The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece Part 8

"Now look at my paG.o.da, Mr. Stacpole," said young Mrs. Waterlow, laughing, yet, he saw, not pleased, and turning from the fire where she had been standing with her foot on the fender.

"Does Mr. Stacpole care for bric-a-brac, too?" old Mrs. Waterlow inquired. "Cicely came home with this last treasure in as much triumph as if some one had left her a fortune. I resent the paG.o.da because it means that she will go without a spring hat. She is always coming home in triumph and always doing without hats; and I sit here without an atom of taste, and get the credit for hers. Frankly, Sybilla, my dear," she addressed the academic lady, "I'd be quite content to sit upon red reps and to cover my tea-pot with a pink satin cosy with apple-blossoms painted on it. I had such a cosy given to me this Christmas; but Cicely wouldn't let me use it."

Owen had risen to face his ordeal. Mrs. Waterlow, he had seen it in the first astonished glance, had, like everybody else in Chislebridge, been imitating Gwendolen, and his whole conception of her was undergoing a reconstruction. He followed her to the table on which the white paG.o.da stood, glancing about him and taking in deep drafts of disillusion. Red lacquer and j.a.panese prints, white porcelain and dimly s.h.i.+ning jars of old Venetian gla.s.s--it was a replica, even to its white walls, of Gwendolen's drawing-room, but hushed and saddened, as it were, humbly smiling, with folded hands and no attempt at emulation. And in the midst, beautifully in place on its little black lacquer table, was the paG.o.da, offering him not a hint of help, but seeming rather, to smile at him with a fantastic and malicious mirth. He was aware, as from the paG.o.da he brought his eyes back to young Mrs. Waterlow, that he was dreadfully sorry. In another woman he would not have given the nave derivativeness a thought; but in her, whom he had felt so full of savour and independence? One thing only helped him, beside the effortless atmosphere of the room, and that was the fact--he clung to it--that the gla.s.ses set everywhere among the red and black and white were filled not, thank goodness! with pink roses, but with poppy anemones, white and purple and rose. And the first thing he found to say of the paG.o.da to Mrs. Waterlow was, "It looks lovely in here," and then, turning to the nearest bowl of delicate colour, he added, "and how beautifully these flowers go with your room!"

He wondered, as their eyes met over the anemones, whether Mrs. Waterlow guessed his discomfiture.

When he saw Gwendolen that evening she asked him at once whether he liked old Mrs. Waterlow. She did not ask him how he liked young Mrs.

Waterlow's drawing-room, and he reflected that this was really very magnanimous of her.

"She seems a witty old lady," he said. "Her daughter-in-law can't be dull with her."

"She's witty, but I always feel her a little spiteful, too," said Gwendolen. "We never get on, she and I. I hate hearing my neighbours scored off, and she has such an eye for people's foibles. I don't think that Cicely always quite likes it, either; but they are devoted to each other. If it weren't for old Mrs. Waterlow, I'd try to see a great deal more of Cicely; I'm really fond of her."

He did not go to Chislebridge for another six months. Gwendolen asked him very pressingly on various occasions, but twice he was engaged and once ill and too depressed and jaded to make the effort. It was the time of all others when Gwendolen and her ministrations would have been most acceptable, but he shrank from submitting himself to their influences, feeling that in his very need he might find too great a compulsion. The thought of Gwendolen and of her possible place in his life must be adjourned--adjourned until she was well out of her mourning and he was able to meet it more impartially.

He saw Gwendolen in London and gave her and her boys tea at his rooms, the dingily comfortable rooms near Manchester Square from which for many years he had not had the initiative to move. There was more potency, he found, in the imaginary Gwendolen than in the real one. The sight of her brought back vividly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, they seemed to have spoiled each other. Gwendolen had all the ethical advantages and even, if it came to that, all the aesthetic ones; yet, ambiguous as the image of the other had become, its charm challenged Gwendolen's virtues and Gwendolen's achievements. He even felt that he could be sure of nothing until he next stayed with Gwendolen, when he must see Mrs. Waterlow and weigh the possible friends.h.i.+p with her, tarnished though it were, against the comfortable solutions that Gwendolen held out to him. Again, curiously, he knew that the two could not be combined.

Gwendolen, however, was gone away to the south of France when he wrote to her in November and asked if he might stop a day and night on his way through Chislebridge to a country week-end. But he had a two-hours'

wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, when he found himself on the platform, to go and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow.

