Richard, whose Parisian experiences of the revolutionary spirit were of a very different nature, was astonished at the absence of personal animosity in what the man advanced. He effaced his own tastes. He effaced the tastes, passions, prejudices, hostilities, of the proletariat he represented.
Everything was reduced to a logical inevitable sequence of cause and effect, which could neither be hastened nor retarded, but which in its own predestined hour, to the discomfiture of some, to the relief of others, would reveal a new order of society.
Richard felt, as he listened to him, as though he were present at some demonic unclothing of the hidden skeleton of the universe – a skeleton of cubes and circles and angles and squares, of inflexible geometric determination!
The steady flow of the tide beneath them, with its gurgling and sucking noises, seemed to gather the man’s reasoning into its own flood and become a living portion of the fatality he represented.
Storm could detect no flaw in Karmakoff’s logic, wherein all that was personal and arbitrary seemed slowly to be obliterated, as if under the power of a remorseless engine. Nature was reduced to a chemistry. Human nature became mathematical necessity. A sublime but cheerless order, irresistible and undeviating, swallowed up in its predetermined march everything that was the accomplice of chance, the evocation of free will.
Deep within his own heart, Richard hid away from the beautiful eyes of this terrible logician, the secret exultation of his own free will, wrought upon by Elise’s great dance. Art, he thought to himself, is anyway safe from this man’s logic. There, at least, will always be a refuge for the free creative spirit that lies behind all this cause and effect. The image of Elise, dancing her dance of the Eternal Vision, became at that moment his only counterpoise to what the Russian was saying. He hid this image away deep in his heart, very much as some crusader in medieval times might have hidden away his piece of the True Cross from the eyes of some conquering Saracen.
In his imagination he seemed to see this great city of marble and iron as some huge Colosseum, in the arena of which the art of Elise wrestled with the science of Karmakoff.
He felt vaguely and obscurely that the mind which could bring these two tremendous forces into some vital relation with one another would be the mind that would dominate the world.
Karmakoff meanwhile was comparing the huge cosmopolitanism of New York harbour with what he had seen at Southampton.
‘Could anything be more English?’ he said. ‘You sail straight in between parks and fields and country villages, and are landed right at the bottom of a quiet provincial street, where nurserymaids and butchers’ boys congregate to watch your exit! You English are a queer race. You seem to have acquired your precious empire without leaving your sheepfolds and rose gardens. You seem to have marched from Cairo to Baghdad in your sleep, without so much as having a single theory that’ll hold water, except with regard to the breeding of terrier dogs. Come now, Mr Storm, I’ve been talking all this evening to you and you’ve hardly spoken a word. What is your theory of the economic problem?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t gone into the matter,’ replied Richard, rising from his seat. ‘My economics are terribly personal.’
Karmakoff laughed softly. ‘How English! Everything you do and think and feel is personal. Do you know, my good friend, you English are so individualistic that I wonder sometimes that any of you manage to get born at all!’
‘Isn’t that rather a personal matter?’ murmured Richard.
Karmakoff positively stared at him. ‘Personal?’ he said. ‘You don’t mean to say you still think – wait a little. Wait a little. You evidently have never been in love.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Richard, almost petulantly.
The man laughed aloud. ‘I’m talking about the utter impersonality of the most devastating force in the universe! I should like you to overhear Catharine Gordon when she’s got her knife into me. Don’t you know what it is to worship the flesh of a girl and to hate her for it? Do you know nothing of that malice? But I beg your pardon. You’re an Englishman. The great forces of the world are your child’s toys. Well! It must have something in it, your little method. Everything must be genteel and well-behaved and respectable and personal. But good Lord!’
Chapter 15
About a week after Richard’s reversion to his old love, Nelly according to her custom was preparing lunch for herself and Canyot in his studio in Seventy-fifth Street.
His model, a handsome girl from Siena, beautiful as that purest Italian race is beautiful, with a certain glowing and yet chaste voluptuousness, was resting from an exhausting pose, and eating cream chocolates.
