Carnival Part 32

"Well, you're not much more than a rasher of wind yourself," commented Jenny.

"Ha! ha!" shouted Maurice. "That's good. Hullo, here's Trafalgar Square.

Aren't we going a pace down Whitehall? Jenny, there aren't any words for what I feel."

He hugged her close.

"Oh, mind!" she protested, withdrawing from the embrace. "People can see us."

"My dear, they don't matter. They don't matter a d.a.m.n. Not one of them matters the tiniest dash."

Nor did they indeed to lovers in the warm apricot of a fine September sunset. What to them were dusty clerks with green s.h.i.+ning elbows, and government officials and policemen, and old women with baskets of tawny chrysanthemums? Fairies only were fit to be their companions. The taxi hummed on over the road shadowed by the stilted Gothic of the Houses of Parliament, hummed out of the shadow and into Grosvenor Road, where the sun was splas.h.i.+ng the river with pools of coppery light. The stream was losing its burnished ripples and a gray mist was veiling the fire-crowned chimneys of Nine Elms when the taxi drew up by 422 Grosvenor Road.

"Right to the very top," called Maurice. "I do hope you don't mind."

As he spoke he caught her round the waist and gathered her to his side to climb the stairs.

"It's an old house. I've got an attic for my studio. Castleton's out. An old woman buried somewhere near the center of the earth cooks for me.

When you see her, you'll think she's arrived via Etna. Jenny, I'm frightfully excited at showing you my studio."

At last they reached the topmost landing, which was lit by a skylight opaque with spiders' webs and dust. The landing itself was full of rubbish, old clothes, and tattered volumes and, as if Maurice sought to emulate Phaethon, a bicycle.

"Not in these!" said Jenny. "You _don't_ carry that up and down all these stairs every day?"

"Never," said Maurice gayly. "Not once since I carried it up for the first time a year ago."

"You silly old thing."

"I am. I am. But isn't it splendid to be able to be silly?"

He opened the door of the studio and Jenny walked into what seemed an astonis.h.i.+ngly large room. There were windows at either end and a long skylight overhead. The ceiling was raftered and on the transverse beams were heaped all sorts of things that young men bring to London but never use, such as cricket-bats and tennis-racquets and skates.

The windows on one side looked out over the river, over barges going up on the full flood, and chimneys flying streamers of pearl-gray smoke.

The windows on the other side opened on to a sea of roofs that rolled away down to a low line of purple cloud above whose bronzed and jagged edge the Byzantine tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in silhouette against a sky of primrose very lucent and serene.

There was a wide fireplace with a scarred rug before it and on either side a deal seat with high straight back. There were divans by the same craftsman along the whitewashed walls, and shelves of tumbled books.

Here and there were broken statues and isolated lead-bound panes of colored gla.s.s, with an easel and a model's throne and the trunk of a lay figure. There was a large table littered with papers and tins of pineapple and a broken bag of oranges very richly hued in the sunset.

The floor was covered with matting, over which were scattered Persian rugs whose arabesques of mauve and puce were merged in a depth of warm color by the fleeting daylight. On the walls were autotypes of Mona Lisa and Botticelli's Venus, of the Prince of Orange and little Philip the Fourth, on his great horse. There was also an alleged Rubens, the purchase of Maurice's first year at Oxford, from the responsibility of whose possession he had never recovered. There were drawings on the wall itself of arms and legs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and necks, and a row of casts in plaster of Paris. Here and there on shelves were blue ginger-jars, Burmese masks and rolls of Florentine end-papers. There was a grandfather-clock, lacquered and silent, which leaned slightly forward to ponder its appearance in a Venetian mirror whose frame was blown in a design of pink and blue roses and shepherds. The window-curtains were chintz in a pattern of faded crimson birds and brown vine-leaves stained with mildew. In one corner was a pile of brocaded green satin that was intended to cover the undulating horsehair sofa before the fire.

Maurice's room was a new experience to Jenny.

"What a shocking untidy place!" she exclaimed. "What! It's like Madge Wilson's mother's second-hand shop in the New Kent Road. You don't _live_ here?"

"Yes, I do," said Maurice.

"Sleep here?"

"No; I sleep underneath. I've a bedroom with Castleton."

"Untidy, like this is?"

"No, rather tidy. Bath-tub, Sandow exerciser, and photographs of my sisters by Ellis and Walery. Quite English and respectable."

Jenny went on:

"Doesn't all this mess ever get on your nerves? Don't you ever go mad to clear it up?"

"You shall be mistress here and clear up when you like."

"All right, Artist Bill. I suppose you are an artist?"

"I don't know what I am. I'd like best to be a sculptor. You must sit for me."

"The only artist I ever sat for I took off my belt to in the finish."

"Why?"

"He annoyed me. Go on. What else are you?"

"I'd like to be a musician."

"You've got a jolly fine piano, any way," said Jenny, sitting down to a Bechstein grand to pick out some of Miss Victoria Monk's songs with the right hand while she held a cigarette in the left.

"Then I write a bit," said Maurice. "Criticisms, you know. I told you I wrote a notice of your ballet. I'm twenty-four and I shall come into a certain amount of money, and my people live in a large house in Surrey and oh, I--well--I'm a _dilettante_. Now you know my history."

"Whatever on earth's a dilly--you do use the most unnatural words. I shall call you Dictionary d.i.c.k."

"Look here, let's chuck explanations," said Maurice. "I simply must kiss you. Let's go and look out at the river."

He pulled her towards the window and flung it wide open. Together they leaned out, smoking. The sparrows were silent now. They could hear the splash and gurgle of the water against the piers, and the wind shaking the plane tree bare along the embankment. They watched the lamp-lighter go past on his twinkling pilgrimage. They listened to the thunder of London streets a long way off. Their cigarettes were finished. Together they dropped to extinction in a shower of orange sparks below.

Maurice drew Jenny back into the darkening room.

"Look! The windows are like big sapphires," he said, and caught her to his arms. They stood enraptured in the dusk and shadows of the old house. Round them Attic shapes glimmered: the G.o.ds of Greece regarded them: Aphrodite laughed.

"Don't all these statues frighten you?" said Jenny.

"No, they're too beautiful."

"Oh!" screamed Jenny. "Oh! She moved. She moved."

"Don't be foolish, child. You're excited."

"I must go to the theater. It's late. I do feel silly."

"I'll drive you down."

"But I'll come again," she said. "Only next time we'll light the gas when it gets dark. I hate these statues. They're like skelingtons."

"I'm going to make a statue of you. May I? Dancing?"