VIII
In the glance which Paul gave Flamby there was something odic and strange. He experienced a consciousness of giving and a consciousness of loss. Flamby was aware of intense shame and mad joy. She threw her arm over her bare shoulder to hide it and shrank back against the door not daring to raise her eyes again. She was trembling violently. Beneath her downcast lashes she could see the door of Chauvin’s studio, and suddenly she determined to fly there for shelter, as had been her original intention. She started—but Paul held her fast. Flamby hid her face against his coat.
“Flamby—who has done this?” Paul’s voice was very low and very steady.
Flamby swallowed emotionally, but already her quick wit was at work again and she realised that Paul must be prevented from entering James’s studio, must be spared a sight of the picture which lay upon the floor. “We were—just ragging,” she said tremulously, “and it got too rough. So I—ran out My dress is torn, you see.” She did not look up. Paul’s Harris tweed coat had a faint odour of peat and tobacco. She realised that she was clutching him for support.
He was carrying a light Burberry on his arm, and he held it open for her. “Slip this on, Flamby,” he said, in the same low, steady voice, “and sit there on the ledge for a moment.” He helped her to put on the coat, which enveloped her grotesquely, led her to the low parapet which surrounded the figure of the dancing faun and stepped toward the door of James’s studio.
Flamby leapt up and clutched his arm with both hands. “No, no!” she cried. “You must not go in there! Oh, please listen to me! I don’t want you to go in.”
Paul half turned, looking down at her. “Don’t excite yourself, Flamby. I shall not be a moment.”
But she clutched him persistently until, looking swiftly up at him, she saw the pallor of his olive skin and the expression in his eyes. She allowed him to unlock her fingers from his arm and she dropped down weakly on to the narrow stone ledge as he crossed to the studio door. It was very still in the courtyard. Some sparrows were chirping up on a roof, but the sounds of the highroad were muted and dim. Paul grasped the brass handle and sought to turn it. As he did so Flamby realised that James had bolted the door. Paul stood for a moment looking at the massive oak and then turned away, rejoining Flamby. “Come along to Chauvin’s,” he said. “I will get a cab for you.”
The only occupant of Chauvin’s studio was a romantic-looking man wearing a very dirty smock, a man who looked like an illustration for La Vie de Bohème, so that a stranger must have mistaken him for a celebrated artist although he actually combined the duties of a concierge with those of a charwoman. He displayed no surprise when Flamby came in, wild-haired, arrayed in Paul’s Burberry.
“See if you can get a taxi, Martin,” said Flamby, dropping into a huge Jacobean arm-chair over which a purple cloak was draped. A King Charles spaniel who had been asleep on a cushion awoke immediately and jumped on to her knees. Flamby caressed the little animal, looking down at his snub-nosed face intently. Paul walked up and down the studio. He began speaking in a low voice.
“I had hoped, Flamby, that you had done as I once asked you to do and dropped—Orlando James.”
“I did,” said Flamby quickly and continuing to caress the spaniel. “I wrote to Don the very night you told me to.”
“And I am sure that Don agreed with me.”
“He did, yes. But—Don knows I still pretend to be friends with—James.”
Paul stood still, facing her, but she did not look up. “Don knows this?”
Flamby nodded her head. She did not seem to care that her hair was in disorder. “He knows that I hate James, though,” she added.
“I don’t understand at all. Whatever can have induced you to trust yourself in that ruffian’s studio?”
“I’ve been before. It was my fault. I made him think he was doing fine.”
“Doing fine?”
“He is so infernally conceited. I wanted to let him down. But he got desperate. He is not a man; he’s a pig. But I threw a cabinet at him.”
“Did you hit him?” asked Paul grimly.
“Yes; but I wish it had been a brick.”
“So do I,” replied Paul. “I shall not ask you for particulars, Flamby, but I shall take certain steps which will make London too hot to hold Mr. Orlando James.” His restrained passion was electric and it acted upon Flamby in a curious way and seemed to set her heart singing.