The two were conversing together without embarrassment, though the richly coloured garment that half-swathed her was more in harmony with a picture by Veronese than with a New York apartment.
Nelly, through the open door leading into the little passage containing the kitchenette, joined amicably, when she could, in their conversation.
‘Amelia swears she’s never had a lover and never means to,’ remarked the young painter, raising his voice a little. ‘Did you hear that, Nelly?’
‘She’s a sensible girl, then,’ came the, answer from the passage.
‘You see? The lady agrees with me!’ cried the model, selecting another chocolate with exquisite care. ‘It’s all nonsense this, about love being so important. I do my work. I help artists. I put myself into pictures. I make pictures. And then I go home and look after the little mother. I cook us a good dinner – a very good dinner. I smoke cigarettes. The little mother smokes cigarettes. We go to the theatre together. We go to hear the singers. And then we go home and sleep till morning and – that’s all!’
‘But haven’t you ever fallen in love, Amelia, dear?’ inquired Canyot, putting a dab of crimson lake upon his canvas and retreating a little to observe its effect.
‘Why should I fall in love? I know what men are. I know what women are. Chocolates are much better. And when the great Caruso sings – basta! I don’t want to think of such things. I go to Mass too, and I love Our Lady. Our Lady didn’t need to have a lover. Her Son was enough for her; and the little mother’s enough for me.’
‘But Amelia darling, don’t you find it rather difficult to be so good? I should have thought with your profession—’
‘That’s just where you’re wrong, Mr Canyot. You’re a good man. You don’t have any lover or any woman about, except Madam, and anyone can see how good she is! And I can tell you that lots of the people I work for are like that. Artists are good men. They love their work. And I’m part of their work.’
‘But haven’t you ever, not ever, seen anyone you’d like to marry?’
‘Don’t tease her so, Robert,’ came the voice from the passage.
‘It’s all right, lady,’ cried the girl from Siena; and then, in a lower voice: ‘If there ever was anyone, it was that Russian gentleman who talked to me about the strike in Milano in this very room. Now don’t you go and tell him what I’ve been telling you, Mr Canyot! Of course I’d never really have him, because of mother. Mother doesn’t like Russians. But I think he was beautiful – as beautiful as St Anthony.’
‘Well run away and dress now, Amelia; I shan’t want you any more this afternoon.’
When the girl reappeared in her street costume she still looked adorably handsome; but no one would have guessed how flawlessly classical her limbs were.
Nelly begged her to stay and share their meal; but she flatly refused to do this. ‘I always go to Castignac’s to get my dinner. They cook me little yellow omelettes, full of red jam. I love Madame. She has a great heart. I am her protector.’
When Amelia had gone, Canyot said to Nelly, ‘I wonder what it is about that fellow Ivan that attracts women so? You’re a woman, Nelly, you ought to know what it is.’
‘You’ll have an opportunity of watching his effect upon me very soon,’ Nelly replied, as she carried in her dishes and arranged them on the table
. ‘He’s going to come round at two o’clock; so we’d better hurry up and get our meal over.’
‘What’s he coming here for? I can’t stand the fellow. He must know I detest him.’
‘Oh my dear,’ cried Nelly, regarding him with an affectionate smile across the plate she held in her hand, ‘no one minds the way you detest them! Of course he’s coming because Catharine is coming.’
‘I don’t like Catharine,’ remarked Canyot pulling a chair up to the table and making his guest sit down while he went to fetch the knives and forks.
‘Why don’t you like her?’ asked Nelly giving a sigh of weariness.
‘I don’t like her because she pulls you about so and makes such a fuss over you. I don’t like her arms or her legs.’
‘Poor old Cathy! She can’t help that, you know. I like both of them. I think she has a very interesting figure.’
