The Divine Fire

by May Sinclair

CHAPTER XLVI

Flossie had been working with one eye on the clock all afternoon. At the closing hour she went out into Lothbury with the other girls; but instead of going up Moorgate Street as usual, she turned out of Prince's Street to her right, and thence made her way westward as quickly as she could for the crowd. It was September, a day when it was good to be out of doors at that hour. The sunlight filtered into the dusty thoroughfare from the west, on her left the sprawling mounted legends over the shops were so many gold blazons on an endless field of grey; on her right, a little way ahead, the tall plane-tree in Wood Street hung out its green leaves over Cheapside like a signal. Thither Flossie was bound.

As she sidled out of the throng into the quiet little lane, Mr. Rickman came forward, raising his hat. He had been waiting under the plane-tree for twenty minutes, and was now beguiling his sylvan solitude with a cigarette. Two years had worked a considerable change in his appearance. His face had grown graver and clearer cut. He had lost his hectic look and had more the air of a man of the world than of a young poet about town. To Flossie's admiration and delight he wore an irreproachable frock-coat and shining linen; she interpreted these changes as corresponding with the improvement in his prospects, and judged that the profession of literature was answering fairly well.

They shook hands seriously, as if they attached importance to these trifles. "Am I dreadfully late?" she asked.

"Dreadfully." He smiled with one corner of his mouth, holding his cigarette firmly in the other, while he took from her the little cape she carried over her arm.

"I expect I've kept you waiting a good bit?" A keen observer of Flossie's face might have detected in it a faintly triumphant appreciation of the fact. "I'm awfully sorry I got behind-hand and had to stay till I'd finished up."

"Never mind, Flossie, it don't matter. At any rate it's worth it." The words implied that Mr. Rickman's time was valuable, otherwise he would not have given it to Flossie. "Where shall we go, and what shall we do?"

"I don't much care."

"Shall we have tea somewhere while we're making up our minds?"

"Well—I wouldn't mind. I hadn't time to get any at the Bank."

"All right. Come along." And they plunged into Cheapside again, he breasting the stream, making a passage for her. They found a favourite confectioner's in St. Paul's Churchyard, where they had sometimes gone before. He noticed that she took her seat with rather a weary air.

"Floss, you must come for a walk on the Embankment. You look as if you didn't get out enough. Why will you go up and down in that abominable underground? You're awfully white, you know."

"I never had a red face."

"Then what's the matter?"

"Nothing, I shall be better when I've had my tea."

She had her tea, which after a proper protest on her part was paid for by Rickman. Then they turned into the cathedral gardens, where it was still pleasant under the trees. Thus approached from the north-east, the building rose up before them in detached incoherent masses, the curve of its great dome broken by the line of the north transept seen obliquely from below. It turned a forbidding face citywards, a face of sallow stone blackened by immemorial grime, while the north-west columns of the portico shone almost white against the nearer gloom.

"It's clever of it to look so beautiful," murmured Rickman, "when it's so infernally ugly." He stood for a few minutes, lost in admiration of its eccentricity. Thus interested, he was not aware that his own expression had grown somewhat abstracted, impersonal and cold.

"I call that silly," said Flossie, looking at him out of the corner of her black eyes. Had he come there to pay attention—to the Cathedral?

"Do you? Why?"

"Because—I suppose you wouldn't say I was beautiful if I were—well, downright ugly?"

"I might, Flossie, if your ugliness was as characteristic, as suggestive as this."

Flossie shrugged her shoulders (not, he thought, a pretty action in a lady with so short a neck). To her St. Paul's was about as beautiful as the Bank and infinitely less "suggestive." Mr. Rickman interpreted her apathy as fatigue and looked about for a lonely seat. They found one under the angle of the transept.

"Let's sit down here," he said; "better not exert ourselves violently so soon after tea."

"For all the tea I've had, it wouldn't matter," said Flossie as if resenting an ignoble implication. Rickman laughed a little uncomfortably and blushed. Perhaps she had hardly given him the right to concern himself with these intimate matters. Yet from the very first his feeling for Flossie had shown itself in minute cares for her physical well-being. They sat for a while in silence. A man passed them smoking; he turned his head to look back at the girl, and the flying ash from his cigarette lighted on her dress.

"Confound the brute!" said Rickman, trying to brush away the obnoxious powder with a touch which would have been more effectual if it had been less of a caress. She shivered slightly, and he put her cape gently about her shoulders. A curious garment, Flossie's cape, made of some thin grey-blue stuff, with gold braid on the collar, cheap, pretty and a little vulgar.

"There's not much warmth in that thing," he said, feeling it with his fingers.

