by Edith Nesbit
“Do come in,” he said, in a voice that matched the smile to a shade. “I knew it was you when you spoke, and yet I knew it couldn’t be. Come in — is it some more art-criticism? All I have is at your service.”
“Mrs. Delarue said you’d hurt your foot,” said Daphne, bluntly, standing about a yard inside the door with her wad of white handkerchiefs held between her ungloved hands.
“So you hastened to the rescue. How kind! And how prompt!”
“Mr. Winston was out — and Mrs. Delarue was afraid to come back without him. She said you would swear so.”
“I see. So you offered to come instead. How suitable!”
“She begged me to come,” said Daphne, steadily. “I thought you were really hurt, or I shouldn’t have come.”
“Of course not,” said Henry. “I quite see that. And — ?”
“She said you would bleed to death,” said Daphne.
“She is full of imaginative humour. Yes?”
“And she said there was an errand. Can I get you anything?” She made herself ask the question. After all, a man hurt is a hurt man, even if he be also a bear.
“No, thank you. I couldn’t think of troubling you.”
“I’m sorry I’ve troubled you. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” said he, with a politeness more insolent than any insolence. “Thank you so much for calling. It was too sweet of you. No — don’t go. For God’s sake don’t leave me like this.”
The “God’s sake” caught Daphne in the full swing of her sudden angry turn to the door.
It was Henry who had spoken, of course — there was no one else in the room — but it was not in any voice that she had ever heard.
“Can I,” she said, very coldly, “be of any service to you?”
He had raised himself on his elbow and was leaning forward eagerly.
“There’s that chap I was telling Winston about yesterday,” he said, in tones wholly matter of fact and friendly. “Could you take him a note from me — and a key? He’s all alone in London. Doesn’t know a soul, and doesn’t speak a word — of negotiable English, I mean. You speak French, Billy says.”
“Yes,” said Daphne, slowly, “yes. I’ll do that.” To refuse had been sheer inhumanity to an unknown Russian, who, after all, had done one no harm.
“I don’t know what sort of chap he is — except that he knows how to draw. He s a great pot in continental circles.”
“Yes,” said she again. “I’ll go.”
“And you won’t curse me if he hasn’t the polished manners of a Labour Member of Parliament?”
“I don’t curse people,” said she, coldly, “and all the people I meet haven’t got polished manners. Shall I get you the paper and things to write?”
“On that table,” said he, curtly. Daphne groped among a mass of sketches, paint-pots, brushes, pencils, jars, pots, paint boxes, pastels, and a litter of papers, the whole unified by charcoal dust as a winter world by snow.
“Thank you,” he carelessly said, and wrote, Daphne standing very upright, with a very marked air of waiting with accentuated patience till he should be ready.
“Won’t you sit down?” he interjected in the middle of the letter, but she would not hear.
“There, then,” he said, putting the envelope to pale lips, “and — thank you very much.”
“Not at all,” said the girl.
“Before you go,” he said, with an air of its being almost nothing but just worth mentioning, “will you forgive me?”
Daphne was not enough on her guard to refuse the obvious question.
“What for?”
“For being such a brute beast when you came in. I’m sorry. Things take me like that sometimes. I am sorry. Is that enough?”
“Quite,” said Daphne, colder than ice. “Goodbye.” To take the note she held out her hand. He caught it and held it.
“It’s not,” he said in the voice of a very sorry child, “it’s not just words. Will you really forgive me? Honestly. You’ve behaved like a decent human being to me, and I’ve behaved like a pig and an ape. I want that washed out.”
She moved her hand, but it was held and not tenderly.
“In the waters of forgiveness,” he said, “you’re very kind, you’re extraordinarily beautiful, and I can’t forgive myself. But your forgiveness would be something.”
She made shift to laugh, and get her hand away.
“Of course!” she said. “And it’s nothing. It serves me right for interfering.”
“It’s not nothing if you say that,” he said, with an air almost imbecile in its travesty of childish repentance; “it was the right thing for you to come. So few people do the right thing.”
