III
It was the neuter quality in Wynne Rendall which made possible the all-hour intimacy which came to exist between Eve and himself. She would come to his rooms, indifferent to time and convention, and stay far into the night.
Sometimes they conversed little, and then, while he worked or wandered about in a seemingly aimless fashion, seeking some cherished but elusive word, she would read, curled up in the age-worn chair. When the talking mood possessed him she would lay her book aside and contribute endorsement or censure to his ideas. In this respect her courage was boundless, for she never hesitated to dispute with him when she felt he was at fault. He would fight for his mental holdings to the last breath of argument, then of a sudden swing round and say:
“Yes, I know you are right—but how do you know?”
His extraordinary belief in himself filled her with a queer mixture of distress and admiration, but the distress was outweighed by the admiration and the joy she took in their brain to brain fencing or accord. Their talks, although embracing nearly every subject under the sun, were, as a rule, impersonal, or rather impersonal in so far as their relations to one another was concerned.
In common with many folk, Wynne thought more highly of his lesser deeds than of his greater, and vaunted them enthusiastically. He was inordinately proud of his truculence and acerbity to men who were more successful than himself, and took pleasure in recounting the fine-edged verbal tools he had employed against them. He was mortally offended when Eve told him frankly the attitude was unworthy and easily misconstrued.
“They only think you are envious,” she said.
“I envious of them? Good God!”
Her frankness had its effect, however, for he modified the characteristic, and no longer shouted “Yah” at lesser intellects and longer purses.
Another change she brought about was the matter of diet. Very drastically she quashed the nibbling habit which with him had taken the place of meals.
“Wynne,” she said, “what did you have for breakfast?”
“Lord knows. I don’t! Nothing, I expect.”
“Would you like to please me?”
“Yes,” he answered, “I suppose so.”
“You are starving yourself.”
“What nonsense!”
“You are. You won’t be able to stand the strain if you don’t eat properly.”
“I shan’t if I do,” he replied. “How can I buy books and pay rent and all that if I lavish my substance on victuals.”
“How much do you spend a week on food?”
“Never thought.”
“Think then.”
“Not I. Look! You haven’t seen this copy of ‘Erewhon,’ have you? It’s a first edition!”
“I want you to answer my question.”
He tossed his head petulantly.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” he implored. “The world is peopled with folk who worry about these matters; let’s be away from them. You’ll want me to buy a dinner-gong next so that half the street may know I am sitting down to table.”
“Perhaps I shall, for I want you to sit at table—regularly.”
He caught the word “regularly,” and played tunes upon it.
“I know,” said Eve, “and I like you for feeling that way—but you are fighting against nature—not convention—and that’s all wrong. We funny little things who walk about on the world must follow certain laws—we can’t help ourselves—and we may as well follow them sensibly. We have to lie down and get up and wash our faces and brush our hair and eat our dinners; we have to—if we didn’t we should accomplish nothing. It is foolish to fight with the ‘musts’ when there are armies of ‘needn’t be’s’ to draw the sword against.”
He snorted derisively and ridiculed prosaic philosophy. When he had finished she calmly repeated her question.
“How much do you spend a week on food?”
Very reluctantly he produced a sheet of paper and a pencil and scribbled a rough estimate.
“Will you give me the nine shillings and let me cater for you?”
“No,” he said emphatically.
“Please do.”
“Why should I spend money on a dinner when I can stave off hunger with a stick of chocolate?”
“Couldn’t we make a common fund and have one meal together each day. I’d cook it here.”
His expression brightened instantly.
“You would? You’d come each day?”
“If you consent.”
Hitherto her comings had been sporadic—too sporadic. He had felt, when she was absent, the consciousness of something lacking.
“I should like you to come here every day,” he said.
He was willing to accept a routine of her society, though rebelling against a time-table for meals. She smiled as the thought crossed her mind, but to have voiced it would have been to sacrifice the gains she had made.
“If you consent,” she repeated.
“All right; do what you will,” he said.
So every afternoon Eve cooked a meal over a grubby little gas-ring, assisted by a methylated spirit stove, and had the satisfaction of seeing her labours rewarded by a slightly added tinge of colour to his cheeks.
In buying the food she contributed more toward the cost than he, for in the matter of money he was strangely unmindful. Frequently he forgot his weekly contribution altogether, and returned home with some trifle of china or an old print by way of alternative. On these occasions it did not occur to him to question how meals still appeared upon his table, and Eve would not have told him for the world how hard it had been that this should be so.
Increasingly her thoughts centred on his welfare, and her own personality took second place. Even her ambitions—and they had been many and glorious—became merged in the task of helping him to success.
He had not taken into consideration the possibility that she, too, was a climber at heart, and had set her sails for the port where the dreams come true. He was quite offended when one day she spoke of herself.
“But can you act?” he staccatoed.
“One day I shall,” she answered. “One day I shall feel I know so much more than all the others—then I shall act, and people will sit up and say so.”
“H’m.”
“You think it unlikely?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He fidgeted with a cup on the mantelshelf. “It seemed you were echoing those things which I say to myself.”
“We have thoughts in common.”
He shook his head irritably.
“I don’t admit it. There is no common currency in thoughts or ideas. To me parallel lines are antagonistic lines. Why should you want to act?”
“I want to express myself as strongly as you do. I want to succeed.”
“I don’t like women who succeed. Why should you succeed? Where’s the necessity—?”