"I don't want to be warm, thank you, a day like this," she retorted, pushing back the cape. For, though it was no longer spring, Flossie's dream tugged at her heartstrings. There was a dull anger against him in her heart. At that moment Flossie could have fought savagely for her dream.

What could have made her so irritable, poor little girl? She didn't look well; or—perhaps it was her work. He was sorry for all women who worked. And Flossie—she was such an utter woman. That touch of exaggeration in the curves of her soft figure made her irresistibly, superlatively feminine. To be sure, as he had hinted in that unguarded moment, her beauty was of the kind that suggests nothing more interesting than itself. Yet there were times when it had power over him, when he was helpless and stupid before it. And now, as he leaned back looking at her, his intellect seemed to melt away gradually and merge in dreamy sense. They sat for a while, still without speaking; then he suddenly bent forward, gazing into her eyes.

"What is it, Flossie? Tell me."

Flossie turned away her face from the excited face approaching it.

"Tell me."

"It's nothing. Can't you see I'm only tired. I've 'ad a hard day."

"I thought you never had hard days at the Bank?"

"No. No more we do—not to speak of."

"Then it's something you don't like to speak of. I say—have the other women been worrying you?"

"No, I should think not indeed. Catch any one trying that on with me!"

"Then I can't see what it can be."

"I daresay you can't. You don't know what it is! It's not much, but it's the same thing day after day, day after day, till I'm sick and tired of it all! I don't see any end to it either."

"I'm so sorry, Floss," said Rickman in a queer thick voice. She had turned her face towards him now, and its expression was inscrutable—to him. To another man it would have said that it was all very well for him to be sorry; he could put a stop to it soon enough if he liked.

"Oh—you needn't be sorry."

"Why not? Do you think I don't care?"

Immense play of expression on Flossie's face. She bit her lip; and that meant that he might care no end, or he mightn't care a rap, how was she to know? She smiled a bitter smile as much as to say that she didn't know, neither did she greatly care. Then her lips quivered, which meant that if by any chance he did care, it was a cruel shame to leave a poor girl in the dark.

"Care? About the Bank?" she said at last. "You needn't. I shan't stand it much longer. I shall fling it up some of these days; see if I don't."

"Would that be wise?"

"I don't know whether it's wise or not. I know I can't go on like this for ever."

"Yes, but would anything else be better, or even half as good? You didn't get much fun out of that last place, you know."

"Well, for all the fun I get out of that old Bank, I might as well be in a ladies' boarding school. If I thought it would end in anything—but it won't."

"How do you know? It may end in your marrying a big fat manager."

"Don't be silly."

"Supposing you knew it would end some day, not necessarily in marrying the manager, would you mind going on with it?"

She looked away from him, and tears formed under her eyelashes, the vague light tears that never fall. "There's no use my talking of flinging it up. I'm fixed there for good."

"Who knows?" said Rickman; and if Flossie's eyes had been candid they would have said, "You ought to know, if anybody does." Whatever they said, it made him shudder, with fear, with shame, but no, not with hatred. "Poor Flossie," he said gently; and there was a pause during which Flossie looked more demure than ever after her little outburst. She had seen the look in his eyes that foreboded flight.

He rose abruptly. "Do you know, I'm awfully sorry, but I've got an appointment at half past five to meet a fellow in Fleet Street."

The fellow was Maddox, but the appointment, he had made it that very minute, which was the twenty-fifth minute past five.

They went their ways; he to Fleet Street, and she home. Maddox did not turn up to the appointment and Rickman had to keep it with himself. As the result of the interview he determined to try the effect of a little timely absence. He did not attempt to conceal from himself that he was really most Horribly afraid; his state of mind or rather body (for the disorder was purely physical) was such that he positively dared not remain in the same house with Flossie another day. What he needed was change of air and scene. He approached Mrs. Downey with a shame-faced air, and a tale of how he was seedy and thought if he could get away for a week it would set him up. It seemed to him that Mrs. Downey's manner conveyed the most perfect comprehension of his condition. He did not care; he was brought so low that he could almost have confided in Mrs. Downey. "Mark my words," said the wise woman to the drawing-room. "He'll be back again before the week's up." And as usual, little Flossie marked them.

He walked out to Hampstead that very evening and engaged rooms there by the week, on the understanding that he might require them for a month or more. He did not certainly know how long the cure would take.