She stood looking down at the note. It is so difficult to know the answers to wholly unexpected speeches.
“But,” she said, suddenly, “how shall I know the man?”
“Oh,” he answered, glibly, “that’s all right. He’s a Russian-looking chap, long hair, and a beard that —— here, give me the pencil again.
She saw grow under his pencil the presentment of a low-browed, high-cheekboned, shock-headed man with large, dark, appealing eyes. “There,” he said, holding out the sketch, “you can’t mistake him. By the way, he’s as helpless as the new-born. All Russians are. If he’s in any sort of awful hole — lost his luggage or forgotten his name, or anything, you might be a guiding hand. Do you mind?” He spoke as to a friend of years’ standing.
“No,” said she, “I don’t mind. Good-bye.”
“Must you go?” he said, as though nothing could have surprised him more.
“Yes, of course I must go.”
“Very well,” he said, discontentedly, “go then.”
“There isn’t anything else, is there?” she asked, doubtfully. She ought to have gone, of course. She wanted to go — but still—”Is you foot really bad? Mayn’t I send a doctor?”
“No; but — what’s that in your other hand?” He spoke as though the hand he had held were in some way set apart. But she did not notice this till afterward, when she lived through the interview again as she walked back to Fitzroy Street.
“Handkerchiefs,” she said, in a tone of studied, sordid commonplace, “for your foot.”
“May I have one?”
“All of them, if you like,” said Daphne; “but oughtn’t it to be bathed or something?” It was only right to suggest this, even if one did hate the man. “Yes.”
“Shall I get some water?”
Incredibly she accepted the quiet affirmative of his answer, and found herself presently under his instructions heating water at the gas-stove in a little slip of a kitchen.
“Shall I bathe if for you?” she asked, standing at the door with the black kettle in one hand and a basin in the other. Surely he would see, at last, the mockery of her attitude’s humbleness.
“No,” he said. “I mean no, thank you. If you’ll put the water here, and then help me to tie it up.” She did these things. The wound as she saw it lost nine-tenths of Mrs. Delarue’s estimate of it — but it was a cut, and a deep one. It was the worst wound she had ever seen, and it made her feel rather sick, but she dried it and, lips close set, bandaged it with firm fingers and eyes that avoided the charcoal-grimed, blood-stained rags that had served as first-aid.
“What clever hands you have,” he said, looking at them as they worked; “it’s a pity they can’t draw.” For the first time as she rose from her knees he let his eyes meet hers fully. She had not, she told herself, really seen his eyes before.
“I’m sorry,” he said, very gently, “that I said you were beautiful.”
Again she had not the skill to refuse him the “Why?”
“Because you didn’t like it. I won’t again.” And again she found no rules for her reply. “Have you got things to eat here?” was all she found to say.
“Enough to go on with. You might send Winston along, if you see him.”
“I will. Good-bye. I suppose you can move abo
ut, to get things?”
“Oh Lord, yes — thank you. I can hop if it comes to that. Good-bye.”
He held out his hand; and hers, as it left his, felt that it was not willingly released.
“It’s peace, then,” he said. “I’m quite forgiven?
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Daphne, clumsily, and, on the words, somehow, got away.
Fitzroy Street seemed quite near, as places are near in the sudden evasions of a dream. She must wash her hands and change her dress. Everything was blackened with the all-pervasive charcoal dust of that Great Ormonde Street studio.
Doris was polishing her plate and glass and spoon under Mrs. Delarue’s directions.
“Regular little housekeeper she’s going to learn to be,” said the charwoman. “And how did you find him, miss?”
“He’s all right,” said Daphne. “I’m going on his errand. Doris, you can come, too.”
“I’d rather stay with Mrs. Delarue and be a regular little housekeeper,” said Doris, tripping over the long apron pinned round her neck by her custodian, and blundering against her sister.
