathy at any mention of the idea were perhaps best not encouraged, he ought to have been able to convey a hint. But he had nothing to say.
The Underside Page 6