Hampstead is a charming and salubrious suburb, and Jewdwine was really very decent to him while he was there, but in four days he had had more of the cure than he wanted. Or was it that he didn't want to be cured? Anyway a week was enough to prove that the flight to Hampstead was a mistake. He had now an opportunity of observing Miss Flossie from a judicious distance, with the result that her image was seen through a tender wash of atmosphere at the precise moment when it acquired relief. He began to miss her morning greetings, the soft touch of her hand when they said good-night, and the voice that seemed to be always saying, "How orf'ly good of you," "Thanks orf'ly, Mr. Rickman, I've had a lovely day." He hadn't given her many lovely days lately, poor little girl.

At the end of the week, coming up from Fleet Street, instead of making straight for the Hampstead Road as he ought to have done, he found himself turning aside in the direction of Tavistock Place. The excuse that he made to himself was that he wanted a book that he had left behind at Mrs. Downey's. Now it was not in the least likely that he had left it in the dining-room, nor yet in the drawing-room, but it was in those places that he thought of looking first. Not finding what he wanted, he went on dejectedly to the second floor, feeling that he must fulfil the quest that justified his presence. And there in his study, in, yes, in it, as far in as anybody could get, by the bookcase next the window, Flossie was sitting; and sitting (if you could believe it) on the floor; sitting and moving her hands along the shelves as familiarly as you please. Good Heavens! if she wasn't busy dusting his books!

Flossie didn't see him, for she had her back to the door; and he stood there on the threshold for a second, just looking at her. She wore a loose dark-blue overall evidently intended to wrap her up and conceal her. But so far from concealing her, the overall, tucked in and smoothed out, and altogether adorably moulded by her crouching attitude, betrayed the full but tender outline of her body. Her face, all but the white curve of her cheek and forehead, was hidden from him, but he could see the ivory bistre at the nape of her bowed neck, with the delicate black tendrils of her curls clustering above it. Her throat, as she stooped over her task, was puckered and gathered, like some incredibly soft stuff, in little folds under her chin. He drew in his breath with a sighing sound which to Flossie was the first intimation of his presence.

To say that Flossie rose to her feet would be a misleading description of her method. She held on to the edge of a bookshelf by the tips of her fingers and drew herself up from the floor, slowly, as it were by some mysterious unfolding process, not ungraceful. She turned on him the wide half-mischievous, half-frightened eyes of a child caught this time in some superb enormity.

"Flossie," he said with an affectation of severity, "what have you been doing?"

She produced her duster gingerly. "You can see," said she, "only I didn't mean you to catch me at it." She knelt down by the fireplace and gave her duster a little flick up the chimney. "I never, never in all my life saw such a lot of dust. I can't think how you've gone on living with it."

He smiled. "No more can I, Flossie. I don't know how I did it."

"Well, you haven't got to do it, now. It's all perfectly sweet and clean."

"It's all perfectly sweet, I know that, dear." She turned towards the door but not without a dissatisfied look back at the bookcase she had left. "Aren't you going to let me thank you?"

"You needn't. I was only helping Mrs. Downey."

"Oh—"

"She's been having a grand turn-out while you were away."

"The deuce she has—"

"Oh you needn't be frightened. Nobody's touched your precious books but me. I wouldn't let them."

"Why wouldn't you let them?"

"Be-cause—Oh, I say, it's six o'clock; are you going to stay?"

"Perhaps. Why?"

"Because I'd only one more shelf to dust and then I'd 'ave finished. I—I'm in rather a hurry."

"Why won't you stay and dust it now?"

"Well—you know—" She took one step inside the room timidly, then another, and stood still.

"Is it me you're afraid of? I'll sit outside, on the stairs, if you'd rather."

"How silly!" She removed an invisible atom of dust from a chair as she spoke, as much as to say she was inspired solely by the instinct of order.

The diminutive smile played about the corners of her mouth. "Miss Roots said I'd better not meddle with your books."

"Did she? Then Miss Roots is a beast."

"She seemed to think I didn't know how to dust them."

"Perhaps she's right. I say, suppose you let me see."

And Flossie, willingly cajoled, began again, and, as he saw with horror, on his hoarded relics of the Harden library. "No, Flossie," he said, with a queer change in his voice. "Not those." But Flossie's fingers moved along their tops with a delicacy born of the incessant manipulation of bank notes. All the same, she did do it wrong, for she dusted towards the backs instead of away from them. But he hadn't the heart to correct her. He watched a moment; then he pretended to be looking for the book he had pretended he wanted to find, then he sat down and pretended to write a letter whilst Flossie went on dusting, skilfully, delicately. She even managed to get through ten volumes of his own Bekker's Plato without damage to the beautiful but perishing Russia leather. That made it all the more singular that the back of the eleventh volume should come off suddenly with a rip.

She gave a little cry of dismay. He looked up, and she came to him holding the book in one hand and its back in the other. She really was a little frightened. "Look," she said, "I didn't think it would have gone and done like that."