‘I don’t like the way she treats that fellow Ivan,’ Canyot went on, eating his food in great hungry mouthfuls but keeping a still hungrier look, full of infinite tenderness, fixed on his friend’s face. ‘Why doesn’t she take him altogether or let him go altogether? I can’t stand all this messing about and playing around.’
‘It is a bit hectic, her life, I admit,’ said Nelly. ‘But I’m not at all sure Ivan loves her.’
‘Loves her? He’s mad about her. He follows her everywhere with those confounded woman’s eyes of his.’
‘He may be mad about her. But that’s not the same thing as loving her. Do you know, Robert dear, I think that there are very few men who really love their woman – love her for herself, I mean, and not for the sensations they get out of her.’
Canyot glanced meaningly at the grey eyes that met his own across the table.
Impulsively Nelly stretched out her hand and, seeking his, gave it a tight squeeze.
‘I’m not thinking of you, Robert,’ she said. ‘You’re one in a thousand. I’m thinking of all the rest.’
Canyot frowned savagely as was his wont when his love for her troubled him.
‘Men and women want different things of each other,’ he muttered, ‘and always will.’
‘But would we want different things – if things had been different with us?’
As soon as she had uttered the words she would have given anything to recall them, for she saw the pain upon his face.
‘Oh yes, I suppose so!’ he replied wearily. And then after a little pause: ‘I could never have satisfied you, Nelly – my darling!’
She thought in her heart, How can I tell him that I love him with everything that is best in me? How can I tell him that I love him because he is strong and good; and that I love my poor Richard because he is weak, and anything but good?
And she also thought in her heart, Am I different from other women and much less moral? Am I doing something callous and selfish in sitting here eating Robert’s food while I am still Richard’s wife? And then, sweeping aside both Richard and Robert, there rose up within her that fierce blind instinct to protect the unborn at any cost; to take from one, to take from another, to exploit them all – if only this flesh of her flesh, this bone of her bone, might live and grow in peace! And she thought to herself, How little, really, is anything in the world important except the creation of life! This idea had come to her several times during these last weeks as she listened to Canyot’s conservatism and Karmakoff’s radicalism. ‘These men understand nothing!’ she had heard her heart whisper. ‘All their theories are superficial! All their words leave the truth untouched!’
‘It is destiny, Robert dear,’ she said at last. ‘I certainly little thought in those old days that we should be sitting together like this this autumn united by your faithfulness, separated by my … nature!’
They finished their lunch in silence after this; then he made her lie down on his studio couch, while he washed up the things.
At two o’clock punctually Karmakoff turned up. He was excited beyond his usual wont. There had been a police raid upon some peculiarly inoffensive Russian utopians, and one Herculean Irish official had used his baton savagely. ‘The absurdity of the whole thing is,’ he said, ‘that these people were not political revolutionaries at all. They were a sect of mystical Tolstoyans – quiet nervous saintly men, like medieval hermits – the sort of people that in any other community would be protected by the populace, as innocents sacred to God.’
‘What annoys me,’ remarked Canyot in his most surly manner, ‘is the way all you fellows appeal to what you call bourgeois justice and bourgeois morality as long as you are persecuted. And then, directly it’s your turn to be the upper dog, to the devil with such scruples! It’s then a case of saving the revolution at the cost of any bloodshed. If you are allowed by the moral law to save your revolution by breaking heads, why isn’t the capitalist allowed to save his system by breaking heads? With both of you it becomes a sheer matter of who can use the greatest force. I never can see what right either of you have to appeal to these moral principles, principles that are just simply human, and quite outside your class struggles.’
‘Nothing,’ replied Karmakoff, smiling patiently, recovering his normal poise; ‘nothing is outside the class struggle. The class struggle is the very thing that has given birth to all these abstract human principles you’re referring to. The principle of the sacredness of property, for instance, is simply the enforced will of the people who have possessed themselves of property. And all these doctrines of justice and order and legality and so forth are really nothing at all but just the will and pleasure of those in possession of power.’