He drove up to the peaceful street where, above the college wall that ran along its upper end, a close tracery of branches showed against the sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight shone in the s.p.a.cious windows of the Georgian house. His dismay, therefore, was the more untempered when the mildly austere maid told him that Mrs. Waterlow was away. His pause there on the threshold expressed his condition, and the maid suggested that he might care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow.

This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go in at all. So he was led for a second time into the drawing-room.

He had been obliged on the former visit to conceal astonishment; but now he found himself alone, and no concealment was needed. And the former astonishment was slight compared with this one. He felt almost giddy as he gazed about him. Nothing was the same. Everything was fantastically, incredibly different, except--his eye caught it with a sharpened pang of wonder--the white paG.o.da; for there, in the centre of the room, upon a round, mahogany table, with heavily bowed and richly carven legs, the white paG.o.da stood, and under it an old bead mat,--a mat of faded, old blue beads,--his eyes were riveted on the paG.o.da and its setting,--of white and gray and blue beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular intervals, raying out from the centre, books were placed upon the table--small, sober books bound in calf.

So the paG.o.da stood, the pivot of an incredible room; yet, inconceivable as it seemed, as right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, as it had been right in the other. It was the one link that joined them, the one thread in the labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, with its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to symbolize its absent owner. Was it an exquisite, extravagant, elaborate joke that she and the paG.o.da were having together?

For the whole room was now a joke. It was furnished with a suite of black satin--sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, excruciating backs, all densely b.u.t.toned and richly fringed. Over the backs of the easy-chairs were laid antimaca.s.sars of finely crocheted white lace. Upon two tall pieces of mahogany, ranged up and down with k.n.o.bbed drawers and recalling in their decorous solidity the b.u.t.toned bodices of mid-Victorian matrons, stood high-handled, white marble urns. An oval gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and upon it stood two l.u.s.tres ringed with prisms of gla.s.s and a little clock of gilt and marble, ornamented with two marble doves hovering over a gilt nest wherein lay marble eggs. Between the clock and the l.u.s.tres, on either side, was a vase of Bohemian gla.s.s, each holding a small nosegay of red and white roses. Mahogany footstools with bead-worked tops stood before the fire, and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the paG.o.da, a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly coloured drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired labour could make them.

No, it was a dream, an insane, delightful dream; for, with it all, above it all, how and why he could not say, the room was delightful. It seemed to set one free from some burden of appreciation that all unconsciously one had been carrying and had been finding heavy. One could live in it, laughing at and with it. For it all laughed--surely yes; and the elfish chorus was led by the white paG.o.da, standing like a Chinese Pierrot, at the centre of the revels.

Old Mrs. Waterlow at last came sailing in, and her black lace shawl and lace-draped head looked as appropriate in the room as everything else seemed to do. Her eyes dwelt on him with a certain fixity, and in them he seemed to read further significances. They held an intention, gay, precise, such as he had felt in the room; and they held, too, it might be, a touch of light-hearted cruelty.

"Yes, isn't it changed?" she said, and he knew that his state of astonishment had spoken from his face.

He stared round him again, smiling.

"It makes me feel," he said, "like the old woman in the nursery rhyme whose skirts were cut up to her knees while she was asleep. One says, 'If I be I.'"

"And I'm the little dog," said Mrs. Waterlow; "but one who doesn't bark at you, so that you can be a.s.sured of your ident.i.ty. I am really more aware of my own in this room than in any I've lived in for years. It is like one of the rooms of my girlhood. Rooms weren't so important then as they are now, and the people who lived in them, I sometimes think, were more so. It amuses me nowadays," said the old lady moving to her tea-table and seating herself, "to observe the way in which people are a.s.sessed by their tastes and their belongings. You say of some one that she is a dull or a disagreeable woman, and the answer and rebuke you receive is, 'Oh, but she has such wonderful Chinese screens!' Sit down here, Mr. Stacpole. It is very nice to see you again."

"But tell me, where is the other room?" Owen asked, drawing his chair to the table, "Is it disbanded, dissolved, gone for ever?"

Mrs. Waterlow looked at him with an air of half-malicious mystery.

"That is a secret, my own little secret, just as this room is, in a way, a little joke which, for my sake, Cicely has made for me. It was finished last week, by the way, and you are the first person to see it.

