VII
Some days later Flamby was taking tea by appointment in Orlando James’s studio. Don had written from France urging her to divulge the nature of her misgivings respecting Paul and their connection with James, and Flamby, greatly daring, had determined to obtain confirmation of the doubts which troubled her. She wore the Liberty dress of grey velvet, and as she bent over an Arab coffee-table and her pretty hands busied themselves amid the old silver of the tea-service, Flamby made a delectable study which Orlando James who watched her found to be exceedingly tantalising. He flicked cigarette ash on to the floor and admired the creamy curve of Flamby’s neck as she lowered her head in the act of pouring out tea.
“What a pretty neck you have, kid,” he said in his drawling self-confident way.
“Yes,” replied Flamby, dropping pieces of sugar into the cups, “it isn’t so bad as necks go. But I should have liked it to be white instead of yellow.”
“It isn’t yellow: it’s a delicious sort of old-ivory velvet which I am just itching to paint.”
“Then why don’t you?” inquired Flamby, composedly settling herself in a nest of cushions on the floor.
“Because you will never pose for me.”
“You have never asked me.”
“Why I asked you only a few days ago to pose for my next big picture.”
Flamby sipped hot tea and looked up at James scornfully. “Do you think I’m daft!” she said. “I am a painter not a model. If you want to paint my portrait I don’t mind, but if you’ve got an idea in your head that I am ever likely to pose for the figure you can get it out as quick as lightning.”
James lounged in a long rest-chair, watching her languidly. “You’re a funny girl,” he said. “I thought I was paying you a compliment, but perhaps it’s a sore point. Where’s the flaw, kid?”
“The flaw?”
“Yes, what is it—knotty knees? It certainly isn’t thick ankles.”
Flamby had much ado to preserve composure; momentarily her thoughts became murderous. This was truly a ‘sore point,’ but mentally comparing Orlando James with Sir Jacques she was compelled to admit that the bold roué was preferable to the masked satyr. She placed her tea cup on a corner of the Arab table and smoothed her skirt placidly.
“Spotty skin,” she replied. “Haven’t you seen my picture in the newspapers advertising somebody’s ointment?”
James stared in the dull manner which characterised his reception of a joke. “Is that funny, Flamby?” he said, “because I don’t believe it is true.”
“Don’t you? Well, it doesn’t matter. Do you want any more tea?”
He passed his cup, watching her constantly and wondering why since he had progressed thus far in her favour not all his well-tried devices could advance him a single pace further. He had learned during a long and varied experience that the chief difficulty in these little affairs was that of breaking down the barrier which ordinarily precludes discussion of such intimately personal matters. Once this was accomplished he had found his art to be a weapon against which woman’s vanity was impotent. Unfortunately for his chance of success, Sir Jacques had also been a graduate of this school of artistic libertinage.
“There is something selfish about a girl who keeps her beauty all to herself when it might delight future generations,” he said, taking the newly filled cup from Flamby. “Besides, it really is a compliment, kid, to ask you to pose for a big thing like The Dreaming Keats. It’s going to be my masterpiece.”
“Our next picture is always going to be our masterpiece,” murmured Flamby wisely, taking an Egyptian cigarette from the Japanese cabinet on the table.
“But I think I can claim to know what I’m talking about, Flamby. It means that I regard you as one of the prettiest girls in London.”
“Your vanity is most soothing,” said Flamby, curling herself up comfortably amid the poppy-hued cushions and trying to blow rings of smoke.
“Where does the vanity come in?”
“In your delightful presumption. Do you honestly believe, Orlando, that any woman in London would turn amateur model if you asked her?”
“I don’t say that any woman would do so, but almost any pretty woman would.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You know who my model was for Eunice, don’t you?”
“I have heard that Lady Daphne Freyle posed for it and the hair is like hers certainly, but the face of the figure is turned away. Oh!—how funny.”
“What is funny?”
“It has just occurred to me that a number of your pictures are like that: the figure is either veiled or half looking away.”
“That is necessary when one’s models are so well-known.”
Flamby hugged her knees tightly and gazed at the speaker as if fascinated. She was endeavouring to readjust her perspective. Vanity in women assumed many strange shapes. There were those who bartered honour for the right to live and in order that they might escape starvation. These were pitiful. There were some who bought jewels at the price of shame, and others who sold body and soul for an hour in the limelight. These were unworthy of pity. But what of those who offered themselves, like ghawâzi in a Keneh bazaar, in return for the odious distinction of knowing their charms to be “immortalised” by the brush of Orlando James? These were beyond Flamby’s powers of comprehension.
“But Lady Daphne is an exception. I am only surprised that she did not want a pose which rendered her immediately recognisable.”
“She did,” drawled James, “but I didn’t.”
“Was she really an ideal model or did you induce her to pose just to please your colossal vanity?”
“My dear Flamby, it is next to impossible to find a flawless model among the professionals. Hammett or anybody will tell you the same. They lack that ideal delicacy, what Crozier calls ‘the texture of nobility,’ which one finds in a woman of good family. Half the success of my big subjects has been due to my models. This will be recognised when the history of modern art comes to be written. I am held up at the moment, and that is the reason why I am anxious to start on Keats.”
“What is holding you up?”
“My model for The Circassian has jibbed. Otherwise it would be finished.”
“There are disadvantages attaching to your method after all?”