“No inconvenience to me, miss,” said Mrs. Delarue; “if I might boil me an egg with a cup of tea, I could set here and darn my gentlemen’s socks as well as not, and you be free as air to do his errand and take him back his answer, which no doubt he’ll be worriting himself to fiddlestrings over.”
“There isn’t any answer,” said Daphne, shortly, and disappeared behind the sagging line that supported the curtain behind which was the “dressing room,”
“but I shall be very much obliged if you can stay with Miss Doris for half an hour.”
“I’ll stay along of her till her bedtime, if you like,” said the charwoman. “All my gentlemen is tidied for the day, so no calls on my time, my dear, and don’t you hurry,”
“Thank you,” said Daphne, “I’ll be back in half an hour. Oh!” — she remembered suddenly the possible claims of Russian incompetence—”I may be kept longer.”
Mrs. Delarue nodded knowingly to herself.
“You’ll stay with Miss Doris till I come home?”
“Now would I leave the dear lamb?” Mrs. Delarue asked; and Doris added: “I should lock the door if she wanted to, and throw the key into the ash-bin — or the ash-tree. Isn’t that a funny joke I made, Daffy? They’re different kinds of ashes, of course,” she added, doubtfully.
“That’s what makes the joke so funny,” said Daphne.
The way from Fitzroy Street to the Mont Blanc is not very easy to find when one has not only not been out alone in London, but has hardly been out alone anywhere. There was a good deal of tacking through Soho streets, and among the bare backs and sides of theatres before Daphne at last found Gerrard Street and the little white-faced restaurant with the two round-topped bay trees in tubs outside it.
The patron received her at the door with a bow and smile. Pleasant, that. Not so pleasant the scrutiny, face by face, of the “clients” seated close together at the Little crowded tables. To stand in a summer gown that would be at home in a country rose-garden, with a hat that is, in fact, a little garden of roses, and to stare into the eyes of twenty complete strangers in succession, demands some sang-froid. Much, indeed. More, to be exact, than Daphne could command. She glanced at the patron with more appeal in her eyes man she knew of.
“Mademoiselle cherche — ?” he responded with instant courtesy, stepping to her side.
“Un Monsieur Russe” — she unrolled the sketch, and handed it to him. All the eyes in the little diningroom were turned on her, forks being suspended in mid-air on their way to the mouths of the curious. Daphne, flushed, withdrew behind the glass screen that separates the passage from the dining-room.
“But perfectly,” said the patron, returning the sketch. This gentleman is in the salon above. He has the air to await someone.”
Daphne stumbled on the edge of her dress as she went up the stairs. Above was another dining-room, smaller, less crowded. At the table in the corner by the open window sat the Russian. He was very unkempt, and very shabby; his elbows were on the table, and his haggard eyes watched the door. He had, as the patron had said, the air to await someone. His eyes did not change as Daphne entered. Indeed, why should they? She walked straight to his table and sat down facing him. He made a little courteous gesture that was half a bow, moved the vinegar and oil out of her way, and resumed his fixed scrutiny of the entrance.
Daphne unfolded her table-napkin and said:
“Mr. Vorontzoff?”
The start that he gave and the sudden terror in his eyes recalled all the stories she had ever read of Underground Russia. A hot flush of sympathy dyed her face and neck:
She made haste to lay the note before him. He looked from her to it, and back again. What he saw in her face reassured him. She answered what she had seen in his face with:
“De la part d’un ami. All goes well.”
He got his eyes from her face to the note, tore it open and read. Instantly his face cleared like an April sky after rain, and broke into the smile which is one of the chief charms of your Russian — a smile sunny yet with a deep, undying memory of storms gone by.
“Now, in effect, all goes well! My friend writes that mademoiselle will be to-day the guardian angel. But how they are good, the English! Mademoiselle, I avow it to you. My money comes not from Paris —— it is to you that I shall owe my dejeuner.”
“Willingly, monsieur,” said the girl, pulling off her gloves. “Monsieur has commanded?”
