Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “How very horrible!” Daphne’s tone was convincing. Her figure drooped from its prim pose, took on the alluring innocent curves that her schoolmates had worshipped at the drawing-class.

  The cocoa controversy raged — the storm of it covered talk. Claud, noting with satisfaction that his white-robed guest had found a tongue and an ear, intensified the bitterness of his defence.

  “I’ve got to earn my living,” Daphne said, with soft, confiding glance — she was playing for a place in this society which regarded her as an outsider, and she was playing her best—”and I don’t in the least know what to do.”

  “Do you draw?” asked the other.

  “Not well enough,” said Daphne—”at least I’m afraid not. But I’ve got to do something, because we haven’t any money at all, hardly.”

  “The omelette is ready,” said the girl on the hearthrug; and everyone got up, and there was a rattle of plates.

  “I would love to draw you,” said Green Eyes, intensely. “Did you ever sit?”

  “Often — no one else ever could — to the drawing class at school.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t care — It’s awfully little, of course. But there’s a sketch club. Would you sit for us? It’s a shilling an hour.”

  “I should love to,” said Daphne, flushing with pleasure.

  “The scrambled eggs are served,” said Claud. “There are only three forks. The higher numbers will eat with teaspoons.”

  The confusion consequent on the disparity between the number of chairs and the number of guests was short, but it was long enough for Green Eyes to convey to the two other girls the true inwardness of Daphne’s white-and-goldness — not side, as anyone would have been justified in inferring, but a sheer desire to fit herself for reverent worship at the shrine of art — and art students.

  The leaning youth roused himself to place the best chair for Daphne. Green Eyes took her hand to lead her to it. Claud gave her cocoa, and an eggy mess on a chipped plate.

  “You are entitled to a fork,” said he, “as guest of the evening.”

  The dark man from the chair was opposite her now. He was thickly powdered with charcoal. He would be able to look at her more than ever. But he had eyes now only for his plate.

  The supper had got to petits suisses from Garnier’s and to éclairs and mille-feuilles, from the only really French pastry cook’s in London — I mean the one in Charlotte Street — and Daphne had had time to wonder whether shyness always thus fools its victims, before Green Eyes spoke up.

  “Miss Carmichael,” she said, “is one of Us. She has got to earn her living. And she has kindly consented to sit for the sketch club — in that dress — to begin with.”

  A murmur ran round the table. Daphne suddenly perceived the meeting to be friendly.

  “I — I’m not a professional model,” she said.

  “That sees itself, said the fair youth who leaned against walls.

  “But if you’ll let me pose for you — I can — I can keep still.”

  Seven cups, mugs, and glasses of cocoa were raised and drained to the new model.

  Daphne moved once again in the atmosphere of assured success. Everyone was as “nice” to Daphne as even Daphne could wish. Obviously she had not only ceased to be a blight, but had become a personage. She was, once again, as she had always felt she should be, and indeed in her school life had been, the centre of things. They acted charades — Daphne had her choice of parts. They sang — Daphne’s voice was praised — solos demanded. Her French songs enraptured — her tuning of the dusty guitar reached from its nail on the wall excited respect — her playing of it roused enthusiasm. An orchestra of combs and paper gave an outlet to unsuspected musical talent.

  “Oh!” said Daphne at last, stooping her head to release her neck from the guitar — two handkerchiefs hastily knotted together had replaced the guitar’s grimy ribbon, “Oh, I have had such a lovely time. I do feel as if I’d known you, all of you, all my life. It has been so jolly.”

  “The pleasure,” said the youth against the wall, “has been ours.”

  The charcoal-powdered man, who had not performed on the comb, or joined in the songs, but had preserved throughout the attitude of a spectator at a play, nodded a sudden “Good night,” and went out abruptly.

  “Will you come and see me?” she asked Green Eyes, at parting.

  “Won’t I just?” Green Eyes answered. “Tomorrow? At five? Right.”

  “Miss Carmichael ought to have a house warming,” said the dirtiest student, “and I haven’t a free day till Tuesday.”