“Born in me,” she answered.
His words for the moment had hurt her bitterly, but the subtler side of her nature took comfort from the almost childishly petulant tone in which he had spoken them.
“The necessity is born by the things around you,” he said. “They are the impulses toward success.”
“Yes, that’s true. Perhaps it was the wretched drabness of my surroundings which fired the impulse in me. We haven’t talked to each other of our people, you and I?”
“I never think back,” he said.
“I do, because it’s the impetus to think forward.”
He looked at her critically.
“You might have come from princely stock by the look of you. You haven’t the seeming of the drab.”
“Perhaps I did; but it was the inbred collapsed finish of the good stock. My father idled backward to the slums—my mother was gentle, but that was all. He was dead before I could remember. Oh, that dreadful back-street life! You can’t understand. We were only a little removed from the gossipy-doorstep folk who talk of a neighbour’s confinement as they lean on the rickety railings. We played with their children, my sister and I, bought from their horrid mean shops—went to the same wretched school. Oh! how I hated it all—the miserable rooms, the bargaining for food, the squabbles, and the never-ending economy and thrift. Grey—grey—grey! I used to lash a purple whiptop at the corner of the street, and pray sometimes a great chariot of fire would snatch me up into the skies.”
It was Wynne’s habit to ignore central ideas in another’s conversation, hence the question:
“Why a purple top?”
“I hardly know—but it was always purple. I kept a patch of purple on my horizon.”
He looked at her queerly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The Royal Purple. Somehow it stands out as the colour which rises above all sordidness. Can’t explain it otherwise.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean. Strange you should feel like that, too.” The “too” was scarcely audible.
“When I was ever so little I had that feeling, and it has grown up with me. I used to believe that a purple goodness lined the great clouds above and the hilltops of my imagination. I could travel in my imagination, too. Just close my eyes and say to myself: Now the world is falling away, and I’m floating upwards, and I would pass above all the slates and see down all the chimneys until the houses became cities, and the cities grey marks on the green earth—and the rivers twisted silver wires which curled from the mountains to the sea.”
“You should meet Uncle Clem,” said Wynne.
“Who is he?”
“A man who thinks that way. But what is it like up there in the clouds?”
“Do you know, strangely, it isn’t very different—only fuller. Just as if one went up discontented and found contentment in what one had left behind. I used to think this was because my imagination couldn’t picture a better state, but I believe that no longer.”
“The climb is for nothing, then?”
“Oh, no, for the climb proves that what you sought is the best of what you left behind.”
“H’m! Sometimes,” he said. “You have queer notions. Have you found out what is the best of your possessions?”
“I don’t know them by heart, yet.”
“Why by heart?”
“I am a woman.”
“Yes, and sometimes, I think, just like any other.”
“I am.”
“Once I tried to define my motives—can you define yours?”
“I want a place in the sun—want it tremendously. I want to be able to think and feel and move among lovely things and people. I have given away twenty years to sordidness, and all I have earned is appreciation of the beautiful. I want to live the beautiful now, and rise above the trivial bother of a washpail and a gas-ring.”
“Mammon, Mammon,” cried Wynne, for want of a better thought.
“Oh no. Don’t think I crave for money, for it isn’t so; but one must have money if one is never to think of it.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t half the sorrow in the world traceable to such little causes as an extra halfpenny on a quartern of bread?”
“Not untrue,” Wynne nodded. His eyes fell on the dirty gas-ring of the grate, and he frowned. “Why do you come here, then?”
“Don’t you know?” she replied.
“No. It’s squalid enough!”
“Then it is because you are the first real person I have ever met outside the cover of a book.”
“I give you something, then?”
“A great deal.”
A modesty seized him, touched with self-reproach.
“Only because it pleases me,” he said, brusquely. “The giving is done by you. That much I realize.”
“I’m glad—and I’m glad to give.”
“Yes, a woman’s life is to give—that’s natural law—the only kind of law worth accepting.” He hesitated—then, “Are you satisfied to give?”
She smiled her wise, intricate smile, and he did not wait for the answer.
“You never smile as you should,” he reproached. “Yours is a thinking smile—perplexing. Do you never smile or laugh from sheer happiness?”
“Perhaps I have never yet been sheerly happy.”
“What would make you?”
“I haven’t found out.”
“But I want to know. If you smiled for me you would seem less remote.”
“Am I remote?”
“Yes—remote is the word.” He looked at her fixedly, then shook himself and began to pace up and down the room. When next he spoke his voice was querulous and irritable:
“I should have been working all this while. The train of my thoughts is all upset—disordered. It is unlike you to disturb me. I’ve lost an hour. Tomorrow I must work all day—alone.”
“Go back to yourself,” she said, gently.
She did not leave at once, but half an hour later he looked up and saw she was buttoning her coat.
“You needn’t go.”
“I had better,” she said; and at the door—“I come here too often, perhaps. It is selfish of me.”
“But I like you to be here—I want you here. I meant nothing—only I’m a little keyed up and worried. I don’t know why.”
“It’s all right,” said Eve. “Just for tomorrow I’ll stay away.”
“You want to?”
“No; but it is good sometimes to do what one doesn’t want. G’bye.” And she was gone.
That night, as he lay in bed, the same feeling of self-reproach which had sprung into being for an instant during their talk came back to him heavily.
“What do I do for her? Nothing.”