"Oh, I say, Flossie—"

"I'm orf'ly sorry." Her mouth dropped, not unbecomingly; her eyes were so liquid that he could have sworn they had tears in them. She looked more than ever like an unhappy child, standing beside him in her long straight overall. "And I wouldn't let anybody look at them but me."

"Why wouldn't you? I've asked you that before, Flossie—why wouldn't you?" He took the book and its mutilated fragment from her, and held both her hands in his.

"Because I knew you were fond enough of them."

"And is there anything I wasn't fond enough of—do you think?"

"I don't think; I know."

"No, you know nothing, you know nothing at all about anything. What did you think?"

"I thought you hated me."

"Hated you?"

"Yes. Hated me like poison."

He put his arms about her, gathering her to him! He drew her head down over his heart. "I hate you like this—and this—and this," he said, kissing in turn her forehead, her eyelids and her mouth. He held her at arm's length and gazed at her as if he wondered whether they were the same woman, the Flossie he had once known, and this Flossie that he had kissed. Then he led her to the sofa, and drew her down by his side, and held her hands to keep her there. And yet he felt that it was he who was being led; he who was being drawn, he who was being held—over the brink of the immeasurable, inexpiable folly. In all this his genius remained alone and apart, unmoved by anything he did or said, as if it knew that through it all the golden chain still held.

Her mouth quivered. "If you didn't hate me, why were you so rude to me, then?" was the first thing she said.

"Because I loved you when I didn't want to love you, and it was more than I could stand. And because—because I didn't know it. But you knew it," he said almost savagely. It seemed to him that his tongue refused the guidance of his brain.

"I'm sure I didn't know anything of the sort." Her mouth quivered again; but this time it was with a smile.

"Why not? Because I didn't say so in a lot of stupid words? You are literal. But surely you understood? Not just at first, of course; I didn't care a bit at first; I didn't care till long after."

"Long after what?" Flossie was thinking of Miss Poppy Grace on the balcony next door.

"Never mind what."

Flossie knew all about Miss Poppy Grace, and she didn't mind at all.

"Would I be here now if I didn't love you?" He still had to persuade himself that this was love. It seemed incredible.

"Rubbish—you know you only came to look at those silly old books," said Flossie, nodding contemptuously towards the bookcase.

"Did you imagine I was in love with them? And think of all the things we've done together. Didn't you know? Didn't you feel it coming on?"

"I know you've been orf'ly good—orf'ly. But as for anything else, I'm sure I never thought of it."

"Then think of it now. Or—does that mean that you don't care for me?"

There was an awful pause. Then Flossie said very indistinctly, so indistinctly that he had to lean his face to hers to catch the words, "No, of course it doesn't." Her voice cleared suddenly. "But if you didn't hate me, why did you go away?"

"I went away because I was ill."

"And are you any better?"

"Yes, I think I'm better. I think I'm nearly all right now. I might say I'll undertake never to be ill again, at least, not if you'll marry me."

At these words his genius turned and looked at him with eyes ominous and aghast. He had a vision of another woman kneeling beside a hearth as her hands tended a dying fire. And he hardly saw the woman at his side as he drew her to him and kissed her again because of the pain at his heart. And Flossie wondered why in that moment he did not look at her.

He was looking now. And as he looked his genius hid his face.

"You knew that was what I wanted?"

She shook her head slowly. "What does that mean? That you didn't know? Or that you won't? But you will, Flossie?"

As he drew her to him a second time the old terror woke in his heart; but only for a moment. For this time Flossie kissed him of her own accord, with a kiss, not passionate like his own, but sweet and fugitive. It was like a reminder of the transience of the thing he sought, a challenge rousing him to assert its immortality.

He put her from him, and stooped over his own outstretched arms and clasped hands; staring stupidly at the floor. When he spoke again it was hardly, incisively, as a man speaks the truth he hates. "Do you know what this means? It means waiting."

"Waiting?"

"Yes. I'm not a bit well off, you know; I couldn't give you the sort of home you ought to have just yet. I'd no business to say anything about it; but somehow I thought you'd rather know. And of course I've no business to ask you, but—will you wait?"

"Well—if we must, we must."

"And if it means working at that beastly Bank for another year, do you think you can keep it up so long?"

"I'll try to."

She leaned towards him, and they sat there, holding each other's hands, looking into each other's eyes, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, but the beating of their own riotous hearts.

It was love as nature loves to have it. It was also what men call honest love. But in the days when he had loved dishonestly, he had never slipped from Poppy Grace's side with such a sense of misery and solitude and shame.

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