  “That fixes the date, of course.” Daphne was now once again quite definitely her pretty commanding self, “won’t you all come to supper on Tuesday, and — and bring your own mugs?

  That settled it.

  At one o’clock a chorus of combs and tissue paper accompanied Daphne’s retirement to her attic. And the tune that they played was, “Who is Sylvia?”

  “What a find!” the gazelle-eyed lady murmured as the trap door closed on her white draperies, and her new friends blundered and rustled according to sex and natural aptitude, down bare, steep, unlighted stairs. “Claud, you ought to be an Arctic explorer.”

  “I am” said Claud, modestly.

  Thus in a little orgie of innocent vanity gratified, Daphne put out the first roots in the new soil.

  CHAPTER X. INTRUDER

  WHEN Daphne promised to sit for the sketch club (in that white and gold gown) Doris had, for the moment, been forgotten. A pang of remorse pierced sharply the elder sister’s heart when she had closed the door on that comb-playing company and found herself alone with the bare attic, and the soft regular breathing of the sleeping Dormouse.

  ‘‘life is very difficult,” she told herself, standing rigid in her gold and white and the spacious bareness of her kingdom. “If the Dormouse is going to feel like a hindrance — that means there’s something wrong.”

  Undressing in the bigness that almost seemed publicity, she asked herself whether any of her sketches — the pictures of saints that girls had begged for their paroissiens, the satirical sketches that had convulsed submissive classes — might, after all, be marketable. One could — insisted a swift-motioned Daphne divesting herself of petticoats — one could but try. Anyhow, the child was the centre of her universe, the one thing that must not be neglected or set aside. If she could not sit for the sketch club without neglecting the child — well sitting for sketch clubs was not her vocation. That was all. White-night-dressed, brushing out her red hair, she stiffened her limbs to rhyme with her new courage that sprang to life at the instance of that sleeping ball of soft related childhood. She would, whatever happened, she would be all in all to the child. She would be more patient, more resourceful. After all, there was the allowance. If she wrote to Cousin Jane — asked for Uncle Hamley’s address? His firm’s name? Cousin Jane was always down before anyone else. It was her place, as a charity-supported worm. She would get the letter. She would not betray. Would n t she? She should not have the chance. Tobacconists, Daphne’s reading of detective novels assured her, received letters for à consideration. Her letters should be received. Cousin Jane should have a chance of betraying — nothing. She fell asleep in the act of composing the affecting letter that should draw from Cousin Jane the address of her guardian, and should at the same time insist on sympathy and silence. Then swift across the soft incoming tide of sleep came the memory of that night when a desolate woman had leaned across a corpse and spoken as the naked soul speaks.

  “Poor Cousin Jane,” said Daphne. “Suppose I’d asked her to run away with me. I might nave, quite safely. She never would have.”

  And there Youth spoke of Age with all the cocksureness of Youth and all Youth’s inaccuracy.

  It was the next day that Daphne went through her portfolio of sketches, selected the least unworthy and spent a shilling on May’s “Press Guide.” Then, wearing her quietest hat and gown, with Doris in one hand and the sketches in the ot
her, she went down into the City to call on editors. Some one had said last night that the only way to sell your stuff for magazines was to call on editors yourself. The students had talked enough when once it was realized that Daphne was not a prig but a dear. And some one else had said that the worse your work was the better editors liked it. This in itself encouraged Daphne. The point of view had been mainly commercial. There had been plenty of shop talked, but there had been no talk of the aims of art or the dignity of art, or of anything but the application of art as a means to getting one’s bread and butter. Only the tall, dark man, who had been unable or unwilling to dissociate himself from his charcoal dust, the man who had looked at her through half-closed eyes, had scowled a little, and muttered something about crossing-sweepers and rotten work. But nobody had paid any attention to him, least of all Daphne. He was the only one, she remembered resentfully, who had seemed able to go on, to the very end of the evening, not realizing at all how nice she was.