When Martin returned to report that a cab waited, Paul walked out under the arch to the street and having placed Flamby in the cab, he held her hand for a moment and their glances met. “Dear little wild-haired Flamby,” he said, and his voice had the same note of tenderness which she had heard in it once before and of which she had dreamed ever since. “Take care of yourself, little girl. You belong to the clean hills and the sweet green woods which I almost wish you had never left.”
For long after the cab had passed around the corner Paul stood by the archway staring in that direction, but presently he aroused himself and returned to the courtyard. He tried the handle of James’s door but learned that the bolt remained fastened, whereupon he determined to proceed to Thessaly’s flat.
A definite change had taken place in the relations existing between himself and Flamby. For all her wildness and her reckless behaviour, that day she had appealed to him as something fragrantly innocent and bewilderingly sweet. The memory of the Charleswood photographs had assumed a different form, too, and he suddenly perceived possibilities of an explanation which should exculpate the girl from a graver sin than that of bravado. He had seen something in her eyes which had rendered such an explanation necessary, had found there something stainless as the heart of a wild rose. Devil-may-care was in her blood and he doubted if she knew the meaning of fear, but for evil he now sought in vain and wondered greatly because he had so misjudged her. He experienced a passionate desire to protect her, to enfold her in careful guardianship. He knew that he had not wanted to leave her at the gate of the studios, but he had only recognised this to be the case at the very moment of parting. He had never entertained an interest quite identical in anyone and he sought to assure himself that it was thus that a father thought of his child. He wondered if it had been her hair or her lips which had maddened Orlando James; he wondered why she had been in the studio; and a cold hatred of James took up a permanent place in his heart.
In the narrow thoroughfare connecting Victoria Street with that in which Thessaly’s flat was situated were a number of curious shops devoted to the sale of church ornaments, altar candlesticks, lecterns, silk banners, cassocks and birettas, statuettes of the Virgin, crucifixes and rosaries. Paul stood before the window of one, reading the titles of the books which were also displayed there, Garden of the Soul, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. A phrase arose before him; he did not seem to hear it but to see it dancing in smoky characters which partially obscured a large ivory crucifix: “To shatter at a blow the structure of the ages.” He recalled that Cardinal Pescara had used those words. His mood was unrestful and his brain was haunted by unaccountable memories, so that when he found himself in the shadow of the lofty campanile of Westminster Cathedral his spirit became translated to an obscure lane in Cairo. Faint organ notes reached his ears.
Thessaly received him in a little room having a balcony which overhung the street. Delicate ivory plaques decorated the walls and the fanciful curtains of Indian muslin hung like smoke of incense in the still air. There were some extraordinary pastels by Degas forming a kind of frieze. The evening was warm and the campanile upstood against a sky blue as a sapphire dome. The Cairo illusion persisted.
“Do you know, Thessaly,” said Paul, “to-night I cannot help thinking of a scene I once witnessed in El Wasr. I formed one of a party of three and we were wandering aimlessly through those indescribable lanes. Pipes wailed in the darkness to an accompaniment of throbbing—throbbing of the eternal darâbukeh which is like the pulsing of evil life through the arteries of the secret city. Harsh woman-voices cried out in the night and bizarre figures flitted like bats from the lighted dance halls into the shadows of nameless houses. We came to a long, narrow street entirely devoted to those dungeon-like chambers with barred windows whose occupants represent all the classified races of the East and all the unclassified sins of the Marquis de Sade. Another street crossed it at right angles and at the cross roads was a mosque. The minaret stood up blackly against the midnight sky and as we turned the corner we perceived what appeared to be another of the ‘cages’ immediately facing the door of the mosque. Out of the turmoil of the one street we came into this other and leaving discord and evil behind us entered into silence and peace. We looked in at the barred window. Woman voices reached us faintly from the street we had left and the muted pulse of the darâbukeh pursued us. Upon a raised dais having candles set at his head and feet reposed a venerable sheikh, dead. His white beard flowed over his breast. He reclined in majestic sleep where the pipes were wailing the call of El Wasr, and the shadow of the minaret lay upon life and upon death. Is it not strange that this scene should recur to me to-night?”
