Rosaleen among the artists

by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Lawrence opened the front door with his key and they entered the dark hall, musty with the smell of cooking, of paints. Outside his own door he held out a hand and she took it; an immense, fat hand.

“Now then, it’s all right, isn’t it?” he said, with exaggerated heartiness. “No ill feeling, is there? We’re the best of friends?”

“Oh, yes!” said Rosaleen, brightly, and in her mind added:

“If only I can get away from you and never, never set eyes on you again ...!”

A desolating weariness was upon her; her limbs were like lead as she climbed the stairs. Her chief desire was not to wake Mell and Bainbridge; the idea of having to talk to them, to open her lips even to answer them, was intolerable. She had had her fill of talking that night.

For the sake of ventilation the girls always slept with the curtains between the rooms drawn back and the studio windows open; and so it was now. She could see them there in the back room, solemnly still, on their cots, with the faint breeze of the sunrise blowing through the big room and lifting a fine, cindery dust from the hearth. Rosaleen sat down near the window and rested her head on her arms, on the broad sill.

Now that the sun had got up, the whole thing began to assume the character of a nightmare. Her tired brain began to confuse the memory of Lawrence with the drawing of a gargoyle she had seen in his studio the day before. In a blurred memory she seemed to see him as a sort of monster who had for hours and hours been sitting by her side and talking. Talking and talking and talking. And about what, do you suppose, but to urge her to run away with him. She had said she didn’t want to, but he had considered that of no importance. He had considered it a matter for logic, for reasoning. He had tried to show her the advantages; and when she persisted in saying that she didn’t want to, he had become offensive and horrible. He had never had the faintest intention of going after Miss Waters; the taxi, by his command, went speeding through Central Park, up Riverside Drive, went on through roads and streets unknown to her, while Lawrence talked, shouted, bullied her. She had never imagined anything so horrible. And yet she wasn’t afraid of him. Perhaps some feminine instinct informed her that a talking man, like a barking dog, is not to be feared.

And, quite suddenly, touched by some obscure impulse, he had become sorry. He had called himself a brute and a beast; he said he must have been mad, and she was privately inclined to agree with him. She didn’t know that it was his theory that women are to be won by force, by daring. With her, love could only be the outcome of sympathy. She could only love a man because she liked him. But she was not so much angry at Lawrence as disgusted and astonished. When he begged for her forgiveness she gave it promptly, and hoped that this would be the end of this immeasurably painful scene. But it was not enough. Nothing would do but a reconciliation, and for this it appeared necessary to go to a road house and have supper and more champagne. She sat at the table with him in the crowded, noisy dining-room, while he acted the jovial host; she had a constrained but polite smile for his pleasantries. She had been as diplomatic with him as if he had been a lunatic.

All the way home he had worshipped her as an angel. He said he wasn’t fit to live in the same world with her....

And now, with the world awake, the sun shining, the streets alive, for the first time since the wretched fiasco, Rosaleen began to weep for young Landry.