  She went out gaily, the child stepping beside her. She returned heavy footed with the child dragging after. And the brown paper parcel of sketches, whose string had been untied so often and so wearily, had grown strangely heavy to carry. The three double flights of stairs seemed like the ascent of Mont Blanc. They sat down on the lowest step of the second flight to rest. At least Daphne did. Both Doris’s shoelaces had come undone, and she planted a brown foot on her sister’s lap.

  “Dorothy Draggletail,” she said, gloomily.

  “We’ll have tea directly we get up, said Daphne, knotting swiftly.

  “Tired, Doris?” a voice from above called suddenly, and a round, dark head showed above the bannisters overhead. “Hold on. I’ll come and carry you up.” Then boots on the stairs louder and nearer.

  “Here’s the elephant.” He hoisted the child to his shoulder. “The signorina looks fairly fagged,” he went on; “if she will crawl slowly up to my unworthy dwelling the tea will just be made by the time the light of her presence dawns upon it. Yes, really. I’ve got it all ready.”

  “But we can’t be always having tea with you,” said Daphne.

  “Oh, yes we can,” Doris assured him. “Quite easily we can.”

  “Well, to-day’s my birthday,” said Claud, as though that settled it, and went off three steps at a time.

  So there was tea, without the trouble of getting it, and a chair easier than her own chair, and a large, handsome, friendly boy dealing with tea-things in a clumsy yet adequate way.

  And Doris having kicked her shoes off and chosen the largest piece of cake, “crummled” it on the table and breathed into her cup unreproved.

  “I’ve been trying to sell my drawings,” said Daphne, suddenly. “Oh, editors are hateful — even when you see them — and when you don’t, and you generally don’t — they’re fiends, I believe.”

  “I know. But I didn’t know you drew.”

  “I don’t; only someone said last night that the worse a thing was the better. For selling.”

  “May I?” He laid a large hand on the parcel. “I’d rather you didn’t. Much rather.”

  “Have some more tea,” he said, taking the hand away again.

  “Very well then. Look. But you’ll only laugh.” He did not laugh when he had undone the paper and looked at the half-dozen drawings. And Daphne would rather he had laughed. He looked at the drawings carefully, laid them down and in silence poured out more tea.

  “I suppose they’re no good,” she broke a quite uncomfortable silence to say.

  “You — you want to study a bit,” he said, slowly.

  “I see,” said Daphne from the depths.

  “There’s a lot of thought in them, and humour and all that. But you have to learn drawing, don’t you know, the same as any other trade.”

  “I see,” she said again, from deeper depths; and did.

  The drawings lay accusingly face upward. She put out a hand to turn them over, but before she could do it the charcoal covered man who had looked at her and not liked her, the man who had talked about crossing-sweepers and rot, was in the room. He seemed not so much to enter as suddenly to be there. She drew back her hand. She did not want to claim those drawings, or indeed to lead attention to them in any way.

  The newcomer bowed with a carelessness that did not lack courtesy and turned to Claud.

  “Your door was open. So I knew you were in. I say, shall you be seeing Vorontzoff, to-night?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Just tell him I’ve got him a studio. I’ll meet him at the Mont Blanc to-morrow at two and take him down there. I’ve had the things moved in that he left at my place, and I’ll lend a hand getting them straight. That’s all. What’s all this rubbish?”

  Daphne would not put out a hand to shield her drawings. Claud, instead, put out a ready, kindly lie.

  “They’re by a friend of Miss Carmichael’s,” he said. I don’t know whether you ought to look at them.”

  “I have looked at them, thank you,” said the other; and indeed he had swept them one and all with quickly moving fingers and a swift withering glance.

  “Mr. Winston is mistaken,” said Daphne; “the drawings are mine.”

  It was as well that she did, for as she spoke Doris, hastily swallowing an incredibly large mouthful of cake, said:

  “They aren’t any old friend’s drawings. They’re Daffy’s very own — and they’re perfectly beautiful. So there.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the man, “that I said they were rubbish. But they are.”

  Daphne recognized the voice of truth.