“I have awaited the arrival of ce cher Henry,” said he, and beckoned to the waiter.
Daphne had, she reflected, wanted adventures. Well, now she had them. The ministering angel’s visit to that blackened studio, and to that studio’s owner — its details hidden away at the back of her mind to be taken out and played with later — and now the incident, in itself an event, of lunching in a little French restaurant with a perfect stranger who had, for anything she knew, killed a prison governor or a general of Cossacks and a Russian Grand Duke or two. She crumbled her bread, searching for a suitable conversational opening.
“You are newly arrived in London?” was all she found.
“But yes. It is a strange town. So rich — so rotten.”
“Are you staying long?”
“I desire to see the poor, the oppressed. To draw them. For so long we make the attack through the ears only — and the rich are very deaf — all. I figure to myself an exhibition of paintings in which I will show, to the eyes even of the half-blind, the slime of misery on which they build their palaces.”
“You mean,” said Daphne, lamely enough, “that you’re going to paint poor people?”
“I shall paint misery,” said the Russian, dropping his spoon in the soup so that it splashed across the table on to Daphne’s fried potatoes. “Misery everywhere where I shall see it. In the faces of the tired rich and the tired poor; in the houses that are like the styes of sick pigs and the houses that are like imperial palaces; in the eyes of the children and the old men; in the wrinkled, knotted red hands of the women who work; the listless white hands of the women who are idle. I shall paint so that all must see. The fear of the thief and the weariness of the harlot — I shall paint the Thing that Is.”
“Don’t you think,” said Daphne, timidly, “that if the world’s so dreadful, you ought to paint beautiful things?”
“Roses and nightingales — and the baby’s bath and the first Communion! Bah! there are many to paint these, and many to buy. I paint men as man has made them. And for beauty,” he added, resuming the bedabbled soup spoon, “all that I paint is beautiful — I paint it so.
“Did you paint those sort of pictures in Russia?” she asked.
“But surely. It is so that I am made. I paint the thing that I see. And in my country it is forbidden to see anything but the glory of the Czar. It is for that I am here.”
“Did they — did they put you in prison?”
He thrust up the sl
eeve of his worn coat and a hitherto unsuspected shirt sleeve; there were curious twisted scars serpentining across the forearm. Daphne shuddered and put down her fork.
The Russian smiled — that childlike, confiding smile of his.
“La, la, my child,” he said, “that is nothing. I am like that on all my body. But I am here alive, and living to work. And I drink to you,” he raised an empty glass, “and to your friend the amiable Henry. But it is he who has the genius, is it not? It is he who has the heart and the spirit — the touch sure, the hand fine.”
“I don’t know,” said Daphne, and suddenly felt again on her hand the last touch of Henry’s. “I haven’t seen any of his pictures. Is he really a great artist?”
“But yes, he is great. He knows to draw the thing that is. My exhibition it is to him and me — to us two — none other. The world shall see his genius.”
“And yours,” said Daphne, politely.
“His genius,” said the Russian, “and my sufferings. Filet de veau Marengo. And mademoiselle drinks nothing?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Daphne blushed, remembering the raised and empty glass, “what — ?”
He took the wine card and ordered Médoc.
“Ah, my fortune I have wasted,” he said. “When I, too, flattered myself to draw only what the world thinks to be the beautiful, it was champagne I ordered. When we put our hand in a friend’s purse we make economies — and it is Médoc.”
“Have champagne, if you like,” said Daphne, helpless before the memory of those twisted scars. She could go without, oh, anything, rather than that anything should be denied to the man with that arm.
But no,” he said; “it was only a little pleasantry to égayer our dejeuner. In prison there was not even Médoc.
When the wine came he raised his glass, not to Henry, but to “The Social Revolution!’
Daphne’s glass was filled, but she jibbed at the toast. He set down his glass.
“You fear the word?” he said.
“Are you an anarchist, or a nihilist, or what?” Daphne asked hurriedly.