Your cousin is in the south of France, isn't she?" said Mrs. Waterlow, with bland inconsequence.

"Yes; I'm only pa.s.sing through. Gwendolen's been gone for nearly a month."

"Yes; I know," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, still with the genial blandness.

"And as to our little joke, Mr. Stacpole, this room, in fact, is in many ways a room of my girlhood. The furniture was my mother's, and Cicely, when the idea struck her, had it brought from the garret of my old home, where it has stood in disgrace for many a year. She has been clever about it, hasn't she?"

"It's genius," said Owen, "What made her think of it?" And then, with a pang, he wondered whether Gwendolen had thought of it first. Was it imaginable that Gwendolen could have turned away from beauty and plunged herself into such gay austerities of ugliness?

"Well, things are in the air, you know," said Mrs. Waterlow, pouring out the tea,--"that's what Cicely always says, at all events,--reactions, repulsions, wearinesses. This room is, she says, a discipline."

"Things in the air": had Gwendolen felt them first, and Mrs. Waterlow felt them after her? This question of priority became of burning interest for him.

"The trouble is that one may get too much of any discipline," he commented, "if it ceases to be self-inflicted and is imposed upon us.

How would your daughter like it if all Chislebridge took to b.u.t.toned black satin and old flower-pieces? It's as an exception that it has its charm and its meaning. But if it became a commonplace?"

"Well, that's the point," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "Will it? It has very much vexed me for years to watch Chislebridge picking Cicely's brains.

And I said to her that I wondered whether it would be possible for her to make a room that wouldn't be copied, and she said that she believed she could. If she could achieve ugliness, she said--downright ugliness, she believed they would fall back. The room is a sort of wager between us, for I am not at all convinced that she will succeed. Sheep, you know, will leap into the ditch if they see their leader land there."

Owen's head was whirling. It was as though suddenly the little crystal rings of the paG.o.da had given out a sportive, significant tinkle. This, then, was what it meant? It was a jest, a game; but it was also a trap.

For whom? Chislebridge, on old Mrs. Waterlow's lips, could mean only Gwendolen. He did not know quite what he hoped or feared, but he knew that he must conceal from old Mrs. Waterlow his recognition of her meaning.

"I felt from the first moment that I saw her in the curiosity-shop that Mrs. Waterlow was the sort of person who would always find the white paG.o.das," he said, smiling above his perturbation; "but I shouldn't have supposed that Chislebridge was intelligent enough, let us put it, to realise it, too, and to follow her lead."

"It's not that they realise it," the old lady interpreted, salting her scone; "it's something deeper than realisation. It's instinct--the instinct of the insignificant for aping the significant. They would probably be annoyed if they were told that they aped Cicely. They hardly know they do it, I will say that for them, if it's anything to their credit. And then since she is poor and they--some of them--rich, their copies are seen by a hundred to the one who sees her original, and Cicely, to some people, I've no doubt of it, seems the ape. It has very much vexed me," Mrs. Waterlow repeated.

Owen, for all his loyal feint of unconsciousness, was growing rather angry with Gwendolen.

"I don't wonder that it should," he said. "It vexes me to hear about it.

Has it gone on for long?"

"Ever since we came to live here after my son's death. People at that time had draped, crowded drawing-rooms,--you remember the dreadful epoch. The more pots and pans and patterns and palms they could squeeze into them, the better they were pleased. Cicely had simple furniture and quiet s.p.a.ces and plain green wall-paper when no one else in Chislebridge had. She fell in love with j.a.panese prints in Paris and bought them when no one else in Chislebridge thought of doing so.--It's wrong, now, I hear, to like them. Chinese paintings are the correct thing.--Chislebridge stared at them and at her empty room, and wondered how she could care for those hideous women. They stared only for a year or two. When they saw that she was quite indifferent to their opinion and intended to remain in the ditch, they jumped in after her. I was amused when I first saw j.a.panese prints on some one else's green walls and heard the Goncourts and Whistler being quoted to Cicely. Then by degrees Cicely got tired of green paper, especially since everybody in Chislebridge by then had it, and she put, with her white walls, the red lacquer and the gla.s.s and that beautiful old set of cane-seated furniture that you saw; and no one else in Chislebridge at that time had white walls or a sc.r.a.p of lacquer. She s.h.i.+fted and rearranged like a bird building its nest, and Chislebridge stared again and said that the white walls were like a workhouse; and then they began to look for lacquer and to put up white paper. Her very grouping has been copied, the smallest points of adjustment. It's not," Mrs. Waterlow pursued, "that I mind people imitating, if they do it frankly and own themselves plagiarists. We must all see the things we like for the first time. But it's not because they like the things that they have them; they have them because some one else likes them. They dress themselves in other people's tastes and make a fine figure as originators." The vexation of years was crystallized in the lightness and crispness of her voice.