  “But if I were to study?” she said, a new note of respect in her voice, “to study very hard?”

  ‘You really want to know? Well, I’m afraid you’d never do the least bit of good if you studied from now till Doomsday. They’re no good at all. You chuck it and try something else.”

  “Don’t mind him, Miss Carmichael,” said Claud, very uncomfortable indeed. “There’s room for all sorts in the Temple of Art.”

  “There’s not room for these,” said the stranger.

  “Oh, but I do mind him,” said Daphne at the same moment, “because I know he knows.”

  The stranger looked straight at her for the first time with eyes not narrowed.

  “Couldn’t I,” she went on, “if I worked very hard — do things good enough to sell? Some of the things in magazines are very bad.”

  “If you want to sell your soul for tuppence-half-penny it only shows that that’s all your soul’s worth.”

  “Oh,” said Claud, “when Henry begins to talk about his soul—”

  Daphne seemed to sweep him out of the conversation.

  “You mean?” She turned to Henry.

  “I mean that if one deliberately does bad work for money one does sell one’s soul, whether one’s P. R. A. or an old charwoman. There must be something that you can do well, and not despise yourself for doing. What you’ve got to do is to find out what, and then do it. And don’t let anything else in the world interfere with your doing it. You put that stuff in the fire, and never touch a pencil again except to do your accounts. What’s the good of getting a little money if you can’t look yourself in the face afterward?”

  “I don’t think I like you,” said Doris suddenly.

  “You’re not the only one, princess,” said Henry, turning dark eyes on the child.

  “Why do you call me that?”

  “Because you are, of course.”

  “You’re not a prince,” Doris retorted.

  “Don’t be rude,” whispered Daphne.

  “A statement of the obvious isn’t rudeness,” said Henry; “it’s quite clear that I’m not a prince.”

  “Daffy and I have got two fairy princes already, even if you were,” Dons informed him.

  “I congratulate you. Good-bye, princess.” He took the child’s hand and kissed it. And immediately was not there any more. There is no other way to describe the utter abruptness of the man’s entrances and exits.

&
nbsp; “He’s a rum chap,” said Claud, apologetically. “I’m sorry he was so rude.”

  “He wasn’t. He only said what he thought. Don’t you think that’s rather fine?”

  “It’s very unusual, thank goodness.” Claud was still disturbed and displeased.

  “Well, I’m not offended, anyhow. Is he a great artist?”

  “Well, some people think a lot of him. Oh, he can draw all right! And his work’s sincere — and that’s something.” —

  “I should think it would be,” said Daphne, thoughtfully.

  “I don’t think,” Doris announced, “that I’ll have any more tea, thank you; and I don’t think I don’t like him as much as I thought I didn’t. But he’s not a prince like you are.” She turned to Claud.

  “I’m afraid you’ve labelled yourself once for all,” Daphne hastened to say.

  I suppose the world is full of princes — to Doris,” said Claud.

  “No, it isn’t,” the child insisted, “only you and the one we met in the train, the story-telling one. I think he might be a prince, that black one, n he was to try very hard!”

  ‘I don’t think he’ll ever try hard enough,” said Claud. “He doesn’t want to be a prince either. He wants to be an artist. And he is, confound him.”

  “What he said about my drawings was true enough, though, wasn’t it? Doris says you’re a prince. Princes cannot lie — they’re like George Washington.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, he is right. He generally is, the brute. Only no one else would have been such a brute as to say it as he did. I meant to break it to you gently.”

  “I hate gentle breakages,” Daphne smiled full at him, and the words lost their sting.

  “I say,” he said, instantly, “since we’re cousins, don’t you think you might call me Claud? My relations do — my other relations, I mean. Everyone else calls me Bill. Will you?”

  “Yes, Claud,” said Daphne, unhesitatingly.

  “I shall call you Bill, like everyone else,” said Doris, superior.

  “And” — Claud was divided between a fear of going too far, too fast, and a conviction that it is good to strike while the iron is hot—”what may I call you?”