“Strange and uncomplimentary,” replied Thessaly. “Whilst I have no objection to your finding an analogy between my perfectly respectable neighbours and the women of the Wasr, the rôle of a defunct and saintly Arab does not appeal to me.” Some reflection of the setting sun touched him where he stood and bathed him as in fire. The small tight curls of hair and beard became each a tongue of flame and his eyes glittered like molten gold. “Pardon my apparent rudeness, but I don’t think you are listening.”
“I am not,” murmured Paul. “Your words reach me from a great distance. My spirit is uneasy to-night, and whilst myself I remain in your ivory room and hear you speak another self stands in a vast temple of black gleaming granite before the shrine of a golden bull.”
“You are possibly thinking of Apis. From Cairo you have proceeded to Sakkâra. Or are the gaudy hue of my hair and the yeoman proportions of my shape responsible for the idea?”
“I cannot say, nor was I actually thinking of the Serapeum.”
“You are not yourself. You have been studying the war news or else you have passed a piebald horse without spitting twice and crossing your fingers.”
Paul laughed, but not in the frank boyish way that was so good to hear. “I am not myself, Thessaly, or if I am I do not recognise myself.”
“You have committed some indiscretion such as presenting your siren-haired protégée, Flamby Duveen, to your wife.”
“I have not,” said Paul sharply.
“I am glad. He who presents one pretty woman to another makes two lifelong enemies.”
“I did not know that you had met Flamby.”
“She has been described to me and she sounds dangerous. I distrust curly-haired girls. They are full of electricity, and electricity is a force of which we know so little. Does the idea of a cocktail appeal to you? I have a man who has invented a new cocktail which he calls ‘Fra Diavolo.’ Viewed through the eyes of Fra Diavolo you will find the world a more cheery globe.”
“Thanks, no. But I will smoke.” From his coat pocket Paul took out a briar pipe and the well-worn pouch. “In a month, Thessaly, The Key will be in the printer’s hands. I found myself thinking of Pandora this morning. There are few really virtuous women and truth is a draught almost as heady I should imagine as Fra Diavolo.”
“My dear Mario, you must admit that virtue is the least picturesque of the vices. When aggressive it becomes a positive disfigurement. The ’on guard’ position, though useful in bayonet-fighting, leaves the æsthete cold. You would not have us treat our women as the Moslems do?”
“Women can rarely distinguish the boundary between freedom and license. Honestly I should like to revise the position of woman in Europe and America before I entrusted The Key to her keeping. Unmarried, she has quite enough freedom, married she has too much.”
“Therefore she conceals her age and dyes her hair.”
“Showing that she is not invulnerable to flattery.”
“No woman is, and flattery may be likened to the artillery preparation which precedes a serious advance. But, my dear Mario, to deprive a woman of admiration is to deprive a fish of water. In London when a woman ceases to interest other men she ceases to interest her husband, unless he is not as other men. In Stambûl on the contrary the odalisque who bathes in rival glances finally bathes in the Bosphorus with her charming head in a sack. Fortunately we are at war with Turkey.”
“Have you considered, Thessaly, what appalling sins must have been committed by the present generation of women in some past phase of existence?”
“There are instances in which the sins belong to the present phase. But I agree with you that the women are suffering more than the men. Therefore their past errors must have been greater. They are being taught the value of love, Mario. In their next incarnation they will remember. They will be reborn beneath a new star—your star. Something perturbs you. You are harassed by doubts and hunted by misgivings. I have secured permission to toil up hundreds of stairs in order that I may emulate the priests of Bel and look out upon the roofs of Babylon. This spectacle will cheer you. Join me, my friend, and I will show you the heart of the world.”