‘Order is the one essential thing!’ cried Canyot. ‘How can anyone work or think without order? What becomes of art without order?’
Karmakoff bowed his head politely. ‘I entirely agree with you,’ he said. ‘It’s you who’re the anarchist, not I. Certainly we must have order. The question is who are to enforce this order – a privileged few or the whole community?’
‘The whole community can enforce nothing,’ cried Canyot controlling his anger with difficulty, his face growing flushed and wrinkled. ‘The whole community is a set of silly sheep!’
‘Precisely,’ replied the other in his most purring voice. ‘And the whole question resolves itself, then, into what set of people are to give this desirable order to these silly sheep. Are they to be people with sheep’s blood in their veins – old horned rams for instance, like myself? Or are they to be wolves in sheep’s clothing? I believe it will be found in the long run that the silly sheep prefer the former!’
‘I wish,’ broke in Nelly, ‘that the day would hurry up and come, when the sheep stop being silly and throw you both overboard!’
Karmakoff laughed heartily at this. ‘The woman speaks!’ he said. ‘But seriously, you know, Mrs Storm, you and I are in much closer agreement than you and Mr Canyot. I am perfectly ready to admit that the dictatorship of certain representatives of the proletariat is only a temporary and transitional thing – an interregnum of horned rams, shall we call it? – until the sheep grow accustomed to power. Mr Canyot would have the poor wretches left for ever at the mercy of the wolves.’
At this point there was a rapid tap at the door and without waiting for a reply Catharine Gordon swung into the room. She had just bought herself a new smock of the very latest futurist design, and though it was so early in the afternoon, she wore a black silk skirt.
‘Ha! you’re here first, then!’ she threw out at Karmakoff while she gravely shook hands with Canyot, who at once, turned away and busied himself with his palette of colours.
Then she rushed across to Nelly who still reclined on the couch. ‘I’ve got a job! I’ve got a job! I’ve got a job!’ she shouted, throwing herself down on the floor by the end of the couch and possessing herself of Nelly’s hand. ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted. The very nicest thing in the world. Try and guess what it is, Ivan!’
‘Not anything on the stage?’ Karmakoff inquired.
‘Oh dear no! I’m sick of that. I�
��m not vulgar enough for Broadway; and I know too much about the theatre for the art people.’
‘Is it dancing, my dear?’ asked Nelly. “I’ve always thought if you only got a chance—’
‘No! it’s not dancing. That may come later, of course, and probably will; but it’s not dancing yet. Shall I tell you what it is – oh, and I’ve got something else by the way to tell you, Nelly, in private, presently, something very comical, something about your husband – well, I’ll tell you. It’s that I’m to be secretary to Elise Angel!’
There was a general exclamation of surprise. Even Canyot turned round from his work. ‘I didn’t know you could typewrite,’ he said.
‘I can’t! That’s just the fun of it. But Elise said it didn’t matter a bit. She liked her letters written in ordinary script. She made me show her my hand and liked it awfully!’
‘Do you mean that she liked your hand or your handwriting?’ inquired Canyot.
‘Both! She made me write on a piece of paper. And when I had written my name, she took my hand in hers and played with my fingers, and said she liked their longness. And – just think – when I said goodbye she kissed me. Yes! kissed me. Oh, isn’t it lovely? I’ve been kissed by Elise Angel! And I’m to go to her this very night to begin!’
‘Surely she doesn’t write her letters by night?’ growled Canyot.
‘Are you going to live with her?’ inquired Karmakoff gravely.
‘Oh no. I’m not going to live with her. She doesn’t want me to do that. I’m going in the daytime, in the morning, in the evening – any old time; just as she wants me, you know.’
As the girl spoke she fixed her eyes steadily upon Karmakoff. The Russian walked up and down the room, frowning, his hands behind his back. Presently he stopped in front of her. ‘You’ll have to introduce me to Elise,’ he said. There is a chance they might invite her to Moscow to take charge of the whole art movement there.’
After My Fashion Page 24