Poor, stupid Gwendolen! After all, one must not be too hard on her. He felt Mrs. Waterlow to be so hard that he reacted to something approaching pitying tolerance, Gwendolen could be stupid in such good faith. There was nothing, when he came to think of it, surprising in this revelation of her stupidity, nothing painful, as there had been in suspecting Cicely Waterlow of stupidity. Gwendolen was so sincerely unaware of having no ideas of her own. He wondered, as he said good-bye to old Mrs. Waterlow and told her that he felt convinced that she had at last reached a haven, whether she guessed that she had made him happy rather than unhappy.

She had made him so happy, with his recovered ideal, that as he drove away it was with a definite thrust of fear that he suddenly remembered Gwendolen's kindly criticism of old Mrs. Waterlow. Was it not possible, after all, that she had been indulging in sheer malice at Gwendolen's expense? Wasn't it possible that Gwendolen and Cicely Waterlow had had the same inspirations independently? But no two people could stumble at once on such a drawing-room as that he had just left. Horrid thought--what if Gwendolen's drawing-room at this moment showed just such a singular reversion to ugliness? After his delicious relief, he could not bear the doubt.

He drove to Gwendolen's. Yes, the old housekeeper, who knew him, said he could of course go up and look at the red lacquer. The red lacquer! He could almost have embraced her for the joy her words gave him. Gwendolen would not have retained red lacquer with a black satin suite. And on the threshold of Gwendolen's drawing-room he received full rea.s.surance. The lovely room was intact. The blacks and whites and reds and golds were all there, unchanged, not a breath of the ambiguous discipline upon them. And in the midst of them all it was not Gwendolen, but Cicely Waterlow, whom he seemed to see smiling upon him, merry, tired, and tolerant. She had, as it were, demonstrated her claim not only to her present, but to her past. For if she had not copied Gwendolen in the mid-Victorian backwater, why should she have copied her in this? She had been first in both, and in her backwater she was now safe.

Many months pa.s.sed before he saw Gwendolen's drawing-room again. He was felled early in the winter by a long and dangerous illness. When he was able to crawl about, he went to the south of France and stayed there for over a year. He was so ill, so tired, and so weak that, if Gwendolen and the boys hadn't joined him, if she hadn't nursed and amused and encouraged him from day to day, he felt that he should probably have died and made an end of it. Gwendolen was more than kind. She was at once tender and tactful, and the only claim she made was that of her long-standing solicitude on his account. Upon this, as upon a comfortable, impersonal cus.h.i.+on that she adjusted for his weary head, she invited him to lean, and upon it for months of dazed invalidism and dubious convalescence he did lean. Lapped round by this fundamental kindness, the flaws and absurdities of Gwendolen's character disappeared. The long pearl ear-rings dangled now over the most delicious beef-teas, which she herself made for him; the graceful hands could perform efficient tasks. Of how very little importance it was that a woman should not show originality in her drawing-room when she could show in taxing daily intercourse such wisdom and resource and sweetness!

Life had contracted about them, and on these simple and elementary terms he found that Gwendolen neither bored nor ruffled him. When she at last left him he knew that the bond between them, unspoken as it remained, was stronger than it had ever yet been, and that when he next saw her he would probably find it the most natural of things to ask her to marry him, and to take care of him for ever. Poor, good, kind Gwendolen! It was with a pensive humility and mirth that he resigned himself to the thought of the bad bargain she would make.

He came back to England in the spring following that in which he had left it, and went at once to Chislebridge. It was late afternoon when he drove, in a twilight like his own mood of meditative acceptance, to the well-known house. Ample and benignant it stood behind its walls and lawns and trees, and seemed to look upon him with eyes of unresentful patience.

He limped in and Gwendolen met him in the hall.

"My dear, dear Owen, how are you? Yes, I had your wire this morning.

Good; I see that the journey has done you no harm. But you are tired, aren't you? Will you go to your own room or have tea with me at once?