“Yes. I shall avoid married models in future. Husbands are so inartistic.”
“You don’t want me to believe that some misguided married woman has been posing for The Circassian?”
“Why misguided? It will be a wonderful picture.”
“It is that Eastern thing is it not?—the marble pool and a half veiled figure lying beside it with one hand in the water?”
“Yes, but I’ve had to shelve it. Did I show you that last sketch for the Keats picture?”
“You did, Orlando; but dismiss the idea that I am going to play Phryne to your Apelles. It won’t come off. It may work successfully with daft society women who have got bored with pretending to be nurses and ambulance drivers but you really cannot expect Flamby Duveen to begin competing with the professional models. I could quote something from Ovid that would be quite to the point but you wouldn’t understand and I should have to laugh all by myself.”
“You are a tantalising little devil,” said James, his dull brain seeking vainly a clue to the cause of Flamby’s obduracy.
Flamby, meanwhile maturing her plan, made the next move. “Is the Keats picture to be more important than The Circassian?” she asked naively.
“Of course,” James replied, believing that at last a clue was his. “I have told you that it will be my masterpiece.” He had offered an identical assurance to many a hesitant amateur.
“Is your model for The Circassian really very pretty?”
“She is; but of a more ordinary type than you, kid. You are simply a nymph in human shape. You will send the critics crazy.”
He watched her with scarcely veiled eagerness, and Flamby, placing the end of her cigarette in a silver ash-tray, seemed to be thinking.
“Is she—well-known?”
James recognised familiar symptoms and his hopes leapt high. “If I show you the canvas and you recognise the model will you promise not to tell anybody? I am painting it by a new process. I got the idea from Wiertz. The violet gauze of the veil is only indicated yet.”
Flamby nodded, watching him wide-eyed. Her expression was inscrutable. He crossed the big studio and wheeled an easel out from the recess in which it had been concealed. The canvas was draped and having set it in a good light he turned, taking a step forward. “No telling,” he said.
“No,” replied Flamby, rising from her extemporised diwân.
James towered over her slight figure vastly. “Give me a kiss and I will believe you,” he said.
Flamby felt a tingling sensation and knew that a flush was rising from her neck to her brow, but with success in view she was loth to abandon her scheme. “Show me first,” she said.
“Oh, no. Be a sport, kid. You might do me no end of harm if you blabbed. Give me a kiss and I shall know we are pals.” He placed his hand on Flamby’s shoulder and she tried not to shrink. The rich colour fled from her cheeks and her oval face assumed that even, dusky hue which was a danger signal, but which Orlando James failed to recognise for one.
“I don’t want to kiss you; I want to see the picture.”
“And I don’t want you to see the picture until you have kissed me,” replied James, smiling confidently and clasping his arm around Flamby’s shoulders. “Only one tiny kiss and I shall know I can trust you.”
He drew her close, and Flamby experienced a thrill of terror because of the strength of his arm and her own helplessness. But she averted her face and thrust one hand against James’s breast, fighting hard to retain composure. He bent over her and thereupon Flamby knew that the truce must end. Her heart began to throb wildly.
“I won’t kiss you!” she cried. “Let me go!”
Orlando James looked into her face, now flushed again and found the lure of Flamby’s lips to be one beyond his powers of rejection. “Don’t get wild, kiddie,” he said softly. “You need not be cruel.”
“Let me go,” repeated Flamby in a low voice.
He held her closer and his face almost touched hers. Whereupon the storm burst. “Are you going to let me go?” said Flamby breathlessly; and even as she spoke James sought to touch her lips. Flamby raised her open hand and struck him hard upon the cheek. “Now will you let me go!”
Orlando James laughed loudly. “You lovely little devil,” he cried. “I shall kiss you a hundred times for that.”
Backward swung Flamby’s foot and James received a shrewd kick upon his shin. But the little suede shoes which Flamby wore were incapable of inflicting such punishment as those heavy boots which once had wrought the discomfiture of Fawkes. James threw both arms around her and lifted her bodily, as one lifts a child, smiling into her face. She battled against him, hand and foot, but could strike with slight force because of her helpless position. He crushed her to him and kissed her on the lips. As he did so she remembered the form of her French shoes and raising her right foot she battered madly at his knee with the high wooden heel. One of the blows got home, and uttering a smothered curse James dropped her, but did not release her.
“You low dirty swine!” she cried at him.
He held her by her arms and now she suddenly twisted violently, writhed and wrenched herself free, leaving a velvet sleeve in James’s grasp and leaping back from him, one creamy shoulder bared by the tattered gown and her wonderful hair loosened and foaming about her head to lend her the aspect of a beautiful Bisharîn girl, wild as the desert gazelle. James saw that she wore an antique gold locket upon a thin chain about her neck. He clutched at her, but she bounded back again, her eyes blazing dangerously and snatched up the Japanese cabinet. With all her strength she hurled it at his head.
“Take that,” she screamed, flushing scarlet—“blast you!”
He ducked, inhaling sibilantly, but a corner of the little cabinet struck his forehead, and he stumbled, caught his foot against a cushion and fell across the table amid a litter of china and silver ware. He clutched at the draped picture, and canvas and easel fell crashing to the floor, revealing the nearly completed Circassian. Flamby sprang across the studio, wrenched open the door and ran out banging it behind her. As it closed she fell back against it, panting—and saw Paul Mario approaching from the direction